stalks--and already the sumac was turning red. I hadn’t any more than
thought all these things than from behind the sumac on the other side
of Sarah Paddler’s tall tombstone I heard a long-tailed sneeze and knew
Dragonfly was there. A jiffy later he came pouting into the little
circular open place we were in, saying, “How come you didn’t wait for
me?”
He looked a little guilty, I thought, as, panting and wheezing a
little, he plumped himself down on the ground between Poetry and me.
Everything was so quiet for a minute that he must have guessed we had
been talking about him. “Are the--are the girls still camping up in the
woods?” he asked--and I knew he was remembering last night’s dunking in
the spring and also probably never would forget it.
There was an interrogatory sentence in my mind, right that minute. So I
exploded at Dragonfly, “What were you doing in the middle of the night
down there at the spring?”
My question probably sounded pretty saucy to him.
“I went to get my knife,” he said. “I was there getting a drink
yesterday afternoon when a whole flock of girls came storming down and
scared me so bad I dropped my knife. I was so scared I ran home. It was
my Dad’s knife, and he was coming home before midnight, and I didn’t
want him to know I had it, so I sneaked back to get it, and--”
* * * * *
Another of my mystery balloons had burst. Poetry and I looked at each
other and shrugged. That let Dragonfly out. He hadn’t had anything to
do with stealing watermelons. He was as innocent as a lamb. I sighed
a big sigh of relief though, ’cause it felt good to get all that
suspicion out of my mind, and to have him with us again.
We all crowded around Big Jim to see what was between the layers of
the bread wrapper. “It’s a map!” Little Jim exclaimed in his squeaky
voice, and it was--a crude drawing made with indelible pencil. That
was the first thing I noticed, that it had been made with indelible
pencil. The drawing looked like a map of the Sugar Creek territory
itself. In fact, it was a _very good_ map of the Gang’s playground with
the names of important places on it--names that only anybody living
in our neighborhood would know about; a few that only the Gang itself
might know--such as “Bumblebee Hill,” “the Black Widow Stump,” and the
“Little-Jim tree.”
My mind cringed when I realized that maybe whoever had drawn the map
was one of our own Gang--maybe one of us who, right that minute, were
in a football-style huddle in the cemetery.
Then Poetry noticed something I hadn’t--“Look at that red X, would you?
Wonder what _that_ means?”
I squeezed in between Poetry and Dragonfly and looked, and there it
was, a very small red X with a red circle around it, in the upper
left-hand corner of the page. I could tell that the red X and the red
circle were marking a spot on the other side of the creek, just below
the big Sugar Creek bridge.
Boy oh boy, it was like a story book! That was the second map of the
territory we had found--the first one, as you already know, had been
hidden in the old hollow sycamore tree, and that map had been the very
center of the very first mystery we had ever had--but I told you all
about that in the very first story there ever was about the Sugar Creek
Gang, and it’s in a book by that name.
Big Jim must have been thinking the same thoughts I was, ’cause right
that second he said, “Who outside our Gang knows the name of the tree
where Little Jim killed the bear?”
Poetry rolled himself into a sitting position and grunted himself
to his feet. Trying to make his voice sound like a detective’s, he
said, “All right, everybody; don’t a one of you leave this room--this
cemetery, I mean. One of you in this circle is a watermelon thief; one
of you drew this map!”
Before anybody could have stopped him he was firing at us one
interrogatory sentence after another. The first one was, “Who among us
has an indelible pencil? You, Bill?”
“No sir,” I said.
I was surprised that Big Jim let Poetry keep on with his questions,
but he did, and pretty soon Poetry had asked us a half-dozen others,
such as, which of us ate Eatmore Bread at home, what kind of
clotheslines did our mothers use--rope or plastic--and did any of us
smoke? Of course the last question was a foolish one, as far as the
Gang was concerned, but I knew why he had asked it. He was remembering
the man in the boat who, last night, had lit a cigar or cigarette with
a match or a lighter.
Poetry was looking as dignified as any fat boy with mussed-up hair and
mischievous eyes can look. He was all set to keep on talking and asking
questions when Big Jim interrupted, saying, “Look, all of you! There’s
only one other person--or rather two--who might know the names we’ve
given to the important places around here. One is Little Tom Till, and
the other is his big brother, Bob.”
I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of Tom before. The very second Big
Jim mentioned his name, I remembered that Tom was very good in art at
school; in fact, he got better grades in it than any of the rest of
us. For some reason, though, I didn’t like the idea of thinking that
Tom was guilty. He wasn’t exactly a member of our Gang but we all felt
he belonged to us anyway. He hadn’t been meeting with the Gang lately,
though, because his brother didn’t want him to, and Tom was very much
afraid of his big brother’s big fists.
“The thing for us to do,” Big Jim interrupted my thoughts to say, “is
to do what Bill suggests--go straight to their house and ask them
point-blank what they know about this map and whether they’ve been
stealing watermelons.”
And _that_ is what we decided to do, only Big Jim cautioned us to watch
our words so as not to stir up Bob’s temper.
“Remember, he will be in church tomorrow--and in our class.”
I remembered it all the way. Our faces were set as we left the
cemetery, moved down the slope of Bumblebee Hill, walking right
through the place where the famous battle of Bumblebee Hill had been
fought and where Little Tom Till had fired the fist heard round the
world. That fist had landed ker-smash right on my nose. I stopped for
a minute, right in the middle of the battleground and looked around,
trying to remember the exact spot where two red-haired, freckle-faced,
fiery-tempered boys, who looked very much alike, most of the time, had
had such an exciting time getting acquainted.
I was glad that Tom was my friend now--or was he? If he had drawn the
map and stuffed it into the watermelon, then _he_ must be mixed up in
our mystery in some way.
We passed the Little-Jim tree and went on to the spring again, then
moved cautiously through the woods toward the rail fence that bordered
the north road, having to pass not more than forty yards from the
pawpaw bushes on the way. Dragonfly managed to sneeze several times
just as we were parallel with the girl scout camp, which proved that
his mind as well as his nose was allergic to perfume, ’cause he
certainly wasn’t close enough to their camp to smell them.
“Girls aren’t anything to be sneezed at,” Poetry was smart enough to
think of to say to Dragonfly; and Dragonfly sneezed again.
At the rail fence, we went through--or under or over--the different
rails--whichever different ones of us decided to do, and in a fast
jiffy were on our way across the bridge, in the direction of the Tills’
house.
The minute we reached the other side of the bridge Little Jim cried
suddenly, “Look! There’s the boat I bet they used last night!”
I looked downstream in the direction Little Jim was pointing and saw
the red stern of a rowboat half hidden under the low-hanging branches
of a willow.
A thousand shivers started racing up and down my spine when I realized
that our mystery was coming to even more life than it had come to last
night when we had seen the boat stopping at the spring.
At that very same instant I saw, back on the shore, half-hidden among
the trees, the forest-green roof of a wall-type tent. What on earth? I
thought. Not only were there a flock of girls camping near the pawpaw
bushes in the woods above the bridge, but here on the other side of
the creek and _below_ the bridge was somebody else camping! I was
remembering last night and the mysterious something-or-other I had seen
somebody carry to the spring from the boat. This very same boat, maybe!
Poetry beside me remarked, “There’s where the woman lives--the one that
was smoking the cigarette last night.”
“There’s where the _man_ lives, you mean,” I disagreed.
Beside the tent was a gun-metal gray pickup truck that looked like it
was maybe ten or fifteen years old. At almost the same instant, there
was the sound of a motor coming to roaring life, and right away the
truck was moving. It went backwards first, then swung left and began
bumping along in the little lane toward the highway.
“Quick, everybody!” Big Jim ordered. “Down the embankment and under the
bridge!”
We obeyed Big Jim like soldiers taking orders from a captain in a
battle. In only a few lightning-fast jiffies, we were all down the
embankment and crouching on a narrow strip of shore underneath the
north end of the bridge, getting there just in time on account of in a
few fast minutes we heard the truck’s wheels on the board floor above
us. And _that was that!_
As soon as the car was across the bridge, we decided it would be a good
idea to look around a little, just to see if we could find any “clues,”
as Poetry was always saying.
We followed a narrow footpath which skirts the shore and is bordered
on either side with willows and ragweeds just like the path on our own
side of the creek.
Pretty soon we came to within twenty-five feet of the boat and the
green tent. “Hello, there!” Big Jim called. “Anybody home?”
There wasn’t any answer from anybody.
“Hello! I say, _Hello!_” Big Jim called again several times, and still
there wasn’t any reply.
While it wouldn’t be right to trespass on somebody’s campground, we
knew we wouldn’t be doing anything wrong if we just walked in the path
which belonged to everybody anyway, past the place where the boat was
moored.
A second later we were there, and what to my wondering eyes should
appear but out in the middle of the boat a gunny sack--an actual,
honest-to-goodness gunny sack--and it had in it something fat and long
and--.
“Hey,” I said to Poetry and to all of us, “look! There’s another
watermelon! In a gunny sack!”
“You’re crazy,” Poetry answered. “That’s not a watermelon; that’s a
water _jug!_” And to my very sad disappointment, Poetry was right.
There was a great big water jug like the kind we used in the Sugar
Creek threshing ring, wrapped round and round with a gunny sack, and
tied on with binder twine.
I remembered then that many a time I had carried drinking water to Pop
from our iron pitcher pump out across the barnyard to whatever field he
was in at the time. First I would soak the burlap bag in cold water. If
you do that to a burlap bag, it will keep the water in the jug cool for
quite a long time.
“That,” Poetry said, “is what the woman in the boat last night was
getting at the spring. She carried an empty jug to the spring, let it
down into the water until it was filled and then carried it back again.”
“I still want to know who drew a map and put it inside that
watermelon,” I said crossly. “And _where_ is Ida!”
After Big Jim had called “Hello,” a few more times and nobody had
answered, we decided to see if we could find any honest-to-goodness
clues, only we wouldn’t go inside the tent.
“Look at that, would you?” Poetry exclaimed, the minute we were on the
other side of the tent. “See that clothesline hanging between those two
trees.”
Most of us had already seen it. It was a brand new plastic line
stretching from a small maple near the tent to the trunk of an ash that
grew about thirty feet away, not more than five feet from a field of
very tall corn. Hanging on the line were two or three pairs of slacks
like women and girls wear; also there were several different kinds of
different-colored other women’s clothes. We didn’t even have time to
try to make up our minds what to do next, on account of all of a sudden
there was a clattering of the boards of the Sugar Creek bridge--and it
was the pickup truck coming back.
“Quick, everybody!” Big Jim exclaimed. “Let’s get out of here!”
And “out of here” we got, scurrying like six scared cottontails into
the tall corn. We didn’t stop running until we knew we were far enough
away so we couldn’t be seen by anybody even if she dropped down on
her hands and knees and looked beneath the drooping cornblades in our
direction.
“I guess this lets Bob and Tom out,” Circus said. It had also knocked
the daylights out of my mystery.
“But what about the burlap bag with the watermelon in it--the one that
was being dragged through our watermelon patch, last night?” I asked.
“It was _dark_ out there, wasn’t it?” Circus asked. “You couldn’t tell
whether it was a watermelon or a water _jug_.”
“But I felt it with my two hands, and it was long and round and----”
“A water jug is long and round,” Little Jim’s mouselike voice squeaked.
“But this one in our watermelon patch didn’t have any spout on it,” I
protested, feeling my mystery-house falling and crashing all around me.
“How do you know it didn’t have? You didn’t feel both _ends_, did you?
You just felt it in the middle!” Poetry argued back. “And besides,”
he went on in a talkative hurry, “your other iron pitcher pump wasn’t
more than twenty feet away when we first saw it. Somebody was helping
himself to some drinking water.”
I felt my jaw muscles tightening with anger. I knew--_knew_ what had
been in that burlap bag last night was a watermelon. Besides, why
would anybody want to get drinking water secretly like that? I quickly
asked the question out loud, and got a quick answer from Poetry, whose
detective-like mind was certainly alert that day: “Sugar Creek water
isn’t safe to drink for anything except a fish in dog days. Look at all
that green scum floating out there.”
* * * * *
Poetry was probably right, but his answer didn’t tell me _why_ whoever
wanted the water, didn’t go right straight to any member of the Sugar
Creek Gang’s parents and ask for a jug of water in the _day_time.
“But somebody _did_ take my prize watermelon!” I protested. “Ida
couldn’t just get up and walk away. Somebody had to carry or drag her.”
And a second later, Poetry was juggling a little jingle we’d heard him
use quite a few times, and was:
“I proposed to Ida,
Ida refused;
I’da won my Ida if I’da used ...”
“STOP!” I ordered Poetry and started to start to say something else but
got stopped by Big Jim shushing me, making me swallow my words and my
temper. But I still knew I was right. The whole thing was as plain as a
dog-day day to anybody with half a mind, which it looked like maybe I
was the only one of us that did have.
That was as far as any of us got to talk or think right then, on
account of from the direction of the tent I heard a car door slam and I
knew it was the truck, and my mind was busy trying to imagine who had
probably just climbed out of it.
“Do you suppose it’s anybody we know?” Dragonfly asked, and sneezed and
grabbed his nose with his right hand to stop another sneeze that was
already getting ready to explode.
For a few anxious seconds we all lay there in the nice clean dust of
the cornfield, listening and thinking and trying to decide what to do,
if anything. For a few minutes, even though I was worrying on account
of the mystery, I was hearing and actually enjoying the sound of the
husky rusty rustle of the corn blades in the very light breeze that was
blowing. Overhead I could see the big white cumulus clouds hanging in
the lazy afternoon sky, also the shimmering green leaves in the top of
the cottonwood tree farther down the shore. I even noticed a lazy crow
loafing along in the sky like he didn’t have a worry in the world. It
wouldn’t be long before fall would be here, I thought, and that lonely
old crow would join about five hundred of his black-feathered friends
and spend half the day everyday, for a while, cawing and cawing in his
hoarse voice, keeping it up and keeping it up, hour after hour in the
bare trees. One of the dreariest things a farm boy ever sees in the
autumn, is a forlorn-looking crow flapping his sad wings above the
frosty cornfields.
Nearly every summer there is a crow’s nest in the top of the old pine
tree on the other side of the creek near the mouth of the branch.
About all a pair of crow parents ever do to make a nest for their crow
children to be hatched in, is to build a rough platform of sticks--some
large and some small--and line it with strips of bark from the cedar
trees. Then the mother crow, who is just as black as her husband only
her feathers don’t shine as brightly, lays from four to seven eggs that
are the color of green dust with little brown spots on them. Crows are
always scattering themselves over the new cornfields in the spring,
digging down into the rows where the grains have been planted, and
gobbling up the grains before they have a chance to grow.
Of course, any farm boy knows a crow eats May beetles and grasshoppers
and cutworms and caterpillers and even mice, and he is also a
thief--_but he doesn’t use a plastic clothesline to help him get what
he wants_.
Just thinking that brought my mind back to the cornfield we were lying
in right that minute.
My thoughts got there just in time to hear Big Jim say to me, “Bill,
you and Poetry tell us once more all you know about everything from
the beginning up to now--” which Poetry and I did, rehearsing to the
Gang what we had seen at the spring on our first trip--the plugged
watermelon with the folded oiled paper in it; the long dark thing we
had seen being dragged through the melon patch which at first I had
thought was some kind of wild animal running; the car that had gone
clattering down the lane and back again; the hole in the fence and
the watermelon being pulled through--or the water _jug_, whichever it
was--and hoisted into the car; and then Poetry’s and my trip back to
the spring again, the mystery man or woman in the boat; and Dragonfly’s
coming for his knife and getting dunked by the girls.
“Don’t forget the perfume,” Dragonfly said, “and the pine-scented paper
and the map and--” And then he quickly grabbed his nose just in time to
stop another sneeze.
“And the red letter X,” Little Jim put in.
Big Jim unfolded the map again and we crowded around him to study it.
There was only one person I knew who could draw a map as neat as that.
“We’d better see Tom about this,” I said. “Here--let me have it. I’m
the one who took it out of the melon in the first place.”
I was surprised when Big Jim handed it to me saying, “All right, you
keep it until we find the real owner. It probably belongs to the girl
scouts.”
I folded it and tucked it into my left hip pocket.
“Don’t forget about the plastic clothesline--the brand new one we
just saw,” Circus said, which I remembered right that very minute was
stretched between two trees behind the tent and had a lot of different
kinds of different colored women’s clothes on it.
Things certainly were mixed up. The more we talked, the more tangled up
everything seemed. All this time, Little Jim had been hanging onto his
brown manila envelope like it was very important. I noticed he had a
far-away expression in his eyes right then like he was thinking about
something a lot farther away than the cornfield we were in. Also he
didn’t have any worries on his face, which I was pretty sure I had.
“Let’s do a little more scouting around,” Poetry suggested. “Let’s send
out a couple of spies to sneak up close to the tent to see what we can
see or hear.”
Big Jim shook his head a very savage “No,” saying, “You don’t go
sneaking around a tent where women or girls are camping! There’s even a
law against it. Remember what happened to that Peeping Tom they caught
looking into a window in town, last winter?”
“What’s a Peeping Tom?” Dragonfly wanted to know. And Big Jim, being
the oldest one of the Gang, explained it to all of us. When he got
through, we made it a rule of the Gang that not a one of us would ever
be one.
That knocked out Poetry’s scouting suggestion. We couldn’t go spying
around any tent or any place where there were women or girls.
Just that second, Dragonfly hissed like he does when he has seen or
heard something important. “Listen! Somebody’s coming!”
We all looked and listened in every direction, and sure enough,
somebody _was_ coming. Was it a man, or a woman, or a girl? Or who, or
what?
I stooped low, looked down the corn row I was in, and when I saw what I
saw, I hissed to everybody, “It’s a _woman_; she’s wearing blue slacks!”
That meant that six boys ought to scramble themselves out of there,
which, on Big Jim’s hissed orders, we did, hurrying like a covey of
quail, only instead of fanning out in a lot of different directions
like flushed quail do, we all followed Big Jim down his corn row, not
stopping until we reached the bridge again.
“We’ll go on over to the Tills’ house right now,” he said, and I
noticed that Little Jim’s hands were clasping tightly his manila
envelope as he said, “Yeah, let’s.”
And away we went.
8
As much as I hated to leave the red boat and the green tent and the
brown burlap bags with the waterjugs in them, and the blue-dressed
woman, I was perfectly willing to go on to Big Bob Till’s house--and of
course Dragonfly was, for some reason, extraordinarily willing to get
as far as possible from anybody who was a woman or a girl. I was all
set in my mind for whatever would happen when Big Bob and Big Jim saw
each other. What _would_ happen? I wondered.
* * * * *
I certainly was surprised when, just before we reached the Tills’
wooden gate which led to their barnyard, I looked down at my hands and
saw that somewhere on the way--I had picked up a three-foot-long stick
and was carrying it, clasping it so tight my knuckles were white. My
eyebrows were down, my lips were pressed tightly together, and my jaw
muscles were tense.
We looked around the barn first and called “Hello,” a few times, with
nobody answering. Then we went inside and out again, and through their
orchard to the back door of their house. Big Jim and Circus went on
to the small roofless porch and knocked--and again nobody answered.
“Hello,” Big Jim called, and there wasn’t any answer or any sound from
inside the house.
“Hello there,” Big Jim called again, and knocked again. Still nobody
answered.
While Big Jim was doing that, I noticed Little Jim had his pencil
out and was writing something on the manila envelope. My parents had
taught me that it isn’t polite to read over anybody’s shoulder unless
he invites you to, so I had a hard time seeing what he was writing,
having to stand in front of him and crane my neck to read upside-down.
And--would you believe it?--that little guy had written:
Dear Bob,
Here’s the Sunday School lesson quarterly Mother promised your
mother. Be sure to study all the questions so in case our teacher
asks you any of them you will know the answers. We will stop for
you at nine o’clock in the morning.
Your friend,
Little Jim Foote.
I couldn’t have read another line without getting a crick in my neck,
but I remembered all of a sudden that it was to Little Jim’s father,
the township trustee, that Bob had been paroled.
I saw Little Jim slip the envelope between the screen door and the
unpainted white-knobbed wooden door, just as we were leaving.
They had probably gone to town or somewhere, I thought.
In a little while we were back at the bridge again and across it and,
because it was Saturday and we were all supposed to get the chores
done early so our parents could go to town, which most of them did on
Saturday night, we separated, each one going to his own house. Even
though Poetry was going to spend the night with me in the tent, he said
he had to go home for a while so I was all by myself when I got to the
north road and turned left toward the Collins’ farm.
I moseyed lazily along, thinking and worrying and trying to figure
out things. It just didn’t seem possible that the gunny sack under
the elder bushes last night had had a water _jug_ in it instead of
a water_melon_. Even if it was possible, I didn’t want to believe
it. Of course, the woman or several women or girls who lived in the
forest-green tent would have to have drinking and cooking water--even
if they could have used the water from the creek to do their washing.
Sugar Creek water wasn’t supposed to be good for drinking, even when it
wasn’t dog days.