Chapter Thirteen.
A Grim Tussle
“I say, Cetchy, isn’t this splendid?” said Haviland, drawing in long breaths of the cool night air. He was simply revelling in the sense of absolute liberty as he gazed around upon the dim fields, then up at the star-gemmed sky.
“Oh, yes. Splendid, rather! Hangman’s Wood long way – get morning very early,” replied the other.
The long, dark outline of the ill-omened covert loomed before them; and at sight of it Haviland could hardly restrain a wild paroxysm of laughter, as he remembered the last time they visited the place, and the awful scare they had put upon the unfortunate keeper. Just as they gained it, the moon in its last quarter arose above the tree tops.
“It’s awfully dark in here, Cetchy,” whispered Haviland, as they stood within the gloomy depths of the wood. “These trees are too thick. We can’t see a blessed bird.”
It was even as he had said. The light of the feeble moon hardly penetrated here, and the chill gloom and weird associations of the place began to take effect even upon their spirits. A fox barked in the further end of the covert, and ever and anon the doleful hooting of owls, both far and near, rang out upon the night, and now and again one of the ghostly birds would drop down almost into their faces, and skim along the ride on soft, noiseless pinions. The earthy moisture of the soil and undergrowth was as the odour of a charnel-house. Every now and then some sound – strange, mysterious, unaccountable – would cause them to stop short, and, with beating hearts, stand intently listening. Then they went on again.
They had secured no spoil; the tree tops were too thick to see the roosting birds. At last, as luck would have it – whether for good or ill we say not – they managed to glimpse a single pheasant through a gap against the sky. All of a quiver with excitement, Haviland pressed the trigger, and missed. Still the dim black ball up aloft never moved. Again he took careful aim, and this time it did move, for it came down from its perch with a resounding flapping of wings, and hit the earth with a hard thud, still flapping. In a moment the Zulu boy was upon it and had wrung its neck, but not before it had uttered a couple of raucous croaks that seemed, to the over-strained sense of its slayers, loud enough to be heard for miles in the midnight stillness.
“I’m glad we’ve got something at last, Cetchy,” whispered Haviland, as he examined the dead bird. “We’ll have to be contented with it, though, for time’s up. Come along, we must get back now.”
Bearing off their spoil in triumph, they had gained the centre of the wood – the spot, in fact, where the old tragedy had occurred, and close to that whereon they had so badly frightened the keeper. Suddenly Haviland felt a hand on his arm, heard a brief whisper:
“Stop! Something moving.”
At first he could hear nothing; then his ears detected a sound, and his nerves thrilled. As the other had said, it was something moving, and instinctively he realised that it was something heavier, more formidable than any of the light-footed denizens of an English wood. Somehow his mind reverted to the grim legend. What if it were true, and the strangled man actually did walk, with all the marks of his horrible and violent death upon him? In front, where the rides of the wood intersected each other, the moonlight streamed through in a broad patch, rendering blacker still the pitchy blackness beneath the trees beyond. The stillness and excitement, together with the gruesome associations of the place, had got upon their nerves even more than they knew. What if some awful apparition – appalling, horrible beyond words – were to emerge from yonder blackness, to stand forth in the ghostly moonlight, and petrify them with the unimaginable terrors of a visitant from beyond the grave? Haviland’s pulses seemed to stand still as the sounds drew nearer and nearer. A keeper’s? No. They were too quick, too heavy, too blundering, somehow. Then Anthony breathed one word:
“Dog!”
A dog! Of course, that solved the mystery. But even then the jump from supernatural fears to the material hardly seemed to mend matters. A dog meant a keeper, of course, unless it were a midnight poacher like themselves, in which event it would give them a wide berth; but this was too much to hope. On the other hand, if it were accompanying a keeper on his midnight round, the brute would certainly attack them; and that it was a large and heavy animal they could determine by the sound of its quick, fierce rushes to and fro, and a sort of deep-toned grunt which it uttered now and then as it snuffed the ground.
Breathlessly they crouched. Ha! It was coming! The sound of its approaching rush in the pitchy blackness was almost upon them – then it passed. It had not discovered them yet, but evidently suspected their presence. When it winded them, as it might do any moment, then it would come straight for them. There was something terribly unnerving in this feeling of being hunted, and that by an enemy whose strength they had no opportunity of estimating.
As the retreating sound grew fainter, Haviland suggested climbing a tree. There was no such thing as playing the ghost again. That was all very well with a keeper, but it wouldn’t do for a moment with a dog. Besides, the brute could maul them horribly even before the keeper should arrive on the scene; but Anthony negatived the suggestion.
“No climb tree,” he said. “I kill him. Look, he come again.”
It was even as he had said. The rush of a heavy body through the undergrowth, this time on the other side of the ride, and then, from the darkness beyond, there sprang forth into the moonlit ride an enormous bull-mastiff.
Terrible to a degree looked the formidable brute, his fangs exposed in a white line across the blackness of his huge bullet head: and the great muscular brindled body looked powerful enough to bring down a bullock with ease. Why, these two would simply be torn to pieces.
As the brute sprang into the light it paused a moment. Then, uttering one deep, cavernous “gowl” it came straight for them.
But at the moment it began its rush, there darted forth into the light a form, lithe and dark. Something flashed aloft, and at the same time descended – and then animal and human were mixed up together in a struggling mass upon the ground. The descendant of a long line of warriors knew better than to give his antagonist the choice of battle ground, and did not prefer to fight in the dark, wherefore he had hurled himself straight at the onrushing monster – stabbing furiously with his improvised sheep-shear assegai.
Not ineffectually either, but the sheer weight of the heavy muscular brute had hurled him flat.
It had all been done with a rapidity that was almost lightning-like. Haviland, witnessing it, felt all in a maze for a moment, realising that he was unarmed – for the air-gun of course would be about as effective against such an adversary as this as the common or school pea-shooter. Yet he bethought him of a weapon more useful still, and without hesitation he advanced upon the struggling pair, and his right fist was armed with a knuckle-duster of the most formidable kind, each knuckle constituting a sharp point – a terrible implement, one moderately strong blow of which could kill a man easily.
The Zulu boy lay on the sward beneath the great dog – his one object being to shield his throat. Fortunately he had previously rolled his jacket round his left arm, and this had received the powerful jaws, which hung on, with a dreadful worrying snarl – while, with his right, he was stabbing furiously at the creature’s body, but somehow without much effect. Haviland saw his chance – and the good moonlight befriended him. With the utmost coolness and ready promptitude he selected his opportunity – letting out with all the force of his iron-bound right hand. “Woof!” It caught the snarling, gnashing monster full and square on the side of the head, and without waiting to see the result he followed it up with another. One quick gasp, and the great brute rolled off, lying on its side, hardly moving – stunned, if not dead. But the Zulu boy would leave nothing to chance. Springing to his feet he drove his sharp weapon through and through the body of the dog. There was no doubt about it then. The animal lay still – the dark pool of its blood widening ever in the moonlight.
“Are you hurt, Cetchy? D’you hear – are you hurt?” gasped Haviland, panting with the effort and excitement of his supreme exertion.
“Hurt? No. He bite me once. Ha! I, Mpukuza! I can kill! Ha!”
Thus spoke the savage – the descendant of a line of fighting savages, standing there, grasping his savage weapon, surveying the dead and bleeding body of his formidable enemy, not in his own native wilds, but in the peaceful glade of an English game preserve.
“Well, come along then, and quick. There’s sure to be a keeper not far off.”
Quickly they took their way to the edge of the wood. They were over the fence and away, but hardly had they gone some fifty yards when a voice behind them shouted: —
“Hi! Stop there! Stop, do ’ee ’ear? I’ll shoot ’ee if ’ee don’t.” And immediately the bang of a discharged gun crashed out upon the night, Haviland laughed.
“It’s all right, Cetchy. He daren’t fire at us, for his life. It’s bluff. Come along.”
And away they raced, but a glance over their shoulder showed them that the keeper was giving chase.
That in itself didn’t afflict them much, but by and by when they had covered several long fields, they observed with concern that he was still on their heels. As a rule, a keeper was easy to distance, but this one seemed lightly built and in excellent training. Even a dark lane down which they dived, hoping to double on him, proved of no avail; rather did it serve to make matters worse, for the keeper, knowing where they were bound to come out, had wasted neither time nor energy, but made straight for that point: a manoeuvre which brought him alarmingly close when he did emerge. And at all hazards he must not be suffered to head them off from their objective.
“Now, then – ’ee’d better stop, I tell ’ee!” he shouted, reckoning them done up. But the fugitives knew better than to waste wind, if he did not. They simply raced on, offering no reply. And by degrees their superior wind and training told, the more so that the race was a long one. They saw they were shaking their pursuer off, and it was all important they should do this, because it would never do for them to let him run them all the way back to the school. They might as well surrender at once as that.
“My clothes all over blood!” said Anthony at last, when they were safe beyond pursuit. “What I do?”
Haviland examined him critically in the moonlight.
“So they are,” he said. “Well, Cetchy, you must peel them off and stow them away in the ditch, and go in without them. You can think you’re back in Zululand again.”
“So I can. Yes,” answered the other, showing his white rows of splendid teeth.
Half an hour later, two wearied perspiring figures shinned up the cord under the angle of the chapel wall at Saint Kirwin’s, and so ended another night of excitement and adventure – as they thought.
Chapter Fourteen.
The Bolt Falls
“I say, you fellows, there’s no end of a row on,” pronounced Wood major, joining a group of others.
“No! Is there? What about? Who’s in it?” were the eager inquiries which hailed the good news. For a row at Saint Kirwin’s was, in its generation, akin to the Coliseum sports in theirs, inasmuch as it afforded pleasurable excitement to the multitude. To the small minority directly implicated it afforded excitement too, but the reverse of pleasurable. This particular group, however, being presumably clear of conscience, hailed the news with unfeigned satisfaction.
“Why, the small room at the end of Williams’s dormitory are all in it, I believe,” explained Wood major. “Cetchy’s been caught getting out late at night.”
“What, Cetchy? Haviland’s chum?”
“Rather. We’re going to see something, I can tell you.”
“Then Haviland’s in it too,” said some one else.
“I expect so. I believe the whole room’s in it.”
“A case of Cetchy caught,” remarked a puffy-faced fellow who set up for being a wag.
“Oh, shut up, Cross. We don’t want Clay’s second-hand wheezes,” was all the appreciation he met with. “Why we’ve yelped at that in all its variations till I believe we’d sooner do his impos. than get off it by putting him in a good humour over that ‘honk’ any more. Go on, Wood. What have you heard about it?”
“Why, Smithson minor told me. He’s rather a chum of Cetchy’s, you know. The first he knew of it was seeing Cetchy come out of Nick’s study looking precious puffy about the chops. Nick had been socking him all over the shop, he told Smithson; and then Nick came out himself, and maybe Smithson didn’t slink off. Oh, no.”
“Well, we shan’t hear anything about it till to-morrow morning,” said Cross. “Sure to come on at morning prep. Great Scott, but there’ll be some swishing on!”
“Haviland won’t take it, I expect.”
“He’ll be jolly well expelled then.”
“He won’t care. I know he won’t take a swishing. I hated him when he was a prefect, but now I hope he’ll score off Nick.”
“P’raps he’s not in it.”
“Not in it? Why, the whole room’s in it.”
And so the discussion ran on; the while, however, the news had somehow leaked out, and the presage of a row – and a very big row at that – hung over the school like a thundercloud.
It will be necessary to go back.
For a day or two after the exploit chronicled in the last chapter our two midnight marauders plumed themselves on their feat of arms, and delighted to meet and fight their battle over again in a secluded corner of the playing fields, the only thorn in the rose being that they had lost the air-gun, abandoned during the precipitancy of their flight, and, of course, the pheasant. This, however, they decided was of small account compared with such a glorious experience as had been theirs, and they positively glowed over the recollection of their adventure. But they were a little premature in their elation. Retribution was at hand, and this is how the bolt fell.
To a group of boys strolling along a field-path not far from the school it was not strange that they should meet a keeper. What was strange to them was the gun in the hand of that worthy.
“That’s a rum sort of gun you’ve got there,” said one of them. “I say, let’s have a look at it.”
The keeper merely shook his head. Then an idea seemed to strike him, and he stopped.
“Yes, it be a rum gun, bean’t it, young genelmen?” he said, extending it to them, but not loosing his hold of it. “That be one o’ they new-fangled air-guns. They don’t make no bang when they goes off.”
The group gathered round interested. The keeper explained the working of the weapon, and from that got to talking on other matters – in fact, was extraordinarily chatty and affable, which was remarkable, because between gamekeepers and the Saint Kirwin’s boys a state of natural hostility existed.
“I’ve heard tell,” he went on at last, “that there’s a black African young genelman up at the school there. If that’s so, I’d like to make so bold as to see he. I ’ad a brother servin’ in the wars again they Africans over yonder, and ’e told me a lot about ’em. Yes, I’d like to see he.”
Now, under ordinary circumstances, this request would have caused them, in their own phraseology, to “smell a rat.” Perhaps in this case it had that effect all the same; but then, as ill-luck would have it, the group the keeper had struck in this instance happened to be Jarnley and his gang. Here was a chance to pay off old scores. Here was a noble opportunity for revenge, and it would in all probability comprehend Haviland too. Jarnley, Perkins, and Co. were simply jubilant.
“There’s no difficulty about that, keeper,” said the former, genially. “You go to the gate of the west field and ask any fellow to point you out Cetchy. I expect he’ll be there now. Cetchy – mind, that’s the name.”
“I’ll remember, sir, and thankee kindly. Mornin’, young genelmen.”
Three-quarters of an hour later our friend Anthony, having, in obedience to an urgent summons, hastened, though not without misgivings, to present himself in the Doctor’s study, found himself confronted by a tall red-whiskered keeper, while on the table, exposed on a sheet of newspaper, lay his lost air-gun and the corpse of a fine cock-pheasant. Then he knew that the game was up.
“Yes, sir. That be he, right enough,” said the keeper. “I saw him several times as I was a chevyin’ of him. There was a good moon, and I’d swear to him anywhere, sir. There was another with him, sir, a tall young chap, but I never got a chance of seeing his face. But this one, I can swear to he.”
“Very well,” said the Doctor. “You had better go down to the porter’s lodge, and wait there in case I should require to see you again.”
The keeper saluted and retired.
“And now,” went on the Doctor, in his most awe-inspiring tone, “what have you got to say? On the night of Tuesday, you and another – with whom I shall presently deal – were found by the man who has just gone out in one of Lord Hebron’s coverts. That pheasant lying there was killed by you with that air-gun. Now, who was with you?”
“I don’t know nothin’ about it, sir.”
“What?” thundered the Doctor, rising from his seat; and the next moment Anthony received a terrific box on the ear which sent him staggering against the table, followed up by another on the other side, the force of which wellnigh restored him to his original equilibrium. “So you would add lying to your other misconduct, would you? Now, answer my question. Who was with you?”
But the question was addressed seemingly to empty air. The Zulu boy, thinking to detect another hostile move, had incontinently dived under the table.
Here was a situation wholly outside the Doctor’s experience. He was a violent-tempered man when roused, especially when his dignity had sustained, as he thought, any slight, but he had too much sense of that dignity to embark actively in the chase of a boy who had got under the table of his own study. Not for a moment, however, was he nonplussed.
“Come out and stand where you were before,” he said, “and that at once, or I shall send for two prefects to drag you out, and shall cane you now as I have never caned a boy before, and that in addition to whatever punishment I shall decide to inflict upon you for your other offence. Do you hear?”
Anthony did hear, and being, like most of his race, of a practical turn of mind, had rapidly decided that it was better to be thrashed once than twice; wherefore he emerged from under the table, and stood upright as before, but with a quick and watchful eye, ready to dodge any further hostile move on the part of the Doctor.
The latter, for his part, had had time to think; and in the result it occurred to him that it was scarcely fair to judge this raw young savage, for he was hardly more, with the same severity as the ordinary boy. So he would refrain from further violent measures for the present.
“Who was with you?” he repeated remorselessly, and in a tone which in all his experience he had never known any boy able to hold out against. But he reckoned without the staunch, inherent Zulu loyalty.
For now Anthony shifted his ground. No power on earth would have induced him to give his accomplice away – they might flog him to death first. But by confessing his own criminality he might save Haviland.
“No one with me, sir. I all alone,” he answered volubly. “That man tell big lie. Or praps he seen a ghost. Ha!”
The Doctor looked at him with compressed lips. Then he rang the bell, and in the result, within a minute or two, the keeper re-appeared.
“Now Anthony,” said the Doctor, “repeat to this man what you have just told me.” Anthony did.
“Why you tell one big lie? Ha! You saw me, yes, yes. No one with me. I alone. How you see other when other not there?”
“Come. That’s a good ’un,” said the man, half amused, half angry. “Why I see he as plain as I see you.”
“See he? Ha! You see a ghost, praps? You ever see a ghost in Hangman’s Wood, hey?” and rolling his eyes so that they seemed to protrude from his head, and lolling his tongue out, the Zulu boy stared into the face of the dazed keeper, uttering the while the same cavernous groan, which had sent that worthy fleeing from the haunted wood as though the demon were at his heels.
“Good Lord!” was all the keeper could ejaculate, staring with mouth and eyes wide open. Then, realising what a fool they had made of him, he grew furious.
“You see ghost, yes? Praps Hangman’s ghost, hey?” jeered the boy.
“You young rascal, you!” cried the infuriated keeper. “This ain’t the first time by a long chalk you’ve been in my coverts, you and the other young scamp. There was another, sir,” turning to the Doctor, “I’ll take my dying oath on it – and I hopes you’ll flog ’em well, sir – and if ever I catches ’em there again I’ll have first in at ’em, that I will.”
“You bring another big dog. I kill him too,” jeered the descendant of savage warriors, now clean forgetful of the dread presence of the headmaster, and the condign punishment hanging over himself. “Kill you, praps, Hau!” he added with a hideous curl of the lips, which exhibited his splendid white teeth.
“See that, Doctor, sir?” cried the exasperated man. “The owdacious, abandoned young blackamoor! But his lordship’ll want that dawg paid for, or he’ll know the reason why. And ’e’s a dawg that’s taken prizes.”
Now Dr Bowen, for all his unbending severity, was a thorough Englishman, and, as such, an admirer of pluck and grit. Here these two boys had been attacked by a brute every whit as savage and formidable as a wolf, and that under circumstances and amid surroundings which, acting on the imagination, should render the affair more terror-striking – viz., at midnight, and in the heart of a wood; yet they had faced and fought the monster, hand to hand, and with very inadequate means of defence, and had overcome and slain it. In his heart of hearts the feat commanded his admiration, and moreover, he was devoutly thankful they had not sustained serious injuries, for the sake of his own responsibilities and the credit of the school. Yet none of these considerations would be suffered in any way to mitigate the penalties due to their very serious offence. He had further been secretly amused at the scene between Anthony and the keeper, though outwardly the grimness of his expression showed no trace of any relaxation.
“That will be a matter for future discussion,” he replied to the keeper. “Now I shall not require your further attendance. I have sufficient to go upon to put my hand on all concerned, and you can rest assured that they will be most severely punished.”
“I hopes you’ll flog ’em well, Doctor, sir,” was the keeper’s parting shot, “and especially that there young blackamoor rascal. Good-day, sir.”