Читать книгу The Outlaw - John David Hennessy - Страница 7

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A man who undertakes to personate another must be prepared to confront novel and unexpected difficulties, and when Salathiel undertook to play the part of John Bennett in the Broadhaven Valley, he met with many more surprises than he had bargained for.

It was necessary for his plans that he should remain for at least three weeks or a month in the district, and that, he found, would necessitate his carrying out the schoolmaster's role pretty well in its entirety. Capable and audacious as he was, he found that he needed to have all his wits about him to sustain the character he had assumed.

In a rough and homely way, the school committee had done its best to make the new teacher comfortable. A tiny two-roomed slab shanty, with a front veranda, had been run up for a residence by the side of the school-house. This had been roughly furnished with tables and chairs and a stretcher by the committee. He was to have his dinner at night at a neighbouring settler's homestead, some half a mile distant; and the considerate thoughtfulness of Mrs. Carey and others had seen to his being provided with a start in the way of ordinary housekeeping.

One had sent over tea and sugar, another flour, another bacon, and another corned beef; for, rough as they mostly were, they were good-hearted folk, and the opening of a school was regarded as a very important event by the community. But, somehow, things cropped up which Jack had never dreamed of. It was suggested that a Sunday afternoon service might be held once a month in the school-house; and one of the first questions put to Jack by old Donald Macpherson was whether he could sing the Psalms of David and preach a bit.

Jack gravely promised to think it over, and, to gain time, recommended Macpherson to consult the school committee about it; he said he must get his school curriculum going first. The Latin word staggered Donald, as it was intended to, and he assured his wife and family that the new schoolmaster was a "varre larn'd mon."

There was a three-quarter moon shining, so, after Jack had made a billy of tea, he went out into the warm night air to have a smoke, and sat down upon a log in the school-house paddock.

He turned over in his mind the events of the day, and laughed a good deal to himself about Poddy Carey and Betsy. He was not apprehensive, at present, of any unlooked-for consequences attending this last daring move of his. There was no one but Bennett, the schoolmaster, to give him away, and he had made it all right in that quarter. It was evident to him that he was going to have some fun among the unsophisticated natives of the district; but he must be careful.

His chief anxiety was how he should start the school and carry it on with a decent measure of success. He thought of his big and probably unruly scholars, not a few of whom would be young women of from seventeen to one and twenty, and young cornstalks in their teens, some as tall, or taller, than himself.

"I've got myself into a pretty mess this time, and no mistake," he said; and then he laughed at the grotesqueness of the whole situation, laughed until his pipe went out and an owl hooted at him, somewhere from the surrounding bush.

This startled him for a moment, for it was a well-known signal among outlaws; but having satisfied himself that this was only the ill-omened hoot of a bird, he returned and sat down on the log again.

It was one of those still, soft, dreamy nights, which, in the moonlight of a voluptuous Australian summer, inclines to thought, and awakens memories which live below the surface thoughts of ordinary life.

Salathiel had no regret that he had wrested freedom from the hands of a hard fate, even at the price of outlawry; it was something to breathe that unfettered air and feel himself his own master. And, before we condemn this man too severely, we should remember that the whole atmosphere of his life, for many years, had been tainted by his surroundings; for in those days the Bush morals of Australia were crude and lax. Vast areas of country, called 'runs,' were unfenced; might was mostly right; and the ownership of the great herds of cattle which roamed the grassy wastes a matter of perpetual give-and-take among the squatters. Acts which in these days would send men to prison were winked at as smart and clever, if the perpetrators were only high enough up the social ladder. With not a few, it was understood that beef killed for station purposes should, as a rule, bear some other man's brand. A squatter, dining with a neighbour, would be hospitably urged to take another helping from a juicy sirloin which, he well knew, was cut from one of his own prime beasts; and he retorted upon his neighbour by the simple plan of doing as he was done by.

It is not to be wondered at that the rights of property were lightly regarded by so many of the convict servants of the squatters; or that bushranging was resorted to by desperate men, and bushrangers so generally protected by those who indirectly or otherwise benefited by their robberies. Salathiel, however, was much above the ordinary class of outlaws, and sitting on that log, he struck a train of thought which carried him far away from the valley farms and his present grotesque surroundings. His father was of Jewish parentage, married to an educated woman of Gentile blood. He was now a man of wealth and social position in Sydney, although the bar sinister was on the family escutcheon, for, through a trivial offence in boyhood, the elder Salathiel had been a 'convict once.' Sorrow had, however, sweetened and purified his father's life, and sitting there, Salathiel recalled the early teachings of his mother and the refined surroundings of his father's household. Like many another convict, he had had a good education and pious training; but in a weak hour of temptation he had brought himself within the clutches of a pitiless law, too often, in those hard days, administered to first offenders—especially if they were the children of one-time convicts—without being tempered by mercy. He had worked for twelve months with a road gang in irons; and truly Fate seemed doggedly against him, for, after getting out of the chain gang, through an intrepid act of bravery, by which, at great personal risk, he saved a soldier's life, he fell into the hands of a hard, exacting master, who, on frivolous pretences, so that he might retain his services the longer, prevented him from getting his good conduct ticket. Soured and dispirited, he was then assigned to the owner of Eurimbla station, where he had, several times, contemplated suicide; but his early teaching saved him, and he plodded along at his work, until he was ultimately promoted to assist the bookkeeper. To escape a threatened flogging he had taken to the Bush; and yet he would have given much that night, hardened as he was, if he could have redeemed the past, even to settle down amid the simple-minded people living around the Bluff.

It was arranged that on the following Saturday there should be a formal opening of the school and welcome to the new teacher. A local magistrate was to preside, and Jack had been asked by the committee to give a short address upon 'Education,' and intimate the lines upon which he proposed to conduct the school.

"Let me see," thought Jack, "I shall have to teach reading and spelling, writing and arithmetic, history and geography, grammar and singing. I might introduce drill, dancing, and deportment. By the way, some instruction in shooting might not be out of place for the elder boys. Oh," he exclaimed, "I am forgetting Scripture lessons, which that old sinner, Donald Macpherson, lays so much stress upon. Yes, I could even teach that, without being any more of a hypocrite and a humbug than are scores of present day parsons. They won't want Euclid, algebra, or drawing, while I am here, at any rate; and as for languages, they are outside the curriculum of Elementary Schools, I must look over those books Bennett gave me, and then, I think, I can start without fear of local criticism or the chance of the beggars tripping me up."

His thoughts went back to Bennett again, "Oh, there's no fear! He'll never 'come it' on me," he said, and laughed.

Salathiel had made the acquaintance of the schoolmaster at a Bush hotel, where the outlaws of the district could always count on a welcome, and friendly warning if necessary. Men of Bennett's profession were frequently addicted to periodical bouts of drinking, nor is it much to be wondered at, in the then state of things. The life of a Bush school-teacher was lonely and monotonous, and the surroundings were mostly uncongenial to an educated man. Many of them had taken to the life under a cloud, and drink was their nepenthe.

Jack had taken to Bennett on their first meeting, for he soon found out that there was a good deal in common between them; and as Bennett was teaching on a neighbouring station, they not infrequently met, and with pipe and glass and talk of other scenes and days, beguiled the hours of night. On one of these occasions, Bennett told Salathiel of the offer he had, to go to the south coast district to take charge of a new school, and it was then it occurred to the bushranger to personate him and carry out a certain matter which he had long planned to accomplish.

So, on the assurance of good behaviour, and also on the payment of a substantial consideration, which was a windfall to the needy schoolmaster, he had got Bennett to agree to the deception. Schoolmasters were scarce, and it turned out that Bennett had the choice of another situation on a Western run, so he took the money, and giving out that he was going south, went west, under an assumed name. There was very little risk in this for the schoolmaster, for in the Forties one name was as good as another in the case of a large portion of the free men of the Colony.