Mitch and Amy by Beverly Cleary Page A

University, dressed in jeans, a plaid sport shirt, and a straw cowboy hat, who showed Mitchell how to scoop up some of the gravel from the bottom of the pool and swirl it around in the pan so that the water and gravel gradually spilled out, leaving the gold, which was heavy, at the bottom of the pan. Mitchell dipped and swirled and sloshed, and, sure enough, there were some glints of gold in the sand left at the bottom.
    â€œHey! I struck it rich!” said Mitchell, as the student picked out the flakes of gold and dropped them into a tiny glass vial of water for Mitchell to take home.
    Mitchell held up his vial to the light and counted seven flakes of gold, minute but real. Someone poked him in the ribs and said, “Stick ‘em up!” It was Bill, who had only five flakes of gold. One of them, however, was quite large, almost as big aroundas the head of a pin.
    â€œHow many did you get, Mitch?” asked Bernadette. “I got fifteen.”
    â€œJust because you pushed past everyone else and got there first,” said Mitchell rudely.
    â€œHa-ha. Don’t you wish you had?” said Bernadette, getting the last word as the class filed out through the glass doors.
    Not until Thursday after school, when Mitchell was searching for a ballpoint pen that worked, did he happen to run across the box of toothpicks on his desk and remember that he was supposed to take a model of Sutter’s sawmill to school the next day. Somehow the project no longer seemed as interesting as it had the day Miss Colby assigned it to him.
    With his arm Mitchell cleared a space on his desk and dumped out the toothpicks. He was not sure what an old-fashioned sawmilllooked like. He had seen modern mills in Northern California, but all he could remember about them were the piles of lumber and great metal cones that poured out smoke smelling of wood. He thought of the sugar-cube mission, complete with bell tower and stables, that Little Miss Perfect had built and looked at his miserable heap of toothpicks. He tried to think how a house was built, and there arose in his mind an impossible picture of concrete, studding, siding, Sheetrock, plywood, tar, and gravel, none of which had been used in the construction of Sutter’s sawmill.
    â€œDrat!” said Mitchell.
    â€œWhat’s the matter, Mitch?” called Mrs. Huff from another room.
    â€œAw, nothing.”
    â€œThat means something is wrong,” said Amy from her room, where Mitchell knew she was making furniture for a doll’s house.
    â€œYou keep out of this,” said Mitchell. Heremembered watching the construction of the new savings-and-loan building where he had panned gold. Its walls were made of slabs of concrete that had been lifted into place, a type of construction known as “tilt-up.” Very well, Mitchell would tilt up the walls of Sutter’s sawmill.
    He found a roll of Scotch tape and tore off two short strips, which he managed to lay on his desk after considerable difficulty in removing them from his fingers. Then he carefully laid toothpicks across the Scotch tape to form one wall. Placing toothpicks on sticky Scotch tape and getting them straight was difficult, but Mitchell persisted, tearing off more Scotch tape, unsticking it from his fingers, and laying rows of toothpicks on it. All the time he was thinking of the sugar-cube mission built by Little Miss Perfect, and the harder he worked the more beautiful and elaborate that mission seemed.
    â€œMom, do you have an old jar lid I can use?” Amy asked from the next room. “I want to put it on top of a spool to make a little round table.”
    Girls! thought Mitchell. They were always good at making things, especially little things. And what could he make? A skateboard that Alan Hibbler wrecked.
    Mitchell tried setting up the two walls of his sawmill and holding them in place while he tore off a piece of Scotch tape, which immediately twisted and stuck to itself.