Next morning early she went through the French Pass—a
narrow gateway of rock, between bold headlands—so
narrow, in fact, that it seemed no wider than a street.
The current tore through there like a mill-race, and
the boat darted through like a telegram. The
passage was made in half a minute; then we were in
a wide place where noble vast eddies swept grandly
round and round in shoal water, and I wondered what
they would do with the little boat. They did
as they pleased with her. They picked her up
and flung her around like nothing and landed her gently
on the solid, smooth bottom of sand—so
gently, indeed, that we barely felt her touch it,
barely felt her quiver when she came to a standstill.
The water was as clear as glass, the sand on the
bottom was vividly distinct, and the fishes seemed
to be swimming about in nothing. Fishing lines
were brought out, but before we could bait the hooks
the boat was off and away again.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
Let us be grateful to Adam our benefactor. He
cut us out of the “blessing of idleness,”
and won for us the “curse of labor.”
—Pudd’nhead
Wilson’s New Calendar.
We soon reached the town of Nelson, and spent the
most of the day there, visiting acquaintances and
driving with them about the garden—the whole
region is a garden, excepting the scene of the “Maungatapu
Murders,” of thirty years ago. That is
a wild place—wild and lonely; an ideal place
for a murder. It is at the base of a vast, rugged,
densely timbered mountain. In the deep twilight
of that forest solitude four desperate rascals—Burgess,
Sullivan, Levy, and Kelley—ambushed themselves
beside the mountain-trail to murder and rob four travelers—Kempthorne,
Mathieu, Dudley, and De Pontius, the latter a New
Yorker. A harmless old laboring man came wandering
along, and as his presence was an embarrassment, they
choked him, hid him, and then resumed their watch for
the four. They had to wait a while, but eventually
everything turned out as they desired.
That dark episode is the one large event in the history
of Nelson. The fame of it traveled far.
Burgess made a confession. It is a remarkable
paper. For brevity, succinctness, and concentration,
it is perhaps without its peer in the literature of
murder. There are no waste words in it; there
is no obtrusion of matter not pertinent to the occasion,
nor any departure from the dispassionate tone proper
to a formal business statement—for that
is what it is: a business statement of a murder,
by the chief engineer of it, or superintendent, or
foreman, or whatever one may prefer to call him.
Copyrights
Following the Equator from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
