For a moment we stood spellbound with horror, and the next, realising what had happened, were kneeling down beside the piteous head. The thin crust of earth had given way beneath the animal’s hindquarters as it grazed over the turf, and before it could recover itself it had slipped bodily through the hole thus formed, and was standing on the rocky bed of the underground river, with its head only in the upper air.
The poor brute was perishing for want of food and water. All around the hole, as far as the head could reach, the turf was eaten, bare, and although it was standing in a couple of feet of water it could not get at it. While the Măluka went for help I brought handfuls of grass, and his hat full of water, again and again, and was haunted for days with the remembrance of those pleading eyes and piteous, nickering lips.
The whole camp, black and white, came to the rescue but it was an awful work getting the exhausted creature out of its death-trap. The hole had to be cut back to a solid ridge of rocky soil, saplings cut to form a solid slope from the bed of the river to the ground above, and the poor brute roped and literally hauled up the slope by sheer force and strength of numbers. After an hour’s digging, dragging, and rope-pulling, the horse was standing on solid turf, a new pool had been added to the Springs, and none of us had much hankering for riding over springy country.
The hour’s work among the pools awakened the latent geologist in all of us, excepting Dan, and set us rooting at the bottom of one of the pools for a piece of the terraced limestone.
It was difficult to dislodge, and our efforts reminded Dan of a night spent in the camp of a geologist—a man with many letters after his name. “Had the chaps heaving rocks round for him half his time,” he said. “Couldn’t see much sense in it meself.” Dan spoke of the geologist as “one of them old Alphabets.” “Never met a chap with so many letters in his brand,” he explained. “He was one of them taxydermy blokes, you know, that’s always messing round with stones and things.”
Out of the water, the opal tints died out of the limestone, and the geologist in us went to sleep again when we found that all we had for our trouble was a piece of dirty-looking rock. Like Dan, we saw little sense in “heaving rocks round,” and went back to the camp and the business of packing up for the homestead.
About next midday we rode into the homestead thoroughfare, where Cheon and Tiddle’ums welcomed us with enthusiasm, but Cheon’s enthusiasm turned to indignation when he found we were only in for a day or two.
“What’s ’er matter?” he ejaculated. “Missus no more stockrider”; but a letter waiting for us at the homestead made “bush” more than ever imperative: a letter, from the foreman of the telegraphic repairing line party, asking for a mob of killers, and fixing a date for its delivery to one “Happy Dick.”
“Spoke just in the nick of time,” Dan said; but as we discussed plans Cheon hinted darkly that the Măluka was not a fit and proper person to be entrusted with the care of a woman, and suggested that he should undertake to treat the missus as she should be treated, while the Măluka attended to the cattle.
Fate, however, interfered to keep the missus at the homestead, to persuade Cheon that, after all, the Măluka was a fit and proper person to have the care of a woman, and to find a very present use for the house; an influenza sore-throat breaking out in the camp, the missus developed it, and Dan went out alone to find the Quiet Stockman and the “killers” for Happy Dick.
Before a week was out the Măluka and Cheon had won each other’s undying regard because of their treatment of the missus.
With the nearest doctor three hundred miles away in Darwin, and held there by hospital routine, the Măluka decided on bed and feeding-up as the safest course, and Cheon came out in a new character.
As medical adviser and reader-aloud to the patient, the Măluka was supposed to have his hands full, and Cheon, usurping the position of sick-nurse, sent everything, excepting the nursing, to the wall. Rice-water, chicken-jelly, barley-water, egg-flips, beef-tea junket, and every invalid food he had ever heard of, were prepared, and, with the Măluka to back him up, forced on the missus; and when food was not being administered, the pillow was being shaken or the bedclothes straightened. (The mattress being still on the ends of cows’ tails, a folded rug served in its place). There was very little wrong with the patient, but the wonder was she did not become really ill through over-eating and want of rest.
I pleaded with the Măluka, but the Măluka pleading for just a little more rest and feeding-up, while Cheon gulped and choked in the background, I gave in, and eating everything as it was offered, snatched what rest I could, getting as much entertainment as possible out of Cheon and the staff in between times.
For three days I lay obediently patient, and each day Cheon grew more affectionate, patting my hands at times, as he confided to the Măluka that although he admired big, moon-faced women as a feast for the eyes, he liked them small and docile when he had to deal personally with them. Until I met Cheon I thought the Chinese incapable of affection; but many lessons are learned out bush.
Travellers—house-visitors—coming in on the fourth day, I hoped for a speedy release, but visitors were considered fatiguing, and release was promised as soon as they were gone.
Fortunately the walls had many cracks in them—not being as much on the plumb as Johnny had predicted, and for a couple of days, watching the visitors through these cracks and listening to their conversation provided additional amusement. I could see them quite distinctly as, no doubt, they could see me; but we kept a decorous silence until the Fizzer came in, then at the Fizzer’s shout the walls of Jericho toppled down.
“The missus sick!” I heard him shout. “Thought she looked in prime condition at the Springs.” (Bush language frequently has a strong twang of cattle in it.)
“So I am now,” I called; and then the Fizzer and I held an animated conversation through the walls. “I’m imprisoned for life,” I moaned, after hearing the news of the outside world; and laughing and chuckling outside, the Fizzer vowed he would “do a rescue next trip if they’ve still got you down.” Then, after appreciating fervent thanks, he shouted in farewell: “The boss is bringing something along that’ll help to pass some of the time—the finest mail you ever clapped eyes on,” and presently patient and bed were under a litter of mail-matter.
The Fizzer having brought down the walls of conventionality, the traveller-guests proffered greetings and sympathy through the material walls, after which we exchanged mail-news and general gossip for a day or two; then just as these travellers were preparing to exchange farewells, others came in and postponed the promised release. As there seemed little hope of a lull in visitors, I was wondering if ever I should be considered well enough to entertain guests, when Fate once more interfered.
“Whatever’s this coming in from the East?” I heard the Măluka call in consternation, and in equal consternation his traveller-guest called back: “Looks like a whole village settlement.” Then Cheon burst into the room in a frenzy of excitement: “Big mob traveller, missus. Two-fellow-missus, sit down,” he began; but the Măluka was at his heels.
“Here’s two women and a mob of youngsters,” he gasped. “I’m afraid you’ll have to get up, little ’un, and lend a hand with them.”
Afraid! By the time the village settlement had “turned out” and found its way to the house, I was out in the open air welcoming its members with a heartiness that must have surprised them. Little did they guess that they were angels unaware. Homely enough angels, though, they proved, as angels unaware should prove: one man and two women from “Queensland way,” who had been “inside” for fifteen years, and with them two fine young lads and a wee, toddling baby—all three children born in the bush and leaving it for the first time.
Never before had Cheon had such a company to provide for; but as we moved towards the house in a body—ourselves, the village settlement, and the Măluka’s traveller-guests, with a stockman traveller and the Dandy looking on from the quarters, his hospitable soul rejoiced at the sight; and by the time seats had been found for all comers, he appeared laden with tea and biscuits, and within half an hour had conjured up a plentiful dinner for all comers.
Fortunately the chairs were all “up” to the weight of the ladies, and the remainder of the company easily accommodated itself to circumstances, in the shape of sawn stumps, rough stools, and sundry boxes; and although the company was large and the dining-table small, and although, at times, we feared the table was about to fulfil its oft-repeated threat and fall over, yet the dinner was there to be enjoyed, and, being bush-folk, and hungry, our guests enjoyed it, passing over all incongruities with simple merriment—a light-hearted, bubbling merriment, in no way comparable to that “laughter of fools,” that crackling of thorns under a pot, provoked by the incongruities of the world’s freak dinners. The one is the heritage of the simple-hearted, and the other—all the world has to give in exchange for this birthright.
The elder lads, one fourteen and one ten years of age, found Cheon by far the most entertaining incongruity at the dinner, and when dinner was over—after we had settled down on the various chairs and stumps that had been carried out to the verandah again—they shadowed him wherever he went.
They were strangely self-possessed children; but knowing little more of the world than the black children their playmates, Cheon, in his turn, found them vastly amusing, and instructing them in the ways of the world—from his point of view—found them also eager pupils.
But their education came to a standstill after they had mastered the mysteries of the Dandy’s gramophone, and Cheon was no longer entertaining.
All afternoon brass-band selections, comic songs, and variety items, blared out with ceaseless reiteration; and as the men-folk smoked and talked cattle, and the wee baby—a bonnie fair child—toddled about, smiling and contented, the women-folk spoke of their life “out-back,” and listening, I knew that neither I nor the telegraph lady had even guessed what roughness means.
For fifteen years things had been improving, and now everyone was to have a well-earned holiday. The children were to be christened and then shown the delights of a large town! Darwin of necessity (Palmerston, by the way, on the map, but Darwin to Territorians). Darwin with its one train, its telegraph offices, two or three stores, banks and public buildings, its Residency, its Chinatown, its lovers’ walk, its two or three empty, wide, grass-grown streets bordered with deep-verandahed, iron-built bungalow-houses, with their gardens planted in painted tins—a development of the white-ant pest—and lastly, its great sea, where ships wander without tracks or made ways! Hardly a typical town, but the best in the Territory.
The women, naturally, were looking forward to doing a bit of shopping, and as we slipped into fashions the traveller guests became interested. “Haven’t seen so many women together for years,” one of them said. “Reminds me of when I was a nipper,” and the other traveller “reckoned” he had struck it lucky for once. “Three on ’em at once,” he chuckled with indescribable relish. “They reckon it never rains but it pours.” And so it would seem with three women guests within three weeks at a homestead where women had been almost unknown for years.
But these women guests only stayed one night, the children being all impatience to get on to the telegraph line, to those wires that talked, and to the railway, where the iron monster ran.
Early in the morning they left us, and as they rode away the fair toddling baby was sitting on its mother’s pommel-knee, smiling out on the world from the deep recesses of a sunbonnet. Already it had ridden a couple of hundred miles, with its baby hands playing with the reins, and before it reached home again another five hundred would be added to the two hundred. Seven hundred miles on horse back in a few weeks, at one year old, compares favourably with one of the Fizzer’s trips. But it is thus the bush develops her Fizzers.
After so much excitement Cheon feared a relapse, and was for prompt, preventive measures; but even the Măluka felt there was a limit to the Rest Cure, and the musterers coming in with Happy Dick’s bullocks and a great mob of mixed cattle for the yards, Dan proved a strong ally; and besides, as the musterers were in and Happy Dick due to arrive by midday, Cheon’s hands were full with other matters.
There was a roly-poly pudding to make for Dan, baked custard for the Dandy, jam-tarts for Happy Dick, cake and biscuits for all comers, in addition to a dinner and supper waiting to be cooked for fifteen black boys, several lubras, and half-a-dozen hungry white folk. Cheon had his own peculiar form of welcome for his many favourites, regaling each one of them with delicacies to their particular liking, each and every time they came in.
Happy Dick, also, had his own peculiar form of welcome. “Good-day! Real glad to see you!” washisusual greeting. Sure of his own welcome wherever he went, he never waited to hear it, but hastened to welcome all men into his fellowship. “Real glad to see you,” he would say, with a ready smile of comradeship; and it always seemed as though he had added: “I hope you’ll make yourself at home while with me.” In some mysterious way, Happy Dick was at all times the host giving liberally of the best he had to his fellow-men.
He was one of the pillars of the Line Party. “Born in it, I think,” he would say. “Don’t quite remember,” adding with his ever-varying smile, “Remember when it was born, anyway.”
When the “Overland Telegraph” was built across the Australian continent from sea to sea, a clear broad avenue two chains wide, was cut for it through bush and scrub and dense forests, along the backbone of Australia, and in this avenue the line party was “born” and bred—a party of axemen and mechanics under the orders of a foreman, whose duty it is to keep the “Territory section” of the line in repair, and this avenue free from the scrub and timber that spring up unceasingly in its length.
In unbroken continuity this great avenue runs for hundreds upon hundreds of miles, carpeted with feathery grasses and shooting scrubs, and walled in on either side with dense, towering forest or lighter and more scattered timber. On and on it stretches in utter loneliness, zigzagging from horizon to horizons beyond, and guarding those two sensitive wires at its centre, as they run along their single line of slender galvanised posts, from the great bush that never ceases in its efforts to close in on them and engulf them. A great broad highway, waiting in its loneliness for the generations to come, with somewhere in its length the line party camp, and here and there within its thousand miles, a chance traveller or two here and there a horseman with pack-horse ambling and grazing along behind him; here and there a trudging speck with a swag across its shoulders, and between them one, two, or three hundred miles of solitude, here and there a horseman riding, and here and there a footman trudging on, each unconscious of the others.
From day to day they travel on, often losing the count of the days, with those lines always above them, and those beckoning posts ever running on before them and as they travel, now and then they touch a post for company—shaking hands with Outside: touching now and then a post for company, and daily realising the company and comfort those posts and wires can be. Here at least is something in touch with the world something vibrating with the lives and actions of men, and an ever-present friend in dire necessity. With those wires above him, any day a traveller can cry for help to the Territory, if he call while he yet has strength to climb one of those friendly posts and cut that quivering wire—for help that will come speedily, for the cutting of the telegraph wire is as the ringing of an alarm-bell throughout the Territory. In all haste the break is located, and food, water, and every human help that suggests itself sent out from the nearest telegraph station. There is no official delay—there rarely is in the Territory—for by some marvellous good fortune, there everything belongs to the Department in which it finds itself.
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Just as Happy Dick is one of the pillars of the line party, so the line party is one of the pillars of the line itself. Up and down this great avenue, year in year out it creeps along, cutting scrub and repairing as it goes, and moving cumbrous main camps from time to time, with its waggon loads of stores, tents, furnishings, flocks of milking goats, its fowls, its gramophone, and Chinese cook. Month after month it creeps on, until, reaching the end of the section, it turns round to creep out again.
Year in, year out, it had crept in and out, and for twenty years Happy Dick had seen to its peace and comfort. Nothing ever ruffled him. “All in the game” was his nearest approach to a complaint, as he pegged away at his work, in between whiles going to the nearest station for killers, carting water in tanks out to “dry stage camps,” and doing any other work that found itself undone. Dick’s position was as elastic as his smile.
He considered himself an authority on three things only: the line party, dog-fights, and cribbage. All else, including his dog Peter and his cheque-book, he left to the discretion of his fellow-men.
Peter—a speckled, drab-coloured, prick-eared creation, a few sizes larger than a fox-terrier—could be kept in order with a little discretion, and by keeping hands off Happy Dick; but all the discretion in the Territory, and a unanimous keeping off of hands, failed to keep order in the cheque-book.
The personal payment of salaries to men scattered through hundreds of miles of bush country being impracticable, the department pays all salaries due to its servants into their bank accounts at Darwin, and therefore when Happy Dick found himself the backbone of the line party, he also found himself the possessor of a cheque-book. At first he was inclined to look upon it as a poor substitute for hard cash; but after the foreman had explained its mysteries, and taught him to sign his name in magic tracery, he became more than reconciled to it and drew cheques blithely, until one for five pounds was returned to a creditor: no funds—and in due course returned to Happy Dick.
“No good?” he said to the creditor, looking critically at the piece of paper in his hands. “Must have been writ wrong. Well, you’ve only yourself to blame, seeing you wrote it”; then added magnanimously, mistaking the creditor’s scorn: “Never mind, write yourself out another. I don’t mind signing ’em.”
The foreman and the creditor spent several hours trying to explain banking principles, but Dick “couldn’t see it.” “There’s stacks of ’em left!” he persisted, showing his book of fluttering bank cheques. Finally, in despair, the foreman took the cheque-book into custody, and Dick found himself poor once more.
But it was only for a little while. In an evil hour he discovered that a cheque from another man’s book answered all purposes if it bore that magic tracery, and Happy Dick was never solvent again. Gaily he signed cheques, and the foreman did all he could to keep pace with him on the cheque-book block; but as no one, excepting the accountant in the Darwin bank, knew the state of his account from day to day, it was like taking a ticket in a lottery to accept a cheque from Happy Dick.
“Real glad to see you,” Happy Dick said in hearty greeting to us all as he dismounted, and we waited to be entertained. Happy Dick had his favourite places and people, and the Elsey community stood high in his favour. “Can’t beat the Elsey for a good dog-fight and a good game of cribbage,” he said, every time he came in or left us, and that from Happy Dick was high praise. At times he added: “Nor for a square meal neither,” thereby inciting Cheon to further triumphs for his approval.
As usual, Happy Dick “played” the Quarters cribbage and related a good dog-fight—“Peter’s latest “—and, as usual before he left us, his pockets were bulging with tobacco—the highest stakes used in the Quarters—and Peter and Brown had furnished him with materials for a still newer dog-fight recital. As usual, he rode off with his killers, assuring all that he would “be along again soon,” and, as usual, Peter and Brown were tattered andhors-de-combat, but both still aggressive. Peter’s death lunge was the death lunge of Brown, and both dogs knew that lunge too well to let the other “get in.”
As usual, Happy Dick had hunted through the store, and taken anything he “really needed,” paying, of course, by cheque; but when he came to sign that cheque, after the Măluka had written it, he entered the dining-room for the first time since its completion.
With calm scrutiny he took in every detail, including the serviettes as they lay folded in their rings on the waiting dinner-table, and before he left the homestead he expressed his approval in the Quarters:
“Got everything up to the knocker, haven’t they?” he said. “Often heard toffs decorated their tables with rags in hobble rings, but never believed it before.”
Happy Dick gone, Cheon turned his attention to the health of the missus; but Dan, persuading the Măluka that “all she needed was a breath of fresh air,” we went bush on a tour of inspection.
Within a week we returned to the homestead, and for twenty-four hours Cheon gloated over us, preparing every delicacy that appealed to him as an antidote to an outbush course of beef and damper. Then a man rode into our lives who was to teach us the depth and breadth of the meaning of the word mate—a sturdy, thick-set man with haggard, tired eyes and deep lines about his firm strong mouth that told of recent and prolonged tension.
“Me mate’s sick; got a touch of fever,” he said simply dismounting near the verandah. “I’ve left him camped back there at the Warlochs”; and as the Măluka prepared remedies—making up the famous Gulf mixture—the man with grateful thanks, found room in his pockets and saddle-pouch for eggs, milk, and brandy, confident that “these’ll soon put him right,” adding, with the tense lines deepening about his mouth as he touched on what had brought them there: “He’s been real bad, ma’am. I’ve had a bit of a job to get him as far as this.” In the days to come we were to learn, little by little, that the “bit of a job” had meant keeping a sick man in his saddle for the greater part of the fifty-mile dry stage, with forty miles of “bad going” on top of that, and fighting for him every inch of the way that terrible symptom of malaria—that longing to “chuck it,” and lie down and die.
Bad water after that fifty-mile dry made men with a touch of fever only too common at the homestead, and knowing how much the comforts of the homestead could do, when the Măluka came out with the medicines he advised bringing the sick man on as soon as he had rested sufficiently. “You’ve only to ask for it and we’ll send the old station buck-board across,” he said, and the man began fumbling uneasily at his saddle-girths, and said something evasive about “giving trouble”; but when the Măluka—afraid that a man’s life might be the forfeit of another man’s shrinking fear of causing trouble—added that on second thoughts we would ride across as soon as horses could be brought in, he flushed hotly and stammered: “If you please, ma’am. If the boss’ll excuse me, me mate’s dead-set against a woman doing things for him. If you wouldn’t mind not coming. He’d rather have me. Me and him’s been mates this seven years. The boss’ll understand.”
The boss did understand, and rode across to the Warlochs alone, to find a man as shy and reticent as a bushman can be, and full of dread lest the woman at the homestead would insist on visiting him. “You see, that’s why he wouldn’t come on,” the mate said. “He couldn’t bear the thought of a woman doing things for him”; and the Măluka explained that the missus understood all that. That lesson had been easily learned; for again and again men had come in “down with a touch of fever,” whose temperatures went up at the very thought of a woman doing things for them, and always the actual nursing was left to the Măluka or the Dandy, the woman seeing to egg-flips and such things, exchanging at first perhaps only an occasional greeting, and listening at times to strange life-histories later on.
But in vain the Măluka explained and entreated: the sick man was “all right where he was.” His mate was worth “ten women fussing round,” he insisted, ignoring the Măluka’s explanations. “Had he not lugged him through the worst pinch already?” and then he played his trump card: “He’ll stick to me till I peg out,” he said—“nothing’s too tough for him”; and as he lay back, the mate deciding “arguing’ll only do for him,” dismissed the Măluka with many thanks, refusing all offers of nursing help with a quiet “He’d rather have me,” but accepting gratefully broths and milk and anything of that sort the homestead could furnish. “Nothing ever knocks me out,” he reiterated, and dragged on through sleepless days and nights, as the days dragged by finding ample reward in the knowledge that “he’d rather have me”, and when there came that deep word of praise from his stricken comrade: “A good mate’s harder to find than a good wife,” his gentle, protecting devotion increased tenfold.
Bushmen are instinctively protective. There is no other word that so exactly defines their tender helpfulness to all weakness and helplessness. Knowing how hard the fight is out-bush for even the strong and enduring all their magnificent strength and courage stand ready for those who would go to the wall without it. A lame dog, a man down in his luck, an old soaker, little women, any woman in need or sickness—each and all call forth this protectiveness; but nothing calls it forth in all its self-sacrificing tenderness like the helplessness of a strong man stricken down in his strength.
Understanding this also, we stood aside, and rejoicing as the sick man, benefiting by the comparative comfort and satisfied to have his own way, seemed to improve. For three days he improved steadily, and then, after standing still for another day slipped back inch by inch to weakness and prostration, until the homestead, without coercion, was the only chance for his life.
But there was a woman there; and as the mate went back to his pleading the woman did what the world may consider a strange thing—but a man’s life depended on it—she sent a message out to the sick man, to say that if he would come to the homestead she would not go to him until he asked her.
He pondered over the message for a day, sceptical of a woman’s word—surely some woman had left that legacy in his heart—but eventually decided he wouldn’t risk it. Then the chief of the telegraph coming in—a man widely experienced in fever—and urging one more attempt, the Dandy volunteered to help us in our extremity, and, driving across to the Warlochs in the chief’s buggy worked one of his miracles; he spent only a few minutes alone with the man (and the Dandy alone knows now what passed), but within an hour the sick traveller was resting quietly between clean sheets in the Dandy’s bed. There were times when the links in the chain seemed all blessing.
Waking warm and refreshed, the sick man faced the battle of life once more, and the chief taking command, and the man quietly and hopefully obeying orders, the woman found her promise easy to keep; but the mate’s hardest task had come, the task of waiting with folded hands. With the same quiet steadfastness he braced himself for this task and when, after weary hours, the chief pronounced “all well” and turned to him with an encouraging “I think he’ll pull through now, my man,” the sturdy shoulders that had borne so much drooped and quivered beneath the kindly words, and with dimming eyes he gave in at last to the Măluka’s persuasions, and lay down and slept, sure of the Dandy’s promise to wake him at dawn.
At midnight the Măluka left the Quarters, and going back just before the dawn to relieve the Dandy, found the sick man lying quietly-restful, with one arm thrown lightly across his brow. He had spoken in his sleep a short while before the Dandy said as the Măluka bent over him with a cup of warm milk, but the cup was returned to the table untasted. Many travellers had come into our lives and passed on with a bright nod of farewell; but at the first stirring of the dawn, without one word of farewell, this traveller had passed on and left us; left us, and the faithful mate of those seven strong young years and those last few days of weariness. “Unexpected heart failure,” our chief said, as the Dandy went to fulfil his promise to the sleeping mate. He promised to waken him at the dawn, and leaving that awakening in the Dandy’s hands, as we thought of that lonely Warloch camp our one great thankfulness was that when the awakening came the man was not to be alone there with his dead comrade. The bush can be cruel at times, and yet, although she may leave us alone with our beloved dead, her very cruelty brings with it a fierce, consoling pain; for out-bush our dead are all our own.
Beyond those seven faithful years the mate could tell us but little of his comrade’s life. He was William Neaves, born at Woolongong, with a mother living somewhere there. That was all he knew. “He was always a reticent chap,” he reiterated. “He never wanted any one but me about him,” and the unspoken request was understood. He washismate, and no one but himself must render the last services.
Dry-eyed and worn, the man moved about, doing all that should be done, the bushmen only helping where they dared; then shouldering a pick and shovel, he went to the tattle rise beyond the slip rails, and set doggedly to work at a little distance from two lonely graves already there. Doggedly he worked on; but, as he worked, gradually his burden lost its overwhelming weight, for the greater part of it had somehow skipped on to the Dandy’s shoulders—those brave, unflinching shoulders, that carried other men’s burdens so naturally and so willingly that their burdens always seemed the Dandy’s own. The Dandy may have had that power of finding “something decent” in every one he met, but in the Dandy all men found the help they needed most.
0001
Quietly and unassumingly, the Dandy put all in order and then, soon after midday, with brilliant sunshine all about us, we stood by an open grave in the shade of the drooping glory of a crimson flowering bauhenia. Some scenes live undimmed in our memories for a lifetime—scenes where we have seemed onlookers rather than actors seeing every detail with minute exactness—and that scene with its mingling of glorious beauty, human pathos, and soft, subdued sound, will live, I think, in the memory of most of us for many years to come:
“In the midst of life we are in death,” the Măluka read, standing among that drooping crimson splendour and at his feet lay the open grave, preaching silently its great lesson of Life and Death, with, beside it, the still quiet form of the traveller whose last weary journey had ended; around it, bareheaded and all in white, a little band of bush-folk, silent and reverent and awed; above it, that crimson glory, and all around and about it, soft sun-flecked bush, murmuring sounds, flooding sunshine, and deep azure blue distances. Beyond the bush, deep azure blue, within it and throughout it, flooding sunshine and golden ladders of light; and at its sun-flecked heart, under that drooping crimson-starred canopy of soft grey-green, that little company of bush-folk, standing beside that open grave, as Mother Nature, strewing with flowers the last resting place of one of her children, scattered gently falling scarlet blossoms into it and about it. Here and there a dog lay, stretched out in the shade, sniffing in idle curiosity at the blossoms as they fell, well satisfied with what life had to give just then; while at their master’s feet lay the traveller who was to leave such haunting memories behind him: William Neaves, born at Woolongong, with somewhere there a mother going quietly about her work, wondering vaguely perhaps where her laddie was that day.
Poor mother! Yet, when even that knowledge came to her, it comforted her in her sorrow to know that a woman had stood beside that grave mourning for her boy in her name.
Quietly the Măluka read on to the end; and then in the hush that followed the mate stooped, and, with deep lines hardening rigidly, picked up a spade. There was no mistaking his purpose; but as he straightened himself the Dandy’s hand was on the spade and the Măluka was speaking. “Perhaps you’ll be good enough to drive the missus back to the house right away,” he was saying, “I think she has had almost more than she can stand.”
The man looked hesitatingly at him. “If you’ll be good enough,” the Măluka added, “I should not leave here myself till all is completed.”
Unerringly the Măluka had read his man: no hint ofhisstrength failing, but a favour asked, and with it a service for a woman.
The stern set lines about the man’s mouth quivered for a moment, then set again as he sacrificed his wishes to a woman’s need, and relinquishing the spade, turned away; and as we drove down to the house in the chief’s buggy—the buggy that a few minutes before had borne our sick traveller along that last stage of his earthly journey—he said gently, almost apologetically: “I should have reckoned on this knocking you out a bit, missus.” Always others, never self, with the bush-folk.
Then, this service rendered for the man who had done what he could for his comrade, his strong, unflinching heart turned back to its labour of love, and, all else being done, found relief for itself in softening and smoothing the rough outline of the newly piled mound, and as the man toiled, Mother Nature went on with her work, silently and sweetly healing the scar on her bosom, hiding her pain from the world, as she shrouded in starry crimson the burial place of her brave, enduring son—a service to be renewed from day to day until the mosses and grasses grew again.
But there were still other services for the mate to render and as the bush-folk stood aside, none daring to trespass here, a rough wooden railing rose about the grave. Then the man packed his comrade’s swag for the last time, and that done, came to the Măluka, as we stood under the house verandah, and held out two sovereigns in his open palm. The man was yet a stranger to the ways of the Never-Never.
“I’ll have to ask for tick for meself for awhile,” he said “But if that won’t pay for all me mate’s had there’s another where they came from. He was always independent and would never take charity.”
The hard lines about his mouth were very marked just then, and the outstretched hand seemed fiercely defiant but the Măluka reading in it only a man’s proud care for a comrade’s honour, put it gently aside, saying: “We give no charity here; only hospitality to our guests. Surely no man would refuse that.”
They speak of a woman’s delicate tact. But daily the bushman put the woman to shame, while she stood dumb or stammering. The Măluka had touched the one chord in the man’s heart that was not strained to breaking point, and instantly the fingers closed over the sovereigns, and the defiant hand fell to his side, as with a husky “Not from your sort, boss,” he turned sharply on his heel; and as he walked away a hand was brushed hastily across the weary eyes.
With that brushing of the hand the inevitable reaction began, and for a little while we feared we would have another sick traveller on our hand. But only for a little while. After a day or two of rest and care his strength came back, but his thoughts were ever of those seven years of steadfast comradeship. Simply and earnestly he spoke of them and of that mother, all unconscious of the heartbreak that was speeding only too surely to her. Poor mother! And yet those other two nameless graves on that little rise deep in the heart of the bush bear witness that other mothers have even deeper sorrows to bear. Their sons are gone from them, and they, knowing nothing of it, wait patiently through the long silent years for the word that can never come to them.
For a few days the man rested, and then, just when work—hard work—was the one thing needful, Dan came in for a consultation, and with him a traveller, the bearer of a message from our kind, great-hearted chief to say that work was waiting for the mate at the line party. Our chief was the personification of all that is best in the bush-folk (as all bushmen will testify to his memory)—men’s lives crossed his by chance just here and there, but at those crossing places life have been happier and better. For one long weary day the mate’s life had run parallel with our chief’s, and because of that, when he left us his heart was lighter than ever we had dared to hope for. But this man was not to fade quite out of our lives, for deep in that loyal heart the Măluka had been enshrined as “one in ten thousand.”
The bearer of the chief’s message had also carried out all extra mail for us, and, opening it, we found the usual questions of the South folk.
“Whatever do you do with your time?” they all asked. “The monotony would kill me,” some declared. “Every day must seem the same,” said others: every one agreeing that life out-bush was stagnation, and all marvelling that we did not die of ennui.
“Whatever do you do with your time?” The day Neaves’s mate left was devoted to housekeeping duties—“spring-cleaning,” the Măluka called it, while Dan drew vivid word-pictures of dogs cleaning their own chains. The day after that was filled in with preparations for a walk-about, and the next again found us camped at Bitter Springs. Monotony! when of the thirty days that followed these three every day was alike only in being different from any other, excepting in their almost unvarying menu: beef and damper and tea for a first course, and tea and damper and jam for a second. They also resembled each other, and all other days out-bush, in the necessity of dressing in a camp mosquito net. “Stagnation!” they called it, when no day was long enough for its work, and almost every night found us camped a day’s journey from our breakfast camp.
It was August, well on in the Dry, and on a cattle station in the Never-Never “things hum” in August. All the surface waters are drying up by then, and the outside cattle—those scattered away beyond the borders—are obliged to come in to the permanent waters, and must be gathered in and branded before the showers scatter them again.
We were altogether at the Springs: Dan, the Dandy, the Quiet Stockman, ourselves, every horse-“boy” that could be mustered, a numerous staff of camp “boys” for the Dandy’s work, and an almost complete complement of dogs, Little Tiddle’ums only being absent, detained at the homestead this time with the cares of a nursery. A goodly company all told as we sat among the camp fires, with our horses clanking through the timber in their hobbles: forty horses and more, pack teams and relays for the whole company and riding hacks, in addition to both stock and camp horses for active mustering; for it requires over two hundred horses to get through successfully a year’s work on a “little place like the Elsey.”
Every one of the company had his special work to attend to; but every one’s work was concerned with cattle, and cattle only. The musterers were to work every area of country again and again, and the Dandy’s work began in the building of the much-needed yard to the north-west.
We breakfasted at the Springs all together, had dinner miles apart, and all met again at the Stirling for supper. Dan and ourselves dined also at the Stirling on damper and “push” and vile-smelling blue-black tea. The damper had been carried in company with some beef and tea, in Dan’s saddle-pouch; the tea was made with the thick, muddy, almost putrid water of the fast-drying water hole, and the “push” was provided by force of circumstances, the pack teams being miles away with the plates, knives, and forks.
Out-bush we take the good with the bad as we find it; so we sat among towering white-ant hills, drinking as little of the tea as possible and enjoying the damper and “push” with hungry relish.
Around the Stirling are acres of red-coloured, queer-shaped uncanny white ant hills, and camped among these we sat, each served with a slice of damper that carried a smaller slice of beef upon it, providing the “push” by cutting off small pieces of the beef with a pen-knife, and “pushing” them along the damper to the edge of the slice, to be bitten off from there in hearty mouthfuls.
No butter, of course. In Darwin, eight months before we had tasted our last butter on ship-board, for tinned butter, out-bush, in the tropics, is as palatable as castor oil. The tea had been made in the Măluka’s quart-pot, our cups having been carried dangling from our saddles, in the approved manner of the bush-folk.
We breakfasted at the Springs, surrounded by the soft forest beauty; ate our dinner in the midst of grotesque ant-hill scenery, and spent the afternoon looking for a lost water-hole.