In Tinlay's Whare

HIS is not at all explained. It is Tinlay’s business, strictly. But Tinlay passed, untelling, and it fell to Clint to pick up the raveled ends.

Tinlay was shepherd to Lane in a log hut set in the bush thirty miles from the homestead. He watched the saddle that made boundary of the low hills, and when the sheep fed afar he employed himself how he might. Once he employed himself in dying, and a stray swagger gave the word to Mindoorie at a considerably later date.

This does not matter, for Tinlay was forgotten in a fortnight; partly because it is well known that the mile-stones for the guidance of the men of to-morrow must be quarried from the bones of the men of to-day, and partly because out-back these milestones carry only such records as may be of use to the next man, and are not in the least of epitaph construction.

Clint was the next man. He went up the day after what had been Tinlay came to final anchor on the little hill behind the township; found the mobs shoulder-deep in rank gullies, and chasing the full feed still lower on the hills; raked out the dead ash left by Tinlay in the chimney-place, and slung his billy from the hook. Then he straightened slowly, being stiff from long hours in the saddle, and looked to what needed next.

The bunk was bare to its wooden slats, for there were reasons why the mattress went away with Tinlay.

“Wonder what Muggins’d say ter this,” he growled, and crawled out to pull bracken—heaps of bracken, for he was a soft sleeper—in the great pillared corridors, always gloomy and always sounding like organ-pipes at moving of the wind in the tops.

But when the fern was spread, and the gray blankets over, and the firelight ran into all the wharè corners, a restlessness caught Clint, so that he overhauled carefully the nine-by-twelve space that had held Tinlay’s private life.

Such outposts as these tell more of a man than his tongue or his face will give. Besides, it is decreed that each soul must influence other souls directly or indirectly. This was why the personality of Tinlay became blatantly real to Clint very presently.

Tinlay had been a neat man. Clint approved of the folding-chairs and camp-table, and the shelves where some odd books lay dusty among candles and string and fifty-one things more. The books did not interest Clint. They were what he called “bally rhymin’-rot.” No more did he care for the thumb-nail sketches crowded on the smoked walls.

“Sheep feedin’,” he said, standing before them and sucking his pipe in pure puzzlement. “An’ a robin on th' choppin’-block outside an’ a beastly blowy night wi’ a wet moon. The on’y wharè on the beat what ain’t got a colored picter from the township. Tinlay’d a rat, sure ’nuff.”

Next, he fished out Tinlay’s diary from between the top log and the sheet-iron roof, and frilled the pages over in his hand by the red of the sunset.

It was scrawled in indelible pencil, and there were copious stretches in Hebrew, or something equally like barb-wire.

“Tommy-rot,” said Clint; and, there being no known person on the face of all the earth who wanted aught to remember Tinlay by, he stuffed the whole thing under the sputtering billy.

Before he left the wharè he would have given more than he had, and more, to have that book back in his hands. For it might have told of The Faces.

The first face he found in the corner by the bunk-head. Tinlay’s pet weka was killing a rat all over the room; and when the twain began to bleed into Clint’s swag he chased them out, falling over the face in the doing of it.

He carried it back to the fireplace; squatted in the glow; turned it as the light fell this way and that. He smoked three pipes for the good of his nerves, and said, very much more than once, “Did Tinlay do it, or ole Nick?”

It was the face of incarnate dread. This was most certain. After, it might be seen that it was the face of a man; young, by the full temples and clean chin, and roughed with vigorous power from a rich, cheesy heart of totara, ten-by-eight by five-and-a-half. The head was flung back, so that the neck muscles stood out; the lips were tight on the teeth, and the cheeks drawn in. But it was the set seeing horror of the eyes that made the thing strenuous with a lurking life beyond the brain and hand of the workman.

“That chap’s lookin’ on his death, an’ funkin’ it,” said Clint suddenly; and then shuddered because he knew that he had spoken truth.

He went to bed and slept badly, dreaming that the face hung in the air above him, and told him why it had feared death. This seemed to be because it would not play football or cricket any more. But the reason was so totally inadequate that Clint woke up laughing.

The face was quite as horrible and truthful by daylight, but the bridge of the nose and one nostril were unfinished. Thereby Clint took sufficient comfort to unclasp his knife for the smoothing. For most bushmen can do all things with their fingers. Five minutes he sat, weakening. Then he dropped the knife back, unfleshed, climbed a stool, and thrust the face to the hind corner of the topmost shelf, beyond bottles and empty matchboxes.

“Uncanny,” he said. “That’s what it is. Tinlay was a genus if he chopped it out, but he must a-bin dotty too. An’ he never did it out o’ his head.”

This night Clint saw the second face. He turned in the strait bunk that Tinlay had mistaken for a coffin, and saw it on the floor. The door was ajar, and the moonlight washed through in a flood; and the shadow of a face fell black on the white. But only the tree-boles showed faintly beyond when Clint looked for the man who cast that shadow, and only the tree-tops whispered together in the silence which is not peaceful, but restless with a thin, ghostly life. Clint looked again at the face. It was profile, and indistinct, especially about the back of the head. Sleepily he fancied that he had seen the thing before. Then he murmured:

“Bloomin’ shadder in a bunch o’ leaves. I’ll be seein’ faces in the billy nex’. An’ I’ll light the fire wi’ that ole heathen o’ Tinlay’s ter-morrer.”

He took the face down at midday, and, happening to hold it sideways, sat suddenly, and did not feel at all well. For, allowing that the one face showed all fear, and the other the short upper lip of easy contempt, this was that which Clint had seen as a puddle of ink on the floor.

But the men of the back-country need not to have coward blood in their hearts. Clint shook himself, and went out from the bush to the free, windy hillside. There he said defiantly to his dog:

“Simple thing, in course. Branches makes a shadder on the floor, an’ Tinlay carves the shadder. The lay o’ the moonlight alters the expression—an’ that’s all there is to’t. Blest if I don’t worry that nose out from the ole shadder myself.”

He felt brave as a man may be when he laid block and knife in the bunk beside him. He began to sweat a little when the shadow dropped sudden and vivid in the white lime. It was cruelly real, and the pupil of the eye fixed on the block in Clint’s hand. Clint swore to this later, and no one could possibly contradict him. He sat quite still, watching; and when another shade moved over the door-sill his eyes burned in his head with a sudden awful dread.

It was Tinlay’s that came with its shadow before it, and heard Clint making incoherent prayer and breaking into laughter of relief. For a weka is above all things companion to lonely men, by reason of its knowledge that the heavy, powerful mystery of the bush is really just a delicate and transparent joke. And this gives the human much confidence.

It gave Clint confidence to watch the forward glide of the bird until its ocher-tipped brown feathers should darken in the unexplainable shadow. He watched. The weka stepped on, head low, spurred feet and wings mincing. It walked into the shadow, blotting the outline with its own, and passed, untouched in its lightest feather by the face, to the chimney-place.

Clint had not known that this Thing was a horror before. He knew it now, rolling in his bunk and biting his fingers; his eyes drawn still while the moon lasted to that face that mocked his fear and was cast by no light of earth.

He fought a little battle between his pride and his lawful alarm in the sunny space about the chopping-block, while the weka ran down into the thick undergrowth many times with scraps of chops and damper for his family. There were two things to be regarded. If he went back and said that he was frightened by a shadow, it would not be very easy to live on Mindoorie after. If he stayed, and that Thing turned to what Tinlay had seen, he would go mad. Quite probably Tinlay had gone mad before his death. Clint wished he had kept that blue-backed diary, that he might know for truth.

Three days he cooked and pottered about the wharè. Three nights he slept in a wild fern gully where glowworms climbed in ghastly gleams to meet the stars. On the fourth night came rain in ruled lines that caused Clint to the soaked fern and crouch over the fire with his dogs. The night was darker than coal in a pit, and therefore no shadow could lie.

“If it was Lavel or Muggins they’d a-guv it best long ago,” he said in his conceit; turned, and saw the face floating on the floor in that strip of white that did not shine through the shut door.

This put the roof on the horror unequivocally. It is not wise to ask Clint anything concerning that night; but it is believed on Mindoorie that he passed it with stopped ears, and face hidden against the soft warmness of his dogs.

He rode back at daybreak, carrying his terror in his face and a carved lump of totara in his swag on the saddle bow. He walked into the wharè as the boys sat at tea, unrolled his blankets, and tossed the face with a bump on the table between Walt’s plate and Jack’s.

“I come back,” he said, “’cause that devil is castin’ his reflection all over the wharè, an’ I don’t like it. Burn him, you chaps. I tried, and I couldn’t wi’ the other face watchin’. Chop him up. But I couldn’t do that nuther.”

Walt was holding the virile staring face in shaking hands.

“It’s de Carteret,” he said unsteadily. “Reggie de Carteret’d got bushed somewheres up there seven years ago ’n was never picked up. Lord! what is it? Good Lord! what made him look that way?”

“Seein’ his death,” cried Clint hysterically, and tumbled over among the plates and pannikins.

They won explanation from him later. But it did not clear matters at all.

“Twenty chaps hev put in th’ season there since Carteret pegged out,” said Walt. “An’ why should he show on’y t’ Tinlay? ’N why show lookin’ like that? Clint, ye’re lucky y’ didn’t hev this thing knockin’ roun’ yer bed. How did Tinlay stan’ ’t t’ carve it? How the land did he?”

“Tinlay saw more than you, Clint,” said Harry gravely. “No man ever cut those suck-in cheeks and bared teeth from a black flat shadow. That is, if Tinlay did do it, and not the devil.”

“Tinlay did it,” said Clint. “Don’t ask me how I know, fur I can’t tell yer. But he did it. An’ it’s a message by the hand o’ one dead man from another dead man. An’ blowed ef I likes bein’ mixed up in it.”

But the shadow never showed there again. And so the true connection of de Carteret and Tinlay and the bush wharè belongs to the things that are not told.

But once in the mustering season Harry’s dog gnawed on a human rib-bone in the glowworm gully, and the boys buried the bone with reverence.