HARD TO BEAT CENTRAL HEAT (Chapter 11)

“That’s gotta be enough! Put too much in and you’ll burn the school down,” George said, regretting their job of preheating the single 25-by50 foot, one-room school before classes started.
“Aw, a little kerosene never hurt anybody. Besides this is a big stove. Nothing is going to blow it up,” Freddy said. He poured in more kerosene.
“That ought to do it. It’ll catch the first time for sure.”
“Hand me six or eight of those,” he said, nodding toward the large box of Diamond wooden matches, resting as always, on the end of the chalk tray along the wall.
Man-o-man, eyebrow-less George thought, he’s going to burn us up! I’m getting to the far side of the teacher’s desk. Then remembering the careless miner from last Saturday’s movie, he said, “The explosion is going to blow you straight up...maybe through the roof!”
As usual, Freddy wasn’t listening. “Ok, here goes. Stay down.” With that, he struck the whole bundle of matches on the cast-iron stove, tossed this firebrand into the coal-gorged maw, slammed the door, and jumped for cover.
Baroovmp! Barooymp-uump-uump! Rattle, rattle, shake kabump, bump, screech!
The concussion rocked the stove. Noise thundered inside the closed room like the howitzers at Fort Riley.
Freddy, down behind the fourth row of seats, swallowed hard. He watched the oversized stovepipe rattle and pull apart high up where it formed an upside down letter L. Black soot spewed out, and then slowed into a gentle, downward dusting-fall.
“Man, oh, man,” Freddy said with a grin. “Now that’s the way to light a stove. That was some boom! Yeah!”
“That baby sure took right off when I flipped that match in there. Look at her go! It sure is hard to beat central heat.”
Bright flames flickered behind the silica-paned door and licked at the remaining kerosene and the big chunks of anthracite. The blaze seemed to warm the room at once, but what about the soot?
George watched the black soot settle down. It dusted the floor, the teacher’s desk, and everything in that end of the room. “Oh boyyyyy,” he said with a low moaning sound. “What do we do now? How are we going to explain this? It’s a mess. And, what about the smoke, leaking from the busted stovepipe?”
“Let’s put the stovepipe back together first…” Freddy directed, “before it gets too hot to handle. Then we’ll open the doors and let the smoke out.”
He climbed on the teacher’s chair and wiggled the black pipe back into place. More soot snowed down, so he handed George—still shivering and disgusted—the school’s broom. Freddy then opened the school’s front and back doors. This let the prairie wind—it ruffled papers and spun midget cyclones of soot—collect smoke on its way through.
The black soot presented a bigger challenge, for it resisted cleanup. It seemed sweeping and dusting encouraged it to seek out the wood grain of the floor and the desk. Still, after long minutes, the room looked almost normal. Most of the smoke had hurried outside, and with the doors closed, the room began to warm—at least near the stove.
For some reason, Mrs. Draper arrived a few minutes late that morning and hurried to start the school day. In her haste, she failed to see anything wrong and the boys dodged another bullet, and even received a compliment. “Freddy and George, you boys got a good fire going this morning. It’s nice and warm in here, like a regular bonfire.”
If she only knew….