When you’re all of a sudden scared like that, you don’t know what to say or think. Things sort of swim in your head and your heart beats fiercely for a minute. Maybe we wouldn’t have been quite so frightened if we hadn’t had so many important things happen to us already on our camping trip, such as finding a little kidnapped girl in this very spot the very first night we’d been up here, and then the next night catching the kidnapper himself in a spooky Indian cemetery.
I was prepared to expect almost anything when I heard that explosion and the crashing in the underbrush; and then I could hardly believe my astonished eyes when I saw right behind and beside Dragonfly and Poetry a little puff of bluish gray smoke and about seventeen pieces of shredded paper, and knew that some body had thrown a firecracker right into the middle of our excitement.
“It’s a firecracker!” Dragonfly yelled at us, and then I had an entirely new kind of scare when I saw a little yellow flame of fire where the explosion had been, and saw some of the dry pine needles leap into flames and the flames start to spread fast.
I knew it must have been one of the gang who’d maybe had some firecrackers left over from the fourth of July at Sugar Creek. Quicker even than I can write it for you, I dashed into the center of things, grabbed up our prune can and in less than a jiffy had the fire out, and then a jiffy later, I heard a scuffling behind me and a grunting and puffing; and looking around quick, the empty prune can in my hands, I was just in time to see Circus, our acrobat, scramble out of Poetry’s fat hands, and in less than another jiffy, go shinning up a tree, where he perched himself on a limb and looked down at us, grinning like a monkey.
I was mad at him for breaking up our game of make-believe, and for shooting off a firecracker in the forest where it might start a terrible fire. So I yelled up at him and said, “You crazy goof! Don’t you know it’s terribly dry around here and you might burn up the whole Chippewa forest!”
“I was trying to help you kill a fat cannibal,” Circus said. He had a hurt expression in his voice and on his face, as he added, “Please don’t tell Barry I was such a dumb-bell,”—Barry being our camp director.
I forgave Circus right away when I saw he was really trying to join in with our fun and just hadn’t used his head, not thinking of the danger of forest fires at all.
“You shouldn’t even be carrying matches, to light a firecracker with,” Poetry said up at him.
“Every camper ought to have a waterproof matchbook with matches in it,” Circus said. “I read it in a book, telling what to take along on a camping trip. Besides,” Circus said down to us, “we can’t play Robinson Crusoe without having to eat food, and how are we going to eat without a fire?” I knew then that he’d guessed what game we were playing and had decided to go along.
“We don’t need you,” I said. “We need only my Man Friday, and a cannibal that gets killed—”