The cynosure of every eye was a springless clay-cart, which was being
slowly driven past the newly-erected 'big house' of Enoch Wood, Esquire,
towards the Town Hall. In this, cart were two constables, with their
painted staves drawn, and between the constables sat a man securely
chained--Black Jack of Moorthorne, the mining village which lies over
the ridge a mile or so east of Bursley. The captive was a ferocious and
splendid young Hercules, tall, with enormous limbs and hands and heavy
black brows. He was dressed in his soiled working attire of a collier,
the trousers strapped under the knees, and his feet shod in vast clogs.
With open throat, small head, great jaws, and bold beady eyes, he looked
what he was, the superb brute--the brute reckless of all save the
instant satisfaction of his desires. He came of a family of colliers,
the most debased class in a lawless district. Jack's father had been a
colliery-serf, legally enslaved to his colliery, legally liable to be
sold with the colliery as a chattel, and legally bound to bring up all
his sons as colliers, until the Act of George III. put an end to this
incredible survival from the customs of the Dark Ages. Black Jack was
now a hero to the crowd, and knew it, for those vast clogs had kicked a
woman to death on the previous day. She was a Moorthorne woman, not his
wife, but his sweetheart, older than he; people said that she nagged
him, and that he was tired of her. The murderer had hidden for a night,
and then, defiantly, surrendered to the watch, and the watch were taking
him to the watch-house in the ashlar basement of the Town Hall. The
feeble horse between the shafts of the cart moved with difficulty
through the press, and often the coloured staves of the constables came
down thwack on the heads of heedless youth. At length the cart reached
the space between the watch-house and the tent of the Inca of Peru,
where it stopped while the constables unlocked a massive door; the
prisoner remained proudly in the cart, accepting, with obvious delight,