The Tracks We Tread/Chapter 13
Chapter XIII
For a week there were men who said hard things of Ted Douglas: men who suggested that he had cause to know why Jimmie Blaine had disappeared utterly and beyond power of Murray’s searching. But they did not know that Murray was not searching very particularly, although Lossin grumbled over it one day, whilst Tod and two more from Mains sat on the edge of Blake’s horse trough and watched the teams drink. Father Denis had told Murray the truth that morning before breakfast, and when the Court sat at midday, Ted Douglas had been publicly cleared with apology. Then he went to see Jimmie’s mother, with Father Denis at his side, and the rest of the township sifted the story through their fingers in the lunch hour. They called Jimmie by some names that do not look well in print; they shied from much talk of Ted, because the prick of shame was on them that had doubted him, and then they talked of Murray. Tod gave his opinion first.
“If ut was Murray as he used to be he would have found it out a long toime ago. Bhut do we not know that somethin’ has put the fear an’ all into him? An ’who wud it be but Pipi, the ould omadhaun?”
“We-ell,” said Steve, slowly, “where’s the sense o’ goin’ arter Jimmie, anyways? Old Buggy hadn’t a relation belongin’ to him but hisself, and who would be puttin’ in a claim fur the money?”
“Murray ain’t got the heart fur his work, though,” said Danny, wisely; “an’ ye kin bet yer teeth it’s Pipi’s blame—what? Sartinly, yer kin call it rot, Jack Yates, but it’s truth fur all that. Didn’t yer see it in the parlour that night? Well, ef yer didn’t see, I kin’t help it. There ain’t been a machine invented fur givin’ a chap brains yet.”
“It was Lou should ’a’ footed that bill,” said Derrett, and Blake grinned.
“Lou’s name won’t hold good fur all the bills he orter foot. But Murray’s———”
“Shut it!” Steve enforced command with his elbow, and the men drew together to see Murray go by with a face that had no right to belong to that uniform. For it was the face of blank fear. Thrice before the street-turning he glanced back over his left shoulder, hastening speed at each glance.
Hynes whistled, and spat into the gutter.
“Shore ’nuff, Murray has rats,” he said; and Lossin gave echo, with the addendum that he did not care to have the safety o£ Argyle depending on a cop with rats.
Steve scowled, gathering up the lines, and wearing his own team round.
“Don’t you fret,” he said; “Murray roped the Packer in last night what has been goin’ it gay fur a week. He’ll git you all right when he comes wantin’ yer.”
Over the hill, on the Lion, Murray was speaking of the Packer to Ormond. Ormond had not seen Murray this month past, and the sight shocked him. For the man was white-lipped and nervous; his well-knit body had fallen away, and his chin twitched. Ormond made place on the dried warm tailings, and tipped tea for the other out of his lunch-billy the while he mined craftily for confidence.
“Yes, I’ll send a man over to bring in the Packer’s tools,” he said. “Not that I think any one would sneak them. They’re patched with every imaginable thing under the sun. And what the devil is the Packer patched with, Murray? He’s a wonder! At his age, too! I couldn’t stand it—or you.”
“We breed good men yet—for more than drink,” said Murray, absently.
Ormond’s eyes lit as he blinked downhill through the rim of sunshine to the creek bed where Gordon and three more staggered under weight of a twenty-one-foot pipe.
“We do so. There’s every breath of four ton in those pipes, and the fellows have been lugging ’em downhill these six hours. We’re going back to paddock work again, you know.”
“There’s one good man in Argyle who’s been bred for drink, I’m thinking,” said Murray, irrelevantly.
Ormond’s palms ceased movement on the half-rubbed Navy-cut.
“Randal?”
Murray nodded.
“He’s driving Conroy’s coach since Scannell cleared him. But he won’t last long at that. If he’d only have the sense to cut the country-there might be a chance for him. But———”
“There are two ways of going through the world,” said Ormond, dogmatically. “The one is to know your own weakness and the other man’s strength. That gets you down every time. The other is to know your strength, and the other man’s weakness; and that gives you the pull as often as you want it. Unfortunately, Randal knows his weakness———”
“And the other man’s strength?”
“Precisely. The man in this case being———”
“Kiliat? Yes; I thought so.”
“Not that he has any strength of any kind,” explained Ormond, coming to his feet. “I fancy his nurse must have put him under a force-pump in his infancy, and drawn out all his brains to make pap of. But he has a certain way with women that answers just as well, under existing circumstances. Coming along down, Murray? Or are you out on business?”
“No—I’m off again to-morrow, though. Plain-clothes job.” He laughed unmirthfully. “Chap hasn’t a chance to grow fat in such an infernally big district,” he said.
The control of his voice was too careful. Ormond had noted it all along, remembering the life of the man before him. By day or night, on saddle or on foot, Murray’s work lay in the hunting of men. He ran them down in the township, in the bush “pubs,” in the gold country, where they fled to herd with odd thousands of their fellows, in the lonely ranges with none to come between the curt menace of the revolver and the defiance of the cornered one. He brought them to punishment such as a prison holds for limited months. He brought them to punishment such as the Argyle lockup afforded the Packer for two sleepy days, and to punishment such as ends in six feet of earth with no name atop. But eternally to punishment; seeking out the evil that is in man, so that it might be hidden from other men.
Knowing all this, Ormond shivered a little on the hot hill-top.
“You’re looking seedy, Murray,” he said. “Can’t you manage a holiday, eh?”
“There’s no holiday will take a man away from himself,” said Murray, speaking suddenly. “Life can’t do it. Nor Death. Nor Eternity. Ormond, it is the cruellest thing Divine power could do to decree that a man can’t get away from himself through all the ages and ages and ages———”
“What the thunder do you want to get away from yourself for?” demanded Ormond in amaze.
“I don’t know. If I did I might block it. It’s because I don’t know—because I can only fear———” He glanced quickly over his left shoulder and wheeled. And he did not see Roddy Duncan staring through the broom, with his half-eaten lunch on his knees.
“Ormond,” he said, coming back, “you heard about my roping in Pipi Wepeha’s son, and about the old chap coming into Blake’s one night and telling yarns that made more than one fellow feel a bit sick?”
Ormond grunted curt assent.
“Since then,” said Murray slowly, “I know a man’s soul can be sensitised to things that his brain can’t understand—that his tongue can’t put into words. You see the sweat ooze on the green scarf of a tree, and you know by that how a part of it realises the death, though it can make no sign. There is a part of a man is as helpless as that, Ormond.”
“Oh, don’t be a blatant ass,” said Ormond, impatiently. “I’m as much a man as you, I reckon, but I’ll swear that my soul is a thing under command of my brain and my tongue—as it should be. What else can rule it?”
“My God!” cried Murray. “Don’t you see that I don’t know? I don’t know what it is that—that has got hold of me. It is only that I know that there is more on earth—that there is more in the day and night than there used to be, Ormond; everything is so awfully alive. If you listen you can hear the hills breathing.”
Ormond came to his feet, and took Murray by the shoulders.
“You go away down to Dunedin,” he said. “Get an exchange. Go and marry someone—anyone. Do something that’ll get you run in on your own account. Take a town-beat, and go to music-halls every night. In a week you’ll find that your own life holds enough interest for you to sharpen your teeth on.”
Murray laughed, kicking loose stones down to the stream with a clatter.
“Haven’t you seen a tired kid crying its heart out, with no one in all the house able to give it what it wants, because it doesn’t know, itself? You can’t help me, Ormond, because I don’t know what I want. I don’t know.”
Ormond tapped his pipe stem on his teeth, looking round on his world as he knew it. The tall straight cabbage trees on the slope were familiar, and the rising terrace on yellow terrace to the ragged flint hills beyond. The greys of sand and shingle down the Changing Creek were familiar, and so were the bellows of laughter from the men feeding in the gay sunlight by the pipes. The pallor of the toi-toi plumes meant nothing, nor the blood-red biddy-bid spread over the scarp behind the Glory which men called Fighting Hill. Ormond had never asked for the legend.
“Any fellow can scare himself dead in a month if he lets imagination take grip enough. But I didn’t think you were quite such an ass, Murray. So long as a man dresses by his reason he does his work as he should do. But once he loses step———”
And then came something headlong from the dead broom to clasp him about the knees, and to pray him, for God’s sake, to win Murray’s forgiveness for this horror that walked in broad day. Roddy’s eyes were set with despair, and his speech broke as Ormond jerked him to his feet in a sudden spate of anger.
“By the Lord Harry, but I’ve had enough of this tommy-rot for one day! What the devil do you mean by eavesdropping, you young———”
“Murray—tell Murray I did it. Don’t let him touch me. Don’t———”
“You needn’t fret. I’ll take as much out of you as Murray could if I find you deserve it. Stand up and speak when I tell you. Now—what have you got to do with this?”
“Pipi—I gave him Murray’s red necktie. He wanted to makutu him. I—I couldn’t help it.”
“If you’re drunk at this hour,” said Ormond, “I’ll take you down and souse you in our new paddock. If you think you’re speaking truth———”
Murray put him aside, grasping the boy’s arm in hot fingers.
“Don’t be scared, Roddy. I won’t hurt you. Now tell me.”
By patient questioning the two wrenched from Roddy all that he knew. Then Ormond looked at Murray standing blank-eyed in the sun of the hill-top, and the sweat of unformed dread sprang on him.
When a tohunga has hate for one of his kind that man presently withers and dies as a blown leaf on a tree. But this arrangement is between Maori and Maori, when kindred blood, and ignorance, and minds soaked in generations of superstitions and in knowledge of things that the white man does not know of must come into account. By all the laws of Heaven and Earth a white man has no right to submit his soul to a brown man’s curse. By all the understanding that thirty-five years of life had given Ormond knew that Murray had done this thing, albeit unwittingly. He spoke quickly.
“Murray! Don’t look like that, man! It’s all rot. Rot! Go down an’ strangle the old brute with your necktie, and then you’ll feel better. There is no sense in it, I tell you. Roddy’s burbling.”
Murray plucked at his waistcoat front. It hung absurdly loose.
“You see,” he said, very low, “I never knew; but it’s taking the flesh off my bones, and the nerve out of my heart, all the same. Have you got any answer for that?”
Ormond was trying to interpret things according to his machine-trained understanding.
“Pipi could curse my whole wardrobe till it rotted for all I’d care. Murray, you’re an Englishman. Don’t you know better than to show funk before a Colonial?”
“Lou telled me,” muttered Roddy, shaking on his feet. “He said it meant things that hadn’t got any words to ’em. He said you’d know it in the smells that come out o’ the swamps at night, an’ in the birds never singin’ near you. Don’t say as you does know it! Don’t say Pipi’s killin’ you ’cause of me! Murray! Murray! I ain’t done that! For the sake o’ God, don’t say as I’ve done that!”
“Murray,” said Ormond, and Murray answered to the spur unhesitatingly. For the knowledge of the irrevocable is a man’s trouble only.
“We all have spells of funk occasionally. Roddy—except the boss, here. I heard Pipi’s yarns that night, as you did; and I have let them work on me—also as you did. That’s all there is in it, of course; and it’s the toe of my boot that Pipi’ll get instead of neckties when I run across him again. But the next time I catch you nosing into my private insanities I’ll give you a bigger licking than ever your fears gave you, Roddy.”
Ormond slipped his pipe into his pocket, and settled his shoulders comfortably under the old coat.
“Insanities,” he said; “that’s the truest word you’ve spoken this day, Murray. Take old Pipi round the township on your boot-leather, and I’ll guarantee you won’t hear anything worse than your own snoring at night. You cut along down, Roddy. I’m just coming.”
But when Roddy had gone he put his hands on the other man’s shoulders.
“Murray, old chap,” he said.
Murray’s eyes did not lift.
“Don’t!” he said in his throat. “Don’t! I’ve got to battle it out on my own. I can’t understand. But I’ve got to meet it alone, Ormond.”
“Murray———”
“You can’t help, old chap. Let me go. I can’t understand—no, I won’t go under if I can help myself. So-long.”
“I’d like to wring young Roddy’s neck!” said Ormond.
Then he went downhill to bolt the flanges of twelve-inch pipes.