The Philanderers | Page 2

on the instant, and for a while there was
silence between the pair. A gray beam of light shot through a chink
between the logs, and then another and another until the darkness 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