‘Lor bless yer!’ exclaims the landlord, ‘there ain’t bin no beer here
this twelvemonth or more! I got some, somewheres, on the teams. But,
the way things is, it’ll be another twelvemonth afore they show up.
Dry time, ye see, sir.’
‘Well, then,’ I say, ‘have you any whisky?’
‘There was a bottle or two, but the boys—’ he commenced, when,—
‘What’s the use av batin’ about the bush that way?’ puts in my
companion. ‘Why don’t ye tell the gint at wanst that sorra a dhrop’ll
he get in Jillibeejee, bar the rum utself. I’ve dhrunk worse in Port
Mackay. Ut’s a wholesome dhrink, in moderation, an’ wid jist a
suspicion o’ Trickle Trickle at the bottom av the tumbler.’
So rum it is. The Officer in Charge takes his, I notice, very nearly
pure, and without winking. We help ourselves, and the price is one
shilling each.
It is still terribly hot.
‘It must be a long way over one hundred degrees in the shade,’ I
remark.
‘Come acrost to the station,’ says the Officer in Charge, ‘an’ we’ll
see. There’s no shade whatever in Jillibeejee. But there’s the best
that is. Sure, ut’s weatherboard an’ lined—the only wan in the town.
There’s a thermomether there as tells how big a hate’s on.’
So we go over. The place is like a furnace, and the glass registers
one hundred and twenty-seven degrees.
‘And you’ve been here some years!’ I gasp, sliding off my chair, a
wet, limp heap, on to the floor, and staying there.
‘I have, indade, sorr,’ replies he. ‘The first summer I was minded to
blow me head off wid me pistol. The second was near as bad; but I
don’t fale ’em so much now. Whin the wet do come, ut’s almost as
thryin’; for the san’-flies an’ miskitties bangs Banagher. Ay, ut’s
dull an’ lonesome like, sure enough, till the b’ys comes in for a
change; an’ thin, if ye’ll belave ut, Jillibeejee is as ructious a
towneen as is on God’s earth.’
‘Come in from where? Where the deuce can anybody come in from? And who
in the world would come to such a hole as this ‘for a change?’ I ask
irritably, whilst wringing my pocket handkerchief, as the heat proves
too trying.
‘Whisht!’ replies my host placidly. ‘Ye’ll mebbe have noticed that
there’s not many min in Jillibeejee, knockin’ aroun’ like?’
‘Only the fellow,’ I answer, ‘that we put in the verandah.’
‘Ay, he’s iver wan o’ the fust, is Tim Healy,’ says the Officer in
Charge. ‘Whin the others are comin’ in, he’ll be afther going back,
stone bruk, so he will, poor divil!’
‘In from _where_? Back to _where_?’ I cry impatiently.
‘To an’ fro the big stations on the border, over yander,’ replies he,
with a wave of his hand westward. ‘To the back av beyant, where they
digs dams, an’ sinks wells, an’ fences an’ fights wid the naygurs, an’
herds cattle, an’ gathers up a cheque, and thin comes back like
pilicans to their women and children on the edge o’ the wiltherness
here. Good b’ys, in the main,’ he continues; ‘just a little rough,
perhaps, when the rum’s in. Ye see, sorr, ye can’t expeck much else
from the craturs, for, iv this is bad, ut’s Hell utself out yander in
the new counthry, where there’s no law, no polis, no nothin’. D’ye
wander at the b’ys, now, wantin’ a change out av ut wanst an’ agin?’
‘Well, perhaps not. But what must that other life be like?’
So, in the gloaming, hot and close, with a hot-looking moon hanging in
a hazy sky, I depart from Jillibeejee, leaving its Officer in
Charge—strong man, and a very fit—stroking a great black beard
meditatively, and possessing his soul in patience for the stirring
times which herald the advent of his charges from the ‘Back av
Beyant.’
‘SOJUR JIM.’
Brightly blazed the watch-fires into the still night air, brightly
from within the circle formed by them gleamed thousands of sparkling
eyes, and fell on the ear a low, continuous sound, like the soft
distant murmur of some summer sea on a shingly beach, as twelve
thousand sheep peacefully chewed their cuds after the long day’s
travel.
The weather was close and sultry. So, feeling indisposed to sleep, I
had left my hot tent and was walking round the whitish, indistinct
mass of recumbent figures, when I nearly stumbled against the
watchman, who, as one of the fires flared up, I saw was the eccentric
individual known in the camp by the nickname of ‘Sojur Jim’; and, in
pursuance of an idea I had long borne in mind, first assuring myself
that all was right with my fleecy charges, I lit my pipe, stretched
myself out on the short, thick grass and sand, and said, whilst
looking at my watch,—
‘Now, Jim, spin us a yarn that will help to pass away the time.’
But my companion is well-deserving of a more particular description.
‘Sojur Jim’ was the only name by which he was called, and this he had
gained by an extraordinary mania he possessed for destroying those
small terrors of the Australian bush, familiar to all dwellers therein
as ‘Soldier’ or ‘Bull-dog’ ants; insects fierce, intractable and
venomous. These, then, seemed objects of especial aversion to Jim; and
many a time, whilst travelling along, would one of the men sing out,
‘Jim, Jim, sojurs!’ The effect was electrical; Jim, leaving his flock,
would bound away towards the nest, and, dexterously using the long
stick, flattened at both ends in rude shovel shape, which was his
constant companion, he would furiously, regardless of innumerable
stings, uproot and turn over the ‘sojurs’’ stronghold, and, having
exposed its inmost recesses, complete the work of destruction by
lighting a great fire upon it, and all this he would do with a set
stern expression on his grim face, as of one who avenges
never-to-be-forgiven or forgotten injuries.
He was indeed a remarkable looking man, strong and athletic, and, in
spite of his snow-white hair, probably not more than fifty years of
age. Part of his nose, the lobes and cartilages of his ears, and one
eye were wanting, whilst the rest of his face was scarred and seamed
as if at one time a cross-cut saw had been roughly drawn to and fro
over it. And as I watched him sitting there on a fallen log, the
flickering blaze playing fitfully on the white hair and corrugated,
mutilated features, I felt more than ever sure that the man had a
story well worth the hearing could he but be induced to tell it.
Amongst his fellows in the camp he was taciturn and morose, never
smiling, speaking rarely, apparently always lost in his own gloomy
reflections. My request, therefore, was made with but faint hopes of
success; but, to my surprise, after a few minutes silence, he
replied,—
‘Very well, I’ll tell you a story. I don’t often tell it; but I will
to-night. If at times you feel disinclined to believe it you have only
to look at my face. I’m going now to tell you how I got all these
pretty lumps and scars and ridges, and how I partly paid the men who
made me what I am. “Sojur Jim” they call me, and think I am mad. God
knows, I fancy so myself sometimes. Well,’ he went on, in language at
times rude and unpolished, at others showing signs of more than
average education, ‘Did you ever hear of Captain Jakes?’
‘Of course,’ I answered, for the notoriously cruel bushranger had,
after his own fashion, helped to make minor Australian history.
‘Yes,’ muttered Jim abstractedly, ‘he’s accounted for. So is his
mate—the one who laughed the loudest of any. But there were three of
them, and there’s still another left somewhere. Not dead yet!’ he
suddenly exclaimed in a loud voice. ‘Surely not! My God, no! After all
these years of ceaseless search! That would be too hard!’ And here he
stood up and gazed excitedly into the outer darkness.
‘But the story, Jim,’ I ventured to remark, after a long pause.
‘Right you are,’ he replied, as he again sat down, and calmly resumed.
‘Well, it was the year of the big rush, the first one, to the Ovens.
I was a strapping young fellow then, with all my life hopeful and
bright before me, as I left the old mother and the girl I loved to try
my luck on the diggings. Three years went by before I thought of
returning to the little Victorian township on the Avoca, where we had
long been settled; but then I struck it pretty rich, and made up my
mind to go back and marry, and settle down alongside the old farm; for
a pair of loving hearts were, I knew, growing weary of waiting for the
return of the wanderer.
‘Like a fool, however, instead of sending down my last lot of gold by
the escort, I all of a sudden got impatient, and, packing it in my
saddle-bags, along with a tidy parcel of notes and sovereigns, I set
off alone. The third night out I camped on a good-sized creek, hobbled
my horses, and after planting my saddle-bags in a hollow log, I
started to boil the billy for supper. Presently, up rides three chaps,
and, before I could get to my swag, I was covered by as many
revolvers; while one of the men says, “Come along, now, hand over the
metal. We know you’ve got it, and if you don’t give it quiet, why,
we’ll take it rough.”
‘“You’ve got hold of the wrong party, this time, mates,” says I, as
cool as I could. “I’m on the wallaby, looking for shearing, and, worse
luck, hav’n’t got no gold.”
‘“Gammon,” says the first speaker. “Turn his swag over, mates.”
‘Well, they found nothing, of course. Then they searched all over the
bush round about, and one fellow actually puts his hand up the hollow
of the log in which lay hid my treasure; and I thought it was all up
with it, when he lets a yell out of him and starts cutting all sorts
of capers, with half-a-dozen big sojurs hanging to his fingers.
‘Jakes (for he was the leader of the gang) now got real savage, and
putting a pistol to my head, swore that he would blow my brains out
unless I told where the gold was. Well, I wouldn’t let on, for I
thought they were trying to bounce me, and that if I held out I might
get clear off, so I still stuck to it that they’d mistaken their man.
‘Seeing I was pretty firm, they drew off for a while, and, after a
short talk, they began to laugh like madmen; and one, taking a
tomahawk, cut down a couple of saplings, whilst another gets ready
some stout cord; and Jakes himself goes poking about in the saltbush
as if looking for something he’d lost. Before this they had tied my
arms and legs together with saddle-straps and greenhide thongs; and
there I lay, quite helpless, wondering greatly what they were up to.
‘Presently the three came up, and tying me tightly to the saplings—one
along my back, and one cross-ways—they carried me away a short
distance to where I had noticed Jakes searching around, and then laid
me down face uppermost, partly stripping me at the same time. I lay
there quietly enough, puzzling my brains to try and guess what it was
all about, and those three devils standing laughing fit to split their
sides.
‘“Tell us now, will you,” said they, “where that gold’s planted? How
does your bed feel? Are you warm enough?” and such like chaff, till I
began to think they must have gone suddenly cranky, for I felt nothing
at all. Perceiving that was the case, one of them took a stick and
thrust it under me into the ground; and then—oh, God! it was awful!’
Here Sojur Jim paused suddenly, and a baleful light gleamed from that
solitary bright eye of his, whilst a spasm shook his whole frame, and
his scarred features were contorted as if once more undergoing the
agonies of that terrible torture.
The wind sighed with an eerie sound through the tall forest trees
around us; the cry of some night-bird came mournfully through the
darkness, whilst black clouds flitted across the young moon, filling
the sombre Australian glade with weird shadows—making the scene, all
at once, dismally in unison with the story, as with a shiver I stirred
the fire, and patiently waited for its narrator to go on.
‘Yes,’ he continued at length, ‘I dropped down to it quickly enough
then. I was tied on to a sojur-ants’ nest, and they swarmed about me
in thousands—into my nose, ears, eyes, mouth, everywhere—sting, sting,
sting, and tear, tear, tear, till I shrieked and yelled for mercy.
‘“Tell us where the gold is planted,” said one of the laughing
fiends—I heard him laugh again years afterward over the same
story—“and we’ll let you go.”
‘“Yes!” I screamed, “I’ll tell you. But for God Almighty’s sake take
me out of this!” “Not much,” replied he. “Tell us first, and then you
can jump into the creek and give your little friends a drink.” “Look
in the big log,” I groaned at last. Then, one of them, remembering the
sojurs, gets a stick and fossicks about till he felt the bags, when he
shoves his arm up and drags them out.
‘“A square thing, by G—d!” says Jakes, and turning to me, he said,
“Mate, you’ve given us a lot of trouble, and as you look as if you
were comfortably turned in for the night, it would be a pity to
disturb you. So long, and pleasant dreams!” And, with that, away the
three of them rode, laughing loudly at my screams for mercy. As you
may think,’ went on Jim, ‘I was by this time nearly raving mad with
pain. Thousands of those devil-ants were eating into my flesh, and me
lying there like a log. Hell! hell will never be as bad as that was!
‘Six months afterward I came to my senses again. It was a sunshiny
spring morning, and I heard the magpies whistling outside the old
humpy on the Ovens, as I tried to get up and go down to the claim,
thinking that I’d had the nightmare terrible bad. But when I got off
my bunk I fainted clean away on the floor, and there my mates found me
when they came home to dinner. Good lads they were true men, who had
nursed me and tended me through all the long months of fever and
madness that had passed since the Escort, for which I should have
waited, had by the merest chance come across me and sent me back
again to die, as everyone thought.
‘But,’ and here, for the first time, Jim’s voice faltered and shook,
‘there was another and a gentler nurse who—God bless her—helped me
back to life; the little girl who loved me came up—my mother was
dead—and would have kept her word to me, too, and taken my half-eaten
carcase into her keeping wholly, had I been mean enough to let her do
it. But that was more than I could stand the thought of. So one
morning I slipped quietly away to begin my man-hunting; for I had
vowed a merciless retribution upon my undoers if I had to track them
the wide world over. That’s close on fifteen years ago. I can account
for two, and live on in hopes of yet meeting with the third.
‘You’ve heard how Jakes pegged out?’ asked Jim abruptly.
‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘Sergeant O’Brien shot him in the Long Swamp.’
‘So most people think,’ was his reply. ‘But I know who was first in at
the end; and when, crouching up to his neck in the mud and long reeds,
with my fingers grasping his throat, I think, as he turned his
bloodshot and protruding eyes on mine, I think, I say, that he knew me
again, all changed as I was. He never spoke, though, and I let him die
slowly, for I was sure that the sergeant was a long way behind. I held
him there, I tell you, and watched him as he tried to blow the bubbles
of blood and froth from out his pale lips, and at last I told him who
I was, and how I had tracked him down, and was now about to send his
vile soul to perdition. Then, as I heard the galloping tramp of the
trooper’s horse, I smothered him in the stagnant ooze of that foul
swamp. Truly a dog’s death, but one too good for him! O’Brien, coming
up soon afterward, found the body, put a couple of pistol bullets into
it, and received the Government reward and promotion, whilst I set off
in search of the others.
‘One I came across four years afterwards on the Adelaide side. I had
taken a job of shepherding up Port Augusta way, when, one night, who
should come to the hut but Number Two, the one who laughed the longest
and loudest of the three, as I lay in agony on the sojurs’ nest. I
knew him in a minute and heartily welcomed him to stop that night.
“Just put those sheep in the yard, matey,” I says, “while I make some
bread for our supper.”
‘Well, I makes two smallish johnnycakes, and we had our tea. Then we
starts smoking and yarning, and at length I turned the talk on to
ants, saying I couldn’t keep nothing there because of them. With that
he falls to laughing, and, says he, “My word, mate, I could tell you a
yarn if I liked ’bout ants—sojurs—that’d make you laugh for a week,
only you see it ain’t always safe, even in the bush, to talk among
strangers.”
‘All of a sudden he turned as white as a sheet, and drops off the
stool, and twists and groans. Then he sings out, “I’m going to die.”
‘You see,’ remarked Jim, with the cold impassiveness which had, almost
throughout, characterised his manner, ‘the strychnine in the
johnnycake that had fallen to his share was beginning to work him, and
as I laughingly reminded him of old times, and asked him to go on with
his story about the sojur ants, he also knew me, and shrieked and
prayed for the mercy that I had once so unavailingly implored at his
hands. He was very soon, however, too far gone to say much. A few more
struggles and it was all over, and then I dragged the dead carrion out
of my hut and buried it eight feet deep under the sheep-dung in the
yard, where, likely enough, it is yet. So much for Number Two!’
exclaimed Jim, as I sat looking rather doubtfully at him. Not that I
questioned the truthfulness of his story—that was stamped on every
word he uttered—but that I began to think him rather a dangerous kind
of monomaniac to have in a drover’s camp. ‘And now, sir,’ he went on
presently, ‘you’ve had the story you asked me for, and if ever we meet
again after this trip, maybe I’ll have something to tell you about
Number Three; that business it is that brought me down about these
parts, for I heard he was working at some of the stations on the
river. And as God made me!’ he exclaimed, with a subdued sort of
gloomy ferocity in his voice, ‘when we do meet, he shall feel the
vengeance of the man whose life and love and fortune he helped to ruin
so utterly. I could pick him out of a thousand, with his great nose
all of a skew, and his one leg shorter than the other.’
* * * * *
The watch-fires were glimmering dimly. The cool air which heralds the
Australian dawn was blowing, and the sheep were moving silently out of
their camp in long strings as I rose to my feet. In the white tents
all was silence. Thanks to Sojur Jim, their occupants had passed an
undisturbed night. Absorbed in his gruesome story—that dark tale of
torture and retribution, with just that one little trait of woman’s
constancy and devotion shining out like some bright star from a murky
sky—the time had slipped away unheeded. Sending him to call the cook,
I put the sheep together, wondering mightily to myself, as the man,
with his bent-down head and slouching gait, moved away, whether he
really could be the same creature who through the silent watches of
the night had unfolded to my view such a concentrated, tireless, and
as yet unsatiated thirst for revenge, such a fixed and relentless
purpose of retaliation, unweakened through the years, but burning
freshly and fiercely to-day, as, when with the scarcely healed scars
still smarting, disfigured, ruined, hopeless, forsaking all, he went
forth alone into the world to hunt down his persecutors.
* * * * *
A few days after Sojur Jim had related to me the story told above, one
evening, at dusk, a swagman entered the camp and asked the cook for a
piece of meat and some bread. Instead of eating it at once with the
accompanying offered drink of tea, he turned away, and, a few minutes
later, we saw his fire burning brightly a little further along the
lagoon, the banks of which formed our resting-place for the night.
Evidently, as the men remarked amongst themselves, our visitor was a
‘hatter.’
Next morning, when Sojur Jim was called out to take his flock, he was
missing. His blankets and few belongings still lay as he had arranged
them in the tent the night before, ready for turning in; and I at once
ordered a search to be made.
It was of very short duration. Just in front of the swagman’s fire, in
the shallow water of the lagoon, we found the two bodies. The
stranger’s throat was grasped by Jim’s fingers in a vice-like clutch,
that, even in death, we long strove in vain to sunder. When parted at
last, and we had washed the slimy mud from the features of the dead
traveller, a truly villainous countenance was disclosed to view; the
huge mouth, low, retreating forehead, and heavy, thick-set jaws, all
betokened their owner to have belonged to the very lowest order of
humanity. But what struck me at once was that the nose, which was of
great size, had, at one time, been knocked completely over to the left
side of the face, and as we straightened the body out, it could
plainly be seen that one leg was much shorter than its fellow.
* * * * *
Was this, then, indeed ‘Number Three,’ and had Sojur Jim’s vengeful
quest, his vow of bitter retaliation, ended at last? I believed so.
But, as I gazed down upon the poor, scarred dead clay of a wasted and
ruined life lying there, now so calm and still, all its fierce desires
and useless repinings, all its feverish passions and longings for
dread retribution at rest, forcibly came to my mind the words of the
sacred and solemn injunction—‘Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord; I
will repay.’