The men rowed straight for a certain sloop, which, it appeared from their conversation, was engaged in the business of conveying stolen horses to Dunkirk and other Continental ports. Dick inwardly determined to follow the fortunes of this rascal boat's crew no longer. Once alongside the sloop, the convicts proceeded to board it, each man for himself. The stern of the boat drifted several feet away from the sloop. Dick, pretending he would leap in his turn, across the intervening space, purposely missed hold of the sloop, and sank into the water. Diving some distance, he came up at a spot far from where the attention of his erstwhile comrades was directed. He then struck out for the outskirts of Gravesend, and landed a little east of the town, in the gray of the morning.
Skirting the town, and passing only bare vegetable gardens and fishermen's houses, he reached the Dover road, and walked on four miles to Gad's Hill, where Sir John Falstaff had played valorous pranks. Three miles more of walking brought him to Rochester, with its twelfth century Cathedral, and its ruined Norman Castle aloft by the Medway. A sailor's wife, living in a small house in a squalid part of the town, gave him a breakfast of porridge, while he dried his clothes at her fire.
Knowing he might be detected by his uniform, and finding the woman good-hearted, Dick offered to exchange the suit he had on for some worn-out raiment of her husband's, saying that the cloth of his garments might be made over into clothes for her little son. This exchange being made in the woman's parlor while she was at work in the kitchen, Dick proceeded on his way. At Sittingbourne, ten miles farther southeast, he stopped at a villager's house, on pretence of asking the road, and received a glass of milk and an egg, which he ate raw. Thus refreshed, he trudged on seven miles, to Ospringe, where he passed the night under a sheep-skin, in a cart-house.
The next morning (Tuesday), breakfasting on a pot of ale given him by an oysterman of Faversham, Dick went on to Canterbury, where, procuring a pack of cards from an hostler of an inn in High Street, he fell back on his card tricks for a living, though now with great aversion. He risked wearing out his welcome at the Canterbury inns and tap-rooms, for that he so much liked the town; and it was reluctantly that, on Saturday morning, he left the old Cathedral behind, and set his face southeastward. Passing the Gothic towers of Lee Priory, he plodded on, mile after mile, hour after hour, over downs and through villages, till he stood at last on the hills at whose feet, before him, lay the town and the harbor of Dover, and from whose top, near the old castle supposed to have been founded by Julius Cæsar, could be seen, beyond the ruffled waves of the Channel, the distant coast of France.
Tired and hungry, Dick descended from the cliff and proceeded along narrow Snaregate Street to a straggling suburb of low-built houses inhabited by sailors and fishermen. It was late in the afternoon, when he entered a small tippling-house, where were a number of seafarers boisterously talking, and called at the bar for a glass of rum. While drinking, he asked the barman how one might go to France more cheaply than by the regular packet. He was immediately referred to one of the fellows drinking at a small table in the room. Thus introduced to this person, who was a stalwart, sea-browned man of fifty, Dick ingratiated himself into his liking, drank with him, and presently began his usual procedure with the cards.
As invariably happened, certain of his spectators offered Dick small sums to show them how one or other of his most puzzling tricks were done. As always, Dick refused. But his first acquaintance, under a curiosity to which Dick had adroitly ministered, persisted hard in begging to know the secret of a certain sleight. Dick finally replied:
"I shall tell you on the other side of the Channel."
"T'other side of the Channel?" repeated the seafarer. "When shall I see you there, man?"
"When you shall have taken me there in your fishing-smack."
"So 'tis settled I'm to take you? But the pay?"