CHAPTER XX.
BAFFLED!
The room was small, low-ceiled, and its only furniture was a table, chair, and truckle-bed—all obviously of Dutch construction—and, unless he could find some means to secure his door, he resolved to remain awake till dawn. The only window in the room overlooked the roof of the stable where the dead horse lay. The sash was loose, and shook in the night wind, and he could see the bright and, to him, new constellations glittering in the southern sky.
Florian contrived to secure the door by placing the chair on the floor as a wedge or barrier between it and the bedstead, on the mattress of which—though not very savoury in appearance—he cast himself, for he was weary, worn, and felt that there was an absolute necessity for husbanding his strength, as he knew not what might be before him, so he extinguished the candle.
Something in the general aspect and bearing of the man Josh Jarrett, and in those of the woman, with her efforts to intoxicate him, and something, too, in his general surroundings and isolated situation—for the few scattered houses of Elandsbergen were all far apart—together with the memory of the prying face he had seen at the window, at the very moment he was picking up the gold, all served to put Florian on his guard; thus he lay down without undressing, and, longing only for daylight, grasped ever and anon the butt of his pistol.
For some time past he had been unused to the luxury of even a truckle-bed or other arrangements for repose than his grey greatcoat and ammunition blanket, with a knapsack for a pillow; hence, despite his keen anxiety, he must have dropped asleep, for how long he knew not; but he suddenly started up as the sound of voices below came to his ear, and the full sense of his peculiar whereabouts rushed on him.
Voices! They were coarse and deep, but not loud—voices of persons talking in low and concentrated tones in the room beneath, separated from him only by the ill-fitting boarding of the floor, between the joints of which lines of light were visible, and one bright upward flake, through a hole from which a knot had dropped out.
'Curse him, he's but a boy; I could smash the life out of him by one blow of my fist!' he heard his host, Josh Jarrett, say.
Others responded to this, but in low, stealthy, and husky tones. Certain that some mischief with regard to himself was on the tapis. Florian crept softly to the orifice in the floor, and looked down. Round a dirty and sloppy table, covered with drinking-vessels, pipes and tobacco-pouches, bottles of squareface and Cape smoke, were Josh Jarrett and three other ruffians, digger-like fellows, with Nan among them, all drinking; and a vile-looking quintette they were, especially the woman, with her hair all dishevelled now, and her face inflamed by that maddening compound known as Cape smoke.
'When I was ass enough to be in the Queen's service,' said Jarrett with a horrible imprecation, 'these 'ere blooming officers and non-comms. led me a devil of a life; they said it was my own fault that I was always drunk and in the mill. Be that as it may, I've one of the cursed lot upstairs, and I'll sarve him out for what they made me undergo, cuss 'em. One will answer my purpose as well as another. Nan, you did your best to screw him, but he was wary—infernally wary. Blest if I don't think the fellow is a Scotsman after all, for all his English lingo.'