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.
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