CHAPTER II.
THE LEGEND OF BARÒLIN.
"Ah!" Frank Hallett drew a long breath and stood in silent thought for a minute or more, Elsie watching him all the time saying nothing. The interest, half indignant, half admiring, and with a dash of the humorous in it, which Elsie's account of the sticking up of the Goondi coach and the robbery of the miser-millionaire had excited, faded suddenly, and gave way to a more personal and absorbing excitement. Moonlight's depredations were certainly a mystery and a shame to the district, and to a Government which was supposed to protect the property of peaceable colonists. But the Luya squatters had got into a way of looking upon Moonlight's misdeeds as not calling for very serious vengeance. He did not bail up their stations or steal their valuable cattle and horses, or frighten helpless women or respected inhabitants. There was, indeed, a certain odd chivalry and daredevilry of the Claude Duval kind in this masked miscreant with the soft voice and courteous manners, who flashed out on moonlight nights to stick up a gold escort and then disappeared into the bowels of the earth, as it seemed, or into the thickets of Baròlin Scrub. It was Moonlight's picturesqueness which appealed to the romantic element in more prosaic natures than that of Elsie Valliant. If truth were told, Frank Hallett was not inclined to judge too harshly a bandit who, granted that he robbed, robbed "on the square." No, it was not of Moonlight that he was thinking, but of the fact suddenly borne in upon him that Mr. Slaney's removal threw open the constituency of the Luya, and assured him of the opportunity for which he had been waiting, in order to begin his chosen career. In a flash he grasped the personal significance of Elsie Valliant's words. The member for Luya was dead. He himself might now be the member for Luya.
At the same moment a pang of remorse shot through him, remorse that he could so allow himself to speculate on the beneficial results to himself of a fellow-creature's death. But it was not in human nature that he could feel more than a passing pang. Mr. Slaney, though the chosen of the electorate, and the possessor of certain good qualities, as the Moonlight episode showed, was almost as unpopular in the district at large as the miser Duncan, whom everybody hated. Slaney had got into the Legislative Assembly on a reactionary wave, and through the vote of the Irish population on the Diggings. To Frank Hallett he had been privately and publicly obnoxious, and they had had more than one encounter, not wholly of a political nature. Slaney had kept a bush inn, and had made his money, people said, by doctoring the grog. He was a queer, cross-grained person, given to hard drinking, and with his blood in the condition in which a bite from a horsefly might prove a fatal poison. Everyone knew that he would not be returned a second time, and everyone said that Frank Hallett's election, should the seat become vacant, was a certainty. In a quick prophetic glance the young man saw himself in the position which he coveted—the leader of a party—a future premier of Leichardt's Land, a public personage whom the most ambitious girl in Australia might be content to own as her lover.
Then, with a thrill of triumph, he realized that Elsie too must have grasped this point in the situation, and he saw that she had worked her narrative up to it with a distinct appreciation of its dramatic importance. She had waited for him at the Crossing that she might be the first to tell him the news. From this, he must infer that she was interested in him—Frank Hallett—and not in the feats of Moonlight, and, as she phrased it, the "raising of the district." She was interested in the way in which he would take the information—in the bearing of the incident on his future fortunes with which, perhaps, she already identified herself. She had divined his secret ambition. Might it not well be that she had divined another ambition dearer and more secret still?
His breath came and went fast in the agitation of his fancied discovery and eager rushing hope. He had been looking away beyond the Crossing. Now he turned to her, and became aware that she was watching him. In an instant there was the shock of a recoil. The sweet indifference of her gaze, the mere friendly curiosity, the slight touch of feminine coquetry in her smile checked all his ardour, and made him draw back and pull himself together as though he had been hurt. He said very quietly:
"It is you who have grasped the dramatic points of the situation, Miss Valliant. I think you must have been giving Braile lessons."
She looked away from him and back again quickly.
"It interested me," she said. "I am interested in Moonlight. I should like very much to see him. But," she added with a little laugh, "even if he carried me off, as you suggested, I shouldn't get a sight of his face. They say no one has ever seen him without his mask."
"Perhaps be doesn't wear it in his hiding-place," said Frank. "I am sorry for Slaney," he went on in the same dulled tone. "And I am glad he kept his promise to Moonlight. I shall always think better of him for that. Yes—I am sorry—though" He paused.
"Well?" she said, "Though?"
"Though of course his death gives me a chance of standing for the Luya. Not that it matters so much. I should have got in for the northern district."
"But this will be much nicer," said she, demurely. "You won't have to go away on electioneering tours, and being our own especial member, we shall have a right to order you about, and to be interested in your general career."
"Shall you really be interested in my career?" he asked, bending a little toward her. She looked at him, letting her big brown eyes rest full on his for a moment or two.
"Why, yes, naturally, and as far as we are concerned, I assure you your duties as member of Parliament will be no sinecure. When Ina and Horace and I want anything from the Government—such as a mail twice a week or a railway to the Luya, or any little trifle of that sort, we shall expect you to make a fuss about it in the House. And then if the Governor does not give balls enough you will be responsible for not voting a sufficient entertaining allowance. And of course when you become a Cabinet Minister we shall want you to look after us at the public functions—find us seats in the special saloon Government carriage when there's a Show or a Railway Opening. And we shall want to be asked to all the Government picnics down the bay. Oh, and I must insist on a seat on the dais—and no one looking askance at me as though I had no right to be there—at the Mayor's ball. And I always did want to be a Minister's wife, so that the Usher of the Black Rod might take me to my place at the Opening of Parliament."
"One might suggest, perhaps, that an opportunity may present itself of securing these advantages," said Hallett grimly.
"How?"
"Why" Hallett reddened and stammered, abashed by her clear gaze. "It would not be so difficult to marry a Minister, would it?"
"Wouldn't it! But there doesn't happen at present to be an unmarried member of the Executive. Still, as you suggest, one may live in hope. There will be new politicians coming on, and I may have a chance yet. I will wait for a change of Ministry. Then your party will be in—and you may be in too."
Her laugh, which was innocent and frank as that of a child, robbed her speech of its audacious coquetry. Elsie said things which no other girl could have said without incurring the charge of being unmaidenly. No one would ever have called Elsie unmaidenly, though they might have called her, and with a good show of reason, an unprincipled flirt, and in spite of her freedom of manner no man would have ventured upon an impertinence towards this young lady, who knew very well upon occasion how to maintain her dignity.
"You are laughing at me," exclaimed Frank Hallett in a hurt tone. "You don't think it is in me to become a leader. Well, we shall see. Yes, Miss Valliant, that's my ambition and my intention. I mean to be a political leader, and I think that if a man has pluck and perseverance and a certain amount of brains, as well as a certain amount of money to make him independent of place, he is bound to get to the front and to make a position that he wouldn't be ashamed to offer to a woman he cared for." The young man's voice shook. "I think that before very long I shall be on the Ministerial bench, or at any rate in the front rank of the Opposition, and when that day comes I shall ask you for your congratulations. "
"And no one will give them with a more sincere heart than I," said Elsie gravely. "And you didn't understand me, Mr. Hallett. I never meant to laugh at you, or to doubt you. Oh, I know well enough that you are considered a coming man. Mamma and Ina and Horace and heaps of other people have told me that of you."
She stopped and blushed. She knew, though Frank did not, why she in particular had had all Frank's advantageous prospects impressed upon her. Oh, of course he would be a very good match for a penniless Leichardt's Town belle, and her mother knew it, and Lord Horace, and Ina, and all the rest of their world knew it too.
"Thank you for saying that, Elsie! If you only knew" the young man began passionately. He came a step nearer her, but Elsie moved and put out her hand in a half laughing, half rebuking manner.
"But I don't know, and perhaps I don't want to know—there, never mind. ... I want you to tell me something"
"Tell you—what?"
"Oh, it's nothing—only"
"Tell me," she went on with the slightest confidential movement. "I'm so interested in Moonlight. Do you think it is true—what they say—that he has some secret hiding-place under Mount Luya?"
"How can I know, and why should I care!" exclaimed Hallett exasperated.
"I should have thought you would care, that you might have some idea if there really is such a hiding-place, for you are always about on the run, and they say no one knows the Upper Luya as well as you do."
"There might be any sort of cave or hiding-place up in the gorges by Bardlin Scrub. Cattle don't go there—except the regular scrubbers that it is no use trying to get at. They used to hunt there for gold. One of these prospecting chaps would have been more likely to come across it, or the Blacks"
"Oh, but there's a Black's legend," said Elsie eagerly.
"If you are going to make a legend out of a Black's tale about the Bunyip or Debil-debil!" he said contemptuously.
"It is a legend, and quite a respectable one. Yoolaman Tommy—King Tommy you know—told me. He says that close to Baròlin Waterfall at the back there is another smaller waterfall, and beside it a huge black rock which is shaped like a man's head with long grey moss growing upon it, so that it looks, as if it were a very old black man with grey hair and a beard. Have you ever seen it?"
"No, Baròlin Waterfall is a cul-de-sac. The water is supposed to come from the lake on the top of the mountain and the precipice cuts the mountain. They say the lake is the crater of an extinct volcano."
"Let us make a picnic there sometime and try to find old Baròlin—the Old Man of the Mountain. Do."
"You couldn't do it. I have never got to the waterfall myself, and I'm a pretty good rider and Pioneer as safe a horse in rough country as you'd find on the Luya."
Frank Hallett patted the big powerful bay who turned from rubbing his cheek against the cedar-tree, as if he knew that he was being talked about.
"We might ride as far as we could and walk the rest of the way," said Elsie.
"Walk five miles over the Luya rocks and through Baròlin Scrub! There wouldn't be much left of you, Miss Valliant."
"I am determined that somehow or other I will see Baròlin," said Elsie, with the wilfulness of a spoilt child. "Perhaps you don't know why the scrub and the waterfall are called Baròlin?"
"Did King Tommy tell you?"
"King Tommy told me that the white-haired old man was once a great chief who lived in Mount Luya and was a mighty man of war, against whom none of the other chiefs could stand. He got so powerful that he offended the great spirit Yoolatanah, and Yoolatanah turned him into a rock and shut him up behind the waterfall, which was called after him Baròlin. The Blacks say that he sleeps, and only wakes when someone goes near the fall. Then he seizes them, and they are never seen or heard of again. So the Blacks will not go near Baròlin or enter the scrub even at bunya time."
"I thought it was the Bunyip," said Hallett laughing. "I know none of the Blacks will go near Baròlin. They always say 'Debil debil sit down there,' and as there are any amount of bunyas in the scrub and none to speak of anywhere else, this superstition must be a pretty powerful one."
At that moment an Alpine call sounded from the other side of the creek. Elsie got up. "That's Horace. Now we shall hear something more about Moonlight."
"Why are you so interested in Moonlight?" asked Hallett jealously.
"I have told you. Because he is a hero. Horace—Horace; have they caught Moonlight?"