"Don't you be afraid," the man answered quickly. "I'll finish the yarn or there won't be time. One of the two men married the woman, and one of the two men swore for vengeance, either on the man, or the woman, or both. And he had it. How? That's what I'll tell you. The yarn don't amuse you, sonny? You want waking up again? Well, one thing he did was to steal the kid."

He stopped again, watching Tony's face closely.

"Yes; go on," Tony said quietly.

"It near broke the mother's heart when she found it out," he continued, speaking maliciously--"near broke her heart. But she never found it, for it was put right out of sight; it was left at a humpy at a place called Taylor's Flat."

He watched Tony narrowly as he spoke, and laughed harshly as he saw him swing round and leap to his feet.

"Now you're interested," he said.

Tony stood looking at him, unable for the moment to find words to express what he felt. Was the coincidence of a delirium-stricken mind still the explanation of the man's striking at the tenderest spot in his heart? If so, it was as nothing; but if not----

"Who are you that you should know this?" Tony cried, moving towards the man where he lay with his eyes, bright as stars and cruel as a snake's, fixed upon him.

"You listen to my yarn. That's your contract," he said derisively.

"You'll live till to-morrow; I shan't. Are you going to cheat a dying man? Let me talk. You can fill in the rest about the kid to suit your own taste, and I'll----"

"You were the man who stole the child; you were the mean----"

"Was I?" interrupted the man. "You wait and hear. The man who stole the kid--you, if you want to be exact, d.a.m.n you, now you've come to see me die--that man went back to the--the place where he stole the kid and where he met--your father."

Again he sought to raise his head as he uttered the words in short, sharp tones, his face growing wet and ghastly under the influence of his pain and his hatred. Tony, watching him, said nothing; the man was either mad or lying, and whichever it was, the best thing to do was to keep quiet and say nothing.

"He came back for fresh mischief, and I--there, you know now--I met him," he shouted; and Tony, keeping still, stood looking at him calmly.

"I waited for him out on the run," he went on, beginning to speak in jerky spasms of words, as though he needed to rest every few seconds if he would keep his energy enough in hand to last him till he finished his story. "He had been rounding up some cattle, and had a stock-whip with him. I had one, too, a beauty, with a sixteen-foot green-hide thong. I knew him as soon as I saw him half a mile away. I skulked in the scrub as he came up--just behind a clump of wattle. To fool him I rode out and past him; he turned after me, and I wheeled."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THROUGH THE BUSH IT WENT, RACING LIKE MAD." [_Page 268._]

The bright eyes glittered as they watched Tony's face.

"You're a fly young chap," he went on, "but you're not fly enough to guess what's coming. A couple of miles from where we were a track ran through a thickly timbered part of the run. It was a winding track, and not too wide. At one of the narrowest bits, just in the middle of a curve, an old dead gum had stood for years. I had gone over that track just an hour or so before, and I saw where that big gum had fallen--lying right up the track. It was a red gum, tough, long-limbed, and sun-dried. When it fell it had splintered lumps off the limbs, making them sharp at the ends, which were pointing up the track like the p.r.o.ngs of a great jagged toasting-fork. Ha, sonny, what a throw-in for me! Here was a game worth playing. I rode at the man I hated, loosening my stock-whip, and as I came near him, I turned aside and sent out the lash--so as not to touch him. The crack of it sounded in his ears and in his horse's as well, and the beast began to plunge. Here was my chance, and I took it. As the horse reared and plunged, I waited till it was facing away from me, and then sent the lash fair on to its flanks. It brought a lump out of the brute, for the green-hide was as hard as nails, and that horse set off straight for the track where the dead gum lay, and with me after it. Through the bush it went, racing like mad, with its flanks dripping red as I landed blow after blow with the good old green-hide. Soon it was on the track, racing, galloping, blindly, madly, like h.e.l.l out for an airing, straight for my toasting-fork, straight--G.o.d!"

In the fury and excitement of his story the man had forgotten his injuries, and to give emphasis to his words, and perhaps make the pale, set face that was turned towards him grow paler and more set, he had reached out his arms, and held his clutching fingers towards Tony as he sought to rise and peer with his vengeful eyes nearer and closer to his victim, till the pangs of agony cut short both his fury and his invective. He fell back, his lips pressed together till they were thin and white, and his fists clenched as he strove to battle with the jarring torture in his nerves. The sweat stood out in glistening beads on his forehead, and his brows contracted down until they almost hid the eyes in the frown of determined will.

The mute agony of the man's face sent back the disgust which was growing in Tony's heart. The tale might be a lie--it might be only delirium; but the man was in agony, in the death-agony perhaps, and Tony went to his side.

"What can I do to help you?" he asked, as gently as he could.

"Pull the d.a.m.ned leg down--it's shifted," the man muttered between his clenched teeth; and Tony did as he asked.

The man lay still with closed eyes for a few moments without heeding Tony's query whether he was easier. Then he raised his eyelids, and, with a short, forced laugh, turned his head on one side.

"I'm going to finish the yarn," he said in a voice that was strained, but in marked contrast to the one he had previously used.

"Never mind the yarn; lie quiet for a bit," Tony exclaimed.

"I'll finish the yarn," the man replied, with a touch of his old fierceness in his voice. "Where was I when the d.a.m.ned bone moved? I remember. We were riding for the jump, riding as I never rode before or since, riding like--like----I wonder if they ride in h.e.l.l? If they do they can't ride wilder, for I cut that horse's flanks to ribbons--yes, cut it till the bone showed through--and it fled down that winding track so fast that I was left behind. It went out of sight, it and its rider, round the bend where the red gum lay. Ha, sonny, I wasn't first in, but I won that race. There was a shout and a shriek from man and horse, and then a crash of shattered timber, and when I rode up at a hand-gallop, I saw on my toasting-fork, stuck with a jagged p.r.o.ng through him, his head hanging down and his legs flying up, just as he had pitched from his horse, the man your mother loved."

The venom had come into the voice again, the hatred into the eyes; and as he uttered the last words, Tony instinctively drew back farther away from him, his whole nature recoiling in loathing from the cruel, brutal pa.s.sion of the man's face.

"That's what you're to tell her; that's my message to her when you find her--my dying message to the woman who made me mad with love and mad with hate. And you'll give it to her--you, her stolen boy, and when she hears it from you, she----"

His voice stopped in a gasp, and for a minute he battled for his breath.

"I don't care now; I'm square at last," he muttered, as soon as he could speak again; and Tony saw by the red firelight how his face was growing pallid and drawn. "I was square with the mother years ago and square with the man she loved, and now I'm square with you; for I've put a sting in your life that'll last as long as you've breath to draw. I came back here to find you; and then--I am the man who collared the gold last time you were here, and I settled your hash with the fair-haired girl that's out at the station now. You've your father's voice and your father's face, and if your mother could see you she'd know in a moment--only she can't, she can't; and you----"

A gasping spasm seized the man, and he battled again for his breath.

Tony sprang across to him, and, stooping down, put his hand under the man's head and raised it. He breathed more easily, and Tony watched the face anxiously, for the eyes were closed and the lips drawn away from the teeth. With his unoccupied hand Tony put back the s.h.a.ggy ma.s.s of hair from the forehead, and, as he felt the touch, the man opened his eyes and stared vindictively at the face above him.

"You thought I'd gone--did you?" he said, in little more than a whisper.

"Don't touch me--you sp.a.w.n of----"

A spasm of pain contracted his features and stopped his words.

"Don't talk like that. Keep quiet. I only want to do what I can to ease you," Tony said gently.

The man, even as he struggled for breath, raised one arm and tried to push Tony away, until, fearing that his efforts to soothe him might only do more harm than good, Tony let the head lie on the pillow again and stood back. The man's chest moved as the gasping struggles for breath sounded hard and grating in his throat, and his frame trembled as it lay. Presently he opened his eyes again and looked at Tony.

"Tell your--mother when you--find her how----"

Another spasm interrupted him, and Tony stepped nearer, for the voice was terribly low. When the worst of the spasm was over, he went on, the words scarcely audible--

"How your--father--died."

The eyes, still full of hatred though they were growing l.u.s.treless and dull, were fixed on Tony's face with a blinkless stare. The distorted lips moved twice without any sound coming from them. Then the chin fell; the glazing eyes turned up from their stare on Tony's face, up to the dark starlit vault overhead; a wavering sigh came as it were on the silent air of the night--and the unknown was dead.

For a time Tony stood looking down at him as he lay, the face, never beautiful, growing more hideous every second with the muscles setting rigid in the last expression of savage hate. The fire softly hissed and crackled as the burning logs flaked into ashes, and beyond the range of the ruddy light the bush formed a deep, impenetrable gloom, darker and more sombre than the deep blue of the moonless sky. The faint wind of night, scarcely perceptible to the senses save by the soft whispering rustle of the foliage, brought no other sound with it. All was still and silent, and Tony, as he stood, felt as a man will sometimes feel when he stands on a silent night in the great immensity of the Australian bush--as though he were something which had no material existence save the consciousness of the moment, and even that were an intrusion on the sublime calm of untrammelled, sleeping nature.

Then, as with the fury of a thunder-peal, there crashed in upon his half-numbed mind the significance of all that he had just seen and heard. The hate the man had shown him; the story of that ghastly revenge; the message he had scoffingly told him to take to his mother,--all returned to him in a moment, blended, as it were, with the hints Nuggan had thrown out, and the suspicion that had often been in his own mind.

The man had spoken of Ailleen; he had claimed the robbery from Leary's hut; he had boasted how he had stolen the child from its mother and left it at Taylor's Flat--and Nuggan had told him to ask next time he was at the Flat who Mrs. Garry was and what she could tell. Nuggan, too, had taunted him with the change in Ailleen's manner and the reason for it--the reason this man had named--the mystery surrounding his birth.

His eyes turned again upon the silent form on the stretcher, with the horribly distorted features and the face moulded in an expression of merciless hate and cruelty.

Mechanically he approached and pulled the end of the blanket over the staring face. With a shudder he turned away, and walked back to his seat by the fire. He was sitting there when, an hour later, Peters and Morton rode up with a led horse, walking lame, between them.

"Our man was thrown and dodged us in the bush," Peters said as he came up. "But we collared the horse and the gold. Murray and his mate are after the other. Hullo!" he broke off, as he glanced over at the figure under the blanket. "Has he gone?"

Tony nodded.

"Well, I hope the others have too--the mean sneak thieves!" Peters exclaimed.

"We'd have lynched them if we'd caught them," Morton added.