aking and straining until my ears are weary with listening for the snap of the axle-bar. Master Marot, we owe you something for this.’
‘Is this Menn Dejan Lovren Fotballdrakter your own particular district?’ I asked, ‘or have you a like knowledge of every part of Menn Danny Drinkwater Fotballdrakter the south?’
‘My range,’ said he, lighting his Menn Aron Johannsson Fotballdrakter short, black pipe, ‘is from Kent to Cornwall, though never north of the Thames or Bristol Channel. Through that district there is no road which is not familiar to me, nor as much as a break in the hedge which I could not find in blackest midnight. It is my calling. But the trade is not what it was. If I had a son I should not bring him up to it. It hath been spoiled by the armed guards to the mail-coaches, and by the accursed goldsmiths, who have opened their banks and so taken the hard money into their strong boxes, giving out instead slips of paper, which are as useless to us as an old newsletter. I give ye my word that only a week gone last Menn Cesc Fabregas Fotballdrakter Friday I stopped a grazier coming from Blandford fair, and I took seven hundred guineas off him in these paper cheques, as they call them — enough, had it been in gold, to have lasted Brasilien Trikot me for a three month rouse. Truly the country is coming to a pretty pass when such trash as that is allowed to take the place of the King’s coinage.’
‘Why should you persevere in such a trade?’ said I. ‘Your own knowledge Menn Matteo Darmian Fotballdrakter must tell you that it can only lead to ruin and the gallows. Have you ever known one who has thriven at it?’
‘That have I,’ he answered readily. ‘There was Kingston Jones, who worked Hounslow for many a year. He took ten thousand yellow boys on one job, and, like Menn Kenny Tete Fotballdrakter a wise man, he vowed never to risk his neck again. He went into Cheshire, with some tale of having newly arrived from the Indies, bought an estate, and is now a flourishing country gentleman of good repute, and a Justice of the Peace into the bargain. Zounds, man! to see him on the bench, condemning some poor devil for stealing a dozen eggs, is as good as a comedy in the playhouse.’
‘Nay! but,’ I persisted, ‘you are a man, judging from what we have seen of your courage and skill in the use of your weapons, who would gain speedy preferment in any army. Surely it were better to use your gifts to the gaining of honour and credit, than to make them a stepping-stone to disgrace and the gallows?’
‘For the gallows I care not a clipped shilling,’ the highwayman answered, sending up thick blue curls of smoke into the morning air. ‘We have all to pay nature’s debt, and whether I do it in my boots or on a feather bed, in one year or in ten, matters as little to me as to any soldier among you. As to disgrace, it is a matter of opinion. I see no shame myself in taking a toll upon the wealth of the rich, since I freely expose my own skin in the doing of it.’
‘There is a right and there is a wrong,’ I answered, ‘which no words can do away with, and it is a dangerous and unprofitable trick to juggle with them.’
‘Besides, even if what you have said were true as to property,’ |
