She reined in again, her bent head puzzling over what she should say.
And again she cantered, the settled words upon her lips; but there they were destined to remain until forgotten; for it was at this point that Moya’s adventure diverged alike from her purpose and her preconception.
In the first place the hut was empty. It took Moya some minutes to convince herself of the fact. Again and again she called upon the supposed occupant to come out declaring herself a friend come to warn him, as indeed she had. At last she dismounted and entered, her whip clutched firmly, her heart in her mouth. The hut was without partition or inner chamber. A glance proved it as empty as it had seemed.
Moya was nonplussed: all her plans had been built upon the supposition that she should find the runaway still skulking in the hut where she had seen him the previous forenoon. She now perceived how groundless her supposition had been; it seemed insane when she remembered that the runaway had as certainly seen her — and her sudden flight at sight of him. Unquestionably she had made a false start. Yet she did not see what else she could have done.
She led her horse to the whim itself. Twin shafts ran deep into the earth, side by side like the barrels of a gun. But this whim was finally forsaken; the long rope and the elaborate buckets had been removed and stored; and the slabbed shafts ended in tiny glimmering squares without break or foot-hole from brink to base.
Moya stood still to think; and very soon the thought of the black tracker put all others out of court. It came with a sigh: if only she had him there! He would think nothing of tracking the fugitive from the hut whithersoever his feet had carried him; was it only the blacks who could do such things?
How would he begin? Moya recalled her brother’s description, and thought she knew. He would begin by riding down the fence, and seeing if anybody had crossed it.
She was doing this herself next minute. And the thought that had come with a sigh had already made her heart beat madly, and the breath come quicker and quicker through her parted lips; but not with fear; she was much too excited to feel a conscious qualm. Besides, she had somehow no fear of the unhappy man, his father.
Excitement flew to frenzy when she actually found the place. She knew it on the instant, and was never in doubt. There were several footmarks on either side of the fence; on the far side a vertebrate line of them, pointing plainly to the scrub; even her unskilled eye could follow it half the way.
The next thing was to strap down the wires, but Moya could not wait for that. She galloped to a gate that she had seen in the corner near the whim, and came up the other side of the fence also at a gallop.
The trail was easily followed to the scrub: among the trees the ground was harder and footprints proportionately faint. By dismounting, however, and dropping her handkerchief at each apparent break of the chain, Moya always succeeded in picking up the links eventually. Now they gave her no trouble for half-an-hour; now a check would last as long again; but each half-hour seemed like five minutes in her excitement. The trees grew thicker and thicker, but never any higher. Their branches swept the ground and interlaced; and many were the windings of the faint footmarks tenaciously followed by Moya and the dapple-grey. They were as divers wandering on the bed of a shallow sea; for all its shallowness, the patches of sunlight were fewer and fewer, and farther between; if they were also hotter, Moya did not notice the difference. She did not realize into what a labyrinth she was penetrating. Her entire attention was divided between the last footprint and the next; she had none over for any other consideration whatsoever. It was an extreme instance of the forcing of one faculty at the expense of all the rest. Moya thought no more even of what she should say when she ran her man to earth. She had decided all that before she reached the hut. No pang of hunger or of thirst assailed her; excitement and concentration were her meat and drink.
Yet when the end came her very first feeling was that of physical faintness and exhaustion. But then it was an exceedingly sudden and really terrifying end. Moya was dodging boles and ducking under branches, the dapple-grey behind her, her arm through the reins, when all at once these tightened. Moya turned quickly, thinking the horse was unable to follow.
It was.
A gnarled hand, all hair and sinew, held it by the bridle.
XIII
BLIND MAN’S BLOCK
It was some moments before Moya looked higher than that hand, and it prepared her for a worse face than she found waiting for her own. The face was fierce enough, and it poured a steady fire upon the girl from black eyes blazing in the double shade of a felt wideawake and the overhanging mallee. But it was also old, and lined, and hunted; the man had grown grey in prison; whatever his offences, there was rare spirit in a last dash for freedom at his age. Moya had not thought so before. She was surprised that she should think it now. The last thing that she had expected to feel was an atom of real sympathy with the destroyer of her happiness. And yet it was the first thing she felt.
“Please don’t look at me like that,” she begged. “I wish you no harm, believe me!”
There was a pause, and then a first stern question.
“Who sent you here?”
“Nobody.”
“Rot!”
“It’s the truth.”
“How else did you find me?”
“I saw you yesterday in the hut; you know that; you saw me.”
“This is not the hut.”
“No, but as you weren’t there I looked for your tracks. And I found them. And here I am.”
Shaggy brows rose above the piercing eyes.
“I thought you didn’t come from the bush?”
“Nor do I; but I have heard a good deal about tracking, this last day or two; and I had luck.”
“You’ve come all this way alone?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then nobody else knows anything about it. That’s certain. But they will know! You’ll be followed, and I shall be found!”
“I don’t think so; they’ll think I’ve gone somewhere else.”
The convict gave her a long look, and his hawk’s eye gleamed; then he turned his attention to the dapple-grey. It was over a minute before he spoke again.
“Do you know who I am?” he then asked.
“Captain Bovill.”
He smiled wickedly.
“And nothing else?”
“Oh, yes,” said Moya, sadly; “I know what else you are, of course. His father!”
“So he’s had the pluck to tell you, after all?”
“He should have told me at once.”
“And lost you?”
“He hasn’t lost me yet!” cried Moya impulsively, but from her loyal heart none the less.
“Then why break away from him like this? Wasn’t his word good enough?”
“I haven’t broken away,” said Moya, “from him. I couldn’t. I’ve come to tell you why. They’ve taken him to prison!”
“Taken him!”
“On your account. They know he helped you. That’s all they do know.”
The convict stared; but, in the perpetual twilight of the mallee that was the only fact to which Moya could have sworn. She could make nothing of the old man’s expression. When he spoke, however, there was no mistaking his tone. It was hard and grim as a prison bell.
“In his turn!” said he. “Well, it’ll teach him what it’s like.”
“But it isn’t his turn,” cried Moya, in a fury; “what has he done to deserve such degradation, except a good deal more than his duty by you? And this is all the thanks he gets! As though he had taken after you! How can you speak like that of him? How dare you — to me?”
So Moya could turn upon the whilom terror of a colony, a desperado all his days, yet surely never more desperate than now; and her rings flashed, and her eyes flashed, and there was no one there to see! No soul within many miles but the great criminal before her, whose turn it was to astonish Moya. He uncovered; he jerked a bow that was half a shrug, but the more convincing f
or the blemish; and thereafter hung his cropped head in strange humility.
“You’re right!” said he. “I deserve all you’ve said, and more. He has treated me ten thousand times better than I deserve, and that’s my gratitude! Yet if you had been half a lifetime in the hulks — in irons — chained down like a wild beast — why, you’d be one, even you!”
“I know,” said Moya in a low voice. “It is terrible to think of!”
“And God bless you for admitting that much,” the old man whined, “for it’s few that will. Break the law, and the law breaks you — on a wheel! Talk about the wrongs of prisoners; they have neither wrongs nor rights in the eyes of the law; it’s their own fault for being prisoners, and that’s the last word.”
“It is very terrible,” said Moya again.
“Ah, but you little know how bad it is; and I’m not going to tell you. It’s worse than your worst dreams, and that must do for you. The floggings, the irons, the solitary confinement in your irons with the blood running down your back! No, I said I wouldn’t, and I won’t. But it’s hard to hold your tongue when you’re talking to a lady for the first time in thirty years. And to think of a young lady like you coming all this way, alone too, to say a kind word to a double-dyed old rogue like me! It’s the most wonderful thing I ever heard of in all my days. I can’t think why you did it, for the life of me I can’t!”
“It was to tell you about your son,” Moya reminded him.
“Ah, poor fellow! God help him, for I can’t.”
“Are you quite sure?” said Moya gently, and for once rather nervously as well.
“Sure? Of course I’m sure! Why, what can I do?” cried the other, with sudden irritation as suddenly suppressed. “Hiding — hunted — with every hand against me but yours — I’d help him if I could, but I can’t.”
“So he’s to go to prison instead of you?”
Moya spoke quietly, but with the more effect; indeed, she was herself beginning to feel surprised at her success with a desperate man in vital straits. He was more amenable than she had imagined possible. That he should parley with her at all was infinite encouragement. But now there came a pause.
“I see what you’re driving at,” he cried savagely at last. “You want me to give myself up! I’ll see you — further.”
The oath was dropped at the last moment — another strange sign — but the tone could not have been stronger. Yet the mere fact that he had seen her point, and made it for her, filled Moya with increasing confidence.
“I don’t wonder,” she had the tact to say. “How could you be expected to go back — to that — of your own free will? And yet what can be worse than waiting — waiting till — —”
“I’m taken, eh? Is that what you want to say? They shall never take me alive, curse them; don’t you trouble about that!”
The tone was stubborn, ferocious, blood-curdling, but at least it was in keeping with the blazing eyes and the great jowl beneath. Moya looked steadily at the bushranger, the mutineer, the indomitable criminal of other days; more remained of him than she had fancied. And to think that he had soft answers for her!
She made haste to earn another.
“Please — please — don’t speak like that! It is dreadful. And I feel sure there is some middle course.”
“I’m no believer in middle courses!”
“That I know. Yet — you have suffered so — I feel sure something could be done! I — that is my people — have influence — money — —”
“They can keep their money.”
Moya begged his pardon. It was not an act in which she excelled. Yet nothing could have been sweeter than her confusion, nothing finer than her frank humility.
“I was only wondering if there was anything — anything — we could any of us do! It would be understood so well. His father! Surely that would be enough! I know the Governor. I would think nothing of going to him. I honestly believe that he would pardon you both!”
Moya felt the black eyes burning, and for once her own eyes fell; indeed she was a wondrous picture of beauty and youth and enthusiasm, there in that place, in her dainty blouse and habit, with the dull green mallee above and all around her. But they were a yet more extraordinary pair, the old bushranger of a bygone day, and the Melbourne beauty of the present.
“So you believe that, do you?” said the former sardonically.
“From the bottom of my heart.”
“Suppose you were wrong?”
“I would move heaven and earth.”
“Then jump on your horse!”
“Why?”
“I’m coming with you — to the police-barracks!”
It was like a dream. Moya could have rubbed her eyes, and soon had to do so, for they were full of tears. She sobbed her thanks; she flung out both hands to press them home. The convict waited grimly at her horse’s head.
“Better wait and see what comes of it,” said he. “And think yourself lucky worse hasn’t come of it yet! I’m not thinking of myself; do you know where you are? Do you know that this is Blind Man’s Block? Haven’t you heard about it? Then you should thank your stars you’ve a good old bushman to lead you out; for it’s like getting out of a maze, I can tell you; and if you’d been warned, as I was, I don’t think you’d have ventured in.”
Moya had never realised that it was into Blind Man’s Block she had plunged so rashly. Nor did the discovery disturb her now. She was too full of her supreme triumph to dwell for many moments upon any one of the risks that she had run for its accomplishment. Neither did she look too far ahead. She would keep faith with this poor creature; no need to count the cost just yet. Moya set her mind’s eye upon the reunion at the police-barracks: her advent as the heroine of a bloodless victory, her intercession for the father, her meeting with the son.
The prospect dazzled her. It had its gravely precarious aspect. But one thing at a time. She had done her best; no ultimate ill could come of it; of that she felt as certain as of the fact that she was sitting in her saddle and blindly following an escaped criminal through untrodden wilds.
Suddenly she discovered that she was not doing this exactly. She had not consciously diverged, and yet her leader was bearing down upon her with a scowl.
“Why don’t you follow me?” he cried. “Do you want to get bushed in Blind Man’s Block?”
“I wasn’t thinking,” replied Moya. “It must have been the horse.”
Bovill seized the bridle.
“It’s a fool of a horse!” said he. “Why, we’re quite close to the fence, and it wants to head back into the middle of the block!”
Moya remarked that she did not recognise the country.
“Of course you don’t,” was the reply. “You came the devil of a round, but I’m taking you straight back to the fence. Trust an old hand like me; I can smell a fence as a sheep smells water. You trust yourself to me!”
Moya had already done so. It was too late to reconsider that. Yet she did begin to wonder somewhat at herself. That hairy hand upon the bridle, it lay also rather heavily on her nerves. And the mallee shrub showed no signs of thinning; the open spaces were as few as ever, and as short; on every hand the leaves seemed whispering for miles and miles.
“We’re a long time getting to that fence,” said Moya at length.
The convict stopped, looked about him in all directions, and finally turned round. In doing so his right hand left the bridle, but in an instant the other was in its place. Moya, however, was too intent upon his face to notice this.
“I’m afraid I’ve missed it,” said he calmly.
“Missed the fence?”
“It looks like it.”
“After what you said just now? Oh, what a fool I was to trust you!”
Their eyes were joined for the next few seconds; then the man’s face relaxed in a brutal grin. And Moya began to see the measure of her folly.
“Hypocrite!” she gasped.
“Don’t call names, my dear. It’s not kind, especially t
o your father-in-law that is to be!”
Moya shuddered in every member except the hand that gripped her whalebone switch. The gold-mounted handle was deep in her flesh.
“Leave go of my bridle,” she said quietly.
“Not just yet, my dear.”
The whalebone whistled through the air, and came slashing down upon the dapple-grey’s neck, within an inch of the hairy fingers, which were nevertheless snatched away. Moya had counted on this and its result. The animal was off at its best pace; but the desperate hands grabbed Moya’s habit as it passed, and in another instant she was on the ground. In yet another she had picked herself up, but she never even looked for the horse; she fixed her eye upon her loathly adversary as on a wild beast; and now he looked nothing else, with canine jaw and one vile lip protruding, and hell’s own fire in his wicked eyes.
Luckily her grip of the riding-whip had tightened, not relaxed; but now she held it as a sword; and it helped her to cow a brute who had the real brute’s dread of the lash. But also she was young and supple, and the man was old. The contrast had never been so sharp; for now they were both in their true colours; and every vileness of the one was met by its own antithesis in the other. It was will against will, personality against personality, in an open space among the mallee and the full glare of a climbing sun, mile upon mile from human help or habitation. And the battle was fought to a finish without a word.
Moya only heard a muttering as the wretch swung round upon his heel, and walked after the dapple-grey, which had come to a standstill within sight. But she was not done with the blackguard yet. She watched him remove the lady’s saddle, then carefully detach the water-bag, and sling it about himself by means of the stirrup-leather. Then he mounted, bare-back; but Moya knew that he would not abandon her without his say; and she was waiting for him with the self-same eye that had beaten him off.
He reined up and cursed her long and filthily. Her ear was deaf to that; but little of it conveyed the slightest meaning; her unchanged face declared as much. So then he trimmed his tongue accordingly.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 178