I didn’t know what he had done, nor why, but it seemed like anybody with that many people swarming all over him like a colony of angry bumblebees, ought to have somebody to stand up for him. If it had been a gang of boys beating up on that innocent little spindle-legged guy, I probably would have made a headfirst dive, football style, into the thick of them and bowled half a dozen of them over into the cement pool. Then I’d have turned loose my two double-up experienced fists on them, windmill fashion, and Poetry would have come tumbling after.
But what do you do when your pal is being torn to pieces by a pack of helpless girls? As I have maybe told you before, my parents had taught me to respect all girls, kind of like they were angels—which most of them aren’t—and only one I ever saw in the whole Sugar Creek territory is anywhere near like one, and she is one of Circus’s many sisters, whose name is Lucille. Also I wouldn’t have the heart to fight a weak-muscled helpless creature which men and boys are supposed to defend from all harm and danger. Right that minute, though, while they were dunking Dragonfly in the spring and shoving him around and calling him names, it didn’t seem like girls were such helpless creatures. Certainly it was Dragonfly who needed the protection from harm and danger!
I decided to use my mind and my voice, instead of my muscles. I remembered that when I myself had been the striped cowboy riding a watermelon, I had scattered the girls in every direction there is, by letting loose a series of wild loon calls which sounded like a woman screaming or a wildcat with a trembling voice trying to scare the wits out of its prey. So, while I was still crouched in the shadows beside and behind Poetry, I lifted my face to the sky and let loose six or seven blood-curdling long-toned, high-voiced, trembling cries, making the loon call, the screech-owl’s screech, and a wolf’s howl, over and over again, and at about the same time.
Poetry, catching on to my idea, joined in with a series of sounds like a young rooster learning to crow, and a guinea hen’s scrawny-necked squawking, screaming song, which made me decide to bark like a dog and also to let out a half-dozen long-toned, high-pitched wailing bawls like Circus’s Pop’s hound, Old Bawler, makes when she’s on a red-hot coon trail.
We probably sounded like the midway of a county fair gone crazy, especially when all of a sudden Poetry, who could imitate almost every farm noise there is, started in bawling like a calf, and I went back to the loon call and the screech-owl’s screech. Then we began shaking the elm saplings we were under, making them sway like a windstorm was blowing and a cyclone would be there any minute.
Things happened pretty fast after that, and the noise got even worse ’cause, all mixed up with Dragonfly’s sneezing and Poetry’s and my eardrum-splitting noises, were the different-pitched screams of the girls. All of a sudden there was a flurry of skirts and slacks and running feet, and in a flash of several jiffies the girls were tumbling over each other on their way up the incline, past the base of the leaning linden tree, and were gone! In my mind’s eye I was watching them making a helter-skelter dash for the pawpaw bushes and their tents.
And that is how we practically saved Dragonfly’s life that very first night of this story, which is only the beginning—and which made the mystery we were trying to solve seem more mysterious than ever.
5
POOR Dragonfly! I guess he never had been so frightened before in his sneezing life. Dog days are ragweed days—and nights, too—and he was not only sneezing but wheezing a little, which meant he might get an asthma attack any minute.