Such Is Life Joseph Furphy (ebook reader screen .TXT) 📖

days, he got his friend to draw out a new will, by which he left everything, without reservation, to his wife. A day or two after completing the will, he took his gun and went out alone, turkey-shooting. He didn’t come home that night; and next day one of the station hands found him at a wire fence, shot straight through the heart. Accidentally, of course. But we knew better.”

“It might have been accidental, Alf,” I suggested. “There’s a lot of supposition in the story.”

“None, Collins. Before going out with his gun, he wrote a letter to my father, and sent it by a trustworthy blackfellow. My father got the letter about ten o’clock at night; and he had a horse run-in at once, and started off for the station through a raging thunderstorm, arriving next day only in time to see his friend’s body before it was moved to the house. My father was terribly cut-up about it. He was manager of an adjoining station at the time.

“Now let me tell you another true story,” pursued Alf dreamily. “Five years ago, I knew a man on the Maroo, a tank-sinker, with a wife and two children. The wife got soft on a young fellow at the camp; and everybody, except the husband, saw how things stood. Presently the husband began to circulate the report that he was going to New Zealand. In the meantime, he sent the two children to a boarding-school in Wagga. He was in no hurry. Afterward, he sold his plant to the station, and bade goodbye, in the most friendly way, to all hands, including the Don Juan. Then he started across the country to Wagga, alone with his wife, in a wagonette. Are you listening?”

“Attentively, Alf. But suppose I boil your billy, and⁠—”

“Two years afterward, a flock was sold off the station I was speaking of, for Western Queensland; and one of the station men went with the drover’s party, to see the sheep delivered. Curious coincidence: he met on the new station his old acquaintance, the tank-sinker, with his two children and a second wife. The tank-sinker told him that his first wife had died soon after leaving the Maroo, and that he had changed his mind about going to New Zealand. Am I making myself clear?”

“Yes; so far. You know the man you’re speaking of?”

“Slightly. I delivered goods to him once on the Maroo, and casually heard the scandal that was in the air. Well, the shearing came round on the Maroo just as the station man got back from Queensland; and while the adjoining station was mustering for the shed, a boundary man found, in the centre of one of the paddocks⁠—in the loneliest, barrenest hole of a place in New South Wales⁠—he found where a big fire had been made, and some bones burnt into white cinders and smashed small with a stick. He kicked the ashes over, and found the steel part of a woman’s stays, and the charred heel of a woman’s boot, and even a thimble and a few shillings that had probably been in her pocket. I was on the station at the time, waiting for wool, and saw the relics when the boundary man brought them in. There are queer things done when every man is a law unto himself.”

“Supposition, Alf; and strained supposition at that. But why should you trouble your mind about these things?”

“There was no supposition on the station where the things were found, nor on the station the tank-sinker had left, when they compared notes. The things were found three or four miles off a bit of a track that led to Wagga; and there was a pine of a year and a half old growing in the ashes. But we’ll pass that story. I want you to listen to another.”

“Some other time, Alf. I’ll make you a drink of tea, and⁠—”

“When I was young,” continued Alf doggedly, “I was very intimate with an American, a man of high principle and fine education. Best-informed man I ever knew. This poor fellow was a drunkard, occasional, but incorrigible. Misfortune had driven him to it. His wife was dead; his children had died in infancy; and at forty-five he was a hopeless wreck. He worked at my father’s farm on the Hawkesbury for two or three years, and died at our place when I was about twenty-five, immediately before I left home⁠—”

“I don’t like to correct you, Alf,” I interposed; “but I understood you to say that your father was a station-manager, on the Queensland border.

“Up to the time I was twenty-one or twenty-two. Then he bought a place on the Hawkesbury, intending, poor man! to spend the evening of his life indulging his hobby of chemistry, while I took the care of the place off his hands⁠—for though I have two sisters, I was his only son. His great ambition was to bequeath some chemical discovery to future generations. But I demolished his castles in the air along with my own. It’s no odds about myself; but my poor father deserved better, after all his work and worry. Ah, my God! we parted in anger; and now I don’t know whether he’s alive or dead!” The prodigal paused, and sighed bitterly.

“And your mother?” I suggested experimentally.

“She was an invalid for several years before I left home,” replied Alf, his tone fulfilling my anticipation.

(Have you ever noticed that the prodigal son of real life, in nineteen cases out of twenty, speaks spontaneously and feelingly of his father, with, perhaps, a dash of reverent humour; whereas, to quote Menenius, he no more remembers his mother than an eight-year-old horse? This is cruel beyond measure, and unjust beyond comment; but, sad to say, it is true; and the platitudinous tract-liar, for the sake of verisimilitude, as well as of novelty, should make a memo of it. Amongst all the hard-cases of my acquaintance, I can only think of one whose mother’s unseen presence is a