AFTER THE STORM
The expected difficulty of getting Blythe down from his strange refuge
was much simplified by his own demeanor. When his agitation subsided he
became as docile as a lamb, seeming quite willing to place himself in
the scouts' hands. He seemed utterly exhausted and bewildered. With this
exception he showed no trace of what he had been through, and appeared
not to remember it.
When they asked him to get up, he stared at Roy's flashlight for a
moment as if puzzled, then rose saying not a word. In the glare of the
light one of the scouts lifted a small locket that dangled on a cord
around Blythe's neck, and several of the boys looked at it. Blythe
either did not know what they did, or he did not care. At all events he
did not object. This seemed odd to them considering how he had clutched
the thing before.
They saw that it was quite useless to question him about the matches and
the wisps of straw or about why the sounds had meant anything to him.
They wondered whether indeed that ghostly calling had aroused anything
in his crippled memory or whether its significance was only in his
disordered mind.
They got him down the ladder and he accompanied them meekly to their
little camp, hanging his head, and never speaking. Westy Martin, who
clasped his arm, noticed that it still trembled, but otherwise he gave
no sign of his hallucination and insane agitation. They pitied him, of
course, but they could not repress a certain repugnance to him. Rational
or not, a murderer is not a pleasant thing.... Their hearty liking for
him, which had grown into a kind of affection, passed now to a feeling
of pity.
Before they reached the camp he made the one remark which broke his
otherwise meek silence. On passing the shack on which they had last been
working, he said, "That's where I found the robin, under that floor.
Hollender thought I would kill it. He thinks I'm that kind." Then he
laughed. Warde said nothing.
They got him back to his couch, where he almost immediately fell sound
asleep. After ten minutes or so, when Roy entered to look at his bare
heel in the brightness of his flashlight, he was breathing heavily,
wrapped in the sleep of utter exhaustion and oblivion. The diagonal mark
seen in his foot imprint was plainly noticeable as a scar on his heel.
Doc Carson felt his pulse and it was almost normal.
There seemed no likelihood of his trying to escape that night. His
composure, they thought, might have been intended to throw them off
their guard; but his deep, sonorous sleep rang true; it was as good as a
cordon of sentinels. But for the scouts there was yet no sleep and they
raked together a few chips from the scene of their former happiness and
sat about the poor disconsolate little blaze talking in undertones,
trying to decide what they had better do. Of one thing they were
resolved, and that was that the county authorities in Bridgeboro should
be informed that this Blythe was none other than Claude Darrell....