They saw that it was quite useless to question him about the matches and the wisps of straw or about why the sounds had meant anything to him. They wondered whether indeed that ghostly calling had aroused anything in his crippled memory or whether its significance was only in his disordered mind.
They got him down the ladder and he accompanied them meekly to their little camp, hanging his head, and never speaking. Westy Martin, who clasped his arm, noticed that it still trembled, but otherwise he gave no sign of his hallucination and insane agitation. They pitied him, of course, but they could not repress a certain repugnance to him. Rational or not, a murderer is not a pleasant thing.... Their hearty liking for him, which had grown into a kind of affection, passed now to a feeling of pity.
Before they reached the camp he made the one remark which broke his otherwise meek silence. On passing the shack on which they had last been working, he said, “That’s where I found the robin, under that floor. Hollender thought I would kill it. He thinks I’m that kind.” Then he laughed. Warde said nothing.
They got him back to his couch, where he almost immediately fell sound asleep. After ten minutes or so, when Roy entered to look at his bare heel in the brightness of his flashlight, he was breathing heavily, wrapped in the sleep of utter exhaustion and oblivion. The diagonal mark seen in his foot imprint was plainly noticeable as a scar on his heel. Doc Carson felt his pulse and it was almost normal.
There seemed no likelihood of his trying to escape that night. His composure, they thought, might have been intended to throw them off their guard; but his deep, sonorous sleep rang true; it was as good as a cordon of sentinels. But for the scouts there was yet no sleep and they raked together a few chips from the scene of their former happiness and sat about the poor disconsolate little blaze talking in undertones, trying to decide what they had better do. Of one thing they were resolved, and that was that the county authorities in Bridgeboro should be informed that this Blythe was none other than Claude Darrell....
CHAPTER XXIV
THE WARNING
They talked late and their decision before turning in was that the three patrol leaders, Roy, Connie Bennett and Arthur Van Arlen should go to Bridgeboro late in the afternoon and tell their scoutmaster, Mr. Ellsworth, of their discovery. They chose the emissaries with the intention of putting the responsibility upon their leaders where it belonged, and also with the thought of having the three patrols participate equally in what seemed an odious thing, view it as they would.
Pee-wee voiced the general sentiment when he said, “Gee, something is all the time happening to prove he’s the one they’re after, and then all of a sudden something happens so as to kind of make us like him and trust him more. Anyway, I think he didn’t know what he was doing, and I like him and I’m not afraid to say so.” And he added, “The Silver Foxes are crazy if it comes to that.”
“They’re crazy about you, Kid,” Roy said in forced good humor and ruffling his hair for him.