Hard Cash Part 82

Mrs. Dodd sighed--"She goes from one thing to another, but always returns to one idea; that he is a victim, not a traitor."

"Well, tell her in one hour the money shall be in the house."

"The money! What does she care?"

"Well, say we shall know all about Alfred by eleven o'clock."

"My dear friend, be prudent," said Mrs. Dodd. "I feel alarmed: you were speaking almost in a whisper when I came in."

"Y' are very obsairvant: but dawnt be uneasy; we are three to one. Just go and comfort Miss Julee with my message."

"Ah, that I will," she said.

She was no sooner gone than they all stole out into the night, and a pitch dark night it was; but Green had a powerful dark lantern to use if necessary.

They waited, Green at the gate of Musgrove Cottage, the other two a little way up the road.

Ten o'clock struck. Some minutes pa.s.sed without the expected signal from Green; and Edward and Sampson began to shiver. For it was very cold and dark, and in the next place they were honest men going to take the law into their own hands and the law sometimes calls that breaking the law.

"Confound him!" muttered Sampson; "if he does not soon come I shall run away. It is bitterly cold."

Presently footsteps were heard approaching; but no signal: it proved to be only a fellow in a smock-frock rolling home from the public-house.

Just as his footsteps died away a low hoot like a plaintive owl was heard, and they knew their game was afoot.

Presently, tramp, tramp, came the slow and stately march of him they had hunted down.

He came very slowly, like one lost in meditation: and these amateur policemen's hearts beat louder and louder, as he drew nearer and nearer.

At last in the blackness of the night a shadowy outline was visible; another tramp or two, it was upon them.

Now the cautious Mr. Green had stipulated that the pocketbook should first be felt for, and, if not there, the matter should go no farther.

So Edward made a stumble and fell against Mr. Hardie and felt his left breast: the pocket-book was there:--"Yes," he whispered: and Mr. Hardie, in the act of remonstrating at his clumsiness, was pinned behind, and his arms strapped with wonderful rapidity and dexterity. Then first he seemed to awake to his hunger, and uttered a stentorian cry of terror, that rang through the night and made two of his three captors tremble.

"Cut that" said Green sternly, "or you'll get into trouble."

Mr. Hardie lowered his voice directly: "Do not kill me, do not hurt me,"

he murmured; "I am but a poor man now. Take my little money; it is in my waistcoat pocket; but spare my life. You see I don't resist."

"Come, stash your gab, my lad," said Green contemptuously, addressing him just as he would any other of the birds he was accustomed to capture. "It's not your stiff that is wanted, but Captain Dodd's."

"Captain Dodd's?" cried the prisoner with a wonderful a.s.sumption of innocence.

"Ay, the pocket-book," said Green; "here, this! this!" He tapped on the pocket-book, and instantly the prisoner uttered a cry of agony, and sprang into the road with an agility no one would have thought possible but Edward and Green soon caught him, and, the Doctor joining, they held him, and Green tore his coat open.

The pocket-book was not there. He tore open his waistcoat; it was not in the waistcoat: but it was sewed to his very shirt on the outside.

Green wrenched it away, and bidding the other two go behind the prisoner and look over his shoulder, unseen themselves, slipped the shade of his lantern.

Mr. Hardie had now ceased to struggle and to exclaim; he stood sullen, mute, desperate; while an agitated face peered eagerly over each of his shoulders at the open pocket-book in Green's hands, on which the lantern now poured a narrow but vivid stream of light.

CHAPTER x.x.xVI

THERE was not a moment to lose, so Green emptied the pocketbook into his hat, and sifted the contents in a turn of the hand, announcing each discovery in a whisper to his excited and peering a.s.sociates.

"A lot of receipts."

"Of no use to any one but me," said the prisoner earnestly.

"Two miniatures; gold rims, pinchbeck backs."

"They are portraits of my children when young: Heaven forgive me, I could not give them up to my creditors: surely, surely, you will not rob me of them."

"Stash your gab," said Mr. Green roughly. "Here's a guinea, Queen Anne's reign."

"It belonged to my great-grandfather: take it, but you will let me redeem it; I will give L. 5 for it poor as I am: you can leave it on my door-step, and I'll leave the L. 5."

"Stow your gab. Letters; papers covered with figures. Stay, what is this? a lot of memoranda."

"They are of the most private and delicate character. Pray do not expose my family misfortunes." And Mr. Hardie, who of late had been gathering composure, showed some signs of agitation; the two figures glaring over his shoulder shared it, and his remonstrance only made Green examine the papers keenly: they might contain some clue to the missing money.

It proved a miscellaneous record: the price of Stocks at various days; notes of the official a.s.signee's remarks in going over the books, &c.

At last, however, Green's quick eye fell upon a fainter entry in pencil; figures: 1, 4; yes, actually L. 14,000. "All right," he said: and took the paper close to the lantern, and began to spell it out--

"'This day Alfred told me to my face I had L. 14,000 of Captain Dodd's.

We had an angry discussion. What can he mean? Drs. Wycherley and Osmond, this same day, afflicted me with hints that he is deranged, or partly. I saw no signs of it before. Wrote to my brother entreating him to give me L. 200 to replace the sum which I really have wronged this respectable and now most afflicted family of. I had better withdraw----'" Here Mr.

Hardie interrupted him with sorrowful dignity: "These are mere family matters; if you are a man, respect them."

Green went reading on like Fate: "'Better withdraw my opposition to the marriage, or else it seems my own flesh and blood will go about the place blackening my reputation.'"

Mr. Hardie stamped on the ground. "I tell you, on my honour as a gentleman, there's no money there but my grandfather's guinea. My money is all in my waistcoat pocket, where you _will not_ look."

A flutter of uneasiness seemed to come over the detective: he darkened his lantern, and replaced the pocket-book hurriedly in the prisoner's breast, felt him all over in a minute, and to keep up the farce, robbed him.

"Only eight yellow boys," said he contemptuously to his mates. He then shipped the money back into Hardie's coat-pocket, and conducted him to his own gate, tied him to it by the waist, and ordered him not to give the alarm for ten minutes on pain of death.

"I consent," said Mr. Hardie, "and thank you for abstaining from violence."

"All right, my tulip," said Mr. Green cheerfully, and drew his companions quietly away. But the next moment he began to run, and making a sudden turn, dived into a street then into a pa.s.sage, and so winded and doubled till he got to a small public-house: he used some flash word, and they were shown a private room. "Wait here an hour for me,"

he whispered; "I must see who liberates him, and whether he is really as innocent as he reads, or we have been countermined by the devil's own tutor."

The unexpected turn the evidence had taken--evidence of their own choosing, too--cleared Mr. Hardie with the unprofessionals. Edward embraced this conclusion as a matter of course, and urged the character of that gentleman's solitary traducer: Alfred was a traitor, and therefore why not a slanderer?

Even Sampson, on the whole, inclined to a similar conclusion.

At this crisis of the discussion a red-haired pedlar, with very large whiskers and the remains of a black eye, put his head in, and asked whether Tom Green was there. "No," said the Doctor stoutly, not desiring company of this stamp. "Don't know the lad."