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Robbery under Arms

by Rolf Boldrewood · English · Gutenberg #1198 · 1,102,744 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Robbery under Arms

Author: Rolf Boldrewood


        
Release date: February 1, 1998 [eBook #1198]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1198

Credits: Produced by Alan R. Light, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBBERY UNDER ARMS ***

ROBBERY UNDER ARMS

A Story of Life and Adventure in the Bush and in the Goldfields of
Australia

By Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood

An Australian writer. 1826-1915.

Author of 'The Miner's Right', 'The Squatter's Dream', 'A Colonial
Reformer', etc.


[Note on text: Italicized words or phrases are capitalised. Some obvious
errors have been corrected, as noted at the end of the text.]




Preface to New Edition


I dedicate this 'ower true tale' of the wilder aspects of Australian
life to my old comrade R. Murray Smith, late Agent-General in London for
the colony of Victoria, with hearty thanks for the time and trouble he
has devoted to its publication. I trust it will do no discredit to the
rising reputation of Australian romance. But though presented in the
guise of fiction, this chronicle of the Marston family must not be
set down by the reader as wholly fanciful or exaggerated. Much of the
narrative is literally true, as can be verified by official records.
A lifelong residence in Australia may be accepted as a guarantee
for fidelity as to local colour and descriptive detail. I take this
opportunity of acknowledging the prompt and liberal recognition of the
tale by the proprietors of the 'Sydney Mail', but for which it might
never have seen the light.

ROLF BOLDREWOOD.

117 Collins Street West,

Melbourne, 12th December 1888.




ROBBERY UNDER ARMS




Chapter 1


My name's Dick Marston, Sydney-side native. I'm twenty-nine years old,
six feet in my stocking soles, and thirteen stone weight. Pretty strong
and active with it, so they say. I don't want to blow--not here, any
road--but it takes a good man to put me on my back, or stand up to me
with the gloves, or the naked mauleys. I can ride anything--anything
that ever was lapped in horsehide--swim like a musk-duck, and track like
a Myall blackfellow. Most things that a man can do I'm up to, and that's
all about it. As I lift myself now I can feel the muscle swell on my arm
like a cricket ball, in spite of the--well, in spite of everything.

The morning sun comes shining through the window bars; and ever since he
was up have I been cursing the daylight, cursing myself, and them that
brought me into the world. Did I curse mother, and the hour I was born
into this miserable life?

Why should I curse the day? Why do I lie here, groaning; yes, crying
like a child, and beating my head against the stone floor? I am not mad,
though I am shut up in a cell. No. Better for me if I was. But it's all
up now; there's no get away this time; and I, Dick Marston, as strong as
a bullock, as active as a rock-wallaby, chock-full of life and spirits
and health, have been tried for bush-ranging--robbery under arms they
call it--and though the blood runs through my veins like the water in
the mountain creeks, and every bit of bone and sinew is as sound as the
day I was born, I must die on the gallows this day month.

Die--die--yes, die; be strung up like a dog, as they say. I'm blessed
if ever I did know of a dog being hanged, though, if it comes to that,
a shot or a bait generally makes an end of 'em in this country. Ha, ha!
Did I laugh? What a rum thing it is that a man should have a laugh in
him when he's only got twenty-nine days more to live--a day for every
year of my life. Well, laughing or crying, this is what it has come to
at last. All the drinking and recklessness; the flash talk and the idle
ways; the merry cross-country rides that we used to have, night or
day, it made no odds to us; every man well mounted, as like as not on a
racehorse in training taken out of his stable within the week; the sharp
brushes with the police, when now and then a man was wounded on each
side, but no one killed. That came later on, worse luck. The jolly
sprees we used to have in the bush townships, where we chucked our money
about like gentlemen, where all the girls had a smile and a kind word
for a lot of game upstanding chaps, that acted like men, if they did
keep the road a little lively. Our 'bush telegraphs' were safe to let
us know when the 'traps' were closing in on us, and then--why the coach
would be 'stuck up' a hundred miles away, in a different direction,
within twenty-four hours. Marston's gang again! The police are in
pursuit! That's what we'd see in the papers. We had 'em sent to us
regular; besides having the pick of 'em when we cut open the mail bags.

And now--that chain rubbed a sore, curse it!--all that racket's over.
It's more than hard to die in this settled, infernal, fixed sort of way,
like a bullock in the killing-yard, all ready to be 'pithed'. I used to
pity them when I was a boy, walking round the yard, pushing their noses
through the rails, trying for a likely place to jump, stamping and
pawing and roaring and knocking their heads against the heavy close
rails, with misery and rage in their eyes, till their time was up.
Nobody told THEM beforehand, though!

Have I and the likes of me ever felt much the same, I wonder, shut up
in a pen like this, with the rails up, and not a place a rat could creep
through, waiting till our killing time was come? The poor devils of
steers have never done anything but ramble off the run now and again,
while we--but it's too late to think of that. It IS hard. There's no
saying it isn't; no, nor thinking what a fool, what a blind, stupid,
thundering idiot a fellow's been, to laugh at the steady working life
that would have helped him up, bit by bit, to a good farm, a good wife,
and innocent little kids about him, like that chap, George Storefield,
that came to see me last week. He was real rightdown sorry for me,
I could tell, though Jim and I used to laugh at him, and call him a
regular old crawler of a milker's calf in the old days. The tears came
into his eyes reg'lar like a woman as he gave my hand a squeeze and
turned his head away. We was little chaps together, you know. A man
always feels that, you know. And old George, he'll go back--a fifty-mile
ride, but what's that on a good horse? He'll be late home, but he can
cross the rock ford the short way over the creek. I can see him turn his
horse loose at the garden-gate, and walk through the quinces that lead
up to the cottage, with his saddle on his arm. Can't I see it all, as
plain as if I was there?

And his wife and the young 'uns 'll run out when they hear father's
horse, and want to hear all the news. When he goes in there's his meal
tidy and decent waiting for him, while he tells them about the poor chap
he's been to see as is to be scragged next month. Ha! ha! what a rum
joke it is, isn't it?

And then he'll go out in the verandah, with the roses growin' all over
the posts and smellin' sweet in the cool night air. After that he'll
have his smoke, and sit there thinkin' about me, perhaps, and old days,
and what not, till all hours--till his wife comes and fetches him in.
And here I lie--my God! why didn't they knock me on the head when I was
born, like a lamb in a dry season, or a blind puppy--blind enough, God
knows! They do so in some countries, if the books say true, and what a
hell of misery that must save some people from!

Well, it's done now, and there's no get away. I may as well make the
best of it. A sergeant of police was shot in our last scrimmage, and
they must fit some one over that. It's only natural. He was rash, or
Starlight would never have dropped him that day. Not if he'd been sober
either. We'd been drinking all night at that Willow Tree shanty. Bad
grog, too! When a man's half drunk he's fit for any devilment that
comes before him. Drink! How do you think a chap that's taken to the
bush--regularly turned out, I mean, with a price on his head, and a
fire burning in his heart night and day--can stand his life if he don't
drink? When he thinks of what he might have been, and what he is! Why,
nearly every man he meets is paid to run him down, or trap him some way
like a stray dog that's taken to sheep-killin'. He knows a score of men,
and women too, that are only looking out for a chance to sell his blood
on the quiet and pouch the money. Do you think that makes a chap mad
and miserable, and tired of his life, or not? And if a drop of grog
will take him right out of his wretched self for a bit why shouldn't he
drink? People don't know what they are talking about. Why, he is that
miserable that he wonders why he don't hang himself, and save the
Government all the trouble; and if a few nobblers make him feel as if
he might have some good chances yet, and that it doesn't so much matter
after all, why shouldn't he drink?

He does drink, of course; every miserable man, and a good many women as
have something to fear or repent of, drink. The worst of it is that
too much of it brings on the 'horrors', and then the devil, instead of
giving you a jog now and then, sends one of his imps to grin in your
face and pull your heartstrings all day and all night long. By George,
I'm getting clever--too clever, altogether, I think. If I could forget
for one moment, in the middle of all the nonsense, that I was to die
on Thursday three weeks! die on Thursday three weeks! die on Thursday!
That's the way the time runs in my ears like a chime of bells. But it's
all mere bosh I've been reading these long six months I've been chained
up here--after I was committed for trial. When I came out of the
hospital after curing me of that wound--for I was hit bad by that black
tracker--they gave me some books to read for fear I'd go mad and cheat
the hangman. I was always fond of reading, and many a night I've read to
poor old mother and Aileen before I left the old place. I was that weak
and low, after I took the turn, and I felt glad to get a book to take
me away from sitting, staring, and blinking at nothing by the hour
together. It was all very well then; I was too weak to think much. But
when I began to get well again I kept always coming across something in
the book that made me groan or cry out, as if some one had stuck a knife
in me. A dark chap did once--through the ribs--it didn't feel so bad, a
little sharpish at first; why didn't he aim a bit higher? He never was
no good, even at that. As I was saying, there'd be something about a
horse, or the country, or the spring weather--it's just coming in now,
and the Indian corn's shooting after the rain, and I'LL never see it; or
they'd put in a bit about the cows walking through the river in the hot
summer afternoons; or they'd go describing about a girl, until I began
to think of sister Aileen again; then I'd run my head against the wall,
or do something like a madman, and they'd stop the books for a week; and
I'd be as miserable as a bandicoot, worse and worse a lot, with all
the devil's tricks and bad thoughts in my head, and nothing to put them
away.

I must either kill myself, or get something to fill up my time till
the day--yes, the day comes. I've always been a middling writer, tho' I
can't say much for the grammar, and spelling, and that, but I'll put it
all down, from the beginning to the end, and maybe it'll save some other
unfortunate young chap from pulling back like a colt when he's first
roped, setting himself against everything in the way of proper breaking,
making a fool of himself generally, and choking himself down, as I've
done.

The gaoler--he looks hard--he has to do that, there's more than one
or two within here that would have him by the throat, with his heart's
blood running, in half a minute, if they had their way, and the warder
was off guard. He knows that very well. But he's not a bad-hearted chap.

'You can have books, or paper and pens, anything you like,' he said,
'you unfortunate young beggar, until you're turned off.'

'If I'd only had you to see after me when I was young,' says I----

'Come; don't whine,' he said, then he burst out laughing. 'You didn't
mean it, I see. I ought to have known better. You're not one of that
sort, and I like you all the better for it.'

    .   .   .   .   .

Well, here goes. Lots of pens, a big bottle of ink, and ever so much
foolscap paper, the right sort for me, or I shouldn't have been here.
I'm blessed if it doesn't look as if I was going to write copies again.
Don't I remember how I used to go to school in old times; the rides
there and back on the old pony; and pretty little Grace Storefield that
I was so fond of, and used to show her how to do her lessons. I believe
I learned more that way than if I'd had only myself to think about.
There was another girl, the daughter of the poundkeeper, that I wanted
her to beat; and the way we both worked, and I coached her up, was a
caution. And she did get above her in her class. How proud we were! She
gave me a kiss, too, and a bit of her hair. Poor Gracey! I wonder where
she is now, and what she'd think if she saw me here to-day. If I could
have looked ahead, and seen myself--chained now like a dog, and going to
die a dog's death this day month!

Anyhow, I must make a start. How do people begin when they set to work
to write their own sayings and doings? There's been a deal more doing
than talking in my life--it was the wrong sort--more's the pity.

Well, let's see; his parents were poor, but respectable. That's what
they always say. My parents were poor, and mother was as good a soul as
ever broke bread, and wouldn't have taken a shilling's worth that wasn't
her own if she'd been starving. But as for father, he'd been a poacher
in England, a Lincolnshire man he was, and got sent out for it. He
wasn't much more than a boy, he said, and it was only for a hare or
two, which didn't seem much. But I begin to think, being able to see the
right of things a bit now, and having no bad grog inside of me to turn a
fellow's head upside down, as poaching must be something like cattle
and horse duffing--not the worst thing in the world itself, but mighty
likely to lead to it.

Dad had always been a hard-working, steady-going sort of chap, good at
most things, and like a lot more of the Government men, as the convicts
were always called round our part, he saved some money as soon as he had
done his time, and married mother, who was a simple emigrant girl
just out from Ireland. Father was a square-built, good-looking chap,
I believe, then; not so tall as I am by three inches, but wonderfully
strong and quick on his pins. They did say as he could hammer any man
in the district before he got old and stiff. I never saw him 'shape' but
once, and then he rolled into a man big enough to eat him, and polished
him off in a way that showed me--though I was a bit of a boy then--that
he'd been at the game before. He didn't ride so bad either, though he
hadn't had much of it where he came from; but he was afraid of nothing,
and had a quiet way with colts. He could make pretty good play in thick
country, and ride a roughish horse, too.

Well, our farm was on a good little flat, with a big mountain in front,
and a scrubby, rangy country at the back for miles. People often asked
him why he chose such a place. 'It suits me,' he used to say, with a
laugh, and talk of something else. We could only raise about enough corn
and potatoes, in a general way, for ourselves from the flat; but there
were other chances and pickings which helped to make the pot boil, and
them we'd have been a deal better without.

First of all, though our cultivation paddock was small, and the good
land seemed squeezed in between the hills, there was a narrow tract up
the creek, and here it widened out into a large well-grassed flat. This
was where our cattle ran, for, of course, we had a team of workers and
a few milkers when we came. No one ever took up a farm in those days
without a dray and a team, a year's rations, a few horses and milkers,
pigs and fowls, and a little furniture. They didn't collar a 40-acre
selection, as they do now--spend all their money in getting the land and
squat down as bare as robins--a man with his wife and children all
under a sheet of bark, nothing on their backs, and very little in their
bellies. However, some of them do pretty well, though they do say they
have to live on 'possums for a time. We didn't do much, in spite of our
grand start.

The flat was well enough, but there were other places in the gullies
beyond that that father had dropped upon when he was out shooting. He
was a tremendous chap for poking about on foot or on horseback, and
though he was an Englishman, he was what you call a born bushman. I
never saw any man almost as was his equal. Wherever he'd been once,
there he could take you to again; and what was more, if it was in the
dead of the night he could do it just the same. People said he was as
good as a blackfellow, but I never saw one that was as good as he was,
all round. In a strange country, too. That was what beat me--he'd know
the way the creek run, and noticed when the cattle headed to camp, and
a lot of things that other people couldn't see, or if they did, couldn't
remember again. He was a great man for solitary walks, too--he and an
old dog he had, called Crib, a cross-bred mongrel-looking brute, most
like what they call a lurcher in England, father said. Anyhow, he could
do most anything but talk. He could bite to some purpose, drive cattle
or sheep, catch a kangaroo, if it wasn't a regular flyer, fight like a
bulldog, and swim like a retriever, track anything, and fetch and carry,
but bark he wouldn't. He'd stand and look at dad as if he worshipped
him, and he'd make him some sign and off he'd go like a child that's got
a message. Why he was so fond of the old man we boys couldn't make out.
We were afraid of him, and as far as we could see he never patted or
made much of Crib. He thrashed him unmerciful as he did us boys. Still
the dog was that fond of him you'd think he'd like to die for him there
and then. But dogs are not like boys, or men either--better, perhaps.

Well, we were all born at the hut by the creek, I suppose, for I
remember it as soon as I could remember anything. It was a snug hut
enough, for father was a good bush carpenter, and didn't turn his
back to any one for splitting and fencing, hut-building and
shingle-splitting; he had had a year or two at sawing, too, but after
he was married he dropped that. But I've heard mother say that he took
great pride in the hut when he brought her to it first, and said it was
the best-built hut within fifty miles. He split every slab, cut every
post and wallplate and rafter himself, with a man to help him at odd
times; and after the frame was up, and the bark on the roof, he camped
underneath and finished every bit of it--chimney, flooring, doors,
windows, and partitions--by himself. Then he dug up a little garden
in front, and planted a dozen or two peaches and quinces in it; put a
couple of roses--a red and a white one--by the posts of the verandah,
and it was all ready for his pretty Norah, as she says he used to call
her then. If I've heard her tell about the garden and the quince trees
and the two roses once, I've heard her tell it a hundred times. Poor
mother! we used to get round her--Aileen, and Jim, and I--and say, 'Tell
us about the garden, mother.' She'd never refuse; those were her happy
days, she always said. She used to cry afterwards--nearly always.

The first thing almost that I can remember was riding the old pony,
'Possum, out to bring in the milkers. Father was away somewhere, so
mother took us all out and put me on the pony, and let me have a
whip. Aileen walked alongside, and very proud I was. My legs stuck out
straight on the old pony's fat back. Mother had ridden him up when she
came--the first horse she ever rode, she said. He was a quiet little old
roan, with a bright eye and legs like gate-posts, but he never fell down
with us boys, for all that. If we fell off he stopped still and began
to feed, so that he suited us all to pieces. We soon got sharp enough
to flail him along with a quince stick, and we used to bring up the
milkers, I expect, a good deal faster than was good for them. After a
bit we could milk, leg-rope, and bail up for ourselves, and help dad
brand the calves, which began to come pretty thick. There were only
three of us children--my brother Jim, who was two years younger than I
was, and then Aileen, who was four years behind him. I know we were both
able to nurse the baby a while after she came, and neither of us wanted
better fun than to be allowed to watch her, or rock the cradle, or as a
great treat to carry her a few steps. Somehow we was that fond and proud
of her from the first that we'd have done anything in the world for her.
And so we would now--I was going to say--but that poor Jim lies under a
forest oak on a sandhill, and I--well, I'm here, and if I'd listened
to her advice I should have been a free man. A free man! How it sounds,
doesn't it? with the sun shining, and the blue sky over your head, and
the birds twittering, and the grass beneath your feet! I wonder if I
shall go mad before my time's up.

Mother was a Roman Catholic--most Irishwomen are; and dad was a
Protestant, if he was anything. However, that says nothing. People that
don't talk much about their religion, or follow it up at all, won't
change it for all that. So father, though mother tried him hard enough
when they were first married, wouldn't hear of turning, not if he was to
be killed for it, as I once heard him say. 'No!' he says, 'my father and
grandfather, and all the lot, was Church people, and so I shall live
and die. I don't know as it would make much matter to me, but such as
my notions is, I shall stick to 'em as long as the craft holds together.
You can bring up the girl in your own way; it's made a good woman of
you, or found you one, which is most likely, and so she may take her
chance. But I stand for Church and King, and so shall the boys, as sure
as my name's Ben Marston.'




Chapter 2



Father was one of those people that gets shut of a deal of trouble in
this world by always sticking to one thing. If he said he'd do this or
that he always did it and nothing else. As for turning him, a wild bull
half-way down a range was a likelier try-on. So nobody ever bothered him
after he'd once opened his mouth. They knew it was so much lost labour.
I sometimes thought Aileen was a bit like him in her way of sticking to
things. But then she was always right, you see.

So that clinched it. Mother gave in like a wise woman, as she was. The
clergyman from Bargo came one day and christened me and Jim--made one
job of it. But mother took Aileen herself in the spring cart all the way
to the township and had her christened in the chapel, in the middle of
the service all right and regular, by Father Roche.

There's good and bad of every sort, and I've met plenty that were no
chop of all churches; but if Father Roche, or Father anybody else, had
any hand in making mother and Aileen half as good as they were, I'd turn
to-morrow, if I ever got out again. I don't suppose it was the religion
that made much difference in our case, for Patsey Daly and his three
brothers, that lived on the creek higher up, were as much on the cross
as men could be, and many a time I've seen them ride to chapel and
attend mass, and look as if they'd never seen a 'clearskin' in their
lives. Patsey was hanged afterwards for bush-ranging and gold robbery,
and he had more than one man's blood to answer for. Now we weren't like
that; we never troubled the church one way or the other. We knew we were
doing what we oughtn't to do, and scorned to look pious and keep two
faces under one hood.

By degrees we all grew older, began to be active and able to do half a
man's work. We learned to ride pretty well--at least, that is we could
ride a bare-backed horse at full gallop through timber or down a range;
could back a colt just caught and have him as quiet as an old cow in
a week. We could use the axe and the cross-cut saw, for father dropped
that sort of work himself, and made Jim and I do all the rough jobs of
mending the fences, getting firewood, milking the cows, and, after a
bit, ploughing the bit of flat we kept in cultivation.

Jim and I, when we were fifteen and thirteen--he was bigger for his
age than I was, and so near my own strength that I didn't care about
touching him--were the smartest lads on the creek, father said--he
didn't often praise us, either. We had often ridden over to help at the
muster of the large cattle stations that were on the side of the range,
and not more than twenty or thirty miles from us.

Some of our young stock used to stray among the squatters' cattle, and
we liked attending the muster because there was plenty of galloping
about and cutting out, and fun in the men's hut at night, and often a
half-crown or so for helping some one away with a big mob of cattle or
a lot for the pound. Father didn't go himself, and I used to notice that
whenever we came up and said we were Ben Marston's boys both master and
super looked rather glum, and then appeared not to think any more about
it. I heard the owner of one of these stations say to his managing man,
'Pity, isn't it? fine boys, too.' I didn't understand what they meant. I
do now.

We could do a few things besides riding, because, as I told you before,
we had been to a bit of a school kept by an old chap that had once seen
better days, that lived three miles off, near a little bush township.
This village, like most of these places, had a public-house and a
blacksmith's shop. That was about all. The publican kept the store, and
managed pretty well to get hold of all the money that was made by the
people round about, that is of those that were 'good drinking men'. He
had half-a-dozen children, and, though he was not up to much, he wasn't
that bad that he didn't want his children to have the chance of being
better than himself. I've seen a good many crooked people in my day, but
very few that, though they'd given themselves up as a bad job, didn't
hope a bit that their youngsters mightn't take after them. Curious,
isn't it? But it is true, I can tell you. So Lammerby, the publican,
though he was a greedy, sly sort of fellow, that bought things he knew
were stolen, and lent out money and charged everybody two prices for the
things he sold 'em, didn't like the thought of his children growing up
like Myall cattle, as he said himself, and so he fished out this old Mr.
Howard, that had been a friend or a victim or some kind of pal of his in
old times, near Sydney, and got him to come and keep school.

He was a curious man, this Mr. Howard. What he had been or done none
of us ever knew, but he spoke up to one of the squatters that said
something sharp to him one day in a way that showed us boys that he
thought himself as good as he was. And he stood up straight and looked
him in the face, till we hardly could think he was the same man that
was so bent and shambling and broken-down-looking most times. He used
to live in a little hut in the township all by himself. It was just big
enough to hold him and us at our lessons. He had his dinner at the inn,
along with Mr. and Mrs. Lammerby. She was always kind to him, and made
him puddings and things when he was ill. He was pretty often ill, and
then he'd hear us our lessons at the bedside, and make a short day of
it.

Mostly he drank nothing but tea. He used to smoke a good deal out of a
big meerschaum pipe with figures on it that he used to show us when he
was in a good humour. But two or three times a year he used to set-to
and drink for a week, and then school was left off till he was right.
We didn't think much of that. Everybody, almost, that we knew did the
same--all the men--nearly all, that is--and some of the women--not
mother, though; she wouldn't have touched a drop of wine or spirits to
save her life, and never did to her dying day. We just thought of it
as if they'd got a touch of fever or sunstroke, or broke a rib or
something. They'd get over it in a week or two, and be all right again.

All the same, poor old Mr. Howard wasn't always on the booze, not by
any manner of means. He never touched a drop of anything, not even
ginger-beer, while he was straight, and he kept us all going from nine
o'clock in the morning till three in the afternoon, summer and winter,
for more than six years. Then he died, poor old chap--found dead in his
bed one morning. Many a basting he gave me and Jim with an old malacca
cane he had with a silver knob to it. We were all pretty frightened of
him. He'd say to me and Jim and the other boys, 'It's the best chance
of making men of yourselves you ever had, if you only knew it. You'll be
rich farmers or settlers, perhaps magistrates, one of these days--that
is, if you're not hanged. It's you, I mean,' he'd say, pointing to me
and Jim and the Dalys; 'I believe some of you WILL be hanged unless
you change a good deal. It's cold blood and bad blood that runs in your
veins, and you'll come to earn the wages of sin some day. It's a strange
thing,' he used to say, as if he was talking to himself, 'that the girls
are so good, while the boys are delivered over to the Evil One, except a
case here and there. Look at Mary Darcy and Jane Lammerby, and my
little pet Aileen here. I defy any village in Britain to turn out such
girls--plenty of rosy-cheeked gigglers--but the natural refinement and
intelligence of these little damsels astonishes me.'

Well, the old man died suddenly, as I said, and we were all very sorry,
and the school was broken up. But he had taught us all to write fairly
and to keep accounts, to read and spell decently, and to know a little
geography. It wasn't a great deal, but what we knew we knew well, and
I often think of what he said, now it's too late, we ought to have made
better use of it. After school broke up father said Jim and I knew quite
as much as was likely to be any good to us, and we must work for our
living like other people. We'd always done a pretty fair share of that,
and our hands were hard with using the axe and the spade, let alone
holding the plough at odd times and harrowing, helping father to kill
and brand, and a lot of other things, besides getting up while the stars
were in the sky so as to get the cows milked early, before it was time
to go to school.

All this time we had lived in a free kind of way--we wanted for nothing.
We had plenty of good beef, and a calf now and then. About this time I
began to wonder how it was that so many cattle and horses passed through
father's hands, and what became of them.

I hadn't lived all my life on Rocky Creek, and among some of the
smartest hands in that line that old New South Wales ever bred, without
knowing what 'clearskins' and 'cross' beasts meant, and being well aware
that our brand was often put on a calf that no cow of ours ever suckled.
Don't I remember well the first calf I ever helped to put our letters
on? I've often wished I'd defied father, then taken my licking, and
bolted away from home. It's that very calf and the things it led to
that's helped to put me where I am!

Just as I sit here, and these cursed irons rattle whenever I move my
feet, I can see that very evening, and father and the old dog with a
little mob of our crawling cattle and half-a-dozen head of strangers,
cows and calves, and a fat little steer coming through the scrub to the
old stockyard.

It was an awkward place for a yard, people used to say; scrubby and
stony all round, a blind sort of hole--you couldn't see till you were
right on the top of it. But there was a 'wing' ran out a good way
through the scrub--there's no better guide to a yard like that--and
there was a sort of track cattle followed easy enough once you were
round the hill. Anyhow, between father and the dog and the old mare he
always rode, very few beasts ever broke away.

These strange cattle had been driven a good way, I could see. The
cows and calves looked done up, and the steer's tongue was out--it was
hottish weather; the old dog had been 'heeling' him up too, for he was
bleeding up to the hocks, and the end of his tail was bitten off. He
was a savage old wretch was Crib. Like all dogs that never bark--and men
too--his bite was all the worse.

'Go and get the brands--confound you--don't stand there frightening the
cattle,' says father, as the tired cattle, after smelling and jostling a
bit, rushed into the yard. 'You, Jim, make a fire, and look sharp about
it. I want to brand old Polly's calf and another or two.' Father came
down to the hut while the brands were getting ready, and began to look
at the harness-cask, which stood in a little back skillion. It was
pretty empty; we had been living on eggs, bacon, and bread and butter
for a week.

'Oh, mother! there's such a pretty red calf in the yard,' I said, 'with
a star and a white spot on the flank; and there's a yellow steer fat
enough to kill!'

'What!' said mother, turning round and looking at father with her eyes
staring--a sort of dark blue they were--people used to say mine and
Jim's were the same colour--and her brown hair pushed back off her face,
as if she was looking at a ghost. 'Is it doing that again you are,
after all you promised me, and you so nearly caught--after the last one?
Didn't I go on my knees to ye to ask ye to drop it and lead a good
life, and didn't ye tell me ye'd never do the like again? And the poor
innocent children, too, I wonder ye've the heart to do it.'

It came into my head now to wonder why the sergeant and two policemen
had come down from Bargo, very early in the morning, about three months
ago, and asked father to show them the beef in his cask, and the hide
belonging to it. I wondered at the time the beast was killed why father
made the hide into a rope, and before he did that had cut out the brand
and dropped it into a hot fire. The police saw a hide with our brand on,
all right--killed about a fortnight. They didn't know it had been taken
off a cancered bullock, and that father took the trouble to 'stick' him
and bleed him before he took the hide off, so as it shouldn't look dark.
Father certainly knew most things in the way of working on the cross.
I can see now he'd have made his money a deal easier, and no trouble of
mind, if he'd only chosen to go straight.

When mother said this, father looked at her for a bit as if he was sorry
for it; then he straightened himself up, and an ugly look came into his
face as he growled out--

'You mind your own business; we must live as well as other people.
There's squatters here that does as bad. They're just like the squires
at home; think a poor man hasn't a right to live. You bring the brand
and look alive, Dick, or I'll sharpen ye up a bit.'

The brand was in the corner, but mother got between me and it, and
stretched out her hand to father as if to stop me and him.

'In God's name,' she cried out, 'aren't ye satisfied with losing your
own soul and bringing disgrace upon your family, but ye must be the ruin
of your innocent children? Don't touch the brand, Dick!'

But father wasn't a man to be crossed, and what made it worse he had
a couple of glasses of bad grog in him. There was an old villain of a
shanty-keeper that lived on a back creek. He'd been there as he came
by and had a glass or two. He had a regular savage temper, father had,
though he was quiet enough and not bad to us when he was right. But the
grog always spoiled him.

He gave poor mother a shove which sent her reeling against the wall,
where she fell down and hit her head against the stool, and lay there.
Aileen, sitting down in the corner, turned white, and began to cry,
while father catches me a box on the ear which sends me kicking, picks
up the brand out of the corner, and walks out, with me after him.

I think if I'd been another year or so older I'd have struck back--I
felt that savage about poor mother that I could have gone at him
myself--but we had been too long used to do everything he told us; and
somehow, even if a chap's father's a bad one, he don't seem like other
men to him. So, as Jim had lighted the fire, we branded the little red
heifer calf first--a fine fat six-months-old nugget she was--and then
three bull calves, all strangers, and then Polly's calf, I suppose just
for a blind. Jim and I knew the four calves were all strangers, but we
didn't know the brands of the mothers; they all seemed different.

After this all was made right to kill a beast. The gallows was ready
rigged in a corner of the yard; father brought his gun and shot the
yellow steer. The calves were put into our calf-pen--Polly's and
all--and all the cows turned out to go where they liked.

We helped father to skin and hang up the beast, and pretty late it was
when we finished. Mother had laid us out our tea and gone to bed with
Aileen. We had ours and then went to bed. Father sat outside and smoked
in the starlight. Hours after I woke up and heard mother crying. Before
daylight we were up again, and the steer was cut up and salted and in
the harness-cask soon after sunrise. His head and feet were all popped
into a big pot where we used to make soup for the pigs, and by the time
it had been boiling an hour or two there was no fear of any one swearing
to the yellow steer by 'head-mark'.

We had a hearty breakfast off the 'skirt', but mother wouldn't touch a
bit, nor let Aileen take any; she took nothing but a bit of bread and
a cup of tea, and sat there looking miserable and downcast. Father said
nothing, but sat very dark-looking, and ate his food as if nothing was
the matter. After breakfast he took his mare, the old dog followed;
there was no need to whistle for him--it's my belief he knew more than
many a Christian--and away they went. Father didn't come home for
a week--he had got into the habit of staying away for days and days
together. Then things went on the old way.




Chapter 3



So the years went on--slow enough they seemed to us sometimes--the green
winters, pretty cold, I tell you, with frost and hail-storms, and the
long hot summers. We were not called boys any longer, except by mother
and Aileen, but took our places among the men of the district. We lived
mostly at home, in the old way; sometimes working pretty hard, sometimes
doing very little. When the cows were milked and the wood chopped, there
was nothing to do for the rest of the day. The creek was that close that
mother used to go and dip the bucket into it herself, when she wanted
one, from a little wooden step above the clear reedy waterhole.

Now and then we used to dig in the garden. There was reaping and
corn-pulling and husking for part of the year; but often, for weeks at
a time, there was next to nothing to do. No hunting worth much--we were
sick of kangarooing, like the dogs themselves, that as they grew old
would run a little way and then pull up if a mob came, jump, jump, past
them. No shooting, except a few ducks and pigeons. Father used to laugh
at the shooting in this country, and say they'd never have poachers
here--the game wasn't worth it. No fishing, except an odd codfish, in
the deepest waterholes; and you might sit half a day without a bite.

Now this was very bad for us boys. Lads want plenty of work, and a
little play now and then to keep them straight. If there's none, they'll
make it; and you can't tell how far they'll go when they once start.

Well, Jim and I used to get our horses and ride off quietly in the
afternoon, as if we were going after cattle; but, in reality, as soon
as we were out of sight of mother, to ride over to that old villain,
Grimes, the shanty-keeper, where we met the young Dalys, and others of
the same sort--talked a good deal of nonsense and gossip; what was worse
played at all-fours and euchre, which we had learned from an American
harvest hand, at one of the large farms.

Besides playing for money, which put us rather into trouble sometimes,
as we couldn't always find a half-crown if we lost it, we learned
another bad habit, and that was to drink spirits. What burning nasty
stuff I thought it at first; and so did we all! But every one wanted to
be thought a man, and up to all kinds of wickedness, so we used to make
it a point of drinking our nobbler, and sometimes treating the others
twice, if we had cash.

There was another family that lived a couple of miles off, higher up the
creek, and we had always been good friends with them, though they
never came to our house, and only we boys went to theirs. They were the
parents of the little girl that went to school with us, and a boy who
was a year older than me.

Their father had been a gardener at home, and he married a native girl
who was born somewhere about the Hawkesbury, near Windsor. Her father
had been a farmer, and many a time she told us how sorry she was to go
away from the old place, and what fine corn and pumpkins they grew; and
how they had a church at Windsor, and used to take their hay and fruit
and potatoes to Sydney, and what a grand place Sydney was, with stone
buildings called markets for people to sell fruit and vegetables and
poultry in; and how you could walk down into Lower George Street and see
Sydney Harbour, a great shining salt-water plain, a thousand times as
big as the biggest waterhole, with ships and boats and sailors, and
every kind of strange thing upon it.

Mrs. Storefield was pretty fond of talking, and she was always fond of
me, because once when she was out after the cows, and her man was away,
and she had left Grace at home, the little thing crawled down to the
waterhole and tumbled in. I happened to be riding up with a message for
mother, to borrow some soap, when I heard a little cry like a lamb's,
and there was poor little Gracey struggling in the water like a drowning
kitten, with her face under. Another minute or two would have finished
her, but I was off the old pony and into the water like a teal flapper.
I had her out in a second or two, and she gasped and cried a bit, but
soon came to, and when Mrs. Storefield came home she first cried over
her as if she would break her heart, and kissed her, and then she kissed
me, and said, 'Now, Dick Marston, you look here. Your mother's a good
woman, though simple; your father I don't like, and I hear many stories
about him that makes me think the less we ought to see of the lot of
you the better. But you've saved my child's life to-day, and I'll be a
friend and a mother to you as long as I live, even if you turn out bad,
and I'm rather afraid you will--you and Jim both--but it won't be my
fault for want of trying to keep you straight; and John and I will
be your kind and loving friends as long as we live, no matter what
happens.'

After that--it was strange enough--but I always took to the little
toddling thing that I'd pulled out of the water. I wasn't very big
myself, if it comes to that, and she seemed to have a feeling about it,
for she'd come to me every time I went there, and sit on my knee and
look at me with her big brown serious eyes--they were just the same
after she grew up--and talk to me in her little childish lingo. I
believe she knew all about it, for she used to say, 'Dick pull Gracey
out of water;' and then she'd throw her arms round my neck and kiss me,
and walk off to her mother. If I'd let her drown then, and tied a stone
round my neck and dropped through the reeds to the bottom of the big
waterhole, it would have been better for both of us.

When John came home he was nearly as bad as the old woman, and wanted to
give me a filly, but I wouldn't have it, boy as I was. I never cared for
money nor money's worth, and I was not going to be paid for picking a
kid out of the water.

George Storefield, Gracey's brother, was about my own age. He thought a
lot of what I'd done for her, and years afterwards I threatened to punch
his head if he said anything more about it. He laughed, and held out his
hand.

'You and I might have been better friends lately,' says he; 'but don't
you forget you've got another brother besides Jim--one that will stick
to you, too, fair weather or foul.'

I always had a great belief in George, though we didn't get on over
well, and often had fallings out. He was too steady and hardworking
altogether for Jim and me. He worked all day and every day, and saved
every penny he made. Catch him gaffing!--no, not for a sixpence. He
called the Dalys and Jacksons thieves and swindlers, who would be locked
up, or even hanged, some day, unless they mended themselves. As for
drinking a glass of grog, you might just as soon ask him to take a
little laudanum or arsenic.

'Why should I drink grog,' he used to say--'such stuff, too, as you
get at that old villain Grimes's--with a good appetite and a good
conscience? I'm afraid of no man; the police may come and live on my
ground for what I care. I work all day, have a read in the evening, and
sleep like a top when I turn in. What do I want more?'

'Oh, but you never see any life,' Jim said; 'you're just like an old
working bullock that walks up to the yoke in the morning and never stops
hauling till he's let go at night. This is a free country, and I don't
think a fellow was born for that kind of thing and nothing else.'

'This country's like any other country, Jim,' George would say, holding
up his head, and looking straight at him with his steady gray eyes; 'a
man must work and save when he's young if he don't want to be a beggar
or a slave when he's old. I believe in a man enjoying himself as well as
you do, but my notion of that is to have a good farm, well stocked and
paid for, by and by, and then to take it easy, perhaps when my back is a
little stiffer than it is now.'

'But a man must have a little fun when he is young,' I said. 'What's the
use of having money when you're old and rusty, and can't take pleasure
in anything?'

'A man needn't be so very old at forty,' he says then, 'and twenty
years' steady work will put all of us youngsters well up the ladder.
Besides, I don't call it fun getting half-drunk with a lot of
blackguards at a low pothouse or a shanty, listening to the stupid
talk and boasting lies of a pack of loafers and worse. They're fit for
nothing better; but you and Jim are. Now, look here, I've got a small
contract from Mr. Andrews for a lot of fencing stuff. It will pay us
wages and something over. If you like to go in with me, we'll go share
and share. I know what hands you both are at splitting and fencing. What
do you say?'

Jim, poor Jim, was inclined to take George's offer. He was that
good-hearted that a kind word would turn him any time. But I was put out
at his laying it down so about the Dalys and us shantying and gaffing,
and I do think now that some folks are born so as they can't do without
a taste of some sort of fun once in a way. I can't put it out clear, but
it ought to be fixed somehow for us chaps that haven't got the gift of
working all day and every day, but can do two days' work in one when
we like, that we should have our allowance of reasonable fun and
pleasure--that is, what we called pleasure, not what somebody thinks we
ought to take pleasure in. Anyway, I turned on George rather rough, and
I says, 'We're not good enough for the likes of you, Mr. Storefield.
It's very kind of you to think of us, but we'll take our own line and
you take yours.'

'I'm sorry for it, Dick, and more sorry that you take huff at an
old friend. All I want is to do you good, and act a friend's part.
Good-bye--some day you'll see it.'

'You're hard on George,' says Jim, 'there's no pleasing you to-day; one
would think there were lots of chaps fighting how to give us a lift.
Good-bye, George, old man; I'm sorry we can't wire in with you; we'd
soon knock out those posts and rails on the ironbark range.'

'You'd better stop, Jim, and take a hand in the deal,' says I (or,
rather, the devil, for I believe he gets inside a chap at times), 'and
then you and George can take a turn at local-preaching when you're cut
out. I'm off.' So without another word I jumped on to my horse and went
off down the hill, across the creek, and over the boulders the other
side, without much caring where I was going. The fact was, I felt I had
acted meanly in sneering at a man who only said what he did for my good;
and I wasn't at all sure that I hadn't made a breach between Gracey and
myself, and, though I had such a temper when it was roused that all the
world wouldn't have stopped me, every time I thought of not seeing that
girl again made my heart ache as if it would burst.

I was nearly home before I heard the clatter of a horse's feet, and Jim
rode up alongside of me. He was just the same as ever, with a smile on
his face. You didn't often see it without one.

I knew he had come after me, and had given up his own fancy for mine.

'I thought you were going to stay and turn good,' I said. 'Why didn't
you?'

'It might have been better for me if I had,' he said, 'but you know very
well, Dick, that whatever turns up, whether it's for good or evil, you
and I go together.'

We looked at one another for a moment. Our eyes met. We didn't say
anything; but we understood one another as well as if we had talked for
a week. We rode up to the door of our cottage without speaking. The sun
had set, and some of the stars had come out, early as it was, for it
was late autumn. Aileen was sitting on a bench in the verandah reading,
mother was working away as usual at something in the house. Mother
couldn't read or write, but you never caught her sitting with her hands
before her. Except when she was asleep I don't think she ever was quite
still.

Aileen ran out to us, and stood while we let go our horses, and brought
the saddles and bridles under the verandah.

'I'm glad you're come home for one thing,' she said. 'There is a message
from father. He wants you to meet him.'

'Who brought it?' I said.

'One of the Dalys--Patsey, I think.'

'All right,' said Jim, kissing her as he lifted her up in his great
strong arms. 'I must go in and have a gossip with the old woman. Aileen
can tell me after tea. I daresay it's not so good that it won't keep.'

Mother was that fond of both of us that I believe, as sure as I sit
here, she'd have put her head on the block, or died in any other way for
either of her boys, not because it was her duty, but glad and cheerful
like, to have saved us from death or disgrace. I think she was fonder
of us two than she was of Aileen. Mothers are generally fonder of their
sons. Why I never could see; and if she thought more of one than the
other it was Jim. He was the youngest, and he had that kind of
big, frolicsome, loving way with him, like a Newfoundland pup about
half-grown. I always used to think, somehow, nobody ever seemed to be
able to get into a pelter with Jim, not even father, and that was a
thing as some people couldn't be got to believe. As for mother and
Aileen, they were as fond of him as if he'd been a big baby.

So while he went to sit down on the stretcher, and let mother put her
arms round his neck and hug him and cry over him, as she always did if
he'd been away more than a day or two, I took a walk down the creek with
Aileen in the starlight, to hear all about this message from father.
Besides, I could see that she was very serious over it, and I thought
there might be something in it more than common.

'First of all, did you make any agreement with George Storefield?' she
said.

'No; why should I? Has he been talking to you about me? What right has
he to meddle with my business?'

'Oh, Dick, don't talk like that. Anything that he said was only to do
you a kindness, and Jim.'

'Hang him, and his kindness too,' I said. 'Let him keep it for those
that want it. But what did he tell you?'

'He said, first of all,' answered poor Aileen, with the tears in her
eyes, and trying to take hold of my hand, 'that he had a contract for
fencing timber, which he had taken at good prices, which he would share
with you and Jim; that he knew you two and himself could finish it in a
few weeks, and that he expected to get the contract for the timber for
the new bridge at Dargo, which he would let you go shares in too. He
didn't like to speak about that, because it wasn't certain; but he had
calculated all the quantities and prices, and he was sure you would make
70 or 80 Pounds each before Christmas. Now, was there any harm in that;
and don't you think it was very good of him to think of it?'

'Well, he's not a bad fellow, old George,' I said, 'but he's a little
too fond of interfering with other people's business. Jim and I are
quite able to manage our own affairs, as I told him this evening, when I
refused to have anything to do with his fencing arrangement.'

'Oh, Dick, did you?' she said. 'What a pity! I made sure Jim would have
liked it so, for only last week he said he was sick and tired of having
nothing to do--that he should soon lose all his knack at using tools
that he used to be so proud of. Didn't he say he'd like to join George?'

'He would, I daresay, and I told him to do as he liked. I came away
by myself, and only saw him just before we crossed the range. He's big
enough and old enough to take his own line.'

'But you know he thinks so much of you,' she groaned out, 'that he'd
follow you to destruction. That will be the end of it, depend upon it,
Dick. I tell you so now; you've taken to bad ways; you'll have his blood
on your head yet.'

'Jim's old enough and big enough to take care of himself,' I said
sulkily. 'If he likes to come my way I won't hinder him; I won't try to
persuade him one way or the other. Let him take his own line; I don't
believe in preaching and old women's talk. Let a man act and think for
himself.'

'You'll break my heart and poor mother's, too,' said Aileen, suddenly
taking both my hands in hers. 'What has she done but love us ever since
we were born, and what does she live for? You know she has no pleasure
of any kind, you know she's afraid every morning she wakes that the
police will get father for some of his cross doings; and now you and Jim
are going the same wild way, and what ever--what ever will be the end of
it?'

Here she let go my hands, and sobbed and cried as if she was a child
again, much as I remember her doing one day when my kangaroo dog killed
her favourite cat. And Aileen was a girl that didn't cry much generally,
and never about anything that happened to herself; it was always about
somebody else and their misfortunes. She was a quiet girl, too, very
determined, and not much given to talking about what she was going to
do; but when she made up her mind she was sure to stick to it. I used to
think she was more like father than any of us. She had his coloured hair
and eyes, and his way of standing and looking, as if the whole world
wouldn't shift him. But she'd mother's soft heart for all that, and I
took the more notice of her crying and whimpering this time because it
was so strange for her.

If any one could have seen straight into my heart just then I was
regularly knocked over, and had two minds to go inside to Jim and tell
him we'd take George's splitting job, and start to tackle it first thing
to-morrow morning; but just then one of those confounded night-hawks
flitted on a dead tree before us and began his 'hoo-ho', as if it was
laughing at me. I can see the place now--the mountain black and dismal,
the moon low and strange-looking, the little waterhole glittering in the
half-light, and this dark bird hooting away in the night. An odd feeling
seemed to come over my mind, and if it had been the devil himself
standing on the dead limb it could not have had a worse effect on me as
I stopped there, uncertain whether to turn to the right or the left.

We don't often know in this world sometimes whether we are turning off
along a road where we shall never come back from, or whether we can go
just a little way and look at the far-off hills and new rivers, and come
home safe.

I remember the whole lot of bad-meaning thoughts coming with a rush
over my heart, and I laughed at myself for being so soft as to choose
a hard-working, pokey kind of life at the word of a slow fellow like
George, when I might be riding about the country on a fine horse, eating
and drinking of the best, and only doing what people said half the old
settlers had made their money by.

Poor Aileen told me afterwards that if she'd thought for a moment I
could be turned she'd have gone down on her knees and never got up till
I promised to keep straight and begin to work at honest daily labour
like a man--like a man who hoped to end his days in a good house, on a
good farm, with a good wife and nice children round him, and not in a
prison cell. Some people would call the first, after years of honest
work, and being always able to look every one in the face, being more
of a man than the other. But people have different ways and different
ideas.

'Come, Ailie,' I said, 'are you going to whine and cry all night? I
shall be afraid to come home if you're going to be like this. What's the
message from father?'

She wiped away her tears, and, putting her hand on my shoulder, looked
steadily into my face.

'Poor boy--poor, dear Dick,' she said, 'I feel as if I should see that
fresh face of yours looking very different some day or other. Something
tells me that there's bad luck before you. But never mind, you'll never
lose your sister if the luck's ever so bad. Father sent word you and Jim
were to meet him at Broken Creek and bring your whips with you.'

'What in the world's that for?' I said, half speaking to myself. 'It
looks as if there was a big mob to drive, and where's he to get a big
mob there in that mountainous, beastly place, where the cattle all bolt
like wallabies, and where I never saw twenty head together?'

'He's got some reason for it,' said Aileen sorrowfully. 'If I were you
I wouldn't go. It's no good, and father's trying now to drag you and Jim
into the bad ways he's been following these years.'

'How do you know it's so bad?' said I. 'How can a girl like you know?'

'I know very well,' she said. 'Do you think I've lived here all these
years and don't know things? What makes him always come home after dark,
and be that nervous every time he sees a stranger coming up you'd think
he was come out of gaol? Why has he always got money, and why does
mother look so miserable when he's at home, and cheer up when he goes
away?'

'He may get jobs of droving or something,' I said. 'You have no right
to say that he's robbing, or something of that sort, because he doesn't
care about tying himself to mother's apron-string.'

Aileen laughed, but it was more like crying.

'You told me just now,' she said--oh! so sorrowfully--'that you and Jim
were old enough to take a line of your own. Why don't you do it now?'

'And tell father we'll have nothing more to do with him!'

'Why not?' she said, standing up straight before me, and facing me just
as I saw father face the big bullock-driver before he knocked him down.
'Why not? You need never ask him for another meal; you can earn an easy
living in half-a-dozen ways, you and Jim. Why should you let him spoil
your life and ruin your soul for evermore?'

'The priest put that into your head,' I said sneeringly; 'Father
Doyle--of course he knows what they'll do with a fellow after he's
dead.'

'No!' she said, 'Father Doyle never said a word about you that wasn't
good and kind. He says mother's a good Catholic, and he takes an
interest in you boys and me because of her.'

'He can persuade you women to do anything,' I said, not that I had any
grudge against poor old Father Doyle, who used to come riding up the
rough mountain track on his white horse, and tiring his old bones,
just 'to look after his flock,' as he said--and nice lambs some of them
were--but I wanted to tease her and make her break off with this fancy
of hers.

'He never does, and couldn't persuade me, except for my good,' said she,
getting more and more roused, and her black eyes glowed again, 'and I'll
tell you what I'll do to prove it. It's a sin, but if it is I'll stand
by it, and now I'll swear it (here she knelt down), as Almighty God
shall help me at the last day, if you and Jim will promise me to start
straight off up the country and take bush-work till shearing comes on,
and never to have any truck with cross chaps and their ways, I'll turn
Protestant. I'll go to church with you, and keep to it till I die.'

Wasn't she a trump? I've known women that would give up a lot for a man
they were sweet on, and wives that would follow their husbands about
like spaniels, and women that would lie and deceive and all but rob and
murder for men they were fond of, and sometimes do nearly as much to
spite other women. But I don't think I ever knew a woman that would
give up her religion for any one before, and it's not as if she
wasn't staunch to her own faith. She was as regular in her prayers and
crossings and beads and all the rest of it as mother herself, and if
there ever was a good girl in the whole world she was one. She turned
faint as she said this, and I thought she was going to drop down. If
anything could have turned me then it would have been this. It was
almost like giving her life for ours, and I don't think she'd have
valued hers two straws if she could have saved us. There's a great
deal said about different kinds of love in this world, but I can't
help thinking that the love between brothers and sisters that have been
brought up together and have had very few other people to care about
is a higher, better sort than any other in the world. There's less
selfishness about it--no thought but for the other's good. If that
can be made safe, death and pain and poverty and misery are all little
things. And wasn't I fond of Aileen, in spite of all my hardness and
cross-grained obstinacy?--so fond that I was just going to hug her to me
and say, 'Take it all your own way, Ailie dear,' when Jim came tearing
out of the hut, bareheaded, and stood listening to a far-off sound that
caught all our ears at once. We made out the source of it too well--far
too well.

What was the noise at that hour of the night?

It was a hollow, faint, distant roaring that gradually kept getting
louder. It was the strange mournful bellowing that comes from a drove
of cattle forced along an unknown track. As we listened the sound came
clearly on the night wind, faint, yet still clearly coming nearer.

'Cattle being driven,' Jim cried out; 'and a big mob too. It's
father--for a note. Let's get our horses and meet him.'




Chapter 4



'All right,' said I, 'he must have got there a day before his time. It
is a big mob and no mistake. I wonder where they're taking them to.'
Aileen shrugged her shoulders and walked in to mother with a look of
misery and despair on her face such as I never saw there before.

She knew it was no use talking to me now. The idea of going out to meet
a large lot of unknown cattle had strongly excited us, as would have
been the case with every bush-bred lad. All sorts of wonders passed
through our minds as we walked down the creek bank, with our bridles in
our hands, towards where our horses usually fed. One was easy to catch,
the other with a little management was secured. In ten minutes we were
riding fast through the dark trees and fallen timber towards the wild
gullies and rock-strewed hills of Broken Creek.

It was not more than an hour when we got up to the cattle. We could hear
them a good while before we saw them. 'My word,' said Jim, 'ain't they
restless. They can't have come far, or they wouldn't roar so. Where can
the old man have “touched” for them?'

'How should I know?' I said roughly. I had a kind of idea, but I thought
he would never be so rash.

When we got up I could see the cattle had been rounded up in a flat with
stony ridges all round. There must have been three or four hundred of
them, only a man and a boy riding round and wheeling them every now and
then. Their horses were pretty well knocked up. I knew father at once,
and the old chestnut mare he used to ride--an animal with legs like
timbers and a mule rump; but you couldn't tire her, and no beast that
ever was calved could get away from her. The boy was a half-caste that
father had picked up somewhere; he was as good as two men any day.

'So you've come at last,' growled father, 'and a good thing too. I
didn't expect to be here till to-morrow morning. The dog came home, I
suppose--that's what brought you here, wasn't it? I thought the infernal
cattle would beat Warrigal and me, and we'd have all our trouble for
nothing.'

'Whose cattle are they, and what are you going to do with them?'

'Never you mind; ask no questions, and you'll see all about it
to-morrow. I'll go and take a snooze now; I've had no sleep for three
nights.'

With our fresh horses and riding round so we kept the cattle easily
enough. We did not tell Warrigal he might go to rest, not thinking a
half-caste brat like him wanted any. He didn't say anything, but went to
sleep on his horse, which walked in and out among the angry cattle as he
sat on the saddle with his head down on the horse's neck. They sniffed
at him once or twice, some of the old cows, but none of them horned him;
and daylight came rather quicker than one would think.

Then we saw whose cattle they were; they had all Hunter's and Falkland's
brands on, which showed that they belonged to Banda and Elingamah
stations.

'By George!' says Jim, 'they're Mr. Hunter's cattle, and all these
circle dots belong to Banda. What a mob of calves! not one of them
branded! What in the world does father intend to do with them?'

Father was up, and came over where we stood with our horses in our hands
before we had time to say more. He wasn't one of those that slept after
daylight, whether he had work to do or not. He certainly COULD work;
daylight or dark, wet or dry, cold or hot, it was all one to father. It
seems a pity what he did was no use to him, as it turned out; for he was
a man, was old dad, every inch of him.

'Now, boys,' he said, quite brisk and almost good-natured for him, 'look
alive and we'll start the cattle; we've been long enough here; let 'em
head up that gully, and I'll show you something you've never seen before
for as long as you've known Broken Creek Ranges.'

'But where are you going to take 'em to?' I said. 'They're all Mr.
Hunter's and Mr. Falkland's; the brands are plain enough.'

'Are the calves branded, you blasted fool?' he said, while the black
look came over his face that had so often frightened me when I was a
child. 'You do what I tell you if you've any pluck and gumption about
you; or else you and your brother can ride over to Dargo Police Station
and “give me away” if you like; only don't come home again, I warn you,
sons or no sons.'

If I had done what I had two minds to do--for I wasn't afraid of him
then, savage as he looked--told him to do his own duffing and ridden
away with Jim there and then--poor Jim, who sat on his horse staring at
both of us, and saying nothing--how much better it would have been for
all of us, the old man as well as ourselves; but it seemed as if it
wasn't to be. Partly from use, and partly from a love of danger and
something new, which is at the bottom of half the crime in the bush
districts, I turned my horse's head after the cattle, which were now
beginning to straggle. Jim did the same on his side. How easy is it for
chaps to take the road to hell! for that was about the size of it, and
we were soon too busy to think about much else.

The track we were driving on led along a narrow rocky gully which looked
as if it had been split up or made out of a crack in the earth thousands
of years ago by an earthquake or something of that kind. The hills were
that steep that every now and then some of the young cattle that were
not used to that sort of country would come sliding down and bellow as
if they thought they were going to break their necks.

The water rushed down it like a torrent in wet winters, and formed a
sort of creek, and the bed of it made what track there was. There were
overhanging rocks and places that made you giddy to look at, and some
of these must have fallen down and blocked up the creek at one time or
other. We had to scramble round them the best way we could.

When we got nearly up to the head of the gully--and great work it was
to force the footsore cattle along, as we couldn't use our whips
overmuch--Jim called out--

'Why, here comes old Crib. Who'd have thought he'd have seen the track?
Well done, old man. Now we're right.'

Father never took any notice of the poor brute as he came limping along
the stones. Woman or child, horse or dog, it's the same old thing--the
more any creature loves a man in this world the worse they're treated.
It looks like it, at any rate. I saw how it was; father had given Crib
a cruel beating the night before, when he was put out for some trifling
matter, and the dog had left him and run home. But now he had thought
better of it, and seen our tracks and come to work and slave, with his
bleeding feet--for they were cut all to pieces--and got the whip across
his back now and then for his pains. It's a queer world!

When we got right to the top of this confounded gully, nearly dead-beat
all of us, and only for the dog heeling them up every now and then, and
making his teeth nearly meet in them, without a whimper, I believe the
cattle would have charged back and beat us. There was a sort of rough
table-land--scrubby and stony and thick it was, but still the grass
wasn't bad in summer, when the country below was all dried up. There
were wild horses in troops there, and a few wild cattle, so Jim and I
knew the place well; but it was too far and too much of a journey for
our own horses to go often.

'Do you see that sugar-loaf hill with the bald top, across the range?'
said father, riding up just then, as we were taking it easy a little.
'Don't let the cattle straggle, and make straight for that.'

'Why, it's miles away,' said Jim, looking rather dismal. 'We could never
get 'em there.'

'We're not going there, stupid,' says father; 'that's only the line to
keep. I'll show you something about dinner-time that'll open your eyes a
bit.'

Poor Jim brightened up at the mention of dinner-time, for, boylike, he
was getting very hungry, and as he wasn't done growing he had no end of
an appetite. I was hungry enough for the matter of that, but I wouldn't
own to it.

'Well, we shall come to somewhere, I suppose,' says Jim, when father was
gone. 'Blest if I didn't think he was going to keep us wandering in
this blessed Nulla Mountain all day. I wish I'd never seen the blessed
cattle. I was only waiting for you to hook it when we first seen the
brands by daylight, and I'd ha' been off like a brindle “Mickey” down a
range.'

'Better for us if we had,' I said; 'but it's too late now. We must stick
to it, I suppose.'

We had kept the cattle going for three or four miles through the
thickest of the country, every now and then steering our course by the
clear round top of Sugarloaf, that could be seen for miles round,
but never seemed to get any nearer, when we came on a rough sort of
log-fence, which ran the way we were going.

'I didn't think there were any farms up here,' I said to Jim.

'It's a “break”,' he said, almost in a whisper. 'There's a
“duffing-yard” somewhere handy; that's what's the matter.'

'Keep the cattle along it, anyway. We'll soon see what it leads to.'

The cattle ran along the fence, as if they expected to get to the end of
their troubles soon. The scrub was terribly thick in places, and every
now and then there was a break in the fence, when one of us had to go
outside and hunt them until we came to the next bit. At last we came to
a little open kind of flat, with the scrub that thick round it as you
couldn't hardly ride through it, and, just as Jim said, there was the
yard.

It was a 'duffing-yard' sure enough. No one but people who had cattle to
hide and young stock they didn't want other people to see branded would
have made a place there.

Just on the south side of the yard, which was built of great heavy
stringy-bark trees cut down in the line of the fence, and made up with
limbs and logs, the range went up as steep as the side of a house. The
cattle were that tired and footsore--half their feet were bleeding, poor
devils--that they ran in through the sliprails and began to lay down.

'Light a fire, one of you boys,' says father, putting up the heavy
sliprails and fastening them. 'We must brand these calves before dark.
One of you can go to that gunyah, just under the range where that big
white rock is, and you'll find tea and sugar and something to eat.'

Jim rushed off at once, while I sulkily began to put some bark and twigs
together and build a fire.

'What's the use of all this cross work?' I said to father; 'we're bound
to be caught some day if we keep on at it. Then there'll be no one left
to take care of mother and Aileen.'

He looked rather struck at this, and then said quietly--

'You and your brother can go back now. Never say I kept you against your
will. You may as well lend a hand to brand these calves; then you may
clear out as soon as you like.'

Well, I didn't quite like leaving the old chap in the middle of the work
like that. I remember thinking, like many another young fool, I suppose,
that I could draw back in time, just after I'd tackled this job.

Draw back, indeed! When does a man ever get the chance of doing that,
once he's regularly gone in for any of the devil's work and wages? He
takes care there isn't much drawing back afterwards. So I said--

'We may as well give you a hand with this lot; but we'll go home then,
and drop all this duffing work. It don't pay. I'm old enough to know
that, and you'll find it out yet, I expect, father, yourself.'

'The fox lives long, and gives the hounds many a long chase before he's
run into,' he said, with a grim chuckle. 'I swore I'd be revenged on 'em
all when they locked me up and sent me out here for a paltry hare; broke
my old mother's heart, so it did. I've had a pound for every hair in
her skin, and I shall go on till I die. After all, if a man goes to work
cautious and runs mute it's not so easy to catch him in this country, at
any rate.'

Jim at this came running out of the cave with a face of joy, a bag of
ship-biscuit, and a lot of other things.

'Here's tea and sugar,' he said; 'and there's biscuits and jam, and a
big lump of cheese. Get the fire right, Dick, while I get some water.
We'll soon have some tea, and these biscuits are jolly.'

The tea was made, and we all had a good meal. Father found a bottle of
rum, too; he took a good drink himself, and gave Jim and me a sip each.
I felt less inclined to quarrel with father after that. So we drafted
all the calves into a small pen-yard, and began to put our brand on them
as quick as we could catch 'em.

A hundred and sixty of 'em altogether--all ages, from a month old to
nearly a year. Fine strong calves, and in rare condition, too. We could
see they were all belonging to Mr. Hunter and Mr. Falkland. How they
came to leave them all so long unbranded I can't say. Very careless
they often are on these large cattle-stations, so that sharp people like
father and the Dalys, and a lot more, get an easy chance at them.

Whatever father was going to do with them all when he had branded 'em,
we couldn't make out.

'There's no place to tail or wean 'em,' whispered Jim. 'We're not above
thirty miles from Banda in a straight line. These cows are dead sure to
make straight back the very minute they're let out, and very nice work
it'll look with all these calves with our brand on sucking these cows.'

Father happened to come round for a hot brand just as Jim finished.

'Never you mind about the weaning,' he snarled. 'I shan't ask you to
tail them either. It wouldn't be a nice job here, would it?' and father
actually laughed. It wasn't a very gay kind of a laugh, and he shut up
his mouth with a sort of snap again. Jim and I hadn't seen him laugh for
I don't know how long, and it almost frightened us.

As Jim said, it wouldn't do to let the cattle out again. If calves are
weaned, and have only one brand on, it is very hard for any man to swear
that they are not the property of the man to whom that brand belongs.
He may believe them to be his, but may never have seen them in his life;
and if he has seen them on a camp or on the run, it's very hard to swear
to any one particular red or spotted calf as you would to a horse.

The great dart is to keep the young stock away from their mothers until
they forget one another, and then most of the danger is past. But if
calves with one man's brand on are seen sucking another man's cows, it
is pretty plain that the brand on the calves has been put on without the
consent of the owner of the cows--which is cattle-stealing; a felony,
according to the Act 7 and 8 George IV, No. 29, punishable with three
years' imprisonment, with hard labour on the roads of the colony or
other place, as the Judge may direct.

There's a lot of law! How did I learn it? I had plenty of time in
Berrima Gaol--worse luck--my first stretch. But it was after I'd done
the foolishness, and not before.




Chapter 5



'Now then, you boys!' says father, coming up all of a sudden like, and
bringing out his words as if it was old times with us, when we didn't
know whether he'd hit first and talk afterwards, or the other way on,
'get out the lot we've just branded, and drive 'em straight for that
peak, where the water shines dripping over the stones, right again the
sun, and look slippy; we're burning daylight, and these cows are making
row enough, blast 'em! to be heard all the way to Banda. I'll go on and
steady the lead; you keep 'em close up to me.'

Father mounted the old mare. The dog stopped behind; he knew he'd
have to mind the tail--that is the hindmost cattle--and stop 'em from
breaking or running clear away from the others. We threw down the rails.
Away the cattle rushed out, all in a long string. You'd 'a thought no
mortal men could 'a kept 'em in that blind hole of a place. But father
headed 'em, and turned 'em towards the peak. The dog worried those that
wanted to stay by the yard or turn another way. We dropped our whip on
'em, and kept 'em going. In five minutes they were all a-moving along
in one mob at a pretty sharpish trot like a lot of store cattle. Father
knew his way about, whether the country was thick or open. It was all as
one to him. What a slashing stockman he would have made in new country,
if he only could have kept straight.

It took us an hour's hard dinkum to get near the peak. Sometimes it was
awful rocky, as well as scrubby, and the poor devils of cattle got as
sore-footed as babies--blood up to the knee, some of 'em; but we crowded
'em on; there was no help for it.

At last we rounded up on a flat, rocky, open kind of a place; and here
father held up his hand.

'Let 'em ring a bit; some of their tongues are out. These young things
is generally soft. Come here, Dick.' I rode up, and he told me to follow
him.

We walked our horses up to the edge of the mountain and looked over. It
was like the end of the world. Far down there was a dark, dreadful drop
into a sort of deep valley below. You couldn't see the bottom of it.
The trees on the mountain side looked like bushes, and they were big
ironbarks and messmates too. On three sides of us was this awful,
desolate-looking precipice--a dreary, gloomy, God-forsaken kind of spot.
The sky got cloudy, and the breeze turned cold and began to murmur
and whistle in an odd, unnatural kind of way, while father, seeing how
scared and puzzled I was, began to laugh. I shuddered. A thought crossed
my mind that it might be the Enemy of Souls, in his shape, going to
carry us off for doing such a piece of wickedness.

'Looks queer, doesn't it?' says father, going to the brink and kicking
down a boulder, that rolled and crashed down the steep mountain side,
tearing its way through scrub and heath till it settled down in the glen
below. 'It won't do for a man's horse to slip, will it, boy? And yet
there's a track here into a fine large paddock, open and clear, too,
where I'm going to put these cattle into.'

I stared at him, without speaking, thinking was he mad.

'No! the old man isn't mad, youngster,' he said; 'not yet, at least. I'm
going to show you a trick that none of you native boys are up to, smart
as you think yourselves.' Here he got off the old mare, and began to
lead her to the edge of the mountain.

'Now, you rally the cattle well after me,' he said; 'they'll follow the
old mare after a bit. I left a few cows among 'em on purpose, and when
they “draw” keep 'em going well up, but not too fast.'

He had lengthened the bridle of the mare, and tied the end of a light
tether rope that he had round her neck to it. I saw her follow him
slowly, and turn down a rocky track that seemed to lead straight over a
bluff of the precipice.

However, I gave the word to 'head on'. The dog had started rounding 'em
up as soon as he saw the old mare walk towards the mountain side, and
the cattle were soon crushed up pretty close to the mare's heels.

Mind this, that they were so footsore and tender about the hoofs that
they could not have run away from us on foot if they had tried.

After 'ringing' a bit, one of the quiet cows followed up the old mare
that was walking step by step forward, and all the rest followed her
like sheep. Cattle will do that. I've seen a stockrider, when all the
horses were dead beat, trying to get fat cattle to take a river in
flood, jump off and turn his horse loose into the stream. If he went
straight, and swam across, all the cattle would follow him like sheep.

Well, when the old mare got to the bluff she turned short round to the
right, and then I saw that she had struck a narrow path down a gully
that got deeper and deeper every yard we went. There was just room for
a couple or three calves to go abreast, and by and by all of 'em was
walking down it like as if they was the beasts agoing into Noah's Ark.
It wound and wound and got deeper and deeper till the walls of rock were
ever so far above our heads. Our work was done then; the cattle had to
walk on like sheep in a race. We led our horses behind them, and the dog
walked along, saving his sore feet as well as he could, and never tried
to bite a beast once he got within the walls. He looked quite satisfied,
and kept chuckling almost to himself. I really believe I've seen dogs
laugh. Once upon a time I've read of they'd have taken poor Crib for a
familiar spirit, and hanged or burnt him. Well, he knew a lot, and no
mistake. I've seen plenty of Christians as he could buy and sell, and no
trouble to him. I'm dashed if the old mare, too, didn't take a pleasure
in working cattle on the cross. She was the laziest old wretch bringing
up the cows at home, or running in the horses. Many a time Jim and I
took a turn out of her when father didn't know. But put her after a
big mob of cattle--she must have known they couldn't be ours--and she'd
clatter down a range like the wall of a house, and bite and kick the
tail cattle if they didn't get out of her way. They say dogs and horses
are all honest, and it's only us as teaches 'em to do wrong. My notion's
they're a deal like ourselves, and some of 'em fancies the square racket
dull and safe, while some takes a deal kindlier to the other. Anyhow, no
cattle-duffer in the colonies could have had a better pair of mates than
old Sally and Crib, if the devil himself had broken 'em in special for
the trade.

It was child's play now, as far as the driving went. Jim and I walked
along, leading our horses and yarning away as we used to do when we were
little chaps bringing in the milkers.

'My word, Dick, dad's dropped into a fine road through this thundering
mountain, hasn't he? I wonder where it leads to? How high the rock-walls
are getting above us!' he says. 'I know now. I think I heard long ago
from one of the Crosbies of a place in the ranges down towards behind
the Nulla Mountain, “Terrible Hollow”. He didn't know about it himself,
but said an old stockman told him about it when he was drunk. He said
the Government men used to hide the cattle and horses there in old
times, and that it was never found out.'

'Why wasn't it found out, Jim? If the old fellow “split” about it some
one else would get to know.'

'Well, old Dan said that they killed one man that talked of telling; the
rest were too frightened after that, and they all swore a big oath never
to tell any one except he was on the cross.'

'That's how dad come to know, I suppose,' said Jim. 'I wish he never
had. I don't care about those cross doings. I never did. I never seen
any good come out of them yet.'

'Well, we must go through with it now, I suppose. It won't do to leave
old dad in the lurch. You won't, will you, Jim?'

'You know very well I won't,' says Jim, very soberlike. 'I don't like
it any the more for that. But I wish father had broke his leg, and was
lying up at home, with mother nursing him, before he found out this
hell-hole of a place.'

'Well, we're going to get out of it, and soon too. The gully seems
getting wider, and I can see a bit of open country through the trees.'

'Thank God for that!' says Jim. 'My boots'll part company soon, and the
poor devils of calves won't have any hoofs either, if there's much more
of this.'

'They're drawing faster now. The leading cattle are beginning to run.
We're at the end of the drive.'

So it was. The deep, rocky gully gradually widened into an open and
pretty smooth flat; this, again, into a splendid little plain, up to
the knees in grass; a big natural park, closed round on every side with
sandstone rockwalls, as upright as if they were built, and a couple of
thousand feet above the place where we stood.

This scrub country was crossed by two good creeks; it was several miles
across, and a trifle more in length. Our hungry weaners spread out and
began to feed, without a notion of their mothers they'd left behind; but
they were not the only ones there. We could see other mobs of cattle,
some near, some farther off; horses, too; and the well-worn track in
several ways showed that this was no new grazing ground.

Father came riding back quite comfortable and hearty-like for him.

'Welcome to Terrible Hollow, lads,' says he. 'You're the youngest chaps
it has ever been shown to, and if I didn't know you were the right
stuff, you'd never have seen it, though you're my own flesh and blood.
Jump off, and let your horses go. They can't get away, even if they
tried; they don't look much like that.'

Our poor nags were something like the cattle, pretty hungry and stiff.
They put their heads down to the thick green grass, and went in at it
with a will.

'Bring your saddles along with you,' father said, 'and come after me.
I'll show you a good camping place. You deserve a treat after last
night's work.'

We turned back towards the rocky wall, near to where we had come in, and
there, behind a bush and a big piece of sandstone that had fallen
down, was the entrance to a cave. The walls of it were quite clean and
white-looking, the floor was smooth, and the roof was pretty high, well
blackened with smoke, too, from the fires which had been lighted in it
for many a year gone by.

A kind of natural cellar had been made by scooping out the soft
sandstone behind a ledge. From this father took a bag of flour and
corn-meal. We very soon made some cakes in the pan, that tasted well,
I can tell you. Tea and sugar too, and quart pots, some bacon in a
flour-bag; and that rasher fried in the pan was the sweetest meat I ever
ate in all my born days.

Then father brought out a keg and poured some rum into a pint pot. He
took a pretty stiff pull, and then handed it to us. 'A little of it
won't hurt you, boys,' he said, 'after a night's work.'

I took some--not much; we hadn't learned to drink then--to keep down
the fear of something hanging over us. A dreadful fear it is. It makes
a coward of every man who doesn't lead a square life, let him be as game
as he may.

Jim wouldn't touch it. 'No,' he said, when I laughed at him, 'I promised
mother last time I had more than was good for me at Dargo Races that I
wouldn't touch it again for two years; and I won't either. I can stand
what any other man can, and without the hard stuff, either.'

'Please yourself,' said father. 'When you're ready we'll have a ride
through the stock.'

We finished our meal, and a first-rate one it was. A man never has
the same appetite for his meals anywhere else that he has in the bush,
specially if he has been up half the night. It's so fresh, and the air
makes him feel as if he'd ate nothing for a week. Sitting on a log, or
in the cave, as we were, I've had the best meal I've ever tasted since
I was born. Not like the close-feeling, close-smelling, dirty-clean
graveyard they call a gaol. But it's no use beginning on that. We were
young men, and free, too. Free! By all the devils in hell, if there are
devils--and there must be to tempt a man, or how could he be so great a
fool, so blind a born idiot, as to do anything in this world that would
put his freedom in jeopardy? And what for? For folly and nonsense. For
a few pounds he could earn with a month's honest work and be all the
better man for it. For a false woman's smile that he could buy, and ten
like her, if he only kept straight and saving. For a bit of sudden pride
or vanity or passion. A short bit of what looks like pleasure, against
months and years of weariness, and cold and heat, and dull half-death,
with maybe a dog's death at the end!

I could cry like a child when I think of it now. I have cried many's
the time and often since I have been shut up here, and dashed my head
against the stones till I pretty nigh knocked all sense and feeling out
of it, not so much in repentance, though I don't say I feel sorry,
but to think what a fool, fool, fool I'd been. Yes, fool, three times
over--a hundred times--to put my liberty and life against such a
miserable stake--a stake the devil that deals the pack is so safe to win
at the end.

I may as well go on. But I can't help breaking out sometimes when I hear
the birds calling to one another as they fly over the yard, and know
it's fresh air and sun and green grass outside that I never shall see
again. Never see the river rippling under the big drooping trees, or
the cattle coming down in the twilight to drink after the long hot day.
Never, never more! And whose fault is it? Who have I to blame? Perhaps
father helped a bit; but I knew better, and no one is half as much to
blame as myself.

Where were we? Oh, at the cave-mouth, coming out with our bridles in our
hands to catch our horses. We soon did that, and then we rode away to
the other cattle. They were a queer lot, in fine condition, but all
sorts of ages and breeds, with every kind of brand and ear-mark.

Lots of the brands we didn't know, and had never heard of. Some had
no brands at all--full-grown beasts, too; that was a thing we had very
seldom seen. Some of the best cattle and some of the finest horses--and
there were some real plums among the horses--had a strange brand, JJ.

'Who does the JJ brand belong to?' I said to father. 'They're the pick
of the lot, whose ever they are.'

Father looked black for a bit, and then he growled out, 'Don't you ask
too many questions, lad. There's only four living men besides yourselves
knows about this place; so take care and don't act foolishly, or you'll
lose a plant that may save your life, as well as keep you in cash for
many a year to come. That brand belongs to Starlight, and he was the
only man left alive of the men that first found it and used it to put
away stock in. He wanted help, and told me five years ago. He took in a
half-caste chap, too, against my will. He helped him with that last lot
of cattle that you noticed.'

'But where did those horses come from?' Jim said. 'I never hardly saw
such a lot before. All got the JJ brand on, too, and nothing else; all
about three year old.'

'They were brought here as foals,' says father, 'following their
mothers. Some of them was foaled here; and, of course, as they've only
the one brand on they never can be claimed or sworn to. They're from
some of Mr. Maxwell's best thoroughbred mares, and their sire was Earl
of Atheling, imported. He was here for a year.'

'Well, they might look the real thing,' said Jim, his eyes brightening
as he gazed at them. 'I'd like to have that dark bay colt with the star.
My word, what a forehand he's got; and what quarters, too. If he can't
gallop I'll never say I know a horse from a poley cow.'

'You shall have him, or as good, never fear, if you stick to your work,'
says father. 'You mustn't cross Starlight, for he's a born devil when
he's taken the wrong way, though he talks so soft. The half-caste is an
out-and-out chap with cattle, and the horse doesn't stand on four legs
that he can't ride--and make follow him, for the matter of that. But
he's worth watching. I don't believe in him myself. And now ye have the
lot.'

'And a d----d fine lot they are,' I said, for I was vexed with Jim for
taking so easy to the bait father held out to him about the horse. 'A
very smart crowd to be on the roads inside of five years, and drag us in
with 'em.'

'How do you make that out?' says father. 'Are you going to turn dog, now
you know the way in? Isn't it as easy to carry on for a few years more
as it was twenty years ago?'

'Not by a long chalk,' I said, for my blood was up, and I felt as if I
could talk back to father and give him as good as he sent, and all for
Jim's sake. Poor Jim! He'd always go to the mischief for the sake of a
good horse, and many another 'Currency' chap has gone the same way. It's
a pity for some of 'em that a blood horse was ever foaled.

'You think you can't be tracked,' says I, 'but you must bear in mind you
haven't got to do with the old-fashioned mounted police as was potterin'
about when this “bot” was first hit on. There's chaps in the police
getting now, natives or all the same, as can ride and track every bit
as well as the half-caste you're talking about. Some day they'll drop on
the track of a mob coming in or getting out, and then the game will be
all up.'

'You can cut it if you like now,' said father, looking at me curious
like. 'Don't say I dragged you in. You and your brother can go home, and
no one will ever know where you were; no more than if you'd gone to the
moon.'

Jim looked at the brown colt that just came trotting up as dad finished
speaking--trotting up with his head high and his tail stuck out like
a circus horse. If he'd been the devil in a horsehide he couldn't have
chosen a better moment. Then his eyes began to glitter.

We all three looked at each other. No one spoke. The colt stopped,
turned, and galloped back to his mates like a red flyer with the dogs
close behind him.

It was not long. We all began to speak at once. But in that time the die
was cast, the stakes were down, and in the pool were three men's lives.

'I don't care whether we go back or not,' says Jim; 'I'll do either way
that Dick likes. But that colt I must have.'

'I never intended to go back,' I said. 'But we're three d----d fools all
the same--father and sons. It'll be the dearest horse you ever bought,
Jim, old man, and so I tell you.'

'Well, I suppose it's settled now,' says father; 'so let's have no more
chat. We're like a pack of old women, blessed if we ain't.'

After that we got on more sociably. Father took us all over the place,
and a splendid paddock it was--walled all round but where we had come
in, and a narrow gash in the far side that not one man in a thousand
could ever hit on, except he was put up to it; a wild country for miles
when you did get out--all scrub and rock, that few people ever had call
to ride over. There was splendid grass everywhere, water, and shelter.
It was warmer, too, than the country above, as you could see by the
coats of the cattle and horses.

'If it had only been honestly come by,' Jim said, 'what a jolly place it
would have been!'

Towards the north end of the paddock was a narrow gully with great
sandstone walls all round, and where it narrowed the first discoverers
had built a stockyard, partly with dry stone walls and partly with logs
and rails.

There was no trouble in getting the cattle or horses into this, and
there were all kinds of narrow yards and pens for branding the stock if
they were clearskins, and altering or 'faking' the brands if they were
plain. This led into another yard, which opened into the narrowest part
of the gully. Once in this, like the one they came down, and the cattle
or horses had no chance but to walk slowly up, one behind the other,
till they got on the tableland above. Here, of course, every kind of
work that can be done to help disguise cattle was done. Ear-marks were
cut out and altered in shape, or else the whole ear was cropped off;
every letter in the alphabet was altered by means of straight bars or
half-circles, figures, crosses, everything you could think of.

'Mr. Starlight is an edicated man,' said father. 'This is all his
notion; and many a man has looked at his own beast, with the ears
altered and the brand faked, and never dreamed he ever owned it. He's a
great card is Starlight. It's a pity he ever took to this kind of life.'

Father said this with a kind of real sorrow that made me look at him to
see if the grog had got into his head; just as if his life, mine, and
Jim's didn't matter a straw compared to this man's, whoever he was, that
had had so many better chances than we had and had chucked 'em all away.

But it's a strange thing that I don't think there's any place in the
world where men feel a more real out-and-out respect for a gentleman
than in Australia. Everybody's supposed to be free and equal now; of
course, they couldn't be in the convict days. But somehow a man that's
born and bred a gentleman will always be different from other men to the
end of the world. What's the most surprising part of it is that men like
father, who have hated the breed and suffered by them, too, can't help
having a curious liking and admiration for them. They'll follow them
like dogs, fight for them, shed their blood, and die for them; must be
some sort of a natural feeling. Whatever it is, it's there safe enough,
and nothing can knock it out of nine-tenths of all the men and women you
meet. I began to be uneasy to see this wonderful mate of father's,
who was so many things at once--a cattle-stealer, a bush-ranger, and a
gentleman.




Chapter 6



After we'd fairly settled to stay, father began to be more pleasant than
he'd ever been before. We were pretty likely, he said, to have a visit
from Starlight and the half-caste in a day or two, if we'd like to wait.
He was to meet him at the Hollow on purpose to help him out with the mob
of fat bullocks we had looked at. Father, it appears, was coming here
by himself when he met this outlying lot of Mr. Hunter's cattle, and
thought he and old Crib could bring them in by themselves. And a mighty
good haul it was. Father said we should share the weaners between the
three of us; that meant 50 Pounds a piece at least. The devil always
helps beginners.

We put through a couple of days pleasantly enough, after our hardish bit
of work. Jim found some fish-hooks and a line, and we caught plenty
of mullet and eels in the deep, clear waterholes. We found a couple
of double-barrelled guns, and shot ducks enough to last us a week. No
wonder the old frequenters of the Hollow used to live here for a month
at a time, having great times of it as long as their grog lasted; and
sometimes having the tribe of blacks that inhabited the district to make
merry and carouse with them, like the buccaneers of the Spanish Main
that I've read about, till the plunder was all gone. There were scrawls
on the wall of the first cave we had been in that showed all the
visitors had not been rude, untaught people; and Jim picked up part of
a woman's dress splashed with blood, and in one place, among some
smouldering packages and boxes, a long lock of woman's hair, fair,
bright-brown, that looked as if the name of Terrible Hollow might not
have been given to this lonely, wonderful glen for nothing.

We spent nearly a week in this way, and were beginning to get rather
sick of the life, when father, who used always to be looking at a bare
patch in the scrub above us, said--

'They're coming at last.'

'Who are coming--friends?'

'Why, friends, of course. That's Starlight's signal. See that smoke? The
half-caste always sends that up--like the blacks in his mother's tribe,
I suppose.'

'Any cattle or horses with them?' said Jim.

'No, or they'd send up two smokes. They'll be here about dinner-time, so
we must get ready for them.'

We had plenty of time to get ourselves or anything else ready. In about
four hours we began to look at them through a strong spyglass which
father brought out. By and by we got sight of two men coming along on
horseback on the top of the range the other side of the far wall. They
wasn't particularly easy to see, and every now and then we'd lose sight
of 'em as they got into thick timber or behind rocks.

Father got the spyglass on to 'em at last, pretty clear, and nearly
threw it down with an oath.

'By----!' he says, 'I believe Starlight's hurt somehow. He's so infernal
rash. I can see the half-caste holding him on. If the police are on his
tracks they'll spring the plant here, and the whole thing'll be blown.'

We saw them come to the top of the wall, as it were, then they stopped
for a long while, then all of a sudden they seemed to disappear.

'Let's go over to the other side,' says father; 'they're coming down the
gully now. It's a terrible steep, rough track, worse than the other. If
Starlight's hurt bad he'll never ride down. But he has the pluck of the
devil, sure enough.'

We rode over to the other side, where there was a kind of gully that
came in, something like the one we came in by, but rougher, and full of
gibbers (boulders). There was a path, but it looked as if cattle could
never be driven or forced up it. We found afterwards that they had an
old pack bullock that they'd trained to walk up this, and down, too,
when they wanted him, and the other cattle followed in his track, as
cattle will.

Father showed us a sort of cave by the side of the track, where one man,
with a couple of guns and a pistol or two, could have shot down a small
regiment as they came down one at a time.

We stayed in there by the track, and after about half-an-hour we heard
the two horses coming down slowly, step by step, kicking the stones down
before them. Then we could hear a man groaning, as if he couldn't bear
the pain, and partly as if he was trying to smother it. Then another
man's voice, very soft and soothing like, trying to comfort another.

'My head's a-fire, and these cursed ribs are grinding against one
another every step of this infernal ladder. Is it far now?' How he
groaned then!

'Just got the bottom; hold on a bit longer and you'll be all right.'

Just then the leading horse came out into the open before the cave. We
had a good look at him and his rider. I never forgot them. It was a bad
day I ever saw either, and many a man had cause to say the same.

The horse held up his head and snorted as he came abreast of us, and
we showed out. He was one of the grandest animals I'd ever seen, and
I afterwards found he was better than he looked. He came stepping down
that beastly rocky goat-track, he, a clean thoroughbred that ought never
to have trod upon anything rougher than a rolled training track, or
the sound bush turf. And here he was with a heavy weight on his back--a
half-dead, fainting man, that couldn't hold the reins--and him walking
down as steady as an old mountain bull or a wallaroo on the side of a
creek bank.

I hadn't much time to look him over. I was too much taken up with the
rider, who was lying forward on his chest across a coat rolled round and
strapped in front of the saddle, and his arms round the horse's neck. He
was as pale as a ghost. His eyes--great dark ones they were, too--were
staring out of his head. I thought he was dead, and called out to father
and Jim that he was.

They ran up, and we lifted him off after undoing some straps and a rope.
He was tied on (that was what the half-caste was waiting for at the top
of the gully). When we laid him down his head fell back, and he looked
as much like a corpse as if he had been dead a day.

Then we saw he had been wounded. There was blood on his shirt, and the
upper part of his arm was bandaged.

'It's too late, father,' said I; 'he's a dead man. What pluck he must
have had to ride down there!'

'He's worth two dead 'uns yet,' said father, who had his hand on his
pulse. 'Hold his head up one of you while I go for the brandy. How did
he get hit, Warrigal?'

'That----Sergeant Goring,' said the boy, a slight, active-looking chap,
about sixteen, that looked as if he could jump into a gum tree and back
again, and I believe he could. 'Sergeant Goring, he very near grab us
at Dilligah. We got a lot of old Jobson's cattle when he came on us. He
jump off his horse when he see he couldn't catch us, and very near drop
Starlight. My word, he very nearly fall off--just like that' (here he
imitated a man reeling in his saddle); 'but the old horse stop steady
with him, my word, till he come to. Then the sergeant fire at him again;
hit him in the shoulder with his pistol. Then Starlight come to his
senses, and we clear. My word, he couldn't see the way the old horse
went. Ha, ha!'--here the young devil laughed till the trees and rocks
rang again. 'Gallop different ways, too, and met at the old needle-rock.
But they was miles away then.'

Before the wild boy had come to the end of his story the wounded man had
proved that it was only a dead faint, as the women call it, not the
real thing. And after he had tasted a pannikin full of brandy and water,
which father brought him, he sat up and looked like a living man once
more.

'Better have a look at my shoulder,' he said. 'That----fellow shot like
a prize-winner at Wimbledon. I've had a squeak for it.'

'Puts me in mind of our old poaching rows,' said father, while he
carefully cut the shirt off, that was stiffened with blood and showed
where the bullet had passed through the muscle, narrowly missing
the bone of the joint. We washed it, and relieved the wounded man by
discovering that the other bullet had only been spent, after striking
a tree most like, when it had knocked the wind out of him and nearly
unhorsed him, as Warrigal said.

'Fill my pipe, one of you. Who the devil are these lads? Yours, I
suppose, Marston, or you wouldn't be fool enough to bring them here. Why
didn't you leave them at home with their mother? Don't you think you and
I and this devil's limb enough for this precious trade of ours?'

'They'll take their luck as it comes, like others,' growled father;
'what's good enough for me isn't too bad for them. We want another hand
or two to work things right.'

'Oh! we do, do we?' said the stranger, fixing his eyes on father as if
he was going to burn a hole in him with a burning-glass; 'but if I'd a
brace of fine boys like those of my own I'd hang myself before I'd drag
them into the pit after myself.'

'That's all very fine,' said father, looking very dark and dangerous.
'Is Mr. Starlight going to turn parson? You'll be just in time, for
we'll all be shopped if you run against the police like this, and next
thing to lay them on to the Hollow by making for it when you're too weak
to ride.'

'What would you have me do? Pull up and hold up my hands? There was
nowhere else to go; and that new sergeant rode devilish well, I can tell
you, with a big chestnut well-bred horse, that gave old Rainbow here all
he knew to lose him. Now, once for all, no more of that, Marston,
and mind your own business. I'm the superior officer in this ship's
company--you know that very well--your business is to obey me, and take
second place.'

Father growled out something, but did not offer to deny it. We could see
plainly that the stranger was or had been far above our rank, whatever
were the reasons which had led to his present kind of life.

We stayed for about ten days, while the stranger's arm got well. With
care and rest, it soon healed. He was pleasant enough, too, when the
pain went away. He had been in other countries, and told us all kinds of
stories about them.

He said nothing, though, about his own former ways, and we often
wondered whatever could have made him take to such a life. Unknown to
father, too, he gave us good advice, warned us that what we were in
was the road to imprisonment or death in due course, and not to flatter
ourselves that any other ending was possible.

'I have my own reasons for leading the life I do,' he said, 'and must
run my own course, of which I foresee the end as plainly as if it was
written in a book before me. Your father had a long account to square
with society, and he has a right to settle it his own way. That yellow
whelp was never intended for anything better. But for you lads'--and
here he looked kindly in poor old Jim's honest face (and an honest face
and heart Jim's was, and that I'll live and die on)--'my advice to you
is, to clear off home, when we go, and never come back here again. Tell
your father you won't come; cut loose from him, once and for all. You'd
better drown yourselves comfortably at once than take to this cursed
trade. Now, mind what I tell you, and keep your own counsel.'

By and by, the day came when the horses were run in for father and Mr.
Starlight and Warrigal, who packed up to be off for some other part.

When they were in the yard we had a good look at his own horse--a good
look--and if I'd been a fellow that painted pictures, and that kind of
thing, I could draw a middlin' good likeness of him now.

By George! how fond I am of a good horse--a real well-bred clinker. I'd
never have been here if it hadn't been for that, I do believe; and many
another Currency chap can say the same--a horse or a woman--that's about
the size of it, one or t'other generally fetches us. I shall never put
foot in stirrup again, but I'll try and scratch out a sort of likeness
of Rainbow.

He was a dark bay horse, nearly brown, without a white hair on him. He
wasn't above 15 hands and an inch high, but looked a deal bigger than
he was, for the way he held his head up and carried himself. He was deep
and thick through behind the shoulders, and girthed ever so much more
than you'd think. He had a short back, and his ribs went out like a
cask, long quarter, great thighs and hocks, wonderful legs, and feet of
course to do the work he did. His head was plainish, but clean and bony,
and his eye was big and well opened, with no white showing. His shoulder
was sloped back that much that he couldn't fall, no matter what
happened his fore legs. All his paces were good too. I believe he could
jump--jump anything he was ridden at, and very few horses could get the
better of him for one mile or three.

Where he'd come from, of course, we were not to know then. He had a
small private sort of brand that didn't belong to any of the big studs;
but he was never bred by a poor man. I afterwards found out that he was
stolen before he was foaled, like many another plum, and his dam killed
as soon as she had weaned him. So, of course, no one could swear to him,
and Starlight could have ridden past the Supreme Court, at the assizes,
and never been stopped, as far as this horse was concerned.

Before we went away father and Starlight had some terrible long talks,
and one evening Jim came to me, and says he--

'What do you think they're up to now?'

'How should I know? Sticking up a bank, or boning a flock of maiden ewes
to take up a run with? They seem to be game for anything. There'll be a
hanging match in the family if us boys don't look out.'

'There's no knowing,' says Jim, with a roguish look in his eye (I didn't
think then how near the truth I was), 'but it's about a horse this
time.'

'Oh! a horse; that alters the matter. But what's one horse to make such
a shine about?'

'Ah, that's the point,' says poor old Jim, 'it's a horse worth talking
about. Don't you remember the imported entire that they had his picture
in the papers--him that Mr. Windhall gave 2000 Pounds for?'

'What! the Marquis of Lorne? Why, you don't mean to say they're going
for him?'

'By George, I do!' says Jim; 'and they'll have him here, and twenty
blood mares to put to him, before September.'

'They're all gone mad--they'll raise the country on us. Every police
trooper in the colony'll be after us like a pack of dingoes after an old
man kangaroo when the ground's boggy, and they'll run us down, too; they
can't be off it. Whatever made 'em think of such a big touch as that?'

'That Starlight's the devil, I think,' said Jim slowly. 'Father didn't
seem to like it at first, but he brought him round bit by bit--said he
knew a squatter in Queensland he could pass him on to; that they'd
keep him there for a year and get a crop of foals by him, and when the
“derry” was off he'd take him over himself.'

'But how's he going to nail him? People say Windhall keeps him locked up
at night, and his box is close to his house.'

'Starlight says he has a friend handy; he seems to have one or
two everywhere. It's wonderful, as father told him, where he gets
information.'

'By George! it would be a touch, and no mistake. And if we could get a
few colts by him out of thoroughbred mares we might win half the races
every year on our side and no one a bit the wiser.'

It did seem a grand sort of thing--young fools that we were--to get hold
of this wonderful stallion that we'd heard so much of, as thoroughbred
as Eclipse; good as anything England could turn out. I say again, if
it weren't for the horse-flesh part of it, the fun and hard-riding and
tracking, and all the rest of it, there wouldn't be anything like the
cross-work that there is in Australia. It lies partly between that and
the dry weather. There's the long spells of drought when nothing can be
done by young or old. Sometimes for months you can't work in the garden,
nor plough, nor sow, nor do anything useful to keep the devil out of
your heart. Only sit at home and do nothing, or else go out and watch
the grass witherin' and the water dryin' up, and the stock dyin' by
inches before your eyes. And no change, maybe, for months. The ground
like iron and the sky like brass, as the parson said, and very true,
too, last Sunday.

Then the youngsters, havin' so much idle time on their hands, take to
gaffin' and flash talk; and money must be got to sport and pay up if
they lose; and the stock all ramblin' about and mixed up, and there's a
temptation to collar somebody's calves or foals, like we did that first
red heifer. I shall remember her to my dying day. It seems as if I had
put that brand on my own heart when I jammed it down on her soft skin.
Anyhow, I never forgot it, and there's many another like me, I'll be
bound.

The next morning Jim and I started off home. Father said he should stay
in the Hollow till Starlight got round a bit. He told us not to tell
mother or Ailie a word about where we'd been. Of course they couldn't
be off knowin' that we'd been with him; but we were to stall them off
by saying we'd been helping him with a bit of bush-work or anything we
could think off. 'It'll do no good, and your mother's quite miserable
enough as it is, boys,' he said. 'She'll know time enough, and maybe
break her heart over it, too. Poor Norah!'

Dashed if I ever heard father say a soft thing before. I couldn't 'a
believed it. I always thought he was ironbark outside and in. But he
seemed real sorry for once. And I was near sayin', 'Why don't ye cut the
whole blessed lot, then, and come home and work steady and make us all
comfortable and happy?' But when I looked again his face was all changed
and hard-like. 'Off you go,' he says, with his old voice. 'Next time I
want either of you I'll send Warrigal for you.'

And with that he walked off from the yard where we had been catching our
horses, and never looked nigh us again.

We rode away to the low end of the gully, and then we led the horses
up, foot by foot, and hard work it was--like climbing up the roof of a
house. We were almost done when we got to the tableland at the top.

We made our way to the yard, where there were the tracks of the cows
all round about it, but nothing but the wild horses had ever been there
since.

'What a scrubby hole it is!' said Jim; 'I wonder how in the world they
ever found out the way to the Hollow?'

'Some runaway Government men, I believe, so that half-caste chap told
me, and a gin [*] showed 'em the track down, and where to get water and
everything. They lived on kangaroos at first. Then, by degrees, they
used to crawl out by moonlight and collar a horse or two or a few
cattle. They managed to live there years and years; one died, one was
killed by the blacks; the last man showed it to the chaps that passed
it on to Starlight. Warrigal's mother, or aunt or something, was the gin
that showed it to the first white men.'

     * A black woman.




Chapter 7



It was pretty late that night when we got home, and poor mother and
Aileen were that glad to see us that they didn't ask too many questions.
Mother would sit and look at the pair of us for ever so long without
speaking, and then the tears would come into her eyes and she'd turn
away her head.

The old place looked very snug, clean, and comfortable, too, after all
the camping-out, and it was first-rate to have our own beds again. Then
the milk and fresh butter, and the eggs and bacon--my word! how Jim did
lay in; you'd have thought he was goin' on all night.

'By George! home's a jolly place after all,' he said. 'I am going to
stay ever so long this time, and work like an old near-side poler--see
if I don't. Let's look at your hands, Aileen; my word, you've been doin'
your share.'

'Indeed, has she,' said mother. 'It's a shame, so it is, and her with
two big brothers, too.'

'Poor Ailie,' said Jim, 'she had to take an axe, had she, in her pretty
little hands; but she didn't cut all that wood that's outside the door
and I nearly broke my neck over, I'll go bail.'

'How do you know?' says she, smiling roguish-like. 'All the world might
have been here for what you'd been the wiser--going away nobody knows
where, and coming home at night like--like----'

'Bush-rangers,' says I. 'Say it out; but we haven't turned out yet, if
that's what you mean, Miss Marston.'

'I don't mean anything but what's kind and loving, you naughty boy,'
says she, throwing her arms about my neck; 'but why will you break our
hearts, poor mother's and mine, by going off in such a wild way and
staying away, as if you were doing something that you were ashamed of?'

'Women shouldn't ask questions,' I said roughly. 'You'll know time
enough, and if you never know, perhaps it's all the better.'

Jim was alongside of mother by this time, lying down like a child on the
old native dogskin rug that we tanned ourselves with wattle bark. She
had her hand on his hair--thick and curly it was always from a child.
She didn't say anything, but I could see the tears drip, drip down from
her face; her head was on Jim's shoulder, and by and by he put his arms
round her neck. I went off to bed, I remember, and left them to it.

Next morning Jim and I were up at sunrise and got in the milkers, as we
always did when we were at home. Aileen was up too. She had done all the
dairying lately by herself. There were about a dozen cows to milk, and
she had managed it all herself every day that we were away; put up the
calves every afternoon, drove up the cows in the cold mornings, made
the butter, which she used to salt and put into a keg, and feed the pigs
with the skim milk. It was rather hard work for her, but I never saw her
equal for farm work--rough or smooth. And she used to manage to dress
neat and look pretty all the time; not like some small settlers'
daughters that I have seen, slouching about with a pair of Blucher boots
on, no bonnet, a dirty frock, and a petticoat like a blanket rag--not
bad-looking girls either--and their hair like a dry mop. No, Aileen was
always neat and tidy, with a good pair of thick boots outside and a thin
pair for the house when she'd done her work.

She could frighten a wildish cow and bail up anything that would stay
in a yard with her. She could ride like a bird and drive bullocks on a
pinch in a dray or at plough, chop wood, too, as well as here and there
a one. But when she was in the house and regularly set down to her
sewing she'd look that quiet and steady-going you'd think she was only
fit to teach in a school or sell laces and gloves.

And so she was when she was let work in her own way, but if she was
crossed or put upon, or saw anything going wrong, she'd hold up her
head and talk as straight as any man I ever saw. She'd a look just like
father when he'd made up his mind, only her way was always the right
way. What a difference it makes, doesn't it? And she was so handsome
with it. I've seen a goodish lot of women since I left the old place,
let alone her that's helped to put me where I am, but I don't think
I ever saw a girl that was a patch on Aileen for looks. She had
a wonderful fair skin, and her eyes were large and soft like poor
mother's. When she was a little raised-like you'd see a pink flush come
on her cheeks like a peach blossom in September, and her eyes had a
bright startled look like a doe kangaroo when she jumps up and looks
round. Her teeth were as white and even as a black gin's. The mouth was
something like father's, and when she shut it up we boys always knew
she'd made up her mind, and wasn't going to be turned from it. But her
heart was that good that she was always thinking of others and not of
herself. I believe--I know--she'd have died for any one she loved. She
had more sense than all the rest of us put together. I've often thought
if she'd been the oldest boy instead of me she'd have kept Jim straight,
and managed to drive father out of his cross ways--that is, if any one
living could have done it. As for riding, I have never seen any one that
could sit a horse or handle him through rough, thick country like her.
She could ride barebacked, or next to it, sitting sideways on nothing
but a gunny-bag, and send a young horse flying through scrub and rocks,
or down ranges where you'd think a horse could hardly keep his feet. We
could all ride a bit out of the common, if it comes to that. Better if
we'd learned nothing but how to walk behind a plough, year in year out,
like some of the folks in father's village in England, as he used to
tell us about when he was in a good humour. But that's all as people are
reared, I suppose. We'd been used to the outside of a horse ever since
we could walk almost, and it came natural to us. Anyhow, I think Aileen
was about the best of the lot of us at that, as in everything else.

Well, for a bit all went on pretty well at home. Jim and I worked away
steady, got in a tidy bit of crop, and did everything that lay in our
way right and regular. We milked the cows in the morning, and brought in
a big stack of firewood and chopped as much as would last for a month
or two. We mended up the paddock fence, and tidied the garden. The old
place hadn't looked so smart for many a day.

When we came in at night old mother used to look that pleased and happy
we couldn't help feeling better in our hearts. Aileen used to read
something out of the paper that she thought might amuse us. I could read
pretty fair, and so could Jim; but we were both lazy at it, and after
working pretty hard all day didn't so much care about spelling out the
long words in the farming news or the stories they put in. All the same,
it would have paid us better if we'd read a little more and put the
'bullocking' on one side, at odd times. A man can learn as much out of
a book or a paper sometimes in an hour as will save his work for a week,
or put him up to working to better purpose. I can see that now--too
late, and more's the pity.

Anyhow, Aileen could read pretty near as fast as any one I ever saw, and
she used to reel it out for us, as we sat smoking over the fire, in a
way that kept us jolly and laughing till it was nearly turning-in time.
Now and then George Storefield would come and stay an hour or two.
He could read well; nearly as well as she could. Then he had always
something to show her that she'd been asking about. His place was eight
miles off, but he'd always get his horse and go home, whatever the night
was like.

'I must be at my work in the morning,' he'd say; 'it's more than half
a day gone if you lose that, and I've no half-days to spare, or
quarter-days either.'

    .   .   .   .   .

So we all got on first-rate, and anybody would have thought that there
wasn't a more steady-going, hard-working, happy family in the colony. No
more there wasn't, while it lasted. After all, what is there that's half
as good as being all right and square, working hard for the food you
eat, and the sleep you enjoy, able to look all the world in the face,
and afraid of nothing and nobody!

We were so quiet and comfortable till the winter was over and the spring
coming on, till about September, that I almost began to believe we'd
never done anything in our lives we could be made to suffer for.

Now and then, of course, I used to wake up in the night, and my thoughts
would go back to 'Terrible Hollow', that wonderful place; and one night
with the unbranded cattle, and Starlight, with the blood dripping on
to his horse's shoulder, and the half-caste, with his hawk's eye
and glittering teeth--father, with his gloomy face and dark words. I
wondered whether it was all a dream; whether I and Jim had been in at
all; whether any of the 'cross-work' had been found out; and, if so,
what would be done to me and Jim; most of all, though, whether father
and Starlight were away after some 'big touch'; and, if so, where and
what it was, and how soon we should hear of it.

As for Jim, he was one of those happy-go-lucky fellows that didn't
bother himself about anything he didn't see or run against. I don't
think it ever troubled him. It was the only bad thing he'd ever been
in. He'd been drawn in against his will, and I think he had made up his
mind--pretty nearly--not to go in for any more.

I have often seen Aileen talking to him, and they'd walk along in the
evening when the work was done--he with his arm round her waist, and she
looking at him with that quiet, pleased face of hers, seeming so proud
and fond of him, as if he'd been the little chap she used to lead
about and put on the old pony, and bring into the calf-pen when she was
milking. I remember he had a fight with a little bull-calf, about a week
old, that came in with a wild heifer, and Aileen made as much of his
pluck as if it had been a mallee scrubber. The calf baaed and butted
at Jim, as even the youngest of them will, if they've the wild blood
in 'em, and nearly upset him; he was only a bit of a toddler. But Jim
picked up a loose leg of a milking-stool, and the two went at it hammer
and tongs. I could hardly stand for laughing, till the calf gave him
best and walked.

Aileen pulled him out, and carried him in to mother, telling her that he
was the bravest little chap in the world; and I remember I got scolded
for not going to help him. How these little things come back!

'I'm beginning to be afraid,' says George, one evening, 'that it's going
to be a dry season.'

'There's plenty of time yet,' says Jim, who always took the bright side
of things; 'it might rain towards the end of the month.'

'I was thinking the same thing,' I said. 'We haven't had any rain
to speak of for a couple of months, and that bit of wheat of ours is
beginning to go back. The oats look better.'

'Now I think of it,' put in Jim, 'Dick Dawson came in from outside, and
he said things are shocking bad; all the frontage bare already, and the
water drying up.'

'It's always the way,' I said, bitter-like. 'As soon as a poor man's
got a chance of a decent crop, the season turns against him or prices go
down, so that he never gets a chance.'

'It's as bad for the rich man, isn't it?' said George. 'It's God's will,
and we can't make or mend things by complaining.'

'I don't know so much about that,' I said sullenly. 'But it's not as
bad for the rich man. Even if the squatters suffer by a drought and lose
their stock, they've more stock and money in the bank, or else credit to
fall back on; while the like of us lose all we have in the world, and no
one would lend us a pound afterwards to save our lives.'

'It's not quite so bad as that,' said George. 'I shall lose my year's
work unless rain comes, and most of the cattle and horses besides; but
I shall be able to get a few pounds to go on with, however the season
goes.'

'Oh! if you like to bow and scrape to rich people, well and good,' I
said; 'but that's not my way. We have as good a right to our share of
the land and some other good things as they have, and why should we be
done out of it?'

'If we pay for the land as they do, certainly,' said George.

'But why should we pay? God Almighty, I suppose, made the land and the
people too, one to live on the other. Why should we pay for what is our
own? I believe in getting my share somehow.'

'That's a sort of argument that doesn't come out right,' said George.
'How would you like another man to come and want to halve the farm with
you?'

'I shouldn't mind; I should go halves with some one else who had a
bigger one,' I said. 'More money too, more horses, more sheep, a bigger
house! Why should he have it and not me?'

'That's a lazy man's argument, and--well, not an honest man's,' said
George, getting up and putting on his cabbage-tree. 'I can't sit and
hear you talk such rot. Nobody can work better than you and Jim, when
you like. I wonder you don't leave such talk to fellows like Frowser,
that's always spouting at the Shearers' Arms.'

'Nonsense or not, if a dry season comes and knocks all our work over, I
shall help myself to some one's stuff that has more than he knows what
to do with.'

'Why can't we all go shearing, and make as much as will keep us for six
months?' said George. 'I don't know what we'd do without the squatters.'

'Nor I either; more ways than one; but Jim and I are going shearing next
week. So perhaps there won't be any need for “duffing” after all.'

'Oh, Dick!' said Aileen, 'I can't bear to hear you make a joke of that
kind of thing. Don't we all know what it leads to! Wouldn't it be better
to live on dry bread and be honest than to be full of money and never
know the day when you'd be dragged to gaol?'

'I've heard all that before; but ain't there lots of people that have
made their money by all sorts of villainy, that look as well as the
best, and never see a gaol?'

'They're always caught some day,' says poor Aileen, sobbing, 'and what a
dreadful life of anxiety they must lead!'

'Not at all,' I said. 'Look at Lucksly, Squeezer, and Frying-pan Jack.
Everybody knows how they got their stock and their money. See how they
live. They've got stations, and public-house and town property, and they
get richer every year. I don't think it pays to be too honest in a dry
country.'

'You're a naughty boy, Dick; isn't he, Jim?' she said, smiling through
her tears. 'But he doesn't mean half what he says, does he?'

'Not he,' says Jim; 'and very likely we'll have lots of rain after all.'




Chapter 8



The 'big squatter', as he was called on our side of the country, was Mr.
Falkland. He was an Englishman that had come young to the colony, and
worked his way up by degrees. He had had no money when he first came,
people said; indeed, he often said so himself. He was not proud, at any
rate in that way, for he was not above telling a young fellow that he
should never be downhearted because he hadn't a coat to his back or a
shilling in his pocket, because he, Herbert Falkland, had known what
it was to be without either. 'This was the best country in the whole
world,' he used to say, 'for a gentleman who was poor or a working man.'
The first sort could always make an independence if they were moderately
strong, liked work, and did not drink. There were very few countries
where idle, unsteady people got rich. 'As for the poor man, he was the
real rich man in Australia; high wages, cheap food, lodging, clothing,
travelling. What more did he want? He could save money, live happily,
and die rich, if he wasn't a fool or a rogue. Unfortunately, these last
were highly popular professions; and many people, high and low, belonged
to them here--and everywhere else.'

We were all well up in this kind of talk, because for the last two or
three years, since we had begun to shear pretty well, we had always
shorn at his shed. He was one of those gentlemen--and he was a
gentleman, if ever there was one--that takes a deal of notice of his
working hands, particularly if they were young. Jim he took a great
fancy to the first moment he saw him. He didn't care so much about me.

'You're a sulky young dog, Richard Marston,' he used to say. 'I'm not
sure that you'll come to any good; and though I don't like to say all
I hear about your father before you, I'm afraid he doesn't teach you
anything worth knowing. But Jim there's a grand fellow; if he'd been
caught young and weaned from all of your lot, he'd have been an honour
to the land he was born in. He's too good for you all.'

'Every one of you gentlemen wants to be a small God Almighty,' I said
impudently. 'You'd like to break us all in and put us in yokes and bows,
like a lot of working bullocks.'

'You mistake me, my boy, and all the rest of us who are worth calling
men, let alone gentlemen. We are your best friends, and would help you
in every way if you'd only let us.'

'I don't see so much of that.'

'Because you often fight against your own good. We should like to see
you all have farms of your own--to be all well taught and able to make
the best of your lives--not driven to drink, as many of you are, because
you have no notion of any rational amusement, and anything between hard
work and idle dissipation.'

'And suppose you had all this power,' I said--for if I was afraid of
father there wasn't another man living that could overcrow me--'don't
you think you'd know the way to keep all the good things for yourselves?
Hasn't it always been so?'

'I see your argument,' he said, quite quiet and reasonable, just as if I
had been a swell like himself--that was why he was unlike any other man
I ever knew--'and it is a perfectly fair way of putting it. But your
class might, I think, always rely upon there being enough kindness and
wisdom in ours to prevent that state of things. Unfortunately, neither
side trusts the other enough. And now the bell is going to ring, I
think.'

Jim and I stopped at Boree shed till all the sheep were cut out. It pays
well if the weather is pretty fair, and it isn't bad fun when there's
twenty or thirty chaps of the right sort in the shearers' hut; there's
always some fun going on. Shearers work pretty hard, and as they buy
their own rations generally, they can afford to live well. After a hard
day's shearing--that is, from five o'clock in the morning to seven at
night, going best pace all the time, every man working as hard as if he
was at it for his life--one would think a man would be too tired to do
anything. But we were mostly strong and hearty, and at that age a man
takes a deal of killing; so we used to have a little card-playing at
night to pass away the time.

Very few of the fellows had any money to spend. They couldn't get any
either until shearing was over and they were paid off; but they'd get
some one who could write to scribble a lot of I O U's, and they did as
well.

We used to play 'all-fours' and 'loo', and now and then an American
game which some of the fellows had picked up. It was strange how soon we
managed to get into big stakes. I won at first, and then Jim and I began
to lose, and had such a lot of I O U's out that I was afraid we'd have
no money to take home after shearing. Then I began to think what a fool
I'd been to play myself and drag Jim into it, for he didn't want to play
at first.

One day I got a couple of letters from home--one from Aileen and another
in a strange hand. It had come to our little post-office, and Aileen had
sent it on to Boree.

When I opened it there were a few lines, with father's name at the
bottom. He couldn't write, so I made sure that Starlight had written
it for him. He was quite well, it said; and to look out for him about
Christmas time; he might come home then, or send for us; to stop at
Boree if we could get work, and keep a couple of horses in good trim, as
he might want us. A couple of five-pound notes fell out of the letter as
I opened it.

When I looked at them first I felt a kind of fear. I knew what they came
from. And I had a sort of feeling that we should be better without them.
However, the devil was too strong for me. Money's a tempting thing,
whether it's notes or gold, especially when a man's in debt. I had begun
to think the fellows looked a little cool on us the last three or four
nights, as our losses were growing big.

So I gave Jim his share; and after tea, when we sat down again, there
weren't more than a dozen of us that were in the card racket. I flung
down my note, and Jim did his, and told them that we owed to take the
change out of that and hand us over their paper for the balance.

They all stared, for such a thing hadn't been seen since the shearing
began. Shearers, as a rule, come from their homes in the settled
districts very bare. They are not very well supplied with clothes; their
horses are poor and done up; and they very seldom have a note in their
pockets, unless they have managed to sell a spare horse on the journey.

So we were great men for the time, looked at by the others with wonder
and respect. We were fools enough to be pleased with it. Strangely, too,
our luck turned from that minute, and it ended in our winning not only
our own back, but more than as much more from the other men.

I don't think Mr. Falkland liked these goings on. He wouldn't have
allowed cards at all if he could have helped it. He was a man that hated
what was wrong, and didn't value his own interest a pin when it came in
the way. However, the shearing hut was our own, in a manner of speaking,
and as long as we shore clean and kept the shed going the overseer, Mr.
M'Intyre, didn't trouble his head much about our doings in the hut.
He was anxious to get done with the shearing, to get the wool into
the bales before the dust came in, and the grass seed ripened, and the
clover burrs began to fall.

'Why should ye fash yoursel',' I heard him say once to Mr. Falkland,
'aboot these young deevils like the Marstons? They're as good's ready
money in auld Nick's purse. It's bred and born and welded in them. Ye'll
just have the burrs and seeds amang the wool if ye keep losing a smart
shearer for the sake o' a wheen cards and dice; and ye'll mak' nae heed
of convairtin' thae young caterans ony mair than ye'll change a Norroway
falcon into a barn-door chuckie.'

I wonder if what he said was true--if we couldn't help it; if it was in
our blood? It seems like it; and yet it's hard lines to think a fellow
must grow up and get on the cross in spite of himself, and come to the
gallows-foot at last, whether he likes it or not. The parson here isn't
bad at all. He's a man and a gentleman, too; and he's talked and read
to me by the hour. I suppose some of us chaps are like the poor stupid
tribes that the Israelites found in Canaan, only meant to live for a bit
and then to be rubbed out to make room for better people.

When the shearing was nearly over we had a Saturday afternoon to
ourselves. We had finished all the sheep that were in the shed, and old
M'Intyre didn't like to begin a fresh flock. So we got on our horses and
took a ride into the township just for the fun of the thing, and for
a little change. The horses had got quite fresh with the rest and
the spring grass. Their coats were shining, and they all looked very
different from what they did when we first came. Our two were not so
poor when they came, so they looked the best of the lot, and jumped
about in style when we mounted. Ah! only to think of a good horse.

All the men washed themselves and put on clean clothes. Then we had our
dinner and about a dozen of us started off for the town.

Poor old Jim, how well he looked that day! I don't think you could pick
a young fellow anywhere in the countryside that was a patch on him for
good looks and manliness, somewhere about six foot or a little over, as
straight as a rush, with a bright blue eye that was always laughing and
twinkling, and curly dark brown hair. No wonder all the girls used to
think so much of him. He could do anything and everything that a man
could do. He was as strong as a young bull, and as active as a rock
wallaby--and ride! Well, he sat on his horse as if he was born on one.
With his broad shoulders and upright easy seat he was a regular picture
on a good horse.

And he had a good one under him to-day; a big, brown, resolute,
well-bred horse he had got in a swap because the man that had him was
afraid of him. Now that he had got a little flesh on his bones he looked
something quite out of the common. 'A deal too good for a poor man, and
him honest,' as old M'Intyre said.

But Jim turned on him pretty sharp, and said he had got the horse in a
fair deal, and had as much right to a good mount as any one else--super
or squatter, he didn't care who he was.

And Mr. Falkland took Jim's part, and rather made Mr. M'Intyre out in
the wrong for saying what he did. The old man didn't say much more, only
shook his head, saying--

'Ah, ye're a grand laddie, and buirdly, and no that thrawn, either--like
ye, Dick, ye born deevil,' looking at me. 'But I misdoot sair ye'll die
wi' your boots on. There's a smack o' Johnnie Armstrong in the glint o'
yer e'e. Ye'll be to dree yer weird, there's nae help for't.'

'What's all that lingo, Mr. M'Intyre?' called out Jim, all good-natured
again. 'Is it French or Queensland blacks' yabber? Blest if I understand
a word of it. But I didn't want to be nasty, only I am regular shook on
this old moke, I believe, and he's as square as Mr. Falkland's dogcart
horse.'

'Maybe ye bocht him fair eneugh. I'll no deny you. I saw the receipt
mysel'. But where did yon lang-leggit, long-lockit, Fish River
moss-trooping callant win haud o' him? Answer me that, Jeems.'

'That says nothing,' answered Jim. 'I'm not supposed to trace back every
horse in the country and find out all the people that owned him since he
was a foal. He's mine now, and mine he'll be till I get a better one.'

'A contuma-acious and stiff-necked generation,' said the old man,
walking off and shaking his head. 'And yet he's a fine laddie; a gra-and
laddie wad he be with good guidance. It's the Lord's doing, nae doot,
and we daurna fault it; it's wondrous in our een.'

That was the way old Mac always talked. Droll lingo, wasn't it?




Chapter 9



Well, away we went to this township. Bundah was the name of it; not that
there was anything to do or see when we got there. It was the regular
up-country village, with a public-house, a store, a pound, and a
blacksmith's shop. However, a public-house is not such a bad place--at
any rate it's better than nothing when a fellow's young and red-hot for
anything like a bit of fun, or even a change. Some people can work away
day after day, and year after year, like a bullock in a team or a horse
in a chaff-cutting machine. It's all the better for them if they can,
though I suppose they never enjoy themselves except in a cold-blooded
sort of way. But there's other men that can't do that sort of thing, and
it's no use talking. They must have life and liberty and a free range.
There's some birds, and animals too, that either pine in a cage or kill
themselves, and I suppose it's the same way with some men. They can't
stand the cage of what's called honest labour, which means working
for some one else for twenty or thirty years, never having a day to
yourself, or doing anything you like, and saving up a trifle for your
old age when you can't enjoy it. I don't wonder youngsters break traces
and gallop off like a colt out of a team.

Besides, sometimes there's a good-looking girl even at a bush public,
the daughter or the barmaid, and it's odd, now, what a difference that
makes. There's a few glasses of grog going, a little noisy, rattling
talk, a few smiles and a saucy answer or two from the girl, a look at
the last newspaper, or a bit of the town news from the landlord; he's
always time to read. Hang him--I mean confound him--for he's generally a
sly old spider who sucks us fellows pretty dry, and then don't care what
becomes of us. Well, it don't amount to much, but it's life--the only
taste of it that chaps like us are likely to get. And people may talk as
much as they like; boys, and men too, will like it, and take to it, and
hanker after it, as long as the world lasts. There's danger in it, and
misery, and death often enough comes of it, but what of that? If a man
wants a swim on the seashore he won't stand all day on the beach because
he may be drowned or snapped up by a shark, or knocked against a rock,
or tired out and drawn under by the surf. No, if he's a man he'll jump
in and enjoy himself all the more because the waves are high and the
waters deep. So it was very good fun to us, simple as it might sound
to some people. It was pleasant to be bowling along over the firm green
turf, along the plain, through the forest, gully, and over the creek.
Our horses were fresh, and we had a scurry or two, of course; but there
wasn't one that could hold a candle to Jim's brown horse. He was a
long-striding, smooth goer, but he got over the ground in wonderful
style. He could jump, too, for Jim put him over a big log fence or two,
and he sailed over them like a forester buck over the head of a fallen
wattle.

Well, we'd had our lark at the Bundah Royal Hotel, and were coming home
to tea at the station, all in good spirits, but sober enough, when, just
as we were crossing one of the roads that came through the run--over the
'Pretty Plain', as they called it--we heard a horse coming along best
pace. When we looked who should it be but Miss Falkland, the owner's
only daughter.

She was an only child, and the very apple of her father's eye, you may
be sure. The shearers mostly knew her by sight, because she had taken
a fancy to come down with her father a couple of times to see the shed
when we were all in full work.

A shed's not exactly the best place for a young lady to come into.
Shearers are rough in their language now and then. But every man
liked and respected Mr. Falkland, so we all put ourselves on our best
behaviour, and the two or three flash fellows who had no sense or
decent feeling were warned that if they broke out at all they would get
something to remember it by.

But when we saw that beautiful, delicate-looking creature stepping down
the boards between the two rows of shearers, most of them stripped to
their jerseys and working like steam-engines, looking curiously and
pitifully at the tired men and the patient sheep, with her great, soft,
dark eyes and fair white face like a lily, we began to think we'd heard
of angels from heaven, but never seen one before.

Just as she came opposite Jim, who was trying to shear sheep and sheep
with the 'ringer' of the shed, who was next on our right, the wether he
was holding kicked, and knocking the shears out of his hand, sent them
point down against his wrist. One of the points went right in, and
though it didn't cut the sinews, as luck would have it, the point stuck
out at the other side; out spurted the blood, and Jim was just going to
let out when he looked up and saw Miss Falkland looking at him, with her
beautiful eyes so full of pity and surprise that he could have had his
hand chopped off, so he told me afterwards, rather than vex her for a
moment. So he shut up his mouth and ground his teeth together, for it
was no joke in the way of pain, and the blood began to run like a blind
creek after a thunderstorm.

'Oh! poor fellow. What a dreadful cut! Look, papa!' she cried out.
'Hadn't something better be bound round it? How it bleeds! Does it pain
much?'

'Not a bit, miss!' said Jim, standing up like a schoolboy going to say
his lesson. 'That is, it doesn't matter if it don't stop my shearing.'

'Tar!' sings out my next-door neighbour. 'Here, boy; tar wanted for No.
36. That'll put it all right, Jim; it's only a scratch.'

'You mind your shearing, my man,' said Mr. Falkland quietly. 'I don't
know whether Mr. M'Intyre will quite approve of that last sheep of
yours. This is rather a serious wound. The best thing is to bind it up
at once.'

Before any one could say another word Miss Falkland had whipped out her
soft fine cambric handkerchief and torn it in two.

'Hold up your hand,' she said. 'Now, papa, lend me yours.' With the
last she cleared the wound of the flowing blood, and then neatly and
skilfully bound up the wrist firmly with the strips of cambric. This she
further protected by her father's handkerchief, which she helped herself
to and finally stopped the blood with.

Jim kept looking at her small white hands all the time she was doing
it. Neither of us had ever seen such before--the dainty skin, the pink
nails, the glittering rings.

'There,' she said, 'I don't think you ought to shear any more to-day;
it might bring on inflammation. I'll send to know how it gets on
to-morrow.'

'No, miss; my grateful thanks, miss,' said Jim, opening his eyes and
looking as if he'd like to drop down on his knees and pray to her. 'I
shall never forget your goodness, Miss Falkland, if I live till I'm a
hundred.' Then Jim bent his head a bit--I don't suppose he ever made
a bow in his life before--and then drew himself up as straight as a
soldier, and Miss Falkland made a kind of bow and smile to us all and
passed out.

Jim did shear all the same that afternoon, though the tally wasn't any
great things. 'I can't go and lie down in a bunk in the men's hut,' he
said; 'I must chance it,' and he did. Next day it was worse and very
painful, but Jim stuck to the shears, though he used to turn white with
the pain at times, and I thought he'd faint. However, it gradually got
better, and, except a scar, Jim's hand was as good as ever.

Jim sent back Mr. Falkland's handkerchief after getting the cook to wash
it and iron it out with a bit of a broken axletree; but the strips of
white handkerchief--one had C. F. in the corner--he put away in his
swag, and made some foolish excuse when I laughed at him about it.

She sent down a boy from the house next day to ask how Jim's hand was,
and the day after that, but she never came to the shed any more. So we
didn't see her again.

So it was this young lady that we saw coming tearing down the back road,
as they called it, that led over the Pretty Plain. A good way behind we
saw Mr. Falkland, but he had as much chance of coming up with her as a
cattle dog of catching a 'brush flyer'.

The stable boy, Billy Donnellan, had told us (of course, like all those
sort of youngsters, he was fond of getting among the men and listening
to them talk) all about Miss Falkland's new mare.

She was a great beauty and thoroughbred. The stud groom had bought
her out of a travelling mob from New England when she was dog-poor and
hardly able to drag herself along. Everybody thought she was going to be
the best lady's horse in the district; but though she was as quiet as
a lamb at first she had begun to show a nasty temper lately, and to get
very touchy. 'I don't care about chestnuts myself,' says Master Billy,
smoking a short pipe as if he was thirty; 'they've a deal of temper, and
she's got too much white in her eye for my money. I'm afeard she'll do
some mischief afore we've done with her; and Miss Falkland's that game
as she won't have nothing done to her. I'd ride the tail off her but
what I'd bring her to, if I had my way.'

So this was the brute that had got away with Miss Falkland, the day
we were coming back from Bundah. Some horses, and a good many men and
women, are all pretty right as long as they're well kept under and
starved a bit at odd times. But give them an easy life and four feeds of
corn a day, and they're troublesome brutes, and mischievous too.

It seems this mare came of a strain that had turned out more devils and
killed more grooms and breakers than any other in the country. She was
a Troubadour, it seems; there never was a Troubadour yet that wouldn't
buck and bolt, and smash himself and his rider, if he got a fright, or
his temper was roused. Men and women, horses and dogs, are very much
alike. I know which can talk best. As to the rest, I don't know whether
there's so much for us to be proud of.

It seems that this cranky wretch of a mare had been sideling and
fidgeting when Mr. Falkland and his daughter started for their ride; but
had gone pretty fairly--Miss Falkland, like my sister Aileen, could ride
anything in reason--when suddenly a dead limb dropped off a tree close
to the side of the road.

I believe she made one wild plunge, and set to; she propped and reared,
but Miss Falkland sat her splendidly and got her head up. When she saw
she could do nothing that way, she stretched out her head and went off
as hard as she could lay legs to the ground.

She had one of those mouths that are not so bad when horses are going
easy, but get quite callous when they are over-eager and excited.
Anyhow, it was like trying to stop a mail-coach going down Mount
Victoria with the brake off.

So what we saw was the wretch of a mare coming along as if the devil was
after her, and heading straight across the plain at its narrowest part;
it wasn't more than half-a-mile wide there, in fact, it was more like a
flat than a plain. The people about Boree didn't see much open country,
so they made a lot out of what they had.

The mare, like some women when they get their monkey up, was clean out
of her senses, and I don't believe anything could have held her under a
hide rope with a turn round a stockyard post. This was what she wanted,
and if it had broken her infernal neck so much the better.

Miss Falkland was sitting straight and square, with her hands down,
leaning a bit back, and doing her level best to stop the brute. Her hat
was off and her hair had fallen down and hung down her back--plenty of
it there was, too. The mare's neck was stretched straight out; her mouth
was like a deal board, I expect, by that time.

We didn't sit staring at her all the time, you bet. We could see the boy
ever so far off. We gathered up our reins and went after her, not in a
hurry, but just collecting ourselves a bit to see what would be the best
way to wheel the brute and stop her.

Jim's horse was far and away the fastest, and he let out to head the
mare off from a creek that was just in front and at the end of the
plain.

'By George!' said one of the men--a young fellow who lived near the
place--'the mare's turning off her course, and she's heading straight
for the Trooper's Downfall, where the policeman was killed. If she goes
over that, they'll be smashed up like a matchbox, horse and rider.'

'What's that?' I said, closing up alongside of him. We were all doing
our best, and were just in the line to back up Jim, who looked as if he
was overhauling the mare fast.

'Why, it's a bluff a hundred feet deep--a straight drop--and rocks at
the bottom. She's making as straight as a bee-line for it now, blast
her!'

'And Jim don't know it,' I said; 'he's closing up to her, but he doesn't
calculate to do it for a quarter of a mile more; he's letting her take
it out of herself.'

'He'll never catch her in time,' said the young chap. 'My God! it's an
awful thing, isn't it? and a fine young lady like her--so kind to us
chaps as she was.'

'I'll see if I can make Jim hear,' I said, for though I looked cool
I was as nearly mad as I could be to think of such a girl being lost
before our eyes. 'No, I can't do that, but I'll TELEGRAPH.'




Chapter 10



Now Jim and I had had many a long talk together about what we should do
in case we wanted to signal to each other very pressing. We thought the
time might come some day when we might be near enough to sign, but not
to speak. So we hit upon one or two things a little out of the common.

The first idea was, in case of one wanting to give the other the office
that he was to look out his very brightest for danger, and not to trust
to what appeared to be the state of affairs, the sign was to hold up
your hat or cap straight over your head. If the danger threatened on the
left, to shift to that side. If it was very pressing and on the jump, as
it were, quite unexpected, and as bad as bad could be, the signalman was
to get up on the saddle with his knees and turn half round.

We could do this easy enough and a lot of circus tricks besides. How
had we learned them? Why, in the long days we had spent in the saddle
tailing the milkers and searching after lost horses for many a night.

As luck would have it Jim looked round to see how we were getting on,
and up went my cap. I could see him turn his head and keep watching
me when I put on the whole box and dice of the telegraph business. He
'dropped', I could see. He took up the brown horse, and made such a rush
to collar the mare that showed he intended to see for himself what the
danger was. The cross-grained jade! She was a well-bred wretch, and be
hanged to her! Went as if she wanted to win the Derby and gave Jim all
he knew to challenge her. We could see a line of timber just ahead of
her, and that Jim was riding for his life.

'By----! they'll both be over it,' said the young shearer. 'They can't
stop themselves at that pace, and they must be close up now.'

'He's neck and neck,' I said. 'Stick to her, Jim, old man!'

We were all close together now. Several of the men knew the place, and
the word had been passed round.

No one spoke for a few seconds. We saw the two horses rush up at top
speed to the very edge of the timber.

'By Jove! they're over. No! he's reaching for her rein. It's no use.
Now--now! She's saved! Oh, my God! they're both right. By the Lord, well
done! Hurrah! One cheer more for Jim Marston!'

    .   .   .   .   .

It was all right. We saw Jim suddenly reach over as the horses were
going stride and stride; saw him lift Miss Falkland from her saddle as
if she had been a child and place her before him; saw the brown horse
prop, and swing round on his haunches in a way that showed he had
not been called the crack 'cutting-out' horse on a big cattle run for
nothing. We saw Jim jump to the ground and lift the young lady down. We
saw only one horse.

Three minutes after Mr. Falkland overtook us, and we rode up together.
His face was white, and his dry lips couldn't find words at first. But
he managed to say to Jim, when we got up--

'You have saved my child's life, James Marston, and if I forget the
service may God in that hour forget me. You are a noble fellow. You must
allow me to show my gratitude in some way.'

'You needn't thank me so out and out as all that, Mr. Falkland,' said
Jim, standing up very straight and looking at the father first, and then
at Miss Falkland, who was pale and trembling, not altogether from fear,
but excitement, and trying to choke back the sobs that would come out
now and then. 'I'd risk life and limb any day before Miss Falkland's
finger should be scratched, let alone see her killed before my eyes. I
wonder if there's anything left of the mare, poor thing; not that she
don't deserve it all, and more.'

Here we all walked forward to the deep creek bank. A yard or two farther
and the brown horse and his burden must have gone over the terrible
drop, as straight as a plumb-line, on to the awful rocks below. We could
see where the brown had torn up the turf as he struck all four hoofs
deep into it at once. Indeed, he had been newly shod, a freak of Jim's
about a bet with a travelling blacksmith. Then the other tracks, the
long score on the brink--over the brink--where the frightened, maddened
animal had made an attempt to alter her speed, all in vain, and had
plunged over the bank and the hundred feet of fall.

We peered over, and saw a bright-coloured mass among the rocks
below--very still. Just at the time one of the ration-carriers came by
with a spring cart. Mr. Falkland lifted his daughter in and took the
reins, leaving his horse to be ridden home by the ration-carrier. As for
us we rode back to the shearers' hut, not quite so fast as we came, with
Jim in the middle. He did not seem inclined to talk much.

'It's lucky I turned round when I did, Dick,' he said at last, 'and saw
you making the “danger-look-out-sharp” signal. I couldn't think what the
dickens it was. I was so cocksure of catching the mare in half-a-mile
farther that I couldn't help wondering what it was all about. Anyhow,
I knew we agreed it was never to be worked for nothing, so thought the
best thing I could do was to call in the mare, and see if I could
find out anything then. When I got alongside, I could see that Miss
Falkland's face was that white that something must be up. It weren't the
mare she was afraid of. She was coming back to her. It took something to
frighten her, I knew. So it must be something I did not know, or didn't
see.

'“What is it, Miss Falkland?” I said.

'“Oh!” she cried out, “don't you know? Another fifty yards and we'll be
over the downfall where the trooper was killed. Oh, my poor father!”

'“Don't be afraid,” I said. “We'll not go over if I can help it.”

'So I reached over and got hold of the reins. I pulled and jerked.
She said her hands were cramped, and no wonder. Pulling double for a
four-mile heat is no joke, even if a man's in training. Fancy a woman,
a young girl, having to sit still and drag at a runaway horse all the
time. I couldn't stop the brute; she was boring like a wild bull. So
just as we came pretty close I lifted Miss Falkland off the saddle and
yelled at old Brownie as if I had been on a cattle camp, swinging round
to the near side at the same time. Round he came like one o'clock. I
could see the mare make one prop to stop herself, and then go flying
right through the air, till I heard a beastly “thud” at the bottom.

'Miss Falkland didn't faint, though she turned white and then red, and
trembled like a leaf when I lifted her down, and looked up at me with a
sweet smile, and said--

'“Jim, you have paid me for binding up your wrist, haven't you? You have
saved me from a horrible death, and I shall think of you as a brave and
noble fellow all the days of my life.”

'What could I say?' said Jim. 'I stared at her like a fool. “I'd have
gone over the bank with you, Miss Falkland,” I said, “if I could not
have saved you.”

'“Well, I'm afraid some of my admirers would have stopped short of that,
James,” she said. She did indeed. And then Mr. Falkland and all of you
came up.'

'I say, Jim,' said one of the young fellows, 'your fortune's made. Mr.
Falkland 'll stand a farm, you may be sure, for this little fakement.'

'And I say, Jack,' says old Jim, very quiet like, 'I've told you all the
yarn, and if there's any chaff about it after this the cove will have to
see whether he's best man or me; so don't make any mistake now.'

There was no more chaff. They weren't afraid. There were two or three
of them pretty smart with their hands, and not likely to take much from
anybody. But Jim was a heavy weight and could hit like a horse kicking;
so they thought it wasn't good enough, and left him alone.

Next day Mr. Falkland came down and wanted to give Jim a cheque for a
hundred; but he wouldn't hear of so much as a note. Then he said he'd
give him a billet on the run--make him under overseer; after a bit buy
a farm for him and stock it. No! Jim wouldn't touch nothing or take a
billet on the place. He wouldn't leave his family, he said. And as for
taking money or anything else for saving Miss Falkland's life, it was
ridiculous to think of it. There wasn't a man of the lot in the shed,
down to the tarboy, that wouldn't have done the same, or tried to. All
that was in it was that his horse was the fastest.

'It's not a bad thing for a poor man to have a fast horse now and then,
is it, Mr. Falkland?' he said, looking up and smiling, just like a boy.
He was very shy, was poor Jim.

'I don't grudge a poor man a good horse or anything else he likes to
have or enjoy. You know that, all of you. It's the fear I have of the
effect of the dishonest way that horses of value are come by, and the
net of roguery that often entangles fine young fellows like you and your
brother; that's what I fear,' said Mr. Falkland, looking at the pair of
us so kind and pitiful like.

I looked him in the face, though I felt I could not say he was wrong.
I felt, too, just then, as if I could have given all the world to be
afraid of no man's opinion.

What a thing it is to be perfectly honest and straight--to be able to
look the whole world in the face!

But if more gentlemen were like Mr. Falkland I do really believe no one
would rob them for very shame's sake. When shearing was over we were all
paid up--shearers, washers, knock-about men, cooks, and extra shepherds.
Every soul about the place except Mr. M'Intyre and Mr. Falkland seemed
to have got a cheque and a walking-ticket at the same time. Away they
went, like a lot of boys out of school; and half of 'em didn't show as
much sense either. As for me and Jim we had no particular wish to go
home before Christmas. So as there's always contracts to be let about
a big run like Banda we took a contract for some bush work, and went at
it. Mr. M'Intyre looked quite surprised. But Mr. Falkland praised us up,
and was proud we were going to turn over a new leaf.

Nobody could say at that time we didn't work. Fencing, dam-making,
horse-breaking, stock-riding, from making hay to building a shed, all
bushwork came easy enough to us, Jim in particular; he took a pleasure
in it, and was never happier than when he'd had a real tearing day's
work and was settling himself after his tea to a good steady smoke. A
great smoker he'd come to be. He never was much for drinking except
now and again, and then he could knock it off as easy as any man I ever
seen. Poor old Jim! He was born good and intended to be so, like mother.
Like her, his luck was dead out in being mixed up with a lot like ours.

One day we were out at the back making some lambing yards. We were about
twenty miles from the head station and had about finished the job. We
were going in the next day. We had been camping in an old shepherd's hut
and had been pretty jolly all by ourselves. There was first-rate feed
for our horses, as the grass was being saved for the lambing season. Jim
was in fine spirits, and as we had plenty of good rations and first-rate
tobacco we made ourselves pretty comfortable.

'What a jolly thing it is to have nothing on your mind!' Jim used to
say. 'I hadn't once, and what a fine time it was! Now I'm always waking
up with a start and expecting to see a policeman or that infernal
half-caste. He's never far off when there's villainy on. Some fine day
he'll sell us all, I really do believe.'

'If he don't somebody else will; but why do you pitch upon him? You
don't like him somehow; I don't see that he's worse than any other.
Besides, we haven't done anything much to have a reward put on us.'

'No! that's to come,' answered Jim, very dismally for him. 'I don't see
what else is to come of it. Hist! isn't that a horse's step coming this
way? Yes, and a man on him, too.'

It was a bright night, though only the stars were out; but the weather
was that clear that you could see ever so well and hear ever so far
also. Jim had a blackfellow's hearing; his eyes were like a hawk's; he
could see in about any light, and read tracks like a printed book.

I could hear nothing at first; then I heard a slight noise a good way
off, and a stick breaking every now and then.

'Talk of the devil!' growled Jim, 'and here he comes. I believe that's
Master Warrigal, infernal scoundrel that he is. Of course he's got a
message from our respectable old dad or Starlight, asking us to put our
heads in a noose for them again.'

'How do you know?'

'I know it's that ambling horse he used to ride,' says Jim. 'I can make
out his sideling kind of way of using his legs. All amblers do that.'

'You're right,' I said, after listening for a minute. 'I can hear the
regular pace, different from a horse's walk.'

'How does he know we're here, I wonder?' says Jim.

'Some of the telegraphs piped us, I suppose,' I answered. 'I begin to
wish they forgot us altogether.'

'No such luck,' says Jim. 'Let's keep dark and see what this black snake
of a Warrigal will be up to. I don't expect he'll ride straight up to
the door.'

He was right. The horse hoofs stopped just inside a thick bit of scrub,
just outside the open ground on which the hut stood. After a few seconds
we heard the cry of the mopoke. It's not a cheerful sound at the dead of
night, and now, for some reason or other, it affected Jim and me in
much the same manner. I remembered the last time I had heard the bird
at home, just before we started over for Terrible Hollow, and it seemed
unlucky. Perhaps we were both a little nervous; we hadn't drunk anything
but tea for weeks. We drank it awfully black and strong, and a great lot
of it.

Anyhow, as we heard the quick light tread of the horse pacing in his
two-feet-on-one-side way over the sandy, thin-grassed soil, every moment
coming nearer and nearer, and this queer dismal-voiced bird hooting its
hoarse deep notes out of the dark tree that swished and sighed-like
in front of the sandhill, a queer feeling came over both of us that
something unlucky was on the boards for us. We felt quite relieved when
the horse's footsteps stopped. After a minute or so we could see a dark
form creeping towards the hut.




Chapter 11



Warrigal left his horse at the edge of the timber, for fear he might
want him in a hurry, I suppose. He was pretty 'fly', and never threw
away a chance as long as he was sober. He could drink a bit, like the
rest of us, now and then--not often--but when he did it made a regular
devil of him--that is, it brought the devil out that lives low down in
most people's hearts. He was a worse one than usual, Jim said. He saw
him once in one of his break-outs, and heard him boast of something he'd
done. Jim never liked him afterwards. For the matter of that he hated
Jim and me too. The only living things he cared about were Starlight and
the three-cornered weed he rode, that had been a 'brumbee', and wouldn't
let any one touch him, much less ride him, but himself. How he used
to snort if a stranger came near him! He could kick the eye out of a
mosquito, and bite too, if he got the chance.

As for Warrigal, Starlight used to knock him down like a log if he
didn't please him, but he never offered to turn upon him. He seemed
to like it, and looked regular put out once when Starlight hurt his
knuckles against his hard skull.

Us he didn't like, as I said before--why, I don't know--nor we him.
Likes and dislikes are curious things. People hardly know the rights of
them. But if you take a regular strong down upon a man or woman when you
first see 'em it's ten to one that you'll find some day as you've good
reason for it. We couldn't say what grounds we had for hating the sight
of Warrigal neither, for he was as good a tracker as ever followed man
or beasts. He could read all the signs of the bush like a printed book.
He could ride any horse in the world, and find his way, day or night, to
any place he'd ever once been to in his life.

Sometimes we should have been hard pushed when we were making across
country at night only for him. Hour after hour he'd ride ahead through
scrub or forest, up hill or down dale, with that brute of a horse of
his--he called him 'Bilbah'--ambling away, till our horses, except
Rainbow, used to shake the lives out of us jogging. I believe he did it
on purpose.

He was a fine shot, and could catch fish and game in all sorts of ways
that came in handy when we had to keep dark. He had pluck enough,
and could fight a pretty sharp battle with his fists if he wasn't
overweighted. There were white men that didn't at all find him a good
thing if they went to bully him. He tried it on with Jim once, but he
knocked the seven senses out of him inside of three rounds, and that
satisfied him. He pretended to make up, but I was always expecting him
to play us some dog's trick yet. Anyway, so far he was all right, and
as long as Starlight and us were mixed up together, he couldn't hurt one
without the other. He came gliding up to the old hut in the dull light
by bits of moves, just as if he'd been a bush that had changed its
place. We pretended to be asleep near the fire.

He peeped in through a chink. He could see us by the firelight, and
didn't suppose we were watching him.

'Hullo, Warrigal!' sung out Jim suddenly, 'what's up now? Some devil's
work, I suppose, or you wouldn't be in it. Why don't you knock at a
gentleman's door when you come a visiting?'

'Wasn't sure it was you,' he answered, showing his teeth; 'it don't do
to get sold. Might been troopers, for all I know.'

'Pity we wasn't,' said Jim; 'I'd have the hobbles on you by this time,
and you'd have got “fitted” to rights. I wish I'd gone into the police
sometimes. It isn't a bad game for a chap that can ride and track, and
likes a bit of rough-and-tumble now and then.'

'If I'd been a police tracker I'd have had as good a chance of nailing
you, Jim Marston,' spoke up Warrigal. 'Perhaps I will some day. Mr.
Garton wanted me bad once, and said they'd never go agin me for old
times. But that says nothin'. Starlight's out at the back and the old
man, too. They want you to go to them--sharp.'

'What for?'

'Dunno. I was to tell you, and show the camp; and now gimme some grub,
for I've had nothing since sunrise but the leg of a 'possum.'

'All right,' said Jim, putting the billy on; 'here's some damper and
mutton to go on with while the tea warms.'

'Wait till I hobble out Bilbah; he's as hungry as I am, and thirsty too,
my word.'

'Take some out of the barrel; we shan't want it to-morrow,' said Jim.

Hungry as Warrigal was--and when he began to eat I thought he never
would stop--he went and looked after his horse first, and got him a
couple of buckets of water out of the cask they used to send us out
every week. There was no surface water near the hut. Then he hobbled him
out of a bit of old sheep-yard, and came in.

The more I know of men the more I see what curious lumps of good and
bad they're made up of. People that won't stick at anything in some ways
will be that soft and good-feeling in others--ten times more so than
your regular good people. Any one that thinks all mankind's divided
into good, bad, and middlin', and that they can draft 'em like a lot of
cattle--some to one yard, some to another--don't know much. There's a
mob in most towns though, I think, that wants boilin' down bad. Some
day they'll do it, maybe; they'll have to when all the good country's
stocked up. After Warrigal had his supper he went out again to see his
horse, and then coiled himself up before the fire and wouldn't hardly
say another word.

'How far was it to where Starlight was?'

'Long way. Took me all day to come.'

'Had he been there long?'

'Yes; had a camp there.'

'Anybody else with him?'

'Three more men from this side.'

'Did the old man say we were to come at once?'

'Yes, or leave it alone--which you liked.'

Then he shut his eyes, and his mouth too, and was soon as fast asleep as
if he never intended to wake under a week.

'What shall we do, Jim?' I said; 'go or not?'

'If you leave it to me,' says Jim, 'I say, don't go. It's only some
other cross cattle or horse racket. We're bound to be nobbled some day.
Why not cut it now, and stick to the square thing? We couldn't do better
than we're doing now. It's rather slow, but we'll have a good cheque by
Christmas.'

'I'm half a mind to tell Warrigal to go back and say we're not on,' I
said. 'Lots of other chaps would join without making any bones about
it.'

'Hoo--hoo--hoo--hoo,' sounded once more the night-bird from the black
tree outside.

'D----the bird! I believe he's the devil in the shape of a mopoke! And
yet I don't like Starlight to think we're afraid. He and the old man
might be in a fix and want help. Suppose we toss up?'

'All right,' says Jim, speaking rather slowly.

You couldn't tell from his face or voice how he felt about it; but I
believe now--more than that, he let on once to me--that he was awfully
cut up about my changing, and thought we were just in for a spell of
straightforward work, and would stash the other thing for good and all.

We put the fire together. It burnt up bright for a bit. I pulled out a
shilling.

'If it's head we go, Jim; if it's woman, we stay here.'

I sent up the coin; we both bent over near the fire to look at it.

The head was uppermost.

'Hoo--hoo--hoo--hoo,' came the night-bird's harsh croak.

There was a heavyish stake on that throw, if we'd only known. Only
ruin--only death. Four men's lives lost, and three women made miserable
for life.

Jim and I looked at one another. He smiled and opened the door.

'It's all the fault of that cursed owl, I believe,' he said; 'I'll have
his life if he waits till it's daylight. We must be off early and get
up our horses. I know what a long day for Warrigal and that ambling
three-cornered devil of his means--seventy or eighty miles, if it's a
yard.'

We slept sound enough till daybreak, and COULD SLEEP then, whatever was
on the card. As for Jim, he slept like a baby always once he turned in.
When I woke I got up at once. It was half dark; there was a little light
in the east. But Warrigal had been out before me, and was leading his
horse up to the hut with the hobbles in his hand.

Our horses were not far off; one of them had a bell on. Jim had his old
brown, and I had a chestnut that I thought nearly as good. We weren't
likely to have anything to ride that wasn't middlin' fast and plucky.
Them that overhauled us would have to ride for it. We saddled up and
took our blankets and what few things we couldn't do without. The rest
stopped in the hut for any one that came after us. We left our wages,
too, and never asked for 'em from that day to this. A trifle like that
didn't matter after what we were going in for. More's the pity.

As we moved off my horse propped once or twice, and Warrigal looked at
us in a queer side sort of way and showed his teeth a bit--smile nor
laugh it wasn't, only a way he had when he thought he knew more than we
did.

'My word! your horse's been where the feed's good. We're goin' a good
way to-day. I wonder if they'll be as flash as they are now.'

'They'll carry us wherever that three-cornered mule of yours will
shuffle to to-night,' said Jim. 'Never you mind about them. You ride
straight, and don't get up to any monkey tricks, or, by George, I'll
straighten you, so as you'll know better next time.'

'You know a lot, Jim Marston,' said the half-caste, looking at him with
his long dark sleepy eyes which I always thought were like a half-roused
snake's. 'Never mind, you'll know more one of these days. We'd better
push on.'

He went off at a hand-gallop, and then pulled back into a long
darting kind of canter, which Bilbah thought was quite the thing for a
journey--anyhow, he never seemed to think of stopping it--went on mile
after mile as if he was not going to pull up this side of sundown. A
wiry brute, always in condition, was this said Bilbah, and just at this
time as hard as nails. Our horses had been doing nothing lately, and
being on good young feed had, of course, got fat, and were rather soft.

After four or five miles they began to blow. We couldn't well pull up;
the ground was hard in places and bad for tracking. If we went on at the
pace we should cook our horses. As soon as we got into a bit of open I
raced up to him.

'Now, look here, Warrigal,' I said, 'you know why you're doing this, and
so do I. Our horses are not up to galloping fifty or sixty miles on end
just off a spell and with no work for months. If you don't pull up and
go our pace I'll knock you off your horse.'

'Oh! you're riled!' he said, looking as impudent as he dared, but
slackening all the same. 'Pulled up before if I knowed your horses were
getting baked. Thought they were up to anything, same as you and Jim.'

'So they are. You'll find that one of these days. If there's work ahead
you ought to have sense enough not to knock smoke out of fresh horses
before we begin.'

'All right. Plenty of work to do, my word. And Starlight said, “Tell 'em
to be here to-day if they can.” I know he's afraid of some one follerin'
up our tracks, as it is.'

'That's all right, Warrigal; but you ride steady all the same, and don't
be tearing away through thick timber, like a mallee scrubber that's
got into the open and sees the devil behind him until he can get cover
again. We shall be there to-night if it's not a hundred miles, and
that's time enough.'

We did drop in for a long day, and no mistake. We only pulled up for a
short halt in the middle, and Warrigal's cast-iron pony was off again,
as if he was bound right away for the other side of the continent.
However, though we were not going slow either, but kept up a reasonable
fast pace, it must have been past midnight when we rode into Starlight's
camp; very glad Jim and I were to see the fire--not a big one either.
We had been taking it pretty easy, you see, for a month or two, and
were not quite so ready for an eighty-mile ride as if we had been in
something like training. The horses had had enough of it, too, though
neither of them would give in, not if we'd ridden 'em twenty mile
farther. As for Warrigal's Bilbah he was near as fresh as when he
started, and kept tossin' his head an' amblin' and pacin' away as if he
was walkin' for a wager round a ring in a show-yard.

As we rode up we could see a gunyah made out of boughs, and a longish
wing of dogleg fence, made light but well put together. As soon as we
got near enough a dog ran out and looked as if he was going to worry us;
didn't bark either, but turned round and waited for us to get off.

'It's old Crib,' said Jim, with a big laugh; 'blest if it ain't.
Father's somewhere handy. They're going to take up a back block and do
the thing regular: Marston, Starlight, and Company--that's the fakement.
They want us out to make dams or put up a woolshed or something. I don't
see why they shouldn't, as well as Crossman and Fakesley. It's six of
one and half-a-dozen of the other, as far as being on the square goes.
Depend upon it, dad's turned over a new leaf.'

'Do you fellows want anything to eat?' said a voice that I knew to be
Starlight's. 'If you do there's tea near the fire, and some grub in
that flour bag. Help yourselves and hobble out your horses. We'll settle
matters a bit in the morning. Your respected parent's abed in his
own camp, and it's just as well not to wake him, unless you want his
blessing ere you sleep.'

We went with Starlight to his gunyah. A path led through a clump of
pines, so thick that a man might ride round it and never dream there
was anything but more pines inside. A clear place had been made in the
sandhill, and a snug crib enough rigged with saplings and a few sheets
of bark. It was neat and tidy, like everything he had to do with. 'I was
at sea when I was young,' he once said to Jim, when he was a bit 'on',
'and a man learns to be neat there.' There was a big chimney outside,
and a lot of leaves and rushes out of a swamp which he had made Warrigal
gather.

'Put your blankets down there, boys, and turn in. You'll see how the
land lies in the morning.' We didn't want asking twice, Jim's eyes were
nigh shut as it was. The sun was up when we woke.

Outside the first thing we saw was father and Starlight talking. Both of
these seemed a bit cranky. 'It's a d----shame,' we heard Starlight
say, as he turned and walked off. 'We could have done it well enough by
ourselves.'

'I know what I'm about,' says father, 'it's all or none. What's the use
of crying after being in it up to our neck?'

'Some day you'll think different,' says Starlight, looking back at him.

I often remembered it afterwards.

'Well, lads,' says father, looking straight at us, 'I wasn't sure as
you'd come. Starlight has been barneying with me about sending for you.
But we've got a big thing on now, and I thought you'd like to be in it.'

'We have come,' says I, pretty short. 'Now we're here what's the play
called, and when does the curtain rise? We're on.' I was riled, vexed
at Starlight talking as if we were children, and thought I'd show as we
were men, like a young fool as I was.

'All right,' says father, and he sat down on a log, and began to tell us
how there was any quantity of cattle running at the back where they were
camped--a good lot strayed and mixed up, from the last dry season, and
had never been mustered for years. The stockmen hardly ever came out
till the autumn musters. One of the chaps that was in it knew all this
side and had told them. They were going to muster for a month or so, and
drive the mob right through to Adelaide. Store cattle were dear then,
and we could get them off easy there and come back by sea. No one was to
know we were not regular overlanders; and when we'd got the notes in our
pockets it would be a hard matter to trace the cattle or prove that we
were the men that sold 'em.

'How many head do you expect to get?' says Jim.

'A thousand or twelve hundred; half of 'em fat, and two-thirds of them
young cattle.'

'By George! that's something like a haul; but you can't muster such a
lot as that without a yard.'

'I know that,' says father. 'We're putting up a yard on a little plain
about a mile from here. When they find it, it'll be an old nest, and the
birds flown.'

'Well, if that ain't the cheekiest thing I ever heard tell of,' says I
laughingly. 'To put up a yard at the back of a man's run, and muster
his cattle for him! I never heard the like before, nor any one else. But
suppose the cove or his men come across it?'

''Tain't no ways likely,' says father. 'They're the sleepiest lot of
chaps in this frontage I ever saw. It's hardly worth while “touching”
 them. There's no fun in it. It's like shooting pheasants when they
ain't preserved. There's no risk, and when there's no risk there's no
pleasure. Anyway that's my notion.'

'Talking about risks, why didn't you work that Marquis of Lorne racket
better? We saw in the papers that the troopers hunted you so close you
had to kill him in the ranges.'

Father looked over at us and then began to laugh--not long, and he broke
off short. Laughing wasn't much in his line.

'Killed him, did we? And a horse worth nigh on to two thousand pounds.
You ought to have known your old father better than that. We did kill
A chestnut horse, one we picked out a purpose; white legs, white knee,
short under lip, everything quite regular. We even fed him for a week on
prairie grass, just like the Marquis had been eating. Bless you, we knew
how to work all that. We deceived Windhall his own self, and he thinks
he's pretty smart. No! the Marquis is all safe--you know where.'

I opened my eyes and stared at father.

'You've some call to crow if you can work things like that. How you ever
got him away beats me; but not more than how you managed to keep him hid
with a ring of troopers all round you from every side of the district.'

'We had friends,' father said. 'Me and Warrigal done all the travelling
by night. No one but him could have gone afoot, I believe, much less led
a blood horse through the beastly scrub and ranges he showed us. But the
devil himself could not beat him and that little brute Bilbah in rough
country.'

'I believe you,' I said, thinking of our ride yesterday. 'It's quite
bad enough to follow him on level ground. But don't you think our tracks
will be easy to follow with a thousand head of cattle before us? Any
fool could do that.'

'It ain't that as I'm looking at,' said father; 'of course an old woman
could do it, and knit stockings all the time; but our dart is to be off
and have a month's start before anybody knows they are off the run. They
won't think of mustering before fat cattle takes a bit of a turn. That
won't be for a couple of months yet. Then they may catch us if they
can.'

We had a long talk with Starlight, and what he said came to much the
same. One stockman they had 'squared', and he was to stand in. They had
got two or three flash chaps to help muster and drive, who were to swear
they thought we were dealers, and had bought cattle all right. One or
two more were to meet us farther on. If we could get the cattle together
and clear off before anything was suspected the rest was easy. The yard
was nearly up, and Jim and I wired in and soon finished it. It didn't
want very grand work putting into it as long as it would last our time.
So we put it up roughly, but pretty strong, with pine saplings.
The drawing in was the worst, for we had to 'hump' the most of them
ourselves. Jim couldn't help bursting out laughing from time to time.

'It does seem such a jolly cheeky thing,' he said. 'Driving off a mob of
cattle on the quiet I've known happen once or twice; but I'm dashed if
ever I heard tell of putting up duffing improvements of a superior class
on a cove's run and clearing off with a thousand drafted cattle, all
quiet and regular, and him pottering about his home-station and never
“dropping” to it no more than if he was in Sydney.'

'People ought to look after their stock closer than they do,' I said.
'It is their fault almost as much as ours. But they are too lazy to look
after their own work, and too miserable to pay a good man to do it for
them. They just get a half-and-half sort of fellow that'll take low
wages and make it up with duffing, and of course he's not likely to look
very sharp after the back country.'

'You're not far away,' says Jim; 'but don't you think they'd have to
look precious sharp and get up very early in the morning to be level
with chaps like father and Starlight, let alone Warrigal, who's as good
by night as day? Then there's you and me. Don't try and make us out
better than we are, Dick; we're all d----scoundrels, that's the truth
of it, and honest men haven't a chance with us, except in the long
run--except in the long run. That's where they'll have us, Dick
Marston.'

'That's quite a long speech for you, Jim,' I said; 'but it don't matter
much that I know of whose fault it is that we're in this duffing racket.
It seems to be our fate, as the chap says in the book. We'll have a
jolly spree in Adelaide if this journey comes out right. And now let's
finish this evening off. To-morrow they're going to yard the first mob.'

After that we didn't talk much except about the work. Starlight and
Warrigal were out every day and all day. The three new hands were some
chaps who formed part of a gang that did most of the horse-stealing in
that neighbourhood, though they never showed up. The way they managed it
was this. They picked up any good-looking nag or second-class racehorse
that they fell across, and took them to a certain place. There they met
another lot of fellows, who took the horses from them and cleared out to
another colony; at the same time they left the horses they had brought.
So each lot travelled different ways, and were sold in places where they
were quite strange and no one was likely to claim them.

After a man had had a year or two at this kind of work, he was good, or
rather bad, for anything. These young chaps, like us, had done pretty
well at these games, and one of them, falling in with Starlight, had
proposed to him to put up a couple of hundred head of cattle on Outer
Back Momberah, as the run was called; then father and he had seen that
a thousand were as easy to get as a hundred. Of course there was a risky
feeling, but it wasn't such bad fun while it lasted. We were out all day
running in the cattle. The horses were in good wind and condition now;
we had plenty of rations--flour, tea, and sugar. There was no cart,
but some good packhorses, just the same as if we were a regular station
party on our own run. Father had worked all that before we came. We had
the best of fresh beef and veal too--you may be sure of that--there was
no stint in that line; and at night we were always sure of a yarn from
Starlight--that is, if he was in a good humour. Sometimes he wasn't, and
then nobody dared speak to him, not even father.

He was an astonishing man, certainly. Jim and I used to wonder, by
the hour, what he'd been in the old country. He'd been all over the
world--in the Islands and New Zealand; in America, and among Malays and
other strange people that we'd hardly ever heard of. Such stories as
he'd tell us, too, about slaves and wild chiefs that he'd lived with and
gone out to fight with against their enemy. 'People think a great deal
of a dead man now and then in this innocent country,' he said once
when the grog was uppermost; 'why, I've seen fifty men killed before
breakfast, and in cold blood, too, chopped up alive, or next thing to
it; and a drove of slaves--men, women, and children--as big nearly as
our mob, handed over to a slave-dealer, and driven off in chains just
as you'd start a lot of station cattle. They didn't like it, going off
their run either, poor devils. The women would try and run back after
their pickaninnies when they dropped, just like that heifer when
Warrigal knocked her calf on the head to-day.' What a man he was! This
was something like life, Jim and I thought. When we'd sold the cattle,
if we got 'em down to Adelaide all right, we'd take a voyage to some
foreign country, perhaps, and see sights too. What a paltry thing
working for a pound a week seemed when a rise like this was to be made!

Well, the long and short of it is that we mustered the cattle quite
comfortably, nobody coming anext or anigh us any more than if we'd
taken the thing by contract. You wouldn't have thought there was anybody
nearer than Bathurst. Everything seemed to be in our favour. So it was,
just at the start. We drafted out all the worst and weediest of the
cattle, besides all the old cows, and when we counted the mob out we
had nearly eleven hundred first-rate store cattle; lots of fine young
bullocks and heifers, more than half fat--altogether a prime well-bred
mob that no squatter or dealer could fault in any way if the price was
right. We could afford to sell them for a shade under market price for
cash. Ready money, of course, we were bound to have.

Just as we were starting there was a fine roan bull came running up with
a small mob.

'Cut him out, and beat him back,' says father; 'we don't want to be
bothered with the likes of him.'

'Why, I'm dashed if that ain't Hood's imported bull,' says Billy the
Boy, a Monaro native that we had with us. 'I know him well. How's he
come to get back? Why, the cove gave two hundred and fifty notes for him
afore he left England, I've heard 'em say.'

'Bring him along,' said Starlight, who came up just then. 'In for a
penny, in for a pound. They'll never think of looking for him on the
Coorong, and we'll be there before they miss any cattle worth talking
about.'

So we took 'Fifteenth Duke of Cambridge' along with us; a red roan he
was, with a little white about the flank. He wasn't more than four year
old. He'd been brought out from England as a yearling. How he'd worked
his way out to this back part of the run, where a bull of his quality
ain't often seen, nobody could say. But he was a lively active beast,
and he'd got into fine hard fettle with living on saltbush, dry grass,
and scrub for the last few months, so he could travel as well as the
others. I took particular notice of him, from his little waxy horns to
his straight locks and long square quarters. And so I'd need to--but
that came after. He had only a little bit of a private brand on the
shoulder. That was easily faked, and would come out quite different.




Chapter 12



We didn't go straight ahead along any main track to the Lower Murray and
Adelaide exactly. That would have been a little too open and barefaced.
No; we divided the mob into three, and settled where to meet in about a
fortnight. Three men to each mob. Father and Warrigal took one lot; they
had the dog, old Crib, to help them. He was worth about two men and a
boy. Starlight, Jim, and I had another; and the three stranger chaps
another. We'd had a couple of knockabouts to help with the cooking and
stockyard work. They were paid by the job. They were to stay at the
camp for a week, to burn the gunyahs, knock down the yard, and blind the
track as much as they could.

Some of the cattle we'd left behind they drove back and forward across
the track every day for a week. If rain came they were to drop it, and
make their way into the frontage by another road. If they heard about
the job being blown or the police set on our track, they were to wire to
one of the border townships we had to pass. Weren't we afraid of their
selling us? No, not much; they were well paid, and had often given
father and Starlight information before, though they took care never
to show out in the cattle or horse-stealing way themselves. As long
as chaps in our line have money to spend, they can always get good
information and other things, too. It is when the money runs short that
the danger comes in. I don't know whether cattle-duffing was ever done
in New South Wales before on such a large scale, or whether it will ever
be done again. Perhaps not. These wire fences stop a deal of cross-work;
but it was done then, you take my word for it--a man's word as hasn't
that long to live that it's worth while to lie--and it all came out
right; that is as far as our getting safe over, selling the cattle, and
having the money in our pockets.

We kept on working by all sorts of outside tracks on the main line of
road--a good deal by night, too--for the first two or three hundred
miles. After we crossed the Adelaide border we followed the Darling down
to the Murray. We thought we were all right, and got bolder. Starlight
had changed his clothes, and was dressed like a swell--away on a
roughish trip, but still like a swell.

'They were his cattle; he had brought them from one of his stations on
the Narran. He was going to take up country in the Northern Territory.
He expected a friend out from England with a lot more capital.'

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