Part 4

I had already seen--first the flash of a match or a cigarette lighter, then a reddish glow in the dark, and I knew somebody was smoking a cigarette or a cigar. That’s how I knew for sure it wasn’t any of the Gang.

“I’d like to get my hands on him, for just one minute,” I said to Poetry. “Both hands--twenty times--in fast succession.”

“You wouldn’t strike a woman or a girl, would you?” he answered.

“What? Who said it was a woman or a girl? He had on a pair of trousers, didn’t he?”

“Girls wear slacks, don’t they? And lots of girls smoke, too.”

“And shouldn’t,” I answered.

We crept from our hiding place, scrambled down to where the boat had been beached and looked to be sure the oarsman--or oarswoman or oarsgirl--was out of sight. Then we slipped through the fence to look into the cement pool to see the melon and also to look around for the wad of paper I had tossed away when I had been here before.

I tell you it was an interesting minute--or three minutes, I should say--’cause that’s all the time it took us to discover some thing very important--very, _very_ important!

Say, did you ever have a flashlight strike you full in the face and blind you for a few seconds? Well, the white light from the match or cigarette lighter and the reddish glow from the cigarette or cigar fifty yards down the shore, sort of blinded me--not my eyes, but my mind. I couldn’t think straight for a minute. It was Poetry’s suggestion, though--that the thief might be a woman or a girl--that really confused me.

I guess all the time I had had it in the back of my mind that the thief was Bob Till--but what if the person in the boat was a _girl!_ No wonder I couldn’t think, I thought.

It was the perfume that sent my mind whirling. We noticed it the very second we had crawled through the fence. It was so strong it made the whole place smell as if somebody had upset the perfume counter in the Sugar Creek Dime Store and half the bottles of cologne and fancy perfumes had been broken.

If Dragonfly had been with us, I thought, he’d have sneezed and sneezed and sneezed, on account of he is allergic to almost every perfume there is.

Well, that was our chance to make a quick search for the wad of oiled paper which is what we had come there for in the first place. I remembered just about where I had tossed it and in only a few seconds Poetry hissed, “Here it is! Here’s our clue!”

His excitement about the thing and his being so sure, had built up my mind to expect to see something wonderful inside that oiled paper. Anybody who would go to the trouble to steal and deliver a watermelon secretly in a boat at night, would probably leave something _in_ the melon worth a hundred times more than the melon itself.

There in the shadow of the linden tree, to the music of the bubbling water in the spring, and the singing of the crickets, Poetry held the flashlight while my trembling fingers unfolded that crumpled piece of oiled paper, and spread it out.

“There’s _printing_ on it!” Poetry exclaimed under his breath.

And there was--_actually_ was!

“What does it say?” I exclaimed.

“It says--it says, ‘_Eat more Eatmore Bread. It’s better for you. The more Eatmore you eat, the more you like it._’”

It was disgusting; very disappointing also.

“Smell it,” Poetry exclaimed, which I did, and say!

Boy oh boy, there was _really_ a perfume odor around the place now! If Dragonfly had been there, I thought again--or rather, started to think and didn’t get to finish, ’cause all of a sudden from the crest of the hill I heard a rustling of last year’s dry leaves, saw a flashlight leading the way and a spindle-legged barefoot boy in red-striped pajamas coming down the incline to the spring. Imagine _that!_ Dragonfly in his night clothes! What on earth!

Poetry and I slipped behind an undergrowth of small elms where we couldn’t be seen, and listened and watched as Dragonfly came all the way down, went straight to the cement pool, shined his flashlight inside, then his hands began to work fast like he was in a big hurry and also like he was scared, and wanted to do what he was doing and get it over quick. He certainly was nervous and he seemed to be having trouble getting what he wanted to do, done.

Poetry’s fat face was close to mine. I decided I could whisper into his ear and only he would hear me, so I said, “Look! He’s got a knife! He’s going to plug the melon. He--”

Poetry jammed his fat elbow into my ribs so hard it made me grunt outloud.

Dragonfly jumped like he was shot, dropped his knife into the spring, started to straighten up, lost his balance, staggered in several moonlit directions, then ker-whammety-swish-splash--into the water he went just like I myself had done an hour or so ago.

And there he was, like I myself had been--a very wet boy in some very wet, very cold water, struggling to get onto his feet and out of the pool, and sneezing and spluttering because he had probably gotten some of the water into his mouth, or nose, and maybe even into his lungs.

And _now_ what should we do?

We didn’t have time to decide, ’cause right that second there was a sound of running steps at the top of the incline and two shadowy figures with flashlights came flying down that leaf-strewn path, and somebody’s voice that was as plain as day a girl’s voice cried, “We’ve got you, you little rascal!”

Those two girls swooped down upon Dragonfly, seized him by the collar and started dunking him in the pool of very cold water, dunking and splashing water over him, and saying, “Take that--and that--and _that!_ We knew if we waited here, you’d be back!”

Then all of a sudden, there was a hullabaloo of other girls’ voices at the top of the incline and a shower of flashlights and excited words came tumbling down with them. It seemed like there must have been a dozen girls, only there probably weren’t. Like a herd of stampeding calves, all of them swarmed around our little half-scared-half-to-death Dragonfly who was shivering and probably wondering what on earth. They were pulling him this way and that, as if they would tear him to pieces.

Things like those I was seeing and hearing that minute just don’t happen. Yet they _were_ happening, and to one of the grandest little guys that ever sneezed in hayfever season--our very own Dragonfly himself.

I didn’t know what he had done, nor why, but it seemed like anybody with that many people swarming all over him like a colony of angry bumblebees, ought to have somebody to stand up for him. If it had been a gang of _boys_ beating up on that innocent little spindle-legged guy, I probably would have made a headfirst dive, football style, into the thick of them and bowled half a dozen of them over into the cement pool. Then I’d have turned loose my two double-up experienced fists on them, windmill fashion, and Poetry would have come tumbling after.

But what do you do when your pal is being torn to pieces by a pack of helpless girls? As I have maybe told you before, my parents had taught me to respect all girls, kind of like they were angels--which most of them aren’t--and only one I ever saw in the whole Sugar Creek territory is anywhere near like one, and she is one of Circus’s many sisters, whose name is Lucille. Also I wouldn’t have the heart to fight a weak-muscled helpless creature which men and boys are supposed to defend from all harm and danger. Right that minute, though, while they were dunking Dragonfly in the spring and shoving him around and calling him names, it didn’t seem like girls _were_ such helpless creatures. Certainly it was Dragonfly who needed the protection from harm and danger!

I decided to use my mind and my voice, instead of my muscles. I remembered that when I myself had been the striped cowboy riding a watermelon, I had scattered the girls in every direction there is, by letting loose a series of wild loon calls which sounded like a woman screaming or a wildcat with a trembling voice trying to scare the wits out of its prey. So, while I was still crouched in the shadows beside and behind Poetry, I lifted my face to the sky and let loose six or seven blood-curdling long-toned, high-voiced, trembling cries, making the loon call, the screech-owl’s screech, and a wolf’s howl, over and over again, and at about the same time.

Poetry, catching on to my idea, joined in with a series of sounds like a young rooster learning to crow, and a guinea hen’s scrawny-necked squawking, screaming song, which made me decide to bark like a dog and also to let out a half-dozen long-toned, high-pitched wailing bawls like Circus’s Pop’s hound, Old Bawler, makes when she’s on a red-hot coon trail.

We probably sounded like the midway of a county fair gone crazy, especially when all of a sudden Poetry, who could imitate almost every farm noise there is, started in bawling like a calf, and I went back to the loon call and the screech-owl’s screech. Then we began shaking the elm saplings we were under, making them sway like a windstorm was blowing and a cyclone would be there any minute.

Things happened pretty fast after that, and the noise got even worse ’cause, all mixed up with Dragonfly’s sneezing and Poetry’s and my eardrum-splitting noises, were the different-pitched screams of the girls. All of a sudden there was a flurry of skirts and slacks and running feet, and in a flash of several jiffies the girls were tumbling over each other on their way up the incline, past the base of the leaning linden tree, and were gone! In my mind’s eye I was watching them making a helter-skelter dash for the pawpaw bushes and their tents.

And that is how we practically saved Dragonfly’s life that very first night of this story, which is only the beginning--and which made the mystery we were trying to solve seem more mysterious than ever.

5

Poor Dragonfly! I guess he never had been so frightened before in his sneezing life. Dog days are ragweed days--and nights, too--and he was not only sneezing but wheezing a little, which meant he might get an asthma attack any minute.

“The w-w-w-water ...” he stammered and gestured behind him toward the spring.

Poetry and I were quick out of our hiding on our way to where Dragonfly was. What, I wondered, was he trying to tell us about the watermelon?

“M-m-m-m-my knife!” he spluttered. “I-i-i-it’s in there--in the bottom of the pool!”

When I heard that, I _knew_ he had been planning to plug the melon, which I was sure somebody had left there a few jiffies ago. It didn’t feel very good to have to believe one of our own gang had been mixed up with the stealing of melons from the Collins’ truck patch.

“Hurry!” Dragonfly wheezed. “G-g-g-get it for me! I’ve got to get home quick or I’ll get a licking! My parents don’t know where I am!”

Because all of us were in a hurry to get away from such a dangerous place for boys to be--which it was, with a colony of bumblebee-like girls on a temper spree--I exclaimed to Poetry: “Hold the flashlight for me. I’ll get it!”--which Poetry did, and which I started to do, but got an exclamation point in my mind for sum when I noticed there wasn’t even one watermelon in the pool--neither the one I was sure somebody had just hoisted over the lip of the pool and lowered inside, nor the long beautiful one I had seen there myself, and which had had the oiled paper wadding in it, and on which I had had a fierce, fast ride in the moonlight.

What on earth!

“Come on! Hurry up!” Dragonfly cried. “I’ve got to get home before my father gets back from town. It’s _his_ knife, and I wasn’t supposed to have it!”

I quickly shoved my stripeless pajama sleeve up to my shoulder, and while Poetry held the flashlight for me and Dragonfly shivered and wheezed and watched, I plunged my arm into that icy water, where in a few seconds my fingers clasped the knife and only a few seconds after that all of us were on our way up the incline. At the top, we looked quick to see if the enemy had retreated, and they had--anyway we didn’t see or hear them--then we skirted the rail fence and the evergreens, and started on the run on the way up the bayou, taking the way that most certainly wouldn’t lead anywhere near the pawpaw bushes.

We would have looked very strange to most anybody--Poetry in his green-striped pajamas, I in my yellowish, stripeless ones, and Dragonfly in his red-striped ones--that was the funny thing about it, that crooked-nosed, spindle-legged, short-of-breath little guy being in his night clothes, too. When we asked him, “How come?” he panted back, “I didn’t have time to dress. I had to get here, and get back again before my father got home.”

It wasn’t a very satisfactory answer. His running around in the woods in his night clothes didn’t make half as much sense as Poetry and I running around in ours did. It must have seemed absolutely nonsensical to those girl campers who must have thought he and I were the same idiotic boy--which we most certainly weren’t--at least I wasn’t.

Dragonfly was going to explain further when he got stopped as quick as a chicken’s squawking stops when you cut its head off to have it dressed for dinner. His wheezy voice was interrupted by somebody in the direction of Bumblebee Hill calling my name, saying, “_Bill! ... Bill Collins! ..._ WHERE IN THE WORLD ARE YOU!”

“It’s your father!” Poetry stopped stock-still and said.

And it was.

That big, half-worried, half-mad, thundery voice trumpeting down to us from the top of Bumblebee Hill was the well-known voice of Theodore Collins, my reddish-brown-mustached, bushy-eyebrowed father. What on earth was Pop doing out there waving his lantern and calling, “Bill Collins, where in the world are you?”

All of a sudden it seemed like wherever I was, it would be a good place not to be. It would be safer if I could take a fast shortcut through the woods and be fast asleep in the tent--or pretending to be--by the time Pop would give up looking for me and come back to the house. I could tell by the tone of his ear-deafening voice that whatever he was saying, he had already said it for the last time.

“Come on,” I whispered to Poetry and Dragonfly, “let’s get home quick--QUICK!” I repeated the last word with a hiss, and lit out for home--the shortcut that would miss Pop, who was still dodging along with his swinging lantern toward the bayou, still calling my name and stopping every few yards to listen. If only Dragonfly could run faster, it would be easy, I thought.

Right then, to my surprise, Pop swung west and started on the run toward the spring. We quick dodged behind some choke-cherry shrubs so as not to be seen, then we scrambled up the hill and into the path made by barefoot boys’ bare feet, and in a fast jiffy reached the rail fence just across the road from the Collins’ gate and the walnut tree.

In less than almost no time, we were inside the tent, Dragonfly puffing and wheezing on account of his asthma, Poetry puffing on account of his weight, and I, just puffing.

But it wasn’t to any peaceful quiet tent that we had come back. Dragonfly was as wet as a drowned rat from having been dunked in the spring water and was shivering with the cold--on such a _hot_ midsummer night!

We certainly had a problem on our hands. In fact, the whole night was all messed up with problems. _Who_ had crawled out into our truck patch, picked one of our melons, slipped it into a burlap bag, dragged it on the end of a long plastic clothesline to a hole in the fence under the elderberry bushes, hoisted it into his car, and driven away with it? Who, quite a while later, had come rowing up the creek in a boat and left the melon in the spring? And how come there wasn’t even one melon there a little later? What on earth was Dragonfly himself doing there? Was he actually looking for his knife, or had he had it with him all the time? How come he had dropped it in the spring?

I felt like I do sometimes on examination day in school when the teacher gives me a little slip of onion-skin paper with seven or eight questions on it, quite a few of which I know I can’t answer. Generally the slip of paper has a printed note at the top which says, “_Answer any five._” But tonight’s questions were worse. I’d certainly need to do a lot of studying, to answer even _one_ of them!

“I have got to get home and into bed, before my father gets home from town and finds I’m not there, or I’ll get a licking!” Dragonfly whined.

“Doesn’t he know you are gone?” Poetry asked, and Dragonfly answered, “I climbed out of my bedroom window. I had to get to the spring to get my knife.”

Then Dragonfly got what he thought was a good idea. “You let me have _your_ red-striped pajamas until tomorrow, Bill.” He was looking at me and noticing I had on my yellow ones.

“I can’t,” I said, “--they are all wet.”

He was standing shivering in the light of Poetry’s flashlight and I was shivering too, from all the excitement. Also I was still wondering how soon Pop would give up looking for us in the woods and come back to the tent. Dragonfly and I both had our fathers after us, I thought.

“Your red-striped pajamas are all wet?” Dragonfly exclaimed, and I answered, “Yes, they just got dunked in the spring!” which, of course, didn’t make sense to him.

We were all standing in the middle of the tent between the two cots, trying to decide what to do, when Poetry said, “Listen! I hear a telephone ringing somewhere!”

I had already heard it. The sound was coming from our house through the open east window near which our phone hangs on the wall. Who, I wondered, would be calling the Collins’ at this time of night? I knew that if Mom woke up and came downstairs to answer the phone, she’d be within a foot of the open window and she could hear anything we would say or do in the tent.

But nobody answered the phone. A jiffy later it rang again, and when nobody answered it, Poetry said, “Maybe your mother’s out in the woods somewhere with your father; you’d better go answer it yourself.”

I lifted the tent awning, sped out across the lawn to the board walk that leads from the back door to the pump, slipped into the house, worked my way through the dark kitchen to the livingroom, hurried to the phone, my heart pounding from having hurried so fast.

“Hello,” I said into the mouthpiece, making my voice sound as much like my mother’s as I could, and there came screeching into my ear an excited woman’s voice saying worriedly, “Hello, Mrs. Collins? I’ve been trying to get you. Is our boy, Roy, there?”

“Roy?” I asked. “Roy _who?_”--not remembering for a second that Dragonfly’s real name is Roy Gilbert, the Gang never calling him that. He was just plain Dragonfly to us.

“Roy--my _boy_. He’s not in his room and I can’t find him anywhere.”

I didn’t have time to tell her anything ’cause right that minute there was a voice hissing to me from outside the window, saying, “Who _is_ it?”

I turned my face away from the telephone mouthpiece and said to Poetry whose hissing voice it was, “It’s Dragonfly’s mother. She’s afraid he’s been kidnapped.”

From behind me I heard footsteps in our dark house, and before I could wonder who it was, I heard Mom’s voice calling from the bottom of the stairs, “What’s going on down here?”

Mom certainly looked strange, standing there in the kitchen doorway in her night gown, her hair done up in curlers, the curlers shining in the light of the lamp she was carrying.

Right then Poetry’s mischievous mind made him say something which he must have thought was funny, but it wasn’t ’cause it made Mom gasp. His squawky duck-like voice was almost like a ghost’s voice coming loudly from just outside the window: “Everything’s all right, Mrs. Collins. The phone rang and Bill answered it, ’cause your husband wasn’t here--but was out in the woods in his night clothes racing around with a lantern and yelling wildly. The last we saw of him he was running like an excited deer with hounds on his trail!”

To make matters worse, Dragonfly’s mother was still on the phone and heard everything Poetry said, and thought he had said it about her boy--that _Dragonfly_ was running around in the woods with a lantern and yelling wildly with hounds on his trail. She gasped into the telephone the same kind of gasp Mom had just made.

“You want to talk to my mother?” I asked Mrs. Gilbert, glad for a chance to get out of the house which the second Mom took the receiver I started to do, and would have, if right that minute, Charlotte Ann, in her baby bed in the downstairs bedroom hadn’t come to life with a frightened baby-style cry.

Mom shushed me and told me to go in and see if Charlotte Ann had fallen out of her bed.

In another second, I would’ve been in the room where Charlotte Ann was, but my eyes took a fleeting glance out the front screen door and across the road in the direction of the spring, and I saw a lighted lantern making crazy jiggling movements which told me that Pop, who was carrying it, was running like a deer in the direction of our house. I knew that in another jiffy Theodore Collins would be over the rail fence, swishing past “Theodore Collins” on our mailbox and sooner than anything would be there in the middle of all our excitement, and want to know what was what, and how come?

* * * * *

Boy oh boy, you should have seen the way Pop flew into action the very minute he landed in his night shirt and trousers in the middle of our brain-whirling trouble and excitement. But, for a father, he certainly didn’t calm things down very fast--not like a father is supposed to when he yells to everybody to “Calm down!” which Pop sometimes does at our house, when he thinks I, especially, am raising what he calls a “ruckus.”

Of course, Pop didn’t know I was inside the house trying to quiet Charlotte Ann nor that Mom had gotten up upstairs and come downstairs and was talking to Dragonfly’s mother on the phone trying to calm _her_ down.

The first thing Pop noticed was Poetry who, by that time, was in the middle of the yard not far from Dragonfly who was not far from the tent. I could hear Pop’s strong voice not far from the plum tree as he demanded of the whole Collins’ farm, “William Jasper Collins”--meaning me--“where on _earth_ have you boys been? And _what_ are you doing with those wet pajamas on again?”--yelling that exclamatory question at poor little red-striped, pajama-clad Dragonfly himself, who, of course, Pop must have thought was his own innocent son.

Seeing and hearing him from the open window near the telephone, I yelled out to Pop, “I haven’t got my red-striped pajamas on! They are still out on the line behind the grape arbor where you hung them yourself!”

You’d have thought Pop’s ears could have told him that his son’s voice had come from the house behind him and not from the tent in front of him, but I guess it was like a ventriloquist’s voice fooling his audience, ’cause Pop was looking at the boy in the shadow of the plum tree, and in the sputtering light of his lantern. He barked back at Dragonfly, “Don’t try to be funny!” and demanded an explanation.

All this time Mom was using a soothing voice on Roy Gilbert’s mother while also all the time I was trying to quiet Charlotte Ann’s half-scared-half-to-death voice.

And _that_ was the way Pop’s understanding of things began--and the way the next thirty minutes started.

_What_ a night!

6

An excitement like the one we were splashing around in--squawky-voiced, barrel-shaped Poetry; red-striped pajama-clad Dragonfly; night-gown-dressed Mom; crying Charlotte Ann; my confused father, and his actual son--couldn’t last forever, and this one didn’t!