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Title:      Landtakers: The Story of an Epoch (1934)
Author:     Brian Penton (1904-1951)
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.:  0200851.txt
Edition:    1
Language:   English
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Date first posted:          November 2002
Date most recently updated: November 2002

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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Landtakers: The Story of an Epoch (1934)
Author:     Brian Penton (1904-1951)




For Jacques Kahane


A perilous crossing, a perilous journeying, a perilous looking
back, a perilous trembling and hesitating.

--ZARATHUSTRA




CONTENTS

I.  SIN, SWEAT, AND SORROW

II.  WASTELANDS

III.  THE DARK DEMON

IV.  CHANGE

V.  A PERILOUS CROSSING





I

SIN, SWEAT, AND SORROW



Chapter One

JOHNNY NEWCOME


Derek Cabell glared round at the ramshackle buildings of the
Moreton Bay Penal Settlement.  His gesture of impatience, failing
even to startle the dog, which slept on with its nose to its tail,
or the drowsy horse he had tethered to his boot, only confirmed his
deep sense of personal futility.

Red earth and blue sky met in the jagged line of a near horizon.
In the middle of this vault stood the settlement--a prison within a
prison.  Shanties built of black bark twisted by the fierce sun,
with crazy-shaped doors and glassless windows.  Jail and barracks
of stone.  A yellow stone windmill.  A long, dusty, empty street.
Sheep, a few cows, pigs, wide patches of yellow Indian corn.  At
one side of the valley a river shimmered in the sunlight; at each
end of the valley the bush.  Into illimitable blue distance it
faded, across unexplored mountains and plains, grey, motionless and
silent.

His eyes screwed up against the harsh light, his boyish features
matted in lines of discontent, Cabell sat on the side of the road
and bitterly compared this crude scene with an image of his native
Dorset village.  The violence with which he beat at the flies
buzzing in a black cloud round his face and neck revealed the
intensity of his feelings.

A detachment of soldiers and yellow-clad convicts approached from
the other end of the street as though upon air.  Only the rattle of
a chain here and there was to be heard, for the dust was inches
thick and soft as powder.  It rose in clouds from their feet and
cast a smoky shadow on the ground.

With undisguised contempt Cabell watched the detachment go by.
There were men of all sizes, in every stage of decrepitude.
Shuffling feet, round shoulders, faces prematurely aged by sun,
hard work and under-nourishment.  The soldiers' uniforms were
unbuttoned and dirty.  Dust and sweat mixed in the lines of their
withered faces.  Of the convicts few were unmarked by disease or
mishap.  The scarlet rash of poisoned blood covered their arms like
long gloves.  Black stumps of teeth showed through their lax
mouths.  Legs dragged heavily that had been broken and badly set.
Hands lacked fingers.  And bitten deeply into all, convicts and
soldiers alike, was the pockmark of spirits desolated by ennui and
despair.

The detachment having halted in the shadow of a stone arch farther
up the street, Cabell turned his attention gloomily to an old man,
with a face like a dried-up orange in colour and texture, who was
lying stretched out under a bullock-dray that had halted in the
middle of the road.  Flies were crawling over the old man's face
and exploring his open mouth.  But Deaf Mickey Moran, Mickey the
Shellback, who had seen twenty years of life in her Majesty's great
jailyard, Australia, who had been starved, ironed, flogged, frozen
and sunstruck while his skin had become a nerveless, calloused
hide, was not likely to lose any sleep for a few flies.  (Had there
not been a time when he had eaten flies and been glad of them?)  He
slept with his face in the dust and snored like a pig.

Cabell called the old man:  "Mickey!  Wake up, confound you."  He
spoke in a petulant way, and when the old man did not move, his
full, red lower lip thrust out like a spoiled child's.  "I'll wake
you up," he muttered, and, seizing a stick from the ground, threw
it with all his strength at the old man's head.  It ricocheted off
the bony skull and hit the dog sleeping behind him.  The dog
growled.

Mickey opened his eyes and looked at the dog.  "What's wrong with
ye?" he grumbled at it.  "Lie down."

"Mickey Moran," Cabell said, venting his bottled-up feelings on the
old man, "why don't you answer when I call you?"

Mickey turned the lobe of an enormous ear with the tips of fingers
that seemed to be wearing away with labour.  "Master?"

"How many?" Cabell shouted, pointing up the street.  "How many have
they got to do?"

Mickey reflected.  "That's what I don't know exactly, master," he
said.  "Ten or more, I reckon it is.  There's Shake Brown for
nickin' over the fance and pinchin' some plums out of the Cove's
garden, and the two young divils was with him.  There's that nigger
went to sleep mindin' the Jim Crows last week and let half an acre
get et up.  There's Punch Judah for smokin'."  He counted them off
slowly on his fingers.

"Ten!"  Cabell struck viciously at a fly on his neck.  "Hours," he
said.  "Curse them!"

"Hours," Mickey repeated, and lay down in the dust again.

Cabell pulled his cabbage-tree hat on to his head.  Hours.  How
they leaked away in this cursed place!  Hours, days, weeks, months.
The blood of your best years, how it drained out unnoticed in this
land of tons of time!  In a burst of wilful pessimism he tormented
himself with a vision of a Derek Cabell forty years hence, still
sitting by the side of this road and waiting for the fulfilment of
unmaturing dreams.  He positively sweated with fear as he looked at
that figure, which was really Mickey Moran with the addition of a
few horrible features glimpsed in the ranks of the convicts.

In an instant he was on his feet, driven by an irresistible anxiety
to do something.  He untied the reins from his boot, tightened the
girth, and climbed into the saddle.  The horse started, woke,
shuffled forward a few paces, and stopped.  Its head drooped to the
ground again.  The dog did not even bother to look up, as though it
realized the impotence of this gesture when there was literally
nothing to do and nowhere to go.

People were coming out of the houses now and going towards the
arch, where quite a crowd had collected.  It looked like a prayer-
meeting and was as quiet as one.  Some settlers sat loosely on
their horses, watching over the heads of the soldiers or talking to
each other.  An aboriginal strode past and mingled with the people.
He carried a spear and wore a dirty blanket over his shoulder.  On
his right foot he had a boot, which was nearly crippling him.
Behind came his wife with a wicker basket on her shoulder.  The
basket contained a dead kitten, a sheep's head and some crusts.
She was nearly stark naked, and grease dripped off her hair and ran
down her breasts and back like sweat.

Cabell pulled his horse on to the road and ambled to the arch.  One
of the horsemen nodded and said "Still here?"

"Still here," Cabell grumbled, reining.

Shyly his eyes appraised, from white sunbonnet to heavily booted
feet, the woman to whom this man had been talking.  One big red
hand held a child to her breast, the other grasped the bridle of a
restive horse and a heavy riding crop.  She was about thirty years
old, grim about the eyes and mouth, but--a woman.

"It's nearly through, Mrs Duffy," the horseman who had greeted
Cabell told her.  "And a good job they're making of it for ye."

She grunted impatiently.  "It won't teach him nothing," she said.
"He'll be drunk again tomorrow."

"Och!" the horseman chided her, laughing.  "Take him in hand
yeself, why don't ye, then?  Ye'll be a widder within this year,
him drinking like that."

She showed him a pair of sunken dark eyes.  Vestiges of a fast-
vanishing prettiness clung to her, of a girlish charm that had once
curved her flat cheeks and softened the bony frame.  "That man, he
was a good husband once, Mr Flanagan," she said.  "That's before he
got into his bit of trouble and come here.  Now he's nothing but a
sly, brawling, soaking good-for-nothing."  She spat into the dust.
"I'm as good as a widder now, that's tellin' ye square."

Flanagan bent down.  "Remember I'll be comin' across about that cow
next week, won't ye?"

"I'll be seeing you."  She nodded and turned away.

Flanagan joined Cabell and they rode off down the street together.

"There's a woman for ye," Flanagan chuckled.  "Brings her husband
in once a month to be flogged.  She took up some land and got him
assigned to her.  But she don't take no lip.  She just waits till
he's drunk himself asleep, claps the darbies on him, hooks him up
to her stirrup, and brings him in for fifty on the bare back.  And
no questions asked."

Cabell was silent, thinking about her, about women, white women.
Soft, round Dorset faces with cherry-coloured cheeks and red lips.
Girls with soft voices who smelt like milk; the girls in Owerbury
high street on Sunday morning.  His black eyebrows drew together.

Flanagan was thoughtful, too.  He stroked his downy, fair beard,
behind which a youthful face, browner than Cabell's and more
amiable and sly, concealed itself.  "I saw her come up the street
six years ago," he said.  "Just a bit of a sheilagh, and a more
nicely spoken one never come out of Ireland."  His grey eyes
grew sad.  "She's not like that now.  Still . . . ten thousand
sheep. . . .  And a woman at that!  That's sayin' a lot."

They had arrived at a grog shanty, a tumbled-down one-roomed shed
built of bark.  The place was full of men drinking, many drunk.  It
was dark, because it had no windows and a door just wide enough to
squeeze through, and smelt of sweat, dust and rum.  A bar, made of
bark slabs nailed on saplings driven into the earth floor, cut off
one corner.  A couple of logs and boxes provided the only seats.

Flanagan shouted loud greetings round the room--a popular man; but
Cabell hesitated in the doorway, repelled, as always, by the faces
which turned to look at them.  Whatever had been there of
friendliness, forbearance and common human decency, life had scored
out with her crudest die.  The skin hung to their skulls like
shrunk leather, their eyes had retreated into deep sockets and were
calculating and suspicious; their lips pressed tightly together so
that no colour showed.  Their harsh voices, their ungracious
gestures, their watchfulness uncovered for him suddenly the surface
of a life in which men had not yet made the social contract that
softens the brutality of "everyone for himself".  At least, so it
seemed to him.

Really the scene was commonplace enough: a number of settlers with
unkempt beards and dusty clothes who passed the time drinking while
their convict servants were being flogged; a few soldiers, drunk
and quarrelsome, and half a dozen bodies stretched out in the dirt,
dead drunk.  But for some reason he never forgot it.  Long after
Pat Dennis's pub had changed, he was given to talking about "that
mob at Pat Dennis's" with a curious inflexion of contempt and fear.
In his mind those faces and voices became a symbol, apparently, of
all the ruthless, unscrupulous, man-against-man struggle that was
the life of this epoch.

He would have gone away at once only Flanagan had already ordered a
drink for him, so he shouldered through the crush and took the
sticky glass which the barman, Pat Dennis, had filled with the only
liquor he sold--a villainous, black, thick mixture of rum, tobacco
juice and bluestone.  Flies blackened the top of the bar, the
walls, the faces of the drunks fallen asleep; flies buzzed in the
thick air, brawled over the barman's ragged beard, bred and
eternally replenished their voracious stock in the bunches of gum-
leaves hung from the ceiling.

"Hev yez heard about Bill Purves?" the barman asked them when they
put their glasses down.

"Drinking himself off the hooks again?" Flanagan said.

"He'll never no more taste liquor.  He's been burnt in half,"
Dennis told him.

"Burnt in half?"

"Sure.  Last week it was.  Takes the short cut through Mahoney's
scrub that was burning off.  Wind blows up.  Down comes a stinking
great hunk of timber on him.  Smashes his arm and leg to
smithereens and pins him underneath.  After a bit he comes round,
sees the fire's in the butt, hollers himself hoarse, then writes a
note to his old woman on a bit of bark.  One of Mahoney's blacks
tracked him down yest'y.  Head and shoulders here, legs there, heap
of ashes in between.  Clean as a whistle."

The drinkers round about listened, but none of them made any
comment except Carney, an ex-convict who was in a fair way to
becoming a rich squatter.  "Now, if I'd 'a known that," he said,
preening a tobacco-stained beard, "I'd 'a been down there like a
shot to cheer up that pore widder."

His friend Curry, another ex-convict, spat scornfully.  "You!  You
ain't got the condition for cheerin' up a widder like that one.  
'D be like puttin' one of them skinny Welsh bulls in with my cows. 
'D be a widder in a week again, she would."

Laughter dismissed the tragic end of Purves.  Pat Dennis was
already telling them how Darrow, a young Englishman, had been
cleared out by the scab and had nearly drunk himself into the D.T.s
with worry.

An institution, this barman, in a land where men lived far apart
and news was hard to come by.  Like many others in the room, he was
an Old Hand, had done time for sheep-stealing.  But he was fat now
and prosperous-looking, despite the dirt crusted on his singlet and
trousers.  They said that when he started the grog shanty a year
before he had bought a hophead of rum and had never bought any
more.  But man must drink, and there was nothing else to drink.  In
a place where everybody knew everybody else, men would have taken
even worse drink than this from a news-vendor such as he was.  He
had information about events that had happened only a month ago in
Sydney, five hundred miles away, as well as stories of murders,
hangings, abscondings and calamities among their common
acquaintances.  His little ferret eyes sparkled when he told them
about disaster and death, and promised it with knowing winks when
he could only report someone's lucky strike.  It was noticeable
that the first kind of news never failed to silence the bar, while
the second got only a few grunts and doubtful head-shakings.

"Rain coming, gents?" he asked Flanagan, pointing through the door
at the line of cloud that daily formed along the horizon of the
thirsty valley.

They looked at it hopefully for a moment or two and listened to its
faraway muttering.

Flanagan shook his head.  "That's not rain, Pat.  That's only God's
bloody gammon," he said.

"Well, it rained down Waring Downs week before last," Pat said,
naming a place two hundred miles away.  "Inch and a half in half an
hour.  And when the blessed thing stopped its racketing there
wasn't a damned beast breathing on the place.  Drownded
everything."  He rubbed his podgy hands cheerfully.

"'Tis a fine country," Flanagan laughed.  "If you ain't killed with
the sunstroke or drove loony for the want of decent company or
poisoned with Pat's liquor, 'tis drownded you'll be.  A real and
regular God's own country, as they say."

Dennis leant across the bar, winked, and nudged him.  "That's the
God's truth, surely," he said.  "Hev yez heard what's happened at
Peppiott's?"

"Not Jack Peppiott?" Cabell put in, ready to defend a man who was,
unlike so many of the others, a free settler and not without the
elements of decency.

Dennis nodded and pointed to the corner of the room farthest from
the bar.  A man was sitting on a box; his hands, on his knees,
gripped a bottle and a glass.  He was a big man with a fine head
and intelligent eyes.  They were fixed on the ground, brooding with
a terrible look of impotent rage.  Without raising his eyes, he
blindly filled the glass and drained it.

"Peppiott drunk!" Flanagan said, surprised.

"Swore he'd never come in here," Dennis said, smiling.  "But they
all come sooner or later to get away from it.  Every dog has his
day, they reckon."  He nodded two or three times.  "But he ain't
drunk, though he'd give half his guts to be; I'll swear he would."

"What's the matter?" Flanagan asked.

Dennis chuckled.  "What d'you think?  Comes home suddenly and finds
his old woman locked up in the storeroom with one of the lags.  He
flogs them both half to death with a stockwhip, grabs his gun and
goes out lookin' for his brats to finish them off.  But he couldn't
find them nowhere, so he comes down here.  He ought to be blind
with the stuff he's soaked up in the last twelve hours, and he
ain't turned a hair."

"Mrs Peppiott!" Cabell said, horrified.

Flanagan's grey eyes opened wide.  "I'll be damned.  There's a
woman I'd've said . . .  Well, and she the daughter of an English
lord!"

Dennis winked his little black eyes.  "It's all fair on top with
them and black as Newgate's knocker inside."

Cabell's cheeks darkened.  The anger that had been working in him
all day flushed a stream of hot blood through his body.  He glared
round at the company and listened to their conversation: four
topics reiterated with endless, monotonous violence--sheep, women,
schemes to get more cheap convict labour, and the prospect of a
drought that would rape their possessions from them.  He wanted to
tell them that he loathed them.  He wanted to stand beside Peppiott
and protect him against their sly, knowing glances.  But his tongue
was frozen.

He was very young, not quite twenty-two years old.  He was
homesick.  He was lonely.  He had just seen a woman who was once
young and pretty watching her husband flogged.  He had heard of
death coming in a horrible way to a man he knew.  He had so far
hardly understood the tragedy at Peppiott's, but he had caught a
glimpse of Peppiott's eyes and had seen in them the shadow of pain.
What he felt was something more intimate than sympathy.  The
sufferings of these people became his own.  It was perhaps a kind
of self-pity he felt.  It became sheer terror of the country in
which such things could happen and of the men who could stand by
and not be moved to horror by them.

"These la-di-dah women," Pat Dennis was saying, "they've all got
the itch if you only knew."

Cabell found his tongue.  "Don't you talk like that about Mrs
Peppiott!" he said angrily, reaching over the bar and giving Dennis
a shove.  "She's--she's a lady."

Dennis looked surprised.  "What's that?  A lady?"

"A lady, yes," Cabell told him.  "And in case you don't know what
that is, it's a woman who wouldn't put her foot where your shadow
had been."

"So's yer old woman," Dennis grumbled, not quite understanding.

Two little white spots spread out in a fan shape from the corners
of Cabell's eyes, and the nostrils of his thin nose widened.
Dennis jumped away from the bar, expecting to be hit.

"You scum!  You dare--"

"Here, me boy, me boy," Flanagan hastily intervened.  "What's it
bitin' ye at all then?"

Cabell shook himself free.  "To hear that--dirty brute talk you
wouldn't think it was Peppiott who got him a ticket-of-leave, would
you?"  He pointed at the door.  "Why, he'd be rattling his chains
out there still if it weren't for Peppiott."

Dennis's mouth closed like a trap and his little eyes sank back
into their sockets.  He muttered and went off to the other end of
the bar.

Flanagan grinned.  "That's one won't dance at your wedding, me boy,
nor forget to spit in your noggin if he gets the chance."

"What do I care?  He WAS a lag," Cabell said.  "Now he's a--a
swine."

"Come, come!"  Flanagan slapped his shoulder.  "You've got to get
over them Nancy English ways.  We're all the Lord God's swine
together here.  A civil tongue and a blind eye's more use than all
them high-and-mighty sentiments.  You won't make no friends
without."

"Friends!"  Cabell flared up again.  "Think I want friends here?"
He gestured round the bar.  "Floggers," he grumbled.  "That's all
they are.  The whole lot of them.  There's nothing in this country
but a lot of floggers and jailbirds."  He had a swift vision of the
continent, silent and unfriendly, dotted here and there with such
clearings as this, pinpoints on its verge, peopled by such men as
he had seen marching down the street, with men like these Currys
and Carneys for their masters, all hating it, hating each other,
hating those who were not like them, not scarred and starved and
ironed, hating their unending exile, and sending down into the
future their passionate hatred.

"Yes, you're right.  We're all the same.  Offscourings," he said
irritably.  "We're only here because we're not wanted in England.
And, floggers or not, we all hate, hate, hate all the time.  We
hate the place.  We hate each other.  We hate those that sent us
here."  He paused to take a deep breath and looked up with
passionate, dark eyes.  By contrast with the eyes of his companion,
which watched him from afar as it were, detached and cool but
thoughtful, what secrets of a young and tormented spirit were here
exposed!  They stared out defiantly, but their gaze shifted
watchfully from side to side.  The heavy black eyebrows had learned
a trick of supercilious disparagement, but the eyes were fixed on
Flanagan's face with the peculiar anxiety of one beseeching to be
understood and reassured.  They were at once wide and frank,
withdrawn and distrustful.  A first glance was struck by their
ingenuous clarity; a second by the suggestion of thoughts cunningly
concealed behind the mask of youthful uncertainty.  From all this a
shrewd observer would have decided that Cabell was at that stage of
development where the spirit has broken adrift from its old
moorings and wanders blindly in search of new ones.

He frowned and pushed his soft, shaven chin into Flanagan's face.
"I've got four brothers in England," he said bitterly.  "THEY sent
me here, and by God don't I hate them!"  The tan on his cheek went
a shade darker and his voice, dropping suddenly to an undertone,
took on a vibration of concentrated venom that surprised even
Flanagan, who had been following his outburst with mildly
conciliatory attempts to make him finish his drink.

Cabell pushed the glass away.  "'Just the place for you.'  That's
what they told me.  'Freedom.  Money.  Fine life.'  Ach!  Look at
it."  He seized Flanagan by the shoulder and pointed through the
door.  "A damned graveyard."

His voice was so urgent that some of the tough Old Hands standing
near glanced involuntarily at the bush, whose heartbreaking
indifference, immensity and loneliness they had only too many
reasons to know.  Not a quiver in the grey leaves.  Only a
shimmering veil of brazen sunlight hardening the earth and turning
the scant pastures to powder.

"Money out of that ground, eh?" Cabell muttered.  "Money out of
scab and footrot?  Fine life, isn't it?  Oh, a fine life for the
flies and the bugs and the lice and the fleas.  And what about
freedom in a jailyard fifty times as wide as England?"  He dropped
a discouraged hand.  "I hate it," he said rather pathetically.  "I
loath it.  It's so different from England, this eternal, cursed,
colourless bush."

"Well now," Flanagan said soothingly.  "What you want, me boy, is
just a good dose of Holloway's.  Isn't it now?"

"No, it isn't," Cabell said.  "I know what I want.  I ought to get
like these. . . ."  He substituted a gesture round the bar for a
word.  "Well, I won't.  There.  I'll cut my throat first."  He
glared defiantly.

"Get along with ye," Flanagan urged him.  "'Tis a bit too much of
Pat's poison ye've got wandering loose in ye brain pan."  He gave
Cabell a shove and steered him towards the door.

"There now," Curry grunted as they passed him.  "There's a cocky
upstart for ye."

"Thinks he's too bloody good for us," Carney said.

Flanagan hastened him out.  He had his own reasons for taking an
abusive young new chum under his wing in the face of the general
disapproval which now showed itself in howls and catcalls and a
stream of black spittle that just missed Cabell's boot.  His sly
wink to them said as much.

Cabell had just reached the door when he heard a voice call "Hey
you, limejuicer, Johnny Newcome!"  Turning, he found that Peppiott,
whom he had quite forgotten in his excitement, was following him
unsteadily across the room.

"I want to tell you something," Peppiott said, taking him apart
from Flanagan.  But at that moment his eye lighted on Cabell's dog,
which was busy scratching off its surplus fleas in the doorway.
Peppiott frowned, ran to the door and kicked the dog savagely.  He
turned on Cabell.  "Don't keep sluts," he said.  "What d'you want
to keep a slut for?"

"It's not a slut," Cabell told him.  "It's a dog."

"Ah, don't tell me--they're all sluts," Peppiott shouted.  "They
make the house stink.  Use somebody else's."

Cabell stared at him.  His eyes were bloodshot but sane.

Flanagan tapped Cabell's shoulder.  "Aw, leave the old gazebo.
He's drunk."

"Do you think I'm drunk?" Peppiott asked.

"No," Cabell said.

He held Cabell's arm tightly.  "You think you know all about it.
But you don't.  Look here, can you wait?"

"Now?" Cabell asked.

"No, not now.  Can you wait till you're good for nothing else?"  He
gazed intently into Cabell's eyes for several seconds.  Then he
shook his head.  "You're as good as done for," he said.  "If there
were tigers, you'd be all right."

Cabell tried to withdraw his arm, but Peppiott dug his nails in.
He came closer, till his breath, stinking from all the bad liquor
he had swallowed, burned on Cabell's cheek.  "I'll tell you
something," he said.  "There are no tigers.  Nothing happens.
That's the curse of it.  You pray for something to startle you,
something to shoot at.  But--nothing happens.  D'you understand?"

"I think so," Cabell said.

"No you don't," Peppiott replied impatiently.  "You'd hang
yourself."  He trembled through all his body, as though chilled to
the bone.  "Look here," he said.  "I had a place right out in the
Never Never.  I was a nipper like you.  It had three inches of
soil.  We got a drought.  I waited two years.  One day a wind came
and blew the dirt right out of the ground and piled it up against
the trees.  Next day the rain started, but there was only the clay
left."

"Yes, I do understand," Cabell told him.

"You're cocked up," Peppiott said.  "You think it depends on you.
But it doesn't.  It'll just break you and change you and break you
again.  If you had the patience of fifty stone sphinxes you might
see it through--or go mad."

The despair in his voice brought a look of pity into Cabell's eyes.
This seemed to strike Peppiott like a fist.  He jerked his head
back, glared, and thrust Cabell away.

Cabell pulled his hat straight and prepared to follow Flanagan.

Peppiott watched him sulkily for a moment, then burst into a wild
laugh.  "Ah," he shouted.  "Mister Bloody Cabell.  He knows what a
lady is, he does.  Well, here's to you, Mister Cabell.  Long life
to you.  And here's to the day when you find yourself bogged in the
country with a LADY hanging round YOUR NECK."  He drained his glass
melodramatically, raised it above his head, and crushed it in his
hand.

Bewildered, Cabell watched the blood run down Peppiott's wrist and
soak into his sleeve.

"And as for you," Peppiott was shouting, "you prison louse, take
that!" and he flung the bottle at Dennis's head.  Dennis dived
behind the bar and the bottle smashed to pieces on the wall.

The crowd laughed.  "Good old Peppiott."

"Go it, Peppiott."

"Buy a goat, Peppiott," Carney said.  "It saves you a lot of
trouble."

Cabell turned and ran after Flanagan.

They rode some distance up the street before Flanagan spoke.
"Ye're daft, ye fool; ye're daft.  Now, fancy breaking out on a
single drink like that!"

"Oh, it's not the drink," Cabell said wearily.  "It's my sheep.
I've nearly gone crazy thinking about them."

Flanagan stroked his beard and sideways considered his companion's
face, by contrast almost girlish with its soft contours and olive
skin and the long, thin, sensitive nose and red lips.  "That's a
ginger bastard, that McGovern," he agreed.  "He'll steal the fleas
off a dog if it didn't watch him."

"Watch?" Cabell said helplessly.

They passed a field of corn where the crow-minder was going round
and round with his rattle, stirring up hordes of black crows that
seated themselves on the fence until he had passed, then settled
into the corn again.  The futility of this idiotic labour pressed
upon Cabell an infuriating sense of his own powerlessness.

"How the devil can I watch?  I can't be everywhere on a fifty-mile
run at once, can I?"

"There'll be some more gone when you get back," Flanagan suggested.

"Of course.  That's why he sent me down here to get the boy
flogged.  He's getting worse every day, too.  Oh, I could murder
him."

"Mind your step there, me boy," Flanagan warned him.  "That's an
old trick of his, to fasten the thought of murder on you.  He'll
kill you on the spot and prove it was your own doing."

"But why don't the men split on him?" Cabell demanded.  "They must
know what he does with what he steals."

Flanagan winked and pointed at the crowd of convicts and soldiers
and settlers gathered round the arch, past which they were riding.
A voice was cursing, threatening, yelling "Hit on the back, you
dirty flogger!" which told them that O'Duffy, the flogger, was up
to his old trick of making the lash curl round under the belly,
where no protective crust of calloused weals had grown.

"While they've got breath in their bodies he can flog out or
starved bellies he can stuff with double rations, you'll have a
hard job coaxing anything about your lost sheep out of them boys,"
Flanagan said.  "I tried that.  Last month he lifted that bit of a
stallion I bought in Sydney."

"Not the roan?"

"The same."  Flanagan nodded.  "You're not the only poor sod who
would like to see that one laid out.  There've been cattle
disappearing around here for a long time.  But them hills behind
Murrumburra is worse than a fly trap.  I know.  I've been lost in
them."

Discouragement got the better of Cabell.  He put his hand
impulsively on Flanagan's arm.  "You're stocking up again," he
said.  "Take what I've got left and let me get out of this place.
I'll start farther away on my own."

Flanagan's grey eyes concealed a sly thought as he replied
disparagingly, "What's a thousand of them poor jumbucks to me?"

They pulled up at the bullock-dray.  Mickey was laying down the law
to a lad in convict's clothes who gazed at him with the loosened
eyes and mouth of one wandering in some limbo of terrifying
phantoms.  The youth was a little older than Cabell, as thin as a
rake, with a dirty down covering his chin and hollow cheeks, and
pink-rimmed lashless eyes.  He did not seem young, but old and
withered and diseased, and looked more like a half-starved white
mouse than anything else.

"What're ye grumbling about at all?" Mickey mocked him.  "Didn't ye
get a trip and two days in town; didn't ye, darlin'?  And didn't
the master here give ye a hunk of bacca, eh?  Yer lout, yer!"

Cabell bent down and shouted roughly in the boy's ear.  "You better
get up on the load."

"Well, when did I get made a coachman for lags," Mickey complained,
stumping angrily up and down as the lad climbed into the cart.  "By
Henie, no one never carried me home after a floggin'.  And who's
goin' to catch it if he bleeds on the Cove's tobacco, eh?"

"Now, if I was in your place," Flanagan said confidentially, "I'd
make them canary-birds sing."

"But how, how?"

"Ah, get along with ye."  Flanagan laughed.  "Ye're too softhearted
to kill the flies in yer tea."  Then, serious, he added:  "Listen,
honey.  McGovern's promised Carney five hundred head of Durhams and
three thousand ewes in lamb.  Now that's the three thousand they
lost down at Finney's last year when the shepherds took to the
bush.  They're worth something to me if I can get them.  And the
roan stallion--ye'd make a slave of me for life if ye delivered
that back.  See?  Use your brains, me boy, and you'll set yourself
up for a new start.  Good day till I see ye."  Before Cabell could
reply he put his horse into a trot and was off down the road.

Mickey's fourteen-foot bullock-whip cracked echoes out of the hill,
the bullocks stirred, and a cloud of hot dust rose around them,
concealing within a few minutes all sign of earth or sky.

Cabell rode ahead, thoughtfully.

In the river an abo stood waist-deep, spearing fish.  Motionless he
stood, as everything else in this sad, grey world was motionless.
Two gins with pendulous black-nippled breasts sat on the bank
watching him.  Heat quivered from the stone walls of the barracks,
from the slab roofs of the houses.  Noiseless on the padded streets
the ghosts of ten bullocks and a lame convict followed Cabell
through the red haze.

Just outside the town they passed another cornfield.  The crow-
minder was sitting on the edge of the road, staring vacantly into
the distance.  The crows lined the fences, the branches of the
trees, and discussed with sardonic chatter their conquered
adversary.  But there was one they could not defeat.  He stood in
the middle of the cornfield--a scarecrow made from the skin of an
abo flayed for the purpose and stuffed with straw.  Against the
empty, burnished sky he tried to raise his jet-black arms, but they
were broken at the elbows.  The straw was beginning to come out at
the eyes and nostrils.



Chapter Two

AN OLD MAN AND SOME DAGUERROTYPES


Perhaps I ought to make it clear that very little of this story is
imaginative.  Until a few years ago there were quite a number of
old people in our district who had been with Cabell in the early
days.  They were all good storytellers, and it needed very little
to set them going.  There was one old fellow named Sambo who could
remember back as far as 1840.  How old Sambo was nobody could
guess, but time had begun to rub his features away, as weather
wears away the nose of a stone statue.  He was terribly scornful of
the days into which he had arrived, and if any of us youngsters
tried to defend ourselves he would immediately produce a story that
threw over our pretentious bravado the gigantic and belittling
shadow of the past.

Then, of course, there are the memoirs and reminiscences of the
early settlers, of which at this time the best of Australian
literature is composed, the gossip handed down in the old families
of our district, the letters that have been preserved, including
Cabell's own letters to his sister Harriet in Dorset.  These begin
with Cabell's arrival in Sydney in 1842 and end with a remarkable
document which marks the end of an epoch in his life and the
opening up of the country.

I think I could have reconstructed nearly the whole of Cabell's
life in Australia from these letters and the things I heard people
tell about him.  But I doubt whether I would have had the impulse
to do so if I had not known Cabell himself--as a very old and
lonely man.  A large part of this book came from his own lips.

Every evening as the sun was sinking he would come out on to the
veranda and seat himself in the rocking-chair which no one else
dared to touch.  For me it was almost a fantastic thing, that
battered old relic out of the past which the storytellers had made
as horrifying as a nightmare to my young imagination.  For the old
man it was the past made tangible.  As his long, thin arms rubbed
slowly up and down the scored and twisted arms he began to talk to
himself, a habit all bushmen get through living alone.  Sometimes
he would talk out quite loud in a curious, sad tone, as though
renouncing something precious.  But most frequently he would begin
to whisper to himself, covertly, suspiciously.  The whisper would
grow into a mutter.  I would be hiding behind the flowerpot-stand
or under the veranda, where glaring toadstools grew on the house
stumps and lizards watched me with open mouths.  I would be as
motionless as they, listening, longing to run away from the things
he was remembering, yet frozen by the fascination of my horror.

Growing up in a period when Australians had begun to feel in
themselves the germ of a new people and to fumble for words to
express themselves, I often wondered what roots that new psyche was
coming from.  Then it struck me that the answer was somewhere in
the life of this old man and his generation.  If I could piece
together the picture of that epoch as I had inherited it from him--
the savage deeds, the crude life, the hatred between men and men
and men and country, the homesickness, the loneliness, the despair
of inescapable exile in the bush; the strange forms of madness and
cruelty; the brooding, inturned characters; and, joined with this,
an almost fanatic idealism which repudiated the past and the
tyranny of the past and looked to the future in a new country for a
new heaven and earth, a new justice; on the one hand the social
outcasts, men broken by degradation and suffering, on the other the
adventurers: blackest pessimism balancing the most radiant
optimism--if I could only SEE all this, then I would understand.

Nowadays it is very difficult to see as they saw.  Our eyes have
grown used to the grey trees with their thin metallic foliage, the
forests of a prehistoric time that stood, just as they are now,
long, long before men began to crawl about the earth.  The vast
emptiness of the western plains, scarred by drought and flood and
bush-fire, today as desolate as the Sahara, tomorrow as lush as an
English meadow, the dry gullies, forty feet deep, that became
torrential rivers overnight, the sad silence of the bush, and the
subhuman people who inhabit it--these things are commonplace to us,
even beautiful; but a hundred years ago, to eyes fresh from the
soft countryside of England, that is like a full-bodied woman
holding her children tenderly to her breast, the new continent was
fantastically alien.

Settling it was quite a different matter from settling Africa and
America.  The story is not at all the same.  There was nothing
spectacular in the country to break the dead monotony and
loneliness of the life--no tigers, as Peppiott put it.  A man just
had to learn to wait--or go mad.  Really all these early settlers
were just slightly off the hinges: not, as one generally conceives
them, simple people, simple honest backwoodsmen.  Loneliness, ennui
and impatience took strange psychological shape in them.  And they
were not ordinary men.  The time and the circumstances bred
enormous hatreds, enormous greeds, and their struggles with the
incredible land, even allowing that the romantic mists of time
magnify all things, were saga-like.

Three questions have puzzled me for a long time.  Why, I have often
wondered, did men like Cabell, hating the country so much, keeping
themselves going with the hope that every wretched day brought them
nearer to England, which their nostalgic fancy had turned into a
promised land--Paradise itself--why did they never go back?  Was it
possible that, although they talked of it continually and always
seemed to be scheming for it, men really did not want happiness,
but even ran away from it as from a plague?  Could it be true what
Cabell said in the last letter he wrote to his sister, that "a man
might want to go back where he had been happy, but it would stop at
that.  Where he'd had his hard times--that was where he would
stay"?

A second question occurred to me quite recently, when I visited
Dorset and saw the house where he was born.  It stands just outside
the village of Owerbury.  There are still only ten white cottages
in the place, with mossy green thatched roofs like seabirds resting
with folded wings in the shelter of the downs.  It has changed very
little since the morning Cabell saw it for the last time.  It is a
lovely place.  The house is very old--Elizabethan, I imagine--built
of red irregular bricks with weatherworn chimneys.  Mosses have
filled up a deep crack across one of the walls.  A gorsebush was
glowing in the corner of the garden, just as Cabell often described
it, and there were the same flowers and herbs and shaven English
lawns, which seem as though they must be swept up every day.  The
village begins at the fretted iron gates, and at the bottom of the
village street is the sea, lazily eating away the chalk cliff on
one side and piling up shingle on the other.

At the house I saw a daguerrotype of Cabell which he had had taken
when he arrived in Sydney in 1842, a little over two years before
this story begins.  It shows him in his colonial clothes--a pair of
Wellingtons, loose trousers, light coat and open shirt, with a
broad-rimmed hat in his hand.  He is standing beside a man about
ten years older--he was just twenty then--and the difference
between them is striking.  The man was withered by sun and worry,
so one sees Cabell's young English face against the background of
the country, as it were.

There is the full, sensual lower lip that was a family
characteristic, the plump, olive cheeks, thrown up vividly by the
blackness of the hair and the thick eyebrows.  In the Byronic
fashion of the period the hair falls into a curling side-lever on
each cheek.  There is something dandified about this that seems out
of place in the businesslike clothes and side by side with the
ragged beard and roughly shorn hair of his companion; deliberately,
defiantly dandified.  It does look, too, as though he were ashamed
of the clothes and for that reason is thrusting himself more
aggressively into the picture.  His whole strained pose seems to be
saying "Yes, look at me.  Laugh.  Glory in it.  I stink of the
jailyard.  But I'm safely buried twelve thousand miles under your
feet.  So you needn't worry."  At the same time, his eyes are
saying something absolutely different.  They are turned slightly
away, and though at first sight they, too, seem to express
defiance, recklessness and self-assurance, one realizes after a
while that they have only that instant glanced out of the picture,
involuntarily, anxiously, as though expecting some harm.  The
effect is disturbing.  It suggests all sorts of unpleasant things
lurking about just outside the range of the camera.

What surprised me most at first was the contrast between this
youthful face and the face of old man Cabell as I knew him.  In
sixty-five years life seemed to have changed even the bones under
the flesh.  The nose, which in old Cabell was predatory, hooked,
with splayed, enormous hairy nostrils--a cruel beak--in the young
man was straight, with a sensitive bridge and a delicate, womanish
septum.  The youth had a chin more rounded than otherwise, neither
weak nor particularly strong, whereas the old man's jaw looked like
three pieces of roughly cast iron clamped together and hinged under
his ears on a huge bulge of muscle that swelled and relaxed
continually as he sat thinking.  The sensual lower lip, so
prominent in the youth as to mark, one would have thought, a
fundamental trait, had disappeared in the old man, whose tightly
repressed mouth seemed to have no lips at all, giving him an air of
Calvanistic severity.  The only likeness between them was
apparently this little trick of glancing anxiously and suspiciously
sideways, so that you expected the door to open upon some horrible
thing.

The contrast became even more marked when I compared the
daguerrotype with the portraits of his father and four brothers
which are to be found in the same album.  The pictures show Clement
and John together, Clement in clerical dress, John in the full-
dress uniform of some stylish regiment, Victor with their father
among the Daylesbury hounds, and David posed foppishly against the
back of an Empire chair in a grotesque get-up that must have been
dashing at the time.  While I could not for the life of me see
anything to connect the old hawk Cabell with these feeble-looking
folk, there was no doubt at all that the lad in the colonial
breeches was their son and brother.  The same high-bridged nose and
heavy underlip.  In the father the mouth was soft and weak and
overindulged.  In David the features had just that extra touch of
refinement needed to give them an effeminate clarity and
handsomeness.  In Victor the same features were coarsened, bovine.
What might be described as a robust kind of homosexuality, common
to a certain type of priest and soldier, marked the broad, simple
but somehow frustrated faces of the twins Clement and John.

At this point, remembering the different man Cabell had been,
almost a different type physically, as I saw him, the second
question occurred to me:  "Was it given to him also to become like
these?  What was it that changed him?  Was the impulse in himself
or did life do it blindly?"

Questions perhaps unanswerable.

I must not forget to mention that he differed from his father and
brothers in one peculiarity.  They were all definitely blonde with
ruddy John Bull complexions, but Cabell had jet-black hair and
dark-brown eyes--almost like a Spaniard.  A picture of his mother
and sister, on another page, explains this.  The mother was a fine-
looking woman, not remotely like Cabell except that she had inky-
black hair and eyes, and in those eyes a vague but haunting look of
doubt and disquiet.  Harriet, the sister, who was ten years older
than Cabell, took after her mother as closely as the sons resembled
their father.

When Cabell's mother died soon after his tenth birthday it was this
sister who tried to replace the older woman's passionate devotion.
There was twenty years between Cabell and his eldest brother.  He
was delicate in childhood, it appears, and literally spent his
first years in cotton-wool, much to the contempt of the squire, who
was disgusted with him from birth and reckoned "he'd turn himself
out to grass and not stand any more if the old woman can't drop
anything better than that".

His mother was Irish, came from County Clare--a mystic and
visionary sort of woman apparently, given to communings with the
air.  A strange mate for the matter-of-fact squire, one would
imagine, but he was not so matter-of-fact.  All the Cabells were
gamblers and had the gambler's awe of signs and portents.  From the
two of them Cabell inherited a disposition to start at shadows and
moon over a twilight landscape.

The squire had brought up his sons to be dependent on him, and the
household was a nest of warring parasites, for the brothers never
stayed away very long.  They fought each other bitterly but joined
in a solid bloc against their youngest brother when their mother
died and left him the remains of her trust money--two thousand
pounds or so.

The youngest child's usual fear of being overlooked, "left out",
cheated, was in Cabell magnified and complicated by many good
reasons for it.  He was continually being pushed aside in scenes of
greedy conflict when the brothers fought over horses, rights of
precedence, even the cut from the joint.  At this time the family
fortune was mortgaged up to the hilt, but the squire had
expectations in a sister who had married well and was now a widow
without heirs.

When Cabell was nineteen this sister, his Aunt Julie, then in her
early middle age, arrived suddenly to live at Owerbury House.
Immediately the Nordic bloc reformed against the quiet and sullen
Celt, to whom they attributed an evil disposition for cunning and
trickery.  Cunning he certainly was.  They had compelled him to be.
Observing in Aunt Julie's cynical eye a twinkle of delight for the
caustic anger with which he defended himself and remembering their
mother's money, they held a family council and decided that Derek
should accept the invitation of their cousin Francis, in Australia,
to teach any member of the family how to make a fortune out of
sheepfarming if a little capital was forthcoming.  Harriet's
protests were wasted.  The squire raked up the two thousand pounds
willed to Cabell and told him to take himself off to the Colonies
as soon as he liked.  Cabell did not argue.  He went about the
house in silence, with his eyes on the ground.  Suddenly he would
stop and remain motionless for ten or fifteen minutes, thinking.  A
prelude to an outburst of anger, two white fans would spread out
from the corners of his eyes.  He would rush from the house, and
Harriet, following, would find him in some corner of the garden
sobbing his heart out.  But she was too wise to let him know what
she had seen.

Aunt Julie, coming upon him thus one afternoon, said in her harsh,
contemptuous voice, "So you still weep, at your age?"

He looked at her resentfully.

"Well," she mocked him, "I've heard Cabells swear a lot and kick
their wives and dogs, but I never seen one weep before.  I wonder
what your father would say if I told him."

"Tell him," he spat at her.  "I don't care."

"Perhaps I will," she said.  "I see you're frightened out of your
wits about going to Australia.  Do you think the cannibals will eat
you?"

"I'm not," he retorted defiantly, adding more defiantly still, "I
want to go."

"Now," she said, "that is indeed surprising.  Are you sure?"

"Yes," he said, sullen, obstinate.

"Fool!" she sneered at him.  "The spit of your mother.  She would
swallow any dirt and say that she liked it rather than let them
think they'd got under her hide at last.  Oh, a fool of a woman!"

He scowled, but said nothing.

"Good-bye, then, my voluntary jailbird," she laughed.  "I hear your
father is going to take you over to Dorchester for the night coach
tomorrow."

"I'm going in the morning," he said furiously.  "By myself."

He went by himself.  The sun was just breaking through the mist
over Owerbury when he crossed the downs.  He could hear farmer
Northover's boy Jake driving the cows up the valley.  He could see
a fisherman from the village, old Sam with the wooden leg, who had
been a powder-monkey at Trafalgar, spreading out his nets on the
shingle.  He could hear Lucy Potter at the Owerbury Arms, singing
to herself as she fed the chickens in the backyard.  Enormous
shadows moved across the mist in the village street.  It was like a
dream.  So he remembered it.

The cousin lived near Limestone, which is now Ipswich, in
Queensland.  He was a scoundrel and kept the kind of station that
is known outback as a Dotheboy's Hall.  He sold Cabell four
thousand scabby culls as first-class merinos, and most of them died
at their first lambing.  Just when Cabell had learnt enough to know
that he had been taken in his cousin died.  Cabell took a job as an
overseer on a station called Murrumburra, about forty miles north
of Moreton Bay, sank the remains of his capital in a thousand
really good ewes, and vowed to himself, "I'll be rich in ten
years."

Aunt Julia wrote:  "By now I suppose you've had enough of it to
come back and eat humble pie with your brothers.  They eat it very
nicely, in big mouthfuls, without a bit sticking in their throats.
I am sending you a draft to pay your fare home."

Cabell replied:  "I do not wish to return.  It was true what I
said: I wanted to come here."

He thought he was telling a lie, but, who knows, perhaps he was
telling the truth.  It is the question in which all other questions
about Cabell end.



Chapter Three

McGOVERN


Although Murrumburra was only forty miles from Moreton Bay, the
journey took a good four days by bullock-waggon at that time.  For
the first two days after they left the settlement Cabell gave
Mickey and the bullocks no peace, he was so anxious to be back with
his sheep; but on the third day he became silent and morose and let
them idle along at their own pace.  He even began making excuses to
stop on the road, so that when they camped on the fourth evening
they still had twelve miles to do.  The fact was that he wished to
put off the moment when he would see McGovern again.  Matters had
come to a head between them.

Cabell's outburst at Moreton Bay was only one of many symptoms of a
crisis.  He felt the spur of two impulses--the one urging him to
throw up everything and return to England and the security of
Owerbury, the other driving him to face the problems of his life,
which was desperately confused.  The first impulse worked upon him
with all the fascination of the gracious memories from which it
sprang--memories of peace and happiness in the lovely vale of
Owerbury.  The second was charged with only the bitterness of his
anger and pride; it showed him that the one way to escape an
ignominious return to the charity of his aunt and the hatred of his
brothers was to force himself upon this alien and ugly land.  At
this moment he stood hesitating on the mystic line that separates
youth from manhood, looking back rather wistfully, looking forward
fearfully, for though the ordeal awaiting him would make him a
cunning and sinewy man, it had to be faced and endured by the
frightened boy.

All that was most forbidding in the life round him centred upon the
character of McGovern, the superintendent of Murrumburra.  The
personality of this greedy, swaggering, bloody-minded Currency Lad
(as native-born whites were called) had travelled along with them,
for they could think and talk of nothing else.

The boy Pete was in a high fever and his groans awakened Cabell at
night.

"What's the matter wid ye at all?" Mickey demanded, sitting up and
kicking him.

"It's me back," the boy moaned.

"Yer back, is it?  Well, if ye still know it's yer back and it
doesn't feel like yer back's yer insides there's nothin' the matter
at all wid yer, darlin'," Mickey told him.  "Tell me, will ye?  Can
ye feel the bare bones stickin' up under yer shirt, can ye, like an
old skeleton?"

"No, Mickey."

"So ye can't.  Well, they didn't flog ye at all then, and if I tell
that to the Cove he'll up with his tape, he will, and put a flamin'
big rut in yer lights with one wallop'd make the Devil shiver his
teeth to bits and him sittin' in the middle of the furnace of
Hell."

The boy shuddered.

"There's a man!" Mickey said.  "Mind ye, he's lazy, and that's
all'd save him makin' ye into a mash for the pigs."

With the suffering one's morbid interest in suffering, the boy
asked, "Did he ever flog you, Mickey?"

"Now ye're askin' somethin', and the answer's he did," Mickey said
proudly, rising out of his blanket.  "It was that time at the
Limeburners' when he was a lobster."  He shook his head.  "That was
a place.  Ye had to fight the rats and maggots for yer tucker, and
after that the dirty floggers'd give you fifty every time they just
thought of ye, for the things ye'd be after doin' if ye had a
chance.  Then they'd send ye into the sea with a sackful of lime on
yer bloody shoulders.  Ye'd hear the gazebos singin' out that time,
and it was somethin' to sing out about, I'm tellin' ye."

He took out his pipe, lit it with an ember from the fire, and
chuckled.  "But I had them fine boys beat.  They flogged and
flogged till the sweat runnin' off their faces near sizzled when it
hit me back, but not a one of the big galoots could break MY hide.
In them three years I got that many strokes ye'd be near three
years addin' them together."

"You must've had a terrible thick back," Pete said.

"Why, didn't the biggest doctors come up from Sydney to set eyes on
it?" Mickey boasted.  "They said it ought to be put behind a glass
case."

"Was it McGovern that broke it?"

"That's what he did, the big brute.  For one Sunday the boys had
the bands on that bad they was they didn't care at all if the Old
Cove was the Old Toaster or what.  So they up and smashed in the
sentry's mug with one swipe of the shovel, grabbed ahold his musket
and run into the store, barred the door and shouted to the Old Cove
to go hang himself and worse, the way you'd wonder they had the
nerve and every mother's son bound to be lashed bare for each word
he spoke that day.  Well, in a few minutes the Old Cove rushes up,
firing off his pistol like he was in the thick of a battle at
Waterloo, and shouts that if we come out hell hang us and if we
don't he'll shoot us through the door, the which he does, killin'
Tommy the Rat dead as a doornail and blowin' off Tim Sheeny's nose
clean into the tin of molasses I'm busy gettin' on the outside of."

Mickey wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and licked his
lips.

"Be the Holy, that was a feed-up, with all them lobsters bangin' on
the doors the way ye'd wonder the grub didn't stick in them lags'
gissards from fear.  But they'd made them doors so thick to keep us
out they couldn't get in themselves now and we just had to sit
there snug as turkey-cocks, ready to bust in fifty little pieces
with the vittles beginnin' to swell inside, if anybody so much as
stuck an elbow into us."

Mickey took a deep breath.

"Then just as old Shake Brown was sayin' if there was a bit of a
burick on his knee he wouldn't change with the Queen herself,
there's a rorty great explosion gives me the scare of me young
life, so's before I know what's happenin' at all I'm as empty as
the priest's saucepan in Lent, and there's old Shake Brown, arse-up
in the flour barrel, kickin' like a two-year-old, with the top of
his head lyin' on the floor among the syrup and the sultanas.  One
of them sneakin' lobster rats had come crawlin' over the roof to
get a pot at us through the skylight, but the very same instant
Gilegan--the same was hanged next week--ups with the musket and
brings that lobster down head first on top of us.  It's as safe as
the Pope's poodle we thought we was then, but. . . ."

He glanced round at the darkness.  "What d'ye think I hear?"  He
bent forward and whispered behind his hand, "Himself."

"McGovern?"

"Sure.  He was up on the roof and the Old Cove was shouting to him
'Get them hangman's carcasses out and I'll make ye a sergeant on
the spot.'

"'Ay, ay, sir!' he says.  'I'll have 'em out in two ups,' says he.

"'Don't ye want no weapons, me man?' says the Old Cove.

"'I got me Tabby,' says he.  'Me dear Tabby.  It'll scamper them
rats.'  And he laughs.  But I don't know him then, so I take no
notice and goes on havin' a shinnanikin with Punch the Nigger over
a ham-bone he's got ahold the one end of, when suddenly I looks up
and sees his face, with its beard the like of gold on fire in the
sun, grinnin' straight down as if he was Nick himself havin' a
squint at the bottom of the burnin' lake to see who he could stick
the fork into.  And that grin gives me such a shock I lets go the
bone and just looks.

"'Aha, me hearty,' says he, 'ye're the one I'm after.'

"'Me?' I says.  'What for'd ye be after me?  I ain't done nothin'.'

"He just chuckles.  You know that way he chuckles?"

"Yes!"

"Well, at that Phil Finey and Ginger Dubbs--the same was topped the
next week along with Gilegan--they lets fly with the muskets, and
when I looks up again there he is still, lookin' down and grinnin'
at me.

"'Hey!' I says, puttin' a handful of flour into me gob by accident,
'go away, darlin'.  'Tis no use ye sittin' up there, or these
blissid murderers'll bring ye tumblin' down on me in a minute.'

"'Tumblin' down I'll be,' he says, 'and tumblin' up again to skin
ye like a new potato.'

"At that the boys laugh hearty and go back to their tucker, except
Dubbs and Finey, that've started loadin' up again.  Then all of a
sudden he roars 'Look out, I'm comin',' and with that gives a
mighty great lep on to me, near brainin' me on the spot, takes me
under his arm, jumps on a barrel, and heaves me through the
skylight, all as quick as a snake's wink.  He's half through after
me when Ginger lets fly and blows his right sole off.  Then three
of the others get a hold on his legs, but one gets his faced bashed
to smithereens, the next's knocked senseless, and the third gets
off easy with a broken shoulder.  By this he's out on top of me,
tears off me shirt, straps me up to the flagpole, pulls the cat out
of his belt, and spits on his hands."

Mickey sighed.

"And that's the end of me power and glory, for the hulkin' great
galoot near cut me liver out with the first whack, he did and all.
And after twenty he looked like Red the Butcher.  And after a
hundred you could hear them old rogues spewin' up their hearts all
over the store.  And after that I don't know except what I was
told.  They reckoned that me two boots was squelchin' like I'd had
me feet in the water when they led me off.  And what's more, there
was enough bits off of me scattered round the store to feed a
hungry dingo."

"It must've been a terrible sight," Pete said weakly.

"It was a sight ye'd never see before nor since," Mickey said,
stroking his beard.  "Why, it broke up that revolt in three minutes
when the Old Cove yells out 'Them what don't come out by the time I
count fifty'll be flogged three hundred by McGovern, and them that
come out'll be flogged three hundred, not by McGovern (that's them
that don't get hanged).'  But he didn't say that last bit loud
enough to hear, so they all come out, lookin' like they'd been shot
out of a cannon, instead of enjoyin' the only bust-up they'd ever
had in their lives, God bless 'em.  There now!"

They were silent for a while, then Pete asked, "Did he get made a
sergeant all right then?"

"Sure, he did, too."

"I nearly have a fit just to look at him," Pete said.

"You!"  Mickey spat.  "His Honour'd hardly take any notice of a bit
of a louse the likes of you.  He might just let fly a kick at ye,
and that'd be all."  He knocked out his pipe and threw a piece of
wood on the fire.  "'Tis a fight he's always after stirrin' ye up
to, the way he'll be able to smash yer face in with one hit'd knock
a bullock down.  It's like I was meself before he broke up me back
for me.  It's a change.  Och! it's hanged ye'd be for a change, and
cheerfully."

Cabell lay stiff as a poker, listening to Mickey's whining Irish
voice.  When the old man was snoring again he rose and went to the
cart for a nip of rum from the cask they were taking up to
McGovern.  He poured out a second drink and took it to Pete, who
looked at him doubtfully for a moment before he grabbed the
pannikin and drained it.

Cabell sat down beside him and poked the fire into a blaze.  Big-
winged nightbirds flew across the stars and settled in the trees
with forlorn cries.  The bullocks splashed about in the mud of the
drying river and rattled their horns together.  Possums and
bandicoots squabbled in the depths of the scrub.  But these noises
were the merest scratches on the thick silence of the night, the
velvet night of the Australian bush, impenetrable, lonely and sad.

Pete was shivering.  He lay with all his weight on his elbow,
straining to keep the shivers out of his back.

"How old are you?" Cabell asked.

"Twenty-three years, master."

"How long have you been here?"

"Five years, master."

Cabell looked at him closely.  His features hung down, his weak
chin, his swollen lips, the bags under his eyes, his ears that
looked like pieces of wet cardboard.  At the same time his eyes--
one had a slight squint--stared up at Cabell watchfully, glancing
away on either side every few seconds.

A picture of a man thrashing a dog with a stick flashed into
Cabell's mind.  Frowning at the fire, he failed to account for this
sudden return of an old memory.  It came of an incident that had
made a deep impression on him when he was quite young.  He was out
driving with his mother one day when they came upon a man beating a
dog in a ditch.  The dog was making no sound, but it was shivering
and gazing up at the man, glancing away quickly on each side every
now and then.  When his mother leant out of the carriage and
protested, the man took off his cap and explained that the dog was
a mongrel from the village that had been chasing the deer in Lord
Winburn's park.  As soon as the carriage drove on, Cabell's mother
promising to see Lord Winburn about it at once, the man had
replaced his hat and picked up his stick and had begun beating the
dog again, heavily, methodically.  Then suddenly a strange thing
happened.  The dog let out a fearful wail and leapt at the man's
throat.  They had to stop the carriage and run back.  He was
frightfully torn about and nearly died.

Cabell looked uneasily at the crazy lad.

"Didn't you kill somebody?" he asked.

"I did me old man in, master--in a fit."

"Do they come often, these fits?" Cabell asked, and at once
wondered angrily why he had asked such a question, but insisted,
"Do they?"

"When I'm started, all on a sudden, that's when they come."

"Are you very sick now?"

A spasm of shivers rattled the boy's teeth.  "I'm afeared, master,"
he whispered.  "I'm afeared."

"Be quiet, you fool," Cabell said angrily, glancing round at the
darkness.  "Go to sleep, why don't you?"

But they sat close together watching the fire and waiting for the
grey dawn to filter through the trees.



Chapter Four

INDESTRUCTIBLE


Cabell rode into the homestead yard just after sunset that evening.
The barking of the dogs brought McGovern to the door.

"Aha, is that the little limejuicer at last?" he called.  "I
thought you'd mizzled."

"Why should I?" Cabell grumbled.

McGovern merely laughed, a low, rich and vibrant laugh with many
mocking undertones.

He sensed trouble in the air.  McGovern was in a gay mood and kept
singing to himself and stretching his shoulders like a dog
preparing for action.  That was one sign of it.  The other was an
unusual quietness in the lags' hut.

He unsaddled his horse, threw a bucket of water over her back, and
let her out into the paddock.  A man was going about with a flare,
lighting the dingo fires round the sheep pens.  Flashes of sheet
lightning sketched the outline of the buildings, the looming hump
of the ranges, spread a carpet of white sheep across the near
landscape.

In the darkness of the harness shed Cabell gave up trying to find a
peg to hang his bridle on, and flung it irritably against the wall.
Then he braced himself and went across the yard to the humpy.
McGovern, his hands thrust in the tops of his trousers, still
sprawled across the narrow doorway.  His body soaked the air for a
yard around with a rank smell of sweat and tobacco and rum.

Cabell began to force his way past, but when he was almost through
an incident happened which, small enough in itself, was yet typical
of McGovern and so humiliating to Cabell that he never forgot it.
On a sudden impish impulse, apparently, McGovern expanded his
shoulders and pinned him to the door-jamb.

Cabell stood a good inch over six feet, and two years of hard work
had put a lot of solid flesh on to him, but beside McGovern he
looked a weed, panting and struggling to free himself--"like a
beetle on a pin," as McGovern said with immense relish, glancing
down sideways and roaring with laughter.  It was all over in ten
seconds, but in that time the doubts and misgivings and hesitations
of months died in Cabell.

McGovern stopped laughing to remark with na�ve pride, "You know
what?  I broke a fellow's rib doing that once."

Cabell rose slowly from the dust and looked at him.  The blood
flushing into his head made his lips look colourless.  But he could
not speak.  His mouth quivered and tears began to well out of his
eyes.

"Hmn!  A hot-tempered fellow," McGovern said, stroking the golden
pelt of his chest thoughtfully, but adding after a while, with a
deep, ironic laugh, "God bless his heart and liver, did I hurt the
little limejuicer?"  He reached out to lay his finger on Cabell's
chest, where blood was beginning to distil from the chaffed flesh,
but Cabell beat his hand down, pushed him aside, grabbed a piece of
rag from his bunk and fled from the humpy.

McGovern stared out at the thickening darkness for a few seconds,
then rubbed his hands together.

There was a knowing twinkle in his eyes, which lurked in the weed-
fringed grottoes of his eye-sockets like suspicious little animals.
Even so, they were the most prominent feature on that face, barring
a pair of thick lips and a set of perfect teeth that flashed out of
the furze of golden beard whenever he smiled.  What kind of a face
it was there was nothing to show, for the beard, tangled and
matted, filled with burrs and grass-seeds, stained with tobacco and
greasy, covered everything but the red tip of a flat nose.  He was
always laughing and talking, in a deep, friendly voice capable of
infinite shades of expression, but all the time his eyes lived
their secretive life apart, twinkling gaily when his mouth looked
downcast, retreating doubtfully when he laughed.  But it was
difficult to draw any conclusion from this, except that McGovern
was by no means the simple, lazy, drunken, cheerful fellow he
pretended to be.

For the rest he was not altogether unpleasant-looking, despite his
bandy legs which had grown round the belly of a horse and his wide
shoulders which tipped him over at every step so that he seemed to
have a hard struggle to get straight again.  There was an air of
swagger and braggadacio about him that went well with his Viking
beard and his deep voice, but like these it probably served a
purpose--the same purpose perhaps.  In fact, it was impossible to
believe that he ever did anything without a purpose--and that a
very obscure one.  Happy-go-lucky, lounging, careless--yes, the
most dangerous and aggressive kind of man.  Ugly as he was, he had
a way of preening and stretching his body that made the muscles
ripple so that the whole rugged frame seemed transfused with
graceful energy.

Add to this that he was the result of a liaison between a lady of
some consequence in the south and one of her convict servants, a
flash confidence trickster, that he had lived on his wits for
nearly thirty years, that he had been soldier, jailer, cattle
thief, that he had spent all his life in the company of convicts,
and one can guess what sort of an antagonist he was likely to be.

When Cabell returned he was sitting at the table--four struts
driven into the floor with a slab of bark for a top--sucking at a
pannikin of black tea.  Before him lay a damper with a chunk torn
out, a tin plate of boiled potatoes, a corner of black salt-beef
with a jack-knife sticking in it, and a dish of rice and raisins.
Among the food stood a lamp, a tin filled with bad fat in which a
piece of rag was burning.  The fat sizzled and gave off a rancid
smoke that coated walls and rafters with dust-filagreed soot.  Soot
lay thick on the floor, lightly feathered Cabell's cheek, made a
glistening paste in the sweat on McGovern's forehead.  Even worse
was the dung fire burning in the middle of the humpy to keep out
mosquitoes.  The grey smoke hung over the table, stung Cabell's
throat, and made his eyes water.  But the mosquitoes still came and
buried themselves in his fresh skin like fiery sparks.  To soot,
dung smoke, mosquitoes and the vermin which bred plentifully in the
dusty floor McGovern was alike indifferent.

Cabell sat down.  He had been washing his hands.  McGovern looked
at them--white, long-fingered, with clean nails--then looked at his
own--squat, red, ingrained with dirt and greasy.  He smiled.

After glowering disgustedly at the flies and the soot for a while,
Cabell reached out for the food.  McGovern promptly seized his
hands in two hairy paws, threw back his head and laughed.  They
repeated the struggle at the door.

Cabell wrenched his hands away and jumped up from the bench.  "I
know what this means," he said, breathless.  "You're trying to
frighten me.  You've been stealing my sheep again."

McGovern put his feet up on the table and clasped his hands across
his belly.  "Stealing your sheep?" he said in a tone of mild
surprise, but his smile, his belittling glance said quite plainly
"Of course I steal your sheep, fool.  What do you expect?"

"I know you do," Cabell said in a shaky voice.

"Go on.  Who's been telling you?"

"I don't need to be told."  He gestured.  "Every time I go
away. . . ."

McGovern nodded amiably.  "Come to think of it, you lost some day
before yest'y."

"How many?"

"Sixty--more or less."

"Sixty!"  Cabell swallowed a lump.  "Why, confound you, I. . . ."

He raised his hands as though to empty the kettle of tea over
McGovern's face, but instead buried them in his hair and let out a
groan.  Before this cool bravado, expressed in bantering smiles,
his courage ebbed out.  He turned away, but the strength and vigour
of the man were inescapable.  They throbbed through the table,
which moved against him as McGovern's deep breath rocked it to and
fro; when he went to the door they pursued him in laughter that at
once maddened and chilled him.

The sky was ablaze with stars.  Their alien faces looked down
coldly.  He felt lonely and bleak.  In a fit of dejection he
thought, "I'll never get away.  Never.  I'll rot.  I'll go mad like
Peppiott.  I can't fight them.  They're too cunning."  Tears of
self-pity thickened in his eyes.

The dogs came out to welcome Mickey and Pete with the dray.  Lowing
and rattling their chains, the bullocks trailed into the yard.  A
halo of dust ringed the dingo fires.

The sight of the cart, reminding him how calmly McGovern had packed
him off to Moreton Bay, quickened Cabell's sense of injury again.
He spun round and demanded in a husky but firmer voice, "If you
didn't lift them--if the dingoes took them--the skins must be
there.  Where are they?"

McGovern picked his teeth with the meat-knife, grunted.  "Find
them, limejuicer.  Find them."

"Limejuicer, limejuicer!" Cabell cried in exasperation.  "I won't
always be a limejuicer."

McGovern laughed a complacent laugh and stroked his arm.

Cabell scowled.  "You think I'm like these wretched lags.  You
think THAT frightens me.  Well, I tell you now, I won't take
another step off Murrumburra till I get back every sheep I've
lost."

"You mean it?"

"I do."

McGovern looked up with a sly grin.  "Now, if I was in YOUR boots,"
he said softly, "I'd be on a better lay than that."

Struck by the tone of his voice, Cabell glanced at him.

He leant across the table and pointed to the lags' hut.  "Quiet,
eh?  Why?"

Cabell had forgotten the convicts, who at this hour were usually
quarrelling over scraps of food and cursing each other.  There was
one who sang mournful songs far into the night, another who sat at
the door weeping and wailing about the pains in his head, a third
who kept running out to spit on a tree where McGovern had cut his
name.  But even these madmen were quiet tonight.

"What's the matter with them?"

McGovern spat on the floor, in the hollows of which lay water, and
tea-leaves, and half-chewed gristles, and dog dung.  "I laid the
tape round them a bit," he said off-hand.  "They came with a stink
about that last dollop of meat."

"It was only half-rations.  You know it was."

"A bit of guts-ache's good for them sometimes," McGovern said.  "It
takes their mind off things.  Oh, they'll soon forget it when
Gursey's flogged."

"Gursey?"

"Aha, a mate of yours?"  He took his feet from the table and sat
up.

"Rubbish!"  Cabell flushed.  Then after a silence he stammered,
"Only . . . well, what could you possibly want to flog him for?"

McGovern stroked his beard and gave him an inscrutable grin.
"We'll soon think of something when it's time."

"You're a filthy brute!" Cabell burst out.  "Now I know what's
behind this.  You think. . . .  He didn't tell me about the sheep,
see.  I asked him and he wouldn't.  You're going to have him
flogged because you think he told me you were stealing my sheep."

"Barking up the wrong tree again," McGovern told him calmly.  "I
wouldn't have the bastard flogged for all the rum in Bengal."  He
puffed at his pipe, then said, with a wink, "He's fly, is Mr
Gursey.  Did you know he was going to top all us superintendents
and start a republic of lags?"

"How should I know?" Cabell flushed again.

"But you do.  Ha, ha!"  McGovern laughed good-naturedly.  "Friend
Gursey doesn't talk about nothing in the smithy."

"I don't know what you mean," Cabell mumbled, nearly as red as
McGovern himself now.

McGovern winked and strolled to the door.

In the yard Mickey was stumbling about among his bullocks.  "Away
wah yeh, ye swabs!" he shouted in their language, kicking them.
They turned slowly and dragged off.  The smell of dust and fresh
dung floated into the room.

"Leave that load tonight.  Just as it stands," McGovern called to
him.

Mickey came into the light and wagged his bald head angrily at
McGovern.  "For what would ye be puttin' more temptations in the
blasted world then unless ye're Himself, the Divil and all?" he
complained.

"Do as I say."

Mickey went off grumbling, and, after scratching the side of his
face thoughtfully and turning his eyes from the dray to the lags'
hut and back to the dray, McGovern grunted and returned to the
table.

He sat down beside Cabell and prodded him with the stem of his
pipe.  "Look you here, my boy, he's a red-hot man, Joe.  But he's
set on getting his Ticket before the year's out, so he's running
with the lambs for a bit, eh?"  He nodded shrewdly.  "You could put
your finger in his gob and he wouldn't bite it."

"Have you tried?" Cabell asked in a challenging voice.

McGovern laughed heartily.  "You've got me there.  It wasn't me
finger I put in his mouth the other day."

Cabell grimaced.  "Ach, you're a disgusting brute," he said.  "I
saw what you did.  You tied him up and smeared his face with--with
that filth."

"Ah, you don't understand Joe," McGovern told him.  "It wasn't the
dung but the tying-up that made him look like he did.  He crept off
like a mouse, though, didn't he?"

Cabell frowned at the table.  He knew that McGovern was weaving a
web round him, but how and where he did not know.  McGovern's face,
at once lazily cheerful and slyly calculating, told him nothing.
He fidgeted with the meat-knife for a second or two, then dug it
deep into the table.  Words impatiently escaped him again.  "You
must be a monster, an absolute maniac, if you haven't got some
purpose treating him like that."  He brushed the hair out of his
eyes with a gesture of helplessness.  "Nobody could be so brutal,
not even in this country."

"Ah!"  McGovern rose and stretched himself, smiled ironically.



Chapter Five

"ONE DAY YOU WILL GET MURDERED!"


Suddenly the yard seemed to have awakened.  The bullocks padded
about in the dust, chains rattled, a door slammed, the watchman
came out of his box and grunted at Mickey, then went round his
fires throwing on fresh wood.  The flames leapt up, tarnishing for
an instant the yellow light in the hut.

Cabell glared at the table, then reached over abruptly and pushed
the knife away.

"Listen," McGovern began again, reseating himself and setting his
back against the table.  "I'll tell you a yarn about Joe.  It was
down in the barracks at Moreton Bay.  There was an overseer, an
Irish sod named Geogarty, that used to 'feed pigs'.  Don't know
what that is?  It's taking some poor sod's tucker and feeding him
only the offal and husks.  He's some lag the rest of the gang's got
a nark on, so he can't split to the Cove because nobody'll stand by
him, and afterwards the overseer'll just kick his stuffing out.
All he can do is sit quiet and hope for a change before he starves.
Geogarty picked on a poor devil called Coyle, the same that's down
in the hut now.  Coyle and Gursey was thick at the time, but Gursey
was expecting word of his Ticket any day, so he says nothing.  But
he shares his tucker with Coyle and just looks at Geogarty as much
as to say 'You wait till I get out.  Your damper'll be dough.'
Well, this Geogarty he's a lag himself, and he doesn't want to lose
a soft crib, so he thinks to himself, 'Get out and split on me,
will you?  We'll see about that, me hearty,' and he begins putting
the boot into Joe with this and with that, enough to make a saint
boil in the gall.  But Joe's got patience.  He's not the same as
other lags at all.  The System soon breaks them up, but Joe it just
sets on fire and leaves him as hard as brick.

"Just to show you.  One day he's working on the roads when he opens
up a bull-ant nest.  He gets out of the hole quick, but Geogarty
sends him back.  Three times he gets out and three times Geogarty
sends him back.  The third time he stays and the ants crawl all
over him, hundreds of them--and you know what ONE nip from a bull-
ant is.  Does Joe say a word?  Not him.  He still goes round with
his eyes on the ground and his gob tight as a corpse's, for fear
some word might slip out and lose him his Ticket.  But when he does
look at Geogarty that sod knows his number's up and he'll be back
in the gang himself unless he can think of something soon.

"Then one day he gets a notion.  There's a terrible Nancy English
officer there, a duke or something, and Geogarty knows Joe's not
nuts on lifting his lid to anyone, specially to this cove, who
spends his time going the rounds and prodding the lags with a bit
of a cane he had.  So Geogarty starts sending Joe on messages
wherever this Lord Muck is.  And when Joe tries to sneak past
without lifting his lid, Lord Muck he pulls him up.  'Haw, haw,
what's this I see, you scum?' says he.  'Don't you know you've got
to raise your hat when you pass me, you gallows-rat?'  And
forthwith he sits himself down and makes Joe walk up and down in
front of him fifty times, raising his hat each time.

"Well, Joe goes back very slow to the gang, and on the way he picks
up a gibber and puts it in his pocket.  'Ho, ho,' says Geogarty
when he sees from Joe's face that his temper's coming up at last,
'you don't look all that pleased, Joe.'  'No,' says Joe, 'I just
found out I've got to leave you and it makes me sad.'  'What, you
got your Ticket already?'  'No,' shouts Joe, 'I've got yours,' and
with that he whips out the gibber and lands it square between
Geogarty's eyes, laying him out flat as a pancake.  'Now, boys,' he
says, after he's made sure he hasn't killed the sod, 'I'm making
for the bush.  Who'll come with me?'  But the only one that would
go was that crazy loon Red."

McGovern glanced into the yard and rubbed his chin.  "Hmn," he
muttered.  "Yes.  What happened then?  Well, he was out for a year.
Went up country where no white man's never been before nor since.
Nearly done for once or twice--thirst, starvation, myalls.  Killed
a black once and ate him.  Flesh the colour of them pretty flowers
you see down the scrub--kind of purply blue.  Then a tribe takes
them in and they could've stayed for the rest of their days, but
Joe begins to think--he's got a head on him--and he thinks this is
just like being in jail; so as there's only one way of getting
free, he sets out with Red, crosses the Divide about five hundred
miles up the coast, comes down through all that bush where they're
just beginning to push out now, in his bare feet and without any
gun or anything, and gives himself and Red up at Moreton Bay, after
trekking close on a thousand miles.  And after that what d'you
think they done to him?  They give him three hundred on the bare
back, and for three months after he couldn't see, feel or walk."
He shook his head.  "Poor Joe!"

Cabell sat with his head in his hands, staring gloomily at the
table.  As the story progressed he had become more and more uneasy,
had walked round the table, then into the far corner of the room as
though he did not wish to listen, but had returned to the bench at
last.

McGovern smoked in silence, watching him.  After a while he leant
over and, peering closely into Cabell's face, said, "Now you see
the kind of man he is.  Just suppose YOU was to drop him the wink
that you're going to take him down to Moreton Bay with the darbies
on, eh?"

Cabell turned his head.  Several seconds passed before he retorted,
indignantly, "I'll do nothing of the kind."

McGovern patted his knee.  "Don't worry your soft heart about it.
He won't be flogged.  He'll see to that."  He nodded slowly with
one eye closed.

"You tell ME this?" Cabell cried.  "Now I WILL tell him.  I
certainly will."

"Ah, I knew you would.  All I got to do then is send you off to
Moreton Bay with him, you let him escape, he comes back to kill me--
or get Red to kill me--and. . . ."  He smiled.

Cabell frowned, sensing vaguely the double meaning behind all
McGovern had been saying.  "What d'you mean?  Why would I let him
escape?"

"Why?"  McGovern nudged him.  "Because you want to go looking for
those skins without anybody looking for you."

Cabell drew away.  "I don't know what you're driving at," he said,
then jumped up.  "I'm going to clear out of this place.  I--"  He
stopped, beat angrily at a mosquito on his cheek, and blurted out
"One day you WILL get murdered!"

"Ah!"  McGovern dropped his hands on his knees with a long sigh of
satisfaction.

But Cabell had stiffened, as though his own words had vouchsafed
him some utterly unexpected and outrageous revelation.

The flame of the lamp, unwavering for an instant, twinkled on the
points of McGovern's suddenly intent eyes.



Chapter Six

THREATS


"Yes?" he urged gently at the end of a long silence.

Cabell roused himself, and as though reluctant to meet McGovern's
eyes, glanced nervously about the hut.  It was the prompting of a
desperate inspiration that made him turn quickly and glance over
McGovern's head at the figures moving about the yard in the light
of the dingo fires.

Still dazed, the boy Pete was staggering around in a drunken
fashion after Mickey, helping him.

McGovern craned his neck.  "Pete?" he disparaged.  "Pete murder me?
Why, he's just a go-along."  He called, "Hey, Pete, you dog, come
here."

Pete looked round doubtfully, then came across the yard.  He
stopped in the doorway, and the light from the slush lamp played
grotesque tricks with his sickly, emasculate face.

Cabell gazed at him intently.  He looked a pathetic figure hunched
up against the background of night, stars and smoky fires.

"Come along in, Pete," McGovern coaxed him.  "Come and tell me what
they did to you, the dirty swine."

The lad shuffled forward a few inches, but kept one foot out ready
to jump away from the kick he was expecting.

"Hurt your little Nancy, did they, Pete?" McGovern mocked him.
"Well, that's rotten.  You won't be getting any extra bits out of
the lags' tucker this week, will you?"

The boy hung his head.

As he talked McGovern edged slowly along the table till he was
within a yard of the door.  Then with a heavy spring he leapt on
the lad and fastened a hand in his collar.  "Got him!" he shouted.

Pete cried out with the pain of wounds reopened.  In an instant
drops of sweat were channelling the down of his cheek.

McGovern chuckled.  "Why do you tremble, my little bird?  Maybe you
don't like me, eh?  Maybe you'd like to flap your wings and fly
away?  But jailbirds don't have no wings, Pete.  And birds that
don't have no wings get boned mighty quick and brought back and
skinned and served up with raspberry jelly.  Yes, raspberry jelly."
He laughed at his joke, a vast, good-natured laugh that blotted out
the silence of the night and the little noises of sheep and men.

The boy covered one dirty foot with the other and shuddered.

"Aha, my little canary-bird, so the cat has been scratching you,
has it?  Is that what you're chirping about?  And while the cat was
crawling up your back didn't a little thought come into your head?
Didn't you think it would be nice to murder the sod that sooled the
cat on you, eh?  Yes, yes, I know all the little notions in canary-
birds' heads."

McGovern kept his eyes fixed on Cabell, and his words took a
special meaning from them.

"Listen here, Pete," he said, drawing the boy closer but talking
straight at Cabell.  "Why don't you do it?"  He pointed to the door
of the room, divided off by a slab wall from the rest of the humpy,
where he slept.  "When he shakes down in there he goes right off to
sleep and he doesn't know nothing again till sun-up.  It's a
drummond, Pete.  You get out of your bunk about midnight; creep
across the yard; come in here (don't be frightened Mr Cabell'll see
you); take this knife"--he let Pete go and picked up the jack-
knife--"(don't use a pistol--you can't trust them); sneak into his
room; listen (he snores like a dog); you bend over him; pull the
blanket back, softly, softly, and you stick the blade into him
here, like this," and he dug the knife up to its handle in the
table.  "But be careful, Pete," he whispered to Cabell; "be sure
and slit his throat after, just to be on the safe side."

Cabell's interest was riveted on Pete, who showed signs of
extraordinary excitement.  As McGovern described how he should
enter the room and listen, Pete held his breath and listened.  When
McGovern told him how to bend over and feel for the heart, he
sucked his lips together and shadows of fear and hatred and triumph
chased vividly across his face; and as McGovern plunged the knife
into the table a choking, animal cry gurgled up his throat.  For a
moment he stood quivering on tiptoe, his long neck stretched out,
his mouth open, one hand raised, then suddenly his features went
lax, as though a spring in them had snapped.  He turned his
bloodshot eyes slowly, sullenly towards Cabell and a look of
ghastly alarm came into them.  "I didn't," he muttered.  "I
didn't."

McGovern nodded shrewdly at Cabell.  "Well, you'd better," he said.
"If you don't get him he might get you."

The boy shook his head in a dazed way, then, becoming aware that
McGovern was not holding him, he stumbled out of the door, tripped
over something and sprawled into the darkness.

McGovern picked up a piece of wood from the floor and flung it
after him.  They heard the boy fall heavily again.

Cabell watched him rise and disappear on the other side of the
fires.

He was roused from deep thought by McGovern speaking close to his
ear.

"I got to thank you for that.  I was beginning to think I only had
a kitten there."  McGovern closed one eye and scratched the tip of
his flat nose.  "So much the better, my lad.  So much the better."
He began to sing softly.



Chapter Seven

LAGS


Twelve convicts lived in the lags' hut.  They slept on heaps of
straw and ragged blankets spread over the floor, which was foul
with spit.  The stench of the place suggested not merely filth but
that utter abandonment of every physical decency that is the last
sign of despair.

Three men were sitting at the table--Joe Gursey, the blacksmith;
Red, the butcher and general rouseabout; and one of the shepherds
named Jimmy Coyle.  Coyle and Gursey were arguing.  As their
movements fluttered the flame of the slush lamp, features flicked
out of the darkness--a wart-crusted ear, a yawning mouth, a naked
chest, arms, legs.

Coyle pointed through the door.  "There's a cart with a month's
tucker.  We've all got the bands on.  And you don't want to rob it.
Getting soft, eh, Joe?"

"No softer than I was when I first met you."

"You weren't a crawler in those days, Joe."

"I'm not one now."

"Get along with you!  You're that meek the boys'll be calling ye
Holy Joe next."

"So we will, too," spoke up Feeny from the darkness.  "Holy Joe the
Whiddler."  There was a laugh from half a dozen of the men.

"Call me what you like," Joe said, repudiating them with a wave of
his hand.  "But you won't make me touch a grain of that corn."

"And for why?" asked Coyle slyly.

"Because I don't want to get done again for a crack."

Coyle laughed sarcastically.  "Did ye hear that boys?  HE doesn't
want to get done for a crack.  But what about us?"  He tapped
Gursey's shoulder.  "Answer me this, Joe.  Did you or did ye not
guts up a dollop of that jumbuck I drove off Flanagan's last week?"

"That's not the point at all."

Coyle smiled.  "I'll tell you how it is, boys.  Joe's all there
when it's somebody else's neck in the squeezer.  But when it's
likely to be his own, he tells ye the crack's a bad ha'penny."

"Ay, that's how it seems," they agreed.

Gursey faced them.  "Think, can't you!  He starts starving you all
of a sudden.  He won't give you tucker this morning.  And in the
night he leaves the cart out under your nose.  Why, d'you think?"

There was a sound of heads being scratched in the darkness and much
uneasy rustling among the straw.

Mark Scuggan spoke out for the convicts who had been silent so far.
"Maybe 'tis as Joe reckons, Jimmy--a trap.  If so be it is, I
haven't got the bands on that bad I can't wait a bit longer."

"Another whiddler," Coyle sneered.

Mark Scuggan thrust his face into the light, a very small grey face
in a wide fringe of white beard, and went on in a quavering
Quakerish voice, "Nay, nay, Jimmy Coyle.  You be a terrible scamp
these days, callin' all honest men by suchlike names.  And what's
more, you be downright criminal to use such words to Joe.  He's no
whiddler, and well do you know it."

"Aw, stow your whid, you old loon," Coyle muttered.

"As for who's the loon," said the old man calmly, "'tisn't far to
look.  You haven't been in your right mind since the day began to
come for Joe to get his Ticket.  If some would make bold to call
him Joe the Whiddler to his face, many more might think the same of
ye behind your back.  For 'tis plain as the fingers on your hand
that ye'd destroy yourself to drag him down with ye."  He nodded
reproachfully and slid back into his straw.

Coyle smiled bitterly.  He was a man about the same age as Gursey,
with sardonic lines about his thin mouth, fine hands, a good Roman
nose, and something of the same passionate energy that distinguished
Gursey from the stolid and indifferent convicts around.  He
exchanged a look with Gursey--a nasty look on both sides.

But the lags had had time by now to think about what Gursey had
said.  Even those who did not like him were inclined to listen to
him: they trusted him, which was more than they did each other;
probably for the same reason they disliked him--because he was
different from them, his hatred a kind of ecstasy, his hopes for
the future when he should be free a fanaticism and a faith.  "Ay,
ay," they grumbled.  "Maybe. . . ."  They were pretty hardened to
hunger by worse places than Murrumburra.

It was nearly midnight.  Through the cracks in the walls light
glowed from the dingo fires.  In the farthest corner Mickey snored
and Pete groaned fitfully.

Coyle gave Gursey a malicious smile and went to the door.

Nervously Gursey watched him.

Gursey was a small man, below medium height, with that frail,
fleshless kind of body that is often the most enduring.  Two years
in the mines on the Coal River, where the men came up only on
Sundays--flogging-day--had left him with a peculiar, rickety
pallor, and as a legacy of the punishment he got for escaping from
Moreton Bay he had a tic in the right side of his face and a leg
that dragged as he walked.  His hair was white and he had a white,
snowy beard, which he chewed nervously.  His body was horribly cut
about from the nape of his neck to his waist.  His fiery little
eyes, set close together, flickered in their deep sockets like
beetles burrowing into his skull, giving the impression of shrewd
and incessant watchfulness.  His voice was high and thin, like the
yap-yapping of a terrier, which his sharp features made him
curiously resemble, and as he talked he kept jumping up and
thumping the table or walking up and down waving his hands in jerky
gestures, as though beset by wasps.  Impatience, exasperation, even
frenzy, were his normal emotions.  Transported for seven years for
agitating for higher wages in the new mills in Manchester, his
constant fierce rebellion against "The System" had kept him in
servitude for fifteen years.  At this time he must have been about
thirty-five years old.

His attention was distracted from Coyle for a moment by the
mutterings of Red, who was counting the devils that were always
trying to get round behind and strangle him.  One of the lost
souls.  Nobody knew where Red came from, how long ago, or why.
When anyone asked "Tell us how you was boned, Red," he just stared,
and had long ceased to know that he was in prison at all.  He had a
bullet head and a nose smashed flat on his face.  The only person
he ever talked to was Gursey, who had been with him in one prison-
yard or another for nearly ten years.  The lags kept a sharp eye
open when he was about, for he was likely to see one of his devils
escaping into their pockets.  Then he would fling them down and
strip them naked and pummel them unconscious in a flash.  A hulking
and dangerous brute of whom an unscrupulous man could easily make
deadly use.

Coyle returned from the door and sat down beside him.  "Red," he
whispered, with one eye on Gursey.  "There's five gallons of Bengal
in the dray, Red."

Red glanced at him with an absent look and glanced away immediately
to swipe at the empty air.

Coyle nudged him and began to sing softly:


     "Cut your name across me backbone,
      Stretch me skin across yer drum,
      Iron me up on Pinchgut
      From now to Kingdom Come;
      I'll eat yer Norfolk Dumpling
      Like a juicy, Spanish plum,
      Even dance the Newgate Hornpipe
      If ye'll only gimme rum!"


The old song seemed to convey more to Red than Coyle's words.  He
grinned and wiped the back of his hand thoughtfully across his
mouth, chuckled, then punched Coyle in the chest.  "Ye Kilmainham
rat, where is it?" he demanded.

"In the dray," Coyle told him.  "Waitin' for ye."

"His dray?"

"Yes; the Cove's dray."

Red brought his two fists down on the table again, making the lamp
jump and splutter so that the faces of the men on the floor were
completely lighted for a moment.  "I'll scuttle his nob with me
fist!" he roared.  "I'll choke the lamps out of him.  I'll--"

Gursey shook him violently.  "Stow your whid."  Turning on Coyle,
he demanded:  "What did you tell him that for, damn you?"

Coyle cocked an eyebrow.  "And why not?"

"Because you knew the whisper of it'd put him off the hooks so
there'd be no holding him back!  Wasn't that it?"

Coyle shrugged.  "There's no pleasing you, Joe.  What DO ye want?"

"I don't want THAT."

"No?"  Coyle looked incredulous.  "And here's me thinkin' all this
time you must've made it up with the limejuicer to do just that and
nothing else."

"Well, you're wrong."

Coyle made a long face.  "Can you tell me why you've been feeding
this one up like a fighting cock, then, and living on the husks and
bones yeself?  Can ye?  Maybe you haven't been putting it into his
head the Cove's got a couple of red devils ready to drop on him,
eh?"

Gursey glowered, opened his mouth to speak, but stuffed the end of
his beard into it instead.

Coyle laughed in his face, then turned to the convicts, who had
raised themselves on their elbows again, roused like Red by the
mention of rum.

"You, Feeny," he demanded, pointing at Gursey, "are ye going to let
this lily-livered damned whiddler come the white rhino over you
when there's Bengal asking ye to lift it?"

Feeny scratched his head and looked doubtfully at the rest, who
looked doubtfully back, each waiting for the other to make up his
mind.  "No, I won't, neither," Feeny grumbled.  "Only . . . well,
I'm wid ye if the rest is."

Coyle raised the lamp.  "Who isn't?"

The light fell on the faces of those nearest the table, toothless,
bony, scarred and sunbaked faces with tangled beards and wrinkles
that might have been cut out with haphazard blows of the chisel.
There was Jake Henn, a London footpad, with a red hole where his
left eye had been knocked out.  There was Nigger Jack.  There was
Mark Scuggan, the old man, perpetually cringing as though expecting
a blow.  There was Hoppy Charlie, one side of his face shrunk to
the bone, the other swollen out with toothache.  There was Flash
Harry, who had worn Cossack trousers and jewelled brooches in his
time, his ribs sticking out through the rags of a dirty jacket now.
They rubbed their chins thoughtfully, peered at each other, grinned
doubtfully.  Rum!

Scuggan looked uneasily at Gursey, licked his lips, then turned his
eyes away.  "Well . . . hmn . . . if 'tis rum you said . . . well--
"

The others stirred.

"Yes," said Jake Henn.  "Rum might be worth crackin' a load for.
How much'd you say?  Five gallons."  He glanced round, trying to
work out what his share would be.  "Well, sayin' that everybody was
in, too. . . ."

"Ay, ay," the rest agreed.

Coyle glanced questioningly at Gursey.

He turned his back on them and beat away his invisible horde of
wasps.  "Hang yourselves, then," he snarled.  "But there won't be a
whiff of the stuff on me in the morning for McGovern to sniff out."

"Did ye hear that?" Coyle asked.

There was an argument on the floor.  It was settled by Feeny
calling "No dirty scabbing tricks now, Joe.  Flog one, flog all.
That's our motter."

"Ay, ay."

Gursey turned on them.  "Of course," he snapped.  "You're in here
for years yet.  I won't do it."

"He won't do it, he says," Coyle told them aside.

"Damn and blast his Ticket, I say," Feeny growled.

"You hear what the boys say?"  Coyle conveyed it to him.

Gursey spat at his feet.  "Swine.  You don't give a damn for the
rum, either."

"Oh, ho!  And don't I?  Just you see, Joe, me boy."  He strode to
the door and looked out.

Red followed him anxiously, smacking his lips and muttering.

"Shake a leg now, lads!" Coyle called to the men after surveying
the yard and the sky.  "Oliver's just getting up in the trees."

The convicts rustled out of the straw, stood hesitating round the
table, looking at Gursey.

Gursey jumped off the bench and confronted them.  "Think what
you're doing.  Didn't I tell you it was a trap?"

"That was only tucker," Feeny said.  "This is rum.  If it's scared
ye are, we ain't."

"Yes, I'm scared," Gursey said.  "And you--you're scared, too.
You've got nothing to look forward to.  You've always been trying
to get shot or hanged.  That's why you've escaped and beaten up
soldiers and tried to strangle each other.  It's despair.  That's
all it is."  He beat frantically on the table and a wild light came
into his eyes.  "But can't you see, you fools?  You have got
something.  You have.  YOU HAVE!"  He waved his hand towards the
door, beyond which was the scrub where dingoes were howling to each
other.  "It's yours.  YOURS.  Can't you understand?  In two, three
five years you'll be out of this muck and misery.  Outside you'll
find a country.  Yes, it's ours.  These tit-sucking limejuicers,
they'll go back home; but we'll stay.  It's all poverty and jails
for us in England.  We'll begin again here.  No more empty guts, no
more--"

"Aw, stow it!" Feeny cut in.  "Ye're never through wid the
talkin'."

"Only wait," Gursey went on, brushing him aside.  "The day WILL
come if you wait.  It will.  It will.  But if you don't wait you'll
just rot here till you die."  He backed against the door.

"You and your day!" Coyle said.

Mark Scuggan piped up in a quavery voice.  "A b'lieve 'ee, Joe.
That I do.  But come three years I'll be on the offal dump, so
'tisn't much use me thinkin' what will be.  Whereas a pannikin of
rum in me hand now.  He, he!"  He laughed nervously.

Feeny thrust Gursey aside.  "Ye'll drink the stuff when we bring it
to ye or by Christ we'll make a hole in ye to pour it in!  Stand
away!"

Gursey recovered himself against the table and sat down while the
lags crowded through the doorway.

Scuggan lingered a while.  "'Tis that big sweep McGovern troublin'
you, I see," he said sympathetically.

"No, no.  I don't care a damn for him."

"Who could trouble you more than these wild beasts, then?  Not
Cabell, surely."

Gursey took the end of his beard between his teeth.  "Yes," he
said.  "Cabell!"

The old man nodded.  "Ay.  A b'lieve.  He's an artful one.  God
made 'em both and Devil brought 'em together. . . ."

Inside the dark homestead humpy McGovern slept as he always did,
sucking up great gulps of air.

Cabell awoke soaked in sweat.  He had been dreaming.  He was locked
up in the humpy, beating a dog with McGovern's stockwhip.  It was
pitch dark and all he could see was the dog's eyes, which glanced
from side to side, but all the time came nearer.  Suddenly there
was a burst of mad laughter and the dog sprang. . . .  He was back
in the cemetery at Three Barrow Down, where his mother was buried,
watching a funeral.  Only it was his own funeral.  His father was
there in a black coat, and all his brothers.  They had red beards.
They were bending over and spitting into the coffin.  He looked
down.  It was himself, but he had the legs of a dog.  The coffin
began to fall, fall, fall. . . .  He was running along labyrinthine
gullies in the ranges behind the homestead, looking for his mother,
who was lost.  He had heavy irons on his legs.  The dog was
following.  He was afraid to move lest the rattling of the irons
attracted the dog.  But he must move.  He must.  HE MUST. . . .

One of the dogs at the homestead end of the pens barked.  The
watchman cursed it quiet, and again the only sound was the drone of
mosquitoes.

Through the window Cabell saw the first tender radiance of the
rising moon.  A black bunya pine was fossilized in the ultramarine
sky.  He felt miserable and heavy with a foreboding of evil--
overtones of his nightmare.  Burying his face in his arms to
protect it from the mosquitoes, he tried to sleep.  But the dog
began yapping again.  He climbed from the bunk, picked up a piece
of wood, and crept out to drive it away.  The dog was yapping, not
at the moon, but at the dray, a grey blur in the middle of the
yard.  It sensed Cabell and trotted back to the pens and lay down.

He was just turning away when his quick ear caught the sound of
movement in the darkness.  Immediately the sound was repeated, and
clearly came an angry whisper.  When his heart quietened down a
little he had first an impulse to wake McGovern, which he checked
at once, then an impulse to get his pistols from under the bunk and
see for himself.  He climbed through the window and got into the
scrub.  In a minute or two he was standing in the shadows a few
yards from the lags' hut, near the fence.  Figures crouched
whispering behind this.  Four men were working at the cart, pulling
the bags about hurriedly in search, he understood, of the rum,
handicapped by having to keep on the side farthest from the
homestead for fear of being seen.

His hands were clammy.  He was afraid to move, and the mosquitoes
bored into his ears, his eyelids, crawled up his wide nostrils.
His gloom persisting, the dream melting into this present
experience in a way that baffled his efforts to separate them and
assure himself that he was awake, he realized at the same time, as
a curious fact, that he could easily burst out laughing if he let
himself go.  But at this point action became imperative.  He
twitched all over, nerves tugging like tight wires in his flesh.
But prudence restrained him from stepping out to present his
pistols at their heads.  He backed towards the humpy to awaken
McGovern.  But he had not reached the edge of the scrub when a new
idea came to him, making his heart leap up in his throat again.
Minutes passed while he stood thinking about it.  The idea vanished
after a while.  He came to and found himself pondering a heavy
scent of clematis, white vines of which trailed from the trees
around him.  It suggested a childish prayer.  He wiped his hands
dry on his trousers, said the prayer over to himself, and began to
feel his way back through the scrub again.

The men were gone from the cart.  He saw them climbing over the
fence in a hurry, then silhouetted against the light as they
entered the hut.  His courage returned in the rush of disappointment.
He was cursing to himself for a great opportunity lost when voices
broke the silence.  They began in mutters and grew to shouts.

Mickey's voice rose above the rest.  "Damned if I will!  Ain't it
like St Gabriel himself I am to ye, the way I'm watchin' over ye by
hidin' the pisin."

"Choke him, Red."  This from Feeny.

There was a scuffle.

"Say it or I'll draw yer like a fowl."  This unmistakably from Red--
a crazy voice.

"Not if ye sit there till ye rot on me."

Sounds of heavy blows, grunts.

"Leave him, Red.  Ye can't hurt him.  There's no time.  Try the
lad."

Another outburst of shouting, then the boy's voice saying wildly,
"I don't Red.  S'elp me God.  I was boned when they loaded.  Mickey
hided it, he did."

"Well, off comes yer shirt for a start," Red muttered with a
frantic kind of glee.

A horrible scream tore layers of imaginary flesh off Cabell's
shoulders.  He guessed that they had ripped the boy's shirt off the
blood-caked back.

The scream died in a long moan.  All the dogs howled horribly, too,
and the dingoes answered them and the curlews began piping in
melancholy agitation by the river.  The watchman came out of his
box, whistled his dogs in, and prudently retreated to the farthest
end of the pens.

"Take it easy, Red," somebody said.  "He'll have a fit on yer."

"Oh, stop him, stop him!" Scuggan's trembling voice protested.
"Are you all loony?"

Another scream, longer and wilder than the first.

"Don't ye like the taste of salt, then?" Red said.  "Ah, but ye've
got a fine bloody back to rub it in."

Another silence while the boy controlled his sobbing.  Then, "I'll
show yer," he whimpered.

An audible gasp of relief came through the door, and an exclamation
rather like disappointment from Red:  "I hadn't hardly started."

Cabell relaxed against the tree and wiped sweat out of his eyes.

The four figures came through the door again, supporting Pete
between them.  He was breathing hard.

They had just got him over the fence when the moonlight broke
through the trees and struck across the door of the humpy.  Whether
Pete thought he saw McGovern standing there or whether it brought
back memories of the scene of the previous evening, he dug his
heels in the ground suddenly, gave a third scream, and began
struggling.

Echoes threw back a scream more bleak and bloodcurdling.

The men hesitated a second, then turned and fled for the hut,
leaving Pete in Red's hands.

Gursey rushed out into the yard, leapt the fence, and flung himself
upon them, clawing the madman's fingers from Pete's throat, kicking
him, punching.  "You'll wake them, you fool," he panted.  "Get back
to the hut.  Quick!"

Cabell, too, was frozen by the scream and held his breath,
expecting McGovern to appear.  But he came to quickly and, burying
his teeth in his lip, stepped out before them, his pistols glinting
in the moonlight.

Gursey gave one look and was over the fence and out of sight in an
instant.  Red automatically lumbered after him.  But the boy was
petrified.  He backed slowly away for ten yards before he could
make his legs turn and run.  Then Cabell was on him.  They came
down heavily on the ground together.

Pete's strength returned in a cat-like frenzy.

"Shut up, curse you!" Cabell hissed.  "You'll wake McGovern."  But
in the end he had to crack the lad on the head with the butt of his
pistol.

The light went out in the lags' hut and the tense silence of
listening was over the place.

Cabell fought down a wave of weakness, dragged the boy under the
trees, then crept back to McGovern's window.  Heavy breathing
reassured him.  He brought a bucket of water, and in a few minutes
the boy was sitting up.

Cabell shook him.  "After another trip to Moreton Bay, are you?" he
asked in a sardonic idiom learnt of McGovern.

Pete rubbed his head.  "It warn't me, master.  I didn't.  S'elp me
God I didn't."

"It doesn't matter now," Cabell said.  "I'll leave you to McGovern
in the morning."

Pete looked as though he might faint, so Cabell threw the rest of
the water into his face.  "Listen," he said.  "I'll give you this
one chance."

Pete cringed away.

"Tell me where my sheep go to."

"I don't know nothin' about your sheep," Pete grumbled.  "I told
you before."

"I couldn't get the ribs thrashed out of you before."

Pete was silent.  Then he began to weep.  "I can't, master.  I
can't.  They'll do me in."

"Who?"

"Them that's on the racket."

"Do you in, how?"

"Baptise me in the river."

Cabell dragged him to his feet.  "I'll ask you again at counting
out.  Think about it."

Pete staggered off dizzily.  The moon was well up now, dappling the
yard with deep shadows.

Cabell walked back to the cart, tidied the load, put a fallen sack
in place and some spilt cobs into the sack, tied the tarpaulin
down, and returned to the humpy.

Back in his bunk, he emerged from a prolonged fit of shivers to a
triumphant feeling of an enterprise miraculously launched.



Chapter Eight

A DANGEROUS LAY


He was not so sure when he came out again in the morning.  The
crystal dawn revealed to him the immensity, crudity and
indifference of the world in which he proposed to act.  Rising to
the west on abrupt escarpments cut through by gullies still gloomy
and moonstruck, falling to the east in wave after wave of untinted
greyness, the bush was a gigantic fist in which the homestead lay
like a grain of sand, a thing of such oceanic antiquity that his
little time-bound heart might well falter at thoughts of conquest
here.

Through McGovern's window came the sound of lusty breathing.
Cabell paused in the act of pouring a bucket of water over his body
and considered his slender arms and legs.  A conviction of
inadequacy completed itself.

His thoughts veered back to the conversation of the night before,
but he dismissed them irritably, not wishing to probe too deeply
into McGovern's designs in case, perhaps, he should see his own.
In telling the story to us as an old man Cabell used to picture
himself, and most sincerely, as a bewildered youth who never knew
what he was going to do next.  For example, he had not the
slightest idea how he was going to make good his threats to Pete.
The idea of handing him over to McGovern--Oh, that was too
repulsive!  But he dismissed thought on this matter, too, deciding
to "wait and see what would turn up".

Shaved, dressed in moleskins, topboots and a red flannel shirt, he
emerged from the humpy with a deep furrow between his eyebrows.  On
his way to the lags' hut he grew a shade paler, passing tell-tale
footmarks in the dust.  He stamped them out and went on with a
little more determination.

Coyle was already up and searching about the edge of the scrub for
dry gum-leaves to put in his pipe.

The fuzz from the crowded hut stopped Cabell in the doorway.  Black
hordes of flies immediately plated his back.  The soot from the
slush lamp had settled on the faces of the sleeping men.  Pete lay
on his stomach, his face towards the door.  A trickle of blood had
dried over his left eye.  Red's head hung backward; his mouth was
open and his purple tongue was curled up in the back of his throat,
as though his devils had done for him in the night.

Cabell kicked the wall.  "Wakey!" he shouted.  "Sun's burning your
eyes out!"

They began to scramble up from the floor, scratched their flea-
bitten bodies, then one by one went out into the yard, nibbling at
corn-cobs already much chewed over.

Pete opened an eye and closed it at once without moving.

When all the lags had gone Cabell stirred the lad with his foot.
"It's time you were getting back to Burradeen, Pete," he said,
adding in a low voice, "IF you're going."

But still he did not move.

Joe Gursey hung about the door.

"Wake up, confound you!" Cabell said, irritable all at once.

"The lad's queer," Gursey told him.

"What's supposed to be wrong with him?"

"It's the rough handling he's had."

Cabell looked at Gursey sternly.  "He'll have worse before the
day's out."

Gursey walked away.

Cabell considered the boy, then bent down and touched him gently.
"But it's no good to try and gammon me, Pete," he said, as though
arguing with a child.  "I'm not as soft as I look."

The boy buried his face in the straw and began to weep.

"I'll leave you till we've counted out, then," Cabell said softly.
"I couldn't leave you any longer.  You know that."  With immense
relief he escaped from the sight of the boy's thin shoulders shaken
by sobs.

The convicts had started work.  The dogs were in the pens driving
the sheep out.  Red, Feeny and Nigger Jack held the gates so that
only four or five sheep could crush through at a time, while Joe
Gursey, Flash Harry and Mark Scuggan stood by and counted.  There
were eight thousand sheep in the pens, eight flocks.  As soon as a
flock was complete one of the shepherds whistled up his dogs and
went off with it towards the river, a thin copper wire coiled among
the now sunlit trees.

The sheep in the pens leapt and crowded towards the gates.  The din
of bleating, barking, men shouting filled the air with birds like
flakes of light.  Clouds of dust rose like a flight of scarlet and
gold motes in the slanting beams of the sun.  The men holding the
gates against the sheep sweated themselves wet, and the falling
dust covered their faces with stiff, ferruginous masks.

The last flock had gone when McGovern appeared yawning in the
doorway.  He spat, scratched himself, then rubbed his hands
briskly, and his eyes fell first on Gursey.  "Hey, you, Joe,
cutthroat; come and strap these boots!" he shouted.

Gursey came back and began to do as he was told.

"What're you scowling about?" McGovern demanded.  "Don't like it,
eh?"

"Yes," Gursey said humbly.

"Lucky for you, or I'd tell you to lick them.  You would, wouldn't
you?  Damn your eyes, you've snapped a strap," McGovern chuckled.
"What're you shivering for?"

"It's a touch of the fever."

"All the tucker you gutsed last night, you mean."

"I didn't have any tucker."

"Is there a beak from here to Hobart'd believe that, Joe?"

"I slept all night," Gursey said quickly.

"Get along with you!"  McGovern laughed and pushed him over into
the dust, then strolled out into the yard, where Cabell was stoking
the fire under the kettle, the nearest job to hand when McGovern
had come out suddenly and caught him going to the lags' hut.

"Now, you ----," McGovern said with a sarcastic twinkle, "I bet YOU
didn't hear a thing, either?"

"Was there anything to hear?"

Standing over him in characteristic attitude, his legs wide apart,
his hands in the top of his trousers, McGovern half closed his eyes
and nodded.  "You're fly.  You're an artful dodger.  But"--he shook
his head--"you'll take that trip just the same, my bonny."

Whistling gaily, he went on again and came at last to the cart,
relieving a painful suspense among the men in the yard.  He pulled
the tarpaulin off, rolled up his sleeves and began to overhaul the
load.  Twice he counted the bags of corn, tested the rum cask, then
scratched his head and frowned.  "I'll be double-damned!" he
muttered in an aggrieved tone.  "What sort of a snivelling mob is
this?"

The men grinned at a miracle from heaven.

Cabell put a handful of tea in the boiling billy.  The water
frothed and coloured and sizzled over on to the flames.  He
returned to the humpy with it and sat down to eat.

McGovern was exploring the yard.  He stopped once or twice to
examine the ground, but went on and vaulted the fence.

As he watched McGovern approach the lags' hut Cabell began to be
afraid.  Once McGovern laid hands on Pete he would have nothing to
offer the boy, he thought.  In fact, things did not turn out
exactly as he feared, when, a few yards from the door of the hut,
McGovern signified by a shout that he had made a discovery.

It consisted of half a dozen cobs of corn with green leaves which
marked them indisputably as part of the load in the dray.  They
were concealed under the rubbish heap near the fence, in such a way
as to be visible only to a quick eye which came from the humpy with
the thought of finding them thereabouts.

"Aha," he shouted, holding them up, "rot me if there isn't some
guts in you still, my bullies!"

The men glanced at each other, and those who had work elsewhere
hastened to it.

Cabell came to the door.  Gursey, hammering an axe-head into a new
handle in the smithy, paused to listen, and a strange look flashed
between them, of entreaty and hatred on the one side, of pity
giving away to a kind of supercilious pitilessness on the other.

McGovern threw the cobs into the yard and went into the hut,
expecting to find more hidden there perhaps.  He reappeared in a
minute dragging Pete by the collar.  "Here's a damn caper!" he
roared.

"He's sick," Cabell said.

"Sick, eh?"  McGovern threw the boy down at the door of the humpy.
"I'll sicken him.  He's just the very one to tell me who cracked
that load last night."

Cabell went back into the humpy and poured himself a pannikin of
tea with unsteady hands.

McGovern was stroking the boy's arm affectionately when he came out
again.  "Cough it up, Pete," he wheedled.  "Wasn't it those swines
Gursey and Red did it?"

More like a white mouse than ever, the boy trembled.  He did not
look at McGovern though, but over McGovern's shoulder at Gursey,
who was swinging the new axe to test it.  As he buried the head in
the stump near the door of the smithy he glanced at Pete.  Pete
turned his eyes away quickly and on the other side of the yard saw
Red clench his fists round a phantom neck and wring it.

"That's all right, Pete," McGovern told him.  "One word and they're
as good as in the rumbler."

Pete had only one other place to turn his eyes, and there he found
himself face to face with Cabell.  He burst into tears.

McGovern lost his patience.  "Say it, curse you," he shouted, "or
I'll drop you dead!"

Pete sagged against the wall.

McGovern ripped off his belt and whistled it down on the boy's
shoulders.  Pete fell to his knees in the dust without a sound.

Cabell waved his pannikin agitatedly between them.  "Don't!" he
cried hoarsely.  "Don't flog him, McGovern!"

"Ay, I'll flog the sod," McGovern shouted, bringing the belt down
again.

"But you're only knocking him senseless," Cabell protested with a
curious exasperation.  "He'll have a fit and be no--no use at all."

McGovern looked at him, impressed, wiped his forehead, grunted, and
went into the humpy.  He came out with a pair of handcuffs, locked
one of the boy's wrists, and dragged him across the yard into the
harness shed.  He threw the loose end of the handcuffs over a beam
and fastened Pete's free wrist with it, so that the boy stood with
his arms raised and his feet just touching the ground.  In half an
hour or less the backs of his legs would begin to turn and his
wrists and shoulders would feel as though they were being torn from
their joints.

"Remember anything yet, honey?" McGovern asked, his good temper
quickly returning as usual.

But Pete only blubbered.

"There's a long day ahead," McGovern said cheerfully, took his
bridle and saddle and went out.  Three minutes later he rode away
into the hills; Cabell returned to his breakfast, Gursey finished
trying his axe out, and the bush stillness settled over them again.

During the next thirty minutes Cabell looked at his watch at least
a dozen times, and slapped more and more savagely at the flies.
Once or twice he even blushed and muttered to himself in an ashamed
kind of way.  But he let half an hour go by before he rose from the
table.

In the harness shed he found Pete breathing hard.  His hands were
red.  Where his jacket had pulled up his white belly was bare, with
purple marks of the lash across it.  Flies crawled over his face
and back.

Cabell pushed a box under his feet.  Then he began waxing a thread
to sew up a rent in the pad of his saddle.

Pete gave hard little gasps as the muscles of his back relaxed.

After ten minutes Cabell said, in a soft voice, as though afraid to
start the conversation:  "Pete, did you find out--you know, about
my sheep?"

The hunted look in Pete's eyes resisted his smile of entreaty.  He
answered nothing.

Another five minutes went by.  It was scorching hot outside.  The
waves of heat struck up into their faces.  Cabell's dogs lay
crushed against the wall of the humpy, snapping at the flies.  The
huts cracked as though they were on fire, and the gum-trees in the
scrub made a tearing noise as they slipped off slivers of bark.
From the roofs of the buildings and from the dust silver shimmers
of heat arose.

"I'll get you out of this," Cabell said.  "I'll protect you.  I'll
get you double rations."

Pete licked his lips.  "I don't know nothing about your sheep," he
grumbed.

"But you must know--you must!"

"I don't know nothing."

"But last night, Pete. . . .  You said they'd--murder you.  So you
must know.  Don't you remember?"

Gursey began to hammer on the anvil.  The vicious blows startled a
flight of cockatoos, which circled, cackling hysterically, over the
homestead.

"I don't--I don't--I don't!" Pete cried, as though trying to mimic
them.

Cabell glanced at his watch, frowned, and went to the door to look
down the track.

Pete's eyes were wide when he turned.  "Oh, crack a whid for me,
master," he besought.  "You seen it.  Tell him, for Jesus's sake."

Cabell ran to him.  "I will, Pete.  Indeed I will.  Only help me,
Pete.  I--I. . . .  Afterwards when you're free I'll give you
money.  I'll be your friend.  I promise.  I swear."

He became solicitous all at once, began brushing the flies off
Pete's back.  "Do you want a drink?  I'll bring you one."  He
dashed out of the shed and returned with a pannikin of rum, which
he held up to Pete's lips.  "Are you better now?  Can you speak?
Hurry.  He's coming back in a minute.  Can't you understand?  You
can be on the way to Burradeen with a sack of food before he comes.
Only tell me, quick."  He stopped babbling suddenly and bent his
head close to the boy's, so that they breathed heavily into each
other's face.

Pete tugged at his handcuffs.  "I dursn't, master."

"You can't!"  Cabell bent the rim of the pannikin against his
thumb.

"I can't.  I can't."

The blood rushed into Cabell's face.  He threw the pannikin on the
ground.  "Damn you," he said.  "Look what you're doing.  You're
making me into a--a beast like HIM."  He pointed to the door, then
in redoubled fury kicked the box from under Pete and left him
jerking about on the beam like a dead carcass.

The sound of a horse splashing through the river startled them.
Cabell went outside and looked around, then strode sulkily into the
smithy, where Gursey was sharpening the axe at the grindstone.

"Did you rivet that leather I told you to?" he snapped.

Gursey took no notice for a while, then said, with a malicious
smile, "So you didn't, did you?"

Cabell stamped like a child.  "But I will.  I will."

They glared at each other.

McGovern rode up and went into the harness shed.  They moved apart
and listened.  They heard his low voice, the sound of blows, a cry,
and he came out again.

"I'm going down the creek.  See that sod doesn't get no water till
I come in," he called to Cabell as he rode past the smithy.

Gursey started the grindstone again.  "And if you do?" he asked.
"What then?"

Cabell turned his head away.

"Oh, I know THAT," Gursey said impatiently.  "I mean after.  When
you've found the sheep."

Cabell beat away a disagreeable question.  "I don't know."

"You'll go away.  You'll get a place of your own.  You'll get Old
Hands to work it for you.  You'll be like him--LIKE HIM!"  Gursey
shouted to make himself heard above the noise of the grindstone,
but he seemed to be shouting in absolutely fiendish glee.

Cabell did not answer.

"Oh, ay," Gursey went on, half mocking, half fierce.  "As like as
not you'll be a big bug in a few years.  Rich.  With a woman in
your bed every night."

"Why not?" Cabell fired.  "It won't be for want of making men like
you work."

Gursey grinned triumphantly.  "But I just told you so.  I said
you'd be like him.  But you'll be worse.  He's a bastard and
nothing's bad enough for him, but you--you'd do anything,
ANYTHING."  He stopped the grindstone and came nearer as he spoke,
waving the axe excitedly over his head.  "HE'S one of us, anyway.
He doesn't look down on us, whatever he does.  But you think we're
dirt, don't you?  I can see through your aristocratic mug.  You
think that ANYTHING YOU DO TO US IS RIGHT."

They looked at each other--Cabell, tall, boyish, pale, gazing down
with an expression of cold and supercilious anger; Gursey, wrought
up by uncontrollable excitement, his face twitching and scarlet.
Gursey turned away abruptly and stumped back to the grindstone.

This was a curious friendship.  Cabell was lonely if he could not
find some excuse to visit the smithy two or three times a day, yet
the moment he saw Gursey his arrogance became ungovernable.  All
the pity he felt when he was away from the man dried up in him and
he felt, as Gursey said, that nothing could hinder him--nothing.
Gursey waited for him eagerly, but as soon as Cabell showed up an
insolent anger got the better of him.  "The aristocratic mug," as
he summed up Cabell's supercilious gestures, whipped him out of
fits of dejection and freshened the longing to be even some day for
all he had suffered.

But deeper than this conflict which attracted them there was
perhaps an understanding, a bond of brotherhood between them, for
what distinguished them in a world of dispirited characters was
that each of them believed, in his own way, that he would
eventually pull himself out of the muck, had a firm faith in the
power of his will.

"Aye," Gursey said after a long silence.  "But suppose they didn't
work?  Suppose they found out they'd only got to stick together?
Where'd you be then and your woman?"

"It won't be in my day," Cabell said.

"Maybe it will and maybe it won't.  But tomorrow it might be."
Gursey came back to the door.

"There'll be no lags in Australia much longer."

"Not new lags, you mean.  But there'll be the old hands and their
brats and their brats' brats.  They'll hate, and hatred never dies.
Never.  Never!"  He spat in the dust at Cabell's feet.  "What say
they took it into their heads to have no more coves here, no more
soldiers and masters?  That'd put the kybosh on you, wouldn't it?"

"That's what every--beaten dog like you hopes for."

"Yes, that's true," Gursey said eagerly.  "But whose country is
this, d'you think?  It's a beaten dog's country.  That's what it
is.  It's full of beaten dogs, what with us lags and all the rest
that come because they had to."

"To be masters and floggers on their own account."

"That's true, too.  But those that do, get rich and go away.
What's left behind is the double-flogged, the poor mongrels that've
been kicked about till they've gone mad and won't stop at nothing."
He pushed his face up close to Cabell's.  It was excited.

Cabell, too, was excited.  They seemed to have reached a crisis of
some sort.

A cry from the harness shed startled them.  The flimsy walls shook,
then all was silent again.

"There," Cabell said contemptuously.  "You talk and talk, but you
never do anything.  You wouldn't lift a finger to save Pete.  Why?"

Gursey's eyes became shifty.  He leant against the doorpost and
took the end of his beard between his teeth.  "It's because I can't
stand another flogging without going mad," he said apologetically
in a low tone.  "I'd murder the first swine I saw when I got off
the triangle.  Then they'd stretch me--and it'd be all over."  The
vitality ebbed out of him suddenly.

"You could escape," Cabell said anxiously.

"I don't want to escape," Gursey fired up.  "I want to be FREE."

Cabell laughed, but in a forced, mechanical way.  "Ach," he said
quickly to change the subject.  "What kind of a new nation could
you make, anyway, with nothing but convicts in chains?"

"It's only convicts in chains could make a new nation," Gursey said
slowly, sadly.  "It's only them who want one."

Cabell laughed again.

"Laugh," Gursey told him bitterly.  "You might laugh on the other
side of your black face one day.  It's a long way from your merry
old England out here, and it's a very funny sort of place, where
nothing happens like it should.  Christmas comes in the middle of
summer.  The north wind's hot and the south wind's cold.  Trees
drop their bark and keep their leaves.  The flowers don't smell and
the birds don't sing.  The swans are black and the eagles white.
You burn cedar to boil your hominy and build your fences out of
mahogany.  Aye," he sneered, "it's not the same as the Old Country
at all."

Cabell rose and went to the door of the harness shed.  He stopped
and listened to Pete trying to reach the box.

"Your Honour," Gursey called, beckoning him back.  "Just one word
before you go in there."

Cabell returned slowly to the smithy.

Gursey seized him by the arm and shook it.  "I never made you ANY
promise.  Never.  Never."

"I didn't say you had."

"But you let him think so, don't you?  Always sneaking round here.
And the way you stop talking all of a sudden when he goes past."
Gursey nodded.  "I'm on to your lay."

"I've got no lay," Cabell said quietly, freeing his arm.  "I asked
you once and you wouldn't tell me.  Very well."  He turned to go.

"I wouldn't tell you if I was free today," Gursey cried.  "No, by
God, I wouldn't!"  He ran in front of Cabell and barred his way to
the harness shed, waving his bony hands.

Cabell watched him with a forced and deprecating smile.  The sun
beat through his hat, like a weight resting on the top of his
skull, and turned the shirt against his back to a thin sheet of hot
metal.  "What d'you want?" he snapped, after another unsuccessful
attempt to get into the shed.

Gursey prodded his chest with a black forefinger.  "He's dead keen
to send me and Red down, isn't he?  Me AND Red, mind you.  Why?"

"How can I tell?"

"Not so he can lift sheep off you this time."

Cabell looked at his feet, prized a stone out of the dust with the
toe of his boot.

"I'll tell you.  He thinks we'll come back to do for him."

Cabell kicked the stone across the yard, and his eyes followed it.

Gursey lowered his voice.  "But he knows--he knows WE'D DO FOR YOU
FIRST."

Cabell opened his mouth to speak, but a voice began calling him
with a desperate urgency.  "Master, master!" it shouted.  "Quick!
I'll tell yer."



Chapter Nine

THE ARTFUL DODGERS


When McGovern came in Pete was gone.  Cabell said he had split on
Gursey and Red as McGovern had expected him to, so he had let the
boy go.  He was pale and upset, but McGovern did not seem to
notice.  After a few moments McGovern laughed.

"That settles HIS hash," he said, half to himself.

That night he put two convicts in irons and chained them to the
anvil in the smithy.

"We ought to settle down snug together for another two years now,"
McGovern mocked Joe.

He tormented them till Red let out a terrible yell and ran at him,
forgetting all about the irons, which jerked him flat on his face.
McGovern went inside chuckling contentedly.  Gursey had not once
spoken or raised his head.

McGovern was in a jovial humour and broached the rum.  But after
tea he began to be restless, kept going to the door and looking at
the smithy.  Through the reflection of distant lightnings the stars
burned with a feverish, sickly colour.  The air was heavy--like
wadding to the nostrils.  The dogs lying round the door panted for
breath.  From far away came an echoing rumble.

He lit his pipe, let it go out, then suddenly began to talk about
indifferent matters, off-handedly as man to man.  He told Cabell
stories about the settlers in the district, how many of them had
"started with a damn sight less than you and made their pile".  He
went over this again and again.  He became very serious and began
giving Cabell good advice.  "You don't want to stick round here,
lad, tailing another man's sheep.  Look here, I could put you on to
land out beyond the Swamp way where you'd run a sheep to the acre.
Clean as billiard table.  Grass like a feather bed.  And water.
You could float a ship in the holes.  Look here, lad"--he jerked
himself across the table and patted Cabell's shoulder--"all you
want--a thousand good ewes and fifty rams and a year's tucker.  You
could go tomorrow."  He seemed to take it for granted that Cabell
would leave Murrumburra soon--as soon as his ewes had lambed.  "And
I wouldn't waste no time, neither, lad.  You're not doing yourself
no good round here with a wet season just in the offing.  Did you
hear them ducks going over this afternoon?  Wouldn't mind betting
we'll be cut off here inside a week if the river starts getting up,
which means you'll be set back a couple of months and a good dollop
of monkeys into the bargain most likely.  Take my tip.  You ought
to move on before it breaks."

At this point he put down his pannikin of rum, from which he was
sipping continually, and entered on a long, involved rigmarole
lasting for nearly two hours, about the necessity of starting young
and remembering that "it was every man for himself and the swag for
him that hit first".  He echoed Cabell's uneasiest thoughts when he
spoke of the way a man's best years ran away in this country, and
drove the point in with some awful yarns about men who had come out
young and hopeful ("Just like you, me boy.  Fine, upstanding Johnny
Newcomes."), and had drunk themselves mad or hanged themselves in
despair.

During this he got gloomier and gloomier, until finally, in a burst
of boozy misery, he beat his chest and began to complain that he
was a "done sod" himself.  "Lazy as a store pig.  That's me.  Take
after my old man.  They hanged him, and they'll hang me."

He stared mournfully at Cabell, nearly pulling the table out of the
earth to save himself from falling over, for by this time he was
very drunk.  His face had gone several shades redder and he talked
as though he had a mouthful of molasses.  "You're laughing at me.
Think I'm dirt, don't you?  Bloody aristocrat.  That's what Joe
says.  Joe's right.  Wouldn't tell you if I wasn't drunk as a
bastard.  'Brighten your lamps.  He's dangerous.'  That's what Joe
says to me long ago.  Well, he don't need to put me flash.  I know
you're dangerous, curse you.  Where's the bloody rum?"  He poured
out another pannikin, spilling half of it over the table.  "Just
you wait," he muttered threateningly.  "You can't come Yorkshire
over Bob McGovern.  I ain't scared of no sod, dead or alive."  He
emptied the pannikin and banged it down on the table, frowning with
the ludicrous, maudlin rage of drunkenness.  But at this moment he
lost his grip on the table and toppled over backwards.  He made a
ridiculous exhibition trying to get on his feet, half staggered,
half crawled into his room, and after repeating that he wasn't
scared of nobody, particularly of Cabell, shut his door and made a
great fuss barring it and pulling the shutter over his window.

All this deeply impressed Cabell, and for some time after McGovern
had closed his door he sat with his chin in his hand, thinking.

Of course, he saw at once that McGovern had been talking, not
wildly, but with a definite purpose--was not, perhaps, really drunk
at all.  His stories, his advice, his humiliation, and, most
interesting, his intentionally transparent pretence of being afraid
by asserting that he was not afraid--all this was calculated to
produce some effect, but for the moment an explanation eluded
Cabell.  At first he thought that McGovern was merely daring him
again, expressing contempt for him.  But he dismissed this quickly.
The only conclusion left, then, was so unexpected, so bizarre,
that, in a curious way, it frightened him.

He walked excitedly up and down the humpy, chewing his nails,
pausing now and then to stare at McGovern's door.  Going to his
bunk then, he sat down with his head in his hands and again went
over all that had been said.  But the incredible conclusion
remained: McGovern HAD been pretending, but BECAUSE HE WAS AFRAID.

Say he had wanted to close the door, what better way was there than
by some such clumsy subterfuge that Cabell would pass over as a
freak of drunken humour.  But why close the door--now--tonight?
Because he knew the vague idea that had been forming in Cabell's
mind since his trip to Moreton Bay?  But the stories and the advice
contradicted this.  They could only excite Cabell to do something--
immediately.  There was also the ironing-up of Gursey and Red and
McGovern's determination that Cabell should leave with them for
Moreton Bay in the morning, his persistently exasperating behaviour
since Cabell's return, all tending in the same way--to force Cabell
to act.  Ah, TO FORCE HIM TO ACT.

He had not to look far to understand that.  He found the same
desire in his own feeling that any violence, any horror was better
than waiting another week, another day in suspense.  But was it
possible that McGovern could feel the same?  Hopefully he projected
a new estimate of McGovern's character, not as a man superhumanly
courageous, but even, perhaps, dogged by incessant fear of the
brooding characters around him, never knowing what insane and
secret revenge they might be plotting, and always trying to bring
them to action.  Always on the watch for a conspiracy, might he
not--as his words had suggested last night, as Gursey's had
suggested this morning--might he not really believe that there was
something between them?  Misinterpreting his timidity as cunning,
McGovern had become more and more truculent--yes, in the hope of
forcing a crisis.

A strange, exalted mood descended on Cabell.  It would seem that
McGovern's tactics were a mistake, then, for seeing himself for the
first time as the attacker Cabell discovered an energy and courage
he had never known before.

But were they?  He checked himself on the brink of a rash act.  He
was taking from under his bunk two bundles which he had prepared
that afternoon before McGovern's return.  A doubt came to him that
there might perhaps be more in McGovern's artful dodge than he had
seen.  He sat down and thought about it again, and, becoming
cooler, he undid the bundles and extracted from each a pistol,
powder and shot, which he put away under his palliasse where they
were usually kept.  Then, having made sure that McGovern was still
asleep, he slipped out into the sultry darkness and took a cautious
detour along the edge of the scrub to the smithy.

Clouds were rising swiftly, ribbed with lightning that burned for
seconds long on the air--like eagles flying up into the stars.  It
lit the country for miles around, showed Red asleep and Gursey
still sitting with his chin on his chest.

Cabell threw one of the bundles on to Gursey's knees, shook Red and
gave him the other.

"Good-bye, Joe.  Good luck," he whispered.

Gursey jerked his head up.  His eyes glittered malignantly in the
lightning.  He flung the bundle from him and muttered, but his
words were lost in the thunder that rumbled like a soft bouncing
ball rolling about among the hills.

Cabell hesitated, looking down at Gursey with a suddenly heavy
heart.

Red was already eating the food.  Feeling about in the bundle, he
stopped chewing, turned to Joe, and whispered.

Gursey jumped to his feet and ran to the length of his chain after
the retreating figure of Cabell.  A stone whistled past Cabell's
head and thudded against the wall of the humpy.  He turned and
looked back.  His blood had begun to beat like a hammer.

A feeling of guilt overpowered him.  He shivered, glanced round
uneasily at the nervous, twitching night, and flattened himself
against the wall.  The thunder grumbled, died away, came again,
nearer.  The sheep clustered together, began to bleat.  A voice
moaned in the gullies, far away, then close at hand.  The door of
the harness shed banged viciously; something seized him by the
throat, the hair, the chest and shook him.  Wind.  On the roof of
the smithy a piece of bark flapped like a bird in a trap, tore
itself free and whirled away overhead.  Dry and brittle branches
crashed in the scrub.  The clouds pressed on the earth and the
darkness was like a jelly.  He ran into the house and barred the
door.  His head and limbs ached.  Blinding light penetrated the
gloom of the humpy through every crack in walls and roof, pressed
his eyeballs back into his head.  Then the thunder rattled the
dishes in the safe and the clouds burst in a solid sheet of water
that poured into the room, extinguishing the candle, and left him
groping under his palliasse with his eyes fixed on the momentarily
lighted window and McGovern's door.

It rained cats and dogs all night, but the thunder and lightning
soon passed and he felt calmer.  Towards dawn he fell asleep.

He started awake and found McGovern leaning over him.

"What's the matter?"

"Our two canaries have flown."  McGovern spoke with his usual air
of ridiculing the world in general, but he looked worried, as
though he had overlooked something.  Also, he found it necessary to
add, "My bunk's awash.  That's why I'm out early."

Cabell trusted his voice to ask, a shade incredulously:  "Escaped?
But how could they?"

McGovern turned away and went to the door.  "They must've had a
file," he grumbled.

Cabell grew bolder and followed him.  "Have I got to ride down to
Moreton Bay for soldiers, then?"

"No need to."  McGovern glanced at him quickly.  "They'll come
back."

"Why should they?"

"You know why."

"I?"

"Look here."  McGovern pointed to the bush.  "There's this here
jailyard a few miles wide.  And all round blacks and nothing else."
He laughed in Cabell's face.  "Blood's what they're after now.  MY
blood."  He moved back into the humpy, as though he did not want to
talk, and began getting things out for a meal.

The sheep in the yard were muddy and forlorn.  The clearing was one
vast puddle.  Above the drip, drip of water from the trees the wash
of the rising river could be heard.  It told Cabell that today or
at latest tomorrow everything must be decided.  He put his coat on
and splashed through the rain to awaken the lags.  Neither said any
more about the escapees.  This created a strained and artificial
silence in the humpy.  When Mickey had patched up the roof,
McGovern got dry blankets from the store and retired with a bottle
of rum, remarking that he had sleep to make up.  After fretting
impatiently about the yard for an hour, Cabell announced to Mickey
in a loud voice outside McGovern's window that he was going over to
the Five Mile to see how his sheep were after the rain.

Out of sight of the humpy, he turned off the track to the Five Mile
and plunged into the sodden scrub towards Winjee Creek.  The gloomy
and mysterious twilight under the trees played on his nerves and
made him stop and listen for the sound of voices and footsteps to
be repeated.  Two hours later he rode out on to an open downland
where Winjee Creek, now a yellow torrent, joined the main river,
from the far bank of which the foothills of the range rose in steep
granite cliffs.  The sun was shining on the mountains.  Deep gashes
of blue shadow cut the surface of grey bush, marking the course of
gullies which crisscrossed like a maze.  Cabell studied these for
some minutes, then turned his attention to the out-station hut at
the junction of river and creek, and, having assured himself that
the two convicts in charge there were safely out of sight, he
cantered down to the river.  It was already swollen enough to make
crossing unpleasant, and he was soaked to the skin when he rode out
on the opposite bank.  Twenty minutes later he disappeared into the
scrub. . . .

When he rode into the yard of the homestead late that night he was
wet and tired, with hands cut about and bruised.  But his eyes were
on fire and great projects were stirring in his brain.  There was
much still to be done--much still to be done, he reminded himself,
as he paused outside the humpy to take a grip on himself.  First,
there was the river.  He turned his head and listened to the sound
of the water coming down from the range.  And there was McGovern.
He thrust his hands out of sight in his pockets and strolled into
the room.

McGovern effaced a querulous look with a smile.  He was sitting at
the table, drunk, or pretended to be drunk, cleaning a pair of
pistols.

"YOU'RE still safe?" he said, casting a quick, suspicious look into
the darkness behind Cabell.

"Of course.  Why not?"

"No reason I know of--up to the present."  McGovern smiled again.

"What d'you mean?"

McGovern squinted down the barrel of one of the pistols.  "Your old
mate and his offsider come back here this afternoon."

"I suppose you mean Gursey?"

McGovern held the pistols up to the light.  "Ain't they little
beauties!" he said.  "They've killed better men."

Cabell turned away to his bunk.

"Pete's gone," McGovern said.

"Escaped?"

"Not on your life!  They dragged him off by the scruff, squealing
like a stuck pig.  What, you didn't know?"

"You mean I helped to murder him?" Cabell asked angrily

"Why not?"

"Why?"

"Ah, why?"  McGovern winked.  "Once a whiddler always a whiddler,
and YOU'VE got brains."

Before Cabell could think of a reply he had disappeared into his
room.

So he knew!



Chapter Ten

SUSPENSE


Well, nothing was decided next day or the next.  Cabell waited and
had hardly any sleep at all.  Under the noise of the river and the
sound of the rain on the roof he could hear footsteps, voices.  A
dozen times each night he slipped out of his bunk to hide himself
behind the flour barrel and watch.  But no one came.

By now the river was over the flats and half a mile wide in places.
It roared down, crashing together the trees it had torn from the
scrub.  McGovern rubbed his hands and sympathized with Cabell at
the prospect of a prolonged flood.  Between the homestead and the
hills Cabell had explored there was a boiling torrent now.
Meanwhile, he waited, too.

He was in exceedingly good spirits, seemed, contrary to Cabell's
idea, to thrive on the suspense.  If Cabell had examined himself
closely in a mirror he would have understood why.  Overnight his
plump cheeks had caved in, his eyes had dark bags under them, and
tight lines had come out round his mouth.  He said nothing and
answered nothing, started to gobble his food greedily and pushed
his plate away after a mouthful, shouted at old Mark Scuggan for no
reason at all and immediately again smuggled a pannikin of rum to
him, rushed from the humpy as though it were stifling him and
rushed back at once and looked round anxiously as though he feared
or hoped that some important event had taken place while he was
away.  Throughout the rest of the day nothing could budge him.  For
a while he sat bolt upright on his bunk, pretending to read, but
glancing every moment at window or door, listening.  Then suddenly
his eyes went dull and his spine seemed turned to jelly.  The flies
devoured him unmolested.

Towards evening he threw his book aside, went resolutely to the
harness shed with a bundle bulging under his coat and saddled his
horse.  When McGovern looked out half an hour later the mare was in
the paddock again and Cabell was sitting on the anvil, a picture of
misery.  McGovern observed all this and was no fool.  He knew that
he would not have long to wait now.

In Cabell a new being laboured to be born.  He feared, even loathed
it--a crude and unscrupulous whisperer of perilous designs.  Oh,
the hesitations and misgivings, the doubts and regrets and
longings!

What touches the heart of the lonely one more sadly than the sound
of rain on the roof at night?  It at once shuts him in more closely
with his own thoughts and sharpens the inhospitality of the world
outside, fills it with gloomy and mysterious questions.  It reminds
him of different rain on a different roof, for each rain and roof
has its own music.  The soft Irish rain falling on peat, the thin
London ooze dribbling over the slates, the gale-driven showers of
the West Country hissing in the thatch, the rain in our district
that comes down in leaden drops on the galvanized iron, with great,
passionate surges of wind. . . .  Cabell sweated in his bunk, for
it was the height of midsummer, and thought of winter nights at
Owerbury, with the clean, white, chill, scented sheets pulled over
his head, the gale whining in the chimneys, the sea rattling the
shingle, the firelight leaping and dying on the walls.  Oh, how he
longed for that life again, the security, the accustomed face of
it!  The smoke of the dung fire and the stench of the dogs
sheltering in the humpy choked him.  Lice and fleas crawled over
his body, which was covered with red lumps from their bites.  And
all the time a dark shadow was hovering over the borderland of his
thoughts.

Yes, he would have given ten years of his life to be quit of
Australia then.

But morning came at last, and with it McGovern, swaggering,
spitting, blowing his nose through his fingers, and thrusting his
frowsy beard in Cabell's face to say "Seems like your offsiders
have let you down, limejuicer, eh?"  He shouldered Cabell aside and
stood in the doorway looking at the sodden bush.

Cabell stared at his neck--red and squat, with thick veins and
sinews and loose, coarse skin like leather.  A red hair stuck out
of a mole behind his right ear.  Vast and gnarled, the ears lay
flat against his head.  The wrinkles of the neck were grained with
dirt and the band of the shirt stiff with it.

Cabell did not think of Owerbury just then.  He thought of Gursey,
sympathetically, perhaps a trifle impatiently, and even looked at
the jack-knife on the table.  The strength and insolent confidence
of that neck.  How often it had been bared to hoot laughter at him,
thrust out as though daring him to choke it, so damnably sure of
itself!  For by this time Cabell had forgotten what he had surmised
a few nights before, and McGovern had become once more a
superhuman, indestructible monster for him.

He found himself glowering into McGovern's eyes.

"Feel like killing something, do you?" McGovern asked him softly.

Cabell licked his lips.

"There's some black duck out," McGovern said with a smile.  "You
can take my old rat-trap."  He gazed up at Cabell's face for a
moment, then went into his room.  In a minute or two he came out
with an old fowling-piece, the barrel pressed into his stomach and
the butt towards Cabell.  Cabell automatically slipped his finger
over the trigger and held the gun in the same position, staring
down in a dazed way at the hammer, on which his thumb rested.

McGovern met his eyes with a faint smile.  "Yes," he said.  "It is
loaded."

Cabell wrenched the gun away and half-ran out of the humpy as
though escaping.

In the harness shed he threw the fowling-piece down and glared at
it resentfully.  Suddenly he went hot and trembled all over.  The
fit was so violent that he had to lean against the wall for a
while.  But it passed.  Gloomy thoughts pulled down the corners of
his mouth.  He beat them away with a gesture of exasperation, and
began to root under a heap of saddlery in the corner.  He recovered
the bundle he had hidden there the evening before--a few letters, a
shirt or two, his razors in a chamois-leather roll, and a pair of
pistols--wound the shirts round his body, put the letters in his
boot and the razors and pistols in the pockets of his coat, as an
afterthought picked up the fowling-piece, and went out with his
bridle jingling on his shoulder to catch his horse.

McGovern was still at the door, an interested look in his eye, as
though he had been watching Cabell's transactions through the bark
walls.

Cabell turned guiltily to see that the pistols were out of sight,
but at the same time asserted to himself, by way of reassurance to
his rapidly beating heart, that he had nothing to be ashamed of,
anyway, if he did leave Murrumburra and never came back.

McGovern looked very pleased and satisfied when he rode past the
humpy.  "If you run into them conspirators up the river," he
called, "give them my love and say I still sleep sound."  His
laughter died away in the hills.

So he was running away from Murrumburra after all.  At least, that
was what he thought.  He would go to Flanagan's, five miles away
across the river, and ask for a job till the floods went down.  At
the same time he speculated on the character of that sly fellow.
Certainly no one was to be trusted.  A man ought to protect
himself.  Now, that roan stallion was a fine horse, worth a lot of
money.  Say Flanagan refused to keep his bargain. . . .

Curious how those two impulses continually at war with each other
in a man--the desire to get away from the stress and the struggle,
the desire to master it--will often mask themselves in each other.
For why was he hurrying to Winjee Creek now if he only wanted to
cross the river?  There were places no worse much nearer the
homestead, and all of them death-traps just now as far as that
went.  And if he had chosen just that place because at the back of
his woolly thoughts was the idea of getting those five hundred
Durhams and three thousand sheep out of the hills he had explored
three days before, then must he not also have known that he would
never dare it while McGovern was free to chase him, that, anyway,
he would be unable to do it alone?  Yes, there were many evasions
and obscurities in this part of the old man's story, much that he
would not admit because, perhaps, of the terrible fruit he gathered
years afterwards from that night's work.  In telling the story he
slurred over this part of it by slipping in a long discourse on the
awful weather it was, how the bush was full all of a sudden with
toadstools like gold plates, till he came to the place where,
arriving at the open downs about four o'clock in the afternoon
(Why, what the devil could he have been doing since ten in the
morning if not idling in the scrub on purpose?), an extraordinary
irregularity attracted his attention to the humpy by the river.
Though it was a good two hours from sunset, THE SHEEP WERE PENNED
UP, and penned up so near the rising waters that it was plain they
had not been taken out that day at all.  They were bleating
mournfully and the dogs were trotting round them in amazement at
untoward events.  A spiral of smoke came from the humpy but no
sounds to break the silence, the brooding tragic silence of a wide
landscape pressing round a tiny habitation of men.

A fact which he had noted at the time became suddenly significant.
The day before, the hut-keepers from all the out-stations had come
in for their weekly rations, but Robins, the hut-keeper at Winjee
Creek, had not come.  An equally significant fact which he did not
recall was that he had said nothing about this to McGovern, having
forgotten it, maybe.

He rode back into the scrub and sat down on a rock for two hours
without moving.  In the end he thought it highly likely that Gursey
and Red would have quartered themselves here.  The humpy was
isolated, the country round it open, and the means of a desperate
retreat near in the river, and had not Flanagan said that
McGovern's accomplices--which the shepherds of Winjee Creek
undoubtedly were--would have enough rum and tobacco to ration an
army?  Still, he thought, he should make sure, reconnoitre.  What
would McGovern say if he came all this way and merely found the
hands sick or drunk?

Oh, he was sure, of course.  Why did he start up suddenly and sniff
the air as though he had smelt a familiar smell--as though he
thought he was being followed?

He went down then and took a good look at the river, marking the
dangerous places in his mind.  It would be worse tomorrow, he
decided, and worse still the day after.

When he got back to his horse the birds were settling among the
dark foliage with disconsolate twitterings.  From the depths of the
scrub a mopoke cried harshly, a lonely, unanswered cry.  The rain
had dropped, but the clouds lay sullenly on the hills, as black as
pitch.  He stood and peered into the scrub for a long time, queerly
affected by the feverish little noises fretting the fall of night.
He felt that something was coming.  The air was heavy with
foreboding of it.  The black clouds hid it in their wombs, ready to
fall upon the desolate wilderness.

He grabbed the horse and dragged it out into the open.  The damp
heat stifled him, so he took off his coat, heavy from the pistols
in the pockets, and laid it across the pommel.  When it was quite
dark he began to walk with the reins over his arm towards the
humpy.

A light wavered and the rectangle of doorway stood out against the
ebony plaque of darkness.  A spasm of lightning left him with an
image of the humpy, its lean-to roof, a cabbage-tree palm behind,
the glinting waters of the uproarious river.  Shadows moved on the
wall, distorted heads, elongated arms.  The lightning came again,
and immediately after a dog barked. . . .

The five men inside the hut turned their heads to the door.  Pete
jumped off the bench and retreated to the wall.

Gursey snatched the lamp off the table and put it on the floor,
rose, took a step towards the door, hesitated, and drew back into
the shadows near the window.  He gazed anxiously down at Red, with
the hypnotically intense stare of one watching the crisis of a
fateful experiment.

Red's eyes lighted up.  He took an axe from the wall, went to the
door and quietened the dog.  They heard him plod round the humpy,
return.

"What's there?" Pete demanded.

Red gave another look at the night.  "Nothin'."

Gursey replaced the lamp on the table and brushed the tumble of
white hair out of his eyes.  The light shone up into their bearded
faces, reversing the shadows, so that they seemed painted like
savages.

Red sat down and resumed his sullen thoughts, a pannikin gripped in
his two fists.  Gursey kept an eye on the bottle between them,
manoeuvring the quantity of liquor in his pannikin so that he
remained hot and excited but not quite drunk--a nasty mood.  His
eyes were bloodshot.  From time to time he broke into a fit of
growling and cursing, came to and stared sulkily at Robins, the
hut-keeper.

Robins broke a heavy silence.  "I 'ad a good crib 'ere.  And now
you done the guy on me.  The nubblin' chit for us all, that's 'ow
it'll end."  His fat face shone from the effort of a long and vain
dispute.

Nobody answered him.

Davy, the shepherd, talked to himself in his bunk.  "Hanged, is it?
So they will.  Ha, ha!  All hanged up in a row, blast ye!"

Pete pulled his jacket up close to his neck, and the old man
laughed.  "Hang ye up in a row.  Ay, that they will.  Ha, ha!"  He
made a motion of passing a rope round his throat and strangling.
His head jerked, his eyes popped, his yellow tongue hung out.  "Ha,
ha, ha!"

Pete rose, stared round the room, sat down again.

Robins appealed to Gursey.  "But the Cove'll come."

Gursey frowned and licked his lips, made one or two false starts,
then burst out impatiently "Let him come."

"Lobsters'll come."

"McGovern won't bring no lobsters here," Gursey said, "and you know
why."

Robins sighed.  "Well, I 'ad a good crib 'ere," he said mournfully
and dropped his hands on his plump thighs.

Red closed one eye and looked at them.  "Ye'd burn well," he said
thoughtfully.

"That's the caper," chuckled old Davy.  "Stick him up the chimbley.
'Ear him frizzle."  A villainous-looking old brute this, with a
chin like a trowel and a mouth turned in over bare gums.

He reduced Pete to a fit of the shivers.

"Scared like, eh?" Red demanded, giving the boy a rough shake.

"No, no, Red.  Not that scared. . . ."

Red picked up the axe and laid it on the table.  "Hmn," he said.

Pete drew away.

"Ain't we three sworn brothers like?"

"Yes, Red.  Yes."

"All in together like?"

"Yes, yes.  Only . . . he'll do us in!" Pete cried.  "He's got
pistols'n everything."

Gursey put a finger through a hole in the boy's jacket and ran it
over the still-unhealed weals.  "If McGovern lays hands on that--
you know, don't you?"

Pete lowered his head.

The dog began to bark and strain at its leash.  Gursey nudged Red,
who ran to the door with the axe again; Pete and Robins jumped up
and watched him.  The dog's barking ceased and all was quiet.  Pete
sank back stiffly on to the bench, but Robins continued to gaze at
the door with a terrified and hopeful expectancy.  Gursey stood up
under the window and did not move.

"It'll only be them dingoes," Robins said persuasively.

They ignored him.

A flash of lightning lifted a patch of downland from the pit of
darkness.  Red bent down and released the dog, which bounded away
yapping.  They heard a shout.  Pete stumbled behind the table.  The
shout was repeated, just audible above the noise of the river.

"The slut's a-top of him!" Red shouted and ran outside.  Gursey
hesitated a moment, then went cautiously to the door.  Cabell was
standing with one foot in the stirrup of a plunging horse.  The dog
had him by the leg and he was trying to beat it off with his coat.
Red was running towards him, waving the axe and roaring at the top
of his voice.  The darkness snapped over them.  Then a stab of
flame, the report of a gun.  The dog let out a whine and the two
noises raced across the downs and died in the wash of the river.
Another flash showed Red, the axe raised, looking round for the
horseman, who was swinging into the saddle only a few paces away.
Red gave a terrible yell, rushed at him, and buried the axe in the
haunches of the horse.  It lashed out with its hind feet, then was
gone, galloping across the downs.  Its hoof-beats died away in the
darkness.

Gursey returned slowly to his bunk and sat down.

Robins opened his mouth twice to speak, but no sounds came from it.
A little snuffling nose that was running all the time completed his
look of abject misery.  "Did they get HIM?" he choked out at last.

"Cabell shot the dog."

Red came splashing back.  The dog had snatched something from
Cabell--his coat.  He threw it on the table and began to look for
what gave it weight.  The pistols of course.  He performed a heavy
dance in the middle of the floor.  Robins was aghast.

Red thrust the barrels against his head.  "I got a mind to try one
pill on ye just to see the powder ain't wet."

Robins's knees gave way and lowered him quivering on to the bench.
"Don't, Red, for the love of God!  I'm in with the boys up to the
neck."

Red looked disappointed.  "Well . . . right y'are, then," he
grumbled, putting the pistols down grudgingly.

Gursey snatched them up, examined them, and flung them on to the
table.

They stared at him.

"Ay," he said bitterly.  "I doubt it's not the first time his kind
has got somebody to do their dirty work."  His fidgety eyes burned
against the whitewash pallor of his face as he gazed at the pistols
in the same resentful way Cabell had gazed at the fowling-piece.
"Dropped them.  Huh!  And hasn't he been tailing me up for this the
last three months?"  He limped to the door and looked out.  "'Very
well,' he says, damn him," Gursey muttered.  "Well, I'll give the
bastard 'Very well'."

Robins gaped at him.  "Is that as much to say you've changed your
mind?" he asked hopefully.

Gursey turned back to the bush.  There was a reckless look in his
eyes.  He picked up the pistols, cocked them, and laid them down
with the butts towards him.

"No!" he snapped.  "I'VE JUST MADE IT UP."



Chapter Eleven

CRISIS


One evolves a straightforward story from events that were twisted
and darkened by the cunning of men.  This gives the impression that
Cabell acted with a conscious and ruthless foresight.  Yet he
always believed that he blundered through that night under the
merciful hand of Heaven.

He galloped a long way down the river before he pulled up to attend
to his own and the horse's wounds.  Only then did he find that the
pistols were gone.  He was shocked.  It was a curious thing that he
should not have realized, till this moment, that the pistols were
in the coat which he threw at the dog, that he never doubted for an
instant that the convicts would find them.

Blood was pouring over the mare's rump.  He did what he could for
her, but that was not much, then washed his own wounds, which were
deep and painful.  By this time his excitement had cooled off a
little and he sat down to think.  But his brain was clogged and
weary.  His thoughts wandered.  He began trying to recall what Mrs
Peppiott looked like; whether the mole was on the right or left
side of her mouth.  Such a homely and pleasant face.  A homely and
pleasant woman.  A GOOD woman.  Then it was old Sam, the Owerbury
fisherman, with his row of medals; but that thought was irritating,
though as persistent as the sound of the river with which its
emotional overtones seemed to war.  He jumped to his feet and
limped to and fro under the trees.  Why this heaviness in his
heart, this feeling of guilt and dishonour?

At this point of his story old Cabell used to fall into a long
silence, which ended with an explosive outburst against, of all
things, Socialists.  "They called me Fighting Cabell," he said,
frowning at us with intense annoyance.  "Raddled it up on the sheds
for miles around, confound their impudence.  'Beware of Fighting
Cabell.'  That was in 'Eighty-seven, when the shearers wanted more
money.  Why, you'd think I was a monster to hear them talk.
Fighting Cabell . . . huh . . . 'thinks we're dirt' . . . 'do
anything, anything' . . ." he mumbled irritably.

He became silent again, still frowning.  After a while his eyebrows
lifted and he sighed.  "Time, time," he said in a rather melancholy
voice.  "It's like a mad dog.  If it only let up for a minute or
two men would be decent enough, decent enough."  He had a look
which went with that tone of voice, a doubtful sideways glance that
contrasted oddly with his customary fierce and defiant effort to
stare you out of countenance.  He seemed to be peering round to
make sure you were doing him justice.  He believed so much in
justice, believed that all could be vindicated in the eyes of the
just--all.

He recovered himself soon and glared at us twice as sternly as
usual, as he always did after one of these lapses.

"But that's neither here nor there," he would grumble, forbidding
us to draw any conclusions.  "What I was telling you about was that
night--McGovern.  A dog of a man.  The way he'd treated that poor
fellow Gursey--well, I could have murdered him myself when I
thought about it."  He turned his head away for another moment or
two, then went on hastily with his story.

He had been walking about under the trees for some time when he
realized suddenly that the noise of the river was dying away.  That
could mean only that a heavy downpour farther along the range had
started it rising again quickly, so that already it was over the
snags and rocks which had previously broken its surface into a
white foam.  Like a sheet of asphalt, it flowed smoothly through
the darkness.

An hour later he rode in to the homestead yard.

McGovern was sitting up, expecting him.  He told his story simply.
He had seen the sheep penned up, had reconnoitred, thinking it
might merely mean that the hands were sick.  He said nothing of the
pistols, little about the convicts, stressing the fact that the
sheep were in danger of being drowned.

McGovern listened attentively but without surprise.  His whole body
seemed to relax.  He took a deep breath and stretched his arms.
His eyes positively danced as he gazed at Cabell with grateful,
almost kindly, satisfaction and the complacency of one who has
foreseen everything.  Then he became serious, hmn-hmned for a
while, tore a splinter from the table with his thumbnail and picked
his teeth with it.  Well, as for those sods in the humpy, they
could wait, he said.  They'd be there for the ironing-up any time.
But the sheep. . . .  The river was getting up quick, did he say?
Hmn!

They looked at each other impenetrably.

"Think we ought to move them, do you?"

"They're not my sheep," Cabell muttered.

"Hmn.  It's a long way."  He stared out doubtfully at the night.

"Only telling you they'll be drowned by morning," Cabell said.

"Hmn."

They prodded each other along like this for some time, till
McGovern rose, yawned, and began to pull on his boots.  "No sort of
a life for a man," he grumbled.

Oh, they were cunning, both of them!

When they were running-in the horses Cabell said, "I suppose I
better take the bay gelding."

"Yes," McGovern chuckled.  "It swims like a duck."

"Is he going to murder me in the scrub, then?" Cabell wondered
fearfully as he rode out of the yard behind McGovern.

But McGovern jogged on easily without once turning to see if Cabell
was there.  He understood.  It was all open and above board to him
now--it was action.  His pipe threw a glow on the brim of his hat,
and after a while he burst into song:


    "''Pon my conscience, dear Larry,' says I,
     'I'm sorry to see you in trouble,
      Your life's cheerful noggin run dry,
      Yourself going off like its bubble.'
     'Hold your tongue in the matter,' says he,
     'For the Neckcloth I don't care a button,
      And by this time tomorrow you'll see
      Your Larry will be dead as mutton.'"


It was long past midnight when they came out on to the downs, but
the lamp was still burning in the humpy.  The ghostly footsteps of
rain shadowed them along the river bank, the horses stumbled and
snorted, the sheep bleated pitifully at terrifying phantoms of
darkness.

Fifty yards from the humpy they dismounted.  McGovern's damp beard
brushed across Cabell's cheek.  "Tie the nags up and follow me
close," he ordered, then splashed forward on clumsy feet.  A dog
flew out at him, but he sent it limping away with one swift kick.

The light in the humpy wavered as somebody rushed past it to the
door.

Cabell stopped between the horses, which tossed their heads against
the tug of his nervous hands.

With a gigantic bound McGovern leapt through the door and collided
with a man coming out.  The man went down with a soft thud and lay
still, huddled against the wall. . . .

Gursey, Pete and Robins jumped out of their bunks.  They saw Red
lying on the ground, blood gushing from his nose, McGovern, with
hands tucked in the tops of his trousers and legs wide apart,
grinning in the doorway.  Gursey stood near the window, Pete at the
farthest end of the table.  Their faces expanded, contracted,
puffed out lopsidedly with dancing shadows.  A pistol lay on the
table.  The brass bands round the barrel, the chasings on the butt
shone in the light.  The air of the room became stagnant again and
the slush-lamp burned without a quiver.

Robins, standing between Pete and Red, was the first to speak.  He
jerked his head in and out for several seconds, trying to dislodge
his tongue from gummy spittle.  It came loose all at once and ran
away with him.  "I--I--I. . . .  It ain't me, master.  They jist
comed round 'ere.  That's 'ow it was, master, s'elp me God."  He
ran forward with this petition, pressing McGovern for immediate
reassurance.

McGovern pushed him aside.  His fat back padded against the wall,
bringing the axe down with a clatter.  He remained there, panting
heavily.

"Well, boys," McGovern said, "it's worth turning out in a dirty
night to set eyes on you again.  And no throats cut, either!"  He
leant against the door-post and crossed his legs.  Idly he pointed
his beard between cross-grained thumb and forefinger.

"They was going to cut MY throat, yer Honour," Robins said.
"Because I wouldn't do the guy on you, that's why."

McGovern smacked his lips.  "All necks soft and sound for the
squeezer."

"Hang 'em, hang "em!"  The parrot voice of Davy screeched with
insane mirth from one of the bunks and eagerly repeated, "Hang 'em!
Hang 'em at once!  Hang 'em up the chimbley!"  His haggard grey
features came out from the bundle of stinking rags that made his
bed, and looked around.  At the sight of Robins he winked slyly.
"Murder and rob ye, he would," he told McGovern, pointing at his
mate.  "I'm on to his racket."

"Liar!" screamed Robins.  "I ain't!"

"I heard yer," Davy nodded.  "And you KNOW what I heared."

McGovern negligently pushed Robins back to the wall.  "A damn fine
crop of murderers you are," he taunted them.  "A good pistol like
that"--he winked sideways at Cabell--"and you don't fire a shot at
a man."  He threw back his head and laughed.  The light penetrated
the high vault of his mouth, gleamed on his tongue and white teeth.

Cabell, in the doorway, saw with sinking heart their despairing
eyes, their loosely hanging arms.

McGovern took off his hat, shook the water out of it, and threw it
on the table.  It overbalanced and fell to the floor.  Robins
darted forward, picked it up, brushed it, and laid it carefully on
the table again.

Gursey was looking at the pistol.  He crammed his beard between his
teeth and let it slide out again.  One step, reach out, pull the
hammer back, fire. . . .  Three seconds. . . .  One side of his
face twitched violently from its nervous tic, the other was chalk-
white and impassive.

"I'll tell you what I'll do," McGovern offered.  "I'll race you for
that pistol."

They did not raise their heads.  Feeny's mouth hung open, his pink-
rimmed eyes blinked, he seemed not to hear or see or understand.

"Come, boys," McGovern rallied them, friendly, persuasive.  "You're
not thinking you'll get another chance?"  He stroked his chin
thoughtfully.  "They might give you the present first and hang you
after.  Or they'll just hang you, maybe.  In a month's time--just
think of it.  No more Gursey, no more Pete, no more Red--or
Robins," he added aside to the collapsed bundle of fat cringing in
the shadows.

Robins gasped, clawed at the collar of his jacket, made formless
sounds.

McGovern picked up the pistol, winked again at Cabell, examined the
flint, the powder.  He laid it down, butt towards them.  "Have a
go, lads," he tempted them, spreading his arms.

They stared at the pistol, fascinated by the light on its shining
barrel.  Cabell had come right into the room now.  In his agitation
he had almost brought the horses with him.  Irritated by the grip
he kept on them, their skinny heads tossed up and down.  The jingle
of their bits was the only sound for a moment.

"You're gonners, anyway," McGovern reasoned, and pushed the pistol
gently towards them.  "You just try and think what I'll do when I
get the irons on."  He swaggered up and down the room, one hand on
his hip, the other lightly caressing his silky beard.  "That last
flogging, Pete," he said confidentially, "forget it.  There's worse
coming.  Then a little spell in the chain-gang perhaps.  How'll you
like that, eh?  Hungry!  My God, you'll be hungry.  And you, Joe.
Well, you'll be topped and no mistake."

His bravado seemed to crush the spirit out of them.  Cabell,
however, it brought to such a pitch of hysterical exasperation that
a gesture of disgust and impatience broke from him.  McGovern spun
round as though it was from this point and not from the other side
of the table that he had expected a movement, thrust his hand in
his shirt, then laughed, a trifle nervously.  He covered a slip by
pretending to scratch his chest and turned away, but his eyes kept
glancing towards the doorway watchfully.  What did he expect?

What worried Cabell most at the moment was how McGovern would act
if Gursey did fire the pistol and missed.  Would he shoot Gursey
and the boy and Red, then kill him as their accomplice?  And what
if Gursey fired and didn't miss?  Would Gursey try to kill him
then?  He saw all these possibilities quite clearly in sudden,
illuminating waves of terror which brought the chilly sweat out in
his hair, but he could not tear himself away.

A blubber of silence enclosed the room.  Dingoes howled far away,
somewhere near the river a curlew kept up an interminable, broken-
hearted piping, the horses stamped, the dogs sniffed suspiciously
round their heels; but none of these sounds came into the humpy.
McGovern lounged against the wall and sucked his teeth.

Cabell's gesture pulled Gursey back to consciousness.  He was
leaning forward with one hand on the table, the other in his beard,
staring at the pistol.  Suddenly aware of Cabell, he glanced up and
their eyes met.  They exchanged a long look.  He rubbed his hands
on the seams of his trousers, half smiled, half frowned, turned
away abruptly and went back to the window.

Cabell cleared his throat huskily.

McGovern stirred and hitched up his trousers.  "Well, boys," he
said cheerfully, "time's up.  You've had your turn, now it's mine."
He reached round to the back of his belt and brought out a pair of
handcuffs.

Pete lifted his head for the first time.  His eyes were glazed.
His teeth began to chatter.

McGovern went towards him with an amiable laugh, waving the
handcuffs.  "Put your mitts in this, lad, and you'll feel more
comfortable."

Pete backed round the table, stumbled over Red, ran blindly towards
the door, collided with Cabell, doubled back to the table.
McGovern followed with clumsy patience, guffawing merrily, but
paying even closer attention to Cabell.  He faced the boy across
the table, leaning on it with the handcuffs clutched in his fists.
Pete glanced rapidly from side to side, then grabbed blindly at the
pistol that lay between them.

Cabell shouted.  The cry came involuntarily, triumphantly from his
dry throat.

For an interminable second they all seemed to be paralysed.  Pete
stood hunched up, fumbling with both hands for the trigger;
McGovern leaned back with one hand in his shirt.  Then--crack--a
pistol exploded.  McGovern staggered as though his leg had been
wrenched away from under him.  The table heaved as his hands,
clawing for support, fastened their nails in the crack between the
slabs of bark.  A look of utter, naive amazement overflowed his
features.

Pete still stood before him with the pistol at arm's length in a
hand gone suddenly limp.  Wild noises came from the boy's puffed-up
lips, flecked with bubbles of spittle.  His body was erect and
stiff.

A fit, Cabell grasped in an instant.  In the next he saw with a
shock that the hammer was still up on the pistol.

McGovern had gone purple in the face.  He was wrenching his hand
out of his shirt.  He got it free at last and pulled into the light
his long, black-barrelled pistol.  He fired it point-blank into
Pete's face.  The boy spun half-round, dropped flat on to the
sticky mud of the floor.

At the same instant Red lifted himself to his knees and took a
deliberate aim at McGovern's heart with the second barrel of the
pistol he had fallen with.

McGovern roared and dived backwards out of the light, staggered on
his broken knee, and collapsed among the bunks in the corner.

Unsteadily Red rose to his feet, laid the barrel on his forearm and
aimed.

Robins bent down stealthily, picked up the axe and raised it.

Cabell turned his head away with an automatic reflex of horror.  A
moment of silence in which two strained shadows blackened the wall,
motionless.  Then a brittle, crushing noise.  He looked round.  The
body of Red was crumbling up slowly against the table, slowly
settling on to the floor, with a deliberate, uncanny movement, as
of life.  Robins stood by watching, the axe across his shoulder.
Tears welled from his melancholy eyes.  He turned and stared at
Cabell, sniffed violently.  "There," he said.  "That just shows
yer."

A haze lifted from Cabell's sight, and, peering into the corner, he
saw the collapsed figure of McGovern and traced to it the incessant
thunder of abuse that had shattered suddenly the febrile silence.
He was trying to scramble up, but his knee kept giving way under
him.

Robins came to and rushed across the room to help him.

A burst of laughter from Davy distracted Cabell's attention.
"Diddled ye!  Ha, ha, ha!  That's one ye won't stretch.  Ha, ha,
ha!  Out the winder he went.  That's one saved his windpipe till
tomorrer."

Cabell looked for Gursey.  He was gone--through the window.  The
discovery pulled him together.  "Diddled us!" he found himself
shouting after Davy.  "Gursey's gone."

McGovern was leaning on Robins's shoulder and trying to wrench a
second pistol from under his shirt.

Cabell flattened himself against the wall, raised his hand as
though to ward off a blow, then turned and dived between the
horses, wrenching them around behind him.

A figure rushed down the slope towards the river.  Gursey.

Cabell came to his senses.  He threw the reins of McGovern's mare
over her neck, savagely kicked her in the ribs, picked up stones
and shied them at her till the sounds of her hoofs galloping
towards the scrub had died away, leapt into his saddle, and urged
the gelding after Gursey.

How automatic these actions had been he realized when he found
himself faced, at the river bank, by the wide stretch of rushing
waters.  He pressed his heels into the horse and galloped along the
bank in pursuit of running feet.  McGovern had staggered to the
door and was shouting into the darkness for him, calling on all the
devils in hell to blast and blind him.  The dogs followed with an
incessant whining and barking.

He ran alongside Gursey.  "Up!  Up!" he shouted, pulling the
gelding back, "and hang on when she jumps!  Grab the stirrup!
Quick!"

Gursey hesitated a moment, white face lifted, backed away a pace or
two, then scrambled up feverishly behind him.

Cabell turned the horse back to the land, spun it round and put it
to the bank.  It went in with a splash like glass breaking.  The
water flowed over their heads, gurgled in their ears.  He slipped
off the saddle, got a hold on the gelding's tail with one hand, on
Gursey with the other.  He could feel the horse's feet working.
The darkness pressed upon them.  From far away came the wild halloo
of voices cursing them.



Chapter Twelve

AN END AND A BEGINNING


Two glasses of Dennis's poison ratified a deal.  Two thousand sheep
and four hundred cattle had changed hands, and Flanagan's order-to-
pay was safely stowed away in the knotted end of his handkerchief.

"Been havin' a go in your way?" Dennis asked Cabell.  Sinking his
wounded pride in the office of district gossip, he smiled, cringed,
served them out of his private bottle.

"Nothing to speak of," Cabell told him.  "I chased a convict over
the river just before it broke the banks and now I can't get back
for a while.  That's all."

"Was he drownded?"

"Yes, he was drowned."

For this concession Dennis leant across the bar and told them,
"It's cleaned old Mahony out.  Saw his house go past this mornin'
with a dog up on the roof howlin' fit to bust.  His cows've bin
comin' down legs-up these three days.  No sign of the old man yet,
though."

"Huh."  Cabell finished his drink.

"Damn lucky if he's feeding the fishes.  It's better than trying to
feed yourself in this hole," one of the drinkers interjected.  He
was caked with mud from head to foot and a lump of dry mud hung in
his beard like a blood globule.

"Drinkin' himself blind five days," Dennis hastened to explain
behind his hand.  "Caught near Badger's--two years' wool went--
bullocks--everything."

The man edged down the bar.  "No women, no booze, and work your
guts out to see yourself break out in scab and the wool washed away
down to the sea."  He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at a man
who stood near the door watching the flooded river.  "Him, for
instance.  Just married, and there's his wife all on her lonesome
fifty miles the other side of Redbank, with all the damn cannibal
blacks sitting round to get at her kidney-fat."

Cabell shrugged.  "Hard luck," he said, and turned away.

The man stared at his back vacantly, then moved down the bar again.

The only other person beside Cabell who seemed comparatively
indifferent to the flood was Peppiott.  He leant on the bar with
his head in his hands.  A skull had come up under his florid skin,
his eyes had fallen in.  Jostled by newcomers to the bar, he became
aware of vague realities behind the engrossing shadows, picked up
his big body and shuffled off to a corner to stand and stare for as
long as he was left alone at the wall a few inches in front of his
nose.  Occasionally he threw back his head and laughed or kicked
the wall savagely, became silent, staring again.

Cabell gave him a passing glance of pity, as one looks at the
misfortunes of a stranger.

Weighty thoughts clouded the amiability in Flanagan's eyes.  He
considered his reflection in the bottom of the glass, considered
the side of Cabell's face, considered the reflection again.

"If ye'd take my advice," he said, "the country's good up the
coast."

"So I've heard," Cabell said.

"Hmn.  Thinking of the Downs?"

"Well--perhaps."

A more reserved and independent, less friendly Cabell--a change
sensed rather than seen.  The soft contours of the olive-skin
cheeks had flattened down a little maybe, the eyes no longer jumped
about from landscape to brawling drunkard with restless discontent.
That and perhaps a little note of arrogance and contempt in the way
he spoke.  "Here, I've brought you those cattle and sheep.  Get a
man to help me into the yards with them," was all he had said when
Flanagan opened the door to him two nights ago.

"Got them.  Holy saints!  Where from?"

"Oh, out of those gullies where you lost yourself."

That from a limejuicer!

They had another drink and went out into the steamy sunlight.
Dennis and the man who had lost his wool roused themselves to gaze
thoughtfully after Cabell--why, perhaps they could have explained
no better than Flanagan.

Flanagan paused at the door.  "Funny thing now, you lettin' that
lag get the slip of you in the river, Cabell," he said.  He rubbed
his beard and stared at the sky.

"Funny?"

"Yes."  He continued to consider, with wrinkled brows, a bizarre
problem located among the broken clouds.  "When ye come to think of
it.  Man might've thought ye'd pick him up and get him to give ye a
hand with all them cattle, now."

"I told you he was drowned."

"Ye-es.  So ye did."  Flanagan nodded two or three times.  "Funny
thing, now," he said, "the way ye got all them cattle down three
miles to my place, fixed up the man he had there in the gully and
all. . . ."

An old gin followed them to their horses with thin, grey palm
outstretched.  "Gib him toombacca, Marmy," she begged.

Cabell threw her a lump of twist.  She picked it out of the mud,
put it in her mouth and went back to the door.

Flanagan stood looking at Cabell's horse for some time, then ran
his hand down a foreleg.  "Bit heavy in the bone, eh?" he said.
"Where'd ye get THIS one?"

Cabell nodded towards Murrumburra.

"Funny thing," Flanagan said, sitting on his heel and squinting up
at Cabell, "funny thing never seeing that roan of mine."

Cabell took the reins off the post, climbed into the saddle, and
squirmed his crutch against the hot leather.  "McGovern must've
sold it."

"Damn funny thing!"  Flanagan rose and took hold of the bridle.
Most of the amiability was gone from his face now.  "Take my tip,"
he said confidentially.  "Ye'd better go some place a mighty long
way from here.  Some place McGovern wouldn't think of or nobody
come sneakin' round after a runaway convict."

Cabell walked the horse out into the yard.  "Well, so long," he
said, touched the gelding with his heels, and in a splash of muddy
water cantered off up the road.

Flanagan watched him out of sight, spat in the mud, and returned to
the bar.  The outstretched hand of the gin he thrust roughly aside,
which shows how the small matter of a roan stallion may wither even
the sources of a charitable nature.



II

Wastelands



Chapter Thirteen

LANDSEEKER


Five men, two bullock drays, five hundred cattle, a thousand sheep--
day after day, week after week they pushed out.  At first the sun
set in their faces.  They crossed mountains where there were trees
taller than ships' masts and so wide in girth that if a tunnel were
driven into them a bullock dray might pass through with room and to
spare for a horseman.

Once or twice they met a man with a drayload of wool, creeping
through the ranges towards the sea.  He pulled up, mopped his brow.

"Going far?" he wanted to know.

"Yes," Cabell answered.

"Downs?" the man asked.

"No."

"Maranoa?"

"Oh--wherever you like."

"No call to get uncivil," the man grumbled, but Cabell had ridden
on to scowl at the hands, who had stopped in the hope of a few
minutes' yarn with a stranger.

The little caravan straggled on again, down the other side of the
mountains to the plains.  Not a tree was to be seen for miles here,
but the grass grew so high that a man might stand up in his
stirrups and not see over the top of it.

Now the sun set on their left hand, day after day, week after week.
Shepherds saw the smoke of their fires from miles away and tramped
in for a chat.  Gursey rose from the fire when they came, and sat
in the shadows.  He was clean-shaven now, more terrier-like than
ever.  He was always looking round at the bush, back the way they
had come, as though expecting someone.  Short shift these visitors
got if Cabell found them about the place.  "Sneaking around to get
a look at the brands," he told himself, though it was pitch-black
nights when the shepherds came.

Soon they were out in trackless, thinly settled country.  Gursey
became quieter, though he still looked back along the cart track-
longingly, almost regretfully, now, it seemed.

But there were violent quarrels when Cabell proposed to stop and
camp.  Gursey nagged.  They stayed in one place on the northwestern
edge of the Downs for three months; in another farther north for
nearly five.  But Cabell gave way in the end to Gursey's
entreaties, sneers, alluring descriptions of country farther north
still and in towards the rich coastal mountains.

They struck camp.

One of the men died of black-water, and Cabell went back a hundred
miles with the drays to get fresh stores and new hands.  When he
returned Gursey hid his face under his hat for a week, ate alone,
till he saw that the two strangers Cabell brought back were
harmless "hatters"--an old man and a lanky boy born in the bush.

On again.  Day after day, week after week--the way Gursey and Red
had gone when they escaped from Moreton Bay years before.

At dawn the hands started the cattle off the camp, then the sheep.
Gursey yoked the bullocks to one of the drays and drove on ahead.
They followed his tracks, and at sunset came upon the camp he had
made.  A big kettle of tea was standing by the fire, dampers were
baking in the ashes, fires were piled ready for the cattle and the
sheep.

All night a man rode round the cattle.  At the campfire the rest
would be smoking a last pipe before turning in to sleep till their
watch.

Cranky Tom fell into deep thought and stroked his magnificent
tobacco-stained whiskers, which looked as though a fine bird had
folded its wings over his face.  "Mr Kebbel, sir.  Must be the
first white men round these parts, Mr Kebbel, sir."  Each word had
to be pulled out of his mouth with both hands, a laborious
business.

Sambo, the boy, looked at him contemptuously.  "Whatyamean, first
white man?"

Tom made a face as though stabbed by sudden pain, jumped up,
stamped with both feet.  "You agen?"

Sambo, young and cynical, had a sarcastic eye, which he kept on
Tom, waiting for him to speak.  He always had a parallel story to
diminish the wonderful things that happened to Tom.

"Put yer peepers on that, will yer?" he said, throwing something
into the firelight.

Cabell examined it.  A buckle from a belt.

"Found it smornin'," Sambo explained.  "Campfire'n' all."

Gursey glanced quickly at Cabell.  Suddenly he got up and went out
into the darkness.  Cabell followed and found him striding up and
down under the trees.

He laid a hand on Gursey's arm.  "It won't be the same this time,
Joe," he said compassionately.  "You'll never have to go back."

"Ay," Gursey said bitterly.  "Never go back.  Never.  Never."

They stood in silence, thinking of the future--each in his own way.
Cabell's hand tightened slightly on Gursey's arm.  Gursey's
shoulder drooped as though a heavy weight had been laid on it.

At the fireside Tom was stroking his whiskers in deep thought
again.  "Ah!" he exclaimed at last.  "Bird dropped it."

"Whatyamean, bird dropped it?"

"Seed one of them hawk-birds pick up a boot, fly off with it," Tom
said, slapping his knee triumphantly at disposing of Sambo.

"Aw, that!  That's nothin'," Sambo did not fail to remember.  "Seen
a eagle onct pick up a young blackfeller, boots'n'all."

"A-a-a-h!"  Tom stamped round the fire angrily again.  "Liar!"

"Better one than you'll ever be, ain't I?" Sambo tempted him.

"What's that?" Tom fired up.  "Was one afore you was born."

Sambo grinned evilly and rolled down into his blankets, while Tom
chuckled with deep satisfaction at an enemy overwhelmed.

"I might as well've let him shoot me, hang me, anything," Gursey
said, "as be tied to your grindstone for the rest of my life,
always sneaking off from a stranger with the fear of God leaping up
in me at every footstep.  And on top of it all ten to one I'll be
nabbed again."

"Who could nab you?  Nobody knows out here."

"YOU know."

"Well?"

Gursey waved his arms.  "Oh, don't you think I can't feel you
holding it over me already?"  He limped away further into the
night.

Cabell went back to the fire and lay down.

At two o'clock the cattle rise, sniff the air, bellow mournfully.
The dogs get up from the fire and stretch themselves.  The sheep
stir and bleat.  The watchman canters round, driving restless cows
back into the mob.  Cabell sits and watches nervously.  Soon the
cattle settle down again.  The watchman rides in to rouse up his
mate, smokes a pipe, and shakes down.  Silence again under the
immense dome of stars as big as fists.  From down near the river
tinkles the bell of a hobbled horse, one near by tears at the
grass, a dog whimpers in its sleep; the sound of cattle chewing the
cud, their soft breathing; the freshened fires crackle and leap,
shining on their eyes; wild things scream far away in the darkness;
the watchman's horse comes near, passes.  Cabell glances at
Gursey's empty blanket, shakes his head, and lies down.  At the
paling of the first star he is up, rousing the camp.

The bush began to thicken, mountains rose up starkly from the
horizon.  The cartwheels furrowed the earth, winding here and there
to avoid a fallen tree, a patch of impenetrable scrub.  The sheep
coming after beat down the grass.  It was the first road.

Day after day, week after week.  They moved so slowly that it
seemed they would never get anywhere.  Summer became winter.
Winter went and summer returned.  Herds of kangaroos fled through
the scrub.  Birds rose in great flocks from under their feet.
Blacks followed them and ran away at the sound of a gun.

Then the rain came.  Torrents of rain for a month.  Their clothes
were never dry.  They slept huddled together under the dray, got up
to ride dispirited horses after weary sheep and cattle.  The rivers
rose and marooned them.  The blacks returned more boldly.  There
was a skirmish.  Sambo was wounded.  The cattle stampeded.  Nearly
fifty were drowned, speared or lost.

They crossed the river.  They took the wheels from the cart, lashed
barrels on each side, and turned it into a boat.  Thus they ferried
across the precious sugar and flour, of which much had already been
destroyed by weevils.  Then they swam the sheep over.  This not for
one, but for five rivers.

The sheep lambed.  They camped till the lambs were strong enough to
be weaned and marked and travelled.  On again--the landseekers, the
forerunners, the men who first broke the silence of the sad, grey
wastelands.  A whole book might be written just about this.

The men got tired, tailing sheep and cattle by day, watching them
by night.  They had been on the march for nearly eighteen months,
over hills so steep that they must cut a road for the waggon,
through scrub so thick that they must hack every inch of the way,
over sun-baked plains, over mud where the wheels sank to the axle.
Cabell's temper got shorter and shorter.  He wanted to stop here or
here or here, but Gursey turned on him angrily and had his way.
Another range of hills was rising out of the northeast.  His cart
tracks led them towards it.

Once more a road must be cut into the hillside, boulders rolled
aside, a tunnel forced through undergrowth.  The lawyer vines hung
over everything, tearing the clothes off their backs and making
festering sores on their bodies.  The stinging tree reached out its
heart-shaped leaves to touch them.  Sambo brushed against it.  He
was twisted with agony.

Gursey turned and looked back.  Only the bush melting into purple
shadows round the whole wide horizon--still, silent, unpeopled.  He
nodded to Cabell.  "Tomorrow."

At evening they entered the valley.

It lay between hills magenta-coloured in the distance, green with
heavy timber and matted undergrowth near at hand.  A wide, shallow
river wound out of sight to east and west, enamelled over with the
lights of the sinking sun.  Here and there a big waterhole, clumps
of trees, stretches of rolling open country like a park.  Grey
galahs flashed their pink breasts among the foliage, white
cockatoos, perched in the gums, looked down at the intruders and
screamed like old women.  Flocks of black duck rose from the water
or swam away into the reeds, spreading a corrugation of gentle
ripples over the images of men and beasts as they crossed the
river.  The grass was high and green after the rains.  A pleasant
smell rose from the trampling feet of the cattle, the scent of
sweet marjoram.  The aromatic smell of wood, of smouldering leaves,
of mud at the edge of the river, of water--the smell of the land.
Now another smell overlay it--the smell of greasy wool, of sweating
horses and cattle.  It loaded the dry air, clear as crystal and
slightly intoxicating.  In the scrub the animals rustled with alarm
at it and cried out.

Cabell stood up in his stirrups, looked round and smiled.

That night they broached the rum.

March the fifth, 1847.



Chapter Fourteen

HARD MAN


They took no holiday.

Within two weeks Cabell had hurdles up for the sheep.  Then he
built pens for the lambing-down and began to split timber for the
drafting yards.

First up and last asleep, he worked for fourteen hours a day.  He
was everywhere at once: deep in the scrub squaring timber, down at
the yards helping Gursey sink postholes, out among the cattle
looking for a cow he thought he had heard coughing during the
night, tailing up the shepherds to make sure they were not asleep,
waiting at the pens to count their sheep as they came in at
sundown.

Then he must feel a belly here and there to see if the sheep had
been driven too hard, walk round and round the pens peering at them
till they settled down for the night, inspect wood-piles to see
that there was enough to keep the dingo-fires going till dawn, test
the hurdles, patch a gap where the brushwood had come adrift, call
Sambo down to say "Do you think that will be all right?  Do you
think it'll last till tomorrow?"

Bill Penberthy came with his blankets to keep watch.

"Sleep round the other side," Cabell said as he spread them out in
a comfortable place.

"What's that ye say?" Penberthy growled back, a great bulk of
resentment at being ordered.

"Sleep where I told you before."

"Are you asking me?"

Cabell threw blankets across the pen.

"What the flamin' hell's he think I am?" Bill asked Tom.  "A
flamin' convict?"  A sore point this that someone might forget that
he had ceased to be a convict three years ago.  "He'll be wantin'
us to lift our lids to him next.  See if he don't."  He jammed his
hat down on his head till it half covered his face.  "Damned if I
will, and that's tellin' ye straight."

Tom thought about it.  "Tell you what, he's a funny sort of cove,
that's what he is."

"Funny!" Bill exploded.  "He's a flamin' dam' slave-driver, that's
what he is, comin' down here three and four times in a night to
pull you out because there's a dinger about--a dam' dinger himself,
sneakin' round so you can't never tell whether his eye's on ye or
what--a miser, the way the first thing he puts up's a storeroom
with a flamin' big padlock'd take ye a week to crack--don't trust
nobody, he don't--countin' the sheep morn and night--looks at you
so you get in a sweat tryin' to remember if ye've just been
pinchin' something."  He spread his blankets on the hard stones
where Cabell had thrown them.  "But I ain't a flamin' convict," he
grumbled.  "Can't order me . . . won't lift me lid . . . blast
him."  He settled down on the stones.

For another hour Cabell poked about in the darkness.  He walked
half a mile across the flats to where the drafting yards were being
built.  He felt along the high barricades, which would have to hold
big herds of half-wild cattle driven in for drafting and branding,
tested each greenhide lashing and wooden peg with his fingers, each
rough mortice, pulled on the rails till his shoulders ached,
counted the number of panels finished that day, and paced out the
distance still to be done.  He must even peer into one of the holes
and measure it with his arm to satisfy himself that Gursey was
putting the posts in as deep as he should.

Yes, he trusted nobody.  Himself alone against all men.  Say
little, keep watch, suspect their easy words of friendship.  Guard
yourself.  At home there were his brothers; here everyone was
an enemy, but he had particular enemies--McGovern, Flanagan,
Gursey. . . .  To Gursey, however, his attitude was a special one, a
feeling that amends must be made for a dishonourable act undefined.
Thus would be lightened the vague and incomprehensible but
omnipotent sense of guilt, punishment for which was always hanging
over him.  He did not feel it as guilt exactly, but as a haunting
conviction of unworthiness that had been with him from earliest
childhood.  Great and inexorable powers had to be placated before
one could hope that the smallest wish would be fulfilled.  They were
harsh, inimical, and all-seeing.  Theirs was the sternest of precise
justice.  Another kind of justice, tender and understanding, was to
be found in his mother's arms.  She often gave what these powers had
denied.

Gursey had just taken the damper out of the fire when he arrived at
the camp.  This was perched on the top of a small hill that
commanded a view up and down the valley and lay within a stone's
throw of the river.  The homestead would be built here eventually.

He ate his share of the damper in silence, with a lump of cold salt
junk, washed it down with scalding black tea which took a strong
aroma from the smoke of the pine log's.

"When'll you start cutting the uprights for the humpies?" Gursey
asked, in his usual challenging voice.

"When you've finished the drafting yards."

"It's time to start on the huts."

"It's time to finish the drafting yards."

The same old tug-of-war.

The men ate their meal on the other side of the fire--Tom and Sambo
back to back, and farther away in the shadows old Don Butler, his
face buried in his hands as though suffering some unimaginable
agony.  Daft, of course, as daft as they all became in the lonely
bush.

"Winter's coming.  You can't leave the men outside like this,"
Gursey argued.

"But the cattle are not branded."

"Cattle, cattle--that's all you ever think of."

"Mr Kebbel, sir."  Cranky Tom smoothed away his whiskery and
cleared his throat.  "Mr Kebbel, sir. . . ."  It took him a lot of
hard thought to get started, most coherent sounds having long left
his memory except the wild yodellings in which he conversed with
sheep.  "This 'ere"--he prodded Sambo--"crow-bait, sir, this 'ere
young . . . Sambo, sir.  What 'e says is there ain't no sich thing
as. . . ."  He put his damper down, rolled back his sleeves, and
began making rapid passes to illustrate some indescribable thing.
Failing, he lapsed into deep thought for a moment or two, then
began again with a gesture of hooking Cabell into mysterious
confidences.  "Mr Kebbel, sir, ain't there no sich thing's two
'umpies built atop each other, now, sir?"  This immense problem of
definition solved, he collapsed into a heap and sat with thin neck
extended, mouth open, ear propped forward with the tips of his
fingers to drink in judgment.

"A two-storey house, do you mean?"

"What I mean. . . ."  In the dust he drew with his forefinger a
lopsided picture of a two-storey house, only he gave it a door
leading out on to vacancy on the top floor.  "There, that's what I
mean you to understand, Mr Kebbel, sir."

"A two-storey house."

"Ain't there sich a thing, now?"

"Certainly."

He pointed scornfully at Sambo.  "There, yer blanky know-all."

But Sambo was not impressed.  His weathered face, which was long
and horselike, hung over the drawing, then split into a grin that
revealed a mouthful of broken, black teeth.  "Why, where's the
steps?  There ain't none."

Tom looked helplessly from Cabell to Gursey, took refuge in abuse.
"Crow-bait!" he snarled.

Sambo laughed good-naturedly.  "Say you was born in one next."

And so truthfully he might have said if the mists of time had not
left the past a wreck of years crowded with the bobbing backsides
of sheep.  He had consorted with them for so long that he had come
at last to look like one, dewlaps and all.  He had the same
fatalistic eye, bleating voice and creaky joints.  The really
remarkable part of him was, strictly speaking, not a part of him at
all--a set of false teeth bought second-hand from a drover for the
price of a drink.  Only the drover had been such a big man and Tom
was such a wizened-up one that it was a hard job to get them into
his mouth.  He put them in at every meal and they stayed clenched
on his lower jaw, giving him a look of tigerish ferocity.  Food was
introduced by lifting them up like a lid or was wedged in through
the gap between them and the gum.  Chewing proceeded without any
assistance from the teeth, but they had the value of a unique objet
d'art in a country where few boasted anything better than a row of
isolated black stumps, like the relics of a burnt-out scrub.

The meal over, he removed this fine fa�ade, knocked it out on his
boot like a pipe, and put it away in a greenhide bag along with
other precious things.  The teeth came out again with little bits
and odours of this assortment clinging to them, so that when Tom
was equipped for a meal he looked and smelt as if he had just been
making one off fly ointment, old boots, fur, paper and gunpowder.

"Kin tell you where you kin see that 'umpy," he told Cabell.  "Down
Echuca way, it is.  Sixty miles this side the Murray.  Glass stuff
and all.  Somethin' like a thousand winders or somethin' they
reckon."

Sambo sneered.  "What fer'd a man want to build 'umpies on top each
other?" he wanted to know.

"What fer?  Fer to get away from them bleedin' blanky kangaroo-
rats, Mr Kebbel, sir.  Et up an extry pair of duds I 'ad.
Somethin' savage, they was."

"You had extra pair duds!  You!"  The last thread in a tissue of
fantastic improbabilities.

Tom plumed his gloomy whiskers.  "Currency scum, Mr Kebbel, sir,"
he said, and jerked his thumb over his shoulder.  "Been nowhere--
seed nothink--knows nothink."

Suddenly an apparition rushed upon them from the shadows.  It was
old Dan Butler.  He stopped at the outer circle of light, grimaced
with exasperation, and clawed the air.  "The noise," he groaned.
"It's fair cruel."

"'Oo's making a noise?" Tom demanded.  "I was a-talkin'."

"Everything's making noise," Dan cried, and clutched his hands over
his ears, sensitive, from long living on voiceless plains, to the
ghostliest vibrations.  "Can't you hear it?"  He waved round the
circle of darkness, where the quietness seemed absolute--"It's
worse'n a pit of jabberin' devils"--then uttered a shriek of
despair and rushed off, dragging his blankets behind, to seek an
impermeable silence out in the scrub.

Tom rolled his eyes thoughtfully.  "Must be goin' off his nut, that
feller."

Cabell got his blanket from the cart and lay down feet to the fire,
his head pillowed on his saddle.  But he did not sleep.  Would the
lambing be good?  Would many die?  Would there be a drought?  A
flood?  Would diseases wipe him out?  Would blacks come across the
hills?

The sky flung over him its studded canopy.  Oh, the crashing
immensity of time and the world, the thin wafer of his little
moment!  Along the river curlews piped.  Dingoes called from the
hills.  This enormous darkness was theirs, and his all that was
contained within the circle of the fires.  How small that circle
was, how many years of enduring toil must pass before the valley
was full of his creatures!  A generation was small enough, and he
had set ten years.

He closed his eyes to shut these worries out and found behind his
lids thoughts more tormenting, the thoughts that never were far
away, the thoughts of England.


We are all in a state of expectation about David.  It certainly
SEEMS to promise a most desirable conclusion.  He dines EVERY night
up at the Hall and Fanny has become so quiet all of a sudden, so
meditative.  She MUST be revolving SOME thought in that pretty
head.


So much for an heiress-endowed brother.  And Victor was running a
horse in the Derby.  And Archdeacon Clement had made a sensation by
purchasing the famous Batrachini vase in the teeth of strong
competition from all the collectors of Europe.  And John had been
promoted.  And so on. . . .

Cabell flung himself over and pressed his thumbs into his eyes as
though he hoped to rub away the images of that far, far world,
clearer and more real to him than the world at hand, where all was
still fantastic in its crude, wild ways.

He opens his eyes and traces the sharp outline of the hills, edged
with the glitter of chill starlight.  Now he tries to recapture the
worst of those worries he put away a few moments ago.  He would
like to wrap them round himself like the chains and penitential
shirt of a devil-infested hermit.  But it is too late.  Thought is
a Hydra.  Lop off one head and it grows another more terrible than
the last--or more lovely.


I read your letter to Phillipa Mayne. . . .  She's grown so tall,
Derek, you could not conceive it.  And so stately.  Quite like the
Queen, but so much more queenlike. . . .  Do you recollect how she
stole a ride on your cob and fell into Northover Pond?  You wrung
the water out of her dress.  Do you remember?


He falls to biting his lip, trying to find the seventh star in the
Pleiades, listening to the interminable argument at the fireside.

As well try to blow out a bushfire, hold back the river with his
hands.  On every passionate sense burns the ardent fantasy of a
beautiful girl in a clinging wet dress, looking down at him one
warm June afternoon.  Overhead the luminous green of the new
leaves.  Around the blossoming lilac.  The sunlight strikes up from
the water and dapples her laughing face with shadows.

He rises urgently and stands staring at the fire.  Becoming aware
of the men gaping at him, he mumbles something about Bill Penberthy
letting tide fires go out and plods down the slope to tramp round
and round the sheep pens.  Then the watchman, waking up, sees his
face, lighted on one side, gloating over the sheep.  He breathes
the oily smell of their wool deep into his lungs; the fit passes.

He climbs the slope again and rolls back wearily into his blankets.

The voices at the fireside drone on and on.  "I knowed that feller
afore you was born, Sambo.  Tailin' sheep he was on Mattarula.  See
him now.  King of the Hawkesbury, they calls 'im."

Fortunes that grew like mushrooms.  Men who came with empty pockets
and now ruled lands as wide as England, immense herds, owned towns,
flocks no one had numbered to within thousands. . . .

He listened greedily.  These were the stories he liked to hear.



Chapter Fifteen

LAMBING-DOWN


Somehow or other the calendar went astray and there was an argument
about the date.  Cabell said it could not be later than August the
eighth and Gursey said it would not be earlier than August the
fifteenth.  Not a very urgent matter at ordinary times, but the
question now was when the lambs would begin to drop.  Cabell had
marked September the thirtieth on the calendar when he put the rams
in on the first of May, but Bill Penberthy now lumbered into the
dispute, on principle, to assert that the rams went in on April
twenty-four.

Cabell was probably the only one who knew for certain when the rams
went in, when the lambs were due, and what the date was, but their
doubts possessed him at once, and before a week was past he had
lost all faith in his own sense of time.  In vain, Sambo tried to
comfort him by saying that the ewes would begin dropping, calendar
or no calendar, when they had to.  Cabell nodded gloomily, as
though he mistrusted even ewes to do their work without a watchful
eye on them.

The result of all this was that Cabell began expecting the lambs a
fortnight before their time.  It was winter.  The westerly wind
beat down the long grass, snatched sparks from the roaring dingo-
fires and set them glowing in the topmost branches of the trees.
Throughout the night of the twenty-second, twenty-third and twenty-
fourth Cabell sat up beside the pens waiting for the first lamb,
but he waited in vain.  The dawn showed only the bush billowing
like a sea, the lambing yards smashed flat.

He became restive, then angry and frightened.  The sheep were late.
Something must be wrong with the pasture.  They would die in
lambing.  All would be lost.

One day shortly after he had begun to worry about the lambs being
overdue he was at work in the scrub splitting timber.  The wind had
dropped.  Everything rested in the noon.  Not a whisper, not a
lisping murmur of air in the stiff leaves glistening on the
treetops a hundred feet overhead.  Strange thoughts came to him out
of the silence, out of the bush that had been listening, waiting
like this for thousands upon uncountable thousands of years.  For
what?  For him?

He saw a stone which his foot had moved from the surface of the
ground where it had sat against another stone worn exactly to its
shape.  Had no foot ever touched that piece of ground, then?  With
wonder, with such childlike awe as he had once tried to imagine the
abyss of space that lay between himself and the star which came out
every evening above Three Barrow Down, he stood with his back
against the cool bark of a gum-tree and tried to imagine the
centuries through which the bush had stood as it stood now.

A frightening thought that took him back to Dorset: the tilled
fields, even the open downs, every inch of earth there had been
worked over, walked over, touched and flavoured by men.  Every inch
of it subdued, made safe and friendly.  It even looked human, a
great full-breasted woman.  But here . . . how forlorn and desolate
seemed the distant figures of men walking about the valley!  The
very cattle and sheep looked uneasy in these wide pastures.  Yet
what was there to fear?  No terrible thing waited to rush out on
them.  Only, weighting the chilly noontide, this barren and inhuman
quietness of a whole empty continent that seemed to brood over an
ancient thought which comprehended nothing of men and their
creatures.  That this old, haggard, grey one had waited so long for
him--HIM--to come and vitalise her was a thought that answered its
own presumption.  He threw down his axe and hurried away to look at
the ewes, beset by the need for immediate action.

But he found the sheep grazing quietly under the sleepy tutelage of
Tom, who was carrying on ruminative converse with the crows that
followed the flock round in excited anticipation of eyes to pick
out.

Cabell appealed to him.  "They're a week late.  Have you ever seen
anything like it?"

Tom winked.  "Mr Kebbel, sir, them sheep . . . ain't nat'ral."

"What the devil's wrong with them?"

"No sheep ain't nat'ral, Mr Kebbel, sir.  Now, I knowed a flock
once what all died in one night and nothing to show what fer they
did it."

"Did you?"

"Now, them sheep--"  Tom lowered his voice.  "Some'll tell you--
sheep's stoopid.  Tain't so, Mr Kebbel, sir.  Pig-'eaded, but not
stoopid.  Pig-'eaded and vicious."

"Do you think they'll start soon, really?"

"Bidin" their time, Mr Kebbel, sir.  Come a real cold night when
it's rainin' and all, then they'll start.  Aw, sheep's got brains
all right."

"You think they're all right, then, eh?" Cabell insisted, cheered a
little by an assumption of dark knowledge in Tom's eye.

Tom tapped his chest.  "Take them crows, now.  Some'll tell you--
birds.  What I says is CROWS IS DEVILS."  Tom pointed at the trees,
where the blue-black legions sat squabbling and blinking their
wicked white eyes.  "Does birds talk, Mr Kebbel, sir?  No, they
don't.  Does crows talk?  They does.  And what about?"  He rose on
tiptoes and whispered in Cabell's ears.  "Greenbobs' eyes.  THEY
knows."

A new worry to plague him.  "I'll get a gun and shoot some," he
said anxiously.

Tom buttonholed him again.  "Take them eagle-birds, now.  Yest'y
afternoon one comes down in that tree.  Takes a look round then
mizzles.  WHERE'S HE NOW?"  Tom nodded towards the Interior.  "Out
in the Never-Never, that's where '_e_ is, a tellin' of his mates.
And what's he sayin'?  Them ewes over Kebbel's's gettin' tight,
boys,' that's what he's sayin' this minute.  '_E_ knows."

Tom closed an eye, as one aware of evil plots.  "Take them dingoes,
now. . . ."

But Cabell fled from such a system of consolation.  Nearly another
week passed and no lambs.  He took his blankets down to the pens
and slept among the sheep.  Looking out from his blankets, Bill
Penberthy saw him going round the fires and stoking them up, then
peering over the hurdles as though a matter of life and death was
being decided there.  "Gawd stiffen the crows," Bill commented
bitterly.

Nobody in the camp got any rest, and suddenly Cabell became mean
and cut off the little extra rations he had allowed them since they
arrived in the valley.  He made them account for every nail they
used, even looked resentfully at the scraps of cold and sodden
damper they threw away, as though they were throwing away his very
substance.

When Bill came down with the dray for a load of timber that
afternoon he pointed across the valley to where a flock of crows
was wheeling over the scrub.  "Some'in's died on ye down there by
the look of it," Bill said.

"What could it be?" Cabell said anxiously.

"Might be a 'oss," Bill drawled.

"A horse?  What horse?"

"The roan stallion.  That's the 'oss it might be."

"How the devil?  I saw it this morning."

"Ain't I tryin' to tell you when I has half a chance," Bill
growled, hitched up his trousers.  He reached into the cart and
threw a piece of hobble-chain on the ground.  "Broke 'is 'obbles.
Just picked that there up down the river."

"Curse him!  It'll take a week to find him."

"If you ever sets eyes on him again--a flighty 'oss like that."

"What makes you think he's dead."

"Don't think he's dead.  Tryin' to tell you about them 'obbles.
Must be that brindle cow what's dead."

"The brindle cow?"

"Yes, or the sheep's begun droppin'.  What's the use argifyin'!
Must be some'in'."

"Lambs!"  Cabell ran the mile and a half to the scrub.  He found
Tom rushing about with a stick, chasing away crows and hawks that
swooped about above the newly born.

Tom shook his fist.  "Call yourselves sheep?" he harangued the
scattered flock.  "Call yourselves pure-bred meriners?  What I call
yer. . . ."

Eighty lambs had been dropped altogether.  Cabell found ten corpses
with their eyes picked out.  The trees were black with crows.

It was just such a night as Tom predicted for the lambing,
perishing cold and windy and wet--the last lick of winter.  All
night Cabell and Sambo and Gursey went about among the sheep,
picking up lambs and wrapping them in blankets and carrying them to
the fire.  When all the spare blankets had been used up Cabell
turned the men out and filled their beds with lambs.  They gathered
to windward of the fire and huddled against a hot rock.

Bill grumbled a lot, but Cabell saved his lambs.  A hundred dropped
in the night and only five died.  Having failed to destroy him
there, the wind made a rear attack that nearly settled everything,
lambs, men, stores and all.  Cabell, on his way to the fire with a
batch of lambs, found that a spark had set the storeroom alight.
He dropped the lambs and tried to tear off the burning sheets of
bark, but they roasted his hands.  When he pulled on the poles the
roof fell in and a tar-soaked tarpaulin inside flared up.

"Look out!" Gursey warned him, running up.  "There's gunpowder!"

Cabell tore the tarpaulin out and muffled the flames.  The men
heaved the poles off.  Old Dan stood among the lambs and dug his
fingers into his ears.  But he was spared.  At the last moment
Cabell got hold of the keg and threw it over the edge of the slope.
This saved all the tea, tobacco, salt and flour they had to last
the next eighteen months, but his hands were badly scorched.

While Gursey was tidying up some spilt grain he started back to the
pens.

"Where're you going with hands like that?" Gursey shouted after
him.

"It's nothing."  He waved stiffly and started off again.

But Gursey caught him roughly by the shoulder.  "No, you don't.
There's enough to do here slaving our guts out without nursing you
and cutting a rotten arm off you as well, maybe."

The raw flesh on his hand and arms began suddenly to shrivel and
throb in the cold wind.  When the wounds had been dressed in flour
and fat he needed a stiff rum to pull him round.

But he could not lie down.  Trussed up like a fowl, he walked about
the lambing paddock in the yellow dawn light and fumed at Tom and
Bill Penberthy, who were busy suckling the greenbobs to their
mothers.  Many mothers had no offspring, and some offspring, thanks
to the dingoes, had no teat to suck at.  So dead ones must be
skinned and the skins sewn over the motherless living and the
imposters fobbed off on the ewe that smelled itself in the false
covering.  Or sometimes, when the lamb was doused with brine, the
ewe would begin licking it and take it for its own.

Every time Tom succeeded in palming-off a lamb in this way he
preened his whiskers and winked at Cabell, indicating a treacherous
blow at the tenderest feelings of a common enemy.  "Got him there,"
he chuckled.  "Wait'll it grows up inter a crossbred wether, yeh
stoopid old mutton-face, yeh."

The sun rose.  In the pale-blue windswept sky a speck appeared,
grew, hung suspended.  A second and a third.  Tom took his pipe out
and pointed.  Eagles.  The crows were already there, lining the
hurdles of the lambing paddock and the branches of the trees.

Cabell fretted in his bonds.


     Everything in the world
     Lives only to destroy me. . . .


A fantastical fellow, who endowed the country with cunning and
subtlety and vindictive purpose.  Yet there might have been some
method in this madness.  Who can say what end a man is serving with
this gesture or that?  Least of all the man himself.  By imagining
danger on every hand he made himself prudent, dogged and far-
seeing.  Any plans for the future of the valley beyond the next ten
years he repudiated, however, defining his only ambition as a
triumphant return to Owerbury.  The periodic arguments which Gursey
forced on him about the nation coming to birth in the Australian
wilds irritated him intensely, as though they compelled him to see
something that distracted his eyes from their goal.

"Funny the way the lambs come out," Gursey remarked one afternoon
towards the end of the lambing-down.  "You got nearly all ewes.  It
used to be the same at Murrumburra.  And down that place I was on
near Bathurst it was the same."  He leant against the stockyards.
"Seems like the country was hungry for things to fill it," he said
thoughtfully.

Cabell shook his head to chase away the flies, for his arms were
still tied up.  "And the next thing you know," he said, "there's a
drought or a flood come to kill them off."

"Just the same, they go on increasing.  Else you wouldn't be here."

"Let them increase, then, and I won't be here long."

Cabell turned, balancing himself gingerly on the rail, and watched
Bill Penberthy drive the strong mob into the pens--the ewes that
had lambed a fortnight ago and could travel now with their lambs.
The green mob, ewes that had just lambed, were in the lambing
paddock, where Tom was going round with a long stick to stir up the
lambs so that they would not sleep too long and neglect their food
or fall prey to the crows and hawks keeping tireless watch from the
trees.  The full-bellied mob was away down the river, waiting for
men to come and pick up the lambs dropped during the day.

It was a late afternoon of spring.  The cicadas had come out to
sing the sun down, but the rasping of their million throats laid
only a greater silence over the valley.  The sheep bleated, Bill
grumbled, Tom cursed, but no sounds penetrated the web of metallic
music.  Old Dan went past with a bundle of sheepskins, and his face
was set in the serene smile that visited it only during rare
interludes of the most perfect quiet.

"Yes, it can be rich when it likes," Cabell admitted, speaking from
a heart delighted by the sight of his growing flocks and herds.  Of
the thousand ewes and sixty rams he had brought from Moreton Bay
five hundred remained, but they had lambed twice now, adding twelve
hundred sturdy fine-woolled animals to his stock.

In the next breath he complained:  "One good season in four.
That's the rule here.  They'll most likely be food for the crows
this time next year."  A concession of pessimism lest the demons
should blast his flocks on the spot.

"Save the water, that's what you've got to do," Gursey said.
"Enough runs away in one night during the rains to last a
lifetime."  In a burst of enthusiasm he climbed on to the rail
beside Cabell and began expounding his favourite theme--the future
of the country.  "Build dams.  Flood up those gullies behind the
hills.  Drought would never come over the ranges then."

Cabell frowned.

"In twenty years," Gursey went on, "you'd've made this a part of
the world.  There'd be roads.  There'd be people.  Just where
you're sitting might be streets.  The bush'd be gone.  Children'd
be born and grow up here.  Before you died you'd see them men, and
they'd find their whole life in this valley where there wasn't a
sign of life when you came exploring."  His enthusiasm transfigured
him.  "What a chance!" he cried.

"A chance!"  Cabell grimaced.  "A chance to live in dirt and
loneliness for the best years of my life.  To go crazy like
everyone else.  To forget that there's anything in the world except
sheep."

"You'd be making a new people."

"What a people!  A mob of despairing immigrants."

Gursey brushed this aside.  "People don't immigrate in despair.
They immigrate in hope," he said.

"I've got my own hopes," Cabell said.  "You know what they are."

Gursey's nagging voice jumped half an octave.  "Ay, like the rest
of them--pick the eyes out of the country and leave it."  He jumped
down from the fence and limped to and fro in front of Cabell.
"Whose fault is it the place is lonely and stinking, with nothing
in it but sheep to think of?  Yours and others like you.  You live
like pigs"--he gestured towards the hovel building on the hillside--
"you don't lift a hand to make the place better than a sty, though
it's few of you want the money to build something fine and fit for
men.  You marry women and breed, but you never think of paying back
what the country's given you by making a home in it.  When you come
the grass is good and the water enough for all and the bush full of
timber.  When you leave it the ground's sick and eaten out, the
timber's cut and burnt and wasted, and the rivers have half dried
up.  As soon as you've got the beans, off you go to spend them
somewhere else, to rot in Owerbury, to be a fat fool on a tame
horse.  And what have you left behind?  Not even a well-bred sheep.
Not even a decent horse.  Nothing--because you've never thought of
anything but yourself."  He spat into the dust.  "It isn't enough
for you to waste what belongs to US by rights.  You want us to work
our guts out so that you can go back and be the sort of thing that
sent us here."

Cabell sensed depths of personal resentment behind his words,
overflowing from a heart full of grievance.  "Is he going mad?" he
wondered in alarm.

Gursey pounded his chest.  "You've done me in, ruined everything,
EVERYTHING for me!" he said.  "Just because you want to lord it
over a pack of sots in England."

"You're ruining yourself," Cabell said, "with your hatred."

Gursey laughed.  "It's that what keeps me alive."

Cabell climbed down from the fence and went for a walk up the
river.  Little spurts of anger kept drawing his heavy black brows
together.  The anger was not with Gursey; for some infuriatingly
elusive reason it seemed to be with himself.



Chapter Sixteen

MYALLS


Sambo crossed the river and rode upstream towards the Three Mile, a
belt of scrub that joined outcropping promontories of hills and cut
the valley in two.  As he passed a flock of sheep scattered along
the bank, Cranky Tom poked his head out of the mulga scrub and
shouted derisively "Hey, you, crow-bait!  Reckon 't'ain't the roan
stallion what's pinchin' them mares away at all."

"Whatyamean, ain't roan stallion?"

Tom screwed up one eye and rubbed his cheek.  "Seed a foal round
'ere yest'y.  Dead spit of you it was."

Sambo sucked his black eye-tooth for five minutes.  "Boss dead sore
's'mornin'," he told Tom.

"What about?"

"Them lambs yours."

"What's wrong with 'em?"

"Boss reckons all growin' long yaller whiskers."

"T'hell with you!  Bring the flies, you do."

"Flies?  Could hang you up by the heels for a fly-trap."

Civilities exchanged, Sambo dug his one rusty old bent spur into
the horse and rode on.  He rode loosely, with the reins thrown over
his arm and both hands stuck in the tops of his trousers.  On
horseback his lanky body, with its disjointed legs and pigeon-toes
that on earth kicked and stumbled over every obstacle, knitted to a
new grace, swayed like a dancer.

It was early in summer, towards the end of Cabell's first year in
the valley.  The rainless winter and three months of heat had
changed the whole face of the valley from green to brown.  The
river was hardly more than a good broad-jump and the lagoons had
dwindled to a chain of pools and mud-ringed shallows that seemed
from a distance in the brilliant sunshine to be crusted over with
snow.  This was flocks of ibis and egret come to scoop out the fish
packed closely in the waters waiting for rain.  Snipe and plover
sat about on the mudbanks or set off, like swarms of insects, to
sweep the dirty waters.  And overhead, ready to prey on the
preyers, a brown kite dived and circled on strong wings that
brought it close over Sambo's head, so that he could see its
bunched claws and yellow, rapacious eye as it swooped away, beating
an eddy of warm air into his face.

He turned up one of the gullies and came out into a wide, open
place where a low-roofed wattle-and-daub shanty stood beside some
sheep pens.  This was the Three Mile out-station, established a
month before with the winter lambs, where Bill Penberthy was
shepherd and Dan kept the hut, looked after the food, shifted the
pens, doctored culls, and stood watch at night.

"Y'there, Dan?" Sambo shouted.  "Y'there, blast yeh?"  But there
was no answer from behind the barricaded door and windows until he
dismounted and began to kick a hole in the bottom of the wall,
which showed signs of having been so kicked many times before.
Then a querulous voice demanded "Whatya want?"

"Open the door!" Sambo demanded.  "Or I'll kick it down."

Prolonged grumblings ceased, and there was a sound of heavy timber
being moved.  After a few minutes a board swung away from the
window and Dan's face, twisted by suffering as usual, appeared at
the opening.  "Must you worrit me?" he asked in a weak voice.

"Only wanted arst yeh if yeh'd seen that roan agen. . . ."

But at the first note of Sambo's stertorous cattleman's voice Dan
slammed the cover and groaned.  The interview might have ended
there if two tom-tits had not started squabbling in the topmost
branches of a pine, faintly scratching the silence of the gully.
At that barely perceptible sound Dan uttered a yell of rage and
began tearing down the barricades of the door.  He emerged suddenly
and looked wildly around, clutching an ear with one hand and waving
aloft an ancient horse-pistol with the other.  The birds, which
realized at once that they were in the wrong gully, long since
deserted by all croaking and whistling things, became suddenly
quiet and huddled together on the end of a branch in the hope of
escaping the avenger's eye.  But it was as sharp as his ear.  He
let out a blood-curdling shriek and fired.  The pistol exploded
with a jet of flame three feet long and a terrible roar.  Dan
dropped it and stood with his head in his hands, trembling till the
last echo had died away and the tom-tits had flown out of hearing.
Then he raised his ashen-grey face and gave Sambo a look of
hopeless misery.

"Yeh'll have to blow yer own head off to get rid of them noises,"
Sambo told him disparagingly.

The old man sat down on the doorstep and shook his head.  "It's
fair cruel, Sambo," he said in a little cracked voice.  "The noise
here fair lifts the top off your nut."  He made a discouraged
gesture towards the sky as a crow flew by.  "It ain't only the
birds, Sambo.  It ain't only you rampagin' at the cows.  It ain't
only the cattle and the curlews and the sound of hammerin' day in,
day out down at the homestead.  It ain't only the blasted bleatin'
sheep, the cockatoos and Bill a-talkin' to hisself.  It's
everything.  Everything!"  He shook a fist at the trees.  "Hear
them crackin' and rustlin', Sambo.  Hear the branches fallin' off.
Hear the wind in the grass.  Hear the bunya nuts droppin'.  Hear
the bleedin' bees.  Hear . . . oh, everything, Sambo!  It'll drive
me off the hooks if I don't get a bit of peace soon."  His voice
trailed off and the silence closed over them again, like the shell
of an unborn world.

"Seein' yeh hear sich a lot," Sambo said, laughing, "have you heard
that runaway horse lately?"

"Horse!" Dan screamed, starting up.  "Twelve legs--rattlin'
'obbles--kickin'--stampin'--playin' hell's delight.  Quadruped!
Hell's cat, that's what that is.  Never 'eard such noises."

"Where'd it go?"

Dan pointed over the hill.  "It was over at the Blue Waterhole last
night, neighin' fit to lift the sky.  Oh, my God. . . ."  At the
memory of it he grabbed his ears again and rushed back into the
humpy, where he could be heard frenziedly piling up his ramparts
against a world of incessant sound.

Sambo rode on towards the waterhole, with a detour to keep him to
windward of the quarry, but when an hour later he left the scrub
there was no sign of the stallion or his runaway stud.  A grey
fringe at the banks of the lagoon heaved up, like a bursting
bubble, and threw a racing shadow across the brown earth.  A flock
of native-companions he had disturbed rose slowly, circled above
him with high-pitched trumpetings, then beat away over the bush.

For another hour Sambo rode about, making casts for fresh tracks,
which, leading from the waterhole, showed that the horses had been
frightened away only a short time before and had galloped up the
valley.  He was just about to give a tedious job best when he heard
the sound of their hoofs in the distance, and a few minutes later
the lovely roan stallion, followed by two young mares, burst out of
the scrub about a mile away and dashed across the open.  Before
Sambo and his suddenly excited horse were properly in their stride
they disappeared in the thick scrub on the other side.  This was a
game after Sambo's own heart.  Without pulling rein he dived into
the cool shadows after them and rode straight on, leaping fallen
trees, bending and swaying to avoid low branches--a centaur if ever
there was one.

He caught glimpses of the mares far ahead among the trees, a tail,
a flying hoof, but he did not seem to gain on them.  Soon he was
toiling up the spine of the heavily wooded hills that ran down the
centre of the valley, midway between the two ranges that bounded it
on either side.  He put his horse to the loose gravel bank of a
dried-up creek, and snorting and almost flat on her belly she
plunged up.  Then a fifty yards' slide down a sheer face of rock,
with stones bounding away ahead to crash out of sight in the gully,
and up again to the foot of a little plateau where at some time
long ago a bushfire had blasted a channel through the thick
undergrowth.  Here Sambo hesitated between two likely patches of
scrub.

Suddenly his horse threw up its head, sniffed the air and stamped.
A hot wind came through the clearing, with terrifying scents from
inland.  Sambo threw up his head and sniffed the air, too.  He
conversed with her in low, wondering snorts, and his bony, equine
face took on a look of doubt.

At this moment, in a scatter of stones, the roan stallion dashed
across the plateau straight towards them, with the two mares close
at his heels.  The horses showed signs of extreme terror.  Their
flanks were shining with sweat and foam flew from their mouths.  He
swung out to head them off, but they galloped past as though they
did not even see him.  His own horse became terrified then, and
Sambo had a hard fight to make her turn and go back across the
plateau where the stallion had come.  By the time they reached the
brow of the hill she was letting out whinnies of alarm.  But
nowhere in the wild and silent landscape, into which the sunlight
pressed like a metal wedge, could Sambo's sharp eye ferret out a
sign of life.  Nothing moved but a column of white smoke rising
from a grassfire at the foot of the ranges.  It curled up till it
reached the ridge of the hills, then spread in flat strata on the
wind.  Twenty miles off, on the opposite side of the valley,
another fire was burning, and at the apex of a triangle, nearer, a
third.  For some time Sambo peered, or rather breathed, towards
this.  Born in the bush, his nose was sharper than his eyes.
Faintly, beyond the smell of burning grass, it scented another
smell less pleasant, of rancid fat and the smoke of rotten wood.
Fifty yards away a clump of low bushes, sheltered from the wind,
stirred gently and a crow called, to be answered from far across
the valley.  Sambo nodded shrewdly and loosened his rein.  The
horse spun round and started down the hill towards the homestead.

Myalls!

Cabell, indulging in an optimistic dream at the end of a fruitful
year, came back to the realities of pioneering with the reflection
that happy thoughts tempt Providence, and began overhauling the
camp's small armoury and melting the lead lining of tea-cases to
make shot.  But the blacks were shy and kept to the hills.  At
night their fires glowed through the scrub and in the day they
burned grass to signal across the valley, but no one saw them.
Three tribes, or branches of a tribe, were coming together from
west, north and south--a yearly meeting for a great corroboree.

A week passed and nothing happened.

Once more, as in the lambing-time, peace departed from the camp.
Cabell lived in the saddle and the men were lucky if they got
through a night without being called up on some alarm or other.  In
vain Gursey told him that the blacks never left their gunyahs in
the dark.  All night he patrolled his woolshed with a gun, stroking
the bales of wool as he passed, as though they were live and timid
things that must be petted lest they pine away and grow thin.

A strip of moon grew to its first quarter.  Voices wailing tuneless
song stirred the night-birds.  There were shouts, women screaming.
Figures moved against the glare of a big fire.  Next day six men
came out of the bush and beckoned from the opposite bank of the
river.  Sign of an important occasion, their noses had been
reddened.  Cabell and Gursey went down.  Cabell gave them the
sodden remains of a damper, some old clay pipes and tobacco.  A
one-eye giant of a fellow made a long speech, waved his spear, and
they withdrew.  That night the voices wailed longer and louder.

Two days later the tribe came down and pitched their gunyahs on the
bank of the river, about three hundred yards from the station.  The
bark gunyahs were like small bell-tents, and a fire was always kept
burning in them.  Cattle promptly evacuated the locality.  The
horses galloped about in their paddock and were restless all night.
Even the stupid sheep hated the smell of the blacks.  Most of the
men were young fellows with chests like barrels and muscles that
seemed likely to split their coal-black skin.  Their eyes were
purple-rimmed and the palms of their hands grey.  They had wide
mouths, low foreheads, and noses that lay flat on their faces, with
big nostrils turned up and out.  They were not like men, somehow--
subhuman.  Sad, wrinkled, oppressed, those faces could have
belonged to the old age of the world but never to its dawn, one
would have thought.  Even Cranky Tom looked youthful in comparison.
The smell of rancid fat and rotten wood clung to everything they
touched, and a horse shied at a gate if they had been near it.  The
women, carrying their babies in bark dillybags on their backs, had
long, pendulous breasts which they flung over their shoulders for
their babies to suck.  Hundreds of dogs infested the camp--hungry,
half-wild dingoes that cringed before the indignant Scotch collies
and came creeping silently back to get round behind the flock or
resume digging at the offal dump Tom and Sambo had chased them away
from.

On the third day the other tribes came in.  Brides were to be
taken, disputes settled, boys circumcized.  There were fights.
Three men chased another up the river.  At sundown they returned
and their bodies shone with a coating of fresh kidney-fat.  Loud
cries echoed along the hills and abruptly stopped.  The night was
dark as pitch.  Heavy clouds covered the moon.  On nights like this
the blacks were depressed and silent.

But on moonlight nights they sang and danced.

The moon was a golden plate in the middle of a blue-black sky.  The
red stars paled, all form became wraithlike.

Cabell lounged in the doorway and watched the lights of the abo
camp.  Voices came up from the men's hut--Cranky Tom's mumblebumble,
Sambo's high-pitched, derisive retorts.

Tom muttered.

"Tell yeh, distinctly heard female voice," Sambo said.

"You get outa here, you young--"  A heavy piece of wood hit the
wall of the hut.

Sambo laughed.  "Next year yeh'll have a tribe o' yeller-whiskered
abos comin' to see yeh, Tom."

The disjointed shadow of Tom shaking a fist sprawled across the
moonlit grass.

A droning noise started, a solitary bullroarer that stopped
abruptly, started again, stopped.  A chatter of voices arose,
stopped.  A song began and ended after a few bars.  The nervous
ecstasy of the blacks gathering round their big fire communicated
itself to the white men.  Sambo ceased laughing.

Ducks and solitary jabiru passed across the moon and geese
hastening to a rendezvous at the lagoons.  The echoes of their
whistling calls trailed up the valley behind them.  Nankin birds
passed on silent wings, croaking horribly and letting out a fowl-
like cackle as they settled in the trees.  Minutes went by and
there were no other sounds.

A strange mood settled on Cabell.  He felt at once calm and
exalted.  It was something the moon was doing to everyone and
everything in the valley.  Remote in depthless peace, the gums
rose, tall, statuesque, motionless, with a white flame of blossoms
burning at the top.  But their shadows were alive with whispers,
the brush of wings, the suppressed cries of the flying-foxes
feasting on the orange-scented flowers.  The silver strip of river
flowed silently from shadow to shadow, but here and there a fish
rose, rippled the surface, broke the quiet.  From the scrub,
covered with blackest darkness, roofed with a dome of silver, came
the quivering cries of animals intoxicated with moonlight.  So it
was with Cabell.  A dreamy contentment like quiet sleep possessed
his body, relaxing weary nerves and muscles.  But under this his
blood thrilled with a passionate stirring--a passionate, deep
yearning, towards what he could not have said, did not even ask.
Consciousness, too, had found a moment of rest, and he was utterly
submerged in the mood that entranced the valley.  It was as though
he had momentarily let go his hold on everything that had kept him
alien in the land and had become a part of its wild fantasy--to
him, for that moment, no longer strange, no longer fantastic.

He felt content.

Gursey came up the slope and leant against the wall beside him.  He
smoked his short, black pipe, making little noises with his lips as
he puffed.

Cabell shook his head.  "Ah, that's a long, long way from here, all
that," he said, half to himself.

"The Old Country?" Gursey said.

Wonderingly Cabell repeated the words:  "The OLD Country."

Gursey took out his pipe and turned his head to watch a drove of
flying-foxes settle in the flame-tree behind the humpy.  Suddenly
they began screeching and as suddenly were quiet again.  Down at
the camp a semicircle of bent figures was forming round the fire.
Behind them stood excited men armed with spears.  Their black
bodies were lost against the shadows, but the moonlight and the
flickering glow of the fire shone on the painting in kopi and
blood-wood gum which spotted and striped their frames and picked
out their eye-sockets, the bridge of their noses, their ribs, the
line of their jaws.

Cabell began to talk again, in a quiet voice, as of one remembering
a long-vanished past.  "My brothers used to chase a tame deer round
Exmoor.  They used to be called hard-riding."  He laughed.  His
gesture printed the shadow of a long arm on the grey mud wall of
the storeroom.  Then he roused himself and said in a surprised
voice, "Used to?  I suppose they're doing it still."

The bullroarer had started again, then another and another, till
the air seemed to moan and quiver inside Cabell's head. . . .  A
man standing beside the fire kept time by banging two flat sticks
together, and burst into fragmentary song in a hoarse voice, like a
dog yelping.  The thunder of the bullroarers died away, rose again--
urgent, vicious. . . .  A few old women sat down by the fire and
stretched out their legs towards it.  On the hollow between their
stomachs and thighs they began to beat rapidly with their cupped
hands. . . .  The moonlight happiness of the blacks burst out in
sudden song.  The air trembled with the chant of men's voices, the
drone of the bullroarers, the rattle of the dry sticks.  The two
white men watched in silence, stirred deeply by the wild rhythm,
the dark power of the voices.

A man had come out of the shadows.  He threw a few twigs on the
embers and the fire blazed up again.  In the flickering light he
danced, with head and feet rigid, his body twisting and shivering
to the music.  His skin began to shine with sweat and the flames
climbed over it.  The music stopped abruptly--horns, voices,
drummers, all together.  The sound rolled away into the night.
Then silence.

"Yes, a long, long way from here," Cabell repeated slowly.  In this
was none of the bitterness that always sharpened his voice when he
spoke of England, none of the jealous longing for precious things
taken from him, but just the faintest accent of contempt.

Gursey puffed at his pipe and smiled.



Chapter Seventeen

DAN


Soon there was always a crowd of blacks at the gate of the
homestead waiting for Cabell to distribute sparing handfuls of
tobacco and flour.  Meanwhile they followed Cranky Tom about.
Sometimes he scared them out of their wits by putting in his false
teeth.

But as the moon waned they withdrew to a new camp near the Three
Mile, whence only a faint echo of their night-time concerts reached
the homestead.  They were hunting kangaroo and feasting on the fish
trapped in the shrunken pools.

When Cabell rode out to Dan's gully with the weekly rations on
Sunday he found the blacks catching duck on the big lagoon.  The
heat of the sun bleached the sky and turned the waterhole to a
sheet of burnished metal.  One of the blacks, with a sod of brown
grass tied to his head, went into the water and swam slowly across
the lagoon to where the ducks were feeding.  The herons stalking in
the reedy shallows looked up suspiciously as the grass floated by,
shook out their wings, but went on picking in the mud.  The little
pigmy geese swimming and diving in the middle of the hole gave the
ducks no sign of the danger approaching.  The grass-tuft floated on
without a ripple.  Suddenly, silently a duck disappeared under the
water and came up again in a few seconds with its neck broken.  So
the hunt went on for half an hour till there were more dead bodies
than live ducks.  Then something alarmed the others and they flew
squawking from the water and disappeared over the scrub.

As Cabell rode past their camp the blacks came out to crowd round
him in the hope of getting a bit of tobacco.  They followed him as
far as the mouth of Dan's gully, then suddenly fell away, and when
he looked round he saw them all crowded together, shaking their
hands and discussing animatedly some terrible thing that resided
hereabouts.

It was Dan apparently.  Cabell pounded the door of the silent
shanty, but for some time there was no answer.  Then Dan appeared,
dishevelled and heavy-eyed, grabbed the rations, darted back into
the house and shut the door again.

"What's the matter with you?" Cabell demanded through a crack in
the mud wall.

Dan groaned.

"Are you sick?"

"Sick!  I'm a-dyin'."

"What's wrong?"

"It's them . . . them devils."

"What devils?"

"Them black devils."

"What have they done to you?"

Dan groaned again.  "Can't you hear NOTHING?"

"Heard nothing unusual."

"Nothing unusual!  Night after night . . . all them shrieks . . .
screams . . . murders . . . 'eathenish rumpus."

"Pull yourself together, man.  They'll be gone soon."

"I sincerely 'ope so, Boss.  I'm just about played out."

But they did not go soon.  The thunderstorms that preluded the
rainy season came with white squalls of rain, the lagoons began to
fill, the river to murmur, but the blacks did not make for the dry
highlands where they spent this time of year.  Half of them hung
about the lagoons fishing and the other half hung about the
station, waiting for stray gifts which became less frequent.  The
new moon arrived, and again there was carousal and dancing at the
Three Mile.  The mood did not come back to Cabell, however.  As the
time of the rains approached, the time of floods, foot-rot and
discomfort, he dealt out more cuffs and kicks than tobacco among
the blacks.

Things went from bad to worse.  One day he caught a black sneaking
away with a leg of mutton from the gallows where the carcass of the
sheep or steer killed for rations was hung every Saturday night.
He snatched up a stockwhip and chased the black into the corner of
the yard with it.  The thief was the ugly one-eyed devil, and twice
already he had cut across Cabell's temper by coming into the yard
and looking at the storeroom.  Now he raised a howl that brought up
half a dozen hulking brutes, armed to the teeth.  After a lot of
arguing and gesticulating they were got off the premises.

Cabell was for riding out at once to drive the lot of them from the
valley at the point of the gun, but Gursey held him back.  "Leave
it to the rain," he said.  "They'll pack up when it sets in
properly."

But the trouble was started.  It came to a head that very night,
and by morning not a black was left in the valley.  At sunset a
terrible thunderstorm passed over.  Trees were struck and the
thunder was like a bombardment.

"Old Dan'll be havin' the time of his life," Sambo said.  But even
he looked relieved himself when, after hammering the valley for two
hours, the storm broke up as quickly as it had come.

The night was still again, still with the silence that is a
thousand little noises.  An excited horse galloped across the
paddock, the river swirled round the bend, water dripped on to an
upturned bucket.  The valley was mosaiced with ragged sheets of
silver that harboured a hundred moons.

Shouts came from the Three Mile, faint at first, then louder and
louder until they seemed to be advancing on the homestead.  Cabell
pushed his plate away and went to the door.

Because of what had happened that afternoon the men were nervous,
too.  Tom stood in the doorway of their hut and looked up the
valley doubtfully.  The dogs began to bark.  The sheep woke up and
bleated.

The voices at the Three Mile ceased abruptly, to be replaced after
ten seconds of heavy silence by a series of bloodcurdling shrieks,
which died away in distant echoes.  As they ceased, the echo of a
pistol shot, or rather, of an explosion like a magazine blowing up,
roared across the valley.  There was another, and after a long
interval another.

Tom was the first to stir.  "Hear that?"

Cabell glanced at Gursey.

"Can't be the blacks," Gursey said.  "They wouldn't budge an inch
at night."

Then faintly they heard the pad of a horse's hooves approaching at
the gallop.  Ten minutes later there was a splash as the horse
plunged through one of the pools left by the thunderstorms, and
shortly afterwards Bill Penberthy rode up to the gate and climbed
stiffly out of the saddle.

He told a strange story.

The thunderstorm had driven old Dan crazy, and he had half
smothered himself by wrapping up his head in blankets.  When it had
passed he spent a frenzied hour trying to stop the noise of water
dripping from the roof.  But no sooner had he fixed that than the
moon came out and the blacks began a corroboree.  That was too much
for Dan.  Shrieking with rage, he dashed out of the gully, burst
into the circle of dancers, grabbed a boomerang clacker and smashed
it across his knee.  Paralysed by the dramatic appearance of an
arch-fiend, the dancers stopped dead.  The children and the women
fled.  Then one of the men shouted and Dan shot him.  After this he
lost his head completely, and before the last black had disappeared
he shot two more.

They looked at each other.

"Dang him!" Tom swore.  "Always said that man 'ad no tact!"



Chapter Eighteen

RAIN


The rainy season started in earnest, and they had something else to
worry about.  Every day it rained, without once letting up for a
month.  Marble masses of cloud rolled down from the north-east and
cracked open against the ranges.  The rain hissed in the trees like
water on fire, ripped the tough leaves of the staghorns to shreds,
and curtained the world into a leaden twilight.  Then the sun broke
through for a few hours with pent-up midsummer heat.  Wreaths of
steam wavered over the sodden ground.  Boots left out to dry
overnight were covered with mildew in the morning, and gun barrels
had a coating of rust a few hours after they were cleaned.  Gaudy
fungi sprouted from the bark walls of the humpies, which were
furred with green slime.  The roofs, shrunk by the long dry season,
and the green beams which supported them swelled and twisted and
leaked at every joint, and the ant-bed floor came up in clods of
grey mud on the men's boots.  Their clothes were never dry.  When a
man put his blankets out in the fugitive sunlight the blowflies
laid on them.

The valley became a vast lake cut in two by the yellow waters of
the river, which had risen to the top of its banks and roared past
with trees torn, roots and all, from the earth.  Where the ground
had been hard as iron it sucked a man down to his knees now.  To
ride was out of the question.  Cabell, keeping an eye on his
cattle, floundered about in mud and water from dawn till dusk,
leading his plunging, sweating horse through the morass to the high
sandy places where instinctively the cattle had made their camps.
In the vapour-packed sunlight he gasped for air.  The sweat never
dried on him.  He came in at night, gobbled a mouthful of food, and
flung himself down as he was, in mud-drenched clothes.

One night a scream awakened him.  He lay for a long time listening,
but the only sound was the patter of rain on the shingles and the
drip, drip of water somewhere near his head.  The blanket round his
feet was soaking wet.  He moved his weary legs a few inches and
prepared to sleep again, convinced that the scream was in his own
dreams, when it came once more, from the far corner of the hut.
Then Gursey's voice, muttering distracted sentences of fear.
"Don't let them. . . .  For Christ's sake. . . .  Don't flog
me. . . .  For Christ's sake."

He got out of bed and tried to light the lamp, but it was
waterlogged and all the matches were wet.  He tramped out into the
rain and got a dry match from Tom, who carried half a dozen wrapped
in canvas in his hair.  When he had coaxed a glimmer from the lamp
then, he found Gursey, his shirt torn off and deep scratches
bleeding on his throat, doubled up on the muddy floor by an attack
of fever.

Cabell nursed him.

"It's rope, soap and calico for me," Gursey kept on repeating.
That was how the soldiers used to announce a hanging in the penal
settlements.  They would come out into the prison yard and shout
"Rope, soap and calico for one!" and Gursey dreamt that they were
holding him down while they shouted it in his ear.  He struggled
with these phantoms till the veins swelled up, blue and knotted, in
his thin neck.  "S'elp me God, I didn't shoot him.  I didn't!  I
didn't!  Tell them, Cabell.  Tell them I didn't want to shoot
McGovern."

Cabell sat on his bunk night after night, holding him down.  As the
dawn came Gursey fell asleep and Cabell went out to help with the
foot-rotting sheep.

Half a dozen or so would have died during the night.  They had to
be skinned and the carcasses burnt at once, for already the
blowflies were breeding in them.  Then the men caught the sufferers
that still lived and pared away the rotten parts of the hooves.
The wet ground did it.  The hooves went black and rotted off the
sheep.  The smell was horrible.  After a sleepless night it made
Cabell nearly vomit his heart out.  All the time there was the rain
or else the sun was grilling them.  Everything was coated with
slimy mud and the ointment they used on the sheep.  Some kind of
corrosive in this ate their nails away and burnt holes in their
clothes till it reached the flesh underneath it, where it made
tender, running sores.

Through eyes swollen by fatigue and the bites of flies Cabell
watched a rebirth of Nature.  In contrast to the weary settlers,
the land was bursting with life.  Not a shade of brown was left on
the landscape.  The grass seemed to grow visibly.  Along the river
it was as soft as a down bed, on the hillsides higher than a man on
a horse.  Vines and creepers enmeshed the trees on the eastern
slopes, where the vegetation was thick and sub tropical.  The
bright green shoots of the bamboos were up more than six feet.  The
lagoons were alive with fish that had concealed themselves in the
mud during the dry spell.  Day and night birds went over in huge
flocks.  The cranes could be heard trumpeting loudly at all hours,
and black-and-white storks paraded the valley and rose in clouds at
the approach of some poor devil plodding through the mud to visit
the cattle camps in the hills.

Cabell went into a trance as he sat beside Gursey's bed at night,
bathing the sick man's temples with brine.  He did this
mechanically all night, and in the dawn came to with the lingering
after-taste of bad dreams.  Once he thought he was in Owerbury
again, and awoke with a terrible, oppressive sense of defeat.  He
sat staring dully at the grey oblong of window, weighed down by his
misery.  Then the chitter of birds awakening in the flame brought
him back to the valley and he felt an unaccountable uprush of joy.
Again, he dreamt of McGovern, prompted by Gursey's nightmare
chatter.  McGovern was standing in the doorway, his hands in the
tops of his trousers, laughing.  "I guessed I'd find you some day,
lad," he said.  Cabell was standing near the table, and once more
he was sick with a sense of defeat.  "What do you want?" he
demanded.  "Everything," McGovern said.  "For attempted murder,
harbouring an escaped convict--everything."  He turned and waved
toward the luxuriant valley.  Cabell grabbed a pistol and fired.
When the smoke cleared McGovern was still standing in the doorway,
laughing.  He awoke.  A hammer was beating on his skull.  His hands
were cold and clammy.  The first flush of fever.  He wanted to
throw himself on the bunk and sleep, sleep for hours, days, weeks.
But he forced himself through the morning ritual of shaving and
bathing and went out giddily to face another day.

A few nights after this he awakened with a start to a conviction
that some unusual thing was happening.  Gursey lay twisted up on
his bunk babbling incoherently.  Cabell fought against the weights
on his eyelids and slowly opened them.  The coming dawn faintly
outlined the black form of the trees.

All at once he heard a mighty splash and the pounding of hooves.
He was fully awake and out of the door in an instant.

Sambo was standing in the yard peering through the twilight.  "Mob
from the west side's off their camp," he said, yawning.

"What the blazes. . . ."

Sambo sniffed the air.  "Blacks."

They swallowed a billy of tea and started off.  They lost three
hours leading their horses to the place where the cattle had been
raided.  They found it by following the crows.  The blacks had
speared and quartered a bullock, hamstrung three cows, and driven
off half a dozen calves.  The hamstrung cows were still alive,
bellowing pitifully, though the crows had already picked out their
eyes.  Cabell shot them and went on.

Now they were able to ride.  The tracks of the marauders were easy
to follow in the rain-soaked gravel, but the raiders had about five
hours' start, though, as they were driving the calves, they would
be travelling slowly.  The way was rough, through clumps of giant
spear grass that cut the hand reached out to part them, over
swamps, holes scooped out by the rain, up crumbling slopes.  Rain
and sun alternately drenched and baked them.  At noon they came on
a spot where the calves had been killed and cut up.  Pools of blood
were still warm.  Encouraged, they set off again.  Soon they were
in the range country.  The going was easier here among the cotton
and pine trees, but they had to ride carefully to avoid the lawyer
vines and the stinging tree, of which Sambo had had one experience.

Half an hour later they came out on to an open plateau and let the
horses go.  They had been cantering for ten minutes when Sambo
suddenly hauled his horse on to its haunches and yelled back "Stop
where y'are!"

Cabell pulled up.  "What's wrong?"

Sambo dismounted, walked ahead a little way, and gingerly picked up
something from the ground.  "See," he said, holding it up for
Cabell to inspect.  "Fishbones.  Poisoned.  Go through a hoof like
butter.  Through yeh boots, too."

"They can't be far ahead if they begin leaving those things,"
Cabell decided.

Sambo pointed to the three hills to the north-west, where came
together the ranges from north and south, now emerged from the
transparent veil of blue that covered them when seen from the
homestead.  "That's where they hang out.  Once they get in them
gullies we ain't got a chance in a lifetime of finding them."

They made a cast and picked up the tracks farther on.  The blacks
were a couple of miles ahead, Sambo thought.  Ten minutes later
they entered a gloomy swamp where the slimy ground heaved up under
the horses' hooves and roared at them.  Frogs.

Millions of frogs.  The tumult made the two men dizzy.  The very
air seemed to be green and slimy here, a primeval twilight through
which the rain oozed.  Except for the frogs the place was deserted.
In a season when birds were nesting everywhere no birds were to be
seen here.  Cabell spurred his horse, so as to be near Sambo.  It
shied.  Then Sambo's horse stopped dead and refused to budge.
Sambo let out a string of curses and spun it around hastily.

"What's up now?" Cabell demanded.

Sambo pointed to the ground just ahead.  A black mound, like a heap
of fresh cow-dung, palpitated with a sluggish, evil life.  "Snakes
matin'," he said.  "Better keep yer eye open."

They made another detour and rode on for a few minutes, but Sambo
stopped again and pointed up into a tree.  Two more snakes,
enmeshed in shining, damp coils clung to the branches.  And when
Cabell looked around he saw the trees everywhere festooned with
coupled snakes, their skins shining in the half-light with
brilliant, phosphorescent colours.  He was horrified.

"Lousy with 'em," Sambo said.

"Let us get out, for God's sake," Cabell said quickly.

"Aw, if yeh want to," Sambo grunted, but he was not far behind
Cabell when they came out in the open again.

So the blacks got safely into the gullies of the overlapping
ranges.  At sunset Cabell and Sambo turned their horses back for
home.

Now hardly a day passed without cattle being speared or hamstrung,
but no one ever saw the blacks.  They came down in small parties
from the ranges and were away before Cabell knew what had happened.
In those few weeks he lost much of the fruit of his year's labour,
not only by the wholesale maiming and stealing of cattle, but
because the mere smell of the blacks stampeded the herds.  Once
disturbed like this, the animals needed weeks to quieten down or
they fretted themselves into poor condition.  One of the best mobs
split up and half the beasts took refuge in a thick scrub.  Short-
handed, harassed, overworked, the men could not drive them out.
Cabell, worn to a skeleton by fatigue and fever, refused to lay up
as long as he had strength to drag himself on to a horse.  Gloomily
he watched the panic among the cattle, foreseeing thus established
on his run a breed of wild scrubbers that would be a perennial
source of destruction, to his pastures and to the integrity of his
herds.

Gursey did not improve.  Cabell continued to spend the nights on
the edge of his bunk.  Dreams of England, so safe, so calm, so
happy, filled his night-time reflections again, and the thought of
his brothers, coddled in peace and plenty there, re-awakened the
bitterness that had softened into contempt when things were going
easier.  Half sleeping, half waking, his mind evolved interminable
galling images in this strain.  But it was the re-awakened thirst
for revenge which gave him the energy to go through the day.  Time
and again he tracked the raiders to the ranges and explored gully
after gully in search of them.  Had it not been for Gursey he would
have camped out on the hills till he found the blacks and
exterminated them.  But as the sun sank he turned his tired horses
homewards and there settled down once more to his nightly vigil.

It was more than fever Gursey had.  It was a breakdown after years
of physical and mental torture.  That he would come out of it sane
seemed doubtful; even that he would come out of it at all seemed
highly unlikely.  In his deliriums he relived scenes of horror
which, re-created vividly by his half-coherent words, stifled
Cabell with pity and disgust--scenes of murder in which crazy
convicts slowly tormented a brutal overseer to death by crucifying
him on an ant-bed, of a semi-official punishment by which Gursey
had been tied to a horse's tail and dragged backwards and forwards
through a salt swamp after the skin had been flogged off his back,
of men starving in a penal camp who had picked over their ordure
for scraps of undigested food to eat.

After such a recital Cabell staggered to the door for air, more
exhausted by the hearing than by a day in the saddle.  He stared
into the night that stretched on all sides across the wilds, and
his loneliness was agony.  Words ached to be spoken, but the night
invited no confidences, mocking the hopes of his weary spirit with
its teeming, vital life.  He heard himself muttering.  "Christ," he
was saying, "Christ, but it's lonely here.  It's lonely here."

He turned back to the spectre in the bunk.  The smoky light of the
slush lamp blackened the hollows of its cheeks, the sunken cavities
of its eyes.  Its pale lips moved incessantly.  Contortions of pain
and terror swept across the thin features.  Cabell reached down and
pressed Gursey's hand.  Many complicated emotions underlay that
simple gesture--pity, a feeling of guilt, the need of his own
loneliness.  There was also in his mind the conviction that the
powers of the brooding darkness would be less threatening if he
could expiate his offence against this man.  "Don't die," he said
aloud.  "Don't die, for God's sake, Joe!" and pledged himself to a
deeper patience and understanding for the future.

The rainy season passed.  The cloudbursts gave way to a drizzle and
this to a brief shower in the afternoons.  The blazing sunshine
dried off the mud and slush, and the river fell back to a wide
sleepy stream.  But the blacks, whose raids had been protected by
the heavy ground, did not become less troublesome.  Rather,
encouraged, they ventured farther, and one day penetrated Dan's
gully, giving the hut a wide berth, however, and surrounded Bill
Penberthy and his flock.  Bill fired one shot, and without waiting
to reload shinned up a tree with the head of a spear in his leg.
The blacks took as many carcasses as they could carry and left
twice as many on the ground.  By the time Bill had extracted the
spearhead and treated his wound and gathered the flock and yarded
it and carried the news to the station the raiders were safe away
as usual.

Cabell decided to evacuate the Three Mile, and sent Bill back to
drive Dan and the sheep down to the homestead at once.  Then he set
out with Sambo for the ranges, not bothering to track the blacks
but hoping, with the speed they could make on dry ground, to
intercept them at the mouth of the gullies.  Having tied their
horses up in the scrub, they settled down in the cover of the
bracken to wait.  But hours passed and no blacks came.

The soft afternoon light flattened out the harsh contours of the
landscape and everything seemed remote and dreamlike.  Bees
murmured in the blossoming dogwood, a bellbird cried from the
distance, the sun drew warm scents from the new grass, the cobalt
blueness of the sky seemed to stain the air.  Cabell felt dizzy and
overheated.  A sense of unreality possessed him.  Incredulously he
stared at the gun propped on the rock before him, at Sambo passing
the time by carving his name on the butt of his Tyrolese rifle.  It
was all a dream--blacks, stolen sheep, ambushes, murder, convicts,
fever, mud, foot-rot, everything. . . .  He slipped into a world
more kindly and convincing.  He was no longer dressed in clothes
that stank of sweat and diseased animals.  Soft linen touched his
skin.  His waistcoat, his cravat, his shining boots belonged to a
man of fashionable and fastidious taste.  His hands were white and
cared for.  It was evening.  He was standing in a garden . . . the
scent of lilac and lavender . . . the sound of the sea . . . a mist
rising . . . Jake Northover driving in the cows . . . Lucy Potter
singing far away in the inn yard.  A girl raised childish blue eyes
to him and smiled.  She put strong arms round his shoulders and
drew him to her, kissed him with cool, firm lips, caressed his
hair, gazed at him with tenderness, understanding, and love.
"Derek!"  "Phillipa!"  What secret source of life was hidden in
those breasts that his body should grow so new and vital against
them?

"Hey, Boss!  Wake up, blast yeh!"

He opened his eyes and stared down into Sambo's mouth, where the
teeth were like little black ticks eating into his gums.

"Hey, Boss, the humpy's burnin' down!"

Following Sambo's pointing finger, he saw a thin wisp of smoke
rising above the hills.  He stared at it dully.  His head was
buzzing.  A soft voice whispered "Derek!  Derek!"

"What's wrong there?" he asked in a thick voice.  He was losing
something, something gracious and scented, something he
passionately wanted.  It was slipping away from him.  He tried to
recapture it by staving off the evil and insistent dream that had
risen to cloud it.  An age seemed to pass in that struggle.
"Derek!  Derek!"  The voice faded, was gone.

He was on his feet, fully awake.

"Them black sods doubled on us," Sambo was saying.  "Now they're
playin' hell's delight with the stores."

"My God!" Cabell cried.  "Gursey!"

They rode hell for leather homewards.  From far off they heard the
voice of Tom wailing, and found him grubbing frenziedly in a heap
of ashes where the men's hut had stood.

Cabell rushed into the homestead humpy.  By some miracle it was
undisturbed.  Gursey lay sleeping quietly.  Cabell brushed the
flies off his face, wiped away the sweat, and went outside.

"What happened?" he asked Tom.

Tom raised his fists and shook them at the heavens.  His
indignation blew his whiskers over his face, wild noises came from
his throat, but no words.

"He's done fer," Sambo explained.  "They roasted his teeth."

Nothing was to be got out of Tom.  He flung himself at the smoking
debris again and went on raking like a mad fowl till he was hidden
in a cloud of dust.

The storeroom was in chaos.  Flour and tobacco were scattered over
the floor.  A cask of black sugar mixed its contents with ointment
for foot-rot, rum and a pool of blood.  The damage was incalculable.

"That's black blood," Sambo said.  "Some'un got a blue pill in."

It was Bill Penberthy.  He rode in at this moment and told how,
coming from the Three Mile with Dan and the sheep, he had seen the
men's hut burst into flames.  As he galloped up the blacks ran out
of the storeroom.  He fired and shot one coming through the
doorway.  The others escaped to the scrub, dragging the body and
howling defiance.



Chapter Nineteen

CATASTROPHE


That night they held a council of war.

"Only a waste of good horse-hoof chasin' them blacks in this
country, Boss," Sambo said.

"But we must do something at once," Cabell said.  "I've got to get
the wool down to Moreton Bay and stores are running short, but I
can't go while the blacks are here."

Sambo winked.  "Just leave 'em alone a day or two."

"Will that make them leave us alone?"

"Bet yeh bottom dollar it won't."  Sambo winked again.

"Well?"

"See, they'll think we're scared and come mobbin' in on us.  Then
we can knock 'em off like flies."

Cabell thought about it.  "But will they come?"

"It's a drummond now they've seen in the store."

Tom roused himself from deep gloom and thumped the table.  "Them
blacks," he said.  "They damn well gone too far.  I'm a-goin' to
take a hand."

"You!  Whatya think you can do?"

Tom snarled.  Malevolent fires lit his dull eye.  "Blow 'em up," he
growled.

"Whatyamean, blow 'em up?"

"Wait and see."  Tom nodded darkly.

"Ooooo!"  A resonant groan from a dark corner of the hut preceded a
feeble protest from Dan, who was sitting with pads of wool stuffed
in his ears.  "Can't you do it without blowin' up?"

Tom hammered the table again.  "I'll make such a hell of a blow-
up," he roared, "there won't be nothin' left of them blacks, not
even 'alf a crow's pickin'!"

Dan staggered out into the middle of the floor, stared at him with
incredulous horror, then rushed from the humpy.

So they prepared for battle.  They cut loopholes in the walls of
the homestead and in the walls of the woolshed, manufactured a
fresh supply of shot, and overhauled the guns.  The flocks never
went out of sight.

Dan watched these preparations, forecasting an hour of hubbub for
which Hell might be a gracious exchange.  He had to bear, too, all
the noises of the homestead--dogs that whimpered, horses that
neighed, people who talked, coughed, spat and laughed, clumsy feet
that kicked buckets, doors that banged, birds that twittered and
screeched night and day, besides a man in delirium and a man who
kept calling on the heavens to bear witness that he intended to
blow up all the blacks in Australia.

Evening in the homestead, where they were all living together till
the new hut was ready for the men, was worse than flaying alive for
Dan.

Sambo and Tom were gambling at the table with greasy cards for wads
of tobacco or packets of Epsom salts.

Gursey stirred and began to mutter.  "Wake up, Red.  Red,
somebody's coming.  Red!"  For a moment he lay motionless, staring
with bright eyes at the darkness beyond the door.  Then he
struggled to get out of the bunk, but Cabell calmed him:  "You're
dreaming, Joe.  Quiet.  Quiet."  He fell back on the bunk
exhausted, to begin again after a moment:  "One step--reach down--
grab the pistol--fire!"  His voice gave out.  His lips moved but no
sounds came.

The little noises of the night, wind in the trees, dingoes, the
crackling of the fires round the sheep pens, re-established
themselves.

"'Ere, wake up, you!"  Tom called Sambo's attention back to the
matter in hand by pounding indignantly on the table.  Gambling for
Epsom salts was a serious business.  Tom brought to it the profound
earnestness of whisker-stroking, deep breathing and cabalistic
muttering.  As each card was dealt he seized it, thrust it out of
sight, glared round as though he suspected a legion of spies, then
examined it intently under the table.  If it was a good card he
groaned.  If it was a bad card he forced out a hollow chuckle and
looked as though he had just been sentenced to death.  Play began.
His claws hovered over each card for long moments of complex
calculation till he seized one and slapped it down on the table,
with a rending shriek for each trick taken and for each one lost a
mutter that expressed long-suffering patience with knavery and foul
play.

Arguments would break out.  "You renigged!"

"Who renigged?"

"Ain't that Jack clubs?"

Tom examined it closely with shifty eyes.  "What's wrong with it?"

"Ain't that spade?"

Exposed, he wriggled, sweated, and reluctantly withdrew the
offending card.

"Sharper!"

"Who's a sharper?"

"You, sheep-dip!"

Tom threw his cards down.  "That's the last stror.  Take that back
or I won't play no more."

"Seen yeh makin' scratch back joker."

Tom rushed from the room.  "So much's mention cards to me again,"
he flung back, "and I'll brain you."

In five minutes they were playing frenziedly again.

A huddled bulk in the corner of the room moved.  "Sssssh!"  It was
Dan.  His ears had detected unfamiliar sounds.  "What's that?"

All heads tipped sideways.  Cabell went to the door.  Owls were
signalling to each other in the trees by the river, like dogs
barking.

Slowly Dan relaxed a pose of strained expectation.  "Catfish," he
sighed with relief.

"What did you think?" Cabell asked him.

"Blacks a-creepin'."

"Nonsense."

"Them blacks!"  Tom threw his cards down and clutched his mouth.
"I'll blow them blacks to Pockataroo."

"Oh!" Dan whimpered.

"First thing tomorrer," Tom promised, "I'll start."

"Start what?" Dan asked nervously.

"The infermal machine."

"A infermal machine!  Oh!"  Dan ran out of his corner.  "What sort
of a infermal machine?"

"One'll shake the marrer out of you."

"Oh, my God!"  Dan appealed to a deaf and pitiless heaven, darted
back to his corner, and buried his head under a pile of sheepskins.

True to his word, Tom was up before daybreak, and disappeared into
the scrub with one of the working bullocks.  An hour later he came
back with an enormous log, hollow and round like a cannon.  He
enlarged the hollow with a crowbar, cut a block to fill one end,
made a priming-hole at the butt, and very soon had ready, mounted
on two boulders and held down by others, stuffed to the mouth with
powder, stones, old iron, old boots and cows' hooves, and pointing
up the valley, a thing which he justly called infernal machine
rather than cannon.

"Must be Dook of Wellington in disguise," Sambo jeered.

Dan groaned all night, and next morning had disappeared.

"Gone back to the Three Mile," Sambo announced.

"He'll be murdered, the fool," Cabell said, and rode out to bring
him back.  But Dan was firmly barricaded in the shanty.  Nothing
could move him.

A week passed.  They kept an eye on the cattle and waited.  As
Cabell rode up the valley the long grass shivered.  Two calves were
stolen, but he did nothing.  The blacks came out of cover and
looked round curiously.  They grew bolder.  One afternoon a party
demonstrated with spears and shields half a mile from the
homestead; their bodies were patterned with kopi and mud.  Cabell
went about his work quietly, but his nerves were all twisted up and
jumpy.  He had arrived at a point of exhaustion where dream and
reality became indissolubly mixed.  A dozen times a day he had to
stop what he was doing and decide, by a great effort of will,
whether he was asleep or awake.

Gursey passed the turn and daily improved.  He slept for twenty-
four hours without moving, and when Cabell came in at noon he was
staring about with dazed but comprehending eyes.

"Hullo," Cabell said.  "You're going to get better, then?"

Gursey tried to speak, but a whisper was all he could manage.
"What happened?"

"A touch of fever."

"You--too?"

"Me?  No, I'm fit."

"Look done up," Gursey said laboriously.

Cabell glanced at himself in the shaving mirror.  It was a week
since he last did so.  A growth of soft, black stubble threw into
startling contrast his olive skin, which the sun did nothing to
tan.  Sharp angles of bone were pushing out.  His hair was matted
and wild.  "Tom o' Bedlam," he grunted.

"Foot-rot started yet?" Gursey asked.

Cabell laughed.  "It's nearly midwinter, man."

"How long since. . . ."

"Ten-twelve weeks," Cabell said.  "I lost count myself."

Gursey shuddered.  "Bloody terrible dreams. . . ."

Cabell made him a broth.  He drank a little and went off into deep
sleep again.

Cabell got himself a meal.  But he had no appetite for the salt
junk, and left it to the flies.  His head propped in his hands, he
watched their sluggish movements in the melting fat.  The sound of
Gursey's soft breathing soothed him.  He dropped off to sleep, too.

He awoke with a start and the flies rose in a buzzing cloud from
his face.  A black silhouette in the doorway became slowly
identifiable as Sambo, sucking his tooth.  "Some'n y'ought to see
out here, Boss," he said.

Cabell went to the door, and shielded his eyes against the brutal
light.

"See, over there, half-way to the Three Mile."

"Blacks--why, they're dressed!"

"Dan's duds," Sambo said. . . .

Fifteen minutes later they galloped into Dan's gully.  The door of
the shanty was wide open.  Flies rose from a pool of blood, like a
red rag, on the threshold.  Of Dan himself, not a sign.

Sambo felt the ashes of the fire.  "Half hour ago," he said.

Cabell looked at him.  "Where is it?"

Sambo jerked his head towards the scrub.  The squabbling of crows,
with their long-drawn, evil-sounding cr-r-rrr, broke the opaque
silence of the hot afternoon.  They traced the sound to a cluster
of stunted trees and vines farther up the gully.  The grass had
been trampled, and the scent of sweet marjoram mixed with the smell
of wild blacks.  Cabell hesitated a moment, then wiped the sweat
out of his eyes and parted the undergrowth.  The rush of wings
obscured the sound of twigs cracking under his feet.  Blind in the
shade, he could see nothing for a moment.  Sambo nudged him and
jerked his head sideways.  It was hanging by the elbows from the
low branch of a tree--Dan's stark-naked body.

At first it looked as though the body had been flayed, but, going
closer, they saw that the skin had peen pricked off with spears.
The ears had been slit open and the eyes were gone, but whether
gouged out by the blacks or taken by the crows it was impossible to
say.

"Do you think they killed him first?" Cabell asked.

After a while Sambo said sheepishly "Ain't dead yet, Boss."  He
held his hand against the open mouth.  "Breathin" like a grampus."

"Confound the old fool!" Cabell said angrily.

But the ghastly fact remained.  When he raised his eyes again he
could see the overhanging hairs of Dan's whiskers moving in the
draught of breath.

Sambo sucked his tooth.

"Get out of here," Cabell said peevishly, giving him a shove.
"Look to the horses."

Sambo went back to the hut, lit his pipe, and sat down.  A tiny
spot at the peak of the incandescent sky grew larger, receded,
melted into light--a kite, waiting like himself.  Watching it, he
dozed.  The crack of a pistol-shot awakened him.  The crows flew
screeching from the scrub and settled in the high trees.  Sambo
yawned, sighed, knocked out his pipe and rose.  He got a shovel
from the hut and went round to the side where the shade was
thickest.  After testing the ground for a soft spot, he began to
dig.

So much for Dan.

But Cabell had no time to brood about it.  For next morning at
sunrise, as they were counting out, fifty howling, painted demons
rushed on them from the scrub.

The battle was short.

Cabell ran up the slope to cut off the raiders from the humpy.  A
hulking fellow was peering in through the doorway and Cabell
dropped him with a running shot, slammed the door, and faced round
with his back to it.  He heard a twang as a spearhead fastened in
the bark, and a second after felt warm blood trickling over his
cheek.  He fired and missed a pair of white eyes staring out from
behind the storeroom.

The lull was broken by the sound of Tom's approach.  He came across
the flat, shrieking and firing at random, his legs disjointedly
flapping on either side.  A nulla-nulla caught him on the brow with
force enough to fell an ox.  He crumpled up and a black rushed out
from behind the flame-tree to finish him with a stone axe, but he
was on his feet again and gave the black a sharp crack on the shins
with the butt of his gun.  The black went down on his knees and Tom
snatched the axe and cleft his skull in two.  For the rest of the
battle he was principally occupied running about in the thick of
the spears waving his arms and yodelling in an attempt to herd the
blacks round to the muzzle of his gun.

But they took cover behind the storeroom and the flame-tree.  A
hand came out, a spear whizzed past, but there was nothing to aim
at.  Cabell and Bill Penberthy waited at the end of the humpy for a
shot.

Sambo had flattened himself against the wall of the store.  Next
time a hand came out he grabbed it, threw his weight back, wrenched
a head into view, and clubbed it with a lump of iron.  Three times
he did this; then the blacks became quiet.

Sambo winked back at Cabell.

Suddenly a hand appeared again.  He grabbed and missed.  In a
second or two it came once more.  This time he reached it, and at
the same instant two fists closed on his own arm, his feet shot up
in the air, and he disappeared round the corner into a crowd of
blacks.  They staggered over each other trying to brain him, and
their nullas missed or took him across the back.  Flinging his arms
round the nearest black, he waltzed a living shield between himself
and the enemy.  Everything happened quickly then.  Cabell and Bill
Penberthy rushed out and fired at random into the tangle of black
bodies.  Those behind the flame-tree fled.  The others hesitated a
moment, then followed, dragging their wounded away.

Sambo hung on to his shield.  It was the giant with the one eye.
Paint and sweat spread a layer of grease over his body, so that it
was all Sambo could do with nails and teeth and knees to keep a
grip on him.  Locked together, they rolled down the slope, both
yelling like madmen.  Cabell and Bill followed with pistol butts
aloft, waiting for a chance to get a blow in.  But blows were as
mosquito-bites on the black's iron-hard skull.  He got a grip on
Sambo's throat and Sambo's voice gurgled.  They came to rest at the
bottom of the slope.  Cabell fastened two fingers in the black's
nostrils and pulled while Penberthy tried to prize open his
stranglehold.  But the black clung to Sambo like a boa, and Sambo's
face became rapidly as blue as the sky above.

Tom saved him.  For some moments he had been standing at the top of
the slope, taking no notice of their shouts, in an attitude of
strained attention, as of one listening for some momently expected,
faint sound.  It came--a burst of flame, a roar that thundered to
and fro across the valley, and a rain of stones, splinters, bits of
iron, cows' hooves and a dozen and one other oddments that had been
missing round the station for the last day or two.  The blacks
stopped on their way to the scrub and looked back, then plunged
with appalling shrieks into the bush.  Tom himself barely escaped
disembowelment from flying fragments, but he emerged unseamed,
though rather surprised by the unanticipated verticality of the
discharge.

The effect on the one-eyed giant was instantaneous.  He unlocked
his hands, looked wildly round, saw the sky raining cows' hooves,
and began to quake.  For the first time Cabell and Penberthy landed
their blows squarely.  He went over like a log, knocking out what
remained of breath in Sambo.

But Sambo was well salted.  He was already stirring when Cabell
hurried back from the store with a tot of rum.

"All right now?" Cabell asked him.

"Course I'm all right.  Whatya think?"

"No bones broken?"

Sambo grunted.  "Coulda fixed him easy without you interferin'."

Cranky Tom, who had been prowling about among the bodies left by
the blacks in a snooping attitude horribly suggestive of one
finishing off the wounded, came out from behind the flame-tree with
a long knife.  "Hey, Boss.  Look at this'n.  Ain't dead yet," he
complained, kicking the one-eyed black.

"Get a rope and lash him up," Cabell ordered.  After a few minutes
the black came round and grinned at them cheerfully.

Cabell pointed to the house, then to himself.  Then he pointed to
the black and to the hills.

The black grinned again, displaying teeth as big nearly as piano
keys.  "Yilbung," he said.

Cabell tapped his chest.  "--Yilbung?"

"Yohi, yohi."

But that was all Cabell got out of him.  When he repeated signs
suggesting that the black should lead them to his camp he merely
grinned.

Sambo tried, Bill tried, but in vain.

"Don't understand you, don't he?" Tom said, recovering from a fit
at the sight of Yilbung's teeth.  "Just leave 'im to me."  He flung
down his hat, rolled up his sleeves, spat on his hands, and
approached the prisoner.

Sambo sneered.  "Like ter like."

But Yilbung thought otherwise.  Tom's preparations convinced him
that the moment of torment and death had arrived.  He opened his
mouth and yelled.

"Shut yer trap," Tom commanded, scowling.  "Now then," when Yilbung
became silent again, "attend and I'll talk to you in your own
langwidge.  D'y'ear?"

Yilbung rolled his eyes.

He prodded the black in the ribs.  "You--Yilbung?"

"Yohi, yohi."

"Me"--he prodded himself--"Tom."

"Toom, yohi."

"This'n--Sambo."

"Sumbo."

He pointed to Sambo's black eye.  "Yilbung done that, eh?"

A grin uncovered Yilbung's molars.

Tom patted his shoulder.  "Good old Yilbung.  'Ere, 'ave a whiff,
Yilbung."  He thrust the pipe into the black's mouth.  "Now"--he
took the pipe away and fixed the black's one eye with a severe
judicial stare--"where's them off-siders of yourn disportin'
'emselves, eh?"

Yilbung gazed greedily at the pipe.

"Come on, Yilbung boy," Tom rallied him.  "Black-fellow sit down
longa ranges, eh?"  He pointed to the hills melting into the
ultramarine horizon.

But Yilbung stared and said nothing.

"You won't, won't yer?" Tom yelled, shaking his fist under
Yilbung's nose.  "Unnerstand this, you lousy off-scourin' of a
scabby, tick-eaten, blamed crow-bait, I'll . . . I'll . . . well,
God 'elp yer."

The spirit of this was only too plain to Yilbung.  He cowered and
panted while Tom danced and stamped in the dust, clutched phantom
throats, split open phantom gizzards, punched phantom eyes, and
wound up by presenting his pistol at Yilbung's ear.

Sambo laughed derisively, but to Yilbung this was an authentic
devil-devil dance by such a devil as his imagination had only dimly
apprehended before.  He addressed an appealing gabble to Cabell.

"Yilbung take Tom," Cabell said, pointing at the men, then at the
hills.

Yilbung hesitated.

"Split, you blackguard," Tom shrieked, giving his butcher's knife a
twist against Yilbung's ribs, "or I'll feed you to the dogs!"

A fearful grimace conveyed the purport of this to Yilbung.  He
wilted.  "Yohi, yohi, yohi," he agreed.

At sundown they were ready to set out.  Cabell told Gursey.

He struggled up weakly on his bunk.  "You're not fit to sit on a
horse, you fool, let alone ride all night," he said.

"Nonsense."

"Look at your face."

Cabell examined a deep, jagged wound that cut his cheek from chin
to ear.  "I'll last till tomorrow."

"And tomorrow you'll be shivering your heart out here."

"That's why I'm going at once.  I want to be sick with an easy
mind.  I won't have one till I've seen those blacks off the run."

"'Dispersed' is the word!"

"Call it what you like."



Chapter Twenty

MASSACRE


That terrible ride through the darkness among the starlit ranges.
A heavy dew soaked them and the cool night air made their teeth
rattle.  Exhausted by weeks of excitement and hard work, they dozed
in their saddles, to awake and find themselves enmeshed in the
thorny vines of the scrub.  Cabell kicked the black shadow at his
stirrup to urge it on, and they hurried forward again.  His wounded
jaw was stiff and fiery.  The fever seemed to be burning his eyes
out.

The gullies wound in and out among the overlapping hills.  There
was nothing to be seen but the sparks which the horses' hooves
struck from the stony ground and the brilliant stars pinning the
thick night to the sky.  Behind this curtain the trees whispered
and the birds cried harshly.  They soon lost all sense of their
whereabouts.  The Southern Cross circled round them--now to the
right, now to the left, now ahead, now lost behind the peak of the
ranges.

A sound like muted bells came nearer, and out of the darkness
emerged a high, rocky escarpment, down which trickled the last
remnant of a torrent that had torn trees and stones out of the
earth a few weeks ago.  The horses stopped at the end of a blind
alley.

"Get a move on, cuss you, or I'll blow the head off of you!" Tom
grumbled, then woke up and found his horse quietly cropping among
the rocks.

Cabell was tying Yilbung's wrists before releasing him from the
stirrup.  "We go the rest of the way on foot it seems," he told
them in a thick voice.

They climbed the escarpment, pulling Yilbung up by the hair, and
plunged into the bush again.  They had a line round the
blackfellow's neck and Cabell held him firmly by the wrist.  After
an hour the bush thinned into a sparse forest of big timber.
Yilbung stopped, whispered, and pointed through the trees.  What
Cabell had thought was a firefly a few inches in front of his nose
he saw to be a glimmer of embers two miles away at the top of the
next rise.  He went on alone.  He saw other fires and the shape of
a fair-sized encampment of perhaps a hundred or a hundred and fifty
blacks.  The smell of their rotten-wood smoke came faintly through
the heavy perfume of gum-trees soaked in dew.

He returned to the men and told them.

Tom pressed his knife into Yilbung's ribs.  "So much's grunt and
your liver's out," he warned.

But no threats were necessary.  The only protest Yilbung made was
when he discovered that they were not going to let him see the
murder; but Tom soon quietened him, and taking him back a mile down
the hill they gagged him and tied his feet and arms round a tree.
Then they toiled wearily along the ridge again and, knocking out
their pipes and slipping back the hammers of their guns, crept
towards the edge of the timber and lay down to wait.

It was within an hour or two of dawn, Cabell guessed.  The dying
fires vaguely outlined the gunyahs in which the blacks slept.
Beyond was the darkness of the bush.  A possum cluttered in a
treetop, leaves rustled, Sambo sucked an empty pipe, the heavy
dewfall dripped on to the stones.  But Cabell could hear only the
beat of blood in his temples.  Every fibre of his body stiffened to
hold the last glimmer of consciousness.  Over and over again he
slipped back into a darkness, and over and over again fought
himself to the surface.

A foreboding fastened upon him that some irrevocable thing was
about to happen.  Soon something would cease, some fine bright
thing that was precious above everything else to him.  Frowning at
the pinhead of light that was the last ember of the nearest fire,
he tried to concrete this vague but penetrating sensation in words,
but it eluded his scattered faculties while every moment tightening
its grip on him till, in a fit of violent trembling, he thought he
heard a voice speaking in his ear, urgently warning him that if he
wanted to save himself he must run away and abandon what he had
planned to do.  Then, overwhelmingly, it came to him, with the
force of a danger understood too late, that after tonight's work he
would never be as he was before, as he was when he left Owerbury,
and simultaneously the happenings of the last four years--the
sacrificing of Gursey, the stealing of the cattle and sheep and the
roan stallion--were re-acted before his eyes and he saw, with
horror and dismay, how far already the corrosive of this new life
had eaten into him.  There was no question here of right or wrong.
What suddenly assailed him, as a terrible revelation, was the
discovery that the Derek Cabell who was once as much a part of
Owerbury as its quaint houses and walls, its trees and hedges, what
with his soft, drawling Dorset voice and his soft, indolent Dorset
manners, had been secretly and treacherously metamorphosed into a
different being, a Derek Cabell who took his place in the crude
life of a country of outcasts as naturally as any Carney or Curry
among them.  And if in so short a time he had come so far, what
more appalling changes might come over him in the future?  In one
of those ghastly descents into darkness he had two swift visions of
himself--one as a boy standing under Farmer Northover's lilac
bushes with a laughing, lovely girl, and one as a man in colonial
clothes vainly trying to make the people in Owerbury High Street
stop and recognize him.  He came to and stared dully at the
dwindling ember.  An aching sadness invaded his heart.  It seemed
that never till this moment had he realized how far England was
away.  Even in a penal settlement, England, his England of soft
hills and rosy-cheeked girls, had not seemed so utterly of another
world.  He shut his eyes, but no image of those lost realities
would come now to blot out the sight of the camp, the stark trees,
the strange stars.  Lost.  Lost realities.  The sense of his loss
grew into a heavy fatalism.  The weak assurances of his exhausted
brain could not convince him that a place in that far, far world
could ever be regained.

These thoughts held him for a moment with all the exaggerated
clarity of hallucination.  Such, indeed, they were.  From one
minute to the next he could not tell whether he was awake or
asleep.  Now he tried to get up and go away as the voice was
telling him to do, but the leaden impotence of a dream fixed him to
the ground.  Again, he was looking impatiently at the sky for some
signs of the dawn.  Then he thought that the tiny remnant of the
fire was the glow of awakening consciousness in his own brain and
this darkness, where the blacks slept and murderous designs that
murdered the murderer were maturing, was only the darkness of a
feverish nightmare.  He clutched at that idea and struggled to
awake in the hope of finding himself in the bunk at the homestead.
But the glow sank lower and lower till it was gone and he was left
floundering in darkness.

Something cold, refreshingly cold and firm and hard touched his
shoulder and gently shook him.  Strength flowed from it into his
blood, which began to move again and melt the stiffness in his
body.

"Say, y'wake, Boss?"

He turned his head, grimacing with the pain that shot down his
neck.  "Yes, what's the matter?"

"Better scatter a bit," Sambo whispered.  "The dawn's comin'."

"Very well," he said; then in a tone of appeal, "But don't go too
far."

"We'll know when to start when you let her rip," Sambo replied.

He saw their forms rise dimly against the stars and move off.  Then
they were gone.  His teeth would not lock together, but chattered
so violently that he felt sure the noise must wake the blacks in
the gunyah ten yards away.  He buried his mouth in the crook of his
elbow and padded his teeth with his lips, so that his tongue became
thirsty with the salt of blood.

When he raised his eyes again Orion, striding the eastern sky, was
pale and remote.  He could see the shadowy forms of gunyahs farther
away.  The day was breaking.  He wished himself in the darkness
again now, and lay willing a miracle to put back the moment when
the first black would come.

But none was vouchsafed him except the blossoming miracle of an
Australian dawn.  The crystal air was on fire.  Stars still blazed
where the western edge of the black roof had not yet crumbled away.
The ranges thirty miles to the east lay sombre in their shadow and
drew a jagged line across the limpid green reaches of the sky.
Everything was silent, waiting.  The fires were black, but a spiral
of blue smoke curled from a still-smouldering log near by.  The air
was delicately shot through with its scent and the scent of gum-
leaves.  Then a bird in the tree overhead fluttered its wings and
ventured a timid call.  Another and another.  Answers from other
trees along the ridge.  Dingoes retreating to the scrub raised
their heads and howled across the valley.  Curlews piped their last
melancholy call.  A kookaburra broke into laughter.  The sunrise of
a new day and all life awakening--for him a melancholy and
incongruous thought, with the overtones of his sad musings still
upon him.

A movement in the camp startled him.  A mangy dog came out of one
of the gunyahs and began to rake in the ashes of a fire after
bones.  Suddenly it cringed and slunk out of sight again.  A man
emerged and walked slowly across the plateau to where it ended in a
granite face that dropped sixty feet or more to the stony gully
below.  He stood looking south-eastwards towards the homestead,
just visible at the edge of the open valley twenty miles away.

Cabell's hands seemed to be covered with tight gloves as he groped
among the stones for his gun and raised it to his shoulder.  He
tried to aim, but the sights would not come together.  His
trembling became uncontrollable.  He lowered the gun again and
rested for a moment, cooling his cheek on the metal breech.  A
movement among the trees to the left that might have been a bird
and might have been an impatient sign from Sambo jerked him out of
a coma.  He raised the rifle again and forced his teeth into his
soft underlip.  The sights met in the shadows of the black's left
shoulder-blade.  Silhouetted against the deepening blue of the sky,
he stood as motionless as a cardboard target.  Cabell gripped the
trigger and stiffened himself for the pain in his cheek as the gun
bucked.  Gripped tighter.  Click!

At first he thought that the click was an explosion filling the
bush and scaring the birds.  Then he understood that the gun had,
by some amazing chance, not been loaded, and flinging it down he
shouted with vexation.

The black jumped a foot in the air, glanced over his shoulder, and
began to run along the edge of the precipice towards the bush on
the other side of the plateau.  He had not gone ten yards before
Tom fired.  He stopped dead, threw his arms up, and disappeared
over the edge.  A feather of smoke drifted from the clump of bushes
on Cabell's left and a loud cackle of laughter broke the silence.
"Blowed that'un to Jimbambie all right," Tom called joyously.

Cabell fought back a surge of hot vomit.

Something ripped through the leaves just overhead and struck the
trunk of a tree behind.  He glanced round.  It was a spear.
Another followed it immediately.  His energy returning suddenly, he
scrambled behind a log, and peering round the end of it after a
silent minute saw a pair of bright eyes staring at him from the
nearest gunyah.  A hand came out, took a spear from the pile at the
entrance, and drew it inside.  He wrenched his pistol from his belt
and fired.  The gunyah rocked and a body pitched head first onto
the grey ashes of the fire.

Not a black showed, but the piles of spears were all stealthily
withdrawn.

Cabell watched the blood trickle down the face of the black he had
shot.  An uprush of fierce satisfaction seemed to strip the tired
skin from his body.  Emotions accreted in weeks of anxiety for his
foothold in the valley, of abortive plan and pursuit broke free in
him, flushing away all other emotions and filling him with a mad
vigour.  He gave a wild halloo.  "Give it to them, boys!" he
shouted, and emptied his pistols through the flimsy gunyah.

Cranky Tom needed no encouragement.  Five minutes of firing and
reloading and he was quite demented.  As for Sambo, it was part of
a day's work to be deprecated by the tacit assumption of some even
more bloody precedent in his young life.

Three times they stopped firing and waited for signs of life in the
camp.  A flight of spears, co-ordinated by some mysterious tribal
instinct, betokened it.  But fewer and fewer spears came over, and
the fourth time they let up there was none.  They waited for five
minutes and gave the camp a last volley, then came out from the
bush.

Their shots had ripped the bark gunyahs to pieces.  Some had fallen
over, revealing huddled bodies inside.  Here and there one groaned.
It was left to Tom to finish these off.  Mouths open on rows of
white teeth mocked away the last remains of sanity.  He rushed
about like a decrepit fiend.

But Nemesis awaited him.  Suspecting treachery, he bent over a body
and listened for signs of life.  Then he retreated and aimed his
pistol at it.  The hammer clicked down--empty.  While he was
reloading the body rose up and scampered out of the camp.  Cabell
and Sambo fired and missed.  Tom clubbed his gun and rushed after
the fugitive, who was forced back to the precipice.  He picked up a
spear and tried to threaten Tom off with it, but Tom was too far
gone.  The spear took him square in the chest and came out three
inches behind his shoulder-blades.  He fell flat on his face,
splitting the haft of the spear in two.  The black poised on the
lip of the precipice, then threw up his hands and went over head
first into the gully.

For some minutes Cabell gazed at the stone barb protruding from
Tom's back.  He worked the toe of his boot under Tom's chin and
turned the face up.  The yellow whiskers were spongy with blood.
But there was nothing deathlike about the face.  It seemed to be
holding its breath for a mad shout.

Cabell drew his fingers across his own face, and his senses began
to return.

Sambo gave the flaccid rump a sentimental little kick.  "Warn't bad
pore ole bastard.  Kin say that much f'r'im."

Three bonfires reduced the tribe to ashes.  Nothing was left of it
except the dogs, which had gone back to the bush.  Cabell sat on a
log with his hands hanging between his knees and watched the
firelight glisten on black flesh.  Sambo sat a little way off, a
black tooth buried in his lip witnessing the arduous difficulties
of carving ZAMBO on to the mahogany butt of his gun.  From time to
time he rose and threw fresh pieces of wood on to the fire.  Black
smoke curled into the blue air.  Overhead, crows.

In a violent reflex of will Cabell flung out his arms to dispel
melancholy thoughts and to embrace the harsh, repugnant thing that
had lodged itself within him.  "If I am to be so, then let it be.
They won't have me, won't they?  Would they have me before?  Well,
we shall see!"

Sambo chuckled and jerked his head towards the bush.  "Bet
Yilbung's feelin' peckish, smellin' all this good barbecue," he
said.

Cabell jumped up.  "I forgot about him.  I'll finish him, too."  He
took a step towards the bush, but he seemed to put his foot into a
bottomless hole.

"Whoa, there, jellylegs!" he heard a distant voice say, and the
hole swallowed him.



Chapter Twenty-one

CABELL BRINGS THE WOOL DOWN


A pair of secretive eyes set in bony hollows, a dry yellow skin
shrunk on to the skull, a scar from temple to chin that dragged up
the corner of his mouth, colourless lips and a tangle of black
beard.  Cabell stared at this face.  Was it a look of enmity or
fear the stranger gave back?  Prudence, not indifference, made him
turn abruptly away from the mirror and replace the razor on the
shelf.  Better to let him remain a stranger, with hidden thoughts,
bearded and unapproachable, so utterly different from the fresh-
cheeked boy that was himself.

He stood for a moment steadying his convalescent legs against the
table, then pulled on his hat and went out to lend a hand with the
shearing.  Hurry infected them.  Three years of loneliness and
hardship were coming to fruition.  The insane routine of tailing
sheep began to fit into some comprehensible system of human
endeavour.  And on the skyline of the men's simple ambitions loomed
more clearly the day of temporary release.  Cabell would load the
dray and disappear over the hills on his four hundred-mile trek to
the coast, across plains, ranges and downs.  He would be away four
months, six months, perhaps, but one day he would return, bringing
hands to relieve them.  They would take their cheques, sixty pounds
or so apiece, saddle their horses, and ride over his wheel-tracks.
After two hundred miles or so they would find a grog shanty.  The
publican would pocket their money, and two months would pass and
sheep be forgotten.  They would get drunk, see new faces, see a
woman, perhaps, sleep--for two months. . . .  A brooding silence
lifted from the homestead.  Even Bill laughed sometimes, talking
far into the night with Sambo, blowing about grog and women.

Then one fine morning late in September the long, double-handed
whip cracked, the bullocks heaved lazily into the yokes and the
dray creaked across the river, its load of twenty-five bales, like
a pyramid of down cushions, straining the greenhide.  The men in
the sheep pens turned, waved casually, and went on with their work.
But there would be no talk in the evenings now except of Cabell's
wayfaring, and the wilderness of days all monotonously alike would
take order again by counting from this one.

That night Cabell camped ten miles away on the hills to the south-
east--a good day's journey.

The sky was a deep, clear cobalt overhead, for the summer was
young.  A nip in the air after sundown helped to keep the
mosquitoes away.  He slept under the dray with the tarpaulin pulled
down and pegged in the ground.  Before it was light he was up and
about looking for the bullocks, whose bells' tinklings were the
only sounds in the dry land.

He turned south-west to avoid an outcrop of rocky hills into a
country of small creeks and shallow holes that ran for a few months
after the rainy season, then dried up.  Just once every ten miles
or so he would come on a trickle of water, enough to fill the keg
swinging at his tailboard and give the bullocks a drink.  Here and
there would be teeming life, as in the valley round the homestead.
Birds flashed in the scrub, kangaroos bounded off and watched him
from a distance.  But in the waterless country between nothing
moved.  The creaking of the cart and the swishing noise the
bullocks made beating down the high, brown grass--no other sound.
On all sides, to limitless horizons, stretched the rolling plains,
and the only sign that life had visited them in the uncountable
centuries was the faint mark of his own wheel-tracks pressed into
the soft earth two years before and hardened by the sun.

It was no fool's job, this bullock-driving with a load of nearly
three tons up, over trackless country, through the sandy beds of
dried-up rivers, in and out among the timber.  With a few inches to
spare on either side a small mistake could ruin everything.  If the
whole team started round and pulled a bullock up against a tree the
beast would be killed on the spot, and others, too, perhaps.  A
whip-crack at the wrong moment might send the whole team bolting
down a hill to smash up at the bottom.  Or the load might slip on a
stiff rise: up would go the dray and the two polers would be swung.
The whole team would go mad and twist up, and it took a smart hand
to split the yoke with an axe without killing an animal in that
moiling fury of bullocks.

Late one afternoon, fifteen days out from the homestead, the team
broke down half-way up a hill.  There was three hundred yards of
ridge before them, washed out by ages of rain into deep cracks and
holes.  He camped for the night and next morning faced the fact
that the load had to be taken off.  With fifteen bales the team
struggled on a hundred yards.  He took off another seven bales, and
at sunset the following day, their hides cut and quivering from the
whip, they got to the top.  Next day he emptied the dray and took
it downhill, loaded again, and fought to the top a second time.  He
made four journeys altogether.  To lift twenty bales weighing two
hundred and fifty pounds apiece on to a dray is no joke.  He spent
seven days climbing this hill three hundred feet high, and he still
had to go down the other side.

The eighth day he worked from daybreak till near midnight putting
on the load, and awoke as stiff as a post to survey the five
hundred yards of rocky slide downhill.  He locked both wheels and
started off.  It was an anxious moment as he watched the pyramid of
bales lean over, but the ropes held, and in a scurry of stones and
gravel the dray slid forward.  It went in zigzags, narrowly missing
feet-deep crevices that could have turned it upside down in a
flash.  Two hundred yards from the bottom the offside wheel jammed
against a rock and the felloe on which the chain was dragging split
from hub to rim.  He took the bullocks out, drove them over the
hill again, back to the nearest patch of scrub that had a fair-
sized tree, cut down an ironbark, hitched the bullocks to it, and
dragged it back to the dray.  It was near midday before they
crossed the hill once more.  He chained the tree to the back of the
dray, put the bullocks in, and half an hour later touched the flat
ground at the bottom.  He lost two more days before he got on his
road--a day to unload and cut a new felloe for the wheel, almost
another day to load.  So it had taken him close on eleven days to
cross that hill.  At the homestead they were picturing him at least
a hundred miles farther on.

A few mornings later two of his bullocks were missing.  He spent
half a day tracking them, only to discover their dead bodies near a
patch of green camelweed.  Coming on this food suddenly, they had
gorged themselves to death.  Two more died during the day.  He had
eight bullocks now to do what twelve had been hard-worked to do
before.  He was lucky to get six miles a day out of them now.

Glorious sunsets of vermilion cloud trailing across the north and
north-east made him toss sleeplessly in his blankets at night.
Would he beat the rain? was his constant thought.  He still had a
hundred and fifty-odd miles to go.

Startled by rumblings near at hand, he crawled out from under the
dray one night.  A rising moon ambered the open jaws of the coming
storm.  It passed, with muffled grumbles of discontent as it
gobbled down the stars.  Heavy drops pattered on the tarpaulin.
Out on the steppes a bullock bellowed gratefully.  In a few minutes
the clouds were gone.  He turned back to the dray and his heart
stood still with fright.  At the edge of the scrub about two miles
away he saw the glow of fires.  Blacks, he thought at once.

He got his gun and went to see.  While he was still a hundred yards
off dogs started barking and a big collie rushed on him.  A thick,
Scotch voice called, "Who's that there?" and a figure rose into the
firelight.

Cabell came forward.  "Good day," he said.

"Guid day to ye."

"Saw your fire and thought I'd come and see," Cabell said, eagerly
scrutinizing the first new face seen for two years.

The man grunted.  "Hae ye ne'er seen a fire afore?"

"None but my own for seven weeks."

The man looked him up and down and grunted again.  "Dinna waste yer
time askin' for tobacco or nothin'," he warned, "for I havena bitty
by me."

Cabell laughed, a boyish, excited laugh.  "Well, have some of
mine."  He took the twist from his pocket and held it out.

The Scotchman looked at it for a moment, produced a small clay
pipe, rubbed his beard, then turned away and went into the scrub.

The fires, Cabell saw, were dingo fires, round a sleeping flock of
sheep.

The man returned with another pipe, a big briar with a bowl as big
as a basin.  "Since ye're so free wi' it, I dinna mind if I. . . ."
He stopped in the middle of cutting the twist in half and glanced
up suspiciously.  "But ye'll probably be wantin' half of my flour
in exchange," he said.

When Cabell reassured him he went on cutting the tobacco a little
farther down the twist, so that Cabell got a poor quarter of it
back.

"Sic an unprincipled lot of rogues as infest the country," the Scot
explained, and the rest of the sentence died away in mutters in the
back of his thick neck.  He was a big fellow with a red beard, a
long face, and arms like ships' cables.  Having examined Cabell
with distrust for some time he asked, "And where d'ye come frae,
then?" his deprecating, down-turned wrinkles expecting the worst
possible answer.

Cabell pointed north-west.  "About two hundred miles," he said.

"Huh."

"And you?"

The Scot prodded his thumb vaguely over his shoulder.

"Travelling far?"

"Weel, that's no sae sure."

"I was only thinking I might put you in the way of the water."

After a long silence and many more uneasy glances, the man gestured
towards the fire and said, "Weel then, set ye doon."

"I don't want to rob you of your sleep," Cabell muttered, but
hastening to take advantage of a rare experience just the same.

"Och, mon, time's no dear in this country and wood's the only thing
ye're no taxed on," the man told him, loosening up a little.  "I'll
mak' up the blaze for ye."  Whereupon, with great prudence, he
selected three small twigs from a carefully gathered pile and
spread them neatly on the embers.  The fire flickered up, lighting
his long face and the barrel of his muscular chest.  "Set ye doon,
set ye doon," he urged.  "It's plain ye're nae common trampin'
pedlar."

"Indeed I'm not," Cabell replied quickly.  "My name's Cabell.
Derek Cabell.  I'm bringing my wool down to Moreton Bay."

Neither his injured voice nor his information impressed his host,
who shook his head doubtfully and grumbled:  "Nae tellin' what a
mon may be by his outer looks in this place.  What wi' yer
blackguards and yer convicts and yer Irish scum, it's no safe for a
man to turn his back."  He looked round at the moonlit plain as
though he suspected that even now some passing blackguards,
convicts or Irish might take a fancy to stop and lift some of his
possessions.

Cabell smiled.  "You can sleep easy out here," he said.  "You're
the first stranger I've seen for nearly four years."

"Dinna believe it, laddie," the Scotchman told him.  "Only four
days by I run into a wheen of cut-throats, and the foul tongues in
their heads'd mak' ye think they were for practisin' speech wi' the
wrong end o' theirsel'.  A wench there, too.  But I could tell ye
somethin' I seen wi' her that wouldna' edify ye muckle."

Cabell interrupted eagerly.  "Where was this?"

The Scot nodded reluctantly sideways.  "Over the back of the burn
ahint the rocks," he said.

"Is there a shanty?"

"Aye, a de'il's kitchen."

"I might get some flour there," Cabell said.  "I've run out."

The Scot grimaced doubtfully.  "Whatever ye dae," he warned, "keep
yer een on yen wi' a cut on the left hand.  A wheen o' hangman's
trash is goin' waste there."

"Did he steal something from you?"

The Scot shoved his lower lip out and shook his head.  "Weel,
that's no sae sure.  I had a mare for carryin' when I gang there
and noo I hinna the mare."

"Did you sell it?"

"I dinna sell it."

"Well?"

The Scot stared gloomily at the fire.  "I hinna the mare.  That's
true.  But I've got a wee bit of a packhorse and a black colt I
didna hae afore.  Hooever"--he looked at Cabell--"that doesna
concern ye.  Ye've seen no Scotch bastard drivin' a flock this way,
see?"

Cabell nodded.  "You seem to have diddled them all right."

"Maybe aye and maybe och aye," the Scotchman answered.  "But it's
plain there's naethin' agin the law in it.  What's been stolen
yince canna be stolen if an honest man takes it frae the thief.
Besides, havena they got my sorrel mare?  There's nae mair'n a wee
bit spavin in her."

A few chance remarks told Cabell that this honest Scot's name was
Ivor McFarlane and that he had no fixed place of abode, but, like
many others at the time, tailed his flock round the open
wastelands, stopping only to lamb and shear his wool; thus he
avoided all ground rents and taxes.  But the country was beginning
to fill up and squatters were becoming more and more ready to
impound the stock of such nomads whenever they saw it near their
precious grass.  ("Ye wouldna think there was sic measly ruffians
i' the world as to plot agin a puir sheep gettin' his nibble o'
God's grass.")  So he was reluctantly forced to think of getting a
run of his own.  There was a new law out, he told Cabell.  Fourteen
years' lease for up to two hundred square miles of land, to be
rated according to its stocking capacity.

"There's land and water to spare where I come from," Cabell said,
thinking that it might be a good thing to have such a discreet and
hermit-like neighbour to share some of the responsibilities of
settling the valley--lending a hand at the muster, the lambing-down
and the shearing, keeping an eye on the blacks, and so forth.

McFarlane narrowed his eyes.  "Ye'd no be askin' for a premium to
say where that might be?" he said when Cabell had seductively
described the valley.

"Of course not."

He continued to scrutinise his visitor thoughtfully, wondering what
axe was here to grind.  "Ye dinna look like a sheep-stealer."

"Follow my tracks for two hundred miles," Cabell told him.  "You'll
see good country nearer, of course."

"Further the better," McFarlane replied.  "When a mon's far frae
the Government they're nae thinkin' every minute of the feus and
taxes and siclike."

A grey light was washing up from the east.  McFarlane knocked out
his pipe and rose.  "Ye'll be pushin' off noo, I daresay," he said,
foreseeing that Cabell might invite himself to breakfast.

"I suppose so," Cabell sighed, and looked across the lonely plain.

"Weel, guid day to ye."  McFarlane touched his forehead, turned,
and went away to his sheep.

Cabell strolled back to the dray.  The air was oppressive and
threatening.  If it had not been for that broken felloe and the
camelweed, he reflected, irritable and tired all at once, he would
have been well down the coast country by now and on some kind of a
road.  He pressed his bullocks in the hope of getting to the shanty
and refilling his tuckerbags.  For some days he had had no damper,
nothing, in fact, but what he shot at the waterholes.

At noon the clouds massed overhead.  The air seemed to coagulate
and clog the lungs.  Then the rain burst on him.  In half a minute
he was wet through and the expanse of downland was blotted out.  He
filled his pannikin at the edge of the tarpaulin and for the first
time in weeks tasted fresh water.

Late that afternoon he was paddling in the dust again.  The deluge
had covered a patch not more than two miles square.  Cabell drove
the bullocks into a wide river bed, as dry as a bone.  The wheels
sank almost to the axle in sand.  When they were near the far bank
the leaders stopped and turned their heads upstream, and a shudder
of uneasiness passed over the team, which from pulling well became
suddenly intractable.  Cabell looked round but saw nothing unusual.
The river bed, strewn with logs and stones, divided down the middle
by a small high island, twisted away to the ranges in the east.
Not a cloud showed in the sky.  The rolling, grassy countryside,
dotted over with clumps of trees and peaceful in the setting sun,
looked like nothing so much as a fine wide park where hunters might
come riding at any moment in red coats, with winding horns and
speckled hounds in pursuit of a deer.  He was speculating on this
thought when a commotion on the island attracted his attention.  A
flock of cockatoos rose and flew away screeching.  Kangaroos
bounced out, looked eastwards, and fled across the river to the
high land on the bank.  Their excitement infected Cabell.  He got
to work with his whip again and put the bullocks to the stiff
incline of the bank.  They resisted, as though paralysed, their
heads lifted to the east, then began to pull like furies.  In ten
minutes they were at the top.

Cabell stopped to wipe the sweat off his face and heard, faint at
first but momently louder, a dull, distant roar.  He looked
anxiously round the skyline again, but at first could fix no
definite direction for this strange noise.  Then he saw from the
commotion among the birds away towards the ranges that it came from
the east.  It was now so loud that it covered the noise of the
bullocks, which were bellowing and rattling their chains.  A cool
stir passed through the air, and a few moments later a wall of
yellow, foaming water, eighteen inches high, came splashing round
the bend of the river, advancing with uncanny slowness across the
dry sand.  It divided at the island and in a few minutes joined
forces again at the near end, with the precision of some military
movement, which its deliberate progress intimidatingly resembled.
The vanguard of surf took fifteen minutes or so to pass round the
next bend and out of sight, leaving a stream of dirty water,
crowded with leaves and logs that had lain in the sand since the
river fell.  The noise receded in the distance.  The soft wash of
the rising river and the cries of scared birds stirring the quiet
nightfall.

Cabell cursed aloud.  "Heavy rain in the mountains," he told
himself.  "Ten to one every blamed creek will be up tomorrow."

He was right.  A terrific storm broke during the night and settled
about daybreak into the perpendicular drench he knew so well.  When
he rose the island that had stood ten feet from the river bed the
afternoon before was almost covered.  Farther on he found things
worse than he had expected.  Creeks were not only up; they had
spread far out from their banks and were treacherous with eddy and
undercurrent.  He climbed a tree and surveyed a country in flood.
Water flowing upstream along the margin of the nearest pool told
him that the creek was still rapidly rising.  Fret and fume as much
as he would, he had to be content with fixing the dray on the
highest piece of ground in sight and settling himself underneath
it.

His patience lasted three weeks.  They were spent in a space six
feet by four feet six and about three feet high--under the dray.
He built a windbreak and a fire at one end.  The tarpaulin pulled
down all round kept off the rain.  Mosquitoes and sandflies came.
The air was black with them.  He made a comforter out of a square
of his shirt and wrapped his neck up to his ears.  Then he bandaged
his hands, but they got under his trouser-legs and they bit through
his shirt.  He scratched and the bites swelled.  He was never
really dry.  A miserable, hissing glow was all he could get out of
the sodden wood, which he had to carry a mile from the nearest
scrub.  Tobacco ran out, then tea.  He laboriously dried some used
tea-leaves by rubbing them in a piece of the torn-up shirt and
smoked these.  Then he smoked gum-leaves till his whole system
seemed saturated with eucalyptus and everything tasted and smelled
of it.  The black soil turned to mud, then to slime, then to
quicksand, so that he sank to his calves at every step.  By
comparison the squelching ground under the cart was dry, but it was
not getting any drier.  He dug a channel to keep the water out, but
that was the merest convention when the whole countryside was
inches deep in flowing water.  Even when he did manage to build a
serviceable dyke of mud, he was no better off.  The water oozed up
through the ground, came in as a kind of sweat on the air.  He
dragged half a hollow log under the dray and slept on that.
Snakes, centipedes, wood-adders, scorpions came to share his camp.

He kept himself calm for two weeks.  By then he had counted the
spokes of the wheels and the boards in the floor of the cart
thousands of times, carved his name on both sides of the butt of
his gun, sung all the songs he knew and recited all the poetry he
remembered from his childhood, had gone over and over the personal
history of every man, woman and child he had ever encountered till
the very thought of them made him sick.  An inspiration suggested
that he should unravel his stockwhip and plait it again.  This kept
him busy for three days, but it was finished at last.  Daily he sat
for hours on end, staring at the fire and muttering strange,
disconnected thoughts.  In the beginning it annoyed him to catch
himself talking aloud, a habit so typical of the dyed-in-the-wool
bushman that he had carefully guarded against it; then he talked
aloud without thinking, and noticed only when the sound of his
voice stopped.

It did not rain all the time.  For a few hours every day there
would be glimpses of sunshine which filled the air with steam.  For
one whole week little rain fell where Cabell was camped, but the
ground got no harder, the river crept farther over the downs.
There was no danger, not even of being drowned.  There was nothing,
absolutely nothing, except a thousand and one petty discomforts--
and the vast boredom of waiting.  Waiting!

"Nothing happens.  That's the curse of it.  You long for something
to startle you, something to shoot at.  But--nothing happens."  He
had thought he understood those words when he heard them nearly
four years ago.  Now he smiled at the memory of the impatience that
had possessed his spirit then.  A chit of a boy.  If he could have
had a prevision that day in Dennis's shanty of what the future
would be--not its horrors and excitements, but of the black spaces
of waiting, waiting, waiting to act in a world keyed down to a
rhythm of timeless, hopeless waiting, would he have been here now?
he wondered.  It came to him then--a thought that was to remain
with him all his life, deepening the doubt and distrust which
underlay his whole attitude to himself and the world around him--
that a man has to earn every atom of his own knowledge for himself,
can never, never learn even the simplest truth from others.  Yes,
he knew better now.  "If you've got the stone patience of fifty
sphinxes you might see it through," Peppiott had said.  "Well, I've
got pretty stony patience now," he told himself, but even as he
smiled a doubt seized him.  Did he know any more of the next four
years than he had known of these?  They said there had been
droughts here which lasted for seven years and longer, floods that
left bullocks sixty feet up in the trees, bushfires that burned out
areas bigger than England.  He thought and thought till his
muscles, tightened to grapple with these ghostly dangers, snapped
and burned as though he were on a rack.  The suspense of lying
inactive, with every slow second bringing this disastrous future
nearer, became intolerable.  Restless to madness, he tore the flap
of the tarpaulin away and scrambled out into the night.

The peace, the utter stillness of it, paralysed him.  Mile upon
mile of waterlogged downland gleaming in the moonlight, white
trunks of trees--nothing else.  He emerged from a trance, seized a
spoke and tried to drag the wheel out of the mud into which it had
sunk a good six inches.  It was as set as a rock.  "It will sink on
me and crush me to death," he muttered.  "No, I won't go under
there again."

But it had begun to rain once more.  He plodded through the mud to
the shelter of the scrub that was really no shelter at all.  Sleep
was impossible.  Sandflies and mosquitoes crawled into his nose and
ears and bit like fire.  His eyes, swollen from sleeplessness and
venom, watched the dawn coming in a red glory over the mountains.

This was the sixty-fourth day out.  Allowing him twenty days for
mishaps and business and rest, they were calculating back at the
homestead that he would be just about where he was now--on his way
home.

He got his gun from the cart and, disregarding a bushman's rule
never to shoot an animal that seems sick, killed the first duck he
saw, a scabby-looking bird that remained on the water when the
others flew away.  He skinned it and threw it into the pot, but
could not eat it.  His head ached and his tongue was furred.  Till
sunset he wandered aimlessly about the sodden plain, bored beyond
all conception of boredom.  As the night was setting he returned to
the dray and tried to eat a few mouthfuls of food, then nauseated,
enraged suddenly, he seized the duck and flung it as far as he
could into the darkness.

Next day a fit of agonizing indigestion set in, the result,
probably, of a prolonged, unrelieved diet of duck.  Pains like
needles piercing his bowels made him double up on the ground and
cry out.  He crept back under the cart and lay sweating and
groaning all that day.  A terrible itching began in his arms and
spread quickly over his whole body, which became inflamed and
covered with a scarlet rash.  Only at night, when the sun had gone
down, did he get any peace from it.  Then the slightest exertion,
even if he raised his hand to brush a mosquito away, set the skin
ablaze.  He scratched frenziedly, and by morning the scratches were
festered and the mosquito-lumps had turned to sores.

Three days passed.  A heavy shower broke down his dykes and flooded
under the dray.  He no longer noticed.  From time to time he drank
a little water.  He ate nothing, but the indigestion got no better.
The only relief from bouts of pain was the greater agony of his
itching skin.  Even his eyelids burned now, his scalp, the inside
of his nose.  He believed that he was dying.  Immediately he said,
breaking a long silence, "I must be dying," a savage desire to live
sprang up in him, flushed a desperate energy through his
debilitated body.  He crawled out from under the cart, which had
now sunk to the axles.  The dawn was just breaking.  Somewhere,
about fifteen miles away, was a shanty with people and medicines.
He undressed on the bank of the swollen river, rolled his clothes
up and tied them on his head, with his gun balanced precariously
crosswise on top and lashed down with a strip of rag from his
shirt, and waded out into the water.

For a hundred yards he was on the bottom, then his foot went over
the bank and a strong current swept him away.  Efforts to swim were
futile.  The current just raced off with him.  He had time to grab
the bundle of clothes as it slipped over his face, but the gun slid
out and was gone.  When he touched bottom he was nearly six hundred
yards down the bank.  He crawled out and threw himself on the
ground, his body smarting as though from a bath in vinegar.  Clouds
of sandflies immediately settled upon it.



Chapter Twenty-two

BUSHED


The loss of the gun had a strange psychological effect.  Realizing
suddenly, as he lay gasping for breath, that without a gun he would
starve in this inhospitable country, he began to feel hungry,
despite the paralysing agony of his indigestion.  From this it
followed that unless he found the shanty soon he must starve to
death.

He jumped to his feet and pulled on his clothes.  Then he
remembered the duck he had thrown away three nights before.  He
undressed, waded into the water again, and reswam the river.  After
searching for half an hour, he found the remains of the meat buried
in the mud.  It was foul, but he swallowed a few mouthfuls, and
swam the river a third time.  By now the midsummer sun was flaming
down from a cloudless sky.  Flails of heat beat across his raw
back, but he was done up and incapable for the moment even of
pulling on a shirt.  At last he dressed and dragged himself to a
thin patch of shade behind a rock.  There he lay till midday before
he could get strength to set out.

Then he had to decide what particular pinpoint on the immense,
swaying arc of skyline to make for.  As well as his scattered
thoughts could do it, he went over everything the Scotchman had
said about the shanty.  He had passed it four days before their
meeting.  He had been travelling from the south-west at about six
miles a day.  So it must lie twenty-four miles from the point where
they met.  As he had travelled ten miles after leaving McFarlane,
it could not now be more than fifteen miles away.  Even if he
missed the shanty he must strike a homestead, a station, a
shepherd, for he was well within the outer rim of settlement now.

Carrying the duck in a piece of cloth looped over his arm he
started off, with confidence reanimated by the mere action of
moving forward, even at a snail's pace and in great pain.  The
black mud was like a ball chained to his legs.  He was fighting it
for an hour before he crossed the depression in which the river lay
and struck firmer ground.  When the night came down the dray was
still in sight, and the new skyline, different from the old in
minute particulars that would not have appeared to less anxious
eyes--the shape of a tree, the extent of a patch of scrub--raised
no shanty to view.

"But it can't be far now," he told himself, and lay wakeful all
night, going over and over what McFarlane had said, endlessly
calculating and recalculating distances.  To the wool on the bank
of a flooded river, to the bullocks straying afar, to what was
happening at the station he gave not a single thought.  His one
idea now was to reach the shanty and save himself.

"Only a few more hours," he told himself as he ate a leg of the
duck next morning.  Immediately there was light he began walking
again.  At noon he was ten miles from the dray, facing a wide patch
of scrub.  "It must be on the other side of that," he said and
plunged in.  For five hours he walked among the trees.  With
exercise the pains were wearing away, but the agony in his skin
became worse.  It was as though he had been clawed all over and the
wound tickled with a feather.

He saw an opening ahead and shouted.  The sound died in answering
echoes.  Running, he burst from cover into a narrow clearing,
strewn with the blackened trunks of trees, brought down by fire,
not by man.  There was no sign of a shanty or any sign of life,
except the white cockatoos chuckling at him derisively from the
treetops.  His heart turned cold.  A light, misty rain began to
fall.  The light faded.  It was night.

In the morning he went over his calculations again and decided that
he must be nearer the dray than he had supposed.  If McFarlane had
come from the Moonie he MUST have come this way.  His misgivings
died in the daylight.  "I'll keep on through this," he determined.
"It MUST be on the other side."  To convince himself that he did
not doubt the shanty was a few miles away, rather than because of
the cravings of hunger that had come upon him suddenly, he ate all
that remained of the duck and even fed a few bones to a solitary
crow which shook its damp wings at him.

He hurried on, momently expecting the end of the scrub.  In the
twilight between the grey timber nothing moved.  Mopokes were
crying in the distance.  Twigs cracked under his feet.  Sometimes
he ran.  A stitch of breathlessness came and went in his side, but
he hardly noticed it till sheer exhaustion pulled him down.  His
brain worked madly, adding and subtracting in an utterly
meaningless way.  An idea was coming to birth in his mind, and the
more clearly it showed itself the more frantically worked his
brain, trying to fill all consciousness with figures to blot it
out.  At last he jumped up and ran on, stumbling among roots and
fallen boughs, pursued by this idea, which he could not bear to
see.  As dusk was falling he came out into the open downs again.
The wavy line of horizon stretched before him, as empty as when he
first sought to chase it.  He threw himself on to the wet ground
and, so weary was he, fell straight into a deep sleep, despite his
hunger and the burning rash.

He awoke in the darkness.  Low down in the western sky the moon
showed itself for a moment through a veil that thickened and left
him staring with hot eyes at a blank wall of darkness.  He gazed
with fear, and a violent shudder swept him.  "Keep your head, you
fool," he said angrily, beating his forehead with his fist.
"You're lost if you lose your head."  The calculations started
again.  "Say I've done twenty-five miles--no, twenty.  Well, he
said four days back.  I ought to be right near it now.  But there's
no sign of it.  What if. . . ."  The idea raised its head again.
He shouted to drown its voice.  Gradually he stopped shouting.  He
went lax suddenly, and out of the silence he heard himself say "The
Scotchman must have been lying."

He shivered, pretending not to hear.  Then a light was vouchsafed
him.  He laughed.  "Of course, the confounded old rascal.  Not a
liar, but a horse-thief.  He wouldn't have dawdled on the road with
people out after him.  He'd have driven the wool off those sheep."
So, more calculations.  "Must be another fifteen miles on," he
decided then.  He jumped up ready to start at once.  In sympathy
the moon broke through the clouds and flooded the land with
brilliant light.  Distant trees stood out against the sky.  He went
forward, hungry and wracked, but hopeful again.

That was his fourth day from the dray, the seventy-second of his
journey.  Neither that day nor the next did he find the shanty.  He
ate a few berries and some mushrooms to take the edge off his
hunger.  The sun hid itself behind a leaden pall and he wandered
aimlessly with nothing to guide him through patches of clearing and
scrub all made to the same mould, all monotonously alike.  Clothed
in the fresh green of new grass, the country looked more than ever
like a park.  Always it seemed that he must find houses and people
over the next rise.  Sheep-droppings, an old axe-head, a rotting
boot sent him delirious with hope, but he saw nothing except the
ever-fleeting skyline, the shimmering veils of heat.  He did not
look for the shanty any longer.  There was no shanty.  The
Scotchman was a liar.  When at the end of the fifth day he dragged
himself under a tree and lay down to sleep, the idea overpowered
his hopes.  That such a cunning, secretive fellow as McFarlane
would have told the truth about a place where he had stolen horses,
even if it did exist, was plainly absurd.

Next day he started to retrace his steps.  He tried to buoy himself
up by saying that he had come thirty miles, but deep in his heart
he knew that the distance was nearer forty.  Hunger became a fever.
He searched for berries.  Searching, he wandered from his
landmarks.  For hours he sought them again in the featureless bush.
Each tree seemed familiar, but there was always another tree,
another stone, another patch of fire-clearing to draw him deeper
into the maze and disappoint him.  To and fro, from one side to the
other he ran.  As soon as he stopped to get his breath hunger
started.  It was a terrible hollow pain eating out the pit of his
stomach.  He left off searching for the landmarks and went back to
the search for food.

The best part of the sixth day he spent trying to climb an old blue
gum in which wild bees were building, sixty feet up.  There were no
branches for forty feet.  He clutched the trunk, scrambled a few
feet, and his hands relaxed of his own weakness and he fell.  Over
and over again he tried, tearing off pieces of dead wood and always
falling.  The pain of the scratches at least helped to take his
mind off the incessant itch of his skin, which was now entirely the
colour of pickled cabbage.  He rested a few minutes, then tried to
climb the tree again with a rope made out of his shirt, but rain
and sun and sweat had rotted the cloth.  He went up a few yards and
the cloth parted, letting him down heavily.  Two hours passed while
he sat watching the bees, imagining the burning, dark honey on his
tongue.  At last his will, nagging him to move, got him to his feet
again.  He flung himself at the tree with a last, desperate, angry
effort, which petered out as before and left him hanging with his
nails buried in a crack.  The wood came away and he fell.  When he
recovered his breath he found himself clutching a piece of rotten,
spongy wood in which were half buried three white, fat wood-grubs.
He devoured them greedily.  He found more.  He went on, looking for
dead trees.  All the rest of that day he spent thus, eating
altogether perhaps twenty grubs, which tasted sweet, like milk, and
took away the dry ache in his stomach.  Late in the afternoon he
had a bit of luck.  He found a goanna asleep on a log and killed it
with a stone.  He felt exactly as he had felt at a successful
lambing or shearing.  Those things belonged to another world now.
All his thoughts and joys and expectations were directed to the
yellowish, fatty flesh sizzling in the fire.  Before it was half
cooked he began to eat it.  It did not kill him, but it made him
violently sick.  He rubbed his greasy hands ruefully over his
distended stomach and almost immediately became aware of an
unbelievable coolness penetrating the fiery skin there.  He took a
piece of warm fat and rubbed it over his shoulders.  The torture
began to ease almost at once.  He greased himself from head to
foot.  Before he fell asleep the colour of his skin was almost
normal.  He thought he had recovered the perfection of physical
well-being.  He slept like a child.

The thought of his dray beside the rising river returned.  He
started walking before dawn.  At sunrise he found himself on the
bank of a creek in flood.  He had never been here before, he knew.
Now he faced what he had long tried to deny--he was lost.  Around
him the green, juicy grass springing from the reanimated earth, the
exuberant blossom of the wattle-trees in the scrub, of the gums,
birds on the wing, fish rising in the river--food and succour for
all things, but for him a vast, murderous indifference.  The face
of the bush, for a fleeting second, became really a face, a woman's
face with cruel, tight, virgin lips.  He saw it staring at him on
all sides, half sightless, half mocking.  The sound of a voice
shouting foul execrations brought him back to himself.  He found
himself staring at a knot on the trunk of an ironbark.  It began to
take the form of a face again.  He covered his eyes with his cold
hands, turned and fled.

This was December the twelfth, his seventh day from the dray and
seventy-fifth from the homestead.  The hands were wondering if he
would be back in time for them to get to a shanty by Christmas.

He no longer looked for food or his way.  He was like a drunken
man, at once superhumanly clear-minded and befogged in illusions.
All he cared for was to keep out of the scrub.  A heavy sense of
guilt oppressed him.  He thought of the massacre in the ranges, and
remembered the tales of superstitious bushmen about bewitching
things in the bush.  But, like a drunken man, he knew even as he
fled that there was nothing to flee from, though he kept that
knowledge hidden in the bottom of his mind, knowing, too, that if
his fear stopped he would drop in his tracks and perhaps never get
up again.

At last he tripped in the grass and lay stretched out, unmoving.
He fell to sleep at once, and dreamt that he was back in the
homestead eating breakfast.  Outside the dogs were barking round
the pens. . . .  He awoke with the sun on his face.  He listened.
It came again--a dog barking, away behind the scrub to the east.
He leapt to his feet and listened.  Again and again the dog barked.

For two hours he hurried eastwards, stopping every few minutes to
listen and cooee, until his throat was raw.  The dog had barked for
five minutes.  It had not barked again.  In his excitement he had
left his hat on the ground, and now the sun beating on his bare
head made him giddy and his thoughts more confused than ever.  He
began to believe that he had only dreamt about the dog barking.  He
grew discouraged.  His steps lagged.  He collapsed panting in the
shade.

He had been there for nearly an hour, half asleep, when the dog
started barking again, this time behind him, but nearer.  He
staggered to his feet.  Early in the afternoon he heard it a third
time, far away to the west.  It must be travelling from him.  He
gripped his lower lip between his teeth, and half ran, half
stumbled across the soft waves of grass-covered downs.  Always
there was another wave ahead and another and another, a void and
trackless sea of grass rolling in from the sun-bleached skyline.

The dog did not bark any more.  The sun slipped down.  When he
stopped to listen he heard only the brazen screech of the cicadas
and the pounding in his head.  Every few minutes he went quite
blind.  A dry vomit came on.  To move at all, in shambling steps of
a few inches, was a battle of will renewed at every step.  A gully,
even a moderate sized log across his path at this moment, would
have brought him to a standstill for ever.  The light turned
yellow.  Dusk began to fall.

The light was almost gone when he noticed a commotion of small
birds above a break in the even line of the ridge where the grass
had been flattened down.  He crawled to the top of the slope,
thinking they might have turned up something to eat, and found,
sure enough, that they had been picking at the body of a young
snake crushed in the soft loam.  It was nearly a minute before he
saw and understood the mark of the heel that had crushed it.
Energy returned to his limbs with a shock that threw him over the
narrow but plain track of a man's footsteps.

The brief twilight thickened into night before he had gone two
hundred yards.  Still trembling with excitement, he made a fire and
lighted torches.  All the time he talked to himself in hoarse
mutterings:  "This wood, worth a fortune in England.  Sell it by
the inch.  That wardrobe in the tower--cedar.  Now no shirt.
Flannel's the stuff.  Funny, yet coolest."  Behind this was the
idea that somebody would hear and turn the track into an illusion.
"A week old.  Probably leads nowhere."  But he knew that it was no
more than a few hours old.  Up and down he went, refreshed, like a
horse that has smelt water.

After three-quarters of an hour the track broadened a little.  The
glimmer of the torches showed more footmarks going in the same
direction.  From time to time he peered into the darkness ahead and
forced a hoarse cooee out of his throat.  The sound faded in the
distance and no answer came.  But the track got clearer and clearer
with the mark of many feet, so that he could no longer repress a
triumphant cry.  "Thank God," he shouted, "I'm safe!"

Two hours later he had to pull up and rest.  The burst of strength
was oozing rapidly away.  As it went, doubts returned.  "How do you
know this goes anywhere?" he asked himself.  "It might go on for
thirty, forty miles yet.  Have you got another ten miles in you?"
He shook his head violently.  "No, no.  It's well trodden and
fresh.  Look.  I must be near some place."

He let the weight of his body carry him along.  His head felt as
though it had been beaten on an anvil.  The itch had started in his
back again.  But no light rose out of the darkness, only a solitary
owl answered his angry cries.

In a last spurt of energy he raised his voice and cursed the
country, the night, the track, and McFarlane whose falseness had
brought him to this.  Then he stumbled forward a few paces and
dropped to the ground. . . .

When he came to, a little man with a round face, as shiny and red
as a pippin, was bending over him and pressing a tin mug to his
lips.  "Drink up, me beauty," he was saying in a gruff Irish voice.
"It's better'n the milk of Paradise you was near tastin'."

He drank greedily for some time, then looked round.  He was in a
big, bare humpy, furnished with bark tables and benches and
innumerable bunks, built one above the other, ship's fashion, in
the wall.  Then he saw that the room was crowded.  It seemed as
though hundreds of other pippin faces, grouped according to
diminishing size, were peering down at him, while behind them all
was an immensely stout woman mixing something in a basin and
ranting to herself all the time.  "Och, ye're a lazy, drunken,
good-fer-nothin' cut off the backside of yer country, the whole lot
of ye!" she roared.

He did not try to understand, but for a long time watched a corner
where a number of bedraggled-looking leghorns were sleeping on the
edge of a bunk.  The walls, the floor and the table were white with
their droppings.

"Won't the light wake the fowls?" he asked.

"Sure'n all, that's not the question.  Drink the milk," the man
answered.

"This isn't the shanty, then?"

"What shanty's that, me love?"

He rested a moment.  "I knew I was getting somewhere," he said
then.  "The track got plainer every minute."

"Sure'n ivry half minute the rate you was goin' round and round it.
Wonder it was you didn't trip over yeself."

He dozed off.  When he woke up there was a smell of cooking in the
humpy.  The hundreds of pippin faces were still watching him.  He
reached out to touch them and they vanished noiselessly into the
shadows.  But he could see their eyes shining, wide and amazed, in
the light of the fire.

The man came back.

"How do you know . . . ?" Cabell began.

"Well now, and ain't Mickey O'Connor's saints in this wilderness as
well as in their native land?"

"Yer saints be--praised," the old woman began again.  "An' the poor
gintleman shoutin' off his head by the hour and you shiverin' in
yer blankets for fear it's the Divil remembered ye, ye overfed,
lyin', cowardly, blasphemious. . . ."

Cabell slid back to sleep.  He thought he was just going from one
dream to another.



III

The Dark Demon



Chapter Twenty-three

THE SHANTY AT PYKE'S CROSSING


How differently everything might have turned out if the wheel of
the dray had not broken, if the bullocks had not died, if the rain
had held off for another ten days, if he had not met that
Scotchman, and if, also, he had never gone to the shanty at Pyke's
Crossing.  Afterwards--for years afterwards--there were times when
he thought:  "Better to have died in that bush.  Better to have
been lost and forgotten. . . ."

But that was far in the future when he awoke in the morning and
found that the pippin faces were real enough.  There were fifteen
of them on Timberinga station, besides their father, Mickey--all
shepherds, even Danny, who was just about big enough to see over a
sheep's back.

"The richest family in the district," Mickey told him proudly, for
their combined wages made three hundred and fifty pounds a year and
rations.  "One of these days I'll buy a pub and settle the old
woman in style," he said.

"Settle on yer backside, that's all the settlin' ye'll ever do,
Mickey O'Connor," retorted his wife, who was still in a very bad
humour it seemed, so that breath could not be expelled from her
lungs without forming itself into abuse.  Add to this the cackle of
hens nesting in the bunks, picking among the scraps on the table,
fighting her for the dough in her pudding-basin, the plaintive
protests of a cow which stood with its head through the door,
contretemps between a litter of puppies and a boxful of kittens in
the corner, sundry screams and mutters from a menagerie of koalas
and cockatoos chained to the roof-beams--and beneath it all the
gentle monotone of Mickey's contemplative maunderings.

"I was born in Dublin, where ye never can hear yeself spake," he
explained sadly, "then I go and come here--"

"Where ye can never hear nothin' else," snapped Mrs O'Connor.

Cabell was already well enough to think again, and the anxieties
pushed aside by the struggle for life came crushing down on him.
He rose on his elbow and asked, "Is there a shanty near here where
I might get some help to move a dray?  I was looking for it."

Mickey had a sudden fit of coughing.  When he recovered, after a
nervous glance at his wife, who was pounding more fiercely than
ever at her pudding mixture, he said, "Is them ticks any better
now, is they?"

"Ticks?"

"Sure.  Wasn't you covered from yer sternpost to breakfast-time
with them?"

"I thought it was prickly-heat."

"No, them small microbes it was, suckin' the blood out of ye."

So they went on to talk about the ticks, and every time Cabell
mentioned the shanty Mrs O'Connor clattered her pots and pans and
flew off at Mickey and Mickey became very busy shooing the chickens
out of the flour-bin or chasing the cow away.

But on the fourth day Cabell was able to leave the bunk--eleven
days since he started from the dray and eighty-one since he last
saw the homestead.  In less time a sailing ship had come twelve
thousand miles from England through the doldrums and gales of three
oceans.

He brusquely drew Mickey out of earshot of the house and demanded,
"Is there a shanty or not?  If so, where?"

Mickey admitted that there was a shanty, forty miles to the north-
east.  "But don't say a word of it in front of the old woman,"
Mickey pleaded.  "Ye see it's that b'y.  He's out on the spree
there this three weeks."

"One of your sons?"

"Yes, that b'y Pat.  He's over there with all the lousy scum and he
won't come home."

"Drinking?"

"And carryin' on fit to be hanged, the lout.  And breakin' the old
woman's heart," Mickey said with a sigh.

Mrs O'Connor's head came round the door.  "If ye're talkin' about
that brat, he ain't none of mine and I won't have him round the
place, I won't.  I'm tellin' ye."

Mickey drew Cabell farther away.  "Would ye tell him if ye went
there, mister, to come home at once or I'll belt the lights out of
him?"

"Certainly."

Mickey rubbed his nose.  "Well, don't do that, neither.  You better
just say 'Ye parrit's got the mange.'"

"Very well."

"It's the old woman," Mickey explained, forcing a few sour wrinkles
into his shining cheeks.  "If 'twuz me I'd see him damned and be
glad of it. . . .  But don't ye go tellin' him that."

Cabell reassured him.

So at dawn next morning Danny was rounded up to guide Cabell to the
track.

"If you see me old man's b'y," Mrs O'Connor whispered as they shook
hands, "mightn't ye just tell him I'se gettin' him a great sucking
pig from the homestead Christmas Day."

"I'll send him home, don't fear," Cabell promised.

"Bless ye.  Bless ye," Mrs O'Connor cried.  "And if ye ever want
the mud licked off the soles of yer boots I'll do it for ye."

Danny was brought up and handed over to Cabell, who was advised to
keep a firm hand on him, as he was likely to run away, being scared
out of his wits of the first stranger he had ever seen.  He
trembled and panted like a wild animal, and sure enough, as soon as
he got half a chance, scampered off into the bush.  Cabell had to
be content with following the glint of his yellow hair, which
brought him about midday to the shanty track, a rutted path
overgrown by the new grass.  He must have passed within a few yards
of it when he heard the dog bark; the scrub they had just come
through was that in which he had had the illusion of watchful
faces.

Danny had already disappeared.  Cabell shouted good-bye to a patch
of quivering grass and set off briskly along the track.  Next day
at sundown he reached the shanty.

An incident which caused him some annoyance happened when he was
about ten miles from it.  A man galloped past, leading two fine
horses.  Cabell shouted good day, but the man rode by, so close
that Cabell had to jump out of the way to avoid being ridden down.
He shouted out again, asking for a lift, and had the chagrin of
seeing the man gallop out of sight over the downs without turning
his head.  Cabell, irritable from flies and dust and weariness,
fixed in his memory a glimpse of black beard and bushy black
eyebrows knitted over sullen eyes, and promised himself a word with
their owner if met at Pyke's Crossing.

The place was crowded when he limped in.  A lonely hut at the
crossing of a river still in flood, its walls held up by props,
straw and rags stuffed in its windows, thirty miles from anywhere--
this was civilization for the isolates of the bush, old hands,
migrants who had become shepherds, settlers for whom it was a
refuge from monotony, loneliness or despair, currency lads like
Sambo, born and bred in the Outback, who could not imagine that
life had anything more gracious to offer.

The proprietor was a fat, cheerful little German named Fritz
Schmidt.  "Goot day," he greeted Cabell.  "How ze world treat you,
huh?"

Cabell took his hat off, wiped the sweat out of his eyes, and
looked around, bewildered a little by the sight of so many new
faces all at once.

The conversation was an incessant roar in every slang and dialect,
from pidgin English to Whitechapel flash cant.  There was a swart
little Portuguese drover, an American nigger, Irishmen and
Scotchmen, an aboriginal begging for tobacco, a Jew pedlar selling
gilt tiepins and bright neckcloths, a man having D.T.s, another
being sick through the window, and thirty-odd lantern-jawed, sun-
shrivelled nondescripts arguing about dogs and horses, cattle and
sheep in terms which suggested that they themselves were an
enslaved sub-species ruled over by quadrupeds.

But Cabell's wonderment changed quickly to embarrassment as he
realized that even in this motley crowd his bedraggled clothes made
a remarkably poor show.  Mickey O'Connor had fitted him up with an
old cabbage-tree hat with the brim hanging off behind and an old
shirt patched with hessian, which he so outsized that the cuffs
barely reached his elbows.  His trousers were in tatters, and the
soles and uppers of his rain-rotted boots had parted company long
ago.  Approached by a boozy individual who said "Down on your luck,
eh, mate?  Well, I'll shout you a wet, damned if I don't," Cabell
blushed and turned his back on the company abruptly, though he was
longing to mix with the friendly crowd and talk.  "What have you
got there?" he asked the myopic little German, shuffling a handful
of silver ostentatiously on the bar.

The barman pointed to the shelves, piled gin-cases stacked with
bottles.  "I got the best three-star in the country," he said
proudly.

"What else?"

"I got jampagne.  First prize!  Goot Cape Smoke.  Goot Chamaica."

Cabell looked doubtfully at the bottles, opened and refilled more
than once, to judge from the greasy labels.

"What you want?  I got everyding."  He spread his white puffy
hands, which seemed to be covered with inflated rubber gloves.  "I
get you trunk pretty dam quick," he promised.  "And no snakes.
Leave it to Fritz."

"If he ain't got it he'll make it for you," one of the men said.
"It's all out of the same tin."

"What din, you blackguard?"

"Binkley's patent scab dip."

Fritz punched his bar, endangering the integrity of the whole
building.  "Why you trink so dam much?  Why you not rub it on your
carcass?"

"I did.  It burnt the hide clean off me."

"You want new hide, new bones, new face, then you be first prize,"
Fritz grumbled.

The man laughed cheerfully--a pleasant-looking young fellow of
about twenty years, with a mop of fair hair and bright, reckless
eyes.  Leaning against the bar, he was talking with a man whose
back was half turned to Cabell.  "That's him," Cabell thought,
recognizing the black beard, and promising himself a few words
there later.

He ordered a drink and, according to custom, bought the barman one,
too.  According to custom, the barman filled his own nobbler from a
bottle of cold tea under the bar.

"My name's Cabell," Cabell told him in a loud voice, perhaps a
little louder and more haughty than he meant.  "I'm looking for
hands.  My dray's bogged with all my wool.  Anybody here likely to
want work?"

"When you want him?"

"Straightaway.  Tomorrow."

"Christmas evening?  Aw, you come next week."  Fritz pointed across
the room to a man with a face bloated by heat and drink, asleep on
the floor.  "That one been trunk tree week.  Ready next week.  That
one"--indicating a little wizened-up monkey of a man who was
sitting disconsolately alone on a box near the door--"he come
before five week with eighty pound.  Got twenty left.  Might be zis
month, might be next, might be never.  Getting olt.  No one else."

The man on the floor looked as though he would need more than a
week to recover.  The man with the monkey face looked, as Fritz
said, as though he might never recover.  His skin, copper-coloured
by the sun, hung in pouches round his eyes and jowls.

Meeting Cabell's stare, he turned his head away quickly and gazed
out at the edge of the downs, where the sun was sinking egg-shaped
into a red haze of heat.

Cabell looked at him more closely, his attention fixed by something
in the discouraged stoop of the shoulders and in his clear blue
eyes, which, round and innocent, contrasted oddly with all the open
secrets of the weatherbeaten face.  In the middle of a brawling,
joyous crowd he looked strangely thoughtful and sad.

"That's Yack Beters," the barman told him.  "Vas Ober on Merriman."

"Overseer?"

"Ja.  Best stockman in New South Wales.  Only"--he tapped his dirty
singlet--"he get the homeache bad, and that makes him mad like a
cut snake."

"Poor devil," Cabell said.

Fritz waved his hand nervously.  "Don't say nossings like that.  He
might hear you.  That makes him madder."  He leant confidentially
across the bar.  "See, every year he comes on one white horse to
say good-bye because he's going to England.  I shake him by ze
hand.  Zen after one minute he say to me, 'Vell, shake a leg,
squarehead, and give the boys a last taste on me.'  I don't answer
him nossings.  'Vat?' he say.  'You won't!' and swell up like a
bullfrog.  'No,' I said him.  'You go to hell.  You go to England.
You go away from here, Yack Beters.  Been wastin' all that money on
booze for five years and never once you go to England.'  'Vat!' he
shout louder.  'Ain't my cheque no ploody goot?  Zat vat you say?'
I just answer him there's a storm coming up and he better pretty
dam quick get over the river.  'Vat!' he yell.  'You call me ploody
new-chum.  You say me I have one drink and can't swim that ploody
creek.  That what you say me?'  Then he start breaking up all ze
bottles and ze glasses and ze walls."  He spread his hands.  "I
give one liddle drink.  Then he never go.  'Go tomorrow,' he say.
But he never go.  Five year.  Always the same.  Drink, fight and
curse."  He sighed.  "Then one day he get up and walk straight
out."  He pointed through the door towards the still-brazen
skyline.  "Straight out over ze downs.  Straight into ze sun.
'Damn old fool you, Yack Beters!' think I.  'Now might you on the
sea be.'  And I don't see him no more till next Christmas, when he
comes in to say me good-bye again."  With his sentimental eyes and
watery little button-nose he looked like a dejected pug dog, but he
roused himself suddenly and briskly wiped the zinc top of the bar.
"Vell, it ain't my fault," he said with resolution.  "I gotta
licence to sell ligger, and by Gott I vill."

Cabell shuddered.  He thought of the little man walking straight
into the blazing sun with two months' liquor in him, back into the
bush he had thought to see the last of.

The man looked up quickly and, seeing their eyes on him, again
glared.  "Hope 'ee'll know me when 'ee sees me," he grumbled.

"Ve don't look at you, Mr Beters," Fritz said nervously.  "Ve look
at the sunset."

"Lying squarehead," Peters muttered resentfully.  "Why did 'ee send
that white mare back?"

Fritz stuttered and turned pale.  "Mr Beters, I don't know what you
say.  A white mare!  Lieber Gott, what white mare?"

"Dang 'ee for an old woman, but 'ee knows well enough what white
mare.  The white mare I boozed away last year.  And 'ee has the
guts and gumption to send it back as though I did just walk off and
leave it behind me like."

"Nein, nein," Fritz protested, in great agitation at the sight of
Peters working himself up into a rage.  "I don't know no such
things, Mr Beters."

"Can't pay for what I drink!  That what ye say?" Peters roared,
jumping up and kicking the front of the bar so that everybody
grabbed to save his drink.  "Insultin' me, that's what you be
doin'."

He badly needed to feel insulted, Cabell guessed, glancing covertly
sideways while Fritz retreated to the other end of the bar.  He was
at that stage of recovery where a feeling of frustration and regret
seeks some motive for smashing the world to pieces.  Robbed of
Fritz, he turned on Cabell, attracting his attention with a vicious
smack between the shoulder-blades.

"I'm Jack Peters if you want to know," he said defiantly.  "How
d'ee do?"

Nothing is more calculated to sour a man instantaneously than an
unexpected blow on the back, especially a back still burning from
blood-sucking ticks and treatment with horse medicines.  Cabell
turned and frowned at the little man with his supercilious stare--
that "aristocratic mug"--which was his automatic mask in moments of
doubt or fear or embarrassment.  It consisted in keeping his eyes
fixed blankly on the bridge of his opponent's nose and remaining
completely passive.  Its effect, heightened now by the scar which
tipped up the corner of his mouth and his left nostril into the
semblance of a sneer, was to drive a man in Peter's frame of mind
quite mad.

He elbowed Cabell roughly.  "Will 'ee drink with me?" he demanded,
and his chin came out a couple of inches to define an invitation
that might otherwise be mistaken for an act of friendliness.

"I've got a drink of my own," Cabell said, firmly withdrawing his
arm from Peters's grasp.

"Won't drink with the likes of me.  That what you mean?"  Now the
conversation had ceased along the bar and necks craned to see what
he would do.  Under this scrutiny, to which he had been
unaccustomed for so long, Cabell withdrew farther into his shell
and said coldly, "I've had all the drink I want for the moment."

"If I'm good enough to talk about I be good enough to drink with,"
Peters shouted.  "Fritz!  Squarehead!  Two phlegm-cutters here."

"Mr Beters," Fritz protested, "why you bick a fight?  Zis
gentleman, he don't know you from a crow."

"Two phlegm-cutters," Peters repeated frantically, "or I'll smash
your mug in for 'ee!"

The crowd cheered, "Go it, Pete!  Douche him, Pete!"  They were
instantly in arms against this stiff-necked stranger who had
refused two invitations to drink--a serious breach in the bush--
talked in a precise English voice, and gave them a belittling stare
down his twitching nose.

Peters pushed a glass towards Cabell and raised his own.  "Here's
to 'ee."

Cabell turned away.

"Won't, won't ye?" Peters cried, smashing his own glass down.
"Damme, but you shall!" and picking up the other glass, he flung it
at Cabell's head.

Cabell ducked and the glass flew down the bar and hit the man with
the black beard full on the side of the face.  He spun round, felt
his bleeding cheek, then rushed across the room and seized Peters
by his scraggy throat.

"Misder!  Misder!" Fritz shouted in dismay.  "It vas not for you
meant."

The drinkers gathered round to watch the one-sided fight.  Peters's
feeble hands beat the air and his blue eyes gazed up in
astonishment at his assailant, who went on shaking him with an
exasperated violence that seemed to seek in this activity a release
for sullen angers long pent up.  He said nothing, and his dark,
brooding face remained set.  One or two of the drinkers shouted
protests, but none interferred.  They seemed afraid of him.

"Give him a chance, Jem," called the young man who had talked about
Fritz's drinks.  "He'll snuff on you."

Jem stopped shaking Peters and studied him at arm's length with a
dull glare, then flung him against the bar.

Peters gulped a chestful of air and spat it out.  "Lousy horse-
thief!" he shouted.  "I'll see 'ee hanged next time."

Jem gazed at him, seemed to hesitate, then with the suddenness of
an irresistible impulse planted a big-knuckled fist between
Peters's eyes.  Peters grabbed at the bar and brought a pile of
glasses crashing down.

The apparently gratuitous brutality of the blow shocked Cabell.
Forgetting his own affront at the sight of blood trickling from the
little man's mouth, he jumped between them and pushed Jem back.  At
the same moment he remembered that he had a grievance here, too,
and it was immensely magnified as the dark eyes stared at him with
a dull, uncomprehending indifference and a big hand brushed him
impatiently aside.

He jumped between them again, and this time gave the man such a
violent shove that he staggered back into the crowd.  "Hit one your
own size," Cabell said.

The man picked himself up.  "Who the devil are you?" he asked, in a
slow, burred voice, as sullen and dead as his face.  "I've no
quarrel with you, mate."

"I've got one with you," Cabell replied.  "You should be taught
some manners."

"Manners?"

"You rode me down this afternoon.  I promised I'd see you about
it."

"Ah!"  The man's eyes came slowly alight, as though seeing Cabell
for the first time.  "You did, eh?"

"Yes, I did."

The young fellow intervened.  "Stow it, Jem.  Remember. . . ."  He
nodded towards a ragged hessian curtain that partitioned the bar
from the back of the humpy, and turning to Cabell said hastily,
"Jem'll apologize if he did you any wrong.  That's an old quarrel
he had with Peters there.  He's too damn quick-tempered, that's
all."

But Jem brushed him aside.  "Don't apologize to no cussed tramps, I
don't," he grumbled, and with one sweep of his fist, on the back of
which Cabell saw suddenly a broad purple scar, he cleared a circle
in the crowd.  Then, hitching his trousers and rolling back his
sleeves, he invited Cabell to "put 'em up".

A moral coward, but lacking no courage physically, Cabell put them
up and came out into the circle.  But before they were within
striking distance of each other a clear voice cried out
passionately behind them, "Jem, what are you doing?"

Cabell turned and saw, with amazement, the figure of a woman,
wrapped in a woollen riding cloak, her long black hair falling in
heavy plaits around her shoulders.

"Emma!" Jem and the young man exclaimed together.

She dropped the hessian curtain and came, on unsteady feet, towards
them.  As she approached Jem withdrew a pace, lowered his eyes with
a frown, and hid his big fists behind his back, shyly, like an
overgrown lout of a boy caught in some disgraceful act.

She went up close to him and asked, in a low, indignant voice, "Do
you want to get us all hanged, you fool?"

Cabell's wide eyes were inmovably fastened upon her.  They saw a
broad face, high, protuberant cheekbones, and flat, broad cheeks,
pale with fever, which distilled a dew of sweat along her high
forehead and long upper lip.

Getting no reply from Jem, she turned her eyes on Cabell,
questioning.  A look, half of fear, half of anger, filmed them like
a shadow.  This gave her whole face an air of enigma and mystery,
so that anyone who had glimpsed it would have been compelled to
turn and stare and to ask what secret it concealed of suffering,
tragedy, or hatred.

Looking on this first young woman he had seen for years, Cabell
felt the blood in his cheeks.  He slid his eyes down to her feet
and discovered that he had been standing for some time with his
left fist thrust out before him.  He lowered his hands and put them
sheepishly into his trouser pockets.  The same kind of feeling
seemed to overcome the other isolates, too.  They moved away and
tried to hide behind each other from the unusual sight of a woman.
"You must be mad," she told Cabell, cutting the air with her hand.
"You're no match for him!"

Cabell glanced up, surprised by her sympathy.

But she shook her head impatiently and added, "He might easily have
killed you," and there was no sympathy in this, but rather an
accusation as though Cabell would have done her a personal injury
if he had got himself killed.

He was even constrained to make an apologetic gesture.  He cleared
his throat and mumbled something, shifting uneasily on his long
legs.  But, the first shock of surprise passing, he returned the
stare of wonder which she had fixed on him as though she sought to
discover what sort of a man this was who could be foolish enough to
try conclusions with Jem.  Now Cabell's eyes cleared a little and
he saw her as a short, rather frail woman of about twenty-eight
years, with dark-ringed hollows to her unusually deep-set eyes, big
hands and tight colourless lips.  These lips were what impressed
him most.  There was something savage in their restraint, as though
all her strength were concentrated there in a vyce-like grip on
herself, holding back God alone knew what cry of indignation or
fear.  Had she let this out it could hardly have exposed more
clearly the fierceness of her spirit than did the power with which
it was suppressed.

"Where did you come from?" she asked in her low but clear and
dominating voice.

He answered her like a child, startled out of his reticence by the
directness of the question and because he was bemused and
embarrassed by her sudden appearance, dropping upon them from the
void in this wild place.  "From two hundred miles to the north-
east," he said, adding rather breathlessly, "My name's Cabell."

She looked him frankly up and down, as one used to dealing with men
and without any shyness before them.  "You MUST be a new-chum in
these parts," she told him, "to be picking a fight with Jem."
Before he could reply, as pride impelled him to do, that all the
Jems in the world couldn't ride him down with impunity, she shifted
her gaze to this now harmless-looking culprit, who stood biting his
nails and staring at the floor.

"Won't you ever stop fighting--?" she began.

But he interrupted her with a brusque wave of his hand, made as if
to speak, and lowered his eyes again without saying a word.

She shrugged her thin shoulders, half despairing, half impatient,
and turned on the young man.  "Did he get the horses, Dirk?"

Dirk put out a hand and supported her, for she was trembling and
pale.  "Yes, Em; we're all ready now."  Between these two faces
brought close together Cabell saw, under superficial differences of
colour, a strong family likeness in the shape of their firm chins
and short, straight noses.  Who, then, he wondered, was this Jem, a
stolid, peasant-like animal?

"Well, why are we waiting?" the woman asked petulantly.  "Why, why,
why?"

Dirk shook her gently.  "Don't be crazy, Em.  You're not fit to
move.  Besides, the rivers won't be low enough for the cattle yet."

She drew her hand wearily across her eyes and leant heavily against
him.  "Oh, let us get on, for God's sake!"

As she spoke they moved off towards the back of the shanty,
followed by Jem.  He gave Cabell a sulky look as he passed, then
disappeared through the hessian curtain.

Fritz raised his head above the bar and smiled tentatively.

"Holy Ghost, but ain't she a white sergeant, that one!" somebody
said admiringly.



Chapter Twenty-four

THE STRANGE WOMAN


Cabell went back to the bar and called for another drink.  For some
time he reflected on the strange woman, whose strangeness, of
course, consisted largely in the mere fact that she was a woman and
that she was here.

"Who's that fellow Jem?" he tried to draw the barman.  But Fritz
had had enough of gossip with Cabell for one day.  "I don't know no
such things," he said sourly.  "Ligger, zat's my business."

Gradually Cabell sank into sad thoughts--the girls in Owerbury High
Street on Sunday morning.  Lucy Potter, who smelt of fresh milk,
Phillipa Mayne under the lilac bush--sad, savage, celibate
fantasies.

A hand on his arm roused him.  It was Peters again, considerably
worse for half an hour's hard drinking and a black eye.  He was
waving an empty bottle in one hand and supporting an even drunker
comrade with the other.  In the gloomy light of the slush lamps,
shining through the haze of smoke from dung fires burning round the
bar, Cabell recognized the bloated face that had been asleep on the
floor when he arrived.

"My mate," Peters introduced him, "Herb Tutt."

Herb opened one eye and fixed it on Cabell.  "'Ave yo' wash yo'
neck jish evenin', Colonel?" he asked.

Cabell remained aloof.

"Not outshide," Herb explained.  "Inshide, I mean.  What I mean,
young 'un--'ave a drink?"  He left Peters and flung his arms round
Cabell.  "Pete told me--great fight--marvellous bastard--
'gratulations," from which telegramatic baring of his soul Cabell
was relieved to understand that Herb was embracing, not strangling
him.  "Yer see," Herb explained feelingly, "he kicked me dawg.
Now, that dawg--"

"Shut yer trap," Peters ordered, pulling him off.  "Mr Cabell,
don't want to head nothing of yer dawg."

"Don't yer?"  Herb looked in amazement at a man who did not want to
hear about his dog.  He had a head like a lump of granite that
somebody had once started to chip into the shape of a face, but
they had not gone far.

"They do say that 'ee has wool to shift," Peters asked Cabell.

"That's so."

"Me and the mate"--Peters nodded to Herb--"we'd come if 'ee'd have
us.  When?"

"Tomorrow?"

Peters hesitated and looked at Fritz's bottles, sighed.  "Aw well,
I can't taste the stuff any more," he said.

Herb thrust his head between them.  "Could '_e_ put a blowfly in a
pickle-bottle?" he asked.

"Can you?"

"My dawg can," Herb said defiantly.  "Just let him try puttin'
blowfly in pickle-bottle.  Then won't kick dawg.  Now, that dawg--"

"Dry up, damme."  Peters gave him a shove.  He staggered back and
sprawled on the floor, where in a few seconds he was sound asleep.

Cabell and Peters exchanged drinks.

Peters pulled his nose, shifted uneasily, then said:  "I've put 'ee
in a devil's black books there," jerking his thumb over his
shoulder towards the hessian curtain.

Cabell waved aside apologies, finding the little man contrite, and
agreeable company with his childlike eyes and drawling West Country
voice.

But Peters shook his head.  "Ay, there's people of one sort and
people of another, but that man--a's a bad lot.  That a be."

"You know him well?"

"Yes and no.  I know him for a horse-stealer and for the man that
lifted a stud off Burgurrah last year.  'Tis that which made bad
blood between us.  That and the Scotchman that lifted two nags off
of him."

"A Scotchman named McFarlane?"

"Ay.  D'ee know him?"

Cabell told him how they had met.

Peters grinned.  "'Twas this way.  She's down with the black-water
and the Scotchman comes in with a nag you could hang your hat on.
He's that afeared of losing it he near brings it into the bar with
him.  So I tells him that feller Jem's just making up his mind to
lift it.  Damme if he don't run off with their two best horses."

"Who are they?" Cabell asked.

Peters stroked his chin.  "First there's the lad.  No harm in him.
That's Dirk Surface.  A bit careless like and reckless as a steer.
Then there's his sister, a damn sight recklesser."

"That's the woman?"

"Call her that.  I'd as lief call her a demon.  She'd ride anything
with hair on.  There's deep waters in the wench, too."

"What d'you mean?"

"No more'n the Devil said to the owl," Peters replied with a wink.

After a long pause Cabell asked, "His wife, is she?"

"HIS wife!" Peters laughed.  "That she's not, for sure.  And shan't
never be, although he's dead nuts on her.  So much so they say he
killed a man outright once for something about her.  I never
rightly knew nor heard of any that did.  They're a deep lot."

"What are they doing here?"

Peters winked again.  "Grow'd too hot round here for Jem since I
got on the track of them Burgurrah horses, so they're pushing out
west.  So they say.  But between us two, man and man, it's eyewash.
Jem's got horses hid to take over the range, and the cattle they
have shall cover the tracks."

Cabell frowned, trying to piece all these facts into a feeling
about the woman that had been growing upon him.  He tried but
failed to see her as a camp follower of horse-thieves, and emerged
from speculation with a deeper sense of her strangeness.

Peters was saying "She's a bit of a mystery.  No one ever knew
where she come from nor when nor why.  But as I've know'd her these
two years they've been living over the back of the Swamp, she's
straight as you could expect where evil do thrive.  But that Black
Jem--"  He spat.  "They say he goes mad fighting and has near
killed more than one man.  That were her meaning when she says
'Ye'll get us all squeezed.'  She's scared for that young
rapscallion Dirk, ye see.  It's said she once rode a hundred miles
to get him out of a shanty where he was boozing with Jem."

Cabell asked about Pat O'Connor.

"The whelp," Peters replied.  "He's out on Jem's cattle camp up the
river, grafting for his booze."

Cabell told him about the O'Connors.

"I know them," Peters nodded.  "Decent old codgers.  But their
lad's straight headed for the gallows.  And as for getting him back
home, well, I did hear tell he was going off to help Jem and Dirk
with the cattle."

They were silent for a moment, Peters thinking of the trouble he
had made for Cabell, as his next remark showed.  "'Tis well we'll
be off early," he said.  "There won't be no occasion to cross paths
with the sod again."

Cabell laughed.  "As far as that goes--"

"Oh, no, no," Peters said hastily.  "He do be a terrible quick man
to knock yer down, and I'd never have an easy mind if a young
strapper like you come to harm on my account."

"Perhaps it would be on my own account," Cabell said, and, as
events turned out, spoke truer than he knew.

When Peters roused him next morning the sun was already well up.

"We're late," he grumbled.

"I were sleeping off," Peters snapped back.  "What did ye expect?"
His face was grey and ill-tempered; but his innocent eye,
expressing relief, betrayed another reason.  "That bunch got away.
They be well out of sight now."

"What?  Not the woman--the Surfaces?"

"Yes.  They went before sun-up."

"Did they take young O'Connor?"

"Ay."

"But I promised I would send him home."

"'Twas more than worth your while," Peters growled.  "The whelp'd
only be back tomorrow in worse company."

Cabell was angry, wondering what the O'Connors would say about his
unfulfilled promise, but that slipped quickly from a mind
overshadowed by a thought--related to certain obscure and uneasy
dreams which had kept him tossing on his palliasse--that he would
not see another woman so young and fresh as Emma Surface for God
alone knew how many long years, perhaps.  A little burst of
exasperation made him complain:  "Wish you'd called me.  You knew I
wanted to speak to O'Connor."

A truth, the wise and aged Peters perceived, which concealed a
truth.

Profounder self-deceptions puzzled Cabell and made him exclaim
irritably, "Why the devil should I sleep late this one morning when
I'm always up at the crack of dawn?"

"The day I was supposed to be spliced," Peters said, "I didn't wake
up at all."

In the bar they found the drinkers cheering Herb Tutt, who was
slowly breaking up the shanty's crockery, a piece at a time--crazy
behaviour explained by the fact that he had ten pounds left on his
cheque.  Change he could not have, because coin was short in the
wilds--only more cheques, and cheques meant booze to be consumed
immediately.  Money had no other meaning.  But it was some
satisfaction to smash ten pounds' worth of crockery.

At noon they left the shanty, glum and silent, Cabell, Peters,
Peters's white horse--"Give 'ee thirty quid for it.  Still owe 'ee
ten, counting what I didn't drink," Peters told Fritz doggedly--
Herb, and Herb's dog, a criminal-looking mongrel with hair coming
off in patches, a shifty eye and a tail like a broom.

They spent three days finding the dray, a week getting wool across
the river a bale at a time, in a canoe made of bark and tarpaulin,
four more days rounding up the bullocks, swimming them over, and
dragging the dray through the bed of the river at the end of a
rope.  Doing all this they swam the river nearly a hundred times
and worked on the banks in mud up to their waists.  The next ten
miles of slimy river flats occupied them for sixteen days.  They
shifted the wool to the high ground six bales at a time, then drove
back through the morass for the next load.  After that five miles a
day seemed like flying.  Thirty-five days later, one hundred and
fifty-one days after Cabell left the homestead, they arrived in
Moreton Bay.



Chapter Twenty-five

THE MOB AT PAT DENNIS'S


Guilty curiosity frustrated a determination to steer clear of Pat
Dennis's.  His business with the agent, the Land Commissioner, and
the storekeeper finished and the dray once more on the west road,
he was congratulating himself on an incognito successfully
preserved from the omnipresent spies of McGovern and Flanagan when
a desire to know what these two old enemies were up to (they must
have been plotting to destroy him for the last four years) became
irresistible.  He sent Peters and Herb on with the dray and rode
back to the settlement.

Settlement was rapidly becoming inadequate to describe broad, well-
made streets, two-storeyed hostelries, houses built of dressed
timber and painted, shops that sold perfumes, pomades, stays and
wedding-rings in a mysterious annex from the saddlery, horse
medicine and barrelled rum department.  A boat arrived fortnightly
from Sydney with news of the great world, and there was a Moreton
Bay Courier to mirror the affairs of the little world held in the
claws of two bends of the river, but busy with the comings and
goings of a vast hinterland.

Gone, for years now, the red coats and the canary jackets.  A
notice on the wall of the Colonial Stores to the effect that the
latest composition of that distinguished and elevated authoress,
Miss Maria Edgeworth, having been received hot from the press,
perusal by members of the Moreton Bay Reading Circle would commence
at eight p.m. sharp on the twenty-first instant at the commodious
residence of Mrs Gribble, near the Colonial Stores, attested to the
dawn of a new era of civilizing influences, which revealed
themselves also in the offer of betrousered abos to recite the
"Lorsprer" for a consideration.  A gentleman who clipped horses and
beards did a thriving trade, and a storekeeper had added a line of
cravats and stiff collars to his stock of ironmongery.

Pat Dennis had kept himself abreast of the times by attaching a
second storey, a private bar, a coffee-room and a name to his
establishment.  A sign announced the Royal Hotel, to which had been
added the respectability of a licence.  Other developments were a
coat of paint and the importation of two or three fresh barrels of
rum for alchemical transmutation into an infinite variety of
phlegm-cutters, mountain dew, potheen, Scotch, three-star and
genuine Napoleon, all of which the steady stream of squatters
arriving with wool and departing with stores consumed in large
quantities at an increased price and, disregarding fancy names,
knew as "Pat's Chain Lightning".  A metamorphosis of the same kind
had taken place in Dennis himself; that is, he was known as a
publican instead of a grog-seller, he smoked a cigar instead of a
pipe, and he changed his shirt once a week.  But he still had a
sly, malicious eye.

Cabell might have measured a deep change in himself from the
astonishment, admiration even, with which he gazed upon the
transformed interior of the pub.  As it was six years since he last
saw real tables and chairs that could be moved, a billiard-table,
or a papered wall, he might be pardoned an illusion of luxurious,
metropolitan accommodation and the shyness which overwhelms the man
from the bush when he finds himself suddenly among such things.
That the wall was papered with pages torn from a volume of
Tillotson's sermons was a detail lost in the general effect of
gracious amenities.  Also, Pat Dennis wore socks!

Cabell watched him from the end of the bar, but Dennis scented a
stranger and drew near.  They exchanged greetings and a few words
about the weather, while Pat's busy little eyes probed the beard,
the scar like a mask, and the withdrawn, doubtful stare in search
of the key to a personality pigeonholed some time ago for future
reference.  Cabell would have been less surprised by this long
hesitation if he had not been accustomed to think of himself as the
same fresh-cheeked boy who had left England.

Suddenly Pat slapped the bar.  "Glory, if it ain't Mr Cabell?"

"Yes," Cabell blurted out.

"Look like a grown-up brother to yeself," Dennis said.  "And how's
it been getting along with ye?"

Fresh from four years among honest men, Cabell was no match for
Dennis.  The friendly sparkle in those ferret eyes made him forget
the depths of malice secreted there.  "Oh, I'm getting along," he
said modestly.

"Didn't I hear them say now ye was out on a fine place on the
Warrego?" Dennis guessed.  "How's it lookin' up?"

"So-so."

"Ye're on good country, then--if it's the Warrego."

"I'm not on the Warrego."

"Of course; ye'd be further north."

"Yes, further north."

Dennis saw that nothing was to be gained like this, so he shouted
to the barman, "Hey, ye there!  A pint of the best fizz in the
house for the gintleman."

The barman, as he filled two glasses, gave Cabell a quizzical look
and, catching his eye, nodded.  "How do, Mr Cabell?  Know me?"

"Can't say I do."

"Jimmy Coyle from up Murrumburra.  Remember?"

Cabell placed the thin, dark face with the sardonic lines at the
side of the mouth and the bitter smile.

He looked Cabell up and down insolently and grinned.  "You can come
round these parts safe now, Boss," he said.  "The old Cove's smoked
off Murrumburra."

"Safe?" Cabell said coldly.

"There was a hell of a stink that night you mizzled."

Cabell said nothing.

"McGovern said he could get you done for a crack," Coyle told him.

Dennis waved the barman away.  "Go on!  Get along with ye.  This
gint don't know ye."

Coyle winked.  "He knows.  I'm Yorkshire, too."

Cabell flushed up, but it was a great weight off his mind to know
that McGovern was gone from the district.  Perhaps from Australia
itself, Pat Dennis added, for the owner of Murrumburra had turned
up suddenly and discovered some deficiencies in the stock and
McGovern had cleared out overnight.  Some said he had joined the
rush to the Californian goldfields.  "It's ten to one that's the
stone end of him," Dennis added, "for if anything goes wrong on the
Sacramento the first thing the mob does is look for an Australian
and hang him."

He chattered on, telling of a death here, a failure there, a murder
by blacks, of Peppiott--and here his eyes gleamed with particular
amiability--who had thrown himself in the river a few days after
Cabell left, of Deaf Mickey, who had married an old woman who used
to be in the female factory at Hamilton but had since exchanged her
for a horse and cart and was now doing well for himself.

"What became of that chap Flanagan?" Cabell asked vaguely.

Dennis chuckled.  "That Flanagan!  Ha, ha!  There's a poor gazook.
Married Mrs Duffy--her that used to bring in her old man to be
flogged.  He died after his last red back, the poor sod, and
Flanagan ups and splices her, thinkin' to get away with them ten
thousand sheep she had.  Ha, ha, ha!"

"He's still about the place, then?"

"Why, sure.  He as goods as lives here."

"Here?"

"Ye see, 'twasn't him got her cattle but her got his.  And she was
that used to havin' the whip-hand that the poor boy was soon
thinkin' Duffy had the best end of the stick.  She had to hand HIM
over to Gilegan to flog, whereas," Dennis lowered his voice, "it's
common knowledge she chases him round the house with her stockwhip
whenever he shows his nose there."

Cabell grinned.  "I suppose he's drinking himself to death."

"Not a bit of it.  He's in for politics."

"Politics?"

"Sure.  Ain't ye heard how we're after havin' a colony of our own,
wid a governor and council.  Some say tomorrow we'll be sendin' our
members to a parliament like the big bugs in the Old Country."

"What's Flanagan got to do with it?"

"Why, he's one of the coves.  Does all the talkin'."

"It won't come to anything," Cabell said, to counter a jealous
thought that Flanagan, once little better off than himself, was
becoming a great man in the country.

"Don't ye think so now?" Dennis said, in his humblest, most
obsequious voice.  "'Tis something to hear a real educated man say
that."

"The folk in England have got their heads about them and wouldn't
listen to such nonsense."

"And now I hear ye say it like that, sure I see they wouldn't at
all."

"A parliament!" Cabell grunted.  "Pooh.  They'll be setting
themselves up for gentlemen next."

"So they will, too, yer Honour.  It's an open secret Flanagan's
missus is only lettin' him waste his rhino in the certain chance of
bein' me lady if it comes off.  If ye seen him the way he is now,
dressed up to the nines, ye'd think he'd kissed the Queen's toe
already."

"Rubbish!"

"Sure, it's galling enough to me, yer Honour, that hasn't the worth
in me whole carcass of the blood that's in yer Honour's little
finger," Dennis said slyly.

"Huh."

"And when I see him up there, as he is this minute, jawing all the
gentry and the likes of Mr Carney and Mr Curry and--"

"Up where?"

"Up in the coffee-room.  He's getting up a round-robin for the
Queen, you see. . . .  But maybe yer Honour'd like to see for
yeself?"

"No, no.  I've got no time to waste."

"Wouldn't take half a minute just to peep round the door.  Ye'd get
a laugh, if nothing else."

"No, no--who did you say was there?"

"A crowd big enough to hide yeself in if yer Honour was ten times
less changed."

A treacly radiance of affability round Dennis's mouth failed to
warn Cabell.  Curiosity got the better of him.  "I admit I'd like
to see the nonsense with my own eyes.  That's a fact."

Dennis hastened to push a chair under his legs.  "Just sit on that
now," he said, "till I make sure the galoot's still there and if
it's worth yer Honour's while stepping up."  Whereupon he flew up
the stairs and announced to Flanagan that the long-missing Cabell
was at this moment drinking in the bar.

"Whew!" said Carney.  "So he come back.  It's a pity Bob McGovern
didn't wait a bit longer."

"Not a word of that," Flanagan told him.  "Just let's have a look
at the darling to see if he's changed at all."

"Not a bit since the day he opened his dirty trap in the bar,"
Dennis said.

So when Cabell entered the room a few minutes later he found
himself expected.  Half a dozen hostile faces, remembered as
habitu�s of Dennis's shanty when he was a despairing limejuicer on
Murrumburra--"that mob at Pat Dennis's"--gave him a derogatory
inspection as he came in.  He stopped in angry embarrassment and
looked around.  That most of the crowd, made up of squatters and
townspeople come to talk of politics, were unknown to him and paid
him no attention, did not exempt them from a curse that the sky
would fall and blast the whole assembly on the spot.  They belonged
to "that mob"--the symbol in which he comprehended all the
ruthless, crude, antagonistic individualism of the time.  He envied
it, he feared it.  He had repudiated it, sworn to hang himself
rather than become like it, yet every day the forces of the life he
lived remoulded him secretly and irresistibly to the same pattern.
Already few observable differences distinguished him from these
thin-lipped, skinny, narrow-eyed, lined faces.

He was not, perhaps, as blind to this as he tried to be.  Mirrors
could not always be avoided; and more eloquent even than mirrors
was the genuine astonishment of Flanagan as he came forward,
exclaiming, "Cabell, by the Holy!  I wouldn't have known ye, man."
Then he seized Cabell's hand and wrung it heartily.  "Well, it
warms me heart to see ye again."

A new Flanagan, too--dressed up to the nines, as Dennis had said,
with gold watch-chain and the suave veneer of a man even now
practised in the art of democratic politics.

"Canvassing for votes already," Cabell thought, giving himself over
to Flanagan's exuberant handshaking after a glimpse of Dennis's
portly figure blocking the gangway had frustrated a flurried idea
of retreat.

"This is Mr Cabell, gentlemen," Flanagan went on, without waiting
for him to speak.  "His name's worth a hundred on the bottom of our
bit of paper.  Lord Felsie that was with Peel in 'forty-three is
his own cousin."  And he shook Cabell's hand again and hastened to
pour him a drink.

But behind this display of affability Cabell detected a hard and
calculating look in the Irishman's eye.  "He's thinking of that
roan stallion still," Cabell thought, and himself began to think of
it with all the resentment a man has towards one he has injured.

"Drink up," Flanagan urged.  "Then take a look at this, me boy.  We
want your monniker here."  He had unrolled a stiff paper, scrawled
over with signatures in all manner of hands, formed and illiterate.
"We're asking after the charter of our liberties, no more, no
less."

"Hear!  Hear!" someone said.  "No more of those damned Sydney
tyrants."

"Nor them damn English tyrants neither," added Carney, with a sour
eye on Cabell.

"Well," said Flanagan, a cautious politician, "I'm not saying a
word against the English as such.  Let them rule in England and
long live the Queen.  But we didn't come out here to hew and carry
and be told what's what by some new-chum dude in Whitehall that
doesn't know B from a bull's foot in the matter of local
conditions."

"That's right," Carney backed him up.  "We're our own masters
here."  He also partook of the spirit of the times, thanks to the
horse-clipper and the ironmonger.  Under those socks, Cabell
reflected, the mark of the irons would still be visible.  "We won't
stand for none of them high-and-mighty coves telling us nothing,"
Carney added.

"Quite," Flanagan agreed.

He was getting paunchy already, Cabell's hypercritical eye noted.
And there was a harassed look about him, as one who momently
expects a whack on the head from behind.  This compensated Cabell
slightly for the deference the substantial-looking squatters paid
to him.

"Self-government," Flanagan continued.  "That's our aim.  And a
boundary of our own.  The sooner they know that in London the
better."

"Three cheers for the Republic of Americky," Carney said.

"That Lord Whatsisname," somebody remarked, stating the perennial
grievance of the settler, "him what's always saying the Crown lands
oughtna be sold.  What's he know?  He hasn't got the right."

"That's so," said one of the squatters.  "If he'd had to open up my
bit of country and fight for every inch of it with blacks and
bushfires, he'd change his ideas mighty quick."

"Or if he'd brought a load of wool where I came last month."

"These limejuicers--they know nothing.  They can't graft, they
can't ride.  If they stood in the sun for five minutes it'd kill
them.  All they're good for is to sit on their backsides in London
and tell us what to do."

"All them lords," Carney said.  "Like females, if you ask me."

To which there was a general assent.

There was an undernote of bitterness and contempt in all this.  It
was the sort of feeling that makes family quarrels and civil wars
so much more violent than quarrels with strangers.  In old hands
like Carney there was some good reason for bitterness no doubt.
But there were few emancipists or exiled Irish rioters or
blackbirded migrants here.  Many of "that mob" were men from the
very same class as Cabell himself.  Yet in some indefinable way
they were no longer Englishmen.  Coarser, tougher, more confident,
and like all men who have become sure of themselves through their
own work and hardship, narrow in outlook, impatient of anything
outside their horizons, and self-opinionated.  The development in
process with Cabell had completed itself with most of them.  They
had grown a hard outer skin, like a husk.  Through this it was
impossible to perceive what a man's antecedents and class had been.
A strange, conglomerate likeness extended even to the pitch of
their voices and their accents, in which all trace of former
refinement was lost.  They talked in the flash cant of the
jailyard.

Seeing him silent while they committed themselves, the squatters
left off talking and stared at him suspiciously.  All men were
suspect in a country where the spirit of the time was every man for
himself.  Not that they were talking any kind of treason.  The
cause of a sudden massing together against the stranger, which
Cabell felt in a wave of antipathy directed at him from twenty
pairs of narrowed eyes, was a subtle and, to the men themselves,
inexplicable reaction against one not yet, they felt, completely
assimilated to their type.  Each of them had come here years before
with illusions, hopes and standards like Cabell's and had shed
them, reluctantly, unconsciously, as Cabell was doing, under the
heels of a hard life.  The result was a certain prickly feeling of
moral inferiority and shame before one in whom the process was not
yet completed, whose silence was criticism unspoken.

Cabell hardened against them, against "that mob", for the very
reason, perhaps, that he felt less strange among them than before,
that he found himself agreeing despite himself with much of what
they were saying.  How could he avoid it?  Their grievances came of
economic necessities that pressed upon him, too.  They wanted
security of tenure in their lands, a government removed from the
influence of wealthy interests at home and in the South, to which,
quaintly, it was left to Carney to add the most serious complaint
of all, that Sydney and England had robbed them of cheap labour by
stopping the transportation of convicts.  With all of which, as a
squatter, Cabell was bound to agree.  Yet it galled him to do so,
as though he were selling himself to the cause of men he loathed
from the bottom of his heart--with all the strength of the
fascination his fantasies of England still exerted upon him.

When Flanagan pushed the petition across to him and said "Will ye
sign there, me boy?" and Cabell pushed it aside and answered
"Certainly not!" the gesture was not begotten entirely of his
instinctive antagonism to men in a crowd, jealousy of Flanagan's
rise in the country, the curiously involved emotions created by the
thought that Flanagan knew he had stolen the roan stallion and was
accusing him.  An uprush of complex moral indignation was
principally the frenzied alarm of the fantasist who feels himself
slipping farther and farther away from his dreamworld.

"Ye won't?  Did ye say that?" Flanagan exclaimed.  "Ye're not
telling me ye're against us?"  There was a twinkle in his hard,
grey, but not unpleasant eyes.  What obscure end he expected to
serve by pushing Cabell into a corner with such a question it would
be difficult to say, for his malice was of an altogether different
quality from Dennis's, more concealed and patient.  Perhaps he
foresaw the day when he would pay himself back a thousand times for
the roan stallion, and sought now to cut the ground of sympathy
from under Cabell's feet by showing him up and planting an aversion
in these stubborn, narrow minds.  Or perhaps he was just an astute
politician, banking on his knowledge of Cabell's diehard
conservatism to give him the cue for a telling flourish.  Anyway,
he had an air of slightly astonished and offended friendliness as
he repeated, "Why, ye wouldn't be turning against the boys, would
ye, Cabell?"

Cabell looked at them coldly.  "I consider everything said here to
be an affront to me," he said in a forced, lofty, stilted voice,
"and to anyone who hasn't let themselves be poisoned by the jail-
yard democracy of the country."

They stared.

"Don't mean yeh'll take orders from them noo-chums in Lunnon?"
Carney demanded.

"If it comes to taking orders," Cabell said, "I prefer to take them
from gentlemen."

Carney pushed out his chin.  "Aren't we as good as you?"

"Durned sight better!" said the man who had spoken about "Lord
Whatsisname," eyeing Cabell's working clothes and deciding that he
could not be prospering too well.

"Better or worse," Cabell said, "I'm an Englishman and proud of it.
When I leave here it will be without regrets."

Flanagan laughed.  "There, and we won't spill no tears neither,
honey."

"Hear!  Hear!"

A burst of laughter drowned Cabell's stammering reply.  He turned
and hurried out past Pat Dennis, who joined a commiserating gesture
to a leer of venomous satisfaction.

Outside the breeze from the river cooled his head.  Suddenly he
felt depressed, frustrated, angry with himself, as when he had
argued with Gursey about the future of the valley.  In the next
moment he raised his hand and felt the thick wad of letters in his
pocket--two years of mail from England.


The Gorse is blooming on Goathorn.  From Corfe to Studland is one
yellow flame. . . .  The mackerel shoals are coming in. . . .  Old
Farmer Treven dreamt last week that you came riding over the Downs
from Weymouth.  Oh, brother, will that ever be?


"Damn them, anyway," he muttered over his shoulder at the hotel.
"I meant what I said, anyway," and went off, unconsciously
clutching the letters to his heart, which they seemed to warm and
stir.



Chapter Twenty-six

CABELL CROSSES HIS FINGERS


Within two months Cabell was back at the homestead with Peters and
Herb Tutt and three hands he had taken on at Pyke's Crossing on the
way up.

Another full season of rain had refreshed the valley.

"Thought we'd seen the last of you," Gursey said, his face
betraying relief from long anxiety.  "What happened?"

"Lost myself in a flood," Cabell explained.  "That's all."

"Nothing happened in Moreton Bay?"

"Nothing."

Gursey drew him aside.  "Did you see HIM?"

"McGovern?  Don't torment yourself so, man.  He's gone off to
America."

"Who told you?"

"I saw Coyle, who used to--"

"Coyle?  He told you?  It's a lie then--a trap.  Did he ask about
me?  You didn't tell him where we are?"

Cabell tried to reassure him.  "I told you once, they think you're
dead.  As for knowing where we are, the Commissioner's the only one
who knows that and he's not likely to tell."

Gursey was not convinced.  "McGovern's lying low, waiting.  One day
he'll come back."  He was all on edge again and kept looking at the
new men nervously.  "Who's this lot?"

Cabell told him their names.

"I don't like the look of them."

Cabell laughed.  It was so good to be back that all these terrors
seemed remote and foolish.  The journey over, his first wool on its
way to market, the first soil of pioneering turned, his flocks
increasing, he had a satisfying sense of construction begun at
last.  "Ah, there's nothing to worry about Joe," he said, laying
his hand on Gursey's shoulder.  "McGovern's too lazy to come all
this way out."

"You don't know him," Gursey said.  "He's greedy, too.  If he heard
some day you were raking in money he'd come quick enough."

"Money?"

"He'd try to blackmail you."

Cabell took his hand away and frowned.  "I'd see him damned first."

Gursey fired up.  "You mean you'd see me hanged first!"

Cabell turned to go.

Gursey grabbed him by the arm.  "I DID see a man yesterday."

"A man?  Where?"

"Over behind the ridge."

"Yes?  What sort of a man?"

"Big.  With a ginger beard.  My guts came into my mouth."

"Oh, McFarlane!" Cabell laughed again.  "He won't harm you."

"Who's McFarlane?"

"A Scotchman I met on the road.  I told him he'd find good country
up here."

"You SENT him?  You must be balmy."

"You don't think we'll be left alone here for ever, do you?" Cabell
said impatiently.  "Anyway, he'll be useful at shearing."

"Ach!" Gursey cried.  "I might have known you'd think of your
damned sheep first."

Cabell went off to help unload the stores--cases of tea, casks of
black sugar, kegs of nails and salt, sacks of flour and meal, a
cask of rum and a barrel of powder, blocks of tobacco, an anvil,
potatoes, a case of Holloway's ointment and pills, ten gallons of
molasses, a box of clay pipes, new shirts, breeches, coats and
boots, a picture in a frame of a landscape covered with snow, trees
weighed down with it.

He hung the picture up on the wall of the humpy and the men came
and gazed wonderingly.

Gursey scowled and turned away from it.

When the men had gone Cabell asked, "What's wrong?  Don't you like
the picture?"

"Huh!  What's it supposed to be?"

"'England in Wintertime', it's called."

"What's that bird?"

"A robin, I suppose."

"Robin?  Huh!  Hasn't got a tail like that.  Shorter.  Hasn't got
that sort of beak, neither."

"That's right.  I didn't notice.  But fancy you remembering what a
robin's like!"

"Don't remember much about England," Gursey muttered.  "That's a
fact.  Don't want to, either."  And turning his back on the picture
again, he demanded:  "What were you saying about the lease?"

"I took up a hundred and fifty square miles," Cabell told him.
"Ten miles on each side of the river, back to the ridge on this
side and back to the scrub over there."

"That's room enough.  You could carry forty thousand sheep and two
thousand cattle on it," Gursey said.

"Ample room for the next seven years."

"AND THEN?"

Cabell gestured.  He did not say what he was thinking--that in
seven years he would be a rich man and free.

"You'll sell out and leave me to look out for myself, eh?" Gursey
said.

Cabell held his tongue.

"Sometimes I half wish McGovern WOULD come," Gursey said with a
smile.

But later, when they were sitting together after a meal, his tone
changed.  "What was it like in the settlement?"

"It's changing, getting bigger--like a town."

"Are there many people?"

"Oh, crowds of people.  Dennis has got tables and chairs you can
move about in his pub.  One shop has got a glass window ten, twelve
times as big as an ordinary window."

"I'd like to see that!"

"There's a notice 'Mind the window.  There's glass in it'."

"They want to be careful, all that glass."

"It's like a mirror.  The women look at themselves as they go
past."

"Women, too?"

"Of course.  A lot of women live there now."

"Hmn.  Did you talk to any?"

"I talked to one, yes."

"Was she young?"

"Not very old."

"I haven't seen a woman for seven years," Gursey said, "not since I
worked at Duffy's.  The missus used to treat us well, but she was
hard on her old man."

"He's dead now.  Flanagan married her."

"No!"

"Mickey Moran's got a wife, too."

"What, Deaf Mickey!  Fancy him with a woman."  After a long pause
Gursey stopped chuckling and said in a gloomy, resentful tone:
"Wonder you didn't bring back a woman, too."

Cabell flushed.

"Ha, ha!  Tell us about it.  Go on, tell us."

"There's nothing at all," Cabell grumbled.

Gursey laughed again.  "You've been with a woman.  Don't deny it.
That's what kept you.  Isn't it, now?"

"No."

Gursey let go his hand, which he had seized in his excitement.  "I
was with a woman once," he said.  "Only once.  It was at Bathurst.
She worked in the house.  I used to see her feeding the chickens.
I used to watch her bending over the feed-bucket.  One day I
cheeked the boss and he ironed me up in the woolshed.  She came
down in the night.  She was as big as the side of a house, but she
had a soft kind of skin on her back.  Next day they took me in to
Bathurst and sent me to the mines.  So I never seen her no more."

"Women all have very soft skins," Cabell said.

"That was ten years ago," Gursey said thoughtfully after a long
pause.

Next morning Sambo and Bill Penberthy came to get their cheques,
had a rum and departed for their booze-up.

Gursey watched them ride out of sight.

"You could go as far as Pyke's Crossing," Cabell suggested
compassionately.

Gursey smiled.  "You can't trick me like that," he said.  "Oh, no!"
He went back to his work and became silent and gloomy again.

Cabell began stocktaking, redrafting his sheep and preparing for
the lambing-down.  He had two thousand ewes and nearly a thousand
wethers now.  Of the ewes he had brought from Moreton Bay only
three hundred remained.  They were past their prime and their wool
deteriorating, so he decided to kill them for the skins, since it
would not pay to drove them to the nearest boiling-down works, four
hundred miles away, for sixpence a head.  He set aside a small
flock for meat and slaughtered the rest.  A big bonfire consumed
two hundred carcasses.  It was like turning to a clean page.  It
lightened his mind.

Now, he felt, he was really starting.  He took stock of his
position:  Say that his flock doubled every two years.  Averaging
his wool at ninepence a pound and his yield at three pounds to the
sheep, he could count on an income rising from about four hundred
pounds, not including cattle sent to the boilers.  Wages were
cheap.  Five hands cost him less than a hundred pounds a year.  In
seven years he reckoned on a fortune of ten thousand pounds, apart
from the value of the run, IF ALL WENT WELL--if--if--if! . . .
Hastily he crossed his fingers and pushed back a treacherous,
optimistic thought that all was sure to go well.



Chapter Twenty-seven

AND INVITES A THUNDERBOLT


He was content.  A dangerous condition, which invites thunderbolts.
Three days later one dropped on him.  Returning towards sundown
from a boundary-marking expedition along the ridge, he found
McFarlane awaiting him in the yard.

"Guid day to ye," McFarlane greeted him, as though they had met
every day of their lives in a crowded street.

Cabell returned the greeting cheerfully.  "I was going to pay you a
call as soon as I got things a bit straight here," he said.

McFarlane shook his head gloomily.  "Dinna fash yesel' aboot that,
mon," he discouraged.  "I hinna time for gossip."

"Come," Cabell laughed, "a neighbourly word's no waste of time.
You'll get few enough out here."

"Didna come away oot the wilderness for to talk," McFarlane
grumbled, following Cabell round the yard while he rubbed his horse
down with a handful of grass and put the saddle away.  Then,
bethinking himself that he had come to ask a favour, he made an
effort to be a little more friendly and added:  "That's no sayin'
I'll turn the dogs on ye, mind.  But"--he grimaced disparagingly--
"there's naethin' to tempt a man wi' your taste.  A bit weevily
parritch and a drop o' post and rails ye wouldna enjoy.  Nae, it's
a puir place."

"I've been marking boundaries," Cabell told him.  "We rub shoulders
up on the hills.  I noticed your marks."

McFarlane was suspicious at once.  "What's that?  Ye've no been
interferin' wi'em?"

"Certainly not.  I just noticed that you seem to have looked up the
poorest land in the valley."

A look of deep cunning overspread the Scotchman's red, freckled
face.  "It's nae a siller mine, I maun grant ye.  And sae I winna
hae to pay a siller mine's feu for the puir stuff.  If there wasna
sic a wheen of brazen-faced rogues in the Administration I wouldna
be askit for a penny-bit."

Cabell washed his hands and face at the waterbutt, wiped them on
the dirty piece of an old shirt which he had become accustomed to
accept as a towel, and led the Scotchman into the humpy.  Having
made tea, he removed the fly-cover from a corner of salt beef and
invited the Scotchman to sit down and eat.

But McFarlane shook his head.  "I maun be makin' tracks.  I didna
come for idle hospeetality."

Cabell added a plate of cold potatoes, a damper, a flask of rum and
a bottle of pickles to the meal.  "Come along, now," he insisted,
"or you'll offend me."

McFarlane glanced at the rum.  "Weel, if ye'd be offendit. . . .
Weel. . . ."  He took off his hat and sat down.  "Weel, just a wee
bite.  But mind ye," he warned, "I can offer ye nowt but parritch
and a wee skinny sliver o' meat in return."

When the meal was over and McFarlane's pipe was full of Cabell's
tobacco and he had mumbled and scratched his head for some time, he
came to the point.

"Ye'll mind them two bits o' nags I was tellin' ye aboot."

"The filly and the packhorse you lifted at the shanty?"

"Lifted!" McFarlane made a long face.  "Nay, nay, mon.  Keep a clip
o' your tongue.  I didna lift naethin'."

"Which you exchanged, then."

"Nay," McFarlane insisted.  "What I come by."

"What about them?"

"Weel. . . ."  McFarlane plucked the long red hairs that grew from
his nose.  "Ye wouldna like to hae them runnin' wi' your horses, I
suppose."

"You want them put in foal?"

"Och!  Did I no say to mesel' that'd be your first thocht,"
McFarlane exclaimed in disgust, slapping his knee.  "And noo ye'll
be askin' some fancy price for what comes i' the richt and proper
course o' Nature.  And that wasna my purpose ava."  This was only
partly true, but it was plain he had some other purpose up his
sleeve, for he added:  "But if ye're feared your stallion'll be for
wastin' a wee bit love--and I winna pay ye for it, mind--then ye
could keep them at opposite ends o' the run."

"But you've got plenty of room over there."

McFarlane shook his head in sad meditation upon the inhumanity of
his fellows.  "I didna think ye were sic a man, Cabell, thinkin' to
spare a mouthfu' o' grass frae a puir nag."

"Rubbish, man.  But are YOU trying to save grass?"

"Nay, it isna that," McFarlane told him, though his tone showed
that this was not a point altogether overlooked.  Then his brows
wrinkled and he grew angry.  "Winna ye mind your ain business?" he
muttered.  "It's no ony affair o' yours."

"Very well.  Run your own horses."

McFarlane grumbled to himself, pushed out his lower lip, tugged at
his nose, then said, "Weel, I wouldna say that, either.  It's a bad
business for us a'."

"Yes?  What is?"

He leant across the table.  "Ye'll mind that skunk wi' the cut on
his hand I slipped ye the word aboot?  Did ye see him?"

"At the shanty?  Yes," Cabell said, with an unaccountable sudden
quickening of his heart.

"And the maid--or woman, mair richtly speakin'?"

"Yes."

"And the young rogue wi' the laugh?"

"Yes, yes.  What about them?"

McFarlane paused, then whispered, raising his eyebrows "They're
here."

"Here?"

"Aye.  Doon the burn."  Seeing Cabell's look of amazement, almost
of consternation, he nodded agreement.  "A' honest men maun arm
theirsel' and stick thegither."

"But I haven't seen any sign of them?"

"Ye wouldna, nay.  They come eastwise frae the coast."

"When?"

"Roond noon the day the whale damn De'ils tribe o' them went by.
Drivin' a handfu' o' coos and three or four hunder horses.  They're
campit just ower ahint the swamp near the ranges."

"You're sure the woman's there?" Cabell asked anxiously.

Something in his voice made McFarlane glance up.  "She's the Old
Toaster's bitch, that," he said, shaking his head.

"Yes, yes.  But how do you know it was them?"

"Didna I hear him cursin' at her and sayin' he wasna goin' a foot
deeper into the wilderness?  And her cursin' back ten to his one,
in a most ungodly fashion?"  He shuddered.  "I wouldna touch her
wi' a ten-foot pitchfork."

Cabell frowned.  "Come, you don't know the woman."

"Nay, I didna seek to enlarge my knowledge after what I seen."

"Well, what did you see?"

McFarlane shuddered again.  "Ane nicht i' that De'il's kitchen at
Pyke's Crossing the young'un, her brother, gets lushy along wi' the
ither rascal.  They begin to quarrel, ye ken.  All of a sudden she
runs into the room, half nakit, wi' her een on fire like the
hellicat queen she is.  She screams like a loon and lashes the
big'un ower the face wi' a whip she has, till the puir brute's
cheek (I wouldna gi'e him legbail, just the same) was a' ower
bluid.  But he doesna speak a word or move an eyelash, till a' at
yince she fa's doon i' a faint.  He picks her up like a cheeld then
and carries her oot.  The same nicht I made tracks wi' my twa nags.
Ye ken, I couldna remain under the same roof after that."

Cabell became thoughtful.  When some minutes had passed in silence
the Scotchman said "Sae when I seen them today I minded thae nags
and come here to ask ye the favour o' puttin' them oot o' sicht for
me.  They wouldna think o' lookin' roond here.  Whereas, if they
see me. . . ."

Cabell roused himself.  "They'd cut your throat," he suggested,
laughing to drive away uneasy thoughts of his own.

McFarlane's long face which seemed to be made of rubber, stretched
three inches longer.  "That I wouldna care sae much aboot," he
said, and it was the truth Cabell saw, thinking of his own fears,
which were not concerned with physical violence exactly.

"All right, bring the horses," he agreed, and went out to let the
sliprails down for McFarlane to ride off.  For a long time he stood
there, looking at the stars above the ranges and thinking of the
woman Emma.

At breakfast he told Gursey and Peters that McFarlane wanted to run
his mares with the stallion and nothing more, and after breakfast
found an excuse to ride round the marsh, known now as Snakey Hollow
because of the experience he and Sambo had had there.  But, though
he found marks of a big horse and cattle camp and signs that during
the last few hours it had moved away north-westwards along the foot
of the ranges, the intruders were well out of sight.



Chapter Twenty-eight

THE MEETING


But he found them.  That was to be expected.  As long as he did not
know where they were he was restless, thinking of horse-thieves
loitering about his property.  Less definitely, but more
restlessly, he thought about the woman, setting her up as a figure
apart from the other two.  This also was natural.  To the aura of
mystery the stories of Peters and McFarlane spun around her was
added the mystery of her womanness and his conception of woman.  A
continually surprising fact that near by, perhaps within a few
days' ride, there was a woman.  He remembered clearly her strained
face, the tight mouth, the filmed eyes, a mole under the right ear,
her sharp chin.  He remembered, too, what he had not consciously
noticed in the bar at Pyke's Crossing, the shape of her frail but
full-breasted body outlined under the poncho.

One day after the lambing he made a long-deferred exploration
beyond the ranges to the north an excuse for a search.  At sundown
he saw a feather of blue smoke rising out of the scrub to the west.
He rode near enough to see evidences of vigorous pioneering in the
shape of a big bark humpy, a yard for horses, a cow-bail and stacks
of heavy building timber.  The sound of an axe came down with the
wind.  They were here to stay.

As the sun tipped the trees she came to the door of the shanty and
cooeed.  The sad intonation of that bushman's call in her high,
firm, woman's voice, the glimpse of her slight figure in a blue
dress billowing out round her in the wind, vitalized his image of
her.  For the moment, however, he was occupied with thoughts of Jem
and Dirk, who came from the scrub and plodded side by side towards
the house.  A dangerous neighbour to have, this Jem.  What could a
woman like that be doing with him about the place?

The shutter of the night fell quickly, but he stayed some time
watching the gutter of pale light at window and door.  Imagine how
different life must be in this bush with a woman.  A new picture
formed of cleanliness, comfort, crudities magicked away.

He thought he would ask Peters more about her when he got back, but
the sight of McFarlane leaving the homestead as he came over the
hills put him into a bad humour for some reason.  He hung about the
scrub to avoid the Scotchman, and when he got in told them nothing,
except that he had seen the roan stallion covering one of
McFarlane's mares.

Gursey and Peters glanced at each other.  Gursey was even a little
more sullen than usual and Peters looked worried.

Twice before the month was out Cabell disappeared again.  Each time
he came back he looked with deeper disgust at the humpy, its rutted
floor covered with the mess of dogs, men's spittle, scraps of food.
These were things he had hardly noticed for a long time.  Now he
even complained about the greasy rag they used for a towel.  He had
not seemed to mind it before.

The long summer dragged on and on.  For weeks a dry wind blew from
the north-west, like an endless flock of firebirds passing over.
The green grass withered away.  The men's nails split back to the
quick.  When they stroked their beards the hair crackled like
paper.  They could not sweat.

Still, it was a fat year.  When Cabell first came to the valley he
had planted corn down by the river.  There must have been some
thistle-seeds in the grain he brought with him.  The thistle spread
year by year--a patch here, a patch there--till this year it
covered the whole valley.  In places it was more than ten feet
high, obliterated all tracks and stifled even a man on horseback
with a sense of diminished horizons.  Everyone suffered from the
feeling of being hedged in.  Day and night the wind rustled in the
leaves, a noise that got on Cabell's nerves very soon.  He was
always expecting more blacks to come creeping on him, and God knows
what else.

A plague of rats came out of the north.  They burrowed into the
store, consumed meal and flour, and when he built platforms five
feet high to keep the bags from them, leapt up and gnawed cunning
holes so that the flour ran out on to the ground below.  He wrapped
the bags up in tarpaulins and the rats began to eat saddles and
boots.  Candles disappeared and slush lamps were empty in the
morning.  He awakened and found them struggling and squeaking under
his blankets, hairy, heavy, hot rats.  He could hear them running
about the floor, snarling and biting each other.  The men slept in
their boots, with their hats on.  They said the rats would soon get
ravenous and begin to eat their hair and toenails.

This was the year 1850, the first great historic fat year at
Cabell's Reach.  The lambing gave an increase of one hundred and
twenty per cent.  All living things multiplied.  Even the ants came
in hordes greater than ever.  Up dozens of beaten tracks they
toiled over the slope to the barrels of molasses-soaked sugar in
the store.  The strong, sickly smell of them was on every mouthful
of food.  There was the little black ant that immolated itself in
millions to reach a grain of food in the cracks of the table-top,
flying ants, the fierce bull-ant which secreted itself in the toes
of boots, in coats, and bit with a pair of red-hot pincers.  These
things poured into the homestead in milliards, in unstemable
armies.

There was a plague of snakes at the same time.  To go about on foot
in the thistle was dangerous.  The black yellow-bellied snake and
the more poisonous brown one were everywhere.  As he lay awake at
night Cabell could hear them hissing in the darkness.  Sometimes
several would hiss together, like leaves shaken in the breeze.  He
pulled the blankets tighter over his head.  The darkness seemed to
be full of snakes.  This went on night after night till he could
bear it no longer.  An assault on the debris piled about the humpy
discovered a nest of snakes under some sheepskins a few inches from
the head of his bunk.  But there were ever more and more snakes--
curled asleep on the middle of the floor when he came home, twisted
among the harness in the storeroom bloated from a feed of rats,
rustling away from under his feet in the long grass, even in his
blankets.  He was afraid to touch anything, to take a step in the
darkness.

The thousand and one petty annoyances of life in the bush which,
exaggerated by a good season, he became conscious of again.
Dingoes in stronger force.  Eagles carrying off his lambs.  Every
mug of water wriggled with the tadpoles of mosquitoes.  Venomous
black centipedes bred in the shingles of the roof and dropped on
his bunk at night, into his clothes, into his food.  Flies. . . .
Andy, one of the shepherds, fell asleep after a drop too much rum
and a blowfly got at his ear.  Cabell syringed it with some
virulent sheep mixture for three days, saved his life probably, but
burned out his hearing.

One morning Cabell rose with a dull pain in his jaw.  At the first
mouthful of hot tea he gasped aloud and clutched at the side of his
face.

"Aha!" Gursey said.  "Toothache."

"It's nothing," he countered quickly, and hastened to pour himself
a rum, but the sticky, sweet liquor only made the pain worse.

Gursey brought a pair of pliers from the store.  "Open your gob and
I'll yank it out for you."

"Go to the devil!" Cabell answered, and snatched up his hat.

In the doorway Gursey grinned, wider than was necessary, to display
his gapped gums.  "You'll have 'em all out soon like the rest of
us," he said with satisfaction.

Cabell went down to the sheep pens, where the lambs were yarded for
marking.  Ghastly work.  The soft cods had to be torn from the
rams, the tails docked, the ears marked, ewes on the left, wethers
on the right.

For two hundred yards round the pens the trampling feet of the
sheep had worn all the grass away.  The hot winds sucked up gusts
of stinging dust.  It filled the men's eyes and gritted between
their teeth.

Gursey lifted the lambs and pushed them along the platform to
Cabell, holding their hind legs apart while Cabell split the bag
with his knife, squeezed out the cods, then drew the tendons with
his teeth.  No one else had teeth good enough.  Then he docked the
tail and blood spurted over them from the stump.  Peters took the
lamb and staunched the wounds with tar, marked the ears, and
dropped the feebly bleating animal into the next pen.  Soon they
were covered in blood.  The heat beat down, the flies buzzed round
them, crawled over Cabell's tightly set lips.  His mouth was slimy
and acrid-tasting, his face stiff with dried blood.  And all the
time needles of throbbing agony thrust up into his temple.  Worse
than pain was the thought of himself with his fine white teeth
gone, like these others.

Gursey mocked him.  "You won't be doing this much longer, either.
Once the rot sets in nothing'll save them."

After three days of stubborn agony he gave in.  He went away by
himself, hiding the big pliers under his shirt.  For ten minutes he
wrestled with the fiery molar, splintering his jaw and half choking
himself with his blood.  When he could bring himself to examine his
teeth in the mirror he saw that, sure enough, they were no longer
white but yellow, with dark lines under the gums.  Some were loose.
Yes, they were going.  It was the sign and symbol of the decay that
was eating away the life he guarded inside him, as the white-ants
ate away the great gum-trees, though they flowered till they fell.
Hadn't his father and mother kept their teeth till twice his age?

And still another seven years.  Now, looking back on the seven
years that had gone, what an immensity of time this was!  Seven
more years of heat, dust, rats, ants, mud, drought and lamb-
marking.

Seven more years to endure the eternal, unconquerable stupidity of
sheep.  How he hated them!  Resigned, fatalistic, always ready to
lie down and die, always being lost, bogged, picked to death by
crows, gutted by dingoes, only kept on their feet by the constant,
exhausting expenditure of his will.  Pale from the operation in the
scrub, he came back to the job of driving a mob to the yards for
crutching--the cutting away of wool from the rump to save the
animals from being blown by flies.  As usual, it was a struggle to
get them through the gate.  They stood stock still and stared into
the yard, bleating timidly, while he danced about in the dust with
wild falsetto shrieks; the side of his face was swollen out as big
as an apple and bands of pain stiffened the jaw.  As usual, he had
to seize the leaders and carry them into the pens--sixty pounds
apiece--and, of course, they ran out again as soon as he turned his
back, and the flock scattered.  He brought them up once more, once
more shrieked with his cracked, sore voice, once more staggered
into the pen with the leaders one by one, the hot panting bodies
clutched to his, the sunlight pressing on his shoulders like a
sheet of hot metal.  The leaders started to escape a second time.
He met one in the gateway and punched at it blindly--a blow
straight between the eyes.  It sagged down, scrambled to its
forefeet in the dust, to rise again, then rolled over with a little
bleat, its quick, pitiable breath expiring, jerked convulsively--
dead.  He rubbed his bruised fist in his hand and suffered a
revulsion as he gazed at its upturned, helpless eyes.  He was
ashamed and hid the body under the woolshed, felt uneasy all that
day and the next, wondering if anybody had seen.  The jangle of his
nerves softened into self-pity.

He harboured resentment against Gursey, who would not let him talk
in the hour between supper and turning in.  He wanted the small
comfort of reciting all these woes aloud, but every evening Gursey
got up from the table and went down to Peters in the men's hut.  He
found that most of all he missed Gursey's passionate upflarings of
rage, prophesying scornfully his return to England as a rich man.
He could have drawn a lot of consolation from this.  But Gursey
withheld himself, brooding with Peters over a dark secret.

Thrown back on himself, he sought relief in his daydreams, but
whatever fantasy he manufactured turned into a girl in a dripping
wet dress, and sooner or later they were together in a dark shed
and he was running his hand over the soft skin of her back.
"Beastly," he thought, pushing the image aside, and called up the
ever-vivid memory of his mother to protect him from it, but
imperceptibly the darkness fell, the soft flesh grew up under his
hand.  He ground his forehead against the frame of the bunk till
his eyes smarted.  Then he fell asleep and dreamt again.

He disappeared for the fourth time.  The evening he returned, dark
and silent, Gursey said, "McFarlane was here."

Cabell turned his eyes away.  "Yes?"

"Wants us to run his sheep for a while.  He's going down to Moreton
Bay to meet his old woman on the boat."

"He's bringing a woman?"

"Yes, why not?"

Cabell frowned.  Suddenly he burst out, "The man must be a monster.
The man who brings a woman into this loneliness and filth and
disorder ought to be horsewhipped."  He spoke angrily, yet it was
easy to see that he was not thinking of McFarlane, but of something
quite different altogether.

Gursey watched narrowly, as he soaked lumps of cinder-crusted
damper in his gravy and carried them blindly to his mouth.

Cabell seemed to have been waiting for just such an opportunity to
unburden himself.  The words poured out.  He was quite pale, as if
enraged, with a lofty, chivalrous indignation, though a moment
before he had been eating in deep if rather restless silence.
"Whipping's too good for them.  They ought to be shot.  Even
shooting's too good for some men in this country."

The bleat of the sheep trailing home came up from the valley--the
sound that went on more or less every hour of the day and night,
whimpering, senseless and monotonous.

He clutched his ears, then rushed at the door and kicked it shut.

Gursey continued to gaze at him, feeding his mouth automatically.

With a gesture of disgust Cabell sat down again.  After a while he
went on in a calmer voice, "Yes, there are men who beat women, like
cattle.  But that's not the worst.  Not by a long way, I can tell
you.  My father hit my mother across the mouth with the back of his
hand once.  He was drunk.  I saw it.  Ach, it's vile, unbelievable.
But even that's not the worst."  He waved towards the closed door.
"To bring a woman out here.  That's worse.  Even for a man it's
terrible.  You know that.  But to shut a woman in here--like a
prisoner--a woman . . . not like a man, you know . . . especially
if she's got any breeding, any"--he fumbled after a word--
"sensibility.  Yes, sensibility. . . ."  His voice trailed off, but
the next moment he banged the table with his fist and exclaimed
angrily, "If you STRANGLED a man like that it wouldn't be a sin.
It might even be--the best thing you'd ever done."  He glanced up.
"What're you looking at me like that for?"

Gursey also was pale.  He turned away and began picking his teeth.

"Sulky swine," Cabell grumbled.  "Don't you ever have a decent word
to say, damn you?"

Gursey rose and went out to the men's hut.  He found Peters mixing
flour and water for a damper.

"He's been there again," Gursey told him.  "This time he SPOKE to
her."

"What, has he telled 'ee so?"

"Told me?" Gursey laughed.  "Yes, he told me he's bringing her
here."

"Man alive!" Peters exclaimed, turning up blue eyes of alarm.
"Don't say that!"

"Yes, it's clear as day.  When the bull's on heat it wants to
fight.  He's thinking how to do that cove in."

Peter's mouth gaped.  "Oh sakes, it be all my doing!  All be broke
up into small splinters with one hit from that Jem."  He ruffled
his sparse grey hair desperately.  "If I did but know one sure-
certain thing against her to tell him!"

"Spare yourself, man.  He wouldn't listen."

"Oh, oh!" Peters moaned.  "Such poisonous things be females to a
man setting eyes on them for the first long time; not better'n
clover to bullocks coming on it all on a sudden.  She seems so
small-like and frail as a wisp of feather when he hasn't seed
nothing but beasts and men for a twelvemonth.  That whitish skin,
them daisy feet, them little fingers. . . .  Just to see her lay
something down, gentle as the thistle blow-aways falling--'tis as
good as watching one of the prize buckjumpers on a two-year-old."
He shook his head sadly.  "But 'tis only seeming.  That it is.  A
bushy's no more'n a brat unteethed wi' 'em.  And on top of all the
ruts in him and a's blind as a winter bat."

Gursey muttered.  "I hope he's served the same as Peppiott."

Peters stared.  "What's that?  'Ee don't sound much like his
cobber, saying that."

"Ah!"  Gursey waved him away.  "What's to become of me, eh?  What's
the first thing she'd do when she come here?  Turn me out.  That's
what she'd do."

"Turn 'ee out?  And why so?"

Gursey scowled.  "Mind your own business."

It was true.  Cabell had spoken to her.

As he rode cautiously along the edge of the scrub that looked out
on the Surface homestead she came out of the trees suddenly and
confronted him.  She did not speak, but eyed him with the curious
upwards-sideways stare of her violet-coloured eyes that was at once
covert and penetrating.

He was deprived of breath for the moment, as though by a violent
blow in the stomach.

The morning sun fell full upon her.  It glinted on her black hair,
tousled by the wind, which blew her wide skirt out behind like a
flag flapping against her horse's rump.  Around them the trees
trembled, the tall grass bent to the swishing waves of wind, but
this violent movement, with the agitation of his own pounding
heart, only deepened her cool and statuesque immobility.  His sense
of her as a being apart from her surroundings, even as one somehow
superior to himself, calmer, stronger, wiser and more enduring, was
verified thereby.  She sat there like a piece of stone, watching
him doubtfully, defiantly, a little angrily, but in her eyes he saw
again the shadows that vouched for her humanness, linking her to
some intimate chord of sad memory--a memory of tender, unhappy eyes
gazing down into his own long, long ago.

The horses pawed impatiently and shook their bridles, irritated by
the wind.

"So--well, we're neighbours, then," he said lamely and took off his
hat.  "I just noticed--"

With the decisive, impatient gesture of one who has penetrated all
fair-seeming human masks she cut him short and demanded:  "Why are
you here again today?"

"Again?"  He flushed.

"Yes, yes.  You were here twice last month.  Pat O'Connor saw you."

He pulled on his hat slowly to give himself time to think.  "Well--
as a matter of fact, yes.  I was riding past, you see, and--"

"Out with it!" she said brusquely.  "You've lost something."

"Not at all.  Oh, no."

"Yes, you have, and you think he's taken it--Jem.  Peters has been
talking to you."

"Excuse me," he hastened to reassure her, smiling nervously.
"There's nothing of the kind.  Nothing at all.  I was just
passing."

"Oh, just passing!" she said scornfully, glancing round at the
empty bush.

"Exploring," he mumbled.

She looked at him closely and seemed to notice for the first time
how pale and excited his face was.  Withdrawing a little on the
saddle, she pulled her gelding's head up and backed down the narrow
track between the trees as though looking for room to turn.  She
caught his eye again, fixed on her anxiously.  "Don't come back
again, please," she murmured, confused.  "Whatever you're looking
for, don't come back here."  Now, suddenly, her resolution had
vanished and she seemed to have grown smaller, slender--an illusion
created by the wind beating on her from a new angle and wrapping
the billowy dress close to her body.  It defined the straight line
of her slight back and shoulders, one of which, Cabell noticed, had
the same nervous trick of hunching itself up a little higher than
the other he had observed in convicts waiting for the lash to come
down.

But his eyes fastened on her hands and stared at them in surprise.
They were raw, big, capable hands.  But it was as Peters said.
Used to men's hands, with tar-ingrained and cracked nails, brown
and horny on the backs, smooth on the palms from working in greasy
wool, he was overcome to see her fingers on the clumsy greenhide
reins, trying to pull the big-headed beast away from a sweet crop
of berang.

"What made you come up here?" he blurted out.  "The blacks are
devils.  Absolute devils."  Involuntarily he stabbed his spurs into
his horse's ribs, jerking it forward a few paces.

She backed her gelding till the wall of tall blue-gums stopped her,
and she continued to search his face with distrustful curiosity.
Now the sadness and trouble of her eyes became a kind of tortured,
animal suspicion.  She looked like a frightened animal forced into
a corner.

They played a game.  As his face showed more compassionate at the
sight of her shrinking away in strange timidity she became paler
and more timid still, and the preconceived notion of her he had
built up out of himself and scraps of gossip grew stronger.

"Tell me," he said quickly.  "Are you in any trouble here?"

At this the mask of her self-assurance was quite gone and her face,
though not the slightest flicker of change passed across the finely
etched lines at the ends of her slit eyes, across her tightly drawn
mouth, her flat, high-boned cheeks, was yet utterly changed, as a
face changes in a dream.  Perhaps it was merely that, moving from
the glare of sunlight, the face shed its crude shadows and took on
subtler shades through which these lines, these eyes, these cracked
lips showed more minutely clear.  But changed or not, there,
indisputably, was a face marked with the print of a ghastly life, a
ghastly tragic life which he was too innocent to understand, though
the general effect he felt powerfully enough.

"I suppose it's impudent--unpardonable," he began, emboldened as
the strength seemed to flow out of her.  "But a woman--a woman like
you--in the bush--with that--that fellow Jem. . . .  Of course, I
don't understand . . . only what I've heard . . . only. . . ."  He
hesitated.

"All lies," she spat out at him.  "It's Peters who told you that
drunken gossip.  Jem's my cousin and my brother's partner, if you
want to know."  Again her face had changed, flushed and resentful.

He stared at the slim column of pale neck, rising from the ruffle
of wind-blown fichu.  An automatic gesture of concealment, reacting
without thought to his spoken curiosity and his probing eyes, she
lifted her hand and drew the loose white cambric up to the nape of
her neck, not troubling, strangely, about the furrow of bosom
exposed by its billowing in front.

Then she went on, in her low, husky voice, ungraciously, as though
he had forced her to explain:  "I wanted to get away from all that
lot, so we came up here.  I thought we'd have some peace and quiet
here.  My brother Dirk's only a lad, and it's no company for him
the sort of men he was mixing with round the Swamp and Pyke's
Crossing."

He nodded, to fill a gap of silence, during which she watched him
impatiently, wanting him to go.  Her impatience broke into words
again:  "Now YOU must come prowling round.  God knows why.  As if
you hadn't seen what he's like.  As if you didn't know."

"Yes, I guessed.  That's why I came."

She frowned.  "Why should you meddle--why?"  Then, brushing that
aside, turned exasperation and scorn into an appeal:  "Oh, don't
you see that I came here because of my brother, not myself?  I can
look after myself.  But all the scum of the earth was down there
tempting the devil in Jem to drink and fight.  And Dirk--of course
he's wild to be in any trouble.  Jem might have killed somebody.
And what then?  They'd take Dirk along too and hang him or put him
in--one of those places.  Oh, can't you see that?"

"You ought to get rid of the fellow, cousin or not," he said.
"He's dangerous."

She laughed scornfully again, but whether at him or at his
proposition was not clear.  He coloured up and grumbled:  "All I
meant was I might be able to start your brother with a few ewes-
lambs.  Five hundred or so.  Four hundred," he corrected himself,
but glanced at her and made it five hundred again.  "It would be
good business for me, too," he said.

But before she could reply the sound of a horse coming across the
flats stiffened her on the saddle.  She listened, then waved at him
and said "Oh, go now; quick, before he sees you!  Go!  Hurry!"

He craned and saw the horseman cantering along the edge of the
scrub, five hundred yards away.  In the clear air the bearded face
was sharply defined.  He was not at all inclined to go.  "You could
have the lambs tomorrow," he told her.  "I could put in some good
Durhams and a couple of horses.  There's better land than this in
the valley near me--that is, near McFarlane and me," he added
quickly.

She pulled her horse round and tried to ride past him, but he
blocked the narrow way.

"Will you think about it, then?"

"Yes, I'll think about it," she said.  "But go now, for heaven's
sake."

He drew back and let her ride out.  She disappeared among the grass
and a few minutes later came up with the horseman from a different
direction.  They talked a while, turned and rode away.

Cabell rode slowly home. . . .

His mind was like a fertile field overshadowed by a promise of
gracious rain.  Stirrings of hidden life, of buried seeds, of
sleeping fruits. . . .

But he thought, "Pity I destroyed those three hundred old ewes."



Chapter Twenty-nine

THE FIGHT


She sent no answer.

He felt an immense relief.  ("Now, how was I to spare five hundred
lambs?")  But at night--in the blank hour before turning in, or
when he awakened from a bad dream--then he felt as though cold
stone walls were closing in and crushing him.  "Seven years, seven
years!" he groaned to himself.

Dawn was the merciful gateway to another day of thought-
obliterating work.

Peters rubbed his hands.  "There now, what fools us be, imagining!"

Gursey kept one eye closed for a long while before he answered.
"Just wait.  Have you heard him dreaming?"

"But hasn't he told us all there is to know now?" Peters argued.
"Didn't he tell me to keep an eye on the horses lest Jem be
tempted?"

"What if Jem was tempted?  He'd be angry, eh?  Or pleased?"

Peters started when the question sank in.  "Eh?  What's that?"

Gursey winked.

But Jem stole none of Cabell's horses.  If Cabell was disappointed
even himself did not know, perhaps, lacking a key to violent
dreams.

The event of the month was Sambo's return, green and shaky, from a
long spree at Pyke's Crossing.  "Aw, that ain't drinkin'," he
growled.  "Ain't much more'n water against what I've had other
places.  Lick the sweat off yer mug day after yeh've had a nobbler,
stone-blind on the spot.  That's drinkin'."

"How's that old Fritz?" Peters inquired.

"He sold out.  A Paddy and fourteen kids moved in."

"Mickey O'Connor?"

"That's the one.  Knows you, Boss."

"He saved my life."

"Got a nut loose," Sambo said.  "Tells everybody to send his kid
home if they sees him.  Howls like a kid himself."

"Hmn.  Does he, eh?  Still?"

"Dang the lousy brat," Peters grumbled.  "Does t' old scut think
God made man to scurry round like a pack of hounds after his
strays?"

Cabell shook his head, frowned.

Gursey nudged Peters.  "Just wait.  Just you wait a little longer,"
he said angrily.  "You'll see how his mind works."

"'Tis far to see behind that dark face," Peters said gloomily.

Far indeed.

In 1851, the following year, Cabell wrote to his sister:


. . . You better forget me, as if I had never existed.  I have
ruined myself.  And it seems as if I had known all the time.  Yes,
as if I HAD KNOWN FROM THE VERY FIRST MOMENT.  When I think back I
seem always on the point of discovering, but some treacherous devil
blinded me.  A hundred and one things cried out to warn me, but I
would not see or listen.  Oh, why?


How often he tormented his heart with that same question!  Why, oh,
why did I do this incomprehensible, this mad thing that utterly
destroyed me?  But the dark demon does not answer questions.  The
dark demon sits in its secret chamber and no one knows what it is
spinning there, a shining fabric of bitterness or a sackcloth of
delight.  Men long for peace and rest.  They long, too, for
achievement--life.  But to live is to throw oneself into the stream
of pain and experience.  No one can do so willingly.  A man has to
shut his eyes for that leap.

Two strangers came into the valley from north-west across the
range.  "Looking out country," they explained.

Cabell waved up the valley.  "Past the red hill is anyone's."

"We've got thirty miles of river behind the range.  A humpy and
yards on it and all."

Cabell jumped.  "Eh?  Humpy and yards?"

"Yes.  Jem Surface must be finding it tight round here.  He's
pushing out further--Burnett way."

When they counted-out two mornings later Cabell was missing.

"Good-bye, Jem," Gursey said bitterly, "and good-bye me."

"Oh, no, no!  'Twas only yesterday he talked of England.  Seven
years come Christmas and he'd be back home, 'twas so he spoke.
Bain't possible he'd yoke up with that lot."

"Ain't possible he'd put his friend's neck in the squeezer, is it?
Ain't possible he'd do men in for the sake of a few sheep?  Ach,
you don't know him yet."  He whistled up his dogs.  "There'll be
skin and hair flying behind those hills tonight!" he shouted back.

"Aie! aie!" Peters groaned.  "They'll kill him, and it will be all
my doing, all my doing."

Gursey sat alone at the door of the homestead humpy after supper,
gazing at the ranges to the north, across which the newly risen
moon slashed the dark shadows of gullies.  Beyond them his fate was
being decided, and he was glad of it; yes, in his heart, he was
glad of it, because for him as well the longing to live warred with
the desire for peace and rest.  Even as he shuddered at the thought
of what awaited him outside this safe and serene valley, his eyes
turned towards the cross in the southern sky, and his blood
stirred.  Over there was the great world.  Men--women--a new
people. . . .

Cabell arrived at the Surface homestead just as the moon was
pushing her crooked back over the blue-gums.  Dogs began barking
when he was still a long way off.  He spurred his tired horse into
a canter, seeing figures appear in the doorway.

Emma caught a glimpse of him as he crossed a lane of moonlight, and
she, too, shuddered with the chilly premonition that her peace, her
precarious and bitterly won security, was going into the melting-
pot of life again.  Oh, would there never be an end of it?

"I left the lines out in the waterhole, Dirk," she said quickly.
"Go, take them in, won't you?"  She sighed when he was gone.

Jem came up from the cow-bail and stood at her elbow, shaggy and
black in the moonlight, like a big, slow-witted faithful dog,
waiting for orders.  Frantically she tried to think of something
that would get him out of the way, but invention failed when the
simplest of excuses would have done.

Suddenly a little stab of exasperation distracted her thoughts.
Why did I send those men back to Pyke's Crossing that way?  I might
have known they'd tell him.

Cabell emerged from the thistle and dismounted.

"Good day."

"Good evening."

They studied each other, trying to pierce the inky shadows in which
the moonlight hid their eyes.

Slow of speech, slow to understand, Jem growled a welcome.  "Water
round the back for the nag."

"All right."  Cabell began to unfasten the girth, and Jem turned
inside to put the kettle back on the fire for a tired traveller.

She looked round to make sure he had gone, and ran out to Cabell.
"What have you come back for?" she whispered fiercely.  "Quick--
what is it?"

"Business," he grumbled.

"What business?  Why tonight?"

"Well, aren't you going off next week?"

She knotted her fingers.  Then furiously, her face knotted into
black creases of anger where the moonlight shadows fell--an
impressive sight for just the reason that she had to express a
swelling rage in a whisper, without a movement that would attract
Jem--"Its you who's driving us away," she said.  "I hope you're
satisfied now."

"Why, I offered--"

She beat the air.  "All I want--to be left alone.  Don't you
understand?"

Their gestures flashed across the wall of the humpy, swept the
grass.

"Anyhow, I've come to see him.  It doesn't concern you."  He went
on pulling the saddle off.  The horse shook itself, lay down and
rolled.

"Ah," she spat at him, pushing her face up close so that her hot
breath set his cheek twitching, "don't you think I've been in this
country long enough now--in the bush--among men?  I'm not blind.
You're no better than dogs."  Her voice rose under the noise the
horse made scrambling to its feet, but she stopped abruptly,
hearing Jem lumber across the room, and recovered her place at the
door with a leap as he thrust his head out to consider them with
vague, heavy eyes and say, "Tea's ready in here."  He went in
again; Emma went in, too, and Cabell, after hitching his trousers
and squaring his shoulders, followed.

In the smoky light of the slush lamp Jem recognized Cabell.  "Huh.
You!"

"You remember me, then?"

"I do that."

"We met at Pyke's Crossing," Cabell insisted truculently.

"So we did."  But Jem's face showed no resentment.  He was too busy
wondering at a sudden change in Emma, who stood beside him,
studying Cabell sideways with her catlike stare.  Without
understanding, he sensed something between them.  Cabell watched
her from under beetling eyebrows, his thick lower lip protruberant
and damp, his scar livid.  Before the scrutiny her face turned down
and away, one hand crept over her shoulder, clutched the collar of
her dress and drew it up to cover the nape of her neck.

Glancing round the big room, whitewashed, spotless, Cabell thought:
Ah, she sleeps in there, then.  Behind hessian curtains he could
see the red poncho spread over a bunk.  At this end of the room
where they stood were flyproof safes, three bunks with neatly
folded blankets, the usual table and benches, a bucket of
maidenhair fern trailing down from the rafters, fresh green boughs
of gum-leaves to catch the flies.  No scraps, grease, dog-dung.  An
absolute paradise to his eyes.

A boy with a loose mouth and weak chin, easily recognizable,
nevertheless, as an O'Connor, was sitting at the table with both
hands round a pannikin, sucking up tea noisily.

The remains of a meal, plates, a bottle. . . .

"Take a seat, mate," Jem said.  "Wet your thirst."

Cabell waved testily.  "I've no time.  I've come to see you about--
him."  He nodded at young O'Connor, who put down his pannikin and
looked quickly at Emma.

Jem glanced down and scratched in his overgrown hair.  A clod of a
man, with black hands, stiff-jointed, like two lumps of stone,
stony gestures, words like stones on his tongue.  He seemed to have
to choke them out.  But when he looked at Emma he became somehow
strangely lost to his surroundings--tender, brooding, though
doubtful and afraid.  "What's that?" he grunted, coming back.
"Pat?  What's wrong with him?"

"You've got to send that boy back home at once," Cabell blurted out
in the high, arrogant voice of his nervousness.  "That's what I
came here for.  To tell you."

Jem took his pipe from between the stumps of teeth.

"You took him away from his parents.  They're distracted.  You had
no right."

"Ho?"

"I promised O'Connor I'd send him home.  So I've come for him."

"Ho, ho!  So you've come for him, eh?"  He put his pipe away in his
pocket.

"Jem!"  Emma seized his arm.  "Hold your tongue.  And you"--she
flew out at Cabell--"you leave us alone.  We don't trouble you."

He turned his eyes on the floor.  "I've just heard from O'Connor,
you see.  He specially asked me. . . .  You see, he saved my life.
It's the least I can do."

"Heavens!" Emma cried.  "What does the boy matter?  He'd be off
drinking somewhere if he wasn't here."

"No place for a lad," Cabell said provokingly.  "These horses--you
know perfectly well. . . .  He'll be landed in jail before he knows
where he is."

Jem snatched his arm free.  "Hey, mate, you've got a high-and-
mighty tongue there.  What's that about my horses?"

But Emma pushed him back.  "No, no fighting, Jem.  Remember--oh,
remember the last. . . ."

He scowled and sat down with his back half turned to the door.
"Let him be off, then.  I've got no quarrel with him."

She turned eagerly to Cabell.  "If that's all you want, you can
have him when we've mustered.  I swear it."

O'Connor began to whimper.  "Don't let him take me, Jem.  Me old
man'll skin me."

Emma waved to silence him.  "He'll come," she assured Cabell.  "The
minute the horses are in.  I swear it."

O'Connor looked at her defiantly.  "You can't make me.  Tell the
boss what I seen. . . ."

She wrung her hands under Cabell's nose.  "What more?  Won't you go
now?"  She grabbed hold of his wrist, and he felt as though a piece
of ice had been laid on his pulse.  A step at a time she forced him
back to the door, exerting all the unexpected strength of her
little body, which laboured against his.  Her breasts crushed
against his arm, her hair brushed his face.

He planted his feet.  "No!" he shouted excitedly.  "I came on
purpose.  I'm not afraid of him."

Jem drummed his fist on his knee and watched them darkly.

"That's the cove I told you. . . ." Pat O'Connor was saying.  "In
the scrub with him she was--if you want to know."

The words stopped their struggle.  They turned and looked guiltily,
expectantly at Jem.  He glowered up at them, then leapt to his feet
and ran at her, glared down into her eyes, strode back to the
table, ran at her again, gestured, thrust both hands into his hair.

Involuntarily she cringed her head before the gaze of his sombre,
dumb eyes.

"Ah!"  He let go a pent-up breath.  "Ah!"  Incoherently he cried
out at her, but not angrily--rather with a humble kind of entreaty.

Cabell jumped between them.  "Don't hit!  Don't you dare.  A woman--
don't raise a finger. . . ."

Jem brushed aside a scarcely perceptible impediment.

Cabell recovered his balance against the table and threw all his
weight on to Jem's shoulder.  The walls shook as Jem thudded
against an upright.  He stayed there, flashing his eyes and slowly
grating his stony hands together.

Cabell turned on her.  "It's true, then.  He bullies you.  He ought
to be choked--choked, d'you hear?"  He waved his fists madly--with
bony flushed face, burning eyes, quivering beak of a nose like an
angry sparrow-hawk's.

But she was not listening.  She screamed and covered her face with
her hands.

He spun round and met a whirlwind of fists that stretched him flat
on his back.

She shrieked again and began to gabble at Jem.

Cabell rose slowly and shook his head.  The walls lurched.  He felt
a sensation of burning at the corners of his eyes, and two fans of
white spread over his bony cheeks.

Jem was standing in front of Emma, listening, gazing dejectedly at
the ground, his hands at his side.

Before he could turn, Cabell landed heavily on the point of his
jaw.  The big man thudded on to his knees.

Emma gasped incredulously.  "You've knocked him down!"

But in the next instant Jem sprang up and flung himself at Cabell.

Cabell retreated before the sledgehammer fists.  He fell against
the table and remained there, supporting an ineffectual guard,
grunting as each blow struck home.  But even worse than the pain
was the sight of Jem, his head down like a mad bull, swinging his
arms as though driven by a force that had taken complete control of
him and must work itself out.  He gathered his failing strength and
ripped in an uppercut that would have floored any ordinary man, but
Jem felt nothing.  It was true--he went mad fighting.

Dirk ran in at this moment, but the woman held him back.

"Not you, Dirk," she said, and pushed the lad behind her.

Cabell sprawled over the table, and his fingers closed on something
hard--the bottle.  He picked it up.

"Yes, hit him with it, hit him with it!" the woman screamed.  Her
voice was harsh.

With every ounce of strength left him he brought the bottle down on
Jem's skull.  The glass splintered and a fountain of sweet-smelling
rum drenched Cabell's face.  He closed his eyes to steady himself,
heard a crash as the table went over with Jem on top of it.

"My God!"  Emma stared unbelievingly at the big body stretched out
among the wreckage of table and crockery.  Its hands were already
dabbled in blood from the gaping wound on its forehead.

Dirk snatched up the lamp, which had rolled spluttering to his
feet, and ran forward to hold it over Jem's face.

"Is he?  Is he?" she asked eagerly.  In her tense, expectant pose
over the fallen man there was something rather terrible, and
something more terrible still in the sigh, of weariness, of
exasperation, with which she turned away as Dirk shook his head.

"Stunned," he said.  "Get some water."

She looked at Cabell.  "Only stunned," she said, in the same
exasperated tone as when she had accused him of injuring her by
nearly getting himself killed.  Then she was gone from his blurred
vision, where the gaping faces of Dirk and Pat O'Connor floated and
merged.  In a second or two she returned with a pannikin of water,
which she flung in his eyes.

His brain cleared.  He could let go the wall and stand up.  "I
came--really--to ask you about those sheep," he said.

"Yes?"

"Have you decided?"

She gave him a long, hard, calculating stare.  It probed,
estimated, and weighed him with a shrewd knowledge, a tart,
disillusioned knowledge--a stare that exposed the secrets of her
own heart if only he could have seen.  It considered the body on
the floor, swept him from head to feet, speculated on his restless
eyes, his sensual mouth.  She drew a deep breath and her breasts
swelled under the thin dress.  The shadows lifted from her eyes for
a moment.  Her tight lips relaxed.  She smiled.  "Well, well. . . .
Perhaps."

"When will you come for them?"

"Sooner or later."

He picked up his hat and went slowly towards the door, still
panting.

"And Pat?"  She smiled again, bitterly.

"What's that?"  He turned back.  "Oh, yes.  He's got to go home to
his father.  I promised that."

"Very well."

Her darkly smiling face baffled him, at once slavish, threatening,
grimly amused.  As he rode away through the moonlight he pulled up
suddenly, confronted by those eyes, staring at him out of the
future.  "What have I promised her?" he asked himself, horrified.



Chapter Thirty

THE BARGAIN


When he came to this part of his story Cabell used to lay great
stress on the terrible year it was--the rats, the ants, the snakes,
the sweeping fires in the thistle before the rain broke, painting a
harrowing picture of his discomfort and loneliness.  Yes, he told
us, he might easily have sold out and gone back to England then.
He often thought of it secretly.  He seemed anxious to make us
understand that he was not altogether to blame for what followed--
his treatment of Gursey, for instance, and the Black Year.

There was a moment after he returned from that bullock journey and
faced the work of pioneering again when his overworked will began
to tire.  He had come to think of England as a place of fresh and
perennial beauty, where life was richer and gayer, where the land
burst spontaneously into gardens and existence moved to a gentle
rhythm and people were kindly and wise and good.  On the other
hand, this country: hard work, uncertainty, prickling annoyances,
exile from all graces; the companionship of old convicts, daft
shepherds, men who had renounced everything but the momentary and
immediate in the struggle with the country, whose only talk was of
dogs, cattle, sheep, scab and rain; and the very galling sight of
Curry and Carney and Flanagan and Dennis growing rich twice as fast
as he.  He had to defend himself against the tug of that alluring
dream by tying himself down.  (Did he not admit afterwards that he
KNEW from the first moment he saw her?)  But why?  One of the
unanswerable questions.  Only the dark demon could have answered
it--that secret, stubborn will which defeated all his efforts to
get back into the happy land of his day-dream.

The old man was silent, thinking of this very same thing.  "A man
goes out to do one job.  Say, to send a young brat back to his
father.  Just from a feeling of what's right and proper, mind you.
Nothing else.  Next minute he finds he's turned the world upside
down.  How d'you account for that, eh?  Fate.  That's what it is.
Fate."

Old Sambo remembered Emma Surface well, remembered how she came in
with Pat O'Connor one afternoon, dusty from a long ride, looking
"like either she expected to be hit or was going to give you one--
you couldn't never tell which."

Cabell was down at the yards, drafting out a mob of bullocks that
were to leave next morning for Smith's boiling-down works at
Redbank.

"I've come--for the ewes and cattle you promised."

Cabell was surly.  "You can't have them till we've sheared.  We
don't shear till next week."

"Dirk couldn't have come," she explained.  "He has to keep an eye
on Jem's things till he's better."

"What's wrong with him?  I thought he was only stunned."

"He's been paralysed.  He can move his hand again now."

An inexplicable resentment died out of his mind, she looked so
small on her big horse, under an immense cabbage-tree hat which hid
half her face, so tired and dusty after her long ride.  "You'll
need to mark off a piece of country before you take the sheep.
When I get this mob off tomorrow I'll take you round.  Meanwhile if
you'd make yourself at home in that pigsty of a humpy. . . ."

"Thank you."

She turned her horse out and went up the slope.

"Can you give me a shakedown in the hut, Pete?" Gursey shouted
across the yard.  "It won't be for long."

"Of course it won't be for long," Cabell snapped him up.  "I told
you what I promised her."

Gursey laughed.  "Well see.  We'll see."

Cabell turned on young O'Connor.  "You'd better get ready to go
back to your precious father tomorrow.  And you"--catching sight of
Peters, alternately looking at the humpy and making long faces at
Gursey--"you can go as far as Pyke's Crossing with the cattle and
see the brat doesn't slip back.  He's made trouble enough."

He spent the night in the watchbox.  When he knocked at the door of
the humpy in the morning she was boiling the kettle for the morning
tea.

"Did you sleep well?"

"Well enough."  She did not turn her head.  The matter-of-fact way
she went about setting the table for his breakfast gave him an
uneasy feeling.  She had brought a big bundle of clothes, he
noticed, a mirror, and a clean towel.

"I'll be away a day or two lending a hand with these cattle.  I'll
tell Sambo to show you the country behind the red hill, as you're
in a hurry."

"Oh, there's no hurry at all.  Dirk can't leave Jem yet awhile.
Besides, you can't spare a man, with shearing near."

He glanced at the bundle of clothes again and spilled the flour he
was pouring into the mixing-basin.

"Let me do that."  She elbowed him aside.

Lounging in the doorway, he studied the hard line of her profile.
A wisp of hair had escaped the severe coiffure which dragged the
shining black masses over her head and fastened them in a lax
bundle at the nape of her neck.  She kept trying to brush it back
with her floury hands.  As she did so her firm breasts swelled and
flexed under the print dress.

"That fellow Jem's a bad egg," he accused her.

After a long pause she said, in the harsh voice of enforced
confession, "He did something for me once.  It was something to be
grateful for."

"And the other night you told me to hit him with the bottle."

She looked at him squarely.  "You'd made up your mind to fight.  I
had to think of Dirk.  If Jem had killed you. . . ."  She kneaded
the husky dough in silence for several minutes before she added,
with a glance half questioning, half grateful, "You beat him.
That's all there is about it.  I don't complain."

"It was that young brat O'Connor I was after," he said quickly.

She shrugged and went on mixing, as one who had no patience with
evasions.  "It's over and done with.  Jem will take the horses and
go--when he can."

He was more and more alarmed to see her so cool and assured.
Behind the shadowed eyes and the clenched mouth he caught a glimpse
of a woman very different from the one he had imagined--the same
woman whose smile had baffled and frightened him the night he
fought Jem.  Her voice was bitter, there was a stubborn will in
her.  An instinct of self-preservation, rather than any conscious
awareness of danger, made him seek to define more precisely the
bargain between them at which all her words hinted.  "I'll find you
land and I'll help you to build.  I'll give you the four hundred
ewes I promised and--"

"Five hundred," she corrected sharply.

"Well, five hundred."

"And the cattle."

"Yes; well, if I said so, yes."

"And rations?  When he breaks with Jem, Dirk will have nothing."

"Then rations, too."  But he frowned at an afterthought.  "And you--
you're breaking with Jem, too?"

"Of course."

"Rations for you as well, then."

She shrugged again and ended the discussion by turning her back and
kneeling to rake out the ashes for the damper.

Here, it seemed to him as he ate his breakfast in watchful silence,
was a game in which he lagged a move behind.  Dispensing his food
to him, she had the cool self-assurance of one who sits with a
winning hand or at least the cool resolution of one who has made up
her mind to win at any cost.  He felt at once as though he was
about to be trapped and about to be released, but trapped into
what, released from what he could not explain, with her
impenetrable face before him posing so many urgent questions.

He was glad when the meal was over.

Shouts and the cracking of whips came up from the valley.  In a
cloud of dust the mob was starting out from the yards.  The cattle
were trying to break back to their old camps, bellowing and
knocking their horns together.

"While you're away--if you had a piece of hessian I could make
curtains to keep the flies out," she said, following him to the
door.

"I don't want any curtains."

But the very docility with which she accepted this ungracious
rebuff, contrasting with the self-possession of the woman who had
elbowed him away from the mixing-basin and served him with food,
put her still another move ahead of him.

"You'll be busy looking after your own business--looking out that
country," he said in an effort to make up lost ground.  "You'll
have no time to waste round here."

She laughed.  "Good heavens, Dirk's capable of doing that much for
himself, don't you think?"

That left him a long way behind.  But the struggle in the valley
was getting hot.  He hurried off to lend a hand, muttering to
himself "No time now.  I'll get this straight when I come back."

A lean strip of a man, parched by sun and wind, salted by many an
ordeal of endurance, tough enough to awe the toughest old hand on
the place, and not much like the olive-cheeked boy who had landed
in Sydney seven years before, but still at heart an innocent, a
babe, beside the woman who watched him go--an innocent straining
towards two irreconcilable opposites.  Here was the bright fantasy
of a lost world, there the seductive, mysterious, promising but
alarming reality.  And, like all innocents, he managed in his own
mind to synthesize a little of the fantasy with a little of the
reality, so that before three days were past they seemed no longer
irreconcilable and he was riding homewards through the lovely
September afternoon with an eager though vague expectation.

He was surprised to find Gursey lounging across the table on easy
terms with her.  What had come over the man?  After months of
gloomy silence he talked like a chatterbox.  She sat sewing a piece
of hessian with a gimlet and cobbler's thread, pale and absorbed.
Suddenly Gursey stopped talking, looked at Cabell, who sat with his
hands on his knees watching them, and burst out laughing.  Then he
took himself off, but he stopped at the door to look at Cabell
again, and there was a glint of malicious delight in his eyes.

"What have you got there?" Cabell demanded as soon as they were
alone.

"I found some hessian in the corner," she replied, undismayed.
"There's enough for curtains and a door, if you'd make a frame."

"Huh."  It was difficult to maintain that he preferred flies.

He glanced round the room.  A familiar smell of old sheepskins,
frowsy clothes and grease had gone.  The blankets were airing
outside in the sun.  Holes where the dogs had buried bones had been
filled in, the table scrubbed, cobwebs cleared away, the debris of
dung fires swept out.  Boughs of gum-leaves hung from the ceiling.
In place of the dirty towel he had grumbled about there was a fresh
rag.  His boots were newly greased and his shirts scrubbed clean.

She saw that he was angry.  "What did you expect?  You surely
didn't think I'd take those sheep for nothing."

"I meant nothing more than--to help you."

"Oh, well."  She went on sewing the hessian.  When she was silent--
then she alarmed him most.  She was looking at him from behind a
high wall.  What was hidden under that deeply scored forehead, at
the back of those eyes?  He had known other silent women: his
nurse, Ady Potter, fat and sleepy--that was one kind; his mother--a
different kind altogether.  With her, silence was a door against
which demons hammered to be let out.  It was the same with this
one.  What was she keeping down under the squaw-like face?

He walked up and down restlessly, glancing at her bent head every
now and then.  With her set mouth and obstinate, sharp chin she
looked as though she was holding out against him in some violent
argument.

She went about getting him a meal--as a matter of course.  "I'll
put it all straight tomorrow," he promised himself.  "Damn it all,
she talks as if we'd agreed about something."

It was a relief when Gursey came in after a silent supper and said
that Andy, the shepherd, in for the shearing, had brought his
concertina.  What about a sing-song?

"Bring him up.  Yes, bring them all up," Cabell said eagerly.

But it took a long time to get three woman-shy isolates into the
humpy.  They stood about outside, nudging each other and guffawing.
Then they made the door with a rush and huddled together like sheep
in the middle of the room, hardly daring to breathe, looking at
everything except Emma, who was sewing her hessian curtains again.

Sambo's ears, like basin handles, twitched and reddened, revealing
that for this experience he had no precedent.  Herb looked like a
sleepwalker.  Andy clutched the concertina under his coat and
breathed nervously, so that faint wheezings emerged from his chest,
like some kind of musical asthma.

Gursey was in a boisterous mood.  "Come on, Andy.  Give us one of
those tunes."

Andy looked round evasively.  "What tunes?"

"One of them you've just been playing."

Andy nudged Sambo.  They hooted, and were silent all of a sudden.

"Bit shy afore the leddies, yeh see," Sambo said boldly and hid his
face in his hat.

"Ha, ha!" Andy screeched.  "Ha, ha!"  Then knocked Sambo against
the wall.  "Garn, kick you flamin' next week."

"Sing 'Molly Mocatta'," Gursey said.  "How does it go?"


     "In the old grey house in Parramatta
      Lived my sweetheart, Moll Mocatta.
      What a pity such a sneezer
      Put her white neck in the squeezer". . . .


Cabell frowned.

"All right," Gursey laughed.  "Sing us something more fit for a
lady's ears."

"Can't sing nowt," Andy grumbled.

"Ain't true," Sambo interjected.  "Ain't never seen nothin' like
him for playin' and singin' tunes.  Should hear him keepin' the mob
quiet at night.  That's the time to hear him."

"Break your flamin' backbone," Andy threatened.

But Sambo would not be put down.  "There's one song he knows, Boss.
About a cove they held over the fire and chucked in the stable.
Can't say he don't."

"Got an awful sore throat on me," Andy protested.

"Give him a nobbler and he can't help singin'," Sambo suggested
cunningly.

So Cabell brought out the bottle.  Then without any further ado
Andy grabbed his concertina and began to sing, all on one note, at
the top of his lungs:  "The beef it was old and tough--off a bull
they'd baited to death--old Hyde got a lump in his gizzard--that
had like to've stopped his breath--the people all start swearin'
and cussin'--when they seen the old bloke choke--so they takes him
out in the kitchen--and holds him over the smoke."

He stopped, emptied his nobbler, took a deep breath and started
again:  "They holds him so close to the fire--he frizzles like a
bit of beefsteak--then they throws him on to the stones--and near
cracks his neck--one gives him a boot in the stomach--another jumps
on his brow--says his wife, 'Chuck him out in the stable--and he'll
be better just now.'  Don't know no more," he finished suddenly,
with a dramatic return to his normal voice.

"There," said Sambo proudly.  "Now sing the leddy that one about
the cove that hanged himself up in mistake for his hat."

"Aw, that one!" Andy said, and was bashful but willing.

The bottle circulated, the concertina howled and skirled, Herb's
dog growled, and Gursey, utterly unlike himself, drank a lot and
capered about noisily.

Again Cabell saw Emma as he had seen her in the shanty at Pyke's
Crossing--as one apart from the crude scene of a man's world.  The
contrast lent her an illusive delicacy and charm.  Her skin,
burnished over by the sun and coarsened by hot winds--only pale
seeming against the background of her hair--looked now more
exquisitely soft than any skin he had ever seen.  Hard work had
roughened her hands, broken the nails, sinewed the arms, and
flattened the contours of her body.  But against the paw Herb had
laid on the table, and compared with the bulky frames around her,
she seemed to have been moulded to a miraculous fragility.  Their
bawling voices set off the quietness of hers, their gestures
invested her with grace; in the same room with them she was the
creature of a different species, and an aura of romantic and
desirable loveliness surrounded her.  No trace remained of the
hard-mouthed woman through whose bitter smile and harsh voice had
echoed the irrepressible overtones of an experience horrible even
to guess at.  When she met his eyes something young and hopeful
showed behind the weary knowledge of hers.  He smiled back, and
felt absurdly proud that before all these men she smiled at him.

But the jollification came to an end on a slightly discordant note.
The rum had awakened an old grievance in Herb.  He was plainly
preparing to speak.  His breath came heavily and his Adam's apple
kept running up his granite pylon of a neck and darting out of
sight behind the band of his shirt again, as though it was a lump
of shy words trying to launch themselves.  These mighty pangs made
themselves felt throughout the room and a lull fell.

Suddenly Herb reached out and patted Emma on the shoulder.  "Miss,
that there Black Jem, he kicked my dawg."

Emma started.  "Jem?  Where?"

"Down Pyke's Crossin'."

"Oh!"

'Bah!" Sambo sneered.  "Three-quarter dinger, that dawg."

"Spanker, dinger?" Herb roared.  "My dawg Spanker!"

They looked down at the one-eyed, three-legged, scabrous brute
which lay between his feet, winking evilly.

"That dawg's a wonder.  A bloody wonder.  Worth six men."

"What kinder men?" Sambo wanted to know.  "Dead men?"

"Missus," Herb appealed to Emma.  "Man to man, what's your opinion
my dawg?"

Emma considered it.  "Seems a very good dog."

"Seems!  Very good!"  Herb gasped at a blind world.  "That dawg,
missus--what d'you think he done last night?  That dawg saved my
life."

"Saved your life?"

Herb nodded.  "War this way.  Puts damper in ashes, clean forgets
it and goes out.  When I looks round no Spanker.  Thinks 'Ah war up
to somethin' on you, Herb.'  But you can't never tell with a dawg
like Spanker.  Comes home arter a bit and locks the monkeys up.
Then all on a sudden I remembers that there damper, gettin' flat in
the ashes.  Looks in the fire--damper gone.  That minute in comes
Spanker, damper in his mouth."  He looked at her hard.  "What d'you
think this here intelligent animal had done?"

"Reckon you musta et that damper and got the willies," Sambo
scoffed.

Herb controlled himself.  "I'll tell YOU, missus.  Sees me got out.
Sees damper in ashes.  Saves my life by taking damper out and
standing it up against a tree."

"Go on," Sambo said.

But Herb sensed treachery.  "Don't believe it, don't you?  Well,
the ironbark where there's a spear stickin' in--that's the
identical tree.  Show you any time you like.  And what's more"--he
grabbed Spanker, upended him, and thrust his brush under Sambo's
nose--"see there?  All them hairs wored off.  That's where he
rubbed hisself bare brushing the ashes off that flamin' damper."

"A blanky miracle," Sambo said.

"Miracle!" Herb shouted.  "It's flamin' incredible.  That's what it
is."

Jealous of all the attention Spanker was getting from Emma, Sambo
spat on it.  "Now, my dawg--" he began, bringing the animal forward
into the light.

Herb spat on Sambo's dog.  "Call that dawg!"

"That dawg--"

"My dawg--"

At this point the owners of two incredible dogs were saved from
falling on each other only by the dogs doing so.  Whereupon every
dog within hearing hastened to the spot and an idyllic evening
ended with the company being nearly put to flight.  When Gursey had
restored peace with a stockwhip handle they found that the
concertina had been chewed up and that Herb's dog had lost an ear.

Strange how a small, ridiculous incident can bite into a man's
memory and come to symbolize a whole experience.  "My honeymoon,"
Cabell used to growl whenever there was any talk of romance in the
family, "it began with a dog-fight."  One can imagine him brooding
over that, recalling every detail--the noise of the dogs, the
curses of the men, the preposterous chagrin of Herb, Andy's laments
for his battered concertina--and contrasting it with some
resplendent, cherished fantasy of an impossibly romantic bridal
bed.

He would recall, too, no doubt, how Gursey, following the men out
of the humpy, stopped at the door and gave him another baffling
grin of vindictive triumph, which revived the obscure doubts that
had been nagging at him since he returned in the afternoon.  If
only he had gone out at once, as his instinct of self-preservation,
suddenly active again, had warned him to do, perhaps he would have
saved himself--and here one can see him going over the whole
miserable business once more, that night and the months which
followed, the night of the flood of 'fifty-one, the fate of Gursey,
the Black Year. . . .

As a matter of fact, he did go out, after a glance at Emma, still
industriously sewing.  The yellow light ambered her long neck and
thrust warm fingers into the gaping neck of her bodice, sketching
the swell of a breast.  Somehow I see Emma more clearly in this
little picture than in all the others which have come down.  The
shining black head bent over everlasting work, her deep eye-sockets
filled with shadows, silent, impenetrable, guarding a secret plan
behind some trivial occupation, patiently waiting.

Half-way to the watchbox where he intended to sleep, Cabell
remembered his blanket, left behind in the humpy.  Frowning at
himself, he went back to fetch it.

She gave him her upwards-sideways glance as he came in and a little
smile.

The smile annoyed him.  "I forgot something," he found it necessary
to explain, took the blanket, and started to go.

But she dropped her sewing and intercepted him at the door.  "Where
are you going then?"  She spoke as if slightly vexed, at the end of
her patience, but smiled again.

"Eh?  Going to sleep.  Isn't it late enough?"  He was brusque,
angry, and sought to find some fault with her, however small.  "All
this singing, larking about--never happened before.  Keeping the
men out of bed like this when they've got to begin washing
tomorrow."

"I?  But did I ask them in?"

He glared down at her.  "Did you ask them?  Well, I'll be damned!
Is this my place or isn't it?  Can't come into my own humpy without
somebody leering at me.  There's Gursey . . . and all this
sweeping, curtains"--abandoning an undefined grievance for one
concretely symbolized in the pile of elaborately stitched hessian
on the table--"Who asked you?"

"YOU asked me yourself--you asked me to come."

"No such thing.  I offered to help your brother."

"You came and made a quarrel with Jem.  You wouldn't have done that
unless--"

"Unless what?"

"Oh, unless you'd made up your mind," she said, coming to the point
at last.  "No, I'm not blaming you.  We're all to blame.  All of
us.  If others do wrong it's not only their fault, it's ours as
well."  She paused, dissatisfied with this vague rendering of a
conviction clear enough in her own feeling of it.  "We're all
plotting and planning for something--every single soul.  We all
want something, at any cost.  Perhaps we don't know--most people
never know, it seems to me.  But it's here--pulling, burning."  She
crushed her breast in her hand.  "Peace, that's what everybody's
looking for all the time.  Not happiness, not anything great.  Just
to get out of this--prison."  She pressed her hands against her
temples.  "But we can't, not except when somebody helps us.  So we
are always watching and waiting to grab at any chance.  The
thinnest shadow of kindness in a smile is a chance."  She paused
again and laughed.  "Grab, yes.  That's more than I meant to say,
perhaps.  Perhaps we only get it by grabbing it from someone else.
Oh, I don't know.  I don't understand when I talk about it.  I only
know we're all equally to blame--in everything we do--good people
as well as bad--because we're all fighting to get at the same
thing."  But she shook her head slowly.  "Not so very much to blame
after all.  It's not much to expect--a little security."

The speech, spoken in a cool and reasonable voice, passed over his
impatient attention, but afterwards he remembered every word of it--
against her and in his own favour.

"You talk," he muttered, quieter, for suddenly his annoyance had
ebbed out, leaving him stranded on the same hollow feeling of
frustration that had taken hold of him when he argued with Gursey
about the future of the valley, with Flanagan and "his mob" at Pat
Dennis's.  A stirring aroma had come to him, the strange aroma of
woman, and he was looking at her with eyes gone dim all at once.

She saw the change, and instantly changed herself.  She returned to
the table and leant back against it, supporting herself on her
hands.  "Oh, well, whatever happens," she said, "I don't blame you.
So if you've taken back the bargain we shan't part in anger."

"I won't break any bargains I've made," he said hastily.  "Only--
well . . . I don't understand myself.  My brain seems turned
inside-out tonight."

She responded to this appeal for pity with a soft, a ruthlessly
soft, "Yes?"

"Wait," he kept on repeating to himself.  "Wait another day.  Wait
and think."  He smiled nervously.  "I don't know how we came to
talk like this."

"No?"  She seemed to have drowsed away.  Her voice was barely
audible.  Her slightly parted lips, no longer hard and repressive,
picked up flickering lights from the lamp.  A splinter in the bark
had caught up the full dress, drawing it tightly around her and
exposing her feet and ankles.

The flutter of wings in the night, cries far away, the breeze
rustling the dried thistle in the valley--swelling, dying away,
like a great, passionate sigh--all this shut them into an intimate
world, far from all other worlds, yesterday, and tomorrow.  The
winter was just past.  Flame-tree and wattle were flowering.  The
heavy perfume came in on the warm air.

"That day I saw you at Pyke's Crossing," he said, "you reminded me
of my mother.  You're not like her, and yet . . . your eyes--sad.
That's why I wanted to help you."

Her strength was in her silence.  Too much was beating against the
lock of her lips for her voice to be gentle and tender.  She knew
it frightened him.  She knew that she had only to wait.  She could
see his eyes on her. . . .

He lifted the catch of the door.  "Well, I'll go now."

She moved her hand, carelessly brushing against the lamp.  It
rolled on to the floor and spluttered out.  They were in darkness.

Groping over the floor, he heard her dress rustle and his cheek
brushed her thigh.  Her hand was in his hair, pressing his face
into the clean-smelling stuff of her dress.

"Are you cold?" she whispered, drawing him up.  "How you shiver!"



Chapter Thirty-one

NEW LIFE


She had released him from a prison.  His heart welled over with
gratitude.  The sharp edge of a new experience had severed him from
past and future.  There was only the present.  It seemed to him
that he had never before seen the crystal magic of sunrise, felt
the warm velvet on a horse's neck, smelt the heat burning over
moist earth.  Through an awakened sensuality--his heritage from a
long line of hot-blooded Cabells--he found his way back into the
world.

And Emma?  She remained just beyond the touch of his understanding.
Only sometimes in the night she would clutch him with little cries,
half of desire, half of fear, that died away as he caressed her.
Apart from this, she said very little.

But it was no lyrical experience.  His sensuality was too urgent,
her desire clouded by purposes too obscure for the gaieties of
love-making.  He had imagined his honeymoon in a setting of
balconies looking out on a misty sea, an English garden of ghostly-
scented English flowers drenched in the mellow English sunlight
that gilds and shrouds rather than reveals.  The girl would have
happy eyes and tight, virgin, apple breasts.  There would be
laughter and lovemaking like some kind of game.  And he got . . .
nights stifling with the acrid smoke of bushfires--heat--an unknown
woman whose desire was harsh and sad.  The smell of sheep and
harness and dogs mixed with the smell of smoke.  Occasionally, on
still evenings when the fires died away, the perfume of wattle and
gum and dogwood would drift into the humpy--perfume as unlike an
English garden as the humpy, with its sunbuckled walls, its
ineradicable fleas and ants, was unlike the balconied honeymoon
chamber of his fantasy.  But no fantasies visited him now, not even
in his sleep--except of Emma.  He dreamt one night that Black Jem
came and killed her.

And now and then, just for fleeting moments, he felt the nudging of
a little doubt, a tiny voice crying from far away.  Why, it asked,
was Gursey always grinning?  And why did he and Emma avoid yet seem
to understand each other?  Again, what could reconcile the
startling wildness of her lovemaking with the modesty that would
never undress in the light and shuddered away from the touch of his
hands till she had covered herself in a heavy woollen shift?  But
this tiny, arguing voice died in the distance, for it was as though
a great flood was rushing him on, out of sight of all old
landmarks.

The drying-off of the thistle contributed to the sense of suddenly
extended horizons.  Only the light, high stalks remained, waiting
for a strong wind to clear them away--a crop of broomsticks
stretching for miles.  The seed-pods cracked open and millions of
silvery balls of thistledown floated into the air, whirling and
eddying on the lazy gusts of summer breeze, high overhead in the
winelike sunshine--an ecstatic dance on the cobalt floor of the
sky, the joy of things released from bondage.  To Cabell they were
the sign and symbol of the release he felt in his own blood.

The pods spilled their bluish seeds thickly across the ground and
thousands of birds came to feed--snowy cockatoos with yellow polls,
the rowdy minah bird, parakeets like ripe fruit falling from the
sky, dancing fantails, rosellas in green-and-yellow jackets
jewelled with red.  Their chattering, squawking, cooing broke the
heavy silence, lifting a deadly weight from his mind and deepening
his sensation of a new world miraculously sprung up around him.

But it was also the arduous time of fires.  A careless spark from a
pipe, merely the heat of the sun, set the tinder stalks alight, and
walls of flame that could be heard from miles away swept across the
valley.  Sheep and cattle stampeded and were in danger of being
outflanked.  A puff of smoke in the distance called him to instant
action.  A five-mile race through thickening smoke, with the heat
belching out like blows from an invisible fist, the centre of the
fire marked by clouds of frightened birds, above which hung the
brown kite called from far off by the smoke in the hope of some
trifle to be picked up among the fleeing snakes and lizards--then a
blind fight for hours with wet bags and branches, over burnt-out
ground that made the soles of the men's boots smoulder and
blistered their feet--suddenly a change in the wind and a thin,
black plume spiralling out of the brown stalks three miles away to
the south, and so on and on at every point of the compass.

Cabell came in with his beard singed, red patches of burnt flesh on
his hands, and black as a chimney-sweep.  The luxury of poultices,
clean clothes, and a meal that did not always taste of cinders and
salt--a meal garnished with green vegetables devised from pigweed
and the soft, unfolded leaf of the cabbage-tree palm which Emma had
ridden ten miles to chop down and disembowel; the comfort of a
comparatively spotless house and a clean-smelling bunk, the blank
hours of evening filled by her listening, her understanding, when
he told her of the first two years in the valley, of McGovern and
Flanagan and Gursey, and all at once, as she turned her head and
the light fell across her throat, as she leant across the table and
he saw the full drop of her breasts, as the breeze tightened the
flimsy dress about her, a stirring in his veins that wiped away the
weariness of the day's work and all memory of it . . . Cabell
wondered how he had lived through the seven years before she came.

A change came over him: he began to enjoy the work of the run and
to head such centaurs as Sambo and old Peters (just returned from
Pyke's Crossing) in the wild rides after horses and cattle.  Emma
would be out watching them or waiting when he came in at night to
hear how he had headed the roan stallion, that uncapturable outlaw
whose tough blood was to run through generations of Cabell's
horses, or to be shown the rip in his saddle flap where an angry
cow had just missed goring him.  Then she turned worried eyes on
him, and he knew that she was afraid of losing him and he was glad.
At such moments, his cheeks flushed, his hair tumbling over his
eyes, gesticulating madly as he told her the story of the day's
run, he looked, indeed, as though he had been born again to a new
experience of living.

In that time there were no fences, of course, and the horses,
except for the ones kept in the paddock for daily use, ran wild
among the gullies.  To round them up was a crazy chase over hidden
logs, through swamps and creeks, up and down the hills.  Thus were
bred horses that could have galloped blindfolded through the
hardest country without missing a step.  The wild flights made the
foals into lean and wiry animals that shirked nothing, took a slide
down a sheer face of rock as something in the natural order, and on
a feed of grass worked the half-wild cattle from dawn till dusk
without turning a hair.  Another traditional characteristic of the
family began to show itself in Cabell--a passionate love of horses
and horsemanship.

When they had broken-in the colts they held the first grand muster
for two years.  It was a fierce three-day battle in which every
horned beast was driven in for drafting, branding and marking.
Noise, dust, heat and excitement--fights with tough old bullocks,
cows half mad with anxiety for lost calves, with young steers
sensing the freedom of the open valley, looking for a break in the
line of horsemen--a dash for freedom that stampeded the mob, a
moment in which they turned with the runaway and made to break
back--shouts, the stamp of hooves, the galloping of horses,
stockwhips and a hundred dogs--then the clatter of horns locking,
of ribs thumping together in the crush--narrow escapes in the
yards, a bullock that leapt a five-barred, six-foot fence, gored a
horse, chased Andy up a tree and got away--the scuffling of steers
and calves, beasts and men peering for each other through the fog
of dust--the smell of flesh seared by branding-irons, the blazing
sunlight, flies, sweat, burns--Sambo and Peters, sensing a rival in
horse and cattle lore, silently challenging each other to wilder
achievements of daring, Peters's monkey-face streaked with dust and
twisted up by the pain of effort beyond his strength, Sambo
deprecating his own doings to imply more astonishing parallels in
the past--Peters walking over the writhing backs in the crush,
nipping into the yard with a noose to slip over the horns of a
young steer and up the fence again with a pair of horns cracking
themselves against the post a few inches under his heels--everybody
covered with dirt and blood, clothes torn, panting--Cabell with a
stub of pencil trying to keep a check in the stock-book, where
sweat-drops turned the dust on the pages to slime--Yilbung (a
rouseabout on the station since the night of the massacre) chased
around the yard by an angry cow while the men sat on the fence and
cheered, till Sambo jumped down on to the cow's back and rode it
with his feet buried in the fat under its shoulders. . . .

A day's rest.

Then a moonlight ride after the cattle that had gone wild and taken
to the thick scrub round the foot of the ranges, dangerous because
they were luring the tamer cattle away and in time would lose their
breeding, become hump-backed, long-haired, reverting within a
couple of generations to some far-away, primitive ancestry.

Waiting in the still moonlight till they came to drink and graze,
then a faint whiff of dust warning the men that they were on the
move--a word along the line, into the saddle and out across the
valley to cut the mob off from the scrub and rush them back to the
yards.  In and out among the timber--wild leaps into pits of
darkness, under low branches that reached out to rip the riders
from their saddles--thorns unnoticed in hair-breadth escapes from
being impaled or gored--love of a sure-footed horse born in such
desperate moments--an hour's battle and the herd headed homewards,
or that small part of it which had not broken back into the bush--
the dawn coming over the range, turning the world into a lovely
mirror on which the shape of things, hills, bush, cattle, was the
merest dim shadow--more scuffling, branding, castrating, a hundred
times harder because these cattle were really wild.

Sleep.  Sleep without dreams.  Black and restful sleep.  And on
awakening, a sense of contentment, of achievement.  System and
order were coming into the life of the station.  The flocks had
been culled over and all bare-bellied and wiry strains cut out.  He
would build a fence across the valley and draft the cattle to
improve the breed.

Emma encouraged all this, but without saying much--only by a nod or
a glance when he spoke of what he had done.  For instance, it was
she who suggested that he ought to buy two or three high-class rams
when he went south again, but afterwards the idea always seemed to
have been his own.

The thought that he must soon go south on another wool trip was
like a voice calling him out of a pleasant dream.  He began to
wonder how he was to arrange matters so that the advantages of
their present arrangement would not be lost, and although he saw
vaguely that they could not go on as they were for ever, he tried
to push out of his mind the question of what was to follow.

This slow awakening dated from Peters's return.  Once or twice he
had caught the old man looking at him, and through the haze of his
preoccupation with Emma he began to ask himself what the men must
be thinking and saying.  Sensitive to the opinion of people around
him, though often for that very reason