"We can't," I said, "the board's still across the chimney and we can't get it off."
That started Poetry to thinking and he made a heavy dive for the long shelf along the back wall, and right there where they had been, only there was some stove pipe wire beside them, were the pliers. In a jiffy, Poetry and I were back outside, and with him holding the ladder and with me all trembling inside, but not too nervous to climb, I went up that ladder, hand over hand, and in less than a half-dozen worried jiffies, had our swing board off the chimney and tossed it out into a snow drift. When I was down again, Poetry and I whisked the ladder back behind the schoolhouse, and with our feet, covered it with snow, and also the swing board, and when we got back inside the schoolhouse, Little Jim and Dragonfly had used their hands and had taken the little fire shovel and scooped out as much of the snow out of the stove as they could and had laid the fire again, like we all knew how to do, from having seen our parents do it. Poetry shoved his hand in his pocket for his water-proof match box, and in a little while we had a roaring fire in the big round iron stove. Then all of us started in to cleaning up the schoolhouse as fast as we could.
Poetry grabbed an eraser and as quick and as fierce as a cat jumping on a mouse, leaped toward the blackboard and swished his poetry into nothing; Little Jim found a dust cloth and went up one row of seats and down another, carefully dusting each one just like I imagine he'd been taught at home—not swishing the cloth around too fast which would make more dust. I began to try to untangle the Christmas tree from the popcorn strings and paper chains, thinking how nice the tree would look standing up in the corner again, when all of a sudden Dragonfly hissed and said, "Hey! Everybody! Come here, quick! See what I found!"
Dragonfly had been standing by a wide open window on account of there was still too much smoke in the room for him to breathe without
sneezing. The Sugar Creek School's great big unabridged dictionary was wide open on a shelf which was fastened to the wall by the window.
Before we could get there, Dragonfly said excitedly, "It's Mr. Black's diary!"
Well, if there is anything a person wants to read, and shouldn't and mustn't, it's somebody's diary, unless that person tells him to. My parents had told me that when I was little, and Pop had licked me once for reading his, and so I knew Dragonfly shouldn't have read Mr. Black's diary, so when I got to where he was and saw him looking at a pretty leather bound notebook lying flat open on the big open dictionary I said, "Stop reading that! It's not good etiquette," which is, "not good manners," or something.
I certainly wasn't going to turn any pages of the diary and read them, I said to myself, remembering what my parents had told me, and also the half hard licking my pop had given me for reading his, when he told me not to, but when I got to where Dragonfly was and looked to see if it really was Mr. Black's diary, without even trying to I saw on the page that was half open, written in printed letters, these words:
"The Sugar Creek Gang had the worst of teachers,
And 'Black' his named was called...."
For some reason it didn't look very funny. In fact, it seemed like anybody who had first thought up such a poem must have been crazy in the head.