“Carry it yourself!” I said.
And then, all of a sudden, Dragonfly set it down on the ground where some of it splashed over the top onto Poetry’s shoes, and Dragonfly got a stubborn look on his face and said, “I think the cannibal ought to carry it. I’m not even Friday yet—not till the cannibal gets killed.”
Well, he was right, so Poetry looked at me, and I at him, and he picked up the can, and we went on till we came to the boathouse, which if you’ve read “The Sugar Creek Gang Goes North,” you already know about.
It was going to be fun initiating Dragonfly—just how much fun I didn’t know—and I certainly didn’t know what a mystery we were going to run into in less than fifteen minutes of the next half hour.
In only a little while we came to Santa’s boathouse, Santa as you maybe know being the barrel-shaped owner of the property where we had pitched our tents. He also owned a lot of other lakeshore property up here in this part of the Paul Bunyan country. Everybody called him Santa ’cause he was round like all the different Santa Clauses we’d seen and was always laughing.
Santa himself with his big laughing voice called to us when he saw us coming and said, “Well, well, if it isn’t Bill Collins, Dragonfly and Poetry,” Santa being a smart man, knowing that if there’s anything a boy likes to hear better than anything else, it’s somebody calling him by his name.
“Hi,” we all answered him, Poetry setting the prune can of water down with a savage sigh like it was too heavy to stand and hold.
Santa was standing beside his boathouse door, with a hammer in one hand and a handsaw in the other.
“Where to, with that can of water?” he asked us, and Dragonfly said, “We’re going to pour the water in a big hole up there on the hill and make a new lake.”
Santa grinned at all of us with a mischievous twinkle in his bluish eyes, knowing Dragonfly hadn’t told any lie but was only doing what most boys do most all the time anyway—playing “Make-believe.”