“Girls wear slacks, don’t they? And lots of girls smoke, too.”
We crept from our hiding place, scrambled down to where the boat had been beached and looked to be sure the oarsman--or oarswoman or oarsgirl--was out of sight. Then we slipped through the fence to look into the cement pool to see the melon and also to look around for the wad of paper I had tossed away when I had been here before.
I tell you it was an interesting minute--or three minutes, I should say--’cause that’s all the time it took us to discover some thing very important--very, _very_ important!
Say, did you ever have a flashlight strike you full in the face and blind you for a few seconds? Well, the white light from the match or cigarette lighter and the reddish glow from the cigarette or cigar fifty yards down the shore, sort of blinded me--not my eyes, but my mind. I couldn’t think straight for a minute. It was Poetry’s suggestion, though--that the thief might be a woman or a girl--that really confused me.
I guess all the time I had had it in the back of my mind that the thief was Bob Till--but what if the person in the boat was a _girl!_ No wonder I couldn’t think, I thought.
It was the perfume that sent my mind whirling. We noticed it the very second we had crawled through the fence. It was so strong it made the whole place smell as if somebody had upset the perfume counter in the Sugar Creek Dime Store and half the bottles of cologne and fancy perfumes had been broken.
If Dragonfly had been with us, I thought, he’d have sneezed and sneezed and sneezed, on account of he is allergic to almost every perfume there is.
Well, that was our chance to make a quick search for the wad of oiled paper which is what we had come there for in the first place. I remembered just about where I had tossed it and in only a few seconds Poetry hissed, “Here it is! Here’s our clue!”
His excitement about the thing and his being so sure, had built up my mind to expect to see something wonderful inside that oiled paper. Anybody who would go to the trouble to steal and deliver a watermelon secretly in a boat at night, would probably leave something _in_ the melon worth a hundred times more than the melon itself.
There in the shadow of the linden tree, to the music of the bubbling water in the spring, and the singing of the crickets, Poetry held the flashlight while my trembling fingers unfolded that crumpled piece of oiled paper, and spread it out.