Dear Sir,--I paid you honest for Number One South, which I stand a good show of loosin' if you don't come out and prove your pegs. The Tips are trying the bluff game, and if you don't stand by me I'll be regular jumped and run off the field. Come afore dinner.
Yours trewly, YORKEY DICKSON.
'My word! I'll have him steady enough by the time we get back to Tin Pot. Been backed first time the day afore yesterday, and of course he's touchy,' he explained, as the colt, after a wild rear, in which he nearly fell backwards, stood with his forefeet rooted to the ground and snorted, trumpet-like. 'Shall I say you're a-comin'?'
'I suppose so--yes,' slowly answered Trevanion, half absently. 'Curse the claim and all belonging to it! I never wanted to see it again. But I won't have the fellow done out of it. Tell him I've half a mind not to come, as I'm going to Melbourne to-morrow. It's lucky for him I got word to-day.'
'All right! I'll tell him you'll be there by dinner-time. So 'long!' and with the words on his lips he turned his horse's head, and with spur and shout forced him into a hand-gallop along the main track to the township, up the principal street, and opposite the hotel door before the half-tamed excited animal had time to halt or resist.
'It's an infernal nuisance,' said Trevanion, half aloud. 'But I don't want to leave things tangled up. Yorkey paid me good money, and I shouldn't like the poor devil to be wronged by those scoundrels. I'll walk, too; it will do me good, and keep me from thinking.'
The day promised to be glorious. Slowly the mountain mist had rolled back, and gradually disclosed the tones and magically blended colour effects which the awakened morn revealed. A dull grayish green tinted the undulating prairies, stretching to the darkly dense forest which clothed the foot-hills of the Australian Alps. The sombre mountains gradually ripened in colour as the sun-rays pierced them in concentric lines, so that a graduated scale, shading from darkest green to brilliant emerald, developed hourly. Deathlike, still eternal-seeming, majestic, their snow-crowns rested on Bogong and Buffalo, with far-seen Kosciusko and Feathertop in the azure distance.
The solar heat became distinctly noticeable--indeed, bordering on oppressive. But Lance, excited in spite of himself, stepped joyously forward as he felt the miles slipping behind him, as though on some long-remembered schoolboy truant expedition. How different was the free elastic stride with which he covered the ground now from the aimless, dejected shuffle of himself and his fellow galley-slaves of the _President_! His spirits rose with each mile of the way traversed.
Surely everything was turning in his favour. He would be pardoned yet, his fair fame re-established. His innocence would not be so hard to prove, after all. Tessie and Kate could _now_ give different evidence.
'Yes! England, Estelle, Wychwood! Fate would repent her of this dire injustice. He would yet again place foot on the shore of his native land, the home of his ancestors, as surely as he would presently ascend the ridge on the other side of this Mountain Ash Gully, into which he was now descending; as surely as he would behold the plain far-stretching towards the horizon, the diggers' tents in the secluded valley.'
Thus thinking, and moving forward with eager, quickened step, he reached the bottom of the ravine, which--a notable exception to the general distribution of timber--was covered with a scrub or thicket of the mountain ash saplings for some distance back. From the course of the little stream, eastward, appeared a narrow flat, riddled with shafts long worked and abandoned, but still furnishing, in this depth and closeness, a record of former richness.
'What would Kate say if she saw me here to-day?' he thought to himself.
And then her warning rang in his ears. 'As you value your life,' he seemed to hear. 'When I get back,' he said, 'I will swear to take excellent care of myself.'
'If such a thing as prudence can be knocked into a Trevanion, surely what I have undergone should produce it. But what a lunatic! what a benighted idiot I was to leave England at all! Why couldn't I have borne the old man's petulance, like scores of other fellows that I have known?
All would have come right in the end, with Estelle's help. What a girl she was! And what a fool I have been! Looking back, it seems incredible that I--that _any man_--could have been so mad, so blindly besotted! I wonder how the old Squire is now? He and Estelle must have a lonely time enough of it in the gloomy old manor-house. Well, I swear--as God hears me now--that when I return--if I ever do--I will humble myself before the old man, and, yes, try for the rest of my life to make amends to him and to her for the sorrow and anxiety which I have cost them.'
As this last thought passed through his mind, shaping itself unconsciously into articulate speech, he stopped, with his right foot raised upon a block of stone, and listened intently, with head half turned towards the thickest portion of the scrub, which here approached the narrow track worn in old days by the cattle-herds of the surrounding pastures.
At that moment a shot was heard, and Lance Trevanion fell forward on his face, temporarily disabled, if not mortally wounded. Following the report, two men emerged from the covert, one of whom carried a gun. They were Caleb Coke and Lawrence Trevenna.
'That dropped him,' said the former, with a fiendish chuckle. 'Not far from the "curl," I'd say, if it was a bullock. Many a one the old single barrel has finished. I thought she'd carry straight that distance.'
Here the wounded man moved his arm and groaned.
'Ha! my fine gentleman!' said Trevenna, 'I swore I'd have ye under my feet yet. Where are ye now?' And here the hellish villain spurned the unresisting form of his prostrate foe. 'What do ye say about "time" now?
This is the last round of all.'
'That's no good,' growled Coke, 'and d--d cowardly, into the bargain.
You couldn't stand up to him when he was right, so ye may leave him alone now. He's only stunned; the ball's grazed his forehead. Lend us that tomahawk o' yourn. I'll finish him.'
Two crashing blows, one of which clove the skull even to the brain, and this man--this 'masterpiece of nature,' so lately in full possession of the strength and beauty of youth--lay a disfigured corpse.
'Now lend a hand and let's get him off the road a bit,' said Coke, as coolly as if he was directing the assistants of a slaughter-yard.
'Scrape some sand over that blood; there ain't much, but it might show.
We've got to strip him first, and then it won't take long to drop him where he won't be seen again in a hurry.'
Dragged through the scrub some twenty yards or more, the dead man lay with dreadful widely open eyes as they had placed him. A heartrending spectacle surely, had but the men who now busied themselves in stripping the corpse possessed the feelings of ordinary humanity. But a lifetime of crime, for the most part undetected, had dulled the heart and brain of the older ruffian, to the exclusion of all but the baser instincts--a veritable demon disguised in form of man. Fiends of the pit could scarce have exceeded him in remorseless cruelty.
In Trevenna's case the love of gain, the hope of booty, together with complicated feelings of jealousy and revenge, rendered him callous to all natural feeling. Swiftly was the dead man divested of his clothing; his watch, a few bank notes, which he had perhaps placed in his purse in readiness for the morrow, were secured, and after counting and inspection, taken possession of by Trevenna.
This done, the old man pointed to a mound a few yards distant around which the saplings clustered thickly, showing that some time had elapsed since the shaft which it marked had been commenced.
'That's the deepest shaft on the flat; they was a-sinking for the blue "lead" and bottomed on rock. You take hold of him.'
A combined effort placed the dead man on the edge of a shaft, down which the old man peered with ghoulish glee, as if to gauge the depth. 'Hold on,' he said, as he dropped a stone. The men waited for some seconds, which seemed long, until a dull thud came up from the lower level, telling by its delay that the shaft was little under a hundred feet.
In another moment the unresisting form was drawn to the edge of the yawning black-mouthed pit, which, so wondrous straight and narrow, had been driven deeply into the bowels of the earth. A push, a heave, and the once noble and beautiful form of him who was Lance Trevanion disappeared from the face of the earth, hidden from the light of the sun, from the ken of mortal man, for ever and for ever!
As the strange dull sound, so unlike any other, which follows the fall of a human body down a deep shaft came up from below, Trevenna shuddered in spite of his hardihood.
The old man laughed aloud. 'You're only half baked yet, Larry, with all your blowing. When you've seen as many coves rubbed out as I have, you'll have better narves. We've got a ticklish game to play yet, mind ye, so don't go a-shivering and shaking like a school-girl. Take off yer duds now and collar his, and let's see how yer look.'
Trevenna, with a rude oath, repelled the accusation of softness, and doffing his own garments, which he made into a bundle and threw down the shaft, proceeded to dress himself in the dead man's clothes. This transformation effected, the curious similarity between the two men became so apparent to the only spectator that Coke yelled with apparent amazement and danced around him with fiendish delight.
'By ----!' he cried, 'if that ain't the rummiest fake ever I see. Your own mother wouldn't know the difference. Hanged if _I_ could tell, and I knowed the pair on ye purty well. Pitch a log or two down the hole; it won't be long afore it falls in. It's bad standing ground, and then he won't need no tombstone. We'd as well collar our horses now and get to the cove's hut after dark. Then you start fair to-morrow morning as 'Ballarat Harry,' alias Lance Trevanion, Esquire, and I'm d--d if there's a digger on Omeo as'll know the difference. What are ye lookin'
in the grass for?'
'When we had the--the mill--I swear he had a watch-chain. It must have dropped hereabouts.'
'Well, I'm blowed!' chuckled the older ruffian, 'if that ain't a good 'un. Takin' a man's life, his money, his duds, and his watch, and then growlin' because the chain's a-missin'. You'll find it in his hut, I'll go bail.'
CHAPTER XXII
Lance Trevanion, dwelling and working by himself, had accustomed the miners around Omeo to his irregular, independent mode of life. Sometimes he was absent for days together, returning at midnight or dawn, as the case might be. When it was reported that he had been seen to enter his hut just after dark in company with another man, no one looked upon the circumstance as calling for comment. He had been at the claim which he had sold to Yorkey Dickson early in the day, and being detained there, discussing the intricacies of a mining dispute, had reached his home after sunset.
On the next morning--the one fixed for the departure of the escort for Melbourne--he was heard inquiring from the Barker storekeeper if his gold had been properly labelled and directed. 'He was not sure about going himself,' he said, 'but thought it likely he might at the last minute.' The storekeeper looked at him with a certain air of surprise.
'What are you staring at?' he asked abruptly, at the same time fixing his eyes intently on the man.
'Oh, nothing, Harry,' Barker replied apologetically, 'only I thought there was something queer about you this morning. If you'd been a drinking man I'd have thought you'd had a booze on the quiet. And your face ain't got rid of them marks yet. Seemed they was about gone, last time I seen yer.'
'They'll not last much longer,' he said grimly, 'and the man that gave them to me got the worst of it. He won't be so ready for a row in future.'
'Is that so?' inquired the trader confidentially. 'We all thought it must have been his fault, you bein' such a quiet card in a general way.
Serve him right, I say.'
'So I say too,' replied his auditor. 'By the way, just send your boy over to the post-office to see if there are any letters for me. I'll have a smoke while he runs over.'
In a few minutes the letters came. One from the banker in Melbourne acknowledging his last draft and informing 'Mr. Henry Johnson' that they would receive and hold to his order the parcel of gold of which they had advices. The other, addressed to 'Mr. Henry Johnson, Long Creek, Omeo,'
was in a female hand. Mr. Johnson placed it in his pocket unread, saying carelessly that it would do to read when he got home.
'He's a rum chap, that Ballarat Harry, as ever I see in Omeo,' said the storekeeper. 'Sometimes so jolly in a quiet way, and then he's as stiff and stand off as can be. But I'm dashed if ever I seen him as queer as he was to-day; why, I hardly knowed him when he came in first!'
When 'Harry Johnson' reached his hut, he sat down, and shutting the door, which he carefully secured with a bolt, took out the letter and read as follows--a sardonic smile upon his features the while--