The escape of Lionel Dering from Duxley Gaol¹ created an extraordinary sensation throughout the country. Government at once offered a reward of two hundred pounds, which, a week later, was increased to four hundred. The telegraph was set to work in every direction, and at every sea-port in England and on the Continent sharp eyes were made sharper still by the possibility of winning so magnificent a prize. But day passed after day till a fortnight had come and gone, and still there was not the slightest clue to the whereabouts of the missing man; nor the smallest scrap² of comfort for the disconsolate³ soul of Mr. Drayton, the superintendent⁴ of the Duxley police.

However positive Jabez Creede, his landlady⁶, and the various prison warders might be that Mr. Hoskyns, and no one but he, was the man who had assisted Lionel Dering to escape, it was easily proved that they were one and all in the wrong. On the evening of the escape Mr. Hoskyns had dined with Mr. Tressil and three or four other members of the bar, and had not parted from them till after midnight. This fact the gentlemen in question all came forward and swore to, and Mr. Hoskyns was at once exculpated⁷ from any share in the extraordinary escape of his client. With Jabez Creede it fared somewhat more hardly. Every one at first was inclined to regard him in the light of an accomplice⁸, and it was not till after he had spent upwards⁹ of a week in prison, and had been examined and remanded about a dozen times, that he was able to prove how really innocent he was of any complicity in the heinous¹⁰ crime of which he was accused.

But who, then, was the

分享到：