The boys were silent. They had not realized how close they were to Ossining, and the thought of the great prison whose name they had often heard mentioned sobered them a little; the mere suggestion of one of its inmates scaling its frowning wall on such a night and setting forth in an open boat, perhaps lurking near their very shelter, cast a shadow over them.
"Are you—are you sure you didn't see a—a crouching shadow when you went out and got that gasoline can last night?" Pee-wee stammered.
"I'm sorry," said Roy, "but I didn't see one crouching shadow."
"His boat might have upset in the storm," Tom suggested. "The wind even shook this boat; it must have been pretty rough out on the river."
"Like enough," said the man. "Des'pret characters'll take des'pret chances."
"What did he do?" Pee-wee asked, his imagination thoroughly aroused.
"Dunno," said the man. "Burglary, like enough. Well now, you youngsters have had yer shelter'n the wust o' the storm's over. It's goin' ter keep right on steady like this till after full moon, an' the ole shebang'll be floppin' roun' the marsh like enough on full moon tide. My advice to you is to git along. Not that you done no damage or what I'd call damage—but it won't do no good fer yer to run amuck o' Ole Man Stanton. 'Cause he's a reg'lar grizzly, as the feller says."
The boys were silent a moment. Perhaps the thought of that desperate convict stealing forth amid the wind and rain still gripped them; but it began to dawn upon them also that they had been trespassing and that they had taken great liberties with this ramshackle boat.
That the owner could object to their use of it seemed preposterous. That he could take advantage of the technical "damage" done was quite unsupposable. But no one knows better than a boy how many "grouchy" men there are in the world, and these very boys had once been ordered out of John Temple's lot with threat and menace.
"Does everybody call him 'Old Man' Stanton?" Pee-wee asked. "Because if they do that's pretty bad. Whenever somebody is known as 'Old Man' it sounds pretty bad for him. They used to say 'Old Man Temple'—he's a man we know that owns a lot of railroads and things; of course, he's reformed now—he's a magnet——"