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Cumner's Son and Other South Sea Folk — Complete

by Gilbert Parker · English · Gutenberg #6201 · 434,832 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Cumner's Son and Other South Sea Folk — Complete

Author: Gilbert Parker


        
Release date: November 16, 2004 [eBook #6201]
                Most recently updated: December 29, 2020

Language: English

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Produced by David Widger





CUMNER’S SON AND OTHER SOUTH SEA FOLK

by Gilbert Parker



CONTENTS

   Volume 1.
   CUMNER’S SON

   Volume 2.
   THE HIGH COURT OF BUDGERY-GAR
   AN EPIC IN YELLOW
   DIBBS, R.N.
   A LITTLE MASQUERADE
   DERELICT
   OLD ROSES
   MY WIFE’S LOVERS
   THE STRANGERS’ HUT

   Volume 3.
   THE PLANTER’S WIFE
   BARBARA GOLDING
   THE LONE CORVETTE

   Volume 4.
   A SABLE SPARTAN
   A VULGAR FRACTION
   HOW PANGO WANGO WAS ANNEXED
   AN AMIABLE REVENGE
   THE BLIND BEGGAR AND THE LITTLE RED PEG
   A FRIEND OF THE COMMUNE

   Volume 5.
   A PAGAN OF THE SOUTH




INTRODUCTION

In a Foreword to Donovan Pasha, published in 1902, I used the following
words:

“It is now twelve years since I began giving to the public tales of life
in lands well known to me. The first of them were drawn from Australia
and the islands of the southern Pacific, where I had lived and roamed in
the middle and late eighties.... Those tales of the Far South were given
out with some prodigality. They did not appear in book form, however;
for at the time I was sending out these antipodean sketches I was also
writing--far from the scenes where they were laid--a series of Canadian
tales, many of which appeared in the ‘Independent’ of New York, in
the ‘National Observer’, edited by Mr. Henley, and in the ‘Illustrated
London News’. On the suggestion of my friend Mr. Henley, the Canadian
tales, Pierre and His People, were published first; with the result that
the stories of the southern hemisphere were withheld from publication,
though they have been privately printed and duly copyrighted. Some day
I may send them forth, but meanwhile I am content to keep them in my
care.”

These stories made the collection published eventually under the title
of Cumner’s Son, in 1910. They were thus kept for nearly twenty years
without being given to the public in book form. In 1910 I decided,
however, that they should go out and find their place with my readers.
The first story in the book, Cumner’s Son, which represents about four
times the length of an ordinary short story, was published in Harper’s
Weekly, midway between 1890 and 1900. All the earlier stories belonged
to 1890, 1891, 1892, and 1893. The first of these to be published was
‘A Sable Spartan’, ‘An Amiable Revenge’, ‘A Vulgar Fraction’, and ‘How
Pango Wango Was Annexed’. They were written before the Pierre series,
and were instantly accepted by Mr. Frederick Greenwood, that great
journalistic figure of whom the British public still takes note, and for
whom it has an admiring memory, because of his rare gifts as an editor
and publicist, and by a political section of the public, because Mr.
Greenwood recommended to Disraeli the purchase of the Suez Canal shares.
Seventeen years after publishing these stories I had occasion to write
to Frederick Greenwood, and in my letter I said: “I can never forget
that you gave me a leg up in my first struggle for recognition in the
literary world.” His reply was characteristic; it was in keeping with
the modest, magnanimous nature of the man. He said: “I cannot remember
that there was any day when you required a leg up.”

While still contributing to the ‘Anti-Jacobin’, which had a short life
and not a very merry one, I turned my attention to a weekly called ‘The
Speaker’, to which I have referred elsewhere, edited by Mr. Wemyss Reid,
afterwards Sir Wemyss Reid, and in which Mr. Quiller-Couch was then
writing a striking short story nearly every week. Up to that time I had
only interviewed two editors. One was Mr. Kinloch-Cooke, now Sir Clement
Kinloch-Cooke, who at that time was editor of the ‘English Illustrated
Magazine’, and a very good, courteous, and generous editor he was, and
he had a very good magazine; the other was an editor whose name I do
not care to mention, because his courtesy was not on the same expansive
level as his vanity.

One bitter winter’s day in 1891 I went to Wemyss Reid to tell him, if
he would hear me, that I had in my mind a series of short stories of
Australia and the South Seas, and to ask him if he could give them a
place in ‘The Speaker’. It was a Friday afternoon, and as I went into
the smudgy little office I saw a gentleman with a small brown bag
emerging from another room.

At that moment I asked for Mr. Wemyss Reid. The gentleman with the
little brown bag stood and looked sharply at me, but with friendly if
penetrating eyes. “I am Wemyss Reid--you wish to see me?” he said. “Will
you give me five minutes?” I asked. “I am just going to the train, but I
will spare you a minute,” he replied. He turned back into another smudgy
little room, put his bag on the table, and said: “Well?” I told him
quickly, eagerly, what I wished to do, and I said to him at last: “I
apologise for seeking you personally, but I was most anxious that
my work should be read by your own eyes, because I think I should
be contented with your judgment, whether it was favourable or
unfavourable.” Taking up his bag again, he replied, “Send your stories
along. If I think they are what I want I will publish them. I will read
them myself.” He turned the handle of the door, and then came back to me
and again looked me in the eyes. “If I cannot use them--and there might
be a hundred reasons why I could not, and none of them derogatory to
your work--” he said, “do not be discouraged. There are many doors. Mine
is only one. Knock at the others. Good luck to you.”

I never saw Wemyss Reid again, but he made a friend who never forgot
him, and who mourned his death. It was not that he accepted my stories;
it was that he said what he did say to a young man who did not yet
know what his literary fortune might be. Well, I sent him a short story
called, ‘An Epic in Yellow’. Proofs came by return of post. This story
was followed by ‘The High Court of Budgery-Gar’, ‘Old Roses’, ‘My Wife’s
Lovers’, ‘Derelict’, ‘Dibbs, R.N.’, ‘A Little Masquerade’, and ‘The
Stranger’s Hut’. Most, if not all, of these appeared before the Pierre
stories were written.

They did not strike the imagination of the public in the same way as the
Pierre series, but they made many friends. They were mostly Australian,
and represented the life which for nearly four years I knew and studied
with that affection which only the young, open-eyed enthusiast, who
makes his first journey in the world, can give. In the same year, for
‘Macmillan’s Magazine’, I wrote ‘Barbara Golding’ and ‘A Pagan of the
South’, which was originally published as ‘The Woman in the Morgue’. ‘A
Friend of the Commune’ was also published in the ‘English Illustrated
Magazine’, and ‘The Blind Beggar and the Little Red Peg’ found a place
in the ‘National Observer’ after W. E. Henley had ceased to be its
editor, and Mr. J. C. Vincent, also since dead, had taken his place.
‘The Lone Corvette’ was published in ‘The Westminster Gazette’ as late
as 1893.

Of certain of these stories, particularly of the Australian group, I
have no doubt. They were lifted out of the life of that continent with
sympathy and care, and most of the incidents were those which had come
under my own observation. I published them at last in book form, because
I felt that no definitive edition of my books ought to appear--and I
had then a definitive edition in my mind--without these stories which
represented an early phase in my work. Whatever their degree of merit,
they possess freshness and individuality of outlook. Others could no
doubt have written them better, but none could have written them with
quite the same touch or turn or individuality; and, after all, what we
want in the art of fiction is not a story alone, not an incident of
life or soul simply as an incident, but the incident as seen with the
eye--and that eye as truthful and direct as possible--of one individual
personality. George Meredith and Robert Louis Stevenson might each have
chosen the same subject and the same story, and each have produced a
masterpiece, and yet the world of difference between the way it was
presented by each was the world of difference between the eyes that saw.
So I am content to let these stories speak little or much, but still to
speak for me.




CUMNER’S SON




I. THE CHOOSING OF THE MESSENGER

There was trouble at Mandakan. You could not have guessed it from
anything the eye could see. In front of the Residency two soldiers
marched up and down sleepily, mechanically, between two ten-pounders
marking the limit of their patrol; and an orderly stood at an open door,
lazily shifting his eyes from the sentinels to the black guns, which
gave out soft, quivering waves of heat, as a wheel, spinning, throws
off delicate spray. A hundred yards away the sea spread out, languid and
huge. It was under-tinged with all the colours of a morning sunrise over
Mount Bobar not far beyond, lifting up its somnolent and massive head
into the Eastern sky. “League-long rollers” came in as steady as columns
of infantry, with white streamers flying along the line, and hovering a
moment, split, and ran on the shore in a crumbling foam, like myriads of
white mice hurrying up the sand.

A little cloud of tobacco smoke came curling out of a window of the
Residency. It was sniffed up by the orderly, whose pipe was in barracks,
and must lie there untouched until evening at least; for he had stood at
this door since seven that morning, waiting orders; and he knew by the
look on Colonel Cumner’s face that he might be there till to-morrow.

But the ordinary spectator could not have noticed any difference in the
general look of things. All was quiet, too, in the big native city. At
the doorways the worker in brass and silver hammered away at his metal,
a sleepy, musical assonance. The naked seller of sweetmeats went by
calling his wares in a gentle, unassertive voice; in dark doorways
worn-eyed women and men gossiped in voices scarce above a whisper; and
brown children fondled each other, laughing noiselessly, or lay asleep
on rugs which would be costly elsewhere. In the bazaars nothing was
selling, and no man did anything but mumble or eat, save the few
scholars who, cross-legged on their mats, read and laboured towards
Nirvana. Priests in their yellow robes and with bare shoulders went by,
oblivious of all things.

Yet, too, the keen observer could have seen gathered into shaded corners
here and there, a few sombre, low-voiced men talking covertly to each
other. They were not the ordinary gossipers; in the faces of some were
the marks of furtive design, of sinister suggestion. But it was all so
deadly still.

The gayest, cheeriest person in Mandakan was Colonel Cumner’s son. Down
at the opal beach, under a palm-tree, he sat, telling stories of his
pranks at college to Boonda Broke, the half-breed son of a former Dakoon
who had ruled the State of Mandakan when first the English came. The
saddest person in Mandakan was the present Dakoon, in his palace by the
Fountain of the Sweet Waters, which was guarded by four sacred warriors
in stone and four brown men armed with the naked kris.

The Dakoon was dying, though not a score of people in the city knew it.
He had drunk of the Fountain of Sweet Waters, also of the well that is
by Bakbar; he had eaten of the sweetmeat called the Flower of Bambaba,
his chosen priests had prayed, and his favourite wife had lain all day
and all night at the door of his room, pouring out her soul; but nothing
came of it.

And elsewhere Boonda Broke was showing Cumner’s Son how to throw a kris
towards one object and make it hit another. He gave an illustration by
aiming at a palm-tree and sticking a passing dog behind the shoulder.
The dog belonged to Cumner’s Son, and the lad’s face suddenly blazed
with anger. He ran to the dog, which had silently collapsed like a
punctured bag of silk, drew out the kris, then swung towards Boonda
Broke, whose cool, placid eyes met his without emotion.

“You knew that was my dog,” he said quickly in English, “and--and I tell
you what, sir, I’ve had enough of you. A man that’d hit a dog like that
would hit a man the same way.”

He was standing with the crimson kris in his hand above the dog. His
passion was frank, vigorous, and natural.

Boonda Broke smiled passively.

“You mean, could hit a man the same way, honoured lord.”

“I mean what I said,” answered the lad, and he turned on his heel; but
presently he faced about again, as though with a wish to give his foe
the benefit of any doubt. Though Boonda Broke was smiling, the lad’s
face flushed again with anger, for the man’s real character had been
revealed to him on the instant, and he was yet in the indignant warmth
of the new experience. If he had known that Boonda Broke had cultivated
his friendship for months, to worm out of him all the secrets of the
Residency, there might have been a violent and immediate conclusion to
the incident, for the lad was fiery, and he had no fear in his heart;
he was combative, high-tempered, and daring. Boonda Broke had learned
no secrets of him, had been met by an unconscious but steady resistance,
and at length his patience had given way in spite of himself. He had
white blood in his veins--fighting Irish blood--which sometimes overcame
his smooth, Oriental secretiveness and cautious duplicity; and this was
one of those occasions. He had flung the knife at the dog with a wish
in his heart that it was Cumner’s Son instead. As he stood looking after
the English lad, he said between his teeth with a great hatred, though
his face showed no change:

“English dog, thou shalt be dead like thy brother there when I am Dakoon
of Mandakan.”

At this moment he saw hurrying towards him one of those natives who, a
little while before, had been in close and furtive talk in the Bazaar.

Meanwhile the little cloud of smoke kept curling out of the Governor’s
door, and the orderly could catch the fitful murmur of talk that
followed it. Presently rifle shots rang out somewhere. Instantly a
tall, broad-shouldered figure, in white undress uniform, appeared in the
doorway and spoke quickly to the orderly. In a moment two troopers were
galloping out of the Residency Square and into the city. Before two
minutes had passed one had ridden back to the orderly, who reported to
the Colonel that the Dakoon had commanded the shooting of five men of
the tribe of the outlaw hill-chief, Pango Dooni, against the rear wall
of the Palace, where the Dakoon might look from his window and see the
deed.

The Colonel sat up eagerly in his chair, then brought his knuckles down
smartly on the table. He looked sharply at the three men who sat with
him.

“That clinches it,” said he. “One of those fellows was Pango Dooni’s
nephew, another was his wife’s brother. It’s the only thing to do--some
one must go to Pango Dooni, tell him the truth, ask him to come down and
save the place, and sit up there in the Dakoon’s place. He’ll stand by
us, and by England.”

No one answered at first. Every face was gloomy. At last a grey-haired
captain of artillery spoke his mind in broken sentences:

“Never do--have to ride through a half-dozen sneaking tribes--Pango
Dooni, rank robber--steal like a barrack cat--besides, no man could get
there. Better stay where we are and fight it out till help comes.”

“Help!” said Cumner bitterly. “We might wait six months before a
man-of-war put in. The danger is a matter of hours. A hundred men, and a
score of niggers--what would that be against thirty thousand natives?”

“Pango Dooni is as likely to butcher us as the Dakoon,” said McDermot,
the captain of artillery. Every man in the garrison had killed at least
one of Pango Dooni’s men, and every man of them was known from the Kimar
Gate to the Neck of Baroob, where Pango Dooni lived and ruled.

The Colonel was not to be moved. “I’d ride the ninety miles myself, if
my place weren’t here--no, don’t think I doubt you, for I know you all!
But consider the nest of murderers that’ll be let loose here when the
Dakoon dies. Better a strong robber with a strong robber’s honour to
perch there in the Palace, than Boonda Broke and his cut-throats--”

“Honour--honour?--Pango Dooni!” broke out McDermot the gunner
scornfully.

“I know the man,” said the Governor gruffly; “I know the man, I tell
you, and I’d take his word for ten thousand pounds, or a thousand head
of cattle. Is there any of you will ride to the Neck of Baroob for me?
For one it must be, and no more--we can spare scarce that, God knows!”
 he added sadly. “The women and children--”

“I will go,” said a voice behind them all; and Cumner’s Son stepped
forward. “I will go, if I may ride the big sorrel from the Dakoon’s
stud.”

The Colonel swung round in his chair and stared mutely at the lad.
He was only eighteen years old, but of good stature, well-knit, and
straight as a sapling.

Seeing that no one answered him, but sat and stared incredulously, he
laughed a little, frankly and boyishly. “The kris of Boonda Broke is
for the hearts of every one of us,” said he. “He may throw it
soon--to-night--to-morrow. No man can leave here--all are needed; but
a boy can ride; he is light in the saddle, and he may pass where a man
would be caught in a rain of bullets. I have ridden the sorrel of the
Dakoon often; he has pressed it on me; I will go to the master of his
stud, and I will ride to the Neck of Baroob.”

“No, no,” said one after the other, getting to his feet, “I will go.”

The Governor waved them down. “The lad is right,” said he, and he looked
him closely and proudly in the eyes. “By the mercy of God, you shall
ride the ride,” said he. “Once when Pango Dooni was in the city, in
disguise, aye, even in the Garden of the Dakoon, the night of the Dance
of the Yellow Fire, I myself helped him to escape, for I stand for
a fearless robber before a cowardly saint.” His grey moustache and
eyebrows bristled with energy as he added: “The lad shall go. He shall
carry in his breast the bracelet with the red stone that Pango Dooni
gave me. On the stone is written the countersign that all hillsmen heed,
and the tribe-call I know also.”

“The danger--the danger--and the lad so young!” said McDermot; but yet
his eyes rested lovingly on the boy.

The Colonel threw up his head in anger. “If I, his father, can let him
go, why should you prate like women? The lad is my son, and he shall win
his spurs--and more, and more, maybe,” he added.

He took from his pocket Pango Dooni’s gift and gave it to the lad, and
three times he whispered in his ear the tribe-call and the countersign
that he might know them. The lad repeated them three times, and, with
his finger, traced the countersign upon the stone.

That night he rode silently out of the Dakoon’s palace yard by a quiet
gateway, and came, by a roundabout, to a point near the Residency.

He halted under a flame-tree, and a man came out of the darkness and
laid a hand upon his knee.

“Ride straight and swift from the Kimar Gate. Pause by the Koongat
Bridge an hour, rest three hours at the Bar of Balmud, and pause again
where the roof of the Brown Hermit drums to the sorrel’s hoofs. Ride for
the sake of the women and children and for your own honour. Ride like a
Cumner, lad.”

The last sound of the sorrel’s hoofs upon the red dust beat in the
Colonel’s ears all night long, as he sat waiting for news from the
Palace, the sentinels walking up and down, the orderly at the door, and
Boonda Broke plotting in the town.




II. “REST AT THE KOONGAT BRIDGE AN HOUR”

There was no moon, and but few stars were shining. When Cumner’s Son
first set out from Mandakan he could scarcely see at all, and he kept
his way through the native villages more by instinct than by sight.
As time passed he saw more clearly; he could make out the figures of
natives lying under trees or rising from their mats to note the flying
horseman. Lights flickered here and there in the houses and by the
roadside. A late traveller turned a cake in the ashes or stirred some
rice in a calabash; an anxious mother put some sandalwood on the coals
and added incense, that the gods might be good to the ailing child
on the mat; and thrice, at forges in the village, he saw the smith
languidly beating iron into shape, while dark figures sat on the floor
near by, and smoked and murmured to each other.

These last showed alertness at the sound of the flying sorrel’s hoofs,
and all at once a tall, keen-eyed horseman sprang to the broad doorway
and strained his eyes into the night after Cumner’s Son. He waited a few
moments; then, as if with a sudden thought, he ran to a horse tethered
near by and vaulted into the saddle. At a word his chestnut mare got
away with telling stride in pursuit of the unknown rider, passing up the
Gap of Mandakan like a ghost.

Cumner’s Son had a start by about half a mile, but Tang-a-Dahit rode a
mare that had once belonged to Pango Dooni, and Pango Dooni had got her
from Colonel Cumner the night he escaped from Mandakan.

For this mare the hill-chief had returned no gift save the gold bracelet
which Cumner’s Son now carried in his belt.

The mare leaned low on her bit, and travelled like a thirsty hound
to water, the sorrel tugged at the snaffle, and went like a bullmoose
hurrying to his herd,

       “That long low gallop that can tire
        The hounds’ deep hate or hunter’s fire.”

The pace was with the sorrel. Cumner’s Son had not looked behind after
the first few miles, for then he had given up thought that he might
be followed. He sat in his saddle like a plainsman; he listened like a
hillsman; he endured like an Arab water-carrier. There was not an ounce
of useless flesh on his body, and every limb, bone, and sinew had
been stretched and hardened by riding with the Dakoon’s horsemen, by
travelling through the jungle for the tiger and the panther, by throwing
the kris with Boonda Broke, fencing with McDermot, and by sabre practice
with red-headed Sergeant Doolan in the barracks by the Residency Square.
After twenty miles’ ride he was dry as a bone, after thirty his skin
was moist but not damp, and there was not a drop of sweat on the
skin-leather of his fatigue cap. When he got to Koongat Bridge he was
like a racer after practice, ready for a fight from start to finish. Yet
he was not foolhardy. He knew the danger that beset him, for he could
not tell, in the crisis come to Mandakan, what designs might be abroad.
He now saw through Boonda Broke’s friendship for him, and he only found
peace for his mind upon the point by remembering that he had told no
secrets, had given no information of any use to the foes of the Dakoon
or the haters of the English.

On this hot, long, silent ride he looked back carefully, but he could
not see where he had been to blame; and, if he were, he hoped to strike
a balance with his own conscience for having been friendly to Boonda
Broke, and to justify himself in his father’s eyes. If he came through
all right, then “the Governor”--as he called his father, with the
friendly affection of a good comrade, and as all others in Mandakan
called him because of his position--the Governor then would say that
whatever harm he had done indirectly was now undone.

He got down at the Koongat Bridge, and his fingers were still in the
sorrel’s mane when he heard the call of a bittern from the river bank.
He did not loose his fingers, but stood still and listened intently, for
there was scarcely a sound of the plain, the river, or jungle he did
not know, and his ear was keen to balance ‘twixt the false note and the
true. He waited for the sound again. From that first call he could not
be sure which had startled him--the night was so still--the voice of a
bird or the call between men lying in ambush. He tried the trigger of
his pistol softly, and prepared to mount. As he did so, the call rang
out across the water again, a little louder, a little longer.

Now he was sure. It was not from a bittern--it was a human voice, of
whose tribe he knew not--Pango Dooni’s, Boonda Broke’s, the Dakoon’s,
or the segments of peoples belonging to none of these--highway robbers,
cattle-stealers, or the men of the jungle, those creatures as wild and
secret as the beasts of the bush and more cruel and more furtive.

The fear of the ambushed thing is the worst fear of this world--the
sword or the rifle-barrel you cannot see and the poisoned wooden spear
which the men of the jungle throw gives a man ten deaths, instead of
one.

Cumner’s Son mounted quickly, straining his eyes to see and keeping his
pistol cocked. When he heard the call a second time he had for a moment
a thrill of fear, not in his body, but in his brain. He had that fatal
gift, imagination, which is more alive than flesh and bone, stronger
than iron and steel. In his mind he saw a hundred men rise up from
ambush, surround him, and cut him down. He saw himself firing a
half-dozen shots, then drawing his sword and fighting till he fell; but
he did fall in the end, and there was an end of it. It seemed like years
while these visions passed through his mind, but it was no longer than
it took to gather the snaffle-rein close to the sorrel’s neck, draw his
sword, clinch it in his left hand with the rein, and gather the pistol
snugly in his right. He listened again. As he touched the sorrel with
his knee he thought he heard a sound ahead.

The sorrel sprang forward, sniffed the air, and threw up his head. His
feet struck the resounding timbers of the bridge, and, as they did so,
he shied; but Cumner’s Son, looking down sharply, could see nothing to
either the right or left--no movement anywhere save the dim trees on the
banks waving in the light wind which had risen. A crocodile slipped off
a log into the water--he knew that sound; a rank odour came from the
river bank--he knew the smell of the hippopotamus.

These very things gave him new courage. Since he came from Eton to
Mandakan he had hunted often and well, and once he had helped to quarry
the Little Men of the Jungle when they carried off the wife and daughter
of a soldier of the Dakoon. The smell and the sound of wild life roused
all the hunter in him. He had fear no longer; the primitive emotion of
fighting or self-defence was alive in him.

He had left the bridge behind by twice the horse’s length, when, all at
once, the call of the red bittern rang out the third time, louder than
before; then again; and then the cry of a grey wolf came in response.

His peril was upon him. He put spurs to the sorrel. As he did so, dark
figures sprang up on all sides of him. Without a word he drove the
excited horse at his assailants. Three caught his bridle-rein, and
others snatched at him to draw him from his horse.

“Hands off!” he cried, in the language of Mandakan, and levelled his
pistol.

“He is English!” said a voice. “Cut him down!”

“I am the Governor’s son,” said the lad. “Let go.” “Cut him down!”
 snarled the voice again.

He fired twice quickly.

Then he remembered the tribe-call given his father by Pango Dooni.
Rising in his saddle and firing again, he called it out in a loud voice.
His plunging horse had broken away from two of the murderers; but one
still held on, and he slashed the hand free with his sword.

The natives were made furious by the call, and came on again, striking
at him with their krises. He shouted the tribe-call once more, but this
time it was done involuntarily. There was no response in front of him;
but one came from behind. There was clattering of hoofs on Koongat
Bridge, and the password of the clan came back to the lad, even as a
kris struck him in the leg and drew out again. Once again he called, and
suddenly a horseman appeared beside him, who clove through a native’s
head with a broadsword, and with a pistol fired at the fleeing figures;
for Boonda Broke’s men who were thus infesting the highway up to Koongat
Bridge, and even beyond, up to the Bar of Balmud, hearing the newcomer
shout the dreaded name of Pango Dooni, scattered for their lives, though
they were yet twenty to two. One stood his ground, and it would have
gone ill for Cumner’s Son, for this thief had him at fatal advantage,
had it not been for the horseman who had followed the lad from the
forge-fire to Koongat Bridge. He stood up in his stirrups and cut down
with his broadsword, so that the blade was driven through the head and
shoulders of his foe as a woodsman splits a log half through, and grunts
with the power of his stroke.

Then he turned to the lad.

“What stranger calls by the word of our tribe?” he asked.

“I am Cumner’s Son,” was the answer, “and my father is brother-in-blood
with Pango Dooni. I ride to Pango Dooni for the women and children’s
sake.”

“Proof! Proof! If you be Cumner’s Son, another word should be yours.”

The Colonel’s Son took out the bracelet from his breast. “It is safe hid
here,” said he, “and hid also under my tongue. If you be from the Neck
of Baroob you will know it when I speak it;” and he spoke reverently the
sacred countersign.

By a little fire kindled in the road, the bodies of their foe beside
them, they vowed to each other, mingling their blood from dagger pricks
in the arm. Then they mounted again and rode towards the Neck of Baroob.

In silence they rode awhile, and at last the hillsman said: “If fathers
be brothers-in-blood, behold it is good that sons be also.”

By this the lad knew that he was now brother-in-blood to the son of
Pango Dooni.




III. THE CODE OF THE HILLS

“You travel near to Mandakan!” said the lad. “Do you ride with a
thousand men?”

“For a thousand men there are ten thousand eyes to see; I travel alone
and safe,” answered Tang-a-Dahit.

“To thrust your head in the tiger’s jaw,” said Cumner’s Son. “Did you
ride to be in at the death of the men of your clan?”

“A man will ride for a face that he loves, even to the Dreadful Gates,”
 answered Tang-a-Dahit. “But what is this of the men of my clan?”

Then the lad told him of those whose heads hung on the rear Palace wall,
where the Dakoon lay dying, and why he rode to Pango Dooni.

“It is fighting and fighting, naught but fighting,” said Tang-a-Dahit
after a pause; “and there is no peace. It is fighting and fighting,
for honour, and glory, and houses and cattle, but naught for love, and
naught that there may be peace.”

Cumner’s Son turned round in his saddle as if to read the face of the
man, but it was too dark.

“And naught that there maybe peace.” Those were the words of a hillsman
who had followed him furiously in the night ready to kill, who had
cloven the head of a man like a piece of soap, and had been riding even
into Mandakan where a price was set on his head.

For long they rode silently, and in that time Cumner’s Son found new
thoughts; and these thoughts made him love the brown hillsman as he had
never loved any save his own father.

“When there is peace in Mandakan,” said he at last, “when Boonda Broke
is snapped in two like a pencil, when Pango Dooni sits as Dakoon in the
Palace of Mandakan--”

“There is a maid in Mandakan,” interrupted Tanga-Dahit, “and these two
years she has lain upon her bed, and she may not be moved, for the bones
of her body are as the soft stems of the lily, but her face is a perfect
face, and her tongue has the wisdom of God.”

“You ride to her through the teeth of danger?”

“She may not come to me, and I must go to her,” answered the hillsman.

There was silence again for a long time, for Cumner’s Son was turning
things over in his mind; and all at once he felt that each man’s acts
must be judged by the blood that is in him and the trail by which he has
come.

The sorrel and the chestnut mare travelled together as on one
snaffle-bar, step by step, for they were foaled in the same stable.
Through stretches of reed-beds and wastes of osiers they passed, and
again by a path through the jungle where the briar-vines caught at them
like eager fingers, and a tiger crossed their track, disturbed in his
night’s rest. At length out of the dank distance they saw the first
colour of dawn.

“Ten miles,” said Tang-a-Dahit, “and we shall come to the Bar of Balmud.
Then we shall be in my own country. See, the dawn comes up! ‘Twixt here
and the Bar of Balmud our danger lies. A hundred men may ambush there,
for Boonda Broke’s thieves have scattered all the way from Mandakan to
our borders.”

Cumner’s Son looked round. There were hills and defiles everywhere, and
a thousand places where foes could hide. The quickest way, but the most
perilous, lay through the long defile between the hills, flanked by
boulders and rank scrub. Tang-a-Dahit pointed out the ways that they
might go--by the path to the left along the hills, or through the green
defile; and Cumner’s Son instantly chose the latter way.

“If the fight were fair,” said the hillsman, “and it were man to man,
the defile is the better way; but these be dogs of cowards who strike
from behind rocks. No one of them has a heart truer than Boonda Broke’s,
the master of the carrion. We will go by the hills. The way is harder
but more open, and if we be prospered we will rest awhile at the Bar of
Balmud, and at noon we will tether and eat in the Neck of Baroob.”

They made their way through the medlar trees and scrub to the plateau
above, and, the height gained, they turned to look back. The sun was
up, and trailing rose and amber garments across the great Eastern arch.
Their path lay towards it, for Pango Dooni hid in the hills, where the
sun hung a roof of gold above his stronghold.

“Forty to one!” said Tang-a-Dahit suddenly. “Now indeed we ride for our
lives!”

Looking down the track of the hillsman’s glance Cumner’s Son saw a bunch
of horsemen galloping up the slope. Boonda Broke’s men!

The sorrel and the mare were fagged, the horses of their foes were
fresh; and forty to one were odds that no man would care to take. It
might be that some of Pango Dooni’s men lay between them and the Bar of
Balmud, but the chance was faint.

“By the hand of Heaven,” said the hillsman, “if we reach to the Bar of
Balmud, these dogs shall eat their own heads for dinner!”

They set their horses in the way, and gave the sorrel and mare the bit
and spur. The beasts leaned again to their work as though they had just
come from a feeding-stall and knew their riders’ needs. The men rode
light and free, and talked low to their horses as friend talks to
friend. Five miles or more they went so, and then the mare stumbled. She
got to her feet again, but her head dropped low, her nostrils gaped red
and swollen, and the sorrel hung back with her, for a beast, like a man,
will travel farther two by two than one by one. At another point where
they had a long view behind they looked back. Their pursuers were
gaining. Tang-a-Dahit spurred his horse on.

“There is one chance,” said he, “and only one. See where the point juts
out beyond the great medlar tree. If, by the mercy of God, we can but
make it!”

The horses gallantly replied to call and spur. They rounded a curve
which made a sort of apse to the side of the valley, and presently they
were hid from their pursuers. Looking back from the thicket they saw the
plainsmen riding hard. All at once Tang-a-Dahit stopped.

“Give me the sorrel,” said he. “Quick--dismount!” Cumner’s Son did as he
was bid. Going a little to one side, the hillsman pushed through a thick
hedge of bushes, rolled away a rock, and disclosed an opening which led
down a steep and rough-hewn way to a great misty valley beneath, where
was never a bridle-path or causeway over the brawling streams and
boulders.

“I will ride on. The mare is done, but the sorrel can make the Bar of
Balmud.”

Cumner’s Son opened his mouth to question, but stopped, for the eyes of
the hillsman flared up, and Tang-a-Dahit said:

“My arm in blood has touched thy arm, and thou art in my hills and not
in thine own country. Thy life is my life, and thy good is my good.
Speak not, but act. By the high wall of the valley where no man bides
there is a path which leads to the Bar of Balmud; but leave it not,
whether it go up or down or be easy or hard. If thy feet be steady,
thine eye true, and thy heart strong, thou shalt come by the Bar of
Balmud among my people.”

Then he caught the hand of Cumner’s Son in his own and kissed him
between the eyes after the manner of a kinsman, and, urging him into the
hole, rolled the great stone into its place again. Mounting the sorrel
he rode swiftly out into the open, rounded the green point full in view
of his pursuers, and was hid from them in an instant. Then, dismounting,
he swiftly crept back through the long grass into the thicket again,
mounted the mare, and drove her at laboured gallop also around the
curve, so that it seemed to the plainsmen following that both men had
gone that way. He mounted the sorrel again, and loosing a long sash from
his waist drew it through the mare’s bit. The mare, lightened of the
weight, followed well. When the plainsmen came to the cape of green,
they paused not by the secret place, for it seemed to them that two had
ridden past and not one.

The Son of Pango Dooni had drawn pursuit after himself, for it is the
law of the hills that a hillsman shall give his life or all that he has
for a brother-in-blood.

When Cumner’s Son had gone a little way he understood it all! And he
would have turned back, but he knew that the hillsman had ridden far
beyond his reach. So he ran as swiftly as he could; he climbed where
it might seem not even a chamois could find a hold; his eyes scarcely
seeing the long, misty valley, where the haze lay like a vapour from
another world. There was no sound anywhere save the brawling water
or the lonely cry of the flute-bird. Here was the last refuge of the
hillsmen if they should ever be driven from the Neck of Baroob. They
could close up every entrance, and live unscathed; for here was land for
tilling, and wood, and wild fruit, and food for cattle.

Cumner’s Son was supple and swift, and scarce an hour had passed ere he
came to a steep place on the other side, with rough niches cut in the
rocks, by which a strong man might lift himself up to safety. He stood a
moment and ate some coffee-beans and drank some cold water from a stream
at the foot of the crag, and then began his ascent. Once or twice he
trembled, for he was worn and tired; but he remembered the last words
of Tang-a-Dahit, and his fingers tightened their hold. At last, with a
strain and a gasp, he drew himself up, and found himself on a shelf of
rock with all the great valley spread out beneath him. A moment only he
looked, resting himself, and then he searched for a way into the hills;
for everywhere there was a close palisade of rocks and saplings. At last
he found an opening scarce bigger than might let a cat through; but he
laboured hard, and at last drew himself out and looked down the path
which led into the Bar of Balmud--the great natural escarpment of giant
rocks and monoliths and medlar trees, where lay Pango Dooni’s men.

He ran with all his might, and presently he was inside the huge defence.
There was no living being to be seen; only the rock-strewn plain and the
woods beyond.

He called aloud, but nothing answered; he called again the tribe-call of
Pango Dooni’s men, and a hundred armed men sprang up.

“I am a brother-in-blood of Pango Dooni’s Son,” said he. “Tang-a-Dahit
rides for his life to the Bar of Balmud. Ride forth if ye would save
him.”

“The lad speaks with the tongue of a friend,” said a scowling hillsman,
advancing, “yet how know we but he lies?”

“Even by this,” said Cumner’s Son, and he spoke the sacred countersign
and showed again the bracelet of Pango Dooni, and told what had
happened. Even as he spoke the hillsmen gave the word, and two score men
ran down behind the rocks, mounted, and were instantly away by the road
that led to the Koongat Bridge.

The tall hillsman turned to the lad.

“You are beaten by travel,” said he. “Come, eat and drink, and rest.”

“I have sworn to breakfast where Pango Dooni bides, and there only will
I rest and eat,” answered the lad.

“The son of Pango Dooni knows the lion’s cub from the tame dog’s whelp.
You shall keep your word. Though the sun ride fast towards noon, faster
shall we ride in the Neck of Baroob,” said the hillsman.

It was half-way towards noon when the hoof-beats drummed over the Brown
Hermit’s cave, and they rested not there; but it was noon and no more
when they rode through Pango Dooni’s gates and into the square where he
stood.

The tall hillsman dropped to the ground, and Cumner’s Son made to do the
same. Yet he staggered, and would have fallen, but the hillsman ran an
arm around his shoulder. The lad put by the arm, and drew him self up.
He was most pale. Pango Dooni stood looking at him, without a word, and
Cumner’s Son doffed his cap. There was no blood in his lips, and his
face was white and drawn.

“Since last night what time the bugle blows in the Palace yard, I have
ridden,” said he.

At the sound of his voice the great chief started. “The voice I know,
but not the face,” said he.

“I am Cumner’s Son,” replied the lad, and once more he spoke the sacred
countersign.




IV. BY THE OLD WELL OF JAHAR

To Cumner’s Son when all was told, Pango Dooni said: “If my son be dead
where those jackals swarm, it is well he died for his friend. If he be
living, then it is also well. If he be saved, we will march to Mandakan,
with all our men, he and I, and it shall be as Cumner wills, if I stay
in Mandakan or if I return to my hills.”

“My father said in the council-room, ‘Better the strong robber than the
weak coward,’ and my father never lied,” said the lad dauntlessly. The
strong, tall chief, with the dark face and fierce eyes, roused in him
the regard of youth for strong manhood.

“A hundred years ago they stole from my fathers the State of Mandakan,”
 answered the chief, “and all that is here and all that is there is mine.
If I drive the kine of thieves from the plains to my hills, the cattle
were mine ere I drove them. If I harry the rich in the midst of the
Dakoon’s men, it is gaining my own over naked swords. If I save your
tribe and Cumner’s men from the half-bred jackal Boonda Broke, and hoist
your flag on the Palace wall, it is only I who should do it.”

Then he took the lad inside the house, with the great wooden pillars and
the high gates, and the dark windows all barred up and down with iron,
and he led him to a court-yard where was a pool of clear water. He made
him bathe in it, and dark-skinned natives brought him bread dipped in
wine, and when he had eaten they laid him on skins and rubbed him dry,
and rolled him in soft linen, and he drank the coffee they gave him, and
they sat by and fanned him until he fell asleep.

        .......................

The red birds on the window-sill sang through his sleep into his dreams.
In his dreams he thought he was in the Dakoon’s Palace at Mandakan with
a thousand men before him, and three men came forward and gave him a
sword. And a bird came flying through the great chambers and hung over
him, singing in a voice that he understood, and he spoke to the three
and to the thousand, in the words of the bird, and said:

“It is fighting, and fighting for honour and glory and houses and kine,
but naught for love, and naught that there may be peace.”

And the men said in reply: “It is all for love and it is all for peace,”
 and they still held out the sword to him. So he took it and buckled it
to his side, and the bird, flying away out of the great window of the
chamber, sang: “Peace! Peace! Peace!” And Pango Dooni’s Son standing by,
with a shining face, said, “Peace! Peace!” and the great Cumner said,
“Peace!” and a woman’s voice, not louder than a bee’s, but clear above
all others, said, “Peace!”

        ......................

He awoke and knew it was a dream; and there beside him stood Pango
Dooni, in his dress of scarlet and gold and brown, his broadsword
buckled on, a kris at his belt, and a rich jewel in his cap.

“Ten of my captains and three of my kinsmen are come to break bread with
Cumner’s Son,” said he. “They would hear the tale of our kinsmen who
died against the Palace wall, by the will of the sick Dakoon.”

The lad sprang to his feet fresh and well, the linen and skins falling
away from his lithe, clean body and limbs, and he took from the slaves
his clothes. The eye of the chief ran up and down his form, from his
keen blue eyes to his small strong ankle.

“It is the body of a perfect man,” said he. “In the days when our State
was powerful and great, when men and not dogs ruled at Mandakan, no man
might be Dakoon save him who was clear of mote or beam; of true bone and
body, like a high-bred yearling got from a perfect stud. But two such
are there that I have seen in Mandakan to-day, and they are thyself and
mine own son.”

The lad laughed. “I have eaten good meat,” said he, “and I have no muddy
blood.”

When they came to the dining-hall, the lad at first was abashed, for
twenty men stood up to meet him, and each held out his hand and spoke
the vow of a brother-in-blood, for the ride he had made and his honest
face together acted on them. Moreover, whom the head of their clan
honoured they also willed to honour. They were tall, barbaric-looking
men, and some had a truculent look, but most were of a daring open
manner, and careless in speech and gay at heart.

Cumner’s Son told them of his ride and of Tang-a-Dahit, and, at last, of
the men of their tribe who died by the Palace wall. With one accord they
rose in their places and swore over bread and a drop of blood of their
chief that they would not sheathe their swords again till a thousand
of Boonda Broke’s and the Dakoon’s men lay where their own kinsmen had
fallen. If it chanced that Tang-a-Dahit was dead, then they would never
rest until Boonda Broke and all his clan were blotted out. Only Pango
Dooni himself was silent, for he was thinking much of what should be
done at Mandakan.

They came out upon the plateau where the fortress stood, and five
hundred mounted men marched past, with naked swords and bare krises in
their belts, and then wheeled suddenly and stood still, and shot their
swords up into the air the full length of the arm, and called the
battle-call of their tribe. The chief looked on unmoved, save once when
a tall trooper rode near him. He suddenly called this man forth.

“Where hast thou been, brother?” he asked.

“Three days was I beyond the Bar of Balmud, searching for the dog who
robbed my mother; three days did I ride to keep my word with a foe, who
gave me his horse when we were both unarmed and spent, and with broken
weapons could fight no more; and two days did I ride to be by a woman’s
side when her great sickness should come upon her. This is all, my lord,
since I went forth, save this jewel which I plucked from the cap of
a gentleman from the Palace. It was toll he paid even at the gates of
Mandakan.”

“Didst thou do all that thou didst promise?”

“All, my lord.”

“Even to the woman?” The chief’s eye burned upon the man.

“A strong male child is come into the world to serve my lord,” said
the trooper, and he bowed his head. “The jewel is thine and not mine,
brother,” said the chief softly, and the fierceness of his eyes abated;
“but I will take the child.”

The trooper drew back among his fellows, and the columns rode towards
the farther end of the plateau. Then all at once the horses plunged into
wild gallop, and the hillsmen came thundering down towards the chief and
Cumner’s Son, with swords waving and cutting to right and left, calling
aloud, their teeth showing, death and valour in their eyes. The chief
glanced at Cumner’s Son. The horses were not twenty feet from the lad,
but he did not stir a muscle. They were not ten feet from him, and
swords flashed before his eyes, but still he did not stir a hair’s
breadth. In response to a cry the horses stopped in full career, not
more than three feet from him. Reaching out he could have stroked the
flaming nostril of the stallion nearest him.

Pango Dooni took from his side a short gold-handled sword and handed it
to him.

“A hundred years ago,” said he, “it hung in the belt of the Dakoon of
Mandakan; it will hang as well in thine.” Then he added, for he saw a
strange look in the lad’s eyes: “The father of my father’s father wore
it in the Palace, and it has come from his breed to me, and it shall go
from me to thee, and from thee to thy breed, if thou wilt honour me.”

The lad stuck it in his belt with pride, and taking from his pocket a
silver-mounted pistol, said:

“This was the gift of a fighting chief to a fighting chief when they met
in a beleaguered town, with spoil, and blood, and misery, and sick women
and children round them; and it goes to a strong man, if he will take
the gift of a lad.”

At that moment there was a cry from beyond the troopers, and it was
answered from among them by a kinsman of Pango Dooni, and presently, the
troopers parting, down the line came Tang-a-Dahit, with bandaged head
and arm.

In greeting, Pango Dooni raised the pistol which Cumner’s Son had given
him and fired it into the air. Straightway five hundred men did the
same.

Dismounting, Tang-a-Dahit stood before his father. “Have the Dakoon’s
vermin fastened on the young bull at last?” asked Pango Dooni, his eyes
glowering. “They crawled and fastened, but they have not fed,” answered
Tang-a-Dahit in a strong voice, for his wounds had not sunk deep. “By
the Old Well of Jahar, which has one side to the mountain wall, and one
to the cliff edge, I halted and took my stand. The mare and the sorrel
of Cumner’s Son I put inside the house that covers the well, and I
lifted two stones from the floor and set them against the entrance. A
beggar lay dead beside the well, and his dog licked his body. I killed
the cur, for, following its master, it would have peace, and peace is
more than life. Then, with the pole of the waterpail, I threw the dead
dog across the entrance upon the paving stones, for these vermin of
plainsmen will not pass where a dead dog lies, as my father knows well.
They came not by the entrance, but they swarmed elsewhere, as ants swarm
upon a sandhill, upon the roofs, and at the little window where the lamp
burns.

“I drove them from the window and killed them through the doorway, but
they were forty to one. In the end the pest would have carried me to
death, as a jackal carries the broken meats to his den, if our hillsmen
had not come. For an hour I fought, and five of them I killed and seven
wounded, and then at the shouts of our hillsmen they fled at last. Nine
of them fell by the hands of our people. Thrice was I wounded, but my
wounds are no deeper than the scratches of a tiger’s cub.”

“Hadst thou fought for thyself the deed were good,” said Pango Dooni,
“but thy blood was shed for another, and that is the pride of good men.
We have true men here, but thou art a true chief and this shalt thou
wear.”

He took the rich belt from his waist, and fastened it round the waist of
his son.

“Cumner’s Son carries the sword that hung in the belt. We are for war,
and the sword should be out of the belt. When we are at peace again ye
shall put the sword in the belt once more, and hang it upon the wall of
the Palace at Mandakan, even as ye who are brothers shall never part.”

Two hours Tang-a-Dahit rested upon skins by the bathing pool, and an
hour did the slaves knead him and rub him with oil, and give him food
and drink; and while yet the sun was but half-way down the sky, they
poured through the Neck of Baroob, over five hundred fighting men, on
horses that would kneel and hide like dogs, and spring like deer, and
that knew each tone of their masters’ voices. By the Bar of Balmud they
gathered another fifty hillsmen, and again half-way beyond the Old Well
of Jahar they met two score more, who had hunted Boonda Broke’s men, and
these moved into column. So that when they came to Koongat Bridge, in
the country infested by the men of the Dakoon, seven hundred stalwart
and fearless men rode behind Pango Dooni. From the Neck of Baroob
to Koongat Bridge no man stayed them, but they galloped on silently,
swiftly, passing through the night like a cloud, upon which the dwellers
by the wayside gazed in wonder and in fear.

At Koongat Bridge they rested for two hours, and drank coffee, and broke
bread, and Cumner’s Son slept by the side of Tang-a-Dahit, as brothers
sleep by their mother’s bed. And Pango Dooni sat on the ground near them
and pondered, and no man broke his meditation. When the two hours were
gone, they mounted again and rode on through the dark villages towards
Mandakan.

It was just at the close of the hour before dawn that the squad of
troopers who rode a dozen rods before the columns, heard a cry from the
dark ahead. “Halt-in the name of the Dakoon!”




V. CHOOSE YE WHOM YE WILL SERVE

The company drew rein. All they could see in the darkness was a single
mounted figure in the middle of the road. The horseman rode nearer.

“Who are you?” asked the leader of the company.

“I keep the road for the Dakoon, for it is said that Cumner’s Son has
ridden to the Neck of Baroob to bring Pango Dooni down.”

By this time the chief and his men had ridden up. The horseman
recognised the robber chief, and raised his voice.

“Two hundred of us rode out to face Pango Dooni in this road. We had
not come a mile from the Palace when we fell into an ambush, even two
thousand men led by Boonda Broke, who would steal the roof and bed of
the Dakoon before his death. For an hour we fought but every man was cut
down save me.”

“And you?” asked Pango Dooni.

“I come to hold the road against Pango Dooni, as the Dakoon bade me.”

Pango Dooni laughed. “Your words are large,” said he. “What could you,
one man, do against Pango Dooni and his hillsman?”

“I could answer the Dakoon here or elsewhere, that I kept the road till
the hill-wolves dragged me down.”

“We be the wolves from the hills,” answered Pango Dooni. “You would
scarce serve a scrap of flesh for one hundred, and we are seven.”

“The wolves must rend me first,” answered the man, and he spat upon the
ground at Pango Dooni’s feet.

A dozen men started forward, but the chief called them back.

“You are no coward, but a fool,” said he to the horseman. “Which is it
better: to die, or to turn with us and save Cumner and the English, and
serve Pango Dooni in the Dakoon’s Palace?”

“No man knows that he must die till the stroke falls, and I come to
fight and not to serve a robber mountaineer.”

Pango Dooni’s eyes blazed with anger. “There shall be no fighting, but a
yelping cur shall be hung to a tree,” said he.

He was about to send his men upon the stubborn horseman when the fellow
said:

“If you be a man you will give me a man to fight. We were two hundred.
If it chance that one of a company shall do as the Dakoon hath said,
then is all the company absolved; and beyond the mists we can meet the
Dakoon with open eyes and unafraid when he saith, ‘Did ye keep your
faith?’”

“By the word of a hillsman, but thou shalt have thy will,” said the
chief. “We are seven hundred men--choose whom to fight.”

“The oldest or the youngest,” answered the man. “Pango Dooni or Cumner’s
Son.”

Before the chief had time to speak, Cumner’s Son struck the man with the
flat of his sword across the breast.

The man did not lift his arm, but looked at the lad steadily for a
moment. “Let us speak together before we fight,” said he, and to show
his good faith he threw down his sword.

“Speak,” said Cumner’s Son, and laid his sword across the pommel of his
saddle.

“Does a man when he dies speak his heart to the ears of a whole tribe?”

“Then choose another ear than mine,” said Cumner’s Son. “In war I have
no secrets from my friends.”

A look of satisfaction came into Pango Dooni’s face. “Speak with the man
alone,” said he, and he drew back.

Cumner’s Son drew a little to one side with the man, who spoke quickly
and low in English.

“I have spoken the truth,” said he. “I am Cushnan Di”--he drew himself
up--“and once I had a city of my own and five thousand men, but a plague
and then a war came, and the Dakoon entered upon my city. I left my
people and hid, and changed myself that no one should know me, and I
came to Mandakan. It was noised abroad that I was dead. Little by little
I grew in favour with the Dakoon, and little by little I gathered strong
men about me-two hundred in all at last. It was my purpose, when the day
seemed ripe, to seize upon the Palace as the Dakoon had seized upon my
little city. I knew from my father, whose father built a new portion
of the Palace, of a secret way by the Aqueduct of the Failing Fountain,
even into the Palace itself. An army could ride through and appear in
the Palace yard like the mist-shapes from the lost legions. When I had a
thousand men I would perform this thing, I thought.

“But day by day the Dakoon drew me to him, and the thing seemed hard to
do, even now before I had the men. Then his sickness came, and I could
not strike an ailing man. When I saw how he was beset by traitors, in
my heart I swore that he should not suffer by my hands. I heard of your
riding to the Neck of Baroob--the men of Boonda Broke brought word. So
I told the Dakoon, and I told him also that Boonda Broke was ready to
steal into his Palace even before he died. He started up, and new life
seemed given him. Calling his servants, he clothed himself, and he came
forth and ordered out his troops. He bade me take my men to keep the
road against Pango Dooni. Then he ranged his men before the Palace, and
scattered them at points in the city to resist Boonda Broke.

“So I rode forth, but I came first to my daughter’s bedside. She lies
in a little house not a stone’s throw from the Palace, and near to the
Aqueduct of the Falling Fountain. Once she was beautiful and tall and
straight as a bamboo stem, but now she is in body no more than a piece
of silken thread. Yet her face is like the evening sky after a rain.
She is much alone, and only in the early mornings may I see her. She is
cared for by an old woman of our people, and there she bides, and thinks
strange thoughts, and speaks words of wisdom.

“When I told her what the Dakoon bade me do, and what I had sworn to
perform when the Dakoon was dead, she said:

“‘But no. Go forth as the Dakoon hath bidden. Stand in the road and
oppose the hillsmen. If Cumner’s Son be with them, thou shalt tell him
all. If he speak for the hillsmen and say that all shall be well with
thee, and thy city be restored when Pango Dooni sits in the Palace of
the Dakoon, then shalt thou join with them, that there may be peace in
the land, for Pango Dooni and the son of Pango Dooni be brave strong
men. But if he will not promise for the hillsmen, then shalt thou keep
the secret of the Palace, and abide the will of God.”’

“Dost thou know Pango Dooni’s son?” asked the lad, for he was sure that
this man’s daughter was she of whom Tang-a-Dahit had spoken.

“Once when I was in my own city and in my Palace I saw him. Then my
daughter was beautiful, and her body was like a swaying wand of the
boolda tree. But my city passed, and she was broken like a trailing
vine, and the young man came no more.”

“But if he came again now?”

“He would not come.”

“But if he had come while she lay there like a trailing vine, and
listened to her voice, and thought upon her words and loved her still.
If for her sake he came secretly, daring death, wouldst thou stand--”

The man’s eyes lighted. “If there were such truth in any man,” he
interrupted, “I would fight, follow him, and serve him, and my city
should be his city, and the knowledge of my heart be open to his eye.”

Cumner’s Son turned and called to Pango Dooni and his son, and they came
forward. Swiftly he told them all. When he had done so the man sprang
from his horse, and taking off the thin necklet of beaten gold he wore
round his throat, without a word he offered it to Tang-a-Dahit, and
Tang-a-Dahit kissed him on the cheek and gave him the thick, loose chain
of gold he wore.

“For this was it you risked your life going to Mandakan,” said Pango
Dooni, angrily, to his son; “for a maid with a body like a withered
gourd.” Then all at once, with a new look in his face, he continued
softly: “Thou hast the soul of a woman, but thy deeds are the deeds of a
man. As thy mother was in heart so art thou.”

        ......................

Day was breaking over Mandakan, and all the city was a tender pink.
Tower and minaret were like inverted cups of ruddy gold, and the streets
all velvet dust, as Pango Dooni, guided by Cushnan Di, halted at the
wood of wild peaches, and a great thicket near to the Aqueduct of the
Failing Fountain, and looked out towards the Palace of the Dakoon. It
was the time of peach blossoms, and all through the city the pink and
white petals fell like the gay crystals of a dissolving sunrise. Yet
there rose from the midst of it a long, rumbling, intermittent murmur,
and here and there marched columns of men in good order, while again
disorderly bands ran hither and hither with krises waving in the sun,
and the red turban of war wound round their heads.

They could not see the front of the Palace, nor yet the Residency
Square, but, even as they looked, a cannonade began, and the smoke of
the guns curled through the showering peach-trees. Hoarse shoutings
and cries came rolling over the pink roofs, and Cumner’s Son could hear
through all the bugle-call of the artillery.

A moment later Cushnan Di was leading them through a copse of pawpaw
trees to a secluded garden by the Aqueduct, overgrown with vines and
ancient rose trees, and cherry shrubs. After an hour’s labour with
spades, while pickets guarded all approach, an opening was disclosed
beneath the great flag-stones of a ruined building. Here was a wide
natural corridor overhung with stalactites, and it led on into an
artificial passage which inclined gradually upwards till it came into
a mound above the level by which they entered. Against this mound
was backed a little temple in the rear of the Palace. A dozen men had
remained behind to cover up the entrance again. When these heard Pango
Dooni and the others in the Palace yard they were to ride straight for a
gate which should be opened to them.

There was delay in opening the stone door which led into the temple,
but at last they forced their way. The place was empty, and they rode
through the Palace yard, pouring out like a stream of spectral horsemen
from the altar of the temple. Not a word was spoken as Pango Dooni and
his company galloped towards the front of the Palace. Hundreds of the
Dakoon’s soldiers and terrified people who had taken refuge in the great
court-yard, ran screaming into corners, or threw themselves in terror
upon the ground. The walls were lined with soldiers, but not one raised
his hand to strike--so sudden was the coming of the dreaded hillsman.
They knew him by the black flag and the yellow sunburst upon it.

Presently Pango Dooni gave the wild battle-call of his tribe, and every
one of his seven hundred answered him as they rode impetuously to the
Palace front. Two thousand soldiers of the Dakoon, under command of his
nephew, Gis-yo-Bahim, were gathered there. They were making ready to
march out and defend the Palace. When they saw the flag and heard the
battle-cry there was a movement backward, as though this handful of
men were an overwhelming army coming at them. Scattered and disorderly
groups of men swayed here and there, and just before the entrance of the
Palace was a wailing group, by which stood two priests with their yellow
robes and bare shoulders, speaking to them. From the walls the soldiers
paused from resisting the swarming herds without.

“The Dakoon is dead!” cried Tang-a-Dahit.

As if in response came the wailing death-cry of the women of the Palace
through the lattice windows, and it was taken up by the discomfited
crowd before the Palace door.

“The Lord of all the Earth, the great Dakoon, is dead.”

Pango Dooni rode straight upon the group, who fled at his approach, and,
driving the priests indoors, he called aloud:

“The Dakoon is living. Fear not!”

For a moment there was no reply, and he waved his men into place
before the Palace, and was about to ride down upon the native army, but
Cumner’s Son whispered to him, and an instant after the lad was riding
alone upon the dark legions. He reined in his horse not ten feet away
from the irregular columns.

“You know me,” said he. “I am Cumner’s Son. I rode into the hills at the
Governor’s word to bring a strong man to rule you. Why do ye stand
here idle? My father, your friend, fights with a hundred men at the
Residency. Choose ye between Boonda Broke, the mongrel, and Pango Dooni,
the great hillsman. If ye choose Boonda Broke, then shall your city be
levelled to the sea, and ye shall lose your name as a people. Choose!”

One or two voices cried out; then from the people, and presently from
the whole dark battalions, came the cry: “Long live Pango Dooni!”

Pango Dooni rode down with Tang-a-Dahit and Cushnan Di. He bade all but
five hundred mounted men to lay down their arms. Then he put over them a
guard of near a hundred of his own horsemen. Gathering the men from the
rampart he did the same with these, reserving only one hundred to remain
upon the walls under guard of ten hillsmen. Then, taking his own six
hundred men and five hundred of the Dakoon’s horsemen, he bade the gates
to be opened, and with Cushnan Di marched out upon the town, leaving
Tanga-Dahit and Cumner’s Son in command at the Palace.

At least four thousand besiegers lay before the walls, and, far beyond,
they could see the attack upon the Residency.

The gates of the Palace closed on the last of Pango Dooni’s men, and
with a wild cry they rode like a monstrous wave upon the rebel mob.
There was no preparation to resist the onset. The rush was like a storm
out of the tropics, and dread of Pango Dooni’s name alone was as death
among them.

The hillsmen clove the besiegers through like a piece of pasteboard,
and turning, rode back again through the broken ranks, their battle-call
ringing high above the clash of steel. Again they turned at the Palace
wall, and, gathering impetus, they rode at the detached and battered
segments of the miserable horde, and once more cut them down, then
furiously galloped towards the Residency.

They could hear one gun firing intermittently, and the roars of Boonda
Broke’s men. They did not call or cry till within a few hundred yards
of the Residency Square. Then their battle-call broke forth, and Boonda
Broke turned to see seven hundred bearing down on his ten thousand, the
black flag with the yellow sunburst over them.

Cumner, the Governor, and McDermot heard the cry of the hillsmen, too,
and took heart.

Boonda Broke tried to divide his force, so that half of them should face
the hillsmen, and half the Residency; but there was not time enough;
and his men fought as they were attacked, those in front against Pango
Dooni, those behind against Cumner. The hillsmen rode upon the frenzied
rebels, and were swallowed up by the great mass of them, so that they
seemed lost. But slowly, heavily, and with ferocious hatred, they drove
their hard path on. A head and shoulders dropped out of sight here and
there; but the hillsmen were not counting their losses that day, and
when Pango Dooni at last came near to Boonda Broke the men he had lost
seemed found again, for it was like water to the thirsty the sight of
this man.

But suddenly there was a rush from the Residency Square, and thirty men,
under the command of Cumner, rode in with sabres drawn.

There was a sudden swaying movement of the shrieking mass between Boonda
Broke and Pango Dooni, and in the confusion and displacement Boonda
Broke had disappeared.

Panic and flight came after, and the hillsmen and the little garrison
were masters of the field.

“I have paid the debt of the mare,” said Pango Dooni, laughing.

“No debt is paid till I see the face of my son,” answered Cumner
anxiously.

Pango Dooni pointed with his sword. “In the Palace yard,” said he.

“In the Palace yard, alive?” asked Cumner. Pango Dooni smiled. “Let us
go and see.”

Cumner wiped the sweat and dust and blood from his face, and turned to
McDermot.

“Was I right when I sent the lad?” said he proudly. “The women and
children are safe.”




VI. CONCERNING THE DAUGHTER OF CUSHNAN DI

The British flag flew half-mast from the Palace dome, and two others
flew behind it; one the black and yellow banner of the hillsmen, the
other the red and white pennant of the dead Dakoon. In the Palace yard
a thousand men stood at attention, and at their head was Cushnan Di with
fifty hillsmen. At the Residency another thousand men encamped, with a
hundred hillsmen and eighty English, under the command of Tang-a-Dahit
and McDermot. By the Fountain of the Sweet Waters, which is over against
the Tomb where the Dakoon should sleep, another thousand men were
patrolled, with a hundred hillsmen, commanded by a kinsman of Pango
Dooni. Hovering near were gloomy, wistful crowds of people, who drew
close to the mystery of the House of Death, as though the soul of a
Dakoon were of more moment than those of the thousand men who had fallen
that day. Along the line of the Bazaar ranged another thousand men,
armed only with krises, under the command of the heir of the late
Dakoon, and with these were a hundred and fifty mounted hillsmen,
watchful and deliberate. These were also under the command of a kinsman
of Pango Dooni.

It was at this very point that the danger lay, for the nephew of the
Dakoon, Gis-yo-Bahim, was a weak but treacherous man, ill-fitted to
rule; a coward, yet ambitious; distrusted by the people, yet the heir to
the throne. Cumner and Pango Dooni had placed him at this point for
no other reason than to give him his chance for a blow, if he dared
to strike it, at the most advantageous place in the city. The furtive
hangers-on, cut-throats, mendicants, followers of Boonda Broke, and
haters of the English, lurked in the Bazaars, and Gis-yo-Bahim should
be tempted for the first and the last time. Crushed now, he could never
rise again. Pango Dooni had carefully picked the hillsmen whom he had
sent to the Bazaar, and their captain was the most fearless and the
wariest fighter from the Neck of Baroob, save Pango Dooni himself.

Boonda Broke was abroad still. He had escaped from the slaughter before
the Residency and was hidden somewhere in the city. There were yet in
Mandakan ten thousand men who would follow him that would promise the
most, and Boonda Broke would promise the doors of Heaven as a gift to
the city, and the treasures of Solomon to the people, if it might serve
his purposes. But all was quiet save where the mourners followed their
dead to the great funeral pyres, which were set on three little hills
just outside the city. These wailed as they passed by. The smoke of the
burnt powder had been carried away by a gentle wind, and in its place
was the pervasive perfume of the peach and cherry trees, and the aroma
of the gugan wood which was like cut sandal in the sun after a rain. In
the homes of a few rich folk there was feasting also, for it mattered
little to them whether Boonda Broke or Pango Dooni ruled in Mandakan,
so that their wealth was left to them. But hundreds of tinkling little
bells broke the stillness. These were carried by brown bare-footed boys,
who ran lightly up and down the streets, calling softly: “Corn and tears
and wine for the dead!” It was the custom for mourners to place in the
hands of the dead a bottle of tears and wine, and a seed of corn, as it
is written in the Proverbs of Dol:

“When thou journeyest into the Shadows, take not sweetmeats with thee,
but a seed of corn and a bottle of tears and wine; that thou mayest have
a garden in the land whither thou goest.”

It was yet hardly night when the pyres were lighted on the little
hills and a warm glow was thrown over all the city, made warmer by
roseate-hued homes and the ruddy stones and velvety dust of the streets.
At midnight the Dakoon was to be brought to the Tomb with the Blue
Dome. Now in the Palace yard his body lay under a canopy, the flags of
Mandakan and England over his breast, twenty of his own naked body-guard
stood round, and four of his high chiefs stood at his head and four at
his feet, and little lads ran softly past, crying: “Corn and tears and
wine for the dead!” And behind all these again were placed the dark
battalions and the hillsmen. It went abroad through the city that Pango
Dooni and Cumner paid great homage to the dead Dakoon, and the dread of
the hillsmen grew less.

But in one house there had been no fear, for there, by the Aqueduct of
the Failing Fountain, lived Cushnan Di, a fallen chief, and his
daughter with the body like a trailing vine; for one knew the sorrow of
dispossession and defeat and the arm of a leader of men, and the other
knew Tang-a-Dahit and the soul that was in him.

This night, while yet there was an hour before the body of the dead
Dakoon should go to the Tomb with the Blue Dome, the daughter of Cushnan
Di lay watching for her door to open; for she knew what had happened in
the city, and there was one whom her spirit longed for. An old woman sat
beside her with hands clasped about her knees.

“Dost thou hear nothing?” said a voice from the bed. “Nothing but the
stir of the mandrake trees, beloved.”

“Nay, but dost thou not hear a step?”

“Naught, child of the heaven-flowers, but a dog’s foot in the moss.”

“Thou art sure that my father is safe?”

“The Prince is safe, angel of the high clouds. He led the hillsmen by
the secret way into the Palace yard.” There was silence for a moment,
and then the girl’s voice said again: “Hush! but there was a footstep--I
heard a breaking twig.”

Her face lighted, and the head slightly turned towards the door. But the
body did not stir. It lay moveless, save where the bosom rose and fell
softly, quivering under the white robe. A great wolf-dog raised its head
at the foot of the bed and pointed its ears, looking towards the door.

The face of the girl was beautiful. A noble peace was upon it, and the
eyes were like lamps of dusky fire, as though they held all the strength
of the nerveless body. The love burning in them was not the love of a
maid for a man, but that which comes after, through pain and trouble and
wisdom. It was the look that lasts after death, the look shot forward
from the Hereafter upon a living face which has looked into the great
mystery, but has not passed behind the curtains.

There was a knock upon the door, and, in response to a summons,
Tang-a-Dahit stepped inside. A beautiful smile settled upon the girl’s
face, and her eyes brooded tenderly upon the young hillsman.

“I am here, Mami,” said he.

“Friend of my heart,” she answered. “It is so long!”

Then he told her how, through Cumner’s Son, he had been turned from his
visit two days before, and of the journey down, and of the fighting, and
of all that had chanced.

She smiled, and assented with her eyes--her father had told her. “My
father knows that thou dost come to me, and he is not angry,” she said.

Then she asked him what was to be the end of all, and he shook his head.
“The young are not taken into counsel,” he answered, “neither I nor
Cumner’s Son.”

All at once her eyes brightened as though a current of light had been
suddenly sent through them. “Cumner’s Son,” said she--“Cumner’s Son, and
thou--the future of Mandakan is all with ye; neither with Cumner, nor
with Pango Dooni, nor with Cushnan Di. To the old is given counsel, and
device, and wisdom, and holding; but to the young is given hope, and
vision, and action, and building, and peace.”

“Cumner’s Son is without,” said he. “May I fetch him to thee?”

She looked grave, and shrank a little, then answered yes.

“So strong, so brave, so young!” she said, almost under her breath, as
the young man entered. Cumner’s Son stood abashed at first to see this
angelic head, so full of light and life, like nothing he had ever seen,
and the nerveless, moveless body, like a flower with no roots.

“Thou art brave,” said she, “and thy heart is without fear, for thou
hast no evil in thee. Great things shall come to thee, and to thee,” she
added, turning to Tang-a-Dahit, “but by different ways.”

Tang-a-Dahit looked at her as one would look at the face of a saint; and
his fingers, tired yet with the swinging of the sword, stroked the white
coverlet of her couch gently and abstractedly. Once or twice Cumner’s
Son tried to speak, but failed; and at last all he could say was: “Thou
art good--thou art good!” and then he turned and stole quietly from the
room.

At midnight they carried the Dakoon to the resting-place of his fathers.
A thousand torches gleamed from the Palace gates through the Street of
Divers Pities, and along the Path by the Bazaar to the Tomb with the
Blue Dome. A hundred hillsmen rode before, and a hundred behind, and
between were two thousand soldiers of Mandakan on foot and fifty of
the late Dakoon’s body-guard mounted and brilliant in scarlet and gold.
Behind the gun-carriage, which bore the body, walked the nephew of the
great Dakoon, then came a clear space, and then Pango Dooni, and
Cumner, and behind these twenty men of the artillery, at whose head rode
McDermot and Cumner’s Son.

As they passed the Path by the Bazaar every eye among the hillsmen and
among the handful of British was alert. Suddenly a savage murmuring
among the natives in the Bazaar broke into a loud snarl, and it seemed
as if a storm was about to break; but as suddenly, at a call from
Cumner, the hillsmen, the British, and a thousand native soldiers, faced
the Bazaar in perfect silence, their lances, swords, and rifles in a
pose of menace. The whole procession stood still for a moment. In the
pause the crowds in the Bazaar drew back, then came a loud voice calling
on them to rescue the dead Dakoon from murderers and infidels; and
a wave of dark bodies moved forward, but suddenly cowered before the
malicious stillness of the hillsmen and the British, and the wave
retreated.

Cumner’s Son had recognised the voice, and his eye followed its
direction with a perfect certainty. Even as he saw the figure of Boonda
Broke disguised as a native soldier the half-breed’s arm was raised, and
a kris flew from his hands, aimed at the heart of Pango Dooni. But as
the kris flew the youth spurred his horse out of the ranks and down upon
the murderer, who sprang back into the Bazaar. The lad fearlessly rode
straight into the Bazaar, and galloped down upon the fugitive, who
suddenly swung round to meet him with naked kris; but, as he did so,
a dog ran across his path, tripped him up, and he half fell. Before he
could recover himself a pistol was at his head. “March!” said the lad;
and even as ten men of the artillery rode through the crowd to rescue
their Colonel’s son, he marched the murderer on. But a sudden frenzy
possessed Boonda Broke. He turned like lightning on the lad, and raised
his kris to throw; but a bullet was quicker, and he leaped into the air
and fell dead without a cry, the kris dropping from his hand.

As Cumner’s Son came forth into the path the hills men and artillery
cheered him, the native troops took it up, and it was answered by the
people in all the thoroughfare.

Pango Dooni had also seen the kris thrown at himself, but he could not
escape it, though he half swung round. It struck him in the shoulder,
and quivered where it struck, but he drew it out and threw it down. A
hillsman bound up the wound, and he rode on to the Tomb.

The Dakoon was placed in his gorgeous house of death, and every man
cried: “Sleep, lord of the earth!” Then Cumner stood up in his saddle,
and cried aloud:

“To-morrow, when the sun stands over the gold dome of the Palace, ye
shall come to hear your Dakoon speak in the hall of the Heavenly Hours.”

No man knew from Cumner’s speech who was to be Dakoon, yet every man in
Mandakan said in the quiet of his home that night:

“To-morrow Pango Dooni will be Dakoon. We will be as the stubble of the
field before him. But Pango Dooni is a strong man.”




VII. THE RED PLAGUE

       “He promised he’d bring me a basket of posies,
         A garland of lilies, a garland of roses,
        A little straw hat to set off the blue ribbons
         That tie up my bonnie brown hair.”

This was the song McDermot sang to himself as he walked up the great
court-yard of the Palace, past the lattice windows, behind which the
silent women of the late Dakoon’s household still sat, passive and
grief-stricken. How knew they what the new Dakoon would do--send them
off into the hills, or kill them? McDermot was in a famous humour, for
he had just come from Pango Dooni, the possessor of a great secret,
and he had been paid high honour. He looked round on the court-yard
complacently, and with an air of familiarity and possession which seemed
hardly justified by his position. He noted how the lattices stirred as
he passed through this inner court-yard where few strangers were ever
allowed to pass, and he cocked his head vaingloriously. He smiled at the
lizards hanging on the foundation stones, he paused to dip his finger
in the basin of a fountain, he eyed good-humouredly the beggars--old
pensioners of the late Dakoon--seated in the shade with outstretched
hands. One of them drew his attention, a slim, cadaverous-looking wretch
who still was superior to his fellows, and who sat apart from them,
evidently by their wish as much as by his own.

McDermot was still humming the song to himself as he neared the group;
but he stopped short, as he heard the isolated beggar repeat after him
in English:

     “He promised he’d bring me a bunch of blue ribbons,
     To tie up my bonnie brown hair.”

He was startled. At first he thought it might be an Englishman in
disguise, but the brown of the beggar’s face was real, and there was no
mistaking the high narrow forehead, the slim fingers, and the sloe-black
eyes. Yet he seemed not a native of Mandakan. McDermot was about to ask
him who he was, when there was a rattle of horse’s hoofs, and Cumner’s
Son galloped excitedly up the court-yard.

“Captain, captain,” said he, “the Red Plague is on the city!”

McDermot staggered back in consternation. “No, no,” cried he, “it is not
so, sir!”

“The man, the first, lies at the entrance of the Path by the Bazaar. No
one will pass near him, and all the city goes mad with fear. What’s to
be done? What’s to be done? Is there no help for it?” the lad cried in
despair. “I’m going to Pango Dooni. Where is he? In the Palace?”

McDermot shook his head mournfully, for he knew the history of this
plague, the horror of its ravages, the tribes it had destroyed.

The beggar leaned back against the cool wall and laughed. McDermot
turned on him in his fury, and would have kicked him, but Cumner’s Son,
struck by some astute intelligence in the man’s look, said:

“What do you know of the Red Plague?”

Again the beggar laughed. “Once I saved the city of Nangoon from the
plague, but they forgot me, and when I complained and in my anger went
mad at the door of the Palace, the Rajah drove me from the country. That
was in India, where I learned to speak English; and here am I at the
door of a Palace again!”

“Can you save the city from the plague?” asked Cumner’s Son, coming
closer and eagerly questioning. “Is the man dead?” asked the beggar.

“Not when I saw him--he had just been taken.”

“Good. The city may be saved if--” he looked at Cumner’s Son, “if thou
wilt save him with me. If he be healed there is no danger; it is the
odour of death from the Red Plague which carries death abroad.”

“Why do you ask this?” asked McDermot, nodding towards Cumner’s Son.

The beggar shrugged his shoulders. “That he may not do with me as did
the Rajah of Nangoon.”

“He is not Dakoon,” said McDermot.

“Will the young man promise me?”

“Promise what?” asked Cumner’s Son.

“A mat to pray on, a house, a servant, and a loaf of bread, a bowl of
goat’s milk, and a silver najil every day till I die.”

“I am not Dakoon,” said the lad, “but I promise for the Dakoon--he will
do this thing to save the city.”

“And if thou shouldst break thy promise?”

“I keep my promises,” said the lad stoutly.

“But if not, wilt thou give thy life to redeem it?”

“Yes.”

The beggar laughed again and rose. “Come,” said he.

“Don’t go--it’s absurd!” said McDermot, laying a hand on the young man’s
arm. “The plague cannot be cured.”

“Yes, I will go,” answered Cumner’s Son. “I believe he speaks the truth.
Go you to Pango Dooni and tell him all.”

He spurred his horse and trotted away, the beggar running beside him.
They passed out of the court-yard, and through the Gate by the Fountain
of Sweet Waters.

They had not gone far when they saw Cumner, the Governor, and six men of
the artillery riding towards them. The Governor stopped, and asked him
where he was going.

The young man told him all.

The Colonel turned pale. “You would do this thing!” said he dumfounded.
“Suppose this rascal,” nodding towards the beggar, “speaks the truth;
and suppose that, after all, the sick man should die and--”

“Then the lad and myself would be the first to follow him,” interrupted
the beggar, “and all the multitude would come after, from the babe on
the mat to the old man by the Palace gates. But if the sick man lives--”

The Governor looked at his son partly in admiration, partly in pain, and
maybe a little of anger.

“Is there no one else? I tell you I--”

“There is no one else; the lad or death for the city! I can believe the
young; the old have deceived me,” interposed the beggar again.

“Time passes,” said Cumner’s Son anxiously. “The man may die. You say
yes to my going, sir?” he asked his father.

The Governor frowned, and the skin of his cheeks tightened.

“Go-go, and good luck to you, boy.” He made as if to ride on, but
stopped short, flung out his hand, and grasped the hand of his son. “God
be with you, lad,” said he; then his jaws closed tightly, and he rode
on. It was easier for the lad than for him.

When he told the story to Pango Dooni the chief was silent for a moment;
then he said:

“Until we know whether it be death or life, whether Cumner’s Son save
the city or lose his life for its sake, we will not call the people
together in the Hall of the Heavenly Hours. I will send the heralds
abroad, if it be thy pleasure, Cumner.”

At noon--the hour when the people had been bidden to cry, “Live, Prince
of the Everlasting Glory!”--they were moving restlessly, fearfully
through the Bazaar and the highways, and watching from a distance a
little white house, with blue curtains, where lay the man who was sick
with the Red Plague, and where watched beside his bed Cumner’s Son and
the beggar of Nangoon. No one came near.

From the time the sick man had been brought into the house, the beggar
had worked with him, giving him tinctures which he boiled with sweetmeat
called the Flower of Bambaba, while Cumner’s Son rubbed an ointment into
his body. Now and again the young man went to the window and looked
out at the lines of people hundreds of yards away, and the empty spaces
where the only life that showed was a gay-plumaged bird that drifted
across the sunlight, or a monkey that sat in the dust eating a nut. All
at once the awe and danger of his position fell upon him. Imagination
grew high in him in a moment--that beginning of fear and sorrow
and heart-burning; yet, too, the beginning of hope and wisdom and
achievement. For the first time in his life that knowledge overcame him
which masters us all sometimes. He had a desire to fly the place; he
felt like running from the house, shrieking as he went. A sweat broke
out on his forehead, his lips clung to his teeth, his mouth was dry, his
breast seemed to contract, and breathing hurt him.

“What a fool I was! What a fool I was to come here!” he said.

He buried his head in his arms as he leaned against the wall, and his
legs trembled. From that moment he passed from headlong, daring, lovable
youth, to manhood; understanding, fearful, conscientious, and morally
strong. Just as abject as was his sudden fear, so triumphant was his
reassertion of himself.

“It was the only way,” he said to himself, suddenly wresting his head
from his protecting arms. “There’s a chance of life, anyhow, chance
for all of us.” He turned away to the sick man’s bed, to see the beggar
watching him with cold, passive eyes and a curious, half-sneering smile.
He braced himself and met the passive, scrutinising looks firmly. The
beggar said nothing, but motioned to him to lift the sick man upright,
while he poured some tincture down his throat, and bound the head and
neck about with saturated linen.

There came a knocking at the door. The beggar frowned, but Cumner’s Son
turned eagerly. He had only been in this room ten hours, but it seemed
like years in which he had lived alone-alone. But he met firmly the
passive, inquisitorial eyes of the healer of the plague, and he turned,
dropped another bar across the door, and bade the intruder to depart.

“It is I, Tang-a-Dahit. Open!” came a loud, anxious voice.

“You may not come in.”

“I am thy brother-in-blood, and my life is thine.”

“Then keep it safe for those who prize it. Go back to the Palace.”

“I am not needed there. My place is with thee.”

“Go, then, to the little house by the Aqueduct.” There was silence for a
moment, and then Tang-a-Dahit said:

“Wilt thou not let me enter?”

The sudden wailing of the stricken man drowned Tang-a-Dahit’s words,
and without a word Cumner’s Son turned again to the victim of the Red
Plague.

All day the people watched from afar, and all day long soldiers and
hillsmen drew a wide cordon of quarantine round the house. Terror seized
the people when the sun went down, and to the watchers the suspense
grew. Ceaseless, alert, silent, they had watched and waited, and at last
the beggar knelt with his eyes fixed on the sleeper, and did not stir. A
little way off from him stood Cumner’s Son-patient, pale, worn, older by
ten years than he was three days before.

In the city dismay and misery ruled. Boonda Broke and the dead Dakoon
were forgotten. The people were in the presence of a monster which could
sweep them from their homes as a hail-storm scatters the hanging nests
of wild bees. In a thousand homes little red lights of propitiation were
shining, and the sweet boolda wood was burning at a thousand shrines.
Midnight came, then the long lethargic hours after; then that moment
when all cattle of the field and beasts of the forest wake and stand
upon their feet, and lie down again, and the cocks crow, and the birds
flutter their wings, and all resign themselves to sleep once more. It
was in this hour that the sick man opened his eyes and raised his head,
as though the mysterious influence of primitive life were rousing him.
He said nothing and did nothing, but lay back and drew in a long, good
breath of air, and afterwards fell asleep.

The beggar got to his feet. “The man is safe,” said he.

“I will go and tell them,” said Cumner’s Son gladly, and he made as if
to open the door.

“Not till dawn,” commanded the beggar. “Let them suffer for their sins.
We hold the knowledge of life and death in our hands.”

“But my father, and Tang-a-Dahit, and Pango Dooni.”

“Are they without sin?” asked the beggar scornfully. “At dawn, only at
dawn!”

So they sat and waited till dawn. And when the sun was well risen, the
beggar threw wide open the door of the house, and called aloud to the
horsemen far off, and Cumner’s Son waved with his hand; and McDermot
came galloping to them. He jumped from his horse and wrung the boy’s
hand, then that of the beggar, then talked in broken sentences, which
were spattered by the tears in his throat. He told Cumner’s Son that his
face was as that of one who had lain in a grave, and he called aloud in
a blustering voice, and beckoned for troopers to come. The whole line
moved down on them, horsemen and soldiers and people.

The city was saved from the Red Plague, and the people, gone mad with
joy, would have carried Cumner’s Son to the Palace on their shoulders,
but he walked beside the beggar to his father’s house, hillsmen in front
and English soldiers behind; and wasted and ghostly, from riding and
fighting and watching, he threw himself upon the bed in his own room,
and passed, as an eyelid blinks, into a deep sleep.

But the beggar sat down on a mat with a loaf of bread, a bowl of goat’s
milk, and a long cigar which McDermot gave him, and he received idly all
who came, even to the sick man, who ere the day was done was brought
to the Residency, and, out of danger and in his right mind, lay in the
shade of a banyan tree, thinking of nothing save the joy of living.




VIII. THE CHOOSING OF THE DAKOON

It was noon again. In the Hall of the Heavenly Hours all the chiefs and
great people of the land were gathered, and in the Palace yard without
were thousands of the people of the Bazaars and the one-storied houses.
The Bazaars were almost empty, the streets deserted. Yet silken banners
of gorgeous colours flew above the pink terraces, and the call of the
silver horn of Mandakan, which was made first when Tubal Cain was young,
rang through the long vacant avenues. A few hundred native troops and
a handful of hillsmen rode up and down, and at the Residency fifty
men kept guard under command of Sergeant Doolan of the artillery--his
superior officers and the rest of his comrades were at the Palace.

In the shade of a banyan tree sat the recovered victim of the Red Plague
and the beggar of Nangoon, playing a game of chuck-farthing, taught them
by Sergeant Doolan, a bowl of milk and a calabash of rice beside them,
and cigarettes in their mouths. The beggar had a new turban and robe,
and he sat on a mat which came from the Palace.

He had gone to the Palace that morning as Colonel Cumner had commanded,
that he might receive the thanks of the Dakoon for the people of
Mandakan; but he had tired of the great place, and had come back to play
at chuck-farthing. Already he had won everything the other possessed,
and was now playing for his dinner. He was still chuckling over his
victory when an orderly and two troopers arrived with a riderless horse,
bearing the command of Colonel Cumner for the beggar to appear at once
at the Palace. The beggar looked doubtfully at the orderly a moment,
then rose with an air of lassitude and languidly mounted the horse.
Before he had got half-way to the Palace he suddenly slid from the horse
and said:

“Why should I go? The son of the great Cumner promised for the Dakoon.
He tells the truth. Light of my soul, but truth is the greatest of all!
I go to play chuck-farthing.”

So saying, he turned and ran lazily back to the Residency and sat down
beneath the banyan tree. The orderly had no commands to bring him by
force, so he returned to the Palace, and entered it as the English
Governor was ending his speech to the people. “We were in danger,”
 said Cumner, “and the exalted chief, Pango Dooni, came to save us. He
shielded us from evil and death and the dagger of the mongrel chief,
Boonda Broke. Children of heavenly Mandakan, Pango Dooni has lived at
variance with us, but now he is our friend. A strong man should rule
in the Palace of Mandakan as my brother and the friend of my people. I
speak for Pango Dooni. For whom do you speak?”

As he had said, so said all the people in the Hall of the Heavenly
Hours, and it was taken up with shouts by the people in the Palace yard.
Pango Dooni should be Dakoon!

Pango Dooni came forward and said: “If as ye say I have saved ye, then
will ye do after my desire, if it be right. I am too long at variance
with this Palace to sit comfortably here. Sometime, out of my bitter
memories, I should smite ye. Nay, let the young, who have no wrongs to
satisfy, let the young who have dreams and visions and hopes, rule; not
the old lion of the hills, who loves too well himself and his rugged
ease of body and soul. But if ye owe me any debt, and if ye mean me
thanks, then will ye make my son Dakoon. For he is braver than I, and
between ye there is no feud. Then will I be your friend, and because my
son shall be Dakoon I will harry ye no more, but bide in my hills, free
and friendly, and ready with sword and lance to stand by the faith and
fealty that I promise. If this be your will, and the will of the great
Cumner, speak.”

Cumner bowed his head in assent, and the people called in a loud voice
for Tang-a-Dahit.

The young man stepped forth, and baring his head, said:

“It is meet that the race be to the swift, to those who have proven
their faith and their swords; who have the gift for ruling, and the
talent of the sword to sustain it. For me, if ye will hear me, I will
go another way. I will not rule. My father hath passed on this honour to
me, but I yield it up to one who hath saved ye from a double death, even
to the great Cumner’s Son. He rode, as ye know, through peril to Pango
Dooni, bearing the call for help, and he hath helped to save the whole
land from the Red Plague. But for him Mandakan would be only a place of
graves. Speak, children of heavenly Mandakan, whom will ye choose?” When
Cumner’s Son stood forth he was pale and astounded before the cries
of greeting that were carried out through the Palace yard, through the
highways, and even to the banyan tree where sat the beggar of Nangoon.

“I have done nothing, I have done nothing,” said he sincerely. “It was
Pango Dooni, it was the beggar of Nangoon. I am not fit to rule.”

He turned to his father, but saw no help in his eyes for refusal. The
lad read the whole story of his father’s face, and he turned again to
the people.

“If ye will have it so, then, by the grace of God, I will do right by
this our land,” said he.

A half-hour later he stood before them, wearing the costly robe of
yellow feathers and gold and perfect silk of the Dakoon of Mandakan.

“The beggar of Nangoon who saved our city, bid him come near,” he said;
but the orderly stepped forward and told his story of how the beggar had
returned to his banyan tree.

“Then tell the beggar of Nangoon,” said he, “that if he will not visit
me, I will visit him; and all that I promised for the Dakoon of Mandakan
I will fulfil. Let Cushnan Di stand forth,” he added, and the old man
came near. “The city which was yours is yours, again, and all that was
taken from it shall be restored,” said he.

Then he called him by his real name, and the people were amazed.

Cushnan Di, as he had been known to them, said quietly:

“If my Lord will give me place near him as general of his armies and
keeper of the gates, I will not ask that my city be restored, and I will
live near to the Palace--”

“Nay, but in the Palace,” interrupted Cumner’s Son, “and thy daughter
also, who hath the wisdom of heaven, that there be always truth shining
in these high places.”

An hour later the Dakoon passed through the Path by the Bazaar.

“Whither goes the Dakoon?” asked a native chief of McDermot.

“To visit a dirty beggar in the Residency Square, and afterwards to the
little house of Cushnan Di,” was the reply.




IX. THE PROPHET OF PEACE

The years went by.

In the cool of a summer evening a long procession of people passed
through the avenues of blossoming peach and cherry trees in Mandakan,
singing a high chant or song. It was sacred, yet it was not solemn;
peaceful, yet not sombre; rather gentle, aspiring, and clear. The people
were not of the city alone, but they had been gathered from all parts of
the land--many thousands, who were now come on a pilgrimage to Mandakan.

At the head of the procession was a tall, lithe figure, whose face
shone, and whose look was at once that of authority and love. Three
years’ labour had given him these followers and many others. His dreams
were coming true.

“Fighting, fighting, naught but fighting for honour and glory and
homes and kine, but naught for love, and naught that there may be
peace.”--This was no longer true; for the sword of the young Dakoon was
ever lifted for love and for peace.

The great procession stopped near a little house by the Aqueduct of the
Failing Fountain, and spread round it, and the leader stepped forward to
the door of the little house and entered. A silence fell upon the crowd,
for they were to look upon the face of a dying girl, who chose to dwell
in her little home rather than in a palace.

She was carried forth on a litter, and set down, and the long procession
passed by her as she lay. She smiled at all an ineffable smile of peace,
and her eyes had in them the light of a good day drawing to its close.
Only once did she speak, and that was when all had passed, and a fine
troop of horsemen came riding up.

This was the Dakoon of Mandakan and his retinue. When he dismounted and
came to her, and bent over her, he said something in a low tone for her
ear alone, and she smiled at him, and whispered the one word “Peace!”

Then the Dakoon, who once was known only as Cumner’s Son, turned and
embraced the prophet Sandoni, as he was now called, though once he had
been called Tang-a-Dahit the hillsman.

“What message shall I bear thy father?” asked the Dakoon, after they had
talked a while.

Sandoni told him, and then the Dakoon said:

“Thy father and mine, who are gone to settle a wild tribe of the hills
in a peaceful city, send thee a message.” And he held up his arm, where
a bracelet shone.

The Prophet read thereon the Sacred Countersign of the hillsmen.




THE HIGH COURT OF BUDGERY-GAR

We were camped on the edge of a billabong. Barlas was kneading a damper,
Drysdale was tenderly packing coals about the billy to make the water
boil, and I was cooking the chops. The hobbled horses were picking the
grass and the old-man salt-bush near, and Bimbi, the black boy,
was gathering twigs and bark for the fire. That is the order of
merit--Barlas, Drysdale, myself, the horses and Bimbi. Then comes the
Cadi all by himself. He is given an isolated and indolent position,
because he was our guest and also because, in a way, he represented
the Government. And though bushmen do not believe much in a far-off
Government--even though they say when protesting against a bad Land
Law, “And your Petitioners will ever Pray,” and all that kind of
yabber-yabber--they give its representative the lazy side of the fire
and a fig of the best tobacco when he bails up a camp as the Cadi did
ours. Stewart Ruttan, the Cadi, was the new magistrate at Windowie and
Gilgan, which stand for a huge section of the Carpentaria country. He
was now on his way to Gilgan to try some cases there. He was a new chum,
though he had lived in Australia for years. As Barlas said, he’d been
kept in a cultivation-paddock in Sydney and Brisbane; and he was now
going to take the business of justice out of the hands of Heaven and
its trusted agents the bushmen, and reduce the land to the peace of the
Beatitudes by the imposing reign of law and summary judgments. Barlas
had just said as much, though in different language.

I knew by the way that Barlas dropped the damper on the hot ashes and
swung round on his heel that he was in a bad temper. “And so you think,
Cadi,” said he, “that we squatters and bushmen are a strong, murderous
lot; that we hunt down the Myalls--[Aborigines]--like kangaroos or
dingoes, and unrighteously take justice in our own hands instead of
handing it over to you?”

“I think,” said the Cadi, “that individual and private revenge
should not take the place of the Courts of Law. If the blacks commit
depredations--”

“Depredations!” interjected Drysdale with sharp scorn.

“If they commit depredations and crimes,” the Cadi continued, “they
should be captured as criminals are captured elsewhere and be brought in
and tried. In that way respect would be shown to British law and--” here
he hesitated slightly, for Barlas’s face was not pleasant to see--“and
the statutes.”

But Barlas’s voice was almost compassionate as he said: “Cadi, every
man to his trade, and you’ve got yours. But you haven’t learned yet that
this isn’t Brisbane or Melbourne. You haven’t stopped to consider how
many police would be necessary for this immense area of country if you
are really to be of any use. And see here,”--his face grew grim and
dark, “you don’t know what it is to wait for the law to set things right
in this Never Never Land. There isn’t a man in the Carpentaria and Port
Darwin country but has lost a friend by the cowardly crack of a waddy
in the dead of night or a spear from behind a tree. Never any fair
fighting, but red slaughter and murder--curse their black hearts!”
 Barlas gulped down what seemed very like a sob.

Drysdale and I knew how strongly Barlas felt. He had been engaged to be
married to a girl on the Daly River, and a week before the wedding she
and her mother and her two brothers were butchered by blacks whom they
had often befriended and fed. We knew what had turned Barlas’s hair grey
and spoiled his life.

Drysdale took up the strain: “Yes, Cadi, you’ve got the true missionary
gospel, the kind of yabber they fire at each other over tea and buns at
Darling Point and Toorak--all about the poor native and the bad, bad men
who don’t put peas in their guns, and do sometimes get an eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth.... Come here, Bimbi.” Bimbi came.

“Yes, master,” Bimbi said.

“You kill that black-fellow mother belonging to you?”

“Yes, master.”

“Yes,” Drysdale continued, “Bimbi went out with a police expedition
against his own tribe, and himself cut his own mother’s head off. As a
race, as a family, the blacks have no loyalty. They will track their
own brothers down for the whites as ruthlessly as they track down the
whites. As a race they are treacherous and vile, though as individuals
they may have good points.”

“No, Cadi,” once more added Barlas, “we can get along very well without
your consolidated statutes or High Courts or Low Courts just yet. They
are too slow. Leave the black devils to us. You can never prove anything
against them in a court of law. We’ve tried that. Tribal punishment is
the only proper thing for individual crime. That is what the nations
practise in the islands of the South Seas. A trader or a Government
official is killed. Then a man-of-war sweeps a native village out of
existence with Hotchkiss guns. Cadi, we like you; but we say to you, Go
back to your cultivation-paddock at Brisbane, and marry a wife and beget
children before the Lord, and feed on the Government, and let us work
out our own salvation. We’ll preserve British justice and the statutes,
too. ... There, the damper, as Bimbi would say, is ‘corbon budgery’, and
your chop is done to a turn, Cadi. And now let’s talk of something that
doesn’t leave a bad taste in the mouth.”

The Cadi undoubtedly was more at home with reminiscences of nights
at the Queensland Club and moonlight picnics at lovely Humpy Bong and
champagne spreads in a Government launch than at dispensing law in
the Carpentaria district. And he had eager listeners. Drysdale’s
open-mouthed, admiring “My word!” as he puffed his pipe, his back
against an ironbark tree, was most eloquent of long banishment from the
delights of the “cultivation-paddock”; and Barlas nodded frequently his
approval, and was less grim than usual. Yet, peaceful as we were, it
might have puzzled a stranger to see that all of us were armed--armed
in this tenantless, lonely wilderness! Lonely and tenantless enough
it seemed. There was the range of the Copper-mine hills to the south,
lighted by the wan moon; and between and to the west a rough scrub
country, desolating beyond words, and where even edible snakes would
be scarce; spots of dead-finish, gidya, and brigalow-bush to north and
east, and in the trees by the billabong the cry of the cockatoo and the
laughing-jackass. It was lonely, but surely it was safe. Yes, perhaps it
was safe!

It was late when we turned in, our heads upon our saddles, for the Cadi
had been more than amusing--he had been confidential, and some political
characters were roughly overhauled for our benefit, while so-called
Society did not escape flagellation. Next morning the Cadi left us. He
gave us his camps--Bora Bora, Budgery-Gar, Wintelliga, and Gilgan--since
we were to go in his direction also soon. He turned round in his saddle
as he rode off, and said gaily: “Gentlemen, I hope you’ll always help to
uphold the majesty of the law as nobly as you have sustained its envoy
from your swags.”

Drysdale and I waved our hands to him, but Barlas muttered something
between his teeth. We had two days of cattle-hunting in the Copper-mine
hills, and then we started westward, in the tracks of the Cadi, to make
for Barlas’s station. The second day we camped at Bora Bora Creek. We
had just hobbled the horses, and were about to build a fire, when Bimbi
came running to us. “Master, master,” he said to Drysdale, “that fellow
Cadi yarraman mumkull over there. Plenty myall mandowie!”--[‘Master,
master, the Cadi’s horse is dead over there, and there are plenty of
black fellows’ tracks about.’)

We found the horse pierced with spears. The Cadi had evidently mounted
and tried to get away. And soon, by a clump of the stay-a-while bush,
we discovered, alas! the late companion of our camp-fire. He was gashed
from head to foot, and naked.

We buried him beneath a rustling sandal-tree, and on its bark carved the
words:

“Sacred to the memory of Stewart Ruttan.”

And beneath, Barlas added the following:

“The Cadi sleeps. The Law regards him not.”

In a pocket of the Cadi’s coat, which lay near, we found the picture of
a pretty girl. On it was written:

“To dearest Stewart, from Alice.”

Barlas’s face was stern and drawn. He looked at us from under his shaggy
brows.

“There’s a Court to be opened,” he said. “Do you stand for law or
justice?”

“For justice,” we replied.

Four days later in a ravine at Budgery-Gar a big camp of blacks were
feasting. With loathsome pantomime they were re-enacting the murders
they had committed within the past few days; murders of innocent white
women and children, and good men and true--among them the Cadi, God help
him! Great fires were burning in the centre of the camp, and the bodies
of the black devils writhed with hideous colour in the glare. Effigies
of murdered whites were speared and mangled with brutal cries, and then
black women of the camp were brought out, and mockeries of unnameable
horrors were performed. Hell had emptied forth its carrion.

But twelve bitter white men looked down upon this scene from the scrub
and rocks above, and their teeth were set. Barlas, their leader, turned
to them and said: “This court is open. Are you ready?”

The click of twelve rifles was the reply.

When these twelve white jurymen rode away from the ravine there was
not one but believed that justice had been done by the High Court of
Budgery-Gar.




AN EPIC IN YELLOW

There was a culminating growth of irritation on board the Merrie
Monarch. The Captain was markedly fitful and, to a layman’s eye,
unreliable at the helm; the Hon. Skye Terryer was smoking violently, and
the Newspaper Correspondent--representing an American syndicate--chewed
his cigar in silence.

“Yes,” Gregson, the Member of Parliament, continued, “if I had my way
I’d muster every mob of Chinamen in Australia, I’d have one thundering
big roundup, and into the Pacific and the Indian Sea they’d go, to the
crack of a stock-whip or of something more convincing.” The Hon. Skye
Terryer was in agreement with the Squatting Member in the principle
of his argument if not in the violence of his remedies. He was a young
travelling Englishman; one of that class who are Radicals at twenty,
Independents at thirty, and Conservatives at forty. He had not yet
reached the intermediate stage. He saw in this madcap Radical Member one
of the crude but strong expressions of advanced civilisation. He had the
noble ideal of Australia as a land trodden only by the Caucasian. The
Correspondent, much to our surprise, had by occasional interjections at
the beginning of the discussion showed that he was not antipathetic to
Mongolian immigration. The Captain?

“Yes, I’d give ‘em Botany Bay, my word!” added the Member as an
anti-climax.

The Captain let go the helm with a suddenness which took our breath
away, apparently regardless that we were going straight as an arrow on
the Island of Pentecost, the shore of which, in its topaz and emerald
tints, was pretty enough to look at but not to attack, end on. He pushed
both hands down deep into his pockets and squared himself for war.

“Gregson,” he said, “that kind of talk may be good enough for Parliament
and for labour meetings, but it is not proper diet for the Merrie
Monarch. It’s a kind of political gospel that’s no better than the creed
of the Malay who runs amuck. God’s Providence--where would your Port
Darwin Country have been without the Chinaman? What would have come
to tropical agriculture in North Queensland if it had not been for the
same? And what would all your cities do for vegetables to eat and
clean shirts to their backs if it was not for the Chinkie? As for their
morals, look at the police records of any well-regulated city where they
are--well-regulated, mind you, not like San Francisco! I pity the morals
of a man and the stupidity of him and the benightedness of him that
would drive the Chinaman out at the point of the bayonet or by the crack
of a rifle. I pity that man, and--and I wash my hands of him.”

And having said all this with a strong Scotch accent the Captain
opportunely turned to his duty and prevented us from trying conclusions
with the walls of a precipice, over which fell silver streams of water
like giant ropes up which the Naiads might climb to the balmy enclosures
where the Dryads dwelt. The beauty of the scene was but a mechanical
impression, to be remembered afterward when thousands of miles away,
for the American Correspondent now at last lit his cigar and took up the
strain.

“Say, the Captain’s right,” he said. “You English are awful prigs and
hypocrites, politically; as selfish a lot as you’ll find on the face of
the globe. But in this matter of the Chinaman there isn’t any difference
between a man from Oregon and one from Sydney, only the Oregonian isn’t
a prig and a hypocrite; he’s only a brute, a bragging, hard-handed
brute. He got the Chinaman to build his railways--he couldn’t get any
other race to do it--same fix as the planter in North Queensland with
the Polynesian; and to serve him in pioneer times and open up the
country, and when that was done he turns round and says: ‘Out you go,
you Chinkie--out you go and out you stay! We’re going to reap this
harvest all alone; we’re going to Chicago you clean off the table!’ And
Washington, the Home of Freedom and Tammany Tigers, shoves a prohibitive
Bill through the Legislature, as Parkes did in Sydney; only Parkes
talked a lot of Sunday-school business about the solidarity of the
British race, and Australia for the Australians, and all that patter;
and the Oregonian showed his dirty palm of selfishness straight out, and
didn’t blush either. ‘Give ‘em Botany Bay! Give’em the stock-whip and
the rifle!’ That’s a nice gospel for the Anglo-Saxon dispensation.”

The suddenness of the attack overwhelmed the Member, but he was choking
with wrath. Had he not stone-walled in the New South Wales Parliament
for nine hours, and been placed on a Royal Commission for that service?
“My word!” But the box of cigars was here amiably passed, and what
seemed like a series of international complications was stayed. It was
perhaps fortunate, however, that at this moment a new interest sprang
up. We were rounding a lofty headland crowned with groves of cocoa-palms
and bananas and with trailing skirts of flowers and vines, when we saw
ahead of us a pretty little bay, and on the shore a human being plainly
not a Polynesian. Up the hillside that rose suddenly from the beach was
a thatched dwelling, not built open all round like most native houses,
and apparently having but one doorway. In front of the house, and near
it, was a tall staff, and on the staff the British Flag.

In a moment we, too, had the British Flag flying at our mast-head.

Long ago I ceased to wonder at coincidences, still I confess I was
scarcely prepared for the Correspondent’s exclamation, as, taking the
marine glass from his eyes, he said: “Well, I’m decalogued if it ain’t a
Chinaman!”

It certainly was so. Here on the Island of Pentecost, in the New
Hebrides, was a Celestial washing clothes on the beach as much at home
as though he were in Tacoma or Cooktown. The Member’s “My oath!”
 Skye Terryer’s “Ah!” and the Captain’s chuckle were as weighty with
importance as though the whole question of Chinese immigration were now
to be settled. As we hove-to and dropped anchor, a boat was pushed out
into the surf by a man who had hurriedly come down the beach from the
house. In a moment or two he was alongside. An English face and an
English voice greeted us, and in the doorway of the house were an
English woman and her child.

What pleasure this meeting gave to us and to the trader--for such he
was, those only can know who have sailed these Southern Seas through
long and nerveless tropic days, and have lived, as this man did with his
wife and child, for months never seeing a white face, and ever in danger
of an attack from cannibal tribes, who, when apparently most disposed to
amity, are really planning a massacre. Yet with that instinct of gain
so strong in the Anglo-Saxon, this trader had dared the worst for the
chance of making money quickly and plentifully by the sale of copra
to occasional vessels. The Chinaman had come with the trader from
Queensland, and we were assured was “as good as gold.” If colour
counted, he looked it. At this the pro-Mongolian magnanimously forbore
to show any signs of triumph. The Correspondent, on the contrary, turned
to the Chinaman and began chaffing him; he continued it as the others,
save myself, passed on towards the house.

This was the close of the dialogue: “Well, John, how are you getting
on?”

“Welly good,” was John’s reply; “thirletty dollars a month, and learn
the plan of salvation.”

The Correspondent laughed.

“Well, you good Englishman, John? You like British flag? You fight?”

And John, blinking jaundicely, replied: “John allee samee
Linglishman-muchee fightee blimeby--nigger no eatee China boy;” and he
chuckled.

A day and a night we lingered in the little Bay of Vivi, and then we
left it behind; each of us, however, watching till we could see the
house on the hillside and the flag no longer, and one at least wondering
if that secret passage into the hills from the palm-thatched home would
ever be used as the white dwellers fled for their lives.

We had promised that, if we came near Pentecost again on our cruise, we
would spend another idle day in the pretty bay. Two months passed
and then we kept our word. As we rounded the lofty headland the
Correspondent said: “Say, I’m hankering after that baby!” But the
Captain at the moment hoarsely cried: “God’s love! but where are the
house and the flag?”

There was no house and there was no flag above the Bay of Vivi.

Ten minutes afterwards we stood beside the flag-staff, and at our feet
lay a moaning, mangled figure. It was the Chinaman, and over his gashed
misery were drawn the folds of the flag that had flown on the staff.
What horror we feared for those who were not to be seen needs no telling
here.

As for the Chinaman, it was as he said; the cannibals would not “eatee
Chinee boy.” They were fastidious. They had left him, disdaining even to
take his head for a trophy.

Hours after, on board the Merrie Monarch, we learned in fragments the
sad story. It was John Chinaman that covered the retreat of the wife and
child into the hills when the husband had fallen.

The last words that the dying Chinkie said were these: “Blitish flag
wellee good thing keepee China boy walm; plentee good thing China boy
sleepee in all a-time.”

So it was. With rude rites and reverent hands, we lowered him to the
deep from the decks of the Merrie Monarch, and round him was that
flag under which he had fought for English woman and English child so
valorously.

       “And he went like a warrior into his rest
        With the Union Jack around him.”

That was the paraphrasing epitaph the Correspondent wrote for him in the
pretty Bay of Vivi, and when he read it, we all drank in silence to the
memory of “a Chinkie.”

We found the mother and the child on the other side of the island ere
a week had passed, and bore them away in safety. They speak to-day of a
member of a despised race, as one who showed

       “The constant service of the antique world.”




DIBBS, R.N.

“Now listen to me, Neddie Dibbs,” she said, as she bounced the ball
lightly on her tennis-racket, “you are very precipitate. It’s only four
weeks since you were court-martialed, and you escaped being reduced by
the very closest shave; and yet you come and make love to me, and want
me to marry you. You don’t lack confidence, certainly.”

Commander Dibbs, R.N. was hurt; but he did not become dramatic. He felt
the point of his torpedo-cut beard, and smiled up pluckily at her--she
was much taller than he.

“I know the thing went against me rather,” he said, “but it was all
wrong, I assure you. It’s cheeky, of course, to come to you like this so
soon after, but for two years I’ve been looking forward up there in the
China Sea to meeting you again. You don’t know what a beast of a station
it is--besides, I didn’t think you’d believe the charge.”

“The charge was that you had endangered the safety of one of her
Majesty’s cruisers by trying to run through an unexplored opening in the
Barrier Reef. Was that it?”

“That was it.”

“And you didn’t endanger her?”

“Yes, I did, but not wilfully, of course, nor yet stupidly.”

“I read the evidence, and, frankly, it looked like stupidity.”

“I haven’t been called stupid usually, have I?”

“No. I’ve heard you called many things, but never that.”

Every inch of his five-feet-five was pluck. He could take her shots
broadside, and laugh while he winced. “You’ve heard me called a good
many things not complimentary, I suppose, for I know I’m not much to
look at, and I’ve an edge to my tongue sometimes. What is the worst
thing you ever said of me?” he added a little bitterly.

“What I say to you now--though, by the way, I’ve never said it
before--that your self-confidence is appalling. Don’t you know that
I’m very popular, that they say I’m clever, and that I’m a tall,
good-looking girl?”

She looked down at him, and said it with such a delightful naivete,
through which a tone of raillery ran, that it did not sound as it
may read. She knew her full value, but no one had ever accused her of
vanity--she was simply the most charming, outspoken girl in the biggest
city of Australia.

“Yes, I know all that,” he replied with an honest laugh. “When you were
a little child,--according to your mother, and were told you were not
good, you said: ‘No, I’m not good--I’m only beautiful.’”

Dibbs had a ready tongue, and nothing else he said at the moment could
have had so good an effect. She laughed softly and merrily. “You have
awkward little corners in your talk at times. I wonder they didn’t
reduce you at the court-martial. You were rather keen with your words
once or twice there.”

A faint flush ran over Dibbs’s face, but he smiled through it, and
didn’t give away an inch of self-possession. “If the board had been
women, I’d have been reduced right enough--women don’t go by evidence,
but by their feelings; they don’t know what justice really is, though by
nature they’ve some undisciplined generosity.”

“There again you are foolish. I’m a woman. Now why do you say such
things to me, especially when--when you are aspiring! Properly, I ought
to punish you. But why did you say those sharp things at your trial?
They probably told against you.”

“I said them because I felt them, and I hate flummery and
thick-headedness. I was as respectful as I could be; but there were
things about the trial I didn’t like--irregular things, which the
Admiral himself, who knows his business, set right.”

“I remember the Admiral said there were points about the case that he
couldn’t quite understand, but that they could only go by such testimony
as they had.”

“Exactly,” he said sententiously.

She wheeled softly on him, and looked him full in the eyes. “What other
testimony was there to offer?”

“We are getting a long way from our starting-point,” he answered
evasively. “We were talking of a more serious matter.”

“But a matter with which this very thing has to do, Neddie Dibbs.
There’s a mystery somewhere. I’ve asked Archie; but he won’t say a word
about it, except that he doesn’t think you were to blame.”

“Your brother is a cautious fellow.” Then, hurriedly: “He is quite right
to express no opinion as to any mystery. Least said soonest mended.”

“You mean that it is proper not to discuss professional matters in
society?”

“That’s it.” A change had passed over Dibbs’s face--it was slightly
paler, but his voice was genial and inconsequential.

“Come and sit down at the Point,” she said.

They went to a cliff which ran out from one corner of the garden, and
sat down on a bench. Before them stretched the harbour, dotted with
sails; men-of-war lay at anchor, among them the little Ruby, Commander
Dibbs’s cruiser. Pleasure-steamers went hurrying along to many shady
harbours; a tall-masted schooner rode grandly in between the Heads,
balanced with foam; and a beach beneath them shone like opal: it was a
handsome sight.

For a time they were silent. At last he said: “I know I haven’t much to
recommend me. I’m a little beggar--nothing to look at; I’m pretty poor;
I’ve had no influence to push me on; and just at the critical point in
my career--when I was expecting promotion--I get this set-back, and lose
your good opinion, which is more to me, though I say it bluntly like a
sailor, than the praise of all the Lords of the Admiralty, if it could
be got. You see, I always was ambitious; I was certain I’d be a captain;
I swore I’d be an admiral one day; and I fell in love with the best girl
in the world, and said I’d not give up thinking I would marry her until
and unless I saw her wearing another man’s name--and I don’t know that I
should even then.”

“Now that sounds complicated--or wicked,” she said, her face turned away
from him.

“Believe me, it is not complicated; and men marry widows sometimes.”

“You are shocking,” she said, turning on him with a flush to her cheek
and an angry glitter in her eye. “How dare you speak so cold-bloodedly
and thoughtlessly?”

“I am not cold-blooded or thoughtless, nor yet shocking. I only speak
what is in my mind with my usual crudeness. I know it sounds insolent
of me, but, after all, it is only being bold with the woman for
whom--half-disgraced, insignificant, but unquenchable fellow as I
am--I’d do as much as, and, maybe, dare more for than any one of the men
who would marry her if they could.”

“I like ambitious men,” she said relenting, and meditatively pushing
the grass with her tennis-racket; “but ambition isn’t everything, is
it? There must be some kind of fulfilment to turn it into capital, as it
were. Don’t let me hurt your feelings, but you haven’t done a great deal
yet, have you?”

“No, I haven’t. There must be occasion. The chance to do something big
may start up any time, however. You never can tell when things will come
your way. You’ve got to be ready, that’s all.”

“You are very confident.”

“You’ll call me a prig directly, perhaps, but I can’t help that. I’ve
said things to you that I’ve never said to any one in the world, and I
don’t regret saying them.”

She looked at him earnestly. She had never been made love to in this
fashion. There was no sentimentalism in it, only straightforward
feeling, forceful, yet gentle. She knew he was aware that the Admiral
of his squadron had paid, and was paying, court to her; that a titled
aide-de-camp at Government House was conspicuously attentive; that one
of the richest squatters in the country was ready to make astonishing
settlements at any moment; and that there was not a young man of
note acquainted with her who did not offer her gallant service-in the
ball-room. She smiled as she thought of it. He was certainly not large,
but no finer head was ever set on a man’s shoulders, powerful,
strongly outlined, nobly balanced. The eyes were everywhere; searching,
indomitable, kind. It was a head for a sculptor. Ambition became it
well. She had studied that head from every stand-point, and had had the
keenest delight in talking to the man. But, as he said, that was two
years before, and he had had bad luck since then.

She suddenly put this question to him: “Tell me all the truth about that
accident to the Ruby. You have been hiding something. The Admiral was
right, I know. Some evidence was not forthcoming that would have thrown
a different light on the affair.”

“I can tell you nothing,” he promptly replied.

“I shall find out one day,” she said.

“I hope not; though I’m grateful that you wish to do so.”

He rose hurriedly to his feet; he was looking at the harbour below. He
raised the field-glass he had carried from the veranda to his eyes. He
was watching a yacht making across the bay towards them.

She spoke again. “You are going again to-morrow?”

“Yes; all the ships of the squadron but one get away.”

“How long shall you be gone?”

“Six months at least----Great God!”

He had not taken the glasses from his eyes as they talked, but had
watched the yacht as she came on to get under the lee of the high shore
at their right. He had noticed that one of those sudden fierce winds,
called Southerly Busters, was sweeping down towards the craft, and would
catch it when it came round sharp, as it must do. He recognised the boat
also. It belonged to Laura Harman’s father, and her brother Archie was
in it. The gale caught the yacht as Dibbs foresaw, and swamped her.
He dropped the glass, cried to the girl to follow, and in a minute had
scrambled down the cliff, and thrown off most of his things. He had
launched a skiff by the time the girl reached the shore. She got in
without a word. She was deadly pale, but full of nerve. They rowed hard
to where they could see two men clinging to the yacht; there had been
three in it. The two men were not hauled in, for the gale was blowing
too hard, but they clung to the rescuing skiff. The girl’s brother was
not to be seen. Instantly Dibbs dived under the yacht. It seemed an
incredible time before he reappeared; but when he did, he had a body
with him. Blood was coming from his nose, the strain of holding his
breath had been so great. It was impossible to get the insensible body
into the skiff. He grasped the side, and held the boy’s head up. The
girl rowed hard, but made little headway. Other rescue boats arrived
presently, however, and they were all got to shore safely.

Lieutenant Archie Harman did not die. Animation was restored after great
difficulty, but he did not sail away with the Ruby next morning to the
Polynesian Islands. Another man took his place.

Little was said between Commander Dibbs and Laura Harman at parting late
that night. She came from her brother’s bedside and laid her hand upon
his arm. “It is good,” she said, “for a man to be brave as well as
ambitious. You are sure to succeed; and I shall be proud of you,
for--for you saved my brother’s life, you see,” she timidly added; and
she was not often timid.

        .........................

Five months after, when the Ruby was lying with the flag-ship off one
of the Marshall Islands, a packet of letters was brought from Fiji by
a trading-schooner. One was for Commander Dibbs. It said in brief: “You
saved my brother’s life--that was brave. You saved his honour--that was
noble. He has told me all. He will resign and clear you when the Admiral
returns. You are a good man.”

“He ought to be kicked,” Dibbs said to himself. “Did the cowardly beggar
think I did it for him--blast him!”

He raged inwardly; but he soon had something else to think of, for a
hurricane came down on them as they lay in a trap of coral with only
one outlet, which the Ruby had surveyed that day. He took his ship out
gallantly, but the flag-ship dare not attempt it--Dibbs was the only man
who knew the passage thoroughly. He managed to land on the shore below
the harbour, and then, with a rope round him, essayed to reach the
flag-ship from the beach. It was a wild chance, but he got there badly
battered. Still, he took her with her Admiral out to the open safely.

That was how Dibbs became captain of a great iron-clad.

Archie Harman did not resign; Dibbs would not let him. Only Archie’s
sister knew that he was responsible for the accident to the Ruby, which
nearly cost Dibbs his reputation; for he and Dibbs had surveyed the
passage in the Barrier Reef when serving on another ship, and he had
neglected instructions and wrongly and carelessly interpreted the chart.
And Dibbs had held his tongue.

One evening Laura Harman said to Captain Dibbs: “Which would you rather
be--Admiral of the Fleet or my husband?” Her hand was on his arm at the
time.

He looked up at her proudly, and laughed slyly. “I mean to be both, dear
girl.”

“You have an incurable ambition,” she said.




A LITTLE MASQUERADE

“Oh, nothing matters,” she said, with a soft, ironical smile, as she
tossed a bit of sugar to the cockatoo.

“Quite so,” was his reply, and he carefully gathered in a loose leaf
of his cigar. Then, after a pause: “And yet, why so? It’s a very pretty
world one way and another.”

“Yes, it’s a pretty world at times.”

At that moment they were both looking out over a part of the world known
as the Nindobar Plains, and it was handsome to the eye. As far as could
be seen was a carpet of flowers under a soft sunset. The homestead by
which they sat was in a wilderness of blossoms. To the left was a high
rose-coloured hill, solemn and mysterious; to the right--afar off--a
forest of gum-trees, pink and purple against the horizon. At their feet,
beyond the veranda, was a garden joyously brilliant, and bright-plumaged
birds flitted here and there.

The two looked out for a long time, then, as if by a mutual impulse,
suddenly turned their eyes on each other. They smiled, and, somehow,
that smile was not delightful to see. The girl said presently: “It is
all on the surface.”

Jack Sherman gave a little click of the tongue peculiar to him, and
said: “You mean that the beautiful birds have dreadful voices; that the
flowers are scentless; that the leaves of the trees are all on edge and
give no shade; that where that beautiful carpet of blossoms is there was
a blazing quartz plain six months ago, and there’s likely to be the
same again; that, in brief, it’s pretty, but hollow.” He made a slight
fantastic gesture, as though mocking himself for so long a speech, and
added: “Really, I didn’t prepare this little oration.”

She nodded, and then said: “Oh, it’s not so hollow,--you would not call
it that exactly, but it’s unsatisfactory.”

“You have lost your illusions.”

“And before that occurred you had lost yours.”

“Do I betray it, then?” He laughed, not at all bitterly, yet not with
cheerfulness.

“And do you think that you have such acuteness, then, and I--” Nellie
Hayden paused, raised her eyebrows a little coldly, and let the cockatoo
bite her finger.

“I did not mean to be egotistical. The fact is I live my life alone, and
I was interested for the moment to know how I appeared to others. You
and I have been tolerably candid with each other since we met, for the
first time, three days ago; I knew you would not hesitate to say what
was in your mind, and I asked out of honest curiosity. One fancies one
hides one’s self, and yet--you see!”

“Do you find it pleasant, then, to be candid and free with some one?...
Why with me?” She looked him frankly in the eyes.

“Well, to be more candid. You and I know the world very well, I fancy.
You were educated in Europe, travelled, enjoyed--and suffered.” The girl
did not even blink, but went on looking at him steadily. “We have both
had our hour with the world; have learned many sides of the game. We
haven’t come out of it without scars of one kind or another. Knowledge
of the kind is expensive.”

“You wanted to say all that to me the first evening we met, didn’t you?”
 There was a smile of gentle amusement on her face.

“I did. From the moment I saw you I knew that we could say many things
to each other ‘without pre liminaries.’ To be able to do that is a great
deal.”

“It is a relief to say things, isn’t it?”

“It is better than writing them, though that is pleasant, after its
kind.”

“I have never tried writing--as we talk. There’s a good deal of vanity
at the bottom of it though, I believe.”

“Of course. But vanity is a kind of virtue, too.” He leaned over towards
her, dropping his arms on his knees and holding her look. “I am very
glad that I met you. I intended only staying here over night, but--”

“But I interested you in a way--you see, I am vain enough to think that.
Well, you also interested me, and I urged my aunt to press you to stay.
It has been very pleasant, and when you go it will be very humdrum
again; our conversation, mustering, rounding-up, bullocks, and rabbits.
That, of course, is engrossing in a way, but not for long at a time.”

He did not stir, but went on looking at her. “Yes, I believe it has been
pleasant for you, else it had not been so pleasant for me. Honestly, I
don’t believe I shall ever get you out of my mind.”

“That is either slightly rude or badly expressed,” she said. “Do you
wish, then, to get me out of your mind?”

“No, no----You are very keen. I wish to remember you always. But what I
felt at the moment was this. There are memories which are always passive
and delightful. We have no wish to live the scenes of which they are
over again, the reflection is enough. There are others which cause us to
wish the scenes back again, with a kind of hunger; and yet they won’t or
can’t come back. I wondered of what class this memory would be.”

The girl flushed ever so slightly, and her fingers clasped a little
nervously, but she was calm. Her voice was even; it had, indeed, a
little thrilling ring of energy. “You are wonderfully daring,” she
replied, “to say that to me. To a school-girl it might mean so much: to
me--!” She shook her head at him reprovingly.

He was not in the least piqued. “I was absolutely honest in that. I said
nothing but what I felt. I would give very much to feel confident one
way or the other--forgive me, for what seems incredible egotism. If I
were five years younger I should have said instantly that the memory
would be one--”

“Which would disturb you, make you restless, cause you to neglect your
work, fill you with regret; and yet all too late--isn’t that it?” She
laughed lightly and gave a lump of sugar to the cockatoo.

“You read me accurately. But why touch your words with satire?”

“I believe I read you better than you read me. I didn’t mean to be
satirical. Don’t you know that what often seems irony directed towards
others is in reality dealt out to ourselves? Such irony as was in my
voice was for myself.”

“And why for yourself?” he asked quietly, his eyes full of interest. He
was cutting the end of a fresh cigar. “Was it”--he was about to strike
a match, but paused suddenly--“was it because you had thought the same
thing?”

She looked for a moment as though she would read him through and
through; as though, in spite of all their candour, there was some
lingering uncertainty as to his perfect straightforwardness; then, as
if satisfied, she said at last: “Yes, but with a difference. I have
no doubt which memory it will be. You will not wish to be again on the
plains of Nindobar.”

“And you,” he said musingly, “you will not wish me here?” There was no
real vanity in the question. He was wondering how little we can be sure
of what we shall feel to-morrow from what we feel to-day. Besides, he
knew that a wise woman is wiser than a wise man.

“I really don’t think I shall care particularly. Probably, if we met
again here, there would be some jar to our comradeship--I may call it
that, I suppose?”

“Which is equivalent to saying that good-bye in most cases, and always
in cases such as ours, is a little tragical, because we can never meet
quite the same again.”

She bowed her head, but did not reply. Presently she glanced up at him
kindly. “What would you give to have back the past you had before you
lost your illusions, before you had--trouble?”

“I do not want it back. I am not really disillusionised. I think that
we should not make our own personal experience a law unto the world. I
believe in the world in spite--of trouble. You might have said trouble
with a woman--I should not have minded.” He was smoking now, and the
clouds twisted about his face so that only his eyes looked through
earnestly. “A woman always makes laws from her personal experience. She
has not the faculty of generalisation--I fancy that’s the word to use.”

She rose now with a little shaking motion, one hand at her belt, and
rested a shoulder against a pillar of the veranda. He rose also at once,
and said, touching her hand respectfully with his finger tips: “We may
be sorry one day that we did not believe in ourselves more.”

“Oh, no,” she said, turning and smiling at him, “I think not. You will
be in England hard at work, I here hard at living; our interests will
lie far apart. I am certain about it all. We might have been what my
cousin calls ‘trusty pals’--no more.”

“I wish to God I felt sure of that.”

She held out her hand to him. “I believe you are honest in this. I
expect both of us have played hide-and-seek with sentiment in our time;
but it would be useless for us to masquerade with each other: we are of
the world, very worldly.”

“Quite useless--here comes your cousin! I hope I don’t look as agitated
as I feel.”

“You look perfectly cool, and I know I do. What an art this living is!
My cousin comes about the boarhunt to-morrow.”

“Shall you join us?”

“Of course. I can handle a rifle. Besides, it is your last day here.”

“Who can tell what to-morrow may bring forth?” he said.

        ........................

The next day the boar-hunt occurred. They rode several miles to a little
lake and a scrub of brigalow, and, dismounting, soon had exciting sport.
Nellie was a capital shot, and, without loss of any womanliness, was a
thorough sportsman. To-day, however, there was something on her mind,
and she was not as alert and successful as usual. Sherman kept with
her as much as possible--the more so because he saw that her cousins,
believing she was quite well able to take care of herself, gave her to
her own resources. Presently, however, following an animal, he left her
a distance behind.

On the edge of a little billabong she came upon a truculent boar. It
turned on her, but she fired, and it fell. Seeing another ahead, she
pushed on quickly to secure it, too. As she went she half-cocked her
rifle. Had her mind been absolutely intent on the sport, she had full
cocked it. All at once she heard the thud of feet behind her. She turned
swiftly, and saw the boar she had shot bearing upon her, its long yellow
tusks standing up like daggers. A sweeping thrust from one of them
leaves little chance of life.

She dropped upon a knee, swung her rifle to her shoulder, and pulled the
trigger. The rifle did not go off. For an instant she did not grasp the
trouble. With singular presence of mind, however, she neither lowered
her rifle nor took her eye from the beast; she remained immovable. It
was all a matter of seconds. Evidently cowed, the animal, when within a
few feet of her, swerved to the right, then made as though to come down
on her again. But, meanwhile, she had discovered her mistake, and cocked
her rifle. She swiftly trained it on the boar, and fired. It was hit,
but did not fall; and came on. Then another shot rang out from behind
her, and the boar fell so near her that its tusk caught her dress.

Jack Sherman had saved her.

She was very white when she faced him. She could not speak. That night,
however, she spoke very gratefully and almost tenderly.

To something that he said gently to her then about a memory, she
replied: “Tell me now as candidly as if to your own soul, did you feel
at the critical moment that life would be horrible and empty without
me?”

“I thought only of saving you,” he said honestly.

“Then I was quite right; you will never have any regret,” she said.

“I wonder, ah, I wonder!” he added sorrowfully. But the girl was sure.

The regret was hers; though he never knew that. It is a lonely life on
the dry plains of Nindobar.




DERELICT

He was very drunk; and because of that Victoria Lindley, barmaid at
O’Fallen’s, was angry--not at him but at O’Fallen, who had given him the
liquor.

She knew more about him than any one else. The first time she saw him he
was not sober. She had left the bar-room empty; and when she came back
he was there with others who had dropped in, evidently attracted by
his unusual appearance--he wore an eyeglass--and he had been saying
something whimsically audacious to Dicky Merritt, who, slapping him on
the shoulder, had asked him to have a swizzle.

Dicky Merritt had a ripe sense of humour, and he was the first to grin.
This was followed by loud laughs from others, and these laughs went out
where the dust lay a foot thick and soft like precipitated velvet, and
hurrying over the street, waked the Postmaster and roused the Little
Milliner, who at once came to their doors. Catching sight of each other,
they nodded, and blushed, and nodded again; and then the Postmaster,
neglecting the business of the country, went upon his own business into
the private sitting-room of the Little Milliner; for those wandering
laughs from O’Fallen’s had done the work set for them by the high
powers.

Over in the hot bar-room the man with the eye-glass was being frankly
“intr’juced” to Dicky Merritt and Company, Limited, by Victoria Lindley,
who, as hostess of this saloon, was, in his eyes, on a footing of
acquaintance. To her he raised his hat with accentuated form, and
murmured his name--“Mr. Jones--Mr. Jones.” Forthwith, that there might
be no possible unpleasantness--for even such hostesses have their duties
of tact--she politely introduced him as Mr. Jones.

He had been a man of innumerable occupations--nothing long: caretaker of
tanks, rabbit-trapper, boundary-rider, cook at a shearers’ camp, and, in
due time, he became book-keeper at O’Fallen’s. That was due to Vic. Mr.
Jones wrote a very fine hand--not in the least like a business man--when
he was moderately sober, and he also had an exceedingly caustic wit
when he chose to use it. He used it once upon O’Fallen, who was a rough,
mannerless creature, with a good enough heart, but easily irritated by
the man with the eye-glass, whose superior intellect and manner, even
when drunk, were too noticeable. He would never have employed him were
it not for Vic, who was worth very much money to him in the course of
the year. She was the most important person within a radius of a hundred
and fifty miles, not excepting Rembrandt, the owner of Bomba Station,
which was twenty miles square, nor the parson at Magari, ninety miles
south, by the Ring-Tail Billabong. For both Rembrandt and the parson
had, and showed, a respect for her, which might appear startling were it
seen in Berkeley Square or the Strand.

When, therefore, O’Fallen came raging into the barroom one morning, with
the gentle remark that “he’d roast the tongue of her fancy gent if he
didn’t get up and git,” he did a foolish thing. It was the first time
that he had insulted Victoria, and it was the last. She came out white
and quiet from behind the bar-counter, and, as he retreated from her
into a corner, said: “There is not a man who drinks over this bar, or
puts his horse into your shed, who wouldn’t give you the lie to that and
thrash you as well--you coward!” Her words came on low and steady: “Mr.
Jones will go now, of course, but I shall go also.”

This awed O’Fallen. To lose Vic was to lose the reputation of his house.
He instantly repented, but she turned her shoulder on him, and went
into the little hot office, where the book-keeper was, leaving him
gesticulating as he swore at himself in the glass behind the bar. When
she entered the room she found Mr. Jones sitting rigid on his stool,
looking at the open ledger before him. She spoke his name. He nodded
ever so slightly, but still looked hard at the book. She knew his
history. Once he had told it to her. It happened one day when he had
resigned his position as boundary-rider, in which he was practically
useless. He had been drinking, and, as he felt for the string of his
eye-glass, his fingers caught another thin black cord which protruded
slightly from his vest. He drew it out by mistake, and a small gold
cross shone for a moment against the faded black coat. His fingers
felt for it to lift it to his eye as though it were his eye-glass, but
dropped it suddenly. He turned pale for a minute, then caught it as
suddenly again, and thrust it into his waistcoat. But Vic had seen, and
she had very calm, intelligent eyes, and a vast deal of common sense,
though she had only come from out Tibbooburra way. She kept her eyes on
him kindly, knowing that he would speak in time. They were alone, for
most of the people of Wadgery were away at a picnic. There is always
one moment when a man who has a secret, good or bad, fatal or otherwise,
feels that he must tell it or die. And Mr. Jones told Vic, and she
said what she could, though she knew that a grasp of her firm hands was
better than any words; and she was equally sure in her own mind that
word and grasp would be of no avail in the end.

She saw that the beginning of the end had come as she looked at him
staring at the ledger, yet exactly why she could not tell. She knew that
he had been making a fight since he had been book-keeper, and that
now he felt that he had lost. She guessed also that he had heard what
O’Fallen said to her, and what she had replied.

“You ought not to have offended him,” she tried to say severely.

“It had to come,” he said with a dry, crackling laugh, and he fastened
his eye-glass in his eye. “I wasn’t made for this. I could only do one
thing, and--” He laughed that peculiar laugh again, got down from the
stool, and held out his hand to her.

“What do you intend?” she said. “I’m going, of course. Good-bye!” “But
not at once?” she said very kindly.

“Perhaps not just at once,” he answered with a strange smile.

She did not know what to say or do; there are puzzling moments even for
a wise woman, and there is nothing wiser than that.

He turned at the door. “God bless you!” he said. Then, as if caught in
an act to be atoned for, he hurried out into the street. From the door
she watched him till the curtains of dust rose up about him and hid him
from sight. When he came back to Wadgery months after he was a terrible
wreck; so much so that Vic could hardly look at him at first; and she
wished that she had left O’Fallen’s as she threatened, and so have no
need to furnish any man swizzles. She knew he would never pull himself
together now. It was very weak of him, and horrible, but then... When
that thirst gets into the blood, and there’s something behind the man’s
life too--as Dicky Merritt said, “It’s a case for the little black
angels.”

Vic would not give him liquor. He got it, however, from other sources.
He was too far gone to feel any shame now. His sensibilities were all
blunted. One day he babbled over the bar-counter to O’Fallen, desiring
greatly that they should be reconciled. To that end he put down the last
shilling he had for a swizzle, and was so outrageously offended when
O’Fallen refused to take it, that the silver was immediately swept into
the till; and very soon, with his eye-glass to his eye, Mr. Jones was
drunk.

That was the occasion mentioned in the first sentence of this history,
when Vic was very angry.

The bar-room was full. Men were wondering why it was that the Postmaster
and the Little Milliner, who went to Magari ten days before, to get
married by the parson there, had not returned. While they talked and
speculated, the weekly coach from Magari came up slowly to the door,
and, strange to say, without a blast from the driver’s horn. Dicky
Merritt and Company rushed out to ask news of the two truants, and were
met with a warning wave of the driver’s hand, and a “Sh-h! sh--!” as
he motioned towards the inside of the coach. There they found the
Postmaster and the Little Milliner mere skeletons, and just alive. They
were being cared for by a bushman, who had found them in the plains,
delirious and nearly naked. They had got lost, there being no regular
road over the plains, and their horse, which they had not tethered
properly, had gone large. They had been days without food and water when
they were found near the coach-track.

They were carried into O’Fallen’s big sitting-room. Dicky brought the
doctor, who said that they both would die, and soon. Hours passed. The
sufferers at last became sane and conscious, as though they could not
go without something being done. The Postmaster lifted a hand to his
pocket. Dicky Merritt took out of it a paper. It was the marriage
licence. The Little Milliner’s eyes were painful to see; she was not
dying happy. The Postmaster, too, moved his head from side to side in
trouble. He reached over and took her hand. She drew it back, shuddering
a little. “The ring! The ring!” she whispered.

“It is lost,” he said.

Vic, who was at the woman’s head, understood. She stooped, said
something in her ear, then in that of the Postmaster, and left the room.
When she came back, two minutes later, Mr. Jones was with her. What she
had done to him to sober him no one ever knew. But he had a book in his
hand, and on the dingy black of his waistcoat there shone a little gold
cross. He came to where the two lay. Vic drew from her finger a ring.
What then occurred was never forgotten by any who saw it; and you could
feel the stillness, it was so great, after a high, sing-song voice said:
“Those whom God hath joined let no man put asunder.”

The two lying cheek by cheek knew now that they could die in peace.

The sing-song voice rose again in the ceremony of blessing, but suddenly
it quavered and broke, the man rose, dropping the prayer-book to the
floor, and ran quickly out of the room and into the dust of the street,
and on, on into the plains.

“In the name of God, who is he?” said Dicky Merritt to Victoria Lindley.

“He was the Reverend Jones Leverton, of Harfordon-Thames,” was her
reply.

“Once a priest, always a priest,” added Dicky. “He’ll never come back,”
 said the girl, tears dropping from her eyes.

And she was right.




OLD ROSES

It was a barren country, and Wadgery was generally shrivelled with heat,
but he always had roses in his garden, on his window-sill, or in his
button-hole. Growing flowers under difficulties was his recreation. That
was why he was called Old Roses. It was not otherwise inapt, for there
was something antique about him, though he wasn’t old; a flavour, an
old-fashioned repose and self-possession. He was Inspector of Tanks
for this God-forsaken country. Apart from his duties he kept mostly to
himself, though when not travelling he always went down to O’Fallen’s
Hotel once a day for a glass of whisky and water--whisky kept especially
for him; and as he drank this slowly he talked to Victoria Lindley the
barmaid, or to any chance visitors whom he knew. He never drank with any
one, nor asked any one to drink; and, strange to say, no one resented
this. As Vic said: “He was different.” Dicky Merritt, the solicitor, who
was hail-fellow with squatter, homestead lessee, cockatoo-farmer, and
shearer, called him “a lively old buffer.” It was he, indeed, who
gave him the name of Old Roses. Dicky sometimes went over to Long Neck
Billabong, where Old Roses lived, for a reel, as he put it, and he
always carried away a deep impression of the Inspector’s qualities.

“Had his day,” said Dicky in O’Fallen’s sitting-room one night, “in
marble halls, or I’m a Jack. Run neck and neck with almighty swells
once. Might live here for a thousand years and he’d still be the
nonesuch of the back-blocks. I’d patent him--file my caveat for him
to-morrow, if I could, bully Old Roses!”

Victoria Lindley, the barmaid, lifted her chin slightly from her hands,
as she leaned through the opening between the bar and the sitting-room,
and said: “Mr. Merritt, Old Roses is a gentleman; and a gentleman is a
gentleman till he--”

“Till he humps his bluey into the Never Never Land, Vic? But what do
you know about gentlemen, anyway? You were born only five miles from the
jumping-off place, my dear.”

“Oh,” was the quiet reply, “a woman--the commonest woman--knows a
gentleman by instinct. It isn’t what they do, it’s what they don’t do;
and Old Roses doesn’t do lots of things.”

“Right you are, Victoria, right you are again! You do Tibbooburra
credit. Old Roses has the root of the matter in him--and there you have
it.”

Dicky had a profound admiration for Vic. She had brains, was perfectly
fearless, no man had ever taken a liberty with her, and every one in the
Wadgery country who visited O’Fallen’s had a wholesome respect for her
opinion.

About this time news came that the Governor, Lord Malice, would pass
through Wadgery on his tour up the back-blocks. A great function was
necessary. It was arranged. Then came the question of the address of
welcome to be delivered at the banquet. Dicky Merritt and the local
doctor were named for the task, but they both declared they’d only “make
rot of it,” and suggested Old Roses.

They went to lay the thing before him. They found him in his garden. He
greeted them, smiling in his quiet, enigmatical way, and listened. While
Dicky spoke, a flush slowly passed over him, and then immediately left
him pale; but he stood perfectly still, his hand leaning against a
sandal tree, and the coldness of his face warmed up again slowly. His
head having been bent attentively as he listened, they did not see
anything unusual.

After a moment of inscrutable deliberation, he answered that he would
do as they wished. Dicky hinted that he would require some information
about Lord Malice’s past career and his family’s history, but he assured
them that he did not need it; and his eyes idled ironically with Dicky’s
face.

When the two had gone, Old Roses sat in his room, a handful of letters,
a photograph, and a couple of decorations spread out before him, his
fingers resting on them, his look engaged with a far horizon.

The Governor came. He was met outside the township by the citizens and
escorted in--a dusty and numerous cavalcade. They passed the Inspector’s
house. The garden was blooming, and on the roof a flag was flying.
Struck by the singular character of the place Lord Malice asked who
lived there, and proposed stopping for a moment to make the acquaintance
of its owner; adding, with some slight sarcasm, that if the officers of
the Government were too busy to pay their respects to their Governor,
their Governor must pay his respects to them. But Old Roses was not in
the garden nor in the house, and they left without seeing him. He
was sitting under a willow at the billabong, reading over and over to
himself the address to be delivered before the Governor in the evening.
As he read his face had a wintry and inhospitable look.

The night came. Old Roses entered the dining-room quietly with the
crowd, far in the Governor’s wake. According to his request, he was
given a seat in a distant corner, where he was quite inconspicuous. Most
of the men present were in evening dress. He wore a plain tweed suit,
but carried a handsome rose in his button-hole. It was impossible to put
him at a disadvantage. He looked distinguished as he was. He appeared to
be much interested in Lord Malice. The early proceedings were cordial,
for the Governor and his suite made themselves agreeable, and talk
flowed amiably. After a time there was a rattle of knives and forks,
and the Chairman rose. Then, after a chorus of “hear, hears,” there
was general silence. The doorways of the room were filled by the
women-servants of the hotel. Chief among them was Vic, who kept her eyes
fixed on Old Roses. She knew that he was to read the address and speak,
and she was more interested in him and in his success than in Lord
Malice and his suite. Her admiration of him was great. He had always
treated her as though she had been born a lady, and it had done her
good.

“And I call upon Mr. Adam Sherwood to speak to the health of His
Excellency, Lord Malice.”

In his modest corner Old Roses stretched to his feet. The Governor
glanced over carelessly. He only saw a figure in grey, with a rose in
his button-hole. The Chairman whispered that it was the owner of the
house and garden which had interested His Excellency that afternoon. His
Excellency looked a little closer, but saw only a rim of iron-grey hair
above the paper held before Old Roses’ face.

Then a voice came from behind the paper: “Your Excellency--”

At the first words the Governor started, and his eyes flashed
searchingly, curiously at the paper that walled the face, and at the
iron-grey hair. The voice rose distinct and clear, with modulated
emphasis. It had a peculiarly penetrating quality. A few in the
room--and particularly Vic--were struck by something in the voice: that
it resembled another voice. She soon found the trail. Her eyes also
fastened on the paper. Then she moved and went to another door. Here she
could see behind the paper at an angle. Her eyes ran from the screened
face to that of the Governor. His Excellency had dropped the lower part
of his face in his hand, and he was listening intently. Vic noticed
that his eyes were painfully grave and concerned. She also noticed other
things.

The address was strange. It had been submitted to the Committee, and
though it struck them as out-of the-wayish, it had been approved.
It seemed different when read as Old Roses was reading it. The words
sounded inclement as they were chiselled out by the speaker’s voice.
Dicky Merritt afterwards declared that many phrases were interpolated by
Old Roses at the moment.

The speaker referred intimately and with peculiar knowledge to the
family history of Lord Malice, to certain more or less private matters
which did not concern the public, to the antiquity of the name, and the
high duty devolving upon one who bore the Earldom of Malice. He dwelt
upon the personal character of His Excellency’s antecedents, and praised
their honourable services to the country. He referred to the death of
Lord Malice’s eldest brother in Burmah, but he did it strangely. Then,
with acute incisiveness, he drew a picture of what a person in so
exalted a position as a Governor should be and should not be. His voice
assuredly at this point had a touch of scorn. The aides-de-camp were
nervous, the Chairman apprehensive, the Committee ill at ease. But the
Governor now was perfectly still, though, as Vic Lindley thought, rather
pinched and old-looking. His fingers toyed with a wine-glass, but his
eyes never wavered from that paper and the grey hair.

Presently the voice of the speaker changed.

“But,” said he, “in Lord Malice we have--the perfect Governor; a man of
blameless and enviable life, and possessed abundantly of discreetness,
judgment, administrative ability and power; the absolute type of English
nobility and British character.”

He dropped the paper from before his face, and his eyes met those of the
Governor, and stayed. Lord Malice let go a long choking breath,
which sounded like immeasurable relief. During the rest of the
speech--delivered in a fine-tempered voice--he sat as in a dream, his
eyes intently upon the other, who now seemed to recite rather than read.
He thrilled all by the pleasant resonance of his tones, and sent the
blood aching delightfully through Victoria Lindley’s veins.

When he sat down there was immense applause. The Governor rose in reply.
He spoke in a low voice, but any one listening outside would have said
that Old Roses was still speaking. By this resemblance the girl, Vic,
had trailed to others. It was now apparent to many, but Dicky said
afterwards that it was simply a case of birth and breeding--men used to
walking red carpet grew alike, just as stud-owners and rabbit-catchers
did.

The last words of the Governor’s reply were delivered in a convincing
tone as his eyes hung on Old Roses’ face.

“And, as I am indebted to you, gentlemen, for the feelings of loyalty to
the Throne which prompted this reception and the address just delivered,
so I am indebted to Mr.--Adam Sherwood for his admirable words and the
unusual sincerity and eloquence of his speech; and to both you and him
for most notable kindness.”

Immediately after the Governor’s speech Old Roses stole out; but as he
passed through the door where Vic stood, his hand brushed against hers.
Feeling its touch, he grasped it eagerly for an instant as though he
were glad of the friendliness in her eyes.

It was just before dawn of the morning that the Governor knocked at the
door of the house by Long Neck Billabong. The door opened at once, and
he entered without a word.

He and Old Roses stood face to face. His countenance was drawn and worn,
the other’s cold and calm. “Tom, Tom,” Lord Malice said, “we thought you
were dead--”

“That is, Edward, having left me to my fate in Burmah--you were only
half a mile away with a column of stout soldiers and hillmen--you waited
till my death was reported, and seemed assured, and then came on to
England: to take the title, just vacant by our father’s death, and to
marry my intended wife, who, God knows, appeared to have little care
which brother it was! You got both. I was long a prisoner. When I got
free, I learned all; I bided my time. I was waiting till you had a
child. Twelve years have gone: you have no child. But I shall spare you
awhile longer. If your wife should die, or you should yet have a child,
I shall return.”

The Governor lifted his head wearily from the table where he now sat.
“Tom,” he said in a low, heavy voice, “I was always something of a
scoundrel, but I’ve repented of that thing every day of my life since.
It has been knives--knives all the way. I am glad--I can’t tell you how
glad--that you are alive.”

He stretched out his hand with a motion of great relief. “I was afraid
you were going to speak to-night--to tell all, even though I was your
brother. You spared me for the sake--”

“For the sake of the family name,” the other interjected stonily.

“For the sake of our name. But I would have taken my punishment, in
thankfulness, because you are alive.”

“Taken it like a man, your Excellency,” was the low rejoinder. He
laughed bitterly.

“You will not wipe the thing out, Tom? You will not wipe it out, and
come back, and take your own--now?” said the other anxiously.

The other dried the perspiration from his forehead. “I will come back in
my own time; and it can never be wiped out. For you shook all my faith
in my old world. That’s the worst thing that can happen a man. I only
believe in the very common people now--those who are not put upon their
honour. One doesn’t expect it of them, and, unlikely as it is, one isn’t
often deceived. I think we’d better talk no more about it.”

“You mean I had better go.”

“I think so. I am going to marry soon.” The other started nervously.

“You needn’t be so shocked. I will come back one day, but not till your
wife dies, or you have a child, as I said.”

The Governor rose to his feet, and went to the door. “Whom do you intend
marrying?” he asked in a voice far from vice-regal, only humbled and
disturbed. The reply was instant and keen: “A bar-maid.”

The other’s hand dropped from the door. But Old Roses, passing over,
opened it, and, waiting for the other to pass through, said: “I do not
doubt but there will be issue. Good-day, my lord!”

The Governor passed out from the pale light of the lamp into the grey
and moist morning. He turned at a point where the house would be lost
to view, and saw the other still standing there. The voice of Old Roses
kept ringing in his ears sardonically. He knew that his punishment must
go on and on; and it did.

Old Roses married Victoria Lindley from “out Tibbooburra way,” and there
was comely issue, and that issue is now at Eton; for Esau came into his
birthright, as he said he would, at his own time. But he and his wife
have a way of being indifferent to the gay, astonished world; and,
uncommon as it may seem, he has not tired of her.




MY WIFE’S LOVERS

There were three of them in 1886, the big drought year: old Eversofar,
Billy Marshall, and Bingong. I never was very jealous of them, not even
when Billy gave undoubted ground for divorce by kissing her boldly in
the front garden, with Eversofar and Bingong looking on--to say nothing
of myself. So far as public opinion went it could not matter, because
we were all living at Tilbar Station in the Tibbooburra country, and the
nearest neighbour to us was Mulholland of Nimgi, a hundred miles away.
Billy was the son of my manager, John Marshall, and, like his father,
had an excellent reputation as a bushman, and, like his mother, was
very good-looking. He was very much indeed about my house, suggesting
improvements in household arrangements; making remarks on my wife’s
personal appearance--with corresponding disparagement of myself; riding
with my wife across the plains; shooting kangaroos with her by night;
and secretly instructing her in the mysteries of a rabbit-trap,
with which, he was sure, he could make “dead loads of metal” (he was
proficient in the argot of the back-blocks); and with this he would buy
her a beautiful diamond ring, and a horse that had won the Melbourne
Cup, and an air-gun! Once when she was taken ill, and I was away in the
South, he used to sit by her bedside, fanning her hour after hour, being
scarcely willing to sleep at night; and was always on hand, smoothing
her pillow, and issuing a bulletin to Eversofar and Bingong the first
thing in the morning. I have no doubt that Eversofar and Bingong cared
for her just as much as he did; but, from first to last, they never
had his privileges, and were always subordinate to him in showing her
devotion. He was sound and frank with them. He told Eversofar that, of
course, she only was kind to him, and let him have a hut all to
himself, because he was old and had had a bad time out on the farthest
back-station (that was why he was called Eversofar), and had once
carried Bingong with a broken leg, on his back, for twenty miles. As
for Bingong, he was only a black fellow, aged fifteen, and height
inconsiderable. So, of the three, Billy had his own way, and even
shamelessly attempted to lord it over me.

Most husbands would consider my position painful, particularly when I
say that my wife accepted the attention of all three lovers with calm
pleasure, and that of Billy with a shocking indifference to my feelings.
She never tried to explain away any circumstance, no matter how awkward
it might look if put down in black and white. Billy never quailed before
my look; he faced me down with his ingenuous smile; he patted me on the
arms approvingly; or, with apparent malice, asked me questions difficult
to answer, when I came back from a journey to Brisbane--for a man
naturally finds it hard to lay bare how he spent all his time in town.
Because he did it so suavely and naively, one could not be resentful. It
might seem that matters had reached a climax, when, one day, Mulholland
came over, and, seeing my wife and her lovers together watering the
garden and teaching cockatoos, said to me that Billy had the advantage
of me on my own ground. It may not be to my credit that I only grinned,
and forbore even looking foolish. Yet I was very fond of my wife all
the time. We stood pretty high on the Charwon Downs, and though it was
terribly hot at times, it was healthy enough; and she never lost her
prettiness, though, maybe, she lacked bloom.

I think I never saw her look better than she did that day when
Mulholland was with me. She had on the lightest, softest kind of stuff,
with sleeves reaching only a little below her elbow--her hands and arms
never got sunburnt in the hottest weather--her face smiled out from
under the coolest-looking hat imaginable, and her hair, though gathered,
had a happy trick of always lying very loose and free about the head,
saving her from any primness otherwise possible, she was so neat.
Mulholland and I were sitting in the veranda. I glanced up at the
thermometer, and it registered a hundred in the shade! Mechanically I
pushed the lime-juice towards Mulholland, and pointed to the water-bag.
There was nothing else to do except grumble at the drought. Yet there
my wife was, a picture of coolness and delight; the intense heat seemed
only to make her the more refreshing to the eye. Water was not abundant,
but we still felt justified in trying to keep her bushes and flowers
alive; and she stood there holding the hose and throwing the water in
the cheerfulest shower upon the beds. Billy stood with his hands on his
hips watching her, very hot, very self-contained. He was shining with
perspiration; and he looked the better of it. Eversofar was camped
beneath a sandal-tree teaching a cockatoo, also hot and panting, but
laughing low through his white beard; and Bingong, black, hatless--less
everything but a pair of trousers which only reached to his knees--was
dividing his time between the cockatoo and my wife.

Presently Bingong sighted an iguana and caught it, and the three
gathered about it in the shade of the sandal. After a time the interest
in the iguana seemed to have shifted to something else; and they were
all speaking very earnestly. At last I saw Billy and my wife only
talking. Billy was excited, and apparently indignant. I could not hear
what they were saying, but I saw he was pale, and his compatriots in
worship rather frightened; for he suddenly got into a lofty rage. It was
undoubtedly a quarrel. Mulholland saw, too, and said to me: “This looks
as if there would be a chance for you yet.” He laughed. So did I.

Soon I saw by my wife’s face that she was saying something sarcastical.
Then Billy drew himself up very proudly, and waving his hand in a grand
way, said loudly, so that we could hear: “It’s as true as gospel; and
you’ll be sorry for this-like anything and anything!” Then he stalked
away from her, raising his hat proudly, but immediately turned, and
beckoning to Eversofar and Bingong added: “Come on with me to barracks,
you two.”

They started away towards him, looking sheepishly at my wife as they did
so; but Billy finding occasion to give counter-orders, said: “But you
needn’t come until you put the cockatoos away, and stuck the iguana in a
barrel, and put the hose up for--for her.”

He watched them obey his orders, his head in the air the while, and when
they had finished, and were come towards him, he again took off his hat,
and they all left her standing alone in the garden.

Then she laughed a little oddly to herself, and stood picking to pieces
the wet leaves of a geranium, looking after the three. After a little
she came slowly over to us. “Well,” said I, feigning great irony,
“all loves must have their day, both old and new. You see how they’ve
deserted you. Yet you smile at it!”

“Indeed, my lord and master,” she said, “it is not a thing to laugh at.
It’s very serious.”

“And what has broken the charm of your companionship?” I asked.

“The mere matter of the fabled Bunyip. He claimed that he had seen it,
and I doubted his word. Had it been you it would not have mattered. You
would have turned the other cheek, you are so tame. But he has fire and
soul, and so we quarrelled.”

“And your other lovers turned tail,” I maliciously, said.

“Which only shows how superior he is,” was her reply. “If you had been
in the case they would never have left me.”

“Oh, oh!” blurted Mulholland, “I am better out of this; for I little
care to be called as a witness in divorce.” He rose from his chair, but
I pushed him back, and he did not leave till “the cool of the evening.”

The next morning, at breakfast-time, a rouseabout brought us a piece of
paper which had been nailed to the sandal-tree. On it was written:

“We have gone for the Bunyip. We travel on foot! Farewell and Farewell!”

We had scarcely read it, when John Marshall and his wife came in
agitation, and said that Billy’s bed had not been slept in during the
night. From the rouseabout we found that Eversofar and Bingong were
also gone. They had not taken horses, doubtless because Billy thought
it would hardly be valiant and adventurous enough, and because neither
Bingong nor Eversofar owned one, and it might look criminal to go off
with mine. We suspected that they had headed for the great Debil-devil
Waterhole, where, it was said, the Bunyip appeared: that mysterious
animal, or devil, or thing, which nobody has ever seen, but many have
pretended to see. Now, this must be said of Billy, that he never had the
feeling of fear--he was never even afraid of me. He had often said he
had seen a Bunyip, and that he’d bring one home some day, but no one
took him seriously. It showed what great influence he had over his
companions, that he could induce them to go with him; for Bingong, being
a native, must naturally have a constitutional fear of the Debil-debil,
as the Bunyip is often called. The Debil-debil Waterhole was a long way
off, and through a terrible country--quartz plains, ragged scrub, and
little or no water all the way. Then, had they taken plenty of food with
them? So far as we could see, they had taken some, but we could not tell
how much.

My wife smiled at the business at first; then became worried as the day
wore on, and she could see the danger and hardship of wandering about
this forsaken country without a horse and with uncertain water. The day
passed. They did not return. We determined on a search the next morning.
At daybreak, Marshall and I and the rouseabout started on good horses,
each going at different angles, but agreeing to meet at the Debil debil
Waterhole, and to wait there for each other. If any one of us did not
come after a certain time, we were to conclude that he had found the
adventurers and was making his way back with them. After a day of
painful travel and little water, Marshall and I arrived, almost within
an hour of each other. We could see no sign of anybody having been at
the lagoon. We waited twelve hours, and were about to go, leaving a mark
behind us to show we had been there, when we saw the rouseabout and
his exhausted horse coming slowly through the bluebush to us. He had
suffered much for want of water.

We all started back again at different angles, our final rendezvous
being arranged for the station homestead, the rouseabout taking a direct
line, and making for the Little Black Billabong on the way. I saw no
sign of the adventurers. I sickened with the heat, and my eyes became
inflamed. I was glad enough when, at last, I drew rein in the home
paddock. I couldn’t see any distance, though I was not far from the
house. But when I got into the garden I saw that others had just
arrived. It was the rouseabout with my wife’s lovers. He had found Billy
nursing Eversofar in the shade of a stunted brigalow, while Bingong was
away hunting for water. Billy himself had pushed his cause as bravely as
possible, and had in fact visited the Little Black Billabong, where--he
always maintains--he had seen the great Bunyip. But after watching
one night, they tried to push on to the Debil-debil Waterhole. Old
Eversofar, being weak and old, gave in, and Billy became a little
delirious--he has denied it, but Bingong says it is so; yet he pulled
himself together as became the leader of an expedition, and did what he
could for Eversofar until the rouseabout came with food and water. Then
he broke down and cried--he denies this also. They tied the sick man on
the horse and trudged back to the station in a bad plight.

As I came near the group I heard my wife say to Billy, who looked sadly
haggard and ill, that she was sure he would have got the Bunyip if it
hadn’t been for the terrible drought; and at that, regardless of my
presence, he took her by the arms and kissed her, and then she kissed
him several times.

Perhaps I ought to have mentioned before that Billy was just nine years
old.




THE STRANGERS’ HUT

I had come a long journey across country with Glenn, the squatter,
and now we were entering the homestead paddock of his sheep-station,
Winnanbar. Afar to the left was a stone building, solitary in a waste of
saltbush and dead-finish scrub. I asked Glenn what it was.

He answered, smilingly: “The Strangers’ Hut. Sundowners and that lot
sleep there; there’s always some flour and tea in a hammock, under the
roof, and there they are with a pub of their own. It’s a fashion we have
in Australia.”

“It seems all right, Glenn,” I said with admiration. “It’s surer than
Elijah’s ravens.”

“It saves us from their prowling about the barracks, and camping on the
front veranda.”

“How many do you have of a week?”

“That depends. Sundowners are as uncertain as they are unknown
quantities. After shearing-time they’re thickest; in the dead of summer
fewest. This is the dead of summer,” and, for the hundredth time in our
travel, Glenn shook his head sadly.

Sadness was ill-suited to his burly form and bronzed face, but it was
there. He had some trouble, I thought, deeper than drought. It was too
introspective to have its origin solely in the fact that sheep were
dying by thousands, that the stock-routes were as dry of water as the
hard sky above us, and that it was a toss-up whether many families in
the West should not presently abandon their stations, driven out by a
water-famine--and worse.

After a short silence Glenn stood up in the trap, and, following the
circle of the horizon with his hand, said: “There’s not an honest blade
of grass in all this wretched West. This whole business is gambling with
God.”

“It is hard on women and children that they must live here,” I remarked,
with my eyes on the Strangers’ Hut.

“It’s harder for men without them,” he mournfully replied; and at
that moment I began to doubt whether Glenn, whom I had heard to be a
bachelor, was not tired of that calm but chilly state. He followed up
this speech immediately by this: “Look at that drinking-tank!”

The thing was not pleasant in the eye. Sheep were dying and dead by
thousands round it, and the crows were feasting horribly. We became
silent again.

The Strangers’ Hut, and its unique and, to me, awesome hospitality, was
still in my mind. It remained with me until, impelled by curiosity, I
wandered away towards it in the glow and silence of the evening. The
walk was no brief matter, but at length I stood near the lonely public,
where no name of guest is ever asked, and no bill ever paid. And then I
fell to musing on how many life-histories these grey walls had sheltered
for a fitful hour, how many stumbling wayfarers had eaten and drunken in
this Hotel of Refuge. I dropped my glances on the ground; a bird, newly
dead, lay at my feet, killed by the heat.

At that moment I heard a child’s crying. I started forward, then
faltered. Why, I could not tell, save that the crying seemed so a part
of the landscape that it might have come out of the sickly sunset, out
of the yellow sky, out of the aching earth about me. To follow it might
be like pursuing dreams. The crying ceased.

Thus for a moment, and then I walked round to the door of the hut. At
the sound of slight moaning I paused again. Then I crossed the threshold
resolutely.

A woman with a child in her arms sat on a rude couch. Her lips were
clinging to the infant’s forehead. At the sound of my footsteps she
raised her head.

“Ah!” she said, and, trembling, rose to her feet. She was fair-haired
and strong, if sad, of face. Perhaps she never had been beautiful, but
in health her face must have been persistent in its charm. Even now it
was something noble.

With that patronage of compassion which we use towards those who are
unfortunate and humble, I was about to say to her, “My poor woman!” but
there was something in her manner so above her rude surroundings that I
was impelled to this instead: “Madam, you are ill. Can I be of service
to you?”

Then I doffed my hat. I had not done so before, and I blushed now as
I did it, for I saw that she had compelled me. She sank back upon the
couch again as though the effort to achieve my courtesy had unnerved
her, and she murmured simply and painfully: “Thank you very much: I have
travelled far.”

“May I ask how far?”

“From Mount o’ Eden, two hundred miles and more, I think”; and her eyes
sought the child’s face, while her cheek grew paler. She had lighted
a tiny fire on the hearthstone and had put the kettle on the wood. Her
eyes were upon it now with the covetousness of thirst and hunger. I
kneeled, and put in the tin of water left behind by some other pilgrim,
a handful of tea from the same source--the outcast and suffering giving
to their kind. I poured out for her soon a little of the tea. Then I
asked for her burden. She gave it to my arms--a wan, wise-faced child.

“Madam,” I said, “I am only a visitor here, but, if you feel able, and
will come with me to the homestead, you shall, I know, find welcome
and kindness, or, if you will wait, there are horses, and you shall be
brought--yes, indeed,” I added, as she shook her head in sad negation,
“you will be welcome.”

I was sure that, whatever ill chances had befallen the mother of this
child, she was one of those who are found in the sight of the Perfect
Justice sworn for by the angels. I knew also that Glenn would see that
she should be cordially sheltered and brought back to health; for men
like Glenn, I said to myself, are kinder in their thought of suffering
women than women themselves-are kinder, juster, and less prone to think
evil.

She raised her head, and answered: “I think that I could walk; but this,
you see, is the only hospitality that I can accept, save, it may be,
some bread and a little meat, that the child suffer no more, until I
reach Winnanbar, which, I fear, is still far away.”

“This,” I replied, “is Winnanbar; the homestead is over there, beyond
the hill.”

“This is--Winnanbar?” she whisperingly said, “this--is--Winnanbar! I
did not think--I was-so near.”... A thankful look came to her face. She
rose, and took the child again and pressed it to her breast, and her
eyes brooded upon it. “Now she is beautiful,” I thought, and waited for
her to speak.

“Sir--” she said at last, and paused. In the silence a footstep sounded
without, and then a form appeared in the doorway. It was Glenn.

“I followed you,” he said to me; “and--!” He saw the woman, and a low
cry broke from her.

“Agnes! Agnes!” he cried, with something of sternness and a little
shame.

“I have come--to you--again-Robert,” she brokenly, but not abjectly,
said.

He came close to her and looked into her face, then into the face of the
child, with a sharp questioning. She did not flinch, but answered
his scrutiny clearly and proudly. Then, after a moment, she turned a
disappointed look upon me, as though to say that I, a stranger, had read
her aright at once, while this man held her afar in the cold courts of
his judgment ere he gave her any welcome or said a word of pity.

She sank back on the bench, and drew a hand with sorrowful slowness
across her brow. He saw a ring upon her finger. He took her hand and
said: “You are married, Agnes?”

“My husband is dead, and the sister of this poor one also,” she replied;
and she fondled the child and raised her eyes to her brother’s.

His face now showed compassion. He stooped and kissed her cheek. And it
seemed to me at that moment that she could not be gladder than I.

“Agnes,” he said, “can you forgive me?”

“He was only a stock-rider,” she murmured, as if to herself, “but he
was well-born. I loved him. You were angry. I went away with him in the
night ... far away to the north. God was good--” Here she brushed her
lips tenderly across the curls of the child. “Then the drought came and
sickness fell and... death... and I was alone with my baby--”

His lips trembled and his hand was hurting my arm, though he knew it
not.

“Where could I go?” she continued.

Glenn answered pleadingly now: “To your unworthy brother, God bless you
and forgive me, dear!--though even here at Winnanbar there is drought
and famine and the cattle die.”

“But my little one shall live!” she cried joyfully. That night Glenn of
Winnanbar was a happy man, for rain fell on the land, and he held his
sister’s child in his arms.




THE PLANTER’S WIFE


I

She was the daughter of a ruined squatter, whose family had been pursued
with bad luck; he was a planter, named Houghton. She was not an uncommon
woman; he was not an unusual man. They were not happy, they might never
be; he was almost sure they would not be; she had long ceased to think
they could be. She had told him when she married him that she did not
love him. He had been willing to wait for her love, believing that by
patience and devotion he could win it. They were both sorry for each
other now. They accepted things as they were, but they knew there was
danger in the situation. She loved some one else, and he knew it, but he
had never spoken to her of it--he was of too good stuff for that. He
was big and burly, and something awkward in his ways. She was pretty,
clear-minded, kind, and very grave. There were days when they were both
bitter at heart. On one such day they sat at luncheon, eating little,
and looking much out of the door across the rice fields and banana
plantations to the Hebron Mountains. The wife’s eyes fixed on the hills
and stayed. A road ran down the hill towards a platform of rock which
swept smooth and straight to the sheer side of the mountain called White
Bluff. At first glance it seemed that the road ended at the cliff--a
mighty slide to destruction. Instead, however, of coming straight to the
cliff it veered suddenly, and ran round the mountain side, coming down
at a steep but fairly safe incline. The platform or cliff was fenced off
by a low barricade of fallen trees, scarcely noticeable from the valley
below. The wife’s eyes had often wandered to the spot with a strange
fascination, as now. Her husband looked at her meditatively. He nodded
slightly, as though to himself. She looked up. Their understanding of
each other’s thoughts was singular.

“Tom,” she said, “I will ride the chestnut, Bowline, to that fence some
day. It will be a big steeplechase.” He winced, but answered slowly.
“You have meant to say that for a long time past. I am glad it has been
said at last.”

She was struck by the perfect quietness of his tone. Her eyes sought his
face and rested for a moment, half bewildered, half pitying.

“Yes, it has been in my mind often--often,” she said. “It’s a horrible
thought,” he gravely replied; “but it is better to be frank. Still,
you’ll never do it, Alice--you’ll never dare to do it.”

“Dare, dare,” she answered, springing to her feet, and a shuddering sigh
broke from her. “The thing itself is easy enough, Tom.”

“And why haven’t you done it?” he asked in a hard voice, but still
calmly.

She leaned one hand upon the table, the other lay at her cheek, and her
head bent forward at him. “Because,” she answered, “because I have tried
to be thoughtful for you.”

“Oh, as to that,” he said--“as to that!” and he shrugged his shoulders
slightly.

“You don’t care a straw,” she said sharply, “you never did.”

He looked up suddenly at her, a great bitterness in his face, and
laughed strangely, as he answered: “Care! Good God! Care!... What’s the
use of caring? It’s been all a mistake; all wrong.”

“That is no news,” she said wearily. “You discovered that long ago.”

He looked out of the door across the warm fields again; he lifted his
eyes to that mountain road; he looked down at her. “I haven’t any hope
left now, Alice. Let’s be plain with each other. We’ve always been
plain, but let us be plainer still. There are those rice fields out
there, that banana plantation, and the sugar-cane stretching back as far
as the valley goes--it’s all mine, all mine. I worked hard for it. I
had only one wish with it all, one hope through it all, and it was,
that when I brought you here as my wife, you would come to love me--some
time. Well, I’ve waited, and waited. It hasn’t come. We’re as far apart
to-day as we were the day I married you. Farther, for I had hope then,
but I’ve no hope now, none at all.”

They both turned towards the intemperate sunlight and the great hill.
The hollowness of life as they lived it came home to them with an aching
force. Yet she lifted her fan from the table and fanned herself gently
with it, and he mechanically lit a cigar. Servants passed in and out
removing the things from the table. Presently they were left alone. The
heavy breath of the palm trees floated in upon them; the fruit of the
passion-flower hung temptingly at the window; they could hear the sound
of a torrent just behind the house. The day was droning luxuriously,
yet the eyes of both, as by some weird influence, were fastened upon the
hill; and presently they saw, at the highest point where the road was
visible, a horseman. He came slowly down until he reached the spot where
the road was barricaded from the platform of the cliff. Here he paused.
He sat long, looking, as it appeared, down into the valley. The husband
rose and took down a field-glass from a shelf; he levelled it at the
figure.

“Strange, strange,” he said to himself; “he seems familiar, and yet--”

She rose and reached out her hand for the glass. He gave it to her. She
raised it to her eyes, but, at that moment, the horseman swerved into
the road again, and was lost to view. Suddenly Houghton started; an
enigmatical smile passed across his face.

“Alice,” said he, “did you mean what you said about the steeplechase--I
mean about the ride down the White Bluff road?”

“I meant all I said,” was her bitter reply.

“You think life is a mistake?” he rejoined.

“I think we have made a mistake,” was her answer; “a deadly mistake, and
it lasts all our lives.”

He walked to the door, trained the glass again on the hill, then
afterwards turned round, and said:

“If ever you think of riding the White Bluff road--straight for the
cliff itself and over--tell me, and I’ll ride it with you. If it’s all
wrong as it is, it’s all wrong for both, and, maybe, the worst of what
comes after is better than the worst of what is here.”

They had been frank with each other in the past, but never so frank as
this. He was determined that they should be still more frank; and so was
she. “Alice,” he said--

“Wait a minute,” she interjected. “I have something to say, Tom. I never
told you--indeed, I thought I never should tell you; but now I think
it’s best to do so. I loved a man once--with all my soul.”

“You love him still,” was the reply; and he screwed and unscrewed the
field-glass in his hand, looking bluntly at her the while. She nodded,
returning his gaze most earnestly and choking back a sob.

“Well, it’s a pity, it’s a pity,” he replied. “We oughtn’t to live
together as it is. It’s all wrong; it’s wicked--I can see that now.”

“You are not angry with me?” she answered in surprise.

“You can’t help it, I suppose,” he answered drearily.

“Do you really mean,” she breathlessly said, “that we might as well die
together, since we can’t live together and be happy?”

“There’s nothing in life that gives me a pleasant taste in the mouth, so
what’s the good? Mind you, my girl, I think it a terrible pity that you
should have the thought to die; and if you could be happy living, I’d
die myself to save you. But can you? That’s the question--can you be
happy, even if I went and you stayed?”

“I don’t think so,” she said thoughtfully, and without excitement.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“The man’s name was Cayley--Cayley,” he said to her bluntly.

“How did you know?” she asked, astonished. “You never saw him.”

“Oh, yes, I’ve seen him,” was the reply--“seen him often. I knew him
once.”

“I do not understand you,” she rejoined.

“I knew it all along,” he continued, “and I’ve waited for you to tell
me.”

“How did you know?”

“Cayley told me.”

“When did he tell you?”

“The morning that I married you.” His voice was thick with misery.

She became white and dazed. “Before--or after?” she asked. He paused a
moment, looking steadily at her, and answered, “Before.”

She drew back as though she had been struck. “Good God!” she cried. “Why
did he not--” she paused.

“Why did he not marry you himself?” he rejoined.

“You must ask him that yourself, if you do not know.”

“And yet you married me, knowing all--that he loved me,” she gasped.

“I would have married you then, knowing a thousand times that.”

She cowered, but presently advanced to him. “You have sinned as much as
I,” she said. “Do you dare pay the penalty?”

“Do I dare ride with you to the cliff--and beyond?” Her lips framed a
reply, but no sound came.

“But we will wait till to-morrow,” he said absently.

“Why not to-day?” she painfully asked.

“We will wait till to-morrow,” he urged, and his eyes followed the trail
of a horseman on the hill.

“Why not while we have courage?” she persisted, as though the suspense
hurt her.

“But we will wait till to-morrow, Alice,” he again repeated.

“Very well,” she answered, with the indifference of despair.

He stood in the doorway and watched a horseman descending into valley.

“Strange things may chance before to-morrow,” he said to himself, and he
mechanically lighted another cigar. She idled with her fan.


II

He did not leave the house that afternoon. He kept his post on the
veranda, watching the valley. With an iron kind of calmness he was
facing a strange event. It was full of the element of chance, and he
had been taking chances all his life. With the chances of fortune he had
won; with the chances of love and happiness he had lost. He knew that
the horseman on the mountain-side was Cayley; he knew that Cayley would
not be near his home without a purpose. Besides, Cayley had said he
would come--he had said it in half banter, half threat. Houghton had had
too many experiences backward and forward in the world, to be afflicted
with littleness of mind. He had never looked to get an immense amount of
happiness out of life, but he thought that love and marriage would give
him a possible approach to content. He had chanced it, and he had lost.
At first he had taken it with a dread

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