I stooped, snapped my third finger several times against her fat green side and called her by name again, saying, “By this time next year you’ll be the mother of a hundred other melons. And year after next, you’ll be the grandmother of more melons than you can shake a stick at.”
I sighed a long noisy happy sigh, thinking about what a wonderful summer day it was and how good it felt to be alive, to be a boy and to live in a boy’s world. I carried another pail of water, poured it into Ida’s trough, then stopped to rest in the shade of the elderberry bushes near the fence. Pop and I had put up a brand new woven-wire fence there early in the spring, and at the top of it had stretched two strands of barbed wire, making it dangerous for anybody to climb over the fence in a hurry. In fact, the only place anybody would be able to get over real fast would be at the stile we were going to build near the iron pitcher pump half way between the pump and the elderberry bushes. We would have to get the stile built pretty soon, I thought, ’cause in another few weeks school would start, and I would want to do like I’d always done—go through or over the fence there to get to the lane, which was a short cut to school.
I didn’t have the slightest idea then that somebody would try to steal my melon, nor that the stealing of it would plunge me into the exciting middle of one of the most dangerous mysteries there had ever been in the Sugar Creek territory. Most certainly I never dreamed that Ida Watermelon Collins would have a share in helping the gang capture a fugitive from justice, an actual runaway thief the police had been looking for for quite a while.
We found out about the thief one hot summer night about a week later when Poetry, the barrel-shaped member of our gang, stayed all night with me in his green sportsman’s tent which my parents had let us pitch under the spreading branches of the plum tree in our yard.
The way it looks now it will take me almost a whole book to write it all for you. Boy oh boy, will it ever be fun remembering everything! Of course everything didn’t happen that very first night but one of the most exciting and confusing things did. It wouldn’t have happened though, if we hadn’t gotten out of our cots and started on a pajama-clad hike in the moonlight down through the woods to the spring—Poetry in his green striped pajamas and I in my red-striped ones, and Dragonfly in——!
But say! I hadn’t planned to tell you just yet that Dragonfly was with us that night—which he wasn’t at first. Dragonfly, as you probably know, is the spindle-legged, pop-eyed member of our gang, who is always showing up when we don’t need him or want him and when we least expect him and is always getting us into trouble—or else we have to help get him out of trouble.
Now that I’ve mentioned Dragonfly and hinted that he was the cause of some of our trouble—mine especially—I’d better tell you that he and I had the same kind of red-striped pajamas—our different mothers having seen the same ad in the Sugar Creek Times and had gone shopping the same afternoon in the same Sugar Creek Dry Goods Store and had seen the same bargains in boys’ night clothes—two pairs of red-striped pajamas being the only kind left when they got there.
Little Tom Till’s mother—Tom being the newest member of our gang—had seen the ad about the sale too, and his mother and mine had each bought for their two red-haired, freckle-faced sons a pair of blue denim western-style jeans exactly alike, also two maroon-and-gray-striped T-shirts exactly alike. When Tom and I were together anywhere, you could hardly tell us apart. So I looked like Little Tom Till in the daytime and like Dragonfly at night.
Poor Dragonfly! All the gang felt very sorry for him on account of he not only is very spindle-legged and pop-eyed, but in ragweed season—which it was at that time of the year—his crooked nose which turns south at the end, is always sneezing, and he also gets asthma.