Old Mrs Barclay stared, suffering at last in understanding of the stern and deathly intention that informed the group of men “about their business”; and with her heart sick with the horror of pain that seemed suddenly to emanate from that one plague-spot of tragedy, and fill all the earth. Her grim old face had grown ghastly under its pale tan colour…. This was Justice, the Justice that she had so constantly hammered into her husband the need of dealing, without shrinking…. This madly desperate mother, and this lad, barely out of his teens (she was seeing sanely at last), standing noosed within a few yards of her, and already, as it were, looking at his mother from the other side of the Eternity of Death…. And the sheriffs men (the Men of Death they seemed now to her) all around, so dreadly purposeful and obdurate to the Voice of Natural Pity that wailed at them out of the lips of the crazed mother…. This was what she—she, Anna Barclay, had urged her husband towards many and many a time; she had never known; never! Never—NEVER! … She could almost have screamed her denial….
No wonder John (her husband) had been always so inclined towards mercy…. My God, were there often such scenes as these going on in the same world…. Was there often this weight of terror and complete HORROR bred into being by the deliberate doings of Man, for any purpose whatever— call it Justice or by any other name?… This dreadfulness. This dreadfulness that choked her. This … and suddenly she found her voice:
“STOP!” she cried, with a voice as deep and hoarse as a man’s. “STOP!” … She waved her hands a moment incoherently, fighting to take control of the fierce passion of horror and agony of pity that beat through every fibre of her, possessing her. “Stop!” she cried again; and then:
“How dare you! … Oh, how dare all you men be met together here to do this—to do such a thing! To do such a thing…” She stopped abruptly, and stared at the men, as if they were things incredibly monstrous, and they, on their part, looked round at her and the Judge, only then aware of their advent.
“Let him go at once!” said old Mrs Judge Barclay, speaking again, as her voice became once more a controllable possession…. “Let him go to his mother…. Let them both go.”
Across the ring of men the mother had fallen suddenly to her knees; her mouth was gabbering breathless words of prayer, her hands outstretched at arms’ length, her fingers twining and intertwining madly.
“Save … him,” came her voice at last, no louder than a hoarse whisper, yet having a strange quality that seemed to make the very leaves above them stir and rustle. And, with the two completed words, she pitched forward, out of the relaxed hands of the two men who held her, on to her face, with a little thump, her forehead and nose ploughing into the trampled mud beneath the tree.
There came a queer, little inarticulate cry from Jem, and he began to fight desperately, bound hands and feet as he was, towards where his mother lay on her knees and face; but the sheriff and one of the men caught him and dragged him back beneath the over-reaching bough. The sheriff signed hastily to old Judge Barclay, and the Judge put his arm about his wife to lead her away. But she tore from him, and faced the sheriff.
“It’ll be all right, mum,” said that man. “You go along quiet now with the Jedge. We ain’t goin’ to hurt Jem more’n the flap of a fly’s tail. Don’t ye worrit…”
“You’re going to hang that young man as soon as I’ve gone!” burst in Mrs Barclay, very white-faced, but with now a strange shining in her eyes. “That’s what you mean to do!”
“Yep,” said the sheriff, scratching his head, and trying to catch Judge Barclay’s eye. But Judge Barclay was looking only at his wife, with something that was new in the way of his look.
“Yep,” said the sheriff again. “Jem’s boun’ to hang, sure, mum, but we ain’t goin’ to hurt him worth a mench. We’ll turn ‘m off nice an’ easy. You go along of the Jedge now…”
But he never finished his piece of excellent and practical advice; for, with a bound astonishing in so elderly a woman, she came at him, and he gave back helplessly, not knowing how to cope with such an attack. Yet she had no meaning to strike him. Instead, before he knew anything beyond his bewilderment, she had opened his holster and twitched out the heavy Smith and Wesson; then, with a leap, she was back from him, facing the group:
“Hands up!” she screamed, her voice cracking and her old eyes literally blazing, “You shall not murder that boy; not so what he’s done! HANDS UP! I say, or I’ll surely shoot at you.”
The old woman’s expression was so full of a desperate resolve that the men’s hands went up, though maybe a little hesitatingly and doubtfully. Yet, they had gone up, and up they remained, as the muzzle of the heavy weapon menaced first one and then another. For suddenly it was very clear to the men that the woman was wound up to such a pitch of intensity that she would shoot first and do the thinking afterwards. It is true that several of the men held their revolvers in their hands; but what could they do? They could undoubtedly have snapped off shots at the old woman, but they were not going to shoot old Mrs Judge Barclay; the thought was below their horizon of practical things. Neither would it have done to have attempted to rush her, for there would have been, most surely, one or two sudden deaths achieved in the operation, and the after situation also would have to be faced; so, as I have told, they kept up their hands, and watched the old woman with quite as much curiosity as rancour. They were very practical men.
Old Judge Barclay, however, failed to realise the entire earnestness of the situation, and, after a moment of stupefaction, began to run towards his wife in vast distress.
“Anna, Anna!” he cried out. “Anna, my dear, put that down and come away!”
But she ripped round at him:
“Stand back, John!” she shouted shrilly. “I shall shoot!”
But the old Judge still failed to realise, and continued to come towards her.
“Stand back, John, or I shall shoot!” she screamed. “I’m fair wound up, an’ you’ll make me do murder! Stand back, John!”
As she spoke, she fired the pistol to frighten him; and because she had never fired a pistol before, she had no suspicion that the reason her husband’s hat flew off was that the bullet had passed clean through the crown of it, just grazing his bald, old head. If she had thought at all about the displacing of the hat, she would merely have supposed that his sudden start at the shot accounted for it.
The old Judge came to an abrupt stand, his face grown very white; but he said not a word more, and his wife took no further notice of him; not even insisting on his putting up his hands. She wheeled round sharply again upon the sheriff and his posse, and discovered the sheriff half way across the grass towards her; for he had thought to catch and disarm her whilst her attention was taken with the Judge. The old woman’s eyes blazed as she saw how nearly he had succeeded:
“Back!” she screamed at him, and in the same instant fired. The sheriff reeled a moment; then steadied himself, and thrust his hands earnestly above his head. The bullet had struck him full in the stomach, but the huge buckle of his belt had turned it, so that it had glanced out through his shirt again harmlessly, a mere half-flattened little chunk of lead.
“Get back to the others!” ordered the old woman, in a voice high and tense. “Turn your backs, all of you!”
As one man, the posse faced about.
“Go off a bit from the young man!” said Mrs Judge Barclay. “Stop there. Keep there!”
She ran swiftly to the prisoner, whirled him round on his heels with one vigorous hand, and pulled out the sheath-knife, which had never been removed from his belt. She slashed at the thin rope about his wrists, and all the time she kept a strict watch upon the line of masculine backs before her. She cut the rope at last, and his hands also, but not badly; then pushed the knife into his cramped fingers, and the lad proceeded to cut loose the lashings about his ankles.
“Now, GO!” said old Mrs Judge Barclay, fiercely, as he stood free. “An’ mind an’ sin no more. GO!”
She almost shrie
ked as he stood and stared at her; and she pointed to the horses of the posse. He looked swiftly towards his mother; but the Judge’s wife beat him with her free hand fiercely, pushing him towards the horses. And suddenly, he obeyed, and began to run stiffly towards the animals.
When he reached them he displayed a little of that sense and ability which I have hinted lay cloaked so securely below his somewhat habitually sullen expression, for, having freed all the reins, he gathered them into his hand, and mounted the finest of the horses, which belonged to the sheriff; then, leading the rest, he went off at a fast trot.
The line of silent men began to stir uneasily, and old Mrs Judge Barclay steadied them with her voice. For a space of fifteen minutes, timed by her old-fashioned gold watch, she stood on guard. At the end of that time the mother of Jem came-to, and lifted a muddy face, stiffening sharply into terror with suddenly returned memory. She hove herself up giddily on to her knees, and glared upwards and round her, expecting dreadfully to see something that swayed, writhing, above her from the great branch.
Said Mrs Judge Barclay:
“Your son’s gone, ma’am. He’ll be well down the trail by this.”
Her voice began to shake curiously as she spoke; and suddenly she reached her breaking-point, and collapsed, settling all in a heap on the muddy ground. She never heard the dazed, crazy words of fierce gratitude that the other woman gave out as she bent over her, aiding the old Judge to lay her down straight.
Old Mrs Judge Barclay came round some minutes later, to find her mouth uncomfortably full of bad whisky, and her husband still anxiously loosening garments that Jem’s mother had already loosed quite sufficiently. His clumsy old fingers shook as he fumbled, and she put up a sudden hand of tenderness, and caught the fumbling fingers and held them with an almost hysterical firmness. In a little she rose to a sitting position, and looked round at the ring of men, who stood, each with his whisky-flask in his hand, ready, as it might be thought, to insure that the supply of restorative should not run dry.
Presently Mrs Judge Barclay spoke:
“Now,” she said, turning her white, plucky old face towards the sheriff, “if you must hang somebody, hang me; not a bit of a young boy like that!”
But they hanged neither old Mrs Judge Barclay nor young Jem Turrill; for the latter got clear away. And concerning the former, if the truth must be known, the sheriff and his men entertain for her a respect few women have ever screwed out of their somewhat rugged-natured hearts. Moreover, they kept the affair strictly quiet, for it was not one in which any of them was able to discover undue credit to himself. As for old Judge Barclay, he had nothing of reproach for his wife. In his heart he was unfeignedly thankful that young Jem had got away; and equally glad, in another fashion, that Providence or kind Chance had ordered it that his wife should witness the working of the unmitigated Justice that she had so often upheld.
The Getting Even of Tommy Dodd
I believe the young beggar will, too!” said James, the eldest ’prentice.
They were in the glory hole of the “Lady Hannibal,” and Dayrin, the youngest ’prentice, aged fourteen, and known aboard by the name of Tommy Dodd, had been expounding a plan “to get level” with everybody in general, it seemed; for Tommy had been tasting another dose of that gross injustice which is dealt out so liberally to the boys in some ships.
“I’ll fairly make the old man a fool, you’ll see,” he said. “And as for that old bo’sun and the third mate and the steward, I’ll make them wish they’d never been born. Fancy the pig breaking all the stops on the fore, main, and mizzen, just at eight bells as I was coming below to dinner, and then sending me up to put new ones on! It’s taken me two hours, and now the beastly dinner’s cold, and I’ve no time for a sleep, or anything. And he’s done that every day this week for my afternoon watch below. I told him he was a bully when he did it again to-day, and look what he’s done!”
And Tommy rolled up his trousers to show a great abraided bruise where the third mate had kicked him with his heavy boots. “I hit him twice in the stummick, but he held my hands, and kicked me till I was sick. Look at my shins!” And he showed his shins, cut and bruised in a dozen places by the third mate’s boots.
James and the other ’prentice in the port watch bent and looked at the boy’s legs, nodding their heads with a sort of savage sympathy.
“If Tommy tries that idea of his for the homeward passage, I guess I’ll help him for all I’m worth,” said James.
“I will say that for the old man,” remarked Tommy; “he sung out to the third to go steady when he was kicking me. But all the same, he turned on me himself, and told me I deserved what I’d got. I was in such a wax I told him straight out that if I’d been even half his size I’d have wiped the deck with both him and the third mate. He kicked me bang off the poop then, down the poop ladder on to the main deck, when I said that; but when I got to the bottom I told him that, after I’d wiped the deck with them, I’d make him kiss my feet to teach him to know a man when he saw one.”
“You know, Tommy,” said James, “you’re a plucky kid; but you’ll be murdered outright one of these days if you don’t mind. I wouldn’t have said what you said to the old man for the value of the ship.”
“Anyway,” ended Tommy, “the first mate likes me. I know that.”
A few days later Tommy got across the bo’sun’s hawse concerning the cleaning of the pigsty, which the bo’sun had set Tommy to do every morning watch for a fortnight past, and which, properly, should have been done by the hands when they washed the decks. When the bo’sun came forrard from washing down the poop, he found, to his pained amazement, that Tommy had not touched the pigsty except with the seat portion of one of his garments, for the boy was sitting calmly on the top of the sty smoking a cigarette, his bucket and broom reclining beneath him on the deck. The bo’sun expressed fluently his distress at this condition of affairs, and suggested, with the aid of the broom-handle, that Tommy Dodd should get to work at his accustomed dirty task.
“Clean it yourself!” said Tommy the instant the bo’sun had loosed him. “Clean it yourself, you old bully, if your back ain’t too fat to bend!”
He avoided further acquaintance with the broom-handle, and, catching up his bucket of water, hove the contents in the bo’sun’s face, then made a sprint for the poop, dodged the broom which the bo’sun threw, and returned the bucket as interest, cracking the bo’sun on the shin, and afterwards continuing at top speed to the poop.
The bo’sun arrived almost in the same instant, and Tommy Dodd would certainly have fared very badly but for the interference of the mate, who told him that he would deal with Tommy. Later, he gave orders privately to the bo’sun that he must ease up on the boy, or he, the mate, would have something to say in the matter.
Yet, in spite of the efforts of the first mate to keep Tommy out of serious trouble, the boy had several narrow escapes from real bodily injury, for the third mate and the bo’sun were by nature bullies, and the captain, though, as I have said, not a bad man, was very hasty-tempered and hard by nature, so that when all is said and done poor Tommy had a very rough and brutal time of it on the way out.
And hence, as I have hinted, Tommy’s plot to avenge himself and the others, for it must not be supposed that he had any monopoly when rough treatment was being handed out. And of the plot and its workings you will have chance to judge, as you read on.
As Tommy himself put it: “I make a spiffing girl when I’ve the right togs on. I’ve acted often at home. You’ll see if I don’t fool ’em all!”
From now until the “Lady Hannibal” reached Melbourne there were long and secret conferences in the ’prentices’ berth, or glory hole, during which the plan was fully matured. As James remarked:
“It should go off all right, you know. The skipper’s an awful old fool over any girl he can get to talk to him, an’ Tommy should be able to fetch him.”
“The old man’ll sure to want to kiss you, Tommy,” said one of t
he ’prentices in the other watch. “What’ll you do then?”
“I’ll smack his face for him, good an’ hard!” said Tommy, with gusto at the thought. “Guess I’ll get square with him. And I’ll fix the third mate, too. You’ll see!”
When Melbourne was reached the ’prentices clubbed their spare cash, and thereafter took to frequenting milliners’ and other shops dedicated to the daintying of woman.
At the conclusion of their purchases the whole six of the young rascals carted the bundles into the ’prentices’ berth, and, having locked the door and covered the ports, Master Tommy Dodd went through an elaborate “trying-on.”
At the end of his efforts, however, a queer silence possessed the glory hole; for Tommy, when finally dressed, from pretty shoes—which his slender feet and years allowed to be surprisingly small—to his mop of naturally curly, golden hair, made so dainty a girl that his fellow ’prentices felt all at once different towards him. He looked so like a girl. It was James who voiced the general feeling, when he said abruptly, “By George, youngster, you make a pretty girl!”
As James made the remark, there came a sharp rap on the berth door, and the voice of the third mate, demanding admittance. The lads looked from one to the other, in complete dismay; but Tommy perceived suddenly that the advent of the third mate might prove helpful, rather than otherwise; moreover, it was a good chance to test the efficiency of his disguise. And he whispered to the others to let the officer in quickly, before he began to suspect that something was up. This the lads now did, and the third mate burst in roughly, with a coarse remark, and looked suspiciously round. Then he saw the girl, standing demurely quiet by the table, and at sight of her quite extraordinary prettiness, he became suddenly so polite, that Tommy nearly burst out laughing. Instead, however, he took up his part in earnest, and looked at him with a primly disgusted look, that made the whole coarse bulk of the third mate abruptly realise itself, which cannot have been pleasant for him. Then Tommy turned to James, and said aloud, but in a nicely modulated voice:
The Dream of X and Other Fantastic Visions Page 5