Robbery Under Arms - Rolf Boldrewood (the best books to read TXT) 📗
- Author: Rolf Boldrewood
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Starlight rests his rifle a minute on the old horse's shoulder, and the man that had fired the shot fell over with a kick. Something hits me in the ribs like a stone, and another on the right arm, which drops down just as I was aiming at a young fellow with light hair that had ridden pretty close up, under a myall tree.
Jim and Sir Ferdinand let drive straight at one another the same minute. They both meant it this time. Sir Ferdinand's hat turned part round on his head, but poor old Jim drops forward on his face and tears up the grass with his hands. I knew what that sign meant.
Goring rides straight at Starlight and calls on him to surrender. He had his rifle on his hip, but he never moved. There he stood, with his hand on the mane of the old horse. 'Keep back if you're wise, Goring,' says he, as quiet and steady as if he'd been cattle-drafting. 'I don't want to have your blood on my head; but if you must——'
Goring had taken so many men in his day that he was got over confident-like. He thought Starlight would give in at the last moment or miss him in the rush. My right arm was broken, and now that Jim was down we might both be took, which would be a great crow for the police. Anyhow, he was a man that didn't know what fear was, and he chanced it.
Two of the other troopers fired point blank at Starlight as Goring rode at him, and both shots told. He never moved, but just lifted his rifle as the other came up at the gallop. Goring threw up his arms, and rolled off his horse a dying man.
Starlight looked at him for a minute.
'We're quits,' he says; 'it's not once or twice either you've pulled trigger on me. I knew this day would come.'
Then he sinks down slowly by the side of the old horse and leans against his fore leg, Rainbow standing quite steady, only tossing his head up and down the old way. I could see, by the stain on Starlight's mouth and the blood on his breast, he'd been shot through the lungs.
I was badly hit too, and going in the head, though I didn't feel it so much at the time. I began to hear voices like in a dream; then my eyes darkened, and I fell like a log.
When I came to, all the men was off their horses, some round Goring—him they lifted up and propped against a tree; but he was stone dead, any one could see. Sir Ferdinand was on his knees beside Starlight, talking to him, and the other saying a word now and then, quite composed and quiet-like.
'Close thing, Morringer, wasn't it?' I heard him say. 'You were too quick for us; another day and we'd been out of reach.'
'True enough. Horses all dead beat; couldn't raise a remount for love or money.'
'Well, the game's up now, isn't it? I've held some good cards too, but they never told, somehow. I'm more sorry for Jim—and—that poor girl, Aileen, than I am for myself.'
'Don't fret—there's a good fellow. Fortune of war, you know. Anything else?'
Here he closed his eyes, and seemed gone; but he wakes up again, and begins in a dreamy way. His words came slowly, but his voice never altered one bit.
'I'm sorry I fired at poor Warrigal now. No dog ever was more faithful than he has been to me all through till now; but I was vexed at his having sold Dick and poor Jim.'
'We knew we should find you here or hereabouts without that,' says Sir Ferdinand.
'How was that?'
'Two jockey-boys met you one night at Calga gate; one of them recognised Locket by the white patch on her neck. He wired to us at the next station.'
'So you were right, after all, Dick. It was a mistake to take that mare. I've always been confoundedly obstinate; I admit that. Too late to think of it now, isn't it?'
'Anything else I can do?' says Sir Ferdinand.
'Give her this ring,' he pulls it off his finger, 'and you'll see Maddie Barnes gets the old horse, won't you? Poor old Rainbow! I know she'll take care of him; and a promise is a promise.'
'All right. He's the property of the Government now, you know; but I'll square it somehow. The General won't object under the circumstances.'
Then he shuts his eyes for a bit. After a while he calls out—
'Dick! Dick Marston.'
'I'm here,' says I.
'If you ever leave this, tell Aileen that her name was the last word I spoke—the very last. She foresaw this day; she told me so. I've had a queer feeling too, this week back. Well, it's over now. I don't know that I'm sorry, except for others. I say, Morringer, do you remember the last pigeon match you and I shot in, at Hurlingham?'
'Why, good God!' says Sir Ferdinand, bending down, and looking into his face. 'It can't be; yes, by Jove, it is——'
He spoke some name I couldn't catch, but Starlight put a finger on his lips, and whispers—
'You won't tell, will you? Say you won't?'
The other nodded.
He smiled just like his old self.
'Poor Aileen!' he says, quite faint. His head fell back. Starlight was dead!
Chapter 50
The breath was hardly out of him when a horse comes tearing through the scrub on to the little plain, with a man on his back that seemed hurt bad or drunk, he rolled in his saddle so. The head of him was bound up with a white cloth, and what you could see of it was dark-looking, with bloodstains on it. I knew the figure and the seat on a horse, though I couldn't see his face. He didn't seem to have much strength, but he was one of those sort of riders that can't fall off a horse, that is unless they're dead. Even then you'd have to pull him down. I believe he'd hang on somehow like a dead 'possum on a branch.
It was Warrigal!
They all knew him when he came close up, but none of the troopers raised their pieces or thought of stopping him. If a dead man had rode right into the middle of us he'd have looked like that. He stopped his horse, and slipped off on his feet somehow.
He'd had a dreadful wound, any one could see. There was blood on the rags that bound his head all up, and being round his forehead and over his chin it made him look more and more like a corpse. Not much you could see, only his eyes, that were burning bright like two coals of fire.
Up to Starlight's body he goes and sits himself down by it. He takes the dead man's head into his lap, looks down at the face, and bursts out into the awfullest sort of crying and lamenting I ever heard of a living man. I've seen the native women mourning for their dead with the blood and tears running down their faces together. I've known them sit for days and nights without stirring from round a corpse, not taking a bite or sup the whole time. I've seen white people that's lost an only child that had, maybe, been all life and spirits an hour before. But in all my life I have never seen no man, nor woman neither, show such regular right-down grief as Warrigal did for his master—the only human creature he loved in the wide world, and him lying stiff on the ground before him.
He lifts up the dead face and wipes the blood from the lips so careful; talks to it in his own language (or leastways his mother's) like a woman over a child. Then he sobbed and groaned and shook all over as if the very life was going out of him. At last he lays the head very soft and gentle down on the ground and looks round. Sir Ferdinand gives him his handkerchief, and he lays it over the face. Then he turns away from the men that stood round, and got up looking that despairing and wretched that I couldn't help pitying him, though he was the cause of the whole thing as far as we could see.
Sudden as a flash of powder he pulls out a small revolver—a Derringer—Starlight gave him once, and holds it out to me, butt-end first.
'You shoot me, Dick Marston; you shoot me quick,' he says. 'It's all my fault. I killed him—I killed the Captain. I want to die and go with him to the never-never country parson tell us about—up there!'
One of the troopers knocked his hand up. Sir Ferdinand gave a nod, and a pair of handcuffs were slipped over his wrists.
'You told the police the way I went?' says I. 'It's all come out of that.'
'Thought they'd grab you at Willaroon,' says he, looking at me quite sorrowful with his dark eyes, like a child. 'If you hadn't knocked me down that last time, Dick Marston, I'd never have done nothing to you nor Jim. I forgot about the old down. That brought it all back again. I couldn't help it, and when I see Jimmy Wardell I thought they'd catch you and no one else.'
'Well, you've made a clean sweep of the lot of us, Warrigal,' says I, 'poor Jim and all. Don't you ever show yourself to the old man or go back to the Hollow, if you get out of this.'
'He's dead now. I'll never hear him speak again,' says he, looking over to the figure on the grass. 'What's the odds about me?'
I didn't hear any more; I must have fainted away again. Things came into my head about being taken in a cart back to Cunnamulla, with Jim lying dead on one side of me and Starlight on the other. I was only half-sensible, I expect. Sometimes I thought we were alive, and another time that the three of us were dead and going to be buried.
What makes it worse I've seen that sight so often since—the fight on the plain and the end of it all. Just like a picture it comes back to me over and over again, sometimes in broad day, as I sit in my cell, in the darkest midnight, in the early dawn.
It rises before my eyes—the bare plain, and the dead men lying where they fell; Sir Ferdinand on his horse, with the troopers standing round; and the half-caste sitting with Starlight's head in his lap, rocking himself to and fro, and crying and moaning like a woman that's lost her child.
I can see Jim, too—lying on his face with his hat rolled off and both arms spread out wide. He never moved after. And to think that only the day before he had thought he might see his wife and child again! Poor old Jim! If I shut my eyes they won't go away. It will be the last sight I shall see in this world before—before I'm——
The coroner of the district held an inquest, and the jury found a verdict of 'justifiable homicide by Sir Ferdinand Morringer and other members of the police force of New South Wales in the case of one James Marston, charged with robbery under arms, and of a man habitually known as “Starlight”, but of whose real name there was no evidence before the jury.' As for the police, it was wilful murder against us. Warrigal and I were remanded to Turon Court for further evidence, and as soon as we were patched up a bit by the doctor—for both of us looked like making a die of it for two or three weeks—we were started on horseback with four troopers overland all the way
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