NEXT day we managed to get the news around quick to all the rest of the gang—but secretly on account of it seemed like our parents ought not to know what was going on until we ourselves investigated. Anybody knows that a mystery isn’t a mystery any longer if someone explains it, and there’s nobody that can spoil a boy’s mystery any quicker than his very bright parents, who always know almost everything anyway—one reason our pops being especially smart being on account of they used to be boys themselves.

The very second I finished all of my dinner that day—except my piece of apple pie—I looked past Pop’s overhanging, reddish-brown eyebrows to where Mom sat at the end of the table. “May I be excused and eat my pie outdoors?” I asked.

You see, if there is anything I would rather do than anything else it is to leave the table early before anybody thinks about starting to do the dishes, and take my three-cornered, one-sixth of an apple pie, and go out our east screen door with the pie in one hand and my straw hat in the other, swing out to our grape arbor, step up on a strong, wooden box, which is always there, reach up and lay the pie on top of the two-by-four crossbeam at the east end of the arbor where there isn’t any vine growing. Then I like to climb up and sit on the top with the cool breeze blowing in my freckled face and with my two bare feet, with their ten stubby toes, hanging swinging below me. I hold the nicely-crusted pie upside down and eat it that way, while I look around the Sugar Creek territory to where different members of the gang live. I also like to look at our farm and the barn and the chicken house and the big walnut tree with the long, rope swing hanging from the first branch, which grows on the south side, and the plum tree with the robin’s nest in the three-limbed crotch up near the top. Boy, oh boy, does it make me feel fine and glad to be alive, especially glad to be a boy!

Even while I was asking to be excused, I was imagining myself to be already outdoors, sitting up on the flat side of the two-by-four crossbeam.

But say, Pop was as smart as I was—smart enough to read my mind—and he saw things in it that I hardly knew were there because right that second he looked at Mom and said, “There are some good habits, some bad habits, and some that are in between. The ones in between don’t hurt a boy very much, but they help to make him him. That’s getting to be quite a habit with you, Bill.” He finished, looking at me with his gray-green eyes.

I had been looking at the pie, which I already had in my hand, expecting Mom to say, “Yes,” like she nearly always does.

“What habit?” I said innocently to Pop.

“Use plain American, Theodore,” Mom said to Pop. “The boy doesn’t understand philosophy.”

And Pop said to Mom with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, “May I take my pie and go outdoors and eat it upside-down on top of our grape arbor?”

Mom looked up at him with a sort of quizzical expression on her face. There was also a twinkle in her eye that seemed funny to Pop, but not to me. Then she said, “Certainly you can do that while Bill and I do the dishes.”

Pop said, “Thank you,” and took his one-sixth of a pie in his big, hard, sun-tanned farmer hand, slipped out of his chair and outdoors fast, letting the screen slam hard behind him like I sometimes do—and shouldn’t. Outside he let out a blood-curdling war whoop and I heard his footsteps running toward the grape arbor.

A second later I was outdoors too.

Say, if there is anything that looks ridiculous, it is a boy’s long-legged, red-haired, bushy-eyebrowed father grunting himself into an upside-down knot and out of it again while he climbs up onto a high grape arbor.

A jiffy later there was Pop up there where I should have been, with his heavy work shoes on his large feet swinging, and eating his pie upside-down and panting for breath from all the unnecessary exercise. It was fun to Pop, but to me it looked silly so I sat down on the porch with my back to him and ate my pie right side up and for some reason it didn’t taste very good.

It was a scorching hot day and I began to feel a little better there in the shade, when all of a sudden Mom said from inside the house, using a very cheerful voice, “O. K. Bill. The dishes are all ready for you.”

I always know when Mom calls me cheerfully like that that she’s trying to make me want to come.

But say, Pop turned out to be a really swell Pop after all, or else he was trying to give me a free education. It seemed like he was still pretending to be me up there on that grape arbor so when he heard Mom say, “dishes,” he called out cheerfully, “Coming,” and swung around quick and down off the grape arbor and hurried into the house like he would rather dry the Collins family dinner dishes than do anything else in the whole world.

He got stopped at the door by Mom though, who was maybe trying to play the game with him, and she said, “Wipe that dirt off your shoes on the mat there”—which she tells me about thirty-seven times a day—sometimes even while I am already doing it, having thought of it first myself. Say, I looked at Pop’s feet and they did have dirt on them—a yellowish-brown dirt on the sides of the soles and heels!

At the very second I saw Pop’s shoes with yellowish-brown dirt on them instead of the very black dirt I knew was the kind that was up under the pignut trees, I wondered what on earth? I certainly didn’t want my Pop to be really getting mixed up in our mystery like I had thought last night for a minute he might be.

Not only that—I didn’t want him to have been the person who had given the bobwhite and turtledove bird calls last night, which my discouraged mind was trying to tell me he could have been.

Not knowing I was going to say what I said, I said, “POP!” in a loud and astonished voice, “Where did you get that kind of mud on your shoes?” I was using the kind of voice I had heard another member of our family use on me several different times in my half-long life.

Pop, who was already wiping off his shoes on the mat at the door, looked down at them in astonishment and said, “What dirt?”

Mom’s astonished voice shot through the finely woven screen of the door and landed with a “kerwham” right where her eyes were looking, which was on both Pop’s big shoes. “Why, Theodore Collins!” she said, “What on earth?”

Pop grinned back through the screen at her and said, “No, not what on earth, but earth on what?” which I could tell he thought was funny, but Mom didn’t think it was very. She went on in her same astonished, accusing voice, saying, “Those are the very same muddy shoes you ate dinner with!”

“I never ate dinner with muddy shoes in my life,” Pop said, with a grin in his voice. “I always use a knife and fork and spoon,” which was supposed to be extra funny—and was to Pop and me—but for some reason Mom only smiled rather than laughed and it looked like she was trying to keep herself from even smiling.

“Go get your father’s house slippers,” Mom ordered me, and I obeyed her in a tickled hurry.

Pop slipped his feet out of his shoes and left them on the porch, and slipped his feet into his slippers and ordered me to follow him into the house, which I also did with a little less speed, because I could tell by the tone of his voice that he had some work for me to do, which I found out was the truth.

It wasn’t too bad though ’cause Pop and I played a little game while we did the dishes. He called me “Pop” and I called him “Bill.” He ordered Mom to go into the front room to look after my baby sister, Charlotte Ann.

Say, Pop and I dived headfirst—or rather, I should say, handsfirst—into the sudsy dishwater, making short work of those dishes, getting them done a lot faster than if a mother and daughter had done them. Also we hurried to be sure to get through before Mom might come out into the kitchen and look over our work and decide we were not using the right kind of soap or something. It really was fun ’cause I kept giving orders to my red-haired, awkward son, giving him cuckoo commands every few minutes such as “Keep your mind on your work, Bill!” ... “Hey, that plate has to be wiped over again!” ... “Your mother likes to have the glasses polished a little better than that, Son, we never know when there might be company from somewhere and those glasses have to shine like everything”—unnecessary things a father nearly always says to a boy.

Well, those dishes got done in about half the usual time. As quick as they were finished, I was free to start to do what I really wanted to do in just the way I wanted to do it, but I got stopped by Pop’s big, gruff voice. I had just tossed Pop’s drying towel toward the rack beside the stove, and missed the rack and had made a red-headfirst dive for it to pick it up quick before Pop, or especially Mom, might see it. I was still in a bent-over position—just right for a good spank from somebody—when Pop’s voice socked me and the words were, “Which one of us is Bill and which is your father now—for the rest of the afternoon, I mean?”

“I am,” I said. In half a jiffy the towel was on the rack nice and straight and I was over by the washstand, stooping to get my straw hat, which was beside Pop’s big still-off work shoes.

“Bring the gang home some time this afternoon,” Pop said. “I want to show them Addie’s nice, new red-haired family.”

“I will,” I answered, I having seen the six cute little quadrupeds myself that morning.

By that time I was already outdoors and ten feet from the slammed screen door, the door having slammed itself on account of its strong, coiled spring. Then Pop called again and stopped me stock-still. “If I am your father again, and you are Bill Collins, you had better stay home and mow the lawn and let me go to meet the gang,”—but I could tell he didn’t mean it. Pop looked awfully cute, I thought, with Mom’s big apron on and his blue shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbows, his slippers still on, standing in the open screen door.

I called to him saying, “I am still Theodore Collins and you are Bill and you are letting flies in. Shut the door quick—and quietly!” As I hurried away, my mischievous Pop called after me, “So long, Mr. Collins! Have a nice time, and don’t forget to find a new beetle for our collection.”

“So long, Bill!” I yelled from the front gate, which I had just opened and gone through and shut after me. Then as I dashed past Theodore Collins on our mailbox I was myself again. I swished across the dusty road, vaulted over the old, lichen-covered rail fence and in a jiffy was running in the path that had been made by barefoot boys’ bare feet, down through the woods as fast as I could go to the spring where the gang was going to meet first before going up to the top of Strawberry Hill to the cemetery.