The Australian winter had passed, the spring was smiling with strict impartiality on Three Star and Dog’s Ear alike, and the heavy rains had swollen the stream beside which Norman and Esmeralda had sat in the placid moonlight into a mighty torrent, whose brawling filled the camp with a sullen music, to which the men worked as to an accompaniment.
Things were looking up at Three Star, and times were flush. The Eldorado had been newly painted—a brilliant red picked out with green—some of the tents had developed into quite respectable wooden houses; MacGrath’s whisky had not improved, and was still as deadly; but empty champagne cases, piled ostentatiously outside the saloon—for the benefit of Dog’s Ear, which had not been lucky—indicated the prosperity of the camp.
At a newly covered table Varley sat, as of old, deftly and gracefully shuffling the cards, and softly inquiring, “Who plays this deal?” In honor of the blandness of the season he wore a new suit of the latest Melbourne fashion, and Esmeralda’s diamond pin glittered and shot fire from his correctly tied scarf.
The saloon was full, business in fine swing, and MacGrath, from his place behind the bar, dispensed, as of old, noggins[267] of his infamous whisky; there was the usual noisy game of billiards going on, and now and again a youth with musical gifts was hammering on the tin-kettle piano. Taffy, gloriously drunk, was bawling out the last comic song—it had expired in England of general loathing six months ago—and two men were quarreling in a corner and breathing threats of mutual destruction.
As of old, Varley sat serene, impassive, languid, his white hands shuffling and dealing the cards, his dark eyes glancing at the faces round the table as if he were performing some feat of magic, from which, sooner or later, as surely as fate or death, he would reap the benefit.
In a pause of the game, Taffy with difficulty steered his way to the table and smiled round with tipsy complacency.
“How’s the game a-going, Varley?” he asked, with a hiccough.
Varley nodded.
“I’ll sit down and take a hand,” said Taffy.
“No, you won’t,” remarked Varley, examining his cards with a quick sweep of his eye, which took in their value in an instant.
“I won’t?” said Taffy. “Oh, won’t I! Why not?”
“Because you couldn’t sit down if you tried, you old soaker; and if you did, you couldn’t see the cards. Go and get another drink and waltz off to bed; your nurse is waiting to undress you, my child.”
Taffy subsided, as he always did, with a tipsy grin.
“That di’mond o’ Esmeralda’s is a-firing away to-night fine, Varley,” he said, changing the subject discreetly. “Reminds me of them eyes of hers. Blame me if they usedn’t to shine jes’ like that when she was in one of her tantrums.”
Varley gave the slightest of nods, and Taffy leaned against a chair and sighed with maudlin tenderness.
“Ain’t—ain’t heard from her lately, I s’pose, Varley?”
“Not lately,” said Varley. “Get out of the light.”
“’Pears to me she don’t write as often as she might,” remarked one of the players. “Dessay she’s a’most forgot us all—forgot as there ever was such a dog-darned place as Three Star.”
Taffy lurched threateningly toward the speaker.
“What’s that?” he demanded, with the quick resentment of a tipsy man thirsting for a fight. “Who’s that as spoke? Scraggy-head, warn’t it? I thought so! And you calkilate Esmeralda’s forgot us all, do you, Ed-er-ward? Ain’t that[268] what he said, boys, or did my ears misdeceive me? Here, come out of it! Stand up and repeat them words like a man, and I’ll knock the head off yer!”
The man growled and looked at Varley appealingly.
“Why don’t somebody take the old man home?” he said, aggrievedly. “I ain’t said nothing’ agin her. It’s only natural as a fine lady should forget such a crew as us and such an all-fired hole as this.”
This repetition of the offense was too much for Taffy, and he lurched on to the speaker and gripped him by the arm.
The always imminent row would have commenced at once, but Varley rose and laid his hand on the giant’s huge shoulder.
“drop it, Taffy!” he said in his listless way. “You’re interfering with the game—with the game, do you hear?” as if he were charging Taffy with something little short of sacrilege. “Come out of it, and go and get a drink.”
“Jes’ let me lay him fust, Varley,” pleaded Taffy, with almost touching meekness. “There ain’t no one going to say a word agin our Esmeralda while I’m able to stand up for her!”
“You wooden-headed idiot, you can’t stand now!” said Varley. “Here!” And with a twist of his wrist he swung Taffy off his man—who had sat quite still, as if the whole responsibility and further conduct of the affair were in Varley’s hands—and led Taffy to the bar.
“A big soda,” he ordered, and was served immediately, though other men were clamoring. “Now drink that, and sit down there quietly;” and with a dexterous push he thrust Taffy into a bottomless chair in a corner, then he sauntered back to the card-table, and the game was resumed.
Suddenly, in the midst of a deal, his hand became motionless, and he looked up listeningly. His ears, quicker than the others—and they were by no means slow—had caught a significant sound.
“What is it, Varley?” asked one of the players.
“A shot,” he said, languidly.
Almost as he spoke, the sound was repeated, and this time was heard by some of the other men who were listening. They sprung to their feet, on the alert in a moment.
“Comes from the east,” said one. “Some o’ them darned Dog’s Ear scum!”
The hubbub in the saloon ceased as if at a word of command, and every eye was turned toward the east.
Varley rose and put on his hat, and, as if it were a signal,[269] the others drew their revolvers and moved to the door. Before any one could reach it, it was thrown open, and Bill, the postman, staggered in. He was covered with mud, was bleeding from a wound on the side of his head, and was panting and breathless.
The men rushed to him and collected round him as he sunk on to a chair, mopping his face with the sleeve of his coat, and staring before him with bulging eyes.
Varley pushed his way through the circle, and laid a white hand upon the heaving shoulder.
“Been dancing, Bill?” he inquired, languidly. “It’s dangerous at your time of life. Here, some one get him a drink!”
One of the men brought him a “stiff” whisky, and Bill, clutching it, tossed it off, and drew a long breath.
“Didn’t know as I was alive till I tasted it,” he remarked, as coolly as his shortness of breath would permit him. “Don’t offer me another, or I shall take it.”
Another was brought, and he disposed of it, the group waiting with sympathetic patience.
“What’s the shindy, Bill?” asked Varley, as the empty tumbler was taken away from him.
“Oh, only a little affair with some Dog’s Ear gentry,” said the postman, drawing his sleeve across his mouth this time. “I s’pose you thought you was never going to get your letters, eh, boys, seeing as I’m a matter of six hours late? Seems to me as things is coming to a pretty pass when Dog’s Ear takes to makin’ a target of her majesty’s mail.”
The listeners growled.
“Spin it out, Bill!” exhorted one.
“It’s this way,” he said, preparing himself for the narration by expectorating on the floor and pulling down his coat-cuffs. “I was a-riding up the slope of the Green Bank, when I see a couple o’ men crouching behind a tree. There was somethin’ so unornary in their way o’ looking around and fingerin’ their irons that it struck me they weren’t holding a Bible class, and I steered the mare behind a bush and took stock of ’em. They couldn’t see me, ’cause I was on the lee o’ the hill. It was evident that they was a-waitin’ for some one, and, as there ain’t any one as passes that way ’cepting myself, I concluded that they was laying for me. I led the mare a matter o’ a quarter of a mile off the track, and tied her up; then I crept round to the clump o’ trees where them two was a-waitin’ as innocent as babes, and I heard them talking as plain as you hear me. ‘He’s late,’ says one—that long-legged son of a sweep they calls Simon—‘and I never[270] knowed Bill late afore,’ which was highly complimentary. ‘No,’ says the other—I don’t know him, but he’s Dog’s Ear, too. ‘Are you sure the swag’s on him?’ ‘Almost certain,’ says Simon. ‘It’s about time for that girl o’ theirs to be sending coin or presents.’”
“Esmeralda!” exclaimed one of the listeners.
“Right, sonny; Esmeralda’s who they meant,” assented Bill. “I believe she sends money or jewelry pretty nigh every month. See’d that diamond pin Varley wears?”
All eyes turned to the sparkle of fire shining in Varley’s scarf, and Bill nodded again.
“‘He’ll be here presently,’ says Simon. ‘You shoot the mare, as arranged, and fire straight, or she’ll be off, and I’ll cover Bill. He may make a fight of it, for he’s precious proud and fussy about that mail-bag o’ his; but I’ll persuade him into reason.’
“‘Oh, will you!’ says I to myself, and, as I didn’t think their conversation elevatin’, I crawls back to where the mare was tied and thinks things over a bit.”
He wet his lips suggestively, and, without a word, one of the men got his glass replenished.
“Now, boys, there’s a kind of affection ’twixt me and the mare; anyhow, I’m thinking her’s too good for a running target for the scum of Dog’s Ear to shoot at, and so I just leaves her there quiet and contented, and set off on foot to make a round of it. I’d got a couple of miles when I hears something moving, and there was my two friends lightin’ out on my trail. I lay low and quiet-like for a bit, then went back on my tracks and waited; that dazed ’em a bit, and then I made straight for here on a bee-line, and keeping under cover of the scrub. I’d spent the afternoon at this game, but I thought I’d given ’em the slip, when up rides a third gentleman a’most a top of me. ‘Hold up!’ says he, covering me. I chucked up my hands, but I’d took the precaution to stick a revolver down the back of the collar o’ my coat—it’s a darned bad fit, and there’s room—and I snatched it out and fired without waiting to ask how his mother was. Then, as he tumbled off his gee-gee, I lit out for all I knew, for I heard the other two comin’ round the bend. I’d got in sight o’ this blessed haven o’ rest an’ respectability, when one o’ the darned skunks fired and peeled a bit off my cocoa-nut. Don’t none o’ you faint,” with a grin—“it ain’t nothin’ to speak of.”
A low growl rose.
“And they’ve got the mail,” said one, with an oath
[271]
But the postman turned on him with an angry twinkle in his eyes.
“How’d you guess that, now?” he asked.
“Where’s the bag?”
“Lyin’ beside the mare, you precocious infant,” said Bill, showing his teeth. “The bag’s there, but it’s empty; the mail’s here. Jes’ you come and take off my boots, you mutton-headed idiot!”
The man, by no means resentful, obeyed, and the letters came pouring out of Bill’s long boots.
The men cheered and offered to grab them up, but Bill kicked out warningly.
“Thank you, all the same,” he remarked, with an ironical smile. “But I guess I’m capable of distributing her majesty’s mail without assistance;” and sweeping the letters into a small heap with his huge feet, he dealt them out to their owners with more than his usual solemnity. “And now, boys, I’m thinking I’ll go and fetch the mare. Oh, she’s safe enough; you bet those Dog’s Ear lambs will get back to their kennel as fast as they can moozle, now they know that I’ve got to shelter, and that Three Star is posted up in their little game.”
There were plenty of volunteers for the task of recovering the pony, but Varley remarked languidly that Bill and he were sufficient, and they decided to start after Bill had got his wound washed by Mother Melinda, who, as chief nurse in Three Star, was sent for.
While Bill was submitting to the operation as patiently as he could, Varley opened his letters. They were partly on business, partly personal; invitations from various camps to come and open a gambling saloon; flowery epistles from members of the fair sex—most of them reproaching him for his long absence and neglect of writing.
The men glanced at him from time to time as he leaned back in his tilted chair and read and tore up his letters with languid impassiveness; and Taffy, rousing from a peaceful slumber, got up and drifted across the room to him, and now quite sober, looked down at him sheepishly.
“Post in, Varley, eh?” he remarked in a low and insinuating voice. “Anything interestin’?”
“Nothing particularly so,” said Varley, rolling a cigarette and lighting it with the last of his letters, an epistle written in the sentimental woman’s hand known as “Italian.”
“Ah!” Taffy drew a long breath of disappointment. “Nothing—nothing from Ralda, I s’pose?” he added in an off-hand way.
[272]
“No,” said Varley.
Taffy, while elaborately filling and lighting his pipe, stole a glance at the clear-cut, impassive face.
“Nothin’ this mail,” he said, as if it were rather satisfactory than otherwise. “Of course not. ’Tain’t to be supposed that Ralda ain’t got nothing else to do than to sit on a cheer writing letters to Three Star, as if she were a blamed clerk in a store, is it?”
Varley nodded.
“An’ yet, somehow,” said Taffy, under his breath, “I shouldn’t a............