Mr Darwin's Shooter by Roger McDonald Read Free Book Online

around the floor.’ The last consideration in MacCracken’s thoughts was the saving of a life, for he believed the man as good as dead with an appendicular abscess, but not last in his actions, you can be sure, which were swift and useful.
    Covington parted his eyes a slit. Nothing else in him moved except his eyeballs, which followed MacCracken around the room. He observed that his saviour was a young man, lean-necked, tall, vital as a whip. He held his lancetsand scalpels to the light, and drew them across his thumbnail to test their sharpness.
    MacCracken kept himself calm. He had no great love of surgery, indeed had only recently begun in that business and doubted his wisdom already. Yet his hands were steady and more to the point he knew that if such advertisements for his skill as this Covington had ample pockets, then so much the better. For MacCracken fancied soon to select himself a slice of that wide-open land of Australia where he could put a man to manage livestock, and so guarantee himself regular percentages without having to dirty his feet in dust. It was how fortunes were made here if you were wise enough, and better than gold. And so was Covington his godsend? You may be sure he was.
    A pall of bushfire smoke rolled along the coast and suffused the harbour foreshores, entering the room where the patient lay and stinging the surgeon’s eyes. Without delay MacCracken administered ether using a glass jar as an improvised ‘ether dome’ (which he had seen demonstrated at Massachussetts General Hospital in Boston), and put Covington to the knife, delivering him of a free flow of pus with a rotten fecal odour.
    Covington blinked awake and found himself among the living. But which lot of people and where?
    â€˜Don,’ he croaked, and reached out a crippled hand.
    Where that ‘Don’ came from MacCracken had no idea, though it declared a bond of vehement familiarity between them that was to last.
    Say there was nothing between them at first except mistaken identity (who was this ‘Don’ at all?), and then that a quality thickened in the air between them—like a lens they could use to know each other better—one man adamant in his being, that man being Covington; and the other, the younger, MacCracken, with his limp brown hair and bony nose, ready for wisdom without having a clue that he was. Over the many days of Covington’s convalescence his lifehung in the balance, and all MacCracken could do was wash his wound in clean water and hope for its healing.
    The first time Covington spoke, MacCracken learned he was deaf as a mountain. His cheeks needed a good hard pinching. ‘Wake up, old dodger!’ But yelling did no good unless made hard against his ears.
    â€˜I had a shell!’ Covington shouted in the half-light.
    â€˜I threw it away,’ said MacCracken.
    â€˜Where is my shell?’
    â€˜ Gone! Vanished! ’
    â€˜Mind the reef!’ Covington shouted.
    â€˜Mr Covington,’ MacCracken held him by the shoulders, ‘ you are on dry land .’
    â€˜I had a shell!’ (etcetera).
    MacCracken flung wide the curtains. It was barely surprising that in his delirium Covington believed him self aboard a vessel, considering the fine chronometer MacCracken had on his wall and the proximity of sea-water breezes wafting through the window. There were books on tables and spilling from shelves, many with a nautical flavour, and in a corner alcove was a fine globe of the world of the sort favoured by ships’ captains. MacCracken rented the house from the widow of one.
    Covington narrowed his eyes and looked at his saviour with a cunning suspicion. MacCracken looked back at him lazily, now. He was an American on his way around the world from Boston, having come to rest in Australia after trying the gold rushes and exhausting his sense of adventure.
    Covington began to struggle again. ‘Don?’ he barked in his delirium. MacCracken