We had had bush-fires in our neighbourhood for some time, but that night the bush seemed to be alight for miles all round Jerry’s Town; and next day, although the flames were not so plain (until the sun had gone down again), grey and black smoke dimmed even the blazing sun, and rolled in stifling clouds into the little town. When everything is dried up as things get dried up in an Australian drought, a lucifer match, or the ashes of a pipe, carelessly thrown down, may set square miles of forest on fire; an old pannikin or an empty bottle may act as a burning-glass, and do the same; and sometimes, for the sake of the luxuriant young grass that will spring up where old withered grass has been burnt, when the rains come, settlers selfishly set fire to it, if the wind is not blowing towards their homesteads, reckless of the loss of life and property they may cause—it is impossible to say how far beyond. That night and day (as I guessed at the time, and as I learnt afterwards) were a dreadful night and day for my Wonga-Wonga friends. Mr. Lawson, and Sydney, and the tutor, and the boys, and a good many of the men too, sat up all night. The women and girls went to bed, but they couldn’t go to sleep, the air was so stiflingly close and smoky, and it was so startling when they looked out of their bed-room windows to see the flames leaping redder and redder out of the brooding and rolling smoke-clouds. The moon was up, but her light—made bloody by the lurid atmosphere through which it seemed to have toforceits way—only gave a still more uncanny look to the landscape.
Poor Miss Smith was half wild with fear, and Mrs. Lawson and her girls, although they did not show their fear so much, were really more frightened at heart, perhaps, because they understood better what their fate would be if from one quarter or another a roaring bush-fire rushed down right upon them. Not much breakfast was eaten at Wonga-Wonga next morning: haggard, pale faces looked anxiously across the table at one another.
Thicker and thicker the smoke rolled in; the heat every moment grew hotter. The head-station sheep were still in their hurdles, gasping for breath. What was the good of sending them out into the burning bush, even if the shepherds would have gone with them? The men stood about watching the fires, and wondering what was to become of them. They would have made a rush for Jerry’s Town, and Mr. Lawson would have sent all his womenfolk thither too, but the bush was on fire between the station and the township. Harry and Donald, of course, were scared like other people, but—boys are such queer little animals—in the midst of their fright they could not help feeling pleased that they would have no school that day, and so they half enjoyed the general consternation.
The hot wind was blowing directly from the north, driving the roaring, crackling flames and the suffocating smoke before it. If it had kept in that quarter, the house, and huts, and outbuildings at Wonga-Wonga would have been in great danger, since the broad road of destruction which the fierce fire was eating through the bush would have passed within a furlong or two of the house, and that and its belongings might easily have been gobbled up with a side-lick or two of the bush-fire’s forked tongues. But when the wind veered about half a point towards the northwest, the Wonga-Wonga people thought it was all up with them. The rushing fire was now steering straight at them like an inevitable express train. The blinding, throat-tickling, lung-clogging smoke-clouds rolled in denser and denser. In spite of the sunlight, the grey clouds spat out pink, and russet, and golden flame plainer and plainer. Flocks of wild cockatoos flew wildly screaming overhead, making the already scared tame cockatoo grovel like a reptile as they flew by. Singed kangaroos and wallabies bounded over the garden fence. Dingoes, looking more cowardly than ever, but cowed into tameness, put their tails between their legs and slunk into the barn. Snakes wriggled along half roasted. Mobs of horses and cattle went by like a whirlwind and an earthquake in a mad stampede. Poor stupid sheep, their small brains quite addled by terror, ran hither and thither purposelessly, stood stock-still to let the flames catch them, or plunged right into the flames. It was an awful time; but so long as the merest chance of life remains, it is the best policy, and our duty to Him who gave us our lives, to do our best to save them, if they can be saved without disgrace.
“THE RUSHING FIRE WAS NOW STEERING STRAIGHT AT THEM.”
“THE RUSHING FIRE WAS NOW STEERING STRAIGHT AT THEM.”
Mr. Lawson and Sydney spirited up the men, most of whom were “astonied” like the sheep. They thought that a doom was coming down on them which it was hopeless to fight against, and so were inclined to hang down their arms helplessly. To the astonishment of all, John Jones—the “sheep,” as his fellows were fond of calling him—behaved more pluckily than any of the other men. Besides his own life, he had his wife’s and his children’s to battle for; he was conscientiously devoted to his master’s interests; and moreover, he seemed pleased at getting a chance of proving that, though he couldn’t sit a buck-jumper, he could play the man better than those who jeered at his clumsy, timid horsemanship, when he and they had to confront a common peril on equal terms.
On roared and rushed the fire. Where there was scrub the earth seemed to be belching smoke. In the bush the giant boles of the gum trees stood up, grimly showing through their winding-sheets of smoke, and holding flags of flame in their gaunt arms. If any water had been left in the creek, the inhabitants of Wonga-Wonga would have plunged into it, even if they had run the risk of drowning in it. But there was not enough water left in the creek to wet the sole of the foot. On and on, with a roar and a crackle like that of huge crunched bones, as the trees toppled over into the under-smoke, came the fire from the north-west; and in the opposite direction, and on both sides, the bush was also on fire.
Mrs. Laws on gathered her girls, and Miss Smith, and Mrs. Jones andherlittle ones, and the other woman servant, about her in the keeping-room, and there, in a voice clear, though it trembled, she prayed, in the midst of a chorus of wails and sobs, for resignation, and preparation for the apparently certain fate, and yet for help to her husband and her boys and the men, who had mustered to give the inhabitants of Wonga-Wonga their last chance. In the line of the on-rushing fire there was a dried-up maize-paddock, which, if it once fairly caught, would bring the fire right down upon the station buildings. If that could be kept unburnt, the fire might just possibly pass them by.
Harry and Donald, I heard afterwards from Mr. Lawson, were just as brave as Sydney (and that was a good deal for Mr. Lawson to say, since he was very proud of Sydney) in this “beating-out” business. Fence-rails had hardly been torn down for weapons to fight against the fire, before the sapless crop caught. Men and boys (Mr. Lawson, Sydney, Harry, Donald, the tutor, and John Jones, in the van) rushed at the flames, mowing right and left, and striking down, like Highlanders with their broadswords. Donald had Highland blood in him, and wielded his timber claymore so courageously, and yet so coolly, that those who saw him felt half inclined to cheer him, in the very face of the quickly crackling flames that were changing, as if by magic, the withered maize into red ashes. Harry was as courageous as Donald, but he was not as cool. He would have been smothered in the smoke into which he had heedlessly plunged, if Sydney had not dashed in to bring him out. Tall men as well as Harry were struck down by the heat of the fire and the heat of the sun combined. John Jones got a sunstroke that knocked him down as a butcher knocks down an ox. The horsebreaker took hold of poor John’s head, and the tutor took hold of poor John’s legs, and between them they dragged him off the blazing heap of maize-stalks on which he had fallen face downwards. Mr. Lawson, who had a great respect for honest John, rushed up then, and stopped beating-out for a minute or two, to carry him as far as possible out of harm’s way—if any place at such a time could be called out of harm’s way. Then Mr. Lawson rushed back again, slashing away and giving the “seventh cut” with his wooden broadsword, as if he wanted to make up for lost time, and after him, up to the thickest of the fire, dashed Sydney, and Donald, and Harry, still giddy from the smoke he had swallowed.
The men, too, fought the flames with almost desperate daring, but, in spite of what any one could do, they gained on the paddock. More than half of it had been consumed when the wind slanted to the N.E. farther and more suddenly than it had veered to the N.W. The fire went by the head-station buildings, gobbling up an outlying hut or two, and many a rod of fencing; but the house and most of the huts, the barn, store, wool-shed, &c., were only blistered.
Mr. Lawson, nevertheless, was a good deal poorer at night than he had been when the morning dawned through the ominous banks and wreaths of smoke; but when he gathered all his people together in the evening to return thanks to the good God for their great deliverance, he felt happier, perhaps, than he had ever felt before in his life. The house verandah was the place of common worship. The air was still stiflingly close, and poor little “salamander” Harry fainted as he leaned his scorched face against one of the half-charred verandah-posts. Sydney carried him to bed, and heroic Harry had to submit to the indignity—fortunately without being conscious of it—of being “tucked in” and kissed, not only by “dear mamma and the girls”—theirs he would have considered, perhaps, rather over-fussy, but still legitimate attentions—but also by Miss Smith and Mrs. Jones.
A few days after the great bush-fire I told you about in my last chapter, Harry and Donald came to spend a week or two with a friend of Mr. Lawson’s who lived just outside Jerry’s Town. The hut that was used for school-room at Wonga-Wonga had come to grief in the fire, not a bit of it being left standing, except the blackened brick chimney. The tutor was laid up, owing to his unwonted exertions at the fire, and it was thought that a little change would do the boys no harm. Accordingly, their saddle-bags were bulged out with changes of raiment (“creases” are not thought so much of in the Bush as they would be by Belgravian swells), and Harry and Donald cantered into Jerry’s Town on Cornstalk and Flora M‘Ivor.
The first week they were in the township the weather was as hot as ever. Although the doors and windows were all wide open, we gasped for breath at church; and though the clergyman’s surplice looked cool, his face was so red that you could not help fancying that he wanted to pray and preach in unbuttoned shirt-sleeves. If he had been obliged to wear a thick black gown, I think he would have been suffocated. But when the boys’ second Sunday in Jerry’s Town came, a good bit of Jerry’s Town was under water, Jerry’s Flats were an inland sea, and some of the worshippers who had hung up their horses on the churchyard rails the Sunday before had had to take refuge in the township with scarcely a shirt or a gown that they could call their own.
On the Wednesday night after that first Sunday we had gone to bed as late as we could in Jerry’s Town, outside the bed-clothes, and with as little covering of any kind as was practicable. After tossing and tumbling about, and getting up every now and then to light pipes to “cool ourselves,” and drive away the humming, bloodthirsty mosquitoes, we had at last fallen asleep at the fag end of the “small hours” of Thursday morning. When we awoke, with a chill on, the rain was coming down as if it did not like its own business, but wanted to get it over, and let sunlight reign and roast once more. It had knocked off shingles, and was pouring into rooms in gallons. Imagine a shower-bath without a perforated bottom—the whole of the mysteriously upheld water coming down bodily the instant the string is touched—and then, if you imagine also that the shower-bath is constantly refilled for a week or so, and that you are obliged to stand under it all the time, you will get some faint notion of the suddenness and force of Australian rain. More “annual inches” of rain, I have read, fall in sunny Australia than in soppy Ireland, and therefore, when the Australians have learnt—perhaps from the Chinamen, whom they tried hard to keep out of their country, but to whom they are grudgingly grateful now for “summer cabbage,” &c., that they could not get from any British-blooded market-gardener—when they have learnt, I say, to wisely manage and husband their bountiful water supply, by damming rivers, and draining what would otherwise be flooded country into reservoirs, Australia will become, in many a part where it is now barren, one of the most fertile lands that the sun shines on. With such a reserve fund of water to use up, the hot Australian sunbeams will be a boon instead of a bane. In my time, however (and, according to theSydney Morning Heraldand theMelbourne Argus, things are not very different now), up-country Australia periodically suffered from a fast from water or a feast of it—the feast, in some respects, being even worse than the fast.
We were glad at first to hear, and see, and smell, and feel the rain, but when it steadily poured on we began to feel alarmed. Part of Jerry’s Town stood on a little rise, but more than half of it was nearly on a level with Jerry’s Flats; and those, according to black fellows’ tradition, had once been the bottom of a lake. There was good reason, therefore, to feel anxious when the rain kept coming down in an almost unbroken mass, and we could tell, from the rapid way in which the Kakadua and the creek rose, that up the country, too, the rain was falling in the same wholesale fashion. The people who lived in the huts on the Flats, and who had pitched their farmhouses along the river-banks for the sake of the rich alluvial soil, had still more reason to be anxious. By Thursday night there were great sheets of water, constantly getting closer to one another, out upon the Flats; the ferry-punt at the mouth of the creek had been swept away; and the muddy flood was washing up into the town. Mark Tapley would have found it hard work to be jolly on that Thursday night, if he had been in Jerry’s Town. The flooded-out people from the lower part of the township and the outlying huts came crowding up, like half-drowned rats, to shelter in the church or the Court House, the police-barracks or the inns, or wherever else they could find refuge; and the waters came after them at a rate that made it doubtful whether they had not merely postponed their doom. Dim lights twinkling far off over the waste of dimly-seen waters were only comforting for a minute. How long—you thought the next minute—will they be able to go on burning? In spite of the rush of the down-pouring rain, the wail of the wind, and the roar of the ever-rising flood, we heard every now and then the crack of an alarm gun, and fancied at any rate that we heard a wild “cooey” for help or a wilder woman’s scream.
Just as dawn broke on Friday the new bridge across the Kakadua went with a crash. (The flood had risen as high as the flooring, and eddied across it, the night before.) The swollen river dashed the big trees it had pulled up like radishes against the bridge like battering-rams. The middle of the roadway caved in; down dropped the arches above the roadway, taking suicidal “headers;” on rushed the heavily-laden river; and in a few minutes a momentary glimpse of a truncated bankside pile was all that was to be seen of the fine bridge which “the hon. member for the Kakadua” had made the Colonial Treasurer pay for in his “Budget.” The remembrance that they had not paid for it themselves comforted the Jerry’s Towners a little when the bridge was whirled away, but it had scarcely ceased to be visible before they began to denounce the Government for squandering the “people’s money” on scamped work like that, and the hon. member for Kakadua sank as rapidly in the opinion of his Jerry’s Town constituents as the Kakadua rose before their eyes. He was a “duffer,” after all, they said, and only shammed to look after the “estimates.”
But that was no time to go into politics. More than half of Jerry’s Town was under water; and Jerry’s Flats were a huge lake, with here and there a clump of trees, or a single tree-top, a chimney, a roof, a yard or two of fencing, or a tiny island of higher ground, showing above the troubled water. Dead horses, bullocks, sheep, pigs, poultry, and bush beasts and birds, little trees, big trees, rafts of branches and brushwood, great mats of withered grass and weeds, rushes and reeds, large clods of red earth, harness, furniture, bark roofs, slab and weather-board sides and fronts of huts and houses, verandah-posts, stray stacks, and wrecks of all kind, were everywhere tossing and jostling; but in the current of the river they were hurried on in such a grinding bumping mass that, even if the water had not run so rapidly, it would have been a most perilous task to pull a boat across the stream. A boat or two did manage to cross it, however, thanks to bold clever steering, although they were whisked along like chips for a mile or so before they could get out of the current. Every boat left unswamped in Jerry’s Town was out soon after daybreak on that Friday morning. The police-boat got away first, and it was queer to see it steering between the roofs that alone marked out the lower end of George Street, pulling right over the pound at the bottom of Pitt Street, and then giving a spurt into the open water across the drowned butcher’s paddock. All the boats had adventures that, I think, would interest you but, of course, you guess that Harry and Donald formed part of a rescue party, and therefore I will tell you their adventures, as I heard them, partly from the boys, and partly from the men they went with.
Harry and Donald had begun to despair of getting afloat, because, of course, when crews were made up, stronger arms than boys’ were picked, and the boats had no room for outward-bound passengers, every inch of room being needed for the poor people they were going to rescue. But the Doctor had a ramshackle old four-oared tub, in which he sometimes pottered about in the creek by himself. It was rowing under difficulties, for the Doctor found it hard work to lug the heavy old literal “torpid” along, and every now and then he had to stop pulling, and set to work at baling. For some reason, however, the Doctor was very proud of his tub; and, the instant the creek began to rise, he had her hauled up his garden, which sloped down to the creek, and laid up in ordinary in his verandah.
There she was lying when the boys came upon two men, who were looking at her somewhat disconsolately. One was the landlord of the “General Bourke,” and the other was the Jerry’s Town shoemaker.
“I doubt if she’d float, Tommy,” said the landlord; “and besides, she hain’t got ne’er a rudder.”
“Oh, we could stuff summat in here and there,” answered the shoemaker, “an’ we could steer her better with a oar, an’ some little cove will be game to bale.”
Harry and Donald at once offered their services, but just then the Doctor came out.
“I’m willing to risk the boat,” he said, “but I must pull stroke.”
“No, Doctor, you must stay ashore,” replied the landlord with a grin. “There’s plenty as can pull a oar your fashion, but you’re the only one than can do doctor’s work. An’ it ain’t so much about risking the boat, as risking the lives of them as goes in her. Hows’ever, one o’ these young coves from Wonga-Wonga will do to bale, an’ then we only want two to pull and another to steer—that’s three; an’ surely there must be three men besides yourself, Doctor, in Jerry’s Town game enough to jine us, though itain’tmuch better than a sieve.”
But such was the reputation of the Doctor’s tub that the three were not forthcoming. Harry and Donald, however, were more eager than ever to embark.
“Do you know anything about a boat, boys?” asked Boniface solemnly, as if he was putting a question out of the Catechism.
“I should think we did,” answered Harry, “a precious sight more than a good many of your Jerry’s Town loafers; we’ve got a boat of our own at Wonga-Wonga.”
“Ay, but can you do anything in her?”
“We can pull her, and steer her, and sail her,” answered Harry, proudly; “I’m not bad in a boat, and Donald is better.”
Boniface scratched his head for a minute in perplexity, and then said,
“Tommy and me will risk it, Doctor. We’ll cobble her up a bit, an’ one on ’em can bale, an’ t’other try his hand at steerin’, an’ p’r’aps, at a pinch, both on ’em can pull a bit. Lawson ain’t a bad sort. He won’t mind us takin’ his boys, will he, Tommy? Anyhow, I don’t like to see anything that calls itself a boat a-doin’ nothing, an’ them poor critturs squealin’ out yonder—good customers o’ mine some on ’em is, ain’t they, Tommy? So you come along, young gentlemen, if you’re willin’, an’ we’ll bring you back as sound as a roach, if you’ll be sure to mind what I tell ye.”
The boys were sharp enough to see that “Dutch courage” had something to do with the landlord’s heroism, and with Tommy’s too; but they could see also that the men could tell well enough what they were about; so, as soon as the boat had been hastily caulked with an old hat or two, and dragged and pushed down the few yards that then separated her from the water, off the four started. In spite of all they could do, however, their craft floundered about in a very tublike fashion, and was nearly wrecked at starting against a hut flooded up to the bark eaves. The water eddied round this hut, and banged the boat up against it, and then, as soon as she was got off again, she ran foul of a floating Chinese hog, so swollen that it looked like a little hippopotamus; and next she was caught in a float of driftwood, and she had to run the gauntlet between all kinds of snags and sawyers. But at last she got away into more open water, and all four pulled with a will over the muddy, scummy waves towards a roof on which they fancied they could see some people clustered. It was the roof of a little farmhouse, and when the boat’s crew reached it, they found the farmer clinging to the chimney, and waving his shirt as a signal of distress (he hadcooeyed!until he had cracked his voice and was almost black in the face). His wife was crouching at his feet, doing her best to shelter her youngest girl against the still heavy rain, and the other poor little children were huddled on the roof-ridge, like a row of draggle-tailed roosting fowls. It was hard work to get the boat alongside without staving her in, and still harder to get all the family on board without capsizing her; but all at length were safely embarked, and then the farmer said:
“THEY FOUND THE FARMER CLINGING TO THE CHIMNEY.”
“THEY FOUND THE FARMER CLINGING TO THE CHIMNEY.”
“There’s a poor thing out yonder with a kid—can’t we take her?” He pointed to a woman in her night-dress, up to her shoulders in water, on the top of an old honeysuckle, and holding her baby above the flood in her poor aching arms. But there was no room in the boat.
“We must come for her next trip,” said Boniface.
“The tree will be gone before then,” cried Donald; “we’ll stay on the roof here—won’t we, Harry?—and then you can come back for us when you’ve got the rest ashore.”
“No, that won’t do, will it, Tommy?” said the landlord; but the boys were quite positive, and said it was a currish thing to leave the woman there, and that they would make a fuss about it, if the boat didn’t go for her. Then the farmer said that, if anybody ought to stay, he supposed he ought to; but he didn’t seem very willing to stay, and his wife cried, and said that he ought to think of his children, if he didn’t care for her; and the boys settled matters by scrambling on to the roof.
“It warn’t my doin’s, mind,” growled Boniface, as the boat pulled off for the honeysuckle. The poor woman and her baby were saved, and only just in time. A few minutes after they were taken off, the tree flung up its roots as a diving duck flings up its feet. It was weary, dreary work for the boys to cling to the chimney, watching the boat pulling for the town, and waiting for it to come back for them. After all, it was not the landlord and the shoemaker who rescued them. Boniface and Tommy had worked off their “Dutch courage” in the first trip, and, besides, the Doctor’s tub would certainly have foundered if she had tried to make another. But the police-sergeant had heard the story, and he had helped to capture Warrigal in his private-trooper days, and had a great respect for Harry.
“We’ll go first for that game young Trojan,” he said to his men; and the farmer volunteered to take one policeman’s place in the boat, that there might be no mistake about the house. Harry’s heart, and Donald’s too, gave a great leap of joy when they saw the police-boat steering as straight as it could for them, over the brown waters, through the grey rain. But, pleased as they were at getting on board the boat, they could think of others. They told the sergeant that they thought they had seen a fire and some people far away on a bit of dry ground.
“I’m out of my reckoning, now,” said Harry; “but Donald thinks it must be the top of Macpherson’s Hill, on the Cornwallis Road; anyhow, Macpherson’s inn has gone.”
“Give way, lads,” cried the sergeant; and he steered the long police-boat towards the spot his young passengers had pointed out. It was a long hard pull, and the boat took up other passengers before she got to the end of it. She took off a man from a shea-oak, and a woman and two children he had lashed to branches higher up. The man had been made quite stupid by the terrible time he had had. It was as much as two policemen could do to drag him off the branch to which he clung, and then he tumbled into the boat like a sack of sand. When the poor scratching, screaming woman was got into it, she had to be tied again, because she had gone mad. About half a mile farther on, the boat came to a hut flooded up to the eaves; and “Whisht!” cried Donald (as if the rain and wind and chopping waves would mind him), “there’s a body in there.”
Nobody else had heard anything to show it, but the sergeant steered the boat alongside the roof, and then they all heard thumps against it, and muffled shouts of “Holy murther! Hooroo! Bad luck to ye!” They pulled the sheets of sodden bark off, and pulled out an old Irish shepherd, who had been bumping up against the rafters, astride upon a box, with a rum-bottle in his fist, like the publican’s Bacchus on his barrel.
The water shoaled as the boat neared the top of Macpherson’s Hill. On the sloppy ground a score or two of men, women, and children had congregated and had managed to light a fire. They had two or three pannikins and some bottles and quart pots amongst them, and were drinking and handing one another tea and grog in a strange, stupefiedly tranquil fashion. There were snakes on the little island also, but they were too scared to bite; and drenched native cats, and quail, and bush-rats, and swamp-parrots, and bandicoots, and diamond-sparrows, and lizards, and spiders, and scorpions, and green and yellow frogs, and centipedes, and praying Mantises, were muddled up in a very miserable “happy family.”
As soon as the people on the little island saw that the boat grounded within a couple of yards of its brink, they woke up from their trance, and rushed into the water, clamorously demanding that either themselves, or somebody they cared for more than they did for themselves, should be carried off first. The sergeant had to make his men back water, and threaten to carry nobody, before he could quiet the poor bewildered creatures, made drunk by sudden hope. Then they, together with the Irish shepherd, were carried over by instalments to a point of undrowned land nearer than what remained above water of Jerry’s Town (Harry and Donald meanwhile staying on the island, and tucking into the tea and stale damper given them, for they were as hungry and thirsty as hunters). Then the boat at last came back, and carried them to Jerry’s Town, with the man and woman, and two scared shivering little children that had been taken off the shea-oak.
The rain did not cease until the following Thursday, and although, when it did cease, the flood went down almost as rapidly as it had risen, a fearful amount of damage had been done on and about Jerry’s Flats. Several lives had been lost. Scores of acres had been washed away bodily, or smothered in white sand. Houses, huts, sheds, fences, had utterly vanished. The flooded buildings that had stood out the flood looked like sewers when the waters went down. A good many of the “cockatoo settlers” were temporarily ruined, and had to petition the Government, through the hon. member for the Kakadua, for seed-corn; living, and re-making some kind of a home meanwhile, on the alms they got from the relief committees. But on the other hand, some of the river-side farms were made richer than ever by the shiploads of fat soil that had been left on them, and it was like magic to see how rapidly the bush, that had been as dry as a calcined bone a few days before, became green again when the sun shone out once more.
“A nice climate yours is, isn’t it?” I said to Harry, when we were talking over our flood adventures.
“Look at the country now,” he retorted, triumphantly. “You couldn’t beat that in slow old England, where it’s always dribbling. Itdoesrain here when it does rain, and then it’s over.”
“Hech, lad! we should be nane the waur o’ a little mair equal division,” commentated the more cautiously patriotic Donald, who talked mongrel Scotch when he became philosophical. “It wasna sae gey fine when we grippit the lum out yonder.”
One day Harry and Donald had been sent a good way from home to drive in a small mob of cattle, to swell the large one which Mr. Lawson was mustering at Wonga-Wonga for another overland trip to Port Phillip. The shortest cut to where they expected to find the cattle was over a high ridge—so high that on the crest there were very few trees, and those very little ones, sheltering in hollows like sentries in their boxes. In winter snow lies on the ridge, but it was not winter then, and the boys and their horses both thought the air deliciously cool, and the short grass and tiny Alpine herbs deliciously green, when they had scrambled up the rugged mountain-track, and stood panting on the top. A great ocean of dark wood, with here and there a shoal-like patch of flat or clearing, spread on all sides beneath them. Of course, the cattle were not to be driven home that way, but to be headed round a spur of the ridge that ran into the plain at its foot seven or eight miles off. An easy gully there ran through the range of hills. As the boys went down the ridge, however, they saw a mob of cattle, wild cattle, some turned, and some born so. The “Rooshians” stood stock-still for a minute, looking at the intruders with red angry eyes, as if they meditated a charge; but the boys cracked their stockwhips, and then off went the Rooshians, shaking the ground as they thundered along. The boys saw a little mob of wild horses, too—descended from stray tame ones, like the American mustangs. Only one of these, a mare, seemed ever to have been even nominally tame. There was just a trace of a brand on her off flank; but the rest apparently had never had their skins scarred by a branding-iron, or their hoofs singed or cramped with a shoe. There were three or four mares in the mob, and a stallion, and a score or so of foals of different sizes. They were all as plump as plums, and yet they galloped off like the wind, with their long tails sweeping the ground, and their great curly manes tossing like waves about their necks and eyes.
A little farther down the boys came to a hollow full of kangaroo-grass, and a mob of mouse-coloured, deer-eyed kangaroo were camped in it. Some were nibbling the spiky brown grass, with their fore feet folded under them like hill sheep. Some were patting one another, and tumbling one another over like kittens. Others were watching in a ring two “old men” that were fighting. One of the boxers was a nearly grey “old man,” with a regular Roman nose; the other was darker and younger, but nearly as tall, and so he did not intend to let old Roman-nose cock over him any more. The old does were looking on as if they hoped their contemporary would win, but the darkie seemed the favourite of the young “flying does.” The two bucks stood up to each other, and hit out at each other, and tried to get each other’s head “into chancery” in prize-ring style; but sometimes they jabbered at each other, just like two Whitechapel vixens, and they gave nasty kicks at each other’s bellies, too, with their sharp-clawed hind feet. They were so taken up with their fight that they let the boys watch it for nearly five minutes. When they found out, however, that they were being watched, they parted sulkily, and hopped off to “have it out” somewhere else, as fighting schoolboys slope when they see a master coming, or fighting street-boys when they see a policeman. After them hopped the rest of the mob, and Harry and Donald gave chase to one of the does. She had come back to pick up her “Joey.” The little fellow jumped into her pouch head foremost like a harlequin, and then up came his bright eyes and cocked ears above the edge of the pocket, and away Mrs. Kangaroo went with her baby. She tried hard to carry him off safe, but the boys had got an advantage over her at starting, and threatened to head her off from the rest of the mob. Into her apron-pocket went Mrs. Kangaroo’s fore paw, and out came poor little Master Kangaroo. The mother was safe then, but it would have been easy to capture the fat, half-stunned baby. The boys, however, did not wish to encumber themselves with a pet, and, besides, they could not help pitying both the baby and his mamma. So they turned their horses’ heads, and presently, when they looked back, they saw the doe watching them, and then bounding to pick up once more the Joey she had “dinged.”
By-and-bye the boys came to the head of a fern-tree gully, and plunged into its moist, warm, dim, luxuriant jungle, overshadowed by gigantic trees. Even what they call the “dwarf” tea tree ran up there to more than one hundred feet. They rode under blackwood trees, twenty feet round at the ground, and without a branch on the straight bole for eighty feet, beech trees two hundred feet high, and gum trees with tops twice as high as theirs. Huge creepers draped and interlaced those monsters. Some of the fern trees were more than fifty feet high, and above the feathery fans of the little ferns great stag-horns spread their antlers, and nest-ferns drooped their six-foot fronds. There were fragrant sassafras trees, too, in the gully, and the gigantic lily pierced the jungle with its long spear-shaft.
As the boys were forcing their way through it on their horses, with many a scratch and damp smack in the face from the swinging boughs, they came suddenly upon a little square of broken-down, almost smothered fencing. Inside there was more jungle, but a rough wooden cross showed them that they were looking at a bush grave. Initials and a date had been rudely carved upon the cross, but an A and 8 were all that could be made out of them. The boys had never heard of any one buried there, and it made them very serious at first to find a forgotten grave in that lonely place. They got off their horses, and took off their hats, and stood looking at the grave for some minutes in silence. Then they mounted again, and rode on, feeling, until they got out of the gully, as if they had been at a funeral. They had other things to think about when they rode into the sunshine again. They had the cattle to look up, and a camping-place to pick, because they were not going back to Wonga-Wonga until next day. But when they sat by their fire in the evening, with the weird night-wind moaning in the bush and sighing through the scrub around them, their thoughts went back to the bush grave.
“A ROUGH WOODEN CROSS SHOWED THEM A BUSH GRAVE.”
“A ROUGH WOODEN CROSS SHOWED THEM A BUSH GRAVE.”
“Wemay die some day like that, Donald,” said Harry, “without a soul to know where we’re buried. It seems dreary somehow, don’t it?”
“Somebody maun hae kenned where that puir fellow was buried,” answered logical Donald, “because he couldna hae buried himsel’, and put that cross up, and cut his name on’t.”
“Ah, perhaps the other fellow murdered him,” cried Harry. “And yet he’d hardly have put the cross up, if he had. No, I expect there were two of them out going to take up new country, just as you and me may be out some day, and one of ’em died. It must have been dreary work for the other chap then, and perhaps he died all by himself, and nobody knows what became ofhim.”
When the boys got back to Wonga-Wonga with their cattle, they made inquiries about the grave in the fern-tree gully, but no one else on the station had either seen it or heard of it before. Old Cranky, the men said, was the only one likely to know anything about it. The old man happened to come to Wonga-Wonga three days afterwards, and Harry at once began to question him about the grave. At first Old Cranky seemed not to understand what he was being asked—then a half-sly, half-frightened look came into his face, and he said that he knew every foot of the Bush for many a mile anywhere thereabouts, and he was sure there wasn’t a grave in it. Then he said he had never been inthatgully; and then he said, Oh yes, he had, and there was a grave in it years back—he remembered now—why, it was an old mate of his—they had been lagged together and had cut away together, because the cove was such a Tartar, and Squinny had knocked up, and it washewho had buried him there, and put up a cross to keep the devil off. He remembered it now as if it had all happened yesterday.
“And is it up yet?” the old man went on. “My word! a A and a 8? Oh, the A was for Andrew—that was Squinny’s name—Andrew Wilson. Didn’t you see ne’er a W? I mind the knife slipped, an’ I cut my finger makin’ it. 8? Let’s see—it was 18, summut 8, or was it 17? when I buried Squinny.”
And then Old Cranky burst out laughing, and said that he had been gammoning Harry all through—heknew nought about the grave, and didn’t believe there was one. Harry had been spinning him a yarn, and so he had spun Harry one to be quits.
All this was very queer, but Old Cranky was so very queer that Harry didn’t think much of it, coming from him. But when Harry told Donald about it, Donald looked very suspicious, and said,
“Anyhow, when we’ve a chance, we’ll go and see whether thereisa W on the cross. Where is Old Cranky?”
“I left him yarning away in the horsebreaker’s hut,” answered Harry; but when the boys strolled down there, they found that Old Cranky had left the station without coming up as usual to the house. Two days afterwards he came back, and as soon as he saw Harry he called out,
“There, I knowed I was right. I’ve been all through yon gully, and there’s no more a grave in it than there is in the back o’ your hand. You goo an’ look again—I’ll goo with you, if ye like.”
But when the boys did go back to the gully, it was without Old Cranky. They were not exactly afraid of him, but still they preferred the old snake-charmer’s room to his company in such a place. They thought they could ride almost straight to the grave, but from top to bottom, and from side to side, they rode through and through the gully without finding again the broken fence and crumbling cross.
“We couldn’t have been dreaming, Donald, could we?” asked Harry.
“Nay, lad,” answered Donald, “but we shouldna hae let that auld scoon’rel get the start of us. We’ll not see him at Wonga-Wonga again, in a hurry, I’m thinkin’.”
But Old Cranky did turn up again there in a few weeks’ time, and chuckled greatly when he heard of the boys’ unsuccessful hunt. That was his last visit to Wonga-Wonga. A short time afterwards he was found dead in the Bush, with his dogs standing over him, and his tame snakes wriggling about him. He had died of old age merely, and was buried in the Bush in which he had spent the greater part of his life. Old Cranky had been the “oldest inhabitant” in that part of the colony; and when he was gone, people began to rake up old stories of the old convict times in which he had figured. One day a settler, to whose father Old Cranky had been assigned, was dining at Wonga-Wonga, and telling us what he remembered of the old lag.
“Had your father one Wilson?” asked Donald.
“Well, really, he had so many, and it’s so long ago, that I can’t remember,” said the gentleman.
“Was your father a Tartar?” was Donald’s next very rude question.
“I dare say he was,” the son answered laughingly, “and he had need to be with such a set of scamps as he had to manage. If you hadn’t kept your eye on them, and let them feel the weight of your hand now and then, they’d have been on you like caged tigers when they see the tamer’s turning funky.”
“If you can’t remember a Wilson, can you remember a body that went by the name of Squinny?” persisted Donald, like a barrister; “and did he take to the Bush because he couldna stand the floggings he got?”
“Squinny! You’re right. I do remember a man of that name. No, he didn’t take to the Bush. He was drowned crossing a creek—at least, that’s what the fellow that was out with him said. By-the-bye, it was this very Old Cranky. But what do you know about him—what makes you ask?”
Then the boys told what they had seen and heard, and afterwards hadn’t seen. Everybody at table, of course, came to the conclusion that Wilson had met with foul play in the gully from Old Cranky, and then been buried there by him in the way he had described.
“If you could find the grave,” said the settler, “I’ll be bound you’d find a cracked skull in it; but of course the old rascal cleared away all tracks of the fence and the rest of it, when Harry put him up to what he’d seen. Besides, what would be the good of finding out anything? You can’t hang the old villain now, and, if he was alive, you’d have hard work to bring the thing home to him. The little I remember, and what he told the boys, is about all the evidence you’d have, and really I don’t remember much, and the old scoundrel was always cranky. Besides, candidly, I don’t see that it would do much good to scrag one villain for knocking another on the head all those years ago. The fellow would have been dead by this time somehow, and perhaps Old Cranky did society a good turn in finishing him off when he did. What doyouthink, Mr. Howe? I think, for my part, that a good many fellows that could be very well spared have been settled in that way in the colony; just as the ants, they say, eat up the rats and the cockroaches. The curious thing is, that Old Cranky should have taken so much trouble to bury the man decently, with the name and date, and all the rest of it, and then forgotten all about it. But he was always a comical coon, was Old Cranky. A native wouldn’t have done a silly thing like that, Mr. Howe. We’re up to time of day; ain’t we, Harry?”