Grit Lawless Part 1

Grit Lawless.

by F.E. Mills Young.

CHAPTER ONE.

"This job has grown. There has got to be a fourth in it, and the fourth must be a man.--You understand?"

The speaker, who was known as the Colonel, took the cigar he was smoking from his mouth the better to emphasise his words, and looked gravely into the serious faces of his audience. It comprised a man of middle-age, bearded, secretive, calculating; and one other. The other was little more than a boy. By profession he was a mining engineer, by disposition a scamp, ready to plunge into any undertaking that promised adventure. The boy's head was bandaged where recently it had been broken for him, and he sat very quiet and silent, which was unusual; as the Colonel was wont to remark, he frequently talked too much. But he was not proud of his broken head and its consequences, so he held his peace.

"Do either of you know of a man likely to suit? He must be possessed of a good nerve and a none too tender conscience. He'll have to put himself outside the law--the business is outside the law. And he must be a man we can trust."

The Colonel looked sharply from one to the other of his listeners, but neither answered. The young engineer was sulkily examining his finger-nails, displaying the same air of detachment that he had shown throughout. He had received so severe a reprimand over the affair of his broken head that he had felt strongly tempted to sever his connection with the Colonel. Only that spirit of adventure that had led him into it, and an unnatural greed of gain, prevented him from cutting the concern.

"I want a man with grit," the Colonel said slowly. "There must be plenty such men in Africa, if I could only put my hand on one."

As he paused the older man looked up suddenly. Something in the Colonel's speech had jerked into his mind a name he had almost forgotten.

"I knew a man once," he said, and hesitated because he was not quite sure whether his knowledge of the man justified a recommendation. The acquaintance had been of the slightest; his opinion of his character was based more upon hearsay than deduction, but he believed it was not at fault.

"Well?"

The Colonel threw in the interjection with sharp impatience, and the other added briefly:

"He might not be sufficiently discreet. I know little of him... I did him a service once."

"What are his qualifications for this job?" the Colonel asked, pa.s.sing over the half-implied doubt as to discretion. "Let us get hold of facts; we can deal with surmises later."

"Your saying you wanted a man with grit brought him to my mind,--that's what the fellows called him--Grit. And, upon my word! though I suppose I've heard his real name, I can remember him by no other. n.o.body ever called him anything else. He was a lean chap, with an ugly scar down one side of his face. I met him first up in Rhodesia. He was mining then. But I saw him recently in Cape Town."

"How did he earn the name of Grit?" the Colonel inquired, showing an increasing interest; and the boy left off biting his nails and looked up with a half-resentful scowl, as if jealous of the unknown man's qualifications for a mission he knew his chief would not entrust to him.

"I don't know whether he earned it on a particular occasion, or if it was only a general recognition of the chap's pluck. They said of him at the mines that he was a man who did not know fear."

"Pshaw?" The Colonel struck the arm of his chair impatiently with his open palm, and jerked one knee over the other. "I thought you had found me my man," he said irritably, "a man with coolness and nerve. I don't want any braggart with a school-boy hero reputation. Tell me something he has done beside boast of his courage."

The other man smiled. He rolled a cigarette and stuck it between his teeth. Then he struck a match and lighted it.

"I can't tell you much," he said. "I know little of him, but I never heard him boast. He was a reserved fellow with a sort of hard recklessness of manner that gave one the impression that life hadn't used him well. I remember one night, some fellows, in ill.u.s.tration of his almost incredible lack of any sense of fear, telling a yarn of how during one of the punitive expeditions after some native rising--he was in the Cape Police then, or some force, I don't remember the details rightly--several of the boys surrounded a hut in which six of the rebellious ringleaders were hiding. They wanted to take the blacks alive and not lose any of their own men over the business. Grit originated a plan, which they carried out, very successfully too, foolhardy though the undertaking seemed. He climbed on a comrade's shoulders, dropped through a hole in the gra.s.s roof right into the midst of them, and he kept those six armed n.i.g.g.e.rs at bay, fighting with a naked sword and his back against the mud wall. And when the other chaps rushed in they declare he was smiling quietly and seemed to be enjoying himself. He never bragged about it, and he never turned a hair. He simply hadn't felt fear."

"Then there was no particular credit due to him."

"Exactly. Nevertheless, it proves the possession of nerve."

"Oh, dash it all!" the boy, who was called Hayhurst, exclaimed suddenly.

"Give the fellow his deserts. It was a d.a.m.ned plucky thing to do."

The Colonel smiled drily.

"It's the kind of hare-brained escapade that appeals to youth."

"Call it hare-brained, if you like. How would you have got at them, sir?" Hayhurst asked brusquely, resenting the other's speech.

"In exactly the same manner, if I could have found anyone fool enough to volunteer."

He pitched the end of his cigar out through the open window and sat up straighter.

"Do you think you could find your man, Simmonds?" he asked. "And if you found him could you persuade him to come and see me here? It would be safer than my going to him. He had better come at night so as to avoid detection. We don't want him to be spotted as in with us at all. If he isn't marked he stands a better chance of success."

"I can find him, right enough," the other answered.

"Then do so with as little delay as possible. You needn't mention what the job is he will be wanted for, but let him know that however valuable his time is it will be paid for well, and give him thoroughly to understand the necessity for secrecy."

The man addressed as Simmonds nodded without speaking; and the boy, muttering something about a headache, got up, and with a brief good-night pa.s.sed out through the French window, and swinging himself off the stoep was swallowed immediately in the heavy blackness without.

The two men smoked in silence while they listened to the crunching of his footsteps on the gravel path, until the sound died away in the distance and only the stirring of the trees as the fitful wind swept through their branches broke the silence of the night. Then Simmonds looked round sharply at the man who sat near the opening, his strong brows drawn together in a frown of balked annoyance, his eyes still turned in the direction whence Hayhurst had disappeared.

"What on earth induced you to enlist that young fool?" he asked.

The heavy brows contracted yet more fiercely as their owner answered, without moving his position:

"Not such a fool as you fancy. And his youth is--or rather, was--an advantage; it put others off their guard. He was smart enough in getting on to the right trail."

"And then bungled the business, and gave away the whole show."

"Many an older man," the Colonel answered tersely, "has been outwitted by a woman."

He mixed himself a whisky and soda, and talked of other matters until, close upon midnight, Simmonds took his leave.

"Better send your man to me, not bring him," the Colonel said as he was departing,--"safer. And be careful not to mention what I am likely to want of him. I prefer to judge a man for myself before engaging his services."

Then he wished his companion good-night, and held a lamp for him to light him to the gate.

A few nights later the man whom other men called Grit, the man who was credited with being entirely devoid of fear, presented himself at the bungalow that the Colonel had rented furnished during the owner's temporary absence in England. The bungalow was on the outskirts of Cape Town, and the Colonel had chosen it for its proximity to the city and its lonely situation. It stood back from the road in an ill-kept, overgrown garden that was a wilderness of trees and vine-tangled shrubs and palms. Tall straggling gum trees, with their bare untidy trunks and ill-shaped limbs, towered above the one-storied building and shaded the Dutch stoep built on to the front of the house. Oleanders, pink and white, grew to an immense height, lending their fragrance to the heavily perfumed air, rich with the mingled scents of nicotine and gardenia, and the strong cloying sweetness of the orange tree, the dark green of its foliage starred with the matchless beauty of its blossoms. Date and other palms, the p.r.i.c.kly cactus and aloe, grew in a wild confusion; and enclosing the whole, undipped, neglected, yet glorious in their disorder, were tall hedges of the blue plumbago, whose pale flowers swept the ground.

The Colonel was seated on the stoep when his visitor arrived. He was alone, and thinking about the man though he was not expecting him. The stranger advanced rapidly, with a trained regular step that caught the listener's attention. Instinctively he sat up straighter, and peered forward into the darkness, curious to behold who it was who approached along the winding path from the gate. When the new-comer stepped into the patch of light below the stoep he recognised him for the man Simmonds had spoken of by the scar on the left side of his face.

He mounted the steps and came on to the stoep, a tall spare man with muscles of iron, the set of whose shoulders suggested, as his footstep had, a military training. He was fair, with a long lightish moustache, a face that was tanned almost copper-coloured, and a pair of dark grey eyes. The eyes were the keenest and the most sombre the Colonel ever remembered to have seen. They were extraordinarily expressive, and yet bafflingly reticent. A woman would have called them beautiful. They conveyed so much of s.e.x, pride, power, of cool aloofness, and at the same time of an almost startling concentration, that their gaze was somewhat disconcerting. The Colonel when he encountered them fully for the first time was conscious of their influence; for quite ten seconds he looked steadily into their inscrutable depths without speaking. Then he tilted the shade of the reading lamp at his elbow the better to see his man, and, perfectly understanding the reason of his action, the stranger advanced a few paces and stood where the light fell more directly on his face.

"I don't know whether Simmonds prepared you for my visit," he said; "but I am here in accordance with your wish."

"Thank you. I am obliged to you for your prompt response."

The Colonel had risen. He led the way into the house through the open window at his back, and carefully closed the window behind his visitor.

"I am fond of trees," he remarked, "but I distrust them. I prefer to hold this interview between walls. We have no occasion to fear the keyholes, for there is not a soul besides ourselves beneath this roof."

He turned up the lamp as he spoke, and again peered closely at the stranger. By the brighter light in the room he observed the disfiguring scar more clearly. It ran a deep seam slantwise down the lower half of the face. At some time or other a bayonet had slashed the man's cheek open and laid the jawbone bare.