Sumner seized Baxter's money and fled England

Patrick Sumner’s escape from Britain begins as a confrontation over the deaths and failed schemes surrounding the Volunteer, but ends as a decisive seizure of Jacob Baxter’s wealth. Baxter offers him money to disappear quietly; Sumner demands the entire contents of the safe, restrains Baxter, and leaves with the cash. His journey north, conducted under an assumed name and with a new destination in view, converts flight into a deliberate attempt to remake himself. The ending brings him to the threshold of departure, not yet safely beyond it.

The confrontation with Baxter

Sumner enters Baxter’s house carrying a revolver and checks that it is loaded before going to the room at the back. He finds Baxter by the fire, dressed for comfort and apparently untroubled. When Baxter starts to rise, Sumner displays the weapon and tells him to remain where he is. The scene reverses their earlier imbalance: the businessman who has treated other people as instruments now has to answer to the man whose survival has unsettled his plans.

Sumner asks what Baxter intended to happen at the timber yard and makes clear that Stevens is dead. Baxter responds by describing Stevens as loyal and useful, then presents Henry Drax as an uncontrollable danger who had to be removed before he could destroy Baxter’s interests. His explanation is self-justifying: he casts his own conduct as practical self-preservation and Drax’s violence as a threat to the respectable order Baxter claims to represent. Sumner does not accept that distinction as an answer to what happened.

When Sumner asks what became of Drax, he tells Baxter that he killed him. He then challenges Baxter’s account of his own role, insisting that he was not merely bait but was meant to die. Sumner’s reconstruction is that Baxter arranged for Cavendish to sink the Volunteer, leaving Drax and Sumner as the people most likely to know or suspect the truth. In the anticipated sequence, Drax would shoot Sumner and Stevens would then shoot Drax, tidying away the witnesses. The plan failed. The exchange establishes Sumner’s understanding of the plot, while Baxter’s defensive explanation shows how he tries to frame deliberate violence as a necessary business decision.

From offered payment to the safe

Baxter does not meet Sumner’s accusation with a confession to every detail. Instead, he walks to the iron safe in his study, unlocks it, and gives Sumner a brown canvas wallet. He says it contains fifty guineas in gold and urges him to go to London, forget the Volunteer and Drax, and leave the past behind. Baxter also offers to invent an explanation that will divert attention from the timber-yard affair. His proposed settlement is meant to turn danger into a transaction: money in exchange for silence and disappearance.

Sumner weighs the wallet but does not immediately agree. The offer arrives at a moment when, as the narration presents it, he feels the world has become unstable and open to change. He recognizes the need to act before that opening closes, yet initially cannot decide what action to take. His hesitation is not a simple refusal of escape; it marks the choice between accepting Baxter’s terms and taking control of the situation himself.

He asks for the rest of the money. When Baxter points out that the safe contains it all, Sumner insists that he wants everything, not merely the fifty guineas already handed over. He raises the revolver and cocks it, measuring his resolve against the possibility of killing Baxter. To press the threat, Sumner invokes his recent killing of Drax with a broken saw blade and argues that threatening him with a bullet will not make him retreat. The demand turns Baxter’s offer into a larger seizure: Sumner will not accept a limited payment designed by the man who tried to dispose of him.

Sumner orders Baxter to bring a leather satchel and fill it from the safe. Once the safe is empty, he checks it, makes Baxter face the wall, and restrains him using materials taken from the room. He then directs Baxter to lead him to the stables. There, Sumner secures Baxter with a rope and leaves him behind. The change in their positions is stark but practical: Baxter’s house, safe, and property become resources for Sumner’s escape, while Baxter himself is prevented from immediately raising an alarm.

Flight under an assumed identity

Sumner takes one of Baxter’s horses, an older gray, saddles it, and loads the satchel. Before leaving, he listens and watches for signs that anyone has noticed him; finding the mews empty, he rides away. The escape depends on speed and discretion, but also on appropriation. The money, horse, and equipment that make his flight possible have all come from Baxter’s household.

By dawn Sumner is twenty miles north. He passes through Driffield without stopping, lets the horse drink at Gorton, and continues through wooded country and open agricultural land. Near noon he crosses the northern edge of the Wolds; by night he reaches Pickering, hungry, sleepless, and unwell. He finds a stable for the horse and takes a room at the adjoining inn. When asked his name, he calls himself Peter Batchelor and offers a story about travelling from York. The alias is his first concrete attempt to sever the identity attached to the Hull events.

Sumner expects that the news from Hull will take time to catch up with him. He plans to reach the coast and find a ship sailing east to Holland or Germany, then use Baxter’s money to disappear and become someone else, with a different name and profession. His imagined future depends on erasure: he hopes that what has happened can be left behind rather than answered for. Yet the plan is not secure. It requires him to avoid recognition, reach a port before reports spread, and persuade someone to carry him across the sea.

At Guisborough, he sells the horse and saddle for half their value and continues on foot. At a newsdealer near the railway station, he buys the Newcastle Courant and finds a report of the murder and robbery in Hull. The newspaper identifies Patrick Sumner as an Irish former soldier and names him as the culprit; it also describes the stolen horse and reports Baxter’s reward for useful information. The public account has already begun to define him as a wanted man. Sumner leaves the paper on the bench and boards a train to Middlesbrough, moving onward while the printed description and reward increase the danger of remaining in Britain.

A passage still to be secured

That night Sumner searches the dockside taverns for foreign voices, listening for Russian, German, Danish, or Portuguese speakers. He is looking for a captain who is neither too clever nor too greedy: someone capable of arranging a discreet passage, but susceptible to payment. In the Baltic Tavern on Commercial Street, he finds a Swedish captain whose brig is due to leave for Hamburg with coal and iron. The captain looks him over skeptically and asks how many men he has murdered. Sumner responds by putting a sovereign on the table.

The captain initially leaves the coin untouched, then says that Sumner will find someone willing to take him if he pays enough. Sumner places a second sovereign beside the first. The money here performs a different role from Baxter’s attempted payment: it is no longer the price of silence imposed by a powerful employer, but Sumner’s means of negotiating passage on his own terms. He smiles as he decides that the captain is the person he has been seeking.

The ending stops before the bargain is completed. Sumner has found a possible route to Hamburg and has demonstrated that he is willing to spend Baxter’s gold to pursue it, but the captain has not yet been shown accepting the coins or taking him aboard. The escape therefore concludes in suspension: Sumner is no longer trapped in Baxter’s house or moving under his own name, but his hoped-for reinvention remains a plan rather than an accomplished outcome.

Significance of the escape

The sequence makes escape both a material operation and a test of agency. Sumner must secure money, transportation, a cover identity, and a destination; each step follows from a specific obstacle, from Baxter’s attempt to buy his silence to the newspaper’s report and reward. He does not simply flee the consequences of the plot. He wrests the means of flight from the man he believes arranged it, then improvises a route through roads, rail, and the port’s uncertain human networks.

The reversal also complicates any clean division between victim and victor. Sumner’s account identifies him as a target in Baxter’s scheme, yet his response involves armed intimidation, robbery, and the restraint of Baxter. The novel presents these actions as part of his effort to escape, without making the escape itself proof that he has achieved freedom or moral renewal. His desired new name and profession promise a break with the past, while the newspaper, the reward, and his dependence on paid passage show how much of that past still follows him.