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Chamber’s Journal June 1889

Long Jake had been indulging in his periodical spree. The fact first dawned upon him with the dawning day, when a heavy driving shower beat into the veranda and soaked him where he lay like a log. As the day advanced, the truth grew gradually sharper and clearer, and piece by piece he began to patch together those fragments of the past few days which still lingered, with blurred outline, in his memory. Yet, though his head ached again—perhaps from the mental effort, perhaps from other exciting causes—of the greater part of the time he was able to recall absolutely nothing. It was on Friday he had ridden into the township from his hut beyond Razorback, and, as a matter of course, parted with that thirty pound cheque to John Byrne, the publican: he was quite sure of that. It was now Tuesday afternoon, and John Byrne, the publican, had plainly intimated that the end of the spirituous tether which that cheque had secured was arrived at: alas! he was equally sure of this. But the interim was a nebulous void. Thus the knowledge that he had been four days drunk stole slowly into the blunted sense of Long Jake, as day steals into some cave deep in the mountains, forcing its laboured way through gap, rift, and crevice. But it was not until it came to catching and saddling his mare, with infinite difficulty and feeble vexation of spirit, that he fully realised and appreciated all that had gone on.

At last, however, he was in the saddle, sitting tight with thigh and knee, the upper part of him huddled into a ball. Not much of a man to look at, at any time; no grace of feature or of form; not even a really good seat in the saddle. Nothing of any account from head to heel. A small fresh-coloured face; crooked beard, turning gray; legs absurdly long in proportion to the rest of him, and that the shape of a bow. They called him Long Jake; for his ill-apportioned length was the man’s sole individuality; and as for surname, it was never dreamed that he had one, either in this little township of King-parrot Flat or in the surrounding ranges.

‘Well?’ shouted John Byrne from the veranda that fronted his grog-shanty, as Jake rode round from the yard. ‘So you’re off, eh? And when shall we see you again? Not for another six months, I s’pose.—So long.’ John Byrne spoke sadly, yet with the consoling certainty with which one augurs the return of summer while watching the falling leaves. For Long Jake was one of his regular sources of income—had been for years. To look at John Byrne as he stood there in his red shirt and cabbage-tree hat, tall and handsome as he was, you would never have taken him for a shark and a robber. On the contrary—though these terms, I assure you, would have been none too hard for him—you would probably have discovered in him a type of rugged, solid, honest manhood. At all events everybody else did—at first sight.

Jake muttered something profane but incoherent in reply, and flung a sulky nod to the knot of loafers in the veranda, who, having been drinking at his expense since Friday, returned it with an interest not dissociated from satire. Then he was off at a brisk canter, sitting, as some one unkindly observed, ‘like a sack of coals;’ and, though sitting close, swaying in the saddle every few strides, in clear indication that his balance was as yet imperfect.

Tenements, whether wood or canvas, were few enough at King-parrot Flat; but what there were lay wide apart on either side the broad bush highway, divided by clumps of gum and belts of wattle and wild fern; so that the township, which could have been set down in three or four acres just as well, extended from end to end nearly a mile. As Jake passed close in front of the opposition grog-shanty at the other side of the road, higher up, he was playfully hooted by a second—naturally hostile—knot of loafers. Outside Harrison’s store, still higher up, the aged Harrison, who was sunning himself in front of the house, laid down his newspaper and broke into a cackle of senile mirth as the odd horseman—whom he took for an Australian John Gilpin—thundered past. And little Martha Byrne, driving back the cows from the creek, made such an impudent, impish grimace in his very path, that Long Jake turned in the saddle with a more savage look upon John Byrne’s child than he had hurled back at the grown men. Even the cows stood still to regard him with blank astonishment, as he clattered through their midst. There was only one house left to pass—a long, low, new building, more pretentious than any other in the township. It was the new store, lately opened by new arrivals in the colony; the bold venture of a young immigrant couple, and so far held in supreme contempt by the broad spirits of King-parrot Flat. Mrs Truscott—the township said unanimously—might be a fine young woman; they weren’t so sure about that, however; but one thing they were sure about—she would have to get rid of those confounded ‘old-country airs’ of hers before they had anything to do either with her or her stuck-up husband. As for the latter, why, he actually thought he knew something about horses; as if a new chum in the colony could know anything about horses! And he had a young colt or two up there in his yards that he was breaking in, English fashion. Just fancy trying on that kind of ‘rot’ with bush-horses! King-parrot Flat thought it all an excellent joke, though one which—as men of ‘savvy’—they could not help feeling strongly about.

Now the road to Razorback twisted abruptly round the corner of this Truscott’s store; and after passing the store, Jake would be alike beyond the township and range of those arrows of ridicule to which an unsteady rider presents a gratuitous target. He therefore made no attempt to check his pace as he swept round close to the picket-fence in front of Truscott’s veranda. Had he done so, he might have heard and understood the bounding thuds of a bucking horse, close at hand, before he doubled the angle of the fence and before it was too late to prevent a collision; for Truscott had mounted a vicious young brute that was at that moment bucking furiously. As it was, before either rider could utter a cry, the horses met.

Jake was thrown clean and far; and as ground and sky whirled before him, the last thing he saw was the young horse reared, as it seemed, into the dark-blue vault overhead—trembling in the balance —falling backward.

Jake was only half-stunned by the fall, but he was more than half-sobered. In an instant he had picked himself up. The colt was just rising to its legs, apparently no worse; his own mare was cantering awkwardly away, with her near foreleg thrust through the reins; and on the ground, close to the stockyard rail, lay a heap of gray flannel and white moleskin and quivering flesh. At sight of this, alcohol seemed to reassert its sway in Jake’s brain; it reeled; and he was hardly more conscious of what followed than of what took place around him while he was lying helpless and insensate at John Byrne’s.

Twenty minutes later, the rushing air on his temples brought him once more to his sober senses. He was on the mare, and was riding swiftly back to the hut. Then, for the second time that day, Long Jake tried to piece together what had happened. But now all came back to him consecutively and with fearful vividness: How he had crept timidly up to the thing that lay so still, touched it, and started back; lifted an arm, and let it drop heavily. How he had taken the warm yet lifeless body in his arms, and, exerting all his strength, staggered with it round to the veranda, where a shrieking, laughing maniac had rushed out upon him. How, in spite of the madwoman, he had borne in his burden and laid it down as gently as might be. How, very soon, a noisy rabble rushed up; how he answered their questions as clearly as he could, and promised to return to the township if wanted; and was then suffered to break away. All as in a dream.

But that night, when safely back at his shepherd’s hut, away on the sloping pasture-land beyond Razorback, when darkness fell over all things, and the white dead gum-trees towered like risen spectres on the side of the range—that night, Long Jake lay tossing on his bunk and making sure that this time, at last, delirium tremens had fairly caught him. For the moon, shooting her cold rays through the open door of the hut, cast a ghostly white shadow on the sandy floor—a gleaming ghostly shadow, sliced as with a knife out of the surrounding blackness, and taking the hideous shape of a coffin; and outside, the young saplings were nodding their heads like funeral plumes; and the crickets croaking a hoarse, monotonous, maddening dirge. Then anon the dead face of the man was thrust before his disordered vision; and anon the frantic face of the woman. So that at last he could bear it no longer, but tore himself from the bunk, and roamed through the night, half-dressed as he was, among the pale corpses of trees, until the morning dew upon his uncovered head, and the morning breeze upon his fevered temples, helped to cool and clear the poor bewildered brain.

Long Jake was in the habit of planning these systematic carousals of his with a deliberation that was little short of horrible. This time he had waited patiently until heavy rain filled the creeks and water-holes, so that his flocks had the best of feed and water close at hand; and he had trimmed and mended the rude fences of the great paddocks, and left everything generally snug. Then he had obtained from his employer a substantial cheque, on the pretext of buying a horse at Wattletown. For the projected ‘bust’ was by no means Jake’s first since his installation in the hut on Razorback, and he was well aware that if he were found out—let alone the harm that might or might not befall the sheep during his absence—it would be at least as much as his place was worth: that was thirty shillings a week, plus rations, and in itself was of small consideration; he could get as much, perhaps more, from any squatter in the colony, as an experienced shepherd and boundary-man. But somehow, Jake had got to like the place for its own sake. He was content in his solitary life among the grim and sombre ranges. Indeed, this queer, reserved, nameless old fellow found the solitude of Razorback the best thing in life. I am not sure that he did not regard those ‘busts’ at King-parrot Flat simply as so many necessary life-tonics which he owed it to himself to administer with unfailing regularity. At anyrate the rude slab hut, the cats, the cockatoo, the very prints pasted on the walls—these simple signs grew by degrees to spell for Long Jake the word—‘Home.’ And until this time he had experienced nothing but thankfulness and relief on returning home, sick and wearied from his excesses.

But this time it was different. Home conveyed no comfort; he could not rest. He felt that which—out of a pretty lengthy experience of similar after-glows—he had never felt before—namely, shame. That was not the worst of it, however. The dead storekeeper was always before his eyes. And when riding through the bush, he found himself unconsciously looking over his shoulder, fearfully expectant of the wild face and uplifted arm of the woman whom he had been instrumental in making a widow. For brooding exaggerated the circumstances of the accident, until the brand of the primal murderer would burn on the brow of Long Jake in the dead of night and send the poor self-accuser wandering pitifully over the ranges.

Rough as the life was in the old days—the other time-honoured epithet is for the optimists —there were still coroners to be had for the sending, even in the ranges. And a couple of days after the accident, a messenger summoned Long Jake to the inquest at the dead man’s store. Well, no blame was laid on poor Jake, except by himself; and he galloped back without speaking to a soul outside the store. The widow could not be brought to attend the inquiry, and she was not seen.

A part of the weight that pressed it down was now lifted from the mind of Long Jake, but only a slight part. In the distorted perspective of his own mind he was still blood-guilty; and could there be degrees in blood-guiltiness? He would have ridden into the home-station and laid bare his naked feelings to the boss, who was a kind and just man, and who, moreover, would certainly hear of the accident from other—possibly unkind—lips. But, unfortunately, the one rigid rule of Long Jake’s life was, never to lay bare a fraction of his feelings to a fellow-man. However, after a few days, a journey to the homestead, for rations, became imperative. It was high noon when, amid a loud barking of dogs, Jake led his mare into the rough stable and walked over to the store. Within, the young gentleman from England—who was obliging enough to acquire ‘colonial experience’ at a nominal salary—was whistling shrilly.

‘Ha! it’s you, Long Jake,’ he cried as Jake entered. ‘Rations'? All right; in a minute; but—hang it!—shake a paw first, do.’ He was evidently in tremendous spirits; and Jake was too perfectly colonised to be in sympathy with any such demonstration. He held out his hand sulkily; he intended to have his rations at once, and go. But the high-spirited young gentleman went on whistling noisily and packing emu eggs in sawdust, as if no one was at the other side of the counter waiting to be served.

‘Tell you what’s up,’ he presently volunteered, pausing in his song; ‘I’m off home! Sick o’ this, don’t you know—rough as blazes, and all that kind of thing. Yes, home to England! Jolly, eh?’ A vivacious continuation of the interrupted tune, in another key, and then: ‘Sail next Tuesday week; Blackwall liner; good business, eh?’ Crescendo: the whole store filled with the volume of this young Briton’s whistle.

‘If it’s a fair question,’ asked Jake, when the tune had come to a blatant end on a wrong note, ‘what might a passage cost?’

‘Just the sort of question it is—ha, ha!—you don’t see it, though!’ laughed the other airily. ‘Why, about seventy pounds, first-class.’

‘Ah, but second?’

‘Oh, about thirty, I should say.—Why? Are you thinking of going home too?’

Jake said curtly that he wasn’t; and asked plainly if he might expect to be served that morning.

While the young man was busy with the scales, William Noble—‘the boss’—came into the store and conversed pleasantly with his boundary-man without one allusion to King-parrot Flat. And before he left the homestead, Long Jake ascertained that he had still five pounds seventeen and eightpence standing to his credit in the station books.

‘Thirty pounds!’ he muttered strangely as he remounted the mare. He had ‘lammed down’ that sum at John Byrne’s the week before! He rode home to the hut in silent thought; but when he dismounted at the well-known spot, he once more whispered, ‘Thirty pounds!’ This time the words fell naturally from his lips; they had formed the keynote of his reflections during the ten-mile ride.

More than three months passed before Long Jake was again seen at King-parrot Flat; and then, one fine afternoon, he dropped in upon the boys in John Byrne’s bar without a word of warning. He was warmly greeted. John Byrne’s handsome face lit up with an evil light as he clapped the newcomer on the back with demonstrative heartiness; Jack Rogers, already three parts tipsy, foresaw earlier consummation than he had dared to hope for; and Surgeon-major Wagstaff—late of H.M. Bombay Staff Corps—deemed it a promising speculation to begin business by pledging Long Jake at his, the surgeon-major’s, expense. To the speechless amazement of all, this delicate overture was politely but promptly declined.

‘No, boys,’ said Long Jake quietly, in answer to the questioning faces that were turned indignantly to his; ‘I ha’n’t come here for a boose—not this time and he calmly seated himself on a flour-bag in the coolest corner of the store.

Jack Rogers feebly appealed to his stars to explain what this might portend; the old Anglo-Indian ripened with more than tropic rapidity from pink to purple, and muttered vaguely about ‘outraged honour’ and ‘instant satisfaction;’ while the proprietor of the bar confined himself to a peremptory inquiry as to why, et cetera, Jake came there if he didn’t mean to take anything for the good of the house—adding that he, for one, as boss of the shanty in question, intended to know the reason why, anyway.

‘Reason why?’ said Long Jake reflectively, without looking up from the fig of tobacco he was daintily paring in his palm. ‘Reason why? Why, to have a bit of a yarn. What else?’ But before the menace that trembled on John Byrne’s tongue could be discharged, he added adroitly, and with a quick upward glance: ‘Hows’ever, though I’m not on for anything myself to-day —feeling just what you call below par, like—I hereby invites all present company to order their usual, if you please.’ With that Long Jake added to the painful interest which his abnormal conduct had already created by shifting the clasp-knife to his left hand, thrusting his right deep into his trousers’ pocket, and, apparently by accident, jingling a fistful of coins. Then he withdrew his hand without raising his eyes, and resumed paring the tobacco with an impassive face.

Coin of the realm being an almost unknown quantity at King-parrot Flat, where paper-money was in common currency, this master-touch of Long Jake’s produced an instantaneous effect. John Byrne turned his back, partly to uncork a fresh demijohn, partly to conceal his emotion. The rest—including even the insulted surgeon-major—maintained a judicious silence. The man, from Razorback reserved his final bomb until the first glass all round had been emptied, and until he had rolled his tobacco caressingly between his palms, and filled and lit his pipe.

‘Fact is, boys,’ he then said, in the same calm deliberate tone, ‘I’m going home!’

The silence that had preceded the announcement outlived it half a minute; then, as one man, the habitues of Byrne’s bar pulled themselves together.

‘What! home to England?’ asked John Byrne incredulously.

‘Home to England,’ said Long Jake.

‘Gad! you don’t mean this?’ exclaimed Surgeon-major Wagstaff.

‘My colonial oath on it,’ said Long Jake.

‘An’ when yer goin’?’ inquired Jack Rogers.

‘Well, not jest yet a while,’ said Long Jake.

This last reply, being distinctly anti-climacteric, disappointed somewhat.

‘Going for good?’ sneered John Byrne, veiling beneath a tone of contempt the reasonable annoyance incident to loss of a sure source of income. Jack Rogers, with a vinous wink, suggested: ‘No; for bad.’ A slight laugh greeted the maudlin sally. But Jake replied gravely: ‘Only for a trip. I mean to have one more look at the old dust; that’s all.—Fill up again, boys.’

The invitation was scarcely needed; and, under the influence of the whisky and Jake’s manoeuvring, the conversation drifted; and he presently turned it into the channel he had all along in view by an innocent inquiry after Widow Truscott. The gratuitous information respecting this lady which he elicited it would be to no purpose to relate at length; moreover, it would be unfair, since the epithets employed could scarcely have been meant for repetition. But it did appear that Mrs Truscott was, to put it mildly, no favourite at King-parrot Flat. Her airs were worse than ever. She thought herself too good for everybody. She was mismanaging the store, making a mess of everything, and doing no business—each substantive being duly qualified. There were plenty of good men ready to enter the business on the square footing, who would guarantee to make a paying concern of it. Yet she wanted to sell the place—sell a place whose good-will wasn’t worth a red cent; she would look at none of them. Here the gallant Surgeon-major waxed peculiarly eloquent and pompous. It seemed that this oriental jewel had indeed gone the length of personally offering himself, body and soul, as a sacrifice at the shrine of this unreasonable woman. Only to be trampled on!

As Long Jake cantered homeward, he could not resist a curious glance at the dwelling of the terrible female. If she treated so maleficently those estimable men, whose worst offence was a too great admiration for herself, how would she behave to him, Long Jake—as he persisted in regarding himself—the author of her widowhood? Might she not send a bullet through him as he passed? Surely she must be capable of that much. She happened to be in front of the house, training lovingly an infant creeper to the base of a veranda-post—honeysuckle, taken from its native northern soil only a few short months ago. She looked up swiftly at the cantering horseman. As it seemed to him, there was nothing forbidding in the glance; nor did she lower her eyes; but, instead, gazed hard at him with something very like interest in her sad face. Long Jake felt the blood mount hotly to his cheeks, and his hand tighten involuntarily on the reins. For an instant he wavered; then, turning away his head, he spurred the mare round the fatal corner. But he had not galloped a furlong before his first impulse of shame gave place to one of indignation, of which he himself was the object; he fell to cursing himself for a fool and a heartless wretch; and by the time he reached the hut, he had resolved that, next time anything took him to the township, he would not leave it before he had told the truth to the poor widow about that terrible day, now nearly four months ago.

It was a little curious that, barely a week later, Long Jake found another trip to King-parrot Flat necessary. He had never before visited the township twice in so short a space of time. It was more curious, however, that he ended by getting no farther than the outermost vedette of the straggling, weather-board houses—by calling, in fine, at Mrs Truscott’s store and nowhere else.

‘I must see the woman; I must make a clean breast to her about that day. I must tell her straight that I was blind drunk and riding madly; that if I had been in my sober senses, the accident would never have happened.’ Such is a paraphrase and a condensation of Long Jake’s conception of his duty, arrived at after hours of slow laborious thought. The logic of the conclusion was more than questionable; and as for the prompting that led to it, Jake was simply self-deceived. Even supposing any good sprang up from the unburdening of spirit, it would be reaped by the wrong person; a load would be lifted from Long Jake’s heart, not a pennyweight from Mrs Truscott’s. Yet, as he reined up at the store, Long Jake honestly believed that he was about to do the next best thing to reparation, which was impossible. Mrs Truscott sat sewing behind the green veranda-blinds —voluptuous extravagances hitherto unknown in the pure air of the Flat. The tall ungainly bush man trembled visibly as he stepped up the little path, crushing his soft wideawake between the twitching fingers of both hands. Instantly, however, the sweet, sad smile with which the young widow looked up at his troubled face disarmed him; that ice-breaking sentence, so carefully prepared, so often rehearsed, went clean out of his head; and Long Jake, for one faint-hearted moment, would have given far more than his credit balance at the station to be safely back in his hut!

Yet a moment later the plunge was made—a veritable flounder of incoherence. Then, coming up—so to speak—for breath, a series of verbal splashes followed, tremulous with rough pent-up emotion; for some seconds the words chased each other tumultuously from his hoarse throat, then ceased. And the widow knew all that had been on the poor fellow’s mind for months past.

How did she hear it? Silently, at first; then with a slight catch of the breath; then with quiet tears. And when all was said, she leant forward on her low chair and pronounced, not forgiveness, but words of thanks. Thanks for his tenderness to him; thanks for his forbearance with her on that awful day. Thanks to him! The man recoiled, and shuddered, and refused to believe his ears. He felt stunned, when no reproach could have stunned him! But a thin white hand was stretched over toward him, and, whether he would or no, it buried itself in his great coarse fist. He dropped it quickly, drew a deep sigh, half of relief, half of bewilderment, wiped his shirt-sleeve across his brow, and without a word, stepped from the veranda.

Mrs Truscott called him back. He must stay a little while, she said kindly, and talk to her: she never talked to any one, you see. Jake sat down humbly; he would have done anything she told him, just then; but what could he talk about? Silence. Jake shifted nervously. Some subtle instinct whispered that he would be evermore disgraced if he left the lady to begin the conversation. So he stumbled into this: ‘I’m goin’ to clear out o’ this soon.’

The widow looked up from her needle-work in surprise, as well she might. ‘How do you mean?’ asked she, not without apprehension.

‘These here ranges: I’m going to leave ’em.’

‘Yes?’—in a tone indicating interest.

‘Yes’—in one betraying exhaustion of topic.

‘And where do you go then?’

‘Ha!’—with unexpected relief, and surprise that he should have forgotten what was indeed his point—‘home to England!’

Mrs Truscott dropped her work on her lap and looked swiftly up at the speaker. And for a single moment—in spite of her thin worn cheeks, in spite of the lines that had come ten years before their time—for that one moment the parted lips, the wide-open blue eyes, the sudden flash of strong interest, lit up the woman’s face into beauty. The next, the blue eyes filled with tears, the chin drooped, the cheeks went paler than before, and a broken voice repeated in a wondering whisper: ‘Home to England!’

‘Yes,’ said Long Jake softly; ‘home! For a trip.’

But he had no sooner uttered the words than he jumped up clumsily without a word of warning and stepped hastily out of the veranda. Almost instantaneously, Mrs Truscott heard a shrill exclamation, followed by a volley of angry words.

‘Why, whatever is it? Ah, dear, dear, dear!’ she cried, rushing out, with something akin to a fresh pang in her heart.

‘It’s only this, ma’am,’ he cried savagely, throwing out a dramatic arm in the direction of a dark little figure that was racing rapidly down the broad bush high-road towards the other houses: ‘that there little snake has been a-hiding behind this here picket-fence and a-listening to every word you and me has been a-saying. Confound her!’

The widow turned; and, though the evening gloom was settling rapidly, it needed but a glance to assure her that yonder skeltering imp was the one human creature in the township in whom she took any sort of interest—little Martha Byrne, whom she had even attempted to teach to read. The hot blood mounted to the woman’s faded face. She faced about. But Long Jake was gone. Growing momently fainter, his mare’s rhythmical canter was borne to Mrs Truscott’s ears as the strokes rang out from the flint-strewn track. The widow sighed deeply. Every breath she drew was a sigh; but this one came with new force from a new pain; or rather, from an ever-present pain re-awakened.

‘Poor thing!’ said Jake aloud, as the mare dropped into a walk at the foot of the steep winding track over Razorback. ‘No signs of business, as I could see. Why, the place was never fairly started. Poor thing!’

Nearly an hour later, he put the mare into a canter at the top of the long gentle slope that stretched, through miles of timber, right down to the hut; and then he was thinking of that look of Mrs Truscott’s when he spoke the word ‘Home!’ ‘Ay, she’d go home too, fast enough, if she had the money,’ thought Long Jake.

With the quickened stride of the mare, the rider’s thoughts, too, came the quicker. At first he made no effort to check them; but presently he found himself spurring on the mare in order to leave them far behind. The grotesquely-twisted gums fled by on either hand, bowing mockingly in the evening breeze as he passed; then the round moon shot up and painted the narrow track an ashy gray, and threw into merciless relief, among a world of phantoms, one solitary mortal flying from a Thought. But the Thought was not to be run away from. It twined its tendrils about the man’s mind, and grew and grew until he became hardly conscious of the trees rushing by; the long gray track reeling out beneath, the scent of the eucalyptus forest tingling in his nostrils. Suddenly a peal of harsh grating laughter broke upon the silence. The rider instinctively pulled up. The hoarse diabolical peal was repeated; but this time it was echoed by a low chuckle from Long Jake. He had lived in the bush more years than he could count; yet here, forsooth, he was startled by the bush man’s familiar, the laughing-jackass! The momentary sensation, however, had an immediate effect: Long Jake shook himself together and rode slowly and soberly onward. Not that the Thought was expelled; it was allowed to remain, but on a different footing; for now it was no longer resisted, but willingly, coolly, discriminately entertained.

Before starting on the rounds of his paddocks next morirng, Long Jake made a calculation with the butt-end of his stock-whip on the sandy soil outside the hut door. When the sum was worked out, he stamped out the figures, as if ashamed. Yet he had merely satisfied himself that in three months’ time his gross savings would amount to pretty nearly fifty pounds. ‘And on that,’ said Long Jake slowly, ‘and what the mare brings, we might manage it.’

The spring months that followed were trying ones to Long Jake. He never went near King-parrot Flat. One or two trips he made over to Wattletown, in order to negotiate for the sale of the mare with a storekeeper there, which ended in a bargain being struck that the mare should be delivered and paid for by Christmas at the latest; but on these occasions Wattletown observed that the man from Razorback conducted himself very meanly, and that the little money he did spend was in hard cash. In point of fact he made it his first business to cash a small cheque at the bank on entering the township. Then, of course, there were the inevitable visits to the home-station. But only two circumstances happened really to break the monotony of life, which, after years and years of it, became actively unpalatable to Long Jake’s temperament for the first time. The first of these was a visit from handsome John Byrne, who slept at the hut on his way to the home-station, where—so he said—he had business with Mr Noble; though, in fact—which he omitted to add—he paid Jake the compliment of travelling many miles out of his way in order to see him, since he came straight from the lair of a lynx-eyed congenial spirit at Wattletown, and not from the grog-shanty on the Flat. The visitor, however, was too welcome for Long Jake to consider the visit mysterious; and as for sinister glances and cunning questions, Jake neither saw the first, nor was he even aware that the second had been put—and answered.

The other circumstance was this: one day he found lying in the station store an envelope addressed to ‘The Boundary-man on Razorback.’ It contained a few lines from Mrs Truscott, begging Jake to call at her store before his departure for England, provided he should consent to be the bearer of a message and a trifle or two besides. He spelt through the note with difficulty, then laboriously indited a reply and dropped it into the mail-bag. In his note a day in December was mentioned on which he would without fail present himself at Mrs Truscott’s service. After that, with a feeling of satisfaction quite new to him, he inquired for the boss. Mr Noble, who had already heard with amusement of Jake’s projected trip home, was not surprised to hear now that he intended coming in for his cheque about the middle of December. Jake, however, promised to stay until a new boundary-rider should be sent out to the hut, which, it was in turn promised, should be done a day or two before that on which he wished expressly to leave.

As December drew gradually nearer, he grew daily wearier of his daily work. He became restlessly impatient; and his nights were broken by vivid, disturbing dreams. As a rule these dreams bore him back across seas of time and the world to a peaceful little hamlet in Somersetshire. But they invariably ended by the distant and indistinct image of the English village fading before the strong, convincing presentment of King-parrot Flat; or the two places would be fused fantastically together, as is the way with dream-locality.

When at length the great day dawned, Jake set out for the station at sunrise, riding the mare, and carrying all his personal belongings in the swag strapped across the saddle. At the station, Jake received his breakfast and his cheque; the latter—the account coming to a few pounds under fifty—being written for that round sum, thanks to a graceful bonus from the boss. Thus emancipated, Jake rode on to Wattletown with a heart of air, leading a station horse which Noble lent him for the completion of his roundabout journey to King-parrot Flat. At Wattletown, the mare was sold, according to previous arrangement, for twenty pounds down in cash. The cheque also was cashed—all gold; so that when Jake rode away from that prosperous settlement at four in the afternoon he had seventy sovereigns in the leather pouch on his belt, which was imprudent, in spite of his modest conviction that not a soul was concerned—and therefore, he argued, not a soul could be acquainted—with the movements of so obscure an individual as Long Jake.

After an hour’s easy riding, Jake was once more on thoroughly familiar ground; for halfway between the Flat and his old hut that track was joined by the one from Wattletown. Never had this man’s spirits been so high before, never had the sombre tints of the bush seemed so warm and gay in the glinting sunlight. The gray rough track had never bounded so lightly from the heels of the good old mare; though surely this heavy bony hack was not a patch upon her for speed and lightness. The excitement that had entered his spirit during the last months had given new life and animation to a narrow, silent, well-nigh animal existence. He was no longer the thing that repeatedly, for days, lay helpless at Byrne’s bar, and returned to the hut he called home without a pang, without a regret, without a hope. And here it was, in these endless cloisters of smooth round trunks, that the Thought had come to him which had worked all this wondrous change—the Thought that was now at last to be put to the test, whether it was wise or unwise, good or evil!

‘Ha, ha! Ha, ha!’

Ah! that could startle him then, but not now! Long Jake turned round in the saddle to look at the queer clumsy bird—surely a bird of good omen. But he did not slacken his steady canter.

‘Ha, ha, ha! ’

This time the laugh did not come from behind. Jake turned sharply. Directly in the track sat a tall, motionless, masked figure on horseback; and a voice that Jake thought he recognised cried: ‘Bale up!’

Bale up!—the seventy sovereigns! Jake’s heart quailed and sickened for a moment. The long barrel of a revolver covered him, and glittered in the sunlight. Must he be robbed in broad daylight? With a wild cry of rage and despair, he buried his spurs in the sides of his heavy mount and dashed straight at the highwayman, leaning forward with his face on the horse’s mane. The robber, being less heavily mounted, backed a pace; and as Long Jake came on unarmed and reckless, took deliberate aim at the chest of the charging horse. A firm quick touch on the reins caused the heavy brute to swerve; and with a loud ring the bullet struck the near stirrup-iron, thence burying itself in the heel of Jake’s boot. The frightened animal thundered on; and in an instant they were past, nearly bringing the smaller horse to earth in their rush. A quick succession of shots and an even louder volley of curses filled the air; Long Jake felt a stinging, burning blow between the shoulder-blades; his brain sickened, and his body reeled in the saddle!

Just as the fiery sun began to dip behind the range, Mrs Truscott heard a furious clatter of hoofs outside. She rose hastily and ran out. So did Martha Byrne, whom the widow had tried in vain to get rid of all the afternoon. Staggering through the little wicket-gate was a strange figure, all dust and sweat and blood, and the ashiest face man ever reeled under. He made his way unsteadily up to the veranda, where he sank down with a deep sobbing sigh; and his head would have fallen back upon the boards had not the widow caught his shoulders and supported him. His breath came thick and short, his eyes seemed closing; yet his fingers fumbled feebly until they had unfastened a leather pouch from his belt. And then his hands were powerless to lift it!

The stricken man looked dumbly upward at the woman; he could just raise a trembling pointing hand to her, then drop it significantly on the pouch. His wan lips moved, and from between them came one faint word: ‘Home!’

Little Martha had for once used her long thin legs to some purpose. After one quick intelligent glance at the pallid face of Long Jake, she had rushed like the wind to her father’s shanty; and now she was returning, almost as swiftly, with a posse of its choice spirits. John Byrne was absent, and mysteriously absent, from the township; but foremost among them was Surgeon-major Wagstaff, carrying his instrument case and a vastly augmented pomposity of bearing; and devoutly hoping that, whoever the fellow was, he would live long enough to give him (Wagstaff) a show of getting his hand in once more. Jack Rogers was there too, and Paddy Welch, and one or two others. As they came up to the end of the store they could see right along the raised veranda. With the carmine glare of the setting sun behind them, the two figures that met their gaze seemed of carved ebony, both were so black and so rigid! As one man, the little party slackened its pace; Paddy Welch doffed his felt wideawake, and the others did the same; then they moved forward very, very slowly. And Jack Rogers said, just above his breath, but, somehow, more gruffly than he intended to say it: ‘He’s gone home square enough now, boys; and for good!’

Yet darkness fell over King-parrot Flat, and the boys still lingered outside the widow Truscott’s store. For the Surgeon-major said there was still the ghost of a chance; and the Surgeon-major was sober and on his mettle, and ought to have known, even if he didn’t.

That day week they ran John Byrne to earth in the ranges. They dragged him back to the Flat, and would have lynched him in sight of his own bar, but for one circumstance. The ink was scarcely dry on an official bulletin nailed to the door of the now flourishing opposition shanty which set forth that the patient was at last definitely out of danger. And they found its author, the gallant and skilful Surgeon-major, already gloriously drunk after his week of enforced sobriety by the sick man’s bed.

So Mr John Byrne, amateur bushranger, was taken over to Wattletown and handed over, quite nicely, to the police. Thanks to a woman’s nursing and a Surgeon-major’s experience, Long Jake pulled through. Just when the days began to shorten, and camping on Razorback became mean work, the shutters were put up at the new store. A week later, Long Jake’s trip home began. But Jack Rogers turned out quite right after all: the trip was confessedly ‘for good.’ Nor was it made alone.