Produced by Stephen Hutcheson and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
_THE GREEN TENT MYSTERY AT SUGAR CREEK_
by
PAUL HUTCHENS
_Published by_
[Illustration]
SCRIPTURE PRESS
SCRIPTURE PRESS PUBLICATIONS, INC.
1825 College Avenue · Wheaton, Illinois
_The Green Tent Mystery at Sugar Creek_
Copyright, 1950, by
Paul Hutchens
All rights in this book are reserved. No part may be reproduced
in any manner without the permission in writing from the author,
except brief quotations used in connection with a review in a
magazine or newspaper.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Chapter Page
1 9
2 13
3 19
4 25
5 31
6 39
7 45
8 53
9 61
10 69
1
It was the darkest summer night I ever saw--the night we accidentally
stumbled onto a brand new mystery at Sugar Creek.
Imagine coming happily home with two of your best pals, carrying a
string of seven fish, and feeling wonderful and proud and then, halfway
home, when you are passing an old, abandoned cemetery, seeing a light
out there and somebody digging! All of a sudden you get a creeping
sensation in your spine and your red hair under your straw hat starts
to try to stand up--!
Well, that’s the way it started. Nobody in Sugar Creek had died and
been buried in that old cemetery for years and years, and it was only
good for wild strawberries to grow in and bumblebees to make their
nests in and barefoot boys to have their gang meetings in--and also to
tell ghost stories to each other in.
And yet, there it was, as plain as the crooked nose on Dragonfly’s thin
face, or the short, wide nose on Poetry’s fat face, or the freckled
nose on mine--an honest-to-goodness man or something, digging in the
light of a kerosene lantern. The lantern itself was standing beside
the tall tombstone of Sarah Paddler, Old Man Paddler’s dead wife, and
was shedding a spooky light on the man and his nervous movements as he
scooped the yellowish-brown dirt out of the hole and piled it onto a
fast-growing pile beside him.
I knew he couldn’t see us because we were crouched behind some elder
bushes that grew along the rail fence just outside the cemetery, but I
also knew that if we made the slightest noise he might hear us; and if
he heard us--well, what would he do?
I kept hoping Dragonfly’s nose, which as everybody knows is almost
always allergic to almost everything, wouldn’t smell something that
would make him sneeze, because Dragonfly had the cuckooest sneeze of
anybody in the world--like a small squeal with a whistling tail on it.
If Dragonfly would sneeze, it would be like the fairy story every child
should know, of Peter Rabbit running away from Mr. McGregor. As you may
remember, Peter Rabbit was running lickety-sizzle trying to get away
from Mr. McGregor, the gardener. Spying a large sprinkler can, Peter
jumped into it to hide himself. The can happened to have water in the
bottom and that was too terribly bad for poor Peter Rabbit’s nose.
Right away Peter sneezed and also right away Mr. McGregor heard it, and
Peter had to jump his wet-footed, wet-furred self out of the can and
go racing furiously in some direction or other to get away from Mr.
McGregor and his mad garden rake.
“Listen,” Poetry beside me hissed.
I listened but couldn’t hear a thing except the scooping sounds the
shovel was making.
Then Poetry, who had his hand on my arm, squeezed my arm so tight I
almost said “Ouch” just as I heard a new sound like the shovel had
struck something hard.
“He’s struck a rock,” I said.
“Rock nothing,” Poetry answered. “I’d know that sound anywhere. That
was metal scraping on metal or maybe somebody’s old coffin.”
Poetry’s nearly-always-squawking voice broke when he said that and he
sounded like a frog with the laryngitis.
As you know, Dragonfly was the only one of us who was a little more
afraid of a cemetery than the rest of us. So when Poetry said that like
that, Dragonfly said, “Let’s get out of here! Let’s go home!”
Well, I had read different stories in my half-long life about buried
treasure. In fact, our own gang had stumbled onto a buried treasure
mystery when we were on a camping trip up North and which you can
read about in some of the other Sugar Creek Gang books. So when I was
peeking through the foliage of the elder bush and also between the
rails of that tumble-down old rail fence, watching the strange things
in a graveyard at a strange hour of the night, say--! I was all of a
sudden all set to get myself tangled up in another mystery just as
quick as I could--that is, _if_ I could without getting into too much
danger at the same time, for, as Pop says, “It is better to have good
sense and try to use it than it is to be brave.”
Just that second I heard a bobwhite whistling, “Bob-white! Bob-white!
Poor-Bob-white!” It was a very cheery bird call--the kind I would
almost rather hear around Sugar Creek than any other.
As fast as a firefly’s fleeting flash, my mind’s eye was seeing a
ten-inch-long, burnished-brown-beaked bird with a white stomach and a
white forehead with feathers on the crown of its head shaped like the
topknot on a topknotted chicken.
The man kept on shovelling, not paying attention to anything except
what he was doing. He seemed to be working faster though. Then all of
another sudden he stopped while he was in a stooped-over position and
for a jiffy didn’t make a move.
“He’s looking at something in the hole,” Poetry whispered. “He sees
something.”
“Maybe he’s listening,” I said, which it seemed like he was--like a
robin does on our front lawn with its head cocked to one side, waiting
to see or hear--or both--a night crawler push part of itself out of its
hole. Then she makes a headfirst dive for the worm, holds on for dear
life while she yanks and pulls till she gets its slimy body out and
then she eats it or else pecks it to death and into small pieces and
flies with it to her nest to feed it to her babies.
A jiffy later I heard another bird call and it was another whistling
sound--a very mournful cry that sounded like, “Coo-o, Coo-o,
Coo-o”--and it was a turtledove.
Say--! it was just like that sad, plaintive turtledove call had scared
the living daylights out of the man. He straightened up, looked all
around and came to quick life, picked up the lantern and started
walking toward the old maple tree on the opposite side of the cemetery.
“He’s got a limp,” Poetry said, “look how he drags one foot after him.”
I didn’t have time to wrack my brain to see if I could remember if
I knew anybody who had that kind of limp because no sooner had the
man reached the maple tree, than he lifted the lantern up to his face
and blew out the light. Then I heard a car door slam, the sound of a
motor starting and then two headlights lit up the whole cemetery for
a second and two long blinding beams made a wide sweep across the top
of Strawberry Hill, lit up the tombstones and the lonely old pine
tree above Sarah Paddler’s grave and the chokecherry shrubs and even
the elder bush we were hiding behind. Then the car went racing down
the abandoned lane that led to the road not more than the distance of
three blocks away, leaving us three boys wondering “What on earth?” and
“Why?” and “Who?” and “Where?”
It seemed like I couldn’t move--I had been crouched in such a cramped
position for so long a time.
It was Dragonfly who thought of something that added to the mystery
when he said, “First time I ever heard a bobwhite whistling in the
night like that.”
The very second he said it I wished I had thought of it first, but I
did think of something else first--anyway I _said_ it first--and it
was, “Yeah, and whoever heard of a turtledove cooing in the night?”
“It’s just plain cuckoo,” Poetry said. “I’ll bet there was somebody
over there in that car waiting for him and maybe watching and those
whistles meant something special. They probably meant ‘Danger.... Look
out!... Get away, quick!’”
Then Poetry said in an authoritative voice like he was the leader of
our gang instead of Big Jim who is when he is with us--and I am when he
isn’t--“Let’s go take a look at what he was doing.”
“Let’s go home,” Dragonfly said.
“Why, Dragonfly _Gilbert_!” I said. “Go on home yourself if you are
scared! Poetry and I have got to investigate!”
“I’m not s-s-s-scared,” Dragonfly said--and was.
As quick as we were sure the car was really gone, I turned on my Pop’s
big, long, three-batteried flashlight--I having had it with me--and
Poetry, Dragonfly and I started to climb through the rail fence to
go toward the mound of yellowish-brown earth beside Sarah Paddler’s
tombstone.
2
As I said, the three of us started to climb through the rail fence to
go to the hole in the ground and investigate what had been going on
there. It took us only a jiffy or two to get through the fence--Poetry
squeezing his fat self through first, he being almost twice as big
around as either Dragonfly or I. If he could get through, we knew we
could too.
I carried the flashlight, Dragonfly the string of seven fish, and
Poetry carried himself. To get to the mound of earth we had to wind
our way around, among chokecherry shrubs, wild rosebushes with reddish
roses on them, mullein stalks and different kinds of wild flowers, such
as blue vervain, and especially ground ivy, which I noticed had a lot
of dark purple flowers on it--the same color as the vervain. The ground
ivy flower clusters were scattered among the notched heart-shaped
leaves of the vine.
In a jiffy we were there and the three of us were standing around the
hole in the form of a right-angled triangle. An imaginary line running
from Poetry to me made the hypotenuse of the right-angled triangle, I
thought, and another imaginary line running from Dragonfly to me would
make the base of the triangle.
There wasn’t a thing to see in the hole except a lot of fresh dirt--in
fact, there wasn’t a thing of any interest whatever to a guy like
Poetry who was the kind of boy that was always looking for a clue
of some kind--and especially a mystery--to jump out at him like a
jack-in-the-box does in a toy store when you press a spring.
The only thing that happened, while we were standing there in that
half-scared silence looking down into the hole and also at the
mound of yellowish-brown earth, was that, all of a sudden, a big,
brown beetle came zooming out of the darkness and landed with a
whamety-sizzle-kerplop against the side of my freckled face, bounced
off and landed upside down on the top of the yellowish-brown earth
where it began wriggling and twisting and trying to get off its back
and onto its six spiney-looking legs.
Anybody who knows anything about bugs and beetles knows that a _June
bug_ isn’t a _bug_ but is a _beetle_, and has two different names--one
of them being a _June beetle_ and the other a _May beetle_, depending
upon whichever month of the year it flies around in the country where
you live.
I was searching every corner of my mind to see if I could even imagine
that anything I was seeing was a clue to help us solve the new mystery,
which we had just discovered. Who in the world was the man and why had
he been here? Why had he gotten scared when he heard the bobwhite and
the turtledove?
I was remembering that June beetles get awful hungry at night and they
eat the foliage of oak and willow and poplar trees. In the daytime they
hide themselves in the soil of anybody’s pasture or in the grass in the
woods. June beetles are crazy about lights at night and the very minute
they see one they make a beetle-line for it just like the one which
right that second was struggling on its back on the mound of earth.
“Crazy old June beetle!” I said and Poetry answered “June _what_?”
“Crazy old June _beetle_,” I said, shining my flashlight directly on
it, and pushing the light up close to its brown ridiculous-looking self
so that Poetry and Dragonfly could see what I was talking about.
Poetry, in a disgusted voice, said, “When are you going to get over
that buggy idea of studying insects?”
I knew I might get over it most any time like I generally do some new
hobby, which I pick up in the summer, but I didn’t want anybody to make
fun of the fun I was having studying insects. Pop and I were having
more fun than you can shake a stick at catching different kinds of
insects that summer, especially beetles, which anybody knows have four
wings. The two wings in front are not used for flying but are like a
hard rain-proof roof protecting its two _flying_ wings, which, when the
beetle _isn’t_ flying, are all nicely folded up underneath like two
colored umbrellas.
Little Jim was always collecting things too and he was to blame for
inspiring me to start a collection of my own. That summer Little Jim
was looking up different kinds of wild flowers and writing their names
down in a notebook. It just so happened that that week Pop and I were
studying beetles and other insects.
Just that minute the big brown beetle I had my flashlight focused on,
wriggled itself off the clod of dirt it was on and went tumblety-sizzle
down the side of the mound and landed kerplop in the grave itself.
“Poor little scarab beetle,” I said to it. “I’ll bet that right
this very second one of your nearest relatives is in that great big
yellow-stomached catfish I caught a half hour ago at the mouth of the
branch.”
Anybody knows that one of the best baits in the world to use to catch a
catfish at night is a juicy grub worm, which is a little C-shaped larva
which hatches out of an egg of a scarab beetle, such as a June beetle
or some other kind.
“You’d be scared too,” Poetry said, “if you were flying around at night
and saw a light in a cemetery and accidentally and all of a sudden
found yourself right in the bottom of a newly dug grave.”
“Goose,” I said. “I didn’t say _scared_--I said _scarab_.” Then,
feeling kind of proud of all the different things Pop and I had learned
that week, I began to rattle off some of it to Poetry: “That’s what
kind of beetle it is,” I said, “only it doesn’t eat dead stuff like
some scarab beetles do. Its larvae eat the roots of nearly everything
Pop plants in our new ground, but most scarabs eat dead things and
worse stuff.”
“Cut out the education!” Poetry said. “Who cares about that? I s’pose
you think that that’s why he flew into this old cemetery in the first
place. He was looking for something dead to eat. Maybe that’s why he
dived headfirst into the side of your face!”
“Cut it out, yourself,” I said, feeling a little temper-fire starting
in my mind.
Just then the June beetle unscrambled himself--or herself, whichever
it was--spread its shell-like front wings and its reddish-colored back
wings and took off again, straight in the direction of my face, but I
snapped off the flashlight quick, ducked my head and he missed me and
disappeared into the night--on his way, maybe, to the lighted window
of somebody’s house. If he should happen to see one somewhere, and if
there should be a window open without a screen, some woman or girl
would soon be screaming bloody murder for a man or boy to come and save
her life.
“Turn your light on again, quick!” Dragonfly said, “and let’s get out
of here!”--and quick started to do it himself, but we stopped him.
We looked all around everywhere but still couldn’t find a single clue
to tell why whoever he was had been digging there.
“Hey!” Poetry exclaimed excitedly all of a sudden, “Look! Here’s a
clear shoe print in the soft dirt.”
Then like he had seen a ghost or something, he almost screamed as he
said, “It’s _a woman’s high-heeled shoe!_”
“What on earth!” I thought.
“But it was a m-m-m-_man_ digging!” Dragonfly said, stammering.
“Then it was a woman dressed in overalls!” I said in the most excited
voice I had heard myself use in a long time.
I stooped, shoved Pop’s powerful three-batteried flashlight down into
the neat little shoe print. “Say, she had very small feet,” I said.
Naturally, there wasn’t anything extra mysterious about a woman wearing
overalls around Sugar Creek, especially when she was doing the kind
of hard work which men have to do and which some women have to do
sometimes, but what would a woman be doing digging in an abandoned
cemetery late at night? “What on earth?” I thought and said so.
Not a one of us knew what to do or say next so we decided to go over to
the old maple tree. The minute we got there Poetry ordered me to shine
my light around the tree trunk while he studied the bark to see if any
of it had been freshly knocked off.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“To see if a _human_ bobwhite or a _human_ turtledove was hiding up
there among the branches as a sort of lookout for the woman. Those two
bird-whistles were warnings of some kind.”
What Poetry said made sense, but we couldn’t stay all night, and our
six parents would be wondering why we didn’t come home--and also
worrying--and any boy who has good sense doesn’t like to do any dumb
thing to make his parents worry any more than they would do anyway--on
account of a parent is something a boy would have a hard time doing
without especially when it is time for breakfast or dinner or supper.
Besides, who would give him a licking when he needed it, which every
once in a while he probably does, even if he’s just had one the week
before?
So we decided to go on home, get secret word to the rest of the
Gang--Big Jim, Circus, Little Jim and Little Tom Till--to all meet us
at the old pine tree beside Sarah Paddler’s tombstone tomorrow right
after lunch. Then we could look to see if we could find out what had
been going on: why a limping woman in overalls was digging in an old
abandoned cemetery, and who had given the bobwhite and turtledove calls
and why?
“Let’s go home, and get some sleep,” I said to Dragonfly and Poetry,
and we started to start up the lane to the highway following an old
brown path, which twenty minutes ago the car had followed.
Then what to my wondering ears should come, from back in the direction
of the open grave and Sarah Paddler’s tombstone but a quail’s sharp,
clear call--“Bob-white! Bob-white! Poor Bob-white.”
Say, Dragonfly, who had been standing there under the tree with us,
his teeth chattering, jumped like a firecracker had exploded under
him, whirled into fast life, and a jiffy later his spindling legs were
flying like a June beetle’s wings, carrying him up the lane toward the
road that would lead us home.
As fast as two other firecrackers getting exploded from the explosion
of the first one, Poetry and I were dashing madly after Dragonfly, I
getting more scared the faster I ran. We didn’t stop until, panting
and gasping for breath, we got to my house.
Say, the very second we came panting into our yard and up to the iron
pitcher pump at the end of the board walk about twenty feet from our
back door, Pop came sauntering up from the direction of the barn,
carrying a kerosene lantern and--would you believe it?--_a spade and a
shovel!_
“Wh-h-hat are you doing still up?” I said, still panting and a little
mixed up in my mind.
“Oh, just digging around in the earth a little,” Pop said in a lazy,
yawning voice, “been burying something or other.”
Say, three boys looked at each other from three different, dark
directions and felt terribly disappointed for it looked like our
mystery was going to explode right in front of our worried faces.
“Somebody die?” Poetry asked, trying to be mischievous at a time when
he shouldn’t have, and Pop said indifferently, “Just a couple of
newborn pigs. Old Red Addie gave us a new family of eight tonight. Two
of them didn’t live so I thought I’d bury ’em right away,” Pop finished.
After being half-scared to death, here our mystery was all solved,
I thought--or was it? How about the woman’s shoe tracks and the
mysterious bird calls and the car?
Well, we divided our seven fish into three equal parts. Poetry took
three sunfish, Dragonfly three and I took the big catfish, which I
myself had caught on the descendant--or else what might have become the
ancestor--of a June beetle. That big, yellow-stomached catfish was as
big as three sunfish--in fact, as big as all six of the insignificant
fish, which Dragonfly and Poetry had pulled in after the fish had
accidentally hooked themselves onto their merely worm-baited hooks and
gotten themselves pulled in to shore.
3
Next day we managed to get the news around quick to all the rest of
the gang--but secretly on account of it seemed like our parents ought
not to know what was going on until we ourselves investigated. Anybody
knows that a mystery isn’t a mystery any longer if someone explains
it, and there’s nobody that can spoil a boy’s mystery any quicker than
his very bright parents, who always know almost everything anyway--one
reason our pops being especially smart being on account of they used to
be boys themselves.
The very second I finished all of my dinner that day--except my piece
of apple pie--I looked past Pop’s overhanging, reddish-brown eyebrows
to where Mom sat at the end of the table. “May I be excused and eat my
pie outdoors?” I asked.
You see, if there is anything I would rather do than anything else it
is to leave the table early before anybody thinks about starting to
do the dishes, and take my three-cornered, one-sixth of an apple pie,
and go out our east screen door with the pie in one hand and my straw
hat in the other, swing out to our grape arbor, step up on a strong,
wooden box, which is always there, reach up and lay the pie on top of
the two-by-four crossbeam at the east end of the arbor where there
isn’t any vine growing. Then I like to climb up and sit on the top
with the cool breeze blowing in my freckled face and with my two bare
feet, with their ten stubby toes, hanging swinging below me. I hold the
nicely-crusted pie upside down and eat it that way, while I look around
the Sugar Creek territory to where different members of the gang live.
I also like to look at our farm and the barn and the chicken house and
the big walnut tree with the long, rope swing hanging from the first
branch, which grows on the south side, and the plum tree with the
robin’s nest in the three-limbed crotch up near the top. Boy, oh boy,
does it make me feel fine and glad to be alive, especially glad to be a
boy!
Even while I was asking to be excused, I was imagining myself to be
already outdoors, sitting up on the flat side of the two-by-four
crossbeam.
But say, Pop was as smart as I was--smart enough to read my mind--and
he saw things in it that I hardly knew were there because right that
second he looked at Mom and said, “There are some good habits, some bad
habits, and some that are in between. The ones in between don’t hurt
a boy very much, but they help to make him _him_. That’s getting to
be quite a habit with you, Bill.” He finished, looking at me with his
gray-green eyes.
I had been looking at the pie, which I already had in my hand,
expecting Mom to say, “Yes,” like she nearly always does.
“What habit?” I said innocently to Pop.
“Use plain American, Theodore,” Mom said to Pop. “The boy doesn’t
understand philosophy.”
And Pop said to Mom with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, “May I take
my pie and go outdoors and eat it upside-down on top of our grape
arbor?”
Mom looked up at him with a sort of quizzical expression on her face.
There was also a twinkle in her eye that seemed funny to Pop, but not
to me. Then she said, “Certainly you can do that while Bill and I do
the dishes.”
Pop said, “Thank you,” and took his one-sixth of a pie in his big,
hard, sun-tanned farmer hand, slipped out of his chair and outdoors
fast, letting the screen slam hard behind him like I sometimes do--and
shouldn’t. Outside he let out a blood-curdling war whoop and I heard
his footsteps running toward the grape arbor.
A second later I was outdoors too.
Say, if there is anything that looks ridiculous, it is a boy’s
long-legged, red-haired, bushy-eyebrowed father grunting himself into
an upside-down knot and out of it again while he climbs up onto a high
grape arbor.
A jiffy later there was Pop up there where I should have been, with
his heavy work shoes on his large feet swinging, and eating his pie
upside-down and panting for breath from all the unnecessary exercise.
It was fun to Pop, but to me it looked silly so I sat down on the porch
with my back to him and ate my pie right side up and for some reason it
didn’t taste very good.
It was a scorching hot day and I began to feel a little better there in
the shade, when all of a sudden Mom said from inside the house, using a
very cheerful voice, “O. K. Bill. The dishes are all ready for you.”
I always know when Mom calls me cheerfully like that that she’s trying
to make me _want_ to come.
But say, Pop turned out to be a really swell Pop after all, or else he
was trying to give me a free education. It seemed like he was still
pretending to be me up there on that grape arbor so when he heard Mom
say, “dishes,” he called out cheerfully, “Coming,” and swung around
quick and down off the grape arbor and hurried into the house like he
would rather dry the Collins family dinner dishes than do anything else
in the whole world.
He got stopped at the door by Mom though, who was maybe trying to
play the game with him, and she said, “Wipe that dirt off your shoes
on the mat there”--which she tells me about thirty-seven times a
day--sometimes even while I am already doing it, having thought of it
first myself. Say, I looked at Pop’s feet and they did have dirt on
them--_a yellowish-brown dirt on the sides of the soles and heels!_
At the very second I saw Pop’s shoes with yellowish-brown dirt on them
instead of the very black dirt I knew was the kind that was up under
the pignut trees, I wondered what on _earth?_ I certainly didn’t want
my Pop to be really getting mixed up in our mystery like I had thought
last night for a minute he might be.
Not only that--I didn’t want him to have been the person who had given
the bobwhite and turtledove bird calls last night, which my discouraged
mind was trying to tell me he could have been.
Not knowing I was going to say what I said, I said, “POP!” in a loud
and astonished voice, “_Where_ did you get that kind of mud on your
shoes?” I was using the kind of voice I had heard another member of
our family use on me several different times in my half-long life.
Pop, who was already wiping off his shoes on the mat at the door,
looked down at them in astonishment and said, “What dirt?”
Mom’s astonished voice shot through the finely woven screen of the door
and landed with a “kerwham” right where her eyes were looking, which
was on both Pop’s big shoes. “Why, Theodore Collins!” she said, “What
on _earth_?”
Pop grinned back through the screen at her and said, “No, not _what on
earth_, but _earth on what_?” which I could tell he thought was funny,
but Mom didn’t think it was very. She went on in her same astonished,
accusing voice, saying, “Those are the very same muddy shoes you ate
dinner with!”
“I never ate dinner with muddy shoes in my life,” Pop said, with a grin
in his voice. “I always use a knife and fork and spoon,” which was
supposed to be extra funny--and was to Pop and me--but for some reason
Mom only smiled rather than laughed and it looked like she was trying
to keep herself from even smiling.
“Go get your father’s house slippers,” Mom ordered me, and I obeyed her
in a tickled hurry.
Pop slipped his feet out of his shoes and left them on the porch, and
slipped his feet into his slippers and ordered me to follow him into
the house, which I also did with a little less speed, because I could
tell by the tone of his voice that he had some work for me to do, which
I found out was the truth.
It wasn’t too bad though ’cause Pop and I played a little game while we
did the dishes. He called me “Pop” and I called him “Bill.” He ordered
Mom to go into the front room to look after my baby sister, Charlotte
Ann.
Say, Pop and I dived headfirst--or rather, I should say,
_hands_first--into the sudsy dishwater, making short work of those
dishes, getting them done a lot faster than if a mother and daughter
had done them. Also we hurried to be sure to get through before Mom
might come out into the kitchen and look over our work and decide we
were not using the right kind of soap or something.
It really was fun ’cause I kept giving orders to my red-haired, awkward
son, giving him cuckoo commands every few minutes such as “Keep your
mind on your work, Bill!” ... “Hey, that plate has to be wiped over
again!” ... “Your mother likes to have the glasses polished a little
better than that, Son, we never know when there might be company from
somewhere and those glasses have to shine like everything”--unnecessary
things a father nearly always says to a boy.
Well, those dishes got done in about half the usual time. As quick as
they were finished, I was free to start to do what I really wanted
to do in just the way I wanted to do it, but I got stopped by Pop’s
big, gruff voice. I had just tossed Pop’s drying towel toward the rack
beside the stove, and missed the rack and had made a red-headfirst dive
for it to pick it up quick before Pop, or especially Mom, might see it.
I was still in a bent-over position--just right for a good spank from
somebody--when Pop’s voice socked me and the words were, “Which one of
us is Bill and which is your father now--for the rest of the afternoon,
I mean?”
“I am,” I said. In half a jiffy the towel was on the rack nice and
straight and I was over by the washstand, stooping to get my straw hat,
which was beside Pop’s big still-off work shoes.
“Bring the gang home some time this afternoon,” Pop said. “I want to
show them Addie’s nice, new red-haired family.”
“I will,” I answered, I having seen the six cute little quadrupeds
myself that morning.
By that time I was already outdoors and ten feet from the slammed
screen door, the door having slammed itself on account of its strong,
coiled spring. Then Pop called again and stopped me stock-still. “If
I am your father again, and you are Bill Collins, you had better stay
home and mow the lawn and let me go to meet the gang,”--but I could
tell he didn’t mean it. Pop looked awfully cute, I thought, with Mom’s
big apron on and his blue shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbows, his
slippers still on, standing in the open screen door.
I called to him saying, “I am still Theodore Collins and you are Bill
and you are letting flies in. Shut the door quick--and _quietly!_”
As I hurried away, my mischievous Pop called after me, “So long, Mr.
Collins! Have a nice time, and don’t forget to find a new beetle for
our collection.”
“So long, Bill!” I yelled from the front gate, which I had just opened
and gone through and shut after me. Then as I dashed past Theodore
Collins on our mailbox I was myself again. I swished across the dusty
road, vaulted over the old, lichen-covered rail fence and in a jiffy
was running in the path that had been made by barefoot boys’ bare feet,
down through the woods as fast as I could go to the spring where the
gang was going to meet first before going up to the top of Strawberry
Hill to the cemetery.
4
Boy, oh boy! I never felt better in my life than I did when I was
galloping through that woods to meet the gang. First I was in the
sunlight and then in the shade as I raced along in that winding,
little, brown path--swishing past different kinds of trees, such as
maple and beech and ash and oak and also dodging around chokecherry
shrubs and wild rosebushes with roses scattered all around among the
thorns, also past dogwood trees and all kinds of wild flowers that grew
on either side of the path.
Even though I had had to be delayed unnecessarily on account of the
dishes, I got to the spring about the same time Little Jim and Poetry
did. Circus was already there in the favorite place where he usually
waits for us when he gets there first, which was in the top branches
of a little elm sapling that grows at the top of the steep bank. As
you know, at the bottom of that steep bank was the spring itself, but
we always met in a little, shaded, open space at the top. Circus was
swinging and swaying and looked really like a chimpanzee, hanging by
his hands and feet and everything except his tail--which he didn’t have
anyway.
As quick as Big Jim, with his almost mustache, and Little Tom Till,
with his freckled face and red hair, got there and also Dragonfly, with
his goggle-eyed face and spindling legs, that was all of us.
Poetry, Dragonfly and I told everybody everything that had happened
last night, but I didn’t tell them about Pop having had yellowish-brown
dirt on his shoes; and with my eyes I kept Poetry and Dragonfly from
telling them about the two baby pigs Pop had buried somewhere, because
I felt sure Pop wouldn’t bury two baby pigs in a cemetery, which had
been reserved for human beings only.
A little later, after a loafing ramble along the bayou and a climb to
the top of Strawberry Hill, we scrambled over the rail fence and in a
couple of jiffies reached the place where the woman had been digging
last night, which was not more than ten feet from Sarah Paddler’s tall
tombstone. Well, we all stopped and stood around in a barefoot circle
looking down into the hole. Sure enough--just as we had seen it last
night--there was the print of a high-heeled, woman’s shoe and also
other high-heeled shoe tracks all around, but none of the others were
as clear as the one we were all studying that very minute.
“What on earth do you s’pose she was digging here for?” Little Tom Till
asked in his high-pitched voice.
Big Jim answered him saying, “If we knew that, we would know what we
want to know.”
For a minute I focused my eyes on the hand, which somebody had
chiseled on Sarah Paddler’s tombstone. One finger of the hand pointed
toward the sky. I had read the words just below the hand maybe a
hundred and twenty times in my life and they were: “There is rest in
Heaven,”--which I knew there was for anybody who got to go there. When
I was in a cemetery, it was easy to think about things like that. I
was sort of dreamily remembering that our minister in the Sugar Creek
church says that there is only one way for a boy to get to Heaven.
First, the boy has to believe that he is an honest-to-goodness sinner
and needs a Saviour. Then he has to believe that Jesus, who is the
Saviour, came all the way from Heaven a long time ago to die for him
and to save him from his sins; then if the boy will open the door of
his heart and let the Saviour come in, that will settle it.
Our minister, who knows almost all the Bible by heart, tells the people
that come to our church that there isn’t any other way for anybody to
be saved except just like I told you.
So I knew that Old Man Paddler, who was saved himself and was the
kindest old, long-whiskered old man that ever was a friend to a boy,
would see his wife, Sarah, again--maybe the very minute he got to
Heaven.
For a fast jiffy, while I was standing by the hole which the June
beetle had tumbled into last night, and was looking up at that carved
hand on the tombstone, my mind sort of drifted away on a friendly
little journey clear up into Heaven--past the great big white cumulus
cloud that was piling itself up in the southwest right that minute
above the tree-covered hills where I knew Old Man Paddler’s cabin was,
and I imagined how that somewhere in Heaven maybe there was a very nice
little cabin waiting for that kind old man, and that his wife, Sarah,
was out there in the garden somewhere looking after the flowers for
him. Every now and then she would stop doing what she was doing and
look toward a little white gate like the one we have at our house by
the big swing near the walnut tree to see if she could see her husband
coming. Then all of a sudden I imagined she did see him and her kinda
oldish face lit up like Mom’s does sometimes when she sees Pop coming
home from somewhere and she started quick on a half walk and half run
out across the yard to meet him, calling “Hi there! I’ve been waiting
for you a long time....”
It was a terribly nice thought to think, I thought. Only I knew that if
that old man ever left Sugar Creek, it would be awful lonesome around
here for a long time, and it sorta seemed like we needed him here even
worse than his wife did up there.
* * * * *
From Sarah Paddler’s grave in the shade of the big pine tree, we went
all the way across the cemetery, winding around a little to get to the
old maple where last night I had shone my flashlight all around looking
for signs of a human quail or a human turtledove.
There we stopped in the friendly shade and lay down in the tall grass
to hold a meeting to help us decide what to do next. While we were
lying there in seven different directions, chewing the juicy ends of
bluegrass and timothy and wild rye, Big Jim gave a special order which
was, “I would like each of us except Poetry and Dragonfly to give a
quail whistle.”
“Why?” Little Tom Till wanted to know.
“I want to find out if any of you were out here last night making those
calls. I also want to know if any of you guys were out here dressed in
overalls and wearing a woman’s high-heeled shoes.”
Little Jim and Little Tom Till and Circus and Big Jim himself did the
best they could making bobwhite calls and Circus was the only one of us
whose whistle sounded like the quail whistle we had heard last night.
Then Big Jim made all of us except Poetry, Dragonfly and me, do a
turtledove call and again Circus was the only one whose call was like
the one we heard last night.
“O. K., Circus,” Big Jim leveled his eyes across our little tangled
up circle and said to him, “Confess or we will drag you down to Sugar
Creek and throw you in.”
“All right,” Circus said, “I confess I was home in bed, sound asleep
when I heard those calls last night.”
“So was I,” Little Tom Till said.
“So was I,” Little Jim echoed.
“Yeh, and so was I. Sound asleep in bed listening to the calls,” Big
Jim said sarcastically.
Well, that left only Poetry, Dragonfly and me, and we were the ones who
had heard the calls in the first place, so the mystery was as still
unsolved as it had been, not a one of us believing that Circus was here
last night.
There wasn’t any use to stay where we were so, it being a very hot
afternoon, we decided to go to the old swimming hole and get cooled off.
“Last one in is a bear’s tail,” Circus yelled back at us over one of
his square shoulders as he galloped off first out across the cemetery
to the other side.
The rest of us quick took off after him, not a one of us wanting to
be a bear’s tail, which means we would have to be almost nothing on
account of bears have very stubby tails.
Long before we got there nearly everyone of us had his shirt off--so
that by the time we should get there all we would have to do would be
to wrestle ourselves out of our overalls and in a jiffy we would be
out in the middle of the swellest water to swim in in the whole world.
Everyone of us knew how to swim like a fish, our parents having made
us learn as soon as we were old enough to--like everybody in the world
should.
Say, you should have seen the way our mystery began to come to life
while we were still on the shore before splashing ourselves in.
All of a sudden Little Jim, who was undressing in the shade of a willow
where he always hangs his clothes, yelled to us in a very excited voice
for him, “Hey, Bill! Circus! Poetry! Everybody! Come here quick! Hurry!
Look what I found!”
Well, when Little Jim or any of our gang calls in an excited voice like
that, it always sends a half dozen thrills through me because it nearly
always means something extra special.
Before I knew it, I was galloping across to where he was, my shirt in
one hand and one of my overall legs in the other, getting there as
quick as the rest of us. I also managed to grab up a stick on my way
just in case Little Jim might have spied a water moccasin or some other
kind of snake, of which there are maybe twenty different varieties
around Sugar Creek.
Little Jim was standing there holding his clothes in one hand and
pointing down with an excited right forefinger to something on the
ground on a little strip of sand at the water’s edge.
At first I didn’t see a thing, except some shaded water where about
fifty or more small, black, flat whirligig beetles were racing round
in excited circles on the surface of the water. Right away I smelled
the smell of ripe apples, which is the kind of odor a whirligig beetle
gives off, which anybody who knows anything about whirligig beetles
knows comes from a kind of milky fluid which they use to protect
themselves from being eaten by fish or some kind of water bird or
something else.
Even Poetry didn’t see what Little Jim was excited about. “Education
again,” he said with a disgruntled snort and turned back to the
swimming hole.
Dragonfly, who wasn’t interested in Pop’s and my new hobby, grunted
too and also sneezed, saying, “I’m allergic to the smell of _sweet
bugs_,”--that being a common name for those lively, little,
ripe-apple-smelling beetles.
“They’re whirligig beetles,” I said, wanting to defend Little Jim for
calling us over in such an excited voice for what the rest of the gang
would think was almost nothing.
“Look, everybody! Look! See, it’s a clue!” Little Jim yelled.
Then my eyes dived in the direction his finger was really pointing and
I saw what he saw. Boy, oh boy! A lively thrill started whirligigging
in my very surprised brain, for what to my wondering eyes had appeared
but, half hidden in the grass, a pair of woman’s new shoes--very small,
expensive looking, white pumps with all-green, extra-high heels and
with a heart-shaped design across the toes that looked kinda like the
leaves from a ground ivy, like the ones that grew all around Sarah
Paddler’s tombstone.
What on _earth_, I thought and remembered that Pop had said, “Earth
on _what?_” when I saw there actually were some yellowish-brown earth
stains on those extra-high heels of those newish-looking, pretty,
woman’s shoes.
Just that second Dragonfly said, “Ps-s-st! Listen, everybody!”--which
everybody did, and there it was again as plain as a Sugar Creek
cloudless day, a sharp bobwhite call from down the creek somewhere,
“Bob-white! Bob-white! Poor-Bob-white!”
5
Say, if that bobwhite call was from a real quail, then we didn’t have
anything to worry about, but we knew that honest-to-goodness quails not
only don’t make their very pretty calls in the middle of the night,
but also they don’t do it in the middle of a sultry, mid-summer, sunny
afternoon--or if they do I don’t remember having heard any do it around
Sugar Creek.
If it was a human being calling like a quail, then what?
And if it was a _man_ human being, we would all want to scramble
ourselves out of there and hide somewhere so that whoever he was
wouldn’t see us; but if it was a _woman_ human being, who had made the
quail call--which it might have been, I thought, on account of the
woman’s shoes lying there in the sand beside Little Jim--then every
single one of us ought to make a headfirst dive toward getting his
clothes on.
Before we could start to try to decide what to do, we heard the quail
call again and this time it was a lot nearer than it had been--in fact
it seemed like it wasn’t a hundred feet distant and had come from the
direction of the spring from which we ourselves had just come. That
meant that the person, man or woman, was maybe walking in the same path
we had been running in a little while before. We wouldn’t have even
half enough time to get our clothes on before running to hide.
I looked all around our tense circle to see if the rest of the gang had
any ideas as to what to do and it seemed like not a one of us could do
a thing except stand stock-still, with his eyes and ears glued to the
direction from which the last quail call had come.
“Quick, Dragonfly!” I heard myself say, taking charge of things and
shouldn’t have tried to on account of Big Jim is our leader when he is
with us. “Get those shoes, quick, and let’s get out of here!”
But Big Jim took my leadership away from me in a split second by
saying, “Leave those shoes alone! Don’t you dare touch ’em! If anything
has happened, we don’t want our fingerprints on them!”
In less than a fourth of a jiffy we were scrambling up the side of the
slope leaving those shoes about eighteen inches from the whirligig
beetles, and with all our minds whirligigging like everything--some
of us with our clothes half on and others with them half off and the
rest of the gang with them all off--and with my mind a little off too,
maybe--we were getting ourselves fast out of there.
At the top of the little slope we came to the narrow footpath, zipped
across it and disappeared into the tall corn--that being one of
Dragonfly’s pop’s cornfields. I knew that on the opposite side of that
rather narrow strip of cornfield was the bayou, which was divided
into two parts with a longish pond on either end of it, and each of
those ponds had in it some very lazy water in which there were a few
lone-wolf, mud pickerel or _barred pickerel_, as some people called
them. Between the two ponds there was a narrow strip of soggy, marshy
soil and a little path that was bordered by giant ragweeds. This was
a sort of shortcut to the woods from the old swimming hole. Once we
got to the woods we could follow the rail fence like we had done last
night and come out at the place where Little Jim had killed the bear,
which you have probably read about in one of the other Sugar Creek Gang
stories. As you know, that was at the bottom of Strawberry Hill; and
at the top of the hill is the old cemetery and the hole in the ground
beside Sarah Paddler’s tombstone.
There we would be safe from whoever was coming up that path, nearer and
nearer every second--that is, if he was dangerous.
As quick as we were far enough into the tall corn to be hidden from
sight of the path, we dropped down on the ground to listen and to look
to see if we could see what was going on. As you know, corn blades are
not as thick at the bottom of the stalks as they are at the top so if
anybody was coming up the path, we could see his feet if we were lying
on the ground.
Poetry, who was real close to me like he nearly always is, whispered in
my ear, saying, “Hey, sh-h-h! There he is!”
I looked and saw the cuffs of somebody’s trousers standing at the end
of my corn row in the very place where we always left the path to
dive down the incline into our willow-and-shrubbery-protected outdoor
dressing room. Then came a startling quail call again and this time
it seemed so near it almost scared me out of what few wits I hadn’t
already been scared out of.
I waited, wondering if there would be an answer, and then what to my
astonished ears should come but the sound of a turtledove’s low, sad,
lonesome call from the other direction farther up the path.
Almost right away I saw the skirt of a woman’s yellowish dress coming
out of our green dressing room. I also noticed that she was barefoot.
Straining my ears in their direction I could hear her talking and
complaining about something like a boy does when he gets called by his
mother to leave his play--and shouldn’t. I could hear the man’s voice
too, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying.
A jiffy later I heard her say, “I was having so much fun wading in the
riffles, and--look! I found this--a big Wash Board shell! I’ll bet I’ll
find a pearl in it! Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I did find one worth
hundreds of dollars?”
And I heard the man say, “That’s fine, but it’s time for your rest.
Let’s get back to the tent.”
_So!_ I thought. They were camping somewhere up in Old Man Paddler’s
woods and that meant they would either have to get their drinking water
at the spring where our gang met everyday when our parents would let
us, or they would have to come to our house to get it out of the iron
pitcher-pump at the end of the boardwalk twenty feet from our back door
and not more than fifteen feet from our grape arbor.
For some reason it didn’t make me feel very good. Of course, Old Man
Paddler owned nearly all the territory around Sugar Creek and he had
a right to let anybody camp on it that wanted to, but it sorta seemed
like the whole territory belonged to the gang, especially the woods
around the spring on account of our bare feet had walked on nearly
every square inch of it. We had climbed nearly every tree and rested
in the shade of every one of them and it was too much like having
company at our house. You don’t feel free to yell and scream and give
loon calls and go screeching through the woods, yelling like wild
Indians or anything, when somebody strange is camping there. You even
have to comb your hair when you are outdoors if there happens to be a
city woman around.
I thought and felt all that while we were still lying on the sandy soil
of Dragonfly’s pop’s cornfield and the man and the woman were still not
more than a few rods up the path on their way towards the spring.
They were out of hearing distance now, but I could see the movement the
tall weeds were making as they swayed back into place after the man and
woman had gone through, and the movement was like it is when the wind
blows across our wheat field.