“You don’t get rid of a man that easily,” he told himself. “They do it in the movies; but in real life, not once in a million times.”
The more he thought of it, the surer he became that he was right. The moon had been under a cloud for a long time, long enough for the man to have escaped over the breakwater to the made land.
“And besides,” Johnny reasoned, “he was just as likely to fall in on the side of the breakwater away from the spray as he was on the dangerous side. On that side it would have been no trick at all to swim to the shore of that made land.”
Having convinced himself that the affair would bear looking into, he retraced his steps to the lake shore. The wind had gone down. The moon was shining. The breakwater appeared to offer a safe passage to the land beyond.
“I’ll chance it,” he murmured to himself.
As the reader already knows, the unfinished breakwater was composed of sharp edged limestone rock, together with broken fragments of cement taken from old sidewalks and cellar walls. To cross from shore to shore was no easy task, even now. More than once Johnny was obliged to drop on his knees to save himself a slide into the water. As he saw how perilous the passage was he was all but forced to believe that the Chief’s conclusion was correct, that the fugitive had been drowned.
“And if he did,” Johnny thought to himself, “and if he was the firebug, then this chase is ended and, what’s more, he took his secret with him to the bottom of the lake.”
This thought left him a feeling of disappointment so keen that it threw him into a fit of despondency. He knew well enough that he should be glad that the man was gone. The city would then see the end of the havoc that had added so much to the discomfort and unhappiness of its people.
“But all the same,” he told himself defiantly, “that fellow had some secret method for setting fires, an unusual and unknown method. It is decidedly disappointing, after you had been for so long a time hot on the trail, to have that secret buried from your sight forever.
“Well, what is to be, will be,” he mused as he picked his way across the final rugged stretch of cold, wet rock.