onsented to the bargain and Goddard was told
that he might sleep in the barn if he liked, and should take a turn at
cutting chaff the next day to pay for the convenience. The convict slept
soundly; he was past lying awake in useless fits of remorse, and he was
exhausted with his day's journey. Moreover he had now the immediate
prospect of obtaining sufficient money to carry him safely out of the
country, and once abroad he felt sure of baffling pursuit. He was an
accomplished man and spoke French with a fluency unusual in Englishmen;
he determined to get across the channel in some fishing craft; he would
then make his way to Paris and enlist in the Foreign Legion. It would be
safer than trying to go to America, where people were invariably caught
as they landed. It was a race for life and death, and he knew it. Had he
been able to obtain clothes, money and a disguise in London he would have
travelled by rail. But that had been impossible and it now seemed a wiser
plan to "tramp" it. His beard was growing rapidly and would soon make a
complete disguise. Village constables are generally simple people, easily
imposed upon, very different from London detectives; and hitherto he felt
sure that he had baffled pursuit by the mere simplicity of his
proceedings. The intelligent officials of Scotland Yard were used to
forgers and swindlers who travelled by express trains and crossed to
America by fashionable steamers. It did not strike them as very likely
that a man of Walter Goddard's previous tastes and habits could get
through the country in the guise of a tramp. If he had been possessed at
the time of his escape of the money he so much desired he would probably
have been caught; as it was, he got away without difficulty, and at the
very time when every railway station and every port in the kingdom were
being watched for him, he was lurking in the purlieus of Whitechapel, and
then tramping his way east in comparative safety, half starved, it is
true, but unmolested.
That he was disappointed at the reception his wife had given him did not
prevent him from sleeping peacefully that night. One thing alone
disturbed him, and that was her mention of Mr. Juxon, in whose house, as
she had told him, she lived. It seems incredible that a man in Walter
Goddard's position, lost to every sense of honour, a criminal of the
worst type, who had deceived his wife before he was indicted for forgery,
who had certainly cared very little for her a
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