Watermelon Mystery at Sugar Creek by Paul Hutchens (graded readers .TXT) 📕

too bad. I live a kind of henpecked life myself.” Taking a handful of corn from my pocket, I tossed it to her. She lifted her head high, twisted her neck in every direction like she wondered how come anybody wanted to be kind to her, then started in gobbling up the grains of corn as fast as she could.

“Atta girl,” I said to her. “Go to it!”

Pretty soon, Mom called us that dinner was ready and pretty soon after dinner—and after Poetry and I had offered to help Mom with the dishes and she had surprised us by letting us—it was time for the Gang to meet under the Little-Jim tree.

It was one of the nicest dog days days I ever saw, with the heat waves dancing above the fields, short-horned grasshoppers springing up along the sunny path as Poetry and I moseyed along, not wanting to run and get hot on such a hot day. I felt kind of sad because of the watermelon and also on account of our boys’ world had been invaded by a flock of girl campers. Girls in our woods would be a lasso on a boy’s fun. He couldn’t go racing wildly among the trees playing leapfrog and yelling and whooping it up like a wild Indian on account of he would be afraid they would think he was a wild Indian.

As I was saying, the short-horned grasshoppers were springing up all along the path, making their funny little rattling sounds during the short time they were in the air, the rattling stopping the very second they landed which they generally did only a few yards from where they took off. Butterflies of a half-dozen families were tossing themselves about in the air above the wild rose bushes and here and there and everywhere in the yellow afternoon.

“Hey, look!” Poetry exclaimed. “There goes a milkweed butterfly! I’ve got to have him for my collection!”—and he started to start on a fast run after him, but I stopped him with “Quiet! The girls will hear you!”

He stopped stock-still and scowled and the beautiful Monarch butterfly swung proudly away in the air, starting to stop every now and then and not doing it, but lifting itself on the breeze and floating away to another place.

It wouldn’t be long until fall now, I thought, when all the Monarchs in the Sugar Creek territory would gather themselves into flocks like blackbirds and crows do, and before winter they would migrate to the South, flying all the way down to the bottom of the United States and even into Mexico or South America. Then next spring they would be back at Sugar Creek to lay their eggs on the milkweeds which grow in the fence rows or wherever a farmer doesn’t cut them down.

The larva that hatches from the milkweed or Monarch butterflies is one of the prettiest a boy ever sees, being a long greenish-yellow caterpillar with crow-black rings around it all along its body from its head to its tail—only it is hard to tell which end is its head on account of it has two short black horns on each end of itself.

You can see a greenish-yellow-and-black Monarch larva hanging from a milkweed leaf most any time in the late summer, if you stop and look close enough.

Dragonfly was the only one of the Gang who didn’t come to our meeting that day, and Poetry and I thought we knew why.

We all plumped ourselves down on the grass under the Little-Jim tree and relaxed awhile, each of us lying in a different direction like we nearly always do. Big Jim looked around at the rest of us, letting his stern eyes stop on each of our faces for a flash of a second—Poetry’s fat mischievous face, Little Jim’s mouselike innocent face, Circus’s monkey-shaped face, and my freckle-faced face.

Big Jim’s own face was more sober than it is sometimes and I noticed his almost mustache on his upper lip was really almost now. If it should keep on growing as fast as it had the last two or three years, pretty soon, he would actually have to start shaving. For a second my mind wandered a little and I was thinking if Big Jim should ever need a razor strap I would very gladly offer him Pop’s discarded one which Pop hardly ever used anymore except for some unnecessary reason. There really wasn’t any sense in having a piece of leather like that lying around our house cluttering up the place and giving a boy’s father the kind of ideas it’s not good for a son for his father to have.

“Anybody know where Dragonfly is?” Big Jim asked.

And Poetry answered, saying, “He had asthma last night; maybe his mother wouldn’t let him come today.”

Big Jim’s stern face probably meant he was remembering his resolution not to fight Bob Till any more, unless he was forced to in self-defense. Of course, if Bob himself started a fight we’d have to defend ourselves.

I got an idea then, and it was, “Bob Till has already started a fight by stealing our watermelons last night. That’s the same as whamming me in the stomach—on account of that’s where the watermelons would have been if I had eaten them. And since he’s already started the fight, I’ve got a right to defend myself, haven’t I?”

“It’s not the same,” Big Jim said grimly, his jaw muscles still working. His fists were doubled up though, I noticed, and I could see he didn’t like the lasso with which he had lassoed himself.

Little Jim spoke up then and said, “How’d we feel in Sunday school tomorrow if Bob came in with a black eye and a smashed nose?”

Right then as I looked into that cute little guy’s cute little mouse-shaped face and saw how innocent he was, and realized he was so tender-hearted he’d even hate to swat a fly and wouldn’t if he didn’t think the fly needed to be swatted—I say, right then was when I noticed for the first time the rectangular manila envelope Little Jim had brought with him. It looked about five inches wide and nine inches long, and had something in it. I couldn’t tell what it was and didn’t get to find out until later in the afternoon.

Little Jim’s question, “How’d we feel in Sunday school tomorrow morning if Bob came in with a black eye and a smashed nose?” took some of the fight out of me, ’cause I knew Bob had to be in church tomorrow—that being one of the things the judge who had put him on probation had said he had to do—he had to go to Sunday school and church at least once every Sunday for a whole year.

I spoke up then with a half-mischievous voice saying, “The judge told him he had to go every Sunday unless he is sick and unable to. He might not be able to if—”

“Stop!” Big Jim cut in. “The thing is not funny!”

Not a one of us said a word for a second. Then Big Jim told us in a serious voice, “We can’t let Bob break his parole. If he does he’ll have to go to Reform School for from one to ten years, and we wouldn’t want that.”

“Hasn’t he already broken it, by stealing my watermelons?” I asked.

Again Big Jim cut in on me almost savagely, “You don’t know that. It could have been somebody else.”

“It was his car,” I countered. “I’d know it anywhere.”

Just thinking about that burlap bag with the stolen watermelon in it and Ida herself being gone, stirred me all up inside again, and I was in a whirlwind of a mood to do something about it. I thought about poor old Marybelle Elizabeth out by our garden fence all alone at the very bottom of our chicken yard’s social ladder, and how she had to take all the pecks of all the other hens and didn’t dare fight back. I felt sorry for her having to live such a henpecked life, ’cause right that minute if I had been her, I’d have felt in a mood to start in licking the feathers off every other hen in the whole Sugar Creek territory.

But we couldn’t just lie around and talk all afternoon, and do nothing. Nothing is something a boy can do for only a few minutes at a time, anyway.

“Let’s go swimming,” Little Jim suggested.

“Can’t,” I said crossly. “We don’t have our bathing suits.”

“Bathing suits!” Circus exclaimed. “Who ever heard of the Sugar Creek Gang using bathing suits in our own swimming hole!”

Nobody ever had, on account of our swimming hole was quite a ways up the creek and was well protected on both sides by bushes and shrubbery, and nobody lived anywhere near the place.

“There are guests in our woods,” Big Jim said. And my sad heart told me he was right. We couldn’t go swimming.

“Girls!” Poetry grunted grouchily and got shushed by Big Jim who asked, “They’re human beings, aren’t they?”

“Are they?” Poetry asked with an innocent voice.

Big Jim sighed, looked around at all of us again and said, “Little Jim here has something he has to do this afternoon and it might be pretty dangerous. He might need our help. You guys want to go along with him and me?”

“I,” I said, “am going to do something dangerous myself before the afternoon is over—but I don’t suppose any of you would care to go with me. You don’t care whether my prize watermelon was stolen or not. But I do, and I’m going to do something about it!” My own words sounded hot in my ears and made me a little braver than I had been—reminded me of Marybelle Elizabeth at the bottom of our chickenyard’s social ladder, living a henpecked life and not daring to fight back at all at any time.

“What you goin’ to do?” Circus asked. “I’m willing to go along and help save your life if you need any help.”

“Yeah, what are you going to do?” Poetry asked me, and I answered: “First, I’m going down to the spring to see if Ida is there. If she’s not, I’m going down to the bridge, and across it, and straight to Bob Till’s house and ask him straight out if he knows anything about a watermelon thief.”

I caught Big Jim’s and Little Jim’s eyes meeting and thought I saw some kind of message pass between them.

“You guys don’t have to go along if you don’t want to,” I said, beginning to feel a little less brave, now that it seemed like I was doing more than just talking, but was actually going to do what I said I was going to do.

“We can’t let you be killed,” Circus said. “Maybe we all ought to go along!”

Pretty soon we were on our way—to the spring first, of course. As we moved grimly along, I noticed my teeth were clenched, my lips were pressed together in a straight line, my eyebrows were down. I was remembering last night’s ridiculous ride on the melon in the spring reservoir, the screaming girls, and especially what had happened in our truck patch near the elderberry bushes. But right in the front of my mind’s eye was the oblong indentation in the sandy loam where Ida Watermelon Collins had spent all the eighty-five days of her life from a tiny quarter of an inch long green baby to the huge, dark green watermelon she now was if she was. Where, I asked myself, was Ida now?

Maybe she was in the spring reservoir. Maybe whoever stole her had sold her to the girl scouts. When we got there, would we run into a flock of perfumed guests, and would they recognize a zebra who had changed his color and shape since last night?

Well, we didn’t find any girls there,