In his turn the lively Fowler had marched whistling into the bank, had ceased whistling to swear down the barrel of a cocked revolver, and met a quicker fate than his comrades by impressing the bushranger as the most dangerous man of the quartette. Unfortunately for him, his fate was still further differentiated from theirs. Fowler’s feet glanced off Carrick’s back, and he plunged into the well head-first, rolling over like a stone as the wooden jaws above closed greedily upon the light of day.
Fergus at once struck matches, and in their light the cashier took the insensible head upon his knees and glared at his enemy as if from sanctuary of the Red Cross. But Fergus returned to Macbean’s side.
“I never said a word to a living soul,” he muttered. “It has come out some other way.”
“Of course it has,” said the old manager, with the same tell-tale inhalation through the teeth. Fergus felt worse than ever. He groped for the bald head and found it cold and dank. In an instant he was clamoring under the trap-door, leaping up and striking it with his fist.
“What do you want?”
“Whiskey. Some of us are hurt.”
“God help you if it’s any hanky-panky!”
“It’s none. Something to drink, and something to drink it in, or there’s blood upon your head!”
Clanking steps departed and returned.
“Stand by to catch, below there!”
And Fergus stood by, expecting to see a long barrel with the bottle and glass that broke their fall on him; but Stingaree had crept away unheard, and he pressed the lever just enough to let the glass and bottle tumble through.
Time passed: it might have been an hour. The huddled heap that was Macbean breathed forth relief. The head on Donkin’s knees moved from side to side with groans. Donkin himself thanked Fergus for his ration; he who served it out alone went thirsty. “Wait till I earn some,” he said bitterly to himself. “I could finish the lot if I started now.” But the others never dreamt that he was waiting, and he lied about it to Macbean.
Now that they sat in silence no sound escaped them overhead. They heard Stingaree and his mate sit down to a feast which Macbean described with groaning modesty as the best that he could do.
“There’s no soup,” he whispered, “but there’s a barr’l of oysters fetched up on purpose by the coach. I hope they havena missed the Chablis. They may as well do the thing complete.” In a little the champagne popped. “Dry Monopole!” moaned the manager, near to tears. “It came up along with the oysters. O sirs, O sirs, but this is hard on us all! Now they’re at the turkey—and I chopped the stuffing with my ain twa han’s!”
They were at the turkey a long time. Another cork popped; but the familiar tread of deaf Hannah was heard no more, and at length they called her.
“Mother!” roared a mouth that was full.
“Old lady!” cried the gallant Stingaree.
“She’s ’ard of ’earing, mate.”
“She might still hear you, Howie.”
And the chairs rasped backward over bare boards as one; at the same instant Fergus leapt to his feet in the earthly Tartarus his own hands had dug.
“I do believe she’s done a bolt,” he gasped, “and got clean away!”
Curses overhead confirmed the supposition. Clanking feet hunted the premises at a run. In a minute the curses were renewed and multiplied, yet muffled, as though there was some fresh cause for them which the prisoners need not know. Hannah had not been found. Yet some disturbing discovery had undoubtedly been made. Doors were banged and bolted. A gunshot came faint but staccato from the outer world. A real report echoed through the bank.
“A siege!” cried Fergus, striking a match to dance by. “The old heroine has fetched the police, and these beauties are in a trap.”
“And what about us?” demanded the cashier.
“Shut up and listen!” retorted Fergus, without ceremony. Macbean was leaning forward, with bald head on one side and hollowed palm at the upper ear. Even the stunned man had recovered sufficiently to raise himself on one elbow and gaze overhead as Fergus struck match after match. The villains were having an altercation on the very trap-door.
“Now’s the time to cut and run—now or never.”
“Very well, you do so. I’m going through the safe.”
“You should ha’ done that first.”
“Better late than not at all.”
“You can’t stop and do it without me.”
“Oh, yes, I can. I’ll call for a volunteer from below. You show them your spurs and save your skin.”
“Oh, I’ll stay, curse you, I’ll stay!”
“And I’ll have my volunteer, whether you stay or not.”
The pair had scarcely parted when the trap-door opened slowly and stayed open for the first time. The banking chamber was but dimly lit, and the light in the pit less than it had been during the brief burning of single matches. No peering face was revealed to those below, but the voice of Stingaree came rich and crisp from behind the counter.
“Your old woman has got away to the police-barracks and the place is surrounded. One of you has got to come up and help, and help fair, or go to hell with a bullet in his heart. I give you one minute to choose your man.”
But in one second the man had chosen himself. Without a word, or a glance at any of his companions, but with a face burning with extraordinary fires, Fergus Carrick sprang for the clean edge of the trap-door, caught it first with one hand and then with both, drew himself up like the gymnast he had been at his Scottish school, and found himself prone upon the floor and trap-door as the latter closed under him on the release of the lever which Stingaree understood so well. A yell of execration followed him into the upper air. And Stingaree was across the counter before his new ally had picked himself up.
“That’s because this was expected of me,” said Fergus, grimly, to explain the cashier’s reiterated anathemas. “I was the writer of the registered letter that led to all this. So now I’m going the whole hog.”
And the blue eyes boiled in his brick-red face.
“You mean that? No nonsense?”
“You shall see.”
“I should shoot you like a native cat.”
“You couldn’t do me a better turn.”
“Right! Swear on your knees that you won’t use it against me or my mate, and I’ll trust you with this revolver. You may fire as high as you please, but they must think we’re three instead of two.”
Fergus took the oath in fierce earnest upon his knees, was handed the weapon belonging to the bank, and posted in his own bedroom window at the rear of the building. The front was secure enough with the shutters and bolts of the official fortress. It was to the back premises that the attack confined itself, making all use of the admirable cover afforded by the stables.
Carrick saw heads and shoulders hunched to aim over stable-doors as he obeyed his orders and kept his oath. His high fire drew a deadlier upon himself; a stream of lead from a Winchester whistled into the room past his ear and over his ducked head. He tried firing from the floor without showing his face. The Winchester let him alone; in a sudden sickness he sprang up to see if anything hung sprawling over the stable-door, and was in time to see men in retreat to right and left, the white pugarees of the police fluttering ingloriously among them. Only one was left upon the ground, and he could sit up to nurse a knee.
Fergus sighed relief as he sought Stingaree, and found him with a comical face before the open safe.
“House full of paltry paper!” said he. “I suppose it’s the old sportsman’s custom to get rid of most of his heavy metal before closing on Saturdays?”
Fergus said it was; he had himself stowed many a strong-box aboard unsuspected barges for Echuca.
“Well, now’s our time to leave you,” continued Stingaree. “If I’m not mistaken, their flight is simply for the moment, and in two or three more they’ll be back to batter in the bank shutters. I wonder what they think we’ve done with our horses? I’ll bet th
ey’ve looked everywhere but in the larder next the kitchen door—not that we ever let them get so close. But my mate’s in there now, mounted and waiting, and I shall have to leave you.”
“But I was coming with you,” cried Fergus, aghast.
Stingaree’s eye-glass dangled on its cord.
“I’m afraid I must trouble you to step into that safe instead,” said he, smiling.
“Man, I mean it! You think I don’t. I’ve fought on your side of my own free will. How can I live that down? It’s the only side for me for the rest of time!”
The fixed eye-glass covered the brick-red face with the molten eyes.
“I believe you do mean it.”
“You shall shoot me if I don’t.”
“I most certainly should. But my mate Howie has his obvious limitations. I’ve long wanted a drop of new blood. Barmaid’s thoroughbred and strong as an elephant; we’re neither of us heavyweights; by the powers, I’ll trust you, and you shall ride behind!”
Now, Barmaid was the milk-white mare that was only less notorious than her lawless rider. It was noised in travellers’ huts and around campfires that she would do more at her master’s word than had been known of horse outside a circus. It was the one touch that Stingaree had borrowed from a more Napoleonic but incomparably coarser and crueller knight of the bush. In all other respects the fin de siècle desperado was unique. It was a stroke of luck, however, that there happened to be an old white mare in the bank stables, which the police had impounded with solemn care while turning every other animal adrift. And so it fell out that not a shot followed the mounted bushrangers into the night, and that long before the bank shutters were battered in the flying trio were miles away.
Fergus flew like a runaway bride, his arms about the belted waist of Stingaree. Trees loomed ahead and flew past by the clump under a wonderful wide sky of scintillating stars. The broad bush track had very soon been deserted at a tangent; through ridges and billows of salt-bush and cotton-bush they sailed with the swift confidence of a well-handled clipper before the wind. Stingaree was the leader four miles out of five, but in the fifth his mate Howie would gallop ahead, and anon they would come on him dismounted at a wire fence, with the wires strapped down and his horse tethered to one of the posts till he had led Barmaid over.
It was thus they careered across the vast chessboard of the fenced back-blocks at dead of night. Stingaree and Fergus sat saddle and bareback without a break until near dawn their pioneer spurred forward yet again and was swallowed in a steely haze. It was cold as a sharp spring night in England. But for a mile or more Fergus had clung on with but one arm round the bushranger’s waist; now the right arm came stealing back; felt something cold for the fraction of a second, and plucked prodigiously, and in another fraction an icy ring mouthed Stingaree’s neck.
“Pull up,” said Fergus, hoarsely, “or your brains go flying.”
“Little traitor!” whispered the other, with an imprecation that froze the blood.
“I am no traitor. I swore I wouldn’t abuse the revolver you gave me, and it’s been in my pocket all the night.”
“The other’s unloaded.”
“You wouldn’t sit so quiet if it were. Now, round we go, and back on our tracks full split. It’s getting light, and we shall see them plain. If you vary a yard either way, or if your mate catches us, out go your brains.”
The bushranger obeyed without a word. Fergus was almost unnerved by the incredible ease of his conquest over so redoubtable a ruffian. His stolid Scottish blood stood by him; but still he made grim apology as they rode.
“I had to do it. It was through me you got to know. I had to live that down; this was the only way.”
“You have spirit. If you would still be my mate—”
“Your mate! I mean this to be the making of me as an honest man. Here’s the fence. I give you two minutes to strap it down and get us over.”
Stingaree slid tamely to the ground.
“Don’t you dare to get through those wires! Strap it from this side with your belt, and strap it quick!”
And the bushranger obeyed with the same sensible docility, but with his back turned, so that Fergus could not see has face; and it was light enough to see faces now; yet Barmaid refused the visible wires, as she had not refused them all that night of indigo starlight.
“Coax her, man!” cried Fergus, in the saddle now, and urging the mare with his heels. So Stingaree whispered in the mare’s ear; and with that the strapped wires flew under his captor’s nose, as the rider took the fence, but not the horse.
At a single syllable the milk-white mare had gone on her knees, like devout lady in holy fane; and as she rose her last rider lay senseless at her master’s feet; but whether from his fall, or from a blow dealt him in the act of falling, the unhappy Fergus never knew. Indeed, knowledge for him was at an end until matches burnt under his nose awakened him to a position of the last humiliation. His throat and chin topped a fence-post, the weight of his body was on chin and throat, while wrists and muscles were lashed at full stretch to the wires on either side.
“Now I’m going to shoot you like a dog,” said Stingaree. He drew the revolver whose muzzle had pressed into his own neck so short a time before. Yet now it was broad daylight, and the sun coming up in the bound youth’s eyes for the last time.
“Shoot away!” he croaked, raising the top of his head to speak at all. “I gave you leave before we started. Shoot away!”
“At ten paces,” said Stingaree, stepping them. “That, I think, is fair.”
“Perfectly,” replied Fergus. “But be kind enough to make this so-called man of yours hold his foul tongue till I’m out of earshot of you all.”
Huge Howie had muttered little enough for him, but to that little Stingaree put an instantaneous stop.
“He’s a dog, to be shot like a dog, but too good a dog for you to blackguard!” cried he. “Any message, young fellow?”
“Not through you.”
“So long, then!”
“Shoot away!”
The long barrel was poised as steadily as field-gun on its carriage. Fergus kept his blue eyes on the gleaming ring of the muzzle.
The hammer fell, the cartridge cracked, and from the lifted muzzle a tiny cloud flowed like a bubble from a pipe. The post quivered under Carrick’s chin, and a splinter flew up and down before his eyes. But that was all.
“Aim longer,” said he. “Get it over this shot.”
“I’ll try.”
But the same thing happened again.
“Come nearer,” sneered Fergus.
And Stingaree strode forward with an oath.
“I was going to give you six of them. But you’re a braver man than I thought. And that’s the lot.”
The bound youth’s livid face turned redder than the red dawn.
“Shoot me—shoot!” he shouted, like a lunatic.
“No, I shall not. I never meant to—I did mean you to sit out six—but you’re the most gallant little idiot I’ve ever struck. Besides, you come from the old country, like myself!”
And a sigh floated into the keen morning air as he looked his last upon the lad through the celebrated monocle.
“Then I’ll shoot myself when I’m free,” sobbed Fergus through his teeth.
“Oh, no, you won’t,” were Stingaree’s last words. “You’ll find it’s not a bit worth while.”
And when the mounted police and others from Glenranald discovered the trussed youngster, not an hour later, they took the same tone. And one and all stopped and stooped to peer at the two bullet-holes in the post, and at something underneath them, before cutting poor Fergus down.
Then they propped him up to read with his own eyes the nailed legend which first helped Fergus Carrick to live down the indiscretion of his letter to Largs, and then did more for him in that Colony than letter from Queen Victoria to His Excellency of New South Wales. For it ran:
“THIS IS THE GAMEST LITTLE COCK I HAVE EVER STRUCK. HE HA
D ME CAPTIVE ONCE, COULD HAVE SHOT ME OVER AND OVER AGAIN, AND ALL BUT TOOK ME ALIVE. MORE POWER TO HIM!
“STINGAREE.”
“TO THE VILE DUST”
Vanheimert had been in many duststorms, but never in such a storm so far from the haunts of men. Awaking in his blanket with his mouth full of sand, he had opened his eyes to the blinding sting of a storm which already shrouded the very tree under which he lay. Other landmarks there were none; the world was swallowed in a yellow swirl that turned browner and more opaque even as Vanheimert shook himself out of his blanket and ran for the fence as for his life. He had only left it in order to camp where his tree had towered against the stars; it could not be a hundred yards away; and along the fence ran that beaten track to which the bushman turned instinctively in his panic. In a few seconds he was groping with outstretched hands to break the violence of a collision with invisible wires; in a few minutes, standing at a loss, wondering where the wires or he had got to, and whether it would not be wise to retrace his steps and try again. And while he wondered a fit of coughing drove the dust from his mouth like smoke; and even as he coughed the thickening swirl obliterated his tracks as swiftly as heavy snow.
Speckled eyeballs stood out of a sanded face as Vanheimert saw himself adrift and drowning in the dust. He was a huge young fellow, and it was a great smooth face, from which the gaping mouth cut a slice from jaw to jaw. Terror and rage, and an overpowering passion of self-pity, convulsed the coarse features in turn; then, with the grunt of a wounded beast, he rallied and plunged to his destruction, deeper and deeper into the bush, further and further from the fence.
The trees were few and mostly stunted, but Vanheimert crashed into more than one upon his headlong course. The sense was choked out of him already; he was fleeing on the wings of the storm; of direction he thought no more. He forgot that the run he had been traversing was at the best abandoned by man and beast; he forgot the “spell” that he had promised himself at the deserted homestead where he had once worked as a lad. He might have remembered that the paddock in which he was burying himself had always been the largest in the district. It was a ten-mile block without subdividing fence or drop of water from end to end. The whole station was a howling desert, little likely to be stocked a second time by enlightened man. But this was the desert’s heart, and into it sped Vanheimert, coated yellow to the eyes and lips, the dust-fiend himself in visible shape. Now he staggered in his stride, now fell headlong to cough and sob in the hollow of his arm. The unfortunate young man had the courage of his desperate strait. Many times he arose and hurled himself onward with curse or prayer; many times he fell or flung himself back to earth. But at length the storm passed over and over his spent members; sand gathered by the handful in the folds of his clothes; the end was as near as end could be.
The Raffles Megapack Page 74