Part 3

Then, all of a disappointing sudden, the brown whatever-it-was disappeared into the shadow of the elderberry bushes, and I heard an exciting whirring noise in the lane on the other side of the fence. A fast jiffy later, an automobile came to noisy-motored life, a pair of head-lamps went on, and an oldish-sounding car went rattling down the lane, headed in the direction of the Sugar Creek school, which is at the end of the lane where it meets the county line road.

Poetry’s long 3-batteried flashlight shot a straight white beam through the firefly-spattered night. It landed ker-flash right on that oldish-looking car as it swished past the iron pitcher pump and disappeared down the hill. A few seconds later, we heard the car go rattlety-crash across the board floor of the branch bridge, the head-lamps lighting up the lane as it sped up the hill on the other side in the direction of the schoolhouse.

_What on earth!_

My mind was still on the car and who might be in it, when I heard Poetry say, “Look! There is our wild animal! He stopped right at the fence! Let’s get him!”

My mind came back to the long brown low very-fat something-or-other we had been chasing a minute before. My eyes got to it at about the same time Poetry’s flashlight socked it ker-wham-flash right in the middle of its fat side.

My feet got there almost as quick as my eyes did.

“What _is_ it?” I exclaimed, looking about for a stick or a club to protect myself, in case I had to.

My imagination had been yelling to me, “It’s some kind of animal, different from anything you’ve ever seen!” so I was terribly disappointed when Poetry let out a disgusted grunt with a surprise in it, saying, “Aw, it’s only an old gunny sack.”

And it was. An old brownish--or rather, _new_, light-brown--gunny sack, with something large inside of it. Fastened to one end was a plastic rope which stretched from the gunny sack back into the elderberry bushes.

We kept on standing stock-still and staring at the thing. Whatever was in the sack wasn’t moving at all, not even breathing, I thought, as we stood studying it and wondering, “What on earth!”

It was large and long and round and very fat and--!

Then like a light turning on in my mind, I knew what was in that brown burlap bag. I knew it as well as I knew my name was Bill Collins, Theodore Collins’ only son. “There’s a watermelon in that bag!” I exclaimed.

Whoever was in that car had probably crawled out into our melon patch, picked the melon, slipped it into this burlap bag, tied the rope to it, and had been hiding here in the bushes, pulling the rope and dragging the melon to him! Doing it that way so nobody would see him walking, carrying it!

Was I ever stirred up in my mind! Yet, there wasn’t any sense in getting too stirred up. A boy couldn’t let himself waste his perfectly good temper in one big explosion, ’cause, as my Pop has told me many a time, you can’t think straight when you are angry. Pop was trying to teach me to _use_ my temper, instead of _losing_ it.

“A temper is a fine thing, if you control it, but not if it controls you,” he has told me maybe five hundred times in my half-long life. As you maybe already know if you’ve read some of the other Sugar Creek Gang stories, my hot temper had gotten me into trouble many a time by shoving me headfirst into an unnecessary fight with somebody who didn’t know how to control his own temper.

In a flash I was down on my haunches beside the burlap bag. “Here,” I said to Poetry, “lend me your knife a minute. Let’s get this old burlap bag off and see if it’s a watermelon!”

“Goose!” Poetry answered me. “I’m wearing my night clothes!” Both of us were, as you already know. His were green-striped, and mine yellow, as I’ve already told you. We both looked ridiculous there in the moonlight.

“Look!” Poetry exclaimed. “Here’s how they were going to get it through the fence!”

My eyes fastened onto the circle of light his flashlight made on a spot back under the elderberry bushes and I noticed there was a hole cut in Pop’s new woven-wire fence, large enough to let a boy through. Boy oh boy, would Pop ever have a hard time using _his_ temper when he saw that tomorrow morning!

But we _had_ to do something _with_ the melon. “Let’s leave it for the gang to see tomorrow,” Poetry suggested. “Let Big Jim decide what to do about it.”

“What to do with Bob Till, you mean,” I said grimly. Already my temper was telling me it was Bob Till himself, the Sugar Creek Gang’s worst enemy, who had been trying to steal one of our melons.

Just thinking that started my blood to running faster in my veins. How many times during the past two years we had had trouble with John Till’s oldest boy, Bob, and how many times Big Jim, the Sugar Creek Gang’s fierce-fighting leader, had had to give Bob a licking--and always Bob was just as bad a boy afterward, and maybe even worse.

I was remembering that only last week at our very latest Gang meeting, Big Jim had told us: “I’m _through_ fighting Bob Till. I’m going to try kindness. We’re _all_ going to try it. Let’s show him that a Christian boy doesn’t have to fight every time somebody knocks a chip off his shoulder--and let’s not put the chip on our shoulder in the first place.”

At that meeting, which had been at the spring, Dragonfly had piped up and asked, “What’s a ‘chip on your shoulder’ mean?”

Poetry had answered for Big Jim by saying, “It’s a doubled-up fist, shaking itself under somebody else’s nose--daring him to hit you first!”

Big Jim ignored Poetry’s supposed-to-be-funny answer and said, “Bob is on probation, you know, and he has to behave, or the sentence that is hanging over him will go into effect and he’ll have to spend a year in the reformatory. We wouldn’t want that. We have got to help him prove that he can behave himself. If he thinks we are mad at him, he will be tempted to do things to get even with us. As long as this sentence is hang--”

Dragonfly cut in, then, with one of his dumbish questions, at the same time trying to show how smart he was in school, asking, “What kind of a sentence--_declarative_, or _interrogative_, or _imperative_, or _exclamatory?_”

Big Jim’s jaw set, and he gave Dragonfly an exclamatory look. Then he went on, shocking us almost out of our wits when he told us something not a one of us knew yet: “One of the conditions of his being on probation instead of in the reformatory is that he go to church at least once a week for a year. That means he’ll probably come to _our_ church, and _that_ means he’ll be in our Sunday school class, and--”

I got one of the queerest feelings I ever had in my life. Whirlwindlike thoughts were spiraling in my mind. I just couldn’t imagine Bob Till in church and Sunday school. It would certainly seem funny to have him there with nice clothes on and his hair combed, listening to our preacher preach from the Bible. What if I had to sit beside him myself--I, who could hardly think his name without feeling my muscles tighten and my fists start to double up?

Another thing Big Jim said at that meeting was, “You guys want to promise that you will stick with me and all of us try to help him?”

And we had promised.

* * * * *

And now here was Bob already doing something that would make the sentence drop on his head. Whoever was in that car just _had_ to be Bob Till on account of he had a car just like that--the car being what people call a “hot rod.”

“Listen!” Poetry exclaimed. I listened in every direction there is, then I heard and saw at the same time a car coming back up the lane, its head-lamps hitting us full in the face.

“Quick!” Poetry cried. “Down!”

We stooped low behind the elderberry bushes and waited for the car to pass.

“Hey!” I said to us. “It’s slowing down. It’s going to stop,” which it did. The same rattling old jalopy. In a split jiffy we were scooting along the fence row to a spot about twenty-five feet farther up the lane. And there we crouched behind some giant ragweeds and goldenrod and orange-rayed, black-eyed Susans--Pop having ordered me a week ago to cut down the ragweeds with our scythe, and I hadn’t done it yet. I nearly always cut the goldenrod too, on account of Dragonfly, the pop-eyed member of our Gang, is allergic to them as well as to the ragweeds and he nearly always uses this lane going to and from school.

My heart was pounding in my ears as I crouched there with Poetry, he in his green-striped pajamas and I in my plain yellow ones.

“Get down!” I hissed to him.

“I _am_ down,” he whispered.

“Flatter!” I ordered him, “so you won’t be seen! Can’t you lie _flat?_”

“I can only lie round,” he answered saucily, which, under any other circumstances, would have sounded funny, he being so extra large around.

“Somebody is getting out,” Poetry whispered.

“How many are there?”

“Only one, I think.”

Then I felt Poetry’s body grow tense. “There goes one of your watermelons,” he hissed to me.

I saw it at the same time he did--the brown burlap bag being pulled deeper into the elderberry bushes--and I knew somebody was actually stealing one of our melons. In a jiffy it would be gone!

“Let’s jump him,” I exclaimed to Poetry. My blood was tingling for battle. I started to my feet, but he stopped me, saying, “_Sh!_” in a subdued but savage whisper. “Detectives don’t stop a man from stealing; they let him do it first, then they capture him.”

It wasn’t an easy thing to do--to do nothing, watching that watermelon being hoisted into the back seat of that car. My muscles were aching to get into some new kind of action that was different from hoeing potatoes, milking cows, gathering eggs, and other things any ordinary boy’s muscles could do. I was straining to go tearing up the fence row to the elderberry bushes, dive through the hole in the fence, make a football-style tackle on that thief’s hind legs and bring him down. I was pretty sure, if all the Gang had been there, one or the other of us wouldn’t have been able to stay stopped stock-still. He would have rushed in, and the rest of us would be like Jack, in the poem about “Jack and Jill”--we would go tumbling after, even if some of us got knocked down and got our crowns cracked.

But the rest of the Gang wasn’t there. Besides it was already too late to do anything. In less time than it has taken me to write it, the melon in the gunny sack was in the car. The thief was in the driver’s seat, and the hot rod was shooting like an arrow with two blazing heads down the moonlit lane.

Poetry shot a long powerful beam from his flashlight straight toward the car, socking it on the license plate, and I knew his mind--which is so good it’s almost like what is called a “photographic mind”--would remember the number if he had been able to see it.

It’s like having a big blown-up balloon suddenly burst in your face to have your excited adventure come to an end like that; kinda like a fish must feel when it’s nibbling on a fat fishing worm down in Sugar Creek and, all of a disappointing sudden, having its nice juicy dinner jerked away from it by the fisherman who is on the other end of the line.

There wasn’t anything left to do except go back to the tent and to bed and to sleep.

Just thinking that reminded me of the fact that I probably would need another pair of pajamas to sleep in, the yellow pair I had on having gotten soiled while I was lying in the grass behind the goldenrod and ragweed and black-eyed Susans. “We’ll have to wash our feet again before we can crawl into Mom’s nice clean sheets,” I said, as we started to start back to the tent.

“Maybe it would be easier and cause less worry for your mother if we just climbed into our cots and went to sleep, and tomorrow if your mother gets angry at us we can explain about the watermelon and that will get her angry at the thief instead of at us. We could offer to help her _wash_ the sheets, anyway.”

It was a pair of very sad, very mad boys that threaded their way through the watermelon patch to the pasture and across it to the gate at the barn and on toward the tent. There were still a few cicadas busy with their drums, I noticed, in spite of the fact that I was all stirred up in my mind about the watermelon. Thinking about the seeds in their long, straight rows, buried in the dark red flesh of the watermelon, like seeds always are, just like somebody had planted them, reminded me of the stars in the sky overhead, and I was wishing I could actually look up and see the Dog Star, which is the brightest star in all the Sugar Creek sky but which, during dog days--which are the hot and sultry days of July and August--you have to get up in the morning to see--on account of the Dog Star always comes up with the sun in July and August and, in a very little while, fades out of sight.

In the winter, in February, the Dog Star is almost straight overhead at night and is like a shining star at the top of a Christmas tree--but who wants to go out in the middle of a zero-cold night just to look at a star, even if it is the brightest one that ever shines?

“Are you sleepy?” Poetry asked me, when we reached the plum tree.

“Not very,” I said, “but I’m still so mad I can’t see straight.”

“You want to go back down to the spring with me?” he asked, his hand on the tent awning, about to lift it for us to go in.

“Are you crazy?” I asked.

“I’m a detective. I want to go down there and see if we can find the oiled paper you threw away when we heard those girls at the top of the hill.”

“My mother has dozens of old bread wrappers,” I told him. “I’ll ask her for one for you in the morning.”

“Listen, Chum,” Poetry whispered, as he let the tent awning drop into place and grabbed me by the arm, “I said I’m a detective, and I’m looking for a clue! I’ve a hunch there was something in that paper--something whoever put it in that melon, didn’t want to get wet!”

I knew, from having studied about watermelons that summer, that the edible part of a watermelon is made up of such things as protein, and fat, and ash, and calcium, and sugar and water and just fibre. Six per cent of the melon is sugar and over ninety-two per cent is water. You could eat a piece of watermelon the size of Charlotte Ann’s head and it would be like drinking more than a pint of sweetened water. I could understand that anything anybody put on the inside of the melon would get wet, almost as wet as if you had dunked it in a pail of water. “Look,” I said to Poetry, “I don’t want to show my face or risk my neck anywhere near a campful of excitable girls who can’t tell a boy in a pair of red-striped pajamas from a zebra and who might start screaming bloody murder if they happened to see us again.”

“I’ll have to go alone, then,” Poetry announced firmly, and in a jiffy, his fat green-striped back was all I could see of him as he waddled off across the moonlit lawn toward the walnut tree and the gate.

* * * * *

It was either let him go alone on a wild goose chase, or go with him and run the risk of stumbling into a whirlwind of honest-to-goodness trouble.

I caught up to him by the time he had reached “Theodore Collins” on our mailbox, and whispered to him, “What do you think might have been wrapped up in it?”

Poetry’s voice sounded mysterious, and also very serious, as he answered, “Didn’t you read the paper this morning?”

I nearly always read the daily paper, part of it anyway, almost as soon as it landed in the mailbox, sometimes racing to get to the box before Pop did. Pop himself always read the editorials and Mom, the fashions and the new recipes and the accidents, and also _worried_ about the accidents outloud to Pop a little. Mom always felt especially sad whenever anything had happened to a little baby.

“Sure,” I puffed to Poetry as I loped along after him in the shadowy moonlight. “What’s that got to do with a wad of oiled paper in a plugged watermelon?”

His answer as it came panting back over his fat shoulder, started the shivers vibrating in my spine again--and if I had been a cicada with a sound-producing organ inside me somewhere, my shaking thoughts would have filled the whole woods with noise.

Here are Poetry’s gasping words, “Whoever broke into the Super Market last week might be hiding out in this part of the county--maybe even along the creek here somewhere!”

“The paper didn’t say that,” I said.

“It didn’t have to,” Poetry shouted back. “It didn’t say where he _was_ hiding, did it? I’ve got a hunch he’s right here in our territory. Maybe in the swamp or----”

I’d had a lot of experiences with Poetry’s hunches, and he’d been right so many times, that whenever he said he had one, I felt myself getting all of a sudden in a mood for a big surprise of some kind.

But this time his idea didn’t seem to make sense--not quite, anyway, so I said, “Who on earth would want to stuff a lot of money inside a watermelon?”

Poetry’s answer was a grouchy grunt, followed by a scolding: “I said I had a _hunch!_ I _know_ we’ll find something important going on around here ... Now, stop asking dumb questions and hurry up!” With that, that barrel-shaped, detective-minded boy set a still faster pace for me as we dashed down the hill to the place where I had just had the humiliating experience of riding a wild green, legless bronco in a reservoir full of cold water.

The red-striped pajamas I had been wearing must have made me look ridiculous to those girl scouts, I thought. I hoped they wouldn’t come back to the spring again while Poetry and I were looking for what he called a “clue.”

4

Several times, before that night was finally over, I thought how much more sensible we had been if we had curled ourselves up in our cots in the tent and gone sound asleep.

It’s better to be in bed when you have your night clothes on than scouting a watermelon patch or splashing in a pool of spring water or crouching shivering behind ragweeds and goldenrod and black-eyed Susans in a fence row, or searching with a flashlight for a wad of oiled paper which somebody has stuffed into a watermelon.

Especially is it better to be in bed, like any decent boy should be, than to be lying on your stomach under an evergreen tree with pine needles pricking you and you don’t dare move or you’ll be heard by somebody you are straining your eyes to see, while he does the most ridiculous thing you ever heard of at the very spring where you yourself were just an hour ago.

Boy oh boy, let me tell you about what happened, the second time Poetry and I went to the spring that night.

When we came to the beech tree, on whose close-grained gray bark the Gang and maybe thirty other people had carved their initials through the years, we stopped to look the situation over. There was a stretch of moonlit open space about twenty yards wide between us and the leaning linden tree which is at the top of the incline leading down to the spring.

The shadowy hulk of the old black widow stump in the middle of the moonlit space looked like a black ghost. I kept straining my ears in the direction of the linden tree wondering if there might be anybody down at the spring; also I kept my ears and my eyes focused in the direction of the pawpaw bushes away off to the left where the girls’ camp was. I could smell the odor of wet ashes and I knew that the girls had had a campfire near the black widow stump--there being an outdoor fireplace there for picnickers to use for wiener roasts, steak fries, and for making coffee--and also for giving a picnic a friendly atmosphere. I was only half glad to notice that the girls had put out the very last spark of their fire, ’cause I hated to have to admit that a flock of girls knew one of the most important safety rules of a good camper, which is: “Never leave a campfire burning, but put it out before you go.”

From the beech tree we moved east maybe a hundred feet, then made a moonlit dash for the row of evergreens which border the rail fence that skirts the top of the hill above the bayou.

“Okay,” Poetry panted when we got there. “We’ll work our way down from here. As soon as we get to the bottom, we’ll turn on the light and start looking for our clue.”

And then I heard something--a noise out in the creek somewhere, as plain as a Dog Star sunrise. It was the sound of an oar in a rowlock.

Poetry and I shushed each other at the same time, straining our ears in the shadowy direction the sound had come from.

At the same instant, we dropped down onto the pine needles under the tree.

“It’s somebody in a boat,” Poetry whispered. “He’s pulling in at the spring.”

I could see the boat now, emerging from the shadow of the trees down the shore. It had come up the creek from the direction of the Sugar Creek bridge.

Now the boat was being steered toward the shore. I knew if it was anybody who knew the shoreline, he wouldn’t stop directly in front of the spring, ’cause the overflow drained into the creek there and it would be a muddy landing. Below it, or just above it, was a good place.

“There’s only one man in it,” Poetry said. Even in the shadowy moonlight, I could tell it was a red boat and one we’d never seen before.

Then I did get a startled surprise, and my whole mind began whirling with wondering what on earth in a gunny sack! No sooner had the prow of the boat touched the gravelled shore than whoever was in it was up and out and beaching the boat, wrapping the guy rope, which is called a “painter,” around the small maple that grew there. Then he stepped back into the boat, stooped, picked up something in both hands--something dark and long and----!

“Hey!” my mind’s voice was screaming, while my _actual_ voice was keeping still. “It’s a gunny sack! It’s the old brown burlap bag we saw in the watermelon patch a half hour ago!”

In a minute the man was out of the boat and disappearing in the path in the shadow of the trees we knew about. A second later, he emerged at the opening in the board fence, worked his way through, and moved straight toward the spring, lugging the burlap bag with the melon in it.

“Let’s jump him!” I whispered to Poetry.

Poetry put his lips to my ear and whispered back, “Nothing doing. Detectives don’t capture a criminal _before_ he commits a crime. They let him do it first, _then_ they capture him!”

“He’s already done it,” I said, “at the melon patch!”

“If you’ll be patient,” Poetry whispered back, “we’ll find out what we want to know.”

We kept on watching from behind the evergreen while the man at the spring hoisted his burlap bag over the cement lip of the pool and let it down inside. He stayed in a stooping, stock-still position for several jiffies, then began doing something with his hands.

“He’s about the size of Big Jim,” I whispered to Poetry.

“Or Circus,” he answered.

“Big Jim,” I insisted--only I knew that neither of them would steal a watermelon and bring it here by night in a boat.

Just then I shifted my position a little on account of I had been sitting on my foot and it was beginning to hurt. It was a crazy time to lose my balance and have to struggle awkwardly to keep from sliding down the incline, but that is what I did, and for a few anxious seconds I was looking after myself instead of watching the mysterious movements at the spring.

When, a jiffy later, I was focusing my vision in his direction, the man or extra large boy--whichever he was--had left the spring and was on his way back to the boat. For a split second we lost sight of him in the shadows, then we saw him again with his back to us at the boat, heard the painter being unwrapped from the tree.

In only a few more seconds the boat was gliding out into the creek--but only a few feet, for right away the oarsman steered it toward the shore and it became only a dim outline in the shadow of the trees that grew along the steep incline.

Poetry, beside me, sighed an exasperated sigh and said, “Well, it wasn’t any of _our_ Gang, anyway. Look!”