Stage-coach and Tavern Days

In the year 1741 the little child of Cornelius Cook, the blacksmith of Westborough, Massachusetts, and of his wife Eunice, lay very close to death. As was the custom of the day, the good old parson, Dr. Parkman, and his deacons prayed earnestly over the boy, that the Lord’s will be done; but his mother in her distress pleaded thus: “Only spare his life, and I care not what he becomes.” Tom Cook recovered, and as years passed on it became evident by his mischievous and evil deeds that he had entered into a compact with the devil, perhaps by his mother’s agonized words, perhaps by his own pledge. The last year of this compact was at an end, and the devil appeared to claim his own as Tom was dressing for another day’s mischief. Tom had all his wits about him, for he lived upon them. “Wait, wait, can’t you,” he answered the imperative call of his visitor, “till I get my galluses on?” The devil acquiesced to this last request, when Tom promptly threw the suspenders in the fire, and therefore could never put them on nor be required to answer the devil’s demands.

Tom Cook became well known throughout Massachusetts, and indeed throughout New England, as a most extraordinary thief. His name appears in the records of scores of New England towns; he was called “the honest thief”; and his own name for himself was “the leveller.” He stole from the rich and well-to-do with the greatest boldness and dexterity, equalled by the kindness and delicacy of feeling shown in the bestowal of his booty upon the poor and needy. He stole the dinner from the wealthy farmer’s kitchen and dropped it into the kettle or on the spit in a poor man’s house. He stole meal and grain from passing wagons and gave it away before the drivers’ eyes. A poor neighbor was ill, and her bed was poor. He went to a thrifty farm-house, selected the best feather bed in the house, tied it in a sheet, carried it downstairs and to the front door, and asked if he could leave his bundle there for a few days. The woman recognized him and forbade him to bring it within doors, and he went off with an easy conscience.

In Dr. Parkman’s diary, now in the library of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, under the date of August 27, 1779, is this entry: “The notorious Thom. Cook came in (he says) on Purpose to see me. I gave him w^t admonition, Instruction, and Caution I could—I beseech God to give it force! He leaves me with fair Words—thankful and promising.” There came a time when his crime of arson or burglary led to his trial, conviction, and sentence to death. He heard the awful words of the judge, “I therefore sentence you to be hanged by the neck till you are dead, dead, dead,” and he called out cheerfully, “I shall not be there on that day, day, day.” And when that day came, surely enough, his cell was empty.

Tom Cook was most attractive in personal appearance; agile, well formed, well featured, with eyes of deepest blue, most piercing yet most kindly in expression. He was adored by children, and his pockets were ever filled with toys which he had stolen for their amusement. By older persons he was feared and disliked. He extorted from many wealthy farmers an annual toll, which exempted them from his depredations. One day a fire was seen rising from the chimney of a disused schoolhouse in Brookline, and Tom was caught within roasting a stolen goose, which he had taken from the wagon of a farmer on his way to market. The squire took him to the tavern, which was filled with farmers and carters, many of whom had been his victims. He was given his choice of trial and jail, or to run a gantlet of the men assembled. He chose the latter, and the long whips of the teamsters paid out many an old score of years’ standing.

A very amusing story of highway robbery is told of John Buckman of Buckman’s Tavern, of Lexington, Massachusetts (which is shown on page 23). An old toper bought a bottle of rum, and the by-standers jokingly asked him what he would do if he were attacked on the road. He answered solemnly that he would rather give up his life than his rum. John Buckman slipped out of the room, took a brass candlestick that had a slide that could be snapped with a noise like the trigger of a pistol. He waylaid the rum-lover not far from the tavern, and terrified him so that he quickly gave up his beloved bottle. This was a famous joke when John told it in the tavern taproom, but John did not laugh the next day when he was arrested for highway robbery and fined fifty dollars.

In the year 1818 there took place the nearest approach to a highway robbery on the English methods that had ever happened in America. It was the robbery of the mail-coach which ran between Baltimore and Philadelphia. The story is thus told by one of the victims:—

At that date and season of the year the “Eastern mail,” on account of the heavy roads, was carried in a light carriage called a dearborn, with four horses. This Lieutenant Ludlow of the United States Navy obtained permission to accompany the driver in this mail-carriage. They left Baltimore at three o’clock and were held up at eleven. One robber desired to shoot Lieutenant Ludlow and the driver, but the others objected, and, on leaving, offered the driver ten dollars. They took no money from Ludlow, and though they looked at his handsome gold repeater to learn the time, they carefully returned it to his pocket. The very next day two men named Hare, known to be journeymen tailors of Baltimore, entered a clothing shop in that city, and made such a lavish display of money that they were promptly arrested, and over twenty thousand dollars in money and drafts was found upon them. They were puny fellows, Levi Hare being but twenty years old, and contemporary accounts say “one person of average strength could easily manage them both.”

The total amount of bills and drafts recovered amounted to ninety thousand dollars, and made the robbery the largest ever attempted. A few days later a third brother Hare was arrested, and thirteen hundred dollars was found in his house. The third robber proved to be John Alexander.

A Baltimore newspaper dated May 18, gives an account of the sentence of the three men after their interesting trial:—

“On Thursday last John Alexander, Joseph T. Hare, and Lewis Hare were brought before Court to receive sentence. Judge Duval presided—first addressed Lewis Hare and sentenced him to ten years’ imprisonment—J. T. Hare and Alexander sentenced to death. As Jos. T. Hare was proceeding from the Court House to prison accompanied by the constable, they had to cross Jones’ Falls, over which the trunk of a tree was laid for foot passengers to walk on; when they arrived in the middle of the creek Hare made an attempt to release his hands from his irons, and to knock the constable into the creek; it proved fruitless, but in the scuffle Hare tore off the lappelle of the constable’s coat. After he reached prison he made an attack on the turnkey and nearly bit off his finger.”

I have seen an amusing old chap-book entitled The Life of the Celebrated Mail Robber and Daring Highwayman Joseph Thompson Hare, and it has a comical illustration of “The Scuffle between Hare and the Constable,” in which the constable, much dressed up in tight trousers, tailed coat, and high silk hat, struggles feebly with the outlaw as they balance like acrobats on the narrow tree-trunk.

The whole account of this mail robbery has a decidedly tame flavoring. The pale tailors, so easily overcoming a presumably brave naval officer and a government mail-carrier; the leisurely ransacking of the mail-bags; the speedy and easy arrest of the tailors and recovery of their booty, and the astonishing simplicity of transporting the scantily guarded felon across a creek on a fallen tree as though on a pleasant country ramble, all combine to render it far from being a tale of terror or wild excitement.

The account of the death of the highwayman is thus told in the Federal Republican and Baltimore Telegraph of September 11, 1818.

This lying dying boast of Hare fitly closes his evident failure as a highwayman.

An account of a negro highwayman is given in the Federal Republican and Baltimore Telegraph of September 11, 1818.

Relay House, Mattapan Tavern.

In the early years of this century there existed in eastern Massachusetts an organized band of thieves. It is said they were but one link in a chain of evil night-workers which, with a home or shelter in every community, reached from Cape Hatteras to Canada. This band was well organized, well trained, and well housed; it had skilful means of concealing stolen goods in innocent-faced cottages, in barns of honest thrift, and in wells and haystacks in simple dooryards. One mild-manered and humble house had a deep cellar which could be entered by an ingeniously hidden broad-side door in a woodshed; into this cave a stolen horse and wagon or a pursued load of cribbed goods might be driven, be shut in, and leave no outward sign. Other houses had secret cellars, a deep and wide one beneath a shallow, innocuous storage place for domestic potato and apple bins, and honest cider barrels. In a house sheltering one of these subterranean mysteries, a hard-working young woman was laboriously and discreetly washing clothes when surprised by the sheriff and his aids, who wisely invaded but fruitlessly searched the house. Nothing save the simplest household belongings was found in that abode of domesticity; but in later years, after the gang was scattered, a trap-door and ladder were found leading to the sub-cellar, and with chagrin and mortification the sheriff remembered that the woman’s washing tubs stood unharmed upon the trap-door during the fruitless search.

An amusing battering ram was used by another woman of this gang on the sheriff who came to her house to arrest one of those thieves. The outlaw fled upstairs at the approach of the officer, but his retreat was noted, and the man of law attempted to follow and seize him. The wife of the thief—his congenial mate—opposed the passage of the sheriff, and when he attempted to push her one side and to crowd past her, she suddenly seized the crosspiece over the staircase, swung back by her hands and arms, planted both feet against the officer’s chest, and knocked him down with such a sudden blow and consequent loss of wind, that the thief was far away ere the sheriff could move or breathe.

The leader of this band of thieves was an ingenious and delightful scamp—one George White. He was hard to catch, and harder to keep than to catch. Handcuffs were to him but pleasing toys. His wrists were large, his hands small; and when the right moment came, the steel bracelets were quickly empty. Locks and bolts were as easily thrust aside and left far, far behind him as were the handcuffs. At last he was branded on his forehead H. T., which stands for horse thief; a mean trick of a stupid constable who had scant self-confidence or inventiveness. Curling lovelocks quickly grow, however, and are ill in no one’s sight; indeed, they were in high fashion in similar circles in England at that time, when various letters of the alphabet might be seen on the cheeks and brow of many a gay traveller on the highway when the wind blew among the long locks.

Wilde Tavern, 1770. Milton, Massachusetts.

Term after term in jail and prison were decreed to George White when luck turned against him. Yet still was he pardoned, as he deserved to be, for his decorous deportment when behind bars; and he had a habit of being taken out on a writ of habeas corpus or to be transferred; but he never seemed to reach his journey’s end, and soon he would appear on the road, stealing and roistering. The last word which came from him to New England was a letter from the Ohio Penitentiary, saying he was dying, and asking some of his kin to visit him. They did not go, he had fooled them too often. Perhaps they feared they might put new life into him. But the one time they were sure he lied he told the truth—and his varied career thus ended.

Flying once along a Massachusetts highway on a stolen horse, George White was hotly pursued. At the first sharp turn in the road he dismounted in a flash, cut the horse a lash with his whip, altered the look of his garment with a turn of his hand, tore off his hat brim and thus had a jaunty cap, and started boldly back on foot. Meeting the sheriff and his men all in a heat, he fairly got under their horses’ feet, and as they pulled up they bawled out to know whether he had seen a man riding fast on horseback. “Why, yes,” he answered ingenuously, “I met a man riding as though the devil were after him.” They found the horse in half an hour, but they never found George White.

He once stole a tavern-keeper’s horse, trimmed the mane, thinned out the tail, and dyed the horse’s white feet. He led the renovated animal in to the bereft landlord, saying innocently that he had heard his horse was stolen, and thought he might want to buy another. He actually sold this horse back to his owner, but in a short time the horse’s too evident familiarity with his wonted stable and yard and the fast-fading dye revealed the rascal’s work. To another tavern-keeper he owed a bill for board and lodging, which, with the incongruity of ideals and morals which is often characteristic of great minds, he really wished to pay. The landlord had a fine black horse which he had displayed to his boarder with pride. This horse was kept temporarily in a distant pasture. White stole the horse one night, rode off a few miles, and sold it and was paid for it. He stole it again that night from the purchaser, sold it, and was paid. He stole it a third time and returned it to the pasture from whence it never had been missed. He then paid his board-bill as an honest man should.

Ashburnham Thief Detecting Society.

These gangs of horse thieves became such pests, such scourges in the Northern states, that harassed citizens in many towns gathered into bands and associations for mutual protection and systematic detection of the miscreants. A handbill of the “Ashburnham Thief Detecting Society” had an engraved heading which is reproduced on this page, which showed a mounted thief riding across country with honest citizens in hot pursuit. The Thief Detecting Society of Hingham had, in 1847, eighty-seven members. It used a similar print for a heading for handbills, also one of a boy stealing apples—as a severe lesson to youth.

In the year 1805 an abrupt and short but fierce attempt was made at highway robbery and burglary in Albany. The story as told in a chap-book is so simple, so antique, so soberly comic, that it might be three centuries old instead of scarce one. The illustrations, though of the date 1836, are of the standard of art of the seventeenth century.

It seems a piece of modern Philistinism to spoil the story—as I must—by condensation. The title of the book is The Robber, or Pye and The Highwayman, and the irony of giving Pye place before the highwayman or any place at all will be apparent by the story. In this tale two sturdy Albany dames shine as models of courage and fearlessness by the side of the terror-stricken burghers of the entire town, whose reputation to a man was only saved from the branding of utter and universal cowardice by the appearance and manly carriage and triumph at the end of the night’s fray of old Winne the pennypost.

There put up that year in December at an Albany tavern a young man who gave his name as Johnson; he was aristocratic in bearing and dress, dark of complexion, sombre of aspect, but courteous and pleasant, “with a daring but cultivated eye.” When questioned of himself and his business, however, Johnson was silent and taciturn. His magnificent horse and pair of splendid pistols were noted by the solid Dutch burghers and sharp Yankee traders who smoked and drank beer within the tavern walls; and one wintry afternoon the stranger was seen carefully cleaning the pair of pistols.

On that bitter night, a man—none other than our black-browed highwayman—rode clattering up to the toll-gate two miles below the town, and called out to open the gate; when the wife of the toll-keeper appeared to do that duty he jumped from his horse, rushed in toward the house, demanding in a terrible voice all the money in the toll till and chest. The woman was terrified at this demand, yet not so scared but she could at his first approach throw the fat bag with all the accumulation of toll money under the porch, and do it unseen by the highwayman; and she at once asserted tearfully, with the alacritous mendacity born of sharp terror (the account says with great earnestness and womanish simplicity), that her husband had gone to the agent in town with all the month’s collections, leaving her but a few shillings for change, which she displayed in the gate-drawer for proof. Disgusted but credulous, the villain rode off with loud oaths, baffled in the simplest fashion by Dame Trusty No. 1.

He then went to the tavern of John Pye, the wealthy landlord, on the West Troy road. He found the house locked peacefully for the night, but forced a window and entered. In the barroom and kitchen, the fire was carefully covered to keep till morning. Lighting his dark lantern with the coals, he then poured water on both fires and extinguished them, and I have puzzled long in my mind wondering why he dallied, risking detection by doing this. He then went to the room where Pye and his wife were peacefully reposing, and rudely awakened them. Mrs. Pye, promptly assuming the rôle she carried throughout, jumped from her bed and asked him what he wished. He answered, the chap-book says, “silently,” “I deal with your husband, Madam, not with you”—and a more fatuous mistake never issued from lips of highwayman. To Pye he then said, “Your money or your life.” Pye, heavy with sleep—and natural stupidity—seemed to fancy some trick was being played on him in mischief, and to the highwayman’s demand for money answered, half alarmed, half peevish, “It’s damned little money you’ll get out of me, my lad, as the thing is but indifferently plenty with me.” But he was roused at last by the fierceness of threats and gestures, and whimpered that his money was below; and the two proceeded downstairs to the taproom by the light of the robber’s lantern. The moment they left the room, Mrs. Pye ran softly to a bedroom where slept two sojourners at the inn, wakened them with hurried words of the robber’s visit and her beloved Pye’s danger, and made appeals for help; and as an emphatic wakener pulled them out of bed upon the floor. Then she ran swiftly back to bed.

In the meantime the terrified Pye recalled that his wife had the keys of the taproom till which held his money, and he and the highwayman returned to her bedroom and demanded them from her. “I’ll give the keys to thee nor no man else,” she stoutly answered. “Thee must, I tell thee,” whined Pye, “or worse may happen.” “Pye, I’ll not give up my keys,” still she cried, and seized a loaded gun by the bedside; for fierce answer the highwayman fired his pistol at Pye. With lamentable outcries Pye called out he was a dead man, and his arm fell to his side. His wife thrust the gun in his hands, shouting, “Fire, Pye, fire! he’s feeling for another pistol.” “I cannot,” he quavered out, “I cannot hold the gun.” She pushed it into his hands, held up his arm, aimed for him, and between them they pulled the trigger. In a second all was utter darkness and stillness: they had hit the highwayman. He pitched forward, fell on his lantern, put it out, and lay as one dead. Here was a situation for a good, thrifty, staid Albany vrouw, a dying husband on one side, a dead highwayman on the other, all in utter darkness. She ran for coals to the barroom and kitchen fires. Both were wet and black. She had no tinder box, coals must be brought from a neighbor’s. She suddenly bethought of an unusual fire that had been lighted in the parlor the previous evening for customers, where still might be a live coal. This was her good fortune, and with lighted candle she proceeded to the scene of attack. Pye lay in a swoon on the bed, but by this time the highwayman had vanished; and safe and untouched under the bed were five hundred dollars in gold and five hundred more in bills, which, it is plain, Pye himself had wholly forgotten in his fright.

In the meantime where were the two “knights of the bedchamber,” as the chap-book calls them? Far more silently than the robber they feared had they slid downstairs, and away from the tavern into hiding, until the highwayman rode past them.

They then tracked him by trails of blood, and soon saw him dismounted and rolling in the snow as if to quench the flow of blood. Though they knew he was terribly wounded and they were two to one, they stole past him at a safe distance in silence to the protection of the town, where they raised the cry of “A robber! Watch! Murder! Help! A band of highwaymen! Pye is dead!” Oh, how bravely they bawled and shouted! and soon a hue and cry was started from end to end of Albany town.

With an extraordinary lack of shrewdness which seemed to characterize the whole of this episode of violence, and which proved Johnson no trained “swift-nick,” as Charles II. called highwaymen, instead of making off to some of the smaller towns or into the country, he rode back to Albany; and soon the night-capped heads thrust from the little Dutch windows, and terrified men leaning out over the Dutch doors, and the few amazed groups in the streets saw a fleet horseman, hatless, with bloody handkerchief bound around his head, come galloping and thundering through Albany, down one street, then back again to the river. When he reached the quay, the horse fearlessly sprang without a moment’s trembling a terrible leap, eight feet perpendicular, twenty feet lateral, out on the ice. All screamed out that horse and rider would go through the ice and perish. But the ice was strong, and soon horse and rider were out of sight; but mounted men were now following the distant sound of hoofs, and when the outlaw reached what he thought was the opposite shore, but what was really a marshy island, one bold pursuer rode up after him. The robber turned, fired at him at random, and the Albany brave fled in dismay back to his discreet neighbors.

But honor and courage was now appearing across the ice in the figure of Captain Winne, the pennypost, who was heard to mutter excitedly in his semi-Dutch dialect: “Mine Cott! vat leeps das horse has mate! vull dwenty feet! Dunder and bliksem! he’s der tuyfel for rooning!” Winne was an old Indian fighter, and soon he boldly grappled the highwayman, who drew a dagger on him. Winne knocked it from his hand. The highwayman grappled with him, wrenched away his club, and hit the pennypost a blow on his mouth which loosened all his front teeth (which, the chap-book says, “Winne afterwards took out at his leisure”). Winne then dallied no longer; he pulled down the handkerchief from the robber’s forehead, twisted it around his neck, and choked him. In the morning twilight the great band of cautious Albanians gravely advanced, bound the highwayman securely, and carried him in triumph back to jail. He was placed in heavy irons, when he said, “Iron me as you will, you can hold me but a short time.” All thought he meant to attempt an escape, but he spoke with fuller meaning; he felt himself mortally wounded. They put an iron belt around his waist and fastened it by a heavy chain to a staple in the floor. They placed great rings around his ankles, chained them to the floor, and then chained ankle-bands and belt together. They would have put an iron collar and chain on him also, but he said, “Gentlemen! have some mercy!” and a horrible wound at the base of the brain made them desist.

Poor Mrs. Pye visited him, with much distress of spirit, and sympathized with him and grieved over him as he lay face downward on the stone floor. And it arouses a sense of amused indignation to know that he asked earnestly for Pye and expressed deep regret at having injured him—he wasn’t badly hurt, anyway. Our heroine, Dame Pye, certainly deserved a better and braver husband, and it is pleasant to know that she outlived Pye and found, if not a more courageous mate, certainly a very fine young one—her bar-keeper, forty years younger than herself.

The highwayman escaped the tree, for he died in jail. There is reason to believe he was a Southerner of good birth. The horse was so widely described and exploited that his story reached a Virginia gentleman, his real owner, from whom he had been stolen. The sagacious animal had been trained to follow a peculiar whistle, and to jump at anything. The gentleman proved his ownership and took the splendid animal-hero home.

In the year 1821 a highwayman was executed in Massachusetts, Mike Martin, or Captain Lightfoot, who really was a very satisfactory outlaw, a real hightoby-crack, though he was only an imported one, not a native production. His life, as given by himself, is most entertaining. He had to his father a Kilkenny Irishman, who apprenticed the boy early in life to his uncle, a brewer. The brewer promptly beat him, he ran home, and got a bigger beating. In truth, he was a most beatable brat. When sixteen years old he joined the Ribbonmen, a political organization that committed many petty crimes and misdemeanors, besides regulating landlords. When his father found out the kind of company kept by the young rascal, he beat him again. Mike promptly took as a salve five guineas from his father’s trunk, opening it with a master-key which had been kindly made for him by a Ribbonman, and which he was enjoined to keep constantly with him as a conveniency. He says, “I had always stolen in a small way.” With his five guineas he ran away to Dublin, and pretended reformation and remorse so successfully to a cousin that the latter employed him in a distillery. In return he stole petty amounts continually from his cousin’s money chest, by help of his master-key. Soon he was a settled outcast, and at this juncture met at an inn a fine, handsome clergyman, about forty years of age, over six feet tall, dark-eyed, of great muscle and strength; his name was John Doherty. In spite of his black clerical dress he seemed somewhat mysterious in character, and after pumping Martin he disclosed in turn that he was the famous highwayman, Captain Thunderbolt.

He at once claimed Martin as one of the real sort, and they were talking over a union of forces and schemes when a party of dragoons came to the inn in pursuit of Thunderbolt. He escaped through a window, but in a week’s time came back dressed as a Quaker and joined his companion, who at the age of twenty-one thus blossomed out as a real knight of the road, as Captain Lightfoot, with a pair of fine pistols and a splendid horse, “Down the Banks,” to keep company with Thunderbolt’s “Beefsteak.” Thus equipped, these two gentlemen rode as gentlemen should, to the hunt. There, alone, to prove what he could do, Mike Martin robbed four huntsmen, and to his pride was mistaken by them for Thunderbolt himself. But the huntsmen soon had their turn; sheriffs and soldiers drove the two knights to the woods; and after weeks of uncomfortable hiding Mike Martin was properly penitent and longed for an honest man’s seat in a tavern taproom. There is no retreat, however, in this career; the pair of robbers next entered a house, called all the people together, and robbed the entire trembling lot. Through Scotland and Ireland they rode till the highways got too hot for them, advertisements were everywhere, a hue and cry was out, and Thunderbolt fled to America.

Mike Martin, terrified at the multiplying advertisements and rewards, disguised himself, and sailed for New York. Quarrels and mutiny on shipboard brought him ashore at Salem, where he worked for a time for Mr. Derby. He soon received a sum of money from his father’s estate and set up as a brewer. But Salem Yankees were too sharp for the honest highwayman, and he lost it all and had to take again to the road. From Portsmouth to Canada,—from pedlers, from gentlemen,—on horseback, in chaises,—he ran his rig; finally, in spite of advertisements in newspapers and printed reports and handbills at every country inn, he worked his way back to New Hampshire; and on a moonlight night he found himself horseless in the bushes. Two men rode up, and one held back as Mike Martin stepped forth. “Who’s that?” said the foremost man. “I’m the bold Doherty from Scotland,” said he, taking Thunderbolt’s name and not in vain. “And what are you after?” said the shaking traveller. “Stop and I’ll show you.” Mike then presented his pistol and demanded of the gentleman his money or his life. Promptly money and papers were turned over. “Stand back by the fence,” said the highwayman. “Here, Jack, look after this fellow,” he swaggered to make the traveller think he had an accomplice; and he mounted the fine horse and rode off. He robbed some one in some way every few miles on the road till he was back in Salem. There he promptly acquiesced to the decorous customs of the New England town, and went to a lecture; on his way home from his intellectual refreshment, he asked the time of a well-dressed man. “Can’t you hear the clock strike?” was the surly answer. “I’ll hear your watch strike or strike your head,” was the surprising reply. Out came watch and money with the cowardly alacrity ever displayed at his demands. From thence to the Sun Tavern in Boston, where he learned of a grand party at Governor Brooks’s at Medford. He said in his confession, “I thought there might be some fat ones there and decided to be of the company.” After an evening of astonishing bravado and recklessness, displaying himself at taverns and on the road, he held up Major Bray and his wife on the Medford turnpike, near the Ten Mile Farm which once belonged to Governor Winthrop. The gentlefolk were in “a genteel horse and chaise.” Madam Bray began to try to conceal her watch-chain, but Captain Lightfoot politely told her he never robbed ladies. Major Bray turned over his watch and pocketbook, but begged to keep his papers. Martin said later, “The circumstances as given by Major Bray at the trial were correct, only he forgot to state that he was much frightened and trembled like a leaf.” After stopping other chaises, he took the surprisingly foolhardy step of going to the tavern at Medford, where he found already much excitement about the robbery of Major Bray, and met many suspicious glances. He rode off, and soon a crowd was after him crying, “Stop Thief.”

Poore Tavern and Sign-board.

In his mad flight his stirrup broke, he fell from his horse and dislocated his shoulder; thence through fields and marshes on foot till he dropped senseless from pain and fatigue. When he recovered, he tied his suspenders to a tree at one end and the other end to his wrist and pulled the shoulder into place. Then by day and night through farms and woods to Holliston. In the taproom of the tavern he called for brandy, but he saw such a good description of himself with a reward for his capture, while he was drinking off his glass, it took away his appetite for the dinner he had ordered.

He was then tired of foot travel, and stole a horse and rode to Springfield. Here he put up at a tavern, where he slept so sound that he was only awakened by landlord, sheriff, and a score of helpers who had traced the horse to Springfield. Major Bray’s robbery was unknown there, but he was tried for it, however, when it was found out, on October 21, and convicted and sentenced to death. He cheerfully announced that he should escape if he could, but he was put in heavy irons. When in jail at Lechmere Point he struck the turnkey, Mr. Coolidge, on the head with his severed chain. He pushed past the stunned keeper, thrust open the door, and ran for his life. He was captured in a cornfield and Coolidge was the man who grabbed him. It was found that he had filed through the chain with a case-knife, filled the cut with a paste of tallow and coal-dust, and though the link had been frequently examined the cut had never been noted. He declared he would have escaped, only the heavy chain and weight which he had worn had made him lose the full use of his legs, and he had to run with one end of the chain and a seventeen-pound weight in his hand.

Monroe Tavern, Lexington, Massachusetts.

He was executed in December and behaved with great propriety and sobriety. He showed neither cant, levity, nor bravado. He prayed silently just before his death, professed penitence, and went to the gallows with composure. He arranged his dress and hair carefully before a glass, showed a kind disposition to all, and finally gave the signal himself for the drop. A tall and handsome scamp, with piercing blue eyes and fine complexion, his marked intelligence and sweetness of expression made him most attractive. His frame was perfect in symmetry, and he was wonderful in his strength and endurance—truly an ideal highwayman; it must have been a pleasure to meet him.

Thus it is very evident that neither highway robbery nor highwaymen thrived in America. They mended their ways very promptly—and apparently they wanted to. A very striking example of this is in the American career of Captain Thunderbolt, the friend and teacher of Mike Martin. When he set foot on American soil, he tamely abandoned all his old picturesque wicked ways. He settled first in Dummerston, Vermont, where he taught school and passed his leisure hours in seclusion and study. He then set up as a physician, in Newfane, Vermont, calling himself Dr. Wilson, and he moved from thence to Brattleboro, where his house stood on the present site of the railroad station. He married the daughter of a prominent Brattleboro farmer, but was too stern and reserved to prove a good American husband. He lived to be about sixty-five years old, and had a good and lucrative professional practice.

I know two authentic cases of highway robbery of stage-coaches in New England; one was from the driver, of a large sum of money which had been entrusted to him. It was his wife who stole it. She was not prosecuted, for she returned the money, and it was believed she would not have taken it from any one else. The other theft was that of a bonnet. Just as a stage was to start off from a tavern door, a woman jumped on the step, seized the bonnet of a woman passenger, tore it from her head, and made off with it before the outraged traveller’s shrieks could reach the driver and stop the coach; and—as the chronicler solemnly recounted to me—the robber was never heard of more. These two highwaywomen have the honors of the road.

It may be deemed somewhat grandiloquent to term to-day this theft of a bonnet “highway robbery”; but I can assure you a fine bonnet was a most respected belonging in olden times, and if of real Dunstable or fine Leghorn straw and trimmed with real ostrich plumes it might be also a costly belonging, and to steal it was no light matter—indeed it was a hanging matter. For in Boston, when John Hancock was governor, a woman was hanged for snatching a bonnet from another’s head and running off with it.

CHAPTER XIX

In New England the tavern was often the chosen place of abode and of visitation of spirits; like other travellers on life’s weary round, these travellers on the round of the dead found their warmest welcome at an inn. Naturally new conditions developed new phenomena; the spirits of unhappy peasants, of cruel barons, of hated heirs at law, of lovelorn ladies, found novel companions, among whom the manitous and wraiths of the red men cut the strangest figure. The ghosts of pirates, too, were prime favorites in America, especially in seaboard towns, but were never such frequent visitors, nor on the whole such picturesque visitors, as were the spirits of Indians:—

“The ghosts that come to haunt us
From the kingdom of Ponemah,
From the land of the Hereafter.”

I have known a good many tavern ghosts of Indians—though their deeds as recounted are often far from being original or aboriginal. Reuben Jencks owned a tavern that had a very good Indian ghost. This ghost was not one of the inconsiderate kind that comes when you are awake, and half scares you to death; this noble red man stole in silently by night, so silently that the sleeper never awakened, and hence was never frightened, for nothing seems overstrange, uncanny, or impossible in a dream. Even when the Indian brandished his tomahawk and seized the visited one by the hair of the head, it never seemed to be anything more than might be expected, nor did he ever appear overfierce in his threats and gestures. Nevertheless in course of time his appearances gave a name to the apartment he visited; it came to be known as the Indian Chamber. And travelling chapmen, pedlers, or traders who had been over the route frequently, and had heard the tale at every trip, sometimes objected to sleeping in the room—not that they were afraid—but it was somewhat of a nuisance.

It was not known that any Indian ever had received aught of injury at the hands of any at the Black Horse Tavern, save the derivative injury from too frequent and liberal draughts of hard cider, which was freely dealt out to every sorry brave who wandered there. There were some simpletons who said that the Indian’s visits were to resent the injury done to another old inn, a rival down the road, named The Pine Tree, but which bore the figure of an Indian on its sign-board, and was oftener known as The Indian Tavern. This was nonsense. The Pine Tree had no visitors because it did not deserve them, had a vile table and a worse stable, while the Black Horse Tavern gave the best of the earth to its guests.

Reuben Jencks had not been born in this tavern. He inherited it from an uncle, and he was already married and had a family of small children when the tavern came to him. Another baby was born soon after, and as the Indian Chamber was the largest in the house, Mrs. Jencks quietly disposed of the objections of timid and superstitious chapmen and pedlers by taking the room for her own sleeping apartment.

It would seem to be a brave warrior, albeit a savage and a ghost, who would enter a room as densely populated as that of Mr. and Mrs. Jencks. There was for the repose of landlord and landlady a vast four-post bedstead with curtains, valance, and tester of white dimity; and under this high bed was thrust by day a low trundle bed. At night it was drawn out, and upon it slept the three little daughters of the Jencks family. Upon an old high-backed settle set on rockers slept Reuben Jencks, Jr., the deposed king of the family. Adjustable bars slipped in the front of this settle made it a safe crib. This stood on one side of the fireplace, and the new baby reposed, when he slept at all, in a deeply hooded mahogany cradle. There was a great fire ever and cheerfully burning in the fireplace—and yet to this chamber of infantile innocence and comfort came the saturnine form of the Indian ghost.