Part 4

While still there, the grub develops into a wiggling, twisting, squirming warble and finally works its way out through the air hole and tumbles off to the ground, and if it is spring and it doesn’t get eaten up by a cowbird or a grackle or some other bird, it gets hard and black and finally changes into a fly on the inside of itself. Then as quick as it is a fly, it crawls out of itself and makes a dive for the first cow it can find, starting to lay eggs as fast as it can before its six short days of noisy, buzzing fly-life are over.

I was remembering all that as I galloped along after Dragonfly’s pop’s stampeding cows. I was also remembering that in the wintertime in some parts of America, starlings, and even magpies light on the backs of cows and start pecking away on them, trying to dig out the warbles with their sharp bills.

Boy, oh boy, if I was a cow and one or a half-dozen of those very high-voiced, buzzing flies was trying to lay her eggs on me and I knew what would happen if they did, I would most certainly beat it for the shade, which warble flies don’t like. Or if I could, I would find somebody’s bayou or a little stream somewhere, splash myself out into it and stand in the water up to my sides like I had seen cows do all around Sugar Creek for years without knowing before why they did it.

Say, you should have seen Dragonfly’s pop’s cows ignore the few rails on the fence when they got to it. They broke right through without stopping and disappeared in a tail-swishing hurry into the brush. By the time we got to the fence ourselves, those cows were down in the sluggish water of the pond at the east end of the bayou.

Maybe I’d better tell you that Pop says that every year American meat packers throw away enough grubby meat to feed eighty-three thousand people for a whole year--all on account of the crazy warble flies. Also, Pop says, a lot of cows’ hides have holes in them when they are butchered and people lose money that way too on account of that part of the cow is where the leather is generally best--and what good is a piece of leather for making shoes or leather goods if it has a hole in it? So a boy ought never to drive a bunch of cows out of a creek or a pond on a hot summer day, but should let them stay there in the shade if they want to.

Cows don’t give as much milk while they are worrying about noisy, whining flies, either, and beef cattle don’t get fat as fast, it not being easy to get fat if you worry a lot, which is maybe why some people are too thin.

Anyway that is how come we didn’t get to look for the tent of the “turtledove” and the “bobwhite” until quite a while later. It took us almost an hour to get Dragonfly’s pop’s cows out of the bayou, we _having_ to drive them out on account of the cornfield being on the other side, and you can’t trust a cow with a cornfield any more than you can trust a boy or a girl with an open cookie jar.

If one of Dragonfly’s pop’s red heifers hadn’t gotten a stubborn streak and decided she wanted to go on a wild run all through the woods, we might not have found the tent for a long time, but while we were chasing her all around through the bushes and up and down the creek, she accidentally took us right to it.

“It was swell of that old red heifer to show us where the tent is, wasn’t it?” Dragonfly said, after we had finally gotten her and the other cows back in Dragonfly’s pop’s dark cattle-shed away from the flies, and we were back again not more than a hundred yards from the tent itself.

“Maybe the heifer smelled the calf-skin in the folded billfold in Bill’s hip pocket, and it scared her. Maybe she thought Bill wanted to make a lot of billfolds out of her hide,” Little Tom Till said, trying to be funny, and Circus said, “I don’t think heifers think.”

One of the first things we noticed about the camp when we got close to it, was that they had picked one of the very worst camp sites in the whole woods. It was up in the middle of the woods, halfway between our house and the spring, away back off the barefoot boys’ path so that I couldn’t have seen it when I had gone galloping to the spring a couple of hours ago. It was under one of the biggest, widest-spreading oak trees around there anywhere and would have shade all day, which would mean it wouldn’t get a chance to dry out after a damp night, which nights often are in any territory where there is a river or a creek or a lake. It wouldn’t have any morning sun on it, at all, like tents are supposed to have.

Any boy scout knows that nobody should ever pitch a tent under an oak tree on account of the droppings from an oak tree will make the canvas rot quicker and before you know it, you will have little holes scattered all over your roof, which will make it leak like everything when it rains. Also, I noticed, they had pitched the tent so the flap would be open toward the west and anybody who lives at Sugar Creek knows that you shouldn’t have the tent flap on the west side because that is the direction most of our rains come from.

Besides, they would have to go too far to get their drinking and cooking water--clear down to the spring or else in the opposite direction to the Collins family’s iron, pitcher-pump.

“They certainly don’t know very much about camp life,” Big Jim said, he having been a boy scout once and had taught us all these different things about the best kind of camp site to pick.

“It’s a good thing they got a shovel,” Little Tom Till said, seeing one standing against an ironwood tree by their station wagon.

“Why?” Dragonfly said and Little Tom Till answered, like a schoolboy who had studied his lesson and knew it by heart, “Because, where the tent’s pitched now, if it rains, the water will run in from all sides and make a lake out of the floor.”

Well, we brought it to a vote to see which one of us had to go up and knock on the tent pole and ask if anybody had lost a billfold.

It took only a jiffy for me to win the election by a six to one vote-six for me and one against me, my vote being the one that was against. So while the rest of the gang kept itself hidden behind some pawpaw bushes, I stepped out into the open and mosied along like I was only interested in seeing different things in the woods, such as a red squirrel in a tree or some kind of new beetle. Also I was walking carefully so as not to awaken them if they were asleep, especially the one who was supposed to take an afternoon nap.

Say, I forgot to tell you that tent wasn’t any ordinary brown canvas tent, but was green and was a sorta three-way tent, shaped like some of the ranch houses that people were building in our town. I could tell just by looking at the tent that it would be wonderful for a gang of boys to go camping in. One of the wings of the tent was only a canvas roof with the sides made out of some kind of netting to keep out different kinds of flies such as houseflies, deer flies and blowflies. It could even keep out a horse-fly or a warble fly if one wanted to get in, which one probably would if somebody’s cow accidentally strayed into the tent. It would also keep out June beetles at night.

Right away I saw somebody was resting on a cot inside one of the wings and as quick as that I was too bashful to go any closer because I could tell it was the woman herself lying there and she was maybe asleep, and it isn’t polite to wake anybody out of a nap if you know he is taking one.

My heart was beating pretty fast on account of I was a little scared to do what I had been voted to do, but the man must have seen me or else heard all of us because right then he opened the flap of the main part of the tent and came out with the forefinger of one hand up to his lips and the other hand making the kind of motions a person’s hand makes when he wants you to keep still and not say a word.

I noticed that the brownish haired man was about as old as my reddish-haired pop and that he had a magazine in his hand like he had been reading. He also motioned for me to stop where I was, which I did and he kept on coming toward me with his finger still up to his lips and shaking a warning finger with his other hand, which meant, “Sh-h-h--don’t say a word.”

I walked back with him to where the rest of the gang was behind the pawpaw bushes and I noticed that he had a very nice face. Also he looked like an important city person, who might be extra smart and maybe had charge of a big office or maybe a store or something.

“Is there anything I can do for you boys?” he said in a very deep-sounding voice.

Even though he had a half-sad look in his eyes, I could tell he was a kind person and probably liked boys.

I looked at Big Jim and he looked at me and we all looked at different ones of us. Finally the rest of the gang’s twelve eyes focused on my freckled face and red hair so I looked up at the man and said, “Ye-s-s, sir, Mr. Bobwhite--I mean. Yes, sir. We found a billfold up along the creek--”

Little Tom Till cut in then and shouldn’t have, saying, “Little Jim here found it and it’s brown and has some dollar bills in it and three fives and one ten--”

“Sh--!” Big Jim shushed Little Tom Till and the man grinned with a twinkle in his eyes and I saw that the edge of one of his upper incisors had gold on it.

“That’s all right. I can describe it for you,” he said, which he did, giving all the details. “It has a tooled flying horse on the leather on the back and the initials F. E., and the name Frances Everhard in the inside on the identification card. The license number of our car is 7-34567. I was just ready to start looking for it.”

There was something about the man that I liked although there was an expression in his eyes that made it seem like he was a little bit worried. I could tell he was the kind of man that would be kind to his wife or his children’s mother--as Pop is to Mom. He might even be willing to do the dishes for her without being asked if she was extra tired. I noticed he kept looking at Little Jim like he thought he was a very wonderful person.

“So you found it, did you, young man?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” Little Jim piped up in his mouse-like voice.

“Well, I want to thank you. I have a reward for you. If you boys come back later, say in about an hour, my wife will wish to thank you in person. She has some cookies that she bought on purpose for you--just in case you happened to call to see us. She is having her nap now--doctor’s orders are for her to sleep an hour every afternoon, you know.”

We let the man have the billfold, which he took, and without opening it, shoved it into his hip pocket. “Frances will be so thankful. I think she doesn’t know she lost it yet--and maybe we won’t tell her, eh?”

We promised we wouldn’t and he started to walk backwards a little, which meant he was through visiting and we could go on home or somewhere.

“Wait,” Mr. Everhard said and stopped as also did we because we had also started to start in our own direction. “How would one of you boys like to earn a quarter every day by bringing our drinking water from the spring--or from up there at the Collins family house? One of you the Collins boy?”

I could feel myself blushing all over my freckled face, clear up to the roots of my red hair and I started to say, “Yes,” but Dragonfly beat me to it by saying, “_He_ is,”--jerking his thumb in my direction.

The man went on to explain, “This isn’t the best place to pitch a tent--so far from a water supply--but somebody told us the spring was your gang’s meeting place so we decided to let you have your own privacy.”

Big Jim was pretty smart, I thought, when he spoke up politely, saying, “That was very thoughtful of you.” Then he added with a Big Jim grin, “You’ll probably have more privacy yourself up here away from the noisy spring,”--meaning us. Then he added, “Sure, we will be glad to bring your drinking water every day, won’t we, Bill?”

“Sure,” I said to Big Jim. “I’ll even help you carry it.”

He was almost halfway back to his tent when he stopped and hurried back to us again. “Mr. Paddler has given us permission to dig a few holes around here in the woods,” he said, “so don’t be too surprised if you find a new one every now and then.”

I started to say, “What are you digging them for,” but didn’t ’cause Big Jim scowled and shook his head at me.

A little later at the spring itself we stopped for a drink and Circus said, “Old Man Paddler doesn’t own the _cemetery_. Who would give them permission to dig out there in the cemetery at night--and why would they want to do it?”

“Maybe they’re studying different kinds of soil. Maybe they have a lot of glass jars full of different kinds of dirt in the tent or in the station wagon,” Poetry suggested.

“They wouldn’t need to dig such deep holes just to get soil samples,” Big Jim said and I noticed he had a little bit of a worried look on his face.

Poetry had another idea and it was, “How are we going to spend our quarter every day--the one Bill is going to earn for us?”--which wasn’t funny.

Our mystery wasn’t any nearer solved than it had been. One reason why I felt quite disappointed was because I was sorta hoping that whoever had been digging in the cemetery the night before was what the police and detectives call a _ghoul_, which is a person who robs graves, and I was hoping that if it was such a person, maybe the gang could have a chance to help capture him or her.

Well, we had done all we could that afternoon although I was still wondering about the bobwhite whistle and the turtledove call. We talked that over while we were still at the spring and decided that maybe it was the way the man and his wife had of calling to each other--a sort of code or something--like we ourselves had. Whenever he wanted to call her, he could use the quail call and she could answer it by cooing like a turtledove. If that was the meaning of it, it was kinda nice and it showed that even married people could have fun together like my own mom and pop do a lot of times, in fact almost every day.

8

At the supper table at our house that night I think I had never heard Mom and Pop laugh so hard as they did. I was still thinking about the warble flies that had scared the living daylights out of Dragonfly’s pop’s cows, I having told them all about it, crowding my words out between bites, and I was sorta crowding the bites in too fast and shouldn’t have, when Pop said, “The heel flies are pretty bad this year. Nearly every farmer in Sugar Creek has been complaining about them. They have been tormenting Old Brindle something fierce today. I don’t dare turn her out into the pasture without leaving the gate into the barnyard open so she can come rushing back in for the protection of the shade anytime she wants to.”

“Speaking of cows,” Mom said, and her voice sorta lit up like her face does when she has thought of something very interesting or funny. “I read something in a farm magazine today that was about the funniest thing I ever read in my life.”

“What was it?” Pop said.

“Yes, what was it?” I said.

Pop and Mom were always reading things in magazines and telling them to each other and I didn’t always get in on their jokes. Sometimes I had to ask them what they were laughing about and it didn’t always seem as funny to me as it did to them. They also talk to each other about things that are not funny--things they have just that day learned about something in the Bible or something they have studied for next Sunday’s Sunday School lesson.

“I’ll get it and read it for you,” Mom said. She excused herself, left the table, went into the other room and came back with a small magazine. “It’s a ten-year-old school girl’s essay on a cow,” Mom said.

Even before she started reading it I wasn’t sure I was going to like it because I am kinda close to being a ten-year-old boy myself and I could imagine what a ten-year-old girl would write on a cow.

Pop cleared his throat like he was going to read himself or else so he would be ready to laugh when the time came, and Mom started reading while Charlotte Ann wiggled and twisted on her highchair, she not being interested in anybody’s essay on a cow. All Charlotte Ann was interested in about cows was the milk she had to drink three times a day and didn’t always want to, so a story about a cow wouldn’t be funny to her.

Even as I looked at Charlotte Ann I was remembering that there were plenty of unsolved things about our mystery. There was the picture of Charlotte Ann in the billfold; the strange-acting woman who had dug holes in a graveyard at night and had permission to dig them all over the Sugar Creek territory, who had to rest every afternoon, and who went barefoot and waded in the riffles all by herself--stuff like that. Why had she had the picture of Charlotte Ann in her lost and found billfold? I knew that the very second Mom got through reading and she and Pop got through laughing that I would ask her about the picture of Charlotte Ann.

Well, this is what Mom read, she not getting to read more than a few lines before Pop interrupted her and the two of them started laughing. Pop stopped her maybe a half-dozen times before she finished and they laughed and laughed and kept on laughing and Mom wiped her tears and held her kinda half-fat sides and Pop held his ordinary ones and I grinned and scowled. This is it:

“The cow is a mammal. It has six sides--right, left, up and below, inside and outside. At the back is a tail on which hangs a brush. With this it sends the flies away so they don’t fall into the milk. The head is for the purpose of growing horns and so the mouth can be somewhere. The horns are to butt with and the mouth is to moo with. Under the cow, hangs the milk. It is arranged for milking. When people milk, the milk comes and there is never an end to the supply. How the cow does it I have never realized, but it makes more and more. The cow has a fine sense of smell, one can smell it far away. This is the reason for the fresh air in the country.”

Well, that simply doubled up my Mom and Pop in laughter and even Charlotte Ann pounded with her spoon on her ordinary wooden food tray, which I used to pound on years and years ago--the same spoon I had probably pounded with--and she acted like she was having the time of her life.

“What’s the matter, Bill? Isn’t it funny?”

“Not very,” I said. “Anybody who is ten years old ought to know more about cows than that.”

Right away Pop was ready to defend the girl, saying, “She was probably a city girl, who didn’t have any _brothers_,” which also wasn’t very funny.

“Say, Mom,” I said to Mom, “have you had any new pictures taken of Charlotte Ann lately?”

“Why, no. Why do you ask?”

“You sure you haven’t had one taken of her sitting in that fancy highchair in the Sugar Creek Furniture Store?”

“Why, no. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, I just wondered,”--I having made up my mind not to tell her any more.

As soon as supper was over, I started to do the dishes without being asked to, for a change, almost enjoying it on account of I was learning to enjoy doing things for Mom when she was tired. In fact, it makes me feel fine inside--almost as good as I feel when I am eating a piece of ripe watermelon--to do the dishes while she rests, on account of she is a pretty swell mom.

Pop was in the other room with Mom, talking to her while she rested--Mom actually lying down while she was doing it, she being that tired.

“The most friendly couple is camping down in the woods,” I heard Mom say. “They were here this afternoon a little while. She’s the prettiest thing I think I ever saw--kinda fancy though, and was wearing high-heeled shoes--not at all the kind an experienced camper or hiker would wear. They wanted a pail of well-water and I sold them a pound of Old Brindle’s butter, which they are going to keep cool in the spring.”

Hearing Mom say that, I sidled over to the kitchen door with her apron on and with the drying towel in my hands and listened to what else she was saying. I got there too late to get all of it, but part of it was, “She’s just out of the hospital, he told me. She doesn’t look like there’s a thing in the world wrong with her, but her husband--their name is Everhard--says she is under special treatment and she has been released to him. She’s not at all dangerous, but she gets depressed at times, and sometimes right in the middle of the night she gets one of her spells.”

I heard Pop sigh and say, “Being out here in the country with plenty of fresh air and good country food with an understanding husband like that will be good for her. I wonder how long she has been that way.”

And Mom said, “He told me confidentially when she was out in the car that it started about a year ago. She’s all right when she’s all right, but these spells come on and she cries--but she never does anything desperate--only wants to go around digging holes in the ground....”

That was as much as I got to hear right then ’cause the phone rang and when Pop answered, it was Little Jim’s mom, the pianist at the Sugar Creek Church, wanting to talk to Mom about something or other.

Mom was always tickled when it was Little Jim’s mom calling ’cause Little Jim’s mom was her almost best friend and sometimes they talked and talked until one of them had to quit ’cause she smelled something burning on the stove.

Well, I, the maid of the Collins family, went back to the kitchen to slosh my hands around a little longer in the hot sudsy water. Seeing our battery radio on the utility table and wondering what program was on, I wrung the water out of my right hand and turned on the radio, dialing to a station that sometimes had on a story for boys at that time of day. I tuned in just in time to hear the deep-voiced announcer in a terribly excited hurry say something about “those red, dish-pan hands” and then he galloped on to tell all the women listeners to be sure to use a certain kind of fancy-named soap or something that would make their hands soft and pretty almost right away. The soap was also good for washing dishes.

Pop had to come through the kitchen on his way to the barn, so he stopped and listened a jiffy with me. Then he said, “You using the right kind of soap, Son?” and I answered, “I don’t know. I hope so, but I’m afraid I _am_ getting ‘dish-pan hands.’ Look at ’em!” I held my hands out for him to look at and he said with a mischievous grin in his voice, “Looks like you got dish-pan hair too.” Then he turned the radio down a little saying, “Your mother is resting so keep it low.”

“She’s talking on the phone,” I said.

“It’s the same thing. You will find out she will be all full of pep when she gets through,”--which I knew might be the truth because Mom nearly always felt fine when she finished listening and talking to Little Jim’s mom, who was always cheerful on the telephone.

“She smiles with her voice,” Mom always says about Little Jim’s mom.

Pop went on out to the barn with the milk pail to see if the warble flies had tormented Old Brindle so much that day that she didn’t have time to manufacture as much milk as usual and I went on back to my kinda half-cold dishwater.

I was just finishing washing the last dish and was getting ready to start wiping them when Mom finished talking and listening to Little Jim’s mom. But say, when she came in she was still tired. She kinda sighed as she lifted the steaming tea-kettle and poured water over the dishes so she could dry them easier.

All of a sudden I got a half-sad, half-glad feeling in my heart, so I said to her, “You go on back in the other room and rest some more. I’m getting along swell.” I suppose I was glad because for a change I actually wanted to help her and maybe I was sad on account of Mom’s sighs nearly always make me feel that way for some reason.

She sighed again and started in helping me. I decided to let her because I didn’t want to discourage her from helping a tired-out son with his work.