I WAS glad there was a little wind blowing so that the waves of the lake were washing against the shore, and also that Dragonfly snored so we wouldn’t be heard if we kept real quiet.

In a few jiffies, Poetry and I had our shoes on, and our trousers and sweaters, and had worked our way out through the tent opening in the front, and with our flashlights we were sneaking up along the beach toward Santa’s cabin and his boathouse.

Suddenly I stopped. The whole idea seemed absolutely crazy to me. I said, “You don’t think for a minute that any kidnapper would be dumb enough to hide out in a boathouse that wasn’t any more than fifty yards from where somebody actually lived, do you?”

“Who said anything about any kidnapper hiding out?” Poetry said. “He’s maybe a hundred miles away from here by now. But he could have left the Ostberg girl there, couldn’t he?”

“Why?” I said, and he stopped and hissed in my ear, “Not so loud!” We’d been following a little footpath we knew about, from having been there the year before.

I was trembling inside, maybe being a little cold, and at the same time couldn’t see any sense to Poetry’s thinking maybe the kidnapper was in that boathouse with the Ostberg girl. It didn’t make sense.

“You’re scared!” Poetry accused me, and I said I wasn’t, but only thought the idea was crazy. “It can’t be,” Poetry said. “Listen—” Then he told me what he’d been thinking, and it was, “What if the kidnapper, who, as the paper said, is supposed to be a lumberman, was looking for an empty cabin up here somewhere to hide out in, and suppose he drove off onto a side road, to dodge the police who were maybe looking for his car, and suppose he got off on the little half-obliterated road that leads to Santa’s cabin which nobody hardly ever uses and suppose he found the boathouse with the door open, and then just suppose that he put the girl in there, gagged and tied up, like kidnappers do, and then suppose that while he was there, Santa with us boys with him came roaring up to the dock in his boat. Wouldn’t the kidnapper be scared, and maybe lock the girl in, and beat it himself, and—”

Well, it made a little sense, so I hurried along behind Poetry, my heart beating faster because we were hurrying so fast. Pretty soon we were almost there, when Poetry stopped all of a sudden and said, “Sh!”

I shushed quick, ’cause I’d heard it as plain as day myself. There was the sound of a car motor running, somewhere. It sounded like it was at the top of the hill away up above the boathouse. We knew there was a sandy road up there, ’cause we’d been on it once ourselves.

“Somebody’s stuck in the sand,” Poetry said, and it sure sounded like it. The motor was whirring and whirring. I’d seen cars stuck in sand and snow before, and I could imagine the driver, whoever he was, doing what is called “rocking” the car, and starting and shifting from first gear to reverse and back and forth, and the wheels spinning, and still the car not getting out of the sand...

We were real close to the boathouse now. Poetry shoved the beam of his light toward the door, and we both let out an excited gasp. I couldn’t believe my eyes, and yet I had to, ’cause the boathouse door was wide open, and the hinge of the lock was hanging like somebody had forced it open with a crowbar or something.

We flashed our lights around inside, and there wasn’t anybody there, but a cot in the other end was mussed up like somebody had been lying down on it. A pile of shavings were on the floor and were also scattered around under a carpenter’s work bench. On the wall above the work bench were a lot of tools such as screwdrivers, saws, planes, and other carpenter’s tools. Santa had maybe been working there, making something during the day.

“Quick!” Poetry ordered. “Let’s go up the hill and get his license number.”

I wanted to tell Santa or Barry or somebody, and get a lot of noisy action around there, but I knew Poetry was right. We were maybe already too late, and we maybe couldn’t do anything helpful. We’d probably be shot if we were seen by the man, whoever he was. But if we could get the car license number, it might help the police to trail him, if he really was the kidnapper.

Up that hill we went, following that hardly-ever-used road. At the top of the hill, we turned right and zipped along the edge of Santa’s woods, where you could hardly see the road at all, but we knew it would come out at the sandy road a little later, which it did. We could see, even with our flashlights off, which they had to be, that it was a newish car, as we sneaked up behind it. It had its tail light on and only its parking lights, and the driver was “rocking” it, starting slowly, going forward a few feet, then backwards, then forward, but not getting anywhere.

Already I was close enough to see the license, but didn’t dare turn on my flashlight, or the guy would find out we were there. “Wait,” Poetry said, “I’ll sneak up behind that tree.” Right away he started to start. Then he hissed to me, “DOWN, BILL! QUICK!”

Down we ducked and didn’t dare make a sound, ’cause the motor had stopped and the guy was opening his car door and getting out. Right there in front of our eyes not more than fifty feet away, we saw him make a dive for the back left wheel, and heard him mumbling something that sounded like mad swear words, and for a second I was glad that Little Jim wasn’t there, ’cause it always hurts him terribly to hear anybody swear, on account of the One whose Name is used in such a terrible way when a person swears is Little Jim’s best Friend. I was glad he wasn’t there for another reason, too, and that was that when he hears somebody using filthy rotten words like that, he can’t stand it and sometimes calls right out and says, “STOP SWEARING!”

We certainly didn’t want anybody to call out to that guy in the automobile.

“What’s he doing?” I whispered in Poetry’s ear, and didn’t need to have asked, on account of I heard a hissing noise coming from that left back tire. “The crazy goof!” I said to Poetry, “He’s letting air out of his tire!”

And he was... “Sssssss!” It made me feel creepy, ’cause if a man who wanted to get away quick was foolish enough to let air out of his tires, he must be insane.

In another jiffy, the tire had stopped hissing and the guy, still grunting and mumbling to himself, like he was terribly mad, and also maybe a little scared, was down on his knees beside the other back tire and right away there was another hissing noise.

And right that second, the man stood up, and made a dive for the front seat again, zipped in and stepped on the starter, and started to rock the car again, then he backed up, and started forward again, and the wheels started spinning and—

“Hey!” Poetry and I hissed to each other at the same time, “The car is moving! He’s getting away!”

Poetry flashed his flashlight on the back of the car to get the license number, and it was 324–179, and was a Minnesota license. My mind took a picture of it quick, and I knew I’d never forget it, but just to make sure, I kept saying it to myself “324–179, 324–179, 324–179...”

Say, the second that car which was a black newish car was out of that sandy place, it shot down that road like a bullet.

There wasn’t a thing we could do, not a thing, I thought, and wondered if the girl was maybe in the back seat and why on earth didn’t we try to rescue her, if she was there?

We made a dive for the place where the car had been stuck, and studied the road. Poetry let out a gasp and said, “He’s awfully smart, that guy. Look at these wide tire tracks, will you?”

I looked, and Poetry was right. First I looked at how narrow they had been before they got stuck in the sand, and then I looked at them after they’d gone on up the road, and they were almost half again as wide.

“Letting out that air, increased traction,” Poetry said, “but he can’t run on them half flat very far or very fast. He’ll have to stop at the first gas station that’s open, and get some air. Come on! Let’s get to a telephone quick, and call the Bemidji and the Pass Lake police and have all the gas stations watch for him. Give them the license number, and I’ll bet the police will catch him!”

With that, Poetry whirled around, his flashlight in his hand and we were starting to run up the sandy lane to where the fire warden lived, when I noticed something shining in the grass at the side of the lane.

“Look!” I said, “Shine your light over here a minute.”

I stooped over to pick up whatever it was, thinking it might be a scarf pin or something the kidnapped girl might have had, but shucks, it was only a piece of glass. I picked it up, though, and was going to throw it away when Poetry grabbed my arm and stopped me and said, “Hey, wait! Let me see it!”

“It’s a piece of broken glass,” I said, but let him look at it up close with his flashlight. “Sure,” he said, “it’s a clue.” “How could a piece of broken glass be a clue?” I asked.

“’Cause it isn’t stained with weather or anything, which means it hasn’t been lying out here very long,” Poetry said, and tucked it in his pocket.

It wasn’t any time to argue, but I thought his detective ideas were nearly all imagination.

He was running awful fast for a barrel-shaped boy, and I was having a hard time keeping up with him as we swished along down that sandy lane. We knew the firewarden didn’t live very far up that lane on account of we had been here the year before and knew that his house was the nearest one that had a telephone—Santa not having one in his cabin, on account of not wanting his vacation spoiled by people calling him up. If he needed a telephone, he could always go to where there was one.

“Wait,” I said to Poetry all of a sudden. “Maybe we’re on a wild goose chase, maybe we’re crazy to waste a lot of good sleeping time chasing an imaginary kidnapper. How do we know that was a kidnapper’s car? What if it was just anybody who got stuck in the sand? He wouldn’t appreciate having policemen stop him and ask a lot of questions!”

“It wasn’t just anybody!” Poetry said. “That guy was down there in the boathouse less than a half hour ago, and there was a girl there, too, see?”

Poetry stopped long enough to pull out of his pocket and show me something he had picked up back there where the car had been, and it was a girl’s yellow scarf! “But that could be any woman’s or any girl’s scarf,” I said.

“It could not,” Poetry disagreed with me with a very sure voice, and also an excited one, “—see that green paint on it—and look! Here’s some white paint also.” Well, I remembered Santa had been using green and white paint in that boathouse that very afternoon, and remembering that put wings on my feet, and I ran like a deer up that winding sandy road toward the firewarden’s house and the telephone.