Читать книгу Inheritors - Brian Penton - Страница 16

Table of Contents

"Yes," Cash said, glinting his teeth in an equivocal, apelike grin, "justice was pretty rough in San Francisco, but we were a sight rougher, and it took more than those cat-lap hicks from the East knew to hold us. There was maybe a couple of hundred coves from this side the Pacific hanging round the El Dorado in Kearney Street or hatching mischief in Sydney Valley or Little Chile. Not many of that mob was looking for a place to dig gold out with a shovel and sweat. They knew a better lay. They were some of the flashest bugs from London and all old fakirs. Stuck together, too--been mates in a hotter place. If you wanted to get in a vault there was plenty of bricklayers to tell you how, and plenty of blacksmiths to cut a key for you, and plenty of clerks to tell you where the dough was planted. There was even a Sydney-sider looking after the lawful property of the hard-working frock-coats of San Francisco. If you couldn't make a do of it with all those outside pals there was always a bumboat in cooee with a couple of willing Australian arms to pull you off to an Australian ship." He stroked his beard where drops of grease from the bacon were beginning to harden in waxen icicles and winked. "Come the night when I wanted one of those boats myself. . . ."

He shifted his hard stare from the fire to Cabell's face and examined him coolly for several seconds. "No saying what you blokes in frockcoats will do when your pocket's been touched," he said, and grinned derisively back at Cabell's tight mouth through the gossamer of his pipe smoke. "They took my old man up a lane once and cut his ears off. But he was a right smart cove and they never laid hands on him again till the night I'm speaking of. They were coming back from church and caught him lugging the safe out of old MacPherson's warehouse, with me holding the horse ready for him. All Vigilantes they were--hot for law and order and topping off a few Sydney Ducks for an example. But my old man had been near stretched so many times he didn't set any store by threats. 'Just you keep your glib shut,' he says, 'and we'll be home in bed in half an hour. These fancy traps ain't got the bone to kill their own chats.' They'd got us into a house by that time. 'You better confess,' they said, 'and we won't make it so hot for you.' 'Kiss me backside,' says me old man. 'We'll hang you,' they said. 'You couldn't hang wall-paper,' says the old man.

"And sure enough they looked a damn sight whiter round the gills than he did. 'Look at 'em,' says the old man. 'They look the dead speaking spit of hangmen, now don't they?'

"But I was listening to something else. A sound like a beetle crawling on paper. It was getting louder. I took a look behind me through the window and saw the street outside crowded with people, standing there not talking, just moving their feet impatient in the dust. 'I wish we hadn't gone near that place to-night,' I says to the old man. 'Aw, stop snivelling,' he says. 'I never been hanged yet.'

"And things did change a bit brighter then because there was a bit of a lull and one bloke blows his nose and says, 'Well, gentlemen, if there's a reasonable doubt . . .' He was a little fat cove who kept a draper's shop and his collar had gone like a bit of wet bread round his neck. 'I, for one,' he says, 'would never agree to topping off a man unless. . . .' But while they're hanging in the wind up jumps a fellow called Barrett, a real nasty looking bastard. 'What's the use beating about the bush,' he says. 'We come here to-night to hang two men, I reckon. Let's get down to business. Call the parson.'

"'But are we sure enough?' says the fat cove.

"'I'm sure of one thing,' says Barrett. 'If we don't we'll get laughed out of town.'

"The little fat cove looked out the window--sounded as if there might be two or three thousand beetles there now--and blew his nose. 'Well, yes,' he says, 'perhaps for the public good . . .'

"And then I knew our number was up. In comes the cushion-smiter and starts trying to make my old man pray, but Barrett cuts him short. 'That's enough talk. Get the praying business over. I'm going to hand these men in half an hour.'

"'Not this youth, surely,' says the parson. 'He's so young.'

"'Younger the better,' Barrett says. 'Like bugs.'

"So he goes to the window and asks the crowd and the crowd yells, 'Yes, hang 'em both. Chuck 'em down here.'

"'That's all right. You'll see 'em hang,' Barrett says. 'In half an hour at the Old Adobe. Go and put a block and tackle on the Liberty Pole.'

"With that they cheered and marched off. It took 'em about fifteen minutes to get clear and then Barrett turns round and says, 'Are you ready, gents?' So they grab hold of us and push us downstairs and into the street. There was a wind getting up. I could smell the sea strong. 'Wish to Christ you'd stayed in Australia,' I says to the old man. 'What're you saying, you damned whelp?' says he. 'You know if I stayed in Australia I'd 'a' been hanged.'

"All the Vigilantes were crowding round us now, holding a rope fence round us with about ten men on each side and in front, and half a dozen outriders with carbines. Barrett shoved his gun into my old man's back. 'March!' he says.

"It must've been near two o'clock. The crowd had lit torches. You could see the glow a mile off. Suddenly the engine companies' bells start to toll. Up Sansome Street to California we went, then up Clay and Montgomery to Portsmouth Square. Then my heart come up hot in my mouth. I heard a cooee, and a mob from Sydney Valley rushed out from the side of the street and start pulling the outriders down. But we went on and after a bit the outriders come up and said they shot a man."

He paused to look in his pipe, knock the ashes out, and fill it again. The sun had moved the shade away from him and its flails beat down on his back and bare head now. He did not notice. Sitting there unwearyingly on his heels he seemed, against the background of his story, encased in an invisible mail of imperviousness to, more than mere discomfort, all possible vagaries of a reckless destiny.

Cabell, man of order and property, hardened against him, instinctively recognizing the eternal soldier of fortune, race-course tout to-day, jailbird to-morrow, and strutting gentleman of brilliant means the day after, but through all of them glazed over with this impervious, because contemptuous, fortitude to change and disaster. Still, he had had too many troubles in his own life not to admire fortitude and envy it. "Well, what then?" he said.

"One thing about that night," Cash said, "I got finished with dying, if you know what I mean. I mean I died fifty times crossing Portsmouth Square, and after that living was like getting a second run for your money. It's just so much for nothing, so you don't worry about losing it again. That's why my old man took it so easy. He'd slept in the condemned cell twice and been pardoned. I'd begun to hang back, but he only cursed harder. The mob was all around us. They sounded like a lot of niggers singing--you know, without a tune. And then we come round the corner all of a sudden and there was the hundred-and-thirty-foot Oregon flagpole and another mob around it with torches, holding the rope ready. We stopped then, and Barrett tried to get hold of the noose, but the cove that had it didn't want to give it up. He held it in both hands close to his chest and kept his eyes on me. So they had to crack him on the head with the butt of a gun to get it off him.

"Barrett looked at it and tried it, with the mob waving their torches and yelling, 'Put it on, Barrett. Don't waste time. Put it on the old bloke first. Put a torch to him. Burn the dog.' And just at that moment somebody grabbed my shoulder. It was the little fat bloke, the draper. He was hanging on to my shoulder breathing hard. His face looked like a lump of lard melting. I saw he was going to be sick and gave him one shove and he staggered back and fell and they walked over him.

"When I looked round Barrett was holding the noose up over the old man's head. I thought, 'This is the stone end,' and stopped feeling scared. The mob, and the torches, and the horses rearing and kicking hell out of the mob all got mixed up, and I felt a bit lushy and as if it was nothing to do with me anyway. Barrett had hold of the old man by the beard and was pulling the noose on. They'd made it a bit small so it took all the skin off his nose. He put his hand up and felt his nose and yelled something, and then he stumbled suddenly and went on his knees and somebody started to shout, 'Look out. He's escaping. They got him by the legs.' I looked down, and sure enough there was somebody, some Sydney Duck, had crawled up in the dark and got my old man by the boot and was trying to pull him out under the rope fence, with Barrett white as a sheet pulling the other end of the chit and my old man's head in between with his tongue hanging out and wagging like a long, red leaf--like the leaf round the end of a bunch of young bananas. It looked nearly six inches long and I expected to see his face turn inside out any minute. He was hanging on to the noose too and they were jabbing at his hands with a torch trying to make him let go, and then he let go and Barrett looked over his shoulder and yelled, 'Every lover of liberty and good order lay hands on the rope,' and about fifty of them grabbed hold of the loose end and my old man went up the pole like a rocket, hung with his legs in the light for a moment while they got another grip, then disappeared into the dark."

His pipe had gone out again. He stowed it under his bowyang, and drank a few mouthfuls of lukewarm tea from the billy. The afternoon was settling in now with a stir of birds rousing from the midday heat and the rasp of insects, like the audible brazen clang of the sunlight striking down on the rocky walls of the gully.

There was a commotion in the bushes and Ike, the hawker, appeared, leading a miserable pantomime horse with a cloud of flies round its head like a nimbus.

"Sold out, Ike?" Cash asked.

"Ah, Yankee, I sell too chip." He began to whine in a thick, slightly rancid voice. "Zat's my trouble."

"That's all our trouble," Cash said. "Still, if good rum was cheaper than kerosene and lampblack I bet you'd still use kerosene and lampblack. You're just made that way."

The Syrian bobbed his head over a pair of intent, viperous eyes and grinned, "Yis, Yankee."

"Where're you sneaking off to now? Just stole something?"

"No, Yankee. I jist go bringa bifsteks." He waved down the gully.

"Plenty more come. Plenty hungry. I bringa bifsteks to-morrow."

"Public benefactor," Cash said.

"Yis, Yankee." The Syrian flashed his vindictive glance between them and went on.

"There's a shrewd-head," Cash said. "You wouldn't catch him swinging a pick after gold that mightn't be there. They reckon he owns a street of houses in Brisbane." He leant forward and touched Cabell's knee. "You weren't thinking of navvying in this sweat-house, were you?"

"I'm not here for the scenery," Cabell said.

"I always heard you were a shrewd-head too." Cash laughed. "But perhaps you don't know goldfields like I do." He nodded past the tree. "Look at those poor plugs digging. How much gold d'you think they've got? Nothing. And not likely to. No, Cabell. I could lay you--both of us, that is--on to a better thing than that."

Cabell jerked his head round with the exaggerated turn necessary to focus his one eye. The hard confidence in the eyes of the other repelled and alarmed him, but attracted him too.

"My face mightn't appeal," Cash said, "but my name ought to. Then there's my luck."

"Yes," Cabell said, hedging, "but you didn't finish your yarn."

"Neither I did." He swung back on his heels again. "But there's not much more. While everybody was looking up at the pole, jerking about like a rod with a big fish on it, someone reached over and cracked me on the head with a torch and laid me out. I felt a lot of feet around me kicking and then I didn't know where I was till I come to running down Clay Street for the lick of my life. The bells were still tolling. I just kept on running towards the smell of the sea . . ."

Cabell grunted. "You were damned lucky."

"A lot are lucky," Cash said, "otherwise a lot more would go up the pole."

"Eh? Lucky? Yes, yes, you're right there."

"So with my luck and your luck we ought to get along," Cash said. "Is it a deal?"