Little Jim who had been shuffling along, ahead of the rest of us, with the swing board under one arm and with his stick in his other hand, stopped all of a sudden and looked back over our heads toward where the sun had just gone behind a cloud in the southwest, and he had a far-away expression in his eyes. He didn't pay any attention to what Dragonfly had said, but dropped back beside me and said, "That certainly was a swell sermon yesterday. I knew maybe Sylvia's pop was going to preach about that, and sure enough he did."
"About what?" I asked him, Little Jim being the only one of the gang that it was easy to talk about sermons with, except maybe Poetry.
Little Jim socked at a brown mullein stalk with his stick, and scattered brown seeds in different directions, then he answered me with his back still turned, "Oh, about when you get Jesus in your heart, you don't get mad so easy, and when you do, you behave yourself anyway—just like a fire in a house melts the snow off the roof, or like when spring comes, the new leaves will push all of the old dead leaves off that've hung on all winter."
Just that second Poetry who had the other end of the ladder, yelled back to me and said, "Quit walking so jerkily, Bill Collins!"
Then I remembered that our teacher had been in church that morning, and of course he had heard the part of the sermon I hadn't heard, on account of I had been thinking about Poetry's pet lamb and Snow-white, our white pigeon.
Then Little Jim said, "When I put that question in 'The Minister's Question Box,' just inside the church door this morning, I hoped Sylvia's pop would answer it in his very first sermon, and he did."
So that was it! It was as plain as day to me now. Dragonfly spoke up then and said, "Was that what you were thinking about yesterday afternoon, when you were looking up in the beech tree at the bottom of Bumblebee hill, and when you kept talking about snow on people's houses?" and that was the first time I even guessed that that little spindle-legged guy knew what we were talking about.
"Sure," Little Jim said.
Dragonfly tossed his new horseshoe up in the air and caught it when it came down, and said, "It's a pretty horseshoe, anyway—besides, I bet the gang does have a lucky year, don't you?"
Little Jim whispered to me something that was a real secret, and it made me like him awful well, to know he wasn't afraid to talk to me about it, and it was, "Do you suppose Mr. Black really became a Christian this morning while Sylvia's pop was preaching—or maybe he is just going to let Jesus into his heart, real soon?"