r the
Sugar Creek Gang!"

Little Jim who had been shuffling along, ahead of the rest of us, with
the swing board under one arm and with his stick in his other hand,
stopped all of a sudden and looked back over our heads toward where
the sun had just gone behind a cloud in the southwest, and he had a
far-away expression in his eyes. He didn't pay any attention to what
Dragonfly had said, but dropped back beside me and said, "That
certainly was a swell sermon yesterday. I knew maybe Sylvia's pop was
going to preach about that, and sure enough he did."

"About _what_?" I asked him, Little Jim being the only one of the gang
that it was easy to talk about sermons with, except maybe Poetry.

Little Jim socked at a brown mullein stalk with his stick, and
scattered brown seeds in different directions, then he answered me
with his back still turned, "Oh, about when you get Jesus in your
heart, you don't get mad so easy, and when you do, you behave yourself
anyway--just like a fire in a house melts the snow off the roof, or
like when spring comes, the new leaves will push all of the old dead
leaves off that've hung on all winter."

Just that second Poetry who had the other end of the ladder, yelled
back to me and said, "Quit walking so jerkily, Bill Collins!"

Then I remembered that our teacher had been in church that morning,
and of course he had heard the part of the sermon I hadn't heard, on
account of I had been thinking about Poetry's pet lamb and Snow-white,
our white pigeon.

Then Little Jim said, "When I put that question in 'The Minister's
Question Box,' just inside the church door this morning, I hoped
Sylvia's pop would answer it in his very first sermon, and he did."

So that was it! It was as plain as day to me now. Dragonfly spoke up
then and said, "Was that what you were thinking about yesterday
afternoon, when you were looking up in the beech tree at the bottom of
Bumblebee hill, and when you kept talking about snow on people's
houses?" and that was the first time I even guessed that that little
spindle-legged guy knew what we were talking about.

"Sure," Little Jim said.

Dragonfly tossed his new horseshoe up in the air and caught it when it
came down, and said, "It's a pretty horseshoe, anyway--besides, I bet
the gang _does_ have a lucky year, don't you?"

Little Jim whispered to me something that was a real secret, and it
made me like him awful well, to know he wasn't afraid to talk to me
about it,