Imagine coming happily home with two of your best pals, carrying a string of seven fish, and feeling wonderful and proud and then, halfway home, when you are passing an old, abandoned cemetery, seeing a light out there and somebody digging! All of a sudden you get a creeping sensation in your spine and your red hair under your straw hat starts to try to stand up—!
Well, that’s the way it started. Nobody in Sugar Creek had died and been buried in that old cemetery for years and years, and it was only good for wild strawberries to grow in and bumblebees to make their nests in and barefoot boys to have their gang meetings in—and also to tell ghost stories to each other in.
And yet, there it was, as plain as the crooked nose on Dragonfly’s thin face, or the short, wide nose on Poetry’s fat face, or the freckled nose on mine—an honest-to-goodness man or something, digging in the light of a kerosene lantern. The lantern itself was standing beside the tall tombstone of Sarah Paddler, Old Man Paddler’s dead wife, and was shedding a spooky light on the man and his nervous movements as he scooped the yellowish-brown dirt out of the hole and piled it onto a fast-growing pile beside him.
I knew he couldn’t see us because we were crouched behind some elder bushes that grew along the rail fence just outside the cemetery, but I also knew that if we made the slightest noise he might hear us; and if he heard us—well, what would he do?
I kept hoping Dragonfly’s nose, which as everybody knows is almost always allergic to almost everything, wouldn’t smell something that would make him sneeze, because Dragonfly had the cuckooest sneeze of anybody in the world—like a small squeal with a whistling tail on it. If Dragonfly would sneeze, it would be like the fairy story every child should know, of Peter Rabbit running away from Mr. McGregor. As you may remember, Peter Rabbit was running lickety-sizzle trying to get away from Mr. McGregor, the gardener. Spying a large sprinkler can, Peter jumped into it to hide himself. The can happened to have water in the bottom and that was too terribly bad for poor Peter Rabbit’s nose.
Right away Peter sneezed and also right away Mr. McGregor heard it, and Peter had to jump his wet-footed, wet-furred self out of the can and go racing furiously in some direction or other to get away from Mr. McGregor and his mad garden rake.
“Listen,” Poetry beside me hissed.
I listened but couldn’t hear a thing except the scooping sounds the shovel was making.
Then Poetry, who had his hand on my arm, squeezed my arm so tight I almost said “Ouch” just as I heard a new sound like the shovel had struck something hard.
“He’s struck a rock,” I said.