The night we accidentally stumbled onto a brand-new mystery at Sugar Creek was the darkest summer night I ever saw.
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, imagine seeing a light out there and somebody digging! All of a sudden you get a creeping sensation in your spine, and your hair under your straw hat starts to try to stand up!
Well, that’s the way it started. Nobody from Sugar Creek had been buried in that old cemetery for years and years. It was only good for wild strawberries to grow in and bumblebees to make their nest in and barefoot boys to have their gang meetings in, telling ghost stories to each other.
And yet there it was, as plain as the crooked nose on Dragonfly’s thin face, or the wide nose on Poetry’s face, or the freckled nose on mine—an honest-to-goodness man was 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. It was shedding a spooky light on the man and his nervous movements as he scooped 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. Dragonfly had the craziest sneeze of anybody in the world—a small squeal with a whistling tail on it. If Dragonfly would sneeze, it would be like the story of Peter Rabbit running away from Mr. McGregor.
As you remember, Peter Rabbit was running lickety-sizzle, trying to get away from Mr. McGregor, the gardener. Spying a large sprinkling can, Peter jumped into it to hide himself. The can happened to have water in the bottom, and that was too bad for poor Peter Rabbit’s nose. He sneezed, and Mr. McGregor heard it, and Peter had to jump his wet-footed, wet-furred self out of the can and go racing furiously to get away from mad Mr. McGregor and his garden rake.
“Listen,” Poetry hissed beside me.
I listened but couldn’t hear a thing except the scooping sounds the shovel was making.
Then he squeezed my arm so tight I almost said “Ouch” just as I heard a new sound. It sounded as if 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 laryngitis.
As you know, Dragonfly was the one who was a little more afraid of a cemetery than the rest. 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 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 between the rails of the tumbledown old fence, watching strange things in a graveyard at a strange hour of the night—well, all of a sudden I was 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. As Dad 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 birdcall, 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, brown-beaked bird with a white stomach and a white forehead. The feathers on the crown of its head were shaped like the topknot on a topknotted chicken.
The man kept shoveling, not paying attention to anything except what he was doing. He seemed to be working faster though. Then all of a sudden he stopped while he was in a stooped-over position and for a minute didn’t make a move.
“He’s looking at something in the hole,” Poetry whispered. “He sees something.”
“Maybe he’s listening,” I said. It seemed he was—the way a robin does on our front lawn with her 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 dive for the worm and holds on for dear life while she yanks and pulls till she gets its slimy body out. 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.
Seconds later I heard another birdcall, and it was another whistling sound, a very mournful cry. “Coo-oo, coo-oo, coo-oo. ”It was a turtledove.
And it was just as though that sad, plaintive turtledove call had scared the living daylights out of the man. He straightened up, looked all around, 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 anybody who had that kind of limp. No sooner had the man reached the maple tree than he lifted the lantern and blew out the light.
Then I heard a car door slam and the sound of a motor starting, and two headlights lit up the whole cemetery for a second. Two long, blinding beams made a wide sweep across the top of Strawberry Hill, lighting 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 three blocks away, leaving us three boys wondering, What on earth? and, Why? and, Who? and, Where?
It seemed 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. 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. 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, as if he were the leader of our gang instead of Big Jim, who is when he is with us—and I am when Big Jim 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-scared,” Dragonfly said.
As quick as we were sure the car was really gone, I turned on my dad’s big long flashlight, 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.