A sou'wester was tearing across the plains, threatening to sweep the whole Wirree township off its foundations and dash the fragments of the mud houses against the hills. It broke round the Black Bull with the noise of great guns, and in the pauses of its blowing the booming of the sea on the beaches five miles away could be heard.
When Davey burst open the door he brought a gust of wind into the tap-room that set the lights sputtering and flaring. Two of them went out. The glasses on McNab's bench danced as he hammered it with his fists.
"For two pins I'd thrash you," he yelled. "You got me into borrowing money from you. I was a blamed young fool! But what's your game? What do you mean playing fair to me and then giving me away to the old man. A neat way of bleeding him, that's what it was. Getting me in here drunk and then—"
The Schoolmaster was playing cards with a couple of men on an upturned box behind the door. He threw down his cards and took Davey's arm.
The boy threw it off.
"Leave me alone, Mr. Farrel," he cried. "I'd sweep the floor with the—the damned swine, if he were worth sweeping the floor with. You're all afraid of him. Well, I'm not! You see here, Mister McNab," he leant across the bar and his eyes burnt their way into the pale shifty eyes of Thad McNab. "I'll break every bone in your body if you ever interfere between me and mine again. D'you hear that? I don't know what you've got up your sleeve, and I don't care! You just keep it there, see, or it'll be the worse for you."
McNab had blenched at the boy's headlong passion. The quivering long arms seemed scarcely able to keep themselves off his miserable shoulders.
His skin was the gingery colour of his hair, and though he grinned feebly, looking everywhere but at Davey, there was not a man who did not see he was trembling. Thad McNab was a coward, everybody knew that. There was nothing in the world he feared more than the vengeance which might wreak itself on his miserable body. As Young Davey stamped out of the bar there was a rustle of movement, smothered oaths of surprise and amusement, a swinging of eyes after him with something of admiration and applause in them; but McNab was recovering himself. He gazed speechlessly after the boy too; there was a ghost of a smile on his face. His mind was working; his lips moved though no words came. The men who had wanted to cheer Young Davey shifted their opinions uneasily. There would be more to score to McNab's account yet, they imagined.
The Schoolmaster did not follow Davey out of the bar as he felt inclined to; but when the boy had gone McNab looked across at him.
"That's what comes of interferin', Farrel," he said.
"You'll know better another time, won't you, McNab," the Schoolmaster drawled, looking up from the cards he was holding. "It's a bad business getting between father and son."
McNab's smile changed.
"I was alludin' to your interferin' when I had a bit of business on hand, Mr. Farrel," he snarled.
"Had you a bit of business on, Thad?" the Schoolmaster asked. "Who with? Davey? And did I interfere? Well, now you beat me! Out with it! Let's hear all about it. We're all old friends here."
McNab's wrath surged so that he could not speak.
"There now!" Farrel cried. "He won't tell! Never mind, McNab, you came off very well! When Young Davey came in I thought he'd have you out on the road for a certainty, and he's a pretty bruiser. Showed him how to put up his fists myself a couple of years ago."
It was Dan's way of saying things, with a whimsicality, an inimitable geniality, tinged with sarcasm, that brought the house down.
When the men in the bar threw back their heads and stretched their lungs that night, Thad did not laugh. He stood, shivering, with gimlet flames in his eyes, his fingers twitching restlessly. There were drinks all round and the Schoolmaster played another rubber before he swung out of the shanty and into the wind that roared and beat over the plains.
Davey was waiting in the lee of the garden fence round Farrel's cottage, his little red mare set with her haunches against the wind.
"What is it, Davey?" the Schoolmaster asked when he saw him.
"It's this, Mr. Farrel," Davey said, on a short breath, "I've quarrelled with the old man. I want a job."
The cottage was in darkness. But after he had taken Davey to the stable and they had turned Red into it, they went indoors, and a light gleamed from the small square windows until the sky was waning on the edge of the plains. Then Davey came to the door and the Schoolmaster with him.
"It's not advice—as I told you—but a job I'm wanting," the boy said. His voice carried against the wind, hoarse with anger and disappointment.
"But this job, Davey, you know what it is."
The Schoolmaster's voice was troubled.
"Yes, I know—haven't I told you. As a matter of fact I haven't the price of food or a bed on me, and I'm not going back for it. You said these cattle of Maitland's in the yards would have to be taken to the hills. Maitland's got fattening paddocks up beyond Steve's, hasn't he? Tim and Pat Kearney have cleared off to the new rush, and you said you'd have to get somebody to take them for Conal."
"You can have what money—" the Schoolmaster began.
"It wasn't what I asked for," Davey said curtly.
None knew better than Farrel what the difficulties of his getting work of any sort would be in the Wirree with McNab's mark against him. In the hills no one would employ him for fear of offending Donald Cameron. But it was neither McNab, nor Donald Cameron, the Schoolmaster was thinking of when he tried to persuade the boy to go home. Not a word moved Davey from his purpose to be independent.
"If you take this mob to-morrow, you will clear out then and look for another job on the other side of the ranges?"
"Yes," Davey said eagerly.
"Right," the Schoolmaster replied, "but I don't want you in this business with Conal, Davey."
The boy gripped his hand.
"You said if ever I was hard-up for a friend," he said, "to come to you. And this job with those beasts of Maitland's is the only thing sticking out for me just now."
Farrel turned away wearily.
"I'd be glad enough to stand by you always, Davey," he said. "But this is different! I'd never forgive myself if I got you into a mess. However, it can't do any harm your taking these beasts to Steve's. Deirdre and I'll be going up in a day or two. I'll tell Conal about it. Then you can go on over the ranges. There's always work on Middleton's or Yaraan. Come in now and I'll make you a cup of tea."
Davey glanced at the lightening dome of the sky.
"It's a couple of hours to dawn yet," he said, with a sigh. "Then I'll be going."
Conal himself, on the road, met Davey behind Maitland's slowly moving, scraggy, high-ribbed cattle.
"What's the meaning of this?" he asked, striding into Farrel's kitchen. "That kid of Cameron's—"
"Wanted a job," the Schoolmaster said. "He's quarrelled with his father."
"Does he know the game?"
The Schoolmaster nodded, staring over his pipe into the fire.
Conal threw off his hat. His eyes were blazing. The breath throbbed against the bare throat down which his beard climbed.
"Do you mean to say, you—"
The Schoolmaster's eye on his, halted his tongue.
"No. I don't mean to," he said slowly. He knocked the ash from his pipe. "By the way, Conal, who fixed the brands on that red bull? You know the beast I mean—small, square, blazed-face, sold in Port Southern last sales."
"I did."
Fighting Conal threw himself into a chair.
"Badly done," the Schoolmaster murmured, gazing before him. "He, Young Davey, twigged it. He's been holding his tongue—for what reason I don't know—but he told me because he wanted this job. I gave it to him. Thad's got his knife into him."
"Then why on earth did you want to take him on and get Thad on our tracks?"
"Don't take orders from Thad yet, do you, Conal?"
Conal fidgeted under that glint in Dan's eye.
"No," he growled, "you know I don't, but there's no good I can see in running against him. What does this kid want anyhow? Why, there's more than a dozen of Cameron's cows in the mob I'm after now."
The log that had been smouldering all day on the open hearth broke and fell with a shattering of embers.
"Tell you the truth, Conal," the Schoolmaster looked straight out before him. "There's something in McNab's eyes tells me he's got his suspicions—well, if he has—it's time to get out. You've had luck so far. But there's something about McNab keeps making me feel as if he were promising himself something on my account, saying to himself: 'There's something coming to you!' Of course he thinks I'm in this business with you."
Conal shifted his position and swore impatiently.
"I'd better keep out of your way—that's what it amounts to, Dan!"
"No," the Schoolmaster said, "not that! Let McNab think what he likes as far as I'm concerned. Only he hasn't any particular quarrel with you, Conal, and he has with me—and if he tripped you up trying to get at me it would be a bad business."
Conal leant forward.
"Things are tightening up north, too?" he said, "I mean to quit, Dan. Maitland knows I do his business—and a little bit extra on my own account. That doesn't worry him so long as he gets a fancy price for the beasts. I want to pull off this last 'lift' and then turn the game down altogether. I wish you were in this with me though you've never been in any but square jobs before. I've been spying out the land—took a short cut from Rane and got into the back hills. Sent Tim and Pat on with those scrags of Maitland's! Picked up Teddy at Steve's. There's not much he doesn't know about the ways of scrub cattle. Trust a black! He took me down Narrow Valley to the plains. We laid a couple of hours under cover in the dark. Then the moon rose, and you should've seen the mob go stringin' out across the plains—lookin' no more than a drove of rats in the dim light. It's a pretty good bunch, rollin' fat—and prices high. I mean to pick it up. Wouldn't 've known anything about it but for you—it's out of my beat. You ought to have a whack of the profits, Dan."
Both men were silent for a few moments. Only the fire creaked in the quiet room.
"When I'm through with this bit of work, I'll get out and set up on the respectable somewhere. We could take up a couple of hundred acres on our own account, you and me," Conal murmured; "go to church, wear long-tailed coats, ring-on some fancy speechifyin'. Me 'n Deirdre'd sing in the choir. When this is all through, there's something I'll want to be saying to you, Dan."
There was another moment's dreaming silence. The Schoolmaster spoke with a sudden resolution.
"No," he said. "Do what you like yourself, Conal, but I made up my mind long ago not to have anything to do with 'cross' jobs. I'm not in this. I don't want to be—and I'll have nothing to do with the proceeds."
"You call, Dan!" Conal rose from his seat by the fire with a gesture of disappointment. "It'll be full moon to-morrow night and I'm goin' to make a dash for 'm. Teddy and I ran up a yard near the old hut in Narrow Valley. That's what's been keeping me. Steve's goin' to send tucker and fire-irons down to-day."
"What about young Cameron?" the Schoolmaster asked.
"We'll have to keep an eye on him. You don't suppose he'll blab, do you? You say he knows the game already and hasn't. But we can't afford to take chances."
"But he's not to be dragged in, Conal!"
Conal threw back his head, laughing.
"Well, I want another man," he said. "As for being dragged in, he won't be dragged in. But did you ever hear of a youngster who'd sit behind the door and suck his thumbs while there was moonlighting in the air? It won't be a case of draggin' him in, but keepin' him out. After all, it's the sport makes it worth while—the waiting, rush, fight and carryin' through of things."
He stretched his long limbs.
"But I won't have Davey 'working' with you, Conal," the Schoolmaster said angrily.
Deirdre came into the room, a little bonnet over her head and a long black cloak covering her. There was a wild colour the wind had whipped into them in her cheeks and her eyes were shining.
"You, Conal!" she cried eagerly when she saw the tall figure of the drover. "When did you get back?"
Conal saw only her shining eyes and the fluttering line of her mouth. He stood stock-still staring at her. It did not occur to his simple mind to ask whether it was for him her eyes were shining. Only that glad and eager note in her voice pleased him.
The Schoolmaster had heard people say that Deirdre was beautiful; but she had never seemed more beautiful than she was this evening, when she came out of the gloom, bringing into the quiet room and across the threshold of his troubled thoughts, her youth and buoyancy of spirit, the whole secret and subtle essence of her femininity in bloom.
"Oh I—I've just got back and came to see your father at once, Deirdre," was all Conal could say.
"Did you have a good trip?" she asked, taking off her hat and coat.
He wondered how much of his enterprise she knew. But there was no shadow on her face.
"Yes, all right," he said, a little awkwardly.
"I saw Mrs. Cameron at the store, father," she continued, busy with her own thoughts, and turning over in her mind what Mrs. Cameron had said to her, what she had said to Mrs. Cameron, and the plot, light as a spider's web, that they had woven between them for Davey's benefit.
"And as I was coming along home," she laughed blithely, "who did I meet on the road but Pat Glynn! And he put this little parcel into my hand, and said that he had been told to give it to me. He made me promise not to open it until I got in, too!"
She tore the wrappings of brown paper and newspaper from a little brown box, opened it and drew out a heavy, old-fashioned necklace made of links and twists of gold, with a locket set with rubies and pearls at the end of it.
"Oh, isn't it pretty!" she cried.
The Schoolmaster stared at it, and on Conal's face a thunder-cloud of resentment gathered.
"Who did he tell you sent it?" the Schoolmaster asked.
"He wouldn't say—only that it was from a 'devoted admirer.'"
"Have you any idea who it's from?" Dan asked, anger and anxiety struggling within him.
Deirdre looked up at Conal.
"It's not from you, Conal?" she asked, hesitatingly.
He shook his head.
"Perhaps it was Davey?"
She looked at the Schoolmaster.
"No," he said, "Davey had no money, I know, so he couldn't have sent it. You've no idea of any one else?"
"No." The light had gone from her face.
Conal seized his hat. His mouth set in an ugly line.
"I'll go and see Pat," he said.
The door slammed behind him.
Deirdre stood looking down on the glimmering thing in her hand.
"You're not to wear it, Deirdre," the Schoolmaster said harshly. Her eyes flew to his. He caught a reflection of his own spirit in them.
"Do you think I'd be likely to," she said.
It was hours later when Conal slammed the door of the cottage again. The suppressed rage in him burned to white ash.
"He's gone—Pat Glynn!" he said angrily. "I've ransacked the place for him. He's melted into thin air. I've been out along the Rane road and half way into the Port; but he's done the disappearing trick. There's not a track of him anywhere."
"So you're goin' to Steve's, Deirdre?"
It was Thad McNab who spoke. He stood on the doorstep in the sunshine, his yellow face thrust through the doorway, the pale eyes in it, smiling.
Deirdre was putting the last of her ribbands, handkerchiefs and little personal belongings into a small canvas saddle-bag. McNab's voice startled her. She glanced across at him.
"Yes," she said. The sight of his crooked figure there, in the doorway, with the sunlight playing across it, brought her a sense of uneasy wondering.
Quite suddenly, the night before, Farrel had decided to go up to the hills with Conal in the morning. He had told Deirdre to follow them as soon as she had set the cottage in order and collected her clothes. She wanted to go with them, but there were a hundred and one things to keep her busy in the house—dishes to scour, floors to sweep, covers and crockery to lock away in the cupboards. She had just quenched the fire. The ashes were smoking behind her, under the water she had poured over them, when McNab appeared. The township was well astir by this time. The Schoolmaster had talked of going to Steve's for long enough; she did not expect anyone to be surprised at it. He did not seem to expect that anyone would be surprised either, though he had made up his mind rather suddenly the night before, and had told her to ride out quietly and without chattering to anyone in the morning.
Yet McNab seemed surprised and annoyed. She wondered how he knew so soon that the Schoolmaster had gone with Conal. It was very early. The sunshine was still of an untarnished brilliance. Mrs. Mary Ann's ducks and geese were making their first trip in wavering white and mottled lines to the shallow pools left by the tide beside the river. Deirdre could see them through the open doorway.
"Mighty sudden the Schoolmaster made up his mind, eh, my blackbird?" Thad said, with, what for him was geniality, though geniality on his voice had a sour sound.
He shuffled into the room and stood near her.
Deirdre folded a ribband and packed it into her bag. She made a great appearance of being busy, going to and from the kitchen and the cupboards, wrapping up and putting into the bag all manner of things that she had not meant to take, in order that she might not be still to look at, or to talk to McNab. She did not want him to see how the sight of him had set her heart throbbing, a little nervous pulse fluttering in her throat. His nearness filled her with a sick fear, but she would not have had McNab guess it. She knew the shrewd sharpness of those pale, shifty eyes of his. Her eyes met his clearly. There was not a flicker of the smooth, white lids above them.
"Oh, no," she said, "he'd fixed to go to-day, sometime ago."
"Well, he might 've said so," replied McNab. "There was something I wanted to talk to him about, something—partic'lar."
"Can I tell him what it is?"
His eyes fell before the clear innocence of her gaze. He moved uneasily.
"No," he said, "I dursay I'll find time to go and see him up at Steve's one of these days. Tell him that ... I'll come soon." He chuckled a moment. "They tell me," he went on, eyeing her narrowly, "they tell me, he's taken that cub of Cameron's with him."
He did not wait for her reply, but ran on, the malice that was never far from it an undercurrent in his voice again.
"He's not very clever, your father, my dear, for all he's a Schoolmaster, or he wouldn't have done that! Give him my respects and say I hope the hills'll be for the good of his health. And you—I hope you'll be enjoyin' y'rself up there. Though it's no place, to be buryin' the most beautiful woman in the South."
"Well, I'll have to be going now!" Deirdre moved quickly.
He had edged nearer and nearer her, until his breath touched her face as she pulled the strings of her bag together.
"Socks has been saddled this half hour. Father'll be glad to see you any day at Steve's, I'm sure, Mr. McNab," she added, backing towards the door.
McNab got between her and it. He put his hand on her arm.
"My, the pretty neck it is," he gurgled, his voice deep in his throat. "But where's the gold chain Pat Glynn told me he had for you from a—'devoted admirer,' no less. A gold chain it was, with rubies and pearls on it—fit for a lady to wear! And there's more for you, where it come from. The one that sent it would dress you up like the finest lady in the land, Pat said, if you would—"
Deirdre wrenched herself away from the clutching hands. They caught at her again.
"You must kiss me good-bye then, pretty," he whispered.
She saw the flame in his eyes, the wry smile on his lips.
The chestnut was standing saddled, his bridle over the post by the door. Deirdre leapt to his back, her bag in her hand.
Thad followed her out-of-doors and stood watching her, rubbing his hands together.
"So shy, my blackbird, so shy!" he exclaimed, almost gleefully. "Never mind. Another day, perhaps!"
Deirdre looked down at him, her eyes blazing.
"If father heard you talking like that, he'd thrash you within an inch of your life," she cried passionately.
McNab lost countenance.
"Eh, would he?" he snarled.
The fear of death and revenge, the dealing out to himself of what he had dealt so often to others, was the continual dogging terror that haunted him. Then he smiled again and chuckled.
"If I let him, eh, my pretty," he said, gazing up at her. "If I let him. I wouldn't advise you to ... to tell him ... create bad feelin' between us ... it'd be a pity ... seeing ... me and y'r father's pretty good friends, and they say it's better to make a friend than an enemy of McNab. Besides it was only my little bit of fun, Deirdre. Haven't I known you since you were—so high."
Deirdre turned the chestnut to the road.
"Good-bye, me dear," McNab called. "And my respects to the Schoolmaster, don't forget! Tell him I think it was mean to do me the trick of clearin' out without lettin' me know though, 'n me wantin' to stand by him in any little bit of trouble that's comin' to him. But I'll be comin' up to see him, soon—sooner than he thinks—p'raps."
There was a warning, a veiled threat, in the words.
As the chestnut flew out along the green roadsides, that mean voice with its geniality and thin-edged malice, reverberated in Deirdre's ears. She looked back when she was some distance out on the flat road that wound over the plains to the hills, and saw McNab hobbling back towards the whitewashed irregular and dilapidated huts of the Wirree township. Her eyes went out to the ranges with an eager sigh. She quickened the chestnut's pace again with a rub of her heels on his sleek side.
Deirdre's spirits rose as White Socks climbed the steep track of the foothills. She drew the strong, sweet leafy smells of the trees with eager breaths. Tying her hat to the saddle, she threw back her head to the sunshine, exclaiming with delight to see the red and brown prickly-shrub blossom out among the ferns, sunlight making the young leaves hang upon the saplings in flakes of translucent green, ruddy-gold and amber.
She talked to Socks and called to the birds that flitted across the track. It was so good to be in the hills again, climbing the long, winding path through the trees. She wanted to catch the sunshine in her hands; it hung in such yarns of palpable gold stuff across the track. She sang softly to herself, gazing into the blue haze that stood among the near trees.
The valleys were steeped in sun mists. Her little horse ambled easily through them, and when he climbed the steep hill sides, she slipped from his back and walked beside him, asking him again and again, if it were not good to be going to Steve's, to the paddocks where Socks himself had flung up his heels an unbroken colt, and all the gay, careless days of her childhood had been spent. She felt as if they were leaving the reek and squalor of the Wirree River for ever.
And yet the vague uneasiness McNab's words had evoked hovered in her mind. His eyes, gestures, ugly writhing smile, kept recurring to her. She was anxious to get to the Schoolmaster and give him McNab's message, to know what he would make of it. What harm was it McNab could do her father? She knew that Dan feared him, in a curious, watchful way. And the trouble that was coming to him. What had McNab meant by that? This business Conal was on, what was it? Why had she been told nothing about it? The way McNab had talked to her, too, disquieted her.
All day a premonition of trouble haunted her. She urged the chestnut on. When they splashed through a creek at midday, she let him stand for a few minutes in the middle of it, dip his patchy white nose into the clear, cold water, and sough it up noisily. A little further on, near a gully in which the mists were unfathomable, the trees, grey as sea lichen in its depths, she sat down by the roadside and ate her sandwich of bread and cheese and had a drink from her bottle of milk.
Davey and she had often made excursions to Long Gully when they were children to hear the bell-birds. They dropped mellow notes through the stillness of the trees that climbed the gully's steep sides. Davey and she had crept warily through the undergrowth, on the look-out for snakes, and had sat still for hours behind a fallen tree, listening for the plomp, plomp, plomp of the shy birds' notes of purest melody thrown into the pool of the silence.
A dead tree stood near the edge of the track. Deirdre remembered that there had been a magpie's nest in it, and that the "maggies" would swoop down on her and on Davey in the springtime, if there were young birds in the nest, screaming and flapping their wings, and sometimes getting in a peck which brought the blood to her freckled face or to Davey's. She glanced up to see if the magpies were about that day; but they were not.
So gaunt and tall the dead tree stood. Its branches seemed to strike against the sky. They rattled with the sound of bones in the wind. The sun and thrashing winter storms had bleached it, and there were black wales and scars where a fire had eaten into the wood above the hacked zone that the axe of a settler had made when he ring-barked it years ago. As long as she could remember the dead tree had stood there, gaunt and ghostly, with the tangle of living trees behind it. They were clad with their shifting, whispering garment of leaves all the year round, and decked with flowers in the springtime. But the dead tree was naked. It might have been an avenging spirit of the wilderness, it stood with an air of such tragic desolation by the wayside.
There were dead trees all along the hill roads; scores of them in the paddocks. The ripping crack and thunder of their crashing to the earth could be heard in the dead of night sometimes. When they thought of it, country folk moved from under a dead tree. Deirdre looked up at this one. It seemed to waver in the wind. She shook the crumbs from her skirt, and caught the chestnut's bridle.
Scarlet-runners were overhanging the bank on that turn of the road, near where the school had been, when she passed. The chimney of the hut was still standing, though the wild creepers had thrown long vines about it. Supple-jack had clambered over the half-dozen twisted fruit trees; it threw its shower of feathery, seeding thistle-down over the dark-leafed apple branches.
Deirdre had meant to take Socks into the clearing, and let him feed on the wild oats and clover matting it, while she investigated the forlorn chimney and the fruit trees and flowers growing near where her garden had been, seeking in the tangled undergrowth for the flowers she had planted long ago. She had thought she would sit on the edge of the well, listen for the great green frogs to go dropping into the water, and weave her dreams of the old times for awhile, watching the sunlight make a patchwork of dancing light with the shadows the leaves of the fruit trees cast on the beaten yard about the doorway of the hut. But she went straight by with scarcely a glance at the grey chimney and the tangled garden greenery, across which a tall, sweet English rose nodded gaily. She only stopped a moment to pull a trail of scarlet-runners from the bank near the house.
She wondered if Davey had remembered the place and the flowers when he passed the day before. She looked down at the scarlet flowers with a little smile, as she pinned them into her dress.
But thought of the flowers and of Davey lasted only a moment. She was eager to ask the Schoolmaster for an explanation, and to hear from him what they had to fear from McNab.
When she saw Dan, with the sun behind him, coming towards her on his big grey nag, whose nose was so like a kangaroo's that they called him "the 'Roo," she quickened her pace, her heart swelling with love at the sight of him, and at the thought of the concern which had sent him back along the road to meet her.
She lifted her face to his with a breathless little glad sob when she came up to him.
"What is it?" he asked, his anxiety leaping instinctively at the sight of her face.
"Perhaps I'm foolish," she said quickly. "It's something McNab said before I left this morning. It wasn't so much what he said, but the way he said it. And I've been thinking of it all the way—wondering what he meant. Is there any harm he could do us?"
"What did he say?" Farrel asked.
"He came just as I was going," Deirdre told him, "and he seemed annoyed that you didn't tell him you were going to-day—said there was something particular he wanted to talk to you about. Then just as I was going, he said: 'It was a mean trick clearin' out without lettin' me know—such old friends as we are too, and me wanting to stand by him in any little bit of trouble that's coming to him. But I'll be coming up to see him one of these days soon—sooner than he thinks p'raps.' It wasn't so much what he said as the way he said it, made me think—"
Deirdre hesitated, looking at her father's face. She knew that he was troubled, that there was enough in this to disturb him without telling him what else McNab had said to her.
They rode on in silence, the horses brushing.
The Schoolmaster's head was bent in thought. He rode in easy, slouching, negligent fashion, and seemed to have forgotten he was not alone. Deirdre spoke first. Her voice had a quick, low-toned intensity.
"I made up my mind on the way, to-day, to ask you what this business is Conal's on, and if you are with him, or not?" she said. "I ought to know. I'm not a child, and I'm with you whatever it is. I have an idea; but you ought to tell me, more than ever now that McNab——"
"Has his suspicions."
The Schoolmaster looked into her steady eyes.
"Are you in this with Conal?" she asked.
"I wasn't until last night," he said. "I changed my mind suddenly and joined him."
"What made you?" she inquired breathlessly.
He did not reply.
"I know—it was that necklace!" The reason had come to her instantly.
"I'm a good-for-nothing now, Deirdre," he said low and bitterly. "There's mighty little I can do ... and there'll be less presently. I want enough money to get us away from here—and keep us by and by when—"
He did not say it, but she knew that he meant when the night of blindness had fallen on him.
"It was because you were afraid for me," she murmured. "Afraid because of that necklace, who it might have come from, afraid—"
He nodded.
"And if you get the money we can go away from here and never come back to the Wirree River any more?"
The Schoolmaster smiled. He was surprised at the eagerness of her voice.
"Yes," he said, "but that was what was bothering me. I thought you would not like to be leaving the place. You were always wanting to come back when we were away before."
"Oh," a little fluttering sigh went out of her, "but I'll be glad to go now! Tell me what you're going to do?"
"There's moonlight to-night, and we want to get a mob of wild cattle," he said quietly. "A couple of hundred are eating their heads off in the scrub above Narrow Valley. Do you remember when we were living here, riding up the range, sometimes we'd start a cow, or steer, and it would plunge away through the brushwood, scared as a rabbit! After the fires more breakaways joined the mob. We lost a couple of cows—- so did Steve—others did too. Well, I told Conal about these beasts a while ago. He made up his mind to get them. He and Steve's black boy 've run up a stockyard near McMillan's hut in Narrow Valley, and Conal and he mean to take the mob with that lot of Maitland's cattle he brought down for fattening, not this, but last trip, up by the Snowy River into New South Wales."
"It isn't as you may say, permitted by law," he continued. "But most of the cattle men who can do it, do—even the squatters when they get a chance. Down here they don't think scrub cattle worth the getting. Rosses staked a couple of horses a month or two ago, and lost a good dog after this mob. Cameron doesn't think them worth his while, so why shouldn't we have them if we can get them. If we get a couple of beasts with brands on them, among the wild ones, it may be worth drafting them out and driving them back to the hills. But the hair grows thick on scrub cattle; there's no need to be brand hunting. If Conal weren't such a fine stockman, we couldn't do it. There's nobody like him.
"When we pull off this deal, we'll go away, you and Conal and I. If the price of cattle keeps up there'll be enough to divide among the three of us—Davey's got to have his share if he's in. Conal's offered him a third to work with him to-night, and run the mob through to the border. He's a man short. I've been trying to persuade Davey to keep out of it—but there's a lot of Donald Cameron in him—he's as obstinate as a mule. Says he wants a job, and has got one, and that's enough for him for the present."
They had come within sight of Steve's shanty on the brow of the hill.
When they drew rein before Steve's, Conal lounged out of the house. The dogs that had started up snarling at the approach of horses stretched themselves again in the dust by the verandahs, and lay with their heads low on their forelegs. Deirdre stood a moment looking about her. Her face, under the flat little yellow straw hat crossed by a red ribband that tied under her chin, was very winsome, her eyes bright with tears and laughter. When she saw Steve in the doorway, she ran to him and threw her arms around him.
"Oh, it's good to be here again, Uncle Stevie," she-cried.
He chuckled delightedly.
"There's a woman you are, Deirdre. A woman y've grown!"
"What else would I grow?" she asked gaily.
"It's good to be anywhere you are, Deirdre!" Conal said, coming up and standing beside them, all his love in his eyes.
She laughed, glancing up at him, and Steve laughed to see the way the wind blew. Davey by the open door, watched them; but Deirdre did not see him.
When she moved to go in, he stood away from the door for her to pass. He saw the scarlet-runners that she had tucked into her gown under her chin. She heard the catch in his breath, and hesitated.
Conal saw her hand go out to him. He saw Davey take it, but he did not see the eyes she turned on him, nor hear her say with a tremulous quiver of the lips:
"They're saying they're glad to see me! Will you not say so too, Davey?"
The Schoolmaster, coming back from the stables, called Conal.
"McNab's been to see Deirdre," he said. "He's got an idea something's in the wind, she seems to think. It's just as well we fixed for to-night, Conal. It won't give him any time to get busy. But hadn't you better be getting down to cover before it's much later?"
"It's only a couple of miles, by the track Teddy goes. There's time enough yet," Conal replied, his eyes on the open door, gaping dark against the brightness of the sunshine.
Davey followed Deirdre indoors.
"Teddy's bringing in the horses now. You'd better get in and have something to eat. Send Davey to me," Farrel said impatiently.
Conal crossed the verandah.
It was in the wide, low-roofed kitchen that he found Davey. Deirdre was standing near him. Only the glow of the firelight lighted the great room; but that was sufficient to show him the sombre, steadfast gaze with which Davey regarded the girl, and something subdued in the droop of her figure, a something of emotion, humiliation in her averted head.
"Dan wants you," he said to Davey.
Davey had stared at Deirdre as though he were trying to read in her face what his heart ached to know, and she had been waiting for him to read and know, waiting for the first sound of his voice with a tremulous expectancy. A moment more might have ended the year-long griefs and heartache between them. But Conal spoke, and Davey wheeled out of the kitchen.
Conal strode over to the table near which Davey bad been. He swung his leg over it, and watched Deirdre as she put cups and saucers, plates and knives on one end of it. She cut some bread and buttered it.
There was a light in her eyes, a colour in her cheeks. She had watched Davey go with a little gesture of impatience, a fluttering sigh. Conal saw that. She turned to him gaily, poured out tea for him, chattering, but avoided his eyes. He watched her with a smouldering suspicion.
Suddenly he leant forward and caught her hand. His swart, leathern face swung towards her; the brilliant, hawk eyes of Conal, the Fighter, leapt into hers.
"You're to marry me, Deirdre," he said, his voice hoarse and throbbing in his throat.
She shrank from him with a little breathless exclamation.
"Don't do that," he cried passionately. "Don't look at me like that, Deirdre."
"Conal!" she gasped.
In his eyes rose the appeal of dumb, unfathomable, devouring tenderness.
"Say you'll love me ... say you will, Deirdre," he begged.
His face was turned towards her, humble and mysteriously moved, a strong light in his eyes.
So absorbed were they that they did not hear, or if they heard, paid no attention to the grind of wheels on the gravel before the shanty, the yelping and snarling of dogs that announced the arrival of a vehicle at Steve's, and such late arrivals were not usual.
"I've had my way with women. They've told you tales of me, I know," Conal pleaded. "But there's never a woman I've cared for but you, Deirdre. And you—" he broke off impatiently, "there's no telling you how I care for you. I haven't got words. Besides, it chokes me to speak of it; raises a storm in me that there's no holding. By and by when this is all over, we'll go away—you and the Schoolmaster and me. Oh, I'll be a good husband. You'll give me y'r word, won't you, Deirdre?"
There were voices in the bar beyond, but they did not heed them. Conal was thinking only of her and his pleading.
"Conal dear," Deirdre said. "If you wouldn't talk like this any more!"
Her eyes fell from his. He snatched her hand from the flower under her chin where it had fallen.
"Is it him you love?" he asked fiercely, jerking his head in the direction of the back door by which Davey had gone out. "Is it? Tell me. I'll let no man come between you and me, Deirdre. I'll kill him if he tries to."
The door from the tap-room, with the sunlight splashing on the benches and bottles behind it, opened, and Steve and the new arrival came into the kitchen.
"And who is it y'll be killing now, Conal?" asked McNab genially.
He glanced from Conal to Deirdre.
"You, if you don't get out of my way," yelled Conal, quivering with rage.
Brushing past McNab, he flung out of the room, his spurs jingling. They heard the irons on his boots click on the stones of the yard.
"There now," cried Steve tremulously. "He's been making love to you, has he, Deirdre? All the boys'll be making love to you, Deirdre! And now here's Mr. McNab come up to see the Schoolmaster ... most partic'lar."
He was altogether flustered at this unexpected visit of McNab's, and at his wits' end what to say next. Dan was in the paddock with the black boy, bringing in the horses for the night's work, and here was McNab on the top of it all.
Deirdre's wits were quicker to work than his.
She realised what McNab's being in the shanty that night might mean to the Schoolmaster, Conal, Davey and herself.
She smiled at him. McNab had not seen her smile like that except at Conal, and that was on the night of the Schoolmaster's return, at the dance at Hegarty's.
"Why there's a surprise to play on me, Mr. McNab?" she cried merrily. "You to be coming up the hills to-day and never say a word about it this morning. There I was, riding along by myself, and might have had a seat in the cart beside you."
McNab hardly knew what to make of her greeting. He imagined that she had been thinking over his attentions of the morning, and was feeling flattered by them—for after all was he not Thadeus McNab and, the gossips said, the richest man in the country side, not excepting Donald Cameron himself, if the truth were known. He thought that she was willing to coquet with him, and that, too, the hint about the gold chain might not have been in vain.
He warmed to her smile, preened himself and gave himself half a dozen gallant airs on the spot. Every male instinct in him responded to her effort to be charming.
"And now everybody's had tea but me," she continued. "So we can just sit down and have some together."
McNab sat down beside her at the big table on which she had spread a white cloth.
A generous and genial glow suffused him. For the moment he forgot the reason of his visit. Deirdre had put it all out of his head with that smile of hers. The sound of her merry voice set every fibre of him tingling and thrilling as his fibres had never tingled and thrilled before.
In the yard Conal told the Schoolmaster of McNab's arrival.
"Settles us," Farrel said shortly. "That's what he came to do. And we can't afford to let him think there's anything on. He's given his suspicions to M'Laughlin most likely and the delay to-night'll give them time to get the word out about us along the road. So all we can do is lie low, play civil to McNab, let him think he's on the wrong track. Then when this blows over—in a couple of months, perhaps—"
Conal swore bitterly.
"I could have wrung his neck when I saw him. It was all I could do to keep me hands off him," he said.
"Don't be giving the game away, Conal," the Schoolmaster cautioned. "Mind, we're not taking chances."
"It'll be a couple of hours to moonrise after dark," Conal said restively, glancing at the waning sky. "If you could keep him busy, playing cards and drinking—let him think we weren't upset at seeing him and he Seems to be settlin' down and looking foolish findin' we're all about—I might walk out after a bit. I could get the beasts, with Davey and that blithering half-breed. Sally's easily worth a couple of men with cattle."
"Do you think I'm likely to be able to keep McNab so busy, he wouldn't notice you were walking out?" the Schoolmaster asked, impatiently. "You and Davey had better come in and hang round loose presently."
He went towards the house.
His greeting of McNab was as lukewarm, negligent and friendly as it always was. Deirdre saw no flicker of anxiety in his face. McNab's eyes were quick and keen on it for the first few minutes, but finding no trace of repressed excitement, not a spark of the impatience he expected, but only a whimsical smile to convey that the Schoolmaster knew why he had come, and was amused at the reason, he dropped into the chair he had taken and sought to cover the unexpectedness of his visit by unusual affability.
He was sitting in Steve's chair by the fire when Farrel came into the room that was kitchen, dining-room, sitting-room, and living-room in general at Steve's. Deirdre slipped out with a jug for water as the Schoolmaster came in. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw her talking to Conal in the yard.
When she returned, her laughter and gaiety surprised him. She set a jug of grog between Steve and McNab on the table near NcNab's elbow. The Schoolmaster swore beneath his breath when he saw McNab's eyes on her.
He trembled with rage when he heard Deirdre talking to McNab; but her eyes met his reassuringly. He caught their message, calm and purposeful. He knew that she was playing the woman to McNab, and why. The knowledge angered and humiliated him.
Davey and Conal came into the long, barely-lighted room. They threw themselves on a bench near the door. Conal, taking a pipe from his belt, smoked morosely. Davey did not look at McNab, and McNab took no notice of him, enjoying his position of importance by the fireside, and chuckling over the gay chatter Deirdre threw to him.
"We eat our heads off, up here, Mr. McNab," she said. "And sleep! Davey and Conal there, to see them yawning over their supper to-night you'd think they'd never seen a bed for weeks. They've been saying they're going to turn in early because they've to go off mustering first thing in the morning, and father and Steve would have sat here dozing by the fire for a while, and then gone off to bed too. I was thinking I would have to take out my sewing and talk to the cat ... till it was a decent hour to be saying my prayers. But now p'raps you'll have a game of cards with me, though I don't suppose Conal and Davey'll go to bed early now, seeing we've got company."
Davey sat bolt upright against the wall. It froze the blood in his veins to hear her on such terms of easy familiarity with McNab. Conal shifted uneasily.
"But we can get along without them, can't we?" Deirdre asked blithely. "There's no need for them to be sitting up trying to be polite, is there?"
"None at all."
McNab chuckled. He thought he was getting on very well with Deirdre and that she was playing him off against Conal and Davey in a spirit of pique.
"Right. Good-night, McNab, see you in the morning," Conal said angrily. He swung out of the room. Davey followed him.
"And now for the business that brought you, McNab. Mighty kind of you to have come after me with it?"
The Schoolmaster sat down before Thad McNab, facing him squarely, his one eye played on McNab's shifty face. There was just the faintest ironical emphasis in his voice.
McNab stirred uneasily.
"Fact is," he began, his eyes shifted under the Schoolmaster's gaze. "Fact is—we're wanting a school in the Wirree," he plunged desperately. "Before you go away I thought—I thought, not knowing exactly what your plans were, I'd have a talk to you about it. The place is gettin' a bad name with the children growing up not able to make more than a mark for their names. In the hills, of course, you taught the first generation, as you might say, so the older ones can teach the others coming on, but down there it's different. We've never had any school or school teachers. The people can't pay enough—just a few of them—to make it worth your while ... but if we built a school, got 'em all together ... it might be a good thing, I'd maybe put up the money for the school—maybe—"
He fidgeted in his seat. He did not want to commit himself too far, and yet he was irritably conscious of the weakness of his explanation unless he did. He had a suspicion than Dan Farrel was laughing at him up his sleeve too. An ill-humour was rising in him.
There was an ominous silence—a moment of suspicion and suspense. A word from either might have been a spark to the long-hidden train of enmity between them. Deirdre broke the silence. She threw down a pack of cards and pulled her chair up to the table.
"All that'll keep till to-morrow, Mr. McNab, won't it?" she asked. "Have a game of euchre with Steve and me, now. Let's play cut-throat—it's more exciting. Father can think over what you've said and tell you in the morning."
"Yes ... yes ... you think it over, Farrel," McNab said eagerly.
He was glad enough to shelve discussion of this urgent matter which had brought him from the Wirree to talk to the Schoolmaster, seeing that it was not at all urgent and did not look like it.
Deirdre pushed the bottle of rum between him and Steve. She sat opposite to them, the broad yellow glare of the dip on her face.
The liquor was already beginning to warm McNab's brain. His head was steady enough on his shoulders; but there was a glow within him. He watched the face of the girl before him as in a dream.
Farrel saw the arabesques of red and blue the cards made under the light as she threw them on the table. He heard her gleeful and triumphant exclamations. He realised what she was doing for him, was sore and angry, but there was nothing to do but to play up to her. He sat at the far end of the table just out of the light: after a while his head drooped.
Deirdre's laughter flashed.
"Look at father," she cried, "he's dead with sleep!"
Farrel started and stared at her, sleepily.
"It's no good your blinking like an owl and pretending you weren't taking forty winks. You'd better go to bed and have done with it," she said.
He struggled to his feet.
"I'm dog-weary," he muttered. "Think I will."
"Good-night," he added after a moment. "And be sure you see the fires are out before you turn in, Deirdre. You're not to be staying up late, either! I won't have her getting too fond of the cards, Steve."
He stumbled across the room to the far end where a screen of brushwood and bagging against the back of the shanty made another small room.
Deirdre laughed again.
"I'm winning all the time," she said gaily, "so they won't want to play long."
The cards went backwards and forwards across the table to the tune of her exclamations and the chime of her laughter, the muttered oaths and exclamations of Steve and McNab. Steve was soggy with drink; but McNab was not as drunk as he seemed. His eyes caught hers with a curious expression when the Schoolmaster had gone from the room.
"And who's the man Conal's going to kill for comin' between you, Deirdre?" he asked.
"How do I know?" she said, a little nervously.
"P'raps it's the man sent you the gold chain," McNab murmured. His eyes glimmered at her out of the darkness. "They tell me Conal went round like a madman looking for Pat Glynn to tell him who it was, threatening to break the last bone in Pat's body if he wouldn't speak."
"Yes, I think it was him," Deirdre said, meeting his eyes. "Conal said if ever he found him, he'd—"
"Conal's a hot head doesn't mean half he says," McNab muttered.
"But he means that, I'm sure," Deirdre said. "And Conal's so strong. Look at his hands. He could put them round a man's throat and wring the life out of it—just as easily as you wring a bird's neck, Mr. McNab. And he's a dead shot, too, Conal—they say."
"Eh, then it's somebody's neck he'll be wringing, or somebody he'll be shooting, for sure," McNab said. "For it's not him you'll be marrin', and it's not him your heart's set on. It's the other."
The quivering of her face, a dilating of the pupils of her eyes that were wells of darkness, told him that he had scored. He leant forward, following up his advantage, eagerly.
"And it's not Conal, for all his blustering, I'm afraid of, my pretty," he whispered. His eyes were narrowed, the smile in them leaping across his face. "It's not Conal, for all his blustering, though I dursay y' think he'd kill me for love of you. And you'd break his heart for love of somebody else—by way of reward. But it's me all the same that'll get you."
Deirdre pushed back her chair. Then she remembered the part she had been playing all the evening. She steadied herself, putting her hands on the edge of the table, and looked down into McNab's eyes, laughing.
"Why," she cried, "you're as drunk as drunk, Mr. McNab! And so is Steve; you'd better see each other to bed. I'm going myself."
She went across to the corner-room next the Schoolmaster's, where she slept. When she had heard Steve shambling before NcNab to the room off the bar where occasional visitors were put, she went back to the kitchen, raked over the embers of the fire, and put out a flare that was burning low in its tin of rancid fat and belching forth streams of heavy black smoke.
She opened the door of the Schoolmaster's room. The bunk against the wall on which he slept was empty, the window open. She entered, closed the door and sat down by the open window.
The moonlight was waning. The silver light in which the forest had been bathed an hour before, was dimmer, the shadows the house and sheds cast black against it. Where the light struck dead trees they stood out wraith-like from the dark wave of the forest.
Listening intently, she heard the distant cracking of whips, the long lowing, belched and terrified cries of cattle.
When McNab awakened in the morning, he realised that his sleep had been too heavy for him to know what had happened during the night, and that much might have occurred while he was snoring.
Farrel found him snapping and biting like a trapped dingo. His voice rasped; his inquisitive, suspicious eyes were everywhere. But the Schoolmaster had none of the air of a victorious gamester, and Deirdre's amiability was of a pattern with what he had imagined it the night before. He had heard Davey and Conal ride out at dawn with a cracking of whips and yelping of dogs to wake the saints. That seemed to negative the suggestion that they had been out all night. They were going to muster a couple of hundred of Maitland's cattle in some paddocks near Red Creek, he remembered the Schoolmaster had said.
Yet by the cold light of early morning, he had an unaccountable sensation of having been tricked. What with the girl's smiles and Steve's grog he had not been as wide awake as he had intended to be, he knew. Farrel's readiness to consider the school proposition irritated him. It had been a pretext; his only anxiety was not to discuss it any more. He was all fret and fume to get back to the Wirree. Nothing would stay him.
When he was up in his high-seated spring-cart, there was none of the complaisant geniality of the night before about him. He gathered up his reins with a sour smile at the little group assembled on Steve's verandah and drove out of sight at a jolting jog-trot.
"The boys got the mob?" Steve asked anxiously.
The Schoolmaster took off his hat with a sigh.
"Had the time of their lives!" he exclaimed. "It was a big mob—rolling fat."
Deirdre's eyes were still on the track down which McNab had gone to the Wirree.
"I won't say good-bye, Deirdre," he had said, as his eyes rested on her for a moment. "I'll be seein' you again soon."
There had been something in the nature of a promise—or a threat—in his eyes.
"There was no time to fix brands," the Schoolmaster was telling Steve. "Conal's running these with a couple of score of Maitland's store beasts. Drafted out about fifty calves, clear skins and a couple of dozen cows, put them into the Narrow Valley run—wants to do some branding when he gets back. I thought he ought to let them go with the half-dozen scrubbers turned back to the bush, but he wouldn't have it; says he can take them along, branded, with Maitland's next bunch."
"It's a bit risky leavin' them there."
Steve's glance wandered in the direction of the valley lying to the westward between the last line of hills that shut the shanty in from the long roll of inland plains.
"It's a bit risky," he repeated. "But Conal knows his business. It'll be all right, I suppose. There's nobody goes Narrow Valley way but Cameron's men, and they're not likely to be going this time of the year—seeing the rains are due. Conal had a look at the fences when he was up a couple of days ago, didn't he? Though fences aren't much good. Seen a wild cow fly like a bird when she wants to. Good thing Conal got away before the rains, Dan. If the rivers were down he'd never've got through."
"Yes," said the Schoolmaster. "It was a case of now or never."
"And, after all," he added gravely, putting his arm out and drawing her to him, "it was Deirdre saved the situation. But I wouldn't have you do what you did again, dear, not for all the cattle in the world, nor all the money in it."
She clung to him.
"And I wouldn't do it," she sobbed, breathlessly.
It was nearly two months before Conal and Davey were back in the Wirree again.
They rode into the township one evening when the sun was sinking behind the purple range of the hills and making a rosy mist of the dust a mob of northern cattle raised.
Dust-grimed and silent, their whips curled on their arms, their dogs lean and limping at heel, they passed McNab's. They might have been any of a dozen cattle-men who were about the sale-yards that day; but McNab recognised them.
It was those cattle of Maitland's that stood between him and his suspicions of the game Conal and the Schoolmaster were on. He thought he knew the part they played in it, but itched for a straw of proof. He hurried to the doorway and stood in it, chewing his underlip, as he watched the road-weary, weedy beasts and their drovers trail out of the town.
Conal saw him.
"Pullin' 'em up and comin' back for a drink in a minute, McNab," he yelled.
He lost no chances of letting Thad think there was nothing to hide in his movements. He returned to the Black Bull a few moments later, and Davey went on to Hegarty's.
Teddy, Steve's black boy, and the dogs, watched the cattle on the edge of the road.
Conal and Davey spent few words on each other. They went their separate ways by mutual consent, avoiding the occasions that mean association or talking.
On the road during the first days, when the cattle were fresh, they had swung their stock-whips, keeping the mob going, like one man. There had been headlong gallops after breakaways, the thrashing-in of stragglers, the crowding of beasts up steep, slippery hillsides with curses and yelping dogs, the watchfulness that driving a mob of wild cattle short-handed meant; nerves and muscles were stretched to the job in hand.
When a halt was made the first night, the mob was ringed with brushwood fires. The wildest of the scrub-bred warrigals, broken by the long day's steady trotting, hustled up quietly against Maitland's well-fattened store beasts. Conal and the black boy took the first watch, Davey and Conal the second, and Davey and the black the third.
Ordinarily the fires flaring against the darkness were enough to keep the cattle in a bunch during the night. Sometimes when a fire died down and there was a longer gap in the links between the fires, a restless heifer or steer made a dash for it, and the watcher had to be quick with a burning bough, brandish and whack it about the head of the runaway before the beast with a moaning bellow and roar turned back to the mob again.
It was on the second night out when Conal was sleeping and Davey and Teddy watching, that the black, stupid with sleep, let his fires go down, and a red bull and half a dozen cows broke through the ring. It looked like a stampede. Davey dashed after the bull. Conal's dog, Sally, alert at the first rush of the cattle's movement, leapt after them. Her long, yellow shape flashed like a streak of lightning in the wan light over the plains. She raced level with the leader's sleek shoulder and laid her teeth in his hide, wheeled him, snapping at his nose and dragging him by it, until he turned in toward the mob again. Davey lashed the cows after the leader. Sally flew round them, a yellow fury, yelping and snapping. Conal, half-asleep, flung on to his horse, and laid about him with his whip, cursing. He and the black boy had all their work cut out to keep the mob steady.
It was a near thing, and Conal used his tongue pretty freely when he talked of it. He had had very little to say to Davey, ordinarily. The memory of that evening in the kitchen at Steve's rankled. It bred a sense of resentment and secret antagonism which he took less pains to hide, from that night. He used his lungs to curse Teddy and the red steer, but did not talk to Davey unless he had something to say about the cattle or the road. From dawn till sunset they rode silently within a dozen yards of each other.
When they came within easy distance of Rane and the lake settlements they kept the mob moving all night. The Snowy was swollen with recent rains when they came to it; but Conal had set his mind on crossing without delay.
He rushed the mob down the incline to the river, and drove it into the swirling stream. Whip thongs swung together ripped and racked in the clear air. The struggling, terrified beasts were crowded, with no more than their heads above water, against the strong currents of the stream until, with rattling and clashing horns, they clambered up the bank on the further side.
The last days on the road were taken more easily. The mob went slowly eastward, grazing as it moved, and was in prime condition when Conal handed it over to Maitland in Cooburra, on the New South Wales side. Maitland was a big man in the district, head of the well-known firm of stock dealers; no difficulties were made about the turn-over. When Conal had had some talk with him, and Davey and he had loafed about the town for a day or two, they went out again with half a hundred poor beasts from a drought-stricken Western run.
On the road behind the mob, despite their secret resentment, Long Conal and Davey Cameron had come to the dumb understanding of road mates. It did nothing to break the silence between them. Davey yielded Conal an unconscious homage. He did it with grudging humility; but there was no breaking the barrier of Conal's reserve. Notwithstanding his blithe recklessness, his daring and bragging enthusiasm, there was a stern quality, an unplumbed depth in Conal. He endured Davey's company, but there was that in his mind against him which one man does not easily forgive another. As they drew nearer Wirreeford, and the thoughts of each took the same track, the latent animosity vibrated between them again.
Conal lost no time in getting out of the township and taking the road to the hills, Davey, conscious that it was Conal, and not he, who would stand well in the eyes of Deirdre and the Schoolmaster when the story of the road was told, lingered at Hegarty's.
A brooding bitterness possessed him. He knew that Conal had wanted him until this deal was fixed up, not only because he was short of a man when Pat and Tim Kearney cleared out, but because he was afraid how he, Davey, might use the knowledge he had told the Schoolmaster he possessed about some other of Conal's cattle dealings. As for himself, Davey knew that not only had his independence demanded a job, but something of the spirit of adventure, a recklessness of consequences, had appealed to him in the moonlighting of a couple of hundred scrub cattle.
He wondered what he would do when the Schoolmaster and Conal and Deirdre left the hills. He knew that a share of the money the cattle had brought would be his. He thought that he would go away from the South when he got it, and strike out in some new line of life for himself.