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

see it was a pair of Little Tom Till’s old, many times-patched jeans.

As soon as I’d given her the oranges and she had thanked me, she said, “You have such a nice mother, Bill. Such a nice mother.”

I shifted from one bare foot to the other, swallowed something in my throat which hadn’t been there a second before, and wished I could think of something polite to say, and couldn’t at first, then managed to think of:

“Tom has a nice mother, too.” I noticed Little Jim’s brown envelope with his awkward handwriting on it, lying on the other end of the ironing board. She’d probably read it, I thought, and then I got a little mixed up in my mind as I said, and was sorry for it afterward:

“Bob’s got a nice mother, too,”—and I knew she knew I was thinking how come such a nice mother could have two boys, one of which was a good boy and the other was a juvenile delinquent?

There were tears in her eyes when she looked at me with a sad smile and answered: “But I love them both—and some day God will answer my prayers for them.”

I forgot for a minute that I had actually been thinking Tom was just as bad as his very bad big brother, Bob, because he had stolen my watermelon.

“Where’s Tom now?” I asked, and she said, “I think he’s down along the creek, somewhere. If you see him or Bob on your way home, tell them it’s chore time.”

She thanked me again for the oranges, and I swung onto my bike, pedalled through their barnyard and out their open gate and on toward the creek.

At the bridge I stopped, looked downstream again at the green tent, and without even straining my eyes, I caught a fleeting glimpse of a boy just my size, wearing blue western-style jeans and a gray and maroon striped T-shirt. He was at the edge of the cornfield behind the green tent not more than ten feet from the clothesline which had on it different colored different kinds of women’s clothes.

“Right now, Bill Collins,” I heard my harsh voice saying to me through my grit teeth, “right now, you’re going to find out what is what, and why ... RIGHT NOW!”

I was down the embankment and under the bridge in a jiffy, and out in the cornfield scooting along in a hurry, like one of Circus’s Pop’s hounds trailing a cottontail—only my voice was quiet.

Closer and closer I came to the place where I had last seen Tom, shading my eyes to see what I could see.

Right then I heard a whirlwind of flying feet coming in my direction straight down the corn row I was stooped over in. In only a few fast-flying jiffies whoever was coming would be storming right into the middle of where I was, and if they didn’t happen to see me and I didn’t get out of the way, they’d bowl me over like a quarterback getting tackled in a football game.

There were other sounds than flying feet and the husky rusty rustle of the cornblades. There was an angry mannish-sounding voice, shouting exclamatory sentences and saying, “Stop you little rascal! Come back here with that! Do you hear me! I’ll whip the daylights out of you if I ever catch you!”

There was also a smallish, half-scared-half-to-death voice yelling “Help! Help! HELP!”

My muddled mind told me the small frightened voice was Little Tom Till’s and the angry voice was his big brother Bob’s—’cause it sounded just like his—and that Bob was chasing his brother and if he caught up to him he would give him a licking within an inch of his life.

Even as I glimpsed Little Tom flying ahead of whoever was behind him, I noticed again that he was dressed the same way I was. Being dressed like that made us look like twins, although, of course, he looked more like me than I did him, which means he was a better-looking boy than I would have been if I had looked like him.

For some reason when I realized that Tom was crying and running to get away from having to take a licking, in spite of the fact that I thought he was a watermelon thief, it seemed like I ought to do something to save him.

Closer and closer, and faster and faster, those flying feet came storming toward me. Then without warning Tom swerved to the left and dashed down a corn row and at the same time part of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address came to life in my mind and I knew I was really going to do something quick to help save Tom.

The thought was lightning fast in my mind: I was dressed exactly like Tom; my hair was red like his, and we were the same height, and would look so much alike from behind that whoever was chasing him wouldn’t know the difference. So I waited only a second until I felt sure Bob had seen me, then like a young deer I started on a fast gallop down the same corn row. I was sure I could run faster than Tom ’cause I had beaten him in a few races, and it would be quite a while before Bob could catch up with me. When he did catch up, he’d stop stock-still and stare, and Tom would be safe—for awhile anyway.

A second later the chase was on, and I was scooting down the row like a cottontail, running and panting and grinning to myself to think what a clever trick I was playing.

But say, that big lummox of a boy whom I hadn’t seen yet but had only heard, seemed to be gaining on me. Within a few minutes he would have me, if I didn’t run faster.

“Faster!” my excited mind ordered me. But I quickly realized I couldn’t save myself by just being fast. I’d have to be smart too, like a cottontail outsmarting a hound.

Remembering how cottontails disappear in a thicket if they can, then circle and go right back to where they were before, I turned left like Little Tom had done and raced madly back toward the tent and the creek and the plastic clothesline.

But it wasn’t a good idea. The big bully of a boy heard, or saw me, or something. I hadn’t any sooner shot out into the open and dashed between a pair of brown slacks and a pink lady’s dress of something hanging on the line than I heard panting and flying feet behind me and knew I would have to be even smarter than a cottontail.

“You dumb bunny!” a savage voice yelled at me. “I’ll make short work of you. Stop, you little thief! STOP!”

Right then was when my world turned upside down for a while. That fierce, very angry voice yelling at me was NOT the voice of Big Bob Till, but of somebody else! I realized that it was somebody who, if he caught up with me, might not know that I wasn’t Tom Till and I would get one of the worst thrashings a boy ever got. “What,” I asked myself, as I panted and dodged and sweat and grunted and hurried and worried—“what will happen to me?”

I made a dive around the wall-type tent, planning to dart into the path that went through the forest of giant ragweeds to the bridge. At the bridge I would rush up the incline on the other side and gallop across.

As soon as I would get across the bridge, I’d leap over the rail fence, hurry through the woods to the spring, swing into the path made by barefoot boys’ bare feet, and in only a little while after that I’d be across the road from “Theodore Collins” on our mailbox and would be safe.

I took a fleeting glance over my shoulder to see who was chasing me, and say! my pursuer was not only not Bob Till but wasn’t a boy at all—instead he was a woman wearing brown slacks and a woman’s hat!

Boy oh boy, was I ever in the middle of a situation! In that quick over-the-shoulder glance I noticed that her hat was straw-colored and looked a lot like the kind Little Jim’s Mom wears to church. Even in that quarter of a jiffy while I was seeing her over my shoulder, I noticed that the hat was the same color as the ripe wheat on Big Jim’s Pop’s farm and that there were several heads of wheat slanted across its left side instead of a feather like lots of women’s hats have on them.

What on earth! Why was I, Bill Collins, a husky hard-working farm boy with muscles like those of the village blacksmith—“as strong as iron bands”—running from just one helpless woman—just one!

But I hardly had time even to wonder “what on earth?” because in that fleeting glance over my shoulder my eyes had seen something else—I’d seen Little Tom Till come storming out of the cornfield behind the forest-green tent, shoot like a blue-jeaned arrow toward the opening, and disappear inside.

Glancing over my shoulder like that, was one of the worst things I could have done. I had seen one red-haired boy dashing into a tent, and I knew where he was right that very second, but I didn’t know where I, myself, was. When my eyes got back to the path I was supposed to be running in, I wasn’t running in it at all. I had swerved aside, stumbled over a log and was making a head-over-heels tumble in the direction of the creek. If the red boat hadn’t been there, I’d have landed in the water. Instead I fell sprawling into the boat itself—that is, that’s where I finally landed when I came to a stop after rolling down the incline.

Looking up from my upside-down position, I saw the woman’s face was hard and had an angry scowl on it. I realized with a gasp that in another jiffy she would be down the incline herself and I would be caught in what I could see were very large, very strong hands. Even though I was saving Tom Till from getting the daylights whaled out of him, I probably would get the double-daylights thrashed out of me.

If it had been winter and Sugar Creek frozen over, I could have leaped out of the boat and raced across the ice to the other side, but there isn’t a boy in the world who can run or walk on the water in the summertime. There was only one way for me to escape that fierce-faced woman, who in another few jiffies would be down that incline herself and into the boat and have me in her clutches.

Quick as a flash I was up and in the prow of the boat unfastening the guy rope. A second later, with one foot in the boat and the other against the bank, I gave the boat a hard shove, and out I shot into the stream.

“You come back here, you—you little red-haired rascal!” the woman’s gruff, angry voice demanded.

For the moment I had forgotten Little Tom Till—I was in such a worried hurry to save myself. Then what to my wondering ears should come sailing out over the water but Tom’s own excited voice, calling, “Hey! Wait for me! WAIT!”

Little Tom’s high-pitched voice coming from behind her, must have astonished the scowling-faced woman. She turned her head quick in the direction of the tent and her eyes landed on Tom who was waving at me and yelling and running toward the creek, looking exactly like me in his western-style blue jeans and maroon-and-gray-striped T-shirt. She must have thought she was seeing double, or that there were two of me: I was out in the nervous water in her red rowboat floating downstream toward the Sugar