The Lost Heir

"I am a magistrate of the County of Essex," Mr. Bostock said, "and I have come to see a warrant executed for the search of your house for a child named Walter Rivington, who is believed to be concealed here, and who has been stolen from the care of his guardians."

"I know nothing of any child of that name," the man replied, "but I have a child here that I am taking care of for a gentleman in London; I have had him here for just a year, and no one has made any inquiries about him. You are welcome to enter and see if he is the one you are in search of. If he is, all that I can say is that I know nothing about his being stolen, and shall be very sorry to lose him."

He stood aside, and the two constables entered, followed closely by Hilda. The latter gave a cry of joy, for seated on the ground, playing with a box of soldiers, was Walter. She would hardly have known him anywhere else. His curls had been cut short, his face was brown and tanned, and his clothes, although scrupulously clean, were such as would be worn by any bargeman's boy at that age. The child looked up as they entered. Hilda ran to him, and caught him up in her arms.

"Don't you know me, Walter? Don't you remember Cousin Hilda?"

"Yes, I remember you," the child said, now returning her embrace. "You used to tell me stories and take me out in a carriage for drives. Where have you been so long? And where is grandpapa? Oh, here is Netta!" and as Hilda put him down he ran to her, for during the four months spent in the country she had been his chief playmate.

"I have learned to swim, Netta. Uncle Bill has taught me himself; and he is going to take me out in his barge some day."

The woman, who had come in with her arms covered with lather, from the little washhouse adjoining the house, now came forward.

"I hope, miss, that there is nothing wrong," she said to Hilda. "We have done our best for the little boy, and I have come to care for him just as if he had been my own; and if you are going to take him away I shall miss him dreadful, for he is a dear little fellow," and she burst into tears.

Walter struggled from Netta's arms, and ran to the woman, and, pulling her by the apron, said:

"Don't cry, Aunt Betsy; Jack is not going away from you. Jack will stay here; he likes going in a barge better than riding in a carriage."

"Well, Miss Covington," Mr. Bostock said, "the recognition appears to be complete on both sides; now what is the next step? Do you give this man into custody for unlawfully concealing this child and aiding and abetting in his abduction?"

"Will you wait a minute while I speak to Mr. Pettigrew?" she said; and they went out of the house together.

"Well, what do you think, Mr. Pettigrew?"

"I have been thinking it over all the way as we came down," the lawyer said. "Of course, we have no shadow of proof that this man was aware who the child was, and, in fact, if he had seen the placards offering altogether fifteen hundred pounds for his recovery, we must certainly assume that he would have given him up; for however well he may have been paid for taking charge of him, the offer would have been too tempting for a man of that kind to have resisted. No doubt he had strong suspicions, but you can hardly say that it amounted to guilty knowledge that the child had been abducted. If Walter had been ill-treated I should have said at once, 'Give him into custody'; but this does not seem to have been the case."

"No; they have evidently been very kind to him. I am so grateful for that that I should be sorry to do the man any harm."

"That is not the only point," the lawyer went on. "It is evident that the other people very seldom come down here, and from what you heard, in future Simcoe is going to write. If we arrest this man the others will know at once that the game is up. Now, if you will take the child away quietly, we can tell the man that he shall not be prosecuted, providing that he takes no steps whatever to inform his employers that the child is gone; even if one of them came down here to see the child, the wife must say that he is away on the barge. Anyhow, we shall have ample time to decide upon what steps to take against Simcoe, and can lay hands upon him whenever we choose; whereas, if he got an inkling that we had discovered the child, he and his associate would probably disappear at once, and we might have lots of trouble to find them."

"Yes, I think that would be a very good plan, Mr. Pettigrew. I will ask him and his wife to come out."

"That will be the best way, my dear. We could hardly discuss the matter before Bostock."

Hilda went in. As soon as she spoke to the man and his wife Mr. Bostock said, "If you want a conference, Miss Covington, I will go out and leave you to talk matters over."

He and the two constables withdrew, and Mr. Pettigrew came in.

"Now, my man," he began, "you must see that you have placed yourself in a very awkward position. You are found taking care of a child that has been stolen, and for whose recovery large rewards have been offered all over the country. It is like the case of a man found hiding stolen goods. He would be called upon to account for their being in his possession. Now, it is hardly possible that you can have been ignorant that this child was stolen. You may not have been told so in words, but you cannot have helped having suspicions. From what the child no doubt said when he first came here, you must have been sure that he had been brought up in luxury. No doubt he spoke of rides in a carriage, of servants, his nurse, and so on. However, Miss Covington is one of the child's guardians, and I am the other, and we are most reluctant to give you in charge. It is evident, from the behavior of the child, and from the affection that he shows to yourself and your wife, that you have treated him very kindly since he has been here, and these toys I see about show that you have done your best to make him happy."

"That we have, sir," the man said. "Betsy and I took to him from the first. We have no children of our own, none living at least, and we have made as much of him as if he had been one of our own – perhaps more. We have often talked it over, and both thought that we were not doing the fair thing by him, and were, perhaps, keeping him out of his own. I did not like having anything to do with it at first, but I had had some business with the man who gave him to me, and when he asked me to undertake the job it did not seem to me so serious an affair as it has done since. I am heartily sorry that we have had any hand in it; not only because we have done the child harm, but because it seems that we are going to lose him now that we have come to care for him as if he was our own."

"Of course you played only a minor part in the business, Nibson. We quite understand that, and it is the men who have carried out this abduction that we want to catch. Do you know the name of the man who brought the child to you?"

"I don't, sir. He knows where to find me, but I have no more idea than a child unborn who he is or where he lives. When he writes to me, which he generally does before he comes down, which may be two or three times a month, or may be once in six months, he signs himself Smith. I don't suppose that is his right name, but I say fairly that if I knew it, and where he lived, I would not peach upon him. He has always been straight with me in the business I have done with him, and I would rather take six months for this affair than say anything against him."

"We are not asking you at present to say anything against him, and he is not the principal man in this business. I believe he is only acting as agent for another more dangerous rascal than himself. We are not prepared at the present moment to arrest the chief scoundrel. Before we do that we must obtain evidence that will render his conviction a certainty. We have reason to believe that this man that you know will not come down for some time, and that you will receive the money for the child's keep by post; but if we abstain altogether from prosecuting you in this matter, you must give us your word that you will not take any steps whatever to let them know that the child is no longer with you. He says that you promised to take him out in your barge. Well, if by any chance this man – not your man, but the other – comes down here, and wants to see the child, you or your wife will lead him to believe that he is on board your barge. It will also be necessary that, if we do arrest them, you should enter as a witness to prove that the man handed the child over to you. You could let it be seen that you are an unwilling witness, but the evidence of the handing over of the child will be an absolute necessity."

"All right, sir, I will undertake that. There is no fear of my letting him know that the child has gone, for I don't know where to write him; and if he or the other should come down, if I am here I shall have no difficulty in keeping it from him that the child has gone, for my man has never set foot in this house. He just meets me on the road near Pitsea, says what he has to say, and gives me what he has to give me, and then drives off again. Of course, if I am summoned as a witness, I know that the law can make me go. I remember now that when he gave me the child he said he was doing it to oblige a friend of his, and he may be able to prove that he had nothing to do with carrying it off."

"That is as it may be," the lawyer said dryly. "However, we are quite content with your promise."

"And I thank you most heartily, you and your wife," Hilda Covington said warmly, "for your kindness to the child. It would have made me very happy all this time if I could have known that he was in such good hands, but I pictured him shut up in some vile den in London, ill treated, and half starved. He has grown very much since he has been with you, and looks a great deal more boyish than he did."

"Yes, he plays a good deal with my barge boy, who has taken to him just as we have."

"Well, your kindness will not be forgotten nor unrewarded, Mr. Nibson."

"I'm sure we don't want any reward, miss; we have been well paid. But even if we hadn't been paid at all after the first month, we should have gone on keeping him just the same."

"Now, Walter," Hilda said, "we want you to come home with us; we have all been wanting you very badly. Nurse and Tom Roberts have been in a terrible way, and so has Dr. Leeds. You remember him, don't you? He was very kind to you all the time that you were down in the country."

The child nodded. "I should like to see Tom Roberts and nurse, but I don't want to go away. I am going out in the barge soon."

"Well, dear, I dare say that we shall be able to arrange for you to come down sometimes, and to go out in it, especially as you have learned to swim. We are going away now in a boat."

"I often go out in the boat," Walter pouted. "I go with Joshua; he is a nice boy, Joshua is, and I like him."

"Well, dear, we will see what we can do for Joshua."

"You are sure that I shall come back and go out in the barge?"

"Quite sure, dear; and perhaps I will go out with you, too."

"Yes, you must go, like a good boy," Mrs. Nibson said. "You know, dear, that I shall always love you, and shall be very, very glad if the ladies can spare you to come down to see me sometimes. You won't forget me, will you?"

"No, Aunt Betsy, I shall never forget you; I promise you that," the child said. "And I don't want to go away from you at all, only Cousin Hilda says I must."

Mr. Pettigrew went out to tell Mr. Bostock that they should not give Nibson into custody.

"The principal scoundrels would take the alarm instantly," he said, "and, above all things, we want to keep them in the dark until we are ready to arrest them. It will be much better that we should have this man to call as a witness than that he should appear in the dock as an accomplice."

"I think that you are right there," the magistrate agreed; "and really, he and his wife seem to have been very kind to the child. I have been talking to this young barge boy. It seems he is no relation of these people. His mother was a tramp, who died one winter's night on the road to Pitsea. He was about ten or eleven years old then, and they would have sent him to the workhouse; but Nibson, who was on the coroner's jury, volunteered to take him, and I dare say he finds him very useful on board the barge. At any rate, he has been well treated, and says that Nibson is the best master on the river. So the fellow must have some good in him, though, from what the coastguard officer said, there are very strong suspicions that he is mixed up in the smuggling business, which, it seems, is still carried on in these marshes. Well, no doubt you have decided wisely; and now, I suppose, we shall be off."

At this moment they were joined by the coastguard officer.

"He has done us again," he said. "We have been investigating these outhouses thoroughly, and there is no question that he has had smuggled goods here. We found a clever hiding-place in that cattle-shed. It struck me that it was a curious thing that there should be a stack of hay built up right against the side of it. So we took down a plank or two, and I was not surprised to find that there was a hollow in the stack. One of the men stamped his foot, and the sound showed that there was another hollow underneath. We dug up the ground, and found, six inches below it, a trapdoor, and on lifting it discovered a hole five or six feet deep and six feet square. It was lined with bricks, roughly cemented together. It is lucky for him that the place is empty, and I should think that after this he will go out of the business for a time. Of course we cannot arrest a man merely for having a hidden cellar; I fancy that there are not many houses on the marshes that have not some places of the sort. Indeed, I am rather glad that we did not catch him, for in other respects Nibson is a decent, hard-working fellow. Sometimes he has a glass or two at the 'Lobster Smack,' but never takes too much, and is always very quiet and decent in his talk. I doubt whether the men would have found that hiding-place if I had not been there; they all know him well, and would not get him into a scrape if they could help it, though there are some fellows on the marshes they would give a month's pay to catch with kegs or tobacco."

The door of the house opened, and the three women and Nibson came out with Walter, who was now dressed in the clothes that they had brought down for him.

While the others were getting ready to enter the boat the officer took Nibson aside.

"You have had a close squeak of it, Nibson; we found your hiding-place under the stack, and it is lucky for you that it was empty. So we have nothing to say to you. I should advise you to give it up, my man; sooner or later you are bound to be caught."

The man's brow had darkened as the officer began, but it cleared up again.

"All right," he said; "I have been thinking for the last half hour that I shall drop the business altogether, but when a man once gets into it, it is not so easy to get out. Now that you have found that cellar, it is a good excuse to cut it. I can well say that I dare not risk it again, for that, after so nearly catching me, you would be sure to keep an extra sharp eye on me in the future."