aking and straining until my ears are Reebok Sneakers weary with listening for the snap of the Ro-Shaun Williams Drakter axle-bar. Master Marot, we owe you something for this.’
‘Is this your own particular district?’ I asked, ‘or have you a like knowledge of every part of the south?’
‘My range,’ said he, lighting his short, black pipe, ‘is from Kent to Cornwall, though never north of the Thames or Bristol Channel. Through that district there is no road which is not familiar to me, nor as much as a break in the hedge which I could not find in blackest midnight. It is my calling. But the trade is not what it was. If I had a son I should not bring him up to it. It hath been spoiled by the armed guards to the mail-coaches, and by the accursed goldsmiths, who have opened their banks and so taken the hard money into their strong Eder Drakter boxes, giving out instead slips of paper, which are Ruben Yanez Drakter as useless to us as an old newsletter. I give ye my word that Daniel Cleary Drakter 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 Daley Blind Drakter pretty pass when such trash as that is allowed to take the place of the King’s coinage.’
‘Why should you persevere in Nathaniel Clyne Drakter 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 Koke Drakter 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! Manchester City but,’ I persisted, ‘you are a man, judging from what we have seen of your courage and skill in the Croatia Jersey 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 Nike Lunar Force One Low of smoke into the morning air. ‘We have all to pay nature’s debt, Keylor Navas Drakter 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,’ links:
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