Page:Bedford-Jones--Boy Scouts of the Air at Cape Peril.djvu/91

 "Then you have no suspicion as to who sunk it or where it came from? Nobody suspicious been seen around?" persisted Hardy.

"No, sir, not so far as I knows," declared the witness, and then, after a few moments' hesitation, he pointed to a lanky man in an oilskin coat in the group around the airplane. "I recollect Joe Turpin, that tallest man yonder, did say that he give some grub to a tramp one night 'bout the time I found the boat. He said he came from Roanoke Island and his name was Buffalo Dare or some such."

Unable to get any further information from Hall, Hardy directed the excited Hatton to stay where he was while he himself interviewed the man in oilskin. Joe Turpin answered the questions after some coaxing. The stranger, he asserted, was a short, stocky, smooth-faced man with a rattlesnake sort of eye, but he stood out of the light with a slouch hat pulled down over him face, and the witness wasn't sure he could recognize him if he saw him in the daylight. "He wore sto' clothes," continued Turpin, "and didn't look like our folks. He paid for his food. Said he was an Indian traveling to Dare