The officer could not follow his example, without attracting attention, for what is eminently sane in one stage of human development would be evidence of an unbalanced mind in a more advanced age and a different station of life. He was not, however, willing to pass on, lest he lose sight of the boy; and something, he could not say what, convinced him that there was an objective point in Ned's wanderings, albeit he himself, perhaps, was as yet unconscious whither, in his undiscriminated mental processes, his steps were tending. The officer met the emergency by pausing in the middle of the road and taking out a cigar. The wind was stirring anew, and thus he was enabled to make the business of deliberately lighting it a longer operation than was really necessary. More than one match flickered and was extinguished by the freakish gusts, although he appeared to shield carefully the timorous flame with his hand. This enabled him to stand still until Ned was once more forging ahead, when the genteel-looking man in citizen's dress again began to stroll along, swinging his cane and leisurely puffing his cigar. He needed its solace, for a sharp nettling irritation was beginning to be very prominent in his consciousness. "I'd rather shadow a grasshopper than a boy," he said to himself, for there seemed to be some chance to restrain the mere activities of the one, and he could not be sure what the vagaries of the other implied. He prided himself on his experience. He had outwitted noted crooks in his time. He felt fully competent to divine any usual motive of flight or aggression or craft or wickedness, but the interest of standing still as Ned was now doing and kicking at a frog as it hopped from one side of the road to the other was something he could not appreciate. It seemed so casual, so inconsistent with any other motive than mere idle diversion, that he would have been minded to leave Ned in this choice batrachian company were he not lured on and on by the hope of finding the boy making an effort to communicate with the older and more important conspirators in the crime. The unique difficulties of the situation, too, appealed to his vanity in invention. What to do while Ned was engaged with the frog he did not, for one moment, know. The next, with a sentiment of discovery, he drew out his watch, having observed a dial on the tower of a small building down a glade so steep that the clock was not many feet higher than his head as he stood on the hillside; he affected to compare the timepieces and then to reset his watch, and to wind it carefully anew. He had not completed this ruse, which he was exploiting in the most natural manner possible, when Ned suddenly started forward at a brisk pace and evidently with a definite goal in view.