“Surrender, you little brute, I should think you did yield!” said Mannering, who had cut his hand getting the slates off the roof, and was in a rare bate.
“You needn’t insult a defeated force, sir,” said Trelawny, keeping his nerve jolly well. “We are prepared to pay the penalty of failure, and having meant well we--we don’t care.”
But whether we meant well or not, I know Trelawney and Bradwell both got expelled, though Thompson was said to have tried very hard for them. Dunston didn’t seem to realize what frightfully good motives prompted them to protest against Thompson in an abstract way. Nothing was done to anybody else except Ashby major and me and Wilson. We were flogged by Mr. Mannering for the Doctor; and he did it as you might expect from a “Blue.”
As for Thompson, he stayed on, and the protest never got into print; and there wasn’t much disgrace for Trelawny or Bradwell after all, because the first afterwards got into Woolwich ten from the top, through an army crammer’s, and the second joined his father, who was the Whiteley of the North I spoke of. He wrote to me only a week ago to say that he was getting a hundred pounds a year from his governor for doing much less than he had to do at Dunston’s. Mind you, Thompson is a jolly good sort, really, and we know it now; and, as I heard my uncle say of somebody else, I don’t suppose it’s a matter of life and death whether or no a chap puts his h’s in the wrong places if his heart’s in the right one.
“Freckles” and “Frenchy”
He was the most peculiar chap that ever came to Merivale, not excepting even Mason, who shot the Doctor’s wife’s parrot with a catapult, and, after he had been flogged, offered to stuff it in the face of the whole school, and nearly got expelled. Freckles was so called owing to his skin, which was simply a complicated pattern much like what you can see in any map of the Grecian Archipelago. This arose, he thought, from his having been born in Australia. Anyway, it was rum to see; and so were his hands, which had reddish down on the backs. His eyes were, also reddish--a sort of mixture of red and gray specks, and they glimmered like a cat’s when he was angry, which was often. His real name was Maine, and he had no side. His father had made a big fortune selling wool at Sydney, and his grandfather was one of the last people to be transported to Botany Bay through no fault of his own. After he had been on a convict ship five years a chap at home confessed on his death-bed that he had done the thing Maine’s grandfather was transported for. So they naturally let Maine’s grandfather go free; and he was so much annoyed about it that he never came back home again, but married a farmer’s daughter near Sydney and settled out there for good.
Maine didn’t think great things of England, and was always talking about the Australian forests of blue gum-trees and bush, and sneering rather at the size of our forests round Merivale, though they were good ones. He never joined in games, but roamed away alone for miles and miles into the country on half-holidays, and trespassed with a cheek I never saw equalled. He could run like a hare--especially about half a mile or so, which, as he explained to me, is just about a distance to blow a keeper. Certainly, though often chased, he was never caught and never recognized, owing to things he did which he had learned in Australia and copied from famous bushrangers. His great hope some day was to be a bushranger himself, and he practised in a quiet way every Saturday afternoon, making it a rule to go out of bounds always. His get-up was fine. My name is Tomkins, called “Nubby” because I happen to have a rather large sort of nose, and, being fond of the country and not keen on games, Maine rather took to me, and after I had sworn on crossed knives not to say a word to a soul (which I never did till Freckles left) he told me his secrets and showed me his things. If you’d seen Freckles starting for an excursion you wouldn’t have said there was anything remarkable about him; but really he was armed to the teeth, and had everything a bushranger would be likely to want in a quiet place like Merivale. Down his leg was the barrel of an air-gun, strong enough to kill any small thing like a cat at twenty-five yards; the rest of the gun was arranged inside the lining of his coat, and the slugs it fired he carried loose in his trousers-pockets. Round his waist he had a leather belt he got from a sailor for a pound. Inside the leather was human skin, said to be flayed off a chap by cannibals somewhere, which was a splendid thing to have for your own, if it was true; and in the belt a place had been specially made for a knife. Freckles, of course, had a knife in it--a “bowie” knife that made you cold to see. He never used it, but kept it ready, and said if a keeper ever caught him he possibly might have to. In addition to these things he carried in his coat-pockets a little spirit-lamp and a collapsible tin pot and a bag of tea.
He said tea was the very life of men in the bush, and that often after a hard escape, when he was out of danger, he would get away behind a woodstack or under banks of a stream, or some such secret place, and brew a cup and drink it, and feel the better for it.
Lastly, Freckles had a flat lead mask with holes for the eyes and mouth, which he always fitted on when trespassing. He said it was copied from the helmet Ned Kelly, the King of the Bushrangers, used to wear, but it was not bullet-proof, but only used for a disguise. We were in the same dormitory, and one night, when all the chaps had gone to sleep, he dressed up in these things and stood where some moonlight came in, and certainly looked jolly.
Once, as an awful favor--me being smaller than him, and not fast enough to run away from a man--he let me come and see what he did when bushranging on a half-holiday in winter. “I sha’n’t run my usual frightful risks with you,” he said, “because I might have to open fire to save you, and that would be very disagreeable to me; but we’ll trespass a bit, and I’ll shoot a few things, if I can. I don’t shoot much, only for food.”