Haviland's Chum

Not ineffectually either, but the sheer weight of the heavy muscular brute had hurled him flat.

It had all been done with a rapidity that was almost lightning-like. Haviland, witnessing it, felt all in a maze for a moment, realising that he was unarmed – for the air-gun of course would be about as effective against such an adversary as this as the common or school pea-shooter. Yet he bethought him of a weapon more useful still, and without hesitation he advanced upon the struggling pair, and his right fist was armed with a knuckle-duster of the most formidable kind, each knuckle constituting a sharp point – a terrible implement, one moderately strong blow of which could kill a man easily.

The Zulu boy lay on the sward beneath the great dog – his one object being to shield his throat. Fortunately he had previously rolled his jacket round his left arm, and this had received the powerful jaws, which hung on, with a dreadful worrying snarl – while, with his right, he was stabbing furiously at the creature’s body, but somehow without much effect. Haviland saw his chance – and the good moonlight befriended him. With the utmost coolness and ready promptitude he selected his opportunity – letting out with all the force of his iron-bound right hand. “Woof!” It caught the snarling, gnashing monster full and square on the side of the head, and without waiting to see the result he followed it up with another. One quick gasp, and the great brute rolled off, lying on its side, hardly moving – stunned, if not dead. But the Zulu boy would leave nothing to chance. Springing to his feet he drove his sharp weapon through and through the body of the dog. There was no doubt about it then. The animal lay still – the dark pool of its blood widening ever in the moonlight.

“Are you hurt, Cetchy? D’you hear – are you hurt?” gasped Haviland, panting with the effort and excitement of his supreme exertion.

“Hurt? No. He bite me once. Ha! I, Mpukuza! I can kill! Ha!”

Thus spoke the savage – the descendant of a line of fighting savages, standing there, grasping his savage weapon, surveying the dead and bleeding body of his formidable enemy, not in his own native wilds, but in the peaceful glade of an English game preserve.

“Well, come along then, and quick. There’s sure to be a keeper not far off.”

Quickly they took their way to the edge of the wood. They were over the fence and away, but hardly had they gone some fifty yards when a voice behind them shouted: —

“Hi! Stop there! Stop, do ’ee ’ear? I’ll shoot ’ee if ’ee don’t.” And immediately the bang of a discharged gun crashed out upon the night, Haviland laughed.

“It’s all right, Cetchy. He daren’t fire at us, for his life. It’s bluff. Come along.”

And away they raced, but a glance over their shoulder showed them that the keeper was giving chase.

That in itself didn’t afflict them much, but by and by when they had covered several long fields, they observed with concern that he was still on their heels. As a rule, a keeper was easy to distance, but this one seemed lightly built and in excellent training. Even a dark lane down which they dived, hoping to double on him, proved of no avail; rather did it serve to make matters worse, for the keeper, knowing where they were bound to come out, had wasted neither time nor energy, but made straight for that point: a manoeuvre which brought him alarmingly close when he did emerge. And at all hazards he must not be suffered to head them off from their objective.

“Now, then – ’ee’d better stop, I tell ’ee!” he shouted, reckoning them done up. But the fugitives knew better than to waste wind, if he did not. They simply raced on, offering no reply. And by degrees their superior wind and training told, the more so that the race was a long one. They saw they were shaking their pursuer off, and it was all important they should do this, because it would never do for them to let him run them all the way back to the school. They might as well surrender at once as that.

“My clothes all over blood!” said Anthony at last, when they were safe beyond pursuit. “What I do?”

Haviland examined him critically in the moonlight.

“So they are,” he said. “Well, Cetchy, you must peel them off and stow them away in the ditch, and go in without them. You can think you’re back in Zululand again.”

“So I can. Yes,” answered the other, showing his white rows of splendid teeth.

Half an hour later, two wearied perspiring figures shinned up the cord under the angle of the chapel wall at Saint Kirwin’s, and so ended another night of excitement and adventure – as they thought.

Chapter Fourteen.

The Bolt Falls

“I say, you fellows, there’s no end of a row on,” pronounced Wood major, joining a group of others.

“No! Is there? What about? Who’s in it?” were the eager inquiries which hailed the good news. For a row at Saint Kirwin’s was, in its generation, akin to the Coliseum sports in theirs, inasmuch as it afforded pleasurable excitement to the multitude. To the small minority directly implicated it afforded excitement too, but the reverse of pleasurable. This particular group, however, being presumably clear of conscience, hailed the news with unfeigned satisfaction.

“Why, the small room at the end of Williams’s dormitory are all in it, I believe,” explained Wood major. “Cetchy’s been caught getting out late at night.”

“What, Cetchy? Haviland’s chum?”

“Rather. We’re going to see something, I can tell you.”

“Then Haviland’s in it too,” said some one else.

“I expect so. I believe the whole room’s in it.”

“A case of Cetchy caught,” remarked a puffy-faced fellow who set up for being a wag.

“Oh, shut up, Cross. We don’t want Clay’s second-hand wheezes,” was all the appreciation he met with. “Why we’ve yelped at that in all its variations till I believe we’d sooner do his impos. than get off it by putting him in a good humour over that ‘honk’ any more. Go on, Wood. What have you heard about it?”

“Why, Smithson minor told me. He’s rather a chum of Cetchy’s, you know. The first he knew of it was seeing Cetchy come out of Nick’s study looking precious puffy about the chops. Nick had been socking him all over the shop, he told Smithson; and then Nick came out himself, and maybe Smithson didn’t slink off. Oh, no.”

“Well, we shan’t hear anything about it till to-morrow morning,” said Cross. “Sure to come on at morning prep. Great Scott, but there’ll be some swishing on!”

“Haviland won’t take it, I expect.”

“He’ll be jolly well expelled then.”

“He won’t care. I know he won’t take a swishing. I hated him when he was a prefect, but now I hope he’ll score off Nick.”

“P’raps he’s not in it.”

“Not in it? Why, the whole room’s in it.”

And so the discussion ran on; the while, however, the news had somehow leaked out, and the presage of a row – and a very big row at that – hung over the school like a thundercloud.

It will be necessary to go back.

For a day or two after the exploit chronicled in the last chapter our two midnight marauders plumed themselves on their feat of arms, and delighted to meet and fight their battle over again in a secluded corner of the playing fields, the only thorn in the rose being that they had lost the air-gun, abandoned during the precipitancy of their flight, and, of course, the pheasant. This, however, they decided was of small account compared with such a glorious experience as had been theirs, and they positively glowed over the recollection of their adventure. But they were a little premature in their elation. Retribution was at hand, and this is how the bolt fell.

To a group of boys strolling along a field-path not far from the school it was not strange that they should meet a keeper. What was strange to them was the gun in the hand of that worthy.

“That’s a rum sort of gun you’ve got there,” said one of them. “I say, let’s have a look at it.”

The keeper merely shook his head. Then an idea seemed to strike him, and he stopped.

“Yes, it be a rum gun, bean’t it, young genelmen?” he said, extending it to them, but not loosing his hold of it. “That be one o’ they new-fangled air-guns. They don’t make no bang when they goes off.”

The group gathered round interested. The keeper explained the working of the weapon, and from that got to talking on other matters – in fact, was extraordinarily chatty and affable, which was remarkable, because between gamekeepers and the Saint Kirwin’s boys a state of natural hostility existed.

“I’ve heard tell,” he went on at last, “that there’s a black African young genelman up at the school there. If that’s so, I’d like to make so bold as to see he. I ’ad a brother servin’ in the wars again they Africans over yonder, and ’e told me a lot about ’em. Yes, I’d like to see he.”

Now, under ordinary circumstances, this request would have caused them, in their own phraseology, to “smell a rat.” Perhaps in this case it had that effect all the same; but then, as ill-luck would have it, the group the keeper had struck in this instance happened to be Jarnley and his gang. Here was a chance to pay off old scores. Here was a noble opportunity for revenge, and it would in all probability comprehend Haviland too. Jarnley, Perkins, and Co. were simply jubilant.

“There’s no difficulty about that, keeper,” said the former, genially. “You go to the gate of the west field and ask any fellow to point you out Cetchy. I expect he’ll be there now. Cetchy – mind, that’s the name.”

“I’ll remember, sir, and thankee kindly. Mornin’, young genelmen.”

Three-quarters of an hour later our friend Anthony, having, in obedience to an urgent summons, hastened, though not without misgivings, to present himself in the Doctor’s study, found himself confronted by a tall red-whiskered keeper, while on the table, exposed on a sheet of newspaper, lay his lost air-gun and the corpse of a fine cock-pheasant. Then he knew that the game was up.

“Yes, sir. That be he, right enough,” said the keeper. “I saw him several times as I was a chevyin’ of him. There was a good moon, and I’d swear to him anywhere, sir. There was another with him, sir, a tall young chap, but I never got a chance of seeing his face. But this one, I can swear to he.”

“Very well,” said the Doctor. “You had better go down to the porter’s lodge, and wait there in case I should require to see you again.”

The keeper saluted and retired.

“And now,” went on the Doctor, in his most awe-inspiring tone, “what have you got to say? On the night of Tuesday, you and another – with whom I shall presently deal – were found by the man who has just gone out in one of Lord Hebron’s coverts. That pheasant lying there was killed by you with that air-gun. Now, who was with you?”

“I don’t know nothin’ about it, sir.”

“What?” thundered the Doctor, rising from his seat; and the next moment Anthony received a terrific box on the ear which sent him staggering against the table, followed up by another on the other side, the force of which wellnigh restored him to his original equilibrium. “So you would add lying to your other misconduct, would you? Now, answer my question. Who was with you?”

But the question was addressed seemingly to empty air. The Zulu boy, thinking to detect another hostile move, had incontinently dived under the table.

Here was a situation wholly outside the Doctor’s experience. He was a violent-tempered man when roused, especially when his dignity had sustained, as he thought, any slight, but he had too much sense of that dignity to embark actively in the chase of a boy who had got under the table of his own study. Not for a moment, however, was he nonplussed.

“Come out and stand where you were before,” he said, “and that at once, or I shall send for two prefects to drag you out, and shall cane you now as I have never caned a boy before, and that in addition to whatever punishment I shall decide to inflict upon you for your other offence. Do you hear?”

Anthony did hear, and being, like most of his race, of a practical turn of mind, had rapidly decided that it was better to be thrashed once than twice; wherefore he emerged from under the table, and stood upright as before, but with a quick and watchful eye, ready to dodge any further hostile move on the part of the Doctor.

The latter, for his part, had had time to think; and in the result it occurred to him that it was scarcely fair to judge this raw young savage, for he was hardly more, with the same severity as the ordinary boy. So he would refrain from further violent measures for the present.

“Who was with you?” he repeated remorselessly, and in a tone which in all his experience he had never known any boy able to hold out against. But he reckoned without the staunch, inherent Zulu loyalty.

For now Anthony shifted his ground. No power on earth would have induced him to give his accomplice away – they might flog him to death first. But by confessing his own criminality he might save Haviland.

“No one with me, sir. I all alone,” he answered volubly. “That man tell big lie. Or praps he seen a ghost. Ha!”

The Doctor looked at him with compressed lips. Then he rang the bell, and in the result, within a minute or two, the keeper re-appeared.

“Now Anthony,” said the Doctor, “repeat to this man what you have just told me.” Anthony did.

“Why you tell one big lie? Ha! You saw me, yes, yes. No one with me. I alone. How you see other when other not there?”

“Come. That’s a good ’un,” said the man, half amused, half angry. “Why I see he as plain as I see you.”

“See he? Ha! You see a ghost, praps? You ever see a ghost in Hangman’s Wood, hey?” and rolling his eyes so that they seemed to protrude from his head, and lolling his tongue out, the Zulu boy stared into the face of the dazed keeper, uttering the while the same cavernous groan, which had sent that worthy fleeing from the haunted wood as though the demon were at his heels.

“Good Lord!” was all the keeper could ejaculate, staring with mouth and eyes wide open. Then, realising what a fool they had made of him, he grew furious.

“You see ghost, yes? Praps Hangman’s ghost, hey?” jeered the boy.

“You young rascal, you!” cried the infuriated keeper. “This ain’t the first time by a long chalk you’ve been in my coverts, you and the other young scamp. There was another, sir,” turning to the Doctor, “I’ll take my dying oath on it – and I hopes you’ll flog ’em well, sir – and if ever I catches ’em there again I’ll have first in at ’em, that I will.”

“You bring another big dog. I kill him too,” jeered the descendant of savage warriors, now clean forgetful of the dread presence of the headmaster, and the condign punishment hanging over himself. “Kill you, praps, Hau!” he added with a hideous curl of the lips, which exhibited his splendid white teeth.

“See that, Doctor, sir?” cried the exasperated man. “The owdacious, abandoned young blackamoor! But his lordship’ll want that dawg paid for, or he’ll know the reason why. And ’e’s a dawg that’s taken prizes.”

Now Dr Bowen, for all his unbending severity, was a thorough Englishman, and, as such, an admirer of pluck and grit. Here these two boys had been attacked by a brute every whit as savage and formidable as a wolf, and that under circumstances and amid surroundings which, acting on the imagination, should render the affair more terror-striking – viz., at midnight, and in the heart of a wood; yet they had faced and fought the monster, hand to hand, and with very inadequate means of defence, and had overcome and slain it. In his heart of hearts the feat commanded his admiration, and moreover, he was devoutly thankful they had not sustained serious injuries, for the sake of his own responsibilities and the credit of the school. Yet none of these considerations would be suffered in any way to mitigate the penalties due to their very serious offence. He had further been secretly amused at the scene between Anthony and the keeper, though outwardly the grimness of his expression showed no trace of any relaxation.

“That will be a matter for future discussion,” he replied to the keeper. “Now I shall not require your further attendance. I have sufficient to go upon to put my hand on all concerned, and you can rest assured that they will be most severely punished.”

“I hopes you’ll flog ’em well, Doctor, sir,” was the keeper’s parting shot, “and especially that there young blackamoor rascal. Good-day, sir.”

Chapter Fifteen.

Sentence

The big room was full. Every form room, always occupied at morning preparation, was emptied of its contents, for all had been convened, by special proclamation, to the large schoolroom, now to become, for the time being, a species of hall of justice. So, even as at prayer time, arranged in the rows of lockers according to dormitories, the whole three hundred and fifty or so of boys chattered in a continuous and undertoned buzz – restrained, but not silenced, by the prefectorial calls:

“Quiet there!”

“You, Jones. I’ve spoken to you before already.”

“Brown, come to me afterwards in the fourth form room.”

“Now, then, that bottom row. Stop that shoving about! D’you hear?”

And so on.

Yes, the excitement was intense. There had not been such a row on, said some one, since that in which Thurston’s gang had been caught smoking. They had set up a kind of divan in a dry ditch, which, being unexpectedly raided, they, and their pipes and tobacco, had been seized in close conjunction the one with the other – and Thurston and five other big fellows had been flogged. Or, said others, since a far worse case of another kind, wherein some fifteen fellows of all ages had been swished. And now all sorts of wild rumours began to go round. All the fellows in the small room at the end of Williams’s dormitory were going to be swished – so extensive was the order sent to the gardener for the manufacture of birch rods, declared some, who affected to be in the know. But the centre light of all the excitement and conjecture was Haviland. He was not a prefect now, and therefore could, constitutionally, be swished. But – would he take it? That was the point – would he take it? Some opined that he would not – others that he would have to.

“Silence! Ss-silence there!” roared the prefects, with a force and unanimity that hushed the room in a minute. For it meant that the Doctor was coming in.

You might have heard a pin drop in that hitherto buzzing assemblage as the Headmaster ascended to the big desk in the middle and signed for the door to be shut. Then it was seen that there stood before him of culprits exactly one dozen, of whom all but two were in varying stages of funk.

The Doctor, you see, acting upon his usual thorough and whole-hearted method, had wasted no time in elaborate investigations. He had simply sent for Haviland and taxed him with what was charged, and Haviland, disdaining to prevaricate or make excuses, had owned his whole share in the alleged misdoing, and rather more, for he had endeavoured to shield Anthony by declaring that the Zulu boy had been entirely influenced by him; nor would it have helped him any way to have denied the matter, for the Doctor meanwhile had ordered the search of every box in the dormitory, and there in Haviland’s box was the coil of cord, and in that of Anthony the blood-stained weapon. Further, with the same thoroughness, he had chosen to consider the whole room as in a degree implicated.

Now, confronting the whole school, speaking in his most awe-inspiring tones, the Doctor commenced his harangue. He dwelt on the complaints that had been coming in for some time past of serious depredations in the game preserves of the neighbouring landowners, and how such were entirely detrimental to the credit of the school, as also to its interests in another way, for the time had now arrived when it had become a grave question whether the reasonable liberty which had always been its privilege should not be withdrawn. Here a stir of sensation went through the listeners, who began to think that this rare excitement, even to those not the most active participants in it, had its unpleasant side.

Fortunately, though protracted, detection had overtaken the offenders, he declared – the principal offenders – as sooner or later it invariably and surely did, let them be certain of that, and, with detection, chastisement immediate and condign.

“It should be a matter of shame and grief to all of us,” he went on, “that one who for so long has held a position of responsibility and trust should be the ringleader in these occasions of disorder and grave offence – leading astray not only his younger schoolfellows, but also one whom the humane and civilising spirit of a noble and self-sacrificing organisation has rescued from a life of barbarism and degradation, and sent here, where every opportunity is placed in his way to become a credit to that organisation, and a shining light in the noble endeavours to rescue from heathenism his barbarous fellow countrymen. I refer to Anthony, upon whom, I trust, the punishment I am about to inflict will act as a salutary warning and prove the turning-point in his school life. The other boys in the room I hold in a lesser degree to be participants in the grave scandal – I will not say breach of rules, because obviously such an offence as to get outside the school walls surreptitiously at night is one that no rule need be definitely formulated to cover.”

Here two or three of the smaller boys implicated began to snivel. The whole lot would be swished, of course, they thought, and, indeed, such was the opinion of the whole school. It was precious hard lines, for they had no more hand in the affair than anybody else in the room; but such was the Doctor’s way.

“As for you, Haviland,” he continued, “it is simply lamentable how you have time after time betrayed your trust and shirked your responsibilities – in short, gone from bad to worse. I had hoped you would have taken warning when I was obliged to suspend you from your office, and have behaved in such wise as to justify me in shortly reinstating you; but, so far from this, you seem to have become utterly reckless and abandoned. You are nearly grown up now, and should be setting an example; but, instead of that, you are using the influence which your age and strength give you in the eyes of your schoolfellows, to lead your juniors into mischief and wrong-doing. It is clear, therefore, that there is no further place for you among us. Yet I am reluctant, very reluctant, to proceed to such an extreme measure as your public expulsion – ”

Now the excitement had reached its height. Haviland was going to be swished, not expelled, decided the spectators, but – would he take it? Haviland standing there, his lips compressed, a set frown on his brow, was of the same opinion, except that he himself, and he only, held the answer to the question. He would not take it – no, decidedly not. They might expel him and welcome, he did not care, he was past caring; but submit to the indignity of a flogging at his age he would not.

“Therefore,” continued the Doctor, “I shall take time to consider so grave and painful a matter; and, meanwhile, you will be withdrawn from all intercourse or contact with the rest of the school. Anthony I shall, of course, soundly flog. I shall also flog Smithson minor and Mcmurdo; and, as for the other boys in the dormitory, on this occasion I shall confine myself to severely warning them.”

There was a sort of audible sensation among the listeners, but it was nothing to what followed. For now Haviland lifted up his voice: —

“Please, sir, Smithson and Mcmurdo had no more to do with it than the man in the moon.”

The Doctor frowned as he gazed sternly at the speaker.

“Keep silence,” he said, in a curt tone. Haviland obeyed. He had made his protest in the name of fair play. He was not concerned to take any further risks. But those who saw – those who heard – was ever such a thing witnessed before at Saint Kirwin’s? The Doctor – the awful, the dreaded Doctor – expostulated with, and that before the whole school! Why did not the very heavens fall?

The public floggings at Saint Kirwin’s were public in the sense that they could be heard by all but seen by none, for they took place in a small room adjoining the big schoolroom, and the audience were able to estimate how each of the victims “took it.” In the present instance, Smithson and Mcmurdo got off with a comparatively slight infliction, and, beyond a smothered yelp or two, “took it” well. But when it came to Anthony’s turn, they wondered if it was going on for ever. He received, in fact, a most relentless swishing, but for all the sound that escaped him – whether of cry or groan – he might just as well not be undergoing chastisement at all. The school was lost in admiration of his pluck and endurance; and, afterwards, when he emerged, showing no sign of pain, but scowling savagely, and muttering in his own tongue – the word having been given to dismiss – he broke forth: —