The Tree House Mystery by Paul Hutchens

Author:Paul Hutchens [Hutchens, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-57567-765-1
Publisher: Moody Publishers
Published: 1999-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

Poetry and I stood frozen in our tracks at what some unsociable person had done—practically ordering our tenant out of our house! Imagine that!

My imagination kept seeing old Bawler standing stiff legged with his nose pointed in this direction, and I wished I could know with my mind what I knew his nose knew.

My eyes were still focused on the insulting words on the sign when my ears caught the sound of something going on farther up the bayou.

“Sounds like somebody digging,” I whispered. “Ker-slup—scrish—ker-slup—scrish—” It was like a shovel or spade being filled with dirt and emptied. Filled—emptied—filled—emptied—

Then the digging stopped, and we heard an entirely different sound. This was like somebody chopping with an ax or hatchet.

“Let’s find out what’s going on, right now!” Poetry said.

I looked into his set face to see if he meant it, and he did.

As my heart always does at a time like that, it was pounding in my ears, and I was feeling pretty tense as we carefully picked our way through the underbrush toward the sound of the chopping ax or hatchet. I just knew that we’d see some stranger when we got there, maybe someone with a fierce face and powerful muscles and an explosive temper who—

But that was as far as my thoughts went, because Poetry let out a surprised, “It’s only Little Jim digging!”

Right away we were both where Little Jim was. He had quite a good-sized hole dug at the base of a small tree.

“What you digging sassafras roots for?” Poetry demanded, squinting up at the only tree that grows around Sugar Creek that has three different kinds of leaves on the same twig. The three kinds were what our schoolteacher calls “oval,” “two-lobed,” and “three-lobed.”

Little Jim answered Poetry with a mouselike squeak in his small voice. “For Mr. Robinson, so he can have sassafras tea.”

For a second, a discouraging thought came into my mind. It was this: Poetry had dug a can of worms for our tenant; Circus offered his hound for a watchdog; Little Jim dug sassafras roots so he could make some of the best-tasting tea there ever was; but I, Bill Collins, hadn’t planned to do a single thing for him! All I had done was go to our toolshed to get Dad’s tape measure for him, he having asked for it first. Of course, I’d helped him through the rail fence across from our mailbox and had carried a pail of water for him, but what I’d done didn’t seem important.

My mind came back to our little circle of things when Poetry said to me, “Little Jim’s got his bird guide with him.”

There wasn’t anything unusual about that. That summer Little Jim carried it around with him nearly all the time. He was as proud as I was about what he knew about different kinds of birds, especially since I had told him that all the birds in the world were divided into two classes: altricial and precocial. The past several weeks, he had been using the words over and over and over.

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