My Friend The Murderer, by A. Conan Doyle—A Project Gutenberg eBook

“Number 43 is no better, Doctor,” said the head-warder, in a slightly reproachful accent, looking in round the corner of my door.

“Confound 43!” I responded from behind the pages of the Australian Sketcher.

“And 61 says his tubes are paining him. Couldn’t you do anything for him?”

“He’s a walking drug-shop,” said I. “He has the whole British pharmacopœia inside him. I believe his tubes are as sound as yours are.”

“Then there’s 7 and 108, they are chronic,” continued the warder, glancing down a blue slip of paper. “And 28 knocked off work yesterday—said lifting things gave him a stitch in the side. I want you to have a look at him, if you don’t mind, Doctor. There’s 31, too—him that killed John Adamson in the Corinthian brig—he’s been carrying on awful in the night, shrieking and yelling, he has, and no stopping him either.”

“All right, I’ll have a look at him afterward,” I said, tossing my paper carelessly aside, and pouring myself out a cup of coffee. “Nothing else to report, I suppose, warder?”

The official protruded his head a little further into the room. “Beg pardon, Doctor,” he said, in a confidential tone, “but I notice as 82 has a bit of a cold, and it would be a good excuse for you to visit him and have a chat, maybe.”

The cup of coffee was arrested half-way to my[Pg 8] lips as I stared in amazement at the man’s serious face.

“An excuse?” I said. “An excuse? What the deuce are you talking about, McPherson? You see me trudging about all day at my practice, when I’m not looking after the prisoners, and coming back every night as tired as a dog, and you talk about finding an excuse for doing more work.”

“You’d like it, Doctor,” said Warder McPherson, insinuating one of his shoulders into the room. “That man’s story’s worth listening to if you could get him to tell it, though he’s not what you’d call free in his speech. Maybe you don’t know who 82 is?”

“No, I don’t, and I don’t care either,” I answered, in the conviction that some local ruffian was about to be foisted upon me as a celebrity.

“He’s Maloney,” said the warder, “him that turned Queen’s evidence after the murders at Bluemansdyke.”

“You don’t say so?” I ejaculated, laying down my cup in astonishment. I had heard of this ghastly series of murders, and read an account of them in a London magazine long before setting foot in the colony. I remembered that the atrocities committed had thrown the Burke and Hare crimes completely into the shade, and that one of the most villainous of the gang had saved his own skin by betraying his companions. “Are you sure?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, it’s him right enough. Just you draw him out a bit, and he’ll astonish you. He’s a man to know, is Maloney; that’s to say, in moderation;” and the head grinned, bobbed, and disappeared, leaving me to finish my breakfast and ruminate over what I had heard.

The surgeonship of an Australian prison is not an enviable position. It may be endurable in Melbourne or Sydney, but the little town of Perth has few attractions to recommend it, and those few had been long exhausted. The climate was detestable, and the society far from congenial. Sheep and cattle were the staple support of the community; and their prices, breeding, and diseases the principal topic of conversation. Now as I, being an outsider, possessed neither the one nor the other, and was utterly callous to the new “dip” and the “rot” and other kindred topics, I found myself in a state of mental isolation, and was ready to hail anything which might relieve the monotony of my existence. Maloney, the murderer, had at least some distinctiveness and individuality in his character, and might act as a tonic to a mind sick of the commonplaces of existence. I determined that I should follow the warder’s advice, and take the excuse for making his acquaintance. When, therefore, I went upon my usual matutinal round, I turned the lock of the door which bore the convict’s number upon it, and walked into the cell.

The man was lying in a heap upon his rough bed as I entered, but, uncoiling his long limbs, he started up and stared at me with an insolent look of defiance on his face which augured badly for our interview. He had a pale, set face, with sandy hair and a steely-blue eye, with something feline in its expression. His frame was tall and muscular, though there was a curious bend in his shoulders, which almost amounted to a deformity. An ordinary observer meeting him in the street might have put him down as a well-developed man, fairly handsome, and of studious habits—even in the hideous uniform of the rottenest convict establishment he[Pg 10] imparted a certain refinement to his carriage which marked him out among the inferior ruffians around him.

“I’m not on the sick-list,” he said, gruffly. There was something in the hard, rasping voice which dispelled all softer illusions, and made me realize that I was face to face with the man of the Lena Valley and Bluemansdyke, the bloodiest bushranger that ever stuck up a farm or cut the throats of its occupants.

“I know you’re not,” I answered. “Warder McPherson told me you had a cold, though, and I thought I’d look in and see you.”

“Blast Warder McPherson, and blast you, too!” yelled the convict, in a paroxysm of rage. “Oh, that’s right,” he added, in a quieter voice; “hurry away; report me to the governor, do! Get me another six months or so—that’s your game.”

“Eight square feet of ground,” he went on, disregarding my protest, and evidently working himself into a fury again. “Eight square feet, and I can’t have that without being talked to and stared at, and—oh, blast the whole crew of you!” and he raised his two clenched hands above his head and shook them in passionate invective.

“You’ve got a curious idea of hospitality,” I remarked, determined not to lose my temper, and saying almost the first thing that came to my tongue.

To my surprise the words had an extraordinary effect upon him. He seemed completely staggered at my assuming the proposition for which he had been so fiercely contending—namely, that the room in which we stood was his own.

“I beg your pardon,” he said; “I didn’t mean to[Pg 11] be rude. Won’t you take a seat?” and he motioned toward a rough trestle, which formed the headpiece of his couch.

I sat down, rather astonished at the sudden change. I don’t know that I liked Maloney better under his new aspect. The murderer had, it is true, disappeared for the nonce, but there was something in the smooth tones and obsequious manner which powerfully suggested the witness of the Queen, who had stood up and sworn away the lives of his companions in crime.

“Come, drop it, Doctor, drop it!” he answered, showing a row of white teeth as he resumed his seat upon the side of the bed. “It wasn’t anxiety after my precious health that brought you along here; that story won’t wash at all. You came to have a look at Wolf Tone Maloney, forger, murderer, Sydney-slider, ranger, and Government peach. That’s about my figure, ain’t it? There it is, plain and straight; there’s nothing mean about me.”

He paused as if he expected me to say something; but as I remained silent, he repeated once or twice, “There’s nothing mean about me.”

“And why shouldn’t I?” he suddenly yelled, his eyes gleaming and his whole satanic nature reasserting itself. “We were bound to swing, one and all, and they were none the worse if I saved myself by turning against them. Every man for himself, say I, and the devil take the luckiest. You haven’t a plug of tobacco, Doctor, have you?”

He tore at the piece of “Barrett’s” which I handed him, as ravenously as a wild beast. It seemed to have the effect of soothing his nerves,[Pg 12] for he settled himself down in the bed and reassumed his former deprecating manner.

“You wouldn’t like it yourself, you know, Doctor,” he said; “it’s enough to make any man a little queer in his temper. I’m in for six months this time for assault, and very sorry I shall be to go out again, I can tell you. My mind’s at ease in here; but when I’m outside, what with the Government and what with Tattooed Tom of Hawkesbury, there’s no chance of a quiet life.”

“He’s the brother of John Grimthorpe, the same that was condemned on my evidence; and an infernal scamp he was, too! Spawn of the devil, both of them! This tattooed one is a murderous ruffian, and he swore to have my blood after that trial. It’s seven year ago, and he’s following me yet; I know he is, though he lies low and keeps dark. He came up to me in Ballarat in ’75; you can see on the back of my hand here where the bullet clipped me. He tried again in ’76, at Port Philip, but I got the drop on him and wounded him badly. He knifed me in ’79, though, in a bar at Adelaide, and that made our account about level. He’s loafing round again now, and he’ll let daylight into me—unless—unless by some extraordinary chance someone does as much for him.” And Maloney gave a very ugly smile.

“I don’t complain of him so much,” he continued. “Looking at it in his way, no doubt it is a sort of family matter that can hardly be neglected. It’s the Government that fetches me. When I think of what I’ve done for this country, and then of what this country has done for me, it makes me fairly wild—clean drives me off my head. There’s no gratitude nor common decency left, Doctor!”

He brooded over his wrongs for a few minutes, and then proceeded to lay them before me in detail.

“Here’s nine men,” he said; “they’ve been murdering and killing for a matter of three years, and maybe a life a week wouldn’t more than average the work that they’ve done. The Government catches them and the Government tries them, but they can’t convict; and why?—because the witnesses have all had their throats cut, and the whole job’s been very neatly done. What happens then? Up comes a citizen called Wolf Tone Maloney; he says ‘The country needs me, and here I am.’ And with that he gives his evidence, convicts the lot, and enables the beaks to hang them. That’s what I did. There’s nothing mean about me! And now what does the country do in return? Dogs me, sir, spies on me, watches me night and day, turns against the very man that worked so very hard for it. There’s something mean about that, anyway. I didn’t expect them to knight me, nor to make me Colonial Secretary; but, damn it! I did expect that they would let me alone!”

“Well,” I remonstrated, “if you choose to break laws and assault people, you can’t expect it to be looked over on account of former services.”

“I don’t refer to my present imprisonment, sir,” said Maloney, with dignity. “It’s the life I’ve been leading since that cursed trial that takes the soul out of me. Just you sit there on that trestle, and I’ll tell you all about it; and then look me in the face and tell me that I’ve been treated fair by the police.”

I shall endeavor to transcribe the experiences of the convict in his own words, as far as I can remember them, preserving his curious perversions of[Pg 14] right and wrong. I can answer for the truth of his facts, whatever may be said for his deductions from them. Months afterward, Inspector H. W. Hann, formerly governor of the jail at Dunedin, showed me entries in his ledger which corroborated every statement. Maloney reeled the story off in a dull, monotonous voice, with his head sunk upon his breast and his hands between his knees. The glitter of his serpent-like eyes was the only sign of the emotions which were stirred up by the recollection of the events which he narrated.

You’ve read of Bluemansdyke (he began, with some pride in his tone). We made it hot while it lasted; but they ran us to earth at last, and a trap called Braxton, with a damned Yankee, took the lot of us. That was in New Zealand, of course, and they took us down to Dunedin, and there they were convicted and hanged. One and all they put up their hands in the dock, and cursed me till your blood would have run cold to hear them—which was scurvy treatment, seeing that we had all been pals together; but they were a blackguard lot, and thought only of themselves. I think it is as well that they were hung.

They took me back to Dunedin jail, and clapped me into the old cell. The only difference they made was, that I had no work to do and was well fed. I stood this for a week or two, until one day the governor was making his round, and I put the matter to him.

“How’s this?” I said. “My conditions were a free pardon, and you’re keeping me here against the law.”

“So much,” said I, “that unless you open that door I’ll have an action against you for illegal detention.”

“Come here, and you’ll know what I mean,” he answered. And he led me down the passage to a window that overlooked the door of the prison. “Look at that!” said he.

I looked out, and there were a dozen or so rough-looking fellows standing outside in the street, some of them smoking, some playing cards on the pavement. When they saw me they gave a yell and crowded round the door, shaking their fists and hooting.

“They wait for you, watch and watch about,” said the governor. “They’re the executive of the vigilance committee. However, since you are determined to go, I can’t stop you.”

“D’ye call this a civilized land,” I cried, “and let a man be murdered in cold blood in open daylight?”

When I said this the governor and the warder and every fool in the place grinned, as if a man’s life was a rare good joke.

“You’ve got the law on your side,” says the governor; “so we won’t detain you any longer. Show him out, warder.”

He’d have done it, too, the black-hearted villain, if I hadn’t begged and prayed and offered to pay for my board and lodging, which is more than any prisoner ever did before me. He let me stay on those conditions; and for three months I was caged up there with every larrikin in the township clamoring[Pg 16] at the other side of the wall. That was pretty treatment for a man that had served his country!

“Well, Maloney,” he said, “how long are you going to honor us with your society?”

I could have put a knife into his cursed body, and would, too, if we had been alone in the bush; but I had to smile, and smooth him and flatter, for I feared that he might have me sent out.

“You’re an infernal rascal,” he said; those were his very words, to a man that had helped him all he knew how. “I don’t want any rough justice here, though; and I think I see my way to getting you out of Dunedin.”

“I don’t want your thanks nor your gratitude,” he answered; “it’s not for your sake that I do it, but simply to keep order in the town. There’s a steamer starts from the West Quay to Melbourne to-morrow, and we’ll get you aboard it. She is advertised at five in the morning, so have yourself in readiness.”

I packed up the few things I had, and was smuggled out by a back door just before daybreak. I hurried down, took my ticket under the name of Isaac Smith, and got safely aboard the Melbourne boat. I remember hearing her screw grinding into the water as the warps were cast loose, and looking back at the lights of Dunedin as I leaned upon the bulwarks, with the pleasant thought that I was leaving them behind me forever. It seemed to me that a new world was before me, and that all my troubles had been cast off. I went down below and had some coffee, and came up again feeling better[Pg 17] than I had done since the morning that I woke to find that cursed Irishman that took me, standing over me with a six-shooter.

Day had dawned by that time, and we were steaming along by the coast, well out of sight of Dunedin. I loafed about for a couple of hours, and when the sun got well up some of the other passengers came on deck and joined me. One of them, a little perky sort of fellow, took a good long look at me, and then came over and began talking.

“I was at it myself,” he says; “I worked at the Nelson fields for three months, and spent all I made in buying a salted claim which busted up the second day. I went at it again, though, and struck it rich; but when the gold wagon was going down to the settlements, it was stuck up by those cursed rangers, and not a red cent left.”

“Broke me—ruined me clean. Never mind, I’ve seen them all hanged for it; that makes it easier to bear. There’s only one left—the villain that gave the evidence. I’d die happy if I could come across him. There are two things I have to do if I meet him.”

“I’ve got to ask him where the money lies—they never had time to make away with it, and it’s cachéd somewhere in the mountains—and then I’ve got to stretch his neck for him, and send his soul down to join the men that he betrayed.”

It seemed to me that I knew something about that caché, and I felt like laughing; but he was[Pg 18] watching me, and it struck me that he had a nasty, vindictive kind of mind.

“I’m going up on the bridge,” I said, for he was not a man whose acquaintance I cared much about making.

He wouldn’t hear of my leaving him, though. “We’re both miners,” he says, “and we’re pals for the voyage. Come down to the bar. I’m not too poor to shout.”

I couldn’t refuse him well, and we went down together; and that was the beginning of the trouble. What harm was I doing anyone on the ship? All I asked for was a quiet life, leaving others alone and getting left alone myself. No man could ask fairer than that. And now just you listen to what came of it.

We were passing the front of the ladies’ cabins, on our way to the saloon, when out comes a servant lass—a freckled currency she-devil—with a baby in her arms. We were brushing past her, when she gave a scream like a railway whistle, and nearly dropped the kid. My nerves gave a sort of a jump when I heard that scream, but I turned and begged her pardon, letting on that I thought I might have trod on her foot. I knew the game was up, though, when I saw her white face, and her leaning against the door and pointing.

“It’s him!” she cried; “it’s him! I saw him in the court-house. Oh, don’t let him hurt the baby!”

“It’s him—Maloney—Maloney, the murderer—oh, take him away—take him away!”

I don’t rightly remember what happened just at that moment. The furniture and me seemed to get[Pg 19] kind of mixed, and there was cursing, and smashing, and someone shouting for his gold, and a general stamp round. When I got steadied a bit, I found somebody’s hand in my mouth. From what I gathered afterward, I conclude that it belonged to that same little man with the vicious way of talking. He got some of it out again, but that was because the others were choking me. A poor chap can get no fair play in this world when once he is down—still I think he will remember me till the day of his death—longer, I hope.

They dragged me out on to the poop and held a damned court-martial—on me, mind you; me, that had thrown over my pals in order to serve them. What were they to do with me? Some said this, some said that; but it ended by the captain deciding to send me ashore. The ship stopped, they lowered a boat, and I was hoisted in, the whole gang of them hooting at me from over the bulwarks. I saw the man I spoke of tying up his hand though, and I felt that things might be worse.

I changed my opinion before we got to the land. I had reckoned on the shore being deserted, and that I might make my way inland; but the ship had stopped too near the Heads, and a dozen beach-combers and such like had come down to the water’s edge and were staring at us, wondering what the boat was after. When we got to the edge of the surf the coxswain hailed them, and after singing out who I was, he and his men threw me into the water. You may well look surprised—neck and crop into ten feet of water, with shark as thick as green parrots in the bush, and I heard them laughing as I floundered to the shore.

I soon saw it was a worse job than ever. As I came scrambling out through the weeds, I was collared[Pg 20] by a big chap with a velveteen coat, and half a dozen others got round me and held me fast. Most of them looked simple fellows enough, and I was not afraid of them; but there was one in a cabbage-tree hat that had a very nasty expression on his face, and the big man seemed to be chummy with him.

They dragged me up the beach, and then they let go their hold of me and stood round in a circle.

“Well, mate,” says the man with the hat, “we’ve been looking out for you some time in these parts.”

“None of your jaw,” says he. “Come, boys, what shall it be—hanging, drowning, or shooting? Look sharp!”

This looked a bit too like business. “No, you don’t!” I said. “I’ve got Government protection, and it’ll be murder.”

“That’s what they call it,” answered the one in the velveteen coat, as cheery as a piping crow.

“Ranger be damned!” said the man. “We’re going to hang you for peaching against your pals; and that’s an end of the palaver.”

They slung a rope round my neck and dragged me up to the edge of the bush. There were some big she-oaks and blue-gums, and they pitched on one of these for the wicked deed. They ran the rope over a branch, tied my hands, and told me to say my prayers. It seemed as if it was all up; but Providence interfered to save me. It sounds nice enough sitting here and telling about it, sir; but it was sick work to stand with nothing but the beach in front of you, and the long white line of surf, with[Pg 21] the steamer in the distance, and a set of bloody-minded villains round you thirsting for your life.

I never thought I’d owe anything good to the police; but they saved me that time. A troop of them were riding from Hawkes Point Station to Dunedin, and hearing that something was up, they came down through the bush and interrupted the proceedings. I’ve heard some bands in my time, Doctor, but I never heard music like the jingle of those traps’ spurs and harness as they galloped out on to the open. They tried to hang me even then, but the police were too quick for them; and the man with the hat got one over the head with the flat of a sword. I was clapped on to a horse, and before evening I found myself in my old quarters in the city jail.

The governor wasn’t to be done, though. He was determined to get rid of me, and I was equally anxious to see the last of him. He waited a week or so until the excitement had begun to die away, and then he smuggled me aboard a three-masted schooner bound to Sydney with tallow and hides.

We got fair away to sea without a hitch, and things began to look a bit more rosy. I made sure that I had seen the last of the prison, anyway. The crew had a sort of an idea who I was, and if there’d been any rough weather, they’d have hove me overboard, like enough; for they were a rough, ignorant lot, and had a notion that I brought bad luck to the ship. We had a good passage, however, and I was landed safe and sound upon Sydney Quay.

Now just you listen to what happened next. You’d have thought they would have been sick of ill-using me and following me by this time—wouldn’t you, now? Well, just you listen. It seems that a cursed steamer started from Dunedin to Sydney on[Pg 22] the very day we left, and got in before us, bringing news that I was coming. Blessed if they hadn’t called a meeting—a regular mass meeting—at the docks to discuss about it, and I marched right into it when I landed. They didn’t take long about arresting me, and I listened to all the speeches and resolutions. If I’d been a prince there couldn’t have been more excitement. The end of all was that they agreed that it wasn’t right that New Zealand should be allowed to foist her criminals upon her neighbors, and that I was to be sent back again by the next boat. So they posted me off again as if I was a damned parcel; and after another eight hundred-mile journey I found myself back for the third time moving in the place that I started from.

By this time I had begun to think that I was going to spend the rest of my existence travelling about from one port to another. Every man’s hand seemed turned against me, and there was no peace or quiet in any direction. I was about sick of it by the time I had come back; and if I could have taken to the bush I’d have done it, and chanced it with my old pals. They were too quick for me, though, and kept me under lock and key; but I managed, in spite of them, to negotiate that caché I told you of, and sewed the gold up in my belt. I spent another month in jail, and then they slipped me aboard a bark that was bound for England.

This time the crew never knew who I was, but the captain had a pretty good idea, though he didn’t let on to me that he had any suspicions. I guessed from the first that the man was a villain. We had a fair passage, except a gale or two off the Cape; and I began to feel like a free man when I saw the blue loom of the old country, and the saucy little pilot-boat from Falmouth dancing toward us over the[Pg 23] waves. We ran down the Channel, and before we reached Gravesend I had agreed with the pilot that he should take me ashore with him when he left. It was at this time that the captain showed me that I was right in thinking him a meddling, disagreeable man. I got my things packed, such as they were, and left him talking earnestly to the pilot, while I went below for my breakfast. When I came up again we were fairly into the mouth of the river, and the boat in which I was to have gone ashore had left us. The skipper said the pilot had forgotten me; but that was too thin, and I began to fear that all my old troubles were going to commence once more.

It was not long before my suspicions were confirmed. A boat darted out from the side of the river, and a tall cove with a long black beard came aboard. I heard him ask the mate whether they didn’t need a mud-pilot to take them up the reaches, but it seemed to me that he was a man who would know a deal more about handcuffs than he did about steering, so I kept away from him. He came across the deck, however, and made some remark to me, taking a good look at me the while. I don’t like inquisitive people at any time, but an inquisitive stranger with glue about the roots of his beard is the worst of all to stand, especially under the circumstances. I began to feel that it was time for me to go.

I soon got a chance, and made good use of it. A big collier came athwart the bows of our steamer, and we had to slacken down to dead slow. There was a barge astern, and I slipped down by a rope and was into the barge before anyone had missed me. Of course I had to leave my luggage behind me, but I had the belt with the nuggets round my waist, and the chance of shaking the police off my[Pg 24] track was worth more than a couple of boxes. It was clear to me now that the pilot had been a traitor, as well as the captain, and had set the detectives after me. I often wish I could drop across those two men again.

I hung about the barge all day as she drifted down the stream. There was one man in her, but she was a big, ugly craft, and his hands were too full for much looking about. Toward evening, when it got a bit dusky, I struck out for the shore, and found myself in a sort of marsh place, a good many miles to the east of London. I was soaking wet and half dead with hunger, but I trudged into the town, got a new rig-out at a slop-shop, and after having some supper, engaged a bed at the quietest lodgings I could find.

I woke pretty early—a habit you pick up in the bush—and lucky for me that I did so. The very first thing I saw when I took a look through a chink in the shutter was one of these infernal policemen, standing right opposite and staring up at the windows. He hadn’t epaulettes nor a sword, like our traps, but for all that there was a sort of family likeness, and the same busybody expression. Whether they’d followed me all the time, or whether the woman that let me the bed didn’t like the looks of me, is more than I have ever been able to find out. He came across as I was watching him, and noted down the address of the house in a book. I was afraid that he was going to ring at the bell, but I suppose his orders were simply to keep an eye on me, for after another good look at the windows he moved on down the street.

I saw that my only chance was to act at once. I threw on my clothes, opened the window softly, and, after making sure that there was nobody about,[Pg 25] dropped out on to the ground and made off as hard as I could run. I travelled a matter of two or three miles, when my wind gave out; and as I saw a big building with people going in and out, I went in too, and found that it was a railway station. A train was just going off for Dover to meet the French boat, so I took a ticket and jumped into a third-class carriage.

There were a couple of other chaps in the carriage, innocent-looking young beggars, both of them. They began speaking about this and that, while I sat quiet in the corner and listened. Then they started on England and foreign countries, and such like. Look ye now, Doctor, this is a fact. One of them begins jawing about the justice of England’s laws. “It’s all fair and above-board,” says he; “there ain’t any secret police, nor spying, like they have abroad,” and a lot more of the same sort of wash. Rather rough on me, wasn’t it, listening to the damned young fool, with the police following me about like my shadow?

I got to Paris right enough, and there I changed some of my gold, and for a few days I imagined I’d shaken them off, and began to think of settling down for a bit of rest. I needed it by that time, for I was looking more like a ghost than a man. You’ve never had the police after you, I suppose? Well, you needn’t look offended, I didn’t mean any harm. If ever you had you’d know that it wastes a man away like a sheep with the rot.

I went to the opera one night and took a box, for I was very flush. I was coming out between the acts when I met a fellow lounging along in the passage. The light fell on his face, and I saw that it was the mud-pilot that had boarded us in the Thames. His beard was gone, but I recognized the man at a glance, for I’ve a good memory for faces.

I tell you, Doctor, I felt desperate for a moment.[Pg 26] I could have knifed him if we had been alone, but he knew me well enough never to give me the chance. It was more than I could stand any longer, so I went right up to him and drew him aside, where we’d be free from all the loungers and theatre-goers.

He seemed a bit flustered for a moment, but then he saw there was no use beating about the bush, so he answered straight:

“Don’t you know,” I said, “that I have served the Government and got a free pardon?”

“We know all about you, Maloney,” he answered. “If you want a quiet life, just you go back where you came from. If you stay here, you’re a marked man; and when you are found tripping it’ll be a lifer for you, at the least. Free trade’s a fine thing, but the market’s too full of men like you for us to need to import any!”

It seemed to me that there was something in what he said, though he had a nasty way of putting it. For some days back I’d been feeling a sort of homesick. The ways of the people weren’t my ways. They stared at me at the street; and if I dropped into a bar, they’d stop talking and edge away a bit, as if I was a wild beast. I’d sooner have had a pint of old Stringybark, too, than a bucketful of their rotgut liquors. There was too much damned propriety. What was the use of having money if you couldn’t dress as you liked, nor bust it properly? There was no sympathy for a man if he shot about a little when he was half-over. I’ve seen a man dropped at Nelson many a time with less row than[Pg 27] they’d make over a broken window-pane. The thing was slow, and I was sick of it.

“Well,” I said, “I don’t care if I do. All I bargain is that you keep your mouth shut and don’t let on who I am, so that I may have a fair start when I get there.”

He agreed to this, and we went over to Southampton the very next day, where he saw me safely off once more. I took a passage round to Adelaide, where no one was likely to know me; and there I settled, right under the nose of the police. I’ve been there ever since, leading a quiet life, but for little difficulties like the one I’m in for now, and for that devil, Tattooed Tom of Hawkesbury. I don’t know what made me tell you all this, Doctor, unless it is that being kind of lonely makes a man inclined to jaw when he gets a chance. Just you take warning from me, though. Never put yourself out to serve your country; for your country will do precious little for you. Just you let them look after their own affairs; and if they find a difficulty in hanging a set of scoundrels, never mind chipping in, but let them alone to do as best they can. Maybe they’ll remember how they treated me after I’m dead, and be sorry for neglecting me. I was rude to you when you came in, and swore a trifle promiscuous; but don’t you mind me, it’s only my way. You’ll allow, though, that I have cause to be a bit touchy now and again when I think of all that’s passed. You’re not going, are you? Well, if you must, you must; but I hope you will look me up at odd times when you are going your round. Oh. I say, you’ve left the balance of that cake of tobacco[Pg 28] behind you, haven’t you? No: it’s in your pocket—that’s all right. Thank ye, Doctor, you’re a good sort, and as quick at a hint as any man I’ve met.

A couple of months after narrating his experiences, Wolf Tone Maloney finished his term, and was released. For a long time I neither saw him nor heard of him, and he had almost slipped from my memory, until I was reminded, in a somewhat tragic manner, of his existence. I had been attending a patient some distance off in the country, and was riding back, guiding my tired horse among the bowlders which strewed the pathway, and endeavoring to see my way through the gathering darkness, when I came suddenly upon a little wayside inn. As I walked my horse up toward the door, intending to make sure of my bearings before proceeding further, I heard the sound of a violent altercation within the little bar. There seemed to be a chorus of expostulation or remonstrance, above which two powerful voices rang out loud and angry. As I listened, there was a momentary hush, two pistol shots sounded almost simultaneously, and with a crash the door burst open and a pair of dark figures staggered out into the moonlight. They struggled for a moment in a deadly wrestle, and then went down together among the loose stones. I had sprung off my horse, and, with the help of half a dozen rough fellows from the bar, dragged them away from one another.

A glance was sufficient to convince me that one of them was dying fast. He was a thick-set, burly fellow, with a determined cast of countenance. The blood was welling from a deep stab in his throat, and it was evident that an important artery had been divided. I turned away from him in despair, and[Pg 29] walked over to where his antagonist was lying. He was shot through the lungs, but managed to raise himself up on his hand as I approached, and peered anxiously up into my face. To my surprise I saw before me the haggard features and flaxen hair of my prison acquaintance, Maloney.

He asked the question so earnestly that I imagined he had softened at the last moment, and feared to leave the world with another homicide upon his conscience. Truth, however, compelled me to shake my head mournfully, and to intimate that the wound would prove a mortal one.

Maloney gave a wild cry of triumph, which brought the blood welling out from between his lips. “Here, boys,” he gasped to the little group around him. “There’s money in my inside pocket. Damn the expense! Drinks round. There’s nothing mean about me. I’d drink with you, but I’m going. Give the Doc. my share, for he’s as good——” Here his head fell back with a thud, his eye glazed, and the soul of Wolf Tone Maloney, forger, convict, ranger, murderer, and Government peach, drifted away into the Great Unknown.

I cannot conclude without borrowing the account of the fatal quarrel which appeared in the columns of the West Australian Sentinel. The curious will find it in the issue of October 4, 1881:

“Fatal Affray.—W. T. Maloney, a well-known citizen of New Montrose, and proprietor of the Yellow Boy gambling saloon, has met with his death under rather painful circumstances. Mr. Maloney was a man who had led a checkered existence, and whose past history is replete with interest. Some[Pg 30] of our readers may recall the Lena Valley murders, in which he figured as the principal criminal. It is conjectured that during the seven months that he owned a bar in that region, from twenty to thirty travellers were hocussed and made away with. He succeeded, however, in evading the vigilance of the officers of the law, and allied himself with the bushrangers of Bluemansdyke, whose heroic capture and subsequent execution are matters of history. Maloney extricated himself from the fate which awaited him by turning Queen’s evidence. He afterward visited Europe, but returned to West Australia, where he has long played a prominent part in local matters. On Friday evening he encountered an old enemy, Thomas Grimthorpe, commonly known as Tattooed Tom, of Hawkesbury. Shots were exchanged, and both were badly wounded, only surviving a few minutes. Mr. Maloney had the reputation of being not only the most wholesale murderer that ever lived, but also of having a finish and attention to detail in matters of evidence which has been unapproached by any European criminal. Sic transit gloria mundi!”

Broadhurst’s store was closed, but the little back room looked very comfortable that night. The fire cast a ruddy glow on ceiling and walls, reflecting itself cheerily on the polished flasks and shot-guns which adorned them. Yet a gloom rested on the two men who sat at either side of the hearth, which neither the fire nor the black bottle upon the table could alleviate.

“Twelve o’clock,” said old Tom, the storeman, glancing up at the wooden timepiece which had come out with him in ’42. “It’s a queer thing, George, they haven’t come.”

“It’s a dirty night,” said his companion, reaching out his arm for a plug of tobacco. “The Wawirra’s in flood, maybe; or maybe their horses is broke down; or they’ve put it off, perhaps. Great Lord, how it thunders! Pass us over a coal, Tom.”

He spoke in a tone which was meant to appear easy, but with a painful thrill in it which was not lost upon his mate. He glanced uneasily at him from under his grizzled eyebrows.

“Oh, nothing; nothing, to be sure,” said old Tom. “You see, George, since the old woman died, Maurice has been all to me; and it makes me kinder anxious. It’s a week since they started from the mine, and you’d ha’ thought they’d be here now. But it’s nothing unusual, I s’pose; nothing at all. Just my darned folly.”

“What’s to harm them?” repeated George Hutton again, arguing to convince himself rather than his comrade. “It’s a straight road from the diggin’s to Rathurst, and then through the hills past Bluemansdyke, and over the Wawirra by the ford and so down to Trafalgar by the bush track. There’s nothin’ deadly in all that, is there? My son Allan’s as dear to me as Maurice can be to you, mate,” he continued; “but they know the ford well, and there’s no other bad place. They’ll be here to-morrow night, certain.”

“Please God they may!” said Broadhurst; and the two men lapsed into silence for some time, moodily staring into the glow of the fire and pulling at their short clays.

It was indeed, as Hutton had said, a dirty night. The wind was howling down through the gorges of the western mountains, and whirling and eddying among the streets of Trafalgar; whistling through the chinks in the rough wood cabins, and tearing away the frail shingles which formed the roofs. The streets were deserted, save for one or two stragglers from the drinking shanties, who wrapped their cloaks around them and staggered home through the wind and rain toward their own cabins.

“Drop it, Broadhurst; drop it, I say,” said Hutton, springing to his feet and pacing up and down the narrow room. “You’re trying to make a coward of me! You know the men must have gone up country prospectin’ or farmin’, maybe. What is it to us where they went? You don’t think I have a register of every man in the colony, as Inspector Burton has of the lags.”

“Sit down, George, and listen,” said old Tom. “There’s something queer about that road; something I don’t understand, and don’t like. Maybe you remember how Maloney, the one-eyed scoundrel, made his money in the early mining days. He’d a half-way drinking shanty on the main road up on a kind of bluff, where the Lena comes down from the hills. You’ve heard, George, how they found a sort of wooden slide from his little back room down to the river; an’ how it came out that man after man had had his drink doctored, and been shot down that into eternity, like a bale of goods. No one will ever know how many were done away with there. They were all supposed to be farmin’ and prospectin’, and the like, till their bodies were picked out of the rapids. It’s no use mincing matters, George; we’ll have the troopers along to the diggin’s if those lads don’t turn up by to-morrow night.”

“By the way, talking of Maloney—it’s a strange[Pg 34] thing,” said Broadhurst, “that Jack Haldane swears he saw a man as like Maloney, with ten years added to him, as could be. It was in the bush on Monday morning. Chance, I suppose; but you’d hardly think there could be two pair of shoulders in the world carrying such villainous mugs on the top of them.”

“Jack Haldane’s a fool,” growled Hutton, throwing open the door and peering anxiously out into the darkness, while the wind played with his long grizzled beard, and sent a train of glowing sparks from his pipe down the street.

Yes, a wild, tempestuous night; a night for birds of darkness and for beasts of prey. A strange night for seven men to lie out in the gully at Bluemansdyke, with revolvers in their hands, and the devil in their hearts.

The sun was rising after the storm. A thick, heavy steam reeked up from the saturated ground and hung like a pall over the flourishing little town of Trafalgar. A bluish mist lay in wreaths over the wide tract of bushland around, out of which the western mountains loomed like great islands in a sea of vapor.

Something was wrong in the town. The most casual glance would have detected that. There was a shouting and a hurrying of feet. Doors were slammed and rude windows thrown open. A trooper of police came clattering down with his carbine unslung. It was past the time for Joe Buchan’s saw-mill to commence work, but the great wheel was motionless, for the hands had not appeared.

There was a surging, pushing crowd in the main[Pg 35] street before old Tom Broadhurst’s house, and a mighty clattering of tongues. “What was it?” demanded the new-comers, panting and breathless. “Broadhurst has shot his mate.” “He has cut his own throat.” “He has struck gold in the clay floor of his kitchen.” “No; it was his son Maurice who had come home rich.” “Who had not come back at all.” “Whose horse had come back without him.” At last the truth had come out; and there was the old sorrel horse in question whinnying and rubbing his neck against the familiar door of the stable, as if entreating entrance; while two haggard, gray-haired men held him by either bridle and gazed blankly at his reeking sides.

“Cheer up, mate,” said Hutton, drawing his rough straw hat down over his brow. “There’s hope yet.”

“Or he’s swum the Wawirra an’ been washed off,” suggested one Job’s comforter.

“Rider fallen off drunk, maybe,” said a bluff old sheep-farmer. “I kin remember,” he continued, “coming into town ’bout this hour myself, with my head in my holster, an’ thinking I was a six-chambered revolver—mighty drunk I was.”

“The horse has a weal on its off fore-quarter,” remarked another, more observant than the rest.

Thus invoked, a strange, gaunt figure stepped out in front of the crowd. He was an extremely tall and powerful man, with the red shirt and high boots of a miner. The shirt was thrown open, showing the sinewy throat and massive chest. His face was seamed and scarred with many a conflict, both with Nature and his brother man; yet beneath his ruffianly exterior there lay something of the quiet dignity of the gentleman. This man was a veteran gold-hunter; a real old Californian ’forty-niner, who had left the fields in disgust when private enterprise began to dwindle before the formation of huge incorporated companies with their ponderous machinery. But the red clay with the little shining points had become to him as the very breath of his nostrils, and he had come half way round the world to seek it once again.

Bill was naturally regarded as an oracle, in virtue of his prowess and varied experience. Every eye was turned on him as Braxton, the young Irish trooper of constabulary, said, “What do you make of the horse, Bill?”

The Yankee was in no hurry to commit himself. He surveyed the animal for some time with his shrewd little gray eye. He bent and examined the girths; then he felt the mane carefully. He stooped once more and examined the hoofs and then the quarters. His eye rested on the blue weal already mentioned. This seemed to put him on a scent, for he gave a long, low whistle, and proceeded at once to examine the hair on either side of the saddle. He[Pg 37] saw something conclusive apparently, for, with a sidelong glance under his shaggy eyebrows at the two old men beside him, he turned and fell back among the crowd.

“He’s done what better men has done afore. He has sunk a shaft for gold and panned out a coffin.”

“I’ve seen the graze of a bushranger’s bullet on the horse’s quarter, an’ I’ve seen a drop of the rider’s blood on the edge of the saddle— Here, hold the old man up, boys; don’t let him drop. Give him a swig of brandy an’ lead him inside. Say,” he continued, in a whisper, gripping the trooper by the wrist, “mind, I’m in it. You an’ I play this hand together. I’m dead on sich varmin. We’ll do as they do in Nevada, strike while the iron is hot. Get any men you can together. I s’pose you’re game to come yourself?”

The American looked at him approvingly. He had learned in his wanderings that an Irishman who grows quieter when deeply stirred is a very dangerous specimen of the genus homo.

“Good lad!” he muttered; and the two went down the street together toward the station-house, followed by half a dozen of the more resolute of the crowd.

One word before we proceed with our story, or our chronicle rather, as every word of it is based upon fact. The colonial trooper of fifteen or twenty years ago was a very different man from his representative of to-day. Not that I would imply any slur upon the courage of the latter; but for reckless dare-devilry and knight-errantry the old constabulary has never been equalled. The reason is a simple one. Men of gentle blood, younger sons and wild rakes who had outrun the constable, were sent off to Australia with some wild idea of making their fortunes. On arriving they found Melbourne by no means the El Dorado they expected; they were unfit for any employment, their money was soon dissipated, and they unerringly gravitated into the mounted police. Thus a sort of colonial “Maison Rouge” became formed, where the lowest private had as much pride of birth and education as his officers. They were men who might have swayed the fate of empires, yet who squandered away their lives in many a lone wild fight with native and bushranger, where nothing but a mouldering blue-ragged skeleton was left to tell the tale.

It was a glorious sunset. The whole western sky was a blaze of flame, throwing a purple tint upon the mountains, and gilding the sombre edges of the great forest which spreads between Trafalgar and the river Wawirra. It stretched out, a primeval, unbroken wilderness, save at the one point where a rough track had been formed by the miners and their numerous camp-followers. This wound amid the great trunks in a zigzag direction, occasionally making a long detour to avoid some marshy hollow or especially dense clump of vegetation. Often it could be hardly discerned from the ground around,[Pg 39] save by the scattered hoof-marks and an occasional rut.

About fifteen miles from Trafalgar there stands a little knoll, well sheltered and overlooking the road. On this knoll a man was lying as the sun went down that Friday evening. He appeared to shun observation, for he had chosen that part in which the foliage was thickest; yet he seemed decidedly at his ease as he lolled upon his back, with his pipe between his teeth and a broad hat down over his face. It was a face that it was well to cover in the presence of so peaceful a scene—a face pitted with the scars of an immaterial small-pox. The forehead was broad and low; one eye had apparently been gouged out, leaving a ghastly cavity; the other was deep-set, cunning, and vindictive. The mouth was hard and cruel; a rough beard covered the chin. It was the cut of face which, seen in a lonely street, would instinctively make one shift the grasp of one’s stick from the knob end to the ferrule—the face of a bold and unscrupulous man.

Some unpleasing thought seemed to occur to him, for he rose with a curse and knocked the ashes out of his pipe. “A darned fine thing,” he muttered, “that I should have to lie out like this! It was Barrett’s fault the job wasn’t a clean one, an’ now he picks me out to get the swamp-fever. If he’d shot the horse as I did the man, we wouldn’t need a watch on this side of the Wawirra. He always was a poor white-livered cuss. Well,” he continued, picking up a gun which lay in the grass behind him, “there’s no use my waiting longer; they wouldn’t start during the night. Maybe the horse never got home, maybe they gave them up as drowned; anyhow, it’s another man’s turn to-morrow, so I’ll just give them five minutes and then make tracks.” He[Pg 40] sat down on the stump of a tree as he spoke and hummed the verse of a song. A sudden thought seemed to strike him, for he plunged his hand into his pocket, and after some searching extracted a pack of playing cards wrapped in a piece of dirty brown paper. He gazed earnestly at their greasy faces for some time. Then he took a pin from his sleeve and pricked a small hole in the corner of each ace and knave. He chuckled as he shuffled them up, and replaced them in his pocket. “I’ll have my share of the swag,” he growled. “They’re sharp, but they’ll not spot that when the liquor is in them. By the Lord, here they are!”

He had sprung to his feet and was bending to the ground, holding his breath as he listened. To the unpractised ear all was as still as before—the hum of a passing insect, the chirp of a bird, the rustle of the leaves; but the bushranger rose with the air of a man who has satisfied himself. “Good-by to Bluemansdyke,” said he; “I reckon it will be too hot to hold us for a time. That thundering idiot! he’s spoiled as nice a lay as ever was, an’ risked our necks into the bargain. I’ll see their number an’ who they are, though,” he continued; and, choosing a point where a rough thicket formed an effectual screen, he coiled himself up, and lay like some venomous snake, occasionally raising his head and peering between the trunks at the reddish streak which marked the Trafalgar road.

There could be no question now as to the approach of a body of horsemen. By the time our friend was fairly ensconced in his hiding-place the sound of voices and the clatter of hoofs was distinctly audible, and in another moment a troop of mounted men came sweeping round the curve of the road. They were eleven all told, armed to the[Pg 41] teeth, and evidently well on the alert. Two rode in front with rifles unslung, leisurely scanning every bush which might shelter an enemy. The main body kept about fifty yards behind them, while a solitary horseman brought up the rear. The ranger scanned them narrowly as they passed. He seemed to recognize most of them. Some were his natural enemies, the troopers; the majority were miners who had volunteered to get rid of an evil which affected their interests so closely. They were a fine bronzed set of men, with a deliberate air about them, as if they had come for a purpose and meant to attain it. As the last rider passed before his hiding-place the solitary watcher started and growled a curse in his beard. “I know his darned face,” he said; “it’s Bill Hanker, the man who got the drop on Long Nat Smeaton in Silver City in ’53; what the thunder brought him here? I must be off by the back track, though, an’ let the boys know.” So saying, he picked up his gun, and with a scowl after the distant party, he crouched down and passed rapidly and silently out of sight into the very thickest part of the bush.

The expedition had started from Trafalgar on the afternoon of the same day that Maurice Broadhurst’s horse, foam-flecked and frightened, had galloped up to the old stable-door. Burton, the inspector of constabulary, an energetic and able man, as all who knew him can testify, was in command. He had detached Braxton, the young Irishman, and Thompson, another trooper, as a vanguard. He himself rode with the main body, gray-whiskered and lean, but as straight in the back as when he and I built a shanty in ’39 in what is now Burke Street, Melbourne. With him were McGillivray, Foley, and[Pg 42] Anson, of the Trafalgar force; Hartley, the sheep-farmer, Murdoch, and Summerville, who had made their pile at the mines; and Dan Murphy, who was cleaned out when the clay of the “Orient” turned to gravel, and had been yearning for a solid square fight ever since. Chicago Bill formed the rear-guard, and the whole party presented an appearance which, though far from military, was decidedly warlike.

They camped out that night seventeen miles from Trafalgar, and next day pushed on as far as where the Stirling road runs across. The third morning brought them to the northern bank of the Wawirra, which they forded. Here a council of war was held, for they were entering what they regarded as enemy’s country. The bush track, though wild, was occasionally traversed both by shepherds and sportsmen. It would hardly be the home of a gang of desperate bushrangers. But beyond the Wawirra the great rugged range of the Tápu Mountains towered up to the clouds, and across a wild spur of these the mining track passed up to Bluemansdyke. It was here, they decided at the council, that the scene of the late drama lay. The question now was, What means were to be taken to attack the murderers?—for that murder had been done no man doubted.

All were of one mind as to what the main line of action should be. To go for them straight, shoot as many as possible on sight, and hang the balance in Trafalgar: that was plain sailing. But how to get at them was the subject of much debate. The troopers were for pushing on at once, and trusting to Fortune to put the rangers in their way. The miners proposed rather to gain some neighboring peak, from which a good view of the country could be obtained, and some idea gained of their whereabouts.[Pg 43] Chicago Bill took rather a gloomy view of things. “Nary one will we see,” said he; “they’ve dusted out of the district ’fore this. They’d know the horse would go home, and likely as not they’ve had a watch on the road to warn them. I guess, boys, we’d best move on an’ do our best.” There was some discussion, but Chicago’s opinion carried the day, and the expedition pushed on in a body.

After passing the second upland station the scenery becomes more and more grand and rugged. Great peaks two and three thousand feet high rose sheer up at each side of the narrow track. The heavy wind and rain of the storm had brought down much débris, and the road was almost impassable in places. They were frequently compelled to dismount and to lead the horses. “We haven’t far now, boys,” said the inspector cheerily, as they struggled on; and he pointed to a great dark cleft which yawned in front of them between two almost perpendicular cliffs. “They are there,” he said, “or nowhere.” A little higher the road became better and their progress was more rapid. A halt was called, guns were unslung, and their pistols loosened in their belts, for the great gully of Bluemansdyke, the wildest part of the whole Tápu range, was gaping before them. But not a thing was to be seen; all was as still as the grave. The horses were picketed in a quiet little ravine, and the whole party crept on on foot. The southern sun glared down hot and clear on the yellow bracken and banks of fern which lined the narrow, winding track. Still not a sign of life. Then came a clear low whistle from the two advanced troopers, announcing that something had been discovered, and the main body hurried up. It was a spot for deeds of blood. On one side of the road there lowered a black gnarled precipice; on the other was the sullen[Pg 44] mouth of the rugged gully. The road took a sharp turn at this spot. Just at the angle several large bowlders were scattered, lining and overlooking the track. It was at this angle that a little bed of mud and trampled red clay betokened a recent struggle. There could be no question that they were at the scene of the murder of the two young miners. The outline of a horse could still be seen in the soft ground, and the prints of its hoofs as it kicked out in its death-agony were plainly marked. Behind one of the rocks were the tracks of several feet, and some pistol-wadding was found in a tuft of ferns. The whole tragedy lay unclosed before them. Two men, careless in the pride of their youth and their strength, had swept round that fatal curve. Then a crash, a groan, a brutal laugh, the galloping of a frightened horse, and all was over.

What was to be done now? The rocks around were explored, but nothing fresh discovered. Some six days had elapsed, and the birds were apparently flown. The party separated and hunted about among the bowlders. Then the American, who could follow a trail like a bloodhound, found tracks leading toward a rugged pile of rocks on the north side of the gully. In a crevice here the remains of three horses were found. Close to them the rim of an old straw hat projected through the loose loam. Hartley, the sheep-farmer, sprang over to pick it up; he started back in the act of stooping, and said in an awe-struck whisper to his friend Murphy “There’s a head under it, Dan!” A few strokes of a spade disclosed a face familiar to most of the group—that of a poor travelling photographer, well known in the colony by the sobriquet of “Stooping Johnny,” who had disappeared some time before. It was now in an advanced stage of putrefaction. Close to him[Pg 45] another body was discovered, and another beside that. In all, thirteen victims of these English thugs were lying under the shadow of the great north wall of the Bluemansdyke gully. It was there, standing in silent awe around the remains of these poor fellows, hurried into eternity and buried like dogs, that the search-party registered a vow to sacrifice all interests and comforts for the space of one month to the single consideration of revenge. The inspector uncovered his grizzled head as he solemnly swore it, and his comrades followed his example. The bodies were then, with a brief prayer, consigned to a deeper grave, a rough cairn was erected over them, and the eleven men set forth upon their mission of stern justice.

Three weeks had passed—three weeks and two days. The sun was sinking over the great waste of bushland, unexplored and unknown, which stretches away from the eastern slope of the Tápu Mountains. Save some eccentric sportsman or bold prospector, no colonist had ever ventured into that desolate land; yet on this autumn evening two men were standing in a little glade in the very heart of it. They were engaged tying up their horses, and apparently making preparations for camping out for the night. Though haggard, unkempt, and worn, one still might recognize two of our former acquaintances—the young Irish trooper and the American Chicago Bill.

This was the last effort of the avenging party. They had traversed the mountain gorges, they had explored every gully and ravine, and now they had split into several small bands, and, having named a trysting-place, they were scouring the country in the hope of hitting upon some trace of the murderers.[Pg 46] Foley and Anson had remained among the hills, Murdoch and Dan Murphy were exploring toward Rathurst, Summerville and the inspector had ascended along the Wawirra, while the others in three parties were wandering through the eastern bushland.

Both the trooper and the miner seemed dejected and weary. The one had set out with visions of glory, and hopes of a short cut to the coveted stripes which would put him above his fellows; the other had obeyed a rough wild sense of justice; and each was alike disappointed. The horses were picketed, and the men threw themselves heavily upon the ground. There was no need to light a fire; a few dampers and some rusty bacon were their whole provisions. Braxton produced them, and handed his share to his comrade. They ate their rough meal without a word. Braxton was the first to break the silence.

“Why, mate,” he continued, “if we did knock up agin these all-fired varmin, ye don’t suppose you and I would go for them? I guess I’d up an’ shove for Trafalgar first.”

Braxton smiled. Chicago’s reckless courage was too well known in the colony for any words of his to throw a doubt upon it. Miners still tell how, during the first great rush in ’52, a blustering ruffian, relying upon some similar remark of the pioneer’s, had tried to establish a reputation by an unprovoked assault upon him; and the narrators then glide imperceptibly into an account of Bill’s handsome conduct toward the widow—how he had given her his week’s clean-up to start her in a[Pg 47] drinking shanty. Braxton thought of this as he smiled at Chicago’s remarks, and glanced at the massive limbs and weather-beaten face.

“We’d best see where we are before it grows darker,” he said; and rising, he stacked his gun against the trunk of a blue-gum tree, and seizing some of the creepers which hung down from it, began rapidly and silently to ascend it.

“His soul’s too big for his body,” growled the American, as he watched the dark lithe figure standing out against the pale-blue evening sky.

“What d’ye see, Jack?” he shouted; for the trooper had reached the topmost branch by this time, and was taking a survey of the country.

“Bush, bush; nothing but bush,” said the voice among the leaves. “Wait a bit, though; there’s a kind of hill about three miles off away to the nor’east. I see it above the trees right over there. Not much good to us, though,” he continued, after a pause, “for it seems a barren, stony sort of place.”

“He seems an almighty long time prospectin’ it,” he muttered, after ten minutes had elapsed. “Ah, here he is!” and the trooper came swinging down and landed panting just in front of him.

Something was the matter. That was very evident. There was a light in Braxton’s blue eyes and a flush on the pale cheek.

“Bill,” he said, putting his hand on his comrade’s shoulder, “it’s about time you made tracks for the settlements.”

“Why, I mean that the murderers are within a[Pg 48] league of us, and that I intend going for them. There, don’t be huffed, old man,” he added; “of course I knew you were only joking. But they are there, Bill; I saw smoke on the top of that hill, and it wasn’t good, honest smoke, mind you; it was dry-wood smoke, and meant to be hid. I thought it was mist at first; but no, it was smoke. I’ll swear it. It could only be them: who else would camp on the summit of a desolate hill? We’ve got them, Bill; we have them as sure as Fate.”

“Or they’ve got us,” growled the American. “But here, lad, here’s my glass; run up and have a look at them.”

“It’s too dark now,” said Braxton; “we’ll camp out to-night. No fear of them stirring. They’re lying by there until the whole thing blows over, depend upon it; so we’ll make sure of them in the morning.”

The miner looked plaintively up at the tree, and then down at his fourteen stone of solid muscle.

“I guess I must take your word for it,” he grumbled; “but you are bushman enough to tell smoke from mist, and a dry-wood fire from an open one. We can’t do anything to-night till we feel our way, so I allow we’d best water the horses an’ have a good night’s rest.”

Braxton seemed to be of the same mind; so after a few minutes’ preparation the two men wrapped themselves in their cloaks, and lay, two little dark spots, on the great green carpet of the primeval bush.

With the first gray light of dawn Chicago sat up and roused his comrade. A heavy mist hung over the bushland. They could hardly see the loom of the trees across the little glade. Their clothes glistened with the little shining beads of moisture.[Pg 49] They brushed each other down, and squatted in bush fashion over their rough breakfast. The haze seemed to be lifting a little now; they could see fifty yards in every direction. The miner paced up and down in silence, ruminating over a plug of “Barrett’s twist.” Braxton sat on a fallen tree sponging and oiling his revolver. Suddenly a single beam of sunshine played over the great blue-gum. It widened and spread, and then in a moment the mist melted away and the yellow leaves glowed like flakes of copper in the glare of the morning sun. Braxton cheerily snapped the lock of the pistol, loaded it, and replaced it in his belt. Chicago began to whistle, and stopped in the middle of his walk.

Braxton slung it round his neck, and ascended the tree as he had done the night before. It was child’s play to the trooper—a splendid climber, as I can testify; for I saw him two years later swarming up the topmost backstay of the Hector frigate in a gale of wind for a bet of a bottle of wine. He soon reached the summit, and shuffling along a naked branch two hundred feet from the ground, he gained a point where no leaves could obstruct his view. Here he sat straddle-legged; and, unslinging the glass, he proceeded to examine the hill, bush by bush and stone by stone.

An hour passed without his moving. Another had almost elapsed before he descended. His face was grave and thoughtful.

“I’ve only seen five; but there may be more. Wait till I think it out, Bill.”

The miner gazed at him with all the reverence matter has toward mind. Thinking things out was not his strong point.

“Blamed if I can help you,” he said, apologetically. “It kinder don’t come nat’ral to me to be plottin’ and plannin’. Want o’ eddication, likely. My father was allowed to be the hardest-headed man in the States. Judge Jeffers let on as how the old man wanted to hand in his checks; so he down an’ put his head on the line when the first engine as ran from Vermont was comin’ up. They fined him a hundred dollars for upsettin’ that ’ere locomotive; an’ the old man got the cussedest headache as ever was.”

“Look here, old man,” said he; “sit down by me on the trunk and listen to what I say. Remember that you are here as a volunteer, Bill—you’ve no call to come; now, I am here in the course of duty. Your name is known through the settlement; you were a marked man when I was in the nursery. Now, Bill, it’s a big thing I am going to ask you. If you and I go in and take these men, it will be another feather in your cap, and in yours only. What do men know of Jack Braxton, the private of police? He’d hardly be mentioned in the matter. Now, I want to make my name this day. We’ll have to secure these men by a surprise after dusk, and it will be as easy for one resolute man to do it as for two; perhaps easier, for there is less chance of detection. Bill, I want you to stay with the horses, and let me go alone.”

Chicago sprang to his feet with a snarl of indignation, and paced up and down in front of the fallen trees. Then he seemed to master himself, for he sat down again.

“They’d chaw you up, lad,” he said, putting his hand on Braxton’s shoulder. “It wouldn’t wash.”

“Not they,” said the trooper. “I’d take your pistol as well as my own, and I’d need a deal of chawing.”

“It’s beyond the reach of calumny. You can afford to give me one fair chance.”

Braxton wrung him by the hand. “There are few men would have done it, Bill; you are a friend worth having. Now, we’ll spend our day as best we can, old man, and lie close till evening; for I won’t start till an hour after dusk; so we have plenty of time on our hands.”

The day passed slowly. The trooper lay among the mosses below the great blue-gum in earnest thought. Once or twice he imagined he heard the subterranean chuckle and slap of the thigh which usually denoted amusement on the part of the miner; but on glancing up at that individual, the expression of his face was so solemn, not to say funereal, that it was evidently an illusion. They partook of their scanty dinner and supper cheerfully and with hearty appetites. The former listlessness had given place to briskness and activity, now that their object was in view. Chicago blossomed out into many strange experiences and racy reminiscences of Western life. The hours passed rapidly and cheerily. The trooper produced a venerable pack of cards from his holster and proposed euchre; but their gregariousness, and the general difficulty of distinguishing the king of clubs from the ace of[Pg 52] hearts, exercised a depressing influence upon the players. Gradually the sun went down on the great wilderness. The shadow fell on the little glade, while the distant hill was still tipped with gold; then that too became purplish, a star twinkled over the Tápu range, and night crept over the scene.

“Good-by, old man,” said Braxton. “I won’t take my carbine; it would only be in the way. I can’t thank you enough for letting me have this chance. If they wipe me out, Bill, you’ll not lose sight of them, I know; and you’ll say I died like a man. I’ve got no friends and no message, and nothing in the world but this pack of cards. Keep them, Bill; they were a fine pack in ’51. If you see a smoke on the hill in the morning you’ll know all’s well, and you’ll bring up the horses at once. If you don’t, you’ll ride to Fallen Pine, where we were to meet—ride day and night, Bill—tell Inspector Burton that you know where the rangers are, that Private Braxton is dead, and that he said he was to bring up his men, else he’d come back from the grave and lead them up himself. Do that, Bill. Good-by”

A great quiet rested over the heart of that desolate woodland. The croak of a frog, the gurgle of a little streamlet half hidden in the long grass—no other sound. Then a wakeful jay gave a shrill chatter, another joined, and another; a bluefinch screamed; a wombat rushed past to gain its burrow. Something had disturbed them; yet all was apparently as peaceful as before. Had you been by the jay’s nest, however, and peered downward, you would have seen something gliding like a serpent through the brushwood, and caught a glimpse, perhaps, of a pale, resolute face, and the glint of a pocket-compass pointing north-by-east.

It was a long and weary night for Trooper Braxton. Any moment he might come on an outpost of the rangers, so every step had to be taken slowly and with care. But he was an experienced woodman, and hardly a twig snapped as he crawled along. A morass barred his progress, and he was compelled to make a long detour. Then he found himself in thick brushwood, and once more had to go out of his way. It was very dark here in the depth of the forest. There was a heavy smell, and a dense steam laden with miasma rose from the ground. In the dim light he saw strange creeping things around him. A bushmaster writhed across the path in front of him, a cold dank lizard crawled over his hand as he crouched down; but the trooper thought only of the human reptiles in front, and made steadily for his goal. Once he seemed to be pursued by some animal; he heard a creaking behind him, but it ceased when he stopped and listened, so he continued his way.

It was when he reached the base of the hill which he had seen from the distance that the real difficulty of his undertaking began. It was almost conical in shape, and very steep. The sides were covered with loose stones and an occasional large bowlder. One false step here would send a shower of these tell-tale fragments clattering down the hill. The trooper stripped off his high leather boots and turned up his trousers; then he began cautiously to climb, cowering down behind every bowlder.

There was a little patch of light far away on the horizon, a very little gray patch, but it caused the figure of a man who was moving upon the crest of the hill to loom out dim and large. He was a sentry apparently, for he carried a gun under his arm. The top of the hill was formed by a little plateau about a[Pg 54] hundred yards in circumference. Along the edge of this the man was pacing, occasionally stopping to peer down into the great dusky sea beneath him. From this raised edge the plateau curved down from every side, so as to form a crater-like depression. In the centre of this hollow stood a large white tent. Several horses were picketed around it, and the ground was littered with bundles of dried grass and harness. You could see these details now from the edge of the plateau, for the gray patch in the east had become white, and was getting longer and wider. You could see the sentry’s face, too, as he paced round and round. A handsome, weak-minded face, with more of the fool than the devil impressed on it. He seemed cheerful, for the birds were beginning to sing, and their thousand voices rose from the bush below. He forgot the forged note, I think, and the dreary voyage, and the wild escape, and the dark gully away beyond the Tápu range; for his eye glistened, and he hummed a quaint little Yorkshire country air. He was back again in the West Riding village, and the rough bowlder in front shaped itself into the hill behind which Nelly lived before he broke her heart, and he saw the ivied church that crowned it. He would have seen something else had he looked again—something which was not in his picture: a white passionless face which glared at him over the bowlder, as he turned upon his heel, still singing, and unconscious that the bloodhounds of justice were close at his heels.

The trooper’s time for action had come. He had reached the last bowlder; nothing lay between the plateau and himself but a few loose stones. He could hear the song of the sentry dying away in the distance; he drew his regulation sword, and, with his Adams in his left, he rose and sprang[Pg 55] like a tiger over the ridge and down into the hollow.

The sentry was startled from his dream of the past by a clatter and a rattling of stones. He sprang round and cocked his gun. No wonder that he gasped, and that a change passed over his bronzed face. A painter would need a dash of ultramarine in his flesh-tints to represent it now. No wonder, I say; for that dark, active figure with the bare feet and the brass buttons meant disgrace and the gallows to him. He saw him spring across to the tent; he saw the gleam of a sword, and heard a crash as the tent-pole was severed and the canvas came down with a run upon the heads of the sleepers. And then above oaths and shouts he heard a mellow Irish voice: “I’ve twelve shots in my hands. I have ye, every mother’s son. Up with your arms! up, I say, before there is blood upon my soul. One move, and ye stand before the throne.” Braxton had stooped and parted the doorway of the fallen tent, and was now standing over six ruffians who occupied it. They lay as they had wakened, but with their hands above their heads, for there was no resisting that quiet voice, backed up by the two black muzzles. They imagined they were surrounded and hopelessly outmatched. Not one of them dreamed that the whole attacking force stood before them. It was the sentry who first began to realize the true state of the case. There was no sound or sign of any reinforcement. He looked to see that the cap was pressed well down on the nipple, and crept toward the tent. He was a good shot, as many a keeper on Braidagarth and the Yorkshire fells could testify. He raised his gun to his shoulder. Braxton heard the click, but dared not remove his eye or his weapon[Pg 56] from his six prisoners. The sentry looked along the sights. He knew his life depended upon that shot. There was more of the devil than the fool in his face now. He paused a moment to make sure of his aim, and then came a crash and the thud of a falling body. Braxton was still standing over the prisoners, but the sentry’s gun was unfired, and he himself was writhing on the ground with a bullet through his lungs. “Ye see,” said Chicago, as he rose from behind a rock with his gun still smoking in his hand, “it seemed a powerful mean thing to leave you, Jack; so I thought as I’d kinder drop around promiscus, and wade in if needed—which I was, as you can’t deny. No, ye don’t,” he added, as the sentry stretched out his hand to grasp his fallen gun; “leave the wepin alone, young man; it ain’t in your way as it lies there.”

“Then lie quiet, like a respectable corpse,” said the miner, “an’ don’t go a-squirmin’ toward yer gun. That’s ornary uneddicated conduct.”

“Come here, Bill,” cried Braxton, “and bring the ropes those horses are picketed with. Now,” he continued, as the American, having abstracted the sentry’s gun, appeared with an armful of ropes, “you tie these fellows up, and I’ll kill any man who moves.”

“A pleasant division of labor—eh, old Blatherskite?” said Chicago, playfully tapping the one-eyed villain Maloney on the head. “Come on; the ugliest first!” So saying, he began upon him and fastened him securely.

One after another the rangers were tied up—all except the pounded man, who was too helpless to need securing. Then Chicago went down and brought up the horses, while Braxton remained[Pg 57] on guard; and by mid-day the cavalcade was in full march through the forest en route for Fallen Pine, the rendezvous of the search-party. The wounded man was tied on to a horse in front, the other rangers followed on foot for safety, while the trooper and Chicago brought up the rear.

There was a sad assemblage at Fallen Pine. One by one they had dropped in, tanned with the sun, torn by briers, weakened by the poisonous miasma of the marshlands, all with the same tale of privation and failure. Summerville and the inspector had fallen in with blacks above the upper ford, and had barely escaped with their lives. Troopers Foley and Anson were well, though somewhat gaunt from privation. Hartley had lost his horse from the bite of a bushmaster. Murdoch and Murphy had scoured the bush as far as Rathurst, but without success. All were dejected and weary. They only waited the arrival of two of their number to set out on their return to Trafalgar.

It was mid-day, and the sun was beating down with a pitiless glare on the little clearing. The men were lying about on the shady side of the trunks, some smoking, some with their hats over their faces and half asleep. The horses were tethered here and there, looking as listless as their masters. Only the inspector’s old charger seemed superior to the weather—a shrewd, blasé old horse, that had seen the world, and was nearly as deeply versed in woodcraft as his master. As Chicago said, “Short of climbin’ a tree, there weren’t nothin’ that horse couldn’t do; an’ it would make a darned good try at that if it was pushed.” Old “Sawback” seemed ill at ease this afternoon. Twice he had pricked up his ears, and once he had raised his head[Pg 58] as if to neigh, but paused before committing himself. The inspector looked at him curiously and put his meerschaum back into its case. Meerschaums were always a weakness of poor Jim Burton’s. “Demme it, sir!” I have heard him say, “a gentleman is known by his pipe. When he comes down in the world his pipe has most vitality.” He put the case inside his uniform and went over to the horse. The ears were still twitching.

“He hears something,” said the inspector. “By Jove, so do I! Here, boys, jump up; there’s a body of men coming!” Every man sprang to his horse’s head. “I hear hoofs, and I hear the tramp of men on foot. They must be a large party. They’re heading straight for us. Get under cover, boys, and have your guns loose.” The men wheeled right and left, and in a very few moments the glade was deserted. Only the brown barrel of a gun here and there among the long grass and the ferns showed where they were crouching. “Steady, boys!” said Burton; “if they are enemies, don’t fire till I give the word. Then one by one aim low, and let the smoke clear. Rangers, by Jove!” he added, as a horseman broke into the clearing some way down, with his head hanging down over his horse’s neck. “More,” he growled, as several men emerged from the bush at the same point. “By the living powers, they are taken! I see the ropes. Hurrah!” And next moment Braxton and Chicago were mobbed by nine shouting, dancing men, who pulled them and tugged at them and slapped them on the back and dragged them about in such a way that Maloney whispered, with a scowl:

And now our story is nearly done. We have[Pg 59] chronicled a fact which, we think, is worthy of a wider circulation than the colonial drinking-bar and the sheep-farmer’s fireside; for Trooper Braxton and his capture of the Bluemansdyke murderers have long been household words among our brothers in the England of the Southern seas.

We need not detail that joyful ride to Trafalgar, nor the welcome, nor the attempt at lynching; nor how Maloney, the arch-criminal, turned Queen’s evidence, and so writhed away from the gallows. All that may be read in the colonial press more graphically than I can tell it. My friend Jack Braxton is an officer now, as his father was before him, and still in the Trafalgar force. Bill I saw last in ’61, when he came over to London in charge of the bark of the Wellingtonia for the International Exhibition. He is laying on flesh, I fear, since he took to sheep-farming, for he was barely brought up by seventeen stone, and his fighting weight used to be fourteen; but he looks well and hearty. Maloney was lynched in Placerville—at least, so I heard. I had a letter last mail from the old inspector; he has left the police, and has a farm at Rathurst. I think, stout-hearted as he is, he must give a little bit of a shudder when he rides down to Trafalgar for the Thursday market, and comes round that sharp turn of the road where the bowlders lie, and the furze looks so yellow against the red clay.

He was known in the Gulch as the Reverend Elias B. Hopkins, but it was generally understood that the title was an honorary one, extorted by his many eminent qualities, and not borne out by any legal claim which he could adduce. “The Parson” was another of his sobriquets, which was sufficiently distinctive in a land where the flock was scattered and the shepherds few. To do him justice, he never pretended to have received any preliminary training for the ministry or any orthodox qualification to practise it. “We’re all working in the claim of the Lord,” he remarked one day, “and it don’t matter a cent whether we’re hired for the job or whether we waltzes in on our own account”—a piece of rough imagery which appealed directly to the instincts of Jackman’s Gulch. It is quite certain that during the first few months his presence had a marked effect in diminishing the excessive use both of strong drinks and of stronger adjectives which had been characteristic of the little mining settlement. Under his tuition, men began to understand that the resources of their native language were less limited than they had supposed, and that it was possible to convey their impressions with accuracy without the aid of a gaudy halo of profanity.

We were certainly in need of a regenerator at Jackman’s Gulch about the beginning of ’53. Times were flush then over the whole colony, but nowhere flusher than there. Our material prosperity had had a bad effect upon our morals. The camp was a small one,[Pg 61] lying rather better than a hundred and twenty miles to the south of Ballarat, at a spot where a mountain torrent finds its way down a rugged ravine on its way to join the Arrowsmith River. History does not relate who the original Jackman may have been, but at the time I speak of the camp it contained a hundred or so adults, many of whom were men who had sought an asylum there after making more civilized mining centres too hot to hold them. They were a rough, murderous crew, hardly leavened by the few respectable members of society who were scattered among them.

Communication between Jackman’s Gulch and the outside world was difficult and uncertain. A portion of the bush between it and Ballarat was infested by a redoubtable outlaw named Conky Jim, who, with a small gang as desperate as himself, made travelling a dangerous matter. It was customary, therefore, at the Gulch, to store up the dust and nuggets obtained from the mines in a special store, each man’s share being placed in a separate bag on which his name was marked. A trusty man, named Woburn, was deputed to watch over this primitive bank. When the amount deposited became considerable, a wagon was hired, and the whole treasure was conveyed to Ballarat, guarded by the police and by a certain number of miners, who took it in turn to perform the office. Once in Ballarat, it was forwarded on to Melbourne by the regular gold wagons. By this plan the gold was often kept for months in the Gulch before being dispatched; but Conky Jim was effectually checkmated, as the escort party were far too strong for him and his gang. He appeared, at the time of which I write, to have forsaken his haunts in disgust, and the road could be traversed by small parties with impunity.

Comparative order used to reign during the daytime at Jackman’s Gulch, for the majority of the inhabitants were out with crowbar and pick among the quartz ledges, or washing clay and sand in their cradles by the banks of the little stream. As the sun sank down, however, the claims were gradually deserted, and their unkempt owners, clay-bespattered and shaggy, came lounging into camp, ripe for any form of mischief. Their first visit was to Woburn’s gold store, where their clean-up of the day was duly deposited, the amount being entered in the store-keeper’s book, and each miner retaining enough to cover his evening’s expenses. After that all restraint was at an end, and each set to work to get rid of his surplus dust with the greatest rapidity possible. The focus of dissipation was the rough bar, formed by a couple of hogsheads spanned by planks, which was dignified by the name of the “Britannia drinking saloon.” Here Nat Adams, the burly bar-keeper, dispensed bad whiskey at the rate of two shillings a noggin, or a guinea a bottle, while his brother Ben acted as croupier in a rude wooden shanty behind, which had been converted into a gambling hell and was crowded every night. There had been a third brother, but an unfortunate misunderstanding with a customer had shortened his existence. “He was too soft to live long,” his brother Nathaniel feelingly observed on the occasion of his funeral. “Many’s the time I’ve said to him, ’If you’re arguin’ a pint with a stranger, you should always draw first, then argue, and then shoot, if you judge that he’s on the shoot.’ Bill was too purlite. He must needs argue first and draw after, when he might just as well have kivered his man before talkin’ it over with him.” This amiable weakness of the deceased Bill was a blow to the firm of[Pg 63] Adams, which became so short-handed that the concern could hardly be worked without the admission of a partner, which would mean a considerable decrease in the profits.

Nat Adams had had a roadside shanty in the Gulch before the discovery of gold, and might, therefore, claim to be the oldest inhabitant. These keepers of shanties were a peculiar race, and, at the cost of a digression, it may be interesting to explain how they managed to amass considerable sums of money in a land where travellers were few and far between. It was the custom of the “bushmen”—i.e., bullock drivers, sheep tenders, and the other white hands who worked on the sheep-runs up country—to sign articles by which they agreed to serve their master for one, two, or three years at so much per year and certain daily rations. Liquor was never included in this agreement, and the men remained, perforce, total abstainers during the whole time. The money was paid in a lump sum at the end of the engagement. When that day came round, Jimmy, the stockman, would come slouching into his master’s office, cabbage-tree hat in hand.

“Morning, master!” Jimmy would say. “My time’s up. I guess I’ll draw my cheque and ride down to town.”

“Yes, I’ll come back. Maybe I’ll be away three weeks, maybe a month. I want some clothes, master, and my bloomin’ boots are well nigh off my feet.”

“There’s sixty pound screw,” Jimmy answers, thoughtfully; “and you mind, master, last March, when the brindled bull broke out o’ the paddock. Two pound you promised me then. And a pound[Pg 64] at the dipping. And a pound when Millar’s sheep got mixed with ourn.” And so he goes on, for bushmen can seldom write, but they have memories which nothing escapes.

His master writes the cheque and hands it across the table. “Don’t get on the drink, Jimmy,” he says.

“No fear of that, master,” and the stockman slips the cheque into his leather pouch, and within an hour he is ambling off upon his long-limbed horse on his hundred-mile journey to town.

Now Jimmy has to pass some six or eight of the above-mentioned roadside shanties in his day’s ride, and experience has taught him that if he once breaks his accustomed total abstinence, the unwonted stimulant has an overpowering effect upon his brain. Jimmy shakes his head warily as he determines that no earthly consideration will induce him to partake of any liquor until his business is over. His only chance is to avoid temptation; so, knowing that there is the first of these houses some half mile ahead, he plunges into a bypath through the bush which will lead him out at the other side.

Jimmy is riding resolutely along this narrow path, congratulating himself upon a danger escaped, when he becomes aware of a sunburned, black-bearded man who is leaning unconcernedly against a tree beside the track. This is none other than the shanty-keeper, who, having observed Jimmy’s manœuvre in the distance, has taken a short cut through the bush in order to intercept him.

“No, now—are you, though? You’ll have bully times down there for a bit. Come round and have a drink at my place—just by way of luck.”

“Well, ye needn’t be so darned short about it. It’s nothin’ to me whether you drinks or not. Good mornin’.”

“Good mornin’,” says Jimmy, and has ridden on about twenty yards when he hears the other calling on him to stop.

“See here, Jimmy!” he says, overtaking him again. “If you’ll do me a kindness when you’re up in town, I’d be obliged.”

“It’s a letter, Jim, as I wants posted. It’s an important one too, an’ I wouldn’t trust it with everyone; but I knows you, and if you’ll take charge on it it’ll be a powerful weight off my mind.”

“I hain’t got it here. It’s round in my caboose. Come round for it with me. It ain’t more’n quarter of a mile.”

Jimmy consents reluctantly. When they reach the tumble-down hut the keeper asks him cheerily to dismount and to come in.

“It ain’t altogether wrote yet, but you sit down here for a minute and it’ll be right,” and so the stockman is beguiled into the shanty.

At last the letter is ready and handed over. “Now, Jimmy,” says the keeper, “one drink at my expense before you go.”

“Oh, that’s it, is it?” the other says, in an aggrieved tone. “You’re too damned proud to drink with a poor cove like me. Here—give us back that letter. I’m cursed if I’ll accept a favor from a man whose too almighty big to have a drink with me.”

“Well, well, mate, don’t turn rusty,” says Jim. “Give us one drink an’ I’m off.”

The keeper pours out about half a pannikin of raw rum and hands it to the bushman. The moment he smells the old familiar smell his longing for it returns, and he swigs it off at a gulp. His eyes shine more brightly, and his face becomes flushed. The keeper watches him narrowly. “You can go now, Jim,” he says.

“Steady, mate, steady,” says the bushman. “I’m as good a man as you. If you stand a drink, I can stand one too, I suppose.” So the pannikin is replenished, and Jimmy’s eyes shine brighter still.

“Now, Jimmy, one last drink for the good of the house,” says the keeper, “and then it’s time you were off.” The stockman has a third gulp from the pannikin, and with it all his scruples and good resolutions vanish forever.

“Look here,” he says, somewhat huskily, taking his cheque out of his pouch. “You take this, mate. Whoever comes along this road, ask ’em what they’ll have, and tell them it’s my shout. Let me know when the money’s done.”

So Jimmy abandons the idea of ever getting to town, and for three weeks or a month he lies about the shanty in a state of extreme drunkenness, and reduces every wayfarer upon the road to the same condition. At last one fine morning the keeper comes to him. “The coin’s done, Jimmy,” he says; “it’s about time you made some more.” So Jimmy has a good wash to sober him, straps his blanket[Pg 67] and his billy to his back, and rides off through the bush to the sheep-run, where he has another year of sobriety, terminating in another month of intoxication.

All this, though typical of the happy-go-lucky manners of the inhabitants, has no direct bearing upon Jackman’s Gulch, so we must return to that Arcadian settlement. Additions to the population there were not numerous, and such as came about the time of which I speak were even rougher and fiercer than the original inhabitants. In particular, there came a brace of ruffians named Phillips and Maule, who rode into camp one day and started a claim upon the other side of the stream. They out-gulched the Gulch in the virulence and fluency of their blasphemy, in the truculence of their speech and manner, and in their reckless disregard of all social laws. They claimed to have come from Bendigo, and there were some among us who wished that the redoubted Conky Jim was on the track once more, as long as he would close it to such visitors as these. After their arrival the nightly proceedings at the “Britannia bar” and at the gambling hell behind became more riotous than ever. Violent quarrels, frequently ending in bloodshed, were of constant occurrence. The more peaceable frequenters of the bar began to talk seriously of lynching the two strangers, who were the principal promoters of disorder. Things were in this unsatisfactory condition when our evangelist, Elias B. Hopkins, came limping into the camp, travel-stained and footsore, with his spade strapped across his back and his Bible in the pocket of his moleskin jacket.

His presence was hardly noticed at first, so insignificant was the man. His manner was quiet and unobtrusive, his face pale, and his figure fragile.[Pg 68] On better acquaintance, however, there was a squareness and firmness about his clean-shaven lower jaw, and an intelligence in his widely opened blue eyes, which marked him as a man of character. He erected a small hut for himself, and started a claim close to that occupied by the two strangers who had preceded him. This claim was chosen with a ludicrous disregard for all practical laws of mining, and at once stamped the new-comer as being a green hand at his work. It was piteous to observe him every morning, as we passed to our work, digging and delving with the greatest industry, but, as we knew well, without the smallest possibility of any result. He would pause for a moment as we went by, wipe his pale face with his bandanna handkerchief, and shout out to us a cordial morning greeting, and then fall to again with redoubled energy. By degrees we got into the way of making a half-pitying, half-contemptuous inquiry as to how he got on. “I hain’t struck it yet, boys,” he would answer, cheerily, leaning on his spade; “but the bed-rock lies deep just hereabouts, and I reckon we’ll get among the pay gravel to-day.” Day after day he returned the same reply, with unvarying confidence and cheerfulness.

It was not long before he began to show us the stuff that was in him. One night the proceedings were unusually violent at the drinking saloon. A rich pocket had been struck during the day, and the striker was standing treat in a lavish and promiscuous fashion, which had reduced three parts of the settlement to a state of wild intoxication. A crowd of drunken idlers stood or lay about the bar, cursing, swearing, shouting, dancing, and here and there firing their pistols into the air out of pure wantonness. From the interior of the shanty[Pg 69] behind there came a similar chorus. Maule, Phillips, and the roughs who followed them were in the ascendant, and all order and decency was swept away.

Suddenly, amid this tumult of oaths and drunken cries, men became conscious of a quiet monotone which underlay all other sounds and obtruded itself at every pause in the uproar. Gradually first one man and then another paused to listen, until there was a general cessation of the hubbub, and every eye was turned in the direction whence this quiet stream of words flowed. There, mounted upon a barrel, was Elias B. Hopkins, the newest of the inhabitants of Jackman’s Gulch, with a good-humored smile upon his resolute face. He held an open Bible in his hand, and was reading aloud a passage taken at random—an extract from the Apocalypse, if I remember right. The words were entirely irrelevant, and without the smallest bearing upon the scene before him; but he plodded on with great unction, waving his left hand slowly to the cadence of his words.

There was a general shout of laughter and applause at this apparition, and Jackman’s Gulch gathered round the barrel approvingly, under the impression that this was some ornate joke, and that they were about to be treated to some mock sermon or parody of the chapter read. When, however, the reader, having finished the chapter, placidly commenced another, and having finished that rippled on into another one, the revellers came to the conclusion that the joke was somewhat too long-winded. The commencement of yet another chapter confirmed this opinion, and an angry chorus of shouts and cries, with suggestions as to gagging the reader, or knocking him off the barrel, rose[Pg 70] from every side. In spite of roars and hoots, however, Elias B. Hopkins plodded away at the Apocalypse with the same serene countenance, looking as ineffably contented as though the babel around him were the most gratifying applause. Before long an occasional boot pattered against the barrel, or whistled past our parson’s head; but here some of the more orderly of the inhabitants interfered in favor of peace and order, aided, curiously enough, by the afore-mentioned Maule and Phillips, who warmly espoused the cause of the little Scripture-reader. “The little cuss has got grit in him,” the latter explained, rearing his bulky red-shirted form between the crowd and the object of its anger. “His ways ain’t our ways, and we’re all welcome to our opinions, and to sling them round from barrels or otherwise, if so minded. What I says, and Bill says, is, that when it comes to slingin’ boots instead o’ words it’s too steep by half; an’ if this man’s wronged we’ll chip in an’ see him righted.” This oratorical effort had the effect of checking the more active signs of disapproval, and the party of disorder attempted to settle down once more to their carouse, and to ignore the shower of Scripture which was poured upon them. The attempt was hopeless. The drunken portion fell asleep under the drowsy refrain, and the others, with many a sullen glance at the imperturbable reader, slouched off to their huts, leaving him still perched upon the barrel. Finding himself alone with the more orderly of the spectators, the little man rose, closed his book, after methodically marking with a lead pencil the exact spot at which he stopped, and descended from his perch. “To-morrow night, boys,” he remarked in his quiet voice, “the reading will commence at the ninth verse of the fifteenth chapter of the Apocalypse,”[Pg 71] with which piece of information, disregarding our congratulations, he walked away with the air of a man who has performed an obvious duty.

We found that his parting words were no empty threat. Hardly had the crowd begun to assemble next night before he appeared once more upon the barrel and began to read with the same monotonous vigor, tripping over words, muddling up sentences, but still boring along through chapter after chapter. Laughter, threats, chaff—every weapon short of actual violence—was used to deter him, but all with the same want of success. Soon it was found that there was a method in his proceedings. When silence reigned, or when the conversation was of an innocent nature, the reading ceased. A single word of blasphemy, however, set it going again, and it would ramble on for a quarter of an hour or so, when it stopped, only to be renewed upon similar provocation. The reading was pretty continuous during that second night, for the language of the opposition was still considerably free. At least it was an improvement upon the night before.

For more than a month Elias B. Hopkins carried on this campaign. There he would sit, night after night, with the open book upon his knee, and at the slightest provocation off he would go, like a musical box when the spring is touched. The monotonous drawl became unendurable, but it could only be avoided by conforming to the parson’s code. A chronic swearer came to be looked upon with disfavor by the community, since the punishment of his transgression fell upon all. At the end of a fortnight the reader was silent more than half the time, and at the end of the month his position was a sinecure.

Never was a moral revolution brought about more rapidly and more completely. Our parson carried his principle into private life. I have seen him, on hearing an unguarded word from some worker in the gulches, rush across, Bible in hand, and perching himself upon the heap of red clay which surmounted the offender’s claim, drawl through the genealogical tree at the commencement of the New Testament in a most earnest and impressive manner, as though it were especially appropriate to the occasion. In time an oath became a rare thing among us. Drunkenness was on the wane too. Casual travellers passing through the Gulch used to marvel at our state of grace, and rumors of it went as far as Ballarat, and excited much comment therein.

There were points about our evangelist which made him especially fitted for the work which he had undertaken. A man entirely without redeeming vices would have had no common basis on which to work, and no means of gaining the sympathy of his flock. As we came to know Elias B. Hopkins better, we discovered that in spite of his piety there was a leaven of old Adam in him, and that he had certainly known unregenerate days. He was no teetotaller. On the contrary, he could choose his liquor with discrimination, and lower it in an able manner. He played a masterly hand at poker, and there were few who could touch him at “cut-throat euchre.” He and the two ex-ruffians, Phillips and Maule, used to play for hours in perfect harmony, except when the fall of the cards elicited an oath from one of his companions. At the first of these offences the parson would put on a pained smile and gaze reproachfully at the culprit. At the second he would reach for his Bible, and the game was over[Pg 73] for the evening. He showed us he was a good revolver shot too, for when we were practising at an empty brandy bottle outside Adams’ bar he took up a friend’s pistol and hit it plumb in the centre at twenty-four paces. There were few things he took up that he could not make a show at apparently, except gold-digging, and at that he was the veriest duffer alive. It was pitiful to see the little canvas bag, with his name printed across it, lying placid and empty upon the shelf at Woburn’s store, while all the other bags were increasing daily, and some had assumed quite a portly rotundity of form, for the weeks were slipping by, and it was almost time for the gold-train to start off for Ballarat. We reckoned that the amount which we had stored at the time represented the greatest sum which had ever been taken by a single convoy out of Jackman’s Gulch.

Although Elias B. Hopkins appeared to derive a certain quiet satisfaction from the wonderful change which he had effected in the camp, his joy was not yet rounded and complete. There was one thing for which he still yearned. He opened his heart to us about it one evening.

“We’d have a blessing on the camp, boys,” he said, “if we only had a service o’ some sort on the Lord’s day. It’s a temptin’ o’ Providence to go on in this way without takin’ any notice of it except that maybe there’s more whiskey drunk and more card-playin’ than on any other day.”

“Ye fool!” growled another, “hain’t we got a man as is worth any three parsons, and can splash texts around like clay out o’ a cradle? What more d’ye want?”

The last proposal was received with a buzz of approval which showed that it was considered the most appropriate locality.

Adams’ saloon was a substantial wooden building in the rear of the bar, which was used partly for storing liquor and partly for a gambling saloon. It was strongly built of rough-hewn logs, the proprietor rightly judging, in the unregenerate days of Jackman’s Gulch, that hogsheads of brandy and rum were commodities which had best be secured under lock and key. A strong door opened into each end of the saloon, and the interior was spacious enough, when the table and lumber were cleared away, to accommodate the whole population. The spirit barrels were heaped together at one end by their owner, so as to make a very fair imitation of a pulpit.

At first the Gulch took but a mild interest in the proceedings, but when it became known that Elias B. Hopkins intended, after reading the service, to address the audience, the settlement began to warm up to the occasion. A real sermon was a novelty to all of them, and one coming from their own parson was additionally so. Rumor announced that it would be interspersed with local hits, and that the moral would be pointed by pungent personalities. Men began to fear that they would be unable to gain seats, and many applications were made to the brothers Adams. It was only when conclusively shown that the saloon could contain them all with a margin that the camp settled down into calm expectancy.

It was as well that the building was of such a size, for the assembly upon the Sunday morning was the largest which had ever occurred in the annals of Jackman’s Gulch. At first it was thought that the whole population was present, but a little reflection showed that this was not so. Maule and Phillips had gone on a prospecting journey among the hills, and had not returned as yet; and Woburn, the gold-keeper, was unable to leave his store. Having a very large quantity of the precious metal under his charge, he stuck to his post, feeling that the responsibility was too great to trifle with. With these three exceptions the whole of the Gulch, with clean red shirts, and such other additions to their toilet as the occasion demanded, sauntered in a straggling line along the clayey pathway which led up to the saloon.

The interior of the building had been provided with rough benches; and the parson, with his quiet, good-humored smile, was standing at the door to welcome them. “Good morning, boys,” he cried cheerily, as each group came lounging up. “Pass in! pass in! You’ll find this is as good a morning’s work as any you’ve done. Leave your pistols in this barrel outside the door as you pass; you can pick them out as you come out again; but it isn’t the thing to carry weapons into the house of peace.” His request was good-humoredly complied with, and before the last of the congregation filed in there was a strange assortment of knives and fire-arms in this depository. When all had assembled the doors were shut and the service began—the first and the last which was ever performed at Jackman’s Gulch.

The weather was sultry and the room close, yet the miners listened with exemplary patience. There was a sense of novelty in the situation which had its[Pg 76] attractions. To some it was entirely new, others were wafted back by it to another land and other days. Beyond a disposition which was exhibited by the uninitiated to applaud at the end of certain prayers, by way of showing that they sympathized with the sentiments expressed, no audience could have behaved better. There was a murmur of interest however, when Elias B. Hopkins, looking down on the congregation from his rostrum of casks, began his address.

He had attired himself with care in honor of the occasion. He wore a velveteen tunic, girt round the waist with a sash of China silk, a pair of moleskin trousers, and held his cabbage-tree hat in his left hand. He began speaking in a low tone, and it was noticed at the time that he frequently glanced through the small aperture which served for a window, which was placed above the heads of those who sat beneath him.

“I’ve put you straight now,” he said, in the course of his address; “I’ve got you in the right rut, if you will but stick in it.” Here he looked very hard out of the window for some seconds. “You’ve learned soberness and industry, and with those things you can always make up any loss you may sustain. I guess there isn’t one of ye that won’t remember my visit to this camp.” He paused for a moment, and three revolver shots rang out upon the quiet summer air. “Keep your seats, damn ye!” roared our preacher, as his audience rose in excitement. “If a man of ye moves, down he goes! The door’s locked on the outside, so ye can’t get out anyhow. Your seats, ye canting, chuckle-headed fools! Down with ye, ye dogs, or I’ll fire among ye!”

Astonishment and fear brought us back into our seats, and we sat staring blankly at our pastor and[Pg 77] each other. Elias B. Hopkins, whose whole face and even figure appeared to have undergone an extraordinary alteration, looked fiercely down on us from his commanding position with a contemptuous smile on his stern face.

“I have your lives in my hands,” he remarked; and we noticed as he spoke that he held a heavy revolver in his hand, and that the butt of another one protruded from his sash. “I am armed and you are not. If one of you moves or speaks, he is a dead man. If not, I shall not harm you. You must wait here for an hour. Why, you fools” (this with a hiss of contempt which rang in our ears for many a long day), “do you know who it is that has stuck you up? Do you know who it is that has been playing it upon you for months as a parson and a saint? Conky Jim, the bushranger, ye apes? And Phillips and Maule were my two right-hand men. They’re off into the hills with your gold——Ha! would ye?” This to some restive member of the audience, who quieted down instantly before the fierce eye and the ready weapon of the bushranger. “In an hour they will be clear of any pursuit, and I advise you to make the best of it and not to follow, or you may lose more than your money. My horse is tethered outside this door behind me. When the time is up I shall pass through it, lock it on the outside, and be off. Then you may break your way out as best you can. I have no more to say to you, except that ye are the most cursed set of asses that ever trod in boot-leather.”

We had time to indorse mentally this outspoken opinion during the long sixty minutes which followed; we were powerless before the resolute desperado. It is true that if we made a simultaneous rush we might bear him down at the cost of eight or[Pg 78] ten of our number. But how could such a rush be organized without speaking, and who would attempt it without a previous agreement that he would be supported? There was nothing for it but submission. It seemed three hours at the least before the ranger snapped up his watch, stepped down from the barrel, walked backward, still covering us with his weapon, to the door behind him, and then passed rapidly through it. We heard the creaking of the rusty lock, and the clatter of his horse’s hoofs as he galloped away.

It has been remarked that an oath had for the last few weeks been a rare thing in the camp. We made up for our temporary abstention during the next half-hour. Never was heard such symmetrical and heartfelt blasphemy. When at last we succeeded in getting the door off its hinges all sight of both rangers and treasure had disappeared, nor have we ever caught sight of either the one or the other since. Poor Woburn, true to his trust, lay shot through the head across the threshold of his empty store. The villains, Maule and Phillips, had descended upon the camp the instant that we had been enticed into the trap, murdered the keeper, loaded up a small cart with the booty, and got safe away to some wild fastness among the mountains, where they were joined by their wily leader.

Jackman’s Gulch recovered from this blow, and is now a flourishing township. Social reformers are not in request there, however, and morality is at a discount. It is said that an inquest has been held lately upon an unoffending stranger who chanced to remark that in so large a place it would be advisable to have some form of Sunday service. The memory of their one and only pastor is still green among the inhabitants, and will be for many a long year to come.

On December 3, 1861, Dr. Otto von Hopstein, Regius Professor of Comparative Anatomy of the University of Buda-Pesth, and Curator of the Academical Museum, was foully and brutally murdered within a stone-throw of the entrance to the college quadrangle.

Besides the eminent position of the victim and his popularity among both students and townsfolk, there were other circumstances which excited public interest very strongly, and drew general attention throughout Austria and Hungary to this murder. The Pesther Abendblatt of the following day had an article upon it, which may still be consulted by the curious, and from which I translate a few passages giving a succinct account of the circumstances under which the crime was committed, and the peculiar features in the case which puzzled the Hungarian police.

“It appears,” said that very excellent paper, “that Professor von Hopstein left the University about half-past four in the afternoon, in order to meet the train which is due from Vienna at three minutes after five. He was accompanied by his old and dear friend, Herr Wilhelm Schlessinger, sub-Curator of the Museum and Privat-docent of Chemistry. The object of these two gentlemen in meeting this particular train was to receive the legacy bequeathed by Graf von Schulling to the University of Buda-Pesth. It is well known that this unfortunate[Pg 80] nobleman, whose tragic fate is still fresh in the recollection of the public, left his unique collection of mediæval weapons, as well as several priceless black-letter editions, to enrich the already celebrated museum of his Alma Mater. The worthy Professor was too much of an enthusiast in such matters to intrust the reception or care of this valuable legacy to any subordinate; and, with the assistance of Herr Schlessinger, he succeeded in removing the whole collection from the train, and stowing it away in a light cart which had been sent by the University authorities. Most of the books and more fragile articles were packed in cases of pinewood, but many of the weapons were simply done round with straw, so that considerable labor was involved in moving them all. The Professor was so nervous, however, lest any of them should be injured, that he refused to allow any of the railway employés (Eisenbahn-diener) to assist. Every article was carried across the platform by Herr Schlessinger, and handed to Professor von Hopstein in the cart, who packed it away. When everything was in, the two gentlemen, still faithful to their charge, drove back to the University, the Professor being in excellent spirits, and not a little proud of the physical exertion which he had shown himself capable of. He made some joking allusion to it to Reinmaul, the janitor, who, with his friend Schiffer, a Bohemian Jew, met the cart on its return and unloaded the contents. Leaving his curiosities safe in the store-room, and locking the door, the Professor handed the key to his sub-curator, and bidding everyone good evening, departed in the direction of his lodgings. Schlessinger took a last look to reassure himself that all was right, and also went off, leaving Reinmaul and his friend Schiffer smoking in the janitor’s lodge.

“At eleven o’clock, about an hour and a half after Von Hopstein’s departure, a soldier of the 14th regiment of Jäger, passing the front of the University on his way to barracks, came upon the lifeless body of the Professor lying a little way from the side of the road. He had fallen upon his face, with both hands stretched out. His head was literally split in two halves by a tremendous blow, which, it is conjectured, must have been struck from behind, there remaining a peaceful smile upon the old man’s face, as if he had been still dwelling upon his new archæological acquisition when death had overtaken him. There is no other mark of violence upon the body, except a bruise over the left patella, caused probably by the fall. The most mysterious part of the affair is that the Professor’s purse, containing forty-three gulden, and his valuable watch have been untouched. Robbery cannot, therefore, have been the incentive to the deed, unless the assassins were disturbed before they could complete their work.

“This idea is negatived by the fact that the body must have lain at least an hour before anyone discovered it. The whole affair is wrapped in mystery. Dr. Langemann, the eminent medico-jurist, has pronounced that the wound is such as might have been inflicted by a heavy sword-bayonet wielded by a powerful arm. The police are extremely reticent upon the subject, and it is suspected that they are in possession of a clew which may lead to important results.”

Thus far the Pesther Abendblatt. The researches of the police failed, however, to throw the least glimmer of light upon the matter. There was absolutely no trace of the murderer, nor could any amount of ingenuity invent any reason which could have induced anyone to commit the dreadful deed.[Pg 82] The deceased Professor was a man so wrapped in his own studies and pursuits that he lived apart from the world, and had certainly never raised the slightest animosity in any human breast. It must have been some fiend, some savage, who loved blood for its own sake, who struck that merciless blow.

Though the officials were unable to come to any conclusions upon the matter, popular suspicion was not long in pitching upon a scapegoat. In the first published accounts of the murder the name of one Schiffer had been mentioned as having remained with the janitor after the Professor’s departure. This man was a Jew, and Jews have never been popular in Hungary. A cry was at once raised for Schiffer’s arrest; but as there was not the slightest grain of evidence against him, the authorities very properly refused to consent to so arbitrary a proceeding. Reinmaul, who was an old and most respected citizen, declared solemnly that Schiffer was with him until the startled cry of the soldier had caused them both to run out to the scene of the tragedy. No one ever dreamed of implicating Reinmaul in such a matter; but still it was rumored that his ancient and well-known friendship for Schiffer might have induced him to tell a falsehood in order to screen him. Popular feeling ran very high upon the subject, and there seemed a danger of Schiffer’s being mobbed in the street, when an incident occurred which threw a very different light upon the matter.

On the morning of December 12th, just nine days after the mysterious murder of the Professor, Schiffer, the Bohemian Jew, was found lying in the northwestern corner of the Grand Platz stone dead, and so mutilated that he was hardly recognizable. His head was cloven open in very much the same[Pg 83] way as that of Von Hopstein, and his body exhibited numerous deep gashes, as if the murderer had been so carried away and transported with fury that he had continued to hack the lifeless body. Snow had fallen heavily the day before, and was lying at least a foot deep all over the square; some had fallen during the night, too, as was evidenced by a thin layer lying like a winding-sheet over the murdered man. It was hoped at first that this circumstance might assist in giving a clew by enabling the footsteps of the assassin to be traced; but the crime had been committed, unfortunately, in a place much frequented during the day, and there were innumerable tracks in every direction. Besides, the newly fallen snow had blurred the footsteps to such an extent that it would have been impossible to draw trustworthy evidence from them.

In this case there was exactly the same impenetrable mystery and absence of motive which had characterized the murder of Professor von Hopstein. In the dead man’s pocket there was found a note-book containing a considerable sum in gold and several very valuable bills, but no attempt had been made to rifle him. Supposing that anyone to whom he had lent money (and this was the first idea which occurred to the police) had taken this means of evading his debt, it was hardly conceivable that he would have left such a valuable spoil untouched. Schiffer lodged with a widow named Gruga, at 49 Marie Theresa Strasse, and the evidence of his landlady and her children showed that he had remained shut up in his room the whole of the preceding day in a state of deep dejection, caused by the suspicion which the populace had fastened upon him. She had heard him go out about eleven o’clock at night for his last and fatal walk, and as he had a latch-key[Pg 84] she had gone to bed without waiting for him. His object in choosing such a late hour for a ramble obviously was that he did not consider himself safe if recognized in the streets.

The occurrence of this second murder so shortly after the first threw not only the town of Buda-Pesth, but the whole of Hungary, into a terrible state of excitement and even of terror. Vague dangers seemed to hang over the head of every man. The only parallel to this intense feeling was to be found in our own country at the time of the Williams murders described by De Quincey. There were so many resemblances between the cases of Von Hopstein and of Schiffer that no one could doubt that there existed a connection between the two. The absence of object and of robbery, the utter want of any clew to the assassin, and, lastly, the ghastly nature of the wounds, evidently inflicted by the same or a similar weapon, all pointed in one direction. Things were in this state when the incidents which I am now about to relate occurred, and in order to make them intelligible I must lead up to them from a fresh point of departure.

Otto von Schlegel was a younger son of the old Silesian family of that name. His father had originally destined him for the army, but at the advice of his teachers, who saw the surprising talent of the youth, had sent him to the University of Buda-Pesth to be educated in medicine. Here young Schlegel carried everything before him, and promised to be one of the most brilliant graduates turned out for many a year. Though a hard reader, he was no bookworm, but an active, powerful young fellow, full of animal spirits and vivacity, and extremely popular among his fellow-students.

The New Year examinations were at hand, and[Pg 85] Schlegel was working hard—so hard that even the strange murders in the town, and the general excitement in men’s minds, failed to turn his thoughts from his studies. Upon Christmas Eve, when every house was illuminated, and the roar of drinking songs came from the Bierkeller in the Student-quartier, he refused the many invitations to roystering suppers which were showered upon him, and went off with his books under his arm to the rooms of Leopold Strauss, to work with him into the small hours of the morning.

Strauss and Schlegel were bosom friends. They were both Silesians, and had known each other from boyhood. Their affection had become proverbial in the University. Strauss was almost as distinguished a student as Schlegel, and there had been many a tough struggle for academic honors between the two fellow-countrymen, which had only served to strengthen their friendship by a bond of mutual respect. Schlegel admired the dogged pluck and never-failing good temper of his old playmate; while the latter considered Schlegel, with his many talents and brilliant versatility, the most accomplished of mortals.

The friends were still working together, the one reading from a volume on anatomy, the other holding a skull and marking off the various parts mentioned in the text, when the deep-toned bell of St. Gregory’s church struck the hour of midnight.

“Hark to that!” said Schlegel, snapping up the book and stretching out his long legs toward the cheery fire. “Why, it’s Christmas morning, old friend! May it not be the last that we spend together!”

“May we have passed all these confounded examinations[Pg 86] before another one comes!” answered Strauss. “But see here, Otto, one bottle of wine will not be amiss. I have laid one up on purpose;” and with a smile on his honest South German face, he pulled out a long-necked bottle of Rhenish from among a pile of books and bones in the corner.

“It is a night to be comfortable indoors,” said Otto von Schlegel, looking out at the snowy landscape, “for ’tis bleak and bitter enough outside. Good health, Leopold!”

“Lebe hoch!” replied his companion. “It is a comfort, indeed, to forget sphenoid bones and ethmoid bones, if it be but for a moment. And what is the news of the corps, Otto? Has Graube fought the Swabian?”

“They fight to-morrow,” said Von Schlegel. “I fear that our man will lose his beauty, for he is short in the arm. Yet activity and skill may do much for him. They say his hanging guard is perfection.”

“They talk, I believe, of nothing but the murders. But I have worked hard of late, as you know, and hear little of the gossip.”

“Have you had time,” inquired Strauss, “to look over the books and the weapons which our dear old Professor was so concerned about the very day he met his death? They say they are well worth a visit.”

“I saw them to-day,” said Schlegel, lighting his pipe. “Reinmaul, the janitor, showed me over the store-room, and I helped to label many of them from the original catalogue of Graf Schulling’s museum. As far as we can see, there is but one article missing of all the collection.”

“One missing!” exclaimed Strauss. “That would grieve old Von Hopstein’s ghost. Is it anything of value?”

“It is described as an antique hatchet, with a head of steel and a handle of chased silver. We have applied to the railway company, and no doubt it will be found.”

“I trust so,” echoed Strauss; and the conversation drifted off into other channels. The fire was burning low and the bottle of Rhenish was empty before the two friends rose from their chairs and Von Schlegel prepared to depart.

“Ugh! It’s a bitter night!” he said, standing on the doorstep and folding his cloak round him. “Why, Leopold, you have your cap on. You are not going out, are you?”

“Yes, I am coming with you,” said Strauss, shutting the door behind him. “I feel heavy,” he continued, taking his friend’s arm, and walking down the street with him. “I think a walk as far as your lodgings, in the crisp frosty air, is just the thing to set me right.”

The two students went down Stephen Strasse together and across Julien Platz, talking on a variety of topics. As they passed the corner of the Grand Platz, however, where Schiffer had been found dead, the conversation turned naturally upon the murder.

“That’s where they found him,” remarked Von Schlegel, pointing to the fatal spot.

“Perhaps the murderer is near us now,” said Strauss. “Let us hasten on.”

They both turned to go, when Von Schlegel gave a sudden cry of pain and stooped down.

“Something has cut through my boot!” he cried; and feeling about with his hand in the snow, he pulled out a small glistening battle-axe, made apparently[Pg 88] entirely of metal. It had been lying with the blade turned slightly upward, so as to cut the foot of the student when he trod upon it.

There could be no doubt that it was both the one and the other. There could not be two such curious weapons, and the character of the wounds was just such as would be inflicted by a similar instrument. The murderer had evidently thrown it aside after committing the dreadful deed, and it had lain concealed in the snow some twenty metres from the spot ever since. It was extraordinary that of all the people who had passed and repassed none had discovered it; but the snow was deep, and it was a little off the beaten track.

“What are we to do with it?” said Von Schlegel, holding it in his hand. He shuddered as he noticed by the light of the moon that the head of it was all dabbled with dark-brown stains.

“He’ll be in bed now. Still, I think you are right. But it is nearly four o’clock. I will wait until morning, and take it round before breakfast. Meanwhile, I must carry it with me to my lodgings.”

“That is the best plan,” said his friend; and the two walked on together talking of the remarkable find which they had made. When they came to Schlegel’s door, Strauss said good-by, refusing an invitation to go in, and walked briskly down the street in the direction of his own lodgings.

Schlegel was stooping down putting the key into the lock, when a strange change came over him. He trembled violently, and dropped the key from his[Pg 89] quivering fingers. His right hand closed convulsively round the handle of the silver hatchet, and his eye followed the retreating figure of his friend with a vindictive glare. In spite of the coldness of the night the perspiration streamed down his face. For a moment he seemed to struggle with himself, holding his hand up to his throat as if he were suffocating. Then, with crouching body and rapid, noiseless steps, he crept after his late companion.

Strauss was plodding sturdily along through the snow, humming snatches of a student song, and little dreaming of the dark figure which pursued him. At the Grand Platz it was forty yards behind him; at the Julien Platz it was but twenty; in Stephen Strasse it was ten, and gaining on him with panther-like rapidity. Already it was almost within arm’s length of the unsuspecting man, and the hatchet glittered coldly in the moonlight, when some slight noise must have reached Strauss’s ears, for he faced suddenly round upon his pursuer. He started and uttered an exclamation as his eye met the white set face, with flashing eyes and clenched teeth, which seemed to be suspended in the air behind him.

“What, Otto!” he exclaimed, recognising his friend. “Art thou ill? You look pale. Come with me to my—— Ah! hold, you madman, hold! Drop that axe! Drop it, I say, or by heaven I’ll choke you!”

Von Schlegel had thrown himself upon him with a wild cry and uplifted weapon; but the student was stout-hearted and resolute. He rushed inside the sweep of the hatchet and caught his assailant round the waist, narrowly escaping a blow which would have cloven his head. The two staggered for a moment in a deadly wrestle, Schlegel endeavoring[Pg 90] to shorten his weapon; but Strauss with a desperate wrench managed to bring him to the ground, and they rolled together in the snow, Strauss clinging to the other’s right arm and shouting frantically for assistance. It was as well that he did so, for Schlegel would certainly have succeeded in freeing his arm had it not been for the arrival of two stalwart gendarmes, attracted by the uproar. Even then the three of them found it difficult to overcome the maniacal strength of Schlegel, and they were utterly unable to wrench the silver hatchet from his grasp. One of the gendarmes, however, had a coil of rope round his waist, with which he rapidly secured the student’s arms to his sides. In this way, half pushed, half dragged, he was conveyed, in spite of furious cries and frenzied struggles, to the central police station.

Strauss assisted in coercing his former friend, and accompanied the police to the station; protesting loudly at the same time against any unnecessary violence, and giving it as his opinion that a lunatic asylum would be a more fitting place for the prisoner. The events of the last half-hour had been so sudden and inexplicable that he felt quite dazed himself. What did it all mean? It was certain that his old friend from boyhood had attempted to murder him, and had nearly succeeded. Was Von Schlegel, then, the murderer of Professor von Hopstein and of the Bohemian Jew? Strauss felt that it was impossible, for the Jew was not even known to him, and the Professor had been his especial favorite. He followed mechanically to the police station, lost in grief and amazement.

Inspector Baumgarten, one of the most energetic and best known of the police officials, was on duty[Pg 91] in the absence of the Commissary. He was a wiry little active man, quiet and retiring in his habits, but possessed of great sagacity and a vigilance which never relaxed. Now, though he had had a six hours’ vigil, he sat as erect as ever, with his pen behind his ear, at his official desk, while his friend, Sub-inspector Winkel, snored in a chair at the side of the stove. Even the inspector’s usually immovable features betrayed surprise, however, when the door was flung open and Von Schlegel was dragged in with pale face and disordered clothes, the silver hatchet still grasped firmly in his hand. Still more surprised was he when Strauss and the gendarmes gave their account, which was duly entered in the official register.

“Young man, young man,” said Inspector Baumgarten, laying down his pen and fixing his eyes sternly upon the prisoner, “this is pretty work for Christmas morning; why have you done this thing?”

“God knows!” cried Von Schlegel, covering his face with his hands and dropping the hatchet. A change had come over him; his fury and excitement were gone, and he seemed utterly prostrated with grief.

“You have rendered yourself liable to a strong suspicion of having committed the other murders which have disgraced our city.”

“The dearest friend I have in the world,” groaned the student. “Oh, how could I! How could I!”

“His being your friend makes your crime ten times more heinous,” said the inspector, severely.[Pg 92] “Remove him for the remainder of the night to the—— But steady! Who comes here?”

The door was pushed open and a man came into the room, so haggard and careworn that he looked more like a ghost than a human being. He tottered as he walked, and had to clutch at the backs of the chairs as he approached the inspector’s desk. It was hard to recognize in this miserable looking object the once cheerful and rubicund sub-Curator of the Museum and Privat-docent of Chemistry, Herr Wilhelm Schlessinger. The practised eye of Baumgarten, however, was not to be baffled by any change.

“Good morning, mein herr,” he said; “you are up early. No doubt the reason is that you have heard that one of your students, Von Schlegel, is arrested for attempting the life of Leopold Strauss?”

“No; I have come for myself,” said Schlessinger, speaking huskily, and putting his hand up to his throat. “I have come to ease my soul of the weight of a great sin, though, God knows, an unmeditated one. It was I who—— But, merciful heavens! there it is—the horrid thing! Oh, that I had never seen it!”

He shrank back in a paroxysm of terror, glaring at the silver hatchet where it lay upon the floor, and pointing at it with his emaciated hand.

“There it lies!” he yelled. “Look at it! It has come to condemn me. See that brown rust on it! Do you know what that is? That is the blood of my dearest, best friend, Professor von Hopstein. I saw it gush over the very handle as I drove the blade through his brain. Mein Gott, I see it now!”

“Sub-inspector Winkel,” said Baumgarten, endeavoring to preserve his official austerity, “you will arrest this man, charged on his own confession[Pg 93] with the murder of the late Professor. I also deliver into your hands Von Schlegel here, charged with a murderous assault upon Herr Strauss. You will also keep this hatchet”—here he picked it from the floor—“which has apparently been used for both crimes.”

Wilhelm Schlessinger had been leaning against the table, with a face of ashy paleness. As the inspector ceased speaking, he looked up excitedly.

“What did you say?” he cried. “Von Schlegel attack Strauss!—the two dearest friends in the college! I slay my old master! It is magic, I say; it is a charm! There is a spell upon us! It is—Ah, I have it! It is that hatchet—that thrice accursed hatchet!” and he pointed convulsively at the weapon which Inspector Baumgarten still held in his hand.

“Restrain yourself, mein herr,” he said. “You do but make your case worse by such wild excuses for the wicked deed you confess to. Magic and charms are not known in the legal vocabulary, as my friend Winkel will assure you.”

“I know not,” remarked his sub-inspector, shrugging his broad shoulders. “There are many strange things in the world. Who knows but that——”

“What!” roared Inspector Baumgarten, furiously. “You would undertake to contradict me! You would set up your opinion! You would be the champion of these accursed murderers! Fool, miserable fool, your hour has come!” and rushing at the astounded Winkel, he dealt a blow at him with the silver hatchet which would certainly have justified his last assertion had it not been that, in his fury, he overlooked the lowness of the rafters above his head. The blade of the hatchet struck one of these, and remained[Pg 94] there quivering, while the handle was splintered into a thousand pieces.

“What have I done?” gasped Baumgarten, falling back into his chair. “What have I done?”

“You have proved Herr Schlessinger’s words to be correct,” said Von Schlegel, stepping forward, for the astonished policemen had let go their grasp of him. “That is what you have done. Against reason, science, and everything else though it be, there is a charm at work. There must be! Strauss, old boy, you know I would not, in my right senses, hurt one hair of your head. And you, Schlessinger, we both know you loved the old man who is dead. And you, Inspector Baumgarten, you would not willingly have struck your friend the sub-inspector?”

“Not for the whole world,” groaned the inspector, covering his face with his hands.

“Then is it not clear? But now, thank Heaven, the accursed thing is broken, and can never do harm again. But see, what is that?”

Right in the centre of the room was lying a thin brown cylinder of parchment. One glance at the fragments of the handle of the weapon showed that it had been hollow. This roll of paper had apparently been hidden away inside the metal case thus formed, having been introduced through a small hole, which had been afterward soldered up. Von Schlegel opened the document. The writing upon it was almost illegible from age; but as far as they could make out it stood thus, in mediæval German:

“Diese Waffe benutzte Max von Erlichingen um Joanna Bodeck zu ermorden, deshalb beschuldige Ich, Johann Bodeck, mittelst der macht welche mir als mitglied des Concils des rothen Kreuzes verliehen wurde, dieselbe mit dieser unthat. Mag sie anderen denselben schmerz verursachen den sie mir[Pg 95] verursacht hat. Mag Jede hand die sie ergreift mit dem blut eines freundes geröthet sein.

“This weapon was used by Max von Erlichingen for the murder of Joanna Bodeck. Therefore do I, Johann Bodeck, accurse it by the power which has been bequeathed to me as one of the Council of the Rosy Cross. May it deal to others the grief which it has dealt to me! May every hand that grasps it be reddened in the blood of a friend!

There was a dead silence in the room when Von Schlegel had finished spelling out this strange document. As he put it down Strauss laid his hand affectionately upon his arm.

“No such proof is needed by me, old friend,” he said. “At the very moment that you struck at me I forgave you in my heart. I well know that if the poor Professor were in the room he would say as much to Herr Wilhelm Schlessinger.”

“Gentlemen,” remarked the inspector, standing up and resuming his official tones, “this affair, strange as it is, must be treated according to rule and precedent. Sub-inspector Winkel, as your superior officer, I command you to arrest me upon a charge of murderously assaulting you. You will commit me to prison for the night, together with Herr von Schlegel and Herr Wilhelm Schlessinger. We shall take our trial at the coming sitting of the judges.[Pg 96] In the meantime take care of that piece of evidence”—pointing to the piece of parchment—“and while I am away devote your time and energy to utilizing the clew you have obtained in discovering who it was who slew Herr Schiffer, the Bohemian Jew.”

The one missing link in the chain of evidence was soon supplied. On December 28th the wife of Reinmaul the janitor, coming into the bedroom after a short absence, found her husband hanging lifeless from a hook in the wall. He had tied a long bolster-case round his neck and stood upon a chair in order to commit the fatal deed. On the table was a note in which he confessed to the murder of Schiffer, the Jew, adding that the deceased had been his oldest friend, and that he had slain him without premeditation, in obedience to some incontrollable impulse. Remorse and grief, he said, had driven him to self-destruction; and he wound up his confession by commending his soul to the mercy of Heaven.

The trial which ensued was one of the strangest which ever occurred in the whole history of jurisprudence. It was in vain that the prosecuting council urged the improbability of the explanation offered by the prisoners, and deprecated the introduction of such an element as magic into a nineteenth-century law-court. The chain of facts was too strong, and the prisoners were unanimously acquitted. “This silver hatchet,” remarked the judge in his summing up “has hung untouched upon the wall in the mansion of the Graf von Schulling for nearly two hundred years. The shocking manner in which he met his death at the hands of his favorite house-steward is still fresh in your recollection. It has come out in evidence that, a few days before the murder, the steward had overhauled[Pg 97] the old weapons and cleaned them. In doing this he must have touched the handle of this hatchet. Immediately afterward he slew his master, whom he had served faithfully for twenty years. The weapon then came, in conformity with the Count’s will, to Buda Pesth, where, at the station, Herr Wilhelm Schlessinger grasped it, and, within two hours, used it against the person of the deceased Professor. The next man whom we find touching it is the janitor Reinmaul, who helped to remove the weapons from the cart to the store-room. At the first opportunity he buried it in the body of his friend Schiffer. We then have the attempted murder of Strauss by Schlegel, and of Winkel by Inspector Baumgarten, all immediately following the taking of the hatchet into the hand. Lastly comes the providential discovery of the extraordinary document which has been read to you by the clerk of the court. I invite your most careful consideration, gentlemen of the jury, to this chain of facts, knowing that you will find a verdict according to your consciences without fear and without favor.”

Perhaps the most interesting piece of evidence to the English reader, though it found few supporters among the Hungarian audience, was that of Dr. Langemann, the eminent medico-jurist, who has written text-books upon metallurgy and toxicology. He said:

“I am not so sure, gentlemen, that there is need to fall back upon necromancy or the black art for an explanation of what has occurred. What I say is merely a hypothesis, without proof of any sort, but in a case so extraordinary every suggestion may be of value. The Rosicrucians, to whom allusion is made in this paper, were the most profound chemists of the early Middle Ages, and included the principal[Pg 98] alchemists whose names have descended to us. Much as chemistry has advanced, there are some points in which the ancients were ahead of us, and in none more so than in the manufacture of poisons of subtle and deadly action. This man Bodeck, as one of the elders of the Rosicrucians, possessed, no doubt, the recipe of many such mixtures, some of which, like the aqua tofana of the Medicis, would poison by penetrating through the pores of the skin. It is conceivable that the handle of this silver hatchet has been anointed by some preparation which is a diffusible poison, having the effect upon the human body of bringing on sudden and acute attacks of homicidal mania. In such attacks it is well known that the madman’s rage is turned against those whom he loved best when sane. I have, as I remarked before, no proof to support me in my theory, and simply put it forward for what it is worth.”

With this extract from the speech of the learned and ingenious professor, we may close the account of this famous trial.

The broken pieces of the silver hatchet were thrown into a deep pond, a clever poodle being employed to carry them in his mouth, as no one would touch them for fear some of the infection might still hang about them. The piece of parchment was preserved in the museum of the University. As to Strauss and Schlegel, Winkel and Baumgarten, they continued the best of friends, and are so still for all I know to the contrary. Schlessinger became surgeon of a cavalry regiment, and was shot at the battle of Sadowa five years later, while rescuing the wounded under a heavy fire. By his last injunctions his little patrimony was to be sold to erect a marble obelisk over the grave of Professor von Hopstein.

On the fourth day of March, in the year 1867, I being at that time in my five-and-twentieth year, I wrote the following words in my note-book, the result of much mental perturbation and conflict:

“The solar system, amid a countless number of other systems as large as itself, rolls ever silently through space in the direction of the constellation of Hercules. The great spheres of which it is composed spin and spin through the eternal void ceaselessly and noiselessly. Of these one of the smallest and most insignificant is that conglomeration of solid and of liquid particles which we have named the earth. It whirls onward now as it has done before my birth, and will do after my death—a revolving mystery, coming none know whence, and going none know whither. Upon the outer crust of this moving mass crawl many mites, of whom I, John McVittie, am one, helpless, impotent, being dragged aimlessly through space. Yet such is the state of things among us that the little energy and glimmering of reason which I possess is entirely taken up with the labors which are necessary in order to procure certain metallic disks, wherewith I may purchase the chemical elements necessary to build up my ever-wasting tissues, and keep a roof over me to shelter me from the inclemency of the weather. I thus have no thought to expend upon the vital questions which surround me on every side. Yet, miserable entity as I am, I can still at times feel[Pg 100] some degree of happiness, and am even—save the mark!—puffed up occasionally with a sense of my own importance.”

These words, as I have said, I wrote down in my note-book, and they reflected accurately the thoughts which I found rooted far down in my soul, ever present and unaffected by the passing emotions of the hour. Every day for seven months I read over my words, and every day when I had finished them I said to myself, “Well done, John McVittie; you have said the thought which was in you. You have reduced things to their least common measure!” At last came a time when my uncle, McVittie of Glencairn, died—the same who was at one time chairman of committees of the House of Commons. He divided his great wealth among his many nephews, and I found myself with sufficient to provide amply for my wants during the remainder of my life, and became at the same time owner of a bleak tract of land upon the coast of Caithness, which I think the old man must have bestowed upon me in derision, for it was sandy and valueless, and he had ever a grim sense of humor. Up to this time I had been an attorney in a midland town in England. Now I saw that I could put my thoughts into effect, and, leaving all petty and sordid aims, could elevate my mind by the study of the secrets of nature. My departure from my English home was somewhat accelerated by the fact that I had nearly slain a man in a quarrel, for my temper was fiery, and I was apt to forget my own strength when enraged. There was no legal action taken in the matter, but the papers yelped at me, and folk looked askance when I met them. It ended by my cursing them and their vile, smoke-polluted town, and hurrying to my northern possession, where I might[Pg 101] at last find peace and an opportunity for solitary study and contemplation. I borrowed from my capital before I went, and so was able to take with me a choice collection of the most modern philosophical instruments and books, together with chemicals and such other things as I might need in my retirement.

The land which I had inherited was a narrow strip, consisting mostly of sand, and extending for rather over two miles round the coast of Mansie Bay, in Caithness. Upon this strip there had been a rambling, gray-stone building—when erected or wherefore none could tell me—and this I had repaired, so that it made a dwelling quite good enough for one of my simple tastes. One room was my laboratory, another my sitting-room, and in a third, just under the sloping roof, I slung the hammock in which I always slept. There were three other rooms, but I left them vacant, except one which was given over to the old crone who kept house for me. Save the Youngs and the McLeods, who were fisher-folk living round at the other side of Fergus Ness, there were no other people for many miles in each direction. In front of the house was the great bay, behind it were two long barren hills, capped by other loftier ones beyond. There was a glen between the hills, and when the wind was from the land it used to sweep down this with a melancholy sough and whisper among the branches of the fir-trees beneath my attic window.

I dislike my fellow-mortals. Justice compels me to add that they appear for the most part to dislike me. I hate their little crawling ways, their conventionalities, their deceits, their narrow rights and wrongs. They take offence at my brusque outspokenness, my disregard for their social laws,[Pg 102] my impatience of all constraint. Among my books and my drugs in my lonely den at Mansie I could let the great drove of the human race pass onward with their politics and inventions and tittle-tattle, and I remained behind stagnant and happy. Not stagnant either, for I was working in my own little groove, and making progress. I have reason to believe that Dalton’s atomic theory is founded upon error, and I know that mercury is not an element.

During the day I was busy with my distillations and analyses. Often I forgot my meals, and when old Madge summoned me to my tea I found my dinner lying untouched upon the table. At night I read Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant—all those who have pried into what is unknowable. They are all fruitless and empty, barren of result, but prodigal of polysyllables, reminding me of men who while digging for gold have turned up many worms, and then exhibit them exultantly as being what they sought. At times a restless spirit would come upon me, and I would walk thirty and forty miles without rest or breaking fast. On these occasions, when I used to stalk through the country villages, gaunt, unshaven, and dishevelled, the mothers would rush into the road and drag their children indoors, and the rustics would swarm out of their pot-houses to gaze at me. I believe that I was known far and wide as the “mad laird o’ Mansie.” It was rarely, however, that I made these raids into the country, for I usually took my exercise upon my own beach, where I soothed my spirit with strong black tobacco, and made the ocean my friend and my confidant.

What companion is there like the great, restless, throbbing sea? What human mood is there which it does not match and sympathize with? There are[Pg 103] none so gay but that they may feel gayer when they listen to its merry turmoil, and see the long green surges racing in, with the glint of the sunbeams in their sparkling crests. But when the gray waves toss their heads in anger, and the wind screams above them, goading them on to madder and more tumultuous efforts, then the darkest-minded of men feels that there is a melancholy principle in Nature which is as gloomy as his own thoughts. When it was calm in the Bay of Mansie the surface would be as clear and bright as a sheet of silver, broken only at one spot, some little way from the shore, where a long black line projected out of the water, looking like the jagged back of some sleeping monster. This was the top of the dangerous ridge of rocks known to the fishermen as the “ragged reef o’ Mansie.” When the wind blew from the east the waves would break upon it like thunder, and the spray would be tossed far over my house and up to the hills behind. The bay itself was a bold and noble one, but too much exposed to the northern and eastern gales, and too much dreaded for its reef, to be much used by mariners. There was something of romance about this lonely spot. I have lain in my boat upon a calm day, and, peering over the edge, I have seen far down the flickering, ghostly forms of great fish—fish, as it seemed to me, such as naturalists never knew, and which my imagination transformed into the genii of that desolate bay. Once, as I stood by the brink of the waters upon a quiet night, a great cry, as of a woman in hopeless grief, rose from the bosom of the deep and swelled out upon the still air, now sinking and now rising, for a space of thirty seconds. This I heard with my own ears.

In this strange spot, with the eternal hills behind[Pg 104] me and the eternal sea in front, I worked and brooded for more than two years unpestered by my fellow-men. By degrees I had trained my old servant into habits of silence, so that she now rarely opened her lips, though I doubt not that when twice a year she visited her relations in Wick her tongue during those few days made up for its enforced rest. I had come almost to forget that I was a member of the human family, and to live entirely with the dead, whose books I pored over, when a sudden incident occurred which threw all my thoughts into a new channel.

Three rough days in June had been succeeded by one calm and peaceful one. There was not a breath of air that evening. The sun sank down in the west behind a line of purple clouds, and the smooth surface of the bay was gashed with scarlet streaks. Along the beach the pools left by the tide showed up like gouts of blood against the yellow sand, as if some wounded giant had toilfully passed that way and had left these red traces of his grievous hurt behind him. As the darkness closed in, certain ragged clouds which had lain low on the eastern horizon coalesced and formed a great, irregular cumulus. The glass was still low, and I knew that there was mischief brewing. About nine o’clock a dull, moaning sound came up from the sea, as from a creature who, much harassed, learns that the hour of suffering has come round again. At ten a sharp breeze sprang up from the eastward. At eleven it had increased to a gale, and by midnight the most furious storm was raging which I ever remember upon that weather-beaten coast.

As I went to bed the shingle and sea-weed was pattering up against my attic-window, and the wind was screaming as though every gust were a lost soul.[Pg 105] By that time the sounds of the tempest had become a lullaby to me. I knew that the gray walls of the old house would buffet it out, and for what occurred in the world outside I had small concern. Old Madge was usually as callous to such things as I was myself. It was a surprise to me when, about three in the morning, I was awoke by the sound of a great knocking at my door and excited cries in the wheezy voice of my housekeeper. I sprang out of my hammock and roughly demanded of her what was the matter.

“Eh, maister, maister!” she screamed in her hateful dialect. “Come doun, mun; come doun! There’s a muckle ship gaun ashore on the reef, and the puir folks are a’ yammerin’ and ca’in’ for help—and I doobt they’ll a’ be drooned. Oh, Maister McVittie, come doun!”

“Hold your tongue, you hag!” I shouted back in a passion. “What is it to you whether they are drowned or not? Get back to your bed and leave me alone.” I turned in again, and drew the blankets over me. “Those men out there,” I said to myself, “have already gone through half the horrors of death. If they be saved they will but have to go through the same once more in the space of a few brief years. It is best, therefore, that they should pass away now, since they have suffered that anticipation which is more than the pain of dissolution.” With this thought in my mind I endeavored to compose myself to sleep once more, for that philosophy which had taught me to consider death as a small and trivial incident in man’s eternal and ever-changing career, had also broken me of much curiosity concerning worldly matters. On this occasion I found, however, that the old leaven still fermented strongly in my soul. I tossed from side to side for[Pg 106] some minutes endeavoring to beat down the impulses of the moment by the rules of conduct which I had framed during months of thought. Then I heard a dull roar amid the wild shriek of the gale, and I knew that it was the sound of a signal-gun. Driven by an uncontrollable impulse, I rose, dressed, and, having lit my pipe, walked out on to the beach.

It was pitch dark when I came outside, and the wind blew with such violence that I had to put my shoulder against it and push my way along the shingle. My face pringled and smarted with the sting of the gravel which was blown against it, and the red ashes of my pipe streamed away behind me dancing fantastically through the darkness. I went down to where the great waves were thundering in, and, shading my eyes with my hand to keep off the salt spray, I peered out to sea. I could distinguish nothing, and yet it seemed to me that shouts and great inarticulate cries were borne to me by the blasts. Suddenly as I gazed I made out the glint of a light, and then the whole bay and the beach were lit up in a moment by a vivid blue glare. They were burning a colored signal-light on board of the vessel. There she lay on her beam-ends right in the centre of the jagged reef, heeled over to such an angle that I could see all the planking of her deck. She was a large two-masted schooner, of foreign rig, and lay perhaps a hundred and eighty or two hundred yards from the shore. Every spar and rope and writhing piece of cordage showed up hard and clear under the livid light which sputtered and flickered from the highest portion of the forecastle. Beyond the doomed ship out of the great darkness came the long rolling lines of black waves, never ending, never tiring, with a petulant tuft of foam here and there upon their crests. Each as it reached the[Pg 107] broad circle of unnatural light appeared to gather strength and volume, and to hurry on more impetuously until, with a roar and a jarring crash, it sprang upon its victim. Clinging to the weather shrouds I could distinctly see some ten or twelve frightened seamen, who, when their light revealed my presence, turned their white faces toward me and waved their hands imploringly. I felt my gorge rise against these poor cowering worms. Why should they presume to shirk the narrow pathway along which all that is great and noble among mankind has travelled? There was one there who interested me more than they. He was a tall man who stood apart from the others, balancing himself upon the swaying wreck as though he disdained to cling to rope or bulwark. His hands were clasped behind his back and his head was sunk upon his breast; but even in that despondent attitude there was a litheness and decision in his pose and in every motion which marked him as a man little likely to yield to despair. Indeed, I could see by his occasional rapid glances up and down and all around him that he was weighing every chance of safety; but though he often gazed across the raging surf to where he could see my dark figure upon the beach, his self-respect, or some other reason, forbade him from imploring my help in any way. He stood, dark, silent, and inscrutable, looking down on the black sea, and waiting for whatever fortune Fate might send him.

It seemed to me that that problem would very soon be settled. As I looked, an enormous billow, topping all the others, and coming after them, like a driver following a flock, swept over the vessel. Her foremast snapped short off, and the men who clung to the shrouds were brushed away like a swarm of flies. With a rending, riving sound the[Pg 108] ship began to split in two, where the sharp back of the Mansie reef was sawing into her keel. The solitary man upon the forecastle ran rapidly across the deck and seized hold of a white bundle which I had already observed, but failed to make out. As he lifted it up the light fell upon it, and I saw that the object was a woman, with a spar lashed across her body and under her arms in such a way that her head should always rise above water. He bore her tenderly to the side and seemed to speak for a minute or so to her, as though explaining the impossibility of remaining upon the ship. Her answer was a singular one. I saw her deliberately raise her hand and strike him across the face with it. He appeared to be silenced for a moment or so by this; but he addressed her again, directing her, as far as I could gather from his motions, how she should behave when in the water. She shrank away from him, but he caught her in his arms. He stooped over her for a moment and seemed to press his lips against her forehead. Then a great wave came welling up against the side of the breaking vessel, and, leaning over, he placed her upon the summit of it as gently as a child might be committed to its cradle. I saw her white dress flickering among the foam on the crest of the dark billow, and then the light sank gradually lower, and the riven ship and its lonely occupant were hidden from my eyes.

As I watched those things my manhood overcame my philosophy, and I felt a frantic impulse to be up and doing. I threw my cynicism to one side as a garment which I might don again at leisure, and I rushed wildly to my boat and my sculls. She was a leaky tub, but what then? Was I, who had cast many a wistful, doubtful glance at my opium bottle, to[Pg 109] begin now to weigh chances and to cavil at danger? I dragged her down to the sea with the strength of a maniac, and sprang in. For a moment or two it was a question whether she could live among the boiling surge, but a dozen frantic strokes took me through it, half-full of water but still afloat. I was out on the unbroken waves now, at one time climbing, climbing up the broad black breast of one, then sinking down, down on the other side, until looking up I could see the gleam of the foam all around me against the dark heavens. Far behind me I could hear the wild wailings of old Madge, who, seeing me start, thought no doubt that my madness had come to a climax. As I rowed I peered over my shoulder, until at last on the belly of a great wave which was sweeping toward me I distinguished the vague white outline of the woman. Stooping over I seized her as she swept by me, and with an effort lifted her, all sodden with water, into the boat. There was no need to row back, for the next billow carried us in and threw us upon the beach. I dragged the boat out of danger, and then lifting up the woman I carried her to the house, followed by my housekeeper, loud with congratulation and praise.

Now that I had done this thing a reaction set in upon me. I felt that my burden lived, for I heard the faint beat of her heart as I pressed my ear against her side in carrying her. Knowing this, I threw her down beside the fire which Madge had lit, with as little sympathy as though she had been a bundle of faggots. I never glanced at her to see if she were fair or no. For many years I had cared little for the face of a woman. As I lay in my hammock upstairs, however, I heard the old woman, as she chafed the warmth back into her, crooning a chorus of “Eh, the puir lassie! Eh, the bonnie[Pg 110] lassie!” from which I gathered that this piece of jetsam was both young and comely.

The morning after the gale was peaceful and sunny. As I walked along the long sweep of sand I could hear the panting of the sea. It was heaving and swirling about the reef, but along the shore it rippled in gently enough. There was no sign of the schooner, nor was there any wreckage upon the beach, which did not surprise me, as I knew there was a great undertow in those waters. A couple of broad-winged gulls were hovering and skimming over the scene of the shipwreck, as though many strange things were visible to them beneath the waves. At times I could hear their raucous voices as they spoke to one another of what they saw.

When I came back from my walk the woman was waiting at the door for me. I began to wish when I saw her that I had never saved her, for here was an end of my privacy. She was very young—at the most nineteen, with a pale, somewhat refined face, yellow hair, merry blue eyes, and shining teeth. Her beauty was of an ethereal type. She looked so white and light and fragile that she might have been the spirit of that storm-foam from out of which I plucked her. She had wreathed some of Madge’s garments round her in a way which was quaint and not unbecoming. As I strode heavily up the pathway she put out her hands with a pretty childlike gesture, and ran down toward me, meaning, as I surmise, to thank me for having saved her; but I put her aside with a wave of my hand and passed her. At this she seemed somewhat hurt, and the tears sprang into her eyes; but she followed me into the sitting-room and watched me wistfully. “What country do you come from?” I asked her, suddenly.

“Français?” I asked. “Deutsch?” “Espagnol?”—each time she shook her head, and then she rippled off into a long statement in some tongue of which I could not understand one word.

After breakfast was over, however, I got a clew to her nationality. Passing along the beach once more, I saw that in a cleft of the ridge a piece of wood had been jammed. I rowed out to it in my boat and brought it ashore. It was part of the sternpost of a boat, and on it, or rather on the piece of wood attached to it, was the word “Archangel,” painted in strange, quaint lettering. “So,” I thought, as I paddled slowly back, “this pale damsel is a Russian. A fit subject for the White Czar, and a proper dweller on the shores of the White Sea!” It seemed to me strange that one of her apparent refinement should perform so long a journey in so frail a craft. When I came back into the house I pronounced the word “Archangel” several times in different intonations, but she did not appear to recognize it.

I shut myself up in the laboratory all the morning, continuing a research which I was making upon the nature of the allotropic forms of carbon and of sulphur. When I came out at mid-day for some food, she was sitting by the table with a needle and thread mending some rents in her clothes, which were now dry. I resented her continued presence, but I could not turn her out on the beach to shift for herself. Presently she presented a new phase of her character. Pointing to herself and then to the scene of the shipwreck, she held up one finger, by which I understood her to be asking whether she was the only one saved. I nodded my head to indicate that she was. On this she sprang out of the chair, with a cry of great joy, and holding the[Pg 112] garment which she was mending over her head, and swaying it from side to side with the motion of her body, she danced as lightly as a feather all round the room, and then out through the open door into the sunshine. As she whirled round she sang in a plaintive, shrill voice some uncouth, barbarous chant, expressive of exultation. I called out to her, “Come in, you young fiend; come in, and be silent!” but she went on with her dance. Then she suddenly ran toward me, and catching my hand before I could pluck it away, she kissed it. While we were at dinner she spied one of my pencils, and taking it up she wrote the two words “Sophie Ramusine” upon a piece of paper, and then pointed to herself as a sign that that was her name. She handed the pencil to me, evidently expecting that I would be equally communicative, but I put it in my pocket as a sign that I wished to hold no intercourse with her.

Every moment of my life now I regretted the unguarded precipitancy with which I had saved this woman. What was it to me whether she had lived or died? I was no young hot-headed youth to do such things. It was bad enough to be compelled to have Madge in the house, but she was old and ugly, and could be ignored. This one was young and lively, and so fashioned as to divert attention from graver things. Where could I send her, and what could I do with her? If I sent information to Wick it would mean that officials and others would come to me, and pry and peep and chatter—a hateful thought. It was better to endure her presence than that.

I soon found that there were fresh troubles in store for me. There is no place safe from the swarming, restless race of which I am a member. In the evening, when the sun was dipping down behind[Pg 113] the hills, casting them into dark shadow, but gilding the sands and casting a great glory over the sea, I went, as is my custom, for a stroll along the beach. Sometimes on these occasions I took my book with me. I did so on this night, and stretching myself upon a sand-dune I composed myself to read. As I lay there I suddenly became aware of a shadow which interposed itself between the sun and myself. Looking round, I saw, to my great surprise, a very tall, powerful man, who was standing a few yards off, and who, instead of looking at me, was ignoring my existence completely, and was gazing over my head with a stern set face at the bay and the black line of the Mansie reef. His complexion was dark, with black hair and short curling beard, a hawk-like nose, and golden earrings in his ears—the general effect being wild and somewhat noble. He wore a faded velveteen jacket, a red flannel shirt, and high sea-boots, coming half-way up his thighs. I recognized him at a glance as being the same man who had been left on the wreck the night before.

“Hullo!” I said, in an aggrieved voice. “You got ashore all right, then?”

“Yes,” he answered, in good English. “It was no doing of mine. The waves threw me up. I wish to God I had been allowed to drown!” There was a slight foreign lisp in his accent which was rather pleasing. “Two good fishermen, who live round yonder point, pulled me out and cared for me—yet I could not honestly thank them for it.”

“Ho! ho!” thought I, “here is a man of my own kidney.” “Why do you wish to be drowned?” I asked.

“Because,” he cried, throwing out his long arms with a passionate, despairing gesture, “there—there[Pg 114] in that blue smiling bay lies my soul, my treasure—everything that I loved and lived for.”

“Well, well,” I said. “People are ruined every day, but there’s no use making a fuss about it. Let me inform you that this ground on which you walk is my ground, and that the sooner you take yourself off it the better pleased I shall be. One of you is quite trouble enough.”

He gazed at me for a moment as if hardly able to realize what I said, and then, with a wild cry, he ran away from me with prodigious speed and raced along the sands toward my house. Never before or since have I seen a human being run so fast. I followed as rapidly as I could, furious at this threatened invasion, but long before I reached the house he had disappeared through the open door. I heard a great scream from the inside, and, as I came nearer, the sound of the man’s bass voice speaking rapidly and loudly. When I looked in, the girl Sophie Ramusine was crouching in a corner, cowering away, with fear and loathing expressed on her averted face and in every line of her shrinking form. The other, with his dark eyes flashing, and his outstretched hands quivering with emotion, was pouring forth a torrent of passionate, pleading words. He made a step forward to her as I entered, but she writhed still further away, and uttered a sharp cry like that of a rabbit when the weasel has him by the throat.

“Here!” I said, pulling him back from her. “This is a pretty to-do! What do you mean? Do you think this is a wayside inn or place of public accommodation?”

“Oh, sir,” he said, “excuse me. This woman is my wife, and I feared that she was drowned. You have brought me back to life.”

“Ourganeff!—and hers is Sophie Ramusine. She is no wife of yours. She has no ring.”

“We are man and wife in the sight of Heaven,” he said, solemnly, looking upward. “We are bound by higher laws than those of earth.” As he spoke the girl slipped behind me and caught me by the other hand, pressing it as though beseeching my protection. “Give me up my wife, sir,” he went on. “Let me take her away from here.”

“Look here, you—whatever your name is,” I said, sternly, “I don’t want this wench here. I wish I had never seen her. If she died it would be no grief to me. But as to handing her over to you, when it is clear she fears and hates you, I won’t do it. So now just clear your great body out of this, and leave me to my books. I hope I may never look upon your face again.”

All my tigerish blood flushed up in a moment. I picked up a billet of wood from beside the fireplace. “Go,” I said, in a low voice; “go quick, or I may do you an injury.” He looked at me irresolutely for a moment, and then he left the house. He came back again in a moment, however, and stood in the doorway looking in at us.

“Have a heed what you do,” he said. “The woman is mine, and I shall have her. When it comes to blows, a Russian is as good a man as a Scotchman.”

“We shall see that,” I cried, springing forward, but he was already gone, and I could see his tall form moving away through the gathering darkness.

For a month or more after this things went smoothly with us. I never spoke to the Russian girl, nor did she ever address me. Sometimes when I was at work at my laboratory she would slip inside the door and sit silently there watching me with her great eyes. At first this intrusion annoyed me, but by degrees, finding that she made no attempt to distract my attention, I suffered her to remain. Encouraged by this concession, she gradually came to move the stool on which she sat nearer and nearer to my table, until, after gaining a little every day during some weeks, she at last worked her way right up to me, and used to perch herself beside me whenever I worked. In this position she used, still without ever obtruding her presence in any way, to make herself very useful by holding my pens, test-tubes, bottles, etc., and handing me whatever I wanted with never-failing sagacity. By ignoring the fact of her being a human being, and looking upon her as a useful automatic machine, I accustomed myself to her presence so far as to miss her on the few occasions when she was not at her post. I have a habit of talking aloud to myself at times when I work, so as to fix my results better in my mind. The girl must have had a surprising memory for sounds, for she could always repeat the words which I let fall in this way, without, of course, understanding in the least what they meant. I have often been amused at hearing her discharge a volley of chemical equations[Pg 117] and algebraic symbols at old Madge, and then burst into a ringing laugh when the crone would shake her head, under the impression, no doubt, that she was being addressed in Russian.

She never went more than a few yards from the house, and indeed never put her foot over the threshold without looking carefully out of each window in order to be sure that there was nobody about. By this I knew that she suspected that her fellow-countryman was still in the neighborhood, and feared that he might attempt to carry her off. She did something else which was significant. I had an old revolver, with some cartridges, which had been thrown away among the rubbish. She found this one day, and at once proceeded to clean it and oil it. She hung it up near the door, with the cartridges in a little bag beside it, and whenever I went for a walk she would take it down and insist upon my carrying it with me. In my absence she would always bolt the door. Apart from her apprehensions she seemed fairly happy, busying herself in helping Madge when she was not attending upon me. She was wonderfully nimble-fingered and natty in all domestic duties.

It was not long before I discovered that her suspicions were well founded, and that this man from Archangel was still lurking in the vicinity. Being restless one night, I rose and peered out of the window. The weather was somewhat cloudy, and I could barely make out the line of the sea and the loom of my boat upon the beach. As I gazed, however, and my eyes became accustomed to the obscurity, I became aware that there was some other dark blur upon the sands, and that in front of my very door, where certainly there had been nothing of the sort the preceding night. As I stood at my diamond-paned[Pg 118] lattice still peering and peeping to make out what this might be, a great bank of clouds rolled slowly away from the face of the moon, and a flood of cold, clear light was poured down upon the silent bay and the long sweep of its desolate shores. Then I saw what this was which haunted my doorstep. It was he, the Russian. He squatted there like a gigantic toad, with his legs doubled under him in strange Mongolian fashion, and his eyes fixed apparently upon the window of the room in which the young girl and the housekeeper slept. The light fell upon his upturned face, and I saw once more the hawk-like grace of his countenance, with the single deeply-indented line of care upon his brow, and the protruding beard which marks the passionate nature. My first impulse was to shoot him as a trespasser, but as I gazed my resentment changed into pity and contempt. “Poor fool!” I said to myself, “is it then possible that you, whom I have seen looking open-eyed at present death, should have your whole thoughts and ambition centred upon this wretched slip of a girl—a girl, too, who flies from you and hates you! Most women would love you—were it but for that dark face and great handsome body of yours—and yet you must needs hanker after the one in a thousand who will have no traffic with you.” As I returned to my bed I chuckled much to myself over this thought. I knew that my bars were strong and my bolts thick. It mattered little to me whether this strange man spent his night at my door or a hundred leagues off, so long as he was gone by the morning. As I expected, when I rose and went out there was no sign of him, nor had he left any trace of his midnight vigil.

It was not long, however, before I saw him again.[Pg 119] I had been out for a row one morning, for my head was aching, partly from prolonged stooping and partly from the effects of a noxious drug which I had inhaled the night before. I pulled along the coast some miles, and then, feeling thirsty, I landed at a place where I knew that a fresh-water stream trickled down into the sea. This rivulet passed through my land, but the mouth of it, where I found myself that day, was beyond my boundary line. I felt somewhat taken aback when, rising from the stream at which I had slaked my thirst, I found myself face to face with the Russian. I was as much a trespasser now as he was, and I could see at a glance that he knew it.

“Hurry up, then!” I answered, glancing at my watch. “I have no time to listen to chatter.”

“Chatter!” he repeated angrily. “Ah, but there! you Scotch people are strange men. Your face is hard and your words rough, but so are those of the good fishermen with whom I stay, yet I find that beneath it all there lies kind, honest natures. No doubt you are kind and good too, in spite of your roughness.”

“In the name of the devil,” I said, “say your say and go your way. I am weary of the sight of you.”

“Can I not soften you in any way?” he cried. “Ah, see—see here!” He produced a small Grecian cross from inside his velvet jacket. “Look at this. Our religions may differ in form, but at least we have some common thoughts and feelings when we see this emblem.”

“You are a very strange man,” he said at last. “I cannot understand you. You still stand between me and Sophie. It is a dangerous position to take, sir. Oh, believe me, before it is too late. If you did but know what I have done to gain that woman—how I have risked my body, how I have lost my soul. You are a small obstacle to some which I have surmounted—you, whom a rip with a knife or a blow from a stone, would put out of my way forever. But God preserve me from that,” he cried, wildly. “I am deep—too deep—already. Anything rather than that.”

“You would do better to go back to your country,” I said, “than to skulk about these sandhills and disturb my leisure. When I have proof that you have gone away, I shall hand this woman over to the protection of the Russian Consul at Edinburgh. Until then, I shall guard her myself, and not you, nor any Muscovite that ever breathed shall take her from me.”

“And what is your object in keeping me from Sophie?” he asked. “Do you imagine that I would injure her? Why, man, I would give my life freely to save her from the slightest harm. Why do you do this thing?”

“I do it because it is my good pleasure to act so,” I answered. “I give no man reasons for my conduct.”

“Look here!” he cried, suddenly blazing into fury, and advancing toward me with his shaggy mane bristling and his brown hands clenched. “If I thought you had one dishonest thought toward this girl—if for a moment I had reason to believe that you had any base motive for detaining her—as sure as there is a God in heaven I should drag the heart out of your bosom with my hands.” The[Pg 121] very idea seemed to have put the man in a frenzy, for his face was all distorted and his hands opened and shut convulsively. I thought that he was about to spring at my throat.

“Stand off!” I said, putting my hand on my pistol. “If you lay a finger on me I shall kill you.”

He put his hand into his pocket, and for a moment I thought that he was about to produce a weapon, too, but instead of that he whipped out a cigarette and lit it, breathing the smoke rapidly into his lungs. No doubt he had found by experience that this was the most effectual way of curbing his passions.

“I told you,” he said, in a quieter voice, “that my name is Ourganeff—Alexis Ourganeff. I am a Finn by birth, but I have spent my life in every part of the world. I was one who could never be still nor settle down to a quiet existence. After I came to own my own ship, there is hardly a port from Archangel to Australia which I have not entered. I was rough and wild and free, but there was one at home, sir, who was prim and white-handed and soft-tongued, skilful in little fancies and conceits which women love. This youth, by his wiles and tricks stole from me the love of the girl whom I had ever marked as my own, and who up to that time had seemed in some sort inclined to return my passion. I had been on a voyage to Hammerfest for ivory, and coming back unexpectedly I learned that my pride and treasure was to be married to this soft-skinned boy, and that the party had actually gone to the church. In such moments, sir, something gives way in my head, and I hardly know what I do. I landed with a boat’s crew—all men who had sailed with me for years, and who were as true as steel. We went up to the church. They were[Pg 122] standing, she and he, before the priest, but the thing had not been done. I dashed between them and caught her round the waist. My men beat back the frightened bridegroom and the lookers-on. We bore her down to the boat and aboard our vessel, and then, getting up anchor, we sailed away across the White Sea until the spires of Archangel sank down behind the horizon. She had my cabin, my room, every comfort. I slept among the men in the forecastle. I hoped that in time her aversion to me would wear away, and that she would consent to marry me in England or in France. For days and days we sailed. We saw the North Cape die away behind us, and we skirted the gray Norwegian coast, but still, in spite of every attention, she would not forgive me for tearing her from that pale-faced lover of hers. Then came this cursed storm which shattered both my ship and my hopes, and has deprived me even of the sight of the woman for whom I have risked so much. Perhaps she may learn to love me yet. You, sir,” he said, wistfully, “look like one who has seen much of the world. Do you not think that she may come to forget this man and to love me?”

“I am tired of your story,” I said, turning away. “For my part, I think you are a great fool. If you imagine that this love of yours will pass away, you had best amuse yourself as best you can until it does. If, on the other hand, it is a fixed thing, you cannot do better than cut your throat, for that is the shortest way out of it. I have no more time to waste on the matter.”

With this I hurried away and walked down to the boat. I never looked round, but I heard the dull sound of his feet upon the sands as he followed me.

“I have told you the beginning of my story,” he[Pg 123] said, “and you shall know the end some day. You would do well to let the girl go.”

I never answered him, but pushed the boat off. When I had rowed some distance out I looked back and saw his tall figure upon the yellow sand as he stood gazing thoughtfully after me. When I looked again, some minutes later, he had disappeared.

For a long time after this my life was as regular and as monotonous as it had been before the shipwreck. At times I hoped that the man from Archangel had gone away altogether, but certain footsteps which I saw upon the sand, and more particularly a little pile of cigarette ash which I found one day behind a hillock from which a view of the house might be obtained, warned me that, though invisible, he was still in the vicinity. My relations with the Russian girl remained the same as before. Old Madge had been somewhat jealous of her presence at first, and seemed to fear that what little authority she had would be taken away from her. By degrees, however, as she came to realize my utter indifference, she became reconciled to the situation, and, as I have said before, profited by it, as our visitor performed much of the domestic work.

And now I am coming near the end of this narrative of mine, which I have written a great deal more for my own amusement than for that of anyone else. The termination of the strange episode in which these two Russians had played a part was as wild and as sudden as the commencement. The events of one single night freed me from all my troubles, and left me once more alone with my books and my studies, as I had been before their intrusion. Let me endeavor to describe how this came about.

I had had a long day of heavy and wearying work, so that in the evening I determined upon taking[Pg 124] a long walk. When I emerged from the house my attention was attracted by the appearance of the sea. It lay like a sheet of glass, so that never a ripple disturbed its surface. Yet the air was filled with that indescribable moaning sound which I have alluded to before—a sound as though the spirits of all those who lay beneath those treacherous waters were sending a sad warning of coming troubles to their brethren in the flesh. The fishermen’s wives along that coast know the eerie sound, and look anxiously across the waters for the brown sails making for the land. When I heard it I stepped back into the house and looked at the glass. It was down below 29°. Then I knew that a wild night was coming upon us.

Underneath the hills where I walked that evening it was dull and chill, but their summits were rosy-red and the sea was brightened by the sinking sun. There were no clouds of importance in the sky, yet the dull groaning of the sea grew louder and stronger. I saw, far to the eastward, a brig beating up for Wick, with a reef in her topsails. It was evident that her captain had read the signs of nature as I had done. Behind her a long, lurid haze lay low upon the water, concealing the horizon. “I had better push on,” I thought to myself, “or the wind may rise before I get back.”

I suppose I must have been at least half a mile from the house when I suddenly stopped and listened breathlessly. My ears were so accustomed to the noises of nature, the sighing of the breeze and the sob of the waves, that any other sound made itself heard at a great distance. I waited, listening with all my ears. Yes, there it was again—a long-drawn, shrill cry of despair ringing over the sands and echoed back from the hills behind me—a piteous[Pg 125] appeal for aid. It came from the direction of my house. I turned and ran back homeward at the top of my speed, ploughing through the sand, racing over the shingle. In my mind there was a great dim perception of what had occurred.

About a quarter of a mile from the house there is a high sandhill, from which the whole country round is visible. When I reached the top of this I paused for a moment. There was the old gray building—there the boat. Everything seemed to be as I had left it. Even as I gazed, however, the shrill scream was repeated, louder than before, and the next moment a tall figure emerged from my door—the figure of the Russian sailor. Over his shoulder was the white form of the young girl, and even in his haste he seemed to bear her tenderly and with gentle reverence. I could hear her wild cries and see her desperate struggles to break away from him. Behind the couple came my old housekeeper, stanch and true—as the aged dog, who can no longer bite, still snarls with toothless gums at the intruder. She staggered feebly along at the heels of the ravisher, waving her long, thin arms, and hurling, no doubt, volleys of Scotch curses and imprecations at his head. I saw at a glance that he was making for the boat. A sudden hope sprang up in my soul that I might be in time to intercept him. I ran for the beach at the top of my speed. As I ran I slipped a cartridge into my revolver. This I determined should be the last of these invasions.

I was too late. By the time I reached the water’s edge he was a hundred yards away, making the boat spring with every stroke of his powerful arms. I uttered a wild cry of impotent anger, and stamped up and down the sands like a maniac. He turned[Pg 126] and saw me. Rising from his seat he made me a graceful bow, and waved his hand to me. It was not a triumphant or a derisive gesture. Even my furious and distempered mind recognized it as being a solemn and courteous leave-taking. Then he settled down to his oars once more, and the little skiff shot away out over the bay. The sun had gone down now, leaving a single dull, red streak upon the water, which stretched away until it blended with the purple haze on the horizon. Gradually the skiff grew smaller and smaller as it sped across this lurid band, until the shades of night gathered round it and it became a mere blur upon the lonely sea. Then this vague loom died away also, and darkness settled over it—a darkness which should never more be raised.

And why did I pace the solitary shore, hot and wrathful as a wolf whose whelp has been torn from it? Was it that I loved this Muscovite girl? No—a thousand times no. I am not one who, for the sake of a white skin or a blue eye, would belie my own life, and change the whole tenor of my thoughts and existence. My heart was untouched. But my pride—ah, there I had been cruelly wounded. To think that I had been unable to afford protection to the helpless one who craved it of me, and who relied on me! It was that which made my heart sick and sent the blood buzzing through my ears.

That night a great wind rose up from the sea, and the wild waves shrieked upon the shore as though they would tear it back with them into the ocean. The turmoil and the uproar were congenial to my vexed spirit. All night I wandered up and down, wet with spray and rain, watching the gleam of the white breakers, and listening to the outcry of the storm. My heart was bitter against the Russian. I[Pg 127] joined my feeble pipe to the screaming of the gale. “If he would but come back again!” I cried, with clenched hands; “if he would but come back!”

He came back. When the gray light of morning spread over the eastern sky and lit up the great waste of yellow, tossing waters, with the brown clouds drifting swiftly over them, then I saw him once again. A few hundred yards off along the sand there lay a long dark object, cast up by the fury of the waves. It was my boat, much shattered and splintered. A little farther on a vague, shapeless something was washing to and fro in the shallow water, all mixed with shingle and with sea-weed. I saw at a glance that it was the Russian, face downward and dead. I rushed into the water and dragged him up on to the beach. It was only when I turned him over that I discovered that she was beneath him, his dead arms encircling her, his mangled body still intervening between her and the fury of the storm. It seemed that the fierce German Sea might beat the life from him, but with all its strength it was unable to tear this one-idea’d man from the woman whom he loved. There were signs which led me to believe that during that awful night the woman’s fickle mind had come at last to learn the worth of the true heart and strong arm which struggled for her and guarded her so tenderly. Why else should her little head be nestling so lovingly on his broad breast, while her yellow hair entwined itself with his flowing beard? Why, too, should there be that bright smile of ineffable happiness and triumph, which death itself had not had power to banish from his dusky face? I fancy that death had been brighter to him than life had ever been.

Madge and I buried them there on the shores of[Pg 128] the desolate northern sea. They lie in one grave deep down beneath the yellow sand. Strange things may happen in the world around them. Empires may rise and may fall, dynasties may perish, great wars may come and go, but, heedless of it all, those two shall embrace each other forever and aye in their lonely shrine by the side of the sounding ocean. I sometimes have thought that their spirits flit like shadowy sea-mews over the wild waters of the bay. No cross or symbol marks their resting-place, but old Madge puts wild flowers upon it at times; and when I pass on my daily walk and see the fresh blossoms scattered over the sand, I think of the strange couple who came from afar and broke for a little space the dull tenor of my sombre life.

It was nine o’clock on a Wednesday morning. The good ship Spartan was lying off Boston Quay with her cargo under hatches, her passengers shipped, and everything prepared for a start. The warning whistle had been sounded twice, the final bell had been rung. Her bowsprit was turned toward England, and the hiss of escaping steam showed that all was ready for her run of three thousand miles. She strained at the warps that held her like a greyhound at its leash.

I have the misfortune to be a very nervous man. A sedentary literary life has helped to increase the morbid love of solitude which, even in my boyhood, was one of my distinguishing characteristics. As I stood upon the quarter-deck of the Transatlantic steamer, I bitterly cursed the necessity which drove me back to the land of my forefathers. The shouts of the sailors, the rattle of the cordage, the farewells of my fellow-passengers, and the cheers of the mob, each and all jarred upon my sensitive nature. I felt sad, too. An indescribable feeling, as of some impending calamity, seemed to haunt me. The sea was calm and the breeze light. There was nothing to disturb the equanimity of the most confirmed of landsmen, yet I felt as if I stood upon the verge of[Pg 130] a great though indefinable danger. I have noticed that such presentiments occur often in men of my peculiar temperament, and that they are not uncommonly fulfilled. There is a theory that it arises from a species of second-sight—a subtle spiritual communication with the future. I well remember that Herr Raumer, the eminent spiritualist, remarked on one occasion that I was the most sensitive subject as regards supernatural phenomena that he had ever encountered in the whole of his wide experience. Be that as it may, I certainly felt far from happy as I threaded my way among the weeping, cheering groups which dotted the white decks of the good ship Spartan. Had I known the experience which awaited me in the course of the next twelve hours, I would even then, at the last moment, have sprung upon the shore, and made my escape from the accursed vessel.

“Time’s up!” said the captain, closing his chronometer with a snap, and replacing it in his pocket.

“Time’s up!” said the mate. There was a last wail from the whistle, a rush of friends and relatives upon the land. One warp was loosened, the gangway was being pushed away, when there was a shout from the bridge, and two men appeared running rapidly down the quay. They were waving their hands and making frantic gestures, apparently with the intention of stopping the ship. “Look sharp!” shouted the crowd. “Hold hard!” cried the captain. “Ease her! stop her! Up with the gangway!” and the two men sprang aboard just as the second warp parted, and a convulsive throb of the engine shot us clear of the shore. There was a cheer from the deck, another from the quay, a mighty fluttering of handkerchiefs, and the great vessel ploughed its way out of the harbor,[Pg 131] and steamed grandly away across the placid bay.

We were fairly started upon our fortnight’s voyage. There was a general dive among the passengers in quest of berths and luggage, while a popping of corks in the saloon proved that more than one bereaved traveller was adopting artificial means for drowning the pangs of separation. I glanced round the deck and took a running inventory of my compagnons de voyage. They presented the usual types met with upon these occasions. There was no striking face among them. I speak as a connoisseur, for faces are a specialty of mine. I pounce upon a characteristic feature as a botanist does on a flower, and bear it away with me to analyze at my leisure, and classify and label it in my little anthropological museum. There was nothing worthy of me here. Twenty types of young America going to “Yurrup,” a few respectable middle-aged couples as an antidote, a sprinkling of clergymen and professional men, young ladies, bagmen, British exclusives, and all the olla podrida of an ocean-going steamer. I turned away from them and gazed back at the receding shores of America, and, as a cloud of remembrances rose before me, my heart warmed toward the land of my adoption. A pile of portmanteaus and luggage chanced to be lying on one side of the deck, awaiting their turn to be taken below. With my usual love for solitude I walked behind these, and sitting on a coil of rope between them and the vessel’s side, I indulged in a melancholy reverie.

I was aroused from this by a whisper behind me. “Here’s a quiet place,” said the voice. “Sit down, and we can talk it over in safety.”

Glancing through a chink between two colossal[Pg 132] chests, I saw that the passengers who had joined us at the last moment were standing at the other side of the pile. They had evidently failed to see me as I crouched in the shadow of the boxes. The one who had spoken was a tall and very thin man with a blue-black beard and a colorless face. His manner was nervous and excited. His companion was a short, plethoric little fellow, with a brisk and resolute air. He had a cigar in his mouth, and a large ulster slung over his left arm. They both glanced round uneasily, as if to ascertain whether they were alone. “This is just the place,” I heard the other say. They sat down on a bale of goods with their backs turned toward me, and I found myself, much against my will, playing the unpleasant part of eavesdropper to their conversation.

“Well, Muller,” said the taller of the two, “we’ve got it aboard right enough.”

“Yes,” assented the man whom he had addressed as Muller; “it’s safe aboard.”

“Ruined them entirely,” said the little man, and puffed furiously at his cigar for some minutes.

“We can’t be too careful where so much is at stake,” said Muller, as he uncoiled the ulster which hung over his arm, and disclosed a dark object which he laid upon the deck. One glance at it was enough to cause me to spring to my feet with an exclamation of horror. Luckily they were so engrossed[Pg 133] in the matter on hand that neither of them observed me. Had they turned their heads they would infallibly have seen my pale face glaring at them over the pile of boxes.

From the first moment of their conversation a horrible misgiving had come over me. It seemed more than confirmed as I gazed at what lay before me. It was a little square box made of some dark wood, and ribbed with brass. I suppose it was about the size of a cubic foot. It reminded me of a pistol-case, only it was decidedly higher. There was an appendage to it, however, on which my eyes were riveted, and which suggested the pistol itself rather than its receptacle. This was a trigger-like arrangement upon the lid, to which a coil of string was attached. Beside this trigger there was a small square aperture through the wood. The tall man, Flannigan, as his companion called him, applied his eye to this and peered in for several minutes with an expression of intense anxiety upon his face.

“Such delicate things heed delicate treatment. Put in some of the needful, Muller.”

The shorter man fumbled in his pocket for some time, and then produced a small paper packet. He opened this, and took out of it half a handful of whitish granules, which he poured down through the hole. A curious clicking noise followed from the inside of the box, and both the men smiled in a satisfied way.

“Look out! here’s some one coming. Take it down to our berth. It wouldn’t do to have any one suspecting what our game is, or, worse still, have[Pg 134] them fumbling with it, and letting it off by mistake.”

“They’d be rather astonished if they pulled the trigger,” said the taller, with a sinister laugh. “Ha, ha! fancy their faces! It’s not a bad bit of workmanship, I flatter myself.”

“No,” said Muller. “I hear it is your own design, every bit of it, isn’t it?”

And the two men laughed again with a cold, harsh laugh, as they took up the little brass-bound package and concealed it in Muller’s voluminous overcoat.

“Come down, and we’ll stow it in our berth,” said Flannigan. “We won’t need it until to-night, and it will be safe there.”

His companion assented, and the two went arm-in-arm along the deck and disappeared down the hatchway, bearing the mysterious little box away with them. The last words I heard were a muttered injunction from Flannigan to carry it carefully, and avoid knocking it against the bulwarks.

How long I remained sitting on that coil of rope, I shall never know. The horror of the conversation I had just overheard was aggravated by the first sinking qualms of sea-sickness. The long roll of the Atlantic was beginning to assert itself over both ship and passengers. I felt prostrated in mind and in body, and fell into a state of collapse, from which I was finally aroused by the hearty voice of our worthy quartermaster.

“Do you mind moving out of that, sir?” he said. “We want to get this lumber cleared off the deck.”

His bluff manner and ruddy, healthy face seemed to be a positive insult to me in my present condition. Had I been a courageous or a muscular man I could have struck him. As it was, I treated the honest sailor to a melodramatic scowl, which seemed to cause him no small astonishment, and strode past him to the other side of the deck. Solitude was what I wanted—solitude in which I could brood over the frightful crime which was being hatched before my very eyes. One of the quarter-boats was hanging rather low down upon the davits. An idea struck me, and, climbing on the bulwarks, I stepped into the empty boat and lay down in the bottom of it. Stretched on my back, with nothing but the blue sky above me, and an occasional view of the mizzen as the vessel rolled, I was at least alone with my sickness and my thoughts.

I tried to recall the words which had been spoken in the terrible dialogue I had overheard. Would they admit of any construction but the one which stared me in the face? My reason forced me to confess that they would not. I endeavored to array the various facts which formed the chain of circumstantial evidence, and to find a flaw in it; but no, not a link was missing. There was the strange way in which our passengers had come aboard, enabling them to evade any examination of their luggage. The very name of “Flannigan” smacked of Fenianism, while “Muller” suggested nothing but Socialism and murder. Then their mysterious manner; their remark that their plans would have been ruined had they missed the ship; their fear of being observed; last, but not least, the clenching evidence in the production of the little square box with the trigger, and their grim joke about the face of the man who should let it off by mistake—could these facts[Pg 136] lead to any conclusion other than that they were the desperate emissaries of some body, political or otherwise, and intended to sacrifice themselves, their fellow-passengers, and the ship, in one great holocaust? The whitish granules which I had seen one of them pour into the box formed no doubt a fuse or train for exploding it. I had myself heard a sound come from it which might have emanated from some delicate piece of machinery. But what did they mean by their allusion to to-night? Could it be that they contemplated putting their horrible design into execution on the very first evening of our voyage? The mere thought of it sent a cold shudder over me, and made me for a moment superior even to the agonies of sea-sickness.

I have remarked that I am a physical coward. I am a moral one also. It is seldom that the two defects are united to such a degree in the one character. I have known many men who were most sensitive to bodily danger, and yet were distinguished for the independence and strength of their minds. In my own case, however, I regret to say that my quiet and retiring habits had fostered a nervous dread of doing anything remarkable, or making myself conspicuous, which exceeded, if possible, my fear of personal peril. An ordinary mortal placed under the circumstances in which I now found myself would have gone at once to the captain, confessed his fears, and put the matter into his hands. To me, however, constituted as I am, the idea was most repugnant. The thought of becoming the observed of all observers, cross-questioned by a stranger, and confronted with two desperate conspirators in the character of a denouncer, was hateful to me. Might it not by some remote possibility prove that I was mistaken? What would be my[Pg 137] feelings if there should turn out to be no grounds for my accusation? No, I would procrastinate; I would keep my eye on the two desperadoes and dog them at every turn. Anything was better than the possibility of being wrong.

Then it struck me that even at that moment some new phase of the conspiracy might be developing itself. The nervous excitement seemed to have driven away my incipient attack of sickness, for I was able to stand up and lower myself from the boat without experiencing any return of it. I staggered along the deck with the intention of descending into the cabin and finding how my acquaintances of the morning were occupying themselves. Just as I had my hand on the companion-rail, I was astonished by receiving a hearty slap on the back, which nearly shot me down the steps with more haste than dignity.

“God bless me,” I said as I turned round, “it can’t be Dick Merton! Why, how are you, old man?”

This was an unexpected piece of luck in the midst of my perplexities. Dick was just the man I wanted; kindly and shrewd in his nature, and prompt in his actions, I should have no difficulty in telling him my suspicions, and could rely upon his sound sense to point out the best course to pursue. Since I was a little lad in the second form at Harrow, Dick had been my adviser and protector. He saw at a glance that something had gone wrong with me.

“Hullo!” he said, in his kindly way, “what’s put you about, Hammond? You look as white as a sheet. Mal de mer, eh?”

“No, not that altogether,” said I. “Walk up and[Pg 138] down with me, Dick; I want to speak to you. Give me your arm.”

Supporting myself on Dick’s stalwart frame, I tottered along by his side; but it was some time before I could muster resolution to speak.

“That’s no reason against your having a cigar now,” said Dick, in his cool way, but looking hard at me from under his shaggy eyebrows as he spoke. He evidently thought my intellect was a little gone.

“No,” I continued; “it’s no laughing matter, and I speak in sober earnest, I assure you. I have discovered an infamous conspiracy, Dick, to destroy this ship and every soul that is in her;” and I then proceeded systematically, and in order, to lay before him the chain of evidence which I had collected. “There, Dick,” I said, as I concluded, “what do you think of that? and, above all, what am I to do?”

“I’d be frightened,” he said, “if any fellow but you had told me as much. You always had a way, Hammond, of discovering mares’ nests. I like to see the old traits breaking out again. Do you remember at school how you swore there was a ghost in the long room, and how it turned out to be your own reflection in the mirror? Why, man,” he continued, “what object would any one have in destroying this ship? We have no great political guns aboard. On the contrary, the majority of the passengers are Americans. Besides, in this sober nineteenth century, the most wholesale murderers stop at including themselves among their victims. Depend upon it, you have misunderstood them, and[Pg 139] have mistaken a photographic camera, or something equally innocent, for an infernal machine.”

“Nothing of the sort, sir,” said I, rather touchily. “You will learn to your cost, I fear, that I have neither exaggerated nor misinterpreted a word. As to the box, I have certainly never before seen one like it. It contained delicate machinery; of that I am convinced, from the way in which the men handled it and spoke of it.”

“You’d make out every packet of perishable goods to be a torpedo,” said Dick, “if that is to be your only test.”

“I don’t think that would go very far in a court of law,” said Dick; “but come, I have finished my cigar. Suppose we go down together and split a bottle of claret. You can point out these two Orsinis to me if they are still in the cabin.”

“All right,” I answered; “I am determined not to lose sight of them all day. Don’t look hard at them, though; for I don’t want them to think that they are being watched.”

“Trust me,” said Dick; “I’ll look as unconscious and guileless as a lamb;” and with that we passed down the companion and into the saloon.

A good many passengers were scattered about the great central table, some wrestling with refractory carpet-bags and rug-straps, some having their luncheon, and a few reading and otherwise amusing themselves. The objects of our quest were not there. We passed down the room and peered into every berth; but there was no sign of them. “Heavens!” thought I, “perhaps at this very moment they are beneath our feet, in the hold or engine-room, preparing their diabolical contrivance!” It was better to know the worst than remain in such suspense.

The smoking-room was a little snuggery, luxuriously fitted up, and adjoining the pantry. We pushed the door open and entered. A sigh of relief escaped from my bosom. The very first object on which my eye rested was the cadaverous face of Flannigan, with his hard-set mouth and unwinking eye. His companion sat opposite to him. They were both drinking, and a pile of cards lay upon the table. They were engaged in playing as we entered. I nudged Dick to show him that we had found our quarry, and we sat down beside them with as unconcerned an air as possible. The two conspirators seemed to take little notice of our presence. I watched them both narrowly. The game at which they were playing was “Napoleon.” Both were adepts at it; and I could not help admiring the consummate nerve of men who, with such a secret at their hearts, could devote their minds to the manipulating of a long suit or the finessing of a queen. Money changed hands rapidly; but the run of luck seemed to be all against the taller of the two players. At last he threw down his cards on the table with an oath and refused to go on.

“No, I’m hanged if I do!” he said; “I haven’t had more than two of a suit for five hands.”

“Never mind,” said his comrade, as he gathered up his winnings; “a few dollars one way or the other won’t go very far after to-night’s work.”

I was astonished at the rascal’s audacity, but took care to keep my eyes fixed abstractedly upon the ceiling, and drank my wine in as unconscious a manner as possible. I felt that Flannigan was looking[Pg 141] toward me with his wolfish eyes to see if I had noticed the allusion. He whispered something to his companion which I failed to catch. It was a caution, I suppose, for the other answered, rather angrily:

“Nonsense! Why shouldn’t I say what I like? Over-caution is just what would ruin us.”

“You believe nothing of the sort,” said the other, speaking rapidly and loudly. “You know as well as I do that when I play for a stake I like to win it. But I won’t have my words criticised and cut short by you or any other man; I have as much interest in our success as you have—more, I hope.”

He was quite hot about it, and puffed furiously at his cigar for a few minutes. The eyes of the other ruffian wandered alternately from Dick Merton to myself. I knew that I was in the presence of a desperate man, that a quiver of my lip might be the signal for him to plunge a weapon into my heart; but I betrayed more self-command than I should have given myself credit for under such trying circumstances. As to Dick, he was as immovable and apparently as unconscious as the Egyptian Sphinx.

There was silence for some time in the smoking-room, broken only by the crisp rattle of the cards as the man Muller shuffled them up before replacing them in his pocket. He still seemed to be somewhat flushed and irritable. Throwing the end of his cigar into the spittoon, he glanced defiantly at his companion, and turned toward me.

“Can you tell me, sir,” he said, “when this ship will be heard of again?”

They were both looking at me; but though my face may have turned a trifle paler, my voice was as steady as ever as I answered:

“I presume, sir, that it will be heard of first when it enters Queenstown Harbor.”

“Ha, ha!” laughed the angry little man; “I knew you would say that. Don’t you kick me under the table, Flannigan; I won’t stand it. I know what I am doing. You are wrong, sir,” he continued, turning to me; “utterly wrong.”

“The weather is fine,” I said; “why should we not be heard of at our destination?”

“I didn’t say we shouldn’t be heard of at our destination. No doubt we shall in the course of time; but that is not where we shall be heard of first.”

“That you will never know. Suffice it that a rapid and mysterious agency will signal our whereabouts, and that before the day is out. Ha, ha!” and he chuckled once again.

“Come on deck!” growled his comrade; “you have drunk too much of that confounded brandy-and-water. It has loosened your tongue. Come away!” and taking him by the arm he half led him, half forced him out of the smoking-room, and we heard them stumbling up the companion together, and on to the deck.

“Well, what do you think now?” I gasped, as I turned toward Dick. He was as imperturbable as ever.

“Think!” he said; “why, I think what his companion thinks—that we have been listening to the ravings of a half-drunken man. The fellow stunk of brandy.”

“Of course he did. He didn’t want his friend to[Pg 143] make a fool of himself before strangers. May be the short one is a lunatic, and the other his private keeper. It’s quite possible.”

“Oh, Dick, Dick,” I cried; “how can you be so blind? Don’t you see that every word confirmed our previous suspicion?”

“Humbug, man!” said Dick; “you’re working yourself into a state of nervous excitement. Why, what the devil do you make of all that nonsense about a mysterious agent who would signal our whereabouts?”

“I’ll tell you what he meant, Dick,” I said, bending forward and grasping my friend’s arm. “He meant a sudden glare and a flash seen far out at sea by some lonely fisherman off the American coast. That’s what he meant.”

“I didn’t think you were such a fool, Hammond,” said Dick Merton, testily. “If you try to fix a literal meaning on the twaddle that every drunken man talks, you will come to some queer conclusions. Let us follow their example, and go on deck. You need fresh air, I think. Depend upon it, your liver is out of order. A sea-voyage will do you a world of good.”

“If ever I see the end of this one,” I groaned, “I’ll promise never to venture on another. They are laying the cloth, so it’s hardly worth while my going up. I’ll stay below and finish my smoke.”

“I hope dinner will find you in a more pleasant state of mind,” said Dick; and he went out, leaving me to my thoughts until the clang of the great gong summoned us to the saloon.

My appetite, I need hardly say, had not been improved by the incidents which had occurred during the day. I sat down, however, mechanically at the table, and listened to the talk which was going on[Pg 144] around me. There were nearly a hundred first-class passengers, and as the wine began to circulate, their voices combined with the clash of the dishes to form a perfect Babel. I found myself seated between a very stout and nervous old lady and a prim little clergyman; and as neither made any advances, I retired into my shell, and spent my time in observing the appearance of my fellow-voyagers. I could see Dick in the dim distance dividing his attentions between a jointless fowl in front of him and a self-possessed young lady at his side. Captain Dowie was doing the honors at my end, while the surgeon of the vessel was seated at the other. I was glad to notice that Flannigan was placed almost opposite to me. As long as I had him before my eyes I knew that, for the time at least, we were safe. He was sitting with what was meant to be a sociable smile on his grim face. It did not escape me that he drank largely of wine—so largely that even before the dessert appeared his voice had become decidedly husky. His friend Muller was seated a few places lower down. He ate little, and appeared to be nervous and restless.

“Now, ladies,” said our genial captain, “I trust that you will consider yourselves at home aboard my vessel. I have no fears for the gentlemen. A bottle of champagne, steward. Here’s to a fresh breeze and a quick passage! I trust our friends in America will hear of our safe arrival in twelve days, or a fortnight at the very latest.”

I looked up. Quick as was the glance which passed between Flannigan and his confederate, I was able to intercept it. There was an evil smile upon the former’s thin lips.

The conversation rippled on. Politics, the sea, amusements, religion, each was in turn discussed.[Pg 145] I remained a silent though an interested listener. It struck me that no harm could be done by introducing the subject which was ever in my mind. It could be managed in an off-hand way, and would at least have the effect of turning the captain’s thoughts in that direction. I could watch, too, what effect it would have upon the faces of the conspirators.

There was a sudden lull in the conversation. The ordinary subjects of interest appeared to be exhausted. The opportunity was a favorable one.

“May I ask, captain,” I said, bending forward and speaking very distinctly, “what you think of Fenian manifestoes?”

“They are poor cowardly things,” he said, “as silly as they are wicked.”

“The impotent threats of a set of anonymous scoundrels,” said a pompous-looking old gentleman beside him.

“Oh, captain!” said the fat lady at my side, “you don’t really think they would blow up a ship?”

“I have no doubt they would if they could. But I am very sure they will never blow up mine.”

“May I ask what precautions are taken against them?” said an elderly man at the end of the table.

During this conversation Flannigan had not betrayed the slightest interest in what was going on. He raised his head now, and looked at the captain.

“Don’t you think you are rather underrating them?” he said. “Every secret society has produced desperate men—why shouldn’t the Fenians have them too? Many men think it a privilege to die in the service of a cause which seems right in their eyes though others may think it wrong.”

“Indiscriminate murder cannot be right in anybody’s eyes,” said the little clergyman.

“The bombardment of Paris was nothing else,” said Flannigan; “yet the whole civilized world agreed to look on with folded arms, and change the ugly word ’murder’ into the more euphonious one of ’war.’ It seemed right enough to German eyes; why shouldn’t dynamite seem so to the Fenian?”

“At any rate their empty vaporings have led to nothing as yet,” said the captain.

“Excuse me,” returned Flannigan, “but is there not some room for doubt yet as to the fate of the Dotterel? I have met men in America who asserted from their own personal knowledge that there was a coal torpedo aboard that vessel.”

“Then they lied,” said the captain. “It was proved conclusively at the court-martial to have arisen from an explosion of coal-gas—but we had better change the subject, or we may cause the ladies to have a restless night;” and the conversation once more drifted back into its original channel.

During this little discussion Flannigan had argued his point with a gentlemanly deference and a quiet power for which I had not given him credit. I could not help admiring a man who, on the eve of a desperate enterprise, could courteously argue upon a point which must touch him so nearly. He had, as I have already mentioned, partaken of a considerable quantity of wine; but though there was a[Pg 147] slight flush upon his pale cheek, his manner was as reserved as ever. He did not join in the conversation again, but seemed to be lost in thought.

A whirl of conflicting ideas was battling in my own mind. What was I to do? Should I stand up now and denounce them before both passengers and captain? Should I demand a few minutes’ conversation with the latter in his own cabin, and reveal it all? For an instant I was half resolved to do it, but then the old constitutional timidity came back with redoubled force. After all there might be some mistake. Dick had heard the evidence, and had refused to believe in it. I determined to let things go on their course. A strange reckless feeling came over me. Why should I help men who were blind to their own danger? Surely it was the duty of the officers to protect us, not ours to give warning to them. I drank off a couple of glasses of wine, and staggered upon deck with the determination of keeping my secret locked in my own bosom.

It was a glorious evening. Even in my excited state of mind I could not help leaning against the bulwarks and enjoying the refreshing breeze. Away to the westward a solitary sail stood out as a dark speck against the great sheet of flame left by the setting sun. I shuddered as I looked at it. It seemed like a sea of blood. A single star was twinkling faintly above our main-mast, but a thousand seemed to gleam in the water below with every stroke of our propeller. The only blot in the fair scene was the great trail of smoke which stretched away behind us like a black slash upon a crimson curtain. It seemed hard to believe that the great peace which hung over all Nature could be marred by a poor miserable mortal.

“After all,” I thought, as I gazed upon the blue depths beneath me, “if the worst comes to the worst, it is better to die here than to linger in agony upon a sick-bed on land.” A man’s life seems a very paltry thing amid the great forces of Nature. All my philosophy could not prevent my shuddering, however, when I turned my head and saw two shadowy figures at the other side of the deck, which I had no difficulty in recognizing. They seemed to be conversing earnestly, but I had no opportunity of overhearing what was said; so I contented myself with pacing up and down, and keeping a vigilant watch upon their movements.

It was a relief to me when Dick came on deck. Even an incredulous confidant is better than none at all.

“Well, old man,” he said, giving me a facetious dig in the ribs, “we’ve not been blown up yet.”

“No, not yet,” said I; “but that’s no proof that we are not going to be.”

“Nonsense, man!” said Dick; “I can’t conceive what has put this extraordinary idea into your head. I have been talking to one of your supposed assassins, and he seems a pleasant fellow enough; quite a sporting character, I should think, from the way he speaks.”

“Dick,” I said, “I am as certain that those men have an infernal machine, and that we are on the verge of eternity, as if I saw them putting the match to the fuse.”

“Well, if you really think so,” said Dick, half awed for the moment by the earnestness of my manner, “it is your duty to let the captain know of your suspicions.”

“You are right,” I said; “I will. My absurd timidity has prevented my doing so sooner. I believe[Pg 149] our lives can only be saved by laying the whole matter before him.”

“Well, go and do it now,” said Dick; “but for goodness’ sake don’t mix me up in the matter.”

“I’ll speak to him when he comes off the bridge,” I answered; “and in the mean time I don’t mean to lose sight of them.”

“Let me know of the result,” said my companion; and with a nod he strolled away in search, I fancy, of his partner at the dinner-table.

Left to myself, I bethought me of my retreat of the morning, and climbing on the bulwark I mounted into the quarter-boat, and lay down there. In it I could reconsider my course of action, and by raising my head I was able at any time to get a view of my disagreeable neighbors.

An hour passed, and the captain was still on the bridge. He was talking to one of the passengers, a retired naval officer, and the two were deep in debate concerning some abstruse point in navigation. I could see the red tips of their cigars from where I lay. It was dark now—so dark that I could hardly make out the figures of Flannigan and his accomplice. They were still standing in the position which they had taken up after dinner. A few of the passengers were scattered about the deck, but many had gone below. A strange stillness seemed to pervade the air. The voices of the watch and the rattle of the wheel were the only sounds which broke the silence.

Another half-hour passed. The captain was still upon the bridge. It seemed as if he would never come down. My nerves were in a state of unnatural tension, so much so that the sound of two steps upon the deck made me start up in a quiver of excitement. I peered over the side of the boat, and[Pg 150] saw that our suspicious passengers had crossed from the other side and were standing almost directly beneath me. The light of a binnacle fell full upon the ghastly face of the ruffian Flannigan. Even in that short glance I saw that Muller had the ulster, whose use I knew so well, slung loosely over his arm. I sank back with a groan. It seemed that my fatal procrastination had sacrificed two hundred innocent lives.

I had read of the fiendish vengeance which awaited a spy. I knew that men with their lives in their hands would stick at nothing. All I could do was to cower at the bottom of the boat and listen silently to their whispered talk below.

“It doesn’t matter. It will be too late for anyone to prevent its going off.”

“That’s true. There will be some excitement among those we have left behind, won’t there?”

There was a pause here. Then I heard Muller’s voice in a ghastly whisper, “There’s only five minutes more.”

How slowly the moments seemed to pass! I could count them by the throbbing of my heart.

I raised my head and peered over the side of the boat. There seemed no hope, no help. Death stared me in the face, whether I did or did not give the alarm. The captain had at last left the bridge. The deck was deserted, save for those two dark figures crouching in the shadow of the boat.

It was the little square box. I knew by the sound that they had placed it near the davit, and almost exactly under my head.

I looked over again. Flannigan was pouring something out of a paper into his hand. It was white and granular—the same that I had seen him use in the morning. It was meant as a fuse, no doubt, for he shovelled it into the little box, and I heard the strange noise which had previously arrested my attention.

He was kneeling down and holding the end in his hand. Flannigan stood behind with his arms folded, and an air of grim resolution upon his face.

“Stop!” I screamed, springing to my feet. “Stop, misguided and unprincipled men!”

They both staggered backward. I fancy they[Pg 152] thought I was a spirit, with the moonlight streaming down upon my pale face.

“Cain was damned!” I cried, “and he slew but one; would you have the blood of two hundred upon your souls?”

“Confound the fellow! There’s too much at stake to stand on ceremony. I’ll hold him, Muller, while you pull the trigger.”

Next moment I was struggling in the herculean grasp of the Irishman. Resistance was useless; I was a child in his hands.

I felt that I was standing on the verge of eternity. Half-strangled in the arms of the taller ruffian, I saw the other approach the fatal box. He stooped over it and seized the string. I breathed one prayer when I saw his grasp tighten upon it. Then came a sharp snap, a strange rasping noise. The trigger had fallen, the side of the box flew out, and let off—two gray carrier-pigeons!

Little more need be said. It is not a subject on which I care to dwell. The whole thing is too[Pg 153] utterly disgusting and absurd. Perhaps the best thing I can do is to retire gracefully from the scene, and let the sporting correspondent of the New York Herald fill my unworthy place. Here is an extract clipped from its columns shortly after our departure from America:

“Pigeon-flying Extraordinary.—A novel match has been brought off, last week, between the birds of John H. Flannigan, of Boston, and Jeremiah Muller, a well-known citizen of Ashport. Both men have devoted much time and attention to an improved breed of bird, and the challenge is an old-standing one. The pigeons were backed to a large amount, and there was considerable local interest in the result. The start was from the deck of the Transatlantic steamship Spartan, at ten o’clock on the evening of the day of starting, the vessel being then reckoned to be about a hundred miles from the land. The bird which reached home first was to be declared the winner. Considerable caution had, we believe, to be observed, as British captains have a prejudice against the bringing off of sporting events aboard their vessels. In spite of some little difficulty at the last moment, the trap was sprung almost exactly at ten o’clock. Muller’s bird arrived in Ashport in an extreme state of exhaustion on the following afternoon, while Flannigan’s has not been heard of. The backers of the latter have the satisfaction of knowing, however, that the whole affair has been characterized by extreme fairness. The pigeons were confined in a specially invented trap, which could only be opened by the spring. It was thus possible to feed them through an aperture in the top, but any tampering with their wings was quite out of the question. A few such matches[Pg 154] would go far toward popularizing pigeon-flying in America, and form an agreeable variety to the morbid exhibitions of human endurance which have assumed such proportions during the last few years.”

“The dickens he does!” thought I; for Mr. Dickson, Odessa agent of Bailey & Co., corn merchants, was a bit of a Tartar, as I had learned to my cost. “What’s the row now?” I demanded of my fellow clerk; “has he got scent of our Nicolaieff escapade, or what is it?”

“No idea,” said Gregory; “the old boy seems in a good enough humor; some business matter, probably. But don’t keep him waiting.” So summoning up an air of injured innocence, to be ready for all contingencies, I marched into the lion’s den.

Mr. Dickson was standing before the fire in a Briton’s time-honored attitude, and motioned me into a chair in front of him. “Mr. Robinson,” he said, “I have great confidence in your discretion and common sense. The follies of youth will break out, but I think that you have a sterling foundation to your character underlying any superficial levity.”

“I believe,” he continued, “that you can speak Russian pretty fluently.”

“I have, then,” he proceeded, “a mission which I wish you to undertake, and on the success of which your promotion may depend. I would not trust it to a subordinate, were it not that duty ties me to my post at present.”

“Right, sir; quite right! What I wish you to do is briefly this: The line of railway has just been opened to Solteff, some hundred miles up the country. Now, I wish to get the start of the other Odessa firms in securing the produce of that district, which I have reason to believe may be had at very low prices. You will proceed by rail to Solteff, and interview a Mr. Dimidoff, who is the largest landed proprietor in the town. Make as favorable terms as you can with him. Both Mr. Dimidoff and I wish the whole thing to be done as quietly and secretly as possible—in fact, that nothing should be known about the matter until the grain appears in Odessa. I desire it for the interests of the firm, and Mr. Dimidoff on account of the prejudice his peasantry entertain against exportation. You will find yourself expected at the end of your journey, and will start to-night. Money shall be ready for your expenses. Good-morning, Mr. Robinson; I hope you won’t fail to realize the good opinion I have of your abilities.”

“Gregory,” I said, as I strutted into the office, “I’m off on a mission—a secret mission, my boy; an affair of thousands of pounds. Lend me your little portmanteau—mine’s too imposing—and tell Ivan to pack it. A Russian millionaire expects me at the end of my journey. Don’t breathe a word of it to any of Simpkins’s people, or the whole game will be up. Keep it dark!”

I was so charmed at being, as it were, behind the scenes, that I crept about the office all day in a sort of cloak-and-bloody-dagger style, with responsibility and brooding care marked upon every feature; and when at night I stepped out and stole down to the[Pg 157] station, the unprejudiced observer would certainly have guessed, from my general behavior, that I had emptied the contents of the strong-box, before starting, into that little valise of Gregory’s. It was imprudent of him, by the way, to leave English labels pasted all over it. However, I could only hope that the “Londons” and “Birminghams” would attract no attention, or at least that no rival corn-merchant might deduce from them who I was and what my errand might be.

Having paid the necessary roubles and got my ticket, I ensconced myself in the corner of a snug Russian car, and pondered over my extraordinary good fortune. Dickson was growing old now, and if I could make my mark in this matter it might be a great thing for me. Dreams arose of a partnership in the firm. The noisy wheels seemed to clank out “Bailey, Robinson & Co.,” “Bailey, Robinson & Co.,” in a monotonous refrain, which gradually sank into a hum, and finally ceased as I dropped into a deep sleep. Had I known the experience which awaited me at the end of my journey it would hardly have been so peaceable.

I awoke with an uneasy feeling that some one was watching me closely; nor was I mistaken. A tall dark man had taken up his position on the seat opposite, and his black sinister eyes seemed to look through me and beyond me, as if he wished to read my very soul. Then I saw him glance down at my little trunk.

“Good heavens!” thought I, “here’s Simpkins’s agent, I suppose. It was careless of Gregory to leave those confounded labels on the valise.”

I closed my eyes for a time, but on reopening them I again caught the stranger’s earnest gaze.

“From England, I see,” he said in Russian,[Pg 158] showing a row of white teeth in what was meant to be an amiable smile.

“Yes,” I replied, trying to look unconcerned, but painfully aware of my failure.

“Of course not,” said he, with a shade of irony in his voice. “Englishmen always travel for pleasure, don’t they? Oh, no; nothing else.”

His conduct was mysterious, to say the least of it. It was only explainable upon two hypotheses—he was either a madman, or he was the agent of some firm bound upon the same errand as myself, and determined to show me that he guessed my little game. They were about equally unpleasant, and, on the whole, I was relieved when the train pulled up in the tumble-down shed which does duty for a station in the rising town of Solteff—Solteff, whose resources I was about to open out, and whose commerce I was to direct into the great world channels. I almost expected to see a triumphal arch as I stepped on to the platform.

I was to be expected at the end of my journey, so Mr. Dickson had informed me. I looked about among the motley crowd, but saw no Mr. Dimidoff. Suddenly a slovenly, unshaved man passed me rapidly, and glanced first at me and then at my trunk—that wretched trunk, the cause of all my woes. He disappeared in the crowd; but in a little time came strolling past me again, and contrived to whisper as he did so, “Follow me, but at some distance,” immediately setting off out of the station and down the street at a rapid pace. Here was mystery with a vengeance! I trotted along in his[Pg 159] rear with my valise, and on turning the corner found a rough droschky waiting for me. My unshaven friend opened the door, and I stepped in.

“Hush!” he cried. “No names, no names; the very walls have ears. You will hear all to-night;” and with that assurance he closed the door, and, seizing the reins, we drove off at a rapid pace—so rapid that I saw my black-eyed acquaintance of the railway carriage gazing after us in surprise until we were out of sight.

I thought over the whole matter as we jogged along in that abominable springless conveyance.

“They say the nobles are tyrants in Russia,” I mused; “but it seems to me to be the other way about, for here’s this poor Mr. Dimidoff, who evidently thinks his ex-serfs will rise and murder him if he raises the price of grain in the district by exporting some out of it. Fancy being obliged to have recourse to all this mystery and deception in order to sell one’s own property! Why, it’s worse than an Irish landlord. It is monstrous! Well, he doesn’t seem to live in a very aristocratic quarter either,” I soliloquized, as I gazed out at the narrow crooked streets and the unkempt dirty Muscovites whom we passed. “I wish Gregory or some one was with me, for it’s a cut-throat-looking shop! By Jove, he’s pulling up; we must be there!”

We were there, to all appearance; for the droschky stopped, and my driver’s shaggy head appeared through the aperture.

“Anything but names,” he whispered; “anything[Pg 160] but that. You are too used to a land that is free. Caution, oh sacred one!” and he ushered me down a stone-flagged passage, and up a stair at the end of it. “Sit for a few minutes in this room,” he said, opening a door, “and a repast will be served for you;” and with that he left me to my own reflections.

“Well,” thought I, “whatever Mr. Dimidoff’s house may be like, his servants are undoubtedly well trained. ’Oh sacred one!’ and ’revered master!’ I wonder what he’d call old Dickson himself, if he is so polite to the clerk! I suppose it wouldn’t be the thing to smoke in this little crib; but I could do a pipe nicely. By the way, how confoundedly like a cell it looks!”

It certainly did look like a cell. The door was an iron one, and enormously strong, while the single window was closely barred. The floor was of wood, and sounded hollow and insecure as I strode across it. Both floor and walls were thickly splashed with coffee or some other dark liquid. On the whole, it was far from being a place where one would be likely to become unreasonably festive.

I had hardly concluded my survey when I heard steps approaching down the corridor, and the door was opened by my old friend of the droschky. He announced that my dinner was ready, and, with many bows and apologies for leaving me in what he called the “dismissal room,” he led me down the passage, and into a large and beautifully furnished apartment. A table was spread for two in the centre of it, and by the fire was standing a man very little older than myself. He turned as I came in, and stepped forward to meet me with every symptom of profound respect.

“So young and yet so honored!” he exclaimed;[Pg 161] and then seeming to recollect himself, he continued, “Pray sit at the head of the table. You must be fatigued by your long and arduous journey. We dine tête-à-tête; but the others assemble afterward.”

“No, sir,” said he, turning his keen gray eyes upon me. “My name is Petrokine; you mistake me perhaps for one of the others. But now, not a word of business until the council meets. Try your chef’s soup; you will find it excellent, I think.”

Who Mr. Petrokine or the others might be I could not conceive. Land stewards of Dimidoff’s, perhaps; though the name did not seem familiar to my companion. However, as he appeared to shun any business questions at present, I gave in to his humor, and we conversed on social life in England—a subject in which he displayed considerable knowledge and acuteness. His remarks, too, on Malthus and the laws of population were wonderfully good, though savoring somewhat of Radicalism.

“By the way,” he remarked, as we smoked a cigar over our wine, “we should never have known you but for the English labels on your luggage; it was the luckiest thing in the world that Alexander noticed them. We had had no personal description of you; indeed we were prepared to expect a somewhat older man. You are young indeed, sir, to be intrusted with such a mission.”

“My employer trusts me,” I replied; “and we have learned in our trade that youth and shrewdness are not incompatible.”

“Your remark is true, sir,” returned my newly made friend; “but I am surprised to hear you call our glorious association a trade! Such a term is gross indeed to apply to a body of men banded together[Pg 162] to supply the world with that which it is yearning for, but which, without our exertions, it can never hope to attain. A spiritual brotherhood would be a more fitting term.”

“By Jove!” thought I, “how pleased the boss would be to hear him! He must have been in the business himself, whoever he is.”

“Now, sir,” said Mr. Petrokine, “the clock points to eight, and the council must be already sitting. Let us go up together, and I will introduce you. I need hardly say that the greatest secrecy is observed, and that your appearance is anxiously awaited.”

I turned over in my mind as I followed him how I might best fulfil my mission and secure the most advantageous terms. They seemed as anxious as I was in the matter, and there appeared to be no opposition, so perhaps the best thing would be to wait and see what they would propose.

I had hardly come to this conclusion when my guide swung open a large door at the end of a passage, and I found myself in a room larger and even more gorgeously fitted up than the one in which I had dined. A long table, covered with green baize and strewn with papers, ran down the middle, and round it were sitting fourteen or fifteen men conversing earnestly. The whole scene reminded me forcibly of a gambling hell I had visited some time before.

Upon our entrance the company rose and bowed. I could not but remark that my companion attracted no attention, while every eye was turned upon me with a strange mixture of surprise and almost servile respect. A man at the head of the table, who was remarkable for the extreme pallor of his face as contrasted with his blue-black hair and mustache, waved his hand to a seat beside him, and I sat down.

“I need hardly say,” said Mr. Petrokine, “that Gustave Berger, the English agent, is now honoring us with his presence. He is young, indeed, Alexis,” he continued to my pale-faced neighbor, “and yet he is of European reputation.”

“Come, draw it mild!” thought I, adding aloud, “If you refer to me, sir, though I am indeed acting as English agent, my name is not Berger, but Robinson—Mr. Tom Robinson, at your service.”

“So be it, so be it,” said the man they called Alexis. “I commend your discretion, most honored sir. One cannot be too careful. Preserve your English sobriquet by all means. I regret that any painful duty should be performed upon this auspicious evening; but the rules of our association must be preserved at any cost to our feelings, and a dismissal is inevitable to-night.”

“What the deuce is the fellow driving at?” thought I. “What is it to me if he does give his servant the sack? This Dimidoff, wherever he is, seems to keep a private lunatic asylum.”

“Take out the gag!” The words fairly shot through me, and I started in my chair. It was Petrokine who spoke. For the first time I noticed that a burly stout man, sitting at the other end of the table, had his arms tied behind his chair and a handkerchief round his mouth. A horrible suspicion began to creep into my heart. Where was I? Was I in Mr. Dimidoff’s? Who were these men, with their strange words?

“Not a dismissal, sirs,” he pleaded; “not a dismissal:[Pg 164] anything but that! I will go into some distant land, and my mouth shall be closed forever. I will do anything that the society asks, but pray, pray do not dismiss me.”

“You know our laws, and you know your crime,” said Alexis, in a cold, harsh voice. “Who drove us from Odessa by his false tongue and his double face? Who wrote the anonymous letter to the Governor? Who cut the wire that would have destroyed the arch-tyrant? You did, Paul Ivanovitch; and you must die.”

“Remove him!” said Petrokine; and the man of the droschky, with two others, forced him out.

I heard the footsteps pass down the passage and then a door open and shut. Then came a sound as of a struggle, ended by a heavy, crunching blow and a dull thud.

“So perish all who are false to their oath,” said Alexis, solemnly; and a hoarse “Amen” went up from his companions.

“Death alone can dismiss us from our order,” said another man further down; “but Mr. Berg—Mr. Robinson is pale. The scene has been too much for him after his long journey from England.”

“Oh, Tom, Tom,” thought I, “if ever you get out of this scrape you’ll turn over a new leaf. You’re not fit to die, and that’s a fact.” It was only too evident to me now that by some strange misconception I had got in among a gang of cold-blooded Nihilists, who mistook me for one of their order. I felt, after what I had witnessed, that my only chance of life was to try to play the rôle thus forced upon me until an opportunity for escape should present itself; so I tried hard to regain my air of self-possession, which had been so rudely shaken.

“I am indeed fatigued,” I replied; “but I feel stronger now. Excuse my momentary weakness.”

“It was but natural,” said a man with a thick beard at my right hand. “And now, most honored sir, how goes the cause in England?”

“Has the great commissioner condescended to send a missive to the Solteff branch?” asked Petrokine.

“Yes; he said he had watched it with feelings of the liveliest satisfaction,” I returned.

I felt giddy and sick from the critical nature of my position. Any moment a question might be asked which would show me in my true colors. I rose and helped myself from a decanter of brandy which stood on a side-table. The potent liquor flew to my excited brain, and as I sat down I felt reckless enough to be half amused at my position, and inclined to play with my tormentors. I still, however, had all my wits about me.

“It is still, I suppose, entirely unsuspected by the police?” continued my interrogator.

“Can you tell us how it is that so large a concern is kept so completely secret?”

Here was a poser; but my native impudence and the brandy seemed to come to my aid.

“That is information,” I replied, “which I do not[Pg 166] feel justified in divulging even here. In withholding it I am acting under the direction of the chief commissioner.”

“You are right—perfectly right,” said my original friend Petrokine. “You will no doubt make your report to the central office at Moscow before entering into such details.”

“We have heard,” said Alexis,“ that you were sent to inspect the Livadia. Can you give us any particulars about it?”

“Well, well, there’s plenty of time yet,” said the man with the beard—“many months. Will the bottom be of wood or iron?”

“’Tis well!” said another voice. “And what is the breadth of the Clyde below Greenock?”

“How many men does she carry?” asked an anæmic-looking youth at the foot of the table, who seemed more fit for a public school than this den of murder.

“Are the store-rooms on a level with or underneath the state-cabins?” asked Petrokine.

“Underneath,” said I decisively, though I need hardly say I had not the smallest conception.

“And now, most honored sir,” said Alexis, “tell us what was the reply of Bauer, the German socialist, to Ravinsky’s proclamation.”

Here was a deadlock with a vengeance. Whether my cunning would have extricated me from it or not was never decided, for Providence hurried me from one dilemma into another and a worse one.

A door slammed downstairs, and rapid footsteps were heard approaching. Then came a loud tap outside, followed by two smaller ones.

“The sign of the society!” said Petrokine; “and yet we are all present; who can it be?”

The door was thrown open, and a man entered, dusty and travel-stained, but with an air of authority and power stamped on every feature of his harsh but expressive face. He glanced round the table, scanning each countenance carefully. There was a start of surprise in the room. He was evidently a stranger to them all.

“Intrusion!” said the stranger. “I was given to understand that I was expected, and had looked forward to a warmer welcome from my fellow-associates. I am personally unknown to you, gentlemen, but I am proud to think that my name should command some respect among you. I am Gustave Berger, the agent from England, bearing letters from the chief commissioner to his well-beloved brothers of Solteff.”

One of their own bombs could hardly have created greater surprise had it been fired in the midst of them. Every eye was fixed alternately on me and upon the newly arrived agent.

“That I am Gustave Berger these credentials will show,” said the stranger, as he threw a packet upon the table. “Who that man may be I know not; but if he has intruded himself upon the lodge under false pretences, it is clear that he must never carry out of the room what he has learned. Speak, sir,” he added, addressing me: “who and what are you?”

I felt that my time had come. My revolver was in my hip-pocket; but what was that against so many desperate men? I grasped the butt of it, however, as a drowning man clings to a straw, and I tried to preserve my coolness as I glanced round at the cold, vindictive faces turned toward me.

“Gentlemen,” I said, “the rôle I have played to-night has been a purely involuntary one on my part. I am no police spy, as you seem to suspect; nor, on the other hand, have I the honor to be a member of your association. I am an inoffensive corn-dealer, who by an extraordinary mistake has been forced into this unpleasant and awkward position.”

I paused for a moment. Was it my fancy that there was a peculiar noise in the street—a noise as of many feet treading softly? No, it had died away; it was but the throbbing of my own heart.

“I need hardly say,” I continued, “that anything I may have heard to-night will be safe in my keeping. I pledge my solemn honor as a gentleman that not one word of it shall transpire through me.”

The senses of men in great physical danger become strangely acute, or their imagination plays them curious tricks. My back was toward the door as I sat, but I could have sworn that I heard heavy breathing behind it. Was it the three[Pg 169] minions whom I had seen before in the performance of their hateful functions, and who, like vultures, had sniffed another victim?

I looked round the table. Still the same hard, cruel faces. Not one glance of sympathy. I cocked the revolver in my pocket.

There was a painful silence, which was broken by the harsh, grating voice of Petrokine.

“Promises are easily made and easily broken,” he said. “There is but one way of securing eternal silence. It is our lives or yours. Let the highest among us speak.”

“You are right, sir,” said the English agent; “there is but one course open. He must be dismissed.”

“By Heaven,” I shouted, putting my back against the door, “you shan’t butcher a free Englishman like a sheep! The first among you who stirs, drops!”

A man sprang at me. I saw along the sights of my Derringer the gleam of a knife and the demoniacal face of Gustave Berger. Then I pulled the trigger, and, with his hoarse scream sounding in my ears, I was felled to the ground by a crashing blow from behind. Half-unconscious, and pressed down by some heavy weight, I heard the noise of shouts and blows above me, and then I fainted away.

When I came to myself I was lying among the débris of the door, which had been beaten in on the top of me. Opposite were a dozen of the men who had lately sat in judgment upon me, tied two and two, and guarded by a score of Russian soldiers. Beside me was the corpse of the ill-fated English agent, the whole face blown in by the force of the[Pg 170] explosion. Alexis and Petrokine were both lying on the floor like myself, bleeding profusely.

“Well, young fellow, you’ve had a narrow escape,” said a hearty voice in my ear.

“Stand up,” he continued: “you’re only a bit stunned; no bones broken. It’s no wonder I mistook you for the Nihilist agent, when the very lodge itself was taken in. Well, you’re the only stranger who ever came out of this den alive. Come downstairs with me. I know who you are, and what you are after now; I’ll take you to Mr. Dimidoff. Nay, don’t go in there,” he cried, as I walked toward the door of the cell into which I had been originally ushered. “Keep out of that; you’ve seen evil sights enough for one day. Come down and have a glass of liquor.”

He explained as we walked back to the hotel that the police of Solteff, of which he was the chief, had had warning and been on the look-out during some time for this Nihilist emissary. My arrival in so unfrequented a place, coupled with my air of secrecy and the English labels on that confounded portmanteau of Gregory’s, had completed the business.

I have little more to tell. My Socialistic acquaintances were all either transported to Siberia or executed. My mission was performed to the satisfaction of my employers. My conduct during the whole business has won me promotion, and my prospects for life have been improved since that horrible night, the remembrance of which still makes me shiver.

Abe Durton’s cabin was not beautiful. People have been heard to assert that it was ugly, and, even after the fashion of Harvey’s Sluice, have gone the length of prefixing their adjective with a forcible expletive which emphasized their criticism. Abe, however, was a stolid and easy-going man, on whose mind the remarks of an unappreciative public made but little impression. He had built the house himself, and it suited his partner and him, and what more did they want? Indeed he was rather touchy upon the subject. “Though I says it, as raised it,” he remarked, “it’ll lay over any shanty in the valley. Holes? Well, of course there are holes. You wouldn’t get fresh air without holes. There’s nothing stuffy about my house. Rain? Well, if it does let the rain in, ain’t it an advantage to know it’s rainin’ without gettin’ up to unbar the door. I wouldn’t own a house that didn’t leak some. As to its bein’ off the perpendic’lar, I like a house with a bit of a tilt. Anyways it pleases my pard, Boss Morgan, and what’s good enough for him is good enough for you, I suppose.” At which approach to personalities his antagonist usually sheered off, and left the honors of the field to the indignant architect.

But whatever difference of opinion might exist as to the beauty of the establishment, there could be[Pg 172] no question as to its utility. To the tired wayfarer, plodding along the Buckhurst road in the direction of the Sluice, the warm glow upon the summit of the hill was a beacon of hope and of comfort. Those very holes at which the neighbors sneered helped to diffuse a cheery atmosphere of light around, which was doubly acceptable on such a night as the present.

There was only one man inside the hut, and that was the proprietor, Abe Durton himself, or “Bones,” as he had been christened with the rude heraldry of the camp. He was sitting in front of the great wood fire, gazing moodily into its glowing depths, and occasionally giving a fagot a kick of remonstrance when it showed any indication of dying into a smoulder. His fair Saxon face, with its bold simple eyes and crisp yellow beard, stood out sharp and clear against the darkness as the flickering light played over it. It was a manly, resolute countenance, and yet the physiognomist might have detected something in the lines of the mouth which showed a weakness somewhere, an indecision which contrasted strangely with his herculean shoulders and massive limbs. Abe’s was one of those trusting, simple natures which are as easy to lead as they are impossible to drive; and it was this happy pliability of disposition which made him at once the butt and the favorite of the dwellers in the Sluice. Badinage in that primitive settlement was of a somewhat ponderous character, yet no amount of chaff had ever brought a dark look on Bones’s face, or an unkind thought into his honest heart. It was only when his aristocratic partner was, as he thought, being put upon, that an ominous tightness about his lower lip and an angry light in his blue eyes, caused even the most irrepressible humorist in the colony[Pg 173] to nip his favorite joke in the bud, in order to diverge into an earnest and all-absorbing dissertation upon the state of the weather.

“The Boss is late to-night,” he muttered, as he rose from his chair, and stretched himself in a colossal yawn. “My stars, how it does rain and blow! Don’t it, Blinky?” Blinky was a demure and meditative owl, whose comfort and welfare was a chronic subject of solicitude to its master, and who at present contemplated him gravely from one of the rafters. “Pity you can’t speak, Blinky,” continued Abe, glancing up at his feathered companion. “There’s a powerful deal of sense in your face. Kinder melancholy too. Crossed in love, maybe, when you was young. Talkin’ of love,” he added, “I’ve not seen Susan to-day;” and lighting the candle which stood in a black bottle upon the table, he walked across the room and peered earnestly at one of the many pictures from stray illustrated papers, which had been cut out by the occupants and posted up upon the walls.

The particular picture which attracted him was one which represented a very tawdrily dressed actress simpering over a bouquet at an imaginary audience. This sketch had, for some inscrutable reason, made a deep impression upon the susceptible heart of the miner. He had invested the young lady with a human interest by solemnly, and without the slightest warrant, christening her as Susan Banks, and had then installed her as his standard of female beauty.

“You see my Susan,” he would say, when some wanderer from Buckhurst, or even from Melbourne, would describe some fair Circe whom he had left behind him. “There ain’t a girl like my Sue. If ever you go to the old country again, just you ask[Pg 174] to see her. Susan Banks is her name, and I’ve got her picture up at the shanty.”

Abe was still gazing at his charmer, when the rough door was flung open, and a blinding cloud of sleet and rain came driving into the cabin, almost obscuring for the moment a young man who sprang in and proceeded to bar the entrance behind him, an operation which the force of the wind rendered no easy matter. He might have passed for the genius of the storm, with the water dripping from his long hair and running down his pale, refined face.

“Well,” he said, in a slightly peevish voice, “haven’t you got any supper?”

“Waiting and ready,” said his companion cheerily, pointing to a large pot which bubbled by the side of the fire. “You seem sort of damp.”

“Damp be hanged! I’m soaked, man, thoroughly saturated. It’s a night that I wouldn’t have a dog out, at least not a dog that I had any respect for. Hand over that dry coat from the peg.”

Jack Morgan, or Boss, as he was usually called, belonged to a type which was commoner in the mines during the flush times of the first great rush than would be supposed. He was a man of good blood, liberally educated, and a graduate of an English university. Boss should, in the natural course of things, have been an energetic curate, or struggling professional man, had not some latent traits cropped out in his character, inherited possibly from old Sir Henry Morgan, who had founded the family with Spanish pieces of eight gallantly won upon the high seas. It was this wild strain of blood no doubt which had caused him to drop from the bedroom window of the ivy-clad English parsonage, and leave home and friends behind him to try his luck with pick and shovel in the Australian fields. In spite of[Pg 175] his effeminate face and dainty manners, the rough dwellers in Harvey’s Sluice had gradually learned that the little man was possessed of a cool courage and unflinching resolution, which won respect in a community where pluck was looked upon as the highest of human attributes. No one ever knew how it was that Bones and he had become partners; yet partners they were, and the large, simple nature of the stronger man looked with an almost superstitious reverence upon the clear, decisive mind of his companion.

“That’s better,” said the Boss, as he dropped into the vacant chair before the fire and watched Abe laying out the two metal plates, with the horn-handled knives and abnormally pronged forks. “Take your mining boots off, Bones; there’s no use filling the cabin with red clay. Come here and sit down.”

His gigantic partner came meekly over and perched himself upon the top of a barrel.

“Shares are up,” said his companion. “That’s what’s up. Look here,” and he extracted a crumpled paper from the pocket of the steaming coat. “Here’s the Buckhurst Sentinel. Read this article—this one here about a paying lead in the Conemara mine. We hold pretty heavily in that concern, my boy. We might sell out to-day and clear something—but I think we’ll hold on.”

Abe Durton in the mean time was laboriously spelling out the article in question, following the lines with his great forefinger, and muttering under his tawny mustache.

“Two hundred dollars a foot,” he said, looking up. “Why, pard, we hold a hundred feet each. It would give us twenty thousand dollars! We might go home on that.”

“Nonsense!” said his companion; “we’ve come out here for something better than a beggarly couple of thousand pounds. The thing is bound to pay. Sinclair the assayer has been over there, and says there’s a ledge of the richest quartz he ever set eyes on. It is just a case of getting the machinery to crush it. By the way, what was to-day’s take like?”

Abe extracted a small wooden box from his pocket and handed it to his comrade. It contained what appeared to be about a teaspoonful of sand and one or two little metallic granules not larger than a pea. Boss Morgan laughed, and returned it to his companion.

“We sha’n’t make our fortune at that rate, Bones,” he remarked; and there was a pause in the conversation as the two men listened to the wind as it screamed and whistled past the little cabin.

“Any news from Buckhurst?” asked Abe, rising and proceeding to extract their supper from the pot.

“Nothing much,” said his companion. “Cockeyed Joe has been shot by Billy Reid in McFarlane’s Store.”

“Bushrangers have been around and stuck up the Rochdale station. They say they are coming over here.”

“Nothing of importance, except that the blacks have been showing a bit down New Sterling way, and that the assayer has bought a piano and is going to have his daughter out from Melbourne to live in the new house opposite on the other side of the road. So you see we are going to have something to look at, my boy,” he added as he sat down, and began attacking[Pg 177] the food set before him. “They say she is a beauty, Bones.”

His partner smiled as he glanced round at the flaring print upon the wall. Suddenly he dropped his knife and seemed to listen. Amid the wild uproar of the wind and the rain there was a low rumbling sound which was evidently not dependent upon the elements.

The two men made for the door and peered out earnestly into the darkness. Far away along the Buckhurst road they could see a moving light, and the dull sound was louder than before.

“Why, man, the ford will be six feet deep to-night, and running like a mill-stream.”

The light was nearer now, coming rapidly round the curve of the road. There was a wild sound of galloping with the rattle of the wheels.

There was a rough individuality about the inhabitants of Harvey’s Sluice, in virtue of which every man bore his misfortunes upon his own shoulders, and had very little sympathy for those of his neighbors. The predominant feeling of the two men was one of pure curiosity as they watched the swinging, swaying lanterns coming down the winding road.

“If he don’t pull ’em up before they reach the ford he’s a goner,” remarked Abe Durton resignedly.

Suddenly there came a lull in the sullen splash of the rain. It was but for a moment, but in that moment there came down on the breeze a long cry which caused the two men to start and stare at each other, and then to rush frantically down the steep incline toward the road below.

“A woman, by Heaven!” gasped Abe, as he sprang across the gaping shaft of a mine in the recklessness of his haste.

Morgan was the lighter and more active man. He drew away rapidly from his stalwart companion. Within a minute he was standing panting and bareheaded in the middle of the soft muddy road, while his partner was still toiling down the side of the declivity.

The carriage was close on him now. He could see in the light of the lamps the raw-boned Australian horse as, terrified by the storm and by its own clatter, it came tearing down the declivity which led to the ford. The man who was driving seemed to see the pale set face in the pathway in front of him, for he yelled out some incoherent words of warning, and made a last desperate attempt to pull up. There was a shout, an oath, and a jarring crash, and Abe, hurrying down, saw a wild infuriated horse rearing madly in the air with a slim dark figure hanging on to its bridle. Boss, with the keen power of calculation which had made him the finest cricketer at Rugby in his day, had caught the rein immediately below the bit, and clung to it with silent concentration. Once he was down with a heavy thud in the roadway as the horse jerked its head violently forward, but when, with a snort of exultation, the animal pressed on, it was only to find that the prostrate man beneath its forehoofs still maintained his unyielding grasp.

“Hold it, Bones,” he said, as a tall figure hurled itself into the road and seized the other rein.

“All right, old man, I’ve got him;” and the horse, cowed by the sight of a fresh assailant, quieted down, and stood shivering with terror.

“I can’t do it, Bones.” There was a catch in the voice as of pain. “There’s something wrong, old chap, but don’t make a fuss. It’s only a shake; give me a lift up.”

Abe bent tenderly over his prostrate companion. He could see that he was very white, and breathing with difficulty.

The last two exclamations were shot out of the honest miner’s bosom as if they were impelled by some irresistible force, and he took a couple of steps backward in sheer amazement. There at the other side of the fallen man, and half shrouded in the darkness, stood what appeared to Abe’s simple soul to be the most beautiful vision that ever had appeared upon earth. To eyes accustomed to rest upon nothing more captivating than the ruddy faces and rough beards of the miners in the Sluice, it seemed that that fair, delicate countenance must belong to a wanderer from some better world. Abe gazed at it with a wondering reverence, oblivious for the moment even of his injured friend upon the ground.

“Oh, papa,” said the apparition, in great distress, “he is hurt, the gentleman is hurt;” and with a quick feminine gesture of sympathy, she bent her lithe figure over Boss Morgan’s prostrate figure.

“Why, it’s Abe Durton and his partner,” said the[Pg 180] driver of the buggy, coming forward and disclosing the grizzled features of Mr. Joshua Sinclair, the assayer to the mines. “I don’t know how to thank you, boys. The infernal brute got the bit between his teeth, and I should have had to have thrown Carrie out and chanced it in another minute. That’s right,” he continued, as Morgan staggered to his feet. “Not much hurt, I hope.”

“I can get up to the hut now,” said the young man, steadying himself upon his partner’s shoulder. “How are you going to get Miss Sinclair home?”

“Oh, we can walk!” said that young lady, shaking off the effects of her fright with all the elasticity of youth.

“We can drive and take the road round the bank so as to avoid the ford,” said her father. “The horse seems cowed enough now; you need not be afraid of it, Carrie. I hope we shall see you at the house, both of you. Neither of us can easily forget this night’s work.”

Miss Carrie said nothing, but she managed to shoot a little demure glance of gratitude from under her long lashes, to have won which honest Abe felt that he would have cheerfully undertaken to stop a runaway locomotive.

There was a cheery shout of “Good-night,” a crack of the whip, and the buggy rattled away in the darkness.

“You told me the men were rough and nasty, pa,” said Miss Carrie Sinclair, after a long silence, when the two dark shadows had died away in the distance, and the carriage was speeding along by the turbulent stream. “I don’t think so. I think they are very nice.” And Carrie was unusually quiet for the remainder of her journey, and seemed more reconciled to the hardship of leaving her dear friend[Pg 181] Amelia in the far-off boarding school at Melbourne.

That did not prevent her from writing a full, true, and particular account of their little adventure to the same young lady upon that very night.

“They stopped the horse, darling, and one poor fellow was hurt. And oh, Amy, if you had seen the other one in a red shirt, with a pistol at his waist! I couldn’t help thinking of you, dear. He was just your idea. You remember, a yellow mustache and great blue eyes. And how he did stare at poor me! You never see such men in Burke Street, Amy;” and so on, for four pages of pretty feminine gossip.

In the mean time poor Boss, badly shaken, had been helped up the hill by his partner and regained the shelter of the shanty. Abe doctored him out of the rude pharmacopœia of the camp, and bandaged up his strained arm. Both were men of few words, and neither made any allusion to what had taken place. It was noticed, however, by Blinky, that his master failed to pay his usual nightly orisons before the shrine of Susan Banks. Whether this sagacious fowl drew any deductions from this, and from the fact that Bones sat long and earnestly smoking by the smouldering fire, I know not. Suffice it that as the candle died away and the miner rose from his chair, his feathered friend flew down upon his shoulder, and was only prevented from giving vent to a sympathetic hoot by Abe’s warning finger, and its own strong inherent sense of propriety.

A casual visitor dropping into the straggling township of Harvey’s Sluice shortly after Miss Carrie Sinclair’s arrival would have noticed a considerable alteration in the manners and customs of its inhabitants. Whether it was the refining influence of[Pg 182] a woman’s presence, or whether it sprang from an emulation excited by the brilliant appearance of Abe Durton, it is hard to say—probably from a blending of the two. Certain it is that that young man had suddenly developed an affection for cleanliness and a regard for the conventionalities of civilization, which aroused the astonishment and ridicule of his companions. That Boss Morgan should pay attention to his personal appearance had long been set down as a curious and inexplicable phenomenon, depending upon early education; but that loose-limbed easy-going Bones should flaunt about in a clean shirt was regarded by every grimy denizen of the Sluice as a direct and premeditated insult. In self-defence, therefore, there was a general cleaning up after working hours, and such a run upon the grocery establishment, that soap went up to an unprecedented figure, and a fresh consignment had to be ordered from McFarlane’s store in Buckhurst.

“Is this here a free minin’ camp, or is it a darned Sunday-school?” had been the indignant query of Long McCoy, a prominent member of the reactionary party, who had failed to advance with the times, having been absent during the period of regeneration. But his remonstrance met with but little sympathy; and at the end of a couple of days a general turbidity of the creek announced his surrender, which was confirmed by his appearance in the Colonial Bar with a shining and bashful face, and hair which was redolent of bear’s grease.

“I felt kinder lonesome,” he remarked apologetically, “so I thought as I’d have a look what was under the clay;” and he viewed himself approvingly in the cracked mirror which graced the select room of the establishment.

Our casual visitor would have noticed a remarkable[Pg 183] change also in the conversation of the community. Somehow, when a certain dainty little bonnet with a sweet girlish figure beneath it was seen in the distance among the disused shafts and mounds of red earth which disfigured the sides of the valley, there was a warning murmur, and a general clearing off of the cloud of blasphemy, which was, I regret to state, an habitual characteristic of the working population of Harvey’s Sluice. Such things only need a beginning; and it was noticeable that long after Miss Sinclair had vanished from sight there was a decided rise in the moral barometer of the gulches. Men found by experience that their stock of adjectives was less limited than they had been accustomed to suppose, and that the less forcible were sometimes even more adapted for conveying their meaning.

Abe had formerly been considered one of the most experienced valuators of an ore in the settlement. It had been commonly supposed that he was able to estimate the amount of gold in a fragment of quartz with remarkable exactness. This, however, was evidently a mistake, otherwise he would never have incurred the useless expense of having so many worthless specimens assayed as he now did. Mr. Joshua Sinclair found himself inundated with such a flood of fragments of mica, and lumps of rock containing decimal percentages of the precious metals, that he began to form a very low opinion of the young man’s mining capabilities. It is even asserted that Abe shuffled up to the house one morning with a hopeful smile, and, after some fumbling, produced half a brick from the bosom of his jersey, with the stereotyped remark, “that he thought he’d struck it at last, and so had dropped in to ask him to cipher out an estimate.” As this anecdote rests,[Pg 184] however, upon the unsupported evidence of Jim Struggles, the humorist of the camp, there may be some slight inaccuracy of detail.

It is certain that what with professional business in the morning and social visits at night, the tall figure of the miner was a familiar object in the little drawing-room of Azalea Villa, as the new house of the assayer had been magniloquently named. He seldom ventured upon a remark in the presence of its female occupant; but would sit on the extreme edge of his chair in a state of speechless admiration while she rattled off some lively air upon the newly imported piano. Many were the strange and unexpected places in which his feet turned up. Miss Carrie had gradually come to the conclusion that they were entirely independent of his body, and had ceased to speculate upon the manner in which she would trip over them on one side of the table while the blushing owner was apologizing from the other. There was only one cloud on honest Bones’s mental horizon, and that was the periodical appearance of Black Tom Ferguson, of Rochdale Ferry. This clever young scamp had managed to ingratiate himself with old Joshua, and was a constant visitor at the villa. There were evil rumors abroad about Black Tom. He was known to be a gambler, and shrewdly suspected to be worse. Harvey’s Sluice was not censorious, and yet there was a general feeling that Ferguson was a man to be avoided. There was a reckless élan about his bearing, however, and a sparkle in his conversation, which had an indescribable charm, and even induced the Boss, who was particular in such matters, to cultivate his acquaintance while forming a correct estimate of his character. Miss Carrie seemed to hail his appearance as a relief, and chattered away for[Pg 185] hours about books and music and the gayeties of Melbourne. It was on these occasions that poor simple Bones would sink into the very lowest depths of despondency, and either slink away, or sit glaring at his rival with an earnest malignancy which seemed to cause that gentleman no small amusement.

The miner made no secret to his partner of the admiration which he entertained for Miss Sinclair. If he was silent in her company, he was voluble enough when she was the subject of discourse. Loiterers upon the Buckhurst road might have heard a stentorian voice upon the hill-side bellowing forth a vocabulary of female charms. He submitted his difficulties to the superior intelligence of the Boss.

“That loafer from Rochdale,” he said, “he seems to reel it off kinder nat’ral, while for the life of me I can’t say a word. Tell me, Boss, what would you say to a girl like that?”

“Talk about the customs of the place and the country,” said the Boss, pulling meditatively at his pipe. “Tell her stories of what you have seen in the mines, and that sort of thing.”

“Eh? You’d do that, would you?” responded his comrade more hopefully. “If that’s the hang of it I am right. I’ll go up now and tell her about Chicago Bill, an’ how he put them two bullets in the man from the bend the night of the dance.”

“That’s hardly the thing,” he said. “You’d frighten her if you told her that. Tell her something[Pg 186] lighter, you know; something to amuse her, something funny.”

“Funny?” said the anxious lover, with less confidence in his voice. “How you and me made Mat Houlahan drunk and put him in the pulpit of the Baptist church, and he wouldn’t let the preacher in in the morning. How would that do, eh?”

“For Heaven’s sake don’t say anything of the sort,” said his Mentor, in great consternation. “She’d never speak to either of us again. No, what I mean is that you should tell about the habits of the mines, how men live and work and die there. If she is a sensible girl that ought to interest her.”

“How they live at the mines? Pard, you are good to me. How they live? There’s a thing I can talk of as glib as Black Tom or any man. I’ll try it on her when I see her.”

“By the way,” said his partner listlessly, “just keep an eye on that man Ferguson. His hands arn’t very clean, you know, and he’s not scrupulous when he is aiming for anything. You remember how Dick Williams, of English Town, was found dead in the bush. Of course it was rangers that did it. They do say, however, that Black Tom owed him a deal more money than he could ever have paid. There’s been one or two queer things about him. Keep your eye on him, Abe. Watch what he does.”

And he did. He watched him that very night. Watched him stride out of the house of the assayer with anger and baffled pride on every feature of his handsome swarthy face. Watched him clear the garden paling at a bound, pass in long rapid strides down the side of the valley, gesticulating wildly with his hands, and vanish into the bushland beyond.[Pg 187] All this Abe Durton watched, and with a thoughtful look upon his face he relit his pipe and strolled slowly backward to the hut upon the hill.

March was drawing to a close in Harvey’s Sluice, and the glare and heat of the antipodean summer had toned down into the rich mellow hues of autumn. It was never a lovely place to look upon. There was something hopelessly prosaic in the two bare rugged ridges, seamed and scarred by the hand of man, with iron arms of windlasses, and broken buckets projecting everywhere through the endless little hillocks of red earth. Down the middle ran the deeply rutted road from Buckhurst, winding along and crossing the sluggish tide of Harper’s Creek by a crumbling wooden bridge. Beyond the bridge lay the cluster of little huts with the Colonial Bar and the Grocery towering in all the dignity of whitewash among the humble dwellings around. The assayer’s veranda-lined house lay above the gulches on the side of the slope nearly opposite the dilapidated specimen of architecture of which our friend Abe was so unreasonably proud.

There was one other building which might have come under the category of what an inhabitant of the Sluice would have described as a “public edifice” with a comprehensive wave of his pipe which conjured up images of an endless vista of colonnades and minarets. This was the Baptist chapel, a modest little shingle-roofed erection on the bend of the river about a mile above the settlement. It was from this that the town looked at its best, when the harsh outlines and crude colors were somewhat softened by distance. On that particular morning the stream looked pretty as it meandered down the valley; pretty, too, was the long rising upland behind,[Pg 188] with its luxuriant green covering; and prettiest of all was Miss Carrie Sinclair, as she laid down the basket of ferns which she was carrying, and stopped upon the summit of the rising ground.

Something seemed to be amiss with that young lady. There was a look of anxiety upon her face which contrasted strangely with her usual appearance of piquant insouciance. Some recent annoyance had left its traces upon her. Perhaps it was to walk it off that she had rambled down the valley; certain it is that she inhaled the fresh breezes of the woodlands as if their resinous fragrance bore with them some antidote for human sorrow.

She stood for some time gazing at the view before her. She could see her father’s house, like a white dot upon the hill-side, though strangely enough it was a blue reek of smoke upon the opposite slope which seemed to attract the greater part of her attention. She lingered there, watching it with a wistful look in her hazel eyes. Then the loneliness of her situation seemed to strike her, and she felt one of those spasmodic fits of unreasoning terror to which the bravest women are subject. Tales of natives and of bushrangers, their daring and their cruelty, flashed across her. She glanced at the great mysterious stretch of silent bushland beside her, and stooped to pick up her basket with the intention of hurrying along the road in the direction of the gulches. She started round, and hardly suppressed a scream as a long, red-flannelled arm shot out from behind her and withdrew the basket from her very grasp.

The figure which met her eye would to some have seemed little calculated to allay her fears. The high boots, the rough shirt, and the broad girdle with its weapons of death were, however, too familiar[Pg 189] to Miss Carrie to be objects of terror; and when above them all she saw a pair of tender blue eyes looking down upon her, and a half-abashed smile lurking under a thick yellow mustache, she knew that for the remainder of that walk ranger and black would be equally powerless to harm her.

“I’m sorry, miss,” said Abe, in great trepidation at having caused his idol one moment’s uneasiness. “You see,” he continued, with simple cunning, “the weather bein’ fine and my partner gone prospectin’, I thought I’d walk up to Hagley’s Hill and round back by the bend, and there I sees you accidental-like and promiscuous a-standin’ on a hillock.” This astounding falsehood was reeled off by the miner with great fluency, and an artificial sincerity which at once stamped it as a fabrication. Bones had concocted and rehearsed it while tracking the little footsteps in the clay, and looked upon it as the very depth of human guile. Miss Carrie did not venture upon a remark, but there was a gleam of amusement in her eyes which puzzled her lover.

Abe was in good spirits this morning. It may have been the sunshine, or it may have been the rapid rise of shares in the Conemara, which lightened his heart. I am inclined to think, however, that it was referable to neither of these causes. Simple as he was, the scene which he had witnessed the night before could only lead to one conclusion. He pictured himself walking as wildly down the valley under similar circumstances, and his heart was touched with pity for his rival. He felt very certain that the ill-omened face of Mr. Thomas Ferguson of Rochdale Ferry would never more be seen within the walls of Azalea Villa. Then why did she[Pg 190] refuse him? He was handsome, he was fairly rich. Could it——? no, it couldn’t; of course it couldn’t; how could it! The idea was ridiculous—so very ridiculous that it had fermented in the young man’s brain all night, and that he could do nothing but ponder over it in the morning, and cherish it in his perturbed bosom.

They passed down the red pathway together, and along by the river’s bank. Abe had relapsed into his normal condition of taciturnity. He had made one gallant effort to hold forth upon the subject of ferns, stimulated by the basket which he held in his hand, but the theme was not a thrilling one, and after a spasmodic flicker he had abandoned the attempt. While coming along he had been full of racy anecdotes and humorous observations. He had rehearsed innumerable remarks which were to be poured into Miss Sinclair’s appreciative ear. But now his brain seemed of a sudden to have become a vacuum, and utterly devoid of any idea save an insane and overpowering impulse to comment upon the heat of the sun. No astronomer who ever reckoned a parallax was so entirely absorbed in the condition of the celestial bodies as honest Bones while he trudged along by the slow-flowing Australian river.

Suddenly his conversation with his partner came back into his mind. What was it Boss had said upon the subject? “Tell her how they live at the mines.” He revolved it in his brain. It seemed a curious thing to talk about; but Boss had said it, and Boss was always right. He would take the plunge; so, with a premonitory hem he blurted out:

He could not see what effect this communication[Pg 191] had upon his companion. He was too tall to be able to peer under the little straw bonnet. She did not answer. He would try again.

Even this failed to arouse any enthusiasm. In fact she seemed to be laughing. Boss was evidently wrong. The young man was in despair. The sight of a ruined hut beside the pathway conjured up a fresh idea. He grasped at it as a drowning man to a straw.

“Three star brandy,” said Abe, decisively. “I used to come over of a night when he was bad and sit by him. Poor chap! he had a wife and two children in Putney. He’d rave, and call me Polly, by the hour. He was cleaned out, hadn’t a red cent; but the boys collected rough gold enough to see him through. He’s buried there in that shaft; that was his claim, so we just dropped him down it an’ filled it up. Put down his pick too, an’ a spade an’ a bucket, so’s he’d feel kinder perky and at home.”

“Well, brandy kills many; but there’s more get’s dropped—shot, you know.”

“I don’t mean that. Do many men die alone and miserable down there, with no one to care for them?” and she pointed to the cluster of houses beneath them. “Is there anyone dying now? It is awful to think of.”

“I wish you wouldn’t use so much slang, Mr.[Pg 192] Durton,” said Carrie, looking up at him reprovingly out of her violet eyes. It was strange what an air of proprietorship this young lady was gradually assuming toward her gigantic companion. “You know it isn’t polite. You should get a dictionary and learn the proper words.”

“Ah, that’s it!” said Bones, apologetically. “It’s gettin’ your hand on the proper one. When you’ve not got a steam drill, you’ve got to put up with a pick.”

“Yes, but it’s easy if you really try. You could say that a man was ’dying,’ or ’moribund,’ if you like.”

“That’s it,” said the miner, enthusiastically. “’Moribund’! That’s a word. Why, you could lay over Boss Morgan in the matter of words. ’Moribund!’ There’s some sound about that.”

“It’s not the sound you must think of, but whether it will express your meaning. Seriously, Mr. Durton, if anyone should be ill in the camp you must let me know. I can nurse, and I might be of use. You will, won’t you?”

Abe readily acquiesced, and relapsed into silence as he pondered over the possibility of inoculating himself with some long and tedious disease. There was a mad dog reported from Buckhurst. Perhaps something might be done with that.

“And now I must say good-morning,” said Carrie, as they came to the spot where a crooked pathway branched off from the track and wound up to Azalea Villa. “Thank you ever so much for escorting me.”

In vain Abe pleaded for the additional hundred yards, and adduced the overwhelming weight of the diminutive basket as a cogent reason. The young lady was inexorable. She had taken him too far[Pg 193] out of his way already. She was ashamed of herself; she wouldn’t hear of it.

So poor Bones departed in a mixture of many opposite feelings. He had interested her. She had spoken kindly to him. But then she had sent him away before there was any necessity; she couldn’t care much about him if she would do that. I think he might have felt a little more cheerful, however, had he seen Miss Carrie Sinclair as she watched his retiring figure from the garden-gate with a loving look upon her saucy face, and a mischievous smile at his bent head and desponding appearance.

The Colonial Bar was the favorite haunt of the inhabitants of Harvey’s Sluice in their hours of relaxation. There had been a fierce competition between it and the rival establishment termed the Grocery, which, in spite of its innocent appellation, aspired also to dispense spirituous refreshments. The importation of chairs into the latter had led to the appearance of a settee in the former. Spittoons appeared in the Grocery against a picture in the Bar, and, as the frequenters expressed it, the honors were even. When, however, the Grocery led a window-curtain, and its opponent returned a snuggery and a mirror, the game was declared to be in favor of the latter, and Harvey’s Sluice showed its sense of the spirit of the proprietor by withdrawing their custom from his opponent.

Though every man was at liberty to swagger into the Bar itself, and bask in the shimmer of its many colored bottles, there was a general feeling that the snuggery, or special apartment, should be reserved for the use of the more prominent citizens. It was in this room that committees met, that opulent companies were conceived and born, and that inquests were generally held. The latter, I regret to state,[Pg 194] was, in 1861, a pretty frequent ceremony at the Sluice; and the findings of the coroner were sometimes characterized by a fine breezy originality. Witness when Bully Burke, a notorious desperado, was shot down by a quiet young medical man, and a sympathetic jury brought in that “the deceased had met his death in an ill-advised attempt to stop a pistol-ball while in motion,” a verdict which was looked upon as a triumph of jurisprudence in the camp, as simultaneously exonerating the culprit, and adhering to the rigid and undeniable truth.

On this particular evening there was an assemblage of notabilities in the snuggery, though no such pathological ceremony had called them together. Many changes had occurred of late which merited discussion; and it was in this chamber, gorgeous in all the effete luxury of the mirror and settee, that Harvey Sluice was wont to exchange ideas. The recent cleansing of the population was still causing some ferment in men’s minds. Then there was Miss Sinclair and her movements to be commented on, and the paying lead in the Conemara, and the recent rumors of bushrangers. It was no wonder that the leading men in the township had come together in the Colonial Bar.

The rangers were the present subject of discussion. For some few days rumors of their presence had been flying about, and an uneasy feeling had pervaded the colony. Physical fear was a thing little known in Harvey’s Sluice. The miners would have turned out to hunt down the desperadoes with as much zest as if they had been so many kangaroos. It was the presence of a large quantity of gold in the town which caused anxiety. It was felt that the fruits of their labor must be secured at any cost. Messages had been sent over to Buckhurst for as[Pg 195] many troopers as could be spared, and in the mean time the main street of the Sluice was paraded at night by volunteer sentinels.

A fresh impetus had been given to the panic by the report brought in to-day by Jim Struggles. Jim was of an ambitious and aspiring turn of mind, and after gazing in silent disgust at his last week’s clean up, he had metaphorically shaken the clay of Harvey’s Sluice from his feet, and had started off into the woods with the intention of prospecting round until he could hit upon some likely piece of ground for himself. Jim’s story was that he was sitting upon a fallen trunk eating his mid-day damper and rusty bacon, when his trained ear had caught the clink of horses’ hoofs. He had hardly time to take the precaution of rolling off the tree and crouching down behind it, before a troop of men came riding down through the bush, and passed within a stone-throw of him.

“There was Bill Smeaton and Murphy Duff,” said Struggles, naming two notorious ruffians; “and there was three more that I couldn’t rightly see. And they took the trail to the right, and looked like business all over, with their guns in their hands.”

Jim was submitted to a searching cross-examination that evening; but nothing could shake his testimony or throw a further light upon what he had seen. He told the story several times and at long intervals; and though there might be a pleasing variety in the minor incidents, the main facts were always identically the same. The matter began to look serious.

There were a few, however, who were loudly sceptical as to the existence of the rangers, and the most prominent of these was a young man who was[Pg 196] perched on a barrel in the centre of the room, and was evidently one of the leading spirits in the community. We have already seen that dark curling hair, lack-lustre eye, and thin cruel lip in the person of Black Tom Ferguson, the rejected suitor of Miss Sinclair. He was easily distinguishable from the rest of the party by a tweed coat, and other symptoms of effeminacy in his dress, which might have brought him into disrepute had he not, like Abe Durton’s partner, early established the reputation of being a quietly desperate man. On the present occasion he seemed somewhat under the influence of liquor, a rare occurrence with him, and probably to be ascribed to his recent disappointment. He was almost fierce in his denunciation of Jim Struggles and his story.

“It’s always the same,” he said; “if a man meets a few travellers in the bush, he’s bound to come back raving about rangers. If they’d seen Struggles there, they would have gone off with a long yarn about a ranger crouching behind a tree. As to recognizing people riding fast among tree-trunks—it is an impossibility.”

Struggles, however, stoutly maintained his original assertion, and all the sarcasms and arguments of his opponent were thrown away upon his stolid complacency. It was noticed that Ferguson seemed unaccountably put out about the whole matter. Something seemed to be on his mind, too; for occasionally he would spring off his perch and pace up and down the room with an abstracted and very forbidding look upon his swarthy face. It was a relief to everyone when suddenly catching up his hat, and wishing the company a curt “Good-night,” he walked off through the bar, and into the street beyond.

“He can’t be afeard of the rangers, surely,” said Joe Shamus, another man of consequence, and principal shareholder of the El Dorado.

“No, he’s not the man to be afraid,” answered another. “There’s something queer about him the last day or two. He’s been long trips in the woods without any tools. They do say that the assayer’s daughter has chucked him over.”

“Quite right too. A darned sight too good for him,” remarked several voices.

“It’s odds but he has another try,” said Shamus. “He’s a hard man to beat when he’s set his mind on a thing.”

“Abe Durton’s the horse to win,” remarked Houlahan, a little bearded Irishman. “It’s sivin to four I’d be willin’ to lay on him.”

“And you’d be afther losing your money, a-vich,” said a young man with a laugh. “She’ll want more brains than ever Bones had in his skull, you bet.”

“I’ve seen him,” said the young miner. “He came round all through the camp asking for a dictionary—wanted to write a letter likely.”

“I saw him readin’ it,” said Shamus. “He came over to me and told me he’d struck something good at the first show. Showed me a word about as long as your arm—’abdicate,’ or something.”

“Well, he’s about made his pile. He holds a hundred feet of the Conemara, and the shares go up every hour. If he’d sell out he’d be about fit to go home.”

“Guess he wants to take somebody home with[Pg 198] him,” said another. “Old Joshua wouldn’t object, seein’ that the money is there.”

I think it has been already recorded in this narrative that Jim Struggles, the wandering prospector, had gained the reputation of being the wit of the camp. It was not only in airy badinage, but in the conception and execution of more pretentious practical pleasantries that Jim had earned his reputation. His adventure in the morning had caused a certain stagnation in his usual flow of humor; but the company and his potations were gradually restoring him to a more cheerful state of mind. He had been brooding in silence over some idea since the departure of Ferguson, and he now proceeded to evolve it to his expectant companions.

“Well, I’ll tell you now. It’s the first o’ April. I’ve got a calendar in the hut as says so.”

“Well, don’t you see, it’s All Fools’ day. Couldn’t we fix up some little joke on some one, eh? Couldn’t we get a laugh out of it? Now there’s old Bones, for instance; he’ll never smell a rat. Couldn’t we send him off somewhere and watch him go maybe? We’d have something to chaff him on for a month to come, eh?”

There was a general murmur of assent. A joke, however poor, was always welcome to the Sluice. The broader the point, the more thoroughly was it appreciated. There was no morbid delicacy of feeling in the gulches.

Jim Struggles was buried in thought for a moment.[Pg 199] Then an unhallowed inspiration seemed to come over him, and he laughed uproariously, rubbing his hands between his knees in the excess of his delight.

“See here, boys. There’s Miss Sinclair. You was saying as Abe’s gone on her. She don’t fancy him much you think. Suppose we write him a note—send it him to-night, you know.”

“Well, pretend the note is from her, d’ye see? Put her name at the bottom. Let on as she wants him to come up an’ meet her in the garden at twelve. He’s bound to go. He’ll think she wants to go off with him. It’ll be the biggest thing played this year.”

There was a roar of laughter. The idea conjured up of honest Bones mooning about in the garden, and of old Joshua coming out to remonstrate with a double-barrelled shot-gun, was irresistibly comic. The plan was approved of unanimously.

“Here’s pencil and here’s paper,” said the humorist. “Who’s goin’ to write the letter?”

“I don’t know how she’d put it,” said Jim, scratching his head in great perplexity. “However, Bones will never know the differ. How will this do? ’Dear old man. Come to the garden at twelve to-night, else I’ll never speak to you again,’ eh?”

“No, that’s not the style,” said the young miner. “Mind, she’s a lass of eddication. She’d put it kinder flowery and soft.”

“This is the sort of thing,” said the miner, moistening the point of it in his mouth. “’When the moon is in the sky—’”

“’And the stars a-shinin’ bright, meet, O meet me, Adolphus, by the garden-gate at twelve.’”

“That’s how the poetry comes in,” said the miner. “It’s kinder fanciful, d’ye see. Sounds a darned sight better than Abe. Trust him for guessing who she means. I’ll sign it Carrie. There!”

This epistle was gravely passed round the room from hand to hand, and reverentially gazed upon as being a remarkable production of the human brain. It was then folded up and committed to the care of a small boy, who was solemnly charged under dire threats to deliver it at the shanty, and to make off before any awkward questions were asked him. It was only after he had disappeared in the darkness that some slight compunction visited one or two of the company.

However, these objections were overruled by the majority, and disappeared entirely upon the appearance of a second jorum of whiskey. The matter had almost been forgotten by the time that Abe had received his note, and was spelling it out with a palpitating heart under the light of his solitary candle.

That night has long been remembered in Harvey’s Sluice. A fitful breeze was sweeping down from the distant mountains, moaning and sighing among the deserted claims. Dark clouds were hurrying across the moon, one moment throwing a shadow over the[Pg 201] landscape, and the next allowing the silvery radiance to shine down, cold and clear upon the little valley, and bathe in a weird mysterious light the great stretch of bushland on either side of it. A great loneliness seemed to rest on the face of Nature. Men remarked afterward on the strange eerie atmosphere which hung over the little town.

It was in the darkness that Abe Durton sallied out from his little shanty. His partner, Boss Morgan, was still absent in the bush, so that beyond the ever-watchful Blinky there was no living being to observe his movements. A feeling of mild surprise filled his simple soul that his angel’s delicate fingers could have formed those great straggling hieroglyphics; however, there was the name at the foot, and that was enough for him. She wanted him, no matter for what, and with a heart as pure and as heroic as any knight-errant, this rough miner went forth at the summons of his love.

He groped his way up the steep winding track which led to Azalea Villa. There was a little clump of small trees and shrubs about fifty yards from the entrance of the garden. Abe stopped for a moment when he had reached them in order to collect himself. It was hardly twelve yet, so that he had a few minutes to spare. He stood under their dark canopy peering at the white house vaguely outlined in front of him. A plain enough little dwelling-place to any prosaic mortal, but girt with reverence and awe in the eyes of the lover.

The miner paused under the shade of the trees, and then moved on to the garden-gate. There was no one there. He was evidently rather early. The moon was shining brightly now, and the country round was as clear as day. Abe looked past the little villa at the road which ran like a white winding[Pg 202] streak over the brow of the hill. A watcher behind could have seen his square athletic figure standing out sharp and clear. Then he gave a start as if he had been shot, and staggered up against the little gate beside him.

He had seen something which caused even his sunburned face to become a shade paler as he thought of the girl so near him. Just at the bend of the road, not two hundred yards away, he saw a dark moving mass coming round the curve, and lost in the shadow of the hill. It was but for a moment; yet in that moment the quick perception of the practised woodman had realized the whole situation. It was a band of horsemen bound for the villa; and what horsemen would ride so by night save the terror of the woodlands—the dreaded rangers of the bush?

It is true that on ordinary occasions Abe was as sluggish in his intellect as he was heavy in his movements. In the hour of danger, however, he was as remarkable for cool deliberation as for prompt and decisive action. As he advanced up the garden he rapidly reckoned up the chances against him. There were half a dozen of the assailants at the most moderate computation, all desperate and fearless men. The question was whether he could keep them at bay for a short time and prevent their forcing a passage into the house. We have already mentioned that sentinels had been placed in the main street of the town. Abe reckoned that help would be at hand within ten minutes of the firing of the first shot.

Were he inside the house he could confidently reckon on holding his own for a longer period than that. Before he could rouse the sleepers and gain admission, however, the rangers would be upon him.[Pg 203] He must content himself with doing his utmost. At any rate he would show Carrie that if he could not talk to her he could at least die for her. The thought gave him quite a glow of pleasure, as he crept under the shadow of the house. He cocked his revolver. Experience had taught him the advantage of the first shot.

The road along which the rangers were coming ended at a wooden gate opening into the upper part of the assayer’s little garden. This gate had a high acacia hedge on either side of it, and opened into a short walk also lined by impassable thorny walls. Abe knew the place well. One resolute man might, he thought, hold the passage for a few minutes until the assailants broke through elsewhere and took him in the rear. At any rate, it was his best chance. He passed the front door, but forbore to give any alarm. Sinclair was an elderly man, and would be of little assistance in such a desperate struggle as was before him, and the appearance of lights in the house would warn the rangers of the resistance awaiting them. O for his partner the Boss, for Chicago Bill, for any one of twenty gallant men who would have come at his call and stood by him in such a quarrel! He turned into the narrow pathway. There was the well-remembered wooden gate; and there, perched upon the gate, languidly swinging his legs backward and forward, and peering down the road in front of him, was Mr. John Morgan, the very man for whom Abe had been longing from the bottom of his heart.

There was short time for explanations. A few hurried words announced that the Boss, returning from his little tour, had come across the rangers riding on their mission of darkness, and overhearing their destination, had managed, by hard running and[Pg 204] knowledge of the country, to arrive before them. “No time to alarm any one,” he explained, still panting from his exertions; “must stop them ourselves—not come for swag—come for your girl. Only over our bodies, Bones;” and with these few broken words the strangely assorted friends shook hands and looked lovingly into each other’s eyes, while the tramp of the horses came down to them on the fragrant breeze of the woods.

There were six rangers in all. One who appeared to be leader rode in front, while the others followed in a body. They flung themselves off their horses when they were opposite the house, and after a few muttered words from their captain, tethered the animals to a small tree, and walked confidently toward the gate.

Boss Morgan and Abe were crouching down under the shadow of the hedge, at the extreme end of the narrow passage. They were invisible to the rangers, who evidently reckoned on meeting little resistance in this isolated house. As the first man came forward and half turned to give some order to his comrades, both the friends recognized the stern profile and heavy mustache of Black Ferguson, the rejected suitor of Miss Carrie Sinclair. Honest Abe made a mental vow that he at least should never reach the door alive.

The ruffian stepped up to the gate and put his hand upon the latch. He started as a stentorian “Stand back!” came thundering out from among the bushes. In war, as in love, the miner was a man of few words.

“There’s no road this way,” explained another voice, with an infinite sadness and gentleness about it which was characteristic of its owner when the devil was rampant in his soul. The ranger recognized[Pg 205] it. He remembered the soft languid address which he had listened to in the billiard-room of the Buckhurst Arms, and which had wound up by the mild orator putting his back against the door, drawing a derringer, and asking to see the sharper who would dare to force a passage. “It’s that infernal fool Durton,” he said, “and his white-faced friend.”

Both were well-known names in the country round. But the rangers were reckless and desperate men. They drew up to the gate in a body.

“Clear out of that!” said their leader, in a grim whisper; “you can’t save the girl. Go off with whole skins while you have the chance.”

The gate was flung open and the party fired a straggling volley, and made a fierce rush toward the gravelled walk.

The revolvers cracked merrily in the silence of the night from the bushes at the other end. It was hard to aim with precision in the darkness. The second man sprang convulsively into the air, and fell upon his face with his arms extended, writhing horribly in the moonlight. The third was grazed in the leg and stopped. The others stopped out of sympathy. After all, the girl was not for them, and their heart was hardly in the work. Their captain rushed madly on, like a valiant blackguard as he was, but was met by a crashing blow from the butt of Abe Durton’s pistol, delivered with a fierce energy which sent him reeling back among his comrades with the blood streaming from his shattered jaw, and his capacity for cursing cut short at the very moment when he needed to draw upon it most.

However, they had no intention of going yet. A[Pg 206] few minutes must elapse, they knew, before Harvey’s Sluice could be upon them. There was still time to force the door if they could succeed in mastering the defenders. What Abe had feared came to pass. Black Ferguson knew the ground as well as he did. He ran rapidly along the hedge, and the five crashed through it where there was some appearance of a gap. The two friends glanced at each other. Their flank was turned. They stood up like men who knew their fate and did not fear to meet it.

There was a wild medley of dark figures in the moonlight, and a ringing cheer from well-known voices. The humorists of Harvey’s Sluice had found something even more practical than the joke which they had come to witness. The partners saw the faces of friends beside them—Shamus, Struggles, McCoy. There was a desperate rally, a sweeping fiery rush, a cloud of smoke, with pistol-shots and fierce oaths ringing out of it, and when it lifted, a single dark shadow flying for dear life to the shelter of the broken hedge was the only ranger upon his feet within the little garden. But there was no sound of triumph among the victors; a strange hush had come over them, and a murmur as of grief—for there, lying across the threshold which he had fought so gallantly to defend, lay poor Abe, the loyal and simple-hearted, breathing heavily with a bullet through his lungs.

He was carried inside with all the rough tenderness of the mines. There were men there, I think, who would have borne his hurt to have had the love of that white girlish figure, which bent over the blood-stained bed and whispered so softly and so tenderly in his ear. Her voice seemed to rouse him. He opened his dreamy blue eyes and looked about him. They rested on her face.

“Played out,” he murmured; “pardon, Carrie, morib——” and with a faint smile he sank back upon the pillow.

However, Abe failed for once to be as good as his word. His hardy constitution asserted itself, and he shook off what might in a weaker man have proved a deadly wound. Whether it was the balmy air of the woodlands which came sweeping over a thousand miles of forest into the sick man’s room, or whether it was the little nurse who tended him so gently, certain it is that within two months we heard that he had realized his shares in the Conemara, and gone from Harvey’s Sluice and the little shanty upon the hill forever.

I had the advantage, a short time afterward, of seeing an extract from the letter of a young lady named Amelia, to whom we have made a casual allusion in the course of our narrative. We have already broken the privacy of one feminine epistle, so we shall have fewer scruples in glancing at another. “I was bridesmaid,” she remarks, “and Carrie looked charming” (underlined) “in the vail and orange blossoms. Such a man, he is, twice as big as your Jack, and he was so funny, and blushed, and dropped the prayer-book. And when they asked the question you could have heard him roar ’I do!’ at the other end of George Street. His best man was a darling” (twice underlined). “So quiet and handsome and nice. Too gentle to take care of himself among those rough men, I am sure.” I think it quite possible that in the fulness of time Miss Amelia managed to take upon herself the care of our old friend Mr. Jack Morgan, commonly known as the Boss.

A tree is still pointed out at the bend as Ferguson’s gum-tree. There is no need to enter into unsavory[Pg 208] details. Justice is short and sharp in primitive colonies, and the dwellers in Harvey’s Sluice were a serious and practical race.

It is still the custom for a select party to meet on a Saturday evening in the snuggery of the Colonial Bar. On such occasions, if there be a stranger or guest to be entertained, the same solemn ceremony is always observed. Glasses are charged in silence; there is a tapping of the same upon the table, and then, with a deprecating cough, Jim Struggles comes forward and tells the tale of the April joke, and of what came of it. There is generally conceded to be something very artistic in the way in which he breaks off suddenly at the close of his narrative, by waving his bumper in the air with “An’ here’s to Mr. and Mrs. Bones. God bless ’em!” a sentiment in which the stranger, if he be a prudent man, will most cordially acquiesce.

I am sure that Nature never intended me to be a self-made man. There are times when I can hardly bring myself to realize that twenty years of my life were spent behind the counter of a grocer’s shop in the East End of London, and that it was through such an avenue that I reached a wealthy independence and the possession of Goresthorpe Grange. My habits are Conservative, and my tastes refined and aristocratic. I have a soul which spurns the vulgar herd. Our family, the D’Odds, date back to a prehistoric era, as is to be inferred from the fact that their advent into British history is not commented on by any trustworthy historian. Some instinct tells me that the blood of a Crusader runs in my veins. Even now, after the lapse of so many years, such exclamations as “By’r Lady!” rise naturally to my lips, and I feel that, should circumstances require it, I am capable of rising in my stirrups and dealing an infidel a blow—say with a mace—which would considerably astonish him.

Goresthorpe Grange is a feudal mansion—or so it was termed in the advertisement which originally brought it under my notice. Its right to this adjective had a most remarkable effect upon its price, and the advantages gained may possibly be more sentimental than real. Still, it is soothing to me to know that I have slits in my staircase through which I can[Pg 210] discharge arrows; and there is a sense of power in the fact of possessing a complicated apparatus by means of which I am enabled to pour molten lead upon the head of the casual visitor. These things chime in with my peculiar humor, and I do not grudge to pay for them. I am proud of my battlements and of the circular uncovered sewer which girds me round. I am proud of my portcullis and donjon and keep. There is but one thing wanting to round off the mediævalism of my abode, and to render it symmetrically and completely antique. Goresthorpe Grange is not provided with a ghost.

Any man with old-fashioned tastes and ideas as to how such establishments should be conducted, would have been disappointed at the omission. In my case it was particularly unfortunate. From my childhood I had been an earnest student of the supernatural, and a firm believer in it. I have revelled in ghostly literature until there is hardly a tale bearing upon the subject which I have not perused. I learned the German language for the sole purpose of mastering a book upon demonology. When an infant I have secreted myself in dark rooms in the hope of seeing some of those bogies with which my nurse used to threaten me; and the same feeling is as strong in me now as then. It was a proud moment when I felt that a ghost was one of the luxuries which my money might command.

It is true that there was no mention of an apparition in the advertisement. On reviewing the mildewed walls, however, and the shadowy corridors, I had taken it for granted that there was such a thing on the premises. As the presence of a kennel presupposes that of a dog, so I imagined that it was impossible that such desirable quarters should be untenanted by one or more restless shades. Good[Pg 211] heavens, what can the noble family from whom I purchased it have been doing during these hundreds of years! Was there no member of it spirited enough to make away with his sweetheart, or take some other steps calculated to establish a hereditary spectre? Even now I can hardly write with patience upon the subject.

For a long time I hoped against hope. Never did rat squeak behind the wainscot, or rain drip upon the attic floor, without a wild thrill shooting through me as I thought that at last I had come upon traces of some unquiet soul. I felt no touch of fear upon these occasions. If it occurred in the night-time, I would send Mrs. D’Odd—who is a strong-minded woman—to investigate the matter, while I covered up my head with the bedclothes and indulged in an ecstasy of expectation. Alas, the result was always the same! The suspicious sound would be traced to some cause so absurdly natural and commonplace that the most fervid imagination could not clothe it with any of the glamour of romance.

I might have reconciled myself to this state of things, had it not been for Jorrocks of Havistock Farm. Jorrocks is a coarse, burly, matter-of-fact fellow, whom I only happened to know through the accidental circumstance of his fields adjoining my demesne. Yet this man, though utterly devoid of all appreciation of archæological unities, is in possession of a well-authenticated and undeniable spectre. Its existence only dates back, I believe, to the reign of the Second George, when a young lady cut her throat upon hearing of the death of her lover at the battle of Dettingen. Still, even that gives the house an air of respectability, especially when coupled with blood stains upon the floor. Jorrocks is densely unconscious of his good fortune; and his language[Pg 212] when he reverts to the apparition is painful to listen to. He little dreams how I covet everyone of those moans and nocturnal wails which he describes with unnecessary objurgation. Things are indeed coming to a pretty pass when democratic spectres are allowed to desert the landed proprietors and annul every social distinction by taking refuge in the houses of the great unrecognized.

I have a large amount of perseverance. Nothing else could have raised me into my rightful sphere, considering the uncongenial atmosphere in which I spent the earlier part of my life. I felt now that a ghost must be secured, but how to set about securing one was more than either Mrs. D’Odd or myself was able to determine. My reading taught me that such phenomena are usually the outcome of crime. What crime was to be done, then, and who was to do it? A wild idea entered my mind that Watkins, the house-steward, might be prevailed upon—for a consideration—to immolate himself or someone else in the interests of the establishment. I put the matter to him in a half-jesting manner; but it did not seem to strike him in a favorable light. The other servants sympathized with him in his opinion—at least, I cannot account in any other way for their having left the house in a body the same afternoon.

“My dear,” Mrs. D’Odd remarked to me one day after dinner, as I sat moodily sipping a cup of sack—I love the good old names—“my dear, that odious ghost of Jorrocks’ has been gibbering again.”

Mrs. D’Odd struck a few chords on her virginal and looked thoughtfully into the fire.

“I’ll tell you what it is, Argentine,” she said at last, using the pet name which we usually substituted[Pg 213] for Silas, “we must have a ghost sent down from London.”

“How can you be so idiotic, Matilda?” I remarked, severely. “Who could get us such a thing?”

Now, this cousin of Matilda’s was rather a sore subject between us. He was a rakish, clever young fellow, who had tried his hand at many things, but wanted perseverance to succeed at any. He was, at that time, in chambers in London, professing to be a general agent, and really living, to a great extent, upon his wits. Matilda managed so that most of our business should pass through his hands, which certainly saved me a great deal of trouble; but I found that Jack’s commission was generally considerably larger than all the other items of the bill put together. It was this fact which made me feel inclined to rebel against any further negotiations with the young gentleman.

“O yes, he could,” insisted Mrs. D., seeing the look of disapprobation upon my face. “You remember how well he managed that business about the crest?”

“It was only a resuscitation of the old family coat-of-arms, my dear,” I protested.

Matilda smiled in an irritating manner. “There was a resuscitation of the family portraits, too, dear,” she remarked. “You must allow that Jack selected them very judiciously.”

I thought of the long line of faces which adorned the walls of my banqueting-hall, from the burly Norman robber, through every gradation of casque, plume, and ruff, to the sombre Chesterfieldian individual who appears to have staggered against a pillar in his agony at the return of a maiden MS. which[Pg 214] he grips convulsively in his right hand. I was fain to confess that in that instance he had done his work well, and that it was only fair to give him an order—with the usual commission—for a family spectre, should such a thing be attainable.

It is one of my maxims to act promptly when once my mind is made up. Noon of the next day found me ascending the spiral stone staircase which leads to Mr. Brocket’s chambers, and admiring the succession of arrows and fingers upon the whitewashed wall, all indicating the direction of that gentleman’s sanctum. As it happened, artificial aids of the sort were entirely unnecessary, as an animated flap-dance overhead could proceed from no other quarter, though it was replaced by a deathly silence as I groped my way up the stair. The door was opened by a youth evidently astounded at the appearance of a client, and I was ushered into the presence of my young friend, who was writing furiously in a large ledger—upside down, as I afterward discovered.

“Spirits you mean!” shouted my wife’s cousin, plunging his hand into the waste-paper basket and producing a bottle with the celerity of a conjuring trick. “Let’s have a drink!”

I held up my hand as a mute appeal against such a proceeding so early in the day; but on lowering it again I found that I had almost involuntarily closed my fingers round the tumbler which my adviser had pressed upon me. I drank the contents hastily off, lest anyone should come in upon us and set me down as a toper. After all there was something very amusing about the young fellow’s eccentricities.

“Not spirits,” I explained, smilingly; “an apparition—a ghost. If such a thing is to be had, I should be very willing to negotiate.”

“A ghost for Goresthorpe Grange?” inquired Mr. Brocket, with as much coolness as if I had asked for a drawing-room suite.

“Easiest thing in the world,” said my companion, filling up my glass again in spite of my remonstrance. “Let us see!” Here he took down a large red note-book, with all the letters of the alphabet in a fringe down the edge. “A ghost you said, didn’t you? That’s G. G—gems—gimlets—gas-pipes—gauntlets—guns—galleys. Ah, here we are. Ghosts. Volume nine, section six, page forty-one. Excuse me!” And Jack ran up a ladder and began rummaging among a pile of ledgers on a high shelf. I felt half inclined to empty my glass into the spittoon when his back was turned; but on second thoughts I disposed of it in a legitimate way.

“Here it is!” cried my London agent, jumping off the ladder with a crash, and depositing an enormous volume of manuscript upon the table. “I have all these things tabulated, so that I may lay my hands upon them in a moment. It’s all right—it’s quite weak” (here he filled our glasses again). “What were we looking up, again?”

“Of course; page 41. Here we are. ’J. H. Fowler & Son, Dunkel Street, suppliers of mediums to the nobility and gentry; charms sold—love philtres—mummies—horoscopes cast.’ Nothing in your line there, I suppose.

“’Frederick Tabb,’” continued my wife’s cousin, “’sole channel of communication between the living[Pg 216] and the dead. Proprietor of the spirits of Byron, Kirke White, Grimaldi, Tom Cribb, and Inigo Jones.’ That’s about the figure!”

“Nothing romantic enough there,” I objected. “Good heavens! Fancy a ghost with a black eye and a handkerchief tied round its waist, or turning summersaults, and saying, ’How are you to-morrow?’” The very idea made me so warm that I emptied my glass and filled it again.

“Here is another,” said my companion, “’Christopher McCarthy; bi-weekly séances—attended by all the eminent spirits of ancient and modern times. Nativities—charms—abracadabras, messages from the dead.’ He might be able to help us. However, I shall have a hunt round myself to-morrow, and see some of these fellows. I know their haunts, and it’s odd if I can’t pick up something cheap. So there’s an end of business,” he concluded, hurling the ledger into the corner, “and now we’ll have something to drink.”

We had several things to drink—so many that my inventive faculties were dulled next morning, and I had some little difficulty in explaining to Mrs. D’Odd why it was that I hung my boots and spectacles upon a peg along with my other garments before retiring to rest. The new hopes excited by the confident manner in which my agent had undertaken the commission, caused me to rise superior to alcoholic reaction, and I paced about the rambling corridors and old-fashioned rooms, picturing to myself the appearance of my expected acquisition, and deciding what part of the building would harmonize best with its presence. After much consideration, I pitched upon the banqueting-hall as being, on the whole, most suitable for its reception. It was a long low room, hung round with valuable tapestry and[Pg 217] interesting relics of the old family to whom it had belonged. Coats of mail and implements of war glimmered fitfully as the light of the fire played over them, and the wind crept under the door, moving the hangings to and fro with a ghastly rustling. At one end there was the raised dais, on which in ancient times the host and his guests used to spread their table, while a descent of a couple of steps led to the lower part of the hall, where the vassals and retainers held wassail. The floor was uncovered by any sort of carpet, but a layer of rushes had been scattered over it by my direction. In the whole room there was nothing to remind one of the nineteenth century; except, indeed, my own solid silver plate, stamped with the resuscitated family arms, which was laid out upon an oak table in the centre. This, I determined, should be the haunted room, supposing my wife’s cousin to succeed in his negotiation with the spirit-mongers. There was nothing for it now but to wait patiently until I heard some news of the result of his inquiries.

A letter came in the course of a few days, which, if it was short, was at least encouraging. It was scribbled in pencil on the back of a playbill, and sealed apparently with a tobacco-stopper. “Am on the track,” it said. “Nothing of the sort to be had from any professional spiritualist, but picked up a fellow in a pub yesterday who says he can manage it for you. Will send him down unless you wire to the contrary. Abrahams is his name, and he has done one or two of these jobs before.” The letter wound up with some incoherent allusions to a check, and was signed by my affectionate cousin, John Brocket.

I need hardly say that I did not wire, but awaited the arrival of Mr. Abrahams with all impatience.[Pg 218] In spite of my belief in the supernatural, I could scarcely credit the fact that any mortal could have such a command over the spirit-world as to deal in them and barter them against mere earthly gold. Still, I had Jack’s word for it that such a trade existed; and here was a gentleman with a Judaical name ready to demonstrate it by proof positive. How vulgar and commonplace Jorrocks’ eighteenth-century ghost would appear should I succeed in securing a real mediæval apparition! I almost thought that one had been sent down in advance, for, as I walked round the moat that night before retiring to rest, I came upon a dark figure engaged in surveying the machinery of my portcullis and drawbridge. His start of surprise, however, and the manner in which he hurried off into the darkness, speedily convinced me of his earthly origin, and I put him down as some admirer of one of my female retainers mourning over the muddy Hellespont which divided him from his love. Whoever he may have been, he disappeared and did not return, though I loitered about for some time in the hope of catching a glimpse of him and exercising my feudal rights upon his person.

Jack Brocket was as good as his word. The shades of another evening were beginning to darken round Goresthorpe Grange, when a peal at the outer bell, and the sound of a fly pulling up, announced the arrival of Mr. Abrahams. I hurried down to meet him, half expecting to see a choice assortment of ghosts crowding in at his rear. Instead, however, of being the sallow-faced, melancholy-eyed man that I had pictured to myself, the ghost-dealer was a sturdy little podgy fellow, with a pair of wonderfully keen sparkling eyes and a mouth which was constantly stretched in a good-humored, if somewhat[Pg 219] artificial, grin. His sole stock-in-trade seemed to consist of a small leather bag jealously locked and strapped, which emitted a metallic chink upon being placed on the stone flags of the hall.

“And ’ow are you, sir?” he asked, wringing my hand with the utmost effusion. “And the missus, ’ow is she? And all the others—’ow’s all their ’ealth?”

I intimated that we were all as well as could reasonably be expected, but Mr. Abrahams happened to catch a glimpse of Mrs. D’Odd in the distance, and at once plunged at her with another string of inquiries as to her health, delivered so volubly and with such an intense earnestness, that I half expected to see him terminate his cross-examination by feeling her pulse and demanding a sight of her tongue. All this time his little eyes rolled round and round, shifting perpetually from the floor to the ceiling, and from the ceiling to the walls, taking in apparently every article of furniture in a single comprehensive glance.

Having satisfied himself that neither of us was in a pathological condition, Mr. Abrahams suffered me to lead him upstairs, where a repast had been laid out for him to which he did ample justice. The mysterious little bag he carried along with him, and deposited it under his chair during the meal. It was not until the table had been cleared and we were left together that he broached the matter on which he had come down.

“I hunderstand,” he remarked, puffing at a trichinopoly, “that you want my ’elp in fitting up this ’ere ’ouse with a happarition.”

I acknowledged the correctness of his surmise, while mentally wondering at those restless eyes of his, which still danced about the room as if he were making an inventory of the contents.

“And you won’t find a better man for the job, though I says it as shouldn’t,” continued my companion. “Wot did I say to the young gent wot spoke to me in the bar of the Lame Dog? ’Can you do it?’ says he. ’Try me,’ says I, ’me and my bag. Just try me.’ I couldn’t say fairer than that.”

My respect for Jack Brocket’s business capacities began to go up very considerably. He certainly seemed to have managed the matter wonderfully well. “You don’t mean to say that you carry ghosts about in bags?” I remarked, with diffidence.

Mr. Abrahams smiled a smile of superior knowledge. “You wait,” he said; “give me the right place and the right hour, with a little of the essence of Lucoptolycus”—here he produced a small bottle from his waistcoat pocket—“and you won’t find no ghost that I ain’t up to. You’ll see them yourself, and pick your own, and I can’t say fairer than that.”

As all Mr. Abrahams’ protestations of fairness were accompanied by a cunning leer and a wink from one or other of his wicked little eyes, the impression of candor was somewhat weakened.

“Ten minutes to one in the morning,” said Mr. Abrahams, with decision. “Some says midnight, but I says ten to one, when there ain’t such a crowd, and you can pick your own ghost. And now,” he continued, rising to his feet, “suppose you trot me round the premises, and let me see where you wants it; for there’s some places as attracts ’em, and some as they won’t hear of—not if there was no other place in the world.”

Mr. Abrahams inspected our corridors and chambers with a most critical and observant eye, fingering the old tapestry with the air of a connoisseur, and[Pg 221] remarking in an undertone that it would “match uncommon nice.” It was not until he reached the banqueting-hall, however, which I had myself picked out, that his admiration reached the pitch of enthusiasm. “’Ere’s the place!” he shouted, dancing, bag in hand, round the table on which my plate was lying, and looking not unlike some quaint little goblin himself. “’Ere’s the place; we won’t get nothin’ to beat this! A fine room—noble, solid, none of your electro-plate trash! That’s the way as things ought to be done, sir. Plenty of room for ’em to glide here. Send up some brandy and the box of weeds; I’ll sit here by the fire and do the preliminaries, which is more trouble than you’d think; for them ghosts carries on hawful at times, before they finds out who they’ve got to deal with. If you was in the room they’d tear you to pieces as like as not. You leave me alone to tackle them, and at half-past twelve come in, and I lay they’ll be quiet enough by then.”

Mr. Abrahams’ request struck me as a reasonable one, so I left him with his feet upon the mantelpiece, and his chair in front of the fire, fortifying himself with stimulants against his refractory visitors. From the room beneath, in which I sat with Mrs. D’Odd, I could hear that, after sitting for some time, he rose up and paced about the hall with quick impatient steps. We then heard him try the lock of the door, and afterward drag some heavy article of furniture in the direction of the window, on which, apparently, he mounted, for I heard the creaking of the rusty hinges as the diamond-paned casement folded backward, and I knew it to be situated several feet above the little man’s reach. Mrs. D’Odd says that she could distinguish his voice speaking in low and rapid whispers after this, but[Pg 222] that may have been her imagination. I confess that I began to feel more impressed than I had deemed it possible to be. There was something awesome in the thought of the solitary mortal standing by the open window and summoning in from the gloom outside the spirits of the nether world. It was with a trepidation which I could hardly disguise from Matilda that I observed that the clock was pointing to half-past twelve, and that the time had come for me to share the vigil of my visitor.

He was sitting in his old position when I entered, and there were no signs of the mysterious movements which I had overheard, though his chubby face was flushed as with recent exertion.

“Are you succeeding all right?” I asked as I came in, putting on as careless an air as possible, but glancing involuntarily round the room to see if we were alone.

“Only your help is needed to complete the matter,” said Mr. Abrahams, in a solemn voice. “You shall sit by me and partake of the essence of Lucoptolycus, which removes the scales from our earthly eyes. Whatever you may chance to see, speak not and make no movement, lest you break the spell.” His manner was subdued, and his usual cockney vulgarity had entirely disappeared. I took the chair which he indicated, and awaited the result.

My companion cleared the rushes from the floor in our neighborhood, and, going down upon his hands and knees, described a half-circle with chalk, which enclosed the fireplace and ourselves. Round the edge of this half-circle he drew several hieroglyphics, not unlike the signs of the zodiac. He then stood up and uttered a long invocation, delivered so rapidly that it sounded like a single gigantic word in some[Pg 223] uncouth guttural language. Having finished this prayer, if prayer it was, he pulled out the small bottle which he had produced before, and poured a couple of teaspoonfuls of clear transparent fluid into a phial, which he handed to me with an intimation that I should drink it.

The liquid had a faintly sweet odor, not unlike the aroma of certain sorts of apples. I hesitated a moment before applying it to my lips, but an impatient gesture from my companion overcame my scruples, and I tossed it off. The taste was not unpleasant; and, as it gave rise to no immediate effects, I leaned back in my chair and composed myself for what was to come. Mr. Abrahams seated himself beside me, and I felt that he was watching my face from time to time, while repeating some more of the invocations in which he had indulged before.

A sense of delicious warmth and languor began gradually to steal over me, partly, perhaps, from the heat of the fire, and partly from some unexplained cause. An uncontrollable impulse to sleep weighed down my eyelids, while at the same time my brain worked actively, and a hundred beautiful and pleasing ideas flitted through it. So utterly lethargic did I feel that, though I was aware that my companion put his hand over the region of my heart, as if to feel how it were beating, I did not attempt to prevent him, nor did I even ask him for the reason of his action. Everything in the room appeared to be reeling slowly round in a drowsy dance, of which I was the centre. The great elk’s head at the far end wagged solemnly backward and forward, while the massive salvers on the tables performed cotillons with the claret-cooler and the épergne. My head fell upon my breast from sheer heaviness, and I should have become unconscious[Pg 224] had I not been recalled to myself by the opening of the door at the other end of the hall.

This door led on to the raised dais, which, as I have mentioned, the heads of the house used to reserve for their own use. As it swung slowly back upon its hinges, I sat up in my chair, clutching at the arms, and staring with a horrified glare at the dark passage outside. Something was coming down it—something unformed and intangible, but still a something. Dim and shadowy, I saw it flit across the threshold, while a blast of ice-cold air swept down the room, which seemed to blow through me, chilling my very heart. I was aware of the mysterious presence, and then I heard it speak in a voice like the sighing of an east wind among pine-trees on the banks of a desolate sea.

It said: “I am the invisible nonentity. I have affinities and am subtle. I am electric, magnetic, and spiritualistic. I am the great ethereal sigh-heaver. I kill dogs. Mortal, wilt thou choose me?”

I was about to speak, but the words seemed to be choked in my throat; and, before I could get them out, the shadow flitted across the hall and vanished in the darkness at the other side, while a long-drawn melancholy sigh quivered through the apartment.

I turned my eyes toward the door once more, and beheld, to my astonishment, a very small old woman, who hobbled along the corridor and into the hall. She passed backward and forward several times, and then, crouching down at the very edge of the circle upon the floor, she disclosed a face the horrible malignity of which shall never be banished from my recollection. Every foul passion appeared to have left its mark upon that hideous countenance.

“Ha! ha!” she screamed, holding out her wizened hands like the talons of an unclean bird. “You see what I am. I am the fiendish old woman. I wear snuff-colored silks. My curse descends on people. Sir Walter was partial to me. Shall I be thine, mortal?”

I endeavored to shake my head in horror; on which she aimed a blow at me with her crutch, and vanished with an eldritch scream.

By this time my eyes turned naturally toward the open door, and I was hardly surprised to see a man walk in of tall and noble stature. His face was deadly pale, but was surmounted by a fringe of dark hair which fell in ringlets down his back. A short pointed beard covered his chin. He was dressed in loose-fitting clothes, made apparently of yellow satin, and a large white ruff surrounded his neck. He paced across the room with slow and majestic strides. Then turning, he addressed me in a sweet, exquisitely modulated voice.

“I am the cavalier,” he remarked. “I pierce and am pierced. Here is my rapier. I clink steel. This is a blood stain over my heart. I can emit hollow groans. I am patronized by many old Conservative families. I am the original manor-house apparition. I work alone, or in company with shrieking damsels.”

He bent his head courteously, as though awaiting my reply, but the same choking sensation prevented me from speaking; and, with a deep bow, he disappeared.

He had hardly gone before a feeling of intense horror stole over me, and I was aware of the presence of a ghastly creature in the room, of dim outlines and uncertain proportions. One moment it seemed to pervade the entire apartment, while at[Pg 226] another it would become invisible, but always leaving behind it a distinct consciousness of its presence. Its voice, when it spoke, was quavering and gusty. It said: “I am the leaver of footsteps and the spiller of gouts of blood. I tramp upon corridors. Charles Dickens has alluded to me. I make strange and disagreeable noises. I snatch letters and place invisible hands on people’s wrists. I am cheerful. I burst into peals of hideous laughter. Shall I do one now?” I raised my hand in a deprecating way, but too late to prevent one discordant outbreak which echoed through the room. Before I could lower it the apparition was gone.

I turned my head toward the door in time to see a man come hastily and stealthily into the chamber. He was a sunburnt powerfully built fellow, with ear-rings in his ears and a Barcelona handkerchief tied loosely round his neck. His head was bent upon his chest, and his whole aspect was that of one afflicted by intolerable remorse. He paced rapidly backward and forward like a caged tiger, and I observed that a drawn knife glittered in one of his hands, while he grasped what appeared to be a piece of parchment in the other. His voice, when he spoke, was deep and sonorous. He said, “I am a murderer. I am a ruffian. I crouch when I walk. I step noiselessly. I know something of the Spanish Main. I can do the lost treasure business. I have charts. Am able-bodied and a good walker. Capable of haunting a large park.” He looked toward me beseechingly, but before I could make a sign I was paralyzed by the horrible sight which appeared at the door.

It was a very tall man, if, indeed, it might be called a man, for the gaunt bones were protruding through the corroding flesh, and the features were[Pg 227] of a leaden hue. A winding-sheet was wrapped round the figure, and formed a hood over the head, from under the shadow of which two fiendish eyes, deep set in their grisly sockets, blazed and sparkled like red-hot coals. The lower jaw had fallen upon the breast, disclosing a withered, shrivelled tongue and two lines of black and jagged fangs. I shuddered and drew back as this fearful apparition advanced to the edge of the circle.

“I am the American blood-curdler,” it said, in a voice which seemed to come in a hollow murmur from the earth beneath it. “None other is genuine. I am the embodiment of Edgar Allan Poe. I am circumstantial and horrible. I am a low-caste spirit-subduing spectre. Observe my blood and my bones. I am grisly and nauseous. No depending on artificial aid. Work with grave-clothes, a coffin-lid, and a galvanic battery. Turn hair white in a night.” The creature stretched out its fleshless arms to me as if in entreaty, but I shook my head; and it vanished, leaving a low, sickening, repulsive odor behind it. I sank back in my chair, so overcome by terror and disgust that I would have very willingly resigned myself to dispensing with a ghost altogether, could I have been sure that this was the last of the hideous procession.

A faint sound of trailing garments warned me that it was not so. I looked up, and beheld a white figure emerging from the corridor into the light. As it stepped across the threshold I saw that it was that of a young and beautiful woman dressed in the fashion of a bygone day. Her hands were clasped in front of her, and her pale proud face bore traces of passion and of suffering. She crossed the hall with a gentle sound, like the rustling of autumn[Pg 228] leaves, and then, turning her lovely and unutterably sad eyes upon me, she said,

“I am the plaintive and sentimental, the beautiful and ill-used. I have been forsaken and betrayed. I shriek in the night-time and glide down passages. My antecedents are highly respectable and generally aristocratic. My tastes are æsthetic. Old oak furniture like this would do, with a few more coats of mail and plenty of tapestry. Will you not take me?”

Her voice died away in a beautiful cadence as she concluded, and she held out her hands as if in supplication. I am always sensitive to female influences. Besides, what would Jorrocks’s ghost be to this? Could anything be in better taste? Would I not be exposing myself to the chance of injuring my nervous system by interviews with such creatures as my last visitor, unless I decided at once? She gave me a seraphic smile, as if she knew what was passing in my mind. That smile settled the matter. “She will do!” I cried; “I choose this one;” and as, in my enthusiasm, I took a step toward her I passed over the magic circle which had girdled me round.

I had an indistinct consciousness of these words being spoken, or rather screamed, in my ear a great number of times without my being able to grasp their meaning. A violent throbbing in my head seemed to adapt itself to their rhythm, and I closed my eyes to the lullaby of “Robbed, robbed, robbed.” A vigorous shake caused me to open them again, however, and the sight of Mrs. D’Odd in the scantiest of costumes and most furious of tempers was sufficiently impressive to recall all my scattered thoughts, and make me realize that I was lying on[Pg 229] my back on the floor, with my head among the ashes which had fallen from last night’s fire, and a small glass phial in my hand.

I staggered to my feet, but felt so weak and giddy that I was compelled to fall back into a chair. As my brain became clearer, stimulated by the exclamations of Matilda, I began gradually to recollect the events of the night. There was the door through which my supernatural visitors had filed. There was the circle of chalk with the hieroglyphics round the edge. There was the cigar-box and brandy-bottle which had been honored by the attentions of Mr. Abrahams. But the seer himself—where was he? and what was this open window with a rope running out of it! And where, O where, was the pride of Goresthorpe Grange, the glorious plate which was to have been the delectation of generations of D’Odds? And why was Mrs. D. standing in the gray light of dawn, wringing her hands and repeating her monotonous refrain? It was only very gradually that my misty brain took these things in, and grasped the connection between them.

Reader, I have never seen Mr. Abrahams since; I have never seen the plate stamped with the resuscitated family crest; hardest of all, I have never caught a glimpse of the melancholy spectre with the trailing garments, nor do I expect that I ever shall. In fact my night’s experiences have cured me of my mania for the supernatural, and quite reconciled me to inhabiting the humdrum nineteenth-century edifice on the outskirts of London which Mrs. D. has long had in her mind’s eye.

As to the explanation of all that occurred—that is a matter which is open to several surmises. That Mr. Abrahams, the ghost-hunter, was identical with Jemmy Wilson, alias the Nottingham crackster, is[Pg 230] considered more than probable at Scotland Yard, and certainly the description of that remarkable burglar tallied very well with the appearance of my visitor. The small bag which I have described was picked up in a neighboring field next day, and found to contain a choice assortment of jemmies and centrebits. Footmarks deeply imprinted in the mud on either side of the moat showed that an accomplice from below had received the sack of precious metals which had been let down through the open window. No doubt the pair of scoundrels, while looking round for a job, had overheard Jack Brocket’s indiscreet inquiries, and promptly availed themselves of the tempting opening.

And now as to my less substantial visitors, and the curious grotesque vision which I had enjoyed—am I to lay it down to any real power over occult matters possessed by my Nottingham friend? For a long time I was doubtful upon the point, and eventually endeavored to solve it by consulting a well-known analyst and medical man, sending him the few drops of the so-called essence of Lucoptolycus which remained in my phial. I append the letter which I received from him, only too happy to have the opportunity of winding up my little narrative by the weighty words of a man of learning:

“Arundel Street.

“Dear Sir: Your very singular case has interested me extremely. The bottle which you sent contained a strong solution of chloral, and the quantity which you describe yourself as having swallowed must have amounted to at least eighty grains of the pure hydrate. This would of course have reduced you to a partial state of insensibility, gradually going on to complete coma. In this semi-unconscious[Pg 231] state of chloralism it is not unusual for circumstantial and bizarre visions to present themselves—more especially to individuals unaccustomed to the use of the drug. You tell me in your note that your mind was saturated with ghostly literature, and that you had long taken a morbid interest in classifying and recalling the various forms in which apparitions have been said to appear. You must also remember that you were expecting to see something of that very nature, and that your nervous system was worked up to an unnatural state of tension. Under the circumstances, I think that, far from the sequel being an astonishing one, it would have been very surprising indeed to any one versed in narcotics had you not experienced some such effects.—I remain, dear sir, sincerely yours,

“T. E. Stube, M.D.

“Argentine D’Odd, Esq.
“The Elms, Brixton.”

Do I know why Tom Donahue is called “Lucky Tom?” Yes; I do; and that is more than one in ten of those who call him so can say. I have knocked about a deal in my time, and seen some strange sights, but none stranger than the way in which Tom gained that sobriquet, and his fortune with it. For I was with him at the time.—Tell it? Oh, certainly; but it is a longish story and a very strange one; so fill up your glass again, and light another cigar while I try to reel it off. Yes, a very strange one; beats some fairy stories I have heard; but it’s true, sir, every word of it. There are men alive at Cape Colony now who’ll remember it and confirm what I say. Many a time has the tale been told round the fire in Boers’ cabins from Orange State to Griqualand; yes, and out in the Bush and at the Diamond Fields too.

I’m roughish now, sir; but I was entered at the Middle Temple once, and studied for the Bar. Tom—worse luck!—was one of my fellow-students; and a wildish time we had of it, until at last our finances ran short, and we were compelled to give up our so-called studies, and look about for some part of the world where two young fellows with strong arms and sound constitutions might make their mark. In those days the tide of emigration had scarcely begun to set in toward Africa, and so we thought[Pg 233] our best chance would be down at Cape Colony. Well—to make a long story short—we set sail, and were deposited in Cape Town with less than five pounds in our pockets; and there we parted. We each tried our hands at many things, and had ups and downs; but when, at the end of three years, chance led each of us up-country and we met again, we were, I regret to say, in almost as bad a plight as when we started.

Well, this was not much of a commencement; and very disheartened we were, so disheartened that Tom spoke of going back to England and getting a clerkship. For you see we didn’t know that we had played out all our small cards, and that the trumps were going to turn up. No; we thought our “hands” were bad all through. It was a very lonely part of the country that we were in, inhabited by a few scattered farmers, whose houses were stockaded and fenced in to defend them against the Kaffirs. Tom Donahue and I had a little hut right out in the Bush; but we were known to possess nothing, and to be handy with our revolvers, so we had little to fear. There we waited, doing odd jobs, and hoping that something would turn up. Well, after we had been there about a month something did turn up upon a certain night, something which was the making of both of us; and it’s about that night, sir, that I’m going to tell you. I remember it well. The wind was howling past our cabin, and the rain threatened to burst in our rude window. We had a great wood-fire crackling and sputtering on the hearth, by which I was sitting mending a whip, while Tom was lying in his bunk groaning disconsolately at the chance which had led him to such a place.

“Cheer up, Tom—cheer up,” said I. “No man ever knows what may be awaiting him.”

“Ill-luck, ill-luck, Jack,” he answered. “I always was an unlucky dog. Here have I been three years in this abominable country; and I see lads fresh from England jingling the money in their pockets, while I am as poor as when I landed. Ah, Jack, if you want to keep your head above water, old friend, you must try your fortune away from me.”

“Nonsense, Tom; you’re down in your luck to-night. But hark! Here’s some one coming outside. Dick Wharton, by the tread; he’ll rouse you, if any man can.”

Even as I spoke the door was flung open, and honest Dick Wharton, with the water pouring from him, stepped in, his hearty red face looming through the haze like a harvest-moon. He shook himself, and after greeting us sat down by the fire to warm himself.

“Whereaway, Dick, on such a night as this?” said I. “You’ll find the rheumatism a worse foe than the Kaffirs, unless you keep more regular hours.”

Dick was looking unusually serious, almost frightened, one would say, if one did not know the man. “Had to go,” he replied—“had to go. One of Madison’s cattle was seen straying down Sasassa Valley, and of course none of our blacks would go down that Valley at night; and if we had waited till morning, the brute would have been in Kaffirland.”

“I suppose they didn’t give such a matter-of-fact fellow as you a sight of their charms?” said Tom, from the bunk.

“Yes,” said Dick, seriously—“yes; I saw what the niggers talk about; and I promise you, lads, I don’t want ever to see it again.”

Tom sat up in his bed. “Nonsense, Dick; you’re joking, man! Come, tell us all about it. The legend first, and your own experience afterward. Pass him over the bottle, Jack.”

“Well, as to the legend,” began Dick—“it seems that the niggers have had it handed down to them that that Sasassa Valley is haunted by a frightful fiend. Hunters and wanderers passing down the defile have seen its glowing eyes under the shadows of the cliff; and the story goes that whoever has chanced to encounter that baleful glare has had his after-life blighted by the malignant power of this creature. Whether that be true or not,” continued Dick, ruefully, “I may have an opportunity of judging for myself.”

“Well, I was groping down the Valley, looking for that cow of Madison’s, and I had, I suppose, got half-way down, where a black craggy cliff juts into the ravine on the right, when I halted to have a pull at my flask. I had my eye fixed at the time upon the projecting cliff I have mentioned, and noticed nothing unusual about it. I then put up my flask and took a step or two forward, when in a moment there burst, apparently from the base of the rock, about eight feet from the ground and a hundred yards from me, a strange, lurid glare, flickering and oscillating, gradually dying away and then reappearing again.—No, no; I’ve seen many a glow-worm and fire-fly—nothing of that sort. There it was, burning away, and I suppose I gazed at it, trembling in every limb, for fully ten minutes. Then[Pg 236] I took a step forward, when instantly it vanished, vanished like a candle blown out. I stepped back again; but it was some time before I could find the exact spot and position from which it was visible. At last, there it was, the weird reddish light, flickering away as before. Then I screwed up my courage, and made for the rock; but the ground was so uneven that it was impossible to steer straight; and though I walked along the whole base of the cliff, I could see nothing. Then I made tracks for home; and I can tell you, boys, that until you remarked it, I never knew it was raining, the whole way along.—But hollo! what’s the matter with Tom?”

What indeed? Tom was now sitting with his legs over the side of the bunk, and his whole face betraying excitement so intense as to be almost painful. “The fiend would have two eyes. How many lights did you see, Dick? Speak out!”

“Hurrah!” cried Tom—“that’s better.” Whereupon he kicked the blankets into the middle of the room, and began pacing up and down with long, feverish strides. Suddenly he stopped opposite Dick, and laid his hand upon his shoulder: “I say, Dick, could we get to Sasassa Valley before sunrise?”

“Well, look here; we are old friends, Dick Wharton, you and I. Now, don’t you tell any other man what you have told us, for a week. You’ll promise that; won’t you?”

I could see by the look on Dick’s face as he acquiesced that he considered poor Tom to be mad; and indeed I was myself completely mystified by his conduct. I had, however, seen so many proofs of my friend’s good sense and quickness of apprehension,[Pg 237] that I thought it quite possible that Wharton’s story had had a meaning in his eyes which I was too obtuse to take in.

All night Tom Donahue was greatly excited, and when Wharton left he begged him to remember his promise, and also elicited from him a description of the exact spot at which he had seen the apparition, as well as the hour at which it appeared. After his departure, which must have been about four in the morning, I turned into my bunk and watched Tom sitting by the fire splicing two sticks together, until I fell asleep. I suppose I must have slept about two hours; but when I awoke Tom was still sitting working away in almost the same position. He had fixed the one stick across the top of the other so as to form a rough ⊤, and was now busy in fitting a smaller stick into the angle between them, by manipulating which, the cross one could be either cocked up or depressed to any extent. He had cut notches, too, in the perpendicular stick, so that by the aid of the small prop, the cross one could be kept in any position for an indefinite time.

“Look here, Jack!” he cried, whenever he saw that I was awake. “Come and give me your opinion. Suppose I put this cross-stick pointing straight at a thing, and arranged this small one so as to keep it so, and left it, I could find that thing again if I wanted it—don’t you think I could, Jack—don’t you think so?” he continued nervously, clutching me by the arm.

“Well,” I answered, “it would depend on how far off the thing was, and how accurately it was pointed. If it were any distance, I’d cut sights on your cross-stick; then a string tied to the end of it, and held in a plumb-line forward, would lead you pretty near[Pg 238] what you wanted. But surely, Tom, you don’t intend to localize the ghost in that way?”

“You’ll see to-night, old friend—you’ll see to-night. I’ll carry this to the Sasassa Valley. You get the loan of Madison’s crowbar, and come with me; but mind you tell no man where you are going, or what you want it for.”

All day Tom was walking up and down the room, or working hard at the apparatus. His eyes were glistening, his cheeks hectic, and he had all the symptoms of high fever. “Heaven grant that Dick’s diagnosis be not correct!” I thought, as I returned with the crowbar; and yet, as evening drew near, I found myself imperceptibly sharing the excitement.

About six o’clock Tom sprang to his feet and seized his sticks. “I can stand it no longer, Jack,” he cried; “up with your crowbar, and hey for Sasassa Valley! To-night’s work, my lad, will either make us or mar us! Take your six-shooter, in case we meet the Kaffirs. I daren’t take mine, Jack,” he continued, putting his hands upon my shoulders—“I daren’t take mine; for if my ill-luck sticks to me to-night, I don’t know what I might not do with it.”

Well, having filled our pockets with provisions, we set out, and as we took our wearisome way toward the Sasassa Valley, I frequently attempted to elicit from my companion some clew as to his intentions. But his only answer was: “Let us hurry on, Jack. Who knows how many have heard of Wharton’s adventure by this time! Let us hurry on, or we may not be first in the field!”

Well, sir, we struggled on through the hills for a matter of ten miles; till at last, after descending a crag, we saw opening out in front of us a ravine so[Pg 239] sombre and dark that it might have been the gate of Hades itself; cliffs many hundred feet shut in on every side the gloomy bowlder-studded passage which led through the haunted defile into Kaffirland. The moon, rising above the crags, threw into strong relief the rough, irregular pinnacles of rock by which they were topped, while all below was dark as Erebus.

I looked at him. He was calm now; the flush and feverishness had passed away; his actions were deliberate and slow. Yet there was a certain rigidity in his face and glitter in his eye which showed that a crisis had come.

We entered the pass, stumbling along amid the great bowlders. Suddenly I heard a short quick exclamation from Tom. “That’s the crag!” he cried, pointing to a great mass looming before us in the darkness. “Now, Jack, for any favor use your eyes! We’re about a hundred yards from that cliff, I take it; so you move slowly toward one side and I’ll do the same toward the other. When you see anything, stop, and call out. Don’t take more than twelve inches in a step, and keep your eye fixed on the cliff about eight feet from the ground. Are you ready?”

“Yes.” I was even more excited than Tom by this time. What his intention or object was I could not conjecture, beyond that he wanted to examine by daylight the part of the cliff from which the light came. Yet the influence of the romantic situation and my companion’s suppressed excitement was so great that I could feel the blood coursing through my veins and count the pulses throbbing at my temples.

“Start!” cried Tom; and we moved off, he to the right, I to the left, each with our eyes fixed intently on the base of the crag. I had moved perhaps twenty feet, when in a moment it burst upon me. Through the growing darkness there shone a small, ruddy, glowing point, the light from which waned and increased, flickered and oscillated, each change producing a more weird effect than the last. The old Kaffir superstition came into my mind, and I felt a cold shudder pass over me. In my excitement I stepped a pace backward, when instantly the light went out, leaving utter darkness in its place; but when I advanced again, there was the ruddy glare glowing from the base of the cliff. “Tom, Tom!” I cried.

“Why, there, there, man, in front of you!” I stepped to the right as I spoke, when the light instantly vanished from my eyes.

But from Tom’s ejaculations of delight it was clear that from my former position it was visible to him also. “Jack,” he cried, as he turned and wrung my hand—“Jack, you and I can never complain of our luck again. Now heap up a few stones where we are standing. That’s right. Now we must fix my sign-post firmly in at the top. There! It would take a strong wind to blow that down; and we only need it to hold out till morning. O Jack, my boy, to think that only yesterday we were talking of becoming clerks, and you saying that no man knew what was awaiting him, too! By Jove, Jack, it would make a good story!”

By this time we had firmly fixed the perpendicular[Pg 241] stick in between two large stones; and Tom bent down and peered along the horizontal one. For fully a quarter of an hour he was alternately raising and depressing it, until at last, with a sigh of satisfaction, he fixed the prop into the angle, and stood up. “Look along, Jack,” he said. “You have as straight an eye to take a sight as any man I know of.”

I looked along. There beyond the further sight was the ruddy scintillating speck, apparently at the end of the stick itself, so accurately had it been adjusted.

“And now, my boy,” said Tom, “let’s have some supper and a sleep. There’s nothing more to be done to-night; but we’ll need all our wits and strength to-morrow. Get some sticks and kindle a fire here, and then we’ll be able to keep an eye on our signal-post, and see that nothing happens to it during the night.”

Well, sir, we kindled a fire, and had supper with the Sasassa demon’s eye rolling and glowing in front of us the whole night through. Not always in the same place though; for after supper, when I glanced along the sights to have another look at it, it was nowhere to be seen. The information did not, however, seem to disturb Tom in any way. He merely remarked: “It’s the moon, not the thing, that has shifted;” and coiling himself up, went to sleep.

By early dawn we were both up, and gazing along our pointer at the cliff; but we could make out nothing save the one dead monotonous slaty surface, rougher perhaps at the part we were examining than elsewhere, but otherwise presenting nothing remarkable.

“Now for your idea, Jack!” said Tom Donahue,[Pg 242] unwinding a long thin cord from round his waist. “You fasten it, and guide me while I take the other end.” So saying, he walked off to the base of the cliff, holding one end of the cord, while I drew the other taut, and wound it round the middle of the horizontal stick, passing it through the sight at the end. By this means I could direct Tom to the right or left, until we had our string stretching from the point of attachment, through the sight, and on to the rock, which it struck about eight feet from the ground. Tom drew a chalk circle of about three feet diameter round the spot, and then called to me to come and join him. “We’ve managed this business together, Jack,” he said, “and we’ll find what we are to find, together.” The circle he had drawn embraced a part of the rock smoother than the rest, save that about the centre there were a few rough protuberances or knobs. One of these Tom pointed to with a cry of delight. It was a roughish, brownish mass about the size of a man’s closed fist, and looking like a bit of dirty glass let into the wall of the cliff. “That’s it!” he cried—“that’s it!”

“Why, man, a diamond, and such a one as there isn’t a monarch in Europe but would envy Tom Donahue the possession of. Up with your crowbar, and we’ll soon exorcise the demon of Sasassa Valley!”

I was so astounded that for a moment I stood speechless with surprise, gazing at the treasure which had so unexpectedly fallen into our hands.

“Here, hand me the crowbar,” said Tom. “Now, by using this little round knob which projects from the cliff here, as a fulcrum, we may be able to lever it off.—Yes; there it goes. I never thought it could have come so easily. Now, Jack, the sooner we get[Pg 243] back to our hut and then down to Cape Town, the better.”

We wrapped up our treasure, and made our way across the hills toward home. On the way, Tom told me how, while a law-student in the Middle Temple, he had come upon a dusty pamphlet in the library, by one Jans van Hounym, which told of an experience very similar to ours, which had befallen that worthy Dutchman in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and which resulted in the discovery of a luminous diamond. This tale it was which had come into Tom’s head as he listened to honest Dick Wharton’s ghost-story; while the means which he had adopted to verify his supposition sprang from his own fertile Irish brain.

“We’ll take it down to Cape Town,” continued Tom, “and if we can’t dispose of it with advantage there, it will be worth our while to ship for London with it. Let us go along to Madison’s first, though; he knows something of these things, and can perhaps give us some idea of what we may consider a fair price for our treasure.”

We turned off from the track accordingly, before reaching our hut, and kept along the narrow path leading to Madison’s farm. He was at lunch when we entered; and in a minute we were seated at each side of him, enjoying South African hospitality.

“Well,” he said, after the servants were gone, “what’s in the wind now? I see you have something to say to me. What is it?”

Tom produced his packet, and solemnly untied the handkerchiefs which enveloped it. “There!” he said, putting his crystal on the table; “what would you say was a fair price for that?”

Madison took it up and examined it critically.[Pg 244] “Well,” he said, laying it down again, “in its crude state about twelve shillings per ton.”

“Twelve shillings!” cried Tom, starting to his feet. “Don’t you see what it is?”

Tom put it to his lips, dashed it down with a dreadful exclamation, and rushed out of the room.

I felt sad and disappointed enough myself; but presently, remembering what Tom had said about the pistol, I, too, left the house, and made for the hut, leaving Madison open-mouthed with astonishment. When I got in, I found Tom lying in his bunk with his face to the wall, too dispirited apparently to answer my consolations. Anathematizing Dick and Madison, the Sasassa demon, and everything else, I strolled out of the hut, and refreshed myself with a pipe after our wearisome adventure. I was about fifty yards from the hut, when I heard issuing from it the sound which of all others I least expected to hear. Had it been a groan or an oath, I should have taken it as a matter of course; but the sound which caused me to stop and take the pipe out of my mouth was a hearty roar of laughter! Next moment, Tom himself emerged from the door, his whole face radiant with delight. “Game for another ten-mile walk, old fellow?”

“’No more of that, Hal, an’ you love me,’” grinned Tom. “Now look here, Jack. What blessed fools we are to be so floored by a trifle! Just sit on this stump for five minutes, and I’ll make it as clear as daylight. You’ve seen many a lump of rock-salt stuck in a crag, and so have I, though we did make[Pg 245] such a mull of this one. Now, Jack, did any of the pieces you have ever seen shine in the darkness brighter than any fire-fly?”

“I’d venture to prophesy that if we waited until night, which we won’t do, we would see that light still glimmering among the rocks. Therefore, Jack, when we took away this worthless salt, we took the wrong crystal. It is no very strange thing in these hills that a piece of rock-salt should be lying within a foot of a diamond. It caught our eyes, and we were excited, and so we made fools of ourselves, and left the real stone behind. Depend upon it, Jack, the Sasassa gem is lying within that magic circle of chalk upon the face of yonder cliff. Come, old fellow, light your pipe and stow your revolver, and we’ll be off before that fellow Madison has time to put two and two together.”

I don’t know that I was very sanguine this time. I had begun in fact to look upon the diamond as a most unmitigated nuisance. However, rather than throw a damper on Tom’s expectations, I announced myself eager to start. What a walk it was! Tom was always a good mountaineer, but his excitement seemed to lend him wings that day, while I scrambled along after him as best I could. When we got within half a mile he broke into the “double,” and never pulled up until he reached the round white circle upon the cliff. Poor old Tom! when I came up, his mood had changed, and he was standing with his hands in his pockets, gazing vacantly before him with a rueful countenance.

“Look!” he said—“look!” and he pointed at the cliff. Not a sign of anything in the least resembling a diamond there. The circle included nothing but flat slate-colored stone, with one large hole, where[Pg 246] we had extracted the rock-salt, and one or two smaller depressions. No sign of the gem.

“I’ve been over every inch of it,” said poor Tom. “It’s not there. Someone has been here and noticed the chalk, and taken it. Come home, Jack; I feel sick and tired. Oh! had any man ever luck like mine!”

I turned to go, but took one last look at the cliff first. Tom was already ten paces off.

“Hollo!” I cried, “don’t you see any change in that circle since yesterday?”

“No; but the little round knob that we used for a fulcrum. I suppose we must have wrenched it off in using the lever. Let’s have a look at what it’s made of.”

I turned round, and there was Tom radiant with delight, and with a little corner of black rock in his hand. At first sight it seemed to be merely a chip from the cliff; but near the base there was projecting from it an object which Tom was now exultingly pointing out. It looked at first something like a glass eye; but there was a depth and brilliancy about it such as glass never exhibited. There was no mistake this time; we had certainly got possession of a jewel of great value; and with light hearts we turned from the valley, bearing away with us the “fiend” which had so long reigned there.

There, sir; I’ve spun my story out too long, and tired you perhaps. You see, when I get talking of[Pg 247] those rough old days, I kind of see the little cabin again, and the brook beside it, and the bush around, and seem to hear Tom’s honest voice once more. There’s little for me to say now. We prospered on the gem. Tom Donahue, as you know, has set up here, and is well known about town. I have done well, farming and ostrich-raising in Africa. We set old Dick Wharton up in business, and he is one of our nearest neighbors. If you should ever be coming up our way, sir, you’ll not forget to ask for Jack Turnbull—Jack Turnbull of Sasassa Farm.

“It air strange, it air,” he was saying as I opened the door of the room where our social little semi-literary society met; “but I could tell you queerer things than that ’ere—almighty queer things. You can’t learn everything out of books, sirs, nohow. You see, it ain’t the men as can string English together and as has had good eddications, as finds themselves in the queer places I’ve been in. They’re mostly rough men, sirs, as can scarce speak aright, far less tell with pen and ink the things they’ve seen; but if they could they’d make some of your Europeans’ har riz with astonishment. They would, sirs, you bet!”

His name was Jefferson Adams, I believe; I know his initials were J. A., for you may see them yet deeply whittled on the right-hand upper panel of our smoking-room door. He left us this legacy, and also some artistic patterns done in tobacco juice upon our Turkey carpet; but beyond these reminiscences our American story-teller has vanished from our ken. He gleamed across our ordinary quiet conviviality like some brilliant meteor, and then was lost in the outer darkness. That night, however, our Nevada friend was in full swing; and I quietly lit my pipe and dropped into the nearest chair, anxious not to interrupt his story.

“Mind you,” he continued, “I hain’t got no grudge against your men of science. I likes and respects a chap as can match every beast and plant, from a[Pg 249] huckleberry to a grizzly with a jaw-breakin’ name; but if you wants real interestin’ facts, something a bit juicy, you go to your whalers and your frontiersmen, and your scouts and Hudson Bay men, chaps who mostly can scarce sign their names.”

There was a pause here, as Mr. Jefferson Adams produced a long cheroot and lit it. We preserved a strict silence in the room, for we had already learned that on the slightest interruption our Yankee drew himself into his shell again. He glanced round with a self-satisfied smile as he remarked our expectant looks, and continued through a halo of smoke:

“Now, which of you gentlemen has ever been in Arizona? None, I’ll warrant. And of all English or Americans as can put pen to paper, how many has been in Arizona? Precious few, I calc’late. I’ve been there, sirs, lived there for years; and when I think of what I’ve seen there, why, I can scarce get myself to believe it now.

“Ah, there’s a country! I was one of Walker’s filibusters, as they chose to call us; and after we’d busted up, and the chief was shot, some on us made tracks and located down there. A reg’lar English and American colony, we was, with our wives and children, and all complete. I reckon there’s some of the old folk there yet, and that they hain’t forgotten what I’m agoing to tell you. No, I warrant they hain’t, never on this side of the grave, sirs.

“I was talking about the country, though; and I guess I could astonish you considerable if I spoke of nothing else. To think of such a land being built for a few ’Greasers’ and half-breeds! It’s a misusing of the gifts of Providence, that’s what I calls it. Grass as hung over a chap’s head as he rode through it, and trees so thick that you couldn’t catch a glimpse of blue sky for leagues and leagues, and[Pg 250] orchids like umbrellas! Maybe some on you has seen a plant as they calls the ’fly-catcher,’ in some parts of the States?”

“Ah, ’Die near a municipal,’ that’s him! You’ll see a fly stand on that ’ere plant, and then you’ll see the two sides of a leaf snap up together and catch it between them, and grind it up and mash it to bits, for all the world like some great sea squid with its beak; and hours after, if you open the leaf, you’ll see the body lying half-digested, and in bits. Well, I’ve seen those fly-traps in Arizona with leaves eight and ten feet long, and thorns or teeth a foot or more; why, they could—But darn it, I’m going too fast!

“It’s about the death of Joe Hawkins I was going to tell you; ’bout as queer a thing, I reckon, as ever you heard tell on. There wasn’t nobody in Montana as didn’t know of Joe Hawkins—’Alabama’ Joe, as he was called there. A reg’lar out and outer, he was, ’bout the darndest skunk as ever man clapt eyes on. He was a good chap enough, mind ye, as long as you stroked him the right way; but rile him anyhow, and he were worse nor a wild-cat. I’ve seen him empty his six-shooter into a crowd as chanced to jostle him a-going into Simpson’s bar when there was a dance on; and he bowied Tom Hooper ’cause he spilt his liquor over his weskit by mistake. No, he didn’t stick at murder, Joe didn’t; and he weren’t a man to be trusted further nor you could see him.

“Now, at the time I tell on, when Joe Hawkins was swaggerin’ about the town and layin’ down the law with his shootin’-irons, there was an Englishman there of the name of Scott—Tom Scott, if I rec’lects aright. This chap Scott was a thorough Britisher[Pg 251] (beggin’ the present company’s pardon), and yet he didn’t freeze much to the British set there, or they didn’t freeze much to him. He was a quiet, simple man, Scott was—rather too quiet for a rough set like that; sneakin’ they called him, but he weren’t that. He kept hisself mostly apart, and didn’t interfere with nobody so long as he were left alone. Some said as how he’d been kinder ill-treated at home—been a Chartist, or something of that sort, and had to up stick and run; but he never spoke of it hisself, an’ never complained. Bad luck or good, that chap kept a stiff lip on him.

“This chap Scott was a sort o’ butt among the men about Montana, for he was so quiet an’ simple-like. There was no party either to take up his grievances; for, as I’ve been saying, the Britishers hardly counted him one of them, and many a rough joke they played on him. He never cut up rough, but was polite to all hisself. I think the boys got to think he hadn’t much grit in him till he showed ’em their mistake.

“It was in Simpson’s bar as the row got up, an’ that led to the queer thing I was going to tell you of. Alabama Joe and one or two other rowdies were dead on the Britishers in those days, and they spoke their opinions pretty free, though I warned them as there’d be an almighty muss. That partic’lar night Joe was nigh half drunk, an’ he swaggered about the town with his six-shooter, lookin’ out for a quarrel. Then he turned into the bar, where he know’d he’d find some o’ the English as ready for one as he was hisself. Sure enough, there was half a dozen lounging about, an’ Tom Scott standin’ alone before the stove. Joe sat down by the table, and put his revolver and bowie down in front of him. ’Them’s my arguments, Jeff,’ he says to me,[Pg 252] ’if any white-livered Britisher dares give me the lie.’ I tried to stop him, sirs; but he weren’t a man as you could easily turn, an’ he began to speak in a way as no chap could stand. Why, even a ’Greaser’ would flare up if you said as much of Greaserland! There was a commotion at the bar, an’ every man laid his hands on his wepins; but afore they could draw we heard a quiet voice from the stove: ’Say your prayers, Joe Hawkins; for, by Heaven, you’re a dead man!’ Joe turned round, and looked like grabbin’ at his iron; but it weren’t no manner of use. Tom Scott was standing up, covering him with his derringer; a smile on his white face, but the very devil shining in his eye. ’It ain’t that the old country has used me over-well,’ he says, ’but no man shall speak agin’ it afore me, and live.’ For a second or two I could see his finger tighten round the trigger, an’ then he gave a laugh, an’ threw the pistol on the floor. ’No,’ he says, ’I can’t shoot a half-drunk man. Take your dirty life, Joe, an’ use it better nor you have done. You’ve been nearer the grave this night than you will be agin until your time comes. You’d best make tracks now, I guess. Nay, never look black at me, man; I’m not afeard at your shootin’-iron. A bully’s nigh always a coward.’ And he swung contemptuously round, and relit his half-smoked pipe from the stove; while Alabama slunk out o’ the bar, with the laughs of the Britishers ringing in his ears. I saw his face as he passed me, and on it I saw murder, sirs—murder, as plain as ever I seed anything in my life.

“I stayed in the bar after the row, and watched Tom Scott as he shook hands with the men about. It seemed kinder queer to me to see him smilin’ and cheerful-like; for I knew Joe’s bloodthirsty mind,[Pg 253] and that the Englishman had small chance of ever seeing the morning. He lived in an out-of-the-way sort of place, you see, clean off the trail, and had to pass through the Flytrap Gulch to get to it. This here gulch was a marshy gloomy place, lonely enough during the day even; for it were always a creepy sort o’ thing to see the great eight- and ten-foot leaves snapping up if aught touched them; but at night there were never a soul near. Some parts of the marsh, too, were soft and deep, and a body thrown in would be gone by the morning. I could see Alabama Joe crouchin’ under the leaves of the great Flytrap in the darkest part of the gulch, with a scowl on his face and a revolver in his hand; I could see it, sirs, as plain as with my two eyes.

“’Bout midnight Simpson shuts up his bar, so out we had to go. Tom Scott started off for his three-mile walk at a slashing pace. I just dropped him a hint as he passed me, for I kinder liked the chap. ’Keep your derringer loose in your belt, sir,’ I says, ’for you might chance to need it.’ He looked round at me with his quiet smile, and then I lost sight of him in the gloom. I never thought to see him again. He’d hardly gone afore Simpson comes up to me and says, ’There’ll be a nice job in the Flytrap Gulch to-night, Jeff; the boys say that Hawkins started half an hour ago to wait for Scott and shoot him on sight. I calc’late the coroner’ll be wanted to-morrow.’

“What passed in the gulch that night? It were a question as were asked pretty free next morning. A half-breed was in Ferguson’s store after daybreak, and he said as he’d chanced to be near the gulch ’bout one in the morning. It warn’t easy to get at his story, he seemed so uncommon scared; but he told us, at last, as he’d heard the fearfullest screams[Pg 254] in the stillness of the night. There weren’t no shots, he said, but scream after scream, kinder muffled, like a man with a serapé over his head, an’ in mortal pain. Abner Brandon and me, and a few more, was in the store at the time; so we mounted and rode out to Scott’s house, passing through the gulch on the way. There weren’t nothing partic’lar to be seen there—no blood nor marks of a fight, nor nothing; and when we gets up to Scott’s house, out he comes to meet us as fresh as a lark. ’Hullo, Jeff!’ says he, ’no need for the pistols after all. Come in an’ have a cocktail, boys.’ ’Did ye see or hear nothing as ye came home last night?’ says I. ’No,’ says he; ’all was quiet enough. An owl kinder moaning in the Flytrap Gulch—that was all. Come, jump off and have a glass.’ ’Thank ye,’ says Abner. So off we gets, and Tom Scott rode into the settlement with us when we went back.

“An allfired commotion was on in Main Street as we rode into it. The ’Merican party seemed to have gone clean crazed. Alabama Joe was gone, not a darned particle of him left. Since he went out to the gulch nary eye had seen him. As we got off our horses there was a considerable crowd in front of Simpson’s, and some ugly looks at Tom Scott, I can tell you. There was a clickin’ of pistols, and I saw as Scott had his hand in his bosom too. There weren’t a single English face about. ’Stand aside, Jeff Adams,’ says Zebb Humphrey, as great a scoundrel as ever lived, ’you hain’t got no hand in this game. Say, boys, are we, free Americans, to be murdered by any darned Britisher?’ It was the quickest thing as ever I seed. There was a rush an’ a crack; Zebb was down, with Scott’s ball in his thigh, and Scott hisself was on the ground with a dozen men holding him. It weren’t no use struggling,[Pg 255] so he lay quiet. They seemed a bit uncertain what to do with him at first, but then one of Alabama’s special chums put them up to it. ’Joe’s gone,’ he said; ’nothing ain’t surer nor that, an’ there lies the man as killed him. Some on you knows as Joe went on business to the gulch last night; he never came back. That ’ere Britisher passed through after he’d gone; they’d had a row, screams is heard ’mong the great flytraps. I say agin he has played poor Joe some o’ his sneakin’ tricks, an’ thrown him into the swamp. It ain’t no wonder as the body is gone. But air we to stan’ by and see English murderin’ our own chums? I guess not. Let Judge Lynch try him, that’s what I say.’ ’Lynch him!’ shouted a hundred angry voices—for all the rag-tag an’ bobtail o’ the settlement was round us by this time. ’Here, boys, fetch a rope, and swing him up. Up with him over Simpson’s door?’ ’See here, though,’ says another, coming forrard; ’let’s hang him by the great flytrap in the gulch. Let Joe see as he’s revenged, if so be as he’s buried ’bout theer.’ There was a shout for this, an’ away they went, with Scott tied on his mustang in the middle, and a mounted guard, with cocked revolvers, round him; for we knew as there was a score or so Britishers about, as didn’t seem to recognize Judge Lynch, and was dead on a free fight.

“I went out with them, my heart bleedin’ for Scott, though he didn’t seem a cent put out, he didn’t. He were game to the backbone. Seems kinder queer, sirs, hangin’ a man to a flytrap; but our’n were a reg’lar tree, and the leaves like a brace of boats with a hinge between ’em and thorns at the bottom.

“We passed down the gulch to the place where the great one grows, and there we seed it with the[Pg 256] leaves, some open, some shut. But we seed something worse nor that. Standin’ round the tree was some thirty men, Britishers all, an’ armed to the teeth. They was waitin’ for us evidently, an’ had a business-like look about ’em, as if they’d come for something and meant to have it. There was the raw material there for about as warm a scrimmidge as ever I seed. As we rode up, a great red-bearded Scotchman—Cameron were his name—stood out afore the rest, his revolver cocked in his hand. ’See here, boys,’ he says, ’you’ve got no call to hurt a hair of that man’s head. You hain’t proved as Joe is dead yet; and if you had, you hain’t proved as Scott killed him. Anyhow, it were in self-defence; for you all know as he was lying in wait for Scott, to shoot him on sight; so I say agin, you hain’t got no call to hurt that man; and what’s more, I’ve got thirty six-barrelled arguments against your doin’ it.’ ’It’s an interestin’ pint, and worth arguin’ out,’ said the man as was Alabama Joe’s special chum. There was a clickin’ of pistols, and a loosenin’ of knives, and the two parties began to draw up to one another, an’ it looked like a rise in the mortality of Montana. Scott was standing behind with a pistol at his ear if he stirred, lookin’ quiet and composed as having no money on the table, when sudden he gives a start an’ a shout as rang in our ears like a trumpet. ’Joe!’ he cried, ’Joe! Look at him! In the flytrap!’ We all turned an’ looked where he was pointin’. Jerusalem! I think we won’t get that picter out of our minds agin. One of the great leaves of the flytrap, that had been shut and touchin’ the ground as it lay, was slowly rolling back upon its hinges. There, lying like a child in its cradle, was Alabama Joe in the hollow of the leaf. The great thorns had been[Pg 257] slowly driven through his heart as it shut upon him. We could see as he’d tried to cut his way out, for there was a slit in the thick fleshy leaf, an’ his bowie was in his hand; but it had smothered him first. He’d lain down on it likely to keep the damp off while he were awaitin’ for Scott, and it had closed on him as you’ve seen your little hothouse ones do on a fly; an’ there he were as we found him, torn and crushed into pulp by the great jagged teeth of the man-eatin’ plant. There, sirs, I think you’ll own as that’s a curious story.”

“Why, we carried him back on our shoulders, we did, to Simpson’s bar, and he stood us liquors round. Made a speech too—a darned fine speech—from the counter. Somethin’ about the British lion an’ the ’Merican eagle walkin’ arm in arm forever an’ a day. And now, sirs, that yarn was long, and my cheroot’s out, so I reckon I’ll make tracks afore it’s later;” and with a “Good-night!” he left the room.

“A most extraordinary narrative!” said Dawson. “Who would have thought a Dianœa had such power!”

“Why on earth couldn’t you say so at once? Come on with it;” on which cordial invitation I marched into my brother’s room and perched myself upon the side of his bed.

“Here you are,” said I: “Indian stamp—Brindisi postmark. Who is it from?”

“Mind your own business, Stumpy,” said my brother, as he pushed back his curly tangled locks, and, after rubbing his eyes, proceeded to break the seal. Now, if there is one appellation for which above all others I have a profound contempt, it is this one of “Stumpy.” Some miserable nurse, impressed by the relative proportions of my round grave face and little mottled legs, had dubbed me with the odious nickname in the days of my childhood. I am not really a bit more stumpy than any other girl of seventeen. On the present occasion I[Pg 259] rose in all the dignity of wrath, and was about to dump my brother on the head with the pillow by way of remonstrance, when a look of interest in his face stopped me.

“Even so,” said Bob. “Jack is coming back and going to stay with us. He says he will be here almost as soon as his letter. Now don’t dance about like that. You’ll knock down the guns, or do some damage. Keep quiet like a good girl, and sit down here again.” Bob spoke with all the weight of the two-and-twenty summers which had passed over his towsy head, so I calmed down and settled into my former position.

“Won’t it be jolly?” I cried. “But, Bob, the last time he was here he was a boy, and now he is a man. He won’t be the same Jack at all.”

“Well, for that matter,” said Bob, “you were only a girl then—a nasty little girl with ringlets, while now——”

“Well, you haven’t got the ringlets, and you are ever so much bigger, you see, and nastier.”

Brothers are a blessing for one thing. There is no possibility of any young lady getting unreasonably conceited if she be endowed with them.

I think they were all glad at breakfast-time to hear of Jack Hawthorne’s promised advent. By “all” I mean my mother and Elsie and Bob. Our cousin Solomon Barker looked anything but overjoyed when I made the announcement in breathless triumph. I never thought of it before, but perhaps[Pg 260] that young man is getting fond of Elsie, and is afraid of a rival; otherwise I don’t see why such a simple thing should have caused him to push away his egg, and declare that he had done famously, in an aggressive manner which at once threw doubt upon his proposition. Grace Maberly, Elsie’s friend, seemed quietly contented, as is her wont.

As for me, I was in a riotous state of delight. Jack and I had been children together. He was like an elder brother to me until he became a cadet and left us. How often Bob and he had climbed old Brown’s apple-trees, while I stood beneath and collected the spoil in my little white pinafore! There was hardly a scrape or adventure which I could remember in which Jack did not figure as a prominent character. But he was “Lieutenant” Hawthorne now, had been through the Afghan War, and was, as Bob said, “quite the warrior.” Whatever would he look like? Somehow the “warrior” had conjured up an idea of Jack in full armor with plumes on his head, thirsting for blood, and hewing at somebody with an enormous sword. After doing that sort of thing I was afraid he would never descend to romps and charades and the other stock amusements of Hatherley House.

Cousin Sol was certainly out of spirits during the next few days. He could be hardly persuaded to make a fourth at lawn-tennis, but showed an extraordinary love of solitude and strong tobacco. We used to come across him in the most unexpected places, in the shrubbery and down by the river, on which occasions, if there was any possibility of avoiding us, he would gaze rigidly into the distance, and utterly ignore feminine shouts and the waving of parasols. It was certainly very rude of him. I got hold of him one evening before dinner, and[Pg 261] drawing myself up to my full height of five feet four and a half inches, I proceeded to give him a piece of my mind, a process which Bob characterizes as the height of charity, since it consists in my giving away what I am most in need of myself.

Cousin Sol was lounging in a rocking-chair with the Times before him, gazing moodily over the top of it into the fire. I ranged up alongside and poured in my broadside.

“We seem to have given you some offence, Mr. Barker,” I remarked, with lofty courtesy.

“What do you mean, Nell?” asked my cousin, looking up at me in surprise. He had a very curious way of looking at me, had cousin Sol.

“You appear to have dropped our acquaintance,” I remarked; and then suddenly descending from my heroics, “You are stupid, Sol! What’s been the matter with you?”

“Nothing, Nell. At least, nothing of any consequence. You know my medical examination is in two months, and I am reading for it.”

“Oh,” said I, in a bristle of indignation, “if that’s it, there’s no more to be said. Of course, if you prefer bones to your female relations, it’s all right. There are young men who would rather make themselves agreeable than mope in corners and learn how to prod people with knives.” With which epitome of the noble science of surgery, I proceeded to straighten some refractory antimacassars with unnecessary violence.

I could see Sol looking with an amused smile at the angry little blue-eyed figure in front of him. “Don’t blow me up, Nell,” he said; “I have been plucked once, you know. Besides,” looking grave, “you’ll have amusement enough when this—what is his name?—Lieutenant Hawthorne comes.”

“Jack won’t go and associate with mummies and skeletons, at any rate,” I remarked.

I still had my theory about Elsie running in my head. I thought I might try and set the matter in a more cheerful light. Sol had got up, and was staring out of the open window. I went over to him and glanced up timidly into his usually good-humored face, which was now looking very dark and discontented. He was a shy man, as a rule, but I thought that with a little leading he might be brought to confess.

“Never you mind. I know it. Let me tell you this,” I added, getting bolder: “that Jack and Elsie never got on very well. There is far more chance of Jack’s falling in love with me. We were always friends.”

If I had stuck the knitting-needle which I held in my hand into cousin Sol, he could not have given a greater jump. “Good heavens!” he said, and I could see his dark eyes staring at me through the twilight. “Do you really think that it is your sister that I care for?”

“Certainly,” said I, stoutly, with a feeling that I was nailing my colors to the mast.

Never did a single word produce such an effect. Cousin Sol wheeled round with a gasp of astonishment, and sprang right out of the window. He[Pg 263] always had curious ways of expressing his feelings, but this one struck me as being so entirely original that I was utterly bereft of any idea save that of wonder. I stood staring out into the gathering darkness. Then there appeared, looking in at me from the lawn, a very much abashed and still rather astonished face. “It’s you I care for, Nell,” said the face, and at once vanished, while I heard the noise of somebody running at the top of his speed down the avenue. He certainly was a most extraordinary young man.

Things went on very much the same at Hatherley House in spite of cousin Sol’s characteristic declaration of affection. He never sounded me as to my sentiments in regard to him, nor did he allude to the matter for several days. He evidently thought that he had done all which was needed in such cases. He used to discompose me dreadfully at times, however, by coming and planting himself opposite me, and staring at me with a stony rigidity which was absolutely appalling.

“Don’t do that, Sol,” I said to him one day; “you give me the creeps all over.”

“Oh yes, I like you well enough,” said I. “I like Lord Nelson, for that matter; but I shouldn’t like his monument to come and stare at me by the hour. It makes me feel quite all-overish.”

“Yes,” I said, “only more.” With which small ray of encouragement poor Sol had to be content,[Pg 264] as Elsie and Miss Maberly came rustling into the room and put an end to our tête-à-tête.

I certainly did like my cousin. I knew what a simple true nature lay beneath his quiet exterior. The idea of having Sol Barker for a lover, however—Sol, whose very name was synonymous with bashfulness—was too incredible. Why couldn’t he fall in love with Grace or with Elsie? They might have known what to do with him; they were older than I, and could encourage him, or snub him, as they thought best. Gracie, however, was carrying on a mild flirtation with my brother Bob, and Elsie seemed utterly unconscious of the whole matter. I have one characteristic recollection of my cousin which I cannot help introducing here, though it has nothing to do with the thread of the narrative. It was on the occasion of his first visit to Hatherley House. The wife of the Rector called one day, and the responsibility of entertaining her rested with Sol and myself. We got on very well at first. Sol was unusually lively and talkative. Unfortunately a hospitable impulse came upon him; and in spite of many warning nods and winks, he asked the visitor if he might offer her a glass of wine. Now, as ill luck would have it, our supply had just been finished, and though we had written to London, a fresh consignment had not yet arrived. I listened breathlessly for the answer, trusting she would refuse; but to my horror she accepted with alacrity. “Never mind ringing, Nell,” said Sol, “I’ll act as butler;” and with a confident smile he marched into the little cupboard in which the decanters were usually kept. It was not until he was well in that he suddenly recollected having heard us mention in the morning that there was none in the house. His mental anguish was so great that he spent the remainder[Pg 265] of Mrs. Salter’s visit in the cupboard, utterly refusing to come out until after her departure. Had there been any possibility of the wine-press having another egress, or leading anywhere, matters would not have been so bad; but I knew that old Mrs. Salter was as well up in the geography of the house as I was myself. She stayed for three-quarters of an hour waiting for Sol’s reappearance, and then went away in high dudgeon. “My dear,” she said, recounting the incident to her husband, and breaking into semi-scriptural language in the violence of her indignation, “the cupboard seemed to open and swallow him!”

“Jack is coming down by the two o’clock train,” said Bob one morning, coming in to breakfast with a telegram in his hand.

I could see Sol looking at me reproachfully; but that did not prevent me from showing my delight at the intelligence.

“We’ll have awful fun when he comes,” said Bob. “We’ll drag the fish-pond, and have no end of a lark. Won’t it be jolly, Sol?”

Sol’s opinion of its jollity was evidently too great to be expressed in words; for he gave an inarticulate grunt as answer.

I had a long cogitation on the subject of Jack in the garden that morning. After all, I was becoming a big girl, as Bob had forcibly reminded me. I must be circumspect in my conduct now. A real live man had actually looked upon me with the eyes of love. It was all very well when I was a child to have Jack following me about and kissing me; but I must keep him at a distance now. I remembered how he presented me with a dead fish once which he had taken out of the Hatherley Brook, and how I[Pg 266] treasured it up among my most precious possessions, until an insidious odor in the house had caused the mother to send an abusive letter to Mr. Burton, who had pronounced our drainage to be all that could be desired. I must learn to be formal and distant. I pictured our meeting to myself, and went through a rehearsal of it. The holly-bush represented Jack, and I approached it solemnly, made it a stately courtesy, and held out my hand with, “So glad to see you, Lieutenant Hawthorne!” Elsie came out while I was doing it, but made no remark. I heard her ask Sol at luncheon, however, whether idiocy generally ran in families, or was simply confined to individuals; at which poor Sol blushed furiously, and became utterly incoherent in his attempts at an explanation.

Our farmyard opens upon the avenue about half-way between Hatherley House and the lodge. Sol and I and Mr. Nicholas Cronin, the son of a neighboring squire, went down there after lunch. This imposing demonstration was for the purpose of quelling a mutiny which had broken out in the hen-house. The earliest tidings of the rising had been conveyed to the House by young Bayliss, son and heir of the henkeeper, and my presence had been urgently requested. Let me remark in parenthesis that fowls were my special department in domestic economy, and that no step was ever taken in their management without my advice and assistance. Old Bayliss hobbled out upon our arrival, and informed us of the full extent of the disturbance. It seems that the crested hen and the Bantam cock had developed such length of wing that they were enabled to fly over into the park; and that the example of these ringleaders had been so contagious,[Pg 267] that even such steady old matrons as the bandy-legged Cochin China had developed roving propensities, and pushed their way into forbidden ground. A council of war was held in the yard, and it was unanimously decided that the wings of the recalcitrants must be clipped.

What a scamper we had! By “we” I mean Mr. Cronin and myself; while cousin Sol hovered about in the background with the scissors, and cheered us on. The two culprits clearly knew that they were wanted; for they rushed under the hayricks and over the coops, until there seemed to be at least half a dozen crested hens and Bantam cocks dodging about in the yard. The other hens were mildly interested in the proceedings, and contented themselves with an occasional derisive cluck, with the exception of the favorite wife of the Bantam, who abused us roundly from the top of the coop. The ducks were the most aggravating portion of the community; for though they had nothing to do with the original disturbance, they took a warm interest in the fugitives, waddling behind them as fast as their little yellow legs would carry them, and getting in the way of the pursuers.

“We have it!” I gasped, as the crested hen was driven into a corner. “Catch it, Mr. Cronin! Oh, you’ve missed it! you’ve missed it! Get in the way, Sol. Oh, dear, it’s coming to me!”

“Well done, Miss Montague!” cried Mr. Cronin, as I seized the wretched fowl by the leg as it fluttered past me, and proceeded to tuck it under my arm to prevent any possibility of escape. “Let me carry it for you.”

“No, no; I want you to catch the cock. There it goes! There—behind the hayrick. You go to one side, and I’ll go to the other.”

“Shoo!” cried I. “Shoo! Oh, it’s gone!” and we both made a dart into the park in pursuit, tore round the corner into the avenue, and there I found myself face to face with a sunburned young man in a tweed suit, who was lounging along in the direction of the house.

There was no mistaking those laughing gray eyes, though I think if I had never looked at him some instinct would have told me that it was Jack. How could I be dignified with the crested hen tucked under my arm? I tried to pull myself up; but the miserable bird seemed to think that it had found a protector at last, for it began to cluck with redoubled vehemence. I had to give it up in despair, and burst into a laugh, while Jack did the same.

“How are you, Nell?” he said, holding out his hand; and then, in an astonished voice, “Why, you’re not a bit the same as when I saw you last!”

“Who would have thought that little Nell would have developed into a woman?” said Jack, still lost in amazement.

“You didn’t expect me to develop into a man, did you?” said I, in high indignation; and then, suddenly dropping all reserve, “We’re awfully glad you’ve come, Jack. Never mind going up to the house. Come and help us to catch that Bantam cock.”

“Right you are,” said Jack, in his old cheery way, still keeping his eyes firmly fixed upon my countenance. “Come on!” and away the three of us scampered across the park, with poor Sol aiding and abetting with the scissors and the prisoner in the rear. Jack was a very crumpled-looking visitor by the time he paid his respects to the mother that[Pg 269] afternoon, and my dreams of dignity and reserve were scattered to the winds.

We had quite a party at Hatherley House that May. There were Bob, and Sol, and Jack Hawthorne, and Mr. Nicholas Cronin; then there were Miss Maberly, and Elsie, and mother, and myself. On an emergency we could always muster half a dozen visitors from the houses round, so as to have an audience when charades or private theatricals were attempted. Mr. Cronin, an easy-going athletic young Oxford man, proved to be a great acquisition, having wonderful powers of organization and execution. Jack was not nearly as lively as he used to be, in fact we unanimously accused him of being in love; at which he looked as silly as young men usually do on such occasions, but did not attempt to deny the soft impeachment.

“What shall we do to-day?” said Bob one morning. “Can anybody make a suggestion?”

“O, there’s plenty of time for that. It isn’t run till the week after next. Anything else?”

“First-class,” said my brother, grasping eagerly at the idea. Picnics are very dear to those who are in the first stage of the tender passion.

“I won’t go at all,” said I; “I’d like to awfully, but I have to plant those ferns Sol got me. You had better walk. It is only three miles, and young Bayliss can be sent over with the basket of provisions.”

Here was another impediment. The Lieutenant had twisted his ankle yesterday. He had not mentioned it to anyone at the time; but it was beginning to pain him now.

“Couldn’t do it, really,” said Jack. “Three miles there and three back.”

“My dear fellow,” answered the Lieutenant, “I have had walking enough to last me the rest of my life. If you had seen how that energetic general of ours bustled me along from Cabul to Candahar, you’d sympathize with me.”

“None of your chaff,” said Jack. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he added, brightening up. “You let me have the trap, Bob, and I’ll drive over with Nell as soon as she has finished planting her ferns. We can take the basket with us. You’ll come, won’t you, Nell?”

“All right,” said I. And Bob having given his assent to the arrangement, and everybody being pleased, except Mr. Solomon Barker, who glared with mild malignancy at the soldier, the matter was finally settled, and the whole party proceeded to get ready, and finally departed down the avenue.

It was an extraordinary thing how that ankle improved[Pg 271] after the last of the troop had passed round the curve of the hedge. By the time the ferns were planted and the gig got ready Jack was as active and lively as ever he was in his life.

“You seem to have got better very suddenly,” I remarked, as we drove down the narrow winding country lane.

“Yes,” said Jack. “The fact is, Nell, there never was anything the matter with me. I wanted to have a talk with you.”

“You don’t mean to say you would tell a lie in order to have a talk with me?” I remonstrated.

I was too lost in contemplation of the depths of guile in Jack’s nature to make any further remark. I wondered whether Elsie would be flattered or indignant were anyone to offer to tell so many lies in her behalf.

“We used to be good friends when we were children, Nell,” remarked my companion.

“Yes,” said I, looking down at the rug which was thrown over my knees. I was beginning to be quite an experienced young lady by this time, you see, and to understand certain inflections of the masculine voice, which are only to be acquired by practice.

“Do you know, Nelly,” continued Jack, “that when I have been camping out in the frozen passes of the Himalayas, when I have seen the hostile array in front of me; in fact,” suddenly dropping into bathos, “all the time I was in that beastly hole Afghanistan, I used to think of the little girl I had left in England.”

“Yes,” said Jack, “I bore the memory of you in my heart, and then when I came back you were a little girl no longer. I found you a beautiful woman, Nelly, and I wondered whether you had forgotten the days that were gone.”

Jack was becoming quite poetical in his enthusiasm. By this time he had left the old bay pony entirely to its own devices, and it was indulging in its chronic propensity of stopping and admiring the view.

“Look here, Nelly,” said Jack, with a gasp like a man who is about to pull the string of his shower-bath, “one of the things you learn in campaigning is to secure a good thing whenever you see it. Never delay or hesitate, for you never know that some other fellow may not carry it off while you are making up your mind.”

“It’s coming now,” I thought in despair, “and there’s no window for Jack to escape by after he has made the plunge.” I had gradually got to associate the ideas of love and jumping out of windows, ever since poor Sol’s confession.

“Do you think, Nell,” said Jack, “that you could ever care for me enough to share my lot forever? could you ever be my wife, Nell?”

He didn’t even jump out of the trap. He sat there beside me, looking at me with his eager gray eyes, while the pony strolled along, cropping the wild flowers on either side of the road. It was quite evident that he intended having an answer. Somehow as I looked down I seemed to see a pale, shy face looking in at me from a dark background, and to hear Sol’s voice as he declared his love. Poor fellow! he was first in the field at any rate.

“I like you very much, Jack,” said I, looking up at him nervously; “but”—how his face changed at that monosyllable!—“I don’t think I like you enough for that. Besides, I’m so young, you know. I suppose I ought to be very much complimented and that sort of thing by your offer; but you mustn’t think of me in that light any more.”

“Why don’t you go and ask Elsie?” cried I in despair. “Why should you all come to me.”

“I don’t want Elsie,” cried Jack, giving the pony a cut with his whip which rather astonished that easy-going quadruped. “What do you mean by ’all,’ Nell?”

“I see how it is,” said Jack, bitterly; “I’ve noticed how that cousin of yours has been hanging round you ever since I have been here. You are engaged to him.”

“Thank God for that!” responded Jack, devoutly. “There is some hope yet. Perhaps you will come to think better of it in time. Tell me, Nelly, are you fond of that fool of a medical student?”

“He isn’t a fool,” said I, indignantly, “and I am quite as fond of him as I shall ever be of you.”

“You might not care for him much and still be that,” said Jack, sulkily; and neither of us spoke again until a joint bellow from Bob and Mr. Cronin announced the presence of the rest of the company.

If the picnic was a success, it was entirely due to the exertions of the latter gentleman. Three lovers out of four was an undue proportion, and it took all his convivial powers to make up for the shortcomings of the rest. Bob seemed entirely absorbed in[Pg 274] Miss Maberley’s charms, poor Elsie was left out in the cold, while my two admirers spent their time in glaring alternately at me and at each other. Mr. Cronin, however, fought gallantly against the depression, making himself agreeable to all, and exploring ruins or drawing corks with equal vehemence and energy.

Cousin Sol was particularly disheartened and out of spirits. He thought, no doubt, that my solitary ride with Jack had been a prearranged thing between us. There was more sorrow than anger in his eyes, however, while Jack, I regret to say, was decidedly ill-tempered. It was this fact which made me choose out my cousin as my companion in the ramble through the woods which succeeded our lunch. Jack had been assuming a provoking air of proprietorship lately, which I was determined to quash once for all. I felt angry with him, too, for appearing to consider himself ill used at my refusal, and for trying to disparage poor Sol behind his back. I was far from loving either the one or the other, but somehow my girlish ideas of fair play revolted at either of them taking what I considered an unfair advantage. I felt that if Jack had not come I should, in the fulness of time, have ended by accepting my cousin; on the other hand, if it had not been for Sol, I might never have refused Jack. At present I was too fond of them both to favor either. “How in the world is it to end?” thought I. I must do something decisive one way or the other; or perhaps the best thing would be to wait and see what the future might bring forth.

Sol seemed mildly surprised at my having selected him as my companion, but accepted the offer with a grateful smile. His mind seemed to have been vastly relieved.

“So I haven’t lost you yet, Nell,” he murmured, as we branched off among the great tree-trunks and heard the voices of the party growing fainter in the distance.

“Nobody can lose me,” said I, “for nobody has won me yet. For goodness’ sake don’t talk about it any more. Why can’t you talk like your old self two years ago, and not be so dreadfully sentimental?”

“You’ll know why some day, Nell,” said the student, reproachfully. “Wait until you are in love yourself, and you will understand it.”

“Sit here, Nell,” said Cousin Sol, manœuvring me into a little bank of wild strawberries and mosses, and perching himself upon a stump of a tree beside me. “Now all I ask you to do is to answer one or two questions, and I’ll never bother you any more.”

“But you must choose between us some time, you know,” said Cousin Sol, with mild reproach in his voice.

“I do wish you wouldn’t bother me so!” I cried,[Pg 276] getting angry, as women usually do when they are in the wrong. “You don’t care for me much or you wouldn’t plague me. I believe the two of you will drive me mad between you.”

Here there were symptoms of sobs on my part, and utter consternation and defeat among the Barker faction.

“Can’t you see how it is, Sol?” said I, laughing through my tears at his woe-begone appearance. “Suppose you were brought up with two girls and had got to like them both very much, but had never preferred one to the other, and never dreamed of marrying either, and then all of a sudden you are told you must choose one, and so make the other very unhappy, you wouldn’t find it an easy thing to do, would you?”

“I don’t blame you, Nelly,” he answered, attacking a great purple toadstool with his stick. “I think you are quite right to be sure of your own mind. It seems to me,” he continued, speaking rather gaspily, but saying his mind like the true English gentleman that he was, “it seems to me that Hawthorne is an excellent fellow. He has seen more of the world than I have, and always does and says the right thing in the right place, which certainly isn’t one of my characteristics. Then he is well born and has good prospects. I think I should be very grateful to you for your hesitation, Nell, and look upon it as a sign of your good-heartedness.”

“We won’t talk about it any more,” said I, thinking in my heart what a very much finer fellow he was than the man he was praising. “Look here, my jacket is all stained with horrid fungi and things. We’d better go after the rest of the party,[Pg 277] hadn’t we? I wonder where they are by this time?”

It didn’t take very long to find that out. At first we heard shouting and laughter coming echoing through the long glades, and then, as we made our way in that direction, we were astonished to meet the usually phlegmatic Elsie careering through the wood at the very top of her speed, her hat off, and her hair streaming in the wind. My first idea was that some frightful catastrophe had occurred—brigands possibly, or a mad dog—and I saw my companion’s big hand close round his stick; but on meeting the fugitive it proved to be nothing more tragic than a game of hide-and-seek which the indefatigable Mr. Cronin had organized. What fun we had, crouching and running and dodging among the Hatherley oaks! and how horrified the prim old abbot who planted them would have been, and the long series of black-coated brethren who have muttered their orisons beneath the welcome shade! Jack refused to play on the excuse of his weak ankle, and lay smoking under a tree in high dudgeon, glaring in a baleful and gloomy fashion at Mr. Solomon Barker; while the latter gentleman entered enthusiastically into the game, and distinguished himself by always getting caught, and never by any possibility catching anybody else.

Poor Jack! He was certainly unfortunate that day. Even an accepted lover would have been rather put out, I think, by an incident which occurred during our return home. It was agreed that all of us should walk, as the trap had been already sent off with the empty baskets, so we started down Thorny Lane and through the fields. We were just getting over a stile to cross old Brown’s ten-acre lot, when Mr. Cronin pulled up, and remarked[Pg 278] that he thought we had better get into the road.

“Road?” said Jack. “Nonsense! We save a quarter of a mile by the field.”

“Where’s the danger?” said our military man, contemptuously twisting his mustache.

“O, nothing,” said Cronin. “That quadruped in the middle of the field is a bull, and not a very good-tempered one either. That’s all. I don’t think that the ladies should be allowed to go.”

“You may go as you like,” said Jack rather testily, “but I am going across the field.”

“You fellows may think it right to turn tail at an old cow, but I don’t. It hurts my self-respect, you see, so I shall join you at the other side of the farm.” With which speech Jack buttoned up his coat in a truculent manner, waved his cane jauntily, and swaggered off into the ten-acre lot.

We clustered about the stile and watched the proceedings with anxiety. Jack tried to look as if he were entirely absorbed in the view and in the probable state of the weather, for he gazed about him and up into the clouds in an abstracted manner. His gaze generally began and ended, however, somewhere in the direction of the bull. That animal, after regarding the intruder with a prolonged stare, had retreated into the shadow of the hedge at one side, while Jack was walking up the long axis of the field.

“I think it’s leading him on,” said Mr. Nicholas Cronin. “It’s a vicious, cunning brute.”

Mr. Cronin had hardly spoken before the bull emerged from the hedge, and began pawing the ground, and tossing its wicked black head in the air. Jack was in the middle of the field by this time, and affected to take no notice of his companion, though he quickened his pace slightly. The bull’s next manœuvre was to run rapidly round in two or three small circles; and then it suddenly stopped, bellowed, put down its head, elevated its tail, and made for Jack at the very top of its speed.

There was no use pretending to ignore its existence any longer. Jack faced round and gazed at it for a moment. He had only his little cane in his hand to oppose to the half ton of irate beef which was charging toward him. He did the only thing that was possible, namely, to make for the hedge at the other side of the field.

At first Jack hardly condescended to run, but went off with a languid contemptuous trot, a sort of compromise between his dignity and his fear, which was so ludicrous that, frightened as we were, we burst into a chorus of laughter. By degrees, however, as he heard the galloping of hoofs sounding nearer and nearer, he quickened his pace, until ultimately he was in full flight for shelter, with his hat gone and his coat-tails fluttering in the breeze, while his pursuer was not ten yards behind him. If all Ayoub Khan’s cavalry had been in his rear, our Afghan hero could not have done the distance in a shorter time. Quickly as he went, the bull went quicker still, and the two seemed to gain the hedge almost at the same moment. We saw Jack spring boldly into it, and the next moment he came flying out at the other side as if he had been[Pg 280] discharged from a cannon, while the bull indulged in a series of triumphant bellows through the hole which he had made. It was a relief to us all to see Jack gather himself up and start off for home without a glance in our direction. He had retired to his room by the time we arrived, and did not appear until breakfast next morning, when he limped in with a very crestfallen expression. None of us was hard-hearted enough to allude to the subject, however, and by judicious treatment we restored him before lunch-time to his usual state of equanimity.

It was a couple of days after the picnic that our great Derby sweepstakes was to come off. This was an annual ceremony never omitted at Hatherley House, where, between visitors and neighbors, there were generally quite as many candidates for tickets as there were horses entered.

“The sweepstakes, ladies and gentlemen, comes off to-night,” said Bob in his character of head of the house. “The subscription is ten shillings. Second gets quarter of the pool, and third has his money returned. No one is allowed to have more than one ticket, or to sell his ticket after drawing it. The drawing will be at seven thirty.” All of which Bob delivered in a very pompous and official voice, though the effect was rather impaired by a sonorous “Amen!” from Mr. Nicholas Cronin.

I must now drop the personal style of narrative for a time. Hitherto my little story has consisted simply in a series of extracts from my own private journal; but now I have to tell of a scene which only came to my ears after many months.

Lieutenant Hawthorne, or Jack, as I cannot help calling him, had been very quiet since the day of[Pg 281] the picnic, and given himself up to reverie. Now, as luck would have it, Mr. Solomon Barker sauntered into the smoking-room after luncheon on the day of the sweepstakes, and found the Lieutenant puffing moodily in solitary grandeur upon one of the settees. It would have seemed cowardly to retreat, so the student sat down in silence, and began turning over the pages of the Graphic. Both the rivals felt the situation to be an awkward one. They had been in the habit of studiously avoiding each other’s society, and now they found themselves thrown together suddenly, with no third person to act as a buffer. The silence began to be oppressive. The Lieutenant yawned and coughed with over-acted nonchalance, while honest Sol felt very hot and uncomfortable, and continued to stare gloomily at the paper in his hand. The ticking of the clock, and the click of the billiard balls across the passage, seemed to grow unendurably loud and monotonous. Sol glanced across once; but catching his companion’s eye in an exactly similar action, the two young men seemed simultaneously to take a deep and all-absorbing interest in the pattern of the cornice.

“Why should I quarrel with him?” thought Sol to himself. “After all, I want nothing but fair play. Probably I shall be snubbed; but I may as well give him an opening.”

The Lieutenant was sorry—extremely sorry—but he was not in possession of a fusee.

This was a bad beginning. Chilly politeness was even more repulsing than absolute rudeness. But Mr. Solomon Barker, like many other shy men, was[Pg 282] audacity itself when the ice had once been broken. He would have no more bickerings or misunderstandings. Now was the time to come to some definite arrangement. He pulled his armchair across the room, and planted himself in front of the astonished soldier.

Jack sprang off the settee with as much rapidity as if Farmer Brown’s bull were coming in through the window.

“And if I am, sir,” he said, twisting his tawny mustache, “what the devil is that to you?”

“Don’t lose your temper,” said Sol. “Sit down again, and talk the matter over like a reasonable Christian. I am in love with her too.”

“What the deuce is the fellow driving at?” thought Jack, as he resumed his seat, still simmering after his recent explosion.

“So the long and the short of it is that we are both in love with her,” continued Sol, emphasizing his remarks with his bony forefinger.

“What then?” said the Lieutenant, showing some symptoms of a relapse. “I suppose that the best man will win, and that the young lady is quite able to choose for herself. You don’t expect me to stand out of the race just because you happen to want the prize, do you?”

“That’s just it,” cried Sol. “One of us will have to stand out. You’ve hit the right idea there. You see, Nelly—Miss Montague, I mean—is, as far as I can see, rather fonder of you than of me, but still fond enough of me not to wish to grieve me by a positive refusal.”

“Honesty compels me to state,” said Jack, in a more conciliatory voice than he had made use of[Pg 283] hitherto, “that Nelly—Miss Montague, I mean—is rather fonder of you than of me; but still, as you say, fond enough of me not to prefer my rival openly in my presence.”

“I don’t think you’re right,” said the student. “In fact, I know you are not; for she told me as much with her own lips. However, what you say makes it easier for us to come to an understanding. It is quite evident that as long as we show ourselves to be equally fond of her, neither of us can have the slightest hope of winning her.”

“There’s some sense in that,” said the Lieutenant, reflectively; “but what do you propose?”

“I propose that one of us stand out, to use your own expression. There is no alternative.”

Matters seemed to have come to a deadlock. Neither of the young men was in the least inclined to abdicate in favor of his rival.

This seemed fair, and was agreed to by both. A new difficulty arose, however. Both of them felt sentimental objections toward risking their angel upon such a paltry chance as the turn of a coin or the length of a straw. It was at this crisis that an inspiration came upon Lieutenant Hawthorne.

“I’ll tell you how we will decide it,” he said. “You and I are both entered for our Derby sweepstakes. If your horse beats mine, I give up my chance; if mine beats yours, you leave Miss Montague forever. Is it a bargain?”

“I have only one stipulation to make,” said Sol.[Pg 284] “It is ten days yet before the race will be run. During that time neither of us must attempt to take an unfair advantage of the other. We shall both agree not to press our suit until the matter is decided.”

I had, as I have already observed, no knowledge of the conversation which had taken place between my suitors. I may mention incidentally that during the course of it I was in the library, listening to Tennyson, read aloud in the deep musical voice of Mr. Nicholas Cronin. I observed, however, in the evening that these two young men seemed remarkably excited about their horses, and that neither of them was in the least inclined to make himself agreeable to me, for which crime I am happy to say that they were both punished by drawing rank outsiders. Eurydice, I think, was the name of Sol’s; while Jack’s was Bicycle. Mr. Cronin drew an American horse named Iroquois, and all the others seemed fairly well pleased. I peeped into the smoking room before going to bed, and was amused to see Jack consulting the sporting prophet of the Field, while Sol was deeply immersed in the Gazette. This sudden mania for the Turf seemed all the more strange, since I knew that if my cousin could distinguish a horse from a cow, it was as much as any of his friends would give him credit for.

The ten succeeding days were voted very slow by various members of the household. I cannot say that I found them so. Perhaps that was because I discovered something very unexpected and pleasing in the course of that period. It was a relief to be free of any fear of wounding the susceptibilities of[Pg 285] either of my former lovers. I could say what I chose and do what I liked now; for they had deserted me completely, and handed me over to the society of my brother Bob and Mr. Nicholas Cronin. The new excitement of horse-racing seemed to have driven their former passion completely out of their minds. Never was a house so deluged with special tips and every vile print which could by any possibility have a word bearing upon the training of the horses or their antecedents. The very grooms in the stable were tired of recounting how Bicycle was descended from Velocipede, or explaining to the anxious medical student how Eurydice was by Orpheus out of Hades. One of them discovered that her maternal grandmother had come in third for the Ebor Handicap; but the curious way in which he stuck the half-crown which he received into his left eye, while he winked at the coachman with his right, throws some doubt upon the veracity of his statement. As he remarked in a beery whisper that evening, “The bloke’ll never know the differ, and it’s worth ’arf a dollar for him to think as it’s true.”

As the day drew nearer the excitement increased. Mr. Cronin and I used to glance across at each other and smile as Jack and Sol precipitated themselves upon the papers at breakfast, and devoured the list of the betting. But matters culminated upon the evening immediately preceding the race. The Lieutenant had run down to the station to secure the latest intelligence, and now he came rushing in, waving a crushed paper frantically over his head.

“Let me see,” groaned my cousin, seizing the paper; and then, dropping it, he rushed out of the room, and banged down the stairs, taking four at a time. We saw no more of him until late at night, when he slunk in, looking very dishevelled, and crept quietly off to his room. Poor fellow, I should have condoled with him had it not been for his recent disloyal conduct toward myself.

Jack seemed a changed man from that moment. He began at once to pay me marked attention, very much to the annoyance of myself and of some one else in the room. He played and sang and proposed round games, and, in fact, quite usurped the rôle usually played by Mr. Nicholas Cronin.

I remember that it struck me as remarkable that on the morning of the Derby-day the Lieutenant should have entirely lost his interest in the race. He was in the greatest spirits at breakfast, but did not even open the paper in front of him. It was Mr. Cronin who unfolded it at last and glanced over its columns.

“Nothing much. O yes, here’s something. Another railway accident. Collision, apparently. Westinghouse brake gone wrong. Two killed, seven hurt, and—by Jove! listen to this: ’Among the victims was one of the competitors in the equine Olympiad of to-day. A sharp splinter had penetrated its side, and the valuable animal had to be sacrificed upon the shrine of humanity. The name of the horse is Bicycle.’ Hullo, you’ve gone and spilled your coffee all over the cloth, Hawthorne! Ah! I forgot, Bicycle was your horse, wasn’t it? Your chance is gone, I am afraid. I see that Iroquois, who started low, has come to be first favorite now.”

Ominous words, reader, as no doubt your nice discernment has taught you during, at the least, the last three columns. Don’t call me a flirt and a coquette until you have weighed the facts. Consider my pique at the sudden desertion of my admirers, think of my delight at the confession from a man whom I had tried to conceal from myself even that I loved, think of the opportunities which he enjoyed during the time that Jack and Sol were systematically avoiding me, in accordance with their ridiculous agreement. Weigh all this, and then which among you will throw the first stone at the blushing little prize of the Derby Sweep?

Here it is as it appeared at the end of three short months in the Morning Post: “August 12th.—At Hatherley Church, Nicholas Cronin, Esq., eldest son of Nicholas Cronin, Esq., of the Woodlands, Cropshire, to Miss Eleanor Montague, daughter of the late James Montague, Esq., J.P., of Hatherley House.”

Jack set off with the declared intention of volunteering for a ballooning expedition to the North Pole. He came back, however, in three days, and said that he had changed his mind, but intended to walk in Stanley’s footsteps across Equatorial Africa. Since then he has dropped one or two gloomy allusions to forlorn hopes and the unutterable joys of death; but on the whole he is coming round very nicely, and has been heard to grumble of late on such occasions as the under-doing of the mutton and the over-doing of the beef, which may be fairly set down as a very healthy symptom.

Sol took it more quietly, but I fear the iron went deeper into his soul. However, he pulled himself together like a dear brave fellow as he is, and actually had the hardihood to propose the bridesmaids,[Pg 288] on which occasion he became inextricably mixed up in a labyrinth of words. He washed his hands of the mutinous sentence, however, and resumed his seat in the middle of it, overwhelmed with blushes and applause. I hear that he has confided his woes and his disappointments to Grace Maberley’s sister, and met with the sympathy which he expected. Bob and Gracie are to be married in a few months, so possibly there may be another wedding about that time.

	page
My Friend the Murderer,	7
The Gully of Bluemansdyke,	31
The Parson of Jackman’s Gulch,	60
The Silver Hatchet,	79
The Man from Archangel,	99
That Little Square Box,	129
A Night among the Nihilists,	155
Bones, the April Fool of Harvey’s Sluice,	171
Selecting a Ghost,	209
The Mystery of Sasassa Valley,	232
The American’s Tale,	248
Our Derby Sweepstakes,	258

MY FRIEND
THE MURDERER

CONTENTS.

MY FRIEND THE MURDERER.

THE GULLY OF BLUEMANSDYKE.
A TRUE COLONIAL STORY.

THE PARSON OF JACKMAN’S GULCH.

THE SILVER HATCHET.

THE MAN FROM ARCHANGEL.

THAT LITTLE SQUARE BOX.

A NIGHT AMONG THE NIHILISTS.

BONES.
THE APRIL FOOL OF HARVEY’S SLUICE.

SELECTING A GHOST.
THE GHOSTS OF GORESTHORPE GRANGE.

THE MYSTERY OF SASASSA VALLEY.
A SOUTH AFRICAN STORY.

THE AMERICAN’S TALE.

OUR DERBY SWEEPSTAKES.

Transcriber’s Notes

MY FRIEND THE MURDERER