In the Roaring Fifties by Edward Dyson (best classic books TXT) 📖

the wound was washed with a lotion, closed as well as possible, and then carefully bandaged, without the waste of a moment.

Ryder lay with his revolver by his side. He knew perfectly that he might be engaged in a life or death struggle at any moment, and was prepared to die by his own hand the instant the fight became hopeless.

'Go, Yarra; pick up his track; find which way he has gone; come back one minute.'

He knew there was no occasion to warn the half-caste, in whom the instincts of his mother's people were paramount. Yarra was a child of the Bush; nothing would escape his eye or his ear, and at the same time he would be as swift and as secret as a snake.

While the boy was away Ryder wrote a note in pencil addressed to Lucy Woodrow. Yarra was back within five minutes.

'Him Boss belonga me all right. Him run longa gully, catch up horse by ole man blackbutt, ride longa gorge same debble chase him,' reported the half-caste.

'Right, right! Yarra plurry fine feller!' said Ryder. 'Now we go up over small spur, down by gorge, sit down little stone cave near big splash. Pretty quick you come back, catch Wallaroo, lead him down to the gorge along down the creek. Make a track by the bank some time, turn him in pool where black fish sit down, and ride back up creek again, and tie horse up by big rock same monkey bear. Then to-night you creep down by Boobyalla, knock on Miss Lucy's window, gib Miss Lucy this letter. No one else must see. If Miss Lucy say yes, when sun jumps up to-morrow you take Wallaroo down by wattle track, gib her horse, come back sit down by me. Yarra catch hold all that?'

Yarra nodded brightly. 'My word, mine know him all right,' he said.

'Yarra always good friend by me?'

'My word!'

The climb over the spur that divided the outlaw's first retreat from the gorge proved a terrible task for the wounded man. For some distance the boy followed him, obliterating his tracks; but before the journey was half completed Ryder required all the assistance the half-caste could give him, and he reached the small cave in the side of the gorge, about a mile and a half from its entrance, in an exhausted and feverish condition. There Yarra gave him drink, and, having made him a comfortable bed, left him with a revolver by his side, and returned for Wallaroo and Ryder's belongings. The boy followed the instructions he had received faithfully, and was with the outlaw again before sundown, watching over him with an interest he had never before felt in any human creature. Ryder knew now that his life depended upon the boy's fidelity, and that there was only one other person in the world upon whom he could rely in his extremity--Jim Done.

We left Done in a poor condition to help any man--lying in Kyley's tent, enfeebled by sickness, clinging to Aurora's fingers as some sort of anchorage in a fragile world. When he awoke again Aurora was still by his side. He grew quite accustomed to waking and finding her there, and in his waking moments for two or three days he clasped her fingers with an almost infantile helplessness. The first stages of recovery were slow, and in them his chief delight was to lie watching his nurse, scarcely conscious of anything beyond. He found her very worn, and she looked old. Few of the qualities that had impelled him to call her Joy remained in this anxious face. She attended to him assiduously; but she was only a nurse, nothing of a lover, and presently he found himself wondering at her lack of emotion, fretting for the absent caress with an invalid's petulance. As his strength returned, Aurora permitted Mary Kyley to assume the larger share of the nursing, and Jim was told what news there was, excepting the truth about poor Mike. It was Ryder who had informed Aurora that Done and his friends were in the stockade, where he had seen them during the Saturday afternoon. Mary read a letter from the Peetrees inviting Jim to join them at Blanket Flat--where they had taken his and Mike's belongings--when he was strong enough to get about. According to Mrs. Ryley's version of this letter, Mike was with the Peetrees.

Eventually Jim was strong enough to sit up for a while, and in the course of a few days Ben helped him out into the open, and the pure, hot sunshine seemed to pour new life into his veins. It was after this that Done missed Aurora. Mrs. Ben said she had gone away for a few days to recruit; but eventually, when Jim was hobbling about, she admitted that she did not know where the girl had gone, and believed that she might not come back.

'But why?' said Jim--' why go away without a word, without giving me a chance to thank her for what she has done?'

'Thank her!' said Mary, with some contempt. 'Are you thinking the poor girl wanted thanks from you?'

'It is strange that she should leave in this way,' answered Done impatiently.

'There's nothing strange in it, man; it's just natural. You never understood how much that girl cared for you, Jimmy. If you did, perhaps you would know what it meant for her to be working herself to a ghost over your bed there while you babbled of love to another woman.'

'I did?'

'Did you? Night and day. It was Lucy, Lucy, Lucy--always Lucy. Lucy with the brown hair and the beautiful eyes--Lucy the pure, and sweet, and good. Never a word of Joy--never the smallest word of the woman who was beating the devil off you, you blackguard!'

'But I was delirious! Surely----'

'True, you were wandering; but it's only when a man's mad or drunk that one gets the truth out of him about women. "There's not a thought of me left in his heart, Mary!" said the poor girl.'

'She was wrong--wrong!' he protested.

'Not a bit, boy! 'Twas the pure girl had all your soul. Heavens! and how you rubbed it in about her purity and goodness! Mother of us! let a man be so infernally bad that the very fiend sniffs at him, but he'll bargain with the impudence of an archangel for the pure girl.'

'And she went away for this?'

'Sure enough. Aurora's the sort to hide her hurts. When she can't fight over them, she'll not cry a whimper.'

'That's true; and I've hurt her deepest of all.'

Mary detected the expression of his face with quick alarm. She had said too much.

'There, there, Jimmy boy,' she said anxiously; 'we mustn't be forgetting that Joy's the strong sort. She'll come again, fresh and rosy and merry as ever--bet your life on it.'

Jim went into the tent that had been his sick-room, and sat for over an hour in deep thought, and his thoughts were all of Aurora. He missed her--missed her at every turn, and in every hour of his convalescence. As a reward for her love and tenderness, he had afflicted her with the greatest bitterness her brave heart could bear. His eyes were fixed upon the floor, and eventually discovered two oval objects half buried in the hard earth. He stooped to pick them up, and found them to be the halves of the locket that contained Lucy Woodrow's miniature. The case had been stamped into the floor with the heel of a boot, the pieces were torn apart, and the portrait ground off the ivory on which it was painted. With the fragments of the locket in his hand, Jim pursued a new train of thought, but there was no comfort in it. He recalled Joy's words: 'I won't bind the strange man you may be to-morrow.' Her love had been too strong for her philosophy. What of his? Had he ever seriously considered the possibilities of a life wholly apart from her? His mind flew to Lucy, but by no effort could he devote his thoughts to either of the women who had so deeply influenced him.

It was no longer possible to keep the truth about Mike Burton from the invalid, and Mary broke the news to him as gently as she could, The shock seemed to stun Jim's sensibilities for a time. As the numbness wore off, a bitter, blind hatred grew in his heart against the men he chose to regard as Mike's murderers, and he had a ferocious longing for vengeance. Again law and order, the forces of society, had intervened to embitter him. His subsequent sorrow over his mate was deep and lasting. He felt now that although their friendship had been free of demonstrativeness, it had been warmed with a generous sincerity.

Done awakened one day, with some sense of fear, to the knowledge that he was drifting back into a morbid condition. He found he had bred a disposition to brood over his weakness. The loss of Mike and the disappearance of Aurora were becoming grievances that he cherished with youthful unreason. He determined to rejoin the Peetrees at once, and, although far from being his old self physically, began to make preparations for the return to Jim Crow.

'There's somethin' I'd like you to be doin' fer me afore you go, mate,' said Ben Kyley to Jim one evening.

'Well, you know I'll do it.

'I reckoned you would. You see, I've been thinkin' of marryin' my wife, an' I'd like you to be bes' man.'

'You've been thinking!' cried Mary. 'No, Jimmy, I've been doing the thinking: Kyley merely agrees. One of these days we're going to build a big hotel in Ballarat, and settle down. It won't be till the rushes peg out, as they're bound to do in time; but certificates of marriage are getting quite common amongst married people here, and we thought it would be as well to be in the fashion.' Mrs. Ben laughed boisterously.

'Well,' said Jim, smiling, 'a couple who disagree as pleasantly as you do can't go far wrong in marrying.'

'The customers at a decent family hotel would expect it, I think,' Mary added soberly.

'Jonathan Prator married his wife a week 'r two back, an' he's skitin' about it,' grumbled Ben.

So Jim remained for the wedding of Mr. and Mrs. Ben Kyley, which was quite a public ceremony. He was Ben's best man, and he gave the rosy bride the prettiest brooches, rings, and bangles he could buy in Ballarat, and left, the blushless couple to the enjoyment of their honeymoon with his warmest blessing. Mary nearly smothered him in a billowy hug as he was trying to thank them for their goodness.

'Leave a kind word for my poor girl,' she said, 'and the minute she comes back I'll write you.'

'Tell her I shall be a miserable devil till I hear of her dancing jigs on Mary Kyley's bar counter again,' said Jim. 'And tell her she wrongs me when she says there is nothing of her in this heart of mine. She is an ineradicable part of it.'

Done found the Peetrees working a fairly profitable mine at Blanket Flat, a sort of tributary field to Jim Crow, and situated about three miles distant from the original rush. Harry stood in with Done, and the two pegged out a claim and set to work; but Jim did not derive the satisfaction he had expected from this return to his friends and his familiar pursuits. His weakness clung to him,