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 passionate 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--wishing 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, nobody 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."