8
I WAS glad there was a little wind blowing so that the waves of the lake were washing against the shore, and also that Dragonfly snored so we wouldn’t be heard if we kept real quiet.
In a few jiffies, Poetry and I had our shoes on, and our trousers and sweaters, and had worked our way out through the tent opening in the front, and with our flashlights we were sneaking up along the beach toward Santa’s cabin and his boathouse.
Suddenly I stopped. The whole idea seemed absolutely crazy to me. I said, “You don’t think for a minute that any kidnapper would be dumb enough to hide out in a boathouse that wasn’t any more than fifty yards from where somebody actually lived, do you?”
“Who said anything about any kidnapper hiding out?” Poetry said. “He’s maybe a hundred miles away from here by now. But he could have left the Ostberg girl there, couldn’t he?”
“Why?” I said, and he stopped and hissed in my ear, “Not so loud!” We’d been following a little footpath we knew about, from having been there the year before.
I was trembling inside, maybe being a little cold, and at the same time couldn’t see any sense to Poetry’s thinking maybe the kidnapper was in that boathouse with the Ostberg girl. It didn’t make sense.
“You’re scared!” Poetry accused me, and I said I wasn’t, but only thought the idea was crazy.
“It can’t be,” Poetry said. “Listen—” Then he told me what he’d been thinking, and it was, “What if the kidnapper, who, as the paper said, is supposed to be a lumberman, was looking for an empty cabin up here somewhere to hide out in, and suppose he drove off onto a side road, to dodge the police who were maybe looking for his car, and suppose he got off on the little half-obliterated road that leads to Santa’s cabin which nobody hardly ever uses and suppose he found the boathouse with the door open, and then just suppose that he put the girl in there, gagged and tied up, like kidnappers do, and then suppose that while he was there, Santa with us boys with him came roaring up to the dock in his boat. Wouldn’t the kidnapper be scared, and maybe lock the girl in, and beat it himself, and—”