Page:A book of the west; being an introduction to Devon and Cornwall.djvu/266

202 got something he didn't like. He forfeited all the years of his imprisonment past, and got seven in addition for the theft of the horse and clothes.

Some years ago a convict escaped and concealed himself in a mine. Impelled by hunger, he showed himself to the men there engaged. He told them that he was, like them, a toiler underground. They agreed to shelter him, and he was kept concealed in the mine till the search for him was past. Then they gave him old clothes, and each subscribed a sum of money to help him to leave the country. He got away, and some year or two after he sent back all the money he had been given, to be repaid to the men who had subscribed to get him off, and a good present into the bargain.

A very different case was this.

A man got out, escaped from the moor, and made his way to his wife's cottage. She gave him up and claimed the five pounds reward for her treachery.

A friend was spending some months at Beardown. One evening he returned late from Tavistock, and to give notice that he was arriving fired off a pistol as he crossed the little bridge over the river below. Little did he then imagine, what he learned later, that a couple of convicts who had escaped were hiding under the bridge; they would have sprung out on him and despoiled him of his clothes and money, possibly have murdered him, but were deterred by his chance firing of the pistol. They were captured a day or two later, and this was their confession.

It is not by any means easy for a convict to escape.