Читать книгу Outlaw and Lawmaker - Rosa Campbell Praed - Страница 4

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CHAPTER I.

ELSIE.

Anyone who has travelled through Australia will identify the Leichardt's Land of these pages, though in the map it is called differently, with that colony in which the explorer Leichardt met his tragic fate, and to a part of which he gave his name, and the same person, if he will examine the map, should have no difficulty in discovering the Luya district, which lies on the southern border of the colony in a bend of the great Dividing Range.

The Luya, in its narrowest part, is fenced on almost three sides with mountains. Here the country is wild and mostly scrubby, intersected by spurs from the range, and broken by deep ravines and volcanic-looking gorges. There is scarcely any grazing land, and till Goondi Diggings were started, the Upper Luya was spoken of as the most picturesque district in Leichardt's Land, but as offering the least attractions to a settler of any kind. Even the Goondi "rush" some few years back, though it had for a time let loose a horde of prospectors, did not do much towards populating this particular nook below the Dividing Range. Goondi became a flourishing township and its output of gold continued steadily, but though other gold fields sprang up on the further side of the district, contrary to expectations no gold was discovered on the Luya waters, and prospectors had now given up the useless search. Moreover, Goondi was on the very edge of the district, across the highroad to the next ​colony, and beyond lay open country and fine stations for cattle and sheep. Goondi called itself the township for the Luya district, but as a matter of fact, the Luya had no especial head-centre. It is a secluded corner hemmed in by mountains, and though at no great distance from the capital of the colony and within easy reach of civilization, it is cut off by its, geographical position from the main current of life and action.

The river which waters the district has its rise in Mount Luya, the highest point of the range, then reputed inaccessible to white men. There are strange fastnesses at the foot of Mount Luya—places where, report still declares, foot of European has never trod. The Blacks have a superstitious reverence, amounting to terror, for this region, and in the aboriginal mythology, if there be indeed any such, Mount Luya with its grey desolate crags and mysterious fissures, and, on either side, twin peaked Burrum and Mount Goondi with its ribbed rampart of rock and black impenetrable scrub, might well represent the lair of Demons or the abode of Gods.

A few stray selectors had settled themselves at the head of the Luyaon the small flats and wattle ridges that offered a certain scant subsistence for stock. But these selections had, for the most part, a suspicious reputation, as affording a convenient base of operations for cattle-stealing and such nefarious practices. Certainly, one or two of these petty land-owners might be credited with strictly honourable intentions, as, for instance, that unprofitable scion of aristocracy, Lord Horace Gage, who, more romantic than practical, had been seduced by the beauty of the scenery and by a keen artistic instinct, as well as by the fascinating prospect of hunting big game in the shape of wild horses, and of starting an industry in hides and horsehair. Or a guileless new chum, such as Morres Blake, of Baròlin Gorge, with a certain ironic humour described himself, taken in by an old hand who was eager to dispose to advantage of a property no seasoned bushman would buy. It may be added that Mr. Blake had accepted his bargain with ​resignation. He turned the Gorge into a nursery for thoroughbred horses, and seldom visited the Luya, leaving the management of affairs there to his working partner, Dominic Trant. Except, however, for these selectors' homesteads, a great part of the Upper Luya belonged to the Hallett Brothers, and made portion of their station Tunimba—a troublesome bit of country in mustering time, when the broken gorges and undergrowth formed an almost impregnable refuge for "scrubbers."

Tunimba was one of the principal stations on the Luya, and extended beyond this mountainous region to the open country where was good grazing land, and where the river was no longer a shallow, uncertain stream brawling over miniature precipices, trickling through quicksands, or dropping into a chain of still, deadly-looking pools—except in flood-time, when it had a way of coming down from its source with amazing volume and rapidity. As the mountains widened out, the Luya widened and deepened, and flowed quite sedately through wooded pastures and the paddocks of well-kept head stations. Lower down it washed peaceful German plantations and the settlements of cedar-cutters, who floated their logs on its surface to the township, below which it finally emptied itself into the ocean.

Of the squatters on the Upper Luya, the Hallett Brothers were perhaps the most important, and with the prospect of greater wealth in the future than any others of the settlers in the district. They were young and enterprising, and besides Tunimba, owned stations out west, which they worked in conjunction with their southern property. Tunimbah was always quoted as the most comfortable and best managed of the Luya stations. Young Mrs. Jem Hallett, the eldest brother's wife, was considered a model housekeeper, and the most dressy woman in the district. She went to Leichardt's Town for the Government House balls, and was a lady not slow to assert her pretensions, social and otherwise. Frank Hallett, the unmarried brother, was popular in the neighbourhood as a capital fellow and a clear-headed man of business. He was particularly popular ​with ladies, being a good match and a sociable person who got up races and picnic parties in slack times, and liked to amuse himself and other people, and he was vaguely known in the colony as a man of promise. He had been mentioned in the newspapers and publicly congratulated by the Governor on having taken high honours at the Sydney University, and was considered a person likely to distinguish himself in politics. He had gone through one election, and had been beaten with credit. Since then he had been biding his time and hoping that the Luya constituency might fall vacant. Yesterday there had seemed little prospect of this being the case. Now, in a few moments after the first shock of a tragic disclosure, he saw himself member for Luya, and at no very distant date leader of the Opposition in the Leichardt's Land Assembly.

The disclosure was made by a girl.

The girl was standing on a point of rock above the steep bank, at what was called Lord Horace's Crossing. Lord Horace's homestead, Luya Dell, lay behind her. The girl was Lord Horace's wife's sister. The crossing was one of Lord Horace's fads.

He had wasted a great deal of money and labour in making it more beautiful than Nature had already done, and that was quite unnecessary, for Nature had not been niggardly in her provisions.

It was a creek flowing down one of the many gorges of Mount Luya. The creeklet ran between high banks, mostly of grey lichen-covered rock—banks which curved in and out, making caves and hollows where ferns, and parasites, and rock lilies, and aromatic smelling shrubs grew in profusion—banks that sometimes shelved upward, and sometimes hung sheer, and sometimes broke into bastion-like projections or into boulders lying pell-mell, and it seemed only kept from crashing down by the binding withes of a creeper, or the twisted trunk of a chestnut tree or crooked gum. Then there were mysterious pools with an iridescent film upon their surface and dank beds of arums and fallen logs and rugged causeways, and the triumph of Lord ​Horace's engineering skill, a bridge of unhewn stone that might have been laid in prehistoric ages by some Australian Titan.

The girl stood framed between two great cedars and outlined against a bit of blue sky. Just here there was a gap in the mountains, and a long narrow flat, on the discovery of which Lord Horace prided himself, curved round a projecting bluff and constituted the freehold of Luya Dell. It was Lord Horace who had christened the place. The girl might have postured as a model for some semi-allegoric Australian statue of Liberty. The cairn of rocks, patched with lichen and the red blossoms of the Kennedia creeper, and tufted with fern, made her a suitable pedestal. She was tall, slender, and lithe of limb, with something of the virginal grace and ease of a Diana, and her clinging holland gown was not an altogether un-goddess-like drapery. She had a red merino scarf twisted round her shoulders and waist, and wore a sort of toque of dark crimson upon her trim little head with its tendril fringe in front and knot of brown curling hair behind. Her face was oval in shape, though the features were not exactly classic. At this moment she looked alert and expectant, her dark eyes were dilated and alight, and her red lips were slightly parted in an eager smile. There was a flush on her soft almost infantine cheek which was of the warm pale tint of a fruit ripened in the shade. She had one arm lifted, and beckoned excitedly to Frank Hallett, whose pulses tingled at the sight of her.

"Stop," she cried, "I want to talk to you."

As if there were any power on earth except that she herself wielded which just then would have kept him from stopping and talking to her! He raised his hat, and put spurs to his horse. He did not trust himself to Lord Horace's bridge, which was in truth intended more for ornament than for use, but splashed through the shallow stream, and scrambled up the steep hill. She watched him leaning forward, raised in the saddle, one hand lightly clutching his horse's mane, his eager face upturned to her. It was an attractive face, bronzed, wholesome, well-featured, with clear ​eyes frank and straight looking, a pleasant smile, dark brown whiskers and moustache, and a square-cut shaven chin. He looked a typical bushman, with a little more polish than one associates with the typical bushman—had the bushman's seat, and the bushman's sinewy sapling-like figure.

But the girl did not admire the typical bushman. She would have preferred the product of a more complex civilization. In this she resembled what indeed she was, the typical Australian girl. She had not a very varied experience of the human product of a complex civilization. Her reading convinced her that she must not generalize by the specimens that drifted to Australia, and of which her own brother-in-law was an example. When she was in a discontented mood she always brought herself into a state of resignation by reflecting that nothing would have induced her to marry Lord Horace Gage.

"Of course I might have married him if I had chosen to cut Ina out," Elsie Valliant had always said to herself, with the complacent vanity of a spoiled beauty. "But one must remember that there's honour among thieves, and besides he is too great a bore for any one to put up with but Ina, who is a placid angel."

To be sure, if Lord Horace had been the heir to the Marquisate, instead of the youngest of many scantily portioned younger sons, Elsie might have altered her mind, for she had the reputation of being a very worldly and a very heartless young lady. At any rate, this was what her rejected admirers declared.

"He really is good-looking," she thought now, as she watched Frank Hallett. And she added:

"It is such a pity that he is—only Frank Hallett."

"Tell me, have you met Braile?" she questioned anxiously, as he pulled up his panting horse and flung himself from the saddle.

"Braile—the postman? No, I've been out on the run. I left Tunimba early."

"That's a pity," said the girl. "He is brimful of news ​—dying to communicate it to someone. Mrs. Jem will have a benefit when he gets to Tunimba."

"Well, I have no doubt Edith will reward him by an extra glass of grog, and that the mail will be late at Corinda in consequence," said Hallett. "What has happened?"

"Braile is never late," said the girl, not answering the question. "He is wound up to carry the mails, and nothing short of a creek risen past his saddle flaps will stop him. I have a respect for Braile. The way in which he grasped the dramatic points of the situation was most admirable."

"What is the situation? You shouldn't tantalize me. I believe it's only some joke. Nothing really exciting now—is there?"

Elsie nodded gravely. "Enough to excite Braile and Horace, and even Ina—and me. Enough to raise the district and to make you wish you were a bushranger, or the head of police, that you might be in the play-bill too."

"Then it's Moonlight out again. Have they caught him?"

"It's Moonlight, and if they had caught him should I say that you would like to be in his place?"

"I suppose not. Not," and the young man reddened and stammered and looked at her in a curious way—"not if you cared two straws about me."

He seemed to wait for her reply, but she only stared at the ground, gazing from her lofty position over his head.

"I wish you'd tell me why in any case I should wish to be Captain Moonlight."

"Because he is a hero," said the girl.

"Do you think so? Must one wear a mask and rob one's neighbours to be a hero?"

The girl made an impatient gesture. "You don't understand. You've no romance; you've no ideas beyond the eternal cattle. You are quite satisfied to be a bushman—you are more humdrum even than Ina."

He did not answer for a moment: "I am very anxious to know what the news was that old Braile brought. Look here, let me help you down from those rocks. You seem ​such miles above me. You look as if you had put yourself up for a landmark."

"So I did. I thought my red shawl would attract attention. I was trying how far I could see down the Gorge—wondering if anyone were in hiding there, and from how far they could see me. I was thinking how easy it would be to hide up in Mount Luya, and wondering"—— She stopped, and then taking his proffered hand, stepped from the pointed stone on which she had been balancing herself to a lower one, and so till she was on the level beside him. He finished her sentence—

"Wondering if there was any chance of Moonlight coming along. How should you like to be carried off by him?"

"On his black horse Abatos?"

"How do you know that his black horse is called Abatos?"

"Ah, that's part of Braile's story. Moonlight hardly ever speaks, you know. It is the Shadow who conveys his orders and intentions. But that night Moonlight was heard to say one word as he rode towards the coach, and that was 'Abatos.'"

"Why his horse's name? Why not a new 'swear'?"

"Oh!" she said with a slight accent of contempt. "Ask Horace to lend you his Lemprière."

Hallett flushed. "I am not as ignorant as you think. I had forgotten for the moment. And so you would like to be carried off by the bushrangers?"

"I think I should like it immensely. I should enjoy the opportunity of talking to Moonlight and his masked henchmen. I shouldn't be at all afraid of their not treating me in a gentlemanly and considerate manner. Only you see I shouldn't be worth carrying off. Unless Mammie realized on the piano and the sewing-machine—we've not a stick else worth twopence—there would be nothing to ransom me with. And anyhow the piano and the sewing-machine would hardly run to a ransom."

"Your brother-in-law?" suggested Hallett.

"Poor Horace has telegraphed to his brother-in-law. The ​Bank will come down on the Dell unless Lord Waveryng sends him a thousand pounds at once. Leichardt's Town, and the wedding trip, and the imported bull have cleared him out. No, I should be left to my fate."

"That seems a melancholy state of things," said Hallett, with an embarrassed laugh; "but in the event of such a calamity as your abduction by Moonlight, Miss Valliant, I think there are some of us fellows who wouldn't think twice of selling the last hoof off their runs to buy you back."

The girl laughed too, and blushed. "Perhaps, after all, I shouldn't want to be bought back. Now I am going to tell you——"

She seated herself on the lowest boulder of the cairn, and he, holding his horse's bridle, leaned against the cedar tree and listened.

She began, "Goondi coach was stuck up on Thursday night."

"Ah! So that's it. The brutes!"

"Do you mean the bushrangers? No, they didn't behave like brutes. Two men against a coachful. Think! Peter Duncan, the millionaire, was on the coach, and Moonlight made him sign a cheque for £2,000 to be cashed at Goondi Bank."

"By Jove!" exclaimed Hallett, "that was cheek. Well, I'm glad it was Peter Duncan. The old miser. He deserves it."

"Moonlight only robs people who deserve to lose their money, and the Government, and the Banks, who don't miss it," went on Elsie imperturbably. "He protects the widow and the orphan. There was a widow on the coach too. She was an old German woman, and she was hurrying down to Leichardt's Town to say goodbye to her only son. He was to sail in The Shooting Star, and her only chance of seeing him was by catching the Goondi coach the next morning. She had her savings with her to give him. She offered them all to Moonlight if he would get her into Goondi."

"And he took them?"

"No," cried the girl triumphantly. "He gave them all ​back to her. Well, Mr. Slaney was in the coach also, and he was in a bad way too. He had got bitten by something, and was blood-poisoned, and he was going to the doctor."

"Slaney the member?"

"Yes, the member for Luya. Oh, I have been thinking of something. I'll tell you presently. I'm a wretch, but I can't help it. Who could be sorry for Mr. Slaney?"

"You don't mean?"

"Wait, wait. I must first prove to you that Moonlight is a hero. He and his Shadow—you know that's what they call the other man—sacked the mail, got Mr. Duncan's cheque, and then tied up the driver and the passengers each to a separate tree, some way off the road. You see Moonlight's only chance of cashing his cheque was by being at the Goondi Bank directly it opened, before the coach was missed, or the telegraph wires could be set working."

"I see. It struck me at first that it would have been safer to have had the cheque drawn on the Leichardt's Town Bank; but of course the other was his wisest plan. Moonlight is a shrewd fellow. Well, Miss Valliant, what is the rest of Braile's story?"

"Ah, now comes the point. Think of the daring! Moonlight meant to leave the coach and the passengers tied up till someone found them in the morning. The old German woman went on her knees to him and cried about her son. Mr. Slaney offered a cheque for £500 if only he would get the coach to Goondi. Mr. Slaney guessed that he was dying."

"Dying!"

"Wait. Moonlight refused the cheque, but said that he would take Mr. Slaney's word. Moonlight and his Shadow had an argument. The Shadow told him he was a fool. It ended in Moonlight having his way. He gave his horse to the Shadow, mounted the box, and drove the coach to within a mile of Goondi, with Mr. Slaney and the German woman, leaving all the others tied up to their respective gum-trees."

"And then?"

"Then day was breaking. Moonlight turned the coach ​off the road, fastened the horses, and remounted his own. Mr. Slaney was groaning with pain. The coach to Leichardt's Town, which the German woman wanted to catch, was to start at eight. The Bank opens at nine. You see what a risk it was. Moonlight explained the situation, and told them he would trust to their honour. He showed the German woman a cross-cut by which she could meet the down coach outside Goondi. Mr. Slaney gave his word that he would not give information to the police, and walked on to Goondi straight to the doctor's house. Moonlight waited——"

Elsie paused dramatically.

"How do you know all these details?" asked Hallett, struck by the vivid way in which the girl told her story.

"Mr. Slaney told the doctor afterwards. Braile had got the particulars at Goondi. And it is easy enough to fill in from one's imagination. I have been thinking of nothing else all day. I have been picturing Moonlight nerving himself to walk into the Bank, not knowing whether a policeman would be there to take him. It seems to me a brave thing to have staked one's liberty on the honour of a poor old German woman and Mr. Slaney."

"They were true to him?"

"Yes. At nine o'clock, when the Bank opened, a very respectably got-up and quiet-looking bushman went in and presented Mr. Duncan's cheque, which he said had been paid him for a mob of store cattle. The Bank cashed it without question. Two hours afterwards it was all over the place that the Goondi coach had been stuck up, and Mr. Duncan bled of £2,000. But Moonlight and his Shadow and the respectably dressed bushman had disappeared."

"And Mr. Slaney?" asked Frank Hallett.

"Mr. Slaney," repeated Elsie solemnly. "Ah, this is what concerns you. The member for Luya died early this morning."