“All right. He’s the property of the Government now, you know; but I’ll square it somehow. The General won’t object under the circumstances.”
Then he shuts his eyes for a bit. After a while he calls out—
“Dick! Dick Marston.”
“I’m here,” says I.
“If you ever leave this, tell Aileen that her name was the last word I spoke—the very last. She foresaw this day; she told me so. I’ve had a queer feeling too, this week back. Well, it’s over now. I don’t know that I’m sorry, except for others. I say, Morringer, do you remember the last pigeon match you and I shot in, at Hurlingham?”
“Why, good God!” says Sir Ferdinand, bending down, and looking into his face. “It can’t be; yes, by Jove, it is—”
He spoke some name I couldn’t catch, but Starlight put a finger on his lips, and whispers—
“You won’t tell, will you? Say you won’t?”
The other nodded.
He smiled just like his old self.
“Poor Aileen!” he says, quite faint. His head fell back. Starlight was dead!
LV
The breath was hardly out of him when a horse comes tearing through the scrub on to the little plain, with a man on his back that seemed hurt bad or drunk, he rolled in his saddle so. The head of him was bound up with a white cloth, and what you could see of it was dark-looking, with bloodstains on it. I knew the figure and the seat on a horse, though I couldn’t see his face. He didn’t seem to have much strength, but he was one of those sort of riders that can’t fall off a horse, that is unless they’re dead. Even then you’d have to pull him down. I believe he’d hang on somehow like a dead ’possum on a branch.
It was Warrigal!
They all knew him when he came close up, but none of the troopers raised their pieces or thought of stopping him. If a dead man had rode right into the middle of us he’d have looked like that. He stopped his horse, and slipped off on his feet somehow.
He’d had a dreadful wound, anyone could see. There was blood on the rags that bound his head all up, and being round his forehead and over his chin it made him look more and more like a corpse. Not much you could see, only his eyes, that were burning bright like two coals of fire.
Up to Starlight’s body he goes and sits himself down by it. He takes the dead man’s head into his lap, looks down at the face, and bursts out into the awfullest sort of crying and lamenting I ever heard of a living man. I’ve seen the native women mourning for their dead with the blood and tears running down their faces together. I’ve known them sit for days and nights without stirring from round a corpse, not taking a bite or sup the whole time. I’ve seen white people that’s lost an only child that had, maybe, been all life and spirits an hour before. But in all my life I have never seen no man, nor woman neither, show such regular right-down grief as Warrigal did for his master—the only human creature he loved in the wide world, and him lying stiff on the ground before him.
He lifts up the dead face and wipes the blood from the lips so careful; talks to it in his own language (or leastways his mother’s) like a woman over a child. Then he sobbed and groaned and shook all over as if the very life was going out of him. At last he lays the head very soft and gentle down on the ground and looks round. Sir Ferdinand gives him his handkerchief, and he lays it over the face. Then he turns away from the men that stood round, and got up looking that despairing and wretched that I couldn’t help pitying him, though he was the cause of the whole thing as far as we could see.
Sudden as a flash of powder he pulls out a small revolver—a Derringer—Starlight gave him once, and holds it out to me, butt-end first.
“You shoot me, Dick Marston; you shoot me quick,” he says. “It’s all my fault. I killed him—I killed the Captain. I want to die and go with him to the never-never country parson tell us about—up there!”
One of the troopers knocked his hand up. Sir Ferdinand gave a nod, and a pair of handcuffs were slipped over his wrists.
“You told the police the way I went?” says I. “It’s all come out of that.”
“Thought they’d grab you at Willaroon,” says he, looking at me quite sorrowful with his dark eyes, like a child. “If you hadn’t knocked me down that last time, Dick Marston, I’d never have done nothing to you nor Jim. I forgot about the old down. That brought it all back again. I couldn’t help it, and when I see Jimmy Wardell I thought they’d catch you and no one else.”
“Well, you’ve made a clean sweep of the lot of us, Warrigal,” says I, “poor Jim and all. Don’t you ever show yourself to the old man or go back to the Hollow, if you get out of this.”
“He’s dead now. I’ll never hear him speak again,” says he, looking over to the figure on the grass. “What’s the odds about me?”
I didn’t hear any more; I must have fainted away again. Things came into my head about being taken in a cart back to Cunnamulla, with Jim lying dead on one side of me and Starlight on the other. I was only half-sensible, I expect. Sometimes I thought we were alive, and another time that the three of us were dead and going to be buried.
What makes it worse I’ve seen that sight so often
