Stingaree took a last look at the barrel drooping from the slackened hand; the back of the hand lay on the ground, the muzzle of the barrel was filled with sand, and yet the angle was such that it was by no means sure whether a bullet would bury itself in the sand or in Stingaree. He took the risk, and with his bare toe he touched the trigger sharply. There was a horrible explosion. It brought the drowsy Superintendent to his senses with such a jerk that it was as though the smoking pistol had leapt out of his hand a thing alive, and so into the hand that flashed to meet it from the sling. And almost in the same second — while the double cloud of smoke and sand still hung between them — Stingaree sprang from the ground, an armed man once more.
“Sit where you are!” he thundered. “Up with those hands before I shoot them to shreds! Your life’s in less danger than mine has been all day, but I’ll wing you limb by limb if you offer to budge!”
With uplifted hands above his ears, the deformed officer sat with head and shoulders depressed into the semblance of one sphere. Not a syllable did he utter; but his upturned eyes shot indomitable fires. Stingaree stood wriggling and fumbling at the coil which bound his left arm to his side; suddenly the revolver went off, as if by accident, but so much by design that there dangled two ends of rope, cut and burnt asunder by lead and powder. In less than a minute the bushranger was unbound, and before the minute was up he had leapt upon the Superintendent’s thoroughbred. It had been tethered all this time to a tree, swishing tails with the station hack which Stingaree had ridden as a captive; he now rode the thoroughbred, and led the hack, to the very feet of the humiliated Cairns.
“I will thank you for that water-bag,” said Stingaree. “I am much obliged. And now I’ll trouble you for that nice wideawake. You really don’t need it in the shade. Thank you so much!”
He received both bag and hat on the barrel of the Government revolver, hooking the one to its proper saddle-strap, and clapping on the other at an angle inimitably imitative of the outwitted officer.
“I won’t carry the rehearsal any further to your face,” continued Stingaree; “but I can at least promise you a more flattering portrait than the last; and this excellent coat, which you have so considerately left strapped to your saddle, should contribute greatly to the verisimilitude. Dare I hope that you begin to appreciate some of the points of my performance so far as it has gone? The pretext on which I bared my foot for its delicate job under your very eyes, eh? Not so vain as it looked, in either sense, I fancy! Should you have said that your hand would recoil from a revolver the moment it went off? You see, I staked my life on it, and I’ve won. And what about that fall? It was the lottery! I was prepared to have my head cracked like an egg, and it’s still pretty sore. The broken wrist wasn’t your fault; it had passed into the accepted situation before you turned up. And you would certainly have seen that I was shamming sleep if we hadn’t both been so genuinely sleepy at the time. I give you my word, I very nearly threw up the whole thing for forty winks! Any other point on which you could wish enlightenment? Then let me thank you with all my heart for one of the worst days, and some of the greatest moments, in my whole career.”
But the crooked man answered never a word, as he sat in a ball with uplifted palms, and glaring, upturned, unconquerable eyes.
“Good-by, Mr. Superintendent Cairns,” said Stingaree. “I’m afraid I’ve been rather cruel to you — but you were never very nice to me!”
Sergeant Cameron was driving the spring-cart, toward sundown, after a variety of unforeseen delays. Of a sudden out of the pink haze came a galloping figure, slightly humped, in the inspector’s coat and wideawake, with a bare foot through one stirrup and only a sock on its fellow.
“Where’s Stingaree?” screamed the sergeant, pulling up. And the galloper drew rein at the driven horse’s head.
“Dead!” said he, thickly. “He was worse than we thought. You fetch him while I — —”
But this time the sergeant knew that voice too well, and his right hand had flown to the back of his belt. Stingaree’s shot was only first by a fraction of a second, but it put a bullet through the brain of the horse between the shafts, so that horse and shafts came down together, and the sergeant fired into the earth as he fell across the splashboard.
Stingaree pressed soft heels into the thoroughbred’s ribs and thundered on and on. Soon there was a gate to open, and when he listened at that gate all was still behind him and before; but far ahead the rolling plain was faintly luminous in the dusk, and as this deepened into night a cluster of terrestrial lights sprang out with the stars. Stingaree knew the handful of gaunt, unsheltered huts the lights stood for. They were an inn, a store, and police-barracks: Clear Corner on the map. The bushranger galloped straight up to the barracks, but skirted the knot of men in the light before the veranda, and went jingling round into the yard. The young constable in charge ran through the building and met him dismounted at the back.
“What’s the matter, sir?”
“He’s gone!”
“Stingaree?”
“He was worse than we thought. Your man all right?”
“No trouble whatever, sir. Only sick and sorry and saying his prayers in a way you’d never credit. Come and hear him.”
“I must come and see him at once. Got a fresh horse in?”
“I have so! In and saddled in the stall. I thought you might want one, sir, and ran up Barmaid, Stingaree’s own mare, that was sent out here from the station when we had the news.”
“That was very thoughtful of you. You’ll get on, young man. Now lead the way with that lamp.”
This time Stingaree had spoken in gasps, like a man who had ridden very far, and the young constable, unlike his sergeant, did not know his voice of old. Yet it struck him at the last moment as more unlike the voice of Superintendent Cairns than the hardest riding should have made it, and with the key in the door of the cell the young fellow wheeled round and held the lamp on high. That instant he was felled to the floor, the lamp went down and out with a separate yet simultaneous crash, and Stingaree turned the key.
“Howie! Not a word — out you come!”
The burly ruffian crept forth with outstretched hands apart.
“What! Not even handcuffed?”
“No; turned over a new leaf the moment we left you, and been praying like a parson for ‘em all to hear!”
“This chap can do the same when he comes to himself. Lies pretty still, doesn’t he? In with him!”
The door clanged. The key was turned. Stingaree popped it into his pocket.
“The later they let him out the better. Here’s the best mount you ever had. And my sweetheart’s waiting for me in the stable!”
Outside, in front, before the barracks veranda, an inquisitive little group heard first the clang of the door within, and presently the clatter of hoofs coming round from the yard. Stingaree and Howie — a white flash and a bay streak — swept past them as they stood confounded. And the dwindling pair still bobbed in sight, under a full complement of stars, when a fresh outcry from the cell, and a mighty hammering against its locked door, broke the truth to one and all.
The Villain-Worshipper
There was no more fervent admirer of Stingaree and all bushrangers than George Oswald Abernethy Melvin. Despite this mellifluous nomenclature young Melvin helped his mother to sell dance-music, ballads, melodeons, and a very occasional pianoforte, in one of the several self-styled capitals of Riverina; and despite both facts the mother was a lady of most gentle blood. The son could either teach or tune the piano with a certain crude and idle skill. He endured a monopoly of what little business the locality provided in this line, and sat superior on the music-stool at all the dances. He had once sung tenor in Bishop Methuen’s choir, but, offended by a word of wise and kindly advice, was seen no more in surplice or in church. It will be perceived that Oswald Melvin had all the aggressive independence of Young Australia without the virility which leavens the truer type.
Yet he was
neither a base nor an unkind lad. His bane was a morbid temperament, which he could no more help than his sallow face and weedy person; even his vanity was directly traceable to the early influence of an eccentric and feckless father with experimental ideas on the upbringing of a child. It was a pity that brilliantly unsuccessful man had not lived to see the result of his sedulous empiricism. His wife was left to bear the brunt — a brave exile whose romantic history was never likely to escape her continent lips. None even knew whether she saw any or one of those aggravated faults of an only child which were so apparent to all her world.
And yet the worst of Oswald Melvin was known only to his own morbid and sensitive heart. An unimpressive presence in real life, on his mind’s stage he was ever in the limelight with a good line on his lips. Not that he was invariably the hero of these pieces. He could see himself as large with the noose round his neck as in coronet or halo; and though this inward and spiritual temper may be far from rare, there had been no one to kick out of him its outward and visible expression. Oswald had never learned to gulp down the little lie which insures a flattering attention; his clever father had even encouraged it in him as the nucleus of imagination. Imagination he certainly had, but it fed on strong meat for an unhealthy mind; it fattened on the sordid history of the earlier bushrangers; its favorite fare was the character and exploits of Stingaree. The sallow and neurotic face would brighten with morbid enthusiasm at the bare mention of the desperado’s name. The somewhat dull, dark eyes would lighten with borrowed fires: the young fool wore an eye-glass in one of them when he dared.
“Stingaree,” he would say, “is the greatest man in all Australia.” He had inherited from his father a delight in uttering startling opinions; but this one he held with unusual sincerity. It had come to all ears, and was the subject of that episcopal compliment which Oswald took as an affront. The impudent little choristers supported his loss by calling “Stingaree!” after him in the street: he was wise to keep his eye-glass for the house.
There, however, with a few even younger men who admired his standpoint and revelled in his store of criminous annals, or with his patient, inscrutable mother, Oswald Melvin was another being. His language became bright and picturesque, his animation surprising. A casual customer would sometimes see this side of him, and carry away the impression of a rare young dare-devil. And it was one such who gave Oswald the first great moment of his bush life.
“Not been down from the back-blocks for three years?” he had asked, as he showed a tremulous and dilapidated bushman how to play the instrument that he had bought with the few shillings remaining out of his check. “Been on the spree and going back to drive a whim until you’ve enough to go on another? How I wish you’d tell that to our high and mighty Lord Bishop of all the Back-Blocks! I should like to see his face and hear him on the subject; but I suppose he’s new since you were down here last? Never come across him, eh? But, of course, you heard how good old Stingaree scored off him the other day, after he thought he’d scored off Stingaree?”
The whim-driver had heard something about it. Young Melvin plunged into the congenial narrative and emerged minutes later in a dusky glow.
“That’s the man for my money,” he perorated. “Stingaree, sir, is the greatest chap in all these Colonies, and deserves to be Viceroy when they get Federation. Thunderbolt, Morgan, Ben Hall and Ned Kelly were not a circumstance between them to Stingaree; and the silly old Bishop’s a silly old fool to him! I don’t care twopence about right and wrong. That’s not the point. The one’s a Force, and the other isn’t.”
“A darned sight too much force, to my mind,” observed the whim-driver with some warmth.
“You don’t take my meaning,” the superior youth pursued. “It’s a question of personality.”
“A bit more personal than you think,” was the dark rejoinder.
“How do you mean?”
Melvin’s tone had altered in an instant.
“I know too much about him.”
“At first hand?” the youth asked, with bated breath.
“Double first!” returned the other, with a muddled glimmer of better things.
“You never knew him, did you?” whispered Oswald.
“Knew him? I’ve been taken prisoner by him,” said the whim-driver, with the pause of a man who hesitates to humiliate himself, but is lost for the sake of that same sensation which Oswald Melvin loved to create.
Mrs. Melvin was in the back room, wistfully engrossed in an English magazine sent that evening from Bishop’s Lodge. The bad blood in the son had not affected Dr. Methuen’s keen but tactful interest in the mother. She looked up in tolerant consternation as her Oswald pushed an unsavory bushman before him into the room; but even through her gentle horror the mother’s love shone with that steady humor which raised it above the sphere of obvious pathos.
“Here’s a man who’s been stuck up by Stingaree!” he cried, boyish enough in his delight. “Do keep an eye on the show, mother, and let him tell me all about it, as he’s good enough to say he will. Is there any whiskey?”
“Not for me!” put in the whim-driver, with a frank shudder. “I should like a drink of tea out of a cup, if I’m to have anything.”
Mrs. Melvin left them with a good-humored word besides her promise. She had given no sign of injury or disapproval; she was not one of the wincing sort; and the tremulous tramp was in her own chair before her back was turned.
“Now fire away!” cried the impatient Oswald.
“It’s a long story,” said the whim-driver; and his dirty brows were knit in thought.
“Let’s have it,” coaxed the young man. And the other’s thoughtful creases vanished suddenly in the end.
“Very well,” said he, “since it means a drink of tea out of a cup! It was only the other day, in a dust-storm away back near the Darling, as bad a one as ever I was out in. I was bushed and done for, gave it up and said my prayers. Then I practically died in my tracks, and came to life in a sunny clearing later in the day. The storm was over; two coves had found me and carried me to their camp; and as soon as I saw them I spotted one for Howie and the other for Stingaree!”
The narrative went no farther for a time. The thrilling youth fired question and leading question like a cross-examining counsel in a fever to conclude his case. The tea arrived, but the whim-driver had to help himself. His host neglected everything but the first chance he had ever had of hearing of Stingaree or any other bushranger at first-hand.
“And how long were you there?”
“About a week.”
“What happened then?”
The whim-driver paused in doubt renewed.
“You will never guess.”
“Tell me.”
“They waited for the next dust-storm, and then cast me adrift in that.”
Oswald stared; he would never have guessed, indeed. The unhealthy light faded from his sallow face. Even his morbid enthusiasm was a little damped.
“You must have done something to deserve it,” he cried, at last.
“I did,” was the reply, with hanging head. “I — I tried to take him.”
“Take your benefactor — take him prisoner?”
“Yes — the man who saved my life.”
Melvin sat staring: it was a stare of honestly incredulous disgust. Then he sprang to his feet, a brighter youth than ever, his depression melted like a cloud. His villainous hero was an heroic villain after all! His heart of hearts — which was not black — could still render whole homage to Stingaree! He no longer frowned on his informer as on a thing accursed. The creature had wiped out his original treachery to Stingaree by replacing the uninjured idol in its niche in this warped mind. Oswald, however, had made his repugnance only too plain; he was unable to elicit another detail; and in a very few minutes Mrs. Melvin was back in her place, though not before flicking it with her handkerchief, undetected by her son.
It was certainly a battered and hang-dog figure that stole away into the bush. Yet t
he creature straightened as he strode into star-light undefiled by earthly illumination; his palsy left him; presently as he went he began fingering the new melodeon in the way of a man who need not have sought elementary instruction from Oswald Melvin. And now a shining disk filled one unwashed eye.
Stingaree lay a part of that night beside the milk-white mare that he had left tethered in a box-clump quite near the town; at sunrise he knelt and shaved on the margin of a Government tank, before breaking the mirror by plunging in. And before the next stars paled he was snugly back in older haunts, none knowing of his descent upon those of men.
There or thereabouts, hidden like the needle in the hay, and yet ubiquitous in the stack, the bushranger remained for months. Then there was an encounter, not the first of this period, but the first in which shots were exchanged. One of these pierced the lungs of his melodeon — an instrument more notorious by this time than the musical-box before it — a still greater treasure to Stingaree. That was near the full of a certain summer moon; it was barely waning to the eye when the battered buyer of melodeons came for a new one to the shop in the pretty bush town.
The shop was closed for the night, but Stingaree knocked at a lighted window under the veranda, which Mrs. Melvin presently threw up. Her eyes flashed when she recognized one against whom she now harbored a bitterness on quite a different plane of feeling from her former repulsion. Even to his first glance she looked an older and a harder woman.
“I am sorry to see you,” she said, with a soft vehemence plainly foreign to herself. “I almost hate the sight of you! You have been the ruin of my son!”
“His ruin?”
Stingaree forgot the speech of the unlettered stockman; but his cry was too short to do worse than warn him.
“Come round,” continued Mrs. Melvin, austerely. “I will see you. You shall hear what you have done.”
In another minute he was in the parlor where he had sat aforetime. He never dreamt of sitting now. But the lady took her accustomed chair as a queen her throne.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 477
