We certainly had a problem on our hands. In fact, the whole night was all messed up with problems. Who had crawled out into our truck patch, picked one of our melons, slipped it into a burlap bag, dragged it on the end of a long plastic clothesline to a hole in the fence under the elderberry bushes, hoisted it into his car, and driven away with it? Who, quite a while later, had come rowing up the creek in a boat and left the melon in the spring? And how come there wasn’t even one melon there a little later? What on earth was Dragonfly himself doing there? Was he actually looking for his knife, or had he had it with him all the time? How come he had dropped it in the spring?
I felt like I do sometimes on examination day in school when the teacher gives me a little slip of onion-skin paper with seven or eight questions on it, quite a few of which I know I can’t answer. Generally the slip of paper has a printed note at the top which says, “Answer any five.” But tonight’s questions were worse. I’d certainly need to do a lot of studying, to answer even one of them!
“I have got to get home and into bed, before my father gets home from town and finds I’m not there, or I’ll get a licking!” Dragonfly whined.
“Doesn’t he know you are gone?” Poetry asked, and Dragonfly answered, “I climbed out of my bedroom window. I had to get to the spring to get my knife.”
Then Dragonfly got what he thought was a good idea. “You let me have your red-striped pajamas until tomorrow, Bill.” He was looking at me and noticing I had on my yellow ones.
“I can’t,” I said, “—they are all wet.”
He was standing shivering in the light of Poetry’s flashlight and I was shivering too, from all the excitement. Also I was still wondering how soon Pop would give up looking for us in the woods and come back to the tent. Dragonfly and I both had our fathers after us, I thought.
“Your red-striped pajamas are all wet?” Dragonfly exclaimed, and I answered, “Yes, they just got dunked in the spring!” which, of course, didn’t make sense to him.
We were all standing in the middle of the tent between the two cots, trying to decide what to do, when Poetry said, “Listen! I hear a telephone ringing somewhere!”
I had already heard it. The sound was coming from our house through the open east window near which our phone hangs on the wall. Who, I wondered, would be calling the Collins’ at this time of night? I knew that if Mom woke up and came downstairs to answer the phone, she’d be within a foot of the open window and she could hear anything we would say or do in the tent.