Ford, policeman-like, saw it all instanter, and a curtain seemed to lift off his soul, and there glared the eyes of ‘Santa Claus’ into his mind’s eyes.  In a second he put two and two together and understood why, deep in his brain that night, had hidden such a feeling of stark care.

“Have you touched they sweets?” he asked, shaking the little boy to make him attend.  “Speak for your life, Joey!  Have you ate one?”

Still the child couldn’t collect himself.  He screamed again when his father shook him, and it was clear some fearful thing had overtook him; but his grief didn’t rise from no pain of body, and in truth the answer to Joseph’s question lay before his eyes, if he’d but understood the truth.  No scream would Joey have screamed, nor tear shed, if he’d helped himself from the box; but ’twas a case when a big heart saved a little body, for Joey had put another creature before himself and the first sweetie out of the gift had went to his pup.  ’Twas chocolates ‘Santa Claus’ had left, and when the dog’s jaws closed upon his little master’s gift, he gave one jump and leapt off the bed and was stone dead in three seconds before the child got to him.

All that the parents presently learned from the shaking babe, and the moment Joseph grasped the truth, he left his wife to praise God and got on his clothes and ran without ceasing to Teddy Pegram’s house.  And in no Christmas temper did he run neither, for he’d have well liked, in his fury, to rob the hangman of a job.  The size of the intended crime swept over him in all its horror as he measured the past and remembered all that the poacher had said and done; and his feet very near gave under him to think of what a fellow creature can harbour hid from every other human eye.

But he wasn’t overmuch surprised to find Teddy Pegram didn’t answer the door, nor yet to discover the place was all unlocked.  He doubted not that his awful enemy had departed overnight, and it came out presently that the last at Little Silver to see Pegram was Ford himself on the previous evening.

So he left it at that, then, and went home and joined his wife in blessing the Maker for His mercy and calming the sorrows and terrors of their little lad.

An unrestful Christmas for the local police, and the countryside was soon busy over Teddy Pegram, while next day the box of chocolates received attention and was found so full of venom as the poisoner could pack ’em.

A nine days’ wonder and no more, for though the police was so placed they could soon learn a lot they didn’t know about the would-be murderer, the wretch himself escaped ’em that time.  But a very interesting thing threw light, and when Teddy’s cottage came to be hunted over, though not a stick offered to show who he might be, or where he might have sped, some fingerprints was took by the police and they got a good picture off an empty bottle in a cupboard and another off a frying-pan.  And so it got to be understood that ‘Santa Claus’ was a famous criminal, who had come to Little Silver straight from seven years of penal servitude for manslaughter and had a record so long as from Newgate to Prince town.  And he was sixty-three years old, or so they thought.