“I’d stopped the pump for a spell,” he said, “an’ presently thought I heard sounds like someone working in the ‘T’ drive. I crept quietly to the mouth of the drive, an’ could see a man with a candle crouched down at work on the floor. I was making towards him when another darted out of the darkness beside me, an’ brought me a fearful lick on the head. I staggered back into the main drive an’ had a sort o’ confused idea of running feet an’ loud voices, an’ then came another welt an’ over I went. They must have dragged me up above the water level, an’ I ought to thank them for that, I s’pose.”
“An’ you couldn’t recognise either of them?” asked Mrs. Haddon.
“No, I haven’t the slightest notion who it was hit me, an’ the figure of the other was just visible an’ no more. I could swear to nothing except this.” He touched his head and smiled.
“The cowardly wretches!” cried Mrs. Haddon, her bosom swelling with indignation.
“They’re all that,” said Harry, “but this is something to be grateful for. Can’t you see what it means? It means that everyone is ready to believe Frank’s story now, an’ a broken head’s worth having at that price, ain’t it?”
“You’re a good fellow, Harry,” said the little widow softly. “Do you think they might let Frank go now?”
“No, worse luck, not without further evidence; but the company’ll probably go in for a big hunt, an’ that may be the saving of him.”
This latter piece of news gave Dick further cause for agitation, and his mother’s distress grew with his deepening melancholy. She was alarmed for his health, and had been trying ever since the return from Yarraman to induce him to drink copious draughts of her favorite specific, camomile tea, but without success; the boy knew of no ailment and could imagine none that would not be preferable to camomile tea taken in large doses.
On the following morning at about eleven o’clock a visitor called upon Mr. Joel Ham at the school, a slightly-built skinny man in a drab suit. He carried a small parcel, and this he opened on the master’s desk as he talked in a slow sleepy way, the sleepiness accented by his inability to lift his eyelids like other people, so that they hung drowsily, almost veiling the eyes. After a few minutes Joel stepped forward and addressed the Fifth Class:
“Boys, attend! Each of you take off his left boot.”
The boys stared incredulously.
“Your left boots,” repeated the master. “This gentleman is—eh—a chiropodist, and eh—come, come!” Joel Ham slashed the desk: the boys hastened to remove their left boots, handed them to the stranger, and watched him curiously as he examined them at the desk. The astonished scholars could see little, but the man in drab had two plaster casts before him and he was deliberately comparing the boys’ boots with these. When he came to Dick’s boot he turned carelessly to the master and said:
“This is our man.”
“Richard Haddon, the first boy on the back seat.”
The chiropodist did not look up.
“Boy with red hair,” he said. “Mixed up in that Cow Flat road affair. Evidently an enterprising nipper, on the high road to the gallows.”
Joel Ham drew thumb and forefinger from the corners of his mouth to the point of his chin, and blinked his white lashes rapidly.
“No,” he said, quite emphatically; “I don’t often give advice—sensible people don’t need it, fools won’t take it—but you might waste time by regarding that boy’s share in this business from a wrong point of view. If he has had a hand in it—and I have no doubt of it since his foot appears—think of him at the worst as the accomplice of some scoundrel, cunning enough to impose upon the folly of a romantic youngster stuffed with rubbishy fiction, and gifted with an extraordinarily adventurous spirit.”
This was perhaps the longest speech ever made by Joel Ham in ordinary conversation since he came to Waddy, and it quite exhausted him. The stranger yawned pointedly.
“Where does he live?” he asked.
“Third house down the road. Mother a widow.”
“Right. You might make an excuse to send him home presently. You are a discreet man, Mr. Ham.”
“In everybody’s business but my own, Mr. Downy.
The stranger took up his parcel and marched out, and the boots having been restored to their owners work was resumed. About twenty minutes later Dick was called out, and Joel presented him with an envelope.
“Take that note to your mother, Ginger, will you? Stay a moment,” he said, as Dick turned away. He took the boy by the coat and blinked at him complaisantly for a moment.
“When in doubt, my boy, always tell the truth,” he said.
Noting a puzzled expression in Dick’s face, he condescended to explain.
“When you’re asked many questions and want an answer, tell the truth. Lies, my boy, are for fools and rogues—remember, fools and rogues.”
Dick set his lips and nodded; and the master, after regarding him curiously for a moment, actually patted his head—an uncommon exhibition of feeling on his part that caused the scholars to gape with wonderment.
When Dick reached his home he was astonished to find his mother seated in the front room with her handkerchief to her eyes, crying quite violently. Opposite her sat the man in drab, swinging his hat between his knees and looking exactly as if he had just been awakened from a nap. The man walked to the door, locked it, and then resumed his seat.
“Now, my lad,” he said, “attend to me. My name is Downy. I am a detective, and I have found you out.”
The admission was not a wise one; it blanched Dick’s lips, but it closed them like a spring-trap.
“I have found you out,” continued the detective. “He has been arrested.” The detective emphasised the ‘he,’ and watched the effect. Dick stood before him, white and silent, his heart beating with quick blows, and his blood humming in his ears, “Who? Who? Who?”
“The man who went down with you has been arrested, my lad, and now you must tell me the whole truth to save yourself. He says you hammered Harry Hardy on the head with an iron bar, and if you do not clear yourself I must take you to gaol.”
Dick answered nothing; his eyes never moved from the green bee on the wall even to glance at his mother sobbing in the corner.
“Come, come, come!” cried Downy impatiently, “it’s no good your denying that you were in the mine on Sunday night. You came home covered with slurry, marked with blood, and very frightened. Your mother admits that, and we have found your footprints in the clay of the Silver Stream drives at both levels. Besides, the man says you were there. Now, tell me this, and I will let you go free: who has the key of the grating over the mouth of the old Red Hand?”
“Oh! Dickie, my boy, my poor boy—why don’t you answer?” sobbed Mrs. Haddon.
The detective tried again, threatened, pleaded, and cajoled, and Mrs. Haddon used all her motherly artifices; but not one word came from the boy’s locked lips. Dick was possessed by a vivid hallucination; he seemed to be standing in the centre of a whirlwind. Downy and his mother were dim figures beyond, seen through the dust; and like shreds of paper whirled in the vortex, visions of Miss Chris’s face, netted in fair hair, passed swiftly before his eyes, and the expression on each face was beseeching and sorrowful. Nothing could have dragged the truth from him at that moment.
Downy stood up and hung over Dick, scratching his head in a despairing way.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said, “but I’ll have to take him.”
“He’s shieldin’ some villain,” moaned Mrs. Haddon.
The detective took the widow aside and whispered with her for a few minutes, with the result that she dried her eyes and was much consoled.
Dick was taken away in Manager Holden’s trap and lodged in gaol at Yarraman; and when the news leaked out, as it did towards evening, Waddy had a new sensation, and quite the most startling one in its experience. Before the women went to bed that night they had found Dick guilty of robbing the Silver Stream of thousands of ounces of gold and perpetrating a murderous assault on Harry Hardy. The news brought Joe Rogers and Ephraim Shine together at their secret meeting-place in the corner paddock—Rogers much disturbed and puzzled, Shine shaken almost out of his wits.
“I’m goin’ to bolt, I tell you!” cried the searcher.
Rogers gripped him roughly.
“Bolt,” he said, “an’ you’re doomed—done for. Hell! man, can’t you see you’d be grabbed in less’n a day? With that mug an’ that figure you’d be spotted whatever hole you crept into.”
“I know, I know; but it’ll come anyhow—it’ll come!”
“Not so sure, unless you blab in one of these blitherin’ fits. What does that kid know? Nothin’. He’s found our gold, an’ he’s hid it away. He wants to keep it, an’ you know what a stubborn devil he is. This is just a try on, an’ they’ll get nothin’ out o’ Dick Haddon. If they do they get the gold, an’ we’re all right if we don’t play the fool.”
Rogers’s reasoning was very good as far as it went; but the discovery of the boy’s footprints in the drives had been kept a close secret, or even he might have admitted the wisdom of bolting without delay.
Dick spent a day and two nights in the cell at the watch-house in Yarraman. Public report at Waddy was to the effect that every influence short of torture had been used in the effort to induce him to divulge the truth, and not a word had he spoken. His mother and Mrs. Hardy and Harry had all visited him in the cell, and had failed to persuade him to open his lips. His callousness in the presence of his poor mother’s distress was described in feeling terms as unworthy of the black and naked savage. All this was much nearer the truth than speculation at Waddy was wont to be; and when Dick was restored to his home in the flesh on Saturday at noon and permitted to run at large again without let or hindrance, Waddy was amazed and indignant, and Waddy’s criticism of the methods of the police authorities was scathing in the extreme.
The boy was driven home by the sergeant, the same who had been commissioned to quell the Great Goat Riot.
“He’s looking pulled down,” said the trooper, delivering him into his mother’s arms. “It’s the confinement. Let him run about as usual, Mrs. Haddon; let him have lots of fresh air, particularly night air, and he’ll soon be all right. At night, Mrs. Haddon, the air is fresh and healthy. Let him run about in the evenings, you know.”
Mrs. Haddon was very grateful for the advice and promised to act upon it. But Dick was a new boy; he remained in doors all Saturday and Sunday, wandering about the house in an aimless manner, trying to read and failing, trying to divert himself in unusual ways and failing in everything. He presented all the symptoms of a guilty, conscience-stricken wretch; and his mother, who had been priming him with camomile surreptitiously, began to lose confidence in that wonderful herb.
Meanwhile a very interesting stranger had made his appearance at Waddy; he was believed to be a drover, and he was on the spree and ‘shouting’ with spontaneity and freedom. His horse, a fine upstanding bay, stood saddled and bridled under McMahon’s shed at the Drovers’ Arms by day and night. His behaviour in drink was original and erratic. He would fraternise with the man at the bar for a time, and then go roaming at large about the township in a desultory way, sleeping casually in all sorts of absurd places; but Waddy had a large experience in ‘drunks’ and made liberal allowances.
Miss Chris called in at Mrs. Haddon’s home on evening shortly after tea. She had not been to chapel, and was anxious about her father, who had absented himself from his duties as superintendent of late and whose behaviour had been most extraordinary when she called on him on two or three occasions during the week. She was afraid of fever, and sought advice from Mrs. Haddon, who unhesitatingly recommended camomile tea. Then Dick’s ailment was discussed and Chris, much concerned, went and sat by the boy, who cowered over his book, too full to answer her kind inquiries. She put an arm about him and talked with tender solicitude; she sympathised with him in his troubles, and was angry with all his enemies, more especially the police, whose folly amazed her. Here a large tear rolled down Dick’s nose and splashed upon the open page, and when she pressed him to tell all he might know and not to suffer abuse and shame to shield some wicked villain, he quite collapsed, and sat with his head sunk upon his arms, sobbing hysterically. This was so unlike the boy that Christina was quite amazed, and her eyes travelled anxiously to and from Dick’s bowed head and his mother’s distressed face. Then the women, to give him time to recover himself, sat together talking of other matters—Harry Hardy mainly—and Dick, ashamed of his tears, crept away to bury his effeminate sobs amongst the Cape broom in the garden.
Dick had not sat alone more than a minute when he heard a sharp whistle from the back. It was Jacker Mack’s whistle and at first Dick did not respond, but sat mopping his tears with his sleeves. The whistle was repeated three or four times, and at length he determined to meet Jacker, thinking there might be some news about the reef in the Mount of Gold. He passed out through the side gate, and along to the fowl-house at the corner, behind which he expected to find his mate sitting. But when he reached the corner a pair of strong arms snatched him from the ground, and he was borne away at a rapid pace in the direction of Wilson’s paddock. His face was crushed against the breast of the man who held him, in such a way that it was impossible for him to utter the slightest sound.
Across the flat in the shallow quarry he was thrown to the ground, and for a moment he caught a glimp of his captor in the darkness, a powerfully built man, wearing a viator cap that covered the whole of his face and head, with the exception of the eyes.
“Let one yelp out o’ you an’ I’ll crush yer head with a rock!” whispered the man ferociously.
Dick was blindfolded and gagged, and his arms and legs were tied with rope, his enemy kneeling on him the while and hurting him badly in his brutal haste.
The boy was caught up again and thrown on the man’s shoulder, and the journey was continued at a trot. He knew when the bush was reached, because here a fence had to be climbed. He tried to understand what this adventure might mean, but his thoughts were all confused and the gag made breathing so difficult that once or twice he feared he was going to die.
When at last the man stopped and Dick was dropped to the ground, they had travelled about a mile and a half into the bush. He heard the sound of timbers being moved, and presently was caught up again; after much fumbling and an oath or two from his companion the latter withdrew his support, and Dick felt himself to be dangling in the air from the rope that tied his limbs. Now the bandage was pulled from his eyes, and the boy, after staring about through the starlit night for a few moments, terrified and amazed, began to realise his position.
“Know where you are, me beauty?” asked the big man who stood before him, and who spoke as if with a pebble on his tongue.
Dick knew where he was. He was hanging over the open shaft of the Piper Mine, another of Waddy’s abandoned claims, suspended from one of the skids by a stout rope.
“Look down,” commanded the man.
Dick obeyed and saw only the black yawning shaft. “Know she’s deep, don’t yer? There’s three hundred feet o’ shaft below you there. That’s the short road to hell. Now look here.”
He flashed the bright blade of a large knife before the eyes of his prisoner; then, seating himself on a broken truck near the shaft he began deliberately to sharpen the knife on his boot. The operation was not in the least hurried—the man was desirous of making a deep impression.
“There,” he said at length, “that’s beautiful. Feel!” He cut the skin of Dick’s nose with a touch of the keen edge. “Now, listen here. I’m goin’ to take this bandage off yer mouth, ’cause I’ve a few perticular questions to ask an’ you must answer ’em, but understand first that one little yell from you, an’—” He made a blood-curdling pretence of cutting at the rope above Dick’s head. “You’d go plug to the bottom an’ be smashed to fifty bits!”
The man removed the gag and reseated himself on the old truck. As he talked he toyed with the ugly knife, making occasional passes on the side of his left boot resting on his knee.
“Look here, young feller,” he said, “if you tell me lies down you go, understand? D’ye believe me?” he asked with sudden ferocity.
“Yes,” whispered Dick.
“Well then listen, an’ answer quick an’ lively. Where’s the bag of gold you stole outer that big tree beyond the Red Hand?”
Dick’s heart jumped like a startled hare. He recognised his enemy now in spite of his cap and his disguised voice. It was Joe Rogers.
“D’ye deny takin’ it?” asked the man sharply.
“Yes,” said Dick, cold at heart and quaking in every limb.
“Damn you for a young liar! Fer two pins I’d send you straight to smash. I know you’ve got that gold stowed somewhere. Where?”
The boy gave him no answer, and Rogers sprang to his feet, and tickled him again with the knife.
“You whelp!” he said hoarsely. “I’d think ez much of slaughterin’ you ez I would of brainin’ a cat. Speak, if you want to live! Where’s that gold?”
Dick was convinced that the man would be as good as his word, but he still lingered, casting about helplessly for an excuse, a hope of escape.
“Blast you, won’t you speak?”
Dick felt the knife cut into the rope above his head, and shrieked aloud in a paroxysm of terror.
“Stop, stop! I’ll tell!”
“Tell then, an’ be quick. That’s one strand o’ the rope gone; there’s two more. Speak!” He raised the knife threateningly.
“It’s under that big flat stone near the spring in the Gaol Quarry.” The lie came almost involuntarily from the boy’s lips in instantaneous response to a new impulse. But he was doomed to disappointment.
“Good!” ejaculated the man. “Now, you go with me. I don’t trust you; you’re too smart a kid to be trusted.” As he spoke he twisted the gag into Dick’s mouth again. “No,” he cried with a sudden change of intention, “you’ll stay where you are. You’re safe enough here. While I’m away think o’ what’s below you there, an’ pray yer hardest in case you’ve lied to me, because if you have you’re done fer. I’ll kill you, s’elp me God, I will!”
Rogers took a bee line through the scrub in the direction of the quarry, leaving Dick hanging over the open shaft. The Gaol Quarry was not more than half a mile off, and Rogers ran the whole of the distance. He made his way clumsily down the rocky side from the hill, falling heavily from half the height and bruising himself badly, but paying no attention to his injuries in the anxiety of the moment. He found the big flat stone after a minute’s search, and succeeded in turning it only after exerting his great strength to the utmost. There was nothing underneath. Yes, there was something; a snake hissed at him in the darkness and slid away amongst the broken rock. Rogers fell upon his knees and groped about blindly, but the ground was hard. There was no sign of the gold anywhere, and not another stone in the quarry that answered to the boy’s description. Possessed with a stupid blundering fury against Dick, Rogers turned back towards the Piper. He breathed horrible blasphemies as he ran, and struck at the scrub in his insensate rage. He was a man of fierce passions, and meant murder during those first few minutes-swift and ruthless. He reached the Piper breathless from his exertions and wild with passion. He did not even pause to resume his disguise, but ran to the shaft, cursing as he went. There he stopped like a man shot, his figure stiffened, his arms thrown out straight before him; his eyes, wide and full of terror, stared between the skids rising from the shaft to the brace above.
Dick Haddon was not there. The space was empty, the rope’s end moved lazily in the wind.
The revulsion of feeling was terrible: it left the strong man as weak as a child, it turned the desperate criminal into a mumbling coward. Rogers staggered to the shaft and examined the rope. It had broken where one strand was cut; the other strands were frayed out. The gold-stealer fell upon his knees and tried to call, but a mere gasp was the only sound that escaped his lips. He remained for a minute or two gazing helplessly into the pitch blackness of the shaft; then, recovering somewhat with a great effort, he rose to his feet, untied the remainder of the rope from the skid and dropped it into the shaft, and turning his back on the mine fled away through the paddocks towards Waddy. As he issued from the bush a quarter of an hour later, and crossed the open flat, a slim figure slipped from the furze covering the rail fence and followed him noiselessly at a distance.