The Crimean Shirt

by E. W. Hornung

 

THE CRIMEAN SHIRT.

BY E. W. HORNUNG.

Author of “A Bride from the Bush,” “The Rogue's March,” etc.

IT is now rather mere than twelve years since the disappearance and the finding of Henry Powell on Mooroolooloo station, New South Wales, and rather less since the subsequent case in which I myself was perhaps the principal witness. And I think that the time has arrived for confessing that the evidence which I gave on that occasion, though indeed “nothing but the truth,” was nevertheless not “the whole truth” at all.

I did not and I do not believe there was a single being in that Colonial court who would have credited the whole truth had I told it there and then upon my oath. Nor was it essential to the case. Nor did I care to return to the station, new chum as I still was, with yet another handle for native-born buffoonery. But I am no longer the storekeeper of Mooroolooloo; and I believe the public mind to be broader than it was in the matter of so-called ghosts. At all events I am going to tell you for the first time what my own eyes saw, on a day and night in January, in the year 1884.

I had been some six weeks in the Riverina, and I was alone at our home-station for the night. The owner was paying us a visit. He and the manager were camping at an out-station nineteen miles away. The overseer was absent on his holiday. I had the homestead entirely to myself, for there was neither woman nor child upon the place. Suddenly, between nine and ten o'clock, as I sat smoking and thinking on the back veranda, a spur jingled, and I made out the crinkled mole-skins and the felt wide-awake of one of the men.

“Powell the rabbiter is lost in the bush, mister,” said he.

I sprang to my feet, for the news was like that of a man overboard at sea.

“How long has he been out?”

“Since yesterday morning.”

“But I thought he camped with old Wylie at the Five-mile whim?”

“So he does.”

“Then why didn't Wylie come in sooner?”

“Ah! there you hit it,” said my man. ‘That's what we've all been asking him, but Wylie says his mate was given to stopping odd nights at other chaps' camps, and he never thought anything of it till he didn't turn up this evening. Even if he had he couldn't have left the whim, Wylie couldn't, with no other water anywhere near, and the sheep drawing to the troughs from four paddocks. But he's come in now, and he's up at the hut if you like to see him.”

And at the men's hut I found the whim-driver, the center still of an attentive group, but no longer, I thought, the target of questions and cross-questions implying criticism and blame. On the contrary, there was now every token of sympathy with the anxiety and distress of mind from which Wylie was obviously suffering, and at the sight of which I also could spare him some of the pity which I felt for the missing rabbiter.

The whim-driver was an elderly man, with brown wrinkles all over his face, and gray whiskers parting at a baggy throat; but he was still powerfully built, and a typical bushman with his eagle eye and his strong bare arms. His eye, however, was hot with horror and remorse as it met mine, and the whole man was twitching as he told me his tale.

“If only I had guessed anything was wrong, sir,” he cried, “I would have left the sheep in a minute, though my billet depended upon it. But he's so often stopped away one night that it never bothered me till the day wore on and he didn't come back. God forgive me, I never even thought of telling the bosses when they passed this morning on their way to the out-station. Yet I might ha' known—I might ha' known! He was a sailor, poor Powell was, and sailors are always the worst bushmen. I've known him get bushed before, but only for an hour or two. And to think of him being out all this time—in this heat, with not a drop of water in the crab-holes! He may—he may be dead already—my poor mate, my poor mate!”

With that he turned his back upon us, in the most evident agitation, so that we thought it kindest not to refer to him in the brief council of war which the men and I now held together. It was promptly decided that all hands should form a search party to start at day-break, with the exception of Wylie and myself. Wylie must return to his whim.

My knowledge of the country was as yet very limited, and therefore I was the one who could best be spared to ride at once to the out-station and inform the “bosses” of what had occurred. The night-horse was the only animal in the yard, but I took it to save time, and shortly after ten o'clock rode oft with Wylie, our way coinciding as far as the Five-mile whim,

There was no moon, and the night was anything but clear for that land of bright stars and cloudless skies. A hot north wind of several days' duration had flown suddenly into the south, whence it was now blowing hard and chill, so that I buttoned my coat up as we cantered side by side, and took off my eye-glasses, lest the rushing wind should lift them from my nose. We spoke very little as we rode, but once, when we drew rein and ambled for a little, my companion reproached himself for not having given an earlier alarm.

It was impossible not to feel sorry for him, but equally impossible to acquit him of blame, so I said very little in reply. When we came to the hut a dull red glow burnt steadily within, and Wylie sighed bitterly as he explained that he had built up the fire before leaving, that his poor mate might find all comfortable if some happy chance should bring him back. He added that he supposed I would push straight on without dismounting; but I was cold and the glow looked grateful, and I had slipped from the saddle before the words were out of his mouth. Next moment I uttered a loud cry.

The door of the hut was at one end, to the left of the dying fire, and at the opposite end were too low, rude bunks, one in each corner. On the foot of the right-hand bunk sat a figure I could have sworn to even without my glasses. It was the missing rabbiter, in a red-checked shirt which I had often seen him wear, and his face was buried in his hands.

“Wylie,” cried I, wheeling around on the threshold, “he has come back, and here he is—sitting on his bunk!”

It was too dark for me to see Wylie's face, but he tumbled rather than dismounted from his horse, and I felt him trembling as he brushed past me into the hut. I followed him, but during the single instant my back had been turned the rabbiter had moved. He was not on the bunk. Wylie kicked the logs into a blaze and then turned upon me fiercely. For the rabbiter was not in the hut at all.

“What d'ye mean,” he roared, “by playing tricks on a chap who's lost his mate? “Out of my hut, you young devil—out of my hut!”

Never have I seen man more completely beside himself; he was shaking from head to foot in a perfect palsy, and his clenched fists were shaking in my face. I assured him I had played no conscious trick—it was my defective eyesight that must have played one on me. Now that I put on my glasses I could see that the hut was empty but for our two selves; that it must have been absolutely empty till we entered. And yet I could have sworn that I had seen the lost rabbiter nursing his face at the foot of the right-hand bunk.

My companion cooled down, however, on becoming convinced of my good faith, and instead of turning me out, seemed to set his heart upon explaining my fancied vision before he would let me go. Pictures from the illustrated papers had been tacked up over the rabbiter's bunk. One was the old colored print of Red Riding Hood, with the four trees like an elephant's leg; and Wylie would have it that the firelight glowing on the child's hood had made the splotch of red which my nerves had exaggerated into a Crimean shirt.

To me this explanation seemed much more ridiculous than the thing it sought to explain, but I had to admit that I could see but poorly without my glasses, and indeed I was very ready to confess to some inexplicable delusion on my part. So at that we left it, and I was glad enough to turn my back on the Five-mile hut, and to push on to the out-station at a hand-gallop.

Mr. Armit, the owner, and Mr. Mackeson, his manager, were still sitting up, discussing ways and means of coping with the long-continued drought; and the owner was good enough to praise my promptitude in coming to them at once. It was now midnight, and after a little consideration it was decided that we should all lie down for a bit preparatory to starting back a couple of hours before daybreak in order to take part in the search. For my part, I made myself very comfortable before the fire, with my saddle for a pillow, and fell asleep in a moment. And in another, as it seemed to me, there was Mackeson laying hold of my shoulder and shouting in my ear that we were an hour late in starting as it was.

Our owner, however, had long been accustomed to the hardships of the bush, and when the time came he could not face the keen edge of the day without his pannikin of tea and his bite of “browny.” So the sun was on us before we were half way to the Five-mile—not the red ball of nineteen out of twenty Riverina dawnings, but a copper disc like a new penny. Clouds of sand were whirling in the wind, which had risen greatly in the night, and was rising still; puffs of sand kept breaking from the plain to join the clouds; and we coughed, all three of us, as we cantered neck and neck.

“Do you think you could drive a whim?” said Mr. Armit, drawing rein as we sighted the Five-mile, and suddenly turning to me.

“I believe I could, sir. I have seen one working, and it looks simple enough,”

“It's as easy as it looks if you keep your tank nice and full, and feed your troughs regularly. Wylie will show you all that's necessary in five minutes; the fact is, I think of leaving you in charge of this whim here, since you can hardly know the paddocks well enough to be of much use in the search, whereas Wylie knows every inch of the run. What do you say, Mr. Mackeson? It is for you to decide.”

“I agree with you, sir. But—but where's the whim got to?”

“Bless my soul!” gasped the other. “I was afraid we were in for a dust-storm, but I didn't think it would come so quick.”

Indeed, we were in the thick of the storm already. It was but a moment since hut and whim had disappeared in a whirl of deep yellow sand, and now we could see nothing at all beyond our horses' ears. Luckily we were not many hundred yards from the hut.

“Give them their heads!" shrieked Mackeson, and, following his advice, we gained the hut before the sea of dust had choked us utterly. It literally tinkled on the corrugated roof, and we led in the horses after us, so terrible was the storm. The whim-driver lighted a slush-lamp and put the billy on the fire to give us some tea. Everything in the hut wore a glistening yellow coat; there were layers of sand on our very eyelids, and what the owner squeezed from his beard alone made a little sand-hill on the floor.

“Poor Powell!” he suddenly exclaimed. “This is the hardest luck of all upon him. It will blot out his tracks. It will double the agonies of thirst he must already have endured. I am very much afraid that it will destroy our last chance of finding him alive.”

And Mr. Armit looked reproachfully at the whim-driver, who was making the tea with his back turned to us, crouching over the fire in an attitude so humble and so disconsolate that it would have been inhuman as well as useless to find open fault with him now. For a few seconds there was silence in the hut, silence broken only by the continual tinkle on the roof, which, however, was harder than it had been. Then of a sudden the man at whom we were all looking, wheeled around, sprang up and pointed dramatically to the rattling roof.

“You are wrong — wrong — wrong!” cried he hoarsely. “Listen to that! That's not sand—that's rain! All the worst dust-storms end so; it'll rain the best part of an inch before it stops; instead of doing for him this'll—save—his—life!”

He looked from one to the other of us—half in triumph, half in terror still, I thought—then down on his knees, and back to the boiling billy, and the sugar and the tea. I saw him throw a handful of each among the bubbles—saw his fingers twitching as they spread—and I knew then that the whim-driver's confidence was only lip-deep.

But a part of his prophecy came true enough. It rained until the crab-holes were full of water—until there was drink enough abroad upon the plains to give the whim a good week's holiday. Long before it stopped, however, I had the Five-mile hut to myself, with that dismal rattle on the roof, and a dull fire of damp logs spitting distressfully beneath the great square chimney. The troughs were not needed, and that was well; they were buried and hidden beneath a ridge of drifted sand, and I was to clear them with the long-handled shovel, instead of driving the whim.

I can still see those three horsemen bobbing into infinity behind the lances of the rain, and I see myself, a lonesome, spindle-shanked figure, in leggings and breeches, and the gray felt wideawake which still hangs on my wall; and I do not look very happy as I stand at the door of that hut, beneath the dripping corrugated eaves, but I do look a little elated and proud. I am going to spend days and nights in a hut five miles from any mortal soul, and I am young enough to appreciate playing Robinson Crusoe in earnest. It will be a good experience to put in the next letter home. A good experience!

The rain ceased before noon, when I had some lunch (for there was plenty to eat in Wylie's ration-bags), and then turned out with the long-handled shovel. My spirits rose in the open air. My own actions were less noisy and nerve-disturbing than I had found them in the lonely hut, and I could look all around me as I worked, without constantly foreseeing the hut door darkened by some apparition that might be welcome enough, but which must certainly startle men when it came. The events which I have already chronicled lay heavy on my nerves. I was only nineteen years of age, and I was cursed with an imagination.

Nothing, therefore, could have been better for me than the play I made during the next few hours with the long-handled shovel. Now and then I knocked off to rest my back and smoke a pipe; but, once started, I stuck to my work pretty closely up to five o'clock by the old Waltham watch in the leather pouch on my belt. And it punished every muscle in my body: the shoulders felt it as I plunged the shovel into the heavy wet sand, the arms and shoulders as I swung it out loaded, while the strain upon back and legs was continuous. My task was the harder owing to the shovel having been bent and blunted by some misuse; yet, so far from loathing it, I was never prouder of anything than of the five-and-twenty yards of submerged trough which I uncovered and cleared that January afternoon.

To tire the body out is the surest way of cleansing and purifying the mind, and I can honestly say that I returned to the hut without any morbid fancy in my head, indeed with no anxiety about anything but the fire, which I had foolishly forgotten. Judge, then, of the sensations with which I stood still on the threshold. The hut had no windows, but the afternoon had turned out very fine, the sun shone merrily through a hundred crevices, and there, on the foot of the same bunk, sat the lost rabbiter, precisely as I had seen him sitting the night before.

How long I stood, how long he remained, I do not know. I remember a hollow voice calling his name. I remember the pattering of my own tottering feet, my nerveless fingers clutching the empty air, my trembling body flung headlong on the other bunk, and the sobs that shook it as it lay. For then I knew that Henry Powell was already dead, and for the second time I had seen his ghost.

Not a particle of doubt remained in my mind. I could not be mistaken twice—I was perfectly certain that I had never been mistaken at all. This time, however, there was no dull red glow to play conceivable tricks in the darkness, for the fire was out, and it was almost as light in the hut as it was outside. Yet there I had seen him, in the self-same attitude, on the self-same spot, his hands covering his face, his beard showing between his wrists, his elbows planted on his thighs. I could have counted the checks in his Crimean shirt, and this time the glasses were still upon my nose.

Yes, I was absolutely certain of what I had seen, and that very certainty was now my consolation. The worst is worst of all before it happens; and the knowledge that I had seen a ghost was much more supportable than the doubt as to whether I had seen one or not. The ghost could not harm me, after all; and instead of sympathizing with myself I should grieve for the poor fellow who was already beyond the reach of succor.

Had they found him yet? Had they found the body? And, if so, would the whim-driver return to his post at once and set me free? My heart beat fast with the hope, in defiance of my head. I might reason with myself that a poor ghost was no fit companion, but how I longed to get away! Even then, however, my courage failed me in another place. Who would believe my yarn? So I stayed where I was, and have held my tongue till now.

Sundown roused me, for I must have my tea, ghost or no ghost, and to make tea I must relight the fire. Here an obstacle confronted and ultimately vanquished me. There was a wood-heap outside, but, of course, the wood was damp, and though I looked for the axe, to chop to the dry heart of the wet logs, I had not found it when night fell hastily, forcing me to abandon the search.

So I went without my tea, but ate with what appetite I had, and washed down the mutton and damper with pannikins of water from the nine-hundred-gallon tank outside. I had lighted the slush-lamp (mole-skin wick in tin of mutton fat), and I sat watching the foot of the dead man's bunk as I ate, but no further vision interrupted my meal. And afterwards, when I was smoking my pipe in the open air, I would look in every few minutes, and past where the light was burning, for I had an odd idea that I must see the apparition thrice. And I wish I had. Yet of what I saw twice I am as positive now as I was then.

It was a magnificent night; the rain had drawn the fever from the sun-baked plains, and left even that clear air clearer than I had known it yet. Every star was a diamond in the dark blue vault, and my little pipe made the only clouds between earth and heaven. Often as I filled it, I had to light it still oftener at the flame which I had left burning in the hut, for I was rapt in thought. You are nowhere nearer to God than when alone in the bush beneath the undimmed tropic stars. I cannot say what brought it home to me, or by what chain of thought I chanced on the conclusion, but all at once I stood still and knew that the hand of God was in the apparition which I had seen. It meant something.

What did it mean? There must be some reason why I alone, and not Wylie for example, had been made to see the lost man, Powell, sitting on his bunk. Then what could that reason be?

I thought, and thought, and thought, sauntering around and around the hut the while. At last, I entered, but not to light my pipe. I do not know what I meant to do; I only know what I did. I walked to the foot of Powell's bunk, and sat down where I had seen Powell sitting, with a vague feeling, I believe, that in that spot and in his own attitude my spirit might receive some subtle communication from that of the rabbiter. What I did receive was quite a nasty tumble; for the foot of the bunk gave way beneath me, and I found myself deposited on the ground instead. Yet he, whom I had seen sitting there, had been in life a much heavier man than myself!

These bunks, or bush bedsteads rather, are constructed upon universal and very simple lines. Four uprights are driven into the earth floor of the hut or tent, and then connected by horizontal poles with sack-cloth slung across. The result combines the merits of both bed and hammock; but the uprights must be firmly rooted in the ground, and I soon saw the explanation of the present downfall; the ground was all loose at the foot of the lost man's bed, and the outer upright had gone down like a ninepin beneath my weight.

For a moment I was merely puzzled. The ground had worn so hard elsewhere in the hut, that I could not imagine why it should begin to crumble in this particular corner. I reached the slush-lamp and peered under the middle of the bed. There it was the same—as soft as a sand-hill—but recently flattened with a shovel. I saw the concave mark. And suddenly I leant back, and got up quietly, but with the perspiration running cold from every pore, for now I knew why the visible form of Henry Powell had appeared to me twice upon the foot of his bed. It was to tell me that his murdered remains lay buried beneath.

Now I knew why Wylie had pretended to be behindhand in bringing in his news; it was that we might think his mate really lost, and be ourselves so full of blame for an error of judgment that there should be no room in our minds for deadlier suspicions, Now I understood his rage and horror when I cried out that there was Powell come back—his subsequent anxiety to explain away my vision. And the missing axe—what had it done that he should hide it? And the long-handled shovel—I knew what had blunted and bent it now.

I remember mechanically looking at my watch, and yet not seeing the time. I remember looking again, and it was not quite half-past nine. The time goes so slowly when one is alone, and midnight begins so soon; but I was thankful it was earlier than I had thought. Now I could make sure—it would all be less ghastly than in the veritable dead of night—and then to the station with my news before anybody was in bed.

The miscreant Wylie! How well he had acted his diabolical part—in there at the men's hut, out here before the owner and the manager! Indignation at his bloody villainy was now my first emotion, and it nerved me mightily. I tore away the poles and the sacking, and the soft earth rose in a mound—it had all been put back! I ran for the long-handled shovel, and, urged on by my boiling blood, I began to dig.

God knows how I went on! A boot stuck out first, and when I felt it there was a foot inside. It was scarce eighteen inches below the ground. Next I uncovered the Crimean shirt. That was enough for me. As I bent over it with the light, and blew away the sand, I saw here and there the red checks (no plainer than in my vision, however), but the most of them were blotted out by a dark, stiff stain. I delved no deeper; this was indeed enough. I turned away, deadly sick, without rising from my knees—and there was Wylie, the whim-driver, watching me from the door.

I set the light down on the table—that, at any rate, was between us—and I looked up at him from my knees. He was glaring down on me with the most ferocious expression, every wrinkle writhing, and that loose pouch at his throat swelling as if with venom for spitting in my face. But, so far as I could see, he was unarmed; his bony right hand rested on what I took to be the handle of a stick, and, luckily, the long-handled shovel lay within reach of mine. I was the first to speak.

“I have found him,” said I.

“More fool you.”

“Why so? I am not frightened of you.”

“Not frightened to die?”

“Not particularly; you'll follow me soon enough. One murder you could only conceal one day, and how long are you going to conceal two? Besides, you've got to kill me first!”

And I was on my legs with the long shovel in both hands.

“That's soon done,” he answered with a laugh, and then I saw my mistake. What I had taken for a mere stick was the missing axe; he must have hidden it somewhere outside and, after first catching me at work, stolen away and come back with it on tiptoe. Now he took two strides into the hut, and, as the axe came up over his shoulder and hung there, I saw blood upon the blade. The sight of it delayed me at the critical instant; yet I lunged as he struck, then started back, and the axe-head split through the table as though it had been a cigar-box. With a curse he wrenched it free, but I was on him first, and round and round we went, and over and over, until I had the wretch at my mercy in the very grave which his own hands had dug.

At my mercy, because he lay as one paralyzed when he found his body stretched out on that of his victim; but how long that would have lasted I do not care to conjecture. He was stronger than I, though less active, and I think that his strength must soon have come back tenfold. But it had not done so when I caught the beat of the sweetest music I have ever heard—a duet between eight cantering hoofs drawing nearer and nearer to the hut.

The slush-lamp had fallen and gone out when the axe fell, but my eyes were searching for that villain's eyes in the darkness, and I would have given something to see them as the music fell on his ears too—as the horsemen's spurs jingled on the ground outside and then in the hut.

“Is Wylie here?” cried the manager's voice.

“He is.”

“We suspect him of having murdered Powell himself!”

“He has done so. Strike a light and you shall see them both.”

But at the trial I said nothing of my two visions, for, as I have stated, I had not then the moral courage, and the case was complete without that. My story began when the bed collapsed beneath me—that was all—so terrified was I of making myself a discredited laughing-stock. Now I do not care; nor do I think there will be so many disbelievers. At all events I have relieved my mind by telling the whole truth at last—so help me God.

This I think irrelevant, but those who are interested and who do not know it, may be glad to learn that Wylie, the whim-driver, lived to die as he deserved.

[THE END.]