雙語·像愛麗絲的小鎮(zhèn) Chapter 5

Chapter 5

In Kuantan, in the evening of that day in July 1942, a sergeant had come to Captain Sugamo in the District Commissioner's house, and had reported that the Australian was still alive. Captain Sugamo found this curious and interesting, and as there was still half an hour before his evening rice, he strolled down to the recreation ground to have a look.

The body still hung by its hands, facing the tree. Blood had drained from the blackened mess that was its back and had run down the legs to form a black pool on the ground, now dried and oxidized by the hot sun. A great mass of flies covered the body and the blood. But the man undoubtedly was still alive; when Captain Sugamo approached the face the eyes opened, and looked at him with recognition.

It is doubtful if the West can ever fully understand the working of a Japanese mind. When Captain Sugamo saw that the Australian recognized him from the threshold of death, he bowed reverently to the torn body, and he said with complete sincerity,“Is there anything that I can get for you before you die?”

The ringer said distinctly,“You bloody bastard. I'll have one of your black chickens and a bottle of beer.”

Captain Sugamo stood looking at the wreck of the man nailed to the tree, and his face was completely expressionless. Presently he turned upon his heel and went back to his house. He called for his orderly as he went into the shade, and he told him to fetch a bottle of beer and a glass, but not to open the bottle.

The man protested that there was no beer. Captain Sugamo already knew that, but he sent his orderly to the town to visit all the Chinese eating-houses to see if he could find a bottle of beer anywhere in Kuantan. In an hour the man came back; Captain Sugamo was sitting in exactly the same attitude as when he had gone out to find the beer. With considerable apprehension he informed his officer that there was no beer in all Kuantan. He was dismissed, and went away gladly.

Death to Captain Sugamo was a ritual. There had been an element of holiness in his approach to the Australian, and having offered in the hearing of his men to implement the last wishes of his victim he was personally dedicated to see that those last wishes were provided. If a bottle of beer had been available he would have sacrificed one of his remaining black Leghorns and sent the cooked meat and the beer down to the dying body on the tree; he might even have carried the tray down himself. By doing so he would have set an example of chivalry and Bushido to the troops under his command. Unfortunately, it was impossible for him to provide the bottle of beer, and since the beer was missing and the soldier's dying wish could not be met in full, there was no point in sacrificing one of the remaining black Leghorns. He could not carry out his own part in the ritual; he could not show Bushido by granting the man's dying wish. Therefore, the Australian could not be allowed to die, or he himself would be disgraced.

He called for his sergeant. When the man came, he ordered him to take a party with a stretcher to the recreation ground. They were to pull the nails out and take the man down from the tree without injuring him any further, and put him face downwards on the stretcher, and take him to the hospital.

To Jean, the news that the Australian was still alive came like the opening of a door. She slipped away and went and sat in the shade of a casuarina tree at the head of the beach to consider this incredible fact. The sun glinted on the surf and the beach was so white, the sea so blue, that it was almost ecstasy to look at them. She felt as if she had suddenly come out of a dark tunnel that she had walked down for six years. She tried to pray, but she had never been religious and she didn't know how to put what she was feeling into a prayer. The best she could do was to recollect the words of a prayer that they had used at school sometimes.“Lighten our darkness, oh Lord, and of Thy great mercy...”That was all she could remember, and she repeated it over and over to herself that afternoon. Her darkness had been lightened by the well-diggers.

She went back that evening and spoke to Suleiman again about the matter, but neither he nor his sons could supply much further information. The Australian had been in the hospital at Kuantan for a long time, but how long they did not know. Yacob said that he had been there for a year, but she soon found that he only meant a very long time. Hussein said three months, and Suleiman did not know how long he had been there, but said that he was sent down on a ship to Singapore to a prison camp, and he was then walking with two sticks. She could not find out from them when that was.

So she had to leave it, and she stayed on in Kuala Telang till the well and washhouse were completed. She had already started the carpenters upon the washhouse after long consultations with the elder women, and the concrete work was now completed in the shuttering, and drying out. On the day that water was reached at the bottom of the well the carpenters began to erect the posts for the atap house, and the well and the house were finished about the same time. Two days were spent in baling out the muddy water from the well till it ran clean, and then they had an opening ceremony when Jean washed her own sarong and all the women crowded into the washhouse laughing, and the men stood round in a tolerant circle at a distance, wondering if they had been quite wise to allow anything that made the women laugh so much.

On the next day she sent a telegram by runner to Kuala Rakit to be dispatched to Wilson-Hays asking him to send the jeep for her, and a day or two later it arrived. She left in a flurry of shy good wishes with some moisture in her eyes; she was going back to her own place and her own people, but she was leaving three years of her life behind her, and that is never a very easy thing to do.

She got back to the Residency at Kota Bahru after dark that night, too tired to eat. Mrs Wilson-Hays sent her up a cup of tea and a little fruit to her bedroom, and she had a long, warm bath, putting off her native clothes for the last time. She lay on the bed in the cool, spacious room under the mosquito net, rested and growing sleepy, and what she thought about was Ringer Harman, and the red country he had told her of round Alice Springs, and euros, and wild horses.

She walked with Wilson-Hays in the garden of the Residency next morning after breakfast in the cool of the day. She told him what she had done in Kuala Telang; he asked her where she had got the idea of the washhouse from.“It's obvious that's what they need,”she said.“Women don't like washing their clothes in public, especially Moslem women.”

He thought about it for a minute.“You've probably started something,”he remarked at last.“Every village will want one now. Where did you get the plan of it—the arrangement of the sinks and all that sort of thing?”

“We worked it out ourselves,”she said.“They knew what they wanted all right.”

They strolled along by the river, brown and muddy and half a mile wide, running its way down to the sea. As they walked she told him about the Australian, because she could talk freely about that now. She told him what had happened.“His name was Joe Harman,”she said,“and he came from a place near Alice Springs. I would like to get in touch with him again. Do you think I could find out anything about him in Singapore?”

He shook his head.“I shouldn't think so, not now that SEAC is disbanded. I shouldn't think there's any record of prisoners of war in Singapore now.”

“How would one find out about him, then?”

“You say he was an Australian?”

She nodded.

“I think you'd have to write to Canberra,”he said.“They ought to have a record of all prisoners there. I suppose you don't happen to know his unit?”

She shook her head.“I'm afraid I don't.”

“That might make it difficult, of course—there may be several Joe Harmans. I should start off by writing to the Minister for the Army—that's what they call him, the head of the War Office. Just address your letter to the Minister for the Army, Canberra, Australia. Something might come of that. What you want is an address where you could write to him, I suppose?”

Jean stared across the river at the rubber trees and coconut palms.“I suppose so. As a matter of fact, I've got an address of a sort. He used to work before the war on a cattle station called Wollara, near a place called Alice Springs. He said that they were keeping his job open for him there.”

“If you've got that address,”he observed,“I should write there. You're much more likely to find him that way than by writing to Canberra.”

“I might do that,”she said slowly.“I would like to see him again. You see, it was because of us that it all happened...”

It had been her intention to go back to Singapore and wait there for a boat to England; if she had to wait long for a cheap passage she intended to try and find a job for a few weeks or months. Malayan Airways called at Koto Bahru next day, and the Dakota landed at Kuantan on the way down to Singapore. She spoke to Wilson-Hays again that evening after dinner.

“Do you think there would be a hotel or anything at Kuantan if I stopped there for a day?”she asked.

He looked at her kindly.“Do you want to go back there?”he asked.

“I think I do,”she said.“I'd like to go and see the people at the hospital and find out what I can.”

He said,“You'd better stay with David and Joyce Bowen. Bowen is the District Commissioner; he'd be glad to put you up.”

“I don't want to be a nuisance to people,”she said.“Isn't there a resthouse that I could stay in? After all, I know this country fairly well.”

“That's why Bowen would like to meet you,”he remarked.“You must realize that you're quite a well-known person in these parts. He would be very disappointed if you stayed at the resthouse.”

She looked at him in wonder.“Do people think of me like that? I only did what anybody could have done.”

“That's as it may be,”he replied.“The fact is, that you did it.”

She flew on down to Kuantan next day. Someone must have told the crew of the aircraft about her, because the Malay stewardess came to her after half an hour and said,“We're just coming up to Kuala Telang, Miss Paget. Captain Philby wants to know if you would care to come forward to the cockpit and see it.”So she went forward through the door and stood between the pilots; they brought the Dakota down to about seven hundred feet and circled the village; she could see the well and the new atap roof of the washhouse, and she could see people standing gazing up at the machine. Fatimah and Zubeidah and Mat Amin. Then they straightened up and flew on down the coast, and Kuala Telang was left behind.

The Bowens met her at the airstrip, which is ten miles from the town of Kuantan; Wilson-Hays had sent them a signal that morning. They were a friendly, unsophisticated couple, and she had no difficulty in telling them a little about the Australian soldier who had been tortured when they were sitting in the DC's house, where Captain Sugamo had sat so often, over a cup of tea. They said that Sister Frost was now in charge of the hospital, but it was doubtful if there was anybody now upon the staff who was there in 1942. They drove down after tea to see Sister Frost.

She received them in the matron's room, very hygienic and smelling strongly of disinfectant. She was an Englishwoman about forty years of age.“There's nobody here now who was on the staff then,”she said.“Nurses in a place like this—they're always leaving to get married. We never seem to keep them longer than about two years. I don't know what to suggest.”

Bowen said,“What about Phyllis Williams? She was a nurse here, wasn't she?”

“Oh, her,”the sister said disparagingly.“She was here for the first part of the war until she married that man. She might know something about it.”

They left the hospital, and as they drove to find Phyllis Williams Mrs Bowen enlightened Jean.“She's a Eurasian,”she said.“Very dark, almost as dark as a Malay. She married a Chinese, a man called Bun Tai Lin who runs the cinema. What you'd call a mixed marriage, but they seem to get along all right. She's a Roman Catholic, of course.”Jean never fathomed the“of course”.

The Bun Tai Lins lived in a rickety wooden house up the hill overlooking the harbour. They could not get the car to the house, but left it in the road and walked up a short lane littered with garbage. They found Phyllis Williams at home, a merry-faced, brown woman with four children around her and evidently about to produce a fifth. She was glad to see them and took them into a shabby room, the chief decorations of which were a set of pewter beer-mugs and a large oleograph of the King and Queen in coronation robes.

She spoke very good English.“Oh yes, I remember that poor boy,”she said.“Joe Harman, that was his name. I nursed him for three or four months—he was in a state when he came in. We none of us thought he'd live. But he got over it. He must have led a very healthy life, because his flesh healed wonderfully. He said that he was like a dog, he healed so well.”

She turned to Jean.“Are you the lady that was leading the party of women and children from Panong?”she asked.“I thought you must be. Fancy you coming here again! You know, he was always wanting to know about you and your party, if anybody knew the way you'd gone. And of course, we didn't know, and with that Captain Sugamo in the mood he was nobody was going to go round asking questions to find out.”

She turned to Jean.“I forget your name?”

“Paget. Jean Paget.”

The Eurasian looked puzzled.“That wasn't it. I wonder now, was he talking about someone different? I can't remember now what he called her, but it wasn't that. I thought it would have been you.”

“Mrs Frith?”

She shook her head.“I'll remember presently.”

She could not tell them very much more than Jean knew already. The Australian had been sent down to a prison camp in Singapore as soon as he was fit to travel; they heard no more of him. They thought that he would make a good recovery in the end, though it would be years before the muscles of his back got back their strength if, indeed, they ever would. She knew no more than that.

They left presently, and went down the garbage-strewn lane towards the car. When they were nearly at the bottom the woman called to them from the veranda.“I just remembered that name. Mrs Boong. That's who he was always talking about, Mrs Boong. Was that one of your party?”

Jean laughed, and called back to her,“That's what he used to call me!”

The woman was satisfied.“I thought it must have been you that he was always talking about.”

On the way back to the DC's house in the car, they passed the recreation ground. There were tennis nets rigged and one or two couples playing; there was a white young man playing a brown girl. The tree still stood overlooking the courts, and underneath it a couple of Malay women sat exactly where the feet of the tortured man had hung, on ground that had been soaked in blood, and gossiped while their children played around. It all looked very peaceful in the evening light.

Jean spent that night with the Bowens, and went on to Singapore next day in the Dakota. Wilson-Hays had advised her about hotels, and she stayed at the Adelphi opposite the Cathedral.

She wrote to me from there a couple of days later. It was a long letter, about eight pages long, written in ink smudged a little with the sweat that had formed on her hand as she wrote in that humid place. First she told me what had happened in Kuala Telang; she told me about the well-diggers and that Joe Harman was still alive. And then she went on,

I've been puzzling over what I could do to get in touch with him again. You see, it was all because of us that it happened. He stole the chickens for us, and he must have known the sort of man that Captain Sugamo was, and the risk that he was taking. I must find out where he is living now, and if he's all right; I can't believe that he can be able to work as a stockrider after having been so terribly injured. I think he was a man who'd always fall upon his feet somehow or other if he was well enough, but I can't bear the thought that he might be still in hospital, perhaps, and likely to stay there for ever with his injuries.

I did think of writing to him at this place Wollara that he

told me about, the cattle station that he worked on, somewhere near Alice Springs. But thinking it over, if he can't work he can't be there, and I don't suppose I'd ever get an answer to a letter from a place like that, or not for ages, anyway. I thought of writing to Canberra to try and find out something, but that's almost as bad. And this brings me to what I wanted to tell you when I started this letter, Noel, and I hope it won't be too much of a shock. I'm going on to Australia from here.

Don't think me absolutely crazy for doing this. The fare from here to Darwin costs sixty pounds by the Constellation, and you can get a bus from Darwin to Alice Springs; it takes two or three days but it ought to be much cheaper than flying. After paying the hotel bill here I shall still have about a hundred and seven pounds, not counting next month's money. I thought I'd go to Alice Springs and get to this place Wollara and find out about him there; someone in that district is bound to know what happened to him, and where he is now.

There are some merchant service officers staying here, very nice young men, and they tell me I can get a cabin on a merchant ship back to England probably from Townsville, that's on the east coast of Australia in Queensland, and if there isn't a ship there I'd certainly get one at Brisbane. I've been talking to a man in the Chartered Bank here in Raffles Place who is very helpful, and I've arranged with him to transfer my next month's money to the Bank of New South Wales in Alice Springs, and so I'll have money to get me across to Townsville or Brisbane. Write to me care of the Bank of New South Wales in Alice Springs, because I know I'm going to feel a long way from home when I get there.

I'm leaving here on Thursday by the Constellation, so I'll be in Australia somewhere by the time you get this letter. I have a feeling that I'm being a terrible nuisance to you, Noel, but I'll have an awful lot to tell you when I get back home. I don't think the trip home from Townsville or Brisbane can take longer than three months at the outside, so I shall be home in England in time for Christmas at the very latest.

I sat there reading and re-reading this, bitterly disappointed. I had been making plans for entertainments for her when she came back, I suppose—in fact, I know I had been. Old men who lead a somewhat empty life get rather stupid over things like that. Lester Robinson came into my office with a sheaf of papers in his hand as I was reading her letter for the third time; I laid the letter down.“My Paget girl,”I said.“You know—that Macfadden estate that we're trustees for. She's not coming home after all. She's gone on from Malaya to Australia.”

He glanced at me, and I suppose the disappointment that I felt showed in my face, because he said gently,“I told you she was old enough to make a packet of trouble for us.”I looked up at him quickly to see what he meant by that, but he began talking about an unadopted road in Colchester, and the moment passed.

I went on with my work, but the black mood persisted and it was with me when I reached the club that night. I settled down after dinner in the library with a volume of Horace because I thought the mental exercise required to read the Latin would take my mind off things and put me in a better frame of mind. But I had forgotten my Horace, I suppose, because a phrase I had not read or thought about for forty years suddenly stared up at me from the page and brought me up with a round turn,

—Dulce ridentem Lalagen amabo,

Dulce loquentem.

It had been a part of my youth, that phrase, as I suppose it is a part of the youth of many young men who have been in love. I could not bear to go on reading Horace after that, and I sat thinking of sweetly smiling, soft-spoken Lalage on her way to Alice Springs in a long-distance bus, until I broke away from morbid fancies and got up and put the book back on the shelf.

It must have been about a week after that that Derek Harris came into my room as the client went out. Derek is one of our two articled clerks, and one day I expect to make him a partner; a pleasant fresh-faced lad. He said,“Could you spare a few minutes for a stranger, sir?”

“What sort of stranger?”I inquired.

He said,“A man called Harman. He came about an hour ago without any appointment and asked to see you. Sergeant Gunning asked if I would see him as you were engaged, and I had a talk with him, but it's you that he wants to see. I understand that it's something to do with Miss Paget.”

I knew now where I had heard that name before, but it was quite incredible. I asked,“What sort of a man is he?”

He grinned broadly.“Some sort of a colonial, I should think. Probably Australian. He's an outdoor type, anyway.”

“Is he a reasonable person?”

“Oh, I think so, sir. He's some sort of a countryman, I should say.”

It was all beginning to fit in, and yet it was incredible that an Australian stockman should have found his way to my office in Chancery Lane.“Is his name Joseph, by any chance?”I asked.

“You know him, do you, sir? Joe Harman. Shall I ask him to come up?”

I nodded.“I'll see him now.”Harris went down to fetch him, and I stood by my window looking out into the grey street, wondering what this visit meant and how it had come about, and how much of my client's business could I tell this man.

Harris showed him in, and I turned from the window to meet him.

He was a fair-haired man, about five feet ten in height. He was thickset but not fat; I judged him to be between thirty and thirty-five years old. His face was deeply tanned but his skin was clear; he had very bright blue eyes. He was not a handsome man; his face was too square and positive for that, but it was a simple and good natured face. He walked towards me with a curious stiff gait.

I shook hands with him.“Mr Harman?”I said.“My name is Strachan. Do you want to see me?”And as I spoke I was unable to resist the temptation to look down at his hand. There was a huge scar on the back of it.

He said a little awkwardly,“I don't want to keep you long.”He was ill at ease and obviously embarrassed.

“Not at all,”I said.“Sit down, Mr Harman, and tell me what I can do for you.”I put him in the client's chair before my desk and gave him a cigarette. He pulled from his pocket a tin box of wax matches of a style that was strange to me, and cracked one expertly with his thumbnail without burning himself. He was wearing a very ready-made suit, quite new, and an unusually ornamental tie for London wear.

“I was wondering if you could tell me about Miss Jean Paget,”he said.“Where she lives, or anything like that.”

I smiled.“Miss Paget is a client of mine, Mr Harman,”I said.“You evidently know that. But a client's business is entirely confidential, you know. Are you a friend of hers?”

The question seemed to embarrass him still further.“Sort of,”he replied.“We met once in the war, in Malaya that was. I'll have to tell you who I am, of course. I'm a Queenslander. I run a station in the Gulf country, about twenty miles from Willstown.”He spoke very slowly and deliberately, not from embarrassment but because that seemed to be his way.“I mean the homestead is twenty miles from the town, but one limb of the land runs down the creek to within five miles. Midhurst, that's the name of my station. Midhurst, Willstown, is the address.”

I made a note upon my pad, and smiled at him again.“You're a long way from home, Mr Harman,”I said.

“Too right,”he replied.“I don't know nobody in England except Miss Paget and a cobber I met in the prison camp who lives at a place called Gateshead in the north of England. I came here for a holiday, you might say, and I thought perhaps Miss Paget might be glad to know that I'm in England, but I don't know her address.”

“Rather a long way to come for a holiday?”I observed.

He smiled a little sheepishly.“I struck it lucky. I won the Casket.”

“The Casket?”

“The Golden Casket. Don't you have that here?”

I shook my head.“I'm afraid I've never heard of it.”

“Oh my word,”he said.“We couldn't get along without the Casket in Queensland. It's the State lottery that gets the money to build hospitals.”

“I see,”I said.“Did you win a prize in the lottery?”

“Oh my word,”he repeated.“Did I win a prize. I won a thousand pounds—not English pounds, of course, Australian pounds, but it's a thousand pounds to us. I always take a ticket in every Casket like everybody else because if you don't get a prize you get a hospital and there's times when that's more useful. You ought to see the hospital the Casket built at Willstown. Three wards it's got, with two beds in each, and two rooms for the sisters, and a separate house for the doctor only we can't get a doctor to come yet because Willstown's a bit isolated, you see. We've got an X-ray apparatus there and a wireless so that the sister can call for the Cairns Ambulance—the aeroplane, you know. We couldn't do without the Casket.”

I must say I was a little bit interested.“Does the Casket pay for the aeroplane, too?”

He shook his head.“You pay seven pounds ten a year to the Cairns Ambulance, each family, that is. Then if you get sick and have to go to Cairns the sister calls Cairns on the wireless and the aeroplane comes out to take you into Cairns to hospital. That's free, provided that you pay the seven pounds ten each year.”

“How far are you from Cairns?”

“About three hundred miles.”

I reverted to the business in hand.“Tell me, Mr Harman,”I said,“how did you get to know that I was Miss Paget's solicitor?”

“She told me in Malaya when we met, she lived in Southampton,”he said.“I didn't know any address, so I went there and stayed in a hotel, because I thought maybe she'd like to know I was in England. I never saw a city that had been bombed before—oh my word. Well, then I looked in the telephone book and asked a lot of people but I couldn't find out nothing except she had an aunt that lived in Wales at a place called Colwyn Bay. So then I went to Colwyn Bay.”

“You went right up there, did you?”

He nodded.“I think her aunt thought I was up to some crook game or other,”he said simply.“She wouldn't tell me where she lived or anything. All she said was that you were her trustee, whatever that means. So I came here.”

“When did you arrive in England?”I asked.

“Last Thursday. Five days ago.”

“You landed at Southampton, did you?”

He shook his head.“I flew from Australia, by Qantas. You see, I got a good stockman looking after Midhurst for me, but I can't afford to be away so long. Jim Lennon's all right for a time, but I wouldn't want to be away from Midhurst more'n three months. You see, this is a slack time in the Gulf country. We mustered in March this year on account of the late season and drove the stock down Julia Creek in April—that's railhead, you know. I had about fourteen hundred stores I sold down to Rockhampton for fattening. Well, after getting them on rail I had to get back up to Midhurst on account of the bore crew. I got Mrs Spears—she's the owner of Midhurst—I got her to agree we sink a bore at Willow Creek, that's about twenty miles south-east of the homestead, to get water down at that end in the dry, and we got a bonza bore, we did. She's flowing over thirty thousand gallons a day; it's going to make a lot of difference down at that end. Well, that took up to about three weeks ago before I got that finished up, and I must be back at Midhurst by the end of October for getting in the stores and that before the wet begins at Christmas. So I thought that coming on this holiday I'd better fly.”

Flying to England, I thought, must have made a considerable hole in his thousand pounds.“You came to London, then, and went straight down to Southampton?”

“That's right,”he said.

“And from there you went up to North Wales. And from there you came here?”

“That's right.”

I looked him in the eyes, and smiled.“You must want to see Miss Paget very much.”

He met my gaze.“I do.”

I leaned back in my chair.“I've got a disappointment for you, I'm afraid, Mr Harman. Miss Paget is abroad.”

He stared down at his hat for a moment. Then he raised his head.“Is she far away?”he asked.“I mean, is it France or anything like that, where I could get to see her?”

I shook my head.“She's travelling in the East.”

He said quietly,“I see.”

I couldn't help liking and respecting this man. It was perfectly obvious that he had come twelve thousand miles or so to find Jean Paget, and now he wasn't going to find her. It was bad luck, to say the least of it, and he was taking it well. I felt that I wanted a little time to consider this affair.

“The most that I can do for you,”I said,“is to forward a letter. I can do that, if you care to write one, and I'll send it to her by air mail. But I'm afraid that you may have to wait a month or so before you get an answer.”

He brightened.“I'd like to do that. I never thought that after coming all this way I'd find that she'd gone walkabout.”

He thought for a minute.“What address should I put upon the letter?”

“I can't give you my client's address, Mr Harman,”I said.“What I suggest that you do is to write her a letter and bring it in to me here tomorrow morning. I will send it on with a short covering note explaining how it came into my hands. Then if she wants to see you she will get in touch with you herself.”

“You don't think she'll want to see me?”he said heavily.

I smiled.“I didn't say anything of the sort, Mr Harman. I'm quite sure that when she hears you've been in England looking for her she will write to you. What I'm saying is that I have her interests to consider, and I'm not going to give her address to anyone who comes into this office and cares to ask for it.”I paused.“There's one thing that you'd better know,”I said.“Miss Paget is a fairly wealthy woman. Women who have command of a good deal of money are apt to be troubled by touts. I'm not saying that you're a tout or that you're after her money. I am saying that you must write to her first of all, and then let her decide if she wants to meet you. If you're a friend of hers you'll see that that's reasonable.”

He stared at me.“I never knew that she had money. She told me she was just a typist in an office.”

“That's quite true,”I said.“She inherited some money recently.”

He was silent.

“Suppose you come back tomorrow morning, Mr Harman,”I said. I glanced at my engagement diary.“Say, twelve o'clock tomorrow morning. Write her a letter saying whatever it is you want to say, and bring it here then. I will forward it to her tomorrow evening.”

“All right,”he said. He got up and I got up with him.“Where are you staying, Mr Harman?”I asked.

“At the Kingsway Palace Hotel.”

“All right, Mr Harman,”I said.“I shall expect you tomorrow morning, at twelve o'clock.”

I spent most of that evening wondering if I had done the right thing in refusing Mr Harman the address. I thought ruefully that Jean would have been very angry if she had known I had done such a thing, especially when she was looking for him all over Australia. At the same time, what I had done would not delay a letter from him reaching her, and there was no sense in putting all her cards upon the table for him to see just at present. One thing that puzzled me a little was, why had he suddenly awoken to the fact that he wanted to meet Jean Paget again, after six years? A question or two upon that point seemed to be in order, and I prepared a small interrogation for him when he came to see me with his letter.

Twelve o'clock next morning came, and he didn't turn up for his appointment. I waited in for him till one o'clock, and then I went to lunch.

By three o'clock I was a little bit concerned. The initiative had passed into his hands. If he should vanish into thin air now and never come back to see me again, Jean Paget would be very cross with me, and rightly so. Between clients I put in a telephone call to the Kingsway Palace Hotel and asked to speak to Mr Joseph Harman. The answer was that Mr Harman had gone out after breakfast, and had left no message at the desk. I left one for him, asking him to ring me as soon as he came in.

He did not ring that day.

At half past ten that night I rang the hotel again, but I was told that Mr Harman was not in.

At eight o'clock next morning I rang again. They told me that Mr Harman had not checked out and his luggage was still in his room, but that he had not slept in the room that night.

As soon as I got into the office I sent for Derek Harris.“Harris,”I said.“I want you to try and find that man Harman. He's an Australian.”I told him briefly what had happened.“I should try the hotel again, and if you draw a blank, ring round the various police courts. I think I may have given him some rather unwelcome news, and it's quite possible he's been out on a blind.”

He came back in a quarter of an hour.“You must have second sight, sir,”he said.“He's coming up at Bow Street this morning, drunk and disorderly. They had him in the cooler for the night.”

“He's a friend of Miss Paget's,”I said.“Get along down to Bow Street, Harris, and make yourself known to him. Which court is he coming up in?”

“Mr Horler's.”

I glanced at my watch.“Get along down there right away. Stay with Harman and pay the fine if he hasn't got any money. Then give me a ring, and if it's all in order take him in a taxi to my flat. I'll meet you there.”

There was nothing on my desk that day that could not be postponed or handled by Lester. I got back to my flat in time to catch my charwoman at work and tell her to make up the spare room bed. I told her I should want food in the flat for three or four meals, and I gave her money and sent her out to buy whatever food she could get off the ration.

Harris arrived with Harman half an hour later, and the Australian looked a little bit the worse for wear. He was cheerful and sober after his night in the cells, but he had lost one shoe and he had lost his collar stud and his hat. I met him in the hall.“Morning, Mr Harman,”I said.“I thought perhaps you'd rather come round here and clean up. You'd better not go back to the hotel looking like that.”

He looked me in the eyes.“I've been on the grog,”he said.

“So I see. The water's hot for a bath if you want one, and there's a razor in the bathroom.”I took him and showed him the geography of the house.“You can use this room.”I looked him up and down, smiling.“I'll get you a clean shirt and collar. You can try a pair of my shoes; if they're too small I'll send out for a pair.”

He wagged his head.“I dunno why you want to do this for me. I'll be all right.”

“You'll be righter when you've had a bath and a shave,”I said.“Miss Paget would never forgive me if I let a friend of hers go wandering about the streets like that.”

He looked at me curiously, but I left him and went back to the sitting-room. Harris was waiting for me there.“Thanks, Derek,”I said.“There was a fine, I suppose?”

“Forty shillings,”he said.“I paid it.”

I gave him the money.“He was cleaned out?”

“He's got four and fourpence halfpenny,”he replied.“He thinks he had about seventy pounds, but he's not sure.”

“It doesn't seem to worry him,”I said.

He laughed.“I don't think it does. He seems quite cheerful over it.”

I sent Harris back to the office and settled down to write a few letters while Harman was in the bath. He came into the sitting-room presently looking a bit sheepish, and again I noticed the curious, stiff gait with which he walked.“I dunno what to say,”he said in his slow way.“Those jokers I was with got all the money I had on me so Mr Harris had to pay the fine. But I got some more. I got a thing called a letter of credit that the bank in Brisbane gave me. I can get some money on that and pay him back.”

“That's all right,”I said.“Have you had any breakfast?”

“No.”

“Want any?”

“Well, I dunno. Maybe I'll get something round at the hotel.”

“You don't have to do that,”I said.“My woman's here still; she'll get you some breakfast.”I went out and organized this, and then I came back and found him standing by the window.“You didn't come back with that letter,”I observed.

“I changed my mind,”he said.“I'm going to give it away.”

“Give it away?”

“That's right,”he said.“I won't be writing any letter.”

“That's seems rather a pity,”I said quietly.

“Maybe. I had a good long think about it, and I won't be writing any letter. I decided that. That's why 1 didn't come back at the time you said.”

“As you like,”I said.“Perhaps you'd like to tell me a bit more about it when you've had some breakfast.”

I left him to his breakfast and went on with my letters. My woman took it to the dining-room and he went in there to eat it; a quarter of an hour later he came back to me in the sitting-room.

“I'd better be getting along now,”he said awkwardly.“Will it be all right if I come round later in the day and leave these shoes with the woman?”

I got up and offered him a cigarette.“Will you tell me a bit more about yourself before you go?”I asked.“You see, I shall be writing to Miss Paget in a day or two, and she's sure to want to know all about you.”

He stared at me, cigarette in hand.“You're going to write and tell her I've been here?”

“Of course.”

He stood silent for a moment, and then said in his slow Queensland way,“It would be better to forget about it, Mr Strachan. Just don't say nothing at all.”

I struck a match and lit his cigarette for him.“Is this because I told you about her inheritance?”

“You mean, the money?”

“Yes.”

He grinned.“I wouldn't mind about her having money, same as any man. No, it's Willstown.”

That was rather less intelligible than Greek to me, of course. I said,“Look, Joe, it won't hurt you to sit down for a few minutes and tell me one or two things.”I called him Joe because I thought that it might make him loosen up.

“I dunno as there's much to tell,”he said sheepishly.

“Sit down, anyway.”I thought for a moment, and then I said,“I'm right in thinking that you met Miss Paget first in the war?”

“That's right,”he said.

“That was in Malaya, when you were both prisoners?”

“That's right.”

“Some time in 1942?”

“That's right.”

“And you've never met her since, nor written to her?”

“That's right.”

“Well, what I don't understand is this,”I said.“Why do you want to meet her now so very badly? After all, it's six years since you met her. Why the sudden urge to get in touch with her now?”It was still vaguely in my mind that he had somehow heard about her money.

He looked up at me, grinning.“I thought she was a married woman.”

I stared at him.“I see.... When did you find out that she wasn't married?”

“I only found out that this May. I met the pilot that had flown her out from a place in Malaya called Kota Bahru. At Julia Creek, that was.”

He had driven his fourteen hundred cattle down from Midhurst station to Julia Creek with Jim Lennon and two Abo stockriders to help. From Midhurst to Julia Creek is about three hundred miles by way of the Norman River, the Saxby River and the Flinders River. They left Midhurst at the end of March and got the herd to railhead at Julia Creek on the third of May, moving them at the rate of about ten miles a day. The beasts were corralled in the stockyards of the railway, and they set to work to load them into trains; this took about three days.

During this time Jim and Joe lived in the Post Office Hotel at Julia Creek. It was very hot and they were working fourteen hours a day to load the cattle into trucks; whenever they were not working they were standing in the bar of the hotel drinking hugely at the cold Australian light beer that does no harm to people sweating freely at hard manual work. One evening while they were standing so two dapper men in uniform came into the bar and shouted a couple of rounds; these were the pilots of a Trans-Australia Airline Dakota which had stopped there for the night with an oil leak in the starboard engine.

Harman found himself next to the chief pilot. Joe was wearing an old green linen sun hat that had once belonged to the American Army, a cotton singlet, a pair of dirty khaki shorts, and boots without socks; his appearance contrasted strangely with the neatness of the airman, but the pilot was accustomed to the outback. They fell into conversation about the war and soon discovered they had both served in Malaya. Joe showed the scars upon his hands and the pilots examined them with interest; he told them how he had been nailed up to be beaten, and they shouted another grog for him.

“The funniest do I ever struck,”said the chief pilot presently,“was a party of women and children that never got into a prison camp at all. They spent most of the war in a Malay village working in the paddy fields.”

Joe said quickly,“Where was that in Malaya? I met that party.”

The pilot said,“It was somewhere between Kuantan and Kota Bahru. When we got back they were taken in trucks to Kota Bahru, and I flew them down to Singapore. All English, they were, but they looked just like Malays. All the women were in native clothes, and brown as anything.”

Joe said,“Was there a Mrs Paget with them then?”It was vastly important to him to hear if Jean had survived the war.

The pilot said,“There was a Miss Paget. She was a hell of a fine girl; she was their leader.”

Joe said,“Mrs. A dark-haired girl, with a baby.”

The pilot said,“That's right—a dark-haired girl. She had a little boy about four years old that she was looking after, but it wasn't hers. It belonged to one of the other women, one who died. I know that, because she was the only unmarried girl among the lot of them, and she was their leader. Just a typist in Kuala Lumpur before the war. Miss Jean Paget.”

Joe stared at him.“I thought she was a married woman.”

“She wasn't married. I know she wasn't, because the Japs had taken all their wedding rings so they had to be sorted out and that was quite easy, because they were all Mrs So and So except this one girl, and she was Miss Jean Paget.”

“That's right,”the ringer said slowly.“Jean was her name.”

He left the bar presently, and went out to the veranda and stood looking up at the stars. Presently he left the pub and strolled towards the stockyards; he found a gate to lean upon and stood there for a long time in the night, thinking things over. He told me a little about what he had been thinking, that morning in my London flat.

“She was a bonza girl,”he said simply.“If ever I got married it would have to be with somebody like her.”

I smiled.“I see,”I said.“That's why you came to England?”

“That's right,”he said simply. He had ridden back with Jim Lennon and the Abo stockmen to Midhurst, a journey that took them about ten days, leading their string of fifteen packhorses; since they had started mustering on the station in February he had been in the saddle almost continuously for three months.“Then there was the bore to see to,”he said.“I'd made such a point of that with Mrs Spears that I couldn't hardly leave before that was finished, but then I got away and I went into Cairns one Wednesday with John Duffy on the Milk Run”—I found out later that he meant the weekly Dakota air mail service—“and so down to Brisbane. And from Brisbane I came here.”

“What about the Golden Casket?”I inquired.

He said a little awkwardly,“I didn't tell you right about that. I did win the Casket, but not this year. I won it in 1946, the year after I got back to Queensland. I won a thousand pounds then, like I said.”

“I see,”I observed.“You hadn't spent it?”

He shook his head.“I was saving it, in case some day I got to have a station of my own, or do a deal with cattle, or something.”

“How much do you think you've got left now?”

He said,“There's five hundred pounds of our money on the letter of credit, and I suppose that's all I've got. Four hundred pounds of yours. There's my pay as manager goes into the bank at Willstown each month, of course.”

I sat smoking for a time in silence, and I couldn't help being sorry for this man. Since he had met Jean Paget six years previously he had held the image of her in his mind hoping to find somebody a little like her. When he had heard that she was not a married woman he had drawn the whole of his small savings and hurried expensively half across the world to England, hoping to find her and to find that she was still unmarried. It was a gambler's action, but his whole life had probably been made up of gambles; it could hardly be otherwise in the outback. Clearly he thought little of his money if it could buy a chance for him of marrying Jean Paget.

It was ironical to think that she was at that moment busy looking for him in his own country. I did not feel that I was quite prepared to tell him that.

“I still don't understand why you've given up the idea of writing to Miss Paget,”I said at last.“You said something about Willstown.”

“Yes.”There was a pause, and then he said in his slow way,“I thought a lot about things after I left you, Mr Strachan. Maybe I'd have done better to have done some thinking before ever I left Midhurst. I told you, I got none of them high-falutin ideas about not marrying a girl with money. So long as she was the right girl, I'd be tickled to death if she had money, same as any man. But there's more to it than that.”

He paused again.“I come from the outback,”he said slowly.“Running a cattle station is the only work I know, and it's where I like to be. I couldn't make out in any of the big cities, Brisbane or Sydney. I couldn't make out even in Cairns for very long, and anyway, there'd be no work there I could do. I never got a lot of schooling, living on a station like we did. I don't say that I won't make money. I can run a station better'n most ringers, and I seem to do all right with selling the stock too. I'll hope to get a station of my own one day, and there's plenty of station owners finish up with fifty thousand pounds. But if I get that far, it'll be staying in the outback and doing what I'm cut out for. And I tell you, Mr Strachan, the outback is a crook place for a woman.”

“In what way?”I asked quietly. We were really getting down to something now.

He smiled a little wryly.“Take Willstown, as an example. There's no radio station to listen to, only the short wave stuff from Brisbane and that comes and goes with static. There's no shop where you can buy fruit or fresh vegetables. The sister says that it's because of that so many of the old folk get this pellagra. There's no fresh milk. There's no dress shop, only what a woman can get in Bill Duncan's Store along with the dried peas and Jeyes Fluid and that. There's no ice-cream in Willstown. There's nowhere that a woman can buy a paper or a magazine or a book, and there's no doctor because we can't get one to come to Willstown. There's no telephone. There's no swimming-pool where a girl could sit around in a pretty bathing dress, although it can be hot there, oh my word. There's no other young women. I don't believe there's more'n five women in the district between the age of seventeen and forty; as soon as they're old enough to leave home they're off out of it, and down to the city. To get to Cairns to do a bit of shopping you can either fly, which costs money, or you can drive for four days in a jeep, and after that you'll find the jeep needs a new set of tyres.”He paused.“It's a grand country for a man to live and work in, and good money, too. But it's a crook place for a woman.”

“I see,”I said.“Are all the outback towns like that?”

“Most of them,”he said.“You get the bigger ones, like the Curry, they're better, of course. But Camooweal and Normanton and Burketown and Croydon and Georgetown—they're all just the same as Willstown.”He paused for a moment in thought.“There's only one good one for a woman,”he said.“Alice Springs. Alice is a bonza place, oh my word. A girl's got everything in Alice—two picture houses, shops for everything, fruit, ice-cream, fresh milk, Eddie Maclean's swimming-pool, plenty of girls and young married women in the place, and nice houses to live in. Alice is a bonza town,”he said,“but that's the only one.”

“Why is that?”I asked.“What makes Alice different from the others?”

He scratched his head.“I dunno,”he said.“It's just that it's got bigger, I suppose.”

I left that one.“What you mean is that if you got Miss Paget to agree to marry you, she wouldn't have a very happy life in Willstown.”

He nodded.“That's right,”he said, and there was pain in his eyes.“It all seemed sort of different when I met her in Malaya. You see, she was a prisoner and she hadn't got nothing, and I hadn't got nothing either, so there was a pair of us. When I got to know there was a chance she wouldn't be married I was so much in a hurry to get over here I didn't stop to think about the outback, or if I did I thought of her as someone who'd got nothing so she'd be all right in Willstown. See what I mean?”He looked at me appealingly.“But then I come to England and I see Southampton and the sort of way people live there, bombed and muggered up although it is, and I been in London and I been in Colwyn Bay. Then when you told me she'd come into money I got thinking about how she would be living and the sort of things that she'd be used to and she wouldn't get in Willstown, and then I thought I'd acted a bit hasty. I never know it to work, for a girl to come straight out from England to the outback. And for a girl with money of her own, it'ld be worse still.”He paused, and grinned at me.“So I went out on the grog.”

In all the circumstances, it now seemed to me that he had taken a very reasonable line of action, but it was a pity it had cost him seventy pounds.“Look, Joe,”I said.“We want to think about this thing a bit. I think I'll have to write and tell Miss Paget that I've met you. You see, she thought you were dead.”

He stared at me.“You knew about me, then?”

“Not very much,”I said.“I know that you stole chickens for her, and the Japs nailed you up and beat you. She thought you died.”

“I bloody near did,”he said grinning.“She told you that, did she?”

I nodded.“It's been a very deep grief to her,”I said quietly.“You wouldn't want her to go on like that? You see, she thinks it was her fault.”

“It wasn't her fault at all,”he said in his slow way.“She told me not to stick my neck out, and I went and bought it. It wasn't her fault at all.”

“I think you ought to write to her,”I repeated.

There was a long pause.

“I dunno what in hell I'd say to her if I did,”he muttered.

There was no point in going on agonizing about it. I got up.“Look, Joe,”I said. Take a bit of time to think it over. When have you got to be back in Australia?”

“I wouldn't be doing right by Mrs Spears unless I get back on the station by the end of October,”he said.“I don't want to serve her a crook deal.”

“That gives you two and a half months,”I said.“How much did your airline ticket cost you when you came here?”

“Three hundred and twenty-five pounds,”he said.

“And you've got five hundred pounds left, on your letter of credit.”

“That's right.”

“Do you want to go back by air, or would you rather go by sea? I could find out about sea passages for you, if you like. I think it would cost about eighty pounds on a tramp steamer, but you'd have to leave pretty soon—within a fortnight, say.”

“There don't seem to be much point in staying here,”he said a little wearily.“There wouldn't be no chance that she'll be coming back to England?”

“Not in that time, I'm afraid.”

“I'd better go back by sea, and save what's left of the money.”

“I think that's wise,”I said.“I'll get my office on to finding out about the passage. In the meantime, why don't you move in here? You're welcome to use that spare room till you go, and it will be cheaper for you than living in the hotel.”

“Wouldn't I be in your way?”

“Not in the least,”I said.“I'm out most of the day, and I'd be very glad for you to stay here if you'd like to.”

He agreed to that, and I asked him what he wanted most to see in England in his brief visit. He wanted to see No. 19 Acacia Road, Hammersmith, where his father had been born. He wanted to see a live broadcast of“Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh”which he listened to on short wave from Brisbane when the static permitted. (“They've got a bonza radio at Alice,”he said wistfully.“A local station, right in the town.”) He wanted to see all he could of thoroughbred horses and thoroughbred cattle. He was interested in saddlery, but he didn't think that we had much to teach them about that.

There was no difficulty about Hammersmith, of course; I put him in a bus that afternoon, and went into my office to deal with my neglected work. Apart from the clients who came to see me, I had plenty to think about. Whether Jean Paget chose to marry this man when she met him was entirely her own affair, but it was quite a possibility that she would do so. Whatever one might think about the suitability of such a match, there was no denying that Joe Harman had some very solid virtues; he seemed to be hard-working, thrifty if one excepts the great extravagance of flying half across the world to look for the girl he loved, and likely to make a success of his life; quite certainly he was a kind man who would make a good husband.

There was another aspect of the matter which was worth investigation. Whether she knew it or not, Jean Paget had Australia in her ancestry. She had never mentioned her grandfather, James Macfadden, to me and it seemed quite possible that she had never thought about him much. And yet, he was the original source of her money, and apparently he had made it in Australia before coming home to England to break his neck while riding in a point-to-point in Yorkshire. It would be interesting, I thought, to find out a little more about James Macfadden. Had he made his money on an outback cattle station, too? Had he been just such another as Joe Harman?

I sent my girl that afternoon to bring me the Macfadden box, and I sat looking through the old deeds and wills after my last client had gone. The only clue I found was in the Will of James Macfadden dated September 18th, 1903, which began,“I, James Nelson Macfadden of Lowdale Manor, Kirkby Moorside, in the County of Yorkshire, and of Hall's Creek in Western Australia, do hereby revoke all former wills... etc.”I knew nothing of Hall's Creek at that time, but I noted the name for future investigation. That is all there was.

I got Marcus Fernie on the telephone that afternoon at his office at the BBC and asked if I could have a ticket for“Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh”. I had to tell him something about Joe Harman in order to get it because there seemed to be considerable competition, and he came back at once with a demand that Harman should be interviewed for the programme“In Town Tonight”. I said I'd see him about that, and he promised to send over the ticket. Then I got on to old Sir Dennis Frampton who has a herd of pedigree Herefords at his place down by Taunton and told him about Joe Harman, and he very kindly invited him down for a couple of nights.

I got back to my flat at about seven o'clock; I had arranged for dinner there. Joe Harman was there, and he had been to the Bank and the hotel, and he had brought his suitcase round to my spare room. I asked if he had found his father's house at Hammersmith.

“I found it,”he said.“Oh my word, I did.”

“Pretty bad?”

He grinned.“That's putting it mild. We got some slums in Australia, but nothing like that. Dad did all right for himself when he come away from that and out to Queensland.”

I offered him a glass of sherry, but he preferred a beer; I went and got him a bottle.“When did your father leave this country?”I inquired,

“1904,”he said.“He went out to the Curry, to Cobb and Co. They used to run the stage coaches, before motors came. He must have been about fifteen then. He fought in the first war with the Aussies at Gallipoli.”

“He's dead now, is he?”

“Aye,”he said.“He died in 1940, soon after I joined the army.”He paused.“Mother's still alive. She lives with my sister Amy at the Curry.”

“Tell me,”I said,“do you know a place called Hall's Creek?”

“Where the gold was? Over by Wyndham, in West Australia?”

“That will be the place,”I said.“There are gold mines there, are there?”

“I don't think they work it now,”he said.“There was a lot of gold there in the nineties, like in Queensland, in the Gulf country. I've never been to Hall's Creek, but I've always thought that it would be like Croydon. There was a lot of gold at Croydon, oh my word. It lasted for about ten years, and then they had to go so deep for it, it didn't pay any longer. Croydon had thirty thousand people one time, so they say. Now it's got two hundred. It's the same at Normanton and Burketown—Willstown's the same. All gold towns at one time, they were.”

“You never heard of anybody called Macfadden over at Hall's Creek, did you?”

He shook his head.“I never heard the name.”

I told him I was getting a ticket for“Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh”, and that they wanted him to broadcast on Saturday night. He agreed diffidently to do this; when the time came I listened in and thought he did it surprisingly well. The announcer shepherded him along quite skilfully, and Harman spoke for about six or seven minutes about the Midhurst cattle station and the country down below the Gulf of Carpentaria that he called the Gulf country. Marcus Fernie took the trouble to ring me up next day to tell me how well it had gone.“I only wish we could get more chaps like him now and then,”he said.“It makes a difference when you hear the real McCoy.”

I put him on the train on Sunday down to Taunton to see Sir Dennis Frampton's cows. He had not much time left, because a ship of the Shaw Savill line was leaving on the following Friday morning for New Zealand and Australia, and I had managed to get him a cheap berth on that. He came back on the Wednesday full of what he had seen.“He's got a bonza herd there, oh my word,”he said.“I learned more about raising up the quality of stock there in two days than I'd have learned in ten years in the Gulf country. Of course, you couldn't do the things that he does on a station like Midhurst, but I got plenty to think about.”

“You mean about breeding?”

“We don't breed for quality at all in the Gulf,”he said.“Not like you set about it here in England. All we do is go out and shoot the scrub bulls when you see them so you keep the best ones breeding. I'd like to see a herd of pedigree stock out there, like he's got. I never see such beasts outside a show.”

After dinner I had a word with him about Miss Paget.“I shall write to her in a day or two and give her your address,”I said.“I know that she'll be very sorry to have missed you, and I should think you'd find a letter from her waiting for you at Midhurst when you get there. In fact, I know you will, because I shall write air mail, and she's certain to write air mail to you.”

He brightened considerably at the thought.“I don't think I'll write to her from here,”he said.“If you're going to do that I'll wait and write when I hear from her. I'm glad I didn't meet her over here, in a way. It's probably all turning out for the best.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him then that she was in Australia, but I refrained. I had written to her in Alice Springs the day before Joe Harman had come to me, and I was expecting a letter from her any day now, because she used to write once a week, very regularly. If necessary, I could cable her to tell her his address in order that she might not leave Australia without seeing him, but there was no reason to lay all her cards before him at this stage.

I saw him off at the docks two days later, as I had seen Jean Paget a few months before. As I turned to go down the gangway he said gruffly,“Thank you for doing so much for me, Mr Strachan. I'll be writing from Midhurst.”And he shook my hand with a grip that made me wince, for all the injury his hand had suffered.

I turned to go down the gangway.“That's all right, Joe. You'll find a letter from Miss Paget when you get back home. You might even find more than that.”

I had reason for that last remark, because I had a letter from her in my pocket that had come by that day's post, and it was postmarked Willstown.