“It’s a secret,” he said. “I’ll tell you tomorrow,—or anyway later...”
Well, I’ve got to step on the gas with this story. Almost right away, we came to the birch-sapling gate. There we stood while I showed Poetry where the kidnapper had started to turn in and then made a sharp turn and gone on. Poetry flashed his flashlight down real close to the ground and studied the patterns of the tracks and said, “He must have slowed down a lot right here, or the tire patterns wouldn’t be so plain.”
Right that second there were the headlight and also a spotlight of a car swinging down the road coming toward us real fast. “It’s the police already,” the firewarden said, and sure enough it was.
Say, there was certainly some excitement around there and also on the inside of me for awhile.
First, they made sure the girl was all right. In fact, Mrs. Firewarden was in the back seat of their car with the girl in her arms and the girl was asleep. In another few minutes an ambulance was coming to take her to a hospital.
“How’d you get here so quick?” Poetry asked one of the big blue-suited policemen, and he answered in a pleasant voice, like he thought a boy’s questions were as important as a grown-up’s, and this is what he said, “We have a radio in our car. We were only a few miles up the highway when the order came through, and so, here we are!”
Even before he had finished saying what he was saying, I was thinking how absolutely silly it is for anybody to think he can commit a crime and not get caught and punished, even though they hadn’t maybe caught the kidnapper yet.
In the next seventeen minutes I saw one of the most interesting things I’d ever seen in my life, and it made me even more sure than I was that anybody—man or boy or even a woman or girl—was just plumb crazy to try to be smarter than the law is and get by with any kind of a crime or sin.
I whispered it to Poetry when I saw what the policemen were doing right that minute, saying, “Anybody can’t get by with any kind of crime,” and Poetry, who is almost as good a Christian as Little Jim is, and who not only has a lot of poems on the tip of his tongue ready to be quoted any second, but also knows many Bible verses, quoted one of them to me right that minute instead of a poem, and it was, “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever man soweth, that shall he also reap,” and he added to it another which was, “It is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment.”
One of the cops heard him and looked up from what he was doing and said, “That’s right, son; that’s what my mother used to say.”