an ebook published by Project Gutenberg Australia
Title: The Romance Of Runnibede
Author: Steele Rudd
eBook No.: 2400221h.html
Language: English
Date first posted: July 2024
Most recent update: July 2024
This eBook was produced by: Walter Moore
I am indebted to my parents, who resided on the Balonne River, Queensland, during the early 50's, for the various incidents and impressions gleaned from them during my boyhood days, which now appear in these pages. Also for the kindly help given by my friend W.H. when writing the “Romance of Runnibede”
Steele Rudd
Chapter 1.
Chapter 2.
Chapter 3.
Chapter 4.
Chapter 5.
Chapter 6.
Chapter 7.
Chapter 8.
Chapter 9.
Chapter 10.
Chapter 11.
Chapter 12.
Chapter 13.
Chapter 14.
Chapter 15.
Chapter 16.
Chapter 17.
Chapter 18.
Chapter 19.
I remember well when father selected Runnibede for a cattle run. A great run it was, too, a hundred thousand acres—stretches of sheltered valleys and scrubs, lofty ranges and wide grass plains. To the north loomed the Great Dividing Range; on the south the winding, bending Condamine, and most of it watered by creeks, lagoons, and great waterholes that never went dry—so father and others reckoned. The homestead, then, was different to what it is today—rougher and wilder, and more romantic. The “big house,” as it was called, with father’s office at the end of a wide, high verandah, was walled and floored with dressed slabs—wonderful slabs they were, too; and the roof was covered with stringy bark. The “store” and butcher’s shop and men’s huts were of similar architecture, and standing in a row amongst the wild limes and brigalow, looked like a lost township of primitive days. And the cattle yards that Sam Mann and Bill Hawkes erected on the bank of the station creek—all made of round saplings—I remember well. They have crumbled and rotted away since then, and only a few shaky panels are standing now.
But the wide-spreading wild fig tree that stood between the wings of the old yard thrives the same as ever. And how the tired, sun-baked stockmen used to gather in the shade of it when the breaking, rushing, crushing mobs were safely yarded, to lunch on damper and steaming billy tea. Splendid horsemen and cattlemen were those old stockmen—reckless, cheerful prodigals for the most part! And tossing junks of damper to each other, as they knelt round the “hamper,” what accounts they had to tell of the gallops and spills and escapes they had in the muster! And carved with pocket knives and skinning knives on the trunk of the fig tree are still to be seen the crude initials of most of them—or what is left of the initials, for the bark has long since grown over, leaving but the scars. Ned Kearney and Jack Holloway are the only two I know of living now; the others all are gone—buried in different parts of Runnibede—and passing drovers will tell you that, when on their lonely night watches round the resting, silent mobs, they often see them—
“Seeing their faces stealing, stealing,
Hearing their laughter pealing, pealing,
Watching their grey forms wheeling, wheeling,
Round where the cattle lie.”
Drovers used to say that in the weird wailings of the curlew and the plover they could discern the voices of the lonely dead souls of the bushland. I remember them telling this to father, one morning at the store, while getting a supply of rations from him.
“What!” he laughed. “Curlews and plovers the reincarnation of dead stockmen? My gosh, imagine Bill Bent, who broke his neck on Hodgson’s Creek, with the thick legs and raucous voice he had, turning into a curlew! If poor old Bill ever turns into anything other than a fat, red worm, it’ll be into a scrub bull.”
Father—or as the station hands called him—“The Governor”—was an Englishman, with all his hopes of treasure in Australia, and his heart in England. A good style of man the Governor was—in build neither thick nor thin; a shaved chin and “mutton-chop” whiskers; ruddy complexion, cheerful, generous, and, in a quiet way, daring as the devil. He was schooled at Eton, and like most well educated men, his intellectual gifts were mediocre. Sometimes he talked about books and literature, sometimes of politics, but more often it was about prices of cattle or sport. An incurable optimist the Governor was, full of theory and ideas. But his ideas were mostly English—so was his seat in the saddle. The English in a saddle are “players to the gallery,” and little better than gymnasium riders. Maybe one in a thousand could be called a horseman in the Australian bush. Like most of the pioneer squatters, the Governor plunged into Australian station life without any knowledge of the Australias bush, or of its moods and changes, and so he had a lot to learn—and he learnt it.
Whenever the mails reached Runnibede—the mailman only happened along at irregular intervals—the Governor would hurry away to his office and shut himself up with the newspapers—most of them English periodicals, back numbers half a year old. And often on reading of the happenings to people or friends known to him far over the sea, he would put the paper down and lose himself in meditation, until mother, perhaps, would seek him out with a sheaf of closely written and cross-written letters in her hand to communicate their contents to him. She, too, was English and educated; and in her heart, even more than any other, she showed a tendency to fret for old associations and friends, and to weary of the isolation and loneliness that the new life on Runnibede brought to her.
“And are we always going to remain here in this Australian bush, Edward?” she would sigh as she folded the letters again and gazed out at the belts of brigalow on the distant landscape.
“Not on your life, my dear,” the Governor would assure her. “Cattle will become gold mines here directly—most of them are animated nuggets now. And in a year or two, we’ll be able to spare a thousand or so on a trip back to London to see them all again.”
“I hope so, Edward.”
“There’s no need to ‘hope,’ Dorrie, my dear—it’s as sure as night follows day and day follows night— which seems something of a paradox.”
“In any case, Edward,” she would remind him in her soft, appealing way, “the boys and Dorothy will be sent home to be properly educated when they are old enough, won’t they?” (The “boys” were Ted, ten years; myself, twelve; and Dorothy, eight.) “My good woman,” and the Governor would pat her on the head, ‘what else do you think I’ll do with them—send them to the blacks’ camp down the river to have ‘King Sandy’ and his tribe of linguists put the finishing touches on them? They shall go to Eton, where their father put in a number of joyful, unproductive years, my dear; and we shall both go with them to witness their enrolment.”
Whatever anxiety mother might have felt at such moments would soon be dispelled, and next minute she would be heard humming airs in her room or talking happily with the governess, or Mrs. Channing in the kitchen. But what a woman mother was! If beauty, combined with gentleness of manner, sympathy and kindness, were qualities that went to make a lady, then she was truly one. More practical minded than the Governor, yet, while having confidence enough in his plans for the future, she knew that high spirits and optimism alone would not turn mobs of cattle into profit or secure a bank overdraft.
And now I remember the first draft—two thousand head of young steers the Governor bought. (Till then the run was carrying eight hundred breeding cows and their progeny only). What station the steers came off I don’t remember, but the Governor paid two pounds a head for them through the bank, and John Strean was the drover in charge. When word came in that the mob was coming up the Condamine and had crossed Myall creek, Joe Eustace, the head stockman, was sent to meet them, and I went with him, as proud as a prince, on a little grey mare called White Wings. Next morning the Governor, with mother beside him in the trap, drove out to inspect the mob on the run.
“What are they like, Eustace?” he asked, as the latter, in a few short, sharp props, reined up beside the trap.
“Not bad stuff, Governor—some good growers— a few brindles among them.”
“What should they be worth in a couple of years, Eustace?”
“A couple of years?” And the head stockman pulled thoughtfully at his horse’s mane, and toyed the stirrup irons with the toes of his boots. “That’s pretty hard to say … they might be worth a fiver … and they might be all dead by that time! Depends on the seasons.’
“The seasons will be all right,” the Governor chuckled confidently, and starting the trap again, drove rapidly around the mob and interviewed the drover.
And while they talked mother sat silently reflecting on Eustace’s words: “They all might be dead by that time.”
Returning to the homestead the Governor was elated.
“Five pounds a head in two years means a profit of six thousand my dear … the natural increase on the run by that time will leave another four thousand, about ten thousand in five; years … in twenty years, an Australian cattle king and millionaire— a blooming multi-millionaire, Dorrie.”
“Then, Edward, you don’t think what Eustace said—”
“To Hong Kong with Eustace. He ought to have his head cut off and given to the blacks … why, look, it’s coming on to rain now, you goose. This bushland is full of rain—it teems with it.”
Then giving whip to the horse and echoing at the top of his voice: “Cattle king and millionaire, my dear,” the Governor drove over the tufty grasses and round through the undergrowth and clumps of myall like a rising cyclone—at least, he thought he was going like a cyclone. But that’s fifty years ago now!
A year passed and midsummer came. And such a summer! There had been worse ones, I know, numbers of them, but for some reason that summer left a more lasting impression upon my memory than any other. The heat, I remember, was terrific. And the flies and other insect hosts swarmed everywhere. They seemed to come in a night; and you’d think they came to remain forever. They were insufferable, and savage as bull ants. Everyone so inclined cursed them, and in that way, at least, got some imaginary revenge and relief—but to dumb brutes they were Sheol. No rain had fallen for ten months, and all the fresh running creeks which the Governor and other cheerful optimists predicted would run on and babble musically for ever, were fast giving out and turning into bogs and traps for weak stock. And the big waterholes were getting very low and “sick” on it—so were some of the cattle, for the land was in the initial grip of a drought, and Runnibede already threatened with desolation.
Still, no one was idle, and work went on apace, for the Governor was a goer. If he didn’t do a great deal himself, he knew how to get the best out of others, and to get it from them willingly and cheerfully. And so the axe; and the maul rang out at different parts of the run to some purpose. A home paddock of three hundred acres, with swing gates painted white, had been fenced off, and only animals that were in work were grazed there. A stable with a loft and outside stalls and a small yard adjoining were added to the improvements. What was to be a “great garden”—the garden of Runnibede— according to the Governor, who never grew tired of rhapsodising over everything that was done, or was going to be done—was laid out in gravel walks— fine gravel it was, too, hauled from the creek’s bed with the bullock team—and avenues of trees and rows of hedges. In the centre of it all stood the “big house,” which one day, when big cheques began to roll in for fat mobs off Runnibede, was to be rebuilt into a castle of stone, with fittings and furniture all of native timber. Such was the home of the Governor’s dreams, and the future home of some of us who had not then been dreamt of. Temporary yards, too, to save time in the musters were erected out on Wallaby Creek, and the fencing of the eastern boundary was in progress. I remember the Governor taking Ted and me out with him one day to see how the men were getting along with it. He wasn’t a hard rider on such occasions, just took things easily—it was only when there was something “worth while” that the Governor would shake his mount up and make the pace, and how Ted and I shortened our reins and fidgeted in our saddle whenever an emu or a kangaroo, perhaps a mob of them, started up. If we had had our own way that day we would have given the lot of them the run of their lives, but whenever we shot out in pursuit of something we’d hear the Governor’s voice thundering after us to “come back here, you young scoundrels; do you want to break your necks?” But we kids, when across a horse, hadn’t time to think of a broken neck. Unless we could keep the animal going like the wind we were never contented. Advice from our elders to “go steady and let the ponies alone” was uncalled for interference by “silly old coves” afraid to put a horse out of a canter, and who didn’t want to see anybody else enjoying themselves. That’s what we reckoned, but we were truly very young those days, Ted and I.
“And when the eastern boundary is finished,” I recollect the Governor telling mother one day, “that’ll be the last I’ll do in the way of improvements for a while … the range makes a good enough fence on the northern side, and the stock rarely cross the Condamine on the south—not even now when it’s little more than a chain of waterholes. And it doesn’t matter about the western end—they may go in that direction as far as they please.”
Though wages in those days were about as low as possible the Governor must have paid out a lot of money for labour before he got the old run into anything like working order. But that didn’t worry him—nothing, I fancy, ever worried him much at that time. The Australian bush was all new and strange to him then. It was his Eldorado. Besides, the spirit of romance and adventure was strong in the Governor. But what often makes me wonder now is that he ever got men to do the work at all for him, considering the rough and isolated conditions that prevailed. Still they did it—for him, and what great work they did, too. Some of it has lasted to this day.
A quiet, drowsy afternoon—scarcely any life about the homestead. Only the flies and the wild bees had any life in them. The Governor, with Joe Eustace and Ned Kearney and Warabah, an aboriginal recommended to the Governor by Haly of Taabinga, were out mustering cows towards the Condamine, to wean the calves and give the mothers a chance in the drought. They had been away three or four days, and were expected to return some time that afternoon with the mob. What wouldn’t Ted and I, kids and all that we were, have given to be in the muster! But mustering wasn’t for us—not then. Instead, we had to go to school, along with Dorothy and Zulu and Tar-pot, two ebony-skinned, frizzle-haired aboriginal kids that had become separated from a tribe on the river during a “dispersal” by the police patrol, and to whom mother had taken a fancy. A slab and bark edifice stood about a hundred yards away from the “big house.” It was known as the station school, and was furnished with a couple of short desks, blackboards, maps, a globe, just like any other school, and big Miss Mary Rumble, the teacher—Lord, how I remember the old girl, with her red nose, and her white stockings falling over her elastic-side boots! She was also “governess.” But why we were kept shut up in that dull school with Mary Rumble trying to hammer things into our heads that didn’t matter tuppence to us or to anyone else, while so much excitement was going on outside was something Ted and I couldn’t understand … It seemed to us that the Governor, mother and the governess hadn’t an ounce of sense between them, so far as our interests were concerned! And on this day Ted and I were on pins and needles.
“Ted Winchester!” said big Mary, “you’ve not done a thing for th’ last hour but stare and glare out the window. If you don’t pay attention and listen to what I’m saying, I’ll tell your father on you when he returns—it’s no use telling your mother, she won’t believe anything about you.”
“I can’t look at you, teacher,” Ted said to her, hanging his lip, “without seein’ the back of Zulu’s head!” And Ted’s big honest eyes rolled round in their sockets as if they had broken loose.
“You can see over his head very well, if you want to, for he’s smaller than you, and he’s sitting on a lower seat.”
“Yes,” Ted admitted, “but there’s a great big flea on him, teacher.”
That was something Mary Rumble wasn’t prepared for.
“A what?” she said, crossing the floor to investigate Zulu.
“There isn’t, Miss Rumble, don’t you believe him,” from Dorothy, who took a delight in helping mother every morning to bath the nigger kids and keep them clean. “It’s grasshopper eggs they’ve been putting in his hair.”
As that incriminated me, I invented a charge against Tar-pot, who was sitting front, and accused him of “smelling like a dead snake,” and holding my nose, turned my head away to emphasise the falsehood.
“That’s a fib, teacher,” indignantly from Dorothy. “Tar-pot smells cleaner than he does,” and in proof she put her nose close to Tar-pot and sniffed noisily.
“Attention, the lot of you,” commanded big Mary, “and don’t let me hear any more of your nonsense, me noble Ted and Jim (Jim was my name), or I’ll box the ears of the two of you myself, without waiting for your father to do it.”
“They want it, too,” and Dorothy, sister-like, screwed a mouth at Ted and me. Poor Dorothy! It was only a couple of weeks later when she had to run for her life from the myall trees to the big house to escape from the old black gin—mother of the two abo. kids. Our lessons continued for another hour or so, when the faint echo of a stock whip crack rumbled into the room. Ted caught the sound and looked at me, open-mouthed. I looked quickly at Ted…
Two more echoes in quick succession, and sounding nearer.
“That’s them!” And Ted and I, disregarding Miss Mary Rumble, cocked our ears and listened.
A volley of stockwhip cracks then rang out, stirring us more than the guns of Waterloo stirred the Brussels ball party. I can see Ted even now, jumping over the desk, and myself jumping after him, and both of us scrambling for our hats.
“Have you young wretches been eating indigo and gone mad, too, like the cattle?” was all I can remember Mary saying as we bounded out the door like brumbies leaving a yard when the rails are thrown down.
“Father said we were to go and meet them,” I shouted at her, then off we went to the stable as fast as our legs could take us.
At the stable, their heads hanging dreamily over the stall-rail, were our two ponies, White Wings and Wallaroo, bridled and saddled and girthed to the last hole. They had been saddled since breakfast, and at intervals during the day when we had asked the governess if we could “please go out,” it was to stuff bush hay and more bush hay into those ponies, till sickening of it they turned from it and went to sleep. But, when we rushed under the rail, panting, and started scrambling into the saddles without giving any warning, those ponies woke up with a fright. What they thought for the moment was attacking them goodness only knows; anyway, Wallaroo, with a loud snort, flew round, and with her hindquarters knocked Ted under the rail, while White Wings stood up on her hind legs and fell back wallop against the wall of the stable. Neither of us was prepared for a reception of that kind from ponies we had been feeding and fondling and galloping about for a year and more. “Hang y’! Don’t y’ know who I am?” Ted gasped—and, “you little brute, I’ll pay y’ out when I get on y’!” But the ponies soon took in the situation, and became apologetic and tried to rub their bridles off against our shoulders. Then into the saddles we climbed with fresh haste—but in the excitement, forgot to throw down the stall-rail before mounting, and there we sat for a moment or two, riding as the crowd “ride” on the grandstands at a race meeting. I managed to reach far enough out of the saddle to drop my rail, and out bounded White Wings; and off round the stable and down the home paddock we went, like Dick Turpin and Black Bess. Ted, though, essaying to follow my example, wasn’t so successful. Wallaroo jumped back when he reached out for the rail, and he fell over her shoulder on to his head. “Wait, wait for me, Jim,” I heard him shout. But I couldn’t lose any more time. Besides, I wanted to be the first to meet the mob and do some “stock-riding.” All the same, I was scarcely abreast of the cattle yards when I heard him coming in the wake of me, crashing through the broom-bush and stunted wattles, lashing into Wallaroo with the double of a saddle strap, and shouting, “I can see them crossin’ the creek!” Up to that I had a pretty good hold of White Wings, and was keeping a sharp eye on the saplings and overhanging limbs. But when Wallaroo came romping up alongside of me, I let her go. Then neck to neck we raced—and a mad, harum-scarum go it was, but only what you’d expect from a pair of excited kids who were beginning to fancy themselves in the saddle. And knowing really nothing, we didn’t fear anything. So we hustled and jostled, and bumped into each other, taking everything before us, and shooting between saplings and solid old gums and coolibahs that might have smashed us to pieces had the ponies misjudged the spaces by a foot between any of them.
Across the point of the sand ridge and past the old sawpit we fairly flew, then rounding the wild lime trees, swooped right in amongst the leaders of the coming mob … Surprise! Gad! What the old Governor and the stockmen thought when they caught sight of us, I don’t know! But I do know that we fouled a number of startled calves that jumped in our way, and only the cleverness of the ponies saved us from coming to grief over the top of them. Then, in our flight we cut off a two-year-old bull, a brindle brute they were bringing in to unsex, that had been breaking from the mob on every opportunity and giving a lot of trouble. He was better conditioned, of course, than the cows, and was pretty flash, and fretting to get back to his own mob—a mixed lot that ran on Dingo Creek, a short branch of the Myall. Anyway, as soon as we dashed between him and the mob he up with his tail and away. Then, to hear the shouts of the Governor and the stockmen! But what they were shouting for we had no idea, and didn’t wait to ascertain. We had come to meet them and to do some stock-riding. And here was our chance to show what we were made of. So, lurching the ponies almost off their feet, and in a cloud of dust, we turned at right angles and took after that bull. Then more yells—yells of great profanity went up on the wind, and Eustace and Warabah spurred their horses in pursuit of the bull, and of us. But we wanted no help—we were out to head the brute and return him to the mob alone and unassisted.
Riding wide and all over the ponies, we drew on to him on either side—Ted on the near, and I on the off. Of course, we didn’t try to “shoulder” him or go for his tail and try to throw him. Our object was to head him and wheel him back into the mob. As we both drew ahead, we were watching and thinking only of the bull—so were the ponies. And we were indulging in some loud, triumphant shouting; so round in front of him we circled full speed. Then, right under his foaming snout, almost, our mounts collided—bang! bash! like two loco engines … (I remember being propelled out of the saddle into the air; but after that, nothing, until I found myself lying in bed with mother standing over me, and Ted sitting in a chair with his arm in a sling and a bandage round his head, his bottom lip hanging and his eyes drooping … But that was three days later.)
And there were the Channings—old Harry and his wife, the first married couple engaged on Runnibede, and what a lot of years they must have spent there. Old Harry was killed at last, which was just as well, perhaps, by a kick from a horse while nearly blind with sandy blight—Harry, I mean, not the horse. And the missus, as he called her, died shortly after, but not, I fancy, from anything corresponding with grief at the loss of Harry; and though they were on Runnibede for quite half a century, I don’t suppose either of them were ever further than the bark of a dog from the smoke of the head station, or ever got on the back of a horse! And Harry, I remember, always counted himself among “bushmen.” Yet, I suppose, it would have been hard to class him as anything else, for truly he lived—in a way—and died there—in a rather unusual way. A queer couple if ever there was one. Hired to work for the Governor by Billy Handcock of Drayton, publican, storekeeper, commission agent, and Parliamentarian before separation, the Channings turned up at Runnibede late one evening on a bullock dray. And how excited and brimful they were of adventures with the blacks on the way out! So frightened of their lives had they been that I recollect them telling the Governor they would stay and work on the station for ever, without pay, rather than face a return trip until the bush became civilised. Yet, as time went on and the bush not only became civilised but baptised and colonised as well, old Harry and “the missus” never displayed any inclination to go back, although the Governor gave them their “walking ticket” often enough! Still, Mrs. Channing was a help to mother in the housework, and, in a way, company for her at times. In addition she cooked for the station hands, while Harry chopped wood and brought water, and pottered about the homestead growling and grumbling habitually of the hard work he had to do. But how they did quarrel with each other, that happy married couple. They would engage in real stand-up fights at times, always over paltry, trifling things that mattered little to anyone and often enough they had no idea what they were rowing about themselves … Comfortably quartered they were, too, in the kitchen, a detachment of three rooms, connected with the big house by a wide “gangway,” shaded with flowering scrub vines.
“Now, Harry,” I recollect mother almost pleading one night, while visiting the kitchen to procure some necessity or other before retiring to bed, “I hope you will let Mrs. Channing have a good rest to-night, and don’t fight with her any more, like a good man! She worked very hard to-day, and I’m sure she must be tired.” Mother, kind soul, ever had a sympathetic thought in her heart for others, and always made allowance for the weaknesses and deficiencies of humans.
“I don’t fight with her, ma’am,” and Harry, leaning his elbows on the kitchen table, and sucking at a clay pipe as black as the nose of a nigger, stared vacantly at the moths flying about the lamp. “It’s herself what does all that.”
“Me! Do you say it’s me what does it all—and to my mistress’s face?” and Mrs. Channing, who had been dropping some salt junk into the pot to soak overnight, flew round and faced her husband … Gad! I can see her now glaring at him with fight all over her, and only a thin, bony wizard of a woman she was, too. But mother—she fled, shuffling along the gangway to our living room as fast as her slippers would allow her. There was none who understood the married couple, as well as mother.
“I’m sure they’ll have another row out there,” she confided to the Governor, as she closed the door firmly behind her, to keep the noise out should a row commence.
“Don’t mind them, my dear, don’t mind them,” and the Governor quietly raised his eyes from the paper he was reading. “Harry and the missus could never get along together if they were not fighting like cat and dog.”
“It does seem like it, but it’s a dreadful pity,” mother sighed, seating herself near the open window that looked out on to the home paddock flat. “And Mrs. Channing has worked so hard to-day.”
“It’s only medicine and recreation to them, my dear,” the Governor smiled. “Keeps them from contracting this weird melancholy of the Australian bush, and from forgetting the beautiful side of it; and prevents them from becoming like the flowers that haven’t any perfume, and the birds that don’t sing.”
As concerned as mother was for Mrs. Channing, her face brightened with a smile.
“You see,” the Governor went on, “it’s these little differences that break the monotony of their existence and make them glad to be alive when so many are dead. It’s just their exclusive way of making love to each other, my dear.”
“Oh, nonsense, Edward. I’ve seen them when they have been quite nice and thoughtful to each other.”
“They must have been in bed, asleep, my dear, where I shall be in a very few minutes,” and the Governor yawned noisily as a tiger. But before his jaws closed again screams and yells came from the kitchen that rang all through the big house.
“There! My goodness, what did I tell you!” Mother shuddered and shook, and held her hand over her heart.
The Governor tossed the newspaper about and chuckled indifferently. Ted, with the wits frightened out of him, sprang from the couch where he had been “camping,” and huddled alongside of me. Fancy him getting alongside of me for safety, when my hair was standing on end and I was thinking about crawling under the table! … But the Governor calmly indulged in another yawn; then sat back with his eyes closed as though calls of the mopokes outside in the myall trees were the only sounds to be heard. But another volley of screams, with hoarse roars in between, came from the kitchen.
“Dear, oh dear, listen to them!” Poor mother covered her ears with her hands. “He’ll kill the woman, Edward. For mercy’s sake go and stop them! Oh do—do!”
“If he kills her, my dear,” drawled the Governor, “we’ll arrest him without a warrant, and try him in the school, and hang him here on the station ourselves, and save the Government all the trouble and expense.”
“Will y’, father? And how will y’ hang him— an’ when will y’—to-morrer?” And gad, didn’t Ted’s face light up at the prospect of seeing old Harry’s execution.
“We’ll swing him up on the gallows of the killing yard,” replied the Governor. “Same as we do the bullocks, my boy.”
“An’ can we come and help to pull him up?” and Ted’s eyes glistened more, and his jaws rattled with enthusiasm. And, of course, I had a word to say in approbation.
“Whatever are you putting such things into the boys’ heads for, Edward?”
But ere the Governor could answer mother, there was a shriek, followed by screams of “murder!” Mother half fainted. My heart stood still, if anyone’s ever did. Ted got under the table. It was even more than the Governor could stand. He gave a start and bumped the table.
“Dern the fellow!” he broke out, jumping to his feet. “What does he mean?”
Then off to the kitchen he hurried, Ted and I, despite mother’s entreaties to “stop here, boys,” crept excitedly after him.
“What th’ hang’s all this row about in here?” and flinging wide the kitchen door the Governor bounced in.
“He’s going to kill me, master, he is! he is!” And Mrs. Channing, her hair all down (though I can’t remember that it was ever all up), threw herself at his feet, sobbing, and embraced him round the knees. And old Harry certainly looked as if he was guilty, for there he stool in the centre of the floor with a huge American axe gripped firmly in both hands.
“Don’t believe her, boss; I weren’t goin’ to at all,” he declared.
“Then what are you doing with that axe?” Never had we heard the Governor in such voice or seen him tremble as he did with rage.
“I was puttin’ a edge on it, boss, so as to have it ready for th’ mornin’ ”—old Harry lifted a file from the table and tapped the face of the axe with it—“and she wanted me to stop it ’cause it give her a headache, and when I wouldn’t and she wouldn’t shut up talkin’ I said I would chop her head off with it—that wer’ all.”
“Woman! Let go my legs and get up out of that,” and the Governor had almost to kick himself free of Mrs. Channing. And though she relaxed her grip she remained kneeling and sobbing out fresh accusations against her husband. A heavy, slow moving man was Harry, of giant’s figure, with a scraggy, faded whisker and a big stomach that filled his coloured shirt and hung over his waist strap like a large pudding in a bag.
“Now look here, Channing,” and the Governor, his gray-granite eyes flashing, his arms stiffened and fists clenched, stood up to the dull-eyed, weak-hearted, hulking giant, “we’ve had enough of your mad squabbling, and for two pins I’d rouse the men out of their huts to drag you to the bank of the creek and rope you to a tree for the dingoes to feed on you, or the blacks to get you.”
Then to hear Harry begging mercy and promising on oath and word of honour never to offend again. Oh, my! Never was there anything so contemptuous, yet it was comedy, for I know that Ted and I could always look back upon it with outbreaks of mirth.
“No! I don’t see why they shouldn’t—and strip every stitch of clothes off you,” the Governor was thundering, when the “missus” jumped to her feet, and, only that he ducked in time, would have thrown her lean arms about his neck. Strong and weighty the Governor was, and he just shoved the “missus” from him with one hand like brushing away a fly.
“Don’t let them touch him, master—don’t,” and she made another grab at his neck. “Eustace would do anything to hurt Harry. He’s got a grouch against him. “Don’t let them take him, master! He didn’t want to kill me ... he didn’t at all … and he’s English, too, like you, master.”
Never did anyone look more disgusted than the old Governor. He eyed her in silence for a moment or two, then: “Pshaw! The pair of you ought to be dealt with.”
“But won’t y’ hang Harry, father?” Ted piped out disappointedly. And gee, how old Harry jumped round to see where the voice came from.
“Come away, boys,” and hustling the two of us out the door, the Governor banged it angrily, and went back to the dining-room.
Meantime, the governess in night attire had joined mother, and from the look in the face of big Mary, you’d think the homestead was being attacked by the blacks—which, by the way, did happen a few months later. But that is another story.
“Nothing the matter with them at all,” the Governor assured mother, with a smile. And sat at the table again.
Mother was thankful, and sighed in relief.
“They’d be sent off to live with the blacks, or do what they liked, if I was their master … disturbing people’s rest, and bringing them out of bed the way they do!” And big Mary gathered herself together and waddled back to bed again. Ted returned to the couch.
Then there was a long silence.
“It’s as bright and clear as day outside, Edward,” mother said, gazing dreamily through the open window into the moonlight, that soft, eerie, mystic moonlight of the bushland. And her voice seemed filled with sadness.
“We get some beautiful moonlights here, my dear,” the Governor said.
“The trees beside the creek, and the shadows out there beneath the mountain, do remind me of Warwickshire.”
“Yes—ah, yes! But I think it’s bedtime, my dear,” and the Governor rose from the table.
Nearly a year had passed, and still no rain other than a few shattered showers, which mostly fell about the homestead. Reports were plentiful, though, of “heavy downfalls” and “terrible big storms” way out, on Wild Bee Creek, or somewhere down along the Condamine. But they were only rumours, or the misinterpretations by stockmen of what members of aboriginal tribes roaming round on hunting expeditions had to say about the weather, or state of the country. And nothing that one knows of was more unreliable than “information” derived from the blacks concerning rain, grass, or the country.
So the drought continued to increase its grip upon the land. The days were hot and fierce—every new day seeming worse than the one before it. The creeks on most parts of Runnibede were rapidly giving out, necessitating mustering and removing of mobs to more favoured spots. Still they were hanging out pretty well, though what another couple of months would mean, no man just then could tell. But an inch or two of rain might fall any day, and settle all doubt and anxiety.
“I don’t know what to think of it. I’m sure,” I remember the Governor would say, when remarking on the outlook to Eustace and the other stockmen. “No one seeing this country a couple of years ago would have thought it possible for it to look as it does now.”
Eustace and Kearney, men somewhere in their thirties I suppose, then, and both natives of the colony, having first seen the light somewhere round Moreton Bay, would shake their heads and reckon the Runnibede country must have always been subject to droughts, and mighty big ones, except, they supposed, in odd seasons, when it must have rained mighty hard to make up for it. “And it must have been just at the end of one of those blanky good years,” they would tell the Governor, “that you first came and saw this place.” And often enough they would recite the fate of Burke and Wills, to prove “what sort of bloody country it must always have been as far west as a man could go.” Little they knew of it, to be sure. Though kings amongst horsemen and cattlemen, theirs wasn’t the spirit that the Governor could expect to find solace in.
But there was one other, Tom Merton, only a young chap then, of eighteen or nineteen, who always backed the Governor up. And what a favourite Tom was right from the first day he started work on Runnibede. I was at the store the morning he rode, up leading a pack-horse, to ask the Governor if there was any chance of a job of stock-riding.
“You’re a young looking chap,” the Governor said to him, “to be out this far looking for a job by yourself.”
“I can’t help that, Mr. Winchester,” he laughed— that pleasant laugh he always had, no matter what was happening—and he tilted back a big cabbage tree hat and showed those big grey eyes and freckled face of his. “I was quite young when I was born, y’ know.”
“Can you sit on a buck-jumper?” the Governor asked. “Oh, yes, sometimes,” and Tom laughed again. “But I’d much sooner sit on a quiet horse, or in the shade of a tree.” And I couldn’t explain how pleased I felt when the Governor told him to let his horses go and put his swag in the hut.
And when Eustace and Kearney were as wet blankets to the Governor, it was good to hear Tom Merton chaffing them, to give him a bit of hope and encouragement.
“Don’t you take any notice of them, Governor,” he would cheerfully advise, “they’ve only dreamed about it being a dry country out here. They’ve been used to inside, along the coast where the big waves are, and where there’s always plenty of wet. Can’t you tell that by their hard salt faces, and their flat, swampy feet, like the hooves on horses that are bred in the big swamps.” And Tom, himself, would laugh with the Governor. “But let me tell you,” he’d go on, “that my old man, old Jim Merton, who was no sea-gull, was two hundred miles west of this place thirty years ago, and there was always boggins of rains and grass that he used to lose his horses in.”
“Well, where th’ blaze has it all gone to, Tom?” Eustace, a pug-nosed, thick set, bow-legged, surly fellow would inquire through his nose.
“Sweet man,” a great expression of Tom Merton’s. “It’s taking a spell for a while, that’s all, and any day at all now, it won’t surprise me to see you fellows out on the run stripping off your shirts and pants and sticking them up a hollow log to keep them dry.”
But how Tom could use his head in the bush; his resourcefulness was almost uncanny, and there was no hole once into that he couldn’t find a way out of. There were few who could ride like him in the pine scrub, and how he could hurtle a horse down the sides of mountain ranges! The part he, played, and the way he rode those blacks down in rescuing Dorothy when the Cooby tribe kidnapped her, was the greatest thing ever done by man on Runnibede. And how she loved him! But that, too, is another story.
Though the homestead tanks had all gone dry and the creeks seemed as if they didn’t want to run any more, there still was Curlew Lagoon. And what a wonderful lagoon that was! I really wonder if in the best of seasons the Garden of Eden was ever anything like it. It was the most charming spot I have ever known. About two miles outside the home paddock boundary it spread itself, a broad, calm, silvery shimmering sheet of deep, clean water. Curlews out of number haunted it, screaming their dirges like the cries of a whole kingdom of lost souls. The Station Creek rising in the pine-clad ranges rippled into the northern end of it, and out again at the southern, to wind along on its way to join the Condamine. Here and there on its smooth surface you could see the splashes of fish, and many a huge cod, and swags of jew were hauled out of it. And around it the blacks often camped, swimming and fishing and holding their weird, wild corrobborees. Over the great rock-slides the thin smoke of their fires curled by day, and by night the sparks from them leaped high into the air. The trees growing along the water’s edge twisted about each other, and swayed in gentle motion as the soft, summer breezes crooned through their branches. All the wild animals and feathered tribes of the bushland made their way there, till Curlew Lagoon seemed the Mecca and centre of their universe. Wild ducks would rise from the seclusion of its reeds and lilies in such numbers that they looked like black storm clouds. And what a gorgeous sight it was when all the bright plumaged birds that gathered there were astir in the sun. And the armfuls and baskets of wild flowers and orchids and ferns that mother and Dorothy used to gather around its banks, in what profusion they must have been! They knew the names of all the varieties, too! Derned if ever I could remember one. The fragrance that came from those wild flowers and blossoms of the trees made one linger to inhale deep breaths of it. It was the very essence of poetry and perfume. Dingo scrub came right to the edge of the rock cliff that walled the western side, and what a place for pigeons! ’Twas a spot that made the bush endear itself to you—a spot right in the heart of the silences and solitudes of the bushland.
From Curlew Lagoon all the water required now for use at the homestead was drawn. That was work given to old Harry. Several times a week he went off with a small iron tank on a dray, and a nuggetty grey horse between the shafts; and all the way there and back Harry yapped and tugged at the mouth of that horse. A hollow-eyed rogue of a horse he was, too, that always kept himself in good condition on the fodder he rifled from the others. Had he been bred a man instead of a common grey horse he would more than likely have been a great success in business. he was a horse with moods. In some of his moods he would pull enough for three horses. In other moods he wouldn’t pull the hat off your head. When leaving the homestead with only old Harry and the empty tank on the dray he would crawl sulkily along, stopping at intervals to wait till Harry got down and humoured him, and led him along affectionately. But on the way back he would be in such a hurry to get home and be freed of the load and his worries, that Harry would have to run as best he could, under anatomical disadvantages, to keep with him. But the day “Tommy,” as Harry called him, jibbed with a load of wood on the other side of the Station Creek—oh! that was a comedy! How he managed it I don’t know, but Harry induced, or seduced, a couple of stalwart aboriginals belonging to the tribe that paid visits to Curlew lagoon—chaps about twenty-five or thirty, who, through the Governor’s friendly attitude to them, were gaining confidence in the whites and getting pretty tame—to accompany him for the load of wood. They were tall, lithe niggers, as black as the ace of spades, and naked as the day they were born. The wonder was, as Eustace and others afterwards said, they didn’t knock old Harry on the head. Perhaps they didn’t think him worth while, or they were not hungry. Anyway, they didn’t. Instead, they enjoyed the dray-ride over the creek, and said things to Harry when he said things to them, no word of which he or they understood. All the same, they followed old Harry’s example when he started to load the dray with fire-wood. Like big black school-boys they entered into the fun of it with the spirit of rivalry. In no time there was a load of iron-bark and box-wood stacked on the dray that would have made a couple of horses much more willing than Tommy scratch pretty hard to shift it far. Then Harry ordered a stop-work, and throwing a rope this way and that way over the load, twitched it tight in several places. By making signs and gesticulating at the grinning abos., he managed to make them understand that they could ride on top of the load if they wished. Nothing could have pleased them more. They climbed over the wheel and on to the top like twin Mephistopheles, and sat there showing their splendid teeth, and making their own jokes as they grinned down at old Harry and Tommy.
“Now then, stick tight up there, you black skins,” said old Harry, taking the reins and starting to turn Tommy and the loaded dray in the direction of home. But he might as well have told those blacks to tumble off and break their necks for all the difference it would have made to their understanding. Anyway, when Tommy wheeled to the right about and scratched and strained and grunted for a yard or so, he stopped trying and gave in with a definite purpose. His purpose was to pull not another stroke until that load of wood was reduced and lightened to his liking. But horses in harness, like humans, don’t always attain their objective. Though old Harry did his best to urge Tommy into further effort by belting him with the double of the reins, and kicking him on his full belly with an ugly crinkled boot, and using insulting language, the grey horse remained obdurate, and stubbornly stood his ground. But, when old Harry anathematised Tommy’s pedigree and relations, and profanely mentioned things that really had nothing to do with the case, the nuggetty grey shook his head violently and cow-kicked under the shaft at his tormentor. Seeing his mistake, old Harry resorted to coaxing. But, being a horse with principle and pride, Tommy wasn’t to be degraded with smooge. Then old Harry seemed to think he had lowered his own prestige by smooging, especially when it wasn’t effective, and taking up a long waddy he broke it into small pieces against Tommy’s back and his rump and against the harness. Combo and Curricomb, as the two niggers afterwards became known, had all this time risen to the occasion. They were showing their appreciation of the position by standing upright on the load like bronze gladiators, holding each other with one arm, while with the other they did to the atmosphere what Harry was doing to the horse. In addition, they let out yells that rent the heavens, and were echoed back from the silent gorges of the home mountain. With perspiration rolling off his angered features, old Harry looked up for a moment or two at his joyous helpmates. “Oh! none of that b—y row up there,” he objected, forgetting that, unlike himself, they hadn’t been educated, “but get down and go round to the other side and give th’ cow a kick.” But all that Combo and Curricomb did in response was point two long black fingers of scorn at the grey then laugh the rich mirth of their tribe, and out of excessive joy with themselves and their new job, embraced each other till they nearly overbalanced.
“Well, if y’ can’t be any other dam use —” snorted old Harry in disgust, “keep your eyes on him till I go and cut one of them saplin’s over there. I’ll make the — go!” Whereon he took the axe from its place on the dray and strode off. The niggers, seeing him depart, suddenly exchanged serious words and looks. Disregarding his injunctions, they descended from the load and pursued him. Harry only became aware of their action when, as he was cutting the sapling, Combo peered curiously over his shoulder like Dick Whittington s cat.
“Why, dammit,” old Harry said, “didn’t I tell y’ to stay an’ keep a eye on him?” They said nothing in reply that afforded him any help or information.
Taking up the sapling just as it had fallen, Harry started back to the dray. Anticipating him, the blacks raced ahead, and up on to the load again they climbed like two gorillas. They seemed to think they had risked the chances of losing their box seats. They marked their joy at recovering them by once more awakening the echoes of the home mountain with their unearthly yells. For a moment or two old Harry, holding the sapling with both hands, stood contemplating the jib in an undecided sort of way. Finally, he thrust the bushy top beneath his flanks. Whether from the unexpectedness of it, or the rustle of the leaves, or what it was, I don’t know, but Tommy plunged in violent action like a horse gone mad, rose on his hind legs, plunged again, swung round and capsized everything, including himself and the wildly joyous niggers, into a gully that was lying in wait nearby. Who it was, the grey or the blacks or Harry himself, that got the biggest surprise would be hard to say, but true it is Tommy came out of the gully free of the shafts and stripped of all his harness except the winkers, and a fragment of the reins, and away he bolted. Combo and Curricomb, after reaching the bottom of the gully into which they had been forced, disentangled their ebony limbs, then sprang to their feet and regarded the bewildered Harry for a moment, as though they suspected him of playing them a dirty trick. But all that Harry had in mind was the flying steed, after whom he waved his two hands, and cursed shamelessly. Whether from a sense of understanding, or the inherent love of pursuit and capture, or the sudden determination not to be done out of their joy-ride, it is hard to say, but one quick glance at the absconding grey, then swift as eagles and noisy as hounds those blacks pursued him—pursued him in all their glossy nudity to the very verandah of the station store, where the Governor and big Mary Rumble and mother were holding converse … but my stars! It calls for the old Governor himself to tell the rest of the happening for it to be fully appreciated.
Mid-day. A fierce, sweltering mid-day it was, too, in November. Joe, Eustace, Kearney, Tom Merton and Warabah had gone off down Station Creek early that morning to keep the cattle from boxing with a mob of bullocks—a thousand head—that had come over from New South Wales and were crossing Runnibede on their way to Bowen Downs. The drover in charge had sent one of his hands on ahead the evening before to ask the Governor’s permission to water the mob at Curlew Lagoon. To do this they had to travel seven miles off their route and to divide into two mobs.
“That travelling mob can’t be far off the lagoon now,” the Governor remarked to mother, as he finished an early lunch, “so I’ll jog off down and see what they look like.”
“I’d like to go with you and see them, too, Edward,” mother said, “but it’s so hot to-day, and I’ve a lot to do this afternoon, and the sight of the country just now only makes one sad.”
At other times she rode out with the Governor when there was something special to see, or a part of the run to visit that was new to her.
A good seat on a horse, and good hands had mother, with a lot more nerve than one would expect to find in one so sweet and so gentle. And the brown blood mare, Kenilworth, that she always rode was a beauty. Yet, I’ve often wondered since then how she, or any woman, could ride at all in the old abominable side-saddle! But she could; and never gave much thought to the risks she often ran from the saddle rolling under the horse’s belly; or her riding habit catching on tree stumps and brambles; or herself getting stuck in the horns if anything went wrong. On the other hand, I suppose mother would have been horrified at the very suggestion of riding astride. And I know the first time that one of the black gins was seen straddling a horse it became the joke of the station for long enough. But human prejudices and human ideas of what is modest or immodest, proper or improper, seem to change with the periods.
So putting on his hat and buckling a pair of spurs to his heels, the Governor strode across to the stable to get old Hyperion, a solid grey cob that no one but himself ever rode. But if the truth would out, I must confess that Ted and I—before Ted was sent away to the Grammar School in Brisbane—took quite a lot of turns out of him on the quiet. Few big logs were lying about the homestead, I fancy, that we didn’t put Hyperion over more than once; and what a jumper he was! Mighty big pine and ironbark logs, most of them were, too, that no “clouting” could shift. And at them he would go, his ears pricked, looking straight ahead, then a couple of short strides and—over! And by gad, he’d go up so high sometimes, that when he landed we’d be astride his neck. We double-banked him for a change, one day; and putting him at two big logs not more than twenty yards from each other, he took the second before we had regained our balance after negotiating the first, and jumped both of us from the saddle on to our heads. Mother and the old Governor, I remember, sat up all night treating Ted for a “touch of the sun.” How far astray they were in their diagnosis, they, of course, never knew—but just as far as the sun was from the ground.
But about the Governor; he had his arm in the reins, leading Hyperion from the stable, and was pencilling some memoranda in a notebook, when school came out for lunch.
“Well, Miss Rumble?” he smiled, “how are these young savages getting along?” Zulu and Tar-pot he referred to. “Are they making much progress in mathematics or at speaking English?”
“At speaking English they are, Mr. Winchester,” the governess laughed, “but I don’t know who’s teaching it all to them—I’m sure I’m not.”
“This little rascal here, I suppose?” And the Governor squeezed Dorothy’s sharp little nose with his finger and thumb, as she pressed her rosy cheek against Hyperion’s shoulder.
“No, indeed it’s not, for what they know is far too advanced for Dorothy.”
The Governor eyed the two little darkies.
“What can you fellows say in English?” Not understanding, Zulu and Tar-pot merely looked pleasant and scratched holes in the sand with their bare toes.
Then big Miss Rumble took them in hand.
“You, Zulu—you. Tar-pot,” said she, “talk English,” and she moved her lips in dumb fashion to give them the cue.
“Gov’nor big ass,” responded Zulu, in a tenor voice.
“Gov’nor him fool,” came gruffly from Tar-pot.
The Governor dropped his notebook, he got such a surprise, while the shrieks of the Governess echoing round the homestead scared all the crows.
“Ooh, you young monkeys, that’s naughty to say that!” and Dorothy held up her finger to them.
“Gov’nor, ass,” repeated Zulu, a note higher, and “Gov’nor, fool,” croaked Tar-pot, a tone lower.
“Just so,” the old Governor nodded amusedly at Tar-pot, and throwing the reins over Hyperion’s head, mounted and started to ride away. But he had only gone a few paces when Ted, standing aloof, taking no interest in Zulu and Tar-pot “talking English,” burst into blubbers, and bellowed like a calf being branded with a hot iron. The Governor stopped the horse and turned half-round.
“Can’t we go, too, father, and see the mob?” blubbered Ted, while I remained downcast and miserable looking. In fact, we had pestered the Governor up to bed-time the evening before for leave to go and see the travelling mob being watered at Curlew Lagoon, and so renewed the appeal again that morning; had, in fact, gone off breakfast, fretting over it. So between Ted’s tears and bellows, and my look of utter misery, the Governor weakened at the last moment. We had an idea he would.
“Very well, then,” he said, “if Miss Rumble will let you out of school half-an-hour earlier, you can go. The mob will be camped about the lagoon all night, so you needn’t be in any great hurry.”
That was all we wanted. And whether big Mary was willing to let us out of the infernal school half-an-hour earlier, or whether she wasn’t, we didn’t wait to inquire. We bolted for the big house, and rushing inside, hustled Mrs. Channing to get our lunch.
“You’ll get it when ’tis ready for y’, and not a minute before! Great men you’re getting,” was all the notice Mrs. Channing took of us. But when it was ready, never did youths, or men for that matter, dispose of a meal in less time or require less waiting upon in the process than we. In face of mother’s kindly injunctions to take our time, we veritably poked it down with our fists; and in grave silence eyeing the other across the table.
When we had taken enough to go on with, we suddenly remembered that our ponies “hadn’t had a drink yet.” We remembered them, because it was a rule that we were never to leave the table till everyone else had finished. But mother stretched a point in the interests of the ponies, and off we rushed, nearly upsetting Mrs. Channing as she came from the kitchen; then bounding off the verandah we scrambled over the top of the big white gate to save time, then down to the stable. And there, faithfully waiting with their heads over the stall rails, those ponies greeted us with short affectionate whinnies. Wonderful what friendly, forgiving natures have horses! And when I think back, how much superior in spirit those ponies were to ourselves, dumb and subordinated and all as they were! ’Twas with their heels, not with their hearts, that they should often enough have greeted us young beggars. And if we had been allowed to have everything our own way, I fancy those ponies would never have been out of the stalls, except when they had us on their backs. What cricket, “footy,” hoops, pictures, shop windows, cigarettes, chew gum and the rest are to city youths, so is the horse to the bush youngster. So we talked patronizingly to them; patted and stroked them from nose to heels, as we thrilled with the pride of ownership and fancied heroism. Then we took down our spurs from the rafters, where they were kept in hiding, and buckled them with care and pride to the heels of our boots. Our spurs were old, rusty pairs that had been discarded by the stockmen; but the rowels that were still in them were sharp enough to make those ponies fairly jump out of their skins. And on occasions they’d draw blood, too.
Having adjusted my spurs so that they wouldn’t turn back to front, or drop off. I thought I’d give White Wings a drink before saddling her. And what a model saddle I had for a kid, too! English made it was, of course. A steel tree, pigskin seat, small knee pads and thigh pads; strong and light, and with a double girth and surcingle. And Ted’s was of similar pattern. Gad, when I think of it, how indulgent the old Governor was with us boys. Lots of youths in the bush to-day are glad enough to ride about bareback, and with a greenhide bridle that they make themselves to guide the moke with. But that kind of gear wouldn’t have suited us.
“You can give yours a drink if you like,” Ted said in a worldly-wise sort of way, as he shoved the saddle on Wallaroo, “but I won’t give mine. It makes them too full, and gives them gripes after a gallop.”
So instead of carrying water to them from the tank, we tightened the girths, then got into the saddles to build castles in the air and rest ourselves. It was much more comfortable lolloping in our saddles than sitting on the floor of the stall; besides, there was something romantic about it. Indeed, we were so contented with ourselves that we dozed into slumber and lay there with our cheeks on the animals’ withers and our arms around their necks.
“Jim and Ted!”
It was the voice of Dorothy; and it woke us up.
“School’s gone in. The teachers’s waiting for you. She sent me to tell you. You’ll get it!”
“Been in how long, Dorothy?” we asked, scrambling to adjust the bridles, and in dread lest we had slumbered for hours, and missed the mob at Curlew Lagoon.
“Ever so long.” And Dorothy ran back to school. Then down dropped the rails, and away flew Ted and I, rattling down the dusty track, hands, heels and heads working as we raced for Curlew Lagoon. Pulled up in a few short strides at the home paddock gate; threw it open; closed it, and off again. Half a mile down we overtook old Harry on the water-cart, going to the lagoon for water, his second trip that day. We yelled like Red Indians for his benefit, and startled Tommy, the dray-horse. Then we reined up in a few short props on either side the water-cart, and cheeked old Harry; asked him why he didn’t grease the cart-wheels, and advised him to get down and walk to take the fat off himself.
“Now both y’ get on away from here, wherever you be goin’,” Harry roared angrily, “or I’ll get down and lift both of you off they ponies.”
Then out of the fullness of our joy we jeered him, and Ted, riding close to Tommy and reaching for his head, said, “I’m goin’ to pull the winkers off him and let him go.”
Old Harry roared “whoa!” and stopped the dray. Then he called Ted and me “a pair of young imps,” and started to get off the dray.
“When you catch us, Harry,” we yelled. And putting spurs to the ponies, we raced on again, standing in the stirrups to give Harry a full view of our backs and increase his wrath by our impudence.
So at full speed we arrived at Curlew lagoon: and not a sign was there of the travelling mob, nor was the Governor anywhere about. Riding round to the edge of the granite wall overlooking the lagoon and affording a view of the vast valley through which the dry creek bed lay in curves and bends, we sat up in the saddles and cooeed. No one answered. But a flight of wild duck rose from the water and what a swarm there was! And great pelicans with their long bills floated gracefully out from the reeds and rushes. “By gad!” we sighed, “if we only had guns!”
We cooeed again, and the heads of black divers and turtle bobbed up inquisitively from beneath the blue water. Shy waterhens called to their mates and fluttered close in to the high bank for safety. And up in the trees overhanging the water, gay plumaged parrots, jabbering among the blossoms, lifted their heads and screamed.
Concluding that the Governor must have gone on down the creek to meet the mob there, we fastened the ponies to the branch of a tree and started out to hunt round the lagoon and kill time till the travelling bullocks would come along. Hardly had we fastened the reins when two curlews rose suddenly from the ground, and with spread wings flew at us aggressively. We knew at once that their nest was somewhere thereabouts, else our presence wouldn’t concern them so. Then we became bent on finding it, no matter if there were a hundred curlews weeping and flapping their wings at us. So, while the two old birds stood a short distance away on their long thin legs, watching us anxiously, we hunted round and jumped about like two bloodhounds.
“Here it is! I found it! It’s mine! Three eggs!” And Ted dropped to his knees amongst some short brown grass tufts that afforded but little shelter for a nest of any kind.
I leaned over the back of him and viewed the find.
“Look out! Keep them old beggars away!” he shouted, as the parent birds, half-running, half flying, advanced to the attack again.
I threw my hat at the enemy, and leaned over Ted again.
“There’s a chicken in one! Look at ’im moving, Jim! It’s kickin’—it’s comin’ out! Look at it!”
Curiously enough, and as much as I have been in the bush since then, I never had the opportunity of seeing it happen again—the egg shell suddenly divided, and to our astonishment, that young curlew took to its long legs and ran in search of cover, stopping every few yards, looking about suspiciously, and exhibiting all the fear and scent of danger of an experienced bird. We refrained from pursuing or aiming missiles at the lanky, moist-looking little fugitive, and to our honour, let it be recorded for once, anyway, we did no harm to the other two eggs.
Going further afield, we gave chase to a family of young ducks; tricky, cute little beggars they were, too! They dodged in and out of the water and under the banks, and played hide and seek with us amongst the clumps of reeds, until, tiring of them, we left them to themselves. Then we got down on our knees and groped under the water’s edge for mussels, and when we had collected a supply, stood and pelted them at the nose of every turtle that showed above water. Fed up with this diversion, we turned our attention to an inoffensive jew lizard that lay sleeping on a log. We woke him up by taking hold of his tail and swinging him round and round. Then we heaved him into the lagoon to ascertain if he could swim. He swam back to the bank as fast as if he had an oil engine inside him. And Ted and I made a note of the fact that when he came out of the water he wasn’t wet.
Abandoning the jew lizard, we looked over the bank and saw the mob of bullocks coming into view —a dark mass moving slowly over the brow of Pinnacle Ridge.
“Here they come!” and back to the ponies we cut like redshanks. On to their backs again, and off round the bend of the creek. In and out of the deep gullies, around another bend, and pulling up short in front of Tom Merton and Warabah. They were riding in advance of the mob to clear away any station cattle that might be about.
“Any cattle on the lagoon when you passed, you young blackguards?” Tom inquired mirthfully.
“None,” we told him, “only a jew lizard.”
“All right, then—the pair of you keep along with us, and don’t get too close to any of the mob, or they’ll make jew lizards of you. What do you think, Warabah?”
“My word,” Warabah grinned, showing his white regular teeth, “stickit a horn in little fella horses all a same time, and pitch dem alonga moon,” and the gentlemanly aboriginal, for such was Warabah, looked up at the sky and chuckled.
A low, rumbling muttering—a weird sort of gladness came from the foremost of the mob, and almost instantly was echoed by the others. Then out of a walk they all broke into a trot.
“They smell the water, Warabah. They’re making for it,” Tom Merton called out. And in a few seconds the first division had quickened pace, the strong outpacing the weak. And what a herd they were! Great bodied beasts with dusty skins; wild staring eyes; red, white and black; roan spotted and starred; spear-horned, hoop-horned, cock-horned and curly; some with one horn; others with broken shattered horns; all of them hollow as could be. Over the black soil bank that looked down on the clean deep water of Curlew Lagoon, the leaders surged. Suddenly they halted, surprised, and stood staring with their heads held square. Something had arrested them.
“What the deuce is there?” asked Tom Merton, who, knowing they were looking at some object strange to them, raised himself in the stirrups to get a better view.
“Ol’ a Harry been there with it water tank. Big fool!” Warabah discovered.
“Mighty! They’ll smother him, dray and all, if he don’t get out quick!” and putting spurs to his horse, Tom, followed by Warabah, Ted and me, galloped to the head.
“Put out of that for your life, there’s a thousand bullocks on top of you!” Tom shouted, as old Harry hanging over the tail of the dray, was hauling up a bucket of water to pour into the tank. And what a fright he got! He had no knowledge that a mob of travellers were going to be watered there, to say nothing of their being right upon him!
Tom and Warabah swung round in the face of the staring leaders, and got to work with the stockwhips; but nothing short of quick-firing guns could now keep those bullocks, several days without water, back. And though Tom shouted to him, and Warabah shouted to him, and Ted and I chipped in, old Harry had scarcely time to drop the empty bucket and look round, before bullocks, moaning, muttering bullocks, four deep, eight deep and twenty deep, were plunging and ploughing into the water, churning, slobbering it, and hustling and squeezing and poking one another on both sides and all round the dray. Tommy, the grey horse, took alarm, and swinging blindly round into the water, hooked the reins on the hoop-horns of a red bullock. The brute bellowed and plunged to free itself of them. But the others paid no attention to his troubles.
More and more of them poured down the embankment, running up and down and all round that great lagoon seeking a place to stick their snouts. It soon was difficult to distinguish the horse and dray amongst the seething mass. Gad, it was a sight! And it took the breath out of Ted and me. Then along came the Governor and the drover in charge, at a hand-gallop, calling out, “What’s up? What’s the matter?”
They soon saw what was up, and what they didn’t see Ted and I took delight in pointing out to them. But beyond sitting on their horses and shouting words of advice to Harry, they were unable to afford him any help. Harry, fearing the dray would be shoved over, struck all round at the nearest bullocks with the empty buckets.
He struck the spear horn of one with it, and the bucket became impaled on it, and Harry, overreaching, nearly fell out of the dray trying to rescue it.
Ted and I yelled joyously to the Governor “to look at the bucket on the red fellow’s horns.” But I remember that the Governor looked very sour at Ted. Handicapped with the shafts and his harness, and with bullocks raking him hip and thigh and ribs and shoulder with their horns as they shoved their heads under him and over him and around him in their thirst, the wretched horse, Tommy, plunged and reared, and fought desperately for life. Poor Harry perched himself on the tank, which wasn’t much higher than the guard-iron, and occupied three-fourths of the dray, and gazed distractedly at the mass of horned heads on every side of him. Reaching out above his head and drooping over the water was the stout limb of an aged gum tree.
“Have you a rope?” the Governor shouted to him. “If you have, fasten it to the limb above your head and hold fast to it. They might upset the dray!” Poor old Harry heard every word, and looking up and seeing the limb, clumsily stood on the tank and clutched it with both hands as though it were a human being or a gold mine. “Put your belt around it, Harry,” Tom Merton called. “You’ve got one on.” Harry unbuckled his belt, and putting it round the limb, hung on like a passenger to a strap in a tram-car. Tommy meantime, finding the pressure easing a little, made further desperate plunges; and as the dray came after him, the wheels went down into several feet of water. But laws, what a predicament it put poor old Harry in! The tank went too far forward, and left him hanging by the strap from the limb with his feet eight inches or so off the bed of the dray.
“We can’t do anything for him,” the Governor, almost in tears, said to the drover. But another plunge and the brave Tommy got free of the shafts. Then out rang yells and shouts of joy as the grey horse went swimming round amongst the cattle. But with that first plunge of Tommy’s the dray went right away from old Harry into deep water, and there in the air he hung above the backs of the bullocks! And as he hung he kicked—why, in the name of everyone, he kicked, I never could understand—and as he kicked, his boots and grimy moleskin pants, in the absence of the belt, kept slip-slip-slipping till they slipped right down and fell off on to the back of a beast.
“Goodness, look at that!” the Governor said solemnly. Warabah yelled the wild mirth of his lost tribe, and Ted and I, pointing to the unhappy Harry, joined in with him. “Confound it, boys!” the Governor shouted to us, “what do you mean by jeering?”
“There’s nothing else for him, now, Governor,” Tom Merton called out. “He’ll have to let go and fall amongst them, and take a chance.” Everyone else seemed breathless.
“Let go, Harry, and drop on them,” Tom shouted, as he and Warabah made a further effort to flog a way through the bullocks.
Then old Harry let go, and fell flop and heavily on the backs of heaven only knows how many bullocks. Holy wars! Didn’t we get excited. Where those bullocks thought Harry had come from, no one could tell. And when at the thud and feel of him, they struggled and heaved and bumped together, and made a water upheaval, you’d think old Harry was riding on a tidal wave. But for once anyway, his luck was in, for his two bare legs slipped between two hairy bodies, one each side the same body, and to his grim astonishment, and the astonishment of all of us, he was sitting astride a black bullock with tremendous horns. But when the black bullock stopped drinking, and began fighting his way back through the crush, Harry’s legs kept getting in the way of horns that were not on the head of his mount. And as soon as the black brute found room enough he came out from the ruck at a run, then buck, unloaded old Harry beside a log, then turned round and bellowed vindictively at him. Laws! How Tom Merton rushed his horse on to that bullock and sent him spinning, big framed and all that he was! But old Harry, with just enough life left in him, had rolled under the log in time, and so saved himself.
That night, after tea, Ted and I had a lot to tell mother and big Mary Rumble about the watering of the travelling mob at Curlew Lagoon—a lot more than I can remember now.
Following upon Combo and Curricomb’s adventure with Old Harry and the load of wood, other aboriginals grew bolder and began to come round the homestead. Shy as a lot of kids they were, and for some time suspicious of everyone and of everything that was done. The Governor wasn’t long, though, in making friends with those children of Cain and wanderers of the bush. He gave them supplies of food and all the discarded clothes on the station, and now and again a blanket or two. But I remember he often regretted ever having introduced clothing amongst them at all. They were a hardier and healthier people, he reckoned, without them. The clothes were not sufficient to cover their skins comfortably, and made them sensitive and susceptible to cold and heat, and vain as white people. They brought colds and coughs amongst some of them, changed their natures, and in time impaired their constitutions by taking the toughness out or them and weakening their powers of resistance.
It was wonderful how quickly the Governor acquired a knowledge of their language, and in a short while used to “yabber” for hours with Combo and Curricomb and “Captain,” interrogating them on all sorts of things, sawing the air with his hands, and slapping himself on the thighs, and grunting and barking, in suiting the action to the word, and the word to the action. It wasn’t long before those blackfellows fairly worshipped the Governor, and if ever man was a guide, mentor and friend to anyone in this world, “Missa Guvnor,” as they called him, was to those blacks of Runnibede. But to Ted and me, for long enough, “King Henry of Curlew Lagoon,” the Governor afterwards crowned him, and “Combo” and “Curricomb” and “The Captain” and all the rest of the tribe, with their nakedness, and their “war wounds” and scars, and high cheek bones and black eyes, and flat noses and thick matted hair, were just plain savages, who would knock us on the head as soon as look at us, and roast and eat us as they would a ’possum. They appeared to us in our dreams, yabbering and brandishing spears and boomerangs and nulla nullas, and gave us nightmares, in the throes of which we would wake the whole house up, yelling blue murder, and shouting for father. Gad! it took Ted and me a long time to become reconciled to those barefooted, sleeky skinned barbarians of the Australian bush, and to take them to our tents as long lost uncles and cousins. But when we did, we too became fond of them.
Mother, too, took a human interest in the black gins. She even become more perfect, I fancy, than the Governor in speaking their dialect. And one day, I remember, she discovered, when one from the Dawson tribe wandered into the station, that different dialects were spoken, and that they might as well have tried to converse with each other in German.
But the day she and big Mary Rumble lured the three lubras, wives of Combo, Curricomb, and the “Captain,” into the big house to show them what it was like, and to advance their ideas of civilised life, one could never forget. The gins had paid a call to the homestead, in company with their gallant husbands, who were loaded up with offerings of wild honey, and ’possum skins, and spears and boomerangs. The Governor sat on the store verandah, after accepting the gifts, discoursing with them on the moon and the stars, the kangaroos, and dry water holes, while mother and the governess took charge of the lubras. It was, of course, the first home those simple-minded black gins had ever put foot in—unless their own wretched gunyahs of a couple of sheets of bark propped slantways against each other, could be called a home. And all the covering they had to their bodies were strips of ’possum tied round their waists, suggesting a girdle. They were very light on clothes, those gins, and couldn’t have been very costly wives. When they mounted the verandah of the big house, they stood rubbing their flat bare feet over the boards, as if astonished at the smoothness of them. Then in quick, timid, glances, they looked curiously about in at the open door, as if suspecting it was a mysterious sort of cave, or place of captivity. After much coaxing and caution on the part of mother and Mary Rumble the nude, straight-limbed visitors entered slowly on the heels of each other, pausing at every step—and what light, silent, angelic steps they—to stretch their necks and peer this way and that like emus. Visions of sinewy symmetry they were, yet with eyes and nostrils of wild horses. And then to hear the hosts endeavouring to assure those shy, wild women of the bush, in pigeon English, and by making signs with their hands and their heads, that everything was quite all right, that they needn’t be afraid, was more enjoyable than any comedy. But laws! what a surprise Ted and I got when, from the sofa where we were doing penance by having to learn pages of history, we saw those ladies stealing in with only ’possum skin girdles on them. Gee!
“Will you boys please go on with your books, and behave yourselves?” Mother frowned at us. Mother would always have us keep silent and proper in the home when she had visitors. No sooner were the gins right inside, gazing at every bit of furniture with the bewildered glances of yarded brumbies, than grandfather’s clock began to strike the hour. Heavens! Mrs. Combo and Mrs. Curricomb and Mrs. Captain must have thought it was the voice of Old Nick. They let out a wild whoop and tried to get out of the house, but in their bewilderment couldn’t find a hole anywhere to go out by, for the door had closed. If they had suspicions before, they were positive now, that they were trapped. For a moment their eyes rolled wildly about in their sockets, their tight held lips projected, then in an outburst of violent yabbering they exchanged views with each other on the situation, and while they yabbered they shook and trembled all over. And it’s different watching women who’ve only got a ’possum skin girdle on, trembling all over, to what it is watching those who are covered in petticoats and things—so Ted and I found out. And how we ourselves shook with mirth behind those history books. Often have I wondered since if our merriment really helped to allay or increase the fears of those simple women. But when mother hurriedly opened the grandfather’s clock and no devil or anything in human or animal form jumped out of it, and when she crossed the room and threw up the window, and made all sorts of childish displays of good feeling, the gins calmed down and took fresh confidence. So much so, that after a while the knick-knacks and attractive ornaments that Big Mary took from the shelves and placed in their hands to admire and enjoy, were regarded as gifts; and they stacked them in their arms, so as they wouldn’t forget them when leaving. Gad, didn’t mother and Big Mary look concerned when they realised the simple intentions of their dark guests! And how happy Ted and I felt about it all!
“Oh, you not been take them home with you,” Big Mary informed them, shaking her head gravely, while mother, forgetting that her speech, like Big Mary’s pigeon English, was double Dutch to them, added, “No, my dears, you must put them all back on the shelves again.” Laws, didn’t Ted and I shriek! Instead of putting them back on the shelves again, one of the gins stuck a silver pepper pot in her girdle, as if it were a tomahawk she was taking care of.
“You can’t take-it that home with you,” repeated Big Mary. “You only to look at them—they stop here—they belonga Missus.” Oh, dear! What a pantomime it was, watching those gins yielding up the “present” reluctantly and sulkily. The look of disappointment on their faces was beautiful. It was like giving a baby your watch to amuse itself with, then telling it you wanted the jewellery returned, and having to force it out of its hands at the same time. And in their simplicity, those wild women were little more than babies. For only after much smiling and coaxing and sisterly persuasion on the part of the governess, was Mrs. Curricomb, who had sandy hair and red eyes, induced to disgorge the Governor’s silver-mounted tobacco box; then the lady gave a most weird exhibition of wailing over the loss of it that ever Ted and I heard. We had listened to dogs lamenting, and native bears weeping, but the moans and lamentations of Mrs. Curricomb gave us more joy than the efforts of all such things put together.
As the moment went by, though, the guests seemed to forget their disappointments and to gain more confidence in their hosts and in themselves. They moved freely about the room, sitting, or rather squatting—first in one chair, then in another; peeping under the table and behind the window curtains —our windows were then draped with the richest Venetian brocade—and even to closely scrutinising Ted and me, and grinning broadly upon us. And at one stage, while mother was decorating the three of them with necklaces of glass beads, Mrs. Captain and Mrs. Combo, both brunettes with bobbed hair, barbered with a lighted fire stick as was the fashion, stood so close to the sofa that the back muscles of their sinewy limbs were nearly touching Ted and me. Whether it was telepathy or what the inspiration I really don’t know, but each of us at the same moment conceived the same happy piece of villainy, and put it to the test at the same instant. Each of us took a pin from the breast of our coat and jabbed it into the fleshy part of the unsuspecting ladys nearest us—Mrs. Combo getting the benefit of my pin, and Mrs. Captain the full measure of Ted’s. Great kangaroos! how they jumped, at the same time! They bumped against mother and Big Mary, and sent them kicking on the floor. Then how they yelled (Mrs Combo and Mrs. Captain I mean, not mother and Mary Rumble). And they glared about the room in search of the hidden dog, or whatever it was they suspected had bitten them, while mother and the governess looked as if they weren’t sure that the bump wasn’t part of a planned attack on their lives. Their sudden alarm, however, was as suddenly dispersed, when, strange as it might seem, Mrs. Curricomb (she with the sandy hair and red eyes), displaying a gallant and sisterly spirit, helped mother to her feet again; then, by gesture and wild demonstrative language, upbraided the other two for their clumsiness and lack of good breeding—at least, that’s how Ted and I interpreted her. All the same, we deemed it discreet to appear composed and innocent looking through it all, a fraudulent frame of mind that was difficult to sustain.
Either Mrs. Curricomb possessed a sense of humour that was lacking in her black sisters, or else she had a deeper curiosity and a greater desire to find things out for herself. Whichever it was, she kept running her red, restless eyes over the white women’s skirts which in those days trailed the floor and kept their ankles and legs a secret. And while Big Mary, with her back turned to the company, was restoring an ornament of some kind to its place on the mantelpiece, Mrs. Currieomb crossed over to her and, bending down, calmly lifted her dress, revealing a back view of the governess’s thick stockinged legs and two gaping holes in the stockings! Then poor old Mary, feeling something, nearly knocked the whole mantelpiece down, she jumped so high.
Just then, the old Governor, mounting the front verandah at the moment, and poking his head in at the window, spoilt everything.
“Here are three jealous husbands waiting out here for their better halves,” he said, “to take them home.”
Simultaneously from the steps rang out a chorus of wild sounding mandates to which the lubras inside answered in humble rigmaroles of gutteral noises. Then, in haste to obey their dear lords, the ladies would have departed through the window, but for the Governor blocking the way. So mother opened the door for them. They didn’t offer any thanks for the pleasant afternoon, or say good-bye to anyone; just “bucked,” rather than walked out, and joining their stalwart, black visioned hubbies, who carried long spears balanced on their naked shoulders, went off noisily to their camp on Curlew Lagoon
In after years the three lubras became known to everyone as Annie, Sally and Maria; and never, as we shall find later, had woman a more faithful, devoted trinity of friends than had our mother in those wild and simple-minded women of the bush, who for years loyally served and loved her as their own “White Mary.”
It was sunset—a brilliant sunset that mocked the parched, drought-gripped earth; strips and streaks and streams of it were slashed across a violet sky. Also beautiful, yet so heartless, so hopeless! God! the earth was crying for rain! Rain! No one wanted glorious sunsets—no one then wanted sun of any kind—the sun was hell!
And it was then that the Governor, with Warabah jogging along behind him, came into view at the wild lime trees inside the home paddock gate, and neither of them, I fancy, turned in the saddle to admire the sunset. They rode along slowly, heeling their tired, weary horses at every stride, for the animals were pretty well done in—so were they themselves. Nothing in the bush world takes more out of you than the last stage of a long, hard ride. And the Governor and Warabah were at the end of a very hard ride. They had been away a week and more at Brisbane, where the Governor had gone to interview his banker and the stock agents. They returned in two days, covering 220 miles as the crow flies. But at Westbrook Station they were given fresh horses by McLean, a friend of the Governor’s; so, leaving their own there to rest and to be looked after, got them again when returning. How those early squatters assisted each other! They were as brothers, and always ready to help one another over the stile. Gad! how excited Ted and Dorothy and I were when we saw the Governor coming! Didn’t we rush to greet him at the stable! You’d think he had been absent from home for a year or two. Of course, we knew he’d never think of returning from Brisbane, even if he had to walk and lead the horse, without bringing something or other for us. And this time his valise was heavily packed. We attached a lot of importance to that valise too. All of us wanted to carry it into the big house for him lest it might be forgotten, or some unseen person suddenly appear and run with it. And we all wanted to carry it at the same time— neither of us could trust the other with it. So the Governor himself, to some extent, settled our apprehensions by saying “Let me!” and hoisted it up on to his shoulder. And, laws! when we had time to look at Warabah, what a swell he was! Tweed trousers and flaring red shirt, a flash belt, a new cabbage-tree hat covering his black head, and elastic side boots on his feet, with new spurs jangling on the heels of them.
“Lit’ a Dor’ty,” he called, grinning over his shoulder, as his long fingers tipped with nails ivory white got busy unbuckling the straps of his saddle pouch, before taking the saddle off his horse, “I bringa you some’ing this time.” Oil of angels! What a bound Dorothy gave! And what a picture she made—dancing all round the stately black, her flowing brown hair and pink ribbons flying about her, commending him in all the terms of endearment she could command, as he pressed a packet of lollies into her open hands. Poor Warabah! The look of pride her girlish fuss and gratitude brought to his dark, open, happy features has remained a vivid memory! And when Ted, bored a bit, I fancy, by Dorothy’s good luck and excessive gratitude, grunted, “Why don’t you kiss him for it?” how quickly Warabah took him up. Pointing with his long piebald finger—white inside and black outside —he said: “You go alonga cowyard and kiss a red fellow bull calf.”
“Warabah,” Ted retorted, half in jest, and half in earnest, ‘you go alonga Curlew Lagoon and kiss old black gin.”
“TED! You young rascal!” And the Governor nearly threw the valise at him. “Apologise for that to Warabah—tell him you’re sorry, or —”
“Norn, no, Ted been all a right; he be a good lit’ a boy, Gov’nor.” And Warabah, while Ted blubbered like an ox, patted him consolingly on the head. A big, unselfish mind and a soft heart had Warabah, and many’s the time did he rescue Ted and me from the rounds of the Governor’s waist strap.
That evening, when tea was over, and the things cleared from the table, and as the light of the blazing glorious moon, silvering everything around, came streaming into the room through the open windows, the Governor sat talking earnestly to Mother of the result of his mission to the capital. The seriousness of their conversation was not, of course, understood by us light-hearted youngsters. That the Governor was standing on the brink of disaster never entered our minds. At intervals they would become silent and thoughtful, and now and again he, looking tired, would lean forward in his chair and, eyeing the floor, would say, “There’s no need to be so alarmed, Dorrie; a few inches of rain any moment, and everything will be alright.”
“But Edward, what a mistake it was to put all our money into mobs of cattle before you knew more about the place and the country itself. You should at least have waited until you knew how your father’s estate was to be settled!” And I can see mother now, pacing the room, nervous and anxious, and quite oblivious of the efforts of us youngsters to rouse the old Governor into telling us all about his trip to the city.
“As things are just now, it was perhaps a mistake, Dorrie,” he admitted, “and I’m sorry my father took it into his head to marry again, but that cannot be helped.”
“I suppose it is his own affair, Edward,” mother sighed. What the words meant then, I did not know—but all of us know now!
“Everything might come out all right, and I think they will.”
“Twelve thousand head was a lot to have bought,” mother went on, “before getting some return. And the men said yesterday that some of them have been dying while you were away.”
“Only a few out on Wallaby Creek, Eustace tells me. And the poorest of the herds are running there.”
“Th’ blacks are helpin’ them to pull out some what got bogged in Curlew Lagoon, yesterd’y, father,” Ted, thinking to afford the Governor some cheerful news for which he might draw all the credit, chipped in.
The Governor lifted his head quickly and stared in surprise at him. Mother, pausing near the table, said earnestly, “I did not hear of that, my son.”
“Yes, they did,” I, like an idiot, confirmed, so that I wouldn’t be quite outdone by Ted in appearing important. “They helped Joe, Eustace and Tom Merton to pull a lot out.”
“How many, Jim?” the Governor spoke quietly but gravely.
“Fifty!” from Ted, who rushed the question to get in before me.
“No, not fifty,” I reckoned; “there might have been forty-eight.” And now, when I reflect upon it, I daresay there were twenty or so bogged that day in a mild sort of way, most of which struggled safely out unaided at sight of the well-meaning black men.
“And Joe Eustace told Tom Merton,” Ted, with wide-open eyes and stammering in his enthusiasm gushed innocently—“told him—that you’ll lose every hoof on th’ station before long, an’ they’ll all lose their jobs.”
A smothered cry came from mother, and before anyone knew what was happening, she fell across the table and lay as if she were dead.
“Heavens!” and springing to his feet, the Governor seized her in his arms.
“Dorrie! Dorrie!” He shook her excitedly.
“You shouldn’t have said that,” I said, looking at Ted. Poor Ted, more innocent and more concerned perhaps than anyone, broke into tears. So did Dorothy.
“Quick, Jim!” the Governor said. “Tell Miss Rumble or Mrs. Channing to come here; get me the brandy.”
I bounded out, calling for Miss Rumble,
But, to the relief of all, though I’ll never forget those few moments, mother recovered; and, after a deep breath or two, looked up at the Governor, and at Big Mary standing there with the brandy bottle in her hand, and said quietly, “it was very foolish of me, I know.”
Then, with his arms around her waist, the Governor took her out on to the verandah into the cool air. All the same, we youngsters were still greatly concerned. And as we watched in anxious silence through the window, while they paced up and down, up and down, how different, how gloomy and lonely seemed the striking of the clock! And over the garden trees, beyond the creek, beneath the everlasting stars, the Home mountain, so full of gloom and grandeur, was wrapped in a glow of sombre fires.
“How do you feel now, Mrs. Winchester?” Miss Rumble, having put away the brandy, called over our heads.
“She’s quite all right,” the Governor answered, “a long way better than a hundred dead ones yet,” and his cheerfulness made us a lot happier, and more like ourselves again.
Coming inside, mother smiled and said, “it was just a passing faintness, Mary. It’s gone now.” Then, as the Governor sat in his chair and talked to the rest of us: “You must be very tired, Edward. I’ll get you a cup of coffee before you go to bed.” And though Big Mary begged her to sit down, too, and rest herself, and offered to go to the kitchen and make the coffee, mother insisted and went off briskly to attend to it.
Meantime, the Governor and Big Mary talked of trifling things, as they thought. Trifling things! If I live a hundred lives, I shall never forget their conversation of that evening. Oh, the grim humour, the unconscious foolishness and tragedy of it! There sat Big Mary at the table, fingering the cloth, looking wondrously wise and endeavouring to talk politely. It was always difficult to converse with her, because, whether by impediment or affectation, she drowned her speech in mouthfuls of breath, which made her articulation sound like the noises of a person inhaling soup through his whiskers. And the Governor, straining his ears to listen, would answer: “Yes—quite so—I didn’t quite catch you— ’tis indeed.”
And then:
“You remember those thick leaved plants that you set along the garden fence the last time you returned from Drayton, Mr. Winchester?” Big Mary questioned proudly.
“I do,” from the Governor.
“Yes—them prickly pear that you and us set, father,” Ted and Dorothy, anticipating Big Mary, broke in with enthusiasm, “they’re all growin’— growin ’ like winky.”
“Growing, are they, in all this dry weather?” and the old Governor sat up and looked quite wide awake again.
“There are a lot of young leaves coming on them,” Big Mary added, which was about all that was left for her to add, “and they looked quite fresh and green. And we only discovered them yesterday.”
“Curious,” the Governor mused, “that they should grow through a drought like this? And they’ve never been watered.
“Me and Jim watered them, though, this evenin’ ” Ted said, while Dorothy also claimed to have tended them.
“McLean, when he was giving me the cuttings from the bunch he has growing in his garden at Westbrook,” the Governor told us, “said he thought they would do well out here. I must have a look at them in the morning. But don’t you youngsters put too much water on them or you might kill them.” My stars! Kill prickly pear! How young the Governor was!
“What is that, Edward?” mother asked, as she arrived with the coffee.
“Those prickly pear cuttings McLean gave me, I believe are doing well.”
“Oh, they’re shooting splendidly, and in all this dry weather, too,” and mother handed the Governor his coffee and some biscuits.
Mighty! When you think that that was how the accursed thing first got its hold! To think that we were nursing an invader, a prolific viper! And now, after all those years of silent, stealthy growth, creeping ruthlessly on in advance of the march of settlement, this green-eyed monster reaches out and by day and by night, from year end to year end, its tentacles close upon acre after acre, until within its resistless grasp is enfolded what once was a veritable land of Canaan. God’s own country— where hills and valleys and plains once teemed with the wealth of grasses and timbers. After all those years, to look now on Runnybede—poor Runnybede!
But when Ted and Dorothy said good-night and went away to bed, and when Big Mary Rumble, sighing and yawning as she mostly had a habit of doing, retired too, I remember that mother and the Governor sat again by the window, silently looking out into the moonlight, where everything was so still, save eerie echoes that seemed to come from out the dried-up bed of the distant creek.
“This silence of the bush, I wonder what it all means, Edward?” mother questioned dreamly. “It is not the silence of the starry sky, nor the silence of sleep, or of death, but a strange silence full of weird noises.”
“A silence that is golden for us, I hope, Dorrie,” was all the Governor said, and went to bed.
Another month passed and yet no signs were there of the breaking of the drought. On parts of the run less favoured than others and along some of the slimy creek beds, more cattle were down and dying, and not a day was there that the men didn’t find a beast or two to skin. Between scratching for food and long drags to water it was becoming a case of the survival of the fittest. As with humans there is no equality among cattle, and as though nature were putting her own ingenuity to the test to be adopted or scrapped, the drought demon had fairly commenced to cull the herds at Runnibede. But the old Governor didn’t get panicky; he kept his block and a bright face when out with the men. He was no Israelite; he didn’t murmur and brood over things, neither did he assume any forced gaiety. He just shook his head in sympathy when a beast was down, and gave a hand to stand it on its legs again, or if it were dead, helped to skin it. All the same there must have been moments when his heart weighed heavily within him, for he was surely realising that the paths in life of the cattle raiser in Australia were not strewn with blossoms and primroses.
And one evening when Tom Merton came in after being out all day on Dingo Gully and said there were about a score out there that would be the better for being knocked on the head and skinned, the Governor smiled resignedly and said: “It’s getting a bit of a terror, isn’t it, Tom?” And Tom, rarely addicted to the use of bad language, shoved his hat back to the middle of his head and answered feelingly, “It’s getting just hell and all, Governor.” The Governor merely shook his head. Then Tom denounced the clerk of the weather or whoever it was he reckoned had charge of it for an “ass.” “I’d like to make a slit in his ear and shove his foot through it, Governor, ” he added. Poor Tom! a quaint serio-comic soul was he, and to the old Governor a sort of spring tide upon which his gloom and anxiety would float off. Pulling the saddle off his horse— Daybreak—an iron grey, fully sixteen hands, and one of the first of the Beeza blood that afterwards became famous as the Runnibede greys, he patted him before getting him a feed and talked to him as though the animal understood. “Just have patience a bit longer, Daybreak, old boy, until the dry weather breaks, and then you’re going out to Wallaby Creek to spell for six months. You can take that from Thomas, old chap, and there’s no mistake about it!”
Wallaby Creek was the favoured part of the run for horses. They fattened quickly there, and came off it with clean glossy coats, and the limestone flint-strewn ridges which it watered hardened their hoofs and shaped them like a saucer.
“I hope you’ll be able to turn him out very soon, Tom,” the Governor said.
“Oh, I think so, Governor,” and grinning broadly, Tom turned away from Daybreak, “for there was a molty whiskered old miracle at the blacks’ camp when I passed Curlew Lagoon this morning, and he’s going to make a devil of a lot of rain to come, I believe.”
“He’s the tribe’s rain-god,” from the Governor. “I tried to converse with him on the subject one day, but I’m afraid, Tom, he’s not a true prophet.”
Then Eustace and Kearney, who had been up to the head of Station Creek, in the ranges, appeared round the corner of the garden, heeling their jaded mounts along and flicking their shoulders with the slack of the reins.
“Don’t know what to make of things up the creek, Governor,” Eustace, said, tossing the reins over the horse’s head, as he had a habit of doing before dismounting. “Th’ feed is not so bad up some of the gullies—dry of course, but a fair amount of it.”
“And how were the stock looking?” the Governor asked.
“There wasn’t any—or devilish few.” Kearney, with his head under the saddle-flap unbuckling his girth, grunted.
“There were seven hundred head put out there, or was it eight hundred, Eustace?” the Governor queried.
“All the C.O.B. cattle were put there,” Eustace answered.
“Strange you didn’t see any,” the Governor mused, “and on a hot day like this you’d think they’d all be on the water.”
“What we saw were weak enough looking, but not too bad,” Eustace went on. “But we didn’t see more than a hundred head altogether, and there were very few tracks.”
“A fortnight ago,” Tom Merton, having attended to Daybreak in his stall, put in, “the creek was full of tracks, and I have seen five hundred head at the least.” Then after a pause: “Did you see the mob that those roan poley cows run with, in that wattle gorge at the junction of Spinnach Creek?”
Kearney answering, said there “wasn’t a hoof there.”
“That’s strange.” Tom said, thoughtfully.
“Lots of them would be on the water at daybreak this sort of weather,” Eustace reckoned, “and then work back into the ranges again.”
“But they’d leave their tracks,” from the Governor. “Did you go right to the head of the creek? ”
“Not up on the range; our horses were too weak to do any climbing.”
“What do you think has become of them?” and the Governor looked troubled.
“They might have all poked back into that spare country on the other side and got cornered in some dry hole or other,” Eustace suggested.
“Or the blacks might have come over and rounded them up,” from Kearney.
But the Governor, I remember, only pooh-poohed the latter idea. He was one of those who didn’t regard the blacks as the terrible menace that others made them out to be, and which they certainly never were when treated decently.
“There are some white men on a skelp of country somewhere on the other side,” Tom Merton chuckled, “and from all accounts they’re, a darn sight worse than the myalls.”
I can see the old Governor now, after he had said “good-night” to them all, and gone into the big house, sitting reflecting in his chair, taking no notice of anyone until mother asked him not to worry about things, and enthused for his benefit over the splendid meal that was prepared, and told him to hurry up and get ready to do the carving. But later, when he took his place at the head of the table, rattling the carver on the steel, and chaffing Big Mary Rumble about looking lovesick, and suggesting that one of the station hands must have proposed to her, he was quite himself again. And on the table of the big house at Runnibede there was always full and plenty to carve, and few were there as expert with a set of carvers as the Governor, for it was wonderful how far he could make even a small joint go amongst a circle of hungry people and leave them all satisfied.
* * * * * *
It was the Queen’s birthday, and the Governor decided to spend it looking over the southern side of the run. And Tom Merton, rather than “camp in,” saddled up Daybreak to go with him. As there was no school that day Ted and I were allowed to accompany them. Gad! Talk about joy! You’d think when we got across our ponies that we were off to a war, or to a circus. We were not calamity seekers, Ted and I. There was nothing but adventure; and magic in the bush for us. And so we all rode away, taking the old track that turned off at the lime tree ridge just before you came to Curlew Lagoon. Ted and I, I remember, made the watering of our ponies the excuse for cantering over to the lagoon to see if there was anything of interest there. And as we loitered on its banks I remember how upon its surface there was reflected the relentless blue sky, till its depth seemed to palpitate with the shadows of the trees around its edges. And then, to overtake the others, we had to have a “flutter.” As we came up suddenly behind them, Hyperion gave a bound that nearly unseated the old Governor, and raised his anger. Tom turned his head and grinned at something imaginary far out across the dull, deaden horizon.
“Couldn’t you come up gently?” the Governor scowled when he had recovered his equilibrium. “What are you always racing the ponies about for? There’ll be no feed left for them directly, and you won’t be able to ride, them at all, then.”
But in our hearts we knew that if he hadn’t nearly fallen off, he wouldn’t have cared two straws how we hustled White Wings and Zulu. All the same, it must have been costing him a great deal for horse feed brought out on the bullock dray for the working stock. We all know now what it meant. And we hadn’t ridden many miles over the country side, slow, miserable miles they were, too, when the desolate sights and scenes of grassless, dusty stretches, dancing mirages, slimy waterholes, gaunt, hollow-sided, staggering stock and dead stock, leafless trees, famine stricken turkeys and emus, too weak to take wing, saddened even our youthful, careless hearts. Here a red bullock lying on its stomach, its legs tucked under it, its snout resting on the earth, looking as though death had come to it in its dreams of grass and herbage and running water in plenty again. There, a spotted beast, 15 cwt. if he had been a lb., before the drought, moaning on its side, the earth where he lay swept bare and scooped hollow with days of helpless struggling. Further along, tilted into a narrow shallow gully, as if it were a coffin, a roan cow, her legs stiffened in death, pointing to the heavens, her withered udder ravaged by wild dogs; and so on.
“Ah, well!” the Governor would sigh, “it’s no use leaving them like this, Tom. Better to put them out of their misery.” And getting down from his horse, would take out his revolver, and level it at the head of a hopeless, pitiful beast. And with a groan that was more a sigh of happy release, the wretched animal would succumb peacefully. Though they differed much in life, lying outstretched they were very much alike in death. How many times we heard the crack of his revolver that day would be hard to say, now, but I know that every time it rang out it performed a kindly, humane act.
Returning home, as the sun dipped behind the Western Range, leaving the miseries to become buried in the mists and gloom of night, Tom Merton suddenly pulled rein, and pointed to the strangest sight we had seen that day, or any other day. “Well, if that ain’t my old pack-horse hanging by the neck, I’ll eat my hat!”
“Well, well, well!” the Governor said, staring at the object. Then crossing a gully that lay between, all of us sat in our saddles, gazing in wonder at Tom’s pack-horse, hanging by the neck from the fork of a tree, as dead as any of the cattle the Governor had fired a bullet into.
“Well, now, if that ain’t a caution,” Tom mused, alighting from Daybreak to inspect the tragedy.
“He suicided, Tom,” the Governor grinned. “You must have treated him badly.”
Ted and I, shifting round the tree, discovered that his eyes were nearly bulging right out.
“He’s been scratching his neck in the fork,” Tom concluded, “and got his head stuck, then pulled back till he strangled himself.”
“H’m!” the Governor said, and rode on again. Nearing the home paddock, Tom, in a confiding tone, said: “If you don’t mind. Governor, I’d like you to send me up Station Creek next time, instead of Eustace and Kearney.”
“All right, Tom,” and the Governor looked hard at him, but no more was said.
That evening, after tea, when mother inquired how he had found the stock faring, the Governor tapped her on the shoulder and said: “Dorrie, I’m not the only one who is losing by the drought. One man has already lost just half of what he owned.” Mother’s face saddened as she inquired who it was. “Tom Merton,” he answered solemnly, and when he recounted the fate of the pack-horse mother’s heart went out to Tom.
“The poor fellow!” she said, “you must give him another in its place, Edward.”
“A dead one or a live one, Dorrie?”
Then Ted and I broke into mirth.
“Bless my soul, it is a dull morning!” I remember the Governor saying when he left his bed and stepped on to the verandah.
“Dull?” mother echoed in surprise from below the blankets. “The sky was a wilderness of stars when we came to bed last night, Edward.”
And old Harry, rubbing his eyes as he approached the wood heap, called out: “Why, damme.—I thought there wer’ someit up.”
“What have y’ thought?” his wife, poking her head through the kitchen window, asked. “We’re all late,” she added. “Whatever is the reason of it this mornin’, I don’t know.”
“Damme if it ain’t goin’ to rain!” and Harry, before lifting the axe, scanned the dark rolling clouds curiously. “I could feel there was somethin’ in the air makin’ everyone sleep late.”
Then Mrs. Channing left the kitchen and hurried along the verandah, calling out, “there’s big black clouds, Mrs. Winchester, and Channing sez it’s goin’ to rain. I hope it are. An’ we’re all behind on account of it.”
“I hope he’s right, Rachel! We want the rain more than we want breakfast,” mother called back.
“He’ll be right about it, I think—though that’s all he ever could be right in!” responded Mrs. Channing.
Then all of us left our beds and hurried out to attend to our respective duties, for everyone at Runnibede down to Dorothy had some kind of work or other to attend to before breakfast. The Governor saw rightly to that.
“What do you think of it, Harry?” the Governor, strolling round to the wood heap, asked with a light of joy in his eyes and a hopeful ring in his voice.
“We’re goin’ to get it, Governor,” and Harry brought down the axe with a grunt. Harry was no newspaper weather prophet. He gave his forecasts without an “if” or a “perhaps” or a “providing.”
“It looks like it, Harry,” and the Governor rubbed his hands gleefully, and regarded him proudly. Had the burly wife-bully asked for a rise in wages just then the Governor would hardly have refused him.
“Th’ wind’s in the right quarter for it, Governor,” and Harry with a smile rather than a grunt, swung the axe harder.
Pleased with everything, the Governor walked off down to the men’s quarters. Seeing him go out the gate, Ted and I abandoned our work of “digging” and scampered on his heels. Just then Tom Merton was running up the horses—his stockwhip echoing across the creek. Eustace and Warabah were round at the killing-yard, and only Kearney was visible. “Grizzly Ned,” we youngsters called him, and he was outside the hut, with only his trousers and boots on, bending over a dish of water sluicing his bearded face. A dense beard he had, too, in which he concealed a long, suspicious smile, like a snake hidden in the grass—at least we used to think so. And while he sluiced himself, he made a noise with his mouth that sounded like a dog swimming with a stick between its teeth. It seems unkind to think of him that way, but he was never a “good egg,” was Kearney.
“Good morning, Kearney, and what do you think of the look of things now?” the Governor enthused.
Kearney tossed the dish of water into the air, watched it come down in a shower on the bare ground, then taking up a cloudy-looking towel and starting to rub his hairy breast with it, said:
“Nothing much in it, I fancy; might get a drizzle or two, but th’ wind’s th’ wrong way, I reckon, Governor.”
“Nonsense!” the Governor frowned angrily. “What way would you want it to come?”
“Not from there, Governor—from over this direction we get all the rain.” And the other swept the horizon with the moist towel.
“All th’ rain!” the Governor echoed with irony. “There’s been hardly any at all, since I’ve been here.”
“You’re pretty right there!” and a portion of the smile that lurked in Kearney’s beard became visible, “but I mean all over th’ colony.”
“Why, it’s raining now,” and the old Governor held out his hand to secure some of the drops. Gad! I can see the expression on his face, as he stood with open palm outstretched.
Then Ted and I held out our hands for the fun of it, and in the hope of helping to undo Kearney, for whom we had no affection. But scowling like a bowlegged bear he joined in and held out his own hand in derisive silence.
“There’s one,” the Governor jerked out, “on my arm—see it?” And his eyes glistened as though a sovereign had dropped upon him from heaven.
“A drop o’ spit,” Kearney drawled, and, my stars, I’ll never forget the look the Governor gave him. Had it been upon one of us, I would have expected his boot to follow, and out of reach we would have danced quickly enough.
But when Ted and I were also visited with a drop —then two, three and four drops—and Kearney himself felt a few, the latter slightly changed his views.
“It might come on,” he said. “You never can tell.”
“Confound it, anyone with a nose can smell rain!” declared the Governor. “I’ve had enough darn drought, Kearney, if you haven’t.” And in a temper he swung round and started back to the big house. He had been suppressing his true state of mind so long, I suppose, that for anyone now to cast doubt upon the likelihood of it raining and saving the Runnibede from disaster, was the last straw. Gad! We had scarcely entered the house grounds and closed the gate, when down it came, and in heavy blinding drops, driven before a rushing gale.
“Here it is!” shouted the Governor, and ran his hardest to the back verandah, while Ted and I, kicking up our heels in jubilation like bull calves after having sucked their mothers dry, ran much harder than he.
“It’s here, Dorrie!” he gasped, holding on to his hat. “We’re getting it at last!”
Mother, standing with her hands clasped, and looking out, could scarcely speak; she seemed to be muttering a prayer of thanksgiving.
Then Big Mary Rumble and Mrs. Channing and Dorothy and the two nigger boys gathered round, and all filled with excitement.
“Look how thick it’s falling—you can’t see th’ mountains. Listen to it!”
Laws, it was something to listen to, too! The rattle of it on the roof, and swishing and sweeping of it into every corner was real music, and to Halifax with your Schumann and your Mozart and Beethoven. Old Harry in the middle of it all, without hat or coat, his shirt and long unkempt hair nearly getting washed off him, came to the verandah rails and yelled: “What y’ think of it now, Governor?”
“Look at him out’n it all!” his wife rasped, while Big Mary above the din greeted him as an “old fool,” and advised him to “get in out the wet if he didn’t want his wife to be a widow.”
“At that rate just let him stop where he are,” and Mrs. Channing withdrew to resume her work. But the old Governor said nothing—just sat back and listened in a dreamy silence.
Inspired with the joy of everything, Dorothy opened the piano, and with the grinning abo. kids, one on each side of her, began banging the keyboard, but only an intermittent note or two could be heard above the God-sent music of that wind-driven rain.
And so it rained on, and on, while we breakfasted, and while we had lunch, and while we had tea. All night it rained unabated; poured and pelted until it found or made weak spots in the roof, and came down on Mary Rumble’s bed, causing a stir amongst the women. Women don’t like rain to come in the house, no matter how badly they are in need of it! They would almost as soon have a visitation of serpents.
But it didn’t excite the Governor. The bush environment was stamping its influence firmly upon him now, and he was falling into the way of taking most things as a matter of course.
“It doesn’t matter if it is,” he said, as if speaking on the wave of a beautiful dream. “A little rain water will do Mary good, after all the dry weather we’ve had.”
And it rained away until we got tired of being “weather bound,” and began wondering when it would stop, until the Station Creek rose to a banker —rose till it spread itself a quarter of a mile on either side, carrying down logs and uprooted trees and the carcases of dead bullocks and dead brumbies, and dead-an’-alive marsupials, and goodness knows what—until we were faced with a milk and butter famine, for the milch cows, being wiser for once than we humans, saw what was coming, and inducing their calves to follow them, crossed the creek while there was yet time, and made for the safety and shelter of the home mountains.
And so from the first flood that we saw at Runnibede we learnt a few lasting lessons, and never again that I can remember did ever the cows get across the creek when it was rising. They went into the “ten acres” instead, and there were left to slop round and “moo” over the fence, same as Strawberry and Cherry did in the Ark.
There were many floods after that, though, and so will there be again. Yet, if ever they cease to be, it will not mean that the millenium has arrived, but Eternity.
Though only a few months since it had ended, the drought now was nearly forgotten. But what recuperation! What a transformation! from dust, desolation and death the great bushland changed to scenes of splendour and plenty; to a wilderness of joy and life—a bush banquet of God’s own catering, and all in a few months of rain and sunshine. Gad! how the creeks ran again. How the grasses and herbage grew. And the stock that came through it all, how they heartened and fattened, and went trotting and bellowing down the mountain tracks to roam the creeks and swamps and billabongs. And at the crack of a whip or sound of human voice, throwing high their heads and tails and—off! breaking and crashing through grass trees, and limes and wattles. Their sleek, glossy skins red, roan, spotted, magpied and starred, glistening in the sun like the bright plumage of birds in their flight. And so it was that summer again with all her green banners was marching over the land. But what had been the actual losses suffered no one yet could tell—not until a muster of every hoof on the run was made could that be known. So with such end in view, the Governor gave instructions for “all hands and the cook” to prepare to start on a certain Monday morning for the cattle yards at Wallaby Creek. The yards would be made the centre of operations for the southern and western portions of the run. But how long it would take to complete the muster none at that stage could say. So many things undreamt of, as in Horatio’s philosophy, were so liable to happen per misadventure, lost horses, broken yards, missing herds, and all the rest, in a muster.
Mother, when the house was quiet of an evening, would question the Governor as to what he thought —“just what he thought—the losses would probably be?” And what anxious looks would come into her face!
“The two boys and little Dorothy are to finish their education, you know,” she would remind him. “It would kill me if that couldn’t be done, Edward.”
Poor mother! It was always “the two boys and little Dorothy.” Her own pleasures and comforts were never part of her plans for the future, at all.
“Don’t worry yourself about that, Dorrie,” the Governor would answer lightly. “That’s a trifle.”
All the worry of life seemed to have left his mind now, and he met everything and everyone with a smile. Indeed, he had more faith now in Runnibede than ever before.
“You’ve got to know a country like this,” he’d say, “and the knowledge is worth paying for. It’s something like finding out the qualities of a horse. And a horse that never stumbles or blunders with you, you never get the full strength of and never know properly. But the one, like Hyperion, for instance, or Daybreak, that Merton rides, that blunders at times and makes a recovery with the strength of a lion, that’s the animal to stake your life on— not the one, no matter how good and confident he seems, that makes a slip is gone with you, and all the beggaring hands and reins in the world won’t hold him up. He’s down and out, and you can’t stop him. It’s something the same with a country.” Mother, though, wasn’t one to allow her cause to be lost in the Governor’s rush of enthusiasm, and in her persistency would give, as a last word: “I don’t mind, Edward, what happens so long as the boys and Dorothy complete their schooling.”
But when, a few evenings before the musterers were, to leave for Wallaby Creek, the Governor spoke disappointedly of Willie Williams having asked “for his cheque,” and thought he’d take me with the men to give what assistance I could, for the first week at all events, until someone else came along seeking a job, mother, poor soul, almost wept. The idea of taking “Jim,” who was only a boy, out mustering with a lot of rough men! And fill him with a desire to follow the life and hate his books, “was too much for her.” “What would the boy be, Edward?” she almost sobbed. “Just a plain uncouth bushman. They never read; scarcely know what their religion is, and have hardly an idea in their heads, no matter how good they might be in other ways as men. As to expressing themselves on anything, except the weather or the time of day, and cattle and horses, they simply can’t, and I pity them for it. And would you see Jim become the same, Edward?”
“But Tom Merton can express things, mother,”
I put in, feeling that she was unacquainted with the efficiency of Tom, for in the eyes of us boys he was a prototype. We looked up to Tom. Though he might not have had any delicate breeding, there was a lot of gentility about him—at least we thought so. And how the Governor looked at me and smiled. But mother regarded me almost with pity.
“Tom knows music,” I went on rapturously. “You haven’t heard him playing his concertina, have you, mother?” (A chuckle came from the regions of the Governor’s stomach.) “Gee! I wish I could play it like him!”
In truth, my youthful notion was that Tom was wasting his time stock-riding on a cattle station, and should be making a fortune playing the concertina to the multitudes. No finer or more praiseworthy profession could exist, I thought, than that of a concertina player.
“I’m glad you can’t play one, Jim,” the Governor chuckled.
“And you should hear Tom telling the other men down in the hut a lot of things they don’t know, mother,” I went ahead. “My word, he told them one day a lot they didn’t know about young kangaroos being born—and about the blacks—he can talk all their language now. You ask young Ted, if you don’t believe me, mother—ask him —”
“Oh, will you be quiet,” she suddenly snapped, and the Governor, I fancy, feeling glad I had come into the discussion, echoed: “The black’s language? I don’t think so, Jim.”
“Yes, he can,” I maintained. “I heard him talking away like fury to that young black gin. Mother knows her, old fat Maria’s daughter, that comes with her to the kitchen sometimes.
Mother opened her eyes and fixed them on the Governor. But that wasn’t all, for I felt myself getting important.
“And my word, she understood every word that Tom said, too. You should have heard her giggle, mother, and seen her look sideways at Tom when he —”
“Jim!” mother interrupted in anger. But as the Governor didn’t seem to mind I thought I’d keep going—“when he poked her in the ribs —”
Just then mother rose and whacked me on the ear, and cried: “How dare you talk of what you see the men do, you bad fellow. Be off to bed this minute!”
I went off sullenly.
A furious storm rose one night, and among the things it damaged was the single men’s hut. While trying to get out before it fell on him, Warabah nearly broke his ankle, and was put right out of action as far as the mustering was concerned.
“There’s nothing else for it now, as far as I can see,” the Governor said regretfully, “but for Jim to give us a hand.”
“Well, if he does, it must be the first and last time, Edward,” mother answered, as she bowed to the inevitable.
So when the Governor told me next morning to see to my riding gear, and take Wallaroo for a second mount, I thought myself a full grown man shaking hands with whole world. Laws, though, when Ted found I was to go stock-riding on his pony he protested in howls and bellows, and went near threatening to suicide. Man, after all, I do believe, merely proposes. And while the men, after seeing to final preparations for the morning, were lounging in their huts that Sunday afternoon, something happened to upset all our calculations, and throw the station suddenly into excitement. Having “heard” them their Sunday school lessons on the verandah, Dorothy pulled a red bonnet over her head, and ran inside to tell mother she was taking Tarpot and Zulu for a walk to the edge of the myall scrub to gather wild flowers. Mother warned her not to go where there were any bullocks for fear they would come after her again, as they had done once before. Dorothy wouldn’t be long—“not very long”—she said, for the wild flowers were in such abundance that gathering of armfuls was a matter of minutes. So off the trio went. As they crossed the ridge to the back of the garden where bronze-wing pigeons used to rise by the dozen, Ted and I noted how Tarpot and Zulu vied with each other for the honour of securing the first flower that peeped out of the grass.
In a moment they had disappeared from view over the brow of the ridge beyond which was a narrow grassy valley, and beyond that again, the myall scrub, with it’s foliage glistening in the sun, it’s wall-like edges proclaiming it the home of Nature in her wildest mood. A home by day full of divine tranquillity, and by night seeming to be haunted by all the dead souls and evil spirits of generations and generations.
A couple of hours passed and mother began to feel anxious. A little later she and big Mary Rumble passed out of the gate and sauntered quietly over the ridge, “cooeeing” as women do, for Dorothy. No one else gave thought until screams and cries came from the vicinity of the ridge. Then everyone who heard knew that something was amiss. The Governor was up from his verandah chair and out like a shot. Ted and I followed. Taking a short cut through the garden and over the back fence, we saw that something was wrong. There was Mary Rumble not twenty paces away holding mother in her arms, while the two abo. kids with scarcely a stitch of their Sunday suits left on them were bellowing and pointing frantically back across the valley to the myall scrub, around which the shades of coming night were falling.
“What has happened? Where’s Dorothy?” the Governor questioned, running towards them. Between the cries of Mary on mother’s account, and the bellowing of the two darkies on account of Dorothy, it was hard to make anything of them for a moment or two.
“Tarpot says black women took Dorothy into the scrub— and Mrs. Winchester has fainted,” Big Mary at last explained. Then Tarpot in his own way made it fairly clear that they had all three been seized by black women and dragged into the scrub. That he and Zulu had got away and had eluded recapture. Zulu, poor kid, all he could do was to weep and howl weirdly and make frantic signs,
The Governor wanted to hear no more.
“Get Mrs. Channing to help Mrs. Winchester to the house, Mary.”
Then to Ted and me: “Run for your life, boys, and tell the men to follow me as fast as they can,” and off he hurried to the myall scrub; and off we dashed to the men’s huts … Lord! What a stir there was then! Eustace, Tom Merton and Kearney seated round the table to an early tea, dropped their knives and forks, and jumping to their feet before we had half explained, in a few seconds were striding over the ridge as fast as their legs could take them. They crossed the valley and arrived at the scrub puffing like winded horses. A cooee from Tom was answered by the Governor, who emerged from the gloomy shades of the myall with a grave face. In his hand were fragments of clothing that had been torn from the abo. kids. Not a trace had he found of Dorothy. The men stood still and silent, their faces filled with deep concern. Of themselves only they seemed to ask and answer questions. Whether one black woman, or a number of black women, or a whole tribe were concerned in the abduction of Dorothy they could only contemplate, and realised that something had to be done quickly.
The light of day was going—and inside the scrub it was already dark. Of the area of that myall scrub belt no one at that time had an idea. That it covered a vast stretch of country extending to the north and west, alternating in brigalow, sandalwood and intricate vine scrubs far beyond the boundaries of Runnibede into the ranges, was as much as anyone, except the aboriginals themselves, knew about it. So dividing into two parties, the Governor with Kearney and Ted forming one, and Eustace, Tom Merton and I the other, we commenced to search the rim of that scrub, they going to the left and we to the right, all of us listening for sounds and straining our eyes in the fading light for tracks that might lead to the camping place of the blacks.
“Look here,” and stooping down Tom Merton began collecting an assortment of wild flowers that were strewn for yards around near a huge old bottle tree.
Eustace stared.
“They’ve taken her, all right,” he said, “and she had a struggle … see here. The heels of her boots scraped the ground as she was dragged along. And look at these bare foot-marks—they’re MEN’S.
“God, Eustace, what will they do with her?” and Ted Merton stared at the footprints.
Eustace hesitated, and I remember the clumsy attempt he made at signalling Tom to say no more in my presence. Tom for the moment had forgotten I was one of the party. And how he tried to turn it off and make light of those bruised and scattered bush flowers and the footprints of aboriginal men and their women!
“My opinion it’s some of those quiet blacks having a joke,” Eustace said. “Some of them from Curlew Lagoon. Perhaps Combo and Curricomb and their better halves,” and he forced a laugh for my benefit. Then, as he slapped me on the shoulder: “Jim, lad, when you get back home you’ll find your little sister having supper.”
Oh! we humans! To what vain ruses we resort to postpone for others their inevitable grief! That Dorothy was in the hands of the blacks rushed as rapidly through my boyish brain as it had rushed through theirs. But of course Eustace and Tom meant well; and time and again have I, myself, since then, attempted to stem the flow of grief in others by the same false assurance …
“Take charge of those for her, Jim,” and Tom pressed into my arms a bundle of daisies and immortelles and orchids. As they covered my chest and poked their nodding heads under my chin, the perfume from them remained a sensitive memory with me ever after. It was not a collection of wild flowers, but Dorothy herself I seemed to be holding.
“They went in here, Tom,” Eustace said, indicating a passage winding through the myall wide enough to admit a team. “We’ll poke in as far as we can and see if there’s any signs of a camp. You stop here, Jim, till we come out again.”
They proceeded cautiously into the scrub. I remained leaning against a bottle tree, my mind flooded with confused imaginings, my eyes running with tears that fell in warm trickles upon those wild flowers. For half an hour I must have leaned there, while the night shades closed and deepened, making the narrow valley where ghostly curlews were screaming seem miles and miles in width, and the vast bushland itself to appear a world gone out, without end.
Suddenly I jumped like a startled marsupial. Rustling through the bushes came old Harry and Warabah—the latter hopping with the aid of two sticks and swinging his bandaged foot. For the moment I thought the blacks had prowled from the scrub and were upon me. And not until Harry asked: “Where’re the others … ain’t they found Dorothy yet?” could I grip myself and tell them what we had discovered. Old Harry, though, so far as my feelings went, only made matters worse. For he was a Job’s comforter.
“I don’t give much hope o’ seein’ of her alive again,” said the old heathen, “for th’ blacks that got her’ll be some o’ them bloodthirsty dogs that come over the ranges to spear the cattle—don’t y’ think I’m right, Warabah?” And he appealed to the manly aboriginal now kneeling on the ground examining the footprints with the aid of a lighted match.
“Don’t you be big fool, old Harry,” and striking another match, Warabah crawled further along.
“Well, that’s what everyone’ll tell y’ about them, anyway,” the other persisted sulkily.
“Two—three blackfellow been here along gins!” Warabah, rising on his improvised crutches, declared solemnly.
“That was what Eustace said, Warabah,” I told him. And as though he didn’t hear me, he added:
“They drag Dor’ty into scrub alonga that way,” pointing through the gloom to the pasage beneath the trees where Eustace and Tom Merton had gone. What a helpless, sinking feeling came over me at his words! And how I listened for sounds of Eustace and Tom returning, bringing Dorothy with them!
“Now what’s your real opinion, Warabah?” Harry asked. “Do y’ think they’ll let her go again—or kill her with their tommyhawks? You ought to know more’n th’ rest of us about it.”
Warabah deigned to reply. His gleaming dark eyes were raised to the sky, and he seemed to be studying the moon and the conditions of the night. At no time was he a talkative person, but there was a silent bush dignity, a racial resignation about Warabah. “Fool!” he said, reproaching himself, “for breakin’ it leg! … Dammit storm!” Then lifting his voice and addressing those who had kidnapped Dorothy: “By gum tree, Cooby tribe; touch it that lil’ girl an’ you die!”
Just then Eustace and Tom Merton came silently out of the shadows of the scrub. But no Dorothy was with them. How sick I felt. Disregarding old Harry, they talked in low tones to Warabah.
Presently came a low cooee, which Tom Merton answered.
“That’s them coming back,” Eustace said. Then we could hear them trailing beneath the hanging boughs and over crackling twigs and branches. Again, how I listened and strained for sight or sound of Dorothy! But at the sound of the Governor’s voice my blood ran cold again.
“That you, boys?” he called softly, almost reverently, yet in it a deep note of terror was sounded.
“It’s us, Governor,” and Tom lowered his voice as though we were in the presence of the dead. Then in hushed voices they conversed beneath the soft rustling foliage. And when the Governor had listened to Eustace and Tom, he stepped close to me, and putting out his hand touched those wild flowers as though they were the hair of Dorothy’s head. Without a word, and breathing as though his heart would burst, poor Ted did the same. And in those wild blooms with the moon shining down upon them were reflected the very eyes and soul of our lost sister.
In answer to the Governor, Warabah, who had been silent, spoke out:
“No,” he said, “blackfellow not kill Dor’ty. They keep her for something. P’raps, might be gins, mothers belong Tarpot and Zulu come to steal them away. Something I don’t know go wrong and boys get away; blackfellows keep Dor’ty and go back tonight over range all through scrub … You go Curley Lagoon, get Combo and Curricomb; they track ’em tribe along daylight and find Dor’ty … Fool me, break’it leg, else Warabah track ’em all night.”
“I know you would,” and the Governor patted him kindly on the back. Then turning to the others:
“Now, back to the house, quick, boys,” and striding off he led the way across the valley.
“And, Tom,” he called back as he hurried along, “saddle the night horse and run all the others into the yard. Some of us will go at once to Curlew Lagoon.”
It took little time to cross the valley; and when the Governor and Ted and I mounted the verandah and entered the home there was mother and Mary Rumble and Mrs. Channing beside her, pale as death, and watching the door with looks in her eyes that no one could ever forget.
“Where is she?” she cried. “Where is Dorothy —have you brought my girl?”
“She’s all right, Dorrie—she’s coming directly. She isn’t harmed,” and the poor old Governor put his big arm around mother. But she refused to listen or to be consoled.
“My God, Edward! Tell me, is she dead? Have they killed her?”
“No, no,” he assured her. “We are going to bring her now; but you must calm yourself, Dorrie.”
Ted, who had not spoken, now threw himself upon the sofa and burst into sobs. And in the midst of it all there stood I in a sort of stupor, still clasping the wild flowers to my breast. Mother’s eyes rested upon them. I shall never forget that moment.
“Hers!” she screamed, “her wild flowers!” and dropped her head on the Governor’s shoulder.
How clearly that night all comes back! The clouds drifting across the moon; the coolibah trees standing beside the gate swaying and rustling in mournful tune; the station hands grouped in silence together beside their horses at the stable; the Governor hurrying from the big house, and out at the gate fumbling a pair of revolvers, unconscious that I was at his side.
“We’re all ready, Governor,” Tom Merton called quietly, leading Hyperion forward along with his own horse, their sharp ears pricked, and in the light of the moon their fiery eyes flashing expectantly.
“Tom, we must hurry; and put this in your pocket.” And as he took the reins the Governor passed one of the revolvers to him.
“Do you want us all with you?” Eustace asked.
“Kearney had better stay with Warabah and Harry,” the Governor answered, “in case something might happen while we’re away.” Then to Kearney: “Tell Miss Rumble you will be about all the time, so that they won’t be nervous.”
“I will, Governor, and I’ll keep a horse in the stall.”
Then into their saddles the Governor and Eustace and Tom swung, and I, following suit, scrambled on to White Wings. The Governor, without a word, took the lead, but instructions were not necessary just then. We knew where we were heading for. Even those horses seemed to know that something serious was in the air, for they required no urging. Off they plunged, tossing their heads, pulling on the reins and reefing. Through shadowy lime and brigalow, crashing into brambles and bush, in and out, and around the head of rugged, shapeless gullies we rattled at a half gallop, heading for the blacks’ camp at Curlew Lagoon. Not until we had covered more than half the distance, and on White Wings cannoning into Hyperion as we swerved to avoid the spiked roots of a fallen tree, did the Governor realise that I was in the party.
“That you, Jim?” he called, glancing back over his shoulder. Then, fixing his eyes on the dim objects ahead, quickened the pace. And how those horses, striding out abreast, swept over the ground! As the mountain peak beyond began to take shape, the Governor, taking a pull on Hyperion, called a warning to “go steady.”
We pulled in, and when the noise of galloping hoofs beneath us was silenced, how the sound of clinking stirrup-irons, the beating of hoofs on the ground, the horses’ nostrils blowing and steaming, broke upon the stillness of the eerie sleeping bush around! Coming to the edge of the lagoon, the Governor stopped, and resting his hand upon Hyperion’s withers, engaged Eustace and Tom in low conversation. While they spoke across the horses to each other, the animals clamped the bridle-bits and pawed the ground restlessly, and flung foam into our faces. And looking down from the saddle upon that calm, silvery water of Curlew Lagoon, what impressions of divine, serenity it made on one! The moon reflected in its depth, the rock walls beyond looming grim and massive, and the waterfalls above roaring as the waters tumbled over the rocks like breakers. And well I remember my feelings as I sat there watching through the moonlight on White Wings, ears open, listening to the croaking frogs, the calling of wild ducks to each other among the reeds, and the swishing flights of night birds overhead. How eerie, how sad, how terrible it all seemed!
“The camp is on the edge of the scrub over the rock walls,” Tom Merton said. “We’ll have to cross at the waterfalls, Governor. The creek is shallow there.”
The Governor agreed. Then, turning our horses’ heads, we rode up the creek for a quarter of a mile, and entered its bed in single file. How our mounts slid and ploughed on all fours down the steep bank of loose soil! I was the last of the file. Gad! when for a moment I lost sight of the others as they took the track zig-zagging up the opposite bank, a sudden fear that I’d be speared or cut off seized me. Poor little White Wings. She blundered to her knees, nearly tossing me over her head, then plunging and bounding, struggled up on a course of her own when I touched her with the spur.
Up the steepest part of that bank she scrambled, and colliding at the top with Tom Merton, gave Daybreak a broadsider that nearly toppled them back into the bed below.
“Great Scott!” Tom gasped, “where did you come from?” But all I was concerned about just then was getting safely out of that creek into company again.
Following the creek to where dingo scrub hung over the rock walls, we saw before us a half circle of smouldering fires.
“Here it is,” Eustace said, breaking the heavy silence. And here and there, with the glooming scrub sheltering a camp of miserable gunyahs made of sheets of stringy bark, leaning slantwise against each other, took shape in the moonlight.
“Careful awhile,” the Governor counselled beneath his breath. And again we halted. “It won’t do to alarm them. We don’t know how they might regard our coming at this hour of night.”
Though friendly relationships had been established with these wild people, and in a sense the Governor had become the guardian of their happiness, the referee and arbiter of their disputes, in truth a wonderful being in their eyes, yet they had moods and fancies of their own, and liable to misunderstandings. Mother, too, on her side had been moving peacefully amongst them in their sicknesses, providing them with clothing and food till her visits to the camp became a feature in their wild lives, and she had become known as “White Mary.” Still, a surprise visit to the camp by night, when the fires were dying low, and all asleep in the gunyas, was an innovation not unattended with risks. So instinct told the Governor that wisdom lay in prudence.
For me, at least, those moments held a thousand terrors. While the others spoke in hushed voices, and the horses tossing their heads, jerked at the reins and snatched for mouthfuls of grass, I stared around, mentally measuring, as a nervous boy will do, the chances of a clear gallop in the event of trouble, for there before us, not more than fifty yards off, slumbered a couple of hundred people, men, women and children, wanderers of the Australian bushland.
And, as we paused, sparks started out the smouldering embers, and flickering heavenward, raced each other into oblivion.
“Listen to them snoring,” Tom Merton whispered. And what a medey of strange, weird noises came from those sleepers! Some of the notes were deep and long-drawn; some high-pitched and shrill. Some seemed the groans and moans of tortured souls. And all so unearthly, so awesome, that you fancied you were standing in a hostile world filled with all the menaces and terrors of the night. Even the mangy, miserable dogs—and there was a pack of them—slept and snored. And from the lonely trees squirrels chattered as though keeping tryst. Curlews screamed all around. Dingoes howled from the scrub. Mopokes called their dismal note from the shelves of the great rock walls. While over all the everlasting stars twinkled and blinked down at the camp of those primitive, precarious people, just as they had twinkled a million years before.
Presently the Governor lifted his voice and called: “King Henry and Combo and Curricomb and Captain!” How the echoes of his voice answered back from the silent rocks and scrub! Gad! And how I shook in the saddle!
In an instant the camp was awake and on the alert. From every gunyah voices called the alarm. Even the miserable dogs set up a chorus of snappy barks. Nude men were on their feet, their hands reaching for war weapons, and the camp became a bedlam of excited jargon.
Again the Governor called those names. We, sitting in the saddle, listened intently. In the dead silence that followed he added: “Gov’nor Runnibede here, want yabba alonga you.”
Then rang out yells of recognition. A rush of men, their black silky skins shining in the moonlight, came hurrying forward, giving our horses a start. What feelings of surprise and curiosity and joy our visit seemed to give them as they crowded round us. They knocked and rapped their war weapons together in their wonder and delight. Though their attitude was full of friendship, I could feel my hair rising on end. The Governor dismounted from Hyperion, and, standing calmly in the centre of them, spoke with the “King,” “Curricomb,” “Combo” and the “Captain,” telling them in their own dialect and broken English the object of our visit. Then he questioned them to ascertain if they knew anything of Dorothy. Eustace and Tom Merton put questions to others of the tribe whom they knew. How the horses distrusted them—snorting in their faces, and turning this way and that. White Wings, when a tall, long whiskered warrior attempted to put his hand on her mane, reared on her hind legs. Gad! What a scatter she made!
“Whoa, you little beggar,” and reaching from his saddle, Tom patted her on the neck to calm her, while I, shaking all over, wasn’t sure if I was still in the saddle or not. “She don’t like the smell of them, Jim.”
The interview was soon over. Then, saluting the king and wishing all the tribe a good-night, the Governor turned to Hyperion and White Wings, and, as silent as the stars, he led the way back to Runnibede. When we mounted the verandah we found the lights still burning brightly, with Mary Rumble and Mrs. Channing sitting up, waiting and watching, their eyes red and tear-stained.
“Don’t make a noise,” they whispered to the Governor, as we entered the room. “Mrs. Winchester has just fallen asleep.” Poor mother.
An hour before dawn and dark as pitch. The sound of snorting, rushing horses; the jangle of stirrup irons and bridle-bits. The dropping of rails, and subdued voices at the stable yard. Lights moving about and disappearing again down at the huts.
The latch of the big white gate clicked, and the Governor’s footsteps patted the beaten pathway leading to the stable.
“We’re all here, sir,” Eustace spoke, to indicate their whereabouts, for the waiting men were standing in a cluster at the heads of their horses, saddled and ready. “I could see the star in the black horse’s forehead from the gate.” The Governor answered, peering through the darkness. Just then Tom Merton struck a match to light his pipe, and back jumped every horse as though some evil spirit had appeared to them, wrenching the arms of the stockmen. Strange how horses are startled by a sudden burst of light while possessing eyesight to see as well by night with as by day.
“What are you scared of, you!” was mumbled by more than one, as the affrighted animals, recovering, stood snorting nervously, while Tom, groping for the pipe that was jerked from his hand, chuckled:
“You’d think they wer’ a lot o’ darn brumbies and had never seen a match struck before.”
The Governor spoke to Hyperion, and taking the reins from Eustace, fumbled for the saddle-bag to put some provender into it. Then to the men: “Have you all thought of bringing a snack with you?” All of them had—a precaution they would hardly have forgotten.
“They ought to be here soon?” Kearney spoke now, and referred to the three blacks, Combo, Curricomb and Captain.
“Not before it’s clear daylight,” Tom Merton reckoned.
“Nothing will coax them away from the camp in the dark, if they’re anything like the coastal tribes.”
“They’re a bit different out here,” from Kearney. “They don’t mind how dark it is if they’re out to tomahawk you! Those dogs that murdered the family at Hornet Bank surrounded the hut long before daylight and travelled a long way through scrub to get there.”
“The whole mob were there, though,” Tom reminded him. “When there’s only a couple of them they’re afraid of their own shadows in the dark.”
The horses gave another sudden start, and with heads turned sideways; then with pricked ears silhouetted against the grey skyline, they remained stationary. The men knew the signal, and watched silently in the direction indicated. An unnerving stillness followed, lasting for minutes. The brigalows on the flat near the home paddock boundary, where the morning star was sinking, lay in the direction the horses were watching. An owl fluttered from the stable roof and perched noiselessly on a yard post within arm’s length of Tom. It’s big, ghostly eyes blinked. Tom peered at it, and felt a shivery feeling run through him.
“Ho! Ho!” said the owl.
“Go to blazes!” Tom hissed.
Eustace and Kearney chuckled.
The foolish bird fluttered off as silently as it had come. Still the horses kept their heads turned and their ears pricked.
“What, th’ h—l do they see?” Eustace mumbled sotto voce.
“They see something,” wondering from the Governor.
“There it is,” from Tom. “A light among the trees—see it?”
All eyes saw it now. Not one light, but a fantastic display of approaching fireworks. It was Combo and Curricomb and Captain swinging lighted fire-sticks about in the dark to keep off the evil spirits. And as they came nearer what excitement those horses were thrown into! They pulled back, bumped the yard and the stables, and got mixed up with each other. And in their efforts to hold them the men were nearly carried off their feet, and they choked back a lot of violent language. When Tom Merton at last called out, “Put out those firesticks. Combo, you blighter; you’re frightening the devil out of my horse,” his voice, came from somewhere down the paddock.
Then from the Governor came a grateful welcome, and his voice was magic to those blackfellows. They responded with a round of wild whoops, their way of expressing joy at having come through safely, rather than as a greeting. And while they drew round him and the restless form of the nervous, distrusting Hyperion, and jabbered and grunted in complex vocabulary, the rest of us, leading our reluctant horses, assembled again.
Presently the day broke, and soon the bushland was arrayed in all its earliest light.
All were ready now, and the Governor rode off, the blackfellows swinging along on either side of the lofty grey. At the myall scrub the tracks discovered the evening before were shown to them. With bent heads they eyed them with the caution and curiosity that one might regard the bruised length of a snake coiled there with a blood-stained waddy lying beside it. Together they consulted earnestly, pointing at intervals to the scrub. And as they put their heads together, I remember how moist their matted hair and black beards were with the morning dew. Signalling their decision to the Governor in gesticulations they started off to run the tracks. It was apparent they had agreed to do it in relays, for Curricomb stepped off in the lead, his eyes riveted to the ground. The others strolled leisurely along at his heels. The Governor and the rest of us remaining mounted formed a rearguard, silent, watchful and expectant. Combo and Captain, though, seemed to find a deal of humour in the proceedings, for they made fun of Curricomb, imitating his gait and pulling faces behind his back, But after penetrating the scrub some five or six miles to where the tracks led into an area of kangaroo grass, in the hollow of which was a soakage (Curricomb Spring we called it afterwards), Curricomb stopped to consult with his black brothers. Then Combo, dropping his levity and assuming solemn countenance, took up the tracking. Curricomb joining with the Captain, now made Combo the butt of ridicule. He even snapped off short ends of dead sticks that impeded his way to toss at the back of the other’s woolly head. But nothing would induce Combo to take his eyes off his work, and I remember how the Governor, watching their antics, would pass meaning glances to the rest of us.
“Just like us fellows when we were kids, Governor,” Tom Merton said, as he bent low in the saddle to clear the loop of a vine and save his neck.
Emerging from the kangaroo grass on to a patch of loamy soil covered with dead leaves and crumbling bark, Combo pointed to the left and to the right. Curricomb and Captain glanced sharply round about, then became grave. Leaning from the saddle the Governor questioned them, only to learn that the tracks at the spot had been reinforced and that the whole tribe had passed over there. From there on there was no more skylarking. The prospect of coming upon the mob of their hostile countrymen set those three blacks thinking very hard. Indeed the bare footprints were so plain and plentiful on either side of our line of march that all of us could distinguish them at a glance. God, how affected the Governor became!
“Hurry on!” he urged, and with difficulty restrained from galloping forward. But instantly he was calm and thoughtful again.
Now it was Combo’s turn to step back and Captain’s to take up the trail. Scarcely had the latter run the tracks for a quarter of a mile over country where wattles and wild limes grew thick, when suddenly he halted, and, walking in a circle, kept pointing to the ground.
“Her boot marks,” came from the Governor, as he leaned down over Hyperion’s shoulder. “Thank God she’s alive, men.”
Since the tracking commenced these were the first footprints of Dorothy’s that had been discovered, and Curricomb demonstrated the cause of it by carrying Combo round on his back and letting him down again, denoting how the kidnappers had been carrying Dorothy, and put her on the ground while they rested or transferred her to other shoulders.
“Hurry on! Hurry!” came from the Governor, his eyes set like steel on the pine scrub in the distance at the head of Wild Bee Creek. Circus scrub they call it these days. And at that time, before the inception of forest fires, the pines spread over the great range and its pointed peaks and rock channelled sides like a flowing leafy blanket of many tints and shades.
The blackfellows kept close together, and were no longer studying or watching the trail. All three walked firmly, their dark faces grim and solemn, their shifty white eyes fixed intently on the nearest point of the scrub. It was plain they knew the abductors of Dorothy were encamped there. The Governor and the others felt for their revolvers. A set, resolute stare was in all their eyes. What a rush of thought flooded my mind as I gazed from one to the other. I was the only one who carried no firearms. Perhaps it was well, too, that I didn’t. But White Wings I knew was under me. What courage and confidence a horse that you know will inspire even in a youth. A bush boy on the back of a good horse has the pluck and spirit of a man of years. A hundred yards from the scrub, and the trackers paused. They yabbered excitedly, casting furtive glances behind and before them. The Governor asked what the matter was. Combo, speaking for the others, made it clear they were afraid to go further. That the tribe camped in the scrub were numerous and powerful enough to make short work of the lot of us. The Governor and Tom displayed their firearms to convince them of our advantage over the tribe with their spears and boomerangs. The trackers grinned and remained obstinate. Suddenly one of the animals pricked its ears, and stared toward the scrub. That was enough for Combo and Co. Like pedestrians starting off to the crack of a pistol in a foot-race they fled for home. We gazed after them in silence and disappointment. Halting in their stride for a moment to glance back to see what was happening—off they went again, and we saw no more of them that day.
Closely scanning the edge of the scrub, the Governor told the rest to look carefully to their guns. “We might have to use them,” he said, “but not until it’s really necessary. Better get across to the trees over there,” he counselled, taking note of a clump of coolibahs, “and one of you hold my horse while I go in and see if I can locate their camp.”
But Tom Merton, revolver in one hand, and hitching his pants with the other, was on the ground before him.
“That’s my job, Governor,” he smiled. “I’m not such a good target for a spear as you, and I can run a bit faster.” Tom was lean and muscular, and could run like an emu. “But keep hold of old Daybreak for me,” he added, glancing at Kearney, “in a way that I can jump right on to him if I’ve got to make a run for it.”
Then boldly he stalked through the long grass, while we sat in our saddles, our eyes roaming the edge of the pine jungle for signs of danger. Presently he entered it and disappeared from view. What moments followed! For how long we watched the spot where the thick foliage closed behind Tom I don’t know. No sounds other than those of a shaken bridle, or the stamping of restless hoofs, were heard. Was Dorothy there, in that silent bush? Would Tom see anything of her, or would he come rushing back with the blacks in hot pursuit, were thoughts that well-nigh strangled one. But just as the Governor, finding the strain of waiting too much for him, had dismounted to go after Tom, the latter reappeared, making signs to the others to join him.
“He’s spotted them, Governor,” Eustace said, as we rode forward abreast.
Tom motioned us to be silent, as we came near, while his eyes glistened and the blood rose to his cheeks.
“What is it, Tom?” in a low voice from the Governor.
“I have seen Dorothy—she is alive,” he stammered.
“Thank God!”
How my heart jumped. I felt like bursting into shouts of joy. But quick gestures from the others suddenly strangled the impulse.
“The mob’s camped in an open space at a waterfall in through there,” Tom pointed. “Dorothy’s sitting up on a rock, and they’re all holding a corroboree.”
The horses were made fast, and, following Tom, we crept lightly through the scrub, our boots sinking deep into the mulch-soil, manured by fallen leaves and bark and vegetable matter over generations and generations. On the inner edge of the jungle he stopped and pointed to an area of bountiful grass-lands hemmed in on every side by the jungle. There, beside a waterfall that roared like the billows, we could see Dorothy in her red frock, elevated on the rock, while around her in a wide circle squatted the tribe, men, women and children, chanting a dirge, and keeping time to it by beating their thighs with the palms of their hands.
The Governor alone remained calm. His was the silent, determined, calculating temperament.
“Don’t be in a hurry—take your time!” he whispered hoarsely, and his hand felt for his revolver.
What my own boyish feelings were would be hard to describe. “Just let us think what is best to do.”
And, while they exchanged whispers, how my eyes stayed fixed on poor Dorothy. There she was, the red frock so familiar, conspicuous against the circle of black skins and heads, her long brown hair, that mother had taken such a pride in from the time she was a mere baby, hanging all about her. Without a hat, she was crouched on the rock, her head bowed in an attitude of dejection. As the doleful chant continued, several tall, sinewy warriors, fearsome in their nudity, and feathers adorning their heads, marched round and round the rock, rapping their nullah-nullahs and boomerangs together, and at intervals crouching down and hopping as marsupials.
Eustace and Kearney reminded the Governor that this was the Cooby tribe. That they were full of bitterness and revenge because of poisoned flour having been distributed amongst them by a cowardly station-owner. So any attempt at friendly parley, they reckoned, would be fatal. On his side the Governor discounted the idea of attacking them, or making any display of violence, unless there was no escape from it. Such attitude could only increase the danger to Dorothy. Then Tom Merton made a suggestion.
“All right, Tom,” the Governor agreed. “Eustace and Kearney will come with me. And you, my boy (to me), go back with Tom, get on White Wings, stay on her, and be ready to go for your life if you see any blacks coming. Never mind about any of us.”
With my heart choking me, I went back to the horses with Tom. On the way he didn’t speak a word. Pale and resolute, he mounted old Daybreak, and patted him affectionately on the neck. Rare companions had Tom and Daybreak become.
“It’s do or die, Daybreak,” he said, and rode back into the scrub. When he had disappeared, and the sound of the horse forcing a way through had died out of my ears, the feeling of isolation and dread was more than I could bear. Casablanca had thrilled me in the schoolroom, but my sense of obedience wasn’t up to the level of the boy who “stood on the burning deck.” I must see all that was going on, even if I were to be tomahawked for it. I followed on Daybreak’s tracks, and came up with Tom just as he pulled rein and took up a position on the inner edge of the pines, where he could observe the movements of the blacks, and study the lay of the surroundings without being observed. He signalled me to keep behind him, and to remain silent. And so I remained, a length or two from him, holding my breath, and wondering what was to happen next. To the right of the circle of chanting blacks I could see the smoke from roasting flesh. I noticed two women with something in their hands resembling feather dusters rise from their places in the circle and approach my unfortunate little sister. They crossed the feathered things over her bowed head, like swords, keeping them poised for a moment while they turned their ugly black faces to those continuing the corroboree. How the hot blood surged through my veins! Had I been entrusted with firearms nothing could have stopped me from firing point-blank at those women! Not a word or movement came from Tom. He sat gazing across the heads of the tribe to a point in the scrub on the other side, about a quarter of a mile off. Once he reached down and gave his girths a pull to test their security. Suddenly a puff of white smoke spurted into the air, followed by the report of a gun, that rang and echoed all around with a loud, prolonged boo-m-m! A second one rang out, and then:
The Governor, with Eustace and Kearney, could be seen, a few paces out from the scrub, all three looking up into the branches of a great gum, making pretensions of aiming at some object in it. Thieves and invaders! What a stir was made amongst those chanting blacks! Every man of them sprang to his feet, and to his weapons of war. For a moment they stood staring at the white man who dared to encroach on the sanctity of their camping-ground! Up rose a savage war-cry, blood curdling, and lifted my hair on end. Then, brandishing their spears, they started off full split, a hundred strong, to settle matters with the intruders. It was what the whites were playing for, and back into the scrub went the Governor and his companions. For a moment Dorothy was forgotten. Oblivious to all that was happening, she remained motionless on the rock. The warriors had advanced about a hundred yards when out dashed Tom Merton full gallop on to the camp ground. Swinging clear of low hanging limbs, and shouting a war cry to confuse the black women and their offspring, he let Daybreak out. Lord, how I held my breath as I watched! And how the women and piccaninnies went flying for shelter when Daybreak went pounding amongst them!
“Stay where you are, Dorothy,” I heard him shout, “stay where you are.” And round the rock he swept. Daybreak circled it in his stride; dust and ashes rising under his heels. Tom carried Dorothy on to his knees, and before one could realise it, was racing back with her, and urging Daybreak with both heels and the slack of the bridle reins. I nearly tumbled off White Wings with excitement. Attracted by the commotion in the camp, the warriors paused, looked round, then with a fresh burst of war-whoops changed their minds, and came running back.
“I’ve got her,” Tom puffed, pulling up short to enter the scrub where I was hidden. Then:
“Get through as slick as you can, lad; they’ll be after us.”
So overjoyed was I that I couldn’t speak a word, but went ahead, guiding White Wings through the jungle as speedily as I could. How Tom steered Daybreak, and kept the limp, fainting form of Dorothy clear of trees and vines, I know not. Every other second I glanced nervously back, making sure we’d be overtaken.
Out into the open we came again—just as the Governor and Eustace and Kearney, their guns and ammunition rattling as they hurriedly reached their horses. At the same moment the fierce yells of the blacks as they entered the scrub behind us fell on our ears like the cries of bloodhounds.
“I have her here,” Tom called triumphantly to the Governor, as he tightened his grip on Dorothy.
“On men, and away,” the Governor ordered as he sprang to Hyperion; and on they scrambled, and off! the lot of us galloped abreast.
We kept the pace up till we came to the hollow where the old wooden wind-mill now stands. Then, jumping from his saddle, the Governor rushed to Dorothy, took her from Tom, and never shall I forget how he held and hugged her, nor the sobs that broke from her as her arms went around his neck.
But later, when we reached the homestead, as the sun was setting in all its grandeur and glory, and Mary Rumble and Mrs. Channing, holding mother between them, and Reg and the two nigger kids, and old Warabah, the big tears loitering on his boney cheeks, were outside the big gate, waiting—when the Governor reached down from Hyperion, and put Dorothy into their arms, and said, “Here she is, Dorrie, a little frightened and upset, but quite safe and unharmed”—there was a burst of feeling that memory can never efface, and which one must always hold sacred.
The Governor was a lover of good horses, with a faith in the demand that was in store for them as settlement advanced, and towns and cities increased. Looking to the time when there would be a big over-sea market for the Australian horse of the right type for military purposes in India, he purchased “Exile,” an imported blood stallion, and brought him to Runnibede. He was a rich chestnut horse, standing fifteen and a half hands, with big bone, a perfect barrel, massive sloping shoulders, and flashing eyes, set wide in a game, noble-looking head that glowed like the back of a beetle.
In the summer months Exile ran loose with the mares among the ranges and valleys of Wild Bee Creek; and many a time had horsemen who crossed his path when mounted on a gelding to ride for their lives to escape his jealous attacks.
In winter he was stabled, and groomed, and fed to perfection. Grooming and tending him was Warabah’s work, and what a proud, jealous groom he was! No mother ever nursed her child with more affection than Warabah bestowed on Exile. No matter when one approached the stable, the faithful abo. could be heard “purring” as he applied the brushes and cloths to the silky coat of the beautiful stallion. And Warabah never spared the “elbow grease.” He gloried in it.
When he wasn’t purring and working at him, he was standing at the head of the stall talking to Exile like a brother, sometimes in pidgin English, often in his own aboriginal dialect. And Exile seemed to understand everything he said, for when he spoke in coaxing flattering terms, the brilliant chestnut would listen with lowered head and dreamy eyes; but when he lifted his voice to rebuke him, Exile would stand to every inch of his height and strike a lordly, defiant attitude. Even then, if Warabah, pointing to a front or hind foot, called, “Lift ’im,” Exile would promptly raise his foot And when the order was “Stand it over,” the stallion would sidle to the other side of his stall. And how visitors to Runnibede, chiefly neighbouring squatters, or stock-buyers, or land-seekers, loved to look Exile over, for through his stock turning out so well he became known to station owners and people far and wide.
And how Warabah loved the light of the horse’s reflected glory as the visitors gazed at him in admiration. He got more of it than the Governor did himself. Gad, I can see Warabah now, standing there, his eyes glistening, holding the halter and stroking the friendly velvety nose of Exile. A familiar sight, too, was that of the black groom taking the horse across the yard to the water-trough every morning with only the halter on him. My! how Exile would career round and play up! He would leave the stable in a flying jump and a squeal, then round Warabah he’d spin with head down, ears back, and snorting as though he meant to devour him clothes and all. But, unperturbed, and stolid as a statue, the black would walk ahead to the trough.
As if giving variety to his exuberance, the stallion would playfully lash out with his heels, ceasing only when Warabah, thinking the sport had gone far enough, would lift his voice, and, jerking the halter, yell, “damn it you!” Then up he’d go on his hind legs, raising his majestic figure to the perpendicular, and in that attitude would approach the trough. If any of us chanced to be loitering there, as sometimes we would, what a scatter there’d be!
Among the mares that the Governor gathered together, some purchased from Mt. Abundance, others from Mt. Brisbane and Port Stephens, he struck a lot that “nicked” happily with Exile. The stock they threw him nearly all turned out perfect hacks, and clever, enduring stockhorses. Most of them were chestnuts, with tough constitutions, none that ever we knew was “washy,” or was a cocktail. Upstanding, good-tempered animals they were, full of muscle and intelligence, and with a rare turn of speed. Nothing on the whole of Runnibede in those days thrilled one like the sight of an unbroken mob of Exiles in the ranges, or on the meadow lands of the forest along Wild Bee Creek. Standing in line, staring at you, their heads held high, tails well out, trotting around, high-spirited and proud, they were pictures that no oil painting could mock. An ideal horse-country, too, was Wild Bee Creek—plenty of shelter in the winter time, clean open country where it junctioned with the river, rich with blue grass knee deep high. And at the head of it were limestone ridges that formed and developed hoofs and fetlocks unknown to horses of the plains and the coastal swamp lands.
The first lot of Exile stock were growing and coming on about the time that Ted and Dorothy and I were in Brisbane at the Grammar. But my term lasting barely two years, I was back again at the station in time to see the handling of them. The Governor, I remember, met the train at the terminus to the railway line. Headed for home, we drove all through the afternoon and night and the whole of the next day in a buggy, behind a pair of big walloping greys that looked more like chestnuts with the dust clinging to their heated, hairy coats. For most of the journey the Governor talked of those young horses, echoing and re-echoing all that he meant to do with them, and what he would make out of them. Ted and Dorothy, much against Ted’s grain at first, remained four or five years in Brisbane, and their course and schemes in life were shaped different to mine. Both Neil and Geof, too, were born while I was at the Grammar. Neil came to light under the buggy, ten miles out of Oakey. Gad! when one thinks of it, how the mater and women like her had to rough it in those days! And what other women, worse off than they, who went West for a home, for mateship and motherhood, silently endured in those wild pioneering days of the outback bush, no one now will ever know! Though the Governor as we drove had lots to tell about Neil and the baby (Geof.), yet I fancy he enthused more as his thoughts turned to the young Exiles. In all, there were eighty head to be handled and broken that year, all beautiful four and five year olds.
“We’ll send sixty of them to the saleyards,” he said, “and the rest will be kept in work on the station. There’s one of them,” he added, “just about up to your weight, Jim, a black colt out of one of the Mt. Abundance mares. A bit small, but looks like a derby winner.”
I was over sixteen then, and weighed about eight and a half stone.
“I’ve my eye on a big chestnut for myself,” he concluded as I hopped out of the buggy to open the horse-paddock gate. And how different were my feelings as I flung it wide, to the heavy heart I had when opening it going away a few years before! If there’s a sadness at heart in doing things we have been in the habit of doing for the last time, I can vouch for the joy and lightness of heart there is in returning to do the old familiar things once again!
What a scene there was at the yards when we started to draft those young Exiles, and to tackle the first of them! A noble, magnificent mob they were. And what snorting and reckless rushing and crushing! Bunches of shapely chestnuts, with here and there a bay and a grey and a brown mingled with them to relieve the sameness. Willie Williams, who had returned again to Runnibede, and Eustace and Warabah and Kearney were all there in their element “woh-ing” and “werping” and “shoo-ing” amidst clouds of dust, and scrambling and trampling of hoofs. Astride the yard-caps at every viewpoint, sat a contingent of the Curlew Lagoon blacks, dusky, grinning, mirth-making spectators. Combo, Curricomb, the Captain, and even old “King Henry,” with his long, grey crop of curly whiskers, had all gathered there. The tribe was part of the homestead now, with a “suburban” camp pitched on the ridge at the back of the stables; but the lagoon, of course, remained their headquarters. And though many of them, men and women, did odd jobs about the station, in return for rations and blankets, they never missed any fun or excitement that was going on. They would “down tools” and off, helter-skelter to the scene the moment they heard the ring of voices, the cracking of stockwhips, or saw a mob coming in.
“He’s the one I meant for you, Jim”—the Governor laughed as a beautifully modelled black colt, in plunging to evade Eustace, nearly knocked the two of us over. Gad! he was a “one,” too! Shorter in the body and limbs than any of the others, and with the head of an aristocrat. Though a lot smaller, his lofty, proud carriage made him look bigger than he really was. “He’s the Napoleon of them,” the Governor remarked, studying him. And Napoleon he was ever after—the same grand, game, swift little Napoleon that everyone for a hundred miles around got to know as if he was their own; the same Napoleon that was stolen from the station no less than three times, and who at the end brought more sorrow and regrets and tears to a lot of us, the day the cur of a scrub bull gored the life out him under me, than ever did human grief! And what days, ah! weeks of excitement, we had handling and breaking those youngsters! It was my first real apprenticeship to horse-breaking. But it was not all excitement—there was a lot of hard work and hard knocks, and sun-baking attached to it, too.
They were not hard horses to catch or handle. A few of them bucked, due to a hereditary streak on the side of their dams, but most of them made no more than a mad rush or two, or reared a bit. A couple of nondescripts, though, the progeny of two mares that were in foal to a brumby stallion when the Governor bought them from a passing drover, did enough bucking to do the lot. Undersized, vicious brutes they were, with eyes as treacherous as their heels. A more nervous or wilder pair of animals never entered a yard. Their hearts thumped like hammers, and their eyes glared at you in terror and distrust. Whenever the balls of mud that clung to the ends of their long tails touched their heels they let fly at them, first one foot, then the other, sometimes both together, till the joints of their legs fairy cracked again! To the dusky spectators they were the joy and delight of the earth. But the morning one of them was saddled and ridden by Tom Merton, the niggers went wilder than the bush had ever made them. It was a yellow bay, a well-set thing, with hairy legs, and eyes like an eagle-hawk’s. Mother and Dorothy were at the yard, too, to see it ridden. Eustace, a good hand at holding a young horse, held the brute by the ear in the centre of the yard while Tom mounted. And holding a raw, terror-stricken animal while another mounts it is neither a pleasant nor a safe undertaking. It calls for strength, and knack, and courage and coolness.
Numbers of good horsemen would rather take their chance on the brute’s back than at its head. But the wisdom of that, one only learns from experience.
“Now then,” Tom called to the merry blacks on the yard-top, as he hitched his pants and approached the outstretched quivering outlaw, “if he bucks me off some of you fellows will have to get on him.”
And when the Governor passed along a clear interpretation of what he had said, fully a dozen of them, men and boys—“yarman” they called the latter— started hurriedly to ascend the rails in readiness for a seat in the saddle. Eustace hung on to the ear and the bridle ring, and pulled the horse’s head well round. Tom took the reins in his left, gripped the off-side of the pommel with the right, made a couple of feints from off the ball of his left boot, pulled the saddle to test the yellow bay’s sensibility and intentions; then, as he made no movement beyond quivering more intensely, rose lightly, deftly, into the saddle and sneaked his foot into the off iron. With the reins in both hands, his eyes on the yellow bay’s head, his lips tight-pressed, Tom sat there as light as the sun on the grass for just an instant. Only those who have ever crossed a young horse, knowing that no one had ever sat astride him before, and that if they fail to anticipate his first movement they’ll hit the ground, can understand all that rushed through Tom’s brain in those few seconds.
“Right?” Eustace queried, looking back over his shoulder. “Let her go!” Tom said. And Eustace let go gladly, and danced out of the way.
Brumbies! and broken necks! How that yellow bay went to market! With his head between his legs he bounced in a ball off all-fours at lightning speed across that yard, giving an exhibition of straight, hard, speedy bucking, no pig-rooting, and looking as if he meant to suicide, and make a wet spot of himself and Tom on the blood-wood rails; but he didn’t. He went close enough to hit them, though, as he swerved cat-like in a whirl of dust, then back across the full length of the enclosure straight for the crowd of yelling niggers. But if they didn’t scatter and climb that yard faster than ever they climbed any tree on an empty stomach, say nothing! Again he scraped the rails, this time swinging the other way round, as if by instinct to test the eye and hands and head of the rider. But Tom anticipated him to the blink of an eye; went with him as if he had grown on his back like a staghorn. Into the centre of the yard again, bucking a hurricane, the niggers yelling, the Governor and the rest of us shouting to Tom to “hang to him.” Now the tussle commenced in grim earnest. It was man or horse for it, and any tactics was fair. The horse had never bucked or rehearsed the art or any of its manoeuvres before, so what brain-thought he had showed instantly when he changed his attack, or whatever one pleases to call it. Round to the off he spun, completing the circle in four or five high bucks that lifted Tom towards the sky every time. Ninety and nine riders out of every hundred would have taken it for granted that the horse would repeat the circle. Tom was one of the ninety and nine. The yellow bay rose his highest, screwed his body mid-air, and, hitting the ground at the reverse, spun to the near side instead of the off. His head wasn’t where Tom was looking for it at the moment, so he slipped in the saddle, and lurched to the off. He clutched, and his rein flopped. “Tom’s a gonner! He’s got him!” Eustace and Kearney reckoned. Gad! how I held my breath as Tom, lithe as an eel, struggled to regain his lost balance. But the yellow-bay saw his chance, and put the bucks in faster; he knew he now had an advantage. He squealed maliciously. The niggers yelled joyously. The reverse circle was completed. Tom was still unbalanced, but clung with desperate grip of the pommel. Then one, two, three rapid corkscrew bucks, neither straight ahead nor in a circle, but backwards! The ugliest bucks of all—and right over the head of the yellow-bay on to his hands and knees went Tom, beaten for the first time for years! Gad, how the blacks rushed in to pick him up! Some of them almost turned pale for fear of his being hurt. But Tom wasn’t even scratched. When he got his wind and finished spitting and thinking, he told Eustace to “get hold of him again.” Eustace held the horse again. And such an exhibition of horsemanship, and of horse-bucking, was never after seen in the Runnibede yard. Tom won, but when he dropped off, how exhausted he was! And in front of everybody, the Governor and mother included, Dorothy, carried away by the excitement of Tom’s achievement, squeezed through the rails and threw her arms around him. Poor Tom! How bashful it made him look! But for him what a fatal kiss that was!
Figuring everything, the blacks gave us little trouble in those early days at Runnibede—not nearly as much, I vow, as the whites would have given them could the positions, by any form of miracle, be reversed. The wonder, indeed, was that they suffered their hunting-grounds and living places to be commandeered and overrun by cattle, sheep, and horses with scarcely a protest! Generally speaking, those wild black people were an innocent, harmless race. Still, from neighbouring stations reports of crimes committed by them would reach Runnibede from time to time, and warnings “telegraphed” to the Governor to be on the watch for a visit from this tribe or that tribe. Rarely did the Governor take any serious notice. He’d merely shake his head, and blame the white settlers themselves as the cause of any trouble. “If they’ll only have the sense to make friends with the tribes, and treat them fairly,” he would say, “they need never be afraid.”
And so it was with us at Runnibede, for as the years went on the blacks became a help and not a hindrance to us, and were our friends, and not our enemies. Of course our relations with them didn’t bring a millennium, or turn Runnibede into a Utopia. There came occasions when a beast, or a couple of them, would be found slain, speared to make an abo’s holiday, far out somewhere on the boundary line. But whenever the Governor heard of it he didn’t tear his hair out, and play the devil about it, or in his mind see the valleys and gorges soaked with the blood of his best bullocks, and himself ruined and carrying his swag, and the rest of us starving. He wasn’t like that. He was something of a humanist and a philosopher; knew the blacks had to live, and that necessity knows no law. And on those grounds he shut his eyes to the butchering of a bullock or two. Indeed, he saw the value and virtue of giving the chiefs of tribes an open order to take a beast every few moons to slay in their own way and make a tribal feast of it. It became a boon to them; gave them the time of their lives, and so far as ever I knew the privilege was never abused. Rather, it gave them a slight proprietary interest in the herds, which often in their rambles they would guard by turning any they found straying over the boundary lines back on to the run again.
But squatters there were in the Never-Never Land who nursed bitter grudges against the black people. It was difficult for them to keep their guns silent whenever they came in contact with any of them; and in retaliation the tribes attacked the lonely shepherds, and at times a homestead, fired the grasses, and speared the stock. These depredations were reported to the police, and at long intervals after their occurrences a body of mounted “trackers,” would scour the country in search of the accused ones, and the accusations were mostly made wholesale. When they came across a tribe, or the remnant of one, that “dropped their bundles and ran,” they judged them guilty, and would gallop rings round them, give any that looked dangerous a taste of shot, and head them all like cattle from that locality to some other corner in the Back of Beyond. Such official displays were called “Dispersals by the Police,” and thereby many a pretty bush daisy bloomed on the innocent blood of the wild blacks.
It was a day in December, and as hot as an oven, and I remember it as well as I remember yesterday. The Governor and Eustace took me with them out on to Yalcalbah Plains—a name, by the way, that has long since disappeared from the map of Queensland, but is preserved on a humble selection nearer in. Some of the Exile stock had been seen out there running with a mob of brumbies, and we rode out to locate them. We had ridden far over the run, and were rounding a belt of brigalow bordering Yalcalbah Plains, keeping a sharp lookout for the brumbies, or horses of any description, when all at once we got a start, and so did our horses. The report of a gun, two barrels in quick succession, rang out ahead of us. Our horses had hardly recovered from the bounds they gave, when bang! and up rose a blanket of smoke from the bushes not fifty yards away!
“Who the deuce is shooting?” the Governor queried, staring in the direction. And while we were staring and straining, a wild, frantic scene suddenly opened before us. A whole tribe of black people—men, women and children—crossed a sort of inlet in the belt of brigalow, running for their lives. Then in pursuit of them galloped a body of police, shouting, yelling, and waving their guns as stockmen might do when on the heels of a mob of scrub-cattle.
The Governor went black with rage and shook all over with indignation.
“Surely to God they are not riding them down and shooting them?” and he was about to put spurs to his horse to get up with the police when Eustace halted him by exclaiming: “Hell, look here!” As he spoke an immense blackfellow, hopping and staggering, came from where the blanket of smoke had risen, toppled over almost beside us, and sank into the grass. His thigh bone was shattered by the gunshot. Gad! what a pathetic sight lying there, the bone protruding through the flesh and muscles, and the long grass about him smeared with his warm red blood! Our horses nearly knocked each other over in the bounds they gave to avoid him. But down and disabled as he was, he still clutched a deadly-looking spear, and was on the verge of throwing it even in that position. And perhaps if it had not been for Eustace we wouldn’t have noticed. The first law of nature was inherent in Eustace, and in a voice of frenzy he shouted: “Don’t you throw that bloody thing!” There was grim humour in the mandate, because he might just as well have urged the man to throw with all his might, for all he could understand. Still, something in the way of an intervention of Providence seemed to stay his hand, all the credit for which I remember, was later claimed by Eustace. Though the Governor threw himself from the saddle to go to his aid, and made friendly signs to him, that black crouched there, his wild white eyes rolling like billiard balls, his sides heaving, his ebony skin glistening with perspiration, regarded him as an enemy. He obviously expected no quarter, and no one could say that courage had deserted him. And how he glared from one to the other of us as we came round him, our horses straining on the reins and snorting. He looked to me, more as a wild animal than a man. And Eustace, I remember, kept his eyes on the spear until he had rescued it from him and tossed it aside. But when the Governor, instead of showing murderous intentions, took the puggaree from his hat and proceeded to bandage the broken limb with it, and to handle him carefully, the look of defiance and terror began to leave the black, and he lay there passive and still while the thigh was put in splints, made of switch sticks that we cut from the brigalows, and bound with saddle-straps. The blackfellow never flinched during the “operation,” though merely looking on, I know, made me shudder through and through. It was the first broken bone I had seen set, and having witnessed quite a number since then, I have learnt that the old Governor was not by any means the worst surgeon in this world. And as I stood by, curiously observing the backfellow stretched out in the long blood-stained grass, how the white skin on the soles of his feet, and on the palms of his hands interested me. And the ridgy scars across his heaving chest, not unlike old brand marks that had been burnt heavily into animals, started me wondering. What was working in his mind as he turned those rolling white eyes on me, and met mine, I would have given anything to know; and about those eyes too, I remember, lurked a couple of tears such as one sometimes sees in the optics of a beast just released from the pangs of pain. No sooner was the bandaging completed than the tragedy of it all turned into comedy.
“I think that will keep it together,” the Governor said to Eustace, and rose from his knees to review his handiwork.
“He’s lucky to get that much done for him out here,” from Eustace. And as though he understood them, or had been turned out of a hospital, the black started to get up to run off.
“No, no,” the Governor objected, placing his hands on the wild man’s woolly head to restrain him.
“Tchat! You damn fool; what are you trying to get up for?” And Eustace forced him on to his back again. But for a while it was like trying to keep an old man kangaroo down, and he struggled and strained as though he held broken thighs in the highest contempt. But soon he became passive again, and the Governor was wondering what was best to do with him, when the police body, riding back in our direction, showed in sight.
The Governor coo-eed, and waved his hat to them. They came on at a hand-gallop, and, pulling up short all about us, asked what was the matter?
“Are you the officer in charge?” And the Governor closely eyed a young-looking fellow with an open, happy cast of features, and a smart seat on a horse.
“Yes,” he said, “but what’s up with this chap?” and he glanced at the injured black.
“He’s got a broken thigh—shattered by a gunshot,” and an unfriendly look of protest was on the Governor’s face.
“You’ve fixed it up for him?”
The Governor nodded coldly. Then: “Do you think it justice or a fair deal to shoot these people without giving them a trial or the chance of a word being said in their defence?”
For a moment or two there was a silence that hung heavy, even way out there in the stillness and solitude of that Never-Never Land.
“No, Mr. Winchester, I do not,” was the answer, and he looked steadily into the Governor’s face. “Nor do I think it justice or a fair deal that whites should take this country from the blacks without giving them some compensation or a voice in the matter.”
It was an answer the Governor hadn’t expected from an officer of police, and it was one that in his heart he could not disagree with.
“Perhaps so,” and the sub-inspector met his gaze calmly enough.
The Governor was puzzled. So were Eustace and I.
“But we heard the shot, and saw the fellow fall,” Eustace confirmed, pointing to the spot.
The officer reflected.
“There were two shots fired,” he said. “I fired them myself, over the heads of a lot that turned to throw their spears, but it was a quarter of a mile from here.”
“There was a third shot,” the Governor insisted, “in the Brigalow there.”
“Not fifty yards away,” Eustace confirmed again, while I couldn’t resist bearing testimony, too.
The sub-inspector scented something. He stepped back and faced his men.
“Who fired that third shot?” he demanded. None, either white or black, answered. But so many of them glanced at Charlie Wallaby, a sly-looking member of the black brigade, as if expecting him to say something, and Charlie himself looked so unutterably guilty, that the sub-inspector instantly accused him. “What for did you shoot at this man?” he asked, “when I said no one was to shoot at all?”
The answer came from “Sam Jonson.”
“Charlie Wallaby been waitin’ a long time for this fellow Murrummi,” he said, “two—six—four fella moons.”
“What for?” and ignoring Sam Johnson, the subinspector addressed himself to Charlie Wallaby. But again Sam Jonson acted as counsel for his black brother-in-trouble.
“He been walk about along his lubra,” he said.
“A matter of jealousy,” the sub-inspector said, turning to the Governor, “but I assure you I never heard the shot, and my instructions to the men were to frighten them off, but not to shoot unless ordered to do so. It’s my first visit to these parts, and while I remain in charge of the patrol I assure you these people will be treated differently to what they have been. You are Mr. Winchester of Runnibede?”
“I’m Sub-inspector Dale.” Then they shook hands, and there began between them a great friendship way out there on Yalalbah Plains that lasted a lifetime.
Turning to the injured black, Dale wondered “what could be done with him?”
“Take him into Runnibede,” the Governor suggested. “I’ll go back along with you, and see what can be done for him. It’s a bad smash.”
Then Sub-inspector Dale ordered the injured one to be lifted on to Charlie Wallaby’s horse. “And take Charlie Wallaby into camp,” he added, “and keep him there till I return to deal with him.”
And when they bent over the casualty to lift him up he surely must have thought they meant to put an end to him, for he clawed at them and spat in their faces like a huge tiger cat. But in a bedlam of dialects every tracker there made effort to assure him of the white man’s goodly intentions. And what a figure he cut in his nakedness when hoisted into the saddle—his bandaged leg dangling, his face filled with doubt and distrust, his black beard spread all over his chest, and his hands clutching the horse’s mane. The Lord only could tell what his thoughts were! But what torture must have been his when they started off, and that horse jogged and jolted along after the sub-inspector for fully a dozen miles.
Meantime, Charlie Wallaby, holding to the stirrup of one of the police, and crestfallen and sulky, was hustled along in any old way down the river to the police camp. Eustace and I, with a few words of instruction from the Governor, went on 0ver Yalcalbah Plains to continue the search for the brumby mob. And a hot, silent ride it was way out there in that open, treeless land—a silence that was broken only by the creaking of our saddles and the rising of quail out of the grass. We crossed to the centre of that plain, then struck north to the timber land again. Nothing did we see but plain turkeys. And what numbers of them! Great grey fellows would raise their long necks out of the grass and stalk off to clear the way on either side of us, but keeping a watchful eye on us all the times, and nodding their heads to every step. Once our horses nearly jumped out of their skins as a huge pair of wings beat the air frantically between them and a turkey rose up.
“A hen!” Eustace said, turning his horse round on the spot. “She has a nest there somewhere.” And leaning from our saddles we twisted about, curiously eyeing the grass tufts. I discovered some feathers.
“Feathers are no good,” Eustace grunted. “Find her blanky eggs.”
Almost in the same breath he cried: “Here they are! I got ’em—two!” And off he got to secure them. A pair of large ones they were. And when he held them up way out there on that silent, sunlit plain, they seemed as something mysterious and beautiful and strange—something that suddenly broke the sameness of everything around, and gave a fascinating spell to the monotony of that mystery land of the Never-Never.
It was late in the evening when Eustace and I returned to the homestead, and with nothing to report in regard to the brumby mob beyond the seeing of numerous tracks. To my delight when we opened the stable door the sub-inspector’s horse was there staring at us. So he himself was still at the homestead! I put my saddle away hurriedly, left Eustace to attend to the horses, and skidaddled inside lest the sub-inspector might leave before I could see him again. At that age, like most boys of the bushland, a police officer in uniform to me was something of a hero to gaze upon. He was more in my mind just then than the wretched black with the shattered thigh. But when I bounded on to the back verandah I was met and surrounded by Reg and the two nigger boys, Zulu and Tarpot. Reg and Dorothy were both home on holidays.
“Heigh, Jim!” Reg gasped, “come and see the wild blackfellow they got in the back room. He’s got a broke leg all strapped up. They put a shirt on him.”
Here Zulu and Tarpot broke into giggles. And Tarpot said: “He wild myall, and got no trouser on, Jim.”
“Warabah is talkin’ to him,” Reg went on, “and keeping him from getting up. And old Harry is frightened, and has got his gun ready in the kitchen.”
“Oh, he wild fellow, all naked,” Zulu put in with a giggle.
“The mater gave him soup,” Reg went on, shoving the little niggers aside, “and he spat it all over the bed. Warabah said he reckoned it was poison. Oh, Holy! come and see his whiskers, Jim.”
“I know about him,” I answered, speaking with a wise and important air. “Wasn’t I at Yalcalbah Plains to-day when he was shot; and helped to set his thigh? But where’s the sub-inspector, Reg? Is he here yet?”
“Can’t you hear him?” Reg answered. “That’s him, singin’ in the drawing-room with Dorothy.” So, before seeking the water-bag and the bathroom, I stole quietly along the corridor and glanced in at the officer in uniform, little thinking that before a year had passed I’d be calling him “Dick,” and he’d be greeting me as “Jim,” and inviting me often enough to accompany him on his patrol work. When I glanced in the sub-inspector was paying Dorothy as much attention as he might have paid to a princess, and Dorothy herself, tho’ girl as she was, you’d think had known him for years. But how wildly improbable then would have been the thought that there in that old drawing-room at Runnibede was beginning in all innocence an attachment between two people that shaped its end through rivalry, sacrifice, unselfishness, and death, and a love that no man had greater.
A feature of Runnibede now was the presence of so many aboriginals at the homestead. From a “suburban” residence, the Curlew Lagoon tribe had pretty well made it their headquarters. And what a change had come over those simple black people! For years the Governor and mater had patiently striven to enlighten them and improve their condition. Tried to show them how to create a happier state of things for themselves, till at last their crude camp ground on Yapparappa ridge, behind the homestead, changed to a civilised, well kept progressive settlement, where a spirit of labour and production and law’n order prevailed. While they still observed their tribal rites and many ways of the wilderness, and roamed round hunting the ’roo and the emu, and climbing trees for ’possums, they learned between times to till the soil sufficiently to produce vegetables for themselves and for the station use. And in seasons, grew maize to provide the camp with rare feasts of roast cob.
In front of their rude gunyahs—and there was quite a street of these—garden plots that the Governor allotted them sprang up, and all fenced round with saplings almost lofty enough to keep the moon and the stars from looking over, to say nothing of keeping the station stock from breaking in to steal, and quickly some of them, though not experts, understood the culture and nourishment of plants and trees. With forks and spades they turned up the soil, and in buckets and oil drums carried water from the station pump, and in dry times, from the creek a mile away. When shown the uses of manure, every lump of cow dung ever after was “budgeree” to them. To establish a “market” for their surplus products, the Governor, through King Henry, explained that the station would utilise it, and give them tobacco and rations in exchange. What a scene there was at the big house when the first consignments were brought along! Without waiting to estimate whether or not there would be a surplus after their “home consumption,” they rushed their produce along by the arm-load as fast as their long spindle shanks could carry them. Laws you’d think a gold mine had been found the way they hurried over the ridge and in through the garden gate! Stacks of giant cabbages stood all round the kitchen door, with more and more arriving, while the proud looking producers grinned and waited for the “tea, tchugar and ’bacea.” And what a time the mater and Mrs. Channing had! After distributing the house patronage as equally and liberally as they could, they then had to make the poor niggers understand that the market was glutted, and they would have to take the rest back to camp and eat the stuff themselves … And the artful Combo, I remember, in pleading his case, told them that his family had “plenty fella ’possum” to eat that day. and so didn’t want the cabbage for themselves. And not until the Governor arrived on the scene and made the situation plain to them, did they take up their produce and go off.
An hour or two later, when the gins started cooking cabbage for the first time, the camp became a scene of clamour and kitchen fragrance. Their billy cans and stone vessels were too small to boil the vegetables in, and there were not oil drums enough to go round. So the Governor provided them with a huge copper boilex—one that the station butcher boiled down the shin bones of bullocks in. Into the copper the gins jammed all the heads of cabbage till the water flowed over and put the fire out … “Baal budgerree him!” they mused, staring at the catastrophe. But Uncle Jackie, more observant than the women, explained their mistake in a long, excited lecture, and started the fire going again. Though the gins were supposed to be doing all the cooking, the men gathered round the steaming cauldron two and three deep, poking the stewing cabbage with discarded spears, and rescuing fragments of it on the ends of them, and dropping them hilariously into the open mouths of each other—like parent birds feeding their young.
One way and another, the blacks did a deal of work about the station, though they slouched through it in their own way, taking their own time over it. Only when the mood was upon them would they commence a job, and they would leave it the moment they felt tired, or it began to bore them. Hard work really didn’t appeal to any of them. But in the garden when there was an abundance of ripe fruit on the trees, or lying about under them, they laboured well. The gins, though, could never do enough housework for the mater. They gloried in the washings and scrubbing, and each envied the other the joy of using the broom or belting the dust out of the carpets when hung across the clothes lines. How loyal and devoted, too, were those black women to “White Mary.” If ever she was ill, and lay up for a day, how they missed her! They would loiter round the home peering through open doors and windows for a glimpse of her. And would chant a doleful sort of requiem until allowed into the room to satisfy themselves that she hadn’t “gone bung.” At other times, when any whisperings were going on in the camp a projected attack on the homestead by a hostile tribe being “telegraphed” through the bush, they would seek out the mater to warn her in confidence. The mater, of course, would pass the information over to the Governor. And more than once he was able to frustrate an attempt to set fire to the outbuildings by the Cooby blacks, and to bring them to reason.
When the Curlew Lagoon people had progressed further along the lines of civilisation, the Governor and the matter set out to develop a taste for music in them. They tested the capabilities of the tribe and sifted out those with ears for melody, which most of them had to a lesser or greater degree. And how quickly they responded and picked up airs that were sung over a few times to them. It is hard to imagine anything more strange, or that fills one with deeper reflection, than listening to voices hitherto only heard chanting wild, eerie corrobborees being lifted in song in your own tongue. Uncle Jackie, the father of Curricomb, and an old favourite of Dorothy’s, had a rare gift of song in his wild make-up. No sooner was a verse sung to him, than he’d spark up and echo it back. They regarded him as a “discovery.” Gad! I can see the Governor and Uncle Jackie now, just as I saw them together on Sunday evening, when I had run the night horse in. At that hour the camp was all peace and quietness, and the sun was dipping behind the clouds in the west. No other blacks were there at the time. They hadn’t returned from the lagoon, where they were spending the afternoon fishing and swimming. Uncle Jackie, with his back to the garden patch, his head to one side, was listening soulfully, while the Governor sang “Abide with Me.” I pulled up about fifty paces from them, and waited to listen to Uncle Jackie. I hadn’t yet heard him in song. So when the Governor concluded and his voice died away, Uncle Jackie rose up to his full height—a majestic looking figure he was, in dark moles, open shirt front, bootless feet and bare head. With uplifted head, he faced the tree-clad slopes of the ranges of his native wilds that looked down from the back of the homestead, raised his voice, and sang the hymn in a way that pulled at one’s heart-strings. What made it perhaps more impressive was the knowledge that only a year or so before, the sight of him made you feel you were in the presence of the evil spirit that led the swine of Gadarea down into the sea! But standing there singing that sacred song, he appeared a reincarnation of one of the Apostles who went down into the wilderness. So the practice of singing went on and developed until the tribe brought forth its own choir. And what a surprise old Parson Glennie got when he visited Runnibede to hold service there one Sunday and heard them sing! Glennie, in years after, became an archbishop. He was the thinnest, leanest, and toughest man I ever remember, and he could walk like a world-beater. He did all the rounds of his “parish” on foot, often enough taking his life in his hands. How many hundred miles it was round his “parish” the Lord only could tell. Anyway, when he turned up at Runnibede, the Governor led into the service more black people with rolling white eyes and huge grins, than the big house and verandah eould hold. And at the close of the service the mater at the piano took charge, and the black choir, led by Uncle Jackie, sang the last hymn.
* * * * *
How the whole tribe would gather from every hole and corner of the camp and homestead to greet Dorothy on days that she arrived back on her school vacations! Gad. how they idolised and worshipped her! And as the days went by and she paid visits to the camp, or met the gins on the verandah of the big house, they loaded her up with gifts of all kinds —necklets of shells and acorns, quaint dillibags made from the skins of birds, and bundles (not bouquets) of wild flowers and wattle blooms. What joy was theirs, too, when she appeared at their camp along with the Governor or some of us, and stayed to sit with them around the fires, joining in their songs and stories and jests. Dorothy was a lovable girl, and grew into a tall, handsome woman, and how old Jackie adored her! I can see the two of them now as I pen this, as they sauntered along one afternoon past the open doors of the huts—the old black in spotless white shirt and pants, and a wide rimmed grass hat on his head. Dorothy with a sun bonnet and a smart print frock, and a leather belt encircling her waist. She held the black’s arm and looked up into his happy, black visage as he talked to her of the mysteries of his race, and was told, what this, that, and the other was called in his tribe’s dialect.
An impressive memory, too, was the big currajong tree at the foot of the garden, when Dorothy gave tea parties under the shade of it to all the black kiddies. Old Uncle Jackie would be seated in the centre of them, telling stories of the tribe’s adventures, of hunting big game, and singing songs to them. One song that he always ended up with, was one that Dorothy herself wrote for him. The whole of it I never knew, but these were its last lines:—
I hear ’em callin’, Jackie, I’m going home to-night!
No longer will I play and sing for you.
Oh, yes, I’m comin’, brothers—I see th’ kindly light
A-shinin’ down along the old Bareoo.”
Time went on. “Fat mobs off Runnibede” and “the Runnibede horses” were by-words along the stock routes to the coastal towns. And what droving trips we had! From Runnibede down over the border to New South Wales, and on to Maitland! The gallops in the big musters—cutting out fats on the camp at Curlew Lagoon. Ah, what exciting days they were! See the mobs stringing through the timber from all directions, roaring, snorting, sniffing, tearing the earth up, raking skin and hair off each other with gleaming sapling-polished horns, boxing and mingling together. What a ring of stockwhips! What ripping and tearing and swearing! The sight of it! Ten thousand head at least! What a mob for the stockmen to hold together! The risks that were taken—and the thrills we got! What life for a lad in his teens!
“See the proud swell of ’em, mighty pell-mell of ’em.”
The mater never worried herself now about what was to become of me in the future. My occupation so far was fixed. I was to follow the Governor’s footsteps, and one day take over the management of Runnibede. But before that came to pass I was to throw off my coat and take my place beside the men for many a long, hard day. There was no false pride or snobbery about the Governor. But he was no “nigger driver,” and he didn’t mind if a bit of sport entered into most things. So that is how I came to be one of the hands who took the thousand head of bullocks to Maitland—a thousand mile droving trip. And it was while we were away that the big mob was stolen off Runnibede. Gad, what a sensation that was! I had been back from school then about eighteen months, and Napoleon, after being broken and ridden for a year, and spelled, was brought back into work again. A wonderful little horse he turned out to be. What an intelligent, lovable animal he was! In the saddle he seemed to apply all he knew of his own kind to outwit them and all I had to do was to sit steady on him and let his head alone. The number of horses that are spoiled by men who can’t ride them without pulling and dragging at their mouths is legion. And so many of them, good riders, too, and yet they don’t know the weight of their own hands. No matter how freely or fast a horse answers to them they lurch him round as if its mouth were of cast iron. But Napoleon was always on the alert. His dark fiery eyes, projecting ever so much, seemed always fixed on everything around. How he would answer to the pressure of your knees, and jump off into his stride in response to the swing of your body like a hare. No wonder we got to understand each other in after years, for I had the shaping and the making of him all in my own hands. He would have been a difficult horse for anyone to spoil.
How elated I was the morning we left Runnibede with those thousand head! The sights I was to see. The life I would have by day and at night around the camp fire! How it all went scampering through my brain. In the party were Tom Merton (in charge), Willie Williams, Warabah, old Harry as cook, Bill Tymes (off Mt. Abundance), and myself.
“Take care of yourself, Jim,” said the old Governor, when he shook hands after seeing us off the run. “Drop a line whenever you get a chance along the road, and let me know how everything is going. Nearly all that we made last year had to go to reduce the bank overdraft; but all that this mob brings will be profit—and it’s wanted, my boy.”
That was the first time the Governor ever spoke to me of the financial affairs of Runnibede, though many and many a time in after years did we sit talking them over together in his little office at the rear of the old store.
Over the steep chocolate bank, across the shallow water-bed of the Condamine, and up the other side moved the great mass of reds and roans, bailies and brindles, across the boundary of Runnibede, and away eastward. And how soon they accepted the situation and settled down to a silent, moving, tractable mob. Like humans they showed a lot of class distinction by seeking company congenial to each other, and before night came on most of them were swinging along in pairs and quartettes, groups and cliques that scarcely altered right throughout that long droving trip. And soon the drovers themselves settled down to lolloping lazily in the saddle. For little, if any, real hard riding is done behind a mob on the road. It is only one of the quaint ideas of the city man that a drover’s life is a galloping one. Gad! If it were, what a supply of horseflesh would be required along the way! ’Tis only when emergency rises, and the unexpected happens, that galloping enters into the day’s work—when something is sprung on the mob when they are down and resting. Something that starts some of them—then there’s a rush, a ghostly affection sets in till the whole mob, in a frenzy, becomes terrified, and makes off in a mad, break-neck stampede. Some galloping has to be done to “ring” them and steady them to their senses, and to be done, perhaps, without a saddle, and in your shirt-tails, for time and tact are the essence of the contract in steadying a stampeding mob. A team of horses startled by something invisible behind the winkers are just as liable to stampede as a mob of bullocks, and with the same blind fury.
As to horsemanship, a very ordinary sort of horseman might make quite a good enough drover. And after droving cattle year in and year out, from north to south, from west to east, he then mightn’t be more than a fair horseman. But give him a dozen vigorous bull calves, just separated from their mothers, to drive ten or twelve miles across an open plain, single-handed, and he would perhaps be a much better horseman at the end of those few miles than he would on finishing a droving trip behind a thousand head of fats. Horsemen will understand.
We had only left the Condamine a few miles behind, though, when the spare horses started to give trouble. Three of them, after showing signs of mutiny, suddenly wheeled from the cattle and broke back at a devil of a pace. A chestnut mare, a mount of Warabah’s, led the rush. By some mischance she had had a foal that year, and as it had only gone to the weaning paddock during the muster, she was still fretting for her offspring. Bushmen know how a mare will fret like a mother over her babe. And if ever animal cut out the pace that chestnut mare did in the rush she made for home. Warabah himself, on Two Bob, a big brown horse with white spots the size of a two shilling piece on his neck and rump, took the first spin out of her. But before reaching the river she raced clear of him. I was riding in the wake of Warabah, at the head of the others, with Napoleon pulling all his might, and jumping every obstacle that happened in his path magnificently. I could see Two Bob floundering and failing to answer to the flapping of Warabah’s long limbs. But when the aboriginal glanced back to see where was I the “S.O.S.” was in the glances he gave. Then it was my turn, and so I gave Napoleon his head. Gad! How he responded! I can feel him doubling under me now. It was the first time he showed his real mettle. Passing the floundering Two Bob in a few strides, he drew on to the flying chestnut at every stride, till we came level. My knee was brushing her shoulder as we descended pell-mell into the shallows of the river. Wars! How we splashed into the water and churned it into foam! Then up over the bank by a long, grassy grade. Across a box tree flat, where we raced locked together. Instead of swinging wide, and resorting to tactics, the mare seemed to welcome Napoleon’s steaming nostrils to her side—to regard him more as a pacemaker than a pursuer. At first I made no attempt to draw the stockwhip. We were too close together, and the pace was so hot that my attention was all on the reins and where we were heading for. But another idea flashed into my mind. Tossing the double of the whip over her neck, I coupled it over her throat. Then tightening the grip, I hauled her in gradually with one hand and Napoleon with the other.
The rest was easy. And when we returned with the rebels, Warabah was so full of our achievement that Napoleon’s reputation was ever after established.
The first and second night out were perhaps the worst to pull through with those bellowing, moaning, restless bullocks during the whole of that long, slow trip. We struck good camps, though, those first nights on the banks of the creeks, where there were splendid grass and good watering places, and piles of firewood, carried down by floods and left there, heaped up around the butts of trees in the bends. But the mob took a power of nursing and steadying before they settled to camp for the night. When the sun had gone down over those great western plains, and the camp fire began to blaze, those bullocks still mooched up and down the creek, poking and mooing, and slobbering round first one waterhole, then another. When the watchful eyes of the stockmen left them for a moment, some would hurry round a bend in the hope of getting away. Cunning as foxes, they were! In fancy I can hear Tom Merton now, as he rode along the banks like a field-marshal surveying troops, calling across the creek to us: “Fetch them out now, boys; they’ve had enough filling.”
Then how the stockwhips would ring out, and our voices echo:
“Wherp! Wherp! Woh there. Werp! You cock-horned, sneaking crawler!” The “sneaking crawler” would imply one that was discovered in his attempt to prowl off, and back to his mates again he would come with one of us close on his heels. And, again, the voice of Tom:
“Steady! Steady there, lads! Don’t rush them. They’ve a long way to go.”
Though it was his first undertaking, a more efficient drover than Tom Merton never took charge of a mob of bullocks. When we rounded them on to the camp, a sheltered spot between the creek and the blazing fire, where the busy, stooping figure of the cook was reflected in the dusk, how in the shadows they surged and ringed, then stood like a wall studded with gleaming, animate horns, and rolling, flashing eyes! How quietly and vigilantly we rode round them! That is an hour on the first night that is filled with anxious moments for the drover, for what might be working in the minds of them he has disturbing doubts. So he moves round, keeping well out, so as not to irritate them, but watching closely through the thickening gloom. He knows that those glinting, ghostly eyes are upon him and his horse, and lowering his voice he talks to them in a friendly, crooning, wooing way as he moves about. Not until a beast here, and two or three there, drop to their knees, then flop their carcases on to the soft grass with a grunt, does he begin to slacken the strain and to breathe freely again. Once a few of them make up their minds to camp, how soon the rest, in twos and half dozens, and dozens follow, till soon the whole mob are down in one dark, breathing mass.
Long watches we had those first two nights. Little more than half the mob rested, then only at intervals. Often enough if a close eye wasn’t kept on them numbers would have slipped away under cover of the darkness. It fell to my lot to take part in the last watch. My stars! When Warabah gave my blanket a tug, and shook me to rouse me up, I felt as though I had only turned in for a minute or two. And sitting up, booted and spurred, just as I had rolled into the blanket, and rubbing my half-open eyes, I would have given the world had it been mine to tumble back again and sleep for another couple of hours. Then, riding slowly round to the other side, how one watched the gleaming horns in strange confusion, and listened to the eerie, breathing of those bullocks! What ghostly impressions the whole scene made on one as dawn started to break, and rising here and there, stretching themselves, and moaning, the mob began to take shape.
So we crept along through the wide bush mile after mile, day after day, through sunshine, wind and storm and rain, from camp to camp. Lolloping in the saddle, now sitting upright, now sitting “sidesaddle,” making crackers for our whips from the manes and tails of our horses, snatching a word, here and there, as we moved to the head or the tail of them, hailing some passer-by for the “right time” and information about the grass and water on ahead, sometimes sighting a mob of kangaroos or a string of scurrying emus, or a coach of Cobb and Co.’s rolling westward, or northward, but all the time watching, watching, and thinking of those bullocks! Like the beasts themselves, our clothes in a few weeks were as dusty as some of the plains; and, gad! how our hair grew! And my pants, how soon they got greasy, and fell into an uncomfortable state of disrepair! It was then I realised how far away I was from home.
Though many of the days were long and dull, and uneventful, some were exciting enough. When about a hundred miles or so from Maitland, we came to a comfortable-looking selection, the home of an Irishman with a turn for horse racing, not unusual in an Irishman. His name was Rafferty, and he came out to his slip-rails to watch the bullocks as they passed. It was about noon, and Tom and I, creeping along at the tail of them, stopped to yarn with him. Unlike most of the folk we had encountered along the route, Rafferty was more interested in our horses than the bullocks.
“Not a bad little hoss ye’re riding, young fellow,” he said, eyeing Napoleon, who was a bit fresh after a fortnight’s spell along the way. “Can he gallop?”
“He’s not too slow,” Tom grinned, answering for me, while the Irishman walked round Napoleon, studying his points.
“I’ll give ye a chance to win a fiver with him,” he suggested after looking wisely at Napoleon’s teeth. “There’s a little mare over in the yard, there, ’ll run ye with f’r a mile.”
“Let’s have a look at her,” Tom suggested. “She might be a thoroughbred.”
Rafferty opened his lungs and yelled to his son to “fetch Lady McCree out here.”
In turn Tom shouted to Warabah to let the bullocks spread out and feed on a reserve that was a short distance ahead.
From the seclusion of a number of sheds came a freckled boy of thirteen or fourteen, mounted on a prancing, glossy skinned mare—a herring-gutted, racey-looking thing that was hand fed.
“There she is,” Raferty affirmed proudly. “Will ye take me on, a mile along the road, f’r a fiver? Money down.”
And pulling a bank-note from his pocket, he approached Lady McCree and twisted it round the ring of the bridle-bit.
“Ye drovers,” he added, “have all th’ besht hosses, but Rafferty ’ll have a go at ye f’r the sport of it with this old screw of his that he bred himself.” And he chuckled merrily, yet somehow suspiciously.
Tom glanced over Lady McCree and looked meaningly at me.
“All right,” I agreed, “I’ll whack it with you, Tom, for the fun of it.”
“It’s a wager,” said Rafferty. “Put th’ stakes on the posht, here,” and taking the bank-note from the bridle-bit he placed it on top of a corner-post. Tom produced a fiver and covered it. Rafferty tightened the girths for his son, gave him a rigmarole of directions as to how he was to ride the mare to victory. Then to me, as I shortened my leathers and threw my hat to Tom: “’Tis just a mile and a bit fr’m th’ first lot of trees ye see up th’ road there to here. Flannigan wil go ’ong with th’ pair of ye and be starter. Ourselves will be th’ judges.”
Flannigan, a long-whiskered person in dusky moleskins and a cabbage-tree hat, had just ridden on the scene, his eyes staring and his mouth full of questions. Tom agreed to the arrangements, and unbuckling the jackshay from the saddle, said: “Send him for his life all the way, Jim.”
So, along with Flannigan, we went to the starting post. On the way I learned that Lady McCree was in training for the local race meeting to be held on the coming Saturday, and had done some wonderful “trials.”
“Line up,” said Flannigan, and we drew together. Then, standing well away from us, he dropped his hat and said “Go!”
We shot off together, and for a distance, were side by side. Then Lady McCree’s head came back to my knee. I could feel the loins of Napoleon doubling under me, and his whipcord muscles fairly lifting the saddle. At the quarter mile he had drawn right away from her, and I could hear the whip going. After that it was no race at all. I won holding Napoleon with both hands. So astonished was Rafferty that he didn’t notice Tom collecting the stakes from the post.
“What happened to ye?” he asked when his son pulled in.
“Nothin’,” the boy answered, gasping for breath.
“H’m!” and from Lady McCree the Irishman turned to Napoleon, capering round excitedly, and repeatedly dragging me over his withers.
“And ye haven’t fed him on corn or oats, do ye say?” he asked.
“Grass fed,” Tom laughed. And he could afford to laugh.
“Well, he’s a champion. And is he f’r sale?”
“I don’t think so,” and Tom grinned at me.
I shook my head, and patted Napoleon jealously on his warm, moist neck.
“I’ll give ye fifteen pounds f’r him, young fellow.”
“Money wouldn’t buy him,” Tom told him, speaking for me, again. “His father owns those bullocks, as well as the station they come off in Queensland.”
“Oh! oh! oh! And what might ye name be? I’m plaised to meet ye.”
Tom enlightened him, and Rafferty and I shook hands cordially. Then each of us, two pounds ten the richer, parted with him and cantered on to pick up the mob.
Five or six miles further along, where two creeks functioned near a belt of gums, we pitched camp that evening. From the reserve the men had got a birds’-eye view of the race, and while we sat round the fire having supper, and went on and came off watch, the match with Lady McCree supplied us all with something fresh to talk about.
Next morning, to our astonishment, when Bill Tymes went out to round up the spare horses, he found Napoleon was missing. At first we thought he had missed him somewhere in the low bushes that grew dense there. But when Warabah and Willie Williams, after scouring the surrounding country for a couple of hours, failed to find him, we concluded he was stolen, and my heart sank within me like lead. Napoleon stolen, and perhaps I’d never see him again. So proud had I become of the fiery little black horse that now I felt useless, lonely, and like something adrift in my little world.
“You fellows look after the mob,” Tom ordered. “Camp them for a couple of hours at dinner time, and Jim and I will ride back to that Irishman’s place and have a yarn with him.”
So back rode Tom and I on fresh horses, or as fresh as it was for spares to be on such a trip, scanning the country closely on either side, and thinking hard as we slipped along.
We found Rafferty in his yard rubbing down Lady McCree with brushes and cloth, and at intervals shouting to her to desist from biting at him. When we told him about Napoleon he seemed genuinely surprised and upset.
“Who do ye think would steal the hoss” he asked.
We had no idea. But Tom asked him a question or two about his friend Flannigan.
A far-away look came into Rafferty’s eyes.
“Well,” be drawled, “a wise man keeps a still tongue in his head, and no one should speak ill of his neighbour. For all that, Flannigan, I will tell you, is not a great friend of mine.”
He paused, and we remained silent. “But, if I were ye, I would come back to this part next Saturday for th’ races and have a look at th’m. If ye understand me?”
Tom thought he understood, and, thanking him, we turned to go off again.
“Ye have nothing to thank me f’r,” he called out, “f’r I have told ye nawthin’.”
On the way back to the mob Tom formulated a plan of action. “The grass is good now, they say, all the way to Maitland, so we’ll camp the bullocks all day Saturday, Jim, while you and I’ll cut back to the races and keep our eyes out for Napoleon. Our friend Rafferty didn’t tell us very much, but he meant a hell of a lot.”
They were miserable hours for me on watch that night, and the next night, too! Banish Napoleon from my mind for a single moment I couldn’t. Not until Saturday morning broke—and a fresh, beautiful morning it was—and we were well on our way to the races, did I brighten up and listen to some of the yarns that Tom had to tell.
They were the usual class of bush races, and the course, we found, was a couple of miles off the stock route. And what a crowd of horsemen had gathered there! And the buggies and carts packed with people standing in them to view the events were a sight to remember. A race had just started. We joined the hustling horsemen lined along either side of the straight; and, standing in our stirrups, watched the field racing down the slope, around the back of the course, and into the straight. They entered it in a bunch. The crowd began to wave their hats, and roar “Currajong! Currajong! Suddenly a horse on the outside came right away, and the shouting ceased. The favourite was being donkey-licked; and as the winning colours flew past, with the rider looking behind him, Tom and I gasped: “Napoleon!” and gazed in astonishment at each other. “Almighty!” Tom cried, and through the thick of the crowd he spurred his horse. Then up alongside him he propped short, as the jockey pulled up and turned round. Tom snatched the reins, and held Napoleon while I wheeled to the other side of him.
“You rode him well,” Tom chuckled, “but this horse is stolen, and belongs to this young man here.”
Then there was commotion. The mob gathered round shouting out questions. The officials fought their way through them. The jockey protested nervously. Tom, sticking to the bridle reins, stated our case. Then Rafferty pushed his way in. He declared he “knew the horse belonged to these gentlemen,” and told how he had matched his mare against Napoleon for a wager, and lost. Calls for the man who brought Napoleon on to the course and entered him for the race were not responded to. He wasn’t to be found. The jockey said he had been engaged by Flannigan to ride him for a friend of his. Flannigan was not present either, and the “friend” had disappeared. That ended it—and we gladly left the course, leading Napoleon between us. Gad! How pleased I was when we got well away! And what joy there was in camp that evening!
With only a few head short, Tom delivered the mob in good condition to the agents in Maitland. They netted, I think, about four pounds a head. Then, after a few days’ spell, we started back on a long, weary ride for Queensland and home. How long it took to do the journey I forget now. The last couple of days, though, when nearing the old station boundary, were the longest stretches of all. Yet what feelings of joy and gladness came to us when familiar landmarks began to reveal themselves. Creek crossings on the Queensland side. Table-top Mountain, on the Darling Downs. Bushmen coming east, starting their evening fires. Mountain gorges, and towering peaks where eagles built their nests. Stalking flocks of high-browed, hollow-eyed emus of aboriginal mould. Curlew Lagoon. And then— Runnibede, old Runnibede again.
Contrary to what was expected, the Cooby tribe resorted to no treachery or acts of revenge, but as time went on showed a disposition to become friendly with us at the homestead. At certain seasons they would travel down from the ranges to pitch camp by the edge of Myall Scrub, where they corroboreed and feasted on the fruit of the bunya that grew there, but now, like many other timbers of those pioneer days, pretty well denuded from those parts. It was only a temporary camp, however, little care being taken in erecting gunyas. The clouds served as blankets for many of the tribe, and the tufts of kangaroo grass were their pillows. It was pitched well in sight of the big house, where, looking from the back verandah at night, we could see their fires, and often by day watched the smoke from them curling above the gunyas up into the sky.
“Gad! How nerveless and restless the mater would get while the “Coobies” were camped in the old scrub! She could never forget that they had once kidnapped Dorothy, and though the Governor laughed at her fears, and assured her that our black neighbours merely wanted to corroboree now and roam in peace, and to be friendly, she took consolation only in the thought that Dorothy was away at school. But the day the Governor decided that he and I would ride over to the camp and take with us a supply of bread and beef as an offering of peace and goodwill to the tribe, Lawd! you’d have thought the mater had received word that we had been captured and roasted alive by the mob. Nothing could persuade her that we wouldn’t be speared through and through if we went near them, and “then what will happen to us, Edward; and to the station?” she asked. “The place would be surrounded and set fire to.”
“Not a bit of it, Dorrie,” the Governor assured her. “They’re nearly as harmless now as ‘King Henry’ and Curricomb, and Captain, and all these of the Curlew Lagoon tribe.” But not until Mary Rumble broke into mirth, and expressed some confidence in the Cooby people, were the mater’s fears allayed at all. And then she insisted on the Governor carrying fire-arms, and warned me to be sure and ride Napoleon, and not to go too near them.
“Put a pair of running shoes on Napoleon, Jim,” the Governor jested as we rose from lunch to go to the stables.
Most of the tribe were away hunting in the scrub when we rode up to the camp. A number of old people—grey-haired grandfathers and grandmothers were in possession, squatting before the doors of the gunyas—their sunken eyes fixed strangely upon us as we approached, for be it remembered the aged and infirm were not deserted by these wild people of the never-never land. Those melancholy, emaciated old folk crouched there like ghosts of the dead sitting by their old camp fires. The Governor greeted them cheerfully, and tried hard to start a conversation, but they only gazed on in strange silence at us. And not as much as a grunt came from any of them. And not until we dismounted and revealed the bag of provender, and the Governor patted one of the old women on the head, did they begin to realise that we hadn’t come while they were alone to destroy them and fire the camp. But even then it was plain they had some bitter memories of white men’s dealings, for, when the Governor proffered one of the “grannies” a scone, she shook her head, while her dim, sunken eyes clouded over with distrust. The Governor understood, and, turning to me, said:—
“Eat one, Jim, and let them see there’s no strychnine in them,” at the same time taking a bite from one himself and munching it up.
I ate a scone in quick time, but before I could gulp down the last of it, a half dozen pair of long black bony hands were held out to the Governor. Next minute he was doing great business serving out the scones. Gad! What a picnic it was. The old men, after the first taste, in their greed plugged their mouths with whole ones, and went nigh choking themselves. They behaved like big hungry kids at a school treat when the cakes came round. And while the Governor was joyously feeding these poor old things a contingent of the tribe, returning from their hunting exploits, suddenly stalked with the silence of emus from the scrub and stood before us. My stars! If I got a start, they looked a bit surprised, too. For the moment I was for jumping on to Napoleon and clearing for my life. But on a sharp “stay where you are, Jim,” from the old Governor, I stayed, with little credit to myself, though, and took my chance. There must have been twenty of them at least, and all men, tall, lithe looking fellows, some with spears in their hands, others holding dead ’possums and a couple of wallabies by the tails. And the more I stared at them the more I noticed what fierce, stubborn, black devils they mostly were, with their naked bodies streaked with the scars of adventure. For a moment or two they seemed to be trying to take in the position of affairs. The Governor, too, was silent, perhaps waiting for some of the old people to say something … Then suddenly a round of terrifying interrogations directed at them broke the spell, and cracked like thunder upon the solitude. Exactly what their words were, I don’t know, but pretty sure it was they demanded to know of the old folk what the hell we whites were doing in the camp, and what was it they were eating. Anyway, the old people were not much perturbed by the questions, for, with self-satisfied expressions on their sunken faces, they rubbed their bingies with their hands and went on eating. Then the Governor made some friendly signs, and got off a few words in their dialect, which set them at ease and brought them all round us like long lost brothers who had gone bush, and formed themselves into a new tribe. All the same, I confess I was still ready at any moment to take a flying jump on to the back of Napoleon and head for the homestead. The old people, however, had nothing to explain to them. They couldn’t have spoken, anyway, for they stuffed their mouths more and more with scones. Indeed, a couple of the old fellows resented their home-coming, for, when one of them essayed to sample the scones, they rose to crouching positions and waved their lean hands and stamped their bare feet in protest. The Governor, however, was able to treat them all to some meat, which they devoured greedily. They talked and laughed a lot among themselves, and when we mounted our horses to come home they gave us a boomerang apiece, and to assure us, I suppose, that they were the genuine article, two of the warriors took them and, stepping out into the open, threw them simultaneously in different directions. I have seen many bomerangs thrown since them, but never such an exhibition as that. No two birds could have been trained to leave the hand, and taking flight in opposite directions, rise gradually into the sky, circle round and return together at different angles with greater accuracy than those boomerangs were made to do.
It was six months or so later, while the Cooby tribe were again camped by Myall Scrub, that Moom, a beautiful girl of eighteen, the daughter of Hippee and Cobbotha, fell ill and died there. The wailings of sorrow and grief that the death caused in the camp, I can well remember. How distinctly their lamentations could be heard at the homestead on the night air! On that occasion, too, the Governor and I visited them, and Warabah went with us. It was the second day of their mourning, and we learned that the dead girl had been a great favourite with the tribe and was looked upon in the light of a princess. Also, that the death had been the work of some mysterious spirit. News of Moom’s death was telegraphed throughout the bushland that lay far back in the ranges, and in wonderfully quick time, instead of fifty or sixty mourners, there must have been a couple of hundred gathered there. They turned up from every point of that realm of ranges in unaccountable fashion, coming at a long swinging trot, and announcing their approach in weird cooees that made the bush seem haunted with lost and tormented souls.
What preparations they made, too, for the burial of the dead girl! The choosing of a last resting place. The making of a bier, and the tribal requiem. The solemnity of their black visages, and the noisy howling consultations they shared! Sheets of stringy bark were stripped from two trees as similar in size, shape and foliage as could be found (one of them, with a new growth of bark, still flourishes by the old scrub; the other has long since disappeared), and between the sheets the corpse of Moom was bound fast by vines cut from the scrub. Upon the bier, formed of green boughs placed on the grass, she was laid in her coffin. Around it the mourners collected in a large circle. The women and children sat in the inside; the men knelt or stood round at the back. Though a form of religious ceremony, it was filled with childish antics. And as we stood there as witnesses, well can I remember the Governor giving me a dig with his elbow and saying, “don’t be laughing at them, boy.” Gad! How difficult it was to watch their faces and refrain from chuckling. The day was a sweltering one, too. The sun blazed down from a white sky, while the leaves of the myalls and kurrajongs sparkled and shimmered in the glaring light. In the throes of their grief, those wild men twisted their bodies, rapped their war weapons together, and waved their long, fierce beards and marched round and round while they drooled and chanted a dirge. The women joined in and beat time by slapping their naked thighs with the palms of their hands, much the same as when they kidnapped Dorothy. This ceremony or corroboree ceased only when a scarred and heavily bearded patriarch, as fierce looking as any wild animal, rose to address them. What class orator he was, I can’t say, but he was the tribe’s prophet, rainmaker, priest and oracle, in whom they had the simple, unshaken faith of children. For, upon his premonitions as to the fate of the dead girl, they placed their dependence. Strange, I have often thought, that a wild, primitive people, who had so much fear of a devil-devil and no idea of a Providence, should hold, however crude, a belief in reincarnation? For such was the hope and consolation that this scarred and bare-limbed prophet—Goondi-Goondi—held out to them in their grief.
“Don’t you mind about it, my children,” he told them, according to the old Governor’s interpretation. And Gad, I can see the latter listening, now, leaning forward with a hand behind his ear. as though on the prophet’s words hung the fate of the bushland. “Our beautiful Moom, she go bung now, but in six moon she jump up white, and come back to Cooby people to be their white queen.”
And when he had pronounced the benediction, which he interpolated with a high jump and a self-inflicted spank on the calf of his leg, in response to an attack by a wandering jumper ant, a confusion of willing pall-bearers surrounded the bier. As many as were able lay hold of the coffin, and, raising it to their shoulders, marched off with it along the rim of the scrub, followed by the others, all groaning and lamenting harder than before. Halting by the trunk of a crooked old gum tree with low-spreading branches, “grave yard tree,” as it was called ever after, they hoisted the remains of Moom on to a frame that was fixed in the first fork, and there they left her in her last resting place, among the scented blossoms, above the nodding dandelions and daisies, near to the everlasting stars, and out of reach of the prowling, slinking dingoes—left her to come down again on the sixth moon to a new life; and without further weeping or smacking of thighs, silently dispersed and went their different ways, into the wilds of their own land, the great Australian bushland.
Though we had gone in the waggonette to meet Dorothy at the railway terminus numerous times before, it somehow seemed different now. Her school days were over, and how the years had passed! She was coming home for good, to be a help and comfort to mother at the homestead. There would be no more “few short weeks at home,” no more partings and seeing her off midst tears and sobs and sad good-byes and remembrances! And so it was in the feeling that she was coming as a joy for ever that we waited for the train to come in, and in those days it only came in on two days of the week.
“There she is!” and, as the carriage rolled past the little platform siding with Dorothy smiling and waving from a window, the old Governor left me standing, and jostled his way through teamsters, station hands, blacks, half-castes, dogs, oil drums and wool packs, to be up in time to open the door for her. I was forced to limp carefully after him because of a stiff knee that I had from being run against a tree during a muster at Wild Bee Creek a few days before. But for the mishap I might not have been there at all … And when I reached the carriage door, not only had the Governor lifted Dorothy to the ground, but he was tossing her up and down like a doll, to find out how much heavier she had got, with the motley crowd of spectators enjoying the performance. And gad! what a swag of luggage she had with her! Bags, baskets, cloaks, coats and hat-boxes without end! When the lot were stacked on the old waggonette, along with the usual station parcels, it was with hard squeezing that the three of us could find sitting room amongst the pile.
“So long as I can get my feet somewhere, and have room to handle the reins,” the Governor chuckled, “I’ll be all right,” and Dorothy wedged between the two of us, was sure she “wouldn’t fall out, ’less Jim did.” So away we went, and at a slashing pace behind the pair of greys that the Governor wouldn’t sell for love or money—and big money he was offered more than once for them, too. He was a great “whip,” like many station owners; and driving was driving those days. And how the feet of those greys soon had the dust flying along that stock route! It was a splendid season, too, one of the best that ever we had on Runnibede, the sort that puts a lot of heart into you and makes you forget you ever had an overdraft or that there ever was a drought. And the day was a real stock-rider’s day—the air so crisp and ripe with the scent of blossoms, of green, fresh herbage and brushwood. Spreading out to either side as we rolled along were miles of wattles in bloom, and red gum tips were splashed against the green of the grass. And far on ahead, as far as the eye could see, stretched the great wide plains that beckoned west, forever west … Rattling over those old scenes again in all their glory, what a joy it was to Dorothy. There was nothing she missed—no rock slide, skyline, tree, shade or sun effect escaped her attention. Objects that passed under the eyes of the Governor and myself in dull procession, Dorothy enthused over as things of beauty, the joys and delights of the bushland … At first her outbursts of admiration were full of amusement for me and inducive to fits of merriment, but before we were a quarter way along the road I found myself turning my eye to searching out quaint old gums, unique coolibahs, battlemented rock slopes and landscapes, lest Dorothy should miss them between the rolling of the waggonette and her snatches of conversation with the Governor. And how I remember when we came up the bank out of Bungeworgaori Creek, a name that is well known now, the pair of great grey kangaroos that was there! Laws, they were a size! Down on their paws picking at the young grass that was shooting after a forest fire had been across that way, their huge tails resting along the ground, they seemed, for a moment or two, to be animals we had never seen or heard of before … As we swung round a bend in the road and came close to them, they rose up like a pair of giants, and stood as a couple of soldiers at the attention, gazing at us fearlessly, and as though we were an every day happening in their lives. We must have been near enough to those old ’roos to have roped them without much effort—I could feel Dorothy fairly tremble with the thrill they gave her, and the old Governor was so amused at the cool daring of the ’roos that he stopped the horses.
“Get out, Jim,” he chuckled, “and catch them,” I was nearest them, but instead of getting out, I let go fly more than half an apple that I had been munching, at Dorothy’s invitation, and it struck one of the old ’roos fair in the paunch. Falling stars! That “old man” got the surprise of his life. He jumped so hard and so blindly that he knocked his mate over, and lost his own balance and his head. They both sprawled on the ground, each struggling to rise before the other. And when they found their legs and tails again, they made off, flying from our yells of mirth as if we were dogs pursuing them.
The incident filled Dorothy with thoughts of a kangaroo hunt on a big scale, when her school friends, whom she had been telling us a lot about along the way, would come to spend their vacations with her at Runnibede.
“Jim and Tom Merton will be able to get up a hunt for you,” the Governor suggested. He was never an ardent kangaroo hunter himself, always reckoning he could get more galloping than he wanted out of mustering the cattle.
Then, leaving the hunt to me, he talked of other things. Dorothy, I remember, asked a lot of questions about Tom, just as though the mere mention of his name had prompted them. But I know now that there was much more at the back of those questions than most people might dream of. I didn’t know, either, that more than one letter had come in the station mail bag for Tom in her handwriting, and they had set the mater and the old Governor thinking and wondering very earnestly. And I could understand more clearly, a year or so later, why it was that the Governor, while not speaking much of Tom, had a lot to tell her of Sub-inspector Dale (Dick Dale, as he called him), and his visits to Runnibede. “A fine young fellow,” the Governor would say. “He’s taking my advice as to the way the blacks should be treated. He’ll go a long way in the service, will Dick.” And dropping Tom Merton for the moment, Dorothy was soon interested in all that the Governor had to say about Dick Dale. So much so that she began recalling the few memories she had kept of him. She remembered the mater and she “thought him a very nice man the first time he came to the station,” and that he “had a fine seat on a horse.”
“A splendid horseman,” the Governor enthused.
“But not the horseman that Tom is,” I put in, always feeling that Tom had no equal anywhere in the saddle.
“A different style of horseman, Jim,” the old Governor reminded me, taking a shorter grip of the reins to steer the greys through a number of close growing cherry woods—“quite a different style.” And then when Dorothy almost sighed: “Oh, the day Tom rode that outlaw!” and sat back, without saying any more for quite a long distance. I should, when I think of it now, been a lot wiser than I was to the understanding and sympathy between them.
But the lull in the conversation made no difference to the greys. They continued to step it out over those rolling plains—foam gathering at their flanks and hot steam coming from their nostrils—at intervals new-shorn sheep scampering out of their way, and quail and ground larks rising in confusion from the long grass. It was a long drive, travelling hour after hour throughout most of the day. But as the last miles were thrown behind, as the sun sank lower and lower, we drew nearer and nearer to the old homestead. The winding track threaded a clump of black wattles, taking us on to the turn-off at the northern side of the home paddock. The “new gate” had just been put there—it’s a crumbling old tumbledown gate these days— and the road made a mile shorter. Some distance off we could see a gathering of blacks there, with a horseman in the centre of them. A mild form of excitement was going on, the cause of which, for a moment or two, wasn’t clear to us.
“It’s Tom Merton,” I discovered at last. “He’s riding one of those fillies we handled last week— couldn’t get her through the gate by herself, I suppose.”
“And some of the Cooby blacks,” the Governor said, as we came closer … What a start Dorothy gave! We couldn’t fail to notice it, and laughed at her … but it was only a nervous flush, for next moment she was wondering aloud if any of them would remember the time they kidnapped her?
“They don’t forget anything,” the Governor said, “but they’ve been tamed a lot since then and you were very small, and they understand us whites better now.”
Then as we came to the gate: “What’s going on, Tom?”
“Helloa! … Oh, nothing, Governor,” Tom shouted, as the filly sidled and capered about, after bounding through the gate which was held open by enough black hands to pull it down and toss it away. “She didn’t want to come through while so many were looking at her.”
“I thought, perhaps, they wanted to buy her from you,” the Governor jested, as he drove the waggonette through into the home paddock and reined up the greys again.
Poor Tom! We were almost beside him now, and how he blushed, like a ripe tomato, when Dorothy smiled upon him and asked how he was. I felt sorry for him, he was so self-conscious, and how he did his best to answer questions the Governor was asking, and at the same time to raise his hat to Dorothy. And by touching his hat, however stealthily, he was taking risks on a nervous, flighty thing, the first time out. Horsemen will understand.
“Are you breaking in, Tom?” Dorothy, observing the caution with which he sat the filly, asked. “What a pretty head it has!”
Tom, as he made answer, blushed more and more.
“Miss Winchester will want a kangaroo hunt arranged, Tom,” the Governor began, when he was interrupted. Gondi, the oracle of the tribe, who was one of those in the gateway, suddenly approached the waggonette on the side on which I was sitting, and with mouth and eyes agape pointed right straight at Dorothy. What a start she got! and I could feel her clutching my arm, and with her other hand, I suppose, clutching the Governor as well. At first I thought Goondi merely wanted to shake hands with her, and perhaps apologise on behalf of the tribe for having stolen her away to Circus Scrub on that memorable evening, and from the look on his face, for a moment, I got some grim amusement. But the light in his eyes imparted a different meaning to Dorothy. A strange stare came into them, and he stood there with finger poised; his scarred chest, as he leaned over, pressed against my knee. And the breathing of the old beggar suddenly speeded up to a pitch of excitement.
“What’s the matter? I said to him, with a grin, but instead of answering, he crooned something to Dorothy, and held out both hands to her in a beseeching way, as if he wanted to make love to her. Gad, I would have laughed into his big black ear, only that I felt Dorothy’s clutch fasten like a vyce. Then the Governor took a hand. “You know her? You want to speak with Dorothy?” he asked. But ignoring him, the prophet turned his head and said things to the other blacks that brought them hurriedly to the waggonette, and there they stood, all yabbering to each other and gazing up at Dorothy. I could see there was no joke in it now, and Dorothy became so alarmed that she appealed to the Governor not to let them touch her! The Governor had to think quickly. Tom Merton, calling to them to “get back out of that,” tried to work the filly nearer the waggonette, but she reared and shied off. Still, their manner was not violently aggressive, and at last, among all the excited yabber, we several times caught the name “Moom,” then “Moom” again and again. Quickly the cause of the clamour dawned on the Governor. Dorothy was Moom, the dead girl, returned in six moons as their white queen. And exactly six; months it was since the black girl had been left in the fork of the gum tree by the rim of the scrub.
“Baal Moom—Baal Moom!” the Governor said, shaking his head at them as he placed his hand on Dorothy’s shoulder … But his words had no effect. Their Moom, she was, jumped up white woman to be their queen. And out went all their hands. Laws, it looked awkward! But the old Governor wasn’t the one to put up with a lot of nonsense too long.
“Get out of the road,” he called, and not caring a darn if they understood him or not, or got run over, whipped up the greys and away we went. When well away we looked back. Instead of them following, as we expected to see, they were all running for their lives towards their camp at the scrub.
“They are going to tell the rest of the tribe that Moom has returned,” the Governor said. And in his voice there was a note of anxiety. Then steadying the horses to give Dorothy time to recover herself, he told her not to mind; that it was just a mistake on the part of the blacks, and that she had nothing to fear from them . “But say nothing to mother,” he added. “I’ll tell her all about it myself, to-morrow.”
Next morning. We were finished breakfast when Maria, the wife of “Captain,” suddenly darkened the door. Rolling her eyes about to locate the mater, she said excitedly: “You tell him Governor, plenty fella wild black sit down to yabba along gum tree … you tell him white Mary.” And while we looked up at each other in surprise, she withdrew and was gone. The gestures of the old gin, her earnestness, gave us a start that brought silence to the table.
“Whatever does she mean?” and the mater stared hard at the Governor.
“Don’t be alarmed, Dorrie,” he said. “She meant the Cooby tribe, I suppose; they’ll be looking for some rations—run short at their camp, I expect.” And rising quietly from his chair, the Governor walked out on to the verandah from the northern end, of which a clear view of the clump of blue gums that in those days grew on the flat in front of the homestead, was to be obtained. But time has passed since then and seen those trees reduced to stumps and ashes. And as he went out, how the women’s eyes followed him, then were questioningly turned to each other. That they dreaded some mischief behind the sudden appearance of these wild blacks was plain, and for my part, somehow, I didn’t want to partake of any more breakfast. So, leaving the table, I stole out on to the verandah and stood beside the Governor. “Slip out through the garden, Jim,” he said, in a low tone, “and tell the men to load their guns and come up quietly to the big gate … but not make a fuss.”
Laws! I never carried out an order with such feelings of awe and responsibility, never before or since. And through the gardens and down to the huts in full view of the loitering blacks I went full split … before I had scarcely opened my mouth the men anticipated the message …
“It’s all right, Jim,” they said, “we’ve been watching them for the last half-hour, whatever it is they’ve come about. Then they saw to the firearms that were always at hand though seldom used … and I remember how they joked about Curricomb and Captain and others of the Lagoon tribe running for dear life over Yabberrappa Ridge (named after the bronzewing pigeon) to their camp when they saw the Cooby men gather at the blue gums. The Lagoon tribe were anything but warlike themselves, which, I suppose, made easy prey of them, and accounted for their diminished numbers. Anyway, if there was going to be trouble at the station, it was clear King Henry and his people were not going to become involved … and the warning that old Maria had given us was undertaken only because of her great attachment for “White Mary” (the mater).
“That black devil, Goondi-Goondi, the prophet, is egging them on to something,” Tom Merton said, snapping the trigger of his gun. “And if the Governor was only away in Brisbane instead of here, I’d walk straight over and put a charge of rock salt into his hindquarters.” Then, as in fancy we saw the big grizzly aboriginal careering off under the pangs of salt, we laughed outright at Tom.
Closing the door and fastening it on the outside when ready to leave, Eustace added: “Since he has come back to the tribe after being amongst the whites at Barambah, he’s got as cunning as a mongrel dingo, and is putting a lot of villainy into the tribe.”
“Look at him now,” and Kearney drew attention to Goondi-Goondi addressing the others as we started off for the big gate—“look at him laying down the law to them!”
“I’d like to counterline my saddle with his grizzly hair,” Tom chuckled, striding carelessly along with his gun on his shoulder, “and eat his fat in a damper.”
“Don’t take any notice of them, Jim,” I heard Eustace say, as he came behind me. “Walk on as if you didn’t know they were there.” But what the others did, or how they looked or walked over the distance that separated the huts from the big gate, I can’t now say. I know, though, that with the corner of my eye I took in every movement of those tall, lithe blacks as they moved about yabbering among themselves in the shelter of those gums. And had any sudden demonstration on their part necessitated our making a dash for the big gate, I reckon I would have reached it first. There must have been at least one hundred of them, and as we passed along they were within three hundred yards or so of us. But they merely watched us, though two of their number, I remember, the humorists of the tribe, stumped about mimicking Kearney, who walked with a limp and was very bandy.
“I don’t know what’s in the wind down there,” the Governor said, meeting us at the gate. “They mightn’t mean anything; but stand your guns in here and just go on catching your horses, as though nothing mattered … Keep your eyes about, though, till we see what’s going to develop.”
“It’s Goondi-Goondi, Governor,” Tom Merton repeated. “He’s got them stuffed with the idea that Miss Winchester is the dead girl come back to life again.”
“Lot o’ black dawgs,” old Harry, who came to join our forces, bewailed. “They oughtn’t to be allowed on the station.”
“The tribe, themselves, have been very friendly for a long while,” the Governor mused.
“That fellow, Goondi-Goondi,” Willie Williams put in quietly, “has picked up some words in English and doesn’t know their meanin’… I said “good-day’ to him yes’day, when passing their camp, and he called out: ‘you fella liar … fella fool.’ ”
“Hold on,” from the Governor, as they were about to go to the yard. “Here he comes now, and two others with him …”
Sure enough Goondi-Goondi, with a tall warrior either side of him, had left the others and were approaching us on some errand or other.
“They’re carrying no weapon, so sit down, men, and smoke your pipes while we hear what they have to say.” Then to me: “Run into the house, Jim, and tell mother that everything is all right, and not to be nervous.” Gad, the way I sped along the garden walk and flew into the house must have been enough to alarm anyone. When I burst in, the women, including Mrs. Channing, snatched at things to defend themselves with. If they had had firearms in their hands they would surely have let them all off at me. I rattled off the Governor’s message to them, and was away again before they had time to recover.
On came the three nude stalwarts, quite fearless, and talking audibly … when about fifty yards away they gestured and waved their hands to signify friendship. Stepping forward a pace or two the Governor called: “Hello, Cooby men,” and saluted in a friendly manner. The three grunted in response and came to a standstill. Then Goondi-Goondi, as spokesman, addressed the Governor excitedly, while his two supports grinned at the rest of us. The station hands, lying on the couch grass, their heads propped up on their elbows, looked up from under their slouch hats as they nodded and smoked. So near were the abos. that one was standing right over the form of Tom Merton, and Tom seemed to be studying his bare feet. Of what Goondi-Goondi was declaiming, the Governor seemed to have a fair understanding, but I certainly had but a vague idea.
“Look, you Goondi-Goondi,” he responded warmly, “you ben tell your people lies that Moom come back a white woman—young woman that come back here is my daughter, not your Moom.” Then he translated his words into their own dialect. Still, Goondi-Goondi was not silenced. He jabbered louder, made a series of fierce gestures, mentioned the name of Moom repeatedly, and stamped his bare feet. The Governor shook his head and said: “Bah, you might fool your tribe with your nonsense, but don’t try it on me, else … ” and again he resorted to the abo. dialect. Once he conferred with Warabah, who addressed Goondi-Goondi, but with little apparent satisfaction, for they concluded with an exchange of angry grunts. Then the “prophet” turned and waved a black hand to those assembled at the gum trees, and faced the Governor again. The Governor waved him off with both hands, and said: “Be off with you, you’re only a humbug.”
“We’ll soon send him, if you want us to, Governor,” Tom Merton chuckled.
“No, no,” he answered, “let him take his own time.”
Goondi-Goondi then delivered a harangue to his supports, in the course of which he pointed to the big house, and several times mentioned Moom again.
“He say,” Warabah interpreted, “that Moom jump up white to be his wife, and you hold her inside, and they will go back and tell king you won’t give her up.”
Gad! I shall never forget the look that came over the Governor.
“What!” he said, clinching those solid fists of his and edging closer to Goondi-Goondi. “You black imposter, you want my daughter?” But just as he was about to crack the prophet hard on the chin, Tom Merton, having struck a match to light his pipe, mischievously laid the flaming wax calmly on the bare instep of one of the abos., as he stood glaring at the Governor. Laws! That unsuspecting black let out such a yell, and jumped so high and sideways, that he took the punch the Governor aimed at Goondi-Goondi right on his bingie, and went down to it in a heap, but in a second he was on his feet again and running for his life, with Goondi-Goondi and the other warrior hard on his heels. The incident gave such a sudden and surprising turn to the interview that even the Governor looked confounded, then amused, as we gazed after the skedaddling delegates. Then Tom Merton and the rest scrambled to their feet, and as they went off to the stable the echoes of their mirth rang back mockingly from the side of Yapperrapa Ridge.
“God bless me,” the Governor broke in, with increased amusement, “they are all running.” And so, indeed, they were, every man of them, without even waiting to hear what Goondi-Goondi and his friend had to report.
What with a run of splendid seasons, a big rise in cattle, the old house turned into a cedar mansion, Dorothy home for good, the Cooby tribe persistently claiming her as their white queen, Dick Dale paying his attention to her, and the mater and the Governor worried because of a secret attachment between her and Tom Merton, Runnibede was indeed in the throes of romance! Though I couldn’t understand then—I can well understand now what the old Governor’s feelings must have been when the knowledge of a love between Dorothy and Tom first came to light. And how the mater used to press him to speak to Tom about it—to “tell him he mustn’t think of Dorothy any more, but go back to his own people and forget her.” What a delicate duty it was for the Governor! For he himself was no snob or class distinctionist, but a big-hearted, broad-minded humanist. Find fault with Tom Merton as a man— straight, honest, courageous, capable and white—he couldn’t, nor could any honest, manly person … True, he wasn’t educated as Dorothy was, and his people were not well off like hers, and for those reasons, perhaps, and it was only a perhaps, mateship for such a pair would be inadvisable. The Governor, he could advance no other sane or friendly objection … The mater, on her side, had something different in view for her daughter … If she married at all, she wished to see her marry someone with a position and some standing. In her heart she had nothing against Tom. She was fond of him, in fact, and openly admired his courage and manliness. But not until one day when out on Wild Bee, and while we were waiting there in the shade of a myall to meet Eustace and Kearney, was it that the Governor opened his mind and spoke to Tom of his love affair. Poor Tom! How the blood rushed to his sun-tanned cheeks when the Governor got out the first few words. His soft grey eyes seemed to loom larger, and he didn’t know what to do with his hands. And half turning his head he gazed at his horse standing over him, while the Governor was speaking. And when the latter, softening his voice, said: “You know, Tom, while I don’t think Dorothy is one bit better than you, she’s hardly the sort of girl, all things considered, who would make a good helpmate for a man in your position.”
“Yes—I know, Governor!” was all that Tom could say, and anyone could see that it was with a struggle he found his voice even to say so little. In what way the mater broke the matter to Dorothy I never knew; but one afternoon when I came upon them together in the garden, beneath the English oak tree that stands sighing there in the cool breezes to this day, “Tom loves me, mother, and I love him,” Dorothy sobbed. “He is a good fellow, and it’s nothing if he hasn’t got money or position … those who have are not the best men.”
I didn’t hear any more. But I remember she always had a strong will of her own, and could be stubborn as a wall. Tom, I know, did his best to meet the Governor’s wishes, and many times after avoided Dorothy’s company in his daily rounds. But it was in the periodical visits of Dick Dale that both the mater and Governor, I fancy, began to see a hopeful solution of the trouble. Apart from his position of Sub-inspector of Police, which in those days was of some degree in a young colony, Dick had a rare personality that assured him unusual popularity. He was a handsome, free and capable fellow. And instead of Tom regarding him as a rival and harbouring feelings of jealousy towards him he met him openly as a friend … They came together way out on the run on occasions and joined in dare-devil feats of horsemanship in the wake of a wild dog or a fugitive kangaroo. Yet, thinking back now one is pretty sure that had Dorothy at any time during those days been called on suddenly to choose between them she would have been thrown into a dilemma.
It was in the old home, though, when Dick Dale was on a visit, and Tom invited along by Dorothy for the evening, that the former seemed to put Tom in the shade. Dick could play and sing and dance well, while Tom only danced, and then clumsily and under much persuasion. And how noticeable it was on those evenings, though by no means neglected by Dorothy, that poor Tom felt himself at a social disadvantage.
The months went by and Dick’s visits to Runnibede were continued. Tom seemed to take the former’s attentions to Dorothy as a matter of course. And how pleased the mater became! But with his inner self Tom was having a harder fight than anyone knew … for in the height and blindness of his love he acknowledged to himself that Dorothy would be happier with Dick … But I never thought, and do not now believe, that ever Dorothy came to any such understanding with him. No one so much as I, perhaps, knew how really heartbroken poor old Tom used to become when on occasions he found himself alone. And I only became aware of it when stealing to the rear of his hut, one evening, to surprise a strange dog there. Then it was I saw Tom, through his window, bowed in grief over a photo of Dorothy, that she had given him! For a second or two I was in doubt whether to speak to him in sympathy, or creep silently away. I obeyed the latter impulse. But that glimpse of the big soft-hearted fellow sorrowing in solitude has remained with me ever since!
It was a day in September. Old Runnibede, following a hard, drab, cold winter, had burst into a green gay world of warmth, and teeming with beauty and bird song again … Spring had returned to the bushland; and the burnt-off grass of the plains and uplands had sprouted into blade as green and tender as young wheat … The great grey kangaroos, in families and communities, spread themselves over it. The humped backs of those nibbling at the shoots, and trailing their grey forms in silence from patch to patch, contrasted in strange wild homeliness with the white flanks and flapping ears of those lounging in the early sun, and others sitting erect and alert.
The long talked of kangaroo hunt, organised for the dual purpose of a holiday for Dorothy’s city girl friends, and a thinning out process in the interests of the stock, for the station was being over-run and eaten out by them, happened on this September day. And never did kangaroo hunt end so tragically, nor a season of plenty change so abruptly to a season of sorrow! The Governor spared neither money nor labour to make the hunt a success. On the boundary fence of the mustering paddock in a wide-spreading valley, thinly timbered with box tree, where galloping was good, he had a high paling enclosure erected, with a calico wing running out for a quarter of a mile from the southern corner. According to Eustace and Kearney, who had a hand in the erecting of it, there was standing room in that enclosure for fully a thousand ’roos. So numerous were the marsupials on Runnibede at that time that even a thousand or a couple of thousand, could they be yarded, would not have made much of a gap in them.
What a troupe of merry, joyous horse-people rode out from the homestead that memorable morning! All hands employed on the station, except old Harry and Mrs. Channing, who were left in charge, were of the party. Neighbouring squatters and their women folk, all good riders, came to Runnibede on the evening before, bringing with them changes of horses. And what ripping, rattling horses they were! A few carried revolvers, but not many, for hard riding, not shooting, was the order of the day. In the way of hounds there were a few cattle dogs that followed on their own initiative, and a couple of house things that were always coming along somewhere behind with their tongues out.
The Governor’s plan of campaign was to work the ’roos on the lines of a big cattle muster, by separating into parties, spreading out and heading, or endeavouring to head them to the centre of the drive … The success of it would depend on horseflesh, horsemanship and co-operation. All of us, I remember, excepting the mater, and she remained true to her old love, were mounted on Exile progeny. And it was the last occasion but one, I think, that the matchless little Napoleon carried me to the front in the maddest of mad gallops … Dorothy was on Beeswing, a dark chestnut mare, a beautiful, faultless beast that Tom had schooled and ridden at all sorts of work for several years. Dick Dale, too, was astride an Exile horse, a tall roan that had just come in after a six months’ spell, and was so fresh and touchy that for the first mile or two Dick could take no chances with him.
As we all moved out into the broken forest country that flanked the great myall scrub, the party began to spread out, and Tom Merton and I came together; and for a while we rode on the heels of Dorothy and Dick.
“If Beeswing puts her head down, Dorothy, and pulls on you when the others start,” I remember Tom calling to her, “don’t take much notice, she’ll throw it up again before she goes far.”
“And what about this fellow, Tom?” Dick, still closely watching the capers of the tall roan, threw back with a smile.
“You’ve only to sit tight on him, Dick, and remember your life’s insured,” Tom laughed … “And when you reach down to get hold of an old ’roo by the tail, keep your spur out of his flank …”
A few minutes later, as some of the party appeared over Black Wattle Hollow, the first mob of ’roos started up—a mixed mob of eighty or a hundred— “old men,” stiff and slow and heavy; huge mammies, flyers, and others little larger than “joeys” … Then the excitement commenced. The Governor’s voice rang out and echoed as the mob made for the high, rough ground, as all wild animals will when hunted. And remembering his orders, Tom and I and a couple of boys from Mt. Abundance rode to head them towards the centre. What a rattle of hoofs and rapping of heels! As we went to the front Dick and Dorothy were galloping behind the thick of the mob, and that was the last that I saw of them for the rest of the hunt. The ’roos, unsuspecting at first, hopped along leisurely, and Tom and I, riding wide, soon were on a level with them before they realised they were being pursued on all sides … But when they saw us, and heard the yelling in the rear, hell’s bells! how they woke up! A string of “flyers” in the lead suddenly bent and stretched and bounded to it as swift and light as the wind! The “mammies” kept close up, but the “old men,” taking long, slow, measured jumps, soon were left behind.
In quick time the mob had strung out and those flyers, superbly as Tom and I were mounted, outpaced Tom and I for the sheltered ridges. But we broke the line on them, and confounded, the others changed their course and made for the lower open country. Then fresh mob after fresh mob, as the pursuers and pursued tore in amongst them, took to their heels and became part of the hunt. Soon the whole country side was in motion, with kangaroos flying for their lives … The whole bush seemed to be alive and lifting, so numerous were they. And confused some became! Rushing in opposite directions, numbers coming through the ranks of the huntspeople like footballers, to be met with shouts and jeers. Some turned and careered the other way in fresh terror, while others stuck to their course, and went the harder. Verily it was a day of wild reckless excitement. If we threw one of those ’roos on the top of his head at full gallop by swinging down, placing a hand under his tail and tossing him as he rose in his leap, we threw scores. Like humans the speed of the ’roo varies with age and condition. While the half-growns, or “flyers,” were swifter than greyhounds, many of the “old men” were in difficulties after spurting a few hundred yards. And how the does, when hotly pressed, would fumble for the joeys and heave them from them into the long grass! And in most cases the soft skinned, long limbed young imp would lie motionless where it fell, as though its neck were broken. And if by any chance the mothers escaped, they would make back to the spot, from no matter what angle of the compass, and restore the joeys to their pouches. But what scenes, what excitement in the vicinity of that paling yard when mob after mob, fugitive after fugitive, struck the calico wing, an obstruction so new and strange, that they were bewildered and thrown into fresh confusion. And when the hunters came up, in some instances followed by yapping, breathless dogs, closing in at every angle, the deluded marsupials, believing the wide open gate was an avenue of escape, rushed and poured through it into the yard … Moses! No circus arena or stadium ever filled to overflowing at such a rate, or in such numbers! Gad, when they found it was a snare, what frenzy set in! And when we charged forward to close the gate, the mad stampede of those who couldn’t gain admittance! Hundreds of them terror-stricken, bounced round, baulked and dodged, sprang over each other, bumped our horses, and off like the wind for their beloved hills again … Little did any of them know how fortunate they had been!
When the gate was secured and we dropped out of our saddles to put our eyes to the palings, what a memorable sight was there! The yard was a packed mass of breathing, struggling, snorting, jumping ’roos. Innocent, beautiful things, and all for the slaughter!
But all the huntspeople hadn’t yet arrived; some were still coming up, their horses blown and in a lather of foam; themselves excited, exhausted, bruised and torn. Various forms of adventure had happened to many—several had had harmless spills, others got bushed for a while, while another was pulled out of the saddle by an “old man” that bailed up and gave fight. The Governor and the mater, I remember, were far from being last in the hunt; and the first thought of the mater’s, on seeing the yard crammed with ’roos, was to “let the poor things go again, Edward!”
But when all had dismounted, and some were securing the horses, others making a fire to boil the tea bucket, the roll was called and Dorothy and Dick were still missing. All manners of reasons were lightly advanced for their slow coming. One of the stockmen remembered having galloped past them way back beneath Bloodwood Ridge, where both were on the heels of an old man ’roo. Several others had noticed them, and were sure no mishap could have come their way … But after waiting and watching for a half hour or so, and one and another began to show some anxiety, Dick’s tall roan, to the amazement of us all, came tearing along the fence with the saddle empty, and the bridle reins over his neck! Consternation! That there had been an accident of some kind most of us now knew! Straightway a wet blanket fell over the hunt. We caught the roan, but there were no marks about him to show that he had fallen. But why hadn’t Dorothy, a good horsewoman and well mounted, followed him, or overtaken and caught him, was what flashed through most of our minds. And though none expressed it, each knew that the other was thinking it.
“A couple of you go back and find out what’s the matter,” the Governor said, and take the horse with you.”
The mater, who only a few minutes before was flushed and happy with the excitement of the chase, was now thoughtful, and as pale looking as death … The other women, with their riding habits pinned up, stood round her and in their wisdom still strove to treat the matter lightly.
“Come on, Jim,” Tom Merton said, taking hold of the tall roan and mounting his own, “hop on to Napoleon and we’ll soon pick them up.” So back into the forest we went and at no steady pace, either. And rattling behind us came the stockman who had passed them beneath Bloodwood Ridge. He was a young fellow from Warra Warra, who had brought some mares across to the station the day before on a visit to Exile … And as he followed he shouted directions to guide us to the place he had seen them last. For a mile or two we made the pace, keeping a sharp lookout on all sides.
“Around this bend, I think it was,” but the youth had hardly got the words out, when Dick himself shouted to us from a log he was standing on, scanning the bush around … Gad! what relief the sound and sight of him gave to one! And to find he was safe and whole! In an instant, though, we realised the strangeness of his being alone, that neither Dorothy or Beeswing were visible. Before we could ask a question Dick had jumped from the log and came running towards us, calling anxiously:
“Where’s Dorothy? Have you seen Dorothy?” That was the strangest of all.
“Isn’t she with you?” we asked, staring at him. Dick could scarcely speak. “My horse got away from me,” he stammered, “when I got off just there,” pointing to the foot of a big tree, “to tackle an old man kangaroo that we bailed up, and Dorothy galloped after him. But haven’t you seen her?”
Tom explained how the tall roan came galloping to the yard.
“But he went off this way, round that ridge,” and Dick pointed due north. The kangaroo yard lay to the south.
“She’s got a spill, then!” we concluded, “while reaching out for your horse, and he worked round and followed the rest to the yard.”
No more time was to be lost.
“Get on Dick, quick,” Tom said, handing him the bridle of the tall roan, “and we’ll follow her tracks. And you, young fellow,” turning to the stockman from Warra Warra, “slither back to the yard and tell Mr. Winchester to come along after us as fast as he can and bring Warabah with him.”
With a touch of his heels, and a rap of the reins, that youth was gone full rip through the timber, while Tom and I picked up the tracks of Beeswing nearby.
All of us knew that if Dorothy had got a fall and lost grip of Beeswing, that the mare would make for the country adjacent to Myall Scrub, where she had been foaled and reared, and which now lay to our right, on the north-east. So fixing on the tracks of both horses, Beeswing and the tall roan, and keeping wide apart, we ran them for awhile at the canter. For some distance they kept fully fifty yards apart, where the timber was thick and the ground fairly rough. Crossing an ironbark ridge, then down a long slope to an open valley, the tracks of Beeswing began to veer to those of the tall roan, coming closer and closer. We knew it was there Dorothy was matching her mare against the horse, and making a run to get up with him and seize the reins. It was a close tussle, for the tracks ran together for a couple of hundred yards. And as we anxiously studied the ground, all three suddenly made the same discovery! Beeswing had galloped into a burnt-out stump hole and fallen heavily!
“God! how she came down! Tom murmured. And I picked up Dorothy’s riding whip. A dozen paces or so away, Dick distinguished her footprints. They showed she had picked herself up all right, and had walked round about as if searching for something, perhaps the whip, or trying to get her bearings. Then they led off, not back to where she had left Dick, or for the kangaroo yard, but right in the direction of Myall Scrub!
“Thank heaven she can’t be hurt much,” both Dick and Tom burst out, “but she’s turned round— she’s lost for a certainty.”
Then Tom looked at me.
“Go back over the ridge and keep a look-out for the Governor and Warabah, Jim,” he said, “and we’ll go on following Dorothy’s tracks.” Before, we separated Dick set up a long cooee. He had a voice that carried like a trumpet, and after listening with our ears on the wind, back came an answer clear and prolonged, far off in the vicinity of Myall Scrub.
“Blacks!” Tom said in a voice hushed and pregnant with alarm. The three of us gazed into the faces of each other.
“Hurry, Jim, and bring the Governor along after us as hard as you can.”
I left them and was going for my life, while they took up Dorothy’s footprints.
I had hardly reined in on the ironbark ridge when the Governor and Warabah came in sight, and along with them the mater and one of her lady friends. And how they came bowling along, and in such grim silence! But when they pulled up beside me, all gazing with questioning eyes, what a state of mind the mater was in! In few words I told them what we had found, then led the way off the ridge to overtake Tom and Dick. And whenever I threw back a glance at them, how all their horses were pulling and reefing behind me! We overtook Tom and Dick almost on the creek; then Warabah took up the tracking. And what a great tracker he was. Leaning over his horse’s shoulder with his keen eyes fixed on the earth, he skirted the creek for a quarter of a mile or so, almost at a hand gallop. His sight seemed as something uncanny. But when he turned into the creek, crossed it, surmounted the opposite bank, and headed straight for the Myall Scrub, where we knew the Cooby blacks had several camping grounds, our anxiety grew to real alarm. Still we rode to keep up with Warabah. and none dared put their thoughts into words. And all the time our eyes were strained to catch a glimpse of Dorothy somewhere on ahead. Rounding a bower of wild brier Warabah came face to face with two stalwart blacks, both carrying spears and boomerangs. There was a halt, and we at once recognised them as members of the Cooby tribe. They showed little surprise at meeting us there, and certainly no signs of fear. Warabah and the Governor questioned them in their own dialect about Dorothy, if they had seen her, and where was she? Instantly they exhibited a strange excitement, and speaking rapidly and at the same time, pointed their spears to the dark scrub looming nearby. The name “Moom” frequently fell from them, and though one hadn’t a good knowledge of their language, it was plain that it was Dorothy they spoke of. When the Governor and Warabah had finished questioning them, Dick Dale introduced himself officially, and was giving them a message to convey to their king, when suddenly, with a shout of defiance, they turned and fled back to the tribe.
“Come on, don’t let us lose any time,” Tom urged. But the Governor, before approaching nearer, turned to the mater and her companion.
“What did they say about Dorothy, Edward?” the mater questioned in dreaded tones, while her horse turned restlessly about.
“That she walked into their camp, over in the scrub there,” he answered. “She’s all right; we’ll go and get her. But better that you wait here with Mrs. Carter, till we return.”
Mrs. Carter thought it would be better, also, and while they remained there, the rest of us, led by Warabah, rode forward to the blacks’ headquarters, concealed almost from view in a pocket on the rim of the great myall scrub. Laws, no matter how long I might live, I shall never forget that camp. There must have been a couple of hundred of the tribe there, and as we drew near, the women sitting round in a huge circle, began wailing and drooling and slapping their thighs with their hands, while the men, in what seemed to me a defiant attitude, stood rapping their war weapons together. They had learned from the two men whom the Governor had questioned that we came to seek Dorothy, their Moom. But instead of being aggressive, the whole camp were rejoicing that their dead Moom had come back of her own free will to be the tribe’s white queen, and to be taken in marriage by the prophet, Goondi. They had already welcomed her, and in reply to the Governor and Dick, who asked where the white girl was, an old gin who knew some English, pointed through an avenue of scattered myall trees skirting the main scrub, and answered: “Goondi take her to gunya, make her his lubra.”
“Quick, boys! … that damn scoundrel has her,” the Governor shouted, and turning and spurring our horses, we galloped down that bush avenue. God, we were just in time! There at the front of his gunya as we pulled our horses in, lurching and propping, was the black giant of the tribe with Dorothy struggling and screaming in his naked arms. In what haste we all dismounted, calling at the same time to the scoundrel to desist, and to Dorothy, to encourage her … Goondi had succeeded in imposing on the innocent faith of his tribe, and he was not unprepared for us. Goondi was ready for anything. With one arm around Dorothy, who was getting exhausted he straightened up and savagely threw a spear that went within hair’s breadth of Tom Merton and pierced the body of Dick Dale. Flinging Dorothy from him, the murderer fled, but retribution was close at hand. A sharp report from Tom Merton’s revolver was heard, and Goondi, his evil career ended, swayed, and fell lifeless at the edge of the scrub. Wild-eyed with terror, Dorothy, when she saw Dick lying there on the ground, realised that he had given his life for her, dropped on her knees beside him. He did not speak, but his gaze wandered steadily from Dorothy to Tom, who knelt with her. Dick wanted something, and a woman’s intuition made Dorothy understand. She placed her hand in his. With a last effort he sought Tom’s also, and a smile flickered across his face. As their two hands met, he gave them a gentle pressure. There kneeling hand in hand beside the stricken form of Dick Dale, Dorothy and Tom knew that a power greater than that of mortal man had at least drawn them together. Then as we gazed awestruck on the tragic scene, the Governor uttered one word.
“Dead,” he whispered.
* * * * *
In the old station cemetery on the slope of Yabberappah Ridge, where wild roses peep from among the tall rank grass, may, to this day, be seen a crude slab stone, on which is inscribed in simple words: “In memory of Richard Dale.” And close beside it another stone intimating that “Eustace and Kearney sleep here.” A little further away: “Warabah, a faithful servant.” And beneath a gum tree left standing, “Jackie,” and the lines:
“I hear ’em callin’, Jackie, I’m going home to-night!
No longer will I play an’ sing for you.
Oh, yes, I’m comin’, brothers, I see the kindly light
A-shinin’ down along the old Barcoo.