Part 3

_So!_ I thought. They were camping somewhere up in Old Man Paddler’s woods and that meant they would either have to get their drinking water at the spring where our gang met everyday when our parents would let us, or they would have to come to our house to get it out of the iron pitcher-pump at the end of the boardwalk twenty feet from our back door and not more than fifteen feet from our grape arbor.

For some reason it didn’t make me feel very good. Of course, Old Man Paddler owned nearly all the territory around Sugar Creek and he had a right to let anybody camp on it that wanted to, but it sorta seemed like the whole territory belonged to the gang, especially the woods around the spring on account of our bare feet had walked on nearly every square inch of it. We had climbed nearly every tree and rested in the shade of every one of them and it was too much like having company at our house. You don’t feel free to yell and scream and give loon calls and go screeching through the woods, yelling like wild Indians or anything, when somebody strange is camping there. You even have to comb your hair when you are outdoors if there happens to be a city woman around.

I thought and felt all that while we were still lying on the sandy soil of Dragonfly’s pop’s cornfield and the man and the woman were still not more than a few rods up the path on their way towards the spring.

They were out of hearing distance now, but I could see the movement the tall weeds were making as they swayed back into place after the man and woman had gone through, and the movement was like it is when the wind blows across our wheat field.

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

“What on _earth?_” I said using my nervous voice before any of the rest of the gang did.

Circus, trying to be funny, said, “Seven boys are.”

We would have to go in swimming now to get the sand of Dragonfly’s cornfield off ourselves. Besides I had some dirt in my red hair too and it would have to be dived out.

It was a not-very-happy gang of boys that sneaked back to our green, leaf-shaded, dressing room and went in swimming.

“Did any of you guys hear him say ‘Let’s get back to the tent’?” I asked.

“Sure,” Poetry said, “what of it?”

“What _of_ it?” I exclaimed. “Why, that means they are camping up there in the woods, somewhere, and we’ll have to be half-scared half to death every time we go in swimming for fear some woman and her husband will hear or see us, or else we’ll have to wear bathing suits,”--which none of our gang had ever worn in our whole lives.

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

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

It happened like this. Little Jim had already finished swimming and was dressing over by the willow where he always dresses and where the whirligig beetles were still in swimming having a sweet time going round and round on the surface of the water like as many boys and girls on skates can do on Sugar Creek in the wintertime.

Little Jim had just finished shoving his head through the neck of his shirt and was reaching for his overalls that were hanging on the willow when all of a sudden he let out another excited yell like he had done before. “Hey, Bill! Circus! Poetry! Everybody! Come here quick! Hurry! Look what I found. It’s somebody’s billfold!”

By the time I got the water out of my ears and eyes and could see, I saw him holding up for us to look at a very pretty, brown billfold like the kind Mom carries in her handbag.

Not waiting to finish getting the water out of my ears and eyes, I went splashety-gallop straight for Little Jim, who was on the shore by the willow still holding up for us to see, the brown leather billfold. Nearly all the rest of the gang were already splashing their different ways toward Little Jim and almost all of us got there at the same time.

Say, when those fifty or more black, flat, oval whirligig beetles saw or heard or felt us coming in such a noisy, splashy hurry out of our swimming hole toward theirs, they got more scared than a gang of boys would if a dozen cows were stampeding in their direction. In a jiffy, like whirligig beetles do when they are badly frightened, they stopped going around in their fast, excited circles and dived under the water to hide themselves on the bottom of Sugar Creek so that by the time I got there, there wasn’t a one in sight and only the smell of ripe apples was left.

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

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

* * * * *

Well, what do you do with a fancy, woman’s billfold when you find it on the ground in a boys’ outdoor dressing room? Do you open the billfold to see what’s in it or do you just open it to see if a name is on the identification card in one of its clearview windows, which most billfolds have in them for the owner’s name and address and for pictures of different members of the family or favorite friends?

Since Big Jim was the leader of our gang, Little Jim handed the billfold to him and right away Big Jim said, “It probably belongs to the turtledove that was here a little while ago looking for her high-heeled shoes. We’d better get dressed quick and take out after her and her bobwhite husband or brother, and see if we can find her and give the billfold back to her.”

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

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

Boy, oh boy, you should have seen me crowd my way into the middle of our huddle to Big Jim’s side to see what Dragonfly had thought he saw, and to my whirligigging surprise I saw what looked like one of the cutest pictures of my baby sister, Charlotte Ann, I had ever seen. In fact, it was one I had never seen before and I wondered when Mom had had it taken and how on earth a barefoot woman, who dug holes in a cemetery at night, had gotten it.

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

Also Charlotte Ann was wearing a very cute baby bonnet and a stylish-looking coat with a lot of lacy stuff around the collar. I didn’t remember her having any outfit like that at all, although Mom could have bought it and had her picture taken one day in town when I hadn’t known it.

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

“It’s _not_ a picture of Charlotte Ann,” Little Jim said, who managed to get his small, curly head in close enough to take a look. “She’s got more hair than that.”

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

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

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

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

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

6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7

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

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

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

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