CHAPTER XXV

JACK’S PRISONERS.

WEAK-EYED Judge Garty, having sanded the warrant by which Jack was to have been conveyed to jail, and winked hard over it for about fifteen seconds (giving at least six winks to the second) to see that it was all right, shook it in the air at the empty space occupied a moment before by the jolly constable.

“Here! Sellick! where are you? Here’s our _mittimus_,” he was saying, when occurred the pleasant little catastrophe related in our last chapter.

The room was filled with confusion in an instant, sounds of men laughing, crying out, rushing to and fro, and clamoring at door and window.

“What’s the matter?” called Squire Peternot, in a loud, stern voice. “Where’s the constable? where’s the prisoner?”

“Gone!” answered somebody in the crowd.

“Gone?” cried Judge Garty, rising to his feet, still shaking his paper and winking blindly. “He can’t go without our warrant! Sellick knows better ’n that!”

“But the boy don’t!” cried Sellick, running to the table.

“The boy!” echoed Peternot; “where is he?”

“Gone—got away—took leg-bail,” answered several voices at once, in the general tumult. “He’s left his hat, though!”

“Why ain’t you—why don’t somebody—ketch him!” gasped out Peternot, striding towards the door.

“Screw-driver! pair of shears! anything!” said Sellick, searching the table, “to force the lock!”

“The lock? the lock?” said the judge, like one just waking from sleep in a strong light.

“Yes, man!” said Sellick, unable to take an altogether serious view of even so serious a matter; “boy has gone for more milk; ’fraid he wouldn’t find us here when he got back, so he turned the key! Tongs!” And he sprang to the empty fireplace.

Peternot reached the door, and found his nephew, Mr. Byron Dinks, standing beside it in a comical attitude.

“Why don’t you open?” cried the squire, putting on his hat.

“Can’t open!” answered Byron.

“Stand away then!”

“Can’t stand away!”

“What’s the reason you can’t?” roared the impatient old man, seizing Byron by the shoulder.

“Door is locked—I’m caught—coat-tail shut in! Look out! you’ll tear!” said Byron, anxiously holding the hinder part of his garment with one hand, and his uncle’s arm with the other.

“I should think ye was all a pack of fools!” exclaimed the squire, pushing on to the now open window, where he found several heads in advance of his own. “Le’ me come! make way here! Why don’t somebody in the street ketch him?”

“The’ ain’t nobody in the street!” giggled a youngster, taking in his head to make room for Peternot. “All the loafers are in here!”

Pressing forward, cane in hand, shouting, and thrusting several of the said loafers aside, Peternot reached the window, and, in attempting to put his head out, smashed his hat very neatly and thoroughly over his eyes. Having then with much ado got his head first out of the hat and then out of the window, he began to bellow forth, “Help! ho! fire!” And he whacked the clapboards outside with his stout cane. “Where is everybody?”

The testimony of the youngster as to all the village loafers being locked up in the room, was so near a literal fact, that not until this moment did anybody appear in answer to the cries from the window. But now three or four persons came running over the canal bridge, two or three out of the store opposite, and as many from the tavern up the street; while a fat little man rushed out of the grocery below, and turning up a face, round and red as a newly risen full moon, at the judge’s office window, screamed in a hoarse voice, “What’s the row up there?”

“Which way did that boy go?” demanded Peternot.

“What boy?” was answered back from the crowd that began to assemble below.

“Sellick’s prisoner! Run for him, some of you! He has locked us all in here! Hurry, and let us out! Help! ho!” And again the old man smote the resounding clapboards.

He had put on his hat once more; and now, accidentally knocked off by striking the window-sash, it fell, and meeting the arm and cane as they were rising vigorously to give the clapboards another blow, it flew in the air, sailed down by the corner of the grocery, and alighted softly and gently in the canal.

“Hurry!” repeated the squire, falling into some slight incongruities of speech in consequence of his very great excitement. “Ketch the door! Open the boy! Pick up—heavens and airth!—pick up my hat!”

Some hastened up stairs to the office door, to find that the escaping prisoner had seriously complicated the difficulties of the situation by carrying off the key. Others, dashing around corners, stared up and down the streets, and under the bridge, and up and down the canal, and into various dark places, including a pig-sty, Sellick’s wagon-seat, and an old molasses-hogshead half filled with rain water, standing under the eaves, without making any noteworthy discoveries. In the mean while a boatman on a passing scow drew Peternot’s hat out of the water with a pike-pole, and reached it to somebody, who placed it on the wooden head of a short post, well grooved by the friction of cables, where it was left to drip and dry.

“Bring a ladder! a ladder!” vociferated Peternot. The crowd below repeated, “Ladder! ladder!” and ran off in various directions to find one.

And now a man in a buggy was observed whipping his horse rather fast down the main street of the village.

“It’s the deacon!” cried Peternot. “May be he has seen him!”

It was Mr. Chatford indeed, who, perceiving signs of commotion at the bridge, urged on old Maje’s paces at as high a speed as that tired and faithful animal could well make after his unusual morning’s exercise with Mose and Annie Felton, and arrived on the spot just in time to be in the way of four or five ladders that came together from as many different directions. Maje turned to avoid one, and, being hit in the nose by another, backed the buggy upon some boys who were bringing a third. Men at the same time came running with fire-buckets and cries of “Fire!”

At last, after one ladder had been set up and found too short, another was erected in such haste over it that it broke the window, and also came near breaking Peternot’s head. And now, just as this mode of egress from the room was established, Sellick succeeded in forcing the obstinate lock. This was hardly done when a ragged little shaver in the street, who had been trying for a long while to tell his little story, managed to make himself heard.

“I feen him wun and fow fumfin in here!” placing his little hand on one of the lower hoops of the aforesaid molasses-hogshead, to enforce his meaning,—that he had seen Jack run and throw something in there.

This speech being at last understood and partly credited, the hogshead was tipped and the water emptied out; and there, sure enough, was Judge Garty’s office-door key, found just after the lock was forced and the useless ladder was sent crashing against the unlucky window.

But the child could give no information as to the way the fugitive had gone. Neither could Deacon Chatford, who now heard with astonishment how Jack had outwitted the witty constable, and turned the key on the court.

“The rogue!” said the deacon. “He ought not to have taken such a desperate course as that!” Yet somehow he wasn’t sorry. Riding over to the Basin, he had been greatly disturbed in his mind at the thought of Jack’s going to jail, and had seriously questioned whether it was not his duty to offer bail for him. He was a kind-hearted man, as we know; but he had lost faith in the boy’s integrity; and it was a relief to him to learn that the question of bail was settled. “Why, Sellick!” he cried, “what have you been about?”

The lately imprisoned crowd came laughing down the stairway to the street, Sellick laughing with the rest, though rather foolishly. He carefully folded Judge Garty’s warrant, and stuck it into the lining of his hat, remarking, “‘It may come in play some time,’ as the stingy man said when he laid away the bad egg in his cupboard.” Then stooping to pick up a bruised tin cup which lay at the foot of the stairs, “That’s an honest boy, deacon! He paid for the milk, and he left the cup.—This belongs to you, I believe,” handing it to the little fat grocer. “It looks like a good cup, and the milk may have been good milk, but the boy, I’m free to say, didn’t seem to be satisfied with it.—Now what’s to be done, squire? There’s no use crying for the article arter it’s spilt, ye know.”

The bareheaded old man strode past him, frowning prodigiously, and, taking his hat from the post, all wet as it was, put it on.

“Get track of your prisoner and take him!” he said impatiently. “What do ye stand dawdling here for? Somebody must have seen him!”

That was true enough. Reports were even then coming in of a youth whom women washing at their back doors had observed leaping fences and running fast across gardens and fields, away from the village. And now came shouts from down the canal, which drew the whole crowd in that direction.