So I did, and he held them over the lamp till they were slightly cooked outside, but not right through. He ate and drank with his ears straining for every sound. Then he took the rest of the rabbit and removed all traces of eating, and buried everything we had left.
“If I didn’t,” he explained, “some keeper’s dog would find my lair, and make a row and give it away, and the keepers would doubtless lie in wait for me and catch me red-handed. You can’t be too careful, because every man’s hand’s against you; which, of course, is the beauty of it.”
We got back without anything happening, and I’ve hated the sight of rabbit pretty well ever since, but Freckles said the juices of animals are better for the human frame underdone.
Well, that gives you an idea of Freckles, and the affair with Frenchy, which I am going to tell you about, showed that he really was cut out for bushranging. Frenchy, as we called him, was Monsieur Michel. He didn’t belong entirely to Dunston’s, but lived in Merivale and came to us three days a week, and went to a girl’s school the other three. He was a rum, oldish chap, whose great peculiarities were to make puns in English and to appeal to our honor about everything.
He would slang a fellow horribly one day, and wave his arms and pretty nearly jump out of his skin; and the next day he would bring up a whacking pear for the fellow he’d slanged, or a new knife or something. He pretty nearly cried sometimes, and he told us his nerves were frightfully tricky, and often led him to be harsh when he didn’t mean it. He couldn’t keep order or make chaps work if they didn’t choose; and Steggles, who had an awfully cunning dodge of always rubbing him up the wrong way, and then looking crushed and broken-hearted so as to get things, which he did, said that Frenchy was like damp fireworks, because you never knew exactly when he’d go off or how.
One day, dashing out of class with a frightful yell, Freckles got sent for, and went back and found Monsieur raving mad. It seemed that Freckles had yelled too soon--before he was out of the class-room, in fact, and Frenchy had got palpitation of the heart from it. He let into Freckles properly then. He said he was his “bête noire” and “un sot à vingt-quatre carats”--which means an eighteen-carat ass in English, but twenty-four carats in French--and “one of the aborigines who ought to be kept on a chain,” and many other such-like things. Freckles turned all colors, and then white, with a sort of bluish tint to his lips. He didn’t say a word, but looked at Frenchy with such a frightful expression that I felt something would happen later. All that happened at the time was that Freckles got the eighth book of Telemachus to write out into French from English, and then correct by Fénelon, which was a pretty big job if a chap had been fool enough to try and do it; and Monsieur Michel went off to Merivale with a big card on his coat-tail with “Ici on parle Français” written upon it in red pencil. This I had managed to do myself while Frenchy was jawing Freckles. I told Freckles, but it didn’t comfort him much. He said there were some things no mortal chap could stand; and to be called “an aborigine” because a man was born in Australia seemed to him about the bitterest insult even an old frog-eating Frenchman could have invented. Happening to him, of all chaps, it was especially a thing which would have to be revenged, seeing what his views were. He said:
“I couldn’t bushrange or anything with a clear conscience in the future if I had a thing like this hanging over me unrevenged. It’s the frightfulest slur on my character, and I won’t sit down under it for fifty Frenchmen.”
Then he said he should take a week to settle what to do, and went into the playground alone.
Next time Frenchy came up he was just the same as ever--awfully easy-going and jolly, and let Freckles off the Telemachus, and offered him as classy a knife, with a corkscrew and other things, including tweezers, as ever you saw--just the knife for Freckles, considering his ways. But it didn’t come off. Freckles got white again when he saw the knife, and said:
“Thank you, Monsieur, I don’t want your knife; and the imposition is half done, and will be finished next time you come.”