I saw Little Jim slip the envelope between the screen door and the unpainted white-knobbed wooden door, just as we were leaving.
They had probably gone to town or somewhere, I thought.
In a little while we were back at the bridge again and across it and, because it was Saturday and we were all supposed to get the chores done early so our parents could go to town, which most of them did on Saturday night, we separated, each one going to his own house. Even though Poetry was going to spend the night with me in the tent, he said he had to go home for a while so I was all by myself when I got to the north road and turned left toward the Collins’ farm.
I moseyed lazily along, thinking and worrying and trying to figure out things. It just didn’t seem possible that the gunny sack under the elder bushes last night had had a water jug in it instead of a watermelon. Even if it was possible, I didn’t want to believe it. Of course, the woman or several women or girls who lived in the forest-green tent would have to have drinking and cooking water—even if they could have used the water from the creek to do their washing. Sugar Creek water wasn’t supposed to be good for drinking, even when it wasn’t dog days.
A lot of ideas were piled up in my mind, but it seemed like one of them was on top, and it was: “If whoever had filled his or her water jugs at the spring, or at the Collins’ other iron pitcher pump, had done it at night, then whoever lived in the tent must be afraid to go to anybody’s house in the daytime and ask for water. And if they were afraid to, why were they afraid?”
One other thing made me set my feet down a little harder as they went plop-plop in the dusty road I was walking in, and that was: “Was the oldish car I had seen and heard in the lane last night the same as the gun-metal gray pickup truck which right this minute was parked beside the green tent?”
My mind was so busy with my thoughts that I was frightened when I heard a car coming behind me, the driver giving what Pop would call “a courteous honk,” like you are supposed to give when you want somebody to know you are behind them and don’t want to scare the living daylights out of them.
A jiffy later the car had pulled up alongside and stopped, and I saw, sitting behind the steering wheel and wearing a watermelon-colored dress and sparkling glasses, a smiling-faced, dark-haired lady about twenty years old. “Hello there!” she called in a friendly, musical voice. “I’ve been looking all over for you. Where have you been?”
Before I could answer she had gone on to say, “You forgot to leave the map in the watermelon. The girls told me there was nothing in it.”
“Map?” I asked, with an exclamatory voice.