Ghost Stories and Mysteries (25 page)

“There’s one chance you have,” I said, when he came back. “This aged baby will, most likely, have to go through all the many ills that babies have to endure. I should take care that he died of croup, or scarlet fever, or whooping cough or something or other of that sort.”

“What do you mean by ‘taking care?’” said Shenwick, looking aghast.

“Nothing at all but what anyone but a fool would understand. I mean, take care of him if he is ill. Now, goodbye, I’m tired.” I went home for a bath and breakfast, fully determined to have no more to do with Shenwick, and his dark experiments.

A fortnight afterwards, he came to the office. “I have got rid of him,” he said, dropping on to the chair, as though wearied out.”

“Buried him?” I asked.

“Oh, no! I called to the doctor who certified his death, and I told him that he had revived, but had come imbecile, imagining that he was an infant. So, after studying the case for some days, he called in another doctor, and he has been removed to an asylum.”

“Do you pay for him?”

“Yes, a small sum weekly.”

“Well, he will be a pensioner on you all your life, for, according to you, he has another span of years to live. Have you told Miss Colthrope about it?”

“Heavens! no; what would be the good?”

“Best to be open in these matters, however, I won’t tell anyone; provided you swear never to have anything to do with this foolery any more.”

“That I’ll readily do,” he said, and he did.

Shenwick married, and years passed, and he had a growing family, when he received a communication from the asylum, stating that the patient had improved so much that they thought he ought to be removed. The fact being that he had grown up into a boy and became more sensible.

Shenwick came to me in despair. “Just fancy, he has the soul of a boy, reared amongst lunatics in an asylum. Of course, he has not been taught anything; what on earth shall I do with him? Will you come out with me and see him? His appearance may suggest something.”

I went out with him; ten years had passed since the fatal night of the experiment, and the body containing the boy’s soul was that of an old man of sixty-six, looking older on account of the exposure and hardships the body had suffered. It was a regular puzzle. It was evident that he could not take the patient home. And it was pitiful, too. The soul, or spirit, whatever you like to call it, was full of life and vigor, which the palsied, doddering old body could not second. I could think of nothing but a benevolent asylum, and Shenwick agreed to it. The subject never reached it, however. There was a railway accident, and he was badly injured. We went to see him at the hospital. He was unconscious at the time, but death was very near, and he came to his senses just before we left. He recognised Shenwick, and growled out in the husky voice of old, “Hang you, are you never going to fetch that adjective beer?” Then he expired.

Shenwick told me that the last words he uttered at the period of his first death was an order to him, in flowery language, to go and get some beer.

DOOMED

(1899)

Jim Turner sat in the verandah of his modest homestead reading a letter. The mailman had just left the bag, and amongst the miscellaneous contents was a letter from an old friend, one Dick Beveridge, and in the contents was an item of information which made him feel rather uncomfortable.

“You perhaps have not heard that Charley Moore is dead, and how he died. His horse fell on him and crippled him. He lay there for four and twenty hours before he was found, and then he had been only dead for about one hour. The ants were swarming over him. Fancy what he must have suffered! So now that he is gone, you and I are the last of the five.”

Five of them. Yes, he remembered it well—five of them, eager, young, and hopeful, who came into the untrodden district just sixteen years ago. They found good country, and each took up a run. Now there was only Beveridge and himself alive, and the other three had all died violent deaths. How distinctly he recalled the occurrence, which had given rise to the looming fate that seemed to be overhanging them.

They were camped one afternoon on the bank of the river; the same river he could now see from the verandah, bordered by luxuriant-foliaged tea-trees, with flocks of white cockatoos screaming and frolicking amongst the bushes, varied by flights of the Blue Mountain parrots crowding and chattering round the white flowers.

“Hullo!” said Moore, “there are some niggers coming.” Across the wide stretch of sand on the opposite bank some wandering blacks from the back country had just put in an appearance. Tired, thirsty, and burdened with their children and their camp furniture, they trooped down the bank to the water, and drank at the grateful pool in the river bed.

“What a start it would give them to drop a bullet in amongst them,” said Daveney; “I’m blessed if I don’t do it.”

“Take care you don’t hit one; there are a lot of gins and children amongst them,” said Moore.

Daveney took up his carbine and fired. There was a start of dismay amongst the natives, and they bolted up the bank. One stopped behind a black patch prostrate on the sand.

“By heavens, you’ve hit one, you clumsy fool,” said Beveridge, and the whole party went across the sand to the water. Not only one, but two, had been hit. The Martini bullet had gone clean through a gin’s body and killed the baby she had been nursing. The gin was still alive. She looked at the white faces still gazing down at her, and commenced to talk. What she said of course none of them could understand, but that it was a wild tirade of vengeance against the murderers of her child and herself they could pretty well understand. Death cut her speech short, and almost at the same time there was a wild yell from the bank above, and a shower of spears fell amongst the run-hunters. Only one man was hit badly, and that was Daveney, the man who fired the fatal shot. The blacks had retreated after throwing their spears, and the whites helped their wounded comrade across to camp. Pursuit was impossible; the evening was well on, and by the time the horses could be got together the blacks would be beyond reach.

Then Turner’s memory recalled Daveney’s death in raging delirium, when the tropic sun had inflamed his wound, and fever had set in.

“Keep that gin away, can’t you? Why do you let her stop there talking, talking, talking? What is she saying? You will all die, die violent deaths. Ha! Ha! Ha! Funny a myall blackgin can talk such good English, but that’s what she says, ‘You will die violent deaths!’ Keep her away, you fellows, can’t you? There’s no sense in letting her stand talking there!” He died, and was buried in a lovely valley, where never a white man has been near since. Then Strathdon was drowned in the wreck of the Gothenburg, and now Moore had met a horrible fate. Turner got up with a shudder. Who would go next, he or Beveridge? He had no wish to die just then. He had but lately married, and in a few years the station would be clear of all back debt. He took up the letter, and read it through. At the end Beveridge said, “I am coming your way, and will see you in a few days.” Turner banished all memories of the past, and went in and ate a hearty dinner and his fair young wife congratulated him on his good appetite.

Beveridge came in due time. Like Turner, he had seemingly banished dull care, and had chosen to ignore the doom that strangely enough seemed hanging over him. Nay, he even declined to talk of it with his host, and resolutely declared it was “all bosh.”

It was a sultry, thunderous evening, and Turner and his wife, with their precious first baby, had driven their guest out to a point of interest in the neighborhood, and were returning, when the thunderstorm suddenly burst over their heads. Turner kept his horses going, but the rain overtook them some five miles from the homestead, and pelted them in their faces. Then came a flash, and darkness, as though the electric fluid had struck their eyeballs blind. With the flash came a roar, as though the world was splitting in twain, and then the horses, which had bolted off the road, went headlong into a wire fence, instead of pulling up at the sliprails.

“It’s as dark as pitch” said Turner, getting on his legs unhurt. “Where are you all?” There was no answer, and he commenced groping about, and came on the struggling horses. “Whoa! Beveridge, man, where are you? It can’t be night, but it’s all dark. Didn’t you see that cursed old gin standing in the road and startling the horses? Beveridge!”

One of the men fortunately came along and found Turner, stricken blind, crouching against a tree. One of the horses was dead, with a broken neck; the other was much cut about with the wire. The baby was uninjured, and Mrs. Turner was unconscious; while Beveridge’s head had been smashed in by the hoof of one of the struggling horses; he was dead. Mrs. Turner recovered, but her unfortunate husband never did, and to the day when a merciful death took him away from the blind earth, whose beauty he would see no more, he asserted that the last thing he saw was the form of a black gin, with a child in her arms, standing in front of the sliprails and blocking the horses.

THE MOUNT OF MISFORTUNE

(1899)

The hill, or mountain, as it was generally called, stood sheer on the bank of the river, which wheeled sharply around its base. The river was broad and sandy, and in its deeper pools the crocodiles of the Northern Territory disported themselves, and in the sunny hours of the winter days could be seen basking on the sandbanks in sleepy ease and contentment. The mount itself was the termination of a range of some sixty miles long, which started from the locality of a gold field, and all along its course the daring prospector had threaded his way, taking his life in his hand as he did so, for the blacks at that time were still savage and dangerous. On the mount by the river several parties had obtained good results; but, strangely enough, none were able to follow it up. Nearly every party obtained one good prospect, and after that were mocked by the color of gold only.

Worse than all, no party had ever camped at the mount but what death, in some shape, had overtaken one of its members. One had gone to the river to wash his clothes. His mates searched in vain for him when he did not return. The clothes were there, but the crocodiles had got the man. Another had sickened of the malarial fever of the north and died, and been buried there. Another had stuck his pick into his foot, and he, poor fellow, died a dreadful death in the agony of lockjaw. Two had gone there, and only one had come back again, disappeared in a day or two, and the story went round that he had murdered his mate. So the tales ran about the mountain on the bank of the Railly River, and men began to get shy of going there.

“The next lot will get chawed up by the niggers,” was the opinion of one old digger. “They haven’t had an innings yet, and it’s about their turn now.”

“Whoever they get, they won’t get me. I wouldn’t go down there for an ounce a day, unless there was a regular camp,” said another.

“What’s the matter with the place?” asked a tall young fellow, who was sitting by the fire with the others, a new arrival from Queensland.

They told him the story, and he laughed as all did at first when these yarns were told by old hands.

“Everybody gets a good prospect to start with and then they can never get any more? Hanged if I don’t try my luck there.”

“We’ll find your bones in a black’s oven,” said the old man who had first spoken.

“Blacks!” returned the other, contemptuously. “You shouldn’t talk to an old Palmer man about niggers.”

“You may be in nigger country for years, and some fine day, when you’re smoking your pipe and reckoning that you’re as safe as the Lord Mayor of London, crash will go your skull, and nothing will trouble you any more. I know ’em,” said the other.

“So do I,” said the young man, “they tackled us like devils when we were on the Roper, when we were coming across, and speared my best horse. I owe them something. But about this mountain, is it a true bill about the prospects?”

“True as gospel; there’s men in the camp here who have been there and found it always the same—one good prospect and nothing more.”

“It must be traced somehow. I’ll have a try, anyhow. By-the-way, a brother of mine came over here about a year ago, and I have never heard of him since. Tall fellow, not unlike me—Sid Thomson was his name—used to be called Lanky Sid!”

“Good Lord!” said the old man. “Thought there was something familiar about the cut of you. Yes, your brother came here, worse luck, but where he is now nobody can say.”

“How’s that?” said the other, quickly.

“Because he went down to that there mountain, and he never came back again.”

“Tell me about it. I came over here from the Palmer, partly in the hope of finding him. Sid and I were always great chums from boys.”

“I’ll tell you, Thomson, if that’s your name,” went on Franks, the old digger, “but it’s a queer story, mind you, and none too pleasant for you to hear. Your brother Sid, I knew him well. He went down to the Railly River Mountain; would go against all we said, just the same as you, and he hasn’t come back yet.”

“How long ago was that?”

More than six months. But that’s not all. He had a mate with him—a fellow called Radforth. Radforth came back alone. Didn’t say much to anyone—and disappeared. Clean gone, nobody knows where.”

“Didn’t anybody ask about my brother?”