‘He laid quiet, thinking he would soon be let go, and while the men laced him up in the hide, making eyelet-holes, and running thongs of hide through, which made it fit pretty close, he thought he might lie for a few hours, and then the people from the next place would find him, and let him go free.
‘The men cut up the bullock. They lighted a large fire and put the head, offal, and feet upon it; they packed part of it on a wheelbarrow. Then they hung a strong green-hide rope between the two trees above the fire; one said something to the other in a low growling tone; he shook his head, but at last they came towards the bound-up wretch; he was not able to stir, in course, but it was pitiful—my God, so it was, to see his eyes move like an animal’s in a trap, as the men went up to him.
‘“For God’s sake, men, spare me,” he moaned out.
‘“Spare you?” said the oldest of ’em; “spare a man who betrays his own pals, and sells his fellow-men for a miserable ticket-of-leave? Damn you!” he roared, “your time’s up, if you had a dozen lives. Here, Ike.”
‘Between them they raised him, lifted him in their arms, and hung him up by the rope actually across the roaring fire. The wet hide protected him for a bit, but when the fire began to take effect his shrieks (they told me) was that horrid and unnatural that they had to stop their ears.
‘There they stopped till the shrieks died away in death. How he writhed and screamed, and prayed and cursed, and wept and struggled like a maniac. But the tough hide held through everything, though he wrenched it as if he could break an iron band. It was a long while to watch the tongues of the flame dart up as inside the black sheet still writhed a shuddering, howling form. It couldn’t have been much like a man’s at last. Then all the noise died away, and the bag hung steady and still.’
‘And did the fiends who perpetrated this awful deed escape punishment?’ asked Ernest.
‘Well, I don’t know about ’scaping punishment,’ said the ancient colonist, looking somewhat like one of Morgan’s buccaneers, questioned as to the retribution, moral or otherwise, that followed the sack of Panama, ‘but they got clear off, and it was years afterwards that a half-burnt hide with a skeleton inside was found near the old camp.’
‘And did the principal criminal never suffer remorse?’ still inquired Ernest, with horror in every tone; ‘are such men suffered by God to live?’
At that moment the fire blazed up; a change, wonderful and dread, came over the face of the old stockman. He started up; his eyeballs glared like those of a maniac; every muscle, every feature was convulsed. ‘Who talks of murderers? They? He? I did it. I, Bill Murdock, and the devil. He was there; I see him grinning by the fire now. Ha, ha! I can hear his screams, my God, my God! as I’ve heard ’em every day since. I hear ’em now. I shall hear ’em in hell! Look!’