For the first time in my entire existence, so far as I can now remember, I was totally nonplussed and abashed. I could not have been more astonished had I walked into the family lot in the Salem cemetery and found my grandfather sitting on his own tombstone; but there the old lawyer surely was, as certainly as he had been there twenty years before; and the same sensations that I had always experienced as a child while in his presence now swept over me and made me feel like a whipped school-boy. Not for the world would I have had him see me and be forced to answer his questions as to my business in the city of Boston; so, holding my breath, I tiptoed out of the door, and the last vision I ever had of him was as he sat there absorbed in some legal problem, bending over his books, the sunlight flooding the mote-filled air of the dusty office, the little bronze horse standing before him on the desk and the branches of the trees outside casting flickering shadows upon the walls and bookcases. Canny old man! He had never put his neck in a noose! I envied him his quiet life among his books and the well-deserved respect and honor that the world accorded him. Ruminating in this strain, I threaded my way through the crowd in Court Street, and was about to return to my hotel, when to my utter horror I beheld Hawkins, in all his regalia, being marched down the hill between two business-like-looking persons, who were unmistakably officers of police. He walked dejectedly and had lost all his bravado. There was no blinking the fact that in my absence he had managed somehow to stumble into the hands of the guardians of the law and was now in process of being transported back to New York. For a moment my circulation stopped abruptly and a clammy moisture broke out upon my back and forehead. Unostentatiously I slipped into a cigar store and allowed the trio to pass me by. So the jig was up! Back I must go, after my fruitless nightmare with the wretch, to consult with my partner as to what was now to be done. I reached the city late that evening, but not before I had read in the evening papers a full account of the apprehension of the fugitive, including my own part in the escape; and it now appeared that the police had been fully cognizant of all our doings, including the manner of our abduction of Hawkins from our office. They had, under the instructions of the district attorney, simply permitted us to carry out our plan in order to use the same as evidence against us at the proper time, and had followed us every step of the way to Worcester and on our drive to Methuen.