I stood there hiding behind my fir trees getting ready to shoot with my imaginary gun, just in time to save Dragonfly from being cooked. Dragonfly looked half crazy standing there tied to the tree and with a grin on his face, watching Poetry stack a little stack of sticks in one place for our imaginary fire. We wouldn’t start a real fire on account of it would have been absolutely crazy to start one, nobody with any sense starting a fire in a forest on account of there might be a terrible forest fire and thousands of beautiful trees would be burned, and lots of wild animals, and maybe homes and cottages of people, and even people themselves. A jiffy after the stack of sticks was ready, Poetry set the big prune can on top, then he turned to Dragonfly and started to untie him. “Groan!” Poetry said to him. “Act like you’re scared to death! Yell! _Do_ omething!” Dragonfly didn’t make a very scared black man. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said; and there wasn’t, I thought--but all of a sudden there was, ’cause the very second Poetry had Dragonfly cut loose and was dragging him toward the imaginary fire, Dragonfly making it hard for him by struggling and hanging back and making his body limp so Poetry had to almost carry him, and just as I peered through the branches of my hideout and pointed my stick at Poetry and was getting ready to yell, “BANG! BANG!” a couple of times, and then rush in and rescue Dragonfly, there was a crashing noise in the underbrush behind me, and footsteps running and then a terribly loud explosion that sounded like the shot of a revolver or some kind of a gun which almost scared the living daylights out of me, and also out of the poor black boy and the cannibal that was getting ready to eat him. Say, when I heard that shot behind me, I jumped almost out of my skin, I was so startled and frightened. Poetry and poor little pop-eyed Dragonfly acted like they were scared even worse than I was. When you’re all of a sudden scared like that, you don’t know what to say or think. Things sort of swim in your head and your heart beats fiercely for a minute. Maybe we wouldn’t have been quite so frightened if we hadn’t had so many important things happen to us already on our camping trip, such as finding a little kidnapped girl in this very spot the very first night we’d been up here, and then the next night catching the kidnapper himself in a spooky Indian cemetery. I was prepared to expect almost anything when I heard that explosion and the crashing in the underbrush; and then I could hardly believe my astonished eyes when I saw right behind and beside Dragonfly and Poetry a little puff of bluish gray smoke and about seventeen pieces of shredded paper, and knew that some body had thrown a firecracker right into the middle of our excitement.