"Oh, please let us go!" begged Noodle. "I'll give you an ice cream cone if you do."
"Yes, and I'll give you two," said Toodle.
"No, sir-ee sir!" exclaimed the wolf, just as the coal man sometimes speaks before he brings in the ice. "I am going to take you off to jail," and away the wolf started with Toodle and Noodle.
Now, just about this time Crackie, the little girl beaver, had her wooden doll all dressed, and she thought she would start out to find her brothers. She asked some other boy and girl beavers, who were out playing after school, which way Toodle and Noodle had gone in their play-boat, and in this way Crackie started toward the make-believe shipwreck island. But she did not go in a boat—she swam, and carried her doll on her back so as not to wet her strawberry-box bonnet.
Crackie easily found the island, for she was a very smart little beaver girl, but at first she could not see her brothers. Then Crackie saw where the two boy beavers had started to gnaw down the hickory nut tree, and next she saw the tracks of the wolf, and she guessed what had happened.
"Oh, the bad wolf has my brothers!" said Crackie. "I am going to try to save them!"
So, without stopping to think that she, a little beaver girl, could not do much against a bad wolf, Crackie started out. And she had not gone very far before she came up behind a blackberry bush, on which strawberries happened to be growing, and on the other side of that bush sat the wolf, holding Toodle in one paw and Noodle in the other. The wolf had become tired and had stopped to rest.