Children of the Bush Part 32

"The whole, and more."

"Do you mean to tell me that? He has only been here since yesterday morning."

"Yes; but he's been shoutin' all round. Look at all these chaps here."

"They only came yesterday afternoon," said Peter. "Here, you had best take this and give me the cheque;" and Peter laid a five-pound note on the bar. Thomas bucked at first, but in the end he handed over the cheque--he had had several warnings from the police. Then he suddenly lost all control over himself; he came round from behind the bar and faced Peter.

"Now, look here, you mongrel parson!" he said. "What the ---- do you mean by coming into my bar and, interfering with me. Who the ---- are you anyway? A ----!" He used the worst oaths that were used in the bush.

"Take off your ---- coat!" he roared at last, shaping up to Peter.

Peter stepped back a pace and b.u.t.toned his coat and threw back his head.

"No need to take off my coat, Thomas," he said, "I am ready."

He said it very quietly, but there was a danger-signal--a red light in his eyes. He was quiet-voiced but hard-knuckled, as some had reason to know.

Thomas balked like a bull at a spread umbrella. Jack lurched past me as I stood in the parlour door, but I caught him and held him back; and almost at the same moment a wretched old boozer that we called "Awful Example," who had been sitting huddled, a dirty bundle of rags and beard and hair, in the corner of the bar, struggled to his feet, staggered forward and faced Thomas, looking once again like something that might have been a man. He s.n.a.t.c.hed a thick gla.s.s bottle from the counter and held it by the neck in his right hand.

"Stand back, Thomas!" he shouted. "Lay a hand--lay a finger on Peter M'Laughlan, and I'll smash your head, as sure as there's a G.o.d above us and I'm a ruined man!"

Peter took "Awful" gently by the shoulders and sat him down. "You keep quiet, old man," he said; "nothing is going to happen." Thomas went round behind the bar muttering something about it not being worth his while to, etc.

"You go and get the horses ready, Joe," said Peter to me; "and you sit down, Jack, and keep quiet."

"He can get the horses," growled Thomas, from behind the bar, "but I'm d.a.m.ned if he gets the saddles. I've got them locked up, and I'll something well keep them till Barnes is sober enough to pay me what he owes me."

Just then a tall, good-looking chap, with dark-blue eyes and a long, light-coloured moustache, stepped into the bar from the crowd on the veranda.

"What's all this, Thomas?" he asked.

"What's that got to do with you, Gentleman Once?" shouted Thomas.

"I think it's got something to do with me," said Gentleman Once. "Now, look here, Thomas; you can do pretty well what you like with us poor devils, and you know it, but we draw the line at Peter M'Laughlan. If you really itch for the thras.h.i.+ng, you deserve you must tempt someone else to give it to you."

"What the ---- are you talking about?" snorted Thomas. "You're drunk or ratty!"

"What's the trouble, M'Laughlan?" asked Gentleman Once, turning to Peter. "No trouble at all, Gentleman Once," said Peter; "thank you all the same. I've managed worse men than our friend Thomas. Now, Thomas, don't you think it would pay you best to hand over the key of the harness-room and have done with this nonsense? I'm a patient man--a very patient man--but I've not always been so, and the old blood comes up sometimes, you know."

Thomas couldn't stand this sort of language, because he couldn't understand it. He threw the key on the bar and told us to clear out.

We were all three very quiet riding along the track that evening. Peter gave Jack a nip now and again from the flask, and before we turned in in camp he gave him what he called a soothing draught from a little medicine chest that he carried in his saddle-bag. Jack seemed to have got rid of his cough; he slept all night, and in the morning, after he'd drunk a pint of mutton-broth that Peter had made in one of the billies, he was all right--except that he was quiet and ashamed. I had never known him to be so quiet, and for such a length of time, since we were boys together. He had learned his own weakness; he'd lost all his c.o.c.ksureness. I know now just exactly how he felt. He felt as if his sober year had been lost and he would have to live it all over again.

Peter didn't preach. He just jogged along and camped with us as if he were an ordinary, every-day mate. He yarned about all sorts of things.

He could tell good yarns, and when he was fairly on you could listen to him all night. He seemed to have been nearly all over the world. Peter never preached except when he was asked to hold service in some bush pub, station-homestead or bush church. But in a case like ours he had a way of telling a little life story, with something in it that hit the young man he wanted to reform, and hit him hard. He'd generally begin quietly, when we were comfortable with our pipes in camp after tea, with "I once knew a young man--" or "That reminds me of a young fellow I knew--" and so on. You never knew when he was going to begin; or when he was going to hit you. In our last camp, before we reached Solong, he told two of his time-fuse yarns. I haven't time to tell them now, but one stuffed up my pipe for a while, and made Jack's hand tremble when he tried to light his. I'm glad it was too dark to see our faces. We lay a good while afterwards, rolled in our blankets, and couldn't get to sleep for thinking; but Peter seemed to fall asleep as soon as he turned in.

Next day he told Jack not to tell Clara that he'd come down with us. He said he wouldn't go right into Solong with us; he was going back along another road to stay a day or two with an old friend of his.

When we reached Solong we stopped on the river-bank just out of sight of Jack's house. Peter took the ten-pound cheque from his pocket and gave it to Jack. Jack hadn't seen Peter give the shanty-keeper the five-pound note.

"But I owed Thomas something," said Jack, staring. "However did you manage to get the cheque out of him?"

"Never mind, Jack, I managed," said Peter.

Jack sat silent for a while, then he began to breathe hard.

"I don't know what to say, Peter."

"Say nothing, Jack. Only promise me that you will give Clara the cheques as soon as you go home, and let her take care of the cash for a while."

"I will," said Jack.

Jack looked down at the ground for a while, then he lifted his head and looked Peter in the eyes.

"Peter," he said, "I can't speak. I'm ashamed to make a promise; I've broken so many. I'll try to thank you in a year's time from now."

"I ask for no promises," said Peter, and he held out his hand. Jack gripped it.

"Aren't you coming home with me, Joe?" he asked.

"No," I said; "I'll go into town. See you in the morning."

Jack rode on. When he got along a piece Peter left his horse and moved up to the head of the lane to watch Jack, and I followed. As Jack neared the cottage we saw a little figure in a cloak run out to the front gate. She had heard the horses and the jingle of the camp-ware on the pack-saddle. We saw Jack jump down and take her in his arms. I looked at Peter, and as he watched them, something, that might have been a strange look of the old days, came into his eyes.

He shook hands with me. "Good-bye, Joe."

He rode across the river again. He took the track that ran along the foot of the spurs by the river, and up over a gap in the curve of blue hills, and down and out west towards the Big Scrubs. And as he rounded the last spur, with his packhorse trotting after him, I thought he must have felt very lonely. And I felt lonely too.

THE STORY OF "GENTLEMAN ONCE"

They learn the world from black-sheep, Who know it all too well.

-Out Back.

Peter M'Laughlan, bush missionary, Joe Wilson and his mate, Jack Barnes, shearers for the present, and a casual swagman named Jack Mitch.e.l.l, were camped at c.o.x's Crossing in a bend of Eurunderee Creek.

It was a gra.s.sy little flat with gum-trees standing clear and clean like a park. At the back was the steep gra.s.sy siding of a ridge, and far away across the creek to the south a spur from the Blue Mountain range ran west, with a tall, blue granite peak showing clear in the broad moonlight, yet dream-like and distant over the sweeps of dark green bush.

There was the jingle of hobble-chains and a crunching at the gra.s.s where the horses moved in the soft shadows amongst the trees. Up the creek on the other side was a surveyors' camp, and from there now and again came the sound of a good voice singing verses of old songs; and later on the sound of a violin and a cornet being played, sometimes together and sometimes each on its own.

Wilson and Barnes were on their way home from shearing out back in the great scrubs at Beenaway Shed. They had been rescued by Peter M`Laughlan from a wayside shanty where they had fallen, in spite of mutual oaths and past promises, sacred and profane, because they had got wringing wet in a storm on the track and caught colds, and had been tempted to take just one drink.

They were in a bad way, and were knocking down their cheques beautifully when Peter M'Laughlan came along. He rescued them and some of their cash from the soulless shanty keeper, and was riding home with them, on some pretence, because he had known them as boys, because Joe Wilson had a vein of poetry in him--a something in sympathy with something in Peter; because Jack Barnes had a dear little girl-wife who was much too good for him, and who was now anxiously waiting for him in the pretty little farming town of Solong amongst the western spurs. Because, perhaps, of something in Peter's early past which was a mystery. Simply and plainly because Peter M'Laughlan was the kindest, straightest and truest man in the West--a "white man."

They all knew Mitch.e.l.l and welcomed him heartily when he turned up in their camp, because he was a pathetic humorist and a kindly cynic--a "joker" or "hard case" as the bushmen say.

Peter was about fifty and the other three were young men.