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 we had looked 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?” 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 Tom Till and Circus and Big Jim himself did the best they could making bobwhite calls, but 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. Again Circus was the only one whose call was like the one we heard last night.
“OK, 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,” Tom Till said.
“So was I,” Little Jim echoed.
“Yeah, 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 believed that Circus was there last night.
There wasn’t any use to stay where we were, and since it was 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, across the cemetery to the other side.
The rest of us took off after him, not a one of us wanting to be a bear’s tail, which meant we would have to be almost nothing, because bears have very stubby tails.
Long before we got to the creek, nearly every one of us had his shirt off, so that by the time we got there all we would have to do would be to wrestle ourselves out of our overalls. In a jiffy we would be out in the middle of the greatest water for swimming in the whole world. Every one of us knew how to swim like a fish, for our parents had made us learn as soon as we were old enough to—as everybody in the world should.
And then you should have seen the way our mystery began to come to life, even 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 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 extraspecial.
I galloped 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 excitedly pointing down with a right forefinger to something on the little strip of sand at the water’s edge.
At first I didn’t see a thing except some shaded water where fifty or more small, black, flat whirligig beetles were racing around in circles on the surface. I could smell ripe apples, which is the kind of odor a whirligig beetle gives off. Anybody who knows anything about whirligig beetles knows that smell comes from a kind of milky fluid that 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 Dad’s and my new hobby, grunted, too. Then he sneezed and said, “I’m allergic to the smell of sweet bugs.” That is 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.
“But, look, everybody!” Little Jim yelled. “Look! See, it’s a clue!”
Then my eyes went in the direction his finger was really pointing, and I saw what he saw. A thrill started whirligigging in my very surprised brain, for what to my wondering eyes did appear but, half hidden in the grass, a pair of women’s new shoes—very small, expensive-looking white pumps with extrahigh heels and a design across the toes that looked kind of like the leaves from the ground ivy growing all around Sarah Paddler’s tombstone.
What on earth! I thought. I remembered that Dad had said, “Earth on what?” when I saw there were some yellowish brown earth stains on those extrahigh heels of those new-looking women’s shoes.
Just that second Dragonfly said, “Psst! Listen,” 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
If that bobwhite call was from a real quail, then we didn’t have anything to worry about. But we all 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, sunny midsummer afternoon. Or if they do, I didn’t remember having heard any do it around Sugar Creek. And if it had been a human being calling like a quail, then what?
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, because some woman’s shoes were lying right this minute 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 decide what to do, we heard the quail call again. This time it was a lot nearer than it had been. In fact, it sounded as if 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 on the same path we had been running on 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 not a one of us could do a thing except stand 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. “Get those shoes, quick, and let’s get out of here!” I shouldn’t have done that, because Big Jim is our leader when he is with us.
And Big Jim took my leadership away from me in a split second by saying, “Leave those shoes alone! Don’t you dare touch them! If anything has happened, we don’t want our fingerprints on them!”
And then we were scrambling up 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. We were getting ourselves out of there fast.
At the top of the little slope, we came to the narrow footpath, zipped across it, and disappeared into the tall corn of one of Dragonfly’s dad’s cornfields.
I knew that on the opposite side of that narrow strip of cornfield was the bayou. It was divided into two parts, having a long pond on either end, and each of those ponds had in it some very lazy water in which there were a few mud pickerel, or barred pickerel, as some people call them. Between the two ponds was a 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 as we had done last night and come out at the place where Little Jim had killed the bear. You have probably read about that 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 were the old cemetery and the hole in the ground beside Sarah Paddler’s tombstone.
There we would be safe if whoever was coming up that path, nearer and nearer every second, was dangerous.
As quickly 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 see if we could learn 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 came up the path, we could see his feet if we were lying on the ground.
Poetry, lying close to me, whispered in my ear, “Shh! 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-protected outdoor dressing room. Then came a startling quail call again, and this time it sounded so near that 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 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, I could hear her talking and complaining about something the way a boy does when he gets called by his mother to leave his play. I could hear the man’s voice too, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying.
Then I heard her say, “I was having so much fun wading in the riffles. Look! I found this—a big washboard 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! They were camping somewhere up in Old Man Paddler’s woods. That meant they would either have to get their drinking water at the spring, where our gang met every day 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 board walk near our back door and grape arbor.
For some reason that didn’t make me feel very good. Of course, Old Man Paddler owned nearly all the territory around Sugar Creek, and he had the right to let anybody camp on it that he wanted to. Still, it seemed the whole territory belonged to the Sugar Creek Gang, especially the woods around the spring, because 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. This 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 men, 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 dad’s cornfield and the man and the woman were still not more than a few yards up the path on their way toward 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 went through. The movement was like it is when the wind blows across our wheatfield.
Then they were gone, and I could hear only the sound of the breathing of seven half-dressed, half-undressed boys.
Using my nervous voice, I said, “What on earth?” before any of the rest of the gang did.
Circus, trying to be funny, said, “Seven boys are.”
We would have to go in swimming now to get the sand of Dragonfly’s cornfield off ourselves. Besides I had some dirt in my red hair too, and it would have to be dived out.
It was a not-very-happy gang of boys that sneaked back to our leafy dressing room and then went in swimming.
“Did any of you guys hear him say, ‘Let’s get back to the tent’?” I asked.
“Sure,” Poetry said. “What of it?”
“What of it?” I exclaimed. “Why, that means they are camping up there in the woods somewhere, and we’ll have to be scared half to death every time we go in swimming for fear some woman and her husband will hear or see us. Or else we’ll have to wear swim trunks!” None of our gang had ever worn them in our whole lives.
I had just come up from diving and was shaking the water out of my ears and rubbing it out of my eyes so that I could hear and see, when our mystery came to livelier life than before.
It happened like this. Little Jim was dressing over by the willow where he always dresses and where the whirligig beetles were still in swimming, having a sweet time going round and round on the surface of the water like boys and girls skating on Sugar Creek in the wintertime.
He had just finished shoving his head through the neck of his shirt and was reaching for his overalls that were hanging on the willow when all of a sudden he let out another excited yell. “Hey, Bill! Circus! Poetry! Everybody! Come here quick! Hurry! Look what I found. It’s somebody’s billfold!”
When I got some of the water out of my ears and eyes and could see, I saw him holding up a pretty brown billfold like the kind Mom carries in her handbag.
Not waiting to finish getting the water out of my ears and eyes, I went splashety-gallop straight for Little Jim, who was on the shore by the willow, still holding up the leather billfold for us to see. All the rest of the gang were already splashing their different ways toward him, and almost all of us got there at the same time.
Well, when those black, flat, oval whirligig beetles saw or heard or felt us coming out of our swimming hole toward theirs, they got scared. At once, the way whirligig beetles do when they are badly frightened, they stopped going around in their fast, excited circles and dived under the water to hide themselves on the bottom of Sugar Creek. By the time I got there, there wasn’t one in sight, and only the smell of ripe apples was left.
The billfold was made out of a very rich-looking leather that could have been goatskin, although maybe it was what leather workers call saddle leather. It had a pretty tooled design on it, a galloping horse with wings. On the other side of the billfold were the initials F. E.
Now, what do you do with a woman’s fancy billfold when you find it on the ground in a boys’ outdoor dressing room? Do you open the billfold to see what’s in it? Or do you open it just to see what name is on the identification card in one of its windows, which most billfolds have for the owner’s name and address and for pictures of favorite friends?
Since Big Jim was the leader of our gang, Little Jim handed the billfold to him, and right away Big Jim said, “It probably belongs to the turtledove that was here a little while ago looking for her high-heeled shoes. We’d better get dressed quick and take out after her and her bobwhite husband or brother. We’ll see if we can find her and give the billfold back to her.”
“What’s her name?” Tom Till wanted to know. He crowded in between Little Jim and me, turning his face sideways so that as soon as Big Jim would open the billfold, he could read the name on the identification card.
“We don’t need to know that,” Big Jim said, but I noticed he did decide to unzip the zipper. And when he did, the billfold flopped open like a four-page leather-covered book. There were four windows wi
th a picture on each side of three of them. One of the windows had a card, and the name on it was Frances Everhard. Then I got a view of one of the most astonishing surprises I ever had in my life.
Dragonfly, who was closest to Big Jim and looking over his elbow, exclaimed, “Why, she’s got a picture of Bill’s baby sister!”
You should have seen me crowd my way into the middle of our huddle to Big Jim’s side to see what Dragonfly thought he saw. And to my surprise I saw one of the cutest pictures of Charlotte Ann that I had ever seen. In fact, it was one I had never seen before, and I wondered when Mom had had it taken and how on earth a barefoot woman who dug holes in a cemetery at night had gotten it.
In the picture, Charlotte Ann was sitting in a fancy high chair that had what looked like an adjustable footrest, the kind they sell in the Sugar Creek Furniture Store. The food tray looked shiny and was maybe made out of chrome. I remembered Mom had once looked at one like that in town and had wanted to buy it for Charlotte Ann, but Dad had said the old one I had used when I was a baby, which was years and years ago, was good enough. It had made a husky boy out of me, and besides he couldn’t afford it—the way he can’t a lot of things Mom would like to buy and maybe knows she shouldn’t, because Dad is still trying to save money so he can buy a new tractor.
Also, Charlotte Ann was wearing a cute baby bonnet and a stylish-looking coat with a lot of lacy stuff around the collar. I didn’t remember her having any outfit like that at all, although Mom could have bought it and had her picture taken one day in town when I hadn’t known about it.
She certainly had a cute expression on her face, one I had seen her have hundreds of times. It looked as if she was thinking some very mischievous thoughts and was trying to tell somebody what she was thinking and couldn’t because she couldn’t talk yet.
“It’s not a picture of Charlotte Ann,” Little Jim said, who managed to get his small, curly head in close enough to take a look. “She’s got more hair than that.”
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24 Page 3