[Frontispiece: Each one of the party was carrying two heads. _Page_
143.]
THE ADVENTURE
OF
THE BROAD ARROW
An Australian Romance
BY
MORLEY ROBERTS
London
Hutchinson & Co.
34 Paternoster Row, E.C.
1897
CONTENTS
Chap.
I. NEW FIND
II. A SPECULATION
III. GOING IT BLIND
IV. TWO IN A DESERT
V. LOOKING FOR WATER
VI. THE BILLABONG
VII. RUNNING UP THE BILLABONG
VIII. THE ASHES OF A FIRE
IX. THE WHITE MAN
X. THE BRODARRO
XI. A SOLUTION
XII. THE BEGINNING OF TROUBLE
XIII. THE FATHER OF THE TRIBE
XIV. THE GOLD OUTCROP
XV. THE FIGHT ON THE RIVER
XVI. THE RIVER SINK
XVII. THE SAND TORNADO
XVIII. THE ROAD WITH PITS
XIX. DELIVERANCE
THE ADVENTURE OF THE BROAD ARROW
CHAPTER I.
NEW FIND.
"It's possible to be damned without being dead," said Smith, as he
drank his nobbler at the Pilbarra Hotel. "And miners are the men who
know it, in such a place as this."
He looked out of the reeking bar-room on the light brown glare of
waterless desert, with a few thirsty trees scattered over it.
"We're in the pit, so to speak," he continued, "but not the lowest,
for there are drinks here still. Fill 'em up again, Bob, and have
one yourself. As for me, I feel I could blue my skin and shirt for a
last one before I tumble to pieces and rot finger by finger in this
hole."
The men in the bar stood and drank with him silently. Yet one who
was mad drunk with brandy and sunlight smashed his tumbler on the bar
top, and pitched the bottom at a mongrel dog slinking outside in a
thin shadow.
"What's the best news, Smith?" asked Bob, who was the only cheerful
man in the crowd.
"The best news," answered Smith, "is that we are back, and the
water's nearly done here, and the rain is not coming, and the camp is
rotting. Tinned meats and fever water are doing for us. I might as
well have stayed out yonder and got sun-dried in mulga and spinifex."
And he went off foolishly into the blazing sun, which came down at a
slant of ninety degrees, and shone back from the hot dust with a
glare that could blister a man under his chin.
The town that he strode through was of boards and canvas and
corrugated iron. It stank in the still air, and, as man, or horse,
or camel went by, the dust rose thick, and empty cans rang.
But into the stagnant desolation came men perpetually. They came in
with gold fever, and went out with typhoid; and still their empty
places filled up. The Western Australian papers screamed "no water,"
and the Eastern papers copied them with jealous additions; but men
came in to drink thick mud and rot like silly sheep piled against a
windward fence in a dry season, when the creeks and tanks are dry,
and grass is not.
From Albany, Perth, and Freemantle, from Kimberley, Murchison, and
Coolgardie, men rushed in, till New Find, so greatly boomed, was full
of good men and thieves, of workers and loafers, of white men and of
Chinamen, and they were all bent on gold, till the fever got them,
and they yelled under canvas which was no shelter from the sun. But
ants and spiders and scorpions gloried while men died, and the flies
were thick on sick men's mouths, and ownerless dogs dug up corpses
and died of blood-poisoning.
For the ways of men under ancient stresses are as the ways of ancient
instinct, inevitable in unalterable channels. They drift where gold
is, or where the thought of its possibility lies; they march like
locusts into a ditch which is death. They pour out of the towns like
ants from a disturbed ant-hill, they try the absurd, and storm the
impossible; they rot and stick in the mire; they perish, and are
known no more; they wither like grass, and are of no avail.
Yet each individual man is even there the centre of his world, and
thinks that he will do this and do that, and each day he does what
the dead day willed, and the night subscribed to, but does no more
and does no other. And such as these was Smith, who braved sudden
death in a bitter sun as he walked through the hideous town to his
mate's hut out west on the plain.
As he went out of the sunlight into shadow, which was thick darkness
after the glare of the noonday light, he stumbled across some one.
"Where the devil are you treading?" growled the somnolent man he had
disturbed.
"Can't see after being in the sun," said Smith. "Is that you, Tom?"
"Yes," said Tom the water-carter, whose job looked like giving out.
For water now was bought by rich men in measured buckets, and by poor
ones in mean tin pannikins. "You mean you can't see after soaking in
whisky at the Pilbarra, don't you?" he added.
"A little of both," said Smith, lying down on a pile of dirty gunny
sacks. "I've been out facing the Earth-destroyer and the Drier-up of
water, and I wanted to get blind."
"Why are you back?" asked Tom. "I came in and saw the Baker yonder,
and I found Hicks, too, so I just lay down. You had a bad time?"
The men he spoke of were at the far end of the hut; one was in an old
bush bed made of stakes and sticks, and stretched sacking, while the
other sat at the table, and scraped grease from it with a clasp knife.
"We funked it," said Smith. "There's no other word for it.
Oh--blazes! I can't lie still."
He rose and went to the table, and sat opposite to Hicks. Reaching
over, he borrowed the other man's knife without ceremony, and
scratched his name in big capital letters in the wood. When he had
finished SMITH, he jabbed the knife into the I of his name, and went
on talking.
"We got sixty miles out across the sand, the mulga, and the porcupine
grass; yes, sixty miles into the desert, and we saw its red rim
dance, and its scrub crackle, and the water bags looked mean betting
against the sun. So we put our tails between our legs, and crawled
back sick, and ready to rot here. But when the rain comes, we're
there, we're there."
"Why didn't you take camels?" asked Tom.
Smith smiled.
"Why didn't we organise an expedition? Camels and Afghans cost
money. And I don't like their ways. Horses are good enough for me.
You wait till the rain comes."
But another chipped into the talk.
"It'll never rain no more," said the man who lay on the bed. "I'm
going home to my ma, and I'll live where there's water, and make love
to the 'alf-a-crown a week slavey, and be a toff in a back street.
What did I come out 'ere for? It's better to be a sneak, and be
jugged in London, than be 'ere. If they did anythin' 'alf so bad to
long timers as make 'em come to such a place as this 'ere, they'd
'ave a bally h'agitation in Hengland, and a meetin' in the Park."
"Dry up, you Cockney baker, you," said Smith, more good-humouredly
than he had yet spoken. "It's never home you'll get. You and I will
fill a sand-pit here, and I'll dig yours. We'll scrape it out with a
broken bottle and a kerosene tin, and we'll write your name on the
hide of your dead dog, and plant him with you to keep you faithful
company."
But the Cockney took it all in good part, and only pretended to weep
at his mate's brutal suggestions.
"Boo-hoo, boo-hoo!" said he, "that I should ever be mates with a man
whose name is Smith when mine is Mandeville."
"And that you stole with your passage money," said Hicks, who had not
spoken yet. But now he angered Mandeville, who suggested forcibly in
the very choicest Australian, that if he didn't dry up he would soon
put the kibosh on him.
But Hicks laughed. As he was six feet four in height and five stone
the heavier man, he could afford to let the Cockney say what he
pleased. And Mandeville said it till Smith interfered.
"Now then, leave each other alone. It's not you that's quarrelling.
It's the sun, moon, and stars, the wind and sand and weather you've a
fight with. Get out and claw the sand, man. Hurrah, hurrah! Go it,
dear boys, against the devil, who is the patron saint of Pilbarra."
He lighted his pipe and smoked, and there was silence for a space in
that sweet heaven.