The Rogue's March Part 2

Part II

THE LAND OF BONDAGE

CHAPTER XXI

AS ASSIGNED SERVANT

The capital sentence on the convict Erichsen having been commuted to one of transportation for life, he was transported to New South Wales, where he arrived, in the official phrase, per Seahorse, in the early morning of Tuesday, 5th December, 1837.

Some nineteen weeks before, still earlier in the morning, his draft had been chained together in gangs of six, and marched from Millbank across the road and down the stone steps to the tug, which conveyed them to the convict-ship then lying at the Nore.

The voyage was not the worst of Tom’s experiences. The first few days they were all in chains, and his leg became excoriated through dragging the cruel harness in and out of his hammock. But presently the chains were struck off, and Tom did not earn a second dose of them. He distinguished himself in no way on board; in the usual attempt to seize the ship he bore no part, nor was it Tom who betrayed the ringleaders and saved so many lives. Yet he was fortunate enough to win the fancy of the Surgeon Superintendent, who employed him pri​vately during a great part of the passage. This officer was in absolute command of the convicts, and to Tom he was very kind indeed. So much so that at the very end of the voyage Tom asked the other to take his word between themselves that he was innocent. He never asked this of any man again. And the lovely harbour with the vernal shores said no more to his stinging soul than to that of the most hardened felon in the ship.

The exiles were landed and marched to Hyde Park Barracks, two hundred strong. It was quite early in the forenoon, yet the heat of the ground struck through their shoes, and the hot land-smell scorched their nostrils, as the ungainly detachment proceeded along the streets, all roving eyes and lurching sea-legs. Suddenly the air filled with a jingle as of inharmonious bells; and round a corner came a team of twenty men in grey and yellow patchwork, yoked to a waggon filled with stone and gravel; they had their chains to drag as well, and these made the mournful music wherever they went. One of the soldiers in charge of the newly landed draft chanced to catch Tom’s eye flashing misery and defiance. “Don’t you trouble your head about them,” cried he; “it’ll be your own fault, young fellow, if ever you come to that; there’s none on you need.”

Tom said nothing, but a convict near him called out, “I believe you, general! We’ve come out here to enjoy ourselves, and that’s what we mean to do.”

“And will, too!” said the soldier. “There’s plenty of us chaps would change shoes with you if we could,” he added below his breath; “assigned servants is more in demand than ever, and a good ’un gets wages just the same as a free man. You’ll all be snapped up before you’ve been in barracks a day. No, this ain’t them; ​this is the ’orspital; them’s the barracks, round the corner to the left.”

A high wall enclosed the sombre pile, which looked the more sinister against that sky of unfathomable blue. Immoderate sunshine and the tantalising proximity of the Governor’s pleasure-grounds put a point to the ominous contrast; and there were misgivings among those bold spirits that had looked forward to New South Wales as a land of exclusive cakes and ale.

“If they’re going to shut us up in there,” said one to another, “we might as well have stayed where we was in blessed old Noogit!”

“I tell you they won’t keep you above a day,” resumed the soldier. “And you’ll never see the place again unless you plays the fool and gets turned into Gov’ment. Them as does that comes back, of course, and has a bad time of it too. Hear that! Hear that!”

Over the wall, as the newcomers marched down one side of it, there came from the other a series of shrill screams; and ere they reached the gate, it was flung open, and out marched four men, carrying a fifth—screaming still—shoulder-high between them. The white face was turned to the sky, the naked trunk writhing in agony; and the blood was running out of the man’s boots as though he had been wading ankle-deep in it, while his leg-irons hung clanking from his legs.

“Aha!” said the soldier. “That’s a Tom-fool who’s got turned into Gov’ment, you see! They’re carrying ‘im across to the ’orspital, ’cause the cat’s been scratching of ’im.”

“The cat?” cried Tom, who was trembling all over.

“Ay, my lad; the one with nine tails; ’tis the commonest breed out here!”

​Tom never knew how his legs carried him through the barrack gates, and when the draft were drawn up within, and formally addressed there by the Deputy-Governor, he caught but little of the harangue. He felt deadly sick; his heart ached like a tooth; and for hours to come those piercing screams pursued his tingling ears. However, he supposed the punishment must have been timed expressly as a salutary warning for the newcomers; devoutly he hoped so; but he soon knew better. Next morning there were two floggings, and one again the morning after. It was, in fact, a daily detail at the Hyde Park Barracks, which were, on the other hand, the headquarters of several hundreds of the most desperate felons in New South Wales. Tom and his draft were only to remain there until assigned into private service, but the rest had all been “turned into Government” as unmanageable by their masters, and were in barracks for re-punishment. Their days were spent in road-gangs or in other organised labour about the town; and not a few of their nights in depredations winked at by the barrack officers.—

For the corruption of the place was as flagrant as the discipline was harsh. The very first night, when Tom was driven from his hammock by the fetid heat of the overcrowded dormitory, he witnessed an instructive incident from the window. It was the return of such a depredator, and the division of his spoil with the officer on duty. Tom soon learnt that burglaries and highway robberies were nightly occurrences in Sydney, and as often the work of convicts under nominal lock and key as that of the assigned servants who infested the streets after dark.

Meanwhile he was himself assigned to a resident in ​urgent quest of a “special,” or “gentleman convict,” as such as Tom were termed. The applicant was a genial greybeard, with a philosophic eye, which looked Tom well up and down at their interview.

“What I want,” said he, “is a tutor for my son. I hear you are a University man. May I ask what makes you stare?”

“I a tutor!”

“Well?”

“You can’t know what I was transported for.”

“Oh, yes, I do. I could wish it had been for something else, certainly; but that doesn’t make you any the less a University man. And the other specials seem to be a poor lot, and I mean to give you a trial. But we’ll drop that name of yours, which I’m afraid may be known in my house, and you shall start fair. In half an hour then, Jones, I shall call for you in my chaise.”

And Tom actually found himself quite a privileged member of a decent household before he had time to realise his good fortune. The other servants were ordered to treat him with respect. His pupil was put entirely in his charge. He had his meals with the family, and had revelled for one night in a deliciously clean bed and bedroom, when the master of the house came to him in the morning with a very wry face.

“It’s all up, Jones,” said that philosopher, with the blunt intimacy which had made Tom like him from the first. “My good wife has discovered who you are, and she refuses to leave her bed while you remain in the house. She has read of you in the English papers, confound them, and she simply won’t have you on the premises! It seems unreasonable when you consider that our cook was a bloodthirsty baby-farmer, our coachman ​a professional burglar, and so on right through the staff—habitual criminals every one—which I don’t think you are. Still there’s another side to it: there’s the boy to be considered, and though I think you’re the very man for him, a mother’s feelings must be studied in such matters. You see I like you well enough to be perfectly frank about the matter; but the fact is, the chaise is waiting for us outside.”

So ended that chapter, and Tom was back at barracks in time to hear the clank of the chain-gangs shuffling painfully out to work, and the swish and whistle of the morning lash. Those two instruments supplied the street-music of the convict city; there were few days and few hours when you might not hear their melancholy duet. To Tom the sound of it was still physical torture, the more unbearable after this cruel taste of better things. Nearly all his shipmates had been assigned and taken away in his absence. Only one other “special” was left, a London clerk transported for fraud. Tom’s late master (a friend of the Superintendent) was allowed to carry him off in Tom’s stead, and long afterwards the latter heard the curious sequel of his own misfortune: so thoroughly did his successor teach what he knew that both tutor and pupil were presently transported to Van Diemen’s Land for life.

The incident was sufficiently disheartening at the time, and yet it had its hopeful side. It revealed the possibilities of the assignment system, or rather its better possibilities, from the convict’s point of view. As a punishment it must needs prove a farce in a community which preferred to estimate convicts by their capacity as colonists, rather than by their crimes as felons. Such was Tom’s comforting reflection; for not ​yet did he realise how entirely the condition of the convict was dependent upon the character of the master; but having had one good master, though for so brief a period, he looked cheerfully for another.

The other, however, was slow to come. His false start seemed to tell against Tom with the authorities. They were in no hurry to assign him again, and presently he found himself the last man of his draft in the barracks, with his hammock the only one a-swing between the stanchions of the great dormitory upstairs. Then one morning he heard a row in the yard, and there was a very over-dressed, thick-set and thick-spoken young man abusing the officers because there were no convicts left.

“I tell you we applied for three, and I’ve come down expressly for them,” he spluttered out. “Over a hundred blessed miles I’ve come, from Castle Sullivan near the Hunter River, for two farm labourers and a groom, all properly applied for in lots of time. And just because I get a touch of the sun, and can’t come on the right day, I’m to go back empty-handed, am I? We’ll see about that. I’ll complain to the Board!”

“That won’t do no good. We’ve only one man left, and the Board can’t split ’im into three.”

“Oh, you have one, have you? Haul him out and let’s have a look at the lubber.”

So Tom was produced to receive the unsteady scrutiny of a swimming blue eye that told a tale; and was informed with an oath that he was a “special,” and they wanted none of that kidney at Castle Sullivan.

Great was Tom’s relief, for a coarser face he had seldom seen; but at this the officials remarked that it ​was a “special” or nothing; and the bleared eyes were on him once more.

“Come from the country?”

“Yes.”

“Saddle a horse?”

“Yes.”

“And ride him after?”

“Better try me.”

“Well, so I will! You be ready in an hour and a horse’ll be ready for you. I’ll go back with a groom if with nothing else!”

“Wait!” said Tom.

“What’s up now?”

“I’m supposed to have committed a murder,” said Tom through his teeth. “In one family they wouldn’t keep me—”

The other drowned his words with a bellowing laugh.

“You wont be the only one at Castle Sullivan!” cried he. “We don’t mind what you’ve done, bless you, so long as you don’t try it on again up there! If you do—” and he jerked a great close-cropped head in the direction of the barrack triangles, while a bloated lower lip stuck out like a tongue between his short fair beard and moustache. “There never yet was the lag that bested Nat Sullivan,” he added with another of his oaths; “and you don’t look the fool to try it on. So be ready in an hour sharp, or you look out!”

“Is he Nat Sullivan?” said Tom to the officers as the stout young man staggered off.

“Ay, ay,” said they; “that’s the celebrated Mr. Nat!”

“Celebrated?”

“They’re all that, you’ll find, are the Sullivans of Castle Sullivan. You wait and see. I sha’n’t say ​nothing to set you agen ’em. But I wish you joy of each other; don’t you, Bill?”

Bill laughed, and Tom troubled them with no more questions.

Mr. Nat did not come in an hour; he came in three, swaying in his saddle, but still managing to lead a pack-horse and a horse for Tom. His blue eyes were now half-closed, and Tom understood him to curse the sun and to mutter something about a fresh touch that morning. They rode off, however, and were near the outskirts of Sydney when Mr. Nat rolled quietly out of his saddle and lay insensible in the middle of Brickfield Hill.

Tom was at his side in an instant. No bones were broken; he was simply fast asleep. Tom shook him up, and managed to get him to the nearest inn, where he again fell asleep, anathematising the sun, and so never stirred for hours.

And the convict-servant stood over the grunting carcass of his free master, and now he marvelled at the system which sought to accomplish the amelioration of the felon by trusting him in such hands as these. The thing had not even the excuse of an irregularity. There was a brand-new Government document sticking out of a pocket of the loud check coat, within a few inches of the bloated face, and Tom guessed rightly that it referred to himself. Then there had been more preliminaries than he had thought; but that only made matters worse, since what was a scandal in itself was immeasurably more scandalous as part and parcel of a System.

Evening came, and Mr. Nat still lay snoring with his swollen lips wide apart. Tom had not left him yet, being partly occupied with his own thoughts and partly taken up with the various sounds of the inn. Some of ​these sounds were sinister, as when stealthy steps came along the passage, and an unseen hand tried the bedroom door, which Tom had locked. He did not care to leave the room, not knowing what the other might have in his pockets; but at last he did so, after turning the key behind him and putting it in his pocket.

He went first to the stables, where he was surprised to find the horses saddled and bridled in their stalls. He had unsaddled them himself after engaging the room for Mr. Nat. There was nobody about, however, to afford an explanation, and it occurred to Tom that the sooner they did get away the better. So he left the horses as they were, but looked into the tap-room on his way upstairs, when all he heard and saw confirmed his impression not only of that particular inn but of the widespread corruption of the convict town. A cattle-stealer was drinking with a constable, and openly boasting before the latter of his exploits; as Tom listened, however, he heard something else that interested him more. It was the sound of hoofs in the yard behind the inn. He darted out and met a man riding his master’s horse and coolly leading the other two.

“What are you doing with those horses?”

“What’s that to you? Hands off, or I’ll brain ye!”

“They’re my master’s. Come out of that saddle. Ah! you would, would you?”

And Tom, receiving the loaded whip on his forearm, sprang at the rider’s neck and brought him heavily to earth among a dozen hoofs. Then he caught and tethered all three animals, and returned to his man as the latter was sitting up and rubbing his eyes in the moonlight. He was a little horsy bowlegs, and Tom dragged him all ​the way into the tap-room in the sitting posture, only relinquishing him at the constable’s feet.

“Here’s something for you!” he cried. “Caught him in the act of riding off with my master’s horses!”

“Why, it’s my ostler!” roared the landlord.

“I was only fetching of ’em round to the door, ’cos I thought they was goin’!” whined bowlegs.

“It’s you that’ll get run in, I’m thinking,” remarked the constable severely to Tom.

“Fetching them round!” cried the latter. “Then why didn’t you say so, and what made you strike at me when I said they were my master’s horses? Oh, I see the kind of place I’m in!” And he rushed upstairs to the room, and nearly trod on something crouching at the door, that fled with a flutter, while a little instrument fell from the key-hole and rang upon the floor. Tom picked it up, unlocked the door, and strode in.

Mr. Nat took some waking, but started up at length with clenched fists and an oath.

“We’re in a den of thieves!” whispered Tom. “Don’t you remember me? Your new groom! We must get out of this as quick as we can!”

“Why, where are we?”

“At an inn: the ‘Bull and Tumbledown.’”

Mr. Nat whistled, and flung his legs over the side of the bed.

“One of the worst houses in Sydney,” said he. “Ring the bell, if there is one.”

There was one, and a woman-servant answered its summons.

“Send up the landlord,” said Sullivan, “and tell him to bring plenty of change. Now, landlord,” he continued when that worthy appeared with a lighted candle, ​“give me change out of that, and don’t you force me to give you any out of this!”

He presented a sovereign in his left hand, a pistol in his right; but it was the great besotted face at which Tom stood gazing. Besotted it still was, and brutal and low, but one virtue shone out of it in the candle-light. There was plenty of cool courage in the bloodshot blue eyes, and an indomitable determination about the pendulous lower lip.

“Sir!” whispered the landlord, falling back. “There’s a constable in the house. I shall fetch him up. Such an outrage upon a law-abiding citizen—”

“Law-abiding grandmother!” cried Mr. Nat. “I know all about you and your inn; who doesn’t? I never would have set foot inside such a den if it hadn’t been your infernal Sydney sun that bowled me over. You may know my name. I’m Nat Sullivan, of Castle Sullivan, near the Hunter River, and I never was bested by a convict yet, no, nor an emancipist either, my fine fellow! There, keep the rest; but you lead the way straight downstairs and out to my horses, or you may have something else to keep besides.”

In another minute they were in their saddles, and as they rode away Tom put a skeleton key in his master’s hand, saying he had picked it up outside the bedroom door.

“And you give it to me!” cried Mr. Nat. “You don’t keep it to use yourself? Well, well, you’ve not made a bad beginning, Erichsen. You looked after me when I was bowled over, and you saved my horses when most of you chaps would have been the first to take ’em. That landlord’s an old lag himself. I know how to treat the breed. I never was bested by one of you yet, ​so put that in your pipe and smoke it. But you’re a wonder, you are! Seen the inside of a Sydney pub and come out sober! Well, there’s one like that to every hundred inhabitants, to say nothing of the sly grogshops. It’s a warm place, Sydney, I can tell you. But the Sydney sun, that’s hotter still!”

It was under a brilliant moon, however, that Tom had his last glimpse of the town for several months to come. Nor did he ever see its sad sights again with the same startled eyes, nor hear its sad sounds with the same thrill of horror. It was a different nature—it was another man—that came back to Sydney after many weeks.

The exodus in the meanwhile proved a pleasanter experience than had at first appeared possible. The small adventure at the “Bull and Tumbledown” had established some degree of mutual regard between Mr. Nat and his new groom. Their ride up-country spread over the better part of a week, during which time the master suffered more than once as he had been suffering when the man first met him. But in the intervals he treated Tom with a certain stupid good humour, which, however, never for a moment concealed the capacity for an equally stupid cruelty, and the nearest approach to a quarrel on the way was occasioned by the brutal beating of the pack-horse, in which Tom interfered. They were good friends, however, on the whole, and once or twice Mr. Nat made quite an interesting guide. In Parramatta he pointed out a large building, like a poor-house, and offered to wait outside while Tom went in to choose a wife.

“A wife!” said Tom with a shudder. “What is the place?”

​“They call it a factory. It is for the women what Hyde Park Barracks are to you fellows. They go there till they’re assigned, and afterwards when they’re turned into Government. Cut in and take your choice! I’m not joking. I’ve chosen ‘em for our men before today, and you’re the sort that deserves one. Get a lightweight, and we’ll take her up on the pack-horse!”

Tom shook his head, and thought of Claire until they stopped at an inn where a new surprise awaited him. The resplendent landlord started when he saw Tom, and tilted a white top-hat over his eyes, but not before the latter had recognised a fellow-convict per Seahorse. They had parted in the barrack-yard, where Tom had seen the other carried off by a gorgeous female in a nankeen pelisse and bright green veil, to whom he had been assigned. Tom now caught a glimpse of the nankeen pelisse in the bar-parlour, and as they rode away he asked Mr. Nat whether convicts were ever assigned to their wives.

“They have been, often enough,” was the reply; “but it’s being put a stop to now. Why, some of the best shops in Sydney are carried on by convicts assigned to their wives, and on capital which was originally the proceeds of the robbery the husband was lagged for! The wife brings it out and is here to meet him when he lands! At least that used to be the dodge; but Bourke tried hard to put his foot on it, and if you hear of a case just let me know.”—

So Tom said no more.

But the most interesting roadside character was encountered at a contractor’s store much farther on the way, where Mr. Sullivan nudged Tom and made him take note of a portly man in a magnificent waistcoat, ​who sang a song in the most charming baritone while the travellers were having their supper.

“Do you know who that was?” said Tom’s master when they were once more on their way. “That was Hunt, the accomplice of Thurtell, who murdered a man called Weare. You remember it, do you? Well, that’s the man, and he just bears out what I say: we don’t care a kick what a convict has done in the old country so long as he don’t go doing it again out here. But there, I keep forgetting you’re one yourself; somehow or other you’re not like the rest; and you take my advice, and go on like you’ve begun.” As he paused, the voice of Hunt was wafted to their ears in a new song, that died very sweetly on the soft night air.

The latter stages of the journey were marked by looks of recognition wherever young Sullivan baited his horses, but by never a single look of welcome; and an ominous climax was reached when the little cavalcade passed a stockade and a chain-gang within twenty miles of their destination.—

Here was a long line of heavily ironed men, some eighty in all, strung together like beads on a rosary, and at work with pick and shovel beneath the burning sun and the eyes and muskets of the military. As the riders approached word seemed to go along the line, and face after face was raised with a curse and a howl as the horses passed. Such faces as they were! Tom had not seen the like in Newgate, nor aboard the Seahorse, nor yet, in such a number, in Sydney itself. Those, on the whole, were only on the lower slopes of degradation; but these had reached its lowest depths, and Tom rode by them with an aching heart and averted eyes.

His attention, indeed, became concentrated upon his ​companion, who had checked his horse instead of urging it forward, and was walking instead of galloping this horrible gauntlet. Tom could see but one sunburnt cheek and one cold blue eye; but the first kept its colour, the second never flinched, and the gross lip, that jutted out between beard and moustache, never quivered once all the way. Nor until he was well past the gang did Mr. Nat put spurs to his horse; but when he did, it was not to draw rein until they reached the next roadside inn; and there he vanished, to reappear next day with running eyes and shaking hands.

“I wouldn’t be assigned to him for something!” said the barman, with whom Tom made friends. “You might as well go to Norfolk Island straight as to Castle Sullivan. Tell you what, mate, I’d give him the go-by to-night, for you’ll never have a better chance. And see here, I’ll come with you, for I’m dead-sick of my job!”

Tom shook his head.

“No, no, my friend; he may be all you say, but he’s treated me well enough so far, and I mean to stick to him.”

“Oh, the young cove’s not the worst. It’s the old cove I was thinking of.”

“What old cove?”

“Dr. Sullivan, this one’s father.”

He had a father, then? Mr. Nat had never mentioned him. And the old man was worse to do with than the son?

Tom put these questions to himself, and then another to his friend the barman, after shortly telling the latter about the behaviour of the iron-gang. “Why was all that?” said Tom.

“Why? Because half them crawlers have worked for ​the Sullivans in their time. They get you flogged, and flogged, and flogged, till all the work’s flogged out of you: then they get you six months in the crawlers, and like as not that’s the end of you.”

“Why doesn’t somebody put a bullet through them both?”

“Because the coves have got the pluck. That’s their secret. They don’t know what fear is. So there’s seventy strong men up there, and over a hundred in harvest-time, and the whole boiling afraid of them two!”

Tom said no more, neither did he have much to say to Mr. Nat next day in their saddles; neither did Mr. Nat have anything at all to say to him before nightfall, so severe had been his latest “touch of the sun.” But towards evening they left the road; and as the moon was rising in a velvet sky, lights also broke upon them through some trees. Dogs innumerable began to bark. And as young Sullivan stooped to open a gate, he pointed across it to the lights, and said that there was Castle Sullivan at last.

“And hark you here,” he added, savagely, seizing Tom’s bridle on the other side, as though every redeeming trait was now left behind upon the neutral ground that they had traversed together; “hark you to this, and recollect it well! You’ve been right enough on the way, and you’ve the makings of a decent groom. But you won’t find me as easy up here as I could afford to be down the road; and one word about that sunstroke—”

He glared at Erichsen, then let the bridle go without finishing his threat; and without another syllable they rode through the trees towards the lights.

 CHAPTER XXI

CASTLE SULLIVAN

The new groom rubbed his eyes in the moonlight. He could have laughed aloud. English castles he had seen, Irish castles he had heard about, but what was this? A jumble of slab-huts upon the right, and facing these a wooden, one-storied, rectilinear eyesore: three sides house, the fourth a formidable palisade, and in their midst an arid courtyard overlooked by French windows and glass doors. No creeper clung to the whitened walls. No shrub softened the rigid angles of the yard, and the verandah was too shallow for real shade. Yet the site had been chosen on a ridge of red gums that had been left unfelled beyond the palisade, and rustled restfully above the slab-huts opposite, rendering the latter the more inviting quarter of the two.

The riders dismounted at a gate in the palisade, and as young Sullivan led the way into the courtyard, a tall bent figure, in a frogged coat and a plaited straw hat, stepped down from the verandah, and then stood still.

“What’s this?” cried an arrogant and aged voice. “Only one, eh? What have you done with the other two?”

“Couldn’t get them, sir,” responded Mr. Nat in a tone quite new to Tom. It was a very model of filial respect and dutiful subservience.

“‘Couldn’t get them, sir!’ Why, what d’ye mean?” the old man thundered. “We applied for two labourers and a groom. Why couldn’t you get them?”

“The fact is, I did,” stammered Nat; “only two out ​of the three were hopeless cases, in the last stages of—of—”

“Phthisis?” cried Dr. Sullivan, who was an old army surgeon, and the bugbear of sick convict and malingerers alike. “Not phthisis, eh?”

“That was it, sir! The very word the doctor used when I made him overhaul them. He said it was no use my taking them, as they’d certainly die on our hands.”

“Humph! he may have been right; but I’d trust a convict to sham death itself—with anybody but me!” said the old gentleman, looking hard at Tom. “I wish I’d seen them myself; however, I’ll take his word and yours, and complain to the Assignment Board—”

“I’ve done all that, sir,” hurriedly interrupted the son. “I stayed the week out doing nothing but complain. They’ll remember me, I promise you! It’ll never happen again to us. Then at the end of the week I couldn’t resist another Sunday, and you wouldn’t grudge it me, father, if you’d heard the sermons I heard in St. Philip’s Church, morning and evening! I must tell you about it later on.”

“You must—you must. No; I don’t grudge you that, my boy, heaven knows!” said the old man, mollified in a moment. He took a bamboo cane from under his arm, and rapped Tom smartly across the shoulders. “And what of this rascal?” he added. “What’s he good for?”

“Groom.”

“Can the ruffian ride?”

“Not so badly.”

“Understands horses, does he, and has behaved himself on the way?”

​“Yes, on the whole, very well.”

“Then let him take them round to the stables, and come back here for his supper. He may have it in the kitchen to-night; only recollect, you convict, that if you misbehave either there or anywhere else on Castle Sullivan, you’ll smart for it pretty quick and pretty heavy. Recollect that. You’re here as a convicted felon, not a free man, and I don’t care what you’ve done to get here; whatever it was, the punishment for it is scandalously light; but the punishment for anything you do amiss on my estate shall be all the heavier on that account. So now you know. And don’t you say you hadn’t a fair warning at the start.”

With this Dr. Sullivan shook his cane in the new groom’s face, and called his overseer, for whom he had directions to which Tom did not listen; he was more interested in a lighted door on the right, where stood a female on the threshold of what he conceived to be the kitchen, and whither Mr. Nat himself had thrown furtive glances. But now father and son went indoors arm-in-arm; the overseer came up, a gruff man with flaming whiskers; and Tom caught him also looking wistfully towards the lighted door, before he was bidden to “come this way.”

So he followed the fiery whiskers to the stables, a long log building some little distance beyond the house; and here Tom was so smart in unsaddling, and so quick to find chaff-bin and oat-sack and saddle-room, that his surly companion was moved to rude advances.

“You’re pretty handy,” he growled. “Been a groom before?”

“Only since we left Sydney.”

​“Well, you’re in luck, too; the groom here has a room to himself, next the saddle-room; come and I’ll show it you.”

The room in question was very small and squalid, with a fixed bunk and a foul paillasse; but Tom thought it would be delightful with nice clean straw; and to be alone at nights was to compass an unexpected and unspeakable luxury. Ginger-whiskers pointed out the other convicts’ quarters on their way back to the house. They were the slab-huts opposite the palisade. Two were large, the others all small; that was the overseer’s hut with the big chimney and the little verandah.

“And who’s the overseer?” inquired Tom. “Mr. Nat?”

“No, I am; and hark’ee, my beauty, here we are at the kitchen, and you’re a well-set-up youngster, ain’t you? But no games with the girl, or there’ll be trouble! In you go; you’ll thank me for the warning when you’ve seen a bit.”

Tom thanked him then and there, and was in the kitchen next moment. It was empty, but from the adjoining scullery there came a sound of scuffling, followed by a crash which arrested Tom’s steps. Spurs then jingled out of the scullery by an outer door; and in the inner one stood a fine young woman, with black hair dishevelled, and a broken piece of crockery in either hand.

“An’ me to pay for it!” Tom had heard her mutter; but in the doorway she stood without a word, her steel-grey eyes upon him till he coloured, when she flung the broken pieces on the dresser and clapped her hands.

“The first blush iver seen at Castle Sullivan!” cried she. “An’ is it the new groom ye are? Shake hands, ​then, and make frinds wid the cook. It’s Peggy O’Brine me name is; so now tell me yours, and all yer histh’ry, while I get ye as good a male as ye can hould.”

So he told her his name, but nothing more, and she looked at him closely as she laid the cloth. “Sure, it’s a special he is!” she murmured. “Poor man, I might have seen it wid half an eye.” And she sighed and clicked her tongue as she put meat and bread upon the board; then looked at him wistfully and long with her clear, bright eyes; for he had rested his elbows on the table, and had hidden his face, touched to the heart by the womanly kindness of her voice. He had heard nothing like it since that fatal night in April, now eight long months ago; nor, when he looked up, had he seen anything, from that night to this, like the womanly compassion in those Irish eyes.

She cut him some mutton and a slice of bread; she put the knife and fork in his hands; but he made no use of them.

“Ah, now, pluck up!” she coaxed. “Pluck up an’ ate.”

He made an effort, but could not finish what was on his plate.

“Your kindness has taken away my appetite, Peggy,” he said with a smile, as he pushed back his chair. “It’s the first I’ve had, from a woman at all events, for many’s the long month!”

With that he rose to go, but she got between him and the door.

“Glory be to God an’ it sha’n’t be the last!” said she, her bosom heaving and a tear in her eye. “Peggy’s your frind, remimber that, sorr; an’ it’s the cook can be the usefullest frind to the assigned servants. If ye’d ​only say out what it is that's throublin' ye so this minute!"

"Coming up here as a convict; that's all, Peggy."

"There's hundhreds more in thim huts forninst us!"

"That's no comfort, I'm afraid. You see I am very selfish, I think only of myself."

"But they're all convicts here. Ivery mother's son but the ould cove and Mr. Nat!"

"What, the overseer too?"

"Ginger? It's Ginger we call'm, an' a dacent man at most times is Ginger, tho' you needn't be tellin' 'm I said so. But faith! he's no betther than the rest of us; if he isn't a convict now he's a tickut-of-lave, an' it's ivery wan of us'll be that, sorr, if we live long enough."

"Yes? Don't 'sir' me, Peggy. Call me Tom. I'm not even like Ginger, you know. I'm a convict of the deepest and the newest dye!"

"An' what am I?"

"Not you, too, Peggy?"

"Me, too, Tom; an' it's siven year I'm here for. So don't you make such a song of it, me dear, or it's me ye'll be puttin' to the blush!"

Indeed he had done so already. And, to believe Peggy, the second blush ever seen at Castle Sullivan was still mantling her pleasant face when spurs jingled again in the scullery, and Mr. Nat stood on the inner threshold. Some moments he stood there without a word, a furious glitter in his cold blue eye—his lewd mouth showing through his beard like a gash. Peggy shrank back. Tom was wondering if the brute had ever struck her, when he was addressed in a voice that shook with ill-governed ferocity.

​“What are you doing here, Erichsen?” were the words.

“I have just had my supper. I was told to have it here.”

“Oh, you’ve had it, have you? Then why the devil haven’t you cleared out?” roared young Sullivan, losing all control. “I tell you what, Peggy, this man’s a cold-blooded murderer. That’s what he is, and that’s what he’s here for. Why they didn’t hang him, God knows; but they didn’t, so we’ve got the benefit instead. Let me never catch him in here again. He’d cut your throat as soon as look at you. Clear out, you gallows-bird, and show your nose inside the palisade again if you dare!”

Tom replied only with his eye, and only scorn was in its steady gaze. When the other ceased, he waited a little to ascertain if that were all; then he turned upon his heel, opened the door, walked out and shut it very quietly behind him.

There were high voices in the kitchen as he went his way. And Tom himself was less cool when he reached his room, where, indeed, he lay awake half the night still wondering whether Nat Sullivan had ever struck Peggy O’Brien, and whether Peggy would admit it if he had. But in the end he slept soundly on the clean straw with which he first took care to line his bunk.

Soundly but not long: for in the middle of the night, as it seemed to Tom, the clanging of a great bell brought him to his feet in a state of high alarm. He slid into his trousers and rushed out. It was that black hour before dawn, and at first in the failing starlight he could see nobody; then he descried a figure in a long coat parading to and fro before the huts; but the bell was silent, though still swaying from the twisted arm of a gigantic gum-tree, when Tom ran up and inquired of ​this man what it meant. He found he was speaking to the night-watchman, who said his business was to ring the bell, first an hour before sunrise, then half an hour later, and lastly when the sun appeared.

“So you’re to be groom?” added the watchman. “I wouldn’t swop my job for yours.”

“No?” said Tom.

“Not me! ’Cause why? I’m on all night, but off all day, so I see less of the coves than any other blessed man on the place. Now you’ll see more of ’em; and Lord help you if you trot out a lame nag or a piece of harness the old cove can’t see his ugly mug in! I wouldn’t be in your shirt for something; it’ll be stickin’ to your back by this day week!”

Tom was returning to his room, when a sash was softly raised in the main building, and there was Peggy at an outer window, in an inky shower-bath of pitch-black hair. She beckoned him with her finger, but transferred it swiftly to her lips.

“You did well! you did well!” she whispered. “I was in the holy terror lest you answered Mr. Nat; if you’d done that—”

She shuddered and shut her lips.

“Well, what if I had?” said Tom, beginning to feel sorry he had not.

“Niver ask me!” she returned. “Only bear in mind that what they’ll call ‘insolence’ is a crime out here. Give ’em cheek, an’ it’s twenty-five or fifty—an’ now I’ve tould ye. ’Tis well ye should know. There’s some poor feller from here gets it ivery Monday as iver is. But you mustn’t; so niver cheek ’em, me dear, and niver come near me kitchen anny more. Sure it’d be the dith of a young gintleman like you!”

​“Would it?” said Tom. “Well, never you fear, Peggy! “I’m not such a fool as all that, and I’ll give them no reason, you may depend.”

“They may be afther makin’ one, Tom dear; faith an’ they’d have one ready-made if they cot ye here! There’s the second bell. For God’s sake be off—an’ remimber Peggy’s words.”

“I’ll go when I’m ready, Peggy; not until; and don’t shut down that window, or you’ll take off my fingers. Your hand again! It’s to you I shall owe my whole skin!”

He gave her his hand; she took it between both of hers, and pressed it with a fervour that should have given him another warning on the spot. But her kind voice only put him in mind of Claire so far away: nor did he hear it again for some few days. Now and then she would wave to him from the kitchen window; but it was always to wave him back. More often he waved to her from the stable door; but she invariably shook her black head at him with the greatest vigour.

Meanwhile her words came true.

Mr. Nat had conceived a palpable spite against the new groom; and from things the latter heard in the convicts’ hut, where he went for his meals, he might have understood the reason; these same things making him the less eager to see very much more of Peggy the cook. Still he gave her a wave whenever he espied her in the distance, for he owed the girl much already: he was daily profiting by her good advice, since no day passed without its measure of wilful provocation from the ruffianly Nat. But Tom was not to be provoked by sneer or taunt or oath; moreover, he made an excellent groom, and being seen no more about the house, gave no further ​occasion to the enemy, who dropped his overt persecutions, but detested Tom the more for his unexceptionable conduct.

This feeling was intensified by the effect of that conduct in a certain quarter. Tom became quite a favourite with the despotic old army surgeon; and Mr. Nat went in constant dread of his “sunstrokes” in Sydney and on the road coming to his father’s ears. It was this dread that decided him to let Tom alone, and to bide his own time for revenge: for besides being privy to the son’s irregularities, and dangerously established in the father’s favour, the new groom had indeed done Mr. Nat an injury of which he himself was all unconscious. Days grew into weeks meanwhile; the old year burnt into the new; and one week-day was still much like another on this primitive Australian farm. When the third bell rang at sunrise, every hut disgorged its surcharge of convicts, and Ginger called them over like so many schoolboys in front of the palisade. Then the shepherds to their pastures, the ploughmen to the arable land, the bullock-drivers to their teams, and Tom to his stables for the livelong day. Such as could come were summoned to breakfast at eight, and to dinner at one, by the great bell clanging in its eucalyptian belfry; and all hands were recalled by it between eight and nine at night.

Sunday was a nominal day of rest which included two long compulsory services in the courtyard beneath a savage sun. Dr. Sullivan read the prayers with the voice of an executioner, his bamboo cane on the desk in front of him, for use as a baton or as an instrument of correction for the man who dared to smile or to whisper within his reach. The terrible old man would also take this weekly opportunity of animadverting on the lost ​souls and abandoned character of his convicts in general, with particular allusions to those whose enormities had earned them the lash during the preceding week. He never failed to assure future offenders that they would be punished without mercy in their turn, and would slash the desk with his cane to emphasise his words. So religion and ferocity ran hand in hand at Castle Sullivan; nor was hypocrisy very far behind. Mr. Nat led the hymns in a devout, sustained, stentorian bellow, while a maiden sister, the only lady of the establishment, whose voice the convicts never heard, and whose face they seldom saw but on these occasions, supplied a perfunctory accompaniment on the pianoforte.

Amid the branches of the red gums without, flocks of parrots would chatter mockingly, their vivid reds and yellows lighting up the sombre hues of those perennial leaves, that whispered none the less enticingly of cool siestas in the shade. Yet Sunday after Sunday these tyrannical observances were maintained and enforced; and the evangelical doctor loved to boast of the device whereby he had enforced them in the beginning. On the first Sunday nine-tenths of his men had announced themselves Roman Catholics. So he had drawn up these gentry in line outside the palisade, and there kept them standing out of earshot, but in the full glare of the sun, during the entire service. And on the Sunday following there was not a Roman Catholic among them.

What remained of their ruined day the convicts spent in breaking as many as possible of those Commandments which Dr. Sullivan had been dinning in their ears. Larceny, however, was the crime most in favour at the farm, whose boundaries were seldom exempt from that foul parasite of the convict, the squatter of the early ​days. He must not be confounded with the squatter of subsequent civilisation. The former was usually a ticket-of-leave man, who built himself a hut in an unoccupied spot, with a preference for the near neighbourhood of a plentiful contingent of assigned convicts. The squatter would supply the convicts with rum. The convict would pay the squatter with the only currency within his reach, namely that of stolen property. The squatter was sly publican and sly pawnbroker in one, and a pretty specimen of his class had his wigwam and his black gin on a creek not a hundred miles from Castle Sullivan.

Hither was Tom taken by one of his fellows on an early Sunday evening; half-a-dozen others were there before them; not one of these were sober when they arrived. And the strong fumes tempted Tom; smouldering misery was in flames at this chance of quenching it for the nonce. He might have followed suit had not his companion produced a screw-hammer in payment for the liquor. Tom glanced at the implement, and then at his mate.

“You’re never going to pay with that, Mac?”

“An’ what for no?”

“There’s the farm brand staring you in the face! It isn’t yours.”

“What’s aboot it? If a man mayn’t bilk the coves, wha may he bilk? They gie us nae wages for our worrk, so we maun help oursels!”

And as this was the principle of all present, and indeed of the average convict throughout the Colony, honest Tom had no choice but to turn on his heel and walk away amid the execrations of his fellows. But not a hand was raised against him; he had still the eye and the bearing that discourage a blow. Even the elder Sullivan ​had given up tapping and rapping him with that bamboo wand which was for ever quickening felon fingers and sowing black murder in felon hearts.

But the incident of the screw-hammer made an unpopular man of Tom among his fellows; and worse was to come of it. The theft was brought home to the man Macbeth, and the very next night Tom met him with a white, pinched face, and his coat on back to front.

“Why, Mac!” cried Tom. “What now?”

The foulest maledictions were his only answer: a white lip quivering with the words.

“What on earth have I done?”

“You ken weel. This, then!”

He turned his back, and Tom started back with horror. The shirt beneath the open coat was sopping red.

In vain Tom protested that he had never told a soul about the hammer. Nobody would believe him. His indignation and his sympathy were treated with scorn as so much hypocrisy. His name was execrated in the convict huts; and so much of the convict spirit survived in Ginger that he was with the men in this, and never spoke to Tom now. The overseer besides shared Nat Sullivan’s grievance against Tom: a furtive admiration for the girl O’Brien was one of his softer traits; and she was the same to neither of them now.

At the end of a month the groom’s truest friend was the terrific old doctor himself. Peggy was his friend indeed; but though her grey eyes watched him wistfully enough from the window, he seldom heard her full, rich brogue. Nor was it consideration for the girl that made Tom deny himself that small consolation; young Sullivan had forbidden him the house, and was sufficiently his enemy as it was. Indeed, the groom discovered ​he was becoming a bone of contention between father and son.

The son wanted to have him turned out of the stables and put to felling timber; the father would not hear of it.

The father granted him the usual good-conduct indulgences of tea, sugar and tobacco, in addition to the regulation rations; the son laid himself out to catch Tom smoking at night, and at once put a stop to the tobacco.

Then came the very hottest day of the summer, for which the son had waited. He had brought from Sydney on the pack-horse a quantity of new harness, saddles, bridles and the like, and he made the groom devote the very hottest day to seasoning the brand-new leather with castor-oil, to be rubbed into every inch of it, in the stifling heat of the little saddle-room. When Tom was finishing, nauseated with the smell, swollen with mosquito-bites, and in streams of perspiration from head to foot, Mr. Nat came in and patiently nagged at him. But even this did not compass the destruction of Tom’s skin: he perceived the design and defeated it with imperturbable civility.

Mr. Nat was driven into deeper plots: he had never been bested by a convict yet. And now at last Tom read revenge in the jaundiced blue eyes; but revenge for what? He felt more mystified than afraid. All he had to do was to keep his temper; but what had he done? To nobody on the farm had he breathed a word about aught that happened in Sydney or on the road. He never ventured within the palisade. What then was his offence?

One night as he lay puzzling his head about it, and yet half asleep, a sound startled him.

​It came from the saddle-room next door. Tom sat up in his bunk.

The sound was very thin and wholly metallic, as the scraping of a dinner-knife between the prongs of a fork; suddenly a bolt shot back with a little slam.

CHAPTER XXII

THE LAST STRAW

Tom sat still in his bunk.

“A licht! A licht!” whispered a voice that he knew.

“He’ll hear ye, Mac; he’s only next door.”

“What’s about it? I’ll slit his juggler if he daurs to interfere. Heard ye that?”

“I did. That’s better!”

The crafty groom was snoring where he sat, with one eye at a cranny in the rude partition between his lair and the saddle-room. In the latter there was as yet no light.

“An’ that’s better still,” muttered Macbeth, as one was struck. “Slit his juggler?” he repeated with a chuckle. “I wadna think twice o’t, the mosing blackguard! Now whaur’s thae saddles, for my hands is free?” And his teeth snapped on something that gleamed between them in the light.

“Wait a bit. I smell the oil. Aha! here’s one.”

“An’ here’s the ither. Dinna heed the bridles. Awa’ we go afore Jarman turns in.”

Jarman was the squatter on the creek; the hour was still short of midnight; and Tom, who had bounded ​lightly to the floor, now stood irresolute. In the end he let the rascals go. Their footsteps had already left the saddle-room; the groom listened and lost them in the night; then he felt about for his clothes.

He was thankful he had not waylaid the thieves at the saddle-room door; the field would have been too unequal, the consequences perhaps too serious for one and all. And he foresaw the neatest triumph now. Jarman’s name had given him a foregone victory, for now he knew the way to Jarman’s ramshackle hut, and the saddles should be back upon their pegs before morning: so full was Tom of confidence as he dressed himself in the dark. But the thought of betraying his comrades in captivity was as far from his heart as that of allowing his master’s saddles to be quietly stolen before his eyes. Stolen they might be, but only for the moment; he would call in Macbeth and his mate to see how nice they looked in the morning.

In a few minutes he was fully dressed, and dodging Roberts (the night-watchman) behind the convict huts. No other man among them would have found this precaution necessary; but the groom was an unpopular character, whom Roberts would have reported none the less readily after winking (as he must have done) at the theft of the saddles. With luck and ingenuity Tom managed to elude him, however, and was soon racing down the wooded slope where the timber was being felled; leaping the stumps as he ran, and steering by the Southern Cross for the southern boundary of the farm, which was, in fact, the creek on whose further bank the squatter was now encamped.

It was a perilously clear night. A white moon grizzled the peeling bark of a small forest of red gums; and the ​famous constellation burnt but feebly in the south. Tom kept his eye on it, however, and bearing slightly to his left, struck the creek at last out of earshot of the squatter’s hut. Here he paused to cool his feet in the delicious running water. His plan was to cross the creek and then reconnoitre the enemy’s position from the rear. And so well did it work out that Tom skipped behind a friendly trunk just as the thieves succeeded in making Jarman hear, who now appeared with his black gin in the mouth of their wigwam.

New saddles? What in thunder was the use of new saddles, or old ones either, to him? Where was he to stow them in the meanwhile? Did they want him to be landed with the swag on his hands, and lagged all over again, to oblige a pair of lubbers like them? And here Tom felt that a door would have slammed had there been one; as it was, the outraged Jarman came to a pause for want of breath, and Macbeth got in his word at last.

Tom could not hear it. But it seemed to make a difference; it made the very plainest difference in the squatter’s tone.

“What? what’s that? I don’t believe it!” cried Jarman in one breath. “Take your oaths to it, will you? Well, if it’s a fact, it’ll bear thinking about. Said all that, did he? And you think he won’t go and round on us after all? Well, then, come inside and we’ll talk it over. In you go, missus, and light up.”

Tom took a peep as the men followed the black woman into the hovel. They had left the saddles outside; but to snatch them now was impossible. The sacking that did duty for a door had been drawn aside and hitched to a nail; on the lighting of a candle stuck in a bottle within, some eager face was revealed to Tom whenever ​he dared to look from behind his tree. Even if he were not seen he would be heard. Besides, the party might break up at any moment.

So he stood where he was, and listened to the voices, but ceased straining after the words. Then a cork popped; the voices were raised in a minute; in less than ten he must hear every syllable, whether he would or no. But he would, for his own name was on their lips, coupled with hideous imprecations and the name of Mr. Nat.

“You savvy?” said the Scotchman’s mate, a young convict known as Brummy. “He wants to get the bloke his fifty, if not his spell in the crawlers too!”

“An’ sairves him richt!” cried Macbeth, with an oath. “Didna’ he squeak and get me my fifty for you screw-hammer? Man, but he’ll be squeakin’ fine the noo!”

“You’ve only to say Erichsen brought ’em,” added Brummy, “and you were too drunk to see what they were, or you’d never have taken them in.”

“He’ll know different!”

“Ay, but he’s going to pretend,” explained the Scot, “an’ you’ve just to do the same.”

“Then I’m to lug them back myself, ami?”

“First thing in the morning; and the cove’ll tip you the stumpy himself.”

“The young cove?”

“Yes.”

“Dinna we keep tellin’ ye it’s Nat’s idee? He thairsts for that man’s blood as much as I do mysel’. An’ I’d slit’s juggler if I got the chance!”

The villains went on talking for another hour. But the foul truth clogged Tom’s mind, and he took in but little more of what he heard.

​So it was not a theft, but a conspiracy; and the archconspirator was the beast that Tom had cared for in his cups; the petty tyrant whose property he was even now risking his life to rescue—from his own confederates! Tom ground his teeth. He would rescue it still. And not only Macbeth and Brummy, but Mr. Nat himself, should see the saddles on their pegs in the morning.

The villains went on drinking as they talked. Another cork popped; yet the moon was still high in the lucid heavens when the two convicts staggered off. Jarman at once put out his light; and, in a little, all was still but the leaves, the locusts, and the tiny tributary of the Hunter in which Tom had laved his feet.

He came from behind his tree. The saddles were still outside.

He stole near: nearer yet: near enough to hear Jarman and his gin already breathing heavily in their sleep.

But they might not be sleeping heavily; and what if they awoke? The stirrup-irons might ring together. Tom knelt down and crossed the leathers over the top of each saddle. The new pigskin might creak, for all the oil it had absorbed; in fact, it did, as Tom lifted the saddles; and he stood there with one on each arm, ready to fling them down and to fight for them still. But nothing happened. So he crept away.

This time he crossed the creek without dallying, and only halted within a few hundred yards of the farm buildings. Here he sat on a stump, mopped his forehead, and wondered whether he should take the trouble to elude the night-watchman a second time; and as he sat the moon twinkled in the four stirrup-irons, which shone ​like silver, they were so beautifully clean; and as he was admiring them it suddenly came home to Tom the groom that he had cleaned those stirrup-irons himself.

Yes! in spite of all, he had taken a sort of involuntary pride in his work. And that was another thing for which his fellow-convicts had cursed and hated him. But tonight he scorned and cursed himself for it, with twice their bitterness, and an oath broke into a sob as he caught up the saddles and started to his feet.

In a word, the sight of his own honest handiwork, so cruelly thrown away, drew blood from a heart that had remained adamant under studied provocation, and cool, but a minute since, in the face of monstrous treachery. To have done a hand’s-turn for such wretches! That was the intolerable thought. It awoke the reckless rebel that had slept so long in this tortured bosom. Not another stroke of willing work would he do; he would be as his fellows from that moment; only, beginning there and then, he would condescend to hide and dodge no more. So the groom marched boldly upon the gate across which Mr. Nat had pointed with his whip to the lights of Castle Sullivan, and would have slammed the gate behind him, but for one circumstance. Mr. Nat was leaning against it now.

Nor was he alone. The girl O’Brien was at his side. Tom was upon them before he could check his steps; but he did not try. He strode up to his enemy and stood before him without a word, but with a saddle speaking for itself on either arm.

“Well—well?” cried Mr. Nat. “What are you doing out of your room? And what—what—what have you got there?”

“The new saddles.”

​“So I see. My saddles. What have you been doing with them? Where did you find them, eh?”

The tone was loud and blustering, but uncertain and surprised. In the moonlight Tom looked his enemy coolly and steadily in the face. And the girl drew away from her companion and gazed at Tom, who never so much as glanced at her as he replied:—

“They were stolen. Thieves broke into the saddle-room and stole your saddles. I heard them and followed them, but I never saw their faces close to, and I wouldn’t swear to a voice. I followed them to Jarmant hut; and, you see, I’ve brought you your saddles back.”

Mr. Nat never said a word. His blue eyes glared fixedly at Tom, out of a white face, from which the girl O’Brien edged further and further away.

“No; I can’t tell you who the men were,” continued Tom. “But I can tell you who put them up to it. It was not a convict, Mr. Sullivan, but a meaner hound than any convict on your farm. One who has a special spite against me— the Lord knows why! So he bribed these men to take the saddles, simply in order to get me into trouble. What do you think of that? I overheard all about it out at Jarman’s hut. I heard his name, too. Would you like to know what it is?”

“Sure it’s himself—the dhirty divil!”

And Peggy O’Brien was at Tom’s side, with one hand clutching his arm, and the other pointing scornfully at the baleful blue eye and the vile, quivering lips of the younger Sullivan.

What followed was the affair of a moment. It was as if a mad bull had made a rush, though whether at the girl, or Tom, or both, it was impossible to say. Tom thought the first, dropped the saddles, and his right arm ​flew out from the shoulder. A sharp smack, a heavy thud, and Nat Sullivan lay in a heap on the ground, with a livid mark between the ear and the eye that lay upturned to the moon.

“Ye’ve kilt’m—ye’ve kilt’m!” cried the girl, clinging in terror to Tom’s arm.

“I hope I have,” he answered. “It will be a good thing done for all concerned.”

“Whisht! They’ll be afther hearin’ ye—look behind!”

Even as he turned, the gate swung open, and there was Dr. Sullivan himself, with his frogged coat flying, and his night-shirt flapping outside his nankeen breeches. The watchman Roberts was at his master’s naked heels, closely followed by Ginger the overseer, in similar dishabille. These two seized Tom, who showed no semblance of resistance, while the doctor knelt over the fallen man, and felt his heart.

“Only stunned,” said he, looking up. “But you shall smart for this, you miscreant, if you don’t hang yet! The very man he warned me against—the very man whose part I took against him! What have you to say for yourself, you ruffian, before I have you put in irons and locked up?”

“You saw the blow, Dr. Sullivan?”

“You dare to ask me? With my own eyes, you villain!”

“Then you also saw the cause.”

“Cause? What cause? As if there could be any!”

“He would have struck a woman if I hadn’t struck him first.”

“It’s a lie,” said a hollow voice from the ground. And a bloodthirsty eye covered Tom.

“Ha, my boy! Thank God you are no worse; but sit ​still and leave this dog to me. A woman, do you say? An impudent slut who’s at the bottom of the whole mischief, and shall go back to Government to-morrow! Be off, you hussy! Be off to your bed before I have you taken there by force!”

Peggy glanced at Tom, and only went at his nod; the tacit interchange brought Nat to a sitting posture with doubled fists.

“I was ordering her there myself,” he vowed. “I had found her prowling about.”

“A brazen baggage!” cried Dr. Sullivan. “Not another female will I ever apply for; they are ten times worse than the men. So you thought he was going to strike her, did you? Anything else, I wonder?”

“Nothing that you will believe. But he was at the bottom of a plot to get me flogged for nothing: he had bribed two of the men to steal those saddles that you see, and put it on me; but I followed them and had got your property back, when at the gate here—”

“I’ll stop his lies!” said Nat, and staggered to his feet, but the doctor pinned him by the arm.

“You will not! You will leave him to me,” said the father, sternly. He was the stronger man; the son stood quelled. “We know they’re lies,” the doctor added; “all convicts are liars. Have any two men been out of the huts to-night, Roberts?”

“Not one, sir—out of the huts. I can swear to that. How this one escaped me—”

“It makes no matter,” said Dr. Sullivan, gripping his son’s arm still. “The saddles are not the point. I saw the blow, and shall inquire into nothing else. The blow, you ruffian, you shall answer for tomorrow before the nearest magistrate. Now take him away. Clap him in ​the heaviest irons we’ve got. Come, make haste: let me see him in front of me!”

So Tom was led off, unresisting still, but scornfully silent now, between watchman and overseer; and the father stalked, and the son slouched, behind.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE COURT-HOUSE

The nearest magistrate was an Anglo-Indian of the name of Strachan, another employer of convict labour on a large scale, and a disciplinarian second only to Dr. Sullivan himself. The two were close friends, and indispensable to each other in certain ways. Both, in fact, were magistrates; but no magistrate was competent to deal judicially with his own offending convicts, and thus an interchange of mutual favours was kept up between the pair.

They would meet on Mondays at the courthouse situated midway between their respective strongholds, and at this courthouse Dr. Sullivan would oblige Mr. Strachan by sentencing any servant of the latter to as many lashes as his master liked, while Mr. Strachan was only too glad to do the same for Dr. Sullivan. So great was the mutual convenience, that either potentate was delighted to hold a special inquiry, in any exceptional case, to oblige the other; and one was held accordingly in the forenoon following Tom’s assault upon his master’s son.

A mounted messenger was despatched to Mr. Strachan, who sent back word that he would be at the court-house ​as soon after twelve o’clock as possible. And he arrived within a few minutes of Dr. Sullivan, his red-bearded overseer, and the culprit, who had spent the night in heavy irons, which he still wore.

The doctor led his brother-magistrate aside, and Tom, raising his lack-lustre eyes for once, watched them walking arm-in-arm in the sunlight for several minutes before entering the courthouse. Ginger stood by and told the constables the kind of man Tom was. Tom heard him without a word or a look. The constables agreed that, whatever else he was, he was evidently a sulky brute. Tom heard them too, but sat doggedly in the strong sunlight, with sullen eyes upon the two magistrates, whom he instinctively knew to be deciding his fate before the case began. Not a word had he spoken since the irons had been clamped upon his limbs, and clasped about his soul.

Not a word did he speak in the justice-room within. His attention, however, was engaged at the outset by the extremely moderate tone in which the charge was preferred against him. Dr. Sullivan, put on his oath, gave a perfectly true account of what he had himself seen and heard in the small hours of that morning. He even admitted, in response to a question from the Bench, his impression that his son was the first to raise a hand; and added, of his own accord, a hope that that circumstance would be taken into due consideration on his servant’s behalf.

Tom could hardly believe his ears. He was still lost in wonder at this extraordinary intercession, on the part of Dr. Sullivan of all men, when Mr. Strachan addressed him in a tone no less clement and benign.

“You are charged,” said he, “with a very grave offence, which you do not attempt to deny. In the ordinary course ​I should feel compelled to commit you to another Court, and your lightest punishment would be a term in the chain-gang, even if you were not sent straight away to Norfolk Island. It is your good fortune, however, to have been assigned to a humane and merciful master, who has spoken for you as I am bound to say I should not have done in his place. He has magnanimously made the most of the one slender point that might be urged in your favour. He has begged me to deal with you here and now. He is generously anxious to give you another chance, of which, for your own good, I would exhort you to take grateful advantage. Meanwhile, you have not me to thank, but Dr. Sullivan entirely, for the ridiculously inadequate punishment which I am about to order you. You will be taken into the yard, and you will receive fifty lashes with the cat-o’-nine-tails.”

At these words Tom turned very white, and opened his lips as if to speak, but shut them tight without a syllable. His dogged eyes gleamed, his handcuffs rattled, and his leg-irons clanked together as the constables took him by either arm and led him, without a murmur, from the room.

“Did I say too much?” asked Mr. Strachan, biting at a cheroot, when the magistrates were left alone.

“Not one word,” replied the doctor, cordially. “I am infinitely obliged to you for saying what you did—for the constables’ benefit, particularly. They seemed to see nothing wrong.”

Mr. Strachan shook his head “It was distinctly irregular, doctor. A clearer case for quarter sessions I have never heard.”

​“Perhaps not; but then I should have lost a most competent groom; and now, thanks to you, I shall keep him.”

“Are you sure he will be worth keeping after this?” asked the Anglo-Indian, sucking at his cheroot, which was but a shade darker than his withered face.

“Worth keeping? He will be better worth it than before. It does them good.”

“That is not my invariable experience,” said Mr. Strachan, shaking his head again.

“But it is mine,” cried the doctor. “They are never any good until they feel your power. They never feel your power until they have first felt the lash:” And he emphasised the sentiment by giving the table a cut with his cane.

“I have not always found it so,” maintained the other. “In your place I should have let that man go to quarter sessions. There are the makings of a desperate criminal in him, or I’m much mistaken.”

Dr. Sullivan flushed and brightened beneath his white hairs, like a man on his mettle. “Desperate criminal?” he repeated eagerly. “He’s one already, my dear sir; and all the better! We’ll see what we can do to tame him. We’ll see what we can do to break his spirit! You know what my son says, Strachan? He never was bested by a convict yet; it would never do for him to remain bested by this one; and that’s another reason why he mustn’t slip through our fingers just yet. No; we shall show him who are his masters; we shall bend or break his spirit as I bend—”

He sprang up, with his bamboo cane, and rushed to the door, as a sudden outcry arose in the yard. At the door, however, even Dr. Sullivan paused aghast.

​“Strachan —Strachan!” he cried. “Good heavens! You were right! Look here!”

What had happened will be the better understood when it is explained that the court-house was not a house at all, but a mere ring of weather-board huts, of which the justice-room was one, the lock-up another, the constables’ quarters a third, and a store and a stable a fourth and fifth. The yard thus formed was furthermore enclosed by a brushwood fence, broken only between the stables and the justice-room, where there was a gate instead; and, in the very centre of this open space, blotting the edge of the deep sky, and scoring the dazzling earth with shadows like scars, stood that worse than gallows, at which men were beaten into brutes, and brutes into devils, week after week throughout the year.

A sergeant and two constables formed the garrison of this lodge of law and order in the wilderness. The sergeant was an emancipist; and of the trio, only one had come to the country on his own account. The third was actually a convict at this very time, and a glaring ruffian into the bargain. Originally a butcher-boy (who had robbed his master in the City Road), he still smacked of the slaughter-house, with his raw red face and cruel eye; and on this young felon devolved the congenial task of administering the lash.

In such hands was Tom led to the triangles, with a white face, but quickened eyes. The ticket-of-leave overseer was also of the party, filling his pipe and grinning to himself between his flaming whiskers, like a man prepared to enjoy the thing thoroughly. The sergeant, however, made him stand back a little, though with a wink, as he touched the culprit on the shoulder.

​“Come, my lad,” said the sergeant, confidentially, “it needn’t hurt you, when all’s said and done!”

Tom looked at him in faint astonishment.

“We ain’t obliged to lay it on that thick,” pursued the sergeant, in the same confidential tone. “It’s all left to us. It needn’t hurt him, need it, mates?”

“Not if he comes up to the mark; but he won’t—no fear!” said the ex-butcher, who had got the cat, and was practising with it upon the woodwork of the whipping-frame.

“We’ll ask him,” said the sergeant. “We’ll give him the chance. Will you come up to the mark, my son, or will you take it hot?”

Tom looked at his inquisitors with a sullen, puzzled expression, and chanced to see the overseer, at a little distance, shaking his head and touching his pockets.

“Not got any?” cried the sergeant.

“You ask him,” returned Ginger.

“Gut no money?” said the sergeant. “That’s what we mean by coming up to the mark, you know.”

“A pound apiece,” suggested the free constable. “That’d soften the job.”

He stared at them in dogged defiance.

“I told you so,” said the butcher, throwing down the cat. “Let’s truss him up.”

“Even a pound between us—” the sergeant had said, when the butcher began to grumble, and Tom’s lip to curl; and this settled it.

“Up with him!” cried the sergeant. “We’ll teach you to sneer at us, my game-cock! Stop a bit, though. His legs won’t stretch in these here irons. Who the blazes put them on?” And the zealous officer knelt ​himself to unfasten a pair of anklets, coupled by a short but massive chain, and employed quite illegally by Dr. Sullivan on his farm.

A pair of figure-eight handcuffs had been locked upon Tom’s wrists at the same time; but both his wrists and his hands were small, and during the night he had found that he could slip out of these at any moment. He was out of them now before a soul dreamt of it—so slyly did he stand to have the shackles off his feet.

The heavy-handled scourge lay on the ground; its raw-faced wielder was half-way out of his coat; the other constable was talking to Ginger in the shade; the sergeant had undone the second anklet, and was just rising from his knees with the pair.

Next moment he was on his back in the dust: and Tom was planted before the triangles, with the scourge caught up by the thongs in his two hands, and the heavy handle whirling round his head.

The butcher rushed at him with one sleeve still in his coat; and received the butt-end of his pet instrument full upon the forehead, where a great green wart sprang out as if by magic, even as he reeled away. It was at this there arose the outcry which brought Dr. Sullivan to the justice-room door; and the sight that staggered even him was the sight of his groom, with the blood all flown from his face to his eyes, gnashing his white teeth, and whirling that thick oak handle round a head of wavy yellow hair. Tom had not improved in looks since his arrival in New South Wales. But at that moment there was a fineness in his ferocity, a sublimity in his despair, which, were not lost upon both the gentlemen now watching from the door. Mr. Strachan, for one, beheld a fellow-man fighting for a manhood that was more to him than ​life, against a degradation worse than death; and he wished himself back at his farm.

Not so Dr. Sullivan, whose consternation lasted but a moment. The next, he was in the thick of it, rallying the constables, flourishing his cane, and leading a rush which made the rebel slip beneath the triangles and take to his heels. The pack followed, all but Dr. Sullivan, who now fell back, with the sun glistening on his white hair, and a gnarled hand shading his eyes.

Tom plunged between the lock-up and the store, and ran round the fence to the left, like a rat in a ring, but it was too high for him at every point. The pack doubled, and had hemmed him in, when he swerved and was through them, leaving Ginger on the ground with redder whiskers than before. The Anglo-Indian, at the justice-room door, was irresistibly reminded of his youth at Rugby, and had an old cry in his throat, when he recollected himself and gulped it down in time. The convict was rushing straight for the outlet between stables and justice-room. The pack were at his heels; in front of him the gaunt old doctor stood his ground like a grenadier, with his bamboo cane, and the open gate and a tethered horse beyond.

Mr. Strachan stood petrified by sheer curiosity as to what would happen next; it never occurred to him to interfere.

He thought the doctor must give way. The doctor did no such thing; he stood fast with his cane as though it had been a sabre; and Tom, whirling his weapon still, whirled it high into the sky, and bowed to the doctor because he could not strike him down. As he bowed, the bamboo slashed his shoulder, and would have cloven him to the ribs had it been steel; next instant he was ​overpowered; and they dragged him back to the triangles, as Dr. Sullivan turned to his brother-magistrate with a heightened colour and sparkling eyes.

“A hundred!” cried the doctor, in his most dictatorial voice.

“A hundred what?” asked Mr. Strachan.

“Lashes!” said the doctor, wiping his forehead with a red silk handkerchief. “You can’t give him less after this. I’d like to make it two! But we needn’t haul him in again to hear it. Just give the order out here.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Strachan, nervously. “I decline to give it at all.”

“Decline to order him another fifty for a bloodthirsty outrage like this?”

“Yes, I do.”

“You must have taken leave of your senses!” cried the domineering doctor. “Or is it that you sympathise with the man who felled my son?”

Mr. Strachan turned a deeper yellow.

“You know me better than that, Dr. Sullivan!” he cried hotly. “Sympathise with a convict! It’s not that at all. It’s because it’s irregular. I doubted whether it was a case for summary jurisdiction in the beginning. I know it isn’t now. And I’ll have no more to do with it.”

“You won’t? Then I will!” said Dr. Sullivan. “I’ll take the responsibility upon myself!”

“I won’t be a party to any further irregularity,” said Strachan, “and it’s a clear case for quarter sessions, if ever there was one. That’s my only point. The man deserves it, of course.”

Yet he retired into the justice-room and shut the door, but failed to shut out the rasping sound of Dr. Sullivan’s voice, exultantly doubling the sentence, and crying to the ​ex-butcher to lay on the whip-cord as he had never laid it on before.

“Trust me!” came the reply through the open window. “Look at my forehead, sir. I’ll cut his bowels out for that!”

Mr. Strachan sprang up and shut the window with a bang. He was strangely shaken. Many were the floggings he had ordered, or inspired, and even witnessed, without a qualm. There was a something in this man’s face that had appealed to him and troubled him from the first. As he shut the window there was a something else in the white sheen of the doomed nude back over yonder that made him feel instinctively there was the remnant of a gentleman, tied up for whipping like a cur. And this conviction made the Anglo-Indian, who was the remnant of a gentleman himself, more uncomfortable than he had felt for years.

He turned his back on the window and sat down, listening against his will, in the very chair from which he had delivered pre-arranged judgment. He heard it once, and winced and twitched his shoulders, as though the stroke had fallen on them. He heard it again. He began mumbling the end of a new cheroot and listening to the flies on the window-pane, whose buzzing had suddenly become very loud. But louder yet were those horrible sounds outside; and even more horrible was the exultant croak of the old doctor at regular intervals between the sounds.

“Comb your lashes, my good man!” his rasping voice kept crying. “Comb those lashes—comb those lashes!”

Strachan found himself counting them, with that striking face still before him, and those desperate eyes waiting upon his as they had waited here while he was delivering his mealy-mouthed address; and looking at him as they ​had looked for one moment when he was done. A white stare of incredulity, a flash of reproach, another of contempt, and a back turned disdainfully with a shrug. That was all—but it had burnt the magistrate at the time—it would burn him in the retrospect ever after.

To stop counting he put his thumbs in his ears (always with an eye on the door so that none should surprise him in that position), but “Comb those lashes!” came to them still, and then he began listening for another voice and a different cry. He listened for these in positive terror, with the perspiration dripping from his nose, and his ears moaning like the sea beneath both thumbs. However, no voice reached them but that of the savage old doctor, crying out about the lashes up to the end. Then came a pause. Mr. Strachan made sure it was a pause, dried his face, put his thumbs in his arm-holes, and tilted back his chair. His features were sufficiently composed when Dr. Sullivan strode into the room with a deeply dissatisfied air.

“Well?” drawled Mr. Strachan.

“Not a sound!” growled the doctor. “Not a moan; but I’ll break his spirit yet! I’ll break him, or I’ll know the reason why!” And he ground what teeth he had, and wiped his wrinkled forehead with the red silk handkerchief.

“Bravo!” cried Mr. Strachan.

Dr. Sullivan looked up sharply, but took this expression of enthusiasm to himself, as a tribute to that indomitable and ferocious will which was his pride.

“You know me, Strachan,” said he. “What I say I mean; and if you’d backed me up just now, and stopped outside, you’d know why I say it. Not—one—solitary—groan! But I’ll break him yet; upon my soul I believe 

CHAPTER XXIV

THE LOCK-UP

The sergeant had looked into the lock-up for the last time that night. He had made his last overture to the prisoner, had cursed and cuffed him for a sulky dog, and so taken leave of him for the night. Not a word had Erichsen uttered in all these hours. He had answered no question, replied to no taunt, nor yet once raised his eyes from the ground: there he sat, with a damp blanket about his torn body, and his rough yellow head between his hands. Food had been put before him, and remained there still. A pannikin of tea stood cold, and sour, and black with drowned flies, upon the ground. The flies were the worst of all his outward ills. But the shocking torments of a brain cruelly cleared by pain and weakness were worse than the flies.

And now he was alone for the night; the key had been turned in the padlock, and put in its place on the beam above; the sergeant’s bluster had died away, and the sergeant’s footsteps followed suit. Across the yard there came a laugh, an oath, a good-night ironically shouted, then a throwing-off of boots that jingled, and a shutting of doors. Now all was still, and in the lock-up the stillness was as unbroken as elsewhere. He never stirred but to shrug away a fly. The moon shone in through holes in the tin-lid roof, through crevices in the matchwood walls; and in the soft, sifted light he sat immovable. It was such a prison as a man of spirit could have broken with preposterous ease. But this one had no spirit left; he was no longer a man. His precious manhood had ​been beaten out of him like dust from a carpet. And the sense of that irrevocable loss bit deeper than the glutted flies.

Was it a horse outside against the brushwood fence? The sound was the first Tom seemed to have heard for many years. In his blackened brain it struck a first inappreciable spark of interest. He listened. Then came another and a nearer sound, as of something torn. He listened eagerly. What could it be? Minutes passed; there were no more sounds until the padlock was tried, and a hand went feeling for the key. Tom raised his head for the first time as the moon streamed in through the open door, when he perceived that it was Peggy’s bare feet, which had made no noise. With that he lowered his head again, for there was no place in it even for surprise. But unconsciously he gave a moan.

She went upon her knees beside him, and flung out her arms, but drew them back with a shiver from that loose-spread blanket. “Tom!” she whispered. “Speak to me, darlin’. It’s Peggy come to see how y’are.”

He never spoke, never looked up, nor gave any sign that he heard her words—unless it was that his bowed head hung more heavily than before.

“It’s Peggy O’Brine,” the girl pursued, with a sob in her throat. “Sure an’ ye’ve not forgotten Peggy the cook? It’s to comfort ye I’ve come, dearie, an’ haven’t I the right? Ah then, an’ wasn’t it all through me it was?”

The sob got loose, and she was wringing her hands and gazing at Tom through her tears as though her heart would break for him. In return he stared heavily at her, but shook his head as her meaning came home to him.

“Indeed an’ it was,” persisted Peggy. “Only for me ​you niver would have struck’m at all. An’ to think it was meself that warned ye in the beginning, an’ went an’ drove ye to it in the ind! If only you had let ’m strike me dead at his feet! It’d have been betther than that—an’ this!”

Still he looked at her without a word; and still there was no light, no life, no feeling in the look; but only dumb and dead despair.

“You thought I liked ’m!” exclaimed Peggy wildly. “They’ve been tellin’ ye their black lies in the huts. It’s little they know how it’s been between us from the shtart. I’ll tell ye this, Tom, betther a hundhred times be the man he’s a spite agin than the girrl he’s his wicked eye upon. That’s Mr. Nat for ye; an’ I hate ’m—I loathe ’m—’tis God’s truth I’m tellin’ ye. Tom, dear, he cot me out there last night—I niver wint out wid ’m. He cot me prowlin’ about, as he said, an’ that’s the truth, too, though he tould it. I couldn’t sleep for thinkin’ o’ the two o’ yez. It’s well I knew he was up to some divil’s work at last. I’d seen’m talkin’—an’ what do you suppose he’s up to now?” asked Peggy, going off at a tangent. “What do you suppose he’s do’n’ at this moment? Lyin’ dhrunk on his bed—lyin’ ded dhrunk for the shame of ’t! You knocked ’m down. You knocked ’m down. He won’t get over ’t till his dyin’ day. Nobody ilse iver so much as lifted a han’ agin ’m on the farm. But glory be to God! you knocked ’m down!”

There was more than unthinking exultation in her tone; there was a very singular sort of pride also, and this as unthinking as the other, it was so ingenuous and plain. But Tom saw nothing with those dreadful eyes, and heard but little beyond her soothing brogue. And then she did think, and saw a mark on the blanket in a rod of moon​light (for she had shut the door), and cried out to God to forgive the most selfish woman in all the world.

She had thought of herself, and not of Tom. She had talked about herself, and not about Tom. In her selfishness she had forgotten what she had brought him; and a medicine-bottle of pilfered milk and rum was at his parched lips in an instant. She made him drink of it, and drink deep; and mutton sandwiches, deliciously cut and salted, she put between his teeth with her own fingers, bite after bite, as though he had been her infant. And all the time she was railing at herself for forgetting this and being the most selfish woman in the world; while he ate and drank from her tender hand and never said a word.

But when this was over he took that hand in his; and so they sat, as it seemed for hours, in a thin rain of filtered moonshine. Still his eyes were steadily downcast the whole time—thus they missed the happy tears in hers.

At last he spoke, and it was terrible, for she could not understand a word; then he coughed and tried again, and said, “God bless you, Peggy—only there isn’t one in New South Wales!” And that left them both silent, and the girl grieving openly, for almost as long again.

Then he said quite quietly:—

“You know I’ve been in the condemned cell, Peggy. But it was nothing to this. My God, it was nothing to this!”

Peggy pressed his hand.

“The condemned cell at Newgate,” he went on. “I was there up to the very last night, and heard the people taking their places to see me swing. Well, that night was nothing to this. And if they had hanged me in the ​morning it would have been nothing—nothing—it would have been nothing—”

The hoarse voice broke, sob after sob shook the tortured body, and the girl glowed with shame to find herself the useless witness of an agony so supreme. But his tears dried hers and bound their fount; it froze her heart to hear and see him. She was afraid to speak to him, to touch his hand. She withdrew a little, and her bare foot pressed a cold oasis on the warm ground; she stooped and picked up a coin.

“Ha!” cried Tom.

His voice was very bitter now, but under control in a moment.

“Where did it come from?” asked Peggy with the coin to a shining crevice.

“I am ashamed to tell you;” and he ground his teeth; “but you will never guess. From a greater brute than either of the Sullivans. He came to look at me just afterwards. I was steaming like a horse in this blanket, and he came and gloated over me, and flung me a farthing—a farthing!—the very beast who ordered me the lashes and pretended to be so kind.”

“A farth’n’!”

“Yes. God help him if ever I get his yellow throat between these ten fingers!” and they were clutching murderously in the air, and there was murder in every vibration of the husky voice.

“Sure, an’ it isn’t a farth’n’ it is at all.”

“What is it, then?”

“A sov’rin!”

And the soft Irish brogue was rich with honest satisfaction. She showed him the coin in triumph. He regarded it with a leaden eye.

​“A sov’rin!” repeated Peggy, with enthusiasm. “Stick it in your pockut, an’ be grateful iver afther to Peggy’s bare fut!”

He shook his head.

“You won’t?”

Another shake.

“’Tis sinful pride I call it,” remonstrated the girl. “The kind man meant well—”

“The kind man!”

“An’ isn’t he?”

“I owe him a bit already,” replied Tom. “Let me settle that first.”

“But this he meant well, man; this is no farth’n’—”

“So much the worse. He thought to heal the wounds I owe him with a sovereign, did he? His conscience and my wounds! May they lie open, and sting and throb and tickle all at once, as they’re doing now, till I have my fingers at his throat!” The girl looked so frightened that he gulped at his passion, and said, “You keep it yourself, Peggy, like a good girl; you deserve a purse of them for all you’ve done for me this night. Why, what now?”

He sat alone in the lock-up; the girl had stolen swiftly out. In the unconscious egotism of his grief and shame, this simply puzzled him. So he sat in the moonbeams, blinking at the moon, until she returned and once more closed the door.

“All’s safe,” she told him cheerfully. “I heard the thraps snorin’ in their slape.”

“Had you heard something else?”

“I had not.”

“Then what was wrong?”

“Is it why I went out?” said Peggy, fixing him with ​an eye that was cheerful too. “To dhrop that sov’rin to the very bottom of their well; an’ it’s we will dhrop it, too, if you plase.”

Tom held out his hand.

“I’ve offended you, Peggy. God knows I didn’t mean to; but I’m capable of all that’s brutal to-night; you see what they’ve made of me already! Forgive me, Peggy. I’ll never forgive them. I’ll be even with every one of them, curse them! curse them! and then I’ll swing as I should have done a year ago. I’m sorry I didn’t keep that pound—to give it him back for his coffin!”

It was terrible to hear him; his voice was very low, and full of fresh tears that made it all sound worse. Peggy asked him what he meant to do.

He meant to die, but not of the lash—the rope; he meant to hang as he should have hung the year before. If only he had! If only he had! But at last he recognised the fate reserved for him by a Providence he blasphemed, so now he would meet it half-way. He was sorry he had not done so long ago. He was sorry he had not driven a knife through Nat in the very beginning; but it was never too late to kill and die; it was only too late to die with a whole skin; and again his sobs and blasphemies were horrible to hear. Yet Peggy listened patiently, and gradually soothed him with a tender, tolerant, womanly word here and there; so that at last he looked at her through his tears (for he was utterly unmanned) and asked her, out of pure curiosity, what he had done to make such an enemy of Mr. Nat.

Peggy resumed her cheerful manner.

“An’ don’t ye know?” said she, masking a trembling lip with a smile. “Is it no notion ye have at all?”

​“None whatever.”

“Arrah, Tom, ’tis in love ye are entirely!”

At these words, which took him cruelly by surprise, he gave her a kind of wounded glare that was their confirmation, whereupon she forced a giggle, and asked him whom he supposed Nat had suspected him of being in love with.

Tom wearily gave it up.

“Be thinkin’ a minute,” said Peggy self-consciously.

“Not you, was it?”

Peggy nodded.

“But what nonsense!” he exclaimed.

“An’ it was all that,” said Peggy.

“I mean we never saw each other. And was that all he had against me?”

“No; there was a little more than that.”

She hesitated.

“What?” he asked.

“More of his nonsense then, for he thought I was as bad as you.”

“Idiot!”

“Idjut indeed,” said Peggy sadly.

“When we hadn’t exchanged a dozen words!”

Not a dozen? Not many dozens, perhaps; for up to to-night Peggy had them every one by heart. She was not so sure that she would be able to remember all they were saying now; she was not so sure that she should want to. But she steeled herself to answer cheerfully. And he guessed nothing then, for to speak of love was still to think of Claire; and to think of Claire was to pray that never, in this life or another, might she know or dream what had befallen him that day. But even with the prayer in his heart he remembered there was ​no God to hear it; and was retracing his steps in this blind alley of despair, when Peggy took his hand and flashed a suggestion before his mind.

Why should he go back to the farm at all—to be bullied and beaten to death or desperation in a cruel and unequal war? He told her in reply what he calmly proposed to do, and her blood ran cold to hear him; then common-sense came to her aid, and she showed him the folly (rather than the wickedness) of his diabolical plans. He listened sullenly, but said he could not answer for himself after this, and pretended to take less than he really did to the suggestion that he should run away there and then; according to Peggy, there was not another minute to lose.

Tom wanted to know where he was to run to, but he began feeling about for his shirt. Peggy found it for him, and noticed, with a pang of instinctive jealousy, as the blanket fell apart in his movements, a mysterious something that he wore next his breast like a scapula. It was sewn up in oiled silk, which glistened in the feeble light; and in the bitter intuition that this precious possession was a packet of true love’s letters, she made him ask his questions twice.

Peggy then told him he must run due east for the sea, for it was but thirty miles from there; and she had a good mind to run with him, since they were going to turn her into Government without fail. This she said with a laugh, but he made no answer. His face was drawn with pain at every movement; it reminded Peggy of some scraps of cotton-wool that she had brought for him to put next his lacerated skin; and a grateful look he gave her was her comfort and her hope, as she left him to fight his own battle with his shirt, and set her​self to pulling down the brushwood fence. A breach was easily and not noisily made; and both moon and stars were still crisp in the sky when Tom painfully followed the girl’s lead, and the two plunged together into the open bush.

“Djue east,” repeated Peggy, stopping in the first thicket. “D’ye know the Southren Cross now? I’m afther misrememberin’ it meself.”

“Up yonder, Peggy. Those five.”

“An’ as like a cross as a han’-saw! But as ye know ’t ye can steer djue east by ’t, an’ djue east lies the say. If you’re wantin’ wather on the way, let the Southren Cross shine in your face an’ that’ll bring ye to the river. I heard ’em say so as I waited table.”

“I know, Peggy, I know. And when I get to the sea—if ever I do—well, at least my bones can sleep in it, instead of in this pestilent land!”

He stood eying her, eager to be gone, and yet reluctant to show ungrateful haste.

“An’ why would they?” cried Peggy. “It’s manny a convict has escaped on raf’s before ye, so why wouldn’t you? Only fetch up wid the say an’ there’s hope!”

“Then, Peggy, there’s no time to lose.” And his hand was out in an instant.

“Ah then, Tom, an’ must I be lavin’ ye?”

Her voice was altered.

“This is not the way to Castle Sullivan, Peggy; it’s the very opposite direction; and I’ve got you into trouble enough, goodness knows.”

Her lips parted as though more arguments were on her tongue; but it was upon his white face the moon was shining, and his eagerness to go, and go alone, was now transparent.

​They have made you crule, Tom,” said Peggy, with a sudden sad dignity. “Good-bye. Go your ways. God bless you!”

“Cruel to you?” he said densely.

“Yes, crule to me! To me that brought ye mate and dhrink; to me that’d—”

“But what can I do?” he asked her in the same dull tone. “I am grateful to you with all the heart they’ve left me; but they tried their best to cut it out, and I believe they have. Make allowances for me, Peggy, and only tell me what I can do!”

“Take me wid ye, Tom,” she whispered.

“To the sea?”

“An’ further!”

“My dear, how can I? If they follow me alone I can fight them alone until I drop and die. With you I couldn’t.”

“An’ wouldn’t we dhrop and die together?”

And now there were tears in her voice that held his own tongue bound; and now a light in her eyes that shot a ray through his brain at last. He understood, and waited for his heart to bleed for her. When it would not, a great groan came from his soul.

“I can’t help it, Peggy,” he mumbled, in his shame; “it’s as you say! They’ve cut my heart out—cut it clean out, they have!—and a cruel brute is all I can ever be now. Forgive me, my girl—and let me go. Never think twice about me. I’m not worth it—a brute like me! Peggy—Peggy—”

He had tried, in his weakness, to put his arms about her, upon an impulse of pure sorrow and gratitude, that flickered within him like the last ember in a fire. And the convict girl had turned so fiercely that her black hair ​swept and stung his face, as she broke away from him once and for all. He saw her bare feet flashing in the moonlight; they fell too softly for his ears. But he heard her sobbing as she ran. And he pitied himself the more passionately for the little he found it in him to pity her.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE LITTLE GREY MAN

To abscond from assigned service was to break yet another law of the land of bondage. And though he little knew it (but cared less), Tom Erichsen was now liable to further transportation—even to Norfolk Island—and that for life.

Six months in a chain-gang was, however, a likelier term; he might even get off with another fifty lashes, and doubtless would, if he fell alive into the ruthless hands through which he had slipped at last. He set his teeth at the thought. It should never be. They might take his body—there would be one or two more to go with it when they did.

The stars were still sharp in the sky. They remained so for some hours longer, when a breath of wind blew them out like candles, and day broke, or rather burst like a shell.

Meanwhile Tom had struck a creek, waded a mile in it to destroy the scent—waded within a stone’s-throw of Jarman’s hut—turned tail in a panic—and waded back, and miles further, in the opposite direction. In ​the creek also he slaked his thirst and laved his wounds. He had turned his back on it when the sun rose. And towards the rising sun he ran and ran until there was a great belt of blue beneath it in the sky; then hid for the day in a tiny clump of trees in the midst of an open plain.

Here he slept for hours, yet dreamt but one dream—of baying dogs and cantering hoofs. When he awoke the first sound was actually audible, but far away and growing fainter. It passed altogether, and he fell asleep again. Awaking a second time, he found the stars back in the sky, but as yet no moon. And Tom was deadly faint for lack of food.

Also, his wounds were so stiff that he could scarcely stir, every movement caused him pain; yet he struggled up, and tottered east, with those five fixed stars shining feebly upon his wan right cheek and haggard profile.

How long this continued Tom could never tell. It might have been hours later, or only minutes that seemed like hours, when the climax came. All he ever knew was that his head was by this time very light; and that the moon was no higher than the trees when it shone upon the stray wether bleating piteously in his path, which was to stand out terribly in his mind ever after. Yet up to that moment a forty hours’ fast had been broken but once—with sandwiches. It was either this or lingering death.

The moon won clear of the trees; it shone into the glutted eyes and on the blood-caked mouth and fingers of as desperate and abandoned a young convict as the settlement contained.

He pushed on now with a new and dreadful energy. He thought he smelt the sea. The country, however, ​was still well timbered; and instinctively, rather than with conscious precaution, the fugitive made his line where the trees were thickest. He was now steering jealously by the moon, with his head thrown further back the higher it sailed; thus it was that a little later he tripped and staggered without seeing what it was that had caught his foot; but it felt peculiar, and after a moment he turned round, stood still, and went back.

It was the dead body of a man.

The body had not a rag upon it.

Tom knelt to examine it by the moonlight, and a cold thrill ran down him which he resented when he had time to think; it showed there was something human in him yet.

The body was that of a very swarthy man, with wonderful white teeth upon which the moon shone and glistened in the ghastliest manner; and pierced ears from which the ear-rings had been brutally torn; and a chapfallen blue chin. Tom thought the man had not been many hours dead; what puzzled him was the apparent absence of a mortal wound where the other evidences of foul play were so glaring. When found, however, the wound itself puzzled him much more; it was at the back of the sunburnt neck, and might have been a bullet-wound, but Tom had never seen one before; nor would he have expected a bullet to drill a hole so clean and round.

He now behaved as though he had been tripping over murdered men all his life. He had not only recovered his composure, he was able to glory in it as a sign that his heart was dead after all, and so past bleeding for anything or anybody any more. At this moment he raised his eyes, and his new-found composure was at an end.

​A light flashed through the trees into his eyes: a tongue of flame from some camp-fire.

Tom listened. No voices reached his ears save those of the nocturnal bush. The fire was farther off than he had thought.

He got up, and first walked, then crept, towards the light. The colony was infested with bands of bushrangers. What if here were one, and this corpse their handiwork? Now Tom thought of it, one particular and most notorious band had been depredating this very part of the country ever since the New Year. He had heard envious reports of the villains in the convicts’ huts at Castle Sullivan, and especially had he heard of their terrible Italian chief, said to be an outlawed brigand come to seek fresh fortunes in New South Wales. Of the merciless ferocity of this free alien the most horrifying stories were afloat. Yet the worst of these but feebly expressed one who shot men from behind, stripped their corpses, and tore the very rings from their ears.

Tom crept near the fire in a personal fright curiously exhilarating in its intensity. He might almost have been a free man once more—worth robbing—worth murdering for his money. The novel sensation brought back a momentary whiff of unconscious self-respect. It was just the little thought of having a life worth taking once more; of being anything to anybody but a beaten dog; and it came and went and was forgotten in the same moment.

The next, he was gazing on a curious scene; and his fears were also at an end.

In the light of the camp-fire four men were sitting solemnly at whist; and three faces more innocently ​intent (for the fourth was turned the other way) Tom had never seen in his life. On his left sat a long-limbed stripling whom the others addressed as Slipper while they shuffled and cut and criticised his play; it was clear that Slipper was a novice, though an anxious student of the game. His partner was a wall-eyed man without a smile; neither did Tom hear a word from the one whose black hair and sullen shoulders were towards him, but opposite whom (facing Tom) sat the visible life and soul of the party.

This was a little elderly man, with grey tufts upon his bloodless cheeks, and horn spectacles pushed halfway up a singularly benevolent brow. He sat tailor-wise, like the rest, but played his cards in a way of his own. He had only one hand for the job; his right arm terminated in a polished hook with a cork at the end of it; but there knelt at his side a gigantic aboriginal, who threw down each card as the player touched it with the cork. Such was the party. At the first glance Tom had looked anxiously for the bloodthirsty Italian brigand; but he soon forgot his existence in the presence of this innocent group, who were not even playing for money.

Tom heard their horses champing hard by beyond the firelight; set them down as a party of drovers; and stepped fearlessly among them the instant the rubber came to an end. The wall-eyed one immediately drew a pistol, while Slipper leapt to his long legs with a knife. But the man with the spectacles ordered them both to put away their weapons and sit quiet; and they both obeyed.

“I saw him some time ago,” said he, lowering his glasses (as he had done once before while Tom was looking on), “and I am very much obliged to him. He ​didn’t interrupt our rub, as a more thoughtless person most certainly would have done. He is a well-bred young man, and I like the looks of him. Do you hear, sir? I like the looks of you; but what on earth’s the matter with your mouth?”

Tom hung his head and told his story. At its conclusion the little grey man insisted on shaking left hands with him.

“You’re the kind of young fellow I like to meet,” said he. “A runaway convict, of course?”

The question was terribly abrupt, but Tom told the truth.

“There, there, never mind!” cried the little grey man. “You’re not so singular in that respect as your sensitive imagination would appear to suggest. In fact, you are not the only one in the present circle; so you see that you may hold up your head again, and even trust us with further particulars. May I ask from whose service you have fled?”

Tom hesitated: if they should carry him back!

“You would rather not say!” exclaimed the little man. “Very natural, very natural; but what if I can guess? What if I said his name began with S, and considered that of his homestead hardly justified by the facts, save insomuch as every man’s dwelling is his Castle?”

Tom’s face convicted him. It was transfigured with amazement. The travellers exchanged significant glances, and proceeded to regard him with an interest obviously redoubled.

“How did you know?” he cried.

“I knew nothing. I only guessed.”

“But how?”

​“More convicts abscond from that particular establishment than from any other in the Colony. Then I perceive that you are suffering from fifty lashes—”

“A hundred!”

“Indeed?—and more convicts are flogged on that farm than on any other in the land. A nice place! I know something about it—I intend knowing more.”

Slipper laughed.

“But you mustn’t let a hundred lashes depress you,” resumed the little grey man, in his smooth and soothing voice. “Why, my friend Wall-eye here had sixteen hundred in three years—on the same farm, mind you!—before he came to me. What do you think of that? But it’s high time I presented you to my friends. That’s Wall-eye, this is Slipper, and over there you see De Gruchy scowling at you; but don’t be frightened; he’s been scowling at us all the whole evening,” said the little man, with a gleam of his eyes behind their glasses. “You needn’t trouble your head about De Gruchy! The heathen’s name is Peter Pindar; he will provide for your needs in one moment; and my name is Hookey Simpson, at your service!”

His manner all through had been so softly grandiose as to point the humour of this anti-climax, which, however, was now lost upon Tom. He was too busy trying to remember where he had heard the name of Hookey Simpson before. And he had remembered nothing when soap and water were put before him by the blackfellow, followed immediately by a supply of lukewarm mutton, which kept him silent for some time.

Meanwhile his entertainers kept silence, too; but replenished the fire and lit their pipes with the burning brands; and rested their eyes on Tom in a medi​tative fashion while he ate. It was he who became communicative when he had finished. Suddenly thinking of it, he told them of the ghastly discovery he had made among those very trees, about an hour before.

The effect was curious. Neither Hookey Simpson nor Wall-eye nor Slipper seemed in the least surprised or perturbed; but De Gruchy showed teeth as white as those of the corpse, and ground them horribly; and Hookey Simpson fixed his spectacles upon De Gruchy, leaning forward with the tip of his hook between finger and thumb.

“The fact is,” said Tom, “I thought it must be the work of that Italian brigand-fellow.”

All but De Gruchy burst out laughing.

“And when I first saw your fire,” he added, “I thought you must be his band!”

All but De Gruchy laughed louder than before. De Gruchy hid his sullen, foreign face in his hands. And the little grey man held up his hook for silence.

“We are!” said he.

“What? Bushrangers after all?”

“The band you speak of.”

“Then where’s the Italian?”

“You saw him for yourself about an hour ago!”

And the little man’s eyes were twinkling through their horn-rimmed lenses as if he had made a joke. But there was no more laughing outright, though Tom heard Slipper chuckle and De Gruchy snarl. As for himself, he was shuddering in the most mortifying fashion under the fascinating spectacles of the little grey man.

“That was your leader!” he stammered out.

“So he flattered himself.”

​“And I thought it was his handiwork!”

“It was mine,” said Hookey Simpson coolly; indeed, a benign smile accompanied the confession, as though it were a public service he had performed, with the utmost mercy. But Tom thought of the stripped body with the torn ears; and those living faces, lit up by the crackling camp-fire, lived ever after in his mind, in the yet more lurid light of this dreadful revelation.

The high forehead, the twinkling spectacles, the grey tufts and the polished hook of the elderly man; the broad, keen, flashing blade with which Slipper sat paring his finger-nails; the wall-eyes, hard, dead stare; the knotted hands that hid De Gruchy’s face, and the blue-black hair in turn hiding half his fingers; the harmless playing-cards upon the ground; the ruddy, genial fire; and the white, the watchful moon, peering through a screen of trembling leaves: all these were as pieces of a mosaic, inlaid at this instant in Tom Erichsen’s brain, for him to carry there to his grave.

“So you killed him yourself?” he found himself saying at last, in a stouter voice.

“I did,” said Hookey. “I was under that painful necessity this very afternoon. It wasn’t done for the fun of the thing, you understand, but only when it became evident that one of us must go. I naturally preferred to stay. At the same time, I must admit I was wearying of being hectored and bullied by a confounded foreigner; and there were three of us Englishmen of the same mind; so you perceive how it all fitted in. Last night we had words. Now, a house divided against itself cannot stand; neither can a band of bushrangers, much less when the mounted police are on their track!”

​“Are they?” cried Tom.

“Maybe within fifteen miles,” replied Hookey Simpson; “maybe within five. An ensign, two sergeants and eighteen troopers, as I understand; but never mind them. We two had words; they had been coming on for weeks. Well, there were three on my side and only two on his; so we made it up, but lay and watched each other with one eye open all night. This afternoon, at his suggestion, we rode behind together, to come to some understanding. But I saw him looking at me queerly,” said the little grey man, “and that was enough for me. When I galloped after these good fellows our number was reduced by one, but the little question of leadership was at an end.”

“A good job too!” cried Slipper; and Wall-eye nodded a grave assent.

“You see, the change is not unpopular,” continued Hookey modestly; “though I’m bound to add that I don’t see how it could be—among Englishmen. What was he before they kicked him out of his own country? The word that described our friend Barabbas was already applicable to the late lamented. But what was I before circumstances compelled me to leave mine? What do you suppose? Come, give a guess,” said Hookey Simpson.

“You talk like a parson,” suggested Tom, to compliment the wretch.

“And I was next door to one!” cried the little man, beaming benevolently. “A schoolmaster! A pedagogue! A pattern to the village, and its model churchwarden, until an accursed organ-fund brought trouble in its train. So here I am, and here I was while our late friend was cutting throats in Italy; yet he thinks I’m ​going to knuckle under to him for ever! Likely, wasn’t it? No, no; he was a bold-enough man, but he’d met another. And I venture to say that to-night—my first in command—we’re on a bigger job than we ever should have tackled under friend Francisco!”

“Hear, hear!” cried Slipper, while Wall-eye nodded again, and Tom caught an evil gleam between De Gruchy’s fingers. There followed a pause, for the mellifluous grey man had taken off his spectacles and was breathing on the lenses with as tranquil a deliberation as though he were still in the village school-room, ruling innocent children, instead of grown men as infamous as himself.

Tom watched him still; indeed, his eyes had scarcely left this venerable villain from the moment it appeared he was one; and now his fascination was complete. He glanced at his own legs, crossed in unconscious imitation of the little bushranger; and his trousers were all stained, and his boots still stiff, from the blood that had run down and into them, drawn by the lash. Then he looked at Hookey, so wicked and strong and sly, and his heart leapt as he had never thought to feel it leap again. Here was the man for a whipped dog to follow! He leant eagerly forward, and begged and craved admission to the band, as another might have pleaded for his life.

Hookey Simpson surveyed him strangely. “Well, well,” said he, “I was thinking it would never do to leave you here.”

“Why not?”

“You were probably heading for the sea.”

“I was.”

“Well, the ensign and his men are, without a doubt, ​between the sea and ourselves. You might have fallen in with them.”

“That would have been my look-out.”

“Mine too, perhaps.”

“What do you mean?”

“You might have put them on my scent.”

Tom had seen it coming, yet he lost his temper when it came.

“So you think that of me?” he cried. “You see how I’ve been treated, and yet you think that!”

“I did think it,” was the reply. “I don’t say I do now. No; it never occurred to me to trust you on the grounds you suggest.”

“Then what did it occur to you to do?”

Hookey Simpson shrugged his shoulders, as one who would rather not say.

“To tie me to a tree, perhaps, and leave me there to starve?”

Hookey Simpson bit his thin lips to avoid smiling, but bent his grey head when that was impossible; and Tom, bending his, saw that the cork was off the polished steel hook, and its point as sharp as a needle. The little grey man was feeling it with his thumb, as he still tried to swallow his smiles.

“I see!” said Tom in a low voice. “Yes, now I see!”

“We never do things by halves,” observed Hookey, sucking a bead of blood, not without ostentation, from the end of his thumb. “We do them with all our might.”

“So I see,” repeated Tom. “Well, and so do I! You stick at nothing—I’ll stick at less. I’ll be with you in what you please—from whist to wholesale murder—only give me the chance! Man alive, can’t you ​see for yourself I’m as desperate as any of you? Haven’t you told me the mounted police are between me and the sea? Then what do you suppose I want with my life, except to sell it as dear as possible, and be done with it as quick? I tell you,” cried Tom, “I’m the very man for you! See here: you’re one short. Take me in his place, and serve me the same if I turn out worse than my word!”

His sudden vehemence, his impassioned manner, his fevered and infuriated eyes, all had their effect upon the bushrangers, who now (with the exception of Peter Pindar and De Gruchy) got up and held a whispered consultation some few paces from the fire. Tom watched them eagerly, and each time the wall-eyes or the fire-lit spectacles were turned upon him, he made ready to rise. But now and then they glanced at De Gruchy instead, who was still nursing a sullen face, and at such times their whispers fell lower still, so that Tom was at once startled and interested when a new voice gobbled in his ear:—

“Yabber-yabber ’longa him—him bael budgerie—him no dam’ use!”

It was Peter Pindar, whose oily locks and curling beard nodded disgustedly in De Gruchy’s direction.

“Why not?” said Tom. “What has he done?”

“Him good-fellow belonging^[1] Francisco,” replied the black. “Me leave ’m alonga Francisco, me Hookey Simp’on. Bael budgerie; me leave ’m alonga good-fellow, my word!”

And the simian face grinned from ear to ear, in each of which Tom now beheld a gold ear-ring smeared with blood. But he was determined to be horrified no more; ​and, the trio beckoning him, he joined them with what alacrity he could, in the strait-waistcoat of stiff wounds which now imprisoned him.

“Well,” began the little grey man, “we’re going to give you a trial!”

Tom broke out with impious thanks which the other instantly cut short.

“Stop till you hear what that means,” said Hookey. “It means that we saddle up straight away—and stick up Castle Sullivan before morning. It means that you’ve got to make yourself extra useful there, since you know the place. So what do you say to it now?”

For the moment Tom could say nothing at all. He was too surprised; and, in his surprise, he was thinking of the Sullivans and sweet revenge, of the detested spot he meant never to see again, and of Peggy who must be protected—all at once.

“Well?” said Hookey. “You know the place. What do you say?”

“I’m known there, too!”

“What of that?”

“They’d make a mark of me. The Sullivans would have me back alive or dead. Then I have enemies among the men—they’d side against me out of spite.”

“Well, we shall all wear masks.”

Tom glanced down at his regulation jacket, shoes and trousers; took off his regulation cap, and shook his head.

“It would never be enough. There are too many of them wearing the very same as these.”

“Then you’ll just have to take your chance,” said Hookey sharply. “Or you may kneel down and say your prayers!”

“Stop!” said Slipper.

​“Well, what now?”

“Francisco’s rig!”

Hookey considered the suggestion, and finally accepted it, though with an evil grace.

“All right—out with them,” said he. “And you slip into them, young fellow, without more of your jaw. We sha’n’t wait for you. Saddle up there, saddle up, or we’ll never get off to-night!”

The little grey man was altogether changed. The long mellifluous word gave way to the monosyllable of short and sharp command; the horn spectacles seemed to kindle and flash to right, left and centre all at once; and yet, in three or four minutes, they were bent as benignly as ever upon Tom, who was now, however, another man himself.

Long spurs, longer boots and a bright blue jacket with enormous buttons, though some sizes too large, became him wonderfully upon the whole; and a straw hat, such as Dr. Sullivan wore and the convicts plaited, but wreathed with leaves and berries in a foreign fashion, crowned a disguise which only required the mask to render it complete.

“Be good enough to turn round,” said Hookey Simpson, with his former urbanity, and some perceptible amusement.

Tom did so; and there was De Gruchy still sitting in the moonlight, with his head between his hands; and the others as busy as bees.

“Now turn back again—and many thanks! That was an admirable idea of Slipper’s; they’ll take you for Francisco himself, and on the whole it’s just as well they should. Yet, mind you, he was a pretty hard nut! You mustn’t disgrace his cloth!”

​Tom was shaking his head when there was a loud cry of “Francisco! Francisco!” behind him; and he turned in time to catch De Gruchy on his knees, with his clasped hands raised, and a face of ashes that broke into flames as the apparition of the dead man resolved itself into the newcomer in the dead man’s clothes. With a single bound the Frenchman was upon him; the hat was torn off; and a gasping, glaring figure crouched with it in both hands, as the others rushed up and closed about him.

“Calm yourself, calm yourself,” said Hookey Simpson, stepping forward. He laid an arm upon the Frenchman’s shoulder. It was the arm that ended in a hook, but the cork still guarded its terrible point. Nevertheless, the man’s face went white again; he started forward, but Hookey Simpson pushed him back. In a moment they were on the ground together.

This was all Tom had seen; all he now saw was Hookey Simpson getting to his feet, with the burst cork forced high up the hook, which gleamed in the moonlight as bright and cleanly as before.

“So that’s all right!” said the little grey man, adjusting his spectacles, which had become crooked in the fray. “Half a heart is worse than no man, and as he couldn’t get on without the other heathen, why, it was the kindest thing to do. What’s more, gentlemen, I rather think that our young recruit here is going to prove himself worth the two of them put together!”

And Tom got a playful prod with the round part of that murderous hook; and yet stood his ground, though De Gruchy lay flat on his face, with the moon beating down on his neck, and on a dark blob there in much the same place as that other mortal wound, which now puzzled Tom no more.

---

1. ↑ Friend of.

CHAPTER XXVII

ADVENTURES OF A SUBSTITUTE

It presently appeared that Tom had not travelled above a dozen miles towards the sea he fancied he had smelt at eighteen; but this he declined to believe until the grey man produced a tattered map and pricked out the positions with his hook. Tom then gave in, but climbed into De Gruchy’s saddle with incomplete convictions upon the point. The delirium of his famished flight still magnified both the time and the space which it had covered. Thinking of the murder done before his eyes, and looking on these villains whom he had joined, he could half believe he was delirious still. The incredible thing was that in two more hours he would be back upon that hated spot whither he had sworn never to return alive.

But a man’s fate was stronger than his will, as it seemed to Tom during that midnight ride, when not care, but a very merciful sort of fatalism, sat behind the reckless horseman. Fatalistic he had felt before, but never with this result; hitherto the feeling had only deepened his despair, whereas now it was his single solace. It consoled him for the horrors he had countenanced that night; it even nerved him for what deeds he must himself commit before the night was out.

In the law’s eye he was a branded murderer as it was. He seemed destined to deserve that brand. He would kick no more against a fate so plain and so persistent. So he decided as he rode, too slowly for his spirit, to deliberate crime. For (despite philosophy) his one ​immediate longing was for a gallop to rekindle blood which the murder of De Gruchy had turned from fire to ice; and a greater comfort than he would have owned to himself came of his resolve to save and protect Peggy and Miss Sullivan from this ruthless crew. Otherwise he was one of them, and would play his part. But he was not yet the villain he had hoped.

Objective details impressed him little at the time. And yet he was left with the very sharpest memories of floating gum-trees and a drooping moon; of the masks they all put on, and the battered top-hat that Hookey wore above his; the pistols that they loaded, and the brace of horse-pistols handed to himself; the little conversation on the way; the startling of an old-man kangaroo, that shone an instant grey and glossy in the moonlight, then boomed and bounded into silence and the shades; of all such things, in fact, to the final plan of attack and division of villainy, made almost within sight of the devoted homestead.

At the time, however, though Tom listened (as he thought) attentively, and was much consulted on the strength of his present knowledge of the place, he grasped very little beyond his own instructions. He was to show them the overseer’s hut (the night-watchman would already be on their side or dead), then he was to station himself beneath the great bell, and to ring it furiously so soon as Ginger was hauled out and his hut set well on fire. Tom was also to answer to the name of Francisco, and to affect a foreign accent, because the Italian’s terrible reputation had been the best part of him.

The bell and the fire were calculated to tempt both Sullivans forth unarmed. At all costs those two were ​to be taken alive. “And then!” said the little man, poking Wall-eye in the ribs with his hook.

“What then?” inquired Tom.

“We shall do unto them as we’ve all been done by.”

“But you were never here yourself?”

“Next door to it,” returned Hookey Simpson. “I was at Strachan’s, and this old tyrant ordered me my fifties. We’ll see how he likes them himself—just for a start!”

“I wish it was Strachan’s we were coming to!” muttered Tom, with a flash of his former passion.

“It’ll be his turn next.”

“But when?”

“Tomorrow—if all goes well.”

“Then you don’t mean to stop at Castle Sullivan?” cried Tom, amazed.

“You’ll see,” rejoined Hookey, “and so shall I. There’s no saying where I may stop with seventy convicts at my back!”

Seventy convicts! That was the rough number at Castle Sullivan. Then what was this to which the little man was leading them? No petty robbery, after all? A grand rebellion instead? Tom’s heart lightened at the thought. He gazed at the confident little man—looking more like a monkey dressed up as a highwayman and perched upon a horse—and he felt that he could have followed so spirited a leader with all the spirit he himself had left but for the thing that had been done before his eyes that night. There was no more, however, to be said; they were at the farm.

At the gate (not the gate of former scenes; this one lay east beyond the stables) all dismounted but the little general, who was to keep his saddle as generals do. The ​others led their horses to the stables, and while Wall-eye stalled them, Tom showed Slipper and the black his old lair. Another convict had succeeded him as groom, and in a few moments young Brummy was dragged forth by Peter Pindar. So far from offering any resistance, however, the obliging youth at once put himself at the bushrangers’ disposal. His zeal and enthusiasm augured well for the other seventy in the huts. Under his eager guidance the watchman, Roberts, was immediately captured in his sleep beneath the bell; whereupon that official joined the enemy with no more demur than Brummy; indeed he went the length of shaking hands with the supposed Italian, and personally thanking him for having come at last.

Hookey on his horse cut this profession short and drove both prisoners before him towards the overseer’s hut, which Tom had already pointed out. The latter was now left in charge of the bell-rope, with a last order not to ring until the hut was well ablaze.

“I thought he was gov’nor?” Tom heard Roberts remark.

“The less you think the better,” retorted Hookey. “But about this overseer of yours: a ticket-of-leave, I understand? A true man, eh?” By which term Hookey meant its opposite.

“I doubt it,” said Roberts.

“Then all the worse for him!”

Ginger’s hut was but a few yards from the bell. Tom heard them enter and held his breath. The door was shut, and then he heard no more.

In the main building all was dark and still. He watched it keenly, with his ears, as it were, upon the hut behind. At last the door re-opened, and he heard ​the striking of lucifers accompanied by another sound, as of something being dragged from the hut. He looked round, and it was Ginger’s bed. The overseer lay upon it, bound and gagged.

Tom drew a deep breath. He had expected worse.

Brummy and Roberts were now despatched to the convicts’ huts, to tell the rest, at the right moment, what was happening, and how they would all be free men within an hour if they abstained from interference, but dead men if they did not. Then the black crept up close to the palisade, while Hookey rode to one side and the other two hid behind trees. Meanwhile the overseer’s hut was beginning to crackle, and all at once Tom saw the shadow of his tree leap out towards the palisade upon a ground of glaring red.

“Ring! Ring!” cried Hookey from his horse.

Almost with his words a terrific clang, clang, clang, burst out from amid the red-gum’s leaves. And almost with the alarum, a couple of white figures leapt out into the red glare behind the palisade.

Tom stood and watched like an actor who has forgotten he is on the stage himself.

He saw the white figures dash through the gate, and a black one glide in front of it next moment. He saw Nat Sullivan stop running, seize his father’s arm and point excitedly towards the burning hut. He saw them both about to turn, when the son was lifted off his legs as though he had been an infant; and there were coal-black arms entwined about his night-shirt, and snow-white teeth grinning over his shoulder. Hookey Simpson galloped up; Slipper and Wall-eye darted from behind their trees. All had pistols in their hands and masks upon their faces. And the masks reminded Tom ​that he was looking on through one himself, and had no business to be a looker-on at all.

He had vaguely wondered why the bell was still ringing; now he let go the rope, and ran a step or two forward. But they were four to two without him, and the four were armed, and watch he must.

The Sullivans were being dragged or driven backward upon the palisade. Tom could make little of the swaying, struggling group, for Hookey Simpson brought up the rear on his horse; but through the animal’s legs he had glimpses of fluttering calico and sparkling spurs, as the glare grew more and more intense. It was now as light as day. Every board of the main building stood out, in abnormal detail, against a blackened sky, while the shadows of the palisade made a glowing gridiron of the yard within.

The scuffle was over; something was happening that Tom could not see, when a flake of red-hot bark lit upon his ear. He was face-about in time to see the roof of the burning hut tumble in, and a column of clean flame spout high into the night. And there was the wretched Ginger, writhing in his bonds within reach of the burning walls, and with the flame of a fallen brand licking the very camp-bed on which he lay.

This time Tom did not forget his part; he ignored it, and had the overseer out of harm’s way in a few seconds; in two more his mask was among the rest, and his pistol pointed with the others at the two white figures that now stood side by side against the palisade—with torn nightshirts and clenched fists—defenceless, but still defiant.

“Now look you here, my fine gentlemen!” exclaimed Hookey from his saddle. “If you’ve got any sense between you, let’s see you show it. You’ll only cut ​things shorter if you don’t. What chance do you think you’ve got? Ah!—it’s too late to look that way now, you old fool!”

The doctor’s eyes were on his convict huts; the men were pouring out of them pell-mell. Hookey Simpson wheeled his horse, and rode up to them with a magnificent air; dropping his reins to wave his battered chimney-pot, as if it were a general’s cocked hat.

“My lads,” cried he, “your kind master would call upon you to stand by him in his hour of need. Now’s the time to show him your gratitude. Stop! stop!—not all of you at once!” And with his horse he stemmed a rush of zealous spirits who explained themselves in chorus as they unwillingly fell back.

“Stand by him?” cried one. “Get at him, you mean! Only give us the word, and we’ll take him off your hands—”

“And cut his throat—”

“An’ slit his juggler—”

“And Nat’s after—”

“The bluidy tyrants!”

Hookey waved them back.

“Is there a single man who’ll take the coves’ side in the time of need? Let him speak now or for ever after hold his mouth!”

Not a convict stirred.

“Then,” said Hookey, “you leave the rest to us, and don’t you interfere. You’re dead men if you do, but free men if you stop where you are. Your blood be on your own heads!”

And he cantered back to the palisade, with his chimneypot hat on the side of his head, and the hook stuck rakishly against his ribs.

​Tom ran up to him and caught his rein.

“The women have got into the store—I saw the light—it’s where they keep the guns —will you leave them to me?”

“No bloodshed, then: they’re scarce!”

“I’ll make them prisoners.”

“And none of your larks just yet!”

Tom was gone. With a horse-pistol in each hand he dashed into the store, and caught Peggy and Miss Sullivan in the act of lifting down the fowling-pieces.

“Surrender!” he roared.

Miss Sullivan shrieked and hid her face. Peggy advanced.

“Shoot a woman if you dare,” said she. “’Tis me that dares ye!”

“Peggy!” he whispered.

“Tom!”

“I am here to save you both. Do as I tell you and make her do the same. I’m here to save you both!” he repeated aloud. “There are horses in the stable. Come with me and I’ll put you on them. Undo those outer doors, Peggy.”

He had said her name by accident. She gave him a warning glance. And now Miss Sullivan stood her ground steadfastly, and having recovered that mettle which was in the blood, refused to move until she knew what they were going to do with her father and brother.

“Nothing at all,” said Tom. “It’s you they’re after.”

“Me, indeed!”

“The two of you,” said Tom. “The men are all right, they’ve given in; but they’ll carry off the women if they can—though not if I know it.”

By this time Peggy O’Brien had unfastened the great ​outer doors at which the store-drays could unload without entering the yard; in another moment Tom had both women out in the open, with the front west angle of house between them and the palisade. Even the burning hut was thus hidden from their view. Yet the voice of Hookey Simpson sounded dreadfully close.

“You shall lay it on yourselves,” he was shouting out. “Let the man who had the last fifty come forward and lay on the first.”

“That’s me,” said Macbeth’s voice. “Gi’e us the cat!”

There was none.

“Then the auld cove’s cane.”

Tom had seized Miss Sullivan by the arm.

“I don’t stir!” she declared. “Not one step!”

“Then worse will come of it.”

“But my father!”

“It’s idle threats—they don’t mean a word of it.”

“Ah, miss, come on!” urged Peggy in an agony for Tom.

“She shall!” he muttered, with the nozzle of one pistol against the lady’s neck; and so between them they got her to the back of the house, and thence across the open space to the stables. As they ran Tom turned his head, and just saw one end of a chain of ruddy convict faces, all horribly intent upon some unseen spectacle before the palisade.

The stable proper faced the open gate through which the bushrangers had ridden. Their saddled horses stood two in a stall, and Tom was backing out a couple when he discovered Peggy meddling with a third. He told her three would not be wanted.

“An’ what about you?”

“I stay with my mates.”

​“Wid thim murtherin, vill’ns?”

“I’m one myself!”

“Already?” she cried. “Tom—Tom—”

It was his turn to hold up a warning hand.

Miss Sullivan stood listening at the door; but not to them.

Tom listened too.

For some instants all was still.

Then a thwack, thwack, thwack was greeted with a yell of savage joy; and Miss Sullivan was gone from the door.

“Let her go,” cried Tom, seizing Peggy’s wrist. “I did my best for her. You at all events shall be saved!”

“Not without you, Tom.”

“Nonsense, Peggy; I must see this through.”

“An’ so must I, then!”

With these words she set her back to the open door; but there stood Tom, looking past and beyond her, as though he had not heard one of them. Presently a soft laugh came from his lips.

“All right, Peggy! You are safer than I thought. Look behind you!”

The girl obeyed; and there, trotting two abreast through the open gate, were a score of troopers, with the glare from the still blazing hut reddening their whiskered faces, jewelling their spurs, and gilding from hilt to point the waving sword of the lad who rode at their head.

Peggy stood aghast with an amazement that left no room for thought; it was only when the cavalcade had swept close by, and so out of sight, at a gallop, that she heard Tom speaking to her from a height. He had himself mounted one of the horses, and was entreating her to stand aside and let him out.

​And then she realised how the situation had reversed itself, and how he was now the one to fly and gallop for his life. Without a word she sprang out of his way. He clattered under the lintel and was gone. She came out to see him gallop through the open gate. He had already vanished, but not that way; he had dashed to the assistance of his rascally mates.

But a dozen shots had been fired already, and blue wreaths were curling in the glare like clouds at sunset. Wall-eye lay stretched upon his face. Slipper and the aboriginal were fighting desperately back to back, but both were wounded, and their moments numbered. Troopers surrounded them; others were already endeavouring to restore order among the convicts; while one—a sergeant—was being dragged and bumped about, with one foot twisted in his stirrup, and his dead face smothered with blood.

Tom looked about for Hookey Simpson, and found him on the verge of shaking off four troopers and the ensign. One saddle he had emptied with his pistol; as Tom came near he hooked the ensign out of his, but was within an ace of being dragged to the ground in doing so. The ensign’s stock gave way and saved him. Ere he could recover himself, a trooper took deliberate aim at the little man. Tom saw him, however, and fired point-blank at the outstretched arm; it fell; and the next Tom knew was that he and Hookey were galloping neck and neck for the gate, with but one pursuer close upon them.

Hookey had apparently received no hurt. The battered hat was off and his benevolent forehead rose high and white above his mask; it was to be Tom’s last memory of the little grey man. He had thrown away ​one pistol, drawn another, and turned to fire it with every furrow of that fine brow showing in the glare. But Tom heard the man behind fire first, and saw those furrows leap into space like snapped fiddle-strings; and he galloped through the gate alone.

Whether the slayer came to grief over the slain, or how else to account for it, Tom never knew; but he now got a start which he was destined to keep and to increase. Now also he began for the first time to appreciate the piece of hard-bitten horse-flesh between his knees. He had taken the dead Italian’s roan, which had been led riderless to the farm, and was thus comparatively fresh. It was a great gaunt brute, with a mouth like leather, as Tom had discovered to his cost in the skirmish. Once through the gate, however, he felt that no more: the beast had run away without his knowing it.

Indeed he knew very little for the first few minutes except that the moon was setting at his back, and he was once more heading for the sea. This he gathered from the grotesque shadow leaping along between the roan’s ears; his first conscious effort was to keep that shadow dead ahead. Now he lost it where the timber thickened, now he found it in an open glade. At length the shadow failed and vanished, and it was very dark indeed. But on went the roan with Tom on its withers to avoid invisible boughs; and when the sky lightened he could have shouted for joy, for the roan’s ears took shape against its lightest point.

He did not shout because his pursuers would have heard him; for all this time he had heard them at intervals; and whenever the ground changed from hard to soft, their hoofs rang out the instant the roan’s were muffled.

​The joy of that wild ride through the gum-trees to the sea! He forgot the little value he had set upon his life, and rode for it now as men ride for nothing else. Yet he recked but little of the result. He knew no fears and no regrets, but instead an exhilaration such as he had never known before. It might be his last hour. He revelled in it the more—was the more grateful for it—on that account. To have tasted such life as this at life’s end! To die after this with no more pain! To reach the sweet sea, and swim out to rest!

And now he smelt it; the rushing air was spiced with salt; even in the pungent forest he detected it through all the odours, and was mistaken in that no more. Only one question remained in his mind. Would the roan hold out? Would the roan hold out?

Long ago the pace had slackened. Long ago Tom had stooped and ripped his big boots down to the ankles, and cast them from him with all else that had been the Italian’s. He was now riding a light ten stone in his shirt and trousers. His bare feet were numb from standing in his stirrups to ease the roan. But the trees had been rushing past in myriads half the night; and still they stood against the morning sky-line, like blots of ink upon a slate, in myriads more.

On the other hand, he had heard nothing of his pursuers for some time, and was beginning to wonder whether they had given up the chase. Their horses might well have started less fresh than his. Had they given it up or had they not?

Tom had asked himself the question for the twentieth time when something happened and he had his answer sitting stupidly on the ground. The roan was disappearing amid the trees with the saddle beneath its belly; ​its startled gallop died away like the roll of a drum; but heavier hoofs were coming up behind.

Tom sprang up, but sat down again with a yelp of pain. His ankle was badly sprained. He felt for a weapon, but he had thrown them all away; even his knife he seemed to have hurled after the long boots, or left in a pocket of the blue jacket, which had been jettisoned in its turn.

He sat still and groaned. To have to surrender sitting still! What an end to his ride! What a beginning of the end of all!

The heavy hoofs came nearer, nearer. Three troopers laboured into view, gave a yell and put spurs to their tired horses, but ceased to spur them when they saw their man.

“Why, who are you?” cried they.

“The man you want.”

“I wish you were! You’re all we shall get with these horses. But you must have heard him pass?”

A light broke over Tom; he said he had heard it, but some time since, when it was darker and he was half-asleep.

“And what made you think you were our man?” asked another trooper suspiciously.

“I—I—I’m a runaway convict.”

“Then you’re better than nothing,” cried the former speaker. “You’ll come with us; but the man we’ve lost is an Italian, and there’s precious little of the Italian about you!”

There was less than little: he had thrown everything away, but without a thought of saving his neck by so doing. Nor indeed had he saved it yet.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE OUTER DARKNESS

The stockade smouldered in the midst of a hard-baked plain, that was as brown as shoe-leather, and as devoid of any sort or kind of vegetation as though it were shaved every morning with some monstrous razor. Trees there were in the distance, marking more than half the sky-line, as though the place had been shaved especially for the stockade; but not a solitary bush was within reach. And the sight of the trees whose leaves they never heard, and whose shade they never felt, was one more torment to those of the eighty prisoners who still lifted their heads to look so far; the majority, however, let their dull eyes redden by the day together on those few hard and blinding yards which might chance to occupy their picks and shovels from five in the morning till the going-down of the sun.

All day they laboured in chains beneath the barrels and bayonets of the military. In the evening, when they returned to the stockade, loaded muskets and fixed bayonets showed them the way. Even in the stockade itself, fixed bayonets and loaded muskets gave them their supper. Thereafter they were locked up for the night in so many small boxes, lined with ledges something more spacious than book-shelves; on these ledges they lay down, as close as mummies in catacombs, until it should be five o’clock once more; and perhaps, after a time, the only sound would be the clank of his fetters as this man or that turned over, in the magnificent space of eighteen inches that was allotted to each.

​It was the same stockade of which Erichsen had seen the outside on his way to Castle Sullivan in the early part of December; he saw the inside by the end of February, when Strachan gave him six months of it for absconding, and by so doing made open enemies of the Sullivans. They wanted to have the breaking of Tom’s spirit all to themselves, and tried to dictate another fifty lashes and the convict’s return to service; but this time Strachan was firm, passing, indeed, the most merciful sentence possible in the circumstances.

The six months began on Wednesday, the last of February, in the year 1838.

First they took his name and made an inventory of his marks, scars and the colour of his eyes and hair; then they cropped the latter, and shaved off the yellow stubble which had lately hidden the hollow cheeks and softened the haggard jaw. And it was an old man’s face that saw itself with sunken eyes in the barber’s glass.

Next they took away his farm-labourer’s clothes, which were not branded, and put him in a Parramatta frock and trousers, which were. And now they clasped round his body a green-hide belt, from which depended, in front, a heavy chain that became two heavy chains at about the level of the knees; and the two chains ended in still heavier rings round either ankle; and the whole made a capital Y upside down. In this harness it was impossible to walk, though with practice you might waddle; and it was never struck off, for a single instant, on any pretext whatsoever.

They now presented him with a spoon all to himself; his knife and fork, his pannikin and his mess-kit, he was to share with five other felons.

​Lastly they showed him his eighteen inches, where he passed the intolerable night in wondering why he had not given himself up as the Italian’s understudy; and in wondering, even more, why he still would not do so if it were all to come over again—for he knew he would not. Indeed, one of the most dreadful features of this present phase was the tenacity with which the poor wretch found himself clinging to life in each emergency, despite all his cooler longings for the end. He longed for that more than ever, but he saw now that death must come to him. He might sink to murder; to self-murder he could never stoop.

Or so he thought at the beginning of this term of broiling days and fetid nights, with foul company and heavy irons common to both. The combined effect of all these things will presently be seen. Meanwhile such feelings as were left him were still tolerably keen; and it was with a real thrill that, towards the end of the first week, he woke up at his work to hear the others hooting, and turned round to see Nat Sullivan once more riding down the line.

The thrill became a shiver: the blue eyes were fixed on Tom, the great lip was thrust out at him, and before Tom the rider reined up.

“You villain!” said Mr. Nat, with inexpressible malignancy of voice and look. “You villain—I’ve found you out!”

A line of red eyes blinked and watered in the sun, then fell with a glimmer of interest from the scowling horseman to the prisoner accosted. Tom had already piqued such attention as his new companions were in the habit of bestowing upon any fellow-creature: for few there were who joined that morose and fierce crew ​with the stamp of such moroseness and ferocity already on them. Those few were crabbed old hands, but here was raw youth, and yet in three long days they had not heard his voice. Nor did they now. Tom moistened his palms, and took a new grip of his pick—but that was not all. He was seen to tremble, and he nearly pinned his own foot to the ground. What was it he had done and been found out in, this cub whose teeth were always showing, but whose voice was never heard?

A perspiring sentry strolled up, his once red swallowtail coat hanging open upon his naked chest, and his white trousers sticking to his legs; he was the only one whose curiosity went the length of a word.

“What’s he been doing of?” said the sentry, wetting his hand on his chest to cool his musket-stock. “We’ve only ’ad ’im ’ere these three days.”

“You won’t have him many more,” said Sullivan. “The hangman will have him.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. Look at him trembling!”

“I see.”

“He’ll tremble in the air before long!”

Tom bent over his pick. There was more hooting here, but whether at himself or at his enemy Tom neither knew nor cared. He wished to appear very busy and regardless; he was really intent upon Nat’s shadow under his pick; wondering whether he could possibly spring so far forward in his chains and get such a swing as to bury the pick in the substance instead. But this was never known. When the hooting subsided, the noise of light wheels approaching took its place, and Nat Sullivan turned round in his saddle.

The military man who debased himself by the charge ​of this iron-gang was a major of gunners, too fat for service, and too gouty to sustain his distended body on his legs; he therefore superintended operations from a bath-chair, in which a blue-jacketed mess-man had to trail him about the works. Major Honeybone had recognised Nat, and had ordered the mess-man to hurry to the spot, but not to seem in a hurry. The major was himself a sufficiently hard and cantankerous man, but some sense of justice he had, and he considered Castle Sullivan one of the angriest plague-spots in a plague-spotted land. The present occasion filled him, therefore, with the greatest glee. He had long desired an opportunity of giving one or other of the Sullivans a piece of his mind, and here was young Sullivan trespassing on the works.

“Go slower,” said the major, making up his mind what to say, and not to say it all at once, as Mr. Nat turned in his saddle. Their greeting was in consequence not uncivil, though the major blandly ignored the coarse, ringed hand obtruded by the other.

“You heard of the outrage the other night at Castle Sullivan?” began Mr. Nat.

“By bushrangers?” observed Major Honeybone.

“By bushrangers; only one of them escaped; and there he is!” roared Nat, pointing savagely at Tom.

“Really?” remarked the major, wilfully unmoved. “Dear me! It was from you he came here—like half my gang—for absconding, I understood?”

“We didn’t know it then.”

“That he was one of the bushrangers?”

“Yes.”

“But you know it now?”

“We do so!”

​“Dear me!” again remarked the major, whose expression was rendered inscrutable by the rich shade of the gigantic umbrella without which he rarely ventured abroad. His small, shrewd eyes glanced from the visitor to Tom, who was still looking down, and fidgeting with his pick, the speaking image of sullen guilt. More repulsive to the major was the gloating ruffian in the saddle; but he signed to the sentry to take away Tom’s pick, and then favoured the other with a slow, contemplative stare.

“A very singular thing, I’m sure,” he resumed, with a sarcastic intonation that punctured even Nat’s thick skull. “Very singular indeed. Upon my word, Mr. Sullivan,” exclaimed the major, “I find it difficult to believe what you say!”

“Sir!”

“Or, if you like, to understand it.”

“If you will allow me to say the rest, and to say it elsewhere—”

“No, sir. Here!” cried Major Honeybone. “Here or nowhere, which you please. This man absconds one night—so I gather—and the next night you are attacked by bushrangers. This man is found the morning after that, and I understand you to suggest he was one of the band that attacked you. Yet you never recognised him at the time! Come now, did none of you?”

“Not then; but he threatened my sister and a female whom we have since returned, and Miss Sullivan remembers hearing him call the female by her name. Now this man and that woman kept company,” snarled Nat, in a perfect flame of rage and spite; “and Miss Sullivan will swear he called the woman by her name. He fell in with the thieves when he absconded, it’s perfectly ​clear; he was the very man to join them in an attack on his own masters, even if he didn’t instigate it. Join in it he did. I can prove it. Though not one of the original gang is left alive, I can prove—”

“What about that Italian fellow?” interrupted the major; and Tom held his breath.

“He wasn’t in it. I believe he’s dead, and they put this Erichsen in his clothes. His horse was found a few miles beyond where they found this man, and now his coat has been discovered with Erichsen’s knife in the pocket. Yes, you may wince!” cried this good hater. “You shall swing for it yet!”

“Kindly confine your remarks to me,” said the major sternly. “You’ll have to prove the knife was his, and that won’t prove everything. Never heard such a story in my life! You’ll have to strengthen it up a bit if you mean to make a case. What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing at all,” said Nat ungraciously.

“Then why the deuce do you come to me?”

“I didn’t. I was on my way to your superiors.”

Major Honeybone turned to the sentry.

“Cock your piece,” said he, “and shoot his horse if he attempts to go till I’ve done with him. Now, you Sullivan,” continued the major, “perhaps you didn’t know you were trespassing when you came on these works? But you were, and you’ll stop on ’em now till I’ve done with you. You came to gloat over the man you’ve hounded here, to tell him you’d hound him to the gallows, did you? To laugh at him, eh? Gadzooks, sir, the boot’s on the other leg this time! The whole chain-gang is laughing at you; and you may frown upon ’em as much as you like, but if you touch one you’ll be ​in irons yourself in two minutes. I know you, sir. We know all about both of you here. Half the men who come here have been driven here by you and your father. Silence in the gang! Go on to Sydney and tell them anything you like about the man you mean to hang. But, gadzooks! you don’t get him out of this—no, and the Governor himself sha’n’t have him out of this until he knows on whose word he’s acting! Go to my superiors; they’ll never listen to your clumsy yarn; if they do, I’ll send down to Sydney myself to tell ’em what I know of you and yours. And Castle Sullivan will be swept into the sea, and you—you slave-driver—you’ll be where these men are now! Be off, sir. I hate the sight of you! Sentry, let him go.”

About the middle of this tirade Nat had been ready with a retort as virulent; but the concluding sentences were too much even for his hard nerves and sturdy ruffianism. Muttering something unintelligible about an “outrage,” and “reporting” Major Honeybone, he put spurs to his horse and galloped off, leaving nothing worse behind him than a look. It was such a look as might be seen any day, any moment even, in an iron-gang; yet Tom never forgot the cruel eyes, the low lip, the murderous scowl, nor the peculiarly bestial whole which they made on that occasion. The convicts cursed and cheered him in derision; and, when he was gone, were given to understand by the major that if they ever did it again he should treat the lot of them as they would be treated at Castle Sullivan—to fifty lashes all round.

“Only I give you fair warning,” said he, “and you don’t catch me break my word either way!”

The major was a man who liked a little opposition for the sake of putting it down, which he never failed ​to do with the highest hand; but he had his chain-gang in such an exemplary state of broken-spirited subjection that the iron will within that flabby body was growing rusty from disuse. The impudence of young Sullivan was consequently a godsend to this born martinet. It gave him an appetite, and it made him sleep. Furthermore, it fixed his eye on Erichsen, and to some extent his thoughts also. The major was harsh by habit but impartial to the core. He did not believe a syllable of Nat Sullivan’s story; but why had Erichsen so taken it to heart? He alone had neither cursed nor cheered; the major was puzzled, but kept watch.

“Fancy he’s a gentleman,” said Honeybone, in a day or two; and he made inquiries.

The result of the inquiries was the information that Erichsen usually sulked; but when he was in a bad temper, he was more blasphemous than any man in the gang; when in a good one he was more foul.

“He is a gentleman—hem!—was,” said the cocksure major. “Only it’s the old story: the further they have to fall, the lower they sink. Poor devil—poor devil!” And old Honeybone sighed, for he had sunk a little too; and if his conscience was clear of crime, it was more or less saturated with sin, of which the perfume was not a little stale and sickly. Whether from that cause or another, the fat major found himself taking a more human interest in this prisoner than in most. “So that’s the most profane tongue in the stockade!” he would think whenever he looked at Tom. “So that’s the foulest mouth!”

It was not; but Tom was educated, and had an educated man’s sense of emphasis and of selection. His bad things stuck—that was all.

​But if those superlatives were not literally justified, others were, and before Tom had been six weeks in chains he had shown a temper as insubordinate, an audacity as brazen, and a callousness as shocking as anything of the sort which the major had yet encountered in his present capacity. It was the reaction from the sulky spirit in which the convict had begun his term. For two whole weeks he broke no rules, but in the next four he was three times flogged.

On the first occasion he knocked down the scourger when it was all over, and so brought it all over again; on the last, the major addressed him from his chair, as the convict positively swaggered from the triangles, with his fetters clanking and his shoes squelching at every step.

“You want to try Norfolk Island,” said the major, “but you sha’n’t.”

Tom shook his head with an ugly sneer.

“The gallows, then,” said the major, “is your game; but you’re not going to get there either. I can show you as good sport as you’ll show me, and we’ll see who wins the game!”

It was nothing else to the combative major. He was growing younger for the exercise; he began to get about again on his legs. His only regret was for a palpably fine young fellow gone so utterly to the bad; for the rest, he found poor Tom as stimulating for some weeks as Nat Sullivan had proved on the occasion described. Nat, by the way, had returned to Castle Sullivan, ignobly crestfallen, but not so intoxicated as to ride by the stockade again in daylight. The major’s superiors had confirmed that officer’s opinion, and Peggy O’Brien, examined on her oath in Parramatta factory, had per​jured herself for Tom in the most illusive and convincing manner. The Principal Superintendent had made a note of the affair; but there was no case, as Nat was pretty plainly told, and Major Honeybone heard no more of him for some time.

As a matter of fact, the bones of the Italian had also been discovered; but, as there were no clothes upon them, and the native dogs had left little else, they were never identified. So Tom was safer, for the moment, than he supposed. Meanwhile he had become a sort of hero among his degraded fellows; not the most popular sort, however, for enthusiasm is difficult in heavy fetters. Besides, he never tried to be popular.

He might have been, after knocking down the scourger. The man was a convict himself, who received 1s. 9d. a day for his unnatural services. It was the butcher over again, only this caitiff had eighty others always there to loathe him, and every hand could have shaken Tom’s for that well-aimed blow. But the very next day they discovered he would as soon turn on them as on their common enemy.

The incident brought to light an interesting fact, and it happened on Tom’s third Sunday in the stockade. About half the gang were incarcerated in the common mess-shed, idling, yarning, cursing and proceeding as fast as possible with that mutual corruption which was the chief fruit of this particular branch of secondary punishment. Tom was of the number, a conspicuous unit. It was the dawn of his prominence. He was in one of those good tempers alluded to already. Everybody was listening; those who could laugh still laughed now; and if he had a guardian angel, surely, surely, she must have been weeping then, more bitterly than when ​he fought for the bushrangers at Castle Sullivan and put a bullet through a troopers arm.

Suddenly something, an association, a reminiscence, a forgotten picture, made him want to weep himself; he was past that, however, and went back into the sulks instead. A new diversion being required, one was provided by the discovery of a young convict, a mere lad, writing a letter in a dark corner on the floor. On being detected, the lad first blushed, and then offered to read them what he had written; whereupon he opened his lips and a ribald stream poured forth, but meandered, slackened, faltered and was soon cut short.

“He’s making it up as he goes along,” cried several. “He never wrote that at all.”

“We’ll see what he did write,” said one who was at hand, cuffing the lad, and snatching the unfinished letter.

With a cry and an uncouth chime from his irons, the young convict attempted to retain his property. It tore in his hand, and a dozen more held him down while the possessor dragged his chains on to one of the long, rude tables, and stood up to read the letter in a silence broken only by the protests of the wretched writer.

“‘My ever dear mother and father,’” the brute brawled out, “‘I received your kind and welcome letter on the 31st of January, and happy was I to read the delightful letter which I received from you that day.’ Ahem! can’t he pitch it in? ‘O, how ’appy I am to ’ear that you are so comfortable and well. O, my dear mother and father, I ’ope my brothers and sisters will mind what you say to them better than ever I done, for you see what it is to be ’eadstrong.’ ’Eadstrong, eh? Stop a bit; now we’re coming to it! ‘O, my dears, I ’ope you will make yourselves as comfortable as you can, for ​perhaps I never may see you again in this world; but I ’ope I shall in the next, where I ’ope to be a comfort to you all, so God bless you all, my dears, for ever—’”

He got no further; nor had many attended to the last sentences. The lad’s unavailing protests had ended in veritable wailing and gnashing of teeth; it was this that had aroused Tom from his lethargy, and he also was now upon the table, clanking down the length of it to where the reader stood.

One or two mistook his intentions. “That’s it— you read it,” said they; but the most of them read Tom’s face.

“Give me that letter,” he said sternly, halting before the man.

“Give who it?” roared the other. “Oh, it’s you, eh?” he added, and seemed in doubt.

“Lads,” cried Tom, seizing his opportunity, “this is going a step too far, don’t you think? We all of us had friends once—in another world as it seems to me—but if any of us like to remember we had them, surely it’s that man’s business and not ours? He’s a better man than most of us, and his letter’s the last thing that we should meddle with. We wouldn’t have done it once, and we won’t now.” His temperate tone surprised himself; but it merely showed how every sensibility had lost its edge. Two months ago he would have argued such a point with his ready hands.

Meanwhile the reader had decided not to fight, being an insufficient number of inches bigger and broader than Tom, and having still in his ears the thud with which the scourger fell. But neither was he going to give in like a man, because men were scarce in those heavy irons. Accordingly he retained the letter a little longer, before handing it to Tom with a mocking bow.

​“We won’t, won’t we?” he sneered. “Well, as it ’appens, we won’t, for more of that rot I couldn’t read if I was paid. But you look out, my special! If you’ve come ’ere to give yourself airs, we’ll soon learn ye. It’s lucky for you I’m in such a good temper, or you’d have gone off this table a bit different, you blighted young upstart!”

Tom had in fact taken his chains in his hands and jumped off: it was when he was on the ground, with his back turned, that the direct abuse was hurled. Others sided with the speaker and added their maledictions to his; yet the group about Butter (for so the poor lad was called) dispersed at Tom’s approach, and he returned the letter to its writer with a look that might have made his guardian angel dry her tears, for after many days there was kindness in his eyes once more.

“Here, Butter,” he said; “take it—and for God’s sake not a word! You’re a better man than I am, or you wouldn’t have written at all. There—shut up. Gratitude, forsooth! If you must show some, don’t set me thinking.”

But the lad’s emotions were aroused too thoroughly to be soon allayed. They had the corner now to themselves, and he was crying like a girl. Tom envied him his tears.

“Read it through,” sobbed the young fellow, forcing the torn letter upon his champion; and to please him Tom perused it from beginning to end.

A while ago it would have made him laugh and cry; now he read it unmoved, save by his own indifference. It contained a touching lie, describing the writer as being still very happy with the master who months since had sent him to the iron-gang. The rest was a wondrous ​jumble … “and I inform you that snaiks is very bad in this country. We ofttimes see from 14 to 15 feet long. Parrots is as thick as crows in your country, kangaroos too, and it is night here when it is day there, but Arthur Smith, I do not know where he is. Mutton is 4d. lb, beef—” But he had written no further, and Tom said, “Thank you, Butter; it should make them happy,” as he returned the letter. He felt that he ought to be touched, and he was not. His heart seemed turned to stone, when suddenly he felt it quicken.

The lad had simply said, “My name isn’t Butter; it’s Butterfield.”

“A Yorkshireman? You talk like one!” cried Tom, with a most painful flash of memory. Once more he was a lucky, hopeful, penitent sinner, in a sweet-smelling waggon, on a night in spring; with Blaydes’s watch ticking no warning in his pocket, and with a vivid mental picture of Blaydes himself smiling wistfully across the stile, beside which he was even then lying dead.

“Ay,” said young Butterfield, “poor old Yarkshire! I doubt I’ll never see it again. My folks have left there an’ all.”

Tom had more flashes. He was getting used to them now.

“Where did they move to?”

“A little place they call Hendon; an’ it was me that drove ’em there by getting into trouble! Oh, it was me disgraced them all, and drove them away!”

Tom let him talk, but said little more in return. It was Jonathan Butterfield’s son. How it brought all that back to him! True, it was not a year ago, but it seemed a lifetime. It was terrible to think of the little time and the stupendous change. Tom Erichsen saw ​himself as he had been and as he was, and the mental vision hurt him more than the material one which the stockade barber had shown him in a glass. He could not tell Butterfield that he had known his father. Nothing was to be gained by telling him; it would lead to his telling more, and how could he speak of things of which the mere thought was become torture so refined and so exquisite?

His eighteen inches were a very rack that night. He was thinking of Claire for the first time in many weeks. She would hold him guilty still. How could she do otherwise? His sweet friend held him guilty when he was innocent, and his enemy the major held him innocent when guilty. Oh, the irony, the biting irony, that had made a worse man of him when he was bad enough already! All the foul night he lay tossing in his noisy chains; his wild eyes were never closed. Yet once the thought stole over him, had he been worthy of Claire when she loved him, would all this ever have been? And after that he lay quieter—his heart knew why.

CHAPTER XXIX

LIGHT AT LAST

The red-hot summer cooled gradually into lukewarm winter, with chilly nights, but the same fierce glare all day; and several men had had their chains struck off, and four had died in them, since Tom first felt the weight of his. But the vacant spaces on the shelves were never ​vacant very long. Those eighty suits of fetters were in continual use. And still the dual work went on, of chiselling the great road to a given level, and of degrading each newcomer to that of the worst man there before him; for there was no levelling-up in these iron-gangs, wherein mutual converse bred mutual debasement, until best and worst found common ground on the very bedrock of human infamy.

Tom for one, however, still stood out among the worst; and there was another newcomer whom the gang had nothing to teach, either of misery or of wickedness; indeed he laughed at the one and greatly increased the other.

This was an ancient felon known only as the First Fleeter: a wizened page of dreadful history, with not a tooth in his head, and but the one redeeming trait of incessant cheerfulness. He had arrived with the first fleet in 1788. He had sinned and suffered through those unspeakable early years, until the sense of suffering became as dead as the moral sense, and not a vestige of either remained to him now. But he would recount his crimes with grinning gums, and gloat over unforgotten agonies until there was a writhing man on every ledge but his own. He lay above Tom, who would listen to him by the hour.

According to his own account there was literally nothing this old man had not done or been done to in the early days; he was cannibal, murderer and worse, and his only regrets were for neglected chances of additional crimes. But his spirits never deserted him, and for a cruel man he was singularly good-natured. He had weak and cunning eyes, a perfectly bald head, displaying every criminal cavity and protuberance, and a ​million wrinkles which, like his mumbling gums, were never still. Yet it was better to hear his wicked laughter than the clanking irons of men who neither slept nor spoke; and the evils endured by the majors iron-gang, which the First Fleeter pooh-poohed with a quaint superiority, did seem less intolerable after one of his yarns.

“Bad rations?” he would croak, when the salt meat was rancid or the fresh meat strong. “Tell ’ee, there’s none on you knows what bad rations is. You should ha’ been at Toongabbie forty year ago; we never had no rations at all, except when a ship come into harbour. Toongabbie would ha’ learned ye! Many’s the time I’ve dragged timber all day, twenty or thirty on us yoked to the one tree like bullocks, and dined off of pounded grass and soup from a native dog. And glad to get it, tell ’ee; we wasn’t pampered and spoilt like you blokes—not at Toongabbie!”

Or perhaps some wretch was groaning from the scourger’s lash. The First Fleeter waxed especially eloquent on all such occasions.

“Call that a flogging?” he would quaver from his ledge. “One little fifty? If we’d had you at Toongabbie you’d know what fledging was. Five, six, an’ even eight bloomin’ hundred I’ve given an’ took. What do you think of that? There was no flies about them floggings, I tell ’ee; no, an’ there was no flies about the hangings either. I’ve seen a man took an’ strung up on the spot for prigging a handful of weevilly biscuits, I have. An’ all the time we was dyin’ by dozens of the bad food an’ the ’ard graft in the ’ot sun. Lord, how we did die! There was a big hole dug; we collected ’em every day an’ pitched ’em in. I mind seeing one man pitched in before the breath was out of ’im. ‘I ​ain’t dead,’ he says. ‘You will be by sundown,’ says the overseer, ‘an’ do you think we want you about the place till to-morrow, you selfish man?’ There wasn’t no flies about that overseer, either; it was him as killed three men in a fortnight, by overwork at the saw. They just dropped dead at their work. ‘Take it away,’ is all he says, ‘put it in the ground’; an’ you never heard nothing more. No, no,” the old monster would conclude, with his senile chuckle; “there wasn’t no flies about them old days in Toongabbie, I can tell ‘ee. I’d give a bit to have ’ad some o’ this feather-bed gang there; them as thinks they know what ’ardship is!”

The First Fleeter became less loquacious after a time, however, and much less severe upon the luxury of the major’s iron-gang. Honeybone’s shrewd eye was on him, and that of the First Fleeter began to droop and ruminate with a cunning preoccupation that made him quite silent on his ledge. At length, however, he took to leaning over and mumbling to Tom in the stillest hours. And when Tom listened, the old wretch mumbled to others, including Macbeth, who had soon followed his enemy from Castle Sullivan, and been well-nigh as refractory in the stockade. The Scot was in another den at nights, but the First Fleeter made and used his opportunities with characteristic craft. So now there was a new poison in the air, and the virus had come all the way from Toongabbie in the early days.

One of the last to be inoculated, and yet the one who perhaps took most kindly to the process, was a certain sleek, bullet-headed youth, who came to the stockade on a day in mid-winter. In the evening, as Tom was sitting at the mess-table, with bloodshot eyes downcast as usual, he heard his name in a voice he seemed to know.

​“Well, Erichsen,” it said, “it’s a small world, ain’t it?”

Tom looked up, and saw the bullet-head nodding at him across the table; but so bloated and debauched was the low face that he was some moments in recognising his old companion of the condemned cell in Newgate.

“Don’t look at a pal like that,” continued Creasey, with a smirk; “you’ve altered worse nor me. No ill-feeling, I say? I was that glad—”

“Silence!” cried the non-commissioned officer on duty. “No talking at your meals, young man, unless you want what-for!”

As for Tom, he had nothing for the newcomer but a surly contempt which he took no trouble to conceal. Creasey, on the other hand, was studiously civil to him on grasping Tom’s reputation in the stockade; and secret circumstances threw them not a little together.

“That’s a biter,” young Butterfield contrived to say to Tom, in a day or two; “where did he know you before?”

“Newgate.”

“He hates you.”

“Let him.”

“I’m jealous he’ll squeak!”

“He might if he dare.”

“How do you know he dursn’t?”

“Too many in it; he’d be torn to little bits. See here, Butter!”

“Yes, Erichsen?”

“You’re to keep out of it.”

“Not unless you do,” said the lad firmly.

“Me! I’m in it up to the neck—and all the better—but you’re different. You’re younger, your time’s ​all but up, you’ve never had the lash, there’s a chance for you; so give me your word.”

The lad hesitated.

“For my sake!”

The lad gave in, but consoled himself by making up to Creasey, who slept in his hut, and was already deeply implicated in that which the other thus forswore.

All was in readiness; the excitement throughout the gang was intense though invisible; and Erichsen, Macbeth, and Creasey were even readier than their fellows (as behoved good ringleaders), when the unforeseen happened at the critical moment. The general failed them on the field of battle. The First Fleeter fell ill and was removed.

It had been coming on for weeks: the old man, who had made light of the iron-gang, was the first to succumb to its hourly hardships. He was older than he had thought; he had it still in him to blacken and corrode every heart in the gang with his own abundant poison, and that he did, but that was all. His irons became very silent all night long. One morning he tumbled at his work; the next, he was sent over to Maitland, unfettered and in a cart. The gang were at work at the time, and the last Tom saw of the First Fleeter, as he waved his cap in the cart, was his bald bad head and his unconquerable smile. Tom wondered whether the last had not in some degree balanced the first, and been doing a little good for a long time in a land that needed light hearts almost as much as pure ones. Still more he wondered how they would manage without him now.

Before nightfall, however, this departure was succeeded by an arrival as unforeseen. It was that of a curricle containing a solitary individual, who drove both ​up and down the line of ironed men, with the sunset-light first on one side of his swarthy, black-whiskered face, and then on the other. He was obviously and openly searching for some one among the eighty prisoners, and his failure to find his man was announced by a frown that had in it more of pain and apprehension than of mere annoyance. Meanwhile the major, who was still a comparatively active man, was bearing down upon the intruder with the help of his furled umbrella; and the gentleman in the curricle was very soon asked what the mischief he wanted there.

“Mischief, my good man?” replied a rich deep voice, a little overladen with superior scorn. “Nothing more mischievous, I take it, than a few words with the superintendent of this gang. Perhaps you will be so extremely condescending as to give him my card.”

“I am he,” said the major. “What can I do for you?”

“The honour of glancing at my card,” said the stranger, with a bow as elaborate as his scorn.

“Well, sir?”

“My name may be familiar to you.”

“Never heard it in my life,” replied the major bluntly. “However,” he added, as the other coloured terribly, “I live out of the world, Mr. Daintree, as you perceive.”

Tom was at work quite near, and he heard the name distinctly. He, too, had never heard it before. And yet he had some dim recollection of the face, so that he was watching it intently, and saw the flush with which Daintree very fussily produced a letter.

“That is your misfortune, sir,” Tom heard him retort; and the rap put the major in a good temper on the spot. He sang out for a wardsman to come and take charge of the gentleman’s horses.

​“Nevertheless,” continued Daintree, “I take it that even you, sir, are acquainted with the name of the writer of the missive in my hand. I am the bearer, Major Honeybone,” with immense pomposity, “of a letter from my friend, his Excellency Sir George Gipps, the Governor of this Colony!”

“Never met him,” returned the major, with a twinkling eye. “It is my first acquaintance even with his handwriting.” Indeed his Excellency had been not many weeks installed; but it was years since the major had heard tones so rich and periods so round as those of his Excellency’s friend, whom he hereupon escorted with hospitality to his house.

Now in this poor hut, opposite that stockade full of felons, and in that desert place, the major kept a few dozens of admirable wine, and some boxes of excellent cigars. Two of these were alight, and the gentlemen had clinked glasses and taken a sip, before Major Honeybone would permit himself to open his Excellency’s letter. Hardly had he done so when he regretted both wine and cigars. He looked up suddenly, and in wrath, which, however, was somewhat disarmed by the eager light he thus surprised in the visitor’s strong and dusky face.

“What on earth do you want him for? I call this a most monstrous request,” said Major Honeybone; and the last sentence was meant to have come first, until Daintree’s look inverted them.

“Request?” said Daintree, raising his eyebrows slightly.

“Yes, sir, request!” cried the major. “Command, sir, is a thing I don’t take from a gentleman I’ve never had the honour of setting eyes on; and this is one that ​Sir Richard Bourke, sir, would sooner have died than give!”

Daintree pursed up his eyes. As it was only by patient exercise of two characteristic qualities that he had got the letter at all, so he now saw that he must trust to those two qualities to overcome this other masterful man. He must be diplomatic; he must have patience; he must pick his way where he could not force it; and it was very clear that there would be no forcing this Major Honeybone.

The letter authorised and begged the major to deliver and hand over Thomas Erichsen, Seahorse, then undergoing sentence in the major’s iron-gang, to the bearer, who particularly wished to have him for his assigned body-servant, and undertook to make himself thenceforward responsible for the said convict’s good behaviour. It was an irregular letter; no reason was given for granting such a favour at all. It did say, however, that Mr. Daintree would give his reasons; and with the letter in both hands, as though on the point of tearing it up, the major leant back in his chair and regarded the other with a prolonged and curious stare.

“What are your reasons?” he asked at length.

“He is an innocent man,” replied Daintree impressively.

“A convicted murderer, I understood.”

“Wrongly convicted. I followed his case. Did you?”

“No, sir,” said the major; “they give me quite enough work out here.”

“Well, I did follow it,” the visitor went on. “Between ourselves, Major Honeybone, I did a great deal more than that. The case interested me from the first. I knew something about this poor lad. That knowledge, ​together with the circumstances of the case, convinced me at the time that he was an innocent man.”

“He isn’t one now,” remarked Major Honeybone.

“I—I am not a pauper, sir,” proceeded Daintree with embarrassment. “I don’t want this to go any further; but you see, I knew something about the boy; and, in short, I found the money for his defence!”

“The dickens you did!” exclaimed the major. “Then you were a friend of his?”

“I am his friend, sir, though he has never seen me.”

“It was a noble thing to do—’pon my soul it was,” observed the major, very much impressed. “Quite quixotic, upon my soul!”

This open admiration hit Daintree in his weakest spot; he leant forward and quoted the irresistible figures in a sudden blaze of self-satisfaction.

“Lor’!” said the major. “You don’t say so. Gadzooks!”

“When I do a thing at all,” remarked Daintree with perfect truth, “I do it with all my heart. Either that or I leave it alone. So I need hardly tell you I didn’t stop short at Serjeant Culliford. No, sir, I went to Lord John Russell himself; it would be an affectation were I to conceal my impression that his lordship’s final decision was not uninfluenced by what I said.”

Major Honeybone was too used to lies not to know the truth when he chanced to hear it. He filled up both glasses and sucked thoughtfully at his cigar. Daintree watched him with an eager eye.

“So he owes his life to you?” said the major at last. “Well, sir, then it is my duty to tell you that he owes you the greatest conceivable grudge!”

Daintree sighed.

​“I know what you mean,” said he. “I have heard much from the Principal Superintendent of convicts. I am only afraid I have more to hear from you.”

“Not a great deal,” said the major, shrugging his shoulders. “He has had four floggings here, and one before he came here; but that’s always the way. I have known convicts who have never had the lash, but very few who’ve only had it once. It has a bad effect; but what can you do? I may tell you, sir, now that I think we understand each other, you are not the only man interested in Erichsen. I take an interest in him myself; but there’s no doing anything with him; and there would be no doing anything with any of ’em if I didn’t come down on him as he will insist on deserving. I am sorry for him, I am sorry for you as his friend; but he’s the most dangerous man in my gang, and it would be a piece of madness to set him free. It would amount to that, you know; but Gipps can’t possibly push the matter any further after what I shall tell him; and no more must you, Mr. Daintree—you mustn’t indeed. Come, sir, I can’t say more. I am almost as sorry as you are. He’s a good sportsman!” cried old Honey bone, who was one himself. “I only wish he was hunting with the hounds instead of running with these confounded foxes of convicts!”

Daintree took all this meekly. The major was not a little softened; that was something, but he might be made softer yet. It seemed to Daintree that a sufficiently affecting interview between himself and Erichsen, with Major Honeybone looking on, might have that effect. He pictured the convict in tears upon his knees, he heard his grateful broken utterances. He foresaw moisture even in the major’s shrewd orbs; and he was ​prepared, if necessary, to go upon his own knees to crave the interview.

It was not necessary. Honeybone shrugged his shoulders, and left the room with Daintree sitting very still in his chair; he was not so still when the door shut, however. He sprang up and looked in a glass; he sat down again, wiping his forehead and his lips, and shrinking from what he courted, like a swain. He had taken deep note of Erichsen at his trial. That honest, fearless, guiltless gaze, he could see it still; yet he had sought it in vain half an hour since in the iron-gang.

A soldier entered with a lighted lamp. Daintree pushed back his chair a little, and was kept waiting no longer. Chains jingled outside, and in another moment the convict was ushered in by a sentry under arms, followed by the major, who shut the door.

“Was this necessary?” whispered Daintree, glancing at the fixed bayonet with a shudder.

“Quite,” replied the major aloud. “You don’t know your man.”

He did not indeed: the fearlessness remained, and that was all.

Daintree was speaking nervously, forcibly, with none of his habitual affectations, with little of his customary flow. He was saying he had taken an interest in the case at home in England, and had all along believed in the prisoner’s innocence. The prisoner stopped him at that word.

“There’s only one man living who thinks so,” said he. “I know now where I’ve seen you before. It was at my trial. You are the man.”

“What man?”

​“The one that saved my life. My worst friend!”

The hoarse and surly voice stabbed Daintree to the heart. He saw Honeybone look at him, and recalled the major’s very similar words. He started up and offered Erichsen his hand.

“Take it away,” growled Tom. “Say what you want with me, for God’s sake!”

No; it was not Daintree’s ideal interview. As little did it resemble the meeting with his benefactor which Tom had once pictured, and even vainly solicited, but all so long ago—in that other life—that upon him the contrast was lost. All he still remembered was that he had once imagined himself indebted to this person for the blessed gift of life; all he now perceived was his mistake, and what a malignant curse that blessed gift had proved. Not that he resented it any more. He no longer resented anything in the world. Even this person’s kind, well-meant, emotional remarks moved him to no stronger feeling than one of slight impatience: nor was he listening when a look, an intonation, a pause, informed him that he had been asked a question.

“Say it again,” said Tom.

“I want you for my assigned servant,” repeated Daintree, disregarding both the decision and the presence of Major Honeybone, who sat there quite enjoying the prospect of further opposition. “I want to be your friend—to take you away from this ghastly place—to sponge the very memory of it out of your mind. The Governor agrees to it—I have his written leave. Will you come with me, Erichsen? Will you come? Will you come?”

“You’re very good,” said Tom. “I prefer to stop where I am.”

“What?” cried both gentlemen at once. The major looked personally aggrieved.

​“I prefer the iron-gang.”

“To my house—my protection—my friendship?”

Horror and mortification were in the rich, strong tones, and in the flushed and swarthy face.

“I prefer the iron-gang,” repeated Tom; but his voice was weaker—he noticed it himself—and with the next breath was crying savagely that he would not go, that he would stop where he was, and who was Daintree to come interfering there? A lot he minded what the Governor or what fifty Governors said; there he was, and there he meant to stick; no power on earth should shift him out of that.

“Oh!” said the major. “No power, eh?”

“Short of a file of red-coats, which you can’t spare.”

“Sentry, remove that man!”

The rest of the gang were at supper. Tom clanked in and sat down with a rattle. He nodded to one or two desperate kindred spirits, half proudly, as much as to say, “All right, my lads; I’m not the man to desert his pals; I’m true game to those that are true game to me—I’m that if I’m nothing else.” Those indeed were the words in his heart; but nobody answered his nod, only some irons jingled, where Creasey had reached out under the table, and given Macbeth a kick.

As they were all shuffling out of the mess-shed, Butter took a pill of paper from his mouth and pressed it into Tom’s hand. Tom unrolled it on his ledge, and furtively read it while the sentry still stood with his lantern on the threshold.

These eleven words:—

“All up since fleater went Mac and Cresy mean to squeek.”

​

Hardly had he deciphered them when a wardsman thrust in his head and summoned Erichsen to the major’s quarters.

“They’ve been quick about it,” thought Tom, as another wardsman joined them on the way.

The major looked very stern and strong. Daintree was drawing on his gloves. Tom thought he recognised the little heap of clothes upon the floor; the trousers were blood-stained still.

“Now, sir!” cried the major with a glittering eye. “I think you said that no power on earth would shift you out of this? Off with those irons, men, and he shall see!”

Through the black window glowed the curricle lamps.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article  Metasyntactic variable, which is released under the  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.