“Bob’s got a nice mother, too,”—and I knew she knew I was thinking how come such a nice mother could have two boys, one of which was a good boy and the other was a juvenile delinquent?
There were tears in her eyes when she looked at me with a sad smile and answered: “But I love them both—and some day God will answer my prayers for them.”
I forgot for a minute that I had actually been thinking Tom was just as bad as his very bad big brother, Bob, because he had stolen my watermelon.
“Where’s Tom now?” I asked, and she said, “I think he’s down along the creek, somewhere. If you see him or Bob on your way home, tell them it’s chore time.”
She thanked me again for the oranges, and I swung onto my bike, pedalled through their barnyard and out their open gate and on toward the creek.
At the bridge I stopped, looked downstream again at the green tent, and without even straining my eyes, I caught a fleeting glimpse of a boy just my size, wearing blue western-style jeans and a gray and maroon striped T-shirt. He was at the edge of the cornfield behind the green tent not more than ten feet from the clothesline which had on it different colored different kinds of women’s clothes.
“Right now, Bill Collins,” I heard my harsh voice saying to me through my grit teeth, “right now, you’re going to find out what is what, and why ... RIGHT NOW!”
I was down the embankment and under the bridge in a jiffy, and out in the cornfield scooting along in a hurry, like one of Circus’s Pop’s hounds trailing a cottontail—only my voice was quiet.
Closer and closer I came to the place where I had last seen Tom, shading my eyes to see what I could see.
Right then I heard a whirlwind of flying feet coming in my direction straight down the corn row I was stooped over in. In only a few fast-flying jiffies whoever was coming would be storming right into the middle of where I was, and if they didn’t happen to see me and I didn’t get out of the way, they’d bowl me over like a quarterback getting tackled in a football game.