“And see here,” he said, in conclusion, “if Mr. Warren gets here by to-morrow noon, that’ll be time enough. And that gives you a chance to take the boat up to-day if you hurry, and bring Mr. Warren back with you. I’ll sorter guarantee we don’t fetch up here again till to-morrow afternoon, so don’t you worry.” And with a sly twinkle in his gray eyes the captain took his leave, and rolled along lazily toward his home. He was still eating a hearty breakfast when the colonel and the squire burst in upon him, hot with impatience. But the captain was provokingly deliberate, and finished a few more huge slices of bread and a biscuit or two, and two cups of coffee and a few of his wife’s doughnuts, before he would budge an inch. “The boys can’t escape,” he said, by way of assurance to the impatient pair. “They can’t go across the Atlantic in a little sardine-box like that, if it has got a mast and a bowsprit and a cabin to it. We’re bound to fetch up with them quick enough. Have a cup of coffee, colonel! Squire, sit down and drink a cup of coffee! Mrs. Curtis knows how to make it, if anybody does.” But the colonel and the squire refused impatiently, and by dint of nagging and voluble persuasion they got Captain Sam started, and the three went down to the shore. The news had spread abroad by this time,—thanks to the colonel and the squire,—and quite a number of villagers and cottagers had gathered to see them off. What they said was not complimentary to the worthy two, for the boys, in spite of their pranks, were universally liked, and the whole village had not done with praising them for their bravery at the fire. “Why don’t you go and arrest Jack Harvey and his crew?” cried one of the villagers. “Looks mighty queer to have them clear out, every one of them, the morning of the blaze. Dan French, he saw them standing out by his point early that morning while the fire was blazing its hardest. Reckon that looks a sight queerer than it does to wait a whole day.” “Well! Well! I guess they had a hand in it,” cried Colonel Witham, as he stepped into the yacht’s tender. “We’ll hunt them up, too, later on. They are all mixed up in it, I’ve no doubt. Wait till we get the boys we are after now, and we’ll make them confess the whole thing.” It certainly did look suspicious, this flight from both camps and from the Warren cottage, just after the fire; and the villagers, however well disposed they might be in the boys’ favour, or however much inclined to show leniency, could not explain it away. “They must have been up to some of their pranks,” they said to one another, “and somehow got the hotel on fire. Colonel Witham must be right,—and, besides, Squire Brackett says he’s got the proof. He must know something bad, or he would not be so certain.” And to this conclusion, reluctant as they might be to come to it, there fitted, in startling corroboration, the coincidence of their being the first to discover the fire,—the first to give the alarm.