WE docked at Santa’s dock, and went into his log cabin with him. It was cozy inside. First he lit two old-fashioned kerosene lamps, then ’cause it might get cold pretty soon, we helped him start a fire in his small wood stove in a corner; Tom pumped a pail of water from the pitcher pump inside the cabin. Santa even had an icebox with ice in it, and in another small room, twin beds; and back in a tiny room away back in the back, there was a bathtub and beside it a very old-fashioned trunk that for some reason made me think of Robinson Crusoe and buried treasure. I wished harder than ever that we would run into a mystery up here in the North.... I was all tingling inside, wanting one so bad. But, of course, I wouldn’t want the kind that would half scare a boy half to death, like the ones that sometimes happened to the Sugar Creek Gang, but I wanted an ordinary mystery anyway.

Pretty soon it would be time to go back to camp and get to sleep. I was wondering how we could keep warm in our cold wall tents—which was the kind ours were—when there wouldn’t be any fires inside and we didn’t have any heaters. Of course I knew I’d be pretty warm myself, after I’d crawled into my sleeping bag, which is a waterproof bed made out of khaki drill. It had a soft kapoc filled mattress, and I would just crawl into it, zip up the zipper slide fastener on the side, and there I’d be, but it’d be cold to get undressed and before getting into my pajamas. Santa showed us different things in his cottage, such as a large mounted fish on the wall which Mrs. Santa had caught, and also a great big bearskin rug which was on the floor and had a fierce bear’s head with wide open red mouth on one end of it; also there was a snake skin on the wall, which a missionary in Africa had sent him.

Well, it was soon time to go home. Poetry looked at Santa’s wood box and said all of a sudden, “You need a load of wood—better let Bill carry one in for you.”

“Fine,” I said, “I’ll hold the flashlight for you.” I took a flashlight off the table, and started toward the door with Poetry right after me.

Outside, we looked back through the window at the pretty little cabin and at Santa and Tom standing by the fire warming themselves, and all of a sudden Poetry said, “I wish Tom had a pop like—I wish Santa was Tom’s daddy.”

I thought of old hook-nosed John Till at Sugar Creek and knew that maybe right that very minute he was probably standing at the bar in a beer joint sousing his fat stomach with beer, and that Tom’s mother was maybe not even going to have enough money to buy groceries for the family the rest of that week.

At the long wood rick, Poetry and I stopped and he said, “Sh! Turn off the light. I heard something.” I snapped off the flashlight, peered out into the dark and listened. “It’s a crazy loon,” I said, when one of those diving birds away out on the dark lake somewhere had let out a long-tailed quavering cry, which came echoing across to where we were. Also right that second another loon, closer to the shore, answered him.

And then my hair started to stand up on end, ’cause I heard another sound almost like that of a loon, but it wasn’t coming from that lake. It sounded like a little girl crying and came from over in the direction of the boathouse where Santa kept his boat in the winter and his tools and oars and things in the summer.

Then I heard the sound again, plain as day, a faint cry like a loon that somebody was trying to smother, and maybe had his fingers on its throat...

Poetry’s hand was tightening on my shoulder, and his face was close to my neck, and I could hear and feel him breathing. “Over there,” he whispered huskily, “close to the boathouse. Down!” he hissed, and drew me down beside him, both of us hiding behind the wood rick.

Before I ducked, though, I’d looked in the direction of the boathouse which was up against the edge of a steep hill, and I saw a tiny glow like somebody had drawn on a cigarette or cigar and it had made it glow in the dark.

I knew it couldn’t be any of our camping party ’cause not a one of us smoked, not even Barry.

Then we heard the boathouse door creaking on its hinges and I knew I was beginning to be scared.

“It’s a man smoking,” Poetry hissed in my ear, but I didn’t want to believe it. “Maybe it was a lightning bug,” I said. There were several of them flashing their spooky little lamps on and off out near Santa’s boat.

“Lightning bugs’ lights are a yellowish green,” Poetry said, “and that was a reddish glow.” I knew he was right but wished in spite of wanting a mystery that whatever it was, it wasn’t some criminal. Then I heard what sounded like a stifled cry again and knew it wasn’t any loon, but said to Poetry, “It’s a loon’s echo, maybe.”

I had the flashlight in my hand and without thinking, but just doing what I wanted to, shot its long white beam right straight toward the boathouse, up against the hill. Before I could even think Poetry had reached out a hand and grabbed my arm and smothered the light against his fat side, but not before I saw what I saw, which was a dark shadow of something dart behind the boathouse.

“Don’t scare whatever it is,” Poetry said. “Give me time to think what to do,” Poetry, as you know, being the one of our gang which wanted to be a detective and knew more about being one than any of the rest of us.

We were both ducked behind the wood rick again and our knees were on a pile of sawdust, which maybe had been left there when somebody had maybe cut the wood with a buzz-saw. Even with a scary mystery just around the corner, Poetry quoted something he had memorized, which was.

“I thought you wanted to think,” I said to him.

“I am,” he said. “I think best when I have what books call a ‘poetic muse.’ Did you notice what I noticed?” he asked me.

“What?” I said, and he said, “That the boathouse has had a new coat of paint since we were here, last year.”

“I saw a shadow move,” I answered him. I was trembling inside and listening toward the boathouse.

We kept on listening but didn’t hear a thing, so we decided to turn the flashlight on the boathouse again, which we did, and sure enough it had been painted, a nice pretty green color. It even looked like it had just been painted.

“Smell the paint?” Poetry said, and I did—for the first time.

That green boathouse had its door closed and looked as innocent as Little Jim’s face looks when it is, and there wasn’t a sound of any kind. A lonely loon let out a wavering wail from across the lake and another one answered him from close to the shore, not far from the dock where we had just left Santa’s boat, but there wasn’t another sound anywhere.

“What about the door creaking on its hinges?” I said.

“Just remember it, when we start to questioning the suspect later on,” Poetry said, and his voice was as calm as if he was actually a detective. But his hand was on my arm, and I could feel it trembling a little. We loaded up our arms with wood as quick as we could and started toward the cottage.

We were both trembling when we got inside, but we’d made up our minds to keep quiet so as not to scare Tom Till. Also if we were only imagining things on account of wanting a mystery so bad, and if there really wasn’t any, we didn’t want to seem silly to anybody except ourselves, which wouldn’t be so bad. We unloaded our two armloads of wood into the big wood box in the corner beside the stove, and then looked around and saw on the table in the corner a copy of a Minneapolis newspaper, and on the very front page, a big headline which said, “FEAR OSTBERG KIDNAPPER HIDING IN CHIPPEWA FOREST.”

I stared and stared at the heading and sidled quickly over to the table, and in the light of the flashlight, on account of the kerosene lamp not being bright enough, I read the whole story.

I was remembering the radio program I’d heard back in our house at Sugar Creek, about a little girl being kidnapped at St. Paul... Poetry sidled over to me and we read the newspaper together while Santa and Tom Till were opening the icebox and getting out some bottles of pop. Poetry’s hand was gripping my arm so tight that it hurt, but I didn’t say a word. I was concentrating on the news story of the little girl who had been taken from her home in St. Paul, and hadn’t been found yet, and I was making up my mind that the kidnapper or whoever he was, was maybe right that minute right out there in Santa’s boathouse, and the Ostberg girl was there, too. The father of the little golden haired girl had already paid the ransom money of $25,000 but the kidnapper hadn’t left the girl where he’d promised to.