“Only one, I think.”
Then I felt Poetry’s body grow tense. “There goes one of your watermelons,” he hissed to me.
I saw it at the same time he did—the brown burlap bag being pulled deeper into the elderberry bushes—and I knew somebody was actually stealing one of our melons. In a jiffy it would be gone!
“Let’s jump him,” I exclaimed to Poetry. My blood was tingling for battle. I started to my feet, but he stopped me, saying, “Sh!” in a subdued but savage whisper. “Detectives don’t stop a man from stealing; they let him do it first, then they capture him.”
It wasn’t an easy thing to do—to do nothing, watching that watermelon being hoisted into the back seat of that car. My muscles were aching to get into some new kind of action that was different from hoeing potatoes, milking cows, gathering eggs, and other things any ordinary boy’s muscles could do. I was straining to go tearing up the fence row to the elderberry bushes, dive through the hole in the fence, make a football-style tackle on that thief’s hind legs and bring him down. I was pretty sure, if all the Gang had been there, one or the other of us wouldn’t have been able to stay stopped stock-still. He would have rushed in, and the rest of us would be like Jack, in the poem about “Jack and Jill”—we would go tumbling after, even if some of us got knocked down and got our crowns cracked.
But the rest of the Gang wasn’t there. Besides it was already too late to do anything. In less time than it has taken me to write it, the melon in the gunny sack was in the car. The thief was in the driver’s seat, and the hot rod was shooting like an arrow with two blazing heads down the moonlit lane.
Poetry shot a long powerful beam from his flashlight straight toward the car, socking it on the license plate, and I knew his mind—which is so good it’s almost like what is called a “photographic mind”—would remember the number if he had been able to see it.
It’s like having a big blown-up balloon suddenly burst in your face to have your excited adventure come to an end like that; kinda like a fish must feel when it’s nibbling on a fat fishing worm down in Sugar Creek and, all of a disappointing sudden, having its nice juicy dinner jerked away from it by the fisherman who is on the other end of the line.
There wasn’t anything left to do except go back to the tent and to bed and to sleep.
Just thinking that reminded me of the fact that I probably would need another pair of pajamas to sleep in, the yellow pair I had on having gotten soiled while I was lying in the grass behind the goldenrod and ragweed and black-eyed Susans. “We’ll have to wash our feet again before we can crawl into Mom’s nice clean sheets,” I said, as we started to start back to the tent.