The little red horse's pace was as swift as a swallow's. Sure-footed,
she flashed on over the long winding roads, up the steep hillsides and
down them, slipping and sliding on the loose shingles, but keeping her
knees in the cunning way that only the mountain horses know. Davey heard
the beat of her hoofs until the sound became mechanical. Though she was
moving, she seemed to get no further--to throw no distance behind her,
forging ahead through the darkness.
Fear and a suffocating weakness began to dull his brain, he could not
see. The sagging pain in his breast ate up his strength. With a
desperate effort he pulled the handkerchief from his throat and thrust
it inside his shirt against the wound. He dug his heels into Red's side,
urging her on.
A diffused glow of lights loomed before him. As if wakening from a
nightmare in which he had been struggling to get forward and was held
back by mysterious, unknown forces, he realised that they were the
lights of the shanty.
The mare carried him on into the stable yard. The welcome yelp of dogs
greeted his ears. He flung off her, staggered across the yard and burst
open the back door. He was conscious of Farrel and Deirdre springing
towards him, of Steve behind them. Then surging darkness, the swirling
tides of dreamless darkness that had been pressing close to him all the
way, closed over him. For a moment he struggled against them, trying to
speak. A few muttered, incoherent words were all Deirdre and the
Schoolmaster caught.
He pitched forward.
Deirdre ran to him. The Schoolmaster helped her to lift Davey over on
his back. She moistened his lips with the spirit that Steve brought
quickly.
"There's blood on him, father," she cried. There was no tremor in her
voice, only a tense anxiety.
Farrel told her what to do, to cut away Davey's shirt where the blood
oozed on it. Steve went for water and rags as she did so. The flickering
light of the candle the Schoolmaster held, showed the broken and
blackened flesh.
"He's been shot ... it's a slug made that mark," Steve gasped when he
saw it.
When he had put a basin of cold water beside her, she laid soaked rags
on the wound. The shock brought Davey a moment of consciousness. He
moaned, stirring with pain. His eyes opened. He saw Deirdre's face above
his and the Schoolmaster bending over him.
He stared at them unseeingly. Then the mists cleared from his brain.
"I'm all right," he muttered, "all right...."
He lay quite still.
"Have you got the calves out of the paddock?" he asked a moment later,
his voice stronger. "M'Laughlin and a couple of men'll be here
presently. McNab's got wind of their being in the paddock, here. Get
them out to the valley quick, or let them go."
"Where's Conal?" Steve asked eagerly; "he ought to be in by now."
There was a crooked furrow of pain on Davey's face.
"I looked for him before I came out," he said. "Couldn't find
him--thought he must have gone on ahead. I got this," his hand went to
his breast, "crossing the culvert over the creek. They said at McNab's,
Conal had been swearing--to do for me--but I didn't believe it...."
His body sagged and his head went back; but Deirdre was behind him; she
rested his head on her knees.
Her eyes flew to the Schoolmaster.
"It was Conal," she breathed. "He said he would do it."
Farrel's face whitened. He put no man before Long Conal.
Deirdre put a pack of wet rags over the wound again, and bound it on
with a piece of unbleached linen.
Her eyes went anxiously to Steve.
"He's not going to die, is he?" she asked.
"No," Steve muttered, cheerfully. His eyes travelled the length of the
boy's sturdy frame. "It's not much more than a surface wound, though
it's cut up the flesh a good deal. He'd look different if he was goin'
to kick the bucket."
"If we could lift him into the other room it would be better," she
suggested. "The men from the Wirree may be coming."
"Yes," the Schoolmaster said.
As they tried to move him, Davey regained consciousness.
"Have you got those beasts out?" he asked querulously. "There's no time
to lose. I'm all right."
Deirdre on one side, the Schoolmaster on the other, they led him to the
room in which Farrel slept. He sank wearily on the bunk against the
wall.
The Schoolmaster went back to the kitchen for a moment.
Deirdre bent over the bunk, gazing at Davey's still face anxiously,
intently. It was no time for weeping or exclamation. She realised the
danger that threatened. If M'Laughlin and the men from the Wirree came
and found the cattle in the paddock below Steve's, not only Davey, but
also the Schoolmaster would have to pay the penalty.
She went back to the kitchen.
"He's sleeping," she said.
The Schoolmaster and Steve were standing by the door arguing in an
undertone together.
The Schoolmaster turned to go out.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"Let those animals out," he said briefly. "It's no good, Teddy won't go
with them alone. He's as afraid of the dark as they are. And if
M'Laughlin's coming we've got to get them out of the way."
"He's going to try and take them himself to the valley; and it's
madness--he can't see," cried Steve.
"Conal was a fool to bring them near the place. I told him this morning,
but he'll take his own way and nobody else's," the Schoolmaster replied.
"If he were here now--"
"I'm going to take them, father," Deirdre said. "They're easy enough to
drive at night and Teddy'll work with me. You watch Davey. He'll be
right now, but in case--Besides the place has got to look peaceable and
ordinary if M'Laughlin comes."
"I can't let you do it, Deirdre."
The Schoolmaster's voice was harsh and peremptory.
"I'm going to!"
He recognised his own spirit in her.
"There's no time to lose," she said, "and I know the track to the
Valley. Conal showed it to me--I helped him to bring in the calves
yesterday, and I haven't been on the roads with you both for the last
year without knowing how to manage a handful of old cows."
"I tell you, I'll not have it," the Schoolmaster interrupted
passionately.
"It means as much to me as to any of you," she said, a little breathless
sob in her voice. "You don't know how much. You can't have these beasts
with the new brands running the hills now. Conal ought to be responsible
for them, but that won't help us much if they're found here. Davey's
known to have been working with him--and you were suspected of being
with him even when you weren't!"
The door slammed behind her.
Steve followed her out of doors.
He pulled the chestnut's girths when she had thrown a saddle across his
back.
"You can manage the calves, of course, Deirdre," he said. "Keep 'm quiet
as you can. No shouting, mind. The dogs know night work with cattle's
mostly quiet work--keep 'm back. You'll not be raising a whip yourself.
I'll tell Teddy, the less crackin' the better. These beasts'll go quiet
enough."
He and the Schoolmaster watched her flying out across the faintly
moonlit paddocks. The dogs were soon working round the mob in a far
corner where the fence panels were down. Deirdre drove them through the
opening. The black boy was on the road waiting to keep the beasts' noses
northwards with an adroit flick of his whip. It was with an occasional
lowing and rattling of horns, the brush and rattle of hoofs on the dry
timber that they passed out into the shadows of the road.
The Schoolmaster had no fear that Deirdre could not manage this handful
of yearlings and old cows. She had chased calves from paddock to paddock
when she was big enough to straddle a pot-bellied pony, and had cracked
a light whip which Conal had made for her, with a fall a couple of
inches shorter than his own, round many a restless herd when Conal and
he were droving and she was on the roads with them. It was the
bitterness of not being able to drive himself that plagued Farrel: the
consciousness of having to stand by and let her do what there was danger
in doing, incensed him. Steve watched the road for sound or sign of men
and horses from Wirreeford. Then he chased his own two milkers up from
the cow paddock and ran them backwards and forwards along the road where
the mob had passed, to obliterate its tracks.
A weight was off the Schoolmaster's mind when Steve said that Deirdre
and the black were out of sight. He knew that by taking the cattle along
the narrow tracks on the ledges of the hills, she would save them.
Narrow Valley scrubs would screen them from curious eyes. If M'Laughlin
came, the road would tell no tales. Steve's cows had made it look as if
a mob had passed in the opposite direction beyond the shanty, and he and
the Schoolmaster had a story to fit the tracks. They did not think that
anybody but themselves knew the way under the trees on the Valley
hillsides. Only if M'Laughlin brought a tracker would he be able to
follow Deirdre.
Farrel wondered how word had reached McNab, and what foolhardiness had
led Conal to bring these branded calves to the paddock below Steve's.
For a moment the idea that Conal, baited and maddened with drink, might
have given some hint at McNab's of the beasts being in Steve's paddock,
occurred to him. And then there was Davey. For a while his mind brooded
over what had happened to him.
"It was only mad with drink, Conal could have shot at a man in the
dark," he told himself. "The open fight is his way." Conal and he had
been friends a good many years, and there was something in his estimate
of the man which defied the idea that he had shot Davey. And yet it
looked as if he had. Why was he not in? He had left Wirreeford an hour
before Davey. Conal was on the road before Davey. And he had been
drinking at McNab's. He had been taunted with Deirdre's name.
"It was only mad with drink he could have done it," the Schoolmaster
told himself again. And even then a fierce contempt and condemnation
surged within him. The memory of Deirdre's fired young womanhood; of the
look in her face, of the glow in her eyes, told him what this hurt to
Davey meant to her.
Steve watched in the room beside Davey.
His shrunken, crippled limbs ached. His head sank on his breast. He
drooped and slept forgetfully. The Schoolmaster strode the length of the
kitchen. The fire smouldered low. He threw some wood on it. The
crackling flames flashed and played freakishly across the room. He
wondered if Conal would come--where he was. The hours passed. There was
no sound or sign of late riders from the Wirree. He opened the door of
the hut. The night was very still. Only a mopoke called plaintively in
the distance.
There was a stir in the room in which Davey was sleeping. Farrel heard
Steve's voice in startled and sleepy protest. The door opened, Davey
stood on the threshold his eyes with a delirious brightness in them.
"What have you done about those calves?" he asked, his voice quick and
clear.
"We are going to let 'em go," Steve gasped. "You go back and lie down
now, Davey."
"You can't do that with the new brands on them," Davey brushed him
aside, irritably. "I'm all right now. I can take them to the Valley.
It's a bit of luck M'Laughlin hasn't turned up yet. P'raps I upset his
calculations--his and McNab's. He's not so fond of gettin' a move on,
Johnny Mac. Might've guessed I'd got a notion he was going to be busy
when I went round asking for Conal. Thought we'd give him the slip
anyway and he'd save himself the trouble of coming!" He laughed a little
unsteadily. "Think I'll get the calves along to the Valley, all the
same."
The Schoolmaster took his arm.
"Go and lie down, Davey," he said. "If you go wandering about like this,
you'll bring on the bleeding again. Besides, Deirdre--"
"Where is she?" His eyes flew searching the room for her.
"She"--it seemed difficult to say--"She has gone down to the Valley, so
it'll be all right," he said.
Davey turned towards the door.
"Don't be a fool, Davey!" The Schoolmaster intercepted him.
Davey pushed him aside.
He strode into the stable yard as though nothing had happened to disable
him. A moment later the Schoolmaster heard the rattle of hoofs on the
road.
Every fibre of him shivered at the boy's contempt, the blazing amazement
of his eyes. He sank into a chair, covering his face with his hands.