Well, this time Big Jim took the envelope, and handed it to Little Jim who read it in his squeaky voice to all of us, and this is what it said in rhyme:
“The Sugar Creek Gang is on the right track Now turn right around and hurry right back-- Go straight to the old hollow sycamore tree, And there if you look, you will see what you see.”
This time it didn’t say it was signed by “Guess Who,” but the poetry sounded like Poetry’s poetry, and I looked at him and he was busy studying the ground around there to see if he could find any shoe tracks.
“Last one to the sycamore tree is a cow’s tail,” Circus said, and started to make a dive for the cemetery fence just as Dragonfly got a queer look on his face, like he was going to sneeze but wasn’t quite sure whether he was or not. Dragonfly looked toward the sun, which hurt his eyes a little, and that maybe made tears, which, with his face raised like that, tickled his nose on the _inside_ and he let out one of his favorite sneezes, which was half blocked like a football kick, but went off to one side. Then he sneezed again three times, just as fast as if he couldn’t help it, and said, “I’m allergic to something in this old graveyard. I’m allergic to ghosts.”
Right away we were all dashing toward the barbed-wire fence, and all of us got through without tearing our clothes and went zippety-zip-zip dash, swerve, swish-swish-swish, toward the spring again, and down the path that led along the top of the hill toward Sugar Creek Bridge, and then across the old north road, and up a steep bank and down the path again toward the old sycamore tree and the swamp, and also toward the entrance to the cave which is a long cave, as you know, and the other end comes out in the basement of Old Man Paddler’s log cabin back up in the hills.
“So am I,” I said, and right that second I remembered that when I’d gone to the spring in the first place, more than maybe an hour ago, I’d taken a water pail from our milk house and was supposed to bring back a pail of sparkling cool water, when I came home. “There isn’t any hurry,” Pop had told me, “but when you do come back be _sure_ to bring a pail of water.”
“I will,” I had said to him, and now as we whizzed past the spring, I remembered that the water pail was on a flat stone down at the bottom of the hill at the spring.