The Shadow of a Man. Hornung Ernest William

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СКАЧАТЬ to twenty! Why, my good fellow, there was a blackfellows' camp in Collins Street, twenty years ago! Corrobborees, and all that, where the trams run now."

      "I'm hanged if there were," rejoined Spicer warmly. "Not twenty years ago, no, nor yet thirty!"

      "Say forty if it makes you happy. It doesn't affect my argument. You don't expect me to bolt out of this verandah because some poor devil painted it red before I was breeched? What shall it profit us that there were bushrangers once upon a time, and blacks before the bushrangers? The point is that they're both about as extinct as the plesiosaurus – "

      "Kill whose cat?" interposed the storekeeper in a burst of his peculiar brand of badinage. "He's coming it again, Ives; you'll have another chance of showing off, old travelling-rug!"

      "And all you've got to offer one instead," concluded Bethune, "besides the subtleties of your own humour, is a so-called turkey the size of a haystack, that'll ram its beak down your gun-barrel if you wait long enough."

      The Rugbeian laughed outright, and Spicer gained time by insulting him while he rummaged his big head for a retort worthy of Bethune; it was worthier of himself when it came.

      "You want adventure, do you? I know the place for you, and its within ten miles of where you sit. Blind Man's Block!"

      "Reminds one of the Tower," yawned Bethune.

      "It'll remind you of your sins if ever you get bushed in it! Ten by ten of abandoned beastliness; not a hoof or a drop between the four fences; only scrub, and scrub, and scrub of the very worst. Mallee and porcupine – porcupine and mallee. But you go and sample it; only don't get too far in from the fence. If you do you may turn up your toes; and you won't be the first or the last to turn 'em up in Blind Man's Block."

      "What of?" asked Bethune sceptically.

      "Thirst," said Spicer; "thirst and hunger, but chiefly thirst."

      "In fenced country?"

      "It's ten miles between the fences, and not a drop of water, nor the trace of a track. It's abandoned country, I'm telling you."

      "But you could never be more than five miles from a fence; surely you could hit one or other of them and follow it up?"

      "Could you?" said the storekeeper. "Well, you try it, and let me know! Try it on horseback, and you'll see what it's like to strike a straight line through mallee and porcupine; and after that, if you're still hard up for an adventure, just you try it on foot."

      "Don't you, Theodore," advised Rigden from his chair. "I'm not keen on turning out all hands to look for you, old chap."

      "But is the place really as bad as all that?" inquired Moya, following him into the conversation for the look of the thing.

      "Worse," said Rigden, and leaned forward, silent. In another moment he had risen, walked to the end of the verandah, and returned as far as Bethune's chair. "Sure you want an adventure, Theodore? Because the Assyrians are coming down in the shape of the mounted police, and it's the second time they've been here to-day. Looks fishy, doesn't it?"

      Listening, they heard the thin staccato jingle whose first and tiniest tinkle had been caught by Rigden; then with one accord the party rose, and gathered at the end of the verandah, whence the three black horsemen could be seen ambling into larger sizes, among the tussocks of blue-bush, between the station and the rising moon.

      "What do they want?" idly inquired Bethune.

      "A runaway convict," said Rigden, quietly.

      "No!" cried Spicer.

      "Is it a fact?" asked Ives, turning instinctively to Miss Bethune.

      "I believe so," replied Moya, with notable indifference.

      "Then why on earth have you been keeping it dark, both of you?" demanded Bethune, and he favoured the engaged couple with a scrutiny too keen for one of them. Moya's eyes fell. But Rigden was equal to the occasion.

      "Because the police don't want it to get about. That's why," said he shortly.

      And Moya admired his resource until she had time to think; then it revolted her as much as all the rest. But meanwhile the riders were dismounting in the moonlight. Rigden went out to meet them, and forthwith disappeared with Harkness among the pines.

      "No luck at all," growled the sergeant. "We're clean off the scent, and it licks me how he gave you such a wide berth and us the slip. We can't have been that far behind him. None of the other gentlemen came across him, I suppose?"

      "As a matter of fact I've only just mentioned it to them," replied Rigden, rather lamely. "I thought I'd leave it till you came back. You seemed not to want it to get about, you know."

      "No more I do – for lots of reasons. I mean to take the devil, alive or dead, and yet I don't want anybody else to take him! Sounds well, doesn't it? Yet I bet you'd feel the same in my place – if you knew who he was!"

      Rigden stood mute.

      "You won't cut me out for the reward, Mr. Rigden, if I tell you who it is, between ourselves? You needn't answer: of course you won't. Well – then – it's good old Bovill the bushranger!" And the sergeant's face shone like the silver buttons of the sergeant's tunic.

      "Captain Bovill!" gasped Rigden, but only because he felt obliged to gasp something.

      "Not so loud, man!" implored the sergeant, who had sunk his own voice to the veriest whisper. "Yes – yes – that's the gentleman. None other! Incredible, isn't it? Of course it wasn't Darlinghurst he escaped from, but Pentridge; only I thought you'd guess if I said; it's been in the papers some days."

      "We get ours very late, and haven't always time to read them then. I knew nothing about it."

      "Well, then, you knew about as much as is known in Victoria from that day to this. The police down there have lost their end of the thread, and it was my great luck to pick it up again by the merest chance last week. I'll tell you about that another time. But you understand what it would mean to me?"

      "Rather!"

      "To land him more or less single-handed!"

      "I won't tell a soul."

      "And don't you go and take the man himself behind my back, Mr. Rigden!" the policeman was obliged to add, with such jocularity as men feign in their deadliest earnest.

      But Rigden's laugh was genuine and involuntary.

      "I can safely promise that I won't do that," said he. "But ask the other fellows if they've seen the kind of man you describe; if they haven't, no harm done."

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