XXXVIII
We scuttled home pretty sharp after we mounted, and got back by dark easy enough. The road was rough, but father’s old mare could spin over stones and through scrub, up hills and down gullies, most like a rock wallaby. I never saw such a surefooted brute. She was what they call a mountain horse, bred in those parts, most likely run in young out of a wild mob. What her blood was of course no one could tell. A deal of hair about her legs and quarters, strong enough to start a ton in a dray; but she’d never looked through a collar in her life, and hated the very sight of harness. She’d kick for five minutes if she heard a trace chain rattle. She had a trifle of vice in her way, was awful touchy, and not over quiet at the best of times with anyone but father. But she knew him, and though he showed her no mercy and rode her till she was close up dead many a time, she’d do more for him than anyone else. It’s the old story all the world over; it’s not them that cares most for others that gets the best served. The other way on, as far as I see. She was pretty well up in front for a mare, and had a goodish shoulder, well-laid back, and her legs and feet were like iron. As for cattle she knew them like a book, and could turn and twist, and stop and wheel, as if she understood what their very thoughts were. She’d open her mouth, and bite, too, if they hung back more than she liked in a thick place. She could gallop all day, and I believe if you’d pitched her down a well she’d have lit on her legs. Anybody would have thought my horse, by the looks of him, could have run away from her, instead of which, now she got her head set towards home, and Dad not in the best of temper, never thought of stopping for anything, it gave me all I knew to keep sight of him.
When we got in there was great laughing and chaffing about our sortie, as Starlight called it, to fetch in letters and a bundle of newspapers. There was no letter for poor Jim, which made him a bit miserabler than usual; but we opened the newspapers, and had a great read at them.
It ain’t often that chaps like us have the chance of seeing such a lot about themselves in print; not that it spoke of us in a way that most people would have liked. It was t’other way on mostly, and yet it was better, in a manner of speaking, than being taken ho notice of at all.
How they did go in. You’d ha’ thought the end of the world was come. They didn’t know which to blame most. These were the respectable, solid sort of newspapers. “The atrocious villainy of the men who had planned and carried out the most daring crime that had ever been committed in the Australian colonies; the inefficiency of the police force or the feebleness of the Government.” My word! They got it hot all round; they let off nobody. Some of them thought it was because there hadn’t been schools enough for the young growing boys and girls, or else they were the wrong sort. Others, that the clergymen hadn’t done their duty in time past. You never heard such a bobbery as our bit of goldfields work, not according to the regulations, had kicked up.
First of all, it was pretty well known that most of the men concerned in it were natives. That everybody seemed to take very much to heart, and I don’t so much wonder. If it had been worked by a lot of the riffraff that had come from America and the old countries they wouldn’t have felt it so much. Of course there were thousands of foreign rascals, robbers, and murderers by profession on the goldfields, who had spent their lives in that kind of work, from whom no better could be expected. The wonder was, when they came to think of it, that it shouldn’t have struck some of ’em before and have been carried out. Simple as it looked now it was done and over.
But what came hardest and was felt so bitter by all who had made New South Wales their home, and had a stake in it, was that all or nearly all of the escort robbers and murderers, for they were nothing short of this in intention, were young men. None of ’em past five and twenty. Born and brought up in the land. “Sons of the soil,” and all the rest of it.
The premeditation with which the whole thing had been planned, the coolness and completeness with which it had been carried out, the cold-blooded carelessness as to shedding blood and taking life—all these (the Morning Advertiser said) were especially bad features in the case, and led to a most gloomy outlook upon the prospects of the rising generation of the land, and to that sense of ordinary morality without which communities could not exist.
Then the Imperial had an innings.
Were we ever to receive any adequate measure of police protection in requital for the enormous annual expenditure upon that department: Could anything have been more ludicrous than sending a force of half-a-dozen policemen (there were eight, but that wouldn’t sound so well) to guard £60,000 worth of gold? Was it not a special temptation offered to a vagrant population, among whom were notoriously some of the boldest and most experienced “filibusters” the world could show? They had probably been anticipated, but was it unlikely that some particularly sensational act of spoliation would not take place if this puerile policy of temptation was adhered to? Would it not strike the man of culture that a parallel was afforded to the situation in which Lord Clive found himself, with the treasure-house of the Nabob of Arcot at his disposal, concerning which he subsequently exclaimed, “Good God, Mr. Speaker, when I think over it, I am astonished at my own moderation.”
And does any well-wisher of this fair land desire this state of things to continue? We put this question in all sorrow and sincerity to the Ministry, and—pause for a reply!
“Well done, Haverton; very neatly put, Watty, old man. I call that very straight from the shoulder,” said Starlight. (We knew the reporter for the Imperial on the Turon and many a supper of oysters and stout had we polished off together.) “Can’t you see him knocking off this for the night mail, sitting in that little hole of an office of his, with his shirtsleeves rolled up and a pot of beer beside him? Well, it’s all true enough, God knows; and it’s a pity too. However, we can do nothing to help that now. The end must come some day. What does the other chap say—the Turon Star?” This was him:
We are aweary, aweary of writing upon this melancholy yet distracting theme. We can but reiterate our conviction that the Government are taking all human means for the discovery of the actors in this most gruesome tragedy—that the police are straining every nerve in their endeavour to fathom the mystery of the disappearance of the outlaws. It is satisfactory to have to announce the recovery of a large proportion of the stolen gold, which was discovered, after a close pursuit, upon the packhorses which the outlaws had been forced to abandon at the foot of the Weddin Mountains, to the fastnesses of which they were doubtless making their way.
“So they were done after all. Dashed if I’m not glad of it,” says dad. “I told them the horses was nothing nigh up to the weight, nor in condition neither; and they was cussed cheeky over it too. Sarve ’em right; they’ll know better another time.”
“So I say, governor,” says Starlight; “well, what comes next?”
We are gratified to hear that the Government have offered a reward of one thousand pounds each for the capture of any of the band, and have, besides, caused sentence of outlawry to be legally pronounced against them.
“What’s that last fakement?” says father, rather earnest-like. “Thousand here or thousand there don’t matter much as I knows of. Them that ’ud let on for a thousand ’ud let on for a hundred. The price don’t make no sort of difference. But they think it does. But what’s a outlaw? We’re out o’ law, and justice too, far enough a’ready; ain’t we?”
“Well, we’re ‘bold outlaws,’ in one sense, as you very I sensibly remark, governor; but not in another. Men have to be declared outlaws and all that sort of thing by a Judge in the regular way. We had to be called up to appear and answer for our crimes.”
“And did they think we’d come?” said father.
“Probably not. But that leaves them at liberty to pronounce us legally outlaws. That being the case, any man may take us alive or dead, shoot us from behind a tree without notice. And the reward paid all the same for us, dead or alive. They’re not obliged to call upon us to surrender in the Queen’s name. We’re henceforth like hunted wolves or mad dogs to our fellow-men. Everyone may join in the hue and cry that likes.”
“Well, so they could afore,” says father. “I don’t see nothin’ in it. If they take us they take us—that’s all about it. It don’t bring ’em no nearer to us that I see. It’s the p’leece and us for it—the old thing. Them and their outlawry be blowed!”
The old man, somehow, seemed to think more than he liked to say about the outlawry question. It worried him as something he wasn’t used to. Not that it made any difference, as he said at first, to men that knew their lives were forfeited whenever they could be surprised, overtaken, outfought, or betrayed. It was wonderful none of these things had happened to us yet. Our fortune might change any day, of course. But with luck and pluck, plenty of good horses, a thorough knowledge of the country and the goodwill on the quiet of plenty of people who didn’t want to see us run down, we might last a few years yet.
A thousand pounds a head was a good price certainly! We were worth as much as so many imported bulls (Starlight said) to any men that could round us up and run us in. We were becoming more valuable, too, every day, in a manner of speaking; and there was no saying how much we mightn’t be worth if we put in a few more years at our present profession. The worst of it was, none of the money would go into our own pockets; we were working for a reputation that was to benefit others, not ourselves. Starlight used to make us laugh sometimes in spite of ourselves, when he got into one of his mad humours, and went on talking like this.
While we were taking it easy, and except for the loneliness of it as safe as if we had been out of the country altogether, Moran and the other fellows hadn’t quite such a good time of it. They were hunted from pillar to post by the police, who were mad to do something to meet the chaff that was always being cast up to them of having a lot of bushrangers robbing and shooting all over the country and not being able to take them. There were some out-of-the-way places enough in the Weddin Mountains, but none like the Hollow, where they could lie quiet and untroubled for weeks together, if they wanted. Besides, they had lost their gold by their own foolishness in not having better packhorses, and hadn’t much to carry on with, and it’s not a life that can be worked on the cheap, I can tell you, as we often found out. Money comes easy in our line, but it goes faster still, and a man must never be short of a pound or two to chuck about if he wants to keep his information fresh, and to have people working for him night and day with a will.
So they had some everyday sort of work cut out to keep themselves going, and it took them all their time to get from one part of the country where they were known to some other place where they weren’t expected. Having out-and-out good hacks, and being all of them chaps that had been born in the bush and knew it like a book, it was wonderful how they managed to rob people at one place one day, and then be at some place a hundred miles off the next. Ever so many times they came off, and they’d call one another Starlight and Marston, and so on, till the people got regularly dumbfoundered, and couldn’t tell which of the gang it was that seemed to be all over the country, and in two places at the same time. We used to laugh ourselves sometimes, when we’d hear tell that all the travellers passing Big Hill on a certain day were “stuck up by Wall’s gang and robbed.” Every man Jack that came along for hours was made to stand behind a clump of trees with two of the gang guarding them, so as the others couldn’t see them as they came up. They all had to deliver up what they’d got about ’em, and no one was allowed to stir till sundown, for fear they should send word to the police. Then the gang went off, telling them to stay where they were for an hour or else they’d come back and shoot them.
This would be on the western road, perhaps. Next day a station on the southern road, a hundred and twenty miles off, would be robbed by the same lot. Money and valuables taken away, and three or four of the best horses. Their own they’d leave behind in such a state that anyone could see how far and fast they’d been ridden.
They often got stood to, when they were hard up for a mount, and it was this way. The squatters weren’t alike, by any manner of means, in their way of dealing with them. Many of them had lots of fine riding-horses in their paddocks. These would be yarded some fine night, the best taken and ridden hard, perhaps returned next morning, perhaps in a day or two.
It was pretty well known who had used them, but nothing was said; the best policy, some think, is to hold a candle to the devil, especially when the devil’s camped close handy to your paddock, and might any time sack your house, burn down your woolshed and stacks, or even shoot at your worshipful self if he didn’t like the way you treated him and his imps.
These careful respectable people didn’t show themselves too forward either in giving help or information to the police. Not by no means. They never encouraged them to stay when they came about the place, and weren’t that over liberal in feeding their horses, or giving them a hand in any way, that they’d come again in a hurry. If they were asked about the bushrangers, or when they’d been last seen, they were very careful, and said as little as possible.
No one wonders at people like the Barnes’s, or little farmers, or the very small sort of settlers, people with one flock of sheep or a few cows, doing this sort of thing; they have a lot to lose and nothing to get if they gain ill-will. But regular country gentlemen, with big properties, lots of money, and all the rest of it, they’re there to show a good example to the countryside, whether it paid for the time or whether it didn’t; and all us sort of chaps, on the cross or not, like them all the better for it.
When I say all of us, I don’t mean Moran. A sulky, black-hearted, revengeful brute he always was—I don’t think he’d any manly feeling about him. He was a half-bred gipsy, they told us that knew where he was reared, and Starlight said gipsy blood was a queer cross, for devilry and hardness it couldn’t be beat; he didn’t wonder a bit at Moran’s being the scoundrel he was.
No doubt he had it in for more than one of the people who helped the police to chevy Wall and his lot about. From what I knew of him I was sure he’d do some mischief one of these days, and make all the country ten times as hot against us as they were now. He had no mercy about him. He’d rather shoot a man any day than not; and he’d burn a house down just for the pleasure of seeing how the owner looked when it was lighted.
Starlight used to say he despised men that tried to save themselves cowardly-like more than he could say, and thought them worse than the bushrangers themselves. Some of them were big people, too.
But other country gentlemen, like Mr. Falkland, were quite of a different pattern. If they all acted like him I don’t think we should any of us have reigned as long as we did. They helped and encouraged the police in every possible way. They sent them information whenever they had received any worth while. They lent them horses freely when their own were tired out and beaten. More than that, when bushrangers were supposed to be in the neighbourhood they went out with them themselves, lying out and watching through the long cold nights, and taking their chance of a shot as well as those that were paid for it.
Now there was a Mr. Whitman that had never let go a chance from the start of running their trail with the police, and had more than once given them all they knew to get away. He was a native of the country, like themselves, a first-class horseman and tracker, a hardy, game sort of a chap that thought nothing of being twenty-four hours in the saddle, or sitting under a fence watching for the whole of a frosty night.
Well, he was pretty close to Moran once, who had been out by himself; that close he ran him he made him drop his rifle and ride for his life. Moran never forgave him for this, and one day when they had all been drinking pretty heavy he managed to persuade Wall, Hulbert, Burke, and Daly to come with him and stick up Whitman’s house.
“I sent word to him I’d pay him out one of these fine days,” he drawled out, “and he’ll find that Dan Moran can keep his word.”
He picked a time when he knew Whitman was away at another station. I always thought Moran was not so game as he gave himself out to be. And I think if he’d had Whitman’s steady eyes looking at him, and seeing a pistol in his hand, he wouldn’t have shot as straight as he generally did when he was practising at a gum tree.
Anyhow, they laid it out all right, as they thought, to take the place unawares. They’d been drinking at a flash kind of inn no great way off, and when they rode up to the house it seems they were all of ’em three sheets in the wind, and fit for any kind of villainy that came uppermost. As for Moran, he was a devil unchained. I know what he was. The people in the house that day trembled and shook when they heard the dogs bark and saw five strange horsemen ride through the back gate into the yard.
They’d have trembled a deal more if they’d known what was coming.