Back o' the Moon, and Other Stories/Back o' the Moon/Chapter 17

the written records on which this tale has partly depended, neither Matthew Moon's books nor the voluminous official documents, all criss-crossed with signatures and stamps and seals and arms, make mention of the departure of Arthur Monjoy from Liverpool. After he had (according to one description) “most feloniously fired and consumed the moor,” he ceased, officially, to exist. But word of mouth, that, with scarce more husks and wrappings, holds now and then as good a kernel of truth, goes a little further. To be sure, for dates and suchlike the documents are the safer authority; for while it was said by some that he sailed within a week, others had it that not until the month of October did he set foot on the deck of a merchant brig bound for Boston, the reason for the delay being the illness of his wife. But documents and tradition together make a pretty tangle, and he who would get at the truth of the matter must dip his cup at both sources. Partaking, perhaps, a little of both was the letter that arrived for the Wadsworth parson from Boston some time in the following spring, informing him of their settling in the new-made Republic and of the birth of a little foster-sister for Jimmy Northrop.

The official records had best be taken first.

There is still extant a letter of William Chamberlayne, Solicitor to His Majesty's Mint, in which oath is made, and it is said, that he and the Solicitor for the Crown in this particular prosecution “are not prepared to proceed further in the trials of Raikes, Dean and Thomas, or any of them, at the assize now being held at the Castle of York, by reason, as he, this deponent, has been informed, of the lack of clear and certain information and the great difficulties in the coming at evidence material to the prosecution;” and, with an extra quirk and pomposity or two, you may read the same of Matthew Moon. Moreover, certain persons were now to be brought to book on a more serious count than clipping and coining, or even the unlicensed smelting of ores (though it is difficult to see how, the penalty being the same, the distinction in guilt is drawn), and that was the murder of Jeremy Cope, Supervisor of Excise when it suited his purpose, Chief of the Bow Street Eight, and a good deal besides—an officer whose lustre was only eclipsed a quarter of a century later by that of the famous Townshend. There is yet to be seen a proclamation in the London Gazette, wherein His Majesty declares himself pleased to promise his most gracious pardon to anyone (save the person who actually shot the said Mr. Cope) who shall declare his or her accomplice or accomplices therein, so that he, she, or they may be apprehended and convicted thereof—ending with an offer of a reward to be paid by the Right Honourable the Lords Commissioners of His Majesty's Treasury, and signed, “Weymouth.” The reward was supplemented by a similar one on the part of “the gentlemen and merchants of the Town and Parish of Horwick, to be paid by the Constables.” And for the account of how these rewards were never paid we must leave the documents for a moment, and turn to the fireside gossip of the weavers and sheepmasters in the ingles on winter nights.

From that source, and similar ones, we learn how Mish Murgatroyd lay hidden in the bellpit until after the advancing fire had roared away above his head, and the soldiers had retired before the flames. Three days in all (so the story went) he stayed there, and, effecting his escape at the end of that time, he returned to his home and followed his ordinary calling—which, to be sure, was little enough good. Maybe he did not know they were provided with his name; if he did, he showed uncommon coolness; for shortly afterwards he went to Horwick Thursday market, got rather more than market-drunk, and set off at six o'clock in the evening with (however he came by them) two heavy budgets of cloth, one under either arm, the straps about his neck. He reached Wadsworth, and took a sheep-track up the Scout; but near the top his foot, or the drink, or both, betrayed him. He slipped and rolled down. He did not roll any great distance, for he lodged against two mountain-ash trees, already reddening with berries. His fetching up against them was the end of Mish Murgatroyd. The heavy budgets bounded forward over an edge; they stopped with a horrible jerk; Mish was hanged at his own cost instead of at that of his country; and the hangman himself could not have done the job more neatly. That was a stroke of luck for the country, for there is no sense in wasting money.

Dick o' Dean's end was, too, in its way, remarkable. Of the blood-money that had been subscribed in the loom-loft of the “Fullers' Arms,” only forty-five pound odd had been actually collected, and the three lucky wolves had taken fifteen pound apiece. When he heard of the hanging of Mish, Dick o' Dean had the effrontery to go to his widow and to demand the unspent balance of Mish's fifteen pounds, averring that he had incurred certain expenses on Mish's behalf that had included a bribe to a sergeant to permit of Mish's escape from the bellpit. The tale was thin enough, but it seems to have sufficed for Mrs. Mish. By that time, however, Parker of Ford was very busy in Horwick, straightening up certain matters with Captain Ritchie; and this exploit of Dick o' Dean's came to his ears. (Dick had already found it an easy matter to get fifteen pounds out of the distracted Charley.) Proceedings for blackmail were promptly instituted, and Dick was laid by the heels. Blackmail or what you like, once they had him they were little likely to let him go again, and they made short work of him in York. His end was not as satisfactory as Mish's, costing more. The youth Charley was suffered to enjoy such peace as his conscience would allow him; and the parson shrugged his shoulders, but could do little more, when, in course of time, Charley and Pim o' Cuddy became stalwart pillars of the Church.

For a matter of some significance, we have to return again to the documents. It is obvious that if you are permitted to select such documents as you require, and to ignore the rest, they may be made very serviceable things; but you will be prudent to make away entirely with such as do not tally with the case you have thus conveniently proved. It was an odd thing that there should have come to light, years afterwards, a paper that in all decency should have been destroyed, namely, another deposition of Eastwood Ellah's. This deposition flatly contradicted the one which Cope had put with a chuckle into his pocket. Cope may or may not have seen this paper; of its existence he must have known, from the circumstances under which it was found; and it is always possible that orders he may have given for its destruction were disregarded. The suppression of it made some difference to Northrop and Haigh, but Cope was not the first, or last, who disregarded what was inconvenient, and, each in our different way, most of us do it. As Cope himself had said, the Law's a queer thing; all's past now, and they didn't get Big Monjoy.

The parson of Wadsworth, too, had his cross to bear, and he reddened when, meeting Captain Ritchie one day in Horwick, the captain looked straight through him, ignoring his existence. Explanation was impossible; the matter must be let go at that; and for long afterwards that hot blush mounted into the parson's cheek, often at inopportune moments. So, the horse being gone, he locked the stable door to save the harness; and the vows of amends that his praying presently gave him strength to make he kept as well as, or, maybe, a trifle better than, most of us. Then one fine day it suddenly occurred to him that he was getting rather sentimentally fond of his delinquency and making quite the most of it. “Hallo,” he thought, “this'll never do!” and a laugh shook him.—“A good thing too!” he declared roundly. “The fellow was a man, anyway, and his wife a treasure, and I'd do it again rather than he should be stretched!”

There was very little hope of the parson after that.

Such parts of Back o' th' Mooin as had been heather were a sad sight for long enough to come. The fire burned here and there for a fortnight, and then there came a light shower or two that set the hills a-steam with opaque white smoke. For days after the apparent extinction of the blaze, you could, by stamping your foot on the consumed patches, set sparks glowing and little flames flickering; and then all died down. It had swept clear over the Slack to the Causeway, and there its progress had only been arrested by the tearing up of stretches of heather, in which work both soldiers and Back o' th' Mooiners had joined.—But a good deal of heather has grown on the hills since then, and Back o' th' Mooin is not very different to look at. In the villages they gradually returned to the weaving of kerseys and shalloons, and some hold that the saw,

had its rise somewhere between Horwick Town and Trawden Edge.

One particular may be added, that, when all's said, is very like Back o' th' Mooin. A little grisly it is, but things are to be valued according to the store you set by them, and the atlas-bone of a king went the same way. It is this: Bit by bit, the two bodies hanging in chains on Wadsworth Shelf began to disappear by other agency than the crows and the weather. A man began it by taking a phalange, then another took a metatarsal bone. Others, seeing the mementoes brought from pockets or placed on the chimney-pieces of their neighbours, followed their example; and so it went on, just as they had bought the rope at sixpence an inch. The things were prized; more than a few in Horwick joined in the filching; and one November nightfall the remains were taken in a lump in a cart by a party of Back o' th' Mooiners returning from the last Thursday market of the year. For long the relics were treasured; then they began to lie about the cottages, and to be lost sight of during a succession of dustings and cleanings. One only, a dorsal vertebra, probably the seventh or eighth, is now known to exist; and it may be added to the documents and the fireside tradition that is testimony to the truth of this tale.