Page:Hornung - Rogues March.djvu/315

Rh ain’t dead,’ he says. ‘You will be by sundown,’ says the overseer, ‘an’ do you think we want you about the place till to-morrow, you selfish man?’ There wasn’t no flies about that overseer, either; it was him as killed three men in a fortnight, by overwork at the saw. They just dropped dead at their work. ‘Take it away,’ is all he says, ‘put it in the ground’; an’ you never heard nothing more. No, no,” the old monster would conclude, with his senile chuckle; “there wasn’t no flies about them old days in Toongabbie, I can tell ‘ee. I’d give a bit to have ’ad some o’ this feather-bed gang there; them as thinks they know what ’ardship is!”

The First Fleeter became less loquacious after a time, however, and much less severe upon the luxury of the major’s iron-gang. Honeybone’s shrewd eye was on him, and that of the First Fleeter began to droop and ruminate with a cunning preoccupation that made him quite silent on his ledge. At length, however, he took to leaning over and mumbling to Tom in the stillest hours. And when Tom listened, the old wretch mumbled to others, including Macbeth, who had soon followed his enemy from Castle Sullivan, and been well-nigh as refractory in the stockade. The Scot was in another den at nights, but the First Fleeter made and used his opportunities with characteristic craft. So now there was a new poison in the air, and the virus had come all the way from Toongabbie in the early days.

One of the last to be inoculated, and yet the one who perhaps took most kindly to the process, was a certain sleek, bullet-headed youth, who came to the stockade on a day in mid-winter. In the evening, as Tom was sitting at the mess-table, with bloodshot eyes downcast as usual, he heard his name in a voice he seemed to know.