Читать книгу Half Crown Bob and Tales of the Riverine - Price Warung - Страница 7

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Yet when the Jessie came abreast of the lower point of Pugga Milly--she took the inner channel, because of lighter draught--Skipper Barton saw that it was a woman who was standing by the signal fire, a woman holding something in her arms, even when she stooped to throw another branch of sapling on the flames.

"Jupiter!" cried the mate. "It's a petticoat."

Jim, prescient of trouble, was silent. And the infernal exhaust was now humming another and more sardonic tune, "Break you, break you--Jim!" Nothing about "making" him now, only "breaking."

"Slow her down!" Jim ordered at last. And the craft trembled reluctantly to half speed.

"Oh!" the woman cried, "oh, stop--for God's sake, stop!" And the Jessie Jane, with much inward and outward cursing from her officers, was eased down about twenty yards from the island bank.

"What is it, ma'am?" Jim spoke with marvellous distinctness considering his throat was full of maledictions. "Going to Echuca?"

"No; Swan Hill!" She stopped, choking.

Jim gave a sigh of relief before he spoke again. "But we're going to Echuca."

"Oh!" It was a long wail this time. "O--oh, Echuca's too far--my child is dyin'--dyin', and I must have a doctor. Oh, take me to Swan Hill!"

"Impossible, ma'am. I'll take you to Echuca--there are better doctors there."

"But Swan Hill's nearer--three hours, and--Echuca, oh God, is twenty or thirty. And my child is dyin'--is dyin'!"

Jim and the mate looked at one another. Then the mate uttered an inquiry as to whether she had asked another boat.

"Yes," she wailed, "but they would not listen. Said you were comin'. Oh, for God's sake, take me! I have a pound--it is all I have. I'll give you that!"

A pound! Jim's throat blistered. And fifteen hundred pounds clear profit hanging on that trip! A pound! The joke of it! And so he said "No," and in the same breath sent the telegraph call to the engine-room--"Full speed ahead!"

When the woman saw the Jessie's steam curving towards mid-stream, she shrieked with a horrible acuteness of sound. Over the exhaust was plainly audible--"Oh, are you men? Fiends you are. May God blight your homes--your wives--your children! May you have your little ones dyin' for the sake of a doctor some one else could reach, but wouldn't! Oh, devils!"

Now in Jim's dream that day, of what might be if he pulled off the Mungadel job, was included a home and a wife and babies clinging around. There was no wife as yet, not even a sweetheart. But he had always thought that the glory of his manhood would never be achieved until he held wife and child in the sway of his strong arm. And the woman's unreasoning cry pierced him with a superstitious fear.

He signalled the engineer to slow down. "But," he asked the mate, "is there a man aboard who'd take that woman in a dingy to Swan Hill?"

"A forty-mile pull! You're drunk, boss."

"No, Bill, not drunk--only mad! I'm going to take that woman to the Hill. Damn her!--and damn Tom Lang of Mungadel!"