So I gathered up the kid and made off with him.
Freddie, dear old chap, was rather slow at first in getting on to the fine points of the idea. When I appeared at the cottage, carrying the child, and dumped him down in the sitting room, he showed no joy whatever. The child had started to bellow by this time, not thinking much of the thing, and Freddie seemed to find it rather trying.
“What the devil’s all this?” he asked, regarding the little visitor with a good deal of loathing.
The kid loosed off a yell that made the windows rattle, and I saw that this was a time for strategy. I raced to the kitchen and fetched a pot of honey. It was the right idea. The kid stopped bellowing and began to smear his face with the stuff.
“Well?” said Freddie, when silence had set in. I explained the scheme. After a while it began to strike him. The careworn look faded from his face, and for the first time since his arrival at Marvis Bay he smiled almost happily.
“There’s something in this, Bertie.”
“It’s the goods.”
“I think it will work,” said Freddie.
And, disentangling the child from the honey, he led him out.
“I expect Elizabeth will be on the beach somewhere,” he said.
What you might call a quiet happiness suffused me, if that’s the word I want. I was very fond of old Freddie, and it was jolly to think that he was shortly about to click once more. I was leaning back in a chair on the veranda, smoking a peaceful cigarette, when down the road I saw the old boy returning, and, by George, the kid was still with him.
“Hallo!” I said. “Couldn’t you find her?”
I then perceived that Freddie was looking as if he had been kicked in the stomach.
“Yes, I found her,” he replied, with one of those bitter, mirthless laughs you read about.
“Well, then—?”
He sank into a chair and groaned.
“This isn’t her cousin, you idiot,” he said. “He’s no relation at all—just a kid she met on the beach. She had never seen him before in her life.”
“But she was helping him build a sandcastle.”
“I don’t care. He’s a perfect stranger.”
It seemed to me that, if the modem girl goes about building sandcastles with kids she has only known for five minutes and probably without a proper introduction at that, then all that has been written about her is perfectly true. Brazen is the word that seems to meet the case.
I said as much to Freddie, but he wasn’t listening.
“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
