would have
minded -- he'd knocked round too much in the Australian Bush
to mind anything much, or to be surprised at anything;
besides, he was more than half murdered once by a man who said afterwards
that he'd mistook him for some one else: he must have been
a very short-sighted murderer.
Presently we put
tobacco, matches, and bits of candle we had,
on the two stools by the heads of our bunks, turned in,
and filled up and smoked
comfortably, dropping in a lazy word now and again
about nothing in particular. Once I happened to look across at Dave,
and saw him sitting up a bit and watching the door. The door opened
very slowly, wide, and a black cat walked in, looked first at me,
then at Dave, and walked out again; and the door closed behind it.
Dave scratched his ear. `That's rum,' he said. `I could have sworn
I fastened that door. They must have left the cat behind.'
`It looks like it,' I said. `Neither of us has been on the boose lately.'
He got out of bed and up on his long hairy spindle-shanks.
The door had the ordinary, common black oblong lock with a brass knob.
Dave tried the latch and found it fast; he turned the knob, opened the door,
and called, `Puss -- puss -- puss!' but the cat wouldn't come.
He shut the door, tried the knob to see that the catch had caught,
and got into bed again.
He'd scarcely settled down when the door opened slowly, the black cat
walked in, stared hard at Dave, and suddenly turned and darted out
as the door closed smartly.
I looked at Dave and he looked at me -- hard; then he scratched
the back of his head. I never saw a man look so puzzled in the face
and scared about the head.
He got out of bed very
cautiously, took a stick of
firewood in his hand,
sneaked up to the door, and snatched it open. There was no one there.
Dave took the candle and went into the next room, but couldn't see the cat.
He came back and sat down by the fire and meowed, and
presently the cat
answered him and came in from somewhere -- she'd been outside the window,
I suppose; he kept on meowing and she sidled up and rubbed against
his hairy shin. Dave could generally bring a cat that way. He had a weakness
for cats. I'd seen him kick a dog, and
hammer a horse -- brutally,
I thought -- but I never saw him hurt a cat or let any one else do it.
Dave was good to cats: if a cat had a family where Dave was round,
he'd see her all right and comfortable, and only drown a fair surplus.
He said once to me, `I can understand a man kicking a dog,
or
hammering a horse when it plays up, but I can't understand a man
hurting a cat.'
He gave this cat something to eat. Then he went and held the light
close to the lock of the door, but could see nothing wrong with it.
He found a key on the mantel-shelf and locked the door.
He got into bed again, and the cat jumped up and curled down at the foot
and started her old drum going, like shot in a sieve.
Dave bent down and patted her, to tell her he'd meant no harm
when he stretched out his legs, and then he settled down again.
We had some books of the `Deadwood Dick' school. Dave was
reading`The Grisly Ghost of the Haunted Gulch', and I had `The Dismembered Hand',
or `The Disembowelled Corpse', or some such names. They were first-class
preparation for a ghost.
I was
reading away, and getting
drowsy, when I noticed a movement
and saw Dave's frightened head rising, with the terrified shadow of it
on the wall. He was staring at the door, over his book, with both eyes.
And that door was
opening again -- slowly -- and Dave had locked it!
I never felt anything so creepy: the foot of my bunk was behind the door,
and I drew up my feet as it came open; it opened wide, and stood so.
We waited, for five minutes it seemed,
hearing each other breathe,
watching for the door to close; then Dave got out, very gingerly,
and up on one end, and went to the door like a cat on wet bricks.
`You shot the bolt OUTSIDE the catch,' I said, as he caught hold of the door
-- like one grabs a craw-fish.
`I'll swear I didn't,' said Dave. But he'd already turned the key
a couple of times, so he couldn't be sure. He shut and locked the door again.
`Now, get out and see for yourself,' he said.
I got out, and tried the door a couple of times and found it all right.
Then we both tried, and agreed that it was locked.
I got back into bed, and Dave was about half in when a thought struck him.
He got the heaviest piece of
firewood and stood it against the door.
`What are you doing that for?' I asked.
`If there's a broken-down
burglar camped round here, and trying
any of his funny business, we'll hear him if he tries to come in while
we're asleep,' says Dave. Then he got back into bed. We
composed our nerves
with the `Haunted Gulch' and `The Disembowelled Corpse',
and after a while I heard Dave snore, and was just dropping off
when the stick fell from the door against my big toe and then to the ground
with
tremendousclatter. I snatched up my feet and sat up with a jerk,
and so did Dave -- the cat went over the
partition. That door opened,
only a little way this time, paused, and shut suddenly. Dave got out,
grabbed a stick, skipped to the door, and clutched at the knob
as if it were a
nettle, and the door wouldn't come! -- it was fast and locked!
Then Dave's face began to look as frightened as his hair.
He lit his candle at the fire, and asked me to come with him;
he unlocked the door and we went into the other room,
Dave shading his candle very carefully and feeling his way slow with his feet.
The room was empty; we tried the outer door and found it locked.
`It
muster gone by the winder,' whispered Dave. I noticed that he said `it'
instead of `he'. I saw that he himself was shook up, and it only needed that
to scare me bad.
We went back to the bedroom, had a drink of cold tea, and lit our pipes.
Then Dave took the
waterproof cover off his bunk, spread it on the floor,
laid his blankets on top of it, his spare clothes, &c., on top of them,
and started to roll up his swag.
`What are you going to do, Dave?' I asked.
`I'm going to take the track,' says Dave, `and camp somewhere farther on.
You can stay here, if you like, and come on in the morning.'
I started to roll up my swag at once. We dressed and fastened on
the tucker-bags, took up the billies, and got outside without making
any noise. We held our backs pretty hollow till we got down on to the road.
`That comes of camping in a deserted house,' said Dave, when we were safe
on the track. No Australian Bushman cares to camp in an
abandoned homestead,
or even near it -- probably because a deserted home looks ghostlier
in the Australian Bush than
anywhere else in the world.
It was blowing hard, but not raining so much.
We went on along the track for a couple of miles and camped
on the sheltered side of a round tussock hill, in a hole
where there had been a landslip. We used all our candle-ends
to get a fire
alight, but once we got it started we knocked the wet bark
off `manuka' sticks and logs and piled them on, and soon had a roaring fire.
When the ground got a little drier we rigged a bit of shelter from the showers
with some sticks and the oil-cloth swag-covers; then we made some coffee
and got through the night pretty
comfortably. In the morning Dave said,
`I'm going back to that house.'
`What for?' I said.
`I'm going to find out what's the matter with that
crimson door.
If I don't I'll never be able to sleep easy within a mile of a door
so long as I live.'
So we went back. It was still blowing. The thing was simple enough
by
daylight -- after a little watching and experimenting.
The house was built of odds and ends and badly fitted. It `gave' in the wind
in almost any direction -- not much, not more than an inch or so,
but just enough to throw the door-frame out of plumb and out of square
in such a way as to bring the latch and bolt of the lock clear of the catch
(the door-frame was of scraps joined). Then the door swung open
according to the hang of it; and when the gust was over the house gave back,
and the door swung to -- the frame easing just a little in another direction.
I suppose it would take Edison to
invent a thing like that, that came about
by accident. The different strengths and directions of the gusts of wind
must have accounted for the variations of the door's movements --
and maybe the
draught of our big fire had helped.
Dave scratched his head a good bit.
`I never lived in a house yet,' he said, as we came away --
`I never lived in a house yet without there was something wrong with it.
Gimme a good tent.'
A Wild Irishman.
About seven years ago I drifted from Out-Back in Australia to Wellington,
the capital of New Zealand, and up country to a little town called Pahiatua,
which meaneth the `home of the gods', and is situated
in the Wairarappa (rippling or sparkling water) district.
They have a pretty little legend to the effect that the name of the district
was not
originally suggested by its rivers, streams, and lakes,
but by the tears alleged to have been noticed, by a dusky squire,
in the eyes of a
warrior chief who was looking his first, or last --
I don't remember which -- upon the scene. He was the discoverer, I suppose,
now I come to think of it, else the place would have been already named.
Maybe the scene re
minded the old
cannibal of the home of his childhood.
Pahiatua was not the home of my god; and it rained for five weeks.
While
waiting for a remittance, from an Australian newspaper --
which, I
anxiously" target="_blank" title="ad.挂念地;渴望地">
anxiously hoped, would arrive in time for enough of it to be left
(after paying board) to take me away somewhere -- I spent many hours
in the little shop of a
shoemaker who had been a
digger;
and he told me yarns of the old days on the West Coast of Middle Island.
And, ever and anon, he returned to one, a hard-case from the West Coast,
called `The Flour of Wheat', and his cousin, and his mate, Dinny Murphy, dead.
And ever and again the
shoemaker (he was large,
humorous, and good-natured)
made me promise that, when I dropped across an old West Coast
digger --
no matter who or what he was, or whether he was drunk or sober --
I'd ask him if he knew the `Flour of Wheat', and hear what he had to say.
I make no attempt to give any one shade of the Irish brogue --
it can't be done in writing.
`There's the little red Irishman,' said the
shoemaker, who was Irish himself,
`who always wants to fight when he has a glass in him; and there's
the big sarcastic dark Irishman who makes more trouble and fights at a spree
than half-a-dozen little red ones put together; and there's the cheerful
easy-going Irishman. Now the Flour was a
combination of all three and several
other sorts. He was known from the first
amongst the boys at Th' Canary
as the Flour o' Wheat, but no one knew exactly why. Some said
that the right name was the F-l-o-w-e-r, not F-l-o-u-r,
and that he was called that because there was no flower on wheat.
The name might have been a
compliment paid to the man's character
by some one who understood and appreciated it -- or appreciated it
without under
standing it. Or it might have come of some chance saying
of the Flour himself, or his mates -- or an accident with bags of flour.
He might have worked in a mill. But we've had enough of that. It's the man
-- not the name. He was just a big, dark, blue-eyed Irish
digger.
He worked hard, drank hard, fought hard -- and didn't swear.
No man had ever heard him swear (except once); all things were `lovely'
with him. He was always lucky. He got gold and threw it away.
`The Flour was sent out to Australia (by his friends) in
connection with
some trouble in Ireland in eighteen-something. The date doesn't matter:
there was
mostly trouble in Ireland in those days; and nobody,
that knew the man, could have the slightest doubt that he helped the trouble
-- provided he was there at the time. I heard all this from a man
who knew him in Australia. The relatives that he was sent out to
were soon very
anxious to see the end of him. He was as wild
as they made them in Ireland. When he had a few drinks, he'd walk restlessly
to and fro outside the shanty, swinging his right arm across in front of him
with elbow bent and hand closed, as if he had a head in chancery,
and muttering, as though in
explanation to himself --
`"Oi must be walkin' or foightin'! -- Oi must be walkin' or foightin'! --
Oi must be walkin' or foightin'!"
`They say that he wanted to eat his Australian relatives before he was done;
and the story goes that one night, while he was on the spree,
they put their
belongings into a cart and took to the Bush.
`There's no floury record for several years; then the Flour turned up
on the west coast of New Zealand and was never very far from a pub.
kept by a cousin (that he had tracked, unearthed, or discovered somehow)
at a place called "Th' Canary". I remember the first time I saw the Flour.
`I was on a bit of a spree myself, at Th' Canary, and one evening
I was
standing outside Brady's (the Flour's cousin's place)