'Surely I have seen that little lad before,' thought Frank; and then he said, aloud—
'What is your name, my boy?'
'Jack the Prig,' replied the little fellow.
Frank started; memory carried him back to the Dark Vaults, where he had heard the Dead Man catechise his little son, and he recollected that the urchin had, on that occasion, made the same reply to a similar question. By referring to the sixth chapter of this work, the reader will find the questions and answers of that singular catechism.
Resolving to test the matter further, our hero asked the boy the next question which he remembered the Dead Man had addressed to his son, on that eventful night:—
'Who gave you that name?'
'The Jolly Knights of the Round Table,' replied the boy, mechanically.
'By heavens, 'tis as I suspected!' thought Frank—'the child's answers to my questions prove him to be the son of the Dead Man; the voice which I heard while listening in the passage, and which seemed familiar to me, was the voice of that infernal miscreant himself: and the woman whom I accompanied hither, and whom I half fancied I had seen before—that woman is his wife.'
The boy, probably fearing a return of his mother, left the room; and Frank continued his meditations in the following strain:—
'The mystery begins to clear up. This house is probably the one that communicates with the secret outlet of the Dark Vaults, through which I passed, blindfolded, accompanied by those two villains, Fred Archer, and the Dead Man. The woman, no doubt, entices unsuspecting men into this devil's trap, and after drugging them into a state of insensibility, hands them over to the tender mercies of her hideous husband, who, after robbing them, casts them, perhaps, into some infernal pit beneath this house, there to die and rot!—Good God, what terrible iniquities are perpetrated in the very heart of this great city—iniquities which are unsuspected and unknown! And yet the perpetrators of them often escape their merited punishment, while I, an innocent man, came within a hair's breadth of perishing upon the scaffold for another's crime! But I will not question the divine justice of the Almighty; the guilty may elude the punishment due their crimes, in this world, but vengeance will overtake them in the next. It shall, however, henceforth be the great object of my life, to bring one stupendous miscreant to the bar of human justice—the Dead Man whose escape from the State Prison was followed by his outrage upon Clinton Romaine, by which the poor boy was forever deprived of the faculty of speech; and 'tis my firm belief that 'twas by his accursed hand my aunt was murdered; she was too elevated in character, and too good a Christian, to commit suicide, and he is the only man in existence who could slay such an excellent and honorable woman! Yes—something tells me that the Dead Man is the murderer of my beloved relative, and never will I rest till he is in my power, that I may wreak upon him my deadly vengeance!'