Harry Heathcote of Gangoil Part 5

"Can I speak a word with you?"

"Certainly. Will you come into the office, or will you go across to the house?"

Harry said that the office would do, and followed Medlicot into a little box-like inclosure which contained a desk and two stools.

"Not much of an office, is it? What can I do for you, Mr. Heathcote?"

Then Harry began his story, which he told at considerable length. He apologized for troubling his neighbor at all on the subject, and endeavored to explain, somewhat awkwardly, that as Mr. Medlicot was a new-comer, he probably might not understand the kind of treatment to which employers in the bush were occasionally subject from their men.

On this matter he said much, which, had he been a better tactician, he might probably have left unspoken. He then went on to the story of his own quarrel with Nokes, who had, in truth, been grossly impudent to the women about the house, but who had been punished by instant and violent dismissal from his employment. It was evidently Harry's idea that a man who had so sinned against his master should be allowed to find no other master--at any rate in that district; an idea with which the other man, who had lately come out from the old country, did not at all sympathize.

"Do you want me to dismiss him?" said Medlicot, in a tone which implied that that would be the last thing he would think of doing.

"You haven't heard me yet." Then Harry went on and told of the fires in the heat of summer, and of their terrible effects--of the easy manner of revenge which they supplied to angry, unscrupulous men, and of his own fears at the present moment.

"I can believe it all," said Medlicot, "and am very sorry that it should be so. But I can not see the justice of punis.h.i.+ng a man on the merest, vaguest suspicion. Your only ground for imputing this crime to him is that your own conduct to him may have given him a motive."

Harry had schooled himself vigorously during the ride as to his own demeanor, and had resolved that he would be cool. "I was going on to tell you," he said, "what occurred that night after I saw you up by the fence." Then he described how he and his boy had entered the shed, and had both seen and heard a man as he escaped from it; how the boy had at once declared that the man was Nokes; how the following day he had discovered the leaves, which Nokes no doubt had deposited there just before the rain, intending to burn the place at once; and how Nokes's manner to him within the last half hour had corroborated his suspicions.

"Is he the boy you call Jacko?"

"That's the name he goes by."

"You don't know his real name?"

"I have never heard any other name."

"Nor any thing about him?" Harry owned, in answer to half a dozen such questions, that Jacko had come to Gangoil about six months ago--he did not know whence--had been kept for a week's job, and had then been allowed to remain about the place without any regular wages. "You admit it was quite dark," continued Medlicot.

Harry did not at all like the cross-examination, and his resolution to be cool was quickly fading. "I told you that I saw myself the figure of a man."

"But that you barely saw a figure. You did not form any opinion of your own as to the man's ident.i.ty."

Harry Heathcote was as honest as the sun. Much as he disliked being cross-examined, he found himself compelled not only to say the exact truth, but the whole truth. "Certainly not. I barely saw a glimpse of a figure, and, till I spoke to Nokes just now, I almost doubted whether the lad could have distinguished him. I am sure he was right now."

"Really, Mr. Heathcote, I can't go along with you. You are accusing a man of committing an offense, which I believe is capital, on the evidence of a boy of whom you know nothing, who may have his own reasons for spiting the man, and whom you yourself did not believe till you had looked this man in the face. I think you allow yourself to be guided too much by your own power of intuition."

"No, I don't," said Harry, who hated his neighbor's methodical argument.

"At any rate, I can't consent to take a man's bread out of his mouth, and to send him away tainted as he would be with this suspicion, either because Jacko thought that he saw him in the dark, or because--"

"I have never asked you to send him away."

"What is it you want, then?"

"I want to have him watched, so that he may feel that if he attempts to destroy my property his guilt will be detected."

"Who is to watch him?"

"He is in your employment."

"He lives in the hut down beyond the gate. Am I to keep a sentry there all night, and every night?"

"I will pay for it."

"No, Mr. Heathcote. I don't pretend to know this country yet, but I'll encourage no such espionage as that. At any rate, it is not English. I dare say the man misbehaved himself in your employment.

You say he was drunk. I do not doubt it. But he is not a drunkard, for he never drinks here. A man is not to starve forever because he once got drunk and was impertinent. Nor is he to have a spy at his heels because a boy whom n.o.body knows chooses to denounce him. I am sorry that you should be in trouble, but I do not know that I can help you."

Harry's pa.s.sion was now very high, and his resolution to be cool was almost thrown to the winds. Medlicot had said many things which were odious to him. In the first place, there had been a tone of insufferable superiority, so Harry thought, and that, too, when he himself had divested himself of all the superiority naturally attached to his position, and had frankly appealed to Medlicot as a neighbor. And then this new-fangled sugar grower had told him that he was not English, and had said grand words, and had altogether made himself objectionable. What did this man know of the Australian bush, that he should dare to talk of this or that as being wrong because it was un-Englis.h.!.+ In England there were police to guard men's property.

Here, out in the Australian forests, a man must guard his own, or lose it. But perhaps it was the indifference to the ruin of the women belonging to him that Harry Heathcote felt the strongest. The stranger cared nothing for the utter desolation which one unscrupulous ruffian might produce, felt no horror at the idea of a vast devastating fire, but could be indignant in his mock philanthropy because it was proposed to watch the doings of a scoundrel!

"Good-morning," said Harry, turning round and leaving the office brusquely. Medlicot followed him, but Harry went so quickly that not another word was spoken. To him the idea of a neighbor in the bush refusing such a.s.sistance as he had asked was as terrible as to us is the thought of a s.h.i.+p at sea leaving another s.h.i.+p in distress. He unhitched his horse from the fence, and galloped home as fast as the animal would carry him.

Medlicot, when he was left alone, took two or three turns about the mill, as though inspecting the work, but at every turn fixed his eyes for a few moments on Noke's face. The man was standing under a huge caldron regulating the escape of the boiling juice into the different vats by raising and lowering a trap, and giving directions to the Polynesians as he did so. He was evidently conscious that he was being regarded, and, as is usual in such a condition, manifestly failed in his struggle to appear unconscious. Medlicot acknowledged to himself that the man could not look even him in the face. Was it possible that he had been wrong, and that Heathcote, though he had expressed himself badly, was ent.i.tled to some sympathy in his fear of what might be done to him by an enemy? Medlicot also desired to be just, being more rational, more logical, and less impulsive than the other, being also somewhat too conscious of his own superior intelligence. He knew that Heathcote had gone away in great dudgeon, and he almost feared that he had been harsh and unneighborly. After a while he stood opposite Nokes and addressed him.

"Do the squatters suffer much from fires?" he said.

"Heathcote has been talking to you about that," said the man.

"Can't you say Mr. Heathcote when you speak of a gentleman whose bread you have eaten?"

"Mr. Heathcote, if you like it. We ain't particular to a shade out here as you are at home. He has been telling you about fires, has he?"

"Well, he has."

"And talking of me, I suppose?"

"You were talking of having a turn at mining some day. How would it be with you if you were to be off to Gympie?"

"You mean to say I'm to go, Mr. Medlicot?"

"I don't say that at all."

"Look here, Mr. Medlicot. My going or staying won't make any difference to Heathcote. There's a lot of 'em about here hates him that much that he is never to be allowed to rest in peace. I tell you that fairly. It ain't any thing as I shall do. Them's not my ways, Mr. Medlicot. But he has enemies here as'll never let him rest."

"Who are they?"

"Pretty nigh every body round. He has carried himself that high they won't stand him. Who's Heathcote?"

"Name some who are his enemies."

"There's the Brownbies."

"Oh, the Brownbies. Well, it's a bad thing to have enemies." After that he left the sugar-house and went across to the cottage.

CHAPTER V.