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

Mrs. Collins were together shopping. They invited our troupe to church tomorrow. You go to Sunday school, I suppose?”

I swallowed a “Yes, Ma’am,” which she managed to hear, and before Theodore Collins called his son again about the undone chores, I said, “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll run over and see if I can stop him from having to call again. I think I know where his boy is.”

My hip pocket seemed to have a fire in it which ought to be put out, so just before I started to start toward Pop to help put out a temper-fire which probably was ready to burn a hole in his hat, I handed to the lady the map Poetry and I had found last night in the watermelon in the spring, saying, “Is this what you wanted?”

She unfolded the “Eat more Eatmore” wrapper, spread out the map and studied it. Her face lit up as she said, “Why this is good—very good! It’s even better than the one you showed me yesterday.”

I liked her friendly voice and her smile so well, that for a second I wished I was actually Little Tom Till, himself. Then she tossed another question at me, and it was “This red X in the circle—does that represent any special location?”

“The red X?” I asked innocently. “Why, that’s—that’s—that’s where the green tent is pitched. I—it’s straight across the creek from the mouth of the branch, and just—uh—about fifty yards above where the current divides, and one part goes down the north side of the island and the other the other.”

She smiled a spoken thank you and added, “You do have a fine sense of humor, don’t you?”

I wasn’t sure what I had, but there was one thing I wanted to know, and very much. I felt I had to know it. What did the red letter X stand for? Of course I knew the tent was there, but who lived in it and why? And why, if Tom had drawn this map for the girl scouts, why had he put the red X there?

I must have been frowning my worry and she saw it, ’cause right away she added, “The girls’ll be intrigued by your story that an old witch is camping there, but I’m afraid instead of their wanting to stay away, they’ll be more curious than ever.”

Then my whole mind gasped. The lady in the watermelon colored dress not only thought I was Little Tom Till, but that little rascal of a red-haired boy had told her there was an old witch living in the tent, and that the girls ought not to go anywhere near it. What on earth!

Just then Theodore Collins’ thundery voice called again for his son, so I said, “I’d better go now,” which I did. Away I went in a galloping hurry to let a reddish-brown-mustached, bushy-eyebrowed father know where his son really was—if he was his son.

I found Mr. Collins in a better humor than I expected. Panting and running fast like a boy who is late for school, I arrived at the barn door just as Pop came out with a pail of Purina Chow for our old brindle cow who was standing at the pasture bars looking at us with question marks on her ears as if wondering why her supper had to come so early—but that it was all right with her.

“Why didn’t you answer me when I called?” Pop asked, and I remembered an old joke our family had read in a magazine and which we had laughed over, so I said, “I didn’t hear you the first two times.”

“Bright boy,” Pop answered, and I answered with another old joke, saying, “I’m so bright my parents call me ‘son.’”

Pop grinned and when I asked him how come we had to get the chores done so early, he explained, “There’s a special prayer meeting for the men of the church. That’s why your mother’s in town now—she went in to get the shopping done this afternoon—she and Mrs. Till.”

It was a good thing we did get the chores done early—a very good thing—because there were a lot of important other things that had to happen that day to make this story even more mysterious, and to clear up some of the cloudy questions in my mind. Nearly everything had to happen before sundown, only of course I didn’t know it at the time, or I’d have hurried even faster with my part of the chores.

I was up in our haymow alone throwing down alfalfa hay when I looked out the east window and saw our car coming down the road, with Mom at the steering wheel and Little Tom Till’s Mom with Charlotte Ann in her lap in the front seat with her. Only a few minutes before I had been thinking about Mrs. Till in a very special way, so when I saw her in the car with Mom, I got the queerest feeling.

Throwing down hay was something I always liked to do because it is like a man’s job; also there was something nice about being alone in a big wide alfalfa-smelling haymow where a boy could think a boy’s thoughts, talk to himself, and whistle, and even sing, and nobody could hear him.

Sometimes when I’m in the haymow, I climb up on the long, axe-hewn beam that stretches across the whole width of the barn from one side to the other, and imagine myself to be Abraham Lincoln who had split so many logs with an ax. I raise my voice and quote all of his Gettysburg address, feeling fine while I am doing it, and important, and glad to be alive. Maybe I would be President of the United States, some time, myself.

I always hated to stop when the last word was said, and I would have to be Theodore Collins’ son again, with years and years of growing yet to do before I would be a man.

Well, I had just said in my deepest, most dignified voice, “... that this nation under God may have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” and was still standing listening to my imaginary audience clap their hands, and thinking about the part of my speech which said, “all men are created equal,” and was also thinking of the Till family—old hook-nosed John Till himself; his oldest boy Bob, and Little Tom, his other son, who wanted to be a good boy and was, part of the time. I was remembering the manila envelope which Little Jim had left at the Tills’ back door and was thinking about Mrs. Till who had such a hard time just to keep from being too discouraged to want to live....

Then is when I heard our car coming and saw Mom with Mrs. Till beside her. I quickly threw down another forkful of hay, hurried to the ladder and climbed down, leaving Abraham Lincoln to look after himself—and to get off the log the best way he could.

It seemed like Mom, by being a friend to Bob and Tom Till’s mother, was helping to prove that “all men are created equal.”

“All men are created equal,” was still in my mind when I reached the bottom of the ladder. For some reason, though, it didn’t seem right that Little red-haired, fiery-tempered, freckle-faced Tim Till was as equal as I was. We might look a lot alike to anybody who saw us dressed in the same kind of clothes, but I was not a watermelon thief—and he was, I thought—and the first chance I got I was going to prove to him that even though all men, boys especially, might be created equal, when one boy sneaked out into another boy’s melon patch, stole a melon, and sold it to a girl scout troupe, the other boy was equal to giving him a sound thrashing.

I was wondering whether I ought to tell Pop about what the girl scout leader had told me, when I heard Mom’s voice calling from up near the walnut tree, “Is Bill out there somewhere?”

I almost jumped out of my bare feet when I heard Pop answer her from just outside the barn door, “He’s helping me with the chores!”

Mom called back to say that she wanted me to take care of Charlotte Ann while she drove Mrs. Till on home.

It wasn’t easy, taking care of that wriggling, impatient little rascal of a sister. Whatever makes a two-year-old baby sister so hard to take care of anyway? And why do they always want to run away from you and get into dangerous situations the very second your back is turned? I hadn’t any sooner sat down in the big rope swing under the walnut tree, and started to pump myself a little, than I heard Pop yelling from some direction or other—in fact from away up at the pignut tree—and how in the world did he get that far away so quick?—yelling for me to “Run quick and get Charlotte Ann away from Old Red Addie’s fence.”

I swung out of the swing in a scared hurry, ’cause my eyes told me that that cute little reddish-brown-haired baby sister of mine was not only near the hog-lot fence but was actually trying to crawl through it to get inside—Charlotte Ann not being afraid of a single animal on our farm—not even one.

I scattered our seventy-eight hens in even more directions than that as I flew to Charlotte Ann’s rescue. Mom would have a conniption fit if I let that little sister of mine get her clean dress soiled and her best shoes muddy in Red Addie’s apartment-house yard—especially if she decided the mud puddle was a good place to walk in, which she probably would.

I got there just in time. Honestly! That child! You can hardly do anything else when you are looking after her. Mom calls it “baby-sitting” when she asks me to take care of her, but it isn’t! It’s baby-running, and keeping your eyes peeled every second or you won’t even have a baby sister. She’ll be gone in a flash, and you have to look all over for her—like the time she got lost in the woods and a terrible cyclone roared into our territory and trees were uprooted and fell in every direction and—But you know all about that if you’ve read the story, “The Green Tent Mystery at Sugar Creek.”

Well, after what seemed like too long a time, Mom got back from driving Mrs. Till home, and I went to the car to help her carry in the groceries and other things, and that’s when we found the brown paper bag with oranges in it, which Mrs. Till had accidentally left on the floor in the back, and Mom hadn’t seen it.

“Yes, that’s hers,” Mom said. “I’d better drive right back with it. Her doctor wants her to have fresh orange juice three times a day.”

“I—it’s almost time to start supper,” Pop said, looking at his watch. He explained to Mom about the special prayer meeting for men at the church, then gave me a quick order which was, “Bill, you take your bike and ride over to the Tills’ with these oranges while your mother starts supper.”

And that’s how come I ran into a situation that gave me a chance to prove in several, very fast hair-raising adventures that Little Tom Till and I were actually created equal.

I got to find out, also, who the old witch who lived in the green tent really was—and also why she lived there.