When he saw me sitting there in the boat, he grinned and said, “I’ll bet I’ll get a hundred in nature study in school next fall. I’ve found forty-one different kinds of wild flowers.” I wasn’t interested in the study of plants at all, right that minute, but in some kind of an adventure instead, so I said to Little Jim, “I wonder if there are any different kinds of flowers over there on that island, where Robinson Crusoe had his adventures.” Little Jim looked at me without seeing me, I thought, then he grinned and said, “Robinson Crusoe never saw _that_ island.” “Oh yes, he did! He’s looking at it right this very minute and wishing he could explore it and find a treasure or something,” meaning I was wishing I was Robinson Crusoe myself. Just that second a strange voice piped up from behind some sumac on the other side of the Balm of Gilead tree and said, “You can’t be a Robinson Crusoe and land on a tropical island without having a shipwreck first, and who wants to have a wreck?” I knew right away it was Poetry, even before I saw his barrel-shaped body shuffle out from behind the sumac and I saw his fat face, and his pompadour hair and his heavy eye brows that grew straight across the top of his nose, like he had just one big longish eyebrow instead of two like most people have. “You _are_ a wreck,” I called to him, and didn’t mean it, but we always liked to have word fights, which we didn’t mean and always liked each other better all the time. “I’ll leave you guys to fight it out,” Little Jim said to us. “I’ve got to find nine more kinds of wild flowers,” and with that, that little chipmunk of a guy shuffled on up the shore swinging his stick around and stooping over to study some new kind of flower he spied every now and then. And that’s how Poetry and I got our heads together to plan a game of Robinson Crusoe, not knowing we were going to run into one of the strangest adventures we’d had in our whole lives. “See here,” Poetry said, grunting himself down and sliding down off the side of the dock and into the boat where I was, “if we play Robinson Crusoe, we’ll have to have one other person to go along with us.” “But there were only _two_ of them,” I said, “--Robinson Crusoe himself and his man Friday, the colored boy who became his slave, and whom Crusoe saved from being eaten by the cannibals, and who, after he was saved, did nearly all Crusoe’s work for him.” “All right,” Poetry said, “I’ll be Crusoe, and _you_ be his Man Friday.” “I _will_ not,” I said. “I’m already Crusoe. I thought of it first, and I’m already _him_.” Poetry and I frowned at each other, almost half mad for a minute until his fat face brightened up and he said, “All right, you be Crusoe, and I’ll be one of the cannibals getting ready to eat your man Friday, and you come along and rescue him.” “But if you’re going to be a cannibal, I’ll have to _shoot_ you, and then you’ll be _dead_,” I said.