Part 2

Say, if there is anything that looks ridiculous, it is a boy’s long-legged, red-haired, bushy-eyebrowed father grunting himself into an upside-down knot and out of it again while he climbs up onto a high grape arbor.

A jiffy later there was Pop up there where I should have been, with his heavy work shoes on his large feet swinging, and eating his pie upside-down and panting for breath from all the unnecessary exercise. It was fun to Pop, but to me it looked silly so I sat down on the porch with my back to him and ate my pie right side up and for some reason it didn’t taste very good.

It was a scorching hot day and I began to feel a little better there in the shade, when all of a sudden Mom said from inside the house, using a very cheerful voice, “O. K. Bill. The dishes are all ready for you.”

I always know when Mom calls me cheerfully like that that she’s trying to make me _want_ to come.

But say, Pop turned out to be a really swell Pop after all, or else he was trying to give me a free education. It seemed like he was still pretending to be me up there on that grape arbor so when he heard Mom say, “dishes,” he called out cheerfully, “Coming,” and swung around quick and down off the grape arbor and hurried into the house like he would rather dry the Collins family dinner dishes than do anything else in the whole world.

He got stopped at the door by Mom though, who was maybe trying to play the game with him, and she said, “Wipe that dirt off your shoes on the mat there”--which she tells me about thirty-seven times a day--sometimes even while I am already doing it, having thought of it first myself. Say, I looked at Pop’s feet and they did have dirt on them--_a yellowish-brown dirt on the sides of the soles and heels!_

At the very second I saw Pop’s shoes with yellowish-brown dirt on them instead of the very black dirt I knew was the kind that was up under the pignut trees, I wondered what on _earth?_ I certainly didn’t want my Pop to be really getting mixed up in our mystery like I had thought last night for a minute he might be.

Not only that--I didn’t want him to have been the person who had given the bobwhite and turtledove bird calls last night, which my discouraged mind was trying to tell me he could have been.

Not knowing I was going to say what I said, I said, “POP!” in a loud and astonished voice, “_Where_ did you get that kind of mud on your shoes?” I was using the kind of voice I had heard another member of our family use on me several different times in my half-long life.

Pop, who was already wiping off his shoes on the mat at the door, looked down at them in astonishment and said, “What dirt?”

Mom’s astonished voice shot through the finely woven screen of the door and landed with a “kerwham” right where her eyes were looking, which was on both Pop’s big shoes. “Why, Theodore Collins!” she said, “What on _earth_?”

Pop grinned back through the screen at her and said, “No, not _what on earth_, but _earth on what_?” which I could tell he thought was funny, but Mom didn’t think it was very. She went on in her same astonished, accusing voice, saying, “Those are the very same muddy shoes you ate dinner with!”

“I never ate dinner with muddy shoes in my life,” Pop said, with a grin in his voice. “I always use a knife and fork and spoon,” which was supposed to be extra funny--and was to Pop and me--but for some reason Mom only smiled rather than laughed and it looked like she was trying to keep herself from even smiling.

“Go get your father’s house slippers,” Mom ordered me, and I obeyed her in a tickled hurry.

Pop slipped his feet out of his shoes and left them on the porch, and slipped his feet into his slippers and ordered me to follow him into the house, which I also did with a little less speed, because I could tell by the tone of his voice that he had some work for me to do, which I found out was the truth.

It wasn’t too bad though ’cause Pop and I played a little game while we did the dishes. He called me “Pop” and I called him “Bill.” He ordered Mom to go into the front room to look after my baby sister, Charlotte Ann.

Say, Pop and I dived headfirst--or rather, I should say, _hands_first--into the sudsy dishwater, making short work of those dishes, getting them done a lot faster than if a mother and daughter had done them. Also we hurried to be sure to get through before Mom might come out into the kitchen and look over our work and decide we were not using the right kind of soap or something.

It really was fun ’cause I kept giving orders to my red-haired, awkward son, giving him cuckoo commands every few minutes such as “Keep your mind on your work, Bill!” ... “Hey, that plate has to be wiped over again!” ... “Your mother likes to have the glasses polished a little better than that, Son, we never know when there might be company from somewhere and those glasses have to shine like everything”--unnecessary things a father nearly always says to a boy.

Well, those dishes got done in about half the usual time. As quick as they were finished, I was free to start to do what I really wanted to do in just the way I wanted to do it, but I got stopped by Pop’s big, gruff voice. I had just tossed Pop’s drying towel toward the rack beside the stove, and missed the rack and had made a red-headfirst dive for it to pick it up quick before Pop, or especially Mom, might see it. I was still in a bent-over position--just right for a good spank from somebody--when Pop’s voice socked me and the words were, “Which one of us is Bill and which is your father now--for the rest of the afternoon, I mean?”

“I am,” I said. In half a jiffy the towel was on the rack nice and straight and I was over by the washstand, stooping to get my straw hat, which was beside Pop’s big still-off work shoes.

“Bring the gang home some time this afternoon,” Pop said. “I want to show them Addie’s nice, new red-haired family.”

“I will,” I answered, I having seen the six cute little quadrupeds myself that morning.

By that time I was already outdoors and ten feet from the slammed screen door, the door having slammed itself on account of its strong, coiled spring. Then Pop called again and stopped me stock-still. “If I am your father again, and you are Bill Collins, you had better stay home and mow the lawn and let me go to meet the gang,”--but I could tell he didn’t mean it. Pop looked awfully cute, I thought, with Mom’s big apron on and his blue shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbows, his slippers still on, standing in the open screen door.

I called to him saying, “I am still Theodore Collins and you are Bill and you are letting flies in. Shut the door quick--and _quietly!_”

As I hurried away, my mischievous Pop called after me, “So long, Mr. Collins! Have a nice time, and don’t forget to find a new beetle for our collection.”

“So long, Bill!” I yelled from the front gate, which I had just opened and gone through and shut after me. Then as I dashed past Theodore Collins on our mailbox I was myself again. I swished across the dusty road, vaulted over the old, lichen-covered rail fence and in a jiffy was running in the path that had been made by barefoot boys’ bare feet, down through the woods as fast as I could go to the spring where the gang was going to meet first before going up to the top of Strawberry Hill to the cemetery.

4

Boy, oh boy! I never felt better in my life than I did when I was galloping through that woods to meet the gang. First I was in the sunlight and then in the shade as I raced along in that winding, little, brown path--swishing past different kinds of trees, such as maple and beech and ash and oak and also dodging around chokecherry shrubs and wild rosebushes with roses scattered all around among the thorns, also past dogwood trees and all kinds of wild flowers that grew on either side of the path.

Even though I had had to be delayed unnecessarily on account of the dishes, I got to the spring about the same time Little Jim and Poetry did. Circus was already there in the favorite place where he usually waits for us when he gets there first, which was in the top branches of a little elm sapling that grows at the top of the steep bank. As you know, at the bottom of that steep bank was the spring itself, but we always met in a little, shaded, open space at the top. Circus was swinging and swaying and looked really like a chimpanzee, hanging by his hands and feet and everything except his tail--which he didn’t have anyway.

As quick as Big Jim, with his almost mustache, and Little Tom Till, with his freckled face and red hair, got there and also Dragonfly, with his goggle-eyed face and spindling legs, that was all of us.

Poetry, Dragonfly and I told everybody everything that had happened last night, but I didn’t tell them about Pop having had yellowish-brown dirt on his shoes; and with my eyes I kept Poetry and Dragonfly from telling them about the two baby pigs Pop had buried somewhere, because I felt sure Pop wouldn’t bury two baby pigs in a cemetery, which had been reserved for human beings only.

A little later, after a loafing ramble along the bayou and a climb to the top of Strawberry Hill, we scrambled over the rail fence and in a couple of jiffies reached the place where the woman had been digging last night, which was not more than ten feet from Sarah Paddler’s tall tombstone. Well, we all stopped and stood around in a barefoot circle looking down into the hole. Sure enough--just as we had seen it last night--there was the print of a high-heeled, woman’s shoe and also other high-heeled shoe tracks all around, but none of the others were as clear as the one we were all studying that very minute.

“What on earth do you s’pose she was digging here for?” Little Tom Till asked in his high-pitched voice.

Big Jim answered him saying, “If we knew that, we would know what we want to know.”

For a minute I focused my eyes on the hand, which somebody had chiseled on Sarah Paddler’s tombstone. One finger of the hand pointed toward the sky. I had read the words just below the hand maybe a hundred and twenty times in my life and they were: “There is rest in Heaven,”--which I knew there was for anybody who got to go there. When I was in a cemetery, it was easy to think about things like that. I was sort of dreamily remembering that our minister in the Sugar Creek church says that there is only one way for a boy to get to Heaven. First, the boy has to believe that he is an honest-to-goodness sinner and needs a Saviour. Then he has to believe that Jesus, who is the Saviour, came all the way from Heaven a long time ago to die for him and to save him from his sins; then if the boy will open the door of his heart and let the Saviour come in, that will settle it.

Our minister, who knows almost all the Bible by heart, tells the people that come to our church that there isn’t any other way for anybody to be saved except just like I told you.

So I knew that Old Man Paddler, who was saved himself and was the kindest old, long-whiskered old man that ever was a friend to a boy, would see his wife, Sarah, again--maybe the very minute he got to Heaven.

For a fast jiffy, while I was standing by the hole which the June beetle had tumbled into last night, and was looking up at that carved hand on the tombstone, my mind sort of drifted away on a friendly little journey clear up into Heaven--past the great big white cumulus cloud that was piling itself up in the southwest right that minute above the tree-covered hills where I knew Old Man Paddler’s cabin was, and I imagined how that somewhere in Heaven maybe there was a very nice little cabin waiting for that kind old man, and that his wife, Sarah, was out there in the garden somewhere looking after the flowers for him. Every now and then she would stop doing what she was doing and look toward a little white gate like the one we have at our house by the big swing near the walnut tree to see if she could see her husband coming. Then all of a sudden I imagined she did see him and her kinda oldish face lit up like Mom’s does sometimes when she sees Pop coming home from somewhere and she started quick on a half walk and half run out across the yard to meet him, calling “Hi there! I’ve been waiting for you a long time....”

It was a terribly nice thought to think, I thought. Only I knew that if that old man ever left Sugar Creek, it would be awful lonesome around here for a long time, and it sorta seemed like we needed him here even worse than his wife did up there.

* * * * *

From Sarah Paddler’s grave in the shade of the big pine tree, we went all the way across the cemetery, winding around a little to get to the old maple where last night I had shone my flashlight all around looking for signs of a human quail or a human turtledove.

There we stopped in the friendly shade and lay down in the tall grass to hold a meeting to help us decide what to do next. While we were lying there in seven different directions, chewing the juicy ends of bluegrass and timothy and wild rye, Big Jim gave a special order which was, “I would like each of us except Poetry and Dragonfly to give a quail whistle.”

“Why?” Little Tom Till wanted to know.

“I want to find out if any of you were out here last night making those calls. I also want to know if any of you guys were out here dressed in overalls and wearing a woman’s high-heeled shoes.”

Little Jim and Little Tom Till and Circus and Big Jim himself did the best they could making bobwhite calls and Circus was the only one of us whose whistle sounded like the quail whistle we had heard last night.

Then Big Jim made all of us except Poetry, Dragonfly and me, do a turtledove call and again Circus was the only one whose call was like the one we heard last night.

“O. K., Circus,” Big Jim leveled his eyes across our little tangled up circle and said to him, “Confess or we will drag you down to Sugar Creek and throw you in.”

“All right,” Circus said, “I confess I was home in bed, sound asleep when I heard those calls last night.”

“So was I,” Little Tom Till said.

“So was I,” Little Jim echoed.

“Yeh, and so was I. Sound asleep in bed listening to the calls,” Big Jim said sarcastically.

Well, that left only Poetry, Dragonfly and me, and we were the ones who had heard the calls in the first place, so the mystery was as still unsolved as it had been, not a one of us believing that Circus was here last night.

There wasn’t any use to stay where we were so, it being a very hot afternoon, we decided to go to the old swimming hole and get cooled off.

“Last one in is a bear’s tail,” Circus yelled back at us over one of his square shoulders as he galloped off first out across the cemetery to the other side.

The rest of us quick took off after him, not a one of us wanting to be a bear’s tail, which means we would have to be almost nothing on account of bears have very stubby tails.

Long before we got there nearly everyone of us had his shirt off--so that by the time we should get there all we would have to do would be to wrestle ourselves out of our overalls and in a jiffy we would be out in the middle of the swellest water to swim in in the whole world. Everyone of us knew how to swim like a fish, our parents having made us learn as soon as we were old enough to--like everybody in the world should.

Say, you should have seen the way our mystery began to come to life while we were still on the shore before splashing ourselves in.

All of a sudden Little Jim, who was undressing in the shade of a willow where he always hangs his clothes, yelled to us in a very excited voice for him, “Hey, Bill! Circus! Poetry! Everybody! Come here quick! Hurry! Look what I found!”

Well, when Little Jim or any of our gang calls in an excited voice like that, it always sends a half dozen thrills through me because it nearly always means something extra special.

Before I knew it, I was galloping across to where he was, my shirt in one hand and one of my overall legs in the other, getting there as quick as the rest of us. I also managed to grab up a stick on my way just in case Little Jim might have spied a water moccasin or some other kind of snake, of which there are maybe twenty different varieties around Sugar Creek.

Little Jim was standing there holding his clothes in one hand and pointing down with an excited right forefinger to something on the ground on a little strip of sand at the water’s edge.

At first I didn’t see a thing, except some shaded water where about fifty or more small, black, flat whirligig beetles were racing round in excited circles on the surface of the water. Right away I smelled the smell of ripe apples, which is the kind of odor a whirligig beetle gives off, which anybody who knows anything about whirligig beetles knows comes from a kind of milky fluid which they use to protect themselves from being eaten by fish or some kind of water bird or something else.

Even Poetry didn’t see what Little Jim was excited about. “Education again,” he said with a disgruntled snort and turned back to the swimming hole.

Dragonfly, who wasn’t interested in Pop’s and my new hobby, grunted too and also sneezed, saying, “I’m allergic to the smell of _sweet bugs_,”--that being a common name for those lively, little, ripe-apple-smelling beetles.

“They’re whirligig beetles,” I said, wanting to defend Little Jim for calling us over in such an excited voice for what the rest of the gang would think was almost nothing.

“Look, everybody! Look! See, it’s a clue!” Little Jim yelled.

Then my eyes dived in the direction his finger was really pointing and I saw what he saw. Boy, oh boy! A lively thrill started whirligigging in my very surprised brain, for what to my wondering eyes had appeared but, half hidden in the grass, a pair of woman’s new shoes--very small, expensive looking, white pumps with all-green, extra-high heels and with a heart-shaped design across the toes that looked kinda like the leaves from a ground ivy, like the ones that grew all around Sarah Paddler’s tombstone.

What on _earth_, I thought and remembered that Pop had said, “Earth on _what?_” when I saw there actually were some yellowish-brown earth stains on those extra-high heels of those newish-looking, pretty, woman’s shoes.

Just that second Dragonfly said, “Ps-s-st! Listen, everybody!”--which everybody did, and there it was again as plain as a Sugar Creek cloudless day, a sharp bobwhite call from down the creek somewhere, “Bob-white! Bob-white! Poor-Bob-white!”

5

Say, if that bobwhite call was from a real quail, then we didn’t have anything to worry about, but we knew that honest-to-goodness quails not only don’t make their very pretty calls in the middle of the night, but also they don’t do it in the middle of a sultry, mid-summer, sunny afternoon--or if they do I don’t remember having heard any do it around Sugar Creek.

If it was a human being calling like a quail, then what?

And if it was a _man_ human being, we would all want to scramble ourselves out of there and hide somewhere so that whoever he was wouldn’t see us; but if it was a _woman_ human being, who had made the quail call--which it might have been, I thought, on account of the woman’s shoes lying there in the sand beside Little Jim--then every single one of us ought to make a headfirst dive toward getting his clothes on.

Before we could start to try to decide what to do, we heard the quail call again and this time it was a lot nearer than it had been--in fact it seemed like it wasn’t a hundred feet distant and had come from the direction of the spring from which we ourselves had just come. That meant that the person, man or woman, was maybe walking in the same path we had been running in a little while before. We wouldn’t have even half enough time to get our clothes on before running to hide.

I looked all around our tense circle to see if the rest of the gang had any ideas as to what to do and it seemed like not a one of us could do a thing except stand stock-still, with his eyes and ears glued to the direction from which the last quail call had come.

“Quick, Dragonfly!” I heard myself say, taking charge of things and shouldn’t have tried to on account of Big Jim is our leader when he is with us. “Get those shoes, quick, and let’s get out of here!”

But Big Jim took my leadership away from me in a split second by saying, “Leave those shoes alone! Don’t you dare touch ’em! If anything has happened, we don’t want our fingerprints on them!”

In less than a fourth of a jiffy we were scrambling up the side of the slope leaving those shoes about eighteen inches from the whirligig beetles, and with all our minds whirligigging like everything--some of us with our clothes half on and others with them half off and the rest of the gang with them all off--and with my mind a little off too, maybe--we were getting ourselves fast out of there.

At the top of the little slope we came to the narrow footpath, zipped across it and disappeared into the tall corn--that being one of Dragonfly’s pop’s cornfields. I knew that on the opposite side of that rather narrow strip of cornfield was the bayou, which was divided into two parts with a longish pond on either end of it, and each of those ponds had in it some very lazy water in which there were a few lone-wolf, mud pickerel or _barred pickerel_, as some people called them. Between the two ponds there was a narrow strip of soggy, marshy soil and a little path that was bordered by giant ragweeds. This was a sort of shortcut to the woods from the old swimming hole. Once we got to the woods we could follow the rail fence like we had done last night and come out at the place where Little Jim had killed the bear, which you have probably read about in one of the other Sugar Creek Gang stories. As you know, that was at the bottom of Strawberry Hill; and at the top of the hill is the old cemetery and the hole in the ground beside Sarah Paddler’s tombstone.

There we would be safe from whoever was coming up that path, nearer and nearer every second--that is, if he was dangerous.

As quick as we were far enough into the tall corn to be hidden from sight of the path, we dropped down on the ground to listen and to look to see if we could see what was going on. As you know, corn blades are not as thick at the bottom of the stalks as they are at the top so if anybody was coming up the path, we could see his feet if we were lying on the ground.

Poetry, who was real close to me like he nearly always is, whispered in my ear, saying, “Hey, sh-h-h! There he is!”

I looked and saw the cuffs of somebody’s trousers standing at the end of my corn row in the very place where we always left the path to dive down the incline into our willow-and-shrubbery-protected outdoor dressing room. Then came a startling quail call again and this time it seemed so near it almost scared me out of what few wits I hadn’t already been scared out of.

I waited, wondering if there would be an answer, and then what to my astonished ears should come but the sound of a turtledove’s low, sad, lonesome call from the other direction farther up the path.

Almost right away I saw the skirt of a woman’s yellowish dress coming out of our green dressing room. I also noticed that she was barefoot. Straining my ears in their direction I could hear her talking and complaining about something like a boy does when he gets called by his mother to leave his play--and shouldn’t. I could hear the man’s voice too, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying.

A jiffy later I heard her say, “I was having so much fun wading in the riffles, and--look! I found this--a big Wash Board shell! I’ll bet I’ll find a pearl in it! Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I did find one worth hundreds of dollars?”

And I heard the man say, “That’s fine, but it’s time for your rest. Let’s get back to the tent.”