Page:Hornung - Rogues March.djvu/233

Rh had given up tapping and rapping him with that bamboo wand which was for ever quickening felon fingers and sowing black murder in felon hearts.

But the incident of the screw-hammer made an unpopular man of Tom among his fellows; and worse was to come of it. The theft was brought home to the man Macbeth, and the very next night Tom met him with a white, pinched face, and his coat on back to front.

“Why, Mac!” cried Tom. “What now?”

The foulest maledictions were his only answer: a white lip quivering with the words.

“What on earth have I done?”

“You ken weel. This, then!”

He turned his back, and Tom started back with horror. The shirt beneath the open coat was sopping red.

In vain Tom protested that he had never told a soul about the hammer. Nobody would believe him. His indignation and his sympathy were treated with scorn as so much hypocrisy. His name was execrated in the convict huts; and so much of the convict spirit survived in Ginger that he was with the men in this, and never spoke to Tom now. The overseer besides shared Nat Sullivan’s grievance against Tom: a furtive admiration for the girl O’Brien was one of his softer traits; and she was the same to neither of them now.

At the end of a month the groom’s truest friend was the terrific old doctor himself. Peggy was his friend indeed; but though her grey eyes watched him wistfully enough from the window, he seldom heard her full, rich brogue. Nor was it consideration for the girl that made Tom deny himself that small consolation; young Sullivan had forbidden him the house, and was sufficiently his enemy as it was. Indeed, the groom discovered