On May 17, 1785, this sentence was carried out.  But here arose circumstances which caused the credulous—­and in those days most people were credulous—­first to doubt, and finally to believe implicitly in the innocence of the convicted men.  From first to last Wallace and Hislop had both most strongly protested that they were entirely guiltless.  That, of course, went for nothing.  But when, on the day of execution, the ropes which were used to hang the poor creatures both broke; when the man who ran to fetch sounder hemp fell as he hurried, and broke his leg, then the credulous and fickle public began to imagine that Providence was intervening to save men falsely convicted.  Then, too, the tale spread abroad among a simple-minded people how a girl, sick unto death, had said to her mother that when Hislop’s time came she would be in heaven with him; and it was told that as Hislop’s body, after execution, was carried into that same tenement, in a room of which the sick girl lay, her spirit fled.  Judgment, also, was said to have fallen on a woman who occupied a room in that house, and who had violently and excitedly objected to the body of a hanged man being brought to defile any abode which sheltered her.  That same evening the body of her own son, found drowned in Tweed, was carried over that threshold across which she had tried to prevent them from bringing the corpse of Hislop.  All these events tended to swing round public opinion, and those who formerly had been most satisfied of their guilt, now most strenuously protested their entire belief in the innocence of the hanged men.  The years slipped away, however, and there had arisen nothing either to confirm or to dissipate this belief; only the story remained fresh in the minds of Border folk, and the horror of the last scene grew rather than lessened with repeated telling.

But there is a belief—­not always borne out by facts—­that “murder will out”; a faith that, “though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small.”  Ten years had passed, and the spring of 1795 was at hand, when it chanced one day that a citizen of Newcastle, homeward bound from Morpeth, had reached a point on the road near Gosforth; here, without word or challenge, a footpad, springing on to the road, fired a pistol at the postillion of the postchaise, knocking off the man’s cap and injuring his face.  The frightened horses plunged, and dashed off madly with the vehicle, leaving in the footpad’s possession no booty of greater value, however, than the postillion’s cap.

Later in the same day the same footpad fired, without effect, on two mounted men, who galloped off and gave the alarm, and a well-armed band setting out from Gosforth soon captured the robber, still with the incriminating postillion’s cap in his possession.  He was a man named Hall, a soldier belonging to the 6th Regiment of Foot, of which a detachment was then stationed in the district.  And he was in uniform, though, as a measure of precaution, and not to make himself too conspicuous, he wore his tunic turned inside out—­a disguise that one would pronounce to be something of the simplest.