Robbery Under Arms by Rolf Boldrewood (epub read online books TXT) 📕

knew what we had to expect. Nothing would make much difference. “As well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.” We were up to our necks in it now, and must fight our way out the best way we could.

Bar any man betraying the secret of the Hollow we might be safe for years to come, as long as we were not shot or taken in fair fight. And who was to let out the secret? No one but ourselves had the least notion of the track or where it led to, or of such a place as the Hollow being in the colony. Only us five were in possession of the secret. We never let any of these other men come near, much less to it. We took good care never to meet them within twenty miles of it. Father was a man that, even when he was drunk, never let out what he didn’t want other people to know. Jim and I and Starlight were not likely to blab, and Warrigal would have had his throat cut sooner than let on about anything that might be against Starlight, or that he told him not to do.

We had good reason, then, to think ourselves safe as long as we had such a place to make for whenever we were in danger or had done a stroke. We had enough in gold and cash to keep us comfortable in any other country⁠—provided we could only get there. That was the rub. When we’d got a glass or two in our heads we thought it was easy enough to get across country, or to make away one by one at shearing time, disguised as swagsmen, to the coast. But when we thought it over carefully in the mornings, particularly when we were a bit nervous after the grog had died out of us, it seemed a rather blue lookout.

There was the whole countryside pretty thick with police stations, where every man, from the sergeant to the last-joined recruit, knew the height, size, colour of hair, and so on of every one of us. If a suspicious-looking man was seen or heard of within miles the telegraph wires could be set to work. He could be met, stopped, searched, and overhauled. What chance would any of us have then?

“Don’t flatter yourselves, my boy,” Starlight said, when we’d got the length of thinking how it was to be done, “that there’s any little bit of a chance, for a year or two at any rate, of getting away. Not a kangaroo rat could hop across from one scrub to another if there was the least suspicion upon him without being blocked or run into. Jim, old man, I’m sorry for you, but my belief is we’re quartered here for a year or two certain, and the sooner we make up our minds to it the better.”

Here poor old Jim groaned. “Don’t you think,” he said, quite timid-like, “that about shearing-time a man might take his chance, leading an old horse with a swag on, as if he wanted to get shearing in some of the big down-the-river sheds?”

“Not a bit of it,” says Starlight. “You’re such a good-looking, upstanding chap that you’re safe to be pulled up and made answer for yourself before you’d get fifty miles. If you rode a good horse they’d think you were too smart-looking for a regular shearer, and nail you at once.”

“But I’d take an old screw with a big leg,” pleaded Jim. “Haven’t I often seen a cove walking and leading one just to carry his blankets and things?”

“Then they’d know a chap like you, full of work and a native to boot, ought to have a better turnout⁠—if it wasn’t a stall. So they’d have you for that.”

“But there’s Isaac Lawson and Campbelltown. You’ve seen them. Isaac’s an inch taller than me, and the same cut and make. Why shouldn’t they shop them when they’re going shearing? They’re square enough, and always was. And Campbelltown’s a good deal like Dick, beard and all.”

“Well, I’ll bet you a new meerschaum that both men are arrested on suspicion before shearing. Of course they’ll let them go again; but, you mark my words, they’ll be stopped, as well as dozens of others. That will show how close the search will be.”

“I don’t care,” says Jim, in his old, obstinate way, which he never put on except very seldom. “I’ll go in a month or two⁠—police or no police. I’ll make for Melbourne if there was an army of soldiers between me and Jeanie.”

We had to settle where the gold was to be hid. After a lot of talk we agreed to keep one bag in a hole in the side of the wall of the cave, and bury the others in the place where we’d found old Mr. Devereux’s box. His treasure had laid many a year safe and sound without anybody touching it, and we thought ours might do the same. Besides, to find it they must get into the Hollow first. So we packed it out bag by bag, and made an ironbark coffin for it, and buried it away there, and put some couch-grass turfs on it. We knew they’d soon grow up, and nobody could tell that it hadn’t always been covered up the same as the rest of the old garden.

It felt pretty hard lines to think we shouldn’t be able to get away from this lonely place after the life we’d led the last year; but Starlight wasn’t often wrong, and we came to the same way of thinking ourselves when we looked at it all round, steady and quiet like.

We’d been a week or ten days all by ourselves, horse-breaking, fishing, and shooting a bit, thinking how strange it was that we should have more than £20,000 in gold and money and not be able to do anything with it, when dad, sudden like, said he’d go out himself and get