The dispute ran high as Tracey entered. Both husband and wife were eager to state their respective grievances, and he listened patiently. Having heard both sides, he summed up judicially.
"Money," he said, "has been the cause of this confusion. Without it you may live in peace and quietness; so, for your own sakes, hand me at once the money you possess"; handling a loaded pistol significantly the while. He took first eighty-five guineas, and then his farewell.
On his way south he met a young Oxonian, whom he accompanied as far as Ware, where they passed the evening in great harmony and friendship. Proceeding next day, Tracey frequently remarked that his companion's valise—a prosperous-looking article—was certainly too weighty for him. But, in constantly recurring to the subject, he aroused his companion's suspicions that this pleasant fellow, whom he had picked up on the road, was none other than a highwayman. He said nothing of his suspicion, but was resolved to be even with him. Presently, remarking that he was travelling to take up his degree of Master of Arts, he hinted that he had with him, in his portmanteau, sixty pounds for his expenses.
"Have you so?" said Tracey. "That is very convenient for me at this time, for I want to borrow just such a sum, and you could not lend it to a better person than myself."
So, without more ado, he helped himself to the valise, untying it from the other's horse and strapping it on his own.
The student poured forth the most lamentable entreaties, and begged Tracey not to thus deprive him of what was to establish his future prospects in life. The money, he declared, was all borrowed, and if it were sto—— er! borrowed from him at this juncture, he had not the least prospect of ever being able to repay it.
All these tears and protestations moved Tracey only so far as to give him his own purse, containing some four pounds, to carry him on for a few days. He then disappeared down a bye-road with the valise, and the student saw him no more, and perhaps had no wish to see him again; for, as Tracey discovered when he halted at the next hedge-row alehouse and unstrapped the valise, the sixty pounds was purely imaginary, and its contents were nothing but two old shirts, half a dozen dirty collars, a ragged and threadbare student's gown, a pair of stockings minus the feet, a pair of shoes with but one heel between them, a comb, some needles and thread, and a ham. The picturesque force of the sucking highwayman's language when he discovered these treasures, and how simply he had been taken in, must have considerably astonished the landlord of that wayside tavern.
The biographers of Ben Jonson mention his once being robbed by Tracey in very humorous style. Tracey met the poet, whom he knew well by sight, on a road in Buckinghamshire, and demanded his purse. To this "Rare Ben," as his epitaph in Westminster Abbey styles him, answered in the following impromptu:
"Fly, villain! hence, or by thy coat of steel,
I'll make thy heart my leaden bullet feel;