But even as he entered into the search he asked himself seriously whether or not he had any business with the man he sought.
“I may, and I may not,” he mumbled to himself at last, “but one thing is sure—this thing has got to stop. When the police can’t pin a thing on a particular man they go out looking for suspects and bring in every suspicious looking character. That’s what I’ll have to do.”
At once his mind was at work on possibilities. Two men had come under suspicion; the pink-eyed man and the man with the hooked nose and the limp. If either was the firebug, which was it most likely to be? Johnny remembered the look he had seen on the face of the pink-eyed man the night of the school house fire. It was a look of pleasure which had seemed to say: “I set the fire. Isn’t it grand!” And yet, had he read that look correctly? One thing was sure—a moment later the look had vanished from the man’s face and he was showing an active interest in the saving of a child from the school building.
“And that,” thought Johnny, “would tend to make a fellow love him.”
“On the other hand,” he mused, “he lives in a disreputable looking place; at least I saw him go in there. And he was at that second fire. What’s he doing at every midnight fire if he has nothing to do with them?”
As for the man who limped, he had seen him at but one fire, and that time there was nothing of a suspicious character revealed other than his presence behind the lines.
“And yet I have a sneaking notion,” Johnny mused, “that it was he who shot at me out there on the marsh.”
“Not much proof for that conclusion, either,” he murmured a moment later.
His mind went back to the double telephone wires he had found in the burned schoolhouse and the one he had hidden beneath the bushes but a few moments before.
“Might be something to it,” he said suddenly and quite out loud. “Might——”