There was dust everywhere; it was a red-hot world of dust. It lay upon
the roads where the labouring wheel tracks marked them out; but the
whole long plain was dust as well. Neither grass nor any green thing
showed, and dead, dry salt-bush, eaten by the sheep till it looked like
broken peasticks, was dust colour to the dancing horizon of that world
of thirst. For seven months and a week, by Wilson’s almanac, there had
been no rain, and what dew had fallen the hot air drank when the fierce
sun rose. And now not even the little fenced garden at Warribah showed
any sign of verdure. Water was precious, and each day the north wind
drank the water-holes drier and drier yet.
But, though the world of desolate Warribah was brown, in the roots of
grass and the mere sticks of salt-bush was sufficient nourishment to
keep life in the sheep who moved across the burnt paddocks of the
station; what they needed, and what they began to suffer for was water,
and the cloudless sky, luminous and terrible, bent over their world and
breathed fire upon them. The wind out of the Austral tropics was as
fierce as a blowpipe flame, or so it seemed. Hope and prosperity melted
under it, and the home at Warribah dissolved.
“I shall go mad,” said Wilson. And having said it, he sent his wife away
to the south. He could not keep a cheerful face before her; it was
easier to lie upon paper, easier to drift into silence that was not
disturbed by her tears. He was a lonely man again, as lonely as when he
had first fought with the bush, and conquered a space for himself where
no water ran.
And now the conquered territory that he had hoped to keep for the uses
of civilisation called in the sun and the north wind, and there was a
great fight in progress between man and nature. As he walked over what
he had won, or as he galloped, the caked and cracked earth fell into
powder, and rose choking and impalpable, as fine as flour. The gaunt,
spare box trees of the plains were powdered with its red-white film;
their dry verdure was obscured. The dust was mud upon his lips, mud upon
his cheeks as he sweated ice, to think the day was coming when there
could be no hope for him and no help.
“How long now?” he asked himself.
And all about the plains rose columns of dust as the uneasy, fretful
sheep, to whom his men doled water, moved up the wind seeking more.
“After ten years—this,” said Wilson, and he laughed. But those who heard
him laugh shivered, and contracted their brows. For he was a hard
worker, and had slaved for this—for bankruptcy, a sky of brass.
“The boss is crazy,” said the men at the hut.
An immense, intolerable sense of pity for the sheep possessed him. He
had no children, and the land he held had been as a child to him. Now
the plains he had delighted in were become ingrate. They refused him
help. The sheep were his children and his delight. He knew thousands of
them by sight, for he had the shepherd’s eye. There was a character
about the Warribah sheep that he had bestowed by his care and by his
choice. He had fenced them in against straying; had chased the cowardly
dingo and had slain him; he had rejoiced in the grass and the whitening
cotton-bush, and the succulence of thick-fleshed salt-bush. How often he
had ridden out and watched the sheep graze; it was a happy world when
the rains in their due season ceased, and the time for shearing came. It
was a riotous pleasure to hear the click of the shears. How the white
inner fleece gleamed and fell over, and parted and showed its woven
beauty! The movements of the shearers, and the sound of them, and the
sound of the pent or loosened sheep wove itself into a kind of fabric;
in the loom of time and the due sweet season pleasure grew, and success,
and the joy of well-doing.
And now there was death in the air and in the north wind. And behind it
ruin. There his ten thousand children would perish off the face of the
inexorable earth and be no more than white bones lying heaped against a
northern fence where no water was. He laughed a thin, crackling laugh,
and walked to and fro in front of his lonely house.
“The boss is crazy,” his men had said. Now in the hot and idle noon they
sat in the southward shadow of the crackling hut and watched him. The
old cook, a blear-eyed outcast thrown up by the seas upon the coast of
Australia, broke suddenly into a drivelling yarn.
“I knew it worse nor this—hell’s flames never beat it, on the Bogan that
year——”
He mumbled on.
“So they died, and the horses, too. Oh, it was cruel, cruel. And Webber
cut his throat from ear to ear, cut his crazy ’ead ’arf off.”
“What of your paddock, Jim?” asked Hill, the old hand of Warribah. The
young boundary rider spat drily.
“The jumbucks is suckin’ mud. The water stinks of yolk. You can smell it
a mile off. Ter-morrer I’ll have to fetch ’em in.”
The black and red ants ran riot in the hut and outside of it. The insect
world flourished and abounded. But for all their bronze there was a
pallid look about the men. Nature was no friend of theirs; they looked
out on fire and blinding light.
“I never knowed it worse.”
But old Blear Eyes had.
“So _he_ blew his brains out.”
“Oh, dry up,” said Hill, but the cook murmured of ancient disasters on
the Darling and the Macquarie.
“Did you die of thirst, you old croaker, and jump up to choke us?”
And still Wilson wandered to and fro in the sunlight, though the sky was
inexorable.
“He’ll be shakin’ his fist at it yet,” said the cook, “and when a man
does that he never comes to no good. It’s all up with them as shakes a
fist at ’eaven. I’ve seen it myself. Now it was in ’79 that Jones of
Quandong Flats went mad. He shook ’is fist at the sky. I seen him, and
the next morning ’e was ravin’ ’orrid, as though the ’orrors of drink
was on ’im. And well I knowed ’em then.”
The boss came towards them through the hot sand, and he leant in the
shade against the pole on which the men’s saddles hung. The men looked
downcast and half-ashamed. Sydney Jim lost all his flashness and moved
uneasily. And the old cook shambled into his kitchen and fell to work
upon his bread.
“There’s little water in the Ten-Mile Tank, Jim?”
“They was suckin’ mud this morning, sir,” said Jim.
Wilson tugged at his grizzled beard and pulled his sunburnt hat over his
eyes.
“We should have put down wells,” said Hill.
Wilson broke into sudden blasphemy, and checked it with a kind of gasp,
as though he felt that madness lay just beyond the limits of his
self-control.
“So we should,” he said; “so we should.”
And he walked away.
“You took that cursin’ very quiet,” said Jim. And there was something in
Hill’s eye that made him flinch.
“Oh, well,” he said apologetically, and Hill glared at him. The heat was
in more than one.
“My son,” said Hill, “I’ve half a mind——”
And then he rose and followed Wilson. He caught him up and talked hard
till Wilson shook his head and went inside and slammed the door.
“He should make it up with Grear, and if Grear let him down on to the
river he might save some.”
For Warribah was in the back-blocks, and Grear held all the river
frontage for twenty miles.
“But they hate each other, and Wilson ain’t the man to crawl,” said
Hill. “He’s a good sort. I’ll go myself.”
He went back to the hut and, taking his saddle and bridle, walked to the
horse paddock, which seemed as barren as a stockyard. He caught his
horse, that was standing at the gate and looking wistfully towards the
stable as if he knew that good feed was there.
“Come,” said Hill, and he rode south through the pine scrub towards
Grear’s. He came to the station as the sun went down, and when he asked
for the boss Grear came out.
“Oh you!” he said roughly. “And what d’ye want?”
He was a long, thin man with a cold eye and thin lips, and as he looked
at him Hill felt that it was a foolish errand he had come on. The man
was worse than he had imagined. It seemed that Wilson was right. To ask
Grear for anything was to invite insult. And though Hill had come twenty
miles to ask he turned away.
“I haven’t seen you for nigh on a year,” said he, “and now I’ve seen
you, why, I shan’t weep if I never see you again.”
He got upon his horse solemnly and turned away, leaving Grear with an
open mouth.
“I was a fool to come,” said Hill, as he ploughed his way among the
sandhills. “He used to reckon that all the back-blocks was his, and
Wilson took ’em up. Grear don’t forgive.”
The night had come upon the land, but there was no remission of the hot
north wind. The heated earth radiated heat still, while in the clear
obscure of the heavens the stars glittered like sharp points of steel.
They stabbed Hill’s very heart as he rode and looked into the rainless
depths of heaven. For the sky was no overarching dome at that season. It
was an awful emptiness without form; it was space itself, unmitigated
and terrible, and heaven’s lamps were near and far and farther still,
while black, starless spaces showed like unfathomable patches in a
silent sea.
“Good God!” said Hill, and fear got hold of him suddenly. He roused his
horse to a canter for the sake of the noise of the motion. The sky
appalled him, and a peculiar sense of reversion took him. He was hung
over depths, and seemed to cling to the suspended earth.
“I’m crazy myself,” said Hill, with a quiver in his voice. And his very
voice broke the silence like a pistol shot. It made him start until he
heard a sheep’s faint baa in the distance. And then a mopoke called its
mate in the trees by an old dry creek. Hill pulled up.
“But it ain’t a creek after all,” he said to himself. “It’s a Billabong,
but it’s twenty years since water came out of the Lachlan so far as
Warribah, and Grear put a dam there fifteen years ago. Ah! if the river
only rose up, and came down roarin’. But it won’t; it won’t.”
As he dreamed of the river, now like a low water-hole with never a
current in it, Wilson, at home, lay in an uneasy sleep. He, too,
dreamed, and dreamed of rain, and he woke himself shouting, “Rain!” and
in his confusion called “Mary” to his wife five hundred miles away.
“Oh God! I dreamt it again,” he said. “I dreamed of rain in our old
place east, and the river came down with thunder and floods, and the
land grew green in an hour—green, green!”
He fell asleep again, and when he woke at dawn he was oddly cheerful.
Perhaps the rest from anxiety in that happy dream had taken part of the
strain from his weary mind.
“I do feel as if it had rained somewhere,” he said; “and if the weather
only breaks anywhere we may have it here.”
“Don’t you think it cooler?” he said to Hill next morning. But the sky
was brass and the sun white hot.
That evening a man riding through to Conoble from Condobolin told him
that he had heard it had rained east of Forbes. And another man who
camped at the Ten-Mile Clump said he knew there had been a great
thunderstorm to the east.
“I dreamed it, so I did!” cried Wilson; “and the Lachlan’s coming down.”
His jaw fell even as he spoke. What use was the Lachlan to him out in
the beyond, when Grear’s lay between? He had no river frontage. Grear
had it all.
In such a country, in spite of its apparent desolation, news travels
fast. They heard that the Lachlan, so quiet at Condobolin, was running
hard at Forbes. It was out in the flats, where the felled trees marked
the old mining camp. There had been a storm, a great cloudburst, in its
head waters, and the river grew alive. Wilson saddled up and rode thirty
miles to see it, and came to the gum-lined ditch just in time to hear
the stream awake. It stirred before his eyes, it became turbid, grew
grey, bubbled, moved and ran, with sticks and leaves and branches on its
full tide.
And still the sky overhead was fire, and the sun a flame. Wilson cursed
it, and prayed to the beautiful grey water. Why should not rain come
there? And soon. But as he rode back he came to sheep of his that stood
against a fence, and pressed on it, as though water was beyond it. Pity
stirred him; he drove them through a gate, and let them suck his last
low tank.
That night Wilson came to the men’s hut under its pines in the sand
dune, and called to Hill.
“Hill, I want to speak to you,” he said, and presently his man came out
into the night. The stars were brilliant. Jupiter was like a little
moon, and cast faint shadows.
“There’ll be no rain here,” said Wilson. “Were you sleeping? I can’t
sleep! Do you hear?”
He waved his hand around the barren horizon.
“I hear,” said Hill.
He heard the sheep.
“You say that old Billabong once came down to Warribah?” asked Wilson.
Hill nodded.
“So they say. But Grear’s dam would stop it.”
“He’s no right to have it there,” said Wilson, savagely. “Look, Hill, I
can’t sleep. I’ll ride out to the dam.”
“I’ll come with you,” said Hill.
“You’re a good sort, Jack,” cried the boss. And they rode together
through the wonderful night, that was so terrible to them, with its hot,
dry air out of the oven of the north.
When they came at last to the long, low dam they tied their horses to
saplings, and sat down. Wilson spoke after a quarter of an hour’s
silence.
“It would be hard to lose it after these years,” he said. “And here’s
Grear’s dam with a fence atop of it. He’s a hard one, Jack!”
“Ay,” said Hill, “he’s hard.”
And Wilson, who had not really slept for days, lay down upon the earth
and dozed, while the star shadows of the gaunt thin boxes moved a foot.
In the hollow of the Billabong some dry reeds, like a cane-brake,
rustled faintly in the air. The leaves of the trees crackled, and
underneath these sharper sounds was the hum of the insect world. Far
away, on every side, the sheep called uneasily for water. What had
seemed silence grew into a very chorus, organic with the earth. The
horses champed their bits and pawed the dusty soil; and once one
whinnied, and was answered by a far-off call from Grear’s.
“I wonder what the river’s like,” thought Hill. He pulled out his pipe
and lighted it. The flare of the match extinguished the starlight for a
moment, and then the darkness melted once more, and he saw each separate
tree, each leaf, each reed.
“I wonder.”
For if the river was in high flood, and over the banks, the Billabong
must be full at Grear’s. And suddenly he heard a sound that he knew
well. He laid his hand upon Wilson’s shoulder.
“D’ye hear it, sir? What is it?”
But both knew. Grear’s sheep were moving from east and west towards
water.
“The blackfellows were right,” said Wilson. “The Billabong is coming
down.”
The horses trampled uneasily, and seemed aware of a change. Perhaps they
too smelt the grey flood as it crawled. And all the air seemed full of
whispers, loud and louder yet. For even the thinned bush is alive, and
holds carnival at midnight and beyond it. A snake crawled by them on the
dam, and suddenly being aware of nigh enemies, it slipped away hastily,
and hid in the hollow trunk of a fallen dwarf box. The sheep on Warribah
grew more uneasy; he heard a distant baa, and then a nearer cry, and a
plaintive chorus came down the dry, hot wind.
“I can’t listen to ’em,” said Wilson. “It makes me mad.”
He rested his head upon his knees, and kept his hands to his ears. But
suddenly he rose up.
“If the water comes we’ll cut the dam, Hill.”
“I would,” said Hill.
“Go back and fetch Jim, and bring shovels,” said Wilson. “I’ll cut it.
If the water comes, I’ve a right to it.”
And Hill rode homeward fast. And as he rode the boss sat still upon the
dam, and looked upon the faintly outlined hollow of the ancient
waterway. And again he dozed, and did not see that round the far bend of
the hollow came a sneaking, quiet band of grey water, like a crawling
snake. But as he slept the night chorus increased, and away to the south
the full sheep baa’ed with content. The Warribah sheep heard and knew,
and moved south through the night: and suddenly ten thousand broke into
a gallop, and stayed in a heap against the fence that topped the dam.
Their voices agonised; they woke Wilson suddenly, and he reached out his
hand and touched water.
And he heard horses galloping. This was Hill returning.
“Thank God!” said Wilson, and he prayed to Heaven with sudden
thankfulness.
But then he started, for the horses came from the south. They came from
Grear’s, and he knew what that meant.
“I’ll do it if I have to kill him,” said Wilson. For behind him the
painful chorus of the sheep was deafening. He saw them packed against
the bulging wires. His heart bled for them, his children.
And then three horses burst through the thin bush.
“Oh, we’re in time,” said Grear. “I thought as much, but we’re in time.
Who’s that?”
“Wilson of Warribah,” said Wilson. “Grear, you will let the water
through.”
And Grear laughed.
“To you that sneaked in and took up my back-lots? Oh, it’s likely,
likely!”
“But the sheep are dying, Grear.”
“Mine ain’t,” said Grear. “Get over the fence and off my land. I’ll not
have you here.”
And Wilson burst into a passionate appeal that was almost a scream.
“Look here, man, if you are a man. I’ll give you ten per cent of ’em to
cut the dam. They’re dying. Oh, my God! hear ’em, Grear; hear ’em! And
I’ve bred ’em. I watched ’em grow. Oh, Grear, I’ll give you half!”
And Grear swore horribly.
“I’ll see them die, and see you get out. I don’t want you here.”
And now in the noise the sheep made it was difficult to hear a man
speak. But the water grew up silently, and spread out, filling the
hollow—a grateful and splendid sheet.
“’Tain’t all yours,” screamed Wilson. “The dam’s not legal. You’ve no
right to rob me and my sheep.”
“Then go to law, you dog, and have it proved,” said Grear. And as he
spoke Hill came galloping, and with him Jim and two other men. And they
carried shovels.
“Look,” said Wilson. “We’re five to you three, you and your men. I mean
to have the water.”
“Never!” cried Grear, and getting off his horse he walked up the dam to
where Wilson stood.
“Get over the fence,” he said.
And Wilson leant against the fence and the sheep behind him. He dabbled
with his hand in their wool. Their hot breath fanned him.
“Don’t, Grear, don’t,” he pleaded. “What would you think if I did the
same to you?”
“You can’t,” said Grear, and he laughed. “I’ve the river at my back.”
And Hill with a spade in his hand pressed through the sheep, until he
came to Wilson. He touched the boss’s shoulder, and Wilson calmed as he
took the spade.
“You don’t mean that they’re to die, Grear, do you?” he asked, with a
catch in his voice.
“What’s that to me?”
“It’s much to me,” said Wilson. “Oh, Grear, I’d rather be hanged than
let it be.”
“Would you? Then be hanged, you rat!” said Grear.
And Wilson lifted the spade, and split Grear’s head with it, and the man
fell back into the water, and dyed it with his blood. But he was dead
before he touched the silver grey stream that had slain him.
And Wilson fell to work digging.
“Good God!” said Hill, and the dead squatter’s men cried out.
“Dig, dig,” said Wilson. “Dig! Grear’s got his water. I’ll have mine.”
When the sun rose his sheep were content.
“Now we’ll see what the law says,” cried Wilson. And he rode south to
find the law.