Vanheimert nodded, and with an eye on the bushranger, who was once more stooping over his beloved Australasian, helped himself enormously from the gallon jar.
“And now for a siesta,” yawned Stingaree, rising and stretching himself after the meal.
“Hear, hear!” croaked Vanheimert, his great face flushed, his bloodshot eyes on fire.
“I shall camp on the shady side of my tent.”
“And I’ll do ditto at the other.”
“So long, then.”
“So long.”
“Sweet repose to you!”
“Same to you,” rasped Vanheimert, and went off cursing and chuckling in his heart by turns.
It was a sweltering afternoon of little air, and that little as hot and dry in the nostrils as the atmosphere of a laundry on ironing day. Beyond and above the trees a fiery blast blew from the north; but it was seldom a wandering puff stooped to flutter the edges of the tents in the little hollow among the trees. And into this empty basin poured a vertical sun, as if through some giant lens which had burnt a hole in the heart of the scrub. Lulled by the faint perpetual murmur of leaf and branch, without a sound from bird or beast to break its soothing monotone, the two men lay down within a few yards, though out of sight, of each other. And for a time all was very still.
Then Vanheimert rose slowly, without a sound, and came on tiptoe to the other tent, his right hand in the pocket where the bandanna handkerchief had been but was no longer. He came close up to the sunny side of the tent and listened vainly for a sound. But Stingaree lay like a log in the shade on the far side, his face to the canvas and his straw sombrero tilted over it. And so Vanheimert found him, breathing with the placid regularity of a sleeping child.
Vanheimert looked about him; only the ring of impenetrable trees and the deep blue eye of Heaven would see what really happened. But as to what exactly was to happen Vanheimert himself was not clear as he drew the revolver ready cocked; even he shrank from shooting a sleeping man; what he desired and yet feared was a sudden start, a semblance of resistance, a swift, justifiable shot. And as his mind’s eye measured the dead man at his feet, the live man turned slowly over on his back.
It was too much for Vanheimert’s nerves. The revolver went off in his hands. But it was only a cap that snapped, and another, and another, as he stepped back firing desperately. Stingaree sat upright, looking his treacherous enemy in the eye, through the glass in which, it seemed, he slept. And when the sixth cap snapped as harmlessly as the other five, Vanheimert caught the revolver by its barrel to throw or to strike. But the raised arm was seized from behind by Howie, who had crept from the scrub at the snapping of the first cap; at the same moment Stingaree sprang upon him; and in less than a minute Vanheimert lay powerless, grinding his teeth, foaming and bleeding at the mouth, and filling the air with nameless imprecations.
The bushrangers let him curse; not a word did they bandy with him or with each other. Their action was silent, swift, concerted, prearranged. They lashed their prisoner’s wrists together, lashed his elbows to his ribs, hobbled his ankles, and tethered him to a tree by the longest and the stoutest of their many ropes. The tree was the one under which Vanheimert had found himself the day before; in the afternoon it was exposed to the full fury of the sun; and in the sun they left him, quieter already, but not so quiet as they. It was near sundown when they returned to look upon a broken man, crouching in his toils like a beaten beast, with undying malice in his swollen eyes. Stingaree sat at his prisoner’s feet, offered him tobacco without a sneer, and lit up his own when the offer was declined with a curse.
“When we came upon you yesterday morning in the storm, one of us was for leaving you to die in your tracks,” began Stingaree. He was immediately interrupted by his mate.
“That was me!” cried Howie, with a savage satisfaction.
“It doesn’t matter which of us it was,” continued Stingaree; “the other talked him over; we put you on one of our horses, and we brought you more dead than alive to the place which no other man has seen since we took a fancy to it. We saved your miserable life, I won’t say at the risk of our own, but at risk enough even if you had not recognized us. We were going to see you through, whether you knew us or not; before this we should have set you on the road from which you had strayed. I thought you must know us by sight, but when you denied it I saw no reason to disbelieve you. It only dawned on me by degrees that you were lying, though Howie here was sure of it.
“I still couldn’t make out your game; if it was funk I could have understood it; so I tried to get you to own up in the night. I let you see that we didn’t mind whether you knew us or not, and yet you persisted in your lie. So then I smelt something deeper. But we had gone out of our way to save your life. It never struck me that you might go out of your way to take ours!”
Stingaree paused, smoking his pipe.
“But it did me!” cried Howie.
“I never meant taking your lives,” muttered Vanheimert. “I meant taking you—as you deserved.”
“We scarcely deserved it of you; but that is a matter of opinion. As for taking us alive, no doubt you would have preferred to do so if it had seemed equally safe and easy; you had not the pluck to run a single risk. You were given every chance. I sent Howie into the scrub, took the powder out of six cartridges, and put what anybody would have taken for a loaded revolver all but into your hands. I sat at your mercy, quite looking forward to the sensation of being stuck up for a change. If you had stuck me up like a man,” said Stingaree, reflectively examining his pipe, “you might have lived to tell the tale.”
There was an interval of the faint, persistent rustling of branch and leaf, varied by the screech of a distant cockatoo and the nearer cry of a crow, as the dusk deepened into night as expeditiously as on the stage. Vanheimert was not awed by the quiet voice to which he had been listening. It lacked the note of violence which he understood; it even lulled him into a belief that he would still live to tell the tale. But in the dying light he looked up, and in the fierce unrelenting face, made the more sinister by its foppish furniture, he read his doom.
“You tried to shoot me in my sleep,” said Stingaree, speaking slowly, with intense articulation. “That’s your gratitude! You will live just long enough to wish that you had shot yourself instead!”
Stingaree rose.
“You may as well shoot me now!” cried Vanheimert, with a husky effort.
“Shoot you? I’m not going to shoot you at all; shooting’s too good for scum like you. But you are to die—make no mistake about that. And soon; but not tonight. That would not be fair on you, for reasons which I leave to your imagination. You will lie where you are tonight; and you will be watched and fed like your superiors in the condemned cell. The only difference is that I can’t tell you when it will be. It might be tomorrow—I don’t think it will—but you may number your days on the fingers of both hands.”
So saying, Stingaree turned on his heel, and was lost to sight in the shades of evening before he reached his tent. But Howie remained on duty with the condemned man.
As such Vanheimert was treated from the first hour of his captivity. Not a rough word was said to him; and his own unbridled outbursts were received with as much indifference as the abject prayers and supplications which were their regular reaction. The ebbing life was ordered on that principle of high humanity which might be the last refinement of calculated cruelty. The prisoner was so tethered to such a tree that it was no longer necessary for him to spend a moment in the red eye of the sun. He could follow a sufficient shade from dawn to dusk. His boots were restored to him; a blanket was permitted him day and night; but night and day he was sedulously watched, and neither knife nor fork was provided with his meals. His fare was relatively not inferior to that of the legally condemned, whose notorious privileges and restrictions served the bushrangers for a model.
And Vanheimert clung to the hope of a reprieve with all the sanguine tenacity of his ill-starred class, thou
gh it did seem with more encouragement on the whole. For the days went on, and each of many mornings brought its own respite till the next. The welcome announcement was invariably made by Howie after a colloquy with his chief, which Vanheimert watched with breathless interest for a day or two, but thereafter with increasing coolness. They were trying to frighten him; they did not mean it, any more than Stingaree had meant to shoot the new chum who had the temerity to put a pistol to his head after the affair of the Glenranald bank. The case of lucky Fergus, justly celebrated throughout the colony, was a great comfort to Vanheimert’s mind; he could see but little difference between the two; but if his treachery was the greater, so also was the ordeal to which he was being subjected. For in the light of a mere ordeal he soon regarded what he was invited to consider as his last days on earth, and in the conviction that they were not, began suddenly to bear them like a man. This change of front produced its fellow in Stingaree, who apologized to Vanheimert for the delay, which he vowed he could not help. Vanheimert was a little shaken by his manner, though he smiled behind the bushranger’s back. And he could scarcely believe his ears when, the very next morning, Howie told him that his hour was come.
“Rot!” said Vanheimert, with a confident expletive.
“Oh, all right,” said Howie. “But if you don’t believe me, I’m sorrier for you than I was.”
He slouched away, but Vanheimert had no stomach for the tea and damper which had been left behind. It was unusual for him to be suffered to take a meal unwatched; something unusual was in the air. Stingaree emerged from the scrub leading the two horses. Vanheimert began to figure the fate that might be in store for him. And the horses, saddled and bridled before his eyes, were led over to where he sat.
“Are you going to shoot me before you go,” he cried, “or are you going to leave me to die alone?”
“Neither, here,” said Stingaree. “We’re too fond of the camp.”
It was his first brutal speech, but the brutality was too subtle for Vanheimert. He was beginning to feel that something dreadful might happen to him after all. The pinions were removed from his arms and legs, the long rope detached from the tree and made fast to one of Stingaree’s stirrups instead. And by it Vanheimert was led a good mile through the scrub, with Howie at his heels.
A red sun had risen on the camp, but in the scrub it ceased to shine, and the first open space was as sunless as the dense bush. Spires of sand kept whirling from earth to sky, joining other spinning spires, forming a monster balloon of yellow sand, a balloon that swelled until it burst, obscuring first the firmament and then the earth. But the mind of Vanheimert was so busy with the fate he feared that he did not realize he was in another dust-storm until Stingaree, at the end of the rope, was swallowed like a tug in a fog. And even then Vanheimert’s peculiar terror of a dust-storm did not link itself to the fear of sudden death which had at last been put into him. But the moment of mental enlightenment was at hand.
The rope trailed on the ground as Stingaree loomed large and yellow through the storm. He had dropped his end. Vanheimert glanced over his shoulder, and Howie loomed large and yellow behind him.
“You will now perceive the reason for so many days’ delay,” said Stingaree. “I have been waiting for such a dust-storm as the one from which we saved you, to be rewarded as you endeavored to reward me. You might, perhaps, have preferred me to make shorter work of you, but on consideration you will see that this is not only just but generous. The chances are perhaps against you, and somewhat in favor of a more unpleasant death; but it is quite possible that the storm may pass before it finishes you, and that you may then hit the fence before you die of thirst, and at the worst we leave you no worse off than we found you. And that, I hold, is more than you had any right to expect. So long!”
The thickening storm had swallowed man and horse once more. Vanheimert looked round. The second man and the second horse had also vanished. And his own tracks were being obliterated as fast as footmarks in blinding snow.…
A BUSHRANGER AT BAY
The Hon. Guy Kentish was trotting the globe—an exercise foreign to his habit—when he went on to Australia for a reason racy of his blood. He wished to witness a certain game of cricket between the full strength of Australia and an English team which included one or two young men of his acquaintance. It was no part of his original scheme to see anything of the country; one of the Australian cricketers put that idea into his head; and it was under inward protest that Mr. Kentish found himself smoking his chronic cigar on the Glenranald and Clear Corner coach one scorching morning in the month of February. He thought he had never seen such a howling desert in his life; and it is to be feared that in his heart he applied the same epithet to his two fellow-passengers. The one outside was chatting horribly with the driver; the other had tried to chaff the Hon. Guy, and had repaired in some disorder to the company of the mail-bags inside. Kentish wondered whether these were the types he might expect to encounter upon the station to which he had reluctantly accepted an officious introduction. He wished himself out of the absurd little two-horse coach, out of an expedition whose absurdity was on a larger scale, and back again on the shady side of the two or three streets where he lived his normal life. The fare at wayside inns made the thought of his club a positive pain; and these pangs were at their sharpest when Stingaree cantered out of the scrub on his lily mare, a blessed bolt from the blue.
Mr. Kentish watched the little operation of “sticking up” without a word, but with revived interest in life. He noted the pusillanimous pallor of the driver and his friend, and felt personally indebted to the desperado who had put a stop to their unpleasant conversation. The inside passenger made a yet more obsequious surrender. Not that the trio were set any better example by their noble ally, who began by smiling at the whole affair, and was content to the last in taking an observant interest in the bushranger’s methods. These were simple and in a sense humane; there was no personal robbery at all. The mail-bags were sufficient for Stingaree, who on this occasion worked alone, but led a pack-horse, to which the driver and the inside passenger were compelled to strap the long canvas bags, under his eye-glass and his long revolver. Few words were spoken from first to last; the Hon. Guy never put in his at all; but he watched the outlaw like a lynx, without betraying an undue attention, and when all was over he gave a sigh.
“So that’s Stingaree!” he said, more to himself than to his comrades in humiliation; but the bushranger had cantered back into the scrub, and his name opened the flood-gates of a profanity which made Kentish wince, for all his knowledge of the world.
“Do you never swear at him till he has gone?” he asked when he had a chance. The driver leant across the legs of his friend.
“Not unless we want a bullet through our skulls,” he answered in boorish derision; and the man between them laughed harshly.
“I thought he had never been known to shoot?”
“That’s just it, mister. We don’t want him to begin on us.”
“Why didn’t you give him a bit of your mind?” the man in the middle inquired of Kentish. “I never heard you open your gills!”
“And we expected to see some pluck from the old country,” added the driver, wreaking vengeance with his lash.
Mr. Kentish produced his cigar-case with an insensitive smile, and, after a moment’s deliberation, handed it for the first time to his uncouth companions. “Do you want those mail-bags back?” he asked, quite casually, when the three cigars were in blast.
“Want them? Of course I want them; but want must be my boss,” said the driver, gloomily.
“I’m not so sure,” said Kentish. “When does the next coach pass this way?”
“Midnight, and I drive it. I turn back when I get to Clear Corner, you see.”
“Then look out for me about this spot. I’m going to ask you to put me down.”
“Put you down?”
“If you don’t mind pulling up. I’m not going on at present; but I’ll go back wit
h you to Glenranald instead, if you’ll keep a lookout for me tonight.”
Instinctively the driver put his foot upon the brake, for the request had been made with that quiet authority which this silent passenger had suddenly assumed; and yet it seemed to them such a mad demand that his companions looked at Kentish as they had not looked before. His face bore a close inspection; it was one of those which burn red, and in the redness twinkled hazel eyes that toned agreeably with a fair beard and fairer mustache. The former he had grown upon his travels; but the trail of the West-end tailor, whose shooting-jacket is as distinctive as his frock-coat, was upon Guy Kentish from head to heel. As they watched him he took an open envelope from his pocket, scribbled a few words on a card, put that in, and stuck down the flap.
“Here,” said he, “is my letter of introduction to the good people at the Mazeppa Station higher up. If I don’t turn up tonight, see that they get it, even if it costs you a bit of this?”
And, putting a sovereign in a startled palm, he jumped to the ground.
“But what are you going to do, sir?” cried the driver, in alarm.
“Recover your mail-bags if I can.”
“What? After you’ve just been stuck up—”
“Exactly. I hope to stick up Stingaree!”
“Then you were armed all the time?”
Mr. Kentish smiled as he shook his head.
“That’s my affair, I imagine; but even so I am not fool enough to tackle such a fellow with his own weapons. You leave it to me, and don’t be anxious. But I must be off if I’m to stalk him before he goes through the letters. No, I know what I’m doing, and I shall do better alone. Till tonight, then!”
The Raffles Megapack Page 76