He was the most peculiar chap that ever came to Merivale, not excepting even Mason, who shot the Doctor’s wife’s parrot with a catapult, and, after he had been flogged, offered to stuff it in the face of the whole school, and nearly got expelled. Freckles was so called owing to his skin, which was simply a complicated pattern much like what you can see in any map of the Grecian Archipelago. This arose, he thought, from his having been born in Australia. Anyway, it was rum to see; and so were his hands, which had reddish down on the backs. His eyes were, also reddish--a sort of mixture of red and gray specks, and they glimmered like a cat’s when he was angry, which was often. His real name was Maine, and he had no side. His father had made a big fortune selling wool at 48Sydney, and his grandfather was one of the last people to be transported to Botany Bay through no fault of his own. After he had been on a convict ship five years a chap at home confessed on his death-bed that he had done the thing Maine’s grandfather was transported for. So they naturally let Maine’s grandfather go free; and he was so much annoyed about it that he never came back home again, but married a farmer’s daughter near Sydney and settled out there for good.
Maine didn’t think great things of England, and was always talking about the Australian forests of blue gum-trees and bush, and sneering rather at the size of our forests round Merivale, though they were good ones. He never joined in games, but roamed away alone for miles and miles into the country on half-holidays, and trespassed with a cheek I never saw equalled. He could run like a hare--especially about half a mile or so, which, as he explained to me, is just about a distance to blow a keeper. Certainly, though often chased, he was never caught and never recognized, owing to things he did 49which he had learned in Australia and copied from famous bushrangers. His great hope some day was to be a bushranger himself, and he practised in a quiet way every Saturday afternoon, making it a rule to go out of bounds always. His get-up was fine. My name is Tomkins, called “Nubby” because I happen to have a rather large sort of nose, and, being fond of the country and not keen on games, Maine rather took to me, and after I had sworn on crossed knives not to say a word to a soul (which I never did till Freckles left) he told me his secrets and showed me his things. If you’d seen Freckles starting for an excursion you wouldn’t have said there was anything remarkable about him; but really he was armed to the teeth, and had everything a bushranger would be likely to want in a quiet place like Merivale. Down his leg was the barrel of an air-gun, strong enough to kill any small thing like a cat at twenty-five yards; the rest of the gun was arranged inside the lining of his coat, and the slugs it fired he carried loose in his trousers-pockets. Round his waist he had a leather belt he got from a sailor for a pound. 50Inside the leather was human skin, said to be flayed off a chap by cannibals somewhere, which was a splendid thing to have for your own, if it was true; and in the belt a place had been specially made for a knife. Freckles, of course, had a knife in it--a “bowie” knife that made you cold to see. He never used it, but kept it ready, and said if a keeper ever caught him he possibly might have to. In addition to these things he carried in his coat-pockets a little spirit-lamp and a collapsible tin pot and a bag of tea.
He said tea was the very life of men in the bush, and that often after a hard escape, when he was out of danger, he would get away behind a woodstack or under banks of a stream, or some such secret place, and brew a cup and drink it, and feel the better for it.
Lastly, Freckles had a flat lead mask with holes for the eyes and mouth, which he always fitted on when trespassing. He said it was copied from the helmet Ned Kelly, the King of the Bushrangers, used to wear, but it was not bullet-proof, but only used 51for a disguise. We were in the same dormitory, and one night, when all the chaps had gone to sleep, he dressed up in these things and stood where some moonlight came in, and certainly looked jolly.
Once, as an awful favor--me being smaller than him, and not fast enough to run away from a man--he let me come and see what he did when bushranging on a half-holiday in winter. “I sha’n’t run my usual frightful risks with you,” he said, “because I might have to open fire to save you, and that would be very disagreeable to me; but we’ll trespass a bit, and I’ll shoot a few things, if I can. I don’t shoot much, only for food.”
He made me a mask with tinfoil off chocolate smoothed out and gummed on cardboard; but I had no weapons, and he said I had better not try and get any.
We started for the usual walk. Chaps were allowed to go through a public pine-wood to Merivale; but half through, by a place where was a board which warned us to keep the path, Freckles branched off into some dead bracken, and squatted down and 52put on his mask. I also put on mine. Then he fastened his air-gun together and loaded it, and told me to walk six paces behind him and do as he did. His eyes were awfully keen, and now and then he pointed to a feather on the ground, or an old nest or a patch of rum fungus or a crab-apple still hanging on the tree, though all the leaves were off.
Once he fired at a jay and missed it, then fell down in the fern as if he was shot himself, and remained quite motionless for some time. He told me that he always did so after firing, that he might hear if anybody had been attracted by the sound. It was a well-known bushman’s dodge. Once we saw a keeper through a clearing, and Freckles lay flat on his stomach, and so did I. He knew the keeper well, and told me that he had many times escaped from him. We waited half an hour, and turned to go back a different way from that of the keeper.
Then, where a glade sloped down to some water and the grass was all dewy and covered with mole-hills, Freckles went to inspect a trap he had set a week before. He 53was collecting skins for a mole-skin waistcoat, but he said skinning moles was one of the beastliest tasks a hunter ever had. However, there was a mole caught, and he skinned it and wrapped up the skin in leaves and put it in his hat.
Then we had some real sport, for on the other side of the glade we saw rabbits lopping about, and Freckles stalked them through the fern while I waited motionless, and finally he shot a young one. I wanted to take it back and get cook to do it for us, but he said I was a fool.
“If you want any you must have it now. It’s about the time I take a meal,” he said, “and that’s a part of my ranging and hunting you haven’t seen yet.”
He knew the country well, and said we were in one of the most carefully preserved places anywhere about, which must have been true, for there were an awful lot of pheasants calling in the glades. But Freckles got down into a drain and showed me a hollow he had scooped out under a lot of ivy where it fell over a bank.
“This is one of my caves,” he said, “and 54here we can feed and drink in safety; but you mustn’t talk or I sha’n’t be able to hear if anything is stirring in the woods.”
He took off his mask, set down his gun, and lighted his spirit-stove.
“Skin the rabbit and cut off his hind-legs while I make tea,” he said.
So I did, and he held them over the lamp till they were slightly cooked outside, but not right through. He ate and drank with his ears straining for every sound. Then he took the rest of the rabbit and removed all traces of eating, and buried everything we had left.
“If I didn’t,” he explained, “some keeper’s dog would find my lair, and make a row and give it away, and the keepers would doubtless lie in wait for me and catch me red-handed. You can’t be too careful, because every man’s hand’s against you; which, of course, is the beauty of it.”
We got back without anything happening, and I’ve hated the sight of rabbit pretty well ever since, but Freckles said the juices of animals are better for the human frame underdone.
55Well, that gives you an idea of Freckles, and the affair with Frenchy, which I am going to tell you about, showed that he really was cut out for bushranging. Frenchy, as we called him, was Monsieur Michel. He didn’t belong entirely to Dunston’s, but lived in Merivale and came to us three days a week, and went to a girl’s school the other three. He was a rum, oldish chap, whose great peculiarities were to make puns in English and to appeal to our honor about everything.
He would slang a fellow horribly one day, and wave his arms and pretty nearly jump out of his skin; and the next day he would bring up a whacking pear for the fellow he’d slanged, or a new knife or something. He pretty nearly cried sometimes, and he told us his nerves were frightfully tricky, and often led him to be harsh when he didn’t mean it. He couldn’t keep order or make chaps work if they didn’t choose; and Steggles, who had an awfully cunning dodge of always rubbing him up the wrong way, and then looking crushed and broken-hearted so as to get things, which he did, 56said that Frenchy was like damp fireworks, because you never knew exactly when he’d go off or how.
One day, dashing out of class with a frightful yell, Freckles got sent for, and went back and found Monsieur raving mad. It seemed that Freckles had yelled too soon--before he was out of the class-room, in fact, and Frenchy had got palpitation of the heart from it. He let into Freckles properly then. He said he was his “bête noire” and “un sot à vingt-quatre carats”--which means an eighteen-carat ass in English, but twenty-four carats in French--and “one of the aborigines who ought to be kept on a chain,” and many other such-like things. Freckles turned all colors, and then white, with a sort of bluish tint to his lips. He didn’t say a word, but looked at Frenchy with such a frightful expression that I felt something would happen later. All that happened at the time was that Freckles got the eighth book of Telemachus to write out into French from English, and then correct by Fénelon, which was a pretty big job if a chap had been fool enough to try and do it; and Monsieur 57Michel went off to Merivale with a big card on his coat-tail with “Ici on parle Fran?ais” written upon it in red pencil. This I had managed to do myself while Frenchy was jawing Freckles. I told Freckles, but it didn’t comfort him much. He said there were some things no mortal chap could stand; and to be called “an aborigine” because a man was born in Australia seemed to him about the bitterest insult even an old frog-eating Frenchman could have invented. Happening to him, of all chaps, it was especially a thing which would have to be revenged, seeing what his views were. He said:
“I couldn’t bushrange or anything with a clear conscience in the future if I had a thing like this hanging over me unrevenged. It’s the frightfulest slur on my character, and I won’t sit down under it for fifty Frenchmen.”
Then he said he should take a week to settle what to do, and went into the playground alone.
Next time Frenchy came up he was just the same as ever--awfully easy-going and 58jolly, and let Freckles off the Telemachus, and offered him as classy a knife, with a corkscrew and other things, including tweezers, as ever you saw--just the knife for Freckles, considering his ways. But it didn’t come off. Freckles got white again when he saw the knife, and said:
“Thank you, Monsieur, I don’t want your knife; and the imposition is half done, and will be finished next time you come.”
Then Frenchy called him a silly boy, and tried to make a joke and pinch Freckles by the ear. But nobody saw the joke, and Freckles dodged away. Then Frenchy sighed, and looked round to see who should have the knife, and didn’t seem to see anybody in particular, and left it on his desk. He often sighed in class, and sometimes told us he was without friends, unless he might call us friends; and we said he might.
When he went, Freckles told me he considered the knife was another insult. Then he explained what he was going to do. He said:
“I shall finish the impot first, so as not to 59be obliged to him for anything, and then I shall stick him up.”
“Stick him up--how?” I said.
“It’s a bushranging expression,” he explained. “To ‘stick up’ a man is to make him stand and deliver what he’s got. I see my way to do this with Frenchy. He always goes and comes from Merivale through the woods, as you know, and now he’s up here on Friday nights coaching Slade and Betterton for their army exam. Afterwards he has supper with Mr. Thompson or the Doctor. There you are. I wait my time in the wood, which is jolly lonely by night, though it is such a potty little place hardly worth calling a wood; then he comes along, and I stick him up.”
“It’s highway robbery,” I said. “You might get years and years of imprisonment.”
“I might,” he said, “but I sha’n’t. You must begin your career some time, and I’m going to next Friday night. I’ve often got out of the dormitory and been in that wood by night, and only the chaps in the dormitory have known it.”
Well, the night came, and all that we heard about it till afterwards was that about 60eleven o’clock, or possibly even later than that, there was a fearful pealing at the front door of Dunston’s, and looking out we could see a stretcher and something on it. That something was actually Freckles, though the few chaps who knew what was going to be done felt sure it must be Frenchy; because Freckles is five feet ten and growing, and Frenchy isn’t more than five feet six at the outside, and a poor thing at that.
But it was Freckles all right, and two laboring men had brought him back, and Frenchy had come with them.
Not until five weeks afterwards, when Freckles could get up and limp about, did I hear the truth; and I’ll tell it in his own words, because they must be better than a chap’s who wasn’t there. He seemed frightfully down in the mouth, and said that he could never look fellows in the eyes again; but it cheered him telling me, and when I told him he was thundering well out of it he admitted he was. He said:
"I got off all right, and the moon was as clear as day, and everything just ripe for sticking a chap up. Then, like a fool, having 61a longish time to wait, I didn’t simply stop in shadow behind a tree-trunk or something in the usual way, but thought I’d do a thing I’d never heard of bushrangers doing, though Indian thugs are pretty good at it. I went and got up a tree which has a branch over the road, and I thought I’d drop down almost on top of Frenchy to start with. And that’s just what I did do, only I dropped wrong, and came down pretty nearly on my head owing to slipping somehow at the start. What did exactly happen to me as I left the tree I never shall know. Anyway, Frenchy came along sure enough, and I dropped, and he jumped I should think fully a yard in the air; but that was all, because in falling I hit a big root (it was a beech-tree), and went and broke something in my ankle and something in my chest and couldn’t stand. Consequently, of course, I couldn’t stick him up. The pain was pretty fair, but feeling what a fool I was seemed to make me forget it. Anyway, finding it was useless to think of sticking him up, I tried to hobble into the fern and get out of sight; and finding I couldn’t crawl, I rolled. But of course you can’t roll 62away from a chap, and he came after me, and my mask fell off while I rolled, and he recognized me.
"‘Mon Dieu! it is the boy Maine!’ he said. ‘Speak, child, what in the wide world was this?’
"I disguised my voice and said I wasn’t Maine, and that he’d better leave me alone or it might be the worse for him yet. But he wouldn’t go, and, chancing to get queer about the head somehow I went off, I suppose, though it wasn’t for long. When I came to he was gone, but he rushed back in a minute with that rotten old top-hat he wears full of water he’d got from the puddle in the stone-pit. He doused my head and made me sit up with my back against a tree. Then, feeling the frightfulness of it, I begged him to clear out and let me alone. I said:
"‘You don’t know what you’re doing. I’m no friend to you, but the deadliest enemy you’ve got in the world, and if I hadn’t fallen down at a critical moment and broken myself I should have stuck you up, Monsieur Michel. So, now, you know.’
"He said to himself, ‘The poor mad boy--the 63poor mad boy--I will run à toutes jambes for succor’; but I told him not to. I began to get a rum hot pain in my side then, but I felt I would gladly have died there rather than be obliged to him. I said:
"‘You called me an “aborigine,” which is the most terrible thing you can call an Australian-born chap, and you wanted to pass it off with a knife with a corkscrew and tweezers in it. But you couldn’t expect me to take it, feeling as I did. Now the fortunes of war have given you the victory, and, if you please, I wish you’d go.’
“But he refused. He said he wouldn’t have hurt my feelings for anything. He seemed to overlook altogether what I was going to do to him, and asked me where it hurt me. I told him, and he said it was his fault--fancy that! and wished he was big enough to carry me back. I kept on asking him to go, and at last, after begging my pardon like anything, for about a week it seemed, he went. But I heard him shouting and yelling French yells in the woods, and after a bit he came back with two men and a hurdle. They presently took me back, 64and what Frenchy’s said since to the Doctor I don’t know. In fact, I didn’t know anything for days. Anyway, I’ve had nothing but a mild rowing and very good grub, and I’m not to be even flogged, though that’s probably because I broke a rib or two, not including the bone in my leg. But I’m all right now, and I think it was about the most sporting thing a chap ever did for Frenchy to treat me like that--eh? I shouldn’t have thought it was in a Frenchman to do it, especially after I told him what I was going to do.”
“Yes,” I said, “that’s all right, but what about bushranging?”
“It’s pretty sickening,” he said, “but I feel as if all the keenness was knocked out of me. If a chap can’t so much as fall out of a tree on a wanderer’s path at the nick of time without smashing himself, what’s the good of him?”
“Besides,” I said, “if it hadn’t been Frenchy, but somebody else of a different turn of mind, he might have taken you at a disadvantage and jolly well killed you.”
“In real bushranging that is what would 65have happened,” admitted Freckles. “As it is, I expect months, perhaps years, will have to go by before I feel to hanker after it again. And meantime I sha’n’t rest in peace till I’ve paid Frenchy.”
“How?” I asked.
“Well, I believe it’s to be done. He’s often come to see me while I was on my back in bed, and he’s told me a lot about himself. He’s frightfully hard up, and a Roman Catholic, and hopes to lay his bones in la belle France with luck, but he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to manage it. He told me all this, little knowing my father was extremely rich. Well, you see, the mater wants somebody French for the kids at home, which are girls, and, knowing Frenchy bars this climate, I think Australia might do him good. He’s fifty-three years old, and it seems to me if the guv’nor wrote and offered him his passage and a good screw he’d go. I have made it a personal thing to myself, and told the guv’nor what a good little chap he is, and what a beautiful accent he’s got, and the thing that happened in the wood.”
66The affair dropped then, and about six weeks after, when Freckles was getting fit again, he walked with me one half-holiday to see the place where he was smashed up. The bough was a frightful high one to drop from even in daylight, also it was broken. Freckles got awfully excited when he spotted it.
“There! there!” he said, “that’s the best thing I’ve seen for twelve weeks!”
“I don’t see much to squeak about,” I said, “especially as the beastly tree nearly did for you.”
“But can’t you see it’s broken? That’s what did it! I thought I slipped, and if I had I shouldn’t have been made of the stuff for a bushranger; but the wretched branch broke, and that is jolly different. That wasn’t my fault. The most hardened old hand must have come down then. In fact, he couldn’t have stopped up. Oh, what a lot of misery I’d have been saved through all these weeks if I’d known it broke in a natural sort of way!”
He got an awful deal of comfort out of this, and said he should return to his old 67ways again as soon as he could run a mile without stopping. And we found his lead mask, like Ned Kelly’s, just where it had dropped when he had rolled over in the fern, and he welcomed it like a dog.
That’s the end, except that his father did write to Dunston about Frenchy; and Dunston, not being very keen about Frenchy himself, seemed to think he would be just the chap for the girls of Freckles’s father. Anyway, he went, and he cried when he said good-bye to the school; and Freckles told me that when he said good-bye to him he yelled with crying, and blessed him both in French and English, and said that the sunny atmosphere of Australia would very likely prolong his life until he had saved enough to get his bones back to France.
So he went, and Freckles went after him much sooner than he ever expected to, because the keepers finally caught him in the game preserves, sitting in his hole under the stream bank, frizzling the leg of a pheasant which he had shot out of a tree with his air-gun and buried seven days before. And Dunston wrote to his father, and his father 68wrote back that Freckles, being now fourteen and apparently having less sense than when he left Australia, had better return to his native land, and go into the wool business, and begin life as an office-boy in his place of business. Freckles told me that chaps in his father’s office generally got a fortnight’s holiday, but that his mother would probably work up his governor to give him three weeks. Then he would get a proper outfit and track away to the boundless scrub, and fall in with other chaps who had similar ideas, and begin to take life seriously. He said I might see his name in Australian papers in about a year. But he never wrote to me, and I don’t know if he really succeeded well. I’m sure I hope he did, for he was a tidy chap, though queer.