“A temper is a fine thing, if you control it, but not if it controls you,” he has told me maybe five hundred times in my half-long life. As you maybe already know if you’ve read some of the other Sugar Creek Gang stories, my hot temper had gotten me into trouble many a time by shoving me headfirst into an unnecessary fight with somebody who didn’t know how to control his own temper.
In a flash I was down on my haunches beside the burlap bag. “Here,” I said to Poetry, “lend me your knife a minute. Let’s get this old burlap bag off and see if it’s a watermelon!”
“Goose!” Poetry answered me. “I’m wearing my night clothes!” Both of us were, as you already know. His were green-striped, and mine yellow, as I’ve already told you. We both looked ridiculous there in the moonlight.
“Look!” Poetry exclaimed. “Here’s how they were going to get it through the fence!”
My eyes fastened onto the circle of light his flashlight made on a spot back under the elderberry bushes and I noticed there was a hole cut in Pop’s new woven-wire fence, large enough to let a boy through. Boy oh boy, would Pop ever have a hard time using his temper when he saw that tomorrow morning!
But we had to do something with the melon. “Let’s leave it for the gang to see tomorrow,” Poetry suggested. “Let Big Jim decide what to do about it.”
“What to do with Bob Till, you mean,” I said grimly. Already my temper was telling me it was Bob Till himself, the Sugar Creek Gang’s worst enemy, who had been trying to steal one of our melons.
Just thinking that started my blood to running faster in my veins. How many times during the past two years we had had trouble with John Till’s oldest boy, Bob, and how many times Big Jim, the Sugar Creek Gang’s fierce-fighting leader, had had to give Bob a licking—and always Bob was just as bad a boy afterward, and maybe even worse.
I was remembering that only last week at our very latest Gang meeting, Big Jim had told us: “I’m through fighting Bob Till. I’m going to try kindness. We’re all going to try it. Let’s show him that a Christian boy doesn’t have to fight every time somebody knocks a chip off his shoulder—and let’s not put the chip on our shoulder in the first place.”
At that meeting, which had been at the spring, Dragonfly had piped up and asked, “What’s a ‘chip on your shoulder’ mean?”