Highwayman

“ Perhaps the task has been abandoned because of the difficulty—the almost insuperable difficulty—of sifting fact from fiction, and because of a chilling sense that it would be a thankless task to present the highwayman as he really was: a fellow rarely heroic, generally foul-mouthed and cruel, and often cowardly. ”

“ Finding the old man so well acquainted with the history of highwaymen, and taking considerable interest in the subject, having myself edited a book containing the lives of many remarkable people who had figured on the highway, I forthwith asked him how it was that the trade of highwayman had become extinct in England, as at present we never heard of any one following it. ”

“ You had simply to watch the "public form," so to speak, of your man, just as people accustomed to bet upon horse-races watch the performances of the animal they favour. If your highwayman were a dashing and enterprising fellow, likely to make much of a stir in his line, it was obviously not worth the while to collar him for the sake of a mere £40 reward offered for the apprehension of a highwayman. You just waited until he became a notorious person, with some great deeds to his credit—a big haul of guineas or jewellery, or perhaps even a murder. ”

“ An early and ignominious fate seemed to be the inevitable lot of those who worked with our heroic pickpocket turned highwayman, and either because the survivors grew shy of him in consequence, or because he thought it best to play a lone hand, he ever afterwards pursued a solitary career. ”

“ Dismounting himself, the highwayman, leaving Twm for the moment, plunged knee-deep into the pond for the treasure, as he supposed, and Twm leapt nimbly on his thoroughbred horse: no highwayman of tradition ever riding a horse that was not thoroughbred, whatever the sorry jades the real ones had often to bestride. ”

“ They end, sordid, mud-splashed figures, from which romance shrinks; in no detail distinguishable from such vermin as the footpads, who on dark nights robbed women and children, and defenceless old men, for coppers in solitary lanes, and fled in terror from the robust.
When the profession of highwayman became extinct, those of pickpocket, card-sharper, and burglar were greatly reinforced. ”

“ Well, that highwayman opened the chaise door and went in to overhaul everything. I had made up my mind what to do. So while he was thus engaged I undid the traces of my ’osses with one [65] hand, holding the highwayman’s ’oss with the other. ”

“ Then he sat himself on Benjamin's legs, which thus ceased to be turbulent, and, taking off the garters, therewith tied the ankles together.
Sighing satisfaction, Harry picked up the pistol and sword, spoils of victory, and rose at his leisure. He contemplated the hapless highwayman with benign interest for a moment, and turned to the coach. "You are still there, ladies? Benjamin is flattered and so am I. But the play is over. He will not be amusing for some time, and at any moment he may be profane. ”

“ It is, indeed, just BECAUSE the old roads and the wayside inns are superseded by the rail and the modern hotel, and because they are altogether removed from the everyday vulgarity of use and competition, that they have assumed their romantic aspect, ixtogether with that which now surrounds the slow and inconvenient coaches and the harmful unnecessary highwayman, long since become genuine antiques and puppets for the historical novelist to play with. ”

“ Although the freight and express traffic of those days lacked the picturesqueness of the passenger coaches, nothing illustrates so conclusively what the great road meant to an awakening West as the long lines of heavy Conestogas and rattling express wagons which raced at "unprecedented" speed across hill and vale. Searight, the local historian of the road, describes these large, broad-wheeled wagons covered with white canvas as
visible all the day long, at every point, making the highway look more like a leading avenue of a great city than a road through rural districts.... ”

“ People traverse it, not with the object of arriving at any particular destination, but for the delight of the road itself, of the joy it gives to the eye and to the imagination. Its only traffic is what the transport agent would call “holiday traffic”; for when the idle season ends the highway is deserted. In earlier days there would rumble along the road the carriage and four of the traveller of great means; then came the humbler vehicle hired from the town; then the sleek motor; and finally, as a sign of democratic progress, the char-à-banc, the omnibus, and the motor-brake. ”

“ And the high-road, a hundred years ago, was not that grass-grown desert of the present time. It was alive with constant travel and traffic: the country towns and inns swarmed with life and gaiety. The ponderous waggon, with its bells and plodding team; the light post-coach that achieved the journey from the "White Hart," Salisbury, to the "Swan with Two Necks," London, in two days; the strings of pack-horses that had not yet left the road; my lord's gilt post-chaise and six, with the outriders galloping on ahead; the country squire's great coach and heavy Flanders mares ”

“ It would be difficult, if not impossible, to say which road out of London was the most infested with highwaymen, in all these centuries. Where all were extremely dangerous for honest men, the bad eminence of any particular one is disputable. All the great highways were bordered by lonely wastes and commons until well on into the nineteenth century, and it is not saying too much to declare that the era of the highwaymen did not really end until that of railways had begun. ”

“ In writing this book, then, I have had constantly in mind the myriads of people who have not the time, and possibly not the facilities, to search the pages of the literature of the past for the origin and development, or to work out their present importance, of our amplification of roads and of road uses. It is felt that many of these people laudably desire a conversational knowledge of the origin, evolution and present status of highway transportation, even though it be glimpsed by a very rapid passage through a very large subject. ”

“ The road is busy as busy can be. Almost any time one can see enormous freight-trains rolling by or mile-a-minute passenger trains. Gates are provided for each farmer's right of way. I was told by an exceptional Mexican with powers of speech that the efficient dragging of the wagon-roads, especially the "New Santa Fé Trail" that follows the railroad, is owing to the missionary work of King, the split-log drag man, who was employed to go up and down this land agitating his hobby. ”

“ This, as the white settler drifted in, became the winter-road; then, as civilization stifled the call of the wild, there uprose from swamp and muskeg the crude corduroy, expanding by degrees into the half-graded highway, until the turnpike and toll-bar, with its despotic keeper, exacted its tribute from progress. ”

“ The highway itself stands as a memorial of the most venerable customs and the most ancient races. As I lift my eyes from its beaten road-bed, and look out upon it through the imagination, it escapes all later boundaries and runs back through history to the very dawn of civilisation; it marks the earliest contact of men with a world which was wrapped in mystery. The hour that saw a second home built by human hands heard the first footfall on the first highway. ”

“ It is amazing to modern readers who read of the notoriety in which the highwaymen often lived, that they should have been suffered to appear in public so frequently, and yet their profession to be so well known. ”

“ Amand the highway is a straight line and, as we descend, it stretches away until lost in perspective, a magnificent route for high speed, and as Jean puts the auto to its best; we skim along scarcely seeming to touch the earth,—hills rise and fall, and the motion is joyous, while the spring winds sweep the dreams of dead kings off and away, leaving only the smell of the grasses and blossoming fruit trees. ”

“ The highwaymen begin in the dimness of antiquity, continue very largely as heroic myths throughout the middle ages, become philanthropic and chivalric figures in succeeding eras, and later are seen to be mere masquerading footmen, brave only in their masters' fine clothes, seeking money wherewith to gamble and to live dissolute lives. ”

“ The highway is irrelevant. The highway is slipshod. The highway is as the necklace of a gipsy or an Indian, a savage string of pebbles and precious stones, no two alike, with an occasional trumpery suspender button or peach seed. Every diamond is in the rough.
I was walking between rugged farms on the edge of the oil country in western Pennsylvania. ”

“ The new highway appeared to have been thrown open to the world, and the dullest imagination saw the air thronged with colossal chariots, bearing travellers in perfect safety, and with more than the speed of the eagle, from city to city, from country to country, reckless of all the obstacles—the seas, and rivers, and mountains—which Nature might have placed in the path of the wayfarer. ”

“ Sometimes, it is true, the highway lies by the side of a foaming torrent, hurrying over stones and boulders to join the sea; sometimes it climbs amongst untrodden snows; sometimes it creeps along the edge of the foam-clad blue, or wanders through a grove of tall and silent pines. ”

“ Here and there wagons pushed on beyond the established limit, and, finding the way not more desperate than much of the preceding "road," had gone on and on, until at last wagons came down the western slopes of the Alleghenies, and wagon traffic began to be considered possible—much to the chagrin of the cursing pack-horse men. No sooner was this fact accomplished than some attention was paid to the road. The wagons could not go everywhere the ponies or even the heavy carts had gone. They could not climb the steep knolls and remain on the rocky ridges. ”

“ The highway now becomes extremely steep and narrow, with countless hairpin turns, though all danger of collision is eliminated by the regulations which permit no down-traffic in the morning and no up-traffic in the afternoon. During the final fifteen miles, in which is made an ascent of more than six thousand feet, one has the curious experience of passing, in a single hour, from the torrid to the temperate zone. ”

“ It opened indeed a limitless vista for new adventure.
Presently, away ahead of me in the road, I saw a man standing near a one-horse wagon. He seemed to be engaged in some activity near the roadside, but I could not tell exactly what. As I hastened nearer I discovered that he was a short, strongly built, sun-bronzed man in working-clothes—and with the shortest of short hair. I saw him take a shovel from the wagon and begin digging. ”

“ In this connection I find myself thinking about the various modes of travel resorted to in those primitive days, when roads and bridges as we have them today were still far in the future. The wagons were generally drawn by cattle teams, from two to five yokes to the wagon. The number of wagons would be all the way from one to one hundred. The larger trains were difficult to pass, as they took up the road for so long a distance that sometimes we would move on in the night in order to get past them. ”

“ In making a mile with his heavy burden on his back, the perspiring coolie must often travel two miles, because the road-makers have made the highway a series of zigzags, the better to bewilder the spirits of the dead. ”

“ Many people living at the present time, who have grown up amidst the exceptional and possibly very transient characteristics of this time, will be disposed to regard the traffic in the streets of our great cities as a part of the natural order of things, and as unavoidable as the throng upon the pavement. But indeed the presence of all the chief constituents of this vehicular torrent—the cabs and hansoms, the vans, the omnibuses—everything indeed except the few private carriages—are as novel, as distinctively things of the nineteenth century, as the railway train and the needle telegraph. ”

“ Commuters and truck-wagons ain’t any sweet haulin’, but I tell you they’re a heap better ’n cuttin’ out refrigerator-cars or oil-tanks. Why, I’ve hauled—”
“Haul! You?” said the Mogul, contemptuously. “It’s all you can do to bunt a cold-storage car up the yard. Now, I—” he paused a little to let the words sink in—“I handle the Flying Freight—e-leven cars worth just anything you please to mention. On the stroke of eleven I pull out; and I’m timed for thirty-five an hour. Costly-perishable-fragile, immediate—that’s me! Suburban traffic’s only but one degree better than switching. ”

“ Much has already been said in these pages of the imaginative character of a good deal to be found in Captain Alexander Smith's Lives of the Highwaymen, but at the same time it would not be proper to regard that work as a work of fiction. The amazing adventures of the highwaymen whose careers are treated of there can be readily paralleled in the actual trials of their kind, not only in the periods with which he deals, but at a much later time. ”

“ This half-hour's chat with the officials on the train, and those among the passengers who are desirous of deriving information or willing to impart the latest news from either coast, is one of the most important events in the day to many of the dwellers by the iron roadway. This link betwixt them and the civilization in which there was no room for them lessens immeasurably their sense of isolation.
But now the whistle of the engine warned the travellers that the time had come when they must again take up the thread of their journey. ”