IT was hard to keep still while we were drinking our pop from Santa’s icebox; in fact, I couldn’t, so I said, “You been doing some painting around here, Santa? I smell fresh paint outdoors.”

Santa set his bottle of orange pop down on the table and swallowed, and said, “The boathouse? Yes, I gave it a new coat yesterday—I’ve been doing a little work inside, too—doing it up in green and white. I plan to use it for a den for my fishing tackle and guns, and a place to write, and when I have company, it’ll do for a guest house—or a sleeping room, anyway—”

Say, right that second, Santa got a queer look on his face, straightened up and said, “What do you know? I just remembered I forgot to lock the boathouse door.”

Tom Till spoke up and asked, “Do the Indians steal things up here when you leave the doors unlocked?” and Santa answered and said something everybody ought to know, which was: “There are white people up here who do. We have very little trouble with the Indians themselves. They like to be trusted, and if they think you’ve locked the door especially because of them, they resent it. Of course, there are Indians and Indians, as there are white men and white men. A man isn’t a thief because he’s an Indian or of any other race, but because he has a sinful nature, which all men do have. You know a man decides for himself whether he is going to steal or not. It doesn’t matter what the color of his face is, if he has a black heart.” Santa stretched himself and started toward the door.

I was wondering about Little Snow-in-the-face, and when we’d get to see him, and said so, and Santa said, “He’s still in the hospital. He’ll be thrilled to death to see you boys. He’s a great little boy.”

Santa opened his cabin door to go out and lock the boathouse door.

I looked at Poetry, and he looked at me, and we stared at each other. “Let’s all go,” Santa said.

In a jiffy, we were all outside, following Santa, walking in and along beside the white path his flashlight made.

“Well, what do you know!” Santa said all of a sudden, stopping and holding the light on the door. “I must have locked it after all, and forgotten I did it.”

At the door we stopped while he shone the light on the Yale padlock on the door, and sure enough it was locked.

Santa laughed and said, “Must be getting forgetful in my old age.” He turned, shot the flashlight all around, focusing it on stumps, out between us and the dock, also on the cottage and the chimney, and on a hole in a hollow tree just above the boathouse, and would you believe it? There sitting in the hole was a rust-red blinking longish-eared screech owl like an olderish woman sitting on the front porch of her house.

Quick as a flash, the owl spread its wings and flew like a shadow out into the night.

Poetry and I looked toward each other and sighed, and knew we’d been fooled by our own imaginations, ’cause if there’s anything a girl sounds like when she is half crying in a high-pitched voice around the Sugar Creek school, it is a screech owl, which makes a sort of moaning, wavering wail....

Well, that was that, and I felt very foolish, as all of us went back to Santa’s dock, climbed into his boat, holding his flashlight and also a bright electric lantern which you are supposed to do when you are out on a lake in a boat, so you won’t run into some other boat and some other boat won’t run into you.

In a little while we were roaring out across the darkish water, around the neck of land and back toward camp.

Pretty soon, Poetry and Dragonfly and Circus and I were in our own tent, with a small candle for a light on a folding table in one corner. It was as warm as toast in the tent in spite of it being really chilly outside, like it is most every night in the Paul Bunyan country.

“What on earth is that water pail doing in the center of the tent?” I asked, ’cause it was right where I wanted to set my suitcase and open it.

“That’s our stove,” Circus said.

“Stove?... That’s a water pail!” Poetry exclaimed.

“That’s where I want my suitcase,” I said, and started to move it, but Circus yelled, “Don’t touch it. You’ll get burned. It’s a stove!”

In the flickering light his monkey face looked ridiculous, and I, knowing how mischievous he was, said, “You’re crazy,” and started to take hold of the handle of the pail, and did, and let go in a fierce hurry. The handle was hot, and there was a lot of heat coming from the outside of the pail and a whole lot coming from the inside. It was pretty dark in the tent so I carried the candle from the corner, and looked in, and—would you believe it?—Well, I wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t seen it, but there it was—one of the big round rocks Poetry and I had rolled into the fire a couple hours ago. It was still as hot as anything, and would maybe stay hot nearly all night.

Pretty soon, I had crawled into my sleeping bag, and with Poetry in his, right beside me, and Dragonfly and Circus on the other side of the tent in theirs, we were ready to try to stop talking and go to sleep. Circus snuffed out the candle, and we all were quiet as we could be for awhile, which wasn’t quiet. We could also hear the rest of the gang—which was Big Jim and Tom Till and Little Jim and also Barry Boyland—still talking over in their tent maybe fifty feet away on the other side of the camp fire.

In spite of having been scared by my own imagination, I was awful sleepy and in a few jiffies was so sleepy I knew that in a minute I’d be gone. I was so sleepy I knew I wouldn’t be able to say a very good good-night prayer to the Heavenly Father. It was better for a boy to do most of his praying when he is wider awake anyway, but I managed to say a few words which I meant from the bottom of my heart, and they were that the little girl’s parents wouldn’t go crazy on account of their little girl being stolen. I also prayed for little Snow-in-the-face and maybe a few other things.

Our gang hardly ever prayed together, on account of boys being bashful about doing it, but each one of us nearly always prayed by himself. Once in a while, though, we did when it was something extra important, and we thought maybe God wanted us to ask Him about it.

It certainly was a wonderful feeling—lying there in my cozy sleeping bag, warm as toast, listening to mosquitos buzzing around my face but not getting bit even once on account of I had mosquito lotion on my face and even on my ears, all of us being very careful, like the directions on the bottle said, not to get any on our lips or too near our eyes. Besides, there weren’t any mosquitos in the tent on account of the window in our tent had mosquito netting built into it and it was mosquito proof.

I certainly was glad I hadn’t told anybody I thought anybody had been kidnapped and was maybe in Santa’s boathouse. I didn’t want to seem ridiculous to anybody except to Poetry and myself; for some reason, though, I wished I had been right, on account of, as my pop once said, anybody doesn’t like to believe he is wrong, even when he is.

I drifted away into a half dream, and it seemed like I could hear the washing of the lake wavelets on the shore, and they were mixed up with Dragonfly’s snoring. Also it seemed like somebody was near me with a saw and was sawing wood, and the pile of sawdust was getting higher and higher, and Poetry and I were standing ankle deep in it. Then, I took off my shoes to get the sawdust out of them, and they were filled with green and white paint. Then somebody started pounding and making a slapping noise beside me, and I woke up, and it was Dragonfly’s twisting and turning in his sleep and slapping at his face and ears. So I said to him, “’Smatter?” He answered back to me in a whining whisper and said, “These crazy mosquitoes are driving me wild. They are the biggest mosquitoes in the world!”

“Didn’t you put on any lotion?” I hissed back to him, and he said, “No, I’m allergic to it. It makes me sneeze!” Right that second he sneezed twice, so I said, “You’re probably allergic to mosquitoes, too.”

That woke Poetry up and he groaned a couple times and then really woke up and said, “Talk about big mosquitoes. Did you ever hear the story about the two big mosquitoes who had a noisy argument?”

“It sounds like we are on the midway of a mosquito circus right now,” Dragonfly said.

“I mean it,” Poetry began, “—there was a real argument between two big mosquitoes who lived up here in the Chippewa Forest. One night two of them were flying around, looking for somebody to eat, and they found Dragonfly lying asleep out on the beach. So one of them said, ‘Let’s pick him up and fly him home and eat him there.’”

“‘Naw,’ the other one said, ‘let’s don’t. Let’s eat him right here, ’cause if we do take him home, the big ones will just take him away from us.’”

We made Dragonfly put on some lotion and pretty soon he was asleep again, but I was wide awake, thinking about the kidnapper. Right that second Poetry nudged me and said, “Bill—Sh!”

I rolled over close to his face, and he said, “I’ve got an idea.”

Right away I was wide awake, and he said, “Remember the time I had a hunch back at Sugar Creek, and you and I got up and went out in the night and the gang captured a robber, digging for buried treasure down by the old sycamore tree.”

“Well?” I said, and he said, “I’ve got that same kind of a hunch tonight. I still think that screech owl wasn’t what we heard. Why didn’t we open the boathouse and look in?”

I wondered that myself, now that he had mentioned it.

I heard Poetry’s zipper on his sleeping bag zip a long zip. All of a sudden my heart began to beat faster, and I knew he and I were going to get up and go down to that boathouse and investigate. There wouldn’t be any real danger, but if there was any little girl in there, we could probably hear her, and we could wake up Santa, or Barry and the whole gang. And if there wasn’t anything to our idea, then we still wouldn’t seem ridiculous to anyone except ourselves.