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?”
“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.