Watermelon Mystery at Sugar Creek - Paul Hutchens (the false prince .TXT) 📗

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.

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 indelible 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, 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, most of the time, had