When Poetry and I realized that we had to take a hike up the lake to a resort on the other side, all of a sudden the weather seemed terribly hot, much too hot for two boys to have to hike so far to get a pail of minnows. In fact, it wouldn’t be good for the minnows to stay in the pail all the way back without changing the water, the same as it is not good for boys not to have fresh air. All fish need plenty of oxygen.
“I’m sorry, boys,” Barry said, his one all-gold front tooth shining in the sunlight, “but there’ll be plenty of time. And besides, wasn’t there a rule about the afternoon rest period lasting until a certain time? And didn’t two boys break that rule? What do you say, gang?” He whirled around and asked Big Jim and Little Jim and Little Tom Till and Circus and Dragonfly.
Not a one of the gang answered at first, on account of all of us were very loyal to the rest of us, and nobody wanted anybody to be punished.
Then Dragonfly spoke up and said, “I think it’s a good idea if I can go along with them.”
He looked wistfully at my freckled face, then at Barry, just as Poetry said, “We could save time, and wouldn’t have to stop on the way back to change the water on the minnows, if we could take the boat and the outboard motor.”
The very thought sent a thrill up and down my spine. If there is anything I’d rather do than anything else, it is to sit in the stern of a boat with the steering handle of an outboard motor in my left hand and feel the vibrating rubber grip on the handle and hear the motor’s roar. I like the feel of the wind in my face, too, as the boat shoots out across the water with its sharp prow making a V-shaped path and with water spraying over the gunwale and spattering a little on my freckled face.
Boy, oh boy! If Barry would only let us! It would be wonderful if the minnows could be brought back in just maybe five minutes after they were put in the pail!
Barry looked from one to the other of us—at Poetry’s round, mischievous face, at my freckled and maybe excited face, and at Dragonfly’s thin face with his dragonfly like eyes. I noticed that Dragonfly’s eyes were squinting at things as if he had eyestrain and needed glasses. Then he sneezed and pulled out his big red handkerchief to stop the second and third sneezes by squeezing his nose shut and pressing hard against his upper lip at the same time.
Barry looked at Dragonfly and said to the three of us, “I believe there are a lot of wild-flowers along the shore, and you boys might stir up a lot of extra pollen walking, and that’d be hard on Dragonfly’s hay fever, so—well, go ahead, you three!”
Whew! I was glad we’d spilled the minnows!
Little Jim piped up and said, “It’d be hard on my hay fever to have to walk too if I had the hay fever. And if I had to be punished, I’d rather go in the boat too!”
Barry grinned at Little Jim and said, “All right, if you think you can stand the punishment.”
Little Jim said he could.
Pretty soon we were ready to go after the minnows. Now I hardly noticed the hot weather, even though right that minute the sky was like a big, upside-down, all-blue breakfast-food bowl that had a big round yellow hole in its bottom. Through that yellow hole a lot of fierce heat was pouring down on us and on the blue lake and all over the Paul Bunyan Playground, which was what people called that part of the North where we were. Paul Bunyan was an imaginary big lumberman who used to live up North. It was imaginary Paul Bunyan’s imaginary big blue ox, Babe, whose imaginary footprints formed all the big lakes in Minnesota.
Dragonfly, Poetry, Little Jim, and I were just ready to shove off and go roaring out across the lake when Big Jim yelled to us from the shore and said, “Wait a minute!” which we did. He came hurrying out to the end of the dock to where we were.
“You forgot the roll call.”
I was surprised, because we were going to be gone only thirty minutes maybe. I’d forgotten that that was one of Barry’s rules. He’d given us a list of things that he said were “standard” for anybody in a boat, and the whole gang had been memorizing the list. And here I was, forgetting it the very first day all on account of wanting to get going in a hurry. Every time any of us went out in the boat somebody “called the roll” to see if we had all of our equipment.
Big Jim looked at a slip of paper he had in his hand, which showed he wasn’t trusting his memory either, and read off the list of things for us, and we answered. It reminded me of our teacher at Sugar Creek School calling the roll of his seventeen pupils and we answering our names if we were there.
“Fire extinguisher!” Big Jim read.
Dragonfly said, “Present,” and held up an empty tin can, trying to be funny and giggling to make it sound funny, which it didn’t, but Dragonfly’s giggle did. There was a fire extinguisher on one of the big boats we used, but none of the small boats had any. The fire extinguisher was in case the outboard motor caught fire. It wouldn’t be any fun if you were far out on a big lake and your motor and boat caught fire and your boat burned out from under you.
“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.