Mary stood back from the threshold. The fear that had haunted her for
days had suddenly left her.
At first glance she had seen that the men had rough pieces of wood in
their hands. Her gaze was arrested by the taller, shaggier man who had
sprung forward. He was about to speak roughly, breathlessly; but she
anticipated him. Her eyes flew past him to the man who hung in his
shadow. The gash of a wound was just visible under a grimy piece of rag
wrapped across his forehead.
"He's hurt!" she cried, a sure instinct of protection urging her. "Come
in, and I'll bind up your head. It wants water and a clean bandage. Oh,
but you look starving, both of you! Have you lost your way in the hills?
It's terrible to do that! But you're welcome indeed. Come in and have
something to eat and rest yourselves."
The tall man hung in the doorway as though speech and reason had
deserted him. But the other, whose thatch of reddish hair stood up
strangely from the filthy rag that bound his forehead, raised his arm
and took a step forward, the glare of madness in his eyes. But that
movement was the last spurt of energy in him. He pitched forward and lay
across the threshold.
"Oh, bring him in and put him on the bed there, and I'll try and do
something for him," Mary cried, her eyes flying from the fallen body to
the man who stood in the doorway.
He did as she asked and turned to her with watchful eyes.
"You hold the child for me while I bathe his head," she said, "it may
bring him to."
She thrust Davey into his arms.
"Sit down, won't you?" she asked, smiling towards him, as she set some
water on the fire and poured some more into a basin.
She tore up a piece of old linen and began very gently to bathe the
unconscious man's head. He groaned as the pain stirred again. She spoke
to him, saying that the wound would mend the sooner for being cleansed,
and that it was a wonder he was alive at all with the state it was in.
Sitting in Donald's chair, holding Davey in his arms, tightly, clumsily,
the tall man watched her; his face turned to, and from her, as his eyes
wandered apprehensively about the hut, and to the door.
"Here, ma'am," he said at last, snarling over the words, "Where's your
man? I've no notion for him to come in and corner us if that's your
game."
"He's away," she replied, "and will not be back--perhaps for a day or
two."
He stared at her.
"I should never have thought Davey would be so good with a stranger,"
she added, her eyes travelling from Davey's round head on his arm to the
man's dark face, and the eyes that leapt and glittered in it. She smiled
into them.
Davey was crooning and gurgling. He had crooked his little hands into
the stranger's beard, and his mother saw with joy that the stranger held
his head as though he feared to dislodge those little hands.
"No games, ma'am," he growled, "or it'll be the worse for you. We're
desperate men. It's our lives we're fighting for."
"I knew that when I saw you," she said quietly.
She put some bread on the table, a mug of milk and a piece of cold meat.
"It is not much to offer you, but it is all I've got," she said. "I wish
it were better, because you're wanting good wholesome food just now.
I'll make some gruel for your friend and maybe there'll be an egg
to-morrow, or I can set snares for a 'possum."
She took Davey from him and he turned to the table to eat. The man on
the bed moaned wearily. She put Davey into his basket, lined with furry
skins, and went to the sick man. The cloths that she had put over it to
soak off the filthy rag which bound his head had served their purpose.
She lifted them and the festering gash on his forehead was laid bare.
Her exclamation, or a twinge of pain as the air touched the wound,
sharpened his brain. His eyes opened. He stared with semi-conscious gaze
a moment. Then with a hoarse oath he sprang at her. His quivering lean
fingers gripped her throat and clung tenaciously. The man at the table
flung himself upon him and wrenched his hands away; they struggled for a
moment, then the sick man dropped on to the bed again; but he shouted
incoherently, his fever-bright eyes baleful by the flickering firelight.
"After the gaols, 'n the sea, 'n the bush, to be taken now and like
this, by God--" he panted. "Let me be! Let me be, don't you see it's a
trap!"
"It's all right," the other gasped. "Don't let your tongue run away with
you, Steve."
"I'll not be taken alive," the man on the bed cried. "Not now, not after
getting through so far, I'll not be taken alive, 'n the one that tries
to take me'll not live either."
The tall man cursed beneath his breath.
"The woman means no harm to you," he said.
"It is the fever troubling him," Mary explained.
The sick man was already weak again. He lay on the bed limply and
muttering uneasily.
"You'd best hold him so as I can put on the clean rags," she said.
She had a length of old linen, smeared with ointment from a small
earthenware jar, in her hands. She laid it over the wound and gently and
firmly bound it into place.
"That'll be better," she murmured.
The gaunt man overlooked her, a curious cynical humour in his eyes.
"You're a brave woman," he said.
"I'm not, indeed," she replied; but her eyes met his squarely.
She laughed softly, and told him how afraid she had been earlier in the
day.
At the sound of his mother's voice, Davey piped, wistfully. She went
over to him and rocked his cradle for a moment or two.
"Hush, Davey," she said talking to him softly in her native Welsh. "We
have company. There's one hungry man wants his supper, and another man,
sick, that thy mother must make gruel for. Do thou sing to thyself, son,
till mother is ready to take thee again."
But Davey had no great notion of the laws of hospitality that separated
him from the source of all consolation. He wailed incontinently and from
wailing took to uttering his protest with all the strength that was in
him.
The unkempt stranger munching his dry bread by the table, glanced
furtively at Mary's back as she stooped over the fire stirring the
gruel; then he got up and went to the cradle. He lifted the child with
awkward carefulness. Davey continued to wail, nevertheless, finding that
it was not the soft covering of his mother's breast that he was laid
against, but a harsh fabric, smelling of the sea, the earth, dank leaves
and a strange personality.
When she took the gruel from the fire and poured it into a little bowl,
her eyes rested on the stranger as he tried to appease Davey.
He was cradling the child in his arms, and muttering awkwardly,
distressfully: "There now! There!" An expression of awe and
reflectiveness veiled the sharpness of his features. "There now! There
then!" he kept saying.
He looked up to find Davey's mother's eyes resting on him and laughed a
little shamefacedly.
"I think he's forgetting his company manners, surely," he said.
"You're the first company he's had to practise on," she replied.
Her simplicity, and again the clear, shining eyes with their direct and
smiling glance astounded him.
"You'd best give this to your friend, yourself," she went on, putting
the bowl on the table. "It seems to trouble him to see a strange face."
She lifted Davey from the stranger's arms and he took the bowl of gruel
to the other man.
"Be gentle with him and humour him," she warned, "but make him eat all
of it. I'll put a blanket here on the hearth for you, and Davey and I
will sleep at the other end of the room."
When she had thrown all the spare clothing in the hut on the floor
before the fire and had spread a patchwork quilt and the rug of 'possum
skins at the far end of the room for herself, she sat down on a low
stool near the door and lifted Davey's lips to her breast. She sang a
half-whispering lullaby, rocking him in her arms. His cries ceased; her
thoughts went off into a dreamy psalm of thanksgiving as his soft mouth
pulled at her breast.
She looked up to find the eyes of the tall stranger on her.
A gaunt, long-limbed man, his clothes hung on his arms and legs as if
they were the wooden limbs of a scarecrow. The shreds were knotted and
tied together, and showed bare, shrunken shanks and shins, burnt and cut
about, the dark hair of virility thick on them. His face, lean and
leathern, had a curious expression of hunger. The eyes in it held dark
memories, yet a glitter of the sun.
Mary Cameron vaguely realised that she had known what manner of man this
was the moment she looked into his eyes. That was why she had not been
afraid when he confronted her on the doorstep; why, too, she had been
able to ask him into her house and treat him as an unexpected, but not
unwelcome guest.
The man on the bed moaned. Suddenly he started up with a shrill scream.
"A wave! A wave! We'll be swamped."
His voice fell away, muttering. Then again he was crying:
"Is that the land, Dan, that line against the sky over there? No, don't
y' see there--there, man. God! Don't say it isn't! How long have we been
in this boat? Seems years ... been seein' the sea, them blasted little
blue waves jumpin' up 'n lickin' my face! Better throw me overboard,
Dan. Dan? Better throw me overboard ... can't stand it any longer. The
thirst and the pain in me head, Dan."
Mary turned pitiful eyes on him, rocking Davey and hushing him gently,
as he wakened and began to cry querulously.
"A sail!" the sick man shouted. "Some blasted clipper for the Port, d'y'
think she'll see us, Dan? Are we too far away? Will the waves hide us?"
He sank back wearily, muttering again.
"I'll not be caught ... not be taken alive, Dan." He started up crying
angrily. "I'd rather go to hell than back. A-u-gh!"
A shriek that curdled the blood in her veins, a cry that sped upwards in
an uncurling scream of uncontrollable anguish, flew from the sick man.
Another and another.
Mary looked at the man before her questioningly.
The lines about his nose were bent to a faint and bitter smile; but
there was no smile in his eyes.
"Thinks he's being flogged," he said. "He would be if we were
caught--taken back again. You know where we came from?"
"Yes," she said.
"From the Island," his head was jerked in the direction of the sea.
"You're the first soul I've spoken to since we escaped except him, and
he's been raving mad most of the time. You and I've got to do some
talking, ma'am."
He looked about the room, lifted Donald's chair and set it before her.
He had recovered his self-possession, was readjusting his plans.
"Yes?" she said.
"You know, we meant to get all the food and clothes we wanted from this
hut," he said harshly. "We watched you all day from the trees and
thought a man would be coming home after sundown. We didn't mean to let
you off if you screamed and brought him before we'd got what we
wanted.... The dog's dead. Did you know? I killed him, caught him by the
throat behind the shed?"
"But that was a pity!" she cried, a note of distress in her voice.
"Pity?" He leaned forward. "But we can't afford to have pity. I saw you
sitting spinning in the sun, singing to the child. My heart turned in me
to see you like the women at home. But that would not have saved you.
Starving men, fighting for our lives we were. Wild beasts. Pity? What
pity's been shown to us? Do y' know what it means to have felt the lash,
and made your escape from Port Arthur, swimming the bay at Eaglehawks'
Neck, wrapped in kelp, cheating the bloodhounds chained a few yards from
each other across the Neck, and the sentry who'd shoot you like a dog if
he saw you? Do y' know what it was like, crawling from one end of the
Island to the other in the bush at night with only a native to guide you
... not knowing whether he was going to spear you, or run you into the
tribe ... making your way in a cockle-shell of a boat in the open sea
without any mariner's tools at all, and only a keg of water and a bit of
'possum skin to chew to keep the life in you?
"No, you don't know! How could you?" He paused a moment, and continued
desperately: "And it's no good my trying to tell you; Steve got a crack
on his head the night we escaped. He was mad with thirst in the boat. I
was near it myself ... and I had all the work to do, pulling and
straining my eyes for the land. We had to keep out of sight of other
boats too, and the Government sloop going between Port Southern and
Hobart Town, for fear we'd be seen, picked up and sent back. Months of
scheming it took to get so far! I'd picked up the lay of the land near
the Port and the way to get about in the country beyond, from sailors.
It was a man who'd got as far as the coast and had been sent back told
me to look for the muddy river-water in the sea and get up the river at
night. We wanted to make the Wirree because there is a man--lives near
the river--we'd heard would give us food and shelter, or help us to get
away to the hills.
"We got to the river and had to be low in the bush all day till night
came again. Then I went up through the trees to a wooden house we could
see among other houses that were all mud, or mud and stones. It was
McNab's shanty. We'd got a sailor to take a letter through to him,
saying we were coming and to be on the look out for us. And I'd got a
message from McNab telling us how to get to him, what sort of man he was
to look at, and saying he was willing to help us get away on condition
that when we got on our feet we'd make it up to him--of course we had to
pay on the spot too. And we'd got a bit to do it with. I've heard them
say on the Island he's making his fortune, McNab....
"They say there are men in this country now--well off, holding big
positions--who pay McNab what he likes because he helped them to get
away. They pay because if they don't--no matter who they are, what
they're doing--a word from him against them, and back they'd go to the
darbies and the cells. But there's a new game now. A reward is out for
the capture of escaped convicts."
The weary bitterness of his voice took a sharper edge.
"It was a hot night; I lay low near McNab's, waiting for the chance to
tell him we'd come and get the food and clothes he'd promised to have
ready for us. It was late.... I waited until there didn't seem anybody
about the bar and the lights went out--all but the one in a room at the
side. Then I got tired of waiting and crept up to the shanty and lay
flat against the wall, hoping to see if the way was clear and I could
get a word with McNab.... The wall was not thick, and there was a crack
in it. I could see into that room with the light. McNab was there, and
the trooper from Port Southern with him. Under his coat, I could make
out his uniform. A bottle of rum made the talk go easy between them, and
I heard the plan they were making. It was that M'Laughlin should not
keep too close a watch for 'travellers' from the Island--be too keen on
their scent--and McNab should play friendly to them and tell M'Laughlin
of their whereabouts when they thought they were getting off finely. He
was to arrest them, and the pair of them would share the reward. Steve
and I were expected. We were to be first victims."
Mary's exclamation of pity and horror comforted him. The compassion of
her eyes banished the evil, mirthless smile from his.
"I got back to Steve," he said more quietly. "He was almost too ill to
walk. He understood though that we would not be troubling McNab, when I
told him what had happened, and was quiet--though he had been moaning
and crying all day. It was because of his fever I was afraid to leave
him again, or to try to get food in the township. So we started for the
ranges. But we hadn't gone far when he gave out and I had to carry him.
I wanted to get him away from the tracks where the sound of his raving
could be heard, and so we've been in the hills ever since--nearly ten
days it must be. This was the first clearing we sighted since we saw the
Wirree and we had to get what we could out of it, or die in our tracks.
I'm talking sane enough now, but I was almost as mad as Steve--with
hunger and rage at the thought of being taken again and serving to get
reward money for McNab, when we came to the door, here...."
He hesitated.
"It was the sight of you ... looking like the Mother of God with the
child in your arms ... saved me."
"I'll give you all the food and clothes I can," she said.
"Ma'am "--his voice trembled. Then he said roughly: "You're not playing
the Thad McNab game?"
Her eyes met his.
"Do you think so?" she asked. "Davey and I, a fine pair we are to play a
game with you."
"You think it's the easiest way to get rid of us--to give us what we ask
for?"
She nodded, smiling.
"You are afraid, then?"
"Not for myself--but for you."
There was no wavering in her eyes. "I was not wanting my husband to find
you here. He might think it was his duty to send word back to the Port.
He might...."
"He'd try."
"Yes, he'd try. But you've got a sick man to think of and you're at the
end of your strength yourself. Donald's a strong man, and he has no love
for desperate characters." A flickering smile played about her mouth.
"You must be gone before he returns. You can rest here to-morrow and
then you would be better going. You can read the stick by the door. The
cross marks the day he went, it will be five days since then to-morrow,
and he may be back on the sixth, or the seventh day."
The man looked from her to the sapling pole by the door, counted the
notches on it and his eyes returned to her.
"You've heard naught good of convicts that you should be treating me
so," he said.
"No, it's terrible tales, I've heard of the things they do, and the
things that are done to them."
A shadow had fallen on her face.
"None too terrible for the truth," he said.
"They tell me--it was a man in Melbourne told me--it is the life makes
them desperate," she cried. "Men who have been sent out for quite little
things, become--"
"Dead to shame," he said, "men who would kill a woman who has served
them as you have served us, for fear when they'd gone she would betray
them--send her men and the black bloodhounds after them, condemn them to
hell and torture again. Oh, women have done it, and men like me have
made other women pay."
A gleam of anger lighted Mary Cameron's eyes.
"If you believe I would give them the chance of taking you back again
there is Donald's gun on the shelf," she said. "Settle the matter for
yourself. But if you will believe the truth it is this: My heart is with
you and all like you."
The sick man muttered and cried; Davey waking, wailed fretfully.
"We'll go to-morrow," the stranger said. "You'll give us food and
clothing?"
"Yes," she replied a little wearily. "But will you not rest now? I must
be sleeping myself because the child will be ill if I'm not careful of
him."
The man stood before her abashed, his face working as though he were
restraining the desire to cry as Davey was crying.
"I can't understand why you should be as you are," he said at length,
his voice breaking.
"Ah, there's reason enough," she sighed, and turned away from him.
He threw himself down before the fire. But Mary did not sleep when she
lay on the floor at the other end of the room, although the regular
breathing of her guest told her when he slept. Once she sat up and
looked at him where he lay stretched before the fire as he had thrown
himself in an attitude of utter exhaustion. The rambling cries, and the
moaning of the man on the bed, kept her awake. She found herself
listening to the tangled threads of his raving. The firelight leapt in
long beams across the room. There was no fear but a strange awe in her
heart.