h his actual person became every day
more and more irritating. And yet, having laid this fuse and having kept
it constantly glowing, the grown people expected nothing to happen to
Georgie.

The catastrophe befell as a consequence of Sam Williams deciding to have
a shack in his backyard. Sam had somehow obtained a vasty piano-box and
a quantity of lumber, and, summoning Penrod Schofield and the coloured
brethren, Herman and Verman, he expounded to them his building-plans
and offered them shares and benefits in the institution he proposed to
found. Acceptance was enthusiastic; straightway the assembly became
a union of carpenters all of one mind, and ten days saw the shack not
completed but comprehensible. Anybody could tell, by that time, that it
was intended for a shack.

There was a door on leather hinges; it drooped, perhaps, but it was a
door. There was a window--not a glass one, but, at least, it could be
"looked out of", as Sam said. There was a chimney made of stovepipe,
though that was merely decorative, because the cooking was done out of
doors in an underground "furnace" that the boys excavated. There were
pictures pasted on the interior walls, and, hanging from a nail, there
was a crayon portrait of Sam's grandfather, which he had brought down
from the attic quietly, though, as he said, it "wasn't any use on earth
up there." There were two lame chairs from Penrod's attic and along
one wall ran a low and feeble structure intended to serve as a bench or
divan. This would come in handy, Sam said, if any of the party "had
to lay down or anything", and at a pinch (such as a meeting of the
association) it would serve to seat all the members in a row.

For, coincidentally with the development of the shack, the builders
became something more than partners. Later, no one could remember who
first suggested the founding of a secret order, or society, as a measure
of exclusiveness and to keep the shack sacred to members only; but it
was an idea that presently began to be more absorbing and satisfactory
than even the shack itself. The outward manifestations of it might
have been observed in the increased solemnity and preoccupation of the
Caucasian members and in a few ceremonial observances exposed to the
public eye. As an instance of these latter, Mrs. Williams, happening to
glance from a rearward window, about four o'clock one afternoon, found
her attention arrested by what seemed to be a flag-raising before the
door