IT was decided to give the Indians their dinner before examining them. Mr. Percival knew they would be more likely to tell the truth if well-treated; and all he wanted was to obtain the watch, not to punish the thieves. Accordingly they were conducted to the kitchen, and there, under charge of the sheriffs, they were provided with a bountiful meal by aunt Puss.
The captors meanwhile explained that they had found their prisoners encamped about ten miles down the road. They had been very angry at first, but the sheriff, who was really a good-natured farmer living about three miles from Mr. Percival’s place, had managed to pacify Sebattis, the father of the family, and he kept Moll in good order. They all, added Mr. Blake, the sheriff, had denied any knowledge of the watch, from first to last.
After dinner, to which the Indians did ample justice, the whole party were conducted to the sitting-room. Mr. Percival took his seat beside a table, at one end of the room, and asked Sebattis to hold up his right hand. He then administered the oath to the prisoner with a dignity and solemnity which impressed the young people, and which were specially admired by Randolph, who had several times seen the ceremony flippantly performed in the city courts.
The magistrate now proceeded with the examination.
“What is your name, sir?” he asked gravely but pleasantly.
The Indian, gratified by the title given him, answered with promptness: “Sebattis Megone.”
“That is your wife with you?”
“Yis. She Moll Megone.”
“Where have you been camping for the last month?”
Sebattis hesitated a moment, then glanced at his wife and replied, “Tent down by Loon Pond. No good. Bad place. Me leave him.”
“What was the matter with the place?”
“No fish. Water bad drink.”
“Then why didn’t you go away before?”
Again the Indian paused, scowled slightly, and threw his blanket across his shoulder with a gesture not without dignity.
“Me go when like; stay when like.”
Here Moll gave a sharp look at her husband, which Randolph was just in time to catch. Seeing that her glance was noticed, she made the best of it and spoke up boldly.
“We go sell baskit,” she said. “Plenty folk in big town to buy ’em—”
“Wait a moment,” interrupted Mr. Percival. “You shall tell your story in a moment. Eunice, you give this woman a comfortable place in the kitchen with her babies, will you?”
Both Indians seemed inclined to resent this move, but the magistrate was evidently not a man to be trifled with, and Moll sullenly withdrew, bearing a pappoose on each arm.
“Now,” continued Mr. Percival once more, “did you, Sebattis, see any of these young people yesterday?”
“No. Me hunt on furder side Loon Pond.”
“Did your wife tell you about it when you came back to the tent at night?”
“When me come wigwam, Moll say girl-with-gold-hair fall in pond, come near drown. Ver’ hard make alive ag’in. That all.”
“Didn’t she show you something she had found?”
“Yis.” And the Indian gravely held up his hand, making a circle with his thumb and forefinger.
“What was it?”
The children leaned forward expectantly, Pet’s eyes sparkling.
The Indian never showed by the movement of a muscle nor a glance of the eye the irony with which he had purposely led his questioners to this point.
“Half dollar,” he replied, in his slow, guttural tones. “Moll find it where white hunter, that man,” indicating Ruel, who was standing near, “drop it in bushes when he go pray.”
All turned and looked at Ruel, who flushed to his hair, but stood his ground.
“How do you know he prayed?” asked Mr. Percival gently.
“Wife find where he two knees go down on moss. Half dollar drop out. Wife say no keep. I say yis, keep him for work an’ wet blankit.”
Mr. Percival smiled in spite of himself at the man’s confession; nevertheless he looked troubled.
“Do you mean to tell me, Sebattis,” he said sternly, after a moment, “that you have never seen this girl’s watch? If half a dollar fell out of a pocket, so could a watch. Come, my man, own up and give it back, and I’ll let you go this time.”
The Indian’s brow darkened, and he drew himself up to his full height.
“Sebattis no see watch. Know nothing ’bout him.”
He delivered himself of this remark with more emphasis than he had yet used; then sat down, pulling his blanket around him; and not another word would he speak, save a few guttural sentences in his own language to his wife, who was now called in once more. The scowl remained on his forehead, and Kittie whispered to Bess that she saw him eying the windows and their fastenings.
Moll was now sharply questioned, but with no better result. She had seen the gold watch-chain, she admitted, when the girls first reached the tent. It was dangling from her pocket—pointing to Kittie!
“O,” cried Kittie, “but that’s impossible, for I haven’t any watch nor chain myself, and I never even touched Pet’s but once, and that was the day we all got here and she was showing it to aunt.”
Mr. Percival looked grave; the sheriff shut one eye knowingly; the girls edged off, half-scared, after Kittie had spoken. Moll alone appeared to retain her perfect self-possession.
“It was in that one’s pocket,” she persisted, using much better English than her husband. “I was ’fraid pappooses grab it, and break. Maybe she take it,” she added, with a malicious look at poor Kittie.
“Silence!” said uncle Will sternly. “Answer my questions, and nothing more. When did you say you saw this chain?”
“When gal first come.”
“Not after they returned from the pond?”
“No. Forget all about it. Too much drown,” said the squaw grimly. “Didn’t see him no more.” And no other answer nor admission could be obtained.
Ruel, Randolph and the girls were now asked a few questions each, to bring out their story in the hearing of the Indians. The latter denied nothing, and admitted nothing.
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.
With a sad heart, both at leaving her friends, and because she felt she was abandoning all hope of her watch, she started off early on the morning after the trial, with Ruel as driver, for the Pineville Station where she was to take the cars on a Branch of the Maine Central Railroad, for Boston.
All the young folks except Tom, who unexpectedly declined to go, on the plea of a headache, accompanied Pet to the station, telling her about their “Camp Christmas” of the preceding winter, and waving hats and handkerchiefs until the train rounded a curve and crept out of sight.
Meanwhile Tom languidly rose from his bed, as soon as he heard the laughing wagon-load drive away; went down to breakfast with a sulky face and red eyes, as if he had been up late the night before, or had been crying—and hardly waiting to reply to his uncle’s cheery good-morning, walked off with his hands in his pockets, in the direction of Loon Pond. After an absence of a couple of hours, he returned, looking tired out, and passed the rest of the forenoon in the barn, lying on the hay-mow with a book. But if you had peeped over his shoulder, you would have seen that the pages were upside-down, and that now and then a tear rolled slowly over the boy’s cheeks, while his lips twitched nervously. Tom was evidently, on this bright June day, one of the unhappiest of boys. What could have happened?