“No, I’m a shoemaker, but I’ve a great fancy for catching thieves and those kind of people.”
“Curse your fancy,” thought Gray.
“I couldn’t sleep to-night without taking what I call a prowl just to see if the fates would place in my way the murderer.”
“Oh, indeed!“
“Yes, and I don’t despair yet. Good evening—good evening.”
“Good evening,” replied Gray; and he walked on with a faint hope that after all the troublesome shoemaker, whom he devoutly wished dead and buried, did not suspect him sufficiently to annoy him any more with his following.
To ascertain this point, after he had left him, was a great object to Gray, as it would afford him an idea how to act, and accordingly after he had proceeded some distance, he just glanced over his shoulder to see if the man had gone, and he supposed such was the case, for he could neither see nor hear him.
Jacob Gray, however was reckoning without his host, for not only did the troublesome shoemaker, who was the pest of Westminster, from his love of meddling with the duties of the police, strongly suspect that he had hit upon the right man, but he determined not to lose sight of him, and had merely ensconced himself in a door way until Gray should have got some distance off, when his intention was to follow him very cautiously till he saw him housed somewhere, when he would bring the officers upon him, for he did not like exactly to run the risk of attempting the capture of so desperate a character as a murderer, who had already taken one man’s life merely because he made an attempt to capture him.
“Who knows,” thought the shoemaker, “he is a desperate chap, and may be a great deal stronger than he looks; he might smash me just as he smashed Vaughan, and that would be no joke, I’ll dog him till I see him fairly housed, and then be down upon him.”
Cunning, however, as was the troublesome shoemaker he was scarcely a match for Jacob Gray, when the latter had a little time to collect his faculties and was not flurried. There were indeed but five persons who could have succeeded in dogging Jacob Gray without his knowing it; and although the shoemaker had in his mind concocted the artful scheme of letting Gray turn a corner, and then running after him, and keeping him in sight, until he had turned another, he did not know his man, for that was the very course which Jacob Gray took good care to provide against by himself popping into a doorway round the first corner he came to, and waiting patiently to see what came of it.