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

of the dishes, I got to the spring about the same time Little Jim and Poetry did. Circus was already there in the favorite place where he usually waits for us when he gets there first, which was in the top branches of a little elm sapling that grows at the top of the steep bank. As you know, at the bottom of that steep bank was the spring itself, but we always met in a little, shaded, open space at the top. Circus was swinging and swaying and looked really like a chimpanzee, hanging by his hands and feet and everything except his tail—which he didn’t have anyway.

As quick as Big Jim, with his almost mustache, and Little Tom Till, with his freckled face and red hair, got there and also Dragonfly, with his goggle-eyed face and spindling legs, that was all of us.

Poetry, Dragonfly and I told everybody everything that had happened last night, but I didn’t tell them about Pop having had yellowish-brown dirt on his shoes; and with my eyes I kept Poetry and Dragonfly from telling them about the two baby pigs Pop had buried somewhere, because I felt sure Pop wouldn’t bury two baby pigs in a cemetery, which had been reserved for human beings only.

A little later, after a loafing ramble along the bayou and a climb to the top of Strawberry Hill, we scrambled over the rail fence and in a couple of jiffies reached the place where the woman had been digging last night, which was not more than ten feet from Sarah Paddler’s tall tombstone. Well, we all stopped and stood around in a barefoot circle looking down into the hole. Sure enough—just as we had seen it last night—there was the print of a high-heeled, woman’s shoe and also other high-heeled shoe tracks all around, but none of the others were as clear as the one we were all studying that very minute.

“What on earth do you s’pose she was digging here for?” Little Tom Till asked in his high-pitched voice.

Big Jim answered him saying, “If we knew that, we would know what we want to know.”

For a minute I focused my eyes on the hand, which somebody had chiseled on Sarah Paddler’s tombstone. One finger of the hand pointed toward the sky. I had read the words just below the hand maybe a hundred and twenty times in my life and they were: “There is rest in Heaven,”—which I knew there was for anybody who got to go there. When I was in a cemetery, it was easy to think about things like that. I was sort of dreamily remembering that our minister in the Sugar Creek church says that there is only one way for a boy to get to Heaven. First, the boy has to believe that he is an honest-to-goodness sinner and needs a Saviour. Then he has to believe that Jesus, who is the Saviour, came all the way from Heaven a long time ago to die for him and to save him from his sins; then if the boy will open the door of his heart and let the Saviour come in, that will settle it.

Our minister, who knows almost all the Bible by heart, tells the people that come to our church that there isn’t any other way for anybody to be saved except just like I told you.

So I knew that Old Man Paddler, who was saved himself and was the kindest old, long-whiskered old man that ever was a friend to a boy, would see his wife, Sarah, again—maybe the very minute he got to Heaven.

For a fast jiffy, while I was standing by the hole which the June beetle had tumbled into last night, and was looking up at that carved hand on the tombstone, my mind sort of drifted away on a friendly little journey clear up into Heaven—past the great big white cumulus cloud that was piling itself up in the southwest right that minute above the tree-covered hills where I knew Old Man Paddler’s cabin was, and I imagined how that somewhere in Heaven maybe there was a very nice little cabin waiting for that kind old man, and that his wife, Sarah, was out there in the garden somewhere looking after the flowers for him. Every now and then she would stop doing what she was doing and look toward a little white gate like the one we have at our house by the big swing near the walnut tree to see if she could see her husband coming. Then all of a sudden I imagined she did see him and her kinda oldish face lit up like Mom’s does sometimes when she sees Pop coming home from somewhere and she started quick on a half walk and half run out across the yard to meet him, calling “Hi there! I’ve been waiting for you a long time....”

It was a terribly nice thought to think, I thought. Only I knew that if that old man ever left Sugar Creek, it would be awful lonesome around here for a long time, and it sorta seemed like we needed him here even worse than his wife did up there.

From Sarah Paddler’s grave in the shade of the big pine tree, we went all the way across the cemetery, winding around a little to get to the old maple where last night I had shone my flashlight all around looking for signs of a human quail or a human turtledove.

There we stopped in the friendly shade and lay down in the tall grass to hold a meeting to help us decide what to do next. While we were lying there in seven different directions, chewing the juicy ends of bluegrass and timothy and wild rye, Big Jim gave a special order which was, “I would like each of us except Poetry and Dragonfly to give a quail whistle.”

“Why?” Little Tom Till wanted to know.

“I want to find out if any of you were out here last night making those calls. I also want to know if any of you guys were out here dressed in overalls and wearing a woman’s high-heeled shoes.”

Little Jim and Little Tom Till and Circus and Big Jim himself did the best they could making bobwhite calls and Circus was the only one of us whose whistle sounded like the quail whistle we had heard last night.

Then Big Jim made all of us except Poetry, Dragonfly and me, do a turtledove call and again Circus was the only one whose call was like the one we heard last night.

“O. K., Circus,” Big Jim leveled his eyes across our little tangled up circle and said to him, “Confess or we will drag you down to Sugar Creek and throw you in.”

“All right,” Circus said, “I confess I was home in bed, sound asleep when I heard those calls last night.”

“So was I,” Little Tom Till said.

“So was I,” Little Jim echoed.

“Yeh, and so was I. Sound asleep in bed listening to the calls,” Big Jim said sarcastically.

Well, that left only Poetry, Dragonfly and me, and we were the ones who had heard the calls in the first place, so the mystery was as still unsolved as it had been, not a one of us believing that Circus was here last night.

There wasn’t any use to stay where we were so, it being a very hot afternoon, we decided to go to the old swimming hole and get cooled off.

“Last one in is a bear’s tail,” Circus yelled back at us over one of his square shoulders as he galloped off first out across the cemetery to the other side.

The rest of us quick took off after him, not a one of us wanting to be a bear’s tail, which means we would have to be almost nothing on account of bears have very stubby tails.

Long before we got there nearly everyone of us had his shirt off—so that by the time we should get there all we would have to do would be to wrestle ourselves out of our overalls and in a jiffy we would be out in the middle of the swellest water to swim in in the whole world. Everyone of us knew how to swim like a fish, our parents having made us learn as soon as we were old enough to—like everybody in the world should.

Say, you should have seen the way our mystery began to come to life while we were still on the shore before splashing ourselves in.

All of a sudden Little Jim, who was undressing in the shade of a willow where he always hangs his clothes, yelled to us in a very excited voice for him, “Hey, Bill! Circus! Poetry! Everybody! Come here quick! Hurry! Look what I found!”

Well, when Little Jim or any of our gang calls in an excited voice like that, it always sends a half dozen thrills through me because it nearly always means something extra special.

Before I knew it, I was galloping across to where he was, my shirt in one hand and one of my overall legs in the other, getting there as quick as the rest of us. I also managed to grab up a stick on my way just in case Little Jim might have spied a water moccasin or some other kind of snake, of which there are maybe twenty different varieties around Sugar Creek.

Little Jim was standing there holding his clothes in one hand and pointing down with an excited right forefinger to something on the ground on a little strip of sand at the water’s edge.

At first I didn’t see a thing, except some shaded water where about fifty or more small, black, flat whirligig beetles were racing round in excited circles on the surface of the water. Right away I smelled the smell of ripe apples, which is the kind of odor a whirligig beetle gives off, which anybody who knows anything about whirligig beetles knows comes from a kind of milky fluid which they use to protect themselves from being eaten by fish or some kind of water bird or something else.

Even Poetry didn’t see what Little Jim was excited about. “Education again,” he said with a disgruntled snort and turned back to the swimming hole.

Dragonfly, who wasn’t interested in Pop’s and my new hobby, grunted too and also sneezed, saying, “I’m allergic to the smell of sweet bugs,”—that being a common name for those lively, little, ripe-apple-smelling beetles.

“They’re whirligig beetles,” I said, wanting to defend Little Jim for calling us over in such an excited voice for what the rest of the gang would think was almost nothing.

“Look, everybody! Look! See, it’s a clue!” Little Jim yelled.

Then my eyes dived in the direction his finger was really pointing and I saw what he saw. Boy, oh boy! A lively thrill started whirligigging in my very surprised brain, for what to my wondering eyes had appeared but, half hidden in the grass, a pair of woman’s new shoes—very small, expensive looking, white pumps with all-green, extra-high heels and with a heart-shaped design across the toes that looked kinda like the leaves from a ground ivy, like the ones that grew all around Sarah Paddler’s tombstone.

What on earth, I thought and remembered that Pop had said, “Earth on what?” when I saw there actually were some yellowish-brown earth stains on those extra-high heels of those newish-looking, pretty, woman’s shoes.

Just that second Dragonfly said, “Ps-s-st! Listen, everybody!”—which everybody did, and there it was again as plain as a Sugar Creek cloudless day, a sharp bobwhite call from down the creek somewhere, “Bob-white! Bob-white! Poor-Bob-white!”