WE were standing together on the platform of the King’s Bridge terminus, Dublin,—five of us—a gallant quintette in the noble army of drummers.
There was Austin Burke, slim, prim, and demure, as befitted the representative of a vast dry-goods establishment whose business lay amongst modistes and milliners; Paul Ryan, tall, dark, and dignified, who travelled for the great ironmongery firm of Locke & Brassey; Tim Malone, smart, chatty, and well-informed, the agent of a flourishing stationery house; dashing Jack Hickey, who was solicitor for a distillery, and rattling, rakish, as packed with funny ideas and comical jokes as a Western newspaper, and as full of mischief as a frolicsome kitten; and lastly, myself. We were waiting for the 11.30 A.M. train south, and indulging in somewhat personal witticisms upon the appearance of various personages in the surrounding crowd, when our attention was attracted by the bustling advent upon the platform of a fussy, florid individual, with a face like an inflamed tomato, and the generally irascible and angry air of an infuriated rooster.
“Know that fellow?” queried Burke. “That’s Major Boomerang, the newly-appointed Resident Magistrate for some part of Cork; all the way from Bengal, to teach the wild Irish Hindoo civilization. He thinks we’re all Thugs and Dacoits, and by the ‘jumping Harry,’ as he would ejaculate, he’s going to sit on us. What do you say, boys, if we have a little lark with him? Let us all get into the same carriage and draw him out. I’ll introduce you, F. (to me), as my friend Captain Neville, of the Galway militia. I won’t know you other fellows, but you can take whatever characters you like, just as the conversation turns. Let me see. You, Ryan, get out at Portarlington, and you, Malone, at Limerick Junction. Jack Hickey goes on with us to Mallow. Now, I know this Boomerang will be launching out into fiery denunciation of Parnell and Biggar and all the rest before we’re aboard ten minutes, and I want each of you fellows to take the role of whoever he pitches into the worst, and challenge him in that character. D’ye see? F., as Capt. Neville, will offer to do the amiable for the major, and persuade him that he must fight. He’s an awful fire-eater in conversation, but I’ll stake my sample case we’ll put him into the bluest of funks before we part. What do you say, boys?”
Of course, we agreed. Whoever heard of a drummer refusing to take a hand in any deviltry afoot that promised a laugh at the end? We watched the major into a first-class carriage, and quietly followed him. He seemed rather inclined to resent our intrusion, for we just crowded the compartment, but he graciously recognized Burke, who had stayed in Dublin at the same hotel, and he was “delighted, sir, by the jumping Harry,—delighted to meet a brother officer” (that was your humble servant).
At first he was somewhat reticent about Irish matters. He told us all manner of thrilling stories of his Indian adventures. He had polished off a few hundred tigers with all sorts of weapons, transfixed them to the trunks of trees with the native spear, riddled them with buckshot, swan-shot and bullets, and on one occasion, when his stock of lead had pegged out, and a Royal Bengal tiger, twelve feet, sir, from his snout to the tip of his tail, was crouched ready to spring on poor Joe Boomerang, why, Joe whipped out a loose double tooth, rammed it home, and sent it crashing through the brute’s frontal ossicles.
He wanted to keep that tooth as a memento, but, by the jumping Harry! the Maharajah of Jubbulpore would take no denial, and that tooth is now the brightest jewel in the dusky prince’s coronet.
He had killed a panther with his naked hands—with one naked hand, in fact. It had leaped upon him with its mouth wide open, and in desperation he had thrust his arm down its throat, intending to tear its tongue out by the roots. But such was the momentum of the panther’s spring and his own thrust, that his arm went in up to the shoulder, and he found his strong right hand groping around the beast’s interior recesses. He tore its heart out, sir,—its heart,—and an assortment of lungs and ribs and other things.
He used to think no more of waking up with a deadly cobra-di-capello crawling up his leg, or a boa constrictor playfully entwining around his waist, than he did of taking his rice pillau or his customary curry. He never lost his presence of mind, by the jumping Harry, not he.
At last, as we were passing through the pleasant pasturage of Kildare, and rapidly nearing Portarlington, where we should part with Ryan, we managed to turn the conversation upon the unsettled state of affairs in Ireland.
“Ah!” said the blusterous Boomerang, “I’m going to change all that—down in Cork, anyhow. I’ll have the murderous scoundrels like mice in a fortnight. By the jumping Harry, I’ll settle ’em! I’ve quelled twenty-seven mutinies and blown four hundred tawny rascals to pulverized atoms in Bengal, and if I don’t make these marauding peasants here sing dumb, my name’s not Boomerang—Joe Boomerang, the terror of Janpore.”