“Well! I expect you’ll see one or two officers landing upon these Sugarloaf Dunes to-morrow, to try and get at the cause of the fire,” said the chief again. “It started in that shed where, so far as we know, there was nothing inflammable.”
“I ought to tell you,” Scoutmaster Estey looked very grave, “that two of my scouts saw a man entering the shed,” pointing to what was now a mere smouldering heap of ashes, “just about an hour, or a little over, before the fire broke out. When they first caught sight of him he was on the piazza of the bungalow itself, and seemed trying to get into the house.”
“Ho! Ho! I thought so. This is a case for the district police, I guess!” muttered the grizzled fire-chief.
That was the opinion also of the police representatives who landed upon the white dunes from a motor-boat early the next morning. And when the sharp questioning of one of the officers brought out the fact that the individual who had lurked about the scene of the fire was believed to be a youthful ne’er-do-weel, Dave Baldwin, with a prison record behind him, whose name was known to the two policemen, though his person was not, suspicion fastened upon that vagrant as possibly the malicious author of the fire.
“That fellow first got into trouble through a morbid craving for excitement,” said one of the officers. “The same craving may have led him on from one thing to another until he hasn’t stopped at arson—especially if he had a spiteful motive for it, which is likely with a tramp. That may have been his purpose in trying to enter the house.”
“I can scarcely imagine Dave’s having become such an utter degenerate,” answered the scoutmaster sadly. “I went to school with him long ago. And Captain Andy Davis knew his father well; they were shipmates on more than one trawling trip to the Grand Banks. Captain Andy speaks of the elder David Baldwin as a brave man and a big fisherman. Even if the son did start this fire, it may have been accidental in some way.”
“Well! we must get our hands on him, anyhow,” decided the officer. “I wonder if he’s skulking round among the dunes still; that’s not probable? I’d like to know whether any one of these observant boy scouts of yours saw a boat leave this shore since daybreak?”
It transpired that Coombsie had: after a night of unprecedented excitement—like his tossing brother scouts who sought the shelter of their tents about one o’clock in the morning—he had been unable to sleep, had crept out of his tent at daybreak and climbed a white sand-hill, to watch the sun rise over the river.
“I saw a rowboat shoot out of a little creek farther up the river, I should say about half a mile from the dunes,” said Marcoo. “There was only one person in it; seemed to me he was acting rather queerly; he’d row for a while, then stand up in the stern and scull a bit, then row again.”
“Could you see for what point he was heading?”