“And far dee ye live?” continued his captor.
“In the West Port.”
Lies, lies! every word of it. Johnny simply named the place farthest from his own home, but then he had an object in view, and the lies wrung more agony out of him than the truth would have done. He was thinking of his father and that fierce warning in the dark—“If ever you turn thief while I’m living, never come near me or look me in the face again.”
“How did I ever come to do it? how did I do it?” he bitterly added to himself; but to that there came no answer.
He did not know that famine and excitement had slightly unhinged his faculties; he knew only that in some amazing manner he had become a housebreaker and a thief in the face of his father’s commands, and got captured by the police in the very act.
“Then jist you tak’ up your bundle and come awa’ wi’ me to the office,” said the policeman; and Johnny lifted the loaves and obeyed, the man closing the window, and taking down the name and address before leaving. While the pair were passing up St Mary’s Wynd towards the High Street, I chanced to be coming down, and stopped to learn the nature of the crime. Johnny’s face was quite unknown to me, and I could not believe that he or his relatives belonged to the West Port, a suspicion which was strengthened when Johnny became taciturn, and refused to reveal aught of his antecedents. I turned back with them, and went as far as the Central, trying in vain to draw the truth from the poor quivering boy. I should not have taken half the trouble with him but for the fact that he was evidently labouring under great excitement, and that more than once I saw his eyes become brimful of tears. Your true gutter child—the raggamuffin who steals as naturally as he draws his breath—is case-hardened against either tears or trembling. There is no mistaking him; and the first glance at Johnny half convinced me that in spite of his wretched clothing and haggard looks, he was not of that class. As he refused to speak, he was entered as “Peter McBain, West Port, aged twelve,” and locked up, charged with breaking into the shop of a baker whom I may name Brown, “and stealing therefrom four loaves of bread, of the value of 2s. 8d. or thereby.”
My idea was that he was a runaway from some distant town, who had tramped the boots off his feet, and then been forced by sheer hunger to the robbery. I therefore had him tested with the offer of food. But Johnny was now too excited and overwhelmed with grief and shame at his position, and refused the food with unaffected loathing. Then the last prop was soon driven from my theory by a policeman on the West Port beat declaring, on being shown “Peter McBain,” that he believed he knew him well as one who had long been a pest to that district.
While this small and terrible burglar was thus seeing the inside of a cell for the first time, his parents were awaiting his return in anxiety and trembling expectancy. Hour after hour passed, and still the light footfall failed to strike upon their ears, and at last, near midnight, the father could bear the strain no longer, and started out to search for the wanderer. Had the hour been an earlier one, Mossman would have gone in the same direction as the boy had taken, and probably have discovered that the name had been changed. But he logically reasoned that now the shop must be shut, and Borland at his own home, which was a street or two further off.
“He’ll have taken pity on the boy and asked him to go home with him,” was his parting remark to his wife, and to the home of his old friend he turned his steps—a shabby shadow, walking softly and hurriedly upon stocking soles, for his boots had long since gone to feed the hungry bairns. He was thoroughly ashamed of his appearance, and nothing short of his great anxiety for the boy would have roused him to brave the humiliation of appearing before Borland. The house was a respectable flat in Lothian Street, and the same which the baker had occupied for years. Mossman made certain by examining the bell-plates by the light of the street lamps, and then rang and was admitted. To his relief the door was opened by Borland himself, who had been busy looking over his books at home after the rest of the household were in bed. The prosperous baker stared at the gaunt and poorly-clad figure rising before him out of the darkness of the stair, and then exclaimed, in lively horror—
“Good God! it’s not Geordie Mossman?”