Stage-coach and Tavern Days

He at once claimed Martin as one of the real sort, and they were talking over a union of forces and schemes when a party of dragoons came to the inn in pursuit of Thunderbolt. He escaped through a window, but in a week’s time came back dressed as a Quaker and joined his companion, who at the age of twenty-one thus blossomed out as a real knight of the road, as Captain Lightfoot, with a pair of fine pistols and a splendid horse, “Down the Banks,” to keep company with Thunderbolt’s “Beefsteak.” Thus equipped, these two gentlemen rode as gentlemen should, to the hunt. There, alone, to prove what he could do, Mike Martin robbed four huntsmen, and to his pride was mistaken by them for Thunderbolt himself. But the huntsmen soon had their turn; sheriffs and soldiers drove the two knights to the woods; and after weeks of uncomfortable hiding Mike Martin was properly penitent and longed for an honest man’s seat in a tavern taproom. There is no retreat, however, in this career; the pair of robbers next entered a house, called all the people together, and robbed the entire trembling lot. Through Scotland and Ireland they rode till the highways got too hot for them, advertisements were everywhere, a hue and cry was out, and Thunderbolt fled to America.

Mike Martin, terrified at the multiplying advertisements and rewards, disguised himself, and sailed for New York. Quarrels and mutiny on shipboard brought him ashore at Salem, where he worked for a time for Mr. Derby. He soon received a sum of money from his father’s estate and set up as a brewer. But Salem Yankees were too sharp for the honest highwayman, and he lost it all and had to take again to the road. From Portsmouth to Canada, – from pedlers, from gentlemen, – on horseback, in chaises, – he ran his rig; finally, in spite of advertisements in newspapers and printed reports and handbills at every country inn, he worked his way back to New Hampshire; and on a moonlight night he found himself horseless in the bushes. Two men rode up, and one held back as Mike Martin stepped forth. “Who’s that?” said the foremost man. “I’m the bold Doherty from Scotland,” said he, taking Thunderbolt’s name and not in vain. “And what are you after?” said the shaking traveller. “Stop and I’ll show you.” Mike then presented his pistol and demanded of the gentleman his money or his life. Promptly money and papers were turned over. “Stand back by the fence,” said the highwayman. “Here, Jack, look after this fellow,” he swaggered to make the traveller think he had an accomplice; and he mounted the fine horse and rode off. He robbed some one in some way every few miles on the road till he was back in Salem. There he promptly acquiesced to the decorous customs of the New England town, and went to a lecture; on his way home from his intellectual refreshment, he asked the time of a well-dressed man. “Can’t you hear the clock strike?” was the surly answer. “I’ll hear your watch strike or strike your head,” was the surprising reply. Out came watch and money with the cowardly alacrity ever displayed at his demands. From thence to the Sun Tavern in Boston, where he learned of a grand party at Governor Brooks’s at Medford. He said in his confession, “I thought there might be some fat ones there and decided to be of the company.” After an evening of astonishing bravado and recklessness, displaying himself at taverns and on the road, he held up Major Bray and his wife on the Medford turnpike, near the Ten Mile Farm which once belonged to Governor Winthrop. The gentlefolk were in “a genteel horse and chaise.” Madam Bray began to try to conceal her watch-chain, but Captain Lightfoot politely told her he never robbed ladies. Major Bray turned over his watch and pocketbook, but begged to keep his papers. Martin said later, “The circumstances as given by Major Bray at the trial were correct, only he forgot to state that he was much frightened and trembled like a leaf.” After stopping other chaises, he took the surprisingly foolhardy step of going to the tavern at Medford, where he found already much excitement about the robbery of Major Bray, and met many suspicious glances. He rode off, and soon a crowd was after him crying, “Stop Thief.”

In his mad flight his stirrup broke, he fell from his horse and dislocated his shoulder; thence through fields and marshes on foot till he dropped senseless from pain and fatigue. When he recovered, he tied his suspenders to a tree at one end and the other end to his wrist and pulled the shoulder into place. Then by day and night through farms and woods to Holliston. In the taproom of the tavern he called for brandy, but he saw such a good description of himself with a reward for his capture, while he was drinking off his glass, it took away his appetite for the dinner he had ordered.

He was then tired of foot travel, and stole a horse and rode to Springfield. Here he put up at a tavern, where he slept so sound that he was only awakened by landlord, sheriff, and a score of helpers who had traced the horse to Springfield. Major Bray’s robbery was unknown there, but he was tried for it, however, when it was found out, on October 21, and convicted and sentenced to death. He cheerfully announced that he should escape if he could, but he was put in heavy irons. When in jail at Lechmere Point he struck the turnkey, Mr. Coolidge, on the head with his severed chain. He pushed past the stunned keeper, thrust open the door, and ran for his life. He was captured in a cornfield and Coolidge was the man who grabbed him. It was found that he had filed through the chain with a case-knife, filled the cut with a paste of tallow and coal-dust, and though the link had been frequently examined the cut had never been noted. He declared he would have escaped, only the heavy chain and weight which he had worn had made him lose the full use of his legs, and he had to run with one end of the chain and a seventeen-pound weight in his hand.

He was executed in December and behaved with great propriety and sobriety. He showed neither cant, levity, nor bravado. He prayed silently just before his death, professed penitence, and went to the gallows with composure. He arranged his dress and hair carefully before a glass, showed a kind disposition to all, and finally gave the signal himself for the drop. A tall and handsome scamp, with piercing blue eyes and fine complexion, his marked intelligence and sweetness of expression made him most attractive. His frame was perfect in symmetry, and he was wonderful in his strength and endurance – truly an ideal highwayman; it must have been a pleasure to meet him.

Thus it is very evident that neither highway robbery nor highwaymen thrived in America. They mended their ways very promptly – and apparently they wanted to. A very striking example of this is in the American career of Captain Thunderbolt, the friend and teacher of Mike Martin. When he set foot on American soil, he tamely abandoned all his old picturesque wicked ways. He settled first in Dummerston, Vermont, where he taught school and passed his leisure hours in seclusion and study. He then set up as a physician, in Newfane, Vermont, calling himself Dr. Wilson, and he moved from thence to Brattleboro, where his house stood on the present site of the railroad station. He married the daughter of a prominent Brattleboro farmer, but was too stern and reserved to prove a good American husband. He lived to be about sixty-five years old, and had a good and lucrative professional practice.

I know two authentic cases of highway robbery of stage-coaches in New England; one was from the driver, of a large sum of money which had been entrusted to him. It was his wife who stole it. She was not prosecuted, for she returned the money, and it was believed she would not have taken it from any one else. The other theft was that of a bonnet. Just as a stage was to start off from a tavern door, a woman jumped on the step, seized the bonnet of a woman passenger, tore it from her head, and made off with it before the outraged traveller’s shrieks could reach the driver and stop the coach; and – as the chronicler solemnly recounted to me – the robber was never heard of more. These two highwaywomen have the honors of the road.

It may be deemed somewhat grandiloquent to term to-day this theft of a bonnet “highway robbery”; but I can assure you a fine bonnet was a most respected belonging in olden times, and if of real Dunstable or fine Leghorn straw and trimmed with real ostrich plumes it might be also a costly belonging, and to steal it was no light matter – indeed it was a hanging matter. For in Boston, when John Hancock was governor, a woman was hanged for snatching a bonnet from another’s head and running off with it.

CHAPTER XIX

TAVERN GHOSTS

England was ever the birthplace and abiding-place of ghosts. Thoroughly respectable most of these old residents were, their manifestations being stereotyped with all the conventionalities of the spirit world. When the colonists came to the new world the friendly and familiar spectres did not desert their old companions, but emigrated also, and “sett down satysfyed” in enlarged log cabins, and houses built of American pine, just as the planters did; and in these humbler domiciles both classes of inhabitants were soon as much at home as they had been in oaken manor houses and stone castles in the “ould countrie.”

In New England the tavern was often the chosen place of abode and of visitation of spirits; like other travellers on life’s weary round, these travellers on the round of the dead found their warmest welcome at an inn. Naturally new conditions developed new phenomena; the spirits of unhappy peasants, of cruel barons, of hated heirs at law, of lovelorn ladies, found novel companions, among whom the manitous and wraiths of the red men cut the strangest figure. The ghosts of pirates, too, were prime favorites in America, especially in seaboard towns, but were never such frequent visitors, nor on the whole such picturesque visitors, as were the spirits of Indians: —

“The ghosts that come to haunt usFrom the kingdom of Ponemah,From the land of the Hereafter.”

I have known a good many tavern ghosts of Indians – though their deeds as recounted are often far from being original or aboriginal. Reuben Jencks owned a tavern that had a very good Indian ghost. This ghost was not one of the inconsiderate kind that comes when you are awake, and half scares you to death; this noble red man stole in silently by night, so silently that the sleeper never awakened, and hence was never frightened, for nothing seems overstrange, uncanny, or impossible in a dream. Even when the Indian brandished his tomahawk and seized the visited one by the hair of the head, it never seemed to be anything more than might be expected, nor did he ever appear overfierce in his threats and gestures. Nevertheless in course of time his appearances gave a name to the apartment he visited; it came to be known as the Indian Chamber. And travelling chapmen, pedlers, or traders who had been over the route frequently, and had heard the tale at every trip, sometimes objected to sleeping in the room – not that they were afraid – but it was somewhat of a nuisance.

It was not known that any Indian ever had received aught of injury at the hands of any at the Black Horse Tavern, save the derivative injury from too frequent and liberal draughts of hard cider, which was freely dealt out to every sorry brave who wandered there. There were some simpletons who said that the Indian’s visits were to resent the injury done to another old inn, a rival down the road, named The Pine Tree, but which bore the figure of an Indian on its sign-board, and was oftener known as The Indian Tavern. This was nonsense. The Pine Tree had no visitors because it did not deserve them, had a vile table and a worse stable, while the Black Horse Tavern gave the best of the earth to its guests.

Reuben Jencks had not been born in this tavern. He inherited it from an uncle, and he was already married and had a family of small children when the tavern came to him. Another baby was born soon after, and as the Indian Chamber was the largest in the house, Mrs. Jencks quietly disposed of the objections of timid and superstitious chapmen and pedlers by taking the room for her own sleeping apartment.

It would seem to be a brave warrior, albeit a savage and a ghost, who would enter a room as densely populated as that of Mr. and Mrs. Jencks. There was for the repose of landlord and landlady a vast four-post bedstead with curtains, valance, and tester of white dimity; and under this high bed was thrust by day a low trundle bed. At night it was drawn out, and upon it slept the three little daughters of the Jencks family. Upon an old high-backed settle set on rockers slept Reuben Jencks, Jr., the deposed king of the family. Adjustable bars slipped in the front of this settle made it a safe crib. This stood on one side of the fireplace, and the new baby reposed, when he slept at all, in a deeply hooded mahogany cradle. There was a great fire ever and cheerfully burning in the fireplace – and yet to this chamber of infantile innocence and comfort came the saturnine form of the Indian ghost.

He was, in one sense, a thoroughly satisfactory apparition, being suitably clad in full trappings of war, buckskin and turkey feathers, bear’s teeth and paint; he was none of those miserable half-breed travesties of Indians who sometimes still sneaked round to the tavern kitchen, clad in vile clothes of civilization, so greasy and worn and dirty that a blanket would have been as stately in comparison as a Roman toga; Indians devoid of bravery, dignity, and even of cunning, whose laziness, high cheek-bones, and hair coarse as a horse’s tail, and their unvarying love of rum, were the only proofs of Indian blood; whose skin, even, had turned from copper tawny to dingy yellow.

To Mrs. Jencks, reposing in state among her abundant goose feathers on the high bedstead, came one night the spectre in her dreams, pulled off her nightcap, seized her by her long hair, dragged her downstairs and out of doors, pointed fiercely to the roots of the great cedar at the gate, muttering all the while in broken English of avenging an insult to his race. As Mrs. Jencks awoke wholly uninjured, she merely laughed at her vision, saying that all the talk she had heard had made her dream it. But when she had dreamt it three times, three nights running, and the ghost kept speaking of an act of insult to him, that it must be avenged, removed, etc., and kept ever pointing to the base of the cedar tree, Ben Jencks insisted on digging for what he felt sure was hidden treasure. He and his menials dug deep and dug wide, and nearly killed the splendid old cedar, but found nothing. The next time the ghost appeared he dragged the astral body of Mrs. Jencks down to the other cedar tree on the right-hand side of the gateway. Ben Jencks dug again with the same result. Neither he nor the ghost was daunted, and a fine apple tree in the garden next the orchard was the next victim. It was a Sapson apple tree, the variety which all the children loved, and it ceased bearing for several years. As it wilted and pined after the rough spading at its roots, Mrs. Jencks doggedly vowed never to repeat any of the ghost’s lies again.

We must not be too contemptuous of this unprincipled Indian spirit. He simply belonged to a class of ghosts of whom Andrew Lang says complainingly that they have a passion for pointing out places and saying treasures or skeletons are buried within; whereas it always proves that nothing of the sort is ever found. There are liars among the living as well as of the dead, and Mrs. Jencks’s Indian never said it was a treasure – he only hinted darkly at the buried thing being associated with some degradation or insult to the Indian race. The treasure was all in Ben Jencks’s brain – and the brains of his friends. Mrs. Jencks’s silence to her husband did not prevent her however from having several treasure-hunts alone by herself, after the Indian’s renewed visits and pointing finger, for he changed nothing in his programme save the spot he indicated. She spent an entire day pulling and poking among the attic rafters. She rolled out several empty cider barrels from a distant cellar corner, and even dug a hole there secretly. Her husband at last discovered her mysteriously poking a hole down a disused well, and promptly had the well cleaned out; but of course nothing was found save the usual well contents, and thus the years rolled on.

One morning Lucy Jencks whimpered that the Indian had pulled her out of bed in the night and pointed out to her where to hunt. Lucy was nearly eleven years old; a clever, sharp, active little Yankee, who helped to shell peas and string beans and scour pewter, and who could knit famously and spin pretty well. This brought her naturally in the company of her elders, and she proved the influence of the ghost talk she had heard by repeating the Indian’s words that “the derision of his ancient race, the degradation of his ancient customs, must be avenged.” Derision and degradation are too big words for a little girl to use untutored, or for an Indian ghost either; and in truth they were not the precise words he had spoken at first. But Parson Pillsbury had been present at the digging under the Sapson apple tree, a piously sceptical but secretly interested spectator, and he had thus explained the somewhat broken “Injun-talk” which Mrs. Jencks reported. It proves the tractability and intelligence of this ghost of a heathen that he ever after used the words of the Puritan minister.

The ghost pointed out to Lucy Jencks a very inaccessible spot to be searched. It was the farther end of a loft over a shed, and had to be entered by a short ladder from a leanto. This loft was packed solidly with the accumulated debris of three-quarters of a century, portions of farm tools, poor old furniture, boxes, barrels, every old stuff and piece that was too mean even for the main attic, in which were poor enough relics. It had never been searched or sorted out since Ben Jencks came to the tavern, and I doubt whether Mrs. Jencks would have listened to a ransacking then but for one circumstance, the Jencks family were going to leave the Black House Tavern – and they really ought to know exactly what was in it ere they sold it with its contents. They had not been driven from the family home by this Indian spirit of dreams, but by a more powerful spirit – that of emigration. Neighbors and friends in Rutland and Worcester were going to Ohio – that strange new territory, and they would go too. A single dead Indian, and such a liar, too, seemed of but little account when they thought of the infinite bands of very live Indians in their chosen home.

Mrs. Jencks and Lucy climbed the ladder to the loft, opened the single shutter, and let in a narrow dancing ray of dusty sunlight on the crowded desolation within. Lucy pointed between bars and barrels and bags, with slender white finger, at a large and remote box which a slender, strong, copper-colored hand had pointed out to her in her dreams. Her mother sternly sent her below to do her stent at quilt-piecing, and she tearfully and unwillingly descended. It was nearly an hour ere the strong arms of Mrs. Jencks had dislodged and repacked the unutterable chaos to the extent of reaching the box. Clouds of dust dimmed the air. She untied and removed a rotten rope that bound the box, which even in the dim litter looked like the upper half of a coffin. Within lay something swathed in linen bands and strips of old flannel – newspapers were then too precious for wrappings. She struck it, and there came a faint rattle of metal. The thought came to her of the description of a mummy which she had read a few nights before in the almanac. She paused; then twisted in and among the boxes to the head of the ladder. She could hear the sound of Perseverance singing a hymn. Perseverance Abbott was the “help,” the sister of a farmer neighbor, and she was baking “rye and Injun” bread for the teamsters who would stop there at nightfall. Mrs. Jencks called down, “Persy, come here a minute!” “I’ll tell her to come,” piped up the shrill voice of Lucy, who was hovering at the base of the ladder and evidently meant to be “in at the death.” Perseverance appeared, floury and serene, at the foot of the ladder. “I’ll come,” she said, in answer to Mrs. Jencks’s appeal for assistance, “because I know you’re scairt, and I ain’t a-goin’ to see Ben Jencks a-huntin for them Indian bones again. I’ve been dyin’, anyway, to clear this out ever since I come here, an’ this’ll be the beginnin’.” “Persy,” said Mrs. Jencks, hesitatingly, “it seems to be something dead.” “Dead!” answered her hand-maid, “I’ll bet it’s dead after layin’ here forty, perhaps a hundred year!” An atmosphere of good sense and fearlessness seemed to halo her about; still both women unwrapped the heavy thing, the mummy, with care. A bare shining scalp came first to view. “It’s a wig-block,” shouted Perseverance in a moment, “yes, and here’s curling irons and wire wig-springs.”

It was “grandpa’s wig-block,” so Reuben Jencks said, when he saw it later; his grandfather had added to his duties of tavern-keeper, roadmaster, selectman, and deacon, that of wig-maker. And in that day, when all men of any station wore handsome flowing wigs, and all, even poor men, wore wigs of some kind, it was a calling of importance. Moreover, an Indian with a tomahawk cut but a sorry figure when he tried to scalp a man who wore a wig; it was a deriding insult to the warlike customs of the whole Indian race.

There is a fine old brick tavern still standing in a New England seaboard town, and now doing service as a rather disreputable road house. It is a building rigidly square, set due north, south, east, and west, with four long, narrow doors opening over broad door-stones to the four ends of the earth. A long tail of summer and winter kitchens, a wash-room, brew-house, smoke-house, wood-rooms, sheds, barns, piggeries, pigeon-houses, hen-houses, once stretched a hundred feet or more adown the road, part of which is now torn down. Each joint of the tail helped loyally in olden times to furnish good cheer to the traveller. The great square rooms of the main house are amply furnished; one was a taproom, and in each second-story room still are two double beds, save in the corner room next the kitchen tail of the house, where stands nailed firmly to the floor of the room a somewhat battered oaken table. A little open staircase in the corner of this room leads down to the working end of the house, and was used in olden days to carry supplies to the upper table from the lower kitchen.

It has been many a year since good cheer was spread on that broad oaken board, though at one time it was the favorite dining place of a choice brotherhood of old salts, called the Mariners’ Club, who gathered there when on shore to tell tales of wild privateering, and of sharp foreign trade, and to plan new and profitable ventures. Many of these Mariners’ Clubs and Marine Societies existed in seaport towns at that golden time in New England’s marine commercial history.

This room was the scene about seventy-five years ago of a somewhat unusual expression of feminine revolt – that is, both the expression and the revolt were unusual. One of the most constant frequenters of the tavern, the heaviest eater and deepest drinker, the greatest money-spender at these Mariners’ dinners, was one Captain Sam Blood, who ran a large coasting brig, which made but short trips to Atlantic seaports. Thus he was ever on hand for tavern fun. He had a large and rather helpless family which he kept somewhat in retreat on a gloomy farm two miles inland; his mother old and feeble, yet ever hard-working; a large number of untidy children, and, worst of all, a sickly wife, a tall, gaunt woman who whined, and whined, and ever whined from her patch-covered couch, over the frequent desertions of her spouse to the tavern-table, and his wilful waste of money, while she could never leave the house. One night a specially good dinner was set in the Mariners’ room, roast and boiled meats, pies and puddings, a grand array of full pitchers, decanters, and bottles; the assembled group of old salts were about to ascend from the taproom to seat themselves comfortably at the round table for solid work, when a terrible crash and scream were heard, each seeming louder than the other, and before the startled eyes of the landlord and his guests, as they rushed up and into the room, there were all the steaming dishes, all the streaming bottles, with table-cloth and plates in a disorderly hopeless wreck on the floor. “Who could have done it?” “There he goes,” shouted one captain, as he ran to the window; and, surely enough, a slender man in nautical garb was seen striking out from under the sheltering walls of the ell-kitchens and sheds, and running desperately across the snowy fields. Full chase was given and the marauder finally captured; he was swung roughly around with oaths and blows, when sudden silence fell on all. It was Sam Blood’s wife in Sam Blood’s togs. “I’ll settle for this dinner,” said Sam Blood, blackly.