For the Term of His Natural Life
Page 39
A few days after this--on the 23rd of December--Maurice Frere wasalarmed by a piece of startling intelligence. The notorious Dawes hadescaped from gaol!
Captain Frere had inspected the prison that very afternoon, and it hadseemed to him that the hammers had never fallen so briskly, nor thechains clanked so gaily, as on the occasion of his visit. "Thinkingof their Christmas holiday, the dogs!" he had said to the patrollingwarder. "Thinking about their Christmas pudding, the luxuriousscoundrels!" and the convict nearest him had laughed appreciatively, asconvicts and schoolboys do laugh at the jests of the man in authority.All seemed contentment. Moreover, he had--by way of a pleasant strokeof wit--tormented Rufus Dawes with his ill-fortune. "The schooner sailsto-morrow, my man," he had said; "you'll spend your Christmas at themines." And congratulated himself upon the fact that Rufus Dawesmerely touched his cap, and went on with his stone-cracking in silence.Certainly double irons and hard labour were fine things to break a man'sspirit. So that, when in the afternoon of that same day he heard theastounding news that Rufus Dawes had freed himself from his fetters,climbed the gaol wall in broad daylight, run the gauntlet of MacquarieStreet, and was now supposed to be safely hidden in the mountains, hewas dumbfounded.
"How the deuce did he do it, Jenkins?" he asked, as soon as he reachedthe yard.
"Well, I'm blessed if I rightly know, your honour," says Jenkins. "Hewas over the wall before you could say 'knife'. Scott fired and missedhim, and then I heard the sentry's musket, but he missed him, too."
"Missed him!" cries Frere. "Pretty fellows you are, all of you! Isuppose you couldn't hit a haystack at twenty yards? Why, the man wasn'tthree feet from the end of your carbine!"
The unlucky Scott, standing in melancholy attitude by the empty irons,muttered something about the sun having been in his eyes. "I don't knowhow it was, sir. I ought to have hit him, for certain. I think I didtouch him, too, as he went up the wall."
A stranger to the customs of the place might have imagined that he waslistening to a conversation about a pigeon match.
"Tell me all about it," says Frere, with an angry curse. "I was justturning, your honour, when I hears Scott sing out 'Hullo!' and when Iturned round, I saw Dawes's irons on the ground, and him a-scramblingup the heap o' stones yonder. The two men on my right jumped up, andI thought it was a made-up thing among 'em, so I covered 'em with mycarbine, according to instructions, and called out that I'd shoot thefirst that stepped out. Then I heard Scott's piece, and the men gave ashout like. When I looked round, he was gone."
"Nobody else moved?"
"No, sir. I was confused at first, and thought they were all in it, butParton and Haines they runs in and gets between me and the wall, andthen Mr. Short he come, and we examined their irons."
"All right?"
"All right, your honour; and they all swore they knowed nothing of it. Iknow Dawes's irons was all right when he went to dinner."
Frere stopped and examined the empty fetters. "All right be hanged," hesaid. "If you don't know your duty better than this, the sooner you gosomewhere else the better, my man. Look here!"
The two ankle fetters were severed. One had been evidently filedthrough, and the other broken transversely. The latter was bent, as froma violent blow.
"Don't know where he got the file from," said Warder Short.
"Know! Of course you don't know. You men never do know anything untilthe mischief's done. You want me here for a month or so. I'd teach youyour duty! Don't know--with things like this lying about? I wonder thewhole yard isn't loose and dining with the Governor."
"This" was a fragment of delft pottery which Frere's quick eye haddetected among the broken metal.
"I'd cut the biggest iron you've got with this; and so would he andplenty more, I'll go bail. You ought to have lived with me at SarahIsland, Mr. Short. Don't know!"
"Well, Captain Frere, it's an accident," says Short, "and can't behelped now."
"An accident!" roared Frere. "What business have you with accidents?How, in the devil's name, you let the man get over the wall, I don'tknow."
"He ran up that stone heap," says Scott, "and seemed to me to jump atthe roof of the shed. I fired at him, and he swung his legs over the topof the wall and dropped."
Frere measured the distance from his eye, and an irrepressible feelingof admiration, rising out of his own skill in athletics, took possessionof him for an instant.
"By the Lord Harry, but it's a big jump!" he said; and then theinstinctive fear with which the consciousness of the hideous wronghe had done the now escaped convict inspired him, made him add: "Adesperate villain like that wouldn't stick at a murder if you pressedhim hard. Which way did he go?"
"Right up Macquarie Street, and then made for the mountain. There werefew people about, but Mr. Mays, of the Star Hotel, tried to stop him,and was knocked head over heels. He says the fellow runs like a deer."
"We'll have the reward out if we don't get him to-night," says Frere,turning away; "and you'd better put on an extra warder. This sort ofgame is catching." And he strode away to the Barracks.
From right to left, from east to west, through the prison city flew thesignal of alarm, and the patrol, clattering out along the road to NewNorfolk, made hot haste to strike the trail of the fugitive. But nightcame and found him yet at large, and the patrol returning, weary anddisheartened, protested that he must be lying hid in some gorge of thepurple mountain that overshadowed the town, and would have to be starvedinto submission. Meanwhile the usual message ran through the island,and so admirable were the arrangements which Arthur the reformer hadinitiated, that, before noon of the next day, not a signal station onthe coast but knew that No. 8942, etc., etc., prisoner for life, wasillegally at large. This intelligence, further aided by a paragraph inthe Gazette anent the "Daring Escape", noised abroad, the world caredlittle that the Mary Jane, Government schooner, had sailed for PortArthur without Rufus Dawes.
But two or three persons cared a good deal. Major Vickers, for one, wasindignant that his boasted security of bolts and bars should have beenso easily defied, and in proportion to his indignation was the grief ofMessieurs Jenkins, Scott, and Co., suspended from office, and threatenedwith absolute dismissal. Mr. Meekin was terribly frightened at the factthat so dangerous a monster should be roaming at large within reach ofhis own saintly person. Sylvia had shown symptoms of nervous terror,none the less injurious because carefully repressed; and Captain MauriceFrere was a prey to the most cruel anxiety. He had ridden off at ahand-gallop within ten minutes after he had reached the Barracks, andhad spent the few hours of remaining daylight in scouring the countryalong the road to the North. At dawn the next day he was away to themountain, and with a black-tracker at his heels, explored as much ofthat wilderness of gully and chasm as nature permitted to him. He hadoffered to double the reward, and had examined a number of suspiciouspersons. It was known that he had been inspecting the prison a few hoursbefore the escape took place, and his efforts were therefore attributedto zeal, not unmixed with chagrin. "Our dear friend feels his reputationat stake," the future chaplain of Port Arthur said to Sylvia at theChristmas dinner. "He is so proud of his knowledge of these unhappy menthat he dislikes to be outwitted by any of them."
Notwithstanding all this, however, Dawes had disappeared. The fatlandlord of the Star Hotel was the last person who saw him, and theflying yellow figure seemed to have been as completely swallowed up bythe warm summer's afternoon as if it had run headlong into the blackestnight that ever hung above the earth.
CHAPTER IX. JOHN REX'S LETTER HOME.