Just then a tall, good-looking chap, with dark-blue eyes and a long, light-coloured moustache, stepped into the bar from the crowd on the veranda.
“What’s all this, Thomas?” he asked.
“What’s that got to do with you, Gentleman Once?” shouted Thomas.
“I think it’s got something to do with me,” said Gentleman Once. “Now, look here, Thomas; you can do pretty well what you like with us poor devils, and you know it, but we draw the line at Peter M’Laughlan. If you really itch for the thrashing, you deserve you must tempt someone else to give it to you.”
“What the —— are you talking about?” snorted Thomas. “You’re drunk or ratty!”
“What’s the trouble, M’Laughlan?” asked Gentleman Once, turning to Peter. “No trouble at all, Gentleman Once,” said Peter; “thank you all the same. I’ve managed worse men than our friend Thomas. Now, Thomas, don’t you think it would pay you best to hand over the key of the harness-room and have done with this nonsense? I’m a patient man—a very patient man—but I’ve not always been so, and the old blood comes up sometimes, you know.”
Thomas couldn’t stand this sort of language, because he couldn’t understand it. He threw the key on the bar and told us to clear out.
We were all three very quiet riding along the track that evening. Peter gave Jack a nip now and again from the flask, and before we turned in in camp he gave him what he called a soothing draught from a little medicine chest that he carried in his saddle-bag. Jack seemed to have got rid of his cough; he slept all night, and in the morning, after he’d drunk a pint of mutton-broth that Peter had made in one of the billies, he was all right—except that he was quiet and ashamed. I had never known him to be so quiet, and for such a length of time, since we were boys together. He had learned his own weakness; he’d lost all his cocksureness. I know now just exactly how he felt. He felt as if his sober year had been lost and he would have to live it all over again.
Peter didn’t preach. He just jogged along and camped with us as if he were an ordinary, every-day mate. He yarned about all sorts of things. He could tell good yarns, and when he was fairly on you could listen to him all night. He seemed to have been nearly all over the world. Peter never preached except when he was asked to hold service in some bush pub, station-homestead or bush church. But in a case like ours he had a way of telling a little life story, with something in it that hit the young man he wanted to reform, and hit him hard. He’d generally begin quietly, when we were comfortable with our pipes in camp after tea, with “I once knew a young man—” or “That reminds me of a young fellow I knew—” and so on. You never knew when he was going to begin; or when he was going to hit you. In our last camp, before we reached Solong, he told two of his time-fuse yarns. I haven’t time to tell them now, but one stuffed up my pipe for a while, and made Jack’s hand tremble when he tried to light his. I’m glad it was too dark to see our faces. We lay a good while afterwards, rolled in our blankets, and couldn’t get to sleep for thinking; but Peter seemed to fall asleep as soon as he turned in.
Next day he told Jack not to tell Clara that he’d come down with us. He said he wouldn’t go right into Solong with us; he was going back along another road to stay a day or two with an old friend of his.