A few days after this--on the 23rd of December--Maurice Frere was
alarmed by a piece of startling intelligence. The notorious Dawes had
escaped from gaol!
Captain Frere had inspected the prison that very afternoon, and it had
seemed to him that the hammers had never fallen so briskly, nor the
chains clanked so gaily, as on the occasion of his visit. “Thinking
of their Christmas holiday, the dogs!” he had said to the patrolling
warder. “Thinking about their Christmas pudding, the luxurious
scoundrels!” and the convict nearest him had laughed appreciatively, as
convicts and schoolboys do laugh at the jests of the man in authority.
All seemed contentment. Moreover, he had--by way of a pleasant stroke
of wit--tormented Rufus Dawes with his ill-fortune. “The schooner sails
to-morrow, my man,” he had said; “you'll spend your Christmas at the
mines.” And congratulated himself upon the fact that Rufus Dawes
merely touched his cap, and went on with his stone-cracking in silence.
Certainly double irons and hard labour were fine things to break a man's
spirit. So that, when in the afternoon of that same day he heard the
astounding news that Rufus Dawes had freed himself from his fetters,
climbed the gaol wall in broad daylight, run the gauntlet of Macquarie
Street, and was now supposed to be safely hidden in the mountains, he
was dumbfounded.
“How the deuce did he do it, Jenkins?” he asked, as soon as he reached
the yard.
“Well, I'm blessed if I rightly know, your honour,” says Jenkins. “He
was over the wall before you could say 'knife'. Scott fired and missed
him, and then I heard the sentry's musket, but he missed him, too.”
“Missed him!” cries Frere. “Pretty fellows you are, all of you! I
suppose you couldn't hit a haystack at twenty yards? Why, the man wasn't
three feet from the end of your carbine!”
The unlucky Scott, standing in melancholy attitude by the empty irons,
muttered something about the sun having been in his eyes. “I don't know
how it was, sir. I ought to have hit him, for certain. I think I did
touch him, too, as he went up the wall.”
A stranger to the customs of the place might have imagined that he was
listening to a conversation about a pigeon match.
“Tell me all about it,” says Frere, with an angry curse. “I was just
turning, your honour, when I hears Scott sing out 'Hullo!' and when I
turned round, I saw Dawes's irons on the ground, and him a-scrambling
up the heap o' stones yonder. The two men on my right jumped up, and
I thought it was a made-up thing among 'em, so I covered 'em with my
carbine, according to instructions, and called out that I'd shoot the
first that stepped out. Then I heard Scott's piece, and the men gave a
shout like. When I looked round, he was gone.”
“Nobody else moved?”
“No, sir. I was confused at first, and thought they were all in it, but
Parton and Haines they runs in and gets between me and the wall, and
then Mr. Short he come, and we examined their irons.”
“All right?”
“All right, your honour; and they all swore they knowed nothing of it. I
know Dawes's irons was all right when he went to dinner.”
Frere stopped and examined the empty fetters. “All right be hanged,” he
said. “If you don't know your duty better than this, the sooner you go
somewhere else the better, my man. Look here!”
The two ankle fetters were severed. One had been evidently filed
through, and the other broken transversely. The latter was bent, as from
a violent blow.
“Don't know where he got the file from,” said Warder Short.
“Know! Of course you don't know. You men never do know anything until
the mischief's done. You want me here for a month or so. I'd teach you
your duty! Don't know--with things like this lying about? I wonder the
whole yard isn't loose and dining with the Governor.”
“This” was a fragment of delft pottery which Frere's quick eye had
detected among the broken metal.
“I'd cut the biggest iron you've got with this; and so would he and
plenty more, I'll go bail. You ought to have lived with me at Sarah
Island, Mr. Short. Don't know!”
“Well, Captain Frere, it's an accident,” says Short, “and can't be
helped now.”
“An accident!” roared Frere. “What business have you with accidents?
How, in the devil's name, you let the man get over the wall, I don't
know.”
“He ran up that stone heap,” says Scott, “and seemed to me to jump at
the roof of the shed. I fired at him, and he swung his legs over the top
of the wall and dropped.”
Frere measured the distance from his eye, and an irrepressible feeling
of admiration, rising out of his own skill in athletics, took possession
of him for an instant.
“By the Lord Harry, but it's a big jump!” he said; and then the
instinctive fear with which the consciousness of the hideous wrong
he had done the now escaped convict inspired him, made him add: “A
desperate villain like that wouldn't stick at a murder if you pressed
him hard. Which way did he go?”
“Right up Macquarie Street, and then made for the mountain. There were
few people about, but Mr. Mays, of the Star Hotel, tried to stop him,
and was knocked head over heels. He says the fellow runs like a deer.”
“We'll have the reward out if we don't get him to-night,” says Frere,
turning away; “and you'd better put on an extra warder. This sort of
game is catching.” And he strode away to the Barracks.
From right to left, from east to west, through the prison city flew the
signal of alarm, and the patrol, clattering out along the road to New
Norfolk, made hot haste to strike the trail of the fugitive. But night
came and found him yet at large, and the patrol returning, weary and
disheartened, protested that he must be lying hid in some gorge of the
purple mountain that overshadowed the town, and would have to be starved
into submission. Meanwhile the usual message ran through the island,
and so admirable were the arrangements which Arthur the reformer had
initiated, that, before noon of the next day, not a signal station on
the coast but knew that No. 8942, etc., etc., prisoner for life, was
illegally at large. This intelligence, further aided by a paragraph in
the Gazette anent the “Daring Escape”, noised abroad, the world cared
little that the Mary Jane, Government schooner, had sailed for Port
Arthur without Rufus Dawes.
But two or three persons cared a good deal. Major Vickers, for one, was
indignant that his boasted security of bolts and bars should have been
so easily defied, and in proportion to his indignation was the grief of
Messieurs Jenkins, Scott, and Co., suspended from office, and threatened
with absolute dismissal. Mr. Meekin was terribly frightened at the fact
that so dangerous a monster should be roaming at large within reach of
his own saintly person. Sylvia had shown symptoms of nervous terror,
none the less injurious because carefully repressed; and Captain Maurice
Frere was a prey to the most cruel anxiety. He had ridden off at a
hand-gallop within ten minutes after he had reached the Barracks, and
had spent the few hours of remaining daylight in scouring the country
along the road to the North. At dawn the next day he was away to the
mountain, and with a black-tracker at his heels, explored as much of
that wilderness of gully and chasm as nature permitted to him. He had
offered to double the reward, and had examined a number of suspicious
persons. It was known that he had been inspecting the prison a few hours
before the escape took place, and his efforts were therefore attributed
to zeal, not unmixed with chagrin. “Our dear friend feels his reputation
at stake,” the future chaplain of Port Arthur said to Sylvia at the
Christmas dinner. “He is so proud of his knowledge of these unhappy men
that he dislikes to be outwitted by any of them.”
Notwithstanding all this, however, Dawes had disappeared. The fat
landlord of the Star Hotel was the last person who saw him, and the
flying yellow figure seemed to have been as completely swallowed up by
the warm summer's afternoon as if it had run headlong into the blackest
night that ever hung above the earth.