d expression on
his face, and I knew what he was going to say before he said it, and
it was, "Are you sure?" You know, Little Jim always had a hard time
believing anybody was bad, or would do anything wrong, on account of
he hardly ever did anything wrong himself, and, also, 'cause he liked
everybody. So when he said, "Are you sure?" Pop said, "No, we're not
sure, till Bill has tried first to remember if maybe he moved it
somewhere else."

I looked all around in a quick circle at the haymow, and I thought
that if Bob Till and Shorty Long _had_ been there, they might have
hidden it under some hay just for meanness, so I got a pitch fork and
started to jab it into the hay all around in different places in the
haymow, and Pop looked in a tunnel under a long beam, and also we all
looked down stairs and all around. Once I looked up into the cupola,
and had a half-glad feeling in my heart when I saw Snow-white's white
head peeking out over the edge of the beam she had her nest on, like
she had just come back, and was wondering "What on earth" anybody
wanted with a ladder anyway, she not needing any herself.

Just then we heard Mom calling for dinner, and we had to go, all of us
being very hungry. I knew Pop was having a hard time believing me,
that I hadn't moved the ladder, on account of many a time Pop had
missed something around the farm and later he or I or somebody had
found it where I'd been using it or playing with it, in some place I'd
forgotten all about.

But there wasn't any use to look for it. It was gone, and not a one of
us knew where--only I was absolutely sure that Bob Till and Shorty
Long had hidden it somewhere. I told Mom and Pop what I thought had
happened, and we all talked it over pretty excitedly at the dinner
table.

After dinner we all looked again, looking all around the barn, inside
and out, and also jabbing forks and shovels in the biggest piles of
snow around the barn, to see if maybe it had been covered up with
snow, and still we couldn't find it. Pop was pretty mad, also, on
account of about six of our pigeons were missing, and it looked like
there had been somebody jumping and running all over the alfalfa hay
which we fed to our cows. "How would YOU like to eat a piece of _pie_
that some boy's dirty boots had walked all over?" Pop asked. That
tickled Little Jim, and he giggled.

Pretty soon Mom and Pop said Little Jim and I could go over to
Poetry's house if we wanted to, and we could pl