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.