There is not much more to be said about the protest of the Wing
Dormitory. I suppose Thompson was better up in tactics really than
Trelawny. Anyway, he found a weak spot that Trelawny never thought of,
and he ended the siege by half-past seven the following morning.
About six Ashby major, whose watch it was, reported that the school
fire-escape was coming round the corner. With it appeared Mr. Thompson,
Mr. Mannering, who is an Oxford “Blue” and not much smaller than Mr.
Thompson, the Doctor, the gardener, and the military agent who drills
our volunteer corps and teaches gymnastics. They put the escape against
the wall of the Wing Dormitory, between two windows, where it couldn’t
be reached by us. Then Thompson and Mannering went up, and the sergeant
and gardener followed. The Doctor waited at the foot of the ladder.
“They’ll get through the roof!” said Trelawny; “I never thought of
that!”
Trelawny turned awfully rum in the face, and tried to think out a way of
repelling a roof attack; but there wasn’t time. In about ten minutes or
so the end of an iron bar came through the ceiling; then followed a
regular avalanche of plaster and dust, that fell on Watson minor and
jolly nearly smothered him. Then came Thompson, Mannering followed, and
the gardener and the sergeant dropped after them as quick as lightning.
Of course, we were done, because only half of us were fighters, the rest
being kids; and Trelawny himself being just fifteen and Bradwell
fourteen and Ashby major twelve and a half, and I only eleven and a
half, it was no good.
“We surrender,” said Trelawny.
“Surrender, you little brute, I should think you did yield!” said
Mannering, who had cut his hand getting the slates off the roof, and was
in a rare bate.
“You needn’t insult a defeated force, sir,” said Trelawny, keeping his
nerve jolly well. “We are prepared to pay the penalty of failure, and
having meant well we--we don’t care.”
But whether we meant well or not, I know Trelawney and Bradwell both got
expelled, though Thompson was said to have tried very hard for them.
Dunston didn’t seem to realize what frightfully good motives prompted
them to protest against Thompson in an abstract way. Nothing was done to
anybody else except Ashby major and me and Wilson. We were flogged by
Mr. Mannering for the Doctor; and he did it as you might expect from a
“Blue.”
As for Thompson, he stayed on, and the protest never got into print; and
there wasn’t much disgrace for Trelawny or Bradwell after all, because
the first afterwards got into Woolwich ten from the top, through an army
crammer’s, and the second joined his father, who was the Whiteley of the
North I spoke of. He wrote to me only a week ago to say that he was
getting a hundred pounds a year from his governor for doing much less
than he had to do at Dunston’s. Mind you, Thompson is a jolly good sort,
really, and we know it now; and, as I heard my uncle say of somebody
else, I don’t suppose it’s a matter of life and death whether or no a
chap puts his h’s in the wrong places if his heart’s in the right one.
“Freckles” and “Frenchy”
He was the most peculiar chap that ever came to Merivale, not excepting
even Mason, who shot the Doctor’s wife’s parrot with a catapult, and,
after he had been flogged, offered to stuff it in the face of the whole
school, and nearly got expelled. Freckles was so called owing to his
skin, which was simply a complicated pattern much like what you can see
in any map of the Grecian Archipelago. This arose, he thought, from his
having been born in Australia. Anyway, it was rum to see; and so were
his hands, which had reddish down on the backs. His eyes were, also
reddish--a sort of mixture of red and gray specks, and they glimmered
like a cat’s when he was angry, which was often. His real name was
Maine, and he had no side. His father had made a big fortune selling
wool at Sydney, and his grandfather was one of the last people to be
transported to Botany Bay through no fault of his own. After he had been
on a convict ship five years a chap at home confessed on his death-bed
that he had done the thing Maine’s grandfather was transported for. So
they naturally let Maine’s grandfather go free; and he was so much
annoyed about it that he never came back home again, but married a
farmer’s daughter near Sydney and settled out there for good.
Maine didn’t think great things of England, and was always talking about
the Australian forests of blue gum-trees and bush, and sneering rather
at the size of our forests round Merivale, though they were good ones.
He never joined in games, but roamed away alone for miles and miles into
the country on half-holidays, and trespassed with a cheek I never saw
equalled. He could run like a hare--especially about half a mile or so,
which, as he explained to me, is just about a distance to blow a keeper.
Certainly, though often chased, he was never caught and never
recognized, owing to things he did which he had learned in Australia and
copied from famous bushrangers. His great hope some day was to be a
bushranger himself, and he practised in a quiet way every Saturday
afternoon, making it a rule to go out of bounds always. His get-up was
fine. My name is Tomkins, called “Nubby” because I happen to have a
rather large sort of nose, and, being fond of the country and not keen
on games, Maine rather took to me, and after I had sworn on crossed
knives not to say a word to a soul (which I never did till Freckles
left) he told me his secrets and showed me his things. If you’d seen
Freckles starting for an excursion you wouldn’t have said there was
anything remarkable about him; but really he was armed to the teeth, and
had everything a bushranger would be likely to want in a quiet place
like Merivale. Down his leg was the barrel of an air-gun, strong enough
to kill any small thing like a cat at twenty-five yards; the rest of the
gun was arranged inside the lining of his coat, and the slugs it fired
he carried loose in his trousers-pockets. Round his waist he had a
leather belt he got from a sailor for a pound. Inside the leather was
human skin, said to be flayed off a chap by cannibals somewhere, which
was a splendid thing to have for your own, if it was true; and in the
belt a place had been specially made for a knife. Freckles, of course,
had a knife in it--a “bowie” knife that made you cold to see. He never
used it, but kept it ready, and said if a keeper ever caught him he
possibly might have to. In addition to these things he carried in his
coat-pockets a little spirit-lamp and a collapsible tin pot and a bag of
tea.
He said tea was the very life of men in the bush, and that often after a
hard escape, when he was out of danger, he would get away behind a
woodstack or under banks of a stream, or some such secret place, and
brew a cup and drink it, and feel the better for it.
Lastly, Freckles had a flat lead mask with holes for the eyes and mouth,
which he always fitted on when trespassing. He said it was copied from
the helmet Ned Kelly, the King of the Bushrangers, used to wear, but it
was not bullet-proof, but only used for a disguise. We were in the same
dormitory, and one night, when all the chaps had gone to sleep, he
dressed up in these things and stood where some moonlight came in, and
certainly looked jolly.
Once, as an awful favor--me being smaller than him, and not fast enough
to run away from a man--he let me come and see what he did when
bushranging on a half-holiday in winter. “I sha’n’t run my usual
frightful risks with you,” he said, “because I might have to open fire
to save you, and that would be very disagreeable to me; but we’ll
trespass a bit, and I’ll shoot a few things, if I can. I don’t shoot
much, only for food.”
He made me a mask with tinfoil off chocolate smoothed out and gummed on
cardboard; but I had no weapons, and he said I had better not try and
get any.
We started for the usual walk. Chaps were allowed to go through a public
pine-wood to Merivale; but half through, by a place where was a board
which warned us to keep the path, Freckles branched off into some dead
bracken, and squatted down and put on his mask. I also put on mine. Then
he fastened his air-gun together and loaded it, and told me to walk six
paces behind him and do as he did. His eyes were awfully keen, and now
and then he pointed to a feather on the ground, or an old nest or a
patch of rum fungus or a crab-apple still hanging on the tree, though
all the leaves were off.
Once he fired at a jay and missed it, then fell down in the fern as if
he was shot himself, and remained quite motionless for some time. He
told me that he always did so after firing, that he might hear if
anybody had been attracted by the sound. It was a well-known bushman’s
dodge. Once we saw a keeper through a clearing, and Freckles lay flat on
his stomach, and so did I. He knew the keeper well, and told me that he
had many times escaped from him. We waited half an hour, and turned to
go back a different way from that of the keeper.
Then, where a glade sloped down to some water and the grass was all dewy
and covered with mole-hills, Freckles went to inspect a trap he had set
a week before. He was collecting skins for a mole-skin waistcoat, but he
said skinning moles was one of the beastliest tasks a hunter ever had.
However, there was a mole caught, and he skinned it and wrapped up the
skin in leaves and put it in his hat.
Then we had some real sport, for on the other side of the glade we saw
rabbits lopping about, and Freckles stalked them through the fern while
I waited motionless, and finally he shot a young one. I wanted to take
it back and get cook to do it for us, but he said I was a fool.
“If you want any you must have it now. It’s about the time I take a
meal,” he said, “and that’s a part of my ranging and hunting you haven’t
seen yet.”
He knew the country well, and said we were in one of the most carefully
preserved places anywhere about, which must have been true, for there
were an awful lot of pheasants calling in the glades. But Freckles got
down into a drain and showed me a hollow he had scooped out under a lot
of ivy where it fell over a bank.
“This is one of my caves,” he said, “and here we can feed and drink in
safety; but you mustn’t talk or I sha’n’t be able to hear if anything is
stirring in the woods.”
He took off his mask, set down his gun, and lighted his spirit-stove.
“Skin the rabbit and cut off his hind-legs while I make tea,” he said.
So I did, and he held them over the lamp till they were slightly cooked
outside, but not right through. He ate and drank with his ears straining
for every sound. Then he took the rest of the rabbit and removed all
traces of eating, and buried everything we had left.
“If I didn’t,” he explained, “some keeper’s dog would find my lair, and
make a row and give it away, and the keepers would doubtless lie in wait
for me and catch me red-handed. You can’t be too careful, because every
man’s hand’s against you; which, of course, is the beauty of it.”
We got back without anything happening, and I’ve hated the sight of
rabbit pretty well ever since, but Freckles said the juices of animals
are better for the human frame underdone.
Well, that gives you an idea of Freckles, and the affair with Frenchy,
which I am going to tell you about, showed that he really was cut out
for bushranging. Frenchy, as we called him, was Monsieur Michel. He
didn’t belong entirely to Dunston’s, but lived in Merivale and came to
us three days a week, and went to a girl’s school the other three. He
was a rum, oldish chap, whose great peculiarities were to make puns in
English and to appeal to our honor about everything.
He would slang a fellow horribly one day, and wave his arms and pretty
nearly jump out of his skin; and the next day he would bring up a
whacking pear for the fellow he’d slanged, or a new knife or something.
He pretty nearly cried sometimes, and he told us his nerves were
frightfully tricky, and often led him to be harsh when he didn’t mean
it. He couldn’t keep order or make chaps work if they didn’t choose; and
Steggles, who had an awfully cunning dodge of always rubbing him up the
wrong way, and then looking crushed and broken-hearted so as to get
things, which he did, said that Frenchy was like damp fireworks, because
you never knew exactly when he’d go off or how.
One day, dashing out of class with a frightful yell, Freckles got sent
for, and went back and found Monsieur raving mad. It seemed that
Freckles had yelled too soon--before he was out of the class-room, in
fact, and Frenchy had got palpitation of the heart from it. He let into
Freckles properly then. He said he was his “_bête noire_” and “_un sot à
vingt-quatre carats_”--which means an eighteen-carat ass in English, but
twenty-four carats in French--and “one of the aborigines who ought to be
kept on a chain,” and many other such-like things. Freckles turned all
colors, and then white, with a sort of bluish tint to his lips. He
didn’t say a word, but looked at Frenchy with such a frightful
expression that I felt something would happen later. All that happened
at the time was that Freckles got the eighth book of Telemachus to write
out into French from English, and then correct by Fénelon, which was a
pretty big job if a chap had been fool enough to try and do it; and
Monsieur Michel went off to Merivale with a big card on his coat-tail
with “_Ici on parle Français_” written upon it in red pencil. This I had
managed to do myself while Frenchy was jawing Freckles. I told Freckles,
but it didn’t comfort him much. He said there were some things no mortal
chap could stand; and to be called “an aborigine” because a man was born
in Australia seemed to him about the bitterest insult even an old
frog-eating Frenchman could have invented. Happening to _him_, of all
chaps, it was especially a thing which would have to be revenged, seeing
what his views were. He said:
“I couldn’t bushrange or anything with a clear conscience in the future
if I had a thing like this hanging over me unrevenged. It’s the
frightfulest slur on my character, and I won’t sit down under it for
fifty Frenchmen.”
Then he said he should take a week to settle what to do, and went into
the playground alone.
Next time Frenchy came up he was just the same as ever--awfully
easy-going and jolly, and let Freckles off the Telemachus, and offered
him as classy a knife, with a corkscrew and other things, including
tweezers, as ever you saw--just the knife for Freckles, considering his
ways. But it didn’t come off. Freckles got white again when he saw the
knife, and said:
“Thank you, Monsieur, I don’t want your knife; and the imposition is
half done, and will be finished next time you come.”
Then Frenchy called him a silly boy, and tried to make a joke and pinch
Freckles by the ear. But nobody saw the joke, and Freckles dodged away.
Then Frenchy sighed, and looked round to see who should have the knife,
and didn’t seem to see anybody in particular, and left it on his desk.
He often sighed in class, and sometimes told us he was without friends,
unless he might call us friends; and we said he might.
When he went, Freckles told me he considered the knife was another
insult. Then he explained what he was going to do. He said:
“I shall finish the impot first, so as not to be obliged to him for
anything, and then I shall stick him up.”
“Stick him up--how?” I said.
“It’s a bushranging expression,” he explained. “To ‘stick up’ a man is
to make him stand and deliver what he’s got. I see my way to do this
with Frenchy. He always goes and comes from Merivale through the woods,
as you know, and now he’s up here on Friday nights coaching Slade and
Betterton for their army exam. Afterwards he has supper with Mr.
Thompson or the Doctor. There you are. I wait my time in the wood, which
is jolly lonely by night, though it is such a potty little place hardly
worth calling a wood; then he comes along, and I stick him up.”
“It’s highway robbery,” I said. “You might get years and years of
imprisonment.”
“I might,” he said, “but I sha’n’t. You must begin your career some
time, and I’m going to next Friday night. I’ve often got out of the
dormitory and been in that wood by night, and only the chaps in the
dormitory have known it.”
Well, the night came, and all that we heard about it till afterwards was
that about eleven o’clock, or possibly even later than that, there was a
fearful pealing at the front door of Dunston’s, and looking out we could
see a stretcher and something on it. That something was actually
Freckles, though the few chaps who knew what was going to be done felt
sure it must be Frenchy; because Freckles is five feet ten and growing,
and Frenchy isn’t more than five feet six at the outside, and a poor
thing at that.
But it _was_ Freckles all right, and two laboring men had brought him
back, and Frenchy had come with them.
Not until five weeks afterwards, when Freckles could get up and limp
about, did I hear the truth; and I’ll tell it in his own words, because
they must be better than a chap’s who wasn’t there. He seemed
frightfully down in the mouth, and said that he could never look fellows
in the eyes again; but it cheered him telling me, and when I told him he
was thundering well out of it he admitted he was. He said:
"I got off all right, and the moon was as clear as day, and everything
just ripe for sticking a chap up. Then, like a fool, having a longish
time to wait, I didn’t simply stop in shadow behind a tree-trunk or
something in the usual way, but thought I’d do a thing I’d never heard
of bushrangers doing, though Indian thugs are pretty good at it. I went
and got up a tree which has a branch over the road, and I thought I’d
drop down almost on top of Frenchy to start with. And that’s just what I
did do, only I dropped wrong, and came down pretty nearly on my head
owing to slipping somehow at the start. What did exactly happen to me as
I left the tree I never shall know. Anyway, Frenchy came along sure
enough, and I dropped, and he jumped I should think fully a yard in the
air; but that was all, because in falling I hit a big root (it was a
beech-tree), and went and broke something in my ankle and something in
my chest and couldn’t stand. Consequently, of course, I couldn’t stick
him up. The pain was pretty fair, but feeling what a fool I was seemed
to make me forget it. Anyway, finding it was useless to think of
sticking him up, I tried to hobble into the fern and get out of sight;
and finding I couldn’t crawl, I rolled. But of course you can’t roll
away from a chap, and he came after me, and my mask fell off while I
rolled, and he recognized me.
"‘_Mon Dieu!_ it is the boy Maine!’ he said. ‘Speak, child, what in the
wide world was this?’
"I disguised my voice and said I wasn’t Maine, and that he’d better
leave me alone or it might be the worse for him yet. But he wouldn’t go,
and, chancing to get queer about the head somehow I went off, I suppose,
though it wasn’t for long. When I came to he was gone, but he rushed
back in a minute with that rotten old top-hat he wears full of water
he’d got from the puddle in the stone-pit. He doused my head and made me
sit up with my back against a tree. Then, feeling the frightfulness of
it, I begged him to clear out and let me alone. I said:
"‘You don’t know what you’re doing. I’m no friend to you, but the
deadliest enemy you’ve got in the world, and if I hadn’t fallen down at
a critical moment and broken myself I should have stuck you up, Monsieur
Michel. So, now, you know.’
"He said to himself, ‘The poor mad boy--the poor mad boy--I will run _à
toutes jambes_ for succor’; but I told him not to. I began to get a rum
hot pain in my side then, but I felt I would gladly have died there
rather than be obliged to him. I said:
"‘You called me an “aborigine,” which is the most terrible thing you can
call an Australian-born chap, and you wanted to pass it off with a knife
with a corkscrew and tweezers in it. But you couldn’t expect me to take
it, feeling as I did. Now the fortunes of war have given you the
victory, and, if you please, I wish you’d go.’
“But he refused. He said he wouldn’t have hurt my feelings for anything.
He seemed to overlook altogether what I was going to do to him, and
asked me where it hurt me. I told him, and he said it was his
fault--fancy that! and wished he was big enough to carry me back. I kept
on asking him to go, and at last, after begging my pardon like anything,
for about a week it seemed, he went. But I heard him shouting and
yelling French yells in the woods, and after a bit he came back with two
men and a hurdle. They presently took me back, and what Frenchy’s said
since to the Doctor I don’t know. In fact, I didn’t know anything for
days. Anyway, I’ve had nothing but a mild rowing and very good grub, and
I’m not to be even flogged, though that’s probably because I broke a rib
or two, not including the bone in my leg. But I’m all right now, and I
think it was about the most sporting thing a chap ever did for Frenchy
to treat me like that--eh? I shouldn’t have thought it was in a
Frenchman to do it, especially after I told him what I was going to do.”
“Yes,” I said, “that’s all right, but what about bushranging?”
“It’s pretty sickening,” he said, “but I feel as if all the keenness was
knocked out of me. If a chap can’t so much as fall out of a tree on a
wanderer’s path at the nick of time without smashing himself, what’s the
good of him?”
“Besides,” I said, “if it hadn’t been Frenchy, but somebody else of a
different turn of mind, he might have taken you at a disadvantage and
jolly well killed you.”
“In real bushranging that is what would have happened,” admitted
Freckles. “As it is, I expect months, perhaps years, will have to go by
before I feel to hanker after it again. And meantime I sha’n’t rest in
peace till I’ve paid Frenchy.”
“How?” I asked.
“Well, I believe it’s to be done. He’s often come to see me while I was
on my back in bed, and he’s told me a lot about himself. He’s
frightfully hard up, and a Roman Catholic, and hopes to lay his bones in
_la belle_ France with luck, but he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to
manage it. He told me all this, little knowing my father was extremely
rich. Well, you see, the mater wants somebody French for the kids at
home, which are girls, and, knowing Frenchy bars this climate, I think
Australia might do him good. He’s fifty-three years old, and it seems to
me if the guv’nor wrote and offered him his passage and a good screw
he’d go. I have made it a personal thing to myself, and told the guv’nor
what a good little chap he is, and what a beautiful accent he’s got, and
the thing that happened in the wood.”
The affair dropped then, and about six weeks after, when Freckles was
getting fit again, he walked with me one half-holiday to see the place
where he was smashed up. The bough was a frightful high one to drop from
even in daylight, also it was broken. Freckles got awfully excited when
he spotted it.
“There! there!” he said, “that’s the best thing I’ve seen for twelve
weeks!”
“I don’t see much to squeak about,” I said, “especially as the beastly
tree nearly did for you.”
“But can’t you see it’s broken? That’s what did it! I thought I slipped,
and if I had I shouldn’t have been made of the stuff for a bushranger;
but the wretched branch broke, and that is jolly different. That wasn’t
my fault. The most hardened old hand must have come down then. In fact,
he couldn’t have stopped up. Oh, what a lot of misery I’d have been
saved through all these weeks if I’d known it broke in a natural sort of
way!”
He got an awful deal of comfort out of this, and said he should return
to his old ways again as soon as he could run a mile without stopping.
And we found his lead mask, like Ned Kelly’s, just where it had dropped
when he had rolled over in the fern, and he welcomed it like a dog.
That’s the end, except that his father did write to Dunston about
Frenchy; and Dunston, not being very keen about Frenchy himself, seemed
to think he would be just the chap for the girls of Freckles’s father.
Anyway, he went, and he cried when he said good-bye to the school; and
Freckles told me that when he said good-bye to him he yelled with
crying, and blessed him both in French and English, and said that the
sunny atmosphere of Australia would very likely prolong his life until
he had saved enough to get his bones back to France.
So he went, and Freckles went after him much sooner than he ever
expected to, because the keepers finally caught him in the game
preserves, sitting in his hole under the stream bank, frizzling the leg
of a pheasant which he had shot out of a tree with his air-gun and
buried seven days before. And Dunston wrote to his father, and his
father wrote back that Freckles, being now fourteen and apparently
having less sense than when he left Australia, had better return to his
native land, and go into the wool business, and begin life as an
office-boy in his place of business. Freckles told me that chaps in his
father’s office generally got a fortnight’s holiday, but that his mother
would probably work up his governor to give him three weeks. Then he
would get a proper outfit and track away to the boundless scrub, and
fall in with other chaps who had similar ideas, and begin to take life
seriously. He said I might see his name in Australian papers in about a
year. But he never wrote to me, and I don’t know if he really succeeded
well. I’m sure I hope he did, for he was a tidy chap, though queer.