rough the
paper and into the snow man's stomach.

"It's your poem, Poetry," I said, remembering the poem which Poetry
had written about our teacher. "How'd it get here?" Right away I was
reading the poem again, which was almost funny, only I didn't feel
like laughing on account of wondering who had stolen the book and had
put the poem here in its place. The poem was written exactly right:

"_The Sugar Creek Gang had the worst of teachers,
And 'Black' his named was called,
His round red face had the homeliest of features,
He was fat and forty and bald._"

It had been funny the first time I had read it, which was not more
than a week ago, but for some reason right that minute it was anything
in the world else. I was gritting my teeth and wondering who had done
it, and who had stolen _The Hoosier Schoolmaster_. There wasn't a one
of the gang that _could_ have done it, 'cause we had all been together
all afternoon; and at the cave all the rest of the gang had gone to
their different homes.

"Who in the world wrote it and put it there?" I said, noticing that
the printing was very large and had been put on with black crayola,
the kind we used in school.

"There's only one other person in the world who knows I wrote that
poem," Poetry said, "and that's Shorty Long."

"Shorty Long!" I said, remembering the newest boy who had moved into
our neighborhood and was almost as fat as Poetry and who had been the
cause of most of our trouble with our new teacher and had had two or
three fights with me and had licked the stuffins out of me once, and I
had licked the stuffins out of him once also, even worse than he had
me, almost.

"How'd he find it out?" I said.

"Dragonfly told him," and also I remembered right that minute that
Dragonfly and Shorty Long had been kinda chummy last week and we had
all worried for fear there was maybe going to be trouble in our own
gang which there'd never been before, and all on account of the new
fat guy who had moved into our neighborhood and had started coming to
our school.

"Are you going to take a picture of it?" I said to Poetry, and he
said, "I certainly am; I'm going to have the evidence and then I can
prove to anybody that doesn't believe it, that somebody actually put
it here."

"Yeah," I said, "but everybody knows _you_ wrote the poem."

Poetry lowered his camera, and just that minute I saw something else
that made me stare and in fact startled me so that for a jif