SAY, if that bobwhite call was from a real quail, then we didn’t have anything to worry about, but we knew that honest-to-goodness quails not only don’t make their very pretty calls in the middle of the night, but also they don’t do it in the middle of a sultry, mid-summer, sunny afternoon—or if they do I don’t remember having heard any do it around Sugar Creek.

If it was a human being calling like a quail, then what?

And if it was a man human being, we would all want to scramble ourselves out of there and hide somewhere so that whoever he was wouldn’t see us; but if it was a woman human being, who had made the quail call—which it might have been, I thought, on account of the woman’s shoes lying there in the sand beside Little Jim—then every single one of us ought to make a headfirst dive toward getting his clothes on.

Before we could start to try to decide what to do, we heard the quail call again and this time it was a lot nearer than it had been—in fact it seemed like it wasn’t a hundred feet distant and had come from the direction of the spring from which we ourselves had just come. That meant that the person, man or woman, was maybe walking in the same path we had been running in a little while before. We wouldn’t have even half enough time to get our clothes on before running to hide.

I looked all around our tense circle to see if the rest of the gang had any ideas as to what to do and it seemed like not a one of us could do a thing except stand stock-still, with his eyes and ears glued to the direction from which the last quail call had come.

“Quick, Dragonfly!” I heard myself say, taking charge of things and shouldn’t have tried to on account of Big Jim is our leader when he is with us. “Get those shoes, quick, and let’s get out of here!”

But Big Jim took my leadership away from me in a split second by saying, “Leave those shoes alone! Don’t you dare touch ’em! If anything has happened, we don’t want our fingerprints on them!”

In less than a fourth of a jiffy we were scrambling up the side of the slope leaving those shoes about eighteen inches from the whirligig beetles, and with all our minds whirligigging like everything—some of us with our clothes half on and others with them half off and the rest of the gang with them all off—and with my mind a little off too, maybe—we were getting ourselves fast out of there.

At the top of the little slope we came to the narrow footpath, zipped across it and disappeared into the tall corn—that being one of Dragonfly’s pop’s cornfields. I knew that on the opposite side of that rather narrow strip of cornfield was the bayou, which was divided into two parts with a longish pond on either end of it, and each of those ponds had in it some very lazy water in which there were a few lone-wolf, mud pickerel or barred pickerel, as some people called them. Between the two ponds there was a narrow strip of soggy, marshy soil and a little path that was bordered by giant ragweeds. This was a sort of shortcut to the woods from the old swimming hole. Once we got to the woods we could follow the rail fence like we had done last night and come out at the place where Little Jim had killed the bear, which you have probably read about in one of the other Sugar Creek Gang stories. As you know, that was at the bottom of Strawberry Hill; and at the top of the hill is the old cemetery and the hole in the ground beside Sarah Paddler’s tombstone.

There we would be safe from whoever was coming up that path, nearer and nearer every second—that is, if he was dangerous.

As quick as we were far enough into the tall corn to be hidden from sight of the path, we dropped down on the ground to listen and to look to see if we could see what was going on. As you know, corn blades are not as thick at the bottom of the stalks as they are at the top so if anybody was coming up the path, we could see his feet if we were lying on the ground. Poetry, who was real close to me like he nearly always is, whispered in my ear, saying, “Hey, sh-h-h! There he is!”

I looked and saw the cuffs of somebody’s trousers standing at the end of my corn row in the very place where we always left the path to dive down the incline into our willow-and-shrubbery-protected outdoor dressing room. Then came a startling quail call again and this time it seemed so near it almost scared me out of what few wits I hadn’t already been scared out of.

I waited, wondering if there would be an answer, and then what to my astonished ears should come but the sound of a turtledove’s low, sad, lonesome call from the other direction farther up the path.

Almost right away I saw the skirt of a woman’s yellowish dress coming out of our green dressing room. I also noticed that she was barefoot. Straining my ears in their direction I could hear her talking and complaining about something like a boy does when he gets called by his mother to leave his play—and shouldn’t. I could hear the man’s voice too, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying.

A jiffy later I heard her say, “I was having so much fun wading in the riffles, and—look! I found this—a big Wash Board shell! I’ll bet I’ll find a pearl in it! Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I did find one worth hundreds of dollars?”

And I heard the man say, “That’s fine, but it’s time for your rest. Let’s get back to the tent.”

So! I thought. They were camping somewhere up in Old Man Paddler’s woods and that meant they would either have to get their drinking water at the spring where our gang met everyday when our parents would let us, or they would have to come to our house to get it out of the iron pitcher-pump at the end of the boardwalk twenty feet from our back door and not more than fifteen feet from our grape arbor.

For some reason it didn’t make me feel very good. Of course, Old Man Paddler owned nearly all the territory around Sugar Creek and he had a right to let anybody camp on it that wanted to, but it sorta seemed like the whole territory belonged to the gang, especially the woods around the spring on account of our bare feet had walked on nearly every square inch of it. We had climbed nearly every tree and rested in the shade of every one of them and it was too much like having company at our house. You don’t feel free to yell and scream and give loon calls and go screeching through the woods, yelling like wild Indians or anything, when somebody strange is camping there. You even have to comb your hair when you are outdoors if there happens to be a city woman around.

I thought and felt all that while we were still lying on the sandy soil of Dragonfly’s pop’s cornfield and the man and the woman were still not more than a few rods up the path on their way towards the spring.

They were out of hearing distance now, but I could see the movement the tall weeds were making as they swayed back into place after the man and woman had gone through, and the movement was like it is when the wind blows across our wheat field.

A jiffy later they were gone and I could hear only the sound of the breathing of seven half-dressed, half-undressed boys.

“What on earth?” I said using my nervous voice before any of the rest of the gang did.

Circus, trying to be funny, said, “Seven boys are.”

We would have to go in swimming now to get the sand of Dragonfly’s cornfield off ourselves. Besides I had some dirt in my red hair too and it would have to be dived out.

It was a not-very-happy gang of boys that sneaked back to our green, leaf-shaded, dressing room and went in swimming.

“Did any of you guys hear him say ‘Let’s get back to the tent’?” I asked.

“Sure,” Poetry said, “what of it?”

“What of it?” I exclaimed. “Why, that means they are camping up there in the woods, somewhere, and we’ll have to be half-scared half to death every time we go in swimming for fear some woman and her husband will hear or see us, or else we’ll have to wear bathing suits,”—which none of our gang had ever worn in our whole lives.

In fact, the only people who ever used bathing suits around Sugar Creek were people who came from far away who went swimming near the bridge—and maybe had to ’cause it was a public place. Hardly anybody knew about our swimming hole.

I had just come up from diving and was shaking the water out of my ears and rubbing it out of my eyes so I could hear and see, when our mystery came to an even livelier life than before.

It happened like this. Little Jim had already finished swimming and was dressing over by the willow where he always dresses and where the whirligig beetles were still in swimming having a sweet time going round and round on the surface of the water like as many boys and girls on skates can do on Sugar Creek in the wintertime.

Little Jim had just finished shoving his head through the neck of his shirt and was reaching for his overalls that were hanging on the willow when all of a sudden he let out another excited yell like he had done before. “Hey, Bill! Circus! Poetry! Everybody! Come here quick! Hurry! Look what I found. It’s somebody’s billfold!”

By the time I got the water out of my ears and eyes and could see, I saw him holding up for us to look at a very pretty, brown billfold like the kind Mom carries in her handbag.

Not waiting to finish getting the water out of my ears and eyes, I went splashety-gallop straight for Little Jim, who was on the shore by the willow still holding up for us to see, the brown leather billfold. Nearly all the rest of the gang were already splashing their different ways toward Little Jim and almost all of us got there at the same time.

Say, when those fifty or more black, flat, oval whirligig beetles saw or heard or felt us coming in such a noisy, splashy hurry out of our swimming hole toward theirs, they got more scared than a gang of boys would if a dozen cows were stampeding in their direction. In a jiffy, like whirligig beetles do when they are badly frightened, they stopped going around in their fast, excited circles and dived under the water to hide themselves on the bottom of Sugar Creek so that by the time I got there, there wasn’t a one in sight and only the smell of ripe apples was left.

Say, that was one of the prettiest billfolds I had ever seen. I noticed it was made out of a very rich-looking leather that could have been goat’s skin, although maybe it was what leather workers call saddle leather and it had a very pretty tooled design on it which was a galloping horse with wings.

On the other side of the billfold were the initials “F.E.”

---

Well, what do you do with a fancy, woman’s billfold when you find it on the ground in a boys’ outdoor dressing room? Do you open the billfold to see what’s in it or do you just open it to see if a name is on the identification card in one of its clearview windows, which most billfolds have in them for the owner’s name and address and for pictures of different members of the family or favorite friends?

Since Big Jim was the leader of our gang, Little Jim handed the billfold to him and right away Big Jim said, “It probably belongs to the turtledove that was here a little while ago looking for her high-heeled shoes. We’d better get dressed quick and take out after her and her bobwhite husband or brother, and see if we can find her and give the billfold back to her.”

“What’s her name?” Little Tom Till wanted to know, crowding in between Little Jim and me and turning his face sidewise so as soon as Big Jim would open it, he could read the name on the identification card in one of the windows.

“We don’t need to know that,” Big Jim said, but I noticed he decided to unzip the three-way zipper, and when he did the billfold flopped open like a four-page, leather-covered book. There were four swinging windows with a picture on each side of three of them. One of the windows had a card and the name on it was Frances Everhard. Then I got one of the most astonishing surprises I ever got in my life when Dragonfly, who was closest to Big Jim and looking on over his elbow, exclaimed, “Why, she’s got a picture of Charlotte Ann, Bill’s baby sister!”

Boy, oh boy, you should have seen me crowd my way into the middle of our huddle to Big Jim’s side to see what Dragonfly had thought he saw, and to my whirligigging surprise I saw what looked like one of the cutest pictures of my baby sister, Charlotte Ann, I had ever seen. In fact, it was one I had never seen before and I wondered when Mom had had it taken and how on earth a barefoot woman, who dug holes in a cemetery at night, had gotten it.

Charlotte Ann in the picture was sitting in a fancy-looking highchair that had what looked like an adjustable footrest like they sell in the Sugar Creek Furniture Store. The food tray looked like it was shiny and was maybe made out of chrome. I remembered Mom had looked at one like that once in town and had wanted to buy it special for Charlotte Ann, but Pop had said the old one I had used when I was a baby, which was years and years ago, was good enough. It had made a husky boy out of me and besides he couldn’t afford it—like he can’t a lot of things Mom would like to buy and maybe knows she shouldn’t on account of Pop is still trying to save money so he can buy a new tractor.

Also Charlotte Ann was wearing a very cute baby bonnet and a stylish-looking coat with a lot of lacy stuff around the collar. I didn’t remember her having any outfit like that at all, although Mom could have bought it and had her picture taken one day in town when I hadn’t known it.

She certainly had a cute expression on her face, which I had seen her have one like hundreds of times in my life. It looked like she was thinking some very mischievous thoughts and was trying to tell somebody what she was thinking and couldn’t on account of she couldn’t talk yet.

“It’s not a picture of Charlotte Ann,” Little Jim said, who managed to get his small, curly head in close enough to take a look. “She’s got more hair than that.”

Circus spoke up then and said, “Maybe it was taken about a year ago when she was a little littler. She’s bigger than that now.”

There were other pictures of different people in the little, clearview windows. Little Jim noticed there were several different sized bills in the bill compartment—in fact, three fives and a ten and several ones, each one of the ones having on it a picture of George Washington, the first President of United States; the fives, a picture of Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth President of the United States, and the tens, one of Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of the United States. Well, we brought it to a quick vote and the decision was to take the billfold up the path and start looking for the tent, which the man and woman were camping in and ask them if they had lost it.

As we moved along in a sorta half-worried hurry up the path toward the spring, I couldn’t for the life of me think how on earth the barefoot woman could have gotten a picture of my baby sister. What would she want with it, anyway?

Well, maybe in the next fifteen minutes or so I would find out but I was worried a little, ’cause, even as I followed along behind Poetry—all of us having to walk single file on account of the path through the tall weeds was narrow, just wide enough for one barefoot boy at a time—I was remembering that the woman was probably the same person who last night had been digging a hole in the old cemetery under the big pine tree beside Sarah Paddler’s tombstone. What on earth? What had she been digging in the earth for? I wondered.