"You were the man who stole the child; you were the mean——"
"Was I?" interrupted the man. "You wait and hear. The man who stole the kid—you, if you want to be exact, damn you, now you've come to see me die—that man went back to the—the place where he stole the kid and where he met—your father."
Again he sought to raise his head as he uttered the words in short, sharp tones, his face growing wet and ghastly under the influence of his pain and his hatred. Tony, watching him, said nothing; the man was either mad or lying, and whichever it was, the best thing to do was to keep quiet and say nothing.
"He came back for fresh mischief, and I—there, you know now—I met him," he shouted; and Tony, keeping still, stood looking at him calmly. "I waited for him out on the run," he went on, beginning to speak in jerky spasms of words, as though he needed to rest every few seconds if he would keep his energy enough in hand to last him till he finished his story. "He had been rounding up some cattle, and had a stock-whip with him. I had one, too, a beauty, with a sixteen-foot green-hide thong. I knew him as soon as I saw him half a mile away. I skulked in the scrub as he came up—just behind a clump of wattle. To fool him I rode out and past him; he turned after me, and I wheeled."
"THROUGH THE BUSH IT WENT, RACING LIKE MAD."[ToList]
[Page 266.]
The bright eyes glittered as they watched Tony's face.
"You're a fly young chap," he went on, "but you're not fly enough to guess what's coming. A couple of miles from where we were a track ran through a thickly timbered part of the run. It was a winding track, and not too wide. At one of the narrowest bits, just in the middle of a curve, an old dead gum had stood for years. I had gone over that track just an hour or so before, and I saw where that big gum had fallen—lying right up the track. It was a red gum, tough, long-limbed, and sun-dried. When it fell it had splintered lumps off the limbs, making them sharp at the ends, which were pointing up the track like the prongs of a great jagged toasting-fork. Ha, sonny, what a throw-in for me! Here was a game worth playing. I rode at the man I hated, loosening my stock-whip, and as I came near him, I turned aside and sent out the lash—so as not to touch him. The crack of it sounded in his ears and in his horse's as well, and the beast began to plunge. Here was my chance, and I took it. As the horse reared and plunged, I waited till it was facing away from me, and then sent the lash fair on to its flanks. It brought a lump out of the brute, for the green-hide was as hard as nails, and that horse set off straight for the track where the dead gum lay, and with me after it. Through the bush it went, racing like mad, with its flanks dripping red as I landed blow after blow with the good old green-hide. Soon it was on the track, racing, galloping, blindly, madly, like hell out for an airing, straight for my toasting-fork, straight—God!"