That woke Poetry up and he groaned a couple times and then really woke up and said, “Talk about big mosquitoes. Did you ever hear the story about the two big mosquitoes who had a noisy argument?”
“It sounds like we are on the midway of a mosquito circus right now,” Dragonfly said.
“I mean it,” Poetry began, “—there was a real argument between two big mosquitoes who lived up here in the Chippewa Forest. One night two of them were flying around, looking for somebody to eat, and they found Dragonfly lying asleep out on the beach. So one of them said, ‘Let’s pick him up and fly him home and eat him there.’”
“‘Naw,’ the other one said, ‘let’s don’t. Let’s eat him right here, ’cause if we do take him home, the big ones will just take him away from us.’”
We made Dragonfly put on some lotion and pretty soon he was asleep again, but I was wide awake, thinking about the kidnapper. Right that second Poetry nudged me and said, “Bill—Sh!”
I rolled over close to his face, and he said, “I’ve got an idea.”
Right away I was wide awake, and he said, “Remember the time I had a hunch back at Sugar Creek, and you and I got up and went out in the night and the gang captured a robber, digging for buried treasure down by the old sycamore tree.”
“Well?” I said, and he said, “I’ve got that same kind of a hunch tonight. I still think that screech owl wasn’t what we heard. Why didn’t we open the boathouse and look in?”
I wondered that myself, now that he had mentioned it.
I heard Poetry’s zipper on his sleeping bag zip a long zip. All of a sudden my heart began to beat faster, and I knew he and I were going to get up and go down to that boathouse and investigate. There wouldn’t be any real danger, but if there was any little girl in there, we could probably hear her, and we could wake up Santa, or Barry and the whole gang. And if there wasn’t anything to our idea, then we still wouldn’t seem ridiculous to anyone except ourselves.