Page:Hornung - Rogues March.djvu/400

380 It was the Receipt!

Pencilled by Blaydes on the back of a letter, signed by Tom in the moonlit Hampstead fields, and taken by the murderer from his victim’s person, it was neither more nor less than the missing document whose production would have acquitted Erichsen at the Old Bailey. And now after eighteen months, and here on these outlandish shores, it had cast up at his very feet; he held it—held his freedom—in his own trembling hands.

The words spun like midges as the paper rustled and shook. He had to set it on the chimney-piece to read it through:—

Words and chirography were as familiar as though he had studied them the night before; the very flourishes were old friends; and the glimmer of a mild London moon seemed still to lurk in the shiny blue paper.

He forgot the wedding-ring, forgot the wedding: he was an innocent man: he could prove it now before all the world, by this incomparable testimony, this inanimate witness that could not lie. That was Tom’s first reflection. His first emotion was a rush of thankfulness, ineffable and unmixed. Curiosity succeeded: how came the receipt here? But as he wondered, as his thoughts flew from the broken-headed robber to his friend Daintree, it was not the bridegroom that they pursued to the