Harry Heathcote of Gangoil | Page 8

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