Hardly had the truck moved to a place of safety than again came the cry:
“Back! Back!”
Once more the crowd surged away from the fire. High time it was, too, for the brick walls, trembling like a tree before its fall, threatened to topple over and crush them.
For a long moment it stood tottering, then instead of pitching headlong into the street, it crumbled down like a melting mass of waxen blocks.
A wail rose from the crowd. Their school was gone. This was followed almost at once by a shout of joy. Their homes were saved, for were not a score of nozzles playing upon the crumbled, red-hot mass, reducing it to blackness and ashes?
Such was the burning of the Shelby School. Who had set this fire? Where was he now? These were Johnny Thompson’s problems. Unless they were speedily solved there was reason to believe that within a month, perhaps within a week, or even a day, other public buildings would be burned to a heap of smouldering ruins. Who was this firebug? What could his motives be?
He thought of the pink-eyed man and of that expression he had surprised on his face. He fought his way back to the store in which he had seen the man. The store was dark, the door locked.
“No use;” he told himself, “couldn’t find him in this crowd. Probably never see him again. Probably nothing to it, anyway. Some people are so constituted that they just naturally enjoy a catastrophe. They’d smile at the burning of their own home. Nero fiddled while Rome burned.”
In this he was partly wrong. He was destined to see this pink-eyed man again, again, and yet again; and always under the most unusual circumstances.
But now his thoughts turned to the child. She had said she had no home. How could that be? What did she know about the fire? Had she been in the building at the time it was set? That seemed probable. Could she answer important questions? That seemed probable, too. He must question her; not now, not here, but in some quiet place. She needed rest and probably food as well. Where should he take her? He had no relatives in the city. His own room would not do. The fire station would be too public and the little girl would be too greatly alarmed to talk well there.