of people about, and he did not want to run, for running would make his arm unsteady, so he asked Heaven to bless the old gentleman and forebore to rob him.
But the thought of that missed opportunity rankled in him. The feeling that he had been obliged to neglect business and accept charity fretted and vexed him. The thought of the mean squalid shilling made him sick, and as soon as he came to a quiet place he threw it with a curse into the middle of the road. He had shillings of his own, and didn't want charity of any man. If he had stolen the shilling that would have been a different affair. Then it would have come to him in a straightforward business-like way, and would, doubtless, be the best he could have done under the circumstances. But now it seemed the result of a fraud committed upon him, to which he had been forced to consent. It was the ransom he had under duress accepted for a gold watch and chain, and was, therefore, loathsome and detestable in his sight. Its presence could not be endured. It was abominable. Foh! He was well rid of it?
He did not approach Welbeck Place by Chetwynd Street. He did not intend repeating his visit to Mr. Williams's house. He had got there all he wanted and a little more. He kept along by the river and then retraced the way he had come that afternoon after leaving the Hanover. On his previous visit to-day to this locality he had been silent and watchful as a cat, and he had a cat's strong sense of locality. He never forgot a place he was once in; and, piercing northward from the river through a network of mean streets he had never seen until today, he hit upon the southward entrance to Welbeck Mews with as much ease and certainty as though he had lived there for twenty years.
The mews were lonely after nightfall, and the road through them little used. When Stamer found himself in the yard, the place was absolutely deserted. They were a cabman's mews and no one would, in all likelihood, have business there for a couple of hours. The night was now as dark as night ever is at that time of the year, and the place was still. It wanted about twenty minutes of twelve yet.
When Stamer came to the gable of the house next but one to the Hanover, and the wall of which formed one half of the northern boundary of the yard, he paused and listened. He could hear no sound of life or movement near him beyond the snort or cough of a horse now and then.
The ostler who waited on the cabmen lived in the house at the gable of which he stood, and at this hour he had to be aroused in case of any man returning because of accident, or a horse knocked up by some long and unexpected drive. As a rule, the ostler slept undisturbed from eleven at night till half-past four or five in the morning.
After a pause of two or three minutes, Stamer stooped, slipped off his boots, slung them around his neck, and having hitched the crook of his heavy stick to a belt he wore under his waistcoat, he laid hold of the waterpipe that descended from the gutter of the double roof to the yard, and began ascending the gable of the house with surprising agility and speed.
In less than two minutes from the time he first seized the waterpipe he disappeared in the gutter above. He crawled in a few yards from the edge and then reclined against the sloping slates of the roof to rest. The ascent had taken only a couple of minutes, but the exertion had been very great, and he was tired and out of breath.
Then he unscrewed the ferrule and withdrew the tampion and unscrewed the handle of his stick, and was busy in the darkness for a while with the weapon he carried. Overhead the stars looked pale and faint and wasting in the pall of pale yellow cloud that hangs by night over London in summer, the glare of millions of lights on the vapour rising up from the great city.
He particularly wished to have a steady hand and arm that night, in a few minutes, so he made up his mind to rest until five minutes to twelve. Then he should get into position. He should creep down the gutter until he came to the wall of the Hanover, the gable wall of the Hanover standing up over the roofs of the houses on which he now was lying. He should then be almost opposite the window at which he last night saw the dwarf wind up his clock. He should be a little out of the direct line, but not much. The width of Welbeck Place was no more from house to house than fifty feet. The distance from the wall of the house he should be on then, and the wall of Forbes's bakery could not be more than sixty feet. The weapon he carried was perfectly trustworthy at a hundred, a hundred-and-fifty yards, or more. He had been practising that afternoon and evening at an old hat at forty yards, and he had never missed it once. Forty yards was just double the distance he should be from that window if he were on a parapet instead of being at the coping tile,
lying on the inside slope of the roof. Allow another ten feet for that. This would bring the distance up to seventy feet at the very outside, and he had never missed once at a hundred and twenty feet. He had given himself now and then a good deal of practice with the gun, for he enjoyed peculiar facilities; because the factory wall by which the lane at the back of his place ran, prevented anyone seeing what he was doing, and the noise of the factory drowned the whurr of the gun and the whizz of the bullet.