University of Virginia Library

14. CHAPTER XIV.
A still more extraordinary adventure, in which Robin Day falls
among Philistines, and is convicted of highway robbery; and
how he escapes the dangers thereof.

In the meanwhile, the tavern keeper had got up,
and opened his doors, and I was glad to shelter me
in his bar-room, where was a cheerful fire. He plied
me with questions about the robbery, which I satisfied
as well as I could, and then about myself,
making little ceremony in asking who I was, whence
I had come, whither I was going, why I travelled
at night, &c.; questions which I could not answer
without some appearance of confusion and equivocation,
(for I feared lest he should discover I was a
fugitive from justice,) which gave him an unfavourable
opinion of me, and excited suspicions not altogether
advantageous to my character.

Fortunately for me, his interrogatories were soon
put an end to by the return of the wagoners, who
had found the robber lying senseless on the road,
dragged him with no great tenderness between them
to the tavern, and now haled him into the bar-room,
where he displayed a figure that inspired me with
dread.

He was a stout, sinewy, middle-aged man, dressed
like a sailor, with a tarpaulin knapsack on his back,
a new blue cloth jacket, and old canvass trowsers

exceedingly well daubed with pitch, and no hat or
cap, that covering having been lost in the scuffle.
He had a most savage countenance, covered with
whiskers, beard, and hair, all black and grizzled,
with a swarthy skin that was now, owing to faintness
and loss of blood, of a cadaverous leaden colour;
and there were drops of blood on his forehead,
coming from some wound on the head, and a more
plentiful besprinkling on his shirt, that added to the
grimness and ferocity of his appearance.

The roughness with which he had been dragged
from the road, had stirred up the latent powers of
life; and he was beginning to rouse from his insensibility,
as the wagoners brought him into the room,
vociferating a thousand triumphant encomiums upon
their own courage, and as many felicitations upon
the prospect they thought they had, both of being
rewarded by the Governor of the State for apprehending
such a desperate villain, and of seeing him
hanged into the bargain. Being in such a happy
mood, they agreed with great generosity to treat
their prisoner to a glass of grog, with a view of
enlivening his spirits and recalling his wits; and this
being accordingly presented, and immediately swallowed
with great eagerness, had the good effect of
restoring him at once to his faculties. This he made
apparent by suddenly bending an eye of indignant
inquiry on his captors, who held him fast by the
collar, and by exclaiming, in corresponding tones,—
“Sink my timbers, shipmates! do you intend to
murder, as well as rob me?”

This address, which filled them with surprise, the
wagoners answered by telling him, “they were no
robbers, but he was, as he should find to his cost;” a
charge that, to my amazement, the honest man, instead
of admitting in full, repelled with furious indignation,

swearing that, instead of being a robber, he
had himself just been robbed by a brace of rascally
land-rats on the road under their noses—plundered
of a huge store of prize-money, the gains of a whole
year of fighting, which he was carrying to his wife
and children in Philadelphia, and knocked on the
head into the bargain; that he would have the blood
of the villains, whom he could swear to, and would
pursue to the ends of the earth; and if they, the wagoners,
were honest fellows, and loved a sailor that
had been fighting their battles on the stormy seas,
they would help him to catch the rascals, instead of
jawing him like a thief and a pirate—they would,
split him.

This address, delivered with matchless effrontery,
and with an air of injured and insulted innocence
quite indescribable, had the effect of staggering
several of the captors, who evidently began to think
they had made a mistake; while others laughed it to
scorn; and one of them called me forward (for I had
kept, from modesty and fear, in the background,)
to confront the fellow; which I did, though with no
good heart, having a great dread of his ferocious
looks. But, however terrible the robber appeared
in my eyes, I, it seems, possessed an appearance
equally alarming in his; for no sooner had he caught
sight of me, than he roared out, “That's one of the
land-sharks, sink me!” and starting back, with the
air of one endeavouring to overcome a fit of trepidation,
called upon some of the company to give him
a pistol or cutlass, and upon the others to “hold the
villain fast, for he could swear his life against me.”

I was confounded at this sally; and as the sailor
had every appearance of being in earnest, and the
wagoners looked as if vastly inclined to believe his
story, I began to have my doubts whether I was not

a robber in reality. To complete my confusion, the
innkeeper now swore “he had had his suspicions of
me from the first,” and said I ought to be searched
for the sailor's money. A furious contention arose
among the wagoners, some insisting that I was, others
that I was not, the robber; the former arguing my
innocence from the fact of my coming of my own
accord into their camp; while the others, among
whom was the man upon whose back I had been
pitched, declared the visit was not voluntary, but
that I had been thrown among them by my horse,
entirely against my will, and had invented the story
of my having been robbed, only to prevent their
arresting me as the robber.

And during all this time, the real Simon Pure,
the highwayman himself, kept up a terrible din,
calling me a thief and pirate, demanding a weapon,
insisting that the wagoners should hold me fast; and,
in the midst of all his rage, discovering so much
disinclination to come within arm's length of me,
who was, on my part, ready to swoon with dismay,
that some of the company were scandalized at his
cowardice; which was the more remarkable in one
of his age and warlike profession, and assured him
“the little boy,” as they contemptuously termed me,
“would not eat him.”

Encouraged, or pretending to be encouraged, by
this assurance, (for the crafty knave was merely
playing a part,) he threw aside his fear, seized me
by the collar, and gave me a furious shaking, overwhelming
me with denunciations and maledictions;
and the others of the company, moved by the same
imitative impulse, which, when one dog of a village
attacks a currish visitant, leads all the other dogs of
the town to set upon the stranger in like manner,
fell upon me likewise; so that I thought I should
have been shaken to death among them.

It was in vain I remonstrated, and protested my
own innocence and the guilt of the sailor. The
latter worthy grew more furious and determined
every moment; and finding that I had a horse at the
door, he carried his audacity to the pitch of claiming
him as his own, or rather as his captain's, which,
he said, he was carrying to Philadelphia for his commander;
swore I had knocked him off that very
beast's back, and then run off with him; and ended
by jumping upon Bay Tom's back, and riding immediately
off, for the purpose, as he said, of hunting
up my accomplice, “the other villain,” who had made
off with his prize-money; in which undertaking he
invited the assistance of the wagoners, promising a
handsome reward to any who should help him to a
a sight of the pirate. This induced two or three of
them to mount their horses; and I had the satisfaction
of seeing the scoundrel, whose unparalleled impudence
had thus carried him through, gallop away
with my patron's horse, leaving me a prisoner in
his place.

I was nearly distracted by this turn of affairs; and
seeing no other way left to release myself from the
hands of the innkeeper and his customers, and persuade
them to attempt the recovery of the horse
before it was too late, I made a merit of necessity,
and told them who I was, and the causes of my
adventurous journey.

This only made matters a hundred times worse
than before; for the wagoners, now discovering I
was a fugitive from justice, and trusting there might
be a reward offered for my apprehension, which
they had it in their power to secure, immediately
locked me up in a little room in the garret; whence
I could hear them through the chinks of the floor,
debating with one another whether they should immediately

carry me back to the town I had left, or
detain me a prisoner, until made certain that a reward
had been actually proclaimed for my delivery.
As neither of these alternatives possessed any
charms for me, but on the contrary filled me with
new desperation, I began to cast about for some
means of escape; and I had the good fortune to discover
a window, through which I found no great
difficulty in creeping out upon the roof, and thence,
by means of a shed, and a willow-tree that grew
beside it, of dropping on the ground.