“Black Swan was a black divil we’d called so ’cos of his gallus long neck. Wal, we cotched Tom’s horse, and Fred took the corpse back on it to the station, and buried his brother close ahind our hut. I can’t say I relished that azactly, nor the way Fred ’ud go an’ sit by the grave arter sundown, mumblin’ to hisself as if he was silly. He’d been a jolly chap afore that—not half as jolly as Tom, though. The hut was like a dead place whenhewas gone. All that Fred seemed to care about was to get a pop at the blacks. Wal, one day when we’d had a scrimmage with ’em, Fred hit Black Swan in the knee. He was a-hoppin’ off, boohooin’ like a babby, a one leg, but Fred was down on him in no time. I ’spected he’d blow his brains out right off, an’ have done wi’ him. But Fred knocked him down with the butt-end er his gun, an’ tied his hands an’ feet, an’ lugged him back to our hut, an’ kicked him into the skillion ahind.
“‘What are you going to do with that poor divil, Fred?’ says I, when we was havin’ our smoke arter supper.
“‘Niveryoumind,’ says he.
“Wal, it worn’t no business o’ mine, an’ so I turned in. Next mornin’ the black was gone, an’ Fred didn’t show. Then I guessed what was up, an’ told the cove. Him and me rode down to the place where poor Tom was skewered, an’ there, right afore the grass tree, was the black, lashed atween two planks, an’ sliced through as neat as you’d cut a sangwidch. Fred niver showed arter that, an’ I worn’t sorry to be rid er his company, though, arter all, it were on’y a black feller.”
Prince Chummy was far less affected by this horrid story than Harry and Donald were. There is not much love lost between black fellows of different tribes; the tribes are not united by any feeling of common patriotism; but native Australian lads have the same kind of liking for the blacks that a young squire has for his peasant foster-brother.
“The cowardly English cur!” cried Harry, indignantly. “If they’d fought fair with spears and womeras, the Englishman would precious soon have cut his lucky.”
But before he left his brother’s station, Harry had learnt to think somewhat more harshly of the blacks.
When Sydney’s party had left that last run, and crossed a wide stretch of dry scrub country, they struck a creek shaded by red gum-trees, and ran it down until they came to what was, for Australia, a fine river. Fig trees and pines—all kinds of trees—laced together with creepers and wild vine, grew thick along the river’s banks. They were pink and purple and crimson and yellow with wild flowers, and big white water-lilies with huge green leaves almost paved the water inshore. There were wild fowl, too, in the river; and scores upon scores of pigeons, bronzewings, and green and purple wompoos, were feasting on the wild figs and cherries, and making them patter down like rain. Besides a host of little birds, there were snowy cockatoos and flashing parrots and lories galore, and sometimes a paddymelon was seen.
“Just won’t we blaze away, Donald!” cried Harry, in ecstasy.
But what pleased Sydney more was the grassy, light-timbered land, that stretched like a wild park for miles on both sides of the river. He determined to seek no farther, and as soon as he had pitched his camp, he was in the saddle again, and off to mark out his run. He scored the bark of a tree from which he started with his initials, and then rode a dozen miles or more, and slashed another tree with his tomahawk. In that free-and-easy fashion he took possession of all the land between the trees for ten miles on both sides of the river. Then he galloped into camp again, and scribbled off a rough description of the district he had taken up for the Crown Lands Office, using the dray for his writing-desk. With this specification Prince Chummy was sent back upon their tracks to the nearest post-office. It was by no means certain that Prince Chummy would return, although he did seem so fond of his young master, since black fellows are very fickle; but he could best be spared from the station when hard work had to be done—that being an occupation not at all to a black fellow’s taste. He might safely be trusted to post the letter, since Sydney had made him believe that it would come back to tell of him if he didn’t.
Whilst he was away Sydney and Jim and Bob set to work at timber-felling and splitting, whilst Harry and Donald in turns mounted guard over the stores or looked after the cattle. Before Prince Chummy got back, a store had been run up, and a hut for Sydney and the boys, and another for the men, and the stockyard was nearly finished. Masters and men fared very much alike. In neither hut was there any superfluous furniture. The bedsteads were bullocks’ hides stretched on posts driven into the ground. All this time not a black had been seen at Pigeon Park, as Sydney had christened his station. They came often enough afterwards, as you will read in my next chapter; but in this I have only room to tell how they first made their appearance there.
One evening the cattle and horses had been driven into a grassy horseshoe peninsula made by the winding river, not far from the huts. Sydney and the men had knocked off work, and were sitting, smoking, on their verandahs, and the boys were out with their guns. Presently Harry cried out,
“Hark! I can hear a horse galloping yonder. Perhaps it’s Chummy come back. Let’s go and meet him.”
When Donald put his ear down to the ground, he heard the hoofs quite plainly, and agreed to go. As a rule, young Australians think it is necessary to ride when they set out anywhither of set purpose. They will take the trouble of running a horse up from a flat almost a mile off in order to ride a mile. But if the boys had gone back then for their horses, the chances were that the horseman, whoever it was, would get to the station almost as soon as they did; so they trotted off on foot. In a few minutes the rider topped a rise, and though the setting sunlight bathed him in bright blood, they could make out that it was Chummy. He reined in as he drew near the boys in a place in which there was a belt of scrub on both sides. He was grinning, and shouting back greetings to his young friends, when from the scrub on both sides whizzed a flight of spears. Poor Chummy, bristled like a porcupine, fell forward on his horse’s neck, clutching the mane with the rigid grasp of death, and the fear-maddened horse, which had been wounded in the neck itself, rushed past the boys like a whirlwind. Out of the scrub darted a score or two of darkies, dancing and jabbering, “Wah! wah! wah!” like angry apes, and advancing on the boys with brandished spears and wildly-waved boomerangs and waddies.
“I did feel funky then, and no mistake, Mr. Howe,” Harry afterwards told me; “but, you see, if we’d shown the white feather then, it would have been all up with us. So we turned round and stared at the blacks.
“‘We must pepper them,’ I said to Donald.
“‘Ay, lad; but ane at a time, and then load whilst the ither is firin’,’ says Donald.
“He’s a cool customer, is Donald, with hist’anesandt’ithers. We hadn’t much time to talk, for I saw one of the beggars just going to let drive at us, so I up with my gun and let drive at him. I was loaded with duck-shot, and though it scattered, I must have spoilt his beauty, for the blood came streaming down his face. It was queer to see how scared the big beggars were—over six foot some of ’em were. They couldn’t have been much used to powder. They all of them stopped short when they saw the blood, as if they’dallbeen shot.
“‘Don’t wait for me,’ I said to Donald, when I was going to load again; but, though he gave ’em both his barrels pretty quick when he saw how things were, he only marked ’em behind. They’d all turned, and before you could say ‘Jack Robinson’ they’d vanished in the scrub. Syd and the men weren’t long in rushing up, I promise you; but there was nothing left for them to do. Poor old Chummy was as dead as a doornail by that time. We buried him before we went to bed, with some of the spear-heads still sticking in him. We couldn’t have got ’em out without tearing him all to bits. I suppose the beggars had got it into their heads that he’d brought us, and so wanted to finish him off first. It’s strange the down black fellows have on black fellows. Poor old Chummy! And yet, after all, if you think of it, you can’t blame the beggars. I can’t see what right we whites have to this country. If you were to get up at night and see a fellow helping himself to your swag, you’d do your best, I guess, to shoot him if he wouldn’t bundle out. And that’s how the blacks must feel when they see us taking up their country. It sounds soft, and yet I can’t help half wishing sometimes that they were as ’cute and as plucky as the Maories.Theywon’t stand nonsense, for all your English red-coats; though the soldiers and settlers between them might eat up every Maori, if they could only catch ’em and kill ’em. There’s enough of ’em to do it.”
After that first brush, the blacks still for a time kept clear of the station buildings, but, now here, now there, they were always giving unpleasant proofs of their presence on the run. It was, in fact, the best bit of their hunting-ground, and therefore it is not astonishing that they considered the whites, instead of themselves, to be the trespassers. The black fellows speared the cattle and horses, and tried hard to kill the men and boys too. They had to look about them “with all their eyes” when they were riding past any cover.
Once Handsome Bob was missing for a couple of days. When he was found he was almost dead; for the blacks had knocked him off his horse with a boomerang, gashed him with their tomahawks, prodded at him with their spears till his flesh was like a perforated card, and then tied him to a tree which ants had connected with their hill by a little sunken path like a miniature railway-cutting. The ants and the flies had made an awful object of poor Bob’s patchwork of wounds; and though he did at last most marvellously “recover,” as it is called, he was half silly ever afterwards. Jawing Jim was kinder to him than you would have expected whilst he lay helpless in the hut, and Sydney and the boys, of course, looked in, and did what they could for him. But for hours he had to be left alone, with the chance that the blacks would swoop down upon him and finish their work. When he did get about again, although half silly in other things, he had a strange, fierce knack of surprising black fellows, and potting them from behind a tree as if they had been so many wild ducks.
Long before Handsome Bob was up again, his mates had been forced, as they thought, to be almost equally savage. Whenever they saw a black, they tried to kill him, as “naturally” as one tries to kill a snake or a wasp or any vermin. It is not pleasant to have to write about such things, but I must if I am to tell the whole truth about Australia. Sydney soon got quite envenomed against the blacks, whom he had robbed of their hunting-ground, because they were killing off his cattle; and not long afterwards Harry and Donald fully sympathized with him. Not one of the three felt the slightest scruple in shooting down a black, and then cutting off his head and hanging itin terroremon a tree, as a gamekeeper nails a hawk against his gable. There is a terrible amount of the tiger in human nature. When blood has once been tasted, so to speak, in savage earnest, “civilization” peels off like nose-skin in the tropics, and “Christian” men, and even boys, are ready—eager—to shed blood like water. They arenoteager to talk about what they have done when they get back from the Bush amongst their mothers, sisters, wives, and sweethearts; but then, they think white mothers, &c., are so different from black gins and their offspring—and when the white women hear of what the black fellows have done or tried to do to their darlings, they are very apt to frame excuses for the white atrocities which they dimly guess at when they kneel beside their beds at night to give God thanks for their darlings’ return to districts in which it is possible to go to a “real church” and “regular services” every Sunday. Jawing Jim wanted to “polish the blacks off” like dingoes, by setting baits of poisoned food about the run; but at poison Sydney drew the line, and the boys, who were half startled by the kindliness with which they had taken to their killing work, could not help feeling relieved at finding that the line was to be drawn anywhere.
“No, Jim,” said Sydney. “Fighting’s all fair. If we didn’t shoot down the blacks when we came across ’em, they’d precious soon spear us. But it’s sneaking to poison the beggars, when they haven’t a chance of hitting back.”
“Boot ye poiason the warrigals, Mester Sydney, an’ ah kent see as there’s mooch to choose atween the two soarts o’ warmin.”
“P’r’aps there isn’t,” answered Sydney. “But anyhow there’s something of a man, so far as look goes, in a black fellow; and so we’ll fight fair. I’ll have no strychnine used—do you understand, Jim?”
“Ahoonerstaun’,” growled Jim, “boottheedoosn’t. Pooder or poiason—wha-at’s the oadds?”
After a good many brushes in the scrub, the black fellows grew more used to fire-arms, and ventured down one night upon the station buildings. Fortunately it was moonlight, and Donald, who chanced to be awake and looking out of the window, could plainly distinguish the invaders as they crept out of a patch of scrub about a couple of hundred yards off, and came crouching towards the huts with their noses almost touching the moonlit grass.
“Sydney! Harry!” he shouted, “here come the blacks!” and snatching up his gun, he deliberately levelled it, and let fly at the foremost black fellow.
When the blacks found that they were discovered, they sprang up erect, streaked and spotted with white and red clay, daubed on in stripes, and hideous faces, brandishing their spears, waving about their boomerangs and waddies, knocking their bark shields together, and advancing rapidly in a wild tramping dance to a horrible chorus of “Wah! wah! wah!”
But Donald’s shot had aroused all the white folk. Handsome Bob was strong enough to fire a gun then, and rushing tohiswindow, he was the first to follow suit to Donald. Five marksmen were soon popping away incessantly. A shower of missiles whizzed through the moonlit air, and hurtled against the slab sides and bark roofs of the huts; but several of the blacks were down on the ground, and more had been slightly hit. Leaving their dead and badly wounded, the blacks turned and fled in disorder, and the five whites, who had defeated more than a hundred savages, sallied from their cover flushed with victory, and commenced an incautious pursuit. In their contempt for their enemy, they straggled from one another, and whilst they were thus giving chase, a tall black suddenly sprang from behind a tree, stunned Harry with a blow of his waddy, and carried him off.
When Harry came to himself, he was lying in a black fellows’ encampment. It was broad daylight. The wounded warriors were crouching here and there, with earth instead of ointment stuffed into their wounds. The unhurt warriors, for the twentieth time, were bragging about their prowess. The gins had already celebrated it in a song, which they sang as they dragged a water-hole for fish, with a mat rather than net of twisted grass, and as they squatted on the ground inside and outside the gunyahs—conical huts of bark and wild vine—that were scattered about and clustered together under the weeping acacias. Grey, glistening bark canoes were lazily rubbing their sides together on a large lagoon hard by. “Tamed” dingoes slouched at their masters’ heels, or snuffed about the gunyahs, gaunt as starved wolves. One woman was suckling alternately her own piccaninny and a puppy dingo! Two or three of the gins were guarding some opossums that were being cooked under a round layer of stones, on the top of which the kitchen fire was kindled. (Sometimes, instead of using this oven arrangement, the blacks bury their game, unskinned, in the hot ashes). The men had nothing on but a strip of kangaroo-skin round their loins, but the women wore kangaroo and ’possum rugs.
When Harry came to himself, he ached all over, and felt so stiff, that, although he was not bound, he could not rise from the ground. He fell sometimes on his face, and sometimes on his back, when he attempted to get on his feet. Some black boys who were standing near jeered at him when they saw this, and pricked him with their spears, at the same time mimicking his motions, like so many monkeys. But an old black, who was sitting with his back to the tree under which Harry was lying, left off nursing his knees for a minute, waved the young rascals off, and beckoned to a party of old gins to come near. These old ladies felt Harry all over, and when they found that no bones were broken, they took off his clothes, and began to dig their skinny black fists into him as if they were kneading bread. Then they dipped him in a water-hole, and, after he had lain down to dry, they trotted him about till all his aches and pains were gone, and he was able to eat a hunch of baked ’possum with relish—strong as it did taste of peppermint—even though he could not help seeing that he was being attended to in this careful way simply that he might give his captors more sport afterwards, when they began to torture him. But one of the old women who had kneaded Harry had noticed a mole on his back which was very much like one that a dead son of hers had onhisback, and so the old woman had come to the conclusion that her dead son had “jumped up white-fellow,” as the blacks phrase it, in Harry. The other members of the tribe opposed this view, and there was a hot argument about it, in which, although it lasted for an hour, the name of the dead son was not once mentioned—the Australian blacks carefully abstaining fromnamingtheir dead. At the end of this controversy Harry was placed on a little mound, and a shield was given him; three of the adroitest spear-throwers being stationed at some distance opposite to him. The first threw, aiming at Harry’s stomach, but Harry, more by good luck than good management, caught the spear in the shield.
“It is the son of Kaludie,” shouted the old gin who claimed him as her son.
“Kaludie is blind,” shouted the others: “the son of Kaludie, when he played with the spears, waved like the wild vine; the white boy stands stiff as the tea-pole.”
The second thrower hurled his spear, and that, too, quivered in the shield, instead of piercing the heart at which it had been hurled.
“It is the son of Kaludie,” shouted the old gin again.
Harry’s marvellous luck still continued. He caught the third spear also, which was aimed at his head.
“It is the son of Kaludie,” for the third time shouted the old gin, running to throw her arms around Harry, and at the same time gashing her cheeks with a stone.
“Kaludie has eyes,” shouted the others, at last convinced. “The white fellow is slow as a koala, but this white boy is quick as a wink.”
After this, although he was strictly watched, a great deal was made of Harry. He was taken hunting and fishing with the tribe, and was helped more plentifully than the other boys to the wallaby, snake, parrot, iguana, yam, figs, honey, grubs, or whatever else happened to be going for food. This made the black lads jealous of him, and one of them asked, “Was not the son of Kaludie a kipper?” and then pointed to Harry’s mouth, out of which, of course, no tooth had been knocked, black-fellow fashion, at the “kipper” age. This discovery brought on another long argument, and it was at last decided that the son of Kaludie must be made a kipper over again next full moon. Accordingly poor Harry was obliged to submit to have a front tooth knocked out. That was rather unpleasant; but if Donald had been with him, he would have enjoyed the hunting and fishing. He learnt to hurl the spear and fling the boomerang almost like a black fellow. But just as he was getting a little reconciled to his captivity in the open air, something occurred which made him long more than ever to get back to his own people. In a fight with another tribe, several of his captors were slain. The corpses were brought back and roasted, peeled like potatoes, and eaten by their own comrades. When the bones had been picked, they were put into baskets of native grass, sent about to be howled over, then brought back to their families’ gunyahs to be kept for a timein memoriam, and at last hung on the branches or dropped into the hollows of trees, on which the emblem of the tribe, a waratah, was carved. A plump arm was thrust into Harry’s hands, as a special treat. When he flung it down, and rushed away from the horrid banquet, even Kaludie became half sceptical as to whether he could indeed be her son. For days afterwards he could not touch flesh food of any kind, and the natives’ suspicions might have been seriously aroused, had not their attention been diverted from him by a mysterious illness which struck down young and old in their camp. In vain were dead men’s skins brought out for the invalids to be laid on. In vain did adventurous warriors waylay the members of other tribes, in order to secure their kidneys to make ointment for the sufferers. In vain did the old gins rinse their mouths and spit beside the sick, invoking curses on the sorcerer who had caused them to writhe in agony. It was manifest, the blacks said, that the sorcerer came and went as he pleased, underground, to the camp, and that he must be slain before its peace could be restored. Handsome Bob was the sorcerer credited with its calamity.
One day a boasting young black bounded into the camp, and, striking an attitude, began to chant (of course in black fellow’s lingo):
“I have slain—whom have I slain? Is it the white wizard that burrowed like the wombat? Is it he whom we caught and fastened to the tree? Is it the white wizard with the face like the flying fox? Yes, it is the white wizard that lies slain under the wattle—slain by the spear of me, the brave Jooragong.”
Then the excited gins took up the song—
“Jooragong is young, but he has slain him who slew the blacks—the white wizard who burrowed like the wombat—the white wizard with the face like the flying fox. Jooragong is young, but he is braver than the old men. We will all be the gins of Jooragong.”
And then there would have been a great corroborree, had not a sceptical old warrior said,
“Jooragong is brave in his own mouth. Why did Jooragong leave the scalp of the white wizard under the wattle? Let us go and look on the face of the flying fox. Let us be sure that the white wizard will no more burrow like the wombat.”
Jooragong looked very much like a trapped dingo, but he could not refuse the old man’s challenge. A party of the blacks started under his guidance to make sure of the death of the white wizard, and the son of Kaludie went with them. At last Jooragong stopped and said,
“The white wizard lies dead underthattree,” pointing to one in the distance; but when they came to the tree, there was no corpse there. “He is gone—he is a wizard,” said Jooragong.
“Let Jooragong show me the white wizard’s tracks,” answered the old warrior.
“He burrows like the wombat,” said Jooragong.
“Then Jooragong, who is young, but braver than the old men, has not speared the wombat,” sneered the old man. “We will go back, and the gins shall sing of Jooragong—‘Jooragong is young. Jooragong is brave. His enemies are dried up before him like water. We look for the enemies whom he hath speared, but we find them not. When dead they still fear Jooragong, who is braver than the old men.’”
The son of Kaludie, however, did not go back to camp. Jooragong had led the party of searchers within sight of the station buildings, and Harry determined to make a bolt for them, if he died for it. He found it easier work than he had expected to get away. The rest of the blacks were so busy jabbering jibes at Jooragong that Harry was not noticed when he lagged behind, and in a few minutes he was able to slip behind a tree, and thence make a slant for the station. When he had once ventured to begin to run, he kept on running as if he was racing Death. He tumbled to the ground dead-beat, but panting like a steam-engine just about to blow up, when he had almost reached the huts. Donald ran out, and then looked half inclined to run away again.
“Harry,” he said, “are ye sure it’s yoursel’, of your wraith? Hech, man, ye’re a sicht for sair een,” Donald went on, with the tears gushing up into his own generally hard-looking grey eyes, like water oozing from a rock. “We thocht ye’d been deid, an’ buried inside the blacks this long while.”
After Harry’s escape the blacks again made very audacious descents on the station buildings. For one thing, they wanted to recapture the son of Kaludie; for another, they wanted to kill the white wizard, who, instead of having been speared by Jooragong, had made the braggart dodge from tree to tree before his gun. For a third thing the black fellows had a great relish for the white fellows’ stores, to which every now and then they found a scrambling chance of helping themselves. More fighting took place, and every now and then a black was shot. Still the blacks came down upon the homestead. As it was impossible to guess when they would come, the place could not be efficiently guarded unless the whole of the little garrison always stayed at home—and in that case how was the work of the station to be done?
“Ah tell thee whet ’tis, Mester Sydney,” said Jawing Jim (who up in the bush had almost begun to merit hissobriquet); “if tha wan’t poiason the warmin, tha moost skeer ’em. Me an’ Boab’ll do it for thee. Boab ain’t mooch fit for nawthing else nowa, poor lahd!”
This was the stratagem the men contrived: They cut off the head of a dead black fellow, and put it into a full flour-cask, the top of which was left open. Then leaving the store door unlocked, and the flour-cask just behind it, all the pioneers left the buildings; the boys, however, returning by a roundabout route, and “planting” in some scrub not far off to witness what might happen. They had to wait some time, but at last the blacks made their appearance. Even their keen eyes detecting no trace of the presence of any whites, they soon swarmed up boldly to the store. Jooragong, bravest of the brave when there was nothing to be feared, rolled out the cask that stood so conveniently near and open, and began to scoop out the flour with both hands. But presently they brought up his countryman’s head. The other blacks raised a wild howl and fled, but Jooragong stood stock-still, gaping, with eyes starting from his head at his hideous handful. The firing of the boys’ guns broke the spell. Off Jooragong bounded also, dropping the floury head out of his floury hands back into the cask; and so long as Harry and Donald stayed at Pigeon Park, the blacks never again ventured within gunshot of the store.
“THE BLACKS RAISED A WILD HOWL AND FLED.”
“THE BLACKS RAISED A WILD HOWL AND FLED.”
Soon after Harry and Donald returned to Wonga-Wonga, the station was excited by the news that gold had been found about seventy miles to the north of Jerry’s Town. At first the news was partially pooh-poohed at Wonga-Wonga.
“We’ve heard ofstorekeepers’ rushesbefore now, haven’t we?” Mr. Lawson said to the men, who were getting unsettled by the tidings. “Those fellows would make out that there was gold in the moon, if people could get there to buy their damaged goods; and nicely they’d clap it on for carriage.”
It soon became certain, however, that something more than the mere “colour of gold” had been found at Jim Crow Creek. Three parts of the population of Jerry’s Town started for the new diggings, and yet the town was busier than ever, such a stream of people poured through it. Nearly every township between Jerry’s Town and Sydney contributed its quota, and amongst those who came from Sydney were a good many who had sailed thither from Melbourne. Perhaps they had been doing very well on the Victoria diggings, but diggers have almost always a belief that they could do better somewhere else than where they are; and so, when they hear of new diggings, off they flock to them, like starlings from England in autumn.
Wonga-Wonga and the other stations near Jerry’s Plains soon became very short-handed. Shepherds and stockmen sloped wholesale for the Creek, sometimes helping themselves to their masters’ horses to get there. To make the best of a bad job, Mr. Lawson resolved to avail himself of the market for meat that had suddenly been created at Jim Crow Creek; and, accordingly, he and the boys started thither with some of the sheep and cattle that had been left with scarcely any one to look after them.
As they rode into Jerry’s Town, they passed a mob of Chinamen, in baggy blue breeches, who were preparing to encamp by the roadside. Most of them still wore their tails, coiled up like snakes, or dangling down like eels. The Jerry’s Town youngsters were pelting the Chinamen, and taking sly pulls at the dangling tails, whenever they got the chance, meanwhile shouting “Chow-chow” and singing in chorus—
“Here he was, and there he goes,Chinaman with the monkey nose.”
“Here he was, and there he goes,
Chinaman with the monkey nose.”
As the Chinamen laid down the bamboos they had carried on their shoulders, with bundles hanging from them like milk-pails from a yoke, and gathered sticks to boil their rice, their almond eyes glanced very evilly from under their beehive hats at the young outside barbarians. I am sorry to say that is not only theyoungbarbarians who behave very brutally to Chinamen in Australia.
All the way from Jerry’s Town to Jim Crow Creek the road, that used to look even more solitary than Highgate Archway Road looks during the greater part of the year, was every here and there almost as crowded as Highgate Archway Road during the time of Barnet Fair. Men on horseback, with saddle-bags and pistols peeping from their holsters, were ambling and cantering along, singly and in couples, and in threes and fours. Moleskin-trousered pedestrians, who had “humped the swag,” were toiling along, footsore and perspiring, their red or blue shirts rolled up and laid upon the top of their heavy loads. Greenhorn-looking young fellows, fresh from the counter or the desk, were sitting down, dead beat. Tarpaulined drays ground along in a long line, monotonously jingling the pots and pannikins slung beneath.
“MEN ON HORSEBACK, WITH SADDLE-BAGS AND PISTOLS.”
“MEN ON HORSEBACK, WITH SADDLE-BAGS AND PISTOLS.”
Here and there a dray had broken down, and the driver was fussing about as angry as a wasp, or smoking in sulky idleness, because he could not get any one to stop to help him right his cargo. Every public was crammed with rowdy-looking, bronzed, bearded fellows, shouting for nobblers, spiders, and stone-fences. The free commons which every traveller in Australia used to look upon as a right rather than a favour, had ceased to be supplied by either house or hut. If any passenger wanted food or drink, he had to pay for them, and pay smartly too. Some of the parties taking their meals along the road were faring jollily, but some of the pedestrians who limped past them cast enviously hungry glances on their commissariat. To say nothing of brandy, bitter beer, sardines, and potted salmon,theywere speculating anxiously as to how much longer they could make sure of tea and damper.
Jim Crow Creek was reached at last. A week or two before, it had been so quiet that the shy water-moles would come up and bask for the half-hour together on the surface of its gravy-soup-coloured water. There was nothing to startle them except the sudden scream of a flock of parrots flashing across, or the lazy rustle of the long, inky, lanky-tassel-like leaves which the grey-boled trees upon the banks dipped into the smooth stream. But now for two or three miles upon both banks there was bustle. The trees had been cut down, the banks scarped and honeycombed, and dotted with big boil-like heaps of dusty earth. The tortured creek, here dammed, there almost drained, and yonder flowing in a new channel, seemed to be as puzzled as to its identity as the old lady who had her petticoats cut all round about. Steam sent up quick, angry white puffs; windlasses went round and round at the top of yawning wells of dirt; the grinding, rattling dash of shovels into soil, the ticking click of picks on stone resounded everywhere. Cradles rocked; hip-booted men, who looked as if they had not washed either face or hands for a twelvemonth, swished their precious mud round and round in washing-pans. Scattered along the sloping sides of the creek, and jostlingly jumbled on the flat it once crept round, so sleepily quiet, were all kinds of extemporized stores and dwellings: a house or two of corrugated iron; more hastily knocked-up ones of slabs; canvas-walled houses, roofed with asphalte-felt; round tents, square tents, polygonal tents, and mere bark gunyahs. Some had their owners’ names roughly painted on the canvas. Outside one tent hung a brass plate inscribed with “Mr. So-and-So, Photographer.” Keen-looking gold-buyers stood at the doors of their wooden “offices.” A commissioner, swellish in gold lace, cantered superciliously through the bustling throngs. Policemen lounged about, striving to look unconscious of the “Joey!” which the miners found time to shout after them in scorn. Hanging about the sly grog-shop tents, there were men who might have been thought to have more time for such amusement, since smoking and nobblerizing was all that they seemed to have to do; but these gentry appeared by no means eager to attract the attention of the police. The gold-buyers looked anxious when the rascals’ furtively-ferocious eyes chanced to fall their way, and they were not the kind of man that a solitary digger would have liked to see peeping into his tent at night, or loitering before him in the bush. Everybody at Jim Crow Creek had guns or pistols of some kind, and took care to let his neighbours know that he was armed by firing off his weapons before he turned in, and then ostentatiously reloading them after the gun-powdery good night.
Before Mr. Lawson and the boys reached the “township,” as the Jim Crow Flat was already called, their sheep and cattle were bought up by a butcher who was waiting on the road. They bought their chops of him for their evening meal, and when they found what he charged for them, Mr. Lawson was not quite so satisfied with his cattle bargain as he had been when he made it. After tea, the boys strolled out to look about them, and presently came to a large tent, with the American colours flying above it. There was a crowd at the entrance, and it was as much as two money-takers could do to make sure that they did take the admission-money from all the boisterous fellows who were rolling in. Amongst them were a few women, with faces like brown leather, who were still more boisterous.
“Let’s go in, Donald,” said Harry. “It must be those Ethiopian chaps that passed us on the road in the American waggon.”
The boys struggled in at last, and then wished, but in vain, that they could struggle out. They were jammed in a steaming, smoking, rum-scented mass of miners, good-tempered enough in the main, but apparently of opinion that the proper place for a man’s elbows was in his neighbour’s ribs, and for his feet upon his neighbour’s toes. Not more than half had seats, and sometimes they swayed about so, that it seemed certain the bulging tent must fall. They joined most discordantly in all the choruses, and when especially pleased, pitched coppers, and sixpences, and shillings on the stage. They threw other things that were not so pleasant. One wag threw a potato, which hit Bones upon the nose just when he was propounding a conundrum to Tambourine; and Mr. Bones, in spite of his fun, being a very irascible little serenader, leaped down amongst his audience, and made frantic efforts to get at his assailant. There was very nearly a battle-royal between house and performers, and Mr. Bones was pulled up at last by his brethren, with his woolly wig half off his head, his long-tailed coat split from waist to collar, and his huge shirt-collar and cravat in a sadly crumpled condition. Whilst the scrimmage lasted, Donald had noticed a broad-shouldered mulatto, in red shirt and ear-rings, who had kept on plunging backwards and forwards in the crowd, apparently bent on increasing the confusion.
“Hae ye got anything in your pockets, Harry?” said Donald, when comparative calm had been restored. “Just spot yon body in the red shirt. He tried my pockets more than once. I suppose he thocht I’d bring a bundle of notes in here. I’m nae sae daft.”
It was nearly midnight when the “entertainment” concluded, and it was Sunday morning before all the entertained got into the open air again. As the reeking crowd struggled out, the mulatto recommenced his plunging manœuvres. When the boys got out, they saw him hurrying in the moonlight down an alley between two little rows of tents.
“He’s a nice young man for a small music party,” said Harry, looking after him; “and there seems to be plenty of his sort. Come along, Donald; we’ve a good step to go, and I should feel so spoony if I got bailed up by those fellows; though it isn’t much, is it, they could ease us of?”
Mr. Lawson had pitched his tent on the other side of the “township,” some little way down the Jerry’s Town road, in a place where there were no other tents near.
When the boys had crossed the flat, and were ascending the steep rough bush track dignified with the name of Jerry’s Town Road, they were not exactly pleased to see a man who looked very much like the mulatto, and two other men, slip out of the bush, and seat themselves on a log and a stump by the roadside.
“It don’t seem game to turn out of the road for those fellows, does it, Donald?” said Harry. “But I’ll go bail they’re up to no good, and they’re hulking big beggars, and I’ll be bound they’ve barkers, and we haven’t.”
“I dinna think they’re planting for us,” answered Donald; “but, as like as not, they’d gie us a knock on the head if we went up to them; an’ what’s the use o’ gettin’ a knock on the head for nae guid, if ye can avoid it?”
“I should uncommonly like to know what they’re scheming,” said Harry, as the boys turned aside into the bush. “They’re jabbering fast enough about something. Let’s creep up behind and listen. P’r’aps it’s the governor they’ve a down on.”
This is what the boys heard when they had crept like cats to a listening-place:
“It’s a squatter fellow that sold some bullocks to Wilcox the butcher,” said one of the mulatto’s companions. “He’s camped out yonder by himself.”
“Well, but,” objected the mulatto, “Wilcox would pay him in orders, and what’s the good of them?”
“Ah, but I heard him ask Wilcox for some in cash or notes, if he had it. The fellow said he’d got cleaned out on the road up, and must have some money to take him back. So Wilcox gave him some; I can’t say how much it was, but any’s worth finding. Besides, he’s a gold ticker—a real handsome one, as big as a frying-pan. And then there’s the three horses, and first-chop colonial saddles.”
“Is there anybody with him, then?”
“Two young ’uns came with him, but they’ve gone down into the town, an’ if they’ve come back, it don’t matter much. I fancy he’s turned in now. I’ve been watching him this good while, till I come down to hunt up you and Bill.”
“Well, let’s be off then,” said the mulatto; and the three began to run. The boys tried to make a short cut for the tent, but lost ground instead. When they reached the tent Mr. Lawson was on his back, half-throttling, however, the mulatto who knelt upon him, whilst the other two scoundrels were giving him savage blows and kicks.
“Put—a—ball—in—to—him,” gasped the mulatto.
Before a pistol could be pointed, however, the two boys had leaped on the two men, and by the suddenness of the onslaught toppled them over, tumbling at the same time themselves. For a minute a confused heap of trunks and limbs heaved and wriggled on the floor; but Mr. Lawson rolled himself out, and, getting uppermost in turn, brought down his huge Northumbrian fist with a tremendous thud upon the mulatto’s face. As soon as the other two men could scramble to their feet, they took to their heels. The boys had got hold of their pistols by that time, and Mr. Lawson was reaching out his hand for his revolver. Three bullets whistled after the two runaways, but neither was hit. Meantime the mulatto, save for his stertorous breathing, lay like a log upon the ground.
“Get your horse, Harry, and ride in for the police,” said Mr. Lawson. “We’d best tie the scoundrel first, though.”
Harry and Donald went to catch the hobbled horse; Mr. Lawson turned to refasten an up-pulled tent-peg, and to get a cord, and when he turned round again, the mulatto was gone.
“The rascal was only shamming,” said Mr. Lawson, feeling rather silly, when the boys returned. “I turned my back for a second, and he wriggled off like a snake. Now, boys, turn in, and I’ll keep watch till the sun comes up. If I hadn’t been in such a hurry to get a snooze, I shouldn’t have been laid on my back by those mean curs. I must have been sleeping like a top when they pounced in upon me. I’ve to thank you, boys, and let us all thank God.”
Mr. Lawson and the boys stayed over the Sunday at Jim Crow Creek, but it was a strange Sunday. The miners knocked off work, but they economized the Sabbath hours in fighting out the week’s quarrels, which they could not spare time to settle on week-days. The only “service” was one conducted by a tall, gauntly-sinewy Cornish miner, who shouted at the top of his voice, and worked himself into a pale perspiration as he flung about his long limbs as if they were galvanized. A few of his hearers looked pleased to be reminded anyhow of what the day was. A few more looked ashamedbecausethey were ashamed to look pleased too. But most grinned, and then passed on to find more exciting amusements.
“Faix, it’s the crathur’s way o’ divartin’ himself,” said the police-sergeant, who had stopped for a few minutes to hear his own creed anathematized; “and a mighty queer kind o’ divarsion it is, to my thinkin’.”
The sergeant, when spoken to about the attempted robbery, instantly recognized the mulatto.