"Yes," said Obed, "I see him jest now streakin' it like a quarter hoss in that direction," pointing off. "But he was pretty nigh blown, and I 'xpect you can catch him in about two minnits."
"Well, just hold my horse," said the sheriff, "and I'll overhaul him."
The sheriff scrambled over the stones and through the bushes in the direction indicated, and the moment he was out of sight, Uncle Obed jumped on the horse and rode off at the top of his speed. He rode his prize to a town a good ways off, and sold the horse for a hundred and fifty dollars.
For some similar exploit, he was arrested and committed to jail in Essex county, to await his trial. But the prison being then in a process of repair, Uncle Obed, with other victims of the law, was incarcerated in the fort in Salem harbor. He made his escape, however, by crawling through the sewer, as Jack Sheppard did from Newgate prison. The sentinel on duty saw a mass of seaweed floating on the surface of the water. Now, this was nothing extraordinary, but it was extraordinary for seaweed to float against the tide. Uncle Obed's head was in that floating mass. He was hailed and ordered to swim back. He made no answer. A volley of musketry was discharged at him, but no boat being very handy, he got off and made his escape, very much after the manner of Rob Roy at the ford of Avondow.
Uncle Obed had a famous black Newfoundland dog, worth from sixty to eighty dollars. When hard up, he used to take the dog about fifty or a hundred miles from home, where he was unknown, and sell him. No matter what the distance was, the dog always came back to his old master, who realized several hundred dollars by the repeated sales of him.
Such were a few of the exploits of this departed worthy, actually vouched for by contemporaries. His passion for stealing was undoubtedly a monomania, for he was known in many cases to make voluntary restitution of articles that he had purloined, and his circumstances did not allow him the plea of necessity which palliates the errors of desperately poor rogues in every eye except that of the law.
THE CASKET OF JEWELS.
Mr. Luke Brandon was a Wall Street broker, of moderate business capacity, little education, and of plain manners, partaking of the rustic simplicity of his original employment—he was, in early life, a farmer in one of the western counties of New York. With less talent and more cunning, he might have become a very rich man, at short notice; but being brought up in an old-fashioned school of morality, he could never learn to dignify swindling by the epithet of smartness, nor consider overreaching his neighbor a "fair business transaction." Hence he plodded along the even tenor of his way, contented with moderate profits, and satisfied with the prospect of becoming independent by slow degrees.