I knew I shouldn't have been reading, and I decided to quit quick, which I did, only I saw one other thing just as my eyes were leaving the page, and it was:
"Things have come to a show down with the boys. I know I'm going to have to take drastic action soon."
"What's 'drastic' mean?" Dragonfly wanted to know, just as I turned away, and I knew he'd read what I'd read, so I said, "I don't know, but whatever it is, I'll bet it'll hurt like everything." I reached
out my hand and laid it down flat on the opened diary, so I wouldn't read anything else, when Dragonfly said, "Psst! Listen!"
We all listened for a half jiffy and things were so quiet in that still-half-smokey room we could hear only the crackling of the fire in the stove, when all of a sudden there was a step on the schoolhouse porch, and the door was thrust open and there stood Mr. Black himself, looking right straight at us.
11
Well, when four boys get caught doing something they're not sure they're supposed to be doing, they don't know what to do or what to say, and sometimes they start talking right away to explain why they are doing what they're doing—which is what we started to do—that is we started to, but all of us talking at once didn't make sense, so we stopped. This is what we all said though: Dragonfly said, "Good morning, Mr. Black!" which is what you say to a teacher when it is morning and you are trying to be polite; Poetry said, "Somebody wrote a crazy poem about you on the black, Mr. Blackboard, and I erased it"; Little Jim said, "That certainly was a good sermon this morning, Mr. Black"; and I, William Jasper Collins, with my torn trousers and my freckled face and my rumpled red hair and my mussed-up mind said, "I hope you don't have to shoot him if he broke his leg. He didn't break it, did he?"
All of us said most of these things at the same time, while we were standing in a semi-circle around the unabridged dictionary with the open notebook on it.