“Quick, everybody!” Big Jim ordered. “Down the embankment and under the bridge!”
We obeyed Big Jim like soldiers taking orders from a captain in a battle. In only a few lightning-fast jiffies, we were all down the embankment and crouching on a narrow strip of shore underneath the north end of the bridge, getting there just in time on account of in a few fast minutes we heard the truck’s wheels on the board floor above us. And that was that!
As soon as the car was across the bridge, we decided it would be a good idea to look around a little, just to see if we could find any “clues,” as Poetry was always saying.
We followed a narrow footpath which skirts the shore and is bordered on either side with willows and ragweeds just like the path on our own side of the creek.
Pretty soon we came to within twenty-five feet of the boat and the green tent. “Hello, there!” Big Jim called. “Anybody home?”
There wasn’t any answer from anybody.
“Hello! I say, Hello!” Big Jim called again several times, and still there wasn’t any reply.
While it wouldn’t be right to trespass on somebody’s campground, we knew we wouldn’t be doing anything wrong if we just walked in the path which belonged to everybody anyway, past the place where the boat was moored.
A second later we were there, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but out in the middle of the boat a gunny sack—an actual, honest-to-goodness gunny sack—and it had in it something fat and long and—.
“Hey,” I said to Poetry and to all of us, “look! There’s another watermelon! In a gunny sack!”