On a wild wet November night in the year of grace 1776, a great lumbering coach creaked, squealed and groaned as its steaming team was lashed at top speed along that bleak country road known as Stone Street, which runs, as straight as the Romans built it, between Canterbury and Lympne.
Although an ancient vehicle, the mud-spattered panels of the coach doors were emblazoned with the armorial bearings of His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose August person was being sadly shaken about inside. His equally distinguished companion was bumping against him with every jolt of the coach. This was General Troubridge of the Dragoons, who sat opposite to his confidential officer, the handsome Major Faunce. These three gentlemen were journeying to Lympne Castle to be guests of Sir Henry Pembury, Justice of the Peace.
It was a Saturday night, and the Archbishop was to deliver an address at the Castle Church in the morning, and then at Evensong go down to Dymchurch to preach, for the Dean of the Peculiars of Romney Marsh, Doctor Syn.
Although the rotund figure of the General was occupying more than his share of the seat, and much to the discomfort of the Archbishop, His Grace was nevertheless glad of his company. The red coats and heavy sabres lent a security which the wild night might well have disturbed, especially as the coach was nearing Slippery Sam's, a lonely farm-house, rumoured to be one of the rallying-places of the Scarecrow, leader of the dreaded Romney Marsh Night-riders.
Although it was only nine o'clock, the coachman noted that all the farmhouse lights were out, and conjectured that Slippery Sam and his wild companions were abed. The guard, however, was better informed. Many a guinea had come his way, during his service under the Archbishop, by doing no more than pass messages along the roads with the Scarecrow's orders. He had never met the Scarecrow. Not that he would have been much wiser if he had, for no one knew the real identity of the Night-riders' ingenious leader. That is, no one but Mipps, the Dymchurch sexton, and the redoubtable Jimmie Bone, gentleman of the road. These two, and these two only, could have turned King's Evidence against their leader, and gained the reward which the various authorities offered for his capture, alive or dead.
But the Scarecrow had no fear of them. He knew his men, and trusted these two implicitly. The rest of the many hundreds of men who took active part in contraband running knew only that the superhuman being who rode Romney Marsh at night in the guise of a Scarecrow never failed his followers and kept not only their pockets well lined with guineas, but their necks safe from the hangman's noose.
With his top-coat collar turned up and his back to the horses and the driving rain, the guard prepared to earn his illicit guinea. He drew from his deep pocket a flat billet of wood. The queer notches cut into its surface meant nothing to him, but, as the Canterbury landlord of the Rising Sun had explained when he had handed it across the bar: “Slippery Sam will understand. All you have to do is throw it over his hedge.” A guinea easily earned, since he had to ride through the storm on the chilly back box in the ordinary course of duty. He turned towards the black line of hedge that ran along on the right of the coach, and which marked the beginning of the farm fields. He watched the twig tops bending with the wind. Soon there would be a break, marking the entrance of the farm lane. Then the hedge would appear again, and then he must throw the queer wooden message. The only thing to guard against was that his action should not attract the notice of the coachman. But that old worthy had enough to occupy his attention. He disliked the vicinity of Slippery Sam's, and was determined to pass it at a full-stretched gallop.
Meanwhile, some dozen men sat silently smoking and drinking in the darkest back kitchen of the farm-house. Not a word was spoken, for everyone was listening. Now and again Sam himself would tiptoe about the room, to fill up his guests' glasses or tankards. A weird figure, Slippery Sam, as he moved about the large kitchen only made the darker by the red glow from the great hearth. A tall middle-aged man with a bald head and a squint. Sometimes he would creep to the steep stairs in the corner and whisper, “Eh, wife?” when a hard female voice would answer, “Nothing.” At last, however, this reply was changed to: “Yes. Lights.” All the men got to their feet, while Sam, pulling a piece of sacking that draped his shoulders over his head to guard against the driving rain, opened the back door and slithered out silently into the storm.
He found that his wife, who had been watching Stone Street from an attic window, was right. He could see the coach lamps moving rapidly towards him, as he crouched down to wait behind the hedge. And it was the right coach too; the one they were expecting.
It was yet too early for the mail, although the coachman, old George, had a confounded habit of making quicker time in bad weather in order to get his outside the drier and his inside the wetter in the Red Lion of Hythe. But the mail horn always rang out as they topped the near rise, and many a warning had Sam received in this way from his friend the guard. If certain notes were played, he knew that the Scarecrow's Night-riders were “out”. Other notes would convey that the Excise men were on the prowl, and that it behoved all those who shifted contraband from place to place to be cautious.
Sam crouched in the shelter of the hedge, listening to the thud of the flying hoofs and the crack of the long whip. The lights were upon him, and a wave of thin wet mud splashed along the other side of the hedgerow, spattering his face as he held the wet twigs apart. But Sam cared not a jot for this, as he heard the sharp rap of the billet of wood falling behind him on to the cobble path.
“There's a pretty rogue lives in that place,” growled the General, peering through the rain-running window of the coach, and pointing to the deep shadow of the wide-spread roof, which could harbour hundreds of kegs in its hidden apple-rooms.
“Slippery Sam's, sir?” laughed Major Faunce.
“A very godless title,” remarked the Archbishop.
“I'm afraid I always laugh at it,” replied the Major. “The way he gained it was at least original.”
“How did he gain it, and who is he?” asked the Archbishop.
“Slippery Sam, Your Grace,” explained the General, “is a squint-eyed rascal believed to be in league with the Romney Marsh smugglers under that damned Scarecrow.” The General coughed a quick apology, and added, “I should not use such a strong expression before so distinguished a churchman. I beg your Grace's pardon.” The Archbishop waved his hand in acceptance, saying: “The word 'damn' is a good one when it is not abused, for of a surety any citizen who works against His Majesty's Government will in the latter day be damned and confounded. But you were about to tell me something of this Slippery Sam, Major Faunce.”
“An unutterable rogue, Your Grace,” went on the Major, “who makes out that his prosperity comes from farming, although the Customs men think otherwise. The difficulty is to prove it, and there the authorities have so far fallen down. Once they actually issued a warrant of search, and the Excise men broke through the back door in the dead of night. They made their way upstairs and thundered on the bolted bedroom door, only to be told by the screaming wife that her husband was from home on business. Not believing this, the officer in charge ordered the door to be forced.
“While engaged in the noisy and tedious operation of breaking through Sam's stout oak defence, the rascal smeared his naked body with oil and suddenly threw open the door and leapt out upon them. They grabbed for him in the dark, but hampered as they were by the steep narrow stairs, they might as well have tried to hold an eel. Sam slipped through them, took to the woods, an in the morning returned in borrowed clothes and driving his own trap, which he had lent to a neighbour.
“The wife had had ample time to see that all the kegs were hidden, and at the inquiry, which Sam insisted on taking place before a magistrate, there were plenty of witnesses who took their oath that Sam had been with them the night of the raid and had slept in a house by Ashford Market. So nothing was gained by Sam's nickname of 'Slippery'.”
“And the house had been called Slippery Sam's ever since,” completed the colonel.
“And truly has it been written,” said the Archbishop, “that the ways of the ungodly are full of deceit.” In the meantime the subject of this conversation had run his fingers down the notches cut in the piece of wood, and returning to the darkened kitchen had interpreted their meaning to the waiting men.
“The next 'run', lads, is for Thursday. The Scarecrow expects from us fifty pack ponies and twenty mounted men. The warning notch is again cut at the base here, and as you know, it means no firearms to be carried, but flashers for * signalling. In case of a brush with the Excise men, you can use 'bats'.” ** “I don't hold with that,” replied a rough young fellow of the company. “If the Excise men carry firearms, why not us? Are we rabbits to be potted at?”
“If an Excise man kills one of us gentlemen,” replied Sam, “it ain't brought in as murder. But if one of us gentlemen shoots an Excise man, it be murder, and murder most foul, and that means Mister Ketch removing your neckcloth for a bit of hemp, see? No, my lad, we're all for the making of money and for having a bit of fun as well. I take it, and if so be as we obeys the Scarecrow in “Flashers” were flint-locked and powder-panned pistols without barrels, used either for signalling * or tinder-boxes.
“Bats” were stout hop-poles used as lances by mounted smugglers.
** every way, he'll look after us as he always has done in the past. Take it from an older man that the Scarecrow knows the game and how to play it. So long as we obeys, we'll be rich men and never dance to the hangman's tune with our toes in the air.” The company growling an assent, the young man kept silent.
When Slippery Sam had duly arranged with each man the apportioning of the ponies and horses required, he was called upon to answer yet another criticism of the Scarecrow's methods. This time the critic was an elderly villager from Sturry, whose outward profession was that of a thatcher, but, like Sam's farming, the store of guineas hidden beneath a floor-board of his bedroom had not been earned through his attention to roofs. He was an old hand at the smuggling game, and had been “out" as he said long before the Scarecrow had been heard of, for both his father and grandfather had initiated him into the business. Consequently his opinion was taken seriously by the others.
“What I says against the Scarecrow is this,” he grumbled. “Why don't the fellow put more trust in us? There's only a few of our gang who have seen him, us being concerned with the 'hides' more than the landings and runnings. Aye, it's only you, Sam, Joe and myself what have spoke to him, that time he warned us that if we didn't get the goods to hiding before dawn there'd be trouble for us. And not one of us knows who or what he is, except a hideous scarecrow on a black horse. What's to prevent him from being a bit more friendly like, I says?”
“What's to prevent him?” cried Sam scornfully. “I'll tell you just that, old man. Just the love of his own neck, and that's good reason enough. You'll own we've never earned so much money at the smuggling since that little rat of a Dymchurch sexton come along with the Scarecrow's proposition. That there Mipps may know who he is, I don't doubt, but who else? Why, several of the lads down yonder on the Marshes have told me that not even the head gang, the Dymchurch Night-riders, know who or what he is, and so long as no one don't know—why, no one can't go turning King's Evidence against him, see? “He's clever, he is, and whoever he is, good luck to him and may he continue to keep his own neck along of ours from the rope. Who but him would have thought of using the blessed Archbishop's coach, as he did just now, to pass us orders? Who but him could have squared every guard on the mail coaches without being found out? Do you ever stop to think how many are working under him? It ain't only our little lot here he has dealings with.
There's the boys below on the luggers, and they'll tell you that he knows more about winds, tides, and weather than they do themselves.
“Then there's the Frenchies, t'other side of the Channel, to be reckoned with, and Hollanders, too, and they do say that he can talk to 'em and swear at 'em too in their own cursed lingo. Aye, he's a man of parts is the Scarecrow, so we don't let none of us start argyfying against him, same as them dirty Bonnington gang are doing. For my own part I'm just awaiting to see what will happen to them poor field mice.
“The Scarecrow will play diddle with them, as he does with the Excise men, and so I told them Ransley boys when they come down here and wanted us to join their damned cracky scheme of getting to work on our own, same as our grandads did before us. If some of 'em had been half as clever as our Scarecrow in them days they bodies wouldn't now be rotting out in Botany Bay. But if so be that some of you wants to swing—why, then betray the Scarecrow if you can, and you'll find it will be the Scarecrow's men what will do your swinging for you and not the common hangman.”
So impressed were they with Sam's spirited oration that the old thatcher replied meekly, “All right, Sam, I only just meant that I'd give a couple of guineas just by way of curiosity to know who the Scarecrow might be.”
“A couple won't buy it,” scoffed Sam. “Ain't the damn Government offered five hundred of the best ringing spades of his blessed Majesty Farmer George just for the same bit of news, which they won't never get?”
“Aye,” nodded the thatcher. “But that's different, Sam. They didn't do it out of no curiosity, but out of downright cursed venom.” And since this remark seemed to re-establish the thatcher's loyalty to the Scarecrow, the company drank whole-heartedly to his toast of “Down with the cursed Customs, and God bless King George.”
