Presently some other travellers approached, and, asking the cause of the struggle, Pinnis told them: asking them to take a hand and give the ruffian a further drubbing, and adding that he was almost out of breath with what he had done already.
The travellers then, informed of the whole affair, conducted Bird in custody to a magistrate, who committed him to Maidstone gaol, where he was tried and condemned to death, but was afterwards, for some reason that has escaped the historian, pardoned and set at liberty, to work more outrages upon unarmed and inoffensive folk.
At first, however, the danger and indignity he had passed through, of being so completely vanquished by a handless man, whom he had at first foolishly despised, quite put him out of conceit with himself and the road, and he resolved to abandon an employment which had at first promised so well, only to turn out so ill. But work—real work—was uncongenial as ever, and as he had to exist somehow, it happened that the road called him successfully again, after all.
The first person he encountered in his new series of adventures was a Welsh drover, who proved to be a muscular man, and the very devil of a fellow with that nasty weapon, the quarter-staff. "Once bit, twice shy," murmured Jack, withdrawing swiftly out of reach. "If a villain of a sailor without hands can overthrow me, I shall not venture my carcase within reach of one that has hands, for fear of something worse." So, he pulled a pistol from the armoury he carried in his belt, and from a safe distance shot the drover through the head. He then searched the body and found, to his disgust, only eighteenpence. But he summoned what philosophy he could over this disappointment, and, cynically remarking that "'Tis a price worth killing a man for, any time," rode off without the least remorse.
On another occasion he met the original "Poor Robin," the almanac-writer and humorous prognosticator; and as he did not disdain to exact contributions from the poor, as well as the rich (although "Poor Robin" probably was by no means so poor as his name would imply), he desired the calendar-maker to halt and surrender. As this was the first time Poor Robin had heard such language, and as he had received no hint of this occasion from the stars, he stood and stared, as if himself had been planet-struck.
"Come now," said Jack, "this is no child's play: I am in earnest."
Robin pleaded the poverty to which, he said, his nickname bore witness.
"That," returned Bird, "is a miserable, threadbare excuse, and will not save your bacon."
"But," pleaded the almanac-maker, "as author of those calendars that yearly come out in my name, I have canonised a great many gentlemen of your profession; look in them for their names, and let this be my protection."