I felt curiosity creeping up and down my spine and was all set for a mystery. Hardly realizing that I was trespassing on other people’s property and most certainly didn’t have a right to, even if the melon was in our spring, I quick stooped and with nervous fingers pulled out the folded piece of paper, which is what it was—the kind that comes off a loaf of bakery bread—and which at our house, when the loaf is all eaten, I nearly always toss into the woodbox or the wastebasket unless Mom sees me first and stops me. Sometimes Mom wants to save the paper and use it for wrapping sandwiches for Pop’s or my lunches, mine especially during the school year.
The melon was ripe, though, I noticed. The inside was a deep dark red.
While my mind was still trying to think up a mystery, something started to happen. From up in the woods at the top of the incline there was the sound of running feet and laughing voices, and flashlights, and flickering shadows, and it sounded like a whole flock of people coming. People, mind you! Only there weren’t any boys’ or men’s voices, but girls’ voices. GIRLS’! They were giggling and laughing and coming toward the base of the linden tree just above us. In another brain-whirling second, they would be where they could see us, and we’d be caught.
Say! when you are wearing a pair of red-striped pajamas and your barrel-shaped friend is wearing a pair of green-striped pajamas, and it is night, and you hear a flock of girls running in your direction and you are half scared of girls even in the daytime, you all of a sudden forget about a plugged watermelon floating in the nice fresh cool water of your spring, and you look for the quickest place you can find to hide yourself!
We couldn’t make a dash up either side of the incline to the top, ’cause that’s where the girls were, and we couldn’t escape in the opposite direction ’cause there was a barbed wire fence there separating us and the creek, but we had to do something! If it had been a gang of boys coming, we could have stood our ground and fought if we had to—but not when it was a bevy of girls, which sounded like a flock of blackbirds getting ready to fly south for the winter, only they weren’t getting ready to fly south, but north, which was in our direction.
“Quick!” Poetry’s faster-thinking mind cried to me. “Let’s beat it!” He showed me what he wanted us to do, by scrambling to his awkward feet and making a dive east toward the place where I knew we could get through a board fence, on the other side of which was a path that wound through a forest of giant ragweeds leading to Dragonfly’s Pop’s cornfield in the direction of the Sugar Creek Gang’s swimming hole.
In another jiffy I would have been following Poetry through the fence and we would have escaped being seen, but my right bare foot which was standing on a thin layer of slime on the cement lip of the pool where the melon was, slipped out from under me, and I felt myself going down.
Down, mind you, and I couldn’t stop myself! I struggled to regain my balance, and couldn’t—couldn’t even fall where my mixed-up mind told me would be a better place to fall than into the pool, which was in a mud puddle on the other side. Then thuddety-whammety, slip-slop-splashety—I was half sitting and half lying in the middle of the pool of ice cold spring water astride that long green watermelon, like a boy astride a bucking bronco at a Sugar Creek rodeo!
From above and all around and from every direction, it seemed, there were the voices of happy-go-lucky girls with flashlights, probably coming to get the watermelon, or the butter in the glass jar, or maybe a pail of drinking water for their camp.