s went as fast as we could through our
gate.

My pop was there, looking at the gate to see if Dragonfly had been too
heavy for it, and just as we left, he said, "Never ride on a gate,
boys, if you want to live long."

His voice was kinda fierce, like it sometimes is, and he was looking
at Dragonfly; then he looked at me and winked, and I knew he wasn't
mad but still didn't want any boy to be dumb enough to ride on our
gate again.

"Yes sir, Mr. Collins," Dragonfly said politely, and grabbed his sled
rope and started on the run across the road to a place in the rail
fence where I always climbed through on my way to the woods.

"Wait a minute!" Pop said, and we waited.

His big bushy eyebrows were straight across, so I knew he liked us all
right. "What?" I said, and he said, "You boys know, of course, that
your new teacher, Mr. Black, is going to keep on teaching the Sugar
Creek School--that the board can't ask him to resign just because the
boys in the school liked their other teacher better, nor because he
has had to punish several of them with old-fashioned beech
switches...."

Imagine my Pop saying such things, just when we had been thinking
about having a lot of fun....

"Yes sir," I said to Pop, remembering the beech switches behind the
teacher's desk.

"Yes sir," Poetry said politely.

"Yes sir," Dragonfly yelled to him from the rail fence where he was
already half-way through.

We all hurried through the fence, and yelling and running and panting,
we dragged our sleds through the woods to Bumblebee hill to where the
gang was yelling and having a lot of fun.

Well, we coasted for a long time, all of us. Even Little Tom Till, the
red-haired, freckled-faced little brother of Big Bob Till who was Big
Jim's worst enemy, was there. Time flew faster than anything, when all
of a sudden Circus who had rolled a big snowball down the hill, said,
"Let's make a snow man--let's make Mr. Black"--which sounded like more
fun, so we all started in, not knowing that Circus was going to make a
_comic_ snow man, the most ridiculous looking snow man I'd ever seen,
and not knowing something else very exciting which I'm going to tell
you about just as quick as I can get to it in this story.

2

It was the craziest snow man I had ever seen when we got through. It
didn't have any legs on account of we had to use a very large snowball
for its foundation, but it had another even-larger snowball for its
stomach, on