Dave Baldwin slipped from the bunk to the ground; he saw that his best course lay in making a clean breast of last night’s proceedings.
“So I was!” he said. “And these two fellows,” he pointed to the boy scouts, “saw me up on the piazza of the house, trying a window. I was hungry; I’d had nothing to eat all day but the last leg of a woodchuck that I knocked on the head day before yesterday. I thought the summer people who had just gone away might have left some canned stuff or remnants o’ food behind ’em. I didn’t want to steal anything else, or to do mischief!” he went on with that same passionate frankness of a man abruptly startled out of sleep, while the policemen listened patiently. “I didn’t, I tell ye! I’d been hangin’ round those Sugarloaf Dunes for nigh on two weeks, watching the boys who were camping there, having a ripping good time—doing a lot o’ stunts that I knew nothing about—wishing I’d had the chanst they have now!”
“How came you to go into the shed that was burned down?” asked one of the officers.
“I was hungry, as I tell you, an’ I couldn’t get into the house, so I thought I’d lie down under the nearest cover, that shed, go to sleep an’ forget it. I guess I knocked the ashes out o’ my pipe an’ dozed. Smoke an’ the smell o’ wood burning woke me. I found one side o’ the shed was on fire. Maybe, some one had left an oily rag, or one with turpentine on it, around, and the spark from my pipe caught it. I don’t know! I tried to stamp out the fire—to beat it out with my hands!” He extended blistered palms and knuckles. “I’ve made a mess o’ my life I know! But I ain’t a crazy fire-bug!”
“Why didn’t you try and get help to fight it?”
“I was too scared. I thought, likely as not, nobody would believe me, seeing I had a ‘reformatory record,’” the youthful vagrant’s face twitched. “I was afraid o’ being ‘sent up ’ again, so I hid among the dunes and crossed to the woods this morning.”
“Well, you can tell all that to the judge; you must come with me now,” said the older policeman inflexibly, not unkindly; he knew that men when suddenly aroused from sleep usually speak the truth; he was impressed by the argument of those blistered palms; on the other hand, the youthful vagrant’s past record was very much against him.
But those charred palms were evidence enough for Toiney; though they might leave the officers of the law unconvinced.
“Ha! courage, Dave,” he cried, feeling an emotion of pity mingle with the contempt which he, honest Antoine, had felt for the vaurien who had caused his old mother’s heart to burst. “Bon courage, Dave! I’ll no t’ink you do dat, for sure, me. Mebbe littal fire fly f’om you’ pipe. I’ll no t’ink you do dat for de fun!”
“We don’t think you did it on purpose, Dave,” struck in the two boy scouts, seconding their guide.