"Fall! No!" snapped Hugh, whose temper was gradually rising as the absurdity of the situation dawned on him. "We haven"t had a fall. We ran the tracks of a lot of our sheep from the big paddock, and here they are now. I"d like to know what this means?"
"Is thim your sheep?" said the bland Mick, surprised. "I wuz wondherin"
whose sheep they wuz, comin" up the flat. I knew they wuzn"t travellin"
sheep, "cause of gettin" no notice, an me bein" laid up in the house this two days--"
"Oh, that"s all very fine, Mick Donohoe?" said the young man angrily.
"Your own dogs have brought them here."
Red Mick laughed gaily. "Ah, thim dogs is always yardin" up things. They never see a mob of sheep, but they"ll start to dhrive "em some place.
When I was travellin" down the Darlin", goin" through Dunloe Station, in one paddock I missed th" old s.l.u.t, and when I see her again, she had gethered fifteen thousand sheep, and was bringin" "em after me. But, Lord bless your heart, Mr. Hugh," he added with a comforting smile, "she wouldn"t hurt a hair of a sheep"s head, nor the young dog ayther. Them sheep"ll be all right. Sorra sheep ever she bit in her life. I wonder where they gethered them?"
"I"ll tell you where they gathered them," said Hugh. "The fence of our paddock was dug up, and the sheep were run out, and then the fence was put up again. That"s how they gathered them."
"The fence wuz dug up! Ah, look at that now. Terrible, ain"t it. An"
who done it, do ye think? Some of them carriers, I expect, puttin" their horses in unbeknownst to you. I"ll bet "twas them done it. Or, perhaps,"
he added, with an evident desire to a.s.sist in solving the difficulty, "perhaps the wind blew it down."
"What!" said Hugh scornfully. "Wind blow down a fence! What next!"
"Well it does blow terrible hard sometimes in these parts," said Red Mick, shaking his head dolefully; "look at me crop of onions I planted--the wind blew "em out of the ground, and hung "em on the fence.
But wait now, till we have a look at these sheep."
"No, we won"t wait," said Hugh angrily. "We will be off home now, and send a man for them. And I advise you to be very careful, Mick Donohoe, for I have my own idea who dug up that fence."
"Well, you don"t suppose that I done it, do you?" said Red Mick.
"I"ve been in the house this three days. Besides, I wouldn"t steal my brother-in-law"s sheep, anyhow. Won"t ye come up, and have a dhrink of tea now, you and the lady? It"s terrible hot."
"No, thank you," said Hugh stiffly. "Come along, Miss Grant." And they marched off towards the horses.
"It beats all who could have took them posts down, doesn"t it?" said Mick. "I"d offer a reward, if I was you. Them fellows about here would steal the eyes out of your head. Good day to ye, Mr. Hugh."
And the c.o.c.katoo added, "Good-bye, c.o.c.kie," in a sepulchral voice, as they trudged off, smitten hip and thigh.
Hugh was suffering intensely at his defeat, and when Mary Grant said, "I suppose you will have him put in gaol at once?" he muttered that he would have to think it over. "It wouldn"t do to prosecute him and fail, and we have no proof that he dug up the fence."
"But why did he say that the sheep belonged to his brother-in-law?"
Hugh started. "Did he say that? Well, he--he must have wanted to make out that he did not know whose sheep they were" but he thought to himself, "Is Red Mick going to bring up that old scandal?"
Mick, as he watched them go, winked twice to himself, and then stooped and patted the head of the collie pup. The other dogs, in answer to a silent wave of his hand, had slunk off quietly. The riders had disappeared. It had been a narrow escape, and Red Mick knew it; and even as things had turned out, there was still ample chance of a conviction.
On the way back to the homestead Hugh began to talk of the chance of a conviction, and the delight it would be to give Mick seven years, but his ideas were disturbed by thoughts of Mick"s face as he said, "Why should I steal my brother-in-law"s sheep?" He looked at the girl alongside him, and prayed that the old story might never be resurrected.
CHAPTER XV. A PROPOSAL AND ITS RESULTS.
The question whether Mick Donohoe should be prosecuted was not likely to be prejudiced by his claim of kinship. Billy the Bully would as soon prosecute his own brother-in-law as anybody else--sooner, in fact. So Hugh, having reached home very crest-fallen and angry, wrote a full account of the affair in his report of the station work, and asked whether he should lay an information.
Grant"s reply was brief and to the point; he seldom wrote letters, always telegraphing when possible. On this occasion the telegram said, "Prosecute at once; offer reward informers;" which, leaking out (as telegrams frequently did at the local office) put Red Mick considerably on the qui vive. The old man actually paid him the compliment of writing a letter about him later on, saying that it would be a good thing to prosecute--it would give Red Mick a good scare, even if it didn"t get him into gaol. Circ.u.mstances, no doubt, justified a prosecution, and it was hard to see bow Mick could make a counter-move.
But that gentleman was not without resource; an anonymous letter arrived for Hugh by the mailboy, a dirty, scrawled epistle, unsigned and undated, running as follows:--
"Mr. Gordon i herd you was gone to summons Michael Donohoe for sheep stealing. You better bewar there is some seen you and that girl in the bush you will get a grate shown up and her two."
This precious epistle was signed "A Friend," and on first reading it Hugh laughed heartily; but the more he thought it over the less he liked it. It was all very well to put Red Mick in the dock, but it was evident that part of the defence would be, "How came you to be under the boughs of a fallen tree with an attractive young woman when Red Mick"s dogs came up with the sheep?" At the very least they would look ridiculous; and the unknown correspondent who promised them a "grate shown up" would probably take care that the story was as highly-coloured as possible. He shuddered to think what the Donohoes would say, and heartily wished he had let Red Mick alone.
He fretted for some hours, and then decided to talk it over with the girl herself. He did not care to let Red Mick think that the anonymous letter had stopped the prosecution; at the same time, he was determined to do nothing that would cause Miss Grant the least annoyance. He opened the discussion that evening while strolling about the garden.
"About this business of Red Mick"s," he said. "I am rather worried."
"Why?"
"Well, the trouble is this: I"ve got an anonymous letter from Red Mick or some of his people, saying that they are going to give you and me a great showing-up about being hidden in the tree together."
"What can they say?" she asked, uncomprehendingly.
"Well, of course, they will talk about our being in the tree together--and--all that kind of thing, you know. They will make things as unpleasant for us as they can. They may want you to give evidence, and all that sort of thing--and I thought, perhaps you mightn"t like it."
She froze into dignity at once. "I certainly shouldn"t like it," she said. "About being in the tree, that does not matter, of course, but I hope you will keep my name out of the affair altogether. I must ask you to do that for me."
Then he rushed on his fate. Many a time he had pictured how he would wait till they were alone together in the garden on some glorious moonlit night, and he would take her hand, and tell her how much he loved her; and now, seeing the girl standing before him flushed with insulted dignity, he suddenly found himself gasping out, in what seemed somebody"s else"s voice, "Couldn"t we--look here, Miss Grant, won"t you be engaged to me? Then it won"t matter what they say."
He tried to take her hand, but she drew back, white to the lips.
"No, no; let me go; let me go," she said. Then the colour came back to her face, and she drew herself up, and spoke slowly and cuttingly:
"I thank you very much for what you have just said. But I really think that I shall be able to put up with anything these people may choose to say about me. It won"t hurt me, and I shouldn"t like you to sacrifice yourself to save me from the talk of such people. Let us go back to the house, please."
He stared helplessly at her, and could not find his voice for a moment.
At last he blurted out:
"It"s not because of that. I don"t care about them any more than you do.
Don"t think it"s that, Miss Grant. Why--"
"Let us go back to the house, please," she said quietly, "and don"t say anything more about it. And whatever happens, I must ask you to keep my name out of the affair altogether. You"ll do that, won"t you? Let us go back now, if you don"t mind."
They walked back in silence. He looked at her once or twice, but her face was stern and rigid, and she would not give him even one glance.
At the door she gave him her hand, with a matter-of-fact "I will say good-night now," and disappeared into her room, where she threw herself on the bed and sobbed bitterly; for the truth was that she was very, very fond of him. She, too, had built her little castles in the air as to what she would say and do when he put the momentous question.
Girls do foresee these things, somehow; although they do pretend to be astonished when the time arrives.
She had pictured him saying all sorts of endearing things, and making all sorts of loving protestations; and now it had come to this--she had been asked as if it were merely a matter of avoiding scandal. It was too great a shock. She lay silently crying, while Hugh, his castles in the air having crumbled around him, was trying in a dazed way to frame a letter to Mr. Grant.
His thoughts were anything but pleasant. What a fool he had been, talking to her like that! Making it look as if he had only proposed to her because he ought to protect her good name! Why hadn"t he spoken to her before--in the tree, on the ride home, any other time? Why hadn"t he spoken differently? To him the refusal seemed the end of all things.
He thought of asking Mr. Grant to give him the management of the most out-back place he had, so that he could go away and bury himself. He even thought of resigning his position altogether and going to the goldfields. Red Mick and his delinquencies seemed but small matters now; and, after what had pa.s.sed, he must, of course, see that Miss Grant was not dragged into the business. So he sat down and began to write.