CHAPTER XXI—FOOTPRINTS
“Now we’re in for it,” Westy said. “Now you put your foot in it.”
“Put my foot in what?” I asked him.
“A lot we can do between now and ten o’clock to-morrow morning,” he said; “even if it’s true that somebody set fire to the place. How are we going to solve the thing between now and tomorrow morning? He doesn’t take any stock in that and I don’t blame him. I bet he’ll beat it to-night.”
“I bet he won’t,” I said. “He didn’t have money enough last night to buy us a couple of sodas. I’d like to know where he’ll beat it to.”
“He’s good and sore at us,” Westy said.
“I should worry,” I told him; “he knows we won’t tell till we’re asked. How could we promise to refuse to tell if the judge makes us? A lot you know about courts. The only court you know anything about is a tennis court. If we don’t answer questions we’ll get in trouble ourselves, and how is that going to help him? He didn’t do it, I could see that. Only he can’t afford to have people know he was there. He’s in bad with everybody. Probably now they’re trying to trace his movements yesterday. Even Mr. Ellsworth thinks he’s no good. We don’t know what they’re up to.”
“Well, how do we know anybody set fire to the shop?” Westy wanted to know.
“How do we know who left these match ends all around the floor of this car—and these cigarette butts?”
You ought to have seen Westy stare.
“I don’t smoke and you don’t smoke and none of us fellows smoke. Well then, how did these ends of cigarettes get here? Somebody was in this car last night. Don’t you suppose I noticed that before I asked him about how the fire started? Believe me, I’m not taking Charlie Slausen’s word for much. But I’ll tell you this, he isn’t as bad as people think he is. What do you suppose Chief O’Day cares who he sends to jail as long as his name gets into the newspapers? ‘Clever catch by Bridgeboro’s chief’ that’s all he’s thinking about. He isn’t smart enough to catch cold, even.”
“Well, what are we going to do?” Westy asked me.
“Now you’re talking,” I said. “First we’re going to go over and help the rest of the fellows. When we get through and they have all gone home, we’re coming back here. Then we’re going to start. We don’t want any one to know about this but ourselves.”
By about five o’clock all the members of the troop had gone home and Westy and I went back over to the car.
I said, “As long as we know there was some one here last night the next thing to do is to see if we can find any footprints.”
In the ground, just at the foot of the step, we found a couple printed there just as plain as day.
“This is a cinch,” Westy said.
“Easier than keeping our mouths shut,” I told him.
Now those footprints went in a straight line over to where the shop had stood and there we lost them on account of the stuff that was all strewn around there. But under where the window had been we found a lot of footprints. I guess some of them were our own. But there weren’t any except right there, and I suppose that was on account of the sidewalk on Willow Place being so near.
Westy said, “If anybody sneaked into the shop I bet he didn’t go along the street when he came out, especially if the fire was already started.”
I said, “Well then, he must have crossed the street and hit into the Sneezenbunker land. If you look at the map I made you’ll see how everything was around there.”
So then we went across the street and looked at the edge of the field where it ran along by the sidewalk. Westy was standing in the field right between the two rusty old tracks and he called, “Here’s a footprint good and plain.”
Good night, we were in luck. Somebody had started walking the tracks toward the river. We couldn’t find footprints in the hard earth between the tracks, where they ran across the Sneezenbunker land, but when the tracks began getting into the low, damp ground toward Cat-tail Marsh, we could see the prints just as plain as writing.
Over the marsh the old tracks run on a kind of trestle and we had to walk the ties. There were no footprints, exactly, on the ties, but there were little chunks of mud on some of them. We were on the track of somebody, all right.
There were no more footprints when we got to Van Schlessenhoff’s field because the tracks run through the grass there. But there was no place to go down that way except to the river, and there wasn’t any building anywhere about except the little shack that the men use when they go rail shooting in the fall. That little shack is on Mr. Van Schlessenhoff’s field and I guess it’s about a couple of hundred feet from the tracks. It’s right close by the river.
We stopped where we were on the tracks and Westy said, “What shall we do? Go over to the shack?”
It was beginning to get dark now and it seemed pretty lonesome down there. It’s a dandy spot, down there by the river. The town seems a long distance away. You can only just see the top of the High School through the trees. I should worry, I wouldn’t care if I couldn’t see any of it. I was glad we were going to have our old car down there. It was awful still, except for the frogs croaking, and the crickets in the field.
I didn’t exactly want to go over to that shack and I guess Westy felt the same way. I’m not afraid of tramps but, gee whiz, I’m not especially stuck on bandits. And there were a lot of those around lately, shooting up automobiles.
“Well, we’re here and we’ve got to go over,” I said, “or else what was the use of coming down here? There’s somebody in that shack, I bet.”
We went over toward the shack, and tiptoed when we got close to it, so as not to make a bit of noise. The door was shut and there wasn’t any window. We came right close to the boards and held our breath and listened....