PAGE 9
His Brother’s Keeper
by
Peter stepped back a pace and buttoned his coat and threw back his head.
“No need to take off my coat, Thomas,” he said, “I am ready.”
He said it very quietly, but there was a danger-signal–a red light in his eyes. He was quiet-voiced but hard-knuckled, as some had reason to know.
Thomas balked like a bull at a spread umbrella. Jack lurched past me as I stood in the parlour door, but I caught him and held him back; and almost at the same moment a wretched old boozer that we called “Awful Example,” who had been sitting huddled, a dirty bundle of rags and beard and hair, in the corner of the bar, struggled to his feet, staggered forward and faced Thomas, looking once again like something that might have been a man. He snatched a thick glass bottle from the counter and held it by the neck in his right hand.
“Stand back, Thomas!” he shouted. “Lay a hand–lay a finger on Peter M’Laughlan, and I’ll smash your head, as sure as there’s a God above us and I’m a ruined man!”
Peter took “Awful” gently by the shoulders and sat him down. “You keep quiet, old man,” he said; “nothing is going to happen.” Thomas went round behind the bar muttering something about it not being worth his while to, etc.
“You go and get the horses ready, Joe,” said Peter to me; “and you sit down, Jack, and keep quiet.”
“He can get the horses,” growled Thomas, from behind the bar, “but I’m damned if he gets the saddles. I’ve got them locked up, and I’ll something well keep them till Barnes is sober enough to pay me what he owes me.”
Just then a tall, good-looking chap, with dark-blue eyes and a long, light-coloured moustache, stepped into the bar from the crowd on the veranda.
“What’s all this, Thomas?” he asked.
“What’s that got to do with you, Gentleman Once?” shouted Thomas.
“I think it’s got something to do with me,” said Gentleman Once. “Now, look here, Thomas; you can do pretty well what you like with us poor devils, and you know it, but we draw the line at Peter M’Laughlan. If you really itch for the thrashing, you deserve you must tempt someone else to give it to you.”
“What the — are you talking about?” snorted Thomas. “You’re drunk or ratty!”
“What’s the trouble, M’Laughlan?” asked Gentleman Once, turning to Peter. “No trouble at all, Gentleman Once,” said Peter; “thank you all the same. I’ve managed worse men than our friend Thomas. Now, Thomas, don’t you think it would pay you best to hand over the key of the harness-room and have done with this nonsense? I’m a patient man–a very patient man–but I’ve not always been so, and the old blood comes up sometimes, you know.”
Thomas couldn’t stand this sort of language, because he couldn’t understand it. He threw the key on the bar and told us to clear out.
We were all three very quiet riding along the track that evening. Peter gave Jack a nip now and again from the flask, and before we turned in in camp he gave him what he called a soothing draught from a little medicine chest that he carried in his saddle-bag. Jack seemed to have got rid of his cough; he slept all night, and in the morning, after he’d drunk a pint of mutton-broth that Peter had made in one of the billies, he was all right–except that he was quiet and ashamed. I had never known him to be so quiet, and for such a length of time, since we were boys together. He had learned his own weakness; he’d lost all his cocksureness. I know now just exactly how he felt. He felt as if his sober year had been lost and he would have to live it all over again.