water in the spring, and the singing of the crickets, Poetry held the
flashlight while my trembling fingers unfolded that crumpled piece of
oiled paper, and spread it out.
“There’s _printing_ on it!” Poetry exclaimed under his breath.
And there was--_actually_ was!
“What does it say?” I exclaimed.
“It says--it says, ‘_Eat more Eatmore Bread. It’s better for you. The
more Eatmore you eat, the more you like it._’”
It was disgusting; very disappointing also.
“Smell it,” Poetry exclaimed, which I did, and say!
Boy oh boy, there was _really_ a perfume odor around the place now! If
Dragonfly had been there, I thought again--or rather, started to think
and didn’t get to finish, ’cause all of a sudden from the crest of the
hill I heard a rustling of last year’s dry leaves, saw a flashlight
leading the way and a spindle-legged barefoot boy in red-striped
pajamas coming down the incline to the spring. Imagine _that!_
Dragonfly in his night clothes! What on earth!
Poetry and I slipped behind an undergrowth of small elms where we
couldn’t be seen, and listened and watched as Dragonfly came all the
way down, went straight to the cement pool, shined his flashlight
inside, then his hands began to work fast like he was in a big hurry
and also like he was scared, and wanted to do what he was doing and
get it over quick. He certainly was nervous and he seemed to be having
trouble getting what he wanted to do, done.
Poetry’s fat face was close to mine. I decided I could whisper into his
ear and only he would hear me, so I said, “Look! He’s got a knife! He’s
going to plug the melon. He--”
Poetry jammed his fat elbow into my ribs so hard it made me grunt
outloud.
Dragonfly jumped like he was shot, dropped his knife into the spring,
started to straighten up, lost his balance, staggered in several
moonlit directions, then ker-whammety-swish-splash--into the water he
went just like I myself had done an hour or so ago.
And there he was, like I myself had been--a very wet boy in some very
wet, very cold water, struggling to get onto his feet and out of the
pool, and sneezing and spluttering because he had probably gotten some
of the water into his mouth, or nose, and maybe even into his lungs.
And _now_ what should we do?
We didn’t have time to decide, ’cause right that second there was
a sound of running steps at the top of the incline and two shadowy
figures with flashlights came flying down that leaf-strewn path, and
somebody’s voice that was as plain as day a girl’s voice cried, “We’ve
got you, you little rascal!”
Those two girls swooped down upon Dragonfly, seized him by the collar
and started dunking him in the pool of very cold water, dunking and
splashing water over him, and saying, “Take that--and that--and _that!_
We knew if we waited here, you’d be back!”
Then all of a sudden, there was a hullabaloo of other girls’ voices at
the top of the incline and a shower of flashlights and excited words
came tumbling down with them. It seemed like there must have been a
dozen girls, only there probably weren’t. Like a herd of stampeding
calves, all of them swarmed around our little half-scared-half-to-death
Dragonfly who was shivering and probably wondering what on earth. They
were pulling him this way and that, as if they would tear him to pieces.
Things like those I was seeing and hearing that minute just don’t
happen. Yet they _were_ happening, and to one of the grandest little
guys that ever sneezed in hayfever season--our very own Dragonfly
himself.
I didn’t know what he had done, nor why, but it seemed like anybody
with that many people swarming all over him like a colony of angry
bumblebees, ought to have somebody to stand up for him. If it had been
a gang of _boys_ beating up on that innocent little spindle-legged
guy, I probably would have made a headfirst dive, football style, into
the thick of them and bowled half a dozen of them over into the cement
pool. Then I’d have turned loose my two double-up experienced fists on
them, windmill fashion, and Poetry would have come tumbling after.
But what do you do when your pal is being torn to pieces by a pack
of helpless girls? As I have maybe told you before, my parents had
taught me to respect all girls, kind of like they were angels--which
most of them aren’t--and only one I ever saw in the whole Sugar Creek
territory is anywhere near like one, and she is one of Circus’s many
sisters, whose name is Lucille. Also I wouldn’t have the heart to fight
a weak-muscled helpless creature which men and boys are supposed to
defend from all harm and danger. Right that minute, though, while they
were dunking Dragonfly in the spring and shoving him around and calling
him names, it didn’t seem like girls _were_ such helpless creatures.
Certainly it was Dragonfly who needed the protection from harm and
danger!
I decided to use my mind and my voice, instead of my muscles. I
remembered that when I myself had been the striped cowboy riding a
watermelon, I had scattered the girls in every direction there is, by
letting loose a series of wild loon calls which sounded like a woman
screaming or a wildcat with a trembling voice trying to scare the wits
out of its prey. So, while I was still crouched in the shadows beside
and behind Poetry, I lifted my face to the sky and let loose six or
seven blood-curdling long-toned, high-voiced, trembling cries, making
the loon call, the screech-owl’s screech, and a wolf’s howl, over and
over again, and at about the same time.
Poetry, catching on to my idea, joined in with a series of sounds like
a young rooster learning to crow, and a guinea hen’s scrawny-necked
squawking, screaming song, which made me decide to bark like a dog and
also to let out a half-dozen long-toned, high-pitched wailing bawls
like Circus’s Pop’s hound, Old Bawler, makes when she’s on a red-hot
coon trail.
We probably sounded like the midway of a county fair gone crazy,
especially when all of a sudden Poetry, who could imitate almost every
farm noise there is, started in bawling like a calf, and I went back
to the loon call and the screech-owl’s screech. Then we began shaking
the elm saplings we were under, making them sway like a windstorm was
blowing and a cyclone would be there any minute.
Things happened pretty fast after that, and the noise got even worse
’cause, all mixed up with Dragonfly’s sneezing and Poetry’s and my
eardrum-splitting noises, were the different-pitched screams of the
girls. All of a sudden there was a flurry of skirts and slacks and
running feet, and in a flash of several jiffies the girls were tumbling
over each other on their way up the incline, past the base of the
leaning linden tree, and were gone! In my mind’s eye I was watching
them making a helter-skelter dash for the pawpaw bushes and their tents.
And that is how we practically saved Dragonfly’s life that very first
night of this story, which is only the beginning--and which made the
mystery we were trying to solve seem more mysterious than ever.
5
Poor Dragonfly! I guess he never had been so frightened before in his
sneezing life. Dog days are ragweed days--and nights, too--and he was
not only sneezing but wheezing a little, which meant he might get an
asthma attack any minute.
“The w-w-w-water ...” he stammered and gestured behind him toward the
spring.
Poetry and I were quick out of our hiding on our way to where Dragonfly
was. What, I wondered, was he trying to tell us about the watermelon?
“M-m-m-m-my knife!” he spluttered. “I-i-i-it’s in there--in the bottom
of the pool!”
When I heard that, I _knew_ he had been planning to plug the melon,
which I was sure somebody had left there a few jiffies ago. It didn’t
feel very good to have to believe one of our own gang had been mixed up
with the stealing of melons from the Collins’ truck patch.
“Hurry!” Dragonfly wheezed. “G-g-g-get it for me! I’ve got to get home
quick or I’ll get a licking! My parents don’t know where I am!”
Because all of us were in a hurry to get away from such a dangerous
place for boys to be--which it was, with a colony of bumblebee-like
girls on a temper spree--I exclaimed to Poetry: “Hold the flashlight
for me. I’ll get it!”--which Poetry did, and which I started to do, but
got an exclamation point in my mind for sum when I noticed there wasn’t
even one watermelon in the pool--neither the one I was sure somebody
had just hoisted over the lip of the pool and lowered inside, nor the
long beautiful one I had seen there myself, and which had had the oiled
paper wadding in it, and on which I had had a fierce, fast ride in the
moonlight.
What on earth!
“Come on! Hurry up!” Dragonfly cried. “I’ve got to get home before my
father gets back from town. It’s _his_ knife, and I wasn’t supposed to
have it!”
I quickly shoved my stripeless pajama sleeve up to my shoulder, and
while Poetry held the flashlight for me and Dragonfly shivered and
wheezed and watched, I plunged my arm into that icy water, where in a
few seconds my fingers clasped the knife and only a few seconds after
that all of us were on our way up the incline. At the top, we looked
quick to see if the enemy had retreated, and they had--anyway we didn’t
see or hear them--then we skirted the rail fence and the evergreens,
and started on the run on the way up the bayou, taking the way that
most certainly wouldn’t lead anywhere near the pawpaw bushes.
We would have looked very strange to most anybody--Poetry in his
green-striped pajamas, I in my yellowish, stripeless ones, and
Dragonfly in his red-striped ones--that was the funny thing about it,
that crooked-nosed, spindle-legged, short-of-breath little guy being in
his night clothes, too. When we asked him, “How come?” he panted back,
“I didn’t have time to dress. I had to get here, and get back again
before my father got home.”
It wasn’t a very satisfactory answer. His running around in the woods
in his night clothes didn’t make half as much sense as Poetry and I
running around in ours did. It must have seemed absolutely nonsensical
to those girl campers who must have thought he and I were the same
idiotic boy--which we most certainly weren’t--at least I wasn’t.
Dragonfly was going to explain further when he got stopped as quick
as a chicken’s squawking stops when you cut its head off to have it
dressed for dinner. His wheezy voice was interrupted by somebody in the
direction of Bumblebee Hill calling my name, saying, “_Bill! ... Bill
Collins! ..._ WHERE IN THE WORLD ARE YOU!”
“It’s your father!” Poetry stopped stock-still and said.
And it was.
That big, half-worried, half-mad, thundery voice trumpeting down to us
from the top of Bumblebee Hill was the well-known voice of Theodore
Collins, my reddish-brown-mustached, bushy-eyebrowed father. What on
earth was Pop doing out there waving his lantern and calling, “Bill
Collins, where in the world are you?”
All of a sudden it seemed like wherever I was, it would be a good place
not to be. It would be safer if I could take a fast shortcut through
the woods and be fast asleep in the tent--or pretending to be--by the
time Pop would give up looking for me and come back to the house. I
could tell by the tone of his ear-deafening voice that whatever he was
saying, he had already said it for the last time.
“Come on,” I whispered to Poetry and Dragonfly, “let’s get home
quick--QUICK!” I repeated the last word with a hiss, and lit out for
home--the shortcut that would miss Pop, who was still dodging along
with his swinging lantern toward the bayou, still calling my name and
stopping every few yards to listen. If only Dragonfly could run faster,
it would be easy, I thought.
Right then, to my surprise, Pop swung west and started on the run
toward the spring. We quick dodged behind some choke-cherry shrubs so
as not to be seen, then we scrambled up the hill and into the path made
by barefoot boys’ bare feet, and in a fast jiffy reached the rail fence
just across the road from the Collins’ gate and the walnut tree.
In less than almost no time, we were inside the tent, Dragonfly puffing
and wheezing on account of his asthma, Poetry puffing on account of his
weight, and I, just puffing.
But it wasn’t to any peaceful quiet tent that we had come back.
Dragonfly was as wet as a drowned rat from having been dunked in the
spring water and was shivering with the cold--on such a _hot_ midsummer
night!
We certainly had a problem on our hands. In fact, the whole night was
all messed up with problems. _Who_ had crawled out into our truck
patch, picked one of our melons, slipped it into a burlap bag, dragged
it on the end of a long plastic clothesline to a hole in the fence
under the elderberry bushes, hoisted it into his car, and driven away
with it? Who, quite a while later, had come rowing up the creek in a
boat and left the melon in the spring? And how come there wasn’t even
one melon there a little later? What on earth was Dragonfly himself
doing there? Was he actually looking for his knife, or had he had it
with him all the time? How come he had dropped it in the spring?
I felt like I do sometimes on examination day in school when the
teacher gives me a little slip of onion-skin paper with seven or eight
questions on it, quite a few of which I know I can’t answer. Generally
the slip of paper has a printed note at the top which says, “_Answer
any five._” But tonight’s questions were worse. I’d certainly need to
do a lot of studying, to answer even _one_ of them!
“I have got to get home and into bed, before my father gets home from
town and finds I’m not there, or I’ll get a licking!” Dragonfly whined.
“Doesn’t he know you are gone?” Poetry asked, and Dragonfly answered,
“I climbed out of my bedroom window. I had to get to the spring to get
my knife.”
Then Dragonfly got what he thought was a good idea. “You let me have
_your_ red-striped pajamas until tomorrow, Bill.” He was looking at me
and noticing I had on my yellow ones.
“I can’t,” I said, “--they are all wet.”
He was standing shivering in the light of Poetry’s flashlight and I was
shivering too, from all the excitement. Also I was still wondering how
soon Pop would give up looking for us in the woods and come back to the
tent. Dragonfly and I both had our fathers after us, I thought.
“Your red-striped pajamas are all wet?” Dragonfly exclaimed, and I
answered, “Yes, they just got dunked in the spring!” which, of course,
didn’t make sense to him.
We were all standing in the middle of the tent between the two cots,
trying to decide what to do, when Poetry said, “Listen! I hear a
telephone ringing somewhere!”
I had already heard it. The sound was coming from our house through
the open east window near which our phone hangs on the wall. Who, I
wondered, would be calling the Collins’ at this time of night? I knew
that if Mom woke up and came downstairs to answer the phone, she’d be
within a foot of the open window and she could hear anything we would
say or do in the tent.
But nobody answered the phone. A jiffy later it rang again, and when
nobody answered it, Poetry said, “Maybe your mother’s out in the woods
somewhere with your father; you’d better go answer it yourself.”
I lifted the tent awning, sped out across the lawn to the board walk
that leads from the back door to the pump, slipped into the house,
worked my way through the dark kitchen to the livingroom, hurried to
the phone, my heart pounding from having hurried so fast.
“Hello,” I said into the mouthpiece, making my voice sound as much
like my mother’s as I could, and there came screeching into my ear an
excited woman’s voice saying worriedly, “Hello, Mrs. Collins? I’ve been
trying to get you. Is our boy, Roy, there?”
“Roy?” I asked. “Roy _who?_”--not remembering for a second that
Dragonfly’s real name is Roy Gilbert, the Gang never calling him that.
He was just plain Dragonfly to us.
“Roy--my _boy_. He’s not in his room and I can’t find him anywhere.”
I didn’t have time to tell her anything ’cause right that minute there
was a voice hissing to me from outside the window, saying, “Who _is_
it?”
I turned my face away from the telephone mouthpiece and said to Poetry
whose hissing voice it was, “It’s Dragonfly’s mother. She’s afraid he’s
been kidnapped.”
From behind me I heard footsteps in our dark house, and before I could
wonder who it was, I heard Mom’s voice calling from the bottom of the
stairs, “What’s going on down here?”
Mom certainly looked strange, standing there in the kitchen doorway in
her night gown, her hair done up in curlers, the curlers shining in the
light of the lamp she was carrying.
Right then Poetry’s mischievous mind made him say something which he
must have thought was funny, but it wasn’t ’cause it made Mom gasp. His
squawky duck-like voice was almost like a ghost’s voice coming loudly
from just outside the window: “Everything’s all right, Mrs. Collins.
The phone rang and Bill answered it, ’cause your husband wasn’t
here--but was out in the woods in his night clothes racing around with
a lantern and yelling wildly. The last we saw of him he was running
like an excited deer with hounds on his trail!”
To make matters worse, Dragonfly’s mother was still on the phone and
heard everything Poetry said, and thought he had said it about her
boy--that _Dragonfly_ was running around in the woods with a lantern
and yelling wildly with hounds on his trail. She gasped into the
telephone the same kind of gasp Mom had just made.
“You want to talk to my mother?” I asked Mrs. Gilbert, glad for a
chance to get out of the house which the second Mom took the receiver
I started to do, and would have, if right that minute, Charlotte Ann,
in her baby bed in the downstairs bedroom hadn’t come to life with a
frightened baby-style cry.
Mom shushed me and told me to go in and see if Charlotte Ann had fallen
out of her bed.
In another second, I would’ve been in the room where Charlotte Ann
was, but my eyes took a fleeting glance out the front screen door and
across the road in the direction of the spring, and I saw a lighted
lantern making crazy jiggling movements which told me that Pop, who was
carrying it, was running like a deer in the direction of our house.
I knew that in another jiffy Theodore Collins would be over the rail
fence, swishing past “Theodore Collins” on our mailbox and sooner than
anything would be there in the middle of all our excitement, and want
to know what was what, and how come?
* * * * *
Boy oh boy, you should have seen the way Pop flew into action the very
minute he landed in his night shirt and trousers in the middle of our
brain-whirling trouble and excitement. But, for a father, he certainly
didn’t calm things down very fast--not like a father is supposed to
when he yells to everybody to “Calm down!” which Pop sometimes does at
our house, when he thinks I, especially, am raising what he calls a
“ruckus.”
Of course, Pop didn’t know I was inside the house trying to quiet
Charlotte Ann nor that Mom had gotten up upstairs and come downstairs
and was talking to Dragonfly’s mother on the phone trying to calm _her_
down.
The first thing Pop noticed was Poetry who, by that time, was in the
middle of the yard not far from Dragonfly who was not far from the
tent. I could hear Pop’s strong voice not far from the plum tree as he
demanded of the whole Collins’ farm, “William Jasper Collins”--meaning
me--“where on _earth_ have you boys been? And _what_ are you doing with
those wet pajamas on again?”--yelling that exclamatory question at poor
little red-striped, pajama-clad Dragonfly himself, who, of course, Pop
must have thought was his own innocent son.
Seeing and hearing him from the open window near the telephone, I
yelled out to Pop, “I haven’t got my red-striped pajamas on! They
are still out on the line behind the grape arbor where you hung them
yourself!”
You’d have thought Pop’s ears could have told him that his son’s voice
had come from the house behind him and not from the tent in front
of him, but I guess it was like a ventriloquist’s voice fooling his
audience, ’cause Pop was looking at the boy in the shadow of the plum
tree, and in the sputtering light of his lantern. He barked back at
Dragonfly, “Don’t try to be funny!” and demanded an explanation.
All this time Mom was using a soothing voice on Roy Gilbert’s mother
while also all the time I was trying to quiet Charlotte Ann’s
half-scared-half-to-death voice.
And _that_ was the way Pop’s understanding of things began--and the way
the next thirty minutes started.
_What_ a night!
6
An excitement like the one we were splashing around in--squawky-voiced,
barrel-shaped Poetry; red-striped pajama-clad Dragonfly;
night-gown-dressed Mom; crying Charlotte Ann; my confused father, and
his actual son--couldn’t last forever, and this one didn’t!
In not too long a while, Pop began to get things clear in his usually
bright mind, as Poetry and I managed to squeeze in a few words of
explanation, keeping some of the mystery to ourselves to talk over with
the Gang tomorrow, when we would have our meeting at the Little-Jim
tree at the bottom of Bumblebee Hill. The Little-Jim tree, as you know,
is the name we had given the tree under which Little Jim had killed the
fierce old mad old mother bear, which you know about if you’ve read the
book, “We Killed a Bear.”
It seemed we ought to tell Pop and Mom _why_ Poetry and I had been
running around in a beautiful moonlit dog days night in our night
clothes, so as soon as we could, we explained about the watermelon in
the burlap bag and the noisy old car racing down the lane and coming
back a little later.
Pop really fired up when I mentioned how the thief had managed to get
the watermelon through the fence. “You mean somebody cut a hole in my
new woven-wire fence!” he half shouted. “We’ll go down there right now
and have a look at it!” He was more angry, it seemed, that his fence
had been cut than that one of our watermelons had been stolen.
Dragonfly broke in then saying, “I’ve got to get home,” and the way he
said it made me wonder if he knew all about the whole thing and wanted
to get away from us.
Mom decided what we were going to do first, by saying, “I promised
Roy’s mother we’d drive him home right away.”
That did seem like the best thing to do and so in a little while all
of us including Mom and Charlotte Ann, were in our car driving up the
road to Dragonfly’s house. It took quite a few minutes for Mom and Pop
and me to calm Dragonfly’s mother down--she was so upset. I helped as
much as I could, taking as much blame as I thought would be safe--not
wanting Pop to start wondering where his razor strap was. But I
_didn’t_ want that little spindle-legged, crooked-nosed little guy to
have to have a licking for doing practically nothing, which it looked
like maybe his mother was excited enough and nervous enough to give him.
“You know how boys are,” Mom said. “They get ideas of things they want
to do, and they think afterwards.”
Pop helped a little by saying, “Even our own son does unpredictable
things once in awhile. Isn’t that right, Bill?”
It was too dark there in the shadow of the big cedar tree that grows
close to Dragonfly’s side door, for Pop to see me frown, but I decided
to look up the word “unpredictable” in our dictionary as soon as I got
a chance, just to see what kind of things I did once in awhile, hoping
they weren’t as bad as such a long word made them sound.
“It’s my fault, he got his pajamas all wet,” I thought it was safe to
say to Dragonfly’s worried mother. Then I told her a little about the
girls at the spring and how they probably thought Dragonfly was me.
I _didn’t_ tell her I thought maybe her innocent son was mixed up in
our watermelon mystery, or she might have had insomnia that night even
worse than another pajama-dressed boy’s mother.
From Dragonfly’s house we drove back toward ours, turned into the lane
that goes down the south side of our farm and stopped at the place in
the fence where the elderberry bushes were, the very same place where
not more than two hours ago the noisy oldish car had been parked.
Say, when Pop’s flashlight showed him the hole in the fence under the
elderberry bushes, he was as angry as I have ever seen him get. He just
stood there at the side of our car, with the moonlight shining on his
stern face, his jaw muscles working, and I knew every other muscle in
his body was tense.
“It’s hard to believe anybody would be _that_ mean,” he said.