Ch. 7: The Deer Stealers

Deer-stealing on Salisbury Plain--The head-keeper Harbutt--Strange
story of a baby--Found as a surname--John Barter the village
carpenter--How the keeper was fooled--A poaching attack planned--The
fight--Head-keeper and carpenter--The carpenter hides his son--The
arrest--Barter's sons forsake the village

There were other memories of deer-taking handed down to Caleb by his
parents, and the one best worth preserving relates to the head-keeper of
the preserves, or chase, and to a great fight in which he was engaged
with two brothers of the girl who was afterwards to be Isaac's wife.

Here it may be necessary to explain that formerly the owner of
Cranbourne Chase, at that time Lord Rivers, claimed the deer and the
right to preserve and hunt deer over a considerable extent of country
outside of his own lands. On the Wiltshire side these rights extended
from Cranbourne Chase over the South Wiltshire Downs to Salisbury, and
the whole territory, about thirty miles broad, was divided into beats or
walks, six or eight in number, each beat provided with a keeper's lodge.
This state of things continued to the year 1834, when the chase was
"disfranchised" by Act of Parliament.

The incident I am going to relate occurred about 1815 or perhaps two or
three years later. The border of one of the deer walks was at a spot
known as Three Downs Place, two miles and a half from Winterbourne
Bishop. Here in a hollow of the downs there was an extensive wood, and
just within the wood a large stone house, said to be centuries old but
long pulled down, called Rollston House, in which the head-keeper lived
with two under-keepers. He had a wife but no children, and was a
middle-aged, thick-set, very dark man, powerful and vigilant, a
"tarrable" hater and persecutor of poachers, feared and hated by them in
turn, and his name was Harbutt.

It happened that one morning, when he had unbarred the front door to go
out, he found a great difficulty in opening it, caused by a heavy object
having been fastened to the door-handle. It proved to be a basket or
box, in which a well-nourished, nice-looking boy baby was sleeping, well
wrapped up and covered with a cloth. On the cloth a scrap of paper was
pinned with the following lines written on it:

Take me in and treat me well,
For in this house my father dwell.

Harbutt read the lines and didn't even smile at the grammar; on the
contrary, he appeared very much upset, and was still standing holding
the paper, staring stupidly at it, when his wife came on the scene.
"What be this?" she exclaimed, and looked first at the paper, then at
him, then at the rosy child fast asleep in its cradle; and instantly,
with a great cry, she fell on it and