"I'd like to have a table like this every noon," said Miss May, smiling at the circle of little faces that went all around her big mahogany table. "We'd both like it, shouldn't we, Miss Davis?"
"I think it would be lovely!" nodded Miss Davis, squeezing Sunny Boy's hand. He sat next to her. "Think of all the questions we could answer, Miss May."
Miss May laughed and said she didn't mind answering questions at all.
As soon as lunch was over, Miss Davis helped them get into their coats and wraps and watched them march out to the back lot for their fun. Jessie Smiley wore a new scarlet sweater that came down to the edge of her dress and was so warm and snug that she said she did not need to wear her coat with it. Miss Davis said she thought she would be warm enough, too, without the coat, and she knew she could run more easily.
"Not that a good soldier runs," she explained, laughing a little as she buttoned the sweater under Jessie's chin. "But a snowball army soldier has to run, I know."
Jessie left her rubbers in the cloakroom, too, for she had her rubber boots. She had worn her rubbers to school that morning. The boots had been left in the cloakroom since the last snowstorm. Jessie wanted to wear one rubber and one boot, but Miss Davis said she thought that two boots would be better, so Jessie had taken her advice.
"Whee, there's a lot of snow!" cried Sunny Boy, wading out into the middle of the lot, followed by his army. "We ought to get a lot of bullets made. And a fort. We must build a fort."
Oliver took his army over at one end of the lot and set them to work making snowballs. The boys made more balls than the girls did. But then the girls were so anxious to make theirs smooth and round that they did not work very quickly. Sunny Boy soon noticed that Dorothy Peters scraped and packed and patted one snowball while he was making four.
Finally General Dunlap shouted to General Sunny Boy and the battle was about to start when something happened that put all thoughts of a snowball fight out of the heads of soldiers and generals alike.
The battlefield, that is the back lot, you know, was directly back of Miss May's school. A large porch ran across the rear of the building and the back yard joined the vacant lot. Just as Sunny Boy waved his hand to signal Oliver that he was ready, Maria came out on the porch of the school.