2
BUT say, it was a queer feeling I had in my mind as we left the boathouse and went up the narrow, hardly-ever-used road to the top of the hill and followed that road through a forest of jack pine and along the edge of the little clearing. I was remembering what exciting things happened here the very first night we’d come up North on our camping trip. Poetry was remembering it too, ’cause he said in a ghost-like voice so as to try to make the atmosphere of Dragonfly’s initiation seem even more mysterious to him, “Right here, at this sandy place in the road, is where the car was stuck in the sand, and right over here behind these bushes is where Bill and I were crouching half scared to death, watching him.”
“Yeah,” I said, “and he had the little Ostberg girl he’d kidnapped right in the back seat of the car all the time and we didn’t know it for sure.”
“How’d he get his car unstuck?” Dragonfly wanted to know, even though the whole Sugar Creek Gang had probably been told it a dozen times, every time Poetry and I had told it to them. So I said to Dragonfly, “Well, his wheels were spinning and spinning in the sand and he couldn’t make his car go forward, but it would rock forth and back, so he got out and let the air out of his back tires till they were almost half flat. That made them wider and increased traction, and then when he climbed back into his car and stepped on the gas, why he pulled out of the sand and went lickety-sizzle right on up this road.”
“You going to initiate me here?” Dragonfly wanted to know, and I started to say, “Yes,” but Poetry said, “No, a little farther up, where we found the little girl herself.”
We walked along, in the terribly sultry afternoon weather. Pretty soon we turned off to the side of the road and came out into a little clearing that was surrounded by tall pine trees. I was remembering how right here Poetry and I had heard the little girl gasping out half-smothered cries and with our flashlights shining right on her, we’d found her lying wrapped up in an Indian blanket.
“She was lying right here,” Poetry said, “—right here where we’re going to initiate you.” Poetry’s ordinarily duck-like voice changed to a sound like a growling bear’s voice as he talked and sounded very fierce. There really wasn’t anything to worry about, though, ’cause we knew the police had caught the kidnapper and he was in jail somewhere, and the pretty little golden-haired Ostberg girl was safe and sound with her parents again back in St. Paul.
“But they never did find the ransom money,” Poetry said, which was the truth, “and nobody knows where it is. But whoever finds it gets a thousand dollar reward—a whole thousand dollars!”
“You think maybe it’s buried somewhere?” Dragonfly asked with a serious face.