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Updated: June 13, 2025
The next day Bowerton saw a tall, handsome stranger, with downcast eyes, walk rapidly through the principal street and disappear behind Mrs. Wyett's gate. A day later, and Bowerton was electrified by the intelligence that the ex-burglar had been installed as a clerk in Guzzy's store. People said that it was a shame that nobody knew how soon Beigh might take to his old tricks again.
Now, the jail at Bowerton, like everything else in the town, was decidedly antiquated, and consisted simply of a thickly-walled room in a building which contained several offices and living apartments. It was as extensive a jail as Bowerton needed, and was fully strong enough to hold the few drunken and quarrelsome people who were occasionally lodged in it.
Under the guidance of the constable, who zealously assisted them in every possible manner, the officers searched every house in Bowerton that might seem likely to afford a hiding-place, and then departed on what they considered the prisoner's most likely route.
When at last the one unmarried minister of Bowerton, who had been the desire of many hearts, manfully admitted that he had proposed and been rejected, and that Miss Wyett had informed him that she was already engaged, all the Bowerton girls declared that Helen Wyett was a darling old thing, and that it was perfectly shameful that she couldn't be let alone.
Finally Jack Whiffer, who was of a first family, and was a store-clerk besides, proposed to Miss Wyett and was declined; then the young ladies of Bowerton thought that perhaps Helen Wyett had some sense after all. Then young Baggs, son of a deceased Congressman, wished to make Miss Wyett mistress of the Baggs mansion and sharer of the Baggs money, but his offer was rejected.
Even casting chilling looks at Miss Wyett when they met her failed to make that unoffending young lady any less attractive to the young men of Bowerton, and critical analysis of Miss Wyett's style of dressing only provoked manly comparisons, which were as exasperating as they were unartistic.
Then the officers escorted the prisoner to the jail, and Guzzy sneaked quietly out, while the squire retired to his slumbers, with the firm conviction that if Solomon had been a justice of the peace at Bowerton, his denial of the newness of anything under the sun would never have been made.
But Beigh, alias Bay Billy, alias Handsome, was no ordinary and vulgar jail-bird, the officers told him, and, that he and they might sleep securely, they considered it advisable to carefully iron his hands. A couple of hours rolled away, and left Beigh still sitting moody and silent on the single bedstead in the Bowerton jail.
Battle, who lived in the house next to the cottage, and who was suddenly, on hearing the crashing of crockery next door, moved to neighborly kindness to the extent of carrying in a nice hot pie to the newcomers, declared that, as she hoped to be saved, there wasn't a bit of crockery in that house which wasn't pure china. Bowerton asked no more.
Wyett a cottage, it learned that Mrs. Wyett had made payment by check on an excellent Boston bank. The poor but respectable female who washed the floors of the cottage informed the public that the whole first floor was to be carpeted with Brussels. The postmaster's clerk ascertained and stated that Mrs. Wyett received two religious papers per week, whereas no else in Bowerton took more than one.
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