Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  Suddenly the horseman stopped, beckoning with his free hand to the pair afoot, pointing at the fire with the one that held the reins; and as they crept up to him he stooped in the stirrups till his mouth was close to the sergeant’s ear.

  “He’s sitting on the far side of the light, but you can’t see his face. I thought he was a log, and I still believe he’s asleep. Creep on him like cats till he looks up; then rush him with your revolvers before he can draw his, and I’ll support you with mine!”

  Nearer and nearer stole Cameron and Tyler; the rider managed to coax a few more noiseless steps from his clever mount, but dropped the reins and squared his elbows some twenty paces from the light — a hurricane lamp now in the sharpest focus. The policemen crawled some yards ahead; all three carried revolver in hand. But still the unsuspecting figure sat motionless, his chin upon his chest, the brim of his wideawake hiding his face, a little heap of gold and notes before him on the ground. Then the Superintendent’s horse flung up its head; its teeth champed upon the bit; the man sat bolt upright, and the light of the hurricane lamp fell full upon the face of Hardcastle the squatter.

  “Rush him! rush him! That’s the man we want!”

  But the momentary stupefaction of the police had given Hardcastle his opportunity; the hurricane lamp flew between them, going out where it fell, and for a minute the revolvers spat harmlessly in the remaining patchwork of moonshine and shadow.

  “Get behind trees; shoot low, don’t kill him!” shouted the chief from his saddle. “Now on to him before he can load again. That’s it! Pin him! Throw your revolvers away, or he’ll snatch one before you know where you are! Ah, I thought he was too strong for you! Mr. Hardcastle, I’ll put a bullet through you myself if you don’t instantly surrender!”

  And the fight ended with the bent man leaning in his stirrups over the locked and swaying group, as he brandished his revolver to suit deed to word. It was a heavy blow with the long barrel that finally turned the scale. In a few seconds Hardcastle stood a prisoner, the handcuffs fitting his large wrists like gloves, his great frame panting from the fray, and yet a marvel of monstrous manhood in its stoical and defiant carriage.

  “For God’s sake, Cairns, do what you say!” he cried. “Put three bullets through me, and divide what’s on the ground between you!”

  “I half wish we could, for your sake,” was the reply. “But it’s idle to speak of it, and I’m afraid you’ve committed a crime that places you beyond the reach of sympathy.”

  “That he has!” cried the sergeant, wiping blood from his gray beard. “It’s plain as a pikestaff now; and to think that he was the one to come and fetch us the very night he’d done it! But what licks me more than anything is how in the world you found him out, sir!”

  The hunchback looked down upon the stalwart prisoner standing up to his last inch between his two captors: there was an impersonal interest in the man’s bold eyes that invited a statement more eloquently than the sergeant’s tongue.

  “I will tell you,” said the horseman, smiling down upon the three on foot. “In the first place, I had my own reasons for knowing that Stingaree was nowhere near this place on the night of the murder, for I happen to have been on his tracks for some time. Who knew all about the dead man’s stroke of luck, his insane preference for hard cash, the time of his return? Mr. Hardcastle, for one. Who swore that he had met Stingaree face to face upon the run? Mr. Hardcastle alone; there was not a soul to corroborate or contradict him. Who was in need of many thousand pounds? Mr. Hardcastle, as I suspected, and as he practically admitted to me when we discussed the bad season on my arrival. I was pretty sure of my man before I crossed the boundary fence, but I was absolutely convinced before I had spent twenty minutes on his veranda.”

  The prisoner smiled sardonically in the moonlight. The policemen gazed with awe upon the man who had solved a nine days’ mystery in fewer hours.

  “You must remember,” he continued, “that I have spent some days and nights upon the run; during the days I have camped in the thickest scrub I could find, but by night I have been very busy, and last night I had a stroke of luck. I stumbled by accident on a track that led me to the place I had been looking for all along. You see, I had put myself in Hardcastle’s skin, and I was quite clear that I should have buried a lapful of gold and notes somewhere in the bush until the hue and cry had blown over. Not that I expected to find it so near the scene of the crime — I should certainly have gone farther afield myself.”

  “But I can’t make out why that wasn’t enough for you, sir,” ventured the sergeant, deferentially. “Why didn’t you come in and arrest him on that?”

  “You shall see in three minutes. Wasn’t it far better to catch him red-handed as we have? You will at least admit that it was far neater. I say I have the place. I say we are all going to it at two in the morning. I say, let us sleep till a little after one. Was it not obvious what would happen? The only thing I did not expect was to find him asleep with the swag under his nose.”

  Then Hardcastle spoke up.

  “I was not asleep,” said he. “I thought I was safe for an hour or two . . . and I began to think . . . I was wondering what to do . . . whether to cut my throat at once . . .”

  And his dreadful voice died away like a single chord struck in an empty room.

  “But Stingaree,” put in Tyler in the end. “What’s happened to him?”

  “He also has been here. But he was many a mile away at the time.”

  “What brought him here?”

  The crooked Superintendent from Sydney was sitting strangely upright in his saddle; his face was not to be seen, for his back was to the moon, but he seemed to rub one of his eyes.

  “He may have wished to clear his character. He may have itched to uphold the honor of that road of which he considers himself a not imperfect knight. He may have found it so jolly easy to play policeman down in Victoria, that he couldn’t resist another shot in a better cause up here. At his worst he never killed a man in all his life. And you will be good enough to take his own word for it that he never will!”

  He had backed his horse while he spoke; he turned a little to the light, and the eye-glass gleamed in his eye.

  The young constable sprang forward.

  “Stingaree!” he screamed.

  But the gray sergeant flung his arms round their prisoner.

  The gray sergeant flung his arms round their prisoner.

  “That’s right!” cried the bushranger, as he trotted off. “Your horses and even your pistols are out of reach, thanks to a discipline for which I love you dearly. You hang on to your bird in the hand, my friends, and never again misjudge the one in the bush!”

  And as the trees swallowed the cantering horse and man, followed by a futile shot from the first revolver which the young constable had picked up, an embittered admiration kindled in the captive murderer’s eyes.

  The Purification of Mulfera

  Mulfera Station, N.S.W., was not only an uttermost end of the earth, but an exceedingly loose end, and that again in more senses than one. There were no ladies on Mulfera, and this wrought inevitable deterioration in the young men who made a bachelors’ barracks of the homestead. Not that they ever turned it into the perfect pandemonium you might suppose; but it was unnecessary either to wear a collar or to repress an oath at table; and this sort of disregard does not usually stop at the elementary decencies. It is true that on Mulfera the bark of the bachelor was something worse than his bite, and his tongue no fair criterion to the rest of him. Nevertheless, the place became a byword, even in the back-blocks; and when at last the good Bishop Methuen had the hardihood to include it in an episcopal itinerary, there were admirers of that dear divine who roundly condemned his folly, and enemies who no longer denied his heroism.

  The Lord Bishop of the Back-Blocks had at that time been a twelvemonth or more in charge of what he himself described playfully as his “oceanic see”; but his long neglect of Mulfera was due less to its remoteness t
han to the notorious fact that they wanted no adjectival and alliterative bishops there. An obvious way of repulse happened to be open to the blaspheming squatter, though there is no other instance of its employment. On these up-country visitations the Bishop was dependent for his mobility upon the horseflesh of his hospitable hosts; thus it became the custom to send to fetch him from one station to another; and as a rule the owner or the manager came himself, with four horses and the big trap. The manager of Mulfera said his horses had something else to do, and his neighbors backed him up with some discreet encouragement on their own account. It was felt that a slur would be left upon the whole district if his lordship actually met with the only sort of reception which was predicted for him on Mulfera. Bishop Methuen, however, was one of the last men on earth to shirk a plague-spot; and on this one, warning was eventually received that the Bishop and his chaplain would arrive on horseback the following Sunday morning, to conduct divine service, if quite convenient, at eleven o’clock.

  The language of the manager was something inconceivable upon the receipt of this cool advice. He was a man named Carmichael, and quite a different type from the neighbors who held up horny hands when the Bishop decided on his raid. Carmichael was not “a native of this colony,” or of the next, but he was that distressing spectacle, the public-school man who is no credit to his public school. Worse than this, he was a man of brains; worst of all, he had promised very differently as a boy. A younger man who had been at school with him, having come out for his health, travelled some hundreds of miles to see Carmichael, whose conversation struck him absolutely dumb. “He was captain of our house,” the visitor explained to Carmichael’s subordinates, “and you daren’t say dash in dormitory — not even dash!”

  In appearance this redoubtable person was chiefly remarkable for the intellectual cast of his still occasionally clean-shaven countenance, and for his double eye-glasses, or rather the way he wore them. They were very strong and very common, without any rims, and Carmichael bought them by the box. He would not wear them with a cord, and in the heat they were continually slipping off his nose; when they did not slip right off they hung at such an angle that Carmichael had to throw his whole body and head backward in order to see anything through them except the ground. And when they fell, someone else had to find them while Carmichael cursed, for his naked eye was as blind as a bat’s.

  “Let’s go mustering on Sunday,” suggested the overseer— “every blessed man! Let him find the whole place deserted, homestead and hut!”

  “Or let’s get blind for the occasion,” was the bookkeeper’s idea— “every mother’s son!”

  “That would do,” agreed the overseer, “if we got just blind enough. And we might get the blacks from Poonee Creek to come and join the dance.”

  The overseer was a dapper Victorian with a golden mustache twisted rakishly up and down at either end respectively, like an overturned letter S. He lived up to the name of Smart. The bookkeeper was a servile echo with a character and a face of putty. He had once perpetrated an opprobrious ode to the overseer, and had answered to the name of Chaucer ever since.

  Carmichael leaned back to look from one of these worthies to the other, and his spectacled eyes flamed with mordant scorn.

  “I suppose you think you’re funny, you fellows,” said he, and without the oath which was a sign of his good-will, except when he lost his temper with the sheep. “If so, I wish you’d get outside to entertain each other. Since the fellow’s coming we shall have to let him come, and the thing is how to choke him off ever coming again without open insult, which I won’t allow. A service of some sort we shall have to have, this once.”

  “I’m on to guy it,” declared the indiscreet Chaucer.

  “If you do I’ll rehearse the men,” the overseer promised.

  “You idiots!” thundered Carmichael, whose temper was as short as his sight. “Can’t you see I weaken on the prospect as much as the two of you stuck together? But the beggar’s certain to be a public-school and ‘Varsity man: and I won’t have him treated as though he’d been dragged up in one of these God-forsaken Colonies!”

  Now — most properly — you cannot talk like this in the bush unless you are also capable of confirming the insult with your fists. But Carmichael could; and he was much too blind to fight without his glasses. He was, in fact, the same strenuous character who had set his dogmatic face against the most harmless expletives in dormitory at school, and set it successfully, because Carmichael was a mighty man, whose influence was not to be withstood. His standard alone was changed. Or he was playing on the other side. Yet he had brought a prayer-book with him to the back-blocks. And he was seen studying it on the eve of the episcopal descent.

  “He may have his say,” observed Carmichael, darkly, “and then I’ll have mine.”

  “Going to heckle him?” inquired Smart, in a nasal voice full of hope and encouragement.

  “Not at the function, you fool,” replied Carmichael, sweetly. “But when it’s all over I should like to take him on about the Athanasian Creed and the Thirty-nine Articles.” Only both substantives were qualified by the epithet of the country, for Carmichael had put himself in excellent temper for the day of battle.

  That day dawned blood-red and beautiful, but in a little it was a blinding blue from pole to pole, and the thermometer in the veranda reached three figures before breakfast. It was a hot-wind day, and even Carmichael’s subordinates pitied Dr. Methuen and his chaplain, who were riding from the south in the teeth of that Promethean blast. But Carmichael himself drew his own line with unswerving rigidity; and though the deep veranda was prepared as a place for worship, and covered in with canvas which was kept saturated with water, he would not permit an escort to sally even to the boundary fence to meet the uninvited prelate.

  Not long after breakfast the two horsemen jogged into view, ambling over the sand-hills whose red-hot edge met a shimmering sky some little distance beyond the station pines. Both wore pith helmets and fluttering buff dust-coats, but both had hot black legs, the pair in gaiters being remarkable for their length. The homestead trio, their red necks chafed by the unaccustomed collar, gathered grimly at the open end of the veranda, where they exchanged impressions while the religious raiders bore down upon them.

  “They can ride a bit, too, I’m bothered if they can’t,” exclaimed the overseer, in considerable astonishment.

  “And do you suppose, my good fool,” inquired Carmichael, with the usual unregenerate embroidery— “do you in your innocence suppose that’s an accomplishment confined to these precious provinces?”

  “They’re as brown as my sugar,” said the keeper of books and stores.

  “The Bishop looks as though he’d been out here all his life.”

  Carmichael did not quarrel with this observation of his overseer, but colorless eyebrows were raised above the cheap glasses as he stepped into the yard to shake hands with the visitors. The bearded Bishop returned his greeting in a grave silence. The chaplain, on the other hand, seemed the victim of a nervous volubility, and unduly anxious to atone for his chief’s taciturnity, which he essayed to explain to Carmichael on the first opportunity.

  “His lordship feels the heat so much more than I do, who have had so many years of it; and to tell you the truth, he is still a little hurt at not being met, for the first time since he has been out here.”

  “Then why did he come?” demanded Carmichael, bluntly. “I never asked him, did I?”

  “No, no, but — ah, well! We won’t go into it,” said the chaplain. “I am glad to see your preparations, Mr. Carmichael; that I consider very magnanimous in you, under all the circumstances; and so will his lordship when he has had a rest. You won’t mind his retiring until it’s time for the little service, Mr. Carmichael?”

  “Not I,” returned Carmichael, promptly. But the worst paddock on Mulfera, in its worst season, was not more dry than the manager’s tone.

  Shortly before eleven the bell was rung which roused th
e men on week-day mornings, and they began trooping over from their hut, while the trio foregathered on the veranda as before. The open end was the one looking east but the sun was too near the zenith to enter many inches, and with equal thoroughness and tact Carmichael had placed the table, the water-bag, and the tumbler, at the open end. They were all that he could do in the way of pulpit, desk, and lectern.

  The men tramped in and filled the chairs, forms, tin trunks, and packing-cases which had been pressed into the service of this makeshift sanctuary. The trio sat in front. The bell ceased, the ringer entering and taking his place. There was some delay, if not some hitch. Then came the chaplain with an anxious face.

  “His lordship wishes to know if all hands are here,” he whispered across the desk.

  Carmichael looked behind him for several seconds. “Every man Jack,” he replied. “And damn his lordship’s cheek!” he added for his equals’ benefit, as the chaplain disappeared.

  “Rum cove, that chaplain,” whispered Chaucer, in the guarded manner of one whose frequent portion is the snub brutal.

  “How so?” inquired Carmichael, with a duly withering glance.

  Chaucer told in whispers of a word which he had overheard through the weather-board wall of the room in which the Bishop had sought repose. It was, in fact, the monosyllable of which Carmichael had just made use. He, however, was the first to heap discredit on the book-keeper’s story, which he laughed to scorn with as much of his usual arrogance as could be assumed below the breath.

  “If you heard it at all,” said Carmichael, “which I don’t for a moment believe, you heard it in the strictly Biblical sense. You can’t be expected to know what that is, Chaucer, but as a matter of fact it means lost and done for, like our noble selves. And it was probably applied to us, if there’s the least truth in what you say.”