Before anybody could have stopped him he was firing at us one interrogatory sentence after another. The first one was, “Who among us has an indelible pencil? You, Bill?”
“No sir,” I said.
I was surprised that Big Jim let Poetry keep on with his questions, but he did, and pretty soon Poetry had asked us a half-dozen others, such as, which of us ate Eatmore Bread at home, what kind of clotheslines did our mothers use—rope or plastic—and did any of us smoke? Of course the last question was a foolish one, as far as the Gang was concerned, but I knew why he had asked it. He was remembering the man in the boat who, last night, had lit a cigar or cigarette with a match or a lighter.
Poetry was looking as dignified as any fat boy with mussed-up hair and mischievous eyes can look. He was all set to keep on talking and asking questions when Big Jim interrupted, saying, “Look, all of you! There’s only one other person—or rather two—who might know the names we’ve given to the important places around here. One is Little Tom Till, and the other is his big brother, Bob.”
I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of Tom before. The very second Big Jim mentioned his name, I remembered that Tom was very good in art at school; in fact, he got better grades in it than any of the rest of us. For some reason, though, I didn’t like the idea of thinking that Tom was guilty. He wasn’t exactly a member of our Gang but we all felt he belonged to us anyway. He hadn’t been meeting with the Gang lately, though, because his brother didn’t want him to, and Tom was very much afraid of his big brother’s big fists.
“The thing for us to do,” Big Jim interrupted my thoughts to say, “is to do what Bill suggests—go straight to their house and ask them point-blank what they know about this map and whether they’ve been stealing watermelons.”
And that is what we decided to do, only Big Jim cautioned us to watch our words so as not to stir up Bob’s temper.
“Remember, he will be in church tomorrow—and in our class.”
I remembered it all the way. Our faces were set as we left the cemetery, moved down the slope of Bumblebee Hill, walking right through the place where the famous battle of Bumblebee Hill had been fought and where Little Tom Till had fired the fist heard round the world. That fist had landed ker-smash right on my nose. I stopped for a minute, right in the middle of the battleground and looked around, trying to remember the exact spot where two red-haired, freckle-faced, fiery-tempered boys, who looked very much alike, most of the time, had had such an exciting time getting acquainted.
I was glad that Tom was my friend now—or was he? If he had drawn the map and stuffed it into the watermelon, then he must be mixed up in our mystery in some way.