an ebook published by Project Gutenberg Australia
Title: On Emu Creek
Author: Steele Rudd
eBook No.: 2400241h.html
Language: English
Date first posted: September 2024
Most recent update: September 2024
This eBook was produced by: Walter Moore
Chapter 1. - Retrenched
Chapter 2. - Weaning Mary Ellen
Chapter 3. - The Bereaved Bear
Chapter 4. - Charlie
Chapter 5. - Real Life Commences
Chapter 6. - A Lively Visitor
Chapter 7. - Old Fred
Chapter 8. - Fireworks
Chapter 9. - Splinter Goes Out Working
Chapter 10. - The Cheese Factory
Chapter 11. - Why Splinter Came Home
Chapter 12. - The Death of Little Jens
Chapter 13. - Starting Dairying
Chapter 14. - Billy Cattfish
Chapter 15. - The Unbroken Heifer
Chapter 16. - Another Go At Breaking The Heifer
Chapter 17. - How They Came To Baptise Her “Stumpy”
Chapter 18. - School Commences
Chapter 19. - Some Nature Study
Chapter 20. - School Goes On Merrily
Chapter 21. - Drought And The Devil
Chapter 22. - A Tight Place
Chapter 23. - Araluen Attracts Admirers
Chapter 24. - Tragedy, Comedy And Love
Chapter 25. - The Great Harvest
The Duffs, except Mrs. Duff, all began life in the city. Mrs. Duff was a Rudd, the daughter of Joe Rudd, the son of Dad Rudd of Shingle Hut, and began life on a farm. Duff, himself, had been a public servant, and if he had had his own way, would still be one. But he hadn’t his own way—the Government had it instead; and had all its own way as well. It was an ass of a Government—so Duff said. He said it because it ran the country into debt and tried to save it from disaster by dispensing with his services.
“There’s what it’s come to”, he said, returning from the office one evening, and handing his wife an official letter in a blue envelope; “they’ve bulleted me, Kit! The ‘native born Ministry’!”
Mrs. Duff turned pale.
“Malice!” Duff hissed viciously. “Malice and dirt!”
The wife read the official rigmarole dispensing with her husband’s service, then dropping it on the floor, stared at him in dismay.
“Ain’t it a knockout!” and Duff threw his leather hand-bag on the table and commenced cracking his fingers.
Mrs. Duff gazed on in silence.
“Let them keep their billet! Gad, if I can’t make a living at something else!” and Duff started rolling himself a cigarette and pacing the floor. Duff always rolled himself a cigarette when he paced the floor—and often when he didn’t pace the floor.
Still Mrs. Duff stared silently on.
“Fifteen years’ service! A hundred and fifty quid a year! No rise for four years; 15 per cent deducted from me under ‘Special retrenchment’; and now the dirty kick-out—and from a lot o’ miserable political billet-hunters! Talk about reputation! It’s the limit!”
Duff dropped into a chair and angrily blew smoke through his nose.
“Strike me!” and he jumped to his feet again—“if I were getting seven hundred a year, like a lot of blobs who go out lapping up whisky all day, I could understand it! But to sack a cove who’s been doing his work honestly and trying to keep a family on a hundred and fifty quid a year, less 15 per cent— God love me! and they call themselves Australians and democrats!”
Mrs. Duff spoke.
“Never mind Titt!” she said putting a hand on his shoulder; “never mind! The service isn’t the only place in the world, so don’t worry!”
Then Duff sat down again; sprawled his long, thin, fork-like legs over the cheap carpet; dropped his sharp-pointed chin on his sunken chest, let the cigarette dangle from his lips, and reflected.
Mrs. Duff lifted the official letter from the floor; and listlessly folding and unfolding it, reflected with him.
Splinter, the eldest boy of the family, with school bag swung over his shoulder, marched into the hall, and, pausing at the sitting-room door, stood staring wonderingly at his parents.
“Home again?” Duff said, looking up slowly.
Splinter grinned and took the bag from his shoulder.
“No more cricket clubs or swimming baths for you after this, old chap!” regretfully, from the father.
“Oh, ain’t there!” and Splinter stared rebelliously.
“Father’s been retrenched by the Government, my son!” the mother explained, sadly.
“Retrenched!” Splinter repeated, staring hard.
“Retrenched—bulleted—speared!” Titt groaned.
“Dicken!” and turning away, Splinter went off to the kitchen to explore for provender.
“His troubles! Ah well!” and drawing in his long legs, Duff turned to his wife again.
“You’re right, Kit,” he said, “th’ service isn’t the only place in the world. ”
And it wasn’t.
Six months later. Titt Duff left the city and came to Emu Creek, and brought his family with him. He also brought some furniture; a heart full of hope; a head empty of agricultural knowledge, and a pair of hands that had never done anything harder than roll a cigarette or wield a cricket bat.
“The Creek” was a subdivision of a famous station run—a run which the Government, after boring all over it with an augur to “test the quality of the soil” turned down at thirty-six shillings an acre, and was afterwards purchased by a “philanthropic” syndicate in the interests of closer settlement at £3 per acre. Said syndicate “close settled” it at prices ranging from £3/10/- to £9 per acre on “easy terms”.
Wonderful looking country, though, was that famous run when Titt Duff, along with a persuasive commission agent, inspected it. Dairy farmers and sheep men from the South— men who knew a thing or two about farm lands—also inspected it. For months scarcely a day passed that didn’t witness fresh contingents of prospective settlers, driving or riding or motoring over the run with lithographs protruding from their pockets, and land-hunger depicted on their faces. And when that run was cut up and thrown on the market, what a Godsend it was—to the philanthropic Syndicate and Commission Agents!
And the growth of grass that was on it was so high and so dense that neither man nor motor car could be seen amongst it; neither could the big stones, strewn over portion of it, nor the flourishing crop of young prickly pear sprouting from end to end of it. The genius who thought of “spelling” that famous run for a couple of seasons and letting, the grass grow before inviting inspection will have something to think of on the Day of Judgment!
But when Sale day came—that was the day! People from all parts gathered at the auction room. Bankers from surrounding branches—farmers with mortgages round their necks— solicitors from the great metropolis to watch the interests of the benign Syndicate, and see they didn’t give too much away for nothing! Commission Agents by the score were there shepherding their clients, advising them how to bid; how many portions to take; and urging them to keep on bidding till all they required was knocked down to them, or the Banks broke, or an earthquake or something happened! Great solace at a land sale is a commission agent to a buyer! But Titt’s agent was one of the straight ones. And Titt secured the block he was after, a bonser it was too! Two hundred and fifty acres of the best scenery on the run, with grass as high as a house. And the terms! They were enough to melt the nose on a Repatriation Committee. Five pounds ten per acre—one-sixth cash; nothing the second year and the balance in five equal instalments extending over five years, with interest at 7 per cent! Seven per cent! Oh, Ikey, my Australian Uncle!
The Auctioneer opened the proceedings with a prophetic speech, in which he painted that run dotted over with a thousand rich prosperous homesteads flowing with milk and honey, then read the provisional agreement and terms of sale at the rate of 366 words to the minute so as no one would understand.
“Those are the conditions of Sale, ladies and gentlemen,” he concluded; “now I’ll begin by offering portion 12—250 acres. Who’ll make me an offer?”
Laws! Titt nearly dropped dead in his seat! Portion 12 was the block he had set his heart on. For some seconds he was struck speechless; and though his friend, the Commission Agent, kept prodding him in the ribs, several bids were taken before Titt could find his tongue. At last he started bidding at the top of his voice, and when portion 12 was knocked down to him he scrambled over the heads of six rows of astonished people in his excitement to reach the table, and signed the agreement without looking at it!
“Gee!” he said, wringing the hand of the Commission Agent, “I was frightened I wouldn’t get it!”
The Commission Agent, to be agreeable, said he “was feeling a bit funky about it himself”. No one can lie so cordially and naturally as a Commission Agent. It’s a pleasure to listen to him.
Then they slipped out and went up the street to the “Commercial”, where they celebrated the occasion in beer—celebrated it until Titt’s double-jointed legs started bending beneath him in different directions—until he started talking of returning to the auction room and bidding for the “homestead” block. There were five thousand acres in the homestead block, worth nearly £5 an acre, with fifteen hundred pounds of improvements on it, and Titt possessed something less than £500.
Months later. Duffs house was built—a modest weatherboard building of four rooms; and when the local contractor was paid, barely sufficient remained of Titt’s money to purchase dairy cows and some machinery and a horse or two to go on with.
A stinging hot day. Titt and Mrs. Duff and Splinter and Araluen, the eldest of the family, were busy moving the furniture in, and cleaning up the mess left about the place by the carpenters. Titt, in shirt and pants, his sleeves rolled up, showing a pair of long lean arms, moved about on his calfless limbs as though he were on springs and couldn’t get enough out of himself. At intervals he paused, and with hands resting on his wide bony hips—hips that held his pants up without the aid of a belt—enthused about the house, and the splendid view from the front door, and the clear air and the blue sky, and his future prospects.
“If we had only come here fifteen years ago, eh Kate?” he said making a seat of the corner of the table and swinging his legs about, “we’d be worth a bit now.”
“Perhaps we wouldn’t—you never know,” his wife answered thoughtfully, wiping the dust from the crockery that had just been unpacked.
“If y’ had come here fifteen years ago, you wouldn’t have been worth me any way,” Splinter chipped in, “’cause I wasn’t born then.” Splinter possessed a wit inherited from his Uncle Joe.
“You!” Titt guffawed, springing from the table, and playfully swinging a feint at Splinter with his long, fleshless right; “if you could stand a punch I’d give y’ one.”
“Give me one then”, and sparring up to his parent, Splinter rolled into him with both hands. The parent sparred and feinted and chuckled and ducked and side-stepped, and hopped all round the room; and the fixing of the furniture, and the splendid view from the front door and his future prospects and all the rest suddenly vanished.
“Oh, look at Splinter! Look at Splinter, Mother!” Araluen called, in delight, from the other end of the room.
“I don’t want to look at him”, the Mother answered. “I wish they’d both stop their nonsense and let us get on with the work.”
But Mrs. Duff was forced to look at Splinter. Something went wrong with his legs—they twisted round each other like the cane of a cart-whip handle, and he flopped backwards into a dish of dough that stood in a corner of the room awaiting the oven, and became submerged to the hips in it.
“Holy!” Titt ejaculated, dropping his hands and pulling a serious face. Araluen flushed joyously. Splinter tried to rise, but sank deeper into the dough and squeezed a lot of it over the edge on to the floor, and cloyed his fingers in it.
Mrs. Duff stared at Splinter, then at Titt.
“Here!” the latter commanded of Splinter, “get out of it, can’t y’. What did you want failin’ into it for?” then jerked him out of the dish by the two arms, Splinter taking enough dough with him on the seat of his pants to make a loaf with.
“It was your fault, father, as much as mine”, the latter protested, plucking the dough from his clothes and returning it in fistfuls to the dish.
“My fault as much as yours?” from Titt.
“And there might have been a hole in his trousers, too!” Araluen suggested, with a giggle.
“Of course there might, and to say it was as much my fault as his!”
“And so it was!” doggedly from Splinter.
“Here! Don’t you give me any more back-jaw!” and Titt struck an attitude.
“Well, it was!” and Splinter dashed for the open door. His parent dashed after him, and risking a flying kick, succeeded in scraping some of the dough off him with the toe of his boot.
“If he ain’t a determined young hound”, and Titt, with an injured expression, turned to Mrs. Duff; but instead of meeting with approval, found her crumpled up in a chair weeping copiously into her apron.
“What’s th’ matter, Kit?” he said, putting a hand on her head; “don’t take it like that. Y’ know it couldn’t be helped.” The wife wept harder.
“Come on, be a sport. Look up, won’t y’?”
He was playfully forcing her face towards his when Splinter rushed back into the room again.
“Someone comin’,” he shouted; “two swells right near th’ house in a buggy.”
Father and mother separated instantly. The latter sprang to her feet and began drying her eyes with her apron. The former moved to the door and looked cautiously out.
“How do I look—my eyes all right? Are they red?” Mrs. Duff hurriedly asked.
“Red? No!” Titt lied—“they’re right as pie.”
Then she wiped them some more, and rapidly smoothing her hair with her hands and removing her apron, looked ready to receive the King.
But it wasn’t the Royal family that were coming—’twas two clerks from the office of the Syndicate; and coming with a completed agreement and a bag of promissory notes for Titt to sign in connection with the purchase of his block of land.
Two nice-looking young men they were, too, city bred, and one a J.P.—the Syndicate’s own particular Justice of the Peace. Had they come with a bag full of yellow, golden sovereigns for free distribution amongst the family, Titt couldn’t have been more pleased to see them.
“Go on!” he said, in surprise, to the J.P., “are you from Brisbane? What part?” And when the Magistrate answered “Woolloongabba”, Titt shook him hard by the hand and called him “Townie”, and asked him what school he went to.
Then they got down to business. Titt sat up to the table, squared his shoulders, flourished the pen and attached his signature to that completed agreement and those promissory notes with an air of importance that would make you think he was a Commonwealth Bank. And when the J.P. had witnessed everything, and initialled the alterations, he and his companion wished Titt “good luck”, and, shaking hands with Mrs. Duff, went off to call upon their next victim, who was hiding somewhere on the adjoining block.
“That’s the way to help people on to the land”, Titt said, directing his wife’s attention to the copy of the agreement lying on the table. “Now, why couldn’t the Government have gone about it that way?” And taking up the agreement he opened its foolscap pages. “For £222/3/4 we are able to go on to this block worth £1525, with seven years, you might say, to pay it off, on terms as easy as falling off a log.”
Mrs. Duff reached for the document, and began perusing it slowly and studiously.
“Just have a squint at it, old girl, to satisfy yourself”, Titt said, encouragingly. Then sitting back, employed himself uselessly scribbling his name and address in fifty different ways on scraps of paper left by the Syndicate’s clerks, at intervals glancing up to see how the wife was enjoying the terms.
But Mrs. Duff wasn’t enjoying them at all.
“Seven per cent interest?” she questioned, wrinkling her brow. “Why, by the time the six years or whatever it is, are up, you’ll have paid for the place twice over!”
“Get out!” Titt scoffed amusedly; “the interest’ll get smaller and smaller every year, won’t it?”
“And if at any time you’re behind with the payment,” the wife went on as though he had never spoken, “they can fine you and make you pay a higher rate.”
“Well, of course,” Titt acquiesced, cheerfully, “that’s th’ general thing in business, ain’t it?”
“And all the improvements must be insured at your expense”, and Mrs. Duff wrinkled her brows some more.
“But all the improvements will be mine, won’t they? Bless me, Kit, you wouldn’t expect a cove to get things for nothing, would you? You’re a great business woman, YOU are!”
“All noxious weeds are to be kept down by you”—and the wife turned over a page of the agreement.
“Not necessarily by meself,” Titt explained; “there’s nothing to stop me from getting anyone else to keep them down, so long as I pay for it.”
“You’ve to pay all rates and taxes, including the Local Government Tax and State and Federal Land Tax.”
“Cer-certainly,” Titt stammered, “all landholders have to do that, haven’t they?”
“You’ve to pay the legal cost of this agreement and the stamp duty on it.”
“Legal cost and stamp duty?” Titt echoed thoughtfully. “Are you sure?”
“And if you fail to pay any of the instalments,” the wife went on, “the place will become the Syndicate’s again, and all that you ever paid or did in the way of work, will be theirs, too!” And Mrs. Duff, her eyes swimming like two large lakes, looked up pitifully at Titt.
Just then the Syndicate’s clerks unexpectedly returned. They returned because one of the P/N’s had been overlooked.
“Oh, yes, I see”, Titt said, sullenly, when the document was placed before him. Then taking up the pen he signed it with a trembling hand. And when the clerks, smiling and bowing, took their departure again, Titt, pale and funky looking, turned to his wife.
“What are you looking so worried for?” she laughed.
“Do y’ think we’ll come out of it all right, Kit?” he mumbled, hoarsely.
“Of course we will.”
Then, taking up the broom, she started sweeping and singing, and whistling.
But deep down in her heart the woman knew that through the long years of hardship and toil and disappointment that lay ahead, hell itself must needs be faced before their souls could ever again be called their own. And if ’twas a lie she uttered, ’twas uttered in a good cause, and the tears that fell from her and mingled with the dust on the floor were surely noted by the good God above.
Early morning in December. The sun rising over Umbrella Mountain; locusts in thousands awakening the forest trees; flies—millions of wretched, sticky, savage flies—swarming from their sleeping haunts. Inside, breakfast ready. Titt, at the head of the table carving the remnant of yesterday’s roast; Mrs. Duff at the end serving out the tea; Splinter and Araluen at either side, snarling, pulling faces, and backbiting each other; the baby perched in a high chair beside its father “goo-gooing” and sucking a strip of gristle that hung from its mouth like a worm in the beak of a young jackass.
The baby, Mary Ellen, was being weaned. For the third time it was being weaned, and for two long nights had squealed and squawked in protest and kept Mrs. Duff singing to it, and Titt grumbling, and everyone else awake.
“You nearly had to give in again last night, Kit”, Titt grinned. Titt, when daylight came, was always inclined to side with the infant.
“But I didn’t”, the mother smiled. “Never again.” Then addressing the infant as though it understood her:
“No more titty-bottle, Miss Bully—never, never any more.”
“There’s no bread on the table”, Splinter discovered.
Araluen left her place and ran to the bread tin.
“Here, cut that out you!” Titt, rattling the knife on the steel, roared at Splinter, “What did y’ snap that off your sister’s plate for? Think I ain’t got any eyes?”
“’Cause I like it well done an’ she don’t”, sulkily from Splinter.
“He’s fibbin’, Father”, Araluen, returning with a loaf, protested. Then a scuffle commenced across the table.
“Araluen!” Mrs. Duff commanded. “Araluen!” Mrs. Duff, in quarrels with his sister, always sided with Splinter.
“Well, he’s taken me meat, Mother, and won’t put it back”, stubbornly from Araluen.
“Never mind, Father will cut you some more.”
But Araluen did mind. She cracked Splinter hard on the head with a spoon and told him to “take that, too!”
Splinter hurriedly stuffed the well-done slice into his mouth and started making headway. Splinter was a slick tactical thief.
“Look at him, Father!” and his sister burst into tears. Sisters always burst into tears when argument fails. “He’s puttin’ it in his mouth! Boo, hoo! hoo!”
“Now look here me noble young buck!” and dropping the carvers on the cloth and rising to his feet Titt eyed the erring one with great authority. “By Christmas! I’m gettin’ tired of talkin’ to you an’ tellin’ y’ to mind yourself—do y’ know that?”
Splinter, his eyes rolling, his cheeks bulging, his jaws working against time, regarded his parent complacently.
“Do y’ hear what I’m sayin’?” loudly from the latter.
Splinter swallowed the meat at a gulp, and said, “Well can’t I have me breakfast as well as her?”
“Have your breakfast as well as her!” the parent sneered Then lifting his voice: “Y’ can’t have her breakfast as well as your own, too, can y’? You ain’t a carpet snake, are y’?”
Splinter quietly reached for some bread, and grinned.
Mrs. Duff pleaded for peace.
“That’s right, my pet lamb, tell them to stop, and to behave themselves!” playfully to the “goo-gooing” youngster.
“It’s a good job for him he’s got his Mother to side with him! But by Christmas if there’s to be any more of this squibbin’ ’’and Titt, whose bark was ever worse than his bite, sat down and renewed the carving.
Araluen, simpering into her apron, lifted her head and saw Splinter smiling.
“He’s laughing now, Father,” she said, “he’s laughing!” Titt never heard her.
“He’s making faces, Father.”
Still Titt didn’t hear her.
“He’s poking his tongue out at you, now, Father!”
“I ain’t!” Splinter promptly lied.
But Titt could stand it no longer. Dropping the carvers again he jumped round the table at Splinter.
Splinter humped his shoulders, and, hanging over to one side, instinctively guarded his head with his elbow.
“You darned young dawg! What did I just tell y’ awhile ago?” And, striking a fearsome attitude, Titt stood over the culprit like an eagle over a defenceless lamb. But just then fresh commotion broke out. A low gurgling sound came from the vicinity of the high chair.
“My God!” Mrs. Duff cried, “the baby’s choking”, and bounded from her seat.
“It’s swallowed th’ grizzle!” from Araluen.
Titt turned and grabbed the gasping infant in his arms and groaned, “Oh, oh.” Then shook it and said, “My God! My God!”
Splinter and Araluen went pale and stared openmouthed. The brat stiffened out and went black in the face.
“Put your finger down its throat”, Mrs. Duff shrieked, wringing her hands frantically. “Down its throat; its throat!”
Titt tried to put his finger down, but couldn’t. It was a sore finger with rag and cotton wool rolled round it, and the lot saturated with “Farmer’s Friend”.
Mrs. Duff snatched the child from him, and holding it upside down, thumped it on the back, and every time she thumped it, Tit moaned, “My goodness! My goodness!”
Not a kick or whisper came from the youngster.
“Do something, some of you, or it’ll be dead!” Mrs. Duff shrieked desperately. “Oh gracious heaven!”
Splinter and Araluen burst into blubbers, and bellowed like two calves. That was all they could do.
Titt rushed to the open window and looked to see if any first-aid was about. An old grey-bearded swagman, deaf as a beetle, with eyes half eaten out of his head by flies, and an empty black billycan in his hand, was approaching the place in search of hot water for breakfast.
“Quick, Mister! Quick!” Titt shouted and waved to him. “Our baby’s chokin’!”
The deaf swagman, in doubt whether Titt’s demonstrations were friendly or otherwise, stood stock still and stared. Titt jumped through the window and ran to fetch him.
The deaf one dropped his billycan, turned, and fled, and in his haste tumbled over a wheel track and hurt himself.
Mrs. Duff plunged her fingers down the youngster’s throat and fished up the gristle. Then it got back its breath and screamed and kicked and nearly got out of her arms.
Titt rushed in again shouting, “Is it all right? Is it up?” Splinter and Araluen ceased bellowing. The kid screamed harder.
“There, there, there, my poor wee lamb, it was Mother’s fault! Mother’s fault!” and opening her dress Mrs. Duff pressed the squalling offspring to her bosom. It grabbed the “bottle” with both hands and “teeth” and was soon silent.
“By Christmas!” Titt said, proudly, “that’s all she was chokin’ for, th’ young devil!”
Then Splinter and Araluen, wiping their eyes, gathered round and laughed. Titt laughed some, too. But Mrs. Duff, bending over the precious brat and coddling it planted kisses on its brow and crooned: “Mother’s little darling!”
That’s eighteen years ago.
“Mother’s little darling” is married now and will soon be weaning one of her own.
Titt took the grubbing tools and a drink of water and started burning off. Grubbing and burning off was an occupation new to Titt. He knew nothing about it then—he knows a wonderful lot about it now. He seemed to think then, that clearing land was an index to the glories of farming—glories he had often heard know-alls raving about in city streets and in offices and in Parliament, so rolling up his shirt sleeves and throwing off his hat, he went at it as though nothing but sport and pastime and pound notes were to be extracted from those huge box and iron bark trees—trees that had stood there stolidly defying the elements for ages and ages! ’Twas the trees that did the extracting—extracted sweat and groans and profanity from Titt till there wasn’t any more left in him; and if he had had any fat about him, which, of course, he hadn’t— there was nothing of the gohanna about Titt—every particle of that would have been extracted from him, too.
Waving the axe, Titt cheerfully indicated a heavily timbered portion of the holding—a fifty acre patch of dense heavy timber—and advanced determinedly on it to knock it all down and chop it all up into small pieces, and burn it all into ashes, and fence it all in with a new fence—a substantial cattle-proof fence—and break it all up with a plough, and plant it all with corn and pumpkin—the best of pumpkin, pumpkin that, when ripe, would take some getting into a dray. Ah, yes, Titt was going to tackle this land business with intelligence and a strong hand and tremendous self-determination. All the old hands on the land were only fooling and fiddling with the industry. They were afraid of it. Grit and pluck were all that was required to win through on. The old hands hadn’t any such qualifications. Titt knew they hadn’t. He had often heard politicians and produce merchants, and financial authorities, and shopwalkers, and gentlemen of the cloth and all the rest of the town men who loved good soft, easy jobs themselves, say they hadn’t. And no one in this world or any other world ever knew so much about land settlement and soils and farming, as politicians and produce merchants, and shop-walkers and financial authorities did—or ever knew so little! Titt, theoretically, was a goer, a scene shifter. In the space of one short evening he could go right through life, right through the world shifting every obstacle in it, material, spiritual or financial, and end up with wads of wealth. ’Twas before the axe and tongues of men like Titt that wildernesses succumbed and were reclaimed. But settlers of his kind didn’t grow on prickly pear bushes! They weren’t made either. They were born behind counters and in Parliament and in pulpits and in offices—and will be born there to the end of time! God bless them!
“And soon as I harvest the corn and pumpkin,” Titt told the Missus, “I’m going to plough it all over again, cross-plough it, and keep on ploughing it till it has a mulch on it a foot deep and fine as flour. Then I’m going to sow the lot with wheat and lucerne—sow them all together—”
His wife stared at him in surprise. She couldn’t conceive where he had got his ideas from.
“That’s th’ surest way of getting crops”, Titt went on, omitting to explain that he’d been yarning with old O’Connor round at Umbrella Mountain. “It gives y’ two strings to your bow, besides saving a lot of labour and time.”
The Missus was deeply impressed.
“Y’ see, the wheat grows the faster of the two,” he explained further, “and by the time it’s ripe and harvested the lucerne will be comin’ on—it’ll be about four or five inches high in fact. Directly after that when the sun gets to it, it’ll shoot up like a mushroom, and before a month is out it’ll be ready for the mower.”
Mrs. Duff, standing with a jug of hot tea and some homemade scones in her hands, for Titt’s “eleven o’clock”, smiled encouragingly; then set the provender down in a shady place beneath the giant gum he was engaged in rooting, lock, stock and barrel, out of the earth. Titt, flushed and perspiring, stepped out of the huge excavation he had made round the roots of the gum and threw himself down beside the tea and scones, and proceeded to enjoy the new life.
“But I must”—pausing and noisily sipping the tea to test its temperature—“get all these trees down first, Kit”, he added.
Mrs. Duff turned her head and ran her eyes over the “clearing” to see how many trees were down. She saw one solitary old iron bark lying prostrate, its great limbs smashed and shattered, its hacked and mutilated roots cocked in the air with junks of turf clinging to them, and its faded, withered leaves drooping in sullen, stricken contrast against the living green and blooming flowers of a glad and joyous world.
“How long were you grubbing that one?” she asked.
“About a week”—and opening his mouth wide, Titt put a scone into it.
“A week?” And the wife turned her eyes to the giant wall of timber yet standing, and a feeling of despair seemed to come over her.
There was an interval of silence. The chirping of the birds and the crowing of the roosters over at the house were the only audible sounds.
“A penny for your thoughts, Kit?” and Titt cheerfully attacked another scone.
His wife swallowed a lump that came into her throat, but kept her thoughts to herself.
Titt raised the jug of tea to his head and commenced to drink. Suddenly a sharp cry came from the tree top. Titt, whose eyes as he drank, chanced to be raised in the direction, nearly choked himself. Dropping the jug, he shouted, “A hawk! A bear! Look out!” And sprang excitedly to his feet as a baby bear, snatched from the back of its unsuspecting mother by a prowling eagle, fell to the ground with a thud and a squeak, within reach of the Missus. Talk about a fright! Mrs. Duff startled every living thing for a mile around with the shriek she gave.
“Holy!” Titt gasped, open-mouthed. “Holy!”
But while he was “holying”, the winged Hun returned to the attack. It swooped brazenly down, this time striking its claws firmly into the furry coat of baby bear, tumbling blindly about in the grass, and rising with it in its clutch, shaped a westerly course and soared triumphantly for the highest point on Mount Sibley.
Titt said he was “damned!”
His wife said nothing; but if her face was an index to her mind, she was solemnly thinking of all that was in the prayer book.
Up above mammy bear was springing frantically from limb to limb—running—literally running—up and down them, shedding tears and filling the air with cries and sobs.
Titt, with solemn countenance, gazed up at her.
“Poor thing! Listen to her!” And Mrs. Duff burst into tears.
“That’ll do, Kit! Never mind!” and Titt struggled to restrain a sob himself.
Mammy bear paused for a moment to listen for some response from her missing offspring. She heard Mrs. Duff whimpering below. Down along these limbs she slithered head first. Reaching the lowest fork, a few feet higher than Titt’s head, she hesitated. Then peering at her sympathisers with red glaring eye-balls, listened some more. A low sob came from Mrs. Duff, and a comforting murmur from Titt. Mrs. Bear didn’t wait for any more. That her stolen young was concealed somewhere about their persons she hadn’t any doubt. She sprang off that fork as though it were a spring-board and, flopping square on Titt’s shoulders, dug her claws into his naked neck and clung to him. He bounded against the Missus and sent her spinning in the grass. “Oh! Oh-h! Oh-h-h!” he bellowed, running round and round with his back humped and mammy bear sitting on his neck. Then he threw himself down and roared, “Help!” and fought the air with his hands and feet. Mrs. Duff rose, and arming herself with a heavy stick, ran to his assistance. She aimed blows in rapid succession at Mrs. Bear, and every one that missed was stopped by some part or other of Titt’s head. But the stick wore shorter and lighter, till one or two blows “got home”, then the bear released her grip and skedaddled for the tree. Mrs. Duff threw the stick after her and shrieked, “You wretch!”
Titt, smeared with blood and dust, arised himself on hands and knees.
“That’s what it was!” he groaned; “I—I—(another groan) thought it was the eagle!”
“Oh, you old Hun!” his wife shrieked again at Mrs. Bear, now gazing contentedly down from the highest limb. “A pity it wasn’t yourself the hawk took!”
Titt let the clearing slide and started hurriedly to erect a milking-yard. He started to erect a milking-yard because he suddenly decided to buy twelve good dairy cows from O’Connor, and make money quickly. He decided to buy them from O’Connor because O’Connor went in for Shorthorns, and Shorthorns were the best stamp, and most profitable class of dairy cattle to have about a farm, or about anything—so O’Connor reckoned. Growing grain was right enough in its way, there was nothing wrong about it, but Titt had learned that waiting till the ground was cleared, and the crop came up, and grew (especially grew) and was harvested, and carted to the railway station, and a cheque came in payment for it would take much time, but with twelve or so good Shorthorn cows on the go the farm would return money right from the word “off”. A monthly cheque would come rolling in, and like the brook, keep on rolling and getting larger. Of course, meanwhile, between milking-time and banking hours, he would go on leisurely clearing the land, and ploughing and sowing, and hoping for rain, and in that way keep abundance of green fodder up to the herd, and cut and convert into hay all they wouldn’t require. And all that the herd wouldn’t require would be tremendous—enough to build dozens of mighty stacks and make the homestead look like a State Experimental Farm or an Art Gallery. And in addition to the ever-recurring monthly cheque he would make a big “scoop” out of these side-lines.
“That’s the way to do it,” he said brimming over with enthusiasm to Mrs. Duff, “wonder it never struck me before? And it ought to have, you know, because I ’spose I must have heard it dozens of times in the city—scores of times—hundreds of times. Bishops and parsons and University Senators and all th’ bloomin’ aristocracy were always preachin’ and writin’ about it down there. Wonderful when y’ think of it what the educated blokes know about farming, and the best way to go about it to make it pay. They know twenty times more than the chaps here do, who’ve been at it all their lives!”
“They know so much about it,” Mrs. Duff snapped, “that they never want to do any of it themselves, or make farmers of their sons.”
Titt opened his eyes and stared. His enthusiasm got a rude shock.
“Still y’ can’t beat the educated coves, for all that”, he mumbled feebly.
“No, not for talking and telling others how to do the hard part while they sit and ride about and have a good easy time themselves!” and Mrs. Duff walked away.
“There’s a lot o’ truth in that, too”, and seating himself on the log he had been barking with the axe to prepare for a gatepost for the yard, Titt reflected silently.
Then after a minute or two.
“There is so!” and lifting a chip from the ground he carelessly tossed it at a soldier ant lurking a few feet in the grass as though it were on scout duty. “A d—n lot of truth!”
Then resting his elbows on his knees, and his chin in the palms of his hands, he gave himself up to reflection.
Old Charlie, a bone collector, driving three horses and standing upright in a dray came blundering along—bumping over ruts and stones and timber hidden in the grass, and making as much noise as the retreat from Mons.
“Woh-h!” he roared, as the leader was about to walk over Titt, log and all, and trample him into the earth. “Woh-h!”
Titt’s reflections were suddenly scattered. He bounced up from that log like an India-rubber man, and snatching the long-handled shovel, angrily glared at the grinning bone collector.
“Hoh! Hoh! Hoh!” the latter laughed from the depths of a tremendous stomach hanging in rolls over a tight-buckled waist strap. “Was y’ sleepin’ on th’ job eh-h? Did y’ think I was agoin’ to run y’ down? Did y’? Hoh! Hoh! Hoh!”
“Well, you might just as well,” Titt gasped, “as to frighten the life out of a chap!”
“Oh, I wouldn’t do thet”, and calmly alighting from the dray, Charlie rolled the reins into a coil and hung them on the harness of the leader. “You wasn’t afrightent I would, was y’, eh?”
Titt made no answer.
Then casting a pair of small, black snakey-looking eyes at the yard Titt had started to build, Charlie, in a loud voice, inquired, “What are you been adoin’ on, eh?”
“Building a milking-yard, I suppose!” and Titt eyed the boisterous intruder sullenly and curiously. Titt had never seen a person like him before—nor had anyone else, for that matter. He was a powerful looking man, a Samson of the bush, with hair and whiskers as black as the ninth plague of Egypt; he wore a flannel shirt and moleskin pants, wondrously dirty, and a pair of heavy boots, without laces. His bare arms were thick as Titt’s thighs, his hands as small as a woman’s, and his Gipsy-coloured skin as unwashed as his clothes.
“A milkin’-yard?” he echoed, amusedly; “Hoh! Hoh! Hoh!” and taking hold of the only panel Titt had erected, shook it mightily, with both hands, then pulled it to him and shoved it from him till the posts, rails and all, lay flat on the ground.
“What th’ devil do y’ mean?” and with fire in his eye, Titt took a short grip of the long-handle shovel and squared up to the offender.
“It tumbled down! Thet ain’t no good? Hoh! Hoh! Hoh!” the other laughed.
“It did when you shoved it!” and Titt, swinging the shovel, jumped closer to Charlie.
“You wouldn’t hit anyone, would y’, eh?”
But just then a puff of wind gave Titt a sniff of Charlie, and suddenly dropping the shovel, he sprang back from him.
“Would y’?” the other repeated.
Titt stood spitting and coughing and grinning.
“Dorn’t y’ know who I be? Ain’t y’ seen I afore? Eh? Hoh! Hoh! Hoh!”
Titt hadn’t.
“I’m Charlie. I be agatherin’ oop the bones. There be a fine lot on ’em in the dray; look at ’em, eh?”
Titt turned and saw a smellsome pile of bullocks’ horned heads, bullocks’ ribs, sheeps’ heads and horses’ heads, shoulder blades, shin bones, joints, knuckles, and whole carcases of defunct kangaroo and emu mingling with each other in the vehicle, and shuddered at the sight. They were more offensive than Charlie himself.
“Do y’ know where old Jim Ruskin lay?” the bone monger, approaching Titt again, inquired covetously.
Titt, scowling and spitting and backing away, said he had never heard of Ruskin, and didn’t want to.
“He lived round here onct, old Jim Ruskin did”, Charlie informed him. “He quarrelled wi’ I one day about a sheep, and took I to court. Hoh! Hoh! Hoh! he wer’ a’ old dog wer’ Jim Ruskin.”
“Yes?” Titt was getting interested.
“But I’m come back now, and they tells me old Jim’s dead?”
“Perhaps he is?” Titt suggested.
“But I wants to find out where he lay.” And Charlie looked concerned.
“Where he’s buried?” from Titt.
“Yais”, loudly from Charlie. “I wants to get his bones.”
Titt fell backwards over a log, trying to get further away from his unwholesome visitor.
“Y’ can’t tell me where he lay, then, eh?” and with a sad far away look in his beady little eyes, Charlie viewed the horizon disappointedly.
Titt shook his head. (Later he learned that the missing one’s last resting place was just inside the garden gate!)
“A chap in the township”, Charlie went on, “said as you would be able to tell I where he lay”—then taking the reins from the harness, he climbed back into the dray, and, standing amongst his gruesome trophies, remained pondering the position a moment or two.
Mrs. Duff, accompanied by Araluen, re-appeared. Standing beside Titt, they stared curiously at Charlie and his load of bones.
“Ask him what he does with them?” whispered Mrs. Duff.
Titt asked him.
“I sends ’em away in a railway truck, and makes money out on ’em.”
Bending down he lifted a human skull with neck and one shoulder and an arm attached, and held it up proudly.
“There’s a good find I got this mornin’, eh?” he enthused. “I be goin’ to ask a big figure for that yun. I got ’em over there at King’s Creek where th’ shanty were. Were it a man or were it a laidy? I don’t be sure about that, eh?” and he turned the face of the grinning skeleton towards them.
But Mrs. Duff and Araluen didn’t wait to solve the question of sex. They both fled back to the house.
“Hoh! Hoh! Hoh!” Charlie chuckled looking after them; “they be frightened o’ a dead yun.”
Then carefully restoring the gruesome thing to the bed of the dray, he jerked the reins, told the horse to “get on”, and drove off through the timber, roaring like a bull at every obstacle that impeded the way, all the while keeping a sharp look-out for any object bleaching whitely amongst the grass or that was newly dead or surely dying.
Though a small kitchen was attached to the house, the Duffs often used an outside fire-place. There was more room in the outside fire-place to hang pots, kettles and things, and to fix the camp-oven. And as Mrs. Duff made all her own bread, the camp-oven was constantly in use. And in the outside fire-place a good roasting fire could always be kept going without danger of burning the house down. The wood it consumed, too, didn’t require much chopping—that, Titt and Splinter reckoned, was “the best thing about it”.
And when first they went on the holding and everything was novel, new and strange, the Duffs delighted in taking their evening meals, picnic fashion, on the short grass before the outside fire-place. And what cheerful, merry meals they were! Seated round the steaming dish of boiled corned beef, with new potatoes in their jackets, the big black billy of boiling tea, the large “wheel-loaf” of home-made bread the size and shape of the camp-oven itself; eating, talking, jesting, while the glowing fire shedding its light around, and the stars coming out winking and blinking till the great dark dome that loomed over all was jewelled with a million silvery little lights, made it a Fairyland, and a world of wonder and enchantment.
“It’s splendid having dinner out here”, Araluen, glancing at the Southern Cross, enthused one evening.
“My word, ain’t it?” And Splinter reached for another potato in its jacket.
“This is what I call life—real life!” from Titt, “not like being caged up down there in th’ dirty city!”
“Imagine us hav’ng a meal like this in the city!” Mrs. Duff laughed, “the neighbours would all be staring over the fence at us!”
“They’d ring up for the police!” Titt reckoned cynically, “or write letters to the papers about us being a public nuisance.”
“Or throw their dead cats over at us”, Araluen thinking reminiscently, laughed.
“Cats!” And Splinter, removing the jacket from the potato preparatory to putting it to “bed” with others that had gone before, paused and grinned, “more like one of th’ ‘old pilgrims of th’ night’ would come bowlin’ in on top of us and—”
“Splinter!” interrupted his Mother wamingly.
“And walk on th’ corned beef, and—”
“Splinter, did you hear me?” his Mother again interrupted.
“And put his big foot in th’ jam.”
A scream of mirth burst from Araluen, in which Splinter, himself, joined heartily.
“That’s quite enough, now! You always carry a joke too far, Splinter!” Mrs. Duff, herself on the verge of bursting into merriment, concluded.
“Ah, well!” Titt, throwing some scraps to Bluey, the dog, standing watching with head in the light and the rest of him out in the dark, sighed independently, “we’re done with the rubbishy, smelly city an’ its dead cats and plague and thieves, and cadgers and bloomin’ gentlemen swankin’ round waitin’ for the farmer to get a crop so as they can dig their claws into it, or waitin’ to be made his representative in Parliament— done with it all, and forever more, thank God, amen!”
And when the dinner things were collected, and the washing-up finished and more wood thrown on the fire, they would remain lounging outside talking of the day’s events, of their hopes and prospects and plans for the future, and listening to the native bears snoring, and the curlews shrieking and the mopokes calling and the dingoes howling as they descended the hill-sides in quest of something to steal or slay. Occasionally some of the neighbours—mostly old pioneers of the Creek —would happen along to while away an hour of two yarning and smoking. And no one loved more than those quiet, horny-handed, sunburnt patriarchs of the Bushland, to be counted amongst the circle seated before that old outside fire-place. With a flat stone, or a woodblock, or a chaff bag beneath them, they were happy and comfortable. A sitting-room, however humble or luxurious, never appealed to those old pioneers. They were never themselves when surrounded with couches and chairs and cushions and antimacassars and such “fal-th’-ra-dols”, as they termed them. Sitting-rooms, or any sort of rooms—except bedrooms perhaps—robbed them of their ease and naturalness. Sitting-rooms didn’t suit those old pioneers, and they didn’t suit sitting-rooms. They were only themselves where they could sprawl their limbs and turn their heads without looking into the faces of those about them or at the wall beside them—where they could smoke and spit and swear if they wanted to. And whenever a dazed snake, or an adder, wriggled from the hollow of a log that was thrown on the fire to keep it going, and excitement ensued, or the voice of a wild dog rang out within a few yards of the home, and gave the family the “creeps”, and drove Bluey hurriedly into the light where he whimpered with fear, those smoke-dried Bush veterans would always be reminded of things that happened on the Creek when first they came to settle there. And no one, not even themselves, ever knew how long it was since first they settled there! The influence of the fire, and the clustering stars and the weird noises arising out of the darkness around, like lost souls crying from the depths of Eternity, thrilled those old denizens, stirred the very marrow in their brittle bones, revived the vital spark again and sent their thoughts flying back—back to fears and terrors and tragedies of days so far arrear! What weird happenings—what dream-haunting skeletons they would resurrect from the graves of their shattered memories! Once, when they had sat talking and whispering in weird hushed tones—their bearded visages well nigh inflexible—until nearly midnight, “the witching hour when churchyards yawn and graves give up their dead”—until the fire had nearly burnt itself out, and no one was inclined to venture into the darkness in search of a fresh supply of wood —about a shepherd names Jones having been murdered by the blacks at a spot not more than a stone’s throw from Duff’s gate, and his remains buried by the station-hands near Blain’s water-hole, and a flat sand stone with his name and the date of his death chiselled on it, placed on the grave; and about the number of times they themselves had seen the ghost of Mrs. Mundle, a woman who got lost on Eton Vale, away back in the 60’s, and was never heard of again—had seen it dressed in white come to the door of their tent at the same hour each night, and stand there till they braced themselves up and found courage to speak to it and how, when they spoke, it answered them quite distinctly, but low and soft, and pointing to the Creek, and, beckoning them to follow, glided swiftly and noiselessly away through the long grass and, disappearing over the steep bank, would fade into the water without making the least sign of a disturbance upon the surface—the Duffs became unnerved with dread and superstitious fear, and were afraid almost to rise and venture into the house. And when they did go in and “light up”, they were afraid to go to bed. Araluen, who was most affected, insisted on sleeping with her Mother. Splinter, who was very pale and thoughtful and kept watching the door, said “he wasn’t frightened to sleep by himself”, but in the night or early morning, woke up yelling like a dingo, and, bounding from the bed, rushed into Titt and plunged in beside him, and made him swear and feel if his ribs were broken.
Next evening Mrs. Duff set the table in the kitchen. “If those old blowers come again with their silly ghost stories,” she complained, “they’ll have to sit inside—but I’ll not listen to them! ”
The old hands, though, didn’t go along the next evening. Young Martin Drygrass went along instead. Martin didn’t go of his own free will—his father, who was going to town early next morning to put a jibbing horse in the sale-yards—sent him along to get the proper time so as he could set his clock right. It hadn’t been set right since Drygrass’ last trip to town, when he put it right by the sun. On reaching town, though, he found it was all wrong, and he never trusted to the sun again.
Martin was a shy, nervous boy, and when he reached Duff’s yard-gate, which he slowly and silently opened, and saw the light shining in the house and heard voices inside, his nerves took possession of him. His feet went cold. He hesitated in the gateway and stood thinking. To approach a strange house and knock on the door and stand face to face with a group of staring people and be your own spokesman, calls for a prodigious amount of courage and confidence in a bush-bred youngster. And Martin possessed but little of either. For several minutes he steadily watched the flashing, erratic movements of the light, occasioned by Araluen and Splinter bobbing their heads into it while leaning over the table, but couldn’t make up his mind to advance further. Presently Bluey discovered his presence and started barking and growling menacingly. Martin took refuge behind one of the gate-posts—a giant round ironbark post with a level-sawn surface top large enough to dance on. Bluey, who had eyes that could see like stars in the night, became suspicious. He cautiously approached the gate and barked more. And Bluey could bark! That was all he could do—except eat! And when it came to eating, he could hold his own with Mayors and Aldermen, or State banqueteers. The door of the house opened, and Titt, poking his head out and scowling into the night, asked Bluey “What th’ devil he was barking at?” Bluey, whimpering and whining and bounding about, did his best to inform him. But no more than the gatepost, behind which Martin was trembling and shaking and perspiring, did Titt comprehend.
“You old fool! Go an’ lie down!” he said, and closed the door again.
But Bluey couldn’t lie down—not in the night. He spent himself at that throughout the day—and at it he went again, bark! bark! bark! at intervals, moving near the gate and bounding back again.
“I’m sure there must be something outside,” Mrs. Duff said nervously, “or the dog wouldn’t keep going on like that!”
“Barkin’ at his shadow”, Titt grunted, taking up the newspaper and trying to read.
Mrs. Duff, not satisfied, sat listening.
“Mrs. Mundle’s ghost, p’raps?” Splinter whispered, his eyes and ears now wide open and alert.
“Oh!” and Araluen sprang from the table and crouched in fear beside her Mother on the sofa.
“What are y’ frightened of?” Titt rebuked, Splinter under cover of “training th’ cat to jump”, left the chair he was kneeling on, and crouched under the table.
“I’ll never stop in this place by myself if ever you are away!” Mrs. Duff tremblingly warned Titt.
“Rot!” he grunted, and started reading the newspaper upside down. Though he didn’t confess it, Titt had a notion himself that Bluey was “barking at something”,
Meantime, Martin’s trembling hand came in contact with a jam tin half full of tar, left by someone on the gate-post, and seizing it he heaved it through the darkness in the direction of Bluey. But before leaving his hand the tin emptied itself over him. Bluey, taken by surprise, retreated full speed for the house as though all the dingoes in the Ranges were on his heels, and noisily dug himself in on the verandah.
“Listen!” and Mrs. Duff fairly shook; “the dog wouldn’t rush onto the verandah like that if there wasn’t someone about.”
“Nonsense!” Titt mumbled; but the short cough he gave to drown the tremor in his voice made his wife the more apprehensive.
“Where’s Splinter?” she almost choked on missing him from the room; “where is he?”
Titt glared about the room, and failing to fix Splinter’s whereabouts, began to look alarmed, too.
“Where is the boy!” And Mrs. Duff, throwing her arms round Araluen, held to her as though determined no one would steal her, too.
“Where (Titt paused to clear his throat) where are y’?” he called, looking towards the bedroom.
“N-Now then—j-j-jump, Pussy—jump”, Splinter, beneath the table, where there wasn’t any cat, lied by innuendo and inference.
“Well, you are a frightened woman!” Titt said, turning to the Mother, “what’s gone wrong with y’ all at once?” And he took up the newspaper again and tried to make it rattle loud enough to drown the row Bluey was making on the verandah.
Having disposed of the dog, Martin, with tar trickling from his face and chest, began weighing the consequences of returning home without the “proper time”. He turned his head to see if the light at his own home was visible in the distance. Instantly all thought of the light fled from his mind. Quite near, and silently approaching him, he distinctly saw a tall white figure. Angels of mercy! His heart stood still. He was between the figure and the gate-post. Martin, too, had heard about Mrs. Mundle’s ghost. He tried to shriek for help, but couldn’t. The tall white figure seemed to grow taller. It stood still. Then Martin remembered the gate was open. Through it he dived! Regardless of Bluey’s barks, or Bluey’s bites, or of anything else, he raced for Duff’s house as fast as his legs and hard bare feet could take him. Bluey saw him coming and lost heart. He howled and yelped and scratched desperately on the door, and made those inside jump to their feet and stare. When the door didn’t open to let him in, he bounded off the end of the verandah and got under the house.
“Oh, my heavens!” and Mrs. Duff clapped her hand over her heart. Mary Ellen, who had been asleep, awoke and screamed. Araluen turned pale, then pink. Splinter, still beneath the table, raised himself on hands and toes in readiness to dart at a moment’s notice in any direction.
“Keep quiet, the lot of y’!” Titt growled irritably, “and I’ll go again and see—if that’ll satisfy y’!”
“Perhaps you better not!” And Mrs. Duff’s teeth chatted audibly.
“Of course I will!” And with visible indecision, Titt moved to the door and turned the knob of it. At the same moment it suddenly burst in—there was a shriek and a bump, and he fell back heavily on the floor with a great noise, and his head under the table, and Martin sprawling over the top of him and smearing him with tar. Talk about a fright! And a screaming match! Nothing ever happened like it anywhere. Titt fought like an Anzac. He struggled and gurgled and spat out tar, and squeezed poor Martin’s throat till his eyes nearly fell out. Meeting with no resistance, he jumped to his feet, grabbed a chair with both hands and, raising it above his head, was about to break it over Martin, when he saw who he was— when Araluen and Splinter saw who he was, too. “It’s Martin Drygrass,” they cried, “Martin”, and leaving their hiding places, gathered joyously round him and held his head up, and helped him to stand on his feet, and wondered how he got the tar all over his face.
Titt put down the chair and for a moment or two walked the room puffing, gasping for breath, and struggling with himself. Then he turned to Martin again:
“What th’ devil did y’ rush in here like that for?” he foamed.
“Th’ ghost!” Martin whispered, his bulging eyes roaming to the open door.
Just then a light footstep was heard on the verandah. Mrs. Duff and Araluen screamed again; Splinter, dragging Martin with him, took refuge once more under the table; Titt, himself, stood like a fixture, then Mrs. Weeviltopp, dressed all in white, glided in, and in a hoarse, despairing voice, said, “I lost me way”.
It happened one bright Monday morning. Titt wasn’t in good humour that morning, and kept venting his feelings on the cranky plough and the two hairy unoffending quadrupeds that strained and tugged and did their best, which was a poor, feeble best, to till the land for him.
Dinner hour. Titt unyoked, and leaving the harness on Darby and Joan to save trouble and time, drove the hairy mokes to the door of the “shed”.
“Keep your darn head steady, won’t yer!” he roared, and was putting the nose-bag on the team over their winkers, when the voice of neighbour O’Connor, calling excitedly from the front of the house, attracted him.
The front of the house was distinguished from the back by a garden containing some cabbages and lettuce that went to seed, and a geranium bush that grew on the grave of old Ruskin, the man who first selected the holding, and died in the excitement of reclaiming it from the wilderness, and made room for Titt.
“Here’s an Amu! An Amu!” O’Connor called.
“A what?” and Titt turned and stared.
“An Amu! Quick, till we catch ud!”
“You mean a plain turkey”, from Titt.
“Do ye think I don’t know a plain turkey! ’Tis an Amu?” sharply from O’Connor.
Titt left the horses and went to see; sure enough an emu, one as tall as himself, was stalking silently and inquisitively to and fro along the crude palings, poking its head in wherever there was a hole to admire the horticulture. O’Connor, his big brown hairy arms extended like wings, was shepherding it and trying to “hoosh” it through the open gate into the garden.
“Why, bless me, it must be a tame one!” Titt said, walking up. “Where did it come from, O’Connor?” Titt looked upon the leggy visitor as the Israelites had looked upon manna.
“It didn’t come from anywhere; it was here admirin’ ye’re garden when I came along. Look out! Block ud!”
Titt side-stepped in time to block the bird from slipping round the corner. Then it stood, and facing them with its head high in the air, looked sideways at them.
“Bedam, ’tis a beauty!” O’Connor enthused, keeping his arms extended and his best leg forward in readiness to check any sudden strategy on the bird’s part.
“They’re fine eatin’, too, them coves”, covetously from Titt.
“The man what wud ate an iligant beast like that,” O’Connor reckoned, “would ate an angel. Block. Block ud!” Titt blocked again.
Mrs. Duff and Araluen appeared on the verandah. “Goodness!” they cried. “An emu!”
“Fetch a bucket of wather, Mam, and put ud near the gate,” O’Connor advised, “an’ when he goes in after ud, we’ll bang the gate and capture ud.”
“Yes, bring a bucket of water, quick!” Titt approved.
“And come ye round here Araluen and help block ud!” O’Connor added.
Araluen ran round the back way, and taking up a position between her father and O’Connor, began waving her apron at the bird and ordering it to “go in”. The emu looked wonderingly at Araluen.
Mrs. Duff came from the house into the garden with a bucket and placed it temptingly in the open gateway; then returned to the verandah again and awaited results.
The emu turned and eyed the water suspiciously.
“Keep steady, keep steady, he’ll go in directly”, and Titt speaking slowly and softly crept lightly toward the game. Araluen, who had a sense of humour, giggled.
“Sh! Sh!” O’Connor whispered, shaking his head at her. “Don’t shpake; they’re as cunning as the divil.”
A large ladybird appeared overhead like a flying machine and volplaned into the bucket. The emu reached through the gate and promptly picked it off the water and interned it.
“Did ever ye see the like of that?” O’Connor asked in wonderment.
The bird’s eye rested on a piece of scrap iron lying on the gate-post, which it leisurely swallowed; then turned its tail to the bucket.
“Hell, but look at that!” And O’Connor’s eyes opened wide. But Titt showed no surprise.
“That ain’t nothing”, he said. “I’ve seen them pull the shoes off horses and swaller ’em.”
O’Connor winked at Araluen.
Then, stooping, Titt quietly collected some fragments of blue metal and tossed one toward the emu. It rattled against the bucket. Suspecting treachery in the rear, the emu kicked out blindly and upset the bucket, and irrigated the garden.
Araluen burst into mirth.
“’Tis no use”, O’Connor said. “Run, fetch ye’re plough reins and we’ll lassoo ud.”
“Lassoo it with my plough reins?” Titt objected, “and let it get away into the bush with them hangin’ to it? Are y’ mad, O’Connor?”
“Catch it with your hands, why don’t y’?” Mrs. Duff advised from the verandah.
“That’s what I’m goin’ to do”, and crouching like Cain when he slew Abel, Titt began creeping nearer the bird.
The emu strolled along the palings, and looking over the tops of them, plucked a geranium and dropped it on old Ruskin’s grave.
“Now, Titt, now!” O’Connor whispered hoarsely.
“Quick, father!” And Araluen turned pale with excitement.
Then Titt dived low at the emu’s legs. But the bird had been attacked before. It jumped high in the air, and Titt knocked three palings out of the fence with his head. Mrs. Duff, when she saw Titt’s head inside the garden, dropped down on the verandah in a fit of mirth; Araluen dropped down behind O’Connor, and O’Connor dropped on his hands and knees in the dirt, and tore up fistfuls of it; and glanced over his shoulder at Titt.
“Yes, that’s right!” Titt growled, extracting his head from the splintery palings. “Laugh away! Laugh away!”
And O’Connor and Araluen laughed until they heard Mrs. Duff shouting:
“My! My! My! It’s got its head in the back window and is eatin’ all the hot pumpkin!”
Then, headed by O’Connor, they hurried to the back of the house.
“Hould on now, jist go steady!” And O’Connor directed operations. “Wait till he puts his head in the windy again, and is swallerin’ a bit of pumpkin—then we’ll all rush him!”
“If I get me hand on th’ wretch,” Titt with malice, murmured solemnly, “I’ll screw its neck.”
Then noticing that Darby and Joan had their heads in the air and were looking alarmed, he shouted, “Wa-a-y, yer fools!” to them, and grimly set his teeth again.
“Don’t let it eat all the dinner—dont’ let it!” Mrs. Duff cried. Then O’Connor and Titt charged, and both got a grip on the emu. But the bird plunged and struggled and twisted and bashed Titt with its stubby wings, and kicked O’Connor in the stomach with one of its long legs and put him out of action.
“Hold it tight, father, hold it!” Araluen cried, keeping out of the fight herself.
But Titt lost his footing and fell, and dragged the emu with him.
“Get the plough reins and tie its legs!” Mrs. Duff cried, coming to her husband’s assistance.
Araluen ran for the plough reins. Darby and Joan must have taken her for the emu. They bolted and fell over the fence into the corn, and left most of the harness hanging on the wire posts. Araluen snatched the plough reins, and hurrying back with them, found her mother lying under the emu and Titt on top of it.
O’Connor, who had recovered himself, took the reins, and making a noose at one end, threw it over the bird’s head and over Titt’s head, too. Then he pulled hard.
“Stop! Stop! Dammit, it’s me you got!” Titt shouted.
O’Connor stopped. Then Titt shook his head out, and O’Connor pulled again and cried:
“Lit the divil up! I have ud!”
The emu flapped its wings, struck at the rope with its feet like a horse, squawked, sprang in the air, then sat back and “scratch-pulled” till its head nearly came off.
“I’ve got ud!” And O’Connor, leaning back, pulled harder.
Suddenly the emu changed tactics. Taking long swift strides, it raced straight at O’Connor, giving him no time to haul in the slack. O’Connor lifted his foot to kick it, but kicked too soon, lost his balance and fell back. The emu ran through his whiskers and over him, and escaped with the plough reins hanging to it.
“Yer didn’t let it go, did yer?” Titt roared, jumping to his feet, with a bunch of feathers in each hand.
“The divil go with ud!” O’Connor gasped, and sat down to regain his wind.
A week later. O’Connor with a hoe on his shoulder, called on Titt at the plough.
“We cot that amu, Titt,” he said; “ud came to our dairy the morning after, and fed out ov the ould woman’s hand like a dove. Sure, ’twas a tame one, all the time.”
“Did it have my plough reins on it?” And Titt scowled at the broken make-shift things he was working the team with.
“A fut of them were round its neck; all the rest were in its crop.”
“They were what?” And Titt regarded O’Connor with suspicion.
“Amu’s ate greenhide like worms, ye know.”
“You’re a liar O’Connor!” And Titt shook his fist in his neighbour’s face.
“Ye’re another!” And tearing off his vest (O’Connor always wore an old vest), and throwing it on the ground, turned and walked away, calling out, “Come on to th’ road! Come on to th’road!”
Titt’s eyes rested on a fig of “twist” tobacco that had fallen from the pocket of O’Connor’s vest. He picked it up, filled his pipe, and speaking to Darby and Joan, went on wobbling behind the old plough and blowing great clouds of smoke.
O’Connor, out on the road, danced about, shouting, “Come on!”
Splinter, driving the cows to the gully paddock, on Paddy Grey, the new saddle horse, came along, and grinned at O’Connor.
“Hello, Mister O’Connor,” he greeted, “did y’ finish sinking th’ well yet?”
“I’ll finish ye, ye—young shnipe!” and lifting a stick big enough to brain an elephant with, O’Connor went after Splinter.
“Yah!” Splinter yelled, labouring hard with his heels and his hat to make Paddy Grey shift himself, “I’d take you on one hand.”
Then O’Connor went into Titt’s again, and putting on his vest and taking out his empty pipe, waited calmly till he finished another round.
“By dam, Titt,” he said, looking along the furrow and laughing, “but ye’re ploughin’ as straight as a dog’s hind leg.”
“Am I?” Titt grinned.
“Ye are: give us a bit of tobacco if y’ have any on ye.”
Titt gave him back his own; then they both sat down and smoked and talked and built castles in the air till dinner time.
Old Fred (a distant relation on Mrs. Duffs side), one day unexpectedly turned up on an old horse and filled the home with joy. None of them, except Mrs. Duff, had ever seen old Fred before, and Titt was delighted to meet him. He made Mrs. Duff give up their bed to him; saw that he was provided with water and a new towel. “And get a brush or something,” he ordered, “and leave it in the room for him to do his hair with.” Titt still retained all his city ideas of hospitality.
And when Old Fred objected to having so much consideration lavished upon him, and asked “what they are going to do themselves?” Titt laughed, and said, “they had plenty of room —enough to start a boardin’ house with.”
“Very well, just as you like”, and Old Fred, a genial, kindly, silent bushman, rubbed his hands together and smiled agreeably.
Then Titt showed his guest the double bed he was to sleep in, and explained the working of the wash basin and the hair brush to him and showed him how to open the window and shut it without severing his fingers or getting his head jammed in it, or letting it fall on the floor, or right outside—and after saying “good-night” and hoping he would sleep sound and have pleasant dreams, slipped out and helped the missus to make a shake-down for themselves on the floor, in the front room; and then turned in as though he had been used to dossing on the floor all his life.
It was a hard, even floor, and Titt didn’t sleep well on it. He didn’t complain though; he was a martyr to the comfort of his new-found relation. He would have suffered death rather than Old Fred should be uncomfortable. But he was careful to rise before daylight next morning, so that the latter wouldn’t know the sacrifices he had made for him. Titt was a modest man, even though he came from the city. He roused Mrs. Duff out, too, and promptly removed the bed. Titt always believed in covering up his tracks. Like murder, though, it all came out the next night. Old Fred had to get up the next night to go outside for something. He groped his way in the dark to the front door, and in his uncertainty trampled heavily on the flat of Titt’s stomach, Titt had a lean hollow stomach, and got a great start when he felt the weight on it.
“Who’s there?” he groaned, when he got his wind back.
Old Fred got a start, too.
“Eh, who is it?” Titt repeated nervously.
“Is that where y’are?” the other responded feebly.
“It’s you, Old Fred? I thought it might be some one else prowlin’ about.” And Titt turned over and rubbed his stomach.
“I—I’m trying to find me way to the door,” Old Fred explained in a voice full of anxiety, “but I don’t know where it is”, and he fumbled the wall all over with his big palms, and knocked down a framed photograph of Brisbane under flood.
“Why? What’s the matter?” Titt inquired, brightening up.
Old Fred never replied, but continued fumbling the wall, and knocked over a whatnot.
“What’s up, man?” Titt asked again with increased nervousness.
“Left me saddle on the fence; stray cattle about might chew it.” Old Fred said with a tremor.
Mrs. Duff gave Titt a silent dig in the ribs and whispered to him. Then Titt changed his tone.
“Can’t you find the door?” It’s there, old chap”, and sitting up in bed he pointed through the darkness with his finger to the place where the door should be.
“Wh—where?” And Old Fred groped some more.
“To your left a little.” Titt was guided by the sound Old Fred’s horny hands were making. “It pulls in this way towards y’.”
Old Fred turned to his left and mauled and fumbled and moaned afresh, till his hands excitedly came in contact with the new sideboard. He grabbed hold of it eagerly—clutched it like a drowning man—and pulled. The side-board and everything on it fell with a great crash in comparison with which the fall of Jerusalem was only a faint echo.
“Man alive!” Titt cried, “don’t pull the bloomin’ house down.”
But Old Fred wasn’t conscious of having pulled anything down.
“There’s no door”, he murmured.
“For heaven’s sake, Titt,” Mrs. Duff burst out, “get up and show him where it is.”
“I suppose I’ll have to!’ and Titt got up slowly.
“Here it is, Old Fred”, he said, throwing the door open without an effort and suddenly letting in streaks of moonlight.
Without a word, Old Fred, like a wild animal given its freedom, darted out.
Titt chuckled and returned to bed.
“It’s not very nice to laugh at him”, Mrs. Duff rebuked.
Then peals of pent-up merriment burst from Splinter’s and Araluen’s rooms.
“Children! you’ve a nice lot of manners, I must say”, Mrs. Duff called to them.
Araluen promptly smothered her mirth with a pillow, but Splinter took all he could out of the situation.
“If I have to go into you, me noble, I’ll soon shut y’ up!” Titt threatened. Splinter shut up, and Araluen broke out again.
“Can’t y’ stop it?” Splinter giggled to her through the partition.
“I’ll stop you, pretty quick, anyway”, and feeling in the dark for one of his boots which he had left near his pillow, Titt heaved it over the partition at Splinter. But it didn’t go over the partition. It hit the Bishop of Someplace hanging on the wall, and made a great crash.
“Now, what have you done?” and Mrs. Duff, in her alarm, clutched Titt and trembled.
Titt hardly knew.
But amidst the dead silence that prevailed, Old Fred crept in again; said it “was a beautiful night outside”, and cheerfully found his way back to bed.
Fireworks, Old Fred’s horse, wasn’t welcomed in the warm way that Old Fred was, himself. Fireworks received a real hot reception. Duff’s farm horses were not like the Duffs themselves—they were a selfish, jealous, inhospitable lot, and when Fireworks, on the first day of his arrival, greeted them in a friendly spirit and wanted to pal in with them and make himself at home, rushed at him, open-mouthed, and aimed heavy kicks at him, and squealing like demented brumbies, chased him round and round the farmyard till, scared of his life, he bailed up in a corner. Then they at him teeth and toes, kicked him below the belt or anywhere; made him cut his throat in three or four places with the barbwire, and would have eaten him alive if Splinter hadn’t by chance come to the rescue in time. There were no manners or sense of hospitality about Duff’s horses, whatever; ignorant as aboriginals, the lot of them.
An uncommon looking horse, too, Fireworks was. Superior and dignified. Stood up well on his legs—must have stood fully six feet high on his two hind ones. His back was the only part of him that was faulty. It had a dip in it—a hollow about a foot deep. But anyone could see in a glance that he had known better days. He must have known a lot of different owners, too, in his day, judging by the number of registered brands he carried. Most of the hair was burnt off him with brands, and from head to tail he was tattooed with numbers and letters in capitals and script, some straight on, some sideways, some upside down, and all mixed together. At a distance, you’d think he was a Chinaman’s sign-board. Those brands were his references—his certificates of popularity.
On the second day, when Fireworks, after holding aloof till he couldn’t hang out any longer, stealthily approached the trough, Duff’s horses rushed at him again. In his hurry to escape them he slipped on the grass and fell down. At first he lay still, and didn’t try to get up, thinking, maybe, they would regard him as dead and let him rest in peace. But when they all gathered round and began clawing and pawing and kneeling on him, and rejoicing over his death, he struggled for his feet. Every time he lifted his head, though, and raised himself on his forefeet, one or the other, or the lot of them at the same time, would kick him over again and walk on him.
“Heigh! Heigh!” Titt, returning from the township with a part of the plough that he had taken to the blacksmith for repair, shouted from the gate, “they’re fightin’ Old Fred’s horse again; they’ve got him down!”
Old Fred ran and got the bridle, and while Titt drove the others off, caught Fireworks and led him to the trough.
“Put him in the yard over there”, Titt, indicating a crude sapling enclosure with an old iron tub and some broken gin-cases that served for feed-boxes lying about, advised when Fireworks had blown himself out with water, and Old Fred was standing wondering what to do about him—“and give him a feed of corn—will he eat corn?”
Old Fred wasn’t quite sure—he had never seen him eat any. “Oh, well—at that rate,” Titt suggested considerately, “we’ll give him some in a nose-bag, and he can learn how to eat it!”
Then, while Old Fred placed Fireworks in the sapling enclosure and put up all the rails—altogether there were about twenty rails to put up, counting the broken ones and others that were several inches too short to “reach”—Titt half filled a nose-bag with corn and chaff, and brought it along.
“You put it on him,” he said handing the bag to Old Fred, “you know him better than I do.”
Titt was a cautious man where strange horses were concerned. And Fireworks wasn’t looking at all friendly—he was surly and depressed.
Taking the bag, Old Fred said, “Come on, old chap”, and held it invitingly in front of Fireworks. For several seconds he took no notice of it. It might as well have been a lump of wood. Old Fred gave the bag a shake and the corn rattled. Fireworks instantly pricked his ears and brightened up and stared all about in a most friendly way.
“Seems to know th’ sound of it”, Titt said.
Old Fred shoved it under his nose; and when Fireworks got a sniff of the contents he whinnied in surprise and plunged his snout into the bag and burrowed to the bottom in search of the corn—and he had to search, too!
“No! he don’t know what it is!” Titt grinned, “not him!”
So ravenous and eager was Fireworks for it that Old Fred couldn’t fasten the nose-bag to his head properly.
“Hold up!” he said, leaning over when the brute forced the bag to the ground and sneezed happily into it and slobbered,and made a great noise cracking the grain with his teeth, when he found some. “Hold up, fer a minute, can’t y’?” And when he didn’t respond as he should have done, Old Fred kicked the bag with the toe of his foot.
Gee! Fireworks must have thought it was the other horses making another assault on him. He threw up his head with such suddenness and hit Old Fred so hard under the chin that he knocked him right off his feet on to the broad of his back.
“Cripes!” Titt gasped, gathering him up, “did he hurt y’?”
But Old Fred was knocked out—right out—and never answered.
Titt, suddenly filled with fury, dropped Old Fred in the dust again, and grabbing up a broken rail hit Fireworks on the head with it and called him a “long ugly cow!” Fireworks swung round, switched his tail, and lowering his head, went on feeding, as if nothing had happened.
When Old Fred recovered and sat up, dazed looking, Titt explained how it happened, and told him where he was, and the time of day, then led him across to the house to “get a drink of something, and have a camp for awhile on the sofa”.
No sooner had they gone than the draught horses gathered round the sapling enclosure and stared enviously through the rails at Fireworks. One would think they had never seen another horse having a feed before. Feeling himself secure, Fireworks bravely laid his ears back and stamped his feet as a sort of challenge to them, and ate faster.
Bounce, Titt’s big ungainly shafter, thrust his head between the rails and craned his neck to reach the nose-bag. Fireworks laid his ears back some more, and moved further away.
Bounce withdrew his head, and to revenge himself on Fireworks, bit Diamond, who was dozing beside him, hard on the rump. Diamond woke up with a start and jumped away and tramped in the iron tub and pressed the bottom out of it. Then Gypsy, a diplomatic old beast who always worked in the furrow and was a great favourite with the women—so the man said who sold her to Titt—shoved her nozzle between the rails and tried to make love to Fireworks. But Fireworks wasn’t an emotional horse—flirting on the spur of the moment wasn’t in his line. He just shook his head and turned his rump disdainfully to Gypsy. Binnie, the slick, brainy horse of the farm, meanwhile, had been standing off doing some hard, deep thinking. And in roguery or thieving, or anything where direct action was required, Binnie was a prime mover. He was also “Boss” of the farm; it was he who made Fireworks cut his throat on the barb-wire, and was first to paw him and trample on him while he was feigning death.
Separating from the others, Binnie strolled leisurely round to the barricade of “slip-rails,” and regarded them thoughtfully. Then he turned his rump to them and started scratching himself against them as if he had the mange. From side to side he rubbed and scrubbed, occasionally “sitting back in the britchen” and putting all his weight into it. At last the top rail became displaced and fell across his back. Without noticing it, Binnie went on rubbing and shoving. But Fireworks took a lot of notice of it. He heard the rail fall and looked round quickly. When he saw Binnie and what he was up to, he designed his motive instantly, and became alarmed. He suddenly lost his appetite, too, and began trotting round the enclosure in search of a place to get out. At intervals he would stand with head high in the air and stare at Binnie to see what chances he had of breaking in. Concluding he had the best of chances, he took to galloping round and snorting into the nose-bag. When at last all the rails fell down on top of Binnie with a crash, Fireworks, as the last recourse, rushed at the highest panel, which was about 7ft. high, to jump out, but changed his mind in the last stride, and bumped his head. Then into the enclosure Binnie bounded triumphantly, and roaring and screaming like a stallion, took Fireworks by the back of the neck and shook him. Fireworks reared straight up on top of the yard; his fore feet became stuck in the top-rail, the nosebag hung over the other side, and there he remained a curious helpless looking spectacle. Nothing could have pleased Binnie more. Dancing round, he shoved his rump up against that of Fireworks, and lowering his head, banged into him hard and fast with both heels. Bing! Bang! Biff! rang out all round the place. Fireworks could do nothing in the way of retaliation only roar into the bag. And while he roared, Bounce, outside, reached up and dragged the nose-bag off him, and spilling most of the feed on the ground, started cleaning it up and showing his teeth to the others when they approached to help him.
“Father! Father!” Araluen, flying into the house, shrieked, “they’re killing Old Fred’s horse!”
“Who’s killing him?” and Titt came to the door.
“Binnie is—look at him!”
“Th’ cow! he’s broken into him! I thought he would!” And off Titt ran.
“Ahoh, you dog! Stop that!” he shouted, when he reached the rails. Then he let fly anything he could lay hands on at Binnie.
Binnie stopped it and rushing out of the enclosure, galloped away, bucking and kicking and showing off to “the gallery”.
“Look at him now!” Titt said, when Old Fred, pale with excitement, came shuffling along. “Too much to eat an’ not enough work! That’s what’s wrong with him.”
But Old Fred just then could only look at Fireworks. There he hung (or stood), with patches of skin and half the brands kicked off him, grunting, groaning and moaning.
“Oh, dear! However did he get up there?” and Old Fred’s eyes filled with tears.
“Binnie kicked him there, of course”, Titt answered proudly. “He’s a terrible powerful horse Binnie is. I paid £8 for him. And if I hadn’t got here when I did he’d ’a’ kicked him right over th’ top on to his head an’ perhaps broke his neck!”
“Oh, dear! what’s to be done!” And Old Fred shivered and shook like a leaf.
“We’ll have to chop him down, I ’spose,” thoughtfully from Titt.
Splinter, with a magpie’s nest hoisted proudly on the end of a long stick, appeared at the gate.
“Heigh, Splinter!” Titt shouted, “bring th’ axe over here— quick! Look sharp!”
“Bring th’ what?” and Splinter put his hand behind his ear.
“Th’ axe! Dammit, th’ axe!”
“Can’t hear y’”, and Splinter shifted the magpie’s nest from the end of the long stick to the top of his head.
“By Christmas you’ll hear me if I go over to y’! Bring th’ axe!” roared his parent.
Splinter started running towards the enclosure.
“Well! Well! Well!” Titt hissed hopelessly. “Damned if he ain’t coming over here!”
Just as he arrived and was about to ask his parent what it was he wanted, Splinter’s eyes rested on Fireworks. He never before saw such a strange sight.
“Holy!” he gasped, “wh—wh—what’s up?”
Then, after a pause, and at the top of his voice: “An ’orse?”
Rushing to the rails and grimacing fiercely through them, Titt yelled: “Yes, a horse; but I want th’ axe! Get th’ axe! Blarst it, haven’t y’ got any ears?”
“What ’orse? an’ how did he get up there like that?” in dreamy amazement from Splinter.
“Well, I’m damned!” and Titt, scratching his head desperately, turned to Old Fred.
“It’s my horse”, Old Fred murmured, sadly, for Splinter’s information. “One of your father’s kicked him up there, and we want the axe to chop the rails with.”
“An’ ain’t y’ got it here?” and Splinter started looking about.
“Would I have shouted so often to y’ to bring it if we had? By cripes!” and Titt started unbuckling his belt.
“Oh! was that what y’ said?” and away went Splinter full split, and returned in a few seconds with the axe.
“Pretty near time, too!” Titt, reaching for the implement, snarled savagely. “Pshaw, y’ chump!”
Then, mounting the enclosure, he severed the top saplings, and Fireworks’ useless life was saved once more.
After a week or so Duffs horses changed their attitude towards Fireworks. They ceased to resent his presence, allowed him to graze peacefully in the paddock and permitted him to drink with them at the creek. A little later he had become one of them, and instead of standing aloof, a lonely, miserable, friendless outcast, took a leading part in everything they did—except farm work.
One Sunday Mickey Masuki, leading a lame horse, called and asked Titt if he could leave it to rest in the paddock until he returned from Felton the following day. Of course Titt said he could, and when Micky pulled the halter off his head the animal limped into a corner and stood there, gazing fretfully over the fence.
After a while Duff’s draughts, with Fireworks bringing up the rear, came trailing along to spend a half-hour or so poking about the “farm-yard”. All of them, at sight of the stranger, stopped and pricked their ears, then disregarding him, went on again—all of them, except Fireworks. He stared at the intruder for quite awhile, as if he was a foreign invasion, then arching his neck and raising his tail and putting a lot of frightfulness into himself, strode straight and aggressively towards him. On hearing his approach, the other turned his head slowly and looked dreamily round. But when he saw Fireworks he woke up and turned right round. One glance at him was enough. Off he went along the fence as fast as his three legs could take him, and off went Fireworks, his neck outstretched and mouth wide open, in pursuit. But finding he was losing instead of gaining, he quickly pulled up. Then shaking his head and kicking feebly up behind, to show he had plenty of go left in him, returned to the others.
Fireworks believed in doing to others when others had done to him. In that respect he resembled human beings.
One day, O’Connor called and after talking the matter over with Titt, engaged Splinter to work for him for ten shillings a week.
“We won’t want him here for a while—not until we get th’ cows going”, Titt explained to Mrs. Duff. “And he’ll learn a lot at O’Connor’s, and be valuable to us when he comes home.”
“He will then,” O’Connor agreed, “and I’ll make a man of him for yez.”
Mrs. Duff consented reluctantly, and stipulated it “would only be for a little while”. But Splinter was eager to go and earn some money—eager till his clothes were packed, and his father warned him to “keep out of mischief”, and he saw tears in his Mother’s and Araluen’s eyes, then his enthusiasm left him; his heart sank; and he would have changed his mind if O’Connor, who was waiting, hadn’t bustled him into the cart and driven hurriedly away.
“This is th’ new mahn”, O’Connor announced, referring to Splinter when the family ran to the front barb-wire gate to meet the cart.
Splinter regarded them sullenly. He wasn’t used to being grinned and stared at and made a lot of.
“He’s been cryin’”, Barney O’Connor, who was about Splinter’s own age, discovered.
Splinter scowled at Barney, and turned his eyes to the garden where pumpkins and melons were growing luxuriantly.
“Poor bhoi,” Mrs. O’Connor sympathised, “sure an’ he’ll be after wantin’ his dinner.”
Splinter sniffed his nostrils noisily, and looked approvingly at Mrs. O’Connor.
A week passed. Splinter began to feel at home with O’Connor’s: made himself familiar with everything about the place; noted the number of melons on the vines and calculated the time it would take them to ripen; and looked happy.
“Phwat’s ye’er name again?” O’Connor inquired of him at breakfast one morning. Splinter grinned and told him for the twentieth time.
“Ov course,” and O’Connor repeated it several times, “I do alez be forgettin’ ud.”
Then, after a pause, “I’ll want y’ with me at the well to-day; Barney he have to take pigs to the sale.”
O’Connor had only the day before started to sink a well in the back yard.
“And if we shtrikes water, ould woman,” he added for his wife’s benefit, “we’ll run it all over the house for ye’.”
“Lord love ye, Tim”, and Mrs. O’Connor helped herself to more breakfast.
O’Connor rose from the table, and went off. Splinter followed him.
Scrambling down the side of the well, the former dropped into the hole, and commenced working with the pick. Splinter sat on the top and caught flies, and in unguarded intervals, knocked loose earth down on top of O’Connor, and caused him to use bad language. No windlass was yet constructed, and whenever he picked enough mullock to fill the bucket, O’Connor would shout to Splinter: “Call Mrs. O’Connor to give ye a hand to haul it up.”
And Mrs. O’Connor, protesting noisily, would come blundering along and knock more earth into the well.
“Shut up, what have ye to growl about?” O’Connor would shout up at her. “and don’t be droppin’ stones on me.”
“If I drops the bucket on ye,” Mrs. O’Connor would grunt, “ye’ll have something to swear about.”
Then O’Connor would crouch silently against the wall of the well, and closely watch the bucket till it was safely landed at the top.
After dinner Mrs. Pat Donovan, the nearest neighbour, came along, carrying her baby. Mrs. O’Connor greeted her loudly and warmly, and taking the infant out of her arms, hugged and cuddled it; then called to Susan, her eldest daughter, to make a cup of tea, “an set it out here on the table under the grape vine. An’ cut some of th’ rainbow cake if it’s cooked.”
Mrs. Donovan leaned over the well and looked down into it.
“What are y’ doin’ down there, Tim O’Connor?” she laughed, “digging a grave for yerself?”
O’Connor dropped the pick and looked up.
“Phwat th’ divvle do ye be doin’ up there wid yaller stocking on, Mrs. Pat Donovan”, he shouted back.
Mrs. Pat Donovan clutching her skirts, jumped away from the well and blushed at Mrs. O’Connor.
Mrs. O’Connor smiled.
“Yaller stockin’s,” Splinter chuckled, looking at Mrs. Donovan, “you haven’t got any on, have y’?”
“Shut up, y’ young divvle,” Mrs. Donovan cried, “how do y’ know whether I have or whether I haven’t.”
Then casting her eyes hurriedly about the yard. “If I could see somethin’ to drop on Tim O’Connor, I would, for his imperdence.”
“Drop the baby on him”, Splinter grinned.
“Ye insolent brat, I’ll—I’ll”, and Mrs. Donovan chased him round the well, but Splinter had often been chased before.
Susan came from the house and set the tea and the rainbow cake on the table beneath the grape vine.
Mrs. O’Connor called down the well to O’Connor to “come up and have some tay”; then turning to Susan, told her to bring out her new ball dress and show it to Mrs. Donovan.
Susan brought the dress, and Mrs. Donovan, placing the baby beneath the table, went into raptures about the “beautiful garmint”.
While they were admiring the dress, Splinter approached the table and reached for the rainbow cake.
“Get the rope, Splinter, and trow me down an end of ud”, came from O’Connor.
Splinter, stuffing his mouth with cake, procured the rope and lowered one end of it.
“Tie it to somethin’ up there, and tie it tight,” O’Connor further ordered, “and I’ll pull myself up be ud.”
Splinter said he could see nothin’ much to tie the rope to.
“There’s lots of things. Use your eyes!” O’Connor called back.
Splinter tied the rope to the leg of the table, and shouted, “Orright!”
Before trusting his weight to it, O’Connor pulled hard and suddenly with both hands. The table instantly reared up and plunged towards the well, threw a forward somersault and tossed the tea and what was left of the rainbow cake, and the crockery into the well on top of himself, and emptied the milk jug over the crooning infant.
“My God, the child!” Mrs. Donovan screamed.
Then there was pandemonium.
Suddenly the table somersaulted some more, and landed across the mouth of the well.
Mrs. O’Connor and Mrs. Donovan and Susan fled with the screaming infant into the house, and left the ball dress behind.
O’Connor, threatening in a loud, angry voice, to take Splinter’s life, started scrambling out of the well.
Splinter waited till the other’s head and body were above the ground, then threw the ball dress over him and ran.
But when O’Connor found his feet, he didn’t run after Splinter. He tore the ball dress from his head, and for an instant stood viewing the wreckage. Then he rushed inside and, using violent language on Mrs. O’Connor and Mrs. Donovan, asked them “pwhat th’ devil do ud all mean?”
There had been a couple of good seasons, and dairying in South Queensland started ahead. People talked hopefully about the industry; some got excited over it, and one day a few of the leaders got together and decided to build a co-operative cheese factory. Then trouble commenced; some believed only in a butter factory; some in a creamery; some in no factory of any kind; others gave the venture a month to prepare its will and make peace with everyone. One-half of those who held shares wanted to become directors, the other half aspired to the position of manager and secretary. Dan O’Heame and old Grogan, who decided to “wait and see if it was going to be a success before putting money into it”, quarrelled over the contract for supplying wood for the engine, and went to law about it, and three weeks after the case was heard both lawyers in the township were wearing new tailor-made suits.
After numerous ordinary meetings, and special meetings, and secret meetings, were held, it was finally announced that the factory would open to receive milk on a certain morning.
Talk about excitement. Scarcely a supplier slept the night before for thinking and dreaming of it. All were anxious to secure the honour of being first to deliver the goods.
At 3 a.m. O’Connor pushed in the door of Splinter’s room, and found the bed empty; an hour later the cows were in the yard, and milking started.
“Milk them dry now,” O’Connor said, “an’ don’t leave a dhrop.”
“Barney ain’t strippin’ his”, Splinter grunted.
O’Connor rose from his block and threatened Barney with annihilation.
“How can he tell if I’m strippin’ them or not?” Barney argued. “Can he see in the dark?”
“Can tell be the sound in yer bucket”, Splinter answered.
“If ye got hit on the nose ye could tell be the sound of it, too, perhaps”, and Barney chuckled aggressively.
“You couldn’t hit it, though”, Splinter said.
“Couldn’t I?” from Barney.
“Now thin,” O’Connor yelled, “if there’s to be any foightin’, I’ll do ud, an’ throw ye both out ob th’ yard.”
Then for quite a while nothing but the “swishing” of the milk was heard.
“Only three more”, Splinter said, bailing up his last cow.
“Leave Mulberry for me, and ye two shove the milk-cans into the cart and put the horse in”, O’Connor yelled.
Splinter and Barney handled the cans, and put the horse in the cart. A few minutes later O’Connor rushed from the bails, climbed into the cart, yelled “throw down th’ gate”, and flogged the horse into a canter.
The others stood watching him through the dawn till he passed Grogan’s and was out of sight.
“Now, then,” Splinter said, turning to Barney, “wot about hittin’ me on th’ nose?”
Barney was taken by surprise.
“You mind yerself”, he said, and tactfully backed into the yard.
“Come on, if yer think yer fit”, and Splinter sparred after him.
Barney jumped back and collided with the hind end of a cow. Plum kicked him hard and he dropped in the dust and bellowed.
Splinter declined to believe Barney.
“She ain’t hurt y’ ”, he said. “Come on, get up, before I counts ten, or I’ll hit y’ down.”
He started counting.
“One…two…”
Barney bellowed harder.
“Three…four…five.”
Mrs. O’Connor, armed with the gridiron, ran from the kitchen.
“Six…seven…eight…nine…”
“Ten, ye young blackguard”, and Mrs. O’Connor hit Splinter on the head and bent the gridiron.
Just then the rattle of the spring-cart and the angry voice of O’Connor were suddenly heard again.
Mrs. O’Connor turned quickly and stared.
“Whatever have brought ye back?” she shouted.
O’Connor sprang wildly to the ground.
It was Splinter’s and Barney’s turn to stare.
“Thim young divils”, O’Connor yelled, “put the can of wather into th’ carrt and left the milk shtandin’ where it is, and made a d—fool of me at th’ fachtry.”
Then he unbuckled his belt, but before he could enter the yard Splinter and Barney were through the rails and streaking like emus for the tall corn.
For twelve months the co-operative factory struggled bravely on, every day manufacturing some cheese, every month paying cheques to suppliers. Then one Saturday the first Annual Meeting happened. It happened in the factory building and an enthusiastic gathering it was! Shareholders crowded in till the room was packed and restlessly waited for proceedings to start. They didn’t start until Duncan McClay, who was manager, secretary, cheese-maker, and the largest shareholder, sauntered in and took the chair.
When he was seated, he rose and spoke about the progress and prosperity of the industry, then began to read the balance-sheet and annual report.
“Can I ask y’ a question?” Old O’Heame said.
“Ye can, if it isna aboot my past heestory”, Duncan answered.
“History! It’s about the money that’s been wasted makin’ them cheese cases”, O’Hearne shouted, angrily.
“Well, ye’ll hear aboot that presently”, and McClay went into finance. He read out sums for advertising and discount, and cartage, and insurance, and repairs, and directors’ fees, and railway fares, and petty cash, and—
“Mercy, mon! You surely ain’t paid away any more?” Mrs. Brown interrupted excitedly.
Old Streeton, who was a great believer in McClay’s ability, and public integrity, turned in his seat and stared at Mrs. Brown. And when old Streeton stared at anyone they felt it.
“That isna a’”, Duncan answered. “There’re plenty more, but I didna like tae pu’ them a’ doon.”
Streeton laughed. Streeton always laughed at McClay’s jokes. Besides being a man of business, Duncan was a humorist. But the meeting was not in a mood for merriment.
“An’ who is ud that’s payin’ all this money ye hab shpent, Mr. Chairman?” O’Connor, with suspicion in his eye, inquired.
“It isna Mister O’Connor, anyway”, McClay answered. “He has a’nely been a reg’lar supplier for a month and doesna always bring milk in his cans either.”
Streeton laughed hard again, but no one else joined in his mirth.
“Thaives! Thaives!” O’Connor shouted.
“Shame!” Streeton said to O’Connor. “Shame!”
Hurried whispers passed from one to another, and the feeling of antagonism to the directors increased.
“Will ye read th’ sums paid away again, Mr. Chairman?” O’Connor shouted. “Read thim!”
All eyes were turned on O’Connor. He became the hope of the opposition.
McClay read the item again, and said that every particle of the expenditure was justified.
“Don’t take any notice of them”, Streeton advised. “Get on with the business, Mr. Chairman.”
“You shut up”, Mrs. Brown, shaking her fist, said to Streeton. “And don’t be looking at me with your old cow eyes!”
O’Connor, yelling out things at the top of his voice, sprang to his feet.
“Order! Order!” from the Chairman.
“Dam yer Order,” O’Connor roared, “I’m not under any order, it’s sthraight dealin’ we want—an’ it’s nothin’ but sthraight dealin’ we’ll hab.”
“I object”, and Streeton sprang to his feet, too.
“Who th’ divvle are ye?” O’Connor asked of him.
“I’m a shareholder, an’ have a right to me opinion”, and Streeton punched his left palm with his right fist.
“I’ve twice as many shares as ye—three times as many, so I have, and have a right to more opinions than ye”, and O’Connor, turning his back on the Chair, shook his fist at Streeton.
“Then you got more shares than you got sense, or opinions either”, and Streeton sat down and stroked his whiskers.
“Order!” the Chairman called again, and Tommy Ryan in a thin voice cried, “Chair! Chair!”
“I have the flure”, O’Connor protested. “An’ Oi’ll sit down for no mahn.”
“Sit doon”, McClay ordered.
“I ask for your rulin’”, O’Connor demanded.
“Hear, hear”, Mrs. Sawpitt said, applauding O’Connor. “Hear, hear.”
“Rubbish!” Streeton said.
“Hauld yer tangs”, and McClay waved the balance-sheet at the meeting.
“I’ll give way to no wahn”, and O’Connor stood upon his seat. “I’m here to hab my say, an’ I’ll hab ud!”
“Sit ye doon”, and McClay pointed his big thick finger at O’Connor as though it were a rifle. “If ye dinna I’ll go an’ throw y’ doon.”
“Hear, hear! Hear, hear!” Streeton shouted approvingly.
“Shut up! You hairy old bear”, Mrs. Brown called to Streeton.
“I’ll shut you up”, Streeton retorted, and Mrs. Brown poked her tongue out.
“There’s manners for yer”, and Streeton scowled at her.
“I’ll shtay here till I know where all this money hab gone to”, and O’Connor folded his arms and wagged his whiskers defiantly at the meeting.
“That’s right; we want to know into whose pocket it went”, Miss McOwen, an old maid who milked her own cows, squeaked.
“That’s corperashin for y’, if y’ like!” Mrs. Daley interjected, and Mrs. Holmes declared it “wasn’t corperashin at all, but robberation of poor, ’ard-workin’ people.”
“Hauld yer gab,” McClay called to Mrs. Holmes, “an’ talk sense, woman—ye an’ your robberation!”
Then old Holmes jumped to his feet and said he “rose on a point of order.”
“I thocht ye rose on the point o’ a pitchfork”, McClay answered, and filled Streeton with more mirth.
“You can laff,” Holmes shouted, “but I’m goin’ to stand here and dee-mand of the Chairman—yes, dee-mand—”
“But I hab the flure”, yelled O’Connor.
“Chair!” Streeton shouted again. “Chair!”
“Oh, you shut up, and get yourself sheared”, Mrs. Brown shrieked at Streeton again, and Streeton told her “it was a good job she wasn’t a man”.
Then Tommy Williams, and Billy Donkin, and Strawberry Smith all rose at the same time to say something.
“Order!” McClay cried to them, “Order!” but they didn’t hear him.
“On whose ertority, Mr. Chairman?” Tom Williams began —but was interrupted by Bill Donkin.
“Mr. Chairman!” Bill roared, “was all that money—”
Then Sam Smith, in a louder voice than Bill Donkin’s, said he “called it nothin’ but rookin’ the suppliers”.
Here the meeting took an unexpected turn.
A mad-eyed, blood-stained, spear-horned bullock burst suddenly in through the open door, and made panic. Shouts, screams, flying cheese cases, and the minute book all greeted the intruder. A wild rush for the “escape door”, a narrow opening in the wall leading to the rear of the building, set in. The Chairman and co-directors abandoned their places and joined in the retreat. The bewildered animal covered with foam and whip-marks stood dazed, till Brown’s terrier noisily attacked it. Then it bellowed and turned on the terrier and upset the directors’ table and tramped on the annual report and balance-sheet. The terrier skedaddled for the “escape door” and disappeared between the legs of McClay and O’Connor, who were last getting out. With a roar, the bullock pursued the terrier.
“Look out! Look out!” McClay cried, but O’Connor couldn’t look out because McClay himself was before him, and McClay was big and broad. O’Connor abandoned the escape door, and took refuge behind the milk vat. The bullock bounded over the vat in pursuit of him. O’Connor jumped it back and faced the brute across it. “Help!” he shouted, “Help!” but no one but McClay rendered any aid. McClay put his head in at the door and shouted, “Tell him ye have the flure, O’Connor.”
Then the local butcher and three dogs arrived, and the bullock bounded out the way it bounded in.
After that the meeting was adjourned sine die.
O’Connor didn’t put a windlass on the well; he hadn’t time. Just when he was about to erect it, masses of black clouds rolled up, and the wind started to blow hard, and everyone said a change was on, and there was going to be rain, and O’Connor got excited.
He threw some harness on a pair of old horses, and hurrying them into the field, commenced planting corn; and when he had planted it all, the clouds rolled by without wetting anyone, and the sun came out again and shone brightly. Then Pat Donovan strolled across and spoke to O’Connor about branding colts.
“Come over in the morning, Pat and help me throw thim,” the latter said, “an’ I’ll have the tackling all ready.”
Donovan came, and they threw the colts and broke the tail of one, and the neck of another, or thought they did. Then O’Connor tore his hair and foamed, and blamed Splinter for the accidents and chased him out of the yard.
Donovan dragged at the fallen colt’s tail to make the brute rise, but it remained motionless. It was apparently dead as Caesar.
O’Connor swore more and groaned and lamented his loss.
Donovan sat astride the prostrate animal and reasoned with O’Connor—told him there were plenty more horses in the world.
“Wouldn’t it make y’ woild, too,” the latter said, “to see y’ besht-bred colt disfigured for loife, and his half brither lyin’ there under y’?”
“But the boy had no more to do with it than yerself”, Donovan said, defending Splinter.
“’Twas him did ud”, roared O’Connor obstinately. “Didn’t Oi yell and yell to him to shlack the rope, and he pulled it harder an’ pulled him over!”
Donovan, who, absent-mindedly, had been scraping hair off the fallen animal with his pocket-knife, suddenly pricked its rump with the blade point.
Talk about a surprise; Donovan did get a surprise!
That colt came to life again, bounded to his feet, and, carrying Donovan astride its back, face to tail, careered round the yard as though possessed of forty devils.
O’Connor, alarmed and delighted, mounted the rails and yelled to Donovan to “shtick to him”.
Splinter climbed up beside O’Connor and waved his hat.
The sleeping dogs about the farm woke up and yelped and barked through the rails.
Mrs. O’Connor, with some of the washing in her hand, followed by the children, ran from the house and gathered round.
No circus ever gave such a performance. It was a thrilling entertainment. Donovan, in desperation, curled his long legs and arms round the maddened animal, and clung to it like a staghorn.
“For the love of heaven, childer, keep back”, Mrs. O’Connor cried, when clouds of dust came flying through the rails.
The children crept closer.
“Shtick to him, Pat, shtick to him”, O’Connor shouted.
Donovan’s hat flew off. The colt met it with both heels, and kicked it past Splinter’s head. Splinter tried to field it amid air, but missed, and, losing his balance, toppled over backwards and fell on Mrs. O’Connor, who was kneeling at the bottom rail. Mrs. O’Connor thought he was the colt, and shrieked. Then she slashed at Splinter with the washing, and chased him from the yard.
Splinter grinned, and, returning, mounted the rails again and proceeded to encourage Donovan some more with shouts of approbation.
But the colt began to tire, so did Donovan. His long legs and arms relinquished their grip and dangled limply down. The colt staggered and stood. Donovan swayed from side to side. The colt trembled and shook, and Donovan rolled off in a helpless heap. Then O’Connor and Splinter jumped into the yard to rescue him.
Splinter seized the cowed and beaten animal by the mane and said: “Give us a leg up; I’ll ride ’im for y’.”
O’Connor kicked Splinter hard in the rear, and shouted: “Help me to lift th’ mahn up.”
Splinter rubbed the injured part, and scowled at O’Connor, then reluctantly gave a hand to drag Donovan through the dust and out the gate.
Mrs. O’Connor ran for a jug of water, and threw it over Donovan.
When Donovan recovered, O’Connor laughed and praised his horsemanship.
Donovan looked round and smiled feebly. Mrs. O’Connor inquired “if he felt all right?”
Donovan said he would “in a minute”.
“If y’ was t’ train that colt t’ alwez gammin’ he was dead, Mister ’Connor,” Splinter advised, “and sit on ’im yerself, and stick a knife inter ’im, you’d make—”
“Oi’ll stick a knife into ye”, and O’Connor rushed at Splinter before he could finish.
Splinter fled. O’Connor pursued him across the barn-yard, through the house, round the house, and round the house again. Then he gave up and held his sides with his hands and used bad language.
“Yah!” Splinter called to him, “I’m goin’ home.” And home he went.
A sweltering hot day; not a breeze blowing; not a cloud in the sky; the sun beating fiercely, relentlessly down, withering the leaves of the great forest trees, scorching, burning every blade of grass, every particle of vegetation, parching, cracking, baking the very earth. In the creek-bed at the “crossing”, where the oak tree stood, and where those whose tanks and water-casks had given out procured their house supplies, dairy herds and miscellaneous stock moaning with thirst hurriedly assembled. In dozens they walked knee-deep into the water, drank and gorged to their fill, then remained to puddle, and slobber and chum it all into “soup”. They would loiter and puddle in that creek the whole day, or until someone with a real, live dog came and dogged them away. And it was the only creek there was for miles around!
Titt, with the help of an experienced “bush carpenter”, whom he engaged at something a week, and Old Fred, had given the finishing touches to the new milking-yard, and with both hands in his pockets, was standing in the centre contemplating it all with silent satisfaction. Neils Jensen, a Danish neighbour, living on the plain where the grass-trees stood, dragging a lean, slab-sided dispirited-looking animal in the shape of a horse attached to a forked log sled, with an empty water-cask rolling about on it, drew up near the gateway and called “voe”, an injunction hardly necessary to bring the leg-weary, heart-broken creature to a standstill!
“Hello, Jensen!” Titt greeted, cheerfully, “come to see my new yard?” And the rough, splintery three-rail enclosure, with its sapling gates and bails, took a firmer grip of his affections. But Jensen hadn’t. Jensen had slaved too often and too long in his lifetime erecting similar yards and getting very little in return to go out of his way to admire Titt’s, or even to take the slightest notice of it. His sunken eyes showed no gleam of appreciation or enthusiasm; no more than those of the jaded quadruped standing so dejectedly beside him, did. He just leaned his two bare, boney, freckled, scarred and hairy arms on one of the middle rails, poked his whiskered chin through, and speaking with a thick tongue in slow, broken English, proceeded to explain the object of his visit.
“What?” Titt said, crawling through the rails to him. “What did you say?”
Using his hands to assist his articulation, the Dane repeated that he had come for a cask of water. “Too many cows,” he explained, “stand by der creek an’ make der vorter no goot!” “Oh, you want some tank water?” Titt responded cheerfully. “Certainly—come along—bring your moke an’ trolly over to th’ house and get what y’ want.” And marching off, swinging his arms, jauntily led the way.
With the aid of a couple of buckets the cask was soon filled and the lid hammered on with a stone over a wet bag to make it water-tight.
“Mooch eiblished, my frien’,” Jensen said, shaking his benefactor by the hand, “yo’ do my fambly a good turn.”
“That’s all right,” Titt said, lightly, “a cask o’ water is nothing: come back for more whenever you want it.” Titt Duff was nothing if he wasn’t generous and open-handed.
“It ees not for oursellef ve vant it,” and big tears started rolling from Jensen’s eyes and mingling with the hair and dust on his big sinewy arms, “it ees for der little Jens.”
“Why so?” wonderingly from Titt.
“He vos ver sick for so long time now!”
“Sick? One of your boys? I didn’t know that.”
“My tent poy, little Jens.”
“Your tenth boy? Good God! How many have y’ got?” and half-amazed, half-amused, Titt stared at the worried-looking Dane.
“Fifteen, countin’ der lash fellow—twelf poy an’ tree girl.”
“Good God!” Titt said again. “Fifteen!” and stepping back a pace or two regarded Jensen with wonder and astonishment. “Why, I’ve only got three—yet”, he added. And the emphasis he placed on the “yet,” seemed prophetic.
“Der poor little Jens!” Jensen went on disregarding the other’s astonishment, “for six week he lay on der bed an’ scream wid pain, an’ der vife she can make him not some better!”
“Send him to the General Hospital”, Titt suggested. “Your wife can’t look after him properly if he is very bad, neither can you, and there are doctors and nurses at the hospital to attend to him.”
In his social isolation and ignorance, Jensen’s only idea of a hospital was that it meant a big bill—a bill that his little homestead would, in the end, have to be sacrificed to pay! And how, in any case, to procure admittance to such an institution he had no more idea than an old man kangaroo. He and his family had always kept to themselves; made no friendship; attended no church; read no newspapers; voted for no politicians; took no part in the many minor public movements that tend to draw the scattered bush-folk to closer circles of intercourse where enlightenment and the hand of fellowship so often lessen their load of disappointment and misfortune. And the more Titt explained about the hospital, the more mysterious and impossible it all seemed to poor Jensen.
“Vould yo’ come an’ see der little chap?” he asked, “den yo’ could tal my vife all vot yo’ tol me vat dat place?”
Titt would—cheerfully.
“You go on with the water,” he said, “while I go inside and get my coat, then I’ll catch you up.”
Jensen nodded, and started off dragging the horse and water-trolly after him.
Mrs. Duff, at work in the kitchen, got a surprise when she saw Titt brushing his hair and putting a coat on.
“Where are you going?” she asked, coming to the door with a dish of peeled potatoes in her hands.
Titt explained.
“They seem very quiet people,” she mused, “I hardly ever see them going anywhere.”
“Nor I,” and Titt buttoned his coat and put on his hat; “and the old chap just told me”, he continued, “that they have fifteen youngsters—twelve boys and three girls.”
“Fifteen? Goodness!” from Mrs. Duff. “They’ve more children than we’ve got hens and chickens.”
“But ye’ll have more than that directly.” And Titt glanced at himself in a hand mirror.
“What! More!” and Mrs. Duff let the dish of potatoes fall on the floor.
“More hens and chickens—yes, I won’t be long away.” And rushing off, Titt followed after Jensen.
Mrs. Duff sighed a sigh of relief, and collecting the scattered potatoes, went on with her work.
Having tarried along the way to exchange a few words with McNelson, the oldest inhabitant of the Creek, about the weather and the prospects of getting a school built, Titt didn’t overtake Jensen until he had almost reached the door of his home. Dragging the horse and trolley into the shade of a peach tree amongst the foliage of which reared a formidable-looking scarecrow purporting to frighten the flying-foxes from the fruit, Jensen called “Voe!” to the tired brute, and turned to Titt.
“Him stan’ dere,” he said, “vile I take yo’ in to see der little Jens.”
But Titt didn’t hear him. His mind was on the crowd of youngsters that came scampering from every corner of the farm—youngsters of all sizes and ages; fair-haired and freckle-faced; two of them with a hat and coat on several sizes too large for them; the rest quaint phenomenons of raggedness. Around the water cask they collected, jostling and scrimmaging for the honour of removing the lid and taking first peep at the water. Following the youngsters came swarms of fowl—fowl of every hue and variety—of every breed and mixture, with here and there amongst their ranks a waddling, quacking, dusty-looking duck; and behind the lot, but holding proudly aloof, a boisterous procession of high-stepping turkey gobblers. Disregarding the presence of the youngsters and the dejected horse, this conglomeration of poultry gathered about the cask with open beaks and widespread wings.
“Struth!” Titt said, “you’ve a lot of fowls and things!”
“But dey trink a lort o’ vater, an’ eat a lort o’ tucker!” and Jensen led the way to the house across a bare, hoof-trodden yard, strewn with loose stones, shelled corn-cobs and horse manure. It wasn’t a very imposing looking dwelling—’twas a long concern made of slabs and covered with a low-pitched, slanting roof of galvanized iron. At one end was a large square fire-place minus a chimney—the smoke, when a fire was burning, escaped between the slabs that lay across the top of it. At the other end was a gaping window with an “old man” grape vine twining round it; and right in the centre was the door. And at the threshold stood Mrs. Jensen, with the “last fellow”, a six months old child, in her arms. A short, stout, weighty woman she was, wearing a sack-apron and heavy shoes. She had an abundance of faded hair, a portion of which was carelessly gathered together in a knot on top of her head, while the remainder fell anyhow about her neck and shoulders. A silent woman, too, the willing drudge and unselfish slave of the farm, who every year, as regularly as the world went round, presented her husband with a fresh contribution to the family.
Titt raised his hat; and by way of introduction, Jensen said:
“Meester Doff, he come to see der little Jens.”
With a movement of the lips Mrs. Jensen turned inside and walked across the floor of the front-room, and standing at the foot of a sofa on which lay the invalid, waited for them to enter it.
“Min’ yo don’t knock yor head,” Jensen stooping low himself, warned, “eet’s not ver’ high.”
Titt “minded,” and crept in after him.
One glance at the interior and the hard struggle the Jensens were having to exist upon the land was quickly revealed to Titt. Anyone else, probably, would have realised it as speedily as he—anyone else except Governments, legislators, and the like! The little there was in that home was clean and tidy enough, God knows; but its littleness was the tragedy of it! Corn sacks ripped up and stitched together covered the ground floor. The slab walls were lined with newspapers. No pictures, no clock, no chairs. Some boxes and bush-made stools took the place of the latter. A long pine table with pieces added to the ends of it to cope with the ever-increasing demand for accommodation stood in the centre of the floor. No cloth was on it; nothing was on it except an official letter lying open —an official letter from the Land Tax Commissioner demanding the Government’s pound of flesh!
“Here is der little shap”, Jensen said, tenderly, taking a position at the head of the sofa. “Vos yo any better now, little Jens?”
The mother, by a despondent shake of the head, answered in the negative for the sufferer. Then Titt’s eyes rested on the little Jens. All save the boy’s face and hand were covered with a calico sheet showing much wear and tear and many specimens of neat patch-work of various shapes and dimensions. And such a pale little face! Such shrivelled little hands! Little Jens was the colour of a ghost, and so emaciated, so wasted! At sight of Titt the drooping eyes of the little fellow suddenly lit up with a ray of hope. They got bigger and brighter. Then he stretched out his little hands and pleaded:
“Make me better: I want to get better!”
For anything so pathetic Titt had not come prepared. Speech for the moment left him, and ghostlike, he stood gazing into those pallid features twitching and writhing in pain, and whereon death so unmistakably was written.
“We didn’t think he would be so bad at first”, the mother explained. “He was quite well six weeks ago, and playing with the other children about the haystack when all at once, he sat down and said he had a pain in the stomach.”
“Did he?” Titt murmured, “poor little chap!”
“It never left him since”, she continued, “and you can see how his stomach has got bigger and bigger and bigger!”
By the rising and falling of the sheet with the short sharp breathing of the boy, Titt could see it only too well, and the conviction that it was cancer made him shudder.
“You’ll make me better”, little Jens appealed.
Titt took one of the withered little hands in his, but a lump that was in his throat choked back any comforting words he might have uttered. He looked away, and his eyes rested sadly on the floor, and only a hopeless, desolate feeling filled his mind. For the power to heal the sick boy he would have given the whole world were it his. But the helplessness and impotence of mortals in the presence of Death were all he could realise or was conscious of. Remain there another minute he couldn’t.
“I’ll go and send for the ambulance to take him to the hospital”, he said, suddenly, and taking his hat, rushed out.
Mrs. Duff was tidying herself for the afternoon when he entered his own home again.
“Well?” she said.
Titt told what he had seen, and added that he was going to the township to communicate with the ambulance.
“I’ll run over and see if I can do anything.” And pinning her hat on, Mrs. Duff left by the front door, while Titt, to save time, hurried out by the back one.
Nearing Jensen’s place, a cry of pain met her ears, and Mrs. Duff quickened her steps. Without announcing herself she swiftly entered.
“Poor little fellow!” she said, fervently, and kneeling beside the sofa smoothed the long fair hair of little Jens back over his forehead with a hand that had not yet lost its city softness. “Poor dear little fellow!”
He slowly turned his eyes to hers, and murmured:
“Make me better; I want to get better.”
“And you will get better”, she answered. “Jesus is watching over you, little Jens—you know that, don’t you?” And bending over him she kissed the pale forehead.
He made no answer. His eyes remained fixed upon the kindly face, that seemed to fill that gloomy room with a heavenly light. His sick little brain seemed puzzled.
“Jesus loves all little boys, Jens,” she added; “and wants them to go to him.”
Then his lips moved.
“Who is Jesus?” he asked.
The simple question struck Mrs. Duff like a bombshell. She turned and cast a look of surprise and pity at the mother, still seated at the foot of the sofa—a look that was plainly understood—and answered by a shake of the head.
“We not had time to tol him abort dosse dings”, the father interposed, apologetically.
“I don’t know Jesus”, the little Jens added.
“But he knows you, Jens”, from Mrs. Duff. “And you will know him, too.”
Then as he lay perplexed and listening with his last feeble strength, she told him in tender earnest words of the birth and love of the Saviour. The rest of the children, crowding noiselessly into the room, she paused a moment to glance at them. That moment seemed an eternity to the soul that was swiftly passing away.
“Tell me about Jesus”, he murmured. “I—I—never saw him.”
Holding his hands between her own, she lifted her voice and repeated the children’s prayer:
“Gentle Jesus meek and mild,
Look upon a little child;
Pity my simplicity;
Suffer me to come to Thee.”
“And will Jesus make me better?” the boy inquired with a struggle.
“Yes, little Jens, He will—He will.”
“S—soon?” he whispered feebly.
“Soon—very soon now!” And tears flowed from Mrs. Duff’s eyes as she leaned over and smoothed the fair hair back over the pale little brow again.
Scarcely was her last word spoken when in the darkening gloom the eyes of little Jens closed themselves for ever and his soul passed out to the Silence of Eternity—to the world beyond the setting sun.
“He’s gone!” Mrs. Duff whispered softly.
“Gone!” echoed the father. While large tears starting into the eyes of the mother, overflowed and fell upon the face of her suckling child. The rest of the children drew nervously to the death-bed. For a minute or more there was a solemn stillness within the house. Then in twos and threes they gave way to grief and wept aloud.
Outside, the sun went down behind the distant hill-tops, casting great black shadows over the rolling plains—the great grey plains filled with mists and land-marks and memories of coaching days and shepherds’ huts and deserted homesteads. One by one the stars came out and twinkled like the eyes of a million angels watching from the windows of another world. The moon rose over the Great Dividing Range, spreading his light around, streaming through timber and trees, creeping up and up till, entering the window like a searchlight from Heaven, revealed a parting smile of peace and serenity on the face of the dead, and pains of affliction upon those of the living. Then the moaning, summer night winds sprang up, rustling the drooping corn-blades and tops of the weird grass trees, and crooning into every corner and angle of the home and farm sheds, seemed to be haunted with ghosts, and charged with messages of grief, and many, many unavailing sorrows and regrets.
It was Spring. The westerly winds had ceased; the frosts departed. Valleys and hills now were bright and green and gay. Gum-trees were in blossom; wattles in bloom; the birds of the bush whistling merrily, and the busy bees humming all around again.
Titt’s block boasted of a patch of cultivation now—a patch of twelve acres, and twelve young Shorthorn cows—the Shorthorns Titt bought from Donovan. Eleven of them were in “profit”; the twelfth, an unbroken one, had yet to “come in”. Titt didn’t milk all the herd himself. Mrs. Duff, who had forgotten more about milking than he was ever likely to learn, accounted for six of them; Splinter and Araluen for four, and the remaining one, “Tulip”, fell to the mercy of Titt himself. And little mercy did she receive at his hands. Milking didn’t come natural to Titt, and whenever he pinched a teat or accidentally pulled the hair on her udder, Tulip would resent it and do her utmost to put her foot in the bucket or kick him off the block. Then Titt would rise and argue the point— sometimes with his mouth; more often with a short stick.
“Goodness me!” Mrs. Duff would say after letting go her last cow, “you are a milker! Why don’t you take both hands to it like this.” And bending over, would seize a teat with each hand and start playing a tune in the bucket. But Titt would never wait to be instructed; he couldn’t bear anyone coming near Tulip when he was sitting under her. He would hurriedly leave the block, and in his haste spill what was in the bottom of the bucket over his boots.
“Do y’ want a bloke to get his brains kicked out?” he would remonstrate; “she ain’t used to a crowd draggin’ at her, y’ know!”
“Bah! no wonder! See how far you’ve got her leg tied back!”
Then his wife would slacken the rope till Tulip rested firmly on all fours, and seating herself on the block, and placing the bucket between her knees, and humming a tune, would milk away till Tulip was drained of her last drop.
“There you are,” she would say, rising again, “now let her out.”
“My Christmas, yes!” Titt would chuckle, “all very fine, to say ‘let her out’. Easier to milk her, I reckon.”
Then cautiously undoing huge ridiculous knots he had tied in the leg-rope, and unwinding it from the post, he’d talk coaxingly to Tulip for a moment or two, and when satisfied her mind was off him snatch stealthily for the loop encircling her leg to pull it off—the loop, not her leg. If he missed it, which he mostly did, the cow would let fly a kick which Titt would elude by springing back and bumping into Mrs. Duff or into the bucket of milk, and letting go the end of the rope. When Tulip felt four or five feet of hemp or greenhide dangling to her she’d mistake it for a snake or a cattle pup or something, and let fly a lot more kicks—savage, reckless kicks, every one harder and swifter than the last. And when the whirling, whizzing rope-end, instead of leaving her leg, would smack her hard on the back, or along the ribs, she’d get hysterical and flop down on her knees, and elevate her hind-part, and put out her tongue and bellow, and the cows that had been milked and let out would rush excitedly back and bellow too, and tear up the dust with their hoofs and throw it over their backs and fill the air with frightfulness.
“Oh dear me!” Mrs. Duff would sigh, coming to the rescue again, “what a way to take a leg-rope off!”
“Well, see what you can do,” Titt would chuckle and cheerfully abandon the job, “a man wants a gun to take a leg-rope off a brute like her, I reckon.”
“Nonsense!” and his wife would pat Tulip on the back and speak soothingly to her for a moment or two; then reach confidently for the loop and take it off her leg.
“There you are,” she would say, tossing the greenhide to Titt, “but I’m sure I don’t know how you’ll ever manage a dairy herd yourself!”
“It’s all very well for you to talk, Kit,” he’d remind her, “you saw some farm life before you went to the city. But wait a while.” Titt didn’t mind how his wife criticised his efforts at farming.
Once, though, when Old Fred, who hated the sight of cows, but loved milk and cream, and spent a lot of time running in and out of the dairy, poked into the yard at milking time and smiled at Titt and reckoned he should never have left the city, there was nearly a separation.
“Here!” Titt barked at him, “get out of this and go and do something for your living! Go and get a hoe and cut th’ prickly pear you were talkin’ so much about at breakfast-time, go on!” And shooting out his right arm like a railway signal, pointed to the gate.
“It’s no good anyone cuttin’ pear,” Old Fred argued, “it only makes it grow more; it’s like cuttin’ hair; anyone ought to know that. Pear must be pizened if y’ want to ’radicate it!”
“Well pizen it, then!” Titt shouted, “and there’s a bunch there outside the yard lookin’ at y’; pizen that, too, and pizen yourself when you’re about it!”
“Don’t know about pizenin’ meself,” Old Fred murmured, “but I don’t mind doin’ th’ pear. Where’s th’ pizen?”
Just then Titt’s eye caught Mrs. Duff frowning and scowling at him, and he temporised.
“Oh, how do I know?” he mumbled, “and don’t care a fig either whether you do it, or whether you don’t it; or what you do about th’ place or what you don’t do about it!” and grabbing a bucket of milk in each hand, slipped away to the dairy.
“Seems I put me foot in it”, Old Fred, taking his hat from his head and spinning it nervously on the first finger on his left hand, said.
Mrs. Duff laughed and was “sure Titt didn’t mean a word he said”.
“Sounded to me as if he did!” and the kindly Old Fred thoughtfully followed Titt to the dairy.
“Come for your mornin’ allowance, Fred?” and Titt cheerfully held up a can of new milk level with his head.
Old Fred took down a pint from the shelf, and holding it out while the other filled it from the can, said:
“What did y’ mean over at th’ yard, Titt? Are you getting full up o’ Old Fred?”
“What did I mean?” Titt echoed, sparring for time.
“Because if yous are,” Fred went on, humbly, “they’ll be startin’ shearin’ at Cecil Plains in a couple of months and th’ boys ’ll never have anyone there for cook but me. And I ain’t a pauper, y’ know.”
“A couple of months?” Titt echoed. “But who said they were getting full up o’ y’?” he chuckled. “Drink that milk and you’ll fill yourself up.” And he punched Old Fred playfully in the ribs.
Old Fred drained the pint without drawing breath and smacking his lips, said he never drank better milk anywhere in his life.
“They’re good little cows all right”, Titt grinned proudly.
“A good little gold mine to y’ in a year or two”, from Old Fred.
“Now for the factory”, and Titt turned down his shirt sleeves.
“Is everything ready for you?” And Old Fred ran out and walked all round the horse and cart and viewed the harness to see if it was buckled properly. And when Titt took the reins and climbed up amongst the cans, Old Fred ran to the gate and swung it wide to let him out, then wished him luck and waved to him as he trotted away.
Driving the milk to the factory was a work of love to Titt. He was in his element at the factory; there was always some company there and its atmosphere was congenial to him. A free and easy sort of place it was, no stiff collars or polished boots or fashionable hats. Nothing was worn there but “milking clothes”, and then never more than was required by the local standard of bare respectability. Besides, it was a cooperative factory, and Titt had become a shareholder. And every morning when their milk was weighed, and taken charge of by the Manager, and they received their “empties”, the suppliers would retire to the whey tank, and congregate about it as though it were a pub and discuss cows and milk and cheese and land and the Government and the district’s “useless representative”. And in these debates Titt became a central figure. He shone out like the morning star. He was not an orator—just a talker. And no matter how many tackled him in argument, he was never perturbed. He would talk and talk and talk until they were all silenced, and then he’d continue talking so as to keep them silent.
But one morning, Billy Cattfish, a sharp-faced slick-tongued, black-whiskered supplier with an inexhaustible flow of profanity suddenly jumped off the elevated box drain that led from the factory to the whey tank (the whey tank was lower than the factory) on which he had been seated, swinging his legs about and scratching and puncturing the drain with the rowel of an old spur that never left the heel of his boot, not even when he went to bed at night, and confronting Titt, aggressively rapped out:
“Just one—word!”
Titt paused and stared at him. The others who knew Cattfish from childhood, rejoiced.
“You being such a wise—coot,” he proceeded spitting to the right and then to the left, “now tell us if y’ can—and I know you—well can’t—why cheese is so cheap?”
The crowd, grinning broadly, waited for Titt’s reply.
“The reason is this”—and Titt crossed his two first fingers— “the farmers have always been mugs who worked for the middleman, and voted for him as well.”
“I’m one of those — farmers!” Cattfish interrupted, “and the man who calls me a mug gets one on th’—jaw.”
Great excitement!
“Do you mean that?” Titt said.
“Ask these—blokes who know me, whether I’m a man that means what he says or not?” And swinging his clenched fists about Cattfish walked round Titt.
“My oath he do!” fully a dozen voices confirmed at once.
“All right—so do I.” And Titt started rolling up his sleeves.
“Mine’s — well coming off!” giving his milk-stained shirt a savage tug, Cattfish stood stripped to the waist.
Greater excitement!
Though lean, lanky and bandy, Titt was no “slouch” with his hands. He had been an active member of the Brisbane Gymnasium for ten years, where his hobby was boxing and everything appertaining to it. There was nothing about the “art” that Titt didn’t know. On the other hand, Cattfish had won some fights at a shearing shed; walloped a number of harmless old “sundowners” for having camped in his paddock without permission, and with the aid of his profanity had worked up a local “reputation”.
“There’s goin’ to be a fight! There’s goin’ to be a fight!” several voices, like the sounding of Gabriel’s dinner-horn, shouted. Next moment the Manager, and cheese-maker and all late arrivals came running from the factory and joined the “ring”.
Bendy Sawpitt, who had often expressed a desire to see Cattfish “get a hiding from someone”, appointed himself Titt’s second. And Podgy Smith, “just to see fair play”, stood behind Cattfish.
“I’ve got scales on me—back,” Cattfish bragged, “as hard as a bull’s horn for the want of a good hiding, and I’ve never met the—man who was able to give it to me.”
Loud laughter from everyone, except Titt.
Titt silently toed the line and faced the foe.
“Go fer his short ribs. Billy”, Podgy Smith advised.
“I’ll go for the whole lot of th’ long—!” Cattfish hissed, with set teeth. “Now come on! Watch your—skin!”
With that he rushed in like a dog at an emu. Titt sidestepped, and Cattfish went on an air-raid.
Loud mirth and looks of surprise all round the ring.
“You—!—!—!” and Cattfish spat and prepared another offensive.
“I’d sunner be here thun home on th’ farm”, old Doughboy said to old Drygrass.
Cutting loose with both fists, Cattfish flew at Titt again; but the latter seemed to be part of the atmosphere. He was in every place except where his opponent’s blows were landing.
“The cow!” Cattfish foamed, “he isn’t game to stand up to me. He keeps running away!”
Titt, smiling, sparred for level ground.
“Now, you’ve got him agin th’ tank, Billy,” Podgy Smith shouted “he can’t back away from there!”
Cattfish judged so, too.
With lowered head and glaring eye-balls, he sprung another wild rush. But instead of finding Titt’s head or short ribs, he landed a heavy right on the whey tank, which rumbled like an approaching storm.
Loud guffaws and shouts of appreciation from everyone.
“Th’—coward!” Cattfish foamed, rubbing his thumb; “someone hold th’—! and make him stand!”
“I’ll wait for you this time!” Titt chuckled, handing him a couple of love-pats on the nose, “but don’t hit too hard.”
Like a panther, Cattfish sprang at him. Titt stopped him with one—two in the ribs.
“Time!” Podgy Smith cried. “Time!” while his principal doubled up and walked round holding his side.
“Ready?” Titt said, after an interval; and both toed the line again, Titt looking resolute; Cattfish cocksure and uncompromising.
“Keep it up, an’ you’ll get him directly, Billy,” Podgy Smith whispered, encouragingly.
“I’ll keep it up, my—oath!” the other responded. Then like a windmill in gear when the pump ain’t working, he went after Titt. Titt’s long right shot out and met him between the two eyes; then his left got him under the chin, and Cattfish’s face suddenly looked skyward, and his head, for a moment, hung down his back.
“Oh! Oh-h!” from the spectators.
Cattfish straightened his head, staggered, swore feebly. Then Titt jumped in and using his hands like a quick-firing machine, punished his man all round that ring and nearly knocking a hole in the whey-tank with him. It was nothing but biff! biff! biff! followed by a mighty jaw-punch and down Cattfish dropped like a pithed bullock.
Consternation and alarm took possession of the onlookers. None of them had ever seen a man knocked out before except by a swingle-tree or a slip-rail, and as Cattfish lay motionless, visions of hand-cuffs and the gallows came to them. Then, suddenly they turned and fled, some into the factory, the rest into their carts; and leaving Titt himself to console Cattfish as best he could, careered out the gate and along the lanes, like Roman chariot races, for their homes.
“Th’ heifer—the unbroken heifer’s calved!” Splinter, rushing breathlessly into the house one afternoon, shouted, “I saw her first.”
“Has she? Where?” and Titt who, with Mrs. Duff and Araluen, was taking a cup of tea in the kitchen, jumped up from the table and tramped on the cat’s tail and made Tom squeal and spit.
“Down in th’ gully,” from Splinter, “an’ it’s a bull—a little red and white bull.”
“I must go and see it”, and Titt started looking round for his hat.
“We’ll all go and see it,” Mrs. Duff enthused, “come along, Araluen.” And they finished their tea hurriedly.
“Will we keep him for a bull, Father?” Splinter asked excitedly. “Will we?”
“I must see what he’s like first”, and Titt continued to look round for his hat.
Mrs. Duff and Araluen started tying their bonnets on.
“Now where th’ diggings has that hat o’ mine got to?” And Titt looked round the room.
“O’Connor is keepin’ one of theirs for a bull”, from Splinter.
“Oh, shut up! It’s me hat I want just now!” from Titt.
“Look!” and Mrs. Duff, with a broad smile, pointed to Bluey, the dog, comfortably coiled up on the floor in the missing felt.
Araluen and Splinter laughed.
“My Christmas! if that ain’t cool!” And taking a place kick at Bluey, Titt lifted him through the door into Splinter’s room.
“Ah!” Mrs. Duff protested, “that’s cruel!”
“Come outer that room, you mongrel!” Splinter yelled, “do y’ hear?”
Bluey, cringing and calculating the direction in which every boot in the kitchen was facing, crept cautiously out till within measurable distance of the back door, then he made such a desperate dart that his toe-nails almost tore up the flooring.
“Cripes!” Splinter laughed, “I was just goin’ to hand him another, but he was too quick!”
Then the whole family, led by Titt, ran out, and in single file, hastened to the gully.
Before they had gone fifty yards, they were joined by Bluey, who raced round Titt and bounded up at his shoulder and barked for sheer joy. There was no bitterness about Bluey. He was a real dog, and felt nothing but love and gratitude for those who put the boot into him.
“Don’t go too near her!” Mrs. Duff cried when they came in sight of the heifer standing guard over her offspring, “it will only disturb her.” Then she and Araluen halted. Titt and Splinter, however, prowled along a little nearer.
“My word,” the former murmured, when he could get a full view of the calf, “it’s a bonser!”
“Will y’ keep him for a bull?” Splinter whispered back.
“Can’t say quite yet”, thoughtfully from his parent.
The heifer raised her head and regarded their presence jealously. She began to moan apprehensively, and, shaking her head, stood right over the calf.
“She was lickin’ its head when I first saw her”, Splinter proudly informed his parent.
“Well, you needn’t be talkin’ about it!” the other snapped.
“I wasn’t talkin’ about it! I only mentioned it, didn’t I?” in an injured undertone from Splinter.
“Well, don’t be mentionin’ it again!”
“Who said I was goin’ to mention it again?” obstinately from Splinter.
“Shut up!” the parent hissed, peremptorily.
“A bloke won’t be able to open his mouth at all directly.” And Splinter hung his bottom lip and contemplated his parent out of the corner of his eye.
Just then Bluey, who wasn’t in the know, suddenly and joyously emerged, wringing wet, from a deep part of the gully within a few yards of the heifer, and started rolling himself gladly in the dust.
Unhappy stars! ’Twas like a Hun suddenly dropping into the Allied trenches in the Great War! That heifer let out a round of infamous bellows, prolonged and curly as chain lightning, and was on top of Bluey before he could get his legs down! And the howl that came from Bluey was a hair-raiser. And when he found his feet, his hair rose too, and whipping his tail between his legs, he raced straight for Titt and Splinter, the heifer bounding and snorting behind him.
“Look out!” Splinter yelled; “she’s after us!” and in his blind haste to skedaddle, bumped into his parent and knocked him off his feet. Titt protested profanely; but at that moment nothing short of a wireless could have communicated anything to Splinter. Recovering himself Titt saw the form of Bluey flash past, and realising that nothing in the world lay between himself and the snorting heifer, but a pair of short, gleaming horns, he stretched his legs and his arms and his neck and ran. Oh, how he did run! Mrs. Duff and Araluen, a hundred yards ahead, their bonnets in their hands, their stockings coming down, were running, too, and squealing like two locomotives. None of them had time to look behind until they reached the milking-yard, the nearest haven of safety; when they did look behind they found the heifer was nowhere in sight. She was still in the gully with her calf.
Three days later. Titt and Splinter and Old Fred in the yard, breaking in the heifer. Armed with heavy sticks they were endeavouring to induce her to put her head in the bail. But instead of putting it in and submitting quietly, she became excited and reckless, and poked her head into every place but the right place; then went down on her knees and tried to crawl under the bottom rail, and the bottom rail of Titt’s yard nearly touched the ground; and finding she could only get her snout under, began to bellow as if she was being slaughtered, and started Bluey barking, and the roosters crowing, and all the hens cackling, and the plough horses neighing, and the clock inside striking, and some stray cattle on the road bucking about with their tails in the air and looking across the fence in wonderment.
‘You’ll have to rope her and pull her into it”, Mrs. Duff, hurrying from the house amidst the turmoil, advised.
“We’ll get her in if we have to cut her bloomin’ head off!” Titt, pausing to wipe the perspiration from his face with the palm of his dusty, clammy hand, declared determinedly.
Old Fred shook his head and seriously agreed with Mrs. Duff.
“All right, then, we’ll pull her in!” and Titt went off to the harness room and returned with brand new hemp rope almost as stiff as steel.
“Who’s goin’ to rope her—you, Father?” Splinter inquired, with a happy grin.
“Well, you don’t think I’m goin’ to ask you to do it, do y’?” his parent snapped.
“No, but I thought p’raps y’ might ask Mother.”
Old Fred hid himself behind one of the bails, and shook with silent mirth.
“Well, y’ see I ain’t”, and Titt started adjusting a noose on one end of the rope, and tangling his legs and feet in the rest of it.
“Here,” Splinter said, “I’ll show you how to do it.”
“Just you get out o’ here before I throw you out!” and Titt glared indignantly at his son.
“Don’t get so scotty”, Mrs. Duff interceded through the rails.
“Ain’t it enough to make a bloke scotty,” Titt returned, “when a kid like him wants to tell his old man how to do things?”
“I didn’t want to tell y’”, Splinter grumbled.
“Well, what did y’ want, then?” and his parent glared at him harder.
“I was only goin’ to show y’.”
“Pshaw! goin’ to show me!” and Titt, swinging the loop round and round his head, as he had seen experts do, approached the heifer, now anchored in a corner of the yard.
“I don’t think you got that loop quite right, Boss”, Old Fred muttered mildly.
“No, of course not,” the other snarled, “I can’t get anythin’ right, accordin’ to you blokes.”
“Don’t be scotty”, Mrs. Duff said again, and Old Fred, deeming it wise to become neutral, sat down in the dust beside a bail post, and with a contented expression on his face, took out his pipe and started smoking placidly.
The heifer faced Titt with a wild, bewildered stare.
“Bet y’ sixpence you don’t throw it on her first shot?” Splinter, climbing on to a top rail to be out of danger, called bravely.
“Nor in the sixth”, Mrs. Duff added, amusedly.
Titt made no response. He kept swinging the noose steadily, and cautiously approaching the animal,
“Don’t throw it till she runs”, Mrs. Duff advised.
Then the heifer ran. She came out of the corner at a gallop, and amidst a cloud of dust flew between Titt and Old Fred.
“Now!” Mrs. Duff screeched, merrily, and Splinter simultaneously yelled, “Now!”
Titt let fly the rope at the brute’s head. It grazed her tail as she flew past, and the full force of the heavily knotted loop hit Old Fred hard and straight, and knocked his hat off, and sent his pipe flying from his mouth, and put hot tobacco ash in both his eyes, and lassooed him by the neck.
“Oh! Oh!” Mrs. Duff gasped.
Splinter clung to the top of the yard, and squealed with joy.
Titt looked dumbfounded.
Old Fred bounded to his feet with a dexterity that was next to marvellous, and clapping both hands over his eyes, and with yells that could only have come from the pangs of torture, rushed blindly through the yard with the rope hanging from his neck.
“Stop him!” Mrs. Duff shrieked, “he’ll run against the heifer!”
But before Titt could pull in the slack, and jerk Old Fred back out of danger, he bumped right into the animals’s hind quarters as she strained to shove the yard down with her head. Next instant, she kicked him in the stomach with both hind legs, and knocked him on his back; then she bounced round and kneeled on him, and bellowed into his ear, and slobbered on him and mixed her horns up in his shirt, and shoved him over when she tried to get up; then she jumped over him and tangled her legs up in the rope and dragged him for several yards by the neck. After that she went fairly off her head. She charged at Titt and put him out of the yard, and snorted aggressively through the rails at Mrs. Duff. Then Splinter, squatting on the cap, attracted her notice. At him she went and made the jump of her life. Splinter made a great jump, too, but landed in the bunch of prickly pear aforementioned. The heifer reached the cap, and for several tragic moments hung on it with her head outside the yard and her tail inside. Then she toppled right over, and without her calf, and in full possession of her freedom, careered for the gully again.
That evening when the sun and the fowls and the birds and everything living had gone to rest, and Titt was sitting smoking peacefully on the verandah, building castles in the air and dreaming of a prosperous future, and Mrs. Duff was rattling the sewing machine inside, and Splinter and Araluen and Mary Ellen were showing a magic lantern to themselves in the darkened kitchen, and Old Fred was groaning in his bed, the voice of the unbroken heifer could be heard in the gully calling and calling for her calf.
Day dawned, revealing the slumbering homesteads scattered over the black soil plains and the mountains looking down upon them. The golden streaks that flushed the eastern sky paled and diminished. The wheat fields, the grass paddocks, trees, shrubs, and bushes, all were wet and glistening with dew. The sun came softly over the mountain. The air grew clear and crisp; and life on Emu Creek seemed real and earnest, good and grand.
Titt, returning from the factory, standing upright in the milk cart, flicking the whip at the horse and throwing tobacco clouds behind him, drove into the yard and, alighting as if he were on springs, commenced unharnessing hurriedly.
“Hullo! Old Fred”, he called cheerfully, as the former emerged from the dairy with milk froth clinging to his shaven lip like icicles. “Soon as I get some breakfast, I’m going to have another go at breaking in that heifer.”
“Right-o,” Old Fred agreed; “I’m with you.” Then removing the “empties” from the cart, and grunting as though he were transporting the whole world on his back, conveyed them to the dairy.
“Bendy Sawpitt gave me a wrinkle this mornin’ how to get her in without any trouble”, Titt added as he passed into the house.
“Right-o”, Old Fred responded again, and helped himself to another pint of milk.
After breakfast. The unbroken heifer and her calf in the milking-yard; the calf bunting and dragging at an empty black teat; the heifer, staring as though some impending misfortune was about to burst upon her, watched every movement of those outside.
“Now, what we’ve got to do is this”, Titt, working his hands as though he were playing a piano, proceeded to explain to Splinter and Old Fred, “not to rope her at all”, and he paused and grinned as if expecting them to be tremendously surprised.
“Not to rope her.” And Old Fred nodded agreeably, and as though he never expected anything else.
“Not to rope her at all?” Splinter squeaked disappointedly. “Oh, go!” Splinter could conceive no satisfaction or joy in breaking a heifer without roping her.
“No, not to rope her,” Titt repeated, with an air of great superiority, “but to catch the calf, and one of us drag it through the bail and hold it there. See?”
Neither Old Fred nor Splinter could quite “see”. And when they shook their heads in the negative, Titt’s feeling of superiority increased.
“Well, listen—when the calf is lugged right through the bail”, he went on, “the heifer’ll follow.”
“An’ what about th’ bloke who’s luggin’ it through?” Splinter, with the first law of Nature uppermost in his mind, interrupted with a faint grin. At the same moment, Old Fred’s hand went swiftly inside his shirt to feel if the bandage protecting the wounds the heifer had, the previous day, made on his ribs with her horns, was still in position, and the agreeable look that had been in his eyes started to die out.
“That’s what I’m coming to,” Titt snapped at Splinter, “if you’ll only keep from puttin’ your spoke in when it ain’t wanted for a minute or two.”
Splinter cocked his head to one side, folded his arms and “kept his spoke” to himself.
“An’ when she goes to go through the bail,” Titt poked his long, first finger into the atmosphere as if it were the open bail, “one of us will be standing close handy, see?”
Old Fred and Splinter both saw.
“And soon as her head goes through, whoever it is, he’s got to shove the bail shut on her neck—hard—and then we’ll have her.” And Titt grinned as if it were all over.
Neither Old Fred nor Splinter even smiled. They were thinking hard, the former unconsciously feeling the bandage round his ribs again.
“Blow it; can’t y’ see how it’s done?” and Titt growled and became restless and impatient.
“I see it all right!” Old Fred answered slowly, “but as he sez”—pointing with his thumb which had a rag on it, to Splinter—“who’s goin’ to drag th’ calf?”
“Oh, anyone, for that matter”, and Titt tossed his head about and walked round in a little circle. Then in a prolonged persuasive tone: “But I suppose I’d be th’ best myself to stand close handy to the bail and shove it on her, because it’s the most important.”
“An’ I’ll keep behind her and see she follers th’ calf”, Splinter, allotting himself a portfolio, got in quickly.
Old Fred scratched his head:
“At that rate,” he concluded, “you want me to drag the calf?”
“Don’t want y’ to do it!” and Titt shook his head indifferently, “but someone’s got to … I’m goin’ to stand by th’ bail, an’ he’s goin’ to keep behind th’ heifer … so—I dunno”, and he scratched the dust with the toe of his boot contemplatively, and waited for old Fred to reply.
Old Fred kept on thinking.
“It won’t be th’ worst job, anyway,” Titt went on, “you’ll have the leg-rope round its neck to pull it by. It’s me who’ll be in th’ dangerous position, no doubt about that.”
“And what about me, if she turns round?” And Splinter started jumping about like a dog let off the chain.
“Oh, all right!” Old Fred assented at last, “but hurry up an’ let us get it over.”
Then the three of them crept into the yard.
“Go steady now”, Titt said, mooching stealthily after the calf with the leg-rope in his hand, but keeping a sharp discerning eye on the movements of its mother.
Several efforts to lassoo the calf failed. At last an opportunity presented itself to Splinter. He jumped in and seized it with both hands by the tail, and hanging on like grim death, shouted “I got him!” The calf bellowed and pig-rooted, and went up and down in waves like a short switch-back railway. Splinter, at the end of him, went up and down, too. The heifer turned and let a roar out of her. Splinter broke up the “railway” and flew up the rails like a wild cat. Titt and Old Fred took shelter behind the bail posts.
“She’s got her monkey up, now,” Titt grumbled, “why didn’t y’ let th’ calf alone when y’ couldn’t hold it?”
“I could ’a’ held him,’ Splinter boasted, “but his tail started crackin up near th’ roots, an’ I thought it was goin’ to come off.”
“Your own was, y’ mean!” Titt snarled, and put Old Fred in a good humour. And when Titt heard Old Fred chuckling, he started chuckling too.
Their joint mirth touched Splinter in a sensitive place. He never could stand being made the cause of others’ merriment.
“Yous blokes are very funny, ain’t y’?” he said, sulkily, descending the rails.
“Who are you callin’ ‘blokes’?” And his parent frowned across the yard at him.
“Well, who are yous laughin’ at?” stubbornly from Splinter.
“That don’t matter. Don’t you call me a bloke again, young man. I’m your father, and don’t you forget it”, and the parent clenched his fists and wagged his head and humped his back determinedly.
“Who said I was forgettin’ it?” grumbled Splinter.
“I won’t stand you or no one else callin’ me a ‘bloke’”, and gathering up the rope, Titt turned his attention to the calf again.
“I alez had to say ‘Sir’ to my old man, or else get a clout on th’ head!” came reminiscently from Old Fred.
“But you never had a proper old man, had y’?” Splinter grinned. Splinter had heard that Old Fred’s was a step-father.
Just then, by the merest fluke, Titt roped the calf.
“Quick!” he shouted; “keep her away! I got him!”
Old Fred and Splinter ran to his assistance.
“Here, take it! Take it!” And Titt shoved the end of the rope into Old Fred’s hand—“and pull—pull him right through th’ bail, an’ I’ll be ready to shove it shut on her when she goes to go through after him.”
Old Fred pulled hard and went backwards to the bail. The calf “burr-ur-ed!” and reared and plunged after him. Old Fred fell over a milking block and burst the bandage round his ribs. When he found his feet again, he saw the heifer coming like a whole herd of devils. He let the rope go and ran through the bail on his own account. The calf with the rope hanging to it, raced blindly after him; the heifer anxiously pursued the calf; Splinter, shouting and waving his hat, pursued the heifer.
Titt, who was ready waiting, slammed the bail when he judged the heifer’s head was in it. But her shoulders and two front legs were in it, too, and the bail couldn’t close! But Titt put all his strength into the job, and shoved and held her by the body. She plunged and bellowed and looked like tearing the bail out of the ground and demolishing the whole yard.
“Quick! Give me a hand!” Titt shouted.
Splinter and Old Fred gave him a hand.
Finding she couldn’t get through, the heifer started to pull back, to retreat. That was what Titt wanted.
“Let her back a bit,” he cried, “till she gets her neck in it, then shove—but look out! Watch her! Watch her!”
They then cautiously eased the pressure little by little till at last the heifer came back with a bound. They shoved. The bail closed with a mighty three-man power push, and as many grunts, and missed her neck by a few inches! also her head!
“Lost her! I’m damned!” Titt said, hanging round the empty bail like a drunken man.
The unbroken heifer and her calf were standing in the yard again.
“If that beast isn’t milked very soon,” Mrs. Duff said, “her udder will go bad, and she’ll be spoilt.”
“We’re going to milk her to-day,” Titt replied resolutely, “if we have to shoot her dead to do it!”
“It wouldn’t be right to shoot one like her, Boss”, Old Fred, always humane, said.
“Well, of course, I only mean we’d do for her,” Titt explained, “in case we had to resort to direct action—see, Old Fred?”
Then he procured the new hemp-rope and started fixing a loop to the end of it again.
“What, yer goin’ to rope her again?” Splinter, with a broad smile, questioned.
“Goin’ to rope her again, me boy,” the father confirmed as confidently as if he had really roped her before, “an’ more than that”, he added.
“More? How? What y’ mean?” wonderingly from Splinter.
“Well, I’m goin’ to hook old Derby to her as well, and pull her into th’ bail—pull her bloomin’ head off if she won’t go in. That’s what I harnessed him up for.”
“Oh, crime!” And Splinter danced about in joyous expectation of more excitement. Old Fred philosophically spun his hat round like a wheel on the first finger of his left hand and chuckled like a frog. Mrs. Duff smiled and said “she had often seen Grandfather Rudd pulling a cow into the bail with a horse”.
“And he knew somethin’ about breakin’-in, didn’t he, Kit?” proudly from Titt.
“He’d break them with a rail or anythin’ if they wouldn’t go in”, Old Fred remembered.
“An’ he got into Parliament, on th’ strength of it, didn’t he, Mother?” Splinter laughed, “and broke it up, too?”
“Good enough for it!” Titt, working away at the loop with hands and teeth, cynically approved; “wants a few brainy old bucks like him in Parliament now.”
“A kind old man, anyway,” Mrs. Duff gratefully reflected, “even if he was a bit wild. And he made money.”
“Which was th’ main thing”, Titt decided. “Make money in this world Old Fred, and then you can talk. My oath, can’t y’! Money’s the recommendation, the qualification, the dinkum passport to anythin’ and everythin’ on this bloomin’ earth.”
There were times when Titt became eloquent.
“I suppose so, Boss”, Old Fred agreed, cheerfully.
“My Christmas, yes,” Titt went on, “if y’ ain’t got money— you’re no bloomin’ good in this world—but if y’ have (tugging hard at a knot with his teeth), if y’ have, you’re a little Almighty standin’ out on your own with everyone. Money’ll get y’ into anywhere!”
“It won’t get y’ into Heaven, Titt?” Old Fred ventured.
“No, it won’t,” Titt admitted, “and thank God for that. It will keep y’ out of Heaven, though; and that’s where you and me, at th’ resurrection, Old Fred, are goin’ to get th’ laugh on these toff blokes in their flash motor cars.”
“But I’m goin’ to have a motor car, some day,” Splinter reckoned, “and chance the ducks.”
“That’s right, Splinter,” Mrs. Duff smiled, “and you can drive Mother about.”
“You think they’ll be able to drive their cars to hell, Titt,” Old Fred grinned, “but—”
“But not to Heaven”, Titt, taking the words out of his mouth, laughed; “not to Heaven, Old Fred. Ha! Ha! Ha!”
“Goodness me,” Mrs. Duff interrupted, “shut up preaching and get the heifer milked.”
“A little worldly discussion now and then does coves good”, and throwing the rope over his shoulder, Titt led the way into the yard.
Soon as the heifer saw their approach, her tranquillity became perturbed and she prepared for action.
“She doesn’t look any too affectionate, does she?” Titt soliloquised, as he started to swing the noose.
“What about lettin’ Mother have a go at ropin’ her this time?” Splinter suggested earnestly.
“All right, if she likes”, and Titt paused and dropped the rope in the dust. “It’s all one to me who ropes her, so long as she gets roped.”
“I don’t know if I could now,” and Mrs. Duff blushed to the tips of her ears, “though I could when I was a girl.”
“Yes, y’ can, Mother,” Splinter urged, eagerly, “you can do it better than him, anyway.”
“Here! Who are you callin’ ‘him’ to?” And facing round quickly Titt scowled. “Can’t y’ think of anything else to call me by, eh?”
“I s’pose so”, and Splinter looked down at his toes.
“Why didn’t y’ call me be it, then?”
“S’pose I never thought.”
“Yer s’pose y’ never thought! My Christmas, then, you better think about it next time!”
Splinter looked up slyly from behind the drooping leaf of his hat at Old Fred.
“You needn’t be squintin’ at Old Fred!” the parent stormed. “He ain’t laughin’ at y; an’ y’ ain’t said anythin’ funny to laugh at, anyway.”
“Never said I did”, sullenly from Splinter.
“Never said y’ did!” and Titt, wrinkling his face and showing his teeth like a dog, was looking right under the leaf of Splinter’s hat when Old Fred, who had moved away to pick up a stone which he tossed over the rails, called: “Look out!” in warning to Mrs. Duff. Titt and Splinter both thought the warning was meant for them, and connecting the heifer with it, suddenly separated and rushed for safety to the nearest panel of the yard and climbed up on it. When Titt looked down and saw the heifer still standing in the corner, and Old Fred hugging a post to restrain his mirth, and heard Mrs. Duff laughing outright, he felt aggrieved and humiliated.
“Blooming old ass!” he mumbled, scowling across at Old Fred, “might be another case of th’ boy and the wolf some day!”
But Splinter, with more presence of mind and a keener appreciation of humour, shrieked:
“Look out, Old Fred! Look out! She’s got y’!”
Old Fred was taken quite off his guard. He left the post he was hugging in the centre of the yard—a post for the stock to scratch themselves against, and plunging headlong to escape one of the bails, struck his head against it, and knocked himself out.
Titt’s mood instantly changed. Old Fred’s fright and fall delighted him. He lay across the rails and laughed till he reckoned he had pains and stitches all over his body.
“You’re all wasting time!” Mrs. Duff said. “Give me the rope! I’ll catch her.”
In an instant Splinter left the rails, and gathered the rope together for his Mother to try her hand.
“Now we’ll see somethin’”, Titt, descending from his perch, grinned.
Old Fred, rubbing his head, sat up and stared.
Mrs. Duff, swinging the noose round her head, turned to the heifer.
Old Fred rose to his feet and gazed in admiration.
Splinter waited breathlessly.
The heifer, deciding to change her quarters, came out of the corner at a run.
Mrs. Duff let her pass, then flung the rope.
“Caught her! Caught her!” Splinter shouted, as the animal went plunging and snorting with the loop fairly round her horns.
“You ain’t forgotten th’ way, Kitty”, Old Fred grinned.
Titt was too surprised to say anything.
“In th’ first shot, too! By go!” from Splinter.
“Only a fluke”, Mrs. Duff laughed, and ran out of the yard.
“My Christmas, eh!” Titt said at last, “that’s th’ sort of wife to have”, and grabbing the end of the rope, hung on to the startled animal.
Then the fun commenced.
“I can hold her!” he cried, jerking and playing with the brute as an angler would a fish on a line. “One of you bring another rope to tie to this one, and the other get the horse and back him close to the rails. Be quick!”
“Right-o, Boss, I’ll fetch another rope”, and Old Fred crept through the rails and hurried to the harness shed, while Splinter raced off to bring Derby along.
“That’s right! That’s right!” Titt said, talking to the struggling heifer, “go on, fight and bellow away. But I got y’! Y’ can’t get out this time!”
Then Old Fred returned with another rope, and Splinter with Derby, whom he dragged along by the winkers.
Titt fastened the two ropes together, passed the end through the open bail, then through the rails to Splinter, who tied it securely to the swingle-tree behind Derby, and grinned expectantly.
“Now then,” Titt commanded when all was ready, “you lead old Derby straight out of the yard, Splinter, as if you were goin’ down the paddock somewhere; and Old Fred an’ me’ll get behind the heifer and keep her straight for the bail when the rope tightens, and Derby starts to pull. But when I sing out, ‘Stop!’ mind y’ stop him sudden, or he might pull her head right off.”
“Orright,” Splinter returned, “I’ll stop him.” And away he went, leading Derby after him.
Titt and Old Fred “shooed” the heifer out of the corner. She bucked across the yard, then tried to force her head between the rails. The rope began to tighten. Old Derby felt the strain and began to pull. He pulled the heifer’s head from between the rails and round to where her tail was. She now faced the bail. Splinter shouted, “Get up!” and Derby pulled harder. The heifer shook her head and roared, then planted her two front feet firmly in the dust and hung back. Derby grunted and tore up the ground with his toes. Splinter urged him louder to “Get up!” and kicked him in the hairy ribs with his bare toe. Derby hung in the collar and swayed from side to side. Titt and Old Fred, one on each side, waved their hats, and kicked dust at the jibbing heifer, and shouted, and made a great noise. But she wouldn’t budge, and it looked as if Derby was really going to pull her head off and get away with it.
“Get up, Derby; get up!” Splinter kept shouting and between him outside, and the other two inside, you’d think a couple of bullock teams were stuck in a creek, and the drivers had “double banked” and were urging the bullocks to shift the creek!
“Why don’t you screw her tail?” Mrs. Duff, returning to the scene, called out advisedly.
“Screw her tail?” and Titt, scratching his head looked puzzled. He’d never before heard of such a device for making a cow go.
“Yes, catch hold of it and give it a little twist near the butt”, Mrs. Duff repeated.
“Yes,” Titt grinned, “and get me bloomin’ head butted off with her foot?”
The same probability seemed to present itself to Old Fred, and he shook his head and smiled dubiously.
“Well, you are a pair of cattle men!” and entering the yard again, Mrs. Duff took hold of the heifer’s tail and gave it a twist. With a roar the brute instantly bounded forward, and Derby fell flop on his head, and in a desperate struggle to recover himself, tramped on the reins which Splinter had abandoned, and tore the whinkers right off his head. Gosh! Things that weren’t on the programme then happened rapidly! When Derby saw himself in harness, a privilege he had never enjoyed before, he took fright and tried to bolt. But he couldn’t get any forrader, because the heifer had her two fore feet stuck in front of her, and was hanging in the “breechen” again. So he snorted like a brumby and kicked up behind and came down with his legs outside the chains and swung to the right, and back to the left; then turned right round, and kept going round and round till all his legs were wound up in the rope; then utterly discouraged, he threw himself down in a heap and put out his tongue, showing his long brown teeth, and blew a crater in the dust with hot blasts from his red nostrils, and turned up the whites of his eyes, and groaned as though he were dying. Meantime, the heifer had wound herself around the “scratching post”, and Titt, to save her neck, was throwing his hand about and bawling. “Stop! Stop! Dammit stop!”
Then howls of alarm and despair came from Splinter.
“Oh, look at th’ horse! Look at th’ horse!” Mrs. Duff shrieked.
Titt and Old Fred turned from the bellowing heifer and, bending down, looked between the rails at the horse.
“Oh, my hell!” Titt choked. But what to do to afford quick relief, neither he nor Old Fred had a baby’s idea.
“Cut the rope! Cut the rope!” Mrs. Duff shrieked.
“Yes—cut th’ rope,” Titt, hardly knowing what he said, repeated in a thick, hoarse voice; “where’s a—a— knife?” And he felt himself over twice. And Old Fred felt himself all over three or four times.
“Oh, what men you are!” And Mrs. Duff disappeared and, returning with the axe, chopped the rope in two against the rail of the yard.
“There!” And she heaved a sigh of relief.
Then old Derby struggled to his feet, and after surveying himself and his surroundings with a most indignant stare, snorted again and careered down the paddock with the swingle-tree flying in the air and at intervals hitting him on the head. The heifer, freeing herself from the post, rushed here, there, and everywhere, finally and passively coming to a standstill in the place where they had all been trying to force her.
“Strath, she’s in the bail! She’s in it!” Titt, with wide open eyes and mouth, cried.
“Where?” and Splinter, taking his eyes off Derby, rushed to the rails, and hung through them and gaped.
“She is, Boss”, Old Fred confirmed, cheerfully.
“But if you go near her to close it,” Mrs. Duff put in, “she’ll run out again.”
“Wonder if one of us could sneak up and shove it shut on her?” in a low, anxious voice from Titt.
Splinter giggled. His father turned and scowled at him.
“Might get something to shove it shut with”, Old Fred thoughtfully suggested.
“A clothes prop!” And away Splinter scampered, returning with the longest prop available.
“My Christmas, the very thing!” Titt said, reaching for it eagerly. Then stealthily advancing a pace or two nearer, poked it against the bail, and while Splinter held his breath and stood on one leg, and Old Fred contemplatively stroked his hairless lip with finger and thumb, and Mrs. Duff struggled to restrain her mirth, he suddenly shoved it.
“Got her! Got her!” Splinter shouted.
“Christmas, but I have!” and discarding the prop, Titt ran to the struggling captive and proudly and bravely placed both hands on her back and said she was his now, and inquired how she felt about it.
Old Fred leaned against the “scratching post” and shook with noiseless mirth.
Mrs. Duff said, “Well! Well! Well!” and went back to the house, smiling to herself.
“But you wouldn’t have got her bailed if I hadn’t fetched the clothes prop?” Splinter claimed.
“If you hadn’t fetched th’ clothes prop!” Titt jeered. “You did a lot, didn’t y’?”
Then, taking the leg-rope he succeeded, after a lot of tumbling and nervous starts, in putting it on the heifer and tying her leg back.
Old Fred brought a bucket, and when the heifer heard it rattle, she bellowed and kicked all the hair off her leg against the rail.
Titt laughed, and punched her triumphantly in the girth, and she roared harder, and kicked more.
“I’ll milk her”, Splinter suggested.
“And make a mess of her,” Titt chuckled, taking the bucket himself, “same as y’ did old Derby. Don’t y’ think so, Old Fred?”
Old Fred smiled benevolently on the two of them. Old Fred never liked taking sides.
Titt discarded the milking block, and, standing with humped back, ready to jump away any moment, started milking. To Titt, milking a cow was a game of hazard; but he never regarded the animal as a partner.
“Is she tough or easy?” Splinter enquired.
“Easy as a beer pump”, Titt answered, and for a while all went merry as a marriage bell.
Then the heifer started flogging him in the face with her tail, which was heavily loaded with mud and burr-seed.
“Darn y’!” Titt shouted and jumped away to take some dirt out of his eye.
Old Fred looked away and grinned.
“Here,” Splinter said, taking possession of the tail, “do what O’Connor used to do”, and he tied the offending appendage to the side-rail of the bail, and laughed when the beast made futile efforts to release it.
“That’s the idea”, Titt said, and returning, completed the milking in comfort.
“She’ll be a great little milker when she’s in for awhile”, he enthused, showing Old Fred what was in the bucket, but ignoring all that was spilled on the ground.
Old Fred supposed she would be.
Then Titt patted her on the back, and talked in a friendly way to her.
“Let me take th’ leg-rope off her!” Splinter said, eagerly.
Titt let him, and stood by her head while it was being taken off.
“Now, stand away yous two, and I’ll let her out.”
Old Fred and Splinter stood away. Titt cautiously opened the bail and jumped away himself. Out the heifer flew, and swung round with a snort. Then she started bucking and bellowing, but couldn’t get away any further. She was tied to the rail by her tail.
“Oh, my hell!” Titt groaned and turned savagely upon Splinter.
“I forgot it was tied”, Splinter squeaked and fled.
“Get her into the bail again, Titt, get her into the bail”, Old Fred suggested.
They ran to her head and tried to “hoosh” her back into the bail. But all the maddened animal would do was roar and plunge, and scratch-pull, and kick up behind. Suddenly she got free, and careered round the yard wagging her tail and spattering blood on the rails, and looking quite a different animal altogether.
“Struth!” Titt gasped, “she’s left half it behind!”
And that was how they came to baptise her “Stumpy.”
The oldest inhabitants of the Creek were few and far between. From time to time, as old years rolled out, and new ones drifted in, they would foregather and talk of their isolation, bewail the circumstances that compelled the upbringing of the children in the wilderness, and resolve for the fiftieth time and more to ask the Government for a school, any sort of an old school, to send them to. And to their petition, the Department, for the fiftieth time and more, would answer in the same well-known weatherworn way: “When it is shown that there are sufficient children in the district of school age, as required by the Act, steps will be taken to comply with your request”, or words to that effect. But the inhabitants of the Creek, like the inhabitants of any other place, or of the whole universe, for that matter, shifted and changed, and came and went, and at no time could they guarantee the essential number of kiddies. And, as far as Bendy Sawpitt could see, “they never would be able to without they manerfacted a foo of ’em of out of th’ black mud”.
“And then th’ — department,” Billy Cattfish was of opinion, “would turn them down because they weren’t white.”
When, however, another old station run, which took in the best lands on the Creek, was cut up and sold in small areas, and the new settlers began to arrive, the position altered. The number of scholars was soon over-subscribed, and a brand new school, spacious enough to accommodate over half a hundred, made of weather boards and boasting of a front verandah, and a wire fence all round, was erected. It stood off the main stock-route where the road to the Range branched away, and faced Dundonald’s cultivation paddock.
Memories of the opening day of Emu Creek School have survived the emus themselves, and the brown kangaroos, so numerous that they seemed to set the whole wild bush in motion whenever they were on the move. It was a real St. Crispian’s Day—a wonderful gathering of the inhabitants, old and young, big and little, took place.
They greeted and congratulated each other noisily and merrily; ate and drank and danced, and talked about “learnin’” The oldest inhabitants were overjoyed. “The youngsters that are still on our hands will now have a chance to get on,” they said, “an’ rise to somethin’ better’n sloggin’ all their lives on selections like their old fathers an’ mothers, or workin’ on wages for th’ squatters, to make rich men of them.”
Even those who had missed their chance and had entered manhood and womanhood weren’t to be left out of the programme altogether. “They can go, too, sometimes,” the old folk reckoned, “when there won’t be much doin’ at home, and make up for some of th’ time they lost.” And Dundonald, a vigorous sturdy Scot, who knew how to take his courage in both hands, told them to “look at Abraham Lincoln. When only a gossoon like a lot o’ these young farllows here, he educated himself in the weeldernaiss of America and rose to be the graitest President the world ever knew; and why in th’ naime o’ conshuns, let me tail you, can na’ a lot o’ thee yokels do the same?”
“Anyway they can pick up somethin’,” Bendy Sawpitt was convinced, “an’ it will be a lot better to them than nothin’. I wish I only had the same chance at their age!” and he shook his old grey head sadly.
“I bet ye do, Bendy!” Dundonald said, shaking his head, too, “but ye’ve seen too mainy winters. Puttin’ you into a school would be as rideeculous as shutting an old parrot in a cage and trying to teach it to wheestle ‘Th’ Red Flag.’”
“Well, I’m quite sure that that Susannah of ours,” Mrs. Drygrass, with motherly pride, enthused, “would learn as quick as anyone, an’ quicker, I believe, if she could only just be given th’ chancet, as th’ sayin’ is.”
“Dat’s quite right, too”, Mrs. Shuttlewood, nodding her head, as if it was on a hinge, and jumping her last baby—her very last baby—up and down in her arms, endorsed, smilingly. “Susannah only wants to get a chancet.”
“Is that the one ye call Susie?” Dundonald inquired.
Mrs. Drygrass nodded, and said, “That’s her ladyship, Mr. Dundonald.”
“Oh, God blaiss me,” he roared, “I’ve known her saince she was in napkins (shrieks and screams from a score of female voices), and, by gosh! I’ve naiver seen a man who could use a butcher’s knife better than her.”
“Nor anyone who could pick up things she hears like her, either”, Mrs. Drygrass rattled on, proudly. “Did you, Mrs. Shuttlewood?”
But Mrs. Shuttlewood had a lot of daughters of her own, and deemed it wise to be cautious.
“N-n-no, dat’s true,” she stammered, “but we’ve got one in our family, too—Clara—who is awful quick at things.”
“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Drygrass conceded, grudgingly, “Clara isn’t too bad when she likes—but that Susannah of ours!” turning to Dundonald, “can git hold of anything she hears jist like a tame magpie.”
“But bless my soul!” Dundonald broke again, “what in the naime of gudeness do ye want tae worry about thaim for? Get thaim gude husbands, that’s a’ they want. Th’ country wants populating. An’ who’s goin’ tae do it? You an’ th’ like o’ mysailf and Bendy Sawpitt can na’ keep on multiplying and replainishing for ever!”
Another chorus of feminine shrieks and squeals; and laughing hoarsely and roughishly himself, Dundonald left them, and went off and started swinging the youngsters.
Later, when Splinter was told he would have to attend school, too, for a year or so, to be “topped off”, he rebelled, and blubbered, and reckoned “he knew enough and wasn’t goin’ back any more”.
“But I say you’ve got to, me noble!” the father put in, “and, my Christmas, if there’s any nonsense about it, an’ you ain’t ready to go with your sister on Monday morning—look out for your skin, that’s all!”
But when Splinter heard that Tom Dyer and Joe Shuttlewood, and Andy Drygrass and some more, all of whom were approaching the twenties, and starting to grow whiskers, were enrolled as scholars, he changed his mind and became cheerful and agreeable.
“What, them big blokes?” he questioned, with a grin. “Well, unlike you, Splinter,” his Mother explained, “the poor chaps never had a chance to go to school before.”
“And will they have to start in the A B C?”
“I suppose so”, Mrs. Duff smiled.
Splinter sat back and laughed hugely.
Just then Tom Dyer, who came to borrow a rope for his father, looked in.
“Hello, Tom,” Mrs. Duff greeted, “we hear you are going to start school on Monday?”
“Yairs, I b’lieve so”, Tom, dragging proudly at a little tuft of hair starting out of his chin, drawled. “Might as well go for a while an’ see what sort of a game it is.”
“You’ll get on all right, Tom”, encouragingly from Mrs. Duff. “Better late than never; and the master they have sent is a good teacher and a very nice man, I believe.”
“Don’t mind how nice he is, so long as he don’t go for me with his waddy, like th’ schoolmaster who father went to in the ol’ country, used to do”, and Tom started filling his pipe.
“No fear of that”, Mrs. Duff assured him.
“There’ll be skin an’ hair flyin’ if he do”, and Tom blew a great cloud, and aimed a kick at his dog for showing its teeth to Duff’s Bluey.
Splinter was immediately transported to regions of endless delight. He saw in Tom a hero who would wipe his feet on the teacher and turn the school upside down. A revolutionary step that should have been taken years before, he thought. Nothing now, only gaol or small-pox, or the Federal police could keep him at home. His heart was all in the school. Visions of those big fellows defying the master and punching him, opened up a vista of undreamt-of excitement to Splinter, and made him restless as a cat on hot bricks. He worked himself into a pitch of high ecstatic fervour and thought Monday would never come.
But when Saturday and Sunday dragged slowly by, it came, and away went Splinter, leaving Araluen to make her own way to the seat of learning. And what a sight it was when those scholars, ranging from infants up to men and women, some in shirt sleeves, some in long dresses, entered the playground. First they peered all round the building, then commenced playing “Drop the Handkerchief”, the only game the girls knew.
For a while the teacher, a kindly, prematurely bald pedagogue, stood on the verandah pulling at his moustache, and regarding them as though their presence involved him in a tremendous responsibility. Once or twice he paced the verandah, and pausing, stood gazing at them again. But when he saw big Susannah Drygrass drop the handkerchief on Joe Shuttlewood, who stood six feet in his stockings, and run away from him like a greyhound, and Joe run full split after her, and catch her, and struggle with her, and kiss her loud and square on the neck, he frowned and snapped his fingers, then, hurrying inside, put on his helmet (he always wore a murky-looking helmet), and rushed out and called them all to the front of the school. In twos and threes they assembled there, the big ones laughing and talking, the infants trembling and staring with fear, and nervous anticipation.
“Good morning”, he said, forcing a smile of welcome, and nodding familiarly to those whom he remembered having seen on “opening day”.
“Mornin’, Master”, several thin little voices squeaked timidly in response, while from several gruff throats came, “Good day”.
Joe Shuttlewood, standing between Andy Drygrass and Splinter, wondered in an undertone, “what time he got up; it’s a pretty late sort o’ mornin’
“Tell him it, Joe,” Splinter urged, “sing it out loud, go on.” Splinter was a thoughtful, unselfish sort of adviser.
Joe pulled his bottom eye-lid down with his thick middle finger, and asked Splinter if “he saw any green in it?”
Splinter looked into it and said he didn’t—and Joe Shuttlewood and Andy Drygrass exchanged winks.
“I want you all to form two lines, according to your respective sizes, and face this way”, the teacher said, taking up a position a few paces from the verandah. “Do you understand?”
Some understood; others didn’t.
“Come on, you blokes with th’ new coats on,” Tom Dyer supplemented, “an’ form into two bloomin’ clothes-lines.”
Splinter, bursting with joy, planted himself next to Tom, and squaring his shoulders and craning his neck, tried to look as tall as he.
Then there was much shifting and changing and talking and shoving.
“Here, you Joe Shuttlewood,” Susannah Drygrass protested digging him in the ribs with her elbow, “don’t you put yourself alongside o’ me—I don’t want y’!”
“Please, sir, she punched me ribs”, Joe bawled, pulling an ugly face and pretending to shed tears.
His complaint was greeted with great laughter, Splinter laughing louder and longer than any of the rest.
“Serves y’ glad, Joe,” Andy Drygrass, taking his sister’s part, drawled, “you shouldn’t have kissed her on the neck, when she was expectin’ it in th’ mouth.”
Another burst of merriment; and when it was over, Susannah, addressing the teacher, said: “Don’t you believe that long-legged brother of mine, mister—he’s a bigger liar than Tom Pepper.”
The teacher, preserving a stern, inflexible countenance, returned Susannah a malevolent stare. Then lifting his voice, asked for silence, and said he had a few words to say to them before they went into school to commence work.
Here Splinter slyly pinched Tom Dyer on the back of the leg.
“Oh!” Tom yelled, in devilment, and jumped as high as the verandah, “somethin’ bit me!”
The tears of mirth that came from the lines made Splinter’s bosom heave with pride—made him feel a hero.
Then the teacher proceeded, and addressing the boys with hair on their faces, and the girls in long dresses, told them he could, if he wished, refuse to admit them to the school. But as a favour to their parents, for whom he had the greatest respect and admiration as brave pioneers of the country, and out of sympathy for themselves, he would admit them the same as the rest of the children, and do all he could to help them and bring them along. All he would ask in return was strict attention to their lessons, good behaviour and obedience.
“Oh, rather!” Tom Dyer interjected, in agreement, and Joe Shuttlewood added:
“All the time, governor! My oath!”
“One other matter he wished to impress upon them, and not the least in importance, was a rule that was strictly enforced at all schools he had ever been connected with: the boys and girls must not mix up or play together in play hours—the girls must use the eastern half of the ground; and the boys confine themselves to the western side.”
This was received with an exchange of doubtful grins and smiles.
“Now—attention!”
Splinter, and those who had been to other schools, straightened up, put out their chests, and looked as if they had been in the army. The others remained standing easy and wondered what was coming next.
“Mark time!” and the teacher, holding up his chin and dropping his hands by his side, suited the action to the word.
Splinter bending his knees nearly to his chin, pounded the earth hard with the flat of his feet, and seemed to have it all his own way.
“Look at this bloke!” Tom Dyer, directing attention to Splinter, laughed; “he knows it.”
“Altogether! Everyone! Everyone!” the teacher, vigorously marking-time himself, urged.
“Oh, I’m with you”, and Tom Dyer, striking a higher knee-action than Splinter, began battering the ground like a draught horse. Then Andy Drygrass and Joe Shuttleworth entered into competition, then Susannah Drygrass and Judith Hammanegg, squealing as their skirts tangled above their knees, got going; then all of them became infected and entered into the exercise with great vigour and enjoyment.
“Right turn!” The teacher himself turned, but no one in the lines, except the few experienced ones, budged.
“Right turn!” and he motioned them with his hands and head, still spiritedly marking time himself.
In twos and threes they turned.
“This is somethin’ new, Joe”, Tom Dyer called to Shuttlewood.
“Like horses treadin’ in th’ thrasher”, Joe called back.
“Quick march!” and the teacher marched.
Splinter kicked Tom Dyer hard on the heels and shoved him forward. Tom kicked Joe Shuttlewood and shoved him. Joe, who was one of the leading file, kicked violently at the atmosphere, and his boot flew off and caused delay to the column.
“Left turn!—and into school!” and the teacher led the way up the steps which were unprotected by side-rails. Nearing the top, Tom Dyer, at Splinter’s whispered suggestion, seized Andy Drygrass’s hat and heaved it over the heads of those crowding behind. Andy shoved Tom right off the steps on to the ground, and said: “Stay down there, you long cow, and get a thousand cuts for comin’ in last.”
Splinter and the others rejoiced.
“Hang all hats and lunch-bags on the pegs—girls on the right, boys on the left. Then all into school.”
Much scuffling, scrimmaging and disorder at each end of the verandah followed this command. One would think there was only one peg at the boys’ end, and all of them were claiming it! But when Tom Dyer mounted the steps again, the commotion had subsided; all had entered the school-room, and every peg in the rack was occupied by a hat and a bag—some held two hats. Tom removed the first two head-pieces his eyes rested on, tossed them over the verandah, and hung his old felt and his bag in their places. Then one by one he examined a number of lunch-bags till he came to what he took for Andy Drygrass’s. Emptying it, he gulped down as much of Andy’s lunch as was possible in the time, stuffed the rest into his pocket, returned the bag to the peg, and blundered into school with a cheerful grin on his face.
Splinter, who had been watching for Tom’s entrance, caught his eye and slyly indicated a vacant place between himself and Andy Drygrass. Tom winked and strode straight into it.
“Wot kep’ y’?” Splinter whispered.
“Havin’ a snack”, Tom said, and producing the remains of the commandeered lunch, shoved it under Drygrass’s nose, and invited him to have some.
Andy grinned and had some.
Tom offered the rest to Splinter; but Splinter was too overjoyed to eat, and wouldn’t take the risk, anyway.
“It’s a floggin’, y’ know,” he warned Tom, “if you’re caught eatin’ in school.”
“Is it?” Tom grunted, “if he tries it on me I’ll break him agen th’ wall.”
“Would you go for him?” in a joyful whisper from Splinter.
“Would I not?” and Tom stuffed his mouth with sandwich.
Splinter rubbed his hands and gazed towards the teacher. Splinter longed to see him flog Tom. If he could, without Tom knowing it, he would even turn informer, so enthusiastic did he feel in the matter.
Tom diverted him with a dig in the ribs.
“Do y’ know whose tucker that was I give Andy a bit of?”
Splinter’s eyes nearly dropped out of his head.
“His own! I went through his bag before comin’ in.”
Splinter hung his head and tittered and giggled beneath the desk.
“He’ll have to go hungry at dinner time!” he said, looking up.
“So he can! He won’t get mine … Look at him”, Tom grinned.
Splinter turned and saw Andy with mouth open trying to catch what the teacher was explaining to a class of infants— and let out an involuntary yell that made the teacher turn quickly and stare.
“He’s got his eye on you blokes!” Andy Drygrass, turning to them, grunted.
Splinter’s heart missed a couple of beats. He pulled an innocent face, sat up straight, and gazing along his nose, looked the embodiment of good behaviour.
A little later the teacher commanded “Silence!” and explaining that he was now going to call the roll, told them how to answer.
Everyone shouted “Present.” or “Here, Sir”, except “Squirrel” Sawpitt, and “Skebo” Woods, and “Snapper” Smith, and “Dwodley” Dyer and “Blue-tongue” Black, and “Blowfly” Brown. When he questioned them and asked why didn’t they answer, and if their names were not Archibald and Matthew and Arnold Jacob, and Josephus and Edward Samuel, and John Thomas, they hung their head and sniggered.
“Them’s their Sunday names you got hold of, Boss,” Joe Shuttlewood explained, “they had nothin’ but week days on th’ Creek afore you come, and they’ve forgotten ’em.”
“Silence Shuttlewood!” the teacher rebuked; “you’re in school, remember!”
“Oh, all right,” Joe drawled, “if you won’t let a bloke speak!”
“Silence!” and the teacher faced him firmly.
“Crimes!” Splinter whispered, “now there’ll be a fight!”
Then Joe glanced side-ways at Andy Drygrass, and grinned, and the storm passed.
The rest of the morning the teacher devoted to organising the classes, serving out material and giving instructions for general guidance.
When one o’clock came, all were let out for lunch. Then Blowfly Brown and Squirrel Sawpitt found their hats were missing and began to weep. Everyone except Tom Dyer suspected some passing swagman of having stolen them.
“And they’ve stolen my dinner!” Splinter gasped, turning pale and holding open his empty bag.
“Yours?” and Tom Dyer stared in surprise.
“It’s gone!” and the tears started swimming into Splinter’s eyes.
“And what about yours, Andy?” Tom, puzzled looking, asked of Drygrass.
“Mine?” Andy said, unpacking a setting of boiled eggs, and starting to shell one; “if there ain’t no chickens about, it’s orlright.”
“Isn’t yours gone?” Splinter asked, in surprise, of Andy.
“It will be directly,” and Andy put the shelled egg into his mouth, and chanced a chicken.
Splinter, with an injured look on his face, turned to Tom Dyer.
“It’s all right, old chap,” Tom said, patting him on the back, “I’ve enough here for the two of us.” And opening his bag, he shared a cargo of buttered scones and corned round, and a bottle of homemade jam with Splinter.
That evening when four o’clock came, and the first day was over, and the youngsters tramped merrily home along the bush-tracks, the cheery faces of mothers watching at the door, the lowing of the cattle, the whistling and calling of the birds, the gentle noise of the wind in the trees, and the sunshine on the plains seemed to be all in unison with each other.
The school had been opened six months. It was making headway. Shyness and dread of the master were wearing off the infants, and giving place to confidence and fidelity. The hair on the faces of the bigger boys was spreading and taking distinctive colour; the dresses of the bigger girls getting longer, and between the lot of them they succeeded in making the school a real live institution that kept the teach busy. He was never out of employment. But Roger Garfield Wimblepip was a teacher! a learned indefatigable, dignified pedagogue. He was no round post in a square hole. No newspaper reporters or society wife or parliamentary, or lodge, or church influence made his reputation. His own hard-worked brains made it. He was a student of Nature, and studied the characters of his pupils, and got to know them as he did the A B C before beginning to teach them anything. “A teacher”, he used to tell Titt, “might pass all the examinations in the world, and get loaded up with honours, yet not be able to teach worth tuppence. Unless he has been taught to teach or happens to be a born teacher, he’s a professional counterfeit, a fly in the departmental ointment, a hired destroyer of the nation’s greatest asset.”
That was why he wavered on the matter of including “Nature Study” in the bill of fare for the Emu Creek School, and couldn’t arrive at a definite conclusion. One day he chose fifteen of the most stalwart and intelligent boys to accompany him along the creek and through the intervening forest country to the top of Mt. Sibley, on a nature study stunt. Great crawling jew lizards! No stunt could have suited or delighted them more. A day out of school together was “into their hands”. They grabbed their hats, poked faces at those who had not been selected, and away they went down the road, the teacher stepping it out in the centre of them like Bonaparte amidst his bodyguard.
Instead of spreading out to collect wild flowers and yams and blackfellows’ fruit, and lizards and spiders and snakes, and all kinds of creeping things, and bring them to the teacher for scientific investigation and explanation, the boys promptly disappeared into water-holes and among grass trees and up the limbs of gums and coolibahs, and left the master waiting.
He waited and studied his watch till his patience gave out.
“God bless my heart and soul!” he mused anxiously; “what’s become of them all?”
Then making a funnel of his two hands, he coo-eed, a high-pitched, mournful coo-ee, with a long melancholy tail to it, and placing his ear to the wind, listened.
No response came—not a sound could he hear save the creak-creaking of chafing limbs and the flapping of moving bark, dangling in strips from the forest trees.
Again and yet again he coo-eed; but no more than if those louts had all been swallowed up by the earth, was any indication of their whereabouts borne back to him on the breeze. Yet, while his throat was getting sore and hoarse and the perspiration breaking out in beads upon his brow, Tom Dyer and Joe Shuttlewood and Splinter, in the hidden bend of a steep gully, were splashing and wallowing in a murky water-hole not more than a hundred yards away. A little lower down, Andy, Drygrass and Bill Billygum and Ned Rudd were secreted in the foliage of a spreading coolibah, chewing grass-tree gum; the rest of the “nature students” were a mile and more away, giving mad chase to anything and everything that had the temerity to start from its hiding place and run, or fly, or creep, or crawl! They were death on Nature Study, were those bush scholars, with no more care or thought for the teacher than they had for the man in the moon.
“Listen to old Roger coo-eein’ for us”, Tom Dyer, shaping a mud-ball to paste Joe Shuttlewood with, grinned.
“If he comes this way,” Joe answered perching himself on a miniature island adorning the centre of the water-hole, “he’ll see some Nature Study.”
All three laughed joyously.
Then Splinter scrambled up the bank and peeped cautiously over the edge to see what the teacher was “up to”.
“There ain’t a single jolly bloke left with him,” he announced, clinging tight to the long grass on the parapet, “everyone of ’em’s cleared.”
Joe Shuttlewood grinned and pointed meaningly to the back view of Splinter.
“Has they?” and Tom Dyer stood up and flung the mud-ball he had prepared for Shuttlewood, at Splinter. It went straight and swift, and with a loud smack, fastened itself on to his bare skin like a parasite in clay.
“Oh!” he yelled, and losing grip of the grass, rolled down the bank into the water.
The others dropped down in helpless heaps and gave themselves up to mirth.
Splinter gathered himself together, and crawling out of the hole, began dressing silently and sulkily.
“Glod bless my heart and soul!” the teacher burst out again. “Well! Well! Well!” then went off to search for the absent students. He walked briskly for a couple of hundred yards, and entered a clump of grass-trees where he came upon foot prints and moist spots of expectorated chew-gum. Then he coo-eed hopefully and listened some more. Andy Drygrass and Bill Billygum and Ned Rudd, perched in the coolibah trees, were only fifty yards distant.
“Look out!” Andy warned his companions; “get up higher! Old Roger’s comin’ through th’ grass-trees. I can see his helmet.”
The others climbed higher, and squatting among the branches like scrub turkeys, listened and watched every movement below.
Emerging from the grass-trees, the teacher paused beneath the coolibah, and peered all round, but never once dreamed of looking up.
A word, a giggle, or the sound of a breaking twig among the branches, and those absconders would have been undone. But Fate befriended them. With their hats shoved half-way down their throats, they sat tight and motionless.
Once again the teacher woke the silence and solitude with a forlorn coo-ee. Those yahoos in the tree never, in their lives, before, experienced such a strange and trying sensation. None dare lift his head to look into the face of the other.
“God bless my heart and soul!” they heard him moan; “whatever has become of them! What ever shall I do?”
Starting off again, he crossed an old sheep-yard that had long been in disuse, and headed for a belt of thick forest timber.
“Oh, my side!” Andy Drygrass broke out, “if he hadn’t gone the instant he did I’d have had to let go and fall right on him.” His companions choked and gurgled, and said they “would have had to, too”.
Then they laughed together like jackasses, and “reckoned it was th’ best fun ever they had in their lives”.
In vain the teacher kept up the search, and amidst red and crimson streaks along the sky, the sun started to go down. Then giving up hope, he began retracing his steps, and instead of returning to the school, got lost! became hopelessly, irretrievably bushed!
Meanwhile, Mrs. Wimblepip, who was left in charge, when four o’clock came, let the scholars out. All of them, closely followed in dribs and drabs by the fifteen absconders, soon reached their respective homes.
Night, dark and cheerless, came on, but no Mr. Wimblepip.
At 8 o’clock, Mrs. Wimblepip, hatless, breathless, pale and almost overcome with alarm, hastened to Duff’s place and asked if Splinter was home.
“Oh, long ago, Mrs. Wimblepip”, and Titt and Mrs. Duff stared in surprise.
“Long ago?” Mrs. Wimblepip echoed. “Oh, dear! dear!” and dropping into a chair, fainted, and looked as if her end had come.
The Duffs grew frantic. They shook her, pleaded with her to speak, and broke into lamentations. Not until they gave her water to drink and poured some down her back did Mrs. Wimblepip revive again, and state her trouble.
Splinter, listening through the kitchen door, took time by the forelock, and in fear and trembling, prepared his defence. For the first time in his life he seriously exploited the regions of thought.
His father called him, and in he slunk, his hands twitching, his lip quivering, a tragic stare in his eye.
“Here,” Titt questioned, “was you one ’o them who went out with Mr. Wimblepip to-day?”
Splinter was.
“Where did yous go?”
Splinter told him (in part).
“How was it Mr. Wimblepip didn’t come home with you?” Splinter didn’t know.
“Where did he go? Did he stop behind or go somewhere be himself, or what? You ought to know, and mind you tell th’ truth, or by cripes, I’ll kill y’!”
“Me and Tom Dyer and Joe Shuttlewood”, Splinter stammered, “left him with all th’ others, an’— an’—”
“Well? Yes? An’ what?”
Splinter lost the thread of his defence, and was ransacking his paralysed brain to find it.
“Can’t y’ remember?”
“Oh, you must know, Splinter?” anxiously and kindly from his mother.
“Yairs!” Splinter spluttered.
“Well, tell Mrs. Wimblepip!” Titt yelled, “an’ don’t be standin’ there lookin’ like a jolly goat!”
“An’ we went to get a yaller flower”, Splinter remembered. “A yaller flower”—and he faltered again.
“You told us that before! By Christmas, young man, look out for yourself if you’re tellin’ any lie! Do you know what all this means, do y’, eh?” Looking into Splinter’s face; “it might mean—murder!”
Mrs. Wimblepip screamed; Splinter bellowed.
“Don’t frighten th’ boy, Titt!” Mrs. Duff protested. “Let him tell what he knows about it in his own way!”
“How can he tell anythin’ in any way, when he’s bellerin’ the way he is!”
“Yes, of course,” Mrs. Duff agreed; “but he’s nervous about it, when I’m sure he has no reason to be!”
Then softly and encouragingly to Splinter:
“You were going to tell us about the yellow flower, son? Yes? Don’t be afraid; no one will hurt you.”
“One growin’ out of a rock that Tom knew about,” Splinter blubbered, “an’—an’ we was to bring it back to—(sob)—to— him—”
“To who?” Titt interrupted.
“To (sob) old Roger.”
“What? Who? By cripes, me noble, I—”
“To the teacher”, and Splinter blubbered harder by way of apology.
“And did you bring it to him?” from Mrs. Duff; “now don’t cry about it.”
“N—No; he was gone when we came back, an’—an’ we couldn’t find him.”
“They have done something terrible to my husband—I know they have!” Mrs. Wimblepip wept, “my intuition tells me there has been foul play! Oh, why did he ever come to such a school! —such an ill-bred, barbarous school!”
“Don’t go on like that, Mrs. Wimblepip,” Mrs. Duff said, “Mr. Wimblepip will turn up all right, never you fear. It won’t surprise me if he is at home when you go back—not in the least”, and she sat down and put her arms around her.
“And did y’ look for him?” Titt asked further of Splinter. “We waited for them all to come back, and when they didn’t come, Tom Dyer said they must have gone home, and then we come home.”
“I see”, Titt reflected wisely.
“Oh, Splinter is not to blame,” Mrs. Duff asserted, positively, “he and Tom Dyer and Joe Shuttlewood merely did what Mr. Wimblepip told them to do, isn’t that so, son?”
“Y—yes, that’s it”, Splinter lied.
“I didn’t see it that way at first,” Titt said, apologetically; “but I understand now.”
“I never saw it any other way,” from Mrs. Duff, “and I knew my boy wouldn’t tell a lie.”
“At that rate,” Titt summed up, “Mr. Wimblepip must have went home with some o’ them others. Perhaps one of ’em took sick or got sunstruck, and he carried him home—?”
It was a brilliant and timely suggestion. It came just when Mrs. Wimblepip was working up for another fantod.
“That’s just what really happened!” Mrs. Duff exclaimed, “just what Mr. Wimblepip would do; he’s so thoughtful and kind. He has taken one of them home—young Hamlet, perhaps—he often takes fits, you know.”
“My Christmas, you’ve struck it, Kit!” Titt laughed, and clapped himself on the thigh, “Hamlet took a fit. He took one here one morning, y’ remember, and nearly fell in the fire.”
Then they both laughed; and their mirth inspired Mrs. Wimblepip with confidence, and dispelled all her anxiety.
“I don’t know what you must think of me?” she smiled. “It was awful foolish and weak-minded to become so anxious.”
“Not a bit of it; anyone else would have felt the same,” Mrs. Duff assured her, “and lots of women wouldn’t have had the courage to cross the paddocks alone on a dark night, as you did.”
“But, to make sure,” Titt said, procuring his hat, “me and Old Fred will drive round to Hamlet’s and if Mr. Wimblepip is still there, we’ll drive him home.”
Mrs. Wimblepip didn’t know how she would ever repay Titt for all his kindness.
“And when I see Mary Ellen to bed,” Mrs. Duff added, “I’ll walk back to the school with Mrs. Wimblepip and come home with you and Old Fred, in the sulky.”
Then everything seemed to be unravelling and terminating beautifully.
Splinter and Araluen alone in the home; the former restless and silent.
“I don’t think you were telling father the truth, Splinter?” his sister said, looking up from her home lessons.
“Not all of it, I didn’t”, he confessed, twisting and screwing his body, and pulling painful faces. “We didn’t look for any flowers—we went bogeying—an’—an’—I’m all sunburnt,” he blubbered; “it’s painin’ me; an’ they’ll find it out!”
“Where? Show me—let me see?” And Araluen, always sympathetic, rose from the table and went to him.
“Don’t touch it, don’t! Oh! it’s stingin’ me all over!”
“Get into bed,” his sister advised; “then I’ll come and put oil and ointment on you and father and mother won’t know anything about it.”
Splinter got into bed; and at intervals, Araluen, bending lightly over him, applied oil and ointment to his red roasted-looking back and shoulders with a feather. When at last he fell asleep, dreams of the day’s misdeeds kept appearing before him like spectres of the dead, and he moaned and talked and tossed about.
Meanwhile, Titt arrived at the home of Hamlet and found that youth in the highest spirits.
“What did you blokes do with the teacher, when you were out in the bush with him to-day?” Titt asked abruptly. “He ain’t come home yet, and Mrs. Wimblepip is over at my place lookin’ for him and cryin’ like winky.”
Hamlet got a shock. His eyes started rolling in their sockets; his muscles began twitching, and his whole frame working.
“Don’t excite him! Don’t excite him!” his uncle (Hamlet was an orphan) cried, jumping up from the table. But the damage was done. Hamlet gave a lurch, and next minute was upon his back on the floor in a fit, fighting the atmosphere with hands and feet, and kicking over the furniture, and everything within reach of his limbs.
Having helped as best they could to soothe the sufferer, Titt and Old Fred hurried to the rest of the homes and inquired for the missing master. In turn, every boy who had been in the “study stunt” was questioned and cross-questioned. And the bad, unreliable memories most of them had were a feature of the investigation.
Tom Dyer was the last to be interrogated. Tom said that “he and Joe Shuttlewood and young Splinter went off up the big gully and got divin’ in th’ round water-hole to see if they could get the bunyip that everyone reckoned was there, to show old Roger”.
“Splinter said you went to get a flower of some kind that was growin’ out of a rock somewhere”, Titt, displeased and suspicious-looking, interrupted.
“Eh!” Tom said, pausing and thinking rapidly.
Titt repeated the correction.
“That’s right, quite right”, and Tom quickly amended his statement. Then, monopolising all the talk, waved his hands about and added a rambling, disconnected string of immortal and transcendent lies on Splinter’s account. Tom wasn’t the chap to desert a confederate once he knew how the land lay.
Then everyone came to the conclusion that the teacher had either got lost in the forest or had met with an accident, and in very short time the whole countryside, per horse and per boot, were out searching for traces of him. Supplied with hurricane lamps and matches, some with a bit of food, others with a drop of spirits, they went off through the darkness in every possible direction. Time was the essence of the search. They took short cuts across paddocks, and where there were no gates or slip-rails, a panel of the fence was pulled down or the wires cut with a file. It was a night of memorable excitement, and rare privileges.
The women, too, after putting the children to bed, and ordering them to sleep, left their homes and congregated at the teacher’s residence. They joined Mrs. Duff, and sympathised with Mrs. Wimblepip, and increased her distress. Then, in a spirit of helpfulness, they over-ran her home, took possession of the kitchen, raided the wood-heap, set the table, made tea for all hands, and insisted on Mrs. Wimblepip “eating something to keep up her strength”.
At intervals they would crowd on the verandah, and, gazing into the night, would turn their eyes to the star strewn sky and listen intently. Now and again some would hear a distant cooee; others would discover fires showing simultaneously on top of Mt. Sibley, and Keefer’s Mountain, and Ryan’s Mountain, and the one in Eton Vale. And they knew they were signals sent up to catch the eye of the lost teacher and guide him to safety and home.
After midnight, as the lingering moon came over the range, the sound of galloping hoofs were heard approaching. The women became excited. It was Tom Dyer and Joe Shuttlewood. They reined in; dismounted quickly, fastened their horses to the palings, and hurried through the garden.
“Have you found him?” a dozen eager voices inquired.
“No,” they answered, bounding breathlessly on to the verandah and pausing in the light of the door, “but we got his helmet”, and Tom, who was wearing it over his old felt, took it off and displayed it proudly in the light, “and there’s blood on it of some kind”, he added.
A high-pitched, prolonged shriek came from Mrs. Wimblepip, and before any of them could reach her, she flopped on the floor and struck her head against the leg of the sofa. There was a confused rush to her assistance. Mrs. Drygrass, a large, clumsy woman, bumped the table with her hip and knocked the kerosene lamp on to the floor. It crashed and flared in a most alarming manner, threatening to set fire to the house and burn it down. Those who expected an explosion, screamed and, grabbing their skirts in their hands, flew to the verandah. Mrs. Shuttlewood was the only one who showed any presence of mind.
“Throw something on it—something on it!” she cried, crawfishing herself into a corner and holding her hands over her face.
“A blanket!” Mrs. O’Connor suggested, trying to squeeze behind Mrs. Shuttlewood.
Tom Dyer sprang forward and clapped the helmet over the flames; then jumped on it with both feet and pounded it, lamp and all, until the room was dark and smoky, and smelt of kerosene.
Then all thought again of Mrs. Wimblepip. They lifted her from the floor, placed her full length on the sofa; dragged her shoes off, opened the neck of her dress, rubbed her hands, and said everything and did everything they could to bring her to life again. When she revived, and looked as if making up her mind to stay in this world for ever, whether her husband was found or not, Tom and Joe started explaining how it was they came across the helmet.
“We saw a fire in Botkin’s Gully,” they exulted, “and when we come up to it, here was two swagmen camped at it and lying alongside one of them was th’ bloomin’ helmet!”
“They’ve murdered him! I knew it!” Mrs. Wimblepip shrieked again, and a second time rolled off the sofa on to the floor. Her large dark eyes went white; her red lips went blue, her small feet quivered, she gave several spasmodic kicks, such as a beheaded rooster gives for a finish, then one hand fell beside the sofa, the other showing several lovely rings, rested lightly on her breast.
Great commotion.
“My hokey!” Tom said, looking gloomy as the inside of an old man kangaroo, “she’s done for this time!”
“Undo her dress—and her stays! Quick! Quick!” Mrs. Drygrass cried, “and leave the room, you boys—leave the room!” Tom and Joe left the room slowly and clumsily, both gaping back over their shoulders as they went.
The rest of the women, feeling they were in the way, left the master’s wife to the care of Mrs. Drygrass and Mrs. Duff, and withdrew on tip-toes to the kitchen. There they stirred up the smouldering fire, put some more wood on it, and sat round conversing in whispers and pricking their ears for any hopeful sounds outside.
From time to time, Mrs. Drygrass or Mrs. Duff would trip in in quest of hot water or something, and in hushed tones all would inquire from her how Mrs. Wimblepip was. Once she screwed her face significantly, and said “she didn’t believe she was really half as bad as she made herself out to be!”
The others all nodded in silent agreement.
“And do y’ think she’s so fond of him as all that?” Mrs. Sawpitt asked.
Mrs. Drygrass pulled a more significant face than before, and returned to the front room.
The others then talked about the absent master and discussed his good qualities and his domestic affairs and wondered if “he was really lost” and “if there wasn’t something else at the bottom of it all”.
After that they fell into reflection, and a heavy drowsiness came over them as they sat looking into the dying fire. Mrs. Crosscut, who had been going hard since five o’clock the morning before, fell right off to sleep and started dreaming aloud. The others smiled and some spoke to her; but she slept and dreamed on. Suddenly she said:
“Mr. Wimbletop!” and leaning forward, put out her hand and touched the fire with it. Then she jumped right out of her sleep in to the lap of Mrs. Sawpitt, and both fell heavily on the floor and shook the house, and all the others squealed.
“Good heavens!” her companions cried, jumping up, “did you burn yourself?”
“My God!” Mrs. Crosscut gasped, “I must have been dreaming? I thought I found the schoolmaster, and he was dead, and I was going to pull him out of some place!”
“It must have been out of the Hot Place,” Mrs. Shuttlewood said, “or you woudn’t have put your hand among them coals.”
The others all laughed. They were laughing when Tom Dyer and Joe Shuttlewood returned again, shouting: “They got him! They’re comin’ with him!”
Then there was more commotion! and all stampeded through the house on to the verandah.
Mrs. Wimblepip raised herself on the sofa and said she wouldn’t believe it until she saw her husband walk in at the door!
A few seconds later when he walked in, she scarcely knew him. He was bare-headed, was mud all over; his clothes torn to tatters; boots wet, and his face conveyed no feelings of joy or pleasure or thankfulness or gratitude. He looked as if he were rehearsing the part of “The Remorseful Drunk”. He was in a bad humour, too—the worst humour he was ever in his life.
“Roger!” his wife cried, throwing her arms around his neck. “My husband! My—”
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” he snapped, trying to shove her off, “what’s all this fuss about?”
“I thought you were murdered—oh, I did! I did!”
“Stuff and nonsense!” and freeing himself from her embraces, the master dropped into a chair and with elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, seemed to be undergoing great mortification.
His wife dropped on her knees beside him and rested her chin affectionately and gratefully on his bald crown, and murmured love things to him.
“Rubbish!” he barked, and rising from her paced the room. That his bump of locality should have failed him as it did injured the master’s professional pride and dignity. He had been lost and found within a few miles of his home, and was humiliated.
Tom Dyer, having heard all he wished to hear from the rescue party, collected about the verandah steps, sauntered inside to see the master.
“Hello, Mister Wimblepip”, he grinned, sympathetically.
The sound of his voice seemed to awaken angry memories in the master and bring him out of his remorse. Turning quickly and facing Tom, he pointed dramatically to the door and said: “Go!”
“I was only goin’ to say—”, Tom mumbled.
“Go!” shouted the master.
“Oh, alright,” Tom said, “if that’s all th’ thanks you got I will”—and he went.
Then Mrs. Drygrass and Mrs. Shuttlewood and all the rest stole softly from the verandah, and joining their husbands, whispered:
“Leave them to theirselves; we better all go home now.”
And though the breaking dawn could not be seen through the gathering fog that was enveloping the Bushland, by the lowing of the cows, the laughing of the jackasses and the twittering of the ground larks, they knew another day had come.
Though the master decided to lead no more boys into the forests on Nature-study stunts, there came moments when he found it difficult to restrain them from breaking out on their own account. Such moments came when a mob of kangaroos would gather round and hop over the fence into the playground to sample the grass growing there. Then only by placing his back firmly against the door, and brandishing his black ruler and angrily shouting a fusilade of threats and warnings to the leaders, was he able to stem the rush and prevent a stampede in pursuit of those marsupials.
“Oh, blow it, Boss!” Tom Dyer, when calm was restored and most of the scholars returned to their places, would grumble, “if you’d let us out, we’d have caught one of them and brought y’ th’ tail to make soup o’”.
“Go back to your studies, Dyer!” with a final flourish of the black ruler, Mr. Wimblepip would order, “or you’ll compel me to expel you from the school!”
“Oh, beggar the expellin’!” and with a surly grin at those in the desks, Tom would reluctantly obey. Then giving Joe Shuttlewood, or whoever happened to be nearest him, a malicious dig in the ribs, he would proceed to clean his slate with his big bony elbow. That done he would look up when Mr. Wimblepip’s back was turned, and in mimicking tones, sneer. “Go back to your studies!” Those within hearing would giggle, and lower their heads to escape detection.
“Shut up!” Joe Shuttlewood would whisper, “he can hear y’.” Tom would shut up.
Then pencils would start scratching again, the hum and din of voices would pervade the room, and once more discipline would be restored.
Out on the floor, at one end, the infant class, which included girls in long dresses and broad leather belts drawn tightly around their waists to preserve their figures, half sang, half shouted, “two and one are three”, and “two and two are four”. At the other end another class, the “low second”, boisterously related to anyone within hearing, the sad story of two unhappy frogs that went off “one hot day to look for water”. And up and down the room the voice of the master, correcting and directing this pandemonium, rang out clearly above the lot.
In the middle of it all the restless gaze of Tom Dyer or Splinter or Joe Shuttlewood or someone would suddenly discover the presence of the “big black gohanna” on the verandah. The “big black gohanna” had developed a habit of visiting the school at convenient moments in search of crumbs and fragments of food left lying about and soon as his ugly form appeared, word was speedily passed around. Then would come a lull. The “two and one are three” sing-song would terminate abruptly. The two frogs who went to look for water would expire instantly. Every eye would be strained and every neck stretched to secure a glimpse of the long-tailed visitor. All worries, too, would disappear. Cheerful grins would brighten and broaden faces, that only a moment before were filled with misery and despair.
Without a word, the master, with eyes wide open, would promptly put down his chalk, and reach for the black ruler. Then stealing softly and cautiously towards the open door, would pause for a moment, take in a deep breath, secure a firmer grip of the ruler, motion the grinning school to perfect silence, then jumping out, to the accompaniment of a tumult of guffaws, would let fly the ruler with all his might at the lurking reptile, and make a dent in the verandah boards, and another in the water tank. Then he’d pursue the startled vermin down the steps, with all the school shouting encouragingly at his heels, and race it to the nearest tree. The nearest tree was about twenty yards away, and the gohanna always arrived there first, and wriggling hurriedly up the trunk, would be half an inch beyond reach, when his pursuer made a spring for the tail-grip.
“Well! well! well! Missed the brute again!” he would murmur when a shower of sticks and stones would fly at the gohanna, and if Garfield Roger Wimblepip didn’t duck a dozen different ways at once, or suddenly drop flat on the ground, he stood a better chance of being brained or maimed than ever the “big black gohanna” did!
As much as the boys of the school hunted and molested the animals and birds of the bush, making their lives a misery to them, the injured creatures seemed to cherish a fondness for their society, notwithstanding. Scarcely had the institution been in full swing when numbers of birds and possums found their way into it. They built nests in the crude ceiling, the boards in which, for mean departmental reasons, were an inch apart, and made their homes there. And talk about a surprise! Talk about mirth! The first time their presence was discovered, there was a surprise! And there was mirth! The discovery happened one sultry afternoon at three o’clock. The fifth class was in the front desk writing a composition “out of their own heads” on “Australian Wild Animals”; some were deep in thought, some writing rapidly. Suddenly Maggie Murphy, sitting about the middle of the desk, next to Splinter, jumped to her feet with a squeal; then stood looking at the ceiling. Splinter gazed at the part of the desk that Maggie had abandoned, then up at the ceiling also, and seeing the tail of a possum dangling through one of the cracks, laughed and shoved further away from Maggie. Then all the class rose up and fixed their eyes on the ceiling, and burst into great merriment.
Next moment the master was brandishing the cane in their faces, and loudly demanding “Silence!” Splinter, for the master’s information, cheerfully pointed to the desk, others directed his attention to the dangling tail with a curl showing on the end of it. He looked at both.
“Possums in the ceiling!” he said.
“My word!” Andy Drygrass, who had left his class to be in the fun said, with a grin, “and they ain’t got any sanitary system up there, either.”
Then Mr. Wimblepip’s sense of humour revealed itself. For the first time in school, he burst into laughter like a man whose very soul was in the mirth, and the whole school, excepting Maggie Murphy, followed his example. Maggie Murphy thought they were all laughing at her, and like a good, illogical little girl, started crying.
Luncheon hour; the boys, in their half of the ground, playing “dogs and kangaroos”; the girls, in theirs, forming sides for a game of “rounders”.
Joe Shuttlewood, one of the “dogs”, having been mauled badly by the ’roos, retired to the shade of a tree and lay down. The rest of the “dogs” continued in their efforts to exterminate the ’roos.
Joe looked across and saw the girls playing rounders and enjoying themselves.
“Blow ’roos and dogs!” he mumbled, and rising again, leisurely slouched into the forbidden ground, and joining the girls, took the ball and started bowling to them.
“Here hold on a bit!” Tom Dyer, who was master of the hounds, yelled in protest to the ’roos, “we’ve lost a dawg!”
They all paused and gazed about in quest of the missing canine, and when they located him, shouted lusty commands to Joe “to come outer that”.
Joe grinned, and waving his hand to them, went on bowling to the girls.
Then in a spirit of devilry, the dogs and ’roos made trumpets of their hands, and in one loud voice, shouted in the direction of the master’s residence that “Shuttlewood is over playing amongst th’ gir-rls”.
Joe waved cheerfully to them again. But Susannah Drygrass, who approved of Joe’s presence there, called to them in sneering tones to “shut their big mouths!”
Ignoring Susannah, the “dogs” and “ ’roos” shouted again, “Shuttlewood is over playing amongst th’ gir-rls”.
The echo had scarcely died away when Mr. Wimblepip, adjusting his helmet, issued from the house, and came striding towards the playground.
“By crimes! Here he comes! Look out!” and the “dogs” and the “’roos” made off, laughing joyously.
“Run, y’ tittle-tattles—y’ mean lot o’ tell-tales!” Susannah Drygrass shrieked after them on Joe’s behalf.
But the valiant “dogs” and “ ’roos” on reaching a patch of long grass from whence they could see and hear anything that might take place, dropped down amongst it and concealed themselves. And all the girls, excepting Susannah, anticipating trouble, deserted Joe and fled to the farthest corner of the ground and started swinging on the wire fence. Susannah struck a defiant attitude, and standing before Joe, resolutely awaited the worst.
Next moment Mr. Wimblepip approached the pair.
“Listen!” the “dogs” hissed though the grass at the “ ’roos”; “keep quiet!”
“If he hits Joe,” Tom Dyer mumbled prophetically, “there’ll be a bloomin’ fight!”
“An’ will you be in it, Tom?” Splinter whispered earnestly.
“Up to me neck!” Tom answered back.
“Cripes! I hope he hits Joe!” and Splinter raised his head to get a better view.
But the master displayed no aggressive signs whatever. He spoke kindly and advisedly to Joe, and when he had said all he wished to say, the latter nodded in agreement, and smiling down at his toes as he mooched along, re-crossed the “borderline” and returned to his own part of the ground. Susannah turned, too, and ran off in pursuit of her companions; while Mr. Wimblepip himself strolled back to finish his lunch.
A little later, school went in again. For awhile all went smoothly. As the hand of the clock pointed to three, Joe and Susannah, after being warned several times for talking, suddenly put down their books, and walking on to the verandah, returned to the room with their hats on their heads and broad smiles on their faces. No roomful of youngsters ever looked more astonished! Nor any schoolmaster, either.
“What does this mean?” Mr. Wimblepip, when he got over the first of the shock, demanded.
“Oh, nothin’ much—only—”, and Joe paused to grin and chuckle shyly at Susannah. Susannah turned partially away, and hanging her head and patting the floor with her foot, smiled from beneath her home-made bonnet at the rows of gaping faces in the desks.
“Only what?” indignantly from the master.
“Well—only—y’ see—”, and catching the eyes of Tom Dyer and Andy Drygrass, Joe broke into a chuckle again.
“I insist on an explanation Shuttlewood!” roared Mr. Wimblepip.
Great alarm! All the school rose to their feet, and some of the girls commenced blubbering.
“Well, th’ short an’ long of it is—”, Joe cast another cheerful side-glance at Susannah; “we finish up here to-day— we’re cut out—”
“Cut out?” and Mr. Wimblepip tugged at the collar of his coat with one hand and scratched his head with the other.
“Yes, we’ve gradeated,” Joe grinned, “an’ are goin’ to a uneversity.”
Loud laughter from Tom Dyer and Andy Drygrass. “Silence!” and the master turned sharply upon them.
Then facing Joe and Susannah again.
“A university! I don’t understand you!”
“One of our own”, Joe responded.
Susannah hung her head again and giggled.
“Well me an’ Susannah is goin’ to get MARRIED!” and Joe made the grand announcement with a boisterous guffaw.
Mr. Wimblepip’s eyes and mouth flew wide open, and his head went right back. For a few moments he was speechless— all his breath seemed to leave him.
“It seems to give y’ a surprise, Mr. Wimblepip?” Susannah, looking up at him with a beaming face, put in; “but it’s quite true—we are!”
Then suddenly his demeanour changed. The blood mounted quickly to his face. Instead of scholars of his school he saw them now as man and woman. Taking both their hands in his, he shook them warmly and kindly, and said:
“Good luck, and may you both do well.”
Turning to the rows of staring faces, Joe and Susannah gave them all a parting smile, and a wave of the hand, and went out. Following them to the door the big human-hearted master stood and watched them descend the steps—watched them pass out of the gate—watched them enter the wide, grassy lane where, hand in hand, step by step, they started slowly, happily, aimlessly along. Above them the sky was bright and blue and clear; beneath their feet carpets of wild daisies and immortelles doffed their gay little heads; among the trees the birds sang merrily, and the soft winds sighed through the leaves like a breath of many ages past and gone.
“Simple, innocent souls!” he reflected, “knowing nothing of the dark, troubled road that’s before you—nothing!”
He started, and turned quickly round.
The scholars had formed themselves into a circle on the floor, and led by Araluen, suddenly lifted their voices and sang:
“Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne?”
Sound travels fast. The ring of those voices fell on the ears of Joe and Susannah. They paused and turning their faces to the school again, listened. When the words “We twa hae run about the braes, and pou’d the gowan fine”, were reached, they both stopped and each plucking a wild flower, waved in response. And when the last note of the old refrain was sung, and the voices died away, they waved and waved again; then went on—on—but to what end in Life’s mystery, whether weal or woe, sunshine or shadow, richer or poorer, better or worse, only the God above could reveal.
Taking a leaf from the book of an old hand who had succeeded on the Creek, Titt Duff resolved to do the same or die. He started out, and slaved and “bullocked” from daylight till dark; sacrificed every pleasure, every moment of leisure to free the homestead from its financial encumbrance, and make it his own. He developed a restless, untiring energy; work became his life, and life held nothing for him but work. No one in the district toiled so hard as he—no one ever did— unless it was those who had worked themselves to death, and died in their tracks. If Titt was lean and bendy when first he went on the land, he was much leaner and more bent now. There was little left of him but courage and sinew, his hands were hard and knotted, his face weather-beaten and burnt almost black with the fierce winds and heat of summer.
“Slogging the way he does is only madness”, Bill Sawpitt, who for eighteen months worked for Titt on wages, used to say. “I never knew him to finish his breakfast the whole time I was with him. Havin’ breakfast or dinner or anything like that was waste of time to him! He’d gulp down a cup of tea and a mouthful of bread and meat and rush off to work before the rest of us had hardly stirred our tea! And at night, after he’d had supper, he wouldn’t sit down and have a smoke or a yarn like anyone else, not him! He’d grab a hurricane lamp, and rush out to the barn or some place, to patch wheat sacks or mend harness, or make new swingletrees, or kill a sheep and hang it ready for th’ mornin’. And to be pullin’ corn with him, and cartin’ it in—” Bill would sigh—“was deadly! He’d kill y’ in a couple o’ days if y’ tried to keep up with him! You’d think it was all a matter of life an’ death to him, and when he saw you gettin’ behind a bit, blowed if he would want to do your share as well as his own. No good to me!” Bill would conclude; “life’s too short an’ uncertain for that sort o’ thing! And Titt Duff one of these fine days’ll drop dead, an’ that’ll be the end of him!”
And so several years passed—years that had started full of hope and promise of plenty—years that had seen the few heifers increase to a dairy herd of five and thirty good and profitable cows, and the eight or ten acres of cultivation expand to a hundred—years through which Titt, in the mistaken impulses that were always bubbling within him, made prophecies that never came to pass—years that changed, that led to bad seasons, and worse seasons, ending in drought, disappointment, and disaster, leaving the Duffs to face a promissory note for £200, a land tax assessment, the local government tax, a marsupial tax, and a large bill at the local store!
“My God!” Titt groaned, when the impending disaster fairly revealed itself; “what is to be done?”
Yes! What was to be done? That was the question. How many poor broken hearts upon the land, before and since, have asked themselves the same hopeless, unanswerable question? And echo ever answered mockingly back: “What is to be done?”
Titt’s total liabilities amounted to nearly £300. Another year of drought and the debt would easily double itself. Should sufficient rain come by that time, however, another six months at least must elapse before there would be any return from the farm. Even if it rained ever so hard, the crop might be a failure, and the cows all be dry for a period, and the dairy deserted. Or the storekeeper might press for payment of his account, and refuse further credit! This chain of gloomy probabilities careered in procession through Titt’s bewildered brain till they appeared realities, and drove him to the verge of despair. His nights became long and sleepless. He went off his meals. Depressed by a sense of remorse and distraction, he walked aimlessly about the farm to compose his spirits. Day after day he turned his eyes from the cloudless, waterless sky to the moaning, starving animals around. The straw-stacks that he had long held as a “stand-by” had disappeared. The cheapest fodder in the market was £14 a ton, and he hadn’t a shilling left to his name! Even if he had hundreds of pounds, there were now forty head of stock to feed, and forty head would eat a ton a day, and a ton a day would absorb £98 a week! “My God!” Titt moaned again. “My God!”
“Don’t let it worry you!” Mrs. Duff, woman-like, pleaded. “Lots of people have been in the same position—in a worse position, perhaps, than we are, and came through all right in the end.”
“No one could be in a much worse position than we are in, Kit”, Titt groaned. “If they were, I’m sure they never got out of it—never! Never—”
“Faith is everything”, she assured him. “Put your trust in Providence, and you’ll yet lift up your eyes and look on the fields, and see them white all ready for the harvest.”
“I hope so,” Titt groaned. “I hope so!”
But when discussing the prospects with Old Fred and the others, Mrs. Duff herself was inclined to lose heart and become despondent. She came, however, from a pioneer stock, whose spirit was never broken, and with an effort she always pulled herself together and smiled in the face of adversity.
Another month passed, and the drought still raged. Some of the stock now were lying about the farmyard unable to rise; others raised in “slings” were hanging between earth and heaven, while those that were still able to stagger about were almost demented.
Realising that his bit of capital, his hard toil, and everything were now lost, Titt was filled with fresh remorse and useless regrets for having left the city and dragged his family on to the wretched land. Remorse and dread became his constant companions.
Prickly pear was the only available food to feed the starving stock with. The whole family took a hand in cutting the wretched plant, and roasting it at open fires to destroy the prickles. The animals ate it eagerly, contracted disorders of the bowels, grew thinner and thinner every day, and then started dying, one by one, till the farmyard was a hospital, a morgue, and cemetery all in one. It had to be a cemetery because there was no horse power left to haul the corpses away. And when Titt and Old Fred and Splinter, the eldest son, had dug a dozen graves or so, and rolled the bodies in and covered them with earth, and in some cases, having misjudged the depth, left the four hoofs protruding and pointing skyward, a grim, humorous-looking cemetery it was! Poor old Diamond, Titt’s favourite draught mare, a huge Clydesdale, died right across the gateway, and there she had to be interred. And so high was the mound when she was covered in that for years after when anyone was driving through the gate, their trap, or car, or whatever it was, would go up and down like a switch-back railway. And children who had learned the stories of that drought would call in reverent warning to whomever chanced to be driving, to “go slowly over poor old Diamond!”
No wonder Titt couldn’t sleep at night. Often he would lie down without undressing, and rising again at midnight would go to the door and through the pale, ghostly moonlight, gaze on the ghastly scene in all its desolate calm. Returning to his bed of wretchedness, he would lie awake in burning restlessness, while the groans of the starving animals rang in his ears till daybreak.
Fall of evening. Everything calm, peaceful. The broad, shadowy plain-lands, black and bare, lay lifeless, and all the world seemed wrapped in the mysteries of life and death.
Titt Duff, sitting on the verandah, his head in his hands, brooding, heard the sound of a horse’s hoofs, and looked up slowly.
Ned Scantleton rode into the yard, dismounted, and fastened his horse to the palings.
“That you, Duff?” he called.
Titt descended the steps without answering, and went to the garden gate.
Scantleton, with a stockwhip hanging loosely over his shoulder, approached from the other side. Both leaned on the top bar and eyed each other in the growing darkness.
“You remember me, I suppose?” the former said.
Titt did.
“You called one day when passing with cattle,” he said, “but you didn’t have a cabbage-tree hat then.”
“You’ve been having a bad time here?” And the visitor, through the gloom, glanced over his shoulder at the “hospital and cemetery”.
“Ah, well! It can’t be helped”, and Titt struggled with a lump that came into his throat.
“You’re not the only one—if that’s any satisfaction.” And Scantleton knocked the ashes from his pipe on the gate.
Titt struggled again with the feeling in his throat, then said: “We’ll be having some tea in a minute or two; you better come in.”
But Scantleton was in a hurry. He was always in a hurry at that hour of the evening.
“I’m making over for over the Range,” he added (“over the Range”, to people of the plains and tablelands was a world away), “and just dropped in on my way to put a little proposition to you.”
“Yes?” Titt said, wonderingly.
“Would you like to make a couple of hundred quid— perhaps a thousand?”
Titt clutched the gate till it rattled, and strained his eyes in the gloom to see if the other’s face was serious.
“Anyway, a couple of hundred for a dead certainty”, and Scantleton started filling his pipe from a pouch.
Titt’s heart beat violently. Two hundred pounds just then would save him from financial disaster, would lift the load of worry from his mind, and brighten his heart and home again.
“H-how?” he stammered.
“Simply by holding some bullocks here for me for a day or two till the Western Butchering Company’s buyer calls, and selling them to him in your name!”
“In my name?” Titt echoed, trembling with excitement, and the hope that had suddenly sprung to his breast.
“It’s just this way.” And Scantleton proceeded calmly to explain that running on one of the creeks over the Range amongst scrub and prickly pear he had 150 head of fat bullocks—bullocks he had bought when calves four years ago for half-a-crown a head.
“By cripes!” Titt interrupted, “you’re a lucky dog!”
“And fats being so scarce now, as you know,” Scantleton went on, “they’re worth anything from £15 to £20 a nob.”
“Ghost!” Titt gushed. “I’d have sold them long ago if they had been mine!”
“No doubt,” the other agreed, “but here’s the difficulty I’m in; I’m not a land-holder, and having got into a bit of trouble about three years ago, through a misunderstanding over a cow and calf that I really had nothing at all to do with, I don’t like to sell these bullocks in my own name now. Some of these chaps who are always trying to be very smart, might try to make out that I didn’t own them, and put me to all sorts of trouble; and I’m a chap who would sooner do anything or give all I got, rather than be put to the bother of going to law or seeing Government officials and all that sort of thing.”
“I see”, Titt said eagerly.
“So if you care to take the bullocks and sell them in your name, and you being a land-holder, there’d be no questions asked, you can keep half of what they fetch, and give me the rest!”
“I’ll do that quick enough,” Titt gasped, “and if anyone asks any questions—well, I bought them, that’s all.”
“Quite so, but not from me!”
“Oh, no,” Titt readily agreed, “anyone but you.”
“Then, if you wake up one morning next week,” Scantleton concluded, “and find fifty head of bullocks in your paddock, for a start, you’ll know what to do.”
“Leave that to me”, and feeling in the dark for the other’s hand, Titt shook it warmly.
But in his excitement, Titt never suspected that those bullocks in which he saw his salvation, and more than salvation, were stolen by Scantleton and a gang of confederates from a border station hundreds of miles away, and skilfully travelled by night to Smuggling Gorge, over the Range. And if he had suspected, we wonder if, under the circumstances, he would have had the moral strength to resist and turn the matter down. Ah, well! who hasn’t at some time or other realised that needs must when the devil drives!
So Scantleton mounted his horse again, and rode silently away into the night and over the Range—over the Range, a world of its own—a world of solitude, of great gloomy scrubs, of deep dark mountain gorges, of wild dogs, wild cattle, and saddle-marked horses—a world of mystery, of robbery and romance.
That evening at tea the family wondered what had come over Titt. His worried look, his restless, depressed spirits had left him. He came to the table with a brisk, confident step, and a broad smile, and was consumed in cheerfulness.
“What’s up?” Splinter grinned, “was it goin’ to rain when y’ came in, father?”
“It’s goin’ to rain sovereigns this time, lad,” he smiled, “and I don’t care now what happens—if every bloomin’ cow and hen an’ dawg on the place croaks before mornin’—or if all th’ fences get burnt as well. That’s how I feel.”
“My word,” Mrs. Duff smiled, “something good must have happened all at once.”
“Something good just did happen, Kit”, and Titt started rubbing his hands together, and grinning with increased cheerfulness.
“Has someone left y’ a fortune?” Old Fred inquired.
“Remembered you in their will, father?” from Araluen.
“Not exactly,” Titt smiled, “but Scantleton has just put me on to a great wicket—on to a little goldmine, an’ saved th’ situation.”
Old Fred, in the act of conveying a spoonful of kangaroo-tail soup to his mouth, suddenly paused, spilled the soup, and stared first at Titt, then at Mrs. Duff.
“Scantleton?” the latter repeated thoughtfully.
“Ned Scantleton?” Old Fred echoed, dropping the spoon in his plate with a rattle.
“Do y’ know him?” Titt replied. “I’ve just been having a long yarn to him at the gate.”
“Everyone knows him! An’ I’d steer clear of him if I was you, Boss!” And lowering his head, Old Fred went on with his meal in grave silence.
“If it’s the Scantleton they used to talk about at Ruddville years ago,” Mrs. Duff reflected, “he was a notorious character!”
“Notorious or not notorious,” Titt laughed, “he’s doin’ me a good turn, for him and me are going into a cattle deal together that’ll see me out of me trouble in no time.”
“That’ll see y ’in trouble in no time!” and rising abruptly, Old Fred left the table and went off to his room on the verandah.
Next morning while Ttit was roasting pear for the few surviving head of cows and whistling merrily as a butcher bird in summer, Mrs. Duff, her heart full of worry and eyes wet with tears, sought Old Fred in the garden and asked him “to tell her truly what he really thought about this Scantleton affair”.
“Just this, Kittie,” and Old Fred looked her solemnly in the face, “Ned Scantleton was always the ringleader of cattle-stealers, and if the Boss has any dealin’s with that gentlemun he’ll land him where he’s landed many another, an’ where he ought to have been himself twinty year ago—in gaol!”
“You must come and tell that to Titt himself, Old Fred”, Mrs. Duff implored. “He won’t listen to me; he thinks I’m too particular, and expect people to be angels.”
“Don’t worry about it, Kittie,” he responded, “I’ll tell him all I know about Scantleton directly—I’ll tell him.”
And a few mornings later, while Titt was standing admiring fifty bullocks that he found locked carefully in the yard, Old Fred approached and, disregarding the sight of the surging animals, told him all he knew of the career of Scantleton.
“That might be,” Titt mumbled sullenly, “he might have done worse things, perhaps, than the Marsdens or Starlight in ‘Robbery Under Arms’, but it don’t prove there’s anything wrong about these bullocks does it?”
“Them bullocks”, and Old Fred, with his long bony finger, pointed dramatically through the rails at them—“are stolen! Ned Scantleton wouldn’t have anything to do with them if they weren’t! And you won’t if you don’t want to get five years in gaol!”
“And then—what?” Titt groaned. “I’ll be without a bean! Without an animal left on the farm! Smashed! Broke! Insolvent! A beggar!”
“No, you needn’t be anything of th’ sort, Boss”, Old Fred answered kindly. “I’m not a pauper, altogether. I’ve always managed to save a little one way an’ another (taking a bank book from inside his shirt), and if £300 will put you on your feet, it’s here for you.”
Titt started, and stared. Then his head hung down; his chin rested on his bosom; big tears swam into his eyes, his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth, and he could say nothing.
Taking his arm, Old Fred led him back to the house, which they both entered in silence.
A little later Splinter and Araluen ran out and threw open the gate of the stock-yard. Then the fifty head of bullocks bounded through, and, with Bluey hard at their heels, stampeded down the main road, and were never heard of again.
The drought was over. Fields and pastures looked green and grand again. The creek was flowing fast and full. People who had struggled and lost and suffered were “bucking up” and cheerfully facing the odds once more—hope became the comfort of their adversity, and, with all her treacherous moods and changes, the world seemed a good old world, after all.
Titt, having squared most of his accounts, and replaced some of the dead stock with live ones from the loan Old Fred advanced him, started out to make up lost ground. A crop in and well above ground, he decided to subdivide the “big paddock”, and go in heavily for lucerne. The soil was low and silty, and rich in the big paddock, with water beneath at shallow depth for the lucerne to dip its roots into. To plant it in any other quality of land, Titt had learned, was only throwing labour and money away. So, along with Old Fred, he began by felling an aged ironbark tree that had been left standing near the cowyard, to convert it into fencing posts. It wasn’t an ideal splitting tree—it was windy and a bit hollow. With the cross-cut they sawed the butt into two 6ft. lengths. Stripping the bark from one of them, they took the maul and wedges, and commenced to burst it in halves. It was tough work. Titt swung the maul while Old Fred, looking on sympathetically, did the grunting. At last the log yielded slightly to the touch of the entering wedge, and began crack-crack-cracking.
“Now, she’s going!” Old Fred announced jubilantly. “Give her another!”
Titt gave it another thump, and Old Fred grunted his loudest. Then Titt took a larger wedge, and, inserting the point of it in the crack that had begun to traverse the face of the log, spat on his hands, opened his shoulders, swung the maul again, and gave the wedge a mighty bump. It sank half-way in; the log opened with a rip and a tear, leaving the crack gaping an inch or so wide and extending halfway along the log.
“It takes you, Boss!” Old Fred complimented.
“My oath!” Titt grinned.
Just then Charlie, the bone collector, with his three horses and dray, and shouting and roaring just for the love of making a noise, came rattling in through the gate.
Titt looked up and stared. Old Fred turned and stared, too.
“What’s he after?” the latter proposed.
“What’s he always after?” Titt reckoned, “a drink of water —or beer, if there was any about!”
“Whoa!” Charlie roared, steadying the horses beside the head of the fallen tree, and jumping from the dray. “What are y’ doin’ on neow, cootin’ dahn a tree, eh? Hoh! Hoh! Hoh!” And he beamed a quaint smile first on Titt, then on Old Fred.
“Trying to knock up some fencing posts”, Titt answered. “What do y’ think you’re after?”
“I’m lookin’ for boanes—what did y’ do wi’ all your dead cows, eh? Hoh! Hoh! Hoh!” And Charlie sat down leisurely on the log inside the wedge.
“Burned them!” Titt said sulkily.
“There’s one of them, under there, alongside of y’ ”, Old Fred added, pointing to the grave of Tulip, and taking up the empty billy-can, he strode across to the house to replenish it.
“So-h? Hoh! Hoh! Hoh!” from Charlie.
“It was no laughing matter”, Titt grunted.
“Hoh! Hoh! Hoh!” Charlie rumbled on. “We heard at th’ township how y’ had a cemeteery out here. But what abaht lettin’ I dig ’em all oop, an’ take on of ’em all away—eh?”
“Let them rip where they are!” Titt said restlessly. He always fidgetted when reminded about the drought—and sitting down on the log faced the opposite way to Charlie, and frowned.
Splinter, crying out, “The gully’s runnin’!” came along and grinned familiarly to the bone collector, then, idly lifting the maul which his parent had thrown down, started thumping the earth with it.
“It wouldn’t take I long to dig ’em all oop”, Charlie persisted. “An’ I’d fill the hoales all in agen for y’?”
“No!” Titt snapped. “Let th’ poor beggars rest. They’re doing no one any harm, and I’ve seen enough of them.”
“Will y’ then if I pays y’ somethin’ for ’em?” and leaning back over the log, and stretching out his right leg, Charlie dipped a hand into his pocket, and produced a match to light his pipe with.
“How much would y’ pay?” quickly from Titt.
“Oh—well—”, and the other lit his pipe and started spitting and pondering.
Tired of thumping the earth, Splinter brought the maul down heavily on the end of the log. Mother of Miracles! That wedge shot out like a cork from a bottle, and the split closed with a snap on the fleshy parts of Charlie and Titt, and like the jaws of a mighty steel trap, held them captives! Oh, the howls and roars of them! Their yells of pain and profanity were appalling! Their faces writhed in agony. The pipe fell from Charlie’s mouth; tears gushed from both their eyes and rushed down their cheeks; both clenched their fists and shook them at Splinter, but neither made any attempt to break loose. They couldn’t. And for the life of him, Splinter, for the moment, couldn’t conceive the cause of their sudden distress. He stood dumb, dazed, alarmed, staring wild-eyed, and trembling like some newly-captured animal of the bush.
Louder and louder the victims bellowed and swore, until Charlie’s horses, taking fright, bolted with the dray. Glad of any excuse to make off, Splinter turned and pursued the runaway animals with a speed and determination next to marvellous.
Attracted by the roaring and bellowing of Charlie and Titt, Old Fred, closely followed by Mrs. Duff and Araluen, hurried from the house.
“What’s up?” Old Fred cried breathlessly. But a glance at their faces and at the closed split in the log conveyed everything to him in a flash.
“They’re caught in the log!” Araluen squealed, “caught in it!”
“Oh, goodness!” Mrs. Duff gasped.
“I see they are!” and lifting the maul, Old Fred drove the wedge into the log again. The split opened instantly and Charlie and Titt rose cautiously to their feet, pulled more ugly faces, and bending backwards and forwards, hobbled about, moaning and groaning.
“That d—d young scoun’rel of a boy did it!” Charlie yelled. “He wants killin’, he do!”
Then Old Fred and Mrs. Duff and Araluen broke into mirth.
“If it’d got a grip of any of you, you wouldn’t be so funny!” And Titt, walking wide and cautiously, directed his steps towards the house.
Splinter, in charge of Charlie’s horses and dray, returned grinning triumphantly. He seemed to anticipate a reward.
“I caught them!” he called; “but what was th’ matter with yous two?”
When he came a little nearer, though, and saw the scalding tears and the look of murder in Charlie’s eye, and heard his teeth grinding, he threw the reins to him and fled.
It was a week before Titt could move about with confidence again; and a year passed before Charlie paid another visit to Duff’s—then it was in the night—the night they heard a great commotion in the fowl-house, and next morning missed two of the fattest roosters.
Whatever obstacles and adversities the Duffs had encountered during the year just passed, the growth of the family had in no way been retarded. There were six of them now—“six little Australians”—and both Araluen and Splinter were as tall as their parents.
Never on Emu Creek was a girl so fair and favoured as Araluen. She grew up a vision of the bush-land. Hers was not a paint and powder and fine feathers over Nature, for in homemade gowns and the sun’s complexion, Araluen was good to look upon. Kindly, sensible, human-hearted, she was, too, and beloved by everyone around.
Ever rounding up cows and horses—galloping here, there, and everywhere, she easily became a good horsewoman. The “egg money” she earned by caring for fowls enabled her to take music-lessons once a week, from Mrs. Brophy, at the township. Thursday was her day for lessons, and it was remarkable how soon Thursday became the day when every single man on the creek and every beardless youth over the age of 16 had business at the township! And somehow just when Araluen’s lessons would be over, and she was ready to return to “Coondalloo”, the name Titt gave to the holding, and the aboriginal word for “emu”, they would all be prepared to leave the township, too! And no matter in what direction their respective homes lay or how far off, the road that led to “Coondalloo” led to theirs as well! And bachelors residing in the township fell into the habit of going for a ride on Thursdays about 5 p.m., and would always take the road that led past “Coondalloo”. The bachelors of the township, though, never left when Araluen was leaving—they always waited till she was well on the road, then “set sail”, and caught up to her. And when she would bow to them, they would feign surprise at seeing her, and tell her they “thought she had gone home long ago”. Of course, Araluen always knew they were lying— any intelligent girl would—but bachelors, out of their vanity, always build a fool’s paradise around themselves where attractive girls are concerned.
One evening Johnny Crosscut and Jimmie Shuttlewood (Joe’s brother), and Danny Jones were ready to leave the township for their homesteads when Araluen came out of Brophy’s to mount her horse. Johnny and Jimmie and Danny, aged 18, 19, and 20 respectively, were all long, lean, shy, silent, beardless young men.
With bridle reins on their arms, they stood around “Beeswing”, a mare Old Fred had given Araluen on her birthday, with a nervous desire to lift her into the saddle, an act of gallantry that every country youth feels he must achieve to earn the favour of a nice girl. Greeting them by their Christian names, Araluen threw the reins over the mare’s neck and proceeded to tighten the girths. Johnnie’s and Jimmie’s and Danny’s hearts beat fast; their faces turned crimson; their big, brown hands closed and opened, yet they never shifted an inch; they stood there as if spiked to the earth.
“My word”—Mrs. Brophy called cheerfully from her verandah—“it’s well to be you, Araluen, with three fine looking young men dancing attendance on you.”
Mrs. Brophy, besides a musical talent, possessed a keen sense of humour. Araluen, blushing like a rose, dallied with the girths to hide her blushing face.
Johnnie Crosscutt, remembering he had purchased his first pipe at the store, took it from his pocket and bravely put it in his mouth. Jimmy and Danny, who had made similar purchases, followed his example and in turn all three grinned and began feeling their pockets for tobacco and matches.
From the opposite side of the street—a two-chain wide thoroughfare, gravelled with big stones and good intentions, and with a network of narrow hideous gutters running through the centre of it—the loud masculine voice of big Mrs. Frawley, the “popular” proprietress of the Horse and Collar Hotel, rang out from the bar verandah.
“Araluen!” she cried, “’tis a pity ye’re not a quadruped, for then ye could give each of them bhois a fut to lift ye on be.”
Araluen looked across the mare’s neck in the direction of the Horse and Collar, and smiled and blushed more.
Mrs. Brophy hung over her verandah rails and laughed joyously.
Filled with an embarrassment that even the thick smokescreens they were now raising from their pipes couldn’t conceal the three lanky timid loons grinned awkwardly at each other.
Just then the burly dusky form of the bone collector appeared. He was blundering along the “footpath”, where herbage and noxious weeds grew luxuriantly, on his way to the store.
“Here’s Charlie coming, Araluen,” Mrs. Brophy laughed again, “don’t be in a hurry; he’ll lift you on.”
Glancing over her shoulder as she gathered the reins together and placed a hand on the saddle. Araluen caught a glimpse of the familiar figure, unwashed, uncombed, unbarbered and pausing, leaned against the mare and laughed to herself.
“Charlie!” called Mrs. Frawley. The bone collector stopped and stared across at her.
“Hello, old woman!” he yelled back. “What be wrong wi’ you? Gotten a long beer for I over theree, eh? Have you? You owe me one, don’t you, eh, for cuttin’ y’ wood o’ Sunday?”
“Charlie!” she repeated, as though he had never spoken, “give Araluen a leg up on to her horse!”
“Eh?” and looking ahead, Charlie saw Araluen standing beside the mare and the three shy loons looking uselessly at her. “What! can’t y’ get on, girl?” And he strode straight to her. “Don’t some o’ these young coves know how to lift a lady on?”
“That’s right, Charlie”, Mrs. Brophy encouraged. “Show them how to do it.”
“My word, ’n I will. Hoh! Hoh! Hoh!” he laughed. “Giv us your leg?”
With a merry giggle Araluen placed her foot in the palm of his hand, and into the saddle he hoisted her without an effort.
“Thank you, Charlie”, she laughed. Then shaking her riding whip, first at Mrs. Brophy, then at Mrs. Frawley, touched the mare and cantered away.
Charlie winked proudly at Johnny and Jimmy and Danny, and went his way to the store.
“Well, you are three beautiful ladies’ ‘men’!” Mrs. Brophy jibed. “Fancy letting old Charlie beat you! I thought you had more go in you than that!”
“I was goin’ to lift her on,” Johnny mumbled, in defence, “but these two seemed anxious—an’—so—I—”
“Gerrout!” Jimmy interrupted, “only for yous two pokin’ your nose in, I would ’a done it!”
“Gerrout yourself!” Danny protested, sulkily. “Didn’t I bring her mare round for her when yous two goats came messin’ about, like y’ alez do!”
“Haven’t any of them got th’ courage to see her home?” Mrs. Frawley’s voice rang out again.
Mrs. Brophy didn’t think they had.
“By cripes, I have, anyway!” and springing on to his clumsy looking half-draught Johnny Crosscutt blundered over the stones and ruts in determined pursuit of Araluen.
“Blowed if I’m goin’ to be left behind!” and Jimmy vaulted on to his “three-legged” piebald and pursued Johnny.
“Well, I ain’t goin’ to be out of it!” and, getting astride his ancient “bob-tail” creamy Danny rattled over the stones at great pace after Jimmy.
“Did ever y’ seen such chumps!” and, shaking her head across at Mrs. Brophy, Mrs. Frawley turned to answer a bar call.
“Never!” and Mrs. Brophy went inside, chuckling.
One after the other, those loons overtook Araluen. Johnny, who was first, lay right back in the saddle, and, hanging to the reins, made an imposing display of pulling in his hairy, wooden-headed half-draught beside her.
“Hard to hold, is he, Johnny?” Araluen asked, steadying her mare to a brisk walk.
“It’s the corn he’s got in him”, Johnny explained.
“I’m feedin’ him twice a day now”, and leaning forward on the saddle he proudly patted the brute on what little neck it possessed.
“Y’ can’t beat corn for puttin’ life into them”, he added, after a pause.
Then Jimmy, standing in the stirrups, came up. He jerked and “propped” his piebald into position on Araluen’s left, and grinned blandly when she greeted him with a smile.
“You wasn’t long before y’ followed me!” Johnny on the right of Araluen, grunted over her mare’s neck accusingly at Jimmy.
“Wasn’t follerin’ you!” Jimmy snivelled. “What would I want to foller you for?”
Before he could answer Johnny’s “corn-fed” mount stumbled badly, and went down on its knees and nose.
Araluen thought the brute was right over and got a start.
“The third time to-day he’s said his prayers with me!” Johnny grunted, squaring himself in the saddle, as the animal recovered. “Th’ third time, y’ keow!” Then he jerked the offender’s mouth hard with the reins, dug his heels into its ribs: again called it a “keow”, and, suddenly hauling it to the “left about turn”, nearly shoved Araluen out of her saddle with the half-draught’s heavy slobbery snout.
In the mix-up that followed, Danny came up full tilt, and commandeered Johnny’s place beside Araluen.
“Caught up to y’”, he said, grinning at her, happily.
“Everyone catches up to me, Danny; I must be a slowcoach”, Araluen said.
Johnny, having finished chastising the half-draught, drew up on the outside of Danny, and gave him a sly dig in the ribs.
Danny turned and frowned indignantly upon him for daring to interrupt his love-making.
“That was my place you teook”, Johnny, springing lightly to the jogging of the half-draught, hissed into the other’s ear.
Danny turned from him with contempt, and grinning lusciously at Araluen, inquired, “was it as hard to learn th’ pianer as th’ concertina?”
The query suddenly sharpened Araluen’s memory.
“Oh!” she cried bringing the mare to a stand-still. “I left my music-roll at Mrs. Brophy’s!”
“Eh!” Jimmy gasped.
“What?” from Johnny.
“Did y’? I’ll get it”, and wheeling round, Danny put heels to the bob-tail cream again, and off back he went for the roll.
“So’ll I”, and putting the piebald under the whip once more, away went Jimmy hot on the heels of Danny.
“Yer music, was it?” Johnny, taking a short hold of his steed’s head, paused to interrogate.
“I forgot it!” Araluen added. “How silly of me!”
“I’ll soon have it for y’”, and belabouring the half-draught, Johnny set off midst a cloud of dust and gravel and dead leaves.
In quick succession they met Sam Jackson cantering along, and shouted haughtily to him, “Clear th’ road, or get run over!”
Sam smiled, and clearing the road, kept cantering till he overtook Araluen.
“Mrs. Brophy asked me to give this to you”, he said, handing her the music-roll.
With a look of surprise, Araluen thanked him.
The Jacksons were the latest arrivals on Emu Creek, and it was the first time Araluen and Sam had met.
“Goodness!” she added, with concern, “and those poor boys have gone all the way back for it!”
Sam said he met them: was sorry he didn’t know it was her music they were going for, or he would have stopped them, and turned them back.
Then he and Araluen rode steadily along together, and made friends with each other.
Meanwhile, Johnny and Jimmy and Danny reined in excitedly at Brophy’s, and throwing themselves from their saddles as though competing in a polo gymkkana, rushed to open the garden gate, just as the lady herself, attracted by the rattling of hoofs, appeared again.
“Araluen forgot her music, Mrs. Brophy”, the three of them shouted in one voice.
“And I got to get it for her”, Johnny added quickly.
“No, I have!” from Jimmy.
“It’s me that has!” from Danny.
Mrs. Bophy laughed and said she gave it to Sam Jackson to give to Araluen, and asked if they hadn’t met him along the road?
All three looked surprised and disappointed.
“That bloke!” Johnny sneered.
“Him!” Jimmy said.
“I nearly run over him. Wish I had!” Danny lamented, sulkily.
A loud peal of mirth came from Mrs. Brophy.
Then, like movie actors, the three turned, and remounting their horses, galloped back again.
When they overtook Araluen Sam was riding close beside her, talking and laughing, and carrying the music roll. Araluen sympathised with them; told them Mr. Jackson had brought the music along, and thought it was a pity they hadn’t noticed it with him.
None of them said anything. But all three eyed Sam sullenly, and cast envious glances at the music roll in his hand.
Then Araluen introduced them to Sam, and Sam to them. Sam nodded and said he was pleased to meet them but neither Johnny, Jimmy, or Danny took any notice of Sam. Somehow, their steeds seemed to demand all their attention at that particular moment.
“You clumsy keow! Mind where you are walkin’!” and Johnny spitefully rattled both his heels against the halfdraught’s ribs.
“Hold yer bloomin’ head up, can’t y’!” Jimmy said to the piebald; while Danny unexpectedly jerked the creamy’s mouth, and grunted, “I’ll make yer walk, yer mule!”
Approaching the school where the road leading to his homestead branched off, Sam returned the music-roll to Araluen, said “Good-bye”, nodded to the others, and raising his hat went his way alone.
“He’s a perlite bloke!” Johnny grinned.
“My oath!” Jimmy sneered.
“Good-bye”, Danny, mimicking Sam, echoed, and raising his slouch hat to the horse under him.
All three guffawed.
Araluen smiled amusedly, and suggested a canter.
Away they all scrambled and kept cantering till Duff’s gate was reached. There Araluen said “Good-night, boys”.
“So-long, Araluen,” Johnny and Jimmy and Danny answered cheerfully, “so-long, till another time.”
Then, quickly separating, each took a different track through the bush. Night fell on the Budgee hills. The mellow, milky moon came up; the stars peeped out and winked. Stirred by a sense of triumph the softening influence of song swelled their bosoms and Johnny and Jimmy and Danny, though a mile apart, lifted their voices and shouted:—
“Hoh! fare-thee-wel me only love!
Hoh! fare-thee-wel awhile!
For I will come again me love
Tho’ ’twere ten million mile!”
And the startled ’possums and owls and mopokes in the weird moonlit trees heard the noise and knowing nought of the strange forms in which the love of striplings manifests itself or the floodgates of sentiment through which it lets itself loose, stared wonderingly down and blinked and blinked.
It was while Titt Duff lay between life and death in the hospital. Splinter and Old Fred, to fill in time, were putting in a supply of firewood. They had gone for the last load, and Araluen was the sole occupant of the home. As afternoon wore on, she finished the ironing, and having put everything away, went out into the garden to work among the flowers. The garden was Araluen’s special pride and care. All her spare time was devoted to it, and wherever she went she collected seeds and plants, and cuttings of fresh varieties to set in it. And when long dry spells came she always “got round” Old Fred to cart water to it. And no one, so well as Araluen, could “get round” Old Fred. No other member of the family cared for gardening. Titt, when at home and well, reckoned he wanted all his time, and more, if he had it, for the farm work, without “bothering about a blessed old garden”. Splinter, on the other hand, was always going to “put in a couple of days at it”, as soon as the ploughing or the harrowing, or the mowing, or something or other was finished, but the ploughing and the harrowing, and the mowing, so far as the garden was concerned, was never finished. All of them, though, when a drought was over the land, and fields and the country around were brown and bare, would turn in wonder and admiration to the garden.
“Come out here”, Titt would enthuse to despondent neighbours, dropping in to ease their minds of their worries, and leading them through the house into the garden, would point to the beds of blooming roses and carnation and sunflowers and things, wagging their dainty heads in defiance of the weather. “Look at that! In the middle of all your drought! Ain’t that beautiful? Ain’t it!— eh? Shows what can be done with water, and a bit o’ brains, no matter how dry it is; don’t it, eh?”
And when the neighbours would shake their heads in admiration, and ask Titt if he had done it all himself, he many times wished he could truthfully answer in the affirmative.
“My gad, no!” he’d chuckle; “like yourselves, I’ve hardly time to finish my breakfast as a rule; Araluen’s our gardener. But when she works at it, I’m blowed if I could tell you! I think she must get up in the middle of the night and get at it.” Splinter, too, when dressed up on Sundays, to go out riding (when there was a horse fit to ride), with a meaning grin, would ask Araluen, “how th’ garden was getting on?” Then he’d saunter leisurely into it, have a good look around, and taking French leave, would cut a bunch of the best blooms to take to his “girl”. But Splinter in his indifferent, flippant way, didn’t grant Araluen so much credit for the garden as her father did. Araluen discovered that sin of omission in her brother the first time Splinter brought his “girl” to the home. After kissing Mrs. Duff and Araluen, and taking off her hat, the young lady went into raptures about Splinter’s manly qualities, and his good looks, and the “funny way he had of saying everything”, and said “there was one thing before everything else that she particularly wanted to see, before she returned home—and that was his garden!”
“Oh, my!” and the look of incredulity Mrs. Duff gave Araluen was enough to convict Splinter of perjury and breach of promise. But Araluen was ever a loyal sister.
“And you shall see it, Julia,” she said, “as soon as you have had a cup of tea, but it’s not looking so well now as it was a few weeks ago.”
“Oh-h!” Julia gushed, “the great bunches of beautiful roses! And the carnations! And the sweet peas he brings me! However does he manage to grow them through such dry weather? That’s what none of us can ever understand. Father thinks Splinter must be wonderful—a real genius on the land.” Mrs. Duff assured her that Splinter was going to be a splendid farmer, then deserting Araluen, she hurried to the kitchen, promptly closed the door, and let her mirth go till Bluey started barking through the window at her.
But on this afternoon Araluen’s mind was not running on the garden or what was growing there. She moved moodily around the beds, stooped to pull a casual weed, took up the fork, dug for a moment or two, then stood the implement in the ground, plucked a pink rose, fastened it in the bosom of her dress, and, hardly knowing why, stood scanning a clump of box trees afar off to the eastward in the wide lane that led to the township. It was while gazing at these box trees the previous afternoon at about the same hour that her eyes chanced to rest on a horseman emerging from them—a horseman that turned out, as he came nearer, to be Sam Jackson. Sam, having heard of Titt’s illness, came along to see Splinter and to ask about the invalid. He saw Araluen as well as Splinter, and remained for tea. And now, as Araluen turned her eyes to the road winding out of those box trees, the smile that dimpled her cheeks revealed a secret. No moving object taking shape, she turned away, and taking up the fork again, commenced digging in earnest, picturing in her mind the bed of pansies that would bloom and flourish there in days to be. So absorbed did she become in her work and her flower-dreams, that she failed to hear the garden gate being shoved open, and heavy footsteps coming along the crude gravel path, and dug on, unconscious that Moneygrub Garr, with a grass stem hanging loosely in his teeth and an ugly accusing leer on his scowling face, was standing beside her.
“You seem very busy”, he sneered.
Araluen let fall the fork with fright.
“Oh!” she cried, staggering on to the dug ground, and facing him, “it’s you—Mr. Garr!”
“Yes, it’s me!’’and he glared at her in savage silence.
“Do you want to see—Splinter—or anyone, Mr. Garr?” in a halting, trembling voice from Araluen.
“No! I don’t want to see Splinter or anyone!” he barked. “I want to see you... You played a rotten game on me last week! Had me sitting in the house waiting for you to come back from Weeviltopps’, like a d—fool, while you were in your room laughing at me!”
“Oh, please forgive me—I really didn’t—er—mean anything to—”
“No, you didn’t mean anything,” he hissed; “d—young flirts like you never do mean anything!”
“Please go now, Mr. Garr”, and Araluen found her courage. “You’ve said enough—go before I scream for my brother!”
“Your brother! ... I’ll go when I’ve settled with you!” and he grabbed hold of her.
Araluen screamed, struck, scratched, and struggled to free herself from his grip. But her puny efforts were in vain; she was as a dove held in the coils of a serpent.
Just then, as though he had dropped from a flying machine, Sam Jackson came over the garden fence like a kangaroo, and throwing himself on Moneygrub, seized him with both hands by the throat. Instantly the other released his hold of Araluen and closed with Sam. Sam’s heart was in the right place, but Moneygrub had all the weight and age and savagery. Both fell and rolled amongst the roses—Moneygrub on top, roaring like an enraged bull. Araluen, in the hope that Splinter and Old Fred, returning with their last load, might be within hearing, screamed her hardest. Splinter and Old Fred, as it happened, were not within hearing; but Johnny Crosscutt and Jimmy Shuttlewood and Danny Jones, riding by in hopes of catching a glimpse of herself, were. Johnny and Jimmy wheeled their horses to the wire fence, dismounted hurriedly, and ran full split for the garden. Danny thought to outdo his companions, rushed his mount at the fence to jump it. But the old bob-tail creamy had only been accustomed to facing logs and gullies. He stopped “dead”, and Danny went over his head on to the fence. His two big feet got twisted in the top wires, and there he hung—his head touching the ground, like an old-man kangaroo.
But Johnny and Jimmy were, in themselves, sufficient reinforcements. Taking the garden fence in their stride, they were beside Araluen in a twinkle. Araluen shrieked, “He’s killing Sam!” and indicated the struggle going on under the rose bushes.
“Moneygrub!” they both yelled. Then on to his back, regardless of rose-thorns, they sprang like a pair of tigers. It was a bad moment for Garr. To those bush striplings the chance of a lifetime had come. They tore him from Sam; belted, butted into him, played havoc with his clothes, threw him heavily every time he tried to rise, and put the boot into him; and only that Araluen, taking fresh alarm, appealed to them to desist and let him go about his business, awkward consequences might have ensued.
“Just th’ cove we’ve always been wantin’ to give a good lambacin’ to,” they foamed, when Moneygrub, bleeding and battered, dragged himself out of the gate and laboured for the road, where his horse and sulky were standing. “But what did the old dawg tackle you for, Sam?” they added eagerly, “what was the matter?”
But before Sam or Araluen could explain, yells for deliverance from Danny reached their ears.
“Cripes!” they cried, “what’s up with Danny?” and back over the palings they bounded again. When they saw the ridiculous plight Danny was in, they burst into mirth—a mirth that was resented by a round of profanity from Danny.
“Why th’ devil couldn’t y’ come and let a bloke out before?” he complained when they lifted him up and released him from the entanglement.
“Because we were stoushing old Moneygrub”, they answered, excitedly. “He had Sam Jackson down in Duffs garden, and was strangling him! By gee, we gave him hell! .... Look at th’ blood from him!” and with pride they displayed their blood-stained shirt sleeves.
“Where is he? I must have a cut at the cow!” and glaring round, Danny saw Moneygrubb Garr, like a wounded beast, crawling into his sulky. Along the fence he rushed and reached the sulky just as Moneygrub started the horse going.
“You ugly old dawg!” Danny, running beside the step, called to him, “come down outer that and I’ll settle y’ myself!”
Moneygrub, who still had some life in him, leaned over and slashed the whip fiercely across Danny’s face: then applied it to the horse.
“Hell!” Danny shrieked, and instantly buckling himself up, sprinted his best; and Danny at his best was like a shot out of a gun for fifty yards. Past the horse’s flank he flashed, then up to its neck. Shouts of laughter from Johnny and Jimmy rang after him; and Araluen and Sam, watching from the garden, wondered what was going to happen. Placing his right hand on the animal’s mane, with his left, Danny slipped the winkers off its head! Then dropping out of the race, he sank down as the affrighted animal propelled Moneygrub along that lane at a mad break-neck gallop.
Riding off together again, Johnny, Jimmy and Danny agreed that while they “didn’t mind being beaten for Araluen by a decent bloke like Sam Jackson, they’d sooner be all hung together at the end of a bit of greenhide, than let a rich dawg like Moneygrub get her”.
And that evening, when tea was over—when Splinter and Old Fred had expressed their scorn for Moneygrub Garr, and solemnly decreed never more to leave Araluen alone on the farm, she and Sam went out into the garden again. There, ’midst the fragrance of blooms and blossoms, surrounded by the soft murmuring of the night breeze in the trees under an archway of running roses, in the presence of the silvery moon, they held each other’s hand and spoke of love, of truth, of life; and as the moon shone down upon them in all the brightness of its orb, they kissed their first kiss, a long, warm kiss, an old, old kiss.
Like snakes emerging from their winter sleep in new skins, the man on the land, after slaving all down the years through cycles of bad seasons for nothing in return, and slaving again through good ones for the benefit of the middleman, began to wake up and shed his ancient suicidal ways in favour of reforms and united methods, promulgated by a few revolutionary spirits that had suddenly risen from the ashes of their fathers, and the “temple of their gods”. Too long had the easygoing, dependent, short-sighted, mortgage-bound old “cockie” been the silent victim of the city exploiter; too long had he been the blind man in the game of industrial “bluff”, too long had he been the dupe of braying politicians and paid scribes. And so now the worm was turning.
The farmer, grey and bent, and broken, as most of him was, tired of fighting in the camp of his foes—weary of trying to gather grapes of thorns and figs of thistles, was at last awakening. He was realising the fool, the flat, the dumb-driven mule, he had been all the years—years when it only wanted a feed of thistles to make him a real donkey, with long ridiculous ears, and a stripe down the back! That he never before woke up to the arrant folly of claiming no real voice in the law-making of his country, in the shaping of market prices for what he produced by the sweat of his brow, and made his own; that he had never realised it was the simple difference between the prices he had been paid for his produce and the prices in all reason and justice he should have been paid but wasn’t that had kept his nose to the grind-stone, his neck in a mortgage, and his family in slavery all down those hopeless, hapless years, was now a matter of stupendous wonder to him. And the slow awakening of the man on the land was the quickening of a young nation.
The bread question had assumed serious aspects—there was a world’s shortage of wheat, and Government for the first time in the history of the State, as an inducement to the farmer to step out and save the situation, guaranteed the price of wheat at 9/- a bushel.
Talk about a stir! You’d think the millennium had come. The public announcement of that guarantee started the farmers of Emu Creek going like alarm clocks. Never before was so much activity seen there. All the ploughs in the district, heavy and light, up-to-date and obsolete, were set going, and all the horses, draught and saddle, old and young, were yoked to them. Old lucerne paddocks, sheep paddocks, neglected gardens, and waste patches, and every available inch of land were marked out for the plough.
Concentrating all their efforts on the land, Titt and Splinter went at it like tigers. There was no delaying—no stopping every moment to tie a rein, or tighten a bolt, or to oil something that didn’t want oiling; no watching the roads to see who was passing; no leaving the team and strolling lazily to the house to fill the water bag or to get some matches, or something. They kept their eyes on the neighbours nearby, and setting the pace, made a race of it. Everyone made a race of it. Like shearers cutting for the biggest tally those farmers raced each other to see who would put the largest area under crop and finish first. And they raced against time and against weather and equipments. Those fortunate enough to possess steam-power or abundance of horse-power, worked by moonlight and starlight, as well as by daylight; but the want of “horse-flesh” was a brake on the will and energy of most.
“By strike,” Splinter used to say to Old Fred, when a family of emus would go striding along the fences, “pity we couldn’t yoke forty or fifty of those beggars to the ploughs, or put ’em in th’ harrows to make a team for you.”
Then encouraged by a approving nod from Old Fred, he’d shout, “Heigh!” across the field to his parent.
Thinking something had gone wrong Titt would suddenly stop his team, and putting his ear to the wind would yell back: “What?”
“There’s some good plough horses for y’”, Splinter, indicating the birds, would laugh.
“Good grandmothers”, and grunting to himself, Titt would start his team again.
Taffey Corrigan, a bachelor, who kept more horses on his place than he had work for, told Titt over the fence one morning when he (Taffey) wasn’t quite sober, that he could have the use of two of the best, if he went for them. Titt, before Taffey had time to get sober, went for them. Then with the help of an old stager of his own, he made up a team for Old Fred, and started him off tramping behind the harrows.
Then there was activity! Such a sight as three teams operating in the field at once had never been seen on “Coondalloo” before. Up and down and round about they went—Titt going one way, Splinter another and Old Fred a course of his own. And from 8 a.m. till 4 p.m., they kept going almost without cessation. Titt believed in only “one yoke”. Unyoking at midday for dinner and a spell, and continuing again till night, Titt reckoned meant loss of time and extra work.
And when the whole of “Coondalloo” was turned over and harrowed up, the chance of leasing an abandoned farm of 160 acres, from the bank, came Titt’s way, and he promptly seized it. Then into that farm he and Splinter and Old Fred went with their teams, and ploughed and harrowed it all, too.
Three hundred acres were ready when seeding-time came, and the horses and men had still a “kick” left in them. Then came fresh problems. What varieties of wheat to sow? When and how to sow? Would he start and sow some of it “dry”, or would he wait till there was rain? These were questions that now confronted Titt! They were questions, too, upon which every farmer in the district had doubts and differences. All of them at some time or other, and under some conditions or other, had obtained good, bad, and indifferent results from all the best known varieties of wheat. They had known every variety to fail, and every variety to succeed. Their early wheat one year was a success, and their late wheat a failure. Their late wheat some other year was a success, and their early wheat a despicable failure. From deep-ploughed land they had harvested heavy crops, and from land that was prepared with only a springtooth cultivator, they harvested nothing. Another year they reaped heavy yields from land that had only been “scratched with a cultivator”, and the grain that was sown in the deep-ploughed fields didn’t come up. All of them had, at some time or other, sown “dry” and got splendid “strikes”, and on other occasions had sown “dry” and didn’t get any strike. All of them had sown without “pickling”, and never got any rust; and again had sown without “pickling”, and “got full of rust”. All of them had known every variety to “stool out” beautifully, and had known every variety not to stool out worth tuppence. They had known every variety to escape frost and every variety to get “hit up” with it; had known every variety to take rust and smut, and to have “white lead”; and every variety to pan out well-filled and free of rust and everything else. And to make matters worse, there was no Solomon anywhere in the district for Titt, or anyone else, to appeal to. True a “State Department” existed with a number of “experimental farms” and agricultural colleges under its control, where students, whose parents could afford it, were taught to dress smartly and polish their boots before putting them on, and brand pigs, and white-wash cow bails, and where good and popular spreads were prepared for “distinguished visitors”, and wonderful results obtained from the farms by manuring them with bank notes and overdrafts, and the whole lot cheerfully presided over by a Minister for Agriculture. But that was all. So nothing startling was to be gained by seeking advice in that quarter.
“I don’t think I would sow before rain came”, Mrs. Duff suggested, “and I’d sow several kinds of wheat when I did sow.”
Splinter reckoned he’d sow before rain came because it could then be planted deeper and cleaner, and quicker, and would come up evenly when the rain came—if ever it did come—and “you could be in bed listenin’ to it failin’ on the roof, an’ be warm an’ happy, instead of jumpin’ up in the dark to find th’ horses and go muckin’ round the fields with th’ drill, n’ comin’ in again all wet and with enough mud hangin’ to your boots to sprain your ankles with.”
“But what if the rain doesn’t come?” his mother suggested; “or if only just enough to germinate the seed, and then it dies off?”
“Then it will be all up with it”, Splinter admitted.
“Ah, well”, Titt drawled, coming at last to a decision. “I’ll leave it to the last penny I have in the world to decide: ‘heads we sow dry, tails we sow wet’.” And he tossed the brownie into the air.
“Tails! A wet sowing!” Splinter cried, picking up the coin. And a wet sowing it was.
“Now for the sort of wheat to put in”, and Titt wrote the name of nine varieties on three separate slips of paper, three names on each slip, and placing them in Old Fred’s hat, invited Mrs. Duff to draw one of them. She drew one, on which was written, “Allera Spring”, “Gluya”, and “Bungee”, then got excited about her chances.
“Fancy that!” she exclaimed “the very three I have always been saying you should plant. Isn’t that curious?”
“Just a coincidence”, Titt remarked.
“There must have been something more than coincidence in it”, Mrs. Duff claimed. “I’m sure there must.”
“I often heer’d y’ tellin’ him to sow ‘Gluya’ and ‘Allera Spring’”, Old Fred remembered.
“And ‘Bungee’ too,” Mrs. Duff insisted—“Didn’t I?” and she appealed to Titt.
“You did, Kit”, he confirmed. “But perhaps you watched me writing down the names?”
“There!” and she struck her breast. “As sure as I’m living, I didn’t.”
Splinter, who had silently been examining the “voting papers”, suddenly discovered that they all had “Allera Spring”, “Gluya” and “Bungee” written on them. Then, with a loud laugh, Titt fled from Mrs. Duff, who pursued him through the house with the yard broom.
To the joy and excitement of all, rain came at the right time; and it kept on raining till the land was soaked—kept on till it was flooded—kept on till people grew weary, and sick, and tired of rain, and began to get alarmed lest it would never stop. But one day, thank goodness, it eased off; and the weather cleared and remained fair till all the grain was sown, and the drills returned to the shelter sheds. Then it rained again, and cleared up again; rained some more, cleared some more, and kept on raining and clearing, raining and clearing, till agricultural areas, far and white, were awave with wheat and barley and oats, the like of which had never been seen before on Emu Creek, or any other creek.
Titt’s three hundred acres were perfection—they were pictures for a painter. And how he guarded those wheat paddocks! How he strolled along the headlands from day to day, from week to week, watching to see if the crop was “stooling out”—watching it emerging into shot-blade, from shot-blade into flower and from flower to grain, and then anxiously watching for signs of rust, and hoping to God there would be no late frosts!
Ah! those are the exciting moments in the life of the wheat grower!—moments when he realises how recklessly he is gambling with frost and caterpillar, rust, smut, storm, flood, Heaven, Hell, and Earth!
And when the crop began to “turn” and harden, how Titt and Old Fred and Splinter, and all the family, would poke amongst it, sampling it—plucking ears, measuring the length of them, and shelling them in the palm of their hands to estimate the probable yield! Ten, eleven, and as high as twelve bags to the acre, they repeatedly concluded. Titt always smiled and shook his head, and said, “He’d be satisfied with eight— twenty-four hundred bags at nine bob a bushel would do him.”
And when the first field had nearly ripened, how eagerly the reaper and binder was taken from the shed and transported to the paddock! And how all the family gathered round to wait and watch if the machine would start working without giving any trouble! There had been occasions in the past when all sorts of mishaps took place and all manner of things went wrong before a start could be effected. The “knotter” wouldn’t “knot” — or the knife wouldn’t cut or would break—or a cog would slip—or the driving chain come off—or something wouldn’t be “put on right”—and much time and “language” would be wasted trying to locate the trouble and fix it up, or waiting for an “expert” to arrive to do it. As a last resource, Titt, like everybody else in the same fix, used to wire for an expert. And when that “genius amongst machinery” would arrive per train or sulky or “footback”, he’d stand scratching his head and gazing at the binder with a heavy frown on his perspiring brow. Suddenly inspired, he’d look in the twine box to see if they had been trying to make her bind without twine. If the twine was in its place, which, of course, it mostly was, he’d unthread the needle and thread it again the same way that it was threaded before, and mumble. “Too much tension! —too much tension!” After that he’d nose round the “knotter” and scrape the dust off it and put some oil on it, and condemn the oil, and recommend some other brand to Titt. Then he’d take off his coat and, if he wasn’t too fat—which he mostly was—would crawl right under the machine, and lie there on his back gazing up at the works like a poet looking to the stars for inspiration.
“A wrench!” he would call suddenly; and the rush that Titt and Old Fred and Splinter would make to procure the wrench for him, would make you think he had called for a stick to kill a snake with. Then he’d groan and swear at the flies, and unscrew several nuts, and screw them on again. “I see-e!” he would mutter, meditatively, after a long, anxious silence; “I see-e—”, then emit a low, tragic whistle that would fall on Titt’s ears like a death-knell. “You’ll have to get a new part here; this is worn,” he would shout, decisively; “she’ll never work the way she is. I wonder you haven’t bust her up to blazes!”
After that he’d crawl out again, sigh triumphantly, and wipe the oil and grease from his hands with good ripe ears of wheat, and put on his coat, and look hurriedly at his watch; “I’ll wire to them to send you a duplicate as soon as I get back to the township.” And away he would drive again, leaving Titt and Old Fred and Splinter scowling at the useless jibbing old binder.
And when that expert reached the township he would perhaps meet some farmer there who wanted to buy a new binder from his firm; and he would promptly invite that farmer to have a drink; and the farmer, who wanted to buy a new binder would invite the expert to drink with him; then they would both drink to each other; then to the success of the new binder, coupled with the names of the great season everyone was having, and the Empire, and the girl behind the bar— and between all the “happy days” and “good lucks” and “prosperous seasons”, the wire would be forgotten, until days later, until a telegram from Titt would reach the firm, saying: “No duplicate yet arrived, crop getting destroyed”. When at last it would arrive, carefully sewn up in a piece of bagging like a ham, and accompanied by an account, and Titt and Old Fred and Splinter had spent a whole day trying to adjust it to the machine, they would suddenly discover it was a part belonging to a lucerne mower! Then Titt would swear, and heave that duplicate as far as he could heave it, and regret he hadn’t punched the expert, fat and old as he was, till nothing of him had been left!
But things were different now. When Splinter climbed into the seat and put the machine in gear, and called to the others to stand clear, and cracked the whip at the horses, the old binder rattled off like a German band, cutting the crop clean, delivering it beautifully, leisurely feeding the rollers, tieing accurately, and throwing the sheaves out like a live thing.
Titt and Old Fred kicked their heels up with joy.
“She’s going great!” Titt said—“making a lovely sheaf.”
Splinter looked round in his seat and waved the whip by way of congratulations. Mrs. Duff and Araluen waved back and smiled. Then Titt and Old Fred bent their backs and started stooking. For days and weeks—from morning till night under a flaming noonday sun, in the cool of the evening breeze they followed after that old binder, stooking, stooking, and “keeping the way clear for her”.
Providence this time was surely watching over the man on the land. Not a drop of rain fell while the crops were down. And weeks later when all the stuff had been carted off the fields, and stacked, what a sight Coondalloo presented! Rows of bright new stacks looming in the distance like the Pyramids could be seen for miles. There they stood in grand manifestation of the wealth to be wrung from the soil when all things are favourable and the seasons pregnant with rains. All that was required now was the thrasher. And the thrasher, with the host of men who followed it from farm to farm, and all the worry and excitement of preparing and cooking for them wasn’t far off. All day long a cloud of dust and chaff flying from the machine could be seen at Drygrass’s; while the droning and buzzing of it all came floating in waves upon the wind.
Every now and again Mrs. Duff or Araluen would go to the verandah to see if they had “commenced on Drygrass’s last stack”, then anxiously hope they wouldn’t “finish before Sunday”. To have the “thrashers” on your hands over Sunday was tragedy. Everyone—especially mothers and daughters— longed for them to come on Monday, put the stacks through, clean up, pull out and take themselves off before Sunday. Men on thrashers are always hungry men, often crabby men, and mostly fault-finders; and how much to cook, how many to cook for, and what to cook for them are fitful nightmares to the women of the farms. And the men themselves, even though they may never have been on the thrasher before, always seemed to know beforehand the places that “tuckered well”, from those that didn’t. And when they “pulled in” to a farm that “tuckered well” they were never in a hurry to pull out again; and if it came on to rain they were always pleased to throw the tarpaulins over the stacks and camp in the huts and barns, turning up regularly for meals, until the weather broke again. But whether it broke the day after or a week after never concerned them.
And one morning, at 9 o’clock, when the engine’s whistle was heard, announcing the thrashing at Drygrass’s had finished, and Mrs. Duff and Araluen flew excitedly to the kitchen and started rattling pots and pans, you’d have thought it was the Royal Family they were expecting.
Splinter was rushed off in the sulky to the township for supplies of bread and meat; Old Fred told off to put on an outside fire, and to see to wood and water, while Titt on pins and needles lest the gateway might prove too narrow to admit the machine, and a panel of the fence had to be taken down, was called upon to ascertain the number of men who would be sitting to dinner. At intervals, Natt and Jimmie, perched on either post, watching the plant approaching, would scramble to the ground and rush inside to inform their mother that it was “comin’ across th’ gully” or was “just down at th’ corner”, and increase her excitement.
At last the “puff—puff—puff” of the grimy old engine could be heard outside on the road. Next minute, with the lumbering plant trailing behind it, and boisterous, dusty looking men and their swags perched all over it, it rumbled through the gate and headed for the rows of wheat stacks. Hardly had it drawn up amongst them when, manned by all hands, it was set in position. Then the engine whistled again, and every man fell into his allotted place; “outside” shirts were discarded, pitchforks gleamed, the engine started, the belt flew round, the thrasher rattled and hummed, sheaves started flying from the stack, a whirl of dust went up, chaff flew with the wind, the straw went climbing up the elevator and toppling over, and into the bags poured the plump golden grain, like streams of water.
“And how is it going?” Mrs. Duff inquired, when the men knocked off and came in for dinner.
“Splendid, Missus,” they said; “the best we’ve struck yet, if it’s all as good as what we’ve put through this morning.”
It was all as good—some of it better. And when the last stack was put through, and the final whistle sounded, Old Fred and Splinter counted 3000 bags.
A parting lunch, and the men collected their belongings, tossed them on to the machine again, climbed up themselves, found seats wherever they could, and the lumbering thrasher went on its way whistling a warning to the next farm.
Then Titt and Mrs. Duff, while the children in proud delight clambered all over it, stood in silent admiration beside that imposing stack of grain piled high, sack upon sack. The sound of the departing thrasher rumbling along the black soil lane was no longer distinguishable. In deep reflection they gazed on the great harvest. A vista of the past—of those years of loss and failure, disappointment and gloom, came vividly to their minds, then quickly faded away. Bright sunshine lit up their faces, and in the light of their eyes, animated with the joy of triumph, was reflected the dawning of prosperity.
And in the years that followed, the days of the Duffs were days of joy and plenty; were as the butterflies that drifted by and the flowers that garlanded the hills and headlands.