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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41658 ***
+
+THE IVORY SERIES
+
+_Each, 16mo, gilt top, 75 cents_
+
+
+AMOS JUDD. By J. A. Mitchell, Editor of "Life"
+IA. A Love Story. By Q. [Arthur T. Quiller-Couch]
+THE SUICIDE CLUB. By Robert Louis Stevenson
+IRRALIE'S BUSHRANGER. By E. W. Hornung
+A MASTER SPIRIT. By Harriet Prescott Spofford
+MADAME DELPHINE. By George W. Cable
+ONE OF THE VISCONTI. By Eva Wilder Brodhead
+A BOOK OF MARTYRS. By Cornelia Atwood Pratt
+A BRIDE FROM THE BUSH. By E. W. Hornung
+THE MAN WHO WINS. By Robert Herrick
+AN INHERITANCE. By Harriet Prescott Spofford
+THE OLD GENTLEMAN OF THE BLACK STOCK.
+  By Thomas Nelson Page
+LITERARY LOVE LETTERS AND OTHER STORIES.
+  By Robert Herrick
+A ROMANCE IN TRANSIT. By Francis Lynde
+IN OLD NARRAGANSETT. By Alice Morse Earle
+SEVEN MONTHS A PRISONER. By J. V. Hadley
+"IF I WERE A MAN." By Harrison Robertson
+SWEETHEARTS AND WIVES. By Anna A. Rogers
+A CIVILIAN ATTACHÉ. By Helen Dawes Brown
+THE BOSS OF TAROOMBA. By E. W. Hornung
+
+_Other volumes to be announced_
+
+
+
+
+THE BOSS OF TAROOMBA
+
+BY
+
+E. W. HORNUNG
+
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+NEW YORK 1900
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+                             PAGE
+THE LITTLE MUSICIAN             1
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+A FRIEND INDEED                13
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+"HARD TIMES"                   25
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE TREASURE IN THE STORE      41
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+MASTERLESS MEN                 55
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+£500                           71
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE RINGER OF THE SHED         83
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+"THREE SHADOWS"               102
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+NO HOPE FOR HIM               120
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+MISSING                       138
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+LOST IN THE BUSH              152
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+FALLEN AMONG THIEVES          162
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+A SMOKING CONCERT             179
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE RAID ON THE STATION       194
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE NIGHT ATTACK              210
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+IN THE MIDST OF DEATH         232
+
+
+
+
+THE BOSS OF TAROOMBA
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE LITTLE MUSICIAN
+
+
+They were terribly sentimental words, but the fellow sang them as though
+he meant every syllable. Altogether, the song was not the kind of thing
+to go down with a back-block audience, any more than the singer was the
+class of man.
+
+He was a little bit of a fellow, with long dark hair and dark glowing
+eyes, and he swayed on the music-stool, as he played and sang, in a
+manner most new to the young men of Taroomba. He had not much voice, but
+the sensitive lips took such pains with each word, and the long, nervous
+fingers fell so lightly upon the old piano, that every one of the
+egregious lines travelled whole and unmistakable to the farthest corner
+of the room. And that was an additional pity, because the piano was so
+placed that the performer was forced to turn his back upon his
+audience; and behind it the young men of Taroomba were making great game
+of him all the time.
+
+In the moderate light of two kerosene lamps, the room seemed full of
+cord breeches and leather belts and flannel collars and sunburnt
+throats. It was not a large room, however, and there were only four men
+present, not counting the singer. They were young fellows, in the main,
+though the one leaning his elbow on the piano had a bushy red beard, and
+his yellow hair was beginning to thin. Another was reading _The
+Australasian_ on the sofa; and a sort of twist to his mustache, a
+certain rigor about his unshaven chin, if they betrayed no sympathy with
+the singer, suggested a measure of contempt for the dumb clownery going
+on behind the singer's back. Over his very head, indeed, the red-bearded
+man was signalling maliciously to a youth who with coarse fat face and
+hands was mimicking the performer in the middle of the room; while the
+youngest man of the lot, who wore spectacles and a Home-bred look,
+giggled in a half-ashamed, half-anxious way, as though not a little
+concerned lest they should all be caught. And when the song ended, and
+the singer spun round on the stool, they had certainly a narrow escape.
+
+"Great song!" cried the mimic, pulling himself together in an instant,
+and clapping out a brutal burlesque of applause.
+
+"Shut up, Sandy," said the man with the beard, dropping a yellow-fringed
+eyelid over a very blue eye. "Don't you mind Mr. Sanderson, sir," he
+added to the musician; "he's not a bad chap, only he thinks he's funny.
+We'll show him what funniment really is in a minute or two. I've just
+found the very song! But what's the price of the last pretty thing?"
+
+"Of 'Love Flees before the Dawn?'" said the musician, simply.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It's the same as all the rest; you see----"
+
+Here the mimic broke in with a bright, congenial joke.
+
+"Love how much?" cried he, winking with his whole heavy face. "I don't,
+chaps, do you?"
+
+The sally was greeted with a roar, in which the musician joined timidly,
+while the man on the sofa smiled faintly without looking up from his
+paper.
+
+"Never mind him," said the red-bearded man, who was for keeping up the
+fun as long as possible; "he's too witty to live. What did you say the
+price was?"
+
+"Most of the songs are half a crown."
+
+"Come, I say, that's a stiffish price, isn't it?"
+
+"Plucky stiff for fleas!" exclaimed the wit.
+
+The musician flushed, but tossed back his head of hair, and held out his
+hand for the song.
+
+"I can't help it, gentlemen. I can't afford to charge less. Every one of
+these songs has been sent out from Home, and I get them from a man in
+Melbourne, who makes _me_ pay for them. You're five hundred miles up
+country, where you can't expect town prices."
+
+"Keep your hair on, old man!" said the wit, soothingly.
+
+"My what? My hair is my own business!"
+
+The little musician had turned upon his tormentor like a knife. His dark
+eyes were glaring indignantly, and his nervous fingers had twitched
+themselves into a pair of absurdly unserviceable white fists. But now a
+freckled hand was laid upon his shoulder, and the man with the beard was
+saying, "Come, come, my good fellow, you've made a mistake; my friend
+Sanderson meant nothing personal. It's our way up here, you know, to
+chi-ak each other and our visitors too."
+
+"Then I don't like your way," said the little man, stoutly.
+
+"Well, Sandy meant no offence, I'll swear to that."
+
+"Of course I didn't," said Sanderson.
+
+The musician looked from one to the other, and the anger went out of
+him, making way for shame.
+
+"Then the offence is on my side," said he, awkwardly, "and I beg your
+pardon."
+
+He took a pile of new music from the piano, and was about to go.
+
+"No, no, we're not going to let you off so easily," said the bearded
+man, laughing.
+
+"You'll have to sing us one more song to show there's no ill feeling,"
+put in Sanderson.
+
+"And here's the song," added the other. "The very thing. I found it just
+now. There you are--'The World's Creation!'"
+
+"Not that thing!" said the musician.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"It's a comic song."
+
+"The very thing we want."
+
+"We'll buy up your whole stock of comic songs," said Sanderson.
+
+"Hear, hear," cried the silent youth who wore spectacles.
+
+"I wish you would," the musician said, smiling.
+
+"But we must hear them first."
+
+"I hate singing them."
+
+"Well, give us this one as a favor! Only this one. Do."
+
+The musician wavered. He was a very sensitive young man, with a
+constitutional desire to please, and an acute horror of making a fool of
+himself. Now the whole soul of him was aching with the conviction that
+he had done this already, in showing his teeth at what had evidently
+been meant as harmless and inoffensive badinage. And it was this feeling
+that engendered the desperate desire at once to expiate his late display
+of temper, and to win the good opinion of these men by fairly amusing
+them after all. Certainly the song in demand did not amuse himself, but
+then it was equally certain that his taste in humor differed from
+theirs. He could not decide in his mind. He longed to make these men
+laugh. To get on with older and rougher men was his great difficulty,
+and one of his ambitions.
+
+"We must have this," said the man with the beard, who had been looking
+over the song. "The words are first chop!"
+
+"I can't stand them," the musician confessed.
+
+"Why, are they too profane?"
+
+"They are too silly."
+
+"Well, they ain't for us. Climb down to our level, and fire away."
+
+With a sigh and a smile, and a full complement of those misgivings which
+were a part of his temperament, the little visitor sat down and played
+with much vivacity a banjo accompaniment which sounded far better than
+anything else had done on the antiquated, weather-beaten bush piano. The
+jingle struck fire with the audience, and the performer knew it, as he
+went on to describe himself as "straight from Old Virginia," with his
+head "stuffed full of knowledge," in spite of the fact that he had
+"never been to 'Frisco or any other college;" the entertaining
+information that "this world it was created in the twinkling of two
+cracks" bringing the first verse to a conclusion. Then came the
+chorus--of which there can scarcely be two opinions. The young men
+caught it up with a howl, with the exception of the reader on the sofa,
+who put his fingers in his ears. This is how it went:
+
+
+     Oh, walk up, Mr. Pompey, oh, walk up while I say,
+     Will you walk into the banjo and hear the parlor play?
+     Will you walk into the parlor and hear the banjo ring?
+     Oh, listen to de darkies how merrily dey sing!
+
+
+The chorus ended with a whoop which assured the soloist that he was
+amusing his men; and having himself one of those susceptible, excitable
+natures which can enter into almost anything, given the fair wind of
+appreciation to fill their sails, the little musician began actually to
+enjoy the nonsense himself. His long fingers rang out the tinkling
+accompaniment with a crisp, confident touch. He sang the second verse,
+which built up the universe in numbers calculated to shock a religious
+or even a reasonably cultivated order of mind, as though he were by no
+means ashamed of it. And so far as culture and religion were concerned
+he was tolerably safe--each fresh peal of laughter reassured him of
+this. That the laugh was with him he never doubted until the end of the
+third verse. Then it was that the roars of merriment rose louder than
+ever, and that their note suddenly struck the musician's trained ear as
+false. He sang through the next verse with an overwhelming sense of its
+inanity, and with the life gone out of his voice and fingers alike.
+Still they roared with laughter, but he who made them knew now that the
+laugh was at his expense. He turned hot all over, then cold, then hotter
+than ever. A shadow was dancing on the music in front of him; he could
+hear a suppressed titter at the back of the boisterous laughter;
+something brushed against his hair, and he could bear it all no longer.
+Snatching his fingers from the keys, he wheeled round on the music-stool
+in time to catch the heavy youth Sanderson in the mimic act of braining
+him with a chair; his tongue was out like a brat's, his eyes shone with
+a baleful mirth, while the red-bearded man was rolling about the room in
+an ecstasy of malicious merriment.
+
+The singer sprang to his feet in a palsy of indignation. His dark eyes
+glared with the dumb rage of a wounded animal; then they ranged round
+the room for something with which to strike, and before Sanderson had
+time to drop the chair he had been brandishing over the other's head,
+the musician had snatched up the kerosene lamp from the top of the
+piano, and was poising it in the air with murderous intent. Yet his
+anger had not blinded him utterly. His flashing eyes were fixed upon the
+fat mocking face which he longed to mark for life, but he could also see
+beyond it, and what he saw made him put down the lamp without a word.
+
+At the other side of the room was a door leading out upon the veranda;
+it had been open all the evening, and now it was the frame of an
+unlooked-for picture, for a tall, strong girl was standing upon the
+threshold.
+
+"Well, I never!" said she, calmly, as she came into their midst with a
+slow, commanding stride. "So this is the way you play when I'm away, is
+it? What poor little mice they are, to be sure!"
+
+Sanderson had put down the chair, and was looking indescribably foolish.
+The boy in the spectacles, though he had been a merely passive party to
+the late proceedings, seemed only a little less uncomfortable. The man
+on the sofa and the little trembling musician were devouring the girl
+with their eyes. It was the personage with the beard who swaggered
+forward into the breach.
+
+"Good-evening, Naomi," said he, holding out a hand which she refused to
+see. "This is Mr. Engelhardt, who has come to tune your piano for you.
+Mr. Engelhardt--Miss Pryse."
+
+The hand which had been refused to the man who was in a position to
+address Miss Pryse as Naomi, was held out frankly to the stranger. It
+was a firm, cool hand, which left him a stronger and a saner man for its
+touch.
+
+"I am delighted to see you, Mr. Engelhardt. I congratulate you on your
+songs, and on your spirit, too. It was about time that Mr. Sanderson met
+somebody who objected to his peculiar form of fun. He has been spoiling
+for this ever since I have known him!"
+
+"Come, I say, Naomi," said the man who was on familiar terms with her,
+"it was all meant in good part, you know. You're rather rough upon poor
+Sandy."
+
+"Not so rough as both you and he have been upon a visitor. I am ashamed
+of you all!"
+
+Her scornful eyes looked black in the lamplight; her eyebrows _were_
+black. This with her splendid coloring was all the musician could be
+sure of; though his gaze never shifted from her face. Now she turned to
+him and said, kindly:
+
+"I have been enjoying your songs immensely--especially the comic one. I
+came in some time ago, and have been listening to everything. You sing
+splendidly."
+
+"These gentlemen will hardly agree with you."
+
+"These gentlemen," said Miss Pryse, laying an unpleasant stress on the
+word, "disagree with me horribly at times. They make me ill. What a lot
+of songs you have brought!"
+
+"I brought them to sell," said the young fellow, blushing. "I have just
+started business--set up shop at Deniliquin--a music-shop, you know. I
+am making a round to tune the pianos at the stations."
+
+"What a capital idea! You will find ours in a terrible state, I'm
+afraid."
+
+"Yes, it is rather bad; I was talking about it to the boss before I
+started to make a fool of myself."
+
+"To the boss, do you say?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And pray which is he?"
+
+The piano-tuner pointed to the bushy red beard.
+
+"Why, bless your life," cried Naomi Pryse, as the red beard split
+across and showed its teeth, "_he's_ not the boss! Don't you believe it.
+If you've anything to say to the boss, you'd better come outside and say
+it."
+
+"But which is he, Miss Pryse?"
+
+"He's a she, and you're talking to her now, Mr. Engelhardt!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+A FRIEND INDEED
+
+
+"Do you mean to say that you have never heard of the female boss of
+Taroomba?" said Naomi Pryse, as she led the piano-tuner across the
+veranda and out into the station-yard. The moon was gleaming upon the
+galvanized-iron roofs of the various buildings, and it picked out the
+girl's smile as she turned to question her companion.
+
+"No, I never heard of you before," replied the piano-tuner, stolidly.
+For the moment the girl and the moonlight stupefied him. The scene in
+the room was still before his eyes and in his ears.
+
+"Well, that's one for me! What station have you come from to-day?"
+
+"Kerulijah."
+
+"And you never heard of me there! Ah, well, I'm very seldom up here.
+I've only come for the shearing. Still, the whole place is mine, and I'm
+not exactly a cipher in the business either; I rather thought I was the
+talk of the back-blocks. At one time I know I was. I'm very vain, you
+see."
+
+"You have something to be vain about," said the piano-tuner, looking at
+her frankly.
+
+She made him a courtesy in the moonlit yard.
+
+"Thank you kindly. But I'm not satisfied yet; I understand that you
+arrived in time for supper; didn't you hear of me at table?"
+
+"I just heard your name."
+
+"Who mentioned it?"
+
+"The fellow with the beard."
+
+"Prettily?"
+
+"I think so. He was wondering where you were. He seems to know you very
+well?"
+
+"He has known me all my life. He is a sort of connection. He was
+overseer here when my father died a year or two ago. He is the manager
+now."
+
+"But you are the boss?"
+
+"I am so! His name, by the way, is Gilroy--my mother was a Gilroy, too.
+See? That's why he calls me Naomi; I call him Monty when I am not wroth
+with him. I am disgusted with them all to-night! But you mustn't mind
+them; it's only their way. Did you speak to the overseer, Tom Chester?"
+
+"Which was he?"
+
+"The one on the sofa."
+
+"No, he hardly spoke to me."
+
+"Well, he's a very good sort; you would like him if you got to know him.
+The new chum with the eye-glasses is all right, too. I don't believe
+those two were to blame. As for Mr. Sanderson, I wouldn't think any more
+about him if I were you; he really isn't worth it."
+
+"I forgive him," said the musician, simply; "but I shall never forgive
+myself for playing the fool and losing my temper!"
+
+"Nonsense! It did them good, and they'll think all the more of you.
+Still, I must say I'm glad you didn't dash the kerosene lamp in Mr.
+Sanderson's face!"
+
+"The what?" cried Engelhardt, in horror.
+
+"The lamp; you were brandishing it over your head when I came in."
+
+"The lamp! To think that I caught up the lamp! I can't have known what
+I was doing!"
+
+He stood still and aghast in the sandy yard; they had wandered to the
+far side of it, where the kitchen and the laundry stood cheek-by-jowl
+with the wood-heap between them, and their back-walls to the six-wire
+fence dividing the yard from the plantation of young pines which
+bordered it upon three sides.
+
+"You were in a passion," said Miss Pryse, smiling gravely. "There's
+nothing in this world that I admire more than a passion--it's so
+uncommon. So are you! There, I owed you a pretty speech, you know! Do
+you mind giving me your arm, Mr. Engelhardt?"
+
+But Engelhardt was gazing absently at the girl, and the road between ear
+and mind was choked with a multitude of new sensations. Her sudden
+request made no impression upon him, until he saw her stamping her foot
+in the sand. Then, and awkwardly enough, he held out his arm to her, and
+her firm hand caught in it impatiently.
+
+"How slow you are to assist a lady! Yet I feel sure that you come from
+the old country?"
+
+"I do; but I have never had much to do with ladies."
+
+The piano-tuner sighed.
+
+"Well, it's all right; only I wanted you to take my arm for Monty
+Gilroy's benefit. He's just come out on to the veranda. Don't look
+round. This will rile him more than anything."
+
+"But why?"
+
+"Why? Oh, because he showed you the hoof; and when a person does that,
+he never likes to see another person being civil to the same person.
+See? Then if you don't, you'd better stand here and work it out while I
+run into the kitchen to speak to Mrs. Potter about your room."
+
+"But I'm not going to stay!" the piano-tuner cried, excitedly.
+
+"Now what are you giving us, Mr. Engelhardt? Of course you are going to
+stay. You're going to stay and tune my poor old piano. Why, your horse
+was run out hours ago!"
+
+"But I can't face those men again----"
+
+"What rubbish!"
+
+"After the way I made a fool of myself this evening!"
+
+"It was they who made fools of themselves. They'll annoy you no more, I
+promise you. In any case, they all go back to the shed to-morrow
+evening; it's seven miles away, and they only come in for Sunday. You
+needn't start on the piano before Monday, if you don't like."
+
+"Oh, no, I'll do it to-morrow," Engelhardt said, moodily. He now felt
+bitterly certain that he should never make friends with the young men of
+Taroomba, and shamefully thankful to think that there would be a set
+occupation to keep him out of their way for the whole of the morrow.
+
+"Very well, then; wait where you are for two twos."
+
+Engelhardt waited. The kitchen-door had closed upon Miss Naomi Pryse;
+there was no sense in watching that any longer. So the piano-tuner's
+eyes climbed over the waterspout, scaled the steep corrugated roof, and
+from the wide wooden chimney leapt up to the moon. It was at the full.
+The white clear light hit the young man between his expressive eyes, and
+still he chose to face it. It gave to the delicate eager face an almost
+ethereal pallor; and as he gazed on without flinching, the raised head
+was proudly carried, and the little man looked tall. To one whom he did
+not hear when she lifted the kitchen-latch and opened the door, he
+seemed a different being; she watched him for some moments before she
+spoke.
+
+"Well, Mr. Engelhardt?"
+
+"Well," said he, coming down from the moon with an absent smile, and
+slowly.
+
+"I have been watching you for quite a minute. I believe it would have
+been an hour if I hadn't spoken. I wish I hadn't! We're going to put you
+in that little building over there--we call it the 'barracks.' You'll be
+next door to Tom Chester, and he'll take care of you. There's no
+occasion to thank me; you can tell me what you've been thinking about
+instead."
+
+"I wasn't thinking at all."
+
+"Now, Mr. Engelhardt!" said Naomi, holding up her finger reprovingly.
+"If you weren't thinking, I should like to know what you were doing?"
+
+"I was waiting for you."
+
+"I know you were. It was very good of you. But you were smiling, too,
+and I want to know the joke."
+
+"Was I really smiling?"
+
+"Haven't I told you so? Have you signed the pledge against smiles? You
+look glum enough for anything now."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Very much yes! I wish to goodness you'd smile again."
+
+"Oh, I'll do anything you like." He forced up the corners of his mouth,
+but it was not a smile; his eyes ran into hers like bayonets.
+
+"Then give me your arm again," she said, "and let me tell you that I'm
+very much surprised at you for requiring to be told that twice."
+
+"I'm not accustomed to ladies," Engelhardt explained once more.
+
+"That's all right. I'm not one, you know. I'm going to negotiate this
+fence. Will you have the goodness to turn your back?"
+
+Engelhardt did so, and saw afar off in the moonlit veranda the lowering
+solitary figure of the manager, Gilroy.
+
+"Yes, he sees us all right," Miss Pryse remarked from the other side of
+the fence. "It'll do him good. Come you over, and we'll make his beard
+curl!"
+
+The piano-tuner looked at her doubtfully, but only for one moment. The
+next he also was over the fence and by her side, and she was leading him
+into the heart of the pines, her strong kind hand within his arm.
+
+"We'll just have a little mouch round," she said, confidentially. "You
+needn't be frightened."
+
+"Frightened!" he echoed, defiantly. The hosts of darkness could not have
+frightened such a voice.
+
+"You see, I'm the boss, and I'm obliged to show it sometimes."
+
+"I see."
+
+"And you have given me an opportunity of showing it pretty plainly."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"Consequently, I'm very much obliged to you; and I do hope you don't
+mind helping me to shock Monty Gilroy?"
+
+"I am proud."
+
+But the kick had gone out of his voice, and to her hand his arm was
+suddenly as a log of wood. She mused a space. Then--
+
+"It isn't everyone I would ask to help me in such--in such a delicate
+matter," she said, in a troubled tone. "You see I am a woman at the
+mercy of men. They're all very kind and loyal in their own way, but
+their way _is_ their own, as _you_ know. I thought as I had given you a
+hand with them--well, I thought you would be in sympathy."
+
+"I am, I am--Heaven knows!"
+
+The log had become exceedingly alive.
+
+"Then let us skirt in and out, on the edge of the plantation, so that
+Mr. Gilroy may have the pleasure of seeing my frock from time to time."
+
+"I'm your man."
+
+"No, not that way--this. There, I'm sure he must have seen me then."
+
+"He must."
+
+"It's time we went back; but this will have done him all the good in the
+world," said Naomi.
+
+"It's a pity you haven't a manager whom you can respect and like," the
+piano-tuner remarked.
+
+Naomi started. She also stopped to lace up her shoe, which necessitated
+the withdrawal of her hand from the piano-tuner's arm; and she did not
+replace it.
+
+"Oh, but I do like him, Mr. Engelhardt," she explained as she stooped.
+"I like Mr. Gilroy very much; I have known him all my life, you know.
+However, that's just where the disadvantage comes in--he's too much
+inclined to domineer. But don't you run away with the idea that I
+dislike him; that would never do at all."
+
+The piano-tuner felt too small to apologize. He had made a deadly
+mistake--so bad a one that she would take his arm no more. He looked up
+at the moon with miserable eyes, and his brain teemed with bitter
+self-upbraiding thoughts. His bitterness was egregiously beyond the
+mark; but that was this young man's weakness. He would condemn himself
+to execution for the pettiest sin. So ashamed was he now that he dared
+not even offer her his hand when they got back to the veranda, and she
+consigned him to the boy in spectacles, who then showed him his room in
+the barracks. And his mistake kept him awake more than half that night;
+it was only in the gray morning he found consolation in recollecting
+that although she had declared so many times that she liked Monty
+Gilroy, she had never once said she respected him.
+
+Had he heard a conversation which took place in the station-yard later
+that night, but only a little later, and while the full moon was in much
+the same place, the piano-tuner might have gone to sleep instead of
+lying awake to flagellate his own meek spirit; though it is more likely
+that he would have lain quietly awake for very joy. The conversation in
+question was between Naomi Pryse and Montague Gilroy, her manager, and
+it would scarcely repay a detailed report; but this is how it
+culminated:
+
+"I tell you that I found you bullying him abominably, and whenever I
+find you bullying anybody I'll make it up to that body in my own way.
+And I won't have my way criticised by you."
+
+"Very good, Naomi. Very good indeed! But if you want to guard against
+all chance of the same thing happening next week, I should recommend you
+to be in for supper next Saturday, instead of gallivanting about the run
+by yourself and coming in at ten o'clock at night."
+
+"The run is mine, and I'll do what I like while I'm here."
+
+"Well, if you won't listen to reason, you might at least remember our
+engagement."
+
+"You mean _your_ engagement? I remember the terms perfectly. I have only
+to write you a check for the next six months' salary any time I like, to
+put an end to it. And upon my word, Monty, you seem to want me to do so
+to-night!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+"HARD TIMES"
+
+
+It was the middle of the Sunday afternoon, when the young men of
+Taroomba were for the most part sound asleep upon their beds. They were
+wise young men enough, in ways, and to punctuate the weeks of hard labor
+at the wool-shed with thoroughly slack Sundays at the home station was a
+practice of the plainest common-sense. To do otherwise would have been
+to fly in the face of nature. Yet just because Naomi Pryse chose to
+settle herself in the veranda outside the sitting-room door with a book,
+the young man who had worked harder than any of the others during the
+week must needs be the one to spend the afternoon of rest at her feet,
+and with nothing but a lean veranda-post to shelter his broad back from
+the sun.
+
+This was Tom Chester, of whom Naomi had spoken highly to her _protégé_,
+the piano-tuner. Tom was newly and beautifully shaved, and he had
+further observed the Sabbath by putting on a white shirt and collar, and
+a suit of clothes in which a man might have walked down Collins Street;
+but he seemed quite content to sit in them on the dirty veranda boards,
+for the sake of watching Naomi as she read. She had not a great deal to
+say to him, but she had commanded him to light his pipe, and as often as
+she dropped the book into her lap to make a remark, she could reckon
+upon a sympathetic answer, preceded by a puff of the tobacco-smoke she
+loved.
+
+"It is a dreadful noise, though, isn't it?" Naomi had observed more than
+once.
+
+"It is so," Tom Chester would answer, with a smile and another puff.
+
+"He made such a point of setting to work this morning, you know, and
+it's so good of him to work on Sunday. I don't see how we can stop him."
+
+Then Naomi would sit silent, but not reading, and would presently
+announce that she had counted the striking of that note twenty-nine
+times in succession. Once she made it sixty-six; but the piano-tuner
+behind the closed door had broken his own record, and seemed in a fair
+way of hammering out the same note a hundred times running, when Monty
+Gilroy came tramping along the veranda with blinking yellow eyelashes,
+and his red face pale with temper. Miss Pryse was keeping tally aloud
+when the manager blundered upon the scene.
+
+"I say, Naomi, how long is this to go on?" exclaimed Gilroy, in a tone
+that was half-complaining, half-injured, but wholly different from that
+which he had employed toward her the night before.
+
+"Eighty-three, eighty-four, eighty-five," counted Naomi, giving him a
+nod and a smile.
+
+"I hadn't been asleep ten minutes when he awoke me with his infernal
+din."
+
+"Ninety, ninety-one, ninety-two, ninety-three----"
+
+"It's no joke when a man has been over the board the whole week," said
+Gilroy, trying to smile nevertheless.
+
+"Ninety-seven, ninety-eight--well, I'll be jiggered!"
+
+"Ninety-eight it is," said Tom Chester.
+
+"Yes, he's changed the note. He might have given it a couple more!
+Still, it's the record. Now, Monty, please forgive us; we're trying to
+make the best of a bad job, as you see."
+
+"It is a bad job," assented Gilroy, whose rueful countenance concealed
+(but not from the girl) a vile temper smouldering. "It's pretty rough, I
+think, on us chaps who've been working like Kanakas all the week."
+
+"Well, but you were pretty rough upon poor Mr. Engelhardt last night; so
+don't you think that it serves you quite right?"
+
+"Poor Mr. Engelhardt!" echoed Gilroy, savagely. "So it serves us right,
+does it?" He forced a laugh. "What do you say, Tom?"
+
+"_I_ think it serves you right, too," answered Tom Chester, coolly.
+
+Gilroy laughed again.
+
+"So you're crackin', old chap," said he, genially. He generally was
+genial with Tom Chester, for whom he entertained a hatred enhanced by
+fear. "But I say, Naomi, need this sort of thing go on all the
+afternoon?"
+
+"If it doesn't he will have to stay till to-morrow."
+
+"Ah! I see."
+
+"I thought you would. The piano was in a bad way, and he said there was
+a long day's work in it; but he seems anxious to get away this evening,
+that's why he began before breakfast."
+
+"Then let him stick to it, by all means, and we'll all clear out
+together. I'll see that his horse is run up--I'll go now."
+
+He went.
+
+"That's the most jealous gentleman in this colony," said Naomi to her
+companion. "He'd rather suffer anything than leave this little
+piano-tuner and me alone together!"
+
+"Poor little chap," said Chester of the musician; he had nothing to say
+about Gilroy, who was still in view from the veranda, a swaggering
+figure in the strong sunlight, with his hands in his cross-cut breeches'
+pockets, his elbows sticking out, and the strut of a cock on its own
+midden. Tom Chester watched him with a hard light in his clear eye, and
+a moistening of the palms of his hands. Tom was pretty good with his
+fists, and for many a weary month he had been spoiling for a fight with
+Monty Gilroy, who very likely was not the only jealous gentleman on
+Taroomba.
+
+All this time the piano-tuner was at his fiendish work behind the closed
+door, over which Naomi Pryse had purposely mounted guard. Distracting
+repetitions of one note were varied only by depressing octaves and
+irritating thirds. Occasionally a chord or two promised a trial trip
+over the keys, but such promises were never fulfilled. At last Naomi
+shut her book, with a hopeless smile at Tom Chester, who was ready for
+her with an answering grin.
+
+"Really, I can't stand it any longer, Mr. Chester."
+
+"You have borne it like a man, Miss Pryse."
+
+"I wanted to make sure that nobody bothered him. Do you think we may
+safely leave him now?"
+
+"Quite safely. Gilroy is up at the yards, and Sanderson only plays the
+fool to an audience. Let me pull you out of your chair."
+
+"Thanks. That's it. Let us stroll up to the horse-paddock gate and back;
+then it will be time for tea; and let's hope our little tuner will have
+finished his work at last."
+
+"I believe he has finished now," Tom Chester said, as they turned their
+backs on the homestead. "He's never run up and down the board like
+_that_ before."
+
+"The board!" said Miss Pryse, laughing. "No, don't you believe it; he
+won't finish for another hour."
+
+Tom Chester was right, however. As Naomi and he passed out of earshot,
+the piano-tuner faced about on the music-stool, and peered wistfully
+through the empty room at the closed door, straining his ear for their
+voices. Of course he heard nothing; but the talking on the veranda had
+never been continuous, so that did not surprise him. It gladdened him,
+rather. She was reading. She might be alone; his heart beat quicker for
+the thought. She had sat there all day, of her own kind will, enduring
+his melancholy performance; now she should have her reward. His eyes
+glistened as he searched in his memory for some restful, dreamy melody,
+which should at once soothe and charm her ears aching from his crude
+unmusical monotonies. Suddenly he rubbed his hands, and then stretching
+them out and leaning backward on the stool he let his fingers fall with
+their lightest and daintiest touch upon Naomi's old piano.
+
+He had chosen a very simple, well-known piece; but it need not be so
+well known in the bush. Miss Pryse might never have heard it before, in
+which case she could not fail to be enchanted. It was the
+"Schlummerlied" of Schumann, and the piano-tuner played it with all the
+very considerable feeling and refinement of which he was capable, and
+with a smile all the time for its exceeding appropriateness. What could
+chime more truly with the lazy stillness of the Sunday afternoon than
+this sweet, bewitching lullaby? Engelhardt had always loved it; but
+never in his life had he played it half so well. As he finished--softly,
+but not so softly as to risk a single note dropping short of the
+veranda--he wheeled round again with a sudden self-conscious movement.
+It was as though he expected to find the door open and Naomi entranced
+upon the threshold. It is a fact that he sat watching the door-handle to
+see it turn, first with eagerness, and at last with acute
+disappointment. His disappointment was no greater when he opened the
+door himself and saw the book lying in the empty chair. That, indeed,
+was a relief. To find her sitting there unmoved was what his soul had
+dreaded.
+
+But now that his work was done, the piano-tuner felt very lonely and
+unhappy. To escape from these men with whom he could not get on was his
+strongest desire but one; the other was to stay and see more of the
+glorious girl who had befriended him; and he was torn between the two,
+because his longing for love was scarcely more innate than his shrinking
+from ridicule and scorn. He knew this, too, and had as profound a scorn
+for himself as any he was likely to meet with from another. His saving
+grace was the moral courage which enabled him to run counter to his own
+craven inclinations.
+
+Thus in the early morning he had apologized to Sanderson, the
+store-keeper, for the loss of his temper overnight; after lying awake
+for hours chewing the bitterness of this humiliating move, he had
+determined upon it in the end. But determination was what he had--it
+takes not a little to bring you to apologize in cold blood to a rougher
+man than yourself. Engelhardt had done this, and more. At breakfast and
+at dinner he had made heroic efforts to be affable and at ease with the
+men who despised him; though each attempt touched a fresh nerve in his
+sensitive, self-conscious soul. And now, because from the veranda he
+could descry Gilroy and Sanderson up at the stock-yards, and because
+these men were the very two whose society he most dreaded, his will was
+that he must join them then and there.
+
+He was a man himself; and if he could not get on with other men, that
+was his own lookout. No doubt, too, it was his own fault. It was a fault
+of which he swore an oath that he would either cure himself or suffer
+the consequences like a man. He may even have taken a private pride in
+being game against the grain. There is no fathoming the thoughts that
+generate action in egotistical, but noble, natures, whose worst enemy is
+their own inner consciousness.
+
+Gilroy and Sanderson were in the horse-yard, leaning backward against
+the heavy white rails. Their pipes were in their mouths, and they were
+watching Sam Rowntree stalk a wiry bay horse that took some catching.
+Sam was the groom, and he had just run up all the horses out of the
+horse-paddock. The yard was full of them. Gilroy hauled a freckled hand
+out of a cross pocket to point at the piano-tuner's nag.
+
+"Poor-looking devil," said he.
+
+"Yes, the kind you see when you're out without a gun," remarked the wit.
+"Quite good enough for a thing like him, though." Some association of
+ideas caused him to glance round toward the homestead through the rails.
+"By the hokey, here's the thing itself!" he cried.
+
+The pair watched Engelhardt approach.
+
+"I'd like to break his beastly head for him," muttered the manager. "The
+cheek of him, spoiling our spell with that cursed row!"
+
+The piano-tuner came up with a pleasant smile that was an effort to him,
+and pretended not to notice Sanderson's stock remark, that "queer
+things come out after the rain."
+
+"You'll be glad to hear, gentlemen, that I've finished my job," said he,
+airily.
+
+"Thank God," growled Gilroy.
+
+"I know it's been a great infliction----"
+
+"Oh, no, not at all," said Sanderson, winking desperately. "We liked it.
+It's just what we _do_ like. You bet!"
+
+The wiry bay horse had been caught by this time, and Sam Rowntree was
+saddling it, by degrees, for the animal was obviously fresh and touchy.
+Engelhardt watched the performance with a bitter feeling of envy for all
+Australian men, and of contempt for himself because they contemned him.
+The fault was his, not theirs. He was of a different order from these
+rough, light-hearted men--of an altogether inferior order, as it seemed
+to his self-criticising mind. But that was no excuse for his not getting
+on with them, and as a rider puts his horse at a fence again and again,
+so Engelhardt spurred himself on to one more effort to do so.
+
+"That's your horse, Mr. Gilroy?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I saw the 'G' on the left shoulder."
+
+"You mean the near shoulder; a horse hasn't a left."
+
+"No? I'm not well up in horses. What's his name?"
+
+"Hard Times."
+
+"That's good! I like his looks, too--not that I know anything about
+horses."
+
+Here Sanderson whispered something to Gilroy, who said carelessly to
+Engelhardt:
+
+"Can you ride?"
+
+"I can ride my own moke."
+
+"Like a turn on Hard Times?"
+
+"Yes! I should."
+
+This was said in a manner that was all the more decided for the moments
+of deliberation which preceded it. The piano-tuner was paler even than
+usual, but all at once his jaw had grown hard and strong, and there was
+a keen light in his eyes. The others looked at him, unable to determine
+whether it was a good rider they were dealing with or a born fool.
+
+"Fetch him out of the yard, Sam," said Gilroy to the groom. "This
+gentleman here is going to draw first blood."
+
+Sam Rowntree stared.
+
+"You'd better not, mister," said he, looking doubtfully at the musician.
+"He's fresh off the grass--hasn't had the saddle on him for two months."
+
+"Get away, Sam. The gentleman means to take some of the cussedness out
+of him. Isn't that it, Engelhardt?"
+
+"I mean to try," said Engelhardt, quietly.
+
+A lanky middle-aged bushman, who had loafed across from the men's hut,
+here spat into the sand without removing the pipe from his teeth, and
+put in his word.
+
+"Becod, then ye're a brave man! He bucks like beggary. He's bucked me as
+high as a blessed house!"
+
+"We'll see how high he can buck me," said Engelhardt.
+
+Gilroy was losing interest in the proceedings. The little fool could
+ride after all; instead of being scored off, he was going to score. The
+manager thrust his hands deep in his cross pockets, and watched
+sullenly, with his yellow eyelashes drooping over his blue eyes.
+Suddenly he strode forward, crying:
+
+"What the blazes are you up to, you idiot?"
+
+Engelhardt had shown signs of mounting on the off-side, but was smiling
+as though he had done it on purpose.
+
+"He's all right," said the long stockman with the pipe. "He knows a
+thing or two, _my_ word."
+
+But his style of mounting in the end hardly tallied with this theory.
+The piano-tuner scrambled into the saddle, and kicked about awkwardly
+before finding his stirrups; and the next thing he did was to job the
+horse's mouth with the wanton recklessness of pure innocence. The
+watchers held their breath. As for Hard Times, he seemed to know that he
+was bestridden by an unworthy foeman, to appreciate the humor of the
+situation, and to make up his evil mind to treat it humorously as it
+deserved. Away he went, along the broad road between homestead and
+yards, at the sweetest and most guileless canter. The rider was sitting
+awkwardly enough, but evidently as tight as he knew how. And he needed
+all the grip within the power of his loins and knees. Half-way to the
+house, without a single premonitory symptom, the wiry bay leapt clean
+into the air, with all its legs gathered up under its body, its head
+tucked between its knees, and its back arched like a bent bow. Down it
+came, with a thud, then up again like a ball, again and again, and yet
+again.
+
+At the first buck Engelhardt stuck nobly; he evidently had been prepared
+for the worst. The second displayed a triangle of blue sky between his
+legs and the saddle; he had lost his stirrups and the reins, but was
+clinging to the mane with all ten fingers, and to the saddle with knees
+and shins.
+
+"Sit tight!" roared Gilroy. "Stick to him!" yelled Sanderson. "Slide off
+as he comes down!" shouted the groom.
+
+But if Engelhardt heard them he did not understand. He only knew that
+for the first time in his life he was on a buck-jumper, and that he
+meant to stay there as long as the Lord would let him. A wild
+exhilaration swamped every other sensation. The blue sky fell before him
+like a curtain at each buck; at the fifth his body was seen against it
+like a burst balloon; and after that, Hard Times was left to the more
+difficult but less exciting task of bucking himself out of an empty
+saddle.
+
+They carried Engelhardt toward the house. But Naomi came running out and
+met them half-way, and Tom Chester was at her back. From the veranda the
+two had seen it happen. And in all that was done during the next minutes
+Naomi was prime mover.
+
+"You call yourselves men. Men indeed! There's more manhood lying here
+than ever there was or will be in the two of you put together!"
+
+"Hear, hear!"
+
+The voices were those of Miss Pryse and Tom Chester. They were the
+first that Engelhardt heard when his senses came back to him. But the
+first thing that was said to him when he opened his eyes was said by
+Gilroy:
+
+"Why the devil didn't you tell us you couldn't ride?"
+
+He did not answer, but Tom Chester said coolly before them all:
+
+"He can ride a jolly sight better than you can, Gilroy. You sit five
+bucks and I'll give you five notes."
+
+There was bad blood in the air. The piano-tuner could not help it. His
+head was all wrong, and his right arm felt red-hot from wrist to elbow;
+he discovered that it was bare, and in the hands of Miss Pryse. He felt
+ashamed, it was such a thin arm. But Miss Pryse smiled at him kindly,
+and he smiled faintly back at her; he just saw Tom Chester tearing the
+yellow backs off a novel, and handing them to the kneeling girl; then
+once more he closed his eyes.
+
+"He's off again," said Naomi. "Thank God I can set a joint. There's
+nothing to watch, all of you! Sam, you may as well turn out this
+gentleman's horse again. If anybody thought of getting rid of him
+to-night, they've gone the wrong way about it, for now he shall stay
+here till he's able to go on tuning pianos."
+
+And as she spoke Naomi looked up, and sent her manager to the rightabout
+with a single stare of contempt and defiance.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE TREASURE IN THE STORE
+
+
+When Engelhardt regained consciousness he found himself spread out on
+his bed in the barracks, with Tom Chester rather gingerly pulling off
+his clothes for him as he lay. The first thing he saw was his own
+heavily splintered arm stretched stiffly across his chest. For the
+moment this puzzled him. His mind was slow to own so much lumber as a
+part of his person. Then he remembered, and let his lids fall back
+without speaking. His head ached abominably, but it was rapidly
+clearing, both as to what had happened and what was happening now. With
+slight, instinctive movements, first of one limb, then another, he
+immediately lightened Tom Chester's task. Presently he realized that he
+was between the sheets and on the point of being left to himself. This
+put some life in him for perhaps the space of a minute.
+
+"Thank you," he said, opening his eyes again. "That was awfully good of
+you."
+
+"What was?" asked the other, in some astonishment. "I thought you were
+stunned."
+
+"No, not this last minute or two; but my head's splitting; I want to
+sleep it off."
+
+"Poor chap! I'll leave you now. But what induced you to tackle Hard
+Times, when you weren't a rider, sweet Heaven only knows!"
+
+"I was a fool," said Engelhardt, wearily.
+
+"You leave that for us to say," returned the other. "You've got some
+pluck, whatever you are, and that's about all you want in the bush. So
+long."
+
+He went straight to Naomi, who was awaiting him outside with
+considerable anxiety. They hovered near the barracks, talking all things
+over for some time longer. Then Naomi herself stole with soft, bold
+steps to the piano-tuner's door. There she hesitated, one hand on the
+latch, the other at her ear. It ended in her entering his room on
+tiptoe. A moment later she was back in the yard, her fine face shining
+with relief.
+
+"He's sleeping like a baby," she said to Chester. "I think we may
+perhaps make our minds easy about him now--don't you? I was terribly
+frightened of concussion; but that's all right, or he wouldn't be
+breathing as he is now. We'll let him be for an hour or two, and then
+send Mrs. Potter to him with some toast and tea. Perhaps you'll look him
+up last thing, Mr. Chester, and give him a hand in the morning if he
+feels well enough to get up?"
+
+"Certainly I would, Miss Pryse, if I were here; but we were all going
+out to the shed to-night, as usual, so as to make an early start----"
+
+"I know; I know. And very glad I shall be to get quit of the others; but
+I have this poor young man on my mind, and you at least must stop till
+morning to see me through. I shall mention it myself to Mr. Gilroy."
+
+"Very well," said Chester, who was only too charmed with the plan. "I'll
+stop, with all my heart, and be very glad to do anything that I can."
+
+With Chester it was certainly two for himself and one for the unlucky
+Engelhardt. He made the most of his evening with Naomi all to himself.
+It was not a very long evening, for Gilroy delayed his departure to the
+last limit, and then drove off in a sullen fury, spitting oaths right
+and left and lashing his horses like a madman. This mood of the
+manager's left Chester in higher spirits than ever; he had the
+satisfaction of feeling himself partly responsible for it. Moreover, he
+had given Gilroy, whom he frankly detested, the most excellent
+provocation to abuse him to his face before starting; but, as usual, the
+opening had been declined. Such were the manager of Taroomba and his
+subordinate the overseer; the case was sufficiently characteristic of
+them both. As for Chester, he made entertaining talk with Naomi as long
+as she would sit up, and left her with an assurance that he would attend
+to the piano-tuner like a mother. Nor was he much worse than his word;
+though the patient knew nothing until awakened next morning by the
+clatter and jingle of boots and spurs at his bedside.
+
+"What is it?" he cried, struggling to sit up.
+
+"Me," said Chester. "Lie perfectly tight. I only came to tell you that
+your breakfast's coming in directly, and to see how you are. How are
+you? Had some sleep?"
+
+"Any quantity," said Engelhardt, with a laugh that slipped into a yawn.
+"I feel another man."
+
+"How's the arm?"
+
+"I don't feel to have one. I suppose it's broken, is it?"
+
+"No, my boy, only dislocated. So Miss Pryse said when she fixed it up,
+and she knows all about that sort of thing. How's the head?"
+
+"Right as the bank!"
+
+"I don't believe you. You're the color of candles. If you feel fit to
+get up, after you've had something to eat, I'm to give you a hand; but
+if I were you I'd lie in."
+
+"Die first," cried the piano-tuner, laughing heartily with his white
+face.
+
+"Well, we'll see. Here comes Mother Potter with your breakfast. I'll be
+back in half an hour, and we'll see about it then."
+
+Chester came back to find the piano-tuner half dressed with his one
+hand. He was stripped and dripping to the waist, and he raised his head
+so vigorously from the cold water, at the overseer's entrance, that the
+latter was well splashed.
+
+"Dry me," he cried.
+
+The overseer did his best.
+
+"I feel as fit as a Strad," panted Engelhardt.
+
+"What may that be?"
+
+"A fiddle and a half."
+
+"Then you don't look it."
+
+"But I soon shall. What's a dislocated arm? Steady on, I say, though.
+Easy over the stones!"
+
+Chester was nonplussed.
+
+"My dear fellow, you're bruised all over. It'd be cruel to touch you
+with a towel of cotton-wool."
+
+"Go on," said Engelhardt. "I must be dried and dressed. Dry away! I can
+stand it."
+
+The other exercised the very greatest care; but ribs and shoulders on
+the same side as the injured arm were fairly dappled with bruises, and
+it was perfectly impossible not to hurt. Once he caught Engelhardt
+wincing. He was busy at his back, and only saw it in the mirror.
+
+"I am hurting you!" he cried.
+
+"Not a bit, sir. Fire away!"
+
+The white face in the mirror was still racked with pain.
+
+"Where did you get your pluck?" asked Chester, casually, when all was
+over.
+
+"From my mother," was the prompt reply; "such as I possess."
+
+"My boy," said Chester, "you've as much as most!" And, without
+thinking, he slapped the other only too heartily on the bruised
+shoulder. Next moment he was sufficiently horrified at what he had done,
+for this time the pain was more than the sufferer could conceal. In an
+instant, however, he was laughing off his friend's apologies with no
+less tact than self-control.
+
+"You're about the pluckiest little devil I've ever seen," said the
+overseer at last. "I thought so yesterday--I know so to-day."
+
+The piano-tuner beamed with joy. "What rot," however, was all he said.
+
+"Not it, my boy! You're a good sort. You've got as much pluck in one
+hair of your head--though they _are_ long 'uns, mind--as that fellow
+Gilroy has in his whole composition. Now I must be off to the shed. I
+should stroll about in the air, if I were you, but keep out of the sun.
+If you care to smoke, you'll find a tin of cut-up on the corner bracket
+in my room, and Miss Pryse'll give you a new pipe out of the store if
+you want one. You'll see her about pretty soon, I should say. Oh, yes,
+she had breakfast with me. She means to keep you by main force till
+you're up to piano-tuning again. Serve Gilroy jolly well right, the
+brute! So we'll meet again this week-end; meanwhile, good-by, old chap,
+and more power to the arm."
+
+Engelhardt watched the overseer out of sight, with a mingled warmth and
+lightness of heart which for the moment were making an unusually happy
+young man of him. This Chester was the very incarnation of a type that
+commonly treated him, as he was too ready to fancy, with contempt; and
+yet that was the type of all others whose friendship and admiration he
+coveted most. All his life he had been so shy and so sensitive that the
+good in him, the very best of him, was an unknown quantity to all save
+those who by accident or intimacy struck home to his inner nature. The
+latter was true as steel, and brave, patient, and enduring to an
+unsuspected degree; but a cluster of small faults hid this from the
+ordinary eye. The man was a little too anxious to please--to do the
+right thing--to be liked or loved by those with whom he mixed. As a
+natural consequence, his anxiety defeated his design. Again, he was a
+little too apt to be either proud or ashamed of himself--one or the
+other--he never could let himself alone. Wherefore appreciation was
+inordinately sweet to his soul, and the reverse proportionately bitter.
+Mere indifference hurt him no less than active disdain; indeed, where
+there was the former, he was in the bad habit of supposing the latter;
+and thus the normal current of his life was never clear of little
+unnecessary griefs of which he was ashamed to speak, but which he only
+magnified by keeping them to himself. Perhaps he had his compensating
+joys. Certainly he was as often in exceedingly high spirits as in the
+dumps, and it is just possible that the former are worth the latter. In
+any case he was in the best of spirits this morning; nor by any means
+ashamed of his slung arm, but rather the reverse, if the whole truth be
+told. And yet, with a fine girl like Naomi, and a smart bushman like Tom
+Chester, both thinking well of him together, there surely was for once
+some slight excuse for an attack of self-satisfaction. It was transitory
+enough, and rare enough, too, Heaven knows.
+
+In this humor, at all events, he wandered about the yard for some time,
+watching the veranda incessantly with jealous eyes. His saunterings led
+him past the rather elaborate well, in the centre of the open space, to
+the store on the farther side. This was a solid isolated building, very
+strongly built, with an outer coating of cement, and a corrugated roof
+broken on the foremost slope by a large-sized skylight. A shallow
+veranda ran in front, but was neither continued at the ends nor renewed
+at the back of the building. Nor were there any windows; the piano-tuner
+walked right round to see, and on coming back to the door (a remarkably
+strong one) there was Naomi fitting in her key. She was wearing an old
+black dress, an obvious item of her cast-off mourning, and over it, from
+her bosom to her toes, a brilliantly white apron, which struck
+Engelhardt as the most charming garment he had ever seen.
+
+"Good business!" she cried at sight of him. "I know how you are from Mr.
+Chester. Just hold these things while I take both hands to this key; it
+always is so stiff."
+
+The things in question, which she reached out to him with her left hand,
+consisted of a box of plate-powder, a piece of chamois leather, a
+tooth-brush, and a small bottle of methylated spirits; the lot lying
+huddled together in a saucer.
+
+"That does it," continued Naomi as the lock shot back with a bang and
+the door flew open. "Now come on in. You can lend me your only hand. I
+never thought of that."
+
+Engelhardt followed her into the store. Inside it was one big room,
+filled with a good but subdued light (for as yet the sun was beating
+upon the hinder slope of corrugated iron), and with those motley
+necessaries of station life which are to be seen in every station store.
+Sides of bacon, empty ration-bags, horse-collars and hames, bridles and
+reins, hung promiscuously from the beams. Australian saddles kept their
+balance on stout pegs jutting out from the walls. The latter were barely
+lined with shelves, like book-cases, but laden with tinned provisions of
+every possible description, sauces and patent medicines in bottles,
+whiskey and ink in stone jars, cases of tea, tobacco, raisins, and figs.
+Engelhardt noticed a great green safe, with a couple of shot-guns and a
+repeating-rifle in a rack beside it, and two or three pairs of rusty
+hand-cuffs on a nail hard by. The floor was fairly open, but for a few
+sacks of flour in a far corner. It was cut up, however, by a raised desk
+with a high office-stool to it, and by the permanent, solid-looking
+counter which faced the door. A pair of scales, of considerable size and
+capacity, was the one encumbrance on the counter. Naomi at once
+proceeded to remove it, first tossing the weights onto the flour bags,
+one after the other, and then lifting down the scales before Engelhardt
+had time to help her. Thereafter she slapped the counter with her flat
+hand, and stood looking quizzically at her guest.
+
+"You don't know what's under this counter," she said at last, announcing
+an obvious fact with extraordinary unction.
+
+"I don't, indeed," said the piano-tuner, shaking his head.
+
+"Nor does your friend Mr. Sanderson, though he's the store-keeper. He's
+out at the shed during shearing-time, branding bales and seeing to the
+loading of the drays. But all the rest of the year he keeps the books at
+that desk or serves out rations across this counter; and yet he little
+dreams what's underneath it."
+
+"You interest me immensely, Miss Pryse."
+
+"I wonder if I dare interest you any more?"
+
+"You had better not trust me with a secret."
+
+"Why not? Do you mean that you couldn't keep one?"
+
+"I don't say that; but I have no right----"
+
+"Right be bothered," cried Naomi, crisply; "there's no question of
+right."
+
+Engelhardt colored up.
+
+"I was only going to say that I had no right to get in your way and
+perhaps make you feel it was better to tell me things than to turn me
+out," he explained, humbly. "I shall turn myself out, since you are too
+kind to do it for me. I meant in any case to take a walk in the pines."
+
+"Did I invite you to come in here, or did I not?" inquired Miss Pryse.
+
+"Well, only to carry these things. Here they are."
+
+He held them out to her, but she refused to look at them.
+
+"When I tell you I don't want you, then it will be time for you to go,"
+she said. "Since you don't live here, there's not the least reason why
+you shouldn't know what no man on the place knows, except Mr. Gilroy.
+Besides, you can really help me. So now will you be good?"
+
+"I'll try," said Engelhardt, catching her smile.
+
+"Then I forgive everything. Now listen to me. My dear father was the
+best and kindest man in all the world; but he had his fair share of
+eccentricity. I have mine, too; and you most certainly have yours; but
+that's neither here nor there. My father came of a pretty good old
+Welsh family. In case you think I'm swaggering about it, let me tell you
+I'd like to take that family and drop the whole crew in the well
+outside--yes, and heat up the water to boil 'em before they'd time to
+drown! I owe them nothing nice, don't you believe it. They treated my
+father shamefully; but he was the eldest son, and when the old savage,
+_his_ father, had the good taste to die, mine went home and collared his
+dues. He didn't get much beyond the family plate; but sure enough he
+came back with that. And didn't the family sit up, that's all! However,
+his eccentricity came in then. He must needs bring that plate up here.
+It's here still. I'm sitting on it now!"
+
+Indeed, she had perched herself on the counter while speaking; and now,
+spinning round where she sat, she was down on the other side and
+fumbling at a padlock before her companion could open his mouth.
+
+"Isn't it very dangerous?" he said at length, as Naomi stood up and set
+the padlock on the desk.
+
+"Hardly that. Mr. Gilroy is absolutely the only person who knows that it
+is here. Still, the bank would be best, of course, and I mean to have it
+all taken there one of these days. Meanwhile, I clean my silver
+whenever I come up here. It's a splendid opportunity when my young men
+are all out at the shed. I did a lot last week, and I expect to finish
+off this morning."
+
+As she spoke the top of the counter answered to the effort of her two
+strong arms, and came up with a jerk. She raised it until it caught,
+when Engelhardt could just get his chin over the rim, and see a huge,
+heavily clamped plate-chest lying like a kernel in its shell. There were
+more locks to undo. Then the baize-lined lid of the chest was raised in
+its turn. And in a very few minutes the Taroomba store presented a scene
+which it would have been more than difficult to match throughout the
+length and breadth of the Australian bush.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+MASTERLESS MEN
+
+
+Naomi had seated herself on the tall stool at the bookkeeper's desk, on
+which she had placed in array the silver that was still unclean. This
+included a fine old epergne, of quaint design and exceedingly solid
+proportions; a pair of candlesticks, in the familiar form of the
+Corinthian column--more modern, but equally handsome in their way; a
+silver coffee-pot with an ivory handle; and a number of ancient skewers.
+She tackled the candlesticks first. They were less tarnished than might
+have been expected, and in Naomi's energetic hands they soon regained
+their pristine purity and lustre. As she worked she talked freely of her
+father, and his family in Wales, to Engelhardt, for whose benefit she
+had unpacked many of the things which she had already cleaned, and set
+them out upon the counter after shutting it down as before. He, too, was
+seated, on the counter's farther edge, with his back half-turned to the
+door. And the revelation of so much treasure in that wild place made him
+more and more uneasy.
+
+"I should have thought you'd be frightened to have this sort of thing on
+the premises," he could not help saying.
+
+"Frightened of what?"
+
+"Well--bushrangers."
+
+"They don't exist. They're as extinct as the dodo. But that reminds me!"
+
+She broke off abruptly, and sat staring thoughtfully at the door, which
+was standing ajar. She even gave the steps of her Corinthian column a
+rest from tooth-brush and plate-powder.
+
+"That reminds you?"
+
+"Yes--of bushrangers. We once had some here, before they became
+extinct."
+
+"Since you've had the plate?"
+
+"Yes; it was the plate they were after. How they got wind of it no one
+ever knew."
+
+"Is it many years ago?"
+
+"Well, I was quite a little girl at the time. But I never shall forget
+it! I woke in the night, hearing shots, and I ran into the veranda in my
+night-dress. There was my father behind one of the veranda posts, with a
+revolver in each hand, roaring and laughing as though it were the
+greatest joke in the world; and there were two men in the store veranda,
+just outside this door. They were shooting at father, all they knew, but
+they couldn't hit him, though they hit the post nearly every time. I'll
+show you the marks when we go over to lunch. My father kept laughing and
+shooting at them the whole time. It was just the sort of game he liked.
+But at last one of the men fell in a heap outside the door, and then the
+other bolted for his horse. He got away, too; but he left something
+behind him that he'll never replace in this world or the next."
+
+"What was that?" asked Engelhardt with a long breath.
+
+"His little finger. My father amputated it with one of his shots. It was
+picked up between this and the place where he mounted his horse. Father
+got him on the wing!" said Naomi, proudly.
+
+"Was he caught?"
+
+"No, he was never heard of again."
+
+"And the man who was shot?"
+
+"He was as dead as sardines. And who do you suppose he turned out to
+be?"
+
+Engelhardt shook his head.
+
+"Tigerskin the bushranger! No less! It was a dirty burgling business for
+a decent bushranger to lose his life in, now wasn't it? For they never
+stuck up the station, mind you; they were caught trying to burst into
+the store. Luckily, they didn't succeed. The best of it was that at the
+inquest, and all that, it never came out what it was they really wanted
+in our store. Soon afterward my father had the windows blocked up and
+the whole place cemented over, as you see it now."
+
+Naomi was done. Back went the tooth-brush to work on the Corinthian
+column, and Engelhardt saw more of the pretty hair, but less of the
+sweet face, as she bent to her task with redoubled vigor. Sweet she most
+certainly was in his sight, and yet she could sit there, and tell him of
+blood spilt and life lost before her own soft eyes, as calmly as though
+such sights were a natural part of a young girl's education. For a space
+he so marvelled at her that there was room in his soul for no other
+sensation. Then the towering sun struck down through the skylight,
+setting light to the silver, and brushing the girl's hair as she leant
+forward, so that it shone like spun copper. From that moment the
+piano-tuner could only and slavishly admire; but he was not allowed much
+time for this slightly perilous recreation. Abruptly, impulsively, as
+she did most things, Naomi raised her face and gave him a nod.
+
+"Now, Mr. Engelhardt, it's your turn to talk. I've done my share. Who
+are you, where do you come from, and what's your ambition in life? It
+really is time I knew something more about you."
+
+The poor fellow was so taken aback, and showed it so plainly, that Naomi
+simplified her question without loss of time.
+
+"It doesn't matter who you are, since you're a very nice young
+man--which is the main thing. And I know that you hail from old
+England, which is all I have any business to know. But come! you must
+have some ambitions. I like all young men to have their ambitions. I
+distrust them when they have none. So what's yours? Out with it quick!"
+
+She discerned delight behind his blushes.
+
+"Come on, I can't wait! What is it?"
+
+"I suppose it's music."
+
+"I knew it. Oh, but that's such a splendid ambition!"
+
+"Do you really think so?"
+
+"It's grand! But what do you aspire to do? Mephistopheles or Faust in
+the opera? Or sentimental songs in your dress-suit, with a tea-rose in
+your button-hole and a signet-ring plain as a pike-staff to the back
+row? Somehow or other I don't think you're sleek enough for a tenor or
+coarse enough for a bass. Certainly I know nothing at all about it."
+
+"Oh, Miss Pryse, I can't sing a bit!"
+
+"My dear young man, I've heard you."
+
+"I only tried because they made me--and to sell my wretched songs."
+
+"Then is it to be solos on the piano?"
+
+"I'm not good enough to earn my rations at that."
+
+"The organ--and a monkey? Burnt cork and the bones?"
+
+"Oh, Miss Pryse!"
+
+"Well, then, what?"
+
+"How can I say it? I should like, above everything else--if only I ever
+could!--to write music--to compose." He said it shyly enough, with
+downcast eyes, and more of his blushes.
+
+"And why not?"
+
+"Well, I don't know why not--one of these days."
+
+His tone had changed. He had tossed up his head erect. She had not
+laughed at him after all!
+
+"I should say that you would compose very well indeed," remarked Naomi,
+naïvely.
+
+"I don't know that; but some day or other I mean to try."
+
+"Then why waste your time tuning pianos?"
+
+"To keep myself alive meanwhile. I don't say that I shall ever do any
+good as a composer. Only that's what you'd call my ambition. In any
+case, I don't know enough to try yet, except to amuse myself when I'm
+alone. I have no technique. I know only the rudiments of harmony. I do
+get ideas; but they're no use to me. I haven't enough knowledge--of
+treatment--of composition--to turn them to any account. But I shall have
+some day! Miss Pryse, do you know why I'm out here? To make enough money
+to go back again and study--and learn my trade--with plenty of time and
+pains--which all trades require and demand. I mean all artistic trades.
+And I'm not doing so very badly, seeing I've only been out three years.
+I really am beginning to make a little. It was my mother's idea, my
+coming out at all. I wasn't twenty-three at the time. It was a splendid
+idea, like everything she does or says or thinks! How I wish you knew my
+mother! She is the best and cleverest woman in all the world, though she
+is so poor, and has lived in a cottage all her life. My father was a
+German. He was clever, too, but he wasn't practical. So he never
+succeeded. But my mother is everything! One day I shall go back to her
+with my little pile. Then we shall go abroad together--perhaps to
+Milan--and I shall study hard-all, and we'll soon find out whether
+there's anything in me or not. If there isn't, back I come to the
+colonies to tune pianos and sell music; but my mother shall come with me
+next time."
+
+"You will find that there is something in you," said Naomi. "I can see
+it."
+
+Indeed, it was not unreasonable to suppose that there was something
+behind that broad, high forehead and those enthusiastic and yet
+intelligent eyes. The mouth, too, was the delicate, mobile mouth of the
+born artist; the nostrils were as sensitive as those of a thoroughbred
+racehorse; and as he spoke the young man's face went white-hot with
+sheer enthusiasm. Clearly there was reason in what Naomi thought and
+said, though she knew little about music and cared less. He beamed at
+her without answering, and she spoke again.
+
+"Certainly you have ambition," she said; "and honestly, there's nothing
+I admire so much in a young man. Please understand that I for one am
+with you heart and soul in all you undertake or attempt. I feel quite
+sure that I shall live to see you famous. Oh, isn't it splendid to be a
+man and aim so high?"
+
+"It is," he answered, simply, out of the frankness of his heart.
+
+"Even if you never succeed, it is fine to try!"
+
+"Thank Heaven for that. Even if you never succeed!"
+
+"But you are going to----"
+
+"Or going to know the reason why!"
+
+To a sympathetic young woman who believes in him, and thus stimulates
+his belief in himself; who is ready with a nod and a smile when his mind
+outstrips his tongue; who understands his incoherences, and is with him
+in his wildest nights; to such a listener the ordinary young man with
+enthusiasm can talk by the hour together, and does. Naomi was one such;
+she was eminently understanding. Engelhardt had enthusiasm. He had more
+than it is good for a man to carry about in his own breast. And there is
+no doubt that he would have spent the entire morning in putting his
+burden, bit by bit, upon Naomi as she sat and worked and listened, had
+no interruption occurred. As it was, however, she interrupted him
+herself, and that in the middle of a fresh tirade, by suddenly holding
+up her finger and sharply enjoining silence.
+
+"Don't you hear voices?" she said.
+
+He listened.
+
+"Yes, I do."
+
+"Do you mind seeing who it is?"
+
+He went to the door. "There are two men hanging about the station
+veranda," he said. "Stay! Now they have seen me, and are coming this
+way."
+
+Naomi said not one word, but she managed to fetch over the office-stool
+in the haste with which she sprang to the ground. At a run she rounded
+the counter, and reached the door just as the men came up. She pushed
+Engelhardt out first, and then followed him herself, locking the door
+and putting the key in her pocket before turning to the men. Last of
+all, but in her most amiable manner, she asked them what they wanted.
+
+"Travellers' rations," said one.
+
+"Especially meat," added the other.
+
+"Very good," said Naomi, "go to the kitchen and get the meat first. Mr.
+Engelhardt, you may not know the station custom of giving rations to
+travellers. We don't give meat here as a rule; so will you take these
+men over to the kitchen, and tell Mrs. Potter I wish them each to have a
+good helping of cold mutton? Then bring them back to the store."
+
+"We don't seek no favors," growled the man who had spoken first.
+
+"No?" said Naomi, with a charming smile. "But I'm sure you need some
+meat. What's more, I mean you to have some!"
+
+"Suppose we take the tea and flour first, now we are at the store!"
+
+"Ah, I can't attend to you for a few minutes," said the girl, casually.
+As she spoke she turned and left them, and Engelhardt gathered her
+unconcern from the snatch of a song as she entered the main building.
+The men accompanied him to the kitchen in a moody silence. As for
+himself, he already felt an extraordinary aversion for them both.
+
+And indeed their looks were against them. The one who had spoken
+offensively about the meat was a stout, thick-set, middle-aged man, who
+gave an impression of considerable activity in spite of his great girth.
+Half his face was covered with short gray bristles, like steel spikes.
+Though his hands were never out of his pockets, he carried his head like
+a man of character; but the full force of a bold, insolent, vindictive
+expression was split and spoilt by the most villanous of squints.
+Nevertheless the force was there. It was not so conspicuous in his
+companion, who was, however, almost equally untoward-looking in his own
+way. He was of the medium size, all bone and gristle like a hawk, and
+with no sign upon his skin of a drop of red blood underneath. The hands
+were brown and furry as an ape's, with the nails all crooked and broken
+by hard work. The face was as brown, and very weather-beaten, with a
+pair of small black eyes twinkling out of the ruts and puckers like
+pools in the sun upon a muddy road. This one rolled as he walked, and
+wore brass rings in his ears; and Engelhardt, who had come out from
+England in a sailing ship, saw in a moment that he was as salt as junk
+all through. Decidedly he was the best of the two, though his eyes were
+never still, nor the hang of his head free and honest. And on the whole
+the piano-tuner was thankful when his share of the trouble with these
+men was at an end, and they all came back to the store.
+
+Rather to his surprise, Naomi was there before them, and busy weighing
+out the traveller's quantum of sugar, tea, and flour, for each man. What
+was really amazing, however, was the apparent miracle that had put every
+trace of the silver out of sight.
+
+"No work for us on the station?" said the stout man, before they finally
+sheered off, and in a tone far from civil, to Engelhardt's thinking.
+
+"None, I'm afraid," said Naomi, again with a smile.
+
+"Nor yet at the shed?" inquired the other, civilly enough.
+
+"Nor yet at the shed, I am sorry to say."
+
+"So long, then," said the fat man, in his impudent manner. "Mayhap we
+shall be coming to see you again, miss, one o' these fine days or
+nights. My dear, you look out for us! You keep your spare-room in
+readiness! A feather-bed for me----"
+
+"Stow it, mate," said the other tramp, as he hitched his swag across his
+shoulders. "Can't you hump your bluey and come away decent?"
+
+"If you don't," cried Engelhardt, putting in his little word in a
+gigantic voice, "it will be the worse for you!"
+
+The big fellow laughed and swore.
+
+"Will it, my little man?" said he. "Are _you_ going to make it the
+worse? I've a blessed good mind to take and crumple you up for manure, I
+have. And a blessed bad barrerful you'd make! See here, my son, I reckon
+you've got one broke bone about you already; mind out that I don't leave
+a few pals to keep it company. A bit more of your cheek, and I'll make
+you so as your own sweetheart--a fine girl she is, as ought to be above
+the likes of you; but I suppose you're better than nothing--I tell you
+I'll make you so as your sweetheart----"
+
+It was the man's own mate who put a stop to this.
+
+"Can't you shut it and come on?" he cried, with a kind of half-amused
+anger. "Wot good is this going to do either me or you, or any blessed
+body else?"
+
+"It'll do somebody some harm," returned the other, "if he opens his
+mouth again. Yes, I'll clear out before I smash 'im! Good-by, my dear,
+and a bigger size to you in sweethearts. So long, little man. You may
+thank your broke arm that your 'ead's not broke as well!"
+
+They were gone at last. Naomi and Engelhardt watched them out of sight
+from the veranda, the latter heaving with rage and indignation. He was
+not one to forget this degradation in a hurry. Naomi, on the other hand,
+who had more to complain of, being a woman, was in her usual spirits in
+five minutes. She took him by the arm, and told him to cheer up. He made
+bitter answer that he could never forgive himself for having stood by
+and heard her spoken to as she had been spoken to that morning. She
+pointed to his useless arm, and laughed heartily.
+
+"As long as they didn't see the silver," said she, "I care very little
+what they said."
+
+"But I care!"
+
+"Then you are not to. Do you think they saw the silver?"
+
+"No; I'm pretty sure they didn't. How quickly you must have bundled it
+in again!"
+
+"There was occasion for quickness. We must put it to rights after lunch.
+Meanwhile come along and look here."
+
+She had led the way along the veranda, and now stood fingering one of
+the whitewashed posts. It was pocked about the middle with ancient
+bullet-marks.
+
+"This was the post my father stood behind. Not much of a shelter, was
+it?"
+
+Engelhardt seemed interested and yet distrait. He made no answer.
+
+"Why don't you speak?" cried Naomi. "What has struck you?"
+
+"Nothing much," he replied. "Only when you heard the voices, and I went
+to the door, the big brute was showing the little brute this very
+veranda-post!"
+
+Naomi considered.
+
+"There's not much in that," she said at last. "It's the custom for
+travellers to wait about a veranda; and what more natural than their
+spotting these holes and having a look at them? As long as they didn't
+spot my silver! Do you know why I came over to the house before putting
+it away?"
+
+"No."
+
+"To get this," said Naomi, pulling something from her pocket. She was
+laughing rather shyly. It was a small revolver.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+£500
+
+
+"And what is your other name, Mr. Engelhardt?"
+
+"Hermann."
+
+"Hermann Engelhardt! That's a lovely name. How well it will look in the
+newspapers!"
+
+The piano-tuner shook his head.
+
+"It will never get into them now," said he, sadly.
+
+"What nonsense!" exclaimed the girl. "When you have told me of all the
+big things you dream of doing one day! You'll do them every one when you
+go home to England again; I'll put my bottom dollar on you."
+
+"Ah, but the point is whether I shall ever go back at all."
+
+"Of course you will."
+
+"I have a presentiment that I never shall."
+
+"Since when?" inquired Naomi, with a kindly sarcasm.
+
+"Oh, I always have it, more or less."
+
+"You had it very much less this morning, when you were telling me how
+you'd go home and study at Milan and I don't know where-all, once you'd
+made the money."
+
+"But I don't suppose I ever shall make it."
+
+"Bless the man!" cried Naomi, giving him up, for the moment in despair.
+She continued to gaze at him, however, as he leant back in his wicker
+chair, with hopeless dark eyes fixed absently upon the distant clumps of
+pale green trees that came between glaring plain and cloudless sky. They
+were sitting on the veranda which did not face the station-yard, because
+it was the shady one in the afternoon. The silver had all been properly
+put away, and locked up as carefully as before. As for the morning's
+visitors, Naomi was herself disposed to think no more of them or their
+impudence; it is therefore sad to relate that her present companion
+would allow her to forget neither. With him the incident rankled
+characteristically; it had left him solely occupied by an extravagantly
+poor opinion of himself. For the time being, this discolored his entire
+existence and prospects, draining his self-confidence to the last drop.
+Accordingly, he harped upon the late annoyance, and his own inglorious
+share in it, to an extent which in another would have tried Naomi very
+sorely indeed; but in him she rather liked it. She had a book in her
+lap, but it did not interest her nearly so much as the human volume in
+the wicker chair at her side. She was exceedingly frank about the
+matter.
+
+"You're the most interesting man I ever met in my life," was her very
+next remark.
+
+"I can't think that!"
+
+He had hauled in his eyes some miles to see whether she meant it.
+
+"Nevertheless, it's the case. Do you know why you're so interesting?"
+
+"No, that I don't!"
+
+"Because you're never the same for two seconds together."
+
+His face fell.
+
+"Among other reasons," added Naomi, nodding kindly.
+
+But Engelhardt had promptly put himself upon the spit. He was always
+doing this.
+
+"Yes, I know I'm a terribly up-and-down kind of chap," said he,
+miserably; "there's no happy medium about _me_."
+
+"When you are good you are very good indeed, and when you are bad you
+are horrid! That's just what I like. I can't stand your always-the-same
+people. They bore me beyond words; they drill me through and through!
+Still, you were very good indeed this morning, you know. It is too
+absurd of you to give a second thought to a couple of tramps and their
+insolence!"
+
+"I can't help it. I'm built that way. To think that I should have stood
+still to hear you insulted like that!"
+
+"But you didn't stand still."
+
+"Oh, yes, I did."
+
+"Well, I wish you wouldn't bother about it. I wish you wouldn't bother
+about yourself."
+
+"When I am bad I am horrid," he said, with a wry smile, "and that's
+now."
+
+"No, I tell you I like it. I never know where I've got you. That's one
+reason why you're so interesting."
+
+His face glowed, and he clasped her with his glance.
+
+"How kind you are!" he said, softly. "How you make the best of one, even
+at one's worst! But oh, how bitterly you make me wish that I were
+different!"
+
+"I'm very glad that you're not," said Naomi; "everybody else is
+different."
+
+"But I would give my head to be like everybody else--to be hail-fellow
+with those men out at the shed, for instance. _They_ wouldn't have stood
+still this morning."
+
+"Wouldn't you as soon be hail-fellow with me?" asked the girl, ignoring
+his last sentence.
+
+"A million times sooner, of course! But surely you understand?"
+
+"I think I do."
+
+"I know you do; you understand everything. I never knew anyone like you,
+never!"
+
+"Then we're quits," said Naomi, as though the game were over. And she
+closed her eyes. But it was she who began it again; it always was.
+
+"You have one great fault," she said, maternally.
+
+"I have a thousand and one."
+
+"There you are. You think too much about them. You take too much notice
+of yourself; that's your great fault."
+
+"Yet I didn't think I was conceited."
+
+"Not half enough. That's just it. Yet you _are_ egotistical."
+
+He looked terribly crestfallen. "I suppose I am," he said, dolefully.
+"In fact, I am."
+
+"Then you're not, so there!"
+
+"Which do you mean?"
+
+"I only said it to tease you. Do you suppose I'd have said such a thing
+if I'd really thought it?"
+
+"I shouldn't mind what you said. If you really do think me egotistical,
+pray say so frankly."
+
+"Of course I don't think anything of the kind!"
+
+"Is that the truth?"
+
+"The real truth."
+
+(It was not.)
+
+"If it's egotistical to think absolutely nothing of yourself," continued
+Naomi, "and to blame yourself and not other people for every little
+thing that goes wrong, then I should call you a twenty-two-carat
+egotist. But even then your aims and ambitions would be rather lofty for
+the billet."
+
+"They never seemed so to me," he whispered, "until you sympathized with
+them."
+
+"Of course I sympathize," said Naomi, laughing at him. It was necessary
+to laugh at him now and then. It kept him on his feet; this time it led
+him from the abstract to the concrete.
+
+"If only I could make enough money to go home and study, to study even
+in London for one year," murmured Engelhardt, as his eyes drifted out
+across the plains. "Then I should know whether my dreams ever were worth
+dreaming. But I have taken root out here, I am beginning to do well,
+better than ever I could have hoped. At our village in the old country I
+was glad enough to play the organ in church for twelve pounds a year.
+Down in Victoria they gave me fifty without a murmur, and I made a
+little more out of teaching. Oh! didn't I tell you I started life out
+here as an organist? That's how it was I was able to buy this business,
+and I am doing very well indeed. Two pounds for tuning a piano! They
+wouldn't credit it in the old country."
+
+"The man before you used to charge three. A piano-tuner in the bush is
+an immensely welcome visitor, mind. I don't think I should have lowered
+my terms at all, especially when you have no intention of doing this
+sort of thing all your days."
+
+"Ah, well, I shall never dare to throw it up."
+
+"Never's not a word I like to hear you use, Mr. Engelhardt. Remember
+that you've only been out here three years, and that you are not yet
+twenty-six. You told me so yourself this morning."
+
+"It's perfectly true," said Engelhardt. "But there's one's mother to
+consider. I told you about her. I am beginning to send her so much money
+now. It would be frightful to give that up, just because there are tunes
+in my head now and then, and I can't put them together in proper
+harmony."
+
+"I should say that your mother would rather have you than your money,
+Mr. Engelhardt."
+
+"Perhaps so, but not if I were on her hands composing things that nobody
+would publish."
+
+"That couldn't be. You would succeed. Something tells me that you would.
+I see it in your face; I did this morning. I know nothing about music,
+yet I feel so certain about you. The very fact that you should have
+these ambitions when you are beginning to do well out here, that in
+itself is enough for me."
+
+He shook his head, without turning it to thank her by so much as a look.
+The girl was glad of that. Though he had so little confidence in
+himself, she knew that the dreams of which he had spoken more freely and
+more hopefully in the morning were thick upon him then, as he sat in the
+wicker chair and looked out over the plains, with parted lips and such
+wistful eyes that Naomi's mind went to work at the promptings of the
+heart in her which he touched. It was a nimble, practical mind, and the
+warm heart beneath it was the home of noble impulses, which broke forth
+continually in kind words and generous acts. Naomi wore that heart upon
+her sweet frank face, it shone with a clear light out of the fearless
+eyes that were fixed now so long and so steadily upon the piano-tuner's
+eager profile. She watched him while the shadow of the building grew
+broader and broader under his eyes, until all at once it lost its edges,
+and there were no more sunlit patches on the plain. Still he neither
+moved nor looked at her. At last she touched him on the arm. She was
+sitting on his right, and she laid her fingers lightly upon the splints
+and bandages which were her own handiwork.
+
+"Well, Mr. Engelhardt?"
+
+He started round, and she was smiling at him in the gloaming, with her
+sweet warm face closer to his than it had ever been before.
+
+"I have been very rude," he stammered.
+
+"I am going to be much ruder."
+
+"Now you are laughing at me."
+
+"No, I am not. I was never farther from laughing in my life, for I fear
+that I shall offend you, though I do hope not."
+
+He saw that something was upon her mind.
+
+"You couldn't do it if you tried," he said, simply.
+
+"Then I want to know how much money you think you ought to have to go
+home to England with a clear conscience, and to give yourself heart and
+soul to music for a year certain? I _am_ so inquisitive about it all."
+
+She was employing, indeed, and successfully, a tone of pure and
+indefensible curiosity. He thought for some moments before answering.
+Then he said, quite innocently:
+
+"Five hundred pounds. That would leave me enough to come back and start
+all over again out here if I failed. I wouldn't tackle it on less."
+
+"But you wouldn't fail. I know nothing about it, but I have my
+instincts, and I see success in your face. I see it there! And I want to
+bet on you. I have more money than is good for any girl, and I want to
+back you for five hundred pounds."
+
+"It is very kind of you," he said, "but you would lose your money." He
+did not see her meaning. The southern night had set in all at once; he
+could not even see her strenuous eyes.
+
+"How dense you are," she said, softly, and with a little nervous laugh.
+"Can't you see that I want to _lend_ you the money?"
+
+"To lend it to me!"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Five hundred pounds!"
+
+"My dear young man, I'm ashamed to say that I should never feel it. It's
+a sporting offer merely. Of course I'd charge interest--you'd dedicate
+all your nice songs to me. Why don't you answer? I don't like to see you
+in the bush, it isn't at all the place for you; and I do want to send
+you home to your mother. You might let me, for her sake. Have you lost
+your tongue?"
+
+Her hand had remained upon the splints and bandages; indeed, she had
+forgotten that there was a living arm inside them, but now something
+trivial occurred that made her withdraw it, and also get up from her
+chair.
+
+"Are you on, or are you not?"
+
+"Oh, how can I thank you? What can I say?"
+
+"Yes or no," replied Naomi, promptly.
+
+"No, then. I can't--I can't----"
+
+"Then don't. Now not another word! No, there's no offence on either
+side, unless it's I that have offended you. It was great cheek of me,
+after all. Yes, it was! Well, then, if it wasn't, will you have the
+goodness to lend me your ears on an entirely different matter?"
+
+"Very well; with all my heart; yet if only I could ever thank you----"
+
+"If only you would be quiet and listen to me! How are the bruises
+behaving? That's all I want to hear now."
+
+"The bruises? Oh, they're all right; I'd quite forgotten I had any."
+
+"You can lean back without hurting?"
+
+"Rather! If I put my weight on the left side it doesn't hurt a bit."
+
+"Think you could stand seven miles in a buggy to-morrow morning?"
+
+"Couldn't I!"
+
+"Then I thought of driving over to the shed in the morning; and you
+shall come with me if you're good."
+
+For an instant he looked radiant. Then his face clouded over as he
+thought again of her goodness and his own ingratitude.
+
+"Miss Pryse," he began--and stuck--but his tone spoke volumes of
+remorse and self-abasement.
+
+Evidently she was getting to know that tone, for she caught him up with
+a look of distinct displeasure.
+
+"Only if you're good, mind!" she told him, sharply. "Not on any account
+unless!"
+
+And Engelhardt said no more.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE RINGER OF THE SHED
+
+
+A sweet breeze and a flawless sky rendered it an exquisite morning when
+Naomi and her piano-tuner took their seats behind the kind of pair which
+the girl loved best to handle. They were youngsters both, the one a
+filly as fresh as paint, the other a chestnut colt, better broken,
+perhaps, but sufficiently ready to be led astray. The very start was
+lively. Engelhardt found himself holding on with his only hand as if his
+life depended on it, instead of on the firm gloved fingers and the taut
+white-sleeved arm at his side. He looked from the pair of young ones to
+that arm and those fingers, and back again at the pair. They were
+pulling alarmingly, especially the filly. Engelhardt took an anxious
+look at the driver's face. He was prepared to find it resolute but pale.
+He found it transfigured with the purest exultation. After all, this was
+the daughter of the man who had returned the bushranger's fire with
+laughter as loud as his shots; she was her father's child; and from this
+moment onward the piano-tuner felt it a new honor to be sitting at her
+side.
+
+"How do you like it?" she found time to ask him when the worst seemed
+over.
+
+"First-rate," he replied.
+
+"Not in a funk?"
+
+"Not with you."
+
+"That's a blessing. The filly needs watching--little demon! But she
+sha'n't smash your other arm for you, Mr. Engelhardt, if I can prevent
+it. No screws loose, Sam, I hope?"
+
+"Not if I knows it, miss!"
+
+Sam Rowntree had jumped on behind to come as far as the first gate, to
+open it. Already they were there, and as Sam ran in front of the
+impatient pair the filly shied violently at a blue silk fly-veil which
+fluttered from his wide-awake.
+
+"That nice youth is the dandy of the men's hut," explained Naomi, as
+they tore through the gates, leaving Sam and his fly-veil astern in a
+twinkling. "I daren't say much to him, because he's the only man the hut
+contains just at present. The rest spend most nights out at the shed, so
+I should be pretty badly off if I offended Sam. I wasn't too pleased
+with the state of the buggy, as a matter of fact. It's the old Shanghai
+my father used to fancy, and somehow it's fallen on idle days; but it
+runs lighter than anything else we've got, and it's sweetly swung.
+That's why I chose it for this little trip of ours. You'll find it like
+a feather-bed for your bruises and bones and things--if only Sam
+Rowntree used his screw-hammer properly. Feeling happy so far?"
+
+Engelhardt declared that he had never been happier in his life. There
+was more truth in the assertion than Naomi suspected. She also was
+happy, but in a different way. A tight rein, an aching arm, a clear
+course across a five-mile paddock, and her beloved Riverina breeze
+between her teeth, would have made her happy at any time and in any
+circumstances. The piano-tuner's company added no sensible zest to a
+performance which she thoroughly enjoyed for its own sake; but with him
+the exact opposite was the case. She was not thinking of him. He was
+thinking only of her. She had her young bloods to watch. His eyes spent
+half their time upon her grand strong hand and arm. Suddenly these gave
+a tug and a jerk, both together. But he was in too deep a dream either
+to see what was wrong or to understand his companion's exclamation.
+
+"He didn't!" she had cried.
+
+"Didn't what?" said Engelhardt. "And who, Miss Pryse?"
+
+"Sam Rowntree didn't use his screw-hammer properly. Wretch! The near
+swingle-tree's down and trailing."
+
+It took Engelhardt some moments to grasp exactly what she meant. Then he
+saw. The near swingle-tree was bumping along the ground at the filly's
+heels, dragged by the traces. Already the filly had shown herself the
+one to shy as well as to pull, and it now appeared highly probable that
+she would give a further exhibition of her powers by kicking the
+Shanghai to matchwood. Luckily, the present pace was too fast for that.
+The filly had set the pace herself. The filly was keeping it up. As for
+the chestnut, it was contentedly playing second fiddle with traces
+drooping like festoons. Thus the buggy was practically being drawn by a
+single rein with the filly's mouth at one end of it and Naomi's hand at
+the other.
+
+"Once let the bar tickle her hoofs, and she'll hack us to smithereens,"
+said the latter, cheerfully. "We'll euchre her yet by keeping this up!"
+And she took her whip and flogged the chestnut.
+
+But this did not ease the strain on her left hand and arm, for the
+chestnut's pace was nothing to the filly's, so that even with the will
+he had not the power to tighten his traces and perform his part.
+Engelhardt saw the veins swelling in the section of wrist between the
+white sleeve and the dogskin glove. He reached across and tried to help
+her with his left hand; but she bade him sit quiet, or he would
+certainly tumble out and be run over; and with her command she sent a
+roar of laughter into his ear, though the veins were swelling on her
+forehead, too. Truly she was a chip of the old block, and the grain was
+as good as ever.
+
+It came to an end at last.
+
+"Hurray!" said Naomi. "I see the fence."
+
+Engelhardt saw it soon after, and in another minute the horses stood
+smoking, and the buggy panting on its delicate springs, before a
+six-bar gate which even the filly was disinclined to tackle just then.
+
+"Do you think you can drive through with your one hand, and hold them
+tight on t'other side?" said Naomi. "Clap your foot on the break and
+try."
+
+He nodded and managed creditably; but before opening the gate Naomi made
+a temporary fixture of the swingle-tree by means of a strap; and this
+proved the last of their troubles. The shed was now plainly in sight,
+with its long regular roof, and at one end three huts parallel with it
+and with each other. To the left of the shed, as they drove up, Naomi
+pointed out the drafting yards. A dense yellow cloud overhung them like
+a lump of London fog.
+
+"They're drafting now," said Naomi. "I expect Mr. Gilroy is drafting
+himself. If so, let's hope he's too busy to see us. It would be a pity,
+you know, to take him away from his work," she added next instant; but
+Engelhardt was not deceived.
+
+They drove down the length of the shed, which had small pens attached on
+either side, with a kind of port-hole opening into each. Out of these
+port-holes there kept issuing shorn sheep, which ran down little sloping
+boards, and thus filled the pens. At one of the latter Naomi pulled up.
+It contained twice as many sheep as any other pen, and a good half of
+them were cut and bleeding. The pens were all numbered, and this one was
+number nineteen.
+
+"Bear that in mind," said Naomi. "Nineteen!"
+
+Engelhardt looked at her. Her face was flushed and her voice unusually
+quiet and hard. But she drove on without another word, save of general
+explanation.
+
+"Each man has his pen," she said, "and shears his sheep just inside
+those holes. Then the boss of the shed comes round with his note-book,
+counts out the pens, and enters the number of sheep to the number of
+each pen. If a shearer cuts his sheep about much, or leaves a lot of
+wool on, he just runs that man's pen--doesn't count 'em at all. At
+least, he ought to. It seems he doesn't always do it."
+
+Again her tone was a singular mixture of hard and soft.
+
+"Mr. Gilroy is over the shed, isn't he?" said Engelhardt, a little
+injudiciously.
+
+"He is," returned Naomi, and that was all.
+
+They alighted from the buggy at the farther end of the shed, where huge
+doors stood open, showing a confused stack of wool-bales within, and
+Sanderson, the store-keeper, engaged in branding them with stencil and
+tar-brush. He took off his wide-awake to Naomi, and winked at the
+piano-tuner. The near-sighted youth was also there, and he came out to
+take charge of the pair, while Engelhardt entered the shed at Naomi's
+skirts.
+
+Beyond the bales was the machine which turned them out. Here the two
+wool-pressers were hard at work and streaming with perspiration. Naomi
+paused to see a bale pressed down and sewn up. Then she led her
+companion on to where the wool-pickers were busy at side tables, and the
+wool-sorter at another table which stood across the shed in a commanding
+position, with a long line of shearers at work to right and left, and an
+equally long pen full of unshorn sheep between them. The wool-sorter's
+seemed the softest job in the shed. Boys brought him fleeces--perhaps a
+dozen a minute--flung them out upon the table, and rolled them up again
+into neat bundles swiftly tied with string. These bundles the
+wool-sorter merely tossed over his shoulder into one or other of the
+five or six bins at his back.
+
+"He gets a pound a thousand fleeces," Naomi whispered, "and we shear
+something over eighty thousand sheep. He will take away a check of
+eighty odd pounds for his six weeks' work."
+
+"And what about the shearers?"
+
+"A pound a hundred. Some of them will go away with forty or fifty
+pounds."
+
+"It beats piano-tuning," said Engelhardt, with a laugh. They crossed an
+open space, mounted a few steps, and began threading their way down the
+left-hand aisle, between the shearers and the pen from which they had to
+help themselves to woolly sheep. The air was heavy with the smell of
+fleeces, and not unmusical with the constant swish and chink of forty
+pairs of shears.
+
+"Well, Harry?" said Naomi, to the second man they came to. "Harry is an
+old friend of mine, Mr. Engelhardt--he was here in the old days. Mr.
+Engelhardt is a new friend, Harry, but a very good one, for all that.
+How are you getting on? What's your top-score?"
+
+"Ninety-one, miss--I shore ninety-one yesterday."
+
+"And a very good top-score, too, Harry. I'd rather spend three months
+over the shearing than have sheep cut about and wool left on. What was
+that number I asked you to keep in mind, Mr. Engelhardt?"
+
+"Nineteen, Miss Pryse."
+
+"Ah, yes! Who's number nineteen, Harry?"
+
+Harry grinned.
+
+"They call him the ringer of the shed, miss."
+
+"Oh, indeed. That means the fastest shearer, Mr. Engelhardt--the man who
+runs rings round the rest, eh, Harry? What's _his_ top-score, do you
+suppose?"
+
+"Something over two hundred."
+
+"I thought as much. And his name?"
+
+"Simons, miss."
+
+"Point him out, Harry."
+
+"Why, there he is; that big chap now helping himself to a woolly."
+
+They turned and saw a huge fellow drag out an unshorn sheep by the leg,
+and fling it against his moleskins with a clearly unnecessary violence
+and cruelty.
+
+"Come on, Mr. Engelhardt," said Naomi, in her driest tones; "I have a
+word to say to the ringer of the shed. I rather think he won't ring much
+longer."
+
+They walked on and watched the long man at his work. It was the work of
+a ruffian. The shearer next him had started on a new sheep
+simultaneously, and was on farther than the brisket when the ringer had
+reached the buttocks. On the brisket of the ringer's sheep a slit of
+livid blue had already filled with blood, and blood started from other
+places as he went slashing on. He was either too intent or too insolent
+to take the least heed of the lady and the young man watching him. The
+young man's heart was going like a clock in the night, and he was
+sufficiently ashamed of it. As for Naomi, she was visibly boiling over,
+but she held her tongue until the sheep rose bleeding from its fleece.
+Then, as the man was about to let the poor thing go, she darted between
+it and the hole.
+
+"Tar here on the brisket!" she called down the board.
+
+A boy came at a run and dabbed the wounds.
+
+"Why didn't you call him yourself?" she then asked sternly of the man,
+still detaining his sheep.
+
+"What business is that of yours?" he returned, impudently.
+
+"That you will see presently. How many sheep did you shear yesterday?"
+
+"Two hundred and two."
+
+"And the day before?"
+
+"Two hundred and five."
+
+"That will do. It's too much, my man, you can't do it properly. I've had
+a look at your sheep, and I mean to run your pen. What's more, if you
+don't intend to go slower and do better, you may throw down your shears
+this minute!"
+
+The man had slowly lifted himself to something like his full height,
+which was enormous. So were his rounded shoulders and his long hairy
+arms and hands. So was his face, with its huge hook-nose and its
+mouthful of yellow teeth. These were showing in an insolent yet savage
+grin, when a good thing happened at a very good time.
+
+A bell sounded, and someone sang out, "Smoke-oh!"
+
+Instantly many pairs of shears were dropped; in the ensuing two minutes
+the rest followed, as each man finished the sheep he was engaged on when
+the bell rang. Thus the swish and tinkle of the shears changed swiftly
+to a hum of conversation mingled with deep-drawn sighs. And this stopped
+suddenly, miraculously, as the shed opened its eyes and ears to the
+scene going forward between its notorious ringer and Naomi Pryse, the
+owner of the run.
+
+In another moment men with pipes in their hands and sweat on their
+brows were edging toward the pair from right and left.
+
+"Your name, I think, is Simons?" Naomi was saying, coolly, but so that
+all who had a mind might hear her. "I have no more to say to you,
+Simons, except that you will shear properly or go where they like their
+sheep to have lumps of flesh taken out and lumps of wool left on."
+
+"Since when have you been over the board, miss?" asked Simons, a little
+more civilly under the eyes of his mates.
+
+"I am not over the board," said Naomi, hotly, "but I am over the man who
+is."
+
+She received instant cause to regret this speech.
+
+"We wish you was!" cried two or three. "_You_ wouldn't make a blooming
+mull of things, you wouldn't!"
+
+"I'll take my orders from Mr. Gilroy, and from nobody else," said
+Simons, defiantly.
+
+"Well, you may take fair warning from me."
+
+"That's as I like."
+
+"It's as _I_ like," said Naomi. "And look here, I won't waste more words
+upon you and I won't stand your impertinence. Better throw down your
+shears now--for I've done with you--before I call upon your mates to
+take them from you."
+
+"We don't need calling, miss, not we!"
+
+Half a dozen fine fellows had stepped forward, with Harry at their head,
+and the affair was over. Simons had flung his shears on the floor with a
+clatter and a curse, and was striding out of the shed amid the hisses
+and imprecations of his comrades.
+
+Naomi would have got away, too, for she had had more than enough of the
+whole business, but this was not so easy. Someone raised three cheers
+for her. They were given with a roar that shook the iron roof like
+thunder. And to cap all this a gray old shearer planted himself in her
+path.
+
+"It's just this way, miss," said he. "We liked Simons little enough,
+but, begging your pardon, we like Mr. Gilroy less. He doesn't know how
+to treat us at all. He has no idea of bossing a shed like this. And mark
+my words, miss, unless you remove that man, and give us some smarter
+gentleman like, say, young Mr. Chester----"
+
+"Ay, Chester'll do!"
+
+"He knows his business!"
+
+"He's a man, he is----"
+
+"And the man for us!"
+
+"Unless you give us someone more to our fancy, like young Mr. Chester,"
+concluded the old man, doing his best to pacify his mates with look and
+gesture, "there'll be further trouble. This is only the beginning.
+There'll be trouble, and maybe worse, until you make a change."
+
+Naomi felt inexpressibly uncomfortable.
+
+"Mr. Gilroy is the manager of this station," said she, for once with a
+slight tremor in her voice. "Any difference that you have with him, you
+must fight it out between you. I am quite sure that he means to be just.
+I, at any rate, must interfere no more. I am sorry I interfered at all."
+
+So they let her go at last, the piano-tuner following close upon her
+heels. He had stuck to her all the time with shut mouth and twitching
+fingers, ready for anything, as he was ready still. And the first person
+these two encountered in the open air was Gilroy himself, with so white
+a face and such busy lips that they hardly required him to tell them he
+had heard all.
+
+"I am very sorry, Monty," said the girl, in a distressed tone which
+highly surprised her companion; "but I simply couldn't help it. You
+can't stand by and see a sheep cut to pieces without opening your
+mouth. Yet I know I was at fault."
+
+"It's not much good knowing it now," returned Gilroy, ungraciously, as
+he rolled along at her side; "you should have thought of that first. As
+it is, you've given me away to the shed, and made a tough job twice as
+tough as it was before."
+
+"I really am very sorry, Monty. I know I oughtn't to have interfered at
+all. At the same time, the man deserved sending away, and I am sure you
+would have been the first to send him had you seen what I saw. I know I
+should have waited and spoken to you; but I shall keep away from the
+shed in future."
+
+"That won't undo this morning's mischief. I heard what the brutes said
+to you!"
+
+"Then you must have heard what I said to them. Don't try to make me out
+worse than I am, Monty."
+
+She laid her hand upon his arm, and Engelhardt, to his horror, saw tears
+on her lashes. Gilroy, however, would not look at her. Instead, he
+hailed the store-keeper, who had passed them on his way to the huts.
+
+"Make out Simons's account, Sandy," he shouted at the top of his voice,
+"and give him his check. Miss Pryse has thought fit to sack him over my
+head!"
+
+Instantly her penitence froze to scorn.
+
+"That was unnecessary," she said, in the same quiet tone she had
+employed toward the shearer, but dropping her arm and halting dead as
+she spoke. "If this is the way you treat the men, no wonder you can't
+manage them. Come, Mr. Engelhardt!"
+
+And with this they turned their back on the manager, but not on the
+shed; that was not Naomi's way at all. She was pre-eminently one to be
+led, not driven, and she remained upon the scene, showing Engelhardt
+everything, and explaining the minutest details for his benefit, much
+longer than she would have dreamt of staying in the ordinary course of
+affairs. This involved luncheon in the manager's hut, at which meal
+Naomi appeared in the highest spirits, cracking jokes with Sanderson,
+chaffing the boy in spectacles, and clinking pannikins with everyone but
+the manager himself. The latter left early, after steadily sulking
+behind his plate, with his beard in his waistcoat and his yellow head
+presented like a bull's. Tom Chester was not there at all. Engelhardt
+was sorry, though the others treated him well enough to-day--Sanderson
+even cutting up his meat for him. It was three o'clock before Naomi and
+he started homeward in the old Shanghai.
+
+With the wool-shed left a mile behind, they overtook a huge horseman
+leading a spare horse.
+
+"That's our friend Simons," said Naomi. "I wonder what sort of a
+greeting he'll give me. None at all, I should imagine."
+
+She was wrong. The shearer reined up on one side of the track, and gave
+her a low bow, wide-awake in hand, and with it a kind of a glaring grin
+that made his teeth stand out like brass-headed nails in the afternoon
+sunshine. Naomi laughed as they drove on.
+
+"Pretty, wasn't it? That man loves me to distraction, I should say. On
+the whole we may claim to have had a rather lively day. First came that
+young lady on the near side, who's behaving herself so angelically now;
+and then the swingle-tree, which they've fixed up well enough to see us
+through this afternoon at any rate. Next there was our friend Simons;
+and after him, poor dear Monty Gilroy--who had cause to complain, mind
+you, Mr. Engelhardt. We mustn't forget that I had no sort of right to
+interfere. And now, unless I'm very much mistaken, we're on the point
+of meeting two more of our particular friends."
+
+In fact, a couple of tramps were approaching, swag on back, with the
+slow swinging stride of their kind. Engelhardt colored hotly as he
+recognized the ruffians of the day before. They were walking on opposite
+sides of the track, and as the buggy cut between them the fat man
+unpocketed one hand and saluted them as they passed.
+
+"Not got a larger size yet?" he shouted out. "Why, that ain't a man at
+all!"
+
+The poor piano-tuner felt red to his toes, and held his tongue with
+exceeding difficulty. But, as usual, Naomi and her laugh came to his
+rescue.
+
+"How polite our friends are, to be sure! A bow here and a salute there!
+Birds of a feather, too, if ever I saw any; you might look round, Mr.
+Engelhardt, and see if they're flocking together."
+
+"They are," said he, next minute.
+
+Then Naomi looked for herself. They were descending a slight incline,
+and, sure enough, on top of the ridge stood the two tramps and the
+mounted shearer. Stamped clean against the sky, it looked much as though
+horses and men had been carved out of a single slab of ebony.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+"THREE SHADOWS"
+
+
+That night the piano-tuner came out in quite a new character, and with
+immediate success. He began repeating poetry in the moonlit veranda, and
+Naomi let him go on for an hour and a half; indeed, she made him; for
+she was in secret tribulation over one or two things that had happened
+during the day, and only too thankful, therefore, to be taken out of
+herself and made to think on other matters. Engelhardt did all this for
+her, and in so doing furthered his own advantage, too, almost as much as
+his own pleasure. At all events, Naomi took to her room a livelier
+interest in the piano-tuner than she had felt hitherto, while her own
+troubles were left, with her boots, outside the door.
+
+It was true she had been interested in him from the beginning. He had so
+very soon revealed to her what she had never come in contact with
+before--a highly sensitized specimen of the artistic temperament. She
+did not know it by this name, or by any name at all; but she was not the
+less alive to his little group of interesting peculiarities, because of
+her inability to label the lot with one phrase. They interested her the
+more for that very reason; just as her instinct as to the possibilities
+that were in him was all the stronger for her incapacity to reason out
+her conviction in a satisfactory manner. Her intellectual experience was
+limited to a degree; but she had seen success in his face; and she now
+heard it in his voice when he quoted verses to her, so beautifully that
+she was delighted to listen whether she followed him or not. Her faith
+in him was sweetly unreasonable, but it was immensely strong. She was
+ready and even eager to back him heavily; and there are those who would
+rather have one brave girl do that on instinct, than win the votes of a
+hundred clear heads, basing their support upon a logical calculation.
+
+For reasons of her own, however, Naomi decided overnight to take her
+visitor a little less seriously to his face. She had been too
+confidential with him concerning station affairs past and present; that
+she must drop, and at the same time discourage him from opening his
+heart to her, as he was beginning to do, on the slightest provocation.
+These resolutions would impose a taboo on nearly all the subjects they
+had found in common. She quite saw that, and she thought it just as
+well. Too much sympathy with this young man might be bad for him. Naomi
+realized this somewhat suddenly in the night, and it kept her awake
+rather longer than she liked. But she rose next morning fully resolved
+to eschew conversation of too sympathetic a character, and to encourage
+her young friend in quotations from the poets instead. Obviously this
+was quite as great a pleasure to him, while it was a much safer one--or
+so Naomi thought in her innocence. But then it was a very genuine
+pleasure to her, too, because the poetry was entirely new to her, and
+her many-sided young man knew so much and repeated it so charmingly.
+
+It was incredible, indeed, what a number of the poets of all ages he had
+at his finger-ends, and how justly he rendered their choicest numbers.
+Their very names were mostly new to Naomi. There was consequently an
+aboriginal barbarity about many of her comments and criticisms, and more
+than once the piano-tuner found it impossible to sit still and hear her
+out. This was notably the case at their second poetical séance, when
+Naomi had got over her private depression on the one hand, and was full
+of her new intentions toward the piano-tuner on the other. He would jump
+out of his chair, and fume up and down the veranda, running his five
+available fingers through his hair until the black shock stood on end.
+It was at these moments that Naomi liked him best.
+
+He had been giving her "Tears, idle tears" (because she had "heard of
+Tennyson," she said) on the Wednesday morning in the veranda facing the
+station-yard. He had recited the great verses with a force and feeling
+all his own. Over one of them in particular his voice had quivered with
+emotion. It was the dear emotion of an æsthetic soul touched to the
+quick by the sheer beauty of the idea and its words. And Naomi said:
+
+"That's jolly; but you don't call it poetry, do you?"
+
+His eyes dried in an instant. Then they opened as wide as they would go.
+He was speechless.
+
+"It doesn't rhyme, you know," Naomi explained, cheerfully.
+
+"No," said Engelhardt, gazing at her severely. "It isn't meant to; it's
+blank verse."
+
+"It's blank _bad_ verse, if you ask me," said Naomi Pryse, with a nod
+that was meant to finish him; but it only lifted him out of his chair.
+
+"Well, upon my word," said the piano-tuner, striding noisily up and
+down, as Naomi laughed. "Upon my word!"
+
+"Please make me understand," pleaded the girl, with a humility that
+meant mischief, if he had only been listening; but he was still
+wrestling with his exasperation. "I can't help being ignorant, you
+know," she added, as though hurt.
+
+"You can help it--that's just it!" he answered, bitterly. "I've been
+telling you one of the most beautiful things that Tennyson himself ever
+wrote, and you say it isn't verse. Verse, forsooth! It's poetry--it's
+gorgeous poetry!"
+
+"It may be gorgeous, but I don't call it poetry unless it rhymes," said
+Naomi, stoutly. "Gordon always does."
+
+Gordon, the Australian poet, she was forever throwing at his head, as
+the equal of any of his English bards. They had already had a heated
+argument about Gordon. Therefore Engelhardt said merely:
+
+"You're joking, of course?"
+
+"I am doing nothing of the sort."
+
+"Then pray what do you call Shakespeare"--pausing in front of her with
+his hand in his pocket--"poetry or prose?"
+
+"Prose, of course."
+
+"Because it doesn't rhyme?"
+
+"Exactly."
+
+"And why do you suppose it's chopped up into lines?"
+
+"Oh, _I_ don't know--to moisten it perhaps."
+
+"I beg your pardon?"
+
+"To make it less dry."
+
+"Ah! Then it doesn't occur to you that there might be some law which
+decreed the end of a line after a certain number of beats, or
+notes--exactly like the end of a bar of music, in fact?"
+
+"Certainly not," said Naomi. There was a touch of indignation in this
+denial. He shrugged his shoulders and then turned them upon the girl,
+and stood glowering out upon the yard. Behind his back Naomi went into
+fits of silent laughter, which luckily she had overcome before he
+wheeled round suddenly with a face full of eager determination. His
+heart now appeared set upon convincing her that verse might be blank.
+And for half an hour he stood beating his left hand in the air, and
+declaiming, in feet, certain orations of Hamlet, until Mrs. Potter, the
+cook-laundress, came out of the kitchen to protect her young mistress if
+necessary. It was not necessary. The broken-armed gentleman was standing
+over her, shaking his fist and talking at the top of his voice; but Miss
+Pryse was all smiles and apparent contentment; and, indeed, she behaved
+much better for awhile, and did her best to understand. But presently
+she began to complain of the "quotations" (for he was operating on the
+famous soliloquy), and to profane the whole subject. And the question of
+blank verse was discussed between them no more.
+
+She could be so good, too, when she liked, so appreciative, so
+sympathetic, so understanding. But she never liked very long. He had a
+tendency to run to love-poems, and after listening to five or six with
+every sign of approval and delight, Naomi would suddenly become flippant
+at the sixth or seventh. On one occasion, when she had turned him on by
+her own act aforethought, and been given a taste of several past-masters
+of the lyric, from Waller to Locker, and including a poem of Browning's
+which she allowed herself to be made to understand, she inquired of
+Engelhardt whether he had ever read anything by "a man called Swinton."
+
+"Swinburne," suggested Engelhardt.
+
+"Are you sure?" said Naomi, jealously. "I believe it's Swinton. I'm
+prepared to bet you that it is!"
+
+"Where have you come across his name?" the piano-tuner said, smiling as
+he shook his head.
+
+"In the preface to Gordon's poems."
+
+Engelhardt groaned.
+
+"It mentions Swinton--what are you laughing at? All right! I'll get the
+book and settle it!"
+
+She came back laughing herself.
+
+"Well?" said Engelhardt.
+
+"You know too much! Not that I should accept anything that preface says
+as conclusive. It has the cheek to say that Gordon was under his
+influence. You give me something of his, and we'll soon see."
+
+"Something of Swinburne's?"
+
+"Oh, you needn't put on side because you happen to be right according to
+a preface. I'll write and ask _The Australasian_! Yes, of course I mean
+something of his."
+
+Engelhardt reflected. "There's a poem called 'A Leave-taking,'" said he,
+tentatively, at length.
+
+"Then trot it out," said Naomi; and she set herself to listen with so
+unsympathetic an expression on her pretty face, that he was obliged to
+look the other way before he could begin. The contrary was usually the
+case. However, he managed to get under way:
+
+
+     "Let us go hence, my songs; she will not hear.
+     Let us go hence together without fear;
+     Keep silence now, for singing-time is over,
+     And over all old things and all things dear.
+     She loves not you nor me as all we love her.
+     Yea, though we sang as angels in her ear,
+                 She would not hear.
+
+     "Let us rise up and part; she will not know.
+     Let us go seaward as the great winds go,
+     Full of blown sand and foam; what help is there?
+     There is no help, for all these things are so,
+     And all the world is bitter as a tear.
+     And how these things are, though ye strove to show
+                 She would not know.
+
+     "Let us go home and hence; she will not weep----"
+
+
+"Stop a moment," said Naomi, "I'm in a difficulty. I can't go on
+listening until I know something."
+
+"Until you know what?" said Engelhardt, who did not like being
+interrupted.
+
+"Who it's all about--who _she_ is!" cried Naomi, inquisitively.
+
+"Who--she--is," repeated the piano-tuner, talking aloud to himself.
+
+"Yes, exactly; who _is_ she?"
+
+"As if it mattered!" Engelhardt went on in the same aside. "However, who
+do _you_ say she is?"
+
+"I? She may be his grandmother for all I know. I'm asking you."
+
+"I know you are. I was prepared for you to ask me anything else."
+
+"Were you? Then why is she such an obstinate old party, anyway? She
+won't hear and she won't know. What will she do? Now it seems that you
+can't even make her cry! 'She will not weep' was where you'd got to. As
+you seem unable to answer my questions, you'd better go on till she
+does."
+
+"I'm so likely to go on," said Engelhardt, getting up.
+
+Naomi relented a little.
+
+"Forgive me, Mr. Engelhardt; I've been behaving horribly. I'm sorry I
+spoke at all, only I did so want to know who she was."
+
+"I don't know myself."
+
+"I was sure you didn't!"
+
+"What's more, I don't care. What _has_ it got to do with the merits of
+the poem?"
+
+"I won't presume to say. I only know that it makes all the difference to
+my interest in the poem."
+
+"But why?"
+
+"Because I want to know what she was like."
+
+"But surely to goodness," cried Engelhardt, "you can imagine her, can't
+you? You're meant to fill her in to your own fancy. You pays your money
+and you takes your choice."
+
+"I get precious little for my money," remarked Naomi, pertinently, "if I
+have to do the filling in for myself!"
+
+Engelhardt had been striding to and fro. Now he stopped pityingly in
+front of the chair in which this sweet Philistine was sitting unashamed.
+
+"Do you mean to say that you like to have every little thing told you in
+black and white?"
+
+"Of course I do. The more the better."
+
+"And absolutely nothing left to your own imagination?"
+
+"Certainly not. The idea!"
+
+He turned away from her with a shrug of his shoulders, and quickened his
+stride up and down the veranda. He was visibly annoyed. She watched him
+with eyes full of glee.
+
+"I do love to make you lose your wool!" she informed him in a minute or
+two, with a sudden attack of candor. "I like you best when you give me
+up and wash your hands of me!"
+
+This cleared his brow instantaneously, and brought him back to her chair
+with a smile.
+
+"Why so, Miss Pryse?"
+
+"Must I tell you?"
+
+"Please."
+
+"Then it's because you forget yourself, and me, too, when I rile you;
+and you're delightful whenever you do that, Mr. Engelhardt."
+
+Naomi regretted her words next moment; but it was too late to unsay
+them. He went on smiling, it is true, but his smile was no longer naïve
+and unconsidered; no more were his recitations during the next few
+hours. His audience did her worst to provoke him out of himself, but she
+could not manage it. Then she tried the other extreme, and became more
+enthusiastic than himself over this and that, but he would not be with
+her; he had retired into the lair of his own self-consciousness, and
+there was no tempting him out any more. When he did come out of
+himself, it was neither by his own will nor her management, and the
+moment was a startling one for them both.
+
+It was late in the afternoon of that same Wednesday. They were sitting,
+as usual, in the veranda which overlooked not the station-yard but the
+boundless plains, and they were sitting in silence and wide apart. They
+had not quarrelled; but Engelhardt had made up his mind to decamp. He
+had reasoned the whole thing out in a spirit of mere common-sense; yet
+he was reasoning with himself still, as he sat in the quiet veranda; he
+thought it probable that he should go on with his reasoning--with the
+same piece of reasoning--until his dying hour. He looked worried. He was
+certainly worrying Naomi, and annoying her considerably. She had given
+up trying to take him out of himself, but she knew that he liked to hear
+himself saying poetry, and she felt perfectly ready to listen if it
+would do him any good. Of course she was not herself anxious to hear
+him. It was entirely for his sake that she put down the book she was
+reading, and broached the subject at last.
+
+"Have you quite exhausted the poetry that you know by heart, Mr.
+Engelhardt?"
+
+"Quite, I'm afraid, Miss Pryse; and I'm sure you must be thankful to
+hear it."
+
+"Now you're fishing," said Naomi, with a smile (not one of her
+sweetest); "we've quarrelled about all your precious poets, it's true,
+but that's why I want you to trot out another. I'm dying for another
+quarrel, don't you see? Out with somebody fresh, and let me have shies
+at him!"
+
+"But I don't know them all off by heart--I'm not a walking Golden
+Treasury, you know."
+
+"Think!" commanded Naomi. When she did this there was no disobeying her.
+He had found out that already.
+
+"Have you ever heard of Rossetti--Dante Gabriel?"
+
+"Kill whose cat?" cried Naomi.
+
+He repeated the poet's name in full. She shook her head. She was smiling
+now, and kindly, for she had got her way.
+
+"There is one little thing of his--but a beauty--that I once learnt,"
+Engelhardt said, doubtfully. "Mind, I'm not sure that I can remember it,
+and I won't spoil it if I can't; no more must you spoil it, if I can."
+
+"Is there some sacred association, then?"
+
+He laughed. "No, indeed! There's more of a sacrilegious association, for
+I once swore that the first song I composed should be a setting for
+these words."
+
+"Remember, you've got to dedicate it to me! What's the name of the
+thing?"
+
+"'Three Shadows.'"
+
+"Let's have them, then."
+
+"Very well. But I love it! You must promise not to laugh."
+
+"Begin," she said, sternly, and he began:
+
+
+     "I looked and saw your eyes
+       In the shadow of your hair,
+     As the traveller sees the stream
+       In the shadow of the wood;
+     And I said, 'My faint heart sighs
+       Ah me! to linger there,
+     To drink deep and to dream
+       In that sweet solitude.'"
+
+
+"Go on," said Naomi, with approval. "I hope you _don't_ see all that;
+but please go on."
+
+He had got thus far with his face raised steadfastly to hers, for he had
+left his chair and seated himself on the edge of the veranda, at her
+feet, before beginning. He went on without wincing or lowering his eyes:
+
+
+     "I looked and saw your heart
+       In the shadow of your eyes,
+     As a seeker sees the gold
+       In the shadow of the stream;
+     And I said, 'Ah me! what art
+       Should win the immortal prize,
+     Whose want must make life cold
+       And heaven a hollow dream?'"
+
+
+"Surely not as bad as all that?" said Naomi, laughing. He had never
+recited anything so feelingly, so slowly, with such a look in his eyes.
+There was occasion to laugh, obviously.
+
+"Am I to go on," said Engelhardt, in desperate earnest, "or am I not?"
+
+"Go on, of course! I am most anxious to know what else you saw."
+
+But the temptation to lower the eyes was now hers; his look was so hard
+to face, his voice was grown so soft.
+
+
+     "I looked and saw your love
+       In the shadow of your heart,
+     As a diver sees the pearl
+       In the shadow of the sea;
+     And I murmured, not above
+       My breath, but all apart----"
+
+
+Here he stopped. Her eyes were shining. He could not see this, because
+his own were dim.
+
+"Go on," she said, nodding violently, "do go on!"
+
+"That's all I remember."
+
+"Nonsense! What did you murmur?"
+
+"I forget."
+
+"You do no such thing."
+
+"I've said all I mean to say."
+
+"But not all I mean you to. I _will_ have the lot."
+
+And, after all, his were the eyes to fall; but in a moment they had
+leapt up again to her face with a sudden reckless flash.
+
+"There are only two more lines," he said; "you had much better not know
+them."
+
+"I must," said she. "What are they?"
+
+
+     "Ah! you can love, true girl,
+       And is your love for me?"
+
+
+"No, I'm afraid not," said Naomi, at last.
+
+"I thought not."
+
+"Nor for anybody else--nor for anybody else!"
+
+She was leaning over him, and one of her hands had fallen upon his
+neck--so kindly--so naturally--like a mother's upon her child.
+
+"Then you are not in love with anybody else!" he cried, joyously. "You
+are not engaged!"
+
+"Yes," she answered, sadly. "I am engaged."
+
+Then Naomi learnt how it feels to quench the fire in joyous eyes, and
+to wrinkle a hopeful young face with the lines of anguish and despair.
+She could not bear it. She took the head of untidy hair between her two
+soft hands, and pressed it down upon the open book on her knees until
+the haunting eyes looked into hers no more. And as a mother soothes her
+child, so she stroked him, and patted him, and murmured over him, until
+he could speak to her calmly.
+
+"Who is he?" whispered Engelhardt, drawing away from her at last, and
+gazing up into her face with a firm lip. "What is he? Where is he? I
+want to know everything!"
+
+"Then look over your shoulder, and you will see him for yourself."
+
+A horseman had indeed ridden round the corner of the house, noiselessly
+in the heavy sand. Monty Gilroy sat frowning at them both from his
+saddle.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+NO HOPE FOR HIM
+
+
+"I'm afraid I have interrupted a very interesting conversation?" said
+Gilroy, showing his teeth through his beard.
+
+Naomi smiled coolly.
+
+"What if I say that you have, Monty?"
+
+"Then I'm sorry, but it can't be helped," replied the manager, jumping
+off his horse, and hanging the bridle over a hook on one of the
+veranda-posts.
+
+"Ah, I thought as much," said Naomi, dryly. She held out her hand,
+however, as she spoke.
+
+But Gilroy had stopped before setting foot in the veranda. He stood
+glaring at Engelhardt, who was not looking at him, but at the fading
+sky-line away beyond the sand and scrub, and with a dazed expression
+upon his pale, eager face. The piano-tuner had not risen; he had merely
+turned round where he sat, at the sound of Gilroy's voice.
+
+Now, however, he seemed neither to see nor to heed the manager, though
+the latter was towering over him, white with mortification.
+
+"Now then, Mr. Piano-tuner, jump up and clear; I've ridden over to see
+Miss Pryse on urgent business----"
+
+"Leaving your manners behind you, evidently," observed that young lady,
+"or I think you would hardly be ordering my visitors out of my veranda
+_and_ my presence!"
+
+"Then will you speak to the fellow?" said Gilroy, sulkily. "He seems
+deaf, and I haven't ridden in for my own amusement. I tell you it's an
+important matter, Naomi."
+
+"Mr. Engelhardt!" said Naomi, gently. He turned at once. "Mr. Gilroy,"
+she went on to explain, "has come from the shed to see me about
+something or other. Will you leave us for a little while?"
+
+"Certainly, Miss Pryse." He rose in sudden confusion. "I--I beg your
+pardon. I was thinking of something else."
+
+It was only Naomi's pardon that he begged. He had not looked twice at
+Gilroy; but as he rounded the corner of the building, he glanced sharply
+over his shoulder. He could not help it. He felt instinctively that a
+glimpse of their lovers' greeting would do something toward his cure.
+All that he saw, however, was Naomi with her back to the wall, and her
+hands laid firmly upon the wicker chair-back where her head had rested
+a moment before. Across this barrier Gilroy had opened so vehement a
+fire upon her that Engelhardt thought twice about leaving them alone
+together. As he hesitated, however, the girl shot him a glance which
+commanded him to be gone, while it as plainly intimated her perfect
+ability to take care of herself.
+
+Once out of her sight, the piano-tuner turned a resolute back upon the
+homestead, determining to get right away from it for the time being--to
+get away and to think. He did not, however, plunge into the plantation
+of pines, in which Naomi and he had often wandered during these last few
+days, that seemed a happy lifetime to him now that he felt they were
+over. He took the broad, sandy way which led past the stables to the
+men's hut on the left, and to the stock-yards on the right. Behind the
+yards the sun was setting, the platform for the pithing of bullocks, and
+the windlass for raising their carcasses, standing out sharp and black
+against the flaming sky; and still farther to the right, where there
+were sheep-yards also, a small yellow cloud rose against the pink like a
+pillar of sand. Engelhardt knew little enough of station life, but he
+saw that somebody was yarding-up a mob of sheep for the night. He went
+on to have a look at the job, which was over, however, before he reached
+the spot. Three horses were trotting off in the direction of the
+horse-paddock, while, coming away from the yard, carrying their saddles
+and bridles, were two of the station hands and the overseer, Tom
+Chester.
+
+"Hulloa, Engelhardt, still here?" said the latter, cheerily, as they
+met. "How goes the arm?"
+
+"First-rate, thanks. I'm off to-morrow."
+
+"Yes? Come on back to the homestead, and help me shave and brush up.
+I've been mustering seventeen miles from the shed. We've run the mob
+into these yards for the night, and I'm roosting in the barracks."
+
+"So is Mr. Gilroy, I fancy."
+
+"The devil he is! Has he come in from the shed, then?"
+
+"Yes; within the last ten minutes."
+
+Chester looked black.
+
+"You didn't hear what for, I suppose?"
+
+"To speak to Miss Pryse about some important matter; that's all I know."
+
+"I should have thought they'd had enough to say to each other yesterday,
+to last Gilroy for a bit. I'm mustering, you know; but I heard all
+about it when I got back to the shed last night. Some of the men came to
+me in a sort of deputation. They hate Gilroy about as much as I do, and
+they want him out of that. If he's a sensible man he's come in to chuck
+up the sponge himself."
+
+Tom Chester flung his saddle and bridle over the rail as they passed the
+stable, and walked on to the station-yard, and across it to the little
+white barracks, without another word. Engelhardt followed him into his
+room and sat down on the bed. He felt that they understood one another.
+That was what made him say, while Chester was stropping his razor:
+
+"You don't love Gilroy, I imagine."
+
+"No, I don't," replied Tom Chester, after a pause.
+
+"But Miss Pryse does!" Engelhardt exclaimed, bitterly.
+
+The other made a longer pause. He was lathering his chin. "Not she,"
+said Tom, coolly, at length.
+
+"Not! But she's engaged to him, I hear!"
+
+"There's a sort of understanding."
+
+"Only an understanding?"
+
+"Well, she doesn't wear a ring, for one thing."
+
+"I wish you would tell me just how it stands," said Engelhardt,
+inquisitively. His heart was beating, nevertheless.
+
+"Tell you?" said Tom Chester, looking only into the glass as he
+flourished his razor. "Why, certainly. I don't wonder at your wanting to
+know how a fine girl like that could go and engage herself to a
+God-forsaken image like Gilroy. _I_ don't know, mind you. I wasn't here
+in Mr. Pryse's time; but everyone says he was a good sort, and that the
+worse thing he ever did was to take on Gilroy, just because he was some
+sort of relation of his dead wife's. He's second cousin to Miss Pryse,
+that's what Gilroy is; but he was overseer here when the boss was his
+own manager, and when he died Gilroy got the management, naturally.
+Well, and then he got the girl, too--the Lord knows how. She knew that
+her father thought well of the skunk, and no doubt she herself felt it
+was the easiest way out of her responsibilities and difficulties. Ay,
+she was a year or two younger then than she is now, and he got the
+promise of her; but I'll bet you an even dollar he never gets her to
+keep."
+
+The piano-tuner had with difficulty sat still upon the bed, as he
+listened to this seemingly impartial version of the engagement which had
+numbed his spirit from the moment he heard of it. Tom Chester had spoken
+with many pauses, filled by the tinkle of his razor against a healthy
+beard three days old. When he offered to bet the dollar, he was already
+putting the razor away in its case.
+
+"I won't take you," said Engelhardt. "You don't think she'll marry him,
+then?" he added, anxiously.
+
+"Tar here on the brisket," remarked Chester, in the shearer's formula,
+as he dabbed at a cut that he had discovered under his right jaw.
+"What's that! Marry him? No; of course she won't."
+
+Engelhardt waited while the overseer performed elaborate ablutions and
+changed his clothes. Then they crossed over together to the front
+veranda, which was empty; but as they went round to the back the sound
+of voices came fast enough to their ears. The owner and her manager were
+still talking in the back veranda, which was now in darkness, and their
+voices were still raised. It was Tom Chester's smile, however, that
+helped Engelhardt to grasp the full significance of the words that met
+their ears. Gilroy was speaking.
+
+"All right, Naomi! You know best, no doubt. You mean to paddle your own
+canoe, you say, and that's all very well; but if Tom Chester remains on
+at the shed there'll be a row, I tell you straight."
+
+"Between whom?" Naomi inquired.
+
+"Between Tom Chester and me. I tell you he's stirring up the men against
+me! You yourself did mischief enough yesterday; but when he came in he
+made bad worse. It may be an undignified thing to do, for the boss of
+the shed; but I can't help that, I shall have to fight him."
+
+"Fight whom?" said Chester, in a tone of interest, as he and Engelhardt
+came upon the scene together.
+
+"You," replied Naomi, promptly. "You have arrived in the nick of time,
+Mr. Chester. I am sorry to hear that you two don't hit it off together
+at the shed."
+
+"So that's it, is it?" said Tom Chester, quietly, glancing from the girl
+to Gilroy, who had not opened his mouth. "And you're prepared to hit it
+off somewhere else, are you? I'm quite ready. I have been wanting to hit
+it off with you, Gilroy, ever since I've known you."
+
+His meaning was as plain as an italicised joke. They all waited for the
+manager's reply.
+
+"Indeed!" said he, at length, out of the kindly dark that hid the color
+of his face. "So you expect me to answer you before Miss Pryse, do you?"
+
+"On the contrary, I'd far rather you came down to the stables and
+answered me there. But you might repeat before Miss Pryse whatever it is
+you were telling her about me behind my back."
+
+"I shall do nothing of the sort."
+
+"Then I must do it for you," said Naomi, firmly.
+
+"Do," said Gilroy. And diving his hands deep into his cross-pockets, he
+swaggered off the scene with his horse at his heels and his arm through
+the reins.
+
+"I think I can guess the kind of thing, Miss Pryse," Tom Chester waited
+to say; "you needn't trouble to tell me, thank you." A moment later he
+had followed the manager, and the piano-tuner was following Tom; but
+Naomi Pryse remained where she was. She had not lifted a finger to
+prevent the fight which, as she saw for herself, was a good deal more
+imminent than he had imagined who warned her of it five minutes before.
+
+"Will you take off your coat?" said Chester, as he caught up to Gilroy
+between homestead and stables.
+
+"Is it likely?" queried Gilroy, without looking round.
+
+"That depends whether you're a man. The light's the same for both. There
+are lanterns in the stables, whether or no. Will you take off your coat
+when we get there?"
+
+"To you? Manager and overseer? Don't be a fool, Tom."
+
+"I'll show you who's the fool in a brace of shakes," said Tom Chester,
+following Gilroy with a swelling chest. "I never thought you had much
+pluck, but, by God, I don't believe you've got the pluck of a louse!"
+
+Gilroy led on his horse without answering.
+
+"Have you got the pluck of a louse?" the overseer sang into his ear.
+Gilroy was trembling, but he turned as they reached the stable.
+
+"Take off your coat, then," said he, doggedly; "I'll leave mine inside."
+
+Gilroy led his horse into the stable. Instead of taking off his coat,
+however, Tom Chester stood waiting with his arms akimbo and his eyes
+upon the open stable-door.
+
+"Aren't you going to take it off?" said an eager yet nervous voice at
+his side. "Don't you mean to fight him after all?"
+
+It was the piano-tuner, whose desire to see the manager soundly thrashed
+was at war with his innate dread of anything approaching a violent
+scene. He could be violent himself when his blood was up, but in his
+normal state the mere sound of high words made him miserable.
+
+"Hulloa! I didn't see that you were there," remarked Chester, with a
+glance at the queer little figure beside him. "Lord, yes; I'll fight him
+if he's game, but I won't believe that till I see it, so we'll let him
+strip first. The fellow hasn't got the pluck of---- I knew he hadn't!
+That's just what I should have expected of him!"
+
+Before Engelhardt could realize what was happening, a horse had emerged
+from the shadow of the stable-door, a man's head and wide-awake had
+risen behind its ears as they cleared the lintel, and Gilroy, with a
+smack of his whip on the horse's flank and a cut and a curse at Tom
+Chester, was disappearing in the dusk at a gallop. Chester had sprung
+forward, but he was not quick enough. When the cut had fallen short of
+him, he gathered himself together for one moment, as though to give
+chase on foot; then stood at ease and watched the rider out of sight.
+
+"Next time, my friend," said he, "you won't get the option of standing
+up to me. No; by the Lord, I'll take him by the scruff of his dirty
+neck, and I'll take the very whip he's got in his hand now, and I'll
+hide him within an inch of his miserable life. That's the way we treat
+curs in these parts, d'ye see? Come on, Engelhardt. No, we'll stop and
+see which road he takes when he gets to the gate. I can just see him
+opening it now. I might have caught him up there if I'd thought. Ah!
+he's shaking his fist at us; he shall smell mine before he's a day
+older! And he's taken the township track; he'll come back to the shed as
+drunk as a fool, and if the men don't dip him in the dam I shall be very
+much surprised."
+
+"And Miss Pryse is going to marry a creature like that," cried
+Engelhardt, as they walked back to the house.
+
+"Not she," said Chester, confidently.
+
+"Yet there's a sort of engagement."
+
+"There is; but it would be broken off to-morrow if I were to tell Miss
+Pryse to-night of the mess he's making of everything out at the shed.
+The men do what they like with him, and he goes dropping upon the
+harmless inoffensive ones, and fining them and running their sheep;
+whereas he daren't have said a word to that fellow Simons, not to save
+his life. I tell you there'd have been a strike last night if it hadn't
+been for me. The men appealed to me, and I said what I thought. So his
+nibs sends me mustering again, about as far off as he can, while he
+comes in to get Miss Pryse to give me the sack. Of course that's what
+he's been after. That's the kind of man he is. But here's Miss Pryse
+herself in the veranda, and we'll drop the subject, d'ye see?"
+
+Naomi herself never mentioned it. Possibly from the veranda she had seen
+and heard enough to enable her to guess the rest pretty accurately.
+However that may be, the name of Monty Gilroy never passed her lips,
+either now in the interval before dinner, or at that meal, during which
+she conversed very merrily with the two young men who faced one another
+on either side of her. She insisted on carving for them both, despite
+the protests of the more talkative of the two. She rattled on to them
+incessantly--if anything, to Engelhardt more than to the overseer. But
+there could be no question as to which of these two talked most to her.
+Engelhardt was even more shy and awkward than at his first meal at
+Taroomba, when Naomi had not been present. He disappeared immediately
+after dinner, and Naomi had to content herself with Tom Chester's
+company for the rest of the evening.
+
+That, however, was very good company at all times, while on the present
+occasion Miss Pryse had matters for discussion with her overseer which
+rendered a private interview quite necessary. So Engelhardt was not
+wanted for at least an hour; but he did not come back at all. When
+Chester went whistling to the barracks at eleven o'clock he found the
+piano-tuner lying upon his bed in all his clothes.
+
+"Hulloa, my son, are you sick?" said Tom, entering the room. The risen
+moon was shining in on all sides of the looking-glass.
+
+"No, I'm well enough, thanks. I felt rather sleepy."
+
+"You don't sound sleepy! Miss Pryse was wondering what could be the
+matter. She told me to tell you that you might at least have said
+good-night to her."
+
+"I'll go and say it now," cried Engelhardt, bounding from the bed.
+
+"Ah, now you're too late, you see," said Chester, laughing a little
+unkindly as he barred the doorway. "You didn't suppose I'd come away
+before I was obliged, did you? Come into my room, and I'll tell you a
+bit of news."
+
+The two rooms were close together; they were divided by the narrow
+passage that led without step or outer door into the station-yard. It
+was a lined, set face that the candle lighted up when Tom Chester put a
+match to it; but that was only the piano-tuner's face, and Tom stood
+looking at his own, and the smile in the glass was peculiar and
+characteristic. It was not conceited; it was merely confident. The
+overseer of Taroomba was one of the smartest, most resolute, and
+confident young men in the back-blocks of New South Wales.
+
+"The news," he said, turning away from the glass and undoing his
+necktie, "may surprise you, but I've expected it all along. Didn't I
+tell you before dinner that Miss Pryse would be breaking off her rotten
+engagement one of these days! Well, then, she's been and done it this
+very afternoon."
+
+"Thank God!" cried Engelhardt.
+
+"Amen," echoed Chester, with a laugh. He had paid no attention to the
+piano-tuner's tone and look. He was winding a keyless watch.
+
+"And is he going on here as manager?" Engelhardt asked, presently.
+
+"No, that's the point. Naomi seems to have told him pretty straight that
+she could get along without him, and on second thoughts he's taken her
+at her word. She got a note an hour ago to say she would never see him
+again. He'd sent a chap with it all the way from the township."
+
+"Do you mean to say he isn't coming back?"
+
+"That's the idea. You bet he had it when he shook his fist at us as he
+opened that gate. He was shaking his fist at the station and all hands
+on the place, particularly including the boss. She's to send his things
+and his check after him to the township, where they'll find him drunk,
+you mark my words. Good riddance to the cur! Of course he was going to
+marry her for her money; but she's tumbled to him in time, and a miss is
+as good as a mile any day in the week."
+
+He finished speaking and winding his watch at the same moment. It was a
+gold watch, and he set it down carelessly on the dressing-table, where
+the candle shone upon the monogram on its back.
+
+"He has nothing of his own?" queried Engelhardt, with jealous eyes upon
+the watch.
+
+"Not a red cent," said Tom Chester, contemptuously. "He lived upon the
+old boss, and of course he meant to live upon his daughter after him. He
+was as poor as a church-mouse."
+
+So indeed was the piano-tuner. He did not say as much, however, though
+the words had risen to his lips. He said no more until the overseer was
+actually in bed. Then a flash of inspiration caused him to ask,
+abruptly,
+
+"Are you anything to do with Chester, Wilkinson, & Killick, the big
+wool-people down in Melbourne?"
+
+"To do with 'em?" repeated Tom, with a smile. "Well, yes; at least, I'm
+Chester's son."
+
+"I've heard that you own more Riverina stations than any other firm or
+company?"
+
+"Yes; this is about the only one around here that we haven't got a
+finger in. That's why I came here, by the way, for a bit of experience."
+
+"Then _you_ don't want to marry her for her money. You'll have more than
+she ever will! Isn't that so?"
+
+"What the blue blazes do you mean, Engelhardt?"
+
+Chester had sat bolt upright in his bed. The piano-tuner was still on
+the foot of it, and all the fire in his being had gone into his eyes.
+
+"Mean?" he cried. "Who cares what _I_ mean! I tell you that she thinks
+more of you than ever she thought of Gilroy. She has said so to me in as
+many words. I tell you to go in and win!"
+
+He was holding out his left hand.
+
+"I intend to," said Tom Chester, taking it good-naturedly enough.
+"That's exactly my game, and everybody must know it, for I've been
+playing it fair and square in the light of day. I may lose; but I hope
+to win. Good-night, Engelhardt. Shall I look you up in the morning? We
+make a very early start, mind."
+
+"Then you needn't trouble. But I do wish you luck!"
+
+"Thanks, my boy. I wish myself luck, too."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+MISSING
+
+
+Naomi's room opened upon the back veranda, and in quitting it next
+morning it was not unnatural that she should pause to contemplate the
+place where so many things had lately happened, which, she felt, must
+leave their mark upon her life for good or evil. It was here that she
+might have seen the danger of unreserved sympathy with so sensitive and
+enthusiastic a nature as that of the piano-tuner. Indeed, she had seen
+it, and made suitable resolutions on the spot; but these she had broken,
+and wilfully shut her eyes to that danger until the young man had told
+her, quite plainly enough, that he loved her. Nay, she had made him tell
+her that, and until he did so she had purposely withheld from him the
+knowledge that she was already engaged. That was the cruel part of it,
+the part of which she was now most sincerely ashamed. Yet some power
+stronger than her own will had compelled her to act as she had done, and
+certainly she had determined beforehand to take the first opportunity of
+severing all ties still existing between herself and Monty Gilroy. And
+it was here that she had actually broken off her engagement with him
+within a few minutes of her announcement of it to Hermann Engelhardt.
+Still she was by no means pleased with herself as she stepped out into
+the flood of sunshine that filled the back veranda of a morning, and saw
+everything as it had been overnight, even to the book she had laid aside
+open when Gilroy rode up. It was lying shut in the self-same spot. This
+little difference was the only one.
+
+She went round to the front of the house, looking out rather nervously
+for Engelhardt on the way. Generally he met her in the front veranda,
+but this morning he was not there. Mrs. Potter was laying the
+breakfast-table, but she had not seen him either. She looked searchingly
+at her young mistress as she answered her question.
+
+"Are you quite well, miss?" she asked at length, without preamble. "You
+look as though you hadn't slep' a wink all night."
+
+"No more I have," said Naomi, calmly.
+
+"Good gracious, miss!" cried Mrs. Potter, clapping down the plate-basket
+with a jingle. "Whatever has been the matter? That nasty toothache, I'll
+be bound!"
+
+"No, it wasn't a tooth this time. I may as well tell you what it was,"
+added Naomi, "since you're bound to know sooner or later. Well, then,
+Mr. Gilroy has left the station for good, and I am not ever going to
+marry him. That's all."
+
+"And I'm thankful----"
+
+Mrs. Potter checked herself with a gulp.
+
+"So am I," said her mistress, dryly; "but it's a little exciting, and I
+let it keep me awake. You are to pack up his boxes, please, so that I
+may send them to the township in the spring-cart. But now make haste
+with the tea, for I need a cup badly, and I'll go and sing out to Mr.
+Engelhardt. Did you call him, by the way?"
+
+"Yes, miss, I called him as usual."
+
+Naomi left the breakfast-room, and was absent some three or four
+minutes. She came back looking somewhat scared.
+
+"I've called him, too," she said, "at the top of my voice. But there's
+no making him hear anything. I've hammered at his door and at his
+window, too; both are shut, as if he wasn't up. I do wish that you would
+come and see whether he is."
+
+A moment later Mrs. Potter was crossing the sandy yard, with Naomi
+almost treading on her ample skirts until they reached the barracks,
+which the elderly woman entered alone. No sooner, however, had she
+opened Engelhardt's door than she called her mistress to the spot. The
+room was empty. It was clear at a glance that the bed had not been slept
+in.
+
+"If he hasn't gone away and left us without a word!" cried Mrs. Potter,
+indignantly.
+
+"I am looking for his valise," said Naomi. "Where has he generally kept
+it?"
+
+"Just there, underneath the dressing-table. He has taken it with him.
+There's nothing belonging to him in the room!"
+
+"Except that half-crown under the tumbler, which is evidently meant for
+you. No, Mrs. Potter, I'm afraid you're right. The half-crown settles
+it. I should take it if I were you. And now I'll have my breakfast, if
+you please."
+
+"But, miss, I can't understand----"
+
+"No more can I. Make the tea at once, please. A little toast is all that
+I require with it."
+
+And Naomi went slowly back toward the house, but stopped half way, with
+bent head and attentive eyes, and then went slower still. She had
+discovered in the sand the print of feet in stockings only. These
+tracks led up to the veranda, where they ended opposite the sitting-room
+door, which Naomi pushed open next moment. The room wore its ordinary
+appearance, but the pile of music which Engelhardt had brought with him
+for sale had been removed from the top of the piano to the music-stool;
+and lying conspicuously across the music, Naomi was mortified to find a
+silk handkerchief of her own, which the piano-tuner had worn all the
+week as a sling for his arm. She caught it up with an angry exclamation,
+and in doing so caught sight of some obviously left-handed writing on
+the topmost song of the pile. She stooped and read:
+
+
+     "_These songs for Miss Pryse, with deep gratitude for all her
+     kindness to Hermann Engelhardt._"
+
+
+It was a pale, set face that Mrs. Potter found awaiting her in the
+breakfast-room when the toast was ready and the tea made. Very little of
+the toast was eaten, and Mrs. Potter saw no more of her young mistress
+until the mid-day meal, to which Naomi sat down in her riding-habit.
+
+"Just wait, Mrs. Potter," said she, hastily helping herself to a chop.
+"Take a chair yourself. I want to speak to you."
+
+"Very good, miss," said the old lady, sitting down.
+
+"I want to know when you last set eyes on Sam Rowntree."
+
+"Let me see, miss. Oh, yes, I remember; it was about this time
+yesterday. He came to the kitchen, and told me he was going to run up a
+fresh mob of killing-sheep out of Top Scrubby, and how much meat could I
+do with? I said half a sheep, at the outside, and that was the last I
+saw of him."
+
+"He never came near you last night?"
+
+"That he didn't, miss. I was looking out for him. I wanted----"
+
+"You didn't see him in the distance, or hear him whistling?"
+
+"No, indeed I didn't."
+
+"Well, he seems to have vanished into space," said Naomi, pushing away
+her plate and pouring out a cup of tea.
+
+"It's too bad," said Mrs. Potter, with sympathy and indignation in equal
+parts. "I can't think what he means--to go and leave us alone like
+this."
+
+"I can't think what Mr. Chester meant by not telling me that he was
+gone," remarked Naomi, hotly.
+
+"I 'xpect he knew nothing about it, miss. He went off before daylight,
+him and the two men that come in with the sheep they was to take on to
+the shed."
+
+"How can you know that?" inquired Naomi, with a touch of irritation. Her
+tea was very hot, and she was evidently in a desperate hurry.
+
+"Because Mr. Chester asked me to put his breakfast ready for him
+overnight; and I did, too, and when I got up at six he'd had it and gone
+long ago. The teapot was cold. The men had gone, too, for I gave 'em
+their suppers last night, and they asked for a snack to take before
+their early start this morning. They must all have got away by five.
+They wouldn't hardly try to disturb Sam so early as all that; so they
+weren't to know he wasn't there."
+
+"Well, he wasn't," said Naomi, "and it's disgraceful, that's what it is!
+Here we are without a man on the place, and there are nearly a hundred
+at the shed! I have had to catch a horse, and saddle it for myself." As
+she spoke Naomi made a last gulp at her hot tea, and then jumped up from
+the table.
+
+"You are going to the shed, miss?"
+
+"No; to the township."
+
+"Ah, that's where you'll find him!"
+
+"I hope I may," said Naomi, softly, and her eyes were far away. She was
+in the veranda, buttoning her gloves.
+
+"I meant Sam Rowntree, miss."
+
+Naomi blushed.
+
+"I meant Mr. Engelhardt," said she, stoutly. "They are probably both
+there; but I have no doubt at all about Mr. Engelhardt. I am going to
+fetch the mail, but I hope I shall see that young gentleman, too, so
+that I may have an opportunity of telling him what I think of him."
+
+"I should, miss, I should that!" cried Mrs. Potter, with virtuous wrath.
+"I should give him a piece of my mind about his way of treating them
+that's good and kind to him. I'm sure, miss, the notice you took of that
+young man----"
+
+"Come, I don't think he's treated _you_ so badly," interrupted Naomi,
+tartly. "Moreover, I am quite sure that he must have had some reason for
+going off so suddenly. I am curious to know what it was, and also what
+he expects me to do with his horse. If he had waited till this morning I
+would have sent him in with the buggy, and saved him a good old tramp.
+However, you don't mind being left in charge for an hour or so--eh, Mrs.
+Potter? No one ever troubles the homestead during shearing, you know."
+
+"Oh, I shall be all right, miss, thank you," Mrs. Potter said,
+cheerfully; and she followed Naomi out into the yard, and watched her,
+in the distance, drag a box out of the saddle-room, mount from it, and
+set off at a canter toward the horse-paddock gate.
+
+But Naomi did not canter all the way. She performed the greater part of
+her ride at a quiet amble, leaning forward in her saddle most of the
+time, and deciding what she should say to the piano-tuner, while she
+searched the ground narrowly for his tracks. She had the eagle eye for
+the trail of man or beast, which is the natural inheritance of all
+children of the bush. Before saddling the night-horse, she had made it
+her business to discover every print of a stocking sole that had been
+left about the premises during the night; and there were so many that
+she had now a pretty definite idea of the movements of her visitor prior
+to his final departure from the station. He had spent some time in
+aimless wandering about the moonlit yard. Then he had stood outside the
+kitchen, just where she had left him standing on the night of his
+arrival; and afterward had crossed the fence, just where they had
+crossed it together, and steered the very same course through the pines
+which she had led him that first evening. Still in his stockings,
+carrying his boots in his one hand and his valise under that arm (for
+she came to a place where he had dropped one boot, and, in picking it
+up, the valise also), he had worked round to the back veranda, and sat
+long on the edge, with his two feet in the soft sand, staring out over
+the scrub-covered, moonlit plain, just as he had sat staring many a time
+in broad daylight. Of all this Naomi was as certain as though she had
+seen it, because it was child's play to her to follow up the trail of
+his stockinged feet and to sort them out from all other tracks. But it
+ought to have been almost as easy to trace him in his boots on the
+well-beaten road to the township, and it was not.
+
+The girl grew uncomfortable as she rode on and on without ever striking
+the trail; and the cutting sentences which she had prepared for the
+piano-tuner escaped her mind long before she reached the township, and
+found, as she now expected, that nobody answering to his description had
+been seen in the vicinity.
+
+Naomi was not the one to waste time in a superfluity of inquiries. She
+saw in a moment that Engelhardt had not been near the place, and a
+similar fact was even more easily ascertained in the matter of Sam
+Rowntree. The township people knew him well. His blue fly-veil had not
+enlivened their hotel verandas for a whole week. So Naomi received her
+mail-bag and rode off without dismounting. A glimpse which she had
+caught of a red beard, at the other side of the broad sandy road, and
+the sound of a well-known voice shouting thickly, added to her haste.
+And on this journey she never once drew rein until her horse cantered
+into the long and sharp-cut shadows of the Taroomba stables.
+
+As Naomi dismounted, Mrs. Potter emerged from the homestead veranda. The
+good woman had grown not a little nervous in her loneliness. Her looks
+as she came up were in striking contrast to those of her mistress. The
+one was visibly relieved; the other had come back ten times more anxious
+than she had gone away.
+
+"No one been near you, Mrs. Potter?"
+
+"Not a soul, miss. Oh, but it's good to see you back! I thought the
+afternoon was never coming to an end."
+
+"They are neither of them at the township," said Naomi, with a miserable
+sigh.
+
+"Nor have they been there at all--neither Mr. Engelhardt nor Sam
+Rowntree!"
+
+Mrs. Potter cudgelled her poor brains for some--for any--kind of
+explanation.
+
+"Sam did tell me"--she had begun, when she was promptly shut up.
+
+"Who cares about Sam?" cried Naomi. "He's a good bushman; he can take
+care of himself. Besides, wherever he is, Sam isn't bushed. But anything
+may have happened to Mr. Engelhardt!"
+
+"What do you think has happened?" the old lady asked, inanely.
+
+"How am I to know?" was the wild answer. "I have nothing to go on. I
+know no more than you do."
+
+Yet she stood thinking hard, with her horse still bridled and the reins
+between her fingers. She had taken off the saddle. Suddenly she slipped
+the reins over a hook and disappeared into the saddle-room. And in a few
+moments she was back, with a blanched face, and in her arms a packed
+valise.
+
+"Is this Mr. Engelhardt's?"
+
+Mrs. Potter took one look at it.
+
+"It is," she said. "Yes, it is his!"
+
+"Take it, then," said Naomi, mastering her voice with difficulty, "while
+I hunt up his saddle and bridle. If they are gone, all the better. Then
+I shall know he has his horse; and with a horse nothing much can happen
+to one."
+
+She disappeared again, and was gone a little longer; but this time she
+came back desperately self-possessed.
+
+"I have found his saddle. His bridle is not there at all. I know it's
+his saddle, because it's a pretty good one, and all our decent saddles
+are in use; besides, they all have the station brand upon them. This one
+has no brand at all. It must be Mr. Engelhardt's; and now I know exactly
+what he has done. Shall I tell you?"
+
+Mrs. Potter clasped her hands.
+
+"He has taken his bridle," said Naomi, still in a deadly calm, "and he
+has set out to catch his horse. How he could do such a thing I can't
+conceive! He knows the run of our horse-paddock no more than you do. He
+has failed to find his horse, tried to come back, and got over the fence
+into Top Scrubby. You don't know what that means! Top Scrubby's the
+worst paddock we have. It's half-full of mallee, it's six miles
+whichever way you take it, and the only drop of water in it is the tank
+at the township corner. Or he may be in the horse-paddock all the time.
+People who don't know the bush may walk round and round in a single
+square mile all day long, and until they drop. But it's no good our
+talking here; wherever he is, I mean to find him."
+
+As she spoke she caught her saddle from the rail across which she had
+placed it, and was for flinging it on to her horse again, when Mrs.
+Potter interposed. The girl was trembling with excitement. The sun was
+fast sinking into the sand and scrub away west. In half an hour it would
+be dark.
+
+"And no moon till ten or eleven," said Mrs. Potter, with sudden
+foresight and firmness. "You mustn't think of it, miss; you mustn't,
+indeed!"
+
+"How can you say that? Why should you stop me? Do you mean me to leave
+the poor fellow to perish for want of water?"
+
+"My dear, you could do no good in the dark," said Mrs. Potter, speaking
+as she had not spoken to Naomi since the latter was a little girl.
+"Besides, neither you nor the horse is fit for anything more until
+you've both had something to eat and drink."
+
+"It's true!"
+
+Naomi said this in helpless tones and with hopeless looks. As she spoke,
+however, her eyes fastened themselves upon the crimson ball just clear
+of the horizon, and all at once they filled with tears. Hardly conscious
+of what she did or said, she lifted up her arms and her voice to the
+sunset.
+
+"Oh, my poor fellow! My poor boy! If only I knew where you were--if only
+I could see you now!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+LOST IN THE BUSH
+
+
+Had Naomi seen him then she would have found some difficulty in
+recognizing Hermann Engelhardt, the little piano-tuner whom already she
+seemed to have known all her life. Yet she had made a singularly shrewd
+guess at his whereabouts. Top Scrubby held him fast enough. And when
+Naomi stretched her arms toward the sunset, it is a strange fact that
+she also stretched them toward the lost young man, who was lying between
+it and her, not three miles from the spot on which she stood.
+
+Within a mile of him ran the horse-paddock fence, which he had crossed
+by mistake at three o'clock that morning. He had never seen it again.
+All day he had wandered without striking track, or fence, or water.
+Once indeed his heart had danced at the sudden revelation of footprints
+under his very nose. They were crisp and clean and obviously recent. All
+at once they took a fatally familiar appearance. Slowly he lifted his
+right foot and compared the mark of it with the marks he had discovered.
+They were identical. To put the matter beyond a doubt he got both his
+feet into a couple of the old footprints. They fitted like pipes in a
+case. And then he knew that he was walking in circles, after the manner
+of lost men, and that he stood precisely where he had been three hours
+before.
+
+That was a bitter moment. There were others and worse before sundown.
+The worst of all was about the time when Naomi flung out her arms and
+cried aloud in her trouble.
+
+His staggering steps had brought him at last, near sundown, within sight
+of a ridge of pines which he seemed to know. The nearer he came to them
+the surer did he become that they were the station pines themselves.
+Footsore and faint and parched as he was, he plucked up all his
+remaining strength to reach those pines alive. If he were to drop down
+now it would be shameful, and he deserved to die. So he did not drop
+until he gained the ridge, and found the pines merely the outer ranks of
+a regular phalanx of mallee scrub. There was no mallee among the station
+pines. Nor would it have been possible to get so near to the homestead
+without squeezing through the wires of two fences at least. He had made
+a hideous and yet a fatuous mistake, and, when he realized it, he flung
+himself on his face in the shade of a hop-bush and burst into tears. To
+think that he must perish miserably after all, when, not five minutes
+since, he had felt the bottle-neck of the water-bag against his
+teeth--the smell of the wet canvas in his nostrils--the shrinking and
+lightening of the bag between his palms as the deep draught of cold
+water brought his dead throat to life.
+
+It was all over now. He turned his face to the sand, and waited sullenly
+for the end. And presently a crow flew down from a pine, and hopped
+nearer and nearer to the prostrate body, with many a cautious pause, its
+wise black head now on one side, now on the other. Was it a dead body or
+a man asleep? There would have been no immediate knowing had not the
+crow been advancing between the setting sun and the man. Its shadow was
+a yard long when it came between Engelhardt's eyes, which were wide
+open, and the patch of sand that was warm with his breath. An instant
+later the crow was away with a hoarse scream, and Engelhardt was sitting
+up with a still hoarser oath upon his lips; indeed, he was inarticulate
+even to his own ears; but he found himself shaking his only fist at the
+crow, now a mere smut upon the evening sky, and next moment he was
+tottering to his feet.
+
+He could hardly stand. His eyes were burning, his tongue swollen, his
+lips cracking like earth in a drought. He was aching, too, from head to
+foot, but he was not yet food for the crows. He set his teeth, and shook
+his head once or twice. Not yet--not yet.
+
+The setting sun made a lane of light through the pines and mallee. The
+piano-tuner looked right and left along this lane, wondering which way
+to turn. He had no prejudice in the matter. All day he had been making
+calculations, and all day his calculations had been working out wrong.
+Like the struggles of a fly in a spider's web, each new effort left him
+more hopelessly entangled than the last. So now, without thinking, for
+thought was of no avail, he turned his face to the sunset, and, after
+half an hour's painful stumbling, was a mile farther from the station,
+and a mile deeper in the maze of Top Scrubby.
+
+Night had fallen now, and the air was cool and sweet. This slightly
+refreshed him, and the continual chewing of leaves also did him some
+little good, as indeed it had done all day. But he was becoming troubled
+with a growing giddiness in addition to his other sufferings, and he
+well knew that the sands of his endurance were almost run. When the
+stars came out he once more altered his course, taking a new line by the
+Southern Cross; but it could not be for long, he was losing strength
+with every step. About this time it occurred to him to cut a branch for
+a staff, but when he took out his knife he was too weak to open the
+blade. A fatal lassitude was creeping over him. He could no longer think
+or even worry. Nothing mattered any more! Naomi--his mother--the plans
+and aspirations of his own life--they were all one to him now, and of
+little account even in the bulk. It had not been so a few hours earlier,
+but body and mind were failing together, and with no more hope there was
+but little more regret. His head and his heart grew light together, and
+when at last he determined to sit down and be done with it all, his
+greatest care was the choice of a soft and sandy place. It was as though
+he had been going to lie down for the night instead of for all time. And
+yet it was this, the mere fad of a wandering mind, that saved him; for
+before he had found what he wanted, suddenly--as by a miracle--he saw a
+light.
+
+In a flash the man was alive and electrified. All the nerves in his body
+tightened like harp-strings, and the breath of life swept over them,
+leaving his heart singing of Naomi and his mother and the deeds to be
+done in this world. And the thrill remained; for the light was no
+phantom of a rocking brain, but a glorious reality that showed brighter
+and lighter every moment.
+
+Yet it was a very long way off. He might never reach it at all. But he
+rushed on with never a look right or left, or up or down, as if his one
+chance of life lay in keeping his grip of that light steadfast and
+unrelaxed. His headlong course brought him twice to his knees with a
+thud that shook him to the very marrow. Once he ran his face into a
+tangle of small branches, and felt a hot stream flowing over his lips
+and chin; he sucked at it as it leapt his lips, and reeled on, thanking
+heaven that he could still see out of his eyes. The light had grown into
+a camp-fire, and he could hear men's voices around it. Their faces he
+could not see--only the leaping, crackling fire. He tried to coo-ee, but
+no sound would come. The thought crossed him that even now, within sight
+and ear-shot of his fellow-men, he might drop for good. His heart kept
+throbbing against his ribs like an egg boiling in a pan, and his every
+breath was as a man's last gasp. He passed some horses tethered among
+the trees. Then before the fire there stood a stout figure with shaded
+eyes and pistols in his belt; another joined him; then a third, with a
+rifle; and the three loomed larger with every stride, until Engelhardt
+fell sprawling and panting in their midst, his hat gone, his long hair
+matted upon his forehead, and the white face beneath all streaming with
+sweat and blood.
+
+"By God, he's dying!" said one of the men, flinging away his fire-arm.
+"Yank us the water-bag, mate, and give the cuss a chance."
+
+Engelhardt looked up, and saw one of his two enemies, the swagmen,
+reaching out his hand for the bag. It was the smaller and quieter of the
+pair--the man with the weather-beaten face and the twinkling eye--and
+as Engelhardt looked further he saw none other than Simons, the
+discharged shearer, handing the dripping bag across. But a third hand
+stretched over and snatched it away with a bellowing curse.
+
+"What a blessed soft pair you are! Can't you see who 'e is? It's 'is
+bloomin' little nibs with the broke arm, and not a damned drop does he
+get from me!"
+
+"Come on, Bill," said the other tramp. "Why not?"
+
+"He knows why not," said Bill, who, of course, was the stout scoundrel
+with the squint. "Don't you, sonny?" And he kicked Engelhardt in the
+side with his flat foot.
+
+"Easy, mate, easy. The beggar's dying!"
+
+"All the better! If he don't look slippy about it I'll take an' slit his
+throat for him!"
+
+"Well, give him a drop o' water first."
+
+"Ay, give 'im a drink, whether or no," put in Simons. "No tortures,
+mate! The plain thing's good enough for me."
+
+"And me, too!"
+
+"Why, Bo's'n," cried Bill, "you've got no more spunk than a blessed old
+ewe! You sailors and shearers are plucky fine chaps to go mates with in
+a job like ours! You wouldn't have done for poor old Tigerskin!"
+
+"To hell with Tigerskin," said Simons, savagely. "We've heard more than
+enough of him. Give the beggar a drink, or, by cripes, I'm off it!"
+
+"All right, boys, all right. You needn't get so scotty about it, matey.
+But he sha'n't drink more than's good for 'im, and he sha'n't drink much
+at a time, or 'e'll burst 'is skin!"
+
+As he spoke Bill uncorked the water-bag, hollowed a filthy palm, flooded
+it, and held it out to the piano-tuner, who all this time had been
+sitting still and listening without a word.
+
+"Drink out o' my hand," said he, "or not at all."
+
+But Engelhardt could only stare at the great hairy paw thrust under his
+nose. It had no little finger. He was trying to remember what this
+meant.
+
+"Drink out o' that, you swine," thundered Bill, "and be damned to you!"
+
+Human nature could endure no more. Instead of drinking, Engelhardt
+knocked the man's hand up, and made a sudden grab at the water-bag. He
+got it, too, and had swallowed a mouthful before it was plucked away
+from him. The oaths came pouring out of Bill's mouth like sheep racing
+through a gate. But the piano-tuner had tasted what was more to him than
+blood, and he made a second dash at the bag, which resulted in a
+quantity of water being spilled; so without struggling any more, he fell
+upon his face with his lips to the wet sand.
+
+"Let the joker suck," said Bill; "I'll back the sand!"
+
+But Engelhardt rolled over on his left side and moved no more.
+
+Simons knelt over him.
+
+"He's a stiff 'un, mates. My blessed oath he is! That's number two, an'
+both on 'em yours, Bill."
+
+Bill laughed.
+
+"That'll be all right," said he. "Where's my pipe got to? I'm weakenin'
+for a smoke."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+FALLEN AMONG THIEVES
+
+
+There was life in Engelhardt yet, though for some time he lay as good as
+dead. The thing that revived him was the name of Naomi Pryse on the lips
+of the late ringer of the Taroomba shed. The piano-tuner listened for
+more without daring to open his eyes or to move a muscle. And more came
+with a horrifying flow of foul words.
+
+"She had the lip to sack me! But I'll be even with her before the
+night's out. Yes, by cripes, by sunrise she'll wish she'd never been
+born!"
+
+"It's not the girl we're after," said Bill's voice, with a pause and a
+spit. "It's the silver." And Engelhardt could hear him puffing at his
+pipe.
+
+"It's gold and silver. She's the gold."
+
+"I didn't dislike her," said the sailor-man. "I'd leave her be."
+
+"She didn't sack you from the shed. Twelve pound a week it meant, with
+that image over the board!"
+
+"Bo's'n'd let the whole thing be, I do believe," said Bill, "if we give
+'im 'alf a chance."
+
+"Not me," said Bo's'n. "I'll stick to my messmates. But we've stiffened
+two people already. It's two too many."
+
+"What about your skipper down at Sandridge?"
+
+"Well, I reckon he's a stiff 'un, too."
+
+"Then none o' your skite, mate," said Bill, knocking out a clay pipe
+against his heel. "Look ye here, lads; it's a blessed Providence that's
+raked us together, us three. Here's me, straight out o' quod, coming
+back like a bird to the place where there's a good thing on. Here's
+Bo's'n, he's bashed in his skipper's skull and cut and run for it. We
+meet and we pal on. The likeliest pair in the Colony! And here's old
+Simons, knocked cock-eye by this 'ere gal, and swearing revenge by all
+that's bloody. He has a couple of horses, too--just the very thing we
+wanted--so he's our man. Is he on? He is. Do we join hands an' cuss an'
+swear to see each other through? We do--all three. Don't we go to the
+township for a few little necessaries an' have a drink on the whole
+thing? We do. Stop a bit! Doesn't a chap and a horse come our way, first
+shot off? Don't we want another horse, an' take it, too, ay and cook
+that chap's hash in fit an' proper style? Of course we do. Then what's
+the good o' talking? Tigerskin used to say, 'We'll swing together,
+matey, or by God we'll drive together in a coach-and-four with yeller
+panels and half-a-dozen beggars in gold lace and powdered wigs.' So
+that's what I say to you. There's that silver. We'll have it and clear
+out with it at any blessed price. We've let out some blood already. A
+four-hundred-gallon tankful more or less can make no difference now. We
+can only swing once. So drink up, boys, and make your rotten lives happy
+while you have 'em. There's only one thing to settle: whether do we
+start at eleven, or twelve, or one in the morning?"
+
+Engelhardt heard a pannikin passed round and sucked at by all three.
+Then a match was struck and a pipe lit. His veins were frozen; he was
+past a tremor.
+
+"Eleven's too early," said Simons; "it's getting on for ten already. I'm
+for a spell before we start; there's nothing like a spell to steady your
+nerve."
+
+"I'd make it eight bells--if not seven," argued the Bo's'n. "The moon'll
+be up directly. The lower she is when we start, the better for us. You
+said the station lay due east, didn't you, Bill? Then it'll be easy
+steering with a low moon."
+
+The other two laughed.
+
+"These 'ere sailors," said Bill, "they're a blessed treat. Always in
+such an almighty funk of getting bushed. I've known dozens, and they're
+all alike."
+
+"There's no fun in it," said the Bo's'n. "Look at this poor devil."
+
+Engelhardt held his breath.
+
+"I suppose he _is_ corpsed?" said Bill.
+
+"Dead as junk."
+
+"Well, he's saved us the trouble. I'd have stuck the beggar as soon as
+I'd stick a sheep. There's only one more point, lads. Do we knock up her
+ladyship, and make her let us into the store----"
+
+"Lug her out by her hair," suggested Simons. "I'll do that part."
+
+"Or do we smash into it for ourselves? That's the game Tigerskin an' me
+tried, ten years ago. It wasn't good enough. You know how it panned out.
+Still, we ain't got old Pryse to reckon with now. He was a terror, he
+was! So what do you say, boys? Show hands for sticking-up--and now for
+breaking in. Then that settles it."
+
+Engelhardt never knew which way it was settled.
+
+"The she-devil!" said Simons. "The little snake! I can see her now,
+when she come along the board and sang out for the tar-boy all on her
+own account. That little deader, there, he was with her. By cripes, if
+she isn't dead herself by morning she'll wish she was! I wonder how
+she'll look to-night? Not that way, by cripes, that's one thing sure!
+You leave her to me, mates! I shall enjoy that part. She sha'n't die,
+because that's what she'd like best; but she shall apologize to me under
+my own conditions--you wait and see what they are. They'll make you
+smile. The little devil! Twelve pound a week! By cripes, but I'll make
+her wish she was as dead as her friend here. I'll teach her----"
+
+"Stiffen me purple," roared Bill, "if the joker's not alive after all!"
+
+The rogues were sitting round their fire in a triangle, Simons with his
+back to the supposed corpse; when he looked over his shoulder, there was
+his dead man glaring at him with eyes like blots of ink on blood-stained
+paper.
+
+Engelhardt, in fact, had been physically unable to lie still any longer
+and hear Naomi so foully threatened and abused. But the moment he sat up
+he saw his folly, and tried, quick as thought, to balance it by gaping
+repeatedly in Simons's face.
+
+"I beg your pardon, I'm sure," said he, in the civilest manner. "I'd
+been asleep, and couldn't think where I was. I assure you I hadn't the
+least intention of interrupting you."
+
+His voice was still terribly husky. Bill seized the water-bag and stuck
+it ostentatiously between his knees. Simons only scowled.
+
+"Please go on with what you were saying," said Engelhardt, crawling to
+the fire and sitting down between these two worthies. "All I ask is a
+drink and a crust. I've been out all day without bite or sup. Yes, and
+all last night as well! That's all I ask. I am dead tired. I'd sleep
+like a stone."
+
+No one spoke, but presently, without a word, Bill took a pannikin,
+filled it from the water-bag, and sullenly handed it to the piano-tuner.
+Then he knifed a great wedge from a damper and tossed it across.
+Engelhardt could scarcely believe his eyes, so silently, so unexpectedly
+was it done. He thanked the fellow with unnecessary warmth, but no sort
+of notice was taken of his remarks. He was half afraid to touch without
+express permission the water which he needed so sorely. He even
+hesitated, pannikin in hand, as he looked from one man to the other; but
+the villanous trio merely stared at him with fixed eyeballs, and at last
+he raised it to his lips and swallowed a pint at one draught.
+
+Even the mouthful he had fought for earlier in the evening--even that
+drop had sent a fresh stream of vitality swimming through his veins. But
+this generous draught made a new man of him in ten seconds. He wanted
+more, it is true; but the need was now a mere desire; and then there was
+the damper under his eyes. He never knew how hungry he was until he had
+quenched his thirst and started to eat. Until he had finished the slice
+of damper, he took no more heed of his companions than a dog with a
+bone. Bill threw him a second wedge, and this also he devoured without
+looking up. But his great thirst had never been properly slaked, and the
+treatment he was now receiving emboldened him to hold out the pannikin
+for more water. Even this was granted him, but still without a word.
+Since he had arisen and joined them by the fire, not one of the men had
+addressed a single remark to him, and his own timid expressions of
+thanks and attempts at affability had been received all alike in
+impenetrable silence. Nor were the ruffians talking among themselves.
+They just sat round the fire, their rough faces reddened by the glow,
+their weapons scintillating in the light, and stared fixedly at the
+little man who had stumbled among them. Their steady taciturnity soon
+became as bad to bear as the conversation he had overheard while
+feigning insensibility. There was a kind of sinister contemplation in
+their looks which was vague, intangible, terrifying. Then their vile
+plot ringing in his ears, with dark allusions to a crime already
+committed, made the piano-tuner's position sickening, intolerable. He
+spoke again, and again received no answer. He announced that he was
+extremely grateful to them for saving his life, but that he must now
+push on to the township. They said nothing to this. He wished them
+good-night; they said nothing to that. Then he got to his feet, and
+found himself on the ground again quicker than he had risen. Bill had
+grabbed him by the ankle, still without a syllable. When Engelhardt
+looked at him, however, the heavy face and squinting eyes met him with a
+series of grimaces, so grotesque, so obscene, that he was driven to bury
+his face in his one free hand, and patiently to await his captors'
+will. He heard the Bo's'n chuckling; but for hours, as it seemed to him,
+that was all.
+
+"Who _is_ the joker?" said Bill, at last. "What does he do for his
+rations?"
+
+"They say as 'e tunes pianners," said Simons.
+
+"Then he don't hang out on Taroomba?"
+
+"No; 'e only come the other day, an' goes an' breaks his arm off a
+buck-jumper. So they were saying at the shed."
+
+"Well, he enjoyed his supper, didn't he? It's good to see 'em enjoying
+theirselves when their time is near. Boys, you was right; it would have
+been a sin to send 'im to 'ell with an empty belly an' a sandy throat.
+If ever I come to swing, I'll swing with a warm meal in my innards, my
+oath!"
+
+Engelhardt held up his head.
+
+"So you mean to kill me, do you?" said he, very calmly, but with a kind
+of scornful indignation. Bill gave him a horrible leer, but no answer.
+
+"I suppose there's nothink else for it," said Simons, half-regretfully;
+"though mark you, mates, I'm none so keen on the kind o' game."
+
+"No more ain't I," cried the Bo's'n, with vigor. "I'd give the cove a
+chance, Bill."
+
+"How?" said Bill.
+
+"I'd lash the beggar to a tree and leave him to snuff out for hisself."
+
+Engelhardt laughed aloud in mock gratitude.
+
+"Oh, I ain't partickler as to ways," said Bill. "One way's as good as
+another for me. There's no bloomin' 'urry, any'ow. The moon ain't up
+yet, and before we go this beggar's got to tell us things. He heard what
+we was saying, mates. I seen it in his eye. Didn't you, you swine?"
+
+Engelhardt took no kind of notice.
+
+"Didn't you--you son of a mangy bandicoot?"
+
+Still Engelhardt would have held his tongue; but Bill started kicking
+him on one side, and Simons on the other; and the pain evoked an answer
+in a note of shrill defiance.
+
+"I did!" he cried. "I heard every word."
+
+"We're after that silver."
+
+"I know you are."
+
+"You've seen it?"
+
+"I have."
+
+"Tell us all about it."
+
+"Not I!"
+
+For this he got a kick on each side.
+
+"Is it in the store yet?"
+
+No answer.
+
+"Is the chest easy to find?"
+
+No answer.
+
+"Is it covered up?"
+
+"Or underground?"
+
+"Or made to look like something else?"
+
+Each man contributed a question; none elicited a word; no more did their
+boots; it was no use kicking him.
+
+There was a long pause. Then Bill said:
+
+"You've lost your hat. You need another. Here you are."
+
+He had blundered to his feet, stepped aside out of the ring of light,
+and spun a wide-awake into Engelhardt's lap. He started. It was adorned
+with a blue silk fly-veil.
+
+"Recognize it?"
+
+He had recognized it at once; it was Sam Rowntree's; and Sam Rowntree
+had been missing, yesterday, before Engelhardt himself said his secret
+farewell to the homestead.
+
+He looked for more. No more was said. The villains had relapsed into
+that silence which was more eloquent of horror than all their threats.
+But Bill now flung fresh branches on the fire; the wood crackled; the
+flames spurted starward; and in the trebled light, Engelhardt, peering
+among the trees for some further sign of Sam, saw that which set the
+pores pringling all over his skin.
+
+It was the glint of firelight upon a pair of spurs that hung motionless
+in the scrub--not a yard from the ground--not ten paces from the fire.
+
+He looked again; the spurs were fixed to a pair of sidespring boots; the
+boots hung out of a pair of moleskins, with a few inches of worsted sock
+in between. All were steady, immovable as the stars above. He could see
+no higher than the knees; but that was enough; a hoarse cry escaped him,
+as he pointed with a quivering finger, and turned his white face from
+man to man.
+
+Neither Simons nor the Bo's'n would meet his look; but Bill gripped his
+arm, with a loud laugh, and dragged him to his feet.
+
+"Come and have a look at him," he said. "He isn't pretty, but he'll do
+you good."
+
+Next instant Engelhardt stood close to the suspended body of the
+unfortunate Rowntree. Both hands were tied behind his back, his hair was
+in his eyes, and the chin drooped forward upon his chest like that of a
+man lost in thought.
+
+"See what you'll come to," said Bill, giving the body a push that set it
+swinging like a pendulum, while the branch creaked horribly overhead.
+"See what you'll come to if you don't speak out! It was a good ten
+minutes before he stopped kicking and jingling his spurs; you're
+lighter, and it'd take you longer. Quarter of an hour, I guess, or
+twenty minutes."
+
+Engelhardt had reeled, and would have fallen, but the Bo's'n jumped up
+and caught him in his arms.
+
+He did more.
+
+"Listen to reason, messmate," said the sailor, with a touch of rude
+friendliness in his lowered tone. "There ain't no sense in keeping mum
+with us. If you won't speak, you'll swing at the yard-arm along with
+t'other cove in a brace of shakes; if you will, you'll get a chance
+whether or no. Besides, what good do you think you can do? We know all
+that's worth knowing. Anything you tell us'll make less trouble in at
+the homestead--not more."
+
+"All right," said Engelhardt, faintly. "Let me sit down; I'll tell you
+anything you like."
+
+"That's more like. Take my place, then you'll be stern-on to that poor
+devil. Now then, Bill, fire away. The little man's hisself again."
+
+"Good for him," growled Bill. "Look at me, you stuck pig, and answer
+questions. Where's that chest?"
+
+"In the store."
+
+"Didn't I say so! Never been shifted! Whereabouts in the store?"
+
+"Inside the counter."
+
+"Much of a chest to bust into?"
+
+"Two locks, and clamps all over."
+
+"Where's the keys?"
+
+"I don't know. Miss Pryse keeps them."
+
+"She won't keep 'em long. See here, you devil, if you look at me again
+like that I'll plug your eyes into your mouth! You seem to know a fat
+lot about this silver. Have you seen it, or haven't you?"
+
+"I have."
+
+"What is there?"
+
+"Not much. A couple of candlesticks; a few spoons; some old skewers; a
+biscuit-box; a coffee-pot--but it's half ivory; an epergne----"
+
+"What the 'ells that? None o' your Greek, you swine!"
+
+"It's a thing for flowers."
+
+"Why didn't you say so, then? What else?"
+
+"Let me see----"
+
+"You'd best look slippy!"
+
+"Well, there's not much more. A cake-basket, some napkin-rings, and a
+pair of nut-crackers. And that's about all. It's all _I_ saw, anyhow."
+
+"All silver?"
+
+"I shouldn't think it."
+
+"You liar! You plucky well know it is. And not a bad lot neither, even
+if it _was_ the lot. By the Lord, I've a good mind to strip and sit you
+on that fire for not telling me the truth!"
+
+"Easy, mate, easy!" remonstrated the Bo's'n. "That sounds near enough."
+
+"By cripes," cried Simons, "it's near enough for me. 'Tain't the silver
+I want. It's the gold, and that's the girl!"
+
+"You won't get her," said Engelhardt.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"She'll put a bullet through you."
+
+"Can she shoot straight?"
+
+"As straight as her father, I should say. I never saw him. But I've seen
+her."
+
+"What do?"
+
+"Stand in the veranda and knock a crow off the well fence--with her own
+revolver."
+
+"By cripes, _that's_ a lie."
+
+(It was.)
+
+"I'm not so blooming sure," said Bill. "I recollect how the old man
+dropped Tigerskin at nigh twenty yards. She was with him, too, at the
+time--a kid out of bed. I took a shot at her and missed. She'd be as
+likely as not to knock a hole through one or other of us, lads, if you
+hadn't got me to see you through. You trust to Bill for ideas! He's got
+one now, but it'll keep. See here, you swine, you! When was it you saw
+all what you pretend to have seen, eh?"
+
+Engelhardt laughed. His answer could do no harm, and it gave him a
+thrill of satisfaction to score even so paltry a point against his
+bestial antagonist.
+
+"It was the day you two came around the station."
+
+"That morning?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Where did you see it?"
+
+"In the store."
+
+"Before we came?"
+
+"While you were there. When Miss Pryse locked the door, it was all over
+the place. While we were in the kitchen she got it swept out of sight."
+
+"Good God!" screamed Bill; "if only I'd known. You little devil, if only
+I'd guessed it!"
+
+His vile face was convulsed and distorted with greed and rage; his
+hairy, four-fingered fist shaking savagely in Engelhardt's face. Bo's'n
+remonstrated again.
+
+"What's the sense o' that, messmate? For God's sake shut it! A fat lot
+we could ha' done without a horse between us."
+
+"We could have rushed the store, stretched 'em stiff----"
+
+"And carried a hundredweight o' silver away in our bluies! No, no, my
+hearty; it's a darn sight better as it is. What do you say, Simons?"
+
+"I'm glad you waited, but I'm bleedin' dry."
+
+"An' me, too," said Bill, sulkily, as he uncorked a black bottle. "Give
+us that pannikin, you spawn!"
+
+Engelhardt handed it over unmoved. He was past caring what was said or
+done to him personally. Bill drank first.
+
+"Here's fun!" said he, saluting the other two simultaneously with a
+single cross-eyed leer.
+
+"'An' they say so--an' we hope so!'" chanted the Bo's'n, who came next.
+"Anyway, here's to the moon, for there she spouts!"
+
+As he raised his pannikin, he pointed it over Engelhardt's shoulder, and
+the latter involuntarily turned his head. He brought it back next
+moment, with a jerk and a shudder. Far away, behind the scrub, on the
+edge of the earth, lay the moon, with a silvery pathway leading up to
+her, and a million twigs and branches furrowing her face. But against
+the top of the great white disc there fell those horrible boots and
+spurs, in grisly silhouette, and still swaying a little to the mournful
+accompaniment of the groaning bough above. Surely the works of God and
+man were never in ghastlier contrast than when Engelhardt turned his
+head without thinking and twitched it back with a shudder. And yet to
+him this was not the worst; he was now in time to catch that which made
+the blood run colder still in all his veins.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+A SMOKING CONCERT
+
+
+Simons was toasting Naomi Pryse. It took Engelhardt some moments to
+realize this. The language he could stand; but no sooner did he grasp
+its incredible application than his self-control boiled over on the
+spot.
+
+"Stop it!" he shrieked at the shearer. "How dare you speak of her like
+that? How dare you?"
+
+The foul mouth fell open, and the camp-fire flames licked the yellow
+teeth within. Engelhardt was within a few inches of them, with a doubled
+fist and reckless eyes. To his amazement, the man burst out laughing in
+his face.
+
+"The little cuss has spunk," said he. "I like to see a cove stick up for
+'is gal, by cripes I do!"
+
+"So do I," said Bo's'n. "Brayvo, little man, brayvo!"
+
+"My oath," said Bill, "I'd have cut 'is stinkin' throat for 'alf as much
+if I'd been you, matey!"
+
+"Not me," said Simons. "I'll give 'im a drink for 'is spunk. 'Ere,
+kiddy, you wish us luck!"
+
+He held out the pannikin. Engelhardt shook his head. He was, in fact, a
+teetotaler, who had made a covenant with himself, when sailing from old
+England, to let no stimulant pass his lips until his feet should touch
+her shores again. The covenant was absolutely private and informal, as
+between a man and his own body, but no power on earth would have made
+him break it.
+
+"Come on," said Simons. "By cripes, we take no refusals here!"
+
+"I must ask you to take mine, nevertheless."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because I don't drink."
+
+"Well, you've got to!"
+
+"I shall not!"
+
+Simons seemed bent upon it. Perhaps he had taken a drop too much
+himself; indeed, none of the three were entirely above such a suspicion;
+but it immediately appeared that this small point was to create more
+trouble than everything that had gone before. Small as it was, neither
+man would budge an inch. Engelhardt said again that he would not drink.
+Simons swore that he should either drink or die. The piano-tuner
+cheerfully replied that he expected to die in any case, but he wasn't
+going to touch whiskey for anybody; so he gave Simons leave to do what
+he liked and get it over--the sooner the better. The shearer promptly
+seized him by his uninjured wrist, twisted it violently behind his back,
+and held out his hand to Bo's'n for the pannikin. Engelhardt was now
+helpless, his left arm a prisoner and in torture, his right lying
+useless in a sling. Bo's'n, however, came to his rescue once more, by
+refusing to see good grog wasted when there was little enough left.
+
+"What's the use?" said he. "If the silly devil won't drink, we'll make
+him sing us a song. He says he tunes pianners. Let him tune up now!"
+
+"That's better," assented Bill. "The joker shall give us a song before
+we let his gas out; and I'll drink his grog. Give it here, Bo's'n."
+
+The worst of a gang of three is the strong working majority always
+obtainable against one or other of them. Simons gave in with a curse,
+and sent Engelhardt sprawling with a heavy kick. As he picked himself
+up, they called upon him to sing. He savagely refused.
+
+"All right," said Bill, "we'll string him up an' be done with him. I'm
+fairly sick o' the swine--I am so!"
+
+"By cripes, so am I."
+
+"Then up he goes."
+
+"The other beggar's got the rope," said Bo's'n.
+
+"Then cut him down. He won't improve by hanging any longer. We ain't
+a-going to eat him, are we? Cut him down, and sling this one up. It's
+your job, Bo's'n."
+
+Bo's'n was disposed to grumble. Bill cut him short.
+
+"All right," said he, getting clumsily to his feet, "I'll do it myself.
+You call yourself a bloomin' man! I'd make a better bloomin' man than
+you with bloomin' baccy-ash. Out of the light, you cripple, an' the
+thing'll be done in half the time you take talking about it!"
+
+Engelhardt was left sitting between Simons and the ill-used Bo's'n. The
+latter had his grumble out, but Bill took no more account of him. As for
+the shearer, the ferocity of his attitude toward the doomed youth was
+now second to none. He sat very close to him, with a hellish scowl and a
+great hand held ready to blast any attempt at escape. But none was made.
+The piano-tuner stuck his thumbs into his ears, covered his closed eyes
+with his palms, and tried both to think and to pray. He could not think;
+vague visions of Naomi crowded his mind, but they formed no thought. Nor
+could he pray for anything but courage to meet his fate. Within a few
+yards of him was the body of a dead man murdered by these thieves among
+whom he himself had fallen. He could not but doubt that they were about
+to murder him too. His last hour had come. He wanted courage. That was
+all he asked for as he sat with plugged ears and tight-shut eyes.
+
+He was aroused by a smart kick in the ribs. As he got up to go to his
+doom, Bill seized him by the shoulders and pushed him roughly toward the
+hanging rope; it hung so low, it bisected the rising moon.
+
+"Let me alone," he cried, wriggling fiercely. "I can get there without
+your help."
+
+"Well, we'll see."
+
+He got there fast enough. A little deeper in the scrub he could see a
+shapeless mass of moleskin and Crimean shirting, with a spurred boot
+half covered by a stiff hand. He was thankful to turn his face to the
+blazing camp-fire, even though the noose went round his neck as he did
+so.
+
+"Now then," said Bill, hauling the rope taut, "will you give us a song
+or won't you?"
+
+He could not speak.
+
+"If you sing us a song we may give you another hour," said the Bo's'n
+from the ground. Simons and he had been whispering together. Bill shook
+his head at them.
+
+"That rests with me," said he to Engelhardt. "Don't you make any
+mistake."
+
+"Another hour!" cried the young man, bitterly, as he found his voice.
+"What's another hour? If you're men at all, put an end to me now and be
+done with it."
+
+"How's that?" said Bill, hauling him upon tip-toe. "No, no, sonny, we
+want our song first," he added, as he let the rope fall slack again.
+
+"Sing up, and there's no saying what'll happen," cried the Bo's'n,
+cheerily.
+
+"What shall I sing?"
+
+"Anything you like."
+
+"Something funny to cheer us up."
+
+"Ay, ay, a comic song!"
+
+Engelhardt wavered--as once before under the eyes and ears of a male
+audience. "I'll do my best," he said at last. And Bo's'n clapped.
+
+A minute later the bushrangers' camp was the scene of as queer a
+performance as ever was given. A very young man, with a pallid,
+blood-stained face, and a rope round his neck, was singing a "comic"
+song to a parcel of cut-throats who were presently to hang him, as they
+had hanged already the corpse at his heels. Meanwhile they surrendered
+themselves like simple innocents to a thorough enjoyment of the fine fun
+provided. The replenished camp-fire lit their villanous faces with a
+rich red glow. They grinned, they laughed, they displayed their pleasure
+and satisfaction each after his own fashion. The fat man shook in his
+fat; the long man showed his grinning teeth; the sailor-man slapped his
+thighs and rolled on the ground in paroxysms of spirituous mirth. It
+must have been the humor of the situation, rather than that of the song,
+which so powerfully appealed to them. The former had the piquant charm
+of being entirely their own creation. The latter was that poetic
+paraphrase of the early chapters of the Book of Genesis which the singer
+had tried upon another back-block audience but a few nights before. Of
+the two, this audience, as such, was decidedly the better. At any rate
+they let him get to the end. And when that came, and Bo's'n clapped
+again, even the other two joined in the applause.
+
+"By cripes," said Simons, "that's not so bad!"
+
+"Bad?" cried the enthusiastic Bo's'n. "It's as good as fifty plays.
+We'll have some more, and I'll give you a song myself."
+
+"Right!" said Bill. "The night's still young. Stiffin me purple if we
+haven't forgot them weeds we laid in at the township! Out with 'em,
+mateys, an' pass round the grog; we'll make a smokin' concert of it. A
+bloomin' smoker, so help me never!"
+
+The cigars were unearthed from the pockets of Bill himself. He and
+Simons at once put two of them in full blast. Meantime, Bo's'n was
+trying his voice.
+
+"Any of you know any sailors' chanties?" said he.
+
+A pause, and then--
+
+"Yes, I do."
+
+The voice was none other than Engelhardt's.
+
+"_You?_ The devil you do! How's that, then?"
+
+"I came out in a sailing ship."
+
+"What do you know?"
+
+"Some of the choruses."
+
+"'Blow the land down?'"
+
+"Yes--best of all."
+
+"Then we'll have that! Messmates you join his nibs in the chorus. I sing
+yarn and chorus too. Ready? Steady! Here goes!"
+
+And in a rich, rolling voice, that had been heard above many a gale on
+the high seas, he began with the familiar words:
+
+
+     Oh, where are you going to, my pretty maid?--
+       _Yo-ho, blow the land down!_
+     Oh, where are you going to, my pretty maid?--
+       _And give us some time to blow the land down!_
+
+
+The words were not long familiar. They quickly became detestable. The
+farther they went, of course, the more they appealed to Simons, Bill,
+and the singer himself. As for Engelhardt, obviously he was in no
+position to protest; nor could mere vileness add at all to his
+discomfort, with that noose still round his neck, and the rope-end still
+tight in Bill's clutch. Then the refrain for every other line was no bad
+thing in itself; at all events, he joined in throughout, and at the
+close stood at least as well with his persecutors as before.
+
+It now appeared, however, that sailors' chanties were the Bo's'n's
+weakness. He insisted on singing two more, with topical and impromptu
+verses of his own. As, for instance:
+
+
+     The proud Miss Pryse may toss 'er 'ead--
+       _An' they say so--an' we hope so_--
+     The proud Miss Pryse will soon be dead--
+       _The poor--old--gal!_
+
+
+Or again, and as bad:
+
+
+     Oh, they call me Hanging Johnny--
+       _Hurray! Pull away!_
+     An' I'll soon hang you, my sonny--
+       _Hang--boys--hang!_
+
+
+These are but opening verses. There were many more in each case, and
+they were bad enough in all respects. And yet Engelhardt chimed in at
+his own expense--even at Naomi's--because it might be that his life and
+hers depended upon it. He was beginning to have his hopes, partly from
+the delay, partly from looks and winks which he had seen exchanged; and
+his hopes led to ideas, because his brain had never been clearer and
+busier than it was now become. He was devoutly thankful not to have been
+twice forced to sing. The second time, however, was still to come. It
+was announced by a jerk of the rope that went near to dislocating his
+neck.
+
+"This image is doing nothink for 'is living, an' yet we're letting 'im
+live!" cried Bill, in a tone of injured and abused magnanimity. "Sing,
+you swine, or swing! One o' the two."
+
+"What sort will you have this time?" asked Engelhardt, meekly. His
+meekness was largely put on, however. The black bottle had been going
+round pretty freely; in fact, it was quite empty. Another had been
+broached, and the men were both visibly and audibly in their cups.
+
+"Another comic!" cried Simons and the Bo's'n in one breath.
+
+"No, something serious this trip," Bill said, contradictiously. "You
+know warri mean, you lubber--somethin' soothin' for a
+night-cap--somethin' Christy-mental. Go ahead an' be damned to ye!"
+
+Engelhardt had no time to consider, to reflect, to choose. The signal to
+start instantly was given by a series of sharp, throttling jerks at the
+rope. Almost before he was himself aware of it, he was giving them the
+well-known "Swannee River." It was the first "Christy-mental" song that
+had risen to his mind and lips. Moreover, he gave it with all the pathos
+and expression of which he was capable, and that, as we know, was not
+inconsiderable. They did not join in the chorus. This made it the
+easier. He tried to forget that these men were there, and, throwing his
+gaze aloft, sung softly--even sweetly--to the stars. Doubtless it was
+all acting, and by a cunning instinct that he went so slow in the final
+chorus:
+
+
+     Oh, my heart is sad and weary,
+       Everywhere I roam;
+     Oh, darkies, but my heart is weary,
+       Far from the old folks at home.
+
+
+And yet one knows that it is possible to act and to feel at one and the
+same time; and, incredible as it may seem in the circumstances,
+Engelhardt found it so just then. He _did_ think of the dear old woman
+at home; and being an artist to his boots, he gave his emotions their
+head, and sang to these blackguards as he would have sung to Naomi
+herself. And the effect was extraordinary--if in part due to the
+whiskey. When the young man lowered his eyes there was the maudlin
+Bo's'n snivelling like a babe, and the other two sucking their cigars to
+life with faces as long as lanterns.
+
+"Lads," said Bill, "the night's still young. What matter does it make
+when we tackle the station? It'll keep. We on'y got to get there before
+mornin'. 'Tain't midnight yet." His voice was thickish.
+
+"If the moon gets much higher," hiccoughed the Bo's'n, "we'll never get
+there at all. We'll never find it!" And he dried his eyes on his sleeve.
+
+Bill took no notice of this. But he shook up his companions, linked arms
+between the two, and halted them in front of Engelhardt. They all three
+swayed a little as they stood, yet all three were still dangerously
+sober; and the second bottle was empty now; and there was no third.
+Engelhardt confronted them with hope, but not confidence, and listened,
+more eagerly than he dared to show, to Bill's harangue.
+
+"Young man," said he, "you're not such a cussed swine's I thought. Sing
+or swing, says I. You sings like a man. So you sha'n't swing at all--not
+yet. No saying what we'll do in an hour or two. P'r'aps we're going to
+take you along with us to the station, to show us things, an' p'r'aps we
+ain't. You make your miseral life happy, to go on with. You bloomin'
+beggar, you, we respite you! Bo's'n, take the same rope an' lash the
+joker to that tree."
+
+Bill stopped to see it done. He was quite sober enough to be
+sufficiently particular in this matter; as was Bo's'n, to perform his
+part in sailor-like fashion. In five minutes the thing was done.
+
+"What do you think of that?" cried the seaman, with a certain honest
+sort of deep-sea pride.
+
+"It'll do, matey."
+
+"By cripes, he'll never get out of that!"
+
+In fact, from his chin to his knees, the poor piano-tuner was encased in
+a straight-waistcoat of rope--the rope that had been round his neck for
+the last half-hour. Even the injured arm was inside. Nor could he move
+his feet, for they were tied separately at the ankles. Otherwise there
+was only one knot in what was indeed a masterpiece of its kind.
+
+"I hope you'll be comfortable," said the Bo's'n, with a quaint touch of
+remorse, "for split me if you didn't sing like a blessed cock-angel! And
+never you fear," he added, under his breath, "for we ain't agoin' to
+hang you. Not us! And if there's anything we can do for you afore we
+take our spell, say the word, messmate, say the word."
+
+The piano-tuner shook his head.
+
+"Then so long and----"
+
+"Stop! you might give us a cigar."
+
+It was given readily.
+
+"Thanks; and now you might light it."
+
+This also was done, with a brand from the dying fire.
+
+"Good-night," said Bo's'n.
+
+"And thank you," added Engelhardt.
+
+The sailor stopped to give a last admiring glance at his handiwork; then
+he joined his companions, who were already spread out upon the broad of
+their backs; and Engelhardt was left to himself at last--unable to move
+hand or foot--with a corpse at hand and the murderers under his
+eyes--with the risen moon shining full upon his face, and the vilest of
+vile cigars held tight between his teeth.
+
+And he was no smoker; tobacco made him sick.
+
+Nevertheless, he kept that bad weed alight, and very carefully alight,
+for ten minutes by guess-work. Then he depressed his chin, knocked off
+an inch of ash against the top-most coil, applied the red end to the
+rope, and sucked and puffed for his life and Naomi's.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE RAID ON THE STATION
+
+
+Those same dark hours of this eventful night were also the slowest and
+the dreariest on record in the mind of Naomi Pryse. She too had waited
+for the moon. At sundown she had stabled her horse, and left it with a
+fine feed of chaff and oats as priming for the further work she had in
+view. This done, she had consented, under protest, to eat something
+herself; but had jumped up early to fill with her own hands a water-bag
+and a flask of which she could have no need for hours. It made no
+matter. She must be up and doing this or that; it was intolerable
+sitting still even to eat and drink. Besides, how could she eat, how
+could she drink, when he who should have shared her meal was perhaps
+perishing of hunger and thirst in Top Scrubby? It was much more
+comforting to cut substantial slices of mutton and bread, to put them up
+in a neat packet, and to set this in readiness alongside the flask and
+the water-bag. Then came the trouble. There was nothing more to be done.
+
+It was barely eight o'clock, and no moon for two hours and a half.
+
+Naomi went round to the back veranda, picked up the book she had been
+reading the day before, and marched about with it under her arm. She had
+not the heart to sit down and read. Her restless feet took her many
+times to the kitchen and Mrs. Potter, who shook her good gray head and
+remonstrated with increasing candor and asperity.
+
+"Go to look for him?" she cried at last. "When the time comes for that,
+you'll be too dead tired to sit in your saddle, miss. If you start
+before the moon's well up, there'll be no telling a hoof-mark from a
+foot-print without getting off every time. You've said so yourself, Miss
+Naomi. Then why not go straight to your bed and lie down for two or
+three hours? I'll bring you a cup of tea at half-past eleven, and you
+can be away by twelve."
+
+Naomi sighed.
+
+"It is so long to wait--doing nothing! He may be dying, poor fellow; and
+yet what can one do in the dark?"
+
+"Lie down and rest," said Mrs. Potter, dryly.
+
+"Well, I will try, but not on my bed--on the sitting-room sofa, I think.
+Will you light the lamp there, please? And bring the tea at eleven; I'll
+start at half-past."
+
+Naomi took a short stroll among the darkling pines--the way that she had
+taken the piano-tuner in the first moments of their swift
+friendship--the way that he had taken alone last night. She reached the
+sitting-room with moist, wistful eyes, which startled themselves as she
+confronted the mirror over the chimney-piece whereon stood the lamp. She
+stood for a little, however, looking at
+herself--steadfastly--inquisitively--as though to search out the secrets
+of her own heart. She gave it up in the end, and turned wearily away.
+What was the use of peering into her own heart now, when so often
+aforetime she had seemed to know it, and had not? There was no use; and
+as it happened, no need. For the first thing her eyes fell upon, as she
+turned, was the pile of music lying yet where Engelhardt had placed it,
+on the stool. The next was his little inscription on the uppermost song.
+She knelt to read it again; when she had done so the two uncertain,
+left-handed, pencilled lines were wet and blotched with her tears, and
+she rose up knowing what she had never known before.
+
+At eleven-thirty--she had set her heart upon that extra half hour if let
+alone--Mrs. Potter rattled the tea-tray against the sitting-room door
+and entered next moment. She found her mistress on the sofa certainly,
+but lying on her back and staring straight at the ceiling. Her face was
+very white and still, but she moved it a little as the door opened. She
+had not slept? Not a wink. Her book was lying in her lap; it had never
+been opened. Mrs. Potter was not slow to exhibit her disappointment, not
+to say her disgust. But Naomi sprang up with every sign of energy, and
+finished her tea in five minutes. In ten she had her horse saddled. In
+twelve she had cantered back to the veranda, and was receiving from Mrs.
+Potter the water-bag, the flask, and the packet of bread and meat.
+
+"Have his room nice and ready for him," said the girl, excitedly, "and
+the kettle boiling, so that we may both have breakfast the instant we
+get in. It will be a pretty early breakfast, you'll see! Do you think
+you can do without sleep as long as I can?"
+
+"Well, I know I sha'n't lie down while you're gone, miss."
+
+"Then I'll be tremendously quick, I will indeed. I only wish I'd started
+long ago. The moon is splendid now. You can see miles----"
+
+"Then look there, Miss Naomi!"
+
+"Where?"
+
+"Past the stables--across the paddock--toward the fence."
+
+Naomi looked. A black figure was running toward them in the moonlight.
+
+"Who can it be, Mrs. Potter? Not Mr. Engelhardt----"
+
+"Who else?"
+
+"But he is reeling and staggering! Could it be some drunken roustabout?
+And yet that's just his height--it must be--it _is_--thank God!"
+
+Her curiosity first, and then her amazement, kept Naomi seated immovable
+in her saddle. She wondered later why she had not cantered to meet him.
+She did not stir even when his stertorous breathing came painfully to
+her ears. It was only when the quivering, spent, and speechless young
+man threw his arms across the withers of her horse, and his white face
+fell forward upon the mane, that Naomi silently detached the water-bag
+which she had strapped to her saddle, and held it to his lips with a
+trembling hand. At first he shook his head. Then he raised his wild eyes
+to hers with a piteously anxious expression.
+
+"You have heard--that they are coming?"
+
+"No--who?"
+
+"You have heard, or why are you on horseback?"
+
+"To look for you. I was on the point of starting. I made sure you must
+be bushed."
+
+"I was. But I got to a camp. They looked after me; I am all right. And
+now they are coming in here--they're probably on their way!" Each little
+sentence came in a fresh gasp from his parched throat.
+
+"But who?"
+
+"Those two tramps who came the other day, and Simons, the ringer of the
+shed. Villains--villains every one!"
+
+"Ah! And what do they want?"
+
+"Can't you guess? The silver! The silver! That fat brute who insulted
+you so, who do you suppose he is? Tigerskin's mate--just out of
+prison--the man whose finger your father shot off ten years ago! You
+remember how he kept his hands in his pockets the other day? Well, that
+was the reason. Now there isn't a moment to lose. I listened to their
+plans. Half an hour ago--or it may be an hour--they lay down for a
+spell. They were drunk, but not very. They only meant to rest for a bit;
+then they're coming straight here. They left me tied up--they were going
+to bring me with them--I'll tell you afterward how I got loose. I
+daren't stop a moment, even to cut adrift their horses. I just bolted
+for the moon--I'd heard them say the station lay due east--and here I
+am. Thank God I've found you up and mounted! It couldn't have been
+better; it's providential. Now you mustn't get off at all; you must just
+ride right on to the shed."
+
+"Must I?" said Naomi, with a tight lip and a keen eye, but a touch of
+the old banter in her tone.
+
+"We could follow on foot. Meanwhile you would rouse them out at the
+shed----"
+
+"And my silver?"
+
+Engelhardt was silent. The girl leant forward in her saddle, and laid a
+hand upon his shoulder.
+
+"No, no, Mr. Engelhardt! Captains don't quit their ships in such a
+hurry as all that. I'm captain here, and I'll stick to mine. It isn't
+only the silver. Still my father smelt powder for that silver, and the
+least I can do is to follow his lead."
+
+She slid to the ground as she spoke.
+
+"You will barricade yourself in the store?" said Engelhardt.
+
+"Exactly. It was fixed up for this very kind of thing, after the first
+fuss with Tigerskin. They'll never get in."
+
+"And you mean to stick to your guns inside?"
+
+"To such as I have--most certainly."
+
+"Then I mean to stick to you."
+
+"Very well."
+
+"But think--think before it's too late! They are devils, Miss
+Pryse--beasts! I have seen them and heard them. Better a hundred times
+be dead than at their mercy. For God's sake, take the horse before they
+are upon us!"
+
+"I stop here," said Naomi, decidedly.
+
+"Yet Mrs. Potter and I could hold the store as easily as you could. They
+shall not get your silver while I'm alive."
+
+"My mind is made up," said the girl, in a voice which silenced his
+remonstrances; "but I agree with you that somebody ought to start off
+for the shed. I think that you should, Mr. Engelhardt, if you feel equal
+to it."
+
+"Equal to it! It's so likely I would ride off and leave two women to the
+mercy of those brutes! If it really must be so, then I think the sooner
+we all three get into the store----"
+
+It was Mrs. Potter who here put in her amazing word. While the young
+people stood and argued, her eyes had travelled over every point of the
+saddled horse. And now she proposed that she should be the one to ride
+to the shed for help.
+
+"You!" the two cried in one breath, as they gazed at her ample figure.
+
+"And why not?" said the hardy woman. "Wasn't I born and bred in the
+bush? Couldn't I ride--bareback, too--before either of you was born? I'm
+not so light as I used to be, and I haven't the nerve either; but what I
+have is all there in the hour of need, Miss Naomi. Let me go now. I'm
+ready this minute."
+
+Naomi had seemed lost in thought.
+
+"Very well!" cried she, whipping her eyes from the ground. "But you
+don't know the way to the shed, and I must make your directions pretty
+plain. Run to the back of the kitchen, Mr. Engelhardt, you'll see a lot
+of clothes-props. Bring as many as you can to the store veranda."
+
+Engelhardt darted off upon his errand. Already they had wasted too many
+minutes in words. His brain was ablaze with lurid visions of the
+loathsome crew in Top Scrubby; of the murderous irruption imminent at
+any moment; of the unspeakable treatment to be suffered at those
+blood-stained hands--not only by himself--that mattered little--but by a
+woman--by Naomi of all women in the world. God help them both if the
+gang arrived before they were safe inside the store! But until the worst
+happened she need not know, nor should she guess, how bad that worst
+might be. Poor Rowntree's fate, and even his own ill-usage by those
+masterless men, were things which Engelhardt was not the man to tell to
+women in the hour of alarm. He was clear enough as to that; and having
+done up to this point all that a man could do, he jumped at the simple
+task imposed by Naomi, and threw himself into it with immense vigor and
+a lightened heart. As he dropped his first clothes-prop in the store
+veranda, Naomi and the housekeeper were still talking, though the
+latter was already huddled up in the saddle. When he got back with a
+second, both women were gone; with a third, Naomi was unlocking the
+store door; with the fourth and last, she had lit a candle inside, and
+was sawing one of the other props in two.
+
+"That'll do," she said, as her saw ran through the wood. "Now hold this
+one up for me."
+
+She pointed to another of the stout poles. She made him hold it with one
+end inside, and the other protruding through the opening. Then she made
+a mark on the prop at the level of the door, sawed it through at her
+mark, and cut down the other two in the same fashion. In less than five
+minutes the four poles had become eight, which cumbered the floor
+within. Then Naomi rose from her knees, flung the saw back into the
+tool-box, and made a final survey with the candle. A few flakes of
+sawdust lay about the shallow veranda. She fetched a broom from a corner
+of the store and whisked them away. Then she removed the key to the
+inside, and was about to lock the door upon herself and Engelhardt when
+he suddenly stopped her.
+
+"Hold on!" he cried. "I want your boots."
+
+"My boots?"
+
+"Yes, those you've got on--with the dust on 'em, just as they are. They
+must be left outside your door, and your door must be locked; you must
+keep the key."
+
+Naomi gave him a grateful, an admiring smile.
+
+"That _is_ a happy thought. I'll get it myself. While I'm gone you might
+fetch in the axe from the wood-heap; I'd almost forgotten it."
+
+They ran off in different directions. Next minute they were both back in
+the store, Engelhardt with the axe. Naomi took it from him, and set it
+aside without a word. Her face was blanched.
+
+"I heard something," she whispered. "I heard a cry. Oh, if they've seen
+me!"
+
+"We'll lock the door as quietly as possible."
+
+This was done.
+
+"Now the props," said Naomi.
+
+Engelhardt had guessed what they were for. He helped her to fix them,
+with one wedged between floor and counter, and the other pressing the
+heavy woodwork of the door. It now appeared how craftily Naomi had cut
+her timbers. They met the door, two at the top, two at the bottom, and
+four about the centre. Still the brave engineer was distressed.
+
+"I meant to hammer them down," she murmured. "Now I daren't."
+
+"We'll put all our weight on them instead," said Engelhardt. They did so
+with a will, until each prop had creaked in turn. Then they listened.
+
+"Out with the light," said Naomi. "There are no windows to give us
+away--but still!"
+
+He blew it out. As yet his own ears had heard nothing, and he was
+beginning to wonder whether Naomi had been deceived. They listened a
+little longer. Then she said:
+
+"We're provisioned for a siege. Did you see the flask and things on the
+counter?"
+
+"I did. How in the world did you find time to get them ready?"
+
+"I had them ready before you came. They were for you."
+
+The two were crouching close together between the props. It was a
+natural though not a necessary attitude. The moon was shining through
+the skylight upon one of the walls; the multifarious tins and bottles on
+the shelves made the most of the white light; and faint reflections
+reached the faces of Naomi and the piano-tuner--so close to each other,
+so pale, so determined, and withal so wistful as their eyes met.
+Engelhardt first looked his thanks, and then stammered them out in a
+broken whisper. Even as he did so the girl raised a finger to her lips.
+
+"Hark! There they are."
+
+"Yes, I hear them. They won't hear us yet a bit."
+
+"They mustn't hear us at all; but off with your boots--we may have to
+move about."
+
+She had already kicked off her shoes, and now, because he had only one
+of his own, she pulled off his boots with her two hands.
+
+"You should not have done that!"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"It's dreadful! Just as though you were my servant."
+
+"Mr. Engelhardt, we must be everything to each other----"
+
+She shot up her hand and ceased. The voices without were now
+distinguishable.
+
+"To-night!" he muttered, bitterly, before heeding them.
+
+Naomi, on the other hand, was at the last pitch of attention; but not to
+him. She inclined her head as she knelt to hear the better. The voices
+were approaching from one side.
+
+"Ay, that's where he dropped--just there!" said one. It was Tigerskin's
+mate, Bill.
+
+"Take the key from the door!" Engelhardt whispered to Naomi, who was the
+nearer it. They had forgotten to do this. For one wild moment the girl
+hesitated, then she cautiously reached out her hand and withdrew the key
+without a scratch.
+
+"So this is the crib!" they heard Bo's'n say.
+
+"The same old crib," said Bill. "Same as it was ten years ago, only
+plastered up a bit. I suppose it _is_ locked, mate?"
+
+The handle was tried. The door shook ever so little. The two inside
+gazed at the props and held their breath. If one of them should be
+shaken down!
+
+"Ay, it's locked all right; and I reckon it's true enough about the girl
+sleeping with the key under her pillow, and all."
+
+"Blast your reckonings!" said Bill. "Make sure the key ain't in the door
+on t'other side."
+
+The thimbleful of starlit sky which Naomi had been watching for the last
+minute and a half was suddenly wiped away. She heard Bo's'n breathing
+hard as he stooped and peered. The key grew colder in her hand.
+
+"No, there ain't no key, Bill."
+
+"That's all right. They're both in their beds then, and that little
+suck-o'-my-thumb hasn't got here yet. When he does, God 'elp him!"
+
+The voices were those of Bill and Bo's'n. For the moment these two
+seemed to be alone together.
+
+"Ay, ay, we'd string the beggar up fast enough another time!"
+
+"String him up? Yes, by his heels, and shoot holes through him while he
+dangled."
+
+"Beginning where you don't kill. Holy smoke! but I wish he'd turn up
+now."
+
+"So do I--the swine! But here comes the ringer. What cheer, matey?"
+
+"It's right," said Simons. "The little devil's locked her door; but
+there are her boots outside, same as if she was stoppin' at a blessed
+'otel. A fat lot she cared whether her precious pal was bushed or
+whether he wasn't! We thought you was telling us lies, mother, but, by
+cripes, you wasn't!"
+
+"I should think not!" said a fourth voice. "She wouldn't believe he was
+lost, but I knew he was; so I just saddled the night-horse after she
+was in bed and asleep, and was going straight to the shed to raise a
+search-party!"
+
+The pair within were staring at each other in dumb horror. That fourth
+voice was but too well known to them both. It was Mrs. Potter's.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE NIGHT ATTACK
+
+
+"See here, mother!" said Bill. "There's one or two things we want to
+know. Spit out the truth, and that'll be all right. Tell us one lie, and
+there'll be an end of _you_. Understand?"
+
+"I ought to."
+
+"Right you are, then; now you know. What about this key?"
+
+"She keeps it in her room."
+
+"Under her pillow, eh?"
+
+"That I can't say; but she will tell you."
+
+"So we reckon. Now look here. Will you take your oath there's not
+another soul on the premises but you and her?"
+
+The pair within again held their breath. They must be discovered; but
+the longer they could postpone it the shorter would be their danger.
+Mrs. Potter's heart was stout, however, and her tongue ready.
+
+"I swear it," she cried, heartily.
+
+"What makes you so cussed sure?"
+
+"Why, it stands to reason. By rights there ought to be four of us.
+That's with Sam Rowntree and Mr. Engelhardt. Sam's gone off on his own
+hook somewhere"--Bill chuckled--"but nobody knows where. Mr.
+Engelhardt's lost, as I told you. So there's nobody left but mistress
+and me. How could there be?"
+
+"I don't know or care a curse how there could be. I only know that if
+there _is_, you'll have a pill to take without opening your mouth for
+it. About this chap that's lost; you'll take your oath he didn't turn up
+before you left the station just now?"
+
+"I told you he hadn't, as soon as ever you overtook me."
+
+"You've got to swear it!" said Bill, savagely.
+
+"I swore it then."
+
+"So she did," said Simons, who had been grumbling openly during this
+cross-examination. "What's the good of going over the same track twice,
+mate? Let her give us the feed she promised, and then let's get to
+work."
+
+"And so say I!" cried the Bo's'n.
+
+"You shall have your supper in five minutes," said Mrs. Potter, "if
+you'll let me get it."
+
+"All right, missus," said Bill, after a pause. "Only mind, if we catch
+you in any hanky-panky, by God I'll screw your neck till I put your face
+where your back-hair ought to be. Don't you dare get on the cross with
+us, or there'll be trouble! Come on, chaps. You show the way to the
+dining-room, mother, and light up; then we'll...."
+
+The rest sounded indistinct in the store. The low crunching of the
+foot-falls in the sandy yard changed to a crisp clatter upon the
+homestead veranda. Naomi waited for that sign; then with a white face
+and eager hands she began to tear down, prop by prop, the barricade on
+which their very lives depended.
+
+"She shall not suffer for this, whoever else does," she muttered. "At
+least she sha'n't suffer alone."
+
+"You mean to open the door?"
+
+"Yes, and catch her as she passes. To get to the kitchen she must pass
+close to the store. We'll open the door, and if she's wise she'll pass
+three or four times without turning her head; she'll wait till they're
+well at work; then she'll come back for something else--and slip in."
+
+As she spoke Naomi went round to the gun-rack, took down the Winchester
+repeating-rifle, loaded it and came back to the front of the store. Then
+she directed Engelhardt to unlock the door, she helping him to be gentle
+with the key. The lock was let back by degrees. A moment later the door
+was wide open, with Naomi standing as in a frame, the Winchester in her
+hands.
+
+The station-yard lay bathed and purified in the sweet moonlight. The
+well-palings opposite, and the barracks beyond, were as though newly
+painted white. The main building Naomi could not see without putting out
+her head, for it ran at right angles with the store, and she was
+standing well inside. But the night wind that blew freshly in her face
+bore upon it the noise of oaths and laughter from the dining-room, and
+presently that of footsteps, too. At this Naomi laid a finger on the
+trigger and stood like a rock, with the piano-tuner, like its shadow, at
+her side. But it was only Mrs. Potter who stepped into the moonlight. So
+far all was as Naomi had hoped and calculated.
+
+But no further. When the poor soul saw the open door she stopped dead,
+hesitated half a second, and then ran like a heavy doe for it and Naomi.
+The latter had made adverse signals in vain. She drew aside to let the
+woman in, and was also in time to prevent Engelhardt from slamming the
+door. She shut it gently, turned the key with as much care as before,
+and with a sternly whispered "hush!" kept still to listen. The other two
+stood as silent, though Mrs. Potter, in the moment of safety and of
+reaction, was heaving and quivering all over, shedding tears like rain,
+and swaying perilously where she stood. But she kept her feet bravely
+during that critical minute; it was but one; the next, a shout of
+laughter from the distance made it clear that by a miracle the incident
+had passed unobserved and unsuspected.
+
+"We may think ourselves lucky," said Naomi, severely. Next moment she
+had thrown her arms round the old woman's neck, and was covering her
+honest wrinkled face with her tears and kisses.
+
+The practical Engelhardt was busily engaged in replacing the props
+against the door. His one hand made him slow at the work. Naomi was
+herself again in time to help him, and now there was sturdy Mrs. Potter
+to lend her weight. The supports were soon firmer than ever, with
+gimlets and bradawls driven into the door above those at the greatest
+slant, which were thus in most danger of being forced out of place. Then
+came a minute's breathing-space.
+
+"I had just got through the first gate," Mrs. Potter was saying, "when I
+heard a galloping, and they were on me. Nay, Miss Naomi, it isn't
+anything to be proud of. I just said the first things that came into my
+head about you both; there was no time to think. It's only a mercy it's
+turned out so well."
+
+"It was presence of mind," said Naomi. "We have scored an hour through
+it, and may another if they are long in missing you. If we can hold out
+till morning, someone may ride in from the shed. Don't you hear them
+talking still?"
+
+"Yes; they're more patient than I thought they'd be."
+
+"They think you're busy in the kitchen. When they find you're not,
+they'll waste their time looking all over the place for you--everywhere
+but here."
+
+"Ay, but they'll come here in the end, and then may the Lord have mercy
+on our souls!"
+
+"Come, come. They're not going to get in as easily as all that. And if
+they do, what with the Winchester----"
+
+"Hush!" said Engelhardt. He was kneeling among the props, with his ear
+close to the bottom of the door.
+
+All three listened. The voices were louder and more distinct. The men
+had come outside.
+
+"I don't believe she's there at all," said one. "I see no light."
+
+"Go you and have a look, Bo's'n. Prick the old squaw up with the p'int
+o' your knife. But if you find her trying to hide, or up to any o' them
+games, I'd slit her throat and save the barney."
+
+"By cripes, so would I!"
+
+"Ay, ay, messmates, but we'll see--we'll see."
+
+All the voices were nearer now. Naomi had taken Mrs. Potter's hand, and
+was squeezing it white. For some moments they could make out nothing
+more. Bo's'n had evidently gone over to the kitchen. The other two were
+talking in low tones somewhere near the well-palings. Suddenly a muffled
+shout from the kitchen reached every ear.
+
+"She's not here at all."
+
+"Not there!"
+
+"Come and look for yourselves."
+
+"By gock," cried Bill, "let me just get my grip on her fat neck!"
+
+A moment later the three could be heard ransacking the kitchen, and
+calling upon the fugitive to come out, with threats and imprecations
+most horrible to hear even in the distance; but as they drew nearer,
+working swiftly from out-building to out-building, like ferrets in a
+rabbit-warren, the ferocity of their language rose to such a pitch that
+the hunted woman within fell back faint and trembling upon the counter.
+Naomi was quick as thought with the flask; but her own cool hand and
+steady eyes were as useful as the brandy, and the fit passed as swiftly
+as it had come. While it lasted, however, the only one to follow every
+move outside was the assiduous Engelhardt. He had not yet risen from his
+knees; but he raised himself a little as Mrs. Potter stood upright
+again, supported by Naomi.
+
+"It's all right," he whispered. "They've no idea where you are. Simons
+has had a look in the barracks, and Bo's'n in the pines. But they've
+given you up now. They're holding a council of war within five yards of
+us!"
+
+"Let's listen," said Naomi. "Their language won't kill us."
+
+They had quite given up Mrs. Potter. This was evident from the tail-end
+of a speech in which Bill bitterly repented not having "stiffened" both
+her and Engelhardt at sight.
+
+"As for getting to the shed," said Simons, who was the obvious authority
+on this point, "that'll take her a good hour and a half on foot. It'd be
+a waste of time and trouble to ride after her, though I'd like to see
+Bill at work on her--I should so! If she had her horse, it'd be another
+thing."
+
+"Ay, ay," cried the Bo's'n. "Let the old gal rip."
+
+Bill had been of the same opinion a moment before; but this indecent
+readiness to be beaten by an old woman was more than he could share or
+bear. He told his mate so in highly abusive terms. They retorted that he
+was beaten by that same old woman himself. Bill was not so sure of that;
+what about the bedroom with the boots outside? Nobody had looked in
+there.
+
+A brisk debate ensued, in which the voice of Simons rose loudest. Bill,
+on the other hand, spoke in a much lower tone than usual; his words did
+not penetrate into the store; it was as though they were meant not to.
+And yet it was Bill who presently cried aloud:
+
+"Then that's agreed. We all three go together to rouse her up anyhow,
+whether the old gal's there or whether she isn't. Come on!"
+
+Apparently they went then and there.
+
+"Nice for me!" whispered Naomi. "Nice for us both, Mrs. Potter, if we
+weren't safe----"
+
+A bovine roar seemed to burst from their very midst. It was Bill outside
+the door.
+
+"Tricked 'em, by God!" he yelled. "Here they are. Never mind that room.
+I tell you they're here--both of 'em; I heard 'em whispering."
+
+"Bill, you're a treat," said the Bo's'n, running up. "I never saw such a
+man----"
+
+"Where's Simons?"
+
+"He was bound to have a look for hisself. Here he comes. Well, messmate,
+where is she?"
+
+"Not there," cried Simons, with an oath. "The room's as empty as we are.
+There's been no one in it all night."
+
+Bill laughed.
+
+"I knew that, matey. You might have saved yourself the trouble when I
+sang out. She's--in--here." And he kicked the store door three times
+with all his might.
+
+"Who is?" said Simons.
+
+"Both on 'em. What did I tell you? They started whisperin' the moment
+they thought we'd sheered off."
+
+"They're not whisperin' now," said Simons, at the keyhole. "By cripes,
+let's burst the door in!"
+
+"Hold on," said Bill. "If they're not born fools they'll listen to
+reason. Out o' the light, matey. See here, ladies, if you walk out now
+you may live to spin the yarn, but if you don't--" He broke away into
+nameless blasphemies.
+
+The cruel voice came hoarse and hot through the keyhole. Engelhardt
+opened his mouth to reply, but Naomi clapped a warm palm upon it, and
+with the other hand signalled silence to Mrs. Potter.
+
+"We've given 'em their chance," said Bill, after a pause. "Come on,
+chaps. One, two, all together--now!"
+
+There was a stampede of feet in the shallow veranda, and then a thud and
+a crash, as the three men hurled themselves against the door. But for
+their oaths outside, in the store it was as though nothing had
+happened. Not a timber had given, not a prop was out of place. Naomi's
+white face wore a smile, which, however, was instantly struck out by a
+loud report and a flash through the keyhole.
+
+Engelhardt crouched lower, picked something from the floor, and passed
+it up to Naomi in his open hand.
+
+She carried it into the moonlight. It was a wisp of the musician's long
+hair, snipped out by the bullet.
+
+They stood aside from the keyhole. More bullets came through, but all at
+the same angle. The women caught up a sack of flour, rolled it over the
+counter, and with Engelhardt's help jammed it between the props, so that
+the top just covered the keyhole. Next moment there was a rush against
+the door, and for the second time all the harm was done to the
+besiegers, not the besieged.
+
+"We'll be black and blue before we've anything to show for it!" they
+heard the Bo's'n groaning.
+
+"There's more than women in this," said Bill. "There's that spawn that I
+should have strung up if it hadn't been for you two white-feathers. It's
+yourselves you've got to thank for this. I might have known it the
+moment I caught sight o' that lump o' lard on horseback. The swine's
+been in here all the time!"
+
+"He has!" shouted Engelhardt at the top of his excited voice; "and it's
+where you'll never get, not a man of you! You take that from me!"
+
+For a short space there was a hush outside. Then arose such a storm of
+curses and foul threats that the women within put their fingers in their
+ears. When they withdrew them, all was silence once more, and this time
+it lasted.
+
+"They must have gone for something!" exclaimed Naomi.
+
+"They have," said the piano-tuner, coolly. "A battering-ram!"
+
+"Then now's our time," cried the girl. "It's absurd to think of our
+being cooped up here with any quantity of fire-arms, and no chance of
+using one of them! First we must light up. Chop that candle in two, Mrs.
+Potter. It'll see us through to daybreak, and there's nothing to keep
+dark any longer, so the more light now the better. Ah, here's the
+tool-box, and yes! here's the brace and bits. Now this is my little
+plan."
+
+She took the brace, fitted it with the largest bit, and was making for
+the door.
+
+"What are you going to do?" said Engelhardt.
+
+"Make a loop-hole to fire through."
+
+"And for them to fire through, too!"
+
+"Well, that can't be helped."
+
+"Excuse me, I think it can. I've been puzzling the thing out for the
+last hour. I've a better plan than that!"
+
+"Let me hear it."
+
+"A tomahawk!"
+
+She gave him one from the tool-box.
+
+"May I hack the roofing a bit?"
+
+"As much as ever you like."
+
+"Now a pile of boxes--here--just at the left of the door--and four feet
+high."
+
+The women had it ready in a twinkling. They then helped him to clamber
+to the top--no easy matter with an arm that was not only useless, but an
+impediment at every turn. When he stood at his full height his head
+touched the corrugated iron some twenty inches from the obtuse angle
+between roof and wall.
+
+He reached out his hand for the tomahawk, and at the height of his eyes
+he hacked a slit in the iron, prising the lower lip downward until he
+could see well out into the yard. Then, a handbreadth above the angle,
+he made a round hole with the sipke of the tomahawk, and called for a
+revolver. Naomi produced a pair. He took one, and worked the barrel in
+the round hole until it fitted loosely enough to permit of training.
+Then he looked down. There was no sign of the thieves.
+
+"Have you plenty of cartridges, Miss Pryse?"
+
+"Any amount."
+
+"Well, I don't expect to spill much blood with them; but, on the other
+hand, I'm not likely to lose any myself." The work and the danger had
+combined to draw his somewhat melancholy spirit out of itself. Or
+perhaps it was not the danger itself, but the fact that he shared it
+with Naomi Pryse. Whatever the cause, the young man was more
+light-hearted than was his wont. "They'll fire at the spot I fire from,"
+he explained, with a touch of pride; "they'll never think of my eyes
+being two feet higher up, and their bullets must strike the roof at such
+an angle that no charge on earth would send them through. Mind, it'll be
+the greatest fluke if I hit them; but they aren't to know that; and at
+any rate I may keep them out of worse mischief for a time."
+
+"You may and you will," said Naomi, enthusiastically. "But still we
+shall want my loop-hole!"
+
+"Why so?"
+
+"The veranda!"
+
+For some moments Engelhardt said nothing. When at last he found his
+voice it was to abuse himself and his works with such unnecessary
+violence that again that soft warm palm lay for an instant across his
+lips. His pride in his own ingenuity had been cruelly humbled, for he
+had to confess that he had entirely forgotten to reckon with the
+store-veranda, a perfect shelter against even the deadliest fusillade
+from his position.
+
+"Very well," he cried at last. "We'll drill a hole through the door, but
+we must drill it near the top, and at an angle, so that they can't put a
+bullet through it at a distance."
+
+"Then let me do it," said Naomi. She sprang upon the flour-bag, and the
+hole was quickly made. Still the men did not return. "Lucky thing I
+remembered the axe in time!" she continued, remaining where she was.
+"They would have hacked in the door in no time with that. I say, Mr.
+Engelhardt, this is my post. I mean to stick here."
+
+"Never!" he cried.
+
+"But you can't work both revolvers."
+
+"Well, then, let us change places. You'll probably shoot straighter than
+I should. I'll stand on the flour-bag with the barrel of the other
+revolver through the hole you've made. If any one of them gets in a line
+with it----well, there'll be a villain less!"
+
+"And Mrs. Potter shall load for us," cried Naomi. "Do you know how?"
+
+"Can't say I do, miss."
+
+"Then I'll show you."
+
+This was the work of a moment. The old bush-woman was handy enough, and
+cool enough too, now that she was getting used to the situation. It was
+her own idea to bring round the storekeeper's tall stool, to plant it
+among the props, within reach of Naomi on the boxes and of Engelhardt on
+the flour-bag, and to perch herself on its leather top with the box of
+cartridges in her lap. Thus prepared and equipped, this strange garrison
+waited for the next assault.
+
+"Here they come," cried Naomi at last, with a sudden catch in her voice.
+"They're carrying a great log they must have fished out from the very
+bottom of the wood-heap. All the top part of the heap was small wood,
+and I guess they've wasted some more time in hunting for the axe. But
+here they are!" She pushed her revolver through the slit in the roof,
+and the sharp report rang through the store.
+
+"Hit anybody?" said Engelhardt next moment.
+
+"No. They're stopping to fire back. Ah, you were right."
+
+As she spoke there was a single report, followed by three smart raps on
+the sloping roof. The bullet had ricochetted like a flat stone flung
+upon a pond. Another and another did the same, and Naomi answered every
+shot.
+
+"For God's sake take care!" cried the piano-tuner.
+
+"I am doing so."
+
+"Hit any one yet?"
+
+"Not yet; it's impossible to aim; and they've never come nearer than the
+well-palings. Ah!"
+
+"What now?"
+
+"They're charging with the log."
+
+Engelhardt slipped his revolver into his pocket, and grasped the shelf
+that jutted out over the lintel. He felt that the shock would be severe,
+and so it was. It came with a rush of feet and a volley of loud oaths--a
+crash that smashed the lock and brought three of the clothes-props
+clattering to the ground. But those secured by gimlet and bradawl still
+held; and though the lower part of the door had given an inch the upper
+fitted as close as before, and the hinges were as yet uninjured.
+
+"One more does it!" cried Bill. "One more little rush like the last, and
+then, by God, if we don't make the three of you wish you was well dead,
+send me to quod again for ten year! Aha, you devil with the pistol! Very
+nice you'd got it arranged, but it don't cover us here. No, no, we've
+got the bulge on you now, you swine you! And you can't hit us, neither!
+We're going to give you one chance more when we've got our breath--just
+one, and then----"
+
+By holding on to the shelf when the crash came Engelhardt had managed to
+stand firm on the flour-bag. Seeing that the door still held, though
+badly battered, he had put his eye to the loop-hole bored by Naomi, and
+it had fallen full on Bill. A more bestial sight he had never seen, not
+even in the earlier hours of that night. The bloated face was swimming
+with sweat, and yet afire with rage and the lust for blood. The
+cross-eyes were turned toward the holes in the roof, hidden from them by
+the veranda, and the hairy fist with the four fingers was being
+savagely shaken in the same direction. The man was standing but a foot
+from the door, and when Engelhardt removed his eye and slipped his
+pistol-barrel in the place, he knew that it covered his midriff, though
+all that he could see through the half-filled hole was a fragment of the
+obscene, perspiring face. It was enough to show him the ludicrous change
+of expression which followed upon a sudden lowering of the eyes and a
+first glimpse of the protruding barrel. Without a moment's hesitation
+Engelhardt pressed the trigger while Bill was stupidly repeating:
+
+"And then--and then----"
+
+A flash cut him short, and as the smoke and the noise died away,
+Engelhardt, removing the pistol once more and applying his eye, saw the
+wounded brute go reeling and squealing into the moonshine with his hand
+to his middle and the blood running over it. To the well-palings he
+reeled, dropping on his knees when he got there, but struggling to his
+feet and running up and down and round and round like a mad bull, still
+screaming and blaspheming at the top of his voice, and with the blood
+bubbling over both his hands, which never ceased to hug his wound. His
+mates rushed up to him, but he beat them off, cursing them, spitting at
+them, and covering them with blood as he struck at them with his soaking
+fists. It was their fault. They should have let him have his way. He
+would have done for that hell-begotten swine who had now done for him.
+It was they who had killed him--his own mates--and he told them so with
+shrieks and curses, varied with sobs and tears, and yet again with wild
+shots from a revolver which he plucked from his belt. But he dropped the
+pistol after madly discharging it twice, and clapping his hand to his
+middle, as though he could only live by pressing the wound with all his
+force, he rushed after them, foaming at the mouth and squirting blood at
+every stride. At last he seemed to trip, and he fell forward in a heap,
+but turned on one side, his knees coming up with a jerk, his feet
+treading the air as though running still. And for some seconds they so
+continued, like the screws of a foundering steamer; then he rolled over
+heavily; his two companions came up at a walk; one of them touched him
+with his foot; and Engelhardt stepped down from the flour-bag with a
+mouth that had never relaxed, and a frown that had never gone.
+
+Naomi was no longer standing on the boxes; but she was sitting on them,
+with her face in her hands; and in the light of the two candle-ends,
+Mrs. Potter was watching her with a white dazed face.
+
+"Cheer up!" said Engelhardt. "The worst is over now."
+
+"Is he dead?" said Naomi, uncovering her face.
+
+"As dead as a man can be."
+
+"And you shot him?"
+
+She knew that he had; but the thing seemed incredible as she sat and
+looked at him; and by the time it came fully home to her, the little
+musician was inches taller in her eyes.
+
+"Yes, I shot the brute; and I'll shoot that shearer, too, if I get half
+a chance."
+
+Naomi felt nervous about it, and sufficiently shocked. She was dubiously
+remarking that they had not committed murder, when she was roughly
+interrupted.
+
+"Haven't they!"
+
+"Whom have they murdered?"
+
+"You'll see."
+
+"I know!" cried Mrs. Potter, with sudden inspiration; but even as they
+looked at her, a voice was heard shouting from a respectful distance
+outside.
+
+"We're going," it cried. "We've had enough of this, me and Simons have.
+Only when they find that chap in the paddock, recollect it was Bill that
+hung him. But for us he'd have hung you, too!"
+
+They listened very closely, but they heard no more. Then Naomi stood up
+to look through the slit in the roof.
+
+"The yard is empty," she cried. "Their horses are gone! Oh, Mr.
+Engelhardt--Mr. Engelhardt--we are saved!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+IN THE MIDST OF DEATH
+
+
+The candle-ends had burnt out in the store; the moon no longer shone in
+through the skylight; but the latter was taking new shape, and a harder
+outline filled with an iron-gray that whitened imperceptibly, like a
+man's hair. The strange trio within sat still and silent, watching each
+other grow out of the gloom like figures on a sensitive film. The packet
+of meat and bread was reduced to a piece of paper and a few crumbs; the
+little flask was empty, and the water-bag half its former size; but now
+that all was over, the horror of the night lay heavier upon them than
+during the night itself. It was Naomi who broke the long silence at
+last.
+
+"They have evidently gone," she said. "Don't you think we might venture
+now?"
+
+"It is for you to decide," said Engelhardt.
+
+"What do you think, Mrs. Potter?"
+
+"If you ask me, Miss Naomi, I think it's beneath us to sit here another
+minute for a couple of rascals who will be ten miles away by this time."
+
+"Then let us go. I will take the Winchester, and if they are still about
+we must just slip in again quicker than we came out. But I think it's
+good enough to chance."
+
+"So do I," said the piano-tuner, "most decidedly."
+
+"Then down with the props. They have served us very well, and no
+mistake! You must keep them in your kitchen, Mrs. Potter, as a trophy
+for all time."
+
+The old woman made no reply. Of what she was thinking none ever knew.
+Her life had run in a narrow, uneventful groove. Its sole adventure was
+probably the one now so nearly at an end. Ten years ago she had been
+ear-witness of a somewhat similar incident. And now she had played a
+part, and no small part, in another and a worse. At her age she might
+have come out shaken and shattered to the verge of imbecility, after
+such a night. Or she might have felt inordinately proud of her share in
+the bushrangers' repulse. But when at last the battered door stood wide
+open, and the keen morning air chilled their faces, and the red morning
+sky met their eyes, the old woman looked merely sad and thoughtful, and
+years older since the day before. Her expression touched Naomi. Once
+more she threw her young arms about the wrinkled neck, and left kisses
+upon the rough cheek, and words of grateful praise in the old ears.
+Meanwhile Engelhardt had pushed past them both and marched into the
+middle of the yard.
+
+"It's all right, I think," said he, standing purposely between the women
+and the hideous corpse by the well-palings. "Yes, the coast is clear.
+But there's the horse you rode, Mrs. Potter, and Bill's horse, too,
+apparently, tied side by side to the fence."
+
+"May God forgive them all," said Mrs. Potter, gravely, as she walked
+across the yard at Naomi's side.
+
+They were the last words she ever uttered. As she spoke, the crack of a
+rifle, with the snap of a pistol before and after, cut the early
+stillness as lightning cuts the sky. Naomi wheeled round and levelled
+her Winchester at the two men who were running with bent backs from a
+puff of smoke to a couple of horses tethered among the pines beyond
+kitchen and wood-heap. She sighted the foremost runner, but never fired.
+A heavy fall at her side made her drop the Winchester and turn sharply
+round. It was Mrs. Potter. She was lying like a log, with her brave old
+eyes wide open to the sky, and a bullet in her heart.
+
+
+"Take me away," said the girl, faintly, as she got up from her knees. "I
+can bear no more."
+
+"There are the horses," answered the piano-tuner, pointing to the two
+that were tied up to the fence. "I should dearly like to give chase!"
+
+"No, no, no!" cried Naomi, in an agony. "Hasn't there been enough
+bloodshed for one night? We will ride straight to the shed. They have
+taken the very opposite direction. Let us start at once!"
+
+"In an instant," he said, and ran indoors for something to throw over
+the dead woman. The girl was again kneeling beside her, when he came
+back with a table-cloth. And she was crying bitterly when, a minute
+later, he slipped his left hand under her foot and helped her into the
+saddle.
+
+
+They never drew rein until the long, low wool-shed was well in sight.
+The sun was up. It was six o'clock. They could see the shearers swarming
+to the shed like bees to a hive. The morning air was pungent as spiced
+wine. Some color had come back to Naomi's cheeks, and it was she who
+first pulled up, forcing Engelhardt to do the same.
+
+"Friday morning!" she said, walking her horse. "Can you realize that you
+only came last Saturday night?"
+
+"I cannot."
+
+"No more can I! We have been through so much----"
+
+"Together."
+
+"Together and otherwise. I think you must have gone through more than I
+can guess, when you were lost in Top Scrubby, and when you fell in with
+those fiends. Will you tell me all about it some time or other?"
+
+"I'm afraid there will be no opportunity," said Engelhardt, speaking
+with unnatural distinctness. "I must be off to-day."
+
+"To-day!"
+
+Her blank tone thrilled him to the soul.
+
+"Of course," he said, less steadily. "Why not? I did my best to get away
+the night before last. Thank God I didn't succeed in that!"
+
+"Why did you go like that?"
+
+"You know why."
+
+"I know why! What do you mean? How can I know anything?"
+
+"Very easily," he bitterly replied, staring rigidly ahead with his
+burning face. "Very easily indeed, when I left you that letter!"
+
+"What letter, Mr. Engelhardt?"
+
+"The awful nonsense I was idiot enough to slip into your book!"
+
+"The book I was reading?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then I have never had your letter. I haven't opened that book since the
+day before yesterday, though more than once I have taken it up with the
+intention of doing so."
+
+"Well, thank Heaven for that!"
+
+"But why?"
+
+"Because I said----"
+
+"Well, what _did_ you say?"
+
+She caught his bridle, and, by stopping both horses, forced him to face
+her at last.
+
+"Surely you can guess? I had just got to know about Tom Chester, and I
+felt there was no hope for me, so I thought----"
+
+"Stop! what had you got to know about Tom Chester, please?"
+
+"That he cared for you."
+
+"Indeed! To me that's a piece of news. Mind, I care for him very much as
+a friend--as a hand."
+
+"Then you don't----"
+
+"No, indeed I don't."
+
+"Oh, Naomi, what am I to say? In that letter I said it all--when I had
+no hope in my heart. And now----"
+
+"And now you have called that letter awful nonsense, and yourself an
+idiot for writing it!"
+
+She was smiling at him--her old, teasing smile--across the gap between
+their horses. But his eyes were full of tears.
+
+"Oh, Naomi, you know what I meant!"
+
+"And I suppose it has never occurred to you what I mean?"
+
+He stared at her open-eyed.
+
+"Will you marry me?" he blurted out.
+
+"We'll see about that," said Naomi, as he took her hand and they rode
+onward with clasped fingers. "But I'll tell you what I _am_ on to do.
+I'm on to put Taroomba in the market this very day, and to back you for
+all that it fetches. After that there's Europe--your mother--Milan--and
+anything you like, my dear fellow, for the rest of our two lives."
+
+
+
+
+ADVERTISEMENTS
+
+
+"_A series which has given us nothing but good_"
+
+The Ivory Series
+
+Each volume bound in green and white with gilt top, 16mo, 75 cents
+
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, PUBLISHERS
+
+
+_JUST PUBLISHED_
+
+
+The Boss of Taroomba
+
+By E. W. HORNUNG
+
+A charming love-story of the Australian bush by the author of "Irralie's
+Bushranger" and the "Amateur Cracksman."
+
+
+_PREVIOUS VOLUMES_
+
+
+Sweethearts and Wives
+
+Stories of Life in the Navy. By ANNA A. ROGERS.
+
+Various episodes, romantic, sentimental, humorous and even tragic, in
+the lives of the wives and sweethearts of naval officers, form the
+subjects of this group of stories, several of which have met with
+approval in the magazines.
+
+
+If I Were a Man
+
+The Story of a New-Southerner. By HARRISON ROBERTSON.
+
+This is the first novel from the pen of a writer already known to a
+considerable audience as the managing editor of _The Louisville
+Courier-Journal_, and as a story-teller of exceptional ability.
+
+
+Amos Judd
+
+By J. A. MITCHELL, Editor of "Life."
+
+"This is an excellent story, well told, and with a plot that deserved
+the care bestowed upon its elaboration."--_The Critic._
+
+
+Ia; a Love Story
+
+By "Q" (ARTHUR T. QUILLER-COUCH).
+
+"No story was ever more fearlessly and more thoughtfully aimed at the
+very heart of life."--_The Bookman._
+
+
+The Suicide Club
+
+By ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
+
+"There is a great deal of grim humor in the 'Suicide Club,' and no lack
+of subtle irony, while as an example of plot weaving and invention it
+compares favorably with some of Stevenson's later work."--New York
+_Times_.
+
+
+Irralie's Bushranger
+
+A Story of Australian Adventure. By E. W. HORNUNG.
+
+"The incidents, just improbable enough to be real, are original and
+cleverly combined, and there is no flagging in the press and stir of the
+story."--_The Nation._
+
+
+A Master Spirit
+
+By HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD.
+
+"The theme is the old one of how it takes a great loss, a great grief, a
+great disappointment to make a really great singer; and this theme Mrs.
+Spofford has developed with a rare grace and charm."--Boston
+_Advertiser_.
+
+
+Madame Delphine
+
+By GEORGE W. CABLE.
+
+"There are few living American writers who can reproduce for us more
+perfectly than Mr. Cable does the speech, the manners, the whole social
+atmosphere of a remote time and a peculiar people."--New York _Tribune_.
+
+
+One of the Visconti
+
+By EVA WILDER BRODHEAD.
+
+"The author has succeeded uncommonly well in combining descriptions of
+actual scenes, as in a book of travel, with the action of a romantic
+tale."--Boston _Transcript_.
+
+
+A Book of Martyrs
+
+By CORNELIA ATWOOD PRATT.
+
+"Miss Pratt shows a strength and insight into character that have
+enabled her, without resorting to the morbid or the ultra-sensational,
+to produce a volume of short stories of which each is a model of its
+kind."--New York _Sun_.
+
+
+A Bride from the Bush
+
+By E. W. HORNUNG.
+
+"The story is prettily told, and is particularly bright in its glimpses
+of Bush life. Mr. Hornung has certainly earned the right to be called
+the Bret Harte of Australia."--Boston _Herald_.
+
+
+The Man Who Wins
+
+By ROBERT HERRICK.
+
+"It is written with admirable restraint, and without affectations of
+style, in the clearest English. It is a pleasure to welcome Mr. Herrick
+into the small company of serious literary workers."--_Chap-Book._
+
+
+An Inheritance
+
+By HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD.
+
+"Mrs. Spofford has done nothing better than this daintily written story,
+if, indeed, anything quite so good."--Philadelphia _Press_.
+
+
+The Old Gentleman of the Black Stock
+
+By THOMAS NELSON PAGE.
+
+"There could hardly be a more appropriate addition to the Scribners'
+dainty Ivory Series than the little volume before us, with its moral
+that, after all, love is best."--_The Critic._
+
+
+Literary Love Letters
+
+And Other Stories. By ROBERT HERRICK.
+
+"It shows literary elegance and skill, to say nothing of the daintiest
+of touches."--Chicago _Times-Herald_.
+
+
+A Romance in Transit
+
+By FRANCIS LYNDE.
+
+"I was surprised at the way he handled the engine, and it was all so
+natural, for I have been there. It is not only a good railroad story,
+but a delightful love story."--_Cy Warman._
+
+
+In Old Narragansett
+
+Romances and Realities. By ALICE MORSE EARLE.
+
+"Told with all the art of a practiced writer of fiction. Mrs. Earle has
+accurate and delightful knowledge of old-time ways in
+Narragansett."--_The Outlook._
+
+
+Seven Months a Prisoner
+
+By Judge J. V. HADLEY.
+
+"The book is a very interesting account of a very rare experience."--New
+York _Times_.
+
+
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+153-157 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Boss of Taroomba, by E. W. Hornung
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41658 ***