od Mr. Black himself,
looking right straight at us.

11

Well, when four boys get caught doing something they're not sure
they're supposed to be doing, they don't know what to do or what to
say, and sometimes they start talking right away to explain _why_ they
are doing what they're doing--which is what _we_ started to do--that
is we _started_ to, but all of us talking at once didn't make sense,
so we stopped. This is what we all said though: Dragonfly said, "Good
morning, Mr. Black!" which is what you say to a teacher when it _is_
morning and you are trying to be polite; Poetry said, "Somebody wrote
a crazy poem about you on the black, Mr. Blackboard, and I erased it";
Little Jim said, "That certainly was a good sermon this morning, Mr.
Black"; and I, William Jasper Collins, with my torn trousers and my
freckled face and my rumpled red hair and my mussed-up mind said, "I
hope you don't have to shoot him if he broke his leg. He didn't break
it, did he?"

All of us said most of these things at the same time, while we were
standing in a semi-circle around the unabridged dictionary with the
open notebook on it.

Mr. Black was puffing and panting, he being Poetry-shaped as well as
the stove, but he all of a sudden said, "Wait, boys, don't move! I
want to get your pictures, right where you are, and _as_ you are."
Before we could decide to move or not to move, he whirled around,
hurried over toward the shelf where we always set our dinner pails on
school days, and came back with his camera which we hadn't noticed had
been there. It was a very pretty camera and was the kind people used
when they took a flashlight picture.

What on earth he wanted a picture of us for, I didn't know, unless it
was so he could prove to anybody who didn't believe it, that we were a
bunch of roughnecks. Quick as a blinding flash he had our picture
taken, and then he whirled around like he wanted to take some more
pictures, and stopped and stared at the Christmas tree which I had
stood back up in the corner, with the popcorn and paper chains tangled
up on it, and at the erased blackboard and at his desk which didn't
have any chairs upside down on it, and he said, "Who straightened up
this room! Did you boys do that!"

"Yes, sir," I said, "we did; we wanted to prove to you that we didn't
do it."

"You WHAT!"

"We wanted to prove to you that we didn't _do_ it!" Little Jim said.

Mr. Black looked at Little Jim and at all of us like