“Why,” exclaimed the woman, “it’s a man! No, it’s a boy!”
“Yes,” agreed the farmer, screwing Tom round to the light; “it’s a boy all right.”
“Ow!” yelled Tom. “Leggo, yer ’urtin’ me.”
“I’ll ’urt ye a dashed sight more afore I’m done with ye,” observed the farmer; “ye thievin’ young varmint.”
“I ain’t,” whined the chief pirate; “I ain’t a thief!”
“Poor child!” said the farmer’s wife. “Don’t hurt him, Jacob!—ah, don’t hurt him!”
“The varmint’s done his best to hurt me!” cried Jacob. “He kicked a few inches of bark off my shins!”
“Well,” howled Tom, “you nearly choked me!”
“Whose boy is he?” asked the farmer’s wife.
“He’s got a ugly face,” replied the burly farmer, holding Tom up to the candle light; “a ugly face that a cove ought to know anywhere; but I don’t recognise ’im.”
“Do you think he really was at the fowls, Jacob?”
“I dunno,” replied Jacob, “what kinder evidence you’d want to prove it; but I ketched him with a Leghorn hen in one hand an’ yer Spanish rooster in the other, coming’ outer the fowlhouse, an’ I reckon that’s strong enough for me; I reckon it’s strong enough to ’ang the varmint on.”
“Whose boy are you?” asked the farmer’s wife. “Where do you come from?”
“I can’t speak,” growled Tom, “he’s chokin’ me.”
“Don’t hurt him, Jacob!” pleaded the good wife, in a sympathetic voice. “He’s only a child.”
“He’s a derned old-fashioned child,” observed the farmer, taking a fresh grip of his prize. “There, now, let’s hear what you got to say for yourself. Who are you? What is your name?”
“Robinson,” replied Tom, tearfully, “Will Robinson.”
“Robinson!” repeated the man. “There ain’t any Robinsons round here. Where did you come from?”
“I came from the Richmond,” replied Tom, readily.
“What were you doin’ up there?”
“Workin’ on a farm.”
“Has your people got a farm?”
“No; me father and mother’s dead.”
“You was with your relations, eh?”
“No; I got no relatives; I’m a orphan.”
“Poor child!” cried the farmer’s wife softly. “Remember, Jacob, the Lord hasn’t blessed us.”
“Yes, I’m a orphan,” cried Tom, tearfully. “I got no father an’ no mother, an’ nobody in the world. I wuz put to work for a cove up there milkin’ cows an’ pullin’ maize an’ ploughin’——”
“Ploughin’!” interrupted the farmer. “Mean to say he put you ploughin’?”
“Yes,” sobbed Tom; “an’ he treated me bad, too—uster knock me about an’ larrup me with a cartwhip. I never hardly got enough to eat—never—so I couldn’t stand it no longer, an’ I run away.”
“What was the cove’s name you was workin’ with?” asked the farmer.
“Smith,” said Tom, “Mr. Smith.”
“What Smith?”
“I dunno his other name,” replied the captured pirate, suspecting a trap; “I never heard ’im called anythink except Mister Smith.”
“Hum,” said the farmer. “An’ how long is it since you run away?”
“’Bout two weeks,” replied Tom. “I bin hidin’ in the bush so’s they wouldn’t ketch me. I didn’t want to be ketched an’ took back an’ knocked about. I’d a rather died. I nearly did die, too! I got starved—I’m starved now. I ain’t ’ad nothink to eat all day, nor yesterday ’ardly. I wouldn’t ’a come ’ere to take them fowls only I wuz ’ungry, an’ that’s the truth. I never stole nothink in me life before.”
“Poor child!” murmured the woman; “perhaps he couldn’t help it, Jacob.”
“Um,” said Jacob. “I thought you said it wuz a native cat arter the fowls?”
“Yes,” replied Tom; “I did say it.”
“An’ now you admit you did it?”
“Well, I wuz frightened, an’ I thought you wuz goin’ to whale me.”
“How were you goin’ to cook them chickens?”
“I wusn’t goin’ to cook ’em.”
“You wasn’t! What, then, goin’ to sell ’em?”
“No, I wuz goin’ to eat ’em raw!”
“My God, Jacob,” exclaimed the farmer’s wife, “the poor boy’s starving! Can’t you see the wolfish look in his eye?”
Tom glared and looked as famished as he could.
“Look ’ere,” cried the farmer, “where is this cove Smith’s place on the Richmond?”
“It’s about Lismore,” said Tom, readily, “at the beginning of the Big Scrub. Ain’t you ever been there?”
“No,” said the farmer, still keeping a firm grip of the pirate’s coat collar, “an’ I doubt if you ’ave either. How did you get down to Lismore?”
“Tramped it,” said Tom.
“How long did it take you?”
“’Bout two days.”
“Two days? What did you have to eat?”
“I got lilly-pillys outer the bush, an’ berries, an’ I uster pull corn cobs an’ roast ’em over a fire an’ uster get a drink of milk at the dairy farms in the mornin’.”
“Ah! Weren’t the police looking for you in Lismore?”
“I dunno. I never went into the town. I stayed in the scrub till it was dark an’ then I got acrost the bridge an’ sneaked on to a boat that wuz goin’ out to Sydney. I meant to go right down in ’er, but they found me out an’ put me off at Woodburn, an’ I walked acrost an’ sneaked on the punt at Chatsworth, an’ kem on this side of the Clarence. I been prowlin’ about the bush ever since.”
“Why didn’t you go into the towns and look for work or something?”
“Because I wuz waitin’ for it to blow over. I thought my boss up there above Lismore might put an advertisement in the paper or set the police onter me.”
“Hum,” said the farmer. “It’s either a true bill, or your the cleverest voting liar outer gaol at the present moment.”
“I ain’t no liar,” protested the pirate: “I ain’t. An’ its true, every word.”
“Hum,” said the farmer; “We’ll see.”
“You ain’t goin’ to give me up?” asked Tom, anxiously. “I say, mister, don’t give a cove up.”
“We’ll see; we’ll see.”
“Don’t!” pleaded Tom; “please don’t. Look, I won’t never shake any more fowls, I won’t. Only I don’t want to ’ave to go back to that Smith up there above Lismore, an’ get knocked about.”
The farmer’s wife was regarding the culprit with pity.
“Are you hungry now?” she asked.
Tom rubbed his stomach.
“I’m nearly dead,” he murmured woefully; “I’m empty as a ’oller log.”
“Let him come inside, Jacob,” pleaded the wife. “Let me give him a feed first before you do anything with him.”
The man relaxed his grip on Tom’s collar.
“Look ’ere,” he said, “if what you say turns out to be true, I won’t give you in charge to the police, like I meant to do.”
“It is true, every word,” said Tom solemnly. “Every bloomin’ word of it.”
“What did you say your name was again?” asked the farmer’s wife.
“Stevenson,” replied Tom; “Joe Stevenson.”
“Why you said Robinson first,” exclaimed the farmer.
“No, I never,” protested Tom; “I said Stevenson.”
“I think it was Stevenson, Jacob,” said the wife.
“I’ll swear he said Robinson,” muttered the farmer. “Anyway Stevenson or Robinson, it don’t matter which, for now, you go straight up to the house there in front o’ me. If you try to get away, I’ll give you a good hidin’ first an’ give you in charge to the police afterwards. D’yer hear?”
“Yes,” replied Tom, meekly. “I hear. I won’t try to run away. I wish I could get a good home,” he added on a second inspiration.
“If yer honest about that, meybe I’ll find a home for you,” said the man. “I want a good lad about the place.”
“You give me a show, an’ don’t whale me like that man Smith did, an’ I’ll work,” said Tom, throwing as much eagerness into his voice as he could.
“I’ll make some enquiries about you in the mornin’,” said the farmer as they entered the kitchen door; “an’ the missus’ll give you a feed for now.”
The good-hearted woman set down a loaf of bread and the best part of a leg of mutton before Tom.
Then she asked him if he would have tea or milk, and he said he’d take milk so as not to put her to any trouble and he was so polite and softspoken, and looked so penitent, that her heart went out to him still more.
Tom rolled his eyes about when he saw the food, and put out his hand and seized a piece of bread and wolfed at it.
Then he grabbed the piece of meat which she had just cut off the joint and tore it as if he were famished.
“Poor thing, poor thing!” said the woman. “Don’t eat so quickly. You’ll be ill. There now, take your time; don’t gulp it. There’s plenty more. You can have as much as you want.”
The pirate chief slowed down, and went steadily to work on the bread and meat. It was not much trouble to him to act the part, because his appetite was good, and the fruit he had eaten on the island that day had not proved too staying. All the time he was eating, he thought and thought.
He ate on in a sort of reverie, taking slice after slice of bread and meat as the farmer’s wife cut them off.
The woman watched him with tears in her eyes. “Poor boy” she murmured from time to time. “Poor boy; he must have been starving!”
The loaf of bread disappeared. The last of the leg of mutton disappeared. The good wife went to the cupboard and got a great piece of seed cake and cut it in slices.
Tom dealt with it slice by slice. The woman’s face became soft and more pitiful. She went to the cupboard again and brought out half a roly-poly.
Tom put his hand secretly down under the table cloth and let go the top button of his trousers.
“Poor boy,” reiterated the farmer’s wife; “poor boy.”
Two great womanly tears gathered in her eyes and slowly overflowed.
Tom, conscious that he was playing a star part, choked down a few more morsels of food; then he laid aside his knife and fork, wiped the perspiration from his forehead, and sat staring into vacancy with bulging eyes.
“Could you eat a piece of pineapple?” asked the woman.
Her intentions were kind, but she did not know.
Tom Pagdin groaned. He felt that any refusal of food might be a weakening of the evidence in his favour. He tried to display as much appetite as possible, and furtively letting go another trouser button, replied that he could.
The woman went to a case in the corner, and selected a fair-sized pineapple from it.
It was freshly cut from the pineapple patch in the garden in front, but its fragrance failed to awake any enthusiasm in Tom. He stowed away a couple of slices as a matter of form, and then he pleaded, in a thick voice, that he couldn’t eat any more.
“Well,” said the farmer, “I reckon if ye did, you’d be like that cow o’ mine that got into the lucerne patch yisterday.”
“Why,” asked Tom, in an anxious voice. He was not feeling well within.
“Good enough reason why,” said Jacob Cayley; “the blamed animal’s dead as a dern door-nail.”
“What happened to ’er?” queried the inflated pirate.
“Busted!” replied Jacob, grimly.
Tom turned pale.
“I ain’t feeling none too well,” he murmured, placing a band on his lower deck. “Do you think a cove ’ud bust like—like a cow?”
“I dunno,” replied the farmer. “If ’e’d et too much he might.”
“Ob, Lord!” groaned Tom.
“How do you feel?” asked Mrs. Cayley.
“I got a pain,” he said, “’ere, an’ ’ere—all over me stummick.”
“’E’s over-et ’imself, Maria,” remarked Cayley. “’E’d better go to bed.”
“I’ll put him in the spare room,” said Maria, regarding Tom with a motherly eye.
“Yes,” replied Jacob, “an’ I’ll lock the door an’ padlock the winder on the outside till we find out whether his yarn is true or not.”
Tom’s face fell. He forgot everything—even the untimely end of Cayley’s cow. While he had been feeding he had thought over a plan of escape. It was simple enough. As soon as the farmer and his wife had gone to bed he would slip out, get quietly down to the river bank, and if Dave had taken the boat across to the Pirate’s Camp, swim over and rejoin him.
But now this scheme was baulked. He was to be locked up for the night like a prisoner in a cell, perhaps only liberated on the morrow under strict surveillance, and his chance of escape reduced to a minimum. Meanwhile enquiries were to be made about him. He was not far away from home. Somebody would know of him, and he would be found out and ignominiously dragged back.
Then again, if he did not succeed in escaping quickly, Dave would probably find solitary pirating too lonesome, and give it up.
The farmer marched Tom off to bunk while he was reflecting over these things, and having seen him undress, gave him good-night, and told him to make himself comfortable. He turned the key as he went, taking the candle and Tom’s clothes with him. A few minutes after the prisoner heard the wooden shutters, with which the window, as in old-fashioned country houses, was provided, bang together, and the sounds which followed told him that they were being secured from the outside.
Tom sat on the bed-side in his shirt, the only garment which the farmer had left him, and pondered. It was an awkward fix.
Chapter VIII.
GEORGE OF THE “GREENWICH” GOES FISHING.
The little river-boat Greenwich was loading freight and passengers at one of the Grafton wharves.
Across the Clarence, on the south side, winches rattled bales of wool and bags of potatoes and maize into the coastal steamer, which traded weekly between Sydney and the fertile North Coast.
On the river bank above, blocking the roadway, were yet standing some of the teams which had brought the wool down from the New England tableland.
The dusty whips of the carriers cracked no longer, and their tired horses dozed contentedly in the sunlight.
Some of the carriers were at the water-side pub, beerily quarrelling over the merits of rival “leaders.” One was in the backyard of the hotel conducting amorous negotiations with a black gin, and another, who did not drink, had gone down to see about back loading.
It was three in the afternoon, and Donald Mac., the skipper of the Greenwich, took his place at the wheel.
On the river, up and down, there was no boat more popular than the Greenwich. The crew of the little steamer consisted of Sam, the fat engineer, George and Bill, and the skipper. George and Bill were the deck hands, who put the cargo and passengers ashore at the various landings.
There was a general air of courtesy and good humour about the Greenwich. Nothing seemed a trouble to little Donald Macpherson, but the fact of the matter was that Donald’s troubles had made him lean, and somewhat sad.
He had all the responsibilities of a deep-sea skipper, with less than the pay of a third mate. It had taken him his life to learn the river, its depths and bars, its shallows and reefs, and banks, and currents, and as the river had a habit of changing its geographical features after each flood, Donald was always at school.
Then there was ever the possibility that some day, as he brought the Greenwich round the Devil’s Elbow, between the reef and the bar at the mouth in a swamping southerly, despite all his knowledge of the game, the Greenwich would stand on her head and kick her propeller at the Milky Way.
It was three in the afternoon, and the skipper swung the nose of his ship out from the wharf.
Sam, the engineer, with his ear at the gong, and his hand on the lever, stood to his post. George, the senior deck hand, who ranked as first mate, ran his eye down the cargo list. Bill stood by. There were coils of fencing wire to drop here and there, boxes of groceries, tins of kerosene, all sorts of sundries, mails, and newspapers.
Where the local newspapers had regular subscribers along the banks, it was George’s custom to tie the paper round a stone (he kept a small pile of ballast for’ard for the purpose), and threw it ashore as the steamer slid by. He had become so expert at this practice that he could generally land a newspaper or a small package right at the farmer’s door.
Most of the farm houses were built on the river’s brink. Cool, comfortable-looking weatherboard cottages, surrounded by shade and fruit trees with maize paddocks, banana groves, or cane fields behind them. As the Greenwich steered past she would give a blast of her whistle, and the farmer, or his wife, or his boy, or often his pretty daughter, would come out and pick up the package and wave pleasantly to the skipper and his crew.
The skipper, with one hand to the wheel and one eye on the river, would wave back, and George and Bill and Sam mostly kissed their hands, in the case of a lady, and smiled cheerfully.
The skipper’s eye caught the waving of a handkerchief at the edge of a cane field on the opposite bank, and crossed to pick up a passenger and a consignment of produce. So they worked down the river. It was almost dark when the steamer tied up at the wharf, where she stayed for the night.
Donald, his duties over for the day, took his tucker basket and went ashore. His fancy went ahead of him, along the street of the little river town. He saw the wife standing at the front door, and in the lamplight behind her a white cloth laid for two, and a child’s chair drawn up to the table.
And Donald forgot that he was tired.
Sam and Bill went ashore also, and left George to mind the ship.
George, being a bachelor, slept in the after-cabin on the transoms, and tuckered for himself aboard.
His chief amusement was fishing; mostly with heavy lines for dog sharks and “jews.”
So when he had had his tea he took his shark line, and baiting it with half a mullet, threw out astern.
Having passed a loop of the line round an empty kerosene tin, and placed it so that a tug at the bait would upset it and make a row, George filled his pipe and went for’ard to smoke.
After an hour’s lounge the first mate thought he would stroll aft and look at the line.
“I’ll bet,” he said to himself, “that the cursed bream have eaten my bait off.”
He drew in the slack of the line and commenced to haul up. The line tautened.
“Hullo!” cried George, “I’m snagged!”
He pulled steadily.
“No,” he added, “I’ve hooked something. It’s coming up,” he resumed, peering over into the water, “Whatever it is it’s dashed heavy; must be a log, I reckon.”
There was a kerosene lamp on the wharf which threw a dim yellow light over the water astern.
George dragged the line around over the rail so that he would be enabled to see what he was bringing up.
“By gosh, it’s heavy,” he soliloquised. “Dashed good thing this line is strong.”
The line was strong; it had held an eight foot grey-nurse shark.
Foot by foot the first mate hauled in.
“Here it comes!” he ejaculated, “what the devil is it, though!”
“Why, my God!” screamed the horrified deck-hand, “IT’S A MAN!!”
George had leaned over the rail to examine his haul, and at the last pull a human head, ghastly and horrible, with livid face, and dank, dripping, matted hair, had risen to the surface. His horrified gaze met the open staring eyes of a corpse!
For one moment he was petrified, fascinated, frozen with horror!
Then he let the line run through his fingers, leaped on to the wharf with a mighty bound and coatless, hatless, charged up the street in the direction of the police station.
The Sergeant had gone to bed, but he rose in his pyjamas and came out on to the verandah in answer to a loud, insistent knocking.
“What’s up?” he cried. “Who’s there?”
“Me!” cried George. “Get up, quick!”
“Who’s me?” demanded the officer.
“George!” said the first mate, still hanging on to the knocker.
“What George?”
“Greenwich; come quick, for God’s sake!”
“What’s up? What do you want?”
“Come down to the wharf quick. I’ve hooked a man.”
“Killed a man?” said the Sergeant. “Has there been a row; I didn’t hear anything?”
“No, no!” exclaimed George, “there hasn’t been any row. I was shark fishing, and I caught a man—a dead man.”
“Hum!” said the Sergeant, doubtfully, “have you been drinking?”
“No!” shouted the excited deck hand, “I don’t touch it; but I swear to God it’s true I did catch a man!”
“Where is he now?”
“On the line; I hooked something and pulled it up. I couldn’t make out what it was; it came so dead and heavy. When I got it to the top I leaned over the stern and looked. My God, I never got such a fright in my life!”
“What did you do then?” asked the Sergeant.
“I let go the line and run up here!” said George.
“All right,” said the officer, in a grieved voice—he hated inquests—“some fellow’s gone and drowned himself in the river, I suppose.”
“I dunno,” replied George. “He’s dead, anyway, and by the look of it, I reckon he’s been dead some time.”
“You ought to have made the line fast,” said the Sergeant; “he might have got off the hook. Hope to Heaven he has,” he added, “and that he gets down to Palmer’s Island, or somewhere; I don’t want him. Wait, till I get my trousers on, I’ll go down and see. It might have been fancy with you. Sure you weren’t asleep, George?”
“No!” exclaimed George, emphatically, “I wasn’t asleep; I hadn’t even made my bunk up.”
The Sergeant re-appeared in a few minutes with his boots and pants on, and the two men wended their way to the riverside where the Greenwich lay rocking gently on the night tide.
On the way down George went over the details two or three times.
“Where’s the line?” asked the Sergeant, as they stepped aboard.
“Here,” replied George, leading the way aft.
“I thought so,” he said, as yard after yard came aboard without resistance. “You fell asleep and had a nightmare; nice thing to come and call a man out of his bed like this. I’ve ridden over thirty miles to-day.”
George vowed and protested that he had not been the victim of a delusion.
“I saw him as plain as I see you,” he answered, mentally assuring himself.
“There!” as the last yard of the line was drawn in, “what’s that! What’s that on the hook?”
The Sergeant threw something on deck wet and slopping.
“Fetch a light,” he cried, “till we see what it is.”
Chapter IX.
GEORGE DECLINES A TASK.
“There!” exclaimed George. “I knew I had something at the end of my line.”
“Knew you had something?” ejaculated the Sergeant. “You knew you had something! Why, hang it, man, do you think I am going to be dragged out of my bed after a thirty miles ride because a blamed fool with the horrors or something hooks a handkerchief off the bottom of the Clarence?”
“It was more than that!” cried George, firmly. “I’ll swear I had a dead man on the hook.”
“I’ve a mind to put you on your oath about it,” said the Sergeant, tartly.
“I’d swear it in Court,” averred George.
“Nice Crown witness you’d make, wouldn’t you.”
“There!” cried George, suddenly stepping back and pointing tragically at the lamp-lit water.
“What!” ejaculated the Sergeant, gazing intently over the stern of the Greenwich.
“There!” repeated George, in the attitude of Macbeth locating Banquo’s ghost—“there! I told you so.”
“By gad!” cried the Sergeant, with a start. “A floating corpse!”
“The same one I hooked,” said George, in a hollow voice.
“You’ll get a name as a fisherman if you keep on,” observed the officer.
“I suppose it’s an inquest.”
“What’ll we do?” asked the first mate, excitedly.
“Hook him again!” replied the Sergeant, in a matter-of-fact voice. “You must have had him by the neck and the cloth gave way. The disturbance floated him.”
“Ugh!” cried George; “I’ll never throw out a blamed line in this river again as long as I live.”
“Well I will!” said the Sergeant. “I’ll throw one now. Lend me that shark hook a minute.”
The officer who was paid, not too liberally, by Government, to act either as assistant pathologist or undertaker, as occasion required, jumped upon the after grating with the end of George’s shark line in his hand.
A human head could be seen bobbing gently up and down with the swell and fall of the tide. It drifted neither to right nor left, but in a sort of ghastly oscillation waited—waited. There was a sardonic smile on the parted lips. The smile that is seen on the face of the murdered dead who come up again from under the earth, from the depths of the waters, anywhere. The dead who come for justice.
Livid and ghastly, and utterly unreal and horrible was the face of the corpse floating steadily in that pool of yellow lamplight. And when the Sergeant, after several throws with the line, succeeded in hooking on, it came towards the stern without resistance. The man of law leaned over the low rail to make an examination.
“Fetch the lantern!” he called to the deck-hand, “and a rope.”
The tide lapped by softly, the little town lay wrapped in darkness, broken only by an occasional lantern in the main street, and the dim lamp at the hotel.
“Hold the light over till I see, can’t you?”
“Ugh!” cried the deck-hand.
“Well, turn your head away if you don’t want to look, or shut your eyes.”
“It’s horrible!” murmured George, whose face was deadly pale. “I don’t want to look at it.”
“Well, don’t!” exclaimed the officer.
“I can’t help it——”
“Great Scott!” ejaculated the Sergeant, taking another pull on the line.
“What!” cried George, his heart in his mouth.
“Murder!” exclaimed the officer, with a new interest in his voice.
“Murder!” cried George, hoarsely.
“Look! Yes, by Gad! the man’s been stabbed.”
“Stabbed! Oh, Lord!”
“Hold the light, can’t you?”
“No,” said George, sitting down suddenly; “I can’t. I’m hanged if I can!”
The Sergeant was busy with the rope. Notwithstanding his ride of thirty miles, he had become active and alert. He passed a slip-noose over the stern presently, drew it tight, and tied the end securely to a stanchion.
“Now,” he said, his mind already full of business; “You’ll have to stay here and keep an eye on this while I go up town and make arrangements!”
“Me?” exclaimed George.
“Yes you! I’ll send the constable down by-and-bye.”
“How long will he be before he comes?” asked George, anxiously.
“Couple of hours at the outside; I’ve something I want him to do first——”
“Two hours!” cried George. “Here by myself, at night, with that—that—that thing tied up to the Greenwich! I wouldn’t do it for ten pounds!”
“But,” argued the Sergeant, “you must. I don’t want the town to know anything about it. I want to keep everything dark till I make a few inquiries. This is a very serious matter. There is a big case hanging to it—a big case for me!”
“I don’t care,” cried George doggedly, “What’s hanging to it or who! I won’t stay here by myself—that’s straight!”
“Oh, confound you!” exclaimed the Sergeant. “All right if you’re such a coward as that I’ll send someone down as soon as I go up to the barracks!”
“I ain’t a coward,” said George; “but I haven’t engaged with the owners of this boat to mind floating corpses. It ain’t part of my duty, and I won’t do it.”
“Remember you are to be a witness—an important witness—in this case,” said the Sergeant, severely.
“All right,” replied George; “but I’ll wait ashore up under the lamp, till somebody comes, I wouldn’t stop on the boat—and another thing, I’m hanged if I think I’ll sleep aboard of her after this!”
Whereat George stepped on to the gangplank and got ashore, so placing himself when he landed that various opaque objects would come between his line of vision and the stern of the steamer.
Tom Pagdin sat on the edge of the bed in Jacob Cayley’s farmhouse and thought hard.
Once he got up and tried the door very gently.
It was firmly locked.
He went to the window and pressed against it.
“There’s an iron bar or a chain across the outside,” he muttered to himself, “and the shutters is an inch thick. It’s no go!”
He felt the boards along the wall with his feet carefully; one of them seemed a little loose.
“If I could raise a bit of the floor and burrow out, like they do in some of those detective yarns, it would be O.K.,” he reflected; “but I got nothin’ to burrow with—unless I break the handle of the washin’ jug,” he added as an after-thought, “an’ sharpen one end.”
But another minute’s consideration convinced him of the futility of this idea.
“It’s all up,” he cried at last in despair. “I’ll be found out an’ took back or sent to gaol! I wonder where Dave is, anyhow.”
Just at this moment Tom heard a bird calling off somewhere towards the river bank.
“Morepoke,” he said listening. “I misremember ever hearin’ a morepoke callin’ so late at night.”
The cries of the night bird were repeated at regular intervals; they seemed to come nearer.
“A morepoke don’t walk about whoopin’ like that,” muttered Tom, “’specially this hour of the night. ’Sides he’s down in the corn. I never heard a morepoke in the corn before.”
A thought struck the elder pirate.
He slipped to the window, and putting his mouth to the shutter, called: “Mo’poke! Mo’poke!” softly.
“Mo’poke! Mo’poke!” came the answer.
“Mo’poke! Mo’poke! Mo’-o-poke!” repeated Tom.
This time he varied the call, putting in an emphasis where no night owl was ever known to place it.
“Mo’-poke! Mo’-poke! Mo’-o-poke!” came the reply.
“By gosh, it’s Dave!” cried Tom, excitedly.
He put his mouth to a crack in the wall and repeated the cry.
Dave answered, drawing nearer and nearer.
He was trying to locate Tom’s exact whereabouts.
The people of the house were sound asleep.
Dave, guided by the sounds uttered sotto voce by his commander, came as Blondin to the call of Richard.
“Where are you?” he whispered at last, outside the wall.
“In ’ere,” responded Tom. “Come round ’ere close; there’s an opening in the weatherboards. I’m locked in,” he explained. “See, if you can get the fastenin’ off the winder-shutter.”
“It’s a padlock an’ chain,” explained Dave from outside. “What will we do?”
“Do!” muttered Tom. “There’s only one thing to do—I got to get out somehow! Have a look at the door.”
“It’s locked,” whispered Dave through the keyhole.
“Ain’t the key outside?”
“No; there’s no key ’ere.”
“He’s took it to bed with him,” muttered Tom in an injured tone. “It’s outrageous!”
“Can’t you get out through the roof?” asked Dave.
“No, I can’t,” replied Tom; “it’s a lined ceilin’. If it wuz calico or bags I’d cut through ’em an’ find a ’ole somewhere; but it ain’t.”
“What about the floor?” asked Dave; “ain’t there no boards loose? The house is built up on piles ’ere at the back——”
“Is it?” asked Tom, eagerly. “Make sure.”
“Yes,” responded the lieutenant pirate. “If you could lift a couple o’ boards you could crawl out under easy enough.”
“They’re all nailed down,” mourned Tom; “I been tryin’ ’em. Say,” he went on—“how thick is the chain on the winder?”
“It’s only a dawg chain,” said Dave through the crack; “but it’s too strong to break.”
“You won’t have to break it,” responded Tom, “if you can get a file.”
“A file!”
“Yes; there’s sure to be a tool-shed round the back there somewhere. All these cockies does a bit o’ tinkerin’. You go round and see if you kin pinch one.”
Tom waited anxiously for his mate to return, and when at last Dave announced that he had got a file, the prisoner’s heart leaped.
“Git to it!” he urged in an excited whisper. “Git to it as quick as you can! Pick the thinnest link, an’ git to it! Don’t make any more row than a dead snake, but ’urry up!”
Dave got to it.
He worked away as rapidly and noiselessly as possible encouraged by frequent whispered inquiries and admonitions from inside.
The report that one side of the link was filed through caused Tom to remark emphatically, in a subdued voice, that Dave had the makings of a true pirate in him.
He also implied that his mate was destined to do great things in the business.
Thus encouraged, Dave worked on till the other side of the link gave way.
The chain was removed, the shutter opened, and Tom climbed out of the window in his shirt.
“Where’s yer clothes?” asked the exhausted first lieutenant.
“He’s took ’em,” replied Tom, resentfully. “’E ’adn’t no right whatever. I could summons ’im if I wanted to. But I don’t want to. We’ve got to get out of this.”
“Yes,” agreed Dave; “I reckon the sooner we get out of it the better. It ain’t lucky.”
“I wouldn’t wonder if that holey sixpence had something to do with it,” observed Tom. “But the bad luck oughter to run itself out now. I wish I ’ad a pair o’ pants though. Let’s go round to the washshed an’ see if we can nick a pair o’ the old man’s. This is the second time since we bin piratin’ I’ve been done in for clothes.”
They found some of the farmer’s working clothes in the shed and appropriated them.
Tom rolled them into a bundle and tucked them under his arms.
They fossicked round for a few minutes longer, and picked up some eatables, including the commandeered fowls which had caused the trouble.
They were hanging up by the feet in the stock-shed, and Tom reached them down with a grunt of satisfaction.
“These’ll pay for my togs,” he said; “that makes ’im an’ me square. ’E’s got my trousers, an’ I got ’is fowls.”
The pirates chuckled over this joke as they took their way to the boat.
As they went Dave explained that after the skirmish in the fowl-shed he had fled back to the boat and waited for his chief. When the latter failed to turn up he came to the conclusion that he had been captured, and was perhaps held as a prisoner of war.
“Then,” said Dave, “I sneaked round by the corn an’ give that mo’-poke call. My word I was glad when I ’eard you answerin’.”
“I reckon,” said Tom, “that we’re gettin’ adventures all right; but it ain’t nothin’ to what we will get when we’re right down the river.”
Dave was silent.
The fact was that the second pirate felt very tired and sleepy.
They got back to the Pirates’ Camp safely, hid the boat in the creek, and lay down, thoroughly worn out, and slept the sleep of youth and health.
Next day they lay close in case Jacob Cayley should have tracked them to the water’s edge and started to look for them along the river. It was unlikely that he should discover that they had come up to the raiding of his poultry in a whale boat like true buccaneers, but their experiences were making them cautious.
So they kept under cover, fed largely on stewed chicken, and laid in a stock of strength for the work which was before them.
They regretted leaving the camp, but a pirate’s life, like a policeman’s, is not all roses; so when evening came they pulled out softly, and started paddling down stream with the falling tide.
The breeze came fresh and cool across the river. They kept their boat in the middle of the stream, and in most places there was a wide stretch of open water between them and either bank.
It was nearly daylight before they reached the island which the chief pirate had in view as a new basis of operations, and they made a bad landing.
They ran in among some young mangroves and grounded.
It took pushing and hauling to get the heavy boat clear of the clinging mud—there is always mud where the mangroves grow—and they were very tired.
At length they found a place where they could get ashore and secure and hide their craft.
Day had broken. The east was reddening with the sun as they staggered along with their traps through a track in the lantana which seemed to lead towards a shady jungle closely covering the centre of the island.
Dave was in front.
He stepped back suddenly, white to the lips, stumbling over Tom, who was close to his heels.
“What’s up?” cried the latter. “What is it—a snake?”
“No,” choked Dave. “No—him!”
“Who?”
“Him!” said Dave, who seemed about to faint.
Tom elbowed him aside and peered ahead through the bushes.
“Oh, cripes!” he muttered, and dropping his load turned about to run.
Chapter X.
THE STORY OF JEAN PETIT.
To get a better conception of one of our characters we must change the scene.
It is a long harkening from an island in the Clarence to the Faubourg St. Antoine of Paris. But the threads in the wool of Life run far and wide.
In the Faubourg St. Antoine, twenty years before, dwelt one Jean Petit.
Petit’s mother had belonged to the lowest class of French criminals; his father was a person understood.
Bred in the gutters of that City by the Seine, where sit the seven devils of Christendom, with the collected devils of Heathendom to keep the watches when they go below—Jean Petit developed in crime.
Let it be said that the criminals of Paris are at once the most degraded and the cleverest in the world. London, New York, and Melbourne produce ruffians and rogues, but these be as little children to the sons of the sewers by the Seine.
The French criminal has all the cunning and the cruelty of the wild beast in addition to his own. In fact, he is more often than not a human tiger, preying not as tigers do upon the outside world, but upon his own kind.
He is steeped to the lips in the vices of his breed, a wild biped prowling the mazes of a great city; an obscene devil-worshipper who cracks indecent jokes at the very steps of the guillotine; a midnight murderer, who does not hesitate to redden his hands for a few sous.
Such was Jean Petit.
He had existed by thieving since he was little more than seven years of age. At twelve he was apprenticed to one of the worst house-breaking gangs in Paris; at seventeen he had taken his diploma, and at twenty-two he was a master of arts in the College of Crime.
For three years Petit reigned in his native city as an Emperor of Thieves. He was the most daring of the Black Confraternity, the hero of a thousand nefarious escapades; the pivot on which the world of ruffianism revolved. Again and again he eluded capture. His robberies were so cleverly organised and carried out that he appeared to be more than a match for the detectives, even to those astute officers who devote their lives to the study of Jean Petits and their methods.
But at last, as must happen, the perpetrator of a catalogue of crimes, in which arson and murder found a place, fell a victim to a slight personal miscalculation.
In escaping from a window by means of a rope ladder, he dropped into the arms of four gendarmes, and, despite a stubborn resistance, was overpowered.
Various offences were proven against Jean Petit at his trial, and the upshot of the matter was that he took a voyage to the island of New Caledonia in company with some other citizens for whom the French Republic had no use.
Petit escaped the guillotine, but he was transported to Noumea for life.
It had happened that in the struggle with the gendarmes the robber received a heavy blow on the base of the skull. The consequence of this was that he lost much of the pantherine vivacity which had been a part of his character, and became of a more morose, hyæna-like nature.
He was feared by the prisoners with whom he was associated, and always regarded as a possible source of danger by the authorities.
Unlike those well-bred ruffians whose money or antecendents make them the pets of Convict New Caledonia, and a source of revenue in lower official quarters, Petit was compelled to undergo all the rigours of his sentence.
The man who had ever scorned the idea of labour, who had lived for twenty five years by the labours of others, was set to the quarrying of stone!
So the thoughts of Jean Petit,—who had everything to gain and nothing to lose by the attempt—shaped themselves time after time towards escape.
Petit had heard that Australia was a good country, and he longed to go there.
One difficulty, and one only, stood in his way—opportunity.
Twice in ten years he had endeavoured to escape, and each time the attempt had proved a failure.
He had been pronounced an incurable criminal. The Republic had experimented on him in vain. He was beyond hope, outside the pale. It was only necessary, therefore, to see that he secured no opportunities to commit crime. Like the wild beast in its cage, it was no longer a question of what would happen if he got out.
But Jean Petit, to whom liberty was as much as to the imprisoned tiger, watched and waited.
It is said that everything comes to him who waits, and after many years, in which the morose criminal-lunatic had grown grizzled, hard of flesh, and still harder of heart, time brought him his opportunity.
Petit, watching Fate from the corner of a red eye, saw the road open.
“At the most,” he explained to the three comrades, “we can but die, and be damned into hell. From the hell here to the hell there—it is but a passage.”
The comrades being each desperate criminals like himself, were agreed.
So they succeeded in stealing a whaleboat, and having matured their schemes, they fled one night for liberty, leaving fresh blood-stains behind them.
At sunrise in the morning Jean Petit and his three friends found themselves, with a scanty supply of provisions and water, afloat on the Pacific without either chart or compass.
Petit assumed the leadership without formality of election. He was captain and commander. His word, supported by the sharp knife in his belt, became law.
He sat sullenly at the tiller, and as the sun rose at the sea margin, headed the boat south by west.
Thus commenced one of the strangest voyages in history.
All that day, and the next, and the next, and the next, the boat, with its crew of four, headed south, south and south by west.
They had taken count of food and water, and to each was apportioned his share.
Each morning Jean Petit, at whose feet lay the provisions, grimly doled out the scanty portions.
At the end of the week a change had come over the four.
They were lean and weatherbeaten; their hands and faces were blistered by the sun. Their cheeks were sunken. There was an anxious look in their hollow eyes.
At the end of fourteen days the change was still more remarkable. Their hair and beards had grown strangely long; their hands had taken the appearance of claws, tipped with long sharp, carnivorous-looking fingernails. Their lips were dry and broken, and their skins had turned from bronze to an ugly yellow.
For ten days there had fallen not a drop of rain; they had left but a pint and a half of impure water.
On the morning of the fifteenth day Jean Petit divided this, together with the remnant of the food, into four even portions!
Never had the grim red-eyed man at the stern been more exact and precise.
“It is well, comrades,” said he, weighing the last crumb of bread, “that we pronounce a benediction. ‘Eat, drink, and be merry!’” he cried solemnly, “‘for to-morrow we die.’”
The morrow fell and the next morrow.
Upon the rim of the Lower Immensity the rim of the Upper Immensity rested, without break in either of sail or cloud.
The next day Jean Petit leaned forward towards the gaunt, motionless, skeletons which gazed with fixed, burning eyes towards the south.
Jean Petit leaned forward, with his hand upon the haft of his knife, and spake.
His words sounded dull and hollow—coming as it were, from the depths of a vault in the awful underworld where lie the mysterious dead.
“There is no reason,” said he, “that all should die.”
The human spectres answered not. Perhaps they had not heard. Perhaps their thoughts were away by cool mountain springs, by spread banquets.
Jean Petit, with strange feverish insistence, repeated his assertion, which was also a question:
“There is no reason that all should die.”
The spectres turned their hollow eyes to him.
Petit read the faces of his three comrades slowly.
The waves, intensely blue and sparkling, rose and fell with awful monotony.
Again, and for the third time, the carnivorous face was thrust forward and the swollen lips framed its sentence:
“For what reason should all die?”
In the ears of the others the words sounded like the tolling of that bell which heralds criminals to execution. They looked not at the waters, not at the sky, not upon each other, but at Jean Petit.
And on the faces of the three was the same questioning, anxious stare.
The red eye grew redder and more devilish.
The man at the tiller tongued his lips and went on in a harsh croak, like the croaking of some foul bird of prey which had scented a carcase:
“Unless we eat soon there is an end!”
The spectres nodded.
“We cannot live another day!”
The spectres passively assented.
The mouth of one of them was marked with a dark stain, where he had been endeavouring to masticate the leather of his shoe.
Jean Petit, not looking from one to the other, but holding all three with his eyes, continued:
“Others have been as we.”
There was a long pause. The whale boat rose slowly upon a wave crest and slid silently into the hollow.
The sun poured out his fires upon the ocean in intense silence.
“Others,” murmured Jean Petit, finishing his sentence, “have done it.”
A shudder of repulsion passed from one wretched frame to the other.
Petit alone did not shudder. He appeared calm—eager, but calm.
“To-morrow,” he said, “it will be too late!”
“To-morrow,” muttered the three, “we will be dead; what matters.”
“To-morrow,” said Jean Petit, forming his meaning more precisely, “one will be dead. The others will live.”
There was a long, long silence.
The boat rose and fell, rose and fell, rose and fell.
It was fully a quarter of an hour before the convict spoke again.
Scanning closely the faces of his companions, he asked:
“Is it agreed?”
They answered not, “yes,” nor “no.”
“It—is—agreed!” said Jean Petit, slowly.
His voice was the voice of command, of authority, of organisation.
The slave had become a master. The subject was at last a king. The man loomed up in the cold bulk of Power!
It was a case of survival, if not of the fittest, at least of the strongest.
With a deep-drawn sigh of satisfaction the leader drew his knife—which his hand had never left—from its sheath, and stooping forward split out four splinters of uneven length from the timbers of the boat.
He closed his left hand upon them, clutching the hilt of the naked knife in his right.
The ends of the splinters alone were visible.
“Come forward!” he ordered.
The three men—their gaze riveted on Petit’s left hand as if fascinated—crawled towards him. It was a terrible picture, all the more terrible for the glory and beauty of its setting, for the sparkle and colour and sunshine which were the picture’s frame.
More terrible, too, in its tragic, portentous silence.
“Draw!” he commanded.
The man under whose face the clutched fist was thrust sucked in a deep breath which was almost a moan.
He extended a trembling hand and drew forth a single splinter.
“Draw!” repeated Jean Petit, offering to each in turn.
The lots were drawn. The spectres waited, sitting silently, their eyes upon the face of their commander.
“The shortest!” snarled the man with the knife.
Their sallow features were full of anguish. Four men knew that it was the mission of one to die. To die—at once.
For man born of woman death is at all times terrible. But with these death had also a sequel!
Already one was doomed.
Who?
The voice of Jean Petit rang grim and unearthly. At the word each man unclosed his hand. The open palms lay side by side.
“Thou!” said the helmsman.
The head of the victim fell forward. A shudder, followed by a sob, convulsed him.
Against a background of blue sky and water rose the hand of Jean Petit, clasping a knife!
Two men turned away their heads!