But suppose Ralph should refuse to go, and suppose Bachelor Billy, with his strong arms, should stand by to protect the lad from force, what then?  Well, there was a law to meet just such a case as that.  He knew of an instance where a child had been taken by its grandfather by virtue of a writ of habeas corpus.

He would get such a writ, the sheriff should go with him, they would bring Ralph to court again; and since the law had declared the boy to be Simon Craft’s grandson, the law could do nothing else than to place him in Simon Craft’s custody.  Then the old man went to bed, thinking that in the morning he would get Sharpman to prepare for him the papers that would be necessary to carry his plan into execution.

He derived much pleasure from his dreams that night, for he dreamed of torturing poor Ralph to his heart’s content.

When Bachelor Billy left the court-room that Monday evening with his unconscious burden in his arms, he remained only long enough in the court-house square to revive the boy, then he took him to the railway station, and they went together, by the earliest train, to Scranton.

The next morning Ralph felt very weak and miserable, and did not leave the house; and Bachelor Billy came home at noon to see him and to learn what news, if any, had been received from Wilkesbarre.  Both he and Ralph expected that a verdict would be rendered for the defendant, in accordance with Ralph’s testimony, and neither of them were surprised, therefore, when Andy Gilgallon came up from the city after supper and informed them that the jury had so found.  That settled the matter, at any rate.  It was a relief to Ralph to know that it was at an end; that he was through with courts and lawyers and judges and juries, and that there need be no further effort on his part to escape from unmerited fortune.  The tumult that had raged in his mind through many hours was at last stilled, and that night he slept.  He wanted to go back the next morning to his work at the breaker, but Bachelor Billy would not allow him to do so.  He still looked very pale and weak, and the anxious man resolved to come home at noon again that day to see to the lad’s health.

Indeed, as the morning wore on, Ralph acknowledged to himself that he did not feel so well.  His head was very heavy, and there was a bruised feeling over the entire surface of his body.  It was a dull day, too; it rained a little now and then, and was cloudy all the morning.  He sat indoors the most of the time, reading a little, sleeping a little, and thinking a great deal.  The sense of his loss was coming back upon him very strongly.  It was not so much the loss of wealth, or of name, or of the power to do other and better things than he had ever done before that grieved him now.  But it was that the dear and gentle lady who was to have been his mother, who had verily been a mother to him for one sweet day, was a mother to him no longer.  To feel that he was nothing to her now, no more, indeed, than any other ragged, dust-black boy in Burnham Breaker, this was what brought pain and sorrow to his heart, and made the hot tears come into his eyes in spite of his determined effort to hold them back.