tightening at his neck. The immediate reward of this bungled attack was
thirty pounds, but two days later he was committed with Barney to
the Durham Assizes, where he exchanged the obscurity of the perfect
craftsman for the notoriety of the dangerous gaol-bird.

For the moment, however, he recovered his freedom: breaking prison, he
straightway conveyed a fiddlestick to his comrade, and in a twinkling
was at Newcastle again, picking up purses well lined with gold, and
robbing the bumpkins of their scouts and chats. But the time of security
was overpast. Marked and suspicious, he began to fear the solitude of
the country; he left the horse-fair for the city, and sought in the
budging-kens of Edinburgh the secrecy impossible on the hill-side. A
clumsy experiment in shop-lifting doubled his danger, and more than once
he saw the inside of the police-office. Henceforth, he was free of the
family; he loafed in the Shirra-Brae; he knew the flash houses of Leith
and the Grassmarket. With Jean Johnston, the blowen of his choice,
he smeared his hands with the squalor of petty theft, and the drunken
recklessness wherewith he swaggered it abroad hastened his approaching
downfall.

With a perpetual anxiety to avoid the nippers his artistry dwindled. The
left hand, invincible on the Cheviots, seemed no better than a bunch
of thumbs in the narrow ways of Edinburgh; and after innumerable
misadventures Haggart was safely lodged in Dumfries gaol. No sooner was
he locked within his cell than his restless brain planned a generous
escape. He would win liberty for his fellows as well as for himself, and
after a brief council a murderous plot was framed and executed. A stone
slung in a handkerchief sent Morrin, the gaoler, to sleep; the keys
found on him opened the massy doors; and Haggart was free with a reward
set upon his head. The shock of the enterprise restored his magnanimity.
Never did he display a finer bravery than in this spirited race for his
life, and though three counties were aroused he doubled and ducked to
such purpose that he outstripped John Richardson himself with all his
bloodhounds, and two days later marched into Carlisle disguised in the
stolen rags of a potato-bogle.

During the few months that remained to him of life he embarked upon a
veritable Odyssey: he scoured Scotland from the Border to St. Andrews,
and finally contrived a journey oversea to Ireland, where he made the
name of Daniel O'Brien a terror to well-do