"There's only one thing wrong with it," Poetry said, in his duck-like voice, standing beside me and squinting up at the ridiculous looking snow man.
"What?" I said, thinking how perfect it was.
"You can't tell who it is supposed to be. It needs some extra identification."
"It's perfect," I said, and looked at Little Jim to see if he didn't think the same thing, but he was looking up into the beech tree again, like he was still thinking about something mysterious and wasn't interested in an ordinary snow man. I looked toward Dragonfly and he was listening toward a half dozen little cedar trees in the direction of the bayou, like he was either seeing or hearing something, which he thought he was, for right that second he said, "Psst, gang, quiet! I think I saw something move over there—sh! Don't look now, or he'll—"
We all looked, of course, but didn't see anything, although I had a funny feeling inside of me which was, "What if it's Mr. Black watching us? What if all of a sudden he should come walking out from behind those cedar trees and see the snow man we've made of him, and what if he'd decide to use one or two of the switches on us?"—not a one of us being sure he didn't like us well enough to do that to us.
Poetry spoke up then and said, "I say, it's not quite perfect. There's one thing wrong with it, and I'm going to fix that right this very minute." With that remark, he pulled off one of his red mittens, shoved one of his fat hands inside his coat pocket, pulled something out,
and started to shuffle toward Mr. Black's snow statue. I could hardly believe my eyes at what I saw, but there it was as plain as day, a red, cloth-bound book with gold letters on it which said, The Hoosier Schoolmaster. I knew right away it was the book he and I had seen in his library one night and had read part of it, that part especially where the tough gang of boys in the story had caused the teacher a lot of trouble, and had locked him out of the schoolhouse; and then the teacher, who had been very smart, had climbed up on top of the school and put a flat board across the top of the chimney, and the smoke which couldn't get out of the chimney had poured out of the stove inside, and all the tough gang of boys had been smoked out....
"What are you going to do?" I said to Poetry, and he said, "Nothing," and right away was doing it, which was sticking two sticks in the snow man's stomach side by side and then opening The Hoosier Schoolmaster to the place where there was the picture of the teacher on the roof, and laying the book flat open across the two sticks.
"There you are, Sir," Poetry said, talking to the snow man. "The Hoosier Schoolmaster himself." Then Poetry made a bow as low as he could, he being so fat he grunted every time he stooped over very far.
Well, it was funny, and most of us laughed, Circus scooped up a snowball and started to throw it at it, but we all stopped him on account of not wanting to have all our hard work spoiled in a few minutes. Besides, Poetry all of a sudden, wanted to take a picture of it, and his camera was at his house which was away down past the sycamore tree and the cave, where we all wanted to go for a while to see Old Man Paddler. So we decided to leave Mr. Black out there by himself at the bottom of Bumblebee hill until we came back later, which we did.