“Uh-huh.”
“What’s he done?”
“I’ve hesitated a long time about mentioning it. It may seem I’m straining at a gnat.”
“Let’s have it,” he urged.
“You do hate to suspect people of being spies and saboteurs, especially when they’re right in the hospital with your own father.”
“All the more reason you shouldn’t take any chances.”
Quickly Kitty gave Brad an account of the little incident on the bus three weeks earlier. “It seems sort of absurd now that I’m talking about it for the first time to think the boy might have had anything to do with the fire at the oyster cannery, but that’s exactly what I have been thinking.”
“I don’t think your suspicions are unfounded.”
“If he used gasoline or kerosene to start that fire it was still fresh enough to flame up from those cigar ashes. And he certainly did get on the bus right at the cannery station.”
“If that fire was the work of saboteurs the objective was no doubt the shipyards, not the cannery.”