The Green Tent Mystery by Paul Hutchens

Author:Paul Hutchens [Hutchens, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-57567-753-8
Publisher: Moody Publishers
Published: 1998-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

8

At the supper table at our house that night, I thought I’d never heard Mom and Dad laugh so hard. I was still thinking about the warble flies that had scared the living daylights out of Dragonfly’s dad’s cows. I told them all about it, crowding my words out between bites, and I was crowding the bites in too fast.

Dad said, “The heel flies are pretty bad this year. Nearly every farmer in Sugar Creek has been complaining about them. They were tormenting Old Brindle something fierce today. I didn’t dare turn her out into the pasture without leaving the gate into the barnyard open so she could come rushing back in for the protection of the shade anytime she wants to.”

“Speaking of cows,” Mom said, and her voice lit up the way her face does when she has thought of something very interesting or funny. “I read something in a farm magazine today that was about the funniest thing I ever read.”

“What was it?” Dad asked.

“Yes, what was it?” I said.

Dad and Mom were always reading things in magazines and telling them to each other, and I didn’t always get in on their jokes. Sometimes I had to ask them what they were laughing about, and it didn’t always seem as funny to me as it did to them. They also talked to each other about things that were not funny—things they had just that day learned about something in the Bible or something they had studied for next week’s Sunday school lesson.

“I’ll get it and read it for you,” Mom said. She excused herself, left the table, went into the other room, and came back with a small magazine. “It’s a ten-year-old schoolgirl’s essay on a cow.”

Even before she started reading it, I wasn’t sure I was going to like it. I am close to being a ten-year-old boy myself, and I could imagine what a ten-year-old girl would write about a cow!

Dad cleared his throat as if he was going to read it himself or else so that he would be ready to laugh when the time came.

Mom started reading, while Charlotte Ann wiggled and twisted in her high chair. She was not interested in anybody’s essay on a cow. All Charlotte Ann was interested in about cows was the milk she drank three times a day. So a story about a cow wouldn’t be funny to her.

Even as I looked at Charlotte Ann, I was remembering that there were still plenty of unsolved things about our mystery. There was the picture of Charlotte Ann in the billfold; the strange-acting woman who dug holes in a graveyard at night and had permission to dig them all over the Sugar Creek territory, who had to rest every afternoon, and who went barefoot and waded in the riffles all by herself—stuff like that.

Why did she have the picture of Charlotte Ann in her billfold? The very second Mom got through reading and she and Dad got through laughing, I would ask her about Charlotte Ann’s picture.

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