Settling Day by Nat Gould (digital ebook reader .txt) 📖

and he picked up a piece of paper—Barragong. I wonder if the worthy P.M. will think I have altered much during the last eight or nine years. Probably he will, most people about here think me changed, even Benjamin Nix, my manager, says he would hardly have known me. The worthy Nix has not altered much, I'll be bound. So far as I can judge, he has managed things all right at Cudgegong—what a name to give a place! but it is suitable.'

'Jim Dennis is a man to be trusted, and he will stick to a pal, he says, and I know he will keep his word. It's deuced slow here after London. I think in a few years I'll sell out and go back again. And if I do return, that lady friend of mine will probably find me out and create a scene. I hate scenes. Perhaps I am better off here, and in time I may settle down into a respectable married man.'

He laughed again, but there was no mirth in the sound. It was an ugly laugh, a laugh that betrayed the baseness of the man, the treachery lurking within. It was not a good laugh to hear.

CHAPTER IX

THE SORT OF MAN DR TOM IS

Dr Tom Sheridan sat in his den concocting cooling drinks for himself, and mixtures of quite a different prescription for his patients.

On board ship, when he acted as medical adviser to the skipper, his officers, the crew, and the passengers—the last-named lot he considered of little account—he had been in the habit of dosing them with the same compound for all manner of complaints.

'It saves a heap of trouble, and it's always handy,' said Dr Tom, as he filled a bottle from his regular tap. 'If it does no good, there is the blessed and everlasting consolation that it can do no harm.'

Passengers annoyed Dr Tom, as they have continued to annoy ships' doctors ever since, for the doctor had a soul above medicine. He considered himself a poet, a truly dramatic poet, and he was sore with the world because his efforts had not been appreciated. He had cast his poems upon the mess-room table, in the hopes of them bearing fruit, and they had been neglected in the most aggravating fashion.

The skipper put the finishing touch to one of Dr Tom's efforts. The worthy medico had, after much toil and brain work, composed a poem which he believed would appeal to the skipper's heart.

It was a wild, weird thing, a concoction of fiery skies, blistering sun, howling winds, dashing waves, heaving billows, snow-flecked seahorses, and what not, and in the midst of this poetic chaos was a good ship, commanded by a worthy skipper with a fiery beard. That was where Dr Tom blundered. He had no tact, even if his poetic ship had, and the skipper's hair being of a bright, flaming colour, he resented this personal allusion.

When the poem was solemnly presented to him by his 'boy,' he read the first few stanzas with pride, but arriving at the fiery beard period, he flew into a rage, hurled himself into Dr Tom's cabin, and said,—

'Did you write this ... d——d insulting thing?'

The doctor was mortally offended, nay, he was more than that, he was hurt. He had expended many hours on the composition of that poem, and had neglected the groans of many patients in order to finish it off.

'That, sir, is an effort that has cost me dear,' he said.

'By the Lord, if there are any more such efforts, it will cost you untold wealth!' yelled the frantic skipper with the fiery beard, and he flung the offending poem into a mass of half-empty drug bottles.

Dr Tom picked it up carefully, smoothed it out, and caressed it as though it had been a pet kitten.

When he arrived in Sydney he secured the shipping reporter of the Morning Light and took him into his cabin.

'Read that,' said Dr Tom, in a solemn manner, handing the rejected of the skipper to the worthy press man.

The shipping reporter of the Morning Light blinked and looked uneasy. He had read Dr Tom's poems before, or pretended to, and the effect was not pleasing.

But the doctor kept good whisky in his den, and the man who chronicled the doings of ships on their voyages from far countries dearly loved a drop of the real stingo, which money could not then purchase in Sydney, and of which very little is to be had even unto this day.

The poem was duly read.

'It is one of your best efforts,' said the scribe. This opinion was diplomatic, and committed him to nothing.

The doctor smiled, and there was a pleasant jingle of glasses, and a soothing odour penetrated the stuffy little medicine box.

'Ah!' sighed Dr Tom, 'I knew you would appreciate it.'

A sound of liquid flowing into a glass was balm to the shipping reporter of the Morning Light.

'Try this. It's a drop of the best.'

The man of letters—ships' letters, sipped it with the air of a connoisseur.

'Splendid stuff, doctor, splendid,' he said.

'That poem has cost me many hours' deep thought,' said Dr Tom.

'No doubt. It is an elegant composition.'

'I wonder if the Morning Light would publish it,' mildly suggested the doctor. 'Here, try another; it will do you no harm.'

'I'll ask our sub; he's not a bad sort. He might cram it into the weekly,' said the reporter.

The doctor looked crestfallen.

'The weekly,' he said sorrowfully. 'Surely it is worthy of a place in the daily.'

'It is, doctor. Upon my word, it is; but you know what they are in the office. They're death on poems. It would be risking my place to suggest it for the daily.'

Dr Tom jingled the glasses, and there was something in them when the sound ceased.

'Try your best,' said Dr Tom. 'I'll give you a couple of real good startling pars about this voyage if you'll get it in the daily.'

'And you'll not tell the other fellows?'

'No. I'll not breathe a word to 'em,' said Dr Tom.

'Then I'll risk it. Now for the news.'

The doctor related a couple of rather spicy incidents that had occurred during the voyage from London, and the shipping reporter chuckled over them.

'I reckon these will get that poem in, doc.' The whisky had made him familiar in his speech. Sure enough Dr Tom succeeded in his object, and when his skipper read the poem in the Morning Light next morning, he went about Sydney saying things, and, encountering the happy doctor, vowed he would not take him back in his ship.

'I have no ambition to sail again in your old tub,' said Dr Tom. 'My fortune is made.' So Dr Tom remained in Sydney, found his fortune was not made, and eventually came to Swamp Creek.

As Dr Tom sat meditating over his fortunes, or what remained of them, he thought of many things.

He thought of the first mate on the ship he had left in Sydney, and who had cleared out at the same time as himself. He had never liked that mate, he was a bad lot, and Dr Tom had at one time serious thoughts of dosing him and giving him to the sharks.

He also thought of the days he had spent wandering about Sydney, almost penniless, until a friendly hand had helped him to Swamp Creek and a monotonous existence, and yet it was an existence he did not dislike. He had not an enemy in the place, so far as he knew, and everyone was kind to him.

True, he did a lot of work, and got very few fees, and had even on one occasion to borrow money from Jim Dennis to purchase drugs to supply to sick people.

'When all my accounts are settled,' said Dr Tom to Jim Dennis, 'I mean to buy a station and throw this job up.'

'Don't let the folk around here know that or you'll never be paid. They would not lose you for anything, old man.'

It was very hot after the rain, and Dr Tom had very little else to do but kill time.

Having bottled up his medicines, he commenced to smoke and think.

What a life his had been. One of those men who with a little exertion might have made a name for themselves, he had been contented to drift carelessly and aimlessly through life.

On board ship he had acquired the art of cultivating laziness, and he was an adept at killing time.

The doctor was a visionary dreamer, and happy in a thousand fancies he conjured up in his imagination.

Children loved him, for no one could tell them a yarn suitable to their tender years better than Dr Tom.

The youngsters of Swamp Creek darted in and out of his dwelling in unrestricted freedom.

'Bless their little hearts, they have overturned that medicine chest again,' he would say on looking at the havoc they had made, and then proceed to put matters to rights in his own careless way.

But when there was danger at hand and Dr Tom was called, as he had been to Willie Dennis, to try and save life or relieve suffering, the best part of the man in him came out, and he strove with might and main to conquer death, and he often succeeded.

He was pottering about as usual, with no coat or waistcoat on, when Constable Doonan came in.

'Busy as usual, Dr Tom,' said the constable in a hearty voice.

'No, my boy, I am not busy. I have been sitting down making up a few prescriptions and picking up a few threads of the past.'

'And how do the threads unravel?' asked Doonan.

'Fairly well, my lad. There's a few tangles, but they are not of much account; there's no occasion for any cutting.'

'No, I'll bet there's not,' said Doonan. 'Jim Dennis is mighty proud of the job you have made of that lad of his.'

'Nice little chap,' said Dr Tom. 'He had a narrow squeak, and I don't mind telling you, if it hadn't been for Sal's care he might have gone before we got there. That woman's a marvel. Wonder who her father was.'

'They give Rodney Shaw's father the credit for it,' said Doonan.

'Eh! You don't say so! Bless me, what a heathenish lot they are about here.'

'Try and convert 'em, doctor.'

'Not I. We ought to import a few pulpit thumpers and let them try their hands.'

'They ought to start on Dalton's gang. I hear there is trouble brewing there.'

'Who's the victim this time?' asked Dr Tom.

'Jim Dennis.'

'Then, by heavens, he'll find one or two to help him!' said Dr Tom, bringing his fist down with such a bang on the table that all the bottles danced.

'What's it about?'

Doonan related how Jim Dennis had taken Seahorse from Dalton's men and restored him to Rodney Shaw.

'Just like Jim. He's the best fellow in the world,' said the doctor. 'We must see him through this. Why does not Machinson clear the whole lot out?'

'That's what I would like to know,' answered Doonan. 'It's not my place to interfere.'

'Something will have to be done soon,' said Dr Tom. 'The gang is a regular pest, and gets worse and worse every week.'

'You go to Barker's Creek sometimes, I think?' questioned the constable.

'Yes. I cannot refuse to attend a sick woman or child even amongst such a crowd, but I have told Abe Dalton I would not go near him or his men if they were dying.'

'You have plenty of pluck,' said Constable Doonan, admiringly.

Dr Tom waved his arm in a gesture of disdain as he replied,—

'There's not much pluck wanted to beard a fellow like Dalton. I'm going to Barker's Creek to-morrow to see a woman and her child. One of the ruffians came in here to-day to ask me. I gave him a bit of