The Welshman slipped off his coat and hung it on a tree, and Tom, seeing no harm in it, fired a ball through the cloth.
“Praise be, but that’s a pretty pounce!” exclaimed the Welshman. “Pray give another to be worth the Master’s money.” Tom cocked his pistol and fired again. “By Saint David,” said the Welshman admiringly, “that’s a better pounce than the first. Let’s have one more.”
But Tom shook his head. “I don’t have another ‘pounce’ left.”
“Ah?” said the Welshman. “But I do.” He reached into his breeches, and fetched out a small pistol. “I will thank you to give me my Master’s money, otherwise I shall be obliged to shoot you through the head.” Tom gave back the sixty pounds, and rode off with nothing to show for his first day on the job.*
Paraphrased from ‘The Life of Tom Dorbel’ in A General and True History of the Lives and Actions of the Most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, Street-Robbers, &c. (1742), by Captain Charles Johnson, probably a pseudonym.
* We gather from Johnson that Dorbel now practised crime quite successfully for five years, but after two close brushes with the gallows (which he escaped by cunning and fraud) he hid for the next six or seven years in blameless domestic service. One day, he was asked to accompany his employers’ sixteen-year-old daughter to London, where she was to be educated. Tom stole her jewel-case, and raped her with shockingly brutal violence. The girl died of grief soon afterwards, and both parents were mentally broken. He was tried, convicted, and taken to Bristol where he was hanged on St Michael’s Hill, quite unrepentant, on Saturday 23rd of March, 1714, in his forty-fifth year of age.