For the Term of His Natural Life Part 24

At such a moment, this discovery seemed like a direct revelation from Heaven. He would not have been surprised had they disappeared. Had he lived in another age, he would have looked round for the angel who had brought them.

By and by, having eaten of this miraculous provender, the poor creature began--reckoning by his convict experience--to understand what had taken place. The coal workings were abandoned; the new Commandant had probably other work for his beasts of burden to execute, and an absconder would be safe here for a few hours at least. But he must not stay. For him there was no rest. If he thought to escape, it behoved him to commence his journey at once. As he contemplated the meat and bread, something like a ray of hope entered his gloomy soul. Here was provision for his needs. The food before him represented the rations of six men. Was it not possible to cross the desert that lay between him and freedom on such fare? The very supposition made his heart beat faster. It surely was possible. He must husband his resources; walk much and eat little; spread out the food for one day into the food for three. Here was six men's food for one day, or one man's food for six days. He would live on a third of this, and he would have rations for eighteen days. Eighteen days! What could he not do in eighteen days? He could walk thirty miles a day--forty miles a day--that would be six hundred miles and more. Yet stay; he must not be too sanguine; the road was difficult; the scrub was in places impenetrable. He would have to make detours, and turn upon his tracks, to waste precious time. He would be moderate, and say twenty miles a day. Twenty miles a day was very easy walking. Taking a piece of stick from the ground, he made the calculation in the sand. Eighteen days, and twenty miles a day--three hundred and sixty miles. More than enough to take him to freedom. It could be done! With prudence, it could be done! He must be careful and abstemious! Abstemious! He had already eaten too much, and he hastily pulled a barely-tasted piece of meat from his mouth, and replaced it with the rest. The action which at any other time would have seemed disgusting, was, in the case of this poor creature, merely pitiable.

Having come to this resolution, the next thing was to disenc.u.mber himself of his irons. This was more easily done than he expected. He found in the shed an iron gad, and with that and a stone he drove out the rivets. The rings were too strong to be "ovalled", * or he would have been free long ago. He packed the meat and bread together, and then pus.h.i.+ng the gad into his belt--it might be needed as a weapon of defence--he set out on his journey.

* Ovalled--"To oval" is a term in use among convicts, and means so to bend the round ring of the ankle fetter that the heel can be drawn up through it.

His intention was to get round the settlement to the coast, reach the settled districts, and, by some tale of s.h.i.+pwreck or of wandering, procure a.s.sistance. As to what was particularly to be done when he found himself among free men, he did not pause to consider. At that point his difficulties seemed to him to end. Let him but traverse the desert that was before him, and he would trust to his own ingenuity, or the chance of fortune, to avert suspicion. The peril of immediate detection was so imminent that, beside it, all other fears were dwarfed into insignificance.

Before dawn next morning he had travelled ten miles, and by husbanding his food, he succeeded by the night of the fourth day in accomplis.h.i.+ng forty more. Footsore and weary, he lay in a thicket of the th.o.r.n.y melaleuca, and felt at last that he was beyond pursuit. The next day he advanced more slowly. The bush was unpropitious. Dense scrub and savage jungle impeded his path; barren and stony mountain ranges arose before him. He was lost in gullies, entangled in thickets, bewildered in mora.s.ses. The sea that had hitherto gleamed, salt, glittering, and hungry upon his right hand, now s.h.i.+fted to his left. He had mistaken his course, and he must turn again. For two days did this bewilderment last, and on the third he came to a mighty cliff that pierced with its blunt pinnacle the cl.u.s.tering bush. He must go over or round this obstacle, and he decided to go round it. A natural pathway wound about its foot.

Here and there branches were broken, and it seemed to the poor wretch, fainting under the weight of his lessening burden, that his were not the first footsteps which had trodden there. The path terminated in a glade, and at the bottom of this glade was something that fluttered. Rufus Dawes pressed forward, and stumbled over a corpse!

In the terrible stillness of that solitary place he felt suddenly as though a voice had called to him. All the hideous fantastic tales of murder which he had read or heard seemed to take visible shape in the person of the loathly carcase before him, clad in the yellow dress of a convict, and lying flung together on the ground as though struck down.

Stooping over it, impelled by an irresistible impulse to know the worst, he found the body was mangled. One arm was missing, and the skull had been beaten in by some heavy instrument! The first thought--that this heap of rags and bones was a mute witness to the folly of his own undertaking, the corpse of some starved absconder--gave place to a second more horrible suspicion. He recognized the number imprinted on the coa.r.s.e cloth as that which had designated the younger of the two men who had escaped with Gabbett. He was standing on the place where a murder had been committed! A murder!--and what else? Thank G.o.d the food he carried was not yet exhausted! He turned and fled, looking back fearfully as he went. He could not breathe in the shadow of that awful mountain.

Cras.h.i.+ng through scrub and brake, torn, bleeding, and wild with terror, he reached a spur on the range, and looked around him. Above him rose the iron hills, below him lay the panorama of the bush. The white cone of the Frenchman's Cap was on his right hand, on his left a succession of ranges seemed to bar further progress. A gleam, as of a lake, streaked the eastward. Gigantic pine trees reared their graceful heads against the opal of the evening sky, and at their feet the dense scrub through which he had so painfully toiled, spread without break and without flaw. It seemed as though he could leap from where he stood upon a solid ma.s.s of tree-tops. He raised his eyes, and right against him, like a long dull sword, lay the narrow steel-blue reach of the harbour from which he had escaped. One darker speck moved on the dark water.

It was the Osprey making for the Gates. It seemed that he could throw a stone upon her deck. A faint cry of rage escaped him. During the last three days in the bush he must have retraced his steps, and returned upon his own track to the settlement! More than half his allotted time had pa.s.sed, and he was not yet thirty miles from his prison. Death had waited to overtake him in this barbarous wilderness. As a cat allows a mouse to escape her for a while, so had he been permitted to trifle with his fate, and lull himself into a false security. Escape was hopeless now. He never could escape; and as the unhappy man raised his despairing eyes, he saw that the sun, redly sinking behind a lofty pine which topped the opposite hill, shot a ray of crimson light into the glade below him. It was as though a b.l.o.o.d.y finger pointed at the corpse which lay there, and Rufus Dawes, shuddering at the dismal omen, averting his face, plunged again into the forest.

For four days he wandered aimlessly through the bush. He had given up all hopes of making the overland journey, and yet, as long as his scanty supply of food held out, he strove to keep away from the settlement.

Unable to resist the pangs of hunger, he had increased his daily ration; and though the salted meat, exposed to rain and heat, had begun to turn putrid, he never looked at it but he was seized with a desire to eat his fill. The coa.r.s.e lumps of carrion and the hard rye-loaves were to him delicious morsels fit for the table of an emperor. Once or twice he was constrained to pluck and eat the tops of tea-trees and peppermint shrubs. These had an aromatic taste, and sufficed to stay the cravings of hunger for a while, but they induced a raging thirst, which he slaked at the icy mountain springs. Had it not been for the frequency of these streams, he must have died in a few days. At last, on the twelfth day from his departure from the Coal Head, he found himself at the foot of Mount Direction, at the head of the peninsula which makes the western side of the harbour. His terrible wandering had but led him to make a complete circuit of the settlement, and the next night brought him round the sh.o.r.es of Birches Inlet to the landing-place opposite to Sarah Island. His stock of provisions had been exhausted for two days, and he was savage with hunger. He no longer thought of suicide. His dominant idea was now to get food. He would do as many others had done before him--give himself up to be flogged and fed. When he reached the landing-place, however, the guard-house was empty. He looked across at the island prison, and saw no sign of life. The settlement was deserted!

The shock of this discovery almost deprived him of reason. For days, that had seemed centuries, he had kept life in his jaded and lacerated body solely by the strength of his fierce determination to reach the settlement; and now that he had reached it, after a journey of unparalleled horror, he found it deserted. He struck himself to see if he was not dreaming. He refused to believe his eyesight. He shouted, screamed, and waved his tattered garments in the air. Exhausted by these paroxysms, he said to himself, quite calmly, that the sun beating on his unprotected head had dazed his brain, and that in a few minutes he should see well-remembered boats pulling towards him. Then, when no boat came, he argued that he was mistaken in the place; the island yonder was not Sarah Island, but some other island like it, and that in a second or so he would be able to detect the difference. But the inexorable mountains, so hideously familiar for six weary years, made mute reply, and the sea, crawling at his feet, seemed to grin at him with a thin-lipped, hungry mouth. Yet the fact of the desertion seemed so inexplicable that he could not realize it. He felt as might have felt that wanderer in the enchanted mountains, who, returning in the morning to look for his companions, found them turned to stone.

At last the dreadful truth forced itself upon him; he retired a few paces, and then, with a horrible cry of furious despair, stumbled forward towards the edge of the little reef that fringed the sh.o.r.e.

Just as he was about to fling himself for the second time into the dark water, his eyes, sweeping in a last long look around the bay, caught sight of a strange appearance on the left horn of the sea beach. A thin, blue streak, uprising from behind the western arm of the little inlet, hung in the still air. It was the smoke of a fire!

The dying wretch felt inspired with new hope. G.o.d had sent him a direct sign from Heaven. The tiny column of bluish vapour seemed to him as glorious as the Pillar of Fire that led the Israelites. There were yet human beings near him!--and turning his face from the hungry sea, he tottered with the last effort of his failing strength towards the blessed token of their presence.

CHAPTER IX. THE SEIZURE OF THE "OSPREY"

Frere's fis.h.i.+ng expedition had been unsuccessful, and in consequence prolonged. The obstinacy of his character appeared in the most trifling circ.u.mstances, and though the fast deepening shades of an Australian evening urged him to return, yet he lingered, unwilling to come back empty-handed. At last a peremptory signal warned him. It was the sound of a musket fired on board the brig: Mr. Bates was getting impatient; and with a scowl, Frere drew up his lines, and ordered the two soldiers to pull for the vessel.

The Osprey yet sat motionless on the water, and her bare masts gave no sign of making sail. To the soldiers, pulling with their backs to her, the musket shot seemed the most ordinary occurrence in the world. Eager to quit the dismal prison-bay, they had viewed Mr Frere's persistent fis.h.i.+ng with disgust, and had for the previous half hour longed to hear the signal of recall which had just startled them. Suddenly, however, they noticed a change of expression in the sullen face of their commander. Frere, sitting in the stern sheets, with his face to the Osprey, had observed a peculiar appearance on her decks. The bulwarks were every now and then topped by strange figures, who disappeared as suddenly as they came, and a faint murmur of voices floated across the intervening sea. Presently the report of another musket shot echoed among the hills, and something dark fell from the side of the vessel into the water. Frere, with an imprecation of mingled alarm and indignation, sprang to his feet, and shading his eyes with his hand, looked towards the brig. The soldiers, resting on their oars, imitated his gesture, and the whale-boat, thus thrown out of trim, rocked from side to side dangerously. A moment's anxious pause, and then another musket shot, followed by a woman's shrill scream, explained all. The prisoners had seized the brig. "Give way!" cried Frere, pale with rage and apprehension, and the soldiers, realizing at once the full terror of their position, forced the heavy whale-boat through the water as fast as the one miserable pair of oars could take her.

Mr. Bates, affected by the insidious influence of the hour, and lulled into a sense of false security, had gone below to tell his little playmate that she would soon be on her way to the Hobart Town of which she had heard so much; and, taking advantage of his absence, the soldier not on guard went to the forecastle to hear the prisoners singing. He found the ten together, in high good humour, listening to a "shanty"

sung by three of their number. The voices were melodious enough, and the words of the ditty--chanted by many stout fellows in many a forecastle before and since--of that character which pleases the soldier nature.

Private Grimes forgot all about the unprotected state of the deck, and sat down to listen.

While he listened, absorbed in tender recollections, James Lesly, William Ches.h.i.+re, William Russen, John Fair, and James Barker slipped to the hatchway and got upon the deck. Barker reached the aft hatchway as the soldier who was on guard turned to complete his walk, and pa.s.sing his arm round his neck, pulled him down before he could utter a cry.

In the confusion of the moment the man loosed his grip of the musket to grapple with his unseen antagonist, and Fair, s.n.a.t.c.hing up the weapon, swore to blow out his brains if he raised a finger. Seeing the sentry thus secured, Ches.h.i.+re, as if in pursuance of a preconcerted plan, leapt down the after hatchway, and pa.s.sed up the muskets from the arm-racks to Lesly and Russen. There were three muskets in addition to the one taken from the sentry, and Barker, leaving his prisoner in charge of Fair, seized one of them, and ran to the companion ladder. Russen, left unarmed by this manoeuvre, appeared to know his own duty. He came back to the forecastle, and pa.s.sing behind the listening soldier, touched the singer on the shoulder. This was the appointed signal, and John Rex, suddenly terminating his song with a laugh, presented his fist in the face of the gaping Grimes. "No noise!" he cried. "The brig's ours"; and ere Grimes could reply, he was seized by Lyon and Riley, and bound securely.

"Come on, lads!" says Rex, "and pa.s.s the prisoner down here. We've got her this time, I'll go bail!" In obedience to this order, the now gagged sentry was flung down the fore hatchway, and the hatch secured. "Stand on the hatchway, Porter," cries Rex again; "and if those fellows come up, knock 'em down with a handspoke. Lesly and Russen, forward to the companion ladder! Lyon, keep a look-out for the boat, and if she comes too near, fire!"

As he spoke the report of the first musket rang out. Barker had apparently fired up the companion hatchway.

When Mr. Bates had gone below, he found Sylvia curled upon the cus.h.i.+ons of the state-room, reading. "Well, missy!" he said, "we'll soon be on our way to papa."

Sylvia answered by asking a question altogether foreign to the subject.

"Mr. Bates," said she, pus.h.i.+ng the hair out of her blue eyes, "what's a coracle?"

"A which?" asked Mr. Bates.

"A coracle. C-o-r-a-c-l-e," said she, spelling it slowly. "I want to know."

The bewildered Bates shook his head. "Never heard of one, missy," said he, bending over the book. "What does it say?"

"'The Ancient Britons,'" said Sylvia, reading gravely, "'were little better than Barbarians. They painted their bodies with Woad'--that's blue stuff, you know, Mr. Bates--'and, seated in their light coracles of skin stretched upon slender wooden frames, must have presented a wild and savage appearance.'"

"Hah," said Mr. Bates, when this remarkable pa.s.sage was read to him, "that's very mysterious, that is. A corricle, a cory "--a bright light burst upon him. "A curricle you mean, missy! It's a carriage! I've seen 'em in Hy' Park, with young bloods a-drivin' of 'em."

"What are young bloods?" asked Sylvia, rus.h.i.+ng at this "new opening".

"Oh, n.o.bs! Swell coves, don't you know," returned poor Bates, thus again attacked. "Young men o' fortune that is, that's given to doing it grand."

"I see," said Sylvia, waving her little hand graciously. "n.o.blemen and Princes and that sort of people. Quite so. But what about coracle?"

"Well," said the humbled Bates, "I think it's a carriage, missy. A sort of Pheayton, as they call it."

Sylvia, hardly satisfied, returned to the book. It was a little mean-looking volume--a "Child's History of England"--and after perusing it awhile with knitted brows, she burst into a childish laugh.

"Why, my dear Mr. Bates!" she cried, waving the History above her head in triumph, "what a pair of geese we are! A carriage! Oh you silly man!

It's a boat!"

"Is it?" said Mr. Bates, in admiration of the intelligence of his companion. "Who'd ha' thought that now? Why couldn't they call it a boat at once, then, and ha' done with it?" and he was about to laugh also, when, raising his eyes, he saw in the open doorway the figure of James Barker, with a musket in his hand.

"Hallo! What's this? What do you do here, sir?"

"Sorry to disturb yer," says the convict, with a grin, "but you must come along o' me, Mr. Bates."

Bates, at once comprehending that some terrible misfortune had occurred, did not lose his presence of mind. One of the cus.h.i.+ons of the couch was under his right hand, and s.n.a.t.c.hing it up he flung it across the little cabin full in the face of the escaped prisoner. The soft ma.s.s struck the man with force sufficient to blind him for an instant. The musket exploded harmlessly in the air, and ere the astonished Barker could recover his footing, Bates had hurled him out of the cabin, and crying "Mutiny!" locked the cabin door on the inside.

The noise brought out Mrs. Vickers from her berth, and the poor little student of English history ran into her arms.

"Good Heavens, Mr. Bates, what is it?"

Bates, furious with rage, so far forgot himself as to swear. "It's a mutiny, ma'am," said he. "Go back to your cabin and lock the door. Those b.l.o.o.d.y villains have risen on us!" Julia Vickers felt her heart grow sick. Was she never to escape out of this dreadful life? "Go into your cabin, ma'am," says Bates again, "and don't move a finger till I tell ye. Maybe it ain't so bad as it looks; I've got my pistols with me, thank G.o.d, and Mr. Frere'll hear the shot anyway. Mutiny? On deck there!" he cried at the full pitch of his voice, and his brow grew damp with dismay when a mocking laugh from above was the only response.