There was an interrogatory sentence in my mind right that minute. So I exploded at Dragonfly, “What were you doing in the middle of the night down there at the spring?”
My question probably sounded pretty saucy to him.
“I went to get my knife,” he said. “I was there getting a drink yesterday afternoon when a whole flock of girls came storming down and scared me so bad I dropped my knife. I was so scared I ran home. It was my dad’s knife, and he was coming home before midnight, and I didn’t want him to know I had it, so I sneaked back to get it, and—”
Another of my mystery balloons had burst. Poetry and I looked at each other and shrugged. That let Dragonfly out. He hadn’t had anything to do with stealing watermelons. He was as innocent as a lamb. I sighed a big sigh of relief, though. It felt good to get all that suspicion out of my mind and to have Dragonfly with us again.
We crowded around Big Jim then to see what was between the layers of the bread wrapper.
“It’s a map!” Little Jim exclaimed in his squeaky voice.
It was a crude drawing made with purple pencil. That was the first thing I noticed—that it had been made with purple pencil. The drawing looked like a map of the Sugar Creek territory itself. In fact, it was a very good map of the gang’s playground and had the names of important places on it—names that only somebody living in our neighborhood would know about. There were a few names that it seemed only the gang itself might know, such as Bumblebee Hill, the Black Widow Stump, and the Little Jim Tree.
My mind cringed when I realized that maybe whoever had drawn the map was one of our own gang—maybe one of us who, right that minute, were in a football-style huddle in the cemetery.
Then Poetry noticed something I hadn’t. “Look at that red X, would you? Wonder what that means?”
I squeezed in between Poetry and Dragonfly and looked. And there it was, a very small red X with a red circle around it in the upper lefthand corner of the page. I could tell that the red X and the red circle were marking a spot on the other side of the creek just below the big Sugar Creek bridge.
Big Jim must have been thinking the same thoughts I was, because right that second he said, “Who outside our gang knows the name of the tree where Little Jim killed the bear?”
Poetry rolled himself into a sitting position and grunted himself to his feet. Trying to make his voice sound like a detective’s, he said, “All right, everybody. Don’t a one of you leave this room—this cemetery, I mean. One of you in this circle is a watermelon thief. One of you drew this map!”
Before anybody could have stopped him, he was firing one question after another at us. The first one was, “Who among us has a purple pencil? You, Bill?”
“No sir,” I said.
I was surprised that Big Jim let Poetry keep on with his questions, but he did, and pretty soon Poetry had asked us a half-dozen others, such as, which of us ate Eatmore Bread at home, what kind of clotheslines did our mothers use—rope or plastic—and did any of us smoke? Of course, the last question was a foolish one as far as the gang was concerned, but I knew why he had asked it. He was remembering the man in the boat who, last night, had lit a cigar or cigarette with a match or a lighter.
Poetry was looking as dignified as any roly-poly boy with mussed-up hair and mischievous eyes can look. He was all set to keep on talking and asking questions when Big Jim interrupted.
“Look, all of you! There’s only one other person—well, two—who might know the names we’ve given to the important places around here. One is Little Tom Till, and the other is his big brother, Bob.”
I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of Tom before. The very second Big Jim mentioned his name, I remembered that Tom was very good in art at school. In fact, he got better grades in it than any of the rest of us. For some reason, though, I didn’t like the idea of thinking that Tom was guilty of making the map. He wasn’t exactly a member of our gang yet. He hadn’t been meeting with the gang lately, because his brother didn’t want him to and Tom was very much afraid of his big brother’s big fists. But we all felt he belonged to us anyway.
“The thing for us to do,” Big Jim interrupted my thoughts to say, “is to do what Bill suggests—go straight to their house and ask them point-blank what they know about this map and whether they’ve been stealing watermelons.”
That is what we decided to do, but Big Jim cautioned us to watch our words so as not to stir up Bob’s temper.
“Remember, he will be in church tomorrow—and in our class.”
I remembered it all the way.
Our faces were set as we left the cemetery and walked down the slope of Bumblebee Hill. We passed the Little Jim Tree and went on to the spring again, then moved cautiously through the woods toward the rail fence that bordered the north road, keeping our distance from the papaw bushes on the way. Dragonfly managed to sneeze several times just as we were parallel with the Girl Scout camp, which proved that his mind as well as his nose was allergic to perfume, because he certainly wasn’t close enough to their camp to smell any!
“Girls aren’t anything to be sneezed at,” Poetry was smart enough to say to Dragonfly, and Dragonfly sneezed again.
At the rail fence, we went through or under or over the different rails, whichever different ones of us decided to do, and quickly were on our way across the bridge in the direction of the Tills’ house.
The minute we reached the other side of the bridge, Little Jim cried suddenly, “There’s the boat I bet they used last night!”
I looked downstream in the direction he was pointing and saw the red stern of a rowboat half hidden under some low-hanging willow branches.
A thousand shivers started racing up and down my spine when I realized that our mystery was coming to more life even than it had come to last night when we had seen the boat stopping at the spring.
At that very same instant I saw, half hidden among the trees, the forest green roof of a tent. What on earth? I thought.
Not only was there a flock of girls camping near the papaw bushes in the woods above the bridge, but here, on the other side of the creek and below the bridge, somebody else was camping! I was remembering last night and the mysterious something or other I had seen somebody carry to the spring from a boat. This very same boat, maybe!
Poetry beside me remarked, “There’s where the woman lives—the one who was smoking the cigarette last night.”
“There’s where the man lives, you mean,” I disagreed.
Beside the tent was a gunmetal gray pickup truck that looked as though it was maybe ten or fifteen years old. At almost the same instant, there was the sound of a motor roaring to life, and right away the truck was moving. It went backward first, then swung left and began bumping along the little lane toward the highway.
“Quick, everybody!” Big Jim ordered. “Down the embankment and under the bridge!”
We obeyed Big Jim like soldiers taking orders from a captain in a battle. In only a few lightning-fast seconds, we were all crouching on a narrow strip of shore underneath the north end of the bridge. We got there just in time, too, because soon we heard the truck’s wheels on the board floor above us. And that was that!
As soon as the truck was across the bridge, we decided it would be a good idea to look around a little, just to see if we could find any “clues,” as Poetry was always saying.
We followed the narrow footpath that skirts the shore and is bordered on either side with willows and ragweeds, just like the path on our own side of the creek.
Pretty soon we came to within twenty-five feet of the boat and the green tent.
“Hello, there!” Big Jim called. “Anybody home?”
There wasn’t any answer from anybody.
“Hello! I say, hello!” Big Jim called again several times, and still there wasn’t any reply.
Though it wouldn’t be right to trespass on somebody’s campground, we knew we wouldn’t be doing anything wrong if we just walked in the path that belonged to everybody
, anyway, past the place where the boat was moored.
Then we were there, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but out in the middle of the boat a gunnysack—an actual, honest-to-goodness gunnysack. It had something in it that was fat and long and—
“Hey,” I said to the gang, “look! There’s another watermelon! In a gunnysack!”
“You’re crazy,” Poetry answered. “That’s not a watermelon. That’s a water jug!”
Well, to my very sad disappointment, Poetry was right. There was a great big water jug like the kind we use at the Sugar Creek threshing time, wrapped round and round with a gunnysack tied on with twine.
I remembered that many a time I had carried drinking water to Dad from our iron pitcher pump out across the barnyard to whatever field he was in at the time. First, I would soak a burlap bag in cold water. If you do that to a burlap bag, it will keep the water in the jug cool for quite a long time.
“That,” Poetry said, “is what the woman in the boat last night was getting at the spring. She carried an empty jug to the spring, let it down into the water until it was filled, and then carried it back again.”
“I still want to know who drew a map and put it in that watermelon,” I said crossly. “And where is Ida!”
After Big Jim had called, “Hello,” a few more times and nobody had answered, we decided to see if we could find any honest-to-goodness clues, but we wouldn’t go inside the tent.
“Look at that, would you?” Poetry exclaimed, the minute we were on the other side of the tent. “See that clothesline hanging between those two trees?” Most of us had already seen it. It was a brand-new plastic line stretching from a small maple near the tent to the trunk of an ash that grew about thirty feet away, close to a field of very tall corn. Hanging on the line were two or three pairs of pants, the kind women and girls wear. Also there were several kinds of women’s different-colored clothes.
We didn’t have time to try to make up our minds what to do next, because all of a sudden there was a clattering of the boards of the Sugar Creek bridge. It was the truck coming back.
“Quick, everybody!” Big Jim exclaimed. “Let’s get out of here!”
And out of there we got, scurrying like six scared cottontails into the tall corn. We didn’t stop running until we knew we were far enough away so that we couldn’t be seen by anybody, not even if she dropped down on her hands and knees and looked beneath the drooping corn blades in our direction.
“I guess this lets Bob and Tom out,” Circus said.
It had also knocked the daylights out of my mystery.
“But what about the burlap bag with the watermelon in it—the one that was being dragged through our watermelon patch last night?” I asked.
“It was dark out there, wasn’t it?” Circus asked. “You couldn’t tell whether it was a watermelon or a water jug.”
“But I felt it with my two hands, and it was long and round and—”
“A water jug is long and round,” Little Jim’s mouselike voice squeaked.
“But this one in our watermelon patch didn’t have any spout on it,” I protested, feeling my mystery house falling and crashing all around me. “And why was it in our watermelon patch?”
“How do you know it didn’t have a spout? You didn’t feel both ends, did you? You just felt it in the middle,” Poetry argued back. “And besides,” he went on in a talkative hurry, “your other pump wasn’t more than twenty feet away when we first saw it. Somebody was just helping himself to some drinking water.”
I felt my jaw muscles tightening with anger. I knew—knew—that what had been in that burlap bag last night was a watermelon. Besides, why would anybody want to get drinking water secretly like that?
I quickly asked that question out loud and got a quick answer from Poetry, whose detective-like mind was certainly alert that day. “Sugar Creek water isn’t safe to drink for anything except a fish in dog days. Look at all that green scum floating out there.”
He was probably right, but his answer didn’t tell me why whoever wanted the water didn’t go right straight to any member of the Sugar Creek Gang’s parents and ask for a jug of water in the daytime.
“But somebody did take my prize watermelon!” I protested. “Ida couldn’t just get up and walk away. Somebody had to carry or drag her.”
And a second later, Poetry started to say a little jingle we’d heard him use quite a few times. It was:
“I proposed to Ida.
Ida refused;
I’da won my Ida if I’da used …”
“Stop!” I ordered him and started to say something else. But I got stopped myself by Big Jim, making me swallow my words and my temper. But still I knew I was right. The whole thing was as plain as a dog-days day to anybody with half a mind, and it looked as if maybe I was the only one of us who had that.
That was as far as any of us got to say or think right then, because from the direction of the tent I heard a car door slam. I knew it was the truck, and my mind was busy trying to imagine who had probably climbed out of it.
“Do you suppose it’s anybody we know?” Dragonfly asked. Then he sneezed and grabbed his nose with his right hand to stop another sneeze that was already getting ready to explode.
For a few anxious seconds we all lay there in the nice clean dust of the cornfield, listening and thinking and trying to decide what to do, if anything. Even though I was worrying because of the mystery, I was hearing and actually enjoying the sound of the husky, rusty rustle of the corn blades in the very light breeze that was blowing. I could see big, white cumulus clouds hanging in the lazy afternoon sky and the shimmering green leaves at the top of the cottonwood tree farther down the shore. I even noticed a lazy crow loafing along in the sky as if he didn’t have a worry in the world.
It wouldn’t be long before fall would be here, I thought, and that lonely old crow would join about five hundred of his black-feathered friends and spend half the day every day for a while, cawing and cawing in his hoarse voice, keeping it up and keeping it up, hour after hour in the bare trees. One of the dreariest things a farm boy ever sees in the autumn is a forlorn-looking crow flapping his sad wings above the frosty cornfields.
Nearly every summer there is a crow’s nest in the top of the old pine tree on the other side of the creek near the mouth of the branch. About all a pair of crow parents ever do to make a nest for their crow children to be hatched in is to build a rough platform of sticks, some large and some small, and line it with strips of bark from the cedar trees. Then the mother crow, who is just as black as her husband, though her feathers don’t shine as brightly, lays from four to seven eggs that are the color of green dust with little brown spots on them.
Crows are always scattering themselves over the new cornfields in the spring, digging down into the rows where the grain has been planted, and gobbling up the grain before it has a chance to grow. Of course, any farm boy knows a crow also eats May beetles and grasshoppers and cutworms and caterpillars and even mice. He is also a thief. But he doesn’t use a plastic clothesline to help him get what he wants.
Just thinking that brought my mind back to the cornfield we were lying in right that minute.
My thoughts got there just in time to hear Big Jim say to me, “Bill, you and Poetry tell us once more all you know about everything from the beginning up to now.”
Poetry and I did, rehearsing to the gang what we had seen at the spring on our first trip—the plugged watermelon with the folded waxed paper in it; the long dark thing we had seen being dragged through the melon patch, which at first I had thought was some kind of wild animal running; and the car that clattered down the lane and back again. We told them about the hole in the fence and the watermelon being pulled through—or the water jug, whichever it was—and hoisted into the car. Then we told about Poetry’s and my trip back to the spring again, the mystery man or woman in the boat, and Dragonfly’s coming for his knife and getting dunked by the girls.
“Don’t forget t
he perfume,” Dragonfly said, “and the pine-scented paper and the map and—” And then he quickly grabbed his nose just in time to stop another sneeze.
“And the red letter X,” Little Jim put in.
Big Jim unfolded the map again, and we crowded around him to study it.
There was only one person I knew who could draw a map as neat as that. “We’d better see Tom about this,” I said. “Here, let me have it. I’m the one who took it out of the melon in the first place.”
I was surprised when Big Jim actually handed it to me, saying, “All right, you keep it until we find the real owner. It probably belongs to the Girl Scouts.”
I folded it and tucked it into my left hip pocket.
“Don’t forget about the plastic clothesline—the brand-new one we just saw,” Circus said, which I remembered was right that very minute stretched between two trees behind the tent and had a lot of women’s different-colored clothes on it.
Things certainly were mixed up. The more we talked, the more tangled up everything seemed.
All this time, Little Jim had been hanging onto his brown manila envelope as though it was very important. I noticed he had a faraway expression in his eyes right then as if he was thinking about something a lot farther away than the cornfield we were in. Also, he didn’t have any worries on his face, which I was pretty sure I had.
“Let’s do a little more scouting around,” Poetry suggested. “Let’s send out a couple of spies to sneak up close to the tent to see what we can see or hear.”
Big Jim shook his head a very savage no, saying, “You don’t go sneaking around a tent where women or girls are camping! There’s even a law against it. Remember what happened to that Peeping Tom they caught looking into a window in town last winter?”
“What’s a Peeping Tom?” Dragonfly wanted to know.
And Big Jim, being the oldest one of the gang, explained it to all of us. When he got through, we made it a rule of the gang that not a one of us would ever be one.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 33