BRITISH TALES OF THE BUSH: 5 Novels in One Volume (Illustrated). E. W. Hornung
enough; he had always some excuse for himself when he regained his room, still unstained by crime; and so the unhealthy excitement was deliciously maintained. To-night, as always when he sallied forth, the deed should be done; he only wished there was a shade less moon, and wondered whether he might not have done better to wait. But, as usual, the die was cast. And indeed it was quite a new complication that deterred this poor creature for the last time: he was feverishly expecting the coach when a patter of hoofs smote his ear from the opposite quarter.
This was enough to stay an older and a bolder hand. Oswald tucked in his guns with unrealized relief. It was his last instinct to wait and see whether the horseman was worth attacking for his own sake; he had room for few ideas at the same time; and his only new one was the sense of a new danger, which he prepared to meet by pocketing his pistols as a child bolts stolen fruit. There was no thinking before the act; but it was perhaps as characteristic of the naturally honest man as of the coward.
Stingaree swept through the trees at a gallop, the milk-white mare flashing in the moonlit patches. At the sight of her Oswald was convulsed with a premonition as to who was coming; his heart palpitated as even his heart had never done before; and yet he would have sat irresolute, inert, and let the man pass as he always let the coach, had the decision been left to him. The real milk-white mare affected the imitation in its turn as the coach-horses never had; and Oswald swayed and swam upon a whinnying steed. . . .
"I thought you were Stingaree!"
The anti-climax was as profound as the weakling's relief. Yet there was a strong dash of indignation in his tone.
"What if I am?"
"But you're not. You're not half smart enough. You can't tell me anything about Stingaree!"
He put his eye-glass up with an air.
Stingaree put up his.
"You young fool!" said he.
The thoroughbred mare, the eye-glass, a peeping pistol, were all superfluous evidence. There was the far more unmistakable authority of voice and eye and bearing. Yet the voice at least was somehow familiar to the ear of Oswald, who stuttered as much when he was able.
"I must have heard it before, or have I dreamt it? I've thought a good deal about you, you know!"
To do him justice, he was no longer very nervous, though still physically shaken. On the other hand, he began already to feel the elation of his dreams.
"I do know. You've thought your soul into a pulp on the subject, and you must give it up," said Stingaree, sternly.
Oswald sat aghast.
"But how on earth did you know?"
"I've come straight from your mother. You're breaking her heart."
"But how can you have come straight from her?"
"I've come down for another melodeon. I've got to have one, too."
"Another——"
And Oswald Melvin knew his drunken whim-driver for what he had really been.
"The yarn I told you about myself was true enough," continued Stingaree. "Only the names were altered, as they say; it happened to the other fellow, not to me. I made it happen. He is hardly likely to have lived to tell the tale."
"Did he really try to betray you after what you'd done for him?"
"More or less. He looked on me as fair game."
"But you had saved his life?"
Stingaree shrugged.
"We rode across him."
"And you think he perished of dust and thirst?"
Stingaree nodded. "In torment!"
"Then he got what he jolly well earned! Anything less would have been too good for him!" cried Oswald, and with a boyish, uncompromising heat which spoke to some human nature in him still.
But Stingaree frowned up the moonlit track. There was still no sign of the coach. Yet time was short, and the morbid enthusiast was not to be disgusted; indeed, he was all enthusiasm now, and a less unattractive lad than the bushranger had hoped to find him. He looked the white screw and Oswald up and down as they sat in their saddles in the moonshine: it seemed like sunlight on that beaming fool.
"And you think of commencing bushranger, do you?"
"Rather!"
"It's a hard life while it lasts, and a nasty death to top up with."
"They don't hang you for it."
"They might hang me for the man I put back in the vile dust from whence he sprung. They'd hang you in six months. You've too many nerves. You'd pull the trigger every time."
"A short life and a merry one!" cried the reckless Oswald. "I shouldn't care."
"But your mother would," retorted Stingaree, sharply. "Don't think about yourself so much; think about her for a change."
The young man turned dusky in the moonlight; he was wounded where the Bishop had wounded him, and Stingaree was quick to see it—as quick to turn the knife round in the wound.
"What a bushranger!" he jeered. "Put your plucky little mother in a side-saddle and she'd make two of you—ten of you—twenty of a puny, namby-pamby, conceited young idiot like you! Upon my word, Melvin, if I had a mother like you I should be ashamed of myself. I never had, I may tell you, or I shouldn't have come down to a dog's life like this."
The bushranger paused to watch the effect of his insults. It was not quite what he wanted. The youth would not hang his head. And, if he did not answer back, he looked back doggedly enough; for he could be dogged, in a passive way; it was his one hard quality, the knot in a character of green deal. Stingaree glanced up the road once more, but only for an instant.
"It is a dog's life," he went on, "whether you believe it or not. But it takes a bull-dog to live it, and don't you forget it. It's no life for a young poodle like you! You can't stick up a better man than yourself, not more than once or twice. It requires something more than a six-shooter, and a good deal more than was put into you, my son! But you shall see for yourself; look over your shoulder."
Oswald did so, and started in a fashion that set the bushranger nodding his scorn. It was only a pair of lamps still close together in the distance up the road.
"The coach!" exclaimed the excited youth.
"Exactly," said Stingaree, "and I'm going to stick it up."
Excitement grew to frenzy in a flash.
"I'll help you!"
"You'll do no such thing. But you shall see how it's done, and then ask yourself candidly if it's nice work and if you're the man to do it. Ride a hundred yards further in, tether your horse quickly in the thickest scrub you can find, then run back and climb into the fork of this gum-tree. You'll have time; if you're sharp I'll give you a leg up. But I sha'n't be surprised if I don't see you again!"
There is no saying what Oswald might have done, but for these last words. Certain it is that they set him galloping with an oath, and brought him back panting in another minute. The coach-lamps were not much wider apart. Stingaree awaited him, also on foot, and quicker than the telling Oswald was ensconced on high where he could see through the meagre drooping leaves with very little danger of being seen.
"And if you come down before I'm done and gone—if it's not to glory—I'll run some lead through you! You'll be the first!"
Oswald perched reflecting on this final threat; and the scene soon enacted before his eyes was viewed as usual through the aura of his own egoism. He longed all the time to be taking part in it; he could see himself so distinctly at the work—save for about a minute in the middle, when for once in his life he held his breath and trembled for other skins.
There had been no unusual feature. The life-size coach-lamps had shown their mountain-range of outside passengers against moonlit sky or trees. A cigar paled and reddened