and it was, "Do you suppose Mr. Black _really_ became a
Christian this morning while Sylvia's pop was preaching--or maybe he
is just _going_ to let Jesus into his heart, real soon?"

"I don't know," I said.

Poetry who didn't know what we were all talking about, on account of
he was up at the other end of the kinda longish ladder, said back to
us, "We shouldn't have carried this ladder home. We should have made
Shorty Long and Bob Till do it. They took it there, in the first
place!"

And Little Jim piped up and said, "Are you _sure_? Maybe Mr. Black did
it, so he could get a picture of it for next Wednesday night."

Dragonfly heard that and said, "But who piled the chairs up on his
desk and knocked the Christmas tree over and everything?"

"Yeah, that's right," Little Jim said, "I guess maybe they did do it,
but I'm not very mad at 'em."

"I'm not either," I said, "not _very_ much, anyway," and I
wasn't,--only I knew that as long as they lived in the neighborhood we
could expect most anything to happen.

Then Little Jim said to all of us. "As soon as the new cold wave is
over, I'll bet it'll start to get warm, and pretty soon spring'll be
here, and all the beech switches all along Sugar Creek will have new
green leaves on 'em."

Then Little Jim whisked on ahead of us, every now and then stopping to
make rabbit tracks in the snow with his pretty striped ash stick.

Boy oh boy, I wished it was already spring, 'cause when spring came we
could all go barefoot again and as soon as Sugar Creek's face was
thawed out, we'd go swimming in the old swimming hole and maybe have
some very exciting brand new adventures, like we always do every
spring and summer. The first thing I wanted to do when spring came,
was to go fishing.

I was thinking what fun it'd be when spring came, when all of a sudden,
I heard a roaring sound coming from the direction of Dragonfly's pop's
woods, like a terrible wind was beginning to blow through the bare
trees. I looked up quick, and noticed that the sky in that direction
was darkish looking and kinda brownish, like there was a lot of dust
blowing in from some far-away prairie. Then I felt a gust of cold wind
hit me hard in the face.

In almost a half a jiffy all of us were in a whirling snowstorm, and I
knew the new cold wave had already come, and that before spring got to
Sugar Creek we'd have a lot more winter--in fact there might even be a
blizzard.

"Hurry up!" all of us yelled to