“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.