"So I was," rejoined O'Brian, "and therefore you ought to imagine that what you see now is only my ghost. However, lest you should be so uncivil as to hang my ghost too, I think the best way is to secure you." So saying, he discharged a pistol through the gentleman's head, and, alighting from his horse, in a fury hewed the body to pieces with his hanger.
Later, he committed a fearful atrocity in Wiltshire, which, although fully detailed in contemporary literature, cannot be set forth here. He carried off at the same time no less a sum of money than £2,500; but was fortunately brought to justice after a further two years of miscellaneous plundering, chiefly through the evidence of an accomplice lying under sentence of death in Bedford gaol. He was taken at his lodgings in Little Suffolk Street, by the Haymarket, and then sent down to Salisbury, to be tried for his Wiltshire enormity. Once lodged in gaol there, he confessed a series of crimes, for which he was executed on April 30th, 1689, aged thirty-one.
JACK BIRD
Jack Bird was humbly born and as humbly educated. When it is added that he was born in the second half of the seventeenth century, it will rightly be supposed that his education did not include any of the sciences, and that it probably did not go far beyond teaching him to write his own name. He had no use for even that small accomplishment, for he was apprenticed to a baker, and before his indentures were expired had run away and 'listed for a soldier in the foot-guards; being almost immediately sent out to the Low Countries. He served under the Duke of Monmouth at the siege of Maestricht, but found too many masters in the army, and so deserted and made his way to Amsterdam, where he commenced a new career by stealing a piece of silk. He was detected in the act, taken before a magistrate, and condemned to a term of hard labour in the "rasp-house," where he was set to rasping log-wood, and to other severe drudgeries, for the term of twelve months. Unaccustomed to such hard labour, Jack fainted at his tasks, but the labour-master set it down to laziness, and to cure it, chained him in the bottom of an empty cistern by one foot, and caused a number of taps to be turned on, so that the cistern began rapidly to fill and the prisoner to be obliged, as the cistern was deeper than his own height, to work vigorously at a pump fixed in it, lest the water should gain upon, and drown, him. An hour's experience of this ingenious punishment rendered him quite anxious to return to the labour that had before been too much for him.
At the end of his term of bondage he hastened to take leave of Holland and the Hollanders, who had proved themselves such connoisseurs in quaint punishments. In England, justice certainly was more severe, and hanged men who stole quite trivial things, but it did not make people perform such hard labour, and Jack was one of those who would rather die than work. There are many of his kind even now.
Although hard labour was distasteful to our hero, he was by no means satisfied to live as humbly as he had been born, and his thoughts turned lightly to the road, as a likely place on which to pick up a good living without over-exertion. There was the choice of footpad or highwayman, and of course he chose the higher branch of the profession; for a footpad had to pad the hoof and be content, after all, with robbing the comparatively poor; while a highwayman could cut a fine figure on horseback, plunder the best, and be at little personal fatigue in doing so. Many foolish fellows, commencing highwayman, would hire, or even purchase, a horse; not so Jack Bird. "Thorough" was his motto, and he began business by stealing the mount he fancied. At the same time he took excellent good care to go fully armed, for we read that he provided himself with six good pistols and a broadsword. In this fortified condition, and in the dress of a gentleman, he opened his campaign. His first few attempts were highly successful, but he soon learned, in a painful adventure on the Dover Road, between Gravesend and Chatham, that fortune is fickle. There he encountered one Joseph Pinnis, a pilot, who was returning from London, where he had received ten or twelve pounds for piloting a Dutch ship up-river. He had been so unfortunate as to lose both hands during an engagement in the Dutch war, some years earlier, and it seemed to our callous highwayman an easy task to rob him.
Summoned to "Stand and deliver!" the pilot replied, "You see, sir, that I have never a hand, so cannot take my money out of my pocket. Be so kind, therefore, as to take the trouble to search me."
The highwayman, without the slightest misgiving, complied with this very reasonable request, and securing the pilot's purse, began to examine its contents, when he found himself suddenly seized around the waist by the traveller, who appeared to have enormous strength in his arms, even though he had no hands. He succeeded in overthrowing the highwayman, and falling upon him, beat him fearfully about the face with his metal-shod wrists.