hissed and said, "Hey! Everybody! Come here, quick! See what
I found!"

Dragonfly had been standing by a wide open window on account of there
was still too much smoke in the room for him to breathe without
sneezing. The Sugar Creek School's great big unabridged dictionary was
wide open on a shelf which was fastened to the wall by the window.

Before we could get there, Dragonfly said excitedly, "It's Mr. Black's
diary!"

Well, if there is anything a person wants to read, and shouldn't and
mustn't, it's somebody's diary, unless that person tells him to. My
parents had told me that when I was little, and Pop had licked me once
for reading his, and so I knew Dragonfly shouldn't have read Mr.
Black's diary, so when I got to where he was and saw him looking at a
pretty leather bound notebook lying flat open on the big open
dictionary I said, "Stop reading that! It's not good etiquette," which
is, "not good manners," or something.

I certainly wasn't going to turn any pages of the diary and read them,
I said to myself, remembering what my parents had told me, and also
the half hard licking my pop had given me for reading his, when he
told me not to, but when I got to where Dragonfly was and looked to
see if it really was Mr. Black's diary, without even trying to I saw
on the page that was half open, written in printed letters, these
words:

"_The Sugar Creek Gang had the worst of teachers,
And 'Black' his named was called...."

For some reason it didn't look very funny. In fact, it seemed like
anybody who had first thought up such a poem must have been crazy in
the head.

I knew I shouldn't have been reading, and I decided to quit quick,
which I did, only I saw one other thing just as my eyes were leaving
the page, and it was:

"Things have come to a show down with the boys. I know I'm going to
have to take drastic action soon."

"What's '_drastic_' mean?" Dragonfly wanted to know, just as I turned
away, and I knew he'd read what I'd read, so I said, "I don't know,
but whatever it is, I'll bet it'll hurt like everything." I reached
out my hand and laid it down flat on the opened diary, so I wouldn't
read anything else, when Dragonfly said, "Psst! Listen!"

We all listened for a half jiffy and things were so quiet in that
still-half-smokey room we could hear only the crackling of the fire in
the stove, when all of a sudden there was a step on the schoolhouse
porch, and the door was thrust open and there sto