Not a one of us said a word for a second. Then Big Jim told us in a serious voice, “We can’t let Bob break his parole. If he does he’ll have to go to Reform School for from one to ten years, and we wouldn’t want that.”
“Hasn’t he already broken it, by stealing my watermelons?” I asked.
Again Big Jim cut in on me almost savagely, “You don’t know that. It could have been somebody else.”
“It was his car,” I countered. “I’d know it anywhere.”
Just thinking about that burlap bag with the stolen watermelon in it and Ida herself being gone, stirred me all up inside again, and I was in a whirlwind of a mood to do something about it. I thought about poor old Marybelle Elizabeth out by our garden fence all alone at the very bottom of our chicken yard’s social ladder, and how she had to take all the pecks of all the other hens and didn’t dare fight back. I felt sorry for her having to live such a henpecked life, ’cause right that minute if I had been her, I’d have felt in a mood to start in licking the feathers off every other hen in the whole Sugar Creek territory.
But we couldn’t just lie around and talk all afternoon, and do nothing. Nothing is something a boy can do for only a few minutes at a time, anyway.
“Let’s go swimming,” Little Jim suggested.
“Can’t,” I said crossly. “We don’t have our bathing suits.”
“Bathing suits!” Circus exclaimed. “Who ever heard of the Sugar Creek Gang using bathing suits in our own swimming hole!”
Nobody ever had, on account of our swimming hole was quite a ways up the creek and was well protected on both sides by bushes and shrubbery, and nobody lived anywhere near the place.