ish worm twisting and squirming and crawling up a stick in the summer-time.... There must have been almost a foot of snow on the roof of that woodshed, I thought, and that reminded me of the snow man at the bottom of Bumblebee hill, and when I noticed that the shadows of the trees out there were getting very long it meant that it wouldn't be long till the sun went down, and if Poetry and I were to get a good picture of Mr. Black's snow statue, we'd have to hurry.
Old Man Paddler all of a sudden spoke up and said to us, looking especially at me, "One of you boys want to take the water pail and go down to the spring and get a pail of fresh water?" which I didn't exactly want to do, on account of it was very warm in the cabin and would be very cold out there, but when Little Jim piped up and said, "Sure, I'll do it," I all of a sudden said the same thing, and Little Jim and I were out there in less than a jiffy, with the old man's empty pail in one of my hands, and were galloping along through the snow toward the spring, which was right close to a big spreading beech tree, which, like the one at the bottom of Bumblebee hill, still had most of its old brown leaves on it....
We filled the pail real quick with the sparkling, very cold water, and hurried back to the cabin. I started to open the door, when Little Jim said, "Wait a minute, I want to see something," and he swished around quick and went back down the path toward the spring, and turned around again and looked up toward the chimney of the old man's cabin. He squinted his eyes to keep the sun from blinding them and looked and looked, then he looked away in the direction of the woodshed, and I wondered what in the world that little guy was thinking.
"'Smatter?" I said, and he said, "Nothing,—there's certainly a lot of snow on the roof of that woodshed, and there isn't any on the old man's cabin. How come?" Then he socked a stump with his stick, and came lickety-sizzle to the door, opened it for me to go in with the pail of water, which I did.
Well, as soon as we got through with our sassafras tea, which Little Jim said tasted like a very sweet hot lolly pop, we all scrambled
around in the old man's cabin getting ready to go home. If it had been in the summer-time, we would have gone home the long way round, following the old wagon trail, and then we'd have taken a short cut through the swamp, and if it had been summer-time maybe stopped at the big mulberry tree and climbed up into it and helped ourselves to the biggest, ripest mulberries that grew anywhere along Sugar Creek. But it wasn't summer, so we took the short cut, going through the cave to the sycamore tree, where most of us separated and went in different directions to our different homes, all except Poetry and me, who, as you know, were going to get his camera and take a picture of Mr. Black's snow statue, his parents having bought a new camera for him at Christmas.
"Well, well," Poetry's mother said to us when we stopped beside their big maple tree, and I waited a jiffy for him to go in the house and get the camera, "where have you boys been? I've been phoning all over for you, Leslie"—meaning she had been phoning all over for Poetry, Leslie being the name which his parents used and which he had to use himself when he signed his name in school ... but he would rather be called Poetry.
"'Smatter?" Poetry asked his kinda round-shaped mom, "Didn't I do my chores, or something?"
Then Poetry's mother startled us by saying, "We've had company. Mr. Black was here. He just left a minute ago."