Indies or America, it being one of the conditions of the contract that
the services of the prisoner were the property of the contractor for a
given number of years. On landing, these wretched prisoners were put up
to auction and sold to the highest bidder--in other words, they were
slaves. Many men made large sums of money in this inhuman trade,
trafficking in the lives of their fellow-countrymen. The thing at last
reached such a pitch that practically no able-bodied man was safe from
the danger of being kidnapped, sold to some dealer, and shipped off to
slavery in the Plantations. That was the fate of many a young man who
mysteriously disappeared from the ken of his friends in those
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century days. Once shipped to the
Plantations, the chance was small of a man ever returning to his native
land. Fever, brought on by exposure to the hot sun and heavy rain of a
tropical or semi-tropical climate, took care of that; in the West
Indies, at least, they died like flies. Not many had the luck, or the
constitution, of one Henry Morgan, who, kidnapped in Bristol when a boy
and sold as a slave in Barbadoes, lived to be one of the most famous--or
rather notorious--buccaneers of all time, and died a knight,
Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica, and commander of our forces in that
island.

It was "Mad Jack Hall's" fortune to save from this fate of being
kidnapped and sent to rot in fever-laden swamps of the West Indies a
young Northumbrian at that time in his service. It was the time of year
when Stagshaw Bank Fair was held, and Mr. Hall, meaning to attend the
fair, had instructed this young man to join him there at a certain hour,
and himself had ridden over to Corbridge, there to pass the night. In
the morning, when Jack Hall reached the fair at the appointed hour, he
was astonished to find his servant, very dejected in appearance, being
led away in charge of a man on horseback. Hall questioned the lad, who