Tom Gerrard Part 8

With the filly she listened, and then smiled as she heard the sound of a horse's feet coming along the track through the scrub. In a few moments horse and rider appeared, and the girl slipped her weapon into the pocket of her short riding skirt.

"How do you do, Miss Fraser?" cried the newcomer as he jumped off his horse and hurried up to her with outstretched hand and an eager light in his eyes; "this is a pleasant surprise. I was on my way to see your father, and when riding along the beach below caught sight of your filly feeding on the bluff. I knew that it could be no one but you who would camp here, so instead of going on to Fraser's Gully, I turned off; and here I am."

"And I am very glad to see you, Mr Forde," said the girl, as she shook hands; "now, will you have something to eat? I have plenty of Fraser's Gully fare here--beef and damper--and I've tea and sugar in my saddle-bag."

"So have I. And now, whilst I light a fire, tell what brought you here to-day? To look at the sea--the 'ever treacherous sea'--I suppose, and 'wish you were a man,'" and the speaker smiled into the brown eyes.

"You are very rude, Mr Forde; the rudest clergyman I ever met Certainly, I've only met three in my life, but then----" Here the brown eyes lit up laughingly. "They were different from you."

"I have no doubt about it," and the man laughed like a boy, as taking up some dead sticks he broke them across his knee. "But you haven't told me how it is I am so fortunate as to find you here--fifteen miles off the track to Fraser's Gully."

"Oh! the old story. Some of our horses are missing, and I have been trying to pick up their tracks."

Forde, with an earnest look in his blue eyes, looked up from the fire he was kindling, and shook his head gravely. "You should not venture so far away, Miss Fraser. How can you tell but that whilst you are trying to pick up the horses' tracks that the blacks about Repulse Bay are not now engaged in picking up yours?"

"Oh, I am not afraid of any of the myalls{*} about Whitsunday Pa.s.sage and Repulse Bay, Mr Forde. I really believe that if I rode into one of their camps they would not bolt. Poor wretches! I do feel sorry for them when I know how they are harried and shot down--so often without cause--by the Native Police. Oh, I hate the Native Police! How is it, Mr Forde, that the Government of this colony can employ these uniformed savages to murder--I call it murder--their own race? Every time I see a patrol pa.s.s, I shudder; their fierce, insolently-evil faces, and the horrid way they show the whites of their eyes when they ride by with their Snider carbines by their sides, looking at every tame black with such a savage, supercilious hatred! And their white officers--oh, how can any man who pretends to be a gentleman, and calls himself a Christian, descend to such an ignominious position as to lead a party of black troopers? If I were a man, and had to become a sub-inspector of Native Police, I would at least blacken my face so as to hide my shame when I rode out with my fellow-murderers and cutthroats."

* Wild blacks.

Her eyes, filled with tears as they were, flashed with scorn as she spoke. The clergyman looked admiringly at her as he put his hand on her arm.

"You must remember, Miss Fraser, that the wild blacks on this coast have committed some dreadful murders. How many settlers, miners, and swagmen have been ruthlessly slaughtered?"

"And how many hundreds of these unfortunate savages have been ruthlessly slaughtered, not only by the Black Police, but by squatters and stockmen, who deny the poor wretches the right to exist? We have taken away their hunting grounds! We shoot them down as vermin, because, impelled by the hunger that we have brought upon them, they occasionally spear a bullock or horse or two! Why cannot the Government do as my father suggests--reserve a long strip of country for these poor savages, just a small piece of G.o.d's earth that shall be inviolate from the greedy squatter, the miner, the sugar planter? And let the wretched beings at least live and die a natural death."

The clergyman's face flushed as he listened to her pa.s.sionate words.

"It is, I believe, impossible to segregate the coastal tribes of the Australian mainland. The cost of such an attempt would, in the first place, be enormous; in the second, the people of the colony----"

"The people, Mr Forde! You mean the squatters, the sugar-planters, the land-devouring swarm of 'Christians,' who think that a bullock's hide, worth twenty s.h.i.+llings, is of more moment than the welfare of thousands of poor, naked savages, whose country we have taken, and yet of whom we make beasts of burden--hewers of wood and drawers of water. Oh, if I were only a man!"

"But you are, instead, a beautiful girl, Miss Fraser."

"Don't pay me any compliments, Mr Forde, or I shall begin to dislike you, and work you a pair of woollen slippers like English girls do in novels for the pale-faced, ascetic young curates, with their thin hands, and the dark, melancholy eyes."

Forde laughed heartily this time, and held out his own hands jestingly for her inspection; they were as brawny and sunburned as those of any stockman or working miner, and were in keeping with his costume, which was decidedly unclerical. For he only wore his clerical "rig" when visiting towns sufficiently populous for him to hold services therein.

At the present time he was clad in the usual Crimean s.h.i.+rt, white moleskins, and brown leather leggings, and the grey slouched felt hat affected by most bushmen. His valise, however, contained all that was necessary--even to the wreck of a clerical hat--to turn himself into the orthodox travelling clergyman of the Australian bush.

"Ah! I was only joking, Mr Forde, as you know. _You_ are not the usual kind of 'parson.' That is why father--and everyone else--likes you.

Then, too, you can ride--I mean sit a horse as an Australian does; and you smoke a pipe, and--oh, I wonder, Mr Forde, that you never married!

Now I am sure that Mrs Tallis admires you--In fact she told me so, and Kaburie is a lovely station, and----"

The clergyman laughed again. "Thank you, Miss Fraser. I'm afraid I should not have courage enough to propose to a brand-new widow even if I was sure she would say 'yes.'" Then he added quietly, "There is only one woman in the world for me; and I have not even dared let her know I care for her. I want her to get to know me a little better. And then a bush parson is not a very eligible _parti?_

"Oh! I don't see why not, though I don't think _I_ should like to marry a clergyman."

"Why?" He asked the question with such sudden earnestness that she looked up.

"Oh! one would have to visit such a lot of disagreeable women, and be at least civil to them. Take old Mrs Piper for instance. She gave fifty pounds towards the little church built at Boorala, and made your predecessor's life miserable for the two years he was in the district.

She told him that she strongly disapproved of single clergymen 'under any circ.u.mstances,' and tried to make the unfortunate man propose to Miss Guggin, who is forty if she's a day, and poor Mr Simpson was only twenty-five."

"No wonder he fled the country."

"No wonder, indeed! Then there are the Treverton family at Boorala; very rich and highly respectable, though old Treverton was a notorious cattle duffer{*} in Victoria. Father says that Mr Treverton would have made the patriarch Jacob die with envy. He started from Gippsland with a team of working bullocks, six horses, and twenty-four cows and calves to take up new country on the Campaspe River, and, in six months' journey overland, his herd of cattle had increased to a thousand head--most of them full-grown, and by some mysterious agency they were branded 'T' as well!

And the six horses had multiplied to an astonis.h.i.+ng extent; from six they had grown to fifty, all in six months! And now Joseph Treverton, Esq., J.P., and Member of the Legislative a.s.sembly, is one of the richest squatters in the North, and the Misses Treverton speak of their 'papa' as 'one of the very earliest pioneers of the pastoral industry in North Queensland, you know.'"

* Cattle stealer.

The girl's frank sarcasm delighted Forde, the more so as he knew that what she had said was perfectly true.

"Well, it is a new country, you see, Miss Fraser, and----"

Just then the two horses raised their heads and neighed, and Forde, going to the edge of the bluff, saw a horseman coming along the beach in a direct line for where they were camped.

"We are to have company, Miss Fraser. There is some one riding direct for the bluff."

CHAPTER IX

In less than half-an-hour the new-comer, who was walking his horse, slowly rode up to the bluff, and raised his hat to Miss Fraser and her companion.

"Good-morning!" he said, as he dismounted. "I saw you as I was coming along the beach and so turned off. Am I on the right track for Kaburie, and Fraser's Gully?"

"Yes," replied Forde, "this is the turn off here for both Kaburie and the Gully; the main track goes on to Boorala. Will you have some tea?"

"Thank you, I shall be very glad of a drink." Then again raising his hat to Kate, he said, "My name is Gerrard. Are you Miss Fraser?"

"Yes," replied Kate smiling, "and you are Mr Gerrard of Ocho Rios, I am sure, for I have seen your photograph. But how did you guess I was Kate Fraser?"

"I really could not tell you; but somehow I felt certain that you were the young lady whom Mr Lacey described so admiringly to me a day or two ago."

"Did he? The dear old man! How nice of him," and she laughed merrily.

"Mr Gerrard, this is my friend, the Reverend Mr Forde, of Boorala--and hundreds of other towns as well."

The two men shook hands, and in a few minutes Gerrard was conversing with him and his fair companion as if he had known them for years, and both Forde and Kate were much interested in learning the object of his visit to Kaburie.

"I do hope you will buy Kaburie, Mr Gerrard," said Kate; "it is a really splendid station, and I am sure that you will like it better than your place away up on Yorke's Peninsula. Of course," she added, with her usual serene frankness, "I am very, very sorry that Mrs Tallis is not coming back, for we are great friends, and always exchanged visits once a week, and now I shall miss going there very much. And, oh, the garden of which she was so proud! I suppose now----" she stopped, and reddened slightly.

"Go on, please," said Gerrard with a.s.sumed gravity, though his eyes were smiling.

"I was about to be rude enough to say that most men don't care much for flowers."

"If I buy Kaburie, Miss Fraser, I will come to you, cap in hand, and humbly beg you to instruct me what to do; and furthermore, I promise that when you say 'do this' it shall be done."

"You are undertaking a big contract, Mr Gerrard," said Forde with a laugh, as he rose to go to his horse; "you will have to send to Sydney for a Scotch gardener."

As soon as the clergyman was out of hearing Gerrard, who had remembered Lacey's remark about "a parson being in the running," said quietly, "I certainly am a most forgetful man, Miss Fraser, and ask your forgiveness. Here is a letter for you, which my friend Aulain asked me to deliver to you."