“It’s queer,” said Nic to himself. “One minute you regularly hate the fellow, and feel half afraid of him; the next you quite like and feel as if it would be nice to know more about him. No, it wouldn’t: he’s a convict, and they warned me about him.”
Nic became very thoughtful, and though his lovely Blue Mountain parrot, the object of his morning’s walk, was close to his side, he did not glance at it, and the beautiful birds the convict had mentioned were for the time forgotten. For he found himself wondering what Leather had done, and why he had done it; whether he was a very bad man; and gradually found his head getting into quite a muddle of conflicting surmises.
“I wish I hadn’t let him think I was suspicious,” he said to himself. “He jumped at it directly. I suppose I showed it pretty plainly. But no wonder! Any one would have felt as I did. To hand over one’s gun to a convict, and give him a chance to point it at you and say, ‘Now then, hand over that powder flask and that belt and all your wads.’ Of course, so that he could go off—bush-ranging, don’t they call it? Why, it seemed a mad thing to do.
“And yet I did it,” said Nic to himself, after a thoughtful pause; “and he didn’t run off. Why, he acted just as a gentleman would under the circumstances. I did feel sorry for him. There, I don’t care: he can’t be such a bad fellow as old Brookes wants to make out. Brookes is an old beast! I’d tell him so for two pins.”
Nic’s thoughts were flowing very freely, and feeling quite excited he went on:
“He must have done something very bad, and he has been severely punished; then they let him come out from the gang to be an assigned servant, and he’s trying hard to make up for the past, and when he gets bullied and ill-used it makes him look savage and fierce, of course.
“Well,” said Nic, after a thoughtful pause, “I can keep him in his place and yet be civil to him. I’m not going to jump on a man because he has done wrong; and I don’t see why he shouldn’t be forgiven—if he deserves it, of course, and—somehow, though I don’t like him, I seem to like him a good deal, and that’s about as big a puzzle as some of the things in mathematics, and—” This next was aloud:
“Oh, murder! Needles and pins! Wasps and hornets! Oh!”
Nic had jumped up, to begin dancing about, slapping his legs, shaking his trousers, pulling off his shoes, and trying hard to get rid of something that was giving him intense pain.
“It’s those bees!” he cried. “They’ve got up the legs of my trousers; and he said they had no stings. No! ants!—You nasty, miserable, abominable little wretches—no, big wretches,” he muttered, as he picked off and crushed one by one the virulent creatures, which had made a lodgment upon his legs and evidently come to the conclusion that they were good to eat.