Just then, however, it was Harry’s turn to look scared, for a great grey owl, with round eyes that gleamed like polished guineas, brushed against his face, and directly afterwards two or three flying foxes floated by, looking in the dark very much like dirty cherubim off a tombstone.
Donald laughed to see how the owl and the great bats made Harry jump, when he had been talking so big the minute before. Presently they walked into a cloud of great dusky moths that came fluttering about the lantern like butterflies’ ghosts, and then they saw stalactites hanging down like sheets and chandeliers, and fruit and flowers, and plucked geese, and organ-pipes, and joining on to the stalagmites on the floor, and making columns and cloisters and great hour-glasses. Some of the stalactites rang in tune when they rapped them, like harmonicons. It would have been a very jolly place to wander about in, if the water had not dropped off the roof down the napes of their necks, and if they had not been obliged to look out so sharp to keep from tumbling down little precipices, or into the streams they could hear running, and the ponds they could sometimes see shining through the darkness.
They had scrambled down three or four of the little precipices (the cave’s floor was like a great rough flight of stairs) when they stopped to look at a pillar that was just like a huge candle with a “winding-sheet.”
“Why, there’s a red hand up there,” said Harry, pointing to the winding-sheet.
Donald could not see it, and so Harry put the lantern on to the end of a long stick he carried, and held it up to what he said was the hand. But still Donald could not see one.
“You must be blind, then,” said Harry impatiently; “there, don’t you see now?” and he pushed the lantern against the stalactite.
Down the lantern dropped, rolled over for a few feet, and disappeared. The boys joined hands, and groped with the stick after the lantern; but presently the end of the stick ran on without anything to stop it, and if they had not pulled themselves up very quick, they would have fallen down the deepest drop they had come to yet. At the bottom was a light, dancing about like a will-o’-the-wisp. The lantern had tumbled into one of the black subterranean streams, and soon, either the water put the candle out, or else the lantern was carried underground. At any rate, Donald and Harry were left quite in the dark.
“We must keep on lighting matches,” said Donald; “or, perhaps, we could make torches out of this stick-it seems dry. Where are the matches?—You had them.”
But when Harry felt in his pocket, the matchbox was gone. He felt in all his pockets, and Donald felt in allhispockets, but not a single match could they find. Then, at first, they did feel very much afraid, and I think you would have been afraid, too, however plucky you may be. The cave was pitch-dark where they had got to. They could hear water dripping and dashing and running all round about them—some of it a long way down. When they moved, they were forced to tap about with the stick like a blind man, and to slide their feet along the ground at a snail’s pace, for fear of suddenly tumbling down some deep pit or into a well-like water-hole. And if they could find their way back to the great steps they had come down, it would be very hard to find the proper places to ascend, and to scramble up them in the dark. It had not been easy scrambling down them, even with a lantern. No wonder Donald and Harry felt frightened. But funking, they knew, would do no good. If they sat down scared in a corner, there they would have to starve, most likely; for no one at Wonga-Wonga knew that they had started for the cave.
“Let’s say our prayers,” said Donald (it was Harry told me); and when they had said them, they gripped hold tight of one another’s hands, and set out.
At first they went quite wrong. After stumbling about for nearly half an hour, they had got again to the top of the precipice the lantern had tumbled down, instead of to the foot of the first one they had to climb up; but then they felt their way along by the wall of the cave, until they came at last to the bottom of the drop they wanted. They could not always keep by the wall. Every now and then their guiding-stick went splash into water. Sometimes, too, they ran full butt against rocks that knocked sparks out of their eyes, and made their noses bleed, and tore their clothes into ragged ribbons; and Donald lost one of his shoes, and Harry both of his, in some mud, as sticky as birdlime, that they floundered into. But, at last, as I have said, they came to the foot of the first great step they had to mount. They felt about with their stick, but for a long time they could find no foot or hand-hold. And when they did come by-and-bye to jutting big stones, they were no good, because a waterfall was tumbling down them. The stream it made below was not very broad, but it ran so fast that the boys could not pole how deep it was; and so they had to be very careful in crossing it, and they would not have been able to cross it at all, if it had not been for a great stone in the middle that the stick tapped against. As it was, Harry (who was more slapdash in his ways than Donald) went into the water up to his waist before he got to the other side.
When they had crossed, they seemed at first as far off from the cave’s mouth as ever; but, after ten minutes’ groping about, they got into a zigzag crack in the great step, through which, with more tearing of clothes and bruising of shins, they managed to wriggle up to the sloping platform above. They had learnt wisdom from experience, and did not try to strike right across it. Perhaps you have tried to walk right across a common in a fog, and have come out not far from the place you started from: well, Donald and Harry had discovered that making short cuts in the pitch-dark Cave of the Red Hand was like that, and so they tapped along the edge of the step until they came to the cave’s wall once more, and then followed that—running up against rocks, and floundering into mud and water as before—until they got to the foot of the next step. When they had climbed a good way up the last step they had to mount, they met with a great disappointment. There were no more stones sticking out for them to take hold of. They swished the stick backwards and forwards like a scythe, but it went over the rock just as if it had been a brick wall.
So they had to go back and try again, and it was so long before they found a mounting-place, that they began to lose heart, and fear that, after all, they would have to die in the cave, with nothing but the pointing red hand at the entrance to show where they were. But at last their heads rose above the edge of the great step, and there, far away, the moonlight was pouring in at the cave’s mouth, and making silver gauze of the mist just inside. Close by them the cave still looked very gloomy; but oh, how jolly they felt! When the owls and the flying foxes brushed against Harry now, he could have shaken hands—or wings—with them, they seemed so much like old friends welcoming him back to life.
It did not take the boys long to get out of the cave when they had the moonlight to guide them, and they did not stop long to look at the inwards-pointing red hand, at which they had looked so curiously when they were going to follow its direction. Then the faded red fingers seemed burnt up by the blazing sunlight; now they pointed dim beneath the dewy moonlight. When the boys thought of the dismal darkness the hand pointed to, they hurried by it as if it had power to push them back into the gloom. In spite of their hobbles, Cornstalk and Flora M‘Ivor had strayed a long way, and it was early Sunday morning before they and their riders got back to Wonga-Wonga.
The bleeding, battered, tattered boys were so full of their adventure that they were quite angry to find every one there sound asleep. They went to bed without waking even the dogs, and heard next day at breakfast that, as they had been seen riding in the direction of the next station, it had been thought that they had been kept there to spend the night. They felt doubly fortunate then in having got out of the Cave of the Red Hand, for no one, plainly enough, would have dreamt of looking for them in it.
There were plenty of things in the Wonga-Wonga garden, but they were not arranged very tidily. It was hard to say where the beds ended, and the paths began; and near the bottom fence there was a patch that was exceedingly slovenly. In the midst of loquat trees and peach trees, and ninety-days’ corn, and sweet potatoes, and golden-blossomed pumpkin vines, there was a coarse grass-plat, almost as big as a little paddock. A clump of prickly pear grew in it, and one great aloe, with names cut on some of its pointed leaves, and the ends of others hacked off as if they were sword-bayonets broken in receiving a charge of cavalry. And yet the grass-plat looked cosy too—shut in with fruit and flowers and vegetables and green corn, or blossoming corn, or brown corn hanging down great heavy cobs, like truncheons with brass-headed nails driven close together into them, and with the hot Australian sunshine pouring down on the long dry tangled grass. Bees buzzed about over it, and butterflies, with white drops on their black velvet wings, found out its flowers, and the pumpkins, squashes, cucumbers, vegetable marrows, and rock and water-melons were fond of crawling into the hay-like grass, to bulge out and ripen into gold and bloomy green, and speckled green and yellow. The guinea-fowl and turkeys were very fond of laying their eggs in the grass-plat too; and in late spring and summer, and early autumn, snakes were very fond of it also. Up-country people in Australia get careless about snakes, as colliers in England get careless about fire-damp and choke-damp—just because they may be killed by them any day.
One day Mrs. Lawson put on her sun-bonnet, with a curtain that came half-way down her back, and went to the grass-plat to look for eggs, and Harry went with her. All of a sudden she started up with a great black snake coiled round her arm. Though Harry was a slapdash little fellow, he could be cool enough sometimes. The instant he saw what was the matter he darted at the snake before it could bite, just like a snake when it springs, as stiff and as straight as an arrow, and caught it round the throat so tightly with both hands, that it could not put its horrid fangs either into them or into his mother’s arm. Mrs. Lawson didn’t shriek, but stood quite still (though her face was very white, both for Harry’s sake and her own), so that the snake might not get a chance to wriggle free: it was lashing about with its nasty tail, and swelling out as if it wanted to burst itself. Harry knew that Sydney was taking an after-breakfast pipe on the verandah, and shouted as loudly as the throttling he was giving the snake would let him:
“Syd, there’s a beastly snake on mamma! I’ve grabbed him.”
All the Lawsons could put this and that together; so, before he rushed to the rescue, Sydney dashed into the keeping-room for the carving-knife. He was not long about it.
“Hold on like grim death,” he said to Harry, when he ran down; and then he sliced through the snake just under Harry’s fingers. The head part gave such a jump that, after all, the horrid fangs nearly went into Mrs. Lawson’s arm, but Harry managed to keep hold of the slippery thing until he could fling it ever so far off; whilst the headless part untwined from his mother’s arm, and writhed about on the ground in a very uncanny fashion. When the head had been smashed with a stone, and kicked up to a great red boil of an ant-hill, and the tail dragged after it, for the ants to pick the bones, both parts still kept twitching every now and then.
“Snakes can’t die outright, you know, until after sundown.” said Harry.
“Confound the beast! He’s made me break my pipe,” said Sydney.
But though they talked in that cool way, they had both hugged their mother like boa-constrictors when she was safe from the black snake; and when she gave over kissing Harry for a minute, Sydney had clapped him on the back, and said that he was proud to have a game little fellow like that for a brother. Harry scarcely knew whether he was more pleased by the kissing or the clapping—although he did not quite relish being called alittlefellow.
Black snakes, and all kinds of snakes, swarmed about Wonga-Wonga in warm weather. In cold weather—such cold weather, that is, as they have in Australia—the snakes lie up in holes. They are not very brisk when they first come out in spring. They seem to be rubbing their eyes, so to speak, after their long sleep; but perhaps they are most dangerous then, because they are more likely to let you tread on them, instead of getting out of your way, as they are generally glad enough to do.
One bright spring morning in September (seasons are turned topsy-turvy, you know, in Australia), Donald had gone down with John Jones’s little boy to pull up some night lines that Harry and Donald had set in the creek, Harry was too lazy to turn out that morning, so Donald had got little Johnny Jones to go with him. Johnny had no shoes or stockings on, and as he ran to pull one of the lines up, he set his bare foot on a sluggish snake, coiled up like a lady’s back-hair, in a hollow of a black log he was clambering over. Up came the flat head and bit Johnny’s great toe, and off the snake wriggled. Poor little Johnny was dreadfully scared, but Donald made him sit down on the log, and tied one of the fishing lines so tightly round the toe that it almost cut to the bone. Then Donald went down on his knees, and sucked the poison out as well as he could, and spat it out on the ground. What with the bite, and the fright, and the tight string, Johnny could not manage to walk. So Donald took him up on his back like a sack, and trotted off to the house with him, and told Mr. Lawson about him. Mr. Lawson at once cut out the bitten part with a sharp pen-knife, and blazed some gunpowder in the hollow, and, except that he had to limp a little for a day or two, Johnny came to no harm. But if it had not been for Donald, very likely his leg would have swelled up, and he would have grown sleepy, and perhaps died, long before the doctor could have been fetched from Jerry’s Town; and when the doctor had come, perhaps he would not have been able to do any good. If “Old Cranky” or any of the black fellows had been on the station,theymight have cured Johnny perhaps.
Old Cranky was a half-crazy, transported poacher, whom the squatters paid to wander about their runs, killing dingoes. Though hewashalf-crazy, he was sharp enough in doing that; and he was a snake-tamer too. He used to carry little ones about in his cabbage-tree hat, and trouser-pockets, and the bosom of his blue blouse, and pull out a bundle of them every now and then like a pocket-handkerchief. He left the fangs in them, and they sometimes bit him, but he had found out something that always curedhimat any rate; and the blacks have got something of the same kind.
Some people say that when a stump-lizard has been bitten in a fight with a snake, it eats the leaves of a little herb that prevents the poison from taking effect, and that the blacks and snake-charmers have found out what the herb is. The stump-lizard is a thick spotted brown and blue thing that is very fond of killing snakes; though it is so lazy generally, that when it thinks you want to hurt it, it won’t take the trouble to run away, but only turns round and makes ugly faces at you. To be sure it can give you a nasty bite if you do lay hold of it. The big-headed laughing jackass is very fond, too, of stabbing snakes and breaking their backs with its strong beak. It seems to enjoy the jobbing job, as if it thought that it was only serving them out fairly for eating birds and birds’ eggs. One day Donald shot a snake that was climbing up a tree to a bird’s-nest; and another day he and Harry came upon one that was mesmerizing a lot of little diamond sparrows. Half of it was coiled up like a corkscrew, and the rest went backwards and forwards, like a boat’s tiller when no one has got hold of it; and the little birds kept on coming nearer and nearer, as if they were being drawn into its open mouth. When Harry shied a stick and frightened them away, the snake looked round at him quite savagely before it rustled off.
There were plenty of snakes, as I have said, about Wonga-Wonga. Great black-backed and yellow-backed fellows crawled into the huts sometimes when the men were away, and coiled themselves up in the boots and blankets; and little lithe mud-brown whip-snakes used to pop out their wicked-looking little heads between the planks of the wool-shed, and the house verandah, and the weather-boards of the barn, and then pop in again before a gun could be pointed at them. Whilst the snakes were about, too, it was a hazardous thing to pull a log out of the wood-heap. You might have fancied that Harry and Donald saw enough snakes to keep them from wanting to hear about any more, but Old Cranky’s snake stories fascinated them as the snakes fascinate the little birds. He told them about the death-adder, with its feet like a lizard’s, and its sting like a wasp’s, besides the venomous fangs in its thick head; and of the huge boas that he had seen “ever so far up country,” joining the trees together with great cat’s cradles. Thereisa stumpy snake in Australia that is, perhaps, particularly dangerous, because it lies still to be trodden on; and thereis, also, a small python; and out of these men like Old Cranky have made up their death-adders and their big boas. When the boys asked him to let them get a peep at these hideous creatures, he always put them off with the excuse that there were none for miles thereabouts; but he did show them something in the snake line that they did not forget in a hurry.
From wandering about the country so much alone, and not being afraid of snakes, Old Cranky knew of places that even the blacks did not know of. It was for one of these that he, and the boys, and his gingerbread kangaroo-bitch, and a shaggy old mongrel, with an ear and a half and a quarter of a tail, that could find game like a pointer and bring it in like a retriever, started one summer’s day. The old man made a great mystery of what he was going to show the boys. Except that he took them by short cuts that they were not familiar with, they saw nothing remarkable until they came to the brim of a deep little basin, with a big water-hole fringed with thick scrub at the bottom. They had not gone many steps down the side before Lag—that was the mongrel’s name—lifted up his fore-foot.
“What’s the dog pointing at?” asked Harry.
“Quail, I suppose?” said Donald.
“No, it ain’tquail,” Old Cranky answered with a grin. “Can’t ye smell ’em? Well, ye’ll see ’em soon. Keep close ahind me. Don’t ye tread but jest where I goes.”
Theydidsee them soon. It wassnakesthe old man meant. He had brought them to what he called the Snakes’ Corrobboree. There they were in scores: snakes with backs like Spanish leather, and snakes with backs like a gaudy-patterned carpet; snakes with white china bellies and with striped china bellies; snakes with verdigrised-copper bellies, and with scoured-copper bellies; snakes of all colours and all sizes, up to seven feet or so; snakes wriggling like eels through the water, and floating on it like straight sticks; snakes undulating through the scrub; snakes basking on dry ground, curled up like coils of rope, or littered about like black cravats untidily thrown down upon the floor; snakes twined round tree-poles like variegated creepers, and snakes dangling their heads from grey branches like waving clusters of poisonous fruit.
“THE SNAKES CORROBBOREE.”
“THE SNAKES CORROBBOREE.”
“I’ll go bail ye niver see the like of that afore,” said Old Cranky. “Ain’t it a pretty sight? I niver showed it to nobody afore. I likes to come an’ watch ’em by myself. Me an’ the dog, that is. Lag likes it ’most as well as me. Fan, there, is afeard. She stayed outside, ye see.”
The boys felt almost as afraid of Lag and Old Cranky as they were of the snakes when they heard of such peculiar tastes. Heartily glad were they when they joined the kangaroo-bitch outside the horrible basin, and they felt relieved, too, when they reached a track they knew, and the crazy old snake-charmer slouched off on his way to the next station with his dogs behind him.
Tired as they were with their long walk when they got back to Wonga-Wonga, Harry and Donald did not have “pleasant dreams and sweet repose” that night. They both of them dreamt of the Snakes’ Corrobboree; and, I scarcely need say, they never took the trouble to find their way to it again.
Black fellows and old bushmen—and young bushmen too, for the matter of that—cannot make out how it is that “new chums” lose themselves in Australia.Theycan tell which way to go by the place of the sun, and the dip of the country, and all kinds of little things that new comers would not understand even if they noticed them; and so they laugh at new comers for getting lost. But for all their bumptious talk, people of “colonial experience” sometimes get lost in the bush, and are never heard of again, like ships that have gone down at sea without any surviving eye, except God’s, to see them sink.
Sad stories are told about these poor lost people. Sometimes they disappear for ever, like rain-drops swallowed by the ocean; sometimes they are found wandering about mad; sometimes they are found starved to death; sometimes just dying. Sometimes a heap of picked and bleached bones is found, with nothing to tell the name of the person whose flesh has been torn or has rotted off them. Sometimes the name, and one or two sprawling, half-unintelligible words have been feebly scratched on the pannikin that rusts hard by.
You may fancy, then, how dreadfully frightened a mother in the bush is when her little child is missing. But, though some of the little strays are never recovered, a great many of them are wonderfully protected, and come upon at last. It is about a little girl that was lost in the bush that I am going to tell you.
One morning I had ridden over to Wonga-Wonga, and was having lunch with Mr. Lawson and Sydney, when Mrs. Jones rushed into the room, crying as if her heart would break.
“Oh, master,” she sobbed out, “I can’t find my Maggie; an’ I’ve been seekin’ her an hour an’ more. Oh! it was you who persuaded Jones to come when you was over at home, an’ if you don’t find my Maggie, I shall do myself or some on ye a mischief, I feel sure I shall. Oh, oh, oh! my ’ead feels fit to burst!”
Mr. Lawson quieted the poor screaming woman, and, when he found that little Maggie was really lost, he had horses run up, and every man and boy about the station started in search of Mrs. Jones’s lost lamb.
Little Maggie was a flaxen-haired, blue-eyed, laughing, lisping little pet; but if she had been a crosspatch everybody would have looked for her just as carefully. Harry and Donald bounced out of the weather-board cottage that was used for a school-room, like pellets from a popgun, when they heard the news; and after them the tutor rushed to horse, though he wasn’t much of a rider. John Jones was fetched up from the paddock where he was ploughing, and when he heard that little Maggie was lost, he made a rush at a young horse that had only had the tacklings on once or twice, and would have got on it too, somehow, though hehadbeen thrown over its head the next second, if the horsebreaker had not laid hold of him, and given him a leg up on to a horse fitter for his riding.
In the course of the day the news spread to the stations round about, and before nightfall the whole countryside was up hunting for poor little Maggie. The shepherds left their dogs to look after their flocks, if theyhaddogs, and their flocks to look after themselves if theyhadn’tdogs, to scour the bush.
Mrs. Lawson and her girls searched all round the head station as if they were looking for a pin. Even Miss Smith mastered her dread of the bush, and went quite a quarter of a mile away from the house, all by herself, as she afterwards related proudly, even into places where she couldn’t see the house, and where she was dreadfully afraid that a bushranger would carry her off, or a snake would bite her, or the little imported bull would run at his timorous countrywoman. As for poor Mrs. Jones, she kept on rushing out into the bush, determined to walk on until she dropped, and then rushing back, before she had walked a mile, to hear whether little Maggie, or any tidings of little Maggie, had been brought home.
Some of those who had been hunting for the little girl gave up the hunt at the end of the first day; some went on hunting with fire-sticks during the night, and then went back to their work next morning very cross because nothing had come of their kindness, and also because—pity often makes people cross—they couldn’t help thinking of the poor father and mother, and of howtheywould feel iftheirlittle ones had “gone a-missing.” Others camped out when the sun had gone down on one day’s unsuccessful search, that they might be fresh to renew their search on the morrow. Harry and Donald were two of these. They had thoroughly fagged themselves out, poking here and poking there, and then riding, as if for a wager, to some place where one or other of them had fancied they might, perhaps, find some traces of poor little Maggie. They were too tired even to be hungry when they got off their horses, as the stars were coming out. They almost fell asleep as they took the saddles off their horses, and were soon snoring between the saddle-flaps they used for pillows.
When the boys woke next morning they were as hungry as fox-hunters, but what were they to do for a breakfast? Donald saw a grass tree, and remembered what he had seen the black fellows do with grass trees on his father’s station, which was farther up the country than Wonga-Wonga.
“It looks as if it would come up easy,” said Donald; “let’s loosen the earth round it a bit though. Now then, Harry, lay hold, and pull with a will, as old Tom the sailor says.”
The two boys laid hold of the queer crooked stump, and pulled withsucha will that presently flat they tumbled on their backs, with the grass tree between them. The root was rotten, and swarmed with fat grubs. They made a black fellow’s breakfast off these, and then they saddled their horses, and off they rode again.
They had not gone far before they came upon King Dick-a-Dick, admiring himself at a water-hole. He was in full dress, and he seemed very proud of it, as he made a looking-glass of the water, and then tossed up his head again. His Majesty’s crown was a battered white hat, and he wore a pair of light-striped knee-breeches—that was all his dress. He had had the hat and the breeches given him at some of the stations near, and the settlers about there had given him a brass chain too, and a brass plate engraved—
“H.M. Dick-a-Dick,King of the ’Possum Tribe,”
“H.M. Dick-a-Dick,
King of the ’Possum Tribe,”
“H.M. DICK-A-DICK, KING OF THE POSSUM TRIBE.”
“H.M. DICK-A-DICK, KING OF THE POSSUM TRIBE.”
with a ’possum engraved underneath. The ’possum was the crest, so to speak, of King Dick-a-Dick’s tribe. Now this was the tribe from which Harry and Donald had had such a narrow escape, and, therefore, they felt rather nervous when they saw King Dick-a-Dick standing by the water-hole with his spear in his hand. But his Majesty was anxious to conciliate. He was fond of tobacco and flour, and he and his people had run short of both since they had been on bad terms with the whites. So, as soon as he saw the boys rein in, he stuck his spear, point downwards, into the ground, and beckoned to them to come on, grinning as if the top of his head was coming off. That washisway of giving “a winning smile.” When he learnt what the boys’ business was, he chuckled greatly at the thought of white fellows trying to find any one in the bush without black trackers, and then proposed that he and the boys should share the credit of finding the little girl. He made sure that hecouldfind her. The direction in which she had left the station was known, so Dick-a-Dick took the boys back to within about a mile and a half of home, and then began to beat about. He went down on his hands and knees, and put his nose to the ground like a dog. Presently he stopped at an ant-hill, peered about for a minute, and then jumped up, and cut a caper. The boys couldn’t make it out, but he had discovered the mark of a tiny little bare heel in a dent on the ant-hill. When he had once found Maggie’s track, he scarcely ever lost it. On he went, walking with his nose almost as low as his toes. He found out little stones that had been moved, and grass-blades that had been scarcely brushed by poor little Maggie’s bare feet. He found out too the blood that had come from a scratch in one of them, got by scrambling over a splintery log.
“Dat where piccaninny lubra stop to drink,” said Dick-a-Dick, pointing to a “crab-hole”—the hole made by a bullock’s hoof—on whose side he could see the print of a chubby little brow. “Missy proud now, pick waratah,” said Dick-a-Dick soon afterwards, as he gathered up the still crimson leaves of the flower which the little girl had bruised and thrown down. “Now Missy ’fraid o’ debil-debil,” said Dick-a-Dick by-and-bye, when he came to a place in which the tracks, invisible to the boys’ eyes, were so bewilderingly visible to him on all sides that he did not know at first which to follow. He soon found the right one, however, and led the boys to a place in which he said the little girl must have slept.
So they kept up the search until, after travelling for hours in a circuitous zigzag, they came upon poor little Maggie, not four miles from home, but on the opposite side of the station to that from which she had started, coiled up in a black, jagged, charred tree-stump, with bright-eyed, basking little lizards watching her. Of course, the lizards vanished as Dick-a-Dick and the boys drew near, but his sharp eyes had seen something peculiar in their bright ones. Poor little Maggie was sound asleep; her fat little face, and neck, and arms, and legs, were sadly scratched. In a scratched, podgy little hand she held a posy of withered wild flowers.
When she woke and saw Dick-a-Dick, trying to look specially amiable, grinning down upon her, she shrieked out, “Mammy!” But when she saw the boys, she jumped up and ran to them, and hid her face between them, and clung to them with two little leech-like arms. They tried to explain to her that if it had not been for her “nas’y b’ack man” she might never have seen her “Mammy” again; and Dick-a-Dick grinned his broadest grin to propitiate her; but it was no use. She screamed whenever her eyes fell upon Dick-a-Dick. And yet, according to her own pretty little prattle, she had not been “muchf’ightened in the thoods.” She had seen “nas’y b’ack ’igglin’ thin’s,” but “the kin’ yady”—whoever that might be—“thoodn’t ’et ’em bite me.”
Harry took Maggie on his horse, and cantered on in front, and Donald and Dick-a-Dick cantered behind on Flora M‘Ivor.
What a reception they had when they got to the station, for they were getting anxious there about the boys as well as the little! The head-station shepherds had come in with their sheep, and a good many of the people who had been searching for a couple of days had gathered at the station quite dispirited at their lack of luck. They all gave a great cheer when Cornstalk and the mare laid down their ears, and brought up their four riders at a steeple-chase gallop.
When Mrs. Jones had almost squeezed the breath out of poor little Maggie, she tried to garotte Harry and Donald, and then hugged Dick-a-Dick; and John Jones seemed inclined to hug all three of them, too, when he had done his best to press the little life his wife had left in her out of little Maggie; and then Mrs. Jones went into hysterics, and John Jones ran indoors and hid his face in the bed-clothes, and blubbered for a quarter of an hour; and everybody thought the better of him because he blubbered.
Just wasn’t there a supper at Wonga-Wonga that night! And didn’t Dick-a-Dick tuck into it? And didn’t Harry and Donald, between them, eat nearly half as much as he did?
“What a set of crawlers you are in Jerry’s Town, Mr. Howe!” said Harry Lawson to me, one frizzlingly hot day. I was staying in Jerry’s Town then, and Harry had ridden in to meet the mail, and take back the Wonga-Wonga newspapers and letters. “I shouldn’t like,” Harry went on, “to live in a town. I should feel choked with such a lot of houses about me. Father talks about England sometimes, but I’m sure he likes the colony twenty times better. Houses everywhere, and all the little bush you’ve got left cut up into paddocks!Iwouldn’t live in England if you paid me for it. You brag about your horses, but they can’t run against ours, when they do come out. I wonder they live out the voyage, from the way I’ve heard you coddle them. Look atourhorses—theydon’t want corn and cloths, just as if they were babies. You can ride them for a hundred miles, and turn them out to grass all in a sweat, and yet they’re as fresh as paint for another hundred miles next day—aren’t you, Cornstalk?” said Harry, proudly patting the damp neck of his favourite steed.
Harry was always very fond of “cracking up the colony,” but he was especially inclined to do so that forenoon, having had his temper somewhat irritated (although he protested that he was as cool as a water-melon) by the hot wind that had been blowing for three days. I have been in glassworks, and close by the mouths of blast-furnaces, but the heat of an Australian hot wind is worse than theirs. The perspiration it brings out does not cool, and the warm beads are licked up the instant they ooze out upon the forehead and the cheeks. If a vitrifying brick could feel, it would sympathize with a “new chum” in an Australian hot wind. When the “southerly buster” comes after the hot wind, rushing with the chill still on from the South Pole, I have seen people ripping open their shirts to let the cold breeze blow right round them. The hot wind, too, makes the eyes smart and itch dreadfully.
When Harry was talking to me that day—shamming that he did not feel the heat in the least—a good many people in Jerry’s Town had got “the blight.” Their eyes were bunged up just as if they had been fighting, though they did keep on dabbing rags dipped in alum-water up to them. And then, as if the blight was not bad enough, flies got into the corners of the eyes, and sucked away with their thirsty probosces. I have heard of a Frenchman who committed suicide because, as he left a letter to say, he was “so bothered by the flies that life was not worth keeping at such a price.” I think that foolish man must have been an Australian immigrant. The flies at the time I am telling you about were really a dreadful nuisance in Jerry’s Town. They buzzed about one’s head like swarming bees, they covered one’s back like a shirt of mail, at mealtimes they made the chops and steaks look as black as if they had been smothered in magnified peppercorns. Itwashot then. The mercury stood at a good bit over 100° in the shade: it was almost impossible to find out what it stood at in the sun without getting a sunstroke. At every corner poor dogs were lying with their tongues out askew, panting like high-pressure steamboats just about to blow up.
For some time we had seen a few dark clouds on the hilly horizon, and heard the low rumble of distant thunder. Oh, how we hoped that the storm would work up our way, and drench us; but for months not a drop of rain had fallen in our parts. Even in Jerry’s Town we began to feel anxious about our water-supply; both the creek and the Kakadua had sunk so low—the creek had become a mere straggling chain of very shallow ponds—and so many bullocks, and sheep, and horses had been driven in, or had found their way, from long distances round, to drink up what water there was to be had.
The tall emu, with its hairy rusty-black feathers, is a shy bird, and, though Jerry’s Town was a very quiet little place, an emu had not been seen within a dozen miles of it for years; but during that long drought the emus stalked right through Macquarie Street in Jerry’s Town to get to the water. Some of them were shot; one of them was so very thirsty that it let itself be knocked on the head like a “booby,” through its anxiety to crook its long neck into the creek; but the poor birds were not nearly so fat as they generally are. They were half-starved as well as parched with thirst. Very little oil (emu oil is a Bush all-heal) was got out of them when they were put into the pot. I dare say you have often growled over wet English weather—especially when it put off a picnic or a cricket match—but, you see, people in Australia are not as ready as you are to say,
“Rain, rain, go away,And come again some other day.”
“Rain, rain, go away,
And come again some other day.”
Sunlight is a very beautiful thing, but when it threatens to kill one it does not seem so beautiful.
When Harry made the polite speech to me I quoted at starting, I was lounging, smoking, in a rocking-chair on a verandah, and could not help feeling that Imustlook very much like “a crawler” to the upright little fellow who looked down on me from the top of Cornstalk, with his leather letter-bag strapped across his grass-cloth jumper. He had ridden ever so many miles through the hot wind, and was going to ride back ever so many miles through it, and yet he gave himself the unconcerned airs of a young salamander.
“My word! youarea lazy lot,” he proceeded presently. “Nobody here seems to be doing anything but smoking and nobblerizing. There’s a whole mob of fellows shouting for spiders and stone fences at the ‘Macquarie Arms,’ and the ‘Royal,’ and the ‘General Bourke,’ and when I came by the police-barracks I saw the sergeant and all the constables with their coats off under the fig tree in the yard—half of them asleep, and the other half smoking. What do you think that lazy old pig Reynolds was doing? I had to take a message to him from father about some Court House business, and when I got to his place I couldn’t make anybody hear. So I went in and poked about till I got down into that little cellar of his where he keeps his beer, and there was old Reynolds, with all his clothes off, on the bricks, and his Chinaman pitching water on him out of a bucket.He’sa nice fellow to be Clerk of Petty Sessions! If Englishmen can’t stand our climate, they oughtn’t to come to it, and then expect us to pay them wages for shirking their work.
“There’s old Biggs, the postmaster. He’s been long enough in the colony, you’d think, to get used to it—he might almost have been one of the First Fleeters—and yet he kept me waiting ever so long for my letters. He was ‘so overcome with the heat,’ poor man! in lifting the mail-bag out of the cart, that he had to go and nobblerize at the ‘Royal’ before he felt equal to opening it. I declare little Marston, the mail guard, is the only fellow I have seen in Jerry’s Town to-day with a mite of go in him—though heisan Englishman. But then they say he used to be a lieutenant in the army. Look there, Mr. Howe: your English officers, that you think such heavy swells at home, are glad to get us to employ them as mail guards, and milkmen, and things like that. I wonder how little Marston likes carrying a carbine and lugging about the letter-bags.”
The heat, although he professed not to care a pin for it, had so plainly affected Harry’s temper that I invited him to get off his horse and finish his abuse of things English in the shade of the verandah. At first he loftily declined to dismount, but he did get down, and stayed chatting with me so long that I could see he did not quite relish the thought of his hot ride home. Harry’s was not cooling conversation. Marston had told him of dozens of teamsters that the mail had passed on the road “stuck up” round dry water-holes and fast-drying fords, with three-fourths of their bullocks dead, and the others so weakened that they could only get upon their knees when they tried to rise from the ground. Harry had had a chat, too, with a bullock-driver who had managed to struggle on into Jerry’s Town that morning.
“He looked just like a black fellow,” said Harry, “with the dust and the heat; and he says that up the country on M’Grath’s Plains there is not a drop of water to be got for fifty miles any way, and the sun and the bush-fires have burnt every bit of grass right down to the roots. The country looks as black as if it was covered with cinders, he says, and there are cracks a foot wide in the ground.”
Things were not much better at Wonga-Wonga, Harry informed me. Most of the water-holes were dried up, and bulls and bullocks, cows and calves, sheep and lambs, brood-mares and foals, were lying rotting round them, with crows and carrion hawks feasting on their carcases, or else half buried in the sticky mud at the bottom which the sun was baking as hard as brick. The sheep that were left alive were lying panting under the trees, too languid even to bleat; and the bullocks were standing crowded together in what had once been swamps and chains of ponds, bellowing dolefully, or lashing off the flies in silent despair. Mr. Lawson, and Sydney, and the overseer were riding about in search of grass and water, so that they might not “lose all the beasts,” and everything in the garden and cultivation-paddocks was shrivelled up into tinder and touchwood. That morning, as Harry rode in, he had seen parrots and lories gasping like fishes out of water on the grey branches, and falling dead, as if they had been shot by the sunbeams, when they tried to fly across the open. When Harry galloped homewards at last through the blazing light and the fiery air, it seemed strange that he did not drop to the ground like the parrots.