In the Wirree, Farrel was never known as anything but the Schoolmaster.
Everybody called him that--even Deirdre when she spoke of him.
They had gone to live in a cottage on the outskirts of the township. The
Schoolmaster had taken up his old trade, though it was understood he had
been droving with Conal for Maitland the greater part of the time he had
been away. Deirdre had wandered with him wherever he went, and it was on
her account he was anxious to get back to steadier and more settled ways
of life, it was said. Before long two or three of the brown-skinned
Wirree children were trotting to the cottage for lessons every day.
The south had heard a great deal of Sam Maitland, head of the well-known
firm of Maitland & Co., stock-dealers, of Cooburra, New South Wales.
There had been a bad season in the north-west for a couple of years.
Maitland had bought up poor beasts and sent them to fatten in the south.
Conal had been driving them through Wirreeford at intervals of two or
three months, taking the fattened beasts back on the return journey over
the border after he brought down the starvers.
All the week the township slept peacefully in the spring sunshine. When
a clear, young moon came up over the plains in the evenings, it drenched
them with wan, silver light.
But on Friday morning at dawn, the cattle came pouring into the town,
with a cracking of whips, barking of dogs, yelling and shouting of men
and boys. With a rush and a rattling of horns, they charged along
between the rows of huddled houses, swinging from one side to the other
of the track, wild and fearful-eyed, with lowered heads, long strings of
glistening saliva dripping from their mouths. They seemed to be
searching for the opportunity to break and head out to the hills again;
But ringed with cracking whips, brushing horses, snapping dogs, they
were turned into the sale-yards.
The one street of Wirreeford had been cobbled for some distance on
either side of the sale-yards because the cattle and horses made a sea
of mud about them when the spring rains had soaked into the soft earth.
The stores and shanties were full on sale days.
Drovers, rough-haired, hawk-eyed men, with faces seared and seamed with
the dust of the roads, hands burnt, and broken with barcoo, slouched
along the streets, or stood watching their cattle, yarning in desultory
fashion, leaning over the rails of the drafting yards. They smoked, or
chewed and spat, in front of the shanties, and at night sprawled over
the table at the Black Bull, playing cards or tossing dice.
A mob that had travelled a long way was often yarded the night before
the sales. When the selling for the day was over, the beasts that had
come down from the hills were driven out along the Rane road, and got
under Way for the northern markets; but sometimes they were left in the
yards, lowing and bellowing all night, while the stockmen who were going
to take charge of them spent the evening at the Black Bull, or Mrs. Mary
Ann's.
The township was full of the smell of cattle and dogs, and of the muddy,
slowly-moving river that had become a waste-butt for the houses.
In the early spring, breezes from the ocean with a tang of salt in them
blew right through the houses, and later, when the trees by the river
blossomed, and bore masses of golden down, a warm, sweet, musky
fragrance was wafted to their very doors. It overlaid the reek of the
cattle yards, the fumes of rank spirits and tobacco that came from the
shanties. And in the long glimmering twilights when the light faded
slowly from the plains and the wall of the hills changed from purple to
blue and misty grey, they were caught up into the mysterious darkness of
the night--those perfumes of the lightwood and wattle trees in
blossom--and rested like a benediction in the air.
From their shabby, whitewashed wattle-and-dab hut on the outskirts of
the town the Schoolmaster and Deirdre could watch the twilight dying on
the plains and breathe all the fragrance of the trees by the river when
they were in bloom. The plains spread in vivid, undulating green before
the cottage to the distant line of the hills, and the grass was full of
wild flowers, all manner of tiny, shy, and starry, blue, and white, and
yellow flowers.
Deirdre had watched Davey bring cattle down from the hills across the
plains. She had seen him riding off runaways. Once a heifer had broken
and careered over the plains before the cottage. Davey had chased after
her at breakneck speed, and, rising in his stirrups, had swept his
stock-whip round her, letting it fall on her plushy hide with ripping
cracks. He had flogged the beast, driving her with strings of oaths, his
dog, a black and tan fury, yelping and snapping at her nozzle, until the
blood streamed from it, and with a mutinous bellow she turned back to
the mob again.
Deirdre had watched him going home in the evening with his father, or
some of Cameron's men, at the heels of a mob, his eyes going straight
out before him. He never looked her way or seemed to see her where she
stood, at the gate of the whitewashed cottage within a hundred yards of
the river.
She had been chasing Mrs. Mary Ann's geese from the river across the
green paddock that lay between the shanty and the Schoolmaster's house,
when Davey rode out of the township towards her, one evening. He was
driving a score or so of weedy, straggling calves.
Deirdre stood by the roadside and waited for him, her eyes luminous in
the dusk. The wind had whipped her hair to the long tendrils it used to
hang in when they raced each other along the roads from school.
"Davey!" she called, as he came towards her.
There was appeal in her voice.
But Davey stared at her as though he had not seen her, and passed on.
"You're a rude, horrible boy! And I hate you, hate you, hate you!" she
cried passionately after him.
When they met again it was near the sale-yards, when the street was
thronged with people from the hills. She had seen his horse hitched to
the posts outside McNab's, and so was ready for him when they passed.
The path was so narrow that they could not avoid brushing. But Deirdre's
chin was well up and her eyes very steady when they met his under his
hat brim. Such gloomy, morose eyes they were that she looked into. She
almost exclaimed with surprise at them. Her mouth opened to speak. But
Davey was as intent on passing as she had been. His face had an ugly,
sullen look, something of his father's dourness. After he had passed she
stood still and watched him.
He crossed the road and went into the Black Bull.
The Schoolmaster saw him there in the evening. It was not often Farrel
was seen in the tap-room of the Black Bull, though there was always a
lighting of eyes, a shifting of seats in anticipation of a lively
evening when he appeared. He wondered what Davey Cameron was doing
there. His father had been crippled with rheumatism for a couple of
weeks and Davey had charge of his business. Farrel wondered if he had
begun to swagger, to give himself airs on the strength of it.
He seemed on good terms with McNab and most of the men in the bar, but
his acknowledgment of Dan's greeting was off-hand and he went soon after
Farrel came in.
The Schoolmaster's eyes met McNab's; but McNab's eyes never met any
man's for very long. Perhaps he was afraid of the inner man a stranger
might get glimpse of, afraid to let any one else see in his eyes the
secrets of that sly, spying soul of his.
Now that Farrel had only one eye, McNab feared him less, although when
the concentrated light of the Schoolmaster's spirit poured from it in a
single beam, he fidgeted, showed craven and was glad to escape.
No one had the knack that Dan Farrel had of showing McNab to the Wirree
for what he was. The Schoolmaster could string McNab up before the eyes
of the men in the bar on the thread of one of his whimsical humours and
show him dangling, all his crooked limbs writhing, his twisted face
simmering with wrath. He could pin McNab with a few, lightly-flung words
and make a butt of him, where he stood before his rows of short-necked,
black and muddied bottles. He would have him quivering with wrath,
impotent against that bitter, blithe wit and the laughter it raised. He
laughed too--McNab. He was wise, as cunning as a dingo. Though his eyes
were baleful, and his hands shook as he poured the raw spirits from his
bottle into a mug beside him, he laughed.
"It's a mad game y're on with McNab," Salt Watson, one of the oldest of
the Wirreeford men, said to the Schoolmaster one evening on his way
home. "Give it up, Dan! It's good enough to make the boys laugh, but
you've only to look at Thad's face when he smiles to know what he is
promising himself of it all."
The Schoolmaster had watched McNab's face when he smiled. He had learnt
all he wanted to. He knew what Salt meant.
For awhile he dropped out of the circle round Thad's bar. When he made
one of it, his laughter was less frequent, and he missed McNab when his
lightly-flung arrows of wit whistled in the assembly. His spirits had
suffered a depression. Some of the men thought the trouble with his eyes
was on his mind. He avoided encounters with McNab, though none of them
had any idea he was afraid of Thad. His one eye was more than a match
for Thad's two any day, they knew.
There was no open quarrel between them. The Schoolmaster's duelling with
McNab had never been more than a laughing matter, a pricking, rapier
fashion, in the intervals of card-playing and drinks. It had an air of
good-fellowship. His humour had a quality of amiability, though nobody
was deceived by it, least of all Thad himself. There was always contempt
and an underlying bitterness in it.