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

be trouble. Pop would hear me sneeze, or see my wet night clothes and wonder what on earth, and why.

So in a jiffy, like the story in one of our school books about a man named Mr. McGregor chasing Peter Rabbit who was all wet from having jumped in a can of water to hide—and Peter Rabbit sneezing—I was acting out that story backwards: I myself was a very wet, very dumb bunny chasing Leslie Poetry Thompson to try to stop him from getting us into even more trouble than we were already in.

We arrived at the iron pitcher pump platform at the same time, where I hissed to him not to pump the pump, pushing in between him and the pump, blocking him from doing what his stubborn mind was driving him to do.

“I’m thirsty,” he squawked to me.

“The pump handle squeaks!” I hissed back to him and shoved him off the pump platform. My left wet pajama sleeve pressed against his face.

What happened after that happened so fast and with so much noise it would have wakened seventeen fathers, as Poetry, my almost best friend who had always stood by me when I was in trouble, who was always on my side, all of a sudden didn’t act like he was my friend at all.

We weren’t any more than three feet from the large iron kettle filled with innocent water, which up to that moment had been reflecting the moon as clearly as if it had been a mirror—clearly enough, in fact, for you to see the man in the moon in it.

The next second Poetry’s powerful arms were around me and he was dragging me toward that big kettle. The next second after that, he swooped my 89 pounds up and with me kicking and squirming and trying to wriggle out of his grasp and not being able to, he sat me down kerplop-splash, double-splashety-slump right in the center of that large kettle of water.

“What on earth!” I exclaimed, my voice trembling with temper, my teeth chattering with the cold and my mind whirling.

My words exploded out of my mouth at the very minute Pop came out the back door. “‘What on earth!’ is right,” he exclaimed in his big father-sounding voice. “What on earth are you doing in the water?”

Poetry answered for me, saying politely like he was trying to save somebody from a razor strap, “It’s all my fault, Mr. Collins. We were getting a drink and I—I shouldn’t have done it—but I pushed him. I—.” Then Poetry’s voice took on a mischievous tone, as he said, “The water was so clear and the man in the moon reflected in it was so handsome, I wanted to see what a good-looking boy would look like in it. I couldn’t resist the temptation.”

Such an innocent voice! So polite! I was boiling inside as I splashed myself out of the kettle and stood dripping on the pump platform.

Then I did get a surprise. Pop’s voice, instead of being like black thunder, which it sometimes is at a time like that, was a sort of husky whisper: “Let’s keep quiet—all of us. We wouldn’t want to wake up your mother, Bill. You boys get back into the tent quick, while I slip into the house and get Bill a pair of dry pajamas. Hurry up! QUICK, into the tent!”

Pop turned, tiptoed to the back screen door, opened it quietly, while Poetry and I scooted to the tent. A second later, we were inside in the shadowy moonlight which oozed in through the plastic window above my cot.

Pop was back out of the house almost before I was out of my wet pajamas. He whispered to us at the tent door, “Here’s a towel. Dry yourself good. Put these fresh pajamas on—but, BE QUIET!” He whispered the last two words almost savagely.

“Here, let me have your old wet ones. I’ll hang them on the line behind the house to dry—and remember, not a word of this to your mother, Bill. Do you hear me?”

“Don’t worry,” I said. It was easy to hear anything as easy to listen to as that.

And Pop was gone.

In only a few jiffies I was dry and had on my nice fresh clean-smelling, Mom-washed stripeless yellow pajamas, and there wasn’t even a sniffle in my nose to hint that maybe I would catch cold.

Boy oh boy, was it ever quiet in the tent—the only sounds being those in my mind. Everything had happened so fast, it seemed as if it had taken only a minute. It also seemed like a year had passed—so many exciting things had happened—crazy things, too, such as a boy galloping around in a pool of cold water on a green watermelon, and a gang of girls screaming like wild hyenas that there was a zebra taking a bath in the spring.

“Wait,” Poetry ordered, as I sat down on the edge of my cot and started to crawl in. “We can’t get in between your mother’s nice clean sheets with feet that have waded through mud and dusty cornfields. I’ll go get the wash pan from the grape arbor, fill it with water, and bring it back.”

“You stay here!” I ordered. “I don’t trust you outside this tent one minute! I’ll get the water myself.”

Say, do you know what that dumb bunny of a fat boy answered me? He said in his very polite voice, “But I’m thirsty—I haven’t had a chance to get a drink—I—”

“Stay here!” I ordered. “I’ll bring you a drink.”

“After all I’ve done for you, you won’t even let me go with you?” he begged.

“What have you done for me, I’d like to know? You—with your plunking me into the middle of that kettle of water?”

Poetry’s strong fat hands grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me. “Listen, Chum,” he said fiercely; “I saved you from getting a licking, didn’t I? I heard your father opening the back door, and I knew he’d be there in a jiffy. If he found you all wet with that spring water, he’d have asked you how come, and you’d really have been in a pretty kettle. So I pushed you in with my bare hands, don’t you see? Besides—look at this!” Poetry turned on his flashlight, reached over to the foot of his cot and picked up a long black something-or-other with a handle on it, and extended it to me. AND IT WAS POP’S RAZOR STRAP!

“He had it in his hand when he came out the door,” Poetry told me. “He accidentally left it on the pump platform when he went in for the fresh pajamas. Now, am I your friend, or not?”

Looking at the eighteen-inch-long blackish-brown leather razor strap in Poetry’s hand, and remembering the last time Pop had given me a few interesting strokes with it, I decided maybe Poetry really had been my friend. Besides, if I let him go to get a pan of water for washing our feet, and if Pop saw and heard him, Pop would probably not say a word—he not wanting to wake Mom up.

“All right,” I said to Poetry, “but hurry back.” Which he did.

Pretty soon we had our feet washed and dried on the towel, which I noticed when we got through might also have to be washed in the morning. In only a little while we were in our bunks again and sound asleep, and right away I began dreaming a crazy mixed-up dream in which I was running in red-striped pajamas through the woods, leaving the path made by barefoot boys’ bare feet and working my way around to the left along the crest of the hill where the pawpaw bushes were, just to see how many girl campers there were. Then it seemed like I was in the spring again, galloping around on a green no-legged bronco which somebody had stolen and plugged and maybe sold to the girls—or even given to them—or maybe some of the girls had invaded our melon patch that very night and stolen it themselves.

I hated to think that, though, ’cause any girl who is a girl scout is supposed to be like a boy who is a boy scout, which is absolutely honest. Besides as much as I didn’t like girls—not most of them anyway—and was scared of them a little—it seemed like there was a small voice inside of me which all my life had been whispering that girls are kind of special—and anybody couldn’t help it if she happened to be born one. Mom had been a girl for quite a few years herself, and it hadn’t hurt her a bit. She had grown up to become one of the most wonderful people in the world.

But who had stole my watermelon? And how had it gotten down there in the spring? It was my melon, of course!

The idea woke me up. Or else my own voice did, when I heard myself hissing to Poetry:

“Hey, you! Poetry! Come on, wake up!”

He groaned, turned over in his cot, and groaned again. “Let me sleep, will you?”

“No,” I whispered, “wake up! Come on and go with me. I’ve got to go down into our watermelon patch to see—”

“I don’t want any more water,” he mumbled, “and I wouldn’t think you would either.”

“That melon in the spring,” I said. “I just dreamed it was my prize melon! I think somebody stole it. I want to go down to our truck patch to see if it’s gone.”

Poetry showed he hadn’t been asleep at all then, ’cause he rolled over, sat up, swung his feet out over the edge of his cot and onto the canvas floor, and I knew we were both going outside once more—just once more.

What we were going to do was one of the most important things we had ever done—even if it might not seem so to a boy’s father if he should happen to wake up and see us in the melon patch and think we were two strange boys out there actually stealing watermelons.

Poetry and I were pretty soon outside the tent again in the wonderful moonlight where now most of the cicadas had stopped their wild whirrings and the crickets had begun to take over for the rest of the night. Fireflies were everywhere, too. It seemed like there were thousands of fireflies flashing their green lights on and off in every tree in our orchard and in all the open spaces everywhere. The lights of those that were flying were like short yellowish green chalk marks being made on a schoolhouse blackboard.

Poetry, with his flashlight, was leading the way as he and I moved out across our barnyard. When we were passing Old Red Addie’s apartment hog house, I was reminded again that all the smells around a farm are not the kind to write about in a story, so I won’t even mention it but will let you imagine what it was like.

At the wooden gate near the barn, Poetry said, “Listen, will you?”

I listened, but all I could hear was the sound of pigeons cooing in the haymow, which is one of the friendliest sounds a boy ever hears—the low lonesome cooing of pigeons.

There are certainly a lot of different sounds around our farm, nearly all of which I have learned to imitate so well I actually sound like a farmyard full of animals sometimes, Pop says. Mom also says that sometimes I actually look like a red-haired freckle-faced pig—which I probably don’t.

Say, did you ever stop to think about all the different kinds of sounds a country boy gets to enjoy?

While you are imagining Poetry and me cutting across the south pasture to the east side of our melon patch, I’ll mention just a few that we get to hear a hundred times a year, such as the wind roaring in a winter blizzard, Dragonfly’s Pop’s