He had a selection on a long box-scrub siding of the ridges, about half
a mile back and up from the coach road. There were no neighbours that
I ever heard of, and the nearest “town” was thirty miles away. He grew
wheat among the stumps of his clearing, sold the crop standing to a
Cockie who lived ten miles away, and had some surplus sons; or, some
seasons, he reaped it by hand, had it thrashed by travelling “steamer”
(portable steam engine and machine), and carried the grain, a few bags
at a time, into the mill on his rickety dray.
He had lived alone for upwards of 15 years, and was known to those who
knew him as “Ratty Howlett”.
Trav'lers and strangers failed to see anything uncommonly ratty about
him. It was known, or, at least, it was believed, without question, that
while at work he kept his horse saddled and bridled, and hung up to the
fence, or grazing about, with the saddle on--or, anyway, close handy
for a moment's notice--and whenever he caught sight, over the scrub and
through the quarter-mile break in it, of a traveller on the road, he
would jump on his horse and make after him. If it was a horseman
he usually pulled him up inside of a mile. Stories were told of
unsuccessful chases, misunderstandings, and complications arising out of
Howlett's mania for running down and bailing up travellers. Sometimes he
caught one every day for a week, sometimes not one for weeks--it was a
lonely track.
The explanation was simple, sufficient, and perfectly natural--from a
bushman's point of view. Ratty only wanted to have a yarn. He and the
traveller would camp in the shade for half an hour or so and yarn and
smoke. The old man would find out where the traveller came from, and
how long he'd been there, and where he was making for, and how long
he reckoned he'd be away; and ask if there had been any rain along the
traveller's back track, and how the country looked after the drought;
and he'd get the traveller's ideas on abstract questions--if he had any.
If it was a footman (swagman), and he was short of tobacco, old Howlett
always had half a stick ready for him. Sometimes, but very rarely, he'd
invite the swagman back to the hut for a pint of tea, or a bit of meat,
flour, tea, or sugar, to carry him along the track.
And, after the yarn by the road, they said, the old man would ride back,
refreshed, to his lonely selection, and work on into the night as long
as he could see his solitary old plough horse, or the scoop of his
long-handled shovel.
And so it was that I came to make his acquaintance--or, rather, that he
made mine. I was cantering easily along the track--I was making for the
north-west with a pack horse--when about a mile beyond the track to the
selection I heard, “Hi, Mister!” and saw a dust cloud following me. I
had heard of “Old Ratty Howlett” casually, and so was prepared for him.
A tall gaunt man on a little horse. He was clean-shaven, except for
a frill beard round under his chin, and his long wavy, dark hair
was turning grey; a square, strong-faced man, and reminded me of one
full-faced portrait of Gladstone more than any other face I had seen.
He had large reddish-brown eyes, deep set under heavy eyebrows, and with
something of the blackfellow in them--the sort of eyes that will peer
at something on the horizon that no one else can see. He had a way of
talking to the horizon, too--more than to his companion; and he had a
deep vertical wrinkle in his forehead that no smile could lessen.
I got down and got out my pipe, and we sat on a log and yarned awhile on
bush subjects; and then, after a pause, he shifted uneasily, it seemed
to me, and asked rather abruptly, and in an altered tone, if I was
married. A queer question to ask a traveller; more especially in my
case, as I was little more than a boy then.
He talked on again of old things and places where we had both been, and
asked after men he knew, or had known--drovers and others--and whether
they were living yet. Most of his inquiries went back before my time;
but some of the drovers, one or two overlanders with whom he had been
mates in his time, had grown old into mine, and I knew them. I notice
now, though I didn't then--and if I had it would not have seemed
strange from a bush point of view--that he didn't ask for news, nor seem
interested in it.
Then after another uneasy pause, during which he scratched crosses in
the dust with a stick, he asked me, in the same queer tone and without
looking at me or looking up, if I happened to know anything about
doctoring--if I'd ever studied it.
I asked him if anyone was sick at his place. He hesitated, and said
“No.” Then I wanted to know why he had asked me that question, and
he was so long about answering that I began to think he was hard of
hearing, when, at last, he muttered something about my face reminding
him of a young fellow he knew of who'd gone to Sydney to “study for a
doctor”. That might have been, and looked natural enough; but why didn't
he ask me straight out if I was the chap he “knowed of”? Travellers do
not like beating about the bush in conversation.
He sat in silence for a good while, with his arms folded, and looking
absently away over the dead level of the great scrubs that spread
from the foot of the ridge we were on to where a blue peak or two of a
distant range showed above the bush on the horizon.
I stood up and put my pipe away and stretched. Then he seemed to wake
up. “Better come back to the hut and have a bit of dinner,” he said.
“The missus will about have it ready, and I'll spare you a handful of
hay for the horses.”
The hay decided it. It was a dry season. I was surprised to hear of a
wife, for I thought he was a hatter--I had always heard so; but
perhaps I had been mistaken, and he had married lately; or had got a
housekeeper. The farm was an irregularly-shaped clearing in the scrub,
with a good many stumps in it, with a broken-down two-rail fence
along the frontage, and logs and “dog-leg” the rest. It was about
as lonely-looking a place as I had seen, and I had seen some
out-of-the-way, God-forgotten holes where men lived alone. The hut was
in the top corner, a two-roomed slab hut, with a shingle roof, which
must have been uncommon round there in the days when that hut was built.
I was used to bush carpentering, and saw that the place had been put
up by a man who had plenty of life and hope in front of him, and for
someone else beside himself. But there were two unfinished skilling
rooms built on to the back of the hut; the posts, sleepers, and
wall-plates had been well put up and fitted, and the slab walls were
up, but the roof had never been put on. There was nothing but burrs
and nettles inside those walls, and an old wooden bullock plough and a
couple of yokes were dry-rotting across the back doorway. The remains of
a straw-stack, some hay under a bark humpy, a small iron plough, and an
old stiff coffin-headed grey draught horse, were all that I saw about
the place.
But there was a bit of a surprise for me inside, in the shape of a clean
white tablecloth on the rough slab table which stood on stakes driven
into the ground. The cloth was coarse, but it was a tablecloth--not
a spare sheet put on in honour of unexpected visitors--and perfectly
clean. The tin plates, pannikins, and jam tins that served as sugar
bowls and salt cellars were polished brightly. The walls and fireplace
were whitewashed, the clay floor swept, and clean sheets of newspaper
laid on the slab mantleshelf under the row of biscuit tins that held the
groceries. I thought that his wife, or housekeeper, or whatever she was,
was a clean and tidy woman about a house. I saw no woman; but on the
sofa--a light, wooden, batten one, with runged arms at the ends--lay a
woman's dress on a lot of sheets of old stained and faded newspapers.
He looked at it in a puzzled way, knitting his forehead, then took it
up absently and folded it. I saw then that it was a riding skirt and
jacket. He bundled them into the newspapers and took them into the
bedroom.
“The wife was going on a visit down the creek this afternoon,” he said
rapidly and without looking at me, but stooping as if to have another
look through the door at those distant peaks. “I suppose she got tired
o' waitin', and went and took the daughter with her. But, never mind,
the grub is ready.” There was a camp-oven with a leg of mutton and
potatoes sizzling in it on the hearth, and billies hanging over the
fire. I noticed the billies had been scraped, and the lids polished.
There seemed to be something queer about the whole business, but then he
and his wife might have had a “breeze” during the morning. I thought
so during the meal, when the subject of women came up, and he said one
never knew how to take a woman, etc.; but there was nothing in what he
said that need necessarily have referred to his wife or to any woman in
particular. For the rest he talked of old bush things, droving, digging,
and old bushranging--but never about live things and living men, unless
any of the old mates he talked about happened to be alive by accident.
He was very restless in the house, and never took his hat off.
There was a dress and a woman's old hat hanging on the wall near the
door, but they looked as if they might have been hanging there for a
lifetime. There seemed something queer about the whole place--something
wanting; but then all out-of-the-way bush homes are haunted by that
something wanting, or, more likely, by the spirits of the things that
should have been there, but never had been.
As I rode down the track to the road I looked back and saw old Howlett
hard at work in a hole round a big stump with his long-handled shovel.
I'd noticed that he moved and walked with a slight list to port, and put
his hand once or twice to the small of his back, and I set it down to
lumbago, or something of that sort.
Up in the Never Never I heard from a drover who had known Howlett that
his wife had died in the first year, and so this mysterious woman, if
she was his wife, was, of course, his second wife. The drover seemed
surprised and rather amused at the thought of old Howlett going in for
matrimony again.
. . . . .
I rode back that way five years later, from the Never Never. It was
early in the morning--I had ridden since midnight. I didn't think the
old man would be up and about; and, besides, I wanted to get on home,
and have a look at the old folk, and the mates I'd left behind--and the
girl. But I hadn't got far past the point where Howlett's track joined
the road, when I happened to look back, and saw him on horseback,
stumbling down the track. I waited till he came up.
He was riding the old grey draught horse this time, and it looked very
much broken down. I thought it would have come down every step, and
fallen like an old rotten humpy in a gust of wind. And the old man was
not much better off. I saw at once that he was a very sick man. His face
was drawn, and he bent forward as if he was hurt. He got down stiffly
and awkwardly, like a hurt man, and as soon as his feet touched the
ground he grabbed my arm, or he would have gone down like a man who
steps off a train in motion. He hung towards the bank of the road,
feeling blindly, as it were, for the ground, with his free hand, as I
eased him down. I got my blanket and calico from the pack saddle to make
him comfortable.
“Help me with my back agen the tree,” he said. “I must sit up--it's no
use lyin' me down.”
He sat with his hand gripping his side, and breathed painfully.
“Shall I run up to the hut and get the wife?” I asked.
“No.” He spoke painfully. “No!” Then, as if the words were jerked out of
him by a spasm: “She ain't there.”