'No; nothing at all. I just came down because I had finished what I had to do upstairs!' And Susannah added, on telling her tale, 'the chair, when I looked, was exactly as we had placed it.'
The alarm once given, the neighbours lost no time in making a thorough search of both town and country for some distance round, even of the most unlikely spots. Ponds and wells were dragged, ditches examined, outhouses explored; though why anyone should wish to hide a harmless old cripple in any of these places, nobody stopped to ask, still less how it could have been done in broad daylight. But in spite of the thorough nature of the hunt, which did not cease even during a sharp thunderstorm, and went on all that night and the next day, neither then nor later was any trace ever found of Owen Parfitt.
As far as we know, nothing further was done about the matter for nearly fifty years, when some gentlemen happened to hear the story and were interested in it. They sought out all the old people in the town who had known the Parfitts and questioned them as to what had happened. Of course, the worst of this kind of evidence is that no kind of notes had been taken down at the time, and also that the love of astonishing their hearers by wonderful details which never occurred is a great temptation to many. On the whole, however, the witnesses in the inquiry into Owen Parfitt's disappearance seem to have been more truthful than usual. Susannah Snook, the last person living to see the old man, told her tale as it has been already set down, and her account was closely borne out by that given by another old woman as far as her own knowledge went. Then followed some men, whose clothes had been made by Parfitt as long as he had been able to work, and who had helped in the search for him. One of these declared that Owen was 'neither a very good nor a very bad man, but was said sometimes to have a very violent temper.' Yet, even if this was correct, it does not throw much light on the mystery.
The general opinion of the neighbours at the time of the vanishing of Parfitt was that he was carried off by demons, and indeed the whole affair was so strange and without reason that their view was hardly to be wondered at. The discovery of part of some human bones under a wall near Parfitt's cottage gave a new turn to their thoughts, but this happened many years after the disappearance of Owen, and were held, when examined in 1814, to be the bones of a girl supposed to have been murdered. One witness only contradicted Susannah's evidence, and that was Jehoshaphat Stone, who swore Mary Parfitt had assured him that she had come downstairs hastily after hearing a noise, to find her brother gone and the chair displaced. But this fact he did not know of his own knowledge, and Susannah, when asked about the displacing of the chair, declared for the second time that the chair was exactly as she had left it, and that Mary had expressly said she had heard no noise.
One more question remained to be put, and that was if the old man had any money about him which might have led to his kidnapping or murder, though this seems very unlikely. One witness said he had a small pension amounting to about seven pounds a year, but an old woman who was related to the Parfitts 'was quite sure he had nothing of the sort,' and even if he had contrived to save a little during the years when he could still work at his trade, it must soon have gone in the days of his helplessness. At any rate, he would hardly have had it upon him when he was dressed in his night things, without any sort of pocket to put it in.
'But was he a totally helpless cripple?' inquired Dr. Butler, the future Bishop of Lichfield, to whom the evidence was sent by the gentlemen who had collected it. 'Be very careful, gentlemen, to discover whether he walked to his chair on the day of his disappearance, or whether he was capable of walking so much as a few yards; for there seems to have been a rumour that a person of his description was seen wandering that evening near Frome ten or twelve miles distant.'
In accordance with Dr. Butler's wish, a close examination was made into this matter, but none of the witnesses had ever seen Parfitt on his feet or attempting to use them for many years before he vanished. But supposing, as has been sometimes known, that a sort of miracle had been wrought and his powers of walking had come suddenly back, how could he have got from Shepton Mallet to Frome in broad daylight, past cottages and along roads where everyone knew him, without being recognised by a single person on the way?
'I give it up,' as they say about riddles; and Dr. Butler 'gave it up,' too.