ACT I

Children of the Bush

by Henry Lawson

Contents

SEND ROUND THE HAT

THAT PRETTY GIRL IN THE ARMY

“LORD DOUGLAS”

THE BLINDNESS OF ONE-EYED BOGAN

TWO SUNDOWNERS

A SKETCH OF MATESHIP

ON THE TUCKER TRACK: A STEELMAN STORY

A BUSH PUBLICAN’S LAMENT

THE SHEARER’S DREAM

THE LOST SOULS’ HOTEL

THE BOOZERS’ HOME

THE SEX PROBLEM AGAIN

THE ROMANCE OF THE SWAG

“BUCKOLTS’ GATE”

THE BUSH-FIRE

THE HOUSE THAT WAS NEVER BUILT

“BARNEY, TAKE ME HOME AGAIN”

A DROVING YARN

GETTIN’ BACK ON DAVE REGAN

“SHALL WE GATHER AT THE RIVER?”

HIS BROTHER’S KEEPER

THE STORY OF “GENTLEMAN ONCE”

THE GHOSTS OF MANY CHRISTMASES

SEND ROUND THE HAT

Now this is the creed from the Book of the Bush—

Should be simple and plain to a dunce:

“If a man’s in a hole you must pass round the hat

Were he jail-bird or gentleman once.”

“Is it any harm to wake yer?”

It was about nine o’clock in the morning, and, though it was Sunday

morning, it was no harm to wake me; but the shearer had mistaken me for

a deaf jackaroo, who was staying at the shanty and was something like

me, and had good-naturedly shouted almost at the top of his voice, and

he woke the whole shanty. Anyway he woke three or four others who were

sleeping on beds and stretchers, and one on a shake-down on the floor,

in the same room. It had been a wet night, and the shanty was full of

shearers from Big Billabong Shed which had cut out the day before. My

room mates had been drinking and gambling overnight, and they swore

luridly at the intruder for disturbing them.

He was six-foot-three or thereabout. He was loosely built, bony,

sandy-complexioned and grey eyed. He wore a good-humoured grin at most

times, as I noticed later on; he was of a type of bushman that I always

liked—the sort that seem to get more good-natured the longer they grow,

yet are hard-knuckled and would accommodate a man who wanted to fight,

or thrash a bully in a good-natured way. The sort that like to carry

somebody’s baby round, and cut wood, carry water and do little things

for overworked married bushwomen. He wore a saddle-tweed sac suit two

sizes too small for him, and his face, neck, great hands and bony

wrists were covered with sun-blotches and freckles.

“I hope I ain’t disturbin’ yer,” he shouted, as he bent over my bunk,

“but there’s a cove—”

“You needn’t shout!” I interrupted, “I’m not deaf.”

“Oh—I beg your pardon!” he shouted. “I didn’t know I was yellin’. I

thought you was the deaf feller.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” I said. “What’s the trouble?”

“Wait till them other chaps is done swearin’ and I’ll tell yer,” he

said. He spoke with a quiet, good-natured drawl, with something of the

nasal twang, but tone and drawl distinctly Australian—altogether apart

from that of the Americans.

“Oh, spit it out for Christ’s sake, Long’un!” yelled One-eyed Bogan,

who had been the worst swearer in a rough shed, and he fell back on his

bunk as if his previous remarks had exhausted him.

“It’s that there sick jackaroo that was pickin’-up at Big Billabong,”

said the Giraffe. “He had to knock off the first week, an’ he’s been

here ever since. They’re sendin’ him away to the hospital in Sydney by

the speeshall train. They’re just goin’ to take him up in the wagonette

to the railway station, an’ I thought I might as well go round with the

hat an’ get him a few bob. He’s got a missus and kids in Sydney.”

“Yer always goin’ round with yer gory hat!” growled Bogan. “Yer’d

blanky well take it round in hell!”

“That’s what he’s doing, Bogan,” muttered Gentleman Once, on the

shake-down, with his face to the wall.

The hat was a genuine “cabbage-tree,” one of the sort that “last a

lifetime.” It was well coloured, almost black in fact with weather and

age, and it had a new strap round the base of the crown. I looked into

it and saw a dirty pound note and some silver. I dropped in half a

crown, which was more than I could spare, for I had only been a

green-hand at Big Billabong.

“Thank yer!” he said. “Now then, you fellers!”

“I wish you’d keep your hat on your head, and your money in your

pockets and your sympathy somewhere else,” growled Jack Moonlight as he

raised himself painfully on his elbow, and felt under his pillow for

two half-crowns. “Here,” he said, “here’s two half-casers. Chuck ’em in

and let me sleep for God’s sake!”

Gentleman Once, the gambler, rolled round on his shake-down, bringing

his good-looking, dissipated face from the wall. He had turned in in

his clothes and, with considerable exertion he shoved his hand down

into the pocket of his trousers, which were a tight fit. He brought up

a roll of pound notes and could find no silver.

“Here,” he said to the Giraffe, “I might as well lay a quid. I’ll

chance it anyhow. Chuck it in.”

“You’ve got rats this mornin’, Gentleman Once,” growled the Bogan. “It

ain’t a blanky horse race.”

“P’r’aps I have,” said Gentleman Once, and he turned to the wall again

with his head on his arm.

“Now, Bogan, yer might as well chuck in somethin,” said the Giraffe.

“What’s the matter with the —— jackaroo?” asked the Bogan, tugging his

trousers from under the mattress.

Moonlight said something in a low tone.

“The —— he has!” said Bogan. “Well, I pity the ——! Here, I’ll chuck in

half a —— quid!” and he dropped half a sovereign into the hat.

The fourth man, who was known to his face as “Barcoo-Rot,” and behind

his back as “The Mean Man,” had been drinking all night, and not even

Bogan’s stump-splitting adjectives could rouse him. So Bogan got out of

bed, and calling on us (as blanky female cattle) to witness what he was

about to do, he rolled the drunkard over, prospected his pockets till

he made up five shillings (or a “caser” in bush language), and

“chucked” them into the hat.

And Barcoo-Rot is probably unconscious to this day that he was ever

connected with an act of charity.

The Giraffe struck the deaf jackaroo in the next room. I heard the

chaps cursing “Long-’un” for waking them, and “Deaf-’un” for being, as

they thought at first, the indirect cause of the disturbance. I heard

the Giraffe and his hat being condemned in other rooms and cursed along

the veranda where more shearers were sleeping; and after a while I

turned out.

The Giraffe was carefully fixing a mattress and pillows on the floor of

a wagonette, and presently a man, who looked like a corpse, was carried

out and lifted into the trap.

As the wagonette started, the shanty-keeper—a fat, soulless-looking

man—put his hand in his pocket and dropped a quid into the hat which

was still going round, in the hands of the Giraffe’s mate, little Teddy

Thompson, who was as far below medium height as the Giraffe was above

it.

The Giraffe took the horse’s head and led him along on the most level

parts of the road towards the railway station, and two or three chaps

went along to help get the sick man into the train.

The shearing-season was over in that district, but I got a job of

house-painting, which was my trade, at the Great Western Hotel (a

two-story brick place), and I stayed in Bourke for a couple of months.

The Giraffe was a Victorian native from Bendigo. He was well known in

Bourke and to many shearers who came through the great dry scrubs from

hundreds of miles round. He was stakeholder, drunkard’s banker,

peacemaker where possible, referee or second to oblige the chaps when a

fight was on, big brother or uncle to most of the children in town,

final court of appeal when the youngsters had a dispute over a

foot-race at the school picnic, referee at their fights, and he was the

stranger’s friend.

“The feller as knows can battle around for himself,” he’d say. “But I

always like to do what I can for a hard-up stranger cove. I was a

green-hand jackaroo once meself, and I know what it is.”

“You’re always bothering about other people, Giraffe,” said Tom Hall,

the shearers’ union secretary, who was only a couple of inches shorter

than the Giraffe. “There’s nothing in it, you can take it from me—I

ought to know.”

“Well, what’s a feller to do?” said the Giraffe. “I’m only hangin’

round here till shearin’ starts agen, an’ a cove might as well be doin’

something. Besides, it ain’t as if I was like a cove that had old

people or a wife an’ kids to look after. I ain’t got no

responsibilities. A feller can’t be doin’ nothin’. Besides, I like to

lend a helpin’ hand when I can.”

“Well, all I’ve got to say,” said Tom, most of whose screw went in

borrowed quids, etc. “All I’ve got to say is that you’ll get no thanks,

and you might blanky well starve in the end.”

“There ain’t no fear of me starvin’ so long as I’ve got me hands about

me; an’ I ain’t a cove as wants thanks,” said the Giraffe.

He was always helping someone or something. Now it was a bit of a

“darnce” that we was gettin’ up for the girls; again it was Mrs Smith,

the woman whose husban’ was drowned in the flood in the Bogan River

lars’ Crismas, or that there poor woman down by the Billabong—her

husband cleared out and left her with a lot o’ kids. Or Bill Something,

the bullocky, who was run over by his own wagon, while he was drunk,

and got his leg broke.

Toward the end of his spree One-eyed Bogan broke loose and smashed

nearly all the windows of the Carriers’ Arms, and next morning he was

fined heavily at the police court. About dinner-time I encountered the

Giraffe and his hat, with two half-crowns in it for a start.

“I’m sorry to trouble yer,” he said, “but One-eyed Bogan carn’t pay his

fine, an’ I thought we might fix it up for him. He ain’t half a bad

sort of feller when he ain’t drinkin’. It’s only when he gets too much

booze in him.”

After shearing, the hat usually started round with the Giraffe’s own

dirty crumpled pound note in the bottom of it as a send-off, later on

it was half a sovereign, and so on down to half a crown and a shilling,

as he got short of stuff; till in the end he would borrow a “few

bob”—which he always repaid after next shearing-“just to start the

thing goin’.”

There were several yarns about him and his hat. ’Twas said that the hat

had belonged to his father, whom he resembled in every respect, and it

had been going round for so many years that the crown was worn as thin

as paper by the quids, half-quids, casers, half-casers, bobs and

tanners or sprats—to say nothing of the scrums—that had been chucked

into it in its time and shaken up.

They say that when a new governor visited Bourke the Giraffe happened

to be standing on the platform close to the exit, grinning

good-humouredly, and the local toady nudged him urgently and said in an

awful whisper, “Take off your hat! Why don’t you take off your hat?”

“Why?” drawled the Giraffe, “he ain’t hard up, is he?”

And they fondly cherish an anecdote to the effect that, when the

One-Man-One-Vote Bill was passed (or Payment of Members, or when the

first Labour Party went in—I forget on which occasion they said it was)

the Giraffe was carried away by the general enthusiasm, got a few beers

in him, “chucked” a quid into his hat, and sent it round. The boys

contributed by force of habit, and contributed largely, because of the

victory and the beer. And when the hat came back to the Giraffe, he

stood holding it in front of him with both hands and stared blankly

into it for a while. Then it dawned on him.

“Blowed if I haven’t bin an’ gone an’ took up a bloomin’ collection for

meself!” he said.

He was almost a teetotaller, but he stood his shout in reason. He

mostly drank ginger beer.

“I ain’t a feller that boozes, but I ain’t got nothin’ agen chaps

enjoyin’ themselves, so long as they don’t go too far.”

It was common for a man on the spree to say to him:

“Here! here’s five quid. Look after it for me, Giraffe, will yer, till

I git off the booze.”

His real name was Bob Brothers, and his bush names, “Long-’un,” “The

Giraffe,” “Send-round-the-hat,” “Chuck-in-a-bob,” and “Ginger-ale.”

Some years before, camels and Afghan drivers had been imported to the

Bourke district; the camels did very well in the dry country, they went

right across country and carried everything from sardines to

flooring-boards. And the teamsters loved the Afghans nearly as much as

Sydney furniture makers love the cheap Chinese in the same line. They

love ’em even as union shearers on strike love blacklegs brought

up-country to take their places.

Now the Giraffe was a good, straight unionist, but in cases of sickness

or trouble he was as apt to forget his unionism, as all bushmen are, at

all times (and for all time), to forget their creed. So, one evening,

the Giraffe blundered into the Carriers’ Arms—of all places in the

world—when it was full of teamsters; he had his hat in his hand and

some small silver and coppers in it.

“I say, you fellers, there’s a poor, sick Afghan in the camp down there

along the—”

A big, brawny bullock-driver took him firmly by the shoulders, or,

rather by the elbows, and ran him out before any damage was done. The

Giraffe took it as he took most things, good-humouredly; but, about

dusk, he was seen slipping down towards the Afghan camp with a billy of

soup.

“I believe,” remarked Tom Hall, “that when the Giraffe goes to

heaven—and he’s the only one of us, as far as I can see, that has a

ghost of a show—I believe that when he goes to heaven, the first thing

he’ll do will be to take his infernal hat round amongst the

angels—getting up a collection for this damned world that he left

behind.”

“Well, I don’t think there’s so much to his credit, after all,” said

Jack Mitchell, shearer. “You see, the Giraffe is ambitious; he likes

public life, and that accounts for him shoving himself forward with his

collections. As for bothering about people in trouble, that’s only

common curiosity; he’s one of those chaps that are always shoving their

noses into other people’s troubles. And, as for looking after sick

men—why! there’s nothing the Giraffe likes better than pottering round

a sick man, and watching him and studying him. He’s awfully interested

in sick men, and they’re pretty scarce out here. I tell you there’s

nothing he likes better—except, maybe, it’s pottering round a corpse. I

believe he’d ride forty miles to help and sympathize and potter round a

funeral. The fact of the matter is that the Giraffe is only enjoying

himself with other people’s troubles—that’s all it is. It’s only vulgar

curiosity and selfishness. I set it down to his ignorance; the way he

was brought up.”

A few days after the Afghan incident the Giraffe and his hat had a run

of luck. A German, one of a party who were building a new wooden bridge

over the Big Billabong, was helping unload some girders from a truck at

the railway station, when a big log slipped on the skids and his leg

was smashed badly. They carried him to the Carriers’ Arms, which was

the nearest hotel, and into a bedroom behind the bar, and sent for the

doctor. The Giraffe was in evidence as usual.

“It vas not that at all,” said German Charlie, when they asked him if

he was in much pain. “It vas not that at all. I don’t cares a damn for

der bain; but dis is der tird year—und I vas going home dis year—after

der gontract—und der gontract yoost commence!”

That was the burden of his song all through, between his groans. There

were a good few chaps sitting quietly about the bar and veranda when

the doctor arrived. The Giraffe was sitting at the end of the counter,

on which he had laid his hat while he wiped his face, neck, and

forehead with a big speckled “sweatrag.” It was a very hot day.

The doctor, a good-hearted young Australian, was heard saying

something. Then German Charlie, in a voice that rung with pain:

“Make that leg right, doctor—quick! Dis is der tird pluddy year—und I

must go home!”

The doctor asked him if he was in great pain. “Neffer mind der pluddy

bain, doctor! Neffer mind der pluddy bain! Dot vas nossing. Make dat

leg well quick, doctor. Dis vas der last gontract, and I vas going home

dis year.” Then the words jerked out of him by physical agony: “Der

girl vas vaiting dree year, und—by Got! I must go home.”

The publican—Watty Braithwaite, known as “Watty Broadweight,” or, more

familiarly, “Watty Bothways”—turned over the Giraffe’s hat in a tired,

bored sort of way, dropped a quid into it, and nodded resignedly at the

Giraffe.

The Giraffe caught up the hint and the hat with alacrity. The hat went

all round town, so to speak; and, as soon as his leg was firm enough

not to come loose on the road German Charlie went home.

It was well known that I contributed to the Sydney _Bulletin_ and

several other papers. The Giraffe’s bump of reverence was very large,

and swelled especially for sick men and poets. He treated me with much

more respect than is due from a bushman to a man, and with an odd sort

of extra gentleness I sometimes fancied. But one day he rather

surprised me.

“I’m sorry to trouble yer,” he said in a shamefaced way. “I don’t know

as you go in for sportin’, but One-eyed Bogan an’ Barcoo-Rot is goin’

to have a bit of a scrap down the Billybong this evenin’, an’——”

“A bit of a what?” I asked.

“A bit of fight to a finish,” he said apologetically. “An’ the chaps is

tryin’ to fix up a fiver to put some life into the thing. There’s bad

blood between One-eyed Bogan and Barcoo-Rot, an’ it won’t do them any

harm to have it out.”

It was a great fight, I remember. There must have been a couple of

score blood-soaked handkerchiefs (or “sweat-rags”) buried in a hole on

the field of battle, and the Giraffe was busy the rest of the evening

helping to patch up the principals. Later on he took up a small

collection for the loser, who happened to be Barcoo-Rot in spite of the

advantage of an eye.

The Salvation Army lassie, who went round with the _War Cry_, nearly

always sold the Giraffe three copies.

A new-chum parson, who wanted a subscription to build or enlarge a

chapel, or something, sought the assistance of the Giraffe’s influence

with his mates.

“Well,” said the Giraffe, “I ain’t a churchgoer meself. I ain’t what

you might call a religious cove, but I’ll be glad to do what I can to

help yer. I don’t suppose I can do much. I ain’t been to church since I

was a kiddy.”

The parson was shocked, but later on he learned to appreciate the

Giraffe and his mates, and to love Australia for the bushman’s sake,

and it was he who told me the above anecdote.

The Giraffe helped fix some stalls for a Catholic Church bazaar, and

some of the chaps chaffed him about it in the union office.

“You’ll be taking up a collection for a joss-house down in the

Chinamen’s camp next,” said Tom Hall in conclusion.

“Well, I ain’t got nothin’ agen the Roming Carflics,” said the Giraffe.

“An’ Father O’Donovan’s a very decent sort of cove. He stuck up for the

unions all right in the strike anyway.” (“He wouldn’t be Irish if he

wasn’t,” someone commented.) “I carried swags once for six months with

a feller that was a Carflick, an’ he was a very straight feller. And a

girl I knowed turned Carflick to marry a chap that had got her into

trouble, an’ she was always jes’ the same to me after as she was

before. Besides, I like to help everything that’s goin’ on.”

Tom Hall and one or two others went out hurriedly to have a drink. But

we all loved the Giraffe.

He was very innocent and very humorous, especially when he meant to be

most serious and philosophical.

“Some of them bush girls is regular tomboys,” he said to me solemnly

one day. “Some of them is too cheeky altogether. I remember once I was

stoppin’ at a place—they was sort of relations o’ mine—an’ they put me

to sleep in a room off the verander, where there was a glass door an’

no blinds. An’ the first mornin’ the girls—they was sort o’ cousins o’

mine—they come gigglin’ and foolin’ round outside the door on the

verander, an’ kep’ me in bed till nearly ten o’clock. I had to put me

trowsis on under the bed-clothes in the end. But I got back on ’em the

next night,” he reflected.

“How did you do that, Bob?” I asked.

“Why, I went to bed in me trowsis!”

One day I was on a plank, painting the ceiling of the bar of the Great

Western Hotel. I was anxious to get the job finished. The work had been

kept back most of the day by chaps handing up long beers to me, and

drawing my attention to the alleged fact that I was putting on the

paint wrong side out. I was slapping it on over the last few boards

when:

“I’m very sorry to trouble yer; I always seem to be troublin’ yer; but

there’s that there woman and them girls——”

I looked down—about the first time I had looked down on him—and there

was the Giraffe, with his hat brim up on the plank and two half-crowns

in it.

“Oh, that’s all right, Bob,” I said, and I dropped in half a crown.

There were shearers in the bar, and presently there was some

barracking. It appeared that that there woman and them girls were

strange women, in the local as well as the Biblical sense of the word,

who had come from Sydney at the end of the shearing-season, and had

taken a cottage on the edge of the scrub on the outskirts of the town.

There had been trouble this week in connection with a row at their

establishment, and they had been fined, warned off by the police, and

turned out by their landlord.

“This is a bit too red-hot, Giraffe,” said one of the shearers. “Them

——s has made enough out of us coves. They’ve got plenty of stuff, don’t

you fret. Let ’em go to ——! I’m blanked if I give a sprat.”

“They ain’t got their fares to Sydney,” said the Giraffe. “An’, what’s

more, the little ’un is sick, an’ two of them has kids in Sydney.”

“How the —— do you know?”

“Why, one of ’em come to me an’ told me all about it.”

There was an involuntary guffaw.

“Look here, Bob,” said Billy Woods, the rouseabouts’ secretary, kindly.

“Don’t you make a fool of yourself. You’ll have all the chaps laughing

at you. Those girls are only working you for all you’re worth. I

suppose one of ’em came crying and whining to you. Don’t you bother

about ’em. _You_ don’t know ’em; they can pump water at a moment’s

notice. You haven’t had any experience with women yet, Bob.”

“She didn’t come whinin’ and cryin’ to me,” said the Giraffe, dropping

his twanging drawl a little. “She looked me straight in the face an’

told me all about it.”

“I say, Giraffe,” said Box-o’-Tricks, “what have you been doin’? You’ve

bin down there on the nod. I’m surprised at yer, Giraffe.”

“An’ he pretends to be so gory soft an’ innocent, too,” growled the

Bogan. “We know all about you, Giraffe.”

“Look here, Giraffe,” said Mitchell the shearer. “I’d never have

thought it of you. We all thought you were the only virgin youth west

the river; I always thought you were a moral young man. You mustn’t

think that because your conscience is pricking you everyone else’s is.”

“I ain’t had anythin’ to do with them,” said the Giraffe, drawling

again. “I ain’t a cove that goes in for that sort of thing. But other

chaps has, and I think they might as well help ’em out of their fix.”

“They’re a rotten crowd,” said Billy Woods. “You don’t know them, Bob.

Don’t bother about them-they’re not worth it. Put your money in your

pocket. You’ll find a better use for it before next shearing.”

“Better shout, Giraffe,” said Box-o’-Tricks.

Now in spite of the Giraffe’s softness he was the hardest man in Bourke

to move when he’d decided on what he thought was “the fair thing to

do.” Another peculiarity of his was that on occasion, such for instance

as “sayin’ a few words” at a strike meeting, he would straighten

himself, drop the twang, and rope in his drawl, so to speak.

“Well, look here, you chaps,” he said now. “I don’t know anything about

them women. I s’pose they’re bad, but I don’t suppose they’re worse

than men has made them. All I know is that there’s four women turned

out, without any stuff, and every woman in Bourke, an’ the police, an’

the law agen ’em. An’ the fact that they is women is agenst ’em most of

all. You don’t expect ’em to hump their swags to Sydney! Why, only I

ain’t got the stuff I wouldn’t trouble yer. I’d pay their fares meself.

Look,” he said, lowering his voice, “there they are now, an’ one of the

girls is cryin’. Don’t let ’em see yer lookin’.”

I dropped softly from the plank and peeped out with the rest.

They stood by the fence on the opposite side of the street, a bit up

towards the railway station, with their portmanteaux and bundles at

their feet. One girl leant with her arms on the fence rail and her face

buried in them, another was trying to comfort her. The third girl and

the woman stood facing our way. The woman was good-looking; she had a

hard face, but it might have been made hard. The third girl seemed half

defiant, half inclined to cry. Presently she went to the other side of

the girl who was crying on the fence and put her arm round her

shoulder. The woman suddenly turned her back on us and stood looking

away over the paddocks.

The hat went round. Billy Woods was first, then Box-o’-Tricks, and then

Mitchell.

Billy contributed with eloquent silence. “I was only jokin’, Giraffe,”

said Box-o’-Tricks, dredging his pockets for a couple of shillings. It

was some time after the shearing, and most of the chaps were hard up.

“Ah, well,” sighed Mitchell. “There’s no help for it. If the Giraffe

would take up a collection to import some decent girls to this

God-forgotten hole there might be some sense in it.... It’s bad enough

for the Giraffe to undermine our religious prejudices, and tempt us to

take a morbid interest in sick Chows and Afghans, and blacklegs and

widows; but when he starts mixing us up with strange women it’s time to

buck.” And he prospected his pockets and contributed two shillings,

some odd pennies, and a pinch of tobacco dust.

“I don’t mind helping the girls, but I’m damned if I’ll give a penny to

help the old ——,” said Tom Hall.

“Well, she was a girl once herself,” drawled the Giraffe.

The Giraffe went round to the other pubs and to the union offices, and

when he returned he seemed satisfied with the plate, but troubled about

something else.

“I don’t know what to do for them for to-night,” he said. “None of the

pubs or boardin’-houses will hear of them, an’ there ain’t no empty

houses, an’ the women is all agen ’em.”

“Not all,” said Alice, the big, handsome barmaid from Sydney. “Come

here, Bob.” She gave the Giraffe half a sovereign and a look for which

some of us would have paid him ten pounds—had we had the money, and had

the look been transferable.

“Wait a minute, Bob,” she said, and she went in to speak to the

landlord.

“There’s an empty bedroom at the end of the store in the yard,” she

said when she came back. “They can camp there for to-night if they

behave themselves. You’d better tell ’em, Bob.”

“Thank yer, Alice,” said the Giraffe.

Next day, after work, the Giraffe and I drifted together and down by

the river in the cool of the evening, and sat on the edge of the steep,

drought-parched bank.

“I heard you saw your lady friends off this morning, Bob,” I said, and

was sorry I said it, even before he answered.

“Oh, they ain’t no friends of mine,” he said. “Only four’ poor devils

of women. I thought they mightn’t like to stand waitin’ with the crowd

on the platform, so I jest offered to get their tickets an’ told ’em to

wait round at the back of the station till the bell rung.... An’ what

do yer think they did, Harry?” he went on, with an exasperatingly

unintelligent grin. “Why, they wanted to kiss me.”

“Did they?”

“Yes. An’ they would have done it, too, if I hadn’t been so long....

Why, I’m blessed if they didn’t kiss me hands.”

“You don’t say so.”

“God’s truth. Somehow I didn’t like to go on the platform with them

after that; besides, they was cryin’, and I can’t stand women cryin’.

But some of the chaps put them into an empty carriage.” He thought a

moment. Then:

“There’s some terrible good-hearted fellers in the world,” he

reflected.

I thought so too. “Bob,” I said, “you’re a single man. Why don’t you

get married and settle down?”

“Well,” he said, “I ain’t got no wife an’ kids, that’s a fact. But it

ain’t my fault.”

He may have been right about the wife. But I thought of the look that

Alice had given him, and—

“Girls seem to like me right enough,” he said, “but it don’t go no

further than that. The trouble is that I’m so long, and I always seem

to get shook after little girls. At least there was one little girl in

Bendigo that I was properly gone on.”

“And wouldn’t she have you?”

“Well, it seems not.”

“Did you ask her?”

“Oh, yes, I asked her right enough.”

“Well, and what did she say?”

“She said it would be redicilus for her to be seen trottin’ alongside

of a chimbley like me.”

“Perhaps she didn’t mean that. There are any amount of little women who

like tall men.”

“I thought of that too—afterwards. P’r’aps she didn’t mean it that way.

I s’pose the fact of the matter was that she didn’t cotton on to me,

and wanted to let me down easy. She didn’t want to hurt me feelin’s, if

yer understand—she was a very good-hearted little girl. There’s some

terrible tall fellers where I come from, and I know two as married

little girls.”

He seemed a hopeless case.

“Sometimes,” he said, “sometimes I wish that I wasn’t so blessed long.”

“There’s that there deaf jackaroo,” he reflected presently. “He’s

something in the same fig about girls as I am. He’s too deaf and I’m

too long.”

“How do you make that out?” I asked. “He’s got three girls, to my

knowledge, and, as for being deaf, why, he gasses more than any man in

the town, and knows more of what’s going on than old Mother Brindle the

washerwoman.”

“Well, look at that now!” said the Giraffe, slowly. “Who’d have thought

it? He never told me he had three girls, an’ as for hearin’ news, I

always tell him anything that’s goin’ on that I think he doesn’t catch.

He told me his trouble was that whenever he went out with a girl people

could hear what they was sayin’—at least they could hear what she was

sayin’ to him, an’ draw their own conclusions, he said. He said he went

out one night with a girl, and some of the chaps foxed ’em an’ heard

her sayin’ ‘don’t’ to him, an’ put it all round town.”

“What did she say ‘don’t’ for?” I asked.

“He didn’t tell me that, but I s’pose he was kissin’ her or huggin’ her

or something.”

“Bob,” I said presently, “didn’t you try the little girl in Bendigo a

second time?”

“No,” he said. “What was the use. She was a good little girl, and I

wasn’t goin’ to go botherin’ her. I ain’t the sort of cove that goes

hangin’ round where he isn’t wanted. But somehow I couldn’t stay about

Bendigo after she gave me the hint, so I thought I’d come over an’ have

a knock round on this side for a year or two.”

“And you never wrote to her?”

“No. What was the use of goin’ pesterin’ her with letters? I know what

trouble letters give me when I have to answer one. She’d have only had

to tell me the straight truth in a letter an’ it wouldn’t have done me

any good. But I’ve pretty well got over it by this time.”

A few days later I went to Sydney. The Giraffe was the last I shook

hands with from the carriage window, and he slipped something in a

piece of newspaper into my hand.

“I hope yer won’t be offended,” he drawled, “but some of the chaps

thought you mightn’t be too flush of stuff—you’ve been shoutin’ a good

deal; so they put a quid or two together. They thought it might help

yer to have a bit of a fly round in Sydney.”

I was back in Bourke before next shearing. On the evening of my arrival

I ran against the Giraffe; he seemed strangely shaken over something,

but he kept his hat on his head.

“Would yer mind takin’ a stroll as fur as the Billerbong?” he said. “I

got something I’d like to tell yer.”

His big, brown, sunburnt hands trembled and shook as he took a letter

from his pocket and opened it.

“I’ve just got a letter,” he said. “A letter from that little girl at

Bendigo. It seems it was all a mistake. I’d like you to read it.

Somehow I feel as if I want to talk to a feller, and I’d rather talk to

you than any of them other chaps.”

It was a good letter, from a big-hearted little girl. She had been

breaking her heart for the great ass all these months. It seemed that

he had left Bendigo without saying good-bye to her. “Somehow I couldn’t

bring meself to it,” he said, when I taxed him with it. She had never

been able to get his address until last week; then she got it from a

Bourke man who had gone south. She called him “an awful long fool,”

which he was, without the slightest doubt, and she implored him to

write, and come back to her.

“And will you go back, Bob?” I asked.

“My oath! I’d take the train to-morrer only I ain’t got the stuff. But

I’ve got a stand in Big Billerbong Shed an’ I’ll soon knock a few quid

together. I’ll go back as soon as ever shearin’s over. I’m goin’ to

write away to her to-night.”

The Giraffe was the “ringer” of Big Billabong Shed that season. His

tallies averaged a hundred and twenty a day. He only sent his hat round

once during shearing, and it was noticed that he hesitated at first and

only contributed half a crown. But then it was a case of a man being

taken from the shed by the police for wife desertion.

“It’s always that way,” commented Mitchell. “Those soft, good-hearted

fellows always end by getting hard and selfish. The world makes ’em so.

It’s the thought of the soft fools they’ve been that finds out sooner

or later and makes ’em repent. Like as not the Giraffe will be the

meanest man out back before he’s done.”

When Big Billabong cut out, and we got back to Bourke with our dusty

swags and dirty cheques, I spoke to Tom Hall:

“Look here, Tom,” I said. “That long fool, the Giraffe, has been

breaking his heart for a little girl in Bendigo ever since he’s been

out back, and she’s been breaking her heart for him, and the ass didn’t

know it till he got a letter from her just before Big Billabong

started. He’s going to-morrow morning.”

That evening Tom stole the Giraffe’s hat. “I s’pose it’ll turn up in

the mornin’,” said the Giraffe. “I don’t mind a lark,” he added, “but

it does seem a bit red hot for the chaps to collar a cove’s hat and a

feller goin’ away for good, p’r’aps, in the mornin’.”

Mitchell started the thing going with a quid.

“It’s worth it,” he said, “to get rid of him. We’ll have some peace

now. There won’t be so many accidents or women in trouble when the

Giraffe and his blessed hat are gone. Any way, he’s an eyesore in the

town, and he’s getting on my nerves for one.... Come on, you sinners!

Chuck ’em in; we’re only taking quids and half-quids.”

About daylight next morning Tom Hall slipped into the Giraffe’s room at

the Carriers’ Arms. The Giraffe was sleeping peacefully. Tom put the

hat on a chair by his side. The collection had been a record one, and,

besides the packet of money in the crown of the hat, there was a

silver-mounted pipe with case—the best that could be bought in Bourke,

a gold brooch, and several trifles—besides an ugly valentine of a long

man in his shirt walking the room with a twin on each arm.

Tom was about to shake the Giraffe by the shoulder, when he noticed a

great foot, with about half a yard of big-boned ankle and shank,

sticking out at the bottom of the bed. The temptation was too great.

Tom took up the hair-brush, and, with the back of it, he gave a smart

rap on the point of an in-growing toe-nail, and slithered.

We heard the Giraffe swearing good-naturedly for a while, and then

there was a pregnant silence. He was staring at the hat we supposed.

We were all up at the station to see him off. It was rather a long

wait. The Giraffe edged me up to the other end of the platform.

He seemed overcome.

“There’s—there’s some terrible good-hearted fellers in this world,” he

said. “You mustn’t forgit ’em, Harry, when you make a big name writin’.

I’m—well, I’m blessed if I don’t feel as if I was jist goin’ to

blubber!”

I was glad he didn’t. The Giraffe blubberin’ would have been a

spectacle. I steered him back to his friends.

“Ain’t you going to kiss me, Bob?” said the Great Western’s big,

handsome barmaid, as the bell rang.

“Well, I don’t mind kissin’ you, Alice,” he said, wiping his mouth.

“But I’m goin’ to be married, yer know.” And he kissed her fair on the

mouth.

“There’s nothin’ like gettin’ into practice,” he said, grinning round.

We thought he was improving wonderfully; but at the last moment

something troubled him.

“Look here, you chaps,” he said, hesitatingly, with his hand in his

pocket, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with all this stuff. There’s

that there poor washerwoman that scalded her legs liftin’ the boiler of

clothes off the fire——”

We shoved him into the carriage. He hung—about half of him—out the

window, wildly waving his hat, till the train disappeared in the scrub.

And, as I sit here writing by lamplight at midday, in the midst of a

great city of shallow social sham, of hopeless, squalid poverty, of

ignorant selfishness, cultured or brutish, and of noble and heroic

endeavour frowned down or callously neglected, I am almost aware of a

burst of sunshine in the room, and a long form leaning over my chair,

and:

“Excuse me for troublin’ yer; I’m always troublin’ yer; but there’s

that there poor woman....”

And I wish I could immortalize him!

THAT PRETTY GIRL IN THE ARMY

Now I often sit at Watty’s, when the night is very near,

With a head that’s full of jingles—and the fumes of bottled beer;

For I always have a fancy that, if I am over there

When the Army prays for Watty, I’m included in the prayer.

It would take a lot of praying, lots of thumping on the drum,

To prepare our sinful, straying, erring souls for Kingdom Come.

But I love my fellow-sinners! and I hope, upon the whole,

That the Army gets a hearing when it prays for Watty’s soul.

From _When the World was Wide_.

The Salvation Army does good business in some of the outback towns of

the great pastoral wastes of Australia. There’s the thoughtless,

careless generosity of the bushman, whose pockets don’t go far enough

down his trousers (that’s what’s the matter with him), and who

contributes to anything that comes along, without troubling to ask

questions, like long Bob Brothers of Bourke, who, chancing to be “a

Protestant by rights,” unwittingly subscribed towards the erection of a

new Catholic church, and, being chaffed for his mistake, said:

“Ah, well, I don’t suppose it’ll matter a hang in the end, anyway it

goes. I ain’t got nothink agenst the Roming Carflicks.”

There’s the shearer, fresh with his cheque from a cut-out shed,

gloriously drunk and happy, in love with all the world, and ready to

subscribe towards any creed and shout for all hands—including Old Nick

if he happened to come along. There’s the shearer, half-drunk and

inclined to be nasty, who has got the wrong end of all things with a

tight grip, and who flings a shilling in the face of out-back

conventionality (as he thinks) by chucking a bob into the Salvation

Army ring. Then he glares round to see if he can catch anybody winking

behind his back. There’s the cynical joker, a queer mixture, who

contributes generously and tempts the reformed boozer afterwards.

There’s the severe-faced old station-hand—in clean shirt and

neckerchief and white moleskins—in for his annual or semi-annual spree,

who contributes on principle, and then drinks religiously until his

cheque is gone and the horrors are come. There’s the shearer, feeling

mighty bad after a spree, and in danger of seeing things when he tries

to go to sleep. He has dropped ten or twenty pounds over bar counters

and at cards, and he now “chucks” a repentant shilling into the ring,

with a very private and rather vague sort of feeling that something

might come of it. There’s the stout, contented, good-natured publican,

who tips the Army as if it were a barrel-organ. And there are others

and other reasons—black sheep and ne’er-do-wells—and faint echoes of

other times in Salvation Army tunes.

Bourke, the metropolis of the Great Scrubs, on the banks of the Darling

River, about five hundred miles from Sydney, was suffering from a long

drought when I was there in ninety-two; and the heat may or may not

have been another cause contributing to the success, from a business

point of view, of the Bourke garrison. There was much beer boozing—and,

besides, it was vaguely understood (as most things are vaguely

understood out there in the drought-haze) that the place the Army came

to save us from was hotter than Bourke. We didn’t hanker to go to a

hotter place than Bourke. But that year there was an extraordinary

reason for the Army’s great financial success there.

She was a little girl, nineteen or twenty, I should judge, the

prettiest girl I ever saw in the Army, and one of the prettiest I’ve

ever seen out of it. She had the features of an angel, but her

expression was wonderfully human, sweet and sympathetic. Her big grey

eyes were sad with sympathy for sufferers and sinners, and her poke

bonnet was full of bunchy, red-gold hair. Her first appearance was

somewhat dramatic—perhaps the Army arranged it so.

The Army used to pray, and thump the drum, and sing, and take up

collections every evening outside Watty Bothways’ Hotel, the Carriers’

Arms. They performed longer and more often outside Watty’s than any

other pub in town—perhaps because Watty was considered the most

hopeless publican and his customers the hardest crowd of boozers in

Bourke. The band generally began to play about dusk. Watty would lean

back comfortably in a basket easy-chair on his wide veranda, and clasp

his hands, in a calm, contented way, while the Army banged the drum and

got steam up, and whilst, perhaps, there was a barney going on in the

bar, or a bloodthirsty fight in the backyard. On such occasions there

was something like an indulgent or fatherly expression on his fat and

usually emotionless face. And by and by he’d move his head gently and

doze. The banging and the singing seemed to soothe him, and the

praying, which was often very personal, never seemed to disturb him in

the least.

Well, it was about dusk one day; it had been a terrible day, a hundred

and something startling in the shade, but there came a breeze after

sunset. There had been several dozen of buckets of water thrown on the

veranda floor and the ground outside. Watty was seated in his

accustomed place when the Army arrived. There was no barney in the bar

because there was a fight in the backyard, and that claimed the

attention of all the customers.

The Army prayed for Watty and his clients; then a reformed drunkard

started to testify against publicans and all their works. Watty settled

himself comfortably, folded his hands, and leaned back and dozed.

The fight was over, and the chaps began to drop round to the bar. The

man who was saved waved his arms, and danced round and howled.

“Ye-es!” he shouted hoarsely. “The publicans, and boozers, and

gamblers, and sinners may think that Bourke is hot, but hell is a

thousand times hotter! I tell you”

“Oh, Lord!” said Mitchell, the shearer, and he threw a penny into the

ring.

“Ye-es! I tell you that hell is a million times hotter than Bourke! I

tell you——”

“Oh, look here,” said a voice from the background, “that won’t wash.

Why, don’t you know that when the Bourke people die they send back for

their blankets?”

The saved brother glared round.

“I hear a freethinker speaking, my friends,” he said. Then, with sudden

inspiration and renewed energy, “I hear the voice of a freethinker.

Show me the face of a freethinker,” he yelled, glaring round like a

hunted, hungry man. “Show me the face of a freethinker, and I’ll tell

you what he is.”

Watty hitched himself into a more comfortable position and clasped his

hands on his knee and closed his eyes again.

“Ya-a-a-s!” shrieked the brand. “I tell you, my friends, I can tell a

freethinker by his face. Show me the face of a——”

At this point there was an interruption. One-eyed, or Wall-eyed, Bogan,

who had a broken nose, and the best side of whose face was reckoned the

ugliest and most sinister—One-eyed Bogan thrust his face forward from

the ring of darkness into the torchlight of salvation. He had got the

worst of a drawn battle; his nose and mouth were bleeding, and his good

eye was damaged.

“Look at my face!” he snarled, with dangerous earnestness. “Look at my

face! That’s the face of a freethinker, and I don’t care who knows it.

Now! what have you got to say against my face, ‘Man-without-a-Shirt?’”

The brother drew back. He had been known in the northwest in his sinful

days as “Man-without-a-Shirt,” alias “Shirty,” or “The Dirty Man,” and

was flabbergasted at being recognized in speech. Also, he had been in a

shearing-shed and in a shanty orgy with One-eyed Bogan, and knew the

man.

Now most of the chaps respected the Army, and, indeed, anything that

looked like religion, but the Bogan’s face, as representing

free-thought, was a bit too sudden for them. There were sounds on the

opposite side of the ring as from men being smitten repeatedly and

rapidly below the belt, and long Tom Hall and one or two others got

away into the darkness in the background, where Tom rolled helplessly

on the grass and sobbed.

It struck me that Bogan’s face was more the result of free speech than

anything else.

The Army was about to pray when the Pretty Girl stepped forward, her

eyes shining with indignation and enthusiasm. She had arrived by the

evening train, and had been standing shrinkingly behind an Army lass of

fifty Australian summers, who was about six feet high, flat and broad,

and had a square face, and a mouth like a joint in boiler plates.

The Pretty Girl stamped her pretty foot on the gravel, and her eyes

flashed in the torchlight.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourselves,” she said. “Great big men like

you to be going on the way you are. If you were ignorant or poor, as

I’ve seen people, there might be some excuse for you. Haven’t you got

any mothers, or sisters, or wives to think of? What sort of a life is

this you lead? Drinking, and gambling, and fighting, and swearing your

lives away! Do you ever think of God and the time when you were

children? Why don’t you make homes? Look at that man’s face!” (she

pointed suddenly at Bogan, who collapsed and sidled behind his mates

out of the light). “Look at that man’s face! Is it a face for a

Christian? And you help and encourage him to fight. You’re worse than

he is. Oh, it’s brutal. It’s—it’s wicked. Great big men like you, you

ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”

Long Bob Brothers—about six-foot-four—the longest and most innocent

there, shrunk down by the wall and got his inquiring face out of the

light. The Pretty Girl fluttered on for a few moments longer, greatly

excited, and then stepped back, seemingly much upset, and was taken

under the wing of the woman with the boiler-plate mouth.

It was a surprise, and very sudden. Bogan slipped round to the

backyard, and was seen bathing his battered features at the pump. The

rest wore the expression of men who knew that something unusual has

happened, but don’t know what, and are waiting vacantly for

developments.—Except Tom Hall, who had recovered and returned. He stood

looking over the head of the ring of bushmen, and apparently taking the

same critical interest in the girl as he would in a fight—his

expression was such as a journalist might wear who is getting exciting

copy.

The Army had it all their own way for the rest of the evening, and made

a good collection. The Pretty Girl stood smiling round with shining

eyes as the bobs and tanners dropped in, and then, being shoved forward

by the flat woman, she thanked us sweetly, and said we were good

fellows, and that she was sorry for some things she’d said to us. Then

she retired, fluttering and very much flushed, and hid herself behind

the hard woman—who, by the way, had an excrescence on her upper lip

which might have stood for a rivet.

Presently the Pretty Girl came from behind the big woman and stood

watching things with glistening eyes. Some of the chaps on the opposite

side of the ring moved a little to one side and all were careful not to

meet her eye—not to be caught looking at her—lest she should be

embarrassed. Watty had roused himself a little at the sound of a

strange voice in the Army (and such a clear, sweet voice too!) and had

a look; then he settled back peacefully again, but it was noticed that

he didn’t snore that evening.

And when the Army prayed, the Pretty Girl knelt down with the rest on

the gravel. One or two tall bushmen bowed their heads as if they had

to, and One-eyed Bogan, with the blood washed from his face, stood with

his hat off, glaring round to see if he could catch anyone sniggering.

Mitchell, the shearer, said afterwards that the whole business made him

feel for the moment like he felt sometimes in the days when he used to

feel things.

The town discussed the Pretty Girl in the Army that night and for many

days thereafter, but no one could find out who she was or where she

belonged to—except that she came from Sydney last. She kept her secret,

if she had one, very close—or else the other S.-A. women were not to be

pumped. She lived in skillion-rooms at the back of the big

weather-board Salvation Army barracks with two other “lassies,” who did

washing and sewing and nursing, and went shabby, and half starved

themselves, and were baked in the heat, like scores of women in the

bush, and even as hundreds of women, suffering from religious mania,

slave and stint in city slums, and neglect their homes, husbands and

children—for the glory of Booth.

The Pretty Girl was referred to as Sister Hannah by the Army people,

and came somehow to be known by sinners as “Miss Captain.” I don’t know

whether that was her real name or what rank she held in the Army, if

indeed she held any.

She sold _War Crys_, and the circulation doubled in a day. One-eyed

Bogan, being bailed up unexpectedly, gave her “half a caser” for a

_Cry_, and ran away without the paper or the change. Jack Mitchell

bought a _Cry_ for the first time in his life, and read it. He said he

found some of the articles intensely realistic, and many of the

statements were very interesting. He said he read one or two things in

the _Cry_ that he didn’t know before. Tom Hall, taken unawares, bought

three _Crys_ from the Pretty Girl, and blushed to find it fame.

Little Billy Woods, the Labourers’ Union secretary—who had a poetic

temperament and more than the average bushman’s reverence for higher

things—Little Billy Woods told me in a burst of confidence that he

generally had two feelings, one after the other, after encountering

that girl. One was that unfathomable far-away feeling of loneliness and

longing, that comes at odd times to the best of married men, with the

best of wives and children—as Billy had. The other feeling, which came

later on, and was a reaction in fact, was the feeling of a man who

thinks he’s been twisted round a woman’s little finger for the benefit

of somebody else. Billy said that he couldn’t help being reminded by

the shy, sweet smile and the shy, sweet “thank you” of the Pretty Girl

in the Army, of the shy, sweet smile and the shy, sweet gratitude of a

Sydney private barmaid, who had once roped him in, in the days before

he was married. Then he’d reckon that the Army lassie had been sent out

back to Bourke as a business speculation.

Tom Hall was inclined to reckon so too—but that was after he’d been

chaffed for a month about the three _War Crys_.

The Pretty Girl was discussed from psychological points of view; not

forgetting the sex problem. Donald Macdonald—shearer, union leader and

labour delegate to other colonies on occasion—Donald Macdonald said

that whenever he saw a circle of plain or ugly, dried-up women or girls

round a shepherd, evangelist or a Salvation Army drum, he’d say

“sexually starved!” They were hungry for love. Religious mania was

sexual passion dammed out of its course. Therefore he held that

morbidly religious girls were the most easily seduced.

But this couldn’t apply to Pretty Girl in the Army. Mitchell reckoned

that she’d either had a great sorrow—a lot of trouble, or a

disappointment in love (the “or” is Mitchell’s); but they couldn’t see

how a girl like her could possibly be disappointed in love—unless the

chap died or got into jail for life. Donald decided that her soul had

been starved somehow.

Mitchell suggested that it might be only a craving for notoriety, the

same thing that makes women and girls go amongst lepers, and out to the

battlefield, and nurse ugly pieces of men back to life again; the same

thing that makes some women and girls swear ropes round men’s necks.

The Pretty Girl might be the daughter of well-to-do people—even

aristocrats, said Mitchell—she was pretty enough and spoke well enough.

“Every woman’s a barmaid at heart,” as the _Bulletin_ puts it, said

Mitchell.

But not even one of the haggard women of Bourke ever breathed a

suspicion of scandal against her. They said she was too good and too

pretty to be where she was. You see it was not as in an old settled

town where hags blacken God’s world with their tongues. Bourke was just

a little camping town in a big land, where free, good-hearted

democratic Australians, and the best of black sheep from the old world

were constantly passing through; where husband’s were often obliged to

be away from home for twelve months, and the storekeepers had to trust

the people, and mates trusted each other, and the folks were

broad-minded. The mind’s eye had a wide range.

After her maiden speech the Pretty Girl seldom spoke, except to return

thanks for collections—and she never testified. She had a sweet voice

and used to sing.

Now, if I were writing pure fiction, and were not cursed with an

obstinate inclination to write the truth, I might say that, after the

advent of the Pretty Girl, the morals of Bourke improved suddenly and

wonderfully. That One-eyed Bogan left off gambling and drinking and

fighting and swearing, and put on a red coat and testified and fought

the devil only; that Mitchell dropped his mask of cynicism; that Donald

Macdonald ate no longer of the tree of knowledge and ceased to worry

himself with psychological problems, and was happy; and that Tom Hall

was no longer a scoffer. That no one sneaked round through the scrub

after dusk to certain necessary establishments in weather-board

cottages on the outskirts of the town; and that the broad-minded and

obliging ladies thereof became Salvation Army lassies.

But none of these things happened. Drunks quieted down or got out of

the way if they could when the Pretty Girl appeared on the scene,

fights and games of “headin’ ’em” were adjourned, and weak, ordinary

language was used for the time being, and that was about all.

Nevertheless, most of the chaps were in love with that Pretty Girl in

the Army—all those who didn’t _worship_ her privately. Long Bob

Brothers hovered round in hopes, they said, that she’d meet with an

accident—get run over by a horse or something—and he’d have to carry

her in; he scared the women at the barracks by dropping firewood over

the fence after dark. Barcoo-Rot, the meanest man in the back country,

was seen to drop a threepenny bit into the ring, and a rumour was

industriously circulated (by Tom Hall) to the effect that One-eyed

Bogan intended to shave and join the Army disguised as a lassie.

Handsome Jake Boreham (_alias_ Bore-’em), a sentimental shearer from

New Zealand, who had read Bret Harte, made an elaborate attempt for the

Pretty Girl, by pretending to be going to the dogs headlong, with an

idea of first winning her sorrowful interest and sympathy, and then

making an apparently hard struggle to straighten up for her sake. He

related his experience with the cheerful and refreshing absence of

reserve which was characteristic of him, and is of most bushmen.

“I’d had a few drinks,” he said, “and was having a spell under a gum by

the river, when I saw the Pretty Girl and another Army woman coming

down along the bank. It was a blazing hot day. I thought of Sandy and

the Schoolmistress in Bret Harte, and I thought it would be a good idea

to stretch out in the sun and pretend to be helpless; so I threw my hat

on the ground and lay down, with my head in the blazing heat, in the

most graceful position I could get at, and I tried to put a look of

pained regret on my face, as if I was dreaming of my lost boyhood and

me mother. I thought, perhaps, the Girl would pity me, and I felt sure

she’d stoop and pick up my hat and put it gently over my poor troubled

head. Then I was going to become conscious for a moment, and look

hopelessly round, and into her eyes, and then start and look sorrowful

and ashamed, and stagger to my feet, taking off my hat like the Silver

King does to the audience when he makes his first appearance drunk on

the stage; and then I was going to reel off, trying to walk as straight

as I could. And next day I was going to clean up my teeth and nails and

put on a white shirt, and start to be a new man henceforth.

“Well, as I lay there with my eyes shut, I heard the footsteps come up

and stop, and heard ’em whisper, and I thought I heard the Pretty Girl

say ‘Poor fellow!’ or something that sounded like that; and just then I

got a God-almighty poke in the ribs with an umbrella—at least I suppose

it was aimed for my ribs; but women are bad shots, and the point of the

umbrella caught me in the side, just between the bottom rib and the

hip-bone, and I sat up with a click, like the blade of a pocketknife.

“The other lassie was the big square-faced woman. The Pretty Girl

looked rather more frightened and disgusted than sentimental, but she

had plenty of pluck, and soon pulled herself together. She said I ought

to be ashamed of myself, a great big man like me, lying there in the

dust like a drunken tramp—an eyesore and a disgrace to all the world.

She told me to go to my camp, wherever that was, and sleep myself

sober. The square-jawed woman said I looked like a fool sitting there.

I did feel ashamed, and I reckon I did look like a fool—a man generally

does in a fix like that. I felt like one, anyway. I got up and walked

away, and it hurt me so much that I went over to West Bourke and went

to the dogs properly for a fortnight, and lost twenty quid on a game of

draughts against a blindfold player. Now both those women had

umbrellas, but I’m not sure to this day which of ’em it was that gave

me the poke. It wouldn’t have mattered much anyway. I haven’t borrowed

one of Bret Harte’s books since.”

Jake reflected a while. “The worst of it was,” he said ruefully, “that

I wasn’t sure that the girl or the woman didn’t see through me, and

that worried me a bit. You never can tell how much a woman suspects,

and that’s the worst of ’em. I found that out after I got married.”

The Pretty Girl in the Army grew pale and thin and bigger-eyed. The

women said it was a shame, and that she ought to be sent home to her

friends, wherever they were. She was laid up for two or three days, and

some of the women cooked delicacies and handed ’em over the barracks

fence, and offered to come in and nurse her; but the square woman took

washing home and nursed the girl herself.

The Pretty Girl still sold _War Crys_ and took up collections, but in a

tired, listless, half shamed-faced way. It was plain that she was tired

of the Army, and growing ashamed of the Salvationists. Perhaps she had

come to see things too plainly.

You see, the Army does no good out back in Australia—except from a

business point of view. It is simply there to collect funds for hungry

headquarters. The bushmen are much too intelligent for the Army. There

was no poverty in Bourke—as it is understood in the city; there was

plenty of food; and camping out and roughing it come natural to the

bushmen. In cases of sickness, accident, widows or orphans, the chaps

sent round the hat, without banging a drum or testifying, and that was

all right. If a chap was hard up he borrowed a couple of quid from his

mate. If a strange family arrived without a penny, someone had to fix

’em up, and the storekeepers helped them till the man got work. For the

rest, we work out our own salvation, or damnation—as the case is—in the

bush, with no one to help us, except a mate, perhaps. The Army can’t

help us, but a fellow-sinner can, sometimes, who has been through it

all himself. The Army is only a drag on the progress of Democracy,

because it attracts many who would otherwise be aggressive

Democrats—and for other reasons.

Besides, if we all reformed the Army would get deuced little from us

for its city mission.

The Pretty Girl went to service for a while with the stock inspector’s

wife, who could get nothing out of her concerning herself or her

friends. She still slept at the barracks, stuck to the Army, and

attended its meetings.

It was Christmas morning, and there was peace in Bourke and goodwill

towards all men. There hadn’t been a fight since yesterday evening, and

that had only been a friendly one, to settle an argument concerning the

past ownership, and, at the same time, to decide as to the future

possession of a dog.

It had been a hot, close night, and it ended in a suffocating sunrise.

The free portion of the male population were in the habit of taking

their blankets and sleeping out in “the Park,” or town square, in hot

weather; the wives and daughters of the town slept, or tried to sleep,

with bedroom windows and doors open, while husbands lay outside on the

verandas. I camped in a corner of the park that night, and the sun woke

me.

As I sat up I caught sight of a swagman coming along the white, dusty

road from the direction of the bridge, where the cleared road ran

across west and on, a hundred and thirty miles, through the barren,

broiling mulga scrubs, to Hungerford, on the border of Sheol. I knew

that swagman’s walk. It was John Merrick (Jack Moonlight), one-time

Shearers’ Union secretary at Coonamble, and generally “Rep” (shearers’

representative) in any shed where he sheared. He was a “better-class

shearer,” one of those quiet, thoughtful men of whom there are

generally two or three in the roughest of rough sheds, who have great

influence, and give the shed a good name from a Union point of view.

Not quiet with the resentful or snobbish reserve of the educated

Englishman, but with a sad or subdued sort of quietness that has force

in it—as if they fully realized that their intelligence is much higher

than the average, that they have suffered more real trouble and

heartbreak than the majority of their mates, and that their mates

couldn’t possibly understand them if they spoke as they felt and

couldn’t see things as they do—yet men who understand and are intensely

sympathetic in their loneliness and sensitive reserve.

I had worked in a shed with Jack Moonlight, and had met him in Sydney,

and to be mates with a bushman for a few weeks is to know him

well—anyway, I found it so. He had taken a trip to Sydney the Christmas

before last, and when he came back there was something wanting. He

became more silent, he drank more, and sometimes alone, and took to

smoking heavily. He dropped his mates, took little or no interest in

Union matters, and travelled alone, and at night.

The Australian bushman is born with a mate who sticks to him through

life—like a mole. They may be hundreds of miles apart sometimes, and

separated for years, yet they are mates for life. A bushman may have

many mates in his roving, but there is always one his mate, “my mate;”

and it is common to hear a bushman, who is, in every way, a true mate

to the man he happens to be travelling with, speak of _his mate’s

mate_—“Jack’s mate”—who might be in Klondyke or South Africa. A bushman

has always a mate to comfort him and argue with him, and work and tramp

and drink with him, and lend him quids when he’s hard up, and call him

a b—— fool, and fight him sometimes; to abuse him to his face and

defend his name behind his back; to bear false witness and perjure his

soul for his sake; to lie to the girl for him if he’s single, and to

his wife if he’s married; to secure a “pen” for him at a shed where he

isn’t on the spot, or, if the mate is away in New Zealand or South

Africa, to write and tell him if it’s any good coming over this way.

And each would take the word of the other against all the world, and

each believes that the other is the straightest chap that ever lived-“a

white man!” And next best to your old mate is the man you’re tramping,

riding, working, or drinking with.

About the first thing the cook asks you when you come along to a

shearers’ hut is, “Where’s your mate?” I travelled alone for a while

one time, and it seemed to me sometimes, by the tone of the inquiry

concerning the whereabouts of my mate, that the bush had an idea that I

might have done away with him and that the thing ought to be looked

into.

When a man drops mateship altogether and takes to “hatting” in the

bush, it’s a step towards a convenient tree and a couple of

saddle-straps buckled together.

I had an idea that I, in a measure, took the place of Jack Moonlight’s

mate about this time.

“’Ullo, Jack!” I hailed as he reached the corner of the park.

“Good morning, Harry!” said Jack, as if he’d seen me last yesterday

evening instead of three months ago. “How are you getting on?”

We walked together towards the Union Office, where I had a camp in the

skillion-room at the back. Jack was silent. But there’s no place in the

world where a man’s silence is respected so much (within reasonable

bounds) as in the Australian bush, where every man has a past more or

less sad, and every man a ghost—perhaps from other lands that we know

nothing of, and speaking in a foreign tongue. They say in the bush,

“Oh, Jack’s only thinking!” And they let him think. Generally you want

to think as much as your mate; and when you’ve been together some time

it’s quite natural to travel all day without exchanging a word. In the

morning Jim says, “Well, I think I made a bargain with that horse,

Bill,” and some time late in the afternoon, say twenty miles farther

on, it occurs to Bill to “rejoin,” “Well, I reckon the blank as sold it

to you had yer proper!”

I like a good thinking mate, and I believe that thinking in company is

a lot more healthy and more comfortable, as well as less risky, than

thinking alone.

On the way to the Union Office Jack and I passed the Royal Hotel, and

caught a glimpse, through the open door, of a bedroom off the veranda,

of the landlord’s fresh, fair, young Sydney girl-wife, sleeping

prettily behind the mosquito-net, like a sleeping beauty, while the

boss lay on a mattress outside on the veranda, across the open door.

(He wasn’t necessary for publication, but an evidence of good faith.)

I glanced at Jack for a grin, but didn’t get one. He wore the pained

expression of a man who is suddenly hit hard with the thought of

something that might have been.

I boiled the billy and fried a pound of steak.

“Been travelling all night, Tack?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Jack. “I camped at Emus yesterday.”

He didn’t eat. I began to reckon that he was brooding too much for his

health. He was much thinner than when I saw him last, and pretty

haggard, and he had something of the hopeless, haggard look that I’d

seen in Tom Hall’s eyes after the last big shearing strike, when Tom

had worked day and night to hold his mates up all through the hard,

bitter struggle, and the battle was lost.

“Look here, Jack!” I said at last. “What’s up?”

“Nothing’s up, Harry,” said Jack. “What made you think so?”

“Have you got yourself into any fix?” I asked. “What’s the Hungerford

track been doing to you?”

“No, Harry,” he said, “I’m all right. How are you?” And he pulled some

string and papers and a roll of dusty pound notes from his pocket and

threw them on the bunk.

I was hard up just then, so I took a note and the billy to go to the

Royal and get some beer. I thought the beer might loosen his mind a

bit.

“Better take a couple of quid,” said Jack. “You look as if you want

some new shirts and things.” But a pound was enough for me, and I think

he had reason to be glad of that later on, as it turned out.

“Anything new in Bourke?” asked Jack as we drank the beer.

“No,” I said, “not a thing—except there’s a pretty girl in the

Salvation Army.”

“And it’s about time,” growled Jack.

“Now, look here, Jack,” I said presently, “what’s come over you lately

at all? I might be able to help you. It’s not a bit of use telling me

that there’s nothing the matter. When a man takes to brooding and

travelling alone it’s a bad sign, and it will end in a leaning tree and

a bit of clothes-line as likely as not. Tell me what the trouble is.

Tell us all about it. There’s a ghost, isn’t there?”

“Well, I suppose so,” said Jack. “We’ve all got our ghosts for that

matter. But never you mind, Harry; I’m all right. I don’t go

interfering with your ghosts, and I don’t see what call you’ve got to

come haunting mine. Why, it’s as bad as kicking a man’s dog.” And he

gave the ghost of a grin.

“Tell me, Jack,” I said, “is it a woman?”

“Yes,” said Jack, “it’s a woman. Now, are you satisfied?”

“Is it a girl?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

So there was no more to be said. I’d thought it might have been a lot

worse than a girl. I’d thought he might have got married somewhere,

sometime, and made a mess of it.

We had dinner at Billy Woods’s place, and a sensible Christmas dinner

it was—everything cold, except the vegetables, with the hose going on

the veranda in spite of the by-laws, and Billy’s wife and her sister,

fresh and cool-looking and jolly, instead of being hot and brown and

cross like most Australian women who roast themselves over a blazing

fire in a hot kitchen on a broiling day, all the morning, to cook

scalding plum pudding and redhot roasts, for no other reason than that

their grandmothers used to cook hot Christmas dinners in England.

And in the afternoon we went for a row on the river, pulling easily up

the anabranch and floating down with the stream under the shade of the

river timber—instead of going to sleep and waking up helpless and

soaked in perspiration, to find the women with headaches, as many do on

Christmas Day in Australia.

Mrs Woods tried to draw Jack out, but it was no use, and in the evening

he commenced drinking, and that made Billy uneasy. “I’m afraid Jack’s

on the wrong track,” he said.

After tea most of us collected about Watty’s veranda. Most things that

happened in Bourke happened at Watty’s pub, or near it.

If a horse bolted with a buggy or cart, he was generally stopped

outside Watty’s, which seemed to suggest, as Mitchell said, that most

of the heroes drank at Watty’s—also that the pluckiest men were found

amongst the hardest drinkers. (But sometimes the horse fetched up

against Watty’s sign and lamppost—which was a stout one of

“iron-bark”—and smashed the trap.) Then Watty’s was the Carriers’ Arms,

a union pub; and Australian teamsters are mostly hard cases: while

there was something in Watty’s beer which made men argue fluently, and

the best fights came off in his backyard. Watty’s dogs were the most

quarrelsome in town, and there was a dog-fight there every other

evening, followed as often as not by a man-fight. If a bushman’s horse

ran away with him the chances were that he’d be thrown on to Watty’s

veranda, if he wasn’t pitched into the bar; and victims of accidents,

and sick, hard-up shearers, were generally carried to Watty’s pub, as

being the most convenient and comfortable for them. Mitchell denied

that it was generosity or good nature on Watty’s part, he said it was

all business—advertisement. Watty knew what he was doing. He was very

deep, was Watty. Mitchell further hinted that if he was sick _he_

wouldn’t be carried to Watty’s, for Watty knew what a thirsty business

a funeral was. Tom Hall reckoned that Watty bribed the Army on the

quiet.

I was sitting on a stool along the veranda wall with Donald Macdonald,

Bob Brothers (the Giraffe) and Mitchell, and one or two others, and

Jack Moonlight sat on the floor with his back to the wall and his hat

well down over his eyes. The Army came along at the usual time, but we

didn’t see the Pretty Girl at first—she was a bit late. Mitchell said

he liked to be at Watty’s when the Army prayed and the Pretty Girl was

there; he had no objection to being prayed for by a girl like that,

though he reckoned that nothing short of a real angel could save him

now. He said his old grandmother used to pray for him every night of

her life and three times on Sunday, with Christmas Day extra when

Christmas Day didn’t fall on a Sunday; but Mitchell reckoned that the

old lady couldn’t have had much influence because he became more sinful

every year, and went deeper in ways of darkness, until finally he

embarked on a career of crime.

The Army prayed, and then a thin “ratty” little woman bobbed up in the

ring; she’d gone mad on religion as women do on woman’s rights and

hundreds of other things. She was so skinny in the face, her jaws so

prominent, and her mouth so wide, that when she opened it to speak it

was like a ventriloquist’s dummy and you could almost see the cracks

open down under her ears.

“They say I’m cracked!” she screamed in a shrill, cracked voice. “But

I’m not cracked—I’m only cracked on the Lord Jesus Christ! That’s all

I’m cracked on——.” And just then the Amen man of the Army—the Army

groaner we called him, who was always putting both feet in it—just then

he blundered forward, rolled up his eyes, threw his hands up and down

as if he were bouncing two balls, and said, with deep feeling:

“Thank the Lord she’s got a crack in the right place!”

Tom Hall doubled up, and most of the other sinners seemed to think

there was something very funny about it. And the Army, too, seemed

struck with an idea that there was something wrong somewhere, for they

started a hymn.

A big American negro, who’d been a night watchman in Sydney, stepped

into the ring and waved his arms and kept time, and as he got excited

he moved his hands up and down rapidly, as if he was hauling down a

rope in a great hurry through a pulley block above, and he kept saying,

“Come down, Lord!” all through the hymn, like a bass accompaniment,

“Come down, Lord; come down, Lord; come down, Lord; come down, Lord!”

and the quicker be said it the faster he hauled. He was as good as a

drum. And, when the hymn was over, he started to testify.

“My frens!” he said, “I was once black as der coals in der mined! I was

once black as der ink in der ocean of sin! But now—thank an’ bless the

Lord!—I am whiter dan der dribben snow!”

Tom Hall sat down on the edge of the veranda and leaned his head

against a post and cried. He had contributed a bob this evening, and he

was getting his money’s worth.

Then the Pretty Girl arrived and was pushed forward into the ring. She

looked thinner and whiter than I’d ever seen her, and there was a

feverish brightness in her eyes that I didn’t like.

“Men!” she said, “this is Christmas Day-.” I didn’t hear any more for,

at the sound of her voice, Jack Moonlight jumped up as if he’d sat on a

baby. He started forward, stared at her for a moment as if he couldn’t

believe his eyes, and then said, “Hannah!” short and sharp. She started

as if she was shot, gave him a wild look, and stumbled forward; the

next moment he had her in his arms and was steering for the private

parlour.

I heard Mrs Bothways calling for water and smelling-salts; she was as

fat as Watty, and very much like him in the face, but she was emotional

and sympathetic. Then presently I heard, through the open window, the

Pretty Girl say to Jack, “Oh, Jack, Jack! Why did you go away and leave

me like that? It was cruel!”

“But you told me to go, Hannah,” said Jack.

“That-that didn’t make any difference. Why didn’t you write?” she

sobbed.

“Because you never wrote to me, Hannah,” he said.

“That—that was no excuse!” she said. “It was so k-k-k-cruel of you,

Jack.”

Mrs Bothways pulled down the window. A new-comer asked Watty what the

trouble was, and he said that the Army girl had only found her chap, or

husband, or long-lost brother or something, but the missus was looking

after the business; then he dozed again.

And then we adjourned to the Royal and took the Army with us.

“That’s the way of it,” said Donald Macdonald. “With a woman it’s love

or religion; with a man it’s love or the devil.”

“Or with a man,” said Mitchell, presently, “it’s love and the devil

both, sometimes, Donald.”

I looked at Mitchell hard, but for all his face expressed he might only

have said, “I think it’s going to rain.”

“LORD DOUGLAS”

“They hold him true, who’s true to one,

However false he be—”

_The Rouseabout of Rouseabouts_.

The Imperial Hotel was rather an unfortunate name for an out-back town

pub, for out back is the stronghold of Australian democracy; it was the

out-back vote and influence that brought about “One Man One Vote,”

“Payment of Members,” and most of the democratic legislation of late

years, and from out back came the overwhelming vote in favour of

Australian as Imperial Federation.

The name Royal Hotel is as familiar as that of the Railway Hotel, and

passes unnoticed and ungrowled at, even by bush republicans. The Royal

Hotel at Bourke was kept by an Irishman, one O’Donohoo, who was Union

to the backbone, loudly in favour of “Australia for the Australians,”

and, of course, against even the democratic New South Wales Government

of the time. He went round town all one St Patrick’s morning with a

bunch of green ribbon fastened to his coat-tail with a large fish-hook,

and wasn’t aware of the fact till he sat down on the point of it. But

that’s got nothing to do with it.

The Imperial Hotel at Bourke was unpopular from the first. It was said

that the very existence of the house was the result of a swindle. It

had been built with money borrowed on certain allotments in the centre

of the town and on the understanding that it should be built on the

mortgaged land, whereas it was erected on a free allotment. Which fact

was discovered, greatly to its surprise, by the building society when

it came to foreclose on the allotments some years later. While the

building was being erected the Bourke people understood, in a vague

way, that it was to be a convent (perhaps the building society thought

so, too), and when certain ornaments in brick and cement in the shape

of a bishop’s mitre were placed over the corners of the walls the

question seemed decided. But when the place was finished a bar was

fitted up, and up went the sign, to the disgust of the other publicans,

who didn’t know a licence had been taken out—for licensing didn’t go by

local option in those days. It was rumoured that the place belonged to,

and the whole business was engineered by, a priest. And priests are men

of the world.

The Imperial Hotel was patronized by the pastoralists, the civil

servants, the bank manager and clerks—all the scrub aristocracy; it was

the headquarters of the Pastoralists’ Union in Bourke; a barracks for

blacklegs brought up from Sydney to take the place of Union shearers on

strike; and the new Governor, on his inevitable visit to Bourke, was

banqueted at the Imperial Hotel. The editor of the local “capitalistic

rag” stayed there; the pastoralists’ member was elected mostly by dark

ways and means devised at the Imperial Hotel, and one of its managers

had stood as a dummy candidate to split the Labour vote; the management

of the hotel was his reward. In short, it was there that most of the

plots were hatched to circumvent Freedom, and put away or deliver into

the clutches of law and order certain sons of Light and Liberty who

believed in converting blacklegs into jellies by force of fists when

bribes, gentle persuasion and pure Australian language failed to

convert them to clean Unionism. The Imperial Hotel was called the

“Squatters’ Pub,” the “Scabbery,” and other and more expressive names.

The hotel became still more unpopular after Percy Douglas had managed

it for a while. He was an avowed enemy of Labour Unionists. He employed

Chinese cooks, and that in the height of the anti-Chinese agitation in

Australia, and he was known to have kindly feelings towards the Afghans

who, with their camels, were running white carriers off the roads. If

an excited Unionist called a man a “blackleg” or “scab” in the Imperial

bar he was run out—sometimes with great difficulty, and occasionally as

far as the lock-up.

Percy Douglas was a fine-looking man, “wid a chest on him an’ well

hung—a fine fee-_gure_ of a man,” as O’Donohoo pronounced it. He was

tall and erect, he dressed well, wore small side-whiskers, had an eagle

nose, and looked like an aristocrat. Like many of his type, who start

sometimes as billiard-markers and suddenly become hotel managers in

Australia, nothing was known of his past. Jack Mitchell reckoned, by

the way he treated his employees and spoke to workmen, that he was the

educated son of an English farmer—gone wrong and sent out to Australia.

Someone called him “Lord Douglas,” and the nickname caught on.

He made himself well hated. He got One-eyed Bogan “three months’ hard”

for taking a bottle of whisky off the Imperial bar counter because he

(Bogan) was drunk and thirsty and had knocked down his cheque, and

because there was no one minding the bar at the moment.

Lord Douglas dismissed the barmaid, and, as she was leaving, he had her

boxes searched and gave her in charge for stealing certain articles

belonging to the hotel. The chaps subscribed to defend the case, and

subsequently put a few pounds together for the girl. She proved her

gratitude by bringing a charge of a baby against one of the chaps—but

that was only one of the little ways of the world, as Mitchell said.

She joined a Chinese camp later on.

Lord Douglas employed a carpenter to do some work about the hotel, and

because the carpenter left before the job was finished, Lord Douglas

locked his tools in an outhouse and refused to give them up; and when

the carpenter, with the spirit of an Australian workman, broke the

padlock and removed his tool-chest, the landlord gave him in charge for

breaking and entering. The chaps defended the case and won it, and

hated Lord Douglas as much as if he were their elder brother. Mitchell

was the only one to put in a word for him.

“I’ve been puzzling it out,” said Mitchell, as he sat nursing his best

leg in the Union Office, “and, as far as I can see, it all amounts to

this—we’re all mistaken in Lord Douglas. We don’t know the man. He’s

all right. We don’t understand him. He’s really a sensitive,

good-hearted man who’s been shoved a bit off the track by the world.

It’s the world’s fault—he’s not to blame. You see, when he was a

youngster he was the most good-natured kid in the school; he was always

soft, and, consequently, he was always being imposed upon, and bullied,

and knocked about. Whenever he got a penny to buy lollies he’d count

’em out carefully and divide ’em round amongst his schoolmates and

brothers and sisters. He was the only one that worked at home, and

consequently they all hated him. His father respected him, but didn’t

love him, because he wasn’t a younger son, and wasn’t bringing his

father’s grey hairs down in sorrow to the grave. If it was in

Australia, probably Lord Douglas was an elder son and had to do all the

hard graft, and teach himself at night, and sleep in a bark skillion

while his younger brothers benefited—they were born in the new brick

house and went to boarding-schools. His mother had a contempt for him

because he wasn’t a black sheep and a prodigal, and, when the old man

died, the rest of the family got all the stuff and Lord Douglas was

kicked out because they could do without him now. And the family hated

him like poison ever afterwards (especially his mother), and spread

lies about him—because they had treated him shamefully and because his

mouth was shut—they knew he wouldn’t speak. Then probably he went in

for Democracy and worked for Freedom, till Freedom trod on him once too

often with her hob-nailed boots. Then the chances are, in the end, he

was ruined by a girl or woman, and driven, against his will, to take

refuge in pure individualism. He’s all right, only we don’t appreciate

him. He’s only fighting against his old ideals—his old self that comes

up sometimes—and that’s what makes him sweat his barmaids and servants,

and hate us, and run us in; and perhaps when he cuts up extra rough

it’s because his conscience kicks him when he thinks of the damned soft

fool he used to be. He’s all right—take my word for it. It’s all a

mask. Why, he might be one of the kindest-hearted men in Bourke

underneath.”

Tom Hall rubbed his head and blinked, as if he was worried by an idea

that there might be some facts in Mitchell’s theories.

“You’re allers findin’ excuses for blacklegs an’ scabs, Mitchell,” said

Barcoo-Rot, who took Mitchell seriously (and who would have taken a

laughing jackass seriously). “Why, you’d find a white spot on a

squatter. I wouldn’t be surprised if you blacklegged yourself in the

end.”

This was an unpardonable insult, from a Union point of view, and the

chaps half-unconsciously made room on the floor for Barcoo-Rot to fall

after Jack Mitchell hit him. But Mitchell took the insult

philosophically.

“Well, Barcoo-Rot,” he said, nursing the other leg, “for the matter of

that, I did find a white spot on a squatter once. He lent me a quid

when I was hard up. There’s white spots on the blackest characters if

you only drop prejudice and look close enough. I suppose even

Jack-the-Ripper’s character was speckled. Why, I can even see spots on

your character, sometimes, Barcoo-Rot. I’ve known white spots to spread

on chaps’ characters until they were little short of saints. Sometimes

I even fancy I can feel my own wings sprouting. And as for turning

blackleg—well, I suppose I’ve got a bit of the crawler in my

composition (most of us have), and a man never knows what might happen

to his principles.”

“Well,” said Barcoo-Rot, “I beg yer pardon—ain’t that enough?”

“No,” said Mitchell, “you ought to wear a three-bushel bag and ashes

for three months, and drink water; but since the police would send you

to an asylum if you did that, I think the best thing we can do is to go

out and have a drink.”

Lord Douglas married an Australian girl somewhere, somehow, and brought

her to Bourke, and there were two little girls—regular little fairies.

She was a gentle, kind-hearted little woman, but she didn’t seem to

improve him much, save that he was very good to her.

“It’s mostly that way,” commented Mitchell. “When a boss gets married

and has children he thinks he’s got a greater right to grind his

fellowmen and rob their wives and children. I’d never work for a boss

with a big family—it’s hard enough to keep a single boss nowadays in

this country.”

After one stormy election, at the end of a long and bitter shearing

strike, One-eyed Bogan, his trusty enemy, Barcoo-Rot, and one or two

other enthusiastic reformers were charged with rioting, and got from

one to three months’ hard. And they had only smashed three windows of

the Imperial Hotel and chased the Chinese cook into the river.

“I used to have some hopes for Democracy,” commented Mitchell, “but

I’ve got none now. How can you expect Liberty, Equality or

Fraternity—how can you expect Freedom and Universal Brotherhood and

Equal Rights in a country where Sons of Light get three months’ hard

for breaking windows and bashing a Chinaman? It almost makes me long to

sail away in a gallant barque.”

There were other cases in connection with the rotten-egging of

Capitalistic candidates on the Imperial Hotel balcony, and it was

partly on the evidence of Douglas and his friends that certain

respectable Labour leaders got heavy terms of imprisonment for rioting

and “sedition” and “inciting,” in connection with organized attacks on

blacklegs and their escorts.

Retribution, if it was retribution, came suddenly and in a most

unexpected manner to Lord Douglas.

It seems he employed a second carpenter for six months to repair and

make certain additions to the hotel, and put him off under various

pretences until he owed him a hundred pounds or thereabout. At last,

immediately after an exciting interview with Lord Douglas, the

carpenter died suddenly of heart disease. The widow, a strong-minded

bushwoman, put a bailiff in the hotel on a very short notice—and

against the advice of her lawyer, who thought the case hopeless—and the

Lord Douglas bubble promptly burst. He had somehow come to be regarded

as the proprietor of the hotel, but now the real proprietors or

proprietor—he was still said to be a priest—turned Douglas out and put

in a new manager. The old servants were paid after some trouble. The

local storekeepers and one or two firms in Sydney, who had large

accounts against the Imperial Hotel (and had trusted it, mainly because

it was patronized by Capitalism and Fat), were never paid.

Lord Douglas cleared out to Sydney, leaving his wife and children, for

the present, with her brother, a hay-and-corn storekeeper, who also had

a large and hopeless account against the hotel; and when the brother

went broke and left the district she rented a two-roomed cottage and

took in dressmaking.

Dressmaking didn’t pay so well in the bush then as it did in the old

diggings days when sewing-machines were scarce and the possession of

one meant an independent living to any girl—when diggers paid ten

shillings for a strip of “flannen” doubled over and sewn together, with

holes for arms and head, and called a shirt. Mrs Douglas had a hard

time, with her two little girls, who were still better and more

prettily dressed than any other children in Bourke. One grocer still

called on her for orders and pretended to be satisfied to wait “till Mr

Douglas came back,” and when she would no longer order what he

considered sufficient provisions for her and the children, and

commenced buying sugar, etc., by the pound, for cash, he one day sent a

box of groceries round to her. He pretended it was a mistake.

“However,” he said, “I’d be very much obliged if you could use ’em, Mrs

Douglas. I’m overstocked now; haven’t got room for another tin of

sardines in the shop. Don’t you worry about bills, Mrs Douglas; I can

wait till Douglas comes home. I did well enough out of the Imperial

Hotel when your husband had it, and a pound’s worth of groceries won’t

hurt me now. I’m only too glad to get rid of some of the stock.”

She cried a little, thought of the children, and kept the groceries.

“I suppose I’ll be sold up soon meself if things don’t git brighter,”

said that grocer to a friend, “so it doesn’t matter much.”

The same with Foley the butcher, who had a brogue with a sort of

drawling groan in it, and was a cynic of the Mitchell school.

“You see,” he said, “she’s as proud as the devil, but when I send round

a bit o’ rawst, or porrk, or the undercut o’ the blade-bawn, she thinks

o’ the little gur-r-rls before she thinks o’ sendin’ it back to me.

That’s where I’ve got the pull on her.”

The Giraffe borrowed a horse and tip-dray one day at the beginning of

winter and cut a load of firewood in the bush, and next morning, at

daylight, Mrs Douglas was nearly startled out of her life by a crash at

the end of the cottage, which made her think that the chimney had

fallen in, or a tree fallen on the house; and when she slipped on a

wrapper and looked out, she saw a load of short-cut wood by the

chimney, and caught a glimpse of the back view of the Giraffe, who

stood in the dray with his legs wide apart and was disappearing into

the edge of the scrub; and soon the rapid clock-clock-clock of the

wheels died away in the west, as if he were making for West Australia.

The next we heard of Lord Douglas he had got two years’ hard for

embezzlement in connection with some canvassing he had taken up. Mrs

Douglas fell ill—a touch of brain-fever—and one of the labourers’ wives

took care of the children while two others took turns in nursing. While

she was recovering, Bob Brothers sent round the hat, and, after a

conclave in the Union Office—as mysterious as any meeting ever called

with the object of downing bloated Capitalism—it was discovered that

one of the chaps—who didn’t wish his name to be mentioned—had borrowed

just twenty-five pounds from Lord Douglas in the old days and now

wished to return it to Mrs Douglas. So the thing was managed, and if

she had any suspicions she kept them to herself. She started a little

fancy goods shop and got along fairly comfortable.

Douglas, by the way, was, publicly, supposed, for her sake and because

of the little girls, to be away in West Australia on the goldfields.

Time passes without much notice out back, and one hot day, when the sun

hung behind the fierce sandstorms from the northwest as dully lurid as

he ever showed in a London fog, Lord Douglas got out of the train that

had just finished its five-hundred-miles’ run, and not seeing a

new-chum porter, who started forward by force of habit to take his bag,

he walked stiffly off the platform and down the main street towards his

wife’s cottage.

He was very gaunt, and his eyes, to those who passed him closely,

seemed to have a furtive, hunted expression. He had let his beard grow,

and it had grown grey.

It was within a few days of Christmas—the same Christmas that we lost

the Pretty Girl in the Salvation Army. As a rule the big shearing-sheds

within a fortnight of Bourke cut out in time for the shearers to reach

the town and have their Christmas dinners and sprees—and for some of

them to be locked up over Christmas Day—within sound of a church-going

bell. Most of the chaps gathered in the Shearers’ Union Office on New

Year’s Eve and discussed Douglas amongst other things.

“I vote we kick the cow out of the town!” snarled One-eyed Bogan,

viciously.

“We can’t do that,” said Bob Brothers (the Giraffe), speaking more

promptly than usual. “There’s his wife and youngsters to consider, yer

know.”

“He something well deserted his wife,” snarled Bogan, “an’ now he comes

crawlin’ back to her to keep him.”

“Well,” said Mitchell, mildly, “but we ain’t all got as much against

him as you have, Bogan.”

“He made a crimson jail-bird of me!” snapped Bogan. “Well,” said

Mitchell, “that didn’t hurt you much, anyway; it rather improved your

character if anything. Besides, he made a jail-bird of himself

afterwards, so you ought to have a fellow-feeling—a feathered feeling,

so to speak. Now you needn’t be offended, Bogan, we’re all jail-birds

at heart, only we haven’t all got the pluck.”

“I’m in favour of blanky well tarrin’ an’ featherin’ him an’ kickin’

him out of the town!” shouted Bogan. “It would be a good turn to his

wife, too; she’d be well rid of the——.”

“Perhaps she’s fond of him,” suggested Mitchell; “I’ve known such cases

before. I saw them sitting together on the veranda last night when they

thought no one was looking.”

“He deserted her,” said One-eyed Bogan, in a climbing-down tone, “and

left her to starve.”

“Perhaps the police were to blame for that,” said Mitchell. “You know

you deserted all your old mates once for three months, Bogan, and it

wasn’t your fault.”

“He seems to be a crimson pet of yours, Jack Mitchell,” said Bogan,

firing up.

“Ah, well, all I know,” said Mitchell, standing up and stretching

himself wearily, “all I know is that he looked like a gentleman once,

and treated us like a gentleman, and cheated us like a gentleman, and

ran some of us in like a gentleman, and, as far as I can see, he’s

served his time like a gentleman and come back to face us and live

himself down like a man. I always had a sneaking regard for a

gentleman.”

“Why, Mitchell, I’m beginning to think you are a gentleman yourself,”

said Jake Boreham.

“Well,” said Mitchell, “I used to have a suspicion once that I had a

drop of blue blood in me somewhere, and it worried me a lot; but I

asked my old mother about it one day, and she scalded me—God bless

her!—and father chased me with a stockwhip, so I gave up making

inquiries.”

“You’ll join the bloomin’ Capitalists next,” sneered One-eyed Bogan.

“I wish I could, Bogan,” said Mitchell. “I’d take a trip to Paris and

see for myself whether the Frenchwomen are as bad as they’re made out

to be, or go to Japan. But what are we going to do about Douglas?”

“Kick the skunk out of town, or boycott him!” said one or two. “He

ought to be tarred and feathered and hanged.”

“Couldn’t do worse than hang him,” commented Jake Boreham, cheerfully.

“Oh, yes, we could,” said Mitchell, sitting down, resting his elbows on

his knees, and marking his points with one forefinger on the other.

“For instance, we might boil him slow in tar. We might skin him alive.

We might put him in a cage and poke him with sticks, with his wife and

children in another cage to look on and enjoy the fun.”

The chaps, who had been sitting quietly listening to Mitchell, and

grinning, suddenly became serious and shifted their positions uneasily.

“But I can tell you what would hurt his feelings more than anything

else we could do,” said Mitchell.

“Well, what is it, Jack?” said Tom Hall, rather impatiently.

“Send round the hat and take up a collection for him,” said Mitchell,

“enough to let him get away with his wife and children and start life

again in some less respectable town than Bourke. You needn’t grin, I’m

serious about it.”

There was a thoughtful pause, and one or two scratched their heads.

“His wife seems pretty sick,” Mitchell went on in a reflective tone. “I

passed the place this morning and saw him scrubbing out the floor. He’s

been doing a bit of house-painting for old Heegard to-day. I suppose he

learnt it in jail. I saw him at work and touched my hat to him.”

“What!” cried Tom Hall, affecting to shrink from Mitchell in horror.

“Yes,” said Mitchell, “I’m not sure that I didn’t take my hat off. Now

I know it’s not bush religion for a man to touch his hat, except to a

funeral, or a strange roof or woman sometimes; but when I meet a braver

man than myself I salute him. I’ve only met two in my life.”

“And who were they, Jack?” asked Jake Boreham.

“One,” said Mitchell—“one is Douglas, and the other—well, the other was

the man I used to be. But that’s got nothing to do with it.”

“But perhaps Douglas thought you were crowing over him when you took

off your hat to him—sneerin’ at him, like, Mitchell,” reflected Jake

Boreham.

“No, Jake,” said Mitchell, growing serious suddenly. “There are ways of

doing things that another man understands.”

They all thought for a while.

“Well,” said Tom Hall, “supposing we do take up a collection for him,

he’d be too damned proud to take it.”

“But that’s where we’ve got the pull on him,” said Mitchell,

brightening up. “I heard Dr Morgan say that Mrs Douglas wouldn’t live

if she wasn’t sent away to a cooler place, and Douglas knows it; and,

besides, one of the little girls is sick. We’ve got him in a corner and

he’ll have to take the stuff. Besides, two years in jail takes a lot of

the pride out of a man.”

“Well, I’m damned if I’ll give a sprat to help the man who tried his

best to crush the Unions!” said One-eyed Bogan.

“Damned if I will either!” said Barcoo-Rot.

“Now, look here, One-eyed Bogan,” said Mitchell, “I don’t like to harp

on old things, for I know they bore you, but when you returned to

public life that time no one talked of kicking you out of the town. In

fact, I heard that the chaps put a few pounds together to help you get

away for a while till you got over your modesty.”

No one spoke.

“I passed Douglas’s place on my way here from my camp to-night,”

Mitchell went on musingly, “and I saw him walking up and down in the

yard with his sick child in his arms. You remember that little girl,

Bogan? I saw her run and pick up your hat and give it to you one day

when you were trying to put it on with your feet. You remember, Bogan?

The shock nearly sobered you.”

There was a very awkward pause. The position had become too

psychological altogether and had to be ended somehow. The awkward

silence had to be broken, and Bogan broke it. He turned up Bob

Brothers’s hat, which was lying on the table, and “chucked” in a

“quid,” qualifying the hat and the quid, and disguising his feelings

with the national oath of the land.

“We’ve had enough of this gory, maudlin, sentimental tommy-rot,” he

said. “Here, Barcoo, stump up or I’ll belt it out of your hide!

I’ll—I’ll take yer to pieces!”

But Douglas didn’t leave the town. He sent his wife and children to

Sydney until the heat wave was past, built a new room on to the

cottage, and started a book and newspaper shop, and a poultry farm in

the back paddock, and flourished.

They called him Mr Douglas for a while, then Douglas, then Percy

Douglas, and now he is well-known as Old Daddy Douglas, and the Sydney

_Worker_, _Truth_, and _Bulletin_, and other democratic rags are on

sale at his shop. He is big with schemes for locking the Darling River,

and he gets his drink at O’Donohoo’s. He is scarcely yet regarded as a

straight-out democrat. He was a gentleman once, Mitchell said, and the

old blood was not to be trusted. But, last elections, Douglas worked

quietly for Unionism, and gave the leaders certain hints, and put them

up to various electioneering dodges which enabled them to return, in

the face of Monopoly, a Labour member who is as likely to go straight

as long as any other Labour member.

THE BLINDNESS OF ONE-EYED BOGAN

They judge not and they are not judged—’tis their philosophy—

(There’s something wrong with every ship that sails upon the sea).

_The Ballad of the Rouseabout_.

“And what became of One-eyed Bogan?” I asked Tom Hall when I met him

and Jack Mitchell down in Sydney with their shearing cheques the

Christmas before last.

“You’d better ask Mitchell, Harry,” said Tom. “He can tell you about

Bogan better than I can. But first, what about the drink we’re going to

have?”

We turned out of Pitt Street into Hunter Street, and across George

Street, where a double line of fast electric tramway was running, into

Margaret Street and had a drink at Pfahlert’s Hotel, where a counter

lunch—as good as many dinners you get for a shilling—was included with

a sixpenny drink. “Get a quiet corner,” said Mitchell, “I like to bear

myself cackle.” So we took our beer out in the fernery and got a cool

place at a little table in a quiet corner amongst the fern boxes.

“Well, One-eyed Bogan was a hard case, Mitchell,” I said. “Wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” said Mitchell, putting down his “long-beer” glass, “he was.”

“Rather a bad egg?”

“Yes, a regular bad egg,” said Mitchell, decidedly.

“I heard he got caught cheating at cards,” I said.

“Did you?” said Mitchell. “Well, I believe he did. Ah, well,” he added

reflectively, after another long pull, “One-eyed Bogan won’t cheat at

cards any more.”

“Why?” I said. “Is he dead then?”

“No,” said Mitchell, “he’s blind.”

“Good God!” I said, “how did that happen?”

“He lost the other eye,” said Mitchell, and he took another drink. “Ah,

well, he won’t cheat at cards any more—unless there’s cards invented

for the blind.”

“How did it happen?” I asked.

“Well,” said Mitchell, “you see, Harry, it was this way. Bogan went

pretty free in Bourke after the shearing before last, and in the end he

got mixed up in a very ugly-looking business: he was accused of doing

two new-chum jackaroos out of their stuff by some sort of confidence

trick.”

“Confidence trick,” I said. “I’d never have thought that One-eyed Bogan

had the brains to go in for that sort of thing.”

“Well, it seems he had, or else he used somebody else’s brains; there’s

plenty of broken-down English gentlemen sharpers knocking about out

back, you know, and Bogan might have been taking lessons from one. I

don’t know the rights of the case, it was hushed up, as you’ll see

presently; but, anyway, the jackaroos swore that Bogan had done ’em out

of ten quid. They were both Cockneys and I suppose they reckoned

themselves smart, but bushmen have more time to think. Besides, Bogan’s

one eye was in his favour. You see he always kept his one eye fixed

strictly on whatever business he had in hand; if he’d had another eye

to rove round and distract his attention and look at things on the

outside, the chances are he would never have got into trouble.”

“Never mind that, Jack,” said Tom Hall. “Harry wants to hear the yarn.”

“Well, to make it short, one of the jackaroos went to the police and

Bogan cleared out. His character was pretty bad just then, so there was

a piece of blue paper out for him. Bogan didn’t seem to think the thing

was so serious as it was, for he only went a few miles down the river

and camped with his horses on a sort of island inside an anabranch,

till the thing should blow over or the new chums leave Bourke.

“Bogan’s old enemy, Constable Campbell, got wind of Bogan’s camp, and

started out after him. He rode round the outside track and came in on

to the river just below where the anabranch joins it, at the lower end

of the island and right opposite Bogan’s camp. You know what those

billabongs are: dry gullies till the river rises from the Queensland

rains and backs them up till the water runs round into the river again

and makes anabranches of ’em—places that you thought were hollows

you’ll find above water, and you can row over places you thought were

hills. There’s no water so treacherous and deceitful as you’ll find in

some of those billabongs. A man starts to ride across a place where he

thinks the water is just over the grass, and blunders into a deep

channel—that wasn’t there before—with a steady undercurrent with the

whole weight of the Darling River funnelled into it; and if he can’t

swim and his horse isn’t used to it—or sometimes if he can swim—it’s a

case with him, and the Darling River cod hold an inquest on him, if

they have time, before he’s buried deep in Darling River mud for ever.

And somebody advertises in the missing column for Jack Somebody who was

last heard of in Australia.”

“Never mind that, Mitchell, go on,” I said.

“Well, Campbell knew the river and saw that there was a stiff current

there, so he hailed Bogan.

“‘Good day, Campbell,’ shouted Bogan.

“‘I want you, Bogan,’ said Campbell. ‘Come across and bring your

horses.’

“‘I’m damned if I will,’ says Bogan. ‘I’m not going to catch me death

o’ cold to save your skin. If you want me you’ll have to bloody well

come and git me.’ Bogan was a good strong swimmer, and he had good

horses, but he didn’t try to get away—I suppose he reckoned he’d have

to face the music one time or another—and one time is as good as

another out back.

“Campbell was no swimmer; he had no temptation to risk his life—you see

it wasn’t as in war with a lot of comrades watching ready to advertise

a man as a coward for staying alive—so he argued with Bogan and tried

to get him to listen to reason, and swore at him. ‘I’ll make it damned

hot for you, Bogan,’ he said, ‘if I have to come over for you.’

“‘Two can play at that game,’ says Bogan.

“‘Look here, Bogan,” said Campbell, ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If you

give me your word that you’ll come up to the police station to-morrow

I’ll go back and say nothing about it. You can say you didn’t know a

warrant was out after you. It will be all the better for you in the

end. Better give me your word, man.’

“Perhaps Campbell knew Bogan better than any of us.

“‘Now then, Bogan,’ he said, ‘don’t be a fool. Give your word like a

sensible man, and I’ll go back. I’ll give you five minutes to make up

your mind.’ And he took out his watch.

“But Bogan was nasty and wouldn’t give his word, so there was nothing

for it but for Campbell to make a try for him.

“Campbell had plenty of pluck, or obstinacy, which amounts to the same

thing. He put his carbine and revolver under a log, out of the rain

that was coming on, saw to his handcuffs, and then spurred his horse

into the water. Bogan lit his pipe with a stick from his camp-fire—so

Campbell said afterwards—and sat down on his heels and puffed away, and

waited for him.

“Just as Campbell’s horse floundered into the current Bogan shouted to

go back, but Campbell thought it was a threat and kept on. But Bogan

had caught sight of a log coming down the stream, end on, with a sharp,

splintered end, and before Campbell knew where he was, the sharp end of

the log caught the horse in the flank. The horse started to plunge and

struggle sideways, with all his legs, and Campbell got free of him as

quick as he could. Now, you know, in some of those Darling River

reaches the current will seem to run steadily far a while, and then

come with a rush. (I was caught in one of those rushes once, when I was

in swimming, and would have been drowned if I hadn’t been born to be

hanged.) Well, a rush came along just as Campbell got free from his

horse, and he went down-stream one side of a snag and his horse the

other. Campbell’s pretty stout, you know, and his uniform was tight,

and it handicapped him.

“Just as he was being washed past the lower end of the snag he caught

hold of a branch that stuck out of the water and held on. He swung

round and saw Bogan running down to the point opposite him. Now, you

know there was always a lot of low cunning about Bogan, and I suppose

he reckoned that if he pulled Campbell out he’d stand a good show of

getting clear of his trouble; anyway, if he didn’t save Campbell it

might be said that he killed him—besides, Bogan was a good swimmer, so

there wasn’t any heroism about it anyhow. Campbell was only a few feet

from the bank, but Bogan started to strip—to make the job look as big

as possible, I suppose. He shouted to Campbell to say he was coming,

and to hold on. Campbell said afterwards that Bogan seemed an hour

undressing. The weight of the current was forcing down the bough that

Campbell was hanging on to, and suddenly, he said, he felt a great

feeling of helplessness take him by the shoulders. He yelled to Bogan

and let go.

“Now, it happened that Jake Boreham and I were passing away the time

between shearings, and we were having a sort of fishing and shooting

loaf down the river in a boat arrangement that Jake had made out of

boards and tarred canvas. We called her the _Jolly Coffin_. We were

just poking up the bank in the slack water, a few hundred yards below

the billabong, when Jake said, ‘Why, there’s a horse or something in

the river.’ Then he shouted, ‘No, by God, it’s a man,’ and we poked the

_Coffin_ out into the stream for all she was worth. ‘Looks like two men

fighting in the water,’ Jake shouts presently. ‘Hurry up, or they’ll

drown each other.’

“We hailed ’em, and Bogan shouted for help. He was treading water and

holding Campbell up in front of him now in real professional style. As

soon as he heard us he threw up his arms and splashed a bit—I reckoned

he was trying to put as much style as he could into that rescue. But I

caught a crab, and, before we could get to them, they were washed past

into the top of a tree that stood well below flood-mark. I pulled the

boat’s head round and let her stern down between the branches. Bogan

had one arm over a limb and was holding Campbell with the other, and

trying to lift him higher out of the water. I noticed Bogan’s face was

bleeding—there was a dead limb stuck in the tree with nasty sharp

points on it, and I reckoned he’d run his face against one of them.

Campbell was gasping like a codfish out of water, and he was the

whitest man I ever saw (except one, and _he’d_ been drowned for a

week). Campbell had the sense to keep still. We asked Bogan if he could

hold on, and he said he could, but he couldn’t hold Campbell any

longer. So Jake took the oars and I leaned over the stern and caught

hold of Campbell, and Jake ran the boat into the bank, and we got him

ashore; then we went back for Bogan and landed him.

“We had some whisky and soon brought Campbell round; but Bogan was

bleeding like a pig from a nasty cut over his good eye, so we bound wet

handkerchiefs round his eyes and led him to a log and he sat down for a

while, holding his hand to his eye and groaning. He kept saying, ‘I’m

blind, mates, I’m blind! I’ve lost me other eye!’ but we didn’t dream

it was so bad as that: we kept giving him whisky. We got some dry

boughs and made a big fire. Then Bogan stood up and held his arms stiff

down to his sides, opening and shutting his hands as if he was in great

pain. And I’ve often thought since what a different man Bogan seemed

without his clothes and with the broken bridge of his nose and his eyes

covered by the handkerchiefs. He was clean shaven, and his mouth and

chin are his best features, and he’s clean limbed and well hung. I

often thought afterwards that there was something of a blind god about

him as he stood there naked by the fire on the day he saved Campbell’s

life—something that reminded me of a statue I saw once in the Art

Gallery. (Pity the world isn’t blinder to a man’s worst points.)

“Presently Jake listened and said, ‘By God, that’s lucky!’ and we heard

a steamer coming up-river and presently we saw her coming round the

point with a couple of wool-barges in tow. We got Bogan aboard and got

some clothes on him, and took him ashore at Bourke to the new hospital.

The doctors did all they knew, but Bogan was blind for life. He never

saw anything again—except ‘a sort of dull white blur,’ as he called

it—or his past life sometimes, I suppose. Perhaps he saw that for the

first time. Ah, well!

“Bogan’s old enemy, Barcoo-Rot, went to see him in the hospital, and

Bogan said, ‘Well, Barcoo, I reckon we’ve had our last fight. I owe you

a hiding, but I don’t see how I’m going to pay you.’ ‘Never mind that,

Bogan, old man,’ says Barcoo. ‘I’ll take it from anyone yer likes to

appoint, if that worries yer; and, look here, Bogan, if I can’t fight

you I can fight for you—and don’t you forget it!’ And Barcoo used to

lead Bogan round about town in his spare time and tell him all that was

going on; and I believe he always had an ear cocked in case someone

said a word against Bogan—as if any of the chaps would say a word

against a blind man.

“Bogan’s case was hushed up. The police told us to fix it up the best

way we could. One of the jackaroos, who reckoned that Bogan had

swindled him, was a gentleman, and he was the first to throw a quid in

the Giraffe’s hat when it went round for Bogan, but the other jackaroo

was a cur: he said he wanted the money that Bogan had robbed him of.

There were two witnesses, but we sent ’em away, and Tom Hall, there,

scared the jackaroo. You know Tom was always the best hand we had at

persuading witnesses in Union cases to go home to see their mothers.”

“How did you scare that jackaroo, Tom?” I asked.

“Tell you about it some other time,” said Tom.

“Well,” said Mitchell, “Bogan was always a good woolsorter, so, next

shearing, old Baldy Thompson—(you know Baldy Thompson, Harry, of

West-o’-Sunday Station)—Baldy had a talk with some of the chaps, and

took Bogan out in his buggy with him to West-o’-Sunday. Bogan would sit

at the end of the rolling tables, in the shearing-shed, with a boy to

hand him the fleeces, and he’d feel a fleece and tell the boy what bin

to throw it into; and by and by he began to learn to throw the fleeces

into the bins himself. And sometimes Baldy would have a sheep brought

to him and get him to feel the fleece and tell him the quality of it.

And then again Baldy would talk, just loud enough for Bogan to

overhear, and swear that he’d sooner have Bogan, blind as he was, than

half a dozen scientific jackaroo experts with all their eyes about

them.

“Of course Bogan wasn’t worth anything much to Baldy, but Baldy gave

him two pounds a week out of his own pocket, and another quid that we

made up between us; so he made enough to pull him through the rest of

the year.

“It was curious to see how soon he learned to find his way about the

hut and manage his tea and tucker. It was a rough shed, but everybody

was eager to steer Bogan about—and, in fact, two of them had a fight

about it one day. Baldy and all of us——and especially visitors when

they came—were mighty interested in Bogan; and I reckon we were rather

proud of having a blind wool-sorter. I reckon Bogan had thirty or forty

pairs of eyes watching out for him in case he’d run against something

or fall. It irritated him to be messed round too much—he said a baby

would never learn to walk if it was held all the time. He reckoned he’d

learn more in a year than a man who’d served a lifetime to blindness;

but we didn’t let him wander much—for fear he’d fall into the big rocky

waterhole there, by accident.

“And after the shearing-season Bogan’s wife turned up in Bourke——”

“Bogan’s wife!” I exclaimed. “Why, I never knew Bogan was married.”

“Neither did anyone else,” said Mitchell. “But he was. Perhaps that was

what accounted for Bogan. Sometimes, in his sober moods, I used to have

an idea that there must have been something behind the Bogan to account

for him. Perhaps he got trapped—or got married and found out that he’d

made a mistake—which is about the worst thing a man can find out——”

“Except that his wife made the mistake, Mitchell,” said Tom Hall.

“Or that both did,” reflected Mitchell. “Ah, well!—never mind—Bogan had

been married two or three years. Maybe he got married when he was on

the spree—I knew that he used to send money to someone in Sydney and I

suppose it was her. Anyway, she turned up after he was blind. She was a

hard-looking woman—just the sort that might have kept a third-rate pub

or a sly-grog shop. But you can’t judge between husband and wife,

unless you’ve lived in the same house with them—and under the same

roofs with their parents right back to Adam for that matter. Anyway,

she stuck to Bogan all right; she took a little two-roomed cottage and

made him comfortable—she’s got a sewing-machine and a mangle and takes

in washing and sewing. She brought a carrotty-headed youngster with

her, and the first time I saw Bogan sitting on the veranda with that

youngster on his knee I thought it was a good thing that he was blind.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because the youngster isn’t his,” said Mitchell.

“How do you know that?”

“By the look of it—and by the look on her face, once, when she caught

me squinting from the kid’s face to Bogan’s.”

“And whose was it?” I asked, without thinking.

“How am I to know?” said Mitchell. “It might be yours for all I

know—it’s ugly enough, and you never had any taste in women. But you

mustn’t speak of that in Bourke. But there’s another youngster coming,

and I’ll swear that’ll be Bogan’s all right.

“A curious thing about Bogan is that he’s begun to be fidgety about his

personal appearance—and you know he wasn’t a dood. He wears a collar

now, and polishes his boots; he wears elastic-sides, and polishes ’em

himself—the only thing is that he blackens over the elastic. He can do

many things for himself, and he’s proud of it. He says he can see many

things that he couldn’t see when he had his eyes. You seldom hear him

swear, save in a friendly way; he seems much gentler, but he reckons he

would stand a show with Barcoo-Rot even now, if Barcoo would stand up

in front of him and keep yelling——”

“By the way,” I asked, “how did Bogan lose the sight of his other eye?”

“Sleeping out in the rain when he was drunk,” said Mitchell. “He got a

cold in his eye.” Then he asked, suddenly:

“Did you ever see a blind man cry?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, I have,” said Mitchell.

“You know Bogan wears goggles to hide his eyes—his wife made him do

that. The chaps often used to drop round and have a yarn with Bogan and

cheer him up, and one evening I was sitting smoking with him, and

yarning about old times, when he got very quiet all of a sudden, and I

saw a tear drop from under one of his shutters and roll down his cheek.

It wasn’t the eye he lost saving Campbell—it was the old wall-eye he

used to use in the days before he was called ‘One-eyed Bogan.’ I

suppose he thought it was dark and that I couldn’t see his face.

(There’s a good many people in this world who think you can’t see

because they can’t.) It made me feel like I used to feel sometimes in

the days when I felt things——”

“Come on, Mitchell,” said Tom Hall, “you’ve had enough beer.”

“I think I have,” said Mitchell. “Besides, I promised to send a wire to

Jake Boreham to tell him that his mother’s dead. Jake’s shearing at

West-o’-Sunday; shearing won’t be over for three or four weeks, and

Jake wants an excuse to get away without offending old Baldy and come

down and have a fly round with us before the holidays are over.”

Down at the telegraph-office Mitchell took a form and filled it in very

carefully: “Jacob Boreham. West-o’-Sunday Station. Bourke. Come home at

once. Mother is dead. In terrible trouble. Father dying.—MARY BOREHAM.”

“I think that will do,” said Mitchell. “It ought to satisfy Baldy, and

it won’t give Jake too much of a shock, because he hasn’t got a sister

or sister-in-law, and his father and mother’s been dead over ten

years.”

“Now, if I was running a theatre,” said Mitchell, as we left the

office, “I’d give five pounds a night for the face Jake’ll have on him

when he takes that telegram to Baldy Thompson.”

TWO SUNDOWNERS

Sheep stations in Australia are any distance from twenty to a hundred

miles apart, to keep well within the boundaries of truth and the great

pastoral country. Shearing at any one shed only lasts a few weeks in

the year; the number of men employed is according to the size of the

shed—from three to five men in the little bough-covered shed of the

small “cockatoo,” up to a hundred and fifty or two hundred hands all

told in the big corrugated iron machine shed of a pastoral company.

Shearing starts early up in northern Queensland, where you can get a

“January shed;” and further south, in February, March or April sheds,

and so on down into New South Wales, where shearing often lasts over

Christmas. Shearers travel from shed to shed; some go a travel season

without getting a pen, and an unlucky shearer might ride or tramp for

several seasons and never get hands in wool; and all this explains the

existence of the “footman” with his swag and the horse man with his

packhorse. They have a rough life, and the Australian shearers are

certainly the most democratic and perhaps the most independent,

intelligent and generous body of workmen in the world.

Shearers at a shed elect their own cook, pay him so much a head, and

they buy their rations in the lump from the station store; and

“travellers,” _i.e._ shearers and rouseabouts travelling for work, are

invited, as a matter of course, to sit down to the shearers’ table.

Also a certain allowance of tea, sugar, flour or meat is still made to

travellers at most Western station stores; so it would be rather

surprising if there weren’t some who travelled on the game. The swagman

loafer, or “bummer,” times himself, especially in bad weather, to

arrive at the shed just about sundown; he is then sure of “tea,”

shelter for the night, breakfast, and some tucker from the cook to take

him on along the track. Brummy and Swampy were sundowners.

Swampy was a bummer born—and proud of it. Brummy had drifted down to

loaferdom, and his nature was soured and his spirit revengeful against

the world because of the memory of early years wasted at hard work and

in being honest. Both were short and stout, and both had scrubby

beards, but Brummy’s beard was a dusty black and Swampy’s fiery red—he

indulged in a monkey-shave sometimes, but his lower face was mostly

like a patch of coarse stubble with a dying hedge round it. They had

travelled together for a long time. They seemed at times to hate each

other with a murderous hatred, but they were too lazy to fight.

Sometimes they’d tramp side by side and growl at each other by the

hour, other times they’d sulk for days; one would push on ahead and the

other drop behind until there was a mile or two between them; but one

always carried the billy, or the sugar, or something that was necessary

to the comfort of the other, so they’d come together at sundown. They

had travelled together a long time, and perhaps that was why they hated

each other. They often agreed to part and take different tracks, and

sometimes they parted—for a while. They agreed in cadging, and cadged

in turn. They carried a spare set of tucker-bags, and if, for instance,

they were out of sugar and had plenty flour and tea, Brummy or Swampy

would go to the store, boundary-rider’s hut, or selector’s, with the

sugar-bag in his hand and the other bags in his shirt front on spec.

He’d get the sugar first, and then, if it looked good enough, the

flour-bag would come out, then the tea-bag. And before he left he’d

remark casually that he and his mate hadn’t had a smoke for two days.

They never missed a chance. And when they’d cadged more tucker than

they could comfortably carry, they’d camp for a day or two and eat it

down. Sometimes they’d have as much as a pound of tobacco, all in

little “borrowed” bits, cut from the sticks or cakes of honest

travellers. They never missed a chance. If a stranger gave Swampy his

cake of tobacco with instructions to “cut off a pipeful,” Swampy would

cut off as much as he thought judicious, talking to the stranger and

watching his eye all the time, and hiding his palm as much as

possible—and sometimes, when he knew he’d cut off more than he could

cram into his pipe, he’d put his hand in his pocket for the pipe and

drop some of the tobacco there. Then he’d hand the plug to his mate,

engage the stranger in conversation and try to hold his eye or detract

his attention from Brummy so as to give Brummy a chance of cutting off

a couple of pipefuls, and, maybe, nicking off a corner of the cake and

slipping it into his pocket. I once heard a bushman say that no one but

a skunk would be guilty of this tobacco trick—that it is about the

meanest trick a man could be capable of—_because it spoils the chances

of the next hard-up swaggy who asks the victim for tobacco._

When Brummy and Swampy came to a shed where shearing was in full swing,

they’d inquire, first thing, and with some show of anxiety, if there

was any chance of gettin’ on; if the shed was full-handed they’d growl

about hard times, wonder what the country was coming to; talk of their

missuses and kids that they’d left in Sydney, curse the squatters and

the Government, and, next morning, get a supply of rations from the

cook and depart with looks of gloom. If, on the other hand, there was

room in the shed for one or both of them, and the boss told them to go

to work in the morning, they’d keep it quiet from the cook if possible,

and depart, after breakfast, unostentatiously.

Sometimes, at the beginning of a drought, when the tall dead grass was

like tinder for hundreds of miles and a carelessly-dropped match would

set the whole country on fire, Swampy would strike a hard-faced

squatter, manager or overseer with a cold eye, and the conversation

would be somewhat as follows:

Swampy: “Good day, boss!”

Boss (shortly): “’Day.”

Swampy: “Any chance of a job?”

Boss: “Naw. Got all I want and we don’t start for a fortnight.”

Swampy: “Can I git a bit o’ meat?”

Boss: “Naw! Don’t kill till Saturday.”

Swampy: “Pint o’ flour?”

Boss: “Naw. Short ourselves.”

Swampy: “Bit o’ tea or sugar, boss?”

Boss: “Naw—what next?”

Swampy: “Bit o’ baccer, boss. Ain’t had a smoke for a week.”

Boss: “Naw. Ain’t got enough for meself till the wagon comes out.”

Swampy: “Ah, well! It’s hot, ain’t it, boss?”

Boss: “Yes-it’s hot.”

Swampy: “Country very dry?”

Boss: “Yes. Looks like it.”

Swampy: “A fire ’ud be very bad just now?”

Boss: “Eh?”

Swampy: “Yes. Now I’m allers very careful with matches an’ fire when

I’m on the track.”

Boss “Are yer?”

Swampy: “Yes. I never lights a fire near the grass—allers in the middle

of the track—it’s the safest place yer can get. An’ I allers puts the

fire out afore I leaves the camp. If there ain’t no water ter spare I

covers the ashes with dirt. An’ some fellers are so careless with

matches lightin’ their pipes.” (Reflective pause.)

Boss: “Are they?”

Swampy: “Yes. Now, when I lights me pipe on the track in dry weather I

allers rubs the match head up an’ drops it in the dust. I never drops a

burnin’ match. But some travellers is so careless. A chap might light

his pipe an’ fling the match away without thinkin’ an’ the match might

fall in a dry tuft, an’-there yer are!” (with a wave of his arms).

“Hundreds of miles o’ grass gone an’ thousands o’ sheep starvin’. Some

fellers is so careless—they never thinks.... An’ what’s more, they

don’t care if they burn the whole country.”

Boss (scratching his head reflectively): “Ah-umph! You can go up to the

store and get a bit of tucker. The storekeeper might let yer have a bit

o’ tobacco.”

On one occasion, when they were out of flour and meat; Brummy and

Swampy came across two other pilgrims camped on a creek, who were also

out of flour and meat. One of them had tried a surveyors’ camp a little

further down, but without success. The surveyors’ cook had said that he

was short of flour and meat himself. Brummy tried him—no luck. Then

Swampy said he’d go and have a try. As luck would have it, the

surveyors’ cook was just going to bake; he had got the flour out in the

dish, put in the salt and baking powder, mixed it up, and had gone to

the creek for a billy of water when Swampy arrived. While the cook was

gone Swampy slipped the flour out of the dish into his bag, _wiped_ the

dish, set it down again, and planted the bag behind a tree at a little

distance. Then he stood waiting, holding a spare empty bag in his hand.

When the cook came back he glanced at the dish, lowered the billy of

water slowly to the ground, scratched his head, and looked at the dish

again in a puzzled way.

“Blanked if I didn’t think I got that flour out!” he said.

“What’s that, mate?” asked Swampy.

“Why! I could have sworn I got the flour out in the dish and mixed it

before I went for the water,” said the cook, staring at the dish again.

“It’s rum what tricks your memory plays on you sometimes.”

“Yes,” said Swampy, showing interest, while the cook got some more

flour out into the dish from a bag in the back of the tent. “It is

strange. I’ve done the same, thing meself. I suppose it’s the heat that

makes us all a bit off at times.”

“Do you cook, then?” asked the surveyors’ cook.

“Well, yes. I’ve done a good bit of it in me time; but it’s about

played out. I’m after stragglers now.” (Stragglers are stray sheep

missed in the general muster and found about the out paddocks and shorn

after the general shearing.)

They had a yarn and Swampy “bit the cook’s ear” for a “bit o’ meat an’

tea an’ sugar,” not forgetting “a handful of flour if yer can spare

it.”

“Sorry,” said the cook, “but I can only let you have about a pint.

We’re very short ourselves.”

“Oh, that’s all right!” said Swampy, as he put the stuff into his spare

bags. “Thank you! Good day!”

“Good day,” said the cook. The cook went on with his work and Swampy

departed, catching up the bag of flour from behind the tree as he

passed it, and keeping the clump of timber well between him and the

surveyors’ camp, lest the cook should glance round, and, noticing the

increased bulk of his load, get some new ideas concerning mental

aberration.

Nearly every bushman has at least one superstition, or notion, that

lasts his time—as nearly every bushman has at least one dictionary word

which lasts him all his life. Brummy had a gloomy notion—Lord knows how

he got it!—that he should ’a’ gone on the boards if his people hadn’t

been so ignorant. He reckoned that he had the face and cut of an actor,

could mimic any man’s voice, and had wonderful control over his

features. They came to a notoriously “hungry” station, where there was

a Scottish manager and storekeeper. Brummy went up to “government

house” in his own proper person, had a talk with the storekeeper, spoke

of a sick mate, and got some flour and meat. They camped down the

creek, and next morning Brummy started to shave himself.

“Whatever are you a-doin’ of, Brummy?” gasped Swampy in great

astonishment.

“Wait and see,” growled Brummy, with awful impressiveness, as if he

were going to cut Swampy’s throat after he’d finished shaving. He

shaved off his beard and whiskers, put on a hat and coat belonging to

Swampy, changed his voice, dropped his shoulders, and went limping up

to the station on a game leg. He saw the cook and got some “brownie,” a

bit of cooked meat and a packet of baking powder. Then he saw the

storekeeper and approached the tobacco question. Sandy looked at him

and listened with some slight show of interest, then he said:

“Oh that’s all right now! But ye needn’t ha’ troublt shavin’ yer

beard—the cold weather’s comin’ on! An’ yer mate’s duds don’t suit

ye—they’re too sma’; an’ yer game leg doesn’t fit ye either—it takes a

lot o’ practice. Ha’ ye got ony tea an’ sugar?”

Brummy must have touched something responsive in that old Scot

somewhere, but his lack of emotion upset Brummy somewhat, or else an

old deep-rooted superstition had been severely shaken. Anyway he let

Swampy do the cadging for several days thereafter.

But one bad season they were very hard up indeed—even for Brummy and

Swampy. They’d tramped a long hungry track and had only met a few

wretched jackaroos, driven out of the cities by hard times, and

tramping hopelessly west. They were out of tobacco, and their trousers

were so hopelessly “gone” behind that when they went to cadge at a

place where there was a woman they were moved to back and sidle and

edge away again—and neither Brummy nor Swampy was over fastidious in

matters of dress or personal appearance. It was absolutely necessary to

earn a pound or two, so they decided to go to work for a couple of

weeks. It wouldn’t hurt them, and then there was the novelty of it.

They struck West-o’-Sunday Station, and the boss happened to want a

rouseabout to pick up wool and sweep the floor for the shearers.

“I can put _one_ of you on,” he said. “Fix it up between yourselves and

go to work in the morning.”

Brummy and Swampy went apart to talk it over.

“Look here! Brum, old man,” said Swampy, with great heartiness, “we’ve

been mates for a long while now, an’ shared an’ shared alike. You’ve

allers acted straight to me an’ I want to do the fair thing by you. _I_

don’t want to stand in _your_ light. You take the job an’ I’ll be

satisfied with a pair of pants out of it and a bit o’ tobacco now an’

agen. There yer are! I can’t say no fairer than that.”

“Yes,” said Brummy, resentfully, “an’ you’ll always be thrown’ it up to

me afterwards that I done you out of a job!”

“I’ll swear I won’t,” said Swampy, hurriedly. “But since you’re so

blasted touchy and suspicious about it, _you_ take this job an’ I’ll

take the next that turns up. How’ll that suit you?”

Brummy thought resentfully.

“Look here!” he said presently, “let’s settle it and have done with

this damned sentimental tommy-rot. I’ll tell you what I’ll do—I’ll give

you the job and take my chance. The boss might want another man

to-morrow. Now, are you satisfied?”

But Swampy didn’t look grateful or happy.

“Well,” growled Brummy, “of all the —— I ever travelled with you’re the

——. What do you want anyway? What’ll satisfy you? That’s all I want to

know. Hey?—can’t yer speak?”

“Let’s toss up for it,” said Swampy, sulkily.

“All right,” said Brummy, with a big oath, and he felt in his pocket

for two old pennies he had. But Swampy had got a suspicion somehow that

one of those pennies had two heads on it, and he wasn’t sure that the

other hadn’t two tails—also, he suspected Brummy of some skill in

“palming,” so he picked up a chip from the wood-heap, spat on it, and

spun it into the air. “Sing out!” he cried, “wet or dry?”

“Dry,” said Brummy, promptly. He had a theory that the wet side of the

chip, being presumably heaviest, was more likely to fall downwards; but

this time it was “wet” up three times in succession. Brummy ignored

Swampy’s hand thrown out in hearty congratulation; and next morning he

went to work in the shed. Swampy camped down the river, and Brummy

supplied him with a cheap pair of moleskin trousers, tucker and

tobacco. The shed cut out within three weeks and the two sundowners

took the track again, Brummy with two pounds odd in his pocket—he

having negotiated his cheque at the shed.

But now there was suspicion, envy, and distrust in the hearts of those

two wayfarers. Brummy was now a bloated capitalist, and proud, and

anxious to get rid of Swampy—at least Swampy thought so. He thought

that the least that Brummy might have done was to have shared the

“stuff” with him.

“Look here, Brummy,” he said reproachfully, “we’ve shared and shared

alike, and——”

“We never shared money,” said Brummy, decidedly.

“Do you think I want yer blasted money?” retorted Swampy, indignantly.

“When did I ever ask yer for a sprat? Tell me that!”

“You wouldn’t have got it if you had asked,” said Brummy,

uncompromisingly. “Look here!” with vehemence. “Didn’t I keep yer in

tobacco and buy yer gory pants? What are you naggin’ about anyway?”

“Well,” said Swampy, “all I was goin’ to say was that yer might let me

carry one of them quids in case you lost one—yer know you’re careless

and lose things; or in case anything happened to you.”

“I ain’t going to lose it—if that’s all that’s fretting you,” said

Brummy, “and there ain’t nothing going to happen to me—and don’t you

forget it.”

“That’s all the thanks I get for givin’ yer my gory job,” said Swampy,

savagely. “I won’t be sick a soft fool agen, I can tell yer.”

Brummy was silent, and Swampy dropped behind. He brooded darkly, and

it’s a bad thing for a man to brood in the bush. He was reg’lar

disgusted with Brummy. He’d allers acted straight to him, and Brummy

had acted like a “cow.” He’d stand it no longer; but he’d have some

satisfaction. He wouldn’t be a fool. If Brummy was mean skunk enough to

act to a mate like that, Swampy would be even with him; he would wait

till Brummy was asleep, collar the stuff, and clear. It was his job,

anyway, and the money was his by rights. He’d have his rights.

Brummy, who carried the billy, gave Swampy a long tramp before he

camped and made a fire. They had tea in silence, and smoked moodily

apart until Brummy turned in. They usually slept on the ground, with a

few leaves under them, or on the sand where there was any, each wrapped

in his own blankets, and with their spare clothes, or rags rather, for

pillows. Presently Swampy turned in and pretended to sleep, but he lay

awake watching, and listening to Brummy’s breathing. When he thought it

was safe he moved cautiously and slipped his hand under Brummy’s head,

but Brummy’s old pocket-book—in which he carried some dirty old letters

in a woman’s handwriting—was not there. All next day Swampy watched

Brummy sharply every time he put his hands into his pockets, to try and

find out in which pocket he kept his money. Brummy seemed very cheerful

and sociable, even considerate, to his mate all day, and Swampy

pretended to be happy. They yarned more than they had done for many a

day. Brummy was a heavy sleeper, and that night Swampy went over him

carefully and felt all his pockets, but without success. Next day

Brummy seemed in high spirits—they were nearing Bourke, where they

intended to loaf round the pubs for a week or two. On the third night

Swampy waited till about midnight, and then searched Brummy, every inch

of him he could get at, and tickled him, with a straw of grass till he

turned over, and ran his hands over the other side of him, and over his

feet (Brummy slept with his socks on), and looked in his boots, and in

the billy and in the tucker-bags, and felt in every tuft of grass round

the camp, and under every bush, and down a hollow stump, and up a

hollow log: but there was no pocket-book. Brummy couldn’t have lost the

money and kept it dark—he’d have gone back to look for it at once.

Perhaps he’d thrown away the book and sewn the money in his clothes

somewhere. Swampy crept back to him and felt the lining of his hat, and

was running his hand over Brummy’s chest when Brummy suddenly started

to snore, and Swampy desisted without loss of time. He crept back to

bed, breathing short, and thought hard. It struck him that there was

something aggressive about that snore. He began to suspect that Brummy

was up to his little game, and it pained him.

Next morning Brummy was decidedly frivolous. At any other time Swampy

would have put it down to a “touch o’ the sun,” but now he felt a

growing conviction that Brummy knew what he’d been up to the last three

nights, and the more he thought of it the more it pained him—till at

last he could stand it no longer.

“Look here, Brummy,” he said frankly, “where the hell do you keep that

flamin’ stuff o’ yourn? I been tryin’ to git at it ever since we left

West-o’-Sunday.”

“I know you have, Swampy,” said Brummy, affectionately—as if he

considered that Swampy had done his best in the interests of mateship.

“I _knowed_ yer knowed!” exclaimed Swampy, triumphantly. “But where the

blazes did yer put it?”

“Under _your_ head, Swampy, old man,” said Brummy, cheerfully.

Swampy was hurt now. He commented in the language that used to be used

by the bullock-punchers of the good days as they pranced up and down by

their teams and lammed into the bullocks with saplings and crow-bars,

and called on them to lift a heavy load out of a bog in the bed of a

muddy creek.

“Never mind, Swampy!” said Brummy, soothingly, as his mate paused and

tried to remember worse oaths. “It wasn’t your fault.”

But they parted at Bourke. Swampy had allers acted straight ter

Brummy—share ’n’ share alike. He’d do as much for a mate as any other

man, an’ put up with as much from a mate. He had put up with a lot from

Brummy: he’d picked him up on the track and learned him all he knowed;

Brummy would have starved many a time if it hadn’t been for Swampy;

Swampy had learned him how to “battle.” He’d stick to Brummy yet, but

he couldn’t stand ingratitude. He hated low cunnin’ an’ suspicion, and

when a gory mate got suspicious of his own old mate and wouldn’t trust

him, an’ took to plantin’ his crimson money—it was time to leave him.

A SKETCH OF MATESHIP

Bill and Jim, professional shearers, were coming into Bourke from the

Queensland side. They were horsemen and had two packhorses. At the last

camp before Bourke Jim’s packhorse got disgusted and home-sick during

the night and started back for the place where he was foaled. Jim was

little more than a new-chum jackaroo; he was no bushman and generally

got lost when he went down the next gully. Bill was a bushman, so it

was decided that he should go back to look for the horse.

Now Bill was going to sell his packhorse, a well-bred mare, in Bourke,

and he was anxious to get her into the yards before the horse sales

were over; this was to be the last day of the sales. Jim was the best

“barracker” of the two; he had great imagination; he was a very

entertaining story-teller and conversationalist in social life, and a

glib and a most impressive liar in business, so it was decided that he

should hurry on into Bourke with the mare and sell her for Bill. Seven

pounds, reserve.

Next day Bill turned up with the missing horse and saw Jim standing

against a veranda-post of the Carriers’ Arms, with his hat down over

his eyes, and thoughtfully spitting in the dust. Bill rode over to him.

“’Ullo, Jim.”

“’Ullo, Bill. I see you got him.”

“Yes, I got him.”

Pause.

“Where’d yer find him?”

“’Bout ten mile back. Near Ford’s Bridge. He was just feedin’ along.”

Pause. Jim shifted his feet and spat in the dust.

“Well,” said Bill at last. “How did you get on, Jim?”

“Oh, all right,” said Jim. “I sold the mare.”

“That’s right,” said Bill. “How much did she fetch?”

“Eight quid;” then, rousing himself a little and showing some emotion,

“An’ I could ’a’ got ten quid for her if I hadn’t been a dam’ fool.”

“Oh, that’s good enough,” said Bill.

“I could ’a’ got ten quid if I’d ’a’ waited.”

“Well, it’s no use cryin’. Eight quid is good enough. Did you get the

stuff?”

“Oh, yes. They parted all right. If I hadn’t been such a dam’ fool an’

rushed it, there was a feller that would ’a’ given ten quid for that

mare.”

“Well, don’t break yer back about it,” said Bill. “Eight is good

enough.”

“Yes. But I could ’a’ got ten,” said Jim, languidly, putting his hand

in his pocket.

Pause. Bill sat waiting for him to hand over the money; but Jim

withdrew his hand empty, stretched, and said:

“Ah, well, Bill, I done it in. Lend us a couple o’ notes.”

Jim had been drinking and gambling all night and he’d lost the eight

pounds as well as his own money.

Bill didn’t explode. What was the use? He should have known that Jim

wasn’t to be trusted with money in town. It was he who had been the

fool. He sighed and lent Jim a pound, and they went in to have a drink.

Now it strikes me that if this had happened in a civilized country

(like England) Bill would have had Jim arrested and jailed for larceny

as a bailee, or embezzlement, or whatever it was. And would Bill or Jim

or the world have been any better for it?

ON THE TUCKER TRACK: A STEELMAN STORY

Steelman and Smith, professional wanderers from New Zealand, took a run

over to Australia one year to have a look at the country, and drifted

out back, and played cards and “headin’ ’em” at the shearing-sheds

(while pretending to be strangers to each other), and sold eye-water

and unpatented medicine, and worked the tucker tracks. They struck a

streak of bad luck at West-o’-Sunday Station, where they were advised

(by the boss and about fifty excited shearers) to go east, and not to

stop till they reached the coast. They were tramping along the track

towards Bourke; they were very hard up and had to “battle” for tucker

and tobacco along the track. They came to a lonely shanty, about two

camps west of Bourke.

“We’ll turn off into the scrub and strike the track the other side of

the shanty and come back to it,” said Steelman. “You see, if they see

us coming into Bourke they’ll say to themselves, ‘Oh, we’re never

likely to see these chaps again,’ and they won’t give us anything, or,

perhaps, only a pinch of tea or sugar in a big lump of paper. There’s

some women that can never see a tucker-bag, even if you hold it right

under their noses. But if they see us going out back they’ll reckon

that we’ll get a shed likely as not, and we’ll be sure to call there

with our cheques coming back. I hope the old man’s got the lumbago, or

sciatica, or something.”

“Why?” asked Smith.

“Because whenever I see an old man poking round the place on a stick I

always make for him straight and inquire about his trouble; and no

matter what complaint he’s got, my old man suffered from it for years.

It’s pretty hard graft listening to an old man with a pet leg, but I

find it pays; and I always finish up by advising him to try St Jacob’s

oil. Perhaps he’s been trying it for years, but that doesn’t matter;

the consultation works out all right all the same, and there’s never

been a remedy tried yet but I’ve got another.

“I’ve got a lot of Maori and blackfellow remedies in my mind, and when

they fail I can fall back on the Chinese; and if that isn’t enough I’ve

got a list of my grandmother’s remedies that she wrote down for me when

I was leaving home, and I kept it for a curiosity. It took her three

days to write them, and I reckon they’ll fill the bill.

“You don’t want a shave. You look better with that stubble on. You

needn’t say anything; just stand by and wear your usual expression, and

if they ask me what’s the matter with my mate I’ll fix up a disease for

you to have, and get something extra on your account, poor beggar!

“I wish we had a chap with us that could sing a bit and run the gamut

on a fiddle or something. With a sickly-looking fish like you to stand

by and look interesting and die slowly of consumption all the time, and

me to do the talking, we’d be able to travel from one end of the bush

to the other and live on the fat of the land. I wouldn’t cure you for a

hundred pounds:”

They reached the shanty, and there, sure enough, was an old man

pottering round with a list to starboard. He was working with a hoe

inside a low paling fence round a sort of garden. Steelman and Smith

stopped outside the fence.

“Good day, boss!”

“’Day.”

“It’s hot.”

“It’s hot.”

So far it was satisfactory.

He was a little man, with a wiry, red beard. He might have been a

Scandinavian.

“You seem to be a bit lame,” said Steelman. “Hurt your foot?”

“Naw,” said the old man. “It’s an old thing.”

“Ah!” said Steelman, “lumbago, I suppose? My father suffered cruel from

it for years.”

“Naw,” said the old man, moving closer to the fence. “It ain’t in me

back; the trouble’s with me leg.”

“Oh!” said Steelman. “One a bit shorter than the other?”

“Well, yes. It seems to be wearin’ a bit shorter. I must see to it.”

“Hip disease, perhaps?” said Steelman. “A brother o’ mine had——”

“Naw, it’s not in the hip,” said the old man. “My leg’s gone at the

knee.”

“Oh! stiff joint; I know what that is. Had a touch of it once myself.

An uncle of mine was nearly crippled with it. He used to use St Jacob’s

oil. Ever try St Jacob’s oil?”

“Naw,” said the old man, “not that I know of. I’ve used linseed oil

though.”

“Linseed oil!” said Steelman; “I’ve never heard of that for stiff knee.

How do you use it?”

“Use it raw,” said the old man. “Raw linseed oil; I’ve rubbed it in,

and I’ve soaked me leg in it.”

“Soaked your leg in it!” said Steelman. “And did it do it any good?”

“Well, it seems to preserve it—keeps it from warping, and it wears

better—and it makes it heavier. It seemed a bit too light before.”

Steelman nudged Smith under cover of the palings. The old man was

evidently a bit ratty.

“Well, I hope your leg will soon be all right, boss,” said Steelman.

“Thank you,” said the old man, “but I don’t think there’s much hope. I

suppose you want some tucker?”

“Well, yes,” said Steelman, rather taken aback by the old man’s sudden

way of putting it. “We’re hard up.”

“Well, come along to the house and I’ll see if I can get yer

something,” said the old man; and they walked along outside the fence,

and he hobbled along inside, till he came to a little gate at the

corner. He opened the gate and stumped out. He had a wooden leg. He

wore his trouser-leg down over it, and the palings had hidden the

bottom from Steelman and Smith.

He wanted them to stay to dinner, but Steelman didn’t feel comfortable,

and thanked him, and said they’d rather be getting on (Steelman always

spoke for Smith); so the old man gave them some cooked meat, bread, and

a supply of tea and sugar. Steelman watched his face very close, but he

never moved a muscle. But when they looked back he was leaning on his

hoe, and seemed to be shaking.

“Took you back a bit, Steely, didn’t it?” suggested Smith.

“How do you make that out?” snorted Steelman, turning on him suddenly.

“I knew a carpenter who used to soak his planes in raw linseed oil to

preserve them and give them weight. There’s nothing funny about that.”

Smith rubbed his head.

A BUSH PUBLICAN’S LAMENT

“... For thirst is long and throats is short

Among the sons o’ men.”

M. J. C.

I wish I was spifflicated before I ever seen a pub!

You see, it’s this way. Suppose a cove comes along on a blazin’ hot day

in the drought—an’ _you_ ought to know how hell-hot it can be out

here—an’ he dumps his swag in the corner of the bar; an’ he turns round

an’ he ses ter me, “Look here boss, I ain’t got a lonely steever on me,

an’ God knows when I’ll git one. I’ve tramped ten mile this mornin’,

an’ I’ll have ter tramp another ten afore to-night. I’m expectin’ ter

git on shearin’ with of Baldy Thompson at West-o’-Sunday nex’ week. I

got a thirst on me like a sun-struck bone, an’, for God sake, put up a

couple o’ beers for me an’ my mate, an’ I’ll fix it up with yer when I

come back after shearin’.”

An’ what’s a feller ter do? I bin there meself, an—I put it to you!

I’ve known what it is to have a thirst on me.

An’ suppose a poor devil comes along in the jim-jams, with every inch

on him jumpin’ an’ a look in his eyes like a man bein’ murdered an’

sent ter hell, an’ a whine in his voice like a whipped cur, an’ the

snakes a-chasing of him; an’ he hooks me with his finger ter the far

end o’ the bar—as if he was goin’ ter tell me that the world was

ended—an’ he hangs over the bar an’ chews me lug, an’ tries to speak,

an’ breaks off inter a sort o’ low shriek, like a terrified woman, an’

he says, “For Mother o’ Christ’s sake, giv’ me a drink!” An’ what am I

to do? I bin there meself. I knows what the horrors is. He mighter

blued his cheque at the last shanty. But what am I ter do? I put it ter

you. If I let him go he might hang hisself ter the nex’ leanin’ tree.

What’s a drink? yer might arst—I don’t mind a drink or two; but when it

comes to half a dozen in a day it mounts up, I can tell yer. Drinks is

sixpence here—I have to pay for it, an’ pay carriage on it. It’s all up

ter me in the end. I used sometimes ter think it was lucky I wasn’t

west o’ the sixpenny line, where I’d lose a shillin’ on every drink I

give away.

An’ supposen a sundowner comes along smokin’ tea-leaves, an’ ses ter

me, “Look her, boss! me an’ my mate ain’t had a smoke for three days!”

What’s a man ter do? I put it ter you! I’m a heavy smoker meself, an’

I’ve known what it is to be without a smoke on the track. But

“nail-rod” is ninepence a stick out here, an’ I have ter pay carriage.

It all mounts up, I can tell yer.

An’ supposen Ole King Billy an’ his ole black gin comes round at

holiday time and squats on the verander, an’ blarneys an’ wheedles and

whines and argues like a hundred Jews an’ ole Irishwomen put tergether,

an’ accuses me o’ takin’ his blarsted country from him, an’ makes me

an’ the missus laugh; an’ we gives him a bottl’er rum an’ a bag of grub

ter get rid of him an’ his rotten ole scarecrow tribe—It all tells up.

I was allers soft on the blacks, an’, beside, a ole gin nursed me an’

me mother when I was born, an’ saved me blessed life—not that that

mounts to much. But it all tells up, an’ I got me licence ter pay. An’

some bloody skunk goes an’ informs on me for supplyin’ the

haboriginalls with intossicatin’ liquor, an’ I have ter pay a fine an’

risk me licence. But what’s a man ter do?

An’ three or four herrin’-gutted jackaroos comes along about

dinner-time, when the table’s set and the cookin’ smellin’ from the

kichen, with their belts done up three holes, an’ not the price of a

feed on ’em. What’s a man ter do? I’ve known what it is ter do a perish

on the track meself. It’s not the tucker I think on. I don’t care a

damn for that. When the shearers come every one is free to go inter the

kitchin an’ forage for hisself when he feels hungry—so long as he pays

for his drink. But the jackaroos can’t pay for drinks, an’ I have ter

pay carriage on the flour an’ tea an’ sugar an’ groceries—an’ it all

tells up by the end o’ the year.

An’ a straight chap that knows me gets a job to take a flock o’ sheep

or a mob o’ cattle ter the bloomin’ Gulf, or South Australia, or

somewheers—an’ loses one of his horses goin’ out ter take charge, an’

borrers eight quid from me ter buy another. He’ll turn up agen in a

year or two an’ most likely want ter make me take twenty quid for that

eight—an’ make everybody about the place blind drunk—but I’ve got ter

wait, an’ the wine an’ sperit merchants an’ the brewery won’t. They

know I can’t do without liquor in the place.

An’ lars’ rains Jimmy Nowlett, the bullick-driver, gets bogged over his

axle-trees back there on the Blacksoil Plains between two flooded

billerbongs, an’ prays till the country steams an’ his soul’s busted,

an’ his throat like a lime-kiln. He taps a keg o’ rum or beer ter keep

his throat in workin’ order. I don’t mind that at all, but him an’ his

mates git flood-bound for near a week, an’ broach more kegs, an’ go on

a howlin’ spree in ther mud, an’ spill mor’n they swipe, an’ leave a

tarpaulin off a load, an’ the flour gets wet, an’ the sugar runs out of

the bags like syrup, an’— What’s a feller ter do? Do yer expect me to

set the law onter Jimmy? I’ve knowed him all my life, an’ he knowed my

father afore I was born. He’s been on the roads this forty year, till

he’s as thin as a rat, and as poor as a myall black; an’ he’s got a

family ter keep back there in Bourke. No, I have ter pay for it in the

end, an’ it all mounts up, I can tell yer.

An’ suppose some poor devil of a new-chum black sheep comes along,

staggerin’ from one side of the track to the other, and spoutin’

poetry; dyin’ o’ heat or fever, or heartbreak an’ home-sickness, or a

life o’ disserpation he’d led in England, an’ without a sprat on him,

an’ no claim on the bush; an’ I ketches him in me arms as he stumbles

inter the bar, an’ he wants me ter hold him up while he turns English

inter Greek for me. An’ I put him ter bed, an’ he gits worse, an’ I

have ter send the buggy twenty mile for a doctor—an’ pay him. An’ the

jackaroo gits worse, an’ has ter be watched an’ nursed an’ held down

sometimes; an’ he raves about his home an’ mother in England, an’ the

blarsted University that he was eddicated at—an’ a woman—an’ somethin’

that sounds like poetry in French; an’ he upsets my missus a lot, an’

makes her blubber. An’ he dies, an’ I have ter pay a man ter bury him

(an’ knock up a sort o’ fence round the grave arterwards ter keep the

stock out), an’ send the buggy agen for a parson, an’—Well, what’s a

man ter do? I couldn’t let him wander away an’ die like a dog in the

scrub, an’ be shoved underground like a dog, too, if his body was ever

found. The Government might pay ter bury him, but there ain’t never

been a pauper funeral from my house yet, an’ there won’t be one if I

can help it—except it be meself.

An’ then there’s the bother goin’ through his papers to try an’ find

out who he was an’ where his friends is. An’ I have ter get the missus

to write a letter to his people, an’ we have ter make up lies about how

he died ter make it easier for ’em. An’ goin’ through his letters, the

missus comes across a portrait an’ a locket of hair, an’ letters from

his mother an’ sisters an’ girl; an’ they upset her, an’ she blubbers

agin, an’ gits sentimental—like she useter long ago when we was first

married.

There was one bit of poetry—I forgit it now—that that there jackaroo

kep’ sayin’ over an’ over agen till it buzzed in me head; an’, weeks

after, I’d ketch the missus mutterin’ it to herself in the kitchen till

I thought she was goin’ ratty.

An’ we gets a letter from the jackaroo’s friends that puts us to a lot

more bother. I hate havin’ anythin’ to do with letters. An’ someone’s

sure to say he was lambed down an’ cleaned out an’ poisoned with bad

bush liquor at my place. It’s almost enough ter make a man wish there

_was_ a recorin’ angel.

An’ what’s the end of it? I got the blazin’ bailiff in the place now! I

can’t shot him out because he’s a decent, hard-up, poor devil from

Bourke, with consumption or somethin’, an’ he’s been talkin’ to the

missus about his missus an’ kids; an’ I see no chance of gittin’ rid of

him, unless the shearers come along with their cheques from

West-o’-Sunday nex’ week and act straight by me. Like as not I’ll have

ter roll up me swag an’ take the track meself in the end. They say

publicans are damned, an’ I think so, too; an’ I wish I’d bin operated

on before ever I seen a pub.

THE SHEARER’S DREAM

Mitchell and I rolled up our swags after New Year and started to tramp

west. It had been a very bad season after a long drought. Old Baldy

Thompson had only shorn a few bales of grass-seed and burrs, so he

said, and thought of taking the track himself; but we hoped to get on

shearing stragglers at West-o’-Sunday or one of the stations of the

Hungerford track.

It was very hot weather, so we started after sunset, intending to

travel all night. We crossed the big billabong, and were ploughing

through the dust and sand towards West Bourke, when a buggy full of

city girls and swells passed by. They were part of a theatrical company

on tour in the Back-Blocks, and some local Johnnies. They’d been driven

out to see an artesian bore, or wool-shed, or something. The horses

swerved, and jerked a little squawk out of one of the girls. Then

another said:

“Ow-w! Two old swaggies. He! he! he!”

I glanced at Mitchell to see if he was hit, and caught his head down;

but he pulled himself up and pretended to hitch his swag into an easier

position.

About a hundred yards further on he gave me a side look and said:

“Did that touch you, Harry”

“No,” I said, and I laughed.

“You see,” reflected Mitchell, “they’re more to be pitied than blamed.

It’s their ignorance. In the first place, we’re not two old tramps, as

they think. We are professional shearers; and the Australian shearers

are about the most independent and intelligent class of men in the

world. We’ve got more genius in one of our little fingers than there is

in the whole of that wagonette-load of diddle-daddle and fiddle-faddle

and giggles. Their intellects are on a level with the rotten dramas

they travel with, and their lives about as false. They are slaves to

the public, and their home is the pub-parlour, with sickly, senseless

Johnnies to shout suppers and drink for them and lend their men money.

If one of those girls is above the average, how she must despise those

Johnnies—and the life! She must feel a greater contempt for them than

the private-barmaid does for the boozer she cleans out. He gets his

drink and some enjoyment, anyhow. And how she must loathe the life she

leads! And what’s the end of it as often as not? I remember once, when

I was a boy, I was walking out with two aunts of mine—they’re both dead

now. God rest their fussy, innocent old souls!—and one of ’em said

suddenly, ‘Look! Quick, Jack! There’s Maggie So-and-So, the great

actress.’ And I looked and saw a woman training vines in a porch. It

seemed like seeing an angel to me, and I never forgot her as she was

then. The diggers used to go miles out of town to meet the coach that

brought her, and take the horses out and drag it in, and throw gold in

her lap, and worship her.

“The last time I was in Sydney I saw her sitting in the back parlour of

a third-rate pub. She was dying of dropsy and couldn’t move from her

chair. She showed me a portrait of herself as I remembered her, and

talked quite seriously about going on the stage again.

“Now, our home is about two thousand miles wide, and the world’s our

stage. If the worst comes to the worst we can always get tucker and

wood and water for nothing. If we’re camping at a job in a tent there’s

no house-cleaning to bother us. All we’ve got to do when the camp gets

too dirty is to shift the tent to a fresh place. We’ve got time to

think and—we’re free.

“But then, agen,” he reflected, “there’s the world’s point of view to

be considered. Some day I might be flashing past in a buggy or

saloon-carriage—or, the chances are it will be you—and you might look

out the window and see an old swaggy tramping along in the dust, or

camped under a strip of calico in the rain in the scrub. (And it might

be me—old Mitchell—that really wrote your books, only the world won’t

know it.) And then you’ll realize what a wretched, miserable life it

was. We never realize the miseries of life till we look back—the

mistakes and miseries that had to be and couldn’t be helped. It’s all

luck—luck and chance.”

But those girls seemed to have gravelled Mitchell, and he didn’t seem

able to talk himself round. He tramped on, brooding for a while, and

then suddenly he said:

“Look here, Harry! Those girls are giving a dance to-night, and if I

liked to go back to Bourke and tog up and go to the dance I could pick

out the prettiest, dance with her all the evening, and take her for a

stroll afterwards, old tramp as they thought me. I’ve lived—but it

wouldn’t be worth my while now.”

I’d seen Jack in a mood like this before, and thought it best to say

nothing. Perhaps the terrible heat had affected him a little. We walked

on in silence until we came to the next billabong. “Best boil the billy

here, Harry,” said Mitchell, “and have some tea before we go any

further.”

I got some sticks together and made a fire and put the billy on. The

country looked wretched—like the ghost of a burnt-out land—in the

moonlight. The banks of the creek were like ashes, the thin, gnarled

gum-bush seemed dry-rotting fast, and in many places the surface of the

ground was cracked in squares where it had shrunk in the drought. In

the bed of the creek was a narrow gutter of water that looked like bad

milk.

Mitchell sat on his swag, with his pint of tea on the ground by his

foot, and chewed his pipe.

“What’s up, Jack?” I asked. “Have you got the blues?”

“Well, yes, Harry,” he said. “I’m generally dull the first day on the

track. The first day is generally the worst, anywhere or

anytime—except, perhaps, when you’re married.... I got—well, I got

thinking of the time when a woman’s word could have hurt me.”

Just then one of the “travellers” who were camped a bit up the creek

suddenly commenced to sing. It was a song called “The Shearer’s Dream,”

and I suppose the buggy of girls, or the conversation they started,

reminded him of it. He started his verses and most of his lines with a

howl; and there were unexpected howls all through the song, and it

wailed off, just as unexpectedly, in places where there was no pathos

that I could see:

Oh, I dreamt I shore in a shearer’s shed, and it was a dream of joy,

For every one of the rouseabouts was a girl dressed up as a boy—

Dressed up like a page in a pantomime, and the prettiest ever seen—

They had flaxen hair, they had coal-black hair—and every shade between.

“Every” with sudden and great energy, a long drop on to “shade,” and a

wail of intense sadness and regret running on into “between,” the dirge

reaching its wailsomest in the “tween” in every case.

The shed was cooled by electric fans that was over every “shoot”;

The pens was of polished ma-ho-gany, and ev’rything else to suit;

The huts was fixed with spring-mattresses, and the tucker was simply

grand,

And every night by the biller-bong we darnced to a German band.

“_Chorus, boys!”_

There was short, plump girls, there was tall, slim girls, and the

handsomest ever seen

They was four-foot-five, they was six-foot high, and hevery size

between.

Our pay was the wool on the jumbucks’ backs, so we shore till all was

blue

The sheep was washed afore they was shore (and the rams was scented

too);

And we all of us cried when the shed cut out, in spite of the long, hot

days,

For hevery hour them girls waltzed in with whisky and beer on

tr-a-a-a-ys!

“_Chorus_! _you_ ——!”

They had kind grey eyes, they had coal-black eyes, and the grandest

ever seen

They had plump pink hands, they had slim white hands, and hevery shape

be-tw-e-e-n.

There was three of them girls to every chap, and as jealous as they

could be—

“Ow! you ——”

The singer’s voice or memory seemed suddenly to have failed him at this

point, but whether his mates hit him on the back of the head with a

tomahawk, or only choked him, I do not know. Mitchell was inclined to

think, from the sound of it, that they choked him.

THE LOST SOULS’ HOTEL

Hunqerford Road, February. One hundred and thirty miles of heavy

reddish sand, bordered by dry, hot scrubs. Dense cloud of hot dust.

Four wool-teams passing through a gate in a “rabbit proof” fence which

crosses the road. Clock, clock, clock of wheels and rattle and clink of

chains, crack of whips and explosions of Australian language. Bales and

everything else coated with dust. Stink of old axle-grease and

tarpaulins. Tyres hot enough to fry chops on: bows and chains so hot

that it’s a wonder they do not burn through the bullock’s hides. Water

lukewarm in blistered kegs slung behind the wagons. Bullocks dragging

along as only bullocks do. Wheels ploughing through the deep sand, and

the load lurching from side to side. Half-way on a “dry-stretch” of

seventeen miles. Big “tank” full of good water through the scrub to the

right, but it is a private tank and a boundary-rider is shepherding it.

Mulga scrub and sparse, spiky undergrowth.

The carriers camp for dinner and boil their billies while the bullocks

droop under their yokes in the blazing heat; one or two lie down and

the leaders drag and twist themselves round under a dead tree, under

the impression that there is shade there. The carriers look like Red

Indians, with the masks of red dust “bound” with sweat on their faces,

but there is an unhealthy-looking, whitish space round their eyes,

caused by wiping away the blinding dust, sweat, and flies. The dry

sticks burn with a pale flame and an almost invisible thin pale blue

smoke. The sun’s heat dancing and dazzling across every white

fence-post, sandhill, or light-coloured object in the distance.

One man takes off his boot and sock, empties half a pint of sand out of

them, and pulls up his trouser-leg. His leg is sheathed to the knee in

dust and sweat; he absently scrapes it with his knife, and presently he

amuses himself by moistening a strip with his forefinger and shaving

it, as if he were vaguely curious to see if he is still a white man.

The Hungerford coach ploughs past in a dense cloud of dust.

The teams drag on again like a “wounded snake that dies at sundown,” if

a wounded snake that dies at sundown could revive sufficiently next

morning to drag on again until another sun goes down.

Hopeless-looking swagmen are met with during the afternoon, and one

carrier—he of the sanded leg—lends them tobacco; his mates contribute

“bits o’” tea, flour, and sugar.

Sundown and the bullocks done up. The teamsters unyoke them and drive

them on to the next water—five miles—having previously sent a mate to

reconnoitre and see that boundary-rider is not round, otherwise, to

make terms with him, for it is a squatter’s bore. They hurry the

bullocks down to the water and back in the twilight, and then, under

cover of darkness, turn them into a clearing in the scrub off the road,

where a sign in the grass might be seen—if you look close. But the

“bullockies” are better off than the horse-teamsters, for bad chaff is

sold by the pound and corn is worth its weight in gold.

Mitchell and I turned off the track at the rabbit-proof fence and made

for the tank in the mulga. We boiled the billy and had some salt mutton

and damper. We were making back for Bourke, having failed to get a cut

in any of the sheds on the Hungerford track. We sat under a clump of

mulga saplings, with our backs to the trunks, and got out our pipes.

Usually, when the flies were very bad on the track, we had to keep

twigs or wild-turkey=tail feathers going in front of our faces the

whole time to keep the mad flies out of our eyes; and, when we camped,

one would keep the feather going while the other lit his pipe—then the

smoke would keep them away. But the flies weren’t so bad in a good

shade or in a darkened hut. Mitchell’s pipe would have smoked out Old

Nick; it was an ancient string-bound meerschaum, and strong enough to

kill a blackfellow. I had one smoke out of it, once when I felt bad in

my inside and wanted to be sick, and the result was very satisfactory.

Mitchell looked through his old pocket-book—more by force of habit than

anything else—and turned up a circular from Tattersall’s. And that

reminded him.

“Do you know what I’d do, Harry,” he said, “if I won Tattersall’s big

sweep, or was to come into fifty or a hundred thousand pounds, or,

better still, a million?”

“Nothing I suppose,” I said, “except to get away to Sydney or some

cooler place than this.”

“I’ll tell you what I’d do,” said Mitchell, talking round his pipe.

“I’d build a Swagman’s Rest right here.”

“A Swagman’s Rest?”

“Yes. Right here on this very God-forsaken spot. I’d build a Swagman’s

Rest and call it the Lost Souls’ Hotel, or the Sundowners’ Arms, or the

Half-way House to ——, or some such name that would take the bushmen’s

fancy. I’d have it built on the best plans for coolness in a hot

country; bricks, and plenty of wide verandas with brick floors, and

balconies, and shingles, in the old Australian style. I wouldn’t have a

sheet of corrugated iron about the place. And I’d have old-fashioned

hinged sashes with small panes and vines round ’em; they look cooler

and more homely and romantic than the glaring sort that shove up.

“And I’d dig a tank or reservoir for surface water as big as a lake,

and bore for artesian water—and get it, too, if I had to bore right

through to England; and I’d irrigate the ground and make it grow

horse-feed and fruit, and vegetables too, if I had to cart manure from

Bourke. And every teamster’s bullock or horse, and every shearer’s

hack, could burst itself free, but I’d make travelling stock pay—for it

belongs to the squatters and capitalists. All carriers could camp for

one night only. And I’d—no, I wouldn’t have any flowers; they might

remind some heart-broken, new-chum black sheep of the house where he

was born, and the mother whose heart he broke—and the father whose grey

hairs he brought down in sorrow to the grave—and break him up

altogether.”

“But what about the old-fashioned windows and the vines?” I asked.

“Oh!” said Mitchell, “I forgot them. On second thought, I think I would

have some flowers; and maybe a bit of ivy-green. The new chum might be

trying to work out his own salvation, and the sight of the roses and

ivy would show him that he hadn’t struck such a God-forgotten country

after all, and help strengthen the hope for something better that’s in

the heart of every vagabond till he dies.”

Puff, puff, puff, slowly and reflectively.

“Until he dies,” repeated Mitchell. “And, maybe,” he said, rousing

himself, “I’d have a little room fixed up like a corner of a swell

restaurant, with silver and napkins on the table, and I’d fix up a

waiter, so that when a broken-down University wreck came along he might

feel, for an hour or so, something like the man he used to be. But I

suppose,” Mitchell reflected, “he wouldn’t feel completely his old self

without a lady friend sitting opposite to him. I might fix up a black

gin for him, but I suppose he’d draw the colour line. But that’s

nonsense.

“All teamsters and travellers could camp there for one night only. I’d

have shower-baths; but I wouldn’t force any man to have a bath against

his will. They could sit down to a table and have a feed off a

table-cloth, and sleep in sheets, and feel like they did before their

old mothers died, or before they ran away from home.”

“Who? The mothers?” I asked.

“Yes, in some cases,” said Mitchell. “And I’d have a nice, cool little

summer-house down near the artificial lake, out of earshot of the

house, where the bullock-drivers could sit with their pipes after tea,

and tell yarns, and talk in their own language. And I’d have boats on

the lake, too, in case an old Oxford or Cambridge man, or an old sailor

came along—it might put years on to his life to have a pull at the

oars. You remember that old sailor we saw in charge of the engine back

there at the government tank? You saw how he had the engine?—clean and

bright as a new pin—everything spick-and-span and shipshape, and his

hut fixed up like a ship’s cabin. I believe he thinks he’s at sea half

his time, and shoving her through it, instead of pumping muddy water

out of a hole in the baking scrubs for starving stock. Or maybe he

reckons he’s keeping her afloat.”

“And would you have fish in this lake of yours?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” said Mitchell, “and any ratty old shepherd or sundowner,

that’s gone mad of heat and loneliness—like the old codger we met back

yonder—he could sit by the lagoon in the cool of the evening and fish

to his heart’s content with a string and a bent pin, and dream he’s

playing truant from school and fishing in the brook near his native

village in England about fifty years ago. It would seem more real than

fishing in the dust as some mad old bushmen do.”

“But you’d draw the line somewhere?” I asked.

“No,” said Mitchell, “not even at poets. I’d try to cure them, too,

with good wholesome food and plenty of physical exercise. The Lost

Souls’ Hotel would be a refuge for men who’d been jail-birds once as

well as men who were gentlemen once, and for physical wrecks and ruined

drunkards as well as healthy honest shearers. I’d sit down and talk to

the boozer or felon just as if I thought he was as good a man as me—and

he might be, for that matter—God knows.

“The sick man would be kept till he recovered, or died; and the boozer,

suffering from a recovery, I’d keep him till he was on his legs again.”

“Then you’d have to have a doctor,” I said.

“Yes,” said Mitchell, “I’d fix that up all right. I wouldn’t bother

much about a respectable medical practitioner from the city. I’d get a

medical wreck who had a brilliant career before him once in England and

got into disgrace, and cleared out to the colonies—a man who knows what

the d.t.’s is—a man who’s been through it all and knows it all.”

“Then you’d want a manager, or a clerk or secretary,” I suggested.

“I suppose I would,” said Mitchell. “I’ve got no head for figures. I

suppose I’d have to advertise for him. If an applicant came with the

highest testimonials of character, and especially if one was signed by

a parson, I’d tell him to call again next week; and if a young man

could prove that he came of a good Christian family, and went to church

regularly, and sang in the choir, and taught Sunday-school, I’d tell

him that he needn’t come again, that the vacancy was filled, for I

couldn’t trust, him. The man who’s been extra religious and honest and

hard-working in his young days is most likely to go wrong afterwards.

I’d sooner trust some poor old devil of a clerk who’d got into the

hands of a woman or racing men when he was young, and went wrong, and

served his time for embezzlement; anyway, I’d take him out and give him

another chance.”

“And what about woman’s influence?” I asked.

“Oh, I suppose there’d have to be a woman, if only to keep the doctor

on the line. I’d get a woman with a past, one that hadn’t been any

better than she should have been, they’re generally the most

kind-hearted in the end. Say an actress who’d come down in the world,

or an old opera-singer who’d lost her voice but could still sing a

little. A woman who knows what trouble is. And I’d get a girl to keep

her company, a sort of housemaid, with a couple of black gins or

half-castes to help her. I’d get hold of some poor girl who’d been

deceived and deserted: and a baby or two wouldn’t be an objection—the

kids would amuse the chaps and help humanize the place.”

“And what if the manageress fell in love with the doctor?” I asked.

“Well, I couldn’t provide against love,” said Mitchell. “I fell in love

myself more than once—and I don’t suppose I’d have been any worse off

if I’d have stayed in love. Ah, well! But suppose she did fall in love

with the doctor and marry him, or suppose she fell in love with him and

didn’t marry him, for that matter—and suppose the girl fell in love

with the secretary? There wouldn’t be any harm done; it would only make

them more contented with the home and bind them to it. They’d be a

happy family, and the Lost Souls’ Hotel would be more cheerful and

homelike than ever.”

“But supposing they all fell in love with each other and cleared out,”

I said.

“I don’t see what they’d have to clear out for,” said Mitchell. “But

suppose they did. There’s more than one medical wreck in Australia, and

more than one woman with a past, and more than one broken old clerk who

went wrong and was found out, and who steadied down in jail, and

there’s more than one poor girl that’s been deceived. I could easily

replace ’em. And the Lost Souls’ Hotel might be the means of patching

up many wrecked lives in that way—giving people with pasts the chance

of another future, so to speak.”

“I suppose you’d have music and books and pictures?” I said.

“Oh, yes,” said Mitchell. “But I wouldn’t have any bitter or

sex-problem books. They do no good. Problems have been the curse of the

world ever since it started. I think one noble, kindly, cheerful

character in a book does more good than all the clever villains or

romantic adventurers ever invented. And I think a man ought to get rid

of his maudlin sentiment in private, or when he’s drunk. It’s a pity

that every writer couldn’t put all his bitterness into one book and

then burn it.

“No; I’d have good cheerful books of the best and brightest sides of

human nature—Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain, and Bret Harte, and those

men. And I’d have all Australian pictures—showing the brightest and

best side of Australian life. And I’d have all Australian songs. I

wouldn’t have ‘Swannie Ribber,’ or ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ or ‘Annie

Laurie,’ or any of those old songs sung at the Lost Souls’

Hotel—they’re the cause of more heartbreaks and drink and suicide in

the bush than anything else. And if a jackaroo got up to sing, ‘Just

before the battle, mother,’ or, ‘Mother bit me in me sleep,’ he’d find

it was just before the battle all right. He’d have to go out and sleep

in the scrub, where the mosquitoes and bulldog ants would bite him out

of his sleep. I hate the man who’s always whining about his mother

through his nose, because, as a rule, he never cared a rap for his old

mother, nor for anyone else, except his own paltry, selfish little

self.

“I’d have intellectual and elevating conversation for those that——”

“Who’d take charge of that department?” I inquired hurriedly.

“Well,” reflected Mitchell, “I did have an idea of taking it on myself

for a while anyway; but, come to think of it, the doctor or the woman

with the past would have more experience; and I could look after that

part of the business at a pinch. Of course you’re not in a position to

judge as to my ability in the intellectual line; you see, I’ve had no

one to practise on since I’ve been with you. But no matter—— There’d be

intellectual conversation for the benefit of black-sheep new chums. And

any broken-down actors that came along could get up a play if they

liked—it would brighten up things and help elevate the bullock-drivers

and sundowners. I’d have a stage fixed up and a bit of scenery. I’d do

all I could to attract shearers to the place after shearing, and keep

them from rushing to the next shanty with their cheques, or down to

Sydney, to be cleaned out by barmaids.

“And I’d have the hero squashed in the last act for a selfish sneak,

and marry the girl to the villain—he’d be more likely to make her happy

in the end.”

“And what about the farm?” I asked. “I suppose you’d get some expert

from the agricultural college to manage that?”

“No,” said Mitchell. “I’d get some poor drought-ruined selector and put

him in charge of the vegetation. Only, the worst of it is,” he

reflected, “if you take a selector who has bullocked all his life to

raise crops on dusty, stony patches in the scrubs, and put him on land

where there’s plenty of water and manure, and where he’s only got to

throw the seed on the ground and then light his pipe and watch it grow,

he’s apt to get disheartened. But that’s human nature.

“And, of course, I’d have to have a ‘character’ about the place—a sort

of identity and joker to brighten up things. I wouldn’t get a man who’d

been happy and comfortable all his life; I’d get hold of some old

codger whose wife had nagged him till she died, and who’d been sold off

many times, and run in for drowning his sorrows, and who started as an

undertaker and failed at that, and finally got a job pottering

round—gardener, or gatekeeper, or something—in a lunatic asylum. I’d

get him. He’d most likely be a humorist and a philosopher, and he’d

help cheer up the Lost Souls’ Hotel. I reckon the lost souls would get

very fond of him.”

“And would you have drink at Lost Souls’?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Mitchell. “I’d have the best beer and spirits and wine to

be had. After tea I’d let every man have just enough to make him feel

comfortable and happy, and as good and clever, and innocent and honest

as any other man, but no more. But if a poor devil came along in the

horrors, with every inch of him jumping, and snakes, and green-eyed

yahoos, and flaming-nosed bunyips chasing him, we’d take him in and

give him soothing draughts, and nurse him, and watch him, and clear him

out with purgatives, and keep giving him nips of good whisky, and,

above all, we’d sympathize with him, and tell him that we were worse

than he was many a time. We wouldn’t tell him what a weak, selfish man

he was, or harp on his ruined life. We’d try to make him out a good

deal better morally than he really was. It’s remorse that hurries most

men to hell—especially in the Bush. When a man firmly believes he is a

hopeless case, then there’s no hope for him: but let him have doubts

and there’s a chance. Make him believe that there are far worse cases

than his. We wouldn’t preach the sin of dissipation to him, no—but we’d

try to show him the _folly_ of a wasted life. I ought to be able to

preach that, God knows.

“And, above all, we’d try to drive out of his head the cursed old

popular idea that it’s hard to reform—that a man’s got to fight a hard

battle with himself to get away from drink—pity drunkards can’t believe

how easy it is. And we’d put it to him straight whether his few hours’

enjoyment were worth the days he had to suffer hell for it.”

“And, likely as not,” I said, “when you’d put him on his feet he’d take

the nearest track to the next shanty, and go on a howling spree, and

come back to Lost Souls’ in a week, raving aid worse than ever. What

would you do then?”

“We’d take him in again, and build him up some more; and a third or

fourth time if necessary. I believe in going right on with a thing once

I take it in hand. And if he didn’t turn up after the last spree we’d

look for him up the scrub and bring him in and let him die on a bed,

and make his death as comfortable as possible. I’ve seen one man die on

the ground, and found one dead in the bush. We’d bury him under a gum

and put ‘Sacred to the Memory of a Man who Died. (Let him R.I.P.)’ over

him. I’d have a nice little graveyard, with gums for tombstones—and I’d

have some original epitaphs—I promise you.”

“And how much gratitude would you expect to get out of the Lost Souls’

Hotel?” I asked.

“None,” said Mitchell, promptly. “It wouldn’t be a Gratitude Discovery

Syndicate. People might say that the Lost Souls’ Hotel was a den for

kidnapping women and girls to be used as decoys for the purpose of

hocussing and robbing bushmen, and the law and retribution might come

after me—but I’d fight the thing out. Or they might want to make a

K.C.M.G., or a god of me, and worship me before they hung me. I reckon

a philanthropist or reformer is lucky if he escapes with a whole skin

in the end, let alone his character— But there!— Talking of gratitude:

it’s the fear of ingratitude that keeps thousands from doing good. It’s

just as paltry and selfish and cowardly as any other fear that curses

the world—it’s rather more selfish than most fears, in fact—take the

fear of being thought a coward, or being considered eccentric, or

conceited, or affected, or too good, or too bad, for instance. The man

that’s always canting about the world’s ingratitude has no gratitude

owing to him as a rule—generally the reverse—he ought to be grateful to

the world for being let live. He broods over the world’s ingratitude

until he gets to be a cynic. He sees the world like the outside of a

window, as it were, with the blind drawn and the dead, cold moonlight

shining on it, and he passes on with a sour face; whereas, if he took

the trouble to step inside he’d most likely find a room full of ruddy

firelight, and sympathy and cheerfulness, and kindness, and love, and

gratitude. Sometimes, when he’s right down on his uppers, and forced to

go amongst people and hustle for bread, he gets a lot of surprises at

the amount of kindness he keeps running against in the world—and in

places where he’d never have expected to find it. But—ah, well! I’m

getting maudlin.”

“And you’ve forgot all about the Lost Souls’ Hotel,” I said.

“No, I haven’t,” said Mitchell; “I’d fix that up all right. As soon as

I’d got things going smoothly under a man I could trust, I’d tie up

every penny I had for the benefit of the concern; get some ‘white men’

for trustees, and take the track again. I’m getting too old to stay

long in one place—(I’m a lost soul that always got along better in

another place). I’m so used to the track that if I was shut up in a

house I’d get walking up and down in my room of nights and disturb the

folk; and, besides, I’d feel lost and light-shouldered without the

swag.”

“So you’d put all your money in the concern?”

“Yes—except a pound or two to go on the track with—for, who knows, I

might come along there, dusty and tired, and ragged and hard up and

old, some day, and be very glad of a night’s rest at the Lost Souls’

Hotel. But I wouldn’t let on that I was old Mitchell, the millionaire,

who founded Lost Souls’. They might be too officious, and I hate

fuss.... But it’s time to take the track, Harry.”

There came a cool breeze with sunset; we stood up stiffly, shouldered

our swags and tucker-bags, and pushed on, for we had to make the next

water before we camped. We were out of tobacco, so we borrowed some

from one of the bullock-drivers.

THE BOOZERS’ HOME

“A dipsomaniac,” said Mitchell, “needs sympathy and commonsense

treatment. (Sympathy’s a grand and glorious thing, taking it all round

and looking at it any way you will: a little of it makes a man think

that the world’s a good world after all, and there’s room and hope for

sinners, and that life’s worth living; enough of it makes him sure of

it: and an overdose of sympathy makes a man _feel_ weak and ashamed of

himself, and so moves him to stop whining—and wining—and buck up.)

“Now, I’m not taking the case of a workman who goes on the spree on pay

night and sweats the drink out of himself at work next day, nor a

slum-bred brute who guzzles for the love of it; but a man with brains,

who drinks to drown his intellect or his memory. He’s generally a man

under it all, and a sensitive, generous, gentle man with finer feelings

as often as not. The best and cleverest and whitest men in the world

seem to take to drink mostly. It’s an awful pity. Perhaps it’s because

they’re straight and the world’s crooked and they can see things too

plain. And I suppose in the bush the loneliness and the thoughts of the

girl-world they left behind help to sink ’em.

“Now a drunkard seldom reforms at home, because he’s always surrounded

by the signs of the ruin and misery he has brought on the home; and the

sight and thought of it sets him off again before he’s had time to

recover from the last spree. Then, again, the noblest wife in the world

mostly goes the wrong way to work with a drunken husband—nearly

everything she does is calculated to irritate him. If, for instance, he

brings a bottle home from the pub, it shows that he wants to stay at

home and not go back to the pub any more; but the first thing the wife

does is to get hold of the bottle and plant it, or smash it before his

eyes, and that maddens him in the state he is in then.

“No. A dipsomaniac needs to be taken away from home for a while. I knew

a man that got so bad that the way he acted at home one night

frightened him, and next morning he went into an inebriate home of his

own accord—to a place where his friends had been trying to get him for

a year past. For the first day or two he was nearly dead with remorse

and shame—mostly shame; and he didn’t know what they were going to do

to him next—and he only wanted them to kill him quick and be done with

it. He reckons he felt as bad as if he was in jail. But there were ten

other patients there, and one or two were worse than he was, and that

comforted him a lot. They compared notes and sympathized and helped

each other. They discovered that all their wives were noble women. He

struck one or two surprises too—one of the patients was a doctor who’d

attended him one time, and another was an old boss of his, and they got

very chummy. And there was a man there who was standing for

Parliament—he was supposed to be having a rest down the coast.... Yes,

my old mate felt very bad for the first day or two; it was all Yes,

Nurse, and Thank you, Nurse, and Yes, Doctor, and No, Doctor, and Thank

you, Doctor. But, inside a week, he was calling the doctor ‘Ol’

Pill-Box’ behind his back, and making love to one of the nurses.

“But he said it was pitiful when women relatives came to visit patients

the first morning. It shook the patients up a lot, but I reckon it did

’em good. There were well-bred old lady mothers in black, and

hard-working, haggard wives and loving daughters—and the expressions of

sympathy and faith and hope in those women’s faces! My old mate said it

was enough in itself to make a man swear off drink for ever.... Ah,

God—what a world it is!

“Reminds me how I once went with the wife of another old mate of mine

to see him. He was in a lunatic asylum. It was about the worst hour I

ever had in my life, and I’ve had some bad ones. The way she tried to

coax him back to his old self. She thought she could do it when all the

doctors had failed. But I’ll tell you about him some other time.

“The old mate said that the principal part of the treatment was

supposed to be injection of bi-chloride of gold or something, and it

was supposed to be a secret. It might have been water and sugar for all

he knew, and he thought it was. You see, when patients got better they

were allowed out, two by two, on their honour—one to watch the

other—and it worked. But it was necessary to have an extra hold on

them; so they were told that if they were a minute late for

‘treatment,’ or missed one injection, all the good would be undone.

This was dinged into their ears all the time. Same as many things are

done in the Catholic religion—to hold the people. My old mate said

that, as far as the medical treatment was concerned, he could do all

that was necessary himself. But it was the sympathy that counted,

especially the sympathy between the patients themselves. They always

got hold of a new patient and talked to him and cheered him up; he

nearly always came in thinking he was the most miserable wretch in this

world. And it comforts a man and strengthens him and makes him happier

to meet another man who’s worse off or sicker, or has been worse

swindled than he has been. That’s human nature.... And a man will take

draughts from a nurse and eat for her when he wouldn’t do it for his

own wife—not even though she had been a trained nurse herself. And if a

patient took a bad turn in the night at the Boozers’ Home and got up to

hunt the snakes out of his room, he wouldn’t be sworn at, or laughed

at, or held down; no, they’d help him shoo the snakes out and comfort

him. My old mate said that, when he got better, one of the new patients

reckoned that he licked St Pathrick at managing snakes. And when he

came out he didn’t feel a bit ashamed of his experience. The

institution didn’t profess to cure anyone of drink, only to mend up

shattered nerves and build up wrecked constitutions; give them back

some will-power if they weren’t too far gone. And they set my old mate

on his feet all right. When he went in his life seemed lost, he had the

horror of being sober, he couldn’t start the day without a drink or do

any business without it. He couldn’t live for more than two hours

without a drink; but when he came out he didn’t feel as if he wanted

it. He reckoned that those six weeks in the institution were the

happiest he’d ever spent in his life, and he wished the time had been

longer; he says he’d never met with so much sympathy and genius, and

humour and human nature under one roof before. And he said it was nice

and novel to be looked after and watched and physicked and bossed by a

pretty nurse in uniform—but I don’t suppose he told his wife that. And

when he came out he never took the trouble to hide the fact that he’d

been in. If any of his friends had a drunkard in the family, he’d

recommend the institution and do his best to get him into it. But when

he came out he firmly believed that if he took one drink he’d be a lost

man. He made a mania of that. One curious effect was that, for some

time after he left the institution, he’d sometimes feel suddenly in

high spirits—with nothing to account for it—something like he used to

feel when he had half a dozen whiskies in him; then suddenly he’d feel

depressed and sort of hopeless—with nothing to account for that

either—just as if he was suffering a recovery. But those moods never

lasted long and he soon grew out of them altogether. He didn’t flee

temptation. He’d knock round the pubs on Saturday nights with his old

mates, but never drank anything but soft stuff—he was always careful to

smell his glass for fear of an accident or trick. He drank gallons of

ginger beer, milk-and-soda, and lemonade; and he got very fond of

sweets, too—he’d never liked them before. He said he enjoyed the

novelty of the whole thing and his mates amused him at first; but he

found he had to leave them early in the evening, and, after a while, he

dropped them altogether. They seemed such fools when they were drunk

(they’d never seemed fools to him before). And, besides, as they got

full, they’d get suspicious of him, and then mad at him, because he

couldn’t see things as they could. That reminds me that it nearly

breaks a man’s heart when his old drinking chum turns teetotaller—it’s

worse than if he got married or died. When two mates meet and one is

drunk and the other sober there is only one of two things for them to

do if they want to hit it together—either the drunken mate must get

sober or the sober mate drunk. And that reminds me: Take the case of

two old mates who’ve been together all their lives, say they always had

their regular sprees together and went through the same stages of

drunkenness together, and suffered their recoveries and sobered up

together, and each could stand about the same quantity of drink and one

never got drunker than the other. Each, when he’s boozing, reckons his

mate the cleverest man and the hardest case in the world—second to

himself. But one day it happens, by a most extraordinary combination of

circumstances, that Bill, being sober, meets Jim very drunk, and pretty

soon Bill is the most disgusted man in this world. He never would have

dreamed that his old mate could make such a fool and such a public

spectacle of himself. And Bill’s disgust intensifies all the time he is

helping Jim home, and Jim arguing with him and wanting to fight him,

and slobbering over him and wanting to love him by turns, until Bill

swears he’ll give Jim a hammering as soon as ever he’s able to stand

steady on his feet.”

“I suppose your old boozing mate’s wife was very happy when he

reformed,” I said to Mitchell.

“Well, no,” said Mitchell, rubbing his head rather ruefully. “I suppose

it was an exceptional case. But I knew her well, and the fact is that

she got more discontented and thinner, and complained and nagged him

worse than she’d ever done in his drinking days. And she’d never been

afraid of him. Perhaps it was this way: She loved and married a

careless, good-natured, drinking scamp, and when he reformed and became

a careful, hard-working man, and an honest and respected

fellow-townsman, she was disappointed in him. He wasn’t the man that

won her heart when she was a girl. Or maybe he was only company for her

when he was half drunk. Or maybe lots of things. Perhaps he’d killed

the love in her before he reformed—and reformed too late. I wonder how

a man feels when he finds out for the first time that his wife doesn’t

love him any longer? But my old mate wasn’t the nature to find out that

sort of thing. Ah, well! If a woman caused all our trouble, my God!

women have suffered for it since—and they suffer like martyrs mostly

and with the patience of working bullocks. Anyway it goes, if I’m the

last man in the world, and the last woman is the worst, and there’s

only room for one more in Heaven, I’ll step down at once and take my

chances in Blazes.”

THE SEX PROBLEM AGAIN

It was Mitchell’s habit to take an evening off now and then from

yarning or reflecting, and proceed, in a most methodical manner, to

wash his spare shirts and patch his pants. I was in the habit of

contributing to some Sydney papers, and every man is an editor at

heart, so, at other times, Mitchell would take another evening off, and

root out my swag, and go through my papers in the same methodical

manner, and make alterations and additions without comment or reference

to me; and sometimes he’d read a little thing of my own which didn’t

meet his views, and accidentally drop it into the fire; and at other

times he’d get hold of some rhyme or sketch that was troubling me, and

wrap it up and give it to a passing mailman unbeknown to me. The

unexpected appearance of such articles in the paper, as well as the

effects of the involuntary collaboration in other pieces, gave me

several big surprises.

It was in camp on a fencing contract west of Bourke. We had a book

which we’d borrowed from a library at Bourke for a year or two—never

mind the name of it—it was in ninety-one or ninety-two, and the sex

problem was booming then. I had been surreptitiously tearing some

carefully-written slips of manuscript—leaves taken from an old

pocket-book—into small pieces; I dropped them, with apparent

carelessness, into the fire and stood with my back to it.

“I’ll bet five pounds,” said Mitchell, suddenly, “that you’ve been

trying your hand on a sex-problem story.”

I shifted uneasily and brought my hands from behind me into my pockets.

“Well, to tell you the truth,” I admitted, “I have.”

“I thought so,” exclaimed Mitchell. “We’ll be put to the expense of

sending you to Sydney for medical treatment yet. You’ve been having too

easy times lately, plenty of hard graft and no anxiety about tucker or

the future. What are the symptoms?”

“Well,” I said, taking a hand out to scratch the back of my head, “the

plot looked all right—at first sight.”

“So there’s a plot, is there? Well, in the first place, a plot is a

problem. Well, what’s the plot?... Come on, you needn’t be frightened

to tell an old mate like me.”

“Well,” I said, “the yarn looked all right at first sight; that article

of ‘T’s’ in the _Bulletin_ turned me off it; listen and see what you

think of it: There was a young fellow, a bit of a genius——”

“Just so, it’s the geniuses that build the sex problems. It’s an

autobiography. Go on.”

“Well, he married a girl.”

Mitchell (sotto voce): “God help her.”

“He loved her, and she loved him: but after they’d been married a while

he found out that, although he understood her, she didn’t and couldn’t

possibly ever understand him.”

“Yes,” commented Mitchell, “and if he hadn’t caught the sex problem,

nor been reading about it, he would never have found that out.”

“It was a terrible disappointment,” I continued—I had got into the

habit of taking Mitchell’s interruptions and comments as matters of

course—“He saw that his life would be a hell with her——”

Mitchell: “Didn’t strike him that her life would be a hell with him?”

“They had no thought in common.”

Mitchell: “She was in her right mind then.”

“But he couldn’t leave her because he loved her, and because he knew

that she loved him and would break her heart if he left her.”

“Must have been a pretty cocksure sort of a fellow,” remarked Mitchell,

“but all geniuses are.”

“When he was with her he saw all her obstinacy, unreason, and

selfishness; but when he was away he only saw her good points.”

Mitchell: “Pity such men don’t stop away.”

“He thought and thought, and brooded over it till his life was a

hell——”

Mitchell: “Jes-so: thanks to the problemaniacs.”

“He thought of killing her and himself, and so taking her with him”

“Where?” asked Mitchell. “He must have loved her a lot.... Good Lord!

That shows the awful effects of the sex problem on the mind of a

healthy young man like you;” and Mitchell stood up.

“He lay awake by her side at nights thinking and fighting the thing

out.”

“And you’ve been lying awake, thinking, with me and ‘the Oracle’ by

your side. We’ll have to plant the tommy-hawk, and watch you by turns

at night till you get over this.”

“One night he rested on his elbow, and watched her sleeping, and tried

to reconstruct his ideal out of her, and, just when he was getting into

a happier frame of mind, her mouth fell open, and she snored.... I

didn’t get any further than the snore,” I said.

“No, of course you didn’t,” said Mitchell, “and none of the sex

problemers ever will—unless they get as far as ‘blanky.’ You might have

made the snore cure him; did it?”

“No, it was making things worse in my idea of the yarn. He fell back

and lay staring at the ceiling in a hopeless kind of a way.”

“Then he was a fit case for the lunatic asylum.... Now, look here,

Harry, you’re a good-natured, soft old fool when you’re in your right

mind; just you go on being a good-natured, soft old fool, and don’t try

to make a problem out of yourself or anybody else, or you’ll come to a

bad end. A pocket-book’s to keep your accounts in, not to take notes in

(you take them in your head and use ’em in your arms), not to write

sex-problem rot in—that’s spoilt many a good pocket-book, and many a

good man. You’ve got a girl you’re talking about going back to as soon

as we’ve finished this contract. Don’t you make a problem of her; make

a happy wife and mother of her.... I was very clever when I was

young”—and here Mitchell’s voice took a tinge of bitterness, or

sadness. “I used to make problems out of things.... I ain’t much to

boast of now.... Seems to me that a good many men want to make angels

of their wives without first taking trouble of making saints of

themselves. We want to make women’s ways our ways—it would be just as

fair to make our ways theirs. Some men want to be considered gods in

their own homes; you’ll generally find that sort of men very small

potatoes outside; if they weren’t they wouldn’t bother so much about

being cocks on their own little dunghills.... And again, old mates

seldom quarrel, because they understand each other’s moods. Now, if you

went brooding round for any length of time I’d say to you. ‘Now then,

Harry, what have I been doing to you? Spit it out, old man.’ And you’d

do the same by me; but how many men would take even that much trouble

with their wives?”

A breeze stirred the mulga and brought the sound of a good voice

singing in the surveyors’ camp:

Should old acquaintance be forgot

And never brought to min’?

Should old acquaintance be forgot

And the days of Auld Lang Syne?

“That damned old tune will upset the Oracle for the rest of the night,”

I said.

“Now, there’s the Oracle,” said Mitchell. “He was wronged by a woman as

few men are wronged; his life was ruined—but he isn’t the man to take

any stock in sex problems on account of her. He thinks he’s great on

problems, but he isn’t. It all amounts to this—that he’s sorry for most

men and all women and tries to act up to it to the best of his ability;

and if he ain’t a Christian, God knows what is—I don’t. No matter what

a woman does to you, or what you think she does to you, there come

times, sooner or later, when you feel sorry for her—deep down in your

heart—that is if you’re a man. And, no matter what action or course you

might take against her, and no matter how right or justified you might

seem in doing it, there comes a time when, deep down in your heart, you

feel mean and doubtful about your own part. You can take that as a

general thing as regards men against women, and man against man, I

think. And I believe that deep-down feeling of being doubtful, or mean,

or sorry, that comes afterwards, when you are cooler and know more

about the world, is a right and natural thing, and we ought to act more

in accordance with it.”

Came the refrain from the surveyors’ camp:

We twa hae run about the braes,

An’ pu’d the gowans fine;

But we’ve wandered mony a weary foot

Sin’ Auld Lang Syne.

“We feel sorry for our quarrels with our worst enemy when we see him

lying still and quiet—dead. Why can’t we try and feel a bit sorry

beforehand?”

For Auld Lang Syne.

We twa ha’ padl’t i’ the burn,

Fra mornin’ sun till dine;

But seas between us braid ha’ roar’d

Sin’ Auld Lang Syne.

“I used to feel blazing bitter against things one time but it never

hurt anybody but myself in the end. I argued and quarrelled with a girl

once—and made a problem of the thing and went away. She’s married to a

brute now, and I’m what I am. I made a problem of a good home or the

world once, and went against the last man in God’s world that I should

have gone against, and turned my back on his hand, and left him. His

hand was very cold the next time I took it in mine. We don’t want

problems to make us more bitter against the world than we get

sometimes.”

And here’s a han’ my trusty frien’,

An’ gie’s a han’ o’ thine,

We’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet

For Auld Lang Syne.

“And that song’s the answer of all problems,” said Mitchell. But it was

I who lay awake and thought that night.

THE ROMANCE OF THE SWAG

The Australian swag fashion is the easiest way in the world of carrying

a load. I ought to know something about carrying loads: I’ve carried

babies, which are the heaviest and most awkward and heartbreaking loads

in this world for a boy or man to carry, I fancy. God remember mothers

who slave about the housework (and do sometimes a man’s work in

addition in the bush) with a heavy, squalling kid on one arm! I’ve

humped logs on the selection, “burning-off,” with loads of

fencing-posts and rails and palings out of steep, rugged gullies (and

was happier then, perhaps); I’ve carried a shovel, crowbar, heavy

“rammer,” a dozen insulators on an average (strung round my shoulders

with raw flax)-to say nothing of soldiering kit, tucker-bag, billy and

climbing spurs—all day on a telegraph line in rough country in New

Zealand, and in places where a man had to manage his load with one hand

and help himself climb with the other; and I’ve helped hump and drag

telegraph-poles up cliffs and sidings where the horses couldn’t go.

I’ve carried a portmanteau on the hot dusty roads in green old jackaroo

days. Ask any actor who’s been stranded and had to count railway

sleepers from one town to another! he’ll tell you what sort of an

awkward load a portmanteau is, especially if there’s a broken-hearted

man underneath it. I’ve tried knapsack fashion—one of the least healthy

and most likely to give a man sores; I’ve carried my belongings in a

three-bushel sack slung over my shoulder—blankets, tucker, spare boots

and poetry all lumped together. I tried carrying a load on my head, and

got a crick in my neck and spine for days. I’ve carried a load on my

mind that should have been shared by editors and publishers. I’ve

helped hump luggage and furniture up to, and down from, a top flat in

London. And I’ve carried swag for months out back in Australia—and it

was life, in spite of its “squalidness” and meanness and wretchedness

and hardship, and in spite of the fact that the world would have

regarded us as “tramps”—and a free life amongst _men_ from all the

world!

The Australian swag was born of Australia and no other land—of the

Great Lone Land of magnificent distances and bright heat; the land of

self-reliance, and never-give-in, and help-your-mate. The grave of many

of the world’s tragedies and comedies—royal and otherwise. The land

where a man out of employment might shoulder his swag in Adelaide and

take the track, and years later walk into a hut on the Gulf, or never

be heard of any more, or a body be found in the bush and buried by the

mounted police, or never found and never buried—what does it matter?

The land I love above all others—not because it was kind to me, but

because I was born on Australian soil, and because of the foreign

father who died at his work in the ranks of Australian pioneers, and

because of many things. Australia! My country! Her very name is music

to me. God bless Australia! for the sake of the great hearts of the

heart of her! God keep her clear of the old-world shams and social lies

and mockery, and callous commercialism, and sordid shame! And heaven

send that, if ever in my time her sons are called upon to fight for her

young life and honour, I die with the first rank of them and be buried

in Australian ground.

But this will probably be called false, forced or “maudlin sentiment”

here in England, where the mawkish sentiment of the music-halls, and

the popular applause it receives, is enough to make a healthy man sick,

and is only equalled by music-hall vulgarity. So I’ll get on.

In the old digging days the knapsack, or straps-across-the chest

fashion, was tried, but the load pressed on a man’s chest and impeded

his breathing, and a man needs to have his bellows free on long tracks

in hot, stirless weather. Then the “horse-collar,” or rolled military

overcoat style—swag over one shoulder and under the other arm—was

tried, but it was found to be too hot for the Australian climate, and

was discarded along with Wellington boots and leggings. Until recently,

Australian city artists and editors—who knew as much about the bush as

Downing Street knows about the British colonies in general—seemed to

think the horse-collar swag was still in existence; and some artists

gave the swagman a stick, as if he were a tramp of civilization with an

eye on the backyard and a fear of the dog. English artists, by the way,

seem firmly convinced that the Australian bushman is born in Wellington

boots with a polish on ’em you could shave yourself by.

The swag is usually composed of a tent “fly” or strip of calico (a

cover for the swag and a shelter in bad weather—in New Zealand it is

oilcloth or waterproof twill), a couple of blankets, blue by custom and

preference, as that colour shows the dirt less than any other (hence

the name “bluey” for swag), and the core is composed of spare clothing

and small personal effects. To make or “roll up” your swag: lay the fly

or strip of calico on the ground, blueys on top of it; across one end,

with eighteen inches or so to spare, lay your spare trousers and shirt,

folded, light boots tied together by the laces toe to heel, books,

bundle of old letters, portraits, or whatever little knick-knacks you

have or care to carry, bag of needles, thread, pen and ink, spare

patches for your pants, and bootlaces. Lay or arrange the pile so that

it will roll evenly with the swag (some pack the lot in an old

pillowslip or canvas bag), take a fold over of blanket and calico the

whole length on each side, so as to reduce the width of the swag to,

say, three feet, throw the spare end, with an inward fold, over the

little pile of belongings, and then roll the whole to the other end,

using your knees and judgment to make the swag tight, compact and

artistic; when within eighteen inches of the loose end take an inward

fold in that, and bring it up against the body of the swag. There is a

strong suggestion of a roley-poley in a rag about the business, only

the ends of the swag are folded in, in rings, and not tied. Fasten the

swag with three or four straps, according to judgment and the supply of

straps. To the top strap, for the swag is carried (and eased down in

shanty bars and against walls or veranda-posts when not on the track)

in a more or less vertical position—to the top strap, and lowest, or

lowest but one, fasten the ends of the shoulder strap (usually a towel

is preferred as being softer to the shoulder), your coat being carried

outside the swag at the back, under the straps. To the top strap fasten

the string of the nose-bag, a calico bag about the size of a

pillowslip, containing the tea, sugar and flour bags, bread, meat,

baking-powder and salt, and brought, when the swag is carried from the

left shoulder, over the right on to the chest, and so balancing the

swag behind. But a swagman can throw a heavy swag in a nearly vertical

position against his spine, slung from one shoulder only and without

any balance, and carry it as easily as you might wear your overcoat.

Some bushmen arrange their belongings so neatly and conveniently, with

swag straps in a sort of harness, that they can roll up the swag in

about a minute, and unbuckle it and throw it out as easily as a roll of

wall-paper, and there’s the bed ready on the ground with the wardrobe

for a pillow. The swag is always used for a seat on the track; it is a

soft seat, so trousers last a long time. And, the dust being mostly

soft and silky on the long tracks out back, boots last marvellously.

Fifteen miles a day is the average with the swag, but you must travel

according to the water: if the next bore or tank is five miles on, and

the next twenty beyond, you camp at the five-mile water to-night and do

the twenty next day. But if it’s thirty miles you have to do it.

Travelling with the swag in Australia is variously and picturesquely

described as “humping bluey,” “walking Matilda,” “humping Matilda,”

“humping your drum,” “being on the wallaby,” “jabbing trotters,” and

“tea and sugar burglaring,” but most travelling shearers now call

themselves trav’lers, and say simply “on the track,” or “carrying

swag.”

And there you have the Australian swag. Men from all the world have

carried it—lords and low-class Chinamen, saints and world martyrs, and

felons, thieves, and murderers, educated gentlemen and boors who

couldn’t sign their mark, gentlemen who fought for Poland and convicts

who fought the world, women, and more than one woman disguised as a

man. The Australian swag has held in its core letters and papers in all

languages, the honour of great houses, and more than one national

secret, papers that would send well-known and highly-respected men to

jail, and proofs of the innocence of men going mad in prisons, life

tragedies and comedies, fortunes and papers that secured titles and

fortunes, and the last pence of lost fortunes, life secrets, portraits

of mothers and dead loves, pictures of fair women, heart-breaking old

letters written long ago by vanished hands, and the pencilled

manuscript of more than one book which will be famous yet.

The weight of the swag varies from the light rouseabout’s swag,

containing one blanket and a clean shirt, to the “royal Alfred,” with

tent and all complete, and weighing part of a ton. Some old sundowners

have a mania for gathering, from selectors’ and shearers’ huts, and

dust-heaps, heart-breaking loads of rubbish which can never be of any

possible use to them or anyone else. Here is an inventory of the

contents of the swag of an old tramp who was found dead on the track,

lying on his face on the sand, with his swag on top of him, and his

arms stretched straight out as if he were embracing the mother earth,

or had made, with his last movement, the sign of the cross to the

blazing heavens:

Rotten old tent in rags. Filthy blue blanket, patched with squares of

red and calico. Half of “white blanket” nearly black now, patched with

pieces of various material and sewn to half of red blanket.

Three-bushel sack slit open. Pieces of sacking. Part of a woman’s

skirt. Two rotten old pairs of moleskin trousers. One leg of a pair of

trousers. Back of a shirt. Half a waistcoat. Two tweed coats, green,

old and rotting, and patched with calico. Blanket, etc. Large bundle of

assorted rags for patches, all rotten. Leaky billy-can, containing

fishing-line, papers, suet, needles and cotton, etc. Jam-tin, medicine

bottles, corks on strings, to hang to his hat to keep the flies off (a

sign of madness in the bush, for the corks would madden a sane man

sooner than the flies could). Three boots of different sizes, all

belonging to the right foot, and a left slipper. Coffee-pot, without

handle or spout, and quart-pot full of rubbish—broken knives and forks,

with the handles burnt off, spoons, etc., picked up on rubbish-heaps;

and many rusty nails, to be used as buttons, I suppose.

Broken saw blade, hammer, broken crockery, old pannikins, small rusty

frying-pan without a handle, children’s old shoes, many bits of old

bootleather and greenhide, part of yellowback novel, mutilated English

dictionary, grammar and arithmetic book, a ready reckoner, a cookery

book, a bulgy anglo-foreign dictionary, part of a Shakespeare, book in

French and book in German, and a book on etiquette and courtship. A

heavy pair of blucher boots, with uppers parched and cracked, and soles

so patched (patch over patch) with leather, boot protectors, hoop iron

and hobnails that they were about two inches thick, and the boots

weighed over five pounds. (If you don’t believe me go into the

Melbourne Museum, where, in a glass case in a place of honour, you will

see a similar, perhaps the same, pair of bluchers labelled “An example

of colonial industry.”) And in the core of the swag was a sugar-bag

tied tightly with a whip-lash, and containing another old skirt, rolled

very tight and fastened with many turns of a length of clothes-line,

which last, I suppose, he carried to hang himself with if he felt that

way. The skirt was rolled round a small packet of old portraits and

almost indecipherable letters—one from a woman who had evidently been a

sensible woman and a widow, and who stated in the letter that she did

not intend to get married again as she had enough to do already,

slavin’ her finger-nails off to keep a family, without having a second

husband to keep. And her answer was “final for good and all,” and it

wasn’t no use comin’ “bungfoodlin’” round her again. If he did she’d

set Satan on to him. “Satan” was a dog, I suppose.

The letter was addressed to “Dear Bill,” as were others. There were no

envelopes. The letters were addressed from no place in particular, so

there weren’t any means of identifying the dead man. The police buried

him under a gum, and a young trooper cut on the tree the words:

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF

BILL,

WHO DIED.

“BUCKOLTS’ GATE”

AN AUSTRALIAN STORY

PROLOGUE

Old Abel Albury had a genius for getting the bull by the tail with a

tight grip, and holding on with both hands and an obstinacy born of

ignorance—and not necessarily for the sake of self-preservation or

selfishness—while all the time the bull might be, so to speak, rooting

up life-long friendships and neighbourly relations, and upsetting

domestic customs and traditions with his horns.

Yes, Uncle Abel was always grasping the wrong end of things, and

sticking to it with that human mulishness which is often stronger, and

more often wearies and breaks down the opposition than an intelligent

man’s arguments. He was——or professed to be, the family said—unable for

a long time to distinguish between his two grand-nephews, one of whom

was short and fat, while the other was tall and thin, the only points

of resemblance between them being that each possessed the old family

nose and eyes. When they were boys he used to lay the strap about one

in mistake for the other. They had a saying that Uncle Abel saw with

ten squinting eyes.

Also, he could never—or would not, as the family said—remember names.

He referred to Mrs Porter, a thin, haggard selector’s wife, as “Mrs

Stout” and he balanced matters by calling Mrs Southwick “Mrs

Porterwicket”—when he didn’t address her as “Mrs

What’s-the-woman’s-name”—and he succeeded in deeply offending both

ladies.

Uncle Abel was Mrs Carey’s uncle.

Down at the lower end of Carey’s selection at Rocky Rises, in the

extreme corner of the lower or outer paddock, were sliprails opening

into the main road, which ran down along the siding, round the foot of

a spur from ridge, and out west. These sliprails were called “The Lower

Sliprails” by the family, and it occurred to Uncle Abel to refer to

them as “Buckolts’ Gate,” for no other reason apparently than that

Buckolts’ farm lay in that direction. The farm was about a mile further

on, on the other side of the creek, and the gate leading to it from the

main road was round the spur, out of sight of Carey’s selection. It is

quite possible that Uncle Abel reasoned the thing out for days, for of

such material are some human brains. Sliprails, or a slip-panel, is a

panel of fencing of which the rails are made to be slipped out of the

mortise holes in the posts so as to give passage to horses, vehicles

and cattle. I suppose Abel called it a gate, because he was always

going to hang a proper gate there some day. The family were unaware of

his new name for the Lower Sliprails, and after he had, on one or two

occasions, informed the boys that they would find a missing cow or

horse at the Buckolts’ Gate, and they had found it calmly camped at the

Lower Sliprails, and after he had made several appointments to meet

parties at Buckolts’ Gate, and had been found leaning obstinately on

the fence by the Lower Sliprails with no explanation to offer other

than that he _was_ waiting at Buckolts’ Gate, they began to fear that

he was becoming weak in his mind.

ACT I

It was New Year’s Eve at Rocky Rises. There was no need for fireworks

nor bonfires, for the bush-fires were out all along the ranges to the

east, and, as night came on, lines and curves of lights—clear lights,

white lights, and, in the nearer distance, red lights and smoky

lights—marked the sidings and ridges of a western spur of the Blue

Mountain Range, and seemed suspended against a dark sky, for the stars

and the loom of the hills were hidden by smoke and drought haze.

There was a dance at Careys’. Old Carey was a cheerful, broad-minded

bushman, haunted at times by the memories of old days, when he was the

beau of the bush balls, and so when he built his new slab-and-bark barn

he had it properly floored with hard-wood, and the floor well-faced “to

give the young people a show when they wanted a dance,” he said. The

floor had a spring in it, and bush boys and girls often rode twenty

miles and more to dance on that floor. The girls said it was a lovely

floor.

On this occasion Carey had stacked his wheat outside until after the

New Year. Spring-carts, and men and girls on horseback came in from

miles round. “Sperm” candles had been cut up and thrown on the floor

during the afternoon, and rubbed over by feet cased tightly in

’lastic-sides; and hoops were hung horizontally from the tie-beams,

with candles stuck round them. There were fresh-faced girls, and sweet,

freckled-faced girls, and jolly girls, and shy girls—all sorts of girls

except sulky, “toney” girls—and lanky chaps, most of them sawney, and

weird, whiskered agriculturists, who watched the dancers with old, old

time-worn smiles, or stood, or sat on their heels yarning, with their

pipes, outside, where two boilers were slung over a log-fire to boil

water for tea; and there were leathery women, with complexions like

dried apples, who gossiped—for the first time in months perhaps—and

watched the young people, and thought at times, no doubt, of other

days—of other days when they were girls. (And not so far distant

either, in some cases, for women dry quickly in the bush.)

And there were one or two old soldiers and their wives, whose eyes

glistened when Jim Bullock played “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”

Jim Bullock was there with his concertina. He sat on a stool in front

of a bench, on which was a beer-keg, piles of teacups and saucers,

several big tin teapots, and plates of sandwiches, sponge-cakes, and

tarts. Jim sat in his shirt-sleeves, with his flat-brimmed, wire-bound,

“hard-hitter” hat on, slanting over his weaker eye. He held one leg

loosely and the other rigid, with the concertina on his knee, and

swanked away at the instrument by the hour, staring straight in front

of him with the expression of a cod-fish, and never moving a muscle

except the muscles of his great hairy arms and big chapped and

sun-blotched hands; while chaps in tight “larstins” (elastic-side

boots), slop suits of black, bound with braid, and with coats too short

in the neck and arms, and trousers bell-mouthed at the bottoms, and

some with paper collars, narrow red ribbon ties, or scarfs through

walnut shells, held their partners rigidly, and went round the room

with their eyes—most of them—cocked at the rafters in semi-idiotic

ecstasy.

But there was tall, graceful, pink-and-white Bertha Buckolt, blue-eyed

and blue-black-haired, and little Mary Carey with the kind, grey eyes

and red-gold hair; there was Mary’s wild brother Jim, with curly black

hair and blue eyes and dimples of innocence; and there was Harry Dale,

the drover, Jim’s shearing and droving mate, a tall, good-looking,

brown-eyed and brown-haired young fellow, a “better-class” bushman and

the best dancer in the district. Uncle Abel usurped the position of

M.C., and roared “Now then! take yer partners!” and bawled instructions

and interrupted and tangled up the dancers, until they got used to

taking no notice of his bull voice. Mary Carey was too shy—because she

loved him, and secretly and fondly hoped and doubted that he cared for

her—to be seen dancing more than once with Harry Dale, so he shared

Bertha Buckolt, the best girl dancer there, with Jim Carey, who danced

with his sister when Harry was dancing with Bertha Buckolt, and who

seemed, for some reason best known to himself, to be perfectly

satisfied with the arrangement. Poor little Mary began to fret

presently, and feel a little jealous of Bertha, her old schoolmate. She

was little and couldn’t dance like Bertha, and she couldn’t help

noticing how well Bertha looked to-night, and what a well-matched pair

she and Harry made; and so, when twelve o’clock came and they all went

outside to watch the Old Year out and the New Year in—with a big

bonfire on the distant ridge where the grass fires had reached a

stretch of dry scrub—and to join hands all round and sing “Auld Lang

Syne,” little Mary was not to be found, for she was sitting on a log

round behind the cow-yard, crying softly to herself.

And when about three o’clock they all started home, Mary gave Bertha

her cheek to kiss instead of her mouth, and that hurt Bertha, who had

_her_ cry riding home, to the astonishment and irritation of her

brother Jack, who rode home with her. But when they were all gone Mary

was missing again and when her mother called her, and, after a pause,

the voice of Harry Dale said, respectfully, in the darkness, “She’s

here, Mrs Carey, she’s all right,” the two were discovered sitting on a

convenient log of the wood-heap, with an awkward and overacted interval

of log between them.

Old Carey liked Harry Dale, and seemed very well satisfied with the way

things appeared to be going. He pressed Harry to stay at the selection

overnight. “The missus will make you a shake-down on the floor,” he

said. Harry had no appointments, and stayed cheerfully, and old Carey,

having had a whisky or two, insisted on Mary making the shake-down, and

the old folks winked at each other behind the young folks’ backs to see

how poor little Mary spread a spare mattress, with redhot, averted

face, and found an extra pillow and a spare pair of ironed sheets for

the shake-down.

At sunrise she stole out to milk the cows, which was her regular duty;

there was no other way out from her room than through the dining-room,

where Harry lay on his back, with his arms folded, resting peacefully.

He seemed sound asleep and safe for a good two hours, so she ventured.

As she passed out she paused a moment looking down on him with all the

lovelight in her eyes, and, obeying a sudden impulse, she stooped

softly and touched his forehead with her lips, then she slipped out.

Harry stretched, opened his eyes, winked solemnly at the ceiling, and

then, after a decent interval, he got up, dressed, and went out to help

her to milk.

Harry Dale and Jim Carey were going out to take charge of a mob of

bullocks going north-west, away up in Queensland. And as they had lost

a day and night to be at the dance, they decided to start in the cool

of the evening and travel all night. Mary walked from the homestead to

the Lower Sliprails between her brother, who rode—because he was her

brother—and led a packhorse on the other side, and Harry, who walked

and led his horse—because he was her sweetheart, avowed only since last

night.

There were thunderstorms about, and Mary had repented sufficiently with

regard to Bertha Buckolt to wear on her shoulders a cape which Bertha

had left behind her last night.

When they reached the Lower Sliprails Jim said he’d go on and that

Harry needn’t hurry: he stooped over his horse’s neck, kissed his

sister, promised to keep away from the drink, not to touch a card, and

to leave off fighting, and rode on. And when he rounded the Spur he saw

a tall, graceful figure slipping through the trees from the creek

towards Buckolts’ Gate.

Then came the critical time at the Lower Sliprails. The shadows from

the setting sun lengthened quickly on the siding, and then the sun

slipped out of sight over a “saddle” in the ridges, and all was soon

dusk save the sunlit peaks of the Blue Mountains away to the east over

the sweeps of blue-grey bush.

“Ah, well! Mary,” said Harry, “I must make a start now.”

“You’ll—you’ll look after Jim, won’t you, Harry?” said Mary.

“I will, Mary, for your sake.”

Her mouth began to twitch, her chin to tremble, and her eyes brimmed

suddenly.

“You must cheer up, Mary,” he said with her in his arms. “I’ll be back

before you know where you are, and then we’ll be married right off at

once and settle down for life.”

She smiled bravely.

“Good-bye, Mary!”

“Good-bye, Harry!”

He led his horse through the rails and lifted them, with trembling

hands, and shot them home. Another kiss across the top rail and he got

on his horse. She mounted the lower rail, and he brought his horse

close alongside the fence and stooped to kiss her again.

“Cheer up, Mary!” he said. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do—when I come back

I’ll whistle when I reach the Spur and you be here to let the sliprails

down for me. I’ll time myself to get here about sundown. I’ll whistle

‘Willie Riley,’ so you’ll know it’s me. Good-bye, little girl! I must

go now. Don’t fret—the time will soon go by.”

He turned, swung his horse, and rode slowly down the track, turning now

and again to wave his hand to her, with a farewell flourish of his hat

as he rounded the Spur. His track, five hundred miles, or perhaps a

thousand, into the great north-west; his time, six months, or perhaps a

year. Hers a hundred yards or so back to the dusty, dreary drudgery of

selection life. The daylight faded into starlight, the sidings grew

very dim, and a faint white figure blurred against the bars of the

slip-panel.