Part 4

Well, that was supposed to be funny, and most everybody around the camp fire thought it was and laughed hard, but it wasn’t funny, maybe. For a minute I was almost mad, but decided it would be a waste of good temper to spoil what the others thought funny; besides my pop says any boy who wants to get along with people can’t afford to always be taking offense. I couldn’t think of anything about Paul Bunyan that would help me get even with Dragonfly, so I let Little Jim tell his story, and we didn’t have time for mine, on account of it was time to go to bed.

I watched Little Jim’s small friendly face in the firelight and in the light of the afterglow of the sun which had already gone to bed, and he looked so innocent, that you couldn’t tell whether he was thinking or not, but it was fun to listen to him, ’cause his mouse-like voice squeaked out the strangest story, which really sounded good, and it was: “Well, when Paul and I were up here in this pretty country of many lakes, we got awful lonesome and wished there were some people living here. We stayed down where Brainerd is now, and Paul would carry me around in his vest pocket and tell me stories, and complain about how lonesome he was...”

Well, it sounded like Little Jim was going to have a real good story, so I listened and sure enough it was. That little innocent-faced guy said that Paul Bunyan got so lonesome finally that he took his big long brown flashlight and some different colored cellophane and stood the flashlight, which was two hundred feet long, up on the ground, and built a wooden platform around it right at the place where the switch was, and every night Little Jim sat on that platform of the two-hundred-foot-tall flashlight and turned that light on and off and on and off; and Paul would stand beside the flashlight and slide different colored pieces of cellophane paper across the top of the flashlight, and the whole sky was all lit up in many different colors every night, changing just like the beautiful northern lights do--(and I thought that maybe the sky above the lake had made little Jim think about the different colors)--and pretty soon in a week or so, people from Iowa, Missouri, Tennessee, and all the southern states, began to come up North to see what they thought were beautiful northern lights, and they liked the country so well they decided to stay and build their homes, which they did, and so the town of Brainerd was founded, and then Paul left his flashlight standing and the people took the big batteries out and used it for a water tower, where it still stands in downtown Brainerd.

Well, it was a cute idea, and I wished I could think of something good, but couldn’t, so we broke up our campfire circle, with Santa standing and yawning his fat self into a straightened up posture. He looked straight at Tom Till and said, “How about a spin on the lake, with my new outboard motor, Tom?”

I remembered that Santa and Mrs. Santa didn’t have any children of their own, and that last year he had liked Tom so well, and had also been the one who had showed Tom how to become a Christian. I knew that Tom’s pop was an infidel, and was hardly ever kind to him, and Tom was maybe hungry for some grown-up person to like him, so I felt happy inside that Tom was going to get a fast boat ride, although I wanted to go along worse than anything.

“You, too, Bill--and Poetry, if you like,” Santa said--“if you can spare them awhile, Barry. I’ll take the rest of the gang tomorrow. This new motor needs breaking in, you know.”

Well, it was all right with Barry, and it certainly was all right with me, so away we four went toward the sandy shore to where Santa’s big white boat was beached, each one of us taking our life preserver vests, and putting them on before getting into the boat... Boy oh boy, that lake looked wonderful, having as many colors as the sky itself, which meant that a lake got its color from the sky, I thought, and said to Poetry, “Looks like Old Babe, the Ox, must have changed his colors like a chameleon and taken a swim out here, while we were telling stories.”

And Poetry surprised me by yelling, “SWELL, BILL, that’s wonderful! Hey, you guys back there! Bill’s got a good story!”

Well, it made me feel half proud of myself to have Poetry yell that to the gang like that, and I liked Poetry a lot for a minute, that being one of the reasons why I liked him anyway--he was always making a person feel like he was worth something.

It certainly felt fine to sit in the prow of Santa’s big boat, with Tom Till and Poetry in the middle and Santa himself in the stern, and go roaring out across the lake. Boy oh boy, in the afterglow of the sunset, the lake was pretty, and without much wind was as smooth as Mom’s mirror in our front room at home. I was wishing Pop and Mom were there, to see things, but wouldn’t want them to stay on account of I wanted to have some real exciting adventures to tell them about when we got home...

Pretty soon, our boat cut a wide circle around the end of a neck of land, and we went roaring down the other side about fifty or maybe a hundred feet from shore. It was still a little light on the lake, but the pine trees on the shore looked darkish and it was getting dark fast. All the time I was wondering if we could run into any exciting adventures up here in the North when Poetry said, “Look Bill! right there’s where our boat upset last year and tossed us out, and right there’s where I hooked that big Northern Pike.”

I remembered and yelled back to him and said so, and went on thinking--wishing we’d have some kinda scary excitement as well as a lot of fun camping.

I watched the widening waves that spread out behind us like a great V, and felt fine and happy, and for some reason I liked everybody. Also I was remembering the Bible story Barry had told, and how Peter was afraid to have the Lord anywhere near him, because he was a sinner, and I began to feel that God was real close to all of us and I wasn’t a bit scared of Him ’cause I knew that He had washed all my sins away, which our Sugar Creek minister and Little Jim say is what He does to a boy or anybody who will really let Him--washing them away in His own blood.

Just then Poetry yelled to me, “Penny for your thoughts, Bill!” I started, and looked at him and said, “Look at that reddish sky, will you?” and Poetry looked and said, “Kinda pretty, isn’t it?”

6

We docked at Santa’s dock, and went into his log cabin with him. It was cozy inside. First he lit two old-fashioned kerosene lamps, then ’cause it might get cold pretty soon, we helped him start a fire in his small wood stove in a corner; Tom pumped a pail of water from the pitcher pump inside the cabin. Santa even had an icebox with ice in it, and in another small room, twin beds; and back in a tiny room away back in the back, there was a bathtub and beside it a very old-fashioned trunk that for some reason made me think of Robinson Crusoe and buried treasure. I wished harder than ever that we would run into a mystery up here in the North.... I was all tingling inside, wanting one so bad. But, of course, I wouldn’t want the kind that would half scare a boy half to death, like the ones that sometimes happened to the Sugar Creek Gang, but I wanted an ordinary mystery anyway.

Pretty soon it would be time to go back to camp and get to sleep. I was wondering how we could keep warm in our cold wall tents--which was the kind ours were--when there wouldn’t be any fires inside and we didn’t have any heaters. Of course I knew I’d be pretty warm myself, after I’d crawled into my sleeping bag, which is a waterproof bed made out of khaki drill. It had a soft kapoc filled mattress, and I would just crawl into it, zip up the zipper slide fastener on the side, and there I’d be, but it’d be cold to get undressed and before getting into my pajamas.

Santa showed us different things in his cottage, such as a large mounted fish on the wall which Mrs. Santa had caught, and also a great big bearskin rug which was on the floor and had a fierce bear’s head with wide open red mouth on one end of it; also there was a snake skin on the wall, which a missionary in Africa had sent him.

Well, it was soon time to go home. Poetry looked at Santa’s wood box and said all of a sudden, “You need a load of wood--better let Bill carry one in for you.”

“Fine,” I said, “I’ll hold the flashlight for you.” I took a flashlight off the table, and started toward the door with Poetry right after me.

Outside, we looked back through the window at the pretty little cabin and at Santa and Tom standing by the fire warming themselves, and all of a sudden Poetry said, “I wish Tom had a pop like--I wish Santa was Tom’s daddy.”

I thought of old hook-nosed John Till at Sugar Creek and knew that maybe right that very minute he was probably standing at the bar in a beer joint sousing his fat stomach with beer, and that Tom’s mother was maybe not even going to have enough money to buy groceries for the family the rest of that week.

At the long wood rick, Poetry and I stopped and he said, “Sh! Turn off the light. I heard something.” I snapped off the flashlight, peered out into the dark and listened. “It’s a crazy loon,” I said, when one of those diving birds away out on the dark lake somewhere had let out a long-tailed quavering cry, which came echoing across to where we were. Also right that second another loon, closer to the shore, answered him.

And then my hair started to stand up on end, ’cause I heard another sound almost like that of a loon, but it wasn’t coming from that lake. It sounded like a little girl crying and came from over in the direction of the boathouse where Santa kept his boat in the winter and his tools and oars and things in the summer.

Then I heard the sound again, plain as day, a faint cry like a loon that somebody was trying to smother, and maybe had his fingers on its throat...

Poetry’s hand was tightening on my shoulder, and his face was close to my neck, and I could hear and feel him breathing. “Over _there_,” he whispered huskily, “close to the boathouse. _Down!_” he hissed, and drew me down beside him, both of us hiding behind the wood rick.

Before I ducked, though, I’d looked in the direction of the boathouse which was up against the edge of a steep hill, and I saw a tiny glow like somebody had drawn on a cigarette or cigar and it had made it glow in the dark.

I knew it couldn’t be any of our camping party ’cause not a one of us smoked, not even Barry.

Then we heard the boathouse door creaking on its hinges and I knew I was beginning to be scared.

“It’s a man smoking,” Poetry hissed in my ear, but I didn’t want to believe it. “Maybe it was a lightning bug,” I said. There were several of them flashing their spooky little lamps on and off out near Santa’s boat.

“Lightning bugs’ lights are a yellowish green,” Poetry said, “and that was a reddish glow.”

I knew he was right but wished in spite of wanting a mystery that whatever it was, it wasn’t some criminal. Then I heard what sounded like a stifled cry again and knew it _wasn’t_ any loon, but said to Poetry, “It’s a loon’s echo, maybe.”

I had the flashlight in my hand and without thinking, but just doing what I wanted to, shot its long white beam right straight toward the boathouse, up against the hill. Before I could even think Poetry had reached out a hand and grabbed my arm and smothered the light against his fat side, but not before I saw what I saw, which was a dark shadow of something dart behind the boathouse.

“Don’t scare whatever it is,” Poetry said. “Give me time to think what to do,” Poetry, as you know, being the one of our gang which wanted to be a detective and knew more about being one than any of the rest of us.

We were both ducked behind the wood rick again and our knees were on a pile of sawdust, which maybe had been left there when somebody had maybe cut the wood with a buzz-saw. Even with a scary mystery just around the corner, Poetry quoted something he had memorized, which was.

“If a wood-saw would saw wood, How much wood would the wood-saw saw If the wood-saw would saw wood?”

“I thought you wanted to think,” I said to him.

“I am,” he said. “I think best when I have what books call a ‘poetic muse.’ Did you notice what I noticed?” he asked me.

“What?” I said, and he said, “That the boathouse has had a new coat of paint since we were here, last year.”

“I saw a shadow move,” I answered him. I was trembling inside and listening toward the boathouse.

We kept on listening but didn’t hear a thing, so we decided to turn the flashlight on the boathouse again, which we did, and sure enough it had been painted, a nice pretty green color. It even looked like it had _just_ been painted.

“Smell the paint?” Poetry said, and I did--for the first time.

That green boathouse had its door closed and looked as innocent as Little Jim’s face looks when it is, and there wasn’t a sound of any kind. A lonely loon let out a wavering wail from across the lake and another one answered him from close to the shore, not far from the dock where we had just left Santa’s boat, but there wasn’t another sound anywhere.

“What about the door creaking on its hinges?” I said.

“Just remember it, when we start to questioning the suspect later on,” Poetry said, and his voice was as calm as if he was actually a detective. But his hand was on my arm, and I could feel it trembling a little. We loaded up our arms with wood as quick as we could and started toward the cottage.

We were both trembling when we got inside, but we’d made up our minds to keep quiet so as not to scare Tom Till. Also if we were only imagining things on account of wanting a mystery so bad, and if there really wasn’t any, we didn’t want to seem silly to anybody except ourselves, which wouldn’t be so bad.

We unloaded our two armloads of wood into the big wood box in the corner beside the stove, and then looked around and saw on the table in the corner a copy of a Minneapolis newspaper, and on the very front page, a big headline which said, “FEAR OSTBERG KIDNAPPER HIDING IN CHIPPEWA FOREST.”

I stared and stared at the heading and sidled quickly over to the table, and in the light of the flashlight, on account of the kerosene lamp not being bright enough, I read the whole story.

I was remembering the radio program I’d heard back in our house at Sugar Creek, about a little girl being kidnapped at St. Paul... Poetry sidled over to me and we read the newspaper together while Santa and Tom Till were opening the icebox and getting out some bottles of pop. Poetry’s hand was gripping my arm so tight that it hurt, but I didn’t say a word. I was concentrating on the news story of the little girl who had been taken from her home in St. Paul, and hadn’t been found yet, and I was making up my mind that the kidnapper or whoever he was, was maybe right that minute right out there in Santa’s boathouse, and the Ostberg girl was there, too. The father of the little golden haired girl had already paid the ransom money of $25,000 but the kidnapper hadn’t left the girl where he’d promised to.

7

It was hard to keep still while we were drinking our pop from Santa’s icebox; in fact, I couldn’t, so I said, “You been doing some painting around here, Santa? I smell fresh paint outdoors.”

Santa set his bottle of orange pop down on the table and swallowed, and said, “The boathouse? Yes, I gave it a new coat yesterday--I’ve been doing a little work inside, too--doing it up in green and white. I plan to use it for a den for my fishing tackle and guns, and a place to write, and when I have company, it’ll do for a guest house--or a sleeping room, anyway--”

Say, right that second, Santa got a queer look on his face, straightened up and said, “What do you know? I just remembered I forgot to lock the boathouse door.”

Tom Till spoke up and asked, “Do the Indians steal things up here when you leave the doors unlocked?” and Santa answered and said something everybody ought to know, which was: “There are _white_ people up here who do. We have very little trouble with the Indians themselves. They like to be trusted, and if they think you’ve locked the door especially because of them, they resent it. Of course, there are Indians and Indians, as there are white men and white men. A man isn’t a thief because he’s an Indian or of any other race, but because he has a sinful nature, which all men do have. You know a man decides for himself whether he is going to steal or not. It doesn’t matter what the color of his face is, if he has a black heart.”

Santa stretched himself and started toward the door.

I was wondering about Little Snow-in-the-face, and when we’d get to see him, and said so, and Santa said, “He’s still in the hospital. He’ll be thrilled to death to see you boys. He’s a great little boy.”

Santa opened his cabin door to go out and lock the boathouse door.

I looked at Poetry, and he looked at me, and we stared at each other. “Let’s all go,” Santa said.

In a jiffy, we were all outside, following Santa, walking in and along beside the white path his flashlight made.

“Well, what do you know!” Santa said all of a sudden, stopping and holding the light on the door. “I must have locked it after all, and forgotten I did it.”

At the door we stopped while he shone the light on the Yale padlock on the door, and sure enough it was locked.

Santa laughed and said, “Must be getting forgetful in my old age.” He turned, shot the flashlight all around, focusing it on stumps, out between us and the dock, also on the cottage and the chimney, and on a hole in a hollow tree just above the boathouse, and would you believe it? There sitting in the hole was a rust-red blinking longish-eared screech owl like an olderish woman sitting on the front porch of her house.

Quick as a flash, the owl spread its wings and flew like a shadow out into the night.

Poetry and I looked toward each other and sighed, and knew we’d been fooled by our own imaginations, ’cause if there’s anything a girl sounds like when she is half crying in a high-pitched voice around the Sugar Creek school, it is a screech owl, which makes a sort of moaning, wavering wail....

Well, that was that, and I felt very foolish, as all of us went back to Santa’s dock, climbed into his boat, holding his flashlight and also a bright electric lantern which you are supposed to do when you are out on a lake in a boat, so you won’t run into some other boat and some other boat won’t run into you.

In a little while we were roaring out across the darkish water, around the neck of land and back toward camp.

Pretty soon, Poetry and Dragonfly and Circus and I were in our own tent, with a small candle for a light on a folding table in one corner. It was as warm as toast in the tent in spite of it being really chilly outside, like it is most every night in the Paul Bunyan country.

“What on earth is that water pail doing in the center of the tent?” I asked, ’cause it was right where I wanted to set my suitcase and open it.

“That’s our stove,” Circus said.

“Stove?... That’s a water pail!” Poetry exclaimed.

“That’s where I want my suitcase,” I said, and started to move it, but Circus yelled, “Don’t touch it. You’ll get burned. It’s a stove!”

In the flickering light his monkey face looked ridiculous, and I, knowing how mischievous he was, said, “You’re crazy,” and started to take hold of the handle of the pail, and did, and let go in a fierce hurry. The handle was hot, and there was a lot of heat coming from the outside of the pail and a whole lot coming from the inside. It was pretty dark in the tent so I carried the candle from the corner, and looked in, and--would you believe it?--Well, I wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t seen it, but there it was--one of the big round rocks Poetry and I had rolled into the fire a couple hours ago. It was still as hot as anything, and would maybe stay hot nearly all night.

Pretty soon, I had crawled into my sleeping bag, and with Poetry in his, right beside me, and Dragonfly and Circus on the other side of the tent in theirs, we were ready to try to stop talking and go to sleep. Circus snuffed out the candle, and we all were quiet as we could be for awhile, which wasn’t quiet. We could also hear the rest of the gang--which was Big Jim and Tom Till and Little Jim and also Barry Boyland--still talking over in their tent maybe fifty feet away on the other side of the camp fire.

In spite of having been scared by my own imagination, I was awful sleepy and in a few jiffies was so sleepy I knew that in a minute I’d be gone. I was so sleepy I knew I wouldn’t be able to say a very good good-night prayer to the Heavenly Father. It was better for a boy to do most of his praying when he is wider awake anyway, but I managed to say a few words which I meant from the bottom of my heart, and they were that the little girl’s parents wouldn’t go crazy on account of their little girl being stolen. I also prayed for little Snow-in-the-face and maybe a few other things.

Our gang hardly ever prayed together, on account of boys being bashful about doing it, but each one of us nearly always prayed by himself. Once in a while, though, we did when it was something extra important, and we thought maybe God wanted us to ask Him about it.

It certainly was a wonderful feeling--lying there in my cozy sleeping bag, warm as toast, listening to mosquitos buzzing around my face but not getting bit even once on account of I had mosquito lotion on my face and even on my ears, all of us being very careful, like the directions on the bottle said, not to get any on our lips or too near our eyes. Besides, there weren’t any mosquitos in the tent on account of the window in our tent had mosquito netting built into it and it was mosquito proof.

I certainly was glad I hadn’t told anybody I thought anybody had been kidnapped and was maybe in Santa’s boathouse. I didn’t want to seem ridiculous to anybody except to Poetry and myself; for some reason, though, I wished I had been right, on account of, as my pop once said, anybody doesn’t like to believe he is wrong, even when he is.

I drifted away into a half dream, and it seemed like I could hear the washing of the lake wavelets on the shore, and they were mixed up with Dragonfly’s snoring. Also it seemed like somebody was near me with a saw and was sawing wood, and the pile of sawdust was getting higher and higher, and Poetry and I were standing ankle deep in it. Then, I took off my shoes to get the sawdust out of them, and they were filled with green and white paint. Then somebody started pounding and making a slapping noise beside me, and I woke up, and it was Dragonfly’s twisting and turning in his sleep and slapping at his face and ears. So I said to him, “’Smatter?” He answered back to me in a whining whisper and said, “These crazy mosquitoes are driving me wild. They are the biggest mosquitoes in the world!”

“Didn’t you put on any lotion?” I hissed back to him, and he said, “No, I’m allergic to it. It makes me sneeze!” Right that second he sneezed twice, so I said, “You’re probably allergic to mosquitoes, too.”

That woke Poetry up and he groaned a couple times and then really woke up and said, “Talk about big mosquitoes. Did you ever hear the story about the two big mosquitoes who had a noisy argument?”

“It sounds like we are on the midway of a mosquito circus right now,” Dragonfly said.

“I mean it,” Poetry began, “--there was a real argument between two big mosquitoes who lived up here in the Chippewa Forest. One night two of them were flying around, looking for somebody to eat, and they found Dragonfly lying asleep out on the beach. So one of them said, ‘Let’s pick him up and fly him home and eat him _there_.’”

“‘Naw,’ the other one said, ‘let’s don’t. Let’s eat him right here, ’cause if we _do_ take him home, the big ones will just take him away from us.’”