Part 7

“A piece of old gold which this lad wants me to buy,” he observed, and then, while the lad started and glanced at me, I, with apparent carelessness, and without looking in his direction, took from my pocket my little staff of authority, as if to polish up with my sleeve the silver crown. The lad’s eyes became fixed on that in a kind of fascination, and when I took the bit of chain and glanced full in his face, I was not astonished to find him deadly pale, and almost tottering on his legs.

“Where did you get it?” I demanded, and then, after a feeble grip at the counter, he sat down, looking ghastly indeed.

“At home; it’s my mother’s,” he stammered; then he seemed to think better of it, for he hastily added, “No—I found it.”

“Imphim; where the Hielantman found the tongs—at the fireside, eh?” I returned, after cautioning him. “Did you find any other things in the same place?”

“No.” It was a lie. I saw that, but then it was meant more as a dogged refusal than a denial. A reaction had come to his terror; he had pondered the position for a moment, and decided to take shelter in silence.

“Where do you live?”

“I’d rather not say,” was the tardy answer.

“Very well; work at anything?”

“Yes; I’m a joiner.” He appeared to regret the admission, for he bit his lip the moment he had said it.

“Apprentice or journeyman?”

“Apprentice. I’ll be out with my time next year.”

“Maybe you will,” I significantly answered; “meantime you’d better come with me and see what the Fiscal has to say to it.”

He objected most strongly to have his wrist fastened to mine, but the jeweller happened just then to address me by name, and my prisoner collapsed and submitted to the degradation. We had no great distance to go, but the road seemed long enough to him, for, though anything but an honest-looking fellow, I guessed rightly that it was his first experience of the handcuffs. At the Office he took refuge in silence, or tried to screen himself with absolute falsehood. He gave a false name; would give no address; denied that he had a mother living; would not say for whom he worked; and altogether emitted as stupid a declaration as any one could well have done. I believe he meant well—he meant to screen himself from further trouble; to save his friends from disgrace along with him; and to keep the knowledge of the scrape into which he had fallen from his employer and acquaintances generally; but then every liar has exactly the same excuse.

It was simply a little more work for me, and as the task was gradually accomplished, the facts revealed seemed to point to his guilt with no uncertain finger.

The discovery of his identity was made simply enough by his mother coming to the Office next morning to report her son missing. He had been absent all night, and had not returned to his work on the previous afternoon, and she was greatly distressed and concerned for his safety. It was the mention of the trade he followed, and the name and address of his employer, which first gave me the idea that we had the missing son; and when she was shown our prisoner he did not appear at all grateful for the boon, but swore at her in a manner in which no mother should be addressed, and which would have put many a professional criminal to the blush.

The mother appeared stunned and stupefied by the discovery that she had helped to rivet fetters on him, and that he was likely to be tried for housebreaking with an alternative charge of theft. How the charge came to assume this form is the most striking and curious feature of the case. As soon as I got the two addresses I went first to the home of the prisoner, Alfred Scott, and searched in vain for the rest of the plunder; then I went to his employer’s workshop, and unearthed the treasure-trove from a most ingenious hiding-place under a pile of wood which took us ten minutes to remove. Everything was there but the gold chain and the servant’s silver ring, and the whole were still wrapped up in Shorty’s spotted cotton handkerchief, which unfortunately did not bear either name or address. But this discovery was not the most important made at that place. From Scott’s master we learned that our prisoner, along with a journeyman, had been employed making some alterations or repairs in the major’s house about six months before the robbery. The natural inference then was that he upon that occasion had provided himself with casts of some of the keys, and so prepared to commit the robbery—hence the framing of the charge on the serious lines I have indicated.

As soon as these facts were made plain, and when the major had identified Scott as one of the joiners who had worked in his house, I went to Shorty’s cell and said that we had got the thief, and that in all probability he and The Fin would be soon at liberty.

Shorty received the news not with the satisfaction I had expected, but with a stony stare which seemed to me absolutely idiotic. He made no remark of any kind, and showed neither gratitude nor resentment. It turned out, however, that he and The Fin did not get off so easily, but were convicted and sent for thirty days to prison for “loitering with intent.”

Meanwhile Scott persisted in his fatal and blundering silence, and his case came on for trial. He pleaded “not guilty,” and the case went to proof, when the evidence, which, link by link, appeared to demonstrate his guilt beyond the shadow of a doubt, took him completely by surprise. There was the selling of the chain; his contradictions and prevarications; the finding of the plunder, and the fact that he had worked on the premises—all damning.

The summing up of the evidence had been completed, and the jury were about to find him guilty without leaving the box, when Scott excitedly asked to be allowed to make a statement in his defence.

“I am innocent of either theft or housebreaking—such crimes never entered my head,” he tremulously declared. “If I’ve done wrong at all it was only in not giving up the articles when I found them. I was sent to a land in H—— Street to repair the fastenings on the hatches leading to the roof, which had been broken by the sweeps or some one. The landlord had been ordered by the police to have them repaired, and I was sent to do it. There were two hatches—one at the head of the stair, and one in the roof; and in the loft between was a cistern. It is a big one, and stands at the side of the loft. I had to get a candle to see my way across the beams, and when I was coming back, after putting on a new hasp, I saw something like the corner of a cotton handkerchief in the space behind the cistern. It just caught my eyes as I was passing, and I went round and pulled it out, and found in it all the things I am accused of stealing. I had no idea they were stolen, or how long they might have been hidden there, and I thought I might keep them.”

This statement produced no impression either upon the Bench or the jury, or, if it did, the impression was damaging to the accused. In the first place, there was an air of romance about his story—it looked like another ingenious lie—and did not account for the plunder being left there, or give any clue to the real thieves. Then, even supposing the strange statement to be true, it still left Scott self-convicted of a serious crime—appropriating to his own use what he perfectly well knew did not belong to him. Without hesitation the jury found him guilty, and he was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, it being his first offence.

And he was innocent! what a shame! some one exclaims. Well, I don’t know. He was not innocent in intention. He was actually a thief, though not the actual first thief, and he suffered a just punishment.

And now to return to Shorty and The Fin. It does not appear that these amiable gentlemen met Scott in prison, or, if they did, that they exchanged confidences on the case which interested them so deeply, and in their seclusion the newspapers were not regularly placed upon their breakfast table, even had they been blessed with the ability to read them. It was agreed that Shorty should go over to the hide and get the plunder, while The Fin went to a safe reset to arrange about its disposal. This programme worked perfectly in all but one trifling item—the finding of the plunder. Shorty did himself up with soot to resemble a chimney-sweep, and with a ladder and the proper key of the hatch got up to his hide behind the cistern, only to groan and curse over the fact that the cotton handkerchief and its contents were gone. The truth flashed on him at once—some one had found the plunder. Shorty was as much enraged as if he had been robbed. While he stood there cursing, something bright caught his eye between the beams behind the cistern, and, stooping down, he picked up the servant’s silver ring—the sole remnant of the valuable plunder, which had in some way fallen out of the cotton handkerchief. Shorty was so furious that he was near pitching it as far as he could throw, but again that fateful second thought came to restrain him, and he put it into his pocket and returned to The Fin, to whom he related the facts, with the exception of the finding of the ring. The Fin, as I have noticed, was a silent man. He heard the whole with open eyes and shut mouth, and Shorty was himself too much enraged to notice that The Fin was displeased and suspicious. Some men would have stormed, and taunted, and uttered their suspicions, and even fought over it, but that was not The Fin’s style. He uttered no reflection, but when Shorty left him, The Fin took the precaution of following him.

Being newly out of prison, Shorty’s funds were low, and he went to the reset who had just been visited by The Fin, and managed to extract two shillings out of him in exchange for the servant’s silver ring. Every article of the plunder was by that time known to The Fin, having been frequently described by Shorty, and more particularly this ring, which Shorty had been so near leaving behind.

Scarcely had Shorty got into a public-house and exchanged one of the shillings for some brandy, when The Fin was up at the reset’s house demanding to know what Shorty had sold, and how many pounds sterling he had got for it. The reset, rather staggered, at last declared that Shorty had sold only the silver ring, and showed the trinket in confirmation.

The Fin did not believe a word of it, but he was a still man, and said nothing. Before three hours were gone he was with me, and had given me such information regarding another feat of Shorty’s that at last I drew a long breath of satisfaction, for I was sure of a conviction and a good long sentence.

As soon as I had taken Shorty—not without a fight—The Fin regretted his hastiness. He saw that if Shorty got a long sentence, he, The Fin, would perhaps never get near him for vengeance, whereas, had he allowed him to remain at liberty, a quick shove down some stair or toss out at some window when Shorty was drunk would have settled the whole business. The Fin’s regret did not last long, for before many hours he was in the cells too, Shorty having in turn revealed some awkward facts which seemed likely to put The Fin as long out of harm’s way as himself. These expectations were fully verified shortly after, when they both received sentence of seven years’ penal, and were duly removed to the penitentiary.

And now I come to the bit of tobacco pipe, which will prove how a mean and insignificant trifle often comes into the world to accomplish a great work, and confer a blessing on all mankind. Every one who knows anything of prison life can understand how a bit of an old tobacco pipe is valued by convicts shut off from tobacco for years. The smallest crumb of it, having the faintest taste of nicotine, is treasured and passed from prisoner to prisoner, to be sucked and finally broken up and chewed to its inmost recesses. It is worth twenty times its weight in gold to them. When The Fin had spent a year in prison in almost absolute silence, he got into hospital for some trifling complaint, and so ingratiated himself with the doctor that he was once or twice allowed into the laboratory. There by some means he had managed to secrete a minute quantity of a deadly poison, which he inserted into the hole in a piece of old tobacco pipe shank. This bit of tobacco pipe he concealed till he was again among the working convicts. He and Shorty were tacit foes, but this difficulty The Fin got over in a manner worthy of the cause. Once, when the warder was approaching, and a search possible, he managed, in sight of Shorty, to conceal the bit of tobacco pipe in a place easily accessible to his old pal, and then, when the danger was past, forgot to go back for it until Shorty had had a chance of appropriating the treasure. Not many minutes later Shorty took a fit and dropped dead among the convicts.

Every one was horrified and astonished, till one of the warders noticed a smell of tobacco about the mouth of the dead convict, and fished out of his clenched teeth the bit of tobacco pipe. It was then supposed that part of the pipe shank had been bitten off by Shorty and drawn back into the windpipe so as to cause his death; and he duly occupied his six feet of prison soil.

And was The Fin convicted and hanged? Not a bit of it. He lived out his sentence and was released, and went about long enough to boast of his deed, though I am bound to confess that few believed him, and the general opinion was that Shorty died of the bit of tobacco pipe without the poison. However, The Fin claimed all the credit, and insisted that he was not to blame for the result, seeing that he did not administer the poison, and that Shorty, in appropriating what he knew was not his own, committed a grave offence against convict society, and could not complain if he suffered for the crime.

The Fin should have been a lawyer, and with education might have risen to be one, had he not been soon after choked by an overdose of shebeen whisky.

THE BROKEN CAIRNGORM.

I had to take Jess Murray for her share in a very bold robbery, in which a commercial traveller, peaceably walking home to his hotel, had been waylaid and stripped of pocket-book, purse, and watch, the haul altogether amounting to upwards of £100 in value, the greater part of which was not his own. The gentleman could give no description of the men, but remembered that they had been assisted at a critical moment by a woman, who, so far as he could judge, was tall and handsome, and not very old. It was the style of the robbery as much as that brief and imperfect description which directed my attention to Jess Murray. She was a bold wench, strong as a lion, and so thoroughly bad that I took the trouble of hating her—an exceptional case indeed, as in general one gets to look upon her kind with as much indifference as a drover does upon a herd of horned knowte, under his care one day and gone the next.

I believed Jess to be one of the few who have not one redeeming quality or trait, and was eager for the chance which should put her out of harm’s way for a good long term of years.

I had really no evidence, but an instinctive feeling, connecting Jess with the robbery; but when on my way to her place I chanced to pass one of her acquaintances on the street. I let him pass, and then a thought struck me, and I turned back and stopped him. A scared look at once came into his face, so I asked him to come with me—back to the Office. He came reluctantly, and the cause I speedily understood when he tried to throw away behind his back a £20 bank note taken from the pocket-book of the commercial traveller. The number and description of this note was already in my possession, and I picked up the paper money with the most lively satisfaction, when the fellow immediately began to protest that he had only been sent to change the note, and was willing to tell all about the robbery if things were made right for himself.

The result of this chance capture was that we had abundant evidence against Jess and another, and I went for her with the greatest of pleasure. She was in the “kitchen” of the place among a crowd of her kind when I entered, and it needed only a motion of my finger and a nod of my head to chase the merriment from her face, and bring her slowly across the floor to my side. It is not usual for me to be communicative, but on the present occasion I was elated, and said in reply to her sullen inquiry—

“It’s that affair of the commercial traveller. It’s all blown, and you are in for five years at least. Jim White is in the office already, and the £20 bank note with him.”

Jess seemed struck in a heap with the news. She flashed deadly pale and sank feebly into a chair, with her bold, bright eyes becoming shiny with tears.

“Where’s Dickie?” she faintly articulated to some of the silent onlookers, and, fearing treachery, I snatched out a double brass whistle which can be heard a whole street off, and swiftly raised it to my lips.

“Stop! you needn’t,” Jess quickly interposed, understanding the motion. “Dickie’s only my laddie. Oh, what will become of him when I’m away?”

Dickie was said to be playing down on the street, so I told her we might see him as we left. Jess began to cry bitterly—Jess! whom I believed to have not one genuine tear in her! and thus we descended the stairs together. In the street a ragged and unkempt boy of seven or eight was brought to her side, and she clutched him to her breast, kissing his smudged face with a passionate fervour which gave me quite a fresh insight into her character. The boy resembled her in features, and would have passed for good-looking had he only been washed and dressed up a little.

“What’s to ’come o’ my bairn?—oh, what’s to ’come o’ my bairn?” wailed Jess, and the boy began to howl in concert, and I saw that it would be useless to try to separate them just then.

“Oh, he’ll be looked after as he has often been before,” I carelessly answered. “He’ll go to the Poorhouse. He’ll be safer there than under your care—and cleaner.”

The remark did not appear to console Jess in the least. Dickie was her only child, and the whole strength of her nature seemed concentrated in her love of that boy. I was astonished, and speculated on the matter all the way to the office, quietly wondering what “line of business” that same gutter child was destined to torment me and others by adopting, when he should be a few years older.

I had made a pretty shrewd guess at Jess’s sentence, for the list of previous convictions was so strong against her that she was awarded exactly the number of years I had named. I was convinced by that time that she did not grieve over the punishment at all, but over her separation from her child, and I remember thinking—“We are poor judges of one another. What a strong hold could be taken of that woman through that child, if one only knew how to use the power.”

Dickie was allowed to see his mother once before she was sent to the Penitentiary, and then he went back to the Poorhouse. He was a good deal cleaner by that time, and had on different clothing, but there was one plaything, or fetish, with which he had resolutely refused to part, and that still hung from his neck. It was a broken cairngorm stone, with a hole drilled at one end, through which a bit of twine had been drawn, that he might suspend the trinket from his neck. I had noticed the stone when I took him to the office with his mother, but merely glanced at it, thinking that it was but an imitation moulded in yellow glass. I was mistaken, for it was part of a real stone, and had probably been set in some stolen brooch which had been broken up for the metal.

It was of no great value, but it pleased Dickie, and kept him from wearying during his long confinement in the Poorhouse, which to him was as irksome as being shut up in a prison. He was a lively, spirited boy, and had never been checked or curbed, so it may be imagined he got into as many scrapes as the average boy of his age.

However, in spite of his mischief and wild pranks, Dickie had a soft spot in his heart, and could be tamed by a gentle word or appeal when lashing had been tried in vain. When he had been about eighteen months in the Poorhouse, a poor knife-grinder was admitted for a day or two, who told Dickie such grand romances of his free life on the road that the boy took an insatiable longing for freedom. Squinting Jerry was the man’s name, but though he had an evil look, he was really an honest fellow.

Jerry had been driven to the Poorhouse for a night’s shelter, and while there had been laid up for a day or two with a bad leg which troubled him at times, but as soon as he was able to move he hastened to quit the oppressive confinement. Before he had done so, Dickie, by a series of pathetic appeals, had extracted from him a consent to receiving him as an apprentice.

Jerry was really not reluctant to having an assistant, whom he needed sorely at times, but he was afraid that the arrangement might get him into trouble with the parochial authorities, should he be followed and Dickie taken back. Then there were Dickie’s antecedents to be considered—he was the son of a convict, and might have the “bad blood” in him, as Jerry expressed it. The old knife-grinder therefore agreed to the proposal with reluctance, as we often do with what turns out a great blessing. Dickie had no difficulty in fulfilling his part of the agreement, for he had already run away twice, and each time gone back of his own accord.

He therefore got out of the Poorhouse easily, and joined Jerry a mile or two out of the city. He took with him his only treasure, the broken cairngorm, which some one had declared to him was a diamond, and worth a great deal of money. This opinion was not shared by Jerry, who failed to find a purchaser for the stone, and finally relegated it to a little box in the grinding machine, which they trundled before them wherever they went. Perhaps the parochial authorities were glad to get rid of Dickie, for he was not followed or taken back. The new life suited him—it was free and untrammelled; it had constant variety, and there was a certain spice of romance about it, which made sleeping in the open air, or getting drenched with rain, or lost and benighted, as they often were, mere trifles, to be forgotten with the first blaze of sunshine. Compared with his life in the Poorhouse Dickie found it heavenly, and very soon a new and altogether unexpected result began to arise from his changed condition.

When Dickie had taken to the road it was sheer impatience of restraint that sent him thither, and he had many ideas of right and wrong which are tolerated only among my “bairns.” Now Jerry was an ignorant man, who did not know one letter from another, but there was one lesson he had learned—that a life of crime is the worst paying trade in the world. Halting by roadside hamlets, resting under shady hedges, or wandering along green lanes, Jerry laid down his ideas to Dickie in a homely fashion, which would have thrown a teacher of grammar into hysterics, but which nevertheless carried conviction to the heart of the boy. Not that Dickie had ever meant to wrong Jerry, but he had only taken to this life as a make-shift till his mother should be released from prison.