A fine dashing lad indeed. I was just about to go out to Albert Gore's global warming country - in fahrenheit, 13 deg, bright sunshine and wind chill worse. I find all this refreshingly on going. For the poem I remember was also the "Highwayman" by Henry Newbolt.
It told the unlikely tale of the redcoats waiting at the inn for the highwayman. They knew he had a rendezvous with a pretty maid. Unlikely, but she was bound tight and then managed to touch off a musket,when her man came riding up. She died from the discharge. He took off. He heard of what happened. Herewith from fifty year memory.
Back he spurred like a madman
Shouting a curse to the sky
With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high
When they shot him down on the highway, down like a dog on the highway.
With a bunch of lace at his throat.
Oh well, back to reality (chuckle).
Whoops, missed a line or two there, something about the moon being blood red. More haste less speed. Back at 4pm.
And still of a winter's night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
A highwayman comes riding—
Riding—riding—
A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.
Over the cobbles he clatters and clangs in the dark inn-yard;
He taps with his whip on the shutters, but all is locked and barred;
He whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Bess, the landlord's daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.
Alfred Noyes wrote it, btw.