Chapter II: Part 2

For some reason it didn’t make me feel very good. Of course, Old Man Paddler owned nearly all the territory around Sugar Creek and he had a right to let anybody camp on it that wanted to, but it sorta seemed like the whole territory belonged to the gang, especially the woods around the spring on account of 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 and it 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 Indians 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 pop’s cornfield and the man and the woman were still not more than a few rods up the path on their way towards 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 had gone through, and the movement was like it is when the wind blows across our wheat field.

A jiffy later they were gone and I could hear only the sound of the breathing of seven half-dressed, half-undressed boys.

“What on _earth?_” I said using my nervous voice 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 green, leaf-shaded, dressing room and 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 half-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 bathing suits,”--which none of our gang had ever worn in our whole lives.

In fact, the only people who ever used bathing suits around Sugar Creek were people who came from far away who went swimming near the bridge--and maybe had to ’cause it was a public place. Hardly anybody knew about our swimming hole.

I had just come up from diving and was shaking the water out of my ears and rubbing it out of my eyes so I could hear and see, when our mystery came to an even livelier life than before.

It happened like this. Little Jim had already finished swimming and 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 as many boys and girls on skates can do on Sugar Creek in the wintertime.

Little Jim 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 like he had done before. “Hey, Bill! Circus! Poetry! Everybody! Come here quick! Hurry! Look what I found. It’s somebody’s billfold!”

By the time I got the water out of my ears and eyes and could see, I saw him holding up for us to look at a very 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 for us to see, the brown leather billfold. Nearly all the rest of the gang were already splashing their different ways toward Little Jim and almost all of us got there at the same time.

Say, when those fifty or more black, flat, oval whirligig beetles saw or heard or felt us coming in such a noisy, splashy hurry out of our swimming hole toward theirs, they got more scared than a gang of boys would if a dozen cows were stampeding in their direction. In a jiffy, like 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 so that by the time I got there, there wasn’t a one in sight and only the smell of ripe apples was left.

Say, that was one of the prettiest billfolds I had ever seen. I noticed it was made out of a very rich-looking leather that could have been goat’s skin, although maybe it was what leather workers call saddle leather and it had a very pretty tooled design on it which was a galloping horse with wings.

On the other side of the billfold were the initials “F.E.”

* * * * *

Well, what do you do with a fancy, woman’s 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 just open it to see if a name is on the identification card in one of its clearview windows, which most billfolds have in them for the owner’s name and address and for pictures of different members of the family or 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, and see if we can find her and give the billfold back to her.”

“What’s her name?” Little Tom Till wanted to know, crowding in between Little Jim and me and turning his face sidewise so as soon as Big Jim would open it, he could read the name on the identification card in one of the windows.

“We don’t need to know that,” Big Jim said, but I noticed he decided to unzip the three-way zipper, and when he did the billfold flopped open like a four-page, leather-covered book. There were four swinging windows with 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 one of the most astonishing surprises I ever got in my life when Dragonfly, who was closest to Big Jim and looking on over his elbow, exclaimed, “Why, she’s got a picture of Charlotte Ann, Bill’s baby sister!”

Boy, oh boy, you should have seen me crowd my way into the middle of our huddle to Big Jim’s side to see what Dragonfly had thought he saw, and to my whirligigging surprise I saw what looked like one of the cutest pictures of my baby sister, Charlotte Ann, 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.

Charlotte Ann in the picture was sitting in a fancy-looking highchair that had what looked like an adjustable footrest like they sell in the Sugar Creek Furniture Store. The food tray looked like it was shiny and was maybe made out of chrome. I remembered Mom had looked at one like that once in town and had wanted to buy it special for Charlotte Ann, but Pop 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--like he can’t a lot of things Mom would like to buy and maybe knows she shouldn’t on account of Pop is still trying to save money so he can buy a new tractor.

Also Charlotte Ann was wearing a very 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 it.

She certainly had a cute expression on her face, which I had seen her have one like hundreds of times in my life. It looked like she was thinking some very mischievous thoughts and was trying to tell somebody what she was thinking and couldn’t on account of 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.”

Circus spoke up then and said, “Maybe it was taken about a year ago when she was a little littler. She’s bigger than that now.”

There were other pictures of different people in the little, clearview windows. Little Jim noticed there were several different sized bills in the bill compartment--in fact, three fives and a ten and several ones, each one of the ones having on it a picture of George Washington, the first President of United States; the fives, a picture of Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth President of the United States, and the tens, one of Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of the United States.

Well, we brought it to a quick vote and the decision was to take the billfold up the path and start looking for the tent, which the man and woman were camping in and ask them if they had lost it.

As we moved along in a sorta half-worried hurry up the path toward the spring, I couldn’t for the life of me think how on earth the barefoot woman could have gotten a picture of my baby sister. What would she want with it, anyway?

Well, maybe in the next fifteen minutes or so I would find out but I was worried a little, ’cause, even as I followed along behind Poetry--all of us having to walk single file on account of the path through the tall weeds was narrow, just wide enough for one barefoot boy at a time--I was remembering that the woman was probably the same person who last night had been digging a hole in the old cemetery under the big pine tree beside Sarah Paddler’s tombstone. What on _earth?_ What had she been digging in the earth for? I wondered.

6

As I told you, it was a terribly hot, sultry day, and over in the southwest sky a great big yellowish, cumulus cloud was building itself up into a thunderhead. I knew from having lived around Sugar Creek for years and years that maybe before the day was over we would find ourselves in the middle of a whopper of a thunderstorm on account of that is the way the southwest part of the sky looks when it is getting ready to pour out about a million gallons of nice, clean rain water all over the farms around Sugar Creek.

Because Charlotte Ann’s picture was in the pretty, brown, four-windowed billfold which Big Jim had zipped shut again, he let me carry it, which I did in the pocket of my overalls, where I also carried a buckeye like some people do who want to keep away the rheumatism. I carried a buckeye only because other people did--I not having any rheumatism to keep away.

Boy, oh boy, it was hot and sultry even in the footpath, which was mostly shaded, on the way to the spring. Pretty soon we came to the spring itself, which as you know is at the bottom of an incline and has an old linden tree leaning out over it and shading it. Pop had made a cement reservoir for the spring water, which was always full of the clearest water you ever saw. The water itself came singing out of an iron pipe, the other end of which Pop had driven away back into the rocky hillside.

“Here’s a woman’s tracks again,” Dragonfly said, looking down at the mud on the west side of the spring. My eyes followed his, expecting to see the print of a woman’s high-heeled shoes. Instead I saw the print of a very small, bare foot with a narrow heel and five small toes, one of the toes being bigger than the rest, which meant that the woman had been still carrying her shoes when she had walked along here on the way back to her tent.

I noticed there was also a closed glass fruit jar in the spring reservoir with what looked like maybe a pound of yellow butter in it like the kind we churned ourselves at our house using an old-fashioned dasher churn, which I nearly always had to churn myself. I was even a better churner than Pop because sometimes Pop would churn for twenty minutes and not get any butter and I could come in and churn for five minutes and it would be done that quick.

Say, that butter in the fruit jar meant that the man and woman were using our spring to get their drinking water and also to keep their butter from getting too soft--like Mom herself does at our house, only we keep ours in a fruit jar or a crock in the cellar instead.

Anyway, I thought, they wouldn’t have to come to our house to get their drinking water out of our iron, pitcher-pump.

From the spring we went up the incline past the elm sapling where Circus always likes to swing, and the linden tree and the friendly, lazy drone of the honeybees getting nectar from the sweet smelling flowers--a linden tree as you know being the same as a basswood, and honeybees have the time of their lives when the clusters of creamy yellow flowers scatter their perfume all up and down the creek.

Going west from the tree, we followed a well-worn path toward the Sugar Creek bridge. Somewhere along that path off to the left we would probably find the tent because Old Man Paddler sometimes lets people camp there for a few nights or a week if they wanted to under one of the spreading beech trees near the pawpaw bushes.

I kept my eyes peeled for the sight of a brown tent, which as soon as we would see it we would go bashfully up to it and ask if anybody had lost a billfold. Then we would have them describe it to us and if it was like the one we had, we would give it to them. While we were there we would get a closer look at the small-footed woman, who had been wearing overalls last night and had been digging in the cemetery. There would probably be an automobile also, since there had been one last night.

But say, we walked clear to the bridge and there wasn’t even a sign of a tent anywhere.

Poetry got an idea then and it was, “Let’s go down to the old sycamore tree and through the cave up to Old Man Paddler’s cabin and ask him. He’ll know where their camp is. They couldn’t camp here anyway without his permission.”

So away we went on across the north road and along the creek till we came to the sycamore tree, which as you know is at the edge of the swamp not far from the cave. Pretty soon we were all standing in front of the cave’s big, wooden door, which Old Man Paddler keeps unlocked when he is at home because the cave is a short-cut to his cabin--the other end of the cave being in the basement of his cabin.

Big Jim seized the white door knob like different ones of us had done hundreds of times. In a jiffy we would be in the cave’s first room and on our way through the long, narrow passage to the cabin itself.

“Hey!” Big Jim exclaimed in a disappointed voice, “It’s locked!”

“What on earth?” I thought, but I remembered that sometimes the old man had the door closed and locked for quite a while when he was going to be away, or when he was on a vacation, or maybe when he was writing something or other and didn’t want any company.

So we turned and went back to the spring again and on up the creek in the other direction to see if we could find the tent we were looking for.

After walking and looking around for maybe ten minutes without finding any tent, we came to another of Circus’ favorite elm saplings near the rail fence, which, if you follow it, leads to Strawberry Hill. On the other side of the fence was Dragonfly’s pop’s pasture where there were nearly always a dozen cows grazing.

It was while we were waiting for Circus to get up the tree and down again that I heard a rumbling noise a little like thunder mixed up with the sound of wind blowing. I looked up quick to the southwest sky expecting to see a rain cloud already formed and the storm itself getting ready to come pouring down upon us. But the big, yellow, cumulus cloud was still where it had been, only it seemed a lot bigger, and some other queer-shaped clouds had come from somewhere to hang themselves up there beside it to keep it company. Those other clouds had probably carried a lot of their own rain water to give to it so it would have enough to give our Sugar Creek farms a “real soaker,” as Mom always called a big rain.

Then I looked over the rail fence into Dragonfly’s pop’s pasture and saw what looked like twenty scared cows racing furiously across the field, their tails up over their backs and also switching fiercely like the cows were terribly excited.

“It’s a _stampede!_” Dragonfly cried excitedly.

Say, those cows acted like they were blind and deaf and dumb and scared out of what few wits a cow has and were all running wildly to get away from something--only I couldn’t see anything for them to run away from.

“I’ll bet it’s a lot of warble flies after them,” I said, remembering quick what Pop and I had been studying that week while we were looking up June beetles.

“What’s a warble fly?” Little Tom Till wanted to know, his folks not having any cows--and they always got the milk they drank at their house from Dragonfly’s folks or mine.

Well, anybody who knows anything about a warble fly knows that it is a noisy, buzzing fly about half as big as a big, black horse-fly and it only lives six days after it is born.

“A warble fly doesn’t have any mouth and can’t sting or bite a cow or anything,” I said, feeling all of a sudden quite proud of myself that I had learned so much about a lot of important things such as flies and beetles and other insects.

“Then why are cows scared of them?” Poetry asked, even he not knowing that.

“They just make a fierce, buzzing sound and dive in and lay their eggs on the hair of the cows and as fast as the cows run the fly flies just that fast and flits in and out laying eggs on them. Then after six days of that kind of life it dies. It probably starves to death,” I said, “not being able to eat.”

“And cows are scared of an innocent egg?” Circus asked, and just then got a little scared himself as did all of us because those twenty milk cows were making a beeline for our fence. “They’re coming for the shade,” I said. “Warble flies don’t like shade.”

And I was right, for a jiffy later in a cloud of whirling dust those twenty cows came to an excited halt under the maple tree just over the fence from us--only they didn’t stay stopped but kept milling around, stamping their forty front feet and switching their twenty tails madly, also doing the same kind of stamping with their forty back feet. It seemed like there were a lot of warble flies and I saw and heard some of them diving in and out under the cows, which kept on switching their tails fiercely and stamping their feet, which meant that if a boy had been there trying to milk one of them, he would have gotten the living daylights kicked out of him and his pail of milk spilled all over the ground or all over his clothes--and his parents would wonder what on earth if they saw him like that.

So not getting any peace, those excited cows, still pestered with the flies, started on another stampede and this time it was towards the bayou and I knew that if they came to the weak place in the rail fence, where we sometimes climbed over, they would make a dive through it and rush into the brush and through the bushes and down the hill and in a jiffy would be in one of the sluggish ends of the bayou in the shade, which flies don’t like. If the cows would stand up to their sides in the shady water, the warble flies would leave them alone on account of warble flies always lay their eggs on the legs and under parts of a cow.

“Hey!” Dragonfly exclaimed excitedly, being as worried as his pop probably would have been. “They’re going straight for the bayou!”

I knew if they did break through that fence and get into the water, they could also wade across and get into the cornfield on the other side and they might eat themselves to death like cows sometimes do.

Dragonfly grabbed up a stick and started out after the cows as fast as his spindling legs could carry him, which wasn’t too fast. Circus who was faster, was already dashing fiercely down the other side of the fence to get to the place which the cows were headed for.

I was running as fast as I could, following the gang--some of the gang following me--when I stepped into a brand new ground-hog den, which I had never seen before, and down I went kerplop onto the ground. I was certainly surprised ’cause there hadn’t been any hole there before. I knew every ground-hog den there was for a mile in every direction from our house.

Then I noticed the hole wasn’t a ground-hog den at all but was another kind of hole. You could tell it hadn’t been dug by any live, heavy-bodied, short-tailed, blunt-nosed, short-haired, short-legged, coarse-haired, grizzly-brown animal with four toes and a stubby thumb on its two front feet and five toes on its two hind feet--which is what a ground-hog is. Besides there wasn’t any ground-hog odor coming out of the hole, which my freckled nose was very close to right that second--and also besides, there were the marks of a shovel and a woman’s high-heeled shoes in the freshly dug soil.

7

I couldn’t let myself stay there on the ground all sprawled out in five different directions wondering what had happened to me, because the gang had already gone and left me, running as fast as they could to catch up with and head off Dragonfly’s pop’s cows to keep them from breaking through the fence into the bayou, so I unscrambled myself, rolled over and up onto my feet and in a jiffy was helping the gang by running and yelling and screaming to the cows to obey us--which they didn’t.

Even as I ran, I was remembering what Pop and I had learned about warble flies--or _heel_ flies, as some folks call them--and I thought what if I was a real cow instead of merely being as awkward as one part of the time? If I had my own brain with what it knew about warble flies, I would have the living daylights scared out of me, my cow-self, on account of even though a warble fly doesn’t have any mouth and never eats any food during the six days of its short life, it does lay eggs all over the legs and lower part of the cow.

When a warble fly egg hatches, which it does in four or five days after it is laid, the thing that hatches out isn’t a fly at all but is a grub, which quick starts to bore its grubby way right through the cow’s skin and into the cow. Once it gets inside, the dumb thing starts on a chewing journey through the inside, making its own path as it goes and making the cow itch like everything, which is maybe why some cows are not as friendly as other cows at certain times of the year. I’ll bet if I were a cow, I wouldn’t be worth a whoop to a farmer or anybody who owned me because I would probably feel the grub and maybe a half-dozen or more of his grubby relatives working their way all through me, some of them stopping like grubs do, right in my throat and staying a while just above where I would be chewing my cud.

During the whole five or six months while a grub is still inside of a cow, it travels all around and finally chews a tunnel along the edges of the cow’s spinal column and at last it stops and makes its home right under the skin of the back. There it chews a small hole all the way through the cowhide so it can breathe, which it does with its tail, getting good fresh country air through the hole, staying there nearly through the winter.

While still there, the grub develops into a wiggling, twisting, squirming warble and finally works its way out through the air hole and tumbles off to the ground, and if it is spring and it doesn’t get eaten up by a cowbird or a grackle or some other bird, it gets hard and black and finally changes into a fly on the inside of itself. Then as quick as it is a fly, it crawls out of itself and makes a dive for the first cow it can find, starting to lay eggs as fast as it can before its six short days of noisy, buzzing fly-life are over.

I was remembering all that as I galloped along after Dragonfly’s pop’s stampeding cows. I was also remembering that in the wintertime in some parts of America, starlings, and even magpies light on the backs of cows and start pecking away on them, trying to dig out the warbles with their sharp bills.

Boy, oh boy, if I was a cow and one or a half-dozen of those very high-voiced, buzzing flies was trying to lay her eggs on me and I knew what would happen if they did, I would most certainly beat it for the shade, which warble flies don’t like. Or if I could, I would find somebody’s bayou or a little stream somewhere, splash myself out into it and stand in the water up to my sides like I had seen cows do all around Sugar Creek for years without knowing before why they did it.

Say, you should have seen Dragonfly’s pop’s cows ignore the few rails on the fence when they got to it. They broke right through without stopping and disappeared in a tail-swishing hurry into the brush. By the time we got to the fence ourselves, those cows were down in the sluggish water of the pond at the east end of the bayou.

Maybe I’d better tell you that Pop says that every year American meat packers throw away enough grubby meat to feed eighty-three thousand people for a whole year--all on account of the crazy warble flies. Also, Pop says, a lot of cows’ hides have holes in them when they are butchered and people lose money that way too on account of that part of the cow is where the leather is generally best--and what good is a piece of leather for making shoes or leather goods if it has a hole in it? So a boy ought never to drive a bunch of cows out of a creek or a pond on a hot summer day, but should let them stay there in the shade if they want to.

Cows don’t give as much milk while they are worrying about noisy, whining flies, either, and beef cattle don’t get fat as fast, it not being easy to get fat if you worry a lot, which is maybe why some people are too thin.

Anyway that is how come we didn’t get to look for the tent of the “turtledove” and the “bobwhite” until quite a while later. It took us almost an hour to get Dragonfly’s pop’s cows out of the bayou, we _having_ to drive them out on account of the cornfield being on the other side, and you can’t trust a cow with a cornfield any more than you can trust a boy or a girl with an open cookie jar.

If one of Dragonfly’s pop’s red heifers hadn’t gotten a stubborn streak and decided she wanted to go on a wild run all through the woods, we might not have found the tent for a long time, but while we were chasing her all around through the bushes and up and down the creek, she accidentally took us right to it.

“It was swell of that old red heifer to show us where the tent is, wasn’t it?” Dragonfly said, after we had finally gotten her and the other cows back in Dragonfly’s pop’s dark cattle-shed away from the flies, and we were back again not more than a hundred yards from the tent itself.

“Maybe the heifer smelled the calf-skin in the folded billfold in Bill’s hip pocket, and it scared her. Maybe she thought Bill wanted to make a lot of billfolds out of her hide,” Little Tom Till said, trying to be funny, and Circus said, “I don’t think heifers think.”

One of the first things we noticed about the camp when we got close to it, was that they had picked one of the very worst camp sites in the whole woods. It was up in the middle of the woods, halfway between our house and the spring, away back off the barefoot boys’ path so that I couldn’t have seen it when I had gone galloping to the spring a couple of hours ago. It was under one of the biggest, widest-spreading oak trees around there anywhere and would have shade all day, which would mean it wouldn’t get a chance to dry out after a damp night, which nights often are in any territory where there is a river or a creek or a lake. It wouldn’t have any morning sun on it, at all, like tents are supposed to have.

Any boy scout knows that nobody should ever pitch a tent under an oak tree on account of the droppings from an oak tree will make the canvas rot quicker and before you know it, you will have little holes scattered all over your roof, which will make it leak like everything when it rains. Also, I noticed, they had pitched the tent so the flap would be open toward the west and anybody who lives at Sugar Creek knows that you shouldn’t have the tent flap on the west side because that is the direction most of our rains come from.

Besides, they would have to go too far to get their drinking and cooking water--clear down to the spring or else in the opposite direction to the Collins family’s iron, pitcher-pump.

“They certainly don’t know very much about camp life,” Big Jim said, he having been a boy scout once and had taught us all these different things about the best kind of camp site to pick.

“It’s a good thing they got a shovel,” Little Tom Till said, seeing one standing against an ironwood tree by their station wagon.

“Why?” Dragonfly said and Little Tom Till answered, like a schoolboy who had studied his lesson and knew it by heart, “Because, where the tent’s pitched now, if it rains, the water will run in from all sides and make a lake out of the floor.”

Well, we brought it to a vote to see which one of us had to go up and knock on the tent pole and ask if anybody had lost a billfold.

It took only a jiffy for me to win the election by a six to one vote-six for me and one against me, my vote being the one that was against. So while the rest of the gang kept itself hidden behind some pawpaw bushes, I stepped out into the open and mosied along like I was only interested in seeing different things in the woods, such as a red squirrel in a tree or some kind of new beetle. Also I was walking carefully so as not to awaken them if they were asleep, especially the one who was supposed to take an afternoon nap.

Say, I forgot to tell you that tent wasn’t any ordinary brown canvas tent, but was green and was a sorta three-way tent, shaped like some of the ranch houses that people were building in our town. I could tell just by looking at the tent that it would be wonderful for a gang of boys to go camping in. One of the wings of the tent was only a canvas roof with the sides made out of some kind of netting to keep out different kinds of flies such as houseflies, deer flies and blowflies. It could even keep out a horse-fly or a warble fly if one wanted to get in, which one probably would if somebody’s cow accidentally strayed into the tent. It would also keep out June beetles at night.

Right away I saw somebody was resting on a cot inside one of the wings and as quick as that I was too bashful to go any closer because I could tell it was the woman herself lying there and she was maybe asleep, and it isn’t polite to wake anybody out of a nap if you know he is taking one.

My heart was beating pretty fast on account of I was a little scared to do what I had been voted to do, but the man must have seen me or else heard all of us because right then he opened the flap of the main part of the tent and came out with the forefinger of one hand up to his lips and the other hand making the kind of motions a person’s hand makes when he wants you to keep still and not say a word.

I noticed that the brownish haired man was about as old as my reddish-haired pop and that he had a magazine in his hand like he had been reading. He also motioned for me to stop where I was, which I did and he kept on coming toward me with his finger still up to his lips and shaking a warning finger with his other hand, which meant, “Sh-h-h--don’t say a word.”

I walked back with him to where the rest of the gang was behind the pawpaw bushes and I noticed that he had a very nice face. Also he looked like an important city person, who might be extra smart and maybe had charge of a big office or maybe a store or something.

“Is there anything I can do for you boys?” he said in a very deep-sounding voice.

Even though he had a half-sad look in his eyes, I could tell he was a kind person and probably liked boys.

I looked at Big Jim and he looked at me and we all looked at different ones of us. Finally the rest of the gang’s twelve eyes focused on my freckled face and red hair so I looked up at the man and said, “Ye-s-s, sir, Mr. Bobwhite--I mean. Yes, sir. We found a billfold up along the creek--”

Little Tom Till cut in then and shouldn’t have, saying, “Little Jim here found it and it’s brown and has some dollar bills in it and three fives and one ten--”

“Sh--!” Big Jim shushed Little Tom Till and the man grinned with a twinkle in his eyes and I saw that the edge of one of his upper incisors had gold on it.

“That’s all right. I can describe it for you,” he said, which he did, giving all the details. “It has a tooled flying horse on the leather on the back and the initials F. E., and the name Frances Everhard in the inside on the identification card. The license number of our car is 7-34567. I was just ready to start looking for it.”

There was something about the man that I liked although there was an expression in his eyes that made it seem like he was a little bit worried. I could tell he was the kind of man that would be kind to his wife or his children’s mother--as Pop is to Mom. He might even be willing to do the dishes for her without being asked if she was extra tired. I noticed he kept looking at Little Jim like he thought he was a very wonderful person.

“So you found it, did you, young man?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” Little Jim piped up in his mouse-like voice.

“Well, I want to thank you. I have a reward for you. If you boys come back later, say in about an hour, my wife will wish to thank you in person. She has some cookies that she bought on purpose for you--just in case you happened to call to see us. She is having her nap now--doctor’s orders are for her to sleep an hour every afternoon, you know.”

We let the man have the billfold, which he took, and without opening it, shoved it into his hip pocket. “Frances will be so thankful. I think she doesn’t know she lost it yet--and maybe we won’t tell her, eh?”

We promised we wouldn’t and he started to walk backwards a little, which meant he was through visiting and we could go on home or somewhere.

“Wait,” Mr. Everhard said and stopped as also did we because we had also started to start in our own direction. “How would one of you boys like to earn a quarter every day by bringing our drinking water from the spring--or from up there at the Collins family house? One of you the Collins boy?”

I could feel myself blushing all over my freckled face, clear up to the roots of my red hair and I started to say, “Yes,” but Dragonfly beat me to it by saying, “_He_ is,”--jerking his thumb in my direction.

The man went on to explain, “This isn’t the best place to pitch a tent--so far from a water supply--but somebody told us the spring was your gang’s meeting place so we decided to let you have your own privacy.”

Big Jim was pretty smart, I thought, when he spoke up politely, saying, “That was very thoughtful of you.” Then he added with a Big Jim grin, “You’ll probably have more privacy yourself up here away from the noisy spring,”--meaning us. Then he added, “Sure, we will be glad to bring your drinking water every day, won’t we, Bill?”

“Sure,” I said to Big Jim. “I’ll even help you carry it.”

He was almost halfway back to his tent when he stopped and hurried back to us again. “Mr. Paddler has given us permission to dig a few holes around here in the woods,” he said, “so don’t be too surprised if you find a new one every now and then.”

I started to say, “What are you digging them for,” but didn’t ’cause Big Jim scowled and shook his head at me.

A little later at the spring itself we stopped for a drink and Circus said, “Old Man Paddler doesn’t own the _cemetery_. Who would give them permission to dig out there in the cemetery at night--and why would they want to do it?”

“Maybe they’re studying different kinds of soil. Maybe they have a lot of glass jars full of different kinds of dirt in the tent or in the station wagon,” Poetry suggested.

“They wouldn’t need to dig such deep holes just to get soil samples,” Big Jim said and I noticed he had a little bit of a worried look on his face.

Poetry had another idea and it was, “How are we going to spend our quarter every day--the one Bill is going to earn for us?”--which wasn’t funny.

Our mystery wasn’t any nearer solved than it had been. One reason why I felt quite disappointed was because I was sorta hoping that whoever had been digging in the cemetery the night before was what the police and detectives call a _ghoul_, which is a person who robs graves, and I was hoping that if it was such a person, maybe the gang could have a chance to help capture him or her.

Well, we had done all we could that afternoon although I was still wondering about the bobwhite whistle and the turtledove call. We talked that over while we were still at the spring and decided that maybe it was the way the man and his wife had of calling to each other--a sort of code or something--like we ourselves had. Whenever he wanted to call her, he could use the quail call and she could answer it by cooing like a turtledove. If that was the meaning of it, it was kinda nice and it showed that even married people could have fun together like my own mom and pop do a lot of times, in fact almost every day.

8

At the supper table at our house that night I think I had never heard Mom and Pop laugh so hard as they did. I was still thinking about the warble flies that had scared the living daylights out of Dragonfly’s pop’s cows, I having told them all about it, crowding my words out between bites, and I was sorta crowding the bites in too fast and shouldn’t have, when Pop said, “The heel flies are pretty bad this year. Nearly every farmer in Sugar Creek has been complaining about them. They have been tormenting Old Brindle something fierce today. I don’t dare turn her out into the pasture without leaving the gate into the barnyard open so she can come rushing back in for the protection of the shade anytime she wants to.”

“Speaking of cows,” Mom said, and her voice sorta lit up like her face does when she has thought of something very interesting or funny. “I read something in a farm magazine today that was about the funniest thing I ever read in my life.”

“What was it?” Pop said.

“Yes, what was it?” I said.

Pop and Mom were always reading things in magazines and telling them to each other and I didn’t always get in on their jokes. Sometimes I had to ask them what they were laughing about and it didn’t always seem as funny to me as it did to them. They also talk to each other about things that are not funny--things they have just that day learned about something in the Bible or something they have studied for next Sunday’s Sunday School lesson.

“I’ll get it and read it for you,” Mom said. She excused herself, left the table, went into the other room and came back with a small magazine. “It’s a ten-year-old school girl’s essay on a cow,” Mom said.

Even before she started reading it I wasn’t sure I was going to like it because I am kinda close to being a ten-year-old boy myself and I could imagine what a ten-year-old girl would write on a cow.

Pop cleared his throat like he was going to read himself or else so he would be ready to laugh when the time came, and Mom started reading while Charlotte Ann wiggled and twisted on her highchair, she not being interested in anybody’s essay on a cow. All Charlotte Ann was interested in about cows was the milk she had to drink three times a day and didn’t always want to, so a story about a cow wouldn’t be funny to her.

Even as I looked at Charlotte Ann I was remembering that there were plenty of unsolved things about our mystery. There was the picture of Charlotte Ann in the billfold; the strange-acting woman who had dug holes in a graveyard at night and had permission to dig them all over the Sugar Creek territory, who had to rest every afternoon, and who went barefoot and waded in the riffles all by herself--stuff like that. Why had she had the picture of Charlotte Ann in her lost and found billfold? I knew that the very second Mom got through reading and she and Pop got through laughing that I would ask her about the picture of Charlotte Ann.

Well, this is what Mom read, she not getting to read more than a few lines before Pop interrupted her and the two of them started laughing. Pop stopped her maybe a half-dozen times before she finished and they laughed and laughed and kept on laughing and Mom wiped her tears and held her kinda half-fat sides and Pop held his ordinary ones and I grinned and scowled. This is it:

“The cow is a mammal. It has six sides--right, left, up and
below, inside and outside. At the back is a tail on which hangs a
brush. With this it sends the flies away so they don’t fall into
the milk. The head is for the purpose of growing horns and so the
mouth can be somewhere. The horns are to butt with and the mouth
is to moo with. Under the cow, hangs the milk. It is arranged for
milking. When people milk, the milk comes and there is never an
end to the supply. How the cow does it I have never realized,
but it makes more and more. The cow has a fine sense of smell,
one can smell it far away. This is the reason for the fresh air
in the country.”

Well, that simply doubled up my Mom and Pop in laughter and even Charlotte Ann pounded with her spoon on her ordinary wooden food tray, which I used to pound on years and years ago--the same spoon I had probably pounded with--and she acted like she was having the time of her life.

“What’s the matter, Bill? Isn’t it funny?”

“Not very,” I said. “Anybody who is ten years old ought to know more about cows than that.”

Right away Pop was ready to defend the girl, saying, “She was probably a city girl, who didn’t have any _brothers_,” which also wasn’t very funny.

“Say, Mom,” I said to Mom, “have you had any new pictures taken of Charlotte Ann lately?”

“Why, no. Why do you ask?”

“You sure you haven’t had one taken of her sitting in that fancy highchair in the Sugar Creek Furniture Store?”

“Why, no. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, I just wondered,”--I having made up my mind not to tell her any more.

As soon as supper was over, I started to do the dishes without being asked to, for a change, almost enjoying it on account of I was learning to enjoy doing things for Mom when she was tired. In fact, it makes me feel fine inside--almost as good as I feel when I am eating a piece of ripe watermelon--to do the dishes while she rests, on account of she is a pretty swell mom.

Pop was in the other room with Mom, talking to her while she rested--Mom actually lying down while she was doing it, she being that tired.

“The most friendly couple is camping down in the woods,” I heard Mom say. “They were here this afternoon a little while. She’s the prettiest thing I think I ever saw--kinda fancy though, and was wearing high-heeled shoes--not at all the kind an experienced camper or hiker would wear. They wanted a pail of well-water and I sold them a pound of Old Brindle’s butter, which they are going to keep cool in the spring.”

Hearing Mom say that, I sidled over to the kitchen door with her apron on and with the drying towel in my hands and listened to what else she was saying. I got there too late to get all of it, but part of it was, “She’s just out of the hospital, he told me. She doesn’t look like there’s a thing in the world wrong with her, but her husband--their name is Everhard--says she is under special treatment and she has been released to him. She’s not at all dangerous, but she gets depressed at times, and sometimes right in the middle of the night she gets one of her spells.”

I heard Pop sigh and say, “Being out here in the country with plenty of fresh air and good country food with an understanding husband like that will be good for her. I wonder how long she has been that way.”

And Mom said, “He told me confidentially when she was out in the car that it started about a year ago. She’s all right when she’s all right, but these spells come on and she cries--but she never does anything desperate--only wants to go around digging holes in the ground....”

That was as much as I got to hear right then ’cause the phone rang and when Pop answered, it was Little Jim’s mom, the pianist at the Sugar Creek Church, wanting to talk to Mom about something or other.

Mom was always tickled when it was Little Jim’s mom calling ’cause Little Jim’s mom was her almost best friend and sometimes they talked and talked until one of them had to quit ’cause she smelled something burning on the stove.

Well, I, the maid of the Collins family, went back to the kitchen to slosh my hands around a little longer in the hot sudsy water. Seeing our battery radio on the utility table and wondering what program was on, I wrung the water out of my right hand and turned on the radio, dialing to a station that sometimes had on a story for boys at that time of day. I tuned in just in time to hear the deep-voiced announcer in a terribly excited hurry say something about “those red, dish-pan hands” and then he galloped on to tell all the women listeners to be sure to use a certain kind of fancy-named soap or something that would make their hands soft and pretty almost right away. The soap was also good for washing dishes.

Pop had to come through the kitchen on his way to the barn, so he stopped and listened a jiffy with me. Then he said, “You using the right kind of soap, Son?” and I answered, “I don’t know. I hope so, but I’m afraid I _am_ getting ‘dish-pan hands.’ Look at ’em!” I held my hands out for him to look at and he said with a mischievous grin in his voice, “Looks like you got dish-pan hair too.” Then he turned the radio down a little saying, “Your mother is resting so keep it low.”

“She’s talking on the phone,” I said.

“It’s the same thing. You will find out she will be all full of pep when she gets through,”--which I knew might be the truth because Mom nearly always felt fine when she finished listening and talking to Little Jim’s mom, who was always cheerful on the telephone.

“She smiles with her voice,” Mom always says about Little Jim’s mom.

Pop went on out to the barn with the milk pail to see if the warble flies had tormented Old Brindle so much that day that she didn’t have time to manufacture as much milk as usual and I went on back to my kinda half-cold dishwater.

I was just finishing washing the last dish and was getting ready to start wiping them when Mom finished talking and listening to Little Jim’s mom. But say, when she came in she was still tired. She kinda sighed as she lifted the steaming tea-kettle and poured water over the dishes so she could dry them easier.