“As I say, a fog lay on the water, and we were not seen, and not discovered by the crew of the dredger until we had parted company with the _Mantania_, and although the story we told to the dredger’s captain was the thinnest imaginable—namely, that we thought it was a tender that had come off to collect us—he very readily accepted it, and the twenty-dollar bill which I gave him. “We made Portsmouth after a great deal of difficulty late in the evening. There was no Customs inspection and we got our bags safely on land. I intended staying the night at Portsmouth, but after we had taken our lodgings, my friend and I went round to a little bar to get a drink, and there we heard something which sent us back to our rooms at full pelt. What we heard was that the robbery had been discovered, and that the police were looking for two men who had made their escape on the dredger. As it was the dredger’s captain who had recommended our lodgings, I had little expectation of getting into the room and out again without capture. “However, we did, and as we passed out of the street at one end, the police came in at the other. I carried one bag, my friend the lighter, and we started on foot across country, and before the morning we had reached a place called Eastleigh. It was to Eastleigh, you will remember, Mr. Elk, that I came when I left the cattle-boat during the war and suddenly changed my character from a hard-up cattle-puncher to a wealthy gambler at Monte Carlo. “That matter I will explain later. When we reached Eastleigh, I had a talk with my companion, and it was a pretty straight talk, because he’d got a load of liquor on board and was becoming more and more unreliable. It ended by his going into the town to buy some food and not returning. When I went in search of him, I found him lying in the street, incapably drunk. There was nothing to do but to leave him; and getting a little food, I took the two bags and struck the road. The bags, however, were much too heavy for me, and I had to consider my position. “Standing by the road was an old cottage, and on a board was an announcement that it was to be sold. I took the address; it was the name of a Winchester lawyer; and then I got over the fence and made an inspection of the ground, to find that, at the lower end of the rank garden, was an old, disused well, boarded over by rotten planks. I could in safety drop the lighter of my burdens down the well and cover it up with the rubble, of which there was plenty around. I might have buried both; in many ways a lot of trouble would have been saved if I had. But I was loth to leave all that I had striven for with such care and pains, and I took the second box on with me, reached Winchester, bought a change of clothing, and spent a comfortable day there, interviewing the lawyer, who owned the cottage.