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.