"Mr. Black!" Poetry said in almost a half scream.... And right away both of us were looking down in the snow around the beech tree, and around the snow man, and sure enough there were horse's tracks, the kind of tracks that showed that the horse had shoes on. And even while I was scared and wondering "What on earth!" there popped into my red head the crazy superstition that if you found a horseshoe and put it up over the door of your house or one of the rooms of your house, you would have good luck....
"I'll bet Mr. Black took the book, and wrote the poem and put it here."
"He wouldn't," I said, but was afraid he might have.
"I'm going to take a picture anyway," Poetry said, and stepped back and took one, and then real quick, took another, and then he took the yellow sheet of paper with the poem on it and folded it up and put it in his coat pocket, and with our faces and minds worried we started in fiercely knocking the living daylights out of that snow man. The first thing we did was to pull off the red nose, and pull out the corn-cob pipe, and knock the round head off and watch it go ker-swish onto the ground and break in pieces, then we pulled the sticks out of his stomach, kicked him in the same place, and in a jiffy had him looking like nothing.
We felt pretty mixed up in our minds, I can tell you.
"Do you suppose Mr. Black did that?" I said.
"He wouldn't," Poetry said, "but if he rode his horse down here and saw it, he'll certainly think we're a bunch of heathen."
"We aren't, though—are we?" I said to Poetry, and for some reason I was remembering that Little Jim had acted like maybe we ought not make fun of our teacher just 'cause he had hair only all around his head and not on top, and couldn't help it. For some reason, it didn't seem very funny, right that minute, and it seemed like Little Jim was right.
"What about The Hoosier Schoolmaster?" Poetry said to me, as we dragged our discouraged sleds up Bumblebee hill. "What'll we tell your mother? And what'll she tell Mrs. Mansfield?"
"I don't know," Poetry said, and his voice sounded more worried than I'd heard it in a long time.