The Green Tent Mystery at Sugar Creek - Paul Hutchens (good english books to read txt) 📗

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.