THE GREEN TENT MYSTERY
AT SUGAR CREEK

THE GREEN TENT MYSTERY
AT SUGAR CREEK

by
PAUL HUTCHENS

Published by

SCRIPTURE PRESS
SCRIPTURE PRESS PUBLICATIONS, INC.
1825 College Avenue · Wheaton, Illinois

Contents

The Green Tent Mystery at Sugar Creek

Copyright, 1950, by
Paul Hutchens

All rights in this book are reserved. No part may be reproduced in any manner without the permission in writing from the author, except brief quotations used in connection with a review in a magazine or newspaper.

Printed in the United States of America

1

IT was the darkest summer night I ever saw—the night we accidentally stumbled onto a brand new mystery at Sugar Creek.

Imagine coming happily home with two of your best pals, carrying a string of seven fish, and feeling wonderful and proud and then, halfway home, when you are passing an old, abandoned cemetery, seeing a light out there and somebody digging! All of a sudden you get a creeping sensation in your spine and your red hair under your straw hat starts to try to stand up—!

Well, that’s the way it started. Nobody in Sugar Creek had died and been buried in that old cemetery for years and years, and it was only good for wild strawberries to grow in and bumblebees to make their nests in and barefoot boys to have their gang meetings in—and also to tell ghost stories to each other in.

And yet, there it was, as plain as the crooked nose on Dragonfly’s thin face, or the short, wide nose on Poetry’s fat face, or the freckled nose on mine—an honest-to-goodness man or something, digging in the light of a kerosene lantern. The lantern itself was standing beside the tall tombstone of Sarah Paddler, Old Man Paddler’s dead wife, and was shedding a spooky light on the man and his nervous movements as he scooped the yellowish-brown dirt out of the hole and piled it onto a fast-growing pile beside him.

I knew he couldn’t see us because we were crouched behind some elder bushes that grew along the rail fence just outside the cemetery, but I also knew that if we made the slightest noise he might hear us; and if he heard us—well, what would he do?

I kept hoping Dragonfly’s nose, which as everybody knows is almost always allergic to almost everything, wouldn’t smell something that would make him sneeze, because Dragonfly had the cuckooest sneeze of anybody in the world—like a small squeal with a whistling tail on it. If Dragonfly would sneeze, it would be like the fairy story every child should know, of Peter Rabbit running away from Mr. McGregor. As you may remember, Peter Rabbit was running lickety-sizzle trying to get away from Mr. McGregor, the gardener. Spying a large sprinkler can, Peter jumped into it to hide himself. The can happened to have water in the bottom and that was too terribly bad for poor Peter Rabbit’s nose.

Right away Peter sneezed and also right away Mr. McGregor heard it, and Peter had to jump his wet-footed, wet-furred self out of the can and go racing furiously in some direction or other to get away from Mr. McGregor and his mad garden rake.

“Listen,” Poetry beside me hissed.

I listened but couldn’t hear a thing except the scooping sounds the shovel was making.

Then Poetry, who had his hand on my arm, squeezed my arm so tight I almost said “Ouch” just as I heard a new sound like the shovel had struck something hard.

“He’s struck a rock,” I said.

“Rock nothing,” Poetry answered. “I’d know that sound anywhere. That was metal scraping on metal or maybe somebody’s old coffin.”

Poetry’s nearly-always-squawking voice broke when he said that and he sounded like a frog with the laryngitis.

As you know, Dragonfly was the only one of us who was a little more afraid of a cemetery than the rest of us. So when Poetry said that like that, Dragonfly said, “Let’s get out of here! Let’s go home!”

Well, I had read different stories in my half-long life about buried treasure. In fact, our own gang had stumbled onto a buried treasure mystery when we were on a camping trip up North and which you can read about in some of the other Sugar Creek Gang books. So when I was peeking through the foliage of the elder bush and also between the rails of that tumble-down old rail fence, watching the strange things in a graveyard at a strange hour of the night, say—! I was all of a sudden all set to get myself tangled up in another mystery just as quick as I could—that is, if I could without getting into too much danger at the same time, for, as Pop says, “It is better to have good sense and try to use it than it is to be brave.”

Just that second I heard a bobwhite whistling, “Bob-white! Bob-white! Poor-Bob-white!” It was a very cheery bird call—the kind I would almost rather hear around Sugar Creek than any other.

As fast as a firefly’s fleeting flash, my mind’s eye was seeing a ten-inch-long, burnished-brown-beaked bird with a white stomach and a white forehead with feathers on the crown of its head shaped like the topknot on a topknotted chicken.

The man kept on shovelling, not paying attention to anything except what he was doing. He seemed to be working faster though. Then all of another sudden he stopped while he was in a stooped-over position and for a jiffy didn’t make a move.

“He’s looking at something in the hole,” Poetry whispered. “He sees something.”

“Maybe he’s listening,” I said, which it seemed like he was—like a robin does on our front lawn with its head cocked to one side, waiting to see or hear—or both—a night crawler push part of itself out of its hole. Then she makes a headfirst dive for the worm, holds on for dear life while she yanks and pulls till she gets its slimy body out and then she eats it or else pecks it to death and into small pieces and flies with it to her nest to feed it to her babies.

A jiffy later I heard another bird call and it was another whistling sound—a very mournful cry that sounded like, “Coo-o, Coo-o, Coo-o”—and it was a turtledove.

Say—! it was just like that sad, plaintive turtledove call had scared the living daylights out of the man. He straightened up, looked all around and came to quick life, picked up the lantern and started walking toward the old maple tree on the opposite side of the cemetery.

“He’s got a limp,” Poetry said, “look how he drags one foot after him.”

I didn’t have time to wrack my brain to see if I could remember if I knew anybody who had that kind of limp because no sooner had the man reached the maple tree, than he lifted the lantern up to his face and blew out the light. Then I heard a car door slam, the sound of a motor starting and then two headlights lit up the whole cemetery for a second and two long blinding beams made a wide sweep across the top of Strawberry Hill, lit up the tombstones and the lonely old pine tree above Sarah Paddler’s grave and the chokecherry shrubs and even the elder bush we were hiding behind. Then the car went racing down the abandoned lane that led to the road not more than the distance of three blocks away, leaving us three boys wondering “What on earth?” and “Why?” and “Who?” and “Where?”

It seemed like I couldn’t move—I had been crouched in such a cramped position for so long a time.

It was Dragonfly who thought of something that added to the mystery when he said, “First time I ever heard a bobwhite whistling in the night like that.”

The very second he said it I wished I had thought of it first, but I did think of something else first—anyway I said it first—and it was, “Yeah, and whoever heard of a turtledove cooing in the night?”

“It’s just plain cuckoo,” Poetry said. “I’ll bet there was somebody over there in that car waiting for him and maybe watching and those whistles meant something special. They probably meant ‘Danger.... Look out!... Get away, quick!’”

Then Poetry said in an authoritative voice like he was the leader of our gang instead of Big Jim who is when he is with us—and I am when he isn’t—“Let’s go take a look at what he was doing.”

“Let’s go home,” Dragonfly said.

“Why, Dragonfly Gilbert!” I said. “Go on home yourself if you are scared! Poetry and I have got to investigate!”

“I’m not s-s-s-scared,” Dragonfly said—and was.

As quick as we were sure the car was really gone, I turned on my Pop’s big, long, three-batteried flashlight—I having had it with me—and Poetry, Dragonfly and I started to climb through the rail fence to go toward the mound of yellowish-brown earth beside Sarah Paddler’s tombstone.

2

AS I said, the three of us started to climb through the rail fence to go to the hole in the ground and investigate what had been going on there. It took us only a jiffy or two to get through the fence—Poetry squeezing his fat self through first, he being almost twice as big around as either Dragonfly or I. If he could get through, we knew we could too.

I carried the flashlight, Dragonfly the string of seven fish, and Poetry carried himself. To get to the mound of earth we had to wind our way around, among chokecherry shrubs, wild rosebushes with reddish roses on them, mullein stalks and different kinds of wild flowers, such as blue vervain, and especially ground ivy, which I noticed had a lot of dark purple flowers on it—the same color as the vervain. The ground ivy flower clusters were scattered among the notched heart-shaped leaves of the vine.

In a jiffy we were there and the three of us were standing around the hole in the form of a right-angled triangle. An imaginary line running from Poetry to me made the hypotenuse of the right-angled triangle, I thought, and another imaginary line running from Dragonfly to me would make the base of the triangle.

There wasn’t a thing to see in the hole except a lot of fresh dirt—in fact, there wasn’t a thing of any interest whatever to a guy like Poetry who was the kind of boy that was always looking for a clue of some kind—and especially a mystery—to jump out at him like a jack-in-the-box does in a toy store when you press a spring.

The only thing that happened, while we were standing there in that half-scared silence looking down into the hole and also at the mound of yellowish-brown earth, was that, all of a sudden, a big, brown beetle came zooming out of the darkness and landed with a whamety-sizzle-kerplop against the side of my freckled face, bounced off and landed upside down on the top of the yellowish-brown earth where it began wriggling and twisting and trying to get off its back and onto its six spiney-looking legs.

Anybody who knows anything about bugs and beetles knows that a June bug isn’t a bug but is a beetle, and has two different names—one of them being a June beetle and the other a May beetle, depending upon whichever month of the year it flies around in the country where you live.

I was searching every corner of my mind to see if I could even imagine that anything I was seeing was a clue to help us solve the new mystery, which we had just discovered. Who in the world was the man and why had he been here? Why had he gotten scared when he heard the bobwhite and the turtledove?

I was remembering that June beetles get awful hungry at night and they eat the foliage of oak and willow and poplar trees. In the daytime they hide themselves in the soil of anybody’s pasture or in the grass in the woods. June beetles are crazy about lights at night and the very minute they see one they make a beetle-line for it just like the one which right that second was struggling on its back on the mound of earth.

“Crazy old June beetle!” I said and Poetry answered “June what?”

“Crazy old June beetle,” I said, shining my flashlight directly on it, and pushing the light up close to its brown ridiculous-looking self so that Poetry and Dragonfly could see what I was talking about.

Poetry, in a disgusted voice, said, “When are you going to get over that buggy idea of studying insects?”

I knew I might get over it most any time like I generally do some new hobby, which I pick up in the summer, but I didn’t want anybody to make fun of the fun I was having studying insects. Pop and I were having more fun than you can shake a stick at catching different kinds of insects that summer, especially beetles, which anybody knows have four wings. The two wings in front are not used for flying but are like a hard rain-proof roof protecting its two flying wings, which, when the beetle isn’t flying, are all nicely folded up underneath like two colored umbrellas.

Little Jim was always collecting things too and he was to blame for inspiring me to start a collection of my own. That summer Little Jim was looking up different kinds of wild flowers and writing their names down in a notebook. It just so happened that that week Pop and I were studying beetles and other insects.

Just that minute the big brown beetle I had my flashlight focused on, wriggled itself off the clod of dirt it was on and went tumblety-sizzle down the side of the mound and landed kerplop in the grave itself.

“Poor little scarab beetle,” I said to it. “I’ll bet that right this very second one of your nearest relatives is in that great big yellow-stomached catfish I caught a half hour ago at the mouth of the branch.”

Anybody knows that one of the best baits in the world to use to catch a catfish at night is a juicy grub worm, which is a little C-shaped larva which hatches out of an egg of a scarab beetle, such as a June beetle or some other kind.

“You’d be scared too,” Poetry said, “if you were flying around at night and saw a light in a cemetery and accidentally and all of a sudden found yourself right in the bottom of a newly dug grave.”

“Goose,” I said. “I didn’t say scared—I said scarab.” Then, feeling kind of proud of all the different things Pop and I had learned that week, I began to rattle off some of it to Poetry: “That’s what kind of beetle it is,” I said, “only it doesn’t eat dead stuff like some scarab beetles do. Its larvae eat the roots of nearly everything Pop plants in our new ground, but most scarabs eat dead things and worse stuff.”

“Cut out the education!” Poetry said. “Who cares about that? I s’pose you think that that’s why he flew into this old cemetery in the first place. He was looking for something dead to eat. Maybe that’s why he dived headfirst into the side of your face!”

“Cut it out, yourself,” I said, feeling a little temper-fire starting in my mind.

Just then the June beetle unscrambled himself—or herself, whichever it was—spread its shell-like front wings and its reddish-colored back wings and took off again, straight in the direction of my face, but I snapped off the flashlight quick, ducked my head and he missed me and disappeared into the night—on his way, maybe, to the lighted window of somebody’s house. If he should happen to see one somewhere, and if there should be a window open without a screen, some woman or girl would soon be screaming bloody murder for a man or boy to come and save her life.

“Turn your light on again, quick!” Dragonfly said, “and let’s get out of here!”—and quick started to do it himself, but we stopped him.

We looked all around everywhere but still couldn’t find a single clue to tell why whoever he was had been digging there.

“Hey!” Poetry exclaimed excitedly all of a sudden, “Look! Here’s a clear shoe print in the soft dirt.”

Then like he had seen a ghost or something, he almost screamed as he said, “It’s a woman’s high-heeled shoe!”

“What on earth!” I thought.

“But it was a m-m-m-man digging!” Dragonfly said, stammering.

“Then it was a woman dressed in overalls!” I said in the most excited voice I had heard myself use in a long time.

I stooped, shoved Pop’s powerful three-batteried flashlight down into the neat little shoe print. “Say, she had very small feet,” I said.

Naturally, there wasn’t anything extra mysterious about a woman wearing overalls around Sugar Creek, especially when she was doing the kind of hard work which men have to do and which some women have to do sometimes, but what would a woman be doing digging in an abandoned cemetery late at night? “What on earth?” I thought and said so.

Not a one of us knew what to do or say next so we decided to go over to the old maple tree. The minute we got there Poetry ordered me to shine my light around the tree trunk while he studied the bark to see if any of it had been freshly knocked off.

“What are you looking for?” I asked.

“To see if a human bobwhite or a human turtledove was hiding up there among the branches as a sort of lookout for the woman. Those two bird-whistles were warnings of some kind.”

What Poetry said made sense, but we couldn’t stay all night, and our six parents would be wondering why we didn’t come home—and also worrying—and any boy who has good sense doesn’t like to do any dumb thing to make his parents worry any more than they would do anyway—on account of a parent is something a boy would have a hard time doing without especially when it is time for breakfast or dinner or supper. Besides, who would give him a licking when he needed it, which every once in a while he probably does, even if he’s just had one the week before?

So we decided to go on home, get secret word to the rest of the Gang—Big Jim, Circus, Little Jim and Little Tom Till—to all meet us at the old pine tree beside Sarah Paddler’s tombstone tomorrow right after lunch. Then we could look to see if we could find out what had been going on: why a limping woman in overalls was digging in an old abandoned cemetery, and who had given the bobwhite and turtledove calls and why?

“Let’s go home, and get some sleep,” I said to Dragonfly and Poetry, and we started to start up the lane to the highway following an old brown path, which twenty minutes ago the car had followed.

Then what to my wondering ears should come, from back in the direction of the open grave and Sarah Paddler’s tombstone but a quail’s sharp, clear call—“Bob-white! Bob-white! Poor Bob-white.”

Say, Dragonfly, who had been standing there under the tree with us, his teeth chattering, jumped like a firecracker had exploded under him, whirled into fast life, and a jiffy later his spindling legs were flying like a June beetle’s wings, carrying him up the lane toward the road that would lead us home.

As fast as two other firecrackers getting exploded from the explosion of the first one, Poetry and I were dashing madly after Dragonfly, I getting more scared the faster I ran. We didn’t stop until, panting and gasping for breath, we got to my house.

Say, the very second we came panting into our yard and up to the iron pitcher pump at the end of the board walk about twenty feet from our back door, Pop came sauntering up from the direction of the barn, carrying a kerosene lantern and—would you believe it?—a spade and a shovel!

“Wh-h-hat are you doing still up?” I said, still panting and a little mixed up in my mind.

“Oh, just digging around in the earth a little,” Pop said in a lazy, yawning voice, “been burying something or other.”

Say, three boys looked at each other from three different, dark directions and felt terribly disappointed for it looked like our mystery was going to explode right in front of our worried faces.

“Somebody die?” Poetry asked, trying to be mischievous at a time when he shouldn’t have, and Pop said indifferently, “Just a couple of newborn pigs. Old Red Addie gave us a new family of eight tonight. Two of them didn’t live so I thought I’d bury ’em right away,” Pop finished.

After being half-scared to death, here our mystery was all solved, I thought—or was it? How about the woman’s shoe tracks and the mysterious bird calls and the car?

Well, we divided our seven fish into three equal parts. Poetry took three sunfish, Dragonfly three and I took the big catfish, which I myself had caught on the descendant—or else what might have become the ancestor—of a June beetle. That big, yellow-stomached catfish was as big as three sunfish—in fact, as big as all six of the insignificant fish, which Dragonfly and Poetry had pulled in after the fish had accidentally hooked themselves onto their merely worm-baited hooks and gotten themselves pulled in to shore.

3

NEXT day we managed to get the news around quick to all the rest of the gang—but secretly on account of it seemed like our parents ought not to know what was going on until we ourselves investigated. Anybody knows that a mystery isn’t a mystery any longer if someone explains it, and there’s nobody that can spoil a boy’s mystery any quicker than his very bright parents, who always know almost everything anyway—one reason our pops being especially smart being on account of they used to be boys themselves.

The very second I finished all of my dinner that day—except my piece of apple pie—I looked past Pop’s overhanging, reddish-brown eyebrows to where Mom sat at the end of the table. “May I be excused and eat my pie outdoors?” I asked.

You see, if there is anything I would rather do than anything else it is to leave the table early before anybody thinks about starting to do the dishes, and take my three-cornered, one-sixth of an apple pie, and go out our east screen door with the pie in one hand and my straw hat in the other, swing out to our grape arbor, step up on a strong, wooden box, which is always there, reach up and lay the pie on top of the two-by-four crossbeam at the east end of the arbor where there isn’t any vine growing. Then I like to climb up and sit on the top with the cool breeze blowing in my freckled face and with my two bare feet, with their ten stubby toes, hanging swinging below me. I hold the nicely-crusted pie upside down and eat it that way, while I look around the Sugar Creek territory to where different members of the gang live. I also like to look at our farm and the barn and the chicken house and the big walnut tree with the long, rope swing hanging from the first branch, which grows on the south side, and the plum tree with the robin’s nest in the three-limbed crotch up near the top. Boy, oh boy, does it make me feel fine and glad to be alive, especially glad to be a boy!

Even while I was asking to be excused, I was imagining myself to be already outdoors, sitting up on the flat side of the two-by-four crossbeam.

But say, Pop was as smart as I was—smart enough to read my mind—and he saw things in it that I hardly knew were there because right that second he looked at Mom and said, “There are some good habits, some bad habits, and some that are in between. The ones in between don’t hurt a boy very much, but they help to make him him. That’s getting to be quite a habit with you, Bill.” He finished, looking at me with his gray-green eyes.

I had been looking at the pie, which I already had in my hand, expecting Mom to say, “Yes,” like she nearly always does.

“What habit?” I said innocently to Pop.

“Use plain American, Theodore,” Mom said to Pop. “The boy doesn’t understand philosophy.”

And Pop said to Mom with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, “May I take my pie and go outdoors and eat it upside-down on top of our grape arbor?”

Mom looked up at him with a sort of quizzical expression on her face. There was also a twinkle in her eye that seemed funny to Pop, but not to me. Then she said, “Certainly you can do that while Bill and I do the dishes.”

Pop said, “Thank you,” and took his one-sixth of a pie in his big, hard, sun-tanned farmer hand, slipped out of his chair and outdoors fast, letting the screen slam hard behind him like I sometimes do—and shouldn’t. Outside he let out a blood-curdling war whoop and I heard his footsteps running toward the grape arbor.

A second later I was outdoors too.

Say, if there is anything that looks ridiculous, it is a boy’s long-legged, red-haired, bushy-eyebrowed father grunting himself into an upside-down knot and out of it again while he climbs up onto a high grape arbor.

A jiffy later there was Pop up there where I should have been, with his heavy work shoes on his large feet swinging, and eating his pie upside-down and panting for breath from all the unnecessary exercise. It was fun to Pop, but to me it looked silly so I sat down on the porch with my back to him and ate my pie right side up and for some reason it didn’t taste very good.

It was a scorching hot day and I began to feel a little better there in the shade, when all of a sudden Mom said from inside the house, using a very cheerful voice, “O. K. Bill. The dishes are all ready for you.”

I always know when Mom calls me cheerfully like that that she’s trying to make me want to come.

But say, Pop turned out to be a really swell Pop after all, or else he was trying to give me a free education. It seemed like he was still pretending to be me up there on that grape arbor so when he heard Mom say, “dishes,” he called out cheerfully, “Coming,” and swung around quick and down off the grape arbor and hurried into the house like he would rather dry the Collins family dinner dishes than do anything else in the whole world.

He got stopped at the door by Mom though, who was maybe trying to play the game with him, and she said, “Wipe that dirt off your shoes on the mat there”—which she tells me about thirty-seven times a day—sometimes even while I am already doing it, having thought of it first myself. Say, I looked at Pop’s feet and they did have dirt on them—a yellowish-brown dirt on the sides of the soles and heels!

At the very second I saw Pop’s shoes with yellowish-brown dirt on them instead of the very black dirt I knew was the kind that was up under the pignut trees, I wondered what on earth? I certainly didn’t want my Pop to be really getting mixed up in our mystery like I had thought last night for a minute he might be.

Not only that—I didn’t want him to have been the person who had given the bobwhite and turtledove bird calls last night, which my discouraged mind was trying to tell me he could have been.

Not knowing I was going to say what I said, I said, “POP!” in a loud and astonished voice, “Where did you get that kind of mud on your shoes?” I was using the kind of voice I had heard another member of our family use on me several different times in my half-long life.

Pop, who was already wiping off his shoes on the mat at the door, looked down at them in astonishment and said, “What dirt?”

Mom’s astonished voice shot through the finely woven screen of the door and landed with a “kerwham” right where her eyes were looking, which was on both Pop’s big shoes. “Why, Theodore Collins!” she said, “What on earth?”

Pop grinned back through the screen at her and said, “No, not what on earth, but earth on what?” which I could tell he thought was funny, but Mom didn’t think it was very. She went on in her same astonished, accusing voice, saying, “Those are the very same muddy shoes you ate dinner with!”

“I never ate dinner with muddy shoes in my life,” Pop said, with a grin in his voice. “I always use a knife and fork and spoon,” which was supposed to be extra funny—and was to Pop and me—but for some reason Mom only smiled rather than laughed and it looked like she was trying to keep herself from even smiling.

“Go get your father’s house slippers,” Mom ordered me, and I obeyed her in a tickled hurry.

Pop slipped his feet out of his shoes and left them on the porch, and slipped his feet into his slippers and ordered me to follow him into the house, which I also did with a little less speed, because I could tell by the tone of his voice that he had some work for me to do, which I found out was the truth.

It wasn’t too bad though ’cause Pop and I played a little game while we did the dishes. He called me “Pop” and I called him “Bill.” He ordered Mom to go into the front room to look after my baby sister, Charlotte Ann.

Say, Pop and I dived headfirst—or rather, I should say, handsfirst—into the sudsy dishwater, making short work of those dishes, getting them done a lot faster than if a mother and daughter had done them. Also we hurried to be sure to get through before Mom might come out into the kitchen and look over our work and decide we were not using the right kind of soap or something.

It really was fun ’cause I kept giving orders to my red-haired, awkward son, giving him cuckoo commands every few minutes such as “Keep your mind on your work, Bill!” ... “Hey, that plate has to be wiped over again!” ... “Your mother likes to have the glasses polished a little better than that, Son, we never know when there might be company from somewhere and those glasses have to shine like everything”—unnecessary things a father nearly always says to a boy.

Well, those dishes got done in about half the usual time. As quick as they were finished, I was free to start to do what I really wanted to do in just the way I wanted to do it, but I got stopped by Pop’s big, gruff voice. I had just tossed Pop’s drying towel toward the rack beside the stove, and missed the rack and had made a red-headfirst dive for it to pick it up quick before Pop, or especially Mom, might see it. I was still in a bent-over position—just right for a good spank from somebody—when Pop’s voice socked me and the words were, “Which one of us is Bill and which is your father now—for the rest of the afternoon, I mean?”

“I am,” I said. In half a jiffy the towel was on the rack nice and straight and I was over by the washstand, stooping to get my straw hat, which was beside Pop’s big still-off work shoes.

“Bring the gang home some time this afternoon,” Pop said. “I want to show them Addie’s nice, new red-haired family.”

“I will,” I answered, I having seen the six cute little quadrupeds myself that morning.

By that time I was already outdoors and ten feet from the slammed screen door, the door having slammed itself on account of its strong, coiled spring. Then Pop called again and stopped me stock-still. “If I am your father again, and you are Bill Collins, you had better stay home and mow the lawn and let me go to meet the gang,”—but I could tell he didn’t mean it. Pop looked awfully cute, I thought, with Mom’s big apron on and his blue shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbows, his slippers still on, standing in the open screen door.

I called to him saying, “I am still Theodore Collins and you are Bill and you are letting flies in. Shut the door quick—and quietly!”

As I hurried away, my mischievous Pop called after me, “So long, Mr. Collins! Have a nice time, and don’t forget to find a new beetle for our collection.”

“So long, Bill!” I yelled from the front gate, which I had just opened and gone through and shut after me. Then as I dashed past Theodore Collins on our mailbox I was myself again. I swished across the dusty road, vaulted over the old, lichen-covered rail fence and in a jiffy was running in the path that had been made by barefoot boys’ bare feet, down through the woods as fast as I could go to the spring where the gang was going to meet first before going up to the top of Strawberry Hill to the cemetery.

4

BOY, oh boy! I never felt better in my life than I did when I was galloping through that woods to meet the gang. First I was in the sunlight and then in the shade as I raced along in that winding, little, brown path—swishing past different kinds of trees, such as maple and beech and ash and oak and also dodging around chokecherry shrubs and wild rosebushes with roses scattered all around among the thorns, also past dogwood trees and all kinds of wild flowers that grew on either side of the path.

Even though I had had to be delayed unnecessarily on account of the dishes, I got to the spring about the same time Little Jim and Poetry did. Circus was already there in the favorite place where he usually waits for us when he gets there first, which was in the top branches of a little elm sapling that grows at the top of the steep bank. As you know, at the bottom of that steep bank was the spring itself, but we always met in a little, shaded, open space at the top. Circus was swinging and swaying and looked really like a chimpanzee, hanging by his hands and feet and everything except his tail—which he didn’t have anyway.

As quick as Big Jim, with his almost mustache, and Little Tom Till, with his freckled face and red hair, got there and also Dragonfly, with his goggle-eyed face and spindling legs, that was all of us.

Poetry, Dragonfly and I told everybody everything that had happened last night, but I didn’t tell them about Pop having had yellowish-brown dirt on his shoes; and with my eyes I kept Poetry and Dragonfly from telling them about the two baby pigs Pop had buried somewhere, because I felt sure Pop wouldn’t bury two baby pigs in a cemetery, which had been reserved for human beings only.

A little later, after a loafing ramble along the bayou and a climb to the top of Strawberry Hill, we scrambled over the rail fence and in a couple of jiffies reached the place where the woman had been digging last night, which was not more than ten feet from Sarah Paddler’s tall tombstone. Well, we all stopped and stood around in a barefoot circle looking down into the hole. Sure enough—just as we had seen it last night—there was the print of a high-heeled, woman’s shoe and also other high-heeled shoe tracks all around, but none of the others were as clear as the one we were all studying that very minute.

“What on earth do you s’pose she was digging here for?” Little Tom Till asked in his high-pitched voice.

Big Jim answered him saying, “If we knew that, we would know what we want to know.”

For a minute I focused my eyes on the hand, which somebody had chiseled on Sarah Paddler’s tombstone. One finger of the hand pointed toward the sky. I had read the words just below the hand maybe a hundred and twenty times in my life and they were: “There is rest in Heaven,”—which I knew there was for anybody who got to go there. When I was in a cemetery, it was easy to think about things like that. I was sort of dreamily remembering that our minister in the Sugar Creek church says that there is only one way for a boy to get to Heaven. First, the boy has to believe that he is an honest-to-goodness sinner and needs a Saviour. Then he has to believe that Jesus, who is the Saviour, came all the way from Heaven a long time ago to die for him and to save him from his sins; then if the boy will open the door of his heart and let the Saviour come in, that will settle it.

Our minister, who knows almost all the Bible by heart, tells the people that come to our church that there isn’t any other way for anybody to be saved except just like I told you.

So I knew that Old Man Paddler, who was saved himself and was the kindest old, long-whiskered old man that ever was a friend to a boy, would see his wife, Sarah, again—maybe the very minute he got to Heaven.

For a fast jiffy, while I was standing by the hole which the June beetle had tumbled into last night, and was looking up at that carved hand on the tombstone, my mind sort of drifted away on a friendly little journey clear up into Heaven—past the great big white cumulus cloud that was piling itself up in the southwest right that minute above the tree-covered hills where I knew Old Man Paddler’s cabin was, and I imagined how that somewhere in Heaven maybe there was a very nice little cabin waiting for that kind old man, and that his wife, Sarah, was out there in the garden somewhere looking after the flowers for him. Every now and then she would stop doing what she was doing and look toward a little white gate like the one we have at our house by the big swing near the walnut tree to see if she could see her husband coming. Then all of a sudden I imagined she did see him and her kinda oldish face lit up like Mom’s does sometimes when she sees Pop coming home from somewhere and she started quick on a half walk and half run out across the yard to meet him, calling “Hi there! I’ve been waiting for you a long time....”

It was a terribly nice thought to think, I thought. Only I knew that if that old man ever left Sugar Creek, it would be awful lonesome around here for a long time, and it sorta seemed like we needed him here even worse than his wife did up there.

From Sarah Paddler’s grave in the shade of the big pine tree, we went all the way across the cemetery, winding around a little to get to the old maple where last night I had shone my flashlight all around looking for signs of a human quail or a human turtledove.

There we stopped in the friendly shade and lay down in the tall grass to hold a meeting to help us decide what to do next. While we were lying there in seven different directions, chewing the juicy ends of bluegrass and timothy and wild rye, Big Jim gave a special order which was, “I would like each of us except Poetry and Dragonfly to give a quail whistle.”

“Why?” Little Tom Till wanted to know.

“I want to find out if any of you were out here last night making those calls. I also want to know if any of you guys were out here dressed in overalls and wearing a woman’s high-heeled shoes.”

Little Jim and Little Tom Till and Circus and Big Jim himself did the best they could making bobwhite calls and Circus was the only one of us whose whistle sounded like the quail whistle we had heard last night.

Then Big Jim made all of us except Poetry, Dragonfly and me, do a turtledove call and again Circus was the only one whose call was like the one we heard last night.

“O. K., Circus,” Big Jim leveled his eyes across our little tangled up circle and said to him, “Confess or we will drag you down to Sugar Creek and throw you in.”

“All right,” Circus said, “I confess I was home in bed, sound asleep when I heard those calls last night.”

“So was I,” Little Tom Till said.

“So was I,” Little Jim echoed.

“Yeh, and so was I. Sound asleep in bed listening to the calls,” Big Jim said sarcastically.

Well, that left only Poetry, Dragonfly and me, and we were the ones who had heard the calls in the first place, so the mystery was as still unsolved as it had been, not a one of us believing that Circus was here last night.

There wasn’t any use to stay where we were so, it being a very hot afternoon, we decided to go to the old swimming hole and get cooled off.

“Last one in is a bear’s tail,” Circus yelled back at us over one of his square shoulders as he galloped off first out across the cemetery to the other side.

The rest of us quick took off after him, not a one of us wanting to be a bear’s tail, which means we would have to be almost nothing on account of bears have very stubby tails.

Long before we got there nearly everyone of us had his shirt off—so that by the time we should get there all we would have to do would be to wrestle ourselves out of our overalls and in a jiffy we would be out in the middle of the swellest water to swim in in the whole world. Everyone of us knew how to swim like a fish, our parents having made us learn as soon as we were old enough to—like everybody in the world should.

Say, you should have seen the way our mystery began to come to life while we were still on the shore before splashing ourselves in.

All of a sudden Little Jim, who was undressing in the shade of a willow where he always hangs his clothes, yelled to us in a very excited voice for him, “Hey, Bill! Circus! Poetry! Everybody! Come here quick! Hurry! Look what I found!”

Well, when Little Jim or any of our gang calls in an excited voice like that, it always sends a half dozen thrills through me because it nearly always means something extra special.

Before I knew it, I was galloping across to where he was, my shirt in one hand and one of my overall legs in the other, getting there as quick as the rest of us. I also managed to grab up a stick on my way just in case Little Jim might have spied a water moccasin or some other kind of snake, of which there are maybe twenty different varieties around Sugar Creek.

Little Jim was standing there holding his clothes in one hand and pointing down with an excited right forefinger to something on the ground on a little strip of sand at the water’s edge.

At first I didn’t see a thing, except some shaded water where about fifty or more small, black, flat whirligig beetles were racing round in excited circles on the surface of the water. Right away I smelled the smell of ripe apples, which is the kind of odor a whirligig beetle gives off, which anybody who knows anything about whirligig beetles knows comes from a kind of milky fluid which they use to protect themselves from being eaten by fish or some kind of water bird or something else.

Even Poetry didn’t see what Little Jim was excited about. “Education again,” he said with a disgruntled snort and turned back to the swimming hole.

Dragonfly, who wasn’t interested in Pop’s and my new hobby, grunted too and also sneezed, saying, “I’m allergic to the smell of sweet bugs,”—that being a common name for those lively, little, ripe-apple-smelling beetles.

“They’re whirligig beetles,” I said, wanting to defend Little Jim for calling us over in such an excited voice for what the rest of the gang would think was almost nothing.

“Look, everybody! Look! See, it’s a clue!” Little Jim yelled.

Then my eyes dived in the direction his finger was really pointing and I saw what he saw. Boy, oh boy! A lively thrill started whirligigging in my very surprised brain, for what to my wondering eyes had appeared but, half hidden in the grass, a pair of woman’s new shoes—very small, expensive looking, white pumps with all-green, extra-high heels and with a heart-shaped design across the toes that looked kinda like the leaves from a ground ivy, like the ones that grew all around Sarah Paddler’s tombstone.

What on earth, I thought and remembered that Pop had said, “Earth on what?” when I saw there actually were some yellowish-brown earth stains on those extra-high heels of those newish-looking, pretty, woman’s shoes.

Just that second Dragonfly said, “Ps-s-st! Listen, everybody!”—which everybody did, and there it was again as plain as a Sugar Creek cloudless day, a sharp bobwhite call from down the creek somewhere, “Bob-white! Bob-white! Poor-Bob-white!”

5

SAY, if that bobwhite call was from a real quail, then we didn’t have anything to worry about, but we knew that honest-to-goodness quails not only don’t make their very pretty calls in the middle of the night, but also they don’t do it in the middle of a sultry, mid-summer, sunny afternoon—or if they do I don’t remember having heard any do it around Sugar Creek.

If it was a human being calling like a quail, then what?

And if it was a man human being, we would all want to scramble ourselves out of there and hide somewhere so that whoever he was wouldn’t see us; but if it was a woman human being, who had made the quail call—which it might have been, I thought, on account of the woman’s shoes lying there in the sand beside Little Jim—then every single one of us ought to make a headfirst dive toward getting his clothes on.

Before we could start to try to decide what to do, we heard the quail call again and this time it was a lot nearer than it had been—in fact it seemed like it wasn’t a hundred feet distant and had come from the direction of the spring from which we ourselves had just come. That meant that the person, man or woman, was maybe walking in the same path we had been running in a little while before. We wouldn’t have even half enough time to get our clothes on before running to hide.

I looked all around our tense circle to see if the rest of the gang had any ideas as to what to do and it seemed like not a one of us could do a thing except stand stock-still, with his eyes and ears glued to the direction from which the last quail call had come.

“Quick, Dragonfly!” I heard myself say, taking charge of things and shouldn’t have tried to on account of Big Jim is our leader when he is with us. “Get those shoes, quick, and let’s get out of here!”

But Big Jim took my leadership away from me in a split second by saying, “Leave those shoes alone! Don’t you dare touch ’em! If anything has happened, we don’t want our fingerprints on them!”

In less than a fourth of a jiffy we were scrambling up the side of the slope leaving those shoes about eighteen inches from the whirligig beetles, and with all our minds whirligigging like everything—some of us with our clothes half on and others with them half off and the rest of the gang with them all off—and with my mind a little off too, maybe—we were getting ourselves fast out of there.

At the top of the little slope we came to the narrow footpath, zipped across it and disappeared into the tall corn—that being one of Dragonfly’s pop’s cornfields. I knew that on the opposite side of that rather narrow strip of cornfield was the bayou, which was divided into two parts with a longish pond on either end of it, and each of those ponds had in it some very lazy water in which there were a few lone-wolf, mud pickerel or barred pickerel, as some people called them. Between the two ponds there was a narrow strip of soggy, marshy soil and a little path that was bordered by giant ragweeds. This was a sort of shortcut to the woods from the old swimming hole. Once we got to the woods we could follow the rail fence like we had done last night and come out at the place where Little Jim had killed the bear, which you have probably read about in one of the other Sugar Creek Gang stories. As you know, that was at the bottom of Strawberry Hill; and at the top of the hill is the old cemetery and the hole in the ground beside Sarah Paddler’s tombstone.

There we would be safe from whoever was coming up that path, nearer and nearer every second—that is, if he was dangerous.

As quick as we were far enough into the tall corn to be hidden from sight of the path, we dropped down on the ground to listen and to look to see if we could see what was going on. As you know, corn blades are not as thick at the bottom of the stalks as they are at the top so if anybody was coming up the path, we could see his feet if we were lying on the ground.

Poetry, who was real close to me like he nearly always is, whispered in my ear, saying, “Hey, sh-h-h! There he is!”

I looked and saw the cuffs of somebody’s trousers standing at the end of my corn row in the very place where we always left the path to dive down the incline into our willow-and-shrubbery-protected outdoor dressing room. Then came a startling quail call again and this time it seemed so near it almost scared me out of what few wits I hadn’t already been scared out of.

I waited, wondering if there would be an answer, and then what to my astonished ears should come but the sound of a turtledove’s low, sad, lonesome call from the other direction farther up the path.

Almost right away I saw the skirt of a woman’s yellowish dress coming out of our green dressing room. I also noticed that she was barefoot. Straining my ears in their direction I could hear her talking and complaining about something like a boy does when he gets called by his mother to leave his play—and shouldn’t. I could hear the man’s voice too, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying.

A jiffy later I heard her say, “I was having so much fun wading in the riffles, and—look! I found this—a big Wash Board shell! I’ll bet I’ll find a pearl in it! Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I did find one worth hundreds of dollars?”

And I heard the man say, “That’s fine, but it’s time for your rest. Let’s get back to the tent.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sure,” Poetry said, “what of it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s not a picture of Charlotte Ann,” Little Jim said, who managed to get his small, curly head in close enough to take a look. “She’s got more hair than that.”

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

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

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

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

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

6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s a stampede!” Dragonfly cried excitedly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7

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

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

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

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

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.