Chapter IV: Part 4

I certainly was surprised when, just before we reached the Tills’ wooden gate which led to their barnyard, I looked down at my hands and saw that somewhere on the way--I had picked up a three-foot-long stick and was carrying it, clasping it so tight my knuckles were white. My eyebrows were down, my lips were pressed tightly together, and my jaw muscles were tense.

We looked around the barn first and called “Hello,” a few times, with nobody answering. Then we went inside and out again, and through their orchard to the back door of their house. Big Jim and Circus went on to the small roofless porch and knocked--and again nobody answered. “Hello,” Big Jim called, and there wasn’t any answer or any sound from inside the house.

“Hello there,” Big Jim called again, and knocked again. Still nobody answered.

While Big Jim was doing that, I noticed Little Jim had his pencil out and was writing something on the manila envelope. My parents had taught me that it isn’t polite to read over anybody’s shoulder unless he invites you to, so I had a hard time seeing what he was writing, having to stand in front of him and crane my neck to read upside-down. And--would you believe it?--that little guy had written:

Dear Bob,

Here’s the Sunday School lesson quarterly Mother promised your
mother. Be sure to study all the questions so in case our teacher
asks you any of them you will know the answers. We will stop for
you at nine o’clock in the morning.

Your friend,
Little Jim Foote.

I couldn’t have read another line without getting a crick in my neck, but I remembered all of a sudden that it was to Little Jim’s father, the township trustee, that Bob had been paroled.

I saw Little Jim slip the envelope between the screen door and the unpainted white-knobbed wooden door, just as we were leaving.

They had probably gone to town or somewhere, I thought.

In a little while we were back at the bridge again and across it and, because it was Saturday and we were all supposed to get the chores done early so our parents could go to town, which most of them did on Saturday night, we separated, each one going to his own house. Even though Poetry was going to spend the night with me in the tent, he said he had to go home for a while so I was all by myself when I got to the north road and turned left toward the Collins’ farm.

I moseyed lazily along, thinking and worrying and trying to figure out things. It just didn’t seem possible that the gunny sack under the elder bushes last night had had a water _jug_ in it instead of a water_melon_. Even if it was possible, I didn’t want to believe it. Of course, the woman or several women or girls who lived in the forest-green tent would have to have drinking and cooking water--even if they could have used the water from the creek to do their washing. Sugar Creek water wasn’t supposed to be good for drinking, even when it wasn’t dog days.

A lot of ideas were piled up in my mind, but it seemed like one of them was on top, and it was: “If whoever had filled his or her water jugs at the spring, or at the Collins’ _other_ iron pitcher pump, had done it _at night_, then whoever lived in the tent must be afraid to go to anybody’s house in the daytime and ask for water. And if they were afraid to, _why_ were they afraid?”

One other thing made me set my feet down a little harder as they went plop-plop in the dusty road I was walking in, and that was: “Was the oldish car I had seen and heard in the lane last night the same as the gun-metal gray pickup truck which right this minute was parked beside the green tent?”

My mind was so busy with my thoughts that I was frightened when I heard a car coming behind me, the driver giving what Pop would call “a courteous honk,” like you are supposed to give when you want somebody to know you are behind them and don’t want to scare the living daylights out of them.

A jiffy later the car had pulled up alongside and stopped, and I saw, sitting behind the steering wheel and wearing a watermelon-colored dress and sparkling glasses, a smiling-faced, dark-haired lady about twenty years old. “Hello there!” she called in a friendly, musical voice. “I’ve been looking all over for you. Where have you been?”

Before I could answer she had gone on to say, “You forgot to leave the map in the watermelon. The girls told me there was nothing in it.”

“Map?” I asked, with an exclamatory voice.

Interrogative sentences were galloping round and round in my mind. Then my thoughts made a dive for my left hip pocket. My face must have had a question-mark on it, ’cause she said, “Don’t you remember? You were going to make us a copy of the one you showed me. We wanted each of our girls to make her own map, using yours as a model, so that if any of them should get lost while they were here, they could easily find their way back to camp.”

Before I could answer--not knowing what to say anyway--she said with a laugh that was like the water in the Sugar Creek riffle above the spring, “I hardly recognized you, at first, with your hair cut, and I see you’ve washed your face since yesterday, too. You certainly remind me of my little brother. His first name was Tom, too.”

Say, you could have knocked me over with a haircut, I was so surprised. All of a brain-whirling sudden, I knew who the watermelon thief was, and my mystery was practically solved. _Little Tom Till and I had red hair and freckles, and each of us wore a striped shirt and blue denim western-style jeans! The lady thought I was Little Tom Till!_

Just then I heard somebody calling from the direction of our farm and it was Pop’s thundery voice saying loud enough to be heard a quarter of a mile away, “Bill! Hurry up! It’s time to start the chores!”

What little presence of mind I had, told me not to answer because it seemed like I ought to let the smiling-faced lady think I _was_ Little Tom Till--for just a little while anyway--so I said to her, “That’s Theodore Collins. He’s probably calling his son to come and help him with the chores.”

“You know the Collins family?” the voice that was still like the Sugar Creek riffle, asked.

When I swallowed again and answered “Yes,” she surprised me by saying, “I met your mother in town this afternoon. She seemed like a very nice person. You must be very proud of her.”

“Uh--my mother? Which one?... I mean--you _did?_”

“She and Mrs. Collins were together shopping. They invited our troupe to church tomorrow. You go to Sunday school, I suppose?”

I swallowed a “Yes, Ma’am,” which she managed to hear, and before Theodore Collins called his son again about the undone chores, I said, “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll run over and see if I can stop him from having to call again. I think I know where his boy is.”

My hip pocket seemed to have a fire in it which ought to be put out, so just before I started to start toward Pop to help put out a temper-fire which probably was ready to burn a hole in his hat, I handed to the lady the map Poetry and I had found last night in the watermelon in the spring, saying, “Is this what you wanted?”

She unfolded the “Eat more Eatmore” wrapper, spread out the map and studied it. Her face lit up as she said, “Why this is _good_--_very_ good! It’s even better than the one you showed me yesterday.”

I liked her friendly voice and her smile so well, that for a second I wished I was actually Little Tom Till, himself. Then she tossed another question at me, and it was “This red X in the circle--does that represent any special location?”

“The red X?” I asked innocently. “Why, that’s--that’s--that’s where the green tent is pitched. I--it’s straight across the creek from the mouth of the branch, and just--uh--about fifty yards above where the current divides, and one part goes down the north side of the island and the other the other.”

She smiled a spoken thank you and added, “You do have a fine sense of humor, don’t you?”

I wasn’t sure _what_ I had, but there was one thing I wanted to know, and very much. I felt I _had_ to know it. What _did_ the red letter X stand for? Of course I knew the tent was there, but who lived in it and why? And why, if Tom had drawn this map for the girl scouts, _why_ had he put the red X there?

I must have been frowning my worry and she saw it, ’cause right away she added, “The girls’ll be intrigued by your story that an old witch is camping there, but I’m afraid instead of their wanting to stay away, they’ll be more curious than ever.”

Then my whole mind gasped. The lady in the watermelon colored dress not only thought I was Little Tom Till, but that little rascal of a red-haired boy had told her there was an old witch living in the tent, and that the girls ought not to go anywhere near it. _What_ on _earth!_

Just then Theodore Collins’ thundery voice called again for his son, so I said, “I’d better go now,” which I did. Away I went in a galloping hurry to let a reddish-brown-mustached, bushy-eyebrowed father know where his son really was--if he _was_ his son.

I found Mr. Collins in a better humor than I expected. Panting and running fast like a boy who is late for school, I arrived at the barn door just as Pop came out with a pail of Purina Chow for our old brindle cow who was standing at the pasture bars looking at us with question marks on her ears as if wondering why her supper had to come so early--but that it was all right with her.

“Why didn’t you answer me when I called?” Pop asked, and I remembered an old joke our family had read in a magazine and which we had laughed over, so I said, “I didn’t hear you the first _two_ times.”

“Bright boy,” Pop answered, and I answered with another old joke, saying, “I’m so bright my parents call me ‘son.’”

Pop grinned and when I asked him how come we had to get the chores done so early, he explained, “There’s a special prayer meeting for the men of the church. That’s why your mother’s in town now--she went in to get the shopping done this afternoon--she and Mrs. Till.”

It was a good thing we _did_ get the chores done early--a _very_ good thing--because there were a lot of important other things that had to happen that day to make this story even more mysterious, and to clear up some of the cloudy questions in my mind. Nearly everything had to happen before sundown, only of course I didn’t know it at the time, or I’d have hurried even faster with my part of the chores.

I was up in our haymow alone throwing down alfalfa hay when I looked out the east window and saw our car coming down the road, with Mom at the steering wheel and Little Tom Till’s Mom with Charlotte Ann in her lap in the front seat with her. Only a few minutes before I had been thinking about Mrs. Till in a very special way, so when I saw her in the car with Mom, I got the queerest feeling.

Throwing down hay was something I always liked to do because it is like a man’s job; also there was something nice about being alone in a big wide alfalfa-smelling haymow where a boy could think a boy’s thoughts, talk to himself, and whistle, and even sing, and nobody could hear him.

Sometimes when I’m in the haymow, I climb up on the long, axe-hewn beam that stretches across the whole width of the barn from one side to the other, and imagine myself to be Abraham Lincoln who had split so many logs with an ax. I raise my voice and quote all of his Gettysburg address, feeling fine while I am doing it, and important, and glad to be alive. Maybe I would be President of the United States, some time, myself.

I always hated to stop when the last word was said, and I would have to be Theodore Collins’ son again, with years and years of growing yet to do before I would be a man.

Well, I had just said in my deepest, most dignified voice, “... that this nation under God may have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” and was still standing listening to my imaginary audience clap their hands, and thinking about the part of my speech which said, “all men are created equal,” and was also thinking of the Till family--old hook-nosed John Till himself; his oldest boy Bob, and Little Tom, his other son, who wanted to be a good boy and was, part of the time. I was remembering the manila envelope which Little Jim had left at the Tills’ back door and was thinking about Mrs. Till who had such a hard time just to keep from being too discouraged to want to live....

Then is when I heard our car coming and saw Mom with Mrs. Till beside her. I quickly threw down another forkful of hay, hurried to the ladder and climbed down, leaving Abraham Lincoln to look after himself--and to get off the log the best way he could.

It seemed like Mom, by being a friend to Bob and Tom Till’s mother, was helping to prove that “all men are created equal.”

“All men are created equal,” was still in my mind when I reached the bottom of the ladder. For some reason, though, it didn’t seem right that Little red-haired, fiery-tempered, freckle-faced Tim Till was as equal as I was. We might look a lot alike to anybody who saw us dressed in the same kind of clothes, but I was _not_ a watermelon thief--and he was, I thought--and the first chance I got I was going to prove to him that even though all men, boys especially, might be created equal, when one boy sneaked out into another boy’s melon patch, stole a melon, and sold it to a girl scout troupe, the other boy was equal to giving him a sound thrashing.

I was wondering whether I ought to tell Pop about what the girl scout leader had told _me_, when I heard Mom’s voice calling from up near the walnut tree, “Is Bill out there somewhere?”

I almost jumped out of my bare feet when I heard Pop answer her from just outside the barn door, “He’s helping me with the chores!”

Mom called back to say that she wanted me to take care of Charlotte Ann while she drove Mrs. Till on home.

It wasn’t easy, taking care of that wriggling, impatient little rascal of a sister. Whatever makes a two-year-old baby sister so hard to take care of anyway? And why do they always want to run away from you and get into dangerous situations the very second your back is turned? I hadn’t any sooner sat down in the big rope swing under the walnut tree, and started to pump myself a little, than I heard Pop yelling from some direction or other--in fact from away up at the pignut tree--and how in the world did _he_ get that far away so quick?--yelling for me to “Run quick and get Charlotte Ann away from Old Red Addie’s fence.”

I swung out of the swing in a scared hurry, ’cause my eyes told me that that cute little reddish-brown-haired baby sister of mine was not only near the hog-lot fence but was actually trying to crawl through it to get inside--Charlotte Ann not being afraid of a single animal on our farm--not even one.

I scattered our seventy-eight hens in even more directions than that as I flew to Charlotte Ann’s rescue. Mom would have a conniption fit if I let that little sister of mine get her clean dress soiled and her best shoes muddy in Red Addie’s apartment-house yard--especially if she decided the mud puddle was a good place to walk in, which she probably would.

I got there just in time. _Honestly!_ That _child!_ You can hardly do anything else when you are looking after her. Mom calls it “baby-sitting” when she asks me to take care of her, but it isn’t! It’s baby-_running_, and keeping your eyes peeled every second or you won’t even have a baby sister. She’ll be gone in a flash, and you have to look all over for her--like the time she got lost in the woods and a terrible cyclone roared into our territory and trees were uprooted and fell in every direction and--But you know all about that if you’ve read the story, “The Green Tent Mystery at Sugar Creek.”

Well, after what seemed like too long a time, Mom got back from driving Mrs. Till home, and I went to the car to help her carry in the groceries and other things, and that’s when we found the brown paper bag with oranges in it, which Mrs. Till had accidentally left on the floor in the back, and Mom hadn’t seen it.

“Yes, that’s hers,” Mom said. “I’d better drive right back with it. Her doctor wants her to have fresh orange juice three times a day.”

“I--it’s almost time to start supper,” Pop said, looking at his watch. He explained to Mom about the special prayer meeting for men at the church, then gave me a quick order which was, “Bill, you take your bike and ride over to the Tills’ with these oranges while your mother starts supper.”

And that’s how come I ran into a situation that gave me a chance to prove in several, very fast hair-raising adventures that Little Tom Till and I were actually created equal.

I got to find out, also, who the old witch who lived in the green tent really was--and also why she lived there.

9

When I knocked at Mrs. Till’s back screen door, she was in the kitchen ironing something with an old fashioned _iron_ iron with an all-iron handle. I could see it was a pair of Little Tom Till’s old, many times-patched jeans.

As soon as I’d given her the oranges and she had thanked me, she said, “You have such a nice mother, Bill. _Such_ a nice mother.”

I shifted from one bare foot to the other, swallowed something in my throat which hadn’t been there a second before, and wished I could think of something polite to say, and couldn’t at first, then managed to think of:

“Tom has a nice mother, too.” I noticed Little Jim’s brown envelope with his awkward handwriting on it, lying on the other end of the ironing board. She’d probably read it, I thought, and then I got a little mixed up in my mind as I said, and was sorry for it afterward:

“_Bob’s_ got a nice mother, too,”--and I knew she knew _I_ was thinking how come such a nice mother could have two boys, one of which was a good boy and the other was a juvenile delinquent?

There were tears in her eyes when she looked at me with a sad smile and answered: “But I love them both--and some day God will answer my prayers for them.”

I forgot for a minute that I had actually been thinking Tom was just as bad as his very bad big brother, Bob, because he had stolen my watermelon.

“Where’s Tom now?” I asked, and she said, “I think he’s down along the creek, somewhere. If you see him or Bob on your way home, tell them it’s chore time.”

She thanked me again for the oranges, and I swung onto my bike, pedalled through their barnyard and out their open gate and on toward the creek.

At the bridge I stopped, looked downstream again at the green tent, and without even straining my eyes, I caught a fleeting glimpse of a boy just my size, wearing blue western-style jeans and a gray and maroon striped T-shirt. He was at the edge of the cornfield behind the green tent not more than ten feet from the clothesline which had on it different colored different kinds of women’s clothes.

“Right now, Bill Collins,” I heard my harsh voice saying to me through my grit teeth, “right _now_, you’re going to find out what is what, and why ... RIGHT NOW!”

I was down the embankment and under the bridge in a jiffy, and out in the cornfield scooting along in a hurry, like one of Circus’s Pop’s hounds trailing a cottontail--only my voice was quiet.

Closer and closer I came to the place where I had last seen Tom, shading my eyes to see what I could see.

Right then I heard a whirlwind of flying feet coming in my direction straight down the corn row I was stooped over in. In only a few fast-flying jiffies whoever was coming would be storming right into the middle of where I was, and if they didn’t happen to see me and I didn’t get out of the way, they’d bowl me over like a quarterback getting tackled in a football game.

There were other sounds than flying feet and the husky rusty rustle of the cornblades. There was an angry mannish-sounding voice, shouting exclamatory sentences and saying, “Stop you little rascal! Come back here with that! Do you hear me! I’ll whip the daylights out of you if I ever catch you!”

There was also a smallish, half-scared-half-to-death voice yelling “Help! Help! HELP!”

* * * * *

My muddled mind told me the small frightened voice was Little Tom Till’s and the angry voice was his big brother Bob’s--’cause it sounded just like his--and that Bob was chasing his brother and if he caught up to him he would give him a licking within an inch of his life.

Even as I glimpsed Little Tom flying ahead of whoever was behind him, I noticed again that he was dressed the same way I was. Being dressed like that made us look like twins, although, of course, he looked more like _me_ than I did _him_, which means he was a better-looking boy than _I_ would have been if I had looked like _him_.

For some reason when I realized that Tom was crying and running to get away from having to take a licking, in spite of the fact that I thought he was a watermelon thief, it seemed like I ought to do something to save him.

Closer and closer, and faster and faster, those flying feet came storming toward me. Then without warning Tom swerved to the left and dashed down a corn row and at the same time part of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address came to life in my mind and I knew I was really going to do something quick to help save Tom.

The thought was lightning fast in my mind: I was dressed exactly like Tom; my hair was red like his, and we were the same height, and would look so much alike from behind that whoever was chasing him wouldn’t know the difference. So I waited only a second until I felt sure Bob had seen me, then like a young deer I started on a fast gallop down the same corn row. I was sure I could run faster than Tom ’cause I had beaten him in a few races, and it would be quite a while before Bob could catch up with me. When he did catch up, he’d stop stock-still and stare, and Tom would be safe--for awhile anyway.

A second later the chase was on, and I was scooting down the row like a cottontail, running and panting and grinning to myself to think what a clever trick I was playing.

But say, that big lummox of a boy whom I hadn’t seen yet but had only heard, seemed to be gaining on me. Within a few minutes he would have me, if I didn’t run faster.

“_Faster!_” my excited mind ordered me. But I quickly realized I couldn’t save myself by just being fast. I’d have to be smart too, like a cottontail outsmarting a hound.

Remembering how cottontails disappear in a thicket if they can, then circle and go right back to where they were before, I turned left like Little Tom had done and raced madly back toward the tent and the creek and the plastic clothesline.

But it wasn’t a good idea. The big bully of a boy heard, or saw me, or something. I hadn’t any sooner shot out into the open and dashed between a pair of brown slacks and a pink lady’s dress of something hanging on the line than I heard panting and flying feet behind me and knew I would have to be even smarter than a cottontail.

“You dumb bunny!” a savage voice yelled at me. “I’ll make short work of you. Stop, you little thief! STOP!”

Right then was when my world turned upside down for a while. _That fierce, very angry voice yelling at me was NOT the voice of Big Bob Till, but of somebody else!_ I realized that it was somebody who, if he caught up with me, might not know that I _wasn’t_ Tom Till and I would get one of the worst thrashings a boy ever got. “What,” I asked myself, as I panted and dodged and sweat and grunted and hurried and worried--“what will happen to me?”

I made a dive around the wall-type tent, planning to dart into the path that went through the forest of giant ragweeds to the bridge. At the bridge I would rush up the incline on the other side and gallop across.

As soon as I would get across the bridge, I’d leap over the rail fence, hurry through the woods to the spring, swing into the path made by barefoot boys’ bare feet, and in only a little while after that I’d be across the road from “Theodore Collins” on our mailbox and would be safe.

I took a fleeting glance over my shoulder to see who was chasing me, and say! my pursuer was not only _not_ Bob Till but wasn’t a boy at all--instead he was a woman wearing brown slacks and a woman’s hat!

Boy oh boy, was I ever in the middle of a situation! In that quick over-the-shoulder glance I noticed that her hat was straw-colored and looked a lot like the kind Little Jim’s Mom wears to church. Even in that quarter of a jiffy while I was seeing her over my shoulder, I noticed that the hat was the same color as the ripe wheat on Big Jim’s Pop’s farm and that there were several heads of wheat slanted across its left side instead of a feather like lots of women’s hats have on them.

What on earth! Why was I, Bill Collins, a husky hard-working farm boy with muscles like those of the village blacksmith--“as strong as iron bands”--running from just one helpless woman--_just one!_

But I hardly had time even to wonder “what on earth?” because in that fleeting glance over my shoulder my eyes had seen something else--I’d seen Little Tom Till come storming out of the cornfield behind the forest-green tent, shoot like a blue-jeaned arrow toward the opening, and disappear inside.

Glancing over my shoulder like that, was one of the worst things I could have done. I had seen one red-haired boy dashing into a tent, and I knew where he was right that very second, but I didn’t know where I, myself, was. When my eyes got back to the path I was supposed to be running in, I wasn’t running in it at all. I had swerved aside, stumbled over a log and was making a head-over-heels tumble in the direction of the creek. If the red boat hadn’t been there, I’d have landed in the water. Instead I fell sprawling into the boat itself--that is, that’s where I _finally_ landed when I came to a stop after rolling down the incline.

Looking up from my upside-down position, I saw the woman’s face was hard and had an angry scowl on it. I realized with a gasp that in another jiffy she would be down the incline herself and I would be caught in what I could see were very large, very strong hands. Even though I was saving Tom Till from getting the daylights whaled out of him, I probably would get the _double_-daylights thrashed out of _me_.

If it had been winter and Sugar Creek frozen over, I could have leaped out of the boat and raced across the ice to the other side, but there isn’t a boy in the world who can run or walk on the water in the summertime. There was only one way for me to escape that fierce-faced woman, who in another few jiffies would be down that incline herself and into the boat and have me in her clutches.

Quick as a flash I was up and in the prow of the boat unfastening the guy rope. A second later, with one foot in the boat and the other against the bank, I gave the boat a hard shove, and out I shot into the stream.

“You come back here, you--you little red-haired rascal!” the woman’s gruff, angry voice demanded.

For the moment I had forgotten Little Tom Till--I was in such a worried hurry to save myself. Then what to my wondering ears should come sailing out over the water but Tom’s own excited voice, calling, “Hey! Wait for me! WAIT!”

Little Tom’s high-pitched voice coming from behind her, must have astonished the scowling-faced woman. She turned her head quick in the direction of the tent and her eyes landed on Tom who was waving at me and yelling and running toward the creek, looking exactly like me in his western-style blue jeans and maroon-and-gray-striped T-shirt. She must have thought she was seeing double, or that there were two of me: I was out in the nervous water in her red rowboat floating downstream toward the Sugar Creek island; I was also on dry land running like a deer toward the creek, waving my arms and yelling to me in the boat to “Wait for me!”

The situation certainly couldn’t have made sense to her. For a minute she stayed stopped stock-still and stared while Tom scurried down the shore to a place about thirty feet ahead of me where there was a little open space, half climbed and half skid down the embankment, plunged into the water and came splashety-sizzle toward the boat.

It was then that I noticed he was carrying something with him, which was making it hard for him to make fast progress. If my mind had had a voice I think I could have heard it screaming an exclamatory sentence: “_He’s got another water jug with a burlap bag wrapped around it. WHAT on earth!_”

That woman in the straw hat with the little bundle of imitation wheat straw across its right side, came to life and started on a fast run toward the place where Tom had plunged in, like she was going to splash in after him and try to get to the boat first, or else to stop him.

In almost less than no time Tom had hoisted his waterjug over the gunwhale and set it down into the boat at my feet, then he swung himself alongside and climbed in over the stern--which is the way to climb into a boat without upsetting it.

“Hurry!” Little Tom Till panted to me. “Let’s get across to the other side!”

I didn’t know what he was worried about nor what he wanted but I figured he would tell me as soon as he could--that is, if he wanted to. Besides I was in a hurry to get across myself.

I reached for the oars--and that’s when I got one of the most startling surprises of my life. There weren’t any oars in the boat--not even one! Not even a board to use for a paddle! All there was in the boat was a water jug with burlap bags wrapped around it, one very _wet_, red-haired, blue-jeaned, maroon-and-gray-T-shirted boy, and one _dry_ one. And all the time our boat was drifting farther downstream toward the island.

In fact, right that very minute, the boat, which I had discovered was an aluminum boat painted red and was very light, was caught in the swift current where the creek divides and half of its current goes down one side of the island and the other half down the other. There wasn’t a thing we could do to stop ourselves from going one way or the other.

Swooshety-swirlety--swishety! Also _hissety!_ Those half-angry waters took hold of our boat and away we went down the north channel, between the island and the shore.

We weren’t in any actual danger as far as the water was concerned, though, ’cause it was a safe boat. After awhile, we’d probably drift close enough to an overhanging willow or other tree and we could catch hold, swing ourselves out and climb to safety--or to the shore anyway.

BUT--say! We _were_ in danger for another reason.

* * * * *

That woman wasn’t going to let us get away as easily as that. She leaped into fast life and began racing down the shore after us, yelling for us to stop, which we couldn’t.

“What’s she so mad about, anyway?” I asked Little Tom Till.

His answer astonished me so much I almost lost my balance and fell out of the boat: “There’s hundreds and hundreds of dollars in this water jug. It’s the stolen money from the Super Market!”

Boy oh _boy!_ No _wonder_ there was a cyclone in that woman’s mind! And no _wonder_ she didn’t want two red-haired boys in blue jeans and gray-and-maroon-striped shirts in a rowboat to get away!

“She’s as mad as a hornet!” I said to Tom when, like a volley of rifle and shotgun shots a splattering of very angry, very filthy words fell thick and fast all around on us and on our ears from the woman’s very angry, very harsh mannish-sounding voice.

“She’s not a _she_,” Little Tom Till answered. “She’s a _he_. He’s been hiding out in the tent pretending to be a woman, wearing women’s clothes and earrings and hats and using fancy perfumes and stuff.”

Every second the fast current was swirling us downstream closer and closer to an overhanging elm, one that had fallen into the water from the last Sugar Creek storm, and its top extended almost all the way across the channel from the north shore to the island. I could see our boat was going to crash into the leafy branches and we’d be stopped.

I knew if we could manage to steer around the tree’s top, we’d be safe for quite awhile on account of there was a thicket that came clear down to the water’s edge there and if the fierce-faced man wanted to follow us any further, he would have to leave the shore and run along the edge of the cornfield for maybe fifty yards before he could get back to the creek again.

If only we had even _one_ oar, we could steer the boat near the island where there was open water. We could miss the fallen elm’s bushy top and----!

And _then_, all of a helpless sudden, we went crashing into the branches _and there we stopped!_

That was when Little Tom Till came to life and proved that he had been created as equal as I had, and maybe even more so. The very second we struck, he scrambled to his feet, grabbing up the jug and the coil of clothesline which was fastened to it and yelling to me, “Come on! Let’s get onto the island!”

It certainly was a bright idea, ’cause the very second our boat hit the tree, the current had whirled it around and one end struck and _stuck_ against the sandy bank of the island, and all we had to do was to use the boat for an aluminum-floored bridge the rest of the way, which in an awkward hurry, we did. In only a few jiffies we were across and out and clambering up the rugged shore of the island into its thicket of willows and tall weeds and wild shrubbery.

“We’re straight across from the sycamore tree and the cave!” Little Tom Till cried. “If we can get across the channel on the other side of the island, and into the cave and go through it to Old Man Paddler’s cabin, we’ll be safe. Bob’s up there helping him cut wood this afternoon--only he’s mad at me about something.”

The trouble was, the boat that had made such a nice bridge for us to cross on, was the same kind of an aluminum-floored bridge for the woman--the _man_, I mean. He could climb out onto the elm’s horizontal trunk, drop down into the boat and get across as quick as anything.

Even as I scrambled up the bank behind my blue-jeaned, red-and-maroon-shirted friend, I glanced back over my shoulder and saw the brown slacks with the woman in them--the _man_, I mean--on the trunk of the tree working his way along through the branches toward the boat. In another second he would drop down into it, and in another would be across and onto the island racing after us.

* * * * *

The chase was on--a wild-running, scared, barefoot-boy’s race ahead of a short-tempered thief dressed in woman’s slacks, wearing a woman’s straw-colored hat, dodging our way across that island which was a thicket of willow and wild shrubbery, with here and there a larger tree, and dozens of little craters hollowed out by the flood waters which nearly every spring went racing across it. Banked against nearly every larger tree trunk were piles of driftwood and cornstalks and stuff the creek had carried from different farmer’s fields farther upstream and deposited there.

I guess I never had realized what a jungle that island was. I had been on it many a time when I was just monkeying around, looking for shells, or with my binoculars studying birds. Once in awhile at night in the spring or summer when it was bullfrog season, we would wade in the weed-grown water along the edge of the riffles with lanterns and flashlights looking for the giant-sized brown and dark-green monsters whose eyes in the light were like the headlamps of toy automobiles--bullfrogs, as you probably know, having long hind legs with bulging muscles, which when they are skinned, are snow-white, and when Mom fries them, they taste even better than fried chicken.

But _such_ a wilderness! And so many rough-edged rocks for a boy’s bare feet to get cut or bruised on, so many briers to scratch him and so many branches to fly back and switch him in the face when another boy has just gone hurrying through ahead of him.

If we had been running from a real woman, or if only he had been wearing a dress instead of slacks, he wouldn’t have been able to take such long steps, and there would have been the chance he might get the skirt caught on a branch or a brier and slow him down while we dodged our way ahead of him in our mad race to the other side.

“We’re almost there!” Little Tom Till cried to me, panting hard from carrying the jug as well as himself.

I could see the other side of the island now and the nervous, excited water in the racing riffle between the island and the shore. I could see the sycamore tree at the top of the bank and the mouth of the cave just beyond.

Another few seconds and we would be there--and would be out in the fast current on our way to safety. It had been a terribly exciting race, I tell you, with Tom not letting me help carry the jug at all.

“It’s not heavy,” he panted. “It’s made out of plastic, the same as the clothesline, and it’s as light as a feather. The money in it is in little rolls with rubber bands around them. I saw him stuff ’em in myself.”

The bottle’s mouth and neck weren’t more than an inch and a half in diameter, I had noticed.

There were about a million questions I wanted to ask Tom, such as, how come he knew the woman was a man? how’d he find out about the money in the first place?--and several other things which my mind was as curious as a cat’s to know.

And then, all of a sudden, we burst out into the open at the water’s edge, with our pursuer only a few rods behind us, panting and cursing and demanding us to stop.

And then I learned something else from that fierce-voiced villain as he yelled at Tom, “You little rascal! I’ll catch you and your brother, Bob, if it’s the last thing I ever do. He’s broken into his _last_ Super Market!”

_That_ was one of the saddest, most astonishing things I had ever heard. It startled me into feeling a lot of other questions: Had Bob Till himself broken into the Sugar Creek Super Market last week? Was the man in woman’s clothes maybe a detective or secret agent who had been camping out along the creek, watching Bob’s movements--his and Tom’s?

Things were all mixed up even worse than ever. For a few jiffies, my watermelon mystery wasn’t even important in my mind, as--quick as a firefly’s fleeting flash--Tom, holding onto the jug’s handle with one hand, plunged into the fast riffle without even bothering to look or to ask me where the water was the most shallow, and a second later was up to his waist and losing his balance and falling down.

Up he struggled, and down he went again, sputtering and wallowing along, with me doing the same thing beside him.

And then all of a cringing sudden, Tom let out a scared cry, saying: “Help! h-h-h-help!” as he lost his balance and went down--_really_ down, I mean. The coil of rope in his hand flew into the air like a lasso straight toward me who, at that minute, was quite a few yards from him. Part of the clothesline caught around my upraised hand with which I was trying to balance myself, the line tightened as Tom went down, still holding onto the jug’s handle--and then down I went myself, like a steer at a rodeo, the water sweeping me off my feet.

And there we both were, struggling in the racing current--two red-haired boys, one on each end of a brand new plastic clothesline.

Even as I went down I saw the willows on the island part and the maddest-faced man I ever saw in my life came rushing toward us. Also, I saw a puzzled expression on his face like he was wondering what on earth, which one of us was Tom and which was me, and which of us had the water jug with the money in it.

Just that second also, his woman’s hat caught on a branch, and off it came and with it a wig of reddish-brown hair, and I noticed the man had a very short haircut.

The woman was an honest-to-goodness man, all right--or _boy_, rather, maybe about as old as Bob Till himself. He had dirt smudges on his rouged cheeks like he had fallen down a few times in his mad race across the island after us. He was panting and gasping for breath and his woman’s blouse was torn at the neck.

Tom and I must have looked queer to her--_him_, I mean--with me like a calf on the end of a lasso, and Tom now fifteen feet from me, with the jug in one hand, struggling to stay on his feet, on account of I was downstream farther than he and being sucked along with the current while my feet fought for the pebbly bottom.

Right away, the mean-faced oldish boy seemed to make up his mind who was who and what was what and what he ought to do about it. He made a rushing plunge out into the water and a series of fast lunges straight for Tom, who began to make even faster lunges toward the other shore and the sycamore tree.

“Run! Swim! HURRY!” I yelled in a sputtering voice to Tom--which he couldn’t on account of right that very fast-fleeting second, his feet shot out from under him and he went down again ker-flopety-splash-SPLASH!

I knew I could never wade back against the swift current to get to him in time to help him. I’d have to get to the other shore QUICK, race along the bank to a place fifteen or twenty feet above him and plunge in again and hurry out to where he was, which I started to start to do, and got stopped.

The current was stronger near that other shore and the water deeper. My feet were sucked out from under me and again I went down, feeling as I was pulled under, my end of the rope still wrapped around my hand, which, also, without my hardly noticing it, I was holding onto for dear life.

Right that second the bully caught up with Tom, made a lunge with his right arm for the jug, seized Tom with the other, and there was a wild wrestling match with water flying and curses and fast flying arms and it looked like Tom was going to get the living daylights licked out of him for sure.

Tom was trying to fight back, and couldn’t with only one hand and because of the swift current. He was as helpless as Marybelle Elizabeth in a chickenyard fight with Cleopatra.

Right then is when I remembered something important, and it was that when a bevy of furious girls had been beating up on Dragonfly at the spring, I had screamed bloody murder, given several wild loon calls, bellowed like a bull and made a lot of other terrifying bird and animal noises, and it had saved Dragonfly. Before I knew I was going to do it, I was yelling and screaming every savage sound I could think of in the direction of the one-sided fight, crying for help at the same time, hoping some of the Gang might be somewhere in the neighborhood and hear.

And that’s when I heard Big Bob Till’s voice answer from the sycamore tree side of the channel. A second later I saw him standing in the black mouth of the cave. He held his hand up to his eyes, shading them like he had been in the dark quite awhile and the afternoon sunlight was too bright for them.

Then he seemed to see his little red-haired brother, Tom, getting a licking within an inch of his life by a butch-haired bully. And _that_ is when Bob Till, the fiercest fighter in all Sugar Creek territory--except maybe Big Jim--came to life. It was like the cave was a bow and Bob was a two-legged arrow being shot by a giant as big as the one in the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. I lost my balance then and went down, the rope in my hand went taut, and the other end was torn from Tom’s grasp, and the water jug, like a jug-shaped balloon wrapped in burlap, plopped to the surface, swung away and came on a fast downstream float toward me.

All I could see for a jiffy was Tom defending himself like a savage little tiger, and Big Bob Till shooting through the air like a man from a flying trapeze from the high bank out across the ten feet of excited air down and out toward where Tom was in the clutches of the thief--and then I was fighting to save myself from drowning because I was in water over my head. My right hand still clung to the rope on the other end of which was the floating, plunging water jug with stolen Super Market money in it.

10

Before even another second could pass, Bob Till landed feet first in the swift current, and even quicker than that was storming his way through the six or seven feet of open water toward where his little brother, Tom, was holding on for dear life to the very same powerful-muscled overgrown man-sized boy who a little while before was wrestling with him trying to get the water jug away from him. Say, that little guy knew what he was doing.

“Oh no, you don’t! You great big bully!” Tom cried. “You don’t get away so easy. Come on, Bob! It’s him--the thief! Help!... Help!... _H-E-L-P!_”

And Bob helped.

Talk about a fierce, fast fist fight. That was one of the fiercest, fastest ones I ever saw and heard. I mean _really_ heard in spite of my own battle to keep myself from losing my own balance in the deep, swift water I was in. If the rock bass and minnows and redhorse and other fish that were down in the water somewhere had been watching that water fight they’d probably have wondered what on earth--only they maybe wouldn’t know very much about the earth but only the water, that being where they lived.

Wham! Biff! Sock!... Wham ... wham ... wham!... Splash!... _SPLASH!_ Double-whamety ... _Pow!_

“You great big lummox!” Bob yelled at his opponent. “You _will_ try to drown my little brother! I’ll teach you right now!”

The bully staggered backwards, his hands and arms waving in a lot of fast directions as he tried to steady himself from falling. Then he struck the water and went down--_and under_.

Bob seemed to know he had his man licked. He quick turned to his little brother and half sobbed to him: “You poor little guy, fighting that big bully all by yourself!”

“Big Bully,” as Bob had just called the fierce-faced man--who wasn’t a man at all, and certainly wasn’t a woman, but was a powerful muscled boy the size of Big Jim--came up from under the water with a bounce like a cork plops back up after you’ve pushed it under. He came up sputtering and shaking his head and struggling to keep his balance in the rapids.

Spying the water jug floating on the surface down near where I was, he started on a fast half-run, half-swim toward it and me.

One reason the jug hadn’t already floated on far beyond me was because one end of the rope was still wrapped around one of my hands, and I was holding onto it for dear life. The other reason was that the middle of the rope which was down under the water was tangled up with and wrapped around the bully’s legs. I knew it for sure when I felt the rope tighten around my arm, and then felt myself being jerked off balance--and then down I went again.

It certainly wasn’t any time to be thinking funny thoughts right then--what with all the dangerous excitement I was in, and might not get out of without getting badly hurt--but a ridiculous idea plopped into my mind and stayed there for a fast flying second, and was: “I’m like a cowboy at a Sugar Creek rodeo. I’ve just lassoed a wild steer and my bronco has just thrown me off into a racing riffle, but I’m going to hold onto him!”

Grunt and groan and puff and sputter and yell and scream and tremble with excitement and hold on tight and fight and just about everything else you can think of--we four were really in a struggle for life--almost anyway.

I don’t know how many times I lost my balance and went down, nor how many times I thought the bully was going to get the water jug away from us and get away himself.

And then all of a sudden, right in the middle of everything, I saw Bob’s powerful right arm swing in a long wide arc, and the fist on the other end of it catch the painted faced tough guy on the jaw--and he went down--and stayed down, and that part of the struggle was over.

I say _that_ part was over. We had another and a harder job on our hands--and that was, to save the bully from drowning, ’cause Bob’s hard-knuckled, experienced fist knocked him completely out.