THE GREEN TENT MYSTERY
AT SUGAR CREEK
by
PAUL HUTCHENS
IT was the darkest summer night I ever saw—the night we accidentally stumbled onto a brand new mystery at Sugar Creek.
Imagine coming happily home with two of your best pals, carrying a string of seven fish, and feeling wonderful and proud and then, halfway home, when you are passing an old, abandoned cemetery, seeing a light out there and somebody digging! All of a sudden you get a creeping sensation in your spine and your red hair under your straw hat starts to try to stand up—!
Well, that’s the way it started. Nobody in Sugar Creek had died and been buried in that old cemetery for years and years, and it was only good for wild strawberries to grow in and bumblebees to make their nests in and barefoot boys to have their gang meetings in—and also to tell ghost stories to each other in.
And yet, there it was, as plain as the crooked nose on Dragonfly’s thin face, or the short, wide nose on Poetry’s fat face, or the freckled nose on mine—an honest-to-goodness man or something, digging in the light of a kerosene lantern. The lantern itself was standing beside the tall tombstone of Sarah Paddler, Old Man Paddler’s dead wife, and was shedding a spooky light on the man and his nervous movements as he scooped the yellowish-brown dirt out of the hole and piled it onto a fast-growing pile beside him.
I knew he couldn’t see us because we were crouched behind some elder bushes that grew along the rail fence just outside the cemetery, but I also knew that if we made the slightest noise he might hear us; and if he heard us—well, what would he do?
I kept hoping Dragonfly’s nose, which as everybody knows is almost always allergic to almost everything, wouldn’t smell something that would make him sneeze, because Dragonfly had the cuckooest sneeze of anybody in the world—like a small squeal with a whistling tail on it. If Dragonfly would sneeze, it would be like the fairy story every child should know, of Peter Rabbit running away from Mr. McGregor. As you may remember, Peter Rabbit was running lickety-sizzle trying to get away from Mr. McGregor, the gardener. Spying a large sprinkler can, Peter jumped into it to hide himself. The can happened to have water in the bottom and that was too terribly bad for poor Peter Rabbit’s nose.
Right away Peter sneezed and also right away Mr. McGregor heard it, and Peter had to jump his wet-footed, wet-furred self out of the can and go racing furiously in some direction or other to get away from Mr. McGregor and his mad garden rake.
“Listen,” Poetry beside me hissed.
I listened but couldn’t hear a thing except the scooping sounds the shovel was making.
Then Poetry, who had his hand on my arm, squeezed my arm so tight I almost said “Ouch” just as I heard a new sound like the shovel had struck something hard.
“He’s struck a rock,” I said.
“Rock nothing,” Poetry answered. “I’d know that sound anywhere. That was metal scraping on metal or maybe somebody’s old coffin.”
Poetry’s nearly-always-squawking voice broke when he said that and he sounded like a frog with the laryngitis.
As you know, Dragonfly was the only one of us who was a little more afraid of a cemetery than the rest of us. So when Poetry said that like that, Dragonfly said, “Let’s get out of here! Let’s go home!”
Well, I had read different stories in my half-long life about buried treasure. In fact, our own gang had stumbled onto a buried treasure mystery when we were on a camping trip up North and which you can read about in some of the other Sugar Creek Gang books. So when I was peeking through the foliage of the elder bush and also between the rails of that tumble-down old rail fence, watching the strange things in a graveyard at a strange hour of the night, say—! I was all of a sudden all set to get myself tangled up in another mystery just as quick as I could—that is, if I could without getting into too much danger at the same time, for, as Pop says, “It is better to have good sense and try to use it than it is to be brave.”
Just that second I heard a bobwhite whistling, “Bob-white! Bob-white! Poor-Bob-white!” It was a very cheery bird call—the kind I would almost rather hear around Sugar Creek than any other.
As fast as a firefly’s fleeting flash, my mind’s eye was seeing a ten-inch-long, burnished-brown-beaked bird with a white stomach and a white forehead with feathers on the crown of its head shaped like the topknot on a topknotted chicken.
The man kept on shovelling, not paying attention to anything except what he was doing. He seemed to be working faster though. Then all of another sudden he stopped while he was in a stooped-over position and for a jiffy didn’t make a move.
“He’s looking at something in the hole,” Poetry whispered. “He sees something.”
“Maybe he’s listening,” I said, which it seemed like he was—like a robin does on our front lawn with its head cocked to one side, waiting to see or hear—or both—a night crawler push part of itself out of its hole. Then she makes a headfirst dive for the worm, holds on for dear life while she yanks and pulls till she gets its slimy body out and then she eats it or else pecks it to death and into small pieces and flies with it to her nest to feed it to her babies.
A jiffy later I heard another bird call and it was another whistling sound—a very mournful cry that sounded like, “Coo-o, Coo-o, Coo-o”—and it was a turtledove.
Say—! it was just like that sad, plaintive turtledove call had scared the living daylights out of the man. He straightened up, looked all around and came to quick life, picked up the lantern and started walking toward the old maple tree on the opposite side of the cemetery.
“He’s got a limp,” Poetry said, “look how he drags one foot after him.”
I didn’t have time to wrack my brain to see if I could remember if I knew anybody who had that kind of limp because no sooner had the man reached the maple tree, than he lifted the lantern up to his face and blew out the light. Then I heard a car door slam, the sound of a motor starting and then two headlights lit up the whole cemetery for a second and two long blinding beams made a wide sweep across the top of Strawberry Hill, lit up the tombstones and the lonely old pine tree above Sarah Paddler’s grave and the chokecherry shrubs and even the elder bush we were hiding behind. Then the car went racing down the abandoned lane that led to the road not more than the distance of three blocks away, leaving us three boys wondering “What on earth?” and “Why?” and “Who?” and “Where?”
It seemed like I couldn’t move—I had been crouched in such a cramped position for so long a time.
It was Dragonfly who thought of something that added to the mystery when he said, “First time I ever heard a bobwhite whistling in the night like that.”
The very second he said it I wished I had thought of it first, but I did think of something else first—anyway I said it first—and it was, “Yeah, and whoever heard of a turtledove cooing in the night?”
“It’s just plain cuckoo,” Poetry said. “I’ll bet there was somebody over there in that car waiting for him and maybe watching and those whistles meant something special. They probably meant ‘Danger.... Look out!... Get away, quick!’”
Then Poetry said in an authoritative voice like he was the leader of our gang instead of Big Jim who is when he is with us—and I am when he isn’t—“Let’s go take a look at what he was doing.”
“Let’s go home,” Dragonfly said.
“Why, Dragonfly Gilbert!” I said. “Go on home yourself if you are scared! Poetry and I have got to investigate!”
“I’m not s-s-s-scared,” Dragonfly said—and was.
As quick as we were sure the car was really gone, I turned on my Pop’s big, long, three-batteried flashlight—I having had it with me—and Poetry, Dragonfly and I started to climb through the rail fence to go toward the mound of yellowish-brown earth beside Sarah Paddler’s tombstone.
AS I said, the three of us started to climb through the rail fence to go to the hole in the ground and investigate what had been going on there. It took us only a jiffy or two to get through the fence—Poetry squeezing his fat self through first, he being almost twice as big around as either Dragonfly or I. If he could get through, we knew we could too.
I carried the flashlight, Dragonfly the string of seven fish, and Poetry carried himself. To get to the mound of earth we had to wind our way around, among chokecherry shrubs, wild rosebushes with reddish roses on them, mullein stalks and different kinds of wild flowers, such as blue vervain, and especially ground ivy, which I noticed had a lot of dark purple flowers on it—the same color as the vervain. The ground ivy flower clusters were scattered among the notched heart-shaped leaves of the vine.
In a jiffy we were there and the three of us were standing around the hole in the form of a right-angled triangle. An imaginary line running from Poetry to me made the hypotenuse of the right-angled triangle, I thought, and another imaginary line running from Dragonfly to me would make the base of the triangle.
There wasn’t a thing to see in the hole except a lot of fresh dirt—in fact, there wasn’t a thing of any interest whatever to a guy like Poetry who was the kind of boy that was always looking for a clue of some kind—and especially a mystery—to jump out at him like a jack-in-the-box does in a toy store when you press a spring.
The only thing that happened, while we were standing there in that half-scared silence looking down into the hole and also at the mound of yellowish-brown earth, was that, all of a sudden, a big, brown beetle came zooming out of the darkness and landed with a whamety-sizzle-kerplop against the side of my freckled face, bounced off and landed upside down on the top of the yellowish-brown earth where it began wriggling and twisting and trying to get off its back and onto its six spiney-looking legs.
Anybody who knows anything about bugs and beetles knows that a June bug isn’t a bug but is a beetle, and has two different names—one of them being a June beetle and the other a May beetle, depending upon whichever month of the year it flies around in the country where you live.
I was searching every corner of my mind to see if I could even imagine that anything I was seeing was a clue to help us solve the new mystery, which we had just discovered. Who in the world was the man and why had he been here? Why had he gotten scared when he heard the bobwhite and the turtledove?
I was remembering that June beetles get awful hungry at night and they eat the foliage of oak and willow and poplar trees. In the daytime they hide themselves in the soil of anybody’s pasture or in the grass in the woods. June beetles are crazy about lights at night and the very minute they see one they make a beetle-line for it just like the one which right that second was struggling on its back on the mound of earth.
“Crazy old June beetle!” I said and Poetry answered “June what?”
“Crazy old June beetle,” I said, shining my flashlight directly on it, and pushing the light up close to its brown ridiculous-looking self so that Poetry and Dragonfly could see what I was talking about.
Poetry, in a disgusted voice, said, “When are you going to get over that buggy idea of studying insects?”
I knew I might get over it most any time like I generally do some new hobby, which I pick up in the summer, but I didn’t want anybody to make fun of the fun I was having studying insects. Pop and I were having more fun than you can shake a stick at catching different kinds of insects that summer, especially beetles, which anybody knows have four wings. The two wings in front are not used for flying but are like a hard rain-proof roof protecting its two flying wings, which, when the beetle isn’t flying, are all nicely folded up underneath like two colored umbrellas.
Little Jim was always collecting things too and he was to blame for inspiring me to start a collection of my own. That summer Little Jim was looking up different kinds of wild flowers and writing their names down in a notebook. It just so happened that that week Pop and I were studying beetles and other insects.
Just that minute the big brown beetle I had my flashlight focused on, wriggled itself off the clod of dirt it was on and went tumblety-sizzle down the side of the mound and landed kerplop in the grave itself.
“Poor little scarab beetle,” I said to it. “I’ll bet that right this very second one of your nearest relatives is in that great big yellow-stomached catfish I caught a half hour ago at the mouth of the branch.”
Anybody knows that one of the best baits in the world to use to catch a catfish at night is a juicy grub worm, which is a little C-shaped larva which hatches out of an egg of a scarab beetle, such as a June beetle or some other kind.
“You’d be scared too,” Poetry said, “if you were flying around at night and saw a light in a cemetery and accidentally and all of a sudden found yourself right in the bottom of a newly dug grave.”
“Goose,” I said. “I didn’t say scared—I said scarab.” Then, feeling kind of proud of all the different things Pop and I had learned that week, I began to rattle off some of it to Poetry: “That’s what kind of beetle it is,” I said, “only it doesn’t eat dead stuff like some scarab beetles do. Its larvae eat the roots of nearly everything Pop plants in our new ground, but most scarabs eat dead things and worse stuff.”
“Cut out the education!” Poetry said. “Who cares about that? I s’pose you think that that’s why he flew into this old cemetery in the first place. He was looking for something dead to eat. Maybe that’s why he dived headfirst into the side of your face!”
“Cut it out, yourself,” I said, feeling a little temper-fire starting in my mind.
Just then the June beetle unscrambled himself—or herself, whichever it was—spread its shell-like front wings and its reddish-colored back wings and took off again, straight in the direction of my face, but I snapped off the flashlight quick, ducked my head and he missed me and disappeared into the night—on his way, maybe, to the lighted window of somebody’s house. If he should happen to see one somewhere, and if there should be a window open without a screen, some woman or girl would soon be screaming bloody murder for a man or boy to come and save her life.
“Turn your light on again, quick!” Dragonfly said, “and let’s get out of here!”—and quick started to do it himself, but we stopped him.
We looked all around everywhere but still couldn’t find a single clue to tell why whoever he was had been digging there.
“Hey!” Poetry exclaimed excitedly all of a sudden, “Look! Here’s a clear shoe print in the soft dirt.”
Then like he had seen a ghost or something, he almost screamed as he said, “It’s a woman’s high-heeled shoe!”
“What on earth!” I thought.
“But it was a m-m-m-man digging!” Dragonfly said, stammering.
“Then it was a woman dressed in overalls!” I said in the most excited voice I had heard myself use in a long time.
I stooped, shoved Pop’s powerful three-batteried flashlight down into the neat little shoe print. “Say, she had very small feet,” I said.
Naturally, there wasn’t anything extra mysterious about a woman wearing overalls around Sugar Creek, especially when she was doing the kind of hard work which men have to do and which some women have to do sometimes, but what would a woman be doing digging in an abandoned cemetery late at night? “What on earth?” I thought and said so.
Not a one of us knew what to do or say next so we decided to go over to the old maple tree. The minute we got there Poetry ordered me to shine my light around the tree trunk while he studied the bark to see if any of it had been freshly knocked off.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“To see if a human bobwhite or a human turtledove was hiding up there among the branches as a sort of lookout for the woman. Those two bird-whistles were warnings of some kind.”