Shenanigans at Sugar Creek

Maybe it was a library book to blame for some of our trouble in this story. I’m not sure, but the very minute my pal Poetry and I saw the picture in a book called The Hoosier Schoolmaster, we both had a very naughty idea come into our minds, which we couldn’t get out no matter how we tried… This is the way it happened…

Poetry and I were in his house. I was staying at his house all night one night. Just before we went to sleep, we sat up in his big bed for a while, looking at the picture, which was a full-page glossy picture of a male teacher away up on the roof of a country schoolhouse, and he was holding a wide board across the top of the chimney. The schoolhouse’s only door was open, and a gang of tough-looking boys was tumbling out, along with a lot of smoke.

“Have you ever read the story?” I said to Poetry, and he said, “No, have you?” and when I said “No,” we both read a part of it. The story was about a male teacher whose naughty boys in the school had locked him out of the building, and he had climbed up on the roof of the school, put a board across the chimney, and smoked them out just like a boy smokes a skunk out of a woodchuck den along Sugar Creek. That put the idea in our heads, and it stayed there until a week or two after Christmas before it got us into trouble… Then, just like a time bomb exploding, all of a sudden, that innocent idea that a clear author had written in an innocent library book exploded—and—Well, here goes the story.