The loss of his friend was a lesson in caution, and henceforth Hind
resolved to follow his craft in solitude. He had embellished his
native talent with all the instruction that others could impart, and he
reflected that he who rode alone neither ran risk of discovery nor
had any need to share his booty. Thus he began his easy, untrammelled
career, making time and space of no account by his rapid, fearless
journeys. Now he was prancing the moors of Yorkshire, now he was
scouring the plain between Gloucester and Tewkesbury, but wherever he
rode, he had a purse in his pocket and a jest on his tongue. To recall
his prowess is to ride with him (in fancy) under the open sky along the
fair, beaten road; to put up with him at the busy, white posthouse, to
drink unnumbered pints of mulled sack with the round-bellied landlord,
to exchange boastful stories over the hospitable fire, and to ride forth
in the morning with the joyous uncertainty of travel upon you. Failure
alone lay outside his experience, and he presently became at once the
terror and the hero of England.
Not only was his courage conspicuous; luck also was his constant
companion; and a happy bewitchment protected him for three years against
the possibility of harm. He had been lying at Hatfield, at the George
Inn, and set out in the early morning for London. As he neared the
town-gate, an old beldame begged an alms of him, and though Hind,
not liking her ill-favoured visage, would have spurred forward, the
beldame's glittering eye held his horse motionless.
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