who concerted it send forward to Newburyport to engage the defendants,
especially as they did not know that they were there? What should induce
any persons so suddenly to apply to the defendants to assist in a robbery?
There was nothing in their personal character or previous history that
should induce this.

Nor was there time for all this. If the prosecutor had not lingered on the
road, for reasons not yet discovered, he must have been in Newburyport
long before the time at which he states the robbery to have been
committed. How, then, could any one expect to leave Exeter, come to
Newburyport, fifteen miles, there look out for and find out assistants for
a highway robbery, and get back two miles to a convenient place for the
commission of the crime? That any body should have undertaken to act thus
is wholly improbable; and, in point of fact, there is not the least proof
of any body's travelling, that afternoon, from Exeter to Newburyport, or
of any person who was at the tavern at Exeter having left it that
afternoon. In all probability, nothing of this sort could have taken place
without being capable of detection and proof. In every particular, the
prosecutor has wholly failed to show the least probability of a plan to
rob him having been laid at Exeter.

But how comes it that Goodridge was near or quite four hours and a half in
travelling a distance which might have been travelled in two hours or two
hours and a half. He says he missed his way, and went the Salisbury road.
But some of the jury know that this could not have delayed him more than
five or ten minutes. He ought to be able to give some better account of
this delay.

Failing, as he seems to do, to create any belief that a plan to rob him
was arranged at Exeter, the prosecutor goes back to Alfred, and says he