“Old Squire Hawkhurst lay dying at Hawkhurst Hall, and the vicar wrote to the solicitor to come down to the Hall, and to bring the will along with him.
“The solicitor wrote back that he should come down by the late train to Stockbridge and arrive by the mail coach at Orton on the night of that 13th day of November.
“Now, the disinherited heir, young Mr. James, was drinking with a lot of us wild young blades at the Tawny Lion public house at Orton. And he told us all about it. We talked about the injustice of the old squire in having robbed young Mr. James of his inheritance in order to give it to hospitals. And we argued this way: that as the squire had not made the fortune himself, but had received the estate from a long line of forefathers, so it was his bounden duty, in common honesty, to pass it along to their descendants, and that if it were not for the existence of that wicked will, the last of the line, the young squire, would enjoy his own, because he was next of kin, and heir-at-law.
“We all loved the young squire, because he made himself one of us and had no pride, and we knew that was the chief reason why the old squire disinherited him. So he was in a measure suffering for us.
“After a little while Mr. James left us, but we all kept drinking and arguing and getting ourselves up more and more into a mad excitement, until one of us—I do not remember now which it really was—proposed that we should all go in a body and stop the coach that ran between Stockbridge railway station and Orton, and take that will away from the lawyer and destroy it, so that our young squire might enjoy his own.
“We were all mad drunk, or we would have remembered that our proposed adventure was really highway robbery—a felony punishable, it might be, with transportation for life—instead of being the brave, heroic exploit we in our madness believed it to be.
“We, five in number—no matter who the others were—I confess only my own part—procured masks and fire-arms, and on the night in question we started out on our adventure.
“On the road we met young Joseph Wyvil, who had just come from Scotland, to which he had run away to marry his sweetheart. He did not belong to our part of the world, though he was known to most of us. He was a wild one, up to any sort of fun, ready for any sort of frolic, but not bad.
“He gave us good e’en, and asked us, ‘Where away?’ And we told him we were going on a glorious lark, and asked him to come along with us, but we would not tell him, no, nor give him a hint of what our adventure was to be.
“First he said he could not, that ‘Lil’—that was his wife—was expecting him; but at last he consented.