Irralie's Bushranger/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X
IRRALIE'S DESERTS
The voices were in dispute so warm that even the Englishman's had lost something of its habitual drawling deliberation. But not until the speakers were inside the stable could the pair without catch a word. Then they heard everything through the cracks and crannies between log and log.
"Look you hear, my good Young! This station is my property, and I don't intend to have the police on the place at all."
"Very sorry, Mr. Fullarton; but Mr. Villiers is still manager of the station; and I gave him my word they should be sent for hours ago. If you object, wake up the boss and settle it with him."
"Of course, I won't do that! But I do object; and I only wish you kept all your promises as well!"
"What do you mean?"
"You promised me to be responsible for the iron-store and our friend inside."
"You kept saying he was so safe! You yourself asked me in to have a drink!"
"Well, my good fellow, but if it comes to keeping one's word! You should practise what you preach. No man can be in two places at once; you undertake to remain in one, yet you want to go gallivanting after the police!"
"I can't help it. The other young fools are not fit."
"What about me?"
"You!" cried Young.
"Why not, my friend? Now look you here: let us understand each other. I don't want the police at all. I want to put that chap in a buggy and tool him over to the police, with two or three of us, well-armed, beside him. He would never be idiot enough to try anything on, and the whole thing would be done quietly without fuss. That's my idea. I've said it till I'm sick of saying it; but no, you must have the police and a public fuss, and our own men jeering at us and cheering Stingaree! Very well, my fine friend; I know a stubborn man when I meet one, and I give in. But if anybody goes for the police it shall be myself; only I don't come back till they've been and gone!"
The listeners heard a match struck, and smelt tobacco; but see they could not, without searching for a cranny wider than its fellows; and not a muscle had they moved as yet.
"You wouldn't know the way," they heard Young answer. "Which way did you come?"
"I believe through a howling desert you call the horse-paddock."
"Well, when you get out of that you take the right-hand track; not the left—that takes you to the Seven-mile. Follow the track to the right till you strike the stock-route and telegraph posts. Five miles along the stock-route—this time to the left, mind—and you come to the township and the police-barracks. But you'd much better let me go!"
"Not I, my good friend. I've heard a good deal of you young Australians; let me see one of you stick to his post! In ten minutes I shall be off; but I must first go and fetch my valise. Come along, Mr. Inexorable Young!"
And they were gone; their voices dwindled and died; and Irralie was peering at her ruffianly companion with an admiration sanctioned and concealed by the night.
"He was frightened to be left in charge of you!" she said. "He's not the man I took him for, after all. But be quick—the horse! the horse!"
They crept round to the stable-door, and found a piebald mare standing saddled in the stall.
"Venus," said Irralie, blowing out the match. "She shows, but she can go! Did you listen to those directions?"
"Yes."
"Then for mercy's sake don't follow them! Now, have we given them long enough? Mount in here; the stirrups might clink; they'll see nothing, but they might hear!"
"For the life of me I don't know why you are doing this!"
"Nor I." She struck another match. "Mount! mount!" she cried in an agony. But the match only showed her a handsome, heedless face touched for once with tenderness and concern. The dark eyes melted into hers; she dropped the match and put it out with her foot.
"If they take you again," she whispered, "I shall die!"
"They sha'n't. I am going. If I could only tell you"
"Don't try: go now: for my sake!"
He was in the saddle. She caught up an armful of straw, and threw it on the ground to deaden the noise. He leant over the withers as she led the animal forth.
"Promise me one thing," he whispered, suddenly, "or I sha'n't go at all!"
"What!"
"To let no one dream it was you—to go straight to your room and stop there till broad daylight!"
"I promise—I promise."
"Lives may depend upon it! Good-by, then. God knows how I've deceived you! I never hope to be forgiven!"
"Oh, go—go! You are breaking my heart!"
She caught and wrung his extended hand, then flung it from her with a sudden gesture of despair. A touch with his heels, and he was gone at an amble; a greater pace would have increased sound and risk alike; and yet even the gentle rhythm of those unshod, ambling hoofs was like thunder in the ears of Irralie. Others must hear! She crushed her thumbs into her ears and stood like one demented. When she removed them the sound was fainter, and still there was no other. She waited, however, with hardly a breath until all was still but her own heart, and a locust in the pines. Then for a space her strength failed her, and she leaned heavily against the stable wall.
But her brain was busy all the time, and her heart with that lawless rider over every inch of the well-known ground. Now they were at the horse-paddock gate; now galloping beyond in the teeth of their own wind. And so Irralie forgot for the moment the one injunction she had received, the one promise she had given. When at length she came back to herself, and her own peril involving his, she ran like a deer to the station; and very nearly into the arms of the last man she wanted to meet, who was stepping down from the veranda with his valise under his arm.
"Er—Miss Villiers, I presume?" said he in his well-bred drawl; and a hat was taken off with a little flourish in the dark.
Irralie had instinctively determined to disarm suspicion with civility, and, simultaneously, to delay to the last moment the discovery of the empty stable which would lead inevitably to that of the prisoner's escape. She therefore said, graciously—
"How do you know?"
"It could be no one else. I have not had the privilege of seeing you before. And then, Miss Villiers, none but the very spirited would choose a night of alarms for a ramble in the small hours! And that I find to be your reputation."
"Indeed!" said Irralie. "I couldn't sleep, that was all."
"So?"
"I was listening to your delightful music!" said Irralie, who was charmed to find herself detaining him with such ease. He had actually sat down on the edge of the veranda, with the valise across his knees; but at this last speech he sprang to his feet.
"You heard me?" he cried. "I am sorry, and yet glad! Sorry to have kept you awake—I had no idea anybody could hear—and yet delighted to think I should have such a listener. And you say you were delighted too! You appreciate! You have a soul for it! I am indeed glad that we have met, even at the eleventh hour! May I light a cigarette and talk a little music for five minutes?"
"Do—please!" said Irralie, with perfectly sincere enthusiasm.
"It is so refreshing to find anybody one can talk to up here! The piano, of course, was execrable, though not much worse than the thing you had to dance to; but it was in reasonably good tune, and one was glad to touch one again. I am going to send home for my Erard. Music one must have—especially in the desert—music and flowers. I mean to make this place one mass of geraniums! Geraniums and pansies and sweet-williams. I love those old crude flowers!"
He struck a match, and Irralie snatched a straw from the skirts of her cloak. She saw the rings blazing on his fingers as the tobacco caught and burnt. To her disappointment, however, instead of continuing the conversation, he looked at his watch by the match-light, and professed surprise at the time. It was after three o'clock. Not another moment could he stay.
"But where are you going?" asked the guilty Irralie.
"To the township—for the police—entirely against what I believe to be my better judgment. I don't intend to come back till they're gone. I wonder, Miss Villiers, if you would come up to the stable and see me off?"
Irralie hesitated in a tremor of nervous apprehensions; but decided to keep suspicion disarmed, and said, as best she could, "Certainly, if you wish it, Mr. Fullarton." Her voice shook, however, and her knees trembled, as she followed him into the dark.
"You sympathize with that poor beggar!" he startled her by saying as they walked.
"What makes you think that?"
"You weren't at the supper-table. You were with him when he was taken. You seemed to like the fellow!"
"I did," said the girl, honestly; "and I do sympathize with him in a way. Ah, you have been brought up in England; you can't understand. A bush girl might be sorry for a bushranger, but it would pass your comprehension altogether. It is only natural that it should."
"I am not so sure about that!"
The girl had spoken earnestly. It was good merely to find herself saying something that she really felt. But at his tone she threw reserve to the winds, and caught him by the sleeve on the very threshold of the empty stable. If she could prevail upon him not to enter it at all!
"Spare him!" she cried to that end. "Oh, Mr. Fullarton, obey your better judgment and don't go for the police at all. Think what will happen. They may hang him—and he a young man—as young as yourself! Give him a chance to escape; spare him, as you hope to be spared!"
The other, however, only laughed, and entering the stable struck a match. But without a sign of surprise he flashed it from the empty stall into Irralie's white face.
"Now, Miss Villiers!" said he, coldly, "what have you done with that horse?"
"I?"
She swayed where she stood, taken utterly, hopelessly, by surprise.
"Yes, you!" he answered with subdued ferocity. "You had come from this when I met you just now. I saw the straw on your cloak. You have let out that horse—confess the truth!"
His manner acted on Irralie like a tonic. "I deny your right to question me," she answered, with spirit; "nothing else! Now let me pass."
But he had stooped and picked up something as the match burnt his fingers. And for hours after, as it seemed to Irralie, he stood and blocked her way in the dark silence of the tomb.
"At least you do things thoroughly," he said at last, with his insolent sneer. "You have let out not only the horse, but—Heaven knows how!—the man as well. He shed this bandage in the straw!"
"Let me pass!" cried Irralie. "This instant—or I call for help!"
The answer came with a crisp, metallic click:
"Call at your peril! I should be sorry to inconvenience a lady of your spirit, but the slightest sound will compel me to put a bullet through your heart!"
"Mr. Fullarton!" gasped the girl.
"Not a bit of it," he replied. "Between ourselves, they call me Stingaree!"