Watermelon Mystery at Sugar Creek by Paul Hutchens (best novel books to read .txt) đź“–
- Author: Paul Hutchens
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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.
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.
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 watermelon. 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
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