AN EXTRACT FROM THE MEMOIRS OF GABRIEL FOOT, HIGHWAYMAN
I sit down to this chapter of my Memoirs with an unwonted relish, because it exhibits me as an instrument in the hands of Providence. Doubtless, in our business, we perform that function oftener than the law recognises, but seldom so directly, so unequivocally, as in the adventure I shall now relate. And I say this, not because it left me with a title to one of the neatest little estates in the West of England, but because I, the one man necessary to the situation, dropped upon it (so to speak) with my hands in my pockets. I had never before happened within thirty miles of Tregarrick town: I walked in at one end purposing only to walk out at the other: and, but for a child's practical joke, I had done so and forgotten the place. It was touch and go, in short: the sort of thing to set you speculating on the possible extent of man's missed opportunities.
I had stepped ashore, after a voyage from Hull (undertaken from expedience and not for health), upon the Market Strand at Falmouth, with one shilling and fourpence in my pocket. I have been in lower water, but never with such a job before me; and I started to tramp it back to London with little more than a dog's determination to get there somehow. The third afternoon found me in Tregarrick, wet through, sullen, and moderately hungry. The time of year was October: all day it had been raining and blowing chilly from the north-west; and traffic had deserted the unlovely Fore Street when, as the town-clock chimed a quarter to five, I passed the windows and open archway of the Red Hart Hotel. A gust from the archway brought me up staggering and clutching my hat: I faced round to it, and, in so doing, caught a momentary glimpse, above the wire blind in a lower window, of a bald-headed man within standing with his back to the street; and at the same instant heard a coin drop on the pavement behind me.
A richer man would have halted, turned and scanned the pavement as I did. But a richer man would probably have taken longer to assure himself that nothing had been lost from his pocket, and would certainly have taken longer to suspect that the coin might have been tossed to him in charity. I flung a glance up at the window overhead, and spied a penny dangling over the sill by a string.
At once I recognised the secular jest; and stepped across the roadway to get a look at the performer. As I did so, an elderly man in an Inverness cape and rusty hat and suit emerged briskly from the archway of the inn, glanced up at the weather, and passed along the pavement beneath the window.
Thereupon, I saw the trick played to perfection. A curly-headed youngster popped into view, leaned out, rang the coin down at the very heels of the pedestrian, and whisked it as nimbly up. The man whipped round and, seeing nothing, pulled out a pair of spectacles and began to adjust them. I heard the youngster chuckle overhead as he stooped and a deflected gust from the archway, skimming his hat into the gutter, revealed the same bald head I had observed above the wire blind.
Just then, three other faces appeared; one above the same blind and two at the upper window behind the child. And a moment later I had spun right-about on my heel and was apparently in deep study of a damp placard upon a hoarding opposite.