Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  She broke down, breathless, and I glanced towards the door. Deedes stood there in my ducks, his face the blacker by contrast; he glared at me, and his evil mouth worked spasmodically; but now more than ever I seemed to discern some foreign trouble in his blazing eyes; and instead of ordering me out of the deck-house, he slammed the door upon us both. Enid I’Anson whipped her face from her hands.

  “That’s all right,” said I. “He’s seen us, and he doesn’t care. There’s something else upon his nerves; when thieves fall out, you know — perhaps they’ve done so already. I feel hopeful; it’s bound to come. There’s just one thing I don’t size down. I know why I am here: he wouldn’t kill me, and alive on land I’d never have let him clear the Heads. That’s why I’m here; but why are you? You didn’t know about the schooner?”

  “No, but — how can I tell you!”

  “Don’t,” said I, for she was clearly in a new distress.

  “I must! He wants to marry me — so he says. He never wanted before. But I did not betray him. I have saved him — he will have it so — so I am to be his wife! Oh, Mr. Bower, it is the worst insult of all! I told him so, just before you came in.”

  “Then that was the trouble,” said I. “It rather disappoints me; I am counting on a row between those two. But it will come. Cheer up, Miss I’Anson; let him leave me out of irons twenty-four hours longer, and I’ll play a hand myself — for you and the bank!”

  And so I talked, trying with all my might to comfort the poor child in her extremity. She was little more; nineteen, she told me. There were elder sisters married, and a brother gone home to Cambridge. He would have to leave there now; and who would pay his passage back to Melbourne? The robbery seemed to spell certain ruin to the I’Ansons, at all events in their own belief; but now at least we knew who had drawn the cartridges from the bank revolver; and I fancy they all exaggerated the element of personal responsibility.

  I did my best to reassure Miss Enid on the point; nor did I leave a comfortable word unsaid that I could hit upon. So noon, and afternoon, found us talking still across the cuddy table. Luncheon in this pirate’s craft was evidently a movable feast, to-day indefinitely postponed. Enid looked at her watch and found it after three o’clock; we had thought it one; but about half-past three the house door was flung open and in strode Deedes. He did not look at us, but snatched a repeating-rifle out of a locker, and would have gone without a word but for Enid I’Anson.

  The girl was terrified. “What are you going to do with it?” she cried; and he paused in the doorway, filling it with his broad shoulders, so that I could see nothing but blue sky without.

  “There’s a big bird in our wake — another mollyhawk!” said Deedes, as I thought with a lighter look. “I’m going to have pots at it. That’s all.”

  “Cruel always,” said the girl, as we heard shot after shot in quick succession. But I went to the door, and then turned back as if with an altered mind. I had found it locked.

  Ere I could regain my seat, a new thing happened. A bullet came clean through the deck-house, passed over Enid’s head, and must have abode in my brain had I sat a minute longer where I had been sitting for hours.

  “Coward!” gasped the girl; but only with her word came the report.

  “A chase!” I shouted. “Down on the floor with you — flat down — that was a Government bullet!” And on the cabin floor we crouched.

  Voices hailing us were now plainly audible. But Deedes vouchsafed no answer, save with his Winchester, and from the spitting of a revolver (doubtless handled by the captain) I gathered we were at pretty close quarters. So the chase had been going on for hours; that was why we two in the house had been left undisturbed and dinnerless; but what amazed me most was the evident good discipline on deck. We must stand some chance; my soul sickened at the thought. It must be canvas that was after us, not steam; but I could not look out to see; my brave comrade would only remain where she was on condition I did the same. Lastly, every man aboard the schooner, myself excepted, must centre his hopes, perhaps his designs, upon the nineteen thousand and odd pounds that lay snug somewhere between her keelson and her trucks.

  I have done livelier things than lie there listening to the shots; many more had struck the house, and even where we lay there was no superfluous safety; but my comrade bore herself throughout with incredible spirit, and made besides a sweet, strange picture, there on that matted floor. The sun streamed in through the skylight, and the schooner’s motion was such that the girl’s face was now bathed in the rays and anon lighted only by its own radiance. I did not know how I liked it best; nor do I to this day, though I see her always as I saw her then. Her blue eyes bent on mine the kind of look which would give one courage in one’s last hour. Her very hand was cool.

  The firing on both sides continued intermittently; but once we heard a heavy thud upon our own deck, and the revolver spat no more.

  “That’s not Deedes,” said I, shaking my head; “I only wish it was!”

  “Don’t say that,” my comrade answered; “it would be too dreadful! He is not fit to die; he has fine qualities — you know it yourself — he could play a man’s part yet in the world.”

  Even as she spoke the door was unlocked, flung open, and Deedes himself stood looking down upon us across his folded arms. I daresay we cut an ignominious figure enough, crouching there upon the cabin floor. Deedes looked very sick and pale, but the sight of us elicited a sardonic smile.

  “Get up,” said he. “There will be no more fighting. Watson’s knocked out. I’ve struck my flag. Your father will be aboard in a minute, Enid.”

  “My father!”

  “Yes,” said Deedes, leaning back against a bulkhead, with his arms still folded. “It’s a pilot’s cutter — the first thing handy, I suppose — with the police and your father aboard her. One word before he comes. Once you’d have come fast enough to my arms. Enid — I’m done for — come to them now!”

  He unfolded and flung them wide as he spoke; a great look lit his face, half mocking, half sublime, and down my duck jacket, where his arms had been, a dark stream trickled to the deck. Before I could get to him he fell in a white heap under our eyes.

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  Deedes was dead. Watson was dying. Two constables in the cutter were badly hit; and with their ghastly burden the little ships tacked home in consort to Port Philip Heads.

  It was midnight when we saw the lights. The bank-manager and I stood together on the cutter’s deck, he with a brace of heavy bags between his heels. His daughter was down below, but the thought of her troubled him still. As he said, the money was the bank’s, and it was safe; but his daughter was his own, and this scandal would attach forever to her name. I denied it hotly, but the old man would have it so.

  “Don’t tell me,” he grumbled. “I know the world, and Enid will go ashore with something unpleasantly like a slur upon her name.”

  “Then it won’t be for long,” I at last retorted. “We meant it to keep until we got there; but with your permission, sir, your daughter and I shall go ashore engaged.”

  THE VOICE OF GUNBAR

  “H’sh! Did you hear a coo-ee?”

  I shook my head in some surprise. My host seemed a good fellow; but hitherto he had proved an extremely poor companion, and for five minutes, I suppose, neither of us had said a word. My eyes had fallen from the new well, with its pump and white palings shining like ivory under the full moon, to our two shadows skewered through and through by those of the iron hurdles against which we were leaning. These hurdles enclosed and protected a Moreton Bay fig, which had been planted where the lid of the old well used to lie, so I had just been told; and I had said I wondered why one well should have been filled in and another sunk so very near the same place, and getting no answer I had gone on wondering for those five minutes. So if there had been any sound beyond the croaking of t
he crickets (which you get to notice about as much as the tick of a clock), I felt certain that I must have heard it too. I, however, was a very new chum, whereas Warburton of Gunbar was a ten-year bushman, whose ear might well be quicker than mine to catch the noises of the wilderness; and when I raised my eyes inquisitively there was a light in his that made me uneasy.

  “Hear it now?” he said quietly, and with a smile, as a seaman points out sails invisible to the land-lubber. “I do — plainly.”

  “I don’t,” I candidly replied. “But if it’s some poor devil lost in the mallee, you’ll be turning out to look for him, and I’ll lend you a hand.”

  His homestead, you see, was in the heart of the mallee, and on the edge of a ten-mile block which was one tangle of mallee and porcupine scrub from fence to fence. I shuddered to think of anyone being bushed in that stuff, for away down in Warburton’s eyes there was a horror that had gone like a bullet to my nerves. I was therefore the more surprised at the dry laugh with which he answered:

  “You’d better stop where you are.”

  I could not understand the man. He was not only the manager of Gunbar, but overseer and store-keeper as well, an unmarried man and a solitary. One’s first impression of him was that his lonely life and depressing surroundings had sadly affected his whole nature. He had looked askance at me when I rode up to the place, making me fancy I had at last found the station where an uninvited guest was also unwelcome. After that preliminary scrutiny, however, his manner had warmed somewhat. He asked me several questions concerning the old country from which we both came; and I remember liking him for putting on a black coat for supper, which struck me as a charming conceit in that benighted spot, and not a woman within twenty-five miles of us. His latest eccentricity pleased me less. Either he was chaffing me, and he had heard nothing (but his sombre manner made that incredible), or he was prepared to let a fellow-creature perish fearfully without an attempt at rescue. I was thankful when he explained himself.

  “I know who it is, you see,” he said presently, striking a match on the hurdle and re-lighting his pipe. “It’s all right.”

  “But who is it?” said I; for that would not do for me.

  “It’s Mad Trevor,” he returned gravely. “Come now!” he added, looking me in the face much as he had done before inviting me to dismount; “do you mean to say you have got as far as this and never heard the yarn of Mad Trevor of Gunbar?”

  I made it clear that I knew nothing at all about it; and in the end he told me the story as we stood in the station yard, and lounged against those iron hurdles right under the great round moon.

  “My lad, I was as young as you are when I came to this place; but that’s very near ten years ago, and ten years take some time in the mallee scrub. Yes, I know I look older than that; but this country would age anybody, even if nothing happened to start your white hairs before their time. I’m going to tell you what did happen within my first two months on this station. Mad Trevor was manager then, and he and I were to run the show between us as soon as I knew my business. To learn it, I used to run up the horses at five o’clock in the morning, and run ‘em out again last thing at night, for the drought had jolly nearly dried us up, and in the yard yonder we had to give every horse his nose-bag of chaff before turning him out. Well, between sparrow-chirp and bedtime I was either mustering or boundary-riding, or weighing out rations in the store, or taking them to the huts in the spring-cart, or making up the books, or sweeping out my store, or cleaning up the harness; but I never had ten minutes to myself, for old Trevor believed in making me work all the harder because I was only to get my tucker for it till I knew the ropes. And for my part I’m bound to say I thoroughly enjoyed the life in those days, as I daresay you do now. The rougher the job, the readier was I to tackle it. So I think the boss was getting to like me, and I know I liked him; but for all that, he was mad, as I soon found out from the men, who had christened him Mad Trevor.

  “It appeared that he had come to Gunbar some three or four years before me, with his young wife and their baby girl, Mona, who was five years old when first I saw her — riding across this very yard on her father’s shoulders. Ay, and I can see her now, with her yellow head of hair and her splendid little legs and arms! She was forever on Mad Trevor’s back, or in his arms, or on his knee, or at his side in the buggy, or even astride in front of him on the saddle-bow; and her father’s face beaming over her shoulder, and his great beard tickling her cheeks, and he watching her all the time with the tenderest love that ever I saw in human eyes. For, you see, the wife had died here on Gunbar, and lay buried in the little cemetery we have behind the stock-yards; but she was going to live again in little Mona; and Trevor knew that, and was just waiting.

  “But his trouble had driven him quite mad; for often I have been wakened when I’d just dropped off, by hearing him come down the verandah trailing his blanket after him; and away he was gone to camp all night on his wife’s grave. The men used to hear him talking to her up there; it would have made your heart bleed for him, he was such a rough-and-ready customer with all of us but the child.

  “Well, one day we were out on the run together, he and I in the buggy. It was to fix a new rope round the drum of the twelve-mile whim — at the far side of the mallee, that is — and I recollect he showed me how it was done that day so that I never needed showing again, and it was because I was quickish at picking up such things that he liked me. But a brute of a dust-storm came on just as we finished, and we had to wait at the whim-driver’s hut till it was over; and that was the first time I ever heard him mention little Mona’s name behind her back. For the whim-driver had a fine coloured print, from some Christmas number, stuck up over his bunk, and it was a treat to hear the poor boss beg it from him to bring home to the little one. It was as though the bare thought of the kid made a difference in the look of his eye and the tone of his voice; for he had been swearing at the rope and us in his best style; but he never swore once on the drive back, he only made me hold the rolled print in my hand the whole time; and I had to take tremendous care of it, and hand it over to him the moment we pulled up in the yard here, so that he might give it to little Mona first thing. But that was not to be: the child was lost. She had been missing since the time of the dust-storm, which was mid-day, and all hands but the cook who told us, and the nurse who was responsible and beside herself, were out searching for her already.

  “The boss took the news without immediately getting down from the buggy, and with none of the bluster which he usually had ready for the least thing. But his face was all hair and freckles, and I recollect how the freckles stood out when he turned to speak to me; and to this day I can feel the pinch of his fingers on the fleshy part of my arm.

  “‘Harry,’ he says, in a kind of whisper, ‘you must turn these two out, and then run up Blücher and Wellington; and you must drive that nurse girl away from this, Harry — you must take her away this very night. For if my child is dead, I’ll kill her too — by God, but I will!’

  “But the nurse had seen us drive up, and as Mad Trevor crossed the yard heavily, like a dazed man, she ran out from the verandah and threw herself at his knees, sobbing her heart out. What he said to her first I couldn’t catch: I only know that in another moment he was crying like a child himself. No wonder either, when the mallee is the worst kind of scrub to get lost in, and there had been enough dust to clean out deeper tracks than a child’s, and when it was growing late in the afternoon, and the poor little thing out for hours already. But it was the most pitiful sight you ever saw — the servant girl in hysterics and the poor old boss steadying his voice to take the blame off her he’d said he’d kill. Ay, he was standing just in front of the verandah, within three yards of where we are now, and that rolled-up print was still in his hand.

  “So no more was said about my carting the poor girl off that night; but Wellington and Blücher were run up all the same, and at sundown they were bowling the buggy away back to the twelve-mile with me in her.
You see, the twelve-mile whim-driver was Gunbar George, our oldest hand, who knew every inch of the run, so the boss thought that George would lay hold of little Mona sooner than he could, if she was in the mallee. And that’s where she was, we were all quite certain; and George was certain too, when I told him; and he told of a man he himself had once found in our mallee, stone-dead, with ‘died from thirst’ scratched in the grime on the bottom of his quart pot, and all within a mile of this very homestead.