A reward of fifty guineas was offered for the arrest of this precious gang, but it was not until the amount was doubled that things grew dangerous, and the unholy brotherhood was broken up. Turpin then took to scouring the roads singly, until he met with Tom King, with whom he entered into a partnership that lasted until he accidentally shot King dead when aiming at a police-officer who was endeavouring to arrest both, at the “Red Lion,” Whitechapel, in 1737. [Illustration: “TURPIN’S CAVE,” NEAR CHINGFORD.] His partner dead, Turpin, finding London too hot to hold him, removed quietly to Welton, a Yorkshire village ten miles from Beverley, where he set up as a gentleman horse-dealer, Palmer by name. He had not long been domiciled in those parts before the farmers and others began to lose their horses in a most unaccountable way, and so they might have continued to lose and not discover the hand that spoiled them, but for the coarse and brutal nature that was Turpin’s undoing. Returning from a shooting excursion in which he had apparently not succeeded in shooting anything, the self-styled “Palmer” wantonly shot one of his neighbours’ fowls. The neighbour remonstrated with him and probably suggested that it required a good shot to bring down game but that the domestic rooster was an easy mark for a poor sportsman, whereupon the “gentlemanly horse-dealer” threatened to serve him in the same way. [Illustration: THE “GREEN DRAGON,” WELTON.] One did not, even in 1739, threaten people with impunity and shot-guns. Something unpleasant generally resulted; and “Palmer” was accordingly arrested at the “Green Dragon” inn, Welton, on a charge of brawling; being afterwards haled before the magistrates assembled at Petty Sessions at Beverley, where, as he could produce no friends to speak on his behalf, he was put back for further inquiries. Those inquiries resulted in his being charged with stealing a black mare, blind of an eye, off Heckington Common. In fiction--and especially in fiction as practised by Harrison Ainsworth--Turpin at this point would in some way have sprung upon the back of Black Bess, come ready to hand from nowhere in particular, and would have been carried off triumphantly from the midst of his “enemies”; but these things do not happen in real life, and he was, instead, lodged in York Castle. Thence he wrote from his dungeon cell a letter to his brother at Hempstead, imploring him in some way to cook him up a character. This letter was not prepaid, and the brother, not recognising the handwriting, refused to pay the sixpence for it demanded by the Post Office. [Illustration: THE “THREE MAGPIES,” SIPSON GREEN.]