The summer of Davey's first year's work with his father was the driest the early settlers had known in the South.
A breathless, insistent heat brooded over the hills, their narrow valleys and the long, bare Wirree plains. The grass stood stiff and straw-like by the roads and in the cleared paddocks, rustling when anything moved in it. Hordes of straw-coloured grasshoppers lay in it, whistling and whispering huskily, or rose with whirring wings when anything disturbed them. The skies, faded to grey, gave no promise of rain, and when the sun set it left a dull, angry flush—the colour of a black snake's belly—behind the hills.
The lesser mountain streams dried up. The creek that ran through Cameron's paddocks became a mere trickle. There was only one deep pool left of it. In that only enough water remained to keep the household going for a month, when Donald Cameron mustered, and he, Davey, and the stockmen drove the cattle to the Clearwater River, ten miles away to the south-west. It was still in good condition and Cameron held three hundred acres of the river frontage there. He was better off than most of the hill folk who, after driving their cattle a dozen miles or so for water, had to pay high prices for paddocks to run them in.
Every man of Cameron's was away at the Clearwater, and Mrs. Cameron and Jenny alone at the homestead, the afternoon that Deirdre came riding up out of the misty depths of the trees.
For days a heavy, yellowish-grey haze had covered the hills. Mrs. Cameron could not from her doorway see the slopes of the ranges behind the house. The mist hung like a pall over the trees, seeming to stifle the wild life of them. Not a twitter of birds was heard. Parroquets, breaking the dun-coloured mist with the scarlet and blue and green of their wings and breasts, dashed over the clearing, chattering hoarsely. Now and then they rose from the orchard with shrill screams, as Jenny drove them away from the few shrivelled plums left on the trees by flapping a dish-cloth at them. The air was full of the smell of burning.
"The fires have been bad on the other side of the ranges," Deirdre told Mrs. Cameron, as she came into the yard and slipped her bridle from Socks' neck. "Father is taking our poddies and cows, and Steve's, to the Clearwater."
"Yes," Mrs. Cameron said, "some men on the roads told us a few days ago that we'd better get our beasts out of the back paddocks in case the fires come this way."
Deirdre caught Socks by his forelock; but instead of turning him into the paddock behind the stables as she ordinarily did, she led him into one of the fern-spread, earthern-floored stalls and slammed the door on him.
"A man at Steve's this morning said some of the people on the other side 've been burnt out," she said, "The fires swept over the bush as if it were a grass paddock. Martin's, at Dale, is burnt down, and he said that some of the children going home from the Dale school were burnt to death."
Mrs. Cameron exclaimed distressfully.
"The fires came up so quickly they couldn't get home before them," Deirdre continued. "And when they turned to go back the flames were all round. Father sent me up. Davey and Mr. Cameron being away, he thought you mightn't know."
"If the fires are at Dale—"
There was a flicker of anxiety in Mrs. Cameron's eyes.
"They've travelled over forty miles already," Deirdre said. "And father says if the wind changes we'll get them up here for sure. They may sweep right on, as it is, and miss us. But he said it would be madness to try to fight them—with only the three of us, and if they do come this way to get down to the pool at once. He said he'd try to get here if the wind changes."
Once or twice there had been scrub fires in the summer, and Mrs. Cameron, with everybody else on the place, had helped to beat out the quickly-running, forked flames which tried to make their way across the paddocks of the clearing to the house and sheds. She had carried water for the men beating, when there was water to spare, and they had dipped their bags and branches of green gum leaves into the water and slashed at the flames in the grass.
"There are beaters and bags by the barn," she said, "I cut the beaters after Davey and his father had gone, thinking we might want them."
She meant to make a fight for her home if the fires came that way, Deirdre realised.
The afternoon wore away slowly. Mrs. Cameron had few treasures; but she made a bundle of them—a Bible, some of Davey's baby clothes, an old-fashioned gold-rimmed brooch with a mosaic on black stone that Donald Cameron had given her and desired her to wear with the black silk dress he had insisted on her having and appearing in, occasionally, when people began to call him the Laird of Ayrmuir. The dress was more an object of veneration than anything else; but she wrapped it, and the ribband and the piece of lace that she wore with it, into the bundle, and put them, with her spinning wheel and a pair of blue vases that had been her first parlour ornaments, on the back verandah where they would be easy to get if the fires threatened the house.
Deirdre moved restlessly about out of doors, watching the haze on every side of the clearing for any sign of a break in it.
"Are there any animals on the place, Mrs. Cameron?" she asked, late in the afternoon.
"Only a couple of cows and Lass," Mrs. Cameron replied. "They're in the top paddock."
"I'll run them down," Deirdre said.
Straddling Socks, and calling to the toothless old cattle dog who lay dozing on his paws before the kitchen door, she went to the hill-top and brought down the cows and Lass a few minutes later.
"Keep 'em there, Jock!" she said and left the old dog shepherding them in the yard behind the barns.
While she was away, Mrs. Cameron and Jenny had bundled half a dozen hens and a game rooster into a big wicker crate.
Just before sunset they went to the hill-top together, Mrs. Cameron and Deirdre, and Jenny buzzing before them.
Not a puff of air stirred the tawny curtain that obscured the hills. At a little distance the trees stood motionless. The light leaves of the young gum saplings hung, down-pointed, with a stillness that had tragedy in it. Faint and far away in the silence though was a rushing murmur. The smell of burning that had been in the air for days came with a harsher tang. Darkness was making way against the smoke-haze.
Neither Deirdre nor Mrs. Cameron spoke, staring into it.
A flock of parroquets flew out of the haze and scattered across the clearing with shrill, startled screams. A little brown feathered bird dropped into the grass. Deirdre picked it up.
"Its wings are singed," she said quickly, "and they're quite hot still! It can't have flown far."
Tense and alert, she threw back her head. A puff of wind, feather light, almost imperceptible, touched her face.
"It's coming from the west," she breathed.
"Will you take the animals to the pool, Deirdre," Mrs. Cameron said sharply. "Jock'll keep them there. Jenny, you bring the beaters up here. I'll stay and watch to see if the fire breaks. If the wind's from the west, it'll strike us first here."
When Deirdre returned from the pool, where she had left Lass, the crate of fowls, and the cows with the old dog standing guard over them, Mrs. Cameron was already beating an arrow of flame that had struck the paddock on the hill-top, and Jenny on the other edge of the fences was also beating.
Darkness had fallen. The glare of the fire was visible above the thick standing wall of haze.
Deirdre saw a glittering line break through the grass at a little distance from Mrs. Cameron, and seizing one of the green branches Jenny had thrown down in the centre of the paddock, beat the fire until it went out. Other threads of fire appeared near her, and she followed them along the fence, slashing with the branch until they died down, leaving blackened earth and breaths of virulent blue smoke.
"Stay near the top of the hill, Deirdre," Mrs. Cameron called, "and watch to see if there's a break on the front clearing, or the pool side, or near the sheds!"
Then the fire began to show in a dozen places at once, wriggling lizard-like through the dry, palely-gleaming grass. Beating became automatic, an unflagging lashing and thrashing, and watch had to be kept that the enemy was not attacking in another part of the clearing. The blackened earth smoked under a dead flame one moment, the next a spark kindled and wispish fire was running through the grass again. Far down the hillside, through the smoke mists, to Deirdre on the top, Mrs. Cameron and Jenny looked wraith-like in their white cotton dresses.
The fire in the trees, of which these swift, silent runners in the grass were fore-warners, was still some distance off. But they could hear the crash of falling trees, the rush and roar of the flames in the tangled leafage, shrill cries of the wild creatures of the bush, the blare and bellowing screams of cattle.
Mrs. Cameron's light skirt caught fire. Jenny beat it out with her hands. She and Mrs. Cameron fell back a moment.
The glare lighted the whole of the clearing. In the valley flashing shafts of flame could be seen. They leapt athwart clouds of smoke which drove, billowing, across the sky, sprayed by showers of sparks.
"Mrs. Cameron!" Deirdre screamed warningly as a fire-maddened steer leapt into the paddock and careered across it into the darkness on the other side.
The heat was suffocating. The heavy, acrid smoke in their lungs made their heads reel. Deirdre was fighting a brilliant patch of flames half-way across the paddock when Mrs. Cameron called to her.
"It's no good, child!" she said. Her face was dim with smoke, her hands burnt and blackened. "It's no good trying to do any more, we must go now."
They ran from the hill-top to the house, Mrs. Cameron caught up her bundle, Jenny, the blue vases and the spinning wheel, and Deirdre, taking Socks from the stable in which he was beginning to whinny with fear, led him down the track in front of the house. They were half way across the clearing when Mrs. Cameron came to a standstill. Flames had eaten their way up the paddock and lay across the track.
"We're cut off," she said.
"What can we do?" Deirdre asked. "There's no time to lose."
Jenny screamed, dancing up and down, beside herself with terror and excitement: "We're cut off! Cut off!"
She dropped one of the vases she was carrying, and it broke in a thousand pieces.
"I don't know," Mrs. Cameron said slowly. Her eyes wandered to the broken pieces of the vase.
For a moment Deirdre's brain was paralysed too. She stood staring down the track. All the terrible stories of the fires, of people who had been burnt to death, flashed into her mind.
A shout was raised behind them.
"It's father!" she cried.
The Schoolmaster dashed round the corner of the house. His face was blackened and had angry weals where the fire had lashed it. His eyebrows and beard were singed close to his head. At a glance he took in the situation. His horse with head hung was blowing like a bellows.
"Davey's just behind me!" he gasped, looking at Mrs. Cameron. "Mr. Cameron and he didn't know the fires were making this way till I told them; then he sent Davey. I came ... to give him a hand. Never thought we'd get here—miles of fire across the road. Get a couple of blankets, Deirdre, and we'll make a dash for the creek."
Deirdre ran back to the house, tore the blankets from the beds inside and threw them on to the verandah. He dipped three of them in a bucket of water that stood by the kitchen door, wrapped her in one, and Mrs. Cameron and Jenny in the others.
Davey swung into the yard on an all but spent horse.
"Keep her going, Davey," the Schoolmaster cried, "and get down to the water. I'll look after your mother. Deirdre, you take Jenny up behind you. Fly along and let down the slip panel. Socks'll stand the grass fire if you keep him at it."
Davey and Deirdre dashed across the smouldering and smoking paddock, putting their horses blindly towards the corner of the fence where the slip-rails were already down.
Trees on the edge of the clearing behind the house were already roaring, wrapped in the smoke and flaming mantle of the fire. A shower of sparks thrown up by a falling tree scattered over the stable and barns.
A hoarse yelping, the cackling of fowls and the wild terrified lowing of the cows, came from the pool. Davey rode into it, hustled the cows into the centre, and took the old sheep-dog up on his saddle. Socks, with Deirdre and Jenny on his back, splashed in after him. The Schoolmaster and Mrs. Cameron followed a few moments later. He had caught up her spinning wheel and she was clutching her bundle and the other blue vase.
The fire did not reach the trees above the pool till it had swept the orchards, sheds, and house on the brow of the hill.
Mrs. Cameron watched it devouring them. Every line of the sheds and barns, the eaves and corners of the home that Donald and she had made, was struck against the glare.
The stables fell with a crash. Flames went up from the new weatherboard corner of the house.
"It's like watching someone you love die slowly," she cried.
A breath of wind brought a shower of blackened and burning leaves. By a flank movement the fire was sweeping towards them. The wind springing up gave it zest; it sprang in long brilliant leaps over the quivering tops of the trees. Davey and the Schoolmaster dropped from their horses. Mrs. Cameron, Deirdre and Jenny crouched in the water till the fury of the flames had passed over their heads. Davey had his hands full to keep the cows from breaking away, mad with terror. Socks, the most restive and mettlesome of the horses, started and whinnied as burning leaves struck him. Deirdre threw her wet blanket over him and cowered next to him under it, murmuring soothingly: "There now! Steady, old boy! Steady, my pretty!"
The Schoolmaster held his own horse and Lass, startled out of her peaceful phlegm by the terrifying roar and heat.
Even when the flames had raced on over the tree-tops it was not safe to leave the pool. The men and women in it stood in water to their waists for hours, a red haze enveloping them. The blankets dried in a few minutes. The bush behind them through which the fire had passed showed trees stripped of their greenery and outlined with glowing embers. Some of the dead trees beside the pool burned dully, and fluttering red and blackened leaves drifted from the saplings.
Once Jenny had to dip to her neck as a spark of fire caught her dress.
"Look out, Mrs. Cameron!" Deirdre cried sharply, hearing a crack and seeing a glowing bough waver over Davey's mother.
The Schoolmaster brushed Mrs. Cameron aside, and the bough struck his face. Deirdre uttered a low cry. Davey, too, had seen the Schoolmaster's movement.
"Are you hurt, Mr. Farrel?" he asked anxiously.
"No, it isn't anything at all!" the Schoolmaster replied brusquely, with a half laugh.
Mrs. Cameron herself did not realise what had happened.
To the glare of the fire and the hot red mists, a few hours before dawn, succeeded a heavy darkness, lit only by the columns of dead trees burning to ember.
The night seemed endless. When the first wavering gleam came in the eastern sky it revealed the blackened fringe of the trees, their green waving draperies scorched and fire-eaten, where the fire, like a ravening monster, had half-consumed them and passed on.
The wind had swept the haze and the smoke before it. The bosom of the earth lay bare of the light, dry, wanly-golden grass that had covered it; and from the paddocks and blackened forest thin spirals and breaths of bluish smoke rose and drifted. The peaceful space of trees and the summer-dried grasses about the Ayrmuir homestead were gone. Charred outlines of sheds and what of the house was still left, stood on the brow of the hill.
In the wan light, the pool mirrored the desolation and the haggard and weary men and women who stood in it. Chilled and cramped from being in the water so long, exhausted with the anxieties of the night, they ventured warily back to the still hot earth.
Mrs. Cameron's eyes turned first to her son. His face was grimed with smoke and leaf smuts. There were angry red flushes on it where scraps of burning foliage had struck him. Deirdre's and Jenny's clothes hung to them, scorched and dripping; there were burnt holes in Mrs. Cameron's own dress. Farrel and Davey were drenched to the skin.
The Schoolmaster had tied a handkerchief over his face, covering one eye.
In the first light of the dawn Deirdre exclaimed when she saw it.
"Father," she cried, "you're hurt."
"I'm all right," he said irritably.
She went over to him and lifted the handkerchief.
His face was curiously wrung with pain and blanched beneath the tan and smoke-grime. A clammy sweat beaded on his forehead.
"Hold your tongue, Deirdre," he muttered. "It's only a bit of a burn."
Mrs. Cameron was gazing at the ruins of her home.
"What is it?" she asked, hearing his voice, low as it as pitched. "Oh, you've got a bad burn?"
She went towards him, distress in her eyes.
"It's nothing at all; it doesn't matter!" He edged away from her so that she should not see. "When you and Davey are fixed up, Mrs. Cameron, Deirdre and I must get along and see how Steve and the school fared."
They found some flour, bread and tea in stone jars among the ruins of the kitchen. Davey milked the cows. Mrs. Cameron and Jenny built a fire in the yard, and when they had all breakfasted on the scorched bread and some tea, Mrs. Cameron wanted to put flour on the Schoolmaster's burn. But he said that it was not worth bothering about and would have nothing done for it.
For months after the fires every settler in the hills was felling and carting timber. New homes were built on the débris of the old. Scarcely a house in the district had escaped the hunger of the flames. A burnt-out family lived in a tent, in a lean-to of bagging and bark, or in what was left of the walls, roofs and doors of houses, jammed together to form some sort of shelter against the weather.
Every pair of hands were busy trying to get the new homes up before the autumn rains; and money was scarce. Most of the settlers had lost cattle and horses as well as their homesteads, sheds and crops.
The wind that had driven the smoke and flames billowing before it brought a downpour which quenched the fire the morning after it had swept the southern slopes of the hills. For days it rained steadily. Light vertical showers soaked into the blackened earth. There was every prospect of a good season to make up for the damage done by the fires. Rain on fired earth makes for fertility, good grain, fat stock and an abundant harvest. The settlers worked like beavers to be ready for it, the prospect of a good season heartening their labours and leavening their disappointment at having again to do all the building and fencing that had been done only a few years before.
The only places in the district that remained a charred monument to the fires were the school and the school-master's cottage.
The Schoolmaster and Deirdre were living at Steve's again. By a miracle the shanty had escaped the fires; it remained standing when scarcely another house in the countryside did. Steve and two teamsters who had been hung-up on the roads had spent the night watching that flying sparks did not catch its splintery grey shingles. A corrugated iron roof had saved it, they said, although there was a good clearing on either side of the shanty.
For the first few days after the fires, while the rain lasted, Steve's had been stretched to the limit of its capacity to shelter homeless men, women and children. The men camped as best they might in the bar, in the kitchen, and on the verandahs. Mrs. Ross, Jess, Deirdre, and Mrs. Mackay, her baby, and three small boys, slept in one room. And when Steve heard that Mrs. Morrison and Kitty, who had wrapped themselves in wet blankets and crept into a corrugated iron tank while the fires were raging around them, had no shelter but the tank during the rain, the Schoolmaster went to bring them into the shanty, and Steve and the Ross boys rigged a wind and rain screen of boughs and bagging round the verandah to make another room for them.
Deirdre took charge of the domestic arrangements, though everybody lent a hand. Notwithstanding the terrible experiences every member of the house party had passed through, there was much more laughing than sighing, much more finding of humour in every phase of awkward predicaments than dilating on dangers and difficulties. Losses were discussed as the women helped Deirdre to make big, savoury stews and put bumper loaves on the ashes of Steve's hearth, but it was always with concluding exclamations of gratitude that "things were no worse." At Dale, only a few miles on the other side of the ranges, three mothers were weeping for little ones caught in the flames and burnt to death on their way home from school. No lives had been lost on the southern slope of the hills.
All day the men were out riding in the rain, trying to get a better idea of the damage done. They ran up fences, mustered stray cattle, and in the evening brought back pitiful accounts of beasts burned to death in the gullies and dry creek-beds. When they sat with the women round the fire in Steve's kitchen, their great, green-hide boots steaming before it, breathless stories of fights with the fires were told. Most of the men had been away taking cattle to water when the homesteads were attacked. The flames had leapt the crest of the range and circled the clearings with incredible speed. The women had to do the best they could to save the children, the animals left on the farms, and the buildings, and many a good fight had been waged before they sought safety themselves.
It rained steadily for three days; then the sunshine gleamed and Steve's house-party broke up.
The men, restless and eager to repair the damage that had been done, were off at dawn; the women and children followed a few hours later, in lumbering carts and carry-alls. Some of them were going to make a lean-to of boughs and bagging, or of oilskins before night, and some were going for stores to the Port, or to the new township that was springing up about the Wirree river. There was bound to be plenty of work for every pair of hands for months to come.
While everybody was busy, felling, fencing, splitting, and running up new buildings, it was rumoured that the Schoolmaster and Deirdre were going to leave the hills.
Davey had said good-bye to the Schoolmaster.
"Well, I'll be going now," he said, moving away clumsily.
He had said all he could, though there was not much of that. Most of what he wanted to say remained deep within him. He could not dig it up. The words to express his feeling would not come. He had muttered something about "passing that way" and having come in "to say good-bye," when he entered the big, bare room at Steve's.
He had not seen Deirdre, nor the Schoolmaster, since the night of the fires. His father had kept him busy; and with all the work of the new buildings going up at Ayrmuir there was plenty to do. He talked of it for a while in a strained, uninterested fashion.
"Deirdre told me mother put up a great fight for the house," he said, "but of course the old man doesn't give her credit for that—thinks he could have saved it, if he had been on the spot in time. I wish he had been there. I'd like to 've seen if he could've beaten a fire—with that wind against him. I might've been with mother a bit earlier and been able to help her, if I'd had a decent nag—and that's what I told him—but I'm not likely to get one. The expense of the new buildings has got him down, and he's mad because Nat left a couple of hundred yearlings in one of the back paddocks. We ran in about a hundred of 'em last week—found some burnt to cinders—the others 've got away."
Awkwardly, uncertainly, he shifted his feet. He did not want to go, to say the final words, and yet he did not know how to stay. Farrel understood that and kept him talking longer. He was still wearing a bandage over his left eye.
"Your eye's all right, isn't it?" Davey asked. "It isn't seriously hurt? Mother was asking me the other day if it was better. She doesn't know how it happened, Mr. Farrel."
"How what happened?" Farrel asked.
A spasm of pain twitched his lean, sunburnt features. He was sitting with his back to the light on a low bench under the window.
"How you got that burn about your eyes," said Davey. "But I saw. If you hadn't tried to prevent the branch falling on mother, the way she was standing, it would have come down on her face."
"It might have fallen on any of us."
The Schoolmaster spoke sharply.
"I hope you're not going to have any trouble with it," Davey said.
"No, of course not."
Dan rose from his seat under the window.
"You'll be wanting to say good-bye to Deirdre, too, won't you, Davey?"
He went across to the door and called into the next room:
"Davey's going, Deirdre!"
But though a muffled sound of someone moving came from it, there was no answer.
He called again; but still there was no reply.
"She must have gone to bring in the cows for Steve," the Schoolmaster said. "Never mind, I'll tell her you left a message for her."
"Yes," said the boy, folding and re-folding his hat.
But it did not seem the same thing as seeing Deirdre and saying good-bye to her himself.
"Mind, if there's any books you're wanting, or any way I can help you, if you want to study more, you can always let me know, and I'll be glad to do anything I can for you," the Schoolmaster said. "Steve will pass a letter on to me. I don't know where we'll settle at first, or just what we're going to do, but he'll generally know our whereabouts. And there's one other thing I'd like to say, Davey, you can always be sure of a friend in the world. If you get into a scrape, or any sort of trouble, will you remember that?"
They gripped hands.
"Thank you, Mr. Farrel," Davey muttered. "But I wish you weren't going," he added, desperately.
"I wish we weren't too," Farrel said with a sigh, "but then you see people don't want to build the school again. They don't think there's the same need for one now. Most of the girls I've been teaching for the last few years can teach the children coming on well enough. And besides, there's talk of Government schools being set up everywhere."
"Yes."
Davey's countenance was one of settled gloom.
"Good-bye."
The Schoolmaster wrung his hand.
Davey found himself lifting his rein from the docked sapling in the shanty yard.
Two other horses, with reins hung over the post, stood before Steve's bar; a couple of cattle dogs lay at their heels nosing the dust. The fowls scratching in the stable-yard spread their wings and cackled as he turned out of the yard to the road.
"So-long, Davey," the Schoolmaster called from the verandah.
"S'-long," Davey replied.
The loose gravel rolled under his mare's feet as she slipped and slid down the hill, the reins hanging loose on her neck. He looked straight before him, trying to understand the state of his mind. He had not expected to be so disturbed at taking leave of the Schoolmaster. Then he remembered that he had not seen Deirdre—to say good-bye to her, he thought.
For the first time he realised that she was going away—going out of his life. Perhaps that realisation had been at the bottom of his thought all the time; but it struck him suddenly, viciously, now.
He was looking into the distance, dazed by the tumult within him, when a blithe voice called him, and glancing up he saw Deirdre standing on the bank by the roadside.
"There you are, Davey!" she cried. "Going away without saying a word to me! I'd a good mind to let you go."
She was breathless with running across the paddocks to reach the turn in the road. The wind had blown her dark hair into little tendrils about her face, and there was a sparkle of anger in her eyes.
"I heard what you said to father," she went on, "and if you haven't anything better to say to me, I'll go back."
Davey gazed at her. He gazed as though he had never seen her before. She seemed another creature, nothing like the ragged little urchin who had climbed trees with him and ridden to school straddle-legged behind him; nothing like the sedate housewife his mother had made of her, either.
Deirdre stared at him too, as though he were quite different from the Davey she had known. A shy smile quivered on her lips. She plucked nervously at trails of the scarlet-runners which overhung the bank, and put the end of a runner between her teeth and chewed the stalk.
Davey saw that her lips were as scarlet as the flowers that, like broken-winged butterflies, hung at the end of the trail.
He slid off his horse and stood facing her. His limbs were trembling.
"What's the matter?" she asked, a little distress creeping into her voice.
Davey's face was tense and colourless.
To the trouble which had surprised him that day, a strange soft thrill was added when she put the runner stalk with its scarlet flowers between her teeth. It struck him with a strange pang that Deirdre was beautiful, that her lips were the same colour as the flowers hanging near them.
It was all translated, this emotion of his, in the shamed, shy smile that came into his face as he stared at her.
Deirdre understood well enough.
She scrambled down the bank and went to him.
"You are sorry we're going, aren't you, Davey?" she asked.
He nodded, finding he could not speak.
The gloom of the forest was closing round them, the sunset dying. She sighed and slipped her hand into his.
After a few moments, as he said nothing, she spoke again.
"It'll be all changed, I suppose, when father and I come back," she said. "Wewillcome back, by and by, sometime, you know, father says. We'll come to see Steve, perhaps. But we'll be grown up ... quite, you and I, Davey. You'll be married, and I—"
"What?"
Davey had wakened.
"I was saying, we'll be grown-up and married, perhaps by the time we see each other again," Deirdre murmured. "None of the times'll come again like the ones when we went home on Lass, or in the spring-cart, or walked, and chased wallies and went after birds' nests. I wish they could! I wish I could be just ten when I come back and give you a race down the road, Davey."
Her voice ran on quickly, but Davey's mind stuck on her first words.
"There's only one girl I'll be married to," he said.
"Yes." Her eyes leapt to his. "Jess Ross!"
"Who says so?"
"She does." Deirdre laughed. "She says she's the only girl you've ever kissed. And her mother says—"
"When she was a kid, they put her face up to me; but I never kissed her—or any girl," Davey said.
"I didn't believe it, of course!"
Deirdre laughed softly.
"Why?"
"Well—I thought—if there was any girl you'd be wanting to kiss, it would be me, Davey!"
The bright shy glance that flew towards him, and the quiver of her lips, fired the boy.
His arms went out to her. He caught her shoulder and held her to him. For an instant he did not know whether it was night or day. But when he withdrew from that moment of unconsciousness, wild, uncontrollable joy and possession, his eyes were humid. And her eyes beneath his were like pools in the forest which the fallen-leaf mould has darkened and the twilight striking through the trees makes a dim, mysterious mirror of.
"Deirdre," he whispered, as if he had never before said her name, and to say it were like singing in church.
He kissed her again, slowly and tenderly; the first pressure of her lips had made a man of him.
"You're my sweetheart, aren't you, Deirdre?" he said exultingly, holding her in his arms and gazing down at her. "When you come back we'll be married."
"Yes," Deirdre whispered.
Her eyes reflected the glow of her heart.
"I've always meant to marry you, Davey, though I've sometimes pretended I liked Mick Ross, or Buddy Morrison better." She drew a little sigh. "But I'm so glad it's all settled, now ... and we're really going to marry each other."
The sunset had died out of the sky, and the forest was dark about them when they kissed and whispered "good-bye—for a little while." Davey could scarcely say the words. He watched Deirdre as she fled up hill to the shanty; then leaping on his horse he sent her clattering down hill, all his young manhood—the tumult of his love, awakened senses, rejoicing and dreams—orchestrating within him.
In the earliest days of Port Southern, settlers tracking inland or further along the coast, had to cross the Wirree, driving their cattle and horses before them. The shallows of the river where they crossed began to be called the Wirree Ford. The tracks converged there, and it was not long before a shanty appeared on the left bank a few hundred yards from the broad and slowly-moving river.
The Wirree came down from the hills and flowed across the plains at the foot of the ranges. The whole of the flat land it watered was spoken of as the Wirree river district, or the Wirree. The stream emptied itself into the waters of Bass Straits. Opposite was Van Diemen's Land, the beautiful green island on which penal settlements had been established. Men had been known to escape from it to the mainland. They made the dangerous passage of the Straits in open boats, and sometimes were picked up in an exhausted condition by a frigate policing the coast, or a trader, and sent back to Hobart Town or Port Arthur. Sometimes their dead bodies were tossed by the sea on the shores they had been trying to reach, and sometimes, steering by the muddy waters of the river that flowed out from the nearest point opposite the Island, bearing silt and drift-wood for a couple of miles into the sea, they reached the land of promise and freedom.
As the beaten grass path along the seaboard became the main stock route between Port Southern and Rane, a newly-founded settlement at the further eastern end of the coast, a township of curious mushroom growth, cropped up about the Wirree Ford and McNab's shanty.
It was a collection of huts, wattle and dab, whitewashed, for the most part; but some of them were of sun-baked sods, plastered together, or of the stones which were scattered over the plains or filled the creek beds. McNab's weatherboard shanty, with its sign-board of a black bull, with red-rimmed eyes on a white ground, was by far the most pretentious. The history of these dwellers about McNab's was a matter of suspicion. They arrived from nowhere, out of the night, silently, and it was surmised, crept up the river in the cockle-shell boats which had brought them over the Straits and were sunk in the slowly-moving river when they had served their purpose.
The fertile flats, stretching to the edge of the mountains, had been taken up before McNab got his holding on an arm of the Wirree. He set about acquiring the selvedge of the plains which was cut off from the finer, more arable land by a scrubby line of densely growing ti-tree. Most of the Wirree Ford men ran cattle on these strips of coarse-grassed land, thrashed by the sea breezes. But they were no sticklers for the niceties of boundaries and property laws. They drove their first, wild-eyed, scraggy herds whither they listed, a cursing, blasphemous crew, none dared gainsay them. It was reckoned better to have the good-will than the enmity of the Wirree river men. The body of a settler who had threatened "to have the law of them" for grazing their beasts on his land was, a few days afterwards, found in the river, drifting with the tide out to sea. Some of the Wirree men made a living as fishermen. Others maintained themselves by a desultory farming. They ploughed the grey land of the seaboard with wooden hand-ploughs. But many of them thrived on what they could make out of the stockmen and drovers who passed through the township on their way to Rane or to the Port.
McNab was powerful enough even in those days, and many and ingenious were the stories he invented to account for the presence of men who came to the Wirree Ford unexpectedly.
As the settlement grew, it did justice to the rumoured accounts of its origin. McNab's was the meeting place of stockmen, drovers and teamsters on the southern roads, and the carouses held there were night-long. It was recognised as a hotbed of thieves and ruffians by the roadsters, and no man of substance or any pretensions at all, would lodge the night in any of the mud-built huts within a stone's throw of the river.
Before long, the Wirree men had fat cattle to dispose of. An open space between the huts, not far from McNab's, was used as a sale yard. It was then that settlers who wanted good prices for their beasts had to drive them to the Wirree market. A better bargain was driven in the Wirree square than anywhere else. So Wirree Ford became Wirreeford, and thrived and prospered until it was the busiest cattle market in the south.
To a certain extent, its prosperity threw an air of respectability over it. At first, cattle-owners and farmers from the hills entered the township in the morning and left it before the shadows of night fell. They did their business, and left the Wirree not much better off for their coming, venturing into the shanty for a midday meal only, and drinking sparingly, if at all, of the curious, dark spirits it vended.
Then stores were opened. There were less fearsome comings and goings. Mrs. Mary Ann Hegarty set up a shanty and proceeded to business with an air of great propriety. Women and children were brought into the township for the cattle sales. Sale days became weekly holidays. They meant the donning of festive ribbands by the women and children, the climbing into high spring-carts and buggies, and driving along the winding track from the hills to the township, where groceries, dress stuffs and household furnishings could be bought, and stowed in the back of the carts for the home journey.
Sale days, however, still ended in gaming and drinking brawls at the shanties, and sometimes in the dropping of a heavy, still body into the Wirree, when the tides would carry it out to sea.
It was the disappearance of a young farmer from the West Hills after a night at the Black Bull that made Donald Cameron decide to take action. He, backed by other farmers and well-to-do hill settlers, made representations to the Port authorities as to the lawless character and conduct of Wirreeford township.
A trooper who rode into it a few days later was pelted with stones, tarred and feathered, and sent back to Port Southern.
Then a building was rim-up on the outskirts of the township—a ramshackle house built of overlapping, smooth, pine shingles. It was whitewashed, so that it stood out on the darkest nights to remind roisterers that law and order were in their midst. And as soon as it was finished, John M'Laughlin, a police-sergeant from the Port, took up his residence in it. He mitigated the impression that undue severity would be meted out to evil-doers from the new police head-quarters, by genially brawling with most of his neighbours at McNab's as soon as he arrived, very successfully intimating that he was far too long-sighted, easy-going and convivial a soul to interfere with the Wirree's little way of doing things.
Donald Cameron was well known in Wirreeford when it began to be a cattle market of importance. So was Davey—Young Davey—as he was called when he began to go regularly to the sales in the years that followed the fires.
Cameron worked all day in the sale-yards with his men. He drove in his own beasts in the morning, threw off his coat for the drafting and, when the sales were over, went out of the township, a stolid, stooping figure, on his heavy bay cob. Although he sometimes made close on a thousand pounds on a day's sales, he went out of the township, as often as not, without spending a penny.
It was said that he was the wealthiest man in the countryside, and as "mean as they make 'em." Yet his disinclination to spend money was made subservient to his sense of justice; and a spirit of matter-of-fact integrity that he carried round with him made the Wirree people regard him with suspicious awe. The iron quality of his will, the hard, straight gaze of his eyes, were difficult things for men with uneasy consciences to encounter. Because he was the first man in the country, it was reckoned a matter of prestige to have the patronage of Donald Cameron of Ayrmuir, whether for a meal, store order, or any job whatever. In jest, half earnest, he was called the Laird of Ayrmuir.
Wirree men said that Thad McNab loathed Donald Cameron "as the devil loathes holy water."
McNab was not the devil in their eyes, nor Donald Cameron holy water, but the saying perhaps suggested to them the composite forces of the two men. Thad, with his twisted mind, his cruel eyes, his treacherous underhand ways, stood to them for something in the nature of the power of evil. Donald Cameron, with his harsh integrity, his unbending virtue, his parsimony, and sober respectability, stood for something in the nature of abstract good. They had the respect for him that people sometimes have for a standard which has been hung before their eyes, and which they have not been able to live up to. But Thad was their aider and abettor.
Thad, for all his tyrannies, blackmail, petulances, made life easier for them. They stood by him and blessed him, cursing Donald Cameron and his sort, who would have sent them back to the prison cells and torture of the Island. It was not from motives of sheer kindness that McNab stood by them, they knew, but because it paid him. Nevertheless, the thing worked out in the same way. Donald Cameron was more their enemy than Thad. Thad's feud with him amused them as much as a cock fight; their money was on their own bird, and they barracked for him, idly, light-heartedly, scoffing at his enemy.
Almost every man in the Wirree was in McNab's debt. He knew more about their lives and antecedents than was to their soul's comfort. They suspected that more than one of the men who had been taken back to the Island had been put away by McNab, and that those lean, crooked hands of his had fingered Government money—rewards for the capture of escaped convicts. But so long as they were in with Thad McNab, Wirreeford men with pasts that would not bear looking into thought they were all right. Although there were rumours of treacherous dealings on his part, with child-like simplicity, with the faith of the desperate, they trusted McNab, believing that he stood between them and the prisons of Port Arthur. They believed that if they were "in with Thad," they need not wake, sweating, out of their sleep at the thought of the "cat," or worry if, forgetful of consequences, they gave that tell-tale start at the clank and rattle of irons.
It was pretty well understood that Thad McNab and Sergeant M'Laughlin "worked" together. Thad had been hand-in-glove with him since he came to the Wirree River. The fact sometimes stood unruly spirits in good stead when there was a merry night at the Black Bull. But when there was an inconvenient accident over the cards once or twice, and when there was a hold-up on the Rane road just outside the township, too, it was conceded that M'Laughlin had earned his screw. Thad saw to it that occasionally he made an appearance of doing his duty. If it had been imagined at head-quarters that Sergeant M'Laughlin winked at irregularities in the application of the law at Wirreeford, he might have been moved on, and that would not have suited the landlord of the Black Bull, who would then have had another man to deal with, or have found that another man was dealing with him.
Donald Cameron made no secret of his attitude to McNab. After M'Laughlin had been several months in the township, and there was no outward or visible sight of his having mended its ways, Mr. Cameron made representation to the authorities at Port Southern, and through them to the powers that had their official residence in Melbourne, in respect to Thadeus McNab's position and breaches of the law in Wirreeford. He was clear in his own mind that there was a case against McNab; first, for harbouring convicts escaped from Van Diemen's Land; and secondly, for being the possessor of a still, and for turning it to account in sly grog making. John Ross, Mathew Morrison, and the rest of the hill folk and settlers at the farther end of the plains, upheld him in this effort to rid the district of McNab; but although an inquiry was made, nothing came of it.
Donald Cameron gained no extra popularity in the Wirree on the first of his counts. Thad's position was, if anything, strengthened by Cameron's hostility. Every man in the township knew that he had to stand by McNab, or McNab would not stand by him; therefore when an officer from the Port came to investigate conditions in Wirreeford, he found nothing to take exception to. He reported that the local police officer was efficient, and that complaints of the hill settlers were due to a personal rancour existing between Donald Cameron and the landlord of the Black Bull.
Thad flourished like a green bay tree after this failure to move him, and forged the weapon of a very serviceable hate against Donald Cameron. He kept it very carefully scabbarded, but occasionally it leapt forth, and its mettle was visible to all and sundry. Ordinarily, Thad kept a locked brain; it was only in rare transports of rage that he revealed anything of its crooked workings. And then those who saw them looked to their own behaviour, and were careful to do nothing that would bring them into its toils.
Probably nobody but Cameron himself thought McNab had swallowed that little business of the inquiry when, a few months later, he was fawning round him, telling him that dinners were to be served at the "Bull" on sale days, and that his patronage would be an esteemed favour. Those who heard him say: "Things has not been as they might have been, always, at the Black Bull, Mr. Cameron—you have had reason to complain in the past—but everything is goin' to be different for the future," could not believe their ears. It was very humbly, with a flattering deference, that McNab had asked "the laird" to help him to improve the tone of the place by occasionally having a meal in it.
Donald Cameron had been in the habit of taking his meat-pasty, or bread and cheese sandwich to the sale yards in his pocket. He ate his lunch there at midday when most of the men made tracks for the bar opposite. But after a while, he took his meals at the Black Bull, lowering not a whit of his dignity in the doing of it, and treating McNab as curtly in his own establishment as he did anywhere else. When he was down with rheumatics in the early spring, the place had open doors to Davey. He was served like a duke in it.
Young Davey promised to be a chip of the old block, the Wirree said. He worked as insatiably as the old man, and was no more than a roadmender by the look of him. His grey trousers had many a patch on them, and his hat was as weathered a bit of felt as was seen in the yards. He walked with the slouch of the cattle-men—men who have spent most of their days in the saddle.
When he flung off his hat, it was seen he was good-looking enough, with an air of breed about him, a something the Wirree did not quite get. There was a great deal of his mother in the cast of his features, and his eyes were grey and green like hers, but his mouth was Donald Cameron's set in a boy's face. Davey was a shy, awkward fellow and spoke as little as the old man, though it was acknowledged that if his hand was as rarely in his breeches' pockets as his father's, it was because there was nothing in them. It was well known that Donald Cameron worked his son like a convict, and kept him on short commons, giving him neither wages nor pocket-money, so that he blushed when a down-and-out blackguard asked him for the price of drink and he had not got it to give.
He fed with the old man, this young Davey Cameron, and was never seen in the bars. Few of the men who entered the shanties could say that they had had much to do with Cameron and his son, except John Ross and the Morrison boys, who occasionally dropped into McNab's. But they were of the same sort—hardworking, thrifty, God-fearing, respectable, homely people of the hills, who despised the Wirree River township, its antecedents, descendants, and associations, and did business with it only because business was better done there than anywhere else.
The Schoolmaster and Deirdre had been gone from the hills for over a year when Wirreeford began to make concessions for the sake of the younger generation.
Although cards were shuffled and dice were thrown at the Black Bull, when the rush-lights flickered in the windows after the sales, and the little fires of cow-dung—lighted before the doors of the houses to keep away the sandflies and mosquitoes—glowed in the dusk, sending up faint wreaths of blue smoke, Mrs. Mary Ann Hegarty threw open her parlour, and there was dancing in it until the small hours.
The hill people lent the countenance of their presence to days of out-door sports, and to the dancing at Mrs. Hegarty's on Christmas and New Year's day. The Ross boys danced with bright-eyed Wirree girls. Morrison's Kitty and some of the other girls from the hills learnt the reels and jigs that their parents had danced in the country beyond the seas, they were always talking of. The old people danced too. There were nights of wholesome, heart-warming merriment and the singing of old songs.
Only Donald Cameron and his wife held aloof from these festivities. But before long it was observed that Young Davey was going to the monthly dancing with the Rosses. He rode down from the hills with the boys and Jess. They made the Wirree streets ring as they galloped to Hegarty's, and their laughter streeled out on the wind behind them, as they went home in the early hours of the morning, when even the roisterers at the Black Bull had fallen asleep in uneasy attitudes about its verandahs.
It was not every day there was dancing at Mrs. Mary Ann's—only on Fridays, after the cattle sales.
And it was not every Friday that Pat Glynn could be got for the music. He wandered all over the country putting the devil into folks' heels. He was in the Port one day, in Wirreeford the next, then on to Rane, or off wandering somewhere over the ranges. Whenever word went round that Pat was coming the couples gathered from every direction. Whether they danced on a wooden floor or on the grass was a matter of little importance. There was always a merry time when Pat Glynn put up anywhere for the night.
He came trotting into Wirreeford on the day of the early November sales, about two years after Deirdre and the Schoolmaster had left the hills. The township was full of dust, cattle, and dogs; boys, yelling, drafting and beating beasts from one yard to another, men watching them, drovers, lean, sun-dried, hawk-eyed men, cattle-buyers, cattle-owners and auctioneers. Horses were hanging on loose reins about the sale-yards, or in rows with drooping heads along the hitching posts at the Black Bull and Mrs. Hegarty's. Two or three heavy family carry-alls were drawn up before the store where the women, with children about them, were shopping, buying lengths of calico, dress stuffs, or groceries and ironmongery, to take home to the hills.
Word that Pat Glynn was at Hegarty's went round like wildfire.
So at Mrs. Mary Ann's it was that all the miscellaneous crowd of the sale-yards foregathered. They danced until the blood boiled under weather-beaten, leathern faces, and the rising sweat left furrows in the dust of the road on them. Matted, lank, sun-bleached hair lay in wet streaky locks on foreheads marked with the line of hats that almost grew on them—the line beyond which the sunburn never travelled. Men, women, boys and girls of all ages, children, grandfathers and grandmothers, Pat danced them all to a state of breathless exhaustion.
As he tucked his fiddle under his chin and raked it with his long bow, his eyes gleamed with mischief and merriment. His arm went backwards and forwards so dexterously, with such agility, that the gay airs he played possessed him as well as everyone who heard them. Old men and women left their benches by the wall and skipped and trundled until the pine floor shook.
The only people who were not dancing were a young mother with a baby in her arms and a teamster too drunk to do more than hang by the doorpost. He attempted a few wild and hilarious movements, fell headlong and was dragged feet foremost to the door and thrown out, because he cumbered the floor. The young mother joggled her baby and sang softly in tune to Pat's music, enfolding the assembled company and Pat himself in her beaming smile.
It was incense to Pat's soul to see everybody within earshot moving. The clatter, rhythmic lift, shuffle and thump of heavily-shod feet was as good to his ears as any of the old airs he played.
His arm flying quicker and quicker, sent old and young along with the strain of his music, like corks on a stream. Heads bobbed, feet stamped busily. A catch of laughter flew out. The elderly, stout mother of a family called breathlessly: "Stop it, Pat! Stop it, ye villain!" But Pat only laughed and his fiddle arm flew faster, till the dancers dropped exhausted against the wall, or hung there gasping with a stitch in their sides. When he had tired them all out, he lifted his bow with a flourish and a shout of laughter.
The two that kept the floor longer than most others were Jess—Ross's Jess, as she was called—and young Davey Cameron. They were reckoned a fine pair of dancers. Pat had great pride in them. When everybody else had left the floor he made the pace faster and faster for them, till they whirled to a finish, watched and cheered by the crowd against the walls. Off-scourings and derelicts of the Wirree, whom Mrs. Hegarty would not have to dance in her parlour, had to amuse themselves by looking in the doorway, or by jigging as best they might out of doors under the star-strewn sky.
It was that night of the November sales, when Pat was at Hegarty's, that the Schoolmaster and Deirdre came back to the Wirree.
They put up at the Black Bull, and it was not until the dance was in full swing that they appeared in Mrs. Hegarty's doorway. Pat was speeding up a reel, his eyes kindling.
"Faith, it's a drop of the craythur you want to waken you up, Mick Ross," he called.
Catching up the air of his tune, he sang gaily, and the company joined in breathlessly at the top of its lungs.
He broke from the song into expostulation and explanation.
"There's the darlin' boy. Buddy Morrison," he cried, tears of laughter running down his withered cheeks. "But he'll break Morrison's daughter's back for her! Let you be gentle with the girl, Buddy. It's a young lady, sir, not a heifer ye have by the horns—"
It was when Davey and Jess were having their last fling against Pat's music, and he scraping for all he was worth to beat them in their whirling and turning, that Jess saw a tall, dark-eyed girl watching them on the outskirts of the people who had just stopped dancing. She knew her at once, her dark eyes, white skin, the black hair that swept back from her face. It was Deirdre—Deirdre grown very tall and lithe and straight-backed—Deirdre in a dark dress with a necklace of red beads about her neck and a blue ribband round her waist.
Jess knew what the look in her eyes meant as she watched the dancing; she knew and her heart exulted. Deirdre would see that Davey and she had become great friends while she was away. He had not seen the girl in the doorway. He flung Jess backwards and forwards, flushed and excited, spurred on by the music and the test of keeping step, losing no movement of hers, to be even with Pat when he drew his last chords. Jess flew with him. Davey saw no more of her than her sonsy face, surrounded with the fair wisps of curls. Her grey eyes came to him and her lips parted and smiled as her arms went out to him. She stumbled and fell breathlessly at the last; he had to hold her to prevent her falling.
When up at the far end of the room he recovered his breath, his eyes were shining. His laughter rang out, a gay challenge in it:
"How's that for a finish, Pat?"
"Oh, ye're a deevil, Davey!" the old man cried, mopping his forehead.
Jess had put herself before Davey and his view of the door; but he had moved to call to the fiddler.
He saw the group there and stood staring for a moment. The colour ebbed from his face. He recognised the Schoolmaster, though he wore a shade over one eye now, but it was the sight of the dark head, the turn of a girl's shoulder and back near him that was a shock to Davey. The great moment had come. Deirdre had returned.
She stood with her back to the room, men and women gathered about her and the Schoolmaster. Davey heard her voice ring out. The sound of it thrilled him and left him trembling. It seemed only yesterday that she had gone ... and yet it was ages—three years. They had written once or twice at first, but somehow the letters had stopped. He had not heard from her for a long time. What could he do? What a lot there would be to tell her. He wanted to show her his new horse, a sturdy red-bay that he had coveted on sight and had induced his father to buy. Would he ever be able to go and speak to her, he wondered, his legs shook so. Would he be able to speak? His throat ached. Did she know that he, Davey, her sweetheart, was there against the wall, so full of love for her that he could not move, that he could only gaze at her. If only she would come to him. If only the whole of Mrs. Mary Ann's room would fall away from them—leave them, just Deirdre and he, together. He did not see Jess, did not realise that she was watching him with a pain in her eyes at the spell-bound wonder and adoration of his.
"It's Deirdre," she said, as if for her the end of the world had come.
"Yes," he breathed.
He could hear Deirdre laughing and chattering with the men and girls who had been to school with her when she and the Schoolmaster lived in the hills. The Schoolmaster had gone out of doors again; but where he had been, a long, black-browed drover of Maitland's, Conal—Fighting Conal—was standing, leaning against the wall and smiling down on her. Beneath the inexplicable exhilaration, the tingling, thrilling joy which possessed Davey, a slow wrath surged, at the way Conal looked and smiled at Deirdre, and at the way she looked—her eyes leaping up to his—and smiled at Conal. But she was his, his sweetheart, and had promised to marry him, Davey told himself, and the resurgent joy at seeing her flooded him.
"Aren't you going to dance, Davey?" Jess asked anxiously, when Pat began to fiddle again.
"No," he said.
"If you're not going to get-up, can I have this one with Jess?" asked Buddy Morrison with restrained eagerness.
"What?" Davey asked, his eyes on Deirdre.
"If you're not getting-up, can I have this one with Jess?" repeated Bud Morrison. His sun-scorched face and ruddy hair was responsible for his youthful appearance although he was older by a couple of years than Davey.
He was Jess's most humble adorer, but his grief was that she would never look at him if Davey was looking at her.
"Oh, yes," Davey replied.
He watched Jess and Buddy Morrison go out among the dancers. His eyes flew back to where Deirdre had been standing. But she was dancing with Conal.
A lightning tremor of surprise flickered through him; he caught his breath. That anybody but himself would dance with Deirdre had not occurred to him. He made up his mind that he would go to her after the dance. What right had Conal to dance with her? He was caught in a cloud of troubled thought and dismay.
Davey watched them dancing, this tall slender girl with her hair knotted up on the nape of her neck and the long-limbed, bearded man who had come to the sales for Sam Maitland. He could dance. He and Deirdre were dancing as the people in Wirreeford had never seen folk dancing, and Conal's dark, handsome face was turned down to the girl's. It was not the dance he was thinking of, but her. There was a gleam in his eyes as they covered her; every movement was tender of her.
Jess, in a fury of impatience with her partner, dragged him off the floor. He was heavy and slow on his feet, missed the time, and muddled his steps. In order not to disgrace her own dancing she had to fall back against the wall.
When Deirdre came away from the dancers with her tall partner, Davey went round to where they were standing. Once only he had seen her flash a swift glance round the room, then her eyes had not rested on him at all, but skimmed past him like swallows in flight. He thought that she had not recognised him.
Now that he stood near her his heart throbbed pain-fully. She laughed and chattered with the people about her. Davey caught a word or two of her greetings to old schoolfellows. Conal bent over her appropriatingly. Deirdre flashed a smile at him as she talked.
Davey stood on the edge of the crowd. A little hurt feeling began to grow in him. Would he never catch her eye? Would she never look his way?
Pat was calling for another dance.
The little crowd shifted and drifted away from Deirdre.
Mick Ross had the temerity to ask her if she would dance with him.
Davey heard him, and he heard Long Conal drawl lazily in reply:
"The man that dances with Deirdre will have to reck'n with me to-night."
"Well, I'm not wanting to reck'n with you, Conal," Mick replied, laughing, and withdrew to find another partner.
Davey's eyes sparkled.
He walked up to where Deirdre stood in the doorway with the drover.
"Will you dance with me, Deirdre?" he said.
"Why!" she exclaimed blithely, much as he had heard her exclaim to a dozen others, "It's Davey Cameron grown up! I'd never 've known you, Davey, but for the scar on your neck where the calf kicked you. Do you remember the day we were taking him up to Steve's in the spring-cart?"
"Davey and I used to have great times at the school," she explained with a glance for Conal.
"This is Conal, you know, Long Conal, Davey—Fighting Conal—they call him, don't they?" she went on with a little mischievous inflection in her voice.
"Yes, I know," said Davey. "Will you dance with me, Deirdre?"
Few people south of the ranges did not know, or had not heard of Fighting Conal, of Sally, the yellow streak of a cattle dog, half dingo, that he swore by, and of his three parts bred mare, Ginger. "Ginger for pluck," Conal said, and that was why she got her name. Though he had his title to live up to, Conal was a prime favourite on the roads. It was rumoured that he had another name, but nobody ever bothered about it. Conal—Fighting Conal—was a good enough name for any man to go by, it was reckoned.
There was talk under the breath of cattle-duffing sometimes when he was mentioned. But it was always under the breath, for Conal was a man with a fist that could punish any reflections on his character as thoroughly as the fist of a man had ever been known to. But he was a lightsome swaggerer, a reckless, devil-me-care, good-natured sort of bully.
"Then if you know," said Conal coolly, "you'd better have gone home and to bed, young shaver, before havin' asked Deirdre to dance with you to-night. I don't like any interference with the partners I choose for meself."
It was all said with a lazy good-natured air. Conal was sure of himself. He reviewed with faint amusement this youngster who made claims to privileges that he had reserved to himself for the evening.
"Will you dance with me, Deirdre?" Davey asked again.
His eyes blazed; he trembled with anger.
"Well, I'm—"
Conal straightened and swore amazedly.
But Deirdre's hand caught his sleeve.
"We're missing all this dance," she said quickly. As she turned away on his arm, her eyes swung round to Davey. "Go and find Jess," she said, "you looked such a pretty couple dancing together when I came in."
Her laughter and light-hearted little speech stupefied Davey. He forgot his anger, forgot Conal, forgot the roomful of dancers stampeding merrily, forgot Pat Glynn and his music. He forgot everything, but that Deirdre was laughing at him. Her words tingled in his ears; he had heard her laughter—Deirdre, his sweetheart, was laughing at him—Deirdre who had promised—
He stumbled out of the room.