286 The Leather Plater, 



leave some trace behind him which inevitably leads to his detection, 

 and the young sailor, in the confusion of the moment, had dropped 

 his tobacco-box, which lay by his old father's head, a damning 

 evidence of the son's guilt. The police in those days might not 

 have been so quick as they now are, but they were as sure. The 

 young sailor was traced to Liverpool, where he was taken on board 

 a brig loading for South America, brought back, tried, convicted, 

 and executed, and after that hung in chains in front of the poor old 

 father's cottage, on the green where he had so often played in 

 childish innocence, but which he had now desecrated by the blackest 

 crime of which man can be guilty. Many years have passed away 

 since that deed of blood was perpetrated, but as long as the old 

 gibbet-post stands, the remembrance of it will ever cast a blight over 

 Holliwell. 



But barren and uncultivated as the whole district just round the 

 village might be, and rough and uncouth as were its inhabitants, 

 there was not a more desolate spot or a more neglected farm in the 

 whole parish than ''Shark's Lodge 5" and old Jack Radford, who 

 lived there, was probably the roughest and most uncultivated old 

 fellow in the whole village. The lodge stood so lonely, on a rising 

 ground, without a hill to shelter it from the howling blast j and 

 around it lay the farm of six hundred acres, which, as Charley the 

 whip — ^who had taken a dreadful spite against Holliwell and all that 

 belonged to it — again observed, might, perhaps, on a dry season, 

 ''carry fifty grasshoppers to the acre." 



But even up at that desolate lodge were two treasures which one 

 would have little dreamt of seeking in so wild a spot — the old black 

 mare Plover, who was acknowledged by all who had seen her go, 

 some twelve or fifteen years back, to have been the very best hunter 

 that was 2ver ridden to our hounds, and • who was now as good as 

 a fifty-pound annuity to her old owner 5 and Annie Radford, the 

 old man's daughter ("the filly indoors," to whom John Harrison 

 had alluded), one of the finest women in England, and who was 

 soon afterwards destined to wear a coronet of her own winning. 

 Who or what old Jack Radford originally was I do not believe a 



