acher, and
no matter what ideas Poetry and I had once had in our minds to find
out whether a board on the top of the schoolhouse chimney would smoke
out a teacher, I, Bill Collins wasn't going to vote "Yes" if the gang
put it to a vote to decide whether to do it or not.... No sir, not me.

Right that second, I heard my pop calling me from away down on the
main floor of the barn, "Better come on down and finish your chores,
Bill," which I had, and which I started to do, climbing backwards down
the new ladder very carefully to the haymow floor and then down the
other ladder to the main floor of the barn.

Pop had just finished milking our one milk cow, and the big
three-gallon milk pail was full clear to the top and there was
inch-high creamy-yellow foam above the top of the pail. Mixy, our old
black and white cat, was mewing and mewing and walking all around
Pop's legs and looking up and mewing and rubbing her sides against his
boots and also running over toward the little milk pan over by a
corner of the barn floor, as if to say to Pop, "For goodness sake, I
may be a mere cat, but does that give you any right to make me wait
for my supper?"

Anyway I was reminded that I was hungry myself, and pretty soon we'd
all be in our house, sitting around our table eating raw-fried
potatoes and reddish slices of fried ham, and other things....

"I'll take the milk on up to the house, Bill," Pop said, and also
said, "You follow me up to the back porch, Mixy--you can't have
_fresh_ milk tonight--and also, only a little raw meat, because there
are absolutely too many mice around this barn. Any ordinary hungry cat
ought to catch at least one mouse a day, Mixy, and if you _don't_
catch them, we'll have to make you hungry, so you will. Understand?" I
looked at Pop's big reddish-blackish eyebrows and he was frowning at
Mixy, although I knew he liked her a lot, but didn't like mice very
well.

I finished gathering the eggs that were in the barn and then went to
the hen house where I knew there would be some more eggs, and then
took my basket of maybe four dozen eggs toward the house.

Mixy was there on the back porch, I noticed, lapping away at her milk
like a house afire. I wiped off my boots carefully like I'd been
trained to do whether I was at home or in somebody else's house,
pushed open the door to our kitchen and went in, expecting to see Mom,
or Pop, or both of them there, but there wasn't anybody there, so I
sat the egg b