Harry Heathcote of Gangoil | Page 8

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