“Extra gasoline!” Big Jim called from his slip of paper.
And Little Jim answered by tapping with his stick on the two-gallon red gasoline can in the bottom of the boat. Little Jim always took his stick with him wherever he went.
“Screwdriver, pliers, and wrench!” Big Jim yelled.
Poetry opened Barry’s tackle box, and there, right in the top drawer, were all three.
“What do we need pliers for?” Dragonfly asked me, he being the kind of person who always wants to know all the whys of everything.
“To take the hooks out of the big fish we catch,” Poetry said, and Dragonfly said in a complaining voice, “Let’s get started—we aren’t going fishing.”
“An extra spark plug!” Big Jim went on calling the roll, and I noticed that the spark plug was also there in the first drawer in a plastic bag.
“Oars!” Big Jim said.
We didn’t have any.
Poetry said, “Don’t need ’em. We’ve got plenty of gasoline and a good motor.”
“Oars!” Big Jim said again, louder. “Go get ’em! They’re in Barry’s tent!”
Poetry, who nearly always had a hard time having his mind changed for him, scowled but knew that scowling wouldn’t help. So up he stood, and out he stepped, and pretty soon back he puffed with two long green oars. He shoved them under our boat seats, where they’d be safe and wouldn’t fall out easily.
Big Jim went on. “Life vests or safety cushions for each person on board!”
There were only three cushions in the boat and four boys, so Dragonfly had to chase back to the tent for another one.
“An extra length of starter cord,” Big Jim said.
We had to have that too, on account of one might break or get dropped in the water while we were away out in the lake, and who would want to row back?
“Hurry up!” I called to Big Jim on the dock. “We’re in a hurry!” I was just itching to get out there on the lake and feel the boat doing what I wanted it to. If there is anything any boy likes, it is to run something that will do what he wants it to do when he wants it to, which is maybe why my dad and mom feel good when I do what they want me to, I thought—which was a crazy time to think it.
And for a second I felt a wave of homesickness go swishing over me like a big wave of water, and I wondered what my folks were doing at Sugar Creek and how my baby sister, Charlotte Ann, was standing the heat. And I wished Mom could have a chance to come to a lake like this and get cooled off—only it was hot here too today. I could imagine her sitting in this pretty green-and-white boat with Charlotte Ann and Dad and with me steering and roaring fast out across the blue water.
Dragonfly came dashing back with a red safety cushion.
Big Jim stooped over and unwound the starter cord, which I had already coiled around the starter disk of the motor so as to be ready to give a quick sharp pull the very second we were out in deep water.
“You can’t go with that starter cord!” Big Jim said and held it up.
“Hey!” I said. “Let me have it. We’re in a hurry!”
“Oh no, you’re not!” Big Jim argued. He pulled out of his pocket a round piece of wood about five inches long and quick made a special knot in the end of the starter cord and tied the cord to the middle of the stick.
“There you are,” he said. “Now if anything happens and this cord falls into the water, it will float, with this piece of wood tied to the end to hold it up.”
Well, that was the end of the roll call, and in a minute we were off, just as Big Jim called to us to hurry back because we were all going to visit an Indian cemetery before supper.
“I don’t see any sense in taking all those things along every time we go out,” Dragonfly complained, and I agreed with him until a little later.
It was a great ride and felt just as I thought it would, and I wished it could have lasted a long time. Soon, though, we rounded a bend in the lake and started zipping along the shore toward the resort where we were to get the minnows. Straight ahead of me, I could see a neat little rustic log cabin, which most of us saw at the same time and started talking about.
“There’s Santa’s cabin,” Little Jim said. “Look! He’s painted his boathouse green!”
Santa, you know, was the big man who had invited us to come North in the first place to camp on his property.
“Yeah,” Poetry yelled above the sound of the motor, “he’s painted the inside green and white both—we saw it last night. That’s where the kidnapper had the little Ostberg girl.”
That started me thinking of the exciting time Poetry and I had had last night.
We took turns yelling to Little Jim and Dragonfly all the different things that had happened—how Poetry and I had got up in the middle of the night and with our flashlights had sneaked out of our tent and down to the boat-house, because earlier last evening we thought we’d heard something inside.
“You know what I wish?” Poetry yelled to me.
I yelled back, “What?”
“I wish we’d got a good look at his face so we could maybe help the police find him. He’s pretty sure to be hiding out up here somewhere.”
“I wish I had been with you last night,” Little Jim said. His small, mouselike, innocent face had a tense look on it, and he was gripping the stick in his hand so tight the knuckles showed white.
“What’d you have done?” Dragonfly, who was sitting in the prow of the boat, yelled to him.
And Little Jim said, “I’d have socked him with this stick.”
I looked at him and, remembering how he loved everybody and didn’t like to see anything or anybody get hurt, I was surprised.
But then he said in one of the fiercest voices I’d ever heard him use, “Anybody that’d treat a helpless little girl like that ought to be socked.”
Dragonfly said, “Aw, you wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
Little Jim got a set look on his face, gripped his stick tighter in one hand and the side of the boat with the other, and said, “I say I’d have socked him!” He raised his stick and whammed it down on the gunwale right close to where Dragonfly was sitting.
“Hey!” Dragonfly yelled, “I’m no kidnapper!”
We steered close to Santa’s dock, then I swerved the boat so that we went swishing past and started a lot of rolling waves toward his shore. Then we zipped on up the shoreline toward the resort where we were going to get the minnows for Barry.
I noticed that Poetry had his hand on the pocket of his khaki shirt where his clue was—the piece of lens that we both had decided was from somebody’s broken glasses.
Dragonfly, who had been looking toward the green-painted boathouse, asked, “How’d you know the little Ostberg girl was in that boathouse?”
“’Cause we found a girl’s scarf up there where the kidnapper’s car was stuck in the sand, and it had fresh green paint and white paint on it.”
We were nearly there. We steered toward the dock of the resort, not knowing that we were about to have another experience that would start us to thinking even harder about the kidnapper.
3
The minute the resort owner saw our boat coming toward his long dock, he stood up from where he’d been sitting in the shade of an oak tree and came wobbling out to the dock to meet us, waving his arm to let me know on which side of the dock he wanted us to put our boat.
“He wants us on the opposite side from which the wind blows,” Poetry said.
As I shoved the steering handle in the right direction, the green-and-white boat swerved in a wide curve, and we came gliding up right to where we were supposed to—almost.
I was coming in pretty fast, not realizing maybe how fast we’d been coming.
“Cut the motor off!” Poetry yelled to me.
I did, quickly shoving the speed control lever to the left as far as it would go. I was trying to tilt the whole motor forward quick, the way you’re supposed to when you’re coming into shallow water and don’t want the propeller to strike the bo
ttom, which wouldn’t be good for it and which a good boatman never lets it do.
The lake must have been more shallow right there than I realized, because even before it had happened I realized it was going to, and it was too late. My hand on the steering handle felt what was happening at the same time I heard it, and I knew my propeller down there in the water had struck the bottom of the lake before I had shut off the motor.
I quick tilted the motor forward far enough to lift the propeller off the bottom and out of the water too, just as the prow, where Dragonfly was sitting, struck the sandy shore instead of the dock.
Dragonfly yelled, “For land’s sake! Watch where you’re going!”
“For the land’s sake, is right,” Poetry yelled, trying to be funny.
“Watch what you’re doing!” Little Jim yelled to Dragonfly, just as Dragonfly stood up.
As the boat struck the sandy beach, Dragonfly lost his balance and tumbled forward and sideways. He landed half in the water and half out. The parts of him not getting wet in the very shallow water were his hands, head, and shoulders, and also his feet, which were up in the air.
Dragonfly sneezed, as he always does when he smells anything he is allergic to and also most any other time. But he was a good sport. He squished himself out of the water, grinned, and said to all of us, “The water’s fine.” Then he pulled his wet bandana out of his wet hip pocket and wiped his face with it.
“What can I do for you boys?” the resort owner said to us.
We told him, and pretty soon we were all out of the boat watching him get the minnows for us. He kept them in a big cement tank filled with running water. It was in an open pavilion with only a roof over the tank, so there would be shade and lots of air.
I never saw so many minnows in my life. It was fun watching the resort owner dip a long wooden-handled net into the tank and scoop up several dozen different kinds and carefully pick out the chubs, letting them slip into our minnow pail. Chubs were the kind Barry wanted.
Just as the man was counting out the last five or six minnows, Little Jim, who was squeezed in between Poetry and me, with Dragonfly on my other side, all of a sudden looked up from watching the wiggling, squirming, slippery minnows in the net and said, “There’s somebody else coming for minnows.”
I looked where he was looking and saw what he saw. A big white boat with a powerful outboard motor propelling it was coming toward the dock.
The stranger acted as if he knew exactly how to run a motorboat. He swerved around the end of the long dock, shut off his motor right away, tilted it forward to save the propeller from striking the bottom, and in almost no time was standing up, wrapping his anchor rope around one of the dock posts, and climbing out.
He didn’t want any minnows but some gasoline instead. He called up to us and said, “I see you’ve got gasoline drums up there against the garage. I’d like to have some for my boat.”
“Sure!” the resort man called. “Take your can over and help yourself! Be through here in a minute!”
In a minute we were finished. Poetry paid for the minnows, and the four of us followed the footpath down to the dock.
On the way, Poetry whispered to me and said, “He’s wearing dark glasses.”
And I said, “What of it? I wish I had some. That sun has a terrible glare to it.”
“Sh!” Poetry said in a mysterious whisper, which somehow sent a scared feeling through me, and I knew what he meant.
Right away my mind was as alive as a pailful of minnows, with all kinds of ideas leaping and wiggling and slithering over each other—some of the ideas getting all tangled up with a lot of other ideas.
I always hated to have Poetry think of things first, though, so I said again, “Dark glasses? What of it?”
“What of what?” Dragonfly asked.
And I said, “The man up there getting gasoline for his motorboat is wearing dark glasses.”
“What of it?” said Dragonfly. “I’ll bet they’re restful to his eyes. I’ll bet if I had a pair I wouldn’t have so much eyestrain and wouldn’t sneeze so much.”
“Whyn’t you buy a pair?” Little Jim asked.
Then I remembered that Dragonfly’s folks didn’t have much money and that a real good pair of dark glasses, if they had ground lenses, maybe would cost a lot.
Before we got to our boat, the man with the dark glasses had his can filled and was hurrying back down to his own boat, which he’d tied to the dock post.
Since our boat had been beached, instead of docked, it took us a little while to get it un beached. But the stranger was in his boat right away, rowing out a little to where it would be safe to start his motor without the propeller’s striking on the bottom.
“Let me run the boat back,” Poetry said. And as soon as he could, he stepped in and sat his big self down in the stern like a king on a throne.
Little Jim was last to get in. Then he spoke up in a commanding voice, which sounded funny for him, and said, “Hold it! Wait for the roll call!”
“We’ve had it!” Dragonfly said. “Get in and let’s get going. I want to see that Indian graveyard.”
Pretty soon we were all in. Little Jim and I grabbed the oars and started rowing us out toward deep water. Poetry had the starter rope coiled around the starter disk and was waiting to give the rope a sharp pull as soon as we were out far enough.
I was glad to be sitting beside Little Jim, because for some reason he was a very likeable little guy. I liked the way he handled his oar. It also felt good to tell him how to do it and have him believe me and do exactly what I told him to and do it exactly right.
Just then there was a roar, and I looked out beyond the dock to where the man with the dark glasses was. He’d started his motor, and his boat was vrooming away real fast.
“I wish we could have a boat race,” Poetry said. “I’ll bet our boat could outrun his.”
“Don’t you dare try it!” I said.
Little Jim piped up and said, “If it was a terribly long race, and we had to have our gas tank filled a lot of times, I’ll bet we’d lose. We only got a two-gallon can, and he just bought five gallons.”
Dragonfly, trying to be funny and not being, said, “But our can’s new, and his is an old battered up one with nearly all the paint off it.”
Little Jim, also feeling mischievous, said, “But his shirt had more paint on it than ours do.”
For some reason I jumped as if I was shot when he said that. “What?” I said.
And Little Jim said, “Yeah, his shirt had green paint on its right sleeve.”
Poetry looked at me, and I looked sort of waveringly into his bluish eyes, and I knew he and I were thinking the same thing.
I said to Poetry, “We’re out far enough. Give her a whirl. Let’s see if we can catch up with him and see if there’s any white paint on his shirt too.” I held my forefinger up to my lips to let him know I was thinking about the kidnapper who’d been in Santa’s boathouse last night.
Poetry already had the gasoline shutoff valve open as far as it would turn, and the air vent open, and the speed control lever pushed over to the place where it said “Start.”
When I said, “Give her a whirl,” Poetry quickly got set, with his right hand on the five-inch-long piece of wood Big Jim had tied on the end of the starter cord, and gave a quick sharp pull. And just like a boy ought to get out of bed in the early morning when his dad calls him, that motor leaped into noisy life and let out a terrific roar, and we were off.
That is, we thought we were. The motor was running terribly fast, and Poetry was pushing the steering handle around so the boat would turn and we could go racing after the man in the other boat to see where he went and if he had green and white paint on his shirt.
But we weren’t moving. We were just sitting still out there. In fact, we were drifting toward the dock and the shallow water again. Also, right that second a little breeze whisked across the lake, and our boat swung around sideways. And in spite of the motor’s wh
irring fiercely, and Poetry’s shoving the steering handle this way and that, nothing happened!
What on earth! I wondered, and so said we all, only each of us used different words. And all the time the man in the big white boat was roaring up the lake to a place where, pretty soon, his boat would round the bend in the shore and he would disappear.
Poetry looked at me and I at him, and he said to me, “You broke a sheer pin back there when you didn’t stop the motor soon enough and tilt it forward soon enough to keep it from hitting bottom.”
I knew it was true and that, even though the motor was racing like a house afire, the little propeller down there in the water wasn’t even moving.
“You mean we’ll have to row back?” I asked.
“We will.” Poetry shoved the speed control lever to the left as far as it would go and shut off the air vent and the gasoline shutoff valve. And that’s how come we were very glad Big Jim had called the roll and made us put the oars in the boat.
“It’s a great punishment for spilling minnows,” Little Jim said, grinning and grunting at the same time, as he and I sat beside each other, pulling away on our two oars while Dragonfly and Poetry rode free.
“Poetry ought to have to help.” Dragonfly spoke up from behind Little Jim and me. “He broke the rest hour rules the same as Bill did.”
Little Jim and I sat facing Poetry, who, as you know, was in the stern in front of us where the motor was. Poetry and I kept our eyes looking straight into each other’s. We both knew we were thinking the same thing—that the man with the dark glasses, whose boat right that very minute was rounding the bend in the shore, was maybe the kidnapper of the little Ostberg girl.
Poetry spoke up then and asked all of us, “Did any of you guys notice whether the boat had any name on it?”
None of us had noticed any name, which meant maybe there hadn’t been any. If there had been, it might mean that the boat belonged to some resort, and most resort owners had their boats all named the same name as their resort and also had a number beside the resort name, so as to identify the boat.
“I’ll bet it was his own boat,” Little Jim said.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18 Page 2