I looked all around our tense circle to see if the rest of the gang had any ideas as to what to do and it seemed like not a one of us could do a thing except stand stock-still, with his eyes and ears glued to the direction from which the last quail call had come.
“Quick, Dragonfly!” I heard myself say, taking charge of things and shouldn’t have tried to on account of Big Jim is our leader when he is with us. “Get those shoes, quick, and let’s get out of here!”
But Big Jim took my leadership away from me in a split second by saying, “Leave those shoes alone! Don’t you dare touch ’em! If anything has happened, we don’t want our fingerprints on them!”
In less than a fourth of a jiffy we were scrambling up the side of the slope leaving those shoes about eighteen inches from the whirligig beetles, and with all our minds whirligigging like everything—some of us with our clothes half on and others with them half off and the rest of the gang with them all off—and with my mind a little off too, maybe—we were getting ourselves fast out of there.
At the top of the little slope we came to the narrow footpath, zipped across it and disappeared into the tall corn—that being one of Dragonfly’s pop’s cornfields. I knew that on the opposite side of that rather narrow strip of cornfield was the bayou, which was divided into two parts with a longish pond on either end of it, and each of those ponds had in it some very lazy water in which there were a few lone-wolf, mud pickerel or barred pickerel, as some people called them. Between the two ponds there was a narrow strip of soggy, marshy soil and a little path that was bordered by giant ragweeds. This was a sort of shortcut to the woods from the old swimming hole. Once we got to the woods we could follow the rail fence like we had done last night and come out at the place where Little Jim had killed the bear, which you have probably read about in one of the other Sugar Creek Gang stories. As you know, that was at the bottom of Strawberry Hill; and at the top of the hill is the old cemetery and the hole in the ground beside Sarah Paddler’s tombstone.
There we would be safe from whoever was coming up that path, nearer and nearer every second—that is, if he was dangerous.
As quick as we were far enough into the tall corn to be hidden from sight of the path, we dropped down on the ground to listen and to look to see if we could see what was going on. As you know, corn blades are not as thick at the bottom of the stalks as they are at the top so if anybody was coming up the path, we could see his feet if we were lying on the ground.
Poetry, who was real close to me like he nearly always is, whispered in my ear, saying, “Hey, sh-h-h! There he is!”
I looked and saw the cuffs of somebody’s trousers standing at the end of my corn row in the very place where we always left the path to dive down the incline into our willow-and-shrubbery-protected outdoor dressing room. Then came a startling quail call again and this time it seemed so near it almost scared me out of what few wits I hadn’t already been scared out of.
I waited, wondering if there would be an answer, and then what to my astonished ears should come but the sound of a turtledove’s low, sad, lonesome call from the other direction farther up the path.