“No! it’s no use.  I don’t want any jail, I don’t want any trial; I’ve had all the hard luck I want, and all the miseries.  Hang me now, and let me out!  It would all come out, anyway—­there couldn’t anything save me.  He has told it all, just as if he’d been with me and seen it—­I don’t know how he found out; and you’ll find the barrel and things, and then I wouldn’t have any chance any more.  I killed him; and you’d have done it too, if he’d treated you like a dog, and you only a boy, and weak and poor, and not a friend to help you.”

“And served him damned well right!” broke in Ham Sandwich.  “Looky here, boys—­”

From the constable:  “Order!  Order, gentlemen!”

A voice:  “Did your uncle know what you was up to?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Did he give you the matches, sure enough?”

“Yes, he did; but he didn’t know what I wanted them for.”

“When you was out on such a business as that, how did you venture to risk having him along—­and him a detective?  How’s that?”

The boy hesitated, fumbled with his buttons in an embarrassed way, then said, shyly: 

“I know about detectives, on account of having them in the family; and if you don’t want them to find out about a thing, it’s best to have them around when you do it.”

The cyclone of laughter which greeted this native discharge of wisdom did not modify the poor little waif’s embarrassment in any large degree.

IV

      From a letter to Mrs. Stillman, dated merely “Tuesday.”

Fetlock Jones was put under lock and key in an unoccupied log cabin, and left there to await his trial.  Constable Harris provided him with a couple of days’ rations, instructed him to keep a good guard over himself, and promised to look in on him as soon as further supplies should be due.

Next morning a score of us went with Hillyer, out of friendship, and helped him bury his late relative, the unlamented Buckner, and I acted as first assistant pall-bearer, Hillyer acting as chief.  Just as we had finished our labors a ragged and melancholy stranger, carrying an old hand-bag, limped by with his head down, and I caught the scent I had chased around the globe!  It was the odor of Paradise to my perishing hope!

In a moment I was at his side and had laid a gentle hand upon his shoulder.  He slumped to the ground as if a stroke of lightning had withered him in his tracks; and as the boys came running he struggled to his knees and put up his pleading hands to me, and out of his chattering jaws he begged me to persecute him no more, and said: 

“You have hunted me around the world, Sherlock Holmes, yet God is my witness I have never done any man harm!”