He found a crooked six-pence beside a crooked style—”
Only we didn’t find any six-pence, but we did find something else, and in a fast jiffy I’ll tell you what it was. In a half minute more we knew we would be ready to turn the last bend in the road just before we got to the firewarden’s house. All of a sudden Poetry stopped and flashed his light about fifty yards down the road ahead of us, and as plain as day I saw a great big beautiful reddish-brown deer standing right in the center of the road. Its head was up and his big antlers looked very pretty. His ears were large and were spread out like our old Brindle cow back home spreads hers out when she is interested in something, or scared. Say, that deer was really scared. It turned and like a reddish-brown flash it was gone, leaping away and disappearing into the trees and bushes at the side of the road. It’s a good thing we saw the deer, though, ’cause if we hadn’t maybe we wouldn’t have stopped and wouldn’t have heard what we heard right that second. We both heard it at the same time, and it sounded exactly like what we’d heard before when we were standing out by the wood rick.
“It’s another screech owl,” Poetry said, and started on, but I stopped him, and said, “Maybe it’s a loon.”
“It’s coming from out there in the trees,” he said. “Loons don’t stay up here in the woods. They’re out on the lake or else right close to it all the time.”
We both listened, my heart thumping like Pop’s hammer driving a terribly big nail into a log in our barn at Sugar Creek. It was a worse scare than I’d had in a long time. It certainly sounded exactly like what we’d heard at the boathouse. I remembered the simpish looking owl we’d seen standing in the hole of the hollow tree behind the boathouse and how it had flown away, but this time I just knew it wasn’t any owl or any loon.
“Let’s go see,” Poetry said, and I said, “What if it is the girl? What’ll we do? What’ll—”
“Let’s decide later,” Poetry interrupted me by saying. We flashed our lights out toward the trees and couldn’t see a thing, but we heard that eery cry that was like a loon being choked, and then we started toward it, our lights shoving the dark back as we went along, and we walked in their yellowish bobbing paths.
We crept up slowly. I had a big stick in my hands, ready to use it as a club if I had to. For some reason we didn’t stop to think that maybe we ought to get to the firewarden’s house first, and tell him, but instead we just kept right on going, the pine needles on the ground making a spooky noise under our shoes and, then, all of a sudden, Poetry stopped, and I, who had been following him, bumped into him.
“Look! There’s an Indian blanket with somebody wrapped up in it,” meaning a blanket of many colors like most all families in Sugar Creek have in their homes.
Then I heard it again, a low half-muffled half cry, and we knew we’d found the kidnapped Ostberg girl.