The Green Tent Mystery at Sugar Creek by Paul Hutchens (red white and royal blue hardcover txt) 📕

IT was the darkest summer night I ever saw—the night we accidentally stumbled onto a brand new mystery at Sugar Creek.

Imagine coming happily home with two of your best pals, carrying a string of seven fish, and feeling wonderful and proud and then, halfway home, when you are passing an old, abandoned cemetery, seeing a light out there and somebody digging! All of a sudden you get a creeping sensation in your spine and your red hair under your straw hat starts to try to stand up—!

Well, that’s the way it started. Nobody in Sugar Creek had died and been buried in that old cemetery for years and years, and it was only good for wild strawberries to grow in and bumblebees to make their nests in and barefoot boys to have their gang meetings in—and also to tell ghost stories to each other in.

And yet, there it was, as plain as the crooked nose on Dragonfly’s thin face, or the short, wide nose on Poetry’s fat face, or the freckled nose on mine—an honest-to-goodness man or something, digging in the light of a kerosene lantern. The lantern itself was standing beside the tall tombstone of Sarah Paddler, Old Man Paddler’s dead wife, and was shedding a spooky light on the man and his nervous movements as he scooped the yellowish-brown dirt out of the hole and piled it onto a fast-growing pile beside him.

I knew he couldn’t see us because we were crouched behind some elder bushes that grew along the rail fence just outside the cemetery, but I also knew that if we made the slightest noise he might hear us; and if he heard us—well, what would he do?

I kept hoping Dragonfly’s nose, which as everybody knows is almost always allergic to almost everything, wouldn’t smell something that would make him sneeze, because Dragonfly had the cuckooest sneeze of anybody in the world—like a small squeal with a whistling tail on it. If Dragonfly would sneeze, it would be like the fairy story every child should know, of Peter Rabbit running away from Mr. McGregor. As you may remember, Peter Rabbit was running lickety-sizzle trying to get away from Mr. McGregor, the gardener. Spying a large sprinkler can, Peter jumped into it to hide himself. The can happened to have water in the bottom and that was too terribly bad for poor Peter Rabbit’s nose.

Right away Peter sneezed and also right away Mr. McGregor heard it, and Peter had to jump his wet-footed, wet-furred self out of the can and go racing furiously in some direction or other to get away from Mr. McGregor and his mad garden rake.

“Listen,” Poetry beside me hissed.

I listened but couldn’t hear a thing except the scooping sounds the shovel was making.

Then Poetry, who had his hand on my arm, squeezed my arm so tight I almost said “Ouch” just as I heard a new sound like the shovel had struck something hard.

“He’s struck a rock,” I said.

“Rock nothing,” Poetry answered. “I’d know that sound anywhere. That was metal scraping on metal or maybe somebody’s old coffin.”

Poetry’s nearly-always-squawking voice broke when he said that and he sounded like a frog with the laryngitis.

As you know, Dragonfly was the only one of us who was a little more afraid of a cemetery than the rest of us. So when Poetry said that like that, Dragonfly said, “Let’s get out of here! Let’s go home!”

Well, I had read different stories in my half-long life about buried treasure. In fact, our own gang had stumbled onto a buried treasure mystery when we were on a camping trip up North and which you can read about in some of the other Sugar Creek Gang books. So when I was peeking through the foliage of the elder bush and also between the rails of that tumble-down old rail fence, watching the strange things in a graveyard at a strange hour of the night, say—! I was all of a sudden all set to get myself tangled up in another mystery just as quick as I could—that is, if I could without getting into too much danger at the same time, for, as Pop says, “It is better to have good sense and try to use it than it is to be brave.”

Just that second I heard a bobwhite whistling, “Bob-white! Bob-white! Poor-Bob-white!” It was a very cheery bird call—the kind I would almost rather hear around Sugar Creek than any other.

As fast as a firefly’s fleeting flash, my mind’s eye was seeing a ten-inch-long, burnished-brown-beaked bird with a white stomach and a white forehead with feathers on the crown of its head shaped like the topknot on a topknotted chicken.

The man kept on shovelling, not paying attention to anything except what he was doing. He seemed to be working faster though. Then all of another sudden he stopped while he was in a stooped-over position and for a jiffy didn’t make a move.

“He’s looking at something in the hole,” Poetry whispered. “He sees something.”

“Maybe he’s listening,” I said, which it seemed like he was—like a robin does on our front lawn with its head cocked to one side, waiting to see or hear—or both—a night crawler push part of itself out of its hole. Then she makes a headfirst dive for the worm, holds on for dear life while she yanks and pulls till she gets its slimy body out and then she eats it or else pecks it to death and into small pieces and flies with it to her nest to feed it to her babies.

A jiffy later I heard another bird call and it was another whistling sound—a very mournful cry that sounded like, “Coo-o, Coo-o, Coo-o”—and it was a turtledove.

Say—! it was just like that sad, plaintive turtledove call had scared the living daylights out of the man. He straightened up, looked all around and came to quick life, picked up the lantern and started walking toward the old maple tree on the opposite side of the cemetery.

“He’s got a limp,” Poetry said, “look how he drags one foot after him.”

I didn’t have time to wrack my brain to see if I could remember if I knew anybody who had that kind of limp because no sooner had the man reached the maple tree, than he lifted the lantern up to his face and blew out the light. Then I heard a car door slam, the sound of a motor starting and then two headlights lit up the whole cemetery for a second and two long blinding beams made a wide sweep across the top of Strawberry Hill, lit up the tombstones and the lonely old pine tree above Sarah Paddler’s grave and the chokecherry shrubs and even the elder bush we were hiding behind. Then the car went racing down the abandoned lane that led to the road not more than the distance of three blocks away, leaving us three boys wondering “What on earth?” and “Why?” and “Who?” and “Where?”

It seemed like I couldn’t move—I had been crouched in such a cramped position for so long a time.

It was Dragonfly who thought of something that added to the mystery when he said, “First time I ever heard a bobwhite whistling in the night like that.”

The very second he said it I wished I had thought of it first, but I did think of something else first—anyway I said it first—and it was, “Yeah, and whoever heard of a turtledove cooing in the night?”

“It’s just plain cuckoo,” Poetry said. “I’ll bet there was somebody over there in that car waiting for him and maybe watching and those whistles meant something special. They probably meant ‘Danger.... Look out!... Get away, quick!’”

Then Poetry said in an authoritative voice like he was the leader of our gang instead of Big Jim who is when he is with us—and I am when he isn’t—“Let’s go take a look at what he was doing.”

“Let’s go home,” Dragonfly said.

“Why, Dragonfly Gilbert!” I said. “Go on home yourself if you are scared! Poetry and I have got to investigate!”

“I’m not s-s-s-scared,” Dragonfly said—and was.

As quick as we were sure the car was really gone, I turned on my Pop’s big, long, three-batteried flashlight—I having had it with me—and Poetry, Dragonfly and I started to climb through the rail fence to go toward the mound of yellowish-brown earth beside Sarah Paddler’s tombstone.