That
same evening he robbed a mounted postman of his mail-bags--having first
ascertained that the postman was unarmed. And here Hudson came to the
end of his tether. The postman gave the alarm, and the robber was
arrested in Newcastle the following day, some of the property lost from
the mail-bags still in his possession. At his trial the following week
at Durham Assizes he did not attempt to make any defence, but after
conviction, by confessing where the booty was hid, he made what
reparation lay in his power. Poor wretch! He had not even the posthumous
satisfaction of going down to posterity as a bold, bad man, a hero of
the road. Not for him was it to emulate Jack Shepherd or Dick Turpin; he
was of feebler clay, unfitted to excel in evil-doing.
After the barbarous fashion of the day, they hanged his body in chains
on the scene of his poor, feebly-executed crimes; and there, on
Gateshead Fell, through many a dreary winter's night, fringed with
loathly icicles, lashed by rains, battered by hail, dangled that
pitiful, shrunken figure, creaking dolefully, as it swung to and fro in
the bitter blasts that come howling in from a storm-tossed North Sea.
And far from acting as the warning intended to others, so little was
this gruesome thing a "terror to evil-doers," that the vicinity of the
gibbet actually became a place noted for the frequency of crimes of
violence.
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