Stand and Deliver

Book excerpt: The true story of the highwaymen has never been written, nor can it be. The chroniclers were slavishly faithful to their authorities—flatteringly so, in fact; for these authorities consisted of a lot of chapbooks, broadsheets, penny dreadfuls and twopenny bloods, “dying confessions” that had come in for a good deal of posthumous editing, and the contemporary gutter Press—which was even more unreliable then than it is today. Many of these ‘authorities’ were so contradictory that the truth-at-all-costs chroniclers left out some of the best bits of highway lore in their vain attempts to keep faithful to their ridiculous principles. Our own ambition is more modest. We have not sought the El Dorado of absolute truth. We have gone back to the same sources that the chroniclers used—and we have taken pains to ignore the latter gentlemen whenever contemporary reports are still extant. We have not moralized, like the chroniclers, nor have we embellished, like the novelists. We have added nothing—but we have taken away a good deal. We have tried to use our discretion in selection, and our judgment in discrimination between contradictory versions of the same events. Since it was impossible to be faithful to the letter, we have tried to recapture the spirit of the Age of Highwaymen.