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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1313 ***
+
+OVER THE SLIPRAILS
+
+By Henry Lawson
+
+Author of “While the Billy Boils”, “When the World was Wide and Other
+Verses”, “On the Track”, “Verses: Popular and Humorous”, &c.
+
+
+
+[Note on text: Italicized words or phrases are capitalised. Some obvious
+errors have been corrected.]
+
+
+
+
+Preface
+
+
+
+     Of the stories in this volume many have already appeared
+     in the columns of [various periodicals], while several
+     now appear in print for the first time.
+
+
+     H. L.
+       Sydney, June 9th, 1900.
+
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+
+     The Shanty-Keeper's Wife
+     A Gentleman Sharper and Steelman Sharper
+     An Incident at Stiffner's
+     The Hero of Redclay
+     The Darling River
+     A Case for the Oracle
+     A Daughter of Maoriland
+     New Year's Night
+     Black Joe
+     They Wait on the Wharf in Black
+     Seeing the Last of You
+     Two Boys at Grinder Brothers'
+     The Selector's Daughter
+     Mitchell on the “Sex” and Other “Problems”
+      The Master's Mistake
+     The Story of the Oracle
+
+
+
+
+
+OVER THE SLIPRAILS
+
+
+
+
+The Shanty-Keeper's Wife
+
+
+
+There were about a dozen of us jammed into the coach, on the box seat
+and hanging on to the roof and tailboard as best we could. We were
+shearers, bagmen, agents, a squatter, a cockatoo, the usual joker--and
+one or two professional spielers, perhaps. We were tired and stiff and
+nearly frozen--too cold to talk and too irritable to risk the inevitable
+argument which an interchange of ideas would have led up to. We had been
+looking forward for hours, it seemed, to the pub where we were to change
+horses. For the last hour or two all that our united efforts had been
+able to get out of the driver was a grunt to the effect that it was
+“'bout a couple o' miles.” Then he said, or grunted, “'Tain't fur now,”
+ a couple of times, and refused to commit himself any further; he seemed
+grumpy about having committed himself that far.
+
+He was one of those men who take everything in dead earnest; who regard
+any expression of ideas outside their own sphere of life as trivial, or,
+indeed, if addressed directly to them, as offensive; who, in fact, are
+darkly suspicious of anything in the shape of a joke or laugh on the
+part of an outsider in their own particular dust-hole. He seemed to
+be always thinking, and thinking a lot; when his hands were not both
+engaged, he would tilt his hat forward and scratch the base of his
+skull with his little finger, and let his jaw hang. But his intellectual
+powers were mostly concentrated on a doubtful swingle-tree, a misfitting
+collar, or that there bay or piebald (on the off or near side) with the
+sore shoulder.
+
+Casual letters or papers, to be delivered on the road, were matters
+which troubled him vaguely, but constantly--like the abstract ideas of
+his passengers.
+
+The joker of our party was a humourist of the dry order, and had been
+slyly taking rises out of the driver for the last two or three stages.
+But the driver only brooded. He wasn't the one to tell you straight if
+you offended him, or if he fancied you offended him, and thus gain your
+respect, or prevent a misunderstanding which would result in life-long
+enmity. He might meet you in after years when you had forgotten all
+about your trespass--if indeed you had ever been conscious of it--and
+“stoush” you unexpectedly on the ear.
+
+Also you might regard him as your friend, on occasion, and yet he would
+stand by and hear a perfect stranger tell you the most outrageous lies,
+to your hurt, and know that the stranger was telling lies, and never put
+you up to it. It would never enter his head to do so. It wouldn't be any
+affair of his--only an abstract question.
+
+It grew darker and colder. The rain came as if the frozen south were
+spitting at your face and neck and hands, and our feet grew as big as
+camel's, and went dead, and we might as well have stamped the footboards
+with wooden legs for all the feeling we got into ours. But they were
+more comfortable that way, for the toes didn't curl up and pain so much,
+nor did our corns stick out so hard against the leather, and shoot.
+
+We looked out eagerly for some clearing, or fence, or light--some sign
+of the shanty where we were to change horses--but there was nothing
+save blackness all round. The long, straight, cleared road was no longer
+relieved by the ghostly patch of light, far ahead, where the bordering
+tree-walls came together in perspective and framed the ether. We were
+down in the bed of the bush.
+
+We pictured a haven of rest with a suspended lamp burning in the frosty
+air outside and a big log fire in a cosy parlour off the bar, and a
+long table set for supper. But this is a land of contradictions; wayside
+shanties turn up unexpectedly and in the most unreasonable places, and
+are, as likely as not, prepared for a banquet when you are not hungry
+and can't wait, and as cold and dark as a bushman's grave when you are
+and can.
+
+Suddenly the driver said: “We're there now.” He said this as if he had
+driven us to the scaffold to be hanged, and was fiercely glad that he'd
+got us there safely at last. We looked but saw nothing; then a light
+appeared ahead and seemed to come towards us; and presently we saw that
+it was a lantern held up by a man in a slouch hat, with a dark bushy
+beard, and a three-bushel bag around his shoulders. He held up his other
+hand, and said something to the driver in a tone that might have been
+used by the leader of a search party who had just found the body. The
+driver stopped and then went on slowly.
+
+“What's up?” we asked. “What's the trouble?”
+
+“Oh, it's all right,” said the driver.
+
+“The publican's wife is sick,” somebody said, “and he wants us to come
+quietly.”
+
+The usual little slab and bark shanty was suggested in the gloom, with a
+big bark stable looming in the background. We climbed down like so many
+cripples. As soon as we began to feel our legs and be sure we had the
+right ones and the proper allowance of feet, we helped, as quietly as
+possible, to take the horses out and round to the stable.
+
+“Is she very bad?” we asked the publican, showing as much concern as we
+could.
+
+“Yes,” he said, in a subdued voice of a rough man who had spent several
+anxious, sleepless nights by the sick bed of a dear one. “But, God
+willing, I think we'll pull her through.”
+
+Thus encouraged we said, sympathetically: “We're very sorry to trouble
+you, but I suppose we could manage to get a drink and a bit to eat?”
+
+“Well,” he said, “there's nothing to eat in the house, and I've only got
+rum and milk. You can have that if you like.”
+
+One of the pilgrims broke out here.
+
+“Well of all the pubs,” he began, “that I've ever--”
+
+“Hush-sh-sh!” said the publican.
+
+The pilgrim scowled and retired to the rear. You can't express your
+feelings freely when there's a woman dying close handy.
+
+“Well, who says rum and milk?” asked the joker, in a low voice.
+
+“Wait here,” said the publican, and disappeared into the little front
+passage.
+
+Presently a light showed through a window, with a scratched and
+fly-bitten B and A on two panes, and a mutilated R on the third, which
+was broken. A door opened, and we sneaked into the bar. It was like
+having drinks after hours where the police are strict and independent.
+
+When we came out the driver was scratching his head and looking at the
+harness on the verandah floor.
+
+“You fellows 'll have ter put in the time for an hour or so. The horses
+is out back somewheres,” and he indicated the interior of Australia with
+a side jerk of his head, “and the boy ain't back with 'em yet.”
+
+“But dash it all,” said the Pilgrim, “me and my mate----”
+
+“Hush!” said the publican.
+
+“How long are the horses likely to be?” we asked the driver.
+
+“Dunno,” he grunted. “Might be three or four hours. It's all accordin'.”
+
+“Now, look here,” said the Pilgrim, “me and my mate wanter catch the
+train.”
+
+“Hush-sh-sh!” from the publican in a fierce whisper.
+
+“Well, boss,” said the joker, “can you let us have beds, then? I don't
+want to freeze here all night, anyway.”
+
+“Yes,” said the landlord, “I can do that, but some of you will have to
+sleep double and some of you'll have to take it out of the sofas, and
+one or two 'll have to make a shakedown on the floor. There's plenty of
+bags in the stable, and you've got rugs and coats with you. Fix it up
+amongst yourselves.”
+
+“But look here!” interrupted the Pilgrim, desperately, “we can't afford
+to wait! We're only 'battlers', me and my mate, pickin' up crumbs by the
+wayside. We've got to catch the----”
+
+“Hush!” said the publican, savagely. “You fool, didn't I tell you my
+missus was bad? I won't have any noise.”
+
+“But look here,” protested the Pilgrim, “we must catch the train at Dead
+Camel----”
+
+“You'll catch my boot presently,” said the publican, with a savage oath,
+“and go further than Dead Camel. I won't have my missus disturbed
+for you or any other man! Just you shut up or get out, and take your
+blooming mate with you.”
+
+We lost patience with the Pilgrim and sternly took him aside.
+
+“Now, for God's sake, hold your jaw,” we said. “Haven't you got any
+consideration at all? Can't you see the man's wife is ill--dying
+perhaps--and he nearly worried off his head?”
+
+The Pilgrim and his mate were scraggy little bipeds of the city push
+variety, so they were suppressed.
+
+“Well,” yawned the joker, “I'm not going to roost on a stump all night.
+I'm going to turn in.”
+
+“It'll be eighteenpence each,” hinted the landlord. “You can settle now
+if you like to save time.”
+
+We took the hint, and had another drink. I don't know how we “fixed it
+up amongst ourselves,” but we got settled down somehow. There was a lot
+of mysterious whispering and scuffling round by the light of a couple of
+dirty greasy bits of candle. Fortunately we dared not speak loud enough
+to have a row, though most of us were by this time in the humour to pick
+a quarrel with a long-lost brother.
+
+The Joker got the best bed, as good-humoured, good-natured chaps
+generally do, without seeming to try for it. The growler of the party
+got the floor and chaff bags, as selfish men mostly do--without seeming
+to try for it either. I took it out of one of the “sofas”, or rather
+that sofa took it out of me. It was short and narrow and down by the
+head, with a leaning to one corner on the outside, and had more nails
+and bits of gin-case than original sofa in it.
+
+I had been asleep for three seconds, it seemed, when somebody shook me
+by the shoulder and said:
+
+“Take yer seats.”
+
+When I got out, the driver was on the box, and the others were getting
+rum and milk inside themselves (and in bottles) before taking their
+seats.
+
+It was colder and darker than before, and the South Pole seemed nearer,
+and pretty soon, but for the rum, we should have been in a worse fix
+than before.
+
+There was a spell of grumbling. Presently someone said:
+
+“I don't believe them horses was lost at all. I was round behind the
+stable before I went to bed, and seen horses there; and if they wasn't
+them same horses there, I'll eat 'em raw!”
+
+“Would yer?” said the driver, in a disinterested tone.
+
+“I would,” said the passenger. Then, with a sudden ferocity, “and you
+too!”
+
+The driver said nothing. It was an abstract question which didn't
+interest him.
+
+We saw that we were on delicate ground, and changed the subject for a
+while. Then someone else said:
+
+“I wonder where his missus was? I didn't see any signs of her about, or
+any other woman about the place, and we was pretty well all over it.”
+
+“Must have kept her in the stable,” suggested the Joker.
+
+“No, she wasn't, for Scotty and that chap on the roof was there after
+bags.”
+
+“She might have been in the loft,” reflected the Joker.
+
+“There was no loft,” put in a voice from the top of the coach.
+
+“I say, Mister--Mister man,” said the Joker suddenly to the driver, “Was
+his missus sick at all?”
+
+“I dunno,” replied the driver. “She might have been. He said so, anyway.
+I ain't got no call to call a man a liar.”
+
+“See here,” said the cannibalistic individual to the driver, in the tone
+of a man who has made up his mind for a row, “has that shanty-keeper got
+a wife at all?”
+
+“I believe he has.”
+
+“And is she living with him?”
+
+“No, she ain't--if yer wanter know.”
+
+“Then where is she?”
+
+“I dunno. How am I to know? She left him three or four years ago. She
+was in Sydney last time I heard of her. It ain't no affair of mine,
+anyways.”
+
+“And is there any woman about the place at all, driver?” inquired a
+professional wanderer reflectively.
+
+“No--not that I knows on. There useter be a old black gin come pottering
+round sometimes, but I ain't seen her lately.”
+
+“And excuse me, driver, but is there anyone round there at all?”
+ enquired the professional wanderer, with the air of a conscientious
+writer, collecting material for an Australian novel from life, with an
+eye to detail.
+
+“Naw,” said the driver--and recollecting that he was expected to be
+civil and obliging to his employers' patrons, he added in surly apology,
+“Only the boss and the stableman, that I knows of.” Then repenting
+of the apology, he asserted his manhood again, and asked, in a
+tone calculated to risk a breach of the peace, “Any more questions,
+gentlemen--while the shop's open?”
+
+There was a long pause.
+
+“Driver,” asked the Pilgrim appealingly, “was them horses lost at all?”
+
+“I dunno,” said the driver. “He said they was. He's got the looking
+after them. It was nothing to do with me.”
+
+    .   .   .   .   .
+
+“Twelve drinks at sixpence a drink”--said the Joker, as if calculating
+to himself--“that's six bob, and, say on an average, four shouts--that's
+one pound four. Twelve beds at eighteenpence a bed--that's eighteen
+shillings; and say ten bob in various drinks and the stuff we brought
+with us, that's two pound twelve. That publican didn't do so bad out of
+us in two hours.”
+
+We wondered how much the driver got out of it, but thought it best not
+to ask him.
+
+    .   .   .   .   .
+
+We didn't say much for the rest of the journey. There was the usual man
+who thought as much and knew all about it from the first, but he
+wasn't appreciated. We suppressed him. One or two wanted to go back and
+“stoush” that landlord, and the driver stopped the coach cheerfully at
+their request; but they said they'd come across him again and allowed
+themselves to be persuaded out of it. It made us feel bad to think how
+we had allowed ourselves to be delayed, and robbed, and had sneaked
+round on tiptoe, and how we had sat on the inoffensive Pilgrim and his
+mate, and all on account of a sick wife who didn't exist.
+
+The coach arrived at Dead Camel in an atmosphere of mutual suspicion and
+distrust, and we spread ourselves over the train and departed.
+
+
+
+
+A Gentleman Sharper and Steelman Sharper
+
+
+
+Steelman and Smith had been staying at the hotel for several days in the
+dress and character of bushies down for what they considered a spree.
+The gentleman sharper from the Other Side had been hanging round
+them for three days now. Steelman was the more sociable, and, to all
+appearances, the greener of the two bush mates; but seemed rather
+too much under the influence of Smith, who was reserved, suspicious,
+self-contained, or sulky. He almost scowled at Gentleman Sharper's
+“Good-morning!” and “Fine day!”, replied in monosyllables and turned
+half away with an uneasy, sullen, resentful hump of his shoulder and
+shuffle of his feet.
+
+Steelman took Smith for a stroll on the round, bald tussock hills
+surrounding the city, and rehearsed him for the last act until after
+sundown.
+
+Gentleman Sharper was lounging, with a cigar, on the end of the balcony,
+where he had been contentedly contemplating the beautiful death of day.
+His calm, classic features began to whiten (and sharpen) in the frosty
+moonlight.
+
+Steelman and Smith sat on deck-chairs behind a half-screen of ferns
+on the other end of the balcony, smoked their after-dinner smoke, and
+talked in subdued tones as befitted the time and the scene--great,
+softened, misty hills in a semicircle, and the water and harbour lights
+in moonlight.
+
+The other boarders were loitering over dinner, in their rooms, or gone
+out; the three were alone on the balcony, which was a rear one.
+
+Gentleman Sharper moved his position, carelessly, noiselessly, yet
+quickly, until he leaned on the rail close to the ferns and could
+overhear every word the bushies said. He had dropped his cigar
+overboard, and his scented handkerchief behind a fern-pot en route.
+
+“But he looks all right, and acts all right, and talks all right--and
+shouts all right,” protested Steelman. “He's not stumped, for I saw
+twenty or thirty sovereigns when he shouted; and he doesn't seem to care
+a damn whether we stand in with him or not.”
+
+“There you are! That's just where it is!” said Smith, with some
+logic, but in a tone a wife uses in argument (which tone, by the way,
+especially if backed by logic or common sense, makes a man wild sooner
+than anything else in this world of troubles).
+
+Steelman jerked his chair half-round in disgust. “That's you!” he
+snorted, “always suspicious! Always suspicious of everybody and
+everything! If I found myself shot into a world where I couldn't trust
+anybody I'd shoot myself out of it. Life would be worse than not worth
+living. Smith, you'll never make money, except by hard graft--hard,
+bullocking, nigger-driving graft like we had on that damned railway
+section for the last six months, up to our knees in water all winter,
+and all for a paltry cheque of one-fifty--twenty of that gone already.
+How do you expect to make money in this country if you won't take
+anything for granted, except hard cash? I tell you, Smith, there's
+a thousand pounds lost for every one gained or saved by trusting too
+little. How did Vanderbilt and----”
+
+Steelman elaborated to a climax, slipping a glance warily, once or
+twice, out of the tail of his eye through the ferns, low down.
+
+“There never was a fortune made that wasn't made by chancing it.”
+
+He nudged Smith to come to the point. Presently Smith asked, sulkily:
+
+“Well, what was he saying?”
+
+“I thought I told you! He says he's behind the scenes in this gold boom,
+and, if he had a hundred pounds ready cash to-morrow, he'd make three of
+it before Saturday. He said he could put one-fifty to one-fifty.”
+
+“And isn't he worth three hundred?”
+
+“Didn't I tell you,” demanded Steelman, with an impatient ring, and
+speaking rapidly, “that he lost his mail in the wreck of the 'Tasman'?
+You know she went down the day before yesterday, and the divers haven't
+got at the mails yet.”
+
+“Yes.... But why doesn't he wire to Sydney for some stuff?”
+
+“I'm----! Well, I suppose I'll have to have patience with a born
+natural. Look here, Smith, the fact of the matter is that he's a sort of
+black-sheep--sent out on the remittance system, if the truth is known,
+and with letters of introduction to some big-bugs out here--that
+explains how he gets to know these wire-pullers behind the boom. His
+people have probably got the quarterly allowance business fixed hard
+and tight with a bank or a lawyer in Sydney; and there'll have to be
+enquiries about the lost 'draft' (as he calls a cheque) and a letter or
+maybe a cable home to England; and it might take weeks.”
+
+“Yes,” said Smith, hesitatingly. “That all sounds right enough.
+But”--with an inspiration--“why don't he go to one of these big-bug
+boomsters he knows--that he got letters of introduction to--and get him
+to fix him up?”
+
+“Oh, Lord!” exclaimed Steelman, hopelessly. “Listen to him! Can't you
+see that they're the last men he wants to let into his game? Why, he
+wants to use THEM! They're the mugs as far as he is concerned!”
+
+“Oh--I see!” said Smith, after hesitating, and rather slowly--as if he
+hadn't quite finished seeing yet.
+
+Steelman glanced furtively at the fern-screen, and nudged Smith again.
+
+“He said if he had three hundred, he'd double it by Saturday?”
+
+“That's what he said,” replied Steelman, seeming by his tone to be
+losing interest in the conversation.
+
+“And... well, if he had a hundred he could double that, I suppose.”
+
+“Yes. What are you driving at now?”
+
+“If he had twenty----”
+
+“Oh, God! I'm sick of you, Smith. What the----!”
+
+“Hold on. Let me finish. I was only going to say that I'm willing to put
+up a fiver, and you put up another fiver, and if he doubles that for us
+then we can talk about standing in with him with a hundred--provided he
+can show his hundred.”
+
+After some snarling Steelman said: “Well, I'll try him! Now are you
+satisfied?”...
+
+“He's moved off now,” he added in a whisper; “but stay here and talk a
+bit longer.”
+
+Passing through the hall they saw Gentleman Sharper standing carelessly
+by the door of the private bar. He jerked his head in the direction of
+drinks. Steelman accepted the invitation--Smith passed on. Steelman took
+the opportunity to whisper to the Sharper--“I've been talking that over
+with my mate, and----”
+
+“Come for a stroll,” suggested the professional.
+
+“I don't mind,” said Steelman.
+
+“Have a cigar?” and they passed out.
+
+When they returned Steelman went straight to the room he occupied with
+Smith.
+
+“How much stuff have we got, Smith?”
+
+“Nine pounds seventeen and threepence.”
+
+Steelman gave an exclamation of disapproval with that state of financial
+affairs. He thought a second. “I know the barman here, and I think he
+knows me. I'll chew his lug for a bob or may be a quid.”
+
+Twenty minutes later he went to Gentleman Sharper's room with ten
+pounds--in very dirty Bank of New Zealand notes--such as those with
+which bush contractors pay their men.
+
+Two mornings later the sharper suggested a stroll. Steelman went with
+him, with a face carefully made up to hear the worst.
+
+After walking a hundred yards in a silence which might have been
+ominous--and was certainly pregnant--the sharper said:
+
+“Well... I tried the water.”
+
+“Yes!” said Steelman in a nervous tone. “And how did you find it?”
+
+“Just as warm as I thought. Warm for a big splash.”
+
+“How? Did you lose the ten quid?”
+
+“Lose it! What did you take me for? I put ten to your ten as I told you
+I would. I landed 50 Pounds----”
+
+“Fifty pounds for twenty?”
+
+“That's the tune of it--and not much of a tune, either. My God! If I'd
+only had that thousand of mine by me, or even half of it, I'd have made
+a pile!”
+
+“Fifty pounds for twenty!” cried Steelman excitedly. “Why, that's grand!
+And to think we chaps have been grafting like niggers all our lives! By
+God, we'll stand in with you for all we've got!”
+
+“There's my hand on it,” as they reached the hotel.
+
+“If you come to my room I'll give you the 25 Pounds now, if you like.”
+
+“Oh, that's all right,” exclaimed Steelman impulsively; “you mustn't
+think I don't----”
+
+“That's all right. Don't you say any more about it. You'd best have the
+stuff to-night to show your mate.”
+
+“Perhaps so; he's a suspicious fool, but I made a bargain with him about
+our last cheque. He can hang on to the stuff, and I can't. If I'd been
+on my own I'd have blued it a week ago. Tell you what I'll do--we'll
+call our share (Smith's and mine) twenty quid. You take the odd fiver
+for your trouble.”
+
+“That looks fair enough. We'll call it twenty guineas to you and your
+mate. We'll want him, you know.”
+
+In his own and Smith's room Steelman thoughtfully counted twenty-one
+sovereigns on the toilet-table cover, and left them there in a pile.
+
+He stretched himself, scratched behind his ear, and blinked at the money
+abstractedly. Then he asked, as if the thought just occurred to him: “By
+the way, Smith, do you see those yellow boys?”
+
+Smith saw. He had been sitting on the bed with a studiously vacant
+expression. It was Smith's policy not to seem, except by request, to
+take any interest in, or, in fact, to be aware of anything unusual that
+Steelman might be doing--from patching his pants to reading poetry.
+
+“There's twenty-one sovereigns there!” remarked Steelman casually.
+
+“Yes?”
+
+“Ten of 'em's yours.”
+
+“Thank yer, Steely.”
+
+“And,” added Steelman, solemnly and grimly, “if you get taken down for
+'em, or lose 'em out of the top-hole in your pocket, or spend so much as
+a shilling in riotous living, I'll stoush you, Smith.”
+
+Smith didn't seem interested. They sat on the beds opposite each other
+for two or three minutes, in something of the atmosphere that pervades
+things when conversation has petered out and the dinner-bell is expected
+to ring. Smith screwed his face and squeezed a pimple on his throat;
+Steelman absently counted the flies on the wall. Presently Steelman,
+with a yawning sigh, lay back on the pillow with his hands clasped under
+his head.
+
+“Better take a few quid, Smith, and get that suit you were looking
+at the other day. Get a couple of shirts and collars, and some socks;
+better get a hat while you're at it--yours is a disgrace to your
+benefactor. And, I say, go to a chemist and get some cough stuff for
+that churchyarder of yours--we've got no use for it just now, and it
+makes me sentimental. I'll give you a cough when you want one. Bring me
+a syphon of soda, some fruit, and a tract.”
+
+“A what?”
+
+“A tract. Go on. Start your boots.”
+
+While Smith was gone, Steelman paced the room with a strange, worried,
+haunted expression. He divided the gold that was left--(Smith had taken
+four pounds)--and put ten sovereigns in a pile on the extreme corner
+of the table. Then he walked up and down, up and down the room, arms
+tightly folded, and forehead knitted painfully, pausing abruptly now
+and then by the table to stare at the gold, until he heard Smith's step.
+Then his face cleared; he sat down and counted flies.
+
+Smith was undoing and inspecting the parcels, having placed the syphon
+and fruit on the table. Behind his back Steelman hurriedly opened a
+leather pocketbook and glanced at the portrait of a woman and child and
+at the date of a post-office order receipt.
+
+“Smith,” said Steelman, “we're two honest, ignorant, green coves;
+hard-working chaps from the bush.”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“It doesn't matter whether we are or not--we are as far as the world
+is concerned. Now we've grafted like bullocks, in heat and wet, for six
+months, and made a hundred and fifty, and come down to have a bit of a
+holiday before going back to bullock for another six months or a year.
+Isn't that so, Smith?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“You could take your oath on it?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Well, it doesn't matter if it is so or not--it IS so, so far as the
+world is concerned. Now we've paid our way straight. We've always been
+pretty straight anyway, even if we are a pair of vagabonds, and I don't
+half like this new business; but it had to be done. If I hadn't taken
+down that sharper you'd have lost confidence in me and wouldn't have
+been able to mask your feelings, and I'd have had to stoush you. We're
+two hard-working, innocent bushies, down for an innocent spree, and we
+run against a cold-blooded professional sharper, a paltry sneak and
+a coward, who's got neither the brains nor the pluck to work in the
+station of life he togs himself for. He tries to do us out of our
+hard-earned little hundred and fifty--no matter whether we had it or
+not--and I'm obliged to take him down. Serve him right for a crawler.
+You haven't the least idea what I'm driving at, Smith, and that's the
+best of it. I've driven a nail of my life home, and no pincers ever made
+will get it out.”
+
+“Why, Steely, what's the matter with you?”
+
+Steelman rose, took up the pile of ten sovereigns, and placed it neatly
+on top of the rest.
+
+“Put the stuff away, Smith.”
+
+After breakfast next morning, Gentleman Sharper hung round a bit, and
+then suggested a stroll. But Steelman thought the weather looked
+too bad, so they went on the balcony for a smoke. They talked of the
+weather, wrecks, and things, Steelman leaning with his elbows on the
+balcony rail, and Sharper sociably and confidently in the same position
+close beside him. But the professional was evidently growing uneasy in
+his mind; his side of the conversation grew awkward and disjointed,
+and he made the blunder of drifting into an embarrassing silence before
+coming to the point. He took one elbow from the rail, and said, with a
+bungling attempt at carelessness which was made more transparent by the
+awkward pause before it:
+
+“Ah, well, I must see to my correspondence. By the way, when could you
+make it convenient to let me have that hundred? The shares are starting
+up the last rise now, and we've got no time to lose if we want to double
+it.”
+
+Steelman turned his face to him and winked once--a very hard, tight,
+cold wink--a wink in which there was no humour: such a wink as Steelman
+had once winked at a half-drunken bully who was going to have a lark
+with Smith.
+
+The sharper was one of those men who pull themselves together in a bad
+cause, as they stagger from the blow. But he wanted to think this time.
+
+Later on he approached Steelman quietly and proposed partnership. But
+Steelman gave him to understand (as between themselves) that he wasn't
+taking on any pupils just then.
+
+
+
+
+An Incident at Stiffner's
+
+
+
+They called him “Stiffner” because he used, long before, to get a living
+by poisoning wild dogs near the Queensland border. The name stuck to
+him closer than misfortune did, for when he rose to the proud and
+independent position of landlord and sole proprietor of an out-back pub
+he was Stiffner still, and his place was “Stiffner's”--widely known.
+
+They do say that the name ceased not to be applicable--that it fitted
+even better than in the old dingo days, but--well, they do say so. All
+we can say is that when a shearer arrived with a cheque, and had a drink
+or two, he was almost invariably seized with a desire to camp on the
+premises for good, spend his cheque in the shortest possible time, and
+forcibly shout for everything within hail--including the Chinaman cook
+and Stiffner's disreputable old ram.
+
+The shanty was of the usual kind, and the scenery is as easily disposed
+of. There was a great grey plain stretching away from the door in front,
+and a mulga scrub from the rear; and in that scrub, not fifty yards from
+the kitchen door, were half a dozen nameless graves.
+
+Stiffner was always drunk, and Stiffner's wife--a hard-featured
+Amazon--was boss. The children were brought up in a detached cottage,
+under the care of a “governess”.
+
+Stiffner had a barmaid as a bait for chequemen. She came from Sydney,
+they said, and her name was Alice. She was tall, boyishly handsome, and
+characterless; her figure might be described as “fine” or “strapping”,
+but her face was very cold--nearly colourless. She was one of those
+selfishly sensual women--thin lips, and hard, almost vacant grey eyes;
+no thought of anything but her own pleasures, none for the man's. Some
+shearers would roughly call her “a squatter's girl”. But she “drew”;
+she was handsome where women are scarce--very handsome, thought a
+tall, melancholy-looking jackeroo, whose evil spirit had drawn him to
+Stiffner's and the last shilling out of his pocket.
+
+Over the great grey plain, about a fortnight before, had come “Old
+Danny”, a station hand, for his semi-annual spree, and one “Yankee Jack”
+ and his mate, shearers with horses, travelling for grass; and, about a
+week later, the Sydney jackeroo. There was also a sprinkling of assorted
+swagmen, who came in through the scrub and went out across the plain,
+or came in over the plain and went away through the scrub, according to
+which way their noses led them for the time being.
+
+There was also, for one day, a tall, freckled native (son of a
+neighbouring “cocky”), without a thought beyond the narrow horizon
+within which he lived. He had a very big opinion of himself in a very
+small mind. He swaggered into the breakfast-room and round the table to
+his place with an expression of ignorant contempt on his phiz, his
+snub nose in the air and his under lip out. But during the meal he
+condescended to ask the landlord if he'd noticed that there horse that
+chap was ridin' yesterday; and Stiffner having intimated that he had,
+the native entertained the company with his opinion of that horse, and
+of a certain “youngster” he was breaking in at home, and divers other
+horses, mostly his or his father's, and of a certain cattle slut, &c....
+He spoke at the landlord, but to the company, most of the time. After
+breakfast he swaggered round some more, but condescended to “shove”
+ his hand into his trousers, “pull” out a “bob” and “chuck” it into the
+(blanky) hat for a pool. Those words express the thing better than any
+others we can think of. Finally, he said he must be off; and, there
+being no opposition to his departure, he chucked his saddle on to his
+horse, chucked himself into the saddle, said “s'long,” and slithered
+off. And no one missed him.
+
+Danny had been there a fortnight, and consequently his personal
+appearance was not now worth describing--it was better left alone,
+for the honour of the bush. His hobby was that he was the “stranger's
+friend”, as he put it. He'd welcome “the stranger” and chum with him,
+and shout for him to an unlimited extent, and sympathise with him, hear
+of jobs or a “show” for him, assure him twenty times a day that he was
+his friend, give him hints and advice more or less worthless, make him
+drunk if possible, and keep him so while the cheque lasted; in short,
+Danny would do almost anything for the stranger except lend him a
+shilling, or give him some rations to carry him on. He'd promise that
+many times a day, but he'd sooner spend five pounds on drink for a man
+than give him a farthing.
+
+Danny's cheque was nearly gone, and it was time he was gone too; in
+fact, he had received, and was still receiving, various hints to that
+effect, some of them decidedly pointed, especially the more recent ones.
+But Danny was of late becoming foolishly obstinate in his sprees, and
+less disposed to “git” when a landlord had done with him. He saw the
+hints plainly enough, but had evidently made up his mind to be doggedly
+irresponsive. It is a mistake to think that drink always dulls a
+man's feelings. Some natures are all the more keenly sensitive when
+alcoholically poisoned.
+
+Danny was always front man at the shanty while his cheque was fresh--at
+least, so he was given to understand, and so he apparently understood.
+He was then allowed to say and do what he liked almost, even to mauling
+the barmaid about. There was scarcely any limit to the free and easy
+manner in which you could treat her, so long as your money lasted. She
+wouldn't be offended; it wasn't business to be so--“didn't pay.” But, as
+soon as your title to the cheque could be decently shelved, you had to
+treat her like a lady. Danny knew this--none better; but he had been
+treated with too much latitude, and rushed to his destruction.
+
+It was Sunday afternoon, but that made no difference in things at the
+shanty. Dinner was just over. The men were in the mean little parlour
+off the bar, interested in a game of cards, and Alice sat in one corner
+sewing. Danny was “acting the goat” round the fireplace; as ill-luck
+would have it, his attention was drawn to a basket of clean linen which
+stood on the side table, and from it, with sundry winks and grimaces,
+he gingerly lifted a certain garment of ladies' underwear--to put the
+matter decently. He held it up between his forefingers and thumbs, and
+cracked a rough, foolish joke--no matter what it was. The laugh didn't
+last long. Alice sprang to her feet, flinging her work aside, and struck
+a stage attitude--her right arm thrown out and the forefinger pointing
+rigidly, and rather crookedly, towards the door.
+
+“Leave the room!” she snapped at Danny. “Leave the room! How dare you
+talk like that before me-e-ee!”
+
+Danny made a step and paused irresolutely. He was sober enough to feel
+the humiliation of his position, and having once been a man of spirit,
+and having still the remnants of manhood about him, he did feel it. He
+gave one pitiful, appealing look at her face, but saw no mercy there.
+She stamped her foot again, jabbed her forefinger at the door, and said,
+“Go-o-o!” in a tone that startled the majority of the company nearly as
+much as it did Danny. Then Yankee Jack threw down his cards, rose from
+the table, laid his strong, shapely right hand--not roughly--on Danny's
+ragged shoulder, and engineered the drunk gently through the door.
+
+“You's better go out for a while, Danny,” he said; “there wasn't much
+harm in what you said, but your cheque's gone, and that makes all the
+difference. It's time you went back to the station. You've got to be
+careful what you say now.”
+
+When Jack returned to the parlour the barmaid had a smile for him; but
+he didn't take it. He went and stood before the fire, with his foot
+resting on the fender and his elbow on the mantelshelf, and looked
+blackly at a print against the wall before his face.
+
+“The old beast!” said Alice, referring to Danny. “He ought to be kicked
+off the place!”
+
+“HE'S AS GOOD AS YOU!”
+
+The voice was Jack's; he flung the stab over his shoulder, and with it a
+look that carried all the contempt he felt.
+
+She gasped, looked blankly from face to face, and witheringly at the
+back of Jack's head; but that didn't change colour or curl the least
+trifle less closely.
+
+“Did you hear that?” she cried, appealing to anyone. “You're a nice lot
+o' men, you are, to sit there and hear a woman insulted, and not one of
+you man enough to take her part--cowards!”
+
+The Sydney jackeroo rose impulsively, but Jack glanced at him, and he
+sat down again. She covered her face with her hands and ran hysterically
+to her room.
+
+That afternoon another bushman arrived with a cheque, and shouted five
+times running at a pound a shout, and at intervals during the rest of
+the day when they weren't fighting or gambling.
+
+Alice had “got over her temper” seemingly, and was even kind to the
+humble and contrite Danny, who became painfully particular with his
+“Thanky, Alice”--and afterwards offensive with his unnecessarily
+frequent threats to smash the first man who insulted her.
+
+But let us draw the curtain close before that Sunday afternoon at
+Stiffner's, and hold it tight. Behind it the great curse of the West is
+in evidence, the chief trouble of unionism--drink, in its most selfish,
+barren, and useless form.
+
+    .   .   .   .   .
+
+All was quiet at Stiffner's. It was after midnight, and Stiffner lay
+dead-drunk on the broad of his back on the long moonlit verandah,
+with all his patrons asleep around him in various grotesque positions.
+Stiffner's ragged grey head was on a cushion, and a broad maudlin smile
+on his red, drink-sodden face, the lower half of which was bordered by
+a dirty grey beard, like that of a frilled lizard. The red handkerchief
+twisted round his neck had a ghastly effect in the bright moonlight,
+making him look as if his throat was cut. The smile was the one he
+went to sleep with when his wife slipped the cushion under his head and
+thoughtfully removed the loose change from about his person. Near him
+lay a heap that was Danny, and spread over the bare boards were the
+others, some with heads pillowed on their swags, and every man about as
+drunk as his neighbour. Yankee Jack lay across the door of the barmaid's
+bedroom, with one arm bent under his head, the other lying limp on the
+doorstep, his handsome face turned out to the bright moonlight. The
+“family” were sound asleep in the detached cottage, and Alice--the only
+capable person on the premises--was left to put out the lamps and “shut
+up” for the night. She extinguished the light in the bar, came out,
+locked the door, and picked her way among and over the drunkards to the
+end of the verandah. She clasped her hands behind her head, stretched
+herself, and yawned, and then stood for a few moments looking out into
+the night, which softened the ragged line of mulga to right and
+left, and veiled the awful horizon of that great plain with which the
+“traveller” commenced, or ended, the thirty-mile “dry stretch”. Then she
+moved towards her own door; before it she halted and stood, with folded
+arms, looking down at the drunken Adonis at her feet.
+
+She breathed a long breath with a sigh in it, went round to the back,
+and presently returned with a buggy-cushion, which she slipped under his
+head--her face close to his--very close. Then she moved his arms gently
+off the threshold, stepped across him into her room, and locked the door
+behind her.
+
+There was an uneasy movement in the heap that stood, or lay, for Danny.
+It stretched out, turned over, struggled to its hands and knees, and
+became an object. Then it crawled to the wall, against which it
+slowly and painfully up-ended itself, and stood blinking round for
+the water-bag, which hung from the verandah rafters in a line with its
+shapeless red nose. It staggered forward, held on by the cords, felt
+round the edge of the bag for the tot, and drank about a quart of water.
+Then it staggered back against the wall, stood for a moment muttering
+and passing its hand aimlessly over its poor ruined head, and finally
+collapsed into a shapeless rum-smelling heap and slept once more.
+
+The jackeroo at the end of the verandah had awakened from his drunken
+sleep, but had not moved. He lay huddled on his side, with his head on
+the swag; the whole length of the verandah was before him; his eyes
+were wide open, but his face was in the shade. Now he rose painfully and
+stood on the ground outside, with his hands in his pockets, and gazed
+out over the open for a while. He breathed a long breath, too--with a
+groan in it. Then he lifted his swag quietly from the end of the floor,
+shouldered it, took up his water-bag and billy, and sneaked over the
+road, away from the place, like a thief. He struck across the plain, and
+tramped on, hour after hour, mile after mile, till the bright moon went
+down with a bright star in attendance and the other bright stars waned,
+and he entered the timber and tramped through it to the “cleared road”,
+which stretched far and wide for twenty miles before him, with ghostly
+little dust-clouds at short intervals ahead, where the frightened
+rabbits crossed it. And still he went doggedly on, with the ghastly
+daylight on him--like a swagman's ghost out late. And a mongrel followed
+faithfully all the time unnoticed, and wondering, perhaps, at his
+master.
+
+“What was yer doin' to that girl yesterday?” asked Danny of Yankee Jack
+next evening, as they camped on the far side of the plain. “What was you
+chaps sayin' to Alice? I heerd her cryin' in her room last night.”
+
+But they reckoned that he had been too drunk to hear anything except an
+invitation to come and have another drink; and so it passed.
+
+
+
+
+The Hero of Redclay
+
+
+
+The “boss-over-the-board” was leaning with his back to the wall between
+two shoots, reading a reference handed to him by a green-hand applying
+for work as picker-up or woolroller--a shed rouseabout. It was terribly
+hot. I was slipping past to the rolling-tables, carrying three fleeces
+to save a journey; we were only supposed to carry two. The boss stopped
+me:
+
+“You've got three fleeces there, young man?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+Notwithstanding the fact that I had just slipped a light ragged fleece
+into the belly-wool and “bits” basket, I felt deeply injured, and
+righteously and fiercely indignant at being pulled up. It was a
+fearfully hot day.
+
+“If I catch you carrying three fleeces again,” said the boss quietly,
+“I'll give you the sack.”
+
+“I'll take it now if you like,” I said.
+
+He nodded. “You can go on picking-up in this man's place,” he said
+to the jackeroo, whose reference showed him to be a non-union man--a
+“free-labourer”, as the pastoralists had it, or, in plain shed terms, “a
+blanky scab”. He was now in the comfortable position of a non-unionist
+in a union shed who had jumped into a sacked man's place.
+
+Somehow the lurid sympathy of the men irritated me worse than the
+boss-over-the-board had done. It must have been on account of the heat,
+as Mitchell says. I was sick of the shed and the life. It was within a
+couple of days of cut-out, so I told Mitchell--who was shearing--that
+I'd camp up the Billabong and wait for him; got my cheque, rolled up
+my swag, got three days' tucker from the cook, said so-long to him, and
+tramped while the men were in the shed.
+
+I camped at the head of the Billabong where the track branched, one
+branch running to Bourke, up the river, and the other out towards the
+Paroo--and hell.
+
+About ten o'clock the third morning Mitchell came along with his cheque
+and his swag, and a new sheep-pup, and his quiet grin; and I wasn't too
+pleased to see that he had a shearer called “the Lachlan” with him.
+
+The Lachlan wasn't popular at the shed. He was a brooding, unsociable
+sort of man, and it didn't make any difference to the chaps whether he
+had a union ticket or not. It was pretty well known in the shed--there
+were three or four chaps from the district he was reared in--that he'd
+done five years hard for burglary. What surprised me was that Jack
+Mitchell seemed thick with him; often, when the Lachlan was sitting
+brooding and smoking by himself outside the hut after sunset, Mitchell
+would perch on his heels alongside him and yarn. But no one else took
+notice of anything Mitchell did out of the common.
+
+“Better camp with us till the cool of the evening,” said Mitchell to
+the Lachlan, as they slipped their swags. “Plenty time for you to start
+after sundown, if you're going to travel to-night.”
+
+So the Lachlan was going to travel all night and on a different track. I
+felt more comfortable, and put the billy on. I did not care so much what
+he'd been or had done, but I was green and soft yet, and his presence
+embarrassed me.
+
+They talked shearing, sheds, tracks, and a little unionism--the Lachlan
+speaking in a quiet voice and with a lot of sound, common sense, it
+seemed to me. He was tall and gaunt, and might have been thirty, or even
+well on in the forties. His eyes were dark brown and deep set, and had
+something of the dead-earnest sad expression you saw in the eyes of
+union leaders and secretaries--the straight men of the strikes of '90
+and '91. I fancied once or twice I saw in his eyes the sudden furtive
+look of the “bad egg” when a mounted trooper is spotted near the shed;
+but perhaps this was prejudice. And with it all there was about the
+Lachlan something of the man who has lost all he had and the chances
+of all he was ever likely to have, and is past feeling, or caring, or
+flaring up--past getting mad about anything--something, all the same,
+that warned men not to make free with him.
+
+He and Mitchell fished along the Billabong all the afternoon; I fished
+a little, and lay about the camp and read. I had an instinct that the
+Lachlan saw I didn't cotton on to his camping with us, though he wasn't
+the sort of man to show what he saw or felt. After tea, and a smoke at
+sunset, he shouldered his swag, nodded to me as if I was an accidental
+but respectful stranger at a funeral that belonged to him, and took the
+outside track. Mitchell walked along the track with him for a mile or
+so, while I poked round and got some boughs down for a bed, and fed and
+studied the collie pup that Jack had bought from the shearers' cook.
+
+I saw them stop and shake hands out on the dusty clearing, and they
+seemed to take a long time about it; then Mitchell started back, and
+the other began to dwindle down to a black peg and then to a dot on the
+sandy plain, that had just a hint of dusk and dreamy far-away gloaming
+on it between the change from glaring day to hard, bare, broad
+moonlight.
+
+I thought Mitchell was sulky, or had got the blues, when he came back;
+he lay on his elbow smoking, with his face turned from the camp towards
+the plain. After a bit I got wild--if Mitchell was going to go on like
+that he might as well have taken his swag and gone with the Lachlan. I
+don't know exactly what was the matter with me that day, and at last I
+made up my mind to bring the thing to a head.
+
+“You seem mighty thick with the Lachlan,” I said.
+
+“Well, what's the matter with that?” asked Mitchell. “It ain't the first
+felon I've been on speaking terms with. I borrowed half-a-caser off a
+murderer once, when I was in a hole and had no one else to go to; and
+the murderer hadn't served his time, neither. I've got nothing against
+the Lachlan, except that he's a white man and bears a faint family
+resemblance to a certain branch of my tribe.”
+
+I rolled out my swag on the boughs, got my pipe, tobacco, and matches
+handy in the crown of a spare hat, and lay down.
+
+Mitchell got up, re-lit his pipe at the fire, and mooned round for
+a while, with his hands behind him, kicking sticks out of the road,
+looking out over the plain, down along the Billabong, and up through the
+mulga branches at the stars; then he comforted the pup a bit, shoved the
+fire together with his toe, stood the tea-billy on the coals, and came
+and squatted on the sand by my head.
+
+“Joe! I'll tell you a yarn.”
+
+“All right; fire away! Has it got anything to do with the Lachlan?”
+
+“No. It's got nothing to do with the Lachlan now; but it's about a chap
+he knew. Don't you ever breathe a word of this to the Lachlan or anyone,
+or he'll get on to me.”
+
+“All right. Go ahead.”
+
+“You know I've been a good many things in my time. I did a deal of
+house-painting at one time; I was a pretty smart brush hand, and made
+money at it. Well, I had a run of work at a place called Redclay, on the
+Lachlan side. You know the sort of town--two pubs, a general store, a
+post office, a blacksmith's shop, a police station, a branch bank, and
+a dozen private weatherboard boxes on piles, with galvanized-iron tops,
+besides the humpies. There was a paper there, too, called the 'Redclay
+Advertiser' (with which was incorporated the 'Geebung Chronicle'), and
+a Roman Catholic church, a Church of England, and a Wesleyan chapel.
+Now you see more of private life in the house-painting line than in
+any other--bar plumbing and gasfitting; but I'll tell you about my
+house-painting experiences some other time.
+
+“There was a young chap named Jack Drew editing the 'Advertiser' then.
+He belonged to the district, but had been sent to Sydney to a grammar
+school when he was a boy. He was between twenty-five and thirty; had
+knocked round a good deal, and gone the pace in Sydney. He got on as a
+boy reporter on one of the big dailies; he had brains and could
+write rings round a good many, but he got in with a crowd that called
+themselves 'Bohemians', and the drink got a hold on him. The paper stuck
+to him as long as it could (for the sake of his brains), but they had to
+sack him at last.
+
+“He went out back, as most of them do, to try and work out their
+salvation, and knocked round amongst the sheds. He 'picked up' in one
+shed where I was shearing, and we carried swags together for a couple
+of months. Then he went back to the Lachlan side, and prospected amongst
+the old fields round there with his elder brother Tom, who was all there
+was left of his family. Tom, by the way, broke his heart digging Jack
+out of a cave in a drive they were working, and died a few minutes after
+the rescue. [*] But that's another yarn. Jack Drew had a bad spree after
+that; then he went to Sydney again, got on his old paper, went to the
+dogs, and a Parliamentary push that owned some city fly-blisters and
+country papers sent him up to edit the 'Advertiser' at two quid a
+week. He drank again, and no wonder--you don't know what it is to run a
+'Geebung Advocate' or 'Mudgee Budgee Chronicle', and live there. He was
+about the same build as the Lachlan, but stouter, and had something the
+same kind of eyes; but he was ordinarily as careless and devil-may-care
+as the Lachlan is grumpy and quiet.
+
+     * See “When the Sun Went Down”, in “While the
+       Billy Boils”.--
+
+“There was a doctor there, called Dr. Lebinski. They said he was a
+Polish exile. He was fifty or sixty, a tall man, with the set of an
+old soldier when he stood straight; but he mostly walked with his hands
+behind him, studying the ground. Jack Drew caught that trick off
+him towards the end. They were chums in a gloomy way, and kept to
+themselves--they were the only two men with brains in that town. They
+drank and fought the drink together. The Doctor was too gloomy and
+impatient over little things to be popular. Jack Drew talked too
+straight in the paper, and in spite of his proprietors--about pub
+spieling and such things--and was too sarcastic in his progress
+committee, town council, and toady reception reports. The Doctor had a
+hawk's nose, pointed grizzled beard and moustache, and steely-grey eyes
+with a haunted look in them sometimes (especially when he glanced at you
+sideways), as if he loathed his fellow men, and couldn't always hide it;
+or as if you were the spirit of morphia or opium, or a dead girl he'd
+wronged in his youth--or whatever his devil was, beside drink. He was
+clever, and drink had brought him down to Redclay.
+
+“The bank manager was a heavy snob named Browne. He complained of being
+a bit dull of hearing in one ear--after you'd yelled at him three or
+four times; sometimes I've thought he was as deaf as a book-keeper in
+both. He had a wife and youngsters, but they were away on a visit while
+I was working in Redclay. His niece--or, rather, his wife's niece--a
+girl named Ruth Wilson, did the housekeeping. She was an orphan,
+adopted by her aunt, and was general slavey and scape-goat to the
+family--especially to the brats, as is often the case. She was rather
+pretty, and lady-like, and kept to herself. The women and girls called
+her Miss Wilson, and didn't like her. Most of the single men--and some
+of the married ones, perhaps--were gone on her, but hadn't the brains
+or the pluck to bear up and try their luck. I was gone worse than any, I
+think, but had too much experience or common sense. She was very good to
+me--used to hand me out cups of tea and plates of sandwiches, or bread
+and butter, or cake, mornings and afternoons the whole time I was
+painting the bank. The Doctor had known her people and was very kind
+to her. She was about the only woman--for she was more woman than
+girl--that he'd brighten up and talk for. Neither he nor Jack Drew were
+particularly friendly with Browne or his push.
+
+“The banker, the storekeeper, one of the publicans, the butcher (a
+popular man with his hands in his pockets, his hat on the back of his
+head, and nothing in it), the postmaster, and his toady, the lightning
+squirter, were the scrub-aristocracy. The rest were crawlers, mostly pub
+spielers and bush larrikins, and the women were hags and larrikinesses.
+The town lived on cheque-men from the surrounding bush. It was a nice
+little place, taking it all round.
+
+“I remember a ball at the local town hall, where the scrub aristocrats
+took one end of the room to dance in and the ordinary scum the other.
+It was a saving in music. Some day an Australian writer will come along
+who'll remind the critics and readers of Dickens, Carlyle, and Thackeray
+mixed, and he'll do justice to these little customs of ours in the
+little settled-district towns of Democratic Australia. This sort of
+thing came to a head one New Year's Night at Redclay, when there was a
+'public' ball and peace on earth and good will towards all men--mostly
+on account of a railway to Redclay being surveyed. We were all there.
+They'd got the Doc. out of his shell to act as M.C.
+
+“One of the aristocrats was the daughter of the local storekeeper;
+she belonged to the lawn-tennis clique, and they WERE select. For some
+reason or other--because she looked upon Miss Wilson as a slavey, or
+on account of a fancied slight, or the heat working on ignorance, or on
+account of something that comes over girls and women that no son of sin
+can account for--this Miss Tea-'n'-sugar tossed her head and refused
+Miss Wilson's hand in the first set and so broke the ladies' chain and
+the dance. Then there was a to-do. The Doctor held up his hand to stop
+the music, and said, very quietly, that he must call upon Miss So-and-so
+to apologise to Miss Wilson--or resign the chair. After a lot of fuss
+the girl did apologise in a snappy way that was another insult. Jack
+Drew gave Miss Wilson his arm and marched her off without a word--I saw
+she was almost crying. Some one said, 'Oh, let's go on with the dance.'
+The Doctor flashed round on them, but they were too paltry for him, so
+he turned on his heel and went out without a word. But I was beneath
+them again in social standing, so there was nothing to prevent me from
+making a few well-chosen remarks on things in general--which I did; and
+broke up that ball, and broke some heads afterwards, and got myself a
+good deal of hatred and respect, and two sweethearts; and lost all the
+jobs I was likely to get, except at the bank, the Doctor's, and the
+Royal.
+
+“One day it was raining--general rain for a week. Rain, rain, rain, over
+ridge and scrub and galvanised iron and into the dismal creeks. I'd done
+all my inside work, except a bit under the Doctor's verandah, where he'd
+been having some patching and altering done round the glass doors of his
+surgery, where he consulted his patients. I didn't want to lose time. It
+was a Monday and no day for the Royal, and there was no dust, so it was
+a good day for varnishing. I took a pot and brush and went along to give
+the Doctor's doors a coat of varnish. The Doctor and Drew were inside
+with a fire, drinking whisky and smoking, but I didn't know that when
+I started work. The rain roared on the iron roof like the sea. All of a
+sudden it held up for a minute, and I heard their voices. The doctor
+had been shouting on account of the rain, and forgot to lower his voice.
+'Look here, Jack Drew,' he said, 'there are only two things for you
+to do if you have any regard for that girl; one is to stop this' (the
+liquor I suppose he meant) 'and pull yourself together; and I don't
+think you'll do that--I know men. The other is to throw up the
+'Advertiser'--it's doing you no good--and clear out.' 'I won't do that,'
+says Drew. 'Then shoot yourself,' said the Doctor. '(There's another
+flask in the cupboard). You know what this hole is like.... She's a good
+true girl--a girl as God made her. I knew her father and mother, and I
+tell you, Jack, I'd sooner see her dead than....' The roof roared again.
+I felt a bit delicate about the business and didn't like to disturb
+them, so I knocked off for the day.
+
+“About a week before that I was down in the bed of the Redclay Creek
+fishing for 'tailers'. I'd been getting on all right with the housemaid
+at the 'Royal'--she used to have plates of pudding and hot pie for me on
+the big gridiron arrangement over the kitchen range; and after the third
+tuck-out I thought it was good enough to do a bit of a bear-up in that
+direction. She mentioned one day, yarning, that she liked a stroll by
+the creek sometimes in the cool of the evening. I thought she'd be off
+that day, so I said I'd go for a fish after I'd knocked off. I thought
+I might get a bite. Anyway, I didn't catch Lizzie--tell you about that
+some other time.
+
+“It was Sunday. I'd been fishing for Lizzie about an hour when I saw a
+skirt on the bank out of the tail of my eye--and thought I'd got a bite,
+sure. But I was had. It was Miss Wilson strolling along the bank in the
+sunset, all by her pretty self. She was a slight girl, not very tall,
+with reddish frizzled hair, grey eyes, and small, pretty features. She
+spoke as if she had more brains than the average, and had been better
+educated. Jack Drew was the only young man in Redclay she could talk to,
+or who could talk to a girl like her; and that was the whole trouble in
+a nutshell. The newspaper office was next to the bank, and I'd seen her
+hand cups of tea and cocoa over the fence to his office window more than
+once, and sometimes they yarned for a while.
+
+“She said, 'Good morning, Mr. Mitchell.'
+
+“I said, 'Good morning, Miss.'
+
+“There's some girls I can't talk to like I'd talk to other girls. She
+asked me if I'd caught any fish, and I said, 'No, Miss.' She asked me if
+it wasn't me down there fishing with Mr. Drew the other evening, and I
+said, 'Yes--it was me.' Then presently she asked me straight if he
+was fishing down the creek that afternoon? I guessed they'd been down
+fishing for each other before. I said, 'No, I thought he was out of
+town.' I knew he was pretty bad at the Royal. I asked her if she'd like
+to have a try with my line, but she said No, thanks, she must be going;
+and she went off up the creek. I reckoned Jack Drew had got a bite and
+landed her. I felt a bit sorry for her, too.
+
+“The next Saturday evening after the rainy Monday at the Doctor's, I
+went down to fish for tailers--and Lizzie. I went down under the banks
+to where there was a big she-oak stump half in the water, going quietly,
+with an idea of not frightening the fish. I was just unwinding the line
+from my rod, when I noticed the end of another rod sticking out from
+the other side of the stump; and while I watched it was dropped into the
+water. Then I heard a murmur, and craned my neck round the back of
+the stump to see who it was. I saw the back view of Jack Drew and
+Miss Wilson; he had his arm round her waist, and her head was on his
+shoulder. She said, 'I WILL trust you, Jack--I know you'll give up the
+drink for my sake. And I'll help you, and we'll be so happy!' or words
+in that direction. A thunderstorm was coming on. The sky had darkened
+up with a great blue-black storm-cloud rushing over, and they hadn't
+noticed it. I didn't mind, and the fish bit best in a storm. But just
+as she said 'happy' came a blinding flash and a crash that shook the
+ridges, and the first drops came peltering down. They jumped up and
+climbed the bank, while I perched on the she-oak roots over the water to
+be out of sight as they passed. Half way to the town I saw them standing
+in the shelter of an old stone chimney that stood alone. He had his
+overcoat round her and was sheltering her from the wind....”
+
+“Smoke-oh, Joe. The tea's stewing.”
+
+Mitchell got up, stretched himself, and brought the billy and pint-pots
+to the head of my camp. The moon had grown misty. The plain horizon
+had closed in. A couple of boughs, hanging from the gnarled and blasted
+timber over the billabong, were the perfect shapes of two men hanging
+side by side. Mitchell scratched the back of his neck and looked down at
+the pup curled like a glob of mud on the sand in the moonlight, and an
+idea struck him. He got a big old felt hat he had, lifted his pup, nose
+to tail, fitted it in the hat, shook it down, holding the hat by the
+brim, and stood the hat near the head of his doss, out of the moonlight.
+“He might get moonstruck,” said Mitchell, “and I don't want that pup
+to be a genius.” The pup seemed perfectly satisfied with this new
+arrangement.
+
+“Have a smoke,” said Mitchell. “You see,” he added, with a sly grin,
+“I've got to make up the yarn as I go along, and it's hard work. It
+seems to begin to remind me of yarns your grandmother or aunt tells of
+things that happened when she was a girl--but those yarns are true. You
+won't have to listen long now; I'm well on into the second volume.
+
+“After the storm I hurried home to the tent--I was batching with a
+carpenter. I changed my clothes, made a fire in the fire-bucket with
+shavings and ends of soft wood, boiled the billy, and had a cup of
+coffee. It was Saturday night. My mate was at the Royal; it was cold and
+dismal in the tent, and there was nothing to read, so I reckoned I might
+as well go up to the Royal, too, and put in the time.
+
+“I had to pass the Bank on the way. It was the usual weatherboard box
+with a galvanised iron top--four rooms and a passage, and a detached
+kitchen and wash-house at the back; the front room to the right (behind
+the office) was the family bedroom, and the one opposite it was the
+living room. The 'Advertiser' office was next door. Jack Drew camped
+in a skillion room behind his printing office, and had his meals at the
+Royal. I noticed the storm had taken a sheet of iron off the
+skillion, and supposed he'd sleep at the Royal that night. Next to the
+'Advertiser' office was the police station (still called the Police
+Camp) and the Courthouse. Next was the Imperial Hotel, where the scrub
+aristocrats went. There was a vacant allotment on the other side of the
+Bank, and I took a short cut across this to the Royal.
+
+“They'd forgotten to pull down the blind of the dining-room window, and
+I happened to glance through and saw she had Jack Drew in there and was
+giving him a cup of tea. He had a bad cold, I remember, and I suppose
+his health had got precious to her, poor girl. As I glanced she stepped
+to the window and pulled down the blind, which put me out of face a
+bit--though, of course, she hadn't seen me. I was rather surprised at
+her having Jack in there, till I heard that the banker, the postmaster,
+the constable, and some others were making a night of it at the
+Imperial, as they'd been doing pretty often lately--and went on doing
+till there was a blow-up about it, and the constable got transferred
+Out Back. I used to drink my share then. We smoked and played cards
+and yarned and filled 'em up again at the Royal till after one in the
+morning. Then I started home.
+
+“I'd finished giving the Bank a couple of coats of stone-colour that
+week, and was cutting in in dark colour round the spouting, doors, and
+window-frames that Saturday. My head was pretty clear going home, and as
+I passed the place it struck me that I'd left out the only varnish brush
+I had. I'd been using it to give the sashes a coat of varnish colour,
+and remembered that I'd left it on one of the window-sills--the sill
+of her bedroom window, as it happened. I knew I'd sleep in next day,
+Sunday, and guessed it would be hot, and I didn't want the varnish tool
+to get spoiled; so I reckoned I'd slip in through the side gate, get it,
+and take it home to camp and put it in oil. The window sash was jammed,
+I remember, and I hadn't been able to get it up more than a couple of
+inches to paint the runs of the sash. The grass grew up close under
+the window, and I slipped in quietly. I noticed the sash was still up
+a couple of inches. Just as I grabbed the brush I heard low voices
+inside--Ruth Wilson's and Jack Drew's--in her room.
+
+“The surprise sent about a pint of beer up into my throat in a lump. I
+tip-toed away out of there. Just as I got clear of the gate I saw the
+banker being helped home by a couple of cronies.
+
+“I went home to the camp and turned in, but I couldn't sleep. I lay
+think--think--thinking, till I thought all the drink out of my head. I'd
+brought a bottle of ale home to last over Sunday, and I drank that. It
+only made matters worse. I didn't know how I felt--I--well, I felt as
+if I was as good a man as Jack Drew--I--you see I've--you might think it
+soft--but I loved that girl, not as I've been gone on other girls, but
+in the old-fashioned, soft, honest, hopeless, far-away sort of way; and
+now, to tell the straight truth, I thought I might have had her. You
+lose a thing through being too straight or sentimental, or not having
+enough cheek; and another man comes along with more brass in his blood
+and less sentimental rot and takes it up--and the world respects him;
+and you feel in your heart that you're a weaker man than he is. Why,
+part of the time I must have felt like a man does when a better man
+runs away with his wife. But I'd drunk a lot, and was upset and
+lonely-feeling that night.
+
+“Oh, but Redclay had a tremendous sensation next day! Jack Drew, of all
+the men in the world, had been caught in the act of robbing the bank.
+According to Browne's account in court and in the newspapers, he
+returned home that night at about twelve o'clock (which I knew was a
+lie, for I saw him being helped home nearer two) and immediately retired
+to rest (on top of the quilt, boots and all, I suppose). Some time
+before daybreak he was roused by a fancied noise (I suppose it was his
+head swelling); he rose, turned up a night lamp (he hadn't lit it,
+I'll swear), and went through the dining-room passage and office to
+investigate (for whisky and water). He saw that the doors and windows
+were secure, returned to bed, and fell asleep again.
+
+“There is something in a deaf person's being roused easily. I know the
+case of a deaf chap who'd start up at a step or movement in the house
+when no one else could hear or feel it; keen sense of vibration, I
+reckon. Well, just at daybreak (to shorten the yarn) the banker woke
+suddenly, he said, and heard a crack like a shot in the house. There was
+a loose flooring-board in the passage that went off like a pistol-shot
+sometimes when you trod on it; and I guess Jack Drew trod on it,
+sneaking out, and he weighed nearly twelve stone. If the truth were
+known, he probably heard Browne poking round, tried the window, found
+the sash jammed, and was slipping through the passage to the back door.
+Browne got his revolver, opened his door suddenly, and caught Drew
+standing between the girl's door (which was shut) and the office door,
+with his coat on his arm and his boots in his hands. Browne covered him
+with his revolver, swore he'd shoot if he moved, and yelled for help.
+Drew stood a moment like a man stunned; then he rushed Browne, and in
+the struggle the revolver went off, and Drew got hit in the arm. Two of
+the mounted troopers--who'd been up looking to the horses for an early
+start somewhere--rushed in then, and took Drew. He had nothing to say.
+What could he say? He couldn't say he was a blackguard who'd taken
+advantage of a poor unprotected girl because she loved him. They found
+the back door unlocked, by the way, which was put down to the burglar;
+of course Browne couldn't explain that he came home too muddled to lock
+doors after him.
+
+“And the girl? She shrieked and fell when the row started, and they
+found her like a log on the floor of her room after it was over.
+
+“They found in Jack's overcoat pocket a parcel containing a cold chisel,
+small screw-wrench, file, and one or two other things that he'd bought
+that evening to tinker up the old printing press. I knew that, because
+I'd lent him a hand a few nights before, and he told me he'd have to get
+the tools. They found some scratches round the key-hole and knob of the
+office door that I'd made myself, scraping old splashes of paint off the
+brass and hand-plate so as to make a clean finish. Oh, it taught me the
+value of circumstantial evidence! If I was judge I wouldn't give a man
+till the 'risin' av the coort' on it, any more than I would on the bare
+word of the noblest woman breathing.
+
+“At the preliminary examination Jack Drew said he was guilty. But it
+seemed that, according to law, he couldn't be guilty until after he was
+committed. So he was committed for trial at the next Quarter Sessions.
+The excitement and gabble were worse than the Dean case, or Federation,
+and sickened me, for they were all on the wrong track. You lose a lot of
+life through being behind the scenes. But they cooled down presently to
+wait for the trial.
+
+“They thought it best to take the girl away from the place where she'd
+got the shock; so the Doctor took her to his house, where he had an old
+housekeeper who was as deaf as a post--a first class recommendation for
+a housekeeper anywhere. He got a nurse from Sydney to attend on Ruth
+Wilson, and no one except he and the nurse were allowed to go near
+her. She lay like dead, they said, except when she had to be held down
+raving; brain fever, they said, brought on by the shock of the attempted
+burglary and pistol shot. Dr. Lebinski had another doctor up from Sydney
+at his own expense, but nothing could save her--and perhaps it was as
+well. She might have finished her life in a lunatic asylum. They were
+going to send her to Sydney, to a brain hospital; but she died a week
+before the Sessions. She was right-headed for an hour, they said, and
+asking all the time for Jack. The Doctor told her he was all right and
+was coming--and, waiting and listening for him, she died.
+
+“The case was black enough against Drew now. I knew he wouldn't have the
+pluck to tell the truth now, even if he was that sort of a man. I didn't
+know what to do, so I spoke to the Doctor straight. I caught him coming
+out of the Royal, and walked along the road with him a bit. I suppose
+he thought I was going to show cause why his doors ought to have another
+coat of varnish.
+
+“'Hallo, Mitchell!' he said, 'how's painting?'
+
+“'Doctor!' I said, 'what am I going to do about this business?'
+
+“'What business?'
+
+“'Jack Drew's.'
+
+“He looked at me sideways--the swift haunted look. Then he walked on
+without a word, for half a dozen yards, hands behind, and studying the
+dust. Then he asked, quite quietly:
+
+“'Do you know the truth?'
+
+“'Yes!'
+
+“About a dozen yards this time; then he said:
+
+“'I'll see him in the morning, and see you afterwards,' and he shook
+hands and went on home.
+
+“Next day he came to me where I was doing a job on a step ladder. He
+leaned his elbow against the steps for a moment, and rubbed his hand
+over his forehead, as if it ached and he was tired.
+
+“'I've seen him, Mitchell,' he said.
+
+“'Yes.'
+
+“'You were mates with him, once, Out Back?'
+
+“'I was.'
+
+“'You know Drew's hand-writing?'
+
+“'I should think so.'
+
+“He laid a leaf from a pocketbook on top of the steps. I read the
+message written in pencil:
+
+“'To Jack Mitchell.--We were mates on the track. If you know anything of
+my affair, don't give it away.--J. D.'
+
+“I tore the leaf and dropped the bits into the paint-pot.
+
+“'That's all right, Doctor,' I said; 'but is there no way?'
+
+“'None.'
+
+“He turned away, wearily. He'd knocked about so much over the world
+that he was past bothering about explaining things or being surprised at
+anything. But he seemed to get a new idea about me; he came back to the
+steps again, and watched my brush for a while, as if he was thinking,
+in a broody sort of way, of throwing up his practice and going in for
+house-painting. Then he said, slowly and deliberately:
+
+“'If she--the girl--had lived, we might have tried to fix it up quietly.
+That's what I was hoping for. I don't see how we can help him now, even
+if he'd let us. He would never have spoken, anyway. We must let it
+go on, and after the trial I'll go to Sydney and see what I can do at
+headquarters. It's too late now. You understand, Mitchell?'
+
+“'Yes. I've thought it out.'
+
+“Then he went away towards the Royal.
+
+“And what could Jack Drew or we do? Study it out whatever way you like.
+There was only one possible chance to help him, and that was to go to
+the judge; and the judge that happened to be on that circuit was a man
+who--even if he did listen to the story and believe it--would have felt
+inclined to give Jack all the more for what he was charged with. Browne
+was out of the question. The day before the trial I went for a long walk
+in the bush, but couldn't hit on anything that the Doctor might have
+missed.
+
+“I was in the court--I couldn't keep away. The Doctor was there too.
+There wasn't so much of a change in Jack as I expected, only he had the
+gaol white in his face already. He stood fingering the rail, as if it
+was the edge of a table on a platform and he was a tired and bored and
+sleepy chairman waiting to propose a vote of thanks.”
+
+The only well-known man in Australia who reminds me of Mitchell is Bland
+Holt, the comedian. Mitchell was about as good hearted as Bland Holt,
+too, under it all; but he was bigger and roughened by the bush. But he
+seemed to be taking a heavy part to-night, for, towards the end of his
+yarn, he got up and walked up and down the length of my bed, dropping
+the sentences as he turned towards me. He'd folded his arms high and
+tight, and his face in the moonlight was--well, it was very different
+from his careless tone of voice. He was like--like an actor acting
+tragedy and talking comedy. Mitchell went on, speaking quickly--his
+voice seeming to harden:
+
+    .   .   .   .   .
+
+“The charge was read out--I forget how it went--it sounded like a long
+hymn being given out. Jack pleaded guilty. Then he straightened up for
+the first time and looked round the court, with a calm, disinterested
+look--as if we were all strangers and he was noting the size of the
+meeting. And--it's a funny world, ain't it?--everyone of us shifted
+or dropped his eyes, just as if we were the felons and Jack the judge.
+Everyone except the Doctor; he looked at Jack and Jack looked at him.
+Then the Doctor smiled--I can't describe it--and Drew smiled back. It
+struck me afterwards that I should have been in that smile. Then the
+Doctor did what looked like a strange thing--stood like a soldier with
+his hands to Attention. I'd noticed that, whenever he'd made up his mind
+to do a thing, he dropped his hands to his sides: it was a sign that he
+couldn't be moved. Now he slowly lifted his hand to his forehead, palm
+out, saluted the prisoner, turned on his heel, and marched from the
+court-room. 'He's boozin' again,' someone whispered. 'He's got a touch
+of 'em.' 'My oath, he's ratty!' said someone else. One of the traps
+said:
+
+“'Arder in the car-rt!'
+
+“The judge gave it to Drew red-hot on account of the burglary being the
+cause of the girl's death and the sorrow in a respectable family; then
+he gave him five years' hard.
+
+“It gave me a lot of confidence in myself to see the law of the land
+barking up the wrong tree, while only I and the Doctor and the prisoner
+knew it. But I've found out since then that the law is often the only
+one that knows it's barking up the wrong tree.”
+
+    .   .   .   .   .
+
+Mitchell prepared to turn in.
+
+“And what about Drew,” I asked.
+
+“Oh, he did his time, or most of it. The Doctor went to headquarters,
+but either a drunken doctor from a geebung town wasn't of much account,
+or they weren't taking any romance just then at headquarters. So the
+Doctor came back, drank heavily, and one frosty morning they found him
+on his back on the bank of the creek, with his face like note-paper
+where the blood hadn't dried on it, and an old pistol in his hand--that
+he'd used, they said, to shoot Cossacks from horseback when he was a
+young dude fighting in the bush in Poland.”
+
+Mitchell lay silent a good while; then he yawned.
+
+“Ah, well! It's a lonely track the Lachlan's tramping to-night; but I
+s'pose he's got his ghosts with him.”
+
+I'd been puzzling for the last half-hour to think where I'd met or heard
+of Jack Drew; now it flashed on me that I'd been told that Jack Drew was
+the Lachlan's real name.
+
+I lay awake thinking a long time, and wished Mitchell had kept his yarn
+for daytime. I felt--well, I felt as if the Lachlan's story should have
+been played in the biggest theatre in the world, by the greatest actors,
+with music for the intervals and situations--deep, strong music, such as
+thrills and lifts a man from his boot soles. And when I got to sleep I
+hadn't slept a moment, it seemed to me, when I started wide awake to
+see those infernal hanging boughs with a sort of nightmare idea that the
+Lachlan hadn't gone, or had come back, and he and Mitchell had hanged
+themselves sociably--Mitchell for sympathy and the sake of mateship.
+
+But Mitchell was sleeping peacefully, in spite of a path of moonlight
+across his face--and so was the pup.
+
+
+
+
+The Darling River
+
+
+
+The Darling--which is either a muddy gutter or a second Mississippi--is
+about six times as long as the distance, in a straight line, from its
+head to its mouth. The state of the river is vaguely but generally
+understood to depend on some distant and foreign phenomena to which
+bushmen refer in an off-hand tone of voice as “the Queenslan' rains”,
+which seem to be held responsible, in a general way, for most of the
+out-back trouble.
+
+It takes less than a year to go up stream by boat to Walgett or Bourke
+in a dry season; but after the first three months the passengers
+generally go ashore and walk. They get sick of being stuck in the same
+sort of place, in the same old way; they grow weary of seeing the same
+old “whaler” drop his swag on the bank opposite whenever the boat ties
+up for wood; they get tired of lending him tobacco, and listening to his
+ideas, which are limited in number and narrow in conception.
+
+It shortens the journey to get out and walk; but then you will have to
+wait so long for your luggage--unless you hump it with you.
+
+We heard of a man who determined to stick to a Darling boat and travel
+the whole length of the river. He was a newspaper man. He started on
+his voyage of discovery one Easter in flood-time, and a month later the
+captain got bushed between the Darling and South Australian border. The
+waters went away before he could find the river again, and left his boat
+in a scrub. They had a cargo of rations, and the crew stuck to the craft
+while the tucker lasted; when it gave out they rolled up their swags and
+went to look for a station, but didn't find one. The captain would study
+his watch and the sun, rig up dials and make out courses, and follow
+them without success. They ran short of water, and didn't smell any
+for weeks; they suffered terrible privations, and lost three of their
+number, NOT including the newspaper liar. There are even dark hints
+considering the drawing of lots in connection with something too
+terrible to mention. They crossed a thirty-mile plain at last, and
+sighted a black gin. She led them to a boundary rider's hut, where they
+were taken in and provided with rations and rum.
+
+Later on a syndicate was formed to explore the country and recover the
+boat; but they found her thirty miles from the river and about eighteen
+from the nearest waterhole deep enough to float her, so they left her
+there. She's there still, or else the man that told us about it is the
+greatest liar Out Back.
+
+    .   .   .   .   .
+
+Imagine the hull of a North Shore ferry boat, blunted a little at the
+ends and cut off about a foot below the water-line, and parallel to it,
+then you will have something shaped somewhat like the hull of a Darling
+mud-rooter. But the river boat is much stronger. The boat we were on
+was built and repaired above deck after the different ideas of many bush
+carpenters, of whom the last seemed by his work to have regarded the
+original plan with a contempt only equalled by his disgust at the work
+of the last carpenter but one. The wheel was boxed in, mostly with round
+sapling-sticks fastened to the frame with bunches of nails and spikes
+of all shapes and sizes, most of them bent. The general result was
+decidedly picturesque in its irregularity, but dangerous to the mental
+welfare of any passenger who was foolish enough to try to comprehend
+the design; for it seemed as though every carpenter had taken the
+opportunity to work in a little abstract idea of his own.
+
+The way they “dock” a Darling River boat is beautiful for its
+simplicity. They choose a place where there are two stout trees about
+the boat's length apart, and standing on a line parallel to the river.
+They fix pulley-blocks to the trees, lay sliding planks down into the
+water, fasten a rope to one end of the steamer, and take the other end
+through the block attached to the tree and thence back aboard a second
+steamer; then they carry a rope similarly from the other end through the
+block on the second tree, and aboard a third boat. At a given signal
+one boat leaves for Wentworth, and the other starts for the Queensland
+border. The consequence is that craft number one climbs the bank
+amid the cheers of the local loafers, who congregate and watch the
+proceedings with great interest and approval. The crew pitch tents, and
+set to work on the hull, which looks like a big, rough shallow box.
+
+    .   .   .   .   .
+
+We once travelled on the Darling for a hundred miles or so on a boat
+called the 'Mud Turtle'--at least, that's what WE called her. She might
+reasonably have haunted the Mississippi fifty years ago. She didn't seem
+particular where she went, or whether she started again or stopped
+for good after getting stuck. Her machinery sounded like a chapter of
+accidents and was always out of order, but she got along all the same,
+provided the steersman kept her off the bank.
+
+Her skipper was a young man, who looked more like a drover than a
+sailor, and the crew bore a greater resemblance to the unemployed than
+to any other body we know of, except that they looked a little
+more independent. They seemed clannish, too, with an unemployed or
+free-labour sort of isolation. We have an idea that they regarded our
+personal appearance with contempt.
+
+    .   .   .   .   .
+
+Above Louth we picked up a “whaler”, who came aboard for the sake of
+society and tobacco. Not that he hoped to shorten his journey; he had no
+destination. He told us many reckless and unprincipled lies, and gave
+us a few ornamental facts. One of them took our fancy, and impressed
+us--with its beautiful simplicity, I suppose. He said: “Some miles
+above where the Darlin' and the Warrygo runs inter each other, there's a
+billygong runnin' right across between the two rivers and makin' a sort
+of tryhangular hyland; 'n' I can tel'yer a funny thing about it.” Here
+he paused to light his pipe. “Now,” he continued, impressively, jerking
+the match overboard, “when the Darlin's up, and the Warrygo's LOW,
+the billygong runs from the Darlin' into the WARRYGO; AND, when the
+Warrygo's up 'n' the Darlin's down, the waters runs FROM the Warrygo 'n'
+inter the Darlin'.”
+
+What could be more simple?
+
+The steamer was engaged to go up a billabong for a load of shearers from
+a shed which was cutting out; and first it was necessary to tie up in
+the river and discharge the greater portion of the cargo in order that
+the boat might safely negotiate the shallow waters. A local fisherman,
+who volunteered to act as pilot, was taken aboard, and after he was
+outside about a pint of whisky he seemed to have the greatest confidence
+in his ability to take us to hell, or anywhere else--at least, he said
+so. A man was sent ashore with blankets and tucker to mind the wool, and
+we crossed the river, butted into the anabranch, and started out back.
+Only the Lord and the pilot know how we got there. We travelled over the
+bush, through its branches sometimes, and sometimes through grass and
+mud, and every now and then we struck something that felt and sounded
+like a collision. The boat slid down one hill, and “fetched” a stump at
+the bottom with a force that made every mother's son bite his tongue or
+break a tooth.
+
+The shearers came aboard next morning, with their swags and two
+cartloads of boiled mutton, bread, “brownie”, and tea and sugar. They
+numbered about fifty, including the rouseabouts. This load of sin sank
+the steamer deeper into the mud; but the passengers crowded over to
+port, by request of the captain, and the crew poked the bank away with
+long poles. When we began to move the shearers gave a howl like the
+yell of a legion of lost souls escaping from down below. They gave three
+cheers for the rouseabouts' cook, who stayed behind; then they cursed
+the station with a mighty curse. They cleared a space on deck, had
+a jig, and afterwards a fight between the shearers' cook and his
+assistant. They gave a mighty bush whoop for the Darling when the boat
+swung into that grand old gutter, and in the evening they had a general
+all-round time. We got back, and the crew had to reload the wool without
+assistance, for it bore the accursed brand of a “freedom-of-contract”
+ shed.
+
+We slept, or tried to sleep, that night on the ridge of two wool bales
+laid with the narrow sides up, having first been obliged to get ashore
+and fight six rounds with a shearer for the privilege of roosting there.
+The live cinders from the firebox went up the chimney all night, and
+fell in showers on deck. Every now and again a spark would burn through
+the “Wagga rug” of a sleeping shearer, and he'd wake suddenly and get up
+and curse. It was no use shifting round, for the wind was all ways,
+and the boat steered north, south, east, and west to humour the river.
+Occasionally a low branch would root three or four passengers off their
+wool bales, and they'd get up and curse in chorus. The boat started two
+snags; and towards daylight struck a stump. The accent was on the stump.
+A wool bale went overboard, and took a swag and a dog with it; then the
+owner of the swag and dog and the crew of the boat had a swearing match
+between them. The swagman won.
+
+About daylight we stretched our cramped limbs, extricated one leg from
+between the wool bales, and found that the steamer was just crayfishing
+away from a mud island, where she had tied up for more wool. Some of the
+chaps had been ashore and boiled four or five buckets of tea and coffee.
+Shortly after the boat had settled down to work again an incident came
+along. A rouseabout rose late, and, while the others were at breakfast,
+got an idea into his head that a good “sloosh” would freshen him up; so
+he mooched round until he found a big wooden bucket with a rope to it.
+He carried the bucket aft of the wheel. The boat was butting up stream
+for all she was worth, and the stream was running the other way, of
+course, and about a hundred times as fast as a train. The jackeroo gave
+the line a turn round his wrist; before anyone could see him in time to
+suppress him, he lifted the bucket, swung it to and fro, and dropped it
+cleverly into the water.
+
+This delayed us for nearly an hour. A couple of men jumped into the row
+boat immediately and cast her adrift. They picked up the jackeroo about
+a mile down the river, clinging to a snag, and when we hauled him aboard
+he looked like something the cat had dragged in, only bigger. We revived
+him with rum and got him on his feet; and then, when the captain and
+crew had done cursing him, he rubbed his head, went forward, and had a
+look at the paddle; then he rubbed his head again, thought, and remarked
+to his mates:
+
+“Wasn't it lucky I didn't dip that bucket FOR'ARD the wheel?”
+
+This remark struck us forcibly. We agreed that it was lucky--for him;
+but the captain remarked that it was damned unlucky for the world,
+which, he explained, was over-populated with fools already.
+
+Getting on towards afternoon we found a barge loaded with wool and tied
+up to a tree in the wilderness. There was no sign of a man to be seen,
+nor any sign, except the barge, that a human being had ever been there.
+The captain took the craft in tow, towed it about ten miles up the
+stream, and left it in a less likely place than where it was before.
+
+Floating bottles began to be more frequent, and we knew by that same
+token that we were nearing “Here's Luck!”--Bourke, we mean. And this
+reminds us.
+
+When the Brewarrina people observe a more than ordinary number of
+bottles floating down the river, they guess that Walgett is on the
+spree; when the Louth chaps see an unbroken procession of dead marines
+for three or four days they know that Bourke's drunk. The poor,
+God-abandoned “whaler” sits in his hungry camp at sunset and watches the
+empty symbols of Hope go by, and feels more God-forgotten than ever--and
+thirstier, if possible--and gets a great, wide, thirsty, quaking, empty
+longing to be up where those bottles come from. If the townspeople knew
+how much misery they caused by their thoughtlessness they would drown
+their dead marines, or bury them, but on no account allow them to go
+drifting down the river, and stirring up hells in the bosoms of less
+fortunate fellow-creatures.
+
+There came a man from Adelaide to Bourke once, and he collected all the
+empty bottles in town, stacked them by the river, and waited for a boat.
+What he wanted them for the legend sayeth not, but the people reckoned
+he had a “private still”, or something of that sort, somewhere down the
+river, and were satisfied. What he came from Adelaide for, or whether he
+really did come from there, we do not know. All the Darling bunyips are
+supposed to come from Adelaide. Anyway, the man collected all the empty
+bottles he could lay his hands on, and piled them on the bank, where
+they made a good show. He waited for a boat to take his cargo, and,
+while waiting, he got drunk. That excited no comment. He stayed drunk
+for three weeks, but the townspeople saw nothing unusual in that. In
+order to become an object of interest in their eyes, and in that line,
+he would have had to stay drunk for a year and fight three times a
+day--oftener, if possible--and lie in the road in the broiling
+heat between whiles, and be walked on by camels and Afghans and
+free-labourers, and be locked up every time he got sober enough to smash
+a policeman, and try to hang himself naked, and be finally squashed by a
+loaded wool team.
+
+But while he drank the Darling rose, for reasons best known to itself,
+and floated those bottles off. They strung out and started for the
+Antarctic Ocean, with a big old wicker-worked demijohn in the lead.
+
+For the first week the down-river men took no notice; but after the
+bottles had been drifting past with scarcely a break for a fortnight or
+so, they began to get interested. Several whalers watched the procession
+until they got the jimjams by force of imagination, and when their
+bodies began to float down with the bottles, the down-river people got
+anxious.
+
+At last the Mayor of Wilcannia wired Bourke to know whether Dibbs or
+Parkes was dead, or democracy triumphant, or if not, wherefore the
+jubilation? Many telegrams of a like nature were received during that
+week, and the true explanation was sent in reply to each. But it wasn't
+believed, and to this day Bourke has the name of being the most drunken
+town on the river.
+
+After dinner a humorous old hard case mysteriously took us aside and
+said he had a good yarn which we might be able to work up. We asked him
+how, but he winked a mighty cunning wink and said that he knew all about
+us. Then he asked us to listen. He said:
+
+“There was an old feller down the Murrumbidgee named Kelly. He was a
+bit gone here. One day Kelly was out lookin' for some sheep, when he
+got lost. It was gettin' dark. Bymeby there came an old crow in a tree
+overhead.
+
+“'Kel-ley, you're lo-o-st! Kel-ley, you're lo-o-st!' sez the crow.
+
+“'I know I am,' sez Kelly.
+
+“'Fol-ler me, fol-ler me,' sez the crow.
+
+“'Right y'are,' sez Kelly, with a jerk of his arm. 'Go ahead.'
+
+“So the crow went on, and Kelly follered, an' bymeby he found he was on
+the right track.
+
+“Sometime after Kelly was washin' sheep (this was when we useter wash
+the sheep instead of the wool). Kelly was standin' on the platform with
+a crutch in his hand landin' the sheep, when there came a old crow in
+the tree overhead.
+
+“'Kelly, I'm hun-gry! Kel-ley, I'm hun-ger-ry!' sez the crow.
+
+“'Alright,' sez Kelly; 'be up at the hut about dinner time 'n' I'll
+sling you out something.'
+
+“'Drown--a--sheep! Drown--a--sheep, Kel-ley,' sez the crow.
+
+“'Blanked if I do,' sez Kelly. 'If I drown a sheep I'll have to pay for
+it, be-God!'
+
+“'Then I won't find yer when yer lost agin,' sez the crow.
+
+“'I'm damned if yer will,' says Kelly. 'I'll take blanky good care I
+won't get lost again, to be found by a gory ole crow.'”
+
+    .   .   .   .   .
+
+There are a good many fishermen on the Darling. They camp along the
+banks in all sorts of tents, and move about in little box boats that
+will only float one man. The fisherman is never heavy. He is mostly a
+withered little old madman, with black claws, dirty rags (which he never
+changes), unkempt hair and beard, and a “ratty” expression. We cannot
+say that we ever saw him catch a fish, or even get a bite, and we
+certainly never saw him offer any for sale.
+
+He gets a dozen or so lines out into the stream, with the shore end
+fastened to pegs or roots on the bank, and passed over sticks about four
+feet high, stuck in the mud; on the top of these sticks he hangs bullock
+bells, or substitutes--jam tins with stones fastened inside to bits of
+string. Then he sits down and waits. If the cod pulls the line the bell
+rings.
+
+The fisherman is a great authority on the river and fish, but has
+usually forgotten everything else, including his name. He chops firewood
+for the boats sometimes, but it isn't his profession--he's a fisherman.
+He is only sane on points concerning the river, though he has all the
+fisherman's eccentricities. Of course he is a liar.
+
+When he gets his camp fixed on one bank it strikes him he ought to be
+over on the other, or at a place up round the bend, so he shifts. Then
+he reckons he was a fool for not stopping where he was before. He
+never dies. He never gets older, or drier, or more withered looking,
+or dirtier, or loonier--because he can't. We cannot imagine him as ever
+having been a boy, or even a youth. We cannot even try to imagine him
+as a baby. He is an animated mummy, who used to fish on the Nile three
+thousand years ago, and catch nothing.
+
+    .   .   .   .   .
+
+We forgot to mention that there are wonderfully few wrecks on the
+Darling. The river boats seldom go down--their hulls are not built that
+way--and if one did go down it wouldn't sink far. But, once down, a boat
+is scarcely ever raised again; because, you see, the mud silts up round
+it and over it, and glues it, as it were, to the bottom of the river.
+Then the forty-foot alligators--which come down with the “Queenslan'
+rains”, we suppose--root in the mud and fill their bellies with sodden
+flour and drowned deck-hands.
+
+They tried once to blow up a wreck with dynamite because it (the
+wreck) obstructed navigation; but they blew the bottom out of the river
+instead, and all the water went through. The Government have been boring
+for it ever since. I saw some of the bores myself--there is one at
+Coonamble.
+
+There is a yarn along the Darling about a cute Yankee who was invited
+up to Bourke to report on a proposed scheme for locking the river. He
+arrived towards the end of a long and severe drought, and was met at the
+railway station by a deputation of representative bushmen, who invited
+him, in the first place, to accompany them to the principal pub--which
+he did. He had been observed to study the scenery a good deal while
+coming up in the train, but kept his conclusions to himself. On the way
+to the pub he had a look at the town, and it was noticed that he tilted
+his hat forward very often, and scratched the back of his head a
+good deal, and pondered a lot; but he refrained from expressing an
+opinion--even when invited to do so. He guessed that his opinions
+wouldn't do much good, anyway, and he calculated that they would keep
+till he got back “over our way”--by which it was reckoned he meant the
+States.
+
+When they asked him what he'd have, he said to Watty the publican:
+
+“Wal, I reckon you can build me your national drink. I guess I'll try
+it.”
+
+A long colonial was drawn for him, and he tried it. He seemed rather
+startled at first, then he looked curiously at the half-empty glass,
+set it down very softly on the bar, and leaned against the same and
+fell into a reverie; from which he roused himself after a while, with a
+sorrowful jerk of his head.
+
+“Ah, well,” he said. “Show me this river of yourn.”
+
+They led him to the Darling, and he had a look at it.
+
+“Is this your river?” he asked.
+
+“Yes,” they replied, apprehensively.
+
+He tilted his hat forward till the brim nearly touched his nose,
+scratched the back of his long neck, shut one eye, and looked at the
+river with the other. Then, after spitting half a pint of tobacco juice
+into the stream, he turned sadly on his heel and led the way back to the
+pub. He invited the boys to “pisen themselves”; after they were served
+he ordered out the longest tumbler on the premises, poured a drop into
+it from nearly every bottle on the shelf, added a lump of ice, and drank
+slowly and steadily.
+
+Then he took pity on the impatient and anxious population, opened his
+mouth, and spake.
+
+“Look here, fellows,” he drawled, jerking his arm in the direction of
+the river, “I'll tell you what I'll dew. I'll bottle that damned river
+of yourn in twenty-four hours!”
+
+Later on he mellowed a bit, under the influence of several drinks which
+were carefully and conscientiously “built” from plans and specifications
+supplied by himself, and then, among other things, he said:
+
+“If that there river rises as high as you say it dew--and if this was
+the States--why, we'd have had the Great Eastern up here twenty years
+ago”----or words to that effect.
+
+Then he added, reflectively:
+
+“When I come over here I calculated that I was going to make things
+hum, but now I guess I'll have to change my prospectus. There's a lot of
+loose energy laying round over our way, but I guess that if I wanted
+to make things move in your country I'd have to bring over the entire
+American nation--also his wife and dawg. You've got the makings of a
+glorious nation over here, but you don't get up early enough!”
+
+    .   .   .   .   .
+
+The only national work performed by the blacks is on the Darling. They
+threw a dam of rocks across the river--near Brewarrina, we think--to
+make a fish trap. It's there yet. But God only knows where they got the
+stones from, or how they carried them, for there isn't a pebble within
+forty miles.
+
+
+
+
+A Case for the Oracle
+
+
+
+The Oracle and I were camped together. The Oracle was a bricklayer by
+trade, and had two or three small contracts on hand. I was “doing a
+bit of house-painting”. There were a plasterer, a carpenter, and a
+plumber--we were all T'othersiders, and old mates, and we worked
+things together. It was in Westralia--the Land of T'othersiders--and,
+therefore, we were not surprised when Mitchell turned up early one
+morning, with his swag and an atmosphere of salt water about him.
+
+He'd had a rough trip, he said, and would take a spell that day and take
+the lay of the land and have something cooked for us by the time we came
+home; and go to graft himself next morning. And next morning he went to
+work, “labouring” for the Oracle.
+
+The Oracle and his mates, being small contractors and not pressed for
+time, had dispensed with the services of a labourer, and had done their
+own mixing and hod-carrying in turns. They didn't want a labourer now,
+but the Oracle was a vague fatalist, and Mitchell a decided one. So it
+passed.
+
+The Oracle had a “Case” right under his nose--in his own employ, in
+fact; but was not aware of the fact until Mitchell drew his attention
+to it. The Case went by the name of Alfred O'Briar--which hinted a mixed
+parentage. He was a small, nervous working-man, of no particular colour,
+and no decided character, apparently. If he had a soul above bricks, he
+never betrayed it. He was not popular on the jobs. There was something
+sly about Alf, they said.
+
+The Oracle had taken him on in the first place as a day-labourer,
+but afterwards shared the pay with him as with Mitchell. O'Briar
+shouted--judiciously, but on every possible occasion--for the Oracle;
+and, as he was an indifferent workman, the boys said he only did this so
+that the Oracle might keep him on. If O'Briar took things easy and did
+no more than the rest of us, at least one of us would be sure to get it
+into his head that he was loafing on us; and if he grafted harder than
+we did, we'd be sure to feel indignant about that too, and reckon that
+it was done out of nastiness or crawlsomeness, and feel a contempt for
+him accordingly. We found out accidentally that O'Briar was an excellent
+mimic and a bit of a ventriloquist, but he never entertained us with his
+peculiar gifts; and we set that down to churlishness.
+
+O'Briar kept his own counsel, and his history, if he had one; and hid
+his hopes, joys, and sorrows, if he had any, behind a vacant grin,
+as Mitchell hid his behind a quizzical one. He never resented alleged
+satire--perhaps he couldn't see it--and therefore he got the name of
+being a cur. As a rule, he was careful with his money, and was called
+mean--not, however, by the Oracle, whose philosophy was simple, and
+whose sympathy could not realise a limit; nor yet by Mitchell. Mitchell
+waited.
+
+    .   .   .   .   .
+
+O'Briar occupied a small tent by himself, and lived privately of
+evenings. When we began to hear two men talking at night in his tent,
+we were rather surprised, and wondered in a vague kind of way how any of
+the chaps could take sufficient interest in Alf to go in and yarn with
+him. In the days when he was supposed to be sociable, we had voted him a
+bore; even the Oracle was moved to admit that he was “a bit slow”.
+
+But late one night we distinctly heard a woman's voice in O'Briar's
+tent. The Oracle suddenly became hard of hearing, and, though we heard
+the voice on several occasions, he remained exasperatingly deaf, yet
+aggressively unconscious of the fact. “I have got enough to do puzzling
+over me own whys and wherefores,” he said. Mitchell began to take some
+interest in O'Briar, and treated him with greater respect. But our camp
+had the name of being the best-constructed, the cleanest, and the most
+respectable in the vicinity. The health officer and constable in charge
+had complimented us on the fact, and we were proud of it. And there were
+three young married couples in camp, also a Darby and Joan; therefore,
+when the voice of a woman began to be heard frequently and at
+disreputable hours of the night in O'Briar's tent, we got uneasy about
+it. And when the constable who was on night duty gave us a friendly
+hint, Mitchell and I agreed that something must be done.
+
+“Av coorse, men will be men,” said the constable, as he turned his
+horse's head, “but I thought I'd mention it. O'Briar is a dacent man,
+and he's one of yer mates. Av coorse. There's a bad lot in that camp in
+the scrub over yander, and--av coorse. Good-day to ye, byes.”
+
+    .   .   .   .   .
+
+Next night we heard the voice in O'Briar's tent again, and decided to
+speak to Alf in a friendly way about it in the morning. We listened
+outside in the dark, but could not distinguish the words, though I
+thought I recognised the voice.
+
+“It's the hussy from the camp over there; she's got holt of that fool,
+and she'll clean him out before she's done,” I said. “We're Alf's mates,
+any way it goes, and we ought to put a stop to it.”
+
+“What hussy?” asked Mitchell; “there's three or four there.”
+
+“The one with her hair all over her head,” I answered.
+
+“Where else should it be?” asked Mitchell. “But I'll just have a peep
+and see who it is. There's no harm in that.”
+
+He crept up to the tent and cautiously moved the flap. Alf's candle was
+alight; he lay on his back in his bunk with his arms under his head,
+calmly smoking. We withdrew.
+
+“They must have heard us,” said Mitchell; “and she's slipped out under
+the tent at the back, and through the fence into the scrub.”
+
+Mitchell's respect for Alf increased visibly.
+
+But we began to hear ominous whispers from the young married couples,
+and next Saturday night, which was pay-night, we decided to see it
+through. We did not care to speak to Alf until we were sure. He stayed
+in camp, as he often did, on Saturday evening, while the others went
+up town. Mitchell and I returned earlier than usual, and leaned on the
+fence at the back of Alf's tent.
+
+We were scarcely there when we were startled by a “rat-tat-tat” as of
+someone knocking at a door. Then an old woman's voice INSIDE the tent
+asked: “Who's there?”
+
+“It's me,” said Alf's voice from the front, “Mr. O'Briar from Perth.”
+
+“Mary, go and open the door!” said the old woman. (Mitchell nudged me to
+keep quiet.)
+
+“Come in, Mr. O'Breer,” said the old woman. “Come in. How do you do?
+When did you get back?”
+
+“Only last night,” said Alf.
+
+“Look at that now! Bless us all! And how did you like the country at
+all?”
+
+“I didn't care much for it,” said Alf. We lost the thread of it until
+the old woman spoke again.
+
+“Have you had your tea, Mr. O'Breer?”
+
+“Yes, thank you, Mrs. O'Connor.”
+
+“Are you quite sure, man?”
+
+“Quite sure, thank you, Mrs. O'Connor.” (Mitchell trod on my foot.)
+
+“Will you have a drop of whisky or a glass of beer, Mr. O'Breer?”
+
+“I'll take a glass of beer, thank you, Mrs. O'Connor.”
+
+There seemed to be a long pause. Then the old woman said, “Ah, well, I
+must get my work done, and Mary will stop here and keep you company, Mr.
+O'Breer.” The arrangement seemed satisfactory to all parties, for there
+was nothing more said for a while. (Mitchell nudged me again, with
+emphasis, and I kicked his shin.)
+
+Presently Alf said: “Mary!” And a girl's voice said, “Yes, Alf.”
+
+“You remember the night I went away, Mary?”
+
+“Yes, Alf, I do.”
+
+“I have travelled long ways since then, Mary; I worked hard and lived
+close. I didn't make my fortune, but I managed to rub a note or two
+together. It was a hard time and a lonesome time for me, Mary. The
+summer's awful over there, and livin's bad and dear. You couldn't have
+any idea of it, Mary.”
+
+“No, Alf.”
+
+“I didn't come back so well off as I expected.”
+
+“But that doesn't matter, Alf.”
+
+“I got heart-sick and tired of it, and couldn't stand it any longer,
+Mary.”
+
+“But that's all over now, Alf; you mustn't think of it.”
+
+“Your mother wrote to me.”
+
+“I know she did”--(very low and gently).
+
+“And do you know what she put in it, Mary?”
+
+“Yes, Alf.”
+
+“And did you ask her to put it in?”
+
+“Don't ask me, Alf.”
+
+“And it's all true, Mary?”
+
+There was no answer, but the silence seemed satisfactory.
+
+“And be sure you have yourself down here on Sunday, Alf, me son.”
+ (“There's the old woman come back!” said Mitchell.)
+
+“An' since the girl's willin' to have ye, and the ould woman's
+willin'--there's me hand on it, Alf, me boy. An' God bless ye both.”
+ (“The old man's come now,” said Mitchell.)
+
+    .   .   .   .   .
+
+“Come along,” said Mitchell, leading the way to the front of the tent.
+
+“But I wouldn't like to intrude on them. It's hardly right, Mitchell, is
+it?”
+
+“That's all right,” said Mitchell. He tapped the tent pole.
+
+“Come in,” said Alf. Alf was lying on his bunk as before, with his arms
+under his head. His face wore a cheerful, not to say happy, expression.
+There was no one else in the tent. I was never more surprised in my
+life.
+
+“Have you got the paper, Alf?” said Mitchell.
+
+“Yes. You'll find it there at the foot of the bunk. There it is. Won't
+you sit down, Mitchell?”
+
+“Not to-night,” said Mitchell. “We brought you a bottle of ale. We're
+just going to turn in.”
+
+And we said “good-night”. “Well,” I said to Mitchell when we got inside,
+“what do you think of it?”
+
+“I don't think of it at all,” said Mitchell. “Do you mean to say you
+can't see it now?”
+
+“No, I'm dashed if I can,” I said. “Some of us must be drunk, I think,
+or getting rats. It's not to be wondered at, and the sooner we get out
+of this country the better.”
+
+“Well, you must be a fool, Joe,” said Mitchell. “Can't you see? ALF
+THINKS ALOUD.”
+
+“WHAT?”
+
+“Talks to himself. He was thinking about going back to his sweetheart.
+Don't you know he's a bit of a ventriloquist?”
+
+Mitchell lay awake a long time, in the position that Alf usually lay in,
+and thought. Perhaps he thought on the same lines as Alf did that night.
+But Mitchell did his thinking in silence.
+
+We thought it best to tell the Oracle quietly. He was deeply interested,
+but not surprised. “I've heerd of such cases before,” he said. But the
+Oracle was a gentleman. “There's things that a man wants to keep to
+himself that ain't his business,” he said. And we understood this remark
+to be intended for our benefit, and to indicate a course of action upon
+which the Oracle had decided, with respect to this case, and which we,
+in his opinion, should do well to follow.
+
+Alf got away a week or so later, and we all took a holiday and went down
+to Fremantle to see him off. Perhaps he wondered why Mitchell gripped
+his hand so hard and wished him luck so earnestly, and was surprised
+when he gave him three cheers.
+
+“Ah, well!” remarked Mitchell, as we turned up the wharf.
+
+“I've heerd of such cases before,” said the Oracle, meditatively. “They
+ain't common, but I've hear'd of such cases before.”
+
+
+
+
+A Daughter of Maoriland
+
+    A sketch of poor-class Maoris
+
+
+
+The new native-school teacher, who was “green”, “soft”, and poetical,
+and had a literary ambition, called her “August”, and fondly hoped to
+build a romance on her character. She was down in the school registers
+as Sarah Moses, Maori, 16 years and three months. She looked twenty; but
+this was nothing, insomuch as the mother of the youngest child in the
+school--a dear little half-caste lady of two or three summers--had not
+herself the vaguest idea of the child's age, nor anybody else's, nor
+of ages in the abstract. The church register was lost some six years
+before, when “Granny”, who was a hundred, if a day, was supposed to
+be about twenty-five. The teacher had to guess the ages of all the new
+pupils.
+
+August was apparently the oldest in the school--a big, ungainly, awkward
+girl, with a heavy negro type of Maori countenance, and about as much
+animation, mentally or physically, as a cow. She was given to brooding;
+in fact, she brooded all the time. She brooded all day over her school
+work, but did it fairly well. How the previous teachers had taught her
+all she knew was a mystery to the new one. There had been a tragedy in
+August's family when she was a child, and the affair seemed to have cast
+a gloom over the lives of the entire family, for the lowering brooding
+cloud was on all their faces. August would take to the bush when things
+went wrong at home, and climb a tree and brood till she was found and
+coaxed home. Things, according to pa gossip, had gone wrong with her
+from the date of the tragedy, when she, a bright little girl, was
+taken--a homeless orphan--to live with a sister, and, afterwards, with
+an aunt-by-marriage. They treated her, 'twas said, with a brutality
+which must have been greatly exaggerated by pa-gossip, seeing
+that unkindness of this description is, according to all the best
+authorities, altogether foreign to Maori nature.
+
+Pa-gossip--which is less reliable than the ordinary washerwoman kind,
+because of a deeper and more vicious ignorance--had it that one time
+when August was punished by a teacher (or beaten by her sister or
+aunt-by-marriage) she “took to the bush” for three days, at the
+expiration of which time she was found on the ground in an exhausted
+condition. She was evidently a true Maori or savage, and this was one of
+the reasons why the teacher with the literary ambition took an interest
+in her. She had a print of a portrait of a man in soldier's uniform,
+taken from a copy of the 'Illustrated London News', pasted over the
+fireplace in the whare where she lived, and neatly bordered by vandyked
+strips of silvered tea-paper. She had pasted it in the place of honour,
+or as near as she could get to it. The place of honour was sacred
+to framed representations of the Nativity and Catholic subjects,
+half-modelled, half-pictured. The print was a portrait of the last Czar
+of Russia, of all the men in the world; and August was reported to have
+said that she loved that man. His father had been murdered, so had her
+mother. This was one of the reasons why the teacher with the literary
+ambition thought he could get a romance out of her.
+
+After the first week she hung round the new schoolmistress,
+dog-like--with “dog-like affection”, thought the teacher. She came down
+often during the holidays, and hung about the verandah and back door for
+an hour or so; then, by-and-bye, she'd be gone. Her brooding seemed
+less aggressive on such occasions. The teacher reckoned that she had
+something on her mind, and wanted to open her heart to “the wife”, but
+was too ignorant or too shy, poor girl; and he reckoned, from his theory
+of Maori character, that it might take her weeks, or months, to come to
+the point. One day, after a great deal of encouragement, she explained
+that she felt “so awfully lonely, Mrs. Lorrens.” All the other girls
+were away, and she wished it was school-time.
+
+She was happy and cheerful again, in her brooding way, in the
+playground. There was something sadly ludicrous about her great,
+ungainly figure slopping round above the children at play. The
+schoolmistress took her into the parlour, gave her tea and cake, and was
+kind to her; and she took it all with broody cheerfulness.
+
+One Sunday morning she came down to the cottage and sat on the edge of
+the verandah, looking as wretchedly miserable as a girl could. She was
+in rags--at least, she had a rag of a dress on--and was barefooted and
+bareheaded. She said that her aunt had turned her out, and she was going
+to walk down the coast to Whale Bay to her grandmother--a long day's
+ride. The teacher was troubled, because he was undecided what to do.
+He had to be careful to avoid any unpleasantness arising out of Maori
+cliquism. As the teacher he couldn't let her go in the state she was in;
+from the depths of his greenness he trusted her, from the depths of
+his softness he pitied her; his poetic nature was fiercely indignant on
+account of the poor girl's wrongs, and the wife spoke for her. Then he
+thought of his unwritten romance, and regarded August in the light of
+copy, and that settled it. While he talked the matter over with his
+wife, August “hid in the dark of her hair,” awaiting her doom. The
+teacher put his hat on, walked up to the pa, and saw her aunt. She
+denied that she had turned August out, but the teacher believed
+the girl. He explained his position, in words simplified for Maori
+comprehension, and the aunt and relations said they understood, and that
+he was “perfectly right, Mr. Lorrens.” They were very respectful. The
+teacher said that if August would not return home, he was willing to let
+her stay at the cottage until such time as her uncle, who was absent,
+returned, and he (the teacher) could talk the matter over with him. The
+relations thought that that was the very best thing that could be done,
+and thanked him. The aunt, two sisters, and as many of the others,
+including the children, as were within sight or hail at the time--most
+of them could not by any possible means have had the slightest
+connection with the business in hand--accompanied the teacher to the
+cottage. August took to the flax directly she caught sight of her
+relations, and was with difficulty induced to return. There was a lot
+of talk in Maori, during which the girl and her aunt shuffled and swung
+round at the back of each other, and each talked over her shoulder, and
+laughed foolishly and awkwardly once or twice; but in the end the girl
+was sullenly determined not to return home, so it was decided that she
+should stay. The schoolmistress made tea.
+
+August brightened from the first day. She was a different girl
+altogether. “I never saw such a change in a girl,” said the young
+schoolmistress, and one or two others. “I always thought she was a
+good girl if taken the right way; all she wanted was a change and kind
+treatment.” But the stolid old Maori chairman of the school committee
+only shrugged his shoulders and said (when the schoolmistress,
+woman-like, pressed him for an opinion to agree with her own), “You can
+look at it two ways, Mrs. Lorrens.” Which, by the way, was about the
+only expression of opinion that the teacher was ever able to get out of
+him on any subject.
+
+August worked and behaved well. She was wonderfully quick in picking up
+English ways and housework. True, she was awkward and not over cleanly
+in some things, but her mistress had patience with her. Who wouldn't
+have? She “couldn't do enough” for her benefactress; she hung on her
+words and sat at her footstool of evenings in a way that gladdened the
+teacher's sentimental nature; she couldn't bear to see him help his wife
+with a hat-pin or button--August must do it. She insisted on doing her
+mistress' hair every night. In short, she tried in every way to show her
+gratitude. The teacher and his wife smiled brightly at each other behind
+her back, and thought how cheerful the house was since she came, and
+wondered what they'd do without her. It was a settled thing that they
+should take her back to the city with them, and have a faithful and
+grateful retainer all their lives and a sort of Aunt Chloe for their
+children, when they had any. The teacher got yards of copy out of her
+for his “Maori Sketches and Characters”, worked joyously at his romance,
+and felt great already, and was happy. She had a bed made up temporarily
+(until the teacher could get a spring mattress for her from town) on the
+floor in the dining-room, and when she'd made her bed she'd squat on it
+in front of the fire and sing Maori songs in a soft voice. She'd sing
+the teacher and his wife, in the next room, to sleep. Then she'd get up
+and have a feed, but they never heard her.
+
+Her manners at the table (for she was treated “like one of themselves”
+ in the broadest sense of the term) were surprisingly good, considering
+that the adults of her people were decidedly cow-like in white society,
+and scoffed sea-eggs, shell-fish, and mutton-birds at home with a gallop
+which was not edifying. Her appetite, it was true, was painful at times
+to the poetic side of the teacher's nature; but he supposed that she'd
+been half-starved at home, poor girl, and would get over it. Anyway, the
+copy he'd get out of her would repay him for this and other expenses a
+hundredfold. Moreover, begging and borrowing had ceased with her advent,
+and the teacher set this down to her influence.
+
+The first jar came when she was sent on horseback to the town for
+groceries, and didn't get back till late the next day. She explained
+that some of her relations got hold of her and made her stay, and wanted
+her to go into public-houses with them, but she wouldn't. She said that
+SHE wanted to come home. But why didn't she? The teacher let it pass,
+and hoped she'd gain strength of character by-and-bye. He had waited up
+late the night before with her supper on the hob; and he and his wife
+had been anxious for fear something had happened to the poor girl
+who was under their care. He had walked to the treacherous river-ford
+several times during the evening, and waited there for her. So perhaps
+he was tired, and that was why he didn't write next night.
+
+The sugar-bag, the onion-basket, the potato-bag and the tea-chest began
+to “go down” alarmingly, and an occasional pound of candles, a pigeon,
+a mutton-bird (plucked and ready for Sunday's cooking), and other little
+trifles went, also. August couldn't understand it, and the teacher
+believed her, for falsehood and deceit are foreign to the simple natures
+of the modern Maoris. There were no cats; but no score of ordinary cats
+could have given colour to the cat theory, had it been raised in this
+case. The breath of August advertised onions more than once, but no
+human stomach could have accounted for the quantity. She surely could
+not have eaten the other things raw--and she had no opportunities for
+private cooking, as far as the teacher and his wife could see. The other
+Maoris were out of the question; they were all strictly honest.
+
+Thefts and annoyances of the above description were credited to the
+“swaggies” who infested the roads, and had a very bad name down that
+way; so the teacher loaded his gun, and told August to rouse him at
+once, if she heard a sound in the night. She said she would; but a
+heavy-weight “swaggie” could have come in and sat on her and had a smoke
+without waking her.
+
+She couldn't be trusted to go a message. She'd take from three to six
+hours, and come back with an excuse that sounded genuine from its very
+simplicity. Another sister of hers lay ill in an isolated hut, alone and
+uncared for, except by the teacher's wife, and occasionally by a poor pa
+outcast who had negro blood in her veins, and a love for a white loafer.
+God help her! All of which sounds strange, considering that Maoris are
+very kind to each other. The schoolmistress sent August one night to
+stay with the sick Maori woman and help her as she could, and gave her
+strict instructions to come to the cottage first thing in the morning,
+and tell her how the sick woman was. August turned up at lunch-time next
+day. The teacher gave her her first lecture, and said plainly that he
+wasn't to be taken for a fool; then he stepped aside to get cool, and,
+when he returned, the girl was sobbing as if her heart would break, and
+the wife comforting her. She had been up all night, poor girl, and was
+thoroughly worn out. Somehow the teacher didn't feel uncomfortable about
+it. He went down to the whare. August had not touched a dishcloth or
+broom. She had slept, as she always did, like a pig, all night, while
+her sister lay and tossed in agony; in the morning she ate everything
+there was to eat in the house (which, it seemed, was the Maori way of
+showing sympathy in sickness and trouble), after which she brooded
+by the fire till the children, running out of school, announced the
+teacher's lunch hour.
+
+August braced up again for a little while. The master thought of the
+trouble they had with Ayacanora in “Westward Ho”, and was comforted, and
+tackled his romance again. Then the schoolmistress fell sick and things
+went wrong. The groceries went down faster than ever, and the house got
+very dirty, and began to have a native smell about it. August grew fat,
+and lazy, and dirty, and less reliable on washing-days, or when there
+was anything special to do in the house. “The savage blood is strong,”
+ thought the teacher, “and she is beginning to long for her own people
+and free unconventional life.” One morning--on a washing-day, too, as it
+happened--she called out, before the teacher and his wife were up, that
+the Maoris who supplied them with milk were away, and she had promised
+to go up and milk the cow and bring the milk down. The teacher gave her
+permission. One of the scholars usually brought the milk early. Lunch
+time came and no August, no milk--strangest of all, only half the school
+children. The teacher put on his hat, and went up to the pa once more.
+He found August squatted in the midst of a circle of relations. She was
+entertaining them with one of a series of idealistic sketches of the
+teacher's domestic life, in which she showed a very vivid imagination,
+and exhibited an unaccountable savage sort of pessimism. Her intervals
+of absence had been occupied in this way from the first. The astounding
+slanders she had circulated concerning the teacher's private life came
+back, bit by bit, to his ears for a year afterwards, and her character
+sketches of previous teachers, and her own relations--for she spared
+nobody--would have earned a white woman a long and well-merited term of
+imprisonment for criminal libel. She had cunningly, by straightforward
+and unscrupulous lying, prejudiced the principal mother and boss woman
+of the pa against the teacher and his wife; as a natural result of which
+the old lady, who, like the rest, was very ignorant and ungrateful,
+“turned nasty” and kept the children from school. The teacher lost
+his temper, so the children were rounded up and hurried down to
+school immediately; with them came August and her aunt, with alleged
+explanations and excuses, and a shell-fish. The aunt and sisters said
+they'd have nothing to do with August. They didn't want her and wouldn't
+have her. The teacher said that, under those circumstances, she'd better
+go and drown herself; so she went home with them.
+
+The whole business had been a plot by her nearest relations. They
+got rid of the trouble and expense of keeping her, and the bother of
+borrowing in person, whenever in need of trifles in the grocery line.
+Borrowing recommenced with her dismissal; but the teacher put a full
+stop to it, as far as he was concerned. Then August, egged on by her
+aunt, sent a blackguardly letter to the teacher's wife; the sick sister,
+by the way, who had been nursed and supplied with food by her all along,
+was in it, and said she was glad August sent the letter, and it served
+the schoolmistress right. The teacher went up to the pa once more; an
+hour later, August in person, accompanied, as usual, by a relation
+or two, delivered at the cottage an abject apology in writing, the
+composition of which would have discouraged the most enthusiastic
+advocate of higher education for the lower classes.
+
+Then various petty annoyances were tried. The teacher is firmly
+convinced that certain animal-like sounds round the house at night were
+due to August's trying to find out whether his wife was as likely to be
+haunted as the Maoris were. He didn't dream of such a thing at the time,
+for he did not believe that one of them had the pluck to venture out
+after dark. But savage superstition must give way to savage hate.
+The girl's last “try-on” was to come down to the school fence, and
+ostentatiously sharpen a table-knife on the wires, while she scowled
+murderously in the direction of the schoolmistress, who was hanging out
+her washing. August looked, in her dark, bushy, Maori hair, a thoroughly
+wild savage. Her father had murdered her mother under particularly
+brutal circumstances, and the daughter took after her father.
+
+The teacher called her and said: “Now, look here, my lady, the best
+thing you can do is to drop that nonsense at once” (she had dropped the
+knife in the ferns behind her), “for we're the wrong sort of people
+to try it on with. Now you get out of this and tell your aunt--she's
+sneaking there in the flax--what I tell you, and that she'd better clear
+out of this quick, or I'll have a policeman out and take the whole
+gang into town in an hour. Now be off, and shut that gate behind you,
+carefully, and fasten it.” She did, and went.
+
+The worst of it was that the August romance copy was useless. Her lies
+were even less reliable and picturesque than the common Jones Alley hag
+lie. Then the teacher thought of the soft fool he'd been, and that made
+him wild. He looked like a fool, and was one to a great extent, but it
+wasn't good policy to take him for one.
+
+Strange to say, he and others had reason to believe that August
+respected him, and liked him rather than otherwise; but she hated his
+wife, who had been kind to her, as only a savage can hate. The younger
+pupils told the teacher, cheerfully and confidently, that August said
+she'd cut Mrs. Lorrens' throat the first chance she got. Next week the
+aunt sent down to ask if the teacher could sell her a bar of soap, and
+sent the same old shilling; he was tired of seeing it stuck out in front
+of him, so he took it, put it in his pocket, and sent the soap. This
+must have discouraged them, for the borrowing industry petered out. He
+saw the aunt later on, and she told him, cheerfully, that August was
+going to live with a half-caste in a certain house in town.
+
+Poor August! For she was only a tool after all. Her “romance” was
+briefly as follows:--She went, per off-hand Maori arrangement, as
+'housekeeper' in the hut of a labourer at a neighbouring saw-mill. She
+stayed three months, for a wonder; at the expiration of which time she
+put on her hat and explained that she was tired of stopping there, and
+was going home. He said, 'All right, Sarah, wait a while and I'll take
+you home.' At the door of her aunt's house he said, 'Well, good-bye,
+Sarah,' and she said, in her brooding way, 'Good-bye, Jim.' And that was
+all.
+
+As the last apparent result of August's mischief-making, her brother
+or someone one evening rode up to the cottage, drunk and inclined to
+bluster. He was accompanied by a friend, also drunk, who came to see the
+fun, and was ready to use his influence on the winning side. The teacher
+went inside, brought out his gun, and slipped two cartridges in.
+“I've had enough of this,” he said. “Now then, be off, you insolent
+blackguards, or I'll shoot you like rabbits. Go!” and he snapped his jaw
+and the breech of his gun together. As they rode off, the old local hawk
+happened to soar close over a dead lamb in the fern at the corner of the
+garden, and the teacher, who had been “laying” for him a long time, let
+fly both barrels at him, without thinking. When he turned, there was
+only a cloud of dust down the track.
+
+    .   .   .   .   .
+
+The teacher taught that school for three years thereafter, without a
+hitch. But he went no more on Universal Brotherhood lines. And, for
+years after he had gone, his name was spoken of with great respect by
+the Maoris.
+
+
+
+
+New Year's Night
+
+
+
+It was dark enough for anything in Dead Man's Gap--a round, warm, close
+darkness, in which retreating sounds seemed to be cut off suddenly at a
+distance of a hundred yards or so, instead of growing faint and fainter,
+and dying away, to strike the ear once or twice again--and after
+minutes, it might seem--with startling distinctness, before being
+finally lost in the distance, as it is on clear, frosty nights. So with
+the sounds of horses' hoofs, stumbling on the rough bridle-track through
+the “saddle”, the clatter of hoof-clipped stones and scrape of gravel
+down the hidden “siding”, and the low sound of men's voices, blurred
+and speaking in monosyllables and at intervals it seemed, and in hushed,
+awed tones, as though they carried a corpse. To practical eyes, grown
+used to such a darkness, and at the nearest point, the passing blurrs
+would have suggested two riders on bush hacks leading a third with an
+empty saddle on its back--a lady's or “side-saddle”, if one could have
+distinguished the horns. They may have struck a soft track or level, or
+rounded the buttress of the hill higher up, but before they had time
+to reach or round the foot of the spur, blurs, whispers, stumble and
+clatter of hoofs, jingle of bridle rings, and the occasional clank
+together of stirrup irons, seemed shut off as suddenly and completely as
+though a great sound-proof door had swung to behind them.
+
+It was dark enough on the glaringest of days down in the lonely hollow
+or “pocket”, between two spurs, at the head of a blind gully behind
+Mount Buckaroo, where there was a more or less dusty patch, barely
+defined even in broad daylight by a spidery dog-legged fence on
+three sides, and a thin “two-rail” (dignified with the adjective
+“split-rail”--though rails and posts were mostly of saplings split in
+halves) running along the frontage. In about the middle of it a little
+slab hut, overshadowed by a big stringy-bark shed, was pointed out as
+Johnny Mears's Farm.
+
+“Black as--as charcoal,” said Johnny Mears. He had never seen coal, and
+was a cautious man, whose ideas came slowly. He stooped, close by the
+fence, with his hands on his knees, to “sky” the loom of his big shed
+and so get his bearings. He had been to have a look at the penned
+calves, and see that all slip-rails were up and pegged, for the words of
+John Mears junior, especially when delivered rapidly and shrilly and in
+injured tones, were not to be relied upon in these matters.
+
+“It's hot enough to melt the belly out of my fiddle,” said Johnny Mears
+to his wife, who sat on a three-legged stool by the rough table in the
+little whitewashed “end-room”, putting a patch of patches over the seat
+of a pair of moleskin knickerbockers. He lit his pipe, moved a stool
+to the side of the great empty fireplace, where it looked cooler--might
+have been cooler on account of a possible draught suggested by the
+presence of the chimney, and where, therefore, he felt a breath
+cooler. He took his fiddle from a convenient shelf, tuned it slowly and
+carefully, holding his pipe (in his mouth) well up and to one side, as
+if the fiddle were an inquisitive and restless baby. He played “Little
+Drops o' Brandy” three times, right through, without variations,
+blinking solemnly the while; then he put the violin carefully back in
+its box, and started to cut up another pipeful.
+
+“You should have gone, Johnny,” said the haggard little woman.
+
+“Rackin' the horse out a night like this,” retorted Johnny, “and
+startin' ploughin' to-morrow. It ain't worth while. Let them come for me
+if they want me. Dance on a night like this! Why! they'll dance in----”
+
+“But you promised. It won't do you no good, Johnny.”
+
+“It won't do me no harm.”
+
+The little woman went on stitching.
+
+“It's smotherin' hot,” said Johnny, with an impatient oath. “I don't
+know whether I'll turn in, or turn out, under the shed to-night. It's
+too d----d hot to roost indoors.”
+
+She bent her head lower over the patch. One smoked and the other
+stitched in silence for twenty minutes or so, during which time Johnny
+might be supposed to have been deliberating listlessly as to whether
+he'd camp out on account of the heat, or turn in. But he broke the
+silence with a clout at a mosquito on the nape of his neck, and a bad
+word.
+
+“I wish you wouldn't swear so much, Johnny,” she said wearily--“at least
+not to-night.”
+
+He looked at her blankly.
+
+“Why--why to-night? What's the matter with you to-night, Mary? What's
+to-night more than any other night to you? I see no harm--can't a man
+swear when a mosquito sticks him?”
+
+“I--I was only thinking of the boys, Johnny.”
+
+“The boys! Why, they're both on the hay in the shed.” He stared at
+her again, shifted uneasily, crossed the other leg tightly, frowned,
+blinked, and reached for the matches. “You look a bit off-colour, Mary.
+It's the heat that makes us all a bit ratty at times. Better put that by
+and have a swill o' oatmeal and water, and turn in.”
+
+“It's too hot to go to bed. I couldn't sleep. I'm all right. I'll--I'll
+just finish this. Just reach me a drink from the water-bag--the
+pannikin's on the hob there, by your boot.”
+
+He scratched his head helplessly, and reached for the drink. When he
+sat down again, he felt strangely restless. “Like a hen that didn't know
+where to lay,” he put it. He couldn't settle down or keep still, and
+didn't seem to enjoy his pipe somehow. He rubbed his head again.
+
+“There's a thunderstorm comin',” he said. “That's what it is; and the
+sooner it comes the better.”
+
+He went to the back door, and stared at the blackness to the east, and,
+sure enough, lightning was blinking there.
+
+“It's coming, sure enough; just hang out and keep cool for another hour,
+and you'll feel the difference.”
+
+He sat down again on the three-legged stool, folded his arms, with his
+elbows on his knees, drew a long breath, and blinked at the clay floor
+for a while; then he twisted the stool round on one leg, until he faced
+the old-fashioned spired wooden clock (the brass disc of the pendulum
+moving ghost-like through a scarred and scratched marine scene--Margate
+in England--on the glass that covered the lower half) that stood alone
+on the slab shelf over the fireplace. The hands indicated half-past
+two, and Johnny, who had studied that clock and could “hit the time nigh
+enough by it,” after knitting his brows and blinking at the dial for a
+full minute by its own hand, decided “that it must be getting on toward
+nine o'clock.”
+
+It must have been the heat. Johnny stood up, raking his hair, turned to
+the door and back again, and then, after an impatient gesture, took up
+his fiddle and raised it to his shoulder. Then the queer thing happened.
+He said afterwards, under conditions favourable to such sentimental
+confidence, that a cold hand seemed to take hold of the bow, through
+his, and--anyway, before he knew what he was about he had played the
+first bars of “When First I Met Sweet Peggy”, a tune he had played
+often, twenty years before, in his courting days, and had never happened
+to play since. He sawed it right through (the cold hand left after the
+first bar or two) standing up; then still stood with fiddle and bow
+trembling in his hands, with the queer feeling still on him, and a
+rush of old thoughts going through his head, all of which he set down
+afterwards to the effect of the heat. He put the fiddle away hastily,
+damning the bridge of it at the same time in loud but hurried tones,
+with the idea of covering any eccentricity which the wife might have
+noticed in his actions. “Must 'a' got a touch o' sun,” he muttered
+to himself. He sat down, fumbled with knife, pipe, and tobacco, and
+presently stole a furtive glance over his shoulder at his wife.
+
+The washed-out little woman was still sewing, but stitching blindly, for
+great tears were rolling down her worn cheeks.
+
+Johnny, white-faced on account of the heat, stood close behind her,
+one hand on her shoulder and the other clenched on the table; but the
+clenched hand shook as badly as the loose one.
+
+“Good God! What is the matter, Mary? You're sick!” (They had had little
+or no experience of illness.) “Tell me, Mary--come now! Has the boys
+been up to anything?”
+
+“No, Johnny; it's not that.”
+
+“What is it then? You're taken sick! What have you been doing with
+yourself? It might be fever. Hold up a minute. You wait here quiet while
+I roost out the boys and send 'em for the doctor and someone----”
+
+“No! no! I'm not sick, John. It's only a turn. I'll be all right in a
+minute.”
+
+He shifted his hand to her head, which she dropped suddenly, with a
+life-weary sigh, against his side.
+
+“Now then!” cried Johnny, wildly, “don't you faint or go into
+disterricks, Mary! It'll upset the boys; think of the boys! It's only
+the heat--you're only takin' queer.”
+
+“It's not that; you ought to know me better than that. It
+was--I--Johnny, I was only thinking--we've been married twenty years
+to-night--an'--it's New Year's Night!”
+
+“And I've never thought of it!” said Johnny (in the afterwards). “Shows
+what a God-forgotten selection will make of a man. She'd thought of it
+all the time, and was waiting for it to strike me. Why! I'd agreed to go
+and play at a darnce at Old Pipeclay School-house all night--that very
+night--and leave her at home because she hadn't asked to come; and
+it never struck me to ask her--at home by herself in that hole--for
+twenty-five bob. And I only stopped at home because I'd got the hump,
+and knew they'd want me bad at the school.”
+
+They sat close together on the long stool by the table, shy and awkward
+at first; and she clung to him at opening of thunder, and they started
+apart guiltily when the first great drops sounded like footsteps on the
+gravel outside, just as they'd done one night-time before--twenty years
+before.
+
+If it was dark before, it was black now. The edge of the awful
+storm-cloud rushed up and under the original darkness like the best
+“drop” black-brushed over the cheap “lamp” variety, turning it grey by
+contrast. The deluge lasted only a quarter of an hour; but it cleared
+the night, and did its work. There was hail before it, too--big as emu
+eggs, the boys said--that lay feet deep in the old diggers' holes on
+Pipeclay for days afterwards--weeks some said.
+
+The two sweethearts of twenty years ago and to-night watched the retreat
+of the storm, and, seeing Mount Buckaroo standing clear, they went to
+the back door, which opened opposite the end of the shed, and saw to the
+east a glorious arch of steel-blue, starry sky, with the distant peaks
+showing clear and blue away back under the far-away stars in the depth
+of it.
+
+They lingered awhile--arms round each other's waists--before she called
+the boys, just as they had done this time of night twenty years ago,
+after the boys' grandmother had called her.
+
+“Awlright, mother!” bawled back the boys, with unfilial independence
+of Australian youth. “We're awlright! We'll be in directly! Wasn't it a
+pelterer, mother?”
+
+They went in and sat down again. The embarrassment began to wear off.
+
+“We'll get out of this, Mary,” said Johnny. “I'll take Mason's offer
+for the cattle and things, and take that job of Dawson's, boss or no
+boss”--(Johnny's bad luck was due to his inability in the past to “get
+on” with any boss for any reasonable length of time)--“I can get the
+boys on, too. They're doing no good here, and growing up. It ain't doing
+justice to them; and, what's more, this life is killin' you, Mary. That
+settles it! I was blind. Let the jumpt-up selection go! It's making a
+wall-eyed bullock of me, Mary--a dry-rotted rag of a wall-eyed bullock
+like Jimmy Nowlett's old Strawberry. And you'll live in town like a
+lady.”
+
+“Somebody coming!” yelled the boys.
+
+There was a clatter of sliprails hurriedly thrown down, and clipped by
+horses' hoofs.
+
+“Insoide there! Is that you, Johnny?”
+
+“Yes!” (“I knew they'd come for you,” said Mrs. Mears to Johnny.)
+
+“You'll have to come, Johnny. There's no get out of it. Here's Jim
+Mason with me, and we've got orders to stun you and pack you if you show
+fight. The blessed fiddler from Mudgee didn't turn up. Dave Regan burst
+his concertina, and they're in a fix.”
+
+“But I can't leave the missus.”
+
+“That's all right. We've got the school missus's mare and side-saddle.
+She says you ought to be jolly well ashamed of yourself, Johnny Mears,
+for not bringing your wife on New Year's Night. And so you ought!”
+
+Johnny did not look shame-faced, for reasons unknown to them.
+
+“The boys couldn't find the horses,” put in Mrs. Mears. “Johnny was just
+going down the gully again.”
+
+He gave her a grateful look, and felt a strange, new thrill of
+admiration for his wife.
+
+“And--there's a bottle of the best put by for you, Johnny,” added Pat
+McDurmer, mistaking Johnny's silence; “and we'll call it thirty bob!”
+ (Johnny's ideas were coming slowly again, after the recent rush.)
+“Or--two quid!--there you are!”
+
+“I don't want two quid, nor one either, for taking my wife to a dance on
+New Year's Night!” said Johnny Mears. “Run and put on your best bib and
+tucker, Mary.”
+
+And she hurried to dress as eager and excited, and smiling to herself
+as girlishly as she had done on such occasions on evenings before the
+bright New Year's Night twenty years ago.--For a related story, see “A
+Bush Dance”, in “Joe Wilson and His Mates”.--A. L., 1998.--
+
+
+
+
+Black Joe
+
+
+
+They called him Black Joe, and me White Joe, by way of distinction and
+for the convenience of his boss (my uncle), and my aunt, and mother; so,
+when we heard the cry of “Bla-a-ack Joe!” (the adjective drawn out until
+it became a screech, after several repetitions, and the “Joe” short
+and sharp) coming across the flat in a woman's voice, Joe knew that the
+missus wanted him at the house, to get wood or water, or mind the baby,
+and he kept carefully out of sight; he went at once when uncle called.
+And when we heard the cry of “Wh-i-i-te Joe!” which we did with
+difficulty and after several tries--though Black Joe's ears were of the
+keenest--we knew that I was overdue at home, or absent without leave,
+and was probably in for a warming, as the old folk called it. On some
+occasions I postponed the warming as long as my stomach held out, which
+was a good while in five-corner, native-cherry, or yam season--but the
+warming was none the cooler for being postponed.
+
+Sometimes Joe heard the wrong adjective, or led me to believe he
+did--and left me for a whole afternoon under the impression that the
+race of Ham was in demand at the homestead, when I myself was wanted
+there, and maternal wrath was increasing every moment of my absence.
+
+But Joe knew that my conscience was not so elastic as his, and--well,
+you must expect little things like this in all friendships.
+
+Black Joe was somewhere between nine and twelve when I first met him,
+on a visit to my uncle's station; I was somewhere in those years too.
+He was very black, the darker for being engaged in the interesting but
+uncertain occupation of “burning off” in his spare time--which wasn't
+particularly limited. He combined shepherding, 'possum and kangaroo
+hunting, crawfishing, sleeping, and various other occupations and
+engagements with that of burning off. I was very white, being a sickly
+town boy; but, as I took great interest in burning off, and was not
+particularly fond of cold water--it was in winter time--the difference
+in our complexions was not so marked at times.
+
+Black Joe's father, old Black Jimmie, lived in a gunyah on the rise
+at the back of the sheepyards, and shepherded for my uncle. He was a
+gentle, good-humoured, easy-going old fellow with a pleasant smile;
+which description applies, I think, to most old blackfellows in
+civilisation. I was very partial to the old man, and chummy with him,
+and used to slip away from the homestead whenever I could, and squat
+by the campfire along with the other piccaninnies, and think, and
+yarn socially with Black Jimmie by the hour. I would give something to
+remember those conversations now. Sometimes somebody would be sent to
+bring me home, when it got too late, and Black Jimmie would say:
+
+“Piccaninnie alonga possum rug,” and there I'd be, sound asleep, with
+the other young Australians.
+
+I liked Black Jimmie very much, and would willingly have adopted him
+as a father. I should have been quite content to spend my days in the
+scrub, enjoying life in dark and savage ways, and my nights “alonga
+possum rug”; but the family had other plans for my future.
+
+It was a case of two blackfellows and one gin, when Black Jimmie went
+a-wooing--about twelve years before I made his acquaintance--and he
+fought for his bride in the black fashion. It was the last affair of
+that kind in the district. My uncle's brother professed to have been
+present at the fight, and gave me an alleged description of it. He said
+that they drew lots, and Black Jimmie put his hands on his knees and
+bent his head, and the other blackfellow hit him a whack on the skull
+with a nulla nulla. Then they had a nip of rum all round--Black Jimmie
+must have wanted it, for the nulla nulla was knotted, and heavy, and
+made in the most approved fashion. Then the other blackfellow bent his
+head, and Jimmie took the club and returned the whack with interest.
+Then the other fellow hit Jimmie a lick, and took a clout in return.
+Then they had another drink, and continued thus until Jimmie's rival
+lost all heart and interest in the business. But you couldn't take
+everything my uncle's brother said for granted.
+
+Black Mary was a queen by right, and had the reputation of being
+the cleanest gin in the district; she was a great favourite with the
+squatters' wives round there. Perhaps she hoped to reclaim Jimmie--he
+was royal, too, but held easy views with regard to religion and the
+conventionalities of civilisation. Mary insisted on being married
+properly by a clergyman, made the old man build a decent hut, had all
+her children christened, and kept him and them clean and tidy up to the
+time of her death.
+
+Poor Queen Mary was ambitious. She started to educate her children,
+and when they got beyond her--that is when they had learnt their
+letters--she was grateful for any assistance from the good-natured bush
+men and women of her acquaintance. She had decided to get her eldest boy
+into the mounted police, and had plans for the rest, and she worked hard
+for them, too. Jimmie offered no opposition, and gave her no assistance
+beyond the rations and money he earned shepherding--which was as much as
+could be expected of him.
+
+He did as many husbands do “for the sake of peace and quietness”--he
+drifted along in the wake of his wife, and took things as easily as her
+schemes of reformation and education would allow him to.
+
+Queen Mary died before her time, respected by all who knew or had heard
+of her. The nearest squatter's wife sent a pair of sheets for a shroud,
+with instructions to lay Mary out, and arranged (by bush telegraph) to
+drive over next morning with her sister-in-law and two other white women
+in the vicinity, to see Mary decently buried.
+
+But the remnant of Jimmie's tribe were there beforehand. They tore the
+sheets in strips and tied Mary up in a bundle, with her chin to her
+knees--preparing her for burial in their own fashion--and mourned all
+night in whitewash and ashes. At least, the gins did. The white women
+saw that it was hopeless to attempt to untie any of the innumerable
+knots and double knots, even if it had been possible to lay Mary out
+afterwards; so they had to let her be buried as she was, with black and
+white obsequies. And we've got no interest in believing that she did not
+“jump up white woman” long ago.
+
+My uncle and his brother took the two eldest boys. Black Jimmie
+shifted away from the hut at once with the rest of his family--for the
+“devil-devil” sat down there--and Mary's name was strictly “tabooed” in
+accordance with aboriginal etiquette.
+
+Jimmie drifted back towards the graves of his fathers in company with
+a decreasing flock of sheep day by day (for the house of my uncle had
+fallen on times of drought and depression, and foot-rot and wool rings,
+and over-drafts and bank owners), and a few strips of bark, a dying
+fire, a black pipe, some greasy 'possum rugs and blankets, a litter of
+kangaroo tails, etc., four neglected piccaninnies, half a score of mangy
+mongrels, and, haply, a “lilly drap o' rum”, by night.
+
+The four little Australians grew dirtier and more shy and savage, and
+ate underdone kangaroo and 'possum and native bear, with an occasional
+treat of oak grubs and goanna by preference--and died out, one by
+one, as blacks do when brought within the ever widening circle of
+civilisation. Jimmie moved promptly after each death, and left the
+evil one in possession, and built another mia-mia--each one being less
+pretentious than the last. Finally he was left, the last of his tribe,
+to mourn his lot in solitude.
+
+But the devil-devil came and sat down by King Jimmie's side one night,
+so he, too, moved out across the Old Man border, and the mia-mia rotted
+into the ground and the grass grew there.
+
+    .   .   .   .   .
+
+I admired Joe; I thought him wiser and cleverer than any white boy in
+the world. He could smell out 'possums unerringly, and I firmly believed
+he could see yards through the muddiest of dam water; for once, when I
+dropped my boat in, and was not sure of the spot, he fished it out first
+try. With cotton reels and bits of stick and bark he would make the
+model of a station homestead, slaughter-yards, sheep-yards, and all
+complete, working in ideas and improvements of his own which might
+have been put into practice with advantage. He was a most original and
+interesting liar upon all subjects upon which he was ignorant and
+which came up incidentally. He gave me a very interesting account of an
+interview between his father and Queen Victoria, and mentioned casually
+that his father had walked across the Thames without getting wet.
+
+He also told me how he, Joe, had tied a mounted trooper to a verandah
+post and thrashed him with pine saplings until the timber gave out and
+he was tired. I questioned Jimmie, but the incidents seemed to have
+escaped the old king's memory.
+
+Joe could build bigger woodheaps with less wood than any black or white
+tramp or loafer round there. He was a born architect. He took a world
+of pains with his wood-heaps--he built them hollow, in the shape of a
+break-wind, with the convex side towards the house for the benefit of
+his employers. Joe was easy-going; he had inherited a love of peace and
+quietness from his father. Uncle generally came home after dark, and Joe
+would have little fires lit at safe distances all round the house,
+in order to convey an impression that the burning off was proceeding
+satisfactorily.
+
+When the warm weather came, Joe and I got into trouble with an old hag
+for bathing in a waterhole in the creek in front of her shanty, and she
+impounded portions of our wardrobe. We shouldn't have lost much if she
+had taken it all; but our sense of injury was deep, especially as she
+used very bad grammar towards us.
+
+Joe addressed her from the safe side of the water. He said, “Look here!
+Old leather-face, sugar-eye, plar-bag marmy, I call it you.”
+
+“Plar-bag marmy” meant “Mother Flour-bag”, and ration sugar was
+decidedly muddy in appearance.
+
+She came round the waterhole with a clothes prop, and made good time,
+too; but we got across and away with our clothes.
+
+That little incident might have changed the whole course of my
+existence. Plar-bag Marmy made a formal complaint to uncle, who happened
+to pass there on horseback about an hour later; and the same evening
+Joe's latest and most carefully planned wood heap collapsed while aunt
+was pulling a stick out of it in the dark, and it gave her a bad scare,
+the results of which might have been serious.
+
+So uncle gave us a thrashing, without the slightest regard for racial
+distinctions, and sent us to bed without our suppers.
+
+We sought Jimmie's camp, but Joe got neither sympathy nor damper from
+his father, and I was sent home with a fatherly lecture “for going
+alonga that fella,” meaning Joe.
+
+Joe and I discussed existence at a waterhole down the creek next
+afternoon, over a billy of crawfish which we had boiled and a piece of
+gritty damper, and decided to retire beyond the settled districts--some
+five hundred miles or so--to a place that Joe said he knew of, where
+there were lagoons and billabongs ten miles wide, alive with ducks and
+fish, and black cockatoos and kangaroos and wombats, that only waited to
+be knocked over with a stick.
+
+I thought I might as well start and be a blackfellow at once, so we
+got a rusty pan without a handle, and cooked about a pint of fat yellow
+oak-grubs; and I was about to fall to when we were discovered, and the
+full weight of combined family influence was brought to bear on the
+situation. We had broken a new pair of shears digging out those grubs
+from under the bark of the she-oaks, and had each taken a blade as his
+own especial property, which we thought was the best thing to do under
+the circumstances. Uncle wanted those shears badly, so he received us
+with the buggy whip--and he didn't draw the colour line either. All
+that night and next day I wished he had. I was sent home, and Joe went
+droving with uncle soon after that, else I might have lived a life of
+freedom and content and died out peacefully with the last of my adopted
+tribe.
+
+Joe died of consumption on the track. When he was dying uncle asked: “Is
+there anything you would like?”
+
+And Joe said: “I'd like a lilly drap o' rum, boss.”
+
+Which were his last words, for he drank the rum and died peacefully.
+
+I was the first to hear the news at home, and, being still a youngster,
+I ran to the house, crying “Oh, mother! aunt's Joe is dead!”
+
+There were visitors at our place at the time, and, as the eldest child
+of the maternal aunt in question had also been christened Joe--after a
+grandfather of our tribe (my tribe, not Black Joe's)--the news caused
+a sudden and unpleasant sensation. But cross-examination explained the
+mistake, and I retired to the rear of the pig-sty, as was my custom when
+things went wrong, with another cause for grief.
+
+
+
+
+They Wait on the Wharf in Black
+
+        “Seems to me that honest, hard-working men seem to accumulate
+        the heaviest swags of trouble in this world.”--Steelman.
+
+    Told by Mitchell's Mate.
+
+
+
+We were coming back from West Australia, steerage--Mitchell, the Oracle,
+and I. I had gone over saloon, with a few pounds in my pocket. Mitchell
+said this was a great mistake--I should have gone over steerage with
+nothing but the clothes I stood upright in, and come back saloon with a
+pile. He said it was a very common mistake that men made, but, as far
+as his experience went, there always seemed to be a deep-rooted popular
+prejudice in favour of going away from home with a few pounds in one's
+pocket and coming back stumped; at least amongst rovers and vagabonds
+like ourselves--it wasn't so generally popular or admired at home, or in
+the places we came back to, as it was in the places we went to. Anyway
+it went, there wasn't the slightest doubt that our nearest and dearest
+friends were, as a rule, in favour of our taking away as little as we
+could possibly manage with, and coming back with a pile, whether we came
+back saloon or not; and that ought to settle the matter as far as any
+chap that had the slightest consideration for his friends or family was
+concerned.
+
+There was a good deal of misery, underneath, coming home in that
+steerage. One man had had his hand crushed and amputated out Coolgardie
+way, and the stump had mortified, and he was being sent to Melbourne by
+his mates. Some had lost their money, some a couple of years of their
+life, some their souls; but none seemed to have lost the heart to
+call up the quiet grin that southern rovers, vagabonds, travellers for
+“graft” or fortune, and professional wanderers wear in front of it
+all. Except one man--an elderly eastern digger--he had lost his wife in
+Sydney while he was away.
+
+They sent him a wire to the Boulder Soak, or somewhere out back of
+White Feather, to say that his wife was seriously ill; but the wire went
+wrong, somehow, after the manner of telegrams not connected with mining,
+on the lines of “the Western”. They sent him a wire to say that his wife
+was dead, and that reached him all right--only a week late.
+
+I can imagine it. He got the message at dinner-time, or when they came
+back to the camp. His mate wanted him to sit in the shade, or lie in
+the tent, while he got the billy boiled. “You must brace up and pull
+yourself together, Tom, for the sake of the youngsters.” And Tom for
+long intervals goes walking up and down, up and down, by the camp--under
+the brassy sky or the gloaming--under the brilliant star-clusters that
+hang over the desert plain, but never raising his eyes to them; kicking
+a tuft of grass or a hole in the sand now and then, and seeming to watch
+the progress of the track he is tramping out. The wife of twenty years
+was with him--though two thousand miles away--till that message came.
+
+I can imagine Tome sitting with his mates round the billy, they talking
+in quiet, subdued tones about the track, the departure of coaches,
+trains and boats--arranging for Tom's journey East, and the working of
+the claim in his absence. Or Tom lying on his back in his bunk, with his
+hands under his head and his eyes fixed on the calico above--thinking,
+thinking, thinking. Thinking, with a touch of his boyhood's faith
+perhaps; or wondering what he had done in his long, hard-working married
+life, that God should do this thing to him now, of all times.
+
+“You'd best take what money we have in the camp, Tom; you'll want it
+all ag'in' the time you get back from Sydney, and we can fix it up
+arterwards.... There's a couple o' clean shirts o' mine--you'd best take
+'em--you'll want 'em on the voyage.... You might as well take them there
+new pants o' mine, they'll only dry-rot out here--and the coat, too,
+if you like--it's too small for me, anyway. You won't have any time in
+Perth, and you'll want some decent togs to land with in Sydney.”
+
+    .   .   .   .   .
+
+“I wouldn't 'a' cared so much if I'd 'a' seen the last of her,” he said,
+in a quiet, patient voice, to us one night by the rail. “I would 'a'
+liked to have seen the last of her.”
+
+“Have you been long in the West?”
+
+“Over two years. I made up to take a run across last Christmas, and have
+a look at 'em. But I couldn't very well get away when 'exemption-time'
+came. I didn't like to leave the claim.”
+
+“Do any good over there?”
+
+“Well, things brightened up a bit the last month or two. I had a hard
+pull at first; landed without a penny, and had to send back every
+shilling I could rake up to get things straightened up a bit at home.
+Then the eldest boy fell ill, and then the baby. I'd reckoned on
+bringing 'em over to Perth or Coolgardie when the cool weather came, and
+having them somewheres near me, where I could go and have a look at 'em
+now and then, and look after them.”
+
+“Going back to the West again?”
+
+“Oh, yes. I must go for the sake of the youngsters. But I don't seem
+to have much heart in it.” He smoked awhile. “Over twenty years we
+struggled along together--the missus and me--and it seems hard that I
+couldn't see the last of her. It's rough on a man.”
+
+“The world is damned rough on a man sometimes,” said Mitchell, “most
+especially when he least deserves it.”
+
+The digger crossed his arms on the rail like an old “cocky” at the fence
+in the cool of the evening, yarning with an old crony.
+
+“Mor'n twenty years she stuck to me and struggled along by my side. She
+never give in. I'll swear she was on her feet till the last, with
+her sleeves tucked up--bustlin' round.... And just when things was
+brightening and I saw a chance of giving her a bit of a rest and comfort
+for the end of her life.... I thought of it all only t'other week when
+things was clearing up ahead; and the last 'order' I sent over I set
+to work and wrote her a long letter, putting all the good news and
+encouragement I could think of into it. I thought how that letter would
+brighten up things at home, and how she'd read it round. I thought of
+lots of things that a man never gets time to think of while his nose is
+kept to the grindstone. And she was dead and in her grave, and I never
+knowed it.”
+
+Mitchell dug his elbow into my ribs and made signs for the matches to
+light his pipe.
+
+“An' yer never knowed,” reflected the Oracle.
+
+“But I always had an idea when there was trouble at home,” the digger
+went on presently, in his quiet, patient tone. “I always knowed; I
+always had a kind of feeling that way--I felt it--no matter how far I
+was away. When the youngsters was sick I knowed it, and I expected the
+letter that come. About a fortnight ago I had a feeling that way when
+the wife was ill. The very stars out there on the desert by the Boulder
+Soak seemed to say: 'There's trouble at home. Go home. There's trouble
+at home.' But I never dreamed what that trouble was. One night I did
+make up my mind to start in the morning, but when the morning came I
+hadn't an excuse, and was ashamed to tell my mates the truth. They might
+have thought I was going ratty, like a good many go out there.” Then he
+broke off with a sort of laugh, as if it just struck him that we
+might think he was a bit off his head, or that his talk was getting
+uncomfortable for us. “Curious, ain't it?” he said.
+
+“Reminds me of a case I knowed,----” commenced the Oracle, after a
+pause.
+
+I could have pitched him overboard; but that was a mistake. He and the
+old digger sat on the for'ard hatch half the night yarning, mostly about
+queer starts, and rum go's, and curious cases the Oracle had knowed,
+and I think the Oracle did him a lot of good somehow, for he seemed more
+cheerful in the morning.
+
+We were overcrowded in the steerage, but Mitchell managed to give up his
+berth to the old digger without letting him know it. Most of the chaps
+seemed anxious to make a place at the first table and pass the first
+helpings of the dishes to the “old cove that had lost his missus.”
+
+They all seemed to forget him as we entered the Heads; they had their
+own troubles to attend to. They were in the shadow of the shame of
+coming back hard up, and the grins began to grow faint and sickly. But I
+didn't forget him. I wish sometimes that I didn't take so much notice of
+things.
+
+There was no mistaking them--the little group that stood apart near the
+end of the wharf, dressed in cheap black. There was the eldest single
+sister--thin, pale, and haggard-looking--that had had all the hard
+worry in the family till her temper was spoilt, as you could see by the
+peevish, irritable lines in her face. She had to be the mother of them
+all now, and had never known, perhaps, what it was to be a girl or a
+sweetheart. She gave a hard, mechanical sort of smile when she saw her
+father, and then stood looking at the boat in a vacant, hopeless sort of
+way. There was the baby, that he saw now for the first time, crowing and
+jumping at the sight of the boat coming in; there was the eldest boy,
+looking awkward and out of place in his new slop-suit of black, shifting
+round uneasily, and looking anywhere but at his father. But the little
+girl was the worst, and a pretty little girl she was, too; she never
+took her streaming eyes off her father's face the whole time. You could
+see that her little heart was bursting, and with pity for him. They were
+too far apart to speak to each other as yet. The boat seemed a cruel
+long long time swinging alongside--I wished they'd hurry up. He'd
+brought his traps up early, and laid 'em on the deck under the rail; he
+stood very quiet with his hands behind him, looking at his children. He
+had a strong, square, workman's face, but I could see his chin and mouth
+quivering under the stubbly, iron-grey beard, and the lump working in
+his throat; and one strong hand gripped the other very tight behind, but
+his eyelids never quivered--only his eyes seemed to grow more and more
+sad and lonesome. These are the sort of long, cruel moments when a man
+sits or stands very tight and quiet and calm-looking, with his whole
+past life going whirling through his brain, year after year, and over
+and over again. Just as the digger seemed about to speak to them he met
+the brimming eyes of his little girl turned up to his face. He looked
+at her for a moment, and then turned suddenly and went below as if
+pretending to go down for his things. I noticed that Mitchell--who
+hadn't seemed to be noticing anything in particular--followed him down.
+When they came on deck again we were right alongside.
+
+“'Ello, Nell!” said the digger to the eldest daughter.
+
+“'Ello, father!” she said, with a sort of gasp, but trying to smile.
+
+“'Ello, Jack, how are you getting on?”
+
+“All right, father,” said the boy, brightening up, and seeming greatly
+relieved.
+
+He looked down at the little girl with a smile that I can't describe,
+but didn't speak to her. She still stood with quivering chin and mouth
+and great brimming eyes upturned, full of such pity as I never saw
+before in a child-face--pity for him.
+
+“You can get ashore now,” said Mitchell; “see, they've got the gangway
+out aft.”
+
+Presently I saw Mitchell with the portmanteau in his hand, and the baby
+on his arm, steering them away to a quiet corner of the shed at the top
+of the wharf. The digger had the little girl in his arms, and both hers
+were round his neck, and her face hidden on his shoulder.
+
+When Mitchell came back, he leant on the rail for a while by my side, as
+if it was a boundary fence out back, and there was no hurry to break up
+camp and make a start.
+
+“What did you follow him below that time for, Mitchell?” I asked
+presently, for want of something better to say.
+
+Mitchell looked at me out of the corners of his eyes.
+
+“I wanted to score a drink!” he said. “I thought he wanted one and
+wouldn't like to be a Jimmy Woodser.”
+
+
+
+
+Seeing the Last of You
+
+
+
+“When you're going away by boat,” said Mitchell, “you ought to say
+good-bye to the women at home, and to the chaps at the last pub. I hate
+waiting on the wharf or up on deck when the boat's behind time. There's
+no sense in it, and a lot of unnecessary misery. Your friends wait on
+the wharf and you are kept at the rail to the bitter end, just when they
+and you most want a spell. And why? Some of them hang out because they
+love you, and want to see the last of you; some because they don't like
+you to see them going away without seeing the last of you; and you hang
+out mostly because it would hurt 'em if you went below and didn't give
+them a chance of seeing the last of you all the time--and you curse the
+boat and wish to God it would start. And those who love you most--the
+women-folk of the family--and who are making all the fuss and breaking
+their hearts about having to see the last of you, and least want to do
+it--they hang out the longest, and are the most determined to see it.
+Where's the sense in it? What's the good of seeing the last of you? How
+do women manage to get consolation out of a thing like that?
+
+“But women get consolation out of queer things sometimes,” he added
+reflectively, “and so do men.
+
+“I remember when I was knocking about the coasts, an old aunt of mine
+always persisted in coming down to see the last of me, and bringing the
+whole family too--no matter if I was only going away for a month. I was
+her favourite. I always turned up again in a few months; but if I'd come
+back every next boat it wouldn't have made the slightest difference to
+her. She'd say that I mightn't come back some day, and then she'd never
+forgive herself nor the family for not seeing me off. I suppose she'll
+see the end of me yet if she lives long enough--and she's a wiry old
+lady of the old school. She was old-fashioned and dressed like a fright,
+they said at home. They hated being seen in public with her; to tell the
+truth, I felt a bit ashamed, too, at times. I wouldn't be, now. When I'd
+get her off on to the wharf I'd be overcome with my feelings, and have
+to retire to the privacy of the bar to hide my emotions till the
+boat was going. And she'd stand on the end of the pier and wave her
+handkerchief and mop her old eyes with it until she was removed by
+force.
+
+“God bless her old heart! There wasn't so much affection wasted on me
+at home that I felt crowded by hers; and I never lost anything by her
+seeing the last of me.
+
+“I do wish the Oracle would stop that confounded fiddle of his--it makes
+you think over damned old things.”
+
+
+
+
+Two Boys at Grinder Brothers'
+
+
+
+Five or six half-grown larrikins sat on the cemented sill of the big
+window of Grinder Bros.' Railway Coach Factory waiting for the work
+bell, and one of the number was Bill Anderson--known as “Carstor
+Hoil”--a young terror of fourteen or fifteen.
+
+“Here comes Balmy Arvie,” exclaimed Bill as a pale, timid-looking little
+fellow rounded the corner and stood against the wall by the door. “How's
+your parents, Balmy?”
+
+The boy made no answer; he shrank closer to the entrance. The first bell
+went.
+
+“What yer got for dinner, Balmy? Bread 'n' treacle?” asked the young
+ruffian; then for the edification of his chums he snatched the boy's
+dinner bag and emptied its contents on the pavement.
+
+The door opened. Arvie gathered up his lunch, took his time-ticket, and
+hurried in.
+
+“Well, Balmy,” said one of the smiths as he passed, “what do you think
+of the boat race?”
+
+“I think,” said the boy, goaded to reply, “that it would be better if
+young fellows of this country didn't think so much about racin' an'
+fightin'.”
+
+The questioner stared blankly for a moment, then laughed suddenly in the
+boy's face, and turned away. The rest grinned.
+
+“Arvie's getting balmier than ever,” guffawed young Bill.
+
+“Here, Carstor Hoil,” cried one of the smiths' strikers, “how much oil
+will you take for a chew of terbaccer?”
+
+“Teaspoonful?”
+
+“No, two.”
+
+“All right; let's see the chew, first.”
+
+“Oh, you'll get it. What yer frighten' of?... Come on, chaps, 'n' see
+Bill drink oil.”
+
+Bill measured out some machine oil and drank it. He got the tobacco, and
+the others got what they called “the fun of seein' Bill drink oil!”
+
+The second bell rang, and Bill went up to the other end of the shop,
+where Arvie was already at work sweeping shavings from under a bench.
+
+The young terror seated himself on the end of this bench, drummed his
+heels against the leg, and whistled. He was in no hurry, for his foreman
+had not yet arrived. He amused himself by lazily tossing chips at
+Arvie, who made no protest for a while. “It would be--better--for this
+country,” said the young terror, reflectively and abstractedly, cocking
+his eye at the whitewashed roof beams and feeling behind him on the
+bench for a heavier chip--“it would be better--for this country--if
+young fellers didn't think so much about--about--racin'--AND fightin'.”
+
+“You let me alone,” said Arvie.
+
+“Why, what'll you do?” exclaimed Bill, bringing his eye down with
+feigned surprise. Then, in an indignant tone, “I don't mind takin' a
+fall out of yer, now, if yer like.”
+
+Arvie went on with his work. Bill tossed all the chips within reach, and
+then sat carelessly watching some men at work, and whistling the “Dead
+March”. Presently he asked:
+
+“What's yer name, Balmy?”
+
+No answer.
+
+“Carn't yer answer a civil question? I'd soon knock the sulks out of yer
+if I was yer father.”
+
+“My name's Arvie; you know that.”
+
+“Arvie what?”
+
+“Arvie Aspinall.”
+
+Bill cocked his eye at the roof and thought a while and whistled; then
+he said suddenly:
+
+“Say, Balmy, where d'yer live?”
+
+“Jones' Alley.”
+
+“What?”
+
+“Jones' Alley.”
+
+A short, low whistle from Bill. “What house?”
+
+“Number Eight.”
+
+“Garn! What yer giv'nus?”
+
+“I'm telling the truth. What's there funny about it? What do I want to
+tell you a lie for?”
+
+“Why, we lived there once, Balmy. Old folks livin'?”
+
+“Mother is; father's dead.”
+
+Bill scratched the back of his head, protruded his under lip, and
+reflected.
+
+“I say, Arvie, what did yer father die of?”
+
+“Heart disease. He dropped down dead at his work.”
+
+Long, low, intense whistle from Bill. He wrinkled his forehead and
+stared up at the beams as if he expected to see something unusual there.
+After a while he said, very impressively: “So did mine.”
+
+The coincidence hadn't done striking him yet; he wrestled with it for
+nearly a minute longer. Then he said:
+
+“I suppose yer mother goes out washin'?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“'N' cleans offices?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“So does mine. Any brothers 'n' sisters?”
+
+“Two--one brother 'n' one sister.”
+
+Bill looked relieved--for some reason.
+
+“I got nine,” he said. “Yours younger'n you?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Lot of bother with the landlord?”
+
+“Yes, a good lot.”
+
+“Had any bailiffs in yet?”
+
+“Yes, two.”
+
+They compared notes a while longer, and tailed off into a silence which
+lasted three minutes and grew awkward towards the end.
+
+Bill fidgeted about on the bench, reached round for a chip, but
+recollected himself. Then he cocked his eye at the roof once more and
+whistled, twirling a shaving round his fingers the while. At last
+he tore the shaving in two, jerked it impatiently from him, and said
+abruptly:
+
+“Look here, Arvie! I'm sorry I knocked over yer barrer yesterday.”
+
+“Thank you.”
+
+This knocked Bill out the first round. He rubbed round uneasily on
+the bench, fidgeted with the vise, drummed his fingers, whistled, and
+finally thrust his hands in his pockets and dropped on his feet.
+
+“Look here, Arvie!” he said in low, hurried tones. “Keep close to me
+goin' out to-night, 'n' if any of the other chaps touches yer or says
+anything to yer I'll hit 'em!”
+
+Then he swung himself round the corner of a carriage “body” and was
+gone.
+
+    .   .   .   .   .
+
+Arvie was late out of the shop that evening. His boss was a
+sub-contractor for the coach-painting, and always tried to find twenty
+minutes' work for his boys just about five or ten minutes before the
+bell rang. He employed boys because they were cheap and he had a lot of
+rough work, and they could get under floors and “bogies” with their pots
+and brushes, and do all the “priming” and paint the trucks. His name was
+Collins, and the boys were called “Collins' Babies”. It was a joke
+in the shop that he had a “weaning” contract. The boys were all “over
+fourteen”, of course, because of the Education Act. Some were nine or
+ten--wages from five shillings to ten shillings. It didn't matter
+to Grinder Brothers so long as the contracts were completed and the
+dividends paid. Collins preached in the park every Sunday. But this has
+nothing to do with the story.
+
+When Arvie came out it was beginning to rain and the hands had all gone
+except Bill, who stood with his back to a verandah-post, spitting with
+very fair success at the ragged toe of one boot. He looked up, nodded
+carelessly at Arvie, and then made a dive for a passing lorry, on the
+end of which he disappeared round the next corner, unsuspected by the
+driver, who sat in front with his pipe in his mouth and a bag over his
+shoulders.
+
+Arvie started home with his heart and mind pretty full, and a stronger,
+stranger aversion to ever going back to the shop again. This new,
+unexpected, and unsought-for friendship embarrassed the poor lonely
+child. It wasn't welcome.
+
+But he never went back. He got wet going home, and that night he was a
+dying child. He had been ill all the time, and Collins was one “baby”
+ short next day.
+
+
+
+
+The Selector's Daughter
+
+
+
+    I.
+
+She rode slowly down the steep siding from the main road to a track in
+the bed of the Long Gully, the old grey horse picking his way zig-zag
+fashion. She was about seventeen, slight in figure, and had a pretty
+freckled face with a pathetically drooping mouth, and big sad brown
+eyes. She wore a faded print dress, with an old black riding skirt drawn
+over it, and her head was hidden in one of those ugly, old-fashioned
+white hoods, which, seen from the rear, always suggest an old woman.
+She carried several parcels of groceries strapped to the front of the
+dilapidated side-saddle.
+
+The track skirted a chain of rocky waterholes at the foot of the gully,
+and the girl glanced nervously at these ghastly, evil-looking pools as
+she passed them by. The sun had set, as far as Long Gully was concerned.
+The old horse carefully followed a rough bridle track, which ran up the
+gully now on one side of the watercourse and now on the other; the gully
+grew deeper and darker, and its sullen, scrub-covered sides rose more
+steeply as he progressed.
+
+The girl glanced round frequently, as though afraid of someone following
+her. Once she drew rein, and listened to some bush sound. “Kangaroos,”
+ she murmured; it was only kangaroos. She crossed a dimmed little
+clearing where a farm had been, and entered a thick scrub of box and
+stringy-bark saplings. Suddenly with a heavy thud, thud, an “old man”
+ kangaroo leapt the path in front, startling the girl fearfully, and went
+up the siding towards the peak.
+
+“Oh, my God!” she gasped, with her hand on her heart.
+
+She was very nervous this evening; her heart was hurt now, and she held
+her hand close to it, while tears started from her eyes and glistened in
+the light of the moon, which was rising over the gap ahead.
+
+“Oh, if I could only go away from the bush!” she moaned.
+
+The old horse plodded on, and now and then shook his head--sadly, it
+seemed--as if he knew her troubles and was sorry.
+
+She passed another clearing, and presently came to a small homestead in
+a stringy-bark hollow below a great gap in the ridges--“Deadman's
+Gap”. The place was called “Deadman's Hollow”, and looked like it.
+The “house”--a low, two-roomed affair, with skillions--was built of
+half-round slabs and stringy-bark, and was nearly all roof; the bark,
+being darkened from recent rain, gave it a drearier appearance than
+usual.
+
+A big, coarse-looking youth of about twenty was nailing a green kangaroo
+skin to the slabs; he was out of temper because he had bruised his
+thumb. The girl unstrapped the parcels and carried them in; as she
+passed her brother, she said:
+
+“Take the saddle off for me, will you, Jack?”
+
+“Oh, carnt yer take it off yerself?” he snarled; “carnt yer see I'm
+busy?”
+
+She took off the saddle and bridle, and carried them into a shed, where
+she hung them on a beam. The patient old hack shook himself with an
+energy that seemed ill-advised, considering his age and condition, and
+went off towards the “dam”.
+
+An old woman sat in the main room beside a fireplace which took up
+almost the entire end of the house. A plank-table, supported on stakes
+driven into the ground, stood in the middle of the room, and two slab
+benches were fixtures on each side. The floor was clay. All was clean
+and poverty-stricken; all that could be whitewashed was white, and
+everything that could be washed was scrubbed. The slab shelves were
+covered with clean newspapers, on which bright tins, and pannikins, and
+fragments of crockery were set to the greatest advantage. The walls,
+however, were disfigured by Christmas supplements of illustrated
+journals.
+
+The girl came in and sat down wearily on a stool opposite to the old
+woman.
+
+“Are you any better, mother?” she asked.
+
+“Very little, Mary, very little. Have you seen your father?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“I wonder where he is?”
+
+“You might wonder. What's the use of worrying about it, mother?”
+
+“I suppose he's drinking again.”
+
+“Most likely. Worrying yourself to death won't help it!”
+
+The old woman sat and moaned about her troubles, as old women do. She
+had plenty to moan about.
+
+“I wonder where your brother Tom is? We haven't heard from him for a
+year now. He must be in trouble again; something tells me he must be in
+trouble again.”
+
+Mary swung her hood off into her lap.
+
+“Why do you worry about it, mother? What's the use?”
+
+“I only wish I knew. I only wish I knew!”
+
+“What good would that do? You know Tom went droving with Fred Dunn, and
+Fred will look after him; and, besides, Tom's older now and got more
+sense.”
+
+“Oh, you don't care--you don't care! You don't feel it, but I'm his
+mother, and----”
+
+“Oh, for God's sake, don't start that again, mother; it hurts me more
+than you think. I'm his sister; I've suffered enough, God knows! Don't
+make matters worse than they are!”
+
+“Here comes father!” shouted one of the children outside, “'n' he's
+bringing home a steer.”
+
+The old woman sat still, and clasped her hands nervously. Mary tried to
+look cheerful, and moved the saucepan on the fire. A big, dark-bearded
+man, mounted on a small horse, was seen in the twilight driving a steer
+towards the cow-yard. A boy ran to let down the slip-rails.
+
+Presently Mary and her mother heard the clatter of rails let down and
+put up again, and a minute later a heavy step like the tread of a horse
+was heard outside. The selector lumbered in, threw his hat in a
+corner, and sat down by the table. His wife rose and bustled round with
+simulated cheerfulness. Presently Mary hazarded--
+
+“Where have you been, father?”
+
+“Somewheers.”
+
+There was a wretched silence, lasting until the old woman took courage
+to say timidly:
+
+“So you've brought a steer, Wylie?”
+
+“Yes!” he snapped; the tone seemed defiant.
+
+The old woman's hands trembled, so that she dropped a cup. Mary turned a
+shade paler.
+
+“Here, git me some tea. Git me some TEA!” shouted Mr. Wylie. “I ain't
+agoin' to sit here all night!”
+
+His wife made what haste her nervousness would allow, and they soon sat
+down to tea. Jack, the eldest son, was sulky, and his father muttered
+something about knocking the sulks out of him with an axe.
+
+“What's annoyed you, Jack?” asked his mother, humbly.
+
+He scowled and made no answer.
+
+The younger children--three boys and a girl--began quarrelling as soon
+as they sat down. Wylie yelled at them now and then, and grumbled at the
+cooking, and at his wife for not being able to keep the children quiet.
+It was: “Marther! you didn't put no sugar in my tea.” “Mother, Jimmy's
+got my place; make him move.” “Mawther! do speak to this Fred.” “Oh!
+father, this big brute of a Harry's kickin' me!” And so on.
+
+
+    II.
+
+When the miserable meal was over, Wylie got a rope and a butcher's
+knife, and went out to slaughter the steer; but first there was a row,
+because he thought--or pretended to think--that somebody had been
+using his knife. He lassoed the beast, drew it up to the rails, and
+slaughtered it.
+
+Meanwhile, Jack and his next brother took an old gun, let the dogs
+loose, and went 'possum shooting.
+
+Presently Wylie came in again, sat down by the fire, and smoked. The
+children quarrelled over a boy's book; Mrs. Wylie made weak attempts
+to keep the peace, but they took no notice of her. Suddenly her husband
+rose with an oath, seized the novel, and threw it behind the fire.
+
+“Git to bed! git to bed!” he roared at the children; “git to bed, or
+I'll smash your brains with the axe!”
+
+They got to bed. It was made of saplings and bark, covered with three
+bushel-bags full of straw and old pieces of blanket sewn together. The
+children quarrelled in bed till their father took off his belt and “went
+into” them, according to promise. There was a sudden hush, followed by
+a sound like a bird-clapper; then howls; then a peaceful calm fell upon
+that happy home.
+
+Wylie went out again, and was absent an hour; on his return he sat by
+the fire and smoked sullenly. After a while he snatched the pipe from
+his mouth, and looked impatiently at the old woman.
+
+“Oh! for God's sake, git to bed,” he snapped, “and don't be asittin'
+there like a blarsted funeral! You're enough to give a man the dismals.”
+
+Mrs. Wylie gathered up her sewing and retired. Then he said to his
+daughter: “You come and hold the candle.”
+
+Mary put on her hood and followed her father to the yard. The carcase
+lay close to the rails, against which two sheets of bark had been raised
+as a break-wind. The beast had been partly skinned, and a portion of
+the hide, where a brand might have been, was carefully turned back. Mary
+noticed this at once. Her father went on with his work, and occasionally
+grumbled at her for not holding the candle right.
+
+“Where did you buy the steer, father?” she asked.
+
+“Ask no questions and hear no lies.” Then he added, “Carn't you see it's
+a clear skin?”
+
+She had a keen sense of humour, and the idea of a “'clear skin' steer”
+ would have amused her at any other time. She didn't smile now.
+
+He turned the carcase over; the loose hide fell back, and the light
+shone on a distinct brand. White as a sheet went Mary's face, and her
+hand trembled so that she nearly let the candle fall.
+
+“What are you adoin' of now?” shouted her father. “Hold the candle,
+carn't you? You're worse than the old woman.”
+
+“Father! the beast is branded! See!---- What does PB stand for?”
+
+“Poor Beggar, like myself. Hold the candle, carn't you?--and hold your
+tongue.”
+
+Mary was startled again by hearing the tread of a horse, but it was only
+the old grey munching round. Her father finished skinning, and drew the
+carcase up to a make-shift “gallows”. “Now you can go to bed,” he said,
+in a gentler tone.
+
+She went to her bedroom--a small, low, slab skillion, built on to the
+end of the house--and fell on her knees by the bunk.
+
+“God help me! God help us all!” she cried.
+
+She lay down, but could not sleep. She was nervously ill--nearly mad,
+because of the dark, disgraceful cloud of trouble which hung over her
+home. Always in trouble--always in trouble. It started long ago, when
+her favourite brother Tom ran away. She was little more than a child
+then, intensely sensitive; and when she sat in the old bark school she
+fancied that the other children were thinking or whispering to each
+other, “Her brother's in prison! Mary Wylie's brother's in prison! Tom
+Wylie's in gaol!” She was thinking of it still. They were ever with her,
+those horrible days and nights of the first shadow of shame. She had the
+same horror of evil, the same fearful dread of disgrace that her mother
+had. She had been ambitious; she had managed to read much, and had wild
+dreams of going to the city and rising above the common level, but that
+was all past now.
+
+How could she rise when the cruel hand of disgrace was ever ready to
+drag her down at any moment. “Ah, God!” she moaned in her misery, “if
+we could only be born without kin--with no one to disgrace us but
+ourselves! It's cruel, God, it's cruel to suffer for the crimes of
+others!” She was getting selfish in her troubles--like her mother. “I
+want to go away from the bush and all I know.... O God, help me to
+go away from the bush!” Presently she fell asleep--if sleep it may be
+called--and dreamt of sailing away, sailing away far out on the sea
+beyond the horizon of her dread. Then came a horrible nightmare, in
+which she and all her family were arrested for a terrible crime. She
+woke in a fright, and saw a reddish glare on the window. Her father
+was poking round some logs where they had been “burning-off”. A pungent
+odour came through a broken pane and turned her sick. He was burning the
+hide.
+
+
+Wylie did not go to bed that night; he got his breakfast before
+daylight, and rode up through the frosty gap while the stars were still
+out, carrying a bag of beef in front of him on the grey horse. Mary said
+nothing about the previous night. Her mother wondered how much “father”
+ had given for the steer, and supposed he had gone into town to sell
+the hide; the poor soul tried to believe that he had come by the steer
+honestly. Mary fried some meat, and tried to eat it for her mother's
+sake, but could manage only a few mouthfuls. Mrs. Wylie also seemed
+to have lost her appetite. Jack and his brother, who had been out
+all night, made a hearty breakfast. Then Jimmy started to peg out the
+'possum skins, while Jack went to look for a missing pony. Mary was left
+to milk all the cows, and feed the calves and pigs.
+
+
+Shortly after dinner one of the children ran to the door, and cried:
+
+“Why, mother--here's three mounted troopers comin' up the gully!”
+
+“Oh, my God!” cried the mother, sinking back in her chair and trembling
+like a leaf. The children ran and hid in the scrub. Mary stood up,
+terribly calm, and waited. The eldest trooper dismounted, came to the
+door, glanced suspiciously at the remains of the meal, and abruptly
+asked the dreaded question:
+
+“Mrs. Wylie, where's your husband?”
+
+She dropped the tea-cup, from which she had pretended to be drinking
+unconcernedly.
+
+“What? Why, what do you want my husband for?” she asked in pitiful
+desperation. SHE looked like the guilty party.
+
+“Oh, you know well enough,” he sneered impatiently.
+
+Mary rose and faced him. “How dare you talk to my mother like that?” she
+cried. “If my poor brother Tom was only here--you--you coward!”
+
+The youngest trooper whispered something to his senior, and then, stung
+by a sharp retort, said:
+
+“Well, you needn't be a pig.”
+
+His two companions passed through into the spare skillion, where they
+found some beef in a cask, and more already salted down under a bag on
+the end of a bench; then they went out at the back and had a look at the
+cow-yard. The younger trooper lingered behind.
+
+“I'll try and get them up the gully on some excuse,” he whispered to
+Mary. “You plant the hide before we come back.”
+
+“It's too late. Look there!” She pointed through the doorway.
+
+The other two were at the logs where the fire had been; the burning hide
+had stuck to the logs in places like glue.
+
+“Wylie's a fool,” remarked the old trooper.
+
+
+    III.
+
+Jack disappeared shortly after his father's arrest on a charge of horse
+and cattle-stealing, and Tom, the prodigal, turned up unexpectedly.
+He was different from his father and eldest brother. He had an open
+good-humoured face, and was very kind-hearted; but was subject to
+peculiar fits of insanity, during which he did wild and foolish things
+for the mere love of notoriety. He had two natures--one bright and
+good, the other sullen and criminal. A taint of madness ran in the
+family--came down from drunken and unprincipled fathers of dead
+generations; under different conditions, it might have developed into
+genius in one or two--in Mary, perhaps.
+
+“Cheer up, old woman!” cried Tom, patting his mother on the back. “We'll
+be happy yet. I've been wild and foolish, I know, and gave you some
+awful trouble, but that's all done with. I mean to keep steady, and
+by-and-bye we'll go away to Sydney or Queensland. Give us a smile,
+mother.”
+
+He got some “grubbing” to do, and for six months kept the family
+in provisions. Then a change came over him. He became moody and
+sullen--even brutal. He would sit for hours and grin to himself without
+any apparent cause; then he would stay away from home for days together.
+
+“Tom's going wrong again,” wailed Mrs. Wylie. “He'll get into trouble
+again, I know he will. We are disgraced enough already, God knows.”
+
+“You've done your best, mother,” said Mary, “and can do no more.
+People will pity us; after all, the thing itself is not so bad as the
+everlasting dread of it. This will be a lesson for father--he wanted
+one--and maybe he'll be a better man.” (She knew better than that.) “YOU
+did your best, mother.”
+
+“Ah, Mary! you don't know what I've gone through these thirty years
+in the bush with your father. I've had to go down on my knees and beg
+people not to prosecute him--and the same with your brother Tom; and
+this is the end of it.”
+
+“Better to have let them go, mother; you should have left father when
+you found out what sort of a man he was; it would have been better for
+all.”
+
+“It was my duty to stick by him, child; he was my husband. Your father
+was always a bad man, Mary--a bad man; I found it out too late. I could
+not tell you a quarter of what I have suffered with him.... I was proud,
+Mary; I wanted my children to be better than others.... It's my fault;
+it's a judgment.... I wanted to make my children better than others....
+I was so proud, Mary.”
+
+Mary had a sweetheart, a drover, who was supposed to be in Queensland.
+He had promised to marry her, and take her and her mother away when he
+returned; at least, she had promised to marry him on that condition. He
+had now been absent on his latest trip for nearly six months, and there
+was no news from him. She got a copy of a country paper to look for the
+“stock passings”; but a startling headline caught her eye:
+
+
+                IMPUDENT ATTEMPT AT ROBBERY UNDER ARMS.
+                                ----
+       “A drover known to the police as Frederick Dunn, alias Drew,
+                  was arrested last week at----”
+
+
+She read to the bitter end, and burned the paper. And the shadow of
+another trouble, darker and drearier than all the rest, was upon her.
+
+So the little outcast family in Long Gully existed for several months,
+seeing no one save a sympathetic old splitter who would come and smoke
+his pipe by the fire of nights, and try to convince the old woman that
+matters might have been worse, and that she wouldn't worry so much if
+she knew the troubles of some of our biggest families, and that things
+would come out all right and the lesson would do Wylie good. Also, that
+Tom was a different boy altogether, and had more sense than to go
+wrong again. “It was nothing,” he said, “nothing; they didn't know what
+trouble was.”
+
+But one day, when Mary and her mother were alone, the troopers came
+again.
+
+“Mrs. Wylie, where's your son Tom?” they asked.
+
+She sat still. She didn't even cry, “Oh, my God!”
+
+“Don't be frightened, Mrs. Wylie,” said one of the troopers, gently. “It
+ain't for much anyway, and maybe Tom'll be able to clear himself.”
+
+Mary sank on her knees by her mother's side, crying “Speak to me,
+mother. Oh, my God, she's dying! Speak for my sake, mother. Don't die,
+mother; it's all a mistake. Don't die and leave me here alone.”
+
+But the poor old woman was dead.
+
+    .   .   .   .   .
+
+Wylie came out towards the end of the year, and a few weeks later he
+brought home a--another woman.
+
+
+    IV.
+
+Bob Bentley, general hawker, was camping under some rocks by the main
+road, near the foot of Long Gully. His mate was fast asleep under the
+tilted trap. Bob stood with his back to the fire, his pipe in his mouth,
+and his hands clasped behind him. The fire lit up the undersides of the
+branches above; a native bear sat in a fork blinking down at it, while
+the moon above him showed every hair on his ears. From among the trees
+came the pleasant jingle of hobble-chains, the slow tread of hoofs, and
+the “crunch, crunch” at the grass, as the horses moved about and grazed,
+now in moonlight, now in the soft shadows. “Old Thunder”, a big black
+dog of no particular breed, gave a meaning look at his master, and
+started up the ridge, followed by several smaller dogs. Soon Bob heard
+from the hillside the “hy-yi-hi, whomp, whomp, whomp!” of old Thunder,
+and the yop-yop-yopping of the smaller fry--they had tree'd a 'possum.
+Bob threw himself on the grass, and pretended to be asleep. There was
+a sound as of a sizeable boulder rolling down the hill, and presently
+Thunder trotted round the fire to see if his master would come. Bob
+snored. The dog looked suspiciously at him, trotted round once or twice,
+and as a last resource gave him two great slobbery licks across the
+face. Bob got up with a good-natured oath.
+
+“Well, old party,” he said to Thunder, “you're a thundering old
+nuisance; but I s'pose you won't be satisfied till I come.” He got a gun
+from the waggonette, loaded it, and started up the ridge; old Thunder
+rushing to and fro to show the way--as if the row the other dogs were
+making wasn't enough to guide his master.
+
+When Bob returned with the 'possums he was startled to see a woman in
+the camp. She was sitting on a log by the fire, with her elbows on her
+knees and her face in her hands.
+
+“Why--what the dev--who are you?”
+
+The girl raised a white desperate face to him. It was Mary Wylie.
+
+“My father and--and the woman--they're drinking--they turned me out!
+they turned me out.”
+
+“Did they now? I'm sorry for that. What can I do for you?... She's mad
+sure enough,” he thought to himself; “I thought it was a ghost.”
+
+“I don't know,” she wailed, “I don't know. You're a man, and I'm a
+helpless girl. They turned me out! My mother's dead, and my brothers
+gone away. Look! Look here!” pointing to a bruise on her forehead. “The
+woman did that. My own father stood by and saw it done--said it served
+me right! Oh, my God!”
+
+“What woman? Tell me all about it.”
+
+“The woman father brought home!... I want to go away from the bush! Oh!
+for God's sake take me away from the bush!... Anything! anything!--you
+know!--only take me away from the bush!”
+
+Bob and his mate--who had been roused--did their best to soothe her;
+but suddenly, without a moment's warning, she sprang to her feet and
+scrambled to the top of the rock overhanging the camp. She stood for a
+moment in the bright moonlight, gazing intently down the vacant road.
+
+“Here they come!” she cried, pointing down the road. “Here they
+come--the troopers! I can see their cap-peaks glistening in
+the moonlight!... I'm going away! Mother's gone. I'm going
+now!--Good-bye!--Good-bye! I'm going away from the bush!”
+
+Then she ran through the trees towards the foot of Long Gully. Bob and
+his mate followed; but, being unacquainted with the locality, they lost
+her.
+
+She ran to the edge of a granite cliff on the higher side of the deepest
+of the rocky waterholes. There was a heavy splash, and three startled
+kangaroos, who had been drinking, leapt back and sped away, like three
+grey ghosts, up the ridge towards the moonlit peak.
+
+
+
+
+Mitchell on the “Sex” and Other “Problems”
+
+
+
+“I agree with 'T' in last week's 'Bulletin',” said Mitchell, after
+cogitating some time over the last drop of tea in his pannikin, held
+at various angles, “about what they call the 'Sex Problem'. There's no
+problem, really, except Creation, and that's not our affair; we can't
+solve it, and we've no right to make a problem out of it for ourselves
+to puzzle over, and waste the little time that is given us about. It's
+we that make the problems, not Creation. We make 'em, and they only
+smother us; they'll smother the world in the end if we don't look
+out. Anything that can be argued, for and against, from half a dozen
+different points of view--and most things that men argue over can
+be--and anything that has been argued about for thousands of years (as
+most things have) is worse than profitless; it wastes the world's time
+and ours, and often wrecks old mateships. Seems to me the deeper you
+read, think, talk, or write about things that end in ism, the less
+satisfactory the result; the more likely you are to get bushed and
+dissatisfied with the world. And the more you keep on the surface of
+plain things, the plainer the sailing--the more comfortable for you and
+everybody else. We've always got to come to the surface to breathe, in
+the end, in any case; we're meant to live on the surface, and we might
+as well stay there and look after it and ourselves for all the good we
+do diving down after fish that aren't there, except in our imagination.
+And some of 'em are very dead fish, too--the 'Sex Problem', for
+instance. When we fall off the surface of the earth it will be time
+enough to make a problem out of the fact that we couldn't stick on. I'm
+a Federal Pro-trader in this country; I'm a Federalist because I think
+Federation is the plain and natural course for Australia, and I'm a
+Free-tectionist because I'm in favour of sinking any question, or any
+two things, that enlightened people can argue and fight over, and try,
+one after the other, for fifty years without being able to come to a
+decision about, or prove which is best for the welfare of the country.
+It only wastes a young country's time, and keeps it off the right track.
+Federation isn't a problem--it's a plain fact--but they make a problem
+out of every panel they have to push down in the rotten old boundary
+fences.”
+
+“Personal interests,” suggested Joe.
+
+“Of course. It's personal interest of the wrong sort that makes all the
+problems. You can trace the sex problem to people who trade in unhealthy
+personal interests. I believe in personal interests of the right
+sort--true individualism. If we all looked after ourselves, and our
+wives and families--if we have any--in the proper way, the world would
+be all right. We waste too much time looking after each other.
+
+“Now, supposing we're travelling and have to get a shed and make a
+cheque so's to be able to send a few quid home, as soon as we can, to
+the missus, or the old folks, and the next water is twenty miles ahead.
+If we sat down and argued over a social problem till doomsday, we
+wouldn't get to the tank; we'd die of thirst, and the missus and kids,
+or the old folks, would be sold up and turned out into the streets,
+and have to fall back on a 'home of hope', or wait their turn at the
+Benevolent Asylum with bags for broken victuals. I've seen that, and I
+don't want anybody belonging to me to have to do it.
+
+“Reminds me that when a poor, deserted girl goes to a 'home' they don't
+make a problem of her--they do their best for her and try to get her
+righted. And the priests, too: if there's anything in the sex or any
+other problem--anything that hasn't been threshed out--they're the men
+that'll know it. I'm not a Catholic, but I know this: that if a girl
+that's been left by one--no matter what Church she belongs to--goes to
+the priest, they'll work all the points they know (and they know 'em
+all) to get her righted, and, if the chap, or his people, won't come up
+to the scratch, Father Ryan'll frighten hell out of 'em. I can't say as
+much for our own Churches.”
+
+“But you're in favour of socialism and democracy?” asked Joe.
+
+“Of course I am. But the world won't do any good arguing over it.
+The people will have to get up and walk, and, what's more, stick
+together--and I don't think they'll ever do that--it ain't in human
+nature. Socialism, or democracy, was all right in this country till
+it got fashionable and was made a fad or a problem of. Then it got
+smothered pretty quick. And a fad or a problem always breeds a host of
+parasites or hangers-on. Why, as soon as I saw the advanced idealist
+fools--they're generally the middle-class, shabby-genteel families that
+catch Spiritualism and Theosophy and those sort of complaints, at the
+end of the epidemic--that catch on at the tail-end of things and think
+they've caught something brand, shining, new;--as soon as I saw them,
+and the problem spielers and notoriety-hunters of both sexes, beginning
+to hang round Australian Unionism, I knew it was doomed. And so it was.
+The straight men were disgusted, or driven out. There are women who hang
+on for the same reason that a girl will sometimes go into the dock and
+swear an innocent man's life away. But as soon as they see that the
+cause is dying, they drop it at once, and wait for another. They come
+like bloody dingoes round a calf, and only leave the bones. They're
+about as democratic as the crows. And the rotten 'sex-problem' sort of
+thing is the cause of it all; it poisons weak minds--and strong ones too
+sometimes.
+
+“Why, you could make a problem out of Epsom salts. You might argue as to
+why human beings want Epsom salts, and try to trace the causes that
+led up to it. I don't like the taste of Epsom salts--it's nasty in
+the mouth--but when I feel that way I take 'em, and I feel better
+afterwards; and that's good enough for me. We might argue that black is
+white, and white is black, and neither of 'em is anything, and nothing
+is everything; and a woman's a man and a man's a woman, and it's really
+the man that has the youngsters, only we imagine it's the woman because
+she imagines that she has all the pain and trouble, and the doctor is
+under the impression that he's attending to her, not the man, and the
+man thinks so too because he imagines he's walking up and down outside,
+and slipping into the corner pub now and then for a nip to keep his
+courage up, waiting, when it's his wife that's doing that all the time;
+we might argue that it's all force of imagination, and that imagination
+is an unknown force, and that the unknown is nothing. But, when we've
+settled all that to our own satisfaction, how much further ahead are we?
+In the end we'll come to the conclusion that we ain't alive, and never
+existed, and then we'll leave off bothering, and the world will go on
+just the same.”
+
+“What about science?” asked Joe.
+
+“Science ain't 'sex problems'; it's facts.... Now, I don't mind
+Spiritualism and those sort of things; they might help to break the
+monotony, and can't do much harm. But the 'sex problem', as it's written
+about to-day, does; it's dangerous and dirty, and it's time to settle it
+with a club. Science and education, if left alone, will look after sex
+facts.
+
+“You can't get anything out of the 'sex problem', no matter how you
+argue. In the old Bible times they had half a dozen wives each, but we
+don't know for certain how THEY got on. The Mormons tried it again, and
+seemed to get on all right till we interfered. We don't seem to be able
+to get on with one wife now--at least, according to the 'sex problem'.
+The 'sex problem' troubled the Turks so much that they tried three. Lots
+of us try to settle it by knocking round promiscuously, and that leads
+to actions for maintenance and breach of promise cases, and all sorts of
+trouble. Our blacks settle the 'sex problem' with a club, and so far I
+haven't heard any complaints from them.
+
+    .   .   .   .   .
+
+“Take hereditary causes and surrounding circumstances, for instance. In
+order to understand or judge a man right, you would need to live under
+the same roof with him from childhood, and under the same roofs, or
+tents, with his parents, right back to Adam, and then you'd be blocked
+for want of more ancestors through which to trace the causes that led
+to Abel--I mean Cain--going on as he did. What's the use or sense of it?
+You might argue away in any direction for a million miles and a million
+years back into the past, but you've got to come back to where you are
+if you wish to do any good for yourself, or anyone else.
+
+“Sometimes it takes you a long while to get back to where you
+are--sometimes you never do it. Why, when those controversies were
+started in the 'Bulletin' about the kangaroos and other things, I
+thought I knew something about the bush. Now I'm damned if I'm sure I
+could tell a kangaroo from a wombat.
+
+“Trying to find out things is the cause of all the work and trouble in
+this world. It was Eve's fault in the first place--or Adam's, rather,
+because it might be argued that he should have been master. Some men are
+too lazy to be masters in their own homes, and run the show properly;
+some are too careless, and some too drunk most of their time, and some
+too weak. If Adam and Eve hadn't tried to find out things there'd have
+been no toil and trouble in the world to-day; there'd have been no
+bloated capitalists, and no horny-handed working men, and no politics,
+no freetrade and protection--and no clothes. The woman next door
+wouldn't be able to pick holes in your wife's washing on the line. We'd
+have been all running about in a big Garden of Eden with nothing on, and
+nothing to do except loaf, and make love, and lark, and laugh, and play
+practical jokes on each other.”
+
+Joe grinned.
+
+“That would have been glorious. Wouldn't it, Joe? There'd have been no
+'sex problem' then.”
+
+
+
+
+The Master's Mistake
+
+
+
+William Spencer stayed away from school that hot day, and “went
+swimming”. The master wrote a note to William's father, and gave it to
+William's brother Joe to carry home.
+
+“You'll give that to your father to-night, Joseph.”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+Bill waited for Joe near the gap, and walked home with him.
+
+“I s'pose you've got a note for father.”
+
+“Yes,” said Joe.
+
+“I s'pose you know what's in it?”
+
+“Ye--yes. Oh, why did you stop away, Bill?”
+
+“You don't mean to say that you're dirty mean enough to give it to
+father? Hey?”
+
+“I must, Will. I promised the master.”
+
+“He needn't never know.”
+
+“Oh, yes, he will. He's coming over to our place on Saturday, and he's
+sure to ask me to-morrow.”
+
+Pause.
+
+“Look here, Joe!” said Bill, “I don't want to get a hiding and go
+without supper to-night. I promised to go 'possuming with Johnny
+Nowlett, and he's going to give me a fire out of his gun. You can come,
+too. I don't want to cop out on it to-night--if I do I'll run away from
+home again, so there.”
+
+Bill walked on a bit in moody, Joe in troubled, silence.
+
+Bill tried again: he threatened, argued, and pleaded, but Joe was firm.
+“The master trusted me, Will,” he said.
+
+“Joe,” said Bill at last, after a long pause, “I wouldn't do it to you.”
+
+Joe was troubled.
+
+“I wouldn't do it to you, Joe.”
+
+Joe thought how Bill had stood up and fought for him only last week.
+
+“I'd tear the note in bits; I'd tell a hundred lies; I'd take a dozen
+hidings first, Joe--I would.”
+
+Joe was greatly troubled. His chest heaved, and the tears came to his
+eyes.
+
+“I'd do more than that for you, Joe, and you know it.”
+
+Joe knew it. They were crossing the old goldfield now. There was a shaft
+close to the path; it had fallen in, funnel-shaped, at the top, but was
+still thirty or forty feet deep; some old logs were jammed across about
+five feet down. Joe suddenly snatched the note from his pocket and threw
+it in. It fluttered to the other side and rested on a piece of the old
+timber. Bill saw it, but said nothing, and, seeing their father coming
+home from work, they hurried on.
+
+Joe was deep in trouble now. Bill tried to comfort and cheer him, but it
+was no use. Bill promised never to run away from home any more, to go
+to school every day, and never to fight, or steal, or tell lies. But Joe
+had betrayed his trust for the first time in his life, and wouldn't be
+comforted.
+
+Some time in the night Bill woke, and found Joe sitting up in bed
+crying.
+
+“Why, what's the matter, Joe?”
+
+“I never done a mean thing like that before,” sobbed Joe. “I wished I'd
+chucked meself down the shaft instead. The master trusted me, Will; an'
+now, if he asks me to-morrow, I'll have to tell a lie.”
+
+“Then tell the truth, Joe, an' take the hidin'; it'll soon be over--just
+a couple of cuts with the cane and it'll be all over.”
+
+“Oh, no, it won't. He won't never trust me any more. I've never been
+caned in that school yet, Will, and if I am I'll never go again. Oh! why
+will you run away from home, Will, and play the wag, and steal, and
+get us all into such trouble? You don't know how mother takes on about
+it--you don't know how it hurts father! I've deceived the master, and
+mother and father to-day, just because you're so--so selfish,” and he
+laid down and cried himself to sleep.
+
+Bill lay awake and thought till daylight; then he got up quietly, put on
+his clothes, and stole away from the house and across the flat, followed
+by the dog, who thought it was a 'possum-hunting expedition. Bill wished
+the dog would not be quite so demonstrative, at least until they got
+away from the house. He went straight to the shaft, let himself down
+carefully on to one of the old logs, and stooped to pick up the note,
+gleaming white in the sickly summer daylight. Then the rotten timber
+gave way suddenly, without a moment's warning.
+
+    .   .   .   .   .
+
+They found him that morning at about nine o'clock. The dog attracted
+the attention of an old fossicker passing to his work. The letter was
+gripped in Bill's right hand when they brought him up. They took him
+home, and the father went for a doctor. Bill came to himself a little
+just before the last, and said: “Mother! I wasn't running away,
+mother--tell father that--I--I wanted to try and catch a 'possum on the
+ground.... Where's Joe? I want Joe. Go out, mother, a minute, and send
+Joe.”
+
+“Here I am, Bill,” said Joe, in a choking, terrified voice.
+
+“Has the master been yet?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Bend down, Joe. I went for the note, and the logs gave way. I meant to
+be back before they was up. I dropped it down inside the bed; you watch
+your chance and get it; and say you forgot it last night--say you
+didn't like to give it--that won't be a lie. Tell the master I'm--I'm
+sorry--tell the master never to send no notes no more--except by
+girls--that's all.... Mother! Take the blankets off me--I'm dyin'.”
+
+
+
+
+The Story of the Oracle
+
+
+
+“We young fellows,” said “Sympathy Joe” to Mitchell, after tea, in
+their first camp west the river--“and you and I ARE young fellows,
+comparatively--think we know the world. There are plenty of young chaps
+knocking round in this country who reckon they've been through it
+all before they're thirty. I've met cynics and men-o'-the-world, aged
+twenty-one or thereabouts, who've never been further than a trip to
+Sydney. They talk about 'this world' as if they'd knocked around in
+half-a-dozen other worlds before they came across here--and they are
+just as off-hand about it as older Australians are when they talk about
+this colony as compared with the others. They say: 'My oath!--same
+here.' 'I've been there.' 'My oath!--you're right.' 'Take it from me!'
+and all that sort of thing. They understand women, and have a contempt
+for 'em; and chaps that don't talk as they talk, or do as they do, or
+see as they see, are either soft or ratty. A good many reckon that 'life
+ain't blanky well worth livin''; sometimes they feel so blanky somehow
+that they wouldn't give a blank whether they chucked it or not; but
+that sort never chuck it. It's mostly the quiet men that do that, and
+if they've got any complaints to make against the world they make 'em at
+the head station. Why, I've known healthy, single, young fellows
+under twenty-five who drank to drown their troubles--some because
+they reckoned the world didn't understand nor appreciate 'em--as if it
+COULD!”
+
+“If the world don't understand or appreciate you,” said Mitchell
+solemnly, as he reached for a burning stick to light his pipe--“MAKE
+it!”
+
+“To drown THEIR troubles!” continued Joe, in a tone of impatient
+contempt. “The Oracle must be well on towards the sixties; he can take
+his glass with any man, but you never saw him drunk.”
+
+“What's the Oracle to do with it?”
+
+“Did you ever hear his history?”
+
+“No. Do you know it?”
+
+“Yes, though I don't think he has any idea that I do. Now, we were
+talking about the Oracle a little while ago. We know he's an old ass;
+a good many outsiders consider that he's a bit soft or ratty, and,
+as we're likely to be mates together for some time on that fencing
+contract, if we get it, you might as well know what sort of a man he is
+and was, so's you won't get uneasy about him if he gets deaf for a while
+when you're talking, or does funny things with his pipe or pint-pot, or
+walks up and down by himself for an hour or so after tea, or sits on a
+log with his head in his hands, or leans on the fence in the gloaming
+and keeps looking in a blank sort of way, straight ahead, across the
+clearing. For he's gazing at something a thousand miles across country,
+south-east, and about twenty years back into the past, and no doubt he
+sees himself (as a young man), and a Gippsland girl, spooning under the
+stars along between the hop-gardens and the Mitchell River. And, if you
+get holt of a fiddle or a concertina, don't rasp or swank too much
+on old tunes, when he's round, for the Oracle can't stand it. Play
+something lively. He'll be down there at that surveyor's camp yarning
+till all hours, so we'll have plenty of time for the story--but don't
+you ever give him a hint that you know.
+
+“My people knew him well; I got most of the story from them--mostly from
+Uncle Bob, who knew him better than any. The rest leaked out through the
+women--you know how things leak out amongst women?”
+
+Mitchell dropped his head and scratched the back of it. HE knew.
+
+“It was on the Cudgegong River. My Uncle Bob was mates with him on one
+of those 'rushes' along there--the 'Pipeclay', I think it was, or the
+'Log Paddock'. The Oracle was a young man then, of course, and so was
+Uncle Bob (he was a match for most men). You see the Oracle now, and you
+can imagine what he was when he was a young man. Over six feet, and as
+straight as a sapling, Uncle Bob said, clean-limbed, and as fresh as
+they made men in those days; carried his hands behind him, as he does
+now, when he hasn't got the swag--but his shoulders were back in
+those days. Of course he wasn't the Oracle then; he was young Tom
+Marshall--but that doesn't matter. Everybody liked him--especially women
+and children. He was a bit happy-go-lucky and careless, but he didn't
+know anything about 'this world', and didn't bother about it; he hadn't
+'been there'. 'And his heart was as good as gold,' my aunt used to
+say. He didn't understand women as we young fellows do nowadays, and
+therefore he hadn't any contempt for 'em. Perhaps he understood, and
+understands, them better than any of us, without knowing it. Anyway, you
+know, he's always gentle and kind where a woman or child is concerned,
+and doesn't like to hear us talk about women as we do sometimes.
+
+“There was a girl on the goldfields--a fine lump of a blonde, and pretty
+gay. She came from Sydney, I think, with her people, who kept shanties
+on the fields. She had a splendid voice, and used to sing 'Madeline'.
+There might have been one or two bad women before that, in the Oracle's
+world, but no cold-blooded, designing ones. He calls the bad ones
+'unfortunate'.
+
+“Perhaps it was Tom's looks, or his freshness, or his innocence, or
+softness--or all together--that attracted her. Anyway, he got mixed up
+with her before the goldfield petered out.
+
+“No doubt it took a long while for the facts to work into Tom's head
+that a girl might sing like she did and yet be thoroughly unprincipled.
+The Oracle was always slow at coming to a decision, but when he does
+it's generally the right one. Anyway, you can take that for granted, for
+you won't move him.
+
+“I don't know whether he found out that she wasn't all that she
+pretented to be to him, or whether they quarrelled, or whether she
+chucked him over for a lucky digger. Tom never had any luck on the
+goldfields. Anyway, he left and went over to the Victorian side, where
+his people were, and went up Gippsland way. It was there for the first
+time in his life that he got what you would call 'properly gone on a
+girl'; he got hard hit--he met his fate.
+
+“Her name was Bertha Bredt, I remember. Aunt Bob saw her afterwards.
+Aunt Bob used to say that she was 'a girl as God made her'--a good,
+true, womanly girl--one of those sort of girls that only love once. Tom
+got on with her father, who was packing horses through the ranges to the
+new goldfields--it was rough country and there were no roads; they had
+to pack everything there in those days, and there was money in it. The
+girl's father took to Tom--as almost everybody else did--and, as far as
+the girl was concerned, I think it was a case of love at first sight.
+They only knew each other for about six months, and were only 'courting'
+(as they called it then) for three or four months altogether, but she
+was that sort of girl that can love a man for six weeks and lose him for
+ever, and yet go on loving him to the end of her life--and die with his
+name on her lips.
+
+“Well, things were brightening up every way for Tom, and he and his
+sweetheart were beginning to talk about their own little home in future,
+when there came a letter from the 'Madeline' girl in New South Wales.
+
+“She was in terrible trouble. Her baby was to be born in a month. Her
+people had kicked her out, and she was in danger of starving. She begged
+and prayed of him to come back and marry her, if only for his child's
+sake. He could go then, and be free; she would never trouble him any
+more--only come and marry her for the child's sake.
+
+“The Oracle doesn't know where he lost that letter, but I do. It was
+burnt afterwards by a woman, who was more than a mother to him in his
+trouble--Aunt Bob. She thought he might carry it round with the rest of
+his papers, in his swag, for years, and come across it unexpectedly when
+he was camped by himself in the bush and feeling dull. It wouldn't have
+done him any good then.
+
+“He must have fought the hardest fight in his life when he got that
+letter. No doubt he walked to and fro, to and fro, all night, with his
+hands behind him, and his eyes on the ground, as he does now sometimes.
+Walking up and down helps you to fight a thing out.
+
+“No doubt he thought of things pretty well as he thinks now: the poor
+girl's shame on every tongue, and belled round the district by every hag
+in the township; and she looked upon by women as being as bad as any
+man who ever went to Bathurst in the old days, handcuffed between two
+troopers. There is sympathy, a pipe and tobacco, a cheering word, and,
+maybe, a whisky now and then, for the criminal on his journey; but
+there is no mercy, at least as far as women are concerned, for the
+poor foolish girl, who has to sneak out the back way and round by back
+streets and lanes after dark, with a cloak on to hide her figure.
+
+“Tom sent what money he thought he could spare, and next day he went to
+the girl he loved and who loved him, and told her the truth, and showed
+her the letter. She was only a girl--but the sort of girl you COULD go
+to in a crisis like that. He had made up his mind to do the right thing,
+and she loved him all the more for it. And so they parted.
+
+“When Tom reached 'Pipeclay', the girl's relations, that she was
+stopping with, had a parson readied up, and they were married the same
+day.”
+
+“And what happened after that?” asked Mitchell.
+
+“Nothing happened for three or four months; then the child was born. It
+wasn't his!”
+
+Mitchell stood up with an oath.
+
+“The girl was thoroughly bad. She'd been carrying on with God knows how
+many men, both before and after she trapped Tom.”
+
+“And what did he do then?”
+
+“Well, you know how the Oracle argues over things, and I suppose he was
+as big an old fool then as he is now. He thinks that, as most men would
+deceive women if they could, when one man gets caught, he's got no call
+to squeal about it; he's bound, because of the sins of men in general
+against women, to make the best of it. What is one man's wrong counted
+against the wrongs of hundreds of unfortunate girls.
+
+“It's an uncommon way of arguing--like most of the Oracle's ideas--but
+it seems to look all right at first sight.
+
+“Perhaps he thought she'd go straight; perhaps she convinced him that he
+was the cause of her first fall; anyway he stuck to her for more than
+a year, and intended to take her away from that place as soon as he'd
+scraped enough money together. It might have gone on up till now, if
+the father of the child--a big black Irishman named Redmond--hadn't come
+sneaking back at the end of a year. He--well, he came hanging round Mrs.
+Marshall while Tom was away at work--and she encouraged him. And Tom was
+forced to see it.
+
+“Tom wanted to fight out his own battle without interference, but the
+chaps wouldn't let him--they reckoned that he'd stand very little show
+against Redmond, who was a very rough customer and a fighting man. My
+uncle Bob, who was there still, fixed it up this way: The Oracle was
+to fight Redmond, and if the Oracle got licked Uncle Bob was to take
+Redmond on. If Redmond whipped Uncle Bob, that was to settle it; but if
+Uncle Bob thrashed Redmond, then he was also to fight Redmond's
+mate, another big, rough Paddy named Duigan. Then the affair would be
+finished--no matter which way the last bout went. You see, Uncle Bob was
+reckoned more of a match for Redmond than the Oracle was, so the thing
+looked fair enough--at first sight.
+
+“Redmond had his mate, Duigan, and one or two others of the rough gang
+that used to terrorise the fields round there in the roaring days of
+Gulgong. The Oracle had Uncle Bob, of course, and long Dave Regan, the
+drover--a good-hearted, sawny kind of chap that'd break the devil's
+own buck-jumper, or smash him, or get smashed himself--and little Jimmy
+Nowlett, the bullocky, and one or two of the old, better-class diggers
+that were left on the field.
+
+“There's a clear space among the saplings in Specimen Gully, where they
+used to pitch circuses; and here, in the cool of a summer evening, the
+two men stood face to face. Redmond was a rough, roaring, foul-mouthed
+man; he stripped to his shirt, and roared like a bull, and swore, and
+sneered, and wanted to take the whole of Tom's crowd while he was at it,
+and make one clean job of 'em. Couldn't waste time fighting them all one
+after the other, because he wanted to get away to the new rush at Cattle
+Creek next day. The fool had been drinking shanty-whisky.
+
+“Tom stood up in his clean, white moles and white flannel shirt--one of
+those sort with no sleeves, that give the arms play. He had a sort
+of set expression and a look in his eyes that Uncle Bob--nor none of
+them--had ever seen there before. 'Give us plenty of----room!' roared
+Redmond; 'one of us is going to hell, now! This is going to be a fight
+to a----finish, and a----short one!' And it was!” Joe paused.
+
+“Go on,” said Mitchell--“go on!”
+
+Joe drew a long breath.
+
+“The Oracle never got a mark! He was top-dog right from the start.
+Perhaps it was his strength that Redmond had underrated, or his want
+of science that puzzled him, or the awful silence of the man that
+frightened him (it made even Uncle Bob uneasy). Or, perhaps, it was
+Providence (it was a glorious chance for Providence), but, anyway, as
+I say, the Oracle never got a mark, except on his knuckles. After a few
+rounds Redmond funked and wanted to give in, but the chaps wouldn't let
+him--not even his own mates--except Duigan. They made him take it as
+long as he could stand on his feet. He even shammed to be knocked out,
+and roared out something about having broken his----ankle--but it was
+no use. And the Oracle! The chaps that knew thought that he'd refuse to
+fight, and never hit a man that had given in. But he did. He just stood
+there with that quiet look in his eyes and waited, and, when he did hit,
+there wasn't any necessity for Redmond to PRETEND to be knocked down.
+You'll see a glint of that old light in the Oracle's eyes even now, once
+in a while; and when you do it's a sign that you or someone are going
+too far, and had better pull up, for it's a red light on the line, old
+as he is.
+
+“Now, Jimmy Nowlett was a nuggety little fellow, hard as cast iron,
+good-hearted, but very excitable; and when the bashed Redmond was
+being carted off (poor Uncle Bob was always pretty high-strung, and was
+sitting on a log sobbing like a great child from the reaction), Duigan
+made some sneering remark that only Jimmy Nowlett caught, and in an
+instant he was up and at Duigan.
+
+“Perhaps Duigan was demoralised by his mate's defeat, or by the
+suddenness of the attack; but, at all events, he got a hiding, too.
+Uncle Bob used to say that it was the funniest thing he ever saw in his
+life. Jimmy kept yelling: 'Let me get at him! By the Lord, let me get at
+him!' And nobody was attempting to stop him, he WAS getting at him all
+the time--and properly, too; and, when he'd knocked Duigan down, he'd
+dance round him and call on him to get up; and every time he jumped or
+bounced, he'd squeak like an india-rubber ball, Uncle Bob said, and he
+would nearly burst his boiler trying to lug the big man on to his feet
+so's he could knock him down again. It took two of Jimmy's mates all
+their time to lam him down into a comparatively reasonable state of mind
+after the fight was over.
+
+“The Oracle left for Sydney next day, and Uncle Bob went with him. He
+stayed at Uncle Bob's place for some time. He got very quiet, they said,
+and gentle; he used to play with the children, and they got mighty fond
+of him. The old folks thought his heart was broken, but it went through
+a deeper sorrow still after that and it ain't broken yet. It takes a lot
+to break the heart of a man.”
+
+“And his wife,” asked Mitchell--“what became of her?”
+
+“I don't think he ever saw her again. She dropped down pretty low after
+he left her--I've heard she's living somewhere quietly. The Oracle's
+been sending someone money ever since I knew him, and I know it's a
+woman. I suppose it's she. He isn't the sort of a man to see a woman
+starve--especially a woman he had ever had anything to do with.”
+
+“And the Gippsland girl?” asked Mitchell.
+
+“That's the worst part of it all, I think. The Oracle went up North
+somewhere. In the course of a year or two his affair got over Gippsland
+way through a mate of his who lived over there, and at last the story
+got to the ears of this girl, Bertha Bredt. She must have written a
+dozen letters to him, Aunt Bob said. She knew what was in 'em, but, of
+course, she'd never tell us. The Oracle only wrote one in reply. Then,
+what must the girl do but clear out from home and make her way over to
+Sydney--to Aunt Bob's place, looking for Tom. She never got any further.
+She took ill--brain-fever, or broken heart, or something of that sort.
+All the time she was down her cry was--'I want to see him! I want to
+find Tom! I only want to see Tom!'
+
+“When they saw she was dying, Aunt Bob wired to the Oracle to come--and
+he came. When the girl saw it was Tom sitting by the bed, she just gave
+one long look in his face, put her arms round his neck, and laid her
+head on his shoulder--and died.... Here comes the Oracle now.”
+
+Mitchell lifted the tea-billy on to the coals.
+
+
+
+
+[End of original text.]
+
+
+
+
+
+From the original advertisements (March, 1900), books by the same
+author:
+
+
+
+
+
+When the World was Wide & Other Verses
+
+By Henry Lawson, Author of “While the Billy Boils”.
+
+  Ninth Thousand.  With photogravure portrait and vignette title.
+  Crown 8vo, cloth, gilt top, 5s.; post free, 5s. 5d.
+
+
+Mr. R. Le Gallienne, in The Idler: “A striking volume of ballad
+poetry. A volume to console one for the tantalising postponement of Mr.
+Kipling's promised volume of sea ballads.”
+
+Weekly Chronicle, Newcastle (Eng.): “Swinging, rhythmic verse.”
+
+Sydney Morning Herald: “The verses have natural vigour, the writer has
+a rough, true faculty of characterisation, and the book is racy of the
+soil from cover to cover.”
+
+Melbourne Age: “'In the Days when the World was Wide and Other Verses',
+by Henry Lawson, is poetry, and some of it poetry of a very high order.”
+
+Otago Witness: “It were well to have such books upon our shelves... they
+are true History.”
+
+New Zealand Herald: “There is a heart-stirring ring about the verses.”
+
+Bulletin: “How graphic he is, how natural, how true, how strong.”
+
+
+
+While the Billy Boils: Australian Stories.
+
+By Henry Lawson.
+
+Author of “In the Days when the World was Wide”.
+
+  Twelfth Thousand.  With eight plates and vignette title by F. P. Mahony.
+  Crown 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d.; paper cover, 2s. 6d. (postage, 6d.)
+
+  Also in two parts (each complete in itself), in picture covers, at 1s.;
+  post free, 1s. 3d. each (Commonwealth Series).
+
+
+The Academy: “A book of honest, direct, sympathetic, humorous writing
+about Australia from within is worth a library of travellers' tales. Mr.
+Lawson shows us what living in the bush really means. The result is
+a real book--a book in a hundred. His language is terse, supple, and
+richly idiomatic.”
+
+Mr. A. Patchett Martin, in Literature (London): “A book which Mrs.
+Campbell Praed, the Australian novelist, assured me made her feel that
+all she had written of bush life was pale and ineffective.”
+
+The Spectator: “In these days when short, dramatic stories are eagerly
+looked for, it is strange that one we would venture to call the greatest
+Australian writer should be practically unknown in England. Short
+stories, but biting into the very heart of the bushman's life, ruthless
+in truth, extraordinarily dramatic, and pathetically uneven....”
+
+The Times: “A collection of short and vigorous studies and stories of
+Australian life and character. A little in Bret Harte's manner, crossed,
+perhaps, with that of Guy de Maupassant.”
+
+
+
+[The Announcements at the end of this section give alternate titles
+for two of Lawson's works, to wit: “On the Track” is given as such, but
+“Over the Sliprails” is given as “By the Sliprails”, and the combined
+work “On the Track and Over the Sliprails” is given as “By Track and
+Sliprails”. Of course, only “On the Track” had actually been printed at
+the date of the advertisement, so it might be theorized that these had
+been working titles, afterwards discarded, whose inclusion here was
+overlooked.--A. L., 1998.]
+
+
+
+
+
+About the author:
+
+
+
+Henry Lawson was born near Grenfell, New South Wales, Australia on
+17 June 1867. Although he has since become Australia's most acclaimed
+writer, in his own lifetime his writing was often “on the side”--his
+“real” work being whatever he could find. His writing was frequently
+taken from memories of his childhood, especially at Pipeclay/Eurunderee.
+In his autobiography, he states that many of his characters were
+taken from the better class of diggers and bushmen he knew there.
+His experiences at this time deeply influenced his work, for it is
+interesting to note a number of descriptions and phrases that are
+identical in his autobiography and in his stories and poems. He died at
+Sydney, 2 September 1922. He is most famous for his short stories.
+
+“On the Track” and “Over the Sliprails” were both published at Sydney
+in 1900, the prefaces being dated March and June respectively--and so,
+though printed separately, a combined edition was printed the same
+year (the two separate, complete works were simply put together in one
+binding); hence they are sometimes referred to as “On the Track and Over
+the Sliprails”. The opposite occurred with “Joe Wilson and His Mates”,
+which was later divided into “Joe Wilson” and “Joe Wilson's Mates”
+ (1901). All of these works are now online, as well as one book of
+Lawson's verse, “In the Days When the World was Wide” (1896).
+
+    .   .   .   .   .
+
+An incomplete glossary of Australian terms and concepts which may prove
+helpful to understanding this book:
+
+  Billy:  Any container used to boil water, especially for tea; a
+  special container designed for this purpose.
+
+  Bunyip:  [pronounced bun-yup]  A large mythological creature, said
+  by the Aborigines to inhabit watery places.  There may be some
+  relation to an actual creature that is now extinct. Lawson uses an
+  obsolete sense of the term, meaning “imposter”.
+
+  Gin:  An aboriginal woman; use of the term is analogous to “squaw”
+   in N. America.  May be considered derogatory in modern usage.
+
+  Goanna:  Any of various lizards of the genus Varanus (monitor
+  lizards) native to Australia.
+
+  Graft:  Work; hard work.
+
+  Gunyah:  (Aboriginal)  A rough or temporary hut or shelter in the
+  bush, especially one built from bark, branches, and the like. A
+  humpy, wurley, or mia-mia.  Variant:  Gunya.
+
+  Jackeroo/Jackaroo:  At the time Lawson wrote, a Jackaroo was a “new
+  chum” or newcomer to Australia, who sought work on a station to gain
+  experience. The term now applies to any young man working as a
+  station hand. A female station hand is a Jillaroo.
+
+  Jimmy Woodser:  A person who drinks alone; a drink drunk alone.
+
+  Larrikin:  A hoodlum.
+
+  Lorry:  A large, low wagon without sides, used for heavy loads.
+
+  Mia-mia:  (Aboriginal)  A rough or temporary hut or shelter in the
+  bush, especially one built from bark, branches, and the like. A
+  humpy, wurley, or gunyah.
+
+  Native bear:  A koala.
+
+  Pa:  A Maori village.
+
+  'Possum/Possum:  In Australia, a class of marsupials that were
+  originally mistaken for the American animal of the same name. They
+  are not especially related to the possums of North and South
+  America, other than being marsupials.
+
+  Public/Pub.:  The traditional pub. in Australia was a hotel with a
+  “public” bar--hence the name.  The modern pub has often (not
+  always) dispensed with the lodging, and concentrated on the bar.
+
+  Push:  A group of people sharing something in common; Lawson uses
+  the word in an older and more particular sense, as a gang of violent
+  city hoodlums.
+
+  Ratty:  Shabby, dilapidated; somewhat eccentric, perhaps even
+  slightly mad.
+
+  Selector:  A free selector, a farmer who selected and settled land
+  by lease or license from the government.
+
+  Shout:  To buy a round of drinks.
+
+  Skillion:  A lean-to or outbuilding.
+
+  Sliprails/slip-rails:  movable rails, forming a section of fence,
+  which can be taken down in lieu of a gate.  “Over the Sliprails”,
+  the title of this volume, might be translated as “Through the Gate”.
+
+  Squatter:  A person who first settled on land without government
+  permission, and later continued by lease or license, generally to
+  raise stock; a wealthy rural landowner.
+
+  Station:  A farm or ranch, especially one devoted to cattle or
+  sheep.
+
+  Stoush:  Violence; to do violence to.
+
+  Tea:  In addition to the regular meaning, Tea can also mean a light
+  snack or a meal (i.e., where Tea is served). In particular, Morning
+  Tea (about 10 AM) and Afternoon Tea (about 3 PM) are nothing more
+  than a snack, but Evening Tea (about 6 PM) is a meal. When just
+  “Tea” is used, it usually means the evening meal. Variant:  Tea-
+  time.
+
+  Tucker:  Food.
+
+  Whare:  [pronounced war-ee]  A Maori term for a hut or similar
+  dwelling.
+
+
+  Also:  a hint with the seasons--remember that the seasons are
+  reversed from those in the northern hemisphere, hence June may be
+  hot, but December is even hotter.  Australia is at a lower latitude
+  than the United States, so the winters are not harsh by US
+  standards, and are not even mild in the north.  In fact, large parts
+  of Australia are governed more by “dry” versus “wet” than by Spring-
+  Summer-Fall-Winter.
+
+
+(Alan R. Light, Monroe, North Carolina, April 1998.)
+
+
+A number of obvious errors were corrected, after being compared against
+other editions. The original edition was the primary source.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Over the Sliprails, by Henry Lawson
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1313 ***