ing something outside, and without
saying anything turned and with the switches in his hands, walked with
heavy steps over to the window and looked out, with his back to us. I
could hear him breathing heavily like he had been running, and there
was a terrible feeling inside of me, which is the way a boy feels when
he knows some grown-up person is awful angry.

The four of us stood by the stove and looked at different things, not
any of us moving, and not a one of us looking at each other, except I
glanced at different ones of us out of the corner of my eye, and then
looked away again. I could still hear Mr. Black breathing heavily....
I didn't look, but I guessed he was still standing and looking out
into the late afternoon sunlight on the snow.

Then I heard him cough a little and clear his throat, and heard him
walking. I looked and he was going to the blackboard, where, very
carefully, like he was afraid he'd drop one of them, he laid the beech
switches on the shelf, then he turned and sat down in his chair at his
desk, and picked up a book that was lying there, opened it and leafed
through it slowly....

"What on earth!" I thought.

You could have knocked me over with a turkey feather, when I saw the
kind of book he was leafing through. I'd never seen it there on that
desk before, and I wondered where it had come from, but there it was
as plain as day, an honest-to-goodness great big beautiful brown-bound
Bible.

All of us were so quiet, and I had such a tense feeling inside of me
that I couldn't say a word, and didn't want to anyway. The fingers of
one of Mr. Black's hands were sort of drumming on the desk, and he was
looking at something in the very front of the Bible in the place where
people nearly always write their names, to show whose Bible it is.

Then real slow-like, he began to turn the pages not looking up at any
of us, but like he was thinking about something that wasn't in the
schoolroom. I could hear the crackling of the fire in the stove, and
hear us all breathing. I caught a corner of Poetry's eye with a corner
of one of mine, but couldn't tell what he was thinking. Little Jim had
his small hands stretched out in front of him warming them at the
stove, and Dragonfly was trying to get his father's big red bandanna
handkerchief out of his pocket before he would sneeze about something,
but didn't get it out quick enough and the sneeze showered itself on
the hot stove and made a sizzling sound.