RGL e-Book Cover 2018©
RGL e-Book Cover 2018©
The Australian authoress Mary Helena Fortune (ca. 1833-1911) was one of the first women to write detective fiction, and probably the first to write it from the viewpoint of the detective. Her opus includes several novels and over 500 stories, many of which feature a detective by the name of Mark Sinclair. She wrote under the pseudonyms "Waif Wander" and "W.W."
"WELL, I suppose we part soon, Mr. Woolston. This is your land we're on now, I think?"
"It is and it is not, friend," the young gentleman addressed replied. "See, there is the homestead," and he pulled up his horse and pointed to a gabled dwelling among some trees at a little distance up on the hill. "I am proud of Braidwood. I came to it ten years ago when it was a wilderness, and to-day I have sold it for fifteen hundred pounds."
"Sold it!"
"Yes, I have just been depositing the money in the bank; so I don't mind telling you, as I'm not worth robbing." He laughed gaily as he spoke, but a suspicious scowl came over his companion's face like a dark cloud.
"Robbing? Do you go about the country taking every man you meet for a robber?"
"Oh, dear! no, but you know we are in the days of bushranging. I was only joking, and, you see, I am in such good spirits that I can't help joking. This is the very last Christmas I shall pass in Australia, and I mean to make it a merry one. If you were stopping anywhere in the neighbourhood I should ask you to drop in and smoke a cigar toward evening."
"Thanks; well, I shall be coming back this way towards evening. I don't mind dropping in. You won't have any strangers with you?"
"No, not to night. To-morrow we expect a few to bid good-bye to Braidwood. Well, I shall expect you. So long."
"So long." And Mr. Woolston turned inside to open the gate admitting him to his own paddock. When he was closing it he fancied he heard a long laugh from the road, and paused, but the noise was not repeated, and his curiosity died as quickly as it had arisen.
EDWARD WOOLSTON was a fine, handsome, fair-haired young man of under thirty,
dressed in the simple, easy attire of a well-to-do country gentleman. The man
he had just parted from was his opposite in every respect. He was tall and
muscular, and black-haired; whiskers and moustache were dark also, and hands
and feet were large and coarse-looking. He was dressed in tight-fitting cord
breeches and long riding boots; and over a crimson plaid Crimean shirt he had
a coarse tweed coat. A bright handkerchief was tied loosely round his neck,
and a Panama hat, with a black ribbon around it, finished his attire. He was
quite a stranger to Mr. Woolston, who had fallen in with him at the table
d'hôte of the Braidwood Arms, and discovered in the course of
conversation that their roads lay in the same direction.
"Well, Soo, dear, its all arranged," he said to his young wife, who hastened to meet him as he dismounted. "Braidwood is sold and paid for, and the money in the bank. One more Christmas day under the old roof, and then hurrah for old England and the dear old mother!"
He was light-hearted as a boy. He could have tossed his hat up in the air as he had done in the breaking-up of school before the Christmas vacation in the dear old home. He almost felt as if neither time nor ocean intervened, but that on the very morrow he should look into his widowed mother's eyes once more, and read there the undying love he know she felt for her boy. Alas! the shadow of death lay between him and home that night, though he knew it not.
"And who is the gentleman you expected, Ned?" asked Soo, as they sat an hour or two after in the pretty sitting-room, whose long French window was open and faced the road. "What is his name?"
"I'm blest if I know, darling. That's just like me, isn't it? We were neighbours at table, and the landlord called him Mason, I think; but I'm not sure. At all events, he's a fine looking chap, though not exactly what you would call gentlemanly.
"I am afraid that I half-offended him by an allusion I made to my deposit in the bank, and the fact that I was not worth robbing. By the by, I might as well have left my revolver at home, Soo. I met no bushrangers."
He was sitting, or rather lounging a little distance from the window as he spoke, and drew the revolver from an inside pocket of his coat; but just at that instant he caught sight of an approaching horseman up through the paddock, and he dropped the revolver and the hand with it into the outside right-hand pocket as he hurriedly got up.
"Here he is, Soo, Isn't he a fine looking chap, and did you ever see a finer bit of blood than he rides? I must go out and send Jim round for his horse."
Mrs. Woolston stood at the window—a perfect picture herself—and watched the approaching stranger. She was tall and slender, with dark, lovely hair, and a sweet earnest face, with a shade of deep thought in it. She had not been many months married to the man whose name she bore, and she loved him with a love all the deeper that it was not frittered away in words. She was of humble birth and humble fortune, and he had chosen her as the dearest of women to walk by his side through life, so that in her earnest, grateful heart, gratitude and love went hand in hand.
When Edward introduced the stranger to her as Mr. Mason, she met his dark eyes with a long, inquiring gaze, and there was for an instant in his look a doubt or suspicion, though unnoticed by her.
The decanters were on the table, and rich cake provided for the season by the careful hands of the young wife herself. As Ned filled the glasses and passed his to "Mr. Mason," who still stood near the window, he laughingly alluded to their morning ride and his fear of the bushrangers.
"Here is many happy returns of the season to you, sir. This day twelve months, if I am alive, I shall drink to your health in dear old England. Just fancy, Soo, dear, I had very nearly taken our friend for a bushranger, Why, who are these—?"
The glass was lowered to the table before Mr. Woolston's lips had touched it. Standing at the open window, nay, crowding through it, were three men in riding-breeches and boots and flannel shirts, and with each a revolver at his belt and in his right hand. They were fierce and determined looking, though all young and by no means bad-looking men. Mrs. Woolston fell back from them with a face white as death, and went close to her husband, whose right hand dropped between her and himself into his pocket.
"These, Mr. Woolston, are a few of my friends come to join us," said Mason, coolly, as he filled some glasses on the table. "They will take a glass with us, and then we will talk a little about business, I see you guess the truth. We are come to relieve you of that bit of money you banked to day."
"You shall never have it!" cried Woolston, all his strong nature aroused by the clearness of the danger. "Never, while I live! Stand back villains! If you lay a finger within a yard of my wife, take the consequences!"
"And pray what are the consequences, Mr. Woolston?" Mason asked with a sneer. "Gilbert, seize that fool. Stand back, missus, or maybe you will come in for some of the consequences your husband is so glib about," but as the man stopped forward, as if to push Mrs Woolston from her husband's side, there was a loud report, a shout of pain mingled with frightful curses, and when the smoke cleared away Mason was seen leaning on the table with his right hand hanging helplessly by his side and the blood pouring from it in a rapid stream.
"The scoundrel has maimed me for life!" he shouted, while his face was transformed with passion. "Seize him! rope him! Drag him outside and shoot him like a dog! By ——,I'll have his heart out for this?"
Before he had half finished, two of his comrades had disarmed Edward Woolston and dragged him from the room, while the third had torn the clinging wife from her hold. Meanwhile, with a face like a fiend's and a thunder of awful curses between his lips, the wounded bushranger was tying up his arm, through the fleshy part of which Woolston's bullet had passed, with his handkerchief. This roughly accomplished, he strode to the window and called out to the man, heedless of poor Soo's prayers behind him.
"Stop! Bring back that crawling wretch. Let him go. Here, I brought this cheque for the purpose; you want to draw that fifteen hundred, do you see? Sign this before more is said. "
"I won't," said Edward Woolston, who saw himself face to face with death and was desperate.
"Oh! Edward, do! Oh my darling husband, what is money in comparison to your life? Sign it, for the love of the living God!"
She clasped her hands, and with her sweet lips rigid with agony she gasped into his face
"Never, my love; I will not leave you a beggar. The double-eyed villains will kill me whether or not, but I defy them to rob my widow."
"I'll give you while I count three," cried Mason," and by ——, if you don't do it then, I'll shoot you where you stand!"
"You needn't count one, man of blood. I'll never sign it."
"Stand out of the way, Gilbert! No, drag him out. Keep back the woman. Here! out in the open ground, by the living God above me, I'll make a target of him! If I don't shoot fair, let him blame himself that my right hand is gone. One, two—"
Here he paused. There was a death-like and terrible stillness, and Edward, who had been upon his knees, closed his eyes, and whispered to himself one great cry to God for hope and mercy. Then it seemed to him that he felt his mother's hand on his forehead, cool and sleep inducing, and his wife's farewell whisper in his ear. He was going to sleep—should he awaken in heaven?
Mrs. Woolston's eyes glared with horror upon the wretched man's lips as he was about to utter the fatal "three," and an inspiration from the God her poor husband was praying to came to her from heaven. Her face lighted up, and, darting from the man who vainly tried to bar her way, she confronted Mason and his rising weapon.
"John Corrigan!" she gasped, "do you remember where you were this Christmas Eve five years?"
"Five years?" The muzzle of the pistol dropped, and he stared into the woman's face strangely.
"This night five years I stood by your mother's death-bed. She was alone, and you were far far away for many long months following the courses that have led you to this. Who walked for miles day after day to take her food? Who sat up night after night in the lonely bush hut with her when she was ill? Who prepared her for her coffin and laid her in it? Who followed her to the grave, ay, and wept there when your own eyes were dry? May God forgive you, John Corrigan! Is it the way you repay me, to murder my husband?"
"Are you Louisa Mayfield?" he said in a changed voice, and with a face that had paled as she spoke.
"Yes, I am Louisa Mayfield. I am the girl that your mother blessed with her last breath, and told you to remember in your dying prayers. If you do this thing, John Corrigan, what will you say to her before the judgment seat of God, where she will accuse you of blood?"
He fell back and turned away his face. One of his mates laid a hand on his shoulder and said, "Let us go Jack; a curse would follow such work as this," and as Corrigan waved his unwounded hand toward the man who had covered Woolston with his weapon to let him go, his wife's arms were around him, and he fainted in them.
IT is some sixteen or seventeen years since these events happened, and this
is a true record of them, though, for obvious reasons, the names are altered.
Many who read these lines will remember the occurrence, which was but too
well known in the colonies. It was this very man whom I have named Corrigan
that some months after fell in an encounter with the police, with thirty
bullets through him. And as in his happy English home, the following
Christmas Eve, Edward Woolston drank many happy returns of the season of
himself and dear ones, he told the story of his dreadful escape, and
remembered sadly his promise to the bushranger who was dead.