Maybe you've heard from Mr. Miles how I come to this.
A tussle with the preventive men was what done it. I'm no thief."

Had it not been for the sadness of the situation, I could almost have
smiled at this fresh proof of the dogged conviction, entertained by
this man and his class, that defrauding the revenue was no crime.

"I should like to have said good-bye to Mr. Miles," continued Lewis.
"Give him my respects when you see him. I suppose, sir, you haven't
got such a thing as a bit of baccy about you?"

Remembering our holiday excursions, and somehow contrasting his present
hapless condition with the freedom of the great sea, I could not but
pity the unhappy fellow. I shook my head, signifying that I had not.

The next moment Tom Barker emerged from the inn, rubbing his mouth with
the back of his hand. He clambered into his place; there was a "Give
'em their heads, Dick," and we were off again.

The next stage was not accomplished quite so successfully as the
previous part of the journey. After a time one of the wheelers went
lame. On examination, it proved to have been badly shod, and at the
end of another mile Tom pulled up at a wayside blacksmith's to have the
offending nail extracted. Here we had to wait some little time while
the smith, who had stopped work for the day, was fetched from his
cottage, which was down a dark lane, and not easy to find. It was
during this pause in the journey, after the coach had remained
stationary for about twenty minutes, that a man thrust his head out of
the window and demanded, in loud and peremptory tones, the reason of
the delay.

"See here, guard," he cried, "this sort of thing won't do! I'm due
aboard one of the king's ships to-morrow!"

The convicts sent up a shout of laughter at this reference to the hulk
for which they were bound, and I was soon aware that the speaker was
not the warder, as I had at first imagined, but the man Rodwood of whom
Tom had spoken. He kept up the joke with a few more sentences of a
similar kind, until the gruff command, "Stow that!" from the warder
caused him to subside once more into his seat. He spoke like an
educated gentleman, and with the air of one accustomed to command.
Indeed, I afterwards learned that he had once held a commission in the
army, but owing to gambling debts had been obliged to sell out,
whereupon he had entered upon a career of crime, which had terminated
in a sentence of transportation for life. At len