Chapter III: Part 3

It was too dark there in the shadow of the big cedar tree that grows close to Dragonfly’s side door, for Pop to see me frown, but I decided to look up the word “unpredictable” in our dictionary as soon as I got a chance, just to see what kind of things I did once in awhile, hoping they weren’t as bad as such a long word made them sound.

“It’s my fault, he got his pajamas all wet,” I thought it was safe to say to Dragonfly’s worried mother. Then I told her a little about the girls at the spring and how they probably thought Dragonfly was me. I _didn’t_ tell her I thought maybe her innocent son was mixed up in our watermelon mystery, or she might have had insomnia that night even worse than another pajama-dressed boy’s mother.

From Dragonfly’s house we drove back toward ours, turned into the lane that goes down the south side of our farm and stopped at the place in the fence where the elderberry bushes were, the very same place where not more than two hours ago the noisy oldish car had been parked.

Say, when Pop’s flashlight showed him the hole in the fence under the elderberry bushes, he was as angry as I have ever seen him get. He just stood there at the side of our car, with the moonlight shining on his stern face, his jaw muscles working, and I knew every other muscle in his body was tense.

“It’s hard to believe anybody would be _that_ mean,” he said.

“Bob Till is mean enough to do anything,” I answered, but Mom stopped me before I could say another word. “You’re _not_ to say that!” she ordered me. “We’re going to give that boy a chance. We’re NOT going to believe he did this, until we have proof.”

“How much more proof do you want?” I asked. “We saw his car parked here; we saw the watermelon being dragged in the gunny sack along the fence right over there on the other side, and actually saw it being dragged through this hole and hoisted into the car and we saw him drive away--Poetry and I both did.”

“Did you count your melons?” Mom asked. “Were there any missing?”

“Were there any--?” I stopped. I didn’t even know how _many_ melons we had. I’d never bothered to count them. Those smaller melons hadn’t seemed as important to me as Ida had, on account of they had grown from ordinary watermelon seed, and not from the packet of special seed from the State Experiment Station.

The only way I could know for sure if any were taken would be to look all over the patch to see if there were any oblong indentations in the ground where a melon _had_ been. “All right,” I said, “I’ll find out right now. I _know_ there was a watermelon in that gunny sack. I felt it with my own hands, and it was long and round and hard.”

Pop let me have his flashlight, and I crawled through the fence and started looking around all over the truck patch to see if there were any melons missing, making a beeline first straight for Ida’s vine to be sure she was there and all right.

Poetry wanted to go with me but he couldn’t get through the small hole in the fence. “At least that proves _he_ didn’t do it,” Pop said grimly, and Poetry answered, “If I’d been cutting a hole in a nice new fence, I’d have made it large enough for a man my size to get through”--trying to be funny even at a time like that!

In only a few barefoot jiffies, I was standing beside the circular trough in which Ida’s vine was growing, and my flashlight was making a circular arc all around the place while my eyes were looking for Ida herself.

And then, all of a sudden, I felt myself get hot inside, as I heard at the same time my excited, angry voice almost _screaming_ back across the moonlit truck patch to Mom and Pop and Charlotte Ann and Poetry, “She’s _gone!_ _Somebody’s sneaked in while we were away and stolen her!_”

There in front of my tear-blurred eyes was a long, smooth indentation in the ground where for the last eighty-five days--which is how long it takes to mature a melon--Ida Watermelon Collins had made her home. I was all mixed up with temper and sobs and doubled-up fists, and ready to explode.

Ida was gone! Ida had been stolen! _My prize watermelon!_ The mother of my next year’s watermelon children, and the _grand_mother of my year-after-next’s watermelon _grand_children--and my college education!

I tell you there were a lot of what Pop called “stormy emotions” whirling around in our minds when, a little later, the five of us got back into the car and drove on down the lane in the direction of the Sugar Creek schoolhouse, to find a place in the road large enough to turn around in.

We talked a lot, and tried to make plans, Poetry and I especially in the back seat. I simply couldn’t understand my parents’ attitude. There was Pop’s fence with an ugly hole in it, and Ida was missing, and yet he was very calm and very set in his mind about what NOT to do. “Like your mother says, Bill, we don’t know that Bob did it. It won’t cost much to repair the fence--and next year, we’ll raise another melon that’ll be even bigger and better.”

I stormed awhile there in the back seat until I got strict orders from both my parents to calm down--Mom making it easier for me to by adding as we pulled up to Theodore Collins on our mailbox, “We’re Christians. We don’t take revenge on people. We’re going to commit this thing to the Lord and see what good He will bring out of it?”

It was quite awhile before things were quiet around the Collins’ farm, that night, with Pop and Mom and Charlotte Ann in the house, and Poetry and I in our hot cots in the tent under the plum tree.

Tomorrow, when the Gang got together at the Little-Jim tree, we’d decide what to do--only it seemed like Mom’s attitude was going to be like a lasso on a rodeo steer to keep me from doing what I really wanted to do, which was to hunt up Bob Till himself and face him with the question of what he had done with my watermelon.

“Listen,” all of a sudden I hissed to Poetry in his cot, and before he could answer, I went on, “If we can find out what happened to the melon, maybe we can still get the seed from it. Anybody he sold it to wouldn’t eat the _seeds_.”

At breakfast table next morning, Pop’s prayer was a little longer than usual, and seemed sort of meant for me to hear. Right in the middle of it, while Charlotte Ann, in the crook of Mom’s arm, was wriggling and squirming and reaching both hands and half-fussing to get started eating, Pop said, “... and bless with a very special blessing those who have sinned against themselves and against Thee by breaking the commandment ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ Help us to love them and to show them by our lives that the Christian life is the only truly satisfying life. Keep us under Thy control ...”

That last request bothered me a little on account of it seemed like I wanted to be under my own control all day, and that if I was going to be under Anybody Else’s control I might not get to help teach Bob Till or whoever-it-was had cut the hole in Pop’s new fence and stolen that watermelon, a good-old-fashioned lesson by giving him a licking.

Mom’s buckwheat pancakes were the best Poetry had ever tasted, he told her--which was probably his excuse for tasting so many of them. He certainly knew how to make Mom’s eyes twinkle, Mom liking boys so well. In fact all the boys of the Sugar Creek Gang liked Mom so well they stopped at our house every chance they got just to make her eyes twinkle while they ate some of her cookies or a piece of one of her pies.

Mom surprised us all, right then, by saying, “Last night while I couldn’t sleep for a while, I got to thinking about whoever took your melon and cut the hole in the fence, and it seemed the Lord wanted me to pray for him or them. I feel so sorry for boys who do things like that.” Mom sighed heavily and I noticed her eyes had a faraway expression in them. Just looking at her, made me think it would be pretty hard for me to be a bad boy as long as I had such a wonderful mother.

After breakfast and before we left the table we passed around what we call the “Bread Box,” which is a small box of cards, each one about two inches long with a Bible verse printed on it and, say! Do you know what? Just like it had been when Pop had prayed, I felt like a frisky young steer that has just been lassoed, on account of the card I picked out of the box when it was passed to me, had on it, “Love your enemies; do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you.”

When I got through reading my verse aloud like we all do every time, I looked across the table toward Pop, and his grey-green eyes were looking straight into mine. He had a half grin on his face when he said, just as if there wasn’t anybody else in the room, “_Your_ watermelon, and _my_ fence!” I could tell by the expression in his voice that he had been lassoed too!

Poetry and I managed to get through the morning all right, but it was hard to wait until two o’clock in the afternoon. We did quite a little work around the place, though, such as helping Mom with the dishes, helping Pop with the chores and running a few errands for each of them. Once we stopped in the middle of the barnyard, while I pointed out to Poetry the boss hen of our whole flock--the one Pop has named Cleopatra. Cleopatra is a very proud, high-combed, very pretty White Leghorn who, like all boss hens in a hen flock, could peck all the other hens any time she wanted to but not a one of them ever dared to peck her back. She had already proved to them who was boss by giving every one of them a licking one at a time.

“We’ve got a boss hen, too,” Poetry told me as we stood watching Cleopatra proudly lifting her yellow feet and strutting around to show how important she was.

“We have a _second_ boss, too; she pecks every other hen except the boss hen, and Cleopatra is the only one that can peck her,” I said to Poetry, which anybody who knows anything about what Pop calls the “social life of a flock of hens” knows is the way they live and get along with each other. At the very bottom of the social ladder in the Collins’ chicken yard is a bedraggled-looking hen Mom has named Marybelle Elizabeth. She gets pecked by every other hen in the barnyard and can never peck _any_ of them back.

We liked Marybelle Elizabeth, though. She was one of the best laying hens we had, even though in a fight she wasn’t any good at defending herself, and always ate her lunch alone when all the others were through.

I was standing beside Poetry near our garden fence watching Marybelle as she foraged around by herself like she didn’t have a friend in the world. I was feeling very sorry for her and thinking how lonely a life she had to live--how she had to take all the unfair things the other hens did to her and couldn’t ever fight back.

Poetry moseyed on toward the house then and I kept on standing not more than fifteen feet from Marybelle. “Here, Marybelle,” I comforted her, “don’t you feel too bad. I live a kind of henpecked life myself.” Taking a handful of corn from my pocket, I tossed it to her. She lifted her head high, twisted her neck in every direction like she wondered how come anybody wanted to be kind to her, then started in gobbling up the grains of corn as fast as she could.

“Atta girl,” I said to her. “Go _to_ it!”

Pretty soon, Mom called us that dinner was ready and pretty soon after dinner--and after Poetry and I had offered to help Mom with the dishes and she had surprised us by letting us--it was time for the Gang to meet under the Little-Jim tree.

It was one of the nicest dog days days I ever saw, with the heat waves dancing above the fields, short-horned grasshoppers springing up along the sunny path as Poetry and I moseyed along, not wanting to run and get hot on such a hot day. I felt kind of sad because of the watermelon and also on account of our boys’ world had been invaded by a flock of girl campers. Girls in our woods would be a lasso on a boy’s fun. He couldn’t go racing wildly among the trees playing leapfrog and yelling and whooping it up like a wild Indian on account of he would be afraid they would think he was a wild Indian.

As I was saying, the short-horned grasshoppers were springing up all along the path, making their funny little rattling sounds during the short time they were in the air, the rattling stopping the very second they landed which they generally did only a few yards from where they took off. Butterflies of a half-dozen families were tossing themselves about in the air above the wild rose bushes and here and there and everywhere in the yellow afternoon.

“Hey, look!” Poetry exclaimed. “There goes a milkweed butterfly! I’ve got to have him for my collection!”--and he started to start on a fast run after him, but I stopped him with “_Quiet! The girls will hear you!_”

He stopped stock-still and scowled and the beautiful Monarch butterfly swung proudly away in the air, starting to stop every now and then and not doing it, but lifting itself on the breeze and floating away to another place.

It wouldn’t be long until fall now, I thought, when all the Monarchs in the Sugar Creek territory would gather themselves into flocks like blackbirds and crows do, and before winter they would migrate to the South, flying all the way down to the bottom of the United States and even into Mexico or South America. Then next spring they would be back at Sugar Creek to lay their eggs on the milkweeds which grow in the fence rows or wherever a farmer doesn’t cut them down.

The larva that hatches from the milkweed or Monarch butterflies is one of the prettiest a boy ever sees, being a long greenish-yellow caterpillar with crow-black rings around it all along its body from its head to its tail--only it is hard to tell which end is its head on account of it has two short black horns on each end of itself.

You can see a greenish-yellow-and-black Monarch larva hanging from a milkweed leaf most any time in the late summer, if you stop and look close enough.

Dragonfly was the only one of the Gang who didn’t come to our meeting that day, and Poetry and I thought we knew why.

We all plumped ourselves down on the grass under the Little-Jim tree and relaxed awhile, each of us lying in a different direction like we nearly always do. Big Jim looked around at the rest of us, letting his stern eyes stop on each of our faces for a flash of a second--Poetry’s fat mischievous face, Little Jim’s mouselike innocent face, Circus’s monkey-shaped face, and my freckle-faced face.

Big Jim’s own face was more sober than it is sometimes and I noticed his almost mustache on his upper lip was _really_ almost now. If it should keep on growing as fast as it had the last two or three years, pretty soon, he would actually have to start shaving. For a second my mind wandered a little and I was thinking if Big Jim should ever need a razor strap I would very gladly offer him Pop’s discarded one which Pop hardly ever used anymore except for some unnecessary reason. There really wasn’t any sense in having a piece of leather like that lying around our house cluttering up the place and giving a boy’s father the kind of ideas it’s not good for a son for his father to have.

“Anybody know where Dragonfly is?” Big Jim asked.

And Poetry answered, saying, “He had asthma last night; maybe his mother wouldn’t let him come today.”

Big Jim’s stern face probably meant he was remembering his resolution not to fight Bob Till any more, unless he was forced to in self-defense. Of course, if Bob himself started a fight we’d have to defend ourselves.

I got an idea then, and it was, “Bob Till has already started a fight by stealing our watermelons last night. That’s the same as whamming me in the stomach--on account of that’s where the watermelons would have been if I had eaten them. And since he’s already _started_ the fight, I’ve got a right to defend myself, haven’t I?”

“It’s not the same,” Big Jim said grimly, his jaw muscles still working. His fists were doubled up though, I noticed, and I could see he didn’t like the lasso with which he had lassoed himself.

Little Jim spoke up then and said, “How’d we feel in Sunday school tomorrow if Bob came in with a black eye and a smashed nose?”

Right then as I looked into that cute little guy’s cute little mouse-shaped face and saw how innocent he was, and realized he was so tender-hearted he’d even hate to swat a fly and wouldn’t if he didn’t think the fly needed to be swatted--I say, right then was when I noticed for the first time the rectangular manila envelope Little Jim had brought with him. It looked about five inches wide and nine inches long, and had something in it. I couldn’t tell what it was and didn’t get to find out until later in the afternoon.

Little Jim’s question, “How’d we feel in Sunday school tomorrow morning if Bob came in with a black eye and a smashed nose?” took some of the fight out of me, ’cause I knew Bob _had_ to be in church tomorrow--that being one of the things the judge who had put him on probation had said he had to do--he had to go to Sunday school and church at least once every Sunday for a whole year.

I spoke up then with a half-mischievous voice saying, “The judge told him he had to go every Sunday unless he is sick and unable to. He might _not_ be able to if--”

“Stop!” Big Jim cut in. “The thing is not funny!”

Not a one of us said a word for a second. Then Big Jim told us in a serious voice, “We can’t let Bob break his parole. If he does he’ll have to go to Reform School for from one to ten years, and we wouldn’t want that.”

“Hasn’t he already broken it, by stealing my watermelons?” I asked.

Again Big Jim cut in on me almost savagely, “You don’t know that. It could have been somebody else.”

“It was _his_ car,” I countered. “I’d know it anywhere.”

Just thinking about that burlap bag with the stolen watermelon in it and Ida herself being gone, stirred me all up inside again, and I was in a whirlwind of a mood to do something about it. I thought about poor old Marybelle Elizabeth out by our garden fence all alone at the very bottom of our chicken yard’s social ladder, and how she had to take all the pecks of all the other hens and didn’t dare fight back. I felt sorry for her having to live such a henpecked life, ’cause right that minute if I had been her, I’d have felt in a mood to start in licking the feathers off every other hen in the whole Sugar Creek territory.

But we couldn’t just lie around and talk all afternoon, and _do_ nothing. _Nothing_ is something a boy can do for only a few minutes at a time, anyway.

“Let’s go swimming,” Little Jim suggested.

“Can’t,” I said crossly. “We don’t have our bathing suits.”

“_Bathing suits!_” Circus exclaimed. “Who ever heard of the Sugar Creek Gang using bathing suits in our own swimming hole!”

Nobody ever had, on account of our swimming hole was quite a ways up the creek and was well protected on both sides by bushes and shrubbery, and nobody lived anywhere near the place.

“There are guests in our woods,” Big Jim said. And my sad heart told me he was right. We _couldn’t_ go swimming.

“Girls!” Poetry grunted grouchily and got shushed by Big Jim who asked, “They’re human beings, aren’t they?”

“Are they?” Poetry asked with an innocent voice.

Big Jim sighed, looked around at all of us again and said, “Little Jim here has something he has to do this afternoon and it might be pretty dangerous. He might need our help. You guys want to go along with him and me?”

“I,” I said, “am going to do something dangerous myself before the afternoon is over--but I don’t suppose any of you would care to go with me. You don’t care whether my prize watermelon was stolen or not. But _I_ do, and I’m going to do something about it!” My own words sounded hot in my ears and made me a little braver than I had been--reminded me of Marybelle Elizabeth at the bottom of our chickenyard’s social ladder, living a henpecked life and not daring to fight back at all at any time.

“What you goin’ to do?” Circus asked. “I’m willing to go along and help save your life if you need any help.”

“Yeah, what _are_ you going to do?” Poetry asked me, and I answered: “First, I’m going down to the spring to see if Ida is there. If she’s not, I’m going down to the bridge, and across it, and straight to Bob Till’s house and ask him straight out if he knows anything about a watermelon thief.”

I caught Big Jim’s and Little Jim’s eyes meeting and thought I saw some kind of message pass between them.

“You guys don’t have to go along if you don’t want to,” I said, beginning to feel a little less brave, now that it seemed like I was doing more than just talking, but was actually going to do what I said I was going to do.

“We can’t let you be killed,” Circus said. “Maybe we _all_ ought to go along!”

Pretty soon we were on our way--to the spring first, of course. As we moved grimly along, I noticed my teeth were clenched, my lips were pressed together in a straight line, my eyebrows were down. I was remembering last night’s ridiculous ride on the melon in the spring reservoir, the screaming girls, and especially what had happened in our truck patch near the elderberry bushes. But right in the front of my mind’s eye was the oblong indentation in the sandy loam where Ida Watermelon Collins had spent all the eighty-five days of her life from a tiny quarter of an inch long green baby to the huge, dark green watermelon she now was if she was. Where, I asked myself, was Ida now?

Maybe she was in the spring reservoir. Maybe whoever stole her had sold her to the girl scouts. When we got there, would we run into a flock of perfumed guests, and would they recognize a zebra who had changed his color and shape since last night?

* * * * *

Well, we didn’t find any girls there, and we didn’t find any watermelon either. All there was in the big cement pool was a glass fruit jar filled with butter, a half dozen cartons of milk and there were girls’ shoe tracks all around the place.

There weren’t any boys’ tracks--not even barefoot ones.

Big Jim wanted to look around where the boat had been moored, so we all gathered in a huddle by the maple tree, keeping as quiet as we could so if anyone did come to the spring we wouldn’t be seen or heard.

For a jiffy, Little Jim slipped out of our huddle and began nosing around over by the board fence where last night Poetry and I had crawled through in such a fast hurry.

“Hey, everybody!” all of a sudden Little Jim’s excited, mouse-like voice squeaked to us. “Look what I found! A note of some kind!”

I looked quick in his direction and he was holding up a piece of paper. I remembered then that that was the exact place where Poetry and I had been when we had unfolded the oiled paper which said on it:

“Eat more Eatmore.”

Poetry’s and my eyes met and we grunted to each other. “That’s only an old bread wrapper. We threw it away last night,” I said to Little Jim.

“You shouldn’t have,” Little Jim answered, and came loping over to where we were, with the happiest grin on his face you ever saw. He held the oiled paper out to us. “Look! There’s a note in it. See!” he cried.

You could have knocked me over with a watermelon seed, I was so astonished. The oiled paper said, “Eat more Eatmore,” all right, but as plain as day there was something sealed in between two layers of the wrapping paper. The thought hit my mind with a thud--there was something _very_ important in that paper!

“Let’s get out of here quick,” Big Jim said. Taking the paper and ordering: “Follow me!” he started on a fast run up the path which led through the forest of giant ragweed toward the old swimming hole.

Zippety-zip-zip, plop-plop-plop, my bare feet went in the cool damp winding path through the ragweed following along with the rest of the Gang.

The minute we reached the place where we had had so many happy times each summer, we heard voices from up the creek.

“Girls!” Circus exclaimed disgustedly. “Let’s get out of here!”

I looked in the direction the sounds came from and saw a boat with three or four girls in it. In less than a firefly’s fleeting flash, we were up and gone, scooting through the rows of tall corn headed for the east end of the bayou.

“We’ll have our meeting in the graveyard,” Big Jim said. “They’ll be afraid to come there.”

7

In almost less time than it has taken me to write these few paragraphs, we were in the cemetery at the top of Bumblebee Hill, and sprawled out on the grass near Sarah Paddler’s tombstone--the one that has the carved hand on it with the forefinger pointing toward the sky and the words that say, “There is rest in heaven.”

Every time we had a meeting there, I would read those words, and look at the other tombstone exactly the same size, which had on it Old Man Paddler’s name and the date the old man was born, with a blank place after it, meaning he was still alive--and nobody would put on the date of his death until after his funeral. Also I would always remember that that kind old long-whiskered old man was an honest-to-goodness Christian who loved the heavenly Father and His only begotten Son. He trusted in the Saviour for the forgiveness of his sins, so I was sure that when he _did_ die his soul would go sailing out across the Sugar Creek sky to heaven itself where his wife Sarah and his two boys already were--and the whole family would be together again.

That old cemetery was certainly an interesting place and was very pretty. I hoped that nobody would ever try to make it look like the well-kept other cemeteries around the country. It’d be nice if people would let the wild rosebushes and the chokecherries and the sumac and the elderberries and the wild grapevines keep on growing there. Of course, it would be all right to keep the weeds away from the different markers and to keep the grass cut, but I liked the little brown paths that wound around from one to the other--and it always seemed like God was there in a special way.

You get a kind of saddish happy feeling in your heart when you think about Him, when all your sins are forgiven and you and your parents like each other. It seems as if maybe He likes boys especially well, on account of He made such a pretty boys’ world for them to live in.

There was purple vervain all over the place and tall mullein stalks--and already the sumac was turning red. I hadn’t any more than thought all these things than from behind the sumac on the other side of Sarah Paddler’s tall tombstone I heard a long-tailed sneeze and knew Dragonfly was there. A jiffy later he came pouting into the little circular open place we were in, saying, “How come you didn’t wait for me?”

He looked a little guilty, I thought, as, panting and wheezing a little, he plumped himself down on the ground between Poetry and me.

Everything was so quiet for a minute that he must have guessed we had been talking about him. “Are the--are the girls still camping up in the woods?” he asked--and I knew he was remembering last night’s dunking in the spring and also probably never would forget it.

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, ’cause it felt good to get all that suspicion out of my mind, and to have him with us again.

We all crowded around Big Jim to see what was between the layers of the bread wrapper. “It’s a map!” Little Jim exclaimed in his squeaky voice, and it was--a crude drawing made with indelible pencil. That was the first thing I noticed, that it had been made with indelible 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 with the names of important places on it--names that only anybody living in our neighborhood would know about; a few that 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 left-hand 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.

Boy oh boy, it was like a story book! That was the second map of the territory we had found--the first one, as you already know, had been hidden in the old hollow sycamore tree, and that map had been the very center of the very first mystery we had ever had--but I told you all about that in the very first story there ever was about the Sugar Creek Gang, and it’s in a book by that name.

Big Jim must have been thinking the same thoughts I was, ’cause 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 at us one interrogatory sentence after another. The first one was, “Who among us has an indelible 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 fat 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, saying, “Look, all of you! There’s only one other person--or rather 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. He wasn’t exactly a member of our Gang but we all felt he belonged to us anyway. He hadn’t been meeting with the Gang lately, though, because his brother didn’t want him to, and Tom was very much afraid of his big brother’s big fists.

“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.”

And _that_ is what we decided to do, only 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, moved down the slope of Bumblebee Hill, walking right through the place where the famous battle of Bumblebee Hill had been fought and where Little Tom Till had fired the fist heard round the world. That fist had landed ker-smash right on my nose. I stopped for a minute, right in the middle of the battleground and looked around, trying to remember the exact spot where two red-haired, freckle-faced, fiery-tempered boys, who looked very much alike, most of the time, had had such an exciting time getting acquainted.

I was glad that Tom was my friend now--or was he? If he had drawn the map and stuffed it into the watermelon, then _he_ must be mixed up in our mystery in some way.

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, having to pass not more than forty yards from the pawpaw 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, ’cause he certainly wasn’t close enough to their camp to smell them.

“Girls aren’t anything to be sneezed at,” Poetry was smart enough to think of 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 in a fast jiffy 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, “Look! There’s the boat I bet they used last night!”

I looked downstream in the direction Little Jim was pointing and saw the red stern of a rowboat half hidden under the low-hanging branches of a willow.

A thousand shivers started racing up and down my spine when I realized that our mystery was coming to even more life than it had come to last night when we had seen the boat stopping at the spring.

At that very same instant I saw, back on the shore, half-hidden among the trees, the forest-green roof of a wall-type tent. What on earth? I thought. Not only were there a flock of girls camping near the pawpaw bushes in the woods above the bridge, but here on the other side of the creek and _below_ the bridge was somebody else camping! I was remembering last night and the mysterious something-or-other I had seen somebody carry to the spring from the boat. This very same boat, maybe!

Poetry beside me remarked, “There’s where the woman lives--the one that was smoking the cigarette last night.”

“There’s where the _man_ lives, you mean,” I disagreed.

Beside the tent was a gun-metal gray pickup truck that looked like it was maybe ten or fifteen years old. At almost the same instant, there was the sound of a motor coming to roaring life, and right away the truck was moving. It went backwards first, then swung left and began bumping along in 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 jiffies, we were all down the embankment and crouching on a narrow strip of shore underneath the north end of the bridge, getting there just in time on account of in a few fast minutes we heard the truck’s wheels on the board floor above us. And _that was that!_

As soon as the car 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 a narrow footpath which 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.

While 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 which belonged to everybody anyway, past the place where the boat was moored.

A second later we were there, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but out in the middle of the boat a gunny sack--an actual, honest-to-goodness gunny sack--and it had in it something fat and long and--.

“Hey,” I said to Poetry and to all of us, “look! There’s another watermelon! In a gunny sack!”

“You’re crazy,” Poetry answered. “That’s not a watermelon; that’s a water _jug!_” And to my very sad disappointment, Poetry was right.

There was a great big water jug like the kind we used in the Sugar Creek threshing ring, wrapped round and round with a gunny sack, and tied on with binder twine.

I remembered then that many a time I had carried drinking water to Pop from our iron pitcher pump out across the barnyard to whatever field he was in at the time. First I would soak the 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 inside 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, only 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, not more than five feet from a field of very tall corn. Hanging on the line were two or three pairs of slacks like women and girls wear; also there were several different kinds of different-colored other women’s clothes. We didn’t even have time to try to make up our minds what to do next, on account of all of a sudden there was a clattering of the boards of the Sugar Creek bridge--and it was the pickup truck coming back.

“Quick, everybody!” Big Jim exclaimed. “Let’s get out of here!”

And “out of here” 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 we couldn’t be seen by anybody even if she dropped down on her hands and knees and looked beneath the drooping cornblades 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.

“How do you know it didn’t have? 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 iron pitcher pump wasn’t more than twenty feet away when we first saw it. Somebody was helping himself to some drinking water.”

I felt my jaw muscles tightening with anger. I knew--_knew_ 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 the 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.”

* * * * *

Poetry 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 _day_time.

“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 was juggling a little jingle we’d heard him use quite a few times, and was:

“I proposed to Ida,
Ida refused;
I’da won my Ida if I’da used ...”

“STOP!” I ordered Poetry and started to start to say something else but got stopped by Big Jim shushing me, making me swallow my words and my temper. But I still knew I was right. The whole thing was as plain as a dog-day day to anybody with half a mind, which it looked like maybe I was the only one of us that did have.

That was as far as any of us got to talk or think right then, on account of from the direction of the tent I heard a car door slam and I knew it was the truck, and my mind was busy trying to imagine who had probably just climbed out of it.

“Do you suppose it’s anybody we know?” Dragonfly asked, and 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. For a few minutes, even though I was worrying on account 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. Overhead I could see the big white cumulus clouds hanging in the lazy afternoon sky, also the shimmering green leaves in the top of the cottonwood tree farther down the shore. I even noticed a lazy crow loafing along in the sky like 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 everyday, 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 only 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 grains have been planted, and gobbling up the grains before they have a chance to grow.

Of course, any farm boy knows a crow eats May beetles and grasshoppers and cutworms and caterpillers and even mice, and 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--” which 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 oiled 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; the car that had gone clattering down the lane and back again; the hole in the fence and the watermelon being pulled through--or the water _jug_, whichever it was--and hoisted into the car; and then 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 the 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 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 right that very minute was stretched between two trees behind the tent and had a lot of different kinds of different colored women’s 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 like it was very important. I noticed he had a far-away expression in his eyes right then like 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.

That knocked out Poetry’s scouting suggestion. We couldn’t go spying around any tent or any place where there were women or girls.

Just that second, Dragonfly hissed like he does when he has seen or heard something important. “Listen! Somebody’s coming!”

We all looked and listened in every direction, and sure enough, somebody _was_ coming. Was it a man, or a woman, or a girl? Or who, or what?

I stooped low, looked down the corn row I was in, and when I saw what I saw, I hissed to everybody, “It’s a _woman_; she’s wearing blue slacks!”

That meant that six boys ought to scramble themselves out of there, which, on Big Jim’s hissed orders, we did, hurrying like a covey of quail, only instead of fanning out in a lot of different directions like flushed quail do, we all followed Big Jim down his corn row, not stopping until we reached the bridge again.

“We’ll go on over to the Tills’ house right now,” he said, and I noticed that Little Jim’s hands were clasping tightly his manila envelope as he said, “Yeah, let’s.”

And away we went.

8

As much as I hated to leave the red boat and the green tent and the brown burlap bags with the waterjugs in them, and the blue-dressed woman, I was perfectly willing to go on to Big Bob Till’s house--and of course Dragonfly was, for some reason, extraordinarily willing to get as far as possible from anybody who was a woman or a girl. I was all set in my mind for whatever would happen when Big Bob and Big Jim saw each other. What _would_ happen? I wondered.

* * * * *