Robbery Under Arms, Rolf Boldrewood [pdf e book reader txt] 📗

the two horses coming down slowly, step by step, kicking the stones down before them. Then we could hear a man groaning, as if he couldn’t bear the pain, and partly as if he was trying to smother it. Then another man’s voice, very soft and soothing like, trying to comfort another.

“My head’s afire, and these cursed ribs are grinding against one another every step of this infernal ladder. Is it far now?” How he groaned then!

“Just got the bottom; hold on a bit longer and you’ll be all right.”

Just then the leading horse came out into the open before the cave. We had a good look at him and his rider. I never forgot them. It was a bad day I ever saw either, and many a man had cause to say the same.

The horse held up his head and snorted as he came abreast of us, and we showed out. He was one of the grandest animals I’d ever seen, and I afterwards found he was better than he looked. He came stepping down that beastly rocky goat-track, he, a clean thoroughbred that ought never to have trod upon anything rougher than a rolled training track, or the sound bush turf. And here he was with a heavy weight on his back⁠—a half-dead, fainting man, that couldn’t hold the reins⁠—and him walking down as steady as an old mountain bull or a wallaroo on the side of a creek bank.

I hadn’t much time to look him over. I was too much taken up with the rider, who was lying forward on his chest across a coat rolled round and strapped in front of the saddle, and his arms round the horse’s neck. He was as pale as a ghost. His eyes⁠—great dark ones they were, too⁠—were staring out of his head. I thought he was dead, and called out to father and Jim that he was.

They ran up, and we lifted him off after undoing some straps and a rope. He was tied on (that was what the half-caste was waiting for at the top of the gully). When we laid him down his head fell back, and he looked as much like a corpse as if he had been dead a day.

Then we saw he had been wounded. There was blood on his shirt, and the upper part of his arm was bandaged.

“It’s too late, father,” said I; “he’s a dead man. What pluck he must have had to ride down there!”

“He’s worth two dead ’uns yet,” said father, who had his hand on his pulse. “Hold his head up one of you while I go for the brandy. How did he get hit, Warrigal?”

“That⁠—Sergeant Goring,” said the boy, a slight, active-looking chap, about sixteen, that looked as if he could jump into a gum tree and back again, and I believe he could. “Sergeant Goring, he very near grab us at Dilligah. We got a lot of old Jobson’s cattle when he came on us. He jump off his horse when he see he couldn’t catch us, and very near drop Starlight. My word, he very nearly fall off⁠—just like that” (here he imitated a man reeling in his saddle); “but the old horse stop steady with him, my word, till he come to. Then the sergeant fire at him again; hit him in the shoulder with his pistol. Then Starlight come to his senses, and we clear. My word, he couldn’t see the way the old horse went. Ha, ha!”⁠—here the young devil laughed till the trees and rocks rang again. “Gallop different ways, too, and met at the old needle-rock. But they was miles away then.”

Before the wild boy had come to the end of his story the wounded man had proved that it was only a dead faint, as the women call it, not the real thing. And after he had tasted a pannikin full of brandy and water, which father brought him, he sat up and looked like a living man once more.

“Better have a look at my shoulder,” he said. “That⁠—fellow shot like a prize-winner at Wimbledon. I’ve had a squeak for it.”

“Puts me in mind of our old poaching rows,” said father, while he carefully cut the shirt off, that was stiffened with blood and showed where the bullet had passed through the muscle, narrowly missing the bone of the joint. We washed it, and relieved the wounded man by discovering that the other bullet had only been spent, after striking a tree most like, when it had knocked the wind out of him and nearly unhorsed him, as Warrigal said.

“Fill my pipe, one of you. Who the devil are these lads? Yours, I suppose, Marston, or you wouldn’t be fool enough to bring them here. Why didn’t you leave them at home with their mother? Don’t you think you and I and this devil’s limb enough for this precious trade of ours?”

“They’ll take their luck as it comes, like others,” growled father; “what’s good enough for me isn’t too bad for them. We want another hand or two to work things right.”

“Oh! we do, do we?” said the stranger, fixing his eyes on father as if he was going to burn a hole in him with a burning-glass; “but if I’d a brace of fine boys like those of my own I’d hang myself before I’d drag them into the pit after myself.”

“That’s all very fine,” said father, looking very dark and dangerous. “Is Mr. Starlight going to turn parson? You’ll be just in time, for we’ll all be shopped if you run against the police like this, and next thing to lay them on to the Hollow by making for it when you’re too weak to ride.”

“What would you have me do? Pull up and hold up my hands? There was nowhere else to go; and that new sergeant rode devilish well, I can tell you, with a big chestnut well-bred horse, that gave old Rainbow here all he