Kilbride obeyed with apparent apathy; but his heart was inflamed with a sudden and infernal glow. Yes, it had never ended in death in any case that he could recall of this time-honored trick of all the bushrangers; on the contrary, sooner or later, most victims had contrived to release themselves. Well, one victim was going to complete his release by hanging himself by the same rope to the same tree! Meanwhile he confronted his captor grimly, the coil in both hands.
“There’s a loop at one end,” said Stingaree. “Stick your foot through it—either foot you like.”
Kilbride obeyed, wondering whether his head would go through when his turn came.
“Now chuck me the other end.”
It fell in coils at the bushranger’s feet.
“Now stand up against that blue gum,” he continued, pointing at the tree with Kilbride’s revolver, his own being back at his hip. “And stand still like a sensible chap!”
Stingaree then walked round and round the tree, paying out the long rope, yet keeping it taut, until it wound round tree and man from the latter’s ankles to his armpits. Instinctively Kilbride had kept his arms free to the last, but they were no use to him in his suit of hemp, and one after the other his wrists were pinned and handcuffed behind the tree. The cold steel came as a shock. The captive had counted on loosening the knots by degrees, beginning with those about his hands. But there was no loosening steel gyves like these; he knew the feel of them too well; they were Kilbride’s own, that he had brought with him for Stingaree. “Found ’em in your saddle-bags while you were in my gunyah,” explained the bushranger, stepping round to survey his handiwork. “Sorry to scar the kid—so to speak! But you see you were my most dangerous enemy on this side of the Murray!”
The enemy did not look very dangerous as he stood in the dusk, in the heart of that forest, lashed to that tree, with his finger-tips not quite meeting behind it, and the blood already on his wrists.
“And now?” he whispered, hoarse already, his lips cracking, and his throat parched.
“I shall give you a drink before I go.”
“I won’t take one from you!”
“I shall make you, if I have to be a bigger brute than ever. You must live to spin this yarn!”
“Never!”
Stingaree smiled to himself as he produced pipe and tobacco; but it was not his sinister smile; it was rather that of the victor who salutes the vanquished in his heart. Meanwhile a more striking and a more subtle change had come over the face of Kilbride. It was not joy, but it was quite a new grimness, and in his own preoccupation the bushranger did not notice it at all. He sauntered nearer with his knife and his tobacco-plug, and there was some compassion in his pensive stare.
“Cheer up, man!” said he. “There’s no disgrace in coming out second best to me. You may smile. You’ll find it’s generally admitted in New South Wales. And after all, you needn’t tell little crooked Cairns how it happened. So that stops your smile! But he’s the best man left on my tracks, and I shouldn’t be surprised if he’s the first to find you.”
“No more should I!” said a harsh voice behind the bushranger. “Hands up and empty, Stingaree, or you’re the next dead man in this little Colony!”
Quick as thought Stingaree stepped in front of the tied Victorian. But his hands were up, and his eye-glass dangling on its string.
“Oh, you don’t catch me kill two birds,” rasped the newcomer’s voice, “though I’m not sure which of you would be least loss!”
Stingaree stood aside once more, and waved his hands without lowering them, bowing from his captor to his captive as he did so.
“Superintendent Cairns, of New South Wales—Inspector Kilbride, of Victoria,” said he. “You two men will be glad to know each other.”
The New South Welshman drawled out a dry expression of his own satisfaction. His was a strange and striking personality. Dark as a mulatto, and round-shouldered to the extent of some distinct deformity, he carried his eyes high under the lids, and shot his piercing glance from under the penthouse of a beetling brow; a lipless mouth was pursed in such a fashion as to shorten the upper lip and exaggerate an already powerful chin; and this stooping and intent carriage was no less suggestive of the human sleuth-hound than were the veiled vigilance and dogged determination of the lowered face. Such was the man who had succeeded where Kilbride had failed—succeeded at the most humiliating moment of that most ignominious failure—and who came unwarrantably from the wrong side of the Murray. The Victorian stood in his bonds and favored his rival with such a glare as he had not levelled at Stingaree himself. But not a syllable did Kilbride vouchsafe. And the Superintendent was fully occupied with his prisoner.
“‘Little crooked Cairns,’ am I? There are those that look a jolly sight smaller, and’ll have a worse hump than mine for the rest of their born days! Come nearer and turn your back.”
And the revolver was withdrawn from its carrier on the stolen constabulary belt. The bushranger was then searched for other weapons; then marched into the bush at the pistol’s point, and brought back handcuffed to the Superintendent’s bridle.
“That’s the way you’ll come marching home, my boy; and one of us on horseback each side; don’t trust you in a saddle on a dark night!”
Indeed, it was nearly dark already, and in the nebulous middle-distance a laughing jackass was indulging in his evening peal. Cairns jerked his head in the direction of the unearthly cackle. “Lots of ’em down here in Vic, I believe,” said he, and at length turned his attention to the bound man. “You see, I wanted to land him alive and kicking without spilling blood,” he continued, opening his knife. “That was why I had to let him tie you up.”
“You let him?” thundered the Victorian, breaking his silence with a bellow. It was as though the man with the knife had cut through the rope into the bound man’s body.
“Stand still,” said he, “or I may hurt you. I had to let him, my good fellow, or we’d have been dropping each other like bullocks. As it is, not a scratch between us, though I found young Bowen in a pretty bad way. Our friend had stuck up Jumping Creek barracks in the small hours, put a bullet through Bowen’s leg, and come away in his uniform. Pretty tall, that, eh? I shouldn’t wonder if you’d swing him for it alone, down here in Vic; no doubt you’ve got to be more severe in a young Colony. Well, I tracked my gentleman to the barracks, and I found Bowen in his blood, sent my trooper for a doctor, and got on your tracks before they were half an hour old. I came up with you just as he’d stuck you up. He had one in each hand. It wasn’t quite good enough at the moment.”
The knife shore through the rope for the last time, and it lay in short ends all round the tree.
“Now my hands,” cried Kilbride fiercely.
“I beg pardon?” said the satirical Superintendent.
“My hands, I tell you!”
“There’s a little word they teach ’em to say at our State Schools. Perhaps you never heard it down in Vic?”
“Don’t be a silly fool,” said Kilbride, wearily. “You haven’t been through what I have!”
“That’s true,” said Cairns. “Still, you might be decently civil to the man that gets you out of a mess.”
Nevertheless, the handcuffs were immediately removed; and that instant, with the curtest thanks, Sub-Inspector Kilbride sprang forward with such vigorous intent that the other detained him forcibly by one of his stiff and aching arms.
“What are you after now, Kilbride?”
“My prisoner!”
“Your what?”
“My prisoner,” I said.
“I like that—and you his!”
Kilbride burst into a voluble defence of his position.
“What right have you on this side of the Murray, you Sydney-sider? None at all, except as a passenger. You can’t lay finger on man, woman, or child in this Colony, and, by God, you sha’n’t! Nor yet upon the three hundred there’s on his head; and the sons of convicts down in Sydney can put that in their pipe and smoke it!
”
For all his cool and ready insolence, the misshapen Superintendent from the other side stood dazed and bewildered by this volcanic outpouring. Then his dark face flushed darker, and with a snarl he clinched his fists. The Victorian, however, had turned on his heel, and now his liberated hands flew skyward, as though the bushranger’s revolver covered him yet again.
But there was no such weapon discernible through the shade; no New South Welshman’s horse; and neither sight, sound, wraith, nor echo of Stingaree, the outlawed bushranger, the terror and the despair of the Sister Colonies!
“I thought it might be done when I saw how you fixed him,” said Kilbride cheerfully. “Those beggars can ride lying down or standing up!”
“I believe you saw him clear!”
“I’ll settle that with you when I’ve caught him.”
“You catch him, you gum-sucker, when you as good as let him go!”
And a volley of further and far more trenchant abuse was discharged by Superintendent Cairns, of the New South Wales Police. But Kilbride was already in the saddle; a covert outward kick with his spurred heel, and the third horse went cantering riderless into the trees.
“He won’t go far,” sang the Sub-Inspector, “and he’ll take you safe back to barracks if you give him his head. It’s easy to get bushed in this country—for new chums from penal settlements!”
As the Victorian galloped into the darkness, and the New South Welshman dashed wildly after the third horse, the laughing jackass in the invisible middle-distance gave his last grotesque guffaw at departed day. And the laughing jackass is a Victorian bird.
THE HONOR OF THE ROAD
Sergeant Cameron was undressing for bed when he first heard the voices through the weather-board walls; in less than a minute there was a knock at his door.
“Here’s Mr. Hardcastle from Rosanna, sir. He says he must see you at once.”
“The deuce he does! What about?”
“He says he’ll only tell you; but he’s ridden over in three hours, and he looks like the dead.”
“Give him some whiskey, Tyler, and tell him I’ll be down in two ticks.”
So saying, the gray-bearded sergeant of the New South Wales Mounted Police tucked his night-gown into his cord breeches, slipped into his tunic, and hastened to the parlor which served as court-room on occasion, buttoning as he went. Mr. Hardcastle had a glass to his lips as the sergeant entered. He was a very fine man of forty, and his massive frame was crowned with a countenance as handsome as it was open and bold; but at a glance it was plain that he was both shaken and exhausted, and in no mood to hide either his fatigue or his distress. Sergeant Cameron sat down on the other side of the oval table with the faded cloth; the younger constable had left the room when Hardcastle called him back.
“Don’t go, Tyler,” said he. “You may as well both hear what I’ve got to say. It’s—it’s Stingaree!”
The name was echoed in incredulous undertones.
“But he’s down in Vic,” urged the sergeant. “He’s been giving our chaps a devil of a time down there!”
“He’s come back. I’ve seen him with my own eyes. But I’m beginning at the wrong end first,” said the squatter, taking another sip and then sitting back to survey his hearers. “You know old Duncan, my overseer?”
The sergeant nodded.
“Of course you know him,” the other continued, “and so does the whole back-country, and did even before he won this fortune in the Melbourne Cup sweep. I suppose you’ve heard how he took the news? He was fuddling himself from his own bottle on Sunday afternoon when the mail came; the first I knew of it was when I saw him sitting with his letter in one hand and throwing out the rest of his grog with the other. Then he told us he had won the first prize of thirty thousand, and that he had made up his mind to have his next drink at his own place in Scotland. He left us that afternoon to catch the coach and go down to Sydney for his money. He ought to have been back this evening before sundown.”
The sergeant put in his word:
“That he ought, for I saw him come off the coach and start for the station as soon as they’d run up the horse he left behind him at the pub. I wondered what had brought him, if he was so set on getting back to the old country.”
“I could tell you,” said Hardcastle, after some little hesitation, “and I may as well. Poor old Duncan was the most generous of men, and nothing would serve him but that every soul on Rosanna should share more or less in his good fortune. I am ashamed to tell you how much he spoke of pressing on myself. You have probably heard that one of his peculiarities was that he would never take payment by check, like other people? I believe it was because he had knocked down too many checks in his day. In any case, we used to call him Hard Cash Duncan on Rosanna; and I am very much afraid that when you saw him he must have had the whole of his thirty thousand pounds upon him in the hardest form of cash.”
“But what has happened, Mr. Hardcastle?”
“The very worst,” said Hardcastle, stooping to sip. The three heads came closer together across the faded tablecloth. “There was no sign of him at seven; he ought to have been with us before six. We had done our best to make it an occasion, and it seemed that the dinner would be spoilt. So at seven young Evans, my store-keeper, went off at a gallop to meet him, and at twenty-five past he came galloping back leading a riderless horse. It was the one you saw Duncan riding this afternoon. There was blood upon the saddle. I found it. And within another hour we had found the poor old boy himself, dead and cold in the middle of the track, with a bullet through his heart.”
The squatter’s voice trembled with an emotion that did him honor in his hearers’ eyes; and the gray-bearded sergeant waited a little before asking questions.
“What makes you think it is Stingaree?” he inquired, at length.
“I tell you I saw him on the run, with my own eyes, this morning. I passed him in one of my paddocks, as close as I am to you, and asked him if he was looking for the homestead. He answered that he was only riding through, and we neither of us stopped.”
“Yet you knew all the time that it was Stingaree?”
“No; to be quite honest,” replied Hardcastle, “I never dreamt of it at the time. But now I am quite positive on the point. He hadn’t his eye-glass in his eye, but it was dangling on its cord all right; and there was the curled mustache, and the boots and breeches that one knows all about, if one has never seen them for oneself. Yet I own it didn’t dawn on me just then. I happened to be thinking of the stations round about, and wondering if they were as burnt up as we are, and when I met this swell I simply took him for a new chum on one or other of them.”
“There had been robbery, of course?”
“An absolute clearance,” said Hardcastle. “The valise had been cut to ribbons with a knife, and its other contents were strewed all about; a pocketbook we found still bulging from the roll of notes which had been taken out. I waited beside him while Evans went back for the buggy, and when they started to take him in I rode on to you.”
“We’ll ride back with you at once,” said the sergeant, “and find you a fresh horse if your own has had enough. Run up the lot, Tyler, and Mr. Hardcastle can take his choice. It seems clear enough,” continued Cameron, as the trooper disappeared. “But this is a new departure for Stingaree; it’s the very thing that everybody said he would never do.”
“And yet it’s the logical climax of his career; it might have happened long ago, but it’s not his first blood as it is,” argued Hardcastle, when he had drained his glass. “Didn’t he wing one of you down in Victoria the other day? Your bushranger is bound to come to it sooner or later. He may much prefer not to shoot; but he has only to get up against a man of his own calibre, as resolute and as well armed as himself, to have no choice in the matter. Poor old Duncan was the very type; he would never have given way. In fact, we found him with his own revolver fast in his hand, and a finger frozen to the trigger, but not a chamber discharged.”
�
��Yes? Then that settles it, and it must have been foul play,” cried Cameron, owning a doubt in its dismissal. “And we mustn’t lose a single minute in getting on this blackguard’s tracks.”
Yet it was midnight before the little cavalcade set out upon a ride of over thirty miles, for arrangements had to be made for a telegram to be sent to the Glenranald coroner first thing in the morning, and to insure this it was necessary to disturb the postmaster, who occupied one of the three weather-board dwellings which constituted the roadside hamlet of Clear Corner. A round moon topped the sand-hills as the trio rode away; it was near its almost dazzling zenith when they reined up at the scene of the murder. This was at a point where the sandy track ran through a belt of scrub, and the sergeant got off to examine the ground with Hardcastle, while Tyler mounted guard in the saddle. But nothing of importance was discovered by the pair on foot, and nothing seen or heard by their mounted comrade.
They found the station still astir and faintly aglow in the veiled daylight of the moon. A cluster of the men stood in a glare at the door of their hut; the travellers’ hut betrayed the like symptoms of excitement; at the kitchen door were more men with pannikins, and odd glimpses of a firelit, white-capped face within. But on the broad veranda sat two young men with their backs to a closed and darkened window. And behind the window lay all that remained of an elderly man, whose brown, gnarled face was scarcely recognizable by the newcomers in its strange smooth pallor, but his grizzled beard weirdly familiar and still crisp with lingering life.
The coroner arrived in some thirty hours, which had brought forth nothing new; his jury was drawn from the men’s hut and rabbiters’ tents; and after a prolonged but inconclusive investigation, the inquest was adjourned for a week. But the seven days were as barren as the first, and a verdict against some person unknown a foregone result. This did not satisfy the many who were positive that they knew the person; for Stingaree had been seen a hundred miles lower down, doubtless on his way back to Victoria, and with his appearance altered in a telltale manner. But the coroner thought he knew better than anybody else, and had his way, notwithstanding the manifest feeling on the long veranda where he held his court.
The Raffles Megapack Page 79