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

daylight, you bet. Father was off and well on his way before the stars were out of the sky. He took Warrigal’s horse, Bilbah, back with him; he and Starlight was going off to the islands together, and couldn’t take horses with them. But he was real sorry to part with the cross-grained varmint; I thought he was going to blubber when he saw father leading him off. Bilbah wouldn’t go neither at first; pulled back, and snorted and went on as if he’d never seen only one man afore in his life. Father got vexed at last and makes a sign to old Crib; he fetches him such a heeler as gave him something else to think of for a few miles. He didn’t hang back much after that.

The three other chaps went their own road. They kept very dark all through. I know their names well enough, but there’s no use in bringing them up now.

Jim and I cuts off into the town, thinking we was due for a little fun. We’d never been in a big town before, and it was something new to us. Adelaide ain’t as grand quite as Melbourne or Sydney, but there’s something quiet and homelike about it to my thinking⁠—great wide streets, planted with trees; lots of steady-going German farmers, with their vineyards and orchards and droll little wagons. The women work as hard as the men, harder perhaps, and get brown and scorched up in no time⁠—not that they’ve got much good looks to lose; leastways none we ever saw.

We could always tell the German farmers’ places along the road from one of our people by looking outside the door. If it was an Englishman or an Australian, you’d see where they’d throwed out the teapot leavings; if it was a German, you wouldn’t see nothing. They drink their own sour wine, if their vines are old enough to make any, or else hop beer; but they won’t lay out their money in the tea chest or sugar bag; no fear, or the grog either, and not far wrong. Then the sea! I can see poor old Jim’s face now the day we went down to the port and he seen it for the first time.

“So we’ve got to the big waterhole at last,” he said. “Don’t it make a man feel queer and small to think of its going away right from here where we stand to the other side of the world? It’s a long way across.”

“Jim,” says I, “and to think we’ve lived all our lives up to this time and never set eyes on it before. Don’t it seem as if one was shut up in the bush, or tied to a gum tree, so as one can never have a chance to see anything? I wonder we stayed in it so long.”

“It’s not a bad place, though it is rather slow and wired in sometimes,” says Jim. “We might be sorry we ever left it yet. When does the steamer go to Melbourne?”

“The day after tomorrow.”

“I’ll be glad to be clear off; won’t you?”

We went to the theatre that night, and amused ourselves pretty well next day and till the time came for our boat to start for Melbourne. We had altered ourselves a bit, had our hair cut and our beards trimmed by the hairdresser. We bought fresh clothes, and what with this, and the feeling of being in a new place and having more money in our pockets than we’d ever dreamed about before, we looked so transmogrified when we saw ourselves in the glass that we hardly knew ourselves. We had to change our names, too, for the first time in our lives; and it went harder against the grain than you’d think, for all we were a couple of cattle-duffers, with a warrant apiece sure to be after us before the year was out.

“It sounds ugly,” says Jim, after we had given our names as John Simmons and Henry Smith at the hotel where we put up at till the steamer was ready to start. “I never thought that Jim Marston was to come to this⁠—to be afraid to tell a fat, greasy-looking fellow like that innkeeper what his real name was. Seems such a pitiful mean lie, don’t it, Dick?”

“It isn’t so bad as being called No. 14, No. 221, as they sing out for the fellows in Berrima Gaol. How would you like that, Jim?”

“I’d blow my brains out first,” cried out Jim, “or let some other fellow do it for me. It wouldn’t matter which.”

It was very pleasant, those two or three days in Adelaide, if they’d only lasted. We used to stroll about the lighted streets till all hours, watching the people and the shops and everything that makes a large city different from the country. The different sorts of people, the carts and carriages, buggies and drays, pony-carriages and spring-carts, all jumbled up together; even the fruit and flowers and oysters and fish under the gaslights seemed strange and wonderful to us. We felt as if we would have given all the world to have got mother and Aileen down to see it all. Then Jim gave a groan.

“Only to think,” says he, “that we might have had all this fun some day, and bought and paid for it honest. Now it isn’t paid for. It’s out of some other man’s pocket. There’s a curse on it; it will have to be paid in blood or prison time before all’s done. I could shoot myself for being such a cursed fool.”

“Too late to think of that,” I said; “we’ll have some fun in Melbourne for a bit, anyhow. For what comes after we must chance it, as we’ve done before, more than once or twice, either.”

Next day our steamer was to sail. We got Starlight to come down with us and show us how to take our passage. We’d never done it before, and felt awkward at it. He’d