CHAPTER II. PETS AND PLAYTHINGS
CHAPTER III. A MENAGERIE RACE
CHAPTER IV. JIM’S IDEA
CHAPTER V. ANGLERS’ BEND
CHAPTER VI. A BUSH FIRE
CHAPTER VII. WHAT NORAH FOUND
CHAPTER VIII. ON A LOG
CHAPTER IX. FISHING
CHAPTER X. THE LAST DAY
CHAPTER XI. GOOD-BYE
CHAPTER XII. THE WINFIELD MURDER
CHAPTER XIII. THE CIRCUS
CHAPTER XIV. CAMPING OUT
CHAPTER XV. FOR FRIENDSHIP
CHAPTER XVI. FIGHTING DEATH
CHAPTER XVII. THE END OF THE STRUGGLE
CHAPTER XVIII. EVENING
CHAPTER I.
BILLABONG
Norah’s home was on a big station in the north of Victoria—so large
that you could almost, in her own phrase, “ride all day and never see
any one you didn’t want to see”; which was a great advantage in Norah’s
eyes. Not that Billabong Station ever seemed to the little girl a place
that you needed to praise in any way. It occupied so very modest a
position as the loveliest part of the world!
The homestead was built on a gentle rise that sloped gradually away on
every side; in front to the wide plain, dotted with huge gum trees and
great grey box groves, and at the back, after you had passed through
the well-kept vegetable garden and orchard, to a long lagoon, bordered
with trees and fringed with tall bulrushes and waving reeds.
The house itself was old and quaint and rambling, part of the old
wattle and dab walls yet remaining in some of the outhouses, as well as
the grey shingle roof. There was a more modern part, for the house had
been added to from time to time by different owners, though no
additions had been made since Norah’s father brought home his young
wife, fifteen years before this story opens. Then he had built a large
new wing with wide and lofty rooms, and round all had put a very broad,
tiled verandah. The creepers had had time to twine round the massive
posts in those fifteen years, and some even lay in great masses on the
verandah roof; tecoma, pink and salmon-coloured; purple bougainvillea,
and the snowy mandevillea clusters. Hard-headed people said this was
not good for the building—but Norah’s mother had planted them, and
because she had loved them they were never touched.
There was a huge front garden, not at all a proper kind of garden, but
a great stretch of smooth buffalo grass, dotted with all kinds of
trees, amongst which flower beds cropped up in most unexpected and
unlikely places, just as if some giant had flung them out on the grass
like a handful of pebbles that scattered as they flew. They were always
trim and tidy, and the gardener, Hogg, was terribly strict, and woe
betide the author of any small footmarks that he found on one of the
freshly raked surfaces. Nothing annoyed him more than the odd bulbs
that used to come up in the midst of his precious buffalo grass;
impertinent crocuses and daffodils and hyacinths, that certainly had no
right there. “Blest if I know how they ever gets there!” Hogg would
say, scratching his head. Whereat Norah was wont to retire behind a
pyramid tree for purposes of mirth.
Hogg’s sworn foe was Lee Wing, the Chinese gardener, who reigned
supreme in the orchard and the kingdom of vegetables—not quite the same
thing as the vegetable kingdom, by the way! Lee Wing was very fat, his
broad, yellow face generally wearing a cheerful grin—unless he happened
to catch sight of Hogg. His long pigtail was always concealed under his
flapping straw hat. Once Jim, who was Norah’s big brother, had found
him asleep in his hut with the pigtail drooping over the edge of the
bunk. Jim thought the opportunity too good to lose and, with such
deftness that the Celestial never stirred, he tied the end of the
pigtail to the back of a chair—with rather startling results when Lee
Wing awoke with a sudden sense of being late, and made a spring from
the bunk. The chair of course followed him, and the loud yell of fear
and pain raised by the victim brought half the homestead to the scene
of the catastrophe. Jim was the only one who did not wait for
developments. He found business at the lagoon.
The queerest part of it was that Lee Wing firmly believed Hogg to be
the author of his woe. Nothing moved him from this view, not even when
Jim, finding how matters stood, owned up like a man. “You allee same
goo’ boy,” said the pigtailed one, proffering him a succulent raw
turnip. “Me know. You tellee fine large crammee. Hogg, he tellee
crammee, too. So dly up!” And Jim, finding expostulation useless,
“dried up” accordingly and ate the turnip, which was better than the
leek.
To the right of the homestead at Billabong a clump of box trees
sheltered the stables that were the unspoken pride of Mr. Linton’s
heart.
Before his time the stables had been a conglomerate mass, bark-roofed,
slab-sided, falling to decay; added to as each successive owner had
thought fit, with a final mixture of old and new that was neither
convenient nor beautiful. Mr. Linton had apologised to his horses
during his first week of occupancy and, in the second, turning them out
to grass with less apology, had pulled down the rickety old sheds,
replacing them with a compact and handsome building of red brick, with
room for half a dozen buggies, men’s quarters, harness and feed rooms,
many loose boxes and a loft where a ball could have been held—and
where, indeed, many a one was held, when all the young farmers and
stockmen and shearers from far and near brought each his lass and
tripped it from early night to early dawn, to the strains of old Andy
Ferguson’s fiddle and young Dave Boone’s concertina. Norah had been
allowed to look on at one or two of these gatherings. She thought them
the height of human bliss, and was only sorry that sheer inability to
dance prevented her from “taking the floor” with Mick Shanahan, the
horse breaker, who had paid her the compliment of asking her first. It
was a great compliment, too, Norah felt, seeing what a man of agility
and splendid accomplishments was Mick—and that she was only nine at the
time.
There was one loose box which was Norah’s very own property, and
without her permission no horse was ever put in it except its rightful
occupant—Bobs, whose name was proudly displayed over the door in Jim’s
best carving.
Bobs had always belonged to Norah, He had been given to her as a foal,
when Norah used to ride a round little black sheltie, as easy to fall
off as to mount. He was a beauty even then, Norah thought; and her
father had looked approvingly at the long-legged baby, with his fine,
well-bred head. “You will have something worth riding when that fellow
is fit to break in, my girlie,” he had said, and his prophecy had been
amply fulfilled. Mick Shanahan said he’d never put a leg over a finer
pony. Norah knew there never had been a finer anywhere. He was a big
pony, very dark bay in colour, and “as handsome as paint,” and with the
kindest disposition; full of life and “go,” but without the smallest
particle of vice. It was an even question which loved the other best,
Bobs or Norah. No one ever rode him except his little mistress. The
pair were hard to beat—so the men said.
To Norah the stables were the heart of Billabong. The house was all
very well—of course she loved it; and she loved her own little room,
with its red carpet and dainty white furniture, and the two long
windows that looked out over the green plain. That was all right; so
were the garden and the big orchard, especially in summer time! The
only part that was not “all right” was the drawing-room—an apartment of
gloomy, seldom-used splendour that Norah hated with her whole heart.
But the stables were an abiding refuge. She was never dull there. Apart
from the never-failing welcome in Bobs’ loose box, there was the dim,
fragrant loft, where the sunbeams only managed to send dusty rays of
light across the gloom. Here Norah used to lie on the sweet hay and
think tremendous thoughts; here also she laid deep plans for catching
rats—and caught scores in traps of her own devising. Norah hated rats,
but nothing could induce her to wage war against the mice. “Poor little
chaps!” she said; “they’re so little—and—and soft!” And she was quite
saddened if by chance she found a stray mouse in any of her
shrewdly-designed traps for the benefit of the larger game which
infested the stables and had even the hardihood to annoy Bobs!
Norah had never known her mother. She was only a tiny baby when that
gay little mother died—a sudden, terrible blow, that changed her father
in a night from a young man to an old one. It was nearly twelve years
ago, now, but no one ever dared to speak to David Linton of his wife.
Sometimes Norah used to ask Jim about mother—for Jim was fifteen, and
could remember just a little; but his memories were so vague and misty
that his information was unsatisfactory. And, after all, Norah did not
trouble much. She had always been so happy that she could not imagine
that to have had a mother would have made any particular difference to
her happiness. You see, she did not know.
She had grown just as the bush wild flowers grow—hardy, unchecked,
almost untended; for, though old nurse had always been there, her
nurseling had gone her own way from the time she could toddle. She was
everybody’s pet and plaything; the only being who had power to make her
stern, silent father smile—almost the only one who ever saw the softer
side of his character. He was fond and proud of Jim—glad that the boy
was growing up straight and strong and manly, able to make his way in
the world. But Norah was his heart’s desire.
Of course she was spoilt—if spoiling consists in rarely checking an
impulse. All her life Norah had done pretty well whatever she
wanted—which meant that she had lived out of doors, followed in Jim’s
footsteps wherever practicable (and in a good many ways most people
would have thought distinctly impracticable), and spent about
two-thirds of her waking time on horseback. But the spoiling was not of
a very harmful kind. Her chosen pursuits brought her under the unspoken
discipline of the work of the station, wherein ordinary instinct taught
her to do as others did, and conform to their ways. She had all the
dread of being thought “silly” that marks the girl who imitates boyish
ways. Jim’s rare growl, “Have a little sense!” went farther home than a
whole volume of admonitions of a more ordinarily genuine feminine type.
She had no little girl friends, for none was nearer than the nearest
township—Cunjee, seventeen miles away. Moreover, little girls bored
Norah frightfully. They seemed a species quite distinct from herself.
They prattled of dolls; they loved to skip, to dress up and “play
ladies”; and when Norah spoke of the superior joys of cutting out
cattle or coursing hares over the Long Plain, they stared at her with
blank lack of understanding. With boys she got on much better. Jim and
she were tremendous chums, and she had moped sadly when he went to
Melbourne to school. Holidays then became the shining events of the
year, and the boys whom Jim brought home with him, at first prone to
look down on the small girl with lofty condescension, generally ended
by voting her “no end of a jolly kid,” and according her the respect
due to a person who could teach them more of bush life than they had
dreamed of.
But Norah’s principal mate was her father. Day after day they were
together, riding over the run, working the cattle, walking through the
thick scrub of the backwater, driving young, half-broken horses in the
high dog-cart to Cunjee—they were rarely apart. David Linton seldom
made a plan that did not naturally include Norah. She was a wise little
companion, too; ready enough to chatter like a magpie if her father
were in the mood, but quick to note if he were not, and then quite
content to be silently beside him, perhaps for hours. They understood
each other perfectly. Norah never could make out the people who pitied
her for having no friends of her own age. How could she possibly be
bothered with children, she reflected, when she had Daddy?
As for Norah’s education, that was of the kind best defined as a minus
quantity.
“I won’t have her bothered with books too early,” Mr. Linton had said
when nurse hinted, on Norah’s eight birthday, that it was time she
began the rudiments of learning. “Time enough yet—we don’t want to make
a bookworm of her!”
Whereat nurse smiled demurely, knowing that that was the last thing to
be afraid of in connexion with her child. But she worried in her
responsible old soul all the same; and when a wet day or the occasional
absence of Mr. Linton left Norah without occupation, she induced her to
begin a few elementary lessons. The child was quick enough, and soon
learned to read fairly well and to write laboriously; but there nurse’s
teaching from books ended.
Of other and practical teaching, however, she had a greater store. Mr.
Linton had a strong leaning towards the old-fashioned virtues, and it
was at a word from him that Norah had gone to the kitchen and asked
Mrs. Brown to teach her to cook. Mrs. Brown—fat, good-natured and
adoring—was all acquiescence, and by the time Norah was eleven she knew
more of cooking and general housekeeping than many girls grown up and
fancying themselves ready to undertake houses of their own. Moreover,
she could sew rather well, though she frankly detested the
accomplishment. The one form of work she cared for was knitting, and it
was her boast that her father wore only the socks she manufactured for
him.
Norah’s one gentle passion was music. Never taught, she inherited from
her mother a natural instinct and an absolutely true ear, and before
she was seven she could strum on the old piano in a way very satisfying
to herself and awe-inspiring to the admiring nurse. Her talent
increased yearly, and at ten she could play anything she heard—from
ear, for she had never been taught a note of music. It was, indeed, her
growing capabilities in this respect that forced upon her father the
need for proper tuition for the child. However, a stopgap was found in
the person of the book-keeper, a young Englishman, who knew more of
music than accounts. He readily undertook Norah’s instruction, and the
lessons bore moderately good effect—the moderation being due to a not
unnatural disinclination on the pupil’s part to walk where she had been
accustomed to run, and to a fixed loathing to practice. As the latter
necessary, if uninteresting, pursuit was left entirely to her own
discretion—for no one ever dreamed of ordering Norah to the piano—it is
small wonder if it suffered beside the superior attractions of riding
Bobs, rat trapping, “shinning up” trees, fishing in the lagoon and
generally disporting herself as a maiden may whom conventional
restrictions have never trammelled.
It follows that the music lessons, twice a week, were times of woe for
Mr. Groom, the teacher. He was an earnest young man, with a sincere
desire for his pupil’s improvement, and it was certainly disheartening
to find on Friday that the words of Tuesday had apparently gone in at
one ear and out at the other simultaneously. Sometimes he would
remonstrate.
“You haven’t got on with that piece a bit!”
“What’s the good?” the pupil would remark, twisting round on the music
stool; “I can play nearly all of it from ear!”
“That’s not the same”—severely—“that’s only frivolling. I’m not here to
teach you to strum.”
“No” Norah would agree abstractedly. “Mr. Groom, you know that poley
bullock down in the far end paddock—”
“No, I don’t,” severely. “This is a music lesson, Norah; you’re not
after cattle now!”
“Wish I were!” sighed the pupil. “Well, will you come out with the dogs
this afternoon?”
“Can’t; I’m wanted in the office. Now, Norah—”
“But if I asked father to spare you?”
“Oh, I’d like to right enough.” Mr. Groom was young, and the temptress,
if younger, was skilled in wiles.
“But your father—”
“Oh, I can manage Dad. I’ll go and see him now.” She would be at the
door before her teacher perceived that his opportunity was vanishing.
“Norah, come back! If I’m to go out, you must play this first—and get
it right.”
Mr. Groom could be firm on occasions. “Come along, you little shirker!”
and Norah would unwillingly return to the music stool, and worry
laboriously though a page of the hated Czerny.