DEAD MAN'S HILL.
BETWEEN Lofthouse in Nidderdale and the Hamlet of Horse Houses in Coverdale, a distance of eight or ten miles, there runs an ancient moorland road. Above Lofthouse the Nidd fetches a wide semicircle, so the road leaves the valley and breasts the steep hill that separates the main street from How Steen Beck, passes the little grey village of Middlesmoor, mounts the height, and falls again into Upper Nidderdale a little below what is now the great reservoir that feeds the town of Bradford forty miles away. Here you are in the midst of the hills ; the curve of the valley prevents your seeing any distance down-stream ; the long dreary crest of Great Whemside shuts off all the westward view. The road crosses the infant Nidd by a ford near which is a broken footbridge built against times of flood. Then it winds up the col that joins Little Whernside and Dead Man's Hill and gradually sinks into the upland meadows and fat pasturelands of Coverdale. In its middle course it passes over a country which a few years ago must have been as will and desolate as any part of England. Now the gigantic stone dam of the reservoir cuts right across the valley ; and the red-roofed huts in which the workmen lived, the manager's house, the canteen, and other buildings are still dotted along the light railway built to facilitate the work. But before this great enterprise began the only inhabited dwellings were two ancient farmhouses, perched on hillocks, half hidden by protecting clumps of ash-trees, on either side the stream. Many years ago there was another house, a sort of inn or house of call, where the traveller could get strong drink, and even, if need were, spend the night. You pass the spot as you climb the slopes of Dead Man's Hill ; the house is now little more than a heap of stones—no roof—only some fragments of tattered wall still withstand the winter storms. Thereby hangs a tale.
In old days this bit of road—if you can call a road what in parte is more like the bed of a mountain torrent, so rough and stony it is—was a portion of one of the main routes of communi- cation between Cumberland and Central Yorkshire. Foot passengers and horsemen would travel from Carlisle by way of Kirkby Stephen into Upper Wensleydale, past Hawes and Aysgarth to Iliddleham, then up Coverdale and across the moors by the old road to Pateley Bridge, and so to Knaresborough and other Yorkshire towns. Especially did packmen and Pedlars favour this route, which was not indeed passable for the heavy vehicles of the day, but was many miles shorter—as an avenue to the Midlands—than the carriage-roads which skirted the edge of that great mass of fells and moors that lies between 1Volsingham, Barnard Castle, Richmond, and Ripon on the one side, and Kirkoswald, Appleby, Sedbergh, and Settle on the other. Moreover, except for the pass between Kirkby Stephen and Upper Wensleydale. and that other between Iliddleham and Lofthouse is Nidderdale, the route touched
many little comfortable towns and villages, whose inhabitants gladly bought the Paisley shawls and Border homespun, and sometimes the sturdy Slots ponies and stout horses, that the pedlars and packmen brought with them to the dales. So the roads over these passes probably saw mom traffic then than they do now ; and Maggie Thomson, the old woman who, about the time of the last great war, kept the inn on the slope of Dead Man's Hill—it got that name later —did much legitimate business. But it is of her illegitimate business that the story has to tell.
The packmen generally came home with their gains, but some of them did not return. That was not very surprising in those days. Travelling, even in stage-coaches, had its risks ; the absentees might have been set upon iu some lonely place, or they might have ventured further afield ; they might even have gone, willingly or unwillingly, to the wars. Still, the friends of the missing men began to talk ; they made inquiries ; the pedlars on the road asked where So-and-so bad last been seen. At length it began to be known that sonic one going south had last been seen at Horse Houses in Coverdalc ; another going north had passed the night at Itliddlesmoor, but had not been heard of since. Further inquiries elicited the fact that friends and relatives of Maggie Thomson in Coverdale were unusually well off for Paisley shawls and other garment% and even that good horses, which seemed beyond the depth of their purses, hauled their hay or trotted them down to Leybura Market. In short, suspicion fell on Maggie, whose only com- panion in her lonely inn was a young man supposed to be hereon.
But how to bring the suspicion home to her, or to discover the truth ? It was useless to go to the Magistrates ; them was no proof, hardly even a case for inquiry. At last a Border packman, bolder than the rest, volunteered to run the risk, and to discover for himself whether Maggie was or was not brigand and a murderer. He loaded one horse with his bags of merchandise, himself mounted another, leading the packhorse by the rein, and started on his venture. In due time he arrived, just as night fell, at the lonely inn. He knocked, and Maggie came to the door, alone—no sign of any one else in the house. " Can I have a bed here to-night, and stabling for my horses ? " " Ou, ay, ye can have a room, and ye can put your horses is the byre " And what shall I do with my bags ? " " Oh. ye can put them in your room." He had his supper and went to bed, but not to sleep. There was no lock on the door, and no means of fastening it securely. He lay awake and listened, taking care to have his thick oak cudgel handy. In the dead of the night the stairs creaked under some one's tread, and he thought he could hear whispers as of two voices. So, after all. Maggie Thomson was not alone I All was again still for a while, but he could hear breathing at the door. No doubt they were listening to hear if he was awake. He kept quite quiet, with his stick in his hand, under the bedclothes ; and presently a man entered the room, visible in the dim light that came from the unehuttered window. He was followed by Maggie herself, with a knife in her hand. The packman rose in his bed, and the male intruder threw himself upon him and tried to seize and hold hint. But the packmm felled his assailant with his stick, struck the knife from Maggie's hand, and jumped through the open window to the ground. There was no time to lose, for the pair could not, for their lives, let him go. He rushed to the byre, loosed his saddle-horse, flung himself on his back, and galloped away.
There was no longer any doubt ; his evidence sufficed. Maggie and her son were arrested. A diligent search was made, and in the plot of garden ground were found the grisly remains of three dead men. It was strongly suspected there were others ; but, if so, they must have been carried further afield. What became of Maggie Thomson and her son my informants know not ; presumably they were hanged. The house they lived in was unroofed ; who would have taken a place so tainted ? And the hill on whose slopes its ruins lie, a grim fragment of the past, was known thenceforward as Dead Man's Hill, and is so
marked on the mapa to this day. G. W. P.
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