I can’t take any more time now anyway on account of I have to get started quick on the next story.
But it was just like it says in the Bible which our minister is always quoting—and also my parents—where the words are: “Be sure your sin will find you out.” That is what the thief’s sins had done. The very rope he had stolen, along with the money, had accidentally lassoed his feet, making it easy for us to capture him.
The two gunny sacks which had been wrapped around the water jug came in handy, too, ’cause we used them to make a litter to carry our prisoner on from the sycamore tree to the tool shed in the woods behind Poetry’s Pop’s barn. We unwrapped the wet sacks from around the jug, spread them out on the ground, cut two poles, using Bob’s axe with which he had been helping Old Man Paddler, slipped the sacks over the ends, making a hole in each of the closed corners—and we had one of the finest stretchers you ever saw.
Bob carried one end of the litter and Little Tom and I the other. Boy oh boy, did we ever feel proud, even though we were worried some because our prisoner was still unconscious. We knew he wasn’t drowned, on account of he was breathing all right, but he was as pale as a sheet of gray writing paper, except for the rouge on his cheeks.
Little Tom puffed out his story to me as we struggled and grunted along, with me helping as much as I could by asking questions that had been worrying me for quite a while: “How did you know he was the Super Market thief?” I asked him, and he said, “I didn’t, at first. I wanted to make a lot of money to get a present for Mother’s birthday tomorrow, so I thought up the idea of selling a map to the girl scouts—so the girls could draw a map apiece like we do when we go on our up-north vacations. The green lady worked out a scheme for me to leave the map in a big watermelon they had in the spring.” Tom’s face was as innocent as a lamb while he was puffing out his story to me.
“Then what?” I asked him, and he said, “When I saw the melon—how big it was, and how pretty, as big and as pretty as your Ida—I got a sinking feeling in my stomach, wondering where they got it, and if it might be yours, so I scooted up the hill, and hurried to your truck patch to find out.
“I was feeling fine when I saw Ida was still there. I beat it back to the spring, plugged the melon like I promised I would, put my map inside and went home.”
“But how—” I began, wondering still how come he knew our prisoner was a Super Market thief, but he cut in on me, adding, “I didn’t know till this afternoon. I saw all the women’s clothes on the line behind the tent, and thought she was a woman of some kind, so I gathered a dozen eggs and went down to see if I could sell them to her. I was kinda scared, on account of being afraid of strange women and girls, so I sneaked up on the cornfield side, and accidentally saw her doing it. That’s how I found out.”
“Saw her doing what?” Bob asked, and Tom answered, “She was rolling paper money into small rolls and stuffing them into the spout—it looked like hundreds and hundreds of dollars.
“I was so scared, I couldn’t move. I don’t know what kind of a noise I made but she heard me, jumped like she was shot, quick squeezed the last roll of paper into the jug, shoved it behind a suitcase, and yelled at me, ‘What do you want?’