Part 5

We made Dragonfly put on some lotion and pretty soon he was asleep again, but I was wide awake, thinking about the kidnapper. Right that second Poetry nudged me and said, “Bill--Sh!”

I rolled over close to his face, and he said, “I’ve got an idea.”

Right away I was wide awake, and he said, “Remember the time I had a hunch back at Sugar Creek, and you and I got up and went out in the night and the gang captured a robber, digging for buried treasure down by the old sycamore tree.”

“Well?” I said, and he said, “I’ve got that same kind of a hunch tonight. I still think that screech owl wasn’t what we heard. Why didn’t we open the boathouse and look in?”

I wondered that myself, now that he had mentioned it.

I heard Poetry’s zipper on his sleeping bag zip a long zip. All of a sudden my heart began to beat faster, and I knew he and I were going to get up and go down to that boathouse and investigate. There wouldn’t be any real danger, but if there _was_ any little girl in there, we could probably hear her, and we could wake up Santa, or Barry and the whole gang. And if there wasn’t anything to our idea, then we still wouldn’t seem ridiculous to anyone except ourselves.

8

I was glad there was a little wind blowing so that the waves of the lake were washing against the shore, and also that Dragonfly snored so we wouldn’t be heard if we kept real quiet.

In a few jiffies, Poetry and I had our shoes on, and our trousers and sweaters, and had worked our way out through the tent opening in the front, and with our flashlights we were sneaking up along the beach toward Santa’s cabin and his boathouse.

Suddenly I stopped. The whole idea seemed absolutely crazy to me. I said, “You don’t think for a minute that any kidnapper would be dumb enough to hide out in a boathouse that wasn’t any more than fifty yards from where somebody actually lived, do you?”

“Who said anything about any kidnapper hiding out?” Poetry said. “He’s maybe a hundred miles away from here by now. But he could have left the Ostberg girl there, couldn’t he?”

“Why?” I said, and he stopped and hissed in my ear, “Not so loud!” We’d been following a little footpath we knew about, from having been there the year before.

I was trembling inside, maybe being a little cold, and at the same time couldn’t see any sense to Poetry’s thinking maybe the kidnapper was in that boathouse with the Ostberg girl. It didn’t make sense.

“You’re scared!” Poetry accused me, and I said I wasn’t, but only thought the idea was crazy.

“It _can’t_ be,” Poetry said. “Listen--” Then he told me what he’d been thinking, and it was, “What if the kidnapper, who, as the paper said, is supposed to be a lumberman, was looking for an empty cabin up here somewhere to hide out in, and suppose he drove off onto a side road, to dodge the police who were maybe looking for his car, and suppose he got off on the little half-obliterated road that leads to Santa’s cabin which nobody hardly ever uses and suppose he found the boathouse with the door open, and then just suppose that he put the girl in there, gagged and tied up, like kidnappers do, and then suppose that while he was there, Santa with us boys with him came roaring up to the dock in his boat. Wouldn’t the kidnapper be scared, and maybe lock the girl in, and beat it himself, and--”

Well, it made a little sense, so I hurried along behind Poetry, my heart beating faster because we were hurrying so fast. Pretty soon we were almost there, when Poetry stopped all of a sudden and said, “Sh!”

I shushed quick, ’cause I’d heard it as plain as day myself. There was the sound of a car motor running, somewhere. It sounded like it was at the top of the hill away up above the boathouse. We knew there was a sandy road up there, ’cause we’d been on it once ourselves.

“Somebody’s stuck in the sand,” Poetry said, and it sure sounded like it. The motor was whirring and whirring. I’d seen cars stuck in sand and snow before, and I could imagine the driver, whoever he was, doing what is called “rocking” the car, and starting and shifting from first gear to reverse and back and forth, and the wheels spinning, and still the car not getting out of the sand...

We were real close to the boathouse now. Poetry shoved the beam of his light toward the door, and we both let out an excited gasp. I couldn’t believe my eyes, and yet I had to, ’cause the boathouse _door was wide open, and the hinge of the lock was hanging like somebody had forced it open with a crowbar or something_.

We flashed our lights around inside, and there wasn’t anybody there, but a cot in the other end was mussed up like somebody had been lying down on it. A pile of shavings were on the floor and were also scattered around under a carpenter’s work bench. On the wall above the work bench were a lot of tools such as screwdrivers, saws, planes, and other carpenter’s tools. Santa had maybe been working there, making something during the day.

“Quick!” Poetry ordered. “Let’s go up the hill and get his license number.”

I wanted to tell Santa or Barry or somebody, and get a lot of noisy action around there, but I knew Poetry was right. We were maybe already too late, and we maybe couldn’t do anything helpful. We’d probably be shot if we were seen by the man, whoever he was. But if we could get the car license number, it might help the police to trail him, if he really was the kidnapper.

Up that hill we went, following that hardly-ever-used road. At the top of the hill, we turned right and zipped along the edge of Santa’s woods, where you could hardly see the road at all, but we knew it would come out at the sandy road a little later, which it did. We could see, even with our flashlights off, which they had to be, that it was a newish car, as we sneaked up behind it. It had its tail light on and only its parking lights, and the driver was “rocking” it, starting slowly, going forward a few feet, then backwards, then forward, but not getting anywhere.

Already I was close enough to see the license, but didn’t dare turn on my flashlight, or the guy would find out we were there. “Wait,” Poetry said, “I’ll sneak up behind that tree.” Right away he started to start. Then he hissed to me, “DOWN, BILL! QUICK!”

Down we ducked and didn’t dare make a sound, ’cause the motor had stopped and the guy was opening his car door and getting out. Right there in front of our eyes not more than fifty feet away, we saw him make a dive for the back left wheel, and heard him mumbling something that sounded like mad swear words, and for a second I was glad that Little Jim wasn’t there, ’cause it always hurts him terribly to hear anybody swear, on account of the One whose Name is used in such a terrible way when a person swears is Little Jim’s best Friend. I was glad he wasn’t there for another reason, too, and that was that when he hears somebody using filthy rotten words like that, he can’t stand it and sometimes calls right out and says, “STOP SWEARING!”

We certainly didn’t want anybody to call out to that guy in the automobile.

“What’s he doing?” I whispered in Poetry’s ear, and didn’t need to have asked, on account of I heard a hissing noise coming from that left back tire.

“The crazy goof!” I said to Poetry, “He’s letting air out of his tire!”

And he was... “Sssssss!” It made me feel creepy, ’cause if a man who wanted to get away quick was foolish enough to let air out of his tires, he must be insane.

In another jiffy, the tire had stopped hissing and the guy, still grunting and mumbling to himself, like he was terribly mad, and also maybe a little scared, was down on his knees beside the other back tire and right away there was another hissing noise.

And right that second, the man stood up, and made a dive for the front seat again, zipped in and stepped on the starter, and started to rock the car again, then he backed up, and started forward again, and the wheels started spinning and--

“Hey!” Poetry and I hissed to each other at the same time, “The car is moving! He’s getting away!”

Poetry flashed his flashlight on the back of the car to get the license number, and it was 324-179, and was a Minnesota license. My mind took a picture of it quick, and I knew I’d never forget it, but just to make sure, I kept saying it to myself “324-179, 324-179, 324-179...”

Say, the second that car which was a black newish car was out of that sandy place, it shot down that road like a bullet.

There wasn’t a thing we could do, not a thing, I thought, and wondered if the girl was maybe in the back seat and why on earth didn’t we try to rescue her, if she was there?

We made a dive for the place where the car had been stuck, and studied the road. Poetry let out a gasp and said, “He’s awfully smart, that guy. Look at these wide tire tracks, will you?”

I looked, and Poetry was right. First I looked at how narrow they had been before they got stuck in the sand, and then I looked at them _after_ they’d gone on up the road, and they were almost half again as wide.

“Letting out that air, increased _traction_,” Poetry said, “but he can’t run on them half flat very far or very fast. He’ll have to stop at the first gas station that’s open, and get some air. Come on! Let’s get to a telephone quick, and call the Bemidji and the Pass Lake police and have all the gas stations watch for him. Give them the license number, and I’ll bet the police will catch him!”

With that, Poetry whirled around, his flashlight in his hand and we were starting to run up the sandy lane to where the fire warden lived, when I noticed something shining in the grass at the side of the lane.

“Look!” I said, “Shine your light over here a minute.”

I stooped over to pick up whatever it was, thinking it might be a scarf pin or something the kidnapped girl might have had, but shucks, it was only a piece of glass. I picked it up, though, and was going to throw it away when Poetry grabbed my arm and stopped me and said, “Hey, wait! Let me see it!”

“It’s a piece of broken glass,” I said, but let him look at it up close with his flashlight. “Sure,” he said, “it’s a clue.”

“How could a piece of broken glass be a clue?” I asked.

“’Cause it isn’t stained with weather or anything, which means it hasn’t been lying out here very long,” Poetry said, and tucked it in his pocket.

It wasn’t any time to argue, but I thought his detective ideas were nearly all imagination.

He was running awful fast for a barrel-shaped boy, and I was having a hard time keeping up with him as we swished along down that sandy lane. We knew the firewarden didn’t live very far up that lane on account of we had been here the year before and knew that his house was the nearest one that had a telephone--Santa not having one in his cabin, on account of not wanting his vacation spoiled by people calling him up. If he needed a telephone, he could always go to where there was one.

“Wait,” I said to Poetry all of a sudden. “Maybe we’re on a wild goose chase, maybe we’re crazy to waste a lot of good sleeping time chasing an imaginary kidnapper. How do we know that was a kidnapper’s car? What if it was just _anybody_ who got stuck in the sand? He wouldn’t appreciate having policemen stop him and ask a lot of questions!”

“It wasn’t just _anybody!_” Poetry said. “That guy was down there in the boathouse less than a half hour ago, and there was a girl there, too, see?”

Poetry stopped long enough to pull out of his pocket and show me something he had picked up back there where the car had been, and it was a girl’s yellow scarf!

“But that could be any woman’s or any girl’s scarf,” I said.

“It _could_ not,” Poetry disagreed with me with a very sure voice, and also an excited one, “--see that green paint on it--and look! Here’s some white paint also.” Well, I remembered Santa had been using green and white paint in that boathouse that very afternoon, and remembering that put wings on my feet, and I ran like a deer up that winding sandy road toward the firewarden’s house and the telephone.

9

If anybody had seen Poetry and me swishing along down that narrow winding road, following along in the bobbing path of our flashlights, our breath coming in quick short pants, they might have thought we were crazy. It was one of the crookedest roads I’d ever seen in my life, and would you believe it, Poetry couldn’t resist puffing a part of a poem as we raced along toward the firewarden’s cabin. The poem started out like this:

“There was a crooked man, he walked a crooked mile; He found a crooked six-pence beside a crooked style--”

Only we didn’t find any six-pence, but we did find something else, and in a fast jiffy I’ll tell you what it was. In a half minute more we knew we would be ready to turn the last bend in the road just before we got to the firewarden’s house. All of a sudden Poetry stopped and flashed his light about fifty yards down the road ahead of us, and as plain as day I saw a great big beautiful reddish-brown deer standing right in the center of the road. Its head was up and his big antlers looked very pretty. His ears were large and were spread out like our old Brindle cow back home spreads hers out when she is interested in something, or scared. Say, that deer was _really_ scared. It turned and like a reddish-brown flash it was gone, leaping away and disappearing into the trees and bushes at the side of the road. It’s a good thing we saw the deer, though, ’cause if we hadn’t maybe we wouldn’t have stopped and wouldn’t have heard what we heard right that second. We both heard it at the same time, and it sounded exactly like what we’d heard before when we were standing out by the wood rick.

“It’s another screech owl,” Poetry said, and started on, but I stopped him, and said, “Maybe it’s a loon.”

“It’s coming from out there in the trees,” he said. “Loons don’t stay up here in the woods. They’re out on the lake or else right close to it all the time.”

We both listened, my heart thumping like Pop’s hammer driving a terribly big nail into a log in our barn at Sugar Creek. It was a worse scare than I’d had in a long time. It certainly sounded exactly like what we’d heard at the boathouse. I remembered the simpish looking owl we’d seen standing in the hole of the hollow tree behind the boathouse and how it had flown away, but this time I just _knew_ it wasn’t any owl or any loon.

“Let’s go see,” Poetry said, and I said, “What if it _is_ the girl? What’ll we do? What’ll--”

“Let’s decide later,” Poetry interrupted me by saying. We flashed our lights out toward the trees and couldn’t see a thing, but we heard that eery cry that was like a loon being choked, and then we started toward it, our lights shoving the dark back as we went along, and we walked in their yellowish bobbing paths.

We crept up slowly. I had a big stick in my hands, ready to use it as a club if I had to. For some reason we didn’t stop to think that maybe we ought to get to the firewarden’s house first, and tell him, but instead we just kept right on going, the pine needles on the ground making a spooky noise under our shoes and, then, all of a sudden, Poetry stopped, and I, who had been following him, bumped into him.

“Look! There’s an Indian blanket with somebody wrapped up in it,” meaning a blanket of many colors like most all families in Sugar Creek have in their homes.

Then I heard it again, a low half-muffled half cry, and we knew we’d found the kidnapped Ostberg girl.

Say, when I looked down at that blanket with the little five-year-old girl wrapped in it, and saw the great big handkerchief the kidnapper had stuffed into her mouth as a gag to keep her from talking or screaming, and as we unwrapped her and saw that her hands were tied together and also her feet so she couldn’t walk, and when I saw the pretty yellowish all-tangled-up hair around her face and shoulders, I forgot all about having been half scared to death a while ago, and got a terribly angry feeling inside that made me want to find the kidnapper and for just about three minutes turn loose both of my fiery-tempered fists on his chin and nose and stomach and literally knock the living daylights out of him.

My pop had told me true stories about how there are wicked men in the world who don’t have any respect for God or girls or women, and how every one of them ought to be locked up somewhere until a doctor can get them cured, or else they should stay in jail for life or be executed for their awful crimes, which means they ought to be put to death in the electric chair or hung, Pop says. Anyway, there ought not to be even one of them allowed to run free in this world, and if they are allowed to, it’s the law’s or the people’s fault.

Well, we couldn’t stand there just staring and wasting good temper on something we couldn’t help, but ought to get the firewarden quick and he would know what to do.

Poetry certainly had presence of mind. “Take my flashlight,” he ordered me, and almost before I could get it into my hand, he was stooped over and taking the gag out of the girl’s mouth, and with his pocket-knife was cutting the cords that were around her wrists and hands.

It was pitiful the way that pretty little girl, who was about three or four years younger than Little Jim, sobbed and cried when we got the gag out of her mouth. She had a terribly scared look in her face. “H-E-L-P!” she half cried, but in a very muffled hoarse voice, like she had been crying for a terribly long time and had worn her vocal cords out.

“Mama! Mama!” she cried. “I want my M-M-Mama!” Then she would just go into a kinda hysterical sobbing and we couldn’t hear a word she was saying.

“We’re your friends,” we tried to tell her, “we’ve come to rescue you. We’ll help you get to the firewarden’s house, and----”

But the poor little thing was so scared that she couldn’t say a word we could understand, except she wanted her mama. She was also so weak she couldn’t stand up and wouldn’t be able to walk the rest of the way to the firewarden’s house, and we didn’t think we ought to try to carry her.

We had to do something quick, though ’cause she probably needed a doctor, too, so Poetry made me go on the run for the firewarden, while he stayed with the helpless girl. He would yell to us when we came back and flash his light so we could know where he and the girl were.

I tell you I _ran_, but I was trembling so much that it was hard for me to keep going.

In a few jiffies I came in sight of some white birch saplings which criss-crossed each other, making a homemade gate. I could see the house just beyond and an old unpainted barn. Also, there was a light in the window of what looked like an ordinary bungalow which meant that maybe the firewarden was still up, not having gone to bed yet.

I lay down and squished myself under that gate, and in a hurried jiffy was knocking at the door of the bungalow.

“Quick!” I panted as soon as the door opened. “We’ve found the kidnapped Ostberg girl! She’s out there in the trees wrapped up in an Indian blanket and----” and for some reason, right that second, I remembered about the automobile and its license number. I half yelled the things I wanted to say. The firewarden looked ridiculous in his green-striped pajamas as he stood in the doorway of his kitchen, with a flashlight in his hand.

“What _is_ it?” a woman’s voice called from somewhere back in the house. It was the voice of a sleepy woman who had just woke up and wanted to know what was going on.

“_Quick!_” I said. “The auto license number is Minnesota 324-179, and he’s got two half-flat tires and will have to stop somewhere at an oil station and get some air.”

I guess maybe the firewarden must have known all about the Ostberg girl having been kidnapped ’cause it only took me a little while to explain enough to him so he was ready for action. He was a kind of an oldish man but he was very spry and could think fast. While his wife was dressing somewhere in the house, he made two quick phone calls, and almost right away he got his powerful electric lantern and the three of us were on our way to his home-made gate. There we stopped while he flashed his flashlight around a little and said, “Well, what do you know--he must have thought our driveway was another bend in the road. He started to turn in, then swung out again. See?”

I used my own flashlight on the tire tracks, and, as plain as day, I saw that some car had made a sharp turn there, and as sure as the nose on Dragonfly’s face, which, as you maybe know, turns south at the end, I noticed that the back tires had wider patterns than the front.

We zipped up to where Poetry was waiting for us with the kidnapped girl. That pretty little girl was still so scared that she couldn’t talk without great sobs getting mixed up with her words, and you couldn’t understand her very well. Say, the firewarden’s wife just knelt down on the ground beside that tangled-up-golden-haired little pretty-faced girl and gathered her into her arms and crooned to her like she was her very own little girl, then stood up with her, and, being a very strong woman, wouldn’t let her husband carry her but carried her herself, and crooned to her all the way back to their cabin.

When we had first got to where Poetry was, though, I noticed he was standing beside the crying little girl, with a little book in one hand and was shining his flashlight on its pages and was reading something. “What on earth?” I thought, and waited for a chance to ask him what he was doing and why.

On the way to the cabin, while I was wishing the rest of the gang was there, and thinking that we’d have some wonderful stories to tell that would be even better than Paul Bunyan stories, and also could tell our folks the same ones, I said to Poetry, “What were you doing back there--reading stories to her to keep her quiet?”

“It’s a secret,” he said. “I’ll tell you tomorrow,--or anyway later...”

Well, I’ve got to step on the gas with this story. Almost right away, we came to the birch-sapling gate. There we stood while I showed Poetry where the kidnapper had started to turn in and then made a sharp turn and gone on. Poetry flashed his flashlight down real close to the ground and studied the patterns of the tracks and said, “He must have slowed down a lot right here, or the tire patterns wouldn’t be so plain.”

Right that second there were the headlight and also a spotlight of a car swinging down the road coming toward us real fast. “It’s the police already,” the firewarden said, and sure enough it was.

Say, there was certainly some excitement around there and also on the inside of me for awhile.

First, they made sure the girl was all right. In fact, Mrs. Firewarden was in the back seat of their car with the girl in her arms and the girl was asleep. In another few minutes an ambulance was coming to take her to a hospital.

“How’d you get here so quick?” Poetry asked one of the big blue-suited policemen, and he answered in a pleasant voice, like he thought a boy’s questions were as important as a grown-up’s, and this is what he said, “We have a radio in our car. We were only a few miles up the highway when the order came through, and so, here we are!”

Even before he had finished saying what he was saying, I was thinking how absolutely silly it is for anybody to think he can commit a crime and not get caught and punished, even though they hadn’t maybe caught the kidnapper yet.

In the next seventeen minutes I saw one of the most interesting things I’d ever seen in my life, and it made me even more sure than I was that anybody--man or boy or even a woman or girl--was just plumb crazy to try to be smarter than the law is and get by with any kind of a crime or sin.