Irralie's Bushranger

Front matter

Irralie's Bushranger

E. W. HORNUNG

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS NEW YORK, 1896

Chapter 1

IRRALIE'S BUSHRANGER

CHAPTER I

ARMS AND A MAN

"Coooooooo-eeeee!"

The voice was very hoarse and far away. But Irralie had fancied she heard something before. And this time she felt sure enough to stop the horses in their own length, while she herself stood up to peer this way and that across the tufts of salt-bush and the spaces of pure sand.

Yet at first no sign of life intervened between the buggy and the Seven-mile Whim whose black timbers stood out like a gallows against the setting sun. The , however, was a league away. Irralie accordingly looked right and left; and on the right a five-wire fence ran east and west into twilit space; but on the left a clump of box-trees grew a couple of hundred paces from the track. Clearly the clump was the place; and, even as she turned her horses, the girl saw a flash and a puff on its outskirts, followed by a sharp report.

Irralie Villiers was used to firearms. A dead Riverina turkey and an empty fowling-piece lay at her feet at the present moment; and the shot from the clump only made her urge her horses the harder in its direction. It was obviously a signal of distress, and a little rough driving showed Irralie who had fired it. A tall, ragged fellow stood with his back to the trees, as still as they; his wide-awake was on the ground in front of him, and the wet hair clung to his white forehead. Also on the ground, in separate heaps, lay a shrunken bay horse and a singularly shabby saddle, bridle, and valise.

The girl drove up with a single word:

"Water?"

"Have you got any?" cried the man, spitting out a leaf as he came forward.

"No; but jump up, and I'll drive you straight to the tank. Can your horse move?"

"We'll see."

And the man knelt over the helpless animal, slipped on the bridle, and coaxed it to its four feet.

"Now tie him on behind," said Irralie, "and put your saddle and valise under the seat. There's a tank not a mile from this spot."

"If only I'd known!"

"You couldn't. How long have you gone without?"

"Oh, for hours; not that there's much wrong with me; it was the poor brute knocked up, not I."

"I should have said you were at death's door by all that shouting and shooting!"

The man laughed, showing beneath a heavy mustache a row of teeth more than presentable. He had fallen asleep beside his horse, and awoke only just in time. Another moment, and the buggy would have been out of earshot; there was no time to give chase, but only to do as he had done. Certainly he felt queer for want of water; but that was all.

Meanwhile, Irralie was steering her horses across country to the tank, and that as fast as the bay could follow. Leaning back at her side, the man scrutinized his deliverer with a glance bold to insolence. The girl was very young, and tall and slim; yet bodily weakness was as little apparent under the close-fitting sleeves of that period as infirmity of purpose in the alert, good-tempered, sunburnt face. Her hair and eyebrows were absolutely black; the latter, indeed, a little heavy for her sex; but the eyes themselves were the blue, continual havens of a smile no lips could equal, and the girl was written fearless and frank by her mere expression. A hearty voice and a blunt way of speaking were further characteristics, duly noted by the time the tank was reached, and man and beast drinking ravenously side by side.

The former was dressed like a common stockman—with a difference in the stockman's favor. He wore the orthodox rough shirt and baggy mole-skins; but the humble legging was replaced by a riding-boot of piratical length; and from a pocket of the dilapidated, loose coat there peeped the butt end of the revolver recently discharged. Now, revolvers were not even then in everyday use in the bush; nor were long boots often seen in the stirrups of the common stockman; and the girl felt a puzzled awe in thus encountering so new a type. She was taken, however, with her protégés appearance, which was quite romantically devil-may-care; and she chiefly viewed him with a very genuine curiosity as he returned to the buggy, dashing the water from his long mustache.

"Now we can push on for ourselves," said he. "You have saved us both, and we are grateful. Allow me to relieve you of my saddle and valise."

"But may I ask where you are going?"

"Surely; to the station."

"This station? Arran Downs?"

"Why, yes; but I really can't think of putting you to any more trouble. I am quite well able to ride2"

"Nonsense!" said Irralie. "Your horse isn't quite well able to carry you. What do you ride?"

"Fourteen stone or so."

"Then tie him on again, and jump up at once."

It was done with a shrug—and subsequent alacrity.

"Then you belong to this station?" said the man, reseating himself in the failing light. But Irralie preferred to regain the track in safety before replying; and the question was put again.

"Oh, yes! I'm the manager's daughter. I beg your pardon; now it's all right, we're in the straight."

"You are, then, a Miss Villiers?"

"I am."

"And you think nothing of driving about alone with a buggy and pair?"

"Nothing in the world. The gates are the only drawback. Do you mind opening this one?"

"Not in the least."

She waited for him in the farther paddock.

"You're not coming for work, I suppose?"

"Well, I wasn't."

"To stay?"

"Yes, if I can be put up."

"No doubt it can be done. But you're a parlor man?"

"A parlor man!"

"I mean to say you're for the house, not for the hut?" said Irralie, judging him by the ear rather than the eye, and not very certain of him yet. "You see, we put up everybody; only the men go to the traveller's hut, and the—the2"

"Exactly! Well, I had thought of the house; still, if you're full2"

"We are fuller than usual; but of course there'll be room. And you will be welcome to it. But I wish you would tell me one thing: why on earth do you carry about a loaded revolver?"

In the buggy there was silence. Irralie glanced over her left shoulder, but now there was darkness too.

"Isn't it the proper thing to do?" he asked at length.

"Far from it," replied Irralie, severely.

"But what about bushrangers?"

"Bushrangers! There are none. They are all dead and gone."

"What about—Stingaree?"

"Stingaree! I forgot him. He's the man who stuck up the Mount Brown gold-escort. Oh, yes, I've heard a lot about Stingaree."

"I wonder what you have heard."

"That he's a bit of a duke—in fact, an Oxford man!"

"Would you know him by sight?"

"I shouldn't; but, as it happens, we have a man here who would."

"A man I shall meet to-night?"

"Oh, no! a whim-driver—the whim at the far end of the last paddock—our Seven-mile. 'Deaf Dawson,' the men call him. He once knew Stingaree, he says; but he hardly ever comes into the home-station. You must go out to the Seven-mile if you want to interview him, and you've got to do that through his ear-trumpet! He'll tell you Stingaree never came so far south as this in his life; and I tell you he'd better not."

"You would give him a pretty bad time, eh. Miss Villiers?"

"My word!" said Irralie.

"I'm glad to hear it," replied the other devoutly, "for I carry that pistol solely on account of Stingaree! I wasn't to know he drew the line at a given degree of latitude."

"I don't say he does," returned the girl. "I only say he better had!"

Again they drove in silence into the night; then the moon got up. in their teeth, and licked the barrels of Irralie's fowling-piece.

"Why, you carry firearms yourself! I'd forgotten that, Miss Villiers."

"I do; but not revolvers," said Irralie, "and not because of Stingaree."

"I see!"

"But to shoot fair game," concluded Irralie, severely. "To-day it was a fatted turkey for the great occasion of to-morrow's Sunday dinner."

"It is to be a great occasion, then?"

"You bet it is!" cried Irralie Villiers. "You mayn't have heard that this station has been bought by a of an Englishman with a handle to his name? But it has, though; and much we care about the handle! A beggarly younger son, that's all he is; but if he was a lord and a duke in one it would make no difference to us! He'll make a fine mess of it, that's one thing sure. Fullarton his name is—the Honorable Greville Fullarton! Put that in your pipe and light it."

"And—and what do you expect him to be like?"

"Don't ask," replied the girl, warmly. "Nice words couldn't tell you. However, we shall find him at the homestead when we get in; and there are the lights."

Her companion looked sidelong at Irralie; then, hesitating, at the constellation of lights which had burst upon them unawares; and so made up his mind.

"We shall not find him there," said he, with a nervous laugh. "I'm sorry to confirm your worst suspicions, but the fact is, Miss Villiers, I'm the man himself!"

Chapter 2

CHAPTER II

A BAD IMPRESSION

Who was the Hon. G. Fullarton, and what did he want with a station in New South Wales? These and kindred questions were bandied from block to block of the honored territory; but only the first was susceptible to a plain, straightforward reply.

The pedigree of the young man could be ascertained from accessible sources; his motives (when he had any) were somewhat farther to seek. Pleasure, idleness, and adventure were the gods of this reactionary offspring of a peer who was also a divine; yet the mauvais sujet of this ancient family would have been the stainless pride of many another of equal antiquity but inferior ideals. Greville Fullarton had never been bankrupt, nor party to a scandalous suit, nor a living excuse of any sort or kind for the blasphemies of the half-penny evening enemy. On the other hand, he was the impious member of a family otherwise united in piety—a goat among sheep, a wanderer, a ne'er-do-weel, and a chronic grief to good gray hairs.

How he came by the money for Arran Downs—which was purchased in a good season, when the head of sheep ran very nearly into six figures—was as great a mystery in the old country as in the new. Yet in London they told a little story, which rather lent itself to deduction, where one happened to know how little the old Earl had spent on himself, and how much he must be worth.

It was said that Mr. Greville had dropped from the clouds into his father's town house one morning in time for prayers, but clad in Californian rags, and such boots that even the Earl could not permit him to kneel down before the servants. He had been two years away, and in all that time had written not at all. But it was said he related his adventures on this occasion with so much frankness and vivacity that the old peer was moved to lament the purposeless character of his son's exploits rather than those exploits themselves. And here the story ends; but that same season saw the purchase of Arran Downs through London agents, and Esau started at the summer's end for another summer in one of the few wildernesses he had yet to explore.

The day had been hot indeed for the end of October, when the thermometer rarely touches a hundred in the shade; but even at that temperature Mrs. Villiers had not rested from sorting linen, selecting napery, cleaning silver, and watching over the Chinese cook in the wattle-and-dab kitchen. All day the storekeeper had been cleaning out his store, the overseer running up fresh horses from outlying paddocks, and Mr. Villiers himself fixing new ropes on two of the whims. For the rest, Miss Villiers (as we have seen) had been following the chase, and her younger brothers and sisters a less exciting routine with their raw, strict, public-school tutor.

At Arran Downs a single note had been received from the new owner naming the day he was likely to arrive. As the hour was not mentioned, all things were ready by about the middle of the day; and by evening the feeling of the garrison expressed itself in a universal inability to sit down. The veranda was paced as though it had been a vessel's deck—the horizon swept as though it had been the sea. At six there was open dissatisfaction, and the young Villierses, who had been decently dressed, and even partially subdued, for some hours—these young ruffians broke out, and drove their tutor in despair to the school-room, because his jurisdiction did not extend beyond those weather-board walls.

But when night set in, Mr. Villiers (a blue-eyed man with a fair beard and bad teeth) was heard to close his watch with a snap and to announce that he would wait no longer. The new owner might be given up for that night; as for Irralie, she had no business to be so late, but something could be kept hot for her. Luckily, however, they had not sat down when Irralie and the owner arrived together, evidently on the best of terms already. For Irralie introduced him, briefly explaining what had happened, but dwelling very lightly (it was noteworthy) on the incident at the clump, and never mentioning the pistol-shot at all. Fullarton shook hands all round with the utmost geniality. It was too dark in the veranda for his extremely rough exterior to be appreciated, and Mr. Villiers made his prepared speech with a glibness which he afterwards regretted.

"I must apologize, Mr. Fullarton, for being still here with my belongings; but as I didn't know your arrangements, I thought we had better all hold on till you came. They thought so in Melbourne too. Everything is ready for you, however, and I think I may say in no bad order either."

The new owner slapped the other on the back.

"My dear sir, I hope to goodness you aren't thinking of deserting me? Do you expect me to run this place by myself, and without knowing how? Let things go on as they are for another year at least; then, if we must, we can talk of it again."

In the same manner he very properly declined to take the head of his own dinner-table; and the impression was distinctly favorable until the rough shirt and ragged coat came to anchor immediately under the lamp. There fell then an embarrassed silence. Mrs. Villiers had made herself a new gown for the occasion. The tutor had saved up his tallest collar. Everybody had made some little difference, and the condition of the Englishman was an inexplicable insult to one and all.

Heavy, excellent George Young, the overseer, was perhaps the most indignant spirit at the table. But the English tutor, Hodding by name, endured the, keenest dis . The overseer and the store-keeper were natives of the colony; so were the entire managerial brood. Hodding had counted upon the arrival of an even newer chum than himself; he had pictured a sufficiently taking type, in rough English tweeds and ponderous boots. The same lively fancy had painted every cornstalk green with envy; and what had happened? Jevons, the storekeeper, was kicking him under the table; honest George Young looked green, indeed, but not with envy; and the son of an Earl was eating as heartily as if he looked what he was, instead of calling to every mind the common, ruffianly, pound-a-week hand.

"There is one more thing I must apologize for," said Mr. Villiers, a little tactlessly, before they left the table. "We hardly thought to see you before the Cup; and we expect a few folks here on Monday night, on their way down to it."

"To the Melbourne Cup?" said the owner, with his mouth full. "Yes, I hear it's a great race; but the turfs about the only evil I ever steered clear of." And he continued to eat, as he had eaten from the beginning, like a half-starved man.

The manager hummed. His confession was not yet complete.

"The fact is," he continued, "we thought it an opportunity to entertain our friends—possibly our last. To tell you the truth, we have something like a party on the day after to-morrow. When I got your letter I did think of putting it off. But, on second thoughts, that struck me as all the more reason for a general muster of such society as we can boast in these wilds. It was an opportunity for the country-side to meet you, Mr. Fullarton."

The owner looked up aghast.

"To meet me?" he cried.

"Why, yes, to be sure. They are all most anxious to make your acquaintance. You must know that you have supplied our papers with a topic for these many weeks past."

"But look at my clothes!" cried the other. "You must have noticed them; and I would have apologized for them before, Mrs. Villiers, had I not felt too ashamed. It is all owing to a mistake. I have nothing better in my valise. But I believe my portmanteaus are on the way up by the coach."

"That's all right; then they'll be here to-morrow," said the manager, with relief only second to that of the tutor. "And now if you'll join me in a pipe on the veranda—for I haven't a cigar fit to offer you—I believe the Company have furnished you with some little papers which we ought to look into together?"

All had risen from the table, and with a fortunate precipitancy the younger men had left the room. There were witnesses enough, however, of the painful flush which now suffused the features of the new owner. And Irralie was one.

"I am very much afraid," he stammered, "that I have lost the papers you—you2"

And without finishing his sentence, he fumbled nervously in the pockets of his disreputable coat.

"Hadn't you an overcoat?" asked Irralie, calmly.

"Yes, yes! I had!"

"Then they may be in that."

"They were—now I think of it. But I have lost the overcoat. I—I must have left it behind me when my horse knocked up!"

"Then think no more about it," said Villiers, instantly. "It'll be as safe in one of these paddocks as on your own back; it's only a question of knowing where to look for it, and that we can do at our leisure to-morrow morning."

So there the subject dropped; but it was something more than fortunate that not one of the younger men was present; for—in fact—the three of them were engaged already, in the tutor's school-room, upon a systematic mutilation of the new owner's character and pretensions.

"So now, George," said Jevons, "the joker we've heard so much about has come and been seen; but I'm jolly well hanged if he has conquered! These native English are an almighty rum race!"

"I'll race him," said George Young venomously. "And I'm bled if I come in second!"

The creature had driven in with Irralie Villiers. As yet this was his rankest offence in the nostrils of good George Young.

"I don't care what you fellows say," cried the fuming tutor. "That brute's not what he says he is. I've been at school with 'em, and I know!"

Jevons winked at Young.

"We know that school, eh, George? We've heard it before. We'll hear of it again; but, my faith, we'll hear a little less of the home-brewed, full-grown Englishman after this!"

"Come outside!" roared the tutor in a frenzy.

"What are you givin' us?"

"Come behind the pines and take off your coat. I don't care whether you hide me or whether you don't! I know you're the better man, but I'm not going to sit still and hear you talk like that!"

He flung open the school-room door, which looked upon a plantation of young pines, and allowed a flood of moonlight to fall upon the floor. At the same moment a couple passed the opening, walking side by side, and in striking silhouette against the moonlit trees,

"My faith!" said Jevons, softly.

"Who was it?" cried George Young, bounding to his feet. "Not Irralie and that2"

"Unrepresentative new chum?" said Jevons, with a laugh. "So help me never, old man, but it was!"

And the fight fell through after all.

Chapter 3

CHAPTER III

THE BROKEN COLUMN

The plantation of pines formed three sides of the station yard, which, indeed, suggested a clearing on the edge of a natural forest rather than a single acre left exactly as it was found. The square was completed by the first and foremost of the homestead buildings: a long, regular structure, framed in the customary veranda, but containing (what was less conventional) the family quarters and the station store beneath one vast, white, corrugated roof. Other offices had buildings to themselves, such as the kitchen and the cook's room, the school-room and those of the three young men, wash-house and dairy, iron-store and blacksmith's forge. All these stood in hollow square, looking inward on the yard. And with the moon shining like a tempered sun on every roof, and the pine-trees whispering on all sides but one, there were worse tasks than learning the names of things from the mouth of Irralie Villiers.

"But if I am to show you the ropes," said the girl, "I may as well show you the lot. The stables are quite separate. The stock-yards are farther still. Would you care to see them to-night?"

He cared considerably, and appeared to find refreshment in the freedom of the situation. The father had gone into the store to write a letter for the outgoing mail; the mother had beaten a retreat earlier than usual after the burden and surprises of the day. The stranger and the girl were left to their own devices, without a hint of vulgar espionage in the name of a too self-conscious propriety. The stables were inspected. A handful of oats was taken to the night-horse in the yard. The men's hut was pointed out on rising ground still farther from the house; also a natural lawn-tennis court, marked out in a clay-pan; and here Irralie descried a racket which had been left out, and picked it up.

"So you actually play lawn-tennis up here!" exclaimed the owner.

"Actually!" repeated Irralie, with fine scorn. "Goodness! do you think we are so far behind you as all that?"

He laughed. "I beg your pardon, Miss Villiers. Still, your rackets are behind us—just a season or so."

"What do you mean ?"

"That one is bent. They are now made straight as a die!"

"I don't believe you," cried Irralie, warmly; and the argument ensuing was lively to the last degree. It ended, however, in laughter, swiftly followed by some consideration on the girl's part that cut her laughter short. It was as if she had suddenly found herself in church or in the presence of death. She stood quite still in the moonlight, and looked him very thoroughly up and down.

"You have lived here always?" he said at length, as if unconscious of her inquisitive gaze. She withdrew it by an effort.

"I wish we had! No; most of us were born in Tasmania; and that's a lovely country, far better than this, though personally I prefer the back-blocks. There's room for you to turn round up here!"

"I wonder what you would think of England."

"Not much! I should spend my time on St. Paul's Cathedral—throwing stones into the sea! Follow me, Mr. Fullarton, there's something else I want to show you before we go in; and we can get back this way."

She led him to a fence, squeezed through the wires, and crossed an open space dividing them from the fringe of the same plantation which extended to the house. This space was the width of a race-course, and struck the stranger as being planted with innumerable scarecrows shorn of their last rag. He asked what they were, and Irralie answered, "Our spare rooms."

"Your what?"

"Our spare rooms for Monday night. On Monday you will see this strip turned into a street of tents; these are the poles. When you go to a dance in the bush you stay the night. And the ladies take up all the rooms; and all the men camp out."

"I see," said the other; and he followed Irralie's lead among the pines.

"You aren't exactly keen about our party!" cried the girl, over her shoulder. "Can't you dance?"

"Not much."

"I thought not! But there is something else?"

"Yes; there are my clothes."

"I understood they were coming to-morrow?"

"Well, I expect them, certainly."

"I wonder if you do!"

And with the words the girl wheeled round and boldly regarded him by the light of the moon.

"Really, Miss Villiers, you take my breath away. Why should you doubt my word?"

He laughed, but he had colored first.

"Because I can't help it!" replied the girl, with a little gasp which she would have given her few possessions to prevent.

"Be frank with me, Miss Villiers. Tell me candidly what it is that makes you suspect me of—of whatever you do suspect?"

She shook her head; she would not or she could not speak; but her fine, unfaltering eyes never left his nor relaxed for one instant their soul-searching scrutiny.

"Was it about those papers?" pursued the other.

"That—for one thing."

"I see. You think I never had them at all!"

"I think you never would have thought of a lost overcoat if I hadn't put the words into your mouth!"

There was a pause; and the man's face showed, as plainly as rent sail or splintered spar, that the shot had gone home.

"Why did you do it?" he cried unwarily.

"You may well ask! Goodness knows—not I!"

"But I have lost a coat," he added, vehemently, perceiving his mistake. "I give you my word I lost one to-day; and those papers were in it as certainly as that moon is in the sky. You may believe or doubt it as you like. It is the case, and you will know it by and by. What else is there suspicious about me?"

Evidently he had forgotten his revolver; but Irralie knew that it was in his pocket still, though she did not intend to remind him of that. His tone was both angry and injured, but the injury appealed to her more than the anger. It destroyed her self-confidence, and, in doing so, restored some confidence in him. Then she recalled her earliest prejudicial observation, and smiled at her momentary misgivings.

"There was your horse!" said she—and saw him wince at the word.

"What about my horse?"

"It had come farther than you said; it had gone longer without water. A horse can go twice as long as a man; yet you were only thirsty, but your horse was hollow as a drum and nearly dead!"

For some moments he either could not or would not face her eyes; when once more he did so it was with a recovered calm, and something more than his former urbanity of speech.

"Will you then kindly tell me what you think?"

"I cannot!" cried the girl. "I think one thing one moment and another thing the next. I give you up; but as I had never any right to attempt to unriddle you, I also beg your pardon. Consider unsaid every word I've spoken; and forgive me if you can."

He laughed aloud.

"Forgive you. Miss Villiers! That's taking it a little too seriously, I am sure. But—the fact is—you are right! And upon my word I've a good mind to tell you everything on the spot!"

Irralie looked in the handsome, reckless face, and involuntarily drew back. "You must do as you please," she said.

"I could trust you? Yes, yes, I could trust you with my life. You are not the one to give a fellow away!"

"I hope not. But that would depend."

"That—would—depend," he repeated slowly. "On the nature of the confidence, of course! Well, well, let it rest. There was something else you were going to show me before we went in?"

"There was," said the girl. "Come this way; it's something that I think is certain to appeal to you."

And once more she led him through the moonlit pines, with a heart in chaos, and thoughts so tangled that unravelment seemed as distant as the day of doom. This much she knew: there was a loaded pistol in his pocket, and the crackling of each twig was like the cocking of the hammer behind her back. And, again, this much she knew even better: that she would have felt no safer out shooting with her father than here and now under the eye of this privily armed man.

So she led him through the soft sand between pine and hop-bush; and the moon peeped over one shoulder now, and now the other, until at last it shone with startling brilliance on white palings, and on a granite column in the midst of them, broken as a tree by the wind.

"A grave!" said Irralie's companion. But the girl said nothing. And when she looked at him his head was bare.

Indeed the unexpectedness of the spot and its memorial compelled an unpremeditated awe; nor could a stranger or a sweeter place have been chosen for the repose of human ashes. Homestead and outbuildings were alike beyond sight and sound. Here was no music but that of the constant cricket and the wind among the trees; and here, for days or for weeks together, no eyes save those of heaven itself. Companion of a thousand pines, yet still with a stillness which exaggerated their every sound and motion, stood the painted palings, the simply storied pedestal, the granite column snapped like a mast. And the spirit of the sepulchre, which all who came there must feel, was one unattainable in sunlit, sweet-smelling cemetery or cool cathedral crypt. It brought the living nearer to the dead; it left the dead more convincingly at peace and rest for ever.