The Philanderers | Page 2

of the hut changed to a vaporous twilight. Then of a sudden the notes of a bugle sounded the reveillé. Gorley raised himself upon his elbows and thrust forward his head. Outside he heard the rattle of arms, the chatter of voices, all the hum of a camp astir.
'Drake,' he whispered across to the figure standing against the door, 'there's enough gold dust to make two men rich, but you shall have it all if you let me go. You can--easily enough. It wouldn't be difficult for a man to slip away into the forest on the march back if you gave the nod to the sentries guarding him. All I ask for is a rifle and a belt of cartridges. I'd shift for myself then.'
He ended abruptly and crouched, listening to the orders shouted to the troops outside. The men were being ranged in their companies. Then the companies in succession were marched, halted, wheeled, and halted again. Gorley traced a plan of their evolutions with his fingers upon the floor of the hut. The companies were formed into a square.
'Drake,' he began again, and he crawled a little way across the hut; 'Drake, do you hear what I'm saying? There's a fortune for you, mind you, all of it; and I am the only one who can tell you where it is. I didn't trust those black fellows--no, no,' and he wagged his head with an attempt at an insinuating laugh. 'I had it all gathered together, and I buried it myself at night. You gave me a chance before with nothing to gain. Give me another; you have everything to gain this time. Drake, why don't you speak?'
'Because there's no bargain to be made between you and me,' replied Drake. 'If you tell me where the gold dust's hid, it will be given back to the people it belonged to, or rather to those of them you left alive. You can do some good that way by telling me, but you won't save your life.'
Steps were heard to approach the hut; there was a rap on the door.
'Well?' asked Drake.
Gorley raised himself from the floor.
'I am not making you rich and letting you kill me too,' he said; and then, 'Who cares? I'm ready.'
Drake opened the door and stepped out. Gorley swaggered after him. He stood for a moment on the threshold. Here and there a wisp of fog ringed a tree-trunk or smoked upon the ground. But for the rest, the clearing, littered with the charred debris of a native village, lay bare and desolate in a cold morning light.
'It looks a bit untidy,' said Gorley, with a laugh. Two of the troopers approached and laid their hands upon his shoulders. At first he made a movement to shake them off. Then he checked the impulse and stood quietly while they pinioned him. After they had finished he spat on the ground, cast a glance at the square and the rope dangling from a branch above it, and walked easily towards it. The square opened to receive him and closed up again.
On the march back two of the Englishmen sickened of ague and died. Six months later a third was killed in a punitive expedition. The fourth was drowned off Walfisch Bay before another year had elapsed.
CHAPTER I
Hugh Fielding, while speculating upon certain obscure episodes in the history of a life otherwise familiar to an applauding public, and at a loss to understand them, caught eagerly at a simile. Now Fielding came second to none in his scorn for the simile as an explanation, possibly because he was so well acquainted with its convenience. 'A fairy lamp' he would describe it, quite conscious of the irony in his method of description, 'effective as an ornament upon a table-cloth, but a poor light to eat your dinner by.'
Nevertheless Fielding hugged this particular simile, applying it as a sort of skeleton key to the problem of Stephen Drake's career.
He compared Drake's career, or at all events that portion of it which was closed, to the writing of a book. So many years represent the accumulation of material, a deliberate accumulation; at a certain date the book is begun with a settled design, finis being clearly foreseen from the first word of the preface. But once fairly started the book throws the writer on one side and takes the lead, drags him, panting and protesting, after it, flings him down by-ways out of sight of his main road, tumbles him into people he had no thought of meeting, and finally stops him dead, Heaven knows where--in front of a blank wall, most likely, at the end of a cul de sac. He may sit down then and cry if he likes, but to that point he has come in