“I guess this lets Bob and Tom out,” Circus said. It had also knocked the daylights out of my mystery.
“But what about the burlap bag with the watermelon in it—the one that was being dragged through our watermelon patch, last night?” I asked.
“It was dark out there, wasn’t it?” Circus asked. “You couldn’t tell whether it was a watermelon or a water jug.”
“But I felt it with my two hands, and it was long and round and——”
“A water jug is long and round,” Little Jim’s mouselike voice squeaked.
“But this one in our watermelon patch didn’t have any spout on it,” I protested, feeling my mystery-house falling and crashing all around me.
“How do you know it didn’t have? You didn’t feel both ends, did you? You just felt it in the middle!” Poetry argued back. “And besides,” he went on in a talkative hurry, “your other iron pitcher pump wasn’t more than twenty feet away when we first saw it. Somebody was helping himself to some drinking water.”
I felt my jaw muscles tightening with anger. I knew—knew what had been in that burlap bag last night was a watermelon. Besides, why would anybody want to get drinking water secretly like that? I quickly asked the question out loud, and got a quick answer from Poetry, whose detective-like mind was certainly alert that day: “Sugar Creek water isn’t safe to drink for anything except a fish in dog days. Look at all that green scum floating out there.”
Poetry was probably right, but his answer didn’t tell me why whoever wanted the water, didn’t go right straight to any member of the Sugar Creek Gang’s parents and ask for a jug of water in the daytime.