Ned did not seat himself again, but began to wander along the shores of the lake. There was all about it a hedge or border of the Southern plant called Yucca gloriosa, and its bayonet-like leaves and tall shafts with their white pendent liliaceous blossoms were reflected in the smooth water, all as motionless as if the whole were some softly vivid aquarelle. Presently a skiff, freighted with children, came gliding along with ripples about its prow and a wake of foam in which the reflections were lost for a time, the snowy blossoms only gradually sketched anew on the surface as by some trembling, tentative, unpracticed brush. The detective, now strolling along the broad drive, could ill keep his eye upon the boy as he dawdled among the tall, flowering spikes; even less when Ned abruptly came to a stand-still to gaze fixedly upon the countenance of a swan, waddling in its ungainly style up the green bank toward a small, daintily befrilled, rosy child, who with her nurse's arm protectively about her waist, was making bold to offer the bird a bit of cracker in disregard of the mandatory sign, "Don't feed the Swans."
The detective found it yet more difficult to dispose of himself appropriately when, as he still incidentally followed the boy, Ned paused in further reaches of the park to gaze through a high fence, which was constructed in a pretty, rustic fashion, and which served to keep in a few deer. One of these had a fawn, and the little creature was beside its mother. The boy had not known before that these animals are dappled with white in early youth, and this indisputable presentment of the fact brought him bolt upright against the fence, where he stared in the interstices while both hands grasped the structure.
The officer could not follow his example, without attracting attention, for what is eminently sane in one stage of human development would be evidence of an unbalanced mind in a more advanced age and a different station of life. He was not, however, willing to pass on, lest he lose sight of the boy; and something, he could not say what, convinced him that there was an objective point in Ned's wanderings, albeit he himself, perhaps, was as yet unconscious whither, in his undiscriminated mental processes, his steps were tending. The officer met the emergency by pausing in the middle of the road and taking out a cigar. The wind was stirring anew, and thus he was enabled to make the business of deliberately lighting it a longer operation than was really necessary. More than one match flickered and was extinguished by the freakish gusts, although he appeared to shield carefully the timorous flame with his hand. This enabled him to stand still until Ned was once more forging ahead, when the genteel-looking man in citizen's dress again began to stroll along, swinging his cane and leisurely puffing his cigar. He needed its solace, for a sharp nettling irritation was beginning to be very prominent in his consciousness. "I'd rather shadow a grasshopper than a boy," he said to himself, for there seemed to be some chance to restrain the mere activities of the one, and he could not be sure what the vagaries of the other implied. He prided himself on his experience. He had outwitted noted crooks in his time. He felt fully competent to divine any usual motive of flight or aggression or craft or wickedness, but the interest of standing still as Ned was now doing and kicking at a frog as it hopped from one side of the road to the other was something he could not appreciate. It seemed so casual, so inconsistent with any other motive than mere idle diversion, that he would have been minded to leave Ned in this choice batrachian company were he not lured on and on by the hope of finding the boy making an effort to communicate with the older and more important conspirators in the crime. The unique difficulties of the situation, too, appealed to his vanity in invention. What to do while Ned was engaged with the frog he did not, for one moment, know. The next, with a sentiment of discovery, he drew out his watch, having observed a dial on the tower of a small building down a glade so steep that the clock was not many feet higher than his head as he stood on the hillside; he affected to compare the timepieces and then to reset his watch, and to wind it carefully anew. He had not completed this ruse, which he was exploiting in the most natural manner possible, when Ned suddenly started forward at a brisk pace and evidently with a definite goal in view.
The boy had all at once recognized the impulse in his mind to which he had been unconsciously tending. He desired counsel. His nature was frank, not secretive. He had only feared to divulge his knowledge of the crime lest a worse thing befall him, and he distrusted the people he knew, all more or less strangers to him and naturally devoid of any special interest in him or his welfare. When in the longing to open his heart he had thought of his mother, the impulse was checked by the doubt of her capacity to cope with the situation. She was even more ignorant of the ways of this world than he himself, he argued, for he knew town life, while she, suspiciously restricting her intercourse even with her nearest neighbors, was hardly more sophisticated now than if she had never left her rural home in New Arcady, Kentucky, where she was born. Moreover she would scold,—alack, for poor femininity! She would ask him why he had done this, and why he had not done that,—all irrevocable, all a part of the immutable past,—and withal she would be as helpless as he himself to take up now the tangled present and unravel its tortuous coils. If only his father had lived! And so Ned suddenly bethought himself of certain of his father's old friends,—friends in the sense of patrons in that far-away country home he had left,—men whose horses he had shod, whose good opinion had been his meat and bread, whose relinquished favor he had always regretted, whose names and exploits were forever on his lips to the day of his death. These were men of note in their section, of substance, of sophistication, of breeding. How often had Ned heard his father describe their genial traits, their lordly traditions, and liberal ways! Doubtless these portraits of the rural magnates were idealized under the softening touch of regretful memory and the roseate haze of distance, but Ned did not appreciate this. He only realized that they were of such station, character, and worldly knowledge as to render them above suspicion and eminently capable of advising him accurately as to his duty and danger in the matter. He thought they would believe his story; they would befriend him and protect him. And what so easy as to seek their advice and assistance! There in that deep cut lay the railroad, the parallel steel bars even now jangling faintly with the vibratory resonance of a far-off train. Should he leave at midnight after his work was over, he would be in that bucolic paradise at noon. Only a few hours' stay, and the night would bring him back, and till all was over and explained, his mother might never know of his absence, being pacified with the subterfuge of a press of work at the printing office.
It was a compact, resolute little shadow, stepping decisively and briskly along, that blurred and blotted out the dapplings of the chestnut and maple leaves, all fair and fresh and whole, which were imprinted by the sunshine in their graceful entirety on the smooth, broad, sandy stretch that led to the little station. The determination, though so suddenly taken, was definite in Ned's mind, and as he entered the building and walked over to the ticket-seller's window he had not a doubt as to his best course now. The man that the little aperture framed was blond, clean-shaven, young, with a steel blue eye and a cardigan jacket which he had donned to save the sleeves of the natty coat hanging on a hook beside his desk, and indeed the frayed sleeves of the jacket told of the wear and tear incident to driving a pen. He fixed upon Ned those matter of course, disconcerting eyes peculiar to the human automaton, whose business it is to do the same mechanical thing a thousand times a day and to repeat the same mechanical words.
Ned demanded the price of a ticket, his little grimy paw already on his cheap buckskin wallet, hid away among less valuable stowage in the museum of his pockets.
"To New Arcady, Kentucky? Twelve dollars!" said the man. Ned felt his hair rise,—more than a month's wages! And was he to beg or beat his way back? The prospect in which he had begun to rejoice was dwindling, fading, vanishing like a mirage! And it had been so hopeful! He wondered, when he thought of this, might he not steal a ride thither,—beat his way! Nay,—had he not yet enough of beating his way?
"Want the ticket? Then move on," said the ticket agent as Ned still vaguely clung to the window, as if he thus kept a clutch on his ephemeral hope. He shook his head, unclasped his hand, and slipped away. "What can I do for you, sir?" the agent asked sharply of a gentleman who was now standing silently at the window, seeming scarcely less dazed and wool-gathering than Ned had been. "Oh, time-table?" The automaton ungraciously flung it out, and went back to his writing with an air which seemed to ask if all the fools who wanted to go nowhere, and whom he wished were there, were coming this day to block up his window, and interrupt his work, and impede traffic.
Ned left the tall, thin gentleman in the station building engaged in the study of the time-table. But he did not long remain there. As the dejected little lad, who had not realized how he had been upborne by his secret hope of help and counsel from his father's old friends till it was snatched from him, took his way along the darkening shadowy paths, the tall man was once more swiftly afoot, and although he passed Ned and walked openly in advance he was determined no more to lose trace of the boy. The idea of quitting the city, which the inquiry at the station had revealed, precipitated the necessity of prompt action. Very little more time could now be accorded to the line of investigation which the detective was pursuing,—the hope of discovering the boy in communication with the incendiaries. It would be necessary to arrest him forthwith, lest he escape from the town, and with him vanish the only clue as yet developed of the origin and perpetrators of the crime. Nevertheless the detective determined that he would still seek in this limited interval to secure some inkling, some vestige of a theory, that might lead to the unmasking of the principals in this nefarious affair. Thus he was acutely conscious of the patter of the small feet as they came nimbly along behind him; when at last they began to lag he turned from the road and sat down on a bench by the wayside, and there Ned noticed him for the first time since they had been in the park, and remembered when and where he had before seen him. Ned was relieved to observe as he passed that the man seemed to take no heed of him. He did not even look up. Perhaps in his turn Ned would not have again thought of the stranger, so frequently encountered, had he not turned back as he reached the big iron gate to gaze regretfully over the great green stretch of the park. The man was just rising from the bench under the tree; he stretched his limbs with much deliberation, caught up his cane and came slowly down the broad walk toward the gate. He too was about to leave the place. Ned could not have said why, but he determined that he would not ride back to town in the same car. He loitered. There were two of the cable double-cars waiting on the track. The foremost was nearly full of passengers,—the other altogether empty.
"I'll take the car that he leaves," Ned said to himself. Impressed with the idea that he was watched, he had half expected that the man would hesitate and wait for him.