Chapter VI: Part 6

“Right, sir; quite right! What I wish you to do is briefly this: The line of railway has just been opened to Solteff, some hundred miles up the country. Now, I wish to get the start of the other Odessa firms in securing the produce of that district, which I have reason to believe may be had at very low prices. You will proceed by rail to Solteff, and interview a Mr. Dimidoff, who is the largest landed proprietor in the town. Make as favorable terms as you can with him. Both Mr. Dimidoff and I wish the whole thing to be done as quietly and secretly as possible--in fact, that nothing should be known about the matter until the grain appears in Odessa. I desire it for the interests of the firm, and Mr. Dimidoff on account of the prejudice his peasantry entertain against exportation. You will find yourself expected at the end of your journey, and will start to-night. Money shall be ready for your expenses. Good-morning, Mr. Robinson; I hope you won’t fail to realize the good opinion I have of your abilities.”

“Gregory,” I said, as I strutted into the office, “I’m off on a mission--a secret mission, my boy; an affair of thousands of pounds. Lend me your little portmanteau--mine’s too imposing--and tell Ivan to pack it. A Russian millionaire expects me at the end of my journey. Don’t breathe a word of it to any of Simpkins’s people, or the whole game will be up. Keep it dark!”

I was so charmed at being, as it were, behind the scenes, that I crept about the office all day in a sort of cloak-and-bloody-dagger style, with responsibility and brooding care marked upon every feature; and when at night I stepped out and stole down to the station, the unprejudiced observer would certainly have guessed, from my general behavior, that I had emptied the contents of the strong-box, before starting, into that little valise of Gregory’s. It was imprudent of him, by the way, to leave English labels pasted all over it. However, I could only hope that the “Londons” and “Birminghams” would attract no attention, or at least that no rival corn-merchant might deduce from them who I was and what my errand might be.

Having paid the necessary roubles and got my ticket, I ensconced myself in the corner of a snug Russian car, and pondered over my extraordinary good fortune. Dickson was growing old now, and if I could make my mark in this matter it might be a great thing for me. Dreams arose of a partnership in the firm. The noisy wheels seemed to clank out “Bailey, Robinson & Co.,” “Bailey, Robinson & Co.,” in a monotonous refrain, which gradually sank into a hum, and finally ceased as I dropped into a deep sleep. Had I known the experience which awaited me at the end of my journey it would hardly have been so peaceable.

I awoke with an uneasy feeling that some one was watching me closely; nor was I mistaken. A tall dark man had taken up his position on the seat opposite, and his black sinister eyes seemed to look through me and beyond me, as if he wished to read my very soul. Then I saw him glance down at my little trunk.

“Good heavens!” thought I, “here’s Simpkins’s agent, I suppose. It was careless of Gregory to leave those confounded labels on the valise.”

I closed my eyes for a time, but on reopening them I again caught the stranger’s earnest gaze.

“From England, I see,” he said in Russian, showing a row of white teeth in what was meant to be an amiable smile.

“Yes,” I replied, trying to look unconcerned, but painfully aware of my failure.

“Travelling for pleasure, perhaps?” said he.

“Yes,” I answered eagerly. “Certainly for pleasure; nothing else.”

“Of course not,” said he, with a shade of irony in his voice. “Englishmen always travel for pleasure, don’t they? Oh, no; nothing else.”

His conduct was mysterious, to say the least of it. It was only explainable upon two hypotheses--he was either a madman, or he was the agent of some firm bound upon the same errand as myself, and determined to show me that he guessed my little game. They were about equally unpleasant, and, on the whole, I was relieved when the train pulled up in the tumble-down shed which does duty for a station in the rising town of Solteff--Solteff, whose resources I was about to open out, and whose commerce I was to direct into the great world channels. I almost expected to see a triumphal arch as I stepped on to the platform.

I was to be expected at the end of my journey, so Mr. Dickson had informed me. I looked about among the motley crowd, but saw no Mr. Dimidoff. Suddenly a slovenly, unshaved man passed me rapidly, and glanced first at me and then at my trunk--that wretched trunk, the cause of all my woes. He disappeared in the crowd; but in a little time came strolling past me again, and contrived to whisper as he did so, “Follow me, but at some distance,” immediately setting off out of the station and down the street at a rapid pace. Here was mystery with a vengeance! I trotted along in his rear with my valise, and on turning the corner found a rough droschky waiting for me. My unshaven friend opened the door, and I stepped in.

“Is Mr. Dim----” I was beginning.

“Hush!” he cried. “No names, no names; the very walls have ears. You will hear all to-night;” and with that assurance he closed the door, and, seizing the reins, we drove off at a rapid pace--so rapid that I saw my black-eyed acquaintance of the railway carriage gazing after us in surprise until we were out of sight.

I thought over the whole matter as we jogged along in that abominable springless conveyance.

“They say the nobles are tyrants in Russia,” I mused; “but it seems to me to be the other way about, for here’s this poor Mr. Dimidoff, who evidently thinks his ex-serfs will rise and murder him if he raises the price of grain in the district by exporting some out of it. Fancy being obliged to have recourse to all this mystery and deception in order to sell one’s own property! Why, it’s worse than an Irish landlord. It is monstrous! Well, he doesn’t seem to live in a very aristocratic quarter either,” I soliloquized, as I gazed out at the narrow crooked streets and the unkempt dirty Muscovites whom we passed. “I wish Gregory or some one was with me, for it’s a cut-throat-looking shop! By Jove, he’s pulling up; we must be there!”

We _were_ there, to all appearance; for the droschky stopped, and my driver’s shaggy head appeared through the aperture.

“It is here, most honored master,” he said, as he helped me to alight.

“Is Mr. Dimi----” I commenced; but he interrupted me again.

“Anything but names,” he whispered; “anything but that. You are too used to a land that is free. Caution, oh sacred one!” and he ushered me down a stone-flagged passage, and up a stair at the end of it. “Sit for a few minutes in this room,” he said, opening a door, “and a repast will be served for you;” and with that he left me to my own reflections.

“Well,” thought I, “whatever Mr. Dimidoff’s house may be like, his servants are undoubtedly well trained. ‘Oh sacred one!’ and ‘revered master!’ I wonder what he’d call old Dickson himself, if he is so polite to the clerk! I suppose it wouldn’t be the thing to smoke in this little crib; but I could do a pipe nicely. By the way, how confoundedly like a cell it looks!”

It certainly did look like a cell. The door was an iron one, and enormously strong, while the single window was closely barred. The floor was of wood, and sounded hollow and insecure as I strode across it. Both floor and walls were thickly splashed with coffee or some other dark liquid. On the whole, it was far from being a place where one would be likely to become unreasonably festive.

I had hardly concluded my survey when I heard steps approaching down the corridor, and the door was opened by my old friend of the droschky. He announced that my dinner was ready, and, with many bows and apologies for leaving me in what he called the “dismissal room,” he led me down the passage, and into a large and beautifully furnished apartment. A table was spread for two in the centre of it, and by the fire was standing a man very little older than myself. He turned as I came in, and stepped forward to meet me with every symptom of profound respect.

“So young and yet so honored!” he exclaimed; and then seeming to recollect himself, he continued, “Pray sit at the head of the table. You must be fatigued by your long and arduous journey. We dine _tête-à-tête_; but the others assemble afterward.”

“Mr. Dimidoff, I presume?” said I.

“No, sir,” said he, turning his keen gray eyes upon me. “My name is Petrokine; you mistake me perhaps for one of the others. But now, not a word of business until the council meets. Try your _chef’s_ soup; you will find it excellent, I think.”

Who Mr. Petrokine or the others might be I could not conceive. Land stewards of Dimidoff’s, perhaps; though the name did not seem familiar to my companion. However, as he appeared to shun any business questions at present, I gave in to his humor, and we conversed on social life in England--a subject in which he displayed considerable knowledge and acuteness. His remarks, too, on Malthus and the laws of population were wonderfully good, though savoring somewhat of Radicalism.

“By the way,” he remarked, as we smoked a cigar over our wine, “we should never have known you but for the English labels on your luggage; it was the luckiest thing in the world that Alexander noticed them. We had had no personal description of you; indeed we were prepared to expect a somewhat older man. You are young indeed, sir, to be intrusted with such a mission.”

“My employer trusts me,” I replied; “and we have learned in our trade that youth and shrewdness are not incompatible.”

“Your remark is true, sir,” returned my newly made friend; “but I am surprised to hear you call our glorious association a trade! Such a term is gross indeed to apply to a body of men banded together to supply the world with that which it is yearning for, but which, without our exertions, it can never hope to attain. A spiritual brotherhood would be a more fitting term.”

“By Jove!” thought I, “how pleased the boss would be to hear him! He must have been in the business himself, whoever he is.”

“Now, sir,” said Mr. Petrokine, “the clock points to eight, and the council must be already sitting. Let us go up together, and I will introduce you. I need hardly say that the greatest secrecy is observed, and that your appearance is anxiously awaited.”

I turned over in my mind as I followed him how I might best fulfil my mission and secure the most advantageous terms. They seemed as anxious as I was in the matter, and there appeared to be no opposition, so perhaps the best thing would be to wait and see what they would propose.

I had hardly come to this conclusion when my guide swung open a large door at the end of a passage, and I found myself in a room larger and even more gorgeously fitted up than the one in which I had dined. A long table, covered with green baize and strewn with papers, ran down the middle, and round it were sitting fourteen or fifteen men conversing earnestly. The whole scene reminded me forcibly of a gambling hell I had visited some time before.

Upon our entrance the company rose and bowed. I could not but remark that my companion attracted no attention, while every eye was turned upon me with a strange mixture of surprise and almost servile respect. A man at the head of the table, who was remarkable for the extreme pallor of his face as contrasted with his blue-black hair and mustache, waved his hand to a seat beside him, and I sat down.

“I need hardly say,” said Mr. Petrokine, “that Gustave Berger, the English agent, is now honoring us with his presence. He is young, indeed, Alexis,” he continued to my pale-faced neighbor, “and yet he is of European reputation.”

“Come, draw it mild!” thought I, adding aloud, “If you refer to me, sir, though I am indeed acting as English agent, my name is not Berger, but Robinson--Mr. Tom Robinson, at your service.”

A laugh ran round the table.

“So be it, so be it,” said the man they called Alexis. “I commend your discretion, most honored sir. One cannot be too careful. Preserve your English _sobriquet_ by all means. I regret that any painful duty should be performed upon this auspicious evening; but the rules of our association must be preserved at any cost to our feelings, and a dismissal is inevitable to-night.”

“What the deuce is the fellow driving at?” thought I. “What is it to me if he does give his servant the sack? This Dimidoff, wherever he is, seems to keep a private lunatic asylum.”

“_Take out the gag!_” The words fairly shot through me, and I started in my chair. It was Petrokine who spoke. For the first time I noticed that a burly stout man, sitting at the other end of the table, had his arms tied behind his chair and a handkerchief round his mouth. A horrible suspicion began to creep into my heart. Where was I? Was I in Mr. Dimidoff’s? Who were these men, with their strange words?

“Take out the gag!” repeated Petrokine; and the handkerchief was removed.

“Now, Paul Ivanovitch,” said he, “what have you to say before you go?”

“Not a dismissal, sirs,” he pleaded; “not a dismissal: anything but that! I will go into some distant land, and my mouth shall be closed forever. I will do anything that the society asks, but pray, pray do not dismiss me.”

“You know our laws, and you know your crime,” said Alexis, in a cold, harsh voice. “Who drove us from Odessa by his false tongue and his double face? Who wrote the anonymous letter to the Governor? Who cut the wire that would have destroyed the arch-tyrant? You did, Paul Ivanovitch; and you must die.”

I leaned back in my chair and fairly gasped.

“Remove him!” said Petrokine; and the man of the droschky, with two others, forced him out.

I heard the footsteps pass down the passage and then a door open and shut. Then came a sound as of a struggle, ended by a heavy, crunching blow and a dull thud.

“So perish all who are false to their oath,” said Alexis, solemnly; and a hoarse “Amen” went up from his companions.

“Death alone can dismiss us from our order,” said another man further down; “but Mr. Berg--Mr. Robinson is pale. The scene has been too much for him after his long journey from England.”

“Oh, Tom, Tom,” thought I, “if ever you get out of this scrape you’ll turn over a new leaf. You’re not fit to die, and that’s a fact.” It was only too evident to me now that by some strange misconception I had got in among a gang of cold-blooded Nihilists, who mistook me for one of their order. I felt, after what I had witnessed, that my only chance of life was to try to play the _rôle_ thus forced upon me until an opportunity for escape should present itself; so I tried hard to regain my air of self-possession, which had been so rudely shaken.

“I am indeed fatigued,” I replied; “but I feel stronger now. Excuse my momentary weakness.”

“It was but natural,” said a man with a thick beard at my right hand. “And now, most honored sir, how goes the cause in England?”

“Remarkably well,” I answered.

“Has the great commissioner condescended to send a missive to the Solteff branch?” asked Petrokine.

“Nothing in writing,” I replied.

“But he has spoken of it?”

“Yes; he said he had watched it with feelings of the liveliest satisfaction,” I returned.

“’Tis well! ’tis well!” ran round the table.

I felt giddy and sick from the critical nature of my position. Any moment a question might be asked which would show me in my true colors. I rose and helped myself from a decanter of brandy which stood on a side-table. The potent liquor flew to my excited brain, and as I sat down I felt reckless enough to be half amused at my position, and inclined to play with my tormentors. I still, however, had all my wits about me.

“You have been to Birmingham?” asked the man with the beard.

“Many times,” said I.

“Then you have, of course, seen the private workshop and arsenal?”

“I have been over them both more than once.”

“It is still, I suppose, entirely unsuspected by the police?” continued my interrogator.

“Entirely,” I replied.

“Can you tell us how it is that so large a concern is kept so completely secret?”

Here was a poser; but my native impudence and the brandy seemed to come to my aid.

“That is information,” I replied, “which I do not feel justified in divulging even here. In withholding it I am acting under the direction of the chief commissioner.”

“You are right--perfectly right,” said my original friend Petrokine. “You will no doubt make your report to the central office at Moscow before entering into such details.”

“Exactly so,” I replied, only too happy to get a lift out of my difficulty.

“We have heard,” said Alexis, “that you were sent to inspect the Livadia. Can you give us any particulars about it?”

“Anything you ask I will endeavor to answer,” I replied, in desperation.

“Have any orders been made in Birmingham concerning it?”

“None when I left England.”

“Well, well, there’s plenty of time yet,” said the man with the beard--“many months. Will the bottom be of wood or iron?”

“Of wood,” I answered at random.

“’Tis well!” said another voice. “And what is the breadth of the Clyde below Greenock?”

“It varies much,” I replied; “on an average about eighty yards.”

“How many men does she carry?” asked an anæmic-looking youth at the foot of the table, who seemed more fit for a public school than this den of murder.

“About three hundred,” said I.

“A floating coffin!” said the young Nihilist, in a sepulchral voice.

“Are the store-rooms on a level with or underneath the state-cabins?” asked Petrokine.

“Underneath,” said I decisively, though I need hardly say I had not the smallest conception.

“And now, most honored sir,” said Alexis, “tell us what was the reply of Bauer, the German socialist, to Ravinsky’s proclamation.”

Here was a deadlock with a vengeance. Whether my cunning would have extricated me from it or not was never decided, for Providence hurried me from one dilemma into another and a worse one.

A door slammed downstairs, and rapid footsteps were heard approaching. Then came a loud tap outside, followed by two smaller ones.

“The sign of the society!” said Petrokine; “and yet we are all present; who can it be?”

The door was thrown open, and a man entered, dusty and travel-stained, but with an air of authority and power stamped on every feature of his harsh but expressive face. He glanced round the table, scanning each countenance carefully. There was a start of surprise in the room. He was evidently a stranger to them all.

“What means this intrusion, sir?” said my friend with the beard.

“Intrusion!” said the stranger. “I was given to understand that I was expected, and had looked forward to a warmer welcome from my fellow-associates. I am personally unknown to you, gentlemen, but I am proud to think that my name should command some respect among you. I am Gustave Berger, the agent from England, bearing letters from the chief commissioner to his well-beloved brothers of Solteff.”

One of their own bombs could hardly have created greater surprise had it been fired in the midst of them. Every eye was fixed alternately on me and upon the newly arrived agent.

“If you are indeed Gustave Berger,” said Petrokine, “who is this?”

“That I am Gustave Berger these credentials will show,” said the stranger, as he threw a packet upon the table. “Who that man may be I know not; but if he has intruded himself upon the lodge under false pretences, it is clear that he must never carry out of the room what he has learned. Speak, sir,” he added, addressing me: “who and what are you?”

I felt that my time had come. My revolver was in my hip-pocket; but what was that against so many desperate men? I grasped the butt of it, however, as a drowning man clings to a straw, and I tried to preserve my coolness as I glanced round at the cold, vindictive faces turned toward me.

“Gentlemen,” I said, “the _rôle_ I have played to-night has been a purely involuntary one on my part. I am no police spy, as you seem to suspect; nor, on the other hand, have I the honor to be a member of your association. I am an inoffensive corn-dealer, who by an extraordinary mistake has been forced into this unpleasant and awkward position.”

I paused for a moment. Was it my fancy that there was a peculiar noise in the street--a noise as of many feet treading softly? No, it had died away; it was but the throbbing of my own heart.

“I need hardly say,” I continued, “that anything I may have heard to-night will be safe in my keeping. I pledge my solemn honor as a gentleman that not one word of it shall transpire through me.”

The senses of men in great physical danger become strangely acute, or their imagination plays them curious tricks. My back was toward the door as I sat, but I could have sworn that I heard heavy breathing behind it. Was it the three minions whom I had seen before in the performance of their hateful functions, and who, like vultures, had sniffed another victim?

I looked round the table. Still the same hard, cruel faces. Not one glance of sympathy. I cocked the revolver in my pocket.

There was a painful silence, which was broken by the harsh, grating voice of Petrokine.

“Promises are easily made and easily broken,” he said. “There is but one way of securing eternal silence. It is our lives or yours. Let the highest among us speak.”

“You are right, sir,” said the English agent; “there is but one course open. He must be dismissed.”

I knew what that meant in their confounded jargon, and sprang to my feet.

“By Heaven,” I shouted, putting my back against the door, “you shan’t butcher a free Englishman like a sheep! The first among you who stirs, drops!”

A man sprang at me. I saw along the sights of my Derringer the gleam of a knife and the demoniacal face of Gustave Berger. Then I pulled the trigger, and, with his hoarse scream sounding in my ears, I was felled to the ground by a crashing blow from behind. Half-unconscious, and pressed down by some heavy weight, I heard the noise of shouts and blows above me, and then I fainted away.

When I came to myself I was lying among the _débris_ of the door, which had been beaten in on the top of me. Opposite were a dozen of the men who had lately sat in judgment upon me, tied two and two, and guarded by a score of Russian soldiers. Beside me was the corpse of the ill-fated English agent, the whole face blown in by the force of the explosion. Alexis and Petrokine were both lying on the floor like myself, bleeding profusely.

“Well, young fellow, you’ve had a narrow escape,” said a hearty voice in my ear.

I looked up, and recognized my black-eyed acquaintance of the railway carriage.

“Stand up,” he continued: “you’re only a bit stunned; no bones broken. It’s no wonder I mistook you for the Nihilist agent, when the very lodge itself was taken in. Well, you’re the only stranger who ever came out of this den alive. Come downstairs with me. I know who you are, and what you are after now; I’ll take you to Mr. Dimidoff. Nay, don’t go in there,” he cried, as I walked toward the door of the cell into which I had been originally ushered. “Keep out of that; you’ve seen evil sights enough for one day. Come down and have a glass of liquor.”

He explained as we walked back to the hotel that the police of Solteff, of which he was the chief, had had warning and been on the look-out during some time for this Nihilist emissary. My arrival in so unfrequented a place, coupled with my air of secrecy and the English labels on that confounded portmanteau of Gregory’s, had completed the business.

I have little more to tell. My Socialistic acquaintances were all either transported to Siberia or executed. My mission was performed to the satisfaction of my employers. My conduct during the whole business has won me promotion, and my prospects for life have been improved since that horrible night, the remembrance of which still makes me shiver.

BONES.

THE APRIL FOOL OF HARVEY’S SLUICE.

Abe Durton’s cabin was not beautiful. People have been heard to assert that it was ugly, and, even after the fashion of Harvey’s Sluice, have gone the length of prefixing their adjective with a forcible expletive which emphasized their criticism. Abe, however, was a stolid and easy-going man, on whose mind the remarks of an unappreciative public made but little impression. He had built the house himself, and it suited his partner and him, and what more did they want? Indeed he was rather touchy upon the subject. “Though I says it, as raised it,” he remarked, “it’ll lay over any shanty in the valley. Holes? Well, of course there are holes. You wouldn’t get fresh air without holes. There’s nothing stuffy about _my_ house. Rain? Well, if it does let the rain in, ain’t it an advantage to know it’s rainin’ without gettin’ up to unbar the door. I wouldn’t own a house that didn’t leak some. As to its bein’ off the perpendic’lar, I like a house with a bit of a tilt. Anyways it pleases my pard, Boss Morgan, and what’s good enough for him is good enough for you, I suppose.” At which approach to personalities his antagonist usually sheered off, and left the honors of the field to the indignant architect.

But whatever difference of opinion might exist as to the beauty of the establishment, there could be no question as to its utility. To the tired wayfarer, plodding along the Buckhurst road in the direction of the Sluice, the warm glow upon the summit of the hill was a beacon of hope and of comfort. Those very holes at which the neighbors sneered helped to diffuse a cheery atmosphere of light around, which was doubly acceptable on such a night as the present.

There was only one man inside the hut, and that was the proprietor, Abe Durton himself, or “Bones,” as he had been christened with the rude heraldry of the camp. He was sitting in front of the great wood fire, gazing moodily into its glowing depths, and occasionally giving a fagot a kick of remonstrance when it showed any indication of dying into a smoulder. His fair Saxon face, with its bold simple eyes and crisp yellow beard, stood out sharp and clear against the darkness as the flickering light played over it. It was a manly, resolute countenance, and yet the physiognomist might have detected something in the lines of the mouth which showed a weakness somewhere, an indecision which contrasted strangely with his herculean shoulders and massive limbs. Abe’s was one of those trusting, simple natures which are as easy to lead as they are impossible to drive; and it was this happy pliability of disposition which made him at once the butt and the favorite of the dwellers in the Sluice. Badinage in that primitive settlement was of a somewhat ponderous character, yet no amount of chaff had ever brought a dark look on Bones’s face, or an unkind thought into his honest heart. It was only when his aristocratic partner was, as he thought, being put upon, that an ominous tightness about his lower lip and an angry light in his blue eyes, caused even the most irrepressible humorist in the colony to nip his favorite joke in the bud, in order to diverge into an earnest and all-absorbing dissertation upon the state of the weather.

“The Boss is late to-night,” he muttered, as he rose from his chair, and stretched himself in a colossal yawn. “My stars, how it does rain and blow! Don’t it, Blinky?” Blinky was a demure and meditative owl, whose comfort and welfare was a chronic subject of solicitude to its master, and who at present contemplated him gravely from one of the rafters. “Pity you can’t speak, Blinky,” continued Abe, glancing up at his feathered companion. “There’s a powerful deal of sense in your face. Kinder melancholy too. Crossed in love, maybe, when you was young. Talkin’ of love,” he added, “I’ve not seen Susan to-day;” and lighting the candle which stood in a black bottle upon the table, he walked across the room and peered earnestly at one of the many pictures from stray illustrated papers, which had been cut out by the occupants and posted up upon the walls.

The particular picture which attracted him was one which represented a very tawdrily dressed actress simpering over a bouquet at an imaginary audience. This sketch had, for some inscrutable reason, made a deep impression upon the susceptible heart of the miner. He had invested the young lady with a human interest by solemnly, and without the slightest warrant, christening her as Susan Banks, and had then installed her as his standard of female beauty.

“You see my Susan,” he would say, when some wanderer from Buckhurst, or even from Melbourne, would describe some fair Circe whom he had left behind him. “There ain’t a girl like my Sue. If ever you go to the old country again, just you ask to see her. Susan Banks is her name, and I’ve got her picture up at the shanty.”

Abe was still gazing at his charmer, when the rough door was flung open, and a blinding cloud of sleet and rain came driving into the cabin, almost obscuring for the moment a young man who sprang in and proceeded to bar the entrance behind him, an operation which the force of the wind rendered no easy matter. He might have passed for the genius of the storm, with the water dripping from his long hair and running down his pale, refined face.

“Well,” he said, in a slightly peevish voice, “haven’t you got any supper?”

“Waiting and ready,” said his companion cheerily, pointing to a large pot which bubbled by the side of the fire. “You seem sort of damp.”

“Damp be hanged! I’m soaked, man, thoroughly saturated. It’s a night that I wouldn’t have a dog out, at least not a dog that I had any respect for. Hand over that dry coat from the peg.”

Jack Morgan, or Boss, as he was usually called, belonged to a type which was commoner in the mines during the flush times of the first great rush than would be supposed. He was a man of good blood, liberally educated, and a graduate of an English university. Boss should, in the natural course of things, have been an energetic curate, or struggling professional man, had not some latent traits cropped out in his character, inherited possibly from old Sir Henry Morgan, who had founded the family with Spanish pieces of eight gallantly won upon the high seas. It was this wild strain of blood no doubt which had caused him to drop from the bedroom window of the ivy-clad English parsonage, and leave home and friends behind him to try his luck with pick and shovel in the Australian fields. In spite of his effeminate face and dainty manners, the rough dwellers in Harvey’s Sluice had gradually learned that the little man was possessed of a cool courage and unflinching resolution, which won respect in a community where pluck was looked upon as the highest of human attributes. No one ever knew how it was that Bones and he had become partners; yet partners they were, and the large, simple nature of the stronger man looked with an almost superstitious reverence upon the clear, decisive mind of his companion.

“That’s better,” said the Boss, as he dropped into the vacant chair before the fire and watched Abe laying out the two metal plates, with the horn-handled knives and abnormally pronged forks. “Take your mining boots off, Bones; there’s no use filling the cabin with red clay. Come here and sit down.”

His gigantic partner came meekly over and perched himself upon the top of a barrel.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“Shares are up,” said his companion. “That’s what’s up. Look here,” and he extracted a crumpled paper from the pocket of the steaming coat. “Here’s the _Buckhurst Sentinel_. Read this article--this one here about a paying lead in the Conemara mine. We hold pretty heavily in that concern, my boy. We might sell out to-day and clear something--but I think we’ll hold on.”

Abe Durton in the mean time was laboriously spelling out the article in question, following the lines with his great forefinger, and muttering under his tawny mustache.

“Two hundred dollars a foot,” he said, looking up. “Why, pard, we hold a hundred feet each. It would give us twenty thousand dollars! We might go home on that.”

“Nonsense!” said his companion; “we’ve come out here for something better than a beggarly couple of thousand pounds. The thing is bound to pay. Sinclair the assayer has been over there, and says there’s a ledge of the richest quartz he ever set eyes on. It is just a case of getting the machinery to crush it. By the way, what was to-day’s take like?”

Abe extracted a small wooden box from his pocket and handed it to his comrade. It contained what appeared to be about a teaspoonful of sand and one or two little metallic granules not larger than a pea. Boss Morgan laughed, and returned it to his companion.

“We sha’n’t make our fortune at that rate, Bones,” he remarked; and there was a pause in the conversation as the two men listened to the wind as it screamed and whistled past the little cabin.

“Any news from Buckhurst?” asked Abe, rising and proceeding to extract their supper from the pot.

“Nothing much,” said his companion. “Cockeyed Joe has been shot by Billy Reid in McFarlane’s Store.”

“Ah!” said Abe, with listless interest.

“Bushrangers have been around and stuck up the Rochdale station. They say they are coming over here.”

The miner whistled as he poured some whiskey into a jug.

“Anything more?” he asked.

“Nothing of importance, except that the blacks have been showing a bit down New Sterling way, and that the assayer has bought a piano and is going to have his daughter out from Melbourne to live in the new house opposite on the other side of the road. So you see we are going to have something to look at, my boy,” he added as he sat down, and began attacking the food set before him. “They say she is a beauty, Bones.”

“She won’t be a patch on my Sue,” returned the other decisively.

His partner smiled as he glanced round at the flaring print upon the wall. Suddenly he dropped his knife and seemed to listen. Amid the wild uproar of the wind and the rain there was a low rumbling sound which was evidently not dependent upon the elements.

“What’s that?”

“Darned if I know.”

The two men made for the door and peered out earnestly into the darkness. Far away along the Buckhurst road they could see a moving light, and the dull sound was louder than before.

“It’s a buggy coming down,” said Abe.

“Where is it going to?”

“Don’t know. Across the ford, I s’pose.”

“Why, man, the ford will be six feet deep to-night, and running like a mill-stream.”

The light was nearer now, coming rapidly round the curve of the road. There was a wild sound of galloping with the rattle of the wheels.

“Horses have bolted, by thunder!”

“Bad job for the man inside.”

There was a rough individuality about the inhabitants of Harvey’s Sluice, in virtue of which every man bore his misfortunes upon his own shoulders, and had very little sympathy for those of his neighbors. The predominant feeling of the two men was one of pure curiosity as they watched the swinging, swaying lanterns coming down the winding road.

“If he don’t pull ’em up before they reach the ford he’s a goner,” remarked Abe Durton resignedly.

Suddenly there came a lull in the sullen splash of the rain. It was but for a moment, but in that moment there came down on the breeze a long cry which caused the two men to start and stare at each other, and then to rush frantically down the steep incline toward the road below.

“A woman, by Heaven!” gasped Abe, as he sprang across the gaping shaft of a mine in the recklessness of his haste.

Morgan was the lighter and more active man. He drew away rapidly from his stalwart companion. Within a minute he was standing panting and bareheaded in the middle of the soft muddy road, while his partner was still toiling down the side of the declivity.

The carriage was close on him now. He could see in the light of the lamps the raw-boned Australian horse as, terrified by the storm and by its own clatter, it came tearing down the declivity which led to the ford. The man who was driving seemed to see the pale set face in the pathway in front of him, for he yelled out some incoherent words of warning, and made a last desperate attempt to pull up. There was a shout, an oath, and a jarring crash, and Abe, hurrying down, saw a wild infuriated horse rearing madly in the air with a slim dark figure hanging on to its bridle. Boss, with the keen power of calculation which had made him the finest cricketer at Rugby in his day, had caught the rein immediately below the bit, and clung to it with silent concentration. Once he was down with a heavy thud in the roadway as the horse jerked its head violently forward, but when, with a snort of exultation, the animal pressed on, it was only to find that the prostrate man beneath its forehoofs still maintained his unyielding grasp.

“Hold it, Bones,” he said, as a tall figure hurled itself into the road and seized the other rein.

“All right, old man, I’ve got him;” and the horse, cowed by the sight of a fresh assailant, quieted down, and stood shivering with terror.

“Get up, Boss, it’s safe now.”

But poor Boss lay groaning in the mud.

“I can’t do it, Bones.” There was a catch in the voice as of pain. “There’s something wrong, old chap, but don’t make a fuss. It’s only a shake; give me a lift up.”

Abe bent tenderly over his prostrate companion. He could see that he was very white, and breathing with difficulty.

“Cheer up, old Boss,” he murmured. “Hullo! my stars!”

The last two exclamations were shot out of the honest miner’s bosom as if they were impelled by some irresistible force, and he took a couple of steps backward in sheer amazement. There at the other side of the fallen man, and half shrouded in the darkness, stood what appeared to Abe’s simple soul to be the most beautiful vision that ever had appeared upon earth. To eyes accustomed to rest upon nothing more captivating than the ruddy faces and rough beards of the miners in the Sluice, it seemed that that fair, delicate countenance must belong to a wanderer from some better world. Abe gazed at it with a wondering reverence, oblivious for the moment even of his injured friend upon the ground.

“Oh, papa,” said the apparition, in great distress, “he is hurt, the gentleman is hurt;” and with a quick feminine gesture of sympathy, she bent her lithe figure over Boss Morgan’s prostrate figure.

“Why, it’s Abe Durton and his partner,” said the driver of the buggy, coming forward and disclosing the grizzled features of Mr. Joshua Sinclair, the assayer to the mines. “I don’t know how to thank you, boys. The infernal brute got the bit between his teeth, and I should have had to have thrown Carrie out and chanced it in another minute. That’s right,” he continued, as Morgan staggered to his feet. “Not much hurt, I hope.”

“I can get up to the hut now,” said the young man, steadying himself upon his partner’s shoulder. “How are you going to get Miss Sinclair home?”

“Oh, we can walk!” said that young lady, shaking off the effects of her fright with all the elasticity of youth.

“We can drive and take the road round the bank so as to avoid the ford,” said her father. “The horse seems cowed enough now; you need not be afraid of it, Carrie. I hope we shall see you at the house, both of you. Neither of us can easily forget this night’s work.”

Miss Carrie said nothing, but she managed to shoot a little demure glance of gratitude from under her long lashes, to have won which honest Abe felt that he would have cheerfully undertaken to stop a runaway locomotive.

There was a cheery shout of “Good-night,” a crack of the whip, and the buggy rattled away in the darkness.

“You told me the men were rough and nasty, pa,” said Miss Carrie Sinclair, after a long silence, when the two dark shadows had died away in the distance, and the carriage was speeding along by the turbulent stream. “I don’t think so. I think they are very nice.” And Carrie was unusually quiet for the remainder of her journey, and seemed more reconciled to the hardship of leaving her dear friend Amelia in the far-off boarding school at Melbourne.

That did not prevent her from writing a full, true, and particular account of their little adventure to the same young lady upon that very night.

“They stopped the horse, darling, and one poor fellow was hurt. And oh, Amy, if you had seen the other one in a red shirt, with a pistol at his waist! I couldn’t help thinking of you, dear. He was just your idea. You remember, a yellow mustache and great blue eyes. And how he did stare at poor me! You never see such men in Burke Street, Amy;” and so on, for four pages of pretty feminine gossip.

In the mean time poor Boss, badly shaken, had been helped up the hill by his partner and regained the shelter of the shanty. Abe doctored him out of the rude pharmacopœia of the camp, and bandaged up his strained arm. Both were men of few words, and neither made any allusion to what had taken place. It was noticed, however, by Blinky, that his master failed to pay his usual nightly orisons before the shrine of Susan Banks. Whether this sagacious fowl drew any deductions from this, and from the fact that Bones sat long and earnestly smoking by the smouldering fire, I know not. Suffice it that as the candle died away and the miner rose from his chair, his feathered friend flew down upon his shoulder, and was only prevented from giving vent to a sympathetic hoot by Abe’s warning finger, and its own strong inherent sense of propriety.

* * * * *

A casual visitor dropping into the straggling township of Harvey’s Sluice shortly after Miss Carrie Sinclair’s arrival would have noticed a considerable alteration in the manners and customs of its inhabitants. Whether it was the refining influence of a woman’s presence, or whether it sprang from an emulation excited by the brilliant appearance of Abe Durton, it is hard to say--probably from a blending of the two. Certain it is that that young man had suddenly developed an affection for cleanliness and a regard for the conventionalities of civilization, which aroused the astonishment and ridicule of his companions. That Boss Morgan should pay attention to his personal appearance had long been set down as a curious and inexplicable phenomenon, depending upon early education; but that loose-limbed easy-going Bones should flaunt about in a clean shirt was regarded by every grimy denizen of the Sluice as a direct and premeditated insult. In self-defence, therefore, there was a general cleaning up after working hours, and such a run upon the grocery establishment, that soap went up to an unprecedented figure, and a fresh consignment had to be ordered from McFarlane’s store in Buckhurst.

“Is this here a free minin’ camp, or is it a darned Sunday-school?” had been the indignant query of Long McCoy, a prominent member of the reactionary party, who had failed to advance with the times, having been absent during the period of regeneration. But his remonstrance met with but little sympathy; and at the end of a couple of days a general turbidity of the creek announced his surrender, which was confirmed by his appearance in the Colonial Bar with a shining and bashful face, and hair which was redolent of bear’s grease.

“I felt kinder lonesome,” he remarked apologetically, “so I thought as I’d have a look what was under the clay;” and he viewed himself approvingly in the cracked mirror which graced the select room of the establishment.

Our casual visitor would have noticed a remarkable change also in the conversation of the community. Somehow, when a certain dainty little bonnet with a sweet girlish figure beneath it was seen in the distance among the disused shafts and mounds of red earth which disfigured the sides of the valley, there was a warning murmur, and a general clearing off of the cloud of blasphemy, which was, I regret to state, an habitual characteristic of the working population of Harvey’s Sluice. Such things only need a beginning; and it was noticeable that long after Miss Sinclair had vanished from sight there was a decided rise in the moral barometer of the gulches. Men found by experience that their stock of adjectives was less limited than they had been accustomed to suppose, and that the less forcible were sometimes even more adapted for conveying their meaning.

Abe had formerly been considered one of the most experienced valuators of an ore in the settlement. It had been commonly supposed that he was able to estimate the amount of gold in a fragment of quartz with remarkable exactness. This, however, was evidently a mistake, otherwise he would never have incurred the useless expense of having so many worthless specimens assayed as he now did. Mr. Joshua Sinclair found himself inundated with such a flood of fragments of mica, and lumps of rock containing decimal percentages of the precious metals, that he began to form a very low opinion of the young man’s mining capabilities. It is even asserted that Abe shuffled up to the house one morning with a hopeful smile, and, after some fumbling, produced half a brick from the bosom of his jersey, with the stereotyped remark, “that he thought he’d struck it at last, and so had dropped in to ask him to cipher out an estimate.” As this anecdote rests, however, upon the unsupported evidence of Jim Struggles, the humorist of the camp, there may be some slight inaccuracy of detail.

It is certain that what with professional business in the morning and social visits at night, the tall figure of the miner was a familiar object in the little drawing-room of Azalea Villa, as the new house of the assayer had been magniloquently named. He seldom ventured upon a remark in the presence of its female occupant; but would sit on the extreme edge of his chair in a state of speechless admiration while she rattled off some lively air upon the newly imported piano. Many were the strange and unexpected places in which his feet turned up. Miss Carrie had gradually come to the conclusion that they were entirely independent of his body, and had ceased to speculate upon the manner in which she would trip over them on one side of the table while the blushing owner was apologizing from the other. There was only one cloud on honest Bones’s mental horizon, and that was the periodical appearance of Black Tom Ferguson, of Rochdale Ferry. This clever young scamp had managed to ingratiate himself with old Joshua, and was a constant visitor at the villa. There were evil rumors abroad about Black Tom. He was known to be a gambler, and shrewdly suspected to be worse. Harvey’s Sluice was not censorious, and yet there was a general feeling that Ferguson was a man to be avoided. There was a reckless _élan_ about his bearing, however, and a sparkle in his conversation, which had an indescribable charm, and even induced the Boss, who was particular in such matters, to cultivate his acquaintance while forming a correct estimate of his character. Miss Carrie seemed to hail his appearance as a relief, and chattered away for hours about books and music and the gayeties of Melbourne. It was on these occasions that poor simple Bones would sink into the very lowest depths of despondency, and either slink away, or sit glaring at his rival with an earnest malignancy which seemed to cause that gentleman no small amusement.

The miner made no secret to his partner of the admiration which he entertained for Miss Sinclair. If he was silent in her company, he was voluble enough when she was the subject of discourse. Loiterers upon the Buckhurst road might have heard a stentorian voice upon the hill-side bellowing forth a vocabulary of female charms. He submitted his difficulties to the superior intelligence of the Boss.

“That loafer from Rochdale,” he said, “he seems to reel it off kinder nat’ral, while for the life of me I can’t say a word. Tell me, Boss, what would _you_ say to a girl like that?”

“Why, talk about what would interest her,” said his companion.

“Ah, that’s where it lies!”

“Talk about the customs of the place and the country,” said the Boss, pulling meditatively at his pipe. “Tell her stories of what you have seen in the mines, and that sort of thing.”

“Eh? You’d do that, would you?” responded his comrade more hopefully. “If that’s the hang of it I am right. I’ll go up now and tell her about Chicago Bill, an’ how he put them two bullets in the man from the bend the night of the dance.”

Boss Morgan laughed.

“That’s hardly the thing,” he said. “You’d frighten her if you told her that. Tell her something lighter, you know; something to amuse her, something funny.”

“Funny?” said the anxious lover, with less confidence in his voice. “How you and me made Mat Houlahan drunk and put him in the pulpit of the Baptist church, and he wouldn’t let the preacher in in the morning. How would that do, eh?”

“For Heaven’s sake don’t say anything of the sort,” said his Mentor, in great consternation. “She’d never speak to either of us again. No, what I mean is that you should tell about the habits of the mines, how men live and work and die there. If she is a sensible girl that ought to interest her.”

“How they live at the mines? Pard, you are good to me. How they live? There’s a thing I can talk of as glib as Black Tom or any man. I’ll try it on her when I see her.”

“By the way,” said his partner listlessly, “just keep an eye on that man Ferguson. His hands arn’t very clean, you know, and he’s not scrupulous when he is aiming for anything. You remember how Dick Williams, of English Town, was found dead in the bush. Of course it was rangers that did it. They do say, however, that Black Tom owed him a deal more money than he could ever have paid. There’s been one or two queer things about him. Keep your eye on him, Abe. Watch what he does.”

“I will,” said his companion.