6
AS I told you, it was a terribly hot, sultry day, and over in the southwest sky a great big yellowish, cumulus cloud was building itself up into a thunderhead. I knew from having lived around Sugar Creek for years and years that maybe before the day was over we would find ourselves in the middle of a whopper of a thunderstorm on account of that is the way the southwest part of the sky looks when it is getting ready to pour out about a million gallons of nice, clean rain water all over the farms around Sugar Creek.
Because Charlotte Ann’s picture was in the pretty, brown, four-windowed billfold which Big Jim had zipped shut again, he let me carry it, which I did in the pocket of my overalls, where I also carried a buckeye like some people do who want to keep away the rheumatism. I carried a buckeye only because other people did—I not having any rheumatism to keep away.
Boy, oh boy, it was hot and sultry even in the footpath, which was mostly shaded, on the way to the spring. Pretty soon we came to the spring itself, which as you know is at the bottom of an incline and has an old linden tree leaning out over it and shading it. Pop had made a cement reservoir for the spring water, which was always full of the clearest water you ever saw. The water itself came singing out of an iron pipe, the other end of which Pop had driven away back into the rocky hillside.
“Here’s a woman’s tracks again,” Dragonfly said, looking down at the mud on the west side of the spring. My eyes followed his, expecting to see the print of a woman’s high-heeled shoes. Instead I saw the print of a very small, bare foot with a narrow heel and five small toes, one of the toes being bigger than the rest, which meant that the woman had been still carrying her shoes when she had walked along here on the way back to her tent.
I noticed there was also a closed glass fruit jar in the spring reservoir with what looked like maybe a pound of yellow butter in it like the kind we churned ourselves at our house using an old-fashioned dasher churn, which I nearly always had to churn myself. I was even a better churner than Pop because sometimes Pop would churn for twenty minutes and not get any butter and I could come in and churn for five minutes and it would be done that quick.
Say, that butter in the fruit jar meant that the man and woman were using our spring to get their drinking water and also to keep their butter from getting too soft—like Mom herself does at our house, only we keep ours in a fruit jar or a crock in the cellar instead.
Anyway, I thought, they wouldn’t have to come to our house to get their drinking water out of our iron, pitcher-pump.
From the spring we went up the incline past the elm sapling where Circus always likes to swing, and the linden tree and the friendly, lazy drone of the honeybees getting nectar from the sweet smelling flowers—a linden tree as you know being the same as a basswood, and honeybees have the time of their lives when the clusters of creamy yellow flowers scatter their perfume all up and down the creek.
Going west from the tree, we followed a well-worn path toward the Sugar Creek bridge. Somewhere along that path off to the left we would probably find the tent because Old Man Paddler sometimes lets people camp there for a few nights or a week if they wanted to under one of the spreading beech trees near the pawpaw bushes.