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

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.

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.

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.

“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: