But Poetry couldn’t be stopped by sighs and yawns. He shook me awake and hissed, “Come on, treat a guest with a little politeness, will you?”—meaning I had to wake up and get up and go out with him to pump a noisy pump and run the risk of stirring up Pop’s already stirred-up temper.
When I kept on breathing like a sleeping baby, Poetry said with a disgruntled grunt, “Give me one little reason why you won’t help me get a drink!”
“One little reason?” I yawned up at his shadow. “I’ll give you a big one—five feet, eleven inches tall, one-hundred-seventy-two pounds, bushy-eyebrowed, reddish-brown mustached, and with a razor strap in his powerful right hand!”
“You want me to die of thirst?” asked Poetry.
“Thirst, or something; whatever you want to do it of. But hurry up and do it, and get it over with, ’cause I’m going to sleep.”
I certainly wasn’t going to get up and go out in the moonlight and run into Pop’s razor strap for anybody.
That must have stirred up Poetry’s temper a little, ’cause he said, “Okay, Chum, I’ll go by myself!”
Quicker than a firefly’s fleeting flash, he had zipped open the zipper of the plastic screened door of the tent, whipped the canvas curtain aside and stepped out into the moonlight.
I was up and out and after him in a nervous hurry. I grabbed him by the sleeve of his green-striped pajamas, but he wouldn’t stay stopped. He whispered a half-growl at me, “If you try to stop me, I’ll scream and you’ll get a licking.”
With that he started off on the run across the moonlit yard—not toward the pump but in a different direction toward the front gate, saying over his shoulder, “I’m going down to the spring to get a drink.”