He invariably lacks imagination. That may be the charitable explanation of his cruelty: it is the sure cause of those inconceivable mistakes which bring the most calculating assassin to the gallows.
He foresees his own course of escape. His heed is for the day and for his own skin. His mind’s eye will not stay behind upon his gruesome handiwork. Yet here Rowland Chandler was notably above the average of his inhuman kind. It was the body in the train that he most probably saw most clearly of all: the evidence of his own revolver, his own clothes, his own linen, at the inquest which should establish the murderer’s death and remove him from the minds of men.
But there was one thing he had forgotten, with all his cunning and I told him so with the studied deliberation of a man talking against time and eternity at once.
“And what’s that?” be scoffed.
“I was getting out at Beattoek Junction. They expect me to breakfast where I was going; they want me for a match all day to-morrow. When I don’t arrive they will wire; you (or I) will no longer provide the only subject of inquiry: there will still be two of us, living or dead, and, after all you will only get your start.”
“Then I’ll get it now!” he cried, with an oath: and my plotted death came nearer, nearer, with feeble flashes from the overhead lamp.
“Nearer still!” I urged with an inspiration that seemed to strike him as insane. “You must bring me down at an inch if you wish it even to look like a case of suicide!”
An oath answered me; the crafty hound had seen that all along, but he had not expected me to see it. I could read him raging with himself for ever having apprised me of his fell intent. He had done it to gloat over me, instinctively, I think, but none the less for the gratification of his murderous lust, and it was to cost him dear as he deserved. Had he resisted this refinement he might have clapped his barrel to my temple and shot me all but unawares; as it was he had to feint and jab at me, and I had ten spread fingers to keep him off, and of a sudden five of them had the barrel tight.
Heaven knows how it happened, or which of us was the more surprised! I only remember the sleek steel, hard to grip, and cold as ice one instant, but hot as a stove the next. Then I knew that he had fired twice, and I gave myself to the struggle as the express ran on with a rattle and a dash that no longer conveyed any tune.
It was as when the orchestra stops playing before the acobatic climacteric.
He was stronger than I. He bore me down; I slid from the seat; he fell upon me with both knees, striking me in the face with his free hand, and all without a syllable, but with wolfs eyes and ferret’s teeth. And all this time I kept that smoking pistol out of harm’s way, and when he got another hand to the butt, I got another to the barrel.
It was all I thought about, and I was still intent when the compartment filled with fresh night air. I had not seen the far door open as we ran rattling through the dark. I did not hear it shut as there towered above us a giant in a bowler and frieze overcoat.
“It’s Chandler! It’s the man they want for the murder!” the ready wretch yelped as he was dragged from my person and hurled upon the seat.
But there were our two faces, and the trained eye knew which was which.
“Don’t hurt him!” I remember saying, as I climbed into a corner with the revolver in my charge.
“Hurt him!” cried the big man over his shoulder, a bald man now, with great frieze elbows at work like pistons. “I wouldn’t hurt a hair of his head!”
And his tone was tender as an entomologist’s with a new moth in the net.
THE JACKEROO ON G-BLOCK
TAHOURDIN went out to Australia for his health, but in his secret soul he cherished other projects. Cursed by a distressing delicacy, and neither physically nor mentally robust, he had nevertheless an incongruous and quite unsuspected hankering after violent experiences in wild places. In part this was due to much early reading in a well-worn groove, in part to a less worthy stimulus. Tahourdin had a big brother, who had once turned up at South Kensington in romantic rags, thereafter to thrill all callers with graphic accounts of his more respectable adventures by flood and field. This had fired Tahourdin with an ignoble ambition, not so much to do and see and suffer in his turn, as to lay in a stock of yarns which should one day compare creditably with those of his brother. An unerring arrival in Hobson’s Bay, after no more than eighty days under canvas, fell proportionately flat upon the bold spirit that had spent half the voyage in wistful day-dreams of coral islands and of pirates’ lairs. But there was one dream whose fulfilment nothing could prevent, and Tahourdin set foot on Australian soil with the fixed determination to plant it forthwith in the very heart of the Bush.
Tahourdin’s preconception of the Bush (the capital was his in all his letters) was a mental picture of singular detail and definition. He saw huge and sombre trees in the bowels of some vast ravine, with perpetual noon above and perpetual night below — in the cool bed of an ocean of unchanging leaves. He picked out the shadow’s with horsemen in jack-boots and red shirts (himself among them), now feasting round monster camp-fires, now’ caracoling behind orderly flocks and herds. Then there were the gold-diggings: you pegged out your claim and dug away until your pick harpooned a nugget. Then there were bushrangers and wild blacks, and Tahourdin had hopes and fears of an encounter with one or the other. Perhaps the hopes predominated; they certainly did in the case of the bushrangers. Tahourdin had read much of these gentry; he intended to go prepared for them, with very little worth stealing about his person at any one time. With their well-known magnanimity they would probably hand him that little back again, and he would have it to talk about for the term of his natural life.
It will be seen that this egoist did not fly too high. He did not aspire to astonish the world, but only his friends, and he kept his aspiration to himself. Moreover, there was one excuse for him. He was not quite eighteen when he landed at Williamstown.
His letters of introduction made him several friends, who did their best to deter the escaped schoolboy from plunging into a life for which he was obviously unfitted. They assured him that there were no wild blacks within a thousand miles; that bushranging had been stamped out years since with the Kellys: that the single digger was obsolete and his claim an anachronism. Tahourdin was sorry to hear all this, but was merely restrained from buying a horse and riding forth to seek adventures as he had originally proposed to himself. Instead, he pushed for introductions to squatters, and finally succeeded in discovering one who at length consented to feed him for his services, if he chose to present himself at the station at his own risk and expense, prepared to do anything he was told, and to pay his own way back if he could not do it well enough to be worth his rations. In other words, he was to be given a trial in the untranslatable capacity of “jackeroo.” Now, “G-Block” the station had no other name — was some six hundred miles from Scott’s Hotel in Melbourne, where this dazzling prospect was unfolded; and Tahourdin had broken into the last ten pounds of his last remittance from home. So he could afford the train no farther than Echuca, whence he travelled steerage by the river steamer to Balranald, which he reached with just enough in hand to coach it to Clare Corner. This was the real bush: it did not deserve a capital after all!
The trees were not a bit high. They were uncommonly low. Ranges and gullies there were none. The whole country was as flat and arid as a rusty frying-pan. It whistled with crickets at night. It quivered in the heat all day. Night and day, Tahourdin had to jump down every five miles or so to open a gate, for he was the only passenger. It seemed that the whole country was in squares like a chess-board: it was as though a vast wire net had been cast across it. Tahourdin was thankful to see some cockatoos and parrakeets, and once a snake, and more than once a kangaroo: they were the only points in common between the real and the ideal. In the end he was met by a lean and nasal lout in a “spring” cart, and jolted forty miles back from the so-called road to a few log huts on a sandy pine ridge. Such was the Riverina station of
his dreams.
A bronzed man in leggings stepped down from a veranda and introduced himself as Mr. Clover, the manager. Tahourdin appreciated his friendly greeting, but lost no time in inquiring for the gentleman whom he had seen (and rather liked) in Melbourne.
“Oh, he doesn’t hang out on G-Block,” said Mr. Glover; “he lives at another of his stations down in Vic. He only conies up here for the lamb-marking and the shearing.”
“When’s that?” asked Tahourdin, feeling somewhat disappointed, but also desirous of obtaining such information for its own sake.
“That?” repeated the manager, cocking his eyebrows with a grin. “It’s not the same thing, you know: it’s two different things. We lamb-mark about June, and shear in August and September, so they’re both over for the year. You’re a pretty new chum, I take it, Mr. Tahourdin?”
“As new as they make them,” admitted Tahourdin, with a laugh.
“Well, were very glad of some fresh blood,” said Mr. Glover; “there are only three of us here at the homestead, and we get pretty sick of each other at times. No ladies for you, Tahourdin! I haven’t sighted a petticoat these six months. A Chinaman cooks for us, and we make our own beds. By the way, Symes and Hutchinson, my overseer and storekeeper, are camping out to-night, so you and I will be alone. Are you very hungry?”
“Not a bit,” said Tahourdin. “I had a square meal when I left the coach.”
“That’s all right. Do you happen to have a good knife on you?”
Tahourdin happened to have a very good one indeed, the kind of present one gets on going to the Colonies, and he produced it with alacrity. The manager found a blade among the other implements, and ran a practised thumb along the edge.
“Will you lend it to me to stick a sheep?”
Tahourdin was taken somewhat aback, but of course complied.
“You see, you run out of things in the back-blocks, and it isn’t worth sending for ‘em piecemeal. I’ve been using my own penknife lately: this is a great improvement. You may as well come and lend a hand, or we’ll never get any dinner to-night.”
“With pleasure,” said Tahourdin, sickening at the thought. “But — but you don’t kill and eat on the same day?”
“Don’t we! Wait till you know this climate; why, it’s still a hundred in the shade, and it must be getting on for six o’clock. This way, Tahourdin, and you can hold your knife till I’m ready for it.”
So the education of the jackeroo began with a baptism of blood, which turned him cold with sickness in the full glare of that sun. Yet he stood his ground manfully with set jaws; was even interested, once the breath was out of the mangled carcass, in its swift and cleanly reduction to the familiar and inoffensive joints; and marvelled later to find he could partake without a qualm. The barbarous repast was eked out with split-peas and a water-melon, the nearest approach to vegetables on the drought stricken run, and washed down with pints of boiling tea; what was incongruous, but the more charming on that account, they sat down to it in black coats and clean collars, the manager setting the example.
“We took to dining in our shirt-sleeves,” said he, “and then pyjamas. It was time to draw the line, so you find us at the opposite extreme.”
Tahourdin did not think it an extreme, but he was pleased, and his pleasure deepened with the night. The manager was very nice to him as they sat in the veranda and watched the stars. He was a man of thirty, hard-featured, square-jowled, brown skinned, a native Australian from wideawake to spurs; very positive in his opinions; not particular as to the language in which he aired them; but, upon the whole, and seeing he was the “boss,” decidedly amiable to the beardless and untried jackeroo.
In point of fact, he was greatly entertained by Tahourdin, who was an exceedingly ingenuous and confiding youth, susceptible to the least friendliness, and apt under its influence to divulge his own feelings and affairs with uncalled-for candour. Thus the jackeroo went to bed, in a chamber rude enough to satisfy even his requirements, with the feeling that he had made a valuable friend for life; and the manager, chuckling consumedly over a final pipe, foresaw infinite sport.
Next day they spent on the run together, shifting a few attenuated sheep from one paddock to another, and covering altogether some twenty miles on horseback in the heat. Tahourdin had not ridden since he became too big for the pony at home, and evening found him an ignominious cripple, driven to join insincerely in the laugh against himself. He was no longer in the highest spirits. He had shown great ineptitude in the saddle, and once at least, in the heat of a skirmish with the stupid sheep, his new friend had spoken to him in a way that rankled. But he had enlisted of his own free will; he was not such a fool as to resent a sharp word from a superior officer, and they rode home together the same good friends. Or so Tahourdin imagined; and Glover would have vowed that he was right; for there was no real malice in the man.
Nevertheless, his manner changed towards Tahourdin in the inspiring company of those tried comrades, Messrs. Hutchinson and Symes, station storekeeper and overseer respectively. Hitherto it had not been worth while to poke even legitimate fun at the jackeroo; there had been no audience; but the manager soon made up for lost time. Tahourdin had scarcely given a second thought to his conversational indiscretions of the night before; the other had treasured the whole series; and out they came at dinner for the delectation of the previous absentees, in bursts of oblique raillery that left its object red with rage, for all the smiles he deemed it prudent to assume.
“Mr. Tahourdin never mixed tea and mutton before. Where’s that champagne, Hutchinson? You’re not half a storekeeper; but cheer up! After all, we’re not such savages as Mr. Tahourdin expected to find us: he was quite astonished at our putting on black coats for dinner — my word!”
“I wasn’t a bit,” protested Tahourdin, stung to the quick by this subtle perfidy, but still all good-nature on the surface. “I thought it awfully jolly.”
“But not so jolly as dressing altogether, eh? He dresses every night of his life when he’s at home in the old country; don’t you, Tahourdin? You don’t happen to have brought your dress-clothes with you, eh?” Tahourdin, amid roars, confessed that he had. “I brought my whole kit,” he shouted in explanation. “I had nowhere to leave anything. Of course I wanted them in Melbourne.”
“Never mind, Tahourdin! You must make allowances for us; what can you expect of poor back-blockers? But, I say, it’s a thousand pities we’ve got no lady of the house! Tahourdin could tell her about the latest fashions. His sister’s been presented at Court!”
It was an undeniable fact, but how the fact had slipped out overnight Tahourdin could not now conceive. Had he fallen so low in unconscious boastfulness? He remembered now that he had been misled into talking about his people; and he was certainly very proud of that sister. Well, she would be the last to forgive him if this detestable conversation should ever come to her ears; meanwhile he deserved all he got.
“Which court?” inquired the overseer, a little man with a squeaky voice, but the roughest customer with whom Tahourdin had yet foregathered. “The police-court, of course,” replied Tahourdin, plunging into the joke in desperation. The manager’s face grew long at once.
“Oh, I wouldn’t give her away. His own sister, too! We’ll drop the subject, gentlemen, if you please.”
But another was soon forthcoming.
“Have we got any bushrangers kicking about, Hutchy? Because Tahourdin would rather like to meet one.”
“The deuce he would!” cried the storekeeper, a buffoon himself, who foresaw many a merry innings when his senior should have wearied of the game.
“The deuce indeed!” echoed Tahourdin, trying once more to laugh it off. “I never said that, Mr. Glover, I really didn’t. I only said I’d read about the bushrangers, and was a bit disappointed to find them extinct. I rather wanted to meet somebody who’s been stuck up by them-”
“Or be stuck up yourself, eh?”
“Well, I’m not even sure that I�
�d mind that so very much, if I hadn’t too much to lose, and they left me with a pretty whole skin. It would be an experience worth having, I’m blowed if it wouldn’t!”
“If you want real, warranted, cold-drawn pluck,” said the manager, sententiously, “you must go to the old country for it, after all!” It was not done in temper, or with at all an evil grace; but the meal was over, the chairs pushed back; and at this point the jackeroo, still red, but still grinning, managed to retreat in fair order.
“That was a nasty one,” chuckled the storekeeper.
“One agen’ his duck-house,” squeaked the overseer.
“Not a bit of it!” cried Glover, rounding upon his wise men like any potentate. “I happened to mean that. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if that kid hadn’t some grit in him somewhere. But — my word! What did I tell you chaps? Isn’t he sport?”
He was more. He had come there of his own accord, for his own peculiar ends. He was willing to work for his bread, as a necessity of the situation, and disposed to enjoy that novelty with the rest. He was none the less, a dabbler and a dilettante among hard-working men. He was not only sport, therefore, but perfectly fair game.
Only the game was not pursued in a very sporting spirit. It was generally three to one; never less than two; for, individually, the trio could be nice enough to Tahourdin; but, collectively, and even in couples, they seemed to vie with one another to make bush life a burden to him. Of course, this was not their cold-blooded design; equally of course, Tahourdin had himself to thank for the excessive measure of his humiliation. He was sensitive and vain, though unconscious of his vanity. It was none the less easily wounded on that account. His skin was as thin as a sensitized film; he was ashamed to show his arms; yet he had deliberately put himself at the mercy of men of infinitely coarser fibre, who could have thrashed him as they thrashed their dogs.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 524