“I went to get my knife,” he said. “I was there getting a drink yesterday afternoon when a whole flock of girls came storming down and scared me so bad I dropped my knife. I was so scared I ran home. It was my Dad’s knife, and he was coming home before midnight, and I didn’t want him to know I had it, so I sneaked back to get it, and—”
Another of my mystery balloons had burst. Poetry and I looked at each other and shrugged. That let Dragonfly out. He hadn’t had anything to do with stealing watermelons. He was as innocent as a lamb. I sighed a big sigh of relief though, ’cause it felt good to get all that suspicion out of my mind, and to have him with us again.
We all crowded around Big Jim to see what was between the layers of the bread wrapper. “It’s a map!” Little Jim exclaimed in his squeaky voice, and it was—a crude drawing made with indelible pencil. That was the first thing I noticed, that it had been made with indelible pencil. The drawing looked like a map of the Sugar Creek territory itself. In fact, it was a very good map of the Gang’s playground with the names of important places on it—names that only anybody living in our neighborhood would know about; a few that only the Gang itself might know—such as “Bumblebee Hill,” “the Black Widow Stump,” and the “Little-Jim tree.”
My mind cringed when I realized that maybe whoever had drawn the map was one of our own Gang—maybe one of us who, right that minute, were in a football-style huddle in the cemetery.
Then Poetry noticed something I hadn’t—“Look at that red X, would you? Wonder what that means?”
I squeezed in between Poetry and Dragonfly and looked, and there it was, a very small red X with a red circle around it, in the upper left-hand corner of the page. I could tell that the red X and the red circle were marking a spot on the other side of the creek, just below the big Sugar Creek bridge.
Boy oh boy, it was like a story book! That was the second map of the territory we had found—the first one, as you already know, had been hidden in the old hollow sycamore tree, and that map had been the very center of the very first mystery we had ever had—but I told you all about that in the very first story there ever was about the Sugar Creek Gang, and it’s in a book by that name.
Big Jim must have been thinking the same thoughts I was, ’cause right that second he said, “Who outside our Gang knows the name of the tree where Little Jim killed the bear?”
Poetry rolled himself into a sitting position and grunted himself to his feet. Trying to make his voice sound like a detective’s, he said, “All right, everybody; don’t a one of you leave this room—this cemetery, I mean. One of you in this circle is a watermelon thief; one of you drew this map!”