From the beech tree we moved east a little way, then made a moonlit dash for the row of evergreens that border the rail fence skirting the top of the hill above the bayou.
“OK,” Poetry panted when we got there. “We’ll work our way down from here. As soon as we get to the bottom, we’ll turn on the light and start looking for our clue.”
And then I heard something. It was a noise out in the creek somewhere. It was the sound of an oar in a rowlock.
Poetry and I hushed each other at the same time and strained our ears in the direction the sound had come from. At the same instant, we dropped down onto the pine needles under the tree.
“It’s somebody in a boat,” Poetry whispered. “He’s pulling in at the spring.”
I could see the boat now, emerging from the shadow of the trees down the shore. It had come up the creek from the direction of the Sugar Creek bridge.
Now the boat was being steered toward the shore. I knew if it was anybody who knew the shoreline, he wouldn’t stop directly in front of the spring, because the overflow drained into the creek there and it would be a muddy landing. Below it, or just above it, was a good place.
“There’s only one man in it,” Poetry said. Even in the shadowy moonlight I could tell that it was a red boat and one we’d never seen before.
Then I did get a surprise, and my whole mind began whirling with wondering what on earth in a gunnysack! No sooner had the prow of the boat touched the gravelly shore than whoever was in it was up and out and beaching the boat, wrapping the guy rope, which is called a “painter,” around the small maple that grew there. Then he stepped back into the boat, stooped, and picked up something in both hands—something dark and long and …
Hey! my mind’s voice was screaming, while my actual voice was keeping still. It’s a gunny-sack! It’s the brown burlap bag we saw in the watermelon patch a half hour ago!
In a minute the man was out of the boat again and disappearing up the path in the shadow of the trees. A second later he emerged at the opening in the board fence, worked his way through, and moved straight toward the spring, lugging the burlap bag with the melon in it.
“Let’s jump him!” I whispered to Poetry.
Poetry put his lips to my ear and whispered back, “Nothing doing. Detectives don’t capture a criminal before he commits a crime. They let him do it first, then they capture him!”
“He’s already done it,” I said, “at the melon patch!”
“If you’ll be patient,” Poetry whispered back, “we’ll find out what we want to know.”
We kept on watching from behind the evergreen while the man at the spring hoisted his burlap bag over the cement edge of the pool and let it down inside. He stayed in a stooping, stock-still position for several seconds, then began doing something with his hands.
“He’s about the size of Big Jim,” I whispered to Poetry.
“Or Circus,” he answered.
“Big Jim,” I insisted, but I knew that neither of them would steal a watermelon and bring it here by night in a boat.
Just then I shifted my position a little because I had been sitting on my foot and it was beginning to hurt. It was a crazy time to lose my balance and have to struggle awkwardly to keep from sliding down the incline, but that is what I did. And for a few anxious seconds I was looking after myself instead of watching the mysterious movements at the spring.
By the time I was focusing my vision in his direction again, the man or extralarge boy—whichever he was—had left the spring and was on his way back to the boat. For a minute we lost sight of him in the shadows. Then we saw him again. He was standing at the boat with his back to us, and we heard the painter being unwrapped from the tree.
In only a few more seconds the boat was gliding out into the creek. It went only a few feet, though, and almost right away the oarsman steered it toward the shore, where it became only a dim outline among the shadow of the trees that grew along the steep slope.
Poetry sighed an exasperated sigh and said, “Well, it wasn’t any of our gang, anyway. See?”
I had already seen—first the flash of a match or a cigarette lighter, then a reddish glow in the dark, and I knew somebody was smoking. That’s how we knew for sure it wasn’t any of the gang.
“I’d like to get my hands on him for just one minute,” I said to Poetry. “Both hands—twenty times—in fast succession.”
“You wouldn’t strike a woman or a girl, would you?” he answered.
“What? Who said it was a woman or a girl? He had on a pair of pants, didn’t he?”
“Girls wear slacks, don’t they? And lots of girls smoke, too.”
“And shouldn’t,” I answered.
We crept from our hiding place, scrambled down to where the boat had been beached, and looked to be sure the oarsman—or oarswoman—was out of sight. Then we slipped through the fence to look for the melon in the cement pool and also to look around for the wad of paper I had tossed away when we had been there before.
It was an interesting two or three minutes, because that’s all the time it took us to discover something important—very, very important!
Did you ever have a flashlight beam strike you full in the face and blind you for a few seconds? Well, the white light from that match or cigarette lighter and the reddish glow from the cigarette or cigar fifty yards down the shore sort of blinded me—not my eyes, but my mind. I couldn’t think straight for a minute. It was Poetry’s suggestion, though—that the thief might be a woman or a girl—that really confused me.
I guess all the time I had had in the back of my mind that the thief was Bob Till. But what if the person in the boat was a girl? No wonder I couldn’t think.
It was the perfume that sent my mind whirling. We’d noticed it the very second we crawled through the fence. It was so strong it made the whole place smell as if somebody had upset the perfume counter in the Sugar Creek Dime Store, and half the bottles of cologne and fancy perfumes had been broken.
If Dragonfly had been with us, I thought, he’d have sneezed and sneezed and sneezed because he’s allergic to almost every perfume there is.
Well, here was our chance to make a quick search for the wad of waxed paper, which is what we had come there for in the first place. I remembered just about where I had tossed it, and in only a few seconds Poetry whispered, “Here it is! Here’s our clue!”
His excitement about the thing, and his being so sure, had built up my mind to expect to see something wonderful inside that waxed paper. Anybody who would go to the trouble to steal a watermelon and deliver it secretly in a boat at night would probably leave something in the melon worth a hundred times more than the melon itself.
There in the shadow of the linden tree, to the music of the bubbling water in the spring and the singing of the crickets, Poetry held the flashlight while my trembling fingers unfolded that crumpled piece of waxed paper and spread it out.
“There’s printing on it!” Poetry exclaimed under his breath.
“What does it say?” I asked.
“It says—it says, ‘Eat more Eatmore Bread. It’s
better for you. The more Eatmore you eat, the more you like it.’”
It was disgusting. Very disappointing also.
“Smell it,” Poetry said.
I did, and boy oh boy—there was really a perfume odor around the place now! If Dragonfly had been there, I thought again—or rather, I started to think. I didn’t get to finish.
All of a sudden from the crest of the hill I heard a rustling of last year’s dry leaves. Then I saw a flashlight leading the way and a spindle-legged barefoot boy in red-striped pajamas coming down the hill to the spring. Imagine that! Dragonfly in his nightclothes! What on earth!
Poetry and I slipped behind an undergrowth of small elms, where we couldn’t be seen, and listened and watched as Dragonfly came all the way down. He went straight to the cement pool and shone his flashlight inside. Then his hands began to work fast as if he was in a big hurry
and also as if he was scared and wanted to do what he was doing and get it over quick. He certainly was nervous, and he seemed to be having trouble getting done what he wanted to do.
Poetry’s face was close to mine. I decided I could whisper into his ear and only he would hear me, so I said, “Look! He’s got a knife! He’s going to plug the melon! He—”
Poetry jammed his elbow into my ribs so hard that it made me grunt out loud.
Dragonfly jumped as though he was shot, dropped his knife into the spring, started to straighten up, lost his balance, staggered in several directions, then went ker-whammety-swish-splash into the water just as I myself had done an hour or so before.
And there he was, as I had been—a very wet boy in some very wet, very cold water, struggling to get onto his feet and out of the pool and sneezing and spluttering because he had probably gotten water into his mouth or nose and maybe even into his lungs.
And now what should we do?
We didn’t have time to decide. Right that second there was the sound of running steps at the top of the incline. Two shadowy figures with flashlights came flying down that leaf-strewn path, and somebody’s voice that was as plain as day a girl’s voice cried, “We’ve got you, you little rascal!”
Those two girls swooped down upon Dragonfly, seized him by the collar, and started dunking him in the pool, dunking and splashing water over him and saying, “Take that—and that—and that! We knew if we waited here, you’d be back!”
Then, all of a sudden, there was a hullabaloo of other girls’ voices at the top of the incline, and a shower of flashlights and excited words came tumbling down with them. It seemed there must have been a dozen girls, though there probably weren’t. Like a herd of stampeding calves, all of them swarmed around our little half-scared-to-death Dragonfly, who was shivering and probably wondering what on earth. They were pulling him this way and that, as if they would tear him to pieces.
Things such as what I was seeing and hearing that minute just don’t happen. Yet they were happening and to one of the grandest little guys who ever sneezed in hay fever season—our very own Dragonfly himself.
I didn’t know what he had done or why, but it seemed that anybody with that many people swarming all over him like a colony of angry bumblebees ought to have somebody to stand up for him. If it had been a gang of boys beating up on that innocent little guy, I probably would have made a football-style dive into the thick of them and bowled half a dozen of them over into the cement pool. Then I’d have turned loose my two doubled-up, experienced fists on them, windmill fashion, and Poetry would have come tumbling after.
But what do you do when your pal is being torn to pieces by a pack of helpless girls? As I have maybe told you before, my parents had taught me to respect all girls, sort of as though they were angels, which most of them aren’t. The only one I ever saw in the whole Sugar Creek territory who is anywhere near to being an angel is one of Circus’s many sisters, whose name is Lucille. Also, I wouldn’t have the heart to fight a weak-muscled helpless creature that men and boys are supposed to defend from all harm and danger.
Right that minute, though, while they were dunking Dragonfly in the spring and shoving him around and calling him names, it didn’t seem girls were such helpless creatures. Certainly it was Dragonfly who needed the protection from harm and danger!
I decided to use my mind and my voice instead of my muscles. I was remembering that, when I had been the striped cowboy riding a watermelon, I had scattered the girls in all directions by letting loose a series of wild loon calls, which sounded like a woman screaming or a wildcat with a trembling voice trying to scare the wits out of its prey.
So while I was still crouched in the shadows behind Poetry, I lifted my face to the sky and let loose six or seven bloodcurdling, high-pitched, trembling cries, making the loon call, the screech owl’s screech, and a wolf’s howl over and over again.
Poetry, catching on to my idea, joined in with a series of sounds like a young rooster learning to crow and a guinea hen’s scrawny-necked squawking scream. That made me decide to also bark like a dog and let out a half-dozen long, wailing bawls like the kind Circus’s dad’s hound Old Bawler makes when she’s on a red-hot coon trail.
We probably sounded like the midway of a county fair gone crazy, especially when all of a sudden Poetry, who could imitate almost every farm noise there is, started bawling like a calf and I went back to the loon call and the screech owl’s screech. Then we began shaking the elm saplings we were under, making them sway as though a windstorm was blowing and a tornado would be there any minute.
Things happened pretty fast after that. The noise got even worse because, all mixed up with Dragonfly’s sneezing and Poetry’s and my eardrum-splitting noises were the different-pitched screams of the girls. All of a sudden there was a flurry of running feet, and in a flash the girls were tumbling over each other on their way up the slope, past the base of the leaning linden tree, and were gone! In my mind’s eye I was watching them making a helter-skelter dash for the papaw bushes and their tents.
And that is how we practically saved Dragonfly’s life that very first night of this story, which is only the beginning—and which made the mystery we were trying to solve seem more mysterious than ever.
5
Poor Dragonfly! I guess he never had been so frightened before in his life. Dog days are ragweed days—and nights, too—and he was not only sneezing but wheezing a little, which meant he might get an asthma attack any minute.
“The w–w–water—” he stammered and gestured behind him toward the spring.
Poetry and I were quickly out of our hiding place on our way to Dragonfly. What, I wondered, is he trying to tell us about the watermelon?
“M–m–my knife!” he spluttered. “It’s in there—in the b–b–bottom of the pool!”
When I heard that, I knew he had been planning to plug the melon, which I was sure somebody had left there a few minutes ago. It didn’t feel very good to have to believe one of our own gang had been mixed up with the stealing of melons from the Collins garden.
“Hurry!” Dragonfly wheezed. “G–g–get it for me! I’ve got to get home quick! My parents don’t know where I am!”
Because all of us were in a hurry to get away from such a dangerous place for boys to be—which it certainly was, with a colony of bumblebee-like girls on a temper spree—I exclaimed to Poetry, “Hold the flashlight for me. I’ll get it!”
Poetry did, and I went to look for the knife, but I got an exclamation point in my mind for sure when I noticed there wasn’t even one watermelon in the pool—neither the one I was sure somebody had just hoisted over the lip of the pool and lowered inside nor the long, beautiful one I had seen there myself, which had had the waxed-paper wadding in it and on which I had had a fierce, fast ride in the moonlight.
What on earth!
“C–c–come on! Hurry up!” Dragonfly cried. “I’ve got to get home before my father gets back from t–t–own. It’s his knife, and I wasn’t supposed to have it!”
I quickly shoved my stripeless pajama sleeve up to my shoulder. And while Poetry held the flashlight for me and Dragonfly shivered and wheezed and watched, I plunged my arm into that icy water. In a few seconds my fingers clasped the knife, and only a few seconds after that all of us were on our way up the incline.
At the top, we looked quick to see if the enemy had retreated, and they had—at least we didn’t see or hear them. Then we skirted the rail fence and the evergreens and started on the run up the bayou, taking the way that most certainly wouldn’t lead anywhere near the papaw bushes.
We would have looked very strange to most anybody—Poetry in his green-striped pajamas, I in my yellowish stripeless ones, and Dragonfly in his red stripes. That was the funny thing about it—that crooked-nosed, short-of-breath little guy being in his nightclothes, too.
When we asked him, “How come?” he panted back, “I didn’t have time to dress. I had to get here and get back agai
n before my father got home.”
It wasn’t a very satisfactory answer. His running around in the woods in his pajamas didn’t make half as much sense as Poetry and I running around in ours did. It must have seemed absolutely nonsensical to those girl campers. They must have thought he and I were the same idiotic boy—which we most certainty weren’t.
Dragonfly was going to explain further when his wheezy voice was interrupted by somebody in the direction of Bumblebee Hill calling my name and saying, “Bill! Bill Collins! Where in the world are you?”
“It’s your father!” Poetry stopped stock-still and said.
It certainly was.
That big, half-worried, half-mad, thundery voice trumpeting down to us from the top of Bumblebee Hill was the well-known voice of Theodore Collins, my reddish brown mustached, bushy-eyebrowed father. What on earth was Dad doing out there waving his lantern and calling, “Bill Collins, where in the world are you?”
All of a sudden it seemed that, wherever I was, it was a good place not to be. It would be safer if I could take a fast shortcut through the woods and be fast asleep in the tent—or pretending to be—by the time Dad would give up looking for me and come back to the house. I could tell by the tone of his ear-deafening voice that whatever he was saying, he had already said it for the last time.
“Come on,” I whispered to Poetry and Dragonfly, “let’s get home quick. Quick!” And we lit out for my house by the shortcut that would miss Dad, who was still dodging along with his swinging lantern toward the bayou, still calling my name, and stopping every few yards to listen. If only Dragonfly could run faster, it would be easy, I thought.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 30