Encounter with the Mail-Coach Highwayman

The Encounter with the Mail-Coach Highwayman is an early demonstration of how Maurice turns danger into a performance that serves his group. When a masked robber stops their coach, Maurice directs the boy to play a penny whistle; the ensuing commotion leaves the highwayman frightened and vulnerable. The travelers then debate whether to take his horse, converting the escape into a comic contest over who is entitled to steal from whom.

The coach is stopped

The encounter begins when the occupants realize that the coach has halted. In the rain outside, harness jingles, the coach rocks, and running feet approach. A voice in the darkness asks whether there are any wizards inside. The question makes the occupants look at one another in puzzlement, and the stranger continues testing his guesses: first werewolves, then vampires. The boy insists that they are harmless, while Maurice responds by crawling under the seat. The exchange gives the scene its first reversal of expected roles: the armed figure outside is trying to identify the people he means to rob, but his guesses and their anxious answers make the coach seem stranger and less predictable than he anticipated.

The interruption follows a conversation in which Maurice has been complaining that little governments spend money on rat-catchers. That reference places the coach journey within the group’s wider experience of rat-catching schemes, but the immediate danger is simpler: the masked man has arrived at the stopped coach, and the travelers have to decide how to respond. His attention turns to the money on the roof, in a case. As he reaches for it, the boy picks up the pipe lying beside him on the seat. It is a penny whistle by its old name, though the narration notes that nobody remembers when such whistles last cost a penny.

The whistle changes the encounter

Maurice quietly tells the boy to play Robbery with Violence. Peaches asks whether they could simply give the highwayman money, but Maurice answers sternly that money is for people to give them. The contrast captures the improvisational confidence of his response: rather than accept the robber’s terms, Maurice treats the robbery as a scene whose next cue he can supply. His choice of tune makes the danger sound like part of an arranged performance, though the results are physical rather than theatrical alone.

As the highwayman drags the case down from the roof, the boy obediently plays a few notes. The coach then fills with a creak, a thud, scuffling, and a very short scream. When the noise stops, Maurice climbs onto the seat and looks out into the rainy darkness. He tells the robber to approach carefully, warns against panic, and checks whether his skin has been broken. The masked man reappears in the coach lamps, moving very slowly with his legs spread wide and whimpering quietly. The reversal is complete: the person who arrived to threaten the travelers now has to follow Maurice’s cautious instructions.

The scene leaves the means of the attack offstage. Its sounds and immediate result are clear, but the narration does not pause to describe each rat’s action. That brisk omission gives the whistle an almost magical theatrical force while preserving the practical logic of the group’s method: a small cue, a sudden burst of coordinated activity, then a vulnerable opponent who can be managed. Maurice’s calm concern about panic and broken skin also makes the aftermath more complicated than a simple triumph. He has helped bring down an armed robber, yet he still treats the man’s condition as something to monitor.

Escape, and the argument over the horse

The victory does not end the argument over property. Maurice objects to leaving the situation untouched on the grounds that someone else might steal what has been left behind. Peaches says that they will leave it. Maurice counters by proposing that they steal the highwayman’s horse, reasoning that stealing from a thief cancels out. The boy tells Peaches that they cannot stay there all night and concedes that Maurice has a point; the highwayman urgently agrees with the practical need to move on. The disagreement turns the escape into a dispute about moral bookkeeping, not merely a scramble away from danger.

The highwayman offers his word as a thief and slowly lowers a hand toward his sword. The cat answers that they certainly trust him. The ensuing action makes that trust sound deliberately ironic: the man feels his trousers lighten as the rats pour out and scamper away, and he hears the harness jingle. He waits, spins around, draws his sword, and runs forward—only to fall hard because somebody has tied his bootlaces together. The travelers’ escape is thus secured not by a final duel but by another small, calculated obstruction.

What the episode establishes

The highwayman later becomes associated with the travelers’ reputation: they say Maurice is amazing, although he never intended to be amazing and the effect has simply happened. That description echoes the encounter’s structure. Maurice’s apparent mastery is assembled from quick instructions, the boy’s obedience, the rats’ intervention, and a tied pair of bootlaces. The outcome looks like a neatly staged feat, but its success depends on details and timing rather than a formal display of heroic strength.

The episode also puts Maurice’s confidence in comic tension with Peaches’s refusal to endorse his logic about stealing. He can explain away taking the horse as a balancing of accounts, while she insists that they leave it. The argument does not erase the difference between their positions; instead, the planned theft and the actual escape make the group’s resourcefulness morally untidy. The highwayman is unquestionably the aggressor, but Maurice’s opportunism is not presented as identical to Peaches’s restraint.

Finally, the encounter establishes the penny whistle as more than a musical prop within this episode: the boy’s few notes initiate a sudden change in power. The music does not persuade the highwayman or settle the travelers’ argument. It cues action, and the scene’s comic reversal follows from the mismatch between the robber’s expectation of control and the coordinated response waiting inside the coach.