“May we look inside your boathouse a minute?” Poetry asked, and Santa said, “Certainly, go right in,” which we did, and looked around a little.
Poetry acted very mysterious, like he was thinking about something very important, while he frowned with his fat forehead, and looked at different things such as the cot in the farther end, the shavings and sawdust on the floor, and the carpenter’s tools above the work bench—which were chisels, screwdrivers, saws, planes and also hammers and nails; also Poetry examined the different kinds of boards made out of beautifully grained wood.
“You boys like to hold this saw and hammer a minute?” Santa asked us, and handed a hammer to me and a saw handle to Dragonfly, which we took, not knowing why.
“That’s the hammer and that’s the saw the kidnapper used the night he was building the gravehouse in the Indian cemetery,” Santa said, and I looked and felt puzzled, till he explained, saying, “The police found them the night you boys caught him.”
“But—how did they get there?” I asked, but Poetry answered me by saying, “Don’t you remember, Bill Collins, that we found this boathouse door wide open that night, with the latch hanging? The kidnapper stole ’em.”
I looked at the hammer in my hand, and remembered, and tried to realize that the hammer handle I had in my hand right that minute was the same one that, one night last week, had been in the wicked hand of a very fierce man who had used it in an Indian cemetery to help him build a gravehouse. Also, the saw in Poetry’s hand was the one the man had used to saw pieces of lumber into the right lengths.
“And here,” Santa said, lifting a piece of canvas from something in the corner, “is the little, nearly-finished gravehouse. The lumber was stolen from here also. The police brought it out this morning. They’ve taken fingerprints from the saw and hammer.”
“Why on earth did he want to build an Indian gravehouse?” I asked, looking at the pretty little house that looked like a longish chicken coop, like we have at home at Sugar Creek, only twice as long, almost. Dragonfly spoke up then and said, “He maybe was going to bury the little Ostberg girl there.”
But Poetry shook his head, “I think he was going to bury the ransom money there, where nobody in the world would guess to look.”
Well, we had to get going with our game of Robinson Crusoe, which we did, all of us feeling fine to think that last week we had had a chance to catch the kidnapper, even though the ransom money was still missing.