“Answer me that, then, and I’ll ask no more for the present.”
“Yes, the ruffian got clean away, and no one knows to this day how he did it. Do you?”
“Yes. I saw him do it.”
“The deuce you did! But there, you shall tell me all about it to-morrow. Have a drop of beef-tea and then go to bye-bye.”
Which I did.
My powers of recuperation are great, and a few days saw me comparatively well in body, though by no means easy in mind. Up to this point my search for Captain Shannon had seemed to me a somewhat public-spirited and deserving enterprise. To bring such a scoundrel to justice would be doing a service to the country and to humanity; and in the wild scene of excitement which I knew would follow the news of his arrest I liked to picture myself as receiving the thanks of the community, and in fact being regarded very much as the hero of the hour.
But while I had been lying in my room, idle in body but abnormally active in brain, the matter had presented itself to me in a very different light, and I was by no means sure that, were the facts made public, I should not be looked upon as a knave rather than as a hero. I had to ask myself seriously whether the course I had taken could be justified at all, and whether, by withholding from the authorities the suspicion I entertained about the man with the red beard, and by taking upon myself the responsibility of keeping, unaided, an eye upon his movements, I was not morally answerable for the lives which had been lost in the last terrible outrage he had effected.
It was quite possible that, had I gone to the authorities before the event and informed them of my unsupported suspicion, I should have been laughed at for my pains. But were I to come forward after the event and admit that before the outrage occurred, and while yet there was time to prevent it, I had suspected the man with the brown bag to be James Mullen, and yet had withheld my suspicions from the police, I might be looked upon as less of a fool than a scoundrel.
My motives for having kept silent would be open to the worst interpretation, and I should be everywhere denounced as an enemy of society whose criminal vanity had made him think himself capable of coping single-handed with the greatest artist in crime of the century, and whose yet more criminal greed and anxiety to secure the entire reward for himself had led him to withhold from the proper authorities information by means of which the capture of the arch-murderer might have been effected and the last dreadful outrage prevented.
Knowing, as I did, how uncontrollable was the feeling of the populace in regard to the outrage, I could not disguise from myself that a man who made such a confession as I had to make, would—should he be recognised in the streets—run a very good chance of being mobbed, if not lynched.