Poetry’s big flashlight shot a straight white beam through the night. It landed ker-flash right on that old-looking car as it rattled past the iron pitcher pump and disappeared down the hill. A few seconds later, we heard it go rattlety-crash across the board floor of the branch bridge. The headlights lit up the lane as it sped up the hill on the other side in the direction of the schoolhouse.
What on earth!
My mind was still on the car and who might be in it when I heard Poetry say, “Look there! There’s our wild animal! He stopped right at the fence! Let’s get him!”
My mind came back to the long, brown, low, very fat something-or-other we had been chasing a minute before. My eyes got to it at about the same time Poetry’s flashlight beam socked it ker-wham-flash right in the middle of its fat side.
“What is it?” I exclaimed, looking about for a stick or a club to protect myself in case I had to.
My imagination had been yelling to me, It’s some kind of animal, different from anything you’ve ever seen! So I was terribly disappointed when Poetry let out a disgusted grunt of surprise, saying, “Aw, it’s only an old gunnysack.”
And it was. A light brown gunnysack with something large inside of it. Fastened to one end was a plastic rope that stretched from the gunnysack back into the elderberry bushes.
Whatever was in the sack wasn’t moving, not even breathing, I thought, as we stood studying it and wondering, What on earth?
It was large and long and round and very fat and—
Then, like a light turning on in my mind, I knew what was in that brown burlap bag. I knew it as well as I knew my name was Bill Collins, Theodore Collins’s only son. “There’s a watermelon in that bag!” I exclaimed.
Whoever was in that car must have crawled out into our garden, picked the melon, slipped it into this gunnysack, tied the rope to it, and had been hiding here in the bushes while pulling the rope and dragging the melon to him! Doing it that way so that nobody would see him carrying it off!
Was I ever stirred up in my mind! Yet, there wasn’t any sense in getting too stirred up. A boy couldn’t let himself waste his perfectly good temper in one big explosion, because, as my dad has told me many a time, you can’t think straight when you’re angry. Dad was trying to teach me to use my temper instead of losing it.
“A temper is a fine thing if you control it but not if it controls you,” he has told me maybe five hundred times in my half-long life. My hot temper had gotten me into trouble many a time by shoving me headfirst into an unnecessary fight with somebody who didn’t know how to control his own temper.
In a flash I was down on my haunches beside the gunnysack. “Here,” I said to Poetry, “lend me your knife a minute. Let’s get this old burlap bag off and see if it’s a watermelon!”
“Goose!” Poetry answered me. “I’m wearing my pajamas!”
Both of us were, of course. In fact, we both looked ridiculous there in the moonlight.
“See!” Poetry exclaimed. “Here’s how they were going to get it through the fence!”
My eyes fastened onto the circle of light his flashlight made on a spot back under the elderberry bushes. Then I noticed there was a hole cut in Dad’s new woven wire fence, large enough to let a boy through. Boy oh boy, would Dad ever have a hard time using his temper when he saw that tomorrow morning!
But we had to do something with the melon. “Let’s leave it for the gang to see tomorrow,” Poetry suggested. “Let Big Jim decide what to do about it.”
“What to do about Bob Till, you mean,” I said grimly. Already my temper was telling me it was Bob Till himself, the Sugar Creek Gang’s worst enemy, who had been trying to steal one of our melons.
Just thinking that started my blood to running faster in my veins. How many times during the past two years we had had trouble with John Till’s oldest boy, Bob! And how many times Big Jim, the Sugar Creek Gang’s fierce-fighting leader, had had to give Bob a licking! And always Bob was just as bad a boy afterward and maybe even worse.
I was remembering that only last week at our very latest gang meeting by the spring, Big Jim had told us, “I’m through fighting Bob Till. I’m going to try kindness. We’re all going to try it. Let’s show him that a Christian boy doesn’t have to fight every time somebody knocks a chip off his shoulder. And let’s not put a chip on our shoulder in the first place.”
At that meeting, Dragonfly had piped up and asked, “What’s a ‘chip on your shoulder’ mean?”
Poetry had answered for Big Jim, saying, “It’s a doubled-up fist shaking itself under somebody else’s nose and daring him to hit you first!”
Big Jim ignored Poetry’s supposed-to-be-funny answer and said, “Bob’s on probation, you know, and he has to behave, or the sentence that is hanging over him will go into effect and he’ll have to spend a year in reform school. We wouldn’t want that. We have got to help him prove that he can behave himself. If he thinks we’re mad at him, he’ll be tempted to do things to get even with us. As long as this sentence is hang—”
Dragonfly cut in then with one of his not so bright questions, at the same time trying to show how smart he was in school. “What kind of a sentence—declarative or interrogative or imperative or exclamatory?”
Big Jim’s jaw set, and he gave Dragonfly an exclamatory look. Then he went on talking, shocking us almost out of our wits when he told us something not a one of us knew yet. “One of the conditions of his being on probation instead of in reform school is that he go to church at least once a week for a year. That means he’ll probably come to our church, and that means he’ll be in our Sunday school class, and—”
Well, I got one of the strangest feelings I ever had in my life. Whirlwindlike thoughts were spiraling in my mind. I just couldn’t imagine Bob Till in church and Sunday school in the first place. It would certainly seem funny to have him there with nice clothes on and his hair combed, listening to our preacher preach from the Bible. What if I had to sit beside him myself—I, who could hardly think his name without feeling my muscles tighten and my fists start to double up?
Another thing Big Jim told us at that meeting was: “You guys want to promise that you will stick with me and all of us try to help him?”
We had promised.
And now here was Bob already doing something that would make the sentence drop on his head. Whoever was in that car just had to be Bob Till, because he had a car just like that—it sounding like a real hot rod.
“Listen!” Poetry exclaimed. I listened in every direction there was. Then I heard and saw at the same time a car coming back up the lane. Its headlights were going to hit us full in the face.
“Quick!” Poetry cried. “Down!”
We stooped low behind the elderberry bushes and waited for the car to pass.
“It’s slowing down. It’s going to stop,” I said.
Which it did. The same rattling old jalopy.
In a split second we were scooting along the fencerow to a spot several feet farther up the lane. And there we crouched behind some giant ragweeds and goldenrod and black-eyed Susans. Dad had told me a week ago to cut down the ragweeds with our scythe, and I hadn’t done it yet. I nearly always cut the goldenrod too, because Dragonfly, the pop-eyed member of our gang, is allergic to them as well as to ragweed, and he nearly always uses this lane going to and from school.
My heart was pounding in my ears as I crouched there with Poetry, he in his green-striped pajamas and I in my plain yellow ones.
“Get down!” I told him.
“I am down,” he whispered.
“Flatter!” I ordered. “So you won’t be seen! Can’t you lie flat?”
“I can only lie round,” he answered. That, under any other circumstances, would have sounded funny, since he was so extralarge around.
“Somebody is getting out,” Poetry whispered.
“How many are there?”
“Only one, I think.”
Then I felt Poetry’s body grow tense. “There g
oes one of your watermelons,” he whispered.
I saw it at the same time he did. The brown burlap bag was being pulled deeper into the elderberry bushes, and I knew somebody was stealing one of our melons. In a minute it would be gone!
“Let’s jump him,” I exclaimed to Poetry. My blood was tingling for battle. I started to my feet.
But he stopped me, saying, “Sh!” in a subdued but savage whisper. “Detectives don’t stop a man from stealing. They let him do it first, then they capture him.”
It wasn’t easy to do nothing, watching that watermelon being hoisted into the backseat of that car. My muscles were aching to get into some new kind of action that was different from hoeing potatoes, milking cows, gathering eggs, and other things any ordinary boy’s muscles could do. I was straining to go tearing up the fencerow to the elderberry bushes, dive through the hole in the fence, make a football-style tackle on that thief’s legs, and bring him down. If all the gang were there, I was pretty sure one or the other of us would not be able to stay crouching stock-still. He would rush in, and the rest of us would be like Jack in the poem about “Jack and Jill”—we would go tumbling after, even if some of us got knocked down and got our crowns cracked.
But the rest of the gang wasn’t there. Besides, it was already too late to do anything. In less time than it has taken me to write it, the melon in the gunnysack was in the car, the thief was in the driver’s seat, and the hot rod was shooting like an arrow with two blazing headlights down the moonlit lane.
Poetry shot his powerful flashlight beam straight after the car, socking it on the license plate. And I knew that his mind—which is so good it’s almost like what is called a “photographic mind”—would remember the number if he had been able to see it.
Well, it’s like having a big blown-up balloon suddenly burst in your face to have your exciting adventure come to an end like that. It’s also kind of how a fish must feel when it’s nibbling on a fat fishing worm down in Sugar Creek and, all of a disappointing sudden, has its nice juicy dinner jerked away from it by the fisherman who is on the other end of the line.
There wasn’t anything left to do except go back to the tent and to bed and to sleep.
Just thinking that reminded me of the fact that I probably would need another pair of pajamas to sleep in. The yellow pair I had on had gotten soiled while I was lying in the grass behind the goldenrod and ragweed and black-eyed Susans. “We’ll have to wash our feet again before we can crawl into Mom’s nice clean sheets,” I said as we started back to the tent.
“Maybe it would be easier and cause less worry for your mother if we just climbed into our cots and went to sleep. Tomorrow, if your mother gets angry at us, we can explain about the watermelon, and that will get her angry at the thief instead of at us. We could offer to help her wash the sheets, anyway.”
It was a pair of very sad, very mad boys that threaded their way through the watermelon patch to the pasture and across it to the gate at the barn and on toward the tent.
There were still a few cicadas busy with their drums, I noticed, in spite of the fact that I was all stirred up in my mind about the watermelon.
Thinking about the seeds in their long, straight rows, buried in the dark red flesh of the watermelon the way seeds always are, just as if somebody had planted them, reminded me of the stars in the sky overhead. I was wishing I could look up and see the Dog Star, which is the brightest star in all the Sugar Creek sky. But during “dog days,” which are the hot and sultry days of July and August, you have to get up in the morning to see it, because the Dog Star comes up with the sun in July and August. Then, in a very little while, it fades out of sight.
In February, the Dog Star is almost straight overhead at night and is like a shining star at the top of a Christmas tree. But who wants to go out in the middle of a zero-cold night just to look at a star, even if it is the brightest one that ever shines?
“Are you sleepy?” Poetry asked when we reached the plum tree.
“Not very,” I said. “But I’m still so mad I can’t see straight.”
“You want to go back down to the spring with me?” he asked, his hand on the tent flap, about to lift it for us to go in.
“Are you crazy?” I asked.
“I’m a detective. I want to go down there and see if we can find the waxed paper you threw away when we heard those girls at the top of the hill.”
“My mother has dozens of old bread wrappers,” I told him. “I’ll ask her for one for you in the morning.”
“Listen, pal,” Poetry whispered as he let the tent flap drop into place and grabbed me by the arm. “I said I’m a detective, and I’m looking for a clue! I’ve a hunch there was something in that paper—something whoever put it in that melon didn’t want to get wet!”
Well, I knew, from having studied about watermelons that summer, that the edible part of a watermelon is made up of such things as protein, and fat, and ash, and calcium, and sugar, and water, and just fiber. Six percent of the melon is sugar and more than 92 percent is water. You could eat a piece of watermelon the size of Charlotte Ann’s head, and it would be like drinking more than a pint of sweetened water. I could understand that anything anybody put on the inside of a watermelon would get wet, almost as wet as if you had dunked it in a pail of water.
“Look,” I said to Poetry, “I don’t want to show my face or risk my neck anywhere near a campful of excitable girls who can’t tell a boy in a pair of red-striped pajamas from a zebra. They might start screaming bloody murder if they happened to see us again.”
“I’ll have to go alone, then,” Poetry announced firmly. And in seconds, his green-striped back was all I could see of him as he waddled off across the moonlit lawn toward the walnut tree and the gate.
It was either let him go alone on a wild-goose chase or go with him and run the risk of stumbling into a whirlwind of honest-to-good-ness trouble.
I caught up to him by the time he had reached our mailbox. I whispered, “What do you think might have been wrapped up in it?”
Poetry’s voice sounded mysterious and also very serious as he answered, “Didn’t you read the paper this morning?“
I nearly always read the daily paper—part of it, anyway—almost as soon as it landed in the mailbox. Sometimes I’d race to get to the box before Dad did. Dad himself always read the editorials. Mom read the fashions and the new recipes and the accidents. She also worried about the accidents out loud to Dad a little. Mom always felt especially sad whenever anything happened to a little baby.
“Sure,” I puffed to Poetry as I loped along after him in the shadowy moonlight. “What’s that got to do with a wad of waxed paper in a plugged watermelon?”
His answer, panted back over his shoulder, started the shivers vibrating in my spine again. If I had been a cicada with a sound-producing organ inside me somewhere, my shaking thoughts would have filled the whole woods with noise.
Poetry’s gasping words were: “Whoever broke into the supermarket last week might be hiding out in this part of the county—maybe even along the creek here somewhere!”
“The paper didn’t say that,” I said.
“It didn’t have to,” Poetry shouted back. “It didn’t say where he was hiding, did it? I’ve got a hunch he’s right here in our territory. Maybe in the swamp or—”
I’d had a lot of experiences with Poetry’s hunches, and he’d been right so many times that, whenever he said he had one, I felt myself suddenly getting in a mood for a big surprise of some kind.
But this time his idea didn’t quite seem to make sense. So I said, “Who on earth would want to stuff a lot of money inside a watermelon?”
Poetry’s answer was a grouchy grunt, followed by a scolding. “I said I had a hunch! I know we’ll find something important going on around here. Now, stop asking dumb questions and hurry up!” With that, the detective-minded boy set a still faster pace for me as we dashed down the hill to the place where I had just had the humiliating experience of rid
ing a wild, green, legless bronco in a reservoir full of cold water.
The red-striped pajamas I had been wearing must have made me look ridiculous to those Girl Scouts, I thought. I hoped they wouldn’t come back to the spring again while Poetry and I were looking for what he called a “clue.”
4
Several times before that night was finally over, I thought how much more sensible we would have been if we had curled ourselves up on our cots in the tent and gone sound asleep.
It’s better to be in bed when you have your pajamas on than scouting a watermelon patch, or splashing in a pool of springwater, or crouching shivering behind ragweeds and goldenrod and black-eyed Susans in a fencerow, or searching with a flashlight for a wad of waxed paper that somebody had stuffed into a watermelon.
Especially is it better to be in bed, as any decent boy should be, than to be lying on your stomach under an evergreen with pine needles pricking you, while you don’t dare move or you’ll be heard by somebody you are straining your eyes to see, and while your friend does the most ridiculous thing you ever heard of at the very spring where you yourself were just an hour ago.
Boy oh boy, let me tell you about what happened the second time Poetry and I went to the spring.
When we came to the beech tree, on whose close-grained gray bark the gang and maybe thirty other people had carved their initials through the years, we stopped to look the situation over. There was a stretch of moonlit open space between us and the leaning linden tree, which is at the top of the slope leading down to the spring.
The shadowy hulk of the old Black Widow Stump in the middle of the moonlit space looked like a black ghost. I kept straining my ears in the direction of the linden tree, wondering if there might be anybody down at the spring. Then I focused my ears and my eyes in the direction of the papaw bushes, away off to the left, where the girls’ camp was. I could smell the odor of wet ashes, and I knew that the girls had had a campfire near the Black Widow Stump. There was an outdoor fireplace there for picnickers to use for wiener roasts, steak fries, making coffee, and for just giving a picnic a friendly atmosphere. I was only half glad to notice that the girls had put out the very last spark of their fire, because I hated to have to admit that a flock of girls knew one of the most important safety rules of a good camper, which is: “Never leave a campfire burning, but put it out before you go.”
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 29