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 bottom, 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 whirring 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.
“Privately owned, anyway,” Poetry said with a puckered forehead. “He probably stole it.”
Little Jim scowled at that, because he never liked to think anybody was bad until he found out for sure he was.
We rowed along. Little Jim and I pulled steadily toward the bend in the lake. When we got there, it’d be Dragonfly’s and Poetry’s turn to row.
“Who said I had to row?” Dragonfly asked.
I looked back over my shoulder and saw him lean his skinny self back and raise his spindly legs and put his feet up on the sides of the boat and yawn.
Then he said, “It’s wonderful to breathe all this fresh air and not have to sneeze,” which it was, but right that minute he sneezed.
Maybe it was because he had leaned back and had looked up toward the sun and that had maybe made tears in his eyes, some of which had started down on the inside of his nose and had tickled him and made him sneeze.
“You need dark glasses,” I said to Dragonfly.
That reminded Poetry of one of the 101 poems that he knew by heart and was always quoting, and it was:
Once a trap was baited with a piece of
cheese,
It tickled so a little mouse, it almost made
him sneeze;
An old rat said, “There’s danger, be careful
where you go.”
“Nonsense,” said the other. “I don’t think
you know.”
So he walked in boldly, nobody in sight,
First, he took a nibble, then he took a bite;
Snap the trap together, close as quick as a
wink,
Catching mousey fast there, ’cause he didn’t
think.
I’d learned that poem last year, and I liked it.
“Dragonfly’s the mouse that got caught,” I said.
And Poetry said, “This boat was the mousetrap, and a free fast ride was the cheese he bit on, and the oars are the jaws of the trap.”
Little Jim said with a grin in his voice, “Who was the old rat that said, ‘Danger, be careful where you go’?”
“Hey!” Dragonfly yelled out all of a sudden, “Be careful where you go!”
At the same second I felt leaves swishing across the back of my red head, and right away we were in the shade of an overhanging tree along the shore.
It was a good place to change oarsmen. Since Poetry was too heavy to sit side by side with anybody as light as Dragonfly—then the boat wouldn’t be balanced right—we decided to let him row by himself. Little Jim and I sat where Poetry had been, and Dragonfly stayed where he was.
The rest of the way to our dock and camp, Poetry and I kept looking each other in the eyes. I knew that as soon as we got to shore, he would have a secret to tell me, and that it would be something very important he had thought up about the kidnapper and how to catch him.
The gang was there on the dock, waiting and yelling and razzing us because we had to row back, and wanting to know why. Circus, who had been practicing the loon call, kept calling over and over again to us in a long, trembling high-pitched wail that sounded even more like a loon than a loon does.
Everybody was in a hurry to get started to the Indian graveyard when Barry, who was in his tent, came out with some letters in his hand, which he’d been writing. He said, “Any of you boys have any letters or cards to send to your folks? I’ll have to run these into town right away if they are to make the late afternoon train.”
He looked around at different ones of us and acted surprised when nearly all of us, even little red-haired Tom Till, had written cards or letters to our folks—even Dragonfly, whose handwriting was terrible and who hated to write anything he didn’t have to.
When Barry took our letters, I noticed that Big Jim gave him two letters to mail. I managed to be real close to Barry when Big Jim handed the letters to him, and one of the envelopes was a sort of pinkish color, and I knew it wasn’t written to his parents. I knew also whom it was written to. She was maybe one of the nicest girls in all the Sugar Creek territory and was our minister’s daughter, whose name was Sylvia.
Right away Big Jim had his back turned to Barry and was whistling a mixed-up tune of some kind. He had a stick in his hand and was stooped over, poking it into the ashes of our dead fire, where we’d cooked our dinner that day.
The fire was dead because we’d put it out. It’s not safe to leave any fire anywhere in any woods. In fact, it’s against the law to even start one in some places, or the whole dry forest might catch fire and burn up thousands of dollars’ worth of timber and people’s houses and wild animals and everything.
For some reason I got a stick real quick and helped Big Jim poke around in the dead ashes, because I had also handed Barry two letters, and one of them had been to my parents.
“You boys are on your own for a while,” Barry said. “I’ll meet you at the cemetery. Just follow the old sandy road from Santa’s cabin up the hill and past the fire warden’s house, and you can’t miss it. About a half mile up that road you’ll come to an opening on the right side, and there you are.”
Then Barry was gone in the station wagon, which is what we’d all come up North on our vacation in, and we were left alone, which is what we wanted anyway. It is ten times more fun to have fun when you are alone with your gang than when a grown-up person is with you, doing what is called “supervising” your play.
Of course, we all liked Barry plenty, but a gang needs to be by itself part of the time if it wants its fun to be fun.
In minutes we would all be tumbling along together toward Santa’s cabin, past the boat-house, where Poetry and I had heard strange noises the night before, and on up the hill to where the kidnapper’s car had been stuck in the sand, and where Poetry found the piece of broken glass.
Then we’d go past the fire warden’s house, where, I remembered, the police had made a plaster of paris cast of the kidnapper’s tire tracks. And then we would hike on the rest of the way, following the same sandy road the kidnapper had followed last night till we came to the Indian cemetery.
There we’d look around at the tombstones and see the different things and tell ghost stories and maybe pick some ripe raspberries—there might not be any raspberries, but then there might be, I thought. The graveyard we sometimes had our gang meetings in at Sugar Creek was full of weeds and had sumac and blue vervain and wild roses and wild raspberries and, earlier in the year, wild strawberries. And sometimes we’d find a bumblebees’ nest and fight the bees and kill them and get a lot of honey.
Boy oh boy! It felt good to be all alone with nobody except just the gang.
“We’ll have a gang meeting in the cemetery,” Big Jim said. “There’s something very important to vote on. Remember, school is going to start in about two weeks after we get home again.”
“School!”
Nearly all of us yelled at Big Jim at the same time. What did he want to spoil our vacation for—reminding us of school?
And then we were on the way, running and jumping and playing leapfrog and laughing and having fun. I noticed that Big Jim had his pocketknife in his hand and was looking at the different trees as we went past. For some reason I had mine out too and was helping Big Jim look for a beech tree, which is the kind of tree you carve anybody’s initials on.
We didn’t find any, though, but we did walk past and through what seemed like a whole forest of white birch. But it was against good campers’ etiquette to spoil the whitish, silvery bark on a birch tree, so we didn’t stop to carve anybody’s initials.
Every now and then Circus would let out a loony loon call, and Dragonfly would sneeze, and Little Jim would sock something with his stick, and Poetry would start a poem and be shushed up by some of us. We all liked Poetry, but we didn’t like poetry the way he did.
All the gang knew about Big Jim’s thinking our minister’s daughter was almost the nicest girl in the whole Sugar Creek territory. She was pretty and polite and studied hard and could throw a snowball as straight and as hard as any boy. She was also an honest-to-goodness Christian and wasn’t ashamed of it and acted as if she’d rather be a real one than be the queen of anybody’s country.
I kept on helping Big Jim try to find a beech tree—and was wondering how long it would take me to grow a little black fuzz on my upper lip like Big Jim had on his, and wishing I would hurry up and grow as big as he was.
Pretty soon Big Jim stopped and looked at a pretty silvery white birch tree’s bark, and I knew he was wishing it wasn’t against good woodsmen’s etiquette to carve initials on white birch trees.
Little Jim had been walking along close to Big Jim and me as though maybe he was looking for a beech tree himself. But I knew he wasn’t—not because he wanted to carve anybody’s initials on one, anyway. He was awfully smart, though, that little brown-haired guy, and sometimes he got a mischievous streak, which surprised everybody because he was almost always kind of serious.
He had a mischievous grin on his small face right that second, and I guessed he was thinking of something. Sure enough, he was.
He stopped beside Big Jim and me and looked at the silver bark of the birch tree and said in Big Jim’s direction, “It’s a very pretty bark, isn’t it? It’s all Sylvia colored!”
Then he gave a terrific whack with his stick at a cylinder-shaped brown cattail that grew right close by and was off on the run to where the rest of the gang were, up ahead of us. His short legs pumped like a small boy’s on a tricycle, and his brown curls shone in the sunlight like the brown flowers at the top of a long cattail stalk.