THE VOICE OF GUNBAR"H'sh! Did you hear a coo-ee?"I shook my head in some surprise. My host seemed a good fellow; but hitherto he had proved an extremely poor companion, and for five minutes, I suppose, neither of us had said a word. My eyes had fallen from the new well, with its pump and white palings shining like ivory under the full moon, to our two shadows skewered through and through by those of the iron hurdles against which we were leaning. These hurdles enclosed and protected a Moreton Bay fig, which had been planted where the lid of the old well used to lie, so I had just been told; and I had said I wondered why one well should have been filled in and another sunk so very near the same place, and getting no answer I had gone on wondering for those five minutes. So if there had been any sound beyond the croaking of the crickets (which you get to notice about as much as the tick of a clock), I felt certain that I must have heard it too. I, however, was a very new chum, whereas Warburton of Gunbar was a ten-year bushman, whose ear might well be quicker than mine to catch the noises of the wilderness; and when Iraised my eyes inquisitively there was a light in his that made me uneasy."Hear it now?" he said quietly, and with a smile, as a seaman points out sails invisible to the land-lubber. "I do—plainly.""I don't," I candidly replied. "But if it's some poor devil lost in the mallee, you'll be turning out to look for him, and I'll lend you a hand."His homestead, you see, was in the heart of the mallee, and on the edge of a ten-mile block which was one tangle of mallee and porcupine scrub from fence to fence. I shuddered to think of anyone being bushed in that stuff, for away down in Warburton's eyes there was a horror that had gone like a bullet to my nerves. I was therefore the more surprised at the dry laugh with which he answered:"You'd better stop where you are."I could not understand the man. He was not only the manager of Gunbar, but overseer and store-keeper as well, an unmarried man and a solitary. One's first impression of him was that his lonely life and depressing surroundings had sadly affected his whole nature. He had looked askance at me when I rode up to the place, making me fancy I had at last found the station where an uninvited guest was also unwelcome. After that preliminary scrutiny, however, his manner had warmed somewhat. He asked me several questions concerning the old country from which we both came; and I remember liking him for putting on ablack coat for supper, which struck me as a charming conceit in that benighted spot, and not a woman within twenty-five miles of us. His latest eccentricity pleased me less. Either he was chaffing me, and he had heard nothing (but his sombre manner made that incredible), or he was prepared to let a fellow-creature perish fearfully without an attempt at rescue. I was thankful when he explained himself."I know who it is, you see," he said presently, striking a match on the hurdle and re-lighting his pipe. "It's all right.""But who is it?" said I; for that would not do for me."It's Mad Trevor," he returned gravely. "Come now!" he added, looking me in the face much as he had done before inviting me to dismount; "do you mean to say you have got as far as this and never heard the yarn of Mad Trevor of Gunbar?"I made it clear that I knew nothing at all about it; and in the end he told me the story as we stood in the station yard, and lounged against those iron hurdles right under the great round moon."My lad, I was as young as you are when I came to this place; but that's very near ten years ago, and ten years take some time in the mallee scrub. Yes, I know I look older than that; but this country would age anybody, even if nothing happened to start your white hairs before their time. I'm going to tell you what did happen within my first two months on thisstation. Mad Trevor was manager then, and he and I were to run the show between us as soon as I knew my business. To learn it, I used to run up the horses at five o'clock in the morning, and run 'em out again last thing at night, for the drought had jolly nearly dried us up, and in the yard yonder we had to give every horse his nose-bag of chaff before turning him out. Well, between sparrow-chirp and bedtime I was either mustering or boundary-riding, or weighing out rations in the store, or taking them to the huts in the spring-cart, or making up the books, or sweeping out my store, or cleaning up the harness; but I never had ten minutes to myself, for old Trevor believed in making me work all the harder because I was only to get my tucker for it till I knew the ropes. And for my part I'm bound to say I thoroughly enjoyed the life in those days, as I daresay you do now. The rougher the job, the readier was I to tackle it. So I think the boss was getting to like me, and I know I liked him; but for all that, he was mad, as I soon found out from the men, who had christened him Mad Trevor."It appeared that he had come to Gunbar some three or four years before me, with his young wife and their baby girl, Mona, who was five years old when first I saw her—riding across this very yard on her father's shoulders. Ay, and I can see her now, with her yellow head of hair and her splendid little legs and arms! She was forever on Mad Trevor's back, or in his arms, or on his knee, or at his side in the buggy,or even astride in front of him on the saddle-bow; and her father's face beaming over her shoulder, and his great beard tickling her cheeks, and he watching her all the time with the tenderest love that ever I saw in human eyes. For, you see, the wife had died here on Gunbar, and lay buried in the little cemetery we have behind the stock-yards; but she was going to live again in little Mona; and Trevor knew that, and was just waiting."But his trouble had driven him quite mad; for often I have been wakened when I'd just dropped off, by hearing him come down the verandah trailing his blanket after him; and away he was gone to camp all night on his wife's grave. The men used to hear him talking to her up there; it would have made your heart bleed for him, he was such a rough-and-ready customer with all of us but the child."Well, one day we were out on the run together, he and I in the buggy. It was to fix a new rope round the drum of the twelve-mile whim—at the far side of the mallee, that is—and I recollect he showed me how it was done that day so that I never needed showing again, and it was because I was quickish at picking up such things that he liked me. But a brute of a dust-storm came on just as we finished, and we had to wait at the whim-driver's hut till it was over; and that was the first time I ever heard him mention little Mona's name behind her back. For the whim-driver had a fine coloured print, from some Christmas number,stuck up over his bunk, and it was a treat to hear the poor boss beg it from him to bring home to the little one. It was as though the bare thought of the kid made a difference in the look of his eye and the tone of his voice; for he had been swearing at the rope and us in his best style; but he never swore once on the drive back, he only made me hold the rolled print in my hand the whole time; and I had to take tremendous care of it, and hand it over to him the moment we pulled up in the yard here, so that he might give it to little Mona first thing. But that was not to be: the child was lost. She had been missing since the time of the dust-storm, which was mid-day, and all hands but the cook who told us, and the nurse who was responsible and beside herself, were out searching for her already."The boss took the news without immediately getting down from the buggy, and with none of the bluster which he usually had ready for the least thing. But his face was all hair and freckles, and I recollect how the freckles stood out when he turned to speak to me; and to this day I can feel the pinch of his fingers on the fleshy part of my arm."'Harry,' he says, in a kind of whisper, 'you must turn these two out, and then run up Blücher and Wellington; and you must drive that nurse girl away from this, Harry—you must take her away this very night. For if my child is dead, I'll kill her too—by God, but I will!'"But the nurse had seen us drive up, and as Mad Trevor crossed the yard heavily, like a dazed man, she ran out from the verandah and threw herself at his knees, sobbing her heart out. What he said to her first I couldn't catch: I only know that in another moment he was crying like a child himself. No wonder either, when the mallee is the worst kind of scrub to get lost in, and there had been enough dust to clean out deeper tracks than a child's, and when it was growing late in the afternoon, and the poor little thing out for hours already. But it was the most pitiful sight you ever saw—the servant girl in hysterics and the poor old boss steadying his voice to take the blame off her he'd said he'd kill. Ay, he was standing just in front of the verandah, within three yards of where we are now, and that rolled-up print was still in his hand."So no more was said about my carting the poor girl off that night; but Wellington and Blücher were run up all the same, and at sundown they were bowling the buggy away back to the twelve-mile with me in her. You see, the twelve-mile whim-driver was Gunbar George, our oldest hand, who knew every inch of the run, so the boss thought that George would lay hold of little Mona sooner than he could, if she was in the mallee. And that's where she was, we were all quite certain; and George was certain too, when I told him; and he told of a man he himself had once found in our mallee, stone-dead, with 'died from thirst'scratched in the grime on the bottom of his quart pot, and all within a mile of this very homestead."That wasn't a pretty story to leave behind with a new chum who was going to camp alone in a lonely hut for the first time of asking, and nothing to think about but the poor little bairn that was lost. I tell you, I shall remember that night as long as I live, and how I felt when I had seen the last of George and the buggy in the moonlight; for by that time it was night, and just such another as this, with the moon right overhead, as round as an orange, and not a cloud in the sky. Ah! we have plenty of nights like that in the back-blocks, and one full moon is as like the last as two peas, for want of clouds; and somehow they always seem to come before they're due; yet it's a weary while to look back upon, with that night at the end of all, like a gate after five miles of posts and wire. Say now—have you never heard him all this time?" He had paused, with his head bent and on one side.I replied that I had heard nothing but his story; that what I wanted to hear was the end of it, and that Mad Trevor would keep. He smiled when I said that, and stood listening for another minute or more, with his eyes drawn back into his head."Ah, well!" he tossed up his head and went on, "it came to an end in time, like most nights; but the worst was before it began, when I could hear George cracking his whip whenever I stood still. So I stood still until I knew I should hear him no more, and thenI blew up the fire for my tea, for I had a fair twist after all that driving. But Lord, you'll hear how your boots creak the first time you camp alone in a hut—especially if it's a good one with a floor to it like our twelve-mile! I tell you I took mine off, and then I put 'em on again, because my stocking-soles made just as much noise in their own way, and it was a creepier way. Then there are two or three rooms to the hut out there—it's a fine hut, our twelve-mile—and I had to poke my nose into them all before I could tackle my tea. And then I had to walk right round the hut in the moonlight, as if it had been a desert island. But it was lighter outside than in, for I had nothing but a slush-lamp—you know, a strip of moleskin in a tin of mutton fat—and I didn't understand the working of one in those days any better than I suppose you would now. Well, then, the whim-water at the twelve-mile is brackish, so I had to fill the billy at an open tank that was getting low; but there'd been a tantalising little shower of sixty points a day or two before that had made the water muddy; and I very well remember that the billy looked full of tea before I opened my hand to slip the tea in. Then the hut was swarming with bull-ants, and they came crawling up the sides of the billy and into the tea where I had set it to cool on the floor; and the light was so bad that I had to chance those ants, because you couldn't tell them from tea-leaves. Well, I could have enjoyed the experience, and thought of the fine letterhome it would have made, if I hadn't been thinking all the time of that poor little thing in the mallee. I was just about as new a chum as you are now, and there was a kind of interest in turning my pouch inside out for the last pipeful of the cut-up tobacco I had brought up with me from Melbourne. It was one of the last fills of cut-up that ever I had until you handed me your pouch to-night, because when you once get used to the black cakes you'll find you'll stick to them. So there I sat and smoked my pipe on the doorstep, and kept looking at the moon, and thinking of the old people in the old country, and wishing they could see me just then. I daresay you think like that sometimes, but you'll find you get over that too. It was worse to think of that little mite in the mallee scrub, and how she had sat on my knee the night before; and how she would come into my store when I was doing the books, spill the flour about, and keep on asking questions. That's the store over there, at the other side of the new well, with the bell on top and the narrow verandah in front. I must show you little Mona's height on the centre post: I had to measure her every morning after once getting her to bed by telling her she only grew in her sleep."Well, thinking wouldn't do any good, and my last pipe of cut-up was soon done, for it was nothing but powder. I had brought a cake of the black stuff with me, but it was too strong for me in those days. So then I thought I had better turn in, though it wasonly ten o'clock; so I took my blanket and the slush-lamp to the little dark room at the back, and pulled off my coat and boots, and spread my blanket on George's bunk. And before I lay down—well, I thought I should like to put in a prayer for the poor little thing that was lost; and I reckon it was about the last time I was ever on my knees at that business, for you'll find these back-blocks don't make a man more religious than he need be. But it was a comfort to me that night; and, while I was kneeling, a little kitten of George's, that I'd never noticed when I first looked into the room, came out and went for my stocking-soles; and that was another comfort, I tell you! Mind you, I was twelve miles from a house, and five from the nearest fellow-creature, a boundary-rider on the next run. I had never been able to get that out of my head, so the kitten was a godsend, and though he would come on to the bed to tickle my toes, I wouldn't have been without him for all I was worth. I had a paper too—one of my home papers that I hadn't had time to read; and I stuck up the slush-lamp, and strained my eyes at the print until I couldn't keep them open any longer; and what with the kitten, that was purring very loud at my feet (but the louder he made it the homelier it sounded), I found myself tumbling off to sleep long before I had expected to, and in better heart too."I suppose I must have slept for some hours, for when I woke the moon was low and swollen, and hanginglike a Chinese lantern in the very middle of my open doorway. But I never looked at my watch; I lay there staring at the setting moon, and listening for a repetition of the sound that had roused me. I had not long to wait, but yet long enough to make me wonder at the time whether I mightn't have heard it in my dreams only. And then it came again—the long-drawn wail, the piercing final cry of a coo-ee from one that had learnt to coo-ee before he could speak. As my feet touched the floor I heard another coo-ee; as I ran out into the moonshine there came a fourth; but the fifth was in my ear before I knew that they all came from the mallee scrub that spreads westward from here to within half a mile of the twelve-mile whim. Then I answered as well as I knew how; but the acquirement was a very recent one in my case; and besides, my wits were still in a tangle. For first I thought it was the child herself, until I realised, with a laugh at the absurdity of the idea, that she could neither walk so far nor coo-ee like that; and then I supposed it must be some chance traveller that had got bushed, like others before him, in that deadly mallee. But all the while I was answering his coo-ees as best I could, and running in my socks in the direction from which they seemed to come. And long before I spied my man I made sure that it was Mad Trevor himself, for I knew no other with such lungs, and who else would have searched for a bairn of five so many weary miles from the spot where it had last been seen?"But, as a matter of fact, he himself had no notion where he was, until he saw me standing in front of him in the low moonlight. Then he wanted to know what I meant by coming back from the twelve-mile; for, don't you see, he thought he had been coasting around the home-station all night—and that'll tell you about our mallee! When I set him right he just stood there, wringing his big hands like a woman; and it was worse to see than when he cried like a child before the little one's nurse."Of course I got him to come back with me to the hut; and he leant on my shoulder with his sixteen stone, and he just said, 'Well, Harry, I don't believe she's in the mallee at all. I've been coo-eeing for her the whole night, ever since you went; and George has been coo-eeing for her ever since he came; and all hands have been coo-eeing for her in the mallee all night long. And I don't believe she's there at all. I believe she's somewhere about the homestead all the time. We never looked there. What fools we all are. You shall make me a pannikin of tea, and I'll turn in and have a sleep, Harry; and we'll go back together when it's light; and we'll find her asleep in the chaff-house, I shouldn't wonder, if they haven't found her already; you bet we'll find her safe and sound in some hole or corner, the rogue! frightening her old dad out of all his wits.'"And indeed, as he spoke, he gave a mad laugh even for him; and I shrank away from under his greathand, that would keep tightening on my shoulder; and left him to sit down in the hut while I went to the wood-heap, and then to the tank to rinse and refill the billy."But that notion of his about the homestead had been my notion too, in a kind of way; only I had kept it to myself because they were all so cock-sure it was the mallee, and they would know best. I was thinking it out, though, as I chopped the wood, and thinking it out as I rinsed the billy. Now, to do this where the water was clearest, I had to lean over from a bit of a staging, the tank being low, as I told you. But this time, through thinking so much more of Mona than of what I was doing, I lost my balance, and very nearly toppled in. And then I had to think no more, for in a flash I knew where little Mona was."The instant he paused I saw him listening. He was standing in front of me now, but my back was still to the little fig-tree, and my hands had the hurdle tight. I neither spoke nor took my eyes off him till he went on."Yes, she was under the ground you're standing on," said Warburton, nodding his head as I started from the place; "she had fallen into the old well, and pulled down the lid in trying to save herself. I knew it at the moment I was near toppling into the twelve-mile tank that wasn't one foot deep. It turned out to be so. But I was never surer of it than when I went back to the hut, spilling the water thewhole way, I was in such a tremble. And the difficulty was to keep the knowledge—for knowledge it was—from the poor boss; it had cheered him so to think the child had never been near the mallee! Why, before daylight he dozed off quite comfortably on George's bunk in my blanket; and I sat and watched him, and listened to him snoring; and could have fetched the axe from the wood-heap and brained him where he lay, so that he might never know."And he took it so calmly after all! I do assure you, when we had buried her alongside her mother, he stood where we are now, and set all hands digging the new well and filling in the old, and swore at us like a healthy man when we didn't do this or that his way. It was he who designed those palings, and would have no more lids, but a pump; though there was neither woman nor child on the station to meet with accidents now, but only us men. And he was smoking his pipe when he planted this fig, for I was by at the time, and remember him telling me his wife had brought it from Moreton Bay in Queensland. I had seen it often in a pot, and now I had to say whether it was plumb; and with his pipe in his mouth and his head on one side he seemed as callous as you please. And for three weeks, to my certain knowledge, he slept every night in his room, and I would have thought nothing of sleeping there with him, he was bearing it so grandly. Then came the full moon and the bright nights again; and we heard him in the mallee,coo-eeing for the child that lay beside her mother—him that had buried them both!"Well, he didn't come back next morning, so now all hands turned out to search forhim. But we never found him all day, for he had crossed his tracks again and again; and all next night we heard him coo-eeing away for his dead child, but now his coo-ee was getting hoarse; and God knows why, but none of us could manage to set eyes on him. It was I who found him the day after. He was lying under a hop-bush, but the sun had shifted and was all over him. His lips were black, and I felt certain he was dead. But when I sung out he jumped clean to his feet, with his fists clenched and his red beard blowing in the hot wind, and his face and his eyes on fire. And if he had never been mad before, he was then."He opened his mouth, and I expected a roar, but I couldn't understand a word he said until he had half emptied my water-bag."'What do you want with me?' he says at last; and of course I said I wanted him to come back to the station with me. So he says, 'You leave me alone—don't you meddle with me. I'm not coming back till I find my little 'un that's bushed in this mallee.' So then I saw there was nothing for it but firmness, and I said he must come with me—as if it had been poor wee Mona herself. But he only laughed and swore, and went on warning me not to meddle with him. Well, I was just forced to. But sixteen stone takes alot of weakening, and the last I saw of him alive was his great freckled fist coming at my head. I went down like a pithed bullock. And it was I who found him again the week after, when he must have been all but a week dead—but I had heard him coo-eeing every blessed night!"He was listening again: whenever he paused, I caught him listening. I was still to understand it, and the deep-down scare in his eyes."Stop a bit!" said I. "Don't tell me he's dead if he's only mad, and you've got him in some hut somewhere. You say you can hear him coo-eeing—I see you can."Warburton of Gunbar heaved the saddest sigh I have ever heard."I hear him always," he said quietly, "when the moon is at the full. I have done, all along, and it's close on ten years ago now. It's in the mallee I hear him, just as he heard little Mona; yet they all three lie together over yonder behind the stock-yards. H'sh, man, h'sh!" He was gripping at my arm, but I twisted away from him even as himself from Mad Trevor, because his listening eyes were more than enough for me. "There's his coo-ee again!" he cried, raising a hand that never quivered. "Mean to tell me you can't hear it now?"
"H'sh! Did you hear a coo-ee?"
I shook my head in some surprise. My host seemed a good fellow; but hitherto he had proved an extremely poor companion, and for five minutes, I suppose, neither of us had said a word. My eyes had fallen from the new well, with its pump and white palings shining like ivory under the full moon, to our two shadows skewered through and through by those of the iron hurdles against which we were leaning. These hurdles enclosed and protected a Moreton Bay fig, which had been planted where the lid of the old well used to lie, so I had just been told; and I had said I wondered why one well should have been filled in and another sunk so very near the same place, and getting no answer I had gone on wondering for those five minutes. So if there had been any sound beyond the croaking of the crickets (which you get to notice about as much as the tick of a clock), I felt certain that I must have heard it too. I, however, was a very new chum, whereas Warburton of Gunbar was a ten-year bushman, whose ear might well be quicker than mine to catch the noises of the wilderness; and when Iraised my eyes inquisitively there was a light in his that made me uneasy.
"Hear it now?" he said quietly, and with a smile, as a seaman points out sails invisible to the land-lubber. "I do—plainly."
"I don't," I candidly replied. "But if it's some poor devil lost in the mallee, you'll be turning out to look for him, and I'll lend you a hand."
His homestead, you see, was in the heart of the mallee, and on the edge of a ten-mile block which was one tangle of mallee and porcupine scrub from fence to fence. I shuddered to think of anyone being bushed in that stuff, for away down in Warburton's eyes there was a horror that had gone like a bullet to my nerves. I was therefore the more surprised at the dry laugh with which he answered:
"You'd better stop where you are."
I could not understand the man. He was not only the manager of Gunbar, but overseer and store-keeper as well, an unmarried man and a solitary. One's first impression of him was that his lonely life and depressing surroundings had sadly affected his whole nature. He had looked askance at me when I rode up to the place, making me fancy I had at last found the station where an uninvited guest was also unwelcome. After that preliminary scrutiny, however, his manner had warmed somewhat. He asked me several questions concerning the old country from which we both came; and I remember liking him for putting on ablack coat for supper, which struck me as a charming conceit in that benighted spot, and not a woman within twenty-five miles of us. His latest eccentricity pleased me less. Either he was chaffing me, and he had heard nothing (but his sombre manner made that incredible), or he was prepared to let a fellow-creature perish fearfully without an attempt at rescue. I was thankful when he explained himself.
"I know who it is, you see," he said presently, striking a match on the hurdle and re-lighting his pipe. "It's all right."
"But who is it?" said I; for that would not do for me.
"It's Mad Trevor," he returned gravely. "Come now!" he added, looking me in the face much as he had done before inviting me to dismount; "do you mean to say you have got as far as this and never heard the yarn of Mad Trevor of Gunbar?"
I made it clear that I knew nothing at all about it; and in the end he told me the story as we stood in the station yard, and lounged against those iron hurdles right under the great round moon.
"My lad, I was as young as you are when I came to this place; but that's very near ten years ago, and ten years take some time in the mallee scrub. Yes, I know I look older than that; but this country would age anybody, even if nothing happened to start your white hairs before their time. I'm going to tell you what did happen within my first two months on thisstation. Mad Trevor was manager then, and he and I were to run the show between us as soon as I knew my business. To learn it, I used to run up the horses at five o'clock in the morning, and run 'em out again last thing at night, for the drought had jolly nearly dried us up, and in the yard yonder we had to give every horse his nose-bag of chaff before turning him out. Well, between sparrow-chirp and bedtime I was either mustering or boundary-riding, or weighing out rations in the store, or taking them to the huts in the spring-cart, or making up the books, or sweeping out my store, or cleaning up the harness; but I never had ten minutes to myself, for old Trevor believed in making me work all the harder because I was only to get my tucker for it till I knew the ropes. And for my part I'm bound to say I thoroughly enjoyed the life in those days, as I daresay you do now. The rougher the job, the readier was I to tackle it. So I think the boss was getting to like me, and I know I liked him; but for all that, he was mad, as I soon found out from the men, who had christened him Mad Trevor.
"It appeared that he had come to Gunbar some three or four years before me, with his young wife and their baby girl, Mona, who was five years old when first I saw her—riding across this very yard on her father's shoulders. Ay, and I can see her now, with her yellow head of hair and her splendid little legs and arms! She was forever on Mad Trevor's back, or in his arms, or on his knee, or at his side in the buggy,or even astride in front of him on the saddle-bow; and her father's face beaming over her shoulder, and his great beard tickling her cheeks, and he watching her all the time with the tenderest love that ever I saw in human eyes. For, you see, the wife had died here on Gunbar, and lay buried in the little cemetery we have behind the stock-yards; but she was going to live again in little Mona; and Trevor knew that, and was just waiting.
"But his trouble had driven him quite mad; for often I have been wakened when I'd just dropped off, by hearing him come down the verandah trailing his blanket after him; and away he was gone to camp all night on his wife's grave. The men used to hear him talking to her up there; it would have made your heart bleed for him, he was such a rough-and-ready customer with all of us but the child.
"Well, one day we were out on the run together, he and I in the buggy. It was to fix a new rope round the drum of the twelve-mile whim—at the far side of the mallee, that is—and I recollect he showed me how it was done that day so that I never needed showing again, and it was because I was quickish at picking up such things that he liked me. But a brute of a dust-storm came on just as we finished, and we had to wait at the whim-driver's hut till it was over; and that was the first time I ever heard him mention little Mona's name behind her back. For the whim-driver had a fine coloured print, from some Christmas number,stuck up over his bunk, and it was a treat to hear the poor boss beg it from him to bring home to the little one. It was as though the bare thought of the kid made a difference in the look of his eye and the tone of his voice; for he had been swearing at the rope and us in his best style; but he never swore once on the drive back, he only made me hold the rolled print in my hand the whole time; and I had to take tremendous care of it, and hand it over to him the moment we pulled up in the yard here, so that he might give it to little Mona first thing. But that was not to be: the child was lost. She had been missing since the time of the dust-storm, which was mid-day, and all hands but the cook who told us, and the nurse who was responsible and beside herself, were out searching for her already.
"The boss took the news without immediately getting down from the buggy, and with none of the bluster which he usually had ready for the least thing. But his face was all hair and freckles, and I recollect how the freckles stood out when he turned to speak to me; and to this day I can feel the pinch of his fingers on the fleshy part of my arm.
"'Harry,' he says, in a kind of whisper, 'you must turn these two out, and then run up Blücher and Wellington; and you must drive that nurse girl away from this, Harry—you must take her away this very night. For if my child is dead, I'll kill her too—by God, but I will!'
"But the nurse had seen us drive up, and as Mad Trevor crossed the yard heavily, like a dazed man, she ran out from the verandah and threw herself at his knees, sobbing her heart out. What he said to her first I couldn't catch: I only know that in another moment he was crying like a child himself. No wonder either, when the mallee is the worst kind of scrub to get lost in, and there had been enough dust to clean out deeper tracks than a child's, and when it was growing late in the afternoon, and the poor little thing out for hours already. But it was the most pitiful sight you ever saw—the servant girl in hysterics and the poor old boss steadying his voice to take the blame off her he'd said he'd kill. Ay, he was standing just in front of the verandah, within three yards of where we are now, and that rolled-up print was still in his hand.
"So no more was said about my carting the poor girl off that night; but Wellington and Blücher were run up all the same, and at sundown they were bowling the buggy away back to the twelve-mile with me in her. You see, the twelve-mile whim-driver was Gunbar George, our oldest hand, who knew every inch of the run, so the boss thought that George would lay hold of little Mona sooner than he could, if she was in the mallee. And that's where she was, we were all quite certain; and George was certain too, when I told him; and he told of a man he himself had once found in our mallee, stone-dead, with 'died from thirst'scratched in the grime on the bottom of his quart pot, and all within a mile of this very homestead.
"That wasn't a pretty story to leave behind with a new chum who was going to camp alone in a lonely hut for the first time of asking, and nothing to think about but the poor little bairn that was lost. I tell you, I shall remember that night as long as I live, and how I felt when I had seen the last of George and the buggy in the moonlight; for by that time it was night, and just such another as this, with the moon right overhead, as round as an orange, and not a cloud in the sky. Ah! we have plenty of nights like that in the back-blocks, and one full moon is as like the last as two peas, for want of clouds; and somehow they always seem to come before they're due; yet it's a weary while to look back upon, with that night at the end of all, like a gate after five miles of posts and wire. Say now—have you never heard him all this time?" He had paused, with his head bent and on one side.
I replied that I had heard nothing but his story; that what I wanted to hear was the end of it, and that Mad Trevor would keep. He smiled when I said that, and stood listening for another minute or more, with his eyes drawn back into his head.
"Ah, well!" he tossed up his head and went on, "it came to an end in time, like most nights; but the worst was before it began, when I could hear George cracking his whip whenever I stood still. So I stood still until I knew I should hear him no more, and thenI blew up the fire for my tea, for I had a fair twist after all that driving. But Lord, you'll hear how your boots creak the first time you camp alone in a hut—especially if it's a good one with a floor to it like our twelve-mile! I tell you I took mine off, and then I put 'em on again, because my stocking-soles made just as much noise in their own way, and it was a creepier way. Then there are two or three rooms to the hut out there—it's a fine hut, our twelve-mile—and I had to poke my nose into them all before I could tackle my tea. And then I had to walk right round the hut in the moonlight, as if it had been a desert island. But it was lighter outside than in, for I had nothing but a slush-lamp—you know, a strip of moleskin in a tin of mutton fat—and I didn't understand the working of one in those days any better than I suppose you would now. Well, then, the whim-water at the twelve-mile is brackish, so I had to fill the billy at an open tank that was getting low; but there'd been a tantalising little shower of sixty points a day or two before that had made the water muddy; and I very well remember that the billy looked full of tea before I opened my hand to slip the tea in. Then the hut was swarming with bull-ants, and they came crawling up the sides of the billy and into the tea where I had set it to cool on the floor; and the light was so bad that I had to chance those ants, because you couldn't tell them from tea-leaves. Well, I could have enjoyed the experience, and thought of the fine letterhome it would have made, if I hadn't been thinking all the time of that poor little thing in the mallee. I was just about as new a chum as you are now, and there was a kind of interest in turning my pouch inside out for the last pipeful of the cut-up tobacco I had brought up with me from Melbourne. It was one of the last fills of cut-up that ever I had until you handed me your pouch to-night, because when you once get used to the black cakes you'll find you'll stick to them. So there I sat and smoked my pipe on the doorstep, and kept looking at the moon, and thinking of the old people in the old country, and wishing they could see me just then. I daresay you think like that sometimes, but you'll find you get over that too. It was worse to think of that little mite in the mallee scrub, and how she had sat on my knee the night before; and how she would come into my store when I was doing the books, spill the flour about, and keep on asking questions. That's the store over there, at the other side of the new well, with the bell on top and the narrow verandah in front. I must show you little Mona's height on the centre post: I had to measure her every morning after once getting her to bed by telling her she only grew in her sleep.
"Well, thinking wouldn't do any good, and my last pipe of cut-up was soon done, for it was nothing but powder. I had brought a cake of the black stuff with me, but it was too strong for me in those days. So then I thought I had better turn in, though it wasonly ten o'clock; so I took my blanket and the slush-lamp to the little dark room at the back, and pulled off my coat and boots, and spread my blanket on George's bunk. And before I lay down—well, I thought I should like to put in a prayer for the poor little thing that was lost; and I reckon it was about the last time I was ever on my knees at that business, for you'll find these back-blocks don't make a man more religious than he need be. But it was a comfort to me that night; and, while I was kneeling, a little kitten of George's, that I'd never noticed when I first looked into the room, came out and went for my stocking-soles; and that was another comfort, I tell you! Mind you, I was twelve miles from a house, and five from the nearest fellow-creature, a boundary-rider on the next run. I had never been able to get that out of my head, so the kitten was a godsend, and though he would come on to the bed to tickle my toes, I wouldn't have been without him for all I was worth. I had a paper too—one of my home papers that I hadn't had time to read; and I stuck up the slush-lamp, and strained my eyes at the print until I couldn't keep them open any longer; and what with the kitten, that was purring very loud at my feet (but the louder he made it the homelier it sounded), I found myself tumbling off to sleep long before I had expected to, and in better heart too.
"I suppose I must have slept for some hours, for when I woke the moon was low and swollen, and hanginglike a Chinese lantern in the very middle of my open doorway. But I never looked at my watch; I lay there staring at the setting moon, and listening for a repetition of the sound that had roused me. I had not long to wait, but yet long enough to make me wonder at the time whether I mightn't have heard it in my dreams only. And then it came again—the long-drawn wail, the piercing final cry of a coo-ee from one that had learnt to coo-ee before he could speak. As my feet touched the floor I heard another coo-ee; as I ran out into the moonshine there came a fourth; but the fifth was in my ear before I knew that they all came from the mallee scrub that spreads westward from here to within half a mile of the twelve-mile whim. Then I answered as well as I knew how; but the acquirement was a very recent one in my case; and besides, my wits were still in a tangle. For first I thought it was the child herself, until I realised, with a laugh at the absurdity of the idea, that she could neither walk so far nor coo-ee like that; and then I supposed it must be some chance traveller that had got bushed, like others before him, in that deadly mallee. But all the while I was answering his coo-ees as best I could, and running in my socks in the direction from which they seemed to come. And long before I spied my man I made sure that it was Mad Trevor himself, for I knew no other with such lungs, and who else would have searched for a bairn of five so many weary miles from the spot where it had last been seen?
"But, as a matter of fact, he himself had no notion where he was, until he saw me standing in front of him in the low moonlight. Then he wanted to know what I meant by coming back from the twelve-mile; for, don't you see, he thought he had been coasting around the home-station all night—and that'll tell you about our mallee! When I set him right he just stood there, wringing his big hands like a woman; and it was worse to see than when he cried like a child before the little one's nurse.
"Of course I got him to come back with me to the hut; and he leant on my shoulder with his sixteen stone, and he just said, 'Well, Harry, I don't believe she's in the mallee at all. I've been coo-eeing for her the whole night, ever since you went; and George has been coo-eeing for her ever since he came; and all hands have been coo-eeing for her in the mallee all night long. And I don't believe she's there at all. I believe she's somewhere about the homestead all the time. We never looked there. What fools we all are. You shall make me a pannikin of tea, and I'll turn in and have a sleep, Harry; and we'll go back together when it's light; and we'll find her asleep in the chaff-house, I shouldn't wonder, if they haven't found her already; you bet we'll find her safe and sound in some hole or corner, the rogue! frightening her old dad out of all his wits.'
"And indeed, as he spoke, he gave a mad laugh even for him; and I shrank away from under his greathand, that would keep tightening on my shoulder; and left him to sit down in the hut while I went to the wood-heap, and then to the tank to rinse and refill the billy.
"But that notion of his about the homestead had been my notion too, in a kind of way; only I had kept it to myself because they were all so cock-sure it was the mallee, and they would know best. I was thinking it out, though, as I chopped the wood, and thinking it out as I rinsed the billy. Now, to do this where the water was clearest, I had to lean over from a bit of a staging, the tank being low, as I told you. But this time, through thinking so much more of Mona than of what I was doing, I lost my balance, and very nearly toppled in. And then I had to think no more, for in a flash I knew where little Mona was."
The instant he paused I saw him listening. He was standing in front of me now, but my back was still to the little fig-tree, and my hands had the hurdle tight. I neither spoke nor took my eyes off him till he went on.
"Yes, she was under the ground you're standing on," said Warburton, nodding his head as I started from the place; "she had fallen into the old well, and pulled down the lid in trying to save herself. I knew it at the moment I was near toppling into the twelve-mile tank that wasn't one foot deep. It turned out to be so. But I was never surer of it than when I went back to the hut, spilling the water thewhole way, I was in such a tremble. And the difficulty was to keep the knowledge—for knowledge it was—from the poor boss; it had cheered him so to think the child had never been near the mallee! Why, before daylight he dozed off quite comfortably on George's bunk in my blanket; and I sat and watched him, and listened to him snoring; and could have fetched the axe from the wood-heap and brained him where he lay, so that he might never know.
"And he took it so calmly after all! I do assure you, when we had buried her alongside her mother, he stood where we are now, and set all hands digging the new well and filling in the old, and swore at us like a healthy man when we didn't do this or that his way. It was he who designed those palings, and would have no more lids, but a pump; though there was neither woman nor child on the station to meet with accidents now, but only us men. And he was smoking his pipe when he planted this fig, for I was by at the time, and remember him telling me his wife had brought it from Moreton Bay in Queensland. I had seen it often in a pot, and now I had to say whether it was plumb; and with his pipe in his mouth and his head on one side he seemed as callous as you please. And for three weeks, to my certain knowledge, he slept every night in his room, and I would have thought nothing of sleeping there with him, he was bearing it so grandly. Then came the full moon and the bright nights again; and we heard him in the mallee,coo-eeing for the child that lay beside her mother—him that had buried them both!
"Well, he didn't come back next morning, so now all hands turned out to search forhim. But we never found him all day, for he had crossed his tracks again and again; and all next night we heard him coo-eeing away for his dead child, but now his coo-ee was getting hoarse; and God knows why, but none of us could manage to set eyes on him. It was I who found him the day after. He was lying under a hop-bush, but the sun had shifted and was all over him. His lips were black, and I felt certain he was dead. But when I sung out he jumped clean to his feet, with his fists clenched and his red beard blowing in the hot wind, and his face and his eyes on fire. And if he had never been mad before, he was then.
"He opened his mouth, and I expected a roar, but I couldn't understand a word he said until he had half emptied my water-bag.
"'What do you want with me?' he says at last; and of course I said I wanted him to come back to the station with me. So he says, 'You leave me alone—don't you meddle with me. I'm not coming back till I find my little 'un that's bushed in this mallee.' So then I saw there was nothing for it but firmness, and I said he must come with me—as if it had been poor wee Mona herself. But he only laughed and swore, and went on warning me not to meddle with him. Well, I was just forced to. But sixteen stone takes alot of weakening, and the last I saw of him alive was his great freckled fist coming at my head. I went down like a pithed bullock. And it was I who found him again the week after, when he must have been all but a week dead—but I had heard him coo-eeing every blessed night!"
He was listening again: whenever he paused, I caught him listening. I was still to understand it, and the deep-down scare in his eyes.
"Stop a bit!" said I. "Don't tell me he's dead if he's only mad, and you've got him in some hut somewhere. You say you can hear him coo-eeing—I see you can."
Warburton of Gunbar heaved the saddest sigh I have ever heard.
"I hear him always," he said quietly, "when the moon is at the full. I have done, all along, and it's close on ten years ago now. It's in the mallee I hear him, just as he heard little Mona; yet they all three lie together over yonder behind the stock-yards. H'sh, man, h'sh!" He was gripping at my arm, but I twisted away from him even as himself from Mad Trevor, because his listening eyes were more than enough for me. "There's his coo-ee again!" he cried, raising a hand that never quivered. "Mean to tell me you can't hear it now?"
THE MAGIC CIGARIt was one of such a hundred as seldom find their way to the back-blocks of New South Wales. And the box was heralded by the following letter, written at a London club in the depth of winter, and read by me in my shirt-sleeves some few weeks later, as I rode home to the station with our weekly mail:—"Dear Old Boy,—A Merry Christmas to you, and may the Lord give you wisdom with the New Year, that you don't spend much of it in such an infernal hole as your station seems to be. I'm particularly exercised about the baccy like shoe-leather, which you cut up for yourself before every pipe. I fear it may have a demoralising effect, so am sending you a Christmas box of decent cigars. Don't treasure them, old chap, but smoke the whole lot between Christmas and New Year, and if you like 'em send for more from your affectionate brother"Charles."Charles was a trump; but he had reckoned without the colonial tariff. I had to get a friend in Sydney to go to the custom-house for me, and I paid pretty heavily for my cigars before they ultimately reached me about the middle of January. However, they were well worth the money and the delay; for the dear good fellow had sent me a box of Villar-y-Villar (ExcepcionalesRothschild) to waste their costly fragrance upon the drought-stricken wilds of Riverina.You should have seen us when we opened the box, the manager and I. It was the cool of the evening in the homestead verandah, yet there was not wind enough to shake the flame of a vesta. We brought out the kerosine lamp, set it down on the edge of the verandah, and seated ourselves one on each side, with our feet in the sand of the station yard, and the cigar-box also between us. Reverently we raised the lid with a paper-knife, and were impressed, you may be sure, to find the cigars wrapped up in silver paper, every one, and looking like so many little silver torpedoes under the lamp. Then we lit up, and leaned against the verandah posts, and blew beautiful clouds into the cloudless purple sky, and listened to the locusts, and made a bet as to whose ash would fall first, which the manager won. Altogether it was a luxurious hour, and I for one had never tasted such a cigar before. The manager, however, a native of the colony, asserted that he had often bought as good, or better, of a bush hawker, at twenty-five shillings the hundred. But I had noticed how very gingerly he removed the silver paper from what was now a few heaps of very white ash and a stump, which he was smoking, with the aid of his pen-knife, down to the last quarter-inch.Though the gift came so late, the donor's sporting injunctions I considered as sacred, and we gave ourselvesa week to finish the box in. It was heavy smoking for hard-working young men accustomed only to the pipe. I afterwards found that the manager had banked some of his share in his desk, and I did not smoke all mine myself. I kept a case in my pocket, however, and so it happened that I had cigars about me on the broiling day when I camped in the shade with the man who had the reputation of being the champion swearer of the back-blocks. He was also a capital hand with sheep, but it was his notoriously foul mouth that had made him a public character, and throughout the district he was known as Hell-fire Jim.We had met neither by accident nor design, but all by reason of the incredibly long range of Jim's language at its worst: on this occasion he must have brought me down at several hundred yards. Not that it was more than a voice that reached me first, for I was cantering to his assistance when the words caused me to draw rein and to marvel. It is one thing to use strong language in wild places where it is impossible to enforce your meaning without recourse to the local convention; to curse dumb animals in the silent bush, as Jim was doing when I came up with him, is surely different and peculiar. Yet I found him in provoking plight: wrestling in the thick of the scrub with some twenty weak sheep. The sheep were camping under the trees in twos and threes. Jim was galloping from one group to another with theperspiration dripping from his nose and beard and imprecations hurtling from his mouth; but it was impossible for a mere man on horseback to round up that mob among those trees, or to manage them at all; and Jim's dog was skulking and lolling its tongue, good for nothing for want of water.That was where I had come in. My water-bag was nearly full; his had sprung a leak and was empty. To give the dog a drink out of his wide-awake was the boundary-rider's first act when I handed him my bag; then he took a pull himself. The suggestion that we should off-saddle and do a spell together came from me. The dog had found its voice and rounded up the mob before Jim finished drinking; we set him to watch the sheep in the shade, tethered our horses, and carried our saddles to a tree apart, leaving marks like inkstains on the animals' backs. The place was a sandy gully thickly timbered with pines. We chose the tree with the closest warp and woof of shadow underneath, and there made short work of such provisions as we carried, with further reductions in the bulk of my water-bag.It was the very hottest day I can remember in the bush; in the shade of the homestead verandah the thermometer touched 116°; and I recollect my companion showing me a tear in his moleskins, done that morning by a pine-branch, and the little triangle of exposed skin on which an hour's sun had left the mark of a mustard leaf. The fellow was near tophysical perfection, a sterling specimen of the Saxon type, with the fair skin which naturally burns red; but his blue eyes were sunken, and had the strange rickety look of one who has drunk both deep and long at some period of his life. Jim still knocked down his cheque, but not oftener or with worse effects than another. We regarded him, however, as our biggest blackguard, and as such he interested me, so that my eye was on him as we ate: I afterwards remembered his way of eating.Our snack over, Jim had his cutty in his mouth and was paring a plug of black tobacco before I thought of my cigars. He laughed and swore as I produced the case, but when I opened it, and the silver cones stuck out under his nose, he helped himself without a word. His easy method of slipping off the silver paper (which had visibly embarrassed the manager of our station), and the way the boundary-rider held out his hand for my knife, are two more things which struck one later. The shape of that sun-chapped hand is a third. Heaven knows I was not consciously observant at the time. I rolled over on my back, my saddle for a pillow, and took to sending up soft, chastening clouds into the garish blue overhead. The subtle fragrance of the smoke mingled with the pungent smell of the pines, the hot still air grew rich with both; a vertical sun stabbed the fronds above us with pins and needles of dazzling light that struck to the ground like golden rain; and, but formy cigar, I had yielded to these sensuous influences and thrown it aside to close my eyes. Thus was I the slave of my luxury, but consoled myself with the thought that Jim's enjoyment would at least be heart-whole. Yet he never said so, and as we lay I could see no more of him than a single sidespring boot, a long spur, and three inches of shiny brown legging."You don't say how it strikes you, Jim.""The cigar?""To be sure.""Oh, it's not a bad smoke.""No?" I raised myself on one elbow to look at the fellow. He had the cigar between his forefinger and thumb, and was blowing the most perfect rings of tobacco-smoke I ever saw."Yes, it's a good cigar," our boundary-rider went so far as to concede; then he replaced it between his teeth, after a moment's scrutiny with his unkempt head on one side."Quite sure?" I smiled."Quite. For my part, mind you, I prefer a good Muria—they're not so rich. It's purely a matter of taste, however, and certainly these are much more expensive.""Indeed! Perhaps you can price them, Jim?""The cigar that I am smoking," said Hell-fire Jim, "would cost you a shilling at the club. If a shilling or two were an object, I suppose you could get them by the box at about ninety-two the hundred."It was no longer what he said that astonished me, but the soft tone of his voice and the sudden absence from his conversation of the ingenious oath-combinations for which it was notorious. I sat bolt upright now, and must have shown my feelings pretty plainly, for he hastened to explain."I was once a waiter in a London club," he said. "That's how I know.""Not a waiter, Jim," said I, looking him steadily in his sunken eyes. Then I begged his pardon. But Jim seemed pleased."Mean to say you think I was a member?""If you ask me, that was my idea.""Then you were right. I was a member of several. Does it surprise you?" he added, with, I think, a rather wistful smile. I cannot be sure of that smile. His whole manner was agreeably free from sentiment."It doesn't surprise me a bit," I said."Not to find me the stump-end of a gentleman, eh?""No; I see that you are one.""Was, my boy—was," corrected Jim. "I say," he went on, "this is a great cigar! You have to puff a bit to appreciate it properly."He threw back his head and left a number of his little grey rings curling into thin air against the blue. I was not going to ask him any questions. We smoked for some time in silence. Then he exclaimed, with hiseyebrows right up on his forehead, as though he himself could hardly credit it:"Yes, by Jove! I was at Eton and the House.""Nothing surprises me in this country," I remarked."Yet you're about the first that ever spottedme. By the way, I'm not the wicked baronet or the disguised duke, don't you know? My father's only a country squire of sorts—if he's alive. But he sent me to Eton and from there to Oxford; and from Oxford I went to the Temple, and from the Temple to the devil and all his angels. There I've stuck. And that's the genesis of Hell-fire Jimmie, if you care to know it."I cared to know infinitely more. These crude headings were small satisfaction to me looking at the handsome sunburnt stockman and realising that I was alone in the wilderness with the romantic ruin of a noble manhood. I turned away from the quiet devil-may-care smile in the sunken blue eyes, in order to conceal the curiosity which was consuming me. I dropped back on my elbow to the ground, and stared into the unbroken unsuggestive blue of the southern summer sky. When I sucked at my cigar I discovered that I had let it out. Turning once more to my companion, I found him puffing his with the loving deliberation of a connoisseur."Like velvet, isn't it?" he murmured, stroking the brown leaf gently with his finger. "That's one of the points of a good cigar, and another's the ash. Younever saw a firmer nor a whiter ash than this. My good fellow, it's a cigar for the gods!"He held it admiringly at arm's length, as I relit mine. Then he smoked on in silence, but very slowly and caressingly, for some minutes longer. At length he said musingly:"I wonder how long it is since I smoked my last cigar? How long is it since I came out here? I'm losing count of the years, and I've just about forgotten Oxford and London, and the wine and the women, and the old country altogether. All but one woman and one village.... I suppose you couldn't put a fellow in the way of forgettingthem?"I was still wondering what on earth to say to him—for once more I seemed to detect a wistful ring in his voice—when he settled the question himself by laughing in my face."How could you help me when you don't know the yarn?" he asked, with his blue eyes full of amusement. "Look here, I've a good mind to inflict it on you!""Wouldn't that hurt?" I could not help asking him."Nothing hurts now," he answered, with a queer, quiet sort of swagger in his tone and manner. "If anything ever did hurt, it's what I'm thinking of now; it might hurt less if I told you something about it.""Then go on by all means. You may trust me to hold my tongue.""My good fellow, why should you? Tell whom you like. It makes no difference. Nothing has made any difference for years. Besides, it's well enough known in the old country, though I've never spoken of it, drunk or sober, out here. I can't think why I should want to speak of it now—but I do."He leant towards me and paused, admiring the white unbroken ash of his cigar, and half smiling. That half-smile was to me the saddest feature of a narrative of which it was the constant accompaniment. The tragic story which affected me so deeply seemed simply to interest the man who had brought the tragedy about. He told it in the fewest and the coolest words."One village and one woman—that's all. Deuce knows how many other women there were who could claim to come into the yarn, but I've forgotten them all but that one. There were plenty of villages, too, round about, including our own, but I'm only going to tell you of hers. Ours was not so much a village as a kingdom under the absolute rule of the most tyrannical old despot in this world—if he is in it still—I mean my father. He bullied and bossed the whole parish, including the parson, insulting the poor devil and threatening to have him suspended every other Sunday. He himself snarled out the lessons in church, and he made me learn texts by rote before I could read; for my father was one of those hard-bittenold saints who breed sinners like me the whole world over."But three miles from our village, which was in a constant simmer of discontent and suppressed rebellion, lay just the sweetest and most peaceful spot on earth, where it seems to me now that the sun was always shining. It was one long, old street of yellow walls and red tiles, and when you got to the end of it, there was the thatched church and the rectory, and the good old rector with his two hands stretched out to greet you, and hovering about him, to a certainty, the purest angel that ever wasted her love on a devil incarnate. I won't tell you the name of the village nor yet of the county. You'll be going back to the old dust one of these days, and you might run across my people. I don't want you to know it if you do. You may take your oath you won't hear of me from them; they've done their best to forget my existence. Oh, dear, yes, my name on the station books is as false as hell, like the rest of me. But I don't mind telling you her name. It was Edith, and I used to call her Edie. Jolly name, Edie, sweet and simple like the poor little thing herself. Rum thing, isn't it, how easily it still slips off my tongue?"He stopped to smile me his strange impersonal smile, and to attend to his cigar. So far he had been holding it between finger and thumb, and admiring it as he talked."You will see how rum this is presently," he continued,with his eye on three fresh rings that were circling upward from his mouth. "We had been boy and girl together, but when we wanted to be man and wife, Edie's old father would not let us be engaged, because he knew of my blackguard ways. He did not give that as his reason. Edie was very young, a delicate slip of a girl, too, and it must have been a long engagement in any case. We were to remain friends, however. I think the dear old boy trusted to his girl to straighten me out first; if she couldn't, then nobody else could."But I was a hopeless case. The country-side rang with my sins long before I was sent down from Oxford; and went on ringing afterwards, louder and louder, when I settled in London and was nominally reading for the bar; but so long as I came down in time for prayers when I was at home, and went to hear our poor brow-beaten devil on Sundays, my father stopped his ears and shook his stick at those who tried to tell him of my misdeeds. I don't think he much cared what I did so long as he saw the soles of my boots at morning prayers. But my good old friend in the next parish was different. I can see him now, and the sorrow in his kind old face, when he forbade me the rectory once and for all. I felt that, too, and on my way home whom should I meet in the fields but Edith herself? So I made as clean a breast of everything as one could to a young girl. Young as she was though, you wouldn't believe how that girlsympathised and understood; and you won't believe this either, but her kindness fetched the tears to my eyes. She was a God's angel to me that summer day. I took her in my arms, little white feather that she was, and I vowed and vowed that I would keep straight for her sake even if I never saw her any more. And when I wouldn't touch her with my foul mouth she raised her pure lips—I can feel them now—and kissed my cheek of her own accord. She did indeed!"His voice had become very sad and soft—so soft that I had to bend forward to catch some of the words—but there was a quiet bitter note in it that cut to the heart. And as he paused, and went on smoking, the queer sardonic smile came back to him. His cigar was now one half snowy ash, the other glossy brown leaf, and as he smoked a little red ring divided the two. He remarked afresh on the excellence of the ash before resuming his story in a lighter, louder tone that lasted him almost to the end."Now I'm going to tell you a very singular thing. I made my peace with the old rector, partly by letter, partly by Edie's intervention, and at Christmas-time I was to have her if she was still of her old mind; so at Christmas-time down I came from town with the engagement ring in my pocket. I knew that the girl would keep true to me through thick and thin, though I did hope that she had not heard of a certain matter which had got my name into the papers that autumn. Never mind what it was. My father had written veryviolently on the subject, but I had not heard a word from hers. So I hoped for the best. I was not as yet a fully reformed character, but I was about to become one. The night before I left town I never went to bed at all. It was my last orgy; but I was sober enough in the early morning to go to Covent Garden in my dress clothes, and to buy flowers to take down to Edie with the ring. I chose roses, because they were the most expensive at that time of year; and red ones, because the girl was naturally so pale. Then I had a sleep in my chambers all the morning, and went down by an afternoon train."It was dark when I landed at the market-town where the dog-cart used to meet one. I hadn't ordered it this time, because I wasn't going straight home. I found it freezing down there, and I thought I would walk out to the rectory through the crisp night air, so as to arrive there fresh, for by now I felt the effects of the previous night. It was so very dark, however, that I bought a lantern and made them light it before I would set out on my three miles' walk. I remember going out of my way to a shop where I was not known. That market-town was our nearest one of any size, I had made it too hot to hold me before I was one-and-twenty, and it hadn't cooled down yet."The frost had followed a long spell of dirty weather, and the roads were fluted ribbons of frozen mud. My footsteps resounded merrily as I pushed into the darkness, the centre of a moving circle oflight thrown upon the ground by my lantern. I shall never forget that walk. The box of flowers I carried in one hand, my lantern in the other, and for all my full hands I must needs keep feeling for the ring in my pocket, to make sure that I had it safe. And I felt as though my back was turned forever upon the town, and all that. We would be married without unnecessary delay, and we would live well outside London—either in the Thames Valley or among the Surrey Hills, I thought. At any price we would keep clear of the town; I would go in as late as possible in the mornings and return quite early in the afternoon. My old haunts should know me no more. With such a prospect and so many good resolutions to occupy my mind, the way seemed short enough, and I was glowing as much from my own thoughts as from the keen clean air when I swung open the rectory gate and walked briskly up the well-known drive; my heart was beating mountains high, for the dear old place had always been infinitely more homelike to me than my own home."The house struck me as being poorly lighted, but then I was purposely taking them by surprise. As I came up to it, my eyes mounted to Edie's bedroom window, and I was astonished to see it standing wide open to the bitter air. There was no light in the room either. The front door was opened by the rector himself. He seemed agitated at the sight of me; norwould he shake my hand, and I knew, then, that he had seen in the papers that which I hoped had escaped his notice. With a sinking heart I asked for Edie. The old man peered at me for a moment; then he answered that she was gone."'Gone away?'"He nodded."'And when?'"'This morning.'"'And where to?' I asked, for you must see how disappointed I was."'Do not ask me,' he says. 'May God forgive you, for I, His minister, never can!' he sings out. And with that the door was shut in my face, and the key turned on the inside."God knows how long I remained standing like a fool on the gravel drive. The gravel must have been very soft before the hard frost which had set in that afternoon, for the light of my lantern struck down upon recent wheel-marks frozen stiff and clean. Instinctively I began to follow them. Edie had gone away, I was on her track. My thoughts were confused, but that was the drift of them. I followed the frozen wheel-marks out into the road, and on, on, on; it was not until I was following them in at the churchyard gate that my confusion fell from me, and left what soul there was in me naked to the freezing night air. Still my lantern fell upon the wheel-marks, andmy feet followed them, until the light shone cold upon a narrow mound half hidden with white flowers. The fresh brown clay was already frozen as hard as the roads. I spent the night upon it, and should have frozen too, but I had started to run a hell of my own in my own heart. I'm running it still. When I crawled away before dawn there were some warm red roses among the cold white things. I was glad I had them. They're the one part of it I don't want ever to forget!"His voice had sunk almost to a whisper, and for all the heat he gave such a shudder that the long ash was shaken at last from his cigar. I saw him gazing at the glowing end. All at once a fiery arc ran from his fingers through the air, and nearly the half of a prime Villar lay smouldering in the Riverina sun. I watched it meditatively, and the reed of heavy smoke ascending from it into the breathless air. I thought of the prostrate penitent upon the frozen grave. I marvelled at the refining spell which had bound the entire man for the last twenty minutes, utterly changing him. And I wondered how long that spell would survive its obvious source.I wondered for one moment—with the soft, sad, gentlemanly voice still ringing in my ears—and for one moment only. The next, a bellow at my side drowned that voice forever; and Hell-fire Jim was himself again, screaming curses at his dog and hissheep, as one who realised that his reputation was at stake.The dog was stretching itself awake in the slumbrous sunshine. The sheep were scattered down the gully as far as my eyes could see.
It was one of such a hundred as seldom find their way to the back-blocks of New South Wales. And the box was heralded by the following letter, written at a London club in the depth of winter, and read by me in my shirt-sleeves some few weeks later, as I rode home to the station with our weekly mail:—
"Dear Old Boy,—A Merry Christmas to you, and may the Lord give you wisdom with the New Year, that you don't spend much of it in such an infernal hole as your station seems to be. I'm particularly exercised about the baccy like shoe-leather, which you cut up for yourself before every pipe. I fear it may have a demoralising effect, so am sending you a Christmas box of decent cigars. Don't treasure them, old chap, but smoke the whole lot between Christmas and New Year, and if you like 'em send for more from your affectionate brother
"Charles."
Charles was a trump; but he had reckoned without the colonial tariff. I had to get a friend in Sydney to go to the custom-house for me, and I paid pretty heavily for my cigars before they ultimately reached me about the middle of January. However, they were well worth the money and the delay; for the dear good fellow had sent me a box of Villar-y-Villar (ExcepcionalesRothschild) to waste their costly fragrance upon the drought-stricken wilds of Riverina.
You should have seen us when we opened the box, the manager and I. It was the cool of the evening in the homestead verandah, yet there was not wind enough to shake the flame of a vesta. We brought out the kerosine lamp, set it down on the edge of the verandah, and seated ourselves one on each side, with our feet in the sand of the station yard, and the cigar-box also between us. Reverently we raised the lid with a paper-knife, and were impressed, you may be sure, to find the cigars wrapped up in silver paper, every one, and looking like so many little silver torpedoes under the lamp. Then we lit up, and leaned against the verandah posts, and blew beautiful clouds into the cloudless purple sky, and listened to the locusts, and made a bet as to whose ash would fall first, which the manager won. Altogether it was a luxurious hour, and I for one had never tasted such a cigar before. The manager, however, a native of the colony, asserted that he had often bought as good, or better, of a bush hawker, at twenty-five shillings the hundred. But I had noticed how very gingerly he removed the silver paper from what was now a few heaps of very white ash and a stump, which he was smoking, with the aid of his pen-knife, down to the last quarter-inch.
Though the gift came so late, the donor's sporting injunctions I considered as sacred, and we gave ourselvesa week to finish the box in. It was heavy smoking for hard-working young men accustomed only to the pipe. I afterwards found that the manager had banked some of his share in his desk, and I did not smoke all mine myself. I kept a case in my pocket, however, and so it happened that I had cigars about me on the broiling day when I camped in the shade with the man who had the reputation of being the champion swearer of the back-blocks. He was also a capital hand with sheep, but it was his notoriously foul mouth that had made him a public character, and throughout the district he was known as Hell-fire Jim.
We had met neither by accident nor design, but all by reason of the incredibly long range of Jim's language at its worst: on this occasion he must have brought me down at several hundred yards. Not that it was more than a voice that reached me first, for I was cantering to his assistance when the words caused me to draw rein and to marvel. It is one thing to use strong language in wild places where it is impossible to enforce your meaning without recourse to the local convention; to curse dumb animals in the silent bush, as Jim was doing when I came up with him, is surely different and peculiar. Yet I found him in provoking plight: wrestling in the thick of the scrub with some twenty weak sheep. The sheep were camping under the trees in twos and threes. Jim was galloping from one group to another with theperspiration dripping from his nose and beard and imprecations hurtling from his mouth; but it was impossible for a mere man on horseback to round up that mob among those trees, or to manage them at all; and Jim's dog was skulking and lolling its tongue, good for nothing for want of water.
That was where I had come in. My water-bag was nearly full; his had sprung a leak and was empty. To give the dog a drink out of his wide-awake was the boundary-rider's first act when I handed him my bag; then he took a pull himself. The suggestion that we should off-saddle and do a spell together came from me. The dog had found its voice and rounded up the mob before Jim finished drinking; we set him to watch the sheep in the shade, tethered our horses, and carried our saddles to a tree apart, leaving marks like inkstains on the animals' backs. The place was a sandy gully thickly timbered with pines. We chose the tree with the closest warp and woof of shadow underneath, and there made short work of such provisions as we carried, with further reductions in the bulk of my water-bag.
It was the very hottest day I can remember in the bush; in the shade of the homestead verandah the thermometer touched 116°; and I recollect my companion showing me a tear in his moleskins, done that morning by a pine-branch, and the little triangle of exposed skin on which an hour's sun had left the mark of a mustard leaf. The fellow was near tophysical perfection, a sterling specimen of the Saxon type, with the fair skin which naturally burns red; but his blue eyes were sunken, and had the strange rickety look of one who has drunk both deep and long at some period of his life. Jim still knocked down his cheque, but not oftener or with worse effects than another. We regarded him, however, as our biggest blackguard, and as such he interested me, so that my eye was on him as we ate: I afterwards remembered his way of eating.
Our snack over, Jim had his cutty in his mouth and was paring a plug of black tobacco before I thought of my cigars. He laughed and swore as I produced the case, but when I opened it, and the silver cones stuck out under his nose, he helped himself without a word. His easy method of slipping off the silver paper (which had visibly embarrassed the manager of our station), and the way the boundary-rider held out his hand for my knife, are two more things which struck one later. The shape of that sun-chapped hand is a third. Heaven knows I was not consciously observant at the time. I rolled over on my back, my saddle for a pillow, and took to sending up soft, chastening clouds into the garish blue overhead. The subtle fragrance of the smoke mingled with the pungent smell of the pines, the hot still air grew rich with both; a vertical sun stabbed the fronds above us with pins and needles of dazzling light that struck to the ground like golden rain; and, but formy cigar, I had yielded to these sensuous influences and thrown it aside to close my eyes. Thus was I the slave of my luxury, but consoled myself with the thought that Jim's enjoyment would at least be heart-whole. Yet he never said so, and as we lay I could see no more of him than a single sidespring boot, a long spur, and three inches of shiny brown legging.
"You don't say how it strikes you, Jim."
"The cigar?"
"To be sure."
"Oh, it's not a bad smoke."
"No?" I raised myself on one elbow to look at the fellow. He had the cigar between his forefinger and thumb, and was blowing the most perfect rings of tobacco-smoke I ever saw.
"Yes, it's a good cigar," our boundary-rider went so far as to concede; then he replaced it between his teeth, after a moment's scrutiny with his unkempt head on one side.
"Quite sure?" I smiled.
"Quite. For my part, mind you, I prefer a good Muria—they're not so rich. It's purely a matter of taste, however, and certainly these are much more expensive."
"Indeed! Perhaps you can price them, Jim?"
"The cigar that I am smoking," said Hell-fire Jim, "would cost you a shilling at the club. If a shilling or two were an object, I suppose you could get them by the box at about ninety-two the hundred."
It was no longer what he said that astonished me, but the soft tone of his voice and the sudden absence from his conversation of the ingenious oath-combinations for which it was notorious. I sat bolt upright now, and must have shown my feelings pretty plainly, for he hastened to explain.
"I was once a waiter in a London club," he said. "That's how I know."
"Not a waiter, Jim," said I, looking him steadily in his sunken eyes. Then I begged his pardon. But Jim seemed pleased.
"Mean to say you think I was a member?"
"If you ask me, that was my idea."
"Then you were right. I was a member of several. Does it surprise you?" he added, with, I think, a rather wistful smile. I cannot be sure of that smile. His whole manner was agreeably free from sentiment.
"It doesn't surprise me a bit," I said.
"Not to find me the stump-end of a gentleman, eh?"
"No; I see that you are one."
"Was, my boy—was," corrected Jim. "I say," he went on, "this is a great cigar! You have to puff a bit to appreciate it properly."
He threw back his head and left a number of his little grey rings curling into thin air against the blue. I was not going to ask him any questions. We smoked for some time in silence. Then he exclaimed, with hiseyebrows right up on his forehead, as though he himself could hardly credit it:
"Yes, by Jove! I was at Eton and the House."
"Nothing surprises me in this country," I remarked.
"Yet you're about the first that ever spottedme. By the way, I'm not the wicked baronet or the disguised duke, don't you know? My father's only a country squire of sorts—if he's alive. But he sent me to Eton and from there to Oxford; and from Oxford I went to the Temple, and from the Temple to the devil and all his angels. There I've stuck. And that's the genesis of Hell-fire Jimmie, if you care to know it."
I cared to know infinitely more. These crude headings were small satisfaction to me looking at the handsome sunburnt stockman and realising that I was alone in the wilderness with the romantic ruin of a noble manhood. I turned away from the quiet devil-may-care smile in the sunken blue eyes, in order to conceal the curiosity which was consuming me. I dropped back on my elbow to the ground, and stared into the unbroken unsuggestive blue of the southern summer sky. When I sucked at my cigar I discovered that I had let it out. Turning once more to my companion, I found him puffing his with the loving deliberation of a connoisseur.
"Like velvet, isn't it?" he murmured, stroking the brown leaf gently with his finger. "That's one of the points of a good cigar, and another's the ash. Younever saw a firmer nor a whiter ash than this. My good fellow, it's a cigar for the gods!"
He held it admiringly at arm's length, as I relit mine. Then he smoked on in silence, but very slowly and caressingly, for some minutes longer. At length he said musingly:
"I wonder how long it is since I smoked my last cigar? How long is it since I came out here? I'm losing count of the years, and I've just about forgotten Oxford and London, and the wine and the women, and the old country altogether. All but one woman and one village.... I suppose you couldn't put a fellow in the way of forgettingthem?"
I was still wondering what on earth to say to him—for once more I seemed to detect a wistful ring in his voice—when he settled the question himself by laughing in my face.
"How could you help me when you don't know the yarn?" he asked, with his blue eyes full of amusement. "Look here, I've a good mind to inflict it on you!"
"Wouldn't that hurt?" I could not help asking him.
"Nothing hurts now," he answered, with a queer, quiet sort of swagger in his tone and manner. "If anything ever did hurt, it's what I'm thinking of now; it might hurt less if I told you something about it."
"Then go on by all means. You may trust me to hold my tongue."
"My good fellow, why should you? Tell whom you like. It makes no difference. Nothing has made any difference for years. Besides, it's well enough known in the old country, though I've never spoken of it, drunk or sober, out here. I can't think why I should want to speak of it now—but I do."
He leant towards me and paused, admiring the white unbroken ash of his cigar, and half smiling. That half-smile was to me the saddest feature of a narrative of which it was the constant accompaniment. The tragic story which affected me so deeply seemed simply to interest the man who had brought the tragedy about. He told it in the fewest and the coolest words.
"One village and one woman—that's all. Deuce knows how many other women there were who could claim to come into the yarn, but I've forgotten them all but that one. There were plenty of villages, too, round about, including our own, but I'm only going to tell you of hers. Ours was not so much a village as a kingdom under the absolute rule of the most tyrannical old despot in this world—if he is in it still—I mean my father. He bullied and bossed the whole parish, including the parson, insulting the poor devil and threatening to have him suspended every other Sunday. He himself snarled out the lessons in church, and he made me learn texts by rote before I could read; for my father was one of those hard-bittenold saints who breed sinners like me the whole world over.
"But three miles from our village, which was in a constant simmer of discontent and suppressed rebellion, lay just the sweetest and most peaceful spot on earth, where it seems to me now that the sun was always shining. It was one long, old street of yellow walls and red tiles, and when you got to the end of it, there was the thatched church and the rectory, and the good old rector with his two hands stretched out to greet you, and hovering about him, to a certainty, the purest angel that ever wasted her love on a devil incarnate. I won't tell you the name of the village nor yet of the county. You'll be going back to the old dust one of these days, and you might run across my people. I don't want you to know it if you do. You may take your oath you won't hear of me from them; they've done their best to forget my existence. Oh, dear, yes, my name on the station books is as false as hell, like the rest of me. But I don't mind telling you her name. It was Edith, and I used to call her Edie. Jolly name, Edie, sweet and simple like the poor little thing herself. Rum thing, isn't it, how easily it still slips off my tongue?"
He stopped to smile me his strange impersonal smile, and to attend to his cigar. So far he had been holding it between finger and thumb, and admiring it as he talked.
"You will see how rum this is presently," he continued,with his eye on three fresh rings that were circling upward from his mouth. "We had been boy and girl together, but when we wanted to be man and wife, Edie's old father would not let us be engaged, because he knew of my blackguard ways. He did not give that as his reason. Edie was very young, a delicate slip of a girl, too, and it must have been a long engagement in any case. We were to remain friends, however. I think the dear old boy trusted to his girl to straighten me out first; if she couldn't, then nobody else could.
"But I was a hopeless case. The country-side rang with my sins long before I was sent down from Oxford; and went on ringing afterwards, louder and louder, when I settled in London and was nominally reading for the bar; but so long as I came down in time for prayers when I was at home, and went to hear our poor brow-beaten devil on Sundays, my father stopped his ears and shook his stick at those who tried to tell him of my misdeeds. I don't think he much cared what I did so long as he saw the soles of my boots at morning prayers. But my good old friend in the next parish was different. I can see him now, and the sorrow in his kind old face, when he forbade me the rectory once and for all. I felt that, too, and on my way home whom should I meet in the fields but Edith herself? So I made as clean a breast of everything as one could to a young girl. Young as she was though, you wouldn't believe how that girlsympathised and understood; and you won't believe this either, but her kindness fetched the tears to my eyes. She was a God's angel to me that summer day. I took her in my arms, little white feather that she was, and I vowed and vowed that I would keep straight for her sake even if I never saw her any more. And when I wouldn't touch her with my foul mouth she raised her pure lips—I can feel them now—and kissed my cheek of her own accord. She did indeed!"
His voice had become very sad and soft—so soft that I had to bend forward to catch some of the words—but there was a quiet bitter note in it that cut to the heart. And as he paused, and went on smoking, the queer sardonic smile came back to him. His cigar was now one half snowy ash, the other glossy brown leaf, and as he smoked a little red ring divided the two. He remarked afresh on the excellence of the ash before resuming his story in a lighter, louder tone that lasted him almost to the end.
"Now I'm going to tell you a very singular thing. I made my peace with the old rector, partly by letter, partly by Edie's intervention, and at Christmas-time I was to have her if she was still of her old mind; so at Christmas-time down I came from town with the engagement ring in my pocket. I knew that the girl would keep true to me through thick and thin, though I did hope that she had not heard of a certain matter which had got my name into the papers that autumn. Never mind what it was. My father had written veryviolently on the subject, but I had not heard a word from hers. So I hoped for the best. I was not as yet a fully reformed character, but I was about to become one. The night before I left town I never went to bed at all. It was my last orgy; but I was sober enough in the early morning to go to Covent Garden in my dress clothes, and to buy flowers to take down to Edie with the ring. I chose roses, because they were the most expensive at that time of year; and red ones, because the girl was naturally so pale. Then I had a sleep in my chambers all the morning, and went down by an afternoon train.
"It was dark when I landed at the market-town where the dog-cart used to meet one. I hadn't ordered it this time, because I wasn't going straight home. I found it freezing down there, and I thought I would walk out to the rectory through the crisp night air, so as to arrive there fresh, for by now I felt the effects of the previous night. It was so very dark, however, that I bought a lantern and made them light it before I would set out on my three miles' walk. I remember going out of my way to a shop where I was not known. That market-town was our nearest one of any size, I had made it too hot to hold me before I was one-and-twenty, and it hadn't cooled down yet.
"The frost had followed a long spell of dirty weather, and the roads were fluted ribbons of frozen mud. My footsteps resounded merrily as I pushed into the darkness, the centre of a moving circle oflight thrown upon the ground by my lantern. I shall never forget that walk. The box of flowers I carried in one hand, my lantern in the other, and for all my full hands I must needs keep feeling for the ring in my pocket, to make sure that I had it safe. And I felt as though my back was turned forever upon the town, and all that. We would be married without unnecessary delay, and we would live well outside London—either in the Thames Valley or among the Surrey Hills, I thought. At any price we would keep clear of the town; I would go in as late as possible in the mornings and return quite early in the afternoon. My old haunts should know me no more. With such a prospect and so many good resolutions to occupy my mind, the way seemed short enough, and I was glowing as much from my own thoughts as from the keen clean air when I swung open the rectory gate and walked briskly up the well-known drive; my heart was beating mountains high, for the dear old place had always been infinitely more homelike to me than my own home.
"The house struck me as being poorly lighted, but then I was purposely taking them by surprise. As I came up to it, my eyes mounted to Edie's bedroom window, and I was astonished to see it standing wide open to the bitter air. There was no light in the room either. The front door was opened by the rector himself. He seemed agitated at the sight of me; norwould he shake my hand, and I knew, then, that he had seen in the papers that which I hoped had escaped his notice. With a sinking heart I asked for Edie. The old man peered at me for a moment; then he answered that she was gone.
"'Gone away?'
"He nodded.
"'And when?'
"'This morning.'
"'And where to?' I asked, for you must see how disappointed I was.
"'Do not ask me,' he says. 'May God forgive you, for I, His minister, never can!' he sings out. And with that the door was shut in my face, and the key turned on the inside.
"God knows how long I remained standing like a fool on the gravel drive. The gravel must have been very soft before the hard frost which had set in that afternoon, for the light of my lantern struck down upon recent wheel-marks frozen stiff and clean. Instinctively I began to follow them. Edie had gone away, I was on her track. My thoughts were confused, but that was the drift of them. I followed the frozen wheel-marks out into the road, and on, on, on; it was not until I was following them in at the churchyard gate that my confusion fell from me, and left what soul there was in me naked to the freezing night air. Still my lantern fell upon the wheel-marks, andmy feet followed them, until the light shone cold upon a narrow mound half hidden with white flowers. The fresh brown clay was already frozen as hard as the roads. I spent the night upon it, and should have frozen too, but I had started to run a hell of my own in my own heart. I'm running it still. When I crawled away before dawn there were some warm red roses among the cold white things. I was glad I had them. They're the one part of it I don't want ever to forget!"
His voice had sunk almost to a whisper, and for all the heat he gave such a shudder that the long ash was shaken at last from his cigar. I saw him gazing at the glowing end. All at once a fiery arc ran from his fingers through the air, and nearly the half of a prime Villar lay smouldering in the Riverina sun. I watched it meditatively, and the reed of heavy smoke ascending from it into the breathless air. I thought of the prostrate penitent upon the frozen grave. I marvelled at the refining spell which had bound the entire man for the last twenty minutes, utterly changing him. And I wondered how long that spell would survive its obvious source.
I wondered for one moment—with the soft, sad, gentlemanly voice still ringing in my ears—and for one moment only. The next, a bellow at my side drowned that voice forever; and Hell-fire Jim was himself again, screaming curses at his dog and hissheep, as one who realised that his reputation was at stake.
The dog was stretching itself awake in the slumbrous sunshine. The sheep were scattered down the gully as far as my eyes could see.