In the Grip of the Hawk: A Story of the Maori Wars
9781465674432
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The long-drawn, melancholy wail of the curlew rose and fell thrice in the garden, and Terence Moore went to the window and looked out into the clear moonlight. 'Is that you, George?' he hailed. 'Yes. Come out quietly; I want to talk to you.' Terence hung by his hands from the sill and dropped to the ground beside his visitor. 'What is the matter, George?' he inquired anxiously. 'Why won't you come in?' 'Because I wish to see you alone, and I don't want any one to know that I am here. You may as well hear it first as last, old fellow—I have left home.' 'I am not surprised. My only wonder is that you have stayed there so long,' Terence commented, lifting his tip-tilted nose still higher. 'Things have come to a head, you see,' explained George Haughton. 'The colonel struck me this evening, and though, of course, I don't mind that, yet I can't stand any longer the sort of life I have been forced to lead for the past year or two.' 'I am not surprised,' repeated Terence. 'Few fellows would have been as patient, I think. Wait a moment and I'll get my hat.' He was back again almost immediately, and, linking arms with George, drew him round the house to the front gate. These two had been friends from earliest childhood, though both in appearance and disposition they differed remarkably from one another. George Haughton, tall and commanding, finely made, with well-knit, muscular frame, fair, curling hair, and Saxon-blue eyes, was the very type of a healthy young Englishman. The other, Terence Moore, was blue-eyed also; but his shock of red hair, his densely freckled skin, the tilt of his nose, and his wide smiling mouth as plainly betrayed his Irish origin as did his name. He was much shorter than George, but his broad shoulders and extraordinary length of arm amply atoned for any deficiency in the matter of inches. Terence was a bushman to his finger-tips, and once had been heir to a fine estate, but on the death of his father, two years before the opening of this story, he had been left penniless. Mrs. Moore had died when her boy was but an infant, and so it happened that the lad lost parent, money and home at one stroke, for the creditors seized his father's station, along with everything upon it which could be turned into cash. Young Moore, then only eighteen, had not money enough to take up land and develop a new station, and though his dear friends, the Haughtons, would have helped him to any extent, he was too proud to become dependent, even upon them. So he started driving fat cattle from one part of the country to another, an occupation at once profitable and healthy. In the intervals of work he stayed in Sydney with his mother's sister; and thus securing the companionship of George Haughton, proceeded to make the latter still more discontented with his lot, by pouring into his ear all the moving incidents by flood and field which fall to the share of the gentleman-drover. To this sympathetic friend did George now confide the tale of the crisis of his long dispute with his father, to which Terence, anxious to secure a congenial companion during his long rides through the bush, replied by an earnest appeal to George to throw in his lot with his own.
