166
THE FORTUNES AND MISFORTUNES OF MOLL FLANDERS
remote from the place where it was done, pretending they were gentleman travelling towards Carlisle, that they had been attacked on the road by highwaymen, and that one of them had shot him into the arm.
This, he said, his friend managed so well that they were not suspected, but lay still till he was cured. He gave me also so many distinct accounts of his adventures, that it is with great reluctance that I decline the relating them; but this is my own story, not his.
I then inquired into the circumstances of his present case, and what it was he expected when he came to be tried. He told me, that they had no evidence against him; for that, of the three robberies which they were all charged with, it was his good fortune that he was but in one of them, and that there was but one witness to be had to that fact, which was not sufficient; but that it was expected some others would come in, and that he thought, when he first saw me, I had been one that came of that errand; but that if nobody came in against him he hoped he should be cleared; that he had some intimation, that if he would submit to transport himself, he might be admitted to it without a trial; but that he could not think of it with any temper, and thought he could much easier submit to be hanged.
I blamed him for that; first, because if he was transported, there might be an hundred ways for him, that was a gentleman, and a bold enterprising man, to find his way back again, and perhaps some ways and means to come back before he went. He smiled at that part, and said he should like the last the best of the two, for he had a kind of horror upon his mind at his being sent to the plantations, as the Romans sent slaves to work in the mines; that he thought the passage into another state much more tolerable at the gallows, and that this was the general notion of all the gentlemen who were driven by the exigence of their fortunes to take the road; that at the place of execution there was at least an end of all the miseries of the present state; and as for what was to follow, a man was, in his opinion, as likely to repent sincerely in the last fortnight of his life, under the agonies of a jail and the condemned hole, as he would ever be in the woods and wildernesses of America; that servitude and hard labour were things gentlemen could never stoop to; that it was but the way to force them to be their own executioners, which was much worse; and that he could not have any patience when he did but think of it.
I used the utmost of my endeavour to persuade him, and joined that known woman's rhetoric to it—I mean that of tears. I told him the infamy of a public execution was certainly a greater pressure upon the spirits of a gentleman than any mortifications that he could meet with abroad; that he had at least in the other a chance for his life, whereas here he had none at all; that it was the easiest thing in the world for him to manage the captain of a ship, who were, generally speaking, men of good humour; and a small matter of conduct, especially if there was any money to be had, would make way for him to buy himself off when he came to Virginia.
He looked wishfully at me, and I guessed he meant that he had no money; but I was mistaken, his meaning was another way. 'You hinted just now, my dear', said he, 'that there might be a way of coming back before I went, by which I understood you that it might be possible to buy it off here. I had rather give £200 to prevent going, than £100 to be set at liberty when I came there.' 'That is, my dear', said I, 'because
