ir
banks and so taken the hard money into their strong boxes, giving out
instead slips of paper, which are as useless to us as an old newsletter.
I give ye my word that only a week gone last Friday I stopped a grazier
coming from Blandford fair, and I took seven hundred guineas off him in
these paper cheques, as they call them--enough, had it been in gold, to
have lasted me for a three month rouse. Truly the country is coming to a
pretty pass when such trash as that is allowed to take the place of the
King's coinage.'

'Why should you persevere in such a trade?' said I. 'Your own knowledge
must tell you that it can only lead to ruin and the gallows. Have you
ever known one who has thriven at it?'

'That have I,' he answered readily. 'There was Kingston Jones, who
worked Hounslow for many a year. He took ten thousand yellow boys on
one job, and, like a wise man, he vowed never to risk his neck again.
He went into Cheshire, with some tale of having newly arrived from the
Indies, bought an estate, and is now a flourishing country gentleman of
good repute, and a Justice of the Peace into the bargain. Zounds, man!
to see him on the bench, condemning some poor devil for stealing a dozen
eggs, is as good as a comedy in the playhouse.'

'Nay! but,' I persisted, 'you are a man, judging from what we have seen
of your courage and skill in the use of your weapons, who would gain
speedy preferment in any army. Surely it were better to use your gifts
to the gaining of honour and credit, than to make them a stepping-stone
to disgrace and the gallows?'

'For the gallows I care not a clipped shilling,' the highwayman
answered, sending up thick blue curls of smoke into the morning air. 'We
have all to pay nature's debt, and whether I do it in my boots or on a
feather bed, in one year or in ten, matters as little to me as to any
soldier among you. As to disgrace, it is a matter of opinion. I see
no shame myself in taking a toll upon the wealth of the rich, since I
freely expose my own skin in the doing of it.'

'There is a right and there is a wrong,' I answered, 'which no words
can do away with, and it is a dangerous and unprofitable trick to juggle
with them.'

'Besides, even if what you have said were true as to property,' Sir
Gervas remarked, 'it would not hold you excused for that recklessness of
human life which your trade begets.'

'Nay! it is but hunting, save that your quarry may at any time turn
round upon you, and beco