“In real bushranging that is what would have happened,” admitted Freckles. “As it is, I expect months, perhaps years, will have to go by before I feel to hanker after it again. And meantime I sha’n’t rest in peace till I’ve paid Frenchy.”
“How?” I asked.
“Well, I believe it’s to be done. He’s often come to see me while I was on my back in bed, and he’s told me a lot about himself. He’s frightfully hard up, and a Roman Catholic, and hopes to lay his bones in la belle France with luck, but he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to manage it. He told me all this, little knowing my father was extremely rich. Well, you see, the mater wants somebody French for the kids at home, which are girls, and, knowing Frenchy bars this climate, I think Australia might do him good. He’s fifty-three years old, and it seems to me if the guv’nor wrote and offered him his passage and a good screw he’d go. I have made it a personal thing to myself, and told the guv’nor what a good little chap he is, and what a beautiful accent he’s got, and the thing that happened in the wood.”
The affair dropped then, and about six weeks after, when Freckles was getting fit again, he walked with me one half-holiday to see the place where he was smashed up. The bough was a frightful high one to drop from even in daylight, also it was broken. Freckles got awfully excited when he spotted it.
“There! there!” he said, “that’s the best thing I’ve seen for twelve weeks!”
“I don’t see much to squeak about,” I said, “especially as the beastly tree nearly did for you.”
“But can’t you see it’s broken? That’s what did it! I thought I slipped, and if I had I shouldn’t have been made of the stuff for a bushranger; but the wretched branch broke, and that is jolly different. That wasn’t my fault. The most hardened old hand must have come down then. In fact, he couldn’t have stopped up. Oh, what a lot of misery I’d have been saved through all these weeks if I’d known it broke in a natural sort of way!”
He got an awful deal of comfort out of this, and said he should return to his old ways again as soon as he could run a mile without stopping. And we found his lead mask, like Ned Kelly’s, just where it had dropped when he had rolled over in the fern, and he welcomed it like a dog.
That’s the end, except that his father did write to Dunston about Frenchy; and Dunston, not being very keen about Frenchy himself, seemed to think he would be just the chap for the girls of Freckles’s father. Anyway, he went, and he cried when he said good-bye to the school; and Freckles told me that when he said good-bye to him he yelled with crying, and blessed him both in French and English, and said that the sunny atmosphere of Australia would very likely prolong his life until he had saved enough to get his bones back to France.
So he went, and Freckles went after him much sooner than he ever expected to, because the keepers finally caught him in the game preserves, sitting in his hole under the stream bank, frizzling the leg of a pheasant which he had shot out of a tree with his air-gun and buried seven days before. And Dunston wrote to his father, and his father wrote back that Freckles, being now fourteen and apparently having less sense than when he left Australia, had better return to his native land, and go into the wool business, and begin life as an office-boy in his place of business. Freckles told me that chaps in his father’s office generally got a fortnight’s holiday, but that his mother would probably work up his governor to give him three weeks. Then he would get a proper outfit and track away to the boundless scrub, and fall in with other chaps who had similar ideas, and begin to take life seriously. He said I might see his name in Australian papers in about a year. But he never wrote to me, and I don’t know if he really succeeded well. I’m sure I hope he did, for he was a tidy chap, though queer.