At break of day, when the world re-awoke from the fear of thieves, he feigned a limp at a cottage door, and borrowed a hammer to straighten a pinching shoe.  Five minutes behind a hedge, and his anklets had dropped from him; and, thus a free man, he took to the high road.  After all he was persuaded to desert London and to escape a while from the sturdy embrace of Edgworth Bess.  Moreover, if Bess herself were in the lock-up, he still feared the interested affection of Mistress Maggot, that other doxy, whose avarice would surely drive him upon a dangerous enterprise; so he struck across country, and kept starvation from him by petty theft.  Up and down England he wandered in solitary insolence.  Once, saith rumour, his lithe apparition startled the peace of Nottingham; once, he was wellnigh caught begging wort at a brew-house in Thames Street.  But he might as well have lingered in Newgate as waste his opportunity far from the delights of Town; the old lust of life still impelled him, and a week after the hue-and-cry was raised he crept at dead of night down Drury Lane.  Here he found harbourage with a friendly fence, Wild’s mortal enemy, who promised him a safe conduct across the seas.  But the desire of work proved too strong for prudence; and in a fortnight he had planned an attack on the pawnshop of one Rawling, at the Four Balls in Drury Lane.

Sheppard, whom no house ever built with hands was strong enough to hold, was better skilled at breaking out than at breaking in, and it is remarkable that his last feat in the cracking of cribs was also his greatest.  Its very conception was a masterpiece of effrontery.  Drury Lane was the thief-catcher’s chosen territory; yet it was the Four Balls that Jack designed for attack, and watches, tie-wigs, snuff-boxes were among his booty.  Whatever he could not crowd upon his person he presented to a brace of women.  Tricked out in his stolen finery, he drank and swaggered in Clare Market.  He was dressed in a superb suit of black; a diamond fawney flashed upon his finger; his light tie-periwig was worth no less than seven pounds; pistols, tortoise-shell snuff-boxes, and golden guineas jostled one another in his pockets.

Thus, in brazen magnificence, he marched down Drury Lane on a certain Saturday night in November 1724.  Towards midnight he visited Thomas Nicks, the butcher, and having bargained for three ribs of beef, carried Nicks with him to a chandler’s hard by, that they might ratify the bargain with a dram.  Unhappily, a boy from the ‘Rose and Crown’ sounded the alarm; for coming into the chandler’s for the empty ale-pots, he instantly recognised the incomparable gaol-thief, and lost no time in acquainting his master.  Now, Mr. Bradford, of the ‘Rose and Crown,’ was a head-borough, who, with the zeal of a triumphant Dogberry, summoned the watch, and in less than half an hour Jack Sheppard was screaming blasphemies in a hackney-cab on his way home to Newgate.