Children of the Bush Part 21

Wall was never accused of employing dummies, or underhanded methods in dealings with selectors, but he had been through so much and had brooded so long that he had grown very hard and bitter and suspicious, and the reverse of generous--as many men do who start out in life too soft and goodhearted and with too much faith in human nature. He was a tall, dark man. He ordered Ross's boys off the run, impounded Ross's stock--before Ross had got his fencing finished, summoned Ross for trespa.s.s, and Ross retaliated as well as he could, until at last it mightn't have been safe for one of those men to have met the other with a gun. The impounding of the selector's cattle led to the last bad quarrel between Wall and his son Billy, who was a tall, good-natured Cornstalk, and who reckoned that Australia was big enough for all of us. One day in the drought, and in an extra bitter mood, Wall heard that some of his sheep had been dogged in the vicinity of Ross's selection, and he ordered Billy to take a station-hand and watch Ross's place all night, and, if Ross's cattle put their noses over the boundary, to drive them to the pound, fifteen miles away; also to lay poisoned baits for the dogs all round the selection.

And Billy flatly refused.

"I know Ross and the boys," he said, "and I don't believe they dogged the sheep. Why, they've only got a Newfoundland pup, and an old lame, one-eyed sheep-dog that couldn't hurt a flea. Now, father, this sort of thing has been going on long enough. What difference does a few paltry acres make to us? The country is big enough, G.o.d knows! Ross is a straight man and--for G.o.d's sake, give the man a chance to get his ground fenced in; he's doing it as fast as he can, and he can't watch his cattle day and night."

"Are you going to do as I tell you, or are you not?" shouted Wall.

"Well, if it comes to that, I'm not," said Billy. "I'm not going to sneak round a place all night and watch for a chance to pound a poor man's cows."

It was an awful row, down behind the wool-shed, and things looked so bad that old Peter, the station-hand, who was a witness, took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves, ready, as he said afterwards, "to roll into"

either the father or the son if one raised a hand against the other.

"Father!" said Billy, though rather sobered by the sight of his father's trembling, choking pa.s.sion, "do you call yourself an Englishman?"

"Yes!" yelled Wall, furiously. "What the h.e.l.l do you call yourself?"

"If it comes to that I'm an Australian," said Billy, and he turned away and went to catch his horse. He went up-country and knocked about in the north-west for a year or two.

II

ROMEO AND JULIET

Mary Wall was twenty-five. She was an Australian bush girl, every inch of her five-foot-nine; she had a pink-and-white complexion, dark blue eyes, blue-black hair, and "the finest figure in the district,"

on horseback or afoot. She was the best girlrider too (saddle or bare-back), and they say that when she was a tomboy she used to tuck her petticoats under her and gallop man-fas.h.i.+on through the scrub after horses or cattle. She said she was going to be an old maid.

There came a jackaroo on a visit to the station. He was related to the bank with which Wall had relations. He was a dude, with an expensive education and no brains. He was very vain of his education and prospects. He regarded Mary with undisguised admiration, and her father had secret hopes. One evening the jackaroo was down by the homestead-gate when Mary came cantering home on her tall chestnut. The gate was six feet or more, and the jackaroo raised his hat and hastened to open it, but Mary reined her horse back a few yards and the "dood"

had barely time to jump aside when there was a scuffle of hoofs on the road, a "Ha-ha-ha!" in mid-air, a landing thud, and the girl was away up the home-track in a cloud of dust.

A few days later the jackaroo happened to be at Kelly's, a wayside shanty, watching a fight between two bushmen, when Mary rode up. She knew the men. She whipped her horse in between them and struck at first one and then the other with her riding-whip.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!" she said; "and both married men, too!"

It evidently struck them that way, for after a bit they shook hands and went home.

"And I wouldn't have married that girl for a thousand pounds," said the jackaroo, relating the incidents to some friends in Sydney.

Mary said she wanted a man, if she could get one.

There was no life at home nowadays, so Mary went to all the bush dances in the district. She thought nothing of riding twenty or thirty miles to a dance, dancing all night, and riding home again next morning. At one of these dances she met young Robert Ross, a clean-limbed, good-looking young fellow about her own age. She danced with him and liked him, and danced with him again, and he rode part of the way home with her. The subject of the quarrel between the two homes came up gradually.

"The boss," said Robert, meaning his father, "the boss is always ready to let bygones be bygones. It's a pity it couldn't be fixed up."

"Yes," said Mary, looking at him (Bob looked very well on horseback), "it is a pity."

They met several times, and next Prince of Wales's birthday they rode home from the races together. Both had good horses, and they happened to be far ahead of the others on the wide, straight clear road that ran between the walls of the scrub. Along, about dusk, they became very confidential indeed--Mary had remarked what a sad and beautiful sunset it was. The horses got confidential, too, and shouldered together, and touched noses, and, after a long interval in the conversation, during which Robert, for one, began to breathe quickly, he suddenly leaned over, put his arm round her waist and made to kiss her. She jerked her body away, threw up her whiphand, and Robert ducked instinctively; but she brought her whip down on her horse's flank instead, and raced ahead.

Robert followed--or, rather, his horse did: he thought it was a race, and took the bit in his teeth. Robert kept calling, appealing:

"Wait a while, Mary! I want to explain! I want to apologize! For G.o.d's sake listen to me, Mary!"

But Mary didn't hear him. Perhaps she misunderstood the reason of the chase and gave him credit for a spice of the devil in his nature. But Robert grew really desperate; he felt that the thing must be fixed up now or never, and gave his horse a free rein. Her horse was the fastest, and Robert galloped in the dust from his heels for about a mile and a half; then at the foot of a rise Mary's horse stumbled and nearly threw her over his head, and then he stopped like the good horse he was.

Robert got down feeling instinctively that he might best make his peace on foot, and approached Mary with a face of misery--she had dropped her whip.

"Oh, Bob!" she said, "I'm knocked out;" and she slipped down into his arms and stayed there a while.

They sat on a log and rested, while their horses made inquiries of each other's noses, and compared notes.

And after a good while Mary said "No, Bob, it's no use talking of marrying just yet. I like you, Bob, but I could never marry you while things are as they are between your father and mine. Now, that'll do.

Let me get on my horse, Bob. I'll be safer there."

"Why?" asked Bob.

"Come on, Bob, and don't be stupid."

She met him often and "liked" him.

III

A TRAMP'S MATCH AND WHAT IT DID

It was Christmas Eve at Wall's, but there was no score or so of buggies and horses and dozens of strange dogs round the place as of old. The gla.s.ses and decanters were dusty on the heavy old-fas.h.i.+oned sideboard in the dining-room; and there was only a sullen, brooding man leaning over the hurdles and looking at his rams in the yard, and a sullen, brooding half-caste at work in the kitchen. Mary had ridden away that morning to visit a girl chum.

It was towards the end of a long drought, and the country was like tinder for hundreds of miles round--the ground for miles and miles in the broiling scrubs "as bare as your hand," or covered with coa.r.s.e, dry tufts. There was feed gra.s.s in places, but you had to look close to see it.

Shearing had finished the day before, but there was a black boy and a station-hand or two about the yards and six or eight shearers and rouseabouts, and a teamster camped in the men's huts--they were staying over the holidays to shear stragglers and clean up generally. Old Peter and a jackaroo were out on the run watching a bush-fire across Sandy Creek.

A swagman had happened to call at the station that morning; he asked for work and then for tucker. He irritated Wall, who told him to clear out. It was the first time that a swagman had been turned away from the station without tucker.

Swaggy went along the track some miles, brooding over his wrongs, and crossed Sandy Creek. He struck a match and dropped it into a convenient tuft of gra.s.s in a likely patch of tufts, with dead gra.s.s running from it up into the scrubby ridges--then he hurried on.

Did you ever see a bush-fire? Not sheets of flame sweeping and roaring from tree-top to tree-top, but the snaky, hissing gra.s.s-fire of hardwood country.

The whole country covered with thin blue smoke so that you never know in what direction the fire is travelling. At night you see it like the lighted streets of cities, in the distant ranges. It roars up the hollows of dead trees and gives them the appearance of factory chimneys in the dusk. It climbs, by shreds of bark, the trunks of old dead white-box and blue-gums--solid and hard as cast-iron--and cuts off the limbs. And where there's a piece of recently ringbarked country, with the dead leaves still on the trees, the fire will roar from bough to bough--a fair imitation of a softwood forest fire. The bush-fire travels through the scrubs for hundreds of miles, taking the gra.s.s to the roots, scorching the living bush but leaving it alive--for gumbush is hardest of any to kill. Where there is no undergrowth, and the country seems bare as a road for miles, the fire will cross, licking up invisible straws of gra.s.s, dusty leaves, twigs and shreds of bark on the hard ground already baking in the drought. You hear of a fire miles away, and next day, riding across the head of a gully, you hear a hissing and crackling and there is the fire running over the ground in lines and curves of thin blue smoke, snakelike, with old logs blazing on the blackened ground behind. Did you ever _hear_ a fire where a fire should not be? There is something h.e.l.lish in the sound of it. When the breeze is, say, from the east the fire runs round western spurs, up sheltered gullies--helped by an "eddy" in the wind perhaps--and appears along the top of the ridge, ready, with a change in the wind, to come down on farms and fields of ripe wheat, with a "front" miles long.

A selector might be protected by a wide sandy creek in front and wide cleared roads behind, and, any hour in the day or night, a shout from the farther end of the wheat paddock, and--"Oh, my G.o.d! the wheat!"

Wall didn't mind this fire much; most of his sheep were on their way out back, to a back run where there was young gra.s.s; and the dry ridges along the creek would be better for a burning-off--only he had to watch his fences.

But, about dusk, Mary came galloping home in her usual breakneck fas.h.i.+on.

"Father," she cried, "turn out the men and send them at once. The fire is all down by Ross's farm, and he has ten acres of wheat standing, and no one at home but him and Bob."

"How do you know?" growled Wall. Then suddenly and suspiciously, "Have you been there?"

"I came home that way."