Here’s what I’d planned to do:
You see, while Circus was slamming that door and shutting Old Hook-nose inside, and I was watching him with my binoculars, I’d seen John’s white boat which was beached there at the lake and had noticed that the outboard motor, which was tilted forward in the stern, had a beautiful black shroud, and was the same kind our camp director had, and which I’d been learning how to run during the past week. It had a powerful seven-horsepower motor and could go terribly fast on a lake. If there was anything I’d rather do than anything else, it was to sit in the stern of a boat, with one hand on the rubber grip of the steering handle, and, facing the prow, go roaring out across the water with fast wind blowing into my freckled face and also feeling the shoreline flash past very fast.
I also knew that the water in many of the big blue-watered lakes up here in the North was kept fresh because the Mississippi river flowed through them, and also flowed from one lake to another. I’d studied the map of the territory and knew that if we could use that boat and motor, we could go roaring up the lake terribly fast, pass—in three or four minutes—the old Indian cemetery, and a little later, come to a place where the Mississippi flowed out of this lake into a long narrow channel and into the other very large lake on which we had our tents pitched. Once we got into that other lake we’d race up the shore, and get back to camp in less than half the time it would take us to hike through the woods, carrying a big heavy sack of fish.
We could leave John Till locked up in the icehouse while we were gone, and hurry back with Big Jim and maybe some other help, and before long we’d have John Till really captured. After that, we’d tell the police what we’d done and then we could claim the reward for finding the thousands and thousands of dollars which the little Ostberg girl’s daddy had paid to the kidnapper.
In a jiffy almost, I was hurrying past the icehouse with my gunny sack of fish. I stopped for a split-jiffy to listen, but everything was pretty quiet. I noticed that the heavy door was really strong and I didn’t see any way John Till could get out. There also was only one place where he could even see out and that was through a crack on the side next to the lake.
In a jiffy all of us were in the boat, and had shoved off and rowed out to deep enough water to make it safe to start the motor without its propeller striking on the bottom.
I was pretty nervous, and also scared and brave at the same time. It wasn’t our boat or motor, but we weren’t stealing it, but were amateur detectives using the criminal’s boat to help get some help to help capture him.
It was a terribly pretty sunshiny day, with only a few scattered white clouds in the sky. In another minute we’d be gone. Poetry was in the middle, on a seat by himself, Dragonfly and Little Jim in one right in front of me, and Circus had a narrow seat up in the prow.
“I don’t see why you don’t let me run it,” Poetry complained. “After all, I taught you how to run it in the first place.”
“SH!” I said, “can’t you co-operate?” which is a word my pop sometimes uses back at Sugar Creek when he wants me to obey him. “You keep your eye on the gunny sack there between your feet.”