Little Jim and I were sitting side by each, and Little red-haired Tom Till was right across the fire from me. The ground was still wet, so we were sitting on our camp chairs. It being a little chilly, I had a blanket wrapped around me, and had it spread out to cover Little Jim too, he being my favorite small guy of the whole gang. For some reason whenever he was with me, I seemed to be a better boy--or anyway, I wished I was. It was the easiest thing in the world to think about the Bible and God and about everybody needing to be saved, and things like that, when Little Jim was with us. And yet he was as much a red-blooded, rough-and-tumble boy as any of the rest of us. I never will forget the way he shot and killed a fierce old mad mother bear once down along Sugar Creek--which story you maybe know about, if you’ve read it in the book, “We Killed a Bear.” “Here’s a good way to save labor,” Eagle Eye told us as soon as our wigwam fire had burned down a little. He picked up one of the long thick poles and dragged it to the fire and laid the end of it right across the still burning wigwam. Then he dragged up another pole and laid the end of it crosswise across the end of the first one. Pretty soon he had the ends of all the poles criss-crossed on each other on the fire with all the opposite ends stretching out in all directions like the spokes of a wagon wheel. Say, almost right away the big hot flames were leaping up like Circus’s pop’s hungry dogs leaping up around a Sugar Creek tree where they’ve treed a coon. It was certainly a pretty sight. “Pretty soon, when the ends of the poles are burned up, we’ll push the poles up a little further,” Eagle Eye said, “and you won’t have to chop them in short pieces at all. When you want your fire to go out, at bed time, you just pull the poles back from the fire and pour water on the ends.” I looked across at my Man Friday, and he grinned back at me and said, “I’d rather have _him_ for my boss than--than Robinson Crusoe himself,” which was maybe half funny, I thought. “Tomorrow night, you use the same poles, and not have to chop,” Eagle Eye explained. Well, Eagle Eye wrapped his blanket around him and sat down on a log and began his story, first taking out his Bible--he, as you know, being a missionary to his own people. Before he got started, though, Little Jim, who was cuddled up close to me, under my blanket, whispered, “That pretty blue smoke hanging up there, is like the pillar of cloud it tells about in the Bible. When it hung above the camp of the people of Israel, it meant God wanted them to stay there awhile, and when it lifted itself up higher, it meant they were supposed to travel on.”