Page:What will he do with it.djvu/262

252 promised to be an effective, investigation. He ascertained that the fugitive certainly had not left by the railway, or by any of the public conveyances; he sent scouts over all the neighborhood; he enlisted the sympathy of the police, who confideptly assured him that they had "a net-work over the three kingdoms; " no doubt they have, and we pay for it; but the meshes are so large that anything less than a whale must be silly indeed if it consent to be caught. Rugge's suspicions were directed to Waife—he could collect, however, no evidence to confirm them. No person answering to Waife's description had been seen in the town. Once, indeed, Rugge was close on the right scent; for, insisting vipon Waife's one eye and his possession of a white dog, he was told by several witnesses that a man blind of two eyes, and led by a black dog, had been close before the stage, just previous to the performance. But then the clown had spoken to that very man; all the Thespian company had observed him; all of them had known Waife familiarly for years; and all deposed that any creature more unlike to Waife than the blind man could not be turned out of Nature's workshop. But where was that blind man? They found out the wayside inn in which he had taken a lodging for the night; and there it was ascertained that he had paid for his room beforehand, stat- ing that he should start for the race-course early in the morning. Rugge himself set out to the race-course to kill two birds with one stone—catch Mr. Losely—examine the blind man himself.

He did catch Mr. Losely, and very nearly caught something else—for that gentleman was in a ring of noisy horsemen, mounted on a hired hack, and loud as the noisiest. When Rugge came up to his stirrup, and began his harangue, Losely turned his hack round with so sudden an appliance of bit and spur that the animal lashed out, and its heel went within an inch of the manager's cheek-bone. Before Rugge could recover Losely was in a hand rillop. But the blind man! Of course Rugge did not find him t You are mistaken; he did. The blind man was there, dog and all. The manager spoke to him, and did not know him from Adam.

Nor have you or I, my venerated readers, any right whatsoever to doubt whether Mr. Rugge could be so stolidly obtuse. Granting that blind sailor to be the veritable William Waife— William Waife was a man of genius, taking pains to appear an ordinary mortal. And the anecdotes of Munden, or of Bamfylde Moore Carew, suffice to tell us how Protean is the power of trans- formation in a man whose genius is mimetic. But how often