“Sure, for complicity in that poisoning case, if that’s what you mean, but ’twas not that he confessed. Mr. Parsons, I’d like to ask you something.” McCarty bent forward. “If a guy—I mean a man—was sent up and escaped and you thought he was innocent, would you think it your duty to hide him or turn him over to the law again?”
“I should deliver him to the authorities.” The answer came without an instant’s hesitation. “A man’s personal opinion could not be allowed to weigh against the mandates of our laws or our whole social fabric would centuries ago have been undermined. The individual must be submerged in the collective body, if civilization is to endure!—But why do you ask?”
“You knew that Radley, the fellow sentenced with Porter, escaped a month ago and that he was caught last night?”
“I knew that he had escaped but not that he was recaptured!” Mr. Parsons spoke in oddly shocked accents. “The newspapers doubtless have an account of it, but I was too disturbed in mind this morning to glance at them.—Where was the unfortunate man found?”
“Not where he was last Sunday, Mr. Parsons!” McCarty retorted significantly. “He’s supposed to be crazy now, so he’ll go to the asylum instead of back up the river, but he wasn’t crazy last Sunday, nor the week and more before that, when he laid hid in the empty house next door here, fed from your table and cared for by some one in your house! That was Porter’s confession, and I’m asking you where is he?”
“He has gone!” Parsons rested his elbow on his desk and shielded his eyes with his hand. “I never suspected this! Christopher laid the table for breakfast as usual this morning and arranged the mail and the newspapers; it must have been then that he saw the account of Radley’s capture and ran away, panic-stricken for fear that he might fall into the hands of the law again! I have thought that he seemed more deeply troubled this week; if he had only come to me, and let me convince him of his higher duty! I have failed with him, failed!”
Deep distress throbbed with a note of pain in his tone but McCarty persisted dryly:
“That’s as may be, sir. He left about the time the papers came? That’ll be around eight o’clock? Was it before or after you ’phoned to me that you knew of it?”
Mr. Parsons’ hand fell.
“Just before. I knew no reason for his departure and he left no word, but the condition of his room showed hurried flight. It was then that I decided to place myself unreservedly in your hands.”