"I don't know," I said.
Poetry who didn't know what we were all talking about, on account of he was up at the other end of the kinda longish ladder, said back to us, "We shouldn't have carried this ladder home. We should have made Shorty Long and Bob Till do it. They took it there, in the first place!"
And Little Jim piped up and said, "Are you sure? Maybe Mr. Black did it, so he could get a picture of it for next Wednesday night."
Dragonfly heard that and said, "But who piled the chairs up on his desk and knocked the Christmas tree over and everything?"
"Yeah, that's right," Little Jim said, "I guess maybe they did do it, but I'm not very mad at 'em."
"I'm not either," I said, "not very much, anyway," and I wasn't,—only I knew that as long as they lived in the neighborhood we could expect most anything to happen.
Then Little Jim said to all of us. "As soon as the new cold wave is over, I'll bet it'll start to get warm, and pretty soon spring'll be here, and all the beech switches all along Sugar Creek will have new green leaves on 'em."
Then Little Jim whisked on ahead of us, every now and then stopping to make rabbit tracks in the snow with his pretty striped ash stick.
Boy oh boy, I wished it was already spring, 'cause when spring came we could all go barefoot again and as soon as Sugar Creek's face was thawed out, we'd go swimming in the old swimming hole and maybe have some very exciting brand new adventures, like we always do every spring and summer. The first thing I wanted to do when spring came, was to go fishing.
I was thinking what fun it'd be when spring came, when all of a sudden, I heard a roaring sound coming from the direction of Dragonfly's pop's woods, like a terrible wind was beginning to blow through the bare trees. I looked up quick, and noticed that the sky in that direction was darkish looking and kinda brownish, like there was a lot of dust blowing in from some far-away prairie. Then I felt a gust of cold wind hit me hard in the face.