“Anyhow, we’re a deal better than the English, though I didn’t know you called yourself a native,” answered Harry. “We shouldn’t have any scamps in the colony if it wasn’t for the lot they sent us out from home; though, after all, the old hands are twice the men the new chums are that come nowadays. A set of stuck-up milksops! They don’t know anything, and they can’t do anything, and yet they talk as if they’d done the colony a great honour in coming to it, to be always growling at it because they ain’t ’cute enough to get on here.”
Harry and Donald did not make their appearance at the Wonga-Wonga dinner-table next day. They had started early in the morning for the fern-tree gully, with a pick and a spade, determined to make one more effort to discover the grave and unravel its mystery.
For a long time their hunt was as fruitless as before, but at last Harry cried out,
“I’m almost certain it was somewhere here! Don’t you remember there was a blue gum close by, with a hole that looked like a black fellow grinning, half-way up? There’s the tree—or else it’s the image of it, and I never saw two trees exactly alike before.”
Donald got off his horse, and poked about in the scrub for some time. Presently he said, “Ye’re richt.” He had been trying the ground with the handle of the pick, and it had run into seven loosely filled-up, hard-sided and hard-bottomed holes, arranged like this:
Diagram.
“Don’t ye see?” said Donald, pointing out the outside ones; “there’s where the posts stood, and this inside one is where the cross stood. The auld villain didn’t dig up the bones, though, if thereareany bones, for the earth hasn’t been stirred anywhere else.”
The boys set to work with a will, and about five feet below the surface they came to a rusty-yellow crumbling skeleton. There was nothing in the look of the bones from which the boys, at any rate, could tell how their owner had met his death. But they dug up also what turned out to have been a white bone-handled pocket knife, when they had washed off the earth that encrusted it. The blades were almost eaten up by rust; the handle was the colour of bad teeth, and the rivets fell out, and it dropped asunder as the boys handled it; but on one of the sides was cut—“Andrew Wilson.”
The boys put back the bones, and filled in the earth again, and knocked up a rude fence once more round the grave. The sun went down as they were finishing their task, and before they got out of the gully the huge funguses at the foot of the shadowy trees were gleaming like lucifer-matches in the dark, and the curlews were wailing most dolefully. Both boys were very glad to ride out where there was nothing between them and the clear starry sky.
“I wouldn’t camp in there for a thousand pounds,” said Harry, looking back at the deep wooded gorge; and even Donald confessed that the place seemed “nae canny.”
The settler who remembered Old Cranky’s antecedents was Mr. Walter Daventry, son of a deceased Captain Daventry, who had moved up into the Kakadua district from the sea-coast, where he had first made himself a home. If I tell you something about Mr. Walter’s boyhood, you will get a notion of Australia in the old convict times. This Captain Daventry was a military settler. When Mrs. Daventry, and her son Walter, and her maid Phœbe, went out from England to join the captain on his grant, both mistress and maid thought they were never to know what comfort was again—that they were going, so to speak, to the world’s back-yard, in which all kinds of dirty rubbish were shot. Walter would have preferred India or Canada; people teased him so when they learnt that he was going to “Botany Bay”—asking him when he was sentenced to transportation—how many years he had got—and a good many more such silly questions, which they thought a great deal wittier than Walter did. Still, any change was acceptable that would take him away from the dull little Norfolk town that never seemed thoroughly awake, and its dark, long, low-pitched grammar-school, in which two masters, in cap and gown, nodded over their far-apart desks, and pretended to teach Walter and another small boy, and tried to fancy that they were preparing a lanky hobbydehoy for the University. Masters, hobbydehoy, and small boy all half-envied Walter, in a drowsy kind of way, when one morning he burst into that gloomy old school-room to say good bye. An hour afterwards he was rattling out of the dreamy little town along the Ipswich road,en routefor London. The coachman was making his leaders and the off-wheeler canter, the guard wastootle-tooingon his horn; the townspeople stood at their doors and the inn gates, sleepily watching the coach that had come from great Norwich and was going to still greater London, and sleepily waving their hands to proud Walter, who had begged for an outside place, instead of being shut up in the stuffy inside with Mamma and Phoebe and an old gentleman, who wore a bandana under his fur travelling-cap, and got out for refreshment at every inn at which the coach stopped to change horses, munching ham sandwiches and drinking cold brandy and water almost without intermission when the coach was in motion. Walter had a much pleasanter companion in the coachman, behind whom he sat, and who told him stories about the gentlemen’s seats they passed, and gave him the biographies of all the horses, and even let him hold the reins sometimes, when Mr. Jehu got down at a roadside house to deliver a parcel or drink a glass of ale. Walter enjoyed the first part of the journey exceedingly, but he was very tired and sleepy before it was over.
As the coach swung through Mile End turnpike, the coachman woke him up with a back thrust of the butt-end of his whip, and said,
“Now, then, squire, you can reckon yourself in London.”
Walter just opened his heavy eyes, and then shut them again—not thinking much of the Great City, ifthatwas London. By the time the coach got to its inn, he was so sound asleep again that a waiter had to carry him up to bed. The ride from Norfolk to London, however, was flying on eagles’ wings compared with the voyage from London to Sydney. In those days the magnificent steamers and sailing clippers that now arrive almost daily at or from Australia had not been dreamt of. At long intervals clumsy old tubs of ships and barques sailed for the far-off southern land, pottered about for months at sea, and at last turned up at the Antipodes, seemingly more through good luck than good management. The barque in which our party sailed was named theAtalanta. Walter had often read through the proper names at the end of his Latin dictionary, and was greatly amused by the barque’s flying name when he found how she crawled. She had to put in at Plymouth, Lisbon, Bona Vista, Rio, and the Cape. She was just half a year and half a month in getting from the Nore to Port Jackson Heads.
Once inside the Heads, however, even Mrs. Daventry and Phœbe picked up a little spirit, and Walter was in ecstasies. Both sky and water were so brightly blue, the islands sprinkled on the water looked so pretty, and, though the trees seemed almost as black as ink to English eyes, the rocky, wooded shores, sweeping down to the little coves and bays, beached with white sand that shone like silver under the glowing sun, had a fairyland-like look. Sydney then had not the fine buildings it boasts of now, but the town was so much more civilized in appearance than Mrs. Daventry and Phœbe expected, and the little country houses, that even then had begun to dot the south side of the harbour, were such darling little nests, that both mistress and maid fell in love with Sydney. Captain Daventry came on board as theAtalantalet go her anchor in Sydney Cove. He was very brown, and he had a long curly beard. He was dressed more lightly than he would have been at home, but still he was dressed, and like a gentleman. A horrid load was lifted from Mrs. Daventry’s mind, since she had half given in to Phœbe’s belief that Master would only wear a bit of ’possum or kangaroo skin about his loins, and that he would carry a spear instead of a walking-stick. As for Walter, he was very proud of the brown manly-looking Papa whom he had not seen since he was almost a baby.
“Oh, Walter,” cried Mrs. Daventry to her husband, when the kissing was over, “I hope your farm is close by. I used to think that they sent the convicts out here because it was a hideously ugly hole, but this is a love of a place.”
“It’s nicer to look at than to live in,” the captain answered. “What with convicts and emancipists, you’d soon be sick of living in Sydney. No, my grant is some miles up-country. There’s a nasty swarm of ticket-of-leavers round it, but, of course, you’ll have nothing to do with them. And then there are some good fellows of our sort within reach—some of them married, too. What a time you’ve been! I was down two months ago looking out for you. It’s quite by chance I’m down now. However, there’ll be room on the dray for your luggage, if you haven’t brought out a ship-load, and we’ll start home to-morrow, if one night will be rest enough for you. I’ve been buying some horses, and you and Walter can ride two of them, and help me to drive the rest. You’ll be better off than you were before you married me, old lady. You had only one horse then, but I can give you your pick out of a dozen or two now. Of course Walter has learnt to stick on a horse somehow, though you couldn’t keep a pony for him? The girl will have to learn to ride, too, if she wants to get about up-country. In the meantime she can go up on the dray. The bullock-driver is an assigned servant, but he’s as true as steel, and that’s more than I can say for some of the beggars I’ve got.”
But when the loaded dray was brought to the inn door next morning, with a chair on it for Phœbe, she had learnt that assigned servant meant convict, and refused at first to take her seat. She wasn’t going to have her throat cut with her eyes open, she screamed. The bullock-driver, Long Steve, was a good-tempered fellow, and did his best to calm her.
“Why, law bless ye, miss,” he said, “I’ve got an old ’ooman an’ half a dozen kids. What call have I got to do any harm to a pretty gal like you?”
But flattery was thrown away on Phœbe. She entreated her mistress not to leave her to the tender mercies of that wicked-looking man, and made such a fuss that at last her master was obliged to say,
“Well, look here, Phœbe. If you don’t go in the dray, you must either stay in Sydney, or walk, or ride one of the horses. Take your choice—which shall it be?”
Phœbe mounted the dray then, and though it was night when she reached her journey’s end, she was on quite good terms with Long Steve when he helped her off the dray. She had been talking to him for hours, half condescendingly, half propitiatingly, thinking all the time what a capital adventure it would be to relate in her first letter home. In that letter Phœbe made out that Long Steve had committed half a dozen murders, whereas the honest fellow had never committed one. A great many terrible scamps were sent out to Australia in the old convict times, but, mixed up with them, there were men who were far better fellows than many of the people left at home.
Late in the afternoon the Captain and his party reached his farm. “Oh, what a first-rate broad!” Walter, fresh from Norfolk, exclaimed, when the riders had mounted the top of the shore-hills, and were looking down on the lagoon which the farm fringed—a lagoon with thickly-wooded banks, cleared here and there, a little stream running into it at one end, and at the other a sandy bar over which the sea was breaking.
Mrs. Daventry was delighted at first with her new home. A pretty flower-garden sloped down to the lagoon, and the verandah of the snug one-storey house of brick and weather-board was smothered in passion-flower. The Captain had furnished the house as comfortably as he could for his wife, and altogether it seemed a much smarter, livelier place than the dark old house in the dull, grass-grown side-street of the little Norfolk town where she had been economizing whilst her husband was first doing military duty, and afterwards building this snug nest in New South Wales. There was no need, apparently, to economize now. Beef and mutton were the commonest of things at Daventry Hall. Cream, butter, eggs, honey, pigs, poultry, fish and game were all to be got, to almost any extent, upon the premises. Besides English vegetables, there were pumpkins and sweet potatoes in the kitchen garden. There was a nice vineyard, which Walter mistook at first for a field of currant-bushes; and in the orchard there were raspberries and strawberries and mulberries, pears and pomegranates, figs and plums and loquats, oranges and lemons, peaches, apricots and nectarines, and gigantic rock and water melons. Walter thought of the scanty pennyworths of sour apples that he used to get in Norfolk, and for a week or two devastated the orchard and the vineyard like a ’possum or a flying-fox. As soon as it was known that Mrs. Daventry had arrived, the Captain’s friends and their wives rode over to Daventry Hall, and then there was a round of dinners at the friends’ houses, and then the Captain gave dinners in return, and both Mrs. Daventry and Phœbe were delighted with the gaiety. But when things settled into everyday course, and, as often happened, Captain Daventry was away from home for hours together, they both began to fall back into their old dread of Australia. Mrs. Daventry had been proud at first of having so many servants inside and outside the house, but it was not pleasant to remember that all except Phœbe were convicts. Captain Daventry was a strict, but then not a severe master, and so he got on pretty well with his assigned servants, but in all their faces—except Long Steve’s and his wife’s—there was a shallow, time-serving look, however cringingly civil they might be, that was not assuring.
Walter did not trouble himself about such things. He made friends after a fashion with the men, and rode about with his father to look after the horses, and cattle, and sheep; the maize-paddock and the potato fields; the clearers, the fencers, and the sawyers. His father soon let him go about by himself, and then hewasa proud and happy boy. He could scarcely believe that only a year ago he was stumbling through the irregular and defective verbs in that gloomy old Norfolk school-room. Walter could leap logs now far better than he could conjugateFioorInquamthen. Of course, his father or his mother gave him lessons every now and then, but that was not like regular school, you know. Long Steve had taught him to crack a stock-whip, and Long Steve’s wife had plaited him a cabbage-tree hat (in those days the lagoon was studded with cabbage-tree palms), and Walter used to gallop through the bush like a Wild Huntsman on his own three-parts blood chestnut Dragon-fly. Sometimes he went out on foot with his little gun, and after a bit he managed to shoot wallabies and kangaroo-rats, and quail and snipe, and bronze-wings, and parrots and cockatoos to make pies of. Sometimes, too, he took his gun out with him in the boat, and shot wild duck, and now and then a black swan, on the lagoon. In the lagoon and the little river, moreover, he caught eels and schnappers, and guard-fish, and so-called bream, and mullet and trout, and delicious oysters. The Captain was very proud of the way in which his little boy took to the colony, but Mrs. Daventry was very anxious because he was out so much alone.
One day, when the Captain and Walter rode home, they found Mrs. Daventry and Phœbe almost dead with alarm. A party of blacks had taken possession of the front verandah, on which they were jabbering and gesticulating—rubbing their sides and poking their fingers down their throats. Poor Mrs. Daventry and her servant thought that these were signs that the blacks wanted to eatthem, and therefore were ready to faint from fear. The Captain soon bundled the black fellows off the verandah, but he made it a point of policy to be kind to them, and so he ordered the cook to supply them with tea and damper and mutton chops. They ate and drank until even they could eat and drink no more, and then remarking, with great self-satisfaction, that they had “budgeree big belly,” they drowsily tramped into the bush, and lay down in the sun to sleep off their surfeit.
The black fellows were not grateful to the Captain for his kindness. Unfortunately, they had tasted his potatoes, and thought them so nice that they twice saved him the trouble of digging up his crop, and once even scooped out and baked his seed-potatoes. The Captain did not want to make enemies of the darkies, but he was obliged after that to give up supplying them with chops and damper, except when they had fairly earned them by working for them.
Far worse thieves than the black fellows, however, persistently preyed on Daventry Hall.
All the assigned servants, except Long Steve and his wife, were habitual thieves. They did not get any wages for their work, and so they thought themselves free to help themselves to their master’s property. So many pounds of salt or fresh meat and flour, so much coarse brown sugar and inferior tea, and a little tobacco, were the rations served out to each man every week; but there was good living in the men’s huts for all that. China pigs, ducks, turkeys, &c., mysteriously disappeared. The men made out that they had wandered into the bush, and been devoured by bush beasts and birds, or else starved to death; but if Captain Daventry had gone to the huts a little more frequently, instead of trusting, as he did, to his overseer, the savoury scent that often issued from them would have told him what had become of his poultry, &c. Walter noticed the savoury steam one evening, but the overseer said that he had shot some wild ducks, and given them to the men. The overseer was a convict—a smooth-faced, smooth-tongued rascal. He was trusted to weigh out the rations, and the men used to carry a good deal besides their rations out of the store. The house servants, too, whenever they had a good opportunity, would appropriate unguarded valuables. They had no difficulty in disposing of them, since all the assigned servants, except Long Steve and his wife, were in league with the ticket-of-leave farmers round about. Most of these ticket-of-leavers were a thieving, drunken lot. Some of them would reconvey their Government grants for a keg of rum. As for conveyance of another kind—Pistol’s—they did not rob one another, but gentlemen-settlers they considered fair game. Captain Daventry’s bullocks found their way into the ticket-of-leavers’ beef-casks. They stole his best horses; they clapped their brands on his best colts, fillies, and calves; they pastured their own horses and cattle on his grant; through the villany of his overseer and convict shepherds, they robbed him of his sheep wholesale. They had even the impudence to steal Dragon-fly!
“Why, Daventry,” said one of the Captain’s friends one day, “what made you sell that capital chestnut your little fellow used to ride? He fetched a good price, though, I believe.”
“Ididn’t sell him,” answered the Captain, moodily; “he was stolen. A nice lot of neighbours we’ve got; however, I think I’ve scared ’em for one while.”
When Dragon-fly was first missing, the overseer had comforted Walter by telling him that his horse could only have strayed a little way into the bush, and was sure to turn up soon. Mounted on another nag, Walter rode about for days in search of his favourite, but never saw him more. Walter found out something, however. He was riding home very dispiritedly one evening, when he noticed Black Poley—as one of his father’s shepherds who lived at an out-station was nicknamed, from the resemblance his head bore to a hornless bullock’s—mounting the rise on the right of the gully in which Walter was riding. Walter could not understand what Poley was doing there at that time of night, and having been made suspicious by the loss of his horse, he pressed after Poley as quietly as he could. By the time he topped the ridge it was nearly dark, but he could make out Poley going down the other side of the ridge, and another man coming up to meet him. Walter was a brave little fellow. He tied his horse to a tree, and, slipping down the ridge, got within earshot of the two men, who were sitting, smoking and talking, on a fallen tree-trunk.
“Well, Poley, how many can you let me have this time?”
Poley gave a gruff laugh, and answered with an oath: “—— if I don’t try it on with three score! The cove is so jolly green, it’s my belief he’ll never miss ’em. I began with twos an’ threes, an’ now I have worked it up to a score, and I’ve al’ays got over the cove somehow. What does sich as him know about sheep an’ farmin’? —— if I don’t tryfourscore—good yows, too; so you must stand something handsome.”
“To-morrow morning then, at the old place—Sal’s Pannikin.”
“All right! I’ll work round there about an hour after sunrise.”
Then something was said about the overseer; but what, Walter could not make out. Not waiting to hear any more, he crept back to his horse, mounted, galloped home, and told his father what he had heard. At first the captain was going to consult with the overseer; but one or two little things recently had rather shaken his confidence in the overseer, and so he sent for Long Steve instead. Long Steve knew Sal’s Pannikin well. It was a lonely hollow in an unoccupied part of the bush, and was called Sal’s because on its brink a Mrs. Sarah Mullins had once kept a most disreputable sly drinking-house. Strange goings on had taken place there. At last the landlady had been brutally murdered in her own house, and after that it was allowed to go to ruin, and had the reputation of being haunted.
“What was the other man like, Master Walter?” asked Long Steve.
Walter could only say that he talked very much as if he had a hot potato in his mouth.
“Oh, that’s little Dick Green, at the head of the lagoon,” cried Long Steve, half disappointed at not having found a worthier foeman. “It’s hard, Cap’en, if you an’ me can’t nab little Dick Green an’ the Poley.”
“Would you like to go, Walter?” said the Captain. “I think it’s only fair that you should see the fun.”
Of course Walter wanted to go. So it was arranged that Steve should have tea and chops ready, and three horses saddled, at his hut (which stood apart from the other men’s), and call his master and Walter at half-past two next morning. The Captain thought it advisable to start thus early, in case the sheep-stealers should have changed their minds after Walter left them, and agreed to meet at an earlier hour for safety’s sake.
Walter greatly enjoyed his early breakfast by the wood fire in Long Steve’s hut, and the silent ride through the bush—all three armed. But when they had put up their horses in Sal’s ruined stables, and were crouching in Sal’s roofless parlour, on the cracked hearthstone of which a frog was croaking dolefully, the adventure did not seem quite so jolly to Walter.
But presently, while it was still quite dark, a light came dancing down the other side of the hollow. Long Steve sallied out to reconnoitre. When he came back he said,
“Yes, it’s little Dick, sure enough, busy finishing off his brush-hurdles. He’ll soon ha’ done, and then you and me, Cap’en, had better creep down to the fold whilst it’s yet dark. Master Walter can stay here with the horses, and bring ’em down when wecooey. Oh, yes, Cap’en, he’ll be safe enough. Neither Dick nor the Poley would set a foot in here if you’d give them a thousand pounds.”
In spite of this assurance, Walter wearied of his lonely vigil.
At length the eastern sky brightened, the laughing-jackasses hooted out their hideously hilarious morning chorus, and the sun came up, bronzing the scrub and the tree-tops. Walter could see Dick quite plainly now. He was lying on the ground smoking his pipe. Then came another weary watch, but at last up started little Dick and went to meet Black Poley, who was coming down to the Pannikin with the stolen sheep. They were all driven into the fold, and the two thieves were quietly talking together, when, as it seemed to Walter, from beneath their very feet the Captain and Long Steve jumped up like Jacks-in-the-box. The Captain felled Black Poley as if he had been indeed a bullock. Long Steve laid little Dick on his back as if he had been a child of four years old. By the time Walter had obeyed the cooey and galloped down with the horses, both thieves had their arms strongly bound behind them with green hide. With strips of the same they were fastened to the Captain’s and Long Steve’s stirrups, and then driving the ewes before them, the three thief-takers set out for home. As Long Steve had expected, they found the rest of the flock on the other side of the ridge that sloped down into Sal’s Pannikin.
The overseer turned as white as a sheet when his master rode up to Daventry Hall with his sheep and his prisoners, but neither Dick nor the Poley peached.
Black Poley was sentenced to an awful flogging before he was sent back to Sydney, and little Dick got ten years in a chain-gang. The Captain thought now that his property would be safe for a while, but he was utterly mistaken. He had only weeded out two scoundrels, whose places were almost instantly supplied by two at least as bad; he had managed to focus the hatred of the district on himself, and, moreover, just then Hook-handed Bill and his gang came on circuit, so to speak, to the country round the lagoon. They had made their lasthabitatrather too hot to hold them, and with secure hiding-places in the range of shore-hills, they promised themselves some rich raids on the gentlemen-settlers who were dotted here and there around the lagoon.
Hook-handed Bill was a bushranger, without any of the redeeming qualities which a certain set of story-tellers are so fond of giving to robbers. He was a greedy, savage brute. Physically he was a left handed-giant, who owed hissobriquetto the fact that he had lost his right hand, and supplied its place with a sharp hook. Horrid tales were told of what that hook had done; “ripping up” was Hook-handed Bill’s favourite mode of murder. Burning alive in a bullock’s hide stood next in his estimation. It was said, too, that he was in the habit of waylaying bullock-drivers on their way down to Sydney with their masters’ wool, of shamming to be on the best of terms with them, and then murdering them wholesale in their sleep, afterwards disposing of the wool through the agency of some of his ticket-of-leave friends.
Such a villain, with half a dozen followers only not quite so bad as himself, was no pleasant bush neighbour. Some of the gentlemen-settlers sent their wives and children into Sydney. All rode about armed by day, and at night had their most valuable cattle driven into the stockyards, and their favourite horses into the stables, whilst their houses were turned into little forts. In spite of all precautions, the bushrangers committed the most impudent robberies, and though some of the gentlemen-settlers assisted the policemen in hunting the robbers, no capture was made.
One afternoon, when Walter was in a lonely part of his father’s grant, a huge, shaggy-bearded, roughly-clad fellow sprang from behind a clump of trees, and seized him by the collar. The stranger’s right arm had no hand, but brandished a sharp hook, and Walter thought that his last hour was come. He was awfully frightened, but he tried not to seem so.
“Let me say my prayers first,” said Walter.
Hook-handed Bill gave a grin which was even more hideous than his habitual frown, as he answered,
“Time enough, youngster. I ain’t a-goin’ to kill you afore night. I want you to take a message to your —— father. He’s a deal too cocky for my taste, is the Captain, flogging his men, and lagging his neighbours, and now he’s been boasting that he’ll take me dead or alive. Will he? We’ll soon see who’s master. I’ll show him how much I care for his blowing. You take him Hook-handed Bill’s compliments, and tell him that I give him fair warning that I mean to pay him a visit to-night, and to half-flog the life out of him and his sneak of a bullock-driver, and then to string ’em both up—an’ you, too, you —— young spy!—an’ to carry off the womenfolk he’s brought from —— Old England to look down on their betters. There! you be off, youngster!”
At first the Captain was inclined to treat the bushranger’s threat as mere bravado.
“However,” he added, “if the rascal does choose to come, he could not have consulted my convenience better. The police are coming over to-night, Walter, my boy. We meant to have given the bushrangers a hunt to-morrow morning, but if they like to save us the trouble, so much the better. Don’t say anything to your mamma, but go and call Long Steve.”
The bullock-driver was firmly convinced that Hook-handed Bill would keep his word, and advised his master to begin his preparations at once, in case the bushrangers should hear from some of their scouts of the intended police visit, and resolve to rush the house before the arrival of the constables. Accordingly guns, pistols, ammunition, a sword, a cutlass, and a bayonet were got in readiness by the Captain—not that he really believed that there would be any use for them that night. The kitchen clock struck seven—eight—nine, and still the constables did not come. A little after nine the convict house-servants went away to their huts, and Long Steve carefully bolted the doors after them. Mrs. Daventry and Phœbe were persuaded to go to bed. The garrison of three sat in silence—the Captain expecting every moment to hear the police ride up; Long Steve and Walter, on the other hand, dreading the arrival of the bushrangers. About ten a party of menwereheard galloping up.
“There they are!” cried the Captain, and before Long Steve could stop him, he had opened the front door and run down to the garden-gate. “Why, what a time you’ve been, Saunders,” the Captain shouted to the supposed police-sergeant.
“Have we?” growled back a gruff voice. “Well, we’ll try to make up for lost time, you ——!”
Discovering his mistake, the captain fired his pistol at the speaker, and rushed back to the house. A hailstorm of lead soon rattled on the weatherboards, and Mrs. Daventry and Phœbe got up and rushed about like maniacs. The women’s screams were not calculated to improve the Captain and Long Steve’s aim, and though they had the advantage of cover, and Walter to load for them, and of the moon which came up presently, seven to two are heavy odds. (The overseer and assigned servants said next morning that they had been sound asleep—one, indeed, had heard a little firing, but thought that it was the Captain out duck-shooting!) I am afraid that the besiegers would have been the victors, had not a party of the Captain’s friends suddenly made their appearance. They had been dining together about ten miles off, and a drunken convict had let out in their hearing the intended attack on Daventry Hall. They had instantly rushed to horse, and galloped the ten miles at racing speed. The bushrangers turned tail when the new-comers poured a volley into them. Five of the scoundrels, altogether, had been hit, but only one was taken. When the prisoner was escorted to the nearest police-barracks next day, the reason of the constables’ non-appearance at Daventry Hall the night before was discovered.
The escort were very much astonished to find no one at the barrack gates, or in the barrack-yard. They were still more astonished to find the sergeant and his men lashed down on the mess-room floor—all gagged, pinioned, and fettered.
Hook-handed Bill had been fully aware of the Captain’s arrangements with the police, and had taken them by surprise in their lonely barracks before he dispatched his insolent message by Walter.
Although the bushranger had been beaten off, he and his ticket-of-leave allies continued to harass Captain Daventry. They did it to such an extent—cruelly hamstringing and mutilating cattle and horses when they did not choose to take the trouble to steal them—that Captain Daventry soon found that he was losing money fast. Being a soldier, however, he thought it would be disgraceful to give in to such “a lot of vermin,” but Mrs. Daventry declared that she could not live any longer in constant fear of her own life and her husband’s. The Captain could face bushrangers, but he could not stand hysterics. The Kakadua was then “outside”—as the colonists used to call unsettled districts—but Mrs. Daventry was willing to go thither when she found that bushrangers did not think it worth their while to visit the district. The Captain took up some good land on both banks of the river, and there—soured by his experiences—he became the Tartar his son owned that he had been.
When Sydney Lawson left home to take up new country for himself, there happened to be no tutor at Wonga-Wonga, and so Harry and Donald were allowed to go with the young squatter, both to keep them out of mischief and to enlarge their “colonial experience.” Besides, they would be of as much use as, at least, a man and a half. The boys were away for months, but they never grew tired of their long holiday, although they often had to work hard enough in it. It was the thought that they were doing real man’s work, and yet holiday-making at the same time, that made the holiday so jolly.
Just after sunrise one calm bright morning, the little expedition started—Sydney, Harry, Donald, and King Dick-a-Dick’s heir-apparent, “Prince Chummy,” on horseback, and in charge of a small mob of horses and another of cattle, and two old hands in charge of the bullock-dray that carried the baggage, stores, tools, nails, horseshoes, arms, ammunition, &c. “Jawing Jim” and “Handsome Bob” were thesobriquetsby which these two old hands were known—both given on thelucus a non lucendoprinciple, since Jim scarcely ever opened his mouth, and Bob was nearly as black, and not nearly so good-looking, as Prince Chummy. Jim was a Staffordshire man, and Bob was a Cockney. They were both good bushmen, but they had both been sent out for burglary, and therefore they may seem to have been strange guards for the commissariat-waggon, though the spirit-caskhadanother cask outside it as a precaution against furtive tapping. But for one thing, they were pretty well under the eye of the rest of the party; and for another, each watched the other like duplicated Japanese officials. There was a long-standing rivalry between them. Each sneered at the other’s home exploits. When Jem did open his lips to any one except his bullocks, it was generally to launch some sarcasm at Bob, but in a tongue-fight he was rarely a match for the ugly Londoner, whose lonely bush life had not cured him of his Cockney glibness.
All the Wonga-Wonga-ites mustered to see the little party off—Mr. Lawson riding with it for a mile or two. There was a little confusion at starting. A young imported bull strolled up, angrily snuffing and pawing, as if jealous of the superior size of the bullocks; and just as they had begun to obey Jim’s very strong language and oft-cracked long whip, the little bull took a mean advantage, made a mad flank charge on the middle yoke, and threw the whole line into disorder. Thereupon Bob, who had made himself comfortable on the flour-sacks in the dray, began to chaff his comrade, in his own elegant style, on his clumsiness.
“Callyourself a bullock-driver?” Bob was saying, when an old shoe that Mrs. Jones had thrown after Harry hit Bob in the face.
He was going to abuse Mrs. Jones then, but Jim growled out,
“Doan’t get inta a scoat, lahd! It hit thee wheer tha ken’t be hoort,” and Handsome Bob had to subside into his flour-sack couch again, silenced for once.
With much cracking of whips, trampling of hoofs, clanking of chains, jingling of tin pots, grinding of wheels, and creaking of pole and yokes, the expedition at last fairly got under way. We watched it go down the rise, across the flat, and through the slip-panels that led into the bush beyond; and then, when we could see nothing but the dust above the tree-tops, Mrs. Lawson and Mrs. M‘Intyre, who was visiting at Wonga-Wonga, went into their bed-rooms—perhaps to pray for their boys’ safety.
I saw them start, but can only relate their adventures from what I heard of them when the boys came back.
The settled country through which they passed would have seemed wild enough to most English people, accustomed to hedged-in little fields, fitting like patches in a patchwork quilt, with roads and lanes curving between them, and railways running over them in the most rural places. In this “settled country” there were miles without a fence, and our pioneers generally camped out at night; although, when they came to a public, or an “accommodation-house,” with a paddock, about sundown, they would have a night between sheets for a change, and when they chanced to halt near a head-station at nightfall, they could make sure of hearty hospitality, although not always of a bed. As they went on, the country seemed wilder and wilder to their eyes, although perhaps we should not have seen much difference.
When I went out to New South Wales, I expected, from what I had read in guide-books, to see capital convict-made roads running through the colony everywhere. What I found was a tolerable bit of road reaching as far as Parramatta (not twenty miles from Sydney), but beyond that there was nothing that we should call a road in England. Deep ruts running right across the road; grey logs that the mail-cart used to bump over, and black jagged tree-stumps that it used to graze against; the smoothest bits of road like a ploughed field; unbridged creeks; “corduroy” causeways of tree-trunks across swampy places;—that is what I remember of Australian up-country roads in dry weather; and in wet weather they were chains of ponds, with marsh that swallowed you to the ankle, and bog that gobbled you above the knee, intervening; and bogged blue-bloused dray-drivers sitting here and there on the tops of their loads of wool-bales, smoking in sullen resignation, like mariners in the tops of gradually-sinking wrecks.
At last, however, our pioneers came to the end of even such roads as these, and had to trust to rare cattle-paths, the sun, the compass, and “gumption” for guidance. They had reached the march-land on which the white man, who has grown nearly as wild, meets the black man who has not been tamed, and shoots him or poisons him with strychnine-damper for spearing his flocks and herds, and sometimes gets speared by him in return. On the last run our pioneers crossed they met a stockman who was herding cattle with pistols in his holsters and a carbine in his hand. A strange wild-looking fellow was this stockman. He wore a rain-blackened, sun-bronzed, cabbage-tree hat, with a jetty, greasy cutty pipe stuck into the discoloured band; a faded, stained, white-seamed red shirt, buckled round him with a chapped brown belt; and tattered moleskin trousers falling in vandyked fringes over rusty gaping boots. One of his stirrup-leathers was made of knotted green hide. His face was just the colour of his hat—the little of it that could be seen peeping through a foot or two of coarse black hair like a guardsman’s bearskin. He had lived so long by himself that, when he first began to talk to the new-comers, he stammered like a bashful girl. He soon recovered his tongue, however, and the first thing he asked for was tobacco. They were smoking tea on that station, owing to the long time the drays that were bringing them fresh stores had been delayed upon the road. When Sydney gave the man a fig or two of colonial tobacco, and another of glossy Barrett’s twist, he pounced upon them as if he could scarcely believe his eyes. The American negrohead he put away jealously in his trousers-pocket for special occasions, and then began to slice and rub up the dull-green saltpetery colonial tobacco, as if he was famishing for want of a “proper smoke.” As it spluttered in his pipe he told the strangers some strange tales about the blacks. They had sighted them several times before this; but, as the blacks had always bounded off like so many kangaroos as soon as they were sighted, our pioneers had begun to think that they would not have much to fear from them.
“Don’t you believe it,” said the stockman. “They’ll be on ye when you’re least lookin’ for ’em, the sneaking divils!”
This is one of the stories he told about the blacks, and from it you will see that white men can be quite as bloodthirsty in those wild parts:
“When we come up here, two er the chaps that the cove hired was brothers. I niver seen brothers so fond er each other as them two young fellers was. Strappin’ young fellers, though they was new to this kind er work. They’d been knockin’ about, an’ was glad to git anythin’ to do, I guess. Wal, one day Tom—that was the youngest—was down by the creek yonder, lookin’ arter a duck, or summat er that. Me an’ Fred—that was the eldest—was up on the rise beyont, lookin’ arter the bullocks. All of a suddent we heerd acooey.
“‘That’s Tom,’ says Fred. I didn’t want him to tell me. It worn’t a bit like a black feller’s.
“‘He’s come to grief,’ says I, for it sounded like that, an’ down we galloped to the creek full pelt. Jist as we got into the scrub we heard anothercooey, an’ presently another, fainter an’ fainter like. Wal, we hunted about, an’ onder a grass tree we found poor Tom with a spear stickin’ into him.
“‘Mother—poor old gal!’ he says, when we come up to him, an’ Fred was kneelin’ by his side. I guess he was the old gal’s pet, and Fred had promised to look arter him when they come out, or summut er that. Anyhow Fred looked like a very divil.
“‘Which way?’ says he, lookin’ about an’ cockin’ his gun. ‘Who was it, Tom?’ says he, with his face as white as ashes.
“Poor Tom had jist breath enough left to say ‘Black Swan,’ an’ then the blood bubbled out er his mouth, an’ he was dead, an’ his brother a-blubberin’ over him like a gal over her sweetheart. I let him blubber for a bit to ease hisself, but he was ser long about it that I gives him a nudge with my foot. ‘Come,’ says I, ‘Fred, git up—that ain’t no good,’ says I.
“‘No,’ says he, jumpin’ up, ‘thatain’tno good—but you hear me, Tom!’ An’ then he clinched his fist like the playactors, an’ swore that, if he iver cotched Black Swan, he’d cut him in two with a cross-cut saw.
“‘Sarve him right,’ says I, ‘but there ain’t much chance er that.’