'Well, who is this ghastly child, then?' I said.
'I don't know. O Lord, I've had a time! Thank goodness you will
probably spend the next few years of your life in Dartmoor for
kidnapping. That's my only consolation. I'll come and jeer at you
through the bars on visiting days.'
'Tell me all, old man,' I said.
He told me all. It took him a good long time to do it, for he broke
off in the middle of nearly every sentence to call me names, but I
gradually gathered what had happened. The girl Elizabeth had listened
like an iceberg while he worked off the story he had prepared, and
then--well, she didn't actually call him a liar in so many words, but
she gave him to understand in a general sort of way that he was a worm
and an outcast. And then he crawled off with the kid, licked to a
splinter.
'And mind,' he concluded, 'this is your affair. I'm not mixed up in it
at all. If you want to escape your sentence--or anyway get a portion of
it remitted--you'd better go and find the child's parents and return
him before the police come for you.'
'Who are his parents?'
'I don't know.'
'Where do they live?'
'I don't know.'
The kid didn't seem to know, either. A thoroughly vapid and uninformed
infant. I got out of him the fact that he had a father, but that was as
far as he went. It didn't seem ever to have occurred to him, chatting
of an evening with the old man, to ask him his name and address. So,
after a wasted ten minutes, out we went into the great world, more or
less what you might call at random.
I give you my word that, until I started to tramp the place with this
child, I never had a notion that it was such a difficult job restoring
a son to his parents. How kidnappers ever get caught is a mystery to
me. I searched Marvis Bay like a bloodhound, but nobody came forward
to claim the infant. You would have thought, from the lack of interest
in him, that he was stopping there all by himself in a cottage of
his own. It wasn't till, by another inspiration, I thought to ask
the sweet-stall man that I got on the track. The sweet-stall man,
who seemed to have seen a lot of him, said that the child's name was
Kegworthy, and that his parents lived at a place called Ocean Rest.
It then remained to find Ocean Rest. And eventually, after visiting
Ocean View, Ocean Prospect, Ocean Breeze, Ocean Cottage, Ocean
Bungalow, Ocean Nook and Ocean Homestead, I trailed it down.
I knocked at the door. Nobody answered. I knocked again. I could hear
movements inside, but nobody appeared. I was just going to get to work
with that knocker in such a way that it would filter through these
people's heads that I wasn't standing there just for the fun of the
thing, when a voice from somewhere above shouted 'Hi!'
I looked up and saw a round, pink face, with grey whiskers east and
west of it, staring down at me from an upper window.
'Hi!' it shouted again. 'You can't come in.'
'I don't want to come in.'
'Because--Oh, is that Tootles?'
'My name is not Tootles. Are you Mr Kegworthy? I've brought back your
son.'
'I see him. Peep-bo, Tootles, Dadda can see 'oo.'
The face disappeared with a jerk. I could hear voices. The face
reappeared.
'Hi!'