in almost less time than it has taken me to write these few paragraphs, we were in the cemetery at the top of bumblebee hill, and sprawled out on the grass near sarah paddler’s tombstone—the one that has the carved hand on it with the forefinger pointing toward the sky and the words that say, “there is rest in heaven.”
every time we had a meeting there, i would read those words, and look at the other tombstone exactly the same size, which had on it old man paddler’s name and the date the old man was born, with a blank place after it, meaning he was still alive—and nobody would put on the date of his death until after his funeral. also i would always remember that that kind old long-whiskered old man was an honest-to-goodness christian who loved the heavenly father and his only begotten son. he trusted in the saviour for the forgiveness of his sins, so i was sure that when he did die his soul would go sailing out across the sugar creek sky to heaven itself where his wife sarah and his two boys already were—and the whole family would be together again.
that old cemetery was certainly an interesting place and was very pretty. i hoped that nobody would ever try to make it look like the well-kept other cemeteries around the country. it’d be nice if people would let the wild rosebushes and the chokecherries and the sumac and the elderberries and the wild grapevines keep on growing there. of course, it would be all right to keep the weeds away from the different markers and to keep the grass cut, but i liked the little brown paths that wound around from one to the other—and it always seemed like god was there in a special way.
you get a kind of saddish happy feeling in your heart when you think about him, when all your sins are forgiven and you and your parents like each other. it seems as if maybe he likes boys especially well, on account of he made such a pretty boys’ world for them to live in.
66 there was purple vervain all over the place and tall mullein stalks—and already the sumac was turning red. i hadn’t any more than thought all these things than from behind the sumac on the other side of sarah paddler’s tall tombstone i heard a long-tailed sneeze and knew dragonfly was there. a jiffy later he came pouting into the little circular open place we were in, saying, “how come you didn’t wait for me?”
he looked a little guilty, i thought, as, panting and wheezing a little, he plumped himself down on the ground between poetry and me.
everything was so quiet for a minute that he must have guessed we had been talking about him. “are the—are the girls still camping up in the woods?” he asked—and i knew he was remembering last night’s dunking in the spring and also probably never would forget it.
there was an interrogatory sentence in my mind, right that minute. so i exploded at dragonfly, “what were you doing in the middle of the night down there at the spring?”
my question probably sounded pretty saucy to him.
“i went to get my knife,” he said. “i was there getting a drink yesterday afternoon when a whole flock of girls came storming down and scared me so bad i dropped my knife. i was so scared i ran home. it was my dad’s knife, and he was coming home before midnight, and i didn’t want him to know i had it, so i sneaked back to get it, and—”
another of my mystery balloons had burst. poetry and i looked at each other and shrugged. that let dragonfly out. he hadn’t had anything to do with stealing watermelons. he was as innocent as a lamb. i sighed a big sigh of relief though, ’cause it felt good to get all that suspicion out of my mind, and to have him with us again.
we all crowded around big jim to see what was between the layers of the bread wrapper. “it’s a map!” little jim exclaimed in his squeaky voice, and it was—a crude drawing made with indelible67 pencil. that was the first thing i noticed, that it had been made with indelible pencil. the drawing looked like a map of the sugar creek territory itself. in fact, it was a very good map of the gang’s playground with the names of important places on it—names that only anybody living in our neighborhood would know about; a few that only the gang itself might know—such as “bumblebee hill,” “the black widow stump,” and the “little-jim tree.”
my mind cringed when i realized that maybe whoever had drawn the map was one of our own gang—maybe one of us who, right that minute, were in a football-style huddle in the cemetery.
then poetry noticed something i hadn’t—“look at that red x, would you? wonder what that means?”
i squeezed in between poetry and dragonfly and looked, and there it was, a very small red x with a red circle around it, in the upper left-hand corner of the page. i could tell that the red x and the red circle were marking a spot on the other side of the creek, just below the big sugar creek bridge.
boy oh boy, it was like a story book! that was the second map of the territory we had found—the first one, as you already know, had been hidden in the old hollow sycamore tree, and that map had been the very center of the very first mystery we had ever had—but i told you all about that in the very first story there ever was about the sugar creek gang, and it’s in a book by that name.
big jim must have been thinking the same thoughts i was, ’cause right that second he said, “who outside our gang knows the name of the tree where little jim killed the bear?”
poetry rolled himself into a sitting position and grunted himself to his feet. trying to make his voice sound like a detective’s, he said, “all right, everybody; don’t a one of you leave this room—this cemetery, i mean. one of you in this circle is a watermelon thief; one of you drew this map!”
before anybody could have stopped him he was firing at us one interrogatory sentence after another. the first one was, “who among us has an indelible pencil? you, bill?”
“no sir,” i said.
i was surprised that big jim let poetry keep on with his questions,68 but he did, and pretty soon poetry had asked us a half-dozen others, such as, which of us ate eatmore bread at home, what kind of clotheslines did our mothers use—rope or plastic—and did any of us smoke? of course the last question was a foolish one, as far as the gang was concerned, but i knew why he had asked it. he was remembering the man in the boat who, last night, had lit a cigar or cigarette with a match or a lighter.
poetry was looking as dignified as any fat boy with mussed-up hair and mischievous eyes can look. he was all set to keep on talking and asking questions when big jim interrupted, saying, “look, all of you! there’s only one other person—or rather two—who might know the names we’ve given to the important places around here. one is little tom till, and the other is his big brother, bob.”
i don’t know why i hadn’t thought of tom before. the very second big jim mentioned his name, i remembered that tom was very good in art at school; in fact, he got better grades in it than any of the rest of us. for some reason, though, i didn’t like the idea of thinking that tom was guilty. he wasn’t exactly a member of our gang but we all felt he belonged to us anyway. he hadn’t been meeting with the gang lately, though, because his brother didn’t want him to, and tom was very much afraid of his big brother’s big fists.
“the thing for us to do,” big jim interrupted my thoughts to say, “is to do what bill suggests—go straight to their house and ask them point-blank what they know about this map and whether they’ve been stealing watermelons.”
and that is what we decided to do, only big jim cautioned us to watch our words so as not to stir up bob’s temper.
“remember, he will be in church tomorrow—and in our class.”
i remembered it all the way. our faces were set as we left the cemetery, moved down the slope of bumblebee hill, walking right through the place where the famous battle of bumblebee hill had been fought and where little tom till had fired the fist heard round the world. that fist had landed ker-smash right on my nose. i stopped for a minute, right in the middle of the battleground and looked around, trying to remember the exact spot where two red-haired, freckle-faced, fiery-tempered boys, who looked very much alike,69 most of the time, had had such an exciting time getting acquainted.
i was glad that tom was my friend now—or was he? if he had drawn the map and stuffed it into the watermelon, then he must be mixed up in our mystery in some way.
we passed the little-jim tree and went on to the spring again, then moved cautiously through the woods toward the rail fence that bordered the north road, having to pass not more than forty yards from the pawpaw bushes on the way. dragonfly managed to sneeze several times just as we were parallel with the girl scout camp, which proved that his mind as well as his nose was allergic to perfume, ’cause he certainly wasn’t close enough to their camp to smell them.
“girls aren’t anything to be sneezed at,” poetry was smart enough to think of to say to dragonfly; and dragonfly sneezed again.
at the rail fence, we went through—or under or over—the different rails—whichever different ones of us decided to do, and in a fast jiffy were on our way across the bridge, in the direction of the tills’ house.
the minute we reached the other side of the bridge little jim cried suddenly, “look! there’s the boat i bet they used last night!”
i looked downstream in the direction little jim was pointing and saw the red stern of a rowboat half hidden under the low-hanging branches of a willow.
a thousand shivers started racing up and down my spine when i realized that our mystery was coming to even more life than it had come to last night when we had seen the boat stopping at the spring.
at that very same instant i saw, back on the shore, half-hidden among the trees, the forest-green roof of a wall-type tent. what on earth? i thought. not only were there a flock of girls camping near the pawpaw bushes in the woods above the bridge, but here on the other side of the creek and below the bridge was somebody else camping! i was remembering last night and the mysterious something-or-other i had seen somebody carry to the spring from the boat. this very same boat, maybe!
poetry beside me remarked, “there’s where the woman lives—the one that was smoking the cigarette last night.”
“there’s where the man lives, you mean,” i disagreed.
70 beside the tent was a gun-metal gray pickup truck that looked like it was maybe ten or fifteen years old. at almost the same instant, there was the sound of a motor coming to roaring life, and right away the truck was moving. it went backwards first, then swung left and began bumping along in the little lane toward the highway.
“quick, everybody!” big jim ordered. “down the embankment and under the bridge!”
we obeyed big jim like soldiers taking orders from a captain in a battle. in only a few lightning-fast jiffies, we were all down the embankment and crouching on a narrow strip of shore underneath the north end of the bridge, getting there just in time on account of in a few fast minutes we heard the truck’s wheels on the board floor above us. and that was that!
as soon as the car was across the bridge, we decided it would be a good idea to look around a little, just to see if we could find any “clues,” as poetry was always saying.
we followed a narrow footpath which skirts the shore and is bordered on either side with willows and ragweeds just like the path on our own side of the creek.
pretty soon we came to within twenty-five feet of the boat and the green tent. “hello, there!” big jim called. “anybody home?”
there wasn’t any answer from anybody.
“hello! i say, hello!” big jim called again several times, and still there wasn’t any reply.
while it wouldn’t be right to trespass on somebody’s campground, we knew we wouldn’t be doing anything wrong if we just walked in the path which belonged to everybody anyway, past the place where the boat was moored.
a second later we were there, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but out in the middle of the boat a gunny sack—an actual, honest-to-goodness gunny sack—and it had in it something fat and long and—.
“hey,” i said to poetry and to all of us, “look! there’s another watermelon! in a gunny sack!”
“you’re crazy,” poetry answered. “that’s not a watermelon; that’s a water jug!” and to my very sad disappointment, poetry was right.
71 there was a great big water jug like the kind we used in the sugar creek threshing ring, wrapped round and round with a gunny sack, and tied on with binder twine.
i remembered then that many a time i had carried drinking water to pop from our iron pitcher pump out across the barnyard to whatever field he was in at the time. first i would soak the burlap bag in cold water. if you do that to a burlap bag, it will keep the water in the jug cool for quite a long time.
“that,” poetry said, “is what the woman in the boat last night was getting at the spring. she carried an empty jug to the spring, let it down into the water until it was filled and then carried it back again.”
“i still want to know who drew a map and put it inside that watermelon,” i said crossly. “and where is ida!”
after big jim had called “hello,” a few more times and nobody had answered, we decided to see if we could find any honest-to-goodness clues, only we wouldn’t go inside the tent.
“look at that, would you?” poetry exclaimed, the minute we were on the other side of the tent. “see that clothesline hanging between those two trees.”
most of us had already seen it. it was a brand new plastic line stretching from a small maple near the tent to the trunk of an ash that grew about thirty feet away, not more than five feet from a field of very tall corn. hanging on the line were two or three pairs of slacks like women and girls wear; also there were several different kinds of different-colored other women’s clothes. we didn’t even have time to try to make up our minds what to do next, on account of all of a sudden there was a clattering of the boards of the sugar creek bridge—and it was the pickup truck coming back.
“quick, everybody!” big jim exclaimed. “let’s get out of here!”
and “out of here” we got, scurrying like six scared cottontails into the tall corn. we didn’t stop running until we knew we were far enough away so we couldn’t be seen by anybody even if she dropped down on her hands and knees and looked beneath the drooping cornblades in our direction.
“i guess this lets bob and tom out,” circus said. it had also knocked the daylights out of my mystery.
72 “but what about the burlap bag with the watermelon in it—the one that was being dragged through our watermelon patch, last night?” i asked.
“it was dark out there, wasn’t it?” circus asked. “you couldn’t tell whether it was a watermelon or a water jug.”
“but i felt it with my two hands, and it was long and round and——”
“a water jug is long and round,” little jim’s mouselike voice squeaked.
“but this one in our watermelon patch didn’t have any spout on it,” i protested, feeling my mystery-house falling and crashing all around me.
“how do you know it didn’t have? you didn’t feel both ends, did you? you just felt it in the middle!” poetry argued back. “and besides,” he went on in a talkative hurry, “your other iron pitcher pump wasn’t more than twenty feet away when we first saw it. somebody was helping himself to some drinking water.”
i felt my jaw muscles tightening with anger. i knew—knew what had been in that burlap bag last night was a watermelon. besides, why would anybody want to get drinking water secretly like that? i quickly asked the question out loud, and got a quick answer from poetry, whose detective-like mind was certainly alert that day: “sugar creek water isn’t safe to drink for anything except a fish in dog days. look at all that green scum floating out there.”
poetry was probably right, but his answer didn’t tell me why whoever wanted the water, didn’t go right straight to any member of the sugar creek gang’s parents and ask for a jug of water in the daytime.
“but somebody did take my prize watermelon!” i protested. “ida couldn’t just get up and walk away. somebody had to carry or drag her.” and a second later, poetry was juggling a little jingle we’d heard him use quite a few times, and was:
“i proposed to ida,
ida refused;
i’da won my ida if i’da used ...”
73 “stop!” i ordered poetry and started to start to say something else but got stopped by big jim shushing me, making me swallow my words and my temper. but i still knew i was right. the whole thing was as plain as a dog-day day to anybody with half a mind, which it looked like maybe i was the only one of us that did have.
that was as far as any of us got to talk or think right then, on account of from the direction of the tent i heard a car door slam and i knew it was the truck, and my mind was busy trying to imagine who had probably just climbed out of it.
“do you suppose it’s anybody we know?” dragonfly asked, and sneezed and grabbed his nose with his right hand to stop another sneeze that was already getting ready to explode.
for a few anxious seconds we all lay there in the nice clean dust of the cornfield, listening and thinking and trying to decide what to do, if anything. for a few minutes, even though i was worrying on account of the mystery, i was hearing and actually enjoying the sound of the husky rusty rustle of the corn blades in the very light breeze that was blowing. overhead i could see the big white cumulus clouds hanging in the lazy afternoon sky, also the shimmering green leaves in the top of the cottonwood tree farther down the shore. i even noticed a lazy crow loafing along in the sky like he didn’t have a worry in the world. it wouldn’t be long before fall would be here, i thought, and that lonely old crow would join about five hundred of his black-feathered friends and spend half the day everyday, for a while, cawing and cawing in his hoarse voice, keeping it up and keeping it up, hour after hour in the bare trees. one of the dreariest things a farm boy ever sees in the autumn, is a forlorn-looking crow flapping his sad wings above the frosty cornfields.
nearly every summer there is a crow’s nest in the top of the old pine tree on the other side of the creek near the mouth of the branch. about all a pair of crow parents ever do to make a nest for their crow children to be hatched in, is to build a rough platform of sticks—some large and some small—and line it with strips of bark from the cedar trees. then the mother crow, who is just as black as her husband only her feathers don’t shine as brightly, lays from four to seven eggs that are the color of green dust with little brown spots on them. crows are always scattering themselves over the new cornfields in the spring,74 digging down into the rows where the grains have been planted, and gobbling up the grains before they have a chance to grow.
of course, any farm boy knows a crow eats may beetles and grasshoppers and cutworms and caterpillers and even mice, and he is also a thief—but he doesn’t use a plastic clothesline to help him get what he wants.
just thinking that brought my mind back to the cornfield we were lying in right that minute.
my thoughts got there just in time to hear big jim say to me, “bill, you and poetry tell us once more all you know about everything from the beginning up to now—” which poetry and i did, rehearsing to the gang what we had seen at the spring on our first trip—the plugged watermelon with the folded oiled paper in it; the long dark thing we had seen being dragged through the melon patch which at first i had thought was some kind of wild animal running; the car that had gone clattering down the lane and back again; the hole in the fence and the watermelon being pulled through—or the water jug, whichever it was—and hoisted into the car; and then poetry’s and my trip back to the spring again, the mystery man or woman in the boat; and dragonfly’s coming for his knife and getting dunked by the girls.
“don’t forget the perfume,” dragonfly said, “and the pine-scented paper and the map and—” and then he quickly grabbed his nose just in time to stop another sneeze.
“and the red letter x,” little jim put in.
big jim unfolded the map again and we crowded around him to study it. there was only one person i knew who could draw a map as neat as that. “we’d better see tom about this,” i said. “here—let me have it. i’m the one who took it out of the melon in the first place.”
i was surprised when big jim handed it to me saying, “all right, you keep it until we find the real owner. it probably belongs to the girl scouts.”
i folded it and tucked it into my left hip pocket.
“don’t forget about the plastic clothesline—the brand new one we just saw,” circus said, which i remembered right that very minute was stretched between two trees behind the tent and had a lot of different kinds of different colored women’s clothes on it.
75 things certainly were mixed up. the more we talked, the more tangled up everything seemed. all this time, little jim had been hanging onto his brown manila envelope like it was very important. i noticed he had a far-away expression in his eyes right then like he was thinking about something a lot farther away than the cornfield we were in. also he didn’t have any worries on his face, which i was pretty sure i had.
“let’s do a little more scouting around,” poetry suggested. “let’s send out a couple of spies to sneak up close to the tent to see what we can see or hear.”
big jim shook his head a very savage “no,” saying, “you don’t go sneaking around a tent where women or girls are camping! there’s even a law against it. remember what happened to that peeping tom they caught looking into a window in town, last winter?”
“what’s a peeping tom?” dragonfly wanted to know. and big jim, being the oldest one of the gang, explained it to all of us. when he got through, we made it a rule of the gang that not a one of us would ever be one.
that knocked out poetry’s scouting suggestion. we couldn’t go spying around any tent or any place where there were women or girls.
just that second, dragonfly hissed like he does when he has seen or heard something important. “listen! somebody’s coming!”
we all looked and listened in every direction, and sure enough, somebody was coming. was it a man, or a woman, or a girl? or who, or what?
i stooped low, looked down the corn row i was in, and when i saw what i saw, i hissed to everybody, “it’s a woman; she’s wearing blue slacks!”
that meant that six boys ought to scramble themselves out of there, which, on big jim’s hissed orders, we did, hurrying like a covey of quail, only instead of fanning out in a lot of different directions like flushed quail do, we all followed big jim down his corn row, not stopping until we reached the bridge again.
“we’ll go on over to the tills’ house right now,” he said, and i noticed that little jim’s hands were clasping tightly his manila envelope as he said, “yeah, let’s.”
and away we went.
