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 the two convicts who had escaped last night.

Further, one of those two was already retaken, 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.