I could tell you a lot about the messes Freddy got into trying to do things the easiest way, but the super. is hanging around with a lot of inventory sheets so I'll have to cut this short with Freddy's prize performance. One summer morning Freddy's Pa and Ma went away for the day, but before they started Half Baked led Freddy out into the yard, shoved an axe into his unwilling hands and ordered him to cut down an oak that stood close to one side of the house, and was growing so big it was shutting out a lot of sunlight.
Now there wasn't a boy in Epping at that time who hadn't had considerable experience in chopping wood, unless it was Sammy Smead and he never counted anyway except on the afternoon we initiated him into the Brothers of Mystery, and there wasn't one of us who didn't hate it; but Freddy loathed it more than anything else, principally I guess, because there wasn't any easy way out. If you had to cut wood you had to cut it, and that's all there was to it.
Along about two that afternoon, a crowd of us boys bound for the swimming hole happened by Freddy's house, and found him pretty limp and blistery. He'd only hacked about half through the tree, but I think his mental anguish was worse than his physical exhaustion, because scheme as he might he had hit on no easy way to fell that oak, and the job looked as though it would last till sundown.
Freddy was a good diplomat, and he tried all the Tom Sawyer stuff on us he carried, but not a chance. There was not one of us who would chop wood when he didn't positively have to, and it looked as though Freddy was going to chop until the job was finished, when Dick Harris said something about blowing it up with some gunpowder his father had stored in a keg in his corn crib.
There was not one of us who would have helped Freddy cut down the tree, neither was there one of us who would refuse to help him blow it up, and Freddy, because he saw an easy way out, was the most enthusiastic of all.
We did it. First we dug a hole about four feet deep at the foot of the tree and buried the keg of powder after boring a hole in the top for a fuse. We packed the dirt down tight all around the keg leaving just enough loose to run the fuse through. Then Freddy as master of ceremonies lighted the fuse and we stepped back to wait results.
We didn't wait long. There was a roar and we found ourselves on the grass in the midst of what resembled a volcano on the war path. Dirt, stones, grass, sticks, and heaven knows what else were milling around us in clouds, and out of the corner of one eye I saw Ma Bean's geranium bed sail gaily across the street and drape itself over Mrs. Harry Brown's front gate. Glass was falling around us like shrapnel, for every window in the Bean's house shivered itself out onto the lawn. The tree—well, Sir, it fell on the house, knocked off a chimney and broke down the piazza roof, and the next day Half Baked had to hire Jed Snow's team of oxen to pull it clear before they could even start cutting it up.
