It seemed to be getting hotter every minute though—the kind of day we sometimes had back home at Sugar Creek just before some big thunderheads came sneaking up and surprised us with a fierce storm. It was also a perfect day for a sunbath. What on earth made people want to get brown all over for anyway? I thought. Then I looked down at my freckled brownish arm, and was disgusted at myself, on account of instead of getting a nice tan like Circus, the acrobatic member of our gang, I always got sunburned and freckled and my upper arm looked like a piece of raw steak instead of a nice piece of brown fried chicken.... Thinking that, reminded me that I was hungry and I wished it was suppertime.
It certainly was a quiet camp, I thought, as I looked at the two tents, where the rest of the gang was supposed to be sleeping. I just couldn’t imagine anybody sleeping that long—anyway, not any boy—unless he was at home and it was morning and time to get up and do the chores.
Just that second I heard a sound of footsteps from up the shore, and looking up I saw a smallish boy with brownish curly hair coming toward me along the path that runs all along the shore line. I knew right away it was Little Jim, my almost best friend, and the grandest little guy that ever lived. I knew it was Little Jim not only ’cause he carried his ash stick with him, which was about as long as a man’s cane, but because of the shuffling way he walked. I noticed he was stopping every now and then to stoop over and look at some kind of wild flower, then he’d write something down in a book he was carrying which I knew was a wild flower Guide Book.
He certainly was an interesting little guy, I thought. I guess he hadn’t seen me, ’cause I could hear him talking to himself which is what he had a habit of doing when he was alone and there was something kinda nice about it that made me like him even better than ever. I think that little guy does more honest-to-goodness thinking than any of the rest of the gang, certainly more than Dragonfly, the pop-eyed member of our gang, who is spindle-legged and slim and whose nose turns south at the end; or Poetry, the barrel-shaped member who reads all the books he can get his hands on and who knows one hundred poems by heart and is always quoting poems; and also more than Big Jim, the leader of our gang who is the oldest and who has maybe seventeen smallish strands of fuzz on his upper lip which one day will be a mustache.
I ducked my head down below the dock so Little Jim couldn’t see me, and listened, still wondering “What on earth!”
Little Jim stopped right beside the path that leads from the dock to the Indian kitchen which was close by the two brown tents, stooped down and said, “Hm! Wild Strawberry....” He leafed through the book he was carrying and with his eversharp pencil wrote something down. Then he looked around him and, seeing a Balm of Gilead tree right close to the dock with a five-leafed ivy on it, went straight to the tree and with his magnifying glass, began to study the ivy.
I didn’t know I was going to call out to him and interrupt his thoughts, which my mother had taught me not to do, when a person is thinking hard, on account of anybody doesn’t like to have somebody interrupt his thoughts.
“Hi, Little Jim!” I said from the stern of the boat where I was.
Say, that little guy acted as cool as a cucumber. He just looked slowly around in different directions, including up and down, then his bluish eyes looked absent-mindedly into mine, and for some reason I had the kindest, warmest feeling toward him. His face wasn’t tanned like the rest of the gang’s either, but was what people called “fair”; his smallish nose was straight, his little chin was pear-shaped, and his darkish eyebrows were straight across, his smallish ears were like they sometimes were—lopped over a little on account of that is the way he nearly always wears his straw hat.
When he saw me sitting there in the boat, he grinned and said, “I’ll bet I’ll get a hundred in nature study in school next fall. I’ve found forty-one different kinds of wild flowers.”