Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  “Kick it open!” exclaimed Kilbride, excitedly.

  But there was no need for that; the box was not even locked; and the lifted lid revealed an inner one of glass, protecting a brass cylinder with steel bristles in uneven growth, and a long line of lilliputian hammers.

  “A musical-box!” said the staggered Sub-Inspector.

  “That’s it, sir. I remember hearing that he’d collared one on one of the stations he stuck up last time he was down here. It must have lain in the ground ever since. And it only shows how hard you must have pressed him, Mr. Kilbride!”

  “Yes! I headed him back across the Murray — I soon had him out o’ this!” rejoined the other in grim bravado. “Anything else in the gunyah?”

  “All he took that trip, I fancy, if we dig a bit. You never gave him time to roll his swag!”

  “I must have a look,” said Kilbride, his excitement fed by his reviving vanity.

  The other questioned whether it were worth while. This settled the Sub-Inspector.

  “There may be something to show where he’s gone,” that casuist suggested, “for I don’t believe he’s anywhere here.”

  “Shall I hold the shooters, sir?”

  “Thanks; and keep your eyes open, just in case. But it’s my opinion that the bird’s flown somewhere else, and it’s for us to find out where.”

  Kilbride then crept into the gunyah upon his hands and knees, and found it less dark than he had supposed, the light filtering freely through the leaves and branches. At the inner extremity he found a mildewed blanket, and the place where the musical-box had evidently lain a long time; but there, though he delved to the elbows in the loosened earth, his discoveries ended. Puzzled and annoyed, Kilbride was on the verge of cursing his subordinate, when all at once he was given fresh cause. The musical-box had burst into selections from The Pirates of Penzance.

  “What the deuce are you at?” shouted the irate officer.

  “Only seeing how it goes.”

  “Stop it at once, you fool! He may hear it!”

  “You said the bird had flown.”

  “You dare to argue with me? By thunder, you shall see!”

  But it was Sub-Inspector Kilbride who saw most. Backing precipitately out of the gunyah, he turned round before rising upright — and remained upon his knees after all. He was covered by two revolvers — one of them his own — and the face behind the barrels was the one with which the last hour had familiarized Kilbride. The only difference was the single eye-glass in the right eye. And the strains of the musical-box — so thin and tinkling in the open air — filled the pause.

  “What in blazes are you playing at?” laughed the luckless officer, feigning to treat the affair as a joke, even while the iron truth was entering his soul by inches.

  “Rise another inch without my leave and you may be in blazes to see!”

  “Look here, Bowen, what do you mean?”

  “Only that Stingaree happens to be at home after all, Mr. Kilbride.”

  The victim’s grin was no longer forced; the situation made for laughter, even if the laughter were hysterical; and for an instant it was given even to Kilbride to see the cruel humor of it. Then he realized all it meant to him — certain ruin or a sudden death — and the drops stood thick upon his skin.

  “What of Bowen?” he at length asked hoarsely. The idea of another victim came as some slight alleviation of his own grotesque case.

  “I didn’t kill him,” Stingaree.

  “Good!” said Kilbride. It was something that two of them should live to share the shame.

  “But wing him I did,” added the bushranger. “I couldn’t help myself. The beggar put a bullet through my hat; he did well only to get one back in the leg.”

  Kilbride longed to be winged and wounded in his turn, since blood alone could lessen his disgrace. On cooler reflection, however, it was obviously wiser to feign a surrender more abject than it might finally prove to have been.

  “Well,” said Kilbride, “you have the whip-hand over me this time, and I give you best. How long are you going to keep me on my knees?”

  “You can get up when you like,” replied Stingaree, “if you promise not to play the fool. So you were really going to take me this time, were you? I have really no desire to rub it in, but if I were you I should have kept that to myself until I’d done it. And you wanted to have me all to yourself? Well, you couldn’t pay me a higher compliment, but I’m going to pay you a high one in return. You really did make me run for it last time, and leave all sorts of things behind. So this time I mean to take them with me and leave you here instead. Nevertheless, you’re the only Victorian trap I have any respect for, Mr. Kilbride, or I shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble to get you here.”

  Kilbride did not blanch, but he heard his apparent doom with a glittering eye, and was deaf for a little to The Pirates of Penzance.

  “Oh! I’m not going to harm a good man like you,” continued Stingaree, “unless you make me. Your friend Bowen made me, but I don’t promise to fire low every time, mark you! There’s another good man on the other side — Cairns by name — you know him, do you? He’ll kick up his heels when he hears of this; but they do no better in New South Wales, so don’t you let that worry you. To think you held both shooters at one stage of the game! I trusted you, and so you trusted me; if only you had known, eh? Hear that tune, and know what it is? It’s in your honor, Mr. Kilbride.”

  And Stingaree hummed the policemen’s chorus sotto voce; but before the end, with a swift remorse, induced by the dignity of Kilbride’s bearing in humiliating disaster, he swooped upon the insolent instrument and stopped its tinkle by touching the lever with one revolver-barrel while sedulously covering the Sub-Inspector with the other. The sudden cessation of the toy music, bringing back into undue prominence all the little bush noises which had filled the air before, brought home to Kilbride a position which he had subconsciously associated with those malevolent strains as something theatrical and unreal. He had known in his heart that it was real, without grasping the reality until now. He flung up his fists in sudden entreaty.

  “Put a bullet through me,” he cried, “if you’re a man!”

  Stingaree shook a decisive head.

  “Not if I can help it,” said he. “But I fear I shall have to tie you up.”

  “That’s slow death!”

  “It never has been yet, but you must take your chance. Get me that rope that’s slung over the gunyah. It’s got to be done.”

  Kilbride obeyed with apparent apathy; but his heart was inflamed with a sudden and infernal glow. Yes, it had never ended in death in any case that he could recall of this time-honored trick of all the bushrangers; on the contrary, sooner or later, most victims had contrived to release themselves. Well, one victim was going to complete his release by hanging himself by the same rope to the same tree! Meanwhile he confronted his captor grimly, the coil in both hands.

  “There’s a loop at one end,” said Stingaree. “Stick your foot through it — either foot you like.”

  Kilbride obeyed, wondering whether his head would go through when his turn came.

  “Now chuck me the other end.”

  It fell in coils at the bushranger’s feet.

  “Now stand up against that blue gum,” he continued, pointing at the tree with Kilbride’s revolver, his own being back at his hip. “And stand still like a sensible chap!”

  Stingaree then walked round and round the tree, paying out the long rope, yet keeping it taut, until it wound round tree and man from the latter’s ankles to his armpits. Instinctively Kilbride had kept his arms free to the last, but they were no use to him in his suit of hemp, and one after the other his wrists were pinned and handcuffed behind the tree. The cold steel came as a shock. The captive had counted on loosening the knots by degrees, beginning with those about his hands. But there was no loosening steel gyves like these; he knew the feel of them too well; they were Kilbride’s own, that he had brought with him for Stinga
ree. “Found ‘em in your saddle-bags while you were in my gunyah,” explained the bushranger, stepping round to survey his handiwork. “Sorry to scar the kid — so to speak! But you see you were my most dangerous enemy on this side of the Murray!”

  The enemy did not look very dangerous as he stood in the dusk, in the heart of that forest, lashed to that tree, with his finger-tips not quite meeting behind it, and the blood already on his wrists.

  “And now?” he whispered, hoarse already, his lips cracking, and his throat parched.

  “I shall give you a drink before I go.”

  “I won’t take one from you!”

  “I shall make you, if I have to be a bigger brute than ever. You must live to spin this yarn!”

  “Never!”

  Stingaree smiled to himself as he produced pipe and tobacco; but it was not his sinister smile; it was rather that of the victor who salutes the vanquished in his heart. Meanwhile a more striking and a more subtle change had come over the face of Kilbride. It was not joy, but it was quite a new grimness, and in his own preoccupation the bushranger did not notice it at all. He sauntered nearer with his knife and his tobacco-plug, and there was some compassion in his pensive stare.

  “Cheer up, man!” said he. “There’s no disgrace in coming out second best to me. You may smile. You’ll find it’s generally admitted in New South Wales. And after all, you needn’t tell little crooked Cairns how it happened. So that stops your smile! But he’s the best man left on my tracks, and I shouldn’t be surprised if he’s the first to find you.”

  “No more should I!” said a harsh voice behind the bushranger. “Hands up and empty, Stingaree, or you’re the next dead man in this little Colony!”

  Quick as thought Stingaree stepped in front of the tied Victorian. But his hands were up, and his eye-glass dangling on its string.

  “Oh, you don’t catch me kill two birds,” rasped the newcomer’s voice, “though I’m not sure which of you would be least loss!”

  Stingaree stood aside once more, and waved his hands without lowering them, bowing from his captor to his captive as he did so.

  “Superintendent Cairns, of New South Wales — Inspector Kilbride, of Victoria,” said he. “You two men will be glad to know each other.”

  The New South Welshman drawled out a dry expression of his own satisfaction. His was a strange and striking personality. Dark as a mulatto, and round-shouldered to the extent of some distinct deformity, he carried his eyes high under the lids, and shot his piercing glance from under the penthouse of a beetling brow; a lipless mouth was pursed in such a fashion as to shorten the upper lip and exaggerate an already powerful chin; and this stooping and intent carriage was no less suggestive of the human sleuth-hound than were the veiled vigilance and dogged determination of the lowered face. Such was the man who had succeeded where Kilbride had failed — succeeded at the most humiliating moment of that most ignominious failure — and who came unwarrantably from the wrong side of the Murray. The Victorian stood in his bonds and favored his rival with such a glare as he had not levelled at Stingaree himself. But not a syllable did Kilbride vouchsafe. And the Superintendent was fully occupied with his prisoner.

  “‘Little crooked Cairns,’ am I? There are those that look a jolly sight smaller, and’ll have a worse hump than mine for the rest of their born days! Come nearer and turn your back.”

  And the revolver was withdrawn from its carrier on the stolen constabulary belt. The bushranger was then searched for other weapons; then marched into the bush at the pistol’s point, and brought back handcuffed to the Superintendent’s bridle.

  “That’s the way you’ll come marching home, my boy; and one of us on horseback each side; don’t trust you in a saddle on a dark night!”

  Indeed, it was nearly dark already, and in the nebulous middle-distance a laughing jackass was indulging in his evening peal. Cairns jerked his head in the direction of the unearthly cackle. “Lots of ‘em down here in Vic, I believe,” said he, and at length turned his attention to the bound man. “You see, I wanted to land him alive and kicking without spilling blood,” he continued, opening his knife. “That was why I had to let him tie you up.”

  “You let him?” thundered the Victorian, breaking his silence with a bellow. It was as though the man with the knife had cut through the rope into the bound man’s body.

  “Stand still,” said he, “or I may hurt you. I had to let him, my good fellow, or we’d have been dropping each other like bullocks. As it is, not a scratch between us, though I found young Bowen in a pretty bad way. Our friend had stuck up Jumping Creek barracks in the small hours, put a bullet through Bowen’s leg, and come away in his uniform. Pretty tall, that, eh? I shouldn’t wonder if you’d swing him for it alone, down here in Vic; no doubt you’ve got to be more severe in a young Colony. Well, I tracked my gentleman to the barracks, and I found Bowen in his blood, sent my trooper for a doctor, and got on your tracks before they were half an hour old. I came up with you just as he’d stuck you up. He had one in each hand. It wasn’t quite good enough at the moment.”

  The knife shore through the rope for the last time, and it lay in short ends all round the tree.

  “Now my hands,” cried Kilbride fiercely.

  “I beg pardon?” said the satirical Superintendent.

  “My hands, I tell you!”

  “There’s a little word they teach ‘em to say at our State Schools. Perhaps you never heard it down in Vic?”

  “Don’t be a silly fool,” said Kilbride, wearily. “You haven’t been through what I have!”

  “That’s true,” said Cairns. “Still, you might be decently civil to the man that gets you out of a mess.”

  Nevertheless, the handcuffs were immediately removed; and that instant, with the curtest thanks, Sub-Inspector Kilbride sprang forward with such vigorous intent that the other detained him forcibly by one of his stiff and aching arms.

  “What are you after now, Kilbride?”

  “My prisoner!”

  “Your what?”

  “My prisoner,” I said.

  “I like that — and you his!”

  Kilbride burst into a voluble defence of his position.

  “What right have you on this side of the Murray, you Sydney-sider? None at all, except as a passenger. You can’t lay finger on man, woman, or child in this Colony, and, by God, you sha’n’t! Nor yet upon the three hundred there’s on his head; and the sons of convicts down in Sydney can put that in their pipe and smoke it!”

  For all his cool and ready insolence, the misshapen Superintendent from the other side stood dazed and bewildered by this volcanic outpouring. Then his dark face flushed darker, and with a snarl he clinched his fists. The Victorian, however, had turned on his heel, and now his liberated hands flew skyward, as though the bushranger’s revolver covered him yet again.

  But there was no such weapon discernible through the shade; no New South Welshman’s horse; and neither sight, sound, wraith, nor echo of Stingaree, the outlawed bushranger, the terror and the despair of the Sister Colonies!

  “I thought it might be done when I saw how you fixed him,” said Kilbride cheerfully. “Those beggars can ride lying down or standing up!”

  “I believe you saw him clear!”

  “I’ll settle that with you when I’ve caught him.”

  “You catch him, you gum-sucker, when you as good as let him go!”

  And a volley of further and far more trenchant abuse was discharged by Superintendent Cairns, of the New South Wales Police. But Kilbride was already in the saddle; a covert outward kick with his spurred heel, and the third horse went cantering riderless into the trees.

  “He won’t go far,” sang the Sub-Inspector, “and he’ll take you safe back to barracks if you give him his head. It’s easy to get bushed in this country — for new chums from penal settlements!”

  As the Victorian galloped into the darkness, and the New South Welshman dashed wildly after the third horse, the laughing jackas
s in the invisible middle-distance gave his last grotesque guffaw at departed day. And the laughing jackass is a Victorian bird.

  The Honor of the Road

  Sergeant Cameron was undressing for bed when he first heard the voices through the weather-board walls; in less than a minute there was a knock at his door.

  “Here’s Mr. Hardcastle from Rosanna, sir. He says he must see you at once.”

  “The deuce he does! What about?”

  “He says he’ll only tell you; but he’s ridden over in three hours, and he looks like the dead.”

  “Give him some whiskey, Tyler, and tell him I’ll be down in two ticks.”

  So saying, the gray-bearded sergeant of the New South Wales Mounted Police tucked his night-gown into his cord breeches, slipped into his tunic, and hastened to the parlor which served as court-room on occasion, buttoning as he went. Mr. Hardcastle had a glass to his lips as the sergeant entered. He was a very fine man of forty, and his massive frame was crowned with a countenance as handsome as it was open and bold; but at a glance it was plain that he was both shaken and exhausted, and in no mood to hide either his fatigue or his distress. Sergeant Cameron sat down on the other side of the oval table with the faded cloth; the younger constable had left the room when Hardcastle called him back.

  “Don’t go, Tyler,” said he. “You may as well both hear what I’ve got to say. It’s — it’s Stingaree!”

  The name was echoed in incredulous undertones.

  “But he’s down in Vic,” urged the sergeant. “He’s been giving our chaps a devil of a time down there!”

  “He’s come back. I’ve seen him with my own eyes. But I’m beginning at the wrong end first,” said the squatter, taking another sip and then sitting back to survey his hearers. “You know old Duncan, my overseer?”

  The sergeant nodded.

  “Of course you know him,” the other continued, “and so does the whole back-country, and did even before he won this fortune in the Melbourne Cup sweep. I suppose you’ve heard how he took the news? He was fuddling himself from his own bottle on Sunday afternoon when the mail came; the first I knew of it was when I saw him sitting with his letter in one hand and throwing out the rest of his grog with the other. Then he told us he had won the first prize of thirty thousand, and that he had made up his mind to have his next drink at his own place in Scotland. He left us that afternoon to catch the coach and go down to Sydney for his money. He ought to have been back this evening before sundown.”