was on top, and it was: “If whoever had filled his or her water jugs
at the spring, or at the Collins’ _other_ iron pitcher pump, had done
it _at night_, then whoever lived in the tent must be afraid to go to
anybody’s house in the daytime and ask for water. And if they were
afraid to, _why_ were they afraid?”
One other thing made me set my feet down a little harder as they went
plop-plop in the dusty road I was walking in, and that was: “Was the
oldish car I had seen and heard in the lane last night the same as the
gun-metal gray pickup truck which right this minute was parked beside
the green tent?”
My mind was so busy with my thoughts that I was frightened when I
heard a car coming behind me, the driver giving what Pop would call
“a courteous honk,” like you are supposed to give when you want
somebody to know you are behind them and don’t want to scare the living
daylights out of them.
A jiffy later the car had pulled up alongside and stopped, and I saw,
sitting behind the steering wheel and wearing a watermelon-colored
dress and sparkling glasses, a smiling-faced, dark-haired lady about
twenty years old. “Hello there!” she called in a friendly, musical
voice. “I’ve been looking all over for you. Where have you been?”
Before I could answer she had gone on to say, “You forgot to leave the
map in the watermelon. The girls told me there was nothing in it.”
“Map?” I asked, with an exclamatory voice.
Interrogative sentences were galloping round and round in my mind. Then
my thoughts made a dive for my left hip pocket. My face must have had
a question-mark on it, ’cause she said, “Don’t you remember? You were
going to make us a copy of the one you showed me. We wanted each of our
girls to make her own map, using yours as a model, so that if any of
them should get lost while they were here, they could easily find their
way back to camp.”
Before I could answer--not knowing what to say anyway--she said with
a laugh that was like the water in the Sugar Creek riffle above the
spring, “I hardly recognized you, at first, with your hair cut, and I
see you’ve washed your face since yesterday, too. You certainly remind
me of my little brother. His first name was Tom, too.”
Say, you could have knocked me over with a haircut, I was so surprised.
All of a brain-whirling sudden, I knew who the watermelon thief was,
and my mystery was practically solved. _Little Tom Till and I had red
hair and freckles, and each of us wore a striped shirt and blue denim
western-style jeans! The lady thought I was Little Tom Till!_
Just then I heard somebody calling from the direction of our farm and
it was Pop’s thundery voice saying loud enough to be heard a quarter of
a mile away, “Bill! Hurry up! It’s time to start the chores!”
What little presence of mind I had, told me not to answer because it
seemed like I ought to let the smiling-faced lady think I _was_ Little
Tom Till--for just a little while anyway--so I said to her, “That’s
Theodore Collins. He’s probably calling his son to come and help him
with the chores.”
“You know the Collins family?” the voice that was still like the Sugar
Creek riffle, asked.
When I swallowed again and answered “Yes,” she surprised me by saying,
“I met your mother in town this afternoon. She seemed like a very nice
person. You must be very proud of her.”
“Uh--my mother? Which one?... I mean--you _did?_”
“She and Mrs. Collins were together shopping. They invited our troupe
to church tomorrow. You go to Sunday school, I suppose?”
I swallowed a “Yes, Ma’am,” which she managed to hear, and before
Theodore Collins called his son again about the undone chores, I said,
“If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll run over and see if I can stop him
from having to call again. I think I know where his boy is.”
My hip pocket seemed to have a fire in it which ought to be put out, so
just before I started to start toward Pop to help put out a temper-fire
which probably was ready to burn a hole in his hat, I handed to the
lady the map Poetry and I had found last night in the watermelon in the
spring, saying, “Is this what you wanted?”
She unfolded the “Eat more Eatmore” wrapper, spread out the map and
studied it. Her face lit up as she said, “Why this is _good_--_very_
good! It’s even better than the one you showed me yesterday.”
I liked her friendly voice and her smile so well, that for a second
I wished I was actually Little Tom Till, himself. Then she tossed
another question at me, and it was “This red X in the circle--does that
represent any special location?”
“The red X?” I asked innocently. “Why, that’s--that’s--that’s where the
green tent is pitched. I--it’s straight across the creek from the mouth
of the branch, and just--uh--about fifty yards above where the current
divides, and one part goes down the north side of the island and the
other the other.”
She smiled a spoken thank you and added, “You do have a fine sense of
humor, don’t you?”
I wasn’t sure _what_ I had, but there was one thing I wanted to know,
and very much. I felt I _had_ to know it. What _did_ the red letter X
stand for? Of course I knew the tent was there, but who lived in it and
why? And why, if Tom had drawn this map for the girl scouts, _why_ had
he put the red X there?
I must have been frowning my worry and she saw it, ’cause right away
she added, “The girls’ll be intrigued by your story that an old witch
is camping there, but I’m afraid instead of their wanting to stay away,
they’ll be more curious than ever.”
Then my whole mind gasped. The lady in the watermelon colored dress
not only thought I was Little Tom Till, but that little rascal of a
red-haired boy had told her there was an old witch living in the tent,
and that the girls ought not to go anywhere near it. _What_ on _earth!_
Just then Theodore Collins’ thundery voice called again for his son, so
I said, “I’d better go now,” which I did. Away I went in a galloping
hurry to let a reddish-brown-mustached, bushy-eyebrowed father know
where his son really was--if he _was_ his son.
I found Mr. Collins in a better humor than I expected. Panting and
running fast like a boy who is late for school, I arrived at the barn
door just as Pop came out with a pail of Purina Chow for our old
brindle cow who was standing at the pasture bars looking at us with
question marks on her ears as if wondering why her supper had to come
so early--but that it was all right with her.
“Why didn’t you answer me when I called?” Pop asked, and I remembered
an old joke our family had read in a magazine and which we had laughed
over, so I said, “I didn’t hear you the first _two_ times.”
“Bright boy,” Pop answered, and I answered with another old joke,
saying, “I’m so bright my parents call me ‘son.’”
Pop grinned and when I asked him how come we had to get the chores done
so early, he explained, “There’s a special prayer meeting for the men
of the church. That’s why your mother’s in town now--she went in to get
the shopping done this afternoon--she and Mrs. Till.”
It was a good thing we _did_ get the chores done early--a _very_ good
thing--because there were a lot of important other things that had to
happen that day to make this story even more mysterious, and to clear
up some of the cloudy questions in my mind. Nearly everything had to
happen before sundown, only of course I didn’t know it at the time, or
I’d have hurried even faster with my part of the chores.
I was up in our haymow alone throwing down alfalfa hay when I looked
out the east window and saw our car coming down the road, with Mom at
the steering wheel and Little Tom Till’s Mom with Charlotte Ann in her
lap in the front seat with her. Only a few minutes before I had been
thinking about Mrs. Till in a very special way, so when I saw her in
the car with Mom, I got the queerest feeling.
Throwing down hay was something I always liked to do because it is like
a man’s job; also there was something nice about being alone in a big
wide alfalfa-smelling haymow where a boy could think a boy’s thoughts,
talk to himself, and whistle, and even sing, and nobody could hear him.
Sometimes when I’m in the haymow, I climb up on the long, axe-hewn beam
that stretches across the whole width of the barn from one side to
the other, and imagine myself to be Abraham Lincoln who had split so
many logs with an ax. I raise my voice and quote all of his Gettysburg
address, feeling fine while I am doing it, and important, and glad to
be alive. Maybe I would be President of the United States, some time,
myself.
I always hated to stop when the last word was said, and I would have to
be Theodore Collins’ son again, with years and years of growing yet to
do before I would be a man.
Well, I had just said in my deepest, most dignified voice, “... that
this nation under God may have a new birth of freedom, and that
government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall
not perish from the earth,” and was still standing listening to my
imaginary audience clap their hands, and thinking about the part of my
speech which said, “all men are created equal,” and was also thinking
of the Till family--old hook-nosed John Till himself; his oldest boy
Bob, and Little Tom, his other son, who wanted to be a good boy and
was, part of the time. I was remembering the manila envelope which
Little Jim had left at the Tills’ back door and was thinking about Mrs.
Till who had such a hard time just to keep from being too discouraged
to want to live....
Then is when I heard our car coming and saw Mom with Mrs. Till beside
her. I quickly threw down another forkful of hay, hurried to the ladder
and climbed down, leaving Abraham Lincoln to look after himself--and to
get off the log the best way he could.
It seemed like Mom, by being a friend to Bob and Tom Till’s mother, was
helping to prove that “all men are created equal.”
“All men are created equal,” was still in my mind when I reached the
bottom of the ladder. For some reason, though, it didn’t seem right
that Little red-haired, fiery-tempered, freckle-faced Tim Till was as
equal as I was. We might look a lot alike to anybody who saw us dressed
in the same kind of clothes, but I was _not_ a watermelon thief--and he
was, I thought--and the first chance I got I was going to prove to him
that even though all men, boys especially, might be created equal, when
one boy sneaked out into another boy’s melon patch, stole a melon, and
sold it to a girl scout troupe, the other boy was equal to giving him a
sound thrashing.
I was wondering whether I ought to tell Pop about what the girl scout
leader had told _me_, when I heard Mom’s voice calling from up near the
walnut tree, “Is Bill out there somewhere?”
I almost jumped out of my bare feet when I heard Pop answer her from
just outside the barn door, “He’s helping me with the chores!”
Mom called back to say that she wanted me to take care of Charlotte Ann
while she drove Mrs. Till on home.
It wasn’t easy, taking care of that wriggling, impatient little rascal
of a sister. Whatever makes a two-year-old baby sister so hard to take
care of anyway? And why do they always want to run away from you and
get into dangerous situations the very second your back is turned? I
hadn’t any sooner sat down in the big rope swing under the walnut tree,
and started to pump myself a little, than I heard Pop yelling from some
direction or other--in fact from away up at the pignut tree--and how in
the world did _he_ get that far away so quick?--yelling for me to “Run
quick and get Charlotte Ann away from Old Red Addie’s fence.”
I swung out of the swing in a scared hurry, ’cause my eyes told me that
that cute little reddish-brown-haired baby sister of mine was not only
near the hog-lot fence but was actually trying to crawl through it to
get inside--Charlotte Ann not being afraid of a single animal on our
farm--not even one.
I scattered our seventy-eight hens in even more directions than that
as I flew to Charlotte Ann’s rescue. Mom would have a conniption fit
if I let that little sister of mine get her clean dress soiled and her
best shoes muddy in Red Addie’s apartment-house yard--especially if she
decided the mud puddle was a good place to walk in, which she probably
would.
I got there just in time. _Honestly!_ That _child!_ You can hardly
do anything else when you are looking after her. Mom calls it
“baby-sitting” when she asks me to take care of her, but it isn’t! It’s
baby-_running_, and keeping your eyes peeled every second or you won’t
even have a baby sister. She’ll be gone in a flash, and you have to
look all over for her--like the time she got lost in the woods and a
terrible cyclone roared into our territory and trees were uprooted and
fell in every direction and--But you know all about that if you’ve read
the story, “The Green Tent Mystery at Sugar Creek.”
Well, after what seemed like too long a time, Mom got back from
driving Mrs. Till home, and I went to the car to help her carry in the
groceries and other things, and that’s when we found the brown paper
bag with oranges in it, which Mrs. Till had accidentally left on the
floor in the back, and Mom hadn’t seen it.
“Yes, that’s hers,” Mom said. “I’d better drive right back with it. Her
doctor wants her to have fresh orange juice three times a day.”
“I--it’s almost time to start supper,” Pop said, looking at his watch.
He explained to Mom about the special prayer meeting for men at the
church, then gave me a quick order which was, “Bill, you take your bike
and ride over to the Tills’ with these oranges while your mother starts
supper.”
And that’s how come I ran into a situation that gave me a chance to
prove in several, very fast hair-raising adventures that Little Tom
Till and I were actually created equal.
I got to find out, also, who the old witch who lived in the green tent
really was--and also why she lived there.
9
When I knocked at Mrs. Till’s back screen door, she was in the kitchen
ironing something with an old fashioned _iron_ iron with an all-iron
handle. I could see it was a pair of Little Tom Till’s old, many
times-patched jeans.
As soon as I’d given her the oranges and she had thanked me, she said,
“You have such a nice mother, Bill. _Such_ a nice mother.”
I shifted from one bare foot to the other, swallowed something in my
throat which hadn’t been there a second before, and wished I could
think of something polite to say, and couldn’t at first, then managed
to think of:
“Tom has a nice mother, too.” I noticed Little Jim’s brown envelope
with his awkward handwriting on it, lying on the other end of the
ironing board. She’d probably read it, I thought, and then I got a
little mixed up in my mind as I said, and was sorry for it afterward:
“_Bob’s_ got a nice mother, too,”--and I knew she knew _I_ was thinking
how come such a nice mother could have two boys, one of which was a
good boy and the other was a juvenile delinquent?
There were tears in her eyes when she looked at me with a sad smile
and answered: “But I love them both--and some day God will answer my
prayers for them.”
I forgot for a minute that I had actually been thinking Tom was just
as bad as his very bad big brother, Bob, because he had stolen my
watermelon.
“Where’s Tom now?” I asked, and she said, “I think he’s down along the
creek, somewhere. If you see him or Bob on your way home, tell them
it’s chore time.”
She thanked me again for the oranges, and I swung onto my bike,
pedalled through their barnyard and out their open gate and on toward
the creek.
At the bridge I stopped, looked downstream again at the green tent,
and without even straining my eyes, I caught a fleeting glimpse of
a boy just my size, wearing blue western-style jeans and a gray and
maroon striped T-shirt. He was at the edge of the cornfield behind the
green tent not more than ten feet from the clothesline which had on it
different colored different kinds of women’s clothes.
“Right now, Bill Collins,” I heard my harsh voice saying to me through
my grit teeth, “right _now_, you’re going to find out what is what, and
why ... RIGHT NOW!”
I was down the embankment and under the bridge in a jiffy, and out in
the cornfield scooting along in a hurry, like one of Circus’s Pop’s
hounds trailing a cottontail--only my voice was quiet.
Closer and closer I came to the place where I had last seen Tom,
shading my eyes to see what I could see.
Right then I heard a whirlwind of flying feet coming in my direction
straight down the corn row I was stooped over in. In only a few
fast-flying jiffies whoever was coming would be storming right into the
middle of where I was, and if they didn’t happen to see me and I didn’t
get out of the way, they’d bowl me over like a quarterback getting
tackled in a football game.
There were other sounds than flying feet and the husky rusty rustle of
the cornblades. There was an angry mannish-sounding voice, shouting
exclamatory sentences and saying, “Stop you little rascal! Come back
here with that! Do you hear me! I’ll whip the daylights out of you if I
ever catch you!”
There was also a smallish, half-scared-half-to-death voice yelling
“Help! Help! HELP!”
* * * * *
My muddled mind told me the small frightened voice was Little Tom
Till’s and the angry voice was his big brother Bob’s--’cause it sounded
just like his--and that Bob was chasing his brother and if he caught up
to him he would give him a licking within an inch of his life.
Even as I glimpsed Little Tom flying ahead of whoever was behind him,
I noticed again that he was dressed the same way I was. Being dressed
like that made us look like twins, although, of course, he looked more
like _me_ than I did _him_, which means he was a better-looking boy
than _I_ would have been if I had looked like _him_.
For some reason when I realized that Tom was crying and running to get
away from having to take a licking, in spite of the fact that I thought
he was a watermelon thief, it seemed like I ought to do something to
save him.
Closer and closer, and faster and faster, those flying feet came
storming toward me. Then without warning Tom swerved to the left and
dashed down a corn row and at the same time part of Abraham Lincoln’s
Gettysburg address came to life in my mind and I knew I was really
going to do something quick to help save Tom.
The thought was lightning fast in my mind: I was dressed exactly like
Tom; my hair was red like his, and we were the same height, and would
look so much alike from behind that whoever was chasing him wouldn’t
know the difference. So I waited only a second until I felt sure Bob
had seen me, then like a young deer I started on a fast gallop down
the same corn row. I was sure I could run faster than Tom ’cause I had
beaten him in a few races, and it would be quite a while before Bob
could catch up with me. When he did catch up, he’d stop stock-still and
stare, and Tom would be safe--for awhile anyway.
A second later the chase was on, and I was scooting down the row like a
cottontail, running and panting and grinning to myself to think what a
clever trick I was playing.
But say, that big lummox of a boy whom I hadn’t seen yet but had only
heard, seemed to be gaining on me. Within a few minutes he would have
me, if I didn’t run faster.
“_Faster!_” my excited mind ordered me. But I quickly realized I
couldn’t save myself by just being fast. I’d have to be smart too, like
a cottontail outsmarting a hound.
Remembering how cottontails disappear in a thicket if they can, then
circle and go right back to where they were before, I turned left like
Little Tom had done and raced madly back toward the tent and the creek
and the plastic clothesline.
But it wasn’t a good idea. The big bully of a boy heard, or saw me,
or something. I hadn’t any sooner shot out into the open and dashed
between a pair of brown slacks and a pink lady’s dress of something
hanging on the line than I heard panting and flying feet behind me and
knew I would have to be even smarter than a cottontail.
“You dumb bunny!” a savage voice yelled at me. “I’ll make short work of
you. Stop, you little thief! STOP!”
Right then was when my world turned upside down for a while. _That
fierce, very angry voice yelling at me was NOT the voice of Big Bob
Till, but of somebody else!_ I realized that it was somebody who, if
he caught up with me, might not know that I _wasn’t_ Tom Till and I
would get one of the worst thrashings a boy ever got. “What,” I asked
myself, as I panted and dodged and sweat and grunted and hurried and
worried--“what will happen to me?”
I made a dive around the wall-type tent, planning to dart into the path
that went through the forest of giant ragweeds to the bridge. At the
bridge I would rush up the incline on the other side and gallop across.
As soon as I would get across the bridge, I’d leap over the rail fence,
hurry through the woods to the spring, swing into the path made by
barefoot boys’ bare feet, and in only a little while after that I’d be
across the road from “Theodore Collins” on our mailbox and would be
safe.
I took a fleeting glance over my shoulder to see who was chasing me,
and say! my pursuer was not only _not_ Bob Till but wasn’t a boy at
all--instead he was a woman wearing brown slacks and a woman’s hat!
Boy oh boy, was I ever in the middle of a situation! In that quick
over-the-shoulder glance I noticed that her hat was straw-colored and
looked a lot like the kind Little Jim’s Mom wears to church. Even in
that quarter of a jiffy while I was seeing her over my shoulder, I
noticed that the hat was the same color as the ripe wheat on Big Jim’s
Pop’s farm and that there were several heads of wheat slanted across
its left side instead of a feather like lots of women’s hats have on
them.
What on earth! Why was I, Bill Collins, a husky hard-working farm boy
with muscles like those of the village blacksmith--“as strong as iron
bands”--running from just one helpless woman--_just one!_
But I hardly had time even to wonder “what on earth?” because in that
fleeting glance over my shoulder my eyes had seen something else--I’d
seen Little Tom Till come storming out of the cornfield behind the
forest-green tent, shoot like a blue-jeaned arrow toward the opening,
and disappear inside.
Glancing over my shoulder like that, was one of the worst things I
could have done. I had seen one red-haired boy dashing into a tent,
and I knew where he was right that very second, but I didn’t know
where I, myself, was. When my eyes got back to the path I was supposed
to be running in, I wasn’t running in it at all. I had swerved
aside, stumbled over a log and was making a head-over-heels tumble
in the direction of the creek. If the red boat hadn’t been there,
I’d have landed in the water. Instead I fell sprawling into the boat
itself--that is, that’s where I _finally_ landed when I came to a stop
after rolling down the incline.
Looking up from my upside-down position, I saw the woman’s face was
hard and had an angry scowl on it. I realized with a gasp that in
another jiffy she would be down the incline herself and I would be
caught in what I could see were very large, very strong hands. Even
though I was saving Tom Till from getting the daylights whaled out of
him, I probably would get the _double_-daylights thrashed out of _me_.
If it had been winter and Sugar Creek frozen over, I could have leaped
out of the boat and raced across the ice to the other side, but there
isn’t a boy in the world who can run or walk on the water in the
summertime. There was only one way for me to escape that fierce-faced
woman, who in another few jiffies would be down that incline herself
and into the boat and have me in her clutches.
Quick as a flash I was up and in the prow of the boat unfastening the
guy rope. A second later, with one foot in the boat and the other
against the bank, I gave the boat a hard shove, and out I shot into the
stream.
“You come back here, you--you little red-haired rascal!” the woman’s
gruff, angry voice demanded.
For the moment I had forgotten Little Tom Till--I was in such a worried
hurry to save myself. Then what to my wondering ears should come
sailing out over the water but Tom’s own excited voice, calling, “Hey!
Wait for me! WAIT!”