fy I was
almost as much excited as I had been when the fierce old mad old
mother bear had been trying to kill Little Jim right at that very
place where we were about a year and a half ago.

"Hey! Look!" I said, "Mr. Black's been here himself!"

"Mr. _Black_!" Poetry said in almost a half scream.... And right away
both of us were looking down in the snow around the beech tree, and
around the snow man, and sure enough there were horse's tracks, the
kind of tracks that showed that the horse had shoes on. And even while
I was scared and wondering "What on earth!" there popped into my red
head the crazy superstition that if you found a horseshoe and put it
up over the door of your house or one of the rooms of your house, you
would have good luck....

"I'll bet Mr. Black took the book, and wrote the poem and put it
here."

"He wouldn't," I said, but was afraid he might have.

"I'm going to take a picture anyway," Poetry said, and stepped back
and took one, and then real quick, took another, and then he took the
yellow sheet of paper with the poem on it and folded it up and put it
in his coat pocket, and with our faces and minds worried we started in
fiercely knocking the living daylights out of that snow man. The first
thing we did was to pull off the red nose, and pull out the corn-cob
pipe, and knock the round head off and watch it go ker-swish onto the
ground and break in pieces, then we pulled the sticks out of his
stomach, kicked him in the same place, and in a jiffy had him looking
like nothing.

We felt pretty mixed up in our minds, I can tell you.

"Do you suppose Mr. Black did that?" I said.

"He wouldn't," Poetry said, "but if he rode his horse down here and
saw it, he'll certainly think we're a bunch of heathen."

"We aren't, though--are we?" I said to Poetry, and for some reason I
was remembering that Little Jim had acted like maybe we ought not make
_fun_ of our teacher just 'cause he had hair only all around his head
and not on top, and couldn't help it. For some reason, it didn't seem
very funny, right that minute, and it seemed like Little Jim was
right.

"What about _The Hoosier Schoolmaster_?" Poetry said to me, as we
dragged our discouraged sleds up Bumblebee hill. "What'll we tell your
mother? And what'll _she_ tell Mrs. Mansfield?"

"I don't know," Poetry said, and his voice sounded more worried than
I'd heard it in a long time.

The first thing Mom said to us when we got to our house was,