It’s hard to tell if good police work made a difference in the recovery of two small children of vagrants near Priest Lake this week. After all, the children – cousins Tatiana Siebert, 4, and Ford Ware, 5 – were where they were supposed to be when authorities found them Monday with family members at a remote campsite.

But good police work played a role in locating the children, nabbing a transient who was wanted in several states on assorted charges and placing the children into protective custody. By alerting various agencies, including the U.S. Forest Service, Coeur d’Alene police found their needles in a haystack – and may have prevented the theft of what few valuables the vagrant families owned.

Consider the problems facing Coeur d’Alene police when Tatiana’s mother, Yvonne, reported last week that her daughter and a nephew may have been abducted by a new acquaintance. John Marc Thompson, 56, was a wanted vagabond who survived by camping. With so much forest in this part of the country and beyond into Canada, he could have hidden with the children for weeks or longer.

Several other factors complicated the police task: The police were dealing with an itinerant woman who didn’t know for sure if her child and nephew had been kidnapped. Yvonne Siebert hadn’t reported the possible abductions right away. An initial attempt to issue a nationwide Amber Alert failed. Time was against them. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 74 percent of children who are kidnapped and later found murdered were killed within three hours after being taken.

Fortunately, Thompson’s criminal activity doesn’t include kidnapping or worse.

Coeur d’Alene police shifted into action when they discovered he was sought in several states for a variety of nonviolent crimes. By issuing an Amber Alert in Idaho, alerting state and federal agencies, and notifying the media, the local police set the stage for Thompson’s apprehension on a backwoods road by Forest Service Capt. Ginger Swisher. The whole area was looking for a man driving a gold Lincoln Town Car with Louisiana plates in North Idaho’s backcountry.

Although the children were safe all along, this story doesn’t have a happy ending.

The episode gave us a glimpse of what it’s like to be down and out in North Idaho. The children come from blended families who are traveling in battered vehicles, desperately looking for work – families too poor to afford 50 cents for a phone call to locate one another. In their dire straits, the families were susceptible to a man who may have had an eye on their worldly goods and a crazy scheme to make money by taking apart catalytic converters to recover the precious metals.

The prognosis for the children isn’t good. As long as they’re subject to a vagrant’s life, they will be exposed to other crises and strangers. At this point, more than good police work is needed to save them from the danger ahead.