 Joe, examining this iron with a smith's eye, declared it to have been
filed asunder some time ago. The hue and cry going off to the Hulks, and people
coming thence to examine the iron, Joe's opinion was corroborated. They did not
undertake to say when it had left the prison-ships to which it undoubtedly had
once belonged; but they claimed to know for certain that that particular manacle
had not been worn by either of two convicts who had escaped last night. Further,
one of those two was already re-taken, and had not freed himself of his iron.
    Knowing what I knew, I set up an inference of my own here. I believed the
iron to be my convict's iron - the iron I had seen and heard him filing at, on
the marshes - but my mind did not accuse him of having put it to its latest use.
For, I believed one of two other persons to have become possessed of it, and to
have turned it to this cruel account. Either Orlick, or the strange man who had
shown me the file.
    Now, as to Orlick; he had gone to town exactly as he told us when we picked
him up at the turnpike, he had been seen about town all the evening, he had been
in divers companies in several public-houses, and he had come back with myself
and Mr. Wopsle. There was nothing against him, save the quarrel; and my sister
had quarrelled with him, and with everybody else about her, ten thousand times.
As to the strange man; if he had come back for his two bank-notes there could
have been no dispute about them, because my sister was fully prepared to restore
them. Besides, there had been no altercation; the assailant had come in so
silently and suddenly, that she had been felled before she could look round.
    It was horrible to think that I had provided the weapon, however
undesignedly, but I could hardly think otherwise. I suffered unspeakable trouble
while I considered and reconsidered whether I should at last dissolve that spell
of my childhood and tell Joe all the story. For months afterwards, I every day
settled the question finally in the negative, and reopened and reargued it next
morning. The contention came, after all, to this; - the secret was such an old
one now, had so grown into me and become a part of myself, that I could not tear
it away. In addition to the dread that, having led up to so much mischief, it
would be now
