Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  “That wasn’t a pretty story to leave behind with a new chum who was going to camp alone in a lonely hut for the first time of asking, and nothing to think about but the poor little bairn that was lost. I tell you, I shall remember that night as long as I live, and how I felt when I had seen the last of George and the buggy in the moonlight; for by that time it was night, and just such another as this, with the moon right overhead, as round as an orange, and not a cloud in the sky. Ah! we have plenty of nights like that in the back-blocks, and one full moon is as like the last as two peas, for want of clouds; and somehow they always seem to come before they’re due; yet it’s a weary while to look back upon, with that night at the end of all, like a gate after five miles of posts and wire. Say now — have you never heard him all this time?” He had paused, with his head bent and on one side.

  I replied that I had heard nothing but his story; that what I wanted to hear was the end of it, and that Mad Trevor would keep. He smiled when I said that, and stood listening for another minute or more, with his eyes drawn back into his head.

  “Ah, well!” he tossed up his head and went on, “it came to an end in time, like most nights; but the worst was before it began, when I could hear George cracking his whip whenever I stood still. So I stood still until I knew I should hear him no more, and then I blew up the fire for my tea, for I had a fair twist after all that driving. But Lord, you’ll hear how your boots creak the first time you camp alone in a hut — especially if it’s a good one with a floor to it like our twelve-mile! I tell you I took mine off, and then I put ‘em on again, because my stocking-soles made just as much noise in their own way, and it was a creepier way. Then there are two or three rooms to the hut out there — it’s a fine hut, our twelve-mile — and I had to poke my nose into them all before I could tackle my tea. And then I had to walk right round the hut in the moonlight, as if it had been a desert island. But it was lighter outside than in, for I had nothing but a slush-lamp — you know, a strip of moleskin in a tin of mutton fat — and I didn’t understand the working of one in those days any better than I suppose you would now. Well, then, the whim-water at the twelve-mile is brackish, so I had to fill the billy at an open tank that was getting low; but there’d been a tantalising little shower of sixty points a day or two before that had made the water muddy; and I very well remember that the billy looked full of tea before I opened my hand to slip the tea in. Then the hut was swarming with bull-ants, and they came crawling up the sides of the billy and into the tea where I had set it to cool on the floor; and the light was so bad that I had to chance those ants, because you couldn’t tell them from tea-leaves. Well, I could have enjoyed the experience, and thought of the fine letter home it would have made, if I hadn’t been thinking all the time of that poor little thing in the mallee. I was just about as new a chum as you are now, and there was a kind of interest in turning my pouch inside out for the last pipeful of the cut-up tobacco I had brought up with me from Melbourne. It was one of the last fills of cut-up that ever I had until you handed me your pouch to-night, because when you once get used to the black cakes you’ll find you’ll stick to them. So there I sat and smoked my pipe on the doorstep, and kept looking at the moon, and thinking of the old people in the old country, and wishing they could see me just then. I daresay you think like that sometimes, but you’ll find you get over that too. It was worse to think of that little mite in the mallee scrub, and how she had sat on my knee the night before; and how she would come into my store when I was doing the books, spill the flour about, and keep on asking questions. That’s the store over there, at the other side of the new well, with the bell on top and the narrow verandah in front. I must show you little Mona’s height on the centre post: I had to measure her every morning after once getting her to bed by telling her she only grew in her sleep.

  “Well, thinking wouldn’t do any good, and my last pipe of cut-up was soon done, for it was nothing but powder. I had brought a cake of the black stuff with me, but it was too strong for me in those days. So then I thought I had better turn in, though it was only ten o’clock; so I took my blanket and the slush-lamp to the little dark room at the back, and pulled off my coat and boots, and spread my blanket on George’s bunk. And before I lay down — well, I thought I should like to put in a prayer for the poor little thing that was lost; and I reckon it was about the last time I was ever on my knees at that business, for you’ll find these back-blocks don’t make a man more religious than he need be. But it was a comfort to me that night; and, while I was kneeling, a little kitten of George’s, that I’d never noticed when I first looked into the room, came out and went for my stocking-soles; and that was another comfort, I tell you! Mind you, I was twelve miles from a house, and five from the nearest fellow-creature, a boundary-rider on the next run. I had never been able to get that out of my head, so the kitten was a godsend, and though he would come on to the bed to tickle my toes, I wouldn’t have been without him for all I was worth. I had a paper too — one of my home papers that I hadn’t had time to read; and I stuck up the slush-lamp, and strained my eyes at the print until I couldn’t keep them open any longer; and what with the kitten, that was purring very loud at my feet (but the louder he made it the homelier it sounded), I found myself tumbling off to sleep long before I had expected to, and in better heart too.

  “I suppose I must have slept for some hours, for when I woke the moon was low and swollen, and hanging like a Chinese lantern in the very middle of my open doorway. But I never looked at my watch; I lay there staring at the setting moon, and listening for a repetition of the sound that had roused me. I had not long to wait, but yet long enough to make me wonder at the time whether I mightn’t have heard it in my dreams only. And then it came again — the long-drawn wail, the piercing final cry of a coo-ee from one that had learnt to coo-ee before he could speak. As my feet touched the floor I heard another coo-ee; as I ran out into the moonshine there came a fourth; but the fifth was in my ear before I knew that they all came from the mallee scrub that spreads westward from here to within half a mile of the twelve-mile whim. Then I answered as well as I knew how; but the acquirement was a very recent one in my case; and besides, my wits were still in a tangle. For first I thought it was the child herself, until I realised, with a laugh at the absurdity of the idea, that she could neither walk so far nor coo-ee like that; and then I supposed it must be some chance traveller that had got bushed, like others before him, in that deadly mallee. But all the while I was answering his coo-ees as best I could, and running in my socks in the direction from which they seemed to come. And long before I spied my man I made sure that it was Mad Trevor himself, for I knew no other with such lungs, and who else would have searched for a bairn of five so many weary miles from the spot where it had last been seen?

  “But, as a matter of fact, he himself had no notion where he was, until he saw me standing in front of him in the low moonlight. Then he wanted to know what I meant by coming back from the twelve-mile; for, don’t you see, he thought he had been coasting around the home-station all night — and that’ll tell you about our mallee! When I set him right he just stood there, wringing his big hands like a woman; and it was worse to see than when he cried like a child before the little one’s nurse.

  “Of course I got him to come back with me to the hut; and he leant on my shoulder with his sixteen stone, and he just said, ‘Well, Harry, I don’t believe she’s in the mallee at all. I’ve been coo-eeing for her the whole night, ever since you went; and George has been coo-eeing for her ever since he came; and all hands have been coo-eeing for her in the mallee all night long. And I don’t believe she’s there at all. I believe she’s somewhere about the homestead all the time. We never looked there. What fools we all are. You shall make me a pannikin of tea, and I’ll turn in and have a sleep, Harry; and we’ll go back together when it’s light; and we’ll find her asleep in the chaff-house, I shouldn’t wonder, if they haven’t found her already; you bet we’ll find her safe and sound in
some hole or corner, the rogue! frightening her old dad out of all his wits.’

  “And indeed, as he spoke, he gave a mad laugh even for him; and I shrank away from under his great hand, that would keep tightening on my shoulder; and left him to sit down in the hut while I went to the wood-heap, and then to the tank to rinse and refill the billy.

  “But that notion of his about the homestead had been my notion too, in a kind of way; only I had kept it to myself because they were all so cock-sure it was the mallee, and they would know best. I was thinking it out, though, as I chopped the wood, and thinking it out as I rinsed the billy. Now, to do this where the water was clearest, I had to lean over from a bit of a staging, the tank being low, as I told you. But this time, through thinking so much more of Mona than of what I was doing, I lost my balance, and very nearly toppled in. And then I had to think no more, for in a flash I knew where little Mona was.”

  The instant he paused I saw him listening. He was standing in front of me now, but my back was still to the little fig-tree, and my hands had the hurdle tight. I neither spoke nor took my eyes off him till he went on.

  “Yes, she was under the ground you’re standing on,” said Warburton, nodding his head as I started from the place; “she had fallen into the old well, and pulled down the lid in trying to save herself. I knew it at the moment I was near toppling into the twelve-mile tank that wasn’t one foot deep. It turned out to be so. But I was never surer of it than when I went back to the hut, spilling the water the whole way, I was in such a tremble. And the difficulty was to keep the knowledge — for knowledge it was — from the poor boss; it had cheered him so to think the child had never been near the mallee! Why, before daylight he dozed off quite comfortably on George’s bunk in my blanket; and I sat and watched him, and listened to him snoring; and could have fetched the axe from the wood-heap and brained him where he lay, so that he might never know.

  “And he took it so calmly after all! I do assure you, when we had buried her alongside her mother, he stood where we are now, and set all hands digging the new well and filling in the old, and swore at us like a healthy man when we didn’t do this or that his way. It was he who designed those palings, and would have no more lids, but a pump; though there was neither woman nor child on the station to meet with accidents now, but only us men. And he was smoking his pipe when he planted this fig, for I was by at the time, and remember him telling me his wife had brought it from Moreton Bay in Queensland. I had seen it often in a pot, and now I had to say whether it was plumb; and with his pipe in his mouth and his head on one side he seemed as callous as you please. And for three weeks, to my certain knowledge, he slept every night in his room, and I would have thought nothing of sleeping there with him, he was bearing it so grandly. Then came the full moon and the bright nights again; and we heard him in the mallee, coo-eeing for the child that lay beside her mother — him that had buried them both!

  “Well, he didn’t come back next morning, so now all hands turned out to search for him. But we never found him all day, for he had crossed his tracks again and again; and all next night we heard him coo-eeing away for his dead child, but now his coo-ee was getting hoarse; and God knows why, but none of us could manage to set eyes on him. It was I who found him the day after. He was lying under a hop-bush, but the sun had shifted and was all over him. His lips were black, and I felt certain he was dead. But when I sung out he jumped clean to his feet, with his fists clenched and his red beard blowing in the hot wind, and his face and his eyes on fire. And if he had never been mad before, he was then.

  “He opened his mouth, and I expected a roar, but I couldn’t understand a word he said until he had half emptied my water-bag.

  “‘What do you want with me?’ he says at last; and of course I said I wanted him to come back to the station with me. So he says, ‘You leave me alone — don’t you meddle with me. I’m not coming back till I find my little ‘un that’s bushed in this mallee.’ So then I saw there was nothing for it but firmness, and I said he must come with me — as if it had been poor wee Mona herself. But he only laughed and swore, and went on warning me not to meddle with him. Well, I was just forced to. But sixteen stone takes a lot of weakening, and the last I saw of him alive was his great freckled fist coming at my head. I went down like a pithed bullock. And it was I who found him again the week after, when he must have been all but a week dead — but I had heard him coo-eeing every blessed night!”

  He was listening again: whenever he paused, I caught him listening. I was still to understand it, and the deep-down scare in his eyes.

  “Stop a bit!” said I. “Don’t tell me he’s dead if he’s only mad, and you’ve got him in some hut somewhere. You say you can hear him coo-eeing — I see you can.”

  Warburton of Gunbar heaved the saddest sigh I have ever heard.

  “I hear him always,” he said quietly, “when the moon is at the full. I have done, all along, and it’s close on ten years ago now. It’s in the mallee I hear him, just as he heard little Mona; yet they all three lie together over yonder behind the stock-yards. H’sh, man, h’sh!” He was gripping at my arm, but I twisted away from him even as himself from Mad Trevor, because his listening eyes were more than enough for me. “There’s his coo-ee again!” he cried, raising a hand that never quivered. “Mean to tell me you can’t hear it now?”

  THE MAGIC CIGAR

  It was one of such a hundred as seldom find their way to the back-blocks of New South Wales. And the box was heralded by the following letter, written at a London club in the depth of winter, and read by me in my shirt-sleeves some few weeks later, as I rode home to the station with our weekly mail: —

  “Dear Old Boy, — A Merry Christmas to you, and may the Lord give you wisdom with the New Year, that you don’t spend much of it in such an infernal hole as your station seems to be. I’m particularly exercised about the baccy like shoe-leather, which you cut up for yourself before every pipe. I fear it may have a demoralising effect, so am sending you a Christmas box of decent cigars. Don’t treasure them, old chap, but smoke the whole lot between Christmas and New Year, and if you like ‘em send for more from your affectionate brother

  “Charles.”

  Charles was a trump; but he had reckoned without the colonial tariff. I had to get a friend in Sydney to go to the custom-house for me, and I paid pretty heavily for my cigars before they ultimately reached me about the middle of January. However, they were well worth the money and the delay; for the dear good fellow had sent me a box of Villar-y-Villar (Excepcionales Rothschild) to waste their costly fragrance upon the drought-stricken wilds of Riverina.

  You should have seen us when we opened the box, the manager and I. It was the cool of the evening in the homestead verandah, yet there was not wind enough to shake the flame of a vesta. We brought out the kerosine lamp, set it down on the edge of the verandah, and seated ourselves one on each side, with our feet in the sand of the station yard, and the cigar-box also between us. Reverently we raised the lid with a paper-knife, and were impressed, you may be sure, to find the cigars wrapped up in silver paper, every one, and looking like so many little silver torpedoes under the lamp. Then we lit up, and leaned against the verandah posts, and blew beautiful clouds into the cloudless purple sky, and listened to the locusts, and made a bet as to whose ash would fall first, which the manager won. Altogether it was a luxurious hour, and I for one had never tasted such a cigar before. The manager, however, a native of the colony, asserted that he had often bought as good, or better, of a bush hawker, at twenty-five shillings the hundred. But I had noticed how very gingerly he removed the silver paper from what was now a few heaps of very white ash and a stump, which he was smoking, with the aid of his pen-knife, down to the last quarter-inch.

  Though the gift came so late, the donor’s sporting injunctions I considered as sacred, and we gave ourselves a week to finish the box in. It was heavy smoking for hard-working young men accustomed only to the pipe. I afterwards found that the manager
had banked some of his share in his desk, and I did not smoke all mine myself. I kept a case in my pocket, however, and so it happened that I had cigars about me on the broiling day when I camped in the shade with the man who had the reputation of being the champion swearer of the back-blocks. He was also a capital hand with sheep, but it was his notoriously foul mouth that had made him a public character, and throughout the district he was known as Hell-fire Jim.

  We had met neither by accident nor design, but all by reason of the incredibly long range of Jim’s language at its worst: on this occasion he must have brought me down at several hundred yards. Not that it was more than a voice that reached me first, for I was cantering to his assistance when the words caused me to draw rein and to marvel. It is one thing to use strong language in wild places where it is impossible to enforce your meaning without recourse to the local convention; to curse dumb animals in the silent bush, as Jim was doing when I came up with him, is surely different and peculiar. Yet I found him in provoking plight: wrestling in the thick of the scrub with some twenty weak sheep. The sheep were camping under the trees in twos and threes. Jim was galloping from one group to another with the perspiration dripping from his nose and beard and imprecations hurtling from his mouth; but it was impossible for a mere man on horseback to round up that mob among those trees, or to manage them at all; and Jim’s dog was skulking and lolling its tongue, good for nothing for want of water.