Mr. Percival looked perplexed. To him the guilt of the Indians seemed plain, especially after the palpable falsehood of the squaw. Nothing could have been easier, in the excitement of the restoration of the half-drowned girl, than to draw the watch from her cast-off clothes, and conceal it. The ground over which the party had passed had been scrutinized inch by inch, as well as the smooth, hard bottom of the lake where the accident had occurred; and by eyes that were as sharp as those of the Indians themselves. When Ruel said quietly after his morning search, that the watch was not in the woods nor the lake, that possibility was dropped, as settled beyond doubt. There had not been much ground to examine, for Pet distinctly remembered, and in this she was corroborated by Randolph, that she had taken out her watch and named the time of day, just before they first reached the wigwam.
Still, the magistrate could not commit the prisoners without some shadow of real proof; and he was obliged to admit to himself that there was none whatever. He called Mr. Blake aside, and held a consultation with him in low tones. The attention of the others was for the moment taken up with the pappooses, who were indulging themselves in various grunts and gasps and queer noises, accompanied by energetic struggles as if they were attacked by some internal foe, such as occasionally invades babyland. Moll sat holding them, sullen and silent.
“It must be a pin—” began aunt Puss, with a sympathetic movement toward the baby whose uncouth wails were the wildest; but she did not finish her sentence. A crashing of glass close at hand startled everybody in the room; and one glance at the shattered window-sash told the whole story. Sebattis, watching his opportunity, and seeing both doors of the room blocked by his persecutors, had sprung through the lower half of the window, carrying glass and all before him, and in an instant was out of sight in the forest.
The babies, strange to say, had become perfectly quiet and no one having seen the quick gleam of triumph in the squaw’s eyes, she was not suspected of having been the cause of their previous outcries, by various sly pinches under the blanket.
The officers of the law at once sprang toward the door, but Mr. Percival checked them. “It’s of no use,” he said. “The only real misdemeanor that can be proved against the fellow is assault and battery on my window,” he added, gazing ruefully at the ragged edges of the glass. “It rather relieves us, Blake, of the necessity of a decision in the watch matter, for you might scour the woods for a month without finding an Indian who wanted to keep out of the way.”
“I only hope,” said the sheriff, “that he won’t lay it up against us, round here. These chaps are ugly enough to burn a barn, if no worse, for sheer revenge.”
Here Ruel whispered to Mr. Percival, who proceeded to act at once upon what was evidently the guide’s suggestion.
“Moll,” he said to the squaw, who had watched the faces of the men with hardly concealed eagerness, “I’m sorry your husband ran away, for I should have let him go, anyway. Now these men will carry you back to your tent. If you ever find that watch,” he added meaningly, looking her full in the eye, “bring it to me and you shall have twenty dollars reward.”
Without a word the woman rose, and passing out, seated herself once more in the wagon, which drove off rapidly down the road in the direction of her wigwam. The trial was over, and the prisoners discharged; but the vexed question still remained, Where was the watch?
In the afternoon, while Ruel and Tim repaired the broken window—for panes of glass, putty and carpenter’s tools were always ready at hand in the workshop—the boys walked over to the pond and examined the path and its vicinity carefully for themselves, and even took turns diving to the bottom of the pond, in a vain search for the missing article. Wherever it might be, it clearly had been carried off by some human agency. Pet’s father and mother were at this time stopping in a large hotel near Boston, and had written for her to come up for a day or two, as there were friends visiting them from the West whom they were particularly anxious for her to meet and help entertain. She could return to Mr. Percival’s, her mother wrote, by the middle of the following week.