“Is this a dream or not?” I asked my fat goat, and he said, “I don’t know, but I know how I can find out for you,” and I said, “How?” and he said, “I’ll pinch you to see if there is any pain, and if there is, it isn’t, and if there isn’t, it is.” He was trying to be funny and not being, ’cause right that second he pinched me and it hurt just like it always does when he pinches me, only worse.
“Hey—ouch!” I said, and right away I pinched him so he could find out for himself that the map wasn’t any dream, and neither was my hard pinch on his fat arm.
The rain was still roaring on the roof, sounding like a fast train roaring past the depot at Sugar Creek. We all sat looking at each other with queer expressions on our faces and mixed-up thoughts in our minds. I was smelling the dead something or other. The odor seemed to come from the direction of the kitchen on account of it was on the side of the cottage next to the steep hillside, which was as steep almost as a cliff, and right above its one window I noticed there was a stubby pine tree growing out of the hill, its branches extending over the roof.
Because the rain wasn’t falling on the window, I opened it and looked out and noticed that water was streaming down the hill like there was a little river up there and was pouring itself down onto the cement walk and rippling around the outside of the cabin. I thought for a jiffy how smart the owners of the cabin had been to put that cement walk there, so the water that swished down the hillside could run away and not pour into the cabin.
It was while I was at the window that I noticed there was an old rusty wire stretched across from the stubby pine tree toward the cabin. I yelled to the rest of the gang to come and look, which they did.
“’Tsa telephone wire,” Dragonfly said, and Poetry, squeezing in between Dragonfly and me and looking up at the wire, said, “I’ll bet it’s a radio aerial!” Poetry’s voice got excited right away and he turned back into the kitchen and said, “There might be a radio around here somewhere.”
With that he started looking for one, with all of us helping him, going from the kitchen where we were, to the main room where the fireplace was, and through the hanging curtains into the bedroom, which had the rollaway bed in it, all folded up against the wall; then we hunted through the screened porch, and looked under some old canvases on the porch floor, but there wasn’t any radio anywhere.
“There’s got to be one,” Circus said. “That’s an aerial, I’m sure.”
Poetry spoke up and said, “If it is, let’s look for the place where it comes into the cabin,” which we did, and which we found. It was through the top of a window in the bedroom. But that didn’t clear up our problem even a tiny bit, on account of there was only a piece of twisted wire hanging down from the curtain pole and it wasn’t fastened to anything.
Well that was that. Besides what’d we want to know whether there was a radio for? “Who cares?” I said, feeling I was the leader, and wishing Poetry wouldn’t insist on following out all his ideas.