trust himself to speak carelessly, while the colonist made traditional comparisons between the old country as he found it and the one which he wished he had never left.
"I know you," said Langholm, when he paused. "You're the man I saw 'knocking down your check,' as you called it, at an inn near here called the Packhorse."
"I am so!" cried the fellow, with sudden savagery. "And do you know where I got the check to knock down? I believe he's a friend of yours; it's him I've come to talk to you about to-night, and he calls himself Steel!"
"Isn't it his real name?" asked Langholm, quickly.
"Well, for all I know, it is. If it isn't, it ought to be!" added Abel, bitterly.
"You knew him in Australia, then?"
"Knew him? I should think I did know him! But who told you he was ever out there? Not him, I'll warrant!"
"I happen to know it," said Langholm, "that's all. But do you mean to tell me that it was Mr. Steel to whom you referred in your letter?"
"I do so!" cried Abel, and clinched it with an oath.
"You said 'they.'"
"But I didn't mean anybody else."
Langholm lowered his voice. Neither foot nor hoof had passed or even sounded in the distance. There was scarcely a whisper of the trees; an ordinary approach could have been heard for hundreds of yards, a stealthy one for tens. Langholm had heard nothing, though his ears were pricked. And yet he lowered his voice.
"Do you actually hint that Mr. Steel has or could have been a gainer by Mr. Minchin's death?"
Abel pondered his reply.
"What I will say," he declared at length, "is that he might have been a loser by his life!"
"You mean if Mr. Minchin had gone on living?"
"Yes—amounts to the same thing, doesn't it?"
"You are not thinking of—of Mrs. Steel?" queried Langholm, after pausing in his turn.
"Bless you, no! She wasn't born or thought of, so far as we was concerned, when we were all three mates up the bush."
"Ah, all three!"
"Steel, Minchin, and me," nodded Abel, as his cutty glowed.
"And you were mates!"
"Well, we were and we weren't: that's just it," said Abel, resentfully. "It would be better for some coves now, if we'd all been on the same footin' then. But that we never were. I was overseer at the principal out-station—a good enough billet in its way—and Minchin was overseer in at the homestead. But Steel was the boss, damn him, trust Steel to be the boss!"
"But if the station was his?" queried Langholm. "I suppose it was a station?" he added, as a furious shower of sparks came from the cutty.
"Was it a station?" the ex-overseer echoed. "Only about the biggest and the best in the blessed back-blocks—that's all! Only about half the size of your blessed little old country cut out square! Oh, yes, it was his all right; bought it for a song after the bad seasons fifteen year ago, and sold it in the end for a quarter of a million, after making a fortune off of his clips alone. And what did I get out of it?" demanded Abel, furiously. "What was my share? A beggarly check same as he give me the other day, and not a penny more!"
"I don't know how much that was," remarked Langholm; "but if you weren't a partner, what claim had you on the profits?"
"Aha! that's tellings," said Abel, with a sudden change both of tone and humor; "that's what I'm here to tell you, if you really want to know! Rum thing, wasn't it? One night I turn up, like any other swaggy, humping bluey, and next week I'm overseer on a good screw (I will say that) and my own boss out at the out-station. Same way, one morning I turn up at his grand homestead here—and you know what! It was a check for three figures. I don't mind telling you. It ought to have been four. But why do you suppose he made it even three? Not for charity, you bet your boots! I leave it to you to guess what for."
The riddle was perhaps more easily solvable by an inveterate novelist than by the average member of the community. It was of a kind which Langholm had been concocting for many years.
"I suppose there is some secret," said he, taking a fresh grip of his stick, in sudden loathing of the living type which he had only imagined hitherto.
"Ah! You've hit it," purred the wretch.
"It is evident enough, and always has been, for that matter," said Langholm, coldly. "And so you know what his secret is!"
"I do, mister."
"And did Mr. Minchin?"
"He did."
"You would tell him, of course?"
The sort of scorn was too delicate for John William Abel, yet even he seemed to realize that an admission must be accompanied by some form of excuse.
"I did tell him," he said, "for I felt I owed it to him. He was a good friend to me, was Mr. Minchin; and neither of us was getting enough for all we did. That was what I felt; to have his own way, the boss'd ride roughshod over us both, and he himself only—but that's tellings again. You must wait a bit, mister! Mr. Minchin hadn't to wait so very long, because I thought we could make him listen to two of us, so one night I told him what I knew. You could ha' knocked him down with a feather. Nobody dreamt of it in New South Wales. No, there wasn't a hand on the place who would have thought it o' the boss! Well, he was fond of Minchin, treated him like a son, and perhaps he wasn't such a good son as he might have been. But when he told the boss what I told him, and made the suggestion that I thought would come best from a gent like him—"
"That you should both be taken into partnership on the spot, I suppose?" interrupted Langholm.
"Well, yes, it came to something like that."
"Go on, Abel. I won't interrupt again. What happened then?"
"Well, he'd got to go, had Mr. Minchin! The boss told him he could tell who he liked, but go he'd have to; and go he did, with his tail between his legs, and not another word to anybody. I believe it was the boss who started him in Western Australia."
"Not such a bad boss," remarked Langholm, dryly; and the words set him thinking a moment on his own account. "And what happened to you?" he added, abandoning reflection by an effort.
"I stayed on."
"Forgiven?"
"If you like to put it that way."
"And you both filed the secret for future use!"
"Don't talk through your neck, mister," said Abel, huffily. "What are you drivin' at?"
"You kept this secret up your sleeve to play it for all it was worth in a country where it would be worth more than it was in the back-blocks? That's all I mean."
"Well, if I did, that's my own affair."
"Oh, certainly. Only you came here at your own proposal in order, I suppose, to sell this secret to me?"
