In a few jiffies I came in sight of some white birch saplings which criss-crossed each other, making a homemade gate. I could see the house just beyond and an old unpainted barn. Also, there was a light in the window of what looked like an ordinary bungalow which meant that maybe the firewarden was still up, not having gone to bed yet.
I lay down and squished myself under that gate, and in a hurried jiffy was knocking at the door of the bungalow.
“Quick!” I panted as soon as the door opened. “We’ve found the kidnapped Ostberg girl! She’s out there in the trees wrapped up in an Indian blanket and——” and for some reason, right that second, I remembered about the automobile and its license number. I half yelled the things I wanted to say. The firewarden looked ridiculous in his green-striped pajamas as he stood in the doorway of his kitchen, with a flashlight in his hand.
“What is it?” a woman’s voice called from somewhere back in the house. It was the voice of a sleepy woman who had just woke up and wanted to know what was going on.
“Quick!” I said. “The auto license number is Minnesota 324–179, and he’s got two half-flat tires and will have to stop somewhere at an oil station and get some air.”
I guess maybe the firewarden must have known all about the Ostberg girl having been kidnapped ’cause it only took me a little while to explain enough to him so he was ready for action. He was a kind of an oldish man but he was very spry and could think fast. While his wife was dressing somewhere in the house, he made two quick phone calls, and almost right away he got his powerful electric lantern and the three of us were on our way to his home-made gate. There we stopped while he flashed his flashlight around a little and said, “Well, what do you know—he must have thought our driveway was another bend in the road. He started to turn in, then swung out again. See?”
I used my own flashlight on the tire tracks, and, as plain as day, I saw that some car had made a sharp turn there, and as sure as the nose on Dragonfly’s face, which, as you maybe know, turns south at the end, I noticed that the back tires had wider patterns than the front.
We zipped up to where Poetry was waiting for us with the kidnapped girl. That pretty little girl was still so scared that she couldn’t talk without great sobs getting mixed up with her words, and you couldn’t understand her very well. Say, the firewarden’s wife just knelt down on the ground beside that tangled-up-golden-haired little pretty-faced girl and gathered her into her arms and crooned to her like she was her very own little girl, then stood up with her, and, being a very strong woman, wouldn’t let her husband carry her but carried her herself, and crooned to her all the way back to their cabin.
When we had first got to where Poetry was, though, I noticed he was standing beside the crying little girl, with a little book in one hand and was shining his flashlight on its pages and was reading something. “What on earth?” I thought, and waited for a chance to ask him what he was doing and why.
On the way to the cabin, while I was wishing the rest of the gang was there, and thinking that we’d have some wonderful stories to tell that would be even better than Paul Bunyan stories, and also could tell our folks the same ones, I said to Poetry, “What were you doing back there—reading stories to her to keep her quiet?”