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

at sea, and he’s paid me over and over agin for doin’ a thing I couldn’t help. He’s about the second rale good man I ever seen. But he’s mad about religion and that⁠—must be. He thinks a man like me can repent.” XXXVIII

We scuttled home pretty sharp after we mounted, and got back by dark easy enough. The road was rough, but father’s old mare could spin over stones and through scrub, up hills and down gullies, most like a rock wallaby. I never saw such a surefooted brute. She was what they call a mountain horse, bred in those parts, most likely run in young out of a wild mob. What her blood was of course no one could tell. A deal of hair about her legs and quarters, strong enough to start a ton in a dray; but she’d never looked through a collar in her life, and hated the very sight of harness. She’d kick for five minutes if she heard a trace chain rattle. She had a trifle of vice in her way, was awful touchy, and not over quiet at the best of times with anyone but father. But she knew him, and though he showed her no mercy and rode her till she was close up dead many a time, she’d do more for him than anyone else. It’s the old story all the world over; it’s not them that cares most for others that gets the best served. The other way on, as far as I see. She was pretty well up in front for a mare, and had a goodish shoulder, well-laid back, and her legs and feet were like iron. As for cattle she knew them like a book, and could turn and twist, and stop and wheel, as if she understood what their very thoughts were. She’d open her mouth, and bite, too, if they hung back more than she liked in a thick place. She could gallop all day, and I believe if you’d pitched her down a well she’d have lit on her legs. Anybody would have thought my horse, by the looks of him, could have run away from her, instead of which, now she got her head set towards home, and Dad not in the best of temper, never thought of stopping for anything, it gave me all I knew to keep sight of him.

When we got in there was great laughing and chaffing about our sortie, as Starlight called it, to fetch in letters and a bundle of newspapers. There was no letter for poor Jim, which made him a bit miserabler than usual; but we opened the newspapers, and had a great read at them.

It ain’t often that chaps like us have the chance of seeing such a lot about themselves in print; not that it spoke of us in a way that most people would have liked. It was t’other way on mostly, and yet it was better, in a manner of speaking, than being taken ho notice of at all.

How they did go in. You’d ha’ thought the end of the world was come. They didn’t know which to blame most. These were the respectable, solid sort of newspapers. “The atrocious villainy of the men who had planned and carried out the most daring crime that had ever been committed in the Australian colonies; the inefficiency of the police force or the feebleness of the Government.” My word! They got it hot all round; they let off nobody. Some of them thought it was because there hadn’t been schools enough for the young growing boys and girls, or else they were the wrong sort. Others, that the clergymen hadn’t done their duty in time past. You never heard such a bobbery as our bit of goldfields work, not according to the regulations, had kicked up.

First of all, it was pretty well known that most of the men concerned in it were natives. That everybody seemed to take very much to heart, and I don’t so much wonder. If it had been worked by a lot of the riffraff that had come from America and the old countries they wouldn’t have felt it so much. Of course there were thousands of foreign rascals, robbers, and murderers by profession on the goldfields, who had spent their lives in that kind of work, from whom no better could be expected. The wonder was, when they came to think of it, that it shouldn’t have struck some of ’em before and have been carried out. Simple as it looked now it was done and over.

But what came hardest and was felt so bitter by all who had made New South Wales their home, and had a stake in it, was that all or nearly all of the escort robbers and murderers, for they were nothing short of this in intention, were young men. None of ’em past five and twenty. Born and brought up in the land. “Sons of the soil,” and all the rest of it.

The premeditation with which the whole thing had been planned, the coolness and completeness with which it had been carried out, the cold-blooded carelessness as to shedding blood and taking life⁠—all these (the Morning Advertiser said) were especially bad features in the case, and led to a most gloomy outlook upon the prospects of the rising generation of the land, and to that sense of ordinary morality without which communities could not exist.

Then the Imperial had an innings.

Were we ever to receive any adequate measure of police protection in requital for the enormous annual expenditure upon that department: Could anything have been more ludicrous than sending a force of half-a-dozen policemen (there were eight, but that wouldn’t sound so well) to guard £60,000 worth of gold? Was it not a special temptation offered to a vagrant population, among whom were notoriously some of the boldest and most experienced “filibusters” the world