“Yes, a mere vagrant. He smarted under some fancied injury that I had done him. He attacked me near my own home in relation to it. He was a violent-tongued man and insulted me. I was hot-tempered then and I punished him for his insults.”
“My two children--mere infants then--were stolen one day, in which I was absent and my wife unwell. It is not necessary to enter into particulars. It is enough to say that we traced them to this vagrant. He was sharply pursued, but we never succeeded in finding him.”
“It killed my wife, and has made me a wanderer for years. I have constantly sought that villain and the two precious ones he stole. I have traced him, but too late. He has escaped me by death. His secret is in the grave with him.”
“Here. In Philadelphia. That is why I have settled here. I have hopes that the children may still be alive and in this city.”
“This is a decidedly interesting matter,” said the visitor. “It is certainly worth while trying to trace the children. What was the man’s name?”
“Jake Johnson was the name he was always known by.”
“Have you set the police force of the city at work on this search?”
“No, I have not much confidence in them. I preferred to conduct it myself.”
“You did wrong there. A thousand men, well posted about the city, are certainly better than one man not at all posted. Please tell me all you know about this man, how you discovered him, when he died and where he was buried.”
Mr. Somers proceeded to do so, in a long narrative of no special interest to the reader.
“And he kept up his vagrant habits to the last?”
“Yes, but had not the children with him. I can trace him back for some months before his death, and he was alone during that period!”
“He probably did not trouble himself with them long,” said the visitor. “Men of that character, unless they can make some special use of them, do not care to be bothered with incumbrances. He has likely placed them somewhere where he calculated you would never find them.”
“That may be so,” said Mr. Somers, thoughtfully. “But where?”
“That is what we need to consider,” was the reply. “I should go first to the most obvious quarter. Men of his kind naturally gravitate to the poor-house. He may have dropped them in some such place. Have you searched the books of the poor-houses?”