All this seemed so plain to me that I sent over to Belvidere for a lawyer, who soon came across the bridge to see me, and to him I narrated the whole circumstances of the case from, beginning to end.  I asked him if I had not a right to carry off the boy whom I knew to be my own?  His reply was that he would not stop to discuss that question; all he knew was that there was a great hue and cry after me for kidnapping the boy; that my son was seized and held for aiding and abetting in the attempted abduction; and he advised me, as a friend, to leave that part of the country as soon as possible.  I gave him fifty dollars to look after Henry’s case.  He thought, considering how little, and that little involuntarily, my son had to do with the matter, be might be got off; he would do all he could for him anyhow.  He then returned to Belvidere, and I took the road north.

When I arrived at Port Jervis I detailed to my landlord the whole occurrences of the day—­what I had tried to do, and how miserably I had failed, and asked him what was to be done next.  He said “nothing;” we could only wait and see what happened.

The day following I received a letter from the Belvidere lawyer informing me that Henry had been examined, had been bound over in the sum of three hundred dollars to take his trial on a charge of kidnapping, and he was then in the county jail.  I at once showed this letter to the landlord, and he offered to go down with another man to Belvidere and see about the bail.  I gave him three hundred dollars, which he took with him and put into the bands of a resident there who became bail, and in a day or two Henry came back with them to Port Jervis.

My son was frantic; he had been roughly treated; and to think, he said, that he should be thrust into the common jail and kept there two days with all sorts of scoundrels, when he had done actually nothing!  He would go back there, stand his trial, and prove his innocence, if he died for it.  He reproached me for attempting to carry off the boy against his advice and warning; he knew we should into trouble; but he would show them that he had nothing to do with it; that’s what he would do.

Now this was precisely what I did not wish to have him do.  A trial of this case, even if Henry should come off scott free, would be certain to revive the whole of the old Scheimer story, which had nearly died away, and which I had no desire to have brought before the public again in any way whatever.  The bail bond I was willing, eager even to forfeit, if that would end the matter.  But Henry was sure they couldn’t touch him, and he meant to have the three hundred dollars returned to me.

Seeing how sensitive the boy was on the subject, and how bent he was on proving his innocence, I thought it best to draw him away from the immediate locality, and so, in the course of a week, I persuaded him to go to New York with me, and we afterward went to Maine for a few weeks to sell my medicines.  This Maine trip was a most lucrative one, which was very fortunate, for the money I made there, to the amount of several hundred dollars, was shortly needed for purposes which I did not anticipate when I put the money by.