It may be doubted whether a large proportion of what man is prone to
call happiness is secured by any mortal, in so compressed and complete
a form, as by the reasonably weary wayfarer during an evening spent in
a cheery old-fashioned inn. The conditions of enjoyment are superbly
complete. The body, healthily tired, craves utter repose, supplemented
by the creature-comforts so plentifully accorded to a solvent lodger.
The mind, ever a comparative reflex of the organic register of the
body, is so far dominated as to lie luxuriously and ruminatively
quiescent. The great ocean of the future, with possible armadas,
Columbus discoveries, whirlpools, and typhoons, lies mist-shrouded
and peaceful-murmurous. The mild lustre of fairly-purchased present
enjoyment is shed lamp-like over the whole being. The difficult past,
the uncertain future, are shut out from the mental view as completely
as are the dark streets and stranger groups of a city, by shrouding
curtains, when the interior life is alone visible. Care, save by
improbable hazard, is thrust out till the morn. Till then the joys of
unpalled appetite. Slumber, soft-touched, silent nurse, points with
warning finger to the couch. Reverie may be fondled, darling nymph,
without the rebuke of cold-eyed prudence. The wayfarer is a monarch
for that evening only. His subjects haste to do his bidding. His purse
contains a compressible coronet, investing him with regal dignity and
absolute power, while the talisman coin is potent. Burly Sam Johnson
loved ‘to take his ease at an inn.’ Was there an added luxury in the
uncounted cups of tea therein possible, dissevered from the fear of
accidents to Mrs. Thrale’s table-cloth?
The supper had come and gone, and Mr. Neuchamp was sleepily watching
the glowing embers in the fireplace with a strong mental deflection
towards bed, when the pistol-crack of stock-whips, the lowing of
cattle, and a faint echo of the far pervading British oath prepared
him for a new and probably interesting arrival. His first impulse was
to rush wildly into the road, in order to see a drove of cattle by
moonlight, but having accidentally observed that the stockyard was
very near the house, he restrained himself and awaited the landlord’s
irrepressible report.
In a quarter of an hour that sympathetic personage, evidently the
bearer of important news, entered the sitting-room.
‘Hear the whip, sir? that was Ironbark Ike, with a couple o’ hundred
head of fat cattle of the () and Bar brand. Splendid lot. Bum
character, old Ike; been a stockman and drover this fifty year. Like to
see him, sir? he’s a-smoking his pipe in the kitchen.’
Like to see him? Of course Mr. Neuchamp would like to see him, though
he mildly assented, and did not betray the tremulous eagerness with
which he mentally grasped the chance of beholding a stockman of half
a century’s experience, in his eyes little less than a sheik of the
Bedaween.
Following his trusty host to the large smoke-blackened, old-fashioned
kitchen, he saw a sinewy, grizzled old man, smoking an extremely black
pipe by the fire, who turned a pair of spectral gleaming eyes upon him,
and then resumed his position.
‘Ike, this is a gentleman going up the country; he ain’t been out long’
(Ike nodded expressively), ‘and he wants your advice about buying a
cattle station. He’d rather them nor sheep.’
‘Sheep be blanked,’ said the old man savagely. ‘I should think not.
Who the blank would walk at the tails of a lot of blank crawling
sheep, when he could ride a good horse after a mob of thousand-weight
bullocks, like I’ve got here to-night?’
‘Mr. Landlord,’ said Ernest, ‘I should like a glass of grog. Won’t
Mr.—a—Ike, here, and yourself join me?’
The refreshment was not declined, and having been produced, Ike
abandoned his pipe and proceeded to expound the law as regarded
cattle—wild, tame, fat, store, branded and unbranded, broken-in, or
‘all over the country’—in an oracular tone, suggestive of experiences
and adventure far beyond the reach of ordinary men.
‘Travelled this line? ah! You remember me a fairish time, Joe; but I’ve
been along these ranges and gullies with stock long before the old road
was finished, when you were sure to meet more than _one_ bushranger,
and had to carry your grub and camp for weeks together. Many a queer
drive I’ve had on this very track. They had no steamers fizzin’ up and
down the rocks then, takin’ sheep and cattle behind ‘em, all mashed up
together in boxes like so many herrin’s. It took a _man_ to bring a mob
of fat bullocks from the Lower Castlereagh or the Macquarie, let alone
the Narran, in them days.’
‘I suppose you had some roughish trips them days,’ suggested the host.
‘You may swear that, Joe,’ affirmed the war-worn stockman, with a grim
contortion of his facial muscles; ‘take the book in your right hand,
as they say, when you are in the “jump-up.” Here,‘ added he, as he
swallowed his brandy at a gulp, and made a sign to the landlord, ‘fetch
in another round, if this gentleman here ain’t too proud, and I’ll tell
you a yarn about drivin’ cattle—one you don’t hear every day.’
The replenished glasses reappeared, and the veteran of the ‘spur, the
bridle, and the well-worn _brand_,’ having filled his pipe and partly
emptied his glass, made a commencement.
‘It was a matter of thirty years ago, or more; I was a young chap then
and pretty flash, knowed my work, and wasn’t afraid of man, beast, or
devil. Well, I’d got a biggish mob of fat stock for them days—there was
no ten thousand head on any man’s run then—and a rough time we’d had of
it. It had rained every day since we started. We’d had to swim every
river and every creek as we come to, and watch for the first fortnight,
all night long, with the horses’ bridles in our hands.’
‘I suppose they were rather wild cattle?’ inquired Mr. Neuchamp,
sipping his brandy and water distrustfully.
Ironbark Ike bent a searching look upon his interrogator before he
answered.
‘Wild? Well, I suppose you might call ’em that, and make no mistake.
They’d come off a very far outrun, where they’d been, as one might say,
neglected. Never see a yard for years, some on ’em. They was that wild,
that as we drove along, if they came to the fresh track of a “footman,”
they’d stop and smell it and paw the ground and roar for ever so long.
We’d hard work to get ‘em by it. As to seein’ people on foot, there
wasn’t much of that; and any travellers they kept clear enough of us,
if they’d ever heard of the DD cattle.
‘Well, we’d dodged them along pretty fair, that is me and a Narran
black boy and a young Fish River native chap, that was pretty nigh as
unbroken as the black boy; he could ride the best, but the black boy
had twice as much savey.’
‘Some o’ them darkies is pretty smart,‘ interposed the host, gradually
becoming less respectful to his ancient guest, of whom he apparently
stood in considerable awe.
‘Smartest chaps ever I had on the road was blackfellows when they’re
wild; as long as they can ride a bit, the wilder the better, and get
’em off their own ground, then they’re afraid to bolt.’
‘I should have supposed when they have had the benefit of education
they would have been more valuable assistants,’ mildly asserted Mr.
Neuchamp.
‘Ruins ’em, bodily and teetotally,’ asserted Ike, with iron decision.
‘No educated blackfellow was ever worth a curse. But tame or wild
they’ve all one fault, and it drops ’em in the end.’
‘Indeed, how singular!’ said Ernest, ‘how strange that this sub-variety
of the human race should have one pronounced weakness! And what may it
be?’
‘Drink!’ shouted the veteran, draining his glass. ‘We can do another
round, Joe. Never knew one of ’em that didn’t take to drink, sooner or
later; and, in course, that cooked ’em,’ he added, with an impressive
moral air.
‘Sure to do,’ echoed the landlord, appearing with fresh rummers.
‘I have no doubt,’ assented Mr. Neuchamp blandly, but much in the dark
as to the real nature of the culinary process described.
‘Well,’ proceeded Mr. Isaac, settling himself calmly down to his fourth
tumbler, ‘where was I? with those blank cattle, oh! at the top of the
road where it used to make in, at the top of Mount Victoria. By gum! it
makes me feel as if there was no rheumatism in these blessed old bones
of mine when I think how we rode all that blessed day. All the night
before we’d been on our horses, round and round the cattle, in a scrub
full of rocks; it rained in buckets and tubs, thundering and lightning,
and pitch dark; and I, knowing that if the cattle broke loose, we’d
never see half of ’em again.’
‘Why, bless my soul!’ ejaculated Mr. Neuchamp, completely dislodged
from his previous conviction that cattle were a more pleasing and
interesting description of stock than sheep, ‘how did you ever succeed
in keeping them?’
‘We did keep ’em, and that’s about all I know,’ responded the fierce
drover of other days. ‘_How_ we did it the devil only knows. I swore
enough that night for him to lend a hand, if he’s on for such fakes,
as some says. I rode slap into Tin Pot, the black boy, once, taking
him for an old cow, and Tommy Toke, the white lad, ran against a tree
and knocked one of his horse’s eyes clean out. Well, daylight came at
last, and we had the cattle at our own price, blast ’em. All day they
was very sulky and slinged along, and wouldn’t feed. Well, we was sulky
too, for we’d no time to stop and cook a bite, it was so thick.’
‘What started ’em so?’ inquired the landlord; ‘they’d had a deal of
camping before they came so far.’
‘God knows!—a kangaroo or a bear, or they saw a ghost or a
blackfellow—something we couldn’t see; and once they were fairly up,
the devil himself wouldn’t get them to settle again. Now I knew a
first-rate camp two or three miles from the bottom of this here hill,
almost as good as a yard, but with a bit of feed and water in, a
regular wall of rock all round; one man, with a fire, could keep ’em
first-rate. So my dart was to get to this place, and I was looking
forward to a bit of hot damper and a warm quart or two of tea, with a
quiet smoke.
‘Just as I thinks of this we turned the corner, and there, in the
narrowest part of the road, was a road gang, as they call it, a goodish
crowd of chained convicts makin’ believe to mend the road, with a party
of soldiers to look after ‘em, and a young officer to look after the
soldiers, and a white-whiskered, hard-hearted old rascal of a corporal
to look after _him_.
‘The corporal was a-walking up and down, on guard, backwards and
forwards, very stiff and solemn. There’d been a chap bolted (and shot
dead, too) the night afore, so he had on a bit of extra pipeclay.
‘Our mob propped, dead—the cattle and Tin Pot and Tommy Toke—at what
they’d never seen afore. Now we couldn’t give the party the go-by
anyhow, unless they went into their huts.’
‘Why not?’ asked Mr. Neuchamp, deeply interested.
‘Because the mountain was like the side of a house above the road, and
fell straight down below five hundred feet, like a sea-cliff. There was
just that chain or two of level track, and that was all. I goes up to
the corporal, “I say, mate,” says I, “can’t you get your canaries off
the track here for about a quarter of an hour, and let my mob of cattle
pass?”
‘He looks at me, turning his eyes, but not his head, and keeps on
marching up and down like a blessed image; all he says was, “Make an
application to the officer in command,” says he.
‘So I looks about, and presently I sees a slight-built young fellow, in
a shell jacket, lounging about a tent.
‘“’Scuse me, captain,” says I, “will you order your men to leave off
their work (work, thinks I) and keep the road clear while I get my
cattle past? They’re awful wild, and won’t face the track with all
these chaps in yellow and black and leg-irons. They never see a road
gang before.”
‘“What extraordinary cattle for New South Wales!” said the young
fellow; “I should say there was plenty of room between the men and the
hill. Can’t move her Majesty’s troops nor the industrious gang before
six o’clock.”
‘By——, I _was_ mad. If we couldn’t get the cattle by with the light, we
ran the risk of their breaking before we got to camp and having another
night like last night over again. It _was_ hard! I ground my teeth
as I went back and passed the corporal, walking up and down with his
confounded musket.
‘When I got past him I saw the cattle staring and looking hard, drawn
up a good deal closer. The two boys were very sulky at the notion of
another night watching and riding, with scarce anything to eat for
twenty-four hours. So was I, when I thought of the long cold hours if
we didn’t make our camp.
‘Suddenly an idea came into my head; I see something as give me a
notion. “Tommy Toke,” says I, “you look out to back up and keep the
tail of the mob going, if they make a rush. Tin Pot, you keep on the
upper side, and look out they don’t break back. They’re a-going to make
a —— charge.”
‘What started me on this plan all of a sudden, was this wise. We had
an old blue half-bred buffalo cow and her son, a four-year-old black
bullock, in the mob; he followed his mother, as they will do sometimes.
He was a regular pebble, and the old cow hadn’t been in a yard since
he was branded. She was the biggest tigress ever I see; that’s sayin’
something. Well, I see the old Roosian paw the ground now and then, and
keep drawing towards the corporal, as was marchin’ up and down same as
he was in Buckingham Palace.
‘I keep watching the old cow drawin’ and drawin’, and pawin’ and
pawin’. He thought she might be a milker. Suddenly she gives a short
bellow, makes for the corporal at the rate of forty miles an hour,
followed by the black bullock, and the mob behind him.
‘The first thing I saw was the corporal a-flyin’ in the air one way,
his musket another, and the cow, the black bullock, and the whole of
the mob charging through the soldiers and the road gang.
‘“Back up, boys,” I roared, “keep them going!” as we swept through the
party; soldiers running one way, the convicts, poor beggars, making
their chains rattle again in their hurry to get safe away. That was a
time! I saw the young soldier-officer capsized on to one of his men.
Such a smash I never see; it was all downhill luckily. Away we went at
the tail of the mob, galloping for our lives, and soon left red coats
and yellow trousers, muskets and leg-irons, far behind us. Luckily the
mob was too wild to break, and before sundown we were miles from the
bottom of the hill, and had the cattle safe inside of the rock-wall
camp, where we had a good feed and a night’s sleep, both of which we
wanted bad enough.’
‘I’ll be bound you did,’ assented the landlord; ‘it’s a hard life, is
a stockman’s—out in all weathers, and risking your life, as one might
say.’
‘Life?’ said the saturnine, grizzled old land-pirate, who had
apparently relapsed into a different train of thought; ‘what’s a man’s
life in this country; leastways used to be. Here!’ roared he, dashing
his hand upon the table, ‘bring in a bottle of brandy, Joe, and a
kettle of water, and I’ll tell you a yarn about old days as’ll make
your hair curl, unless this here gentleman’s ashamed to drink with old
Ike?’
Mr. Neuchamp had by this period of the evening made the discovery that
he had invoked a fiend that he was unable to lay; as the old stockman
glared at him with half-infuriate, half-imploring eyes, while putting
his last observation into the form of a question, he felt much inclined
to defy and refuse his uncomfortable boon companion. But having evaded
the implied obligation to drink so far he thought it expedient to
comply, partly from the novelty of the experience, partly from his
dislike to a possible quarrel.
‘Ha!’ said the strange old man, as he half filled his tumbler with the
powerful spirit, and stirred the heavy red glowing logs in the stone
fireplace till they shot up a shower of sparks, and threw out a fierce
heat like the mouth of a furnace; ‘fine thing is a fire! that put me in
mind of it. Fill up, curse ye! Joe, ye old, half-baked Jimmy. It was
over on the Dervent side, afore I came here at all, that two chaps as
did a good deal on the cross, that’s how it was told me, was a-skinnin’
a bullock in a gully, as had only one end to it.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ inquired Mr. Neuchamp. ‘Surely——’
‘I mean,’ impatiently broke in the narrator, ‘as you could run stock in
at one end, and if they got high up they found a wall of rock at the
far end, and they couldn’t well get back, it was so tarnation narrow.
Now do you savey? They were the only coves as knew the secret of it
in that part, and many a beast, and many a colt and filly—horses was
horses then—they branded or put away there. Well, as I was saying,
they wasn’t two very particular chaps, and they was a-skinnin’ of a
bullock, having previously killed him; there warn’t no doubt of that,
as the head was on the ground close by with a bullet hole not very
far off the curl. Similarly it was a “cross” beast. No mistake about
that either. The hide, three-parts off, showed the RX brand; one that
belonged to H., one of the largest stockholders in the island, and a
man who would prosecute any man as dared touch his property, to the
gallows, if he could get him there. No hope of mercy from _him_. They
had no right to take the bullock, of course it was felony, and now they
were caught red-handed by this chap—Pretty Jack; he was the ugliest
man in the island, and he was going to turn informer. He grinned when
he came up. “There’s my liberty,” says he, pointing to the beast;
“I’m sorry for you, boys,” says he, “but every man for himself.” The
men looks at one another, then at him; he had ’em in his hand; they
saw the courthouse crammed, and heard the judge pass the sentence, a
heavy one of course, for a second colonial conviction. They heard the
gaol door clang as they were shut in for the long infernal years which
would bring ’em nearly, if not quite, to the end of a man’s life. Some
of this sort these two chaps _had_ tasted before; they shuddered and
trembled when they thought of it, and the man who was to do all this
by his own willing informing was their own friend and fellow-prisoner;
an accomplice, too, in a goodish lot of undiscovered crimes. He sat
looking at the beast with a stupid grin on his ugly face. They looked
at each other. Then one man walked past him on the track, and stopped.
When he saw this man’s eyes, and the murder written there, he called
out, “For God’s sake, don’t kill me, mates; it was all in joke, I never
meant to inform on you.” But it was too late—they were too much afraid
of their own lives to trust them to him; besides their anger had been
kindled against the man who had been an accomplice, and was now an
informer. “All right, Jack,” called out one of the men, “help us to get
off this hide.” He did so nervously, and anxious to curry favour. The
hide was soon stripped, and as they turned to make some joking remark,
one of them struck him over the head with a heavy piece of wood. The
wretched fool fell on his knees, groaning bad enough.
‘“O my God!—Charley,” said he, in his agony, “what’s this about?—you
won’t really hurt me? for the love of God, for the sake of my wife and
the young ones, pity me; I never meant it, God above knows.”
‘“Nonsense, man,” said one of them, “we ain’t a-going to hurt ye; we’re
only a-goin’ to stitch ye up in this here hide a bit, to keep ye from
gabbin’ while we’re putting this bullock away. Now lie still, or by ——
I’ll pole-axe you.”
‘He laid quiet, thinking he would soon be let go, and while the men
laced him up in the hide, making eyelet-holes, and running thongs of
hide through, which made it fit pretty close, he thought he might lie
for a few hours, and then the people from the next place would find
him, and let him go free.
‘The men cut up the bullock. They lighted a large fire and put the
head, offal, and feet upon it; they packed part of it on a wheelbarrow.
Then they hung a strong green-hide rope between the two trees above the
fire; one said something to the other in a low growling tone; he shook
his head, but at last they came towards the bound-up wretch; he was not
able to stir, in course, but it _was_ pitiful—my God, so it was, to see
his eyes move like an animal’s in a trap, as the men went up to him.
‘“For God’s sake, men, spare me,” he moaned out.
‘“Spare you?” said the oldest of ’em; “spare a man who betrays his own
pals, and sells his fellow-men for a miserable ticket-of-leave? Damn
you!” he roared, “your time’s up, if you had a dozen lives. Here, Ike.”
‘Between them they raised him, lifted him in their arms, and hung him
up by the rope actually across the roaring fire. The wet hide protected
him for a bit, but when the fire began to take effect his shrieks (they
told me) was that horrid and unnatural that they had to stop their ears.
‘There they stopped till the shrieks died away in death. How he writhed
and screamed, and prayed and cursed, and wept and struggled like a
maniac. But the tough hide held through everything, though he wrenched
it as if he could break an iron band. It was a long while to watch the
tongues of the flame dart up as inside the black sheet still writhed a
shuddering, howling form. It couldn’t have been much like a man’s at
last. Then all the noise died away, and the bag hung steady and still.’
‘And did the fiends who perpetrated this awful deed escape punishment?’
asked Ernest.
‘Well, I don’t know about ’scaping punishment,’ said the ancient
colonist, looking somewhat like one of Morgan’s buccaneers, questioned
as to the retribution, moral or otherwise, that followed the sack of
Panama, ‘but they got clear off, and it was years afterwards that a
half-burnt hide with a skeleton inside was found near the old camp.’
‘And did the principal criminal never suffer remorse?’ still inquired
Ernest, with horror in every tone; ‘are such men suffered by God to
live?’
At that moment the fire blazed up; a change, wonderful and dread, came
over the face of the old stockman. He started up; his eyeballs glared
like those of a maniac; every muscle, every feature was convulsed.
‘Who talks of murderers? They? He? _I_ did it. I, Bill Murdock, and
the devil. _He_ was there; I see him grinning by the fire now. Ha, ha!
I can hear _his_ screams, my God, my God! as I’ve heard ’em every day
since. I hear ’em now. I shall hear ’em in hell! Look!’
So speaking, with eyes protruding, with every facial nerve and muscle
quivering with horror and unspeakable dread, he pointed towards
the fireplace, as one who sees the approach of a form, horrible,
unavoidable, unearthly. Then, gasping and shuddering, he fell prone and
heavily to the floor, without an effort to save himself.
The landlord approached and loosened his handkerchief. ‘It’s partly the
grog,’ he whispered to Ernest. ‘Nobody can say how much brandy and how
much truth’s mixed up in this here yarn; but he’s seen some rough work
in his day, has Ike—though I never see him like this before. Thank you,
sir; I can get him to bed now.’
Mr. Neuchamp promptly sought _his_ couch, deciding that he had come in
for a much larger dose of the sensational element than he had counted
upon, and doubting whether he should repeat the experiment.
When he awoke, after a heavy but perturbed slumber, the sun was up, and
his first question was of the welfare of the strange old stockman.
‘Gone, hours ago, sir. He just slept till nigh hand daylight, and then
he roused out his men, lets the cattle out of the yard, and off he
goes.’
‘And was he able to sit on his horse,’ was Mr. Neuchamp’s very natural
question, ‘after drinking a bottle of brandy and having a fit?’
‘A deal better nor we could, I expect, sir. He’s iron-bark right
through, that old Ike. Takes a deal to kill the likes of him.’
‘Apparently so,’ assented Ernest. ’What wonderful energy, what
indomitable resolution must he possess! Used in a better cause, what
results might such a man not have reached! “‘Tis pity of him,” as the
Douglas said of Marmion, who in this century, instead of that in which
Flodden was fought, might have adorned a colony too, if there had
been any one to lay the information, “for that he did feloniously and
unlawfully obtain the custody of one young lady,” etc. etc., anent that
forged letter. Heigh ho! I don’t feel quite as much in the humour for
walking to-day as I did yesterday. Still, it’s a case of Excelsior,
I suppose. _En avant_, Neuchamp! St. Newbold inspire thy son and
servant.’