“The paper didn’t say that,” I said.
“It didn’t have to,” Poetry shouted back. “It didn’t say where he was hiding, did it? I’ve got a hunch he’s right here in our territory. Maybe in the swamp or——”
I’d had a lot of experiences with Poetry’s hunches, and he’d been right so many times, that whenever he said he had one, I felt myself getting all of a sudden in a mood for a big surprise of some kind.
But this time his idea didn’t seem to make sense—not quite, anyway, so I said, “Who on earth would want to stuff a lot of money inside a watermelon?”
Poetry’s answer was a grouchy grunt, followed by a scolding: “I said I had a hunch! I know we’ll find something important going on around here ... Now, stop asking dumb questions and hurry up!” With that, that barrel-shaped, detective-minded boy set a still faster pace for me as we dashed down the hill to the place where I had just had the humiliating experience of riding a wild green, legless bronco in a reservoir full of cold water.
The red-striped pajamas I had been wearing must have made me look ridiculous to those girl scouts, I thought. I hoped they wouldn’t come back to the spring again while Poetry and I were looking for what he called a “clue.”
4
SEVERAL times, before that night was finally over, I thought how much more sensible we had been if we had curled ourselves up in our cots in the tent and gone sound asleep.
It’s better to be in bed when you have your night clothes on than scouting a watermelon patch or splashing in a pool of spring water or crouching shivering behind ragweeds and goldenrod and black-eyed Susans in a fence row, or searching with a flashlight for a wad of oiled paper which somebody has stuffed into a watermelon.