“The w-w-w-water ...” he stammered and gestured behind him toward the spring.
Poetry and I were quick out of our hiding on our way to where Dragonfly was. What, I wondered, was he trying to tell us about the watermelon?
“M-m-m-m-my knife!” he spluttered. “I-i-i-it’s in there—in the bottom of the pool!”
When I heard that, I knew he had been planning to plug the melon, which I was sure somebody had left there a few jiffies ago. It didn’t feel very good to have to believe one of our own gang had been mixed up with the stealing of melons from the Collins’ truck patch.
“Hurry!” Dragonfly wheezed. “G-g-g-get it for me! I’ve got to get home quick or I’ll get a licking! My parents don’t know where I am!”
Because all of us were in a hurry to get away from such a dangerous place for boys to be—which it was, with a colony of bumblebee-like girls on a temper spree—I exclaimed to Poetry: “Hold the flashlight for me. I’ll get it!”—which Poetry did, and which I started to do, but got an exclamation point in my mind for sum when I noticed there wasn’t even one watermelon in the pool—neither the one I was sure somebody had just hoisted over the lip of the pool and lowered inside, nor the long beautiful one I had seen there myself, and which had had the oiled paper wadding in it, and on which I had had a fierce, fast ride in the moonlight.
What on earth!
“Come on! Hurry up!” Dragonfly cried. “I’ve got to get home before my father gets back from town. It’s his knife, and I wasn’t supposed to have it!”
I quickly shoved my stripeless pajama sleeve up to my shoulder, and while Poetry held the flashlight for me and Dragonfly shivered and wheezed and watched, I plunged my arm into that icy water, where in a few seconds my fingers clasped the knife and only a few seconds after that all of us were on our way up the incline. At the top, we looked quick to see if the enemy had retreated, and they had—anyway we didn’t see or hear them—then we skirted the rail fence and the evergreens, and started on the run on the way up the bayou, taking the way that most certainly wouldn’t lead anywhere near the pawpaw bushes.
We would have looked very strange to most anybody—Poetry in his green-striped pajamas, I in my yellowish, stripeless ones, and Dragonfly in his red-striped ones—that was the funny thing about it, that crooked-nosed, spindle-legged, short-of-breath little guy being in his night clothes, too. When we asked him, “How come?” he panted back, “I didn’t have time to dress. I had to get here, and get back again before my father got home.”