He was running awful fast for a barrel-shaped boy, and I was having a hard time keeping up with him as we swished along down that sandy lane. We knew the firewarden didn’t live very far up that lane on account of we had been here the year before and knew that his house was the nearest one that had a telephone—Santa not having one in his cabin, on account of not wanting his vacation spoiled by people calling him up. If he needed a telephone, he could always go to where there was one.
“Wait,” I said to Poetry all of a sudden. “Maybe we’re on a wild goose chase, maybe we’re crazy to waste a lot of good sleeping time chasing an imaginary kidnapper. How do we know that was a kidnapper’s car? What if it was just anybody who got stuck in the sand? He wouldn’t appreciate having policemen stop him and ask a lot of questions!”
“It wasn’t just anybody!” Poetry said. “That guy was down there in the boathouse less than a half hour ago, and there was a girl there, too, see?”
Poetry stopped long enough to pull out of his pocket and show me something he had picked up back there where the car had been, and it was a girl’s yellow scarf!
“But that could be any woman’s or any girl’s scarf,” I said.
“It could not,” Poetry disagreed with me with a very sure voice, and also an excited one, “—see that green paint on it—and look! Here’s some white paint also.” Well, I remembered Santa had been using green and white paint in that boathouse that very afternoon, and remembering that put wings on my feet, and I ran like a deer up that winding sandy road toward the firewarden’s house and the telephone.
9
IF anybody had seen Poetry and me swishing along down that narrow winding road, following along in the bobbing path of our flashlights, our breath coming in quick short pants, they might have thought we were crazy. It was one of the crookedest roads I’d ever seen in my life, and would you believe it, Poetry couldn’t resist puffing a part of a poem as we raced along toward the firewarden’s cabin. The poem started out like this:
“There was a crooked man, he walked a crooked mile;