One evening, about a fortnight after the last-recorded events, an elderly tramp was sitting against a haystack upon some farm premises, at no great distance from the town of Cottonborough. His age might be sixty, or, allowing for the rough life he had led, something less. He looked jaded and unwell. The day had been very warm, and the man was eating, with no great appetite, a sumptuous supper of German sausage and bread. The sausage had been wrapped in a piece of newspaper, which spread out upon his knees, was now doing duty as a tablecloth. Having finished his meal, the man lazily glanced at the paper; but finding its contents, at first, to possess no particular interest, he was about to crumple it up and throw it away, when his eye lighted on a paragraph which induced him to pause. He smoothed out the paper, and raised it nearer to his eyes.
“Well,” he muttered, “I ain’t much of a scholard; but I means to get to the bottom o’ this ’ere.”
With intense eagerness, he began to spell out the words of the paragraph which had arrested his attention. It was headed, “‘The Golden Shoemaker’ recovers his daughter, supposed to have been stolen by tramps in her childhood.” From line to line he laboured painfully on. Many times his progress was stayed by some formidable word; and again and again he was interrupted by a violent cough; but at length he had ascertained the contents of the paragraph. It contained as much as was known of the history of Marian Horn. It told how, at the age of five, she had, as was supposed, run away from home, and, as recently-discovered circumstances seemed to indicate, fallen into the hands of evil persons; and how all trace of her had then been lost until a few weeks afterwards, when, as had now become known, she was found, a wretched little waif, upon the highway, and adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Burton. The circumstances of her after life were then set forth; and the narrative concluded with a glowing account of her re-union with her friends. The tramp deeply pondered this romantic story.
“Ah,” he said to himself, “that must ha’ been the little wench as me and the old woman took to. It was somewhere here away. I remember about the shoe as she’d lost. They must ha’ found it. The old woman cut the other shoe, same as it says here. It were a bad thing of us to take the kid, that it were.”
At this point the man was seized with a violent fit of coughing. When it had subsided, he resumed his half-muttered meditations. “Well, I’m glad as the little ’un got took care on, arter all, and has got back to her own natural born father at last; for she were a game little wench, and no mistake. She were a poor people’s child when we got hold on her. But I’ve heerd tell o’ ‘the Golden Shoemaker,’ as they calls him. It must ha’ been arter she was lost that he got his money. Well, I feels sorry, like, as we didn’t try to find her friends. But the old gal were that onscrupulous, she didn’t stick at nothink, she didn’t. As sure as my name’s Jake Dafty, this ’ere’s a queer go.”
Thus mused Jake, the tramp, sitting against the haystack; and his musings were, ever and anon, disturbed by his racking cough. He felt indisposed to move. As he brooded over the past, his mind became uneasy, he was conscious of a vague desire to make confession of the evil he had done. Did he feel that the sands of his life were almost sped? And was conscience waking at last?
At length, between his fits of coughing, he was overtaken by sleep. The night was chilly after the warm day. The sun went down, and the stars peeped out serenely upon the frowzy and wretched tramp asleep against the haystack; and the dew settled thickly on his ragged beard and tattered clothes. Every now and then he was shaken by his cough; but he was weary, and remained asleep. And, in his sleep, the past came back more vividly than it had ever re-visited him in his waking hours. He seemed to be present at the despoiling and ill-using of a dark-eyed child, whom he might have delivered, and did not; and, from time to time, he moved uneasily in his sleep, and groaned aloud.
Thus passed the night; and, in the morning, Jake, being found by the farm people, in his place against the haystack, delirious, and evidently ill, was conveyed to the workhouse.
The next day “the Golden Shoemaker” received word that a man who was dying in the workhouse begged to see him at once. “Cobbler” Horn ordered his closed carriage, and drove to the workhouse without delay. The man, who was Jake, the tramp, had not long to live. His delirium was over now, and he was quite himself. His eyes were fixed eagerly upon the face of “Cobbler” Horn, as the latter entered the room.
“Are you ‘the Golden Shoemaker’?” he asked.