A Scout of To-day Part 27

"Then, he's probably hiding in the woods beyond the marshes. We must search them. That French-Canadian, Toiney Leduc, who's camping with you, has worked as a lumberman in those woods; he knows them well, and is a good trailer. I'd like to have him for a guide this morning." Here the officer turned to the scoutmaster. "And if you have no objection I think it would be well that those two boys should come with us," he nodded toward Scouts Warren and Chase. "They can identify the man whom they saw trying to enter that bungalow last night."

There is nothing at all inspiriting about a man-hunt; so Nixon and Leon decided when, within an hour, they landed from the police boat on the familiar salt-marshes high up the river, and silently took their way across them, in company with Toiney and the policemen, over the uplands into the woods.

They had come upon the fugitive's boat, hidden among a clump of bushes near the river. Using that as a starting-point, Toiney followed Dave Baldwin's trail into the maze of woodland; though how he did so was to the boy scouts a problem, for to them it seemed blind work.

But the guide in the ta.s.seled cap, blue s.h.i.+rt, and heelless high boots, would stop now and again at a soft spot on the marshes or uplands, or when they came to a swampy patch in the woods; at such times he would generally drop on all fours with a muttered: "Ha! _V'la ses pis!_" in his queer patois. "Dere's heem step!" And anon: "Dere me fin his feets again!"

When there was no footprint to guide him Toiney would stoop down and read the story of the dry pine-needles, just faintly disturbed by the toe of a rough boot which had kicked them aside a little in pa.s.sing.

Or he would carefully examine a broken twig, the wood of which, being whitish and not discolored, showed that it had been recently snapped by a tread heavier than that of a fox; and again they would hear him mutter in his quaint dialect: "_Tiens! le tzit ramille ca.s.se_: de littal stick broke! I'll t'ink hees step jus' here--engh?"

It was a lesson in trailing which the two boy scouts never forgot as they took their way through the thick woods, fairly well known to them now, past Varney's Paintpot, Rattlesnake Brook, and other points of interest.

Ere they reached the Bear's Den, however, the trail which Toiney had been following seemed to turn off at an angle and then double backward through the woods, in an opposite direction to that in which they had been pursuing it.

"Mebbe she's no' de same trail?" pondered the guide aloud. "Mebbe dere's oder man's feets, engh?"

It was now that a sudden idea, a swift memory, struck Scout Warren.

"Say! Starrie," he exclaimed in a low tone to his brother scout. "Do you remember our looking all over that loggers' camp last year, the shanty back there in the woods, with the rusty grindstone trough and mountain of sawdust beside it? We found some fresh tobacco ash on the table and in one of the bunks which showed that, though the shanty was deserted in summer, somebody was using it for a shelter at night. That somebody may have been Dave Baldwin."

"Yes, they say he has spent his time--or most of it--loafing among the dunes or in the woods," returned Leon, well recalling the incident and how, too, he had scoffed at the boy scout for taking the trouble to read the sign story told by every article in and about the rough shanty, including the overturned trough.

"Eh! what's that, boys?" asked one of the two policemen, catching part of the conversation.

As in duty bound they told him; and the search party turned in the direction of the log shanty.

As they surmised it was not empty. On the discolored mattress in the lower bunk left there by the lumbermen who once occupied it, was stretched the figure of a man, fast asleep. One foot emerging from a charred, torn trouser-leg which looked as if it had come into contact with fire, hung over the edge of the deal crib.

When the party filed into the shanty the sleeper started up and rubbed his eyes. At sight of the two policemen his smudged face took on a pinched pallor.

"I didn't do it on purpose!" he cried in the bewilderment of this sudden awakening, without time to collect his senses. "So help me! I never meant to set that shed on fire!"

"You were seen hanging round there an hour before the blaze broke out, and trying to get into the house too," challenged the elder of the policemen.

Dave Baldwin slipped from the bunk to the ground; he saw that his best course lay in making a clean breast of last night's proceedings.

"So I was!" he said. "And these two fellows," he pointed to the boy scouts, "saw me up on the piazza of the house, trying a window. I was hungry; I'd had nothing to eat all day but the last leg of a woodchuck that I knocked on the head day before yesterday. I thought the summer people who had just gone away might have left some canned stuff or remnants o' food behind 'em. I didn't want to steal anything else, or to do mischief!" he went on with that same pa.s.sionate frankness of a man abruptly startled out of sleep, while the policemen listened patiently.

"I didn't, I tell ye! I'd been hangin' round those Sugarloaf Dunes for nigh on two weeks, watching the boys who were camping there, having a ripping good time--doing a lot o' stunts that I knew nothing about--wis.h.i.+ng I'd had the chanst they have now!"

"How came you to go into the shed that was burned down?" asked one of the officers.

"I was hungry, as I tell you, an' I couldn't get into the house, so I thought I'd lie down under the nearest cover, that shed, go to sleep an'

forget it. I guess I knocked the ashes out o' my pipe an' dozed. Smoke an' the smell o' wood burning woke me. I found one side o' the shed was on fire. Maybe, some one had left an oily rag, or one with turpentine on it, around, and the spark from my pipe caught it. I don't know! I tried to stamp out the fire--to beat it out with my hands!" He extended blistered palms and knuckles. "I've made a mess o' my life I know! But I ain't a crazy fire-bug!"

"Why didn't you try and get help to fight it?"

"I was too scared. I thought, likely as not, n.o.body would believe me, seeing I had a 'reformatory record,'" the youthful vagrant's face twitched. "I was afraid o' being 'sent up' again, so I hid among the dunes and crossed to the woods this morning."

"Well, you can tell all that to the judge; you must come with me now,"

said the older policeman inflexibly, not unkindly; he knew that men when suddenly aroused from sleep usually speak the truth; he was impressed by the argument of those blistered palms; on the other hand, the youthful vagrant's past record was very much against him.

But those charred palms were evidence enough for Toiney; though they might leave the officers of the law unconvinced.

"Ha! _courage_, Dave," he cried, feeling an emotion of pity mingle with the contempt which he, honest Antoine, had felt for the _vaurien_ who had caused his old mother's heart to burst. "_Bon courage_, Dave! I'll no t'ink you do dat, for sure, me. Mebbe littal fire fly f'om you' pipe.

I'll no t'ink you do dat for de fun!"

"We don't think you did it on purpose, Dave," struck in the two boy scouts, seconding their guide.

Nevertheless, Dave Baldwin pa.s.sed that night in a prison cell and appeared before the judge next morning with the certainty confronting him that he would be remanded to appear before the higher court on the grave charge of being an incendiary.

And it seemed improbable that bail would be offered for the prisoner, so that he would be allowed out of jail in the mean time.

Yet bail was forthcoming. A ma.s.sive, weatherbeaten figure, well known in this part of Ess.e.x County, stood up in court declaring that he was ready and willing to sign the prisoner's bail bonds. It was Captain Andy Davis.

And when all formalities had been gone through, when the prisoner was liberated until such time as his case should come up for trial, Captain Andy took him in tow.

"You come along home with me, Dave!" he commanded. "I'm going to put it up to you straight whether you want to live a man's life, or not."

And so he did that evening.

"I've been wanting to get hold of you for some time, Dave Baldwin," said the sea-captain. "Your father an' I were s.h.i.+pmates together on more'n one trip. He was a white man, brave an' hard-working; it's hard for me to believe that there isn't some o' the same stuff in his son."

The youthful ne'er-do-weel was silent. Captain Andy slowly went on:--

"As for the matter of this fire, I don't believe you started it on purpose. I doubt if the policemen who arrested you do! It's your past record that's against you. Now! if I see the district attorney, Dave Baldwin," Captain Andy's eyes narrowed meditatively under the heavy lids, "and succeed in getting this case against you _nol prossed_--I guess that's the term the lawyer used--it means squashed, anyhow, do you want to start over again an' head for some port worth while?"

"n.o.body would give me the chance," muttered the younger man huskily.

"I will. I've bought a piece of land over there on the edge of the woods, lad; it ain't more'n half cleared yet. I'm intending to start a farm. But I don't know much about farming; that's the truth!" The grand old Viking looked almost pathetically helpless. "But you've worked on a farm, Dave, when you were a boy and since: if you want to take hold an'

help me--if you want to stick to work an' make good--this is your chance!"

An inarticulate sound from the _vaurien_; it sounded like a sob bitten in two by clenched teeth!

"The two boys who were with the officers who arrested you told me that you declared you'd been hangin' round the Sugarloaf Dunes lately, watching those scouts at their signaling stunts an' the like, an'

wis.h.i.+ng that you'd had the chance they have now, when you were a boy.

Well! _theirs_ is a splendid chance--better than boys ever had before, it seems to me--of joining the learning o' useful things with fun."

Captain Andy planted an elbow emphatically upon a little table near him.

"Now! Dave, you don't want to let those boy scouts be the ones to do the good turns for your old mother that you should do? If you ain't set on breaking her heart altogether--if you want to be a decent citizen of the country that raises boys like these scouts--if you want to see your own sons scouts some day--well, give us your fin, lad!"

The captain's voice dropped upon the last words, the semi-comical wind-up of a peroration broken and bl.u.s.tering in its earnestness.

There was a repet.i.tion of the hysterical sound in Dave Baldwin's throat which failed to pa.s.s his gritting teeth. He did not extend his hand at Captain Andy's invitation. But his shoulders heaved as he turned his head away; and the would-be benefactor was satisfied.

"And so Captain Andy is going to stand back of Dave Baldwin and give him another chance to make good in life!" said the Exmouth doctor, member of the Local Council of Boy Scouts, when he heard what had come of the vagrant's arrest. "That's like Andy! And I don't think he'll have much difficulty with the district attorney; n.o.body really believes that Baldwin started that fire maliciously, and the district attorney will be very ready to listen to anything Captain Andy has to say!"

Here the doctor's eye watered. He was recalling an incident which had occurred some years before at sea, when the son of that district attorney, who did not then occupy his present distinguished position, and the doctor's own son, with one or two other young men of Dave Baldwin's age, had been wrecked while yachting upon certain ragged rocks of Newfoundland, owing to their foolhardiness in putting to sea when a storm was brewing.