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 down his bottle of orange pop on the table and swallowed and said, “The boat-house? Yes, I gave it a new coat yesterday. I’ve been doing a little work inside the boathouse 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.”
Then Santa got an odd 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: “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. 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 sinful 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 I said so.
Santa said, “He’s still in the hospital. He’ll be thrilled to death to see you boys. He’s a great little boy.”
He opened his cabin door to go out and lock the boathouse.
I looked at Poetry, and he looked at me, and we stared at each other.
Then Santa said, “Let’s all go. We’ll take a boat ride.”
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 boathouse door. “I must have locked it after all and forgotten I did it.”
We stopped while he shone the light on the Yale padlock on the door, and I saw it was locked.
Santa laughed. “Must be getting forgetful in my old age.” He turned, shot the flashlight all around, focusing it on the stumps out between us and the dock, then on the cottage and the chimney, and then on a hole in a hollow tree just above the boathouse.
And there, sitting in the hole, was a rust-red, blinking, long-eared screech owl, looking like an elderly 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. We’d been fooled by our own imaginations, because if there’s anything a girl sounds like when she is half crying in a high-pitched voice around 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.
All of us went to Santa’s dock and climbed into his boat, taking his flashlight and also a bright electric lantern as you are supposed to do when you are out on a lake in a boat at night, so you won’t run into some other boat and some other boat won’t run into you. We roared across the dark water, around the neck of land, and then in a little while back toward camp.
Later, Poetry and Dragonfly and Circus and I went into our own tent. There was 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 its being really chilly outside, as it is most every night in Paul Bunyan country.
“What on earth is that water pail doing in the center of the tent?” I asked. 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, knowing how mischievous he was, I said, “You’re crazy.” I started to take hold of the handle of the pail—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 I wouldn’t have believed it 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 maybe it would stay hot nearly all night to keep us warm.
I 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 as quiet as we could be for a while, which wasn’t very quiet. We could hear the rest of the gang—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 campfire.
In spite of having been scared by my own imagination, I was awfully sleepy, and 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 is better for a boy to do most of his praying when he is wide awake, 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 would be brave even though their little girl had been kidnapped. I also prayed for Snow-in-the-Face and maybe a few other things.
Our gang hardly ever prayed together, because the boys were bashful about doing it, but each one of us nearly always prayed by himself. Once in a while, though, we did pray together 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 mosquitoes buzzing around my face. I had mosquito lotion on, though, even on my ears. All of us had been very careful, as the directions on the bottle said, not to get any on our lips or too near our eyes.
I certainly was glad I hadn’t said I thought anybody had been kidnapped and might be in Santa’s boathouse. I didn’t want to seem ridiculous to anybody except to Poetry and myself. But I wished I had been right, because, as my dad once said, nobody likes to believe he is wrong, even when he is.
I drifted away into a half dream, and it seemed I could hear the washing of the lake wavelets on the shore, and they were mixed up with Dragonfly’s snoring. Also it seemed somebody was near me with a saw and was sawing wood, and the pile of sawdust was getting higher and higher until Poetry and I were standing ankle deep in it. 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, and I woke up. It was Dragonfly, twisting and turning in his sleep and slapping at his face and ears. So I asked him, “’S’matter?”
He answered back 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 repellent?”
And he said, “No, I’m allergic to it. It makes me sneeze!” Right that second he sneezed—twice.
I said, “You’re probably allergic to mosquitoes too.”
That woke Poetry up. 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 mosquitoes who had a noisy argument?”
“It sounds like we’re on the midway of a mosquito circus right now,” Dragonfly said.
“I mean it,” Poetry began. “There was a big argument between two mosquitoes who lived up here in the Chippewa Forest. One night the 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 not. Let’s eat him right here. If we take him home, the big ones will just take him away from us.’”
We made Dragonfly put on some lotion, and pretty soon he was asleep again. But now I was awake, thinking about the kidnapper.
Poetry nudged me and said, “Bill—sh!”
When I rolled over close to his face, he said, “I’ve got an idea.”
Right away I was wide awake.
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 a screech owl wasn’t what we heard. Why didn’t we open the boathouse and look in?”
I wondered that myself, now that he mentioned it.
I heard Poetry zip a long zip on his sleeping bag, and all of a sudden my heart began to beat faster. 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. 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 a little wind was blowing so that the waves of the lake were washing against the shore, and also that Dragonfly snored. We wouldn’t be heard if we kept real quiet.
Poetry and I put on our shoes, pants, and sweaters and worked our way out through the tent opening. Carrying our flashlights, we sneaked up along the beach toward Santa’s cabin and his boathouse.
Suddenly I stopped. The whole idea seemed absolutely crazy. 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.
He stopped me 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, maybe because I was a little cold. But also I couldn’t see any sense to Poetry’s thinking maybe the kidnapper had the Ostberg girl in that boathouse.
“You’re scared!” Poetry accused, and I said I wasn’t but only thought his idea was crazy
“It can’t be,” Poetry said. “Listen …” Then he told me what he’d been thinking. “What if the kidnapper, who, as the paper said, is supposed to be a lumberman, was looking for an empty cabin somewhere up here to hide out in, and suppose he drove off onto a side road to dodge the police who might be looking for his car. And suppose he got off on the little half-hidden 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 her, and tied her up, like kidnappers do. And then suppose that while he was there, Santa and us boys came roaring up to the dock in the 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 still because we were hurrying so fast. Pretty soon, when we were almost there, he stopped all of a sudden and said, “Sh!”
I was quiet because I’d heard a sound as plain as day myself. It was a car engine running somewhere. It sounded as if it was at the top of the hill above the boathouse. We knew there was a sandy road up there, because we’d been on it once ourselves.
“Somebody’s stuck in the sand,” Poetry said.
And it sure sounded like it. The engine 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, 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 close to the boathouse now. Poetry aimed his beam of light toward the door, and we both let out excited gasps. The boathouse door was wide open, and the hinge of the lock was hanging as though somebody had forced it open with a crowbar.
We flashed our lights around inside. Nobody was there, but a cot at the other end was messed up as if somebody had been lying on it. A pile of shavings was on the floor, and sawdust was scattered around under a carpenter’s workbench. On the wall above the workbench were a lot of tools such as screwdrivers, saws, and planes. Maybe Santa had 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, but I knew Poetry was right. Maybe we were already too late, and maybe we 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 license number, it might help the police to trail him—if he really was the kidnapper.
Up that hill we went, following the hardly-ever-used road. At the top we turned right and slipped along the edge of Santa’s woods, where we could barely see the path ahead. 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 new car. We sneaked up behind it. It had its taillights and parking lights on, and the driver was starting slowly, going forward a few feet, then backward, then forward, but not getting anywhere.
Already I was almost close enough to see the license plate, but I 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.” He started to go, then he whispered to me, “Down, Bill! Quick!”
Down we ducked and didn’t dare make a sound, because the car engine had stopped and the guy was opening his door and getting out. He made a dive for the back left wheel, and we heard him mumbling something that sounded like mad swear words.
I was glad that Little Jim wasn’t there. It always hurts him to hear anybody swear, because 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 certainIy didn’t want anybody to call out to that man in the automobile.
“What’s he doing?” I whispered in Poetry’s ear and didn’t need to ask, because 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!”
Sssssss …
It made me feel creepy, because if a man who wanted to get away quick was foolish enough to let air out of his tires, he must be insane.
In a minute the tire had stopped hissing, and the guy, still grunting and mumbling to himself as if he was terribly mad and also maybe a little scared, was down on his knees beside the other back tire. Right away there was another hissing noise.
Then the man stood up and made a dive for the front seat and started to rock the car again. He backed up, and started forward, and the wheels started spinning and—
“Hey!” Poetry and I said at the same time. “The car is moving! He’s getting away!”
He turned his flashlight on the back of the car to get the number, and it was a Minnesota plate. My mind took a picture of it quick, and I knew I’d never forget the number, but just to make sure, I kept saying it to myself, o
ver and over and over.
The second that new black car was out of that sandy place, it shot down the road like a bullet.
And there wasn’t a thing we could do. Not a thing, I thought, and wondered if the girl might be in the backseat and why on earth hadn’t we tried to rescue her if she was there?
We ran to 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 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. 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 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 road.
“Shine your light over here a minute,” I said.
I stooped over to pick up whatever it was, thinking it might be 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, “Wait! Let me see it!”
“It’s a piece of broken glass,” I said, but I 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?”
“’Cause it isn’t stained with weather or anything, which means it hasn’t been lying out here very long,” he said and tucked it in his pocket.
It wasn’t any time to argue, but I thought his detective ideas were nearly all imagination.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 7-12 Page 46