The Rider of Waroona

by G. Firth Scott

"I want neither you nor your troopers," Dudgeon snarled. "I can take care of myself and my money, too, without anyone's help."

He watched, with undisguised suspicion, while the counted piles of sovereigns were replaced in the bags, while the bags were carried away and stacked in the rackety old vehicle. Then, when the tally was complete, he walked out of the bank, climbed into the buggy, gathered up the reins and drove away without a word or a glance for anyone.

The bitterness of defeat was rankling in him, the defeat of his lifelong determination that never, while he was on the earth to prevent it, should a woman live where his faith in the sex had been wrecked. It was bitter to think how he had been foiled after all by a woman, but still more so when the woman was of such a type as the one who had outwitted him. It was a new experience for him to be beaten at his own game, still a newer experience to find himself remembering the one by whom he was beaten as he was remembering the woman whose voice, despite his surly antagonism, rang in his ears with a melody which was as the song of a syren. Each time he had measured swords with her she had triumphed—just as, in the far-off days, Kitty Lambton had triumphed.

Kitty Lambton!

He pulled himself up short as the name passed through his mind. Why should he recall her now as Kitty Lambton when she had ceased to be that the day she left Waroona Downs with O'Guire? Why should this resolute woman recall her as Kitty Lambton and not as Kitty O'Guire?

As he drove along the lonely bush track which led to Taloona, his mind drifted across the years to the time when first he had come to the district, to the time when Kitty Lambton stood for him for all that was noble and generous and pure in life; when he was content to work the livelong day with a light heart and happy mind, satisfied with the reward of her presence when his day's work was done. For a mile or so of the journey he strove to nurse his resentment against this clear-eyed woman whose raven black hair was in such absolute contrast to the flaxen locks of the vanished Kitty, but whose voice had caused the intrusion of these bygone memories into his waking thoughts. But gradually, unconsciously, the long-suppressed recollections of the girl who had charmed his youthful fancies took possession of him.

Hitherto, whenever he had remembered her, it was with bitterness and anger; but now his mind was as free from anger as though the cause for it had never existed. It was the time when Kitty was the charmer which had come to him, the time when the gnawing anguish of betrayal was unknown, and slowly there obtruded itself upon him a dim, shadowy, speculating wonder as to all which might have been had she never changed for him from the charmer to the betrayer.

But he was not used to introspective analysis, and the efforts to grapple with the subtleties of his own subconscious memories brought a tendency to his mind to lose the clear-cut edge of a fact in a blur of misty vision. No longer did the memory of Nora Burke irritate him. Had he associated her with Kitty the betrayer, the irritation would never have passed; but as it was Kitty the charmer her voice brought to him, he drifted, in the sere and yellow age, down the stream of fantasy upon which he had turned his back in scorn when the blood of youth ran in his veins.

For miles the road slipped by unnoticed and unheeded as the old horse stumbled on at his own pace, unguided by the hand that held the reins. The breath of life had sought to fan the withered soul, but only one small spark, deep-smothered by the dead mass of loveless years, smouldered weakly where the record of a long life filled with human sympathy should have blazed in answer. The gold for which he had striven lay forgotten at his feet; the hate which he had nurtured passed, a vapid filmy shade, as the withered soul shrank shivering, chilled at the void the one poor spark revealed.

The sight of his solitary hut, glowing in the warm mellow light of the evening sun, broke in upon a reverie so deep he could never recall all that it had contained.