“Here, you!” I said, displaying my staff as I jumped down.
“Alfred Johnston, I’ve been looking for you. I’ve a warrant for all Scotland, so step up quietly;” and before he had recovered from his astonishment, or uttered a word, I had the handcuffs on his dirty wrists.
“My name isn’t Johnston—that I’ll swear,” he said, simply, when he got his breath; then a light appeared to break on him, and with a great oath he added, “Now I think I know why the kind gentleman got me to change clothes with him, though mine were sorry rags and them is first-class. Whew! who’d have thought it? He’s done something, and the police is after him for it?”
This seemed not bad at all, and quite worthy of the man who had so neatly befooled McSweeny, but I only grinned unfeelingly in his simple face, and said dryly that “I believed so,” and bundled him without ceremony into the gig.
“But—but—ye don’t mean to tell me ye’re going to take me instead of him?” he at length articulated, with a look of half-comical alarm.
“I am—just.”
“Then the real man’ll get off, and I’ll be hanged in his stead!” he cried, fairly breaking down with terror; “for he’s footing it out fast enough, I tell ye.”
“The real man?” I said, thinking to humour him, as I resumed the reins and turned the horse’s head; “and what was he like, pray?”
“A clean-shaved, smooth-spoken gentleman—for all the world like a priest or a minister, only that his head’s cropped as close as if he was just new out of jail,” was the prompt answer; “though, by my troth, he looked more like a shockerawn in my old duds when I left him.”
I started, and began to think. Then I pulled off my prisoner’s hat, and found his hair not at all close cropped. I drove rapidly back to one of those wayside stations of the county police, and there left my prisoner safely locked up, every question he answered confirming my impression that he had been speaking the truth. The only difficulty I had with him was in getting him to describe the clothes which he had exchanged for the old blacks he wore. These he either could not or would not name—in colour, shape, or material—a difficulty which I only understood when the rags were before me—and then it would have puzzled me to do what I wondered at him not doing. Even a detective can be unreasonable at times.