“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!”
5
SAY, if that bobwhite call was from a real quail, then we didn’t have anything to worry about, but we knew that honest-to-goodness quails not only don’t make their very pretty calls in the middle of the night, but also they don’t do it in the middle of a sultry, mid-summer, sunny afternoon—or if they do I don’t remember having heard any do it around Sugar Creek.
If it was a human being calling like a quail, then what?
And if it was a man human being, we would all want to scramble ourselves out of there and hide somewhere so that whoever he was wouldn’t see us; but if it was a woman human being, who had made the quail call—which it might have been, I thought, on account of the woman’s shoes lying there in the sand beside Little Jim—then every single one of us ought to make a headfirst dive toward getting his clothes on.
Before we could start to try to decide what to do, we heard the quail call again and this time it was a lot nearer than it had been—in fact it seemed like it wasn’t a hundred feet distant and had come from the direction of the spring from which we ourselves had just come. That meant that the person, man or woman, was maybe walking in the same path we had been running in a little while before. We wouldn’t have even half enough time to get our clothes on before running to hide.