Those little sticks would be all soaked with kerosene from having stood there all night or longer, and he'd take them to the stove and lay them in carefully, along with other small pieces of wood and a few larger pieces, and then he would very carefully light a match and touch the flame to the kerosene-soaked sticks, and right away there would be a nice fire....
I knew it would take Mr. Black only a little while to lay the fire, and in a few minutes the fire in the stove would be roaring away. But with the board on the chimney, the smoke couldn't get out, and it'd have to come out of the stove somewhere, which it would, and the schoolhouse would be filled with smoke in a jiffy; also I remembered the Christmas tree which we'd left up since Christmas, wasn't more than fifteen feet from the stove, and its needles were dry enough to burn....
Something had to be done in a hurry, and yet there was Mr. Black getting closer and closer to the schoolhouse.... In fact, it was already too late to get there before he went inside, without being seen. I knew that if I got there in time to hurry up that ladder and take off the board, I'd have to do it after Mr. Black got inside, and before he could get the fire laid and started....
The rail fence behind which we were hiding right that minute was on the same side of the school the ladder was, and about as far from the school as our barn is from our house....
All of us were squatted down behind the fence now, and I took charge of the gang and said, "You guys stay here. The very minute he gets in, I'll dive out of here and make a bee-line for the schoolhouse, and zip up the ladder and take the board off. Then I'll climb back down, take the ladder and drag it around behind the schoolhouse quick, and come back here.... Then tonight or sometime after Mr. Black goes home, some of us'll sneak over and bring the ladder home, and everything'll be all right."
It was a good idea if only it would work, which it had to, or I just knew that the gentleman I'd made up my mind I was going to try to be, would get a terrible licking, which any gentleman shouldn't have to have, or he isn't one, which I wasn't, yet, anyway....
"Let ME do it," Poetry said beside me, puffing hard from the fast run we'd just had, and Dragonfly said, "The ladder'd break with you on it," trying to be funny and not being.
Little Jim piped up and said, "All the snow's off the roof right next to the chimney." I looked at him real quick, and he had a far-away look in his eyes, like he was not only looking at the dry roof all around the schoolhouse chimney, but was thinking something very important, which he'd heard in church that morning, but which I hadn't....
"Here goes," I said, my heart beating wildly. "You guys stay here, and watch," and Little Jim piped up and said, "We will—we'll watch and—and—" I knew what he was going to say even before he said it, and for some reason it seemed like it was all right for him to say it, and it didn't sound sissified for him to, either. While I was climbing over that rail fence and making a dive for the schoolhouse and the ladder, Little Jim's whole sentence was tumbling around in my mind, and it was, "We will—we'll watch and—and pray."
Little Jim was almost as good a friend of mine, as Tom Till was, I thought....