Other spoil fell to him on the way, and when the Warrington stage hove in sight, he held it up with dramatic completeness and much financial success, spurring on to Dunstable in a tumult of port and professional pride. At the “Bull” he called for brandy, and had but raised the glass to his lips when the robbed coach came lumbering in, and the passengers entered the room where he was. How he rushed out, and, mounting his horse, dashed away, he never knew; but presently found himself at Hockliffe, where, in the kitchen of the “Star,” with more brandy at his elbow, he fell into a drunken stupor by the fire. The whole district was, however, aroused, and the road being searched while he lay in that condition. Three soldiers traced him to the “Star,” and he awoke to find himself covered by their pistols. To them he yielded all his varied wealth, with the exception of a few trifles hidden in his neckcloth, and then staggered up to bed with the troopers at his heels. There they watched him all night. He was, as he says in his last account and confession of a wild career, “a good deal chagrined” at this. How to escape? He thought of a plan. Throwing the few remaining trinkets suddenly in the fire, the soldiers, as he had expected, made a dash to save them, while he pounced upon the pistols. He seized a couple, and, standing at the door, desperately pulled the triggers. The soldiers would probably have been sent to Kingdom Come but for the trifling circumstance that the weapons missed fire. It was a mishap that cost Simms his life, for he was quickly seized and more vigilantly guarded, and, when morning dawned, taken up to London on the road he had so blithely travelled the day before. One more journey followed—to Tyburn, where they hanged him in the following June. The pilgrim of the roads who looks for the “Bull” at Dunstable, or the “Star” at Hockliffe, will not find those signs: the shrines of the saints and the haunts of the highwaymen are alike the food of ravenous Time. XIX Who shall say certainly how or when the phrase “Downright Dunstahle” first arose, or what it originally meant. Not the present historian, who merely sucks his wisdom from local legends as he goes. And when it happens, as not infrequently is the case, they have no agreement, but lead the questing toiler after truth into _culs-de-sac_ of falsehoods and blind-alleys and mazes of contradictions, the labour were surely as profitless as the mediæval search for the Philosopher’s Stone. Briefly, then, “Downright Dunstable” is a figurative expression for either or both of two things: a state of helpless intoxication, or for that kind of candid speech often called “brutal frankness.” At any rate, it is ill questing at Dunstable for light on the subject, and it is quite within the usual run of things to find the old saying unknown nowadays in the place that gave it birth.