“He’s spied our clothes!” Dragonfly said.
Sure enough, he had, and he was pushing his way through the tall weeds straight toward them!
We knew right then we’d better do something quick, for I had a brand new knife in my overalls pocket, and Dragonfly had a watch in his.
“Let’s scream like a hundred wild Indians,” Dragonfly said, his teeth chattering.
It sounded like a good idea, so we both let out a yell as loud as we could, making it sound as fierce as if we were a whole tribe. Except that I knew it must have sounded like two kids, half scared to death, which we were.
But the old man didn’t even look around. He acted as if he was deaf. Now he was standing right where our clothes were hanging, and in a second he was going through our pockets. He found Dragonfly’s watch first and held it up in the sunlight, close to his big dark glasses. Then he brushed it against his long white whiskers, put it to his ear and listened, then shook his head as if he couldn’t hear a thing.
“My—my watch!” Dragonfly gulped.
I’d never seen him so scared before. And being scared is kind of like getting the measles—it’s catching. Dragonfly’s face made me afraid too. But if getting scared is contagious, so is getting angry. Pretty soon we were both so mad I knew we were going to do something in just about a minute.
We yelled again, a wild, bloodcurdling scream. But do you think that made any difference? Not a bit!
“He’s deaf!” Dragonfly said.
I believed it. And when I saw my new knife going into the old man’s pocket, I got madder than ever. Then the old man just naturally picked up our clothes, slung them over his shoulder, and waddled back through the tall grass and weeds whistling. Whistling, mind you!
We knew we couldn’t go home without our clothes, though at that time I didn’t think much about anything because I was so mad.
And so was Dragonfly. We would have to do something, and you can bet your life we did. We climbed up that creek bank, picked up a couple of clubs, and whooped it up, yelling, “Come back herewith our clothes! Stop, or we’ll shoot!” and about everything frightening we could think of.
This time that barrel of a man, with his long white hair shining in the sunlight, turned around and glared at us. He seemed to know the lay of the land there too, for he shuffled quickly to the left and tossed our clothes right over into the middle of a brier patch and said gruffly, “Help yourself!”
Brier patch! Why, we’d be scratched half to death trying to get those clothes!
That was too much. We both made a dive for him, and before you could say Jack Robinson we’d caught up with him—not because we could run faster but because he stumbled and fell and rolled down the hill. We stumbled over the man and landed right on top of him, getting our arms and legs all tangled up like an octopus doing an acrobatic stunt.
“Stop!” he cried. “Don’t hurt me! I’ll give up!” And then, as if he was crazy, he started quoting poetry:
“Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water;
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.”
In a jiffy those long whiskers were off. And the long hair. And the dark glasses. And we were looking straight into the mischievous blue eyes of Leslie “Poetry” Thompson, who started to laugh as loud as he could and quoted from “The Night Before Christmas”:
“He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook when he laughed,
like a bowl full of jelly.”
Poetry sprang to his feet and began to dance a jig and to sing:
“Hey, diddle, diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon.
The little dog laughed
To see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.”
He held up Dragonfly’s watch and my knife and started all over again about the cat and the fiddle.
I was still mad, and so was Dragonfly. And as much as we liked good old mischievous Poetry, we made him wade into that brier patch and get our clothes, which were still a little wet.
Then we all went in swimming. Poetry got ducked again and again for being so smart. Only it was just like trying to duck a rubber barrel; he wouldn’t stay under, and he could swim and dive like a fish.
“Where’d you get those whiskers?” I asked when we were dressing.
“And your dark glasses and your long hair?” Dragonfly added.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Poetry asked. Then he lowered his voice and looked around mysteriously. “I found ’em,” he said.
“Found ’em?” Dragonfly and I asked in chorus.
“In the old hollow sycamore tree down along the swamp.”
“How do you suppose they got there?” I asked.
Poetry looked at me scornfully as if I was too ignorant to know much about mysterious things. “They grew there, just like moss,” he said.
“Maybe there’s some robber around here, and he used these for a disguise,” Dragonfly said, trying on the dark glasses.
Poetry looked pretty serious when Dragonfly said that. And that, too, was like getting the measles. The more we thought about it, the more we began to wonder if Dragonfly might not be right.
That old sycamore was the biggest tree around here. Three or four feet from the ground was a big opening. Inside, it was all hollow and large enough for three of us boys to stand in it at the same time—that is, three the size of Little Jim and Dragonfly and me. Poetry couldn’t even get inside.
The tree grew about fifteen feet from a steep rocky precipice that dropped straight down to Sugar Creek. It was an awful lonely place down in that part of the woods, and none of us boys ever went there alone because our folks didn’t want us to. But we sometimes went there together.
Somebody had started the rumor that the old swamp was haunted, and that meant ghosts. While none of us boys believed in ghosts, we weren’t exactly hoping to meet one without Big Jim along, who could have made short work of any ghost in a jiffy, he was so strong. But Poetry! You couldn’t ever tell what he was going to do next. And as I told you, he’d already made up his mind he was going to be a detective when he grew up, and he wasn’t afraid of anything.
The three of us stood there sober-faced, talking about what we’d better do. Each of us tried on the disguise just to see how we looked with it on. Then all of a sudden it was five o’clock, and we knew we’d better be getting home quick or our folks’d be worrying about us. That was one of Big Jim’s rules: we weren’t to cause our parents any worry if we could help it.
Dragonfly made me take the fish even though we had both caught it. Tomorrow, we decided, we’d get Big Jim and Circus and Little Jim, and the six of us would go down along the swamp and investigate that old hollow tree.
We’d sneak up on the place and attack it from ambush. Of course, there wasn’t anything to it … but you never could tell.
4
It felt mighty good to be carrying that fish home for Dad to see, although I kept wondering what Mom would say about my wrinkled overalls. They’d been pressed so nicely when I’d left the house.
But Mom was as good a mother as Dad was a father. She was standing in the kitchen doorway when I came up past the barn and garden carrying my black bass, the fishing pole, and the bait can.
Dad was washing his face and hands in the big washbasin under our grape arbor, which ran along the side of the garage. He straightened up with soapsuds all over his face and neck and looked me over from head to foot. His eyes lit up proudly when I held up the fish.
“It’s wonderful,” Dad said.
“They’re terrible,” Mom said.
Dad was looking at the fish, and Mom was looking at my soiled overalls.
I didn’t have a chance to be either glad or sad, now, did I? But I was worried some just the same, because I didn’t want to make Mom feel bad.
“I’ll wash them myself,
” I said.
“He won’t need washing,” Dad said, “only cleaning and skinning”—meaning the fish, of course, not me.
Just then the telephone rang, and Mom had to go answer it, so I had a minute to be happy about my fish. Dad brought a ruler and measured it. “Ten and one-half inches,” he said. And he gave me the other half of that hug he’d started to give me earlier in the afternoon.
Supper was ready right away, and as soon as I had washed my face and hands and combed my hair, we sat down to eat. I was still feeling kind of heavy around the heart on account of my overalls, even though I was as cheerful as anything on the outside and as hungry as a bear on the inside.
Mom’s big, soft brown eyes kept watching me.
We all bowed our heads quietly before eating. Hungry as I was, I kept my eyes shut all the time Dad was praying, which wasn’t very long. Dad knew how hungry a boy could get at mealtime—and most anytime. He was a boy once himself. Oh, Dad was a real Christian all right. I knew that not only because he prayed and read the Bible and went to church but because he acted like one toward Mom and me and everybody else.
I was just itching to tell them the whole story about how I caught the fish—that is, how Dragonfly and I caught it. But I couldn’t on account of not wanting Mom to know I fell in the creek.
But pretty soon, when she was waiting on the table and pouring a second glass of milk for me, she reached down and kissed the top of my head just as though I was a little boy. And she whispered in my ear, “Don’t worry, Billy boy, I know you didn’t do it on purpose.” Then she went around to her chair and sat down again. After that it was the easiest thing in the world to talk.
Dad laughed and laughed and wiped his eyes over Dragonfly and me falling into the water.
That night after I’d scrubbed my feet good and gone up to bed, calling, “Good night,” at the top of the stairs, I stood beside my bed a long time before getting down on my knees to say my prayers. I looked out the window at the moonlight shining on the barn and the garage and the new garden. I could even see the little green tops of onions set in long rows across the garden.
Then I looked up at the Milky Way, stretched like a big white bow across the sky and at all the thousands of stars. And I just kind of felt that God had made them, and I couldn’t help but be glad I had a dad and mom who loved Him and tried to teach me about Him. Somehow I couldn’t help but think maybe He was like my mother and father, only more wonderful and a lot greater. He had made an awful pretty world, and He must have liked boys a lot because He’d sent His own Son down to earth to be a boy Himself once.
I knelt down and said my little poem prayer and then added some words of my own, which I can’t remember now. I felt like telling Jesus I loved Him, the way I did my parents and maybe even more, but I was scared to. But I did love Him just the same. And I guess He can hear a boy’s thoughts anyway, the same as his words. Only it’s good to use real words when you can.
I tell you that nice clean bed felt good even if it was hot. The pillow was so big and soft, only … only … why, it was wet! No, not much, but as though someone had sprinkled a few drops of water on it.
And that’s how I found out I’d been crying a little bit. I hadn’t known it at all. I sighed a great big happy sigh, and the next thing I knew it was morning.
5
It was a fine morning. The big red sun was just peeping up over the horizon as if he wasn’t quite awake yet and hated to get up. The birds were singing like everything. Right up in the top of our big walnut tree, which grew on the other side of the garden and where we had the biggest swing in the whole neighborhood and where the gang liked to play, was a robin hollering for all he was worth, “Jasper Collins! Get up, get up!” I liked robins, even if they did call me Jasper.
And down on the ground, with his head cocked to one side listening for a worm, was another robin redbreast standing in the sunlight. He must have heard a worm all right, for all of a sudden he turned like a flash and pulled at something with his big black-and-yellow bill. And, sure enough, in a second there was a big, long fishing worm in his beak, twisting and squirming like it was on a hook.
It really doesn’t hurt fishing worms much to be put on a hook, Dad said once. Dad is a sort of a scientist-farmer, and he said something about its being just a “minor irritation.” Kind of like a boy getting his neck and ears washed with soap and water when he’d rather wash them himself by swimming and diving in Sugar Creek.
Pretty soon that robin flew up into a fork of the walnut tree, where there was a nest full of little robin quadruplets waiting for their breakfast. Think of eating worms for breakfast! Worms!
I dressed in a hurry because today was to be the big day. Right after dinner, the gang would all get together, and Poetry would tell us what he’d found in the hollow tree down by the haunted swamp. We’d all arm ourselves with bows and arrows and slingshots and with a big club for Little Jim, and the fun would begin.
First thing, though, was getting through the morning, which would be awful long since all of us boys helped our folks in the morning. That was Big Jim’s rule. I guess there never was a boy who liked to work unless he could imagine his work was play. But Mom had been trying to teach me ever since I was little that work came first and then play. I guess she was right. Besides, if you really love your parents, you like to do things that make them happy.
I helped Mom wipe the dishes, which most boys think is a girl’s job, but it isn’t when you don’t have any girls in the family. I finished raking the lawn, built a fire, burned all the dead grass and leaves, and gathered up all the tin cans and things that somehow had gotten scattered all over the barnyard mainly because I’d been using them for imaginary golf balls. Then I dropped the potato slices with the eyes in them into the long, deep rows Dad had made across the garden. I stepped on them with my bare feet so they’d be pressed down into the dirt better and would grow quicker. Maybe you think that wasn’t fun, feeling the cool, damp dirt oozing up between my toes!
And finally it was noon—dinnertime—and we had fish for dinner. “What kind of bait did you use to catch this bass?” Dad asked. And I said, between mouthfuls, having a hard time to eat slowly on account of having to meet the gang at one o’clock, “Why, just plain worms. Why?”
“I just wondered,” Dad said. “I found a nice little chub on the inside of him.” A chub is a small, carplike fish, you know. “And the little chub was full of fishing worms,” Dad added.
I was surprised. That meant that first I’d hooked a little chub, and then the bigger bass had come along and had swallowed the chub. Right away I knew what kind of bait to use for bass the next time I wanted to catch one.
“It’ll be all right to fish for bass today,” Dad said. “If the game warden had seen you catch that one yesterday, it would have been too bad. You didn’t know, but it wasn’t bass season yet.”
Well, at ten minutes to one I was ready to go down to the spring where the gang had agreed to meet. It was Thursday, and we always met there on Thursday afternoons, if we could.
I ran upstairs to get my binoculars, thinking maybe we’d need them. On the way down again I stopped to fasten the strap around my neck. Dad had the radio going, listening to the midday news, and all of a sudden I went numb all over. At just that minute I’d heard the announcer say, “Be warned to be on the lookout for a man suspected of being an accomplice in a bank holdup. It is believed he is hiding somewhere in the swamp.”
I couldn’t make out where in the swamp, because there was a lot of static on the radio.
“He’s described as having black hair and eyes and …”
When I got downstairs and looked at myself in the mirror, I was as white as a sheet. But I hurried out of doors quickly so the folks wouldn’t see me and ran as fast as I could through the woods toward the spring. My heart beat wildly because of what I’d heard and because it looked like maybe we were going to have a chance to help catch a real robber.
6
I was
the first one of the gang to get to the spring, and Circus was the last. He’d had a hard time persuading his parents that it was important not to miss a meeting. Circus’s folks—his dad especially—never did understand boys very well, although his dad must have been a boy once himself.
But sometimes grown-up people are funny that way. They forget that inside a boy there is something that just makes him want to keep his promise to the gang.
And I tell you, it’s pretty hard to obey your parents when they don’t understand. We had to, though. Big Jim said he’d read it in the Bible as plain as day—“Children, obey your parents.” Little Jim agreed it was true; he had seen it in the Bible with his own eyes. “Besides,” Big Jim said, “if you ever want to become a Boy Scout, one of the qualifications is obedience.”
Well, pretty soon we were all there. Big Jim had come with a mysterious package under his arm. Circus climbed a small elm sapling almost as soon as he got there and was swaying in the top, back and forth, looking every bit like a monkey in the zoo. Dragonfly and Poetry and Little Jim and I started tumbling around in the grass like kittens having a good time. All six of us were as pleased to see each other as if we hadn’t been together in years.
The spring, you know, comes bubbling up out of a hole in a rock at the bottom of a steep hill, only about twenty feet from the creek. Dad had had the water tested to see if it was all right to drink, and it was.
Just that minute a big green shitepoke came flying up the creek with his long neck sticking out in front of him like the long handle on my green coaster wagon. His wings were flapping and driving him through the air awful fast. He was the most idiotic-looking bird you ever saw.
I had just gotten my binoculars focused on him and was following him up the creek with my eyes when Poetry was reminded of a verse from Hiawatha. Away he went in his squawky voice. It was about as squawky as the big quoke heron’s, which goes quoking up the creek at night sounding like a young rooster learning to crow:
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