was a fortnight since. There was no heat then, and the men were boiling their kettle. I spoke about it.”
“A log like that, Mr. Medlicot, will burn for weeks sometimes. I’ll tell you fairly what I’m afraid of. There’s a man with you whom I turned out of the shed last shearing, and I think he might put a match down—not by accident.”
“You mean Nokes. As far as I know, he’s a decent man. You wouldn’t have me not employ a man just because you had dismissed him?”
“Certainly not; that is, I shouldn’t think of dictating to you about such a thing.”
“Well, no, Mr. Heathcote, I suppose not. Nokes has got to earn his bread, though you did dismiss him. I don’t know that he’s not as honest a man as you or I.”
“If so, there’s three of us very bad; that’s all, Mr. Medlicot. Good-night; and if you’ll trouble yourself to look after the ash of your tobacco it might be the saving of me and all I have.” So saying, he turned round, and made his way back to the horses.
Medlicot had placed himself on the fence during the interview, and he still kept his seat. Of course he was now thinking of the man who had just left him, whom he declared to himself to be an ignorant, prejudiced, ill-constituted cur. “I believe in his heart he thinks that I’m going to set fire to his run,” he said, almost aloud. “And because he grows wool he thinks himself above every body in the colony. He occupies thousands of acres, and employs three or four men. I till about two hundred, and maintain thirty families. But he is such a pig that he can’t understand all that; and he thinks that I must be something low because I’ve bought with my own money a bit of land which never belonged to him, and which he couldn’t use.” Such was the nature of Giles Medlicot’s soliloquy as he sat swinging his legs, and still smoking his pipe, on the fence which divided his sugar-cane from the other young man’s run.
And Harry Heathcote uttered his soliloquy also. “I wouldn’t swear that he wouldn’t do it himself, after all;” meaning that he almost suspected that Medlicot himself would be an incendiary. To him, in his way of thinking, a man who would take advantage of the law to buy a bit of another man’s land—or become a free-selector, as the term goes—was a public enemy, and might be presumed capable of any iniquity. It was all very well for the girls—meaning his wife and sister-in-law—to tell him that Medlicot had the manners of a gentleman and had come of decent people. Women were always soft enough to be taken by soft hands, a good-looking face, and a decent coat. This Medlicot went about dressed like a man in the towns, exhibiting, as Harry thought, a contemptible, unmanly finery. Of what use was it to tell him that Medlicot was a gentleman? What Harry knew was that since Medlicot had come he had lost his sheep, that the heads of three or four had been found buried on Medlicot’s side of his run, and that if he dismissed “a hand,” Medlicot employed him—a proceeding which, in Harry Heathcote’s aristocratic and patriarchal views of life, was altogether ungentleman-like. How were the “hands” to be kept in their place if one employer of labor did not back up another?
He had been warned to be on his guard against fire. The warnings had hardly been implicit, but yet had come in a shape which made him unable to ignore them. Old Bates, whom he trusted implicitly, and who was a man of very few words, had told him to be on his guard. The German, at whose hut he had been in the morning, Karl Bender by name, and a servant of his own, had told him that there would be fire about before long.
“Why should any one want to ruin me?” Harry had asked. “Did I ever wrong a man of a shilling?”
The German had learned to know his young master, had made his way through the crust of his master’s character, and was prepared to be faithful at all points—though he too could have quarreled and have avenged himself had it not chanced that he had come to the point of loving instead of hating his employer.
“You like too much to be governor over all,” said the German, as he stooped over the fire in his own hut in his anxiety to boil the water for Heathcote’s tea.
“Somebody must be governor, or every thing would go to the devil,” said Harry.
“Dat’s true—only fellows don’t like be made feel it,” said the German, “Nokes, he was made feel it when you put him over de gate.”
But neither would Bates nor the German express absolute suspicion of any man. That Medlicot’s “hands” at the sugar-mill were stealing his sheep Harry thought that he knew; but that was comparatively a small affair, and he would not have pressed it, as he was without absolute evidence. And even he had a feeling that it would be unwise to increase the anger felt against himself—at any rate, during the present heats.
Jacko had his pipe still alight when Heathcote returned. “You young monkey,” said he, “have you been using matches?”
“Why not, Mr. Harry? Don’t the grass burn ready, Mr. Harry? My word!” Then Jacko stooped down, lit another match, and showed Heathcote the burned patch.
“Was it so when we came?” Harry asked, with emotion. Jacko, still kneeling on the ground, and holding the lighted match in his hand, shook his head and tapped his breast, indicating that he had burned the grass. “You dropped the match by accident?”
“My word! no. Did it o’ purpose to see. It’s all just one as gunpowder, Mr. Harry.”
Harry got on his horse without a word, and rode away through the forest, taking a direction different from that by which he had come, and the boy followed him. He was by no means certain that this young fellow might not turn against him; but it had been a part of his theory to make no difference to any man because of such fears. If he could make the men around him respect him, then they would treat him well; but they could never be brought to respect him by flattery. He was very nearly right in his views of men, and would have been right altogether could he have seen accurately what justice demanded for others as well as for himself. As far as the intention went, he was minded to be just to every man.
It seemed, as they were riding, that the heat grew fiercer and fiercer. Though there was still the same moaning sound, there was not a breath of air. They had now got upon a track very well known to Heathcote, which led up from the river to the wool-shed, and so on to the station, and they had turned homeward. When they were near the wool-shed, suddenly there fell a heavy drop or two of rain. Harry stopped and turned his face upward, when, in a moment, the whole heavens above them and the forest around were illumined by a flash of lightning so near them that it made each of them start in his saddle, and made the horses shudder in every limb. Then came the roll of thunder immediately over their heads, and with the thunder rain so thick and fast that Harry’s “ten thousand buckets” seemed to be emptied directly over their heads.
“God A’mighty has put out the fires now,” said Jacko.
Harry paused for a moment, feeling the rain through to his bones—for he had nothing on over his shirt—and rejoicing in it. “Yes,” he said; “we may go to bed for a week, and let the grass grow, and the creeks fill, and the earth cool. Half an hour like this over the whole run, and there won’t be a dry stick on it.”
As they went on, the horses splashed through the water. It seemed as though a deluge were falling, and that already the ground beneath their feet were becoming a lake.
“We might have too much of this, Jacko.”
“My word! yes.”
“I don’t want to have the Mary flooded again.”
“My word! no.”
