"The charge was read out -- I forget how it went -- it sounded like a long hymn being given out. Jack pleaded guilty.
Then he straightened up for the first time and looked round the court, with a calm, disinterested look -- as if we were all strangers and he was noting the size of the meeting. And -- it's a funny world, ain't it? -- everyone of us shifted or dropped his eyes, just as if we were the felons and Jack the judge. Everyone except the Doctor; he looked at Jack and Jack looked at him. Then the Doctor smiled -- I can't describe it -- and Drew smiled back. It struck me afterwards that I should have been in that smile. Then the Doctor did what looked like a strange thing -- stood like a soldier with his hands to Attention. I'd noticed that, whenever he'd made up his mind to do a thing, he dropped his hands to his sides: it was a sign that he couldn't be moved.
Now he slowly lifted his hand to his forehead, palm out, saluted the prisoner, turned on his heel, and marched from the court-room. `He's boozin' again,' someone whispered. `He's got a touch of 'em.' `My oath, he's ratty!' said someone else. One of the traps said:
"`Arder in the car-rt!'
"The judge gave it to Drew red-hot on account of the burglary being the cause of the girl's death and the sorrow in a respectable family; then he gave him five years' hard.
"It gave me a lot of confidence in myself to see the law of the land barking up the wrong tree, while only I and the Doctor and the prisoner knew it. But I've found out since then that the law is often the only one that knows it's barking up the wrong tree."
. . . . .
Mitchell prepared to turn in.
"And what about Drew," I asked.
"Oh, he did his time, or most of it. The Doctor went to headquarters, but either a drunken doctor from a geebung town wasn't of much account, or they weren't taking any romance just then at headquarters.
So the Doctor came back, drank heavily, and one frosty morning they found him on his back on the bank of the creek, with his face like note-paper where the blood hadn't dried on it, and an old pistol in his hand -- that he'd used, they said, to shoot Cossacks from horseback when he was a young dude fighting in the bush in Poland."
Mitchell lay silent a good while; then he yawned.
"Ah, well! It's a lonely track the Lachlan's tramping to-night; but I s'pose he's got his ghosts with him."
I'd been puzzling for the last half-hour to think where I'd met or heard of Jack Drew; now it flashed on me that I'd been told that Jack Drew was the Lachlan's real name.
I lay awake thinking a long time, and wished Mitchell had kept his yarn for daytime. I felt -- well, I felt as if the Lachlan's story should have been played in the biggest theatre in the world, by the greatest actors, with music for the intervals and situations -- deep, strong music, such as thrills and lifts a man from his boot soles.
And when I got to sleep I hadn't slept a moment, it seemed to me, when I started wide awake to see those infernal hanging boughs with a sort of nightmare idea that the Lachlan hadn't gone, or had come back, and he and Mitchell had hanged themselves sociably-- Mitchell for sympathy and the sake of mateship.
But Mitchell was sleeping peacefully, in spite of a path of moonlight across his face -- and so was the pup.
