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Updated: June 5, 2025
Come on, Tom. I want to run you home. And on the way, I tell you, I've got something to put up to you myself. It may not promise a small fortune like this electric locomotive business; but bless my barbed wire fence! my trouble has more than a little to do with footpads, too." He led the way out of the house and to the motor car again.
"Do you mean to say, Master Cale," he asked, "that men accuse Lord Claud of being the accomplice of highwaymen and footpads?" And then he himself remembered the words of the message with which Captain Jack had entrusted him, and a strange thrill seemed to run down his spine. "Men say nought of him openly," answered Cale, "but they whisper among themselves.
Should he chance to be stopped by two or three footpads and call for help, he will doubtless wake up some drowsy guardian of the law, but the help will be all against him. Instances have been related to me of robberies in which the police were the most active assailants, the robbers merely standing by for their share of the plunder.
Calderwood started from Edinburgh on the 3rd of June, when the roads were dry and the weather was fine, and she reached London on the evening of the 10th, which was considered a rapid journey in those days. The danger, however, from footpads and highwaymen was not greatest in remote country places, but in and about the metropolis itself.
At night she would not have ventured to cross this big open space haunted as it was after dark by footpads and pickpockets, but at that early hour of the morning there was nothing to fear. Only a few people were about and in the enclosure railed off from the roadway by posts was a horse being broken in. The theatre was a link between her and Lancelot Vane and thinking of him she walked towards it.
After about half-an-hour's walking, all three in profound silence, they approached an old barn, which stood on the edge of some cultivated ground, but remote from everything like a habitation. It was itself, however, tenanted, for there was light in the windows. One of the footpads scratched at the door, which was opened by a female, and they entered with their unhappy prisoner.
Just as he had clenched the winch the foremost of the footpads came down the hill and shouted as he saw the sailor. Jack got underneath the chain, took firm hold with his hands and twisted his legs round as though he were climbing a back-stay; then he began to haul himself across.
These strangely gifted men have appeared only at intervals of centuries. If an ordinary man is attacked in a lonely spot by armed footpads, he finds himself helpless. But history tells of a man who carried such reserves that, bound and unaided, he could deliver himself from an entire band of robbers. Surprised one day by a company of bandits, he was knocked down, robbed, and bound.
"He's got his fist on the rhino," said Sherry to me in English. "He's not quite sure whether we're footpads or not poor devil." "How much has he got?" asked I. "Perhaps four or five dollars. Good business, eh? Got it in big money mostly, too had it changed at some cafe." The blind man was nervous, seemed not to understand us. He made as if to move on.
The footpads persisted until the horse-trader came near enough to see that they were black men, or rather white men with blackened faces and hands. Then they sprang up and vanished in the gathering dusk. Tom was conscious when Pettigrass got him on his feet and hastily bound a handkerchief over the ugly wound in his head.
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