Robbery Under Arms - Rolf Boldrewood (most important books of all time .TXT) 📗

He’s a great card is Starlight. It’s a pity he ever took to this kind of life.”

Father said this with a kind of real sorrow that made me look at him to see if the grog had got into his head; just as if his life, mine, and Jim’s didn’t matter a straw compared to this man’s, whoever he was, that had had so many better chances than we had and had chucked ’em all away.

But it’s a strange thing that I don’t think there’s any place in the world where men feel a more real out-and-out respect for a gentleman than in Australia. Everybody’s supposed to be free and equal now; of course, they couldn’t be in the convict days. But somehow a man that’s born and bred a gentleman will always be different from other men to the end of the world. What’s the most surprising part of it is that men like father, who have hated the breed and suffered by them, too, can’t help having a curious liking and admiration for them. They’ll follow them like dogs, fight for them, shed their blood, and die for them; must be some sort of a natural feeling. Whatever it is, it’s there safe enough, and nothing can knock it out of nine-tenths of all the men and women you meet. I began to be uneasy to see this wonderful mate of father’s, who was so many things at once⁠—a cattle-stealer, a bushranger, and a gentleman.

VI

After we’d fairly settled to stay, father began to be more pleasant than he’d ever been before. We were pretty likely, he said, to have a visit from Starlight and the half-caste in a day or two, if we’d like to wait. He was to meet him at the Hollow on purpose to help him out with the mob of fat bullocks we had looked at. Father, it appears, was coming here by himself when he met this outlying lot of Mr. Hunter’s cattle, and thought he and old Crib could bring them in by themselves. And a mighty good haul it was. Father said we should share the weaners between the three of us; that meant £50 a piece at least. The devil always helps beginners.

We put through a couple of days pleasantly enough, after our hardish bit of work. Jim found some fishhooks and a line, and we caught plenty of mullet and eels in the deep, clear waterholes. We found a couple of double-barrelled guns, and shot ducks enough to last us a week. No wonder the old frequenters of the Hollow used to live here for a month at a time, having great times of it as long as their grog lasted; and sometimes having the tribe of blacks that inhabited the district to make merry and carouse with them, like the buccaneers of the Spanish Main that I’ve read about, till the plunder was all gone. There were scrawls on the wall of the first cave we had been in that showed all the visitors had not been rude, untaught people; and Jim picked up part of a woman’s dress splashed with blood, and in one place, among some smouldering packages and boxes, a long lock of woman’s hair, fair, bright-brown, that looked as if the name of Terrible Hollow might not have been given to this lonely, wonderful glen for nothing.

We spent nearly a week in this way, and were beginning to get rather sick of the life, when father, who used always to be looking at a bare patch in the scrub above us, said⁠—

“They’re coming at last.”

“Who are coming⁠—friends?”

“Why, friends, of course. That’s Starlight’s signal. See that smoke? The half-caste always sends that up⁠—like the blacks in his mother’s tribe, I suppose.”

“Any cattle or horses with them?” said Jim.

“No, or they’d send up two smokes. They’ll be here about dinnertime, so we must get ready for them.”

We had plenty of time to get ourselves or anything else ready. In about four hours we began to look at them through a strong spyglass which father brought out. By and by we got sight of two men coming along on horseback on the top of the range the other side of the far wall. They wasn’t particularly easy to see, and every now and then we’d lose sight of ’em as they got into thick timber or behind rocks.

Father got the spyglass on to ’em at last, pretty clear, and nearly threw it down with an oath.

“By⁠—!” he says, “I believe Starlight’s hurt somehow. He’s so infernal rash. I can see the half-caste holding him on. If the police are on his tracks they’ll spring the plant here, and the whole thing’ll be blown.”

We saw them come to the top of the wall, as it were, then they stopped for a long while, then all of a sudden they seemed to disappear.

“Let’s go over to the other side,” says father; “they’re coming down the gully now. It’s a terrible steep, rough track, worse than the other. If Starlight’s hurt bad he’ll never ride down. But he has the pluck of the devil, sure enough.”

We rode over to the other side, where there was a kind of gully that came in, something like the one we came in by, but rougher, and full of gibbers.2 There was a path, but it looked as if cattle could never be driven or forced up it. We found afterwards that they had an old pack bullock that they’d trained to walk up this, and down, too, when they wanted him, and the other cattle followed in his track, as cattle will.

Father showed us a sort of cave by the side of the track, where one man, with a couple of guns and a pistol or two, could have shot down a small regiment as they came down one at a time.

We stayed in there by the track, and after about half-an-hour we heard