Page:Hornung - Rogues March.djvu/317

Rh all but up, you’ve never had the lash, there’s a chance for you; so give me your word.”

The lad hesitated.

“For my sake!”

The lad gave in, but consoled himself by making up to Creasey, who slept in his hut, and was already deeply implicated in that which the other thus forswore.

All was in readiness; the excitement throughout the gang was intense though invisible; and Erichsen, Macbeth, and Creasey were even readier than their fellows (as behoved good ringleaders), when the unforeseen happened at the critical moment. The general failed them on the field of battle. The First Fleeter fell ill and was removed.

It had been coming on for weeks: the old man, who had made light of the iron-gang, was the first to succumb to its hourly hardships. He was older than he had thought; he had it still in him to blacken and corrode every heart in the gang with his own abundant poison, and that he did, but that was all. His irons became very silent all night long. One morning he tumbled at his work; the next, he was sent over to Maitland, unfettered and in a cart. The gang were at work at the time, and the last Tom saw of the First Fleeter, as he waved his cap in the cart, was his bald bad head and his unconquerable smile. Tom wondered whether the last had not in some degree balanced the first, and been doing a little good for a long time in a land that needed light hearts almost as much as pure ones. Still more he wondered how they would manage without him now.

Before nightfall, however, this departure was succeeded by an arrival as unforeseen. It was that of a curricle containing a solitary individual, who drove both