Page 205 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

‘Now, my lads,’ says Rex—who seemed to have endured
the cast-off authority of Frere—‘we give you your choice.
Stay at Hell’s Gates, or come with us!’
The soldiers paused, irresolute. To join the mutineers
meant a certainty of hard work, with a chance of ultimate
hanging. Yet to stay with the prisoners was—as far as they
could see— to incur the inevitable fate of starvation on a
barren coast. As is often the case on such occasions, a trifle
sufficed to turn the scale. The wounded Grimes, who was
slowly recovering from his stupor, dimly caught the mean-
ing of the sentence, and in his obfuscated condition of
intellect must needs make comment upon it. ‘Go with him,
ye beggars!;’ said he, ‘and leave us honest men! Oh, ye’ll get
a tying-up for this.’
The phrase ‘tying-up’ brought with it recollection of the
worst portion of military discipline, the cat, and revived in
the minds of the pair already disposed to break the yoke
that sat so heavily upon them, a train of dismal memories.
The life of a soldier on a convict station was at that time a
hard one. He was often stinted in rations, and of necessity
deprived of all rational recreation, while punishment for of-
fences was prompt and severe. The companies drafted to the
penal settlements were not composed of the best material,
and the pair had good precedent for the course they were
about to take.
‘Come,’ says Rex, ‘I can’t wait here all night. The wind is
freshening, and we must make the Bar. Which is it to be?’
‘We’ll go with you!’ says the man who had pulled the
stroke in the whale-boat, spitting into the water with avert-

0 For the Term of His Natural Life