“Very well; work at anything?”
“Yes; I’m a joiner.” He appeared to regret the admission, for he bit his lip the moment he had said it.
“Apprentice or journeyman?”
“Apprentice. I’ll be out with my time next year.”
“Maybe you will,” I significantly answered; “meantime you’d better come with me and see what the Fiscal has to say to it.”
He objected most strongly to have his wrist fastened to mine, but the jeweller happened just then to address me by name, and my prisoner collapsed and submitted to the degradation. We had no great distance to go, but the road seemed long enough to him, for, though anything but an honest-looking fellow, I guessed rightly that it was his first experience of the handcuffs. At the Office he took refuge in silence, or tried to screen himself with absolute falsehood. He gave a false name; would give no address; denied that he had a mother living; would not say for whom he worked; and altogether emitted as stupid a declaration as any one could well have done. I believe he meant well—he meant to screen himself from further trouble; to save his friends from disgrace along with him; and to keep the knowledge of the scrape into which he had fallen from his employer and acquaintances generally; but then every liar has exactly the same excuse.
It was simply a little more work for me, and as the task was gradually accomplished, the facts revealed seemed to point to his guilt with no uncertain finger.
The discovery of his identity was made simply enough by his mother coming to the Office next morning to report her son missing. He had been absent all night, and had not returned to his work on the previous afternoon, and she was greatly distressed and concerned for his safety. It was the mention of the trade he followed, and the name and address of his employer, which first gave me the idea that we had the missing son; and when she was shown our prisoner he did not appear at all grateful for the boon, but swore at her in a manner in which no mother should be addressed, and which would have put many a professional criminal to the blush.
The mother appeared stunned and stupefied by the discovery that she had helped to rivet fetters on him, and that he was likely to be tried for housebreaking with an alternative charge of theft. How the charge came to assume this form is the most striking and curious feature of the case. As soon as I got the two addresses I went first to the home of the prisoner, Alfred Scott, and searched in vain for the rest of the plunder; then I went to his employer’s workshop, and unearthed the treasure-trove from a most ingenious hiding-place under a pile of wood which took us ten minutes to remove. Everything was there but the gold chain and the servant’s silver ring, and the whole were still wrapped up in Shorty’s spotted cotton handkerchief, which unfortunately did not bear either name or address. But this discovery was not the most important made at that place. From Scott’s master we learned that our prisoner, along with a journeyman, had been employed making some alterations or repairs in the major’s house about six months before the robbery. The natural inference then was that he upon that occasion had provided himself with casts of some of the keys, and so prepared to commit the robbery—hence the framing of the charge on the serious lines I have indicated.
As soon as these facts were made plain, and when the major had identified Scott as one of the joiners who had worked in his house, I went to Shorty’s cell and said that we had got the thief, and that in all probability he and The Fin would be soon at liberty.