"Except for the sea-voyage, it
might be a middle-aged jaunt in a po'-shay!"
[1] Miss Belcher was here employing a smuggling term. A "spotsman"
is the agent who arranges for a run of goods, and directs the
operation from the shore, without necessarily taking a part in it.
CHAPTER XXII.
A STRANGE MAN IN THE GARDEN.
Indeed, the longer we weighed the pros and cons the more feasible
appeared the simple adventure. We ran, to be sure, the risk of being
waylaid on our passage by an American privateer; but this was a
danger incident to all who sailed on board his Majesty's Post Office
packets in the year 1814. That anything was to be feared from the
man Glass, none of us (I believe) stopped to consider. We thought of
him only as a foiled criminal, a fugitive from justice, and
speculated only on the chance that, with the hue-and-cry out and the
whole countryside placarded, the Plymouth runners would lay him by
the heels.
Undoubtedly he had made for Plymouth. From Torpoint came news that a
man answering to his description had crossed the ferry there on the
morning after the murder. The regular ferryman there had stepped
into a public-house for his regular morning glass of rum-and-water;
and in his absence the small boy who acted as substitute had taken a
stranger across.
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