The Shadow of a Man

by E. W. Hornung

"On your account. They know he helped you. That's all they do know."

The convict stared; but, in the perpetual twilight of the mallee that was the only fact to which Moya could have sworn. She could make nothing of the old man's expression. When he spoke, however, there was no mistaking his tone. It was hard and grim as a prison bell.

"In his turn!" said he. "Well, it'll teach him what it's like."

"But it isn't his turn," cried Moya, in a fury; "what has he done to deserve such degradation, except a good deal more than his duty by you? And this is all the thanks he gets! As though he had taken after you! How can you speak like that of him? How dare you—to me?"

So Moya could turn upon the whilom terror of a colony, a desperado all his days, yet surely never more desperate than now; and her rings flashed, and her eyes flashed, and there was no one there to see! No soul within many miles but the great criminal before her, whose turn it was to astonish Moya. He uncovered; he jerked a bow that was half a shrug, but the more convincing for the blemish; and thereafter hung his cropped head in strange humility.

"You're right!" said he. "I deserve all you've said, and more. He has treated me ten thousand times better than I deserve, and that's my gratitude! Yet if you had been half a lifetime in the hulks—in irons—chained down like a wild beast—why, you'd be one, even you!"

"I know," said Moya in a low voice. "It is terrible to think of!"

"And God bless you for admitting that much," the old man whined, "for it's few that will. Break the law, and the law breaks you—on a wheel! Talk about the wrongs of prisoners; they have neither wrongs nor rights in the eyes of the law; it's their own fault for being prisoners, and that's the last word."

"It is very terrible," said Moya again.

"Ah, but you little know how bad it is; and I'm not going to tell you. It's worse than your worst dreams, and that must do for you. The floggings, the irons, the solitary confinement in your irons with the blood running down your back! No, I said I wouldn't, and I won't. But it's hard to hold your tongue when you're talking to a lady for the first time in thirty years. And to think of a young lady like you coming all this way, alone too, to say a kind word to a double-dyed old rogue like me! It's the most wonderful thing I ever heard of in all my days. I can't think why you did it, for the life of me I can't!"