Set a Thief to Catch a Thief

by G. B. Lancaster

SET A THIEF TO
CATCH A THIEF

By G. B. LANCASTER

"‘I CAN assure you, father, that no man could do more than I have done, but Balestier is impossible. He has joined a travelling circus now, and is doing buck-jump acts all down the Murrumbidgee and across to Tieryboo, and the people we have to mix with are most offensive to me. Several times he has gambled away the very shirt from his back, and once he took mine also, and I caught cold on the way home. I consider that it is asking a little too much to expect me to bear this for ever, and as I have made no headway in four months of a misery which I shall never forget, I wish to be allowed to come home at once.’"

Joynt laid his son's letter on the heavy office table and looked across at his partner over his gold spectacles.

"What are we going to do?" he asked.

Bowden rubbed his broad jowls reflectively, but his brain was working with the vivid clarity of lightning.

"Arthur is too young," he said. "We must send a man who has been there himself. We must send Lutwyche, Joynt."

"Lutwyche! But he doesn't know Northern Queensland, even if——"

"Sho! He knows life, if his reputation and his eyes go for anything, and this young Balestier evidently needs strong handling. We'll send Lutwyche, on the principle of 'set a thief to catch a thief,' and he must fight it out as he can. Shall we have him in at once?"

It was ever Bowden's way to force the pace, even as it was Joynt's to hang back. But Joynt nodded now, although the line of his thin lips expressed disapproval. His pride was touched on his son's account, yet too much was at stake for hesitation. Bowden rang a bell and gave the order; and then there was silence in the dusky, well-furnished room, which smelt of law books and good leather, until the man for whom he had sent came in, closing the door quietly behind him. All that Lutwyche did was quiet, but it was the quiet of restraint, never of resignation or obsequiousness, and the two prosperous middle-aged men moved with a sudden sense of uneasiness as though a new force had come into the room with Lutwyche.

"We sent for you, Lutwyche," began Bowden, fingering his gold fob pompously, "to tell you that we have decided to entrust to you a very delicate and difficult mission—one which Mr. Arthur Joynt has essayed, unfortunately, without success——"

"And which, as a mark of confidence which we hope you will merit, we pass on to you," added Joynt.

Lutwyche glanced from one to the other, and a slight red showed under the tan of his thin face.

"Thank you," he said dryly, and waited. He did not express the gratitude which his employers had expected, and Bowden's voice rasped a little as he continued—

"We have lately had communications from Sir Vernon Balestier, of Vernon Court, Lancashire, requesting us to trace his son, who left England about five years ago. After much difficulty we have succeeded in this, and we commissioned Mr. Arthur Joynt to follow him up and bring him down to Melbourne. He—er—has not been able to do so. Mr. Balestier is—is—unfortunately, he is doing—er—buck-jump acts in a bush travelling circus, and he declines to—er—vacate the position——"

"And, moreover, he has subjected my son to extreme unpleasantness," interjected Joynt.

"Ah!" said Lutwyche sympathetically.

"The young man is about twenty-four years old," went on Bowden. "He is now heir, through the death of his elder brother, to a very considerable property, and his father wishes him to return to England and take up his rightful position. We think that you may, perhaps, as an older man, be able to convince him of the necessity——"

"He does not, we are afraid, appear to be a very desirable character," struck in Joynt. "My son says that he will gamble away the very clothes off his body, and he is neither a teetotaler nor a church-goer. You—we understand that you presumably know how failings of this sort may be overcome—pardon my speaking on a personal matter—and we therefore think that you may have more influence over this misguided young man than my son, who has lived a blameless life."

Lutwyche dropped his eyes, or they would assuredly have startled these two comfortable men, with their broadcloth and their decent money-making souls, and there was a twitch of humour on his mouth. This was putting a premium on sin indeed, although the idea would have been horror to Bowden and Joynt, Solicitors, Melbourne, not to mention young Arthur Joynt of the blameless life.

"I don't mind being subjected to extreme unpleasantness also, in the interests of the firm," he said, "but I don't see how I can do more. Mr. Balestier appears to have made his choice."

"He must be persuaded to unmake it. We—er—we can always outlive the follies of youth, and return in penitence to the beaten track."

The soul in Lutwyche winced, for well it knew the desolate nakedness of the beaten track to one who has sown no seeds of honour there. Blindly and with stumbling feet he had come back to it after that lesson which had brought, not penitence, but rather a dogged desire to inflict daily punishment on himself. That he had found the means on a stool in the office of Bowden and Joynt would have possibly surprised these gentlemen rather more than they deserved, considered Lutwyche. That the whole of him revolted from using his knowledge to persuade another man to forsake those wild, deadly joys which tear in memory at a man's heart in his latter days would, perhaps, have surprised them more. But Lutwyche's spirit, for all that he had it in chains now, was that of a gambler still, and he realised that in this game the odds were heavily against him—so heavily that the blood ran quicker along his veins when he boarded the North-going train in the next mid-day, and his desire to bring young Balestier back with him was very little influenced by the substantial money benefits connected with it.

One day in the following week, with hideous memories of little coastal steamers and bush inns behind him, he came to Dingadee, with its tin-roofed shanties, its weatherboard hotels, and vacant selections of rung trees and prickly-pear clumps. The heavy bush surrounded it, and the white road ran through it—the broad highway of the rover who follows his wandering fires for ever, and cannot rest by a fireside of his own. Lutwyche walked up to the Station Hotel and found young Arthur Joynt drinking lukewarm lemonade under a split-leaved Bangalo palm. The last four months had not destroyed the dapper little city man in him, but they had woefully depressed it. He ordered another lemonade and pushed a chair up for Lutwyche.

"It means hundreds to the firm to get him!" he said. "Hundreds! I have told him so, but even that won't move him. He is the—the most selfish ruffian I have ever met, and, if I were his father, I would pay half my fortune for the certainty that I would never see him again."

"Where is he now?" asked Lutwyche.

"In the circus tent, I suppose. His act comes on about now. It really is disgusting that a gentleman should do such things. And he will be a baronet some day." Joynt sighed, looking down at his little neat legs. "Yes, the ways of Providence are very strange. Are you going over to see him? Then I will say good-bye, for there is only one train a day out of this horrible place, and it goes in half an hour."

"Good-bye," said Lutwyche cheerfully. "Aren't you going to wish me better luck than you had?"

"I don't suppose you'll have any at all. By the way, don't ask for Balestier—say you want Rick the Rider. He is doing an elopement act with the Little Living Wonder, too. Take care that he doesn't marry her."

Lutwyche walked across to the tent in the belief that this business was going to be one in which only such as young Joynt could meddle with impunity. Balestier, if he had any sense of humour, would laugh at Joynt. But he would not be able to laugh at Lutwyche, and therefore he would certainly resent interference as Lutwyche himself would have resented it.

In the tent he sat on a form, with a child's feet in the small of his back and the odour of wild beasts, bananas, and cheap tobacco all about him, and watched the antics of a couple of clowns, who gave joy to the bearded bushmen and the draggled-looking women and the healthy, rough children who crowded the tent. Then a big chestnut horse was led in, wincing and shying from the flares and the kerosene lamps and the shine of white faces, and the man beside Lutwyche spoke suddenly.

"Killed a chap out on the Murray, he did. My—savaged him!" he said, and relapsed again into silence.

Lutwyche shrugged his shoulders. Men were beasts still in their sneaking desire for blood, and the man who pandered to that desire could be little better.

The curtains at the far end of the ring were jerked apart, and a man came out—a tall man, finely formed, with a laugh on his mouth and a light in the grey, keen eyes that glanced round on his audience in easy confidence.

"Feelin' bad?" suddenly inquired the man next to Lutwyche.

"No," said Lutwyche. "Why?"

"You're makin' noises like it, then. Don't do it agin, mister, for that there hoss is scary enough now, I guess."

Lutwyche did not know that he had spoken. He did not know that anyone spoke now. Eyes and brain were fixed on the man in the ring—the man whom chance had delivered up to him at last, the man whose life he had spoiled, and who, by a sudden turn of Fate's wheel, had spoiled life and the hereafter for Lutwyche.

The short daring battle was fought, and the chestnut was ridden out, sweating and conquered. Then Lutwyche arose, with his thin face drawn and pain in his eyes, and went round to ask for Rick the Rider. Behind the curtains a few flares gave a yellow, smoky light, and moving figures showed uncertainly. Then Balestier came forward, a lithe theatrical figure in his scarlet shirt and gaudy waistcloth, and his tone was easy and indifferent.

"Want me to ride a horse for you, sir?" he asked.

"No," said Lutwyche, speaking slowly. "No, I want—you, Boy Bailey."

Balestier straightened up with a jerk, and Lutwyche saw the cold glint of his eyes.

"Lutwyche!" he said. "Lutwyche!" And then, sharply: "What are you here for?"

"To take Arthur Joynt's place," said Lutwyche.

"What!" Balestier stared. Then he began to laugh. "You've grown mighty moral since we met last, Lutwyche," he said. "Have you forgotten that it was you first set me going along this track?"

"No," said Lutwche. He seemed to speak with difficulty. "No. But I didn't know that it was you until I saw you. You never told me that your name was Balestier."

"People hashed up the pronunciation so hideously that I dropped it." Balestier shrugged, and in his voice was a shade of the old fastidiousness, which seemed the only thing remaining of the soft-faced boy whom Lutwyche had introduced to those fires which sear and wither the soul. "And what are you doing now, Lutwyche? You look confoundedly—respectable. Paid back that trust money yet, eh?"

The question and the laugh were lightly brutal. Lutwyche stared at him with a curious stilling of the heart, as of one who sees his own sins and passions quickened into concrete form before him. Boy Bailey had been such a fine lad, such a wholesome, jolly lad, until he and Lutwyche had become mates together.

"I paid back the last of that money three weeks ago," he said. "I have worked day and night for four years to do it."

"Really! Deuced noble of you, isn't it? But she died, didn't she—the woman you swindled? I fancy that you reformed a bit too late, Lutwyche."

It was that death which had reformed Lutwyche, and the pain of its memory stung him into sudden savagery.

"What business is that of yours?" he said.

"Oh, none—none, except that I think I have a right to know your intimate affairs, if you've come up here to learn mine. And if you've come for that, you'll do it, I suppose. You usually did do what you wanted to do, I remember, for you never had too many scruples to hamper you anywhere."

"You've learnt to use your tongue in these last years." Lutwyche laughed dryly. "Yes, I've come to save you and to send you back to your sorrowing parents. And there's humour enough in that to appeal to us both, I think."

"Quite so," said Balestier. He glanced round as a bell rang, reached a revolver from a bench, and thrust it into the red sash at his waist. "I'll be through this in twenty minutes," he said. "Wait for me outside, and then we'll go over to the hotel and drink to the luck of our first meeting, Lutwyche."

He disappeared through the curtains with a laugh, and Lutwyche went out to the calm night of hot stars, and of hot winds filled with the scents of wattle and honeysuckle, and the dry rustle of belar and messmate leaves down the gully. The punishment which had dropped on him was greater than he had thought possible, and through those twenty minutes under the stars he learned that it would not be for money's sake, nor yet for the sake of that gambler spirit which he would never entirely quench, that he was going to set himself, body and soul, to bring Boy Bailey back to a clean man's honour once more.

But in the weeks that followed Lutwyche ate bread in the sweat of the spirit many times. Balestier was uncertain handling bitter always, and breaking out into uncontrollable wildness often. Slowly they drifted north to the Gulf, with Balestier still eloping nightly with the Little Living Wonder, who was a pinched, plain girl in a tattered frock behind the scenes, making impudent love to her when he was in the mood, and again ignoring her as though she were no more than the flies which walked over everything, until Lutwyche expected sometimes to feel them crawling on his brain. But love meant little to Balestier, and drink meant little, although it was daily coming to mean more. The cards were his curse, as they had been Lutwyche's, and the sins of this godfather of Boy Bailey's youth were being visited on the child. And Lutwyche, toiling to repair the mischief he had done, seemed to make no headway at all.

All day and all night the heat laid moist, relentless hands on them, and the wild brumbies brought in at every little township for Balestier to ride took from him more vitality than he was able to give easily. Rung trees and split fences succeeded cast- iron tanks and board houses, to give place, again, to stretches of barren sand and ragged bush that made cracking, warping noises in the heat. And all the months long the cloudless sky burned above them, and no dew came to bless the breathless nights. Balestier was quicker in his temper during the hot weather. There were hollows in his brown cheeks, and a nasty watching light in his blue eyes, and the hands, which were steel-steady when they touched a horse, seemed itching always for the cards.

They came at last to a lonely township washed by the northern waters. A few pearling-luggers were becalmed beyond the curve of the beach, and their owners spent the days drinking and playing cards in the one hotel. Life had nothing else to offer them in this backwater of man's desolation. Balestier played that night, as always, and Lutwyche watched, also as always. He had schooled himself to watch without a flutter of the pulses, but he knew that he dared not play again. He had learned his limitations, and there lay his salvation. Balestier refused limitations. No stake was too trivial or too great for him. He would have played for a brass button or his life with the same careless delight in the game. But this night he had drunk more than usual. He played feverishly, muttering over his ill-luck, and calling the barman again and yet again to refill the big "schooner" at his elbow. Through open doors and windows drifted the stagnant smell of seaweed and of the rotting shell decanted from the pearling-luggers, and always there was the slow washing sound of the sea. Balestier thrust the cards away from him and stood up unsteadily.

"Broke!" he said, and his laugh was angry. "I've nothing left to put up, for a man can't go quite naked, even here. But I wish I had something more for you. It isn't once in twenty times I meet a man who can give me such a doing as you have done."

The man opposite him leaned back. He was quiet and wiry as the backswoodsmen are, and he had the Australian's love of sport for sport's sake.

"I've brought a horse down for you to handle, Rick the Rider," he said. "A devil, if ever there was one. I'll play you double or quits for your share of the gate-money—that is, if you're game to back him. There's not too many would be."

Balestier laughed again. Drink had dulled his senses, and he was less quick than usual in answering. Lutwyche looked up.

"I warn you that Rick is not game over everything, Jessop," he said.

"That's new hearing." Balestier flung back his head and laughed loudly. "Give it a name, Lutwyche. What am I afraid of, eh?"

"You know that as well as I do," said Lutwyche.

"Ah," said Jessop, "got a soft side somewhere, has he?" And then Balestier lunged forward, with a sudden flare in his blue eyes.

"Dash it! Don't you tell lies about me, my friend!" he said to Lutwyche. "I never burked anything in my life, and you know it."

"You wouldn't be game to do something that I've done, anyway," said Lutwyche composedly. All the room was listening now, and through the reek of pipe-smoke they watched the streak of red on Balestier's face and the twitching of the muscle in his throat. Suddenly he plunged his hand into his trouser pocket, dragging out some coin.

"There!" he said, and slapped it down on the table. "That's what I owe Jessop, and it's every blessed cent I've got! I can't pledge that—it's gone. But I'll bet you—I'll bet you my pay for the next fortnight that I am game to do any mortal thing that you have done!"

Lutwyche sat very still. It was the chance he had been praying for.

"I have sworn off gambling for four years and a half," he said, "and I'll bet you whatever you like that you are not game to swear off it for three months, Balestier."

There was a roar of delight from bearded throats. Horny hands beat the tables, and heavy feet clattered approval. Balestier stood still, swaying a little, and under the warm tan of his sunburn his face went sickly white. Lutwyche watched him with a still intensity. The boy was young yet—young enough and strong enough in the native bright gold of his manhood to take up this challenge and break with it out of the bonds that shackled him. But had he the grit and the will to help his heritage? Lutwyche breathed quickly, and there was sweat on his forehead where it met the dark hair. For this boy's soul had been in his pit, and he alone knew, through the knowledge of these past terrible months, to whom he had gifted it.

Balestier looked round on the grinning faces, reading no sympathy, nothing but the natural eagerness of mankind when they see a man put on his mettle. And the spur of that look stung him. He swept the money up and handed it over to Jessop.

"We're square," he said. "And if I run across you in three months' time, we'll play again, with Lutwyche to settle the accounts. But I've sworn off until then, you see. Not very sporting of Lutwyche to ask it, was it?"

He went out with a laugh; but later on, when the moon had gone, and the weary moan of the sea made the only sound, Lutwyche found Balestier still walking the strip of beach beyond the mangroves where the great crabs crawled, and then he put a hand on his arm.

"Come away to bed. Rick," he said, and his voice was hushed, for out of the past he had caught again a glimpse of that hell where he knew the other man to be treading. Balestier looked at him with strained eyes.

"How am I going to keep my word?" he said. "Lutwyche, how am I going to keep my word? You know I'd play away my right to a soul, if I was sure I had one!"

"I have played away my right to the woman I loved, and I have played away my honour!" said Lutwyche quietly.

There was a silence, threaded through by the murmur of the turning tide and the buzz of the night-beetles only. Balestier shivered.

"A great thing like that might make a man strong enough," he said; "but for a joke, and I wasn't quite sober——"

"Your brother is dead, and you are needed to take up the name and the work your father and mother gave you. Is that no great thing, old chap?"

Balestier began to walk again. They said little more, but the promise came at last. He would go out with Lutwyche placer-mining on an old, long-deserted camp that Lutwyche knew well. Chinamen, abstemious, thrifty souls, were making a good living on that spur of the Mirridong, and there would be neither the loneliness which would try both men too cruelly, nor the temptations which might prove too hard.

"And so I'll go," said Balestier. "I'll hate you for it, and I shouldn't wonder if I knifed you, but I'll keep my word, if it's in mortal man to do it."

"That's all I ask," said Lutwyche, looking out at the sea, which knows rest no more than the restless heart of a man may know it.

And yet for both came some semblance to rest in the weeks that followed. The smell of earth and the feel of it, the fresh wetness of the water brought with infinite labour and cunning from the river, the song of birds in the bush-silence, and the cheerful chatter of the busy, little yellow men, had a more soothing power than either man had hoped for, and the cooler nights were filled with sleep and the days with that muscle-testing and spirit-testing work which gives a man clean pride in himself.

One night Lutwyche drew a deck of cards from his pocket.

"I think those have got to stand on the chimney-piece, Rick," he said, and Balestier, cooking bacon over the open fire, glanced up with a line between his brows and a wry smile on his lips.

"This is part of the training, is it?" he said. "All right. Put 'em up."

The hard work and the straight living had sloughed much of the evil off him, and he was at times almost the Boy Bailey of earlier years. But there were nights still when speech was edged with vitriol, and the misery in the blue eyes kept Lutwyche awake until the parrots called the dawn up behind the blue-gum trees. For well he knew that the sin a man does by day and day he must pay for by year and year.

One night of fresh scents and breezes a drover called at Lutwyche's humpy, leading a spare horse. Balestier had been down swimming in the river, where the wild swan flew over and the platypus were splashing, and he felt the new invigoration in him grow at the sight and smell of a horse again.

"I'll help you rub them down," he said, and spent the happiest hour that he had known for long in the grooming and the bedding-down of them on fresh-cut dried grass. And that evening he talked with more verve and blitheness, until Lutwyche believed that the battle was won and Rick Balestier his own master again. And then the drover glanced up at the chimney and saw the cards.

"Hallo! Let's have a round of poker," he said.

"We don't play cards," said Lutwyche, lighting his pipe with fingers that fumbled a little.

"Somebody left 'em here by mistake, then?" The drover laughed. "Don't tell me you're a couple of Australians and can't play cards," he said.

Balestier was putting away the remains of supper on a high shelf across the humpy. Then he turned, and the passion which Lutwyche had seen there for a moment was gone out of his face.

"We're swearing off for a bet," he said pleasantly. "Lutwyche there was going it a bit too steep."

The matter ended on a laugh, and later Lutwyche went to bed in a strange thankfulness which had no pride in it. The lean years, the bitter years, had not been wasted if he had bought back this man's soul by the spending of them.

He woke to a dawn of windy gold and the joyous carolling of magpies beyond the open door, and he sat up in his bunk to see the drover lying asleep on the floor by the table, with a shower of spilt cards below and round him, and an overturned dried slush-lamp at his foot. The drover was snoring loudly, and he waked with a choke as Lutwyche shook him with frenzied hands.

"What? What? You shan't have the other one, too, hang you!" he said. And then he blinked drowsily at Lutwyche. "Plays like the deuce and all, that chap," he said. "We were at it till he got all I could afford to lose off me, and then I thought he'd smash me for turning it up. But he won that spare horse, and he was off like a streak soon as he found I was dry. He's a son of Old Nick, if ever I saw one!"

Lutwyche leaned against the table, and new lines—deep lines—came round his mouth.

"I brought him here to save him—to save him!" he said, as though speaking to himself.

The drover laughed unpleasantly. He had lost more than he could consider with equanimity by the light of day.

"Well, he told me you'd spent good years in teaching him," he said. "Suppose you're findin' out that it ain't so easy for a man to undo what he's once done, eh? Same here. I've lost my horse. I done it, an' I'm sorry I done it. But that won't put things straight."

He stooped to gather up the cards, and Lutwyche stood still, staring out before him. But he was seeing something which was making the courage in him crumble and fall away. The cards slithered with their familiar, brushing sound as the drover put them together. It was like the whispering of a voice—a soft voice—a siren's voice.

"Plays like the deuce and all, that chap," said the drover again, and then Lutwyche wheeled suddenly.

"I taught him," he said. "I'm his master yet. I could beat him every time. Look here—I'll show you!"

And, as he reached trembling hands for the cards, that thing in his soul which he had believed slain sprang to life again, man-high and demon-strong, and through eager lips he heard it calling him—calling him—that old undying devil of the thousand lures that snare man's feet.

 

Copyright, by G. B. Lancaster, in the United States of America.