“The crazy goof!” Poetry said to me in my left ear, and I said to him in his right one, “He’s cutting big wide circles,” which is what whoever it was was doing.
It seemed silly for anybody to do what he was doing; so, because it was a crazy night anyway, and so many crazy things had happened on our fishing trip, Poetry and I squeezed our crazy way through the tent flap and went down to the dock to see what on earth anybody was doing out there going round and round like that. And then all of a sudden, Poetry gasped breathily and said, “Hey, there isn’t anybody in that boat. It’s empty!”
Just that second the boat came out into the middle of a big wide silver path which lakes have on moonlight nights, when you look out across them in the direction of the moon. And sure enough, Poetry was right. I could hardly believe my surprised eyes, but in that silver path was a row boat about the size of the one Bob Till had gone away in, cutting big, terribly fast wide circles, going round and round and round. The motor sounded exactly like the big black shrouded two-cylinder one I knew how to run so well and which Bob had taken from Santa’s dock.
It didn’t make sense—a boat out there without anybody in it.
And then, Poetry said something else, which was, “Hey, it’s getting closer! The wind is blowing it toward the shore. It gets closer every time it makes a circle!”—which I noticed it was.
What to do or whether to do anything, was the question. Poetry and I stood there on the dock in our pajamas, not slapping at the mosquitoes, on account of when the wind blows, like it was right that second, mosquitoes’ smallish wings can’t control their flight, and they stop looking for boys to bite.
Whirr! ... Roar! ... Whizzz! ... and also Plop! ... plop! ... plop! ...—the motor doing the whirring and the whizzing, and the bottom of the boat doing the plop-plop-plopping on the waves.
“It’s empty!” we said to each other, and it looked like it was, for sure.
“Maybe whoever was in it fell out. Maybe it was John Till and he was drunk and fell out and the boat just keeps on running,” I said. I knew a motor could do that, and if the steering handle was set, it would maybe stay set, and the motor would keep on going until it ran out of gas, or until it rammed into an island or a shore somewhere.... Then, almost before anything could happen if there had been anything to, that boat straightened out a little, like the motor’s steering handle had swung around—which they do sometimes when nobody holds onto them—and the boat came roaring straight toward our dock at a terrific rate of speed.... In another half minute maybe it would crash ker-wham-splinter-smash into the end of the dock where we were—right there by the flagpole. It was coming toward us as straight as a torpedo and almost as fast, I thought, just like this was a war and somebody had shot a torpedo straight for where we were.
And then, a second later while my mind was whirling, not believing it could or would happen, the sharp prow of that big white boat with the fierce racing motor on the other end of it, struck with a crash that jarred and shook the dock, glanced sidewise, swerved up along its edge and ran ker-squash-jam into the sandy shore, while at the same time or just before, the propeller, down in the water, struck the shallow sandy bottom, which made the motor tilt forward.