Part II.

The Golden Graveyard.

Mother Middleton was an awful woman, an ‘old hand’ (transported convict)

some said. The prefix ‘mother’ in Australia mostly means ‘old hag’,

and is applied in that sense. In early boyhood we understood, from

old diggers, that Mother Middleton--in common with most other ‘old

hands’--had been sent out for ‘knocking a donkey off a hen-roost.’ We

had never seen a donkey. She drank like a fish and swore like a trooper

when the spirit moved her; she went on periodical sprees, and swore on

most occasions. There was a fearsome yarn, which impressed us greatly

as boys, to the effect that once, in her best (or worst) days, she had

pulled a mounted policeman off his horse, and half-killed him with a

heavy pick-handle, which she used for poking down clothes in her boiler.

She said that he had insulted her.

She could still knock down a tree and cut a load of firewood with any

Bushman; she was square and muscular, with arms like a navvy’s; she had

often worked shifts, below and on top, with her husband, when he’d be

putting down a prospecting shaft without a mate, as he often had to

do--because of her mainly. Old diggers said that it was lovely to see

how she’d spin up a heavy green-hide bucket full of clay and ‘tailings’,

and land and empty it with a twist of her wrist. Most men were afraid of

her, and few diggers’ wives were strong-minded enough to seek a second

row with Mother Middleton. Her voice could be heard right across Golden

Gully and Specimen Flat, whether raised in argument or in friendly

greeting. She came to the old Pipeclay diggings with the ‘rough crowd’

(mostly Irish), and when the old and new Pipeclays were worked out, she

went with the rush to Gulgong (about the last of the great alluvial or

‘poor-man’s’ goldfields) and came back to Pipeclay when the Log Paddock

goldfield ‘broke out’, adjacent to the old fields, and so helped prove

the truth of the old digger’s saying, that no matter how thoroughly

ground has been worked, there is always room for a new Ballarat.

Jimmy Middleton died at Log Paddock, and was buried, about the last,

in the little old cemetery--appertaining to the old farming town on the

river, about four miles away--which adjoined the district racecourse, in

the Bush, on the far edge of Specimen Flat. She conducted the funeral.

Some said she made the coffin, and there were alleged jokes to the

effect that her tongue had provided the corpse; but this, I think, was

unfair and cruel, for she loved Jimmy Middleton in her awful way, and

was, for all I ever heard to the contrary, a good wife to him. She then

lived in a hut in Log Paddock, on a little money in the bank, and did

sewing and washing for single diggers.

I remember hearing her one morning in neighbourly conversation, carried

on across the gully, with a selector, Peter Olsen, who was hopelessly

slaving to farm a dusty patch in the scrub.

‘Why don’t you chuck up that dust-hole and go up country and settle on

good land, Peter Olsen? You’re only slaving your stomach out here.’ (She

didn’t say stomach.)

*Peter Olsen* (mild-whiskered little man, afraid of his wife). ‘But then

you know my wife is so delicate, Mrs Middleton. I wouldn’t like to take

her out in the Bush.’

*Mrs Middleton*. ‘Delicate, be damned! she’s only shamming!’ (at her

loudest.) ‘Why don’t you kick her off the bed and the book out of her

hand, and make her go to work? She’s as delicate as I am. Are you a man,

Peter Olsen, or a----?’

This for the edification of the wife and of all within half a mile.

Long Paddock was ‘petering’. There were a few claims still being worked

down at the lowest end, where big, red-and-white waste-heaps of clay and

gravel, rising above the blue-grey gum-bushes, advertised deep sinking;

and little, yellow, clay-stained streams, running towards the creek over

the drought-parched surface, told of trouble with the water below--time

lost in baling and extra expense in timbering. And diggers came up with

their flannels and moleskins yellow and heavy, and dripping with wet

‘mullock’.

Most of the diggers had gone to other fields, but there were a few

prospecting, in parties and singly, out on the flats and amongst the

ridges round Pipeclay. Sinking holes in search of a new Ballarat.

Dave Regan--lanky, easy-going Bush native; Jim Bently--a bit of a ‘Flash

Jack’; and Andy Page--a character like what ‘Kit’ (in the ‘Old Curiosity

Shop’) might have been after a voyage to Australia and some Colonial

experience. These three were mates from habit and not necessity, for

it was all shallow sinking where they worked. They were poking down

pot-holes in the scrub in the vicinity of the racecourse, where the

sinking was from ten to fifteen feet.

Dave had theories--‘ideers’ or ‘notions’ he called them; Jim Bently laid

claim to none--he ran by sight, not scent, like a kangaroo-dog. Andy

Page--by the way, great admirer and faithful retainer of Dave Regan--was

simple and trusting, but, on critical occasions, he was apt to be

obstinately, uncomfortably, exasperatingly truthful, honest, and he had

reverence for higher things.

Dave thought hard all one quiet drowsy Sunday afternoon, and next

morning he, as head of the party, started to sink a hole as close to the

cemetery fence as he dared. It was a nice quiet spot in the thick scrub,

about three panels along the fence from the farthest corner post

from the road. They bottomed here at nine feet, and found encouraging

indications. They ‘drove’ (tunnelled) inwards at right angles to the

fence, and at a point immediately beneath it they were ‘making tucker’;

a few feet farther and they were making wages. The old alluvial bottom

sloped gently that way. The bottom here, by the way, was shelving,

brownish, rotten rock.

Just inside the cemetery fence, and at right angles to Dave’s drive,

lay the shell containing all that was left of the late fiercely lamented

James Middleton, with older graves close at each end. A grave

was supposed to be six feet deep, and local gravediggers had been

conscientious. The old alluvial bottom sloped from nine to fifteen feet

here.

Dave worked the ground all round from the bottom of his shaft,

timbering--i.e., putting in a sapling prop--here and there where he

worked wide; but the ‘payable dirt’ ran in under the cemetery, and in no

other direction.

Dave, Jim, and Andy held a consultation in camp over their pipes

after tea, as a result of which Andy next morning rolled up his swag,

sorrowfully but firmly shook hands with Dave and Jim, and started to

tramp Out-Back to look for work on a sheep-station.

This was Dave’s theory--drawn from a little experience and many long

yarns with old diggers:--

He had bottomed on a slope to an old original water-course, covered with

clay and gravel from the hills by centuries of rains to the depth of

from nine or ten to twenty feet; he had bottomed on a gutter running

into the bed of the old buried creek, and carrying patches and streaks

of ‘wash’ or gold-bearing dirt. If he went on he might strike it rich

at any stroke of his pick; he might strike the rich ‘lead’ which was

supposed to exist round there. (There was always supposed to be a rich

lead round there somewhere. ‘There’s gold in them ridges yet--if a man

can only git at it,’ says the toothless old relic of the Roaring Days.)

Dave might strike a ledge, ‘pocket’, or ‘pot-hole’ holding wash rich

with gold. He had prospected on the opposite side of the cemetery, found

no gold, and the bottom sloping upwards towards the graveyard. He had

prospected at the back of the cemetery, found a few ‘colours’, and the

bottom sloping downwards towards the point under the cemetery towards

which all indications were now leading him. He had sunk shafts across

the road opposite the cemetery frontage and found the sinking twenty

feet and not a colour of gold. Probably the whole of the ground under

the cemetery was rich--maybe the richest in the district. The old

gravediggers had not been gold-diggers--besides, the graves, being six

feet, would, none of them, have touched the alluvial bottom. There

was nothing strange in the fact that none of the crowd of experienced

diggers who rushed the district had thought of the cemetery and

racecourse. Old brick chimneys and houses, the clay for the bricks of

which had been taken from sites of subsequent goldfields, had been put

through the crushing-mill in subsequent years and had yielded ‘payable

gold’. Fossicking Chinamen were said to have been the first to detect a

case of this kind.

Dave reckoned to strike the ‘lead’, or a shelf or ledge with a good

streak of wash lying along it, at a point about forty feet within the

cemetery. But a theory in alluvial gold-mining was much like a theory

in gambling, in some respects. The theory might be right enough, but old

volcanic disturbances--‘the shrinkage of the earth’s surface,’ and that

sort of old thing--upset everything. You might follow good gold along

a ledge, just under the grass, till it suddenly broke off and the

continuation might be a hundred feet or so under your nose.

Had the ‘ground’ in the cemetery been ‘open’ Dave would have gone to the

point under which he expected the gold to lie, sunk a shaft there, and

worked the ground. It would have been the quickest and easiest way--it

would have saved the labour and the time lost in dragging heavy buckets

of dirt along a low lengthy drive to the shaft outside the fence. But

it was very doubtful if the Government could have been moved to open

the cemetery even on the strongest evidence of the existence of a rich

goldfield under it, and backed by the influence of a number of diggers

and their backers--which last was what Dave wished for least of all. He

wanted, above all things, to keep the thing shady. Then, again, the old

clannish local spirit of the old farming town, rooted in years way back

of the goldfields, would have been too strong for the Government, or

even a rush of wild diggers.

‘We’ll work this thing on the strict Q.T.,’ said Dave.

He and Jim had a consultation by the camp fire outside their tent. Jim

grumbled, in conclusion,--

‘Well, then, best go under Jimmy Middleton. It’s the shortest and

straightest, and Jimmy’s the freshest, anyway.’

Then there was another trouble. How were they to account for the size of

the waste-heap of clay on the surface which would be the result of such

an extraordinary length of drive or tunnel for shallow sinkings? Dave

had an idea of carrying some of the dirt away by night and putting it

down a deserted shaft close by; but that would double the labour, and

might lead to detection sooner than anything else. There were boys

‘possum-hunting on those flats every night. Then Dave got an idea.

There was supposed to exist--and it has since been proved--another, a

second gold-bearing alluvial bottom on that field, and several had tried

for it. One, the town watchmaker, had sunk all his money in ‘duffers’,

trying for the second bottom. It was supposed to exist at a depth

of from eighty to a hundred feet--on solid rock, I suppose. This

watchmaker, an Italian, would put men on to sink, and superintend in

person, and whenever he came to a little ‘colour’-showing shelf, or

false bottom, thirty or forty feet down--he’d go rooting round and spoil

the shaft, and then start to sink another. It was extraordinary that

he hadn’t the sense to sink straight down, thoroughly test the second

bottom, and if he found no gold there, to fill the shaft up to the other

bottoms, or build platforms at the proper level and then explore them.

He was living in a lunatic asylum the last time I heard of him. And the

last time I heard from that field, they were boring the ground like a

sieve, with the latest machinery, to find the best place to put down a

deep shaft, and finding gold from the second bottom on the bore. But I’m

right off the line again.

‘Old Pinter’, Ballarat digger--his theory on second and other bottoms

ran as follows:--

‘Ye see, THIS here grass surface--this here surface with trees an’ grass

on it, that we’re livin’ on, has got nothin’ to do with us. This here

bottom in the shaller sinkin’s that we’re workin’ on is the slope to the

bed of the NEW crick that was on the surface about the time that men was

missin’ links. The false bottoms, thirty or forty feet down, kin be said

to have been on the surface about the time that men was monkeys. The

SECON’ bottom--eighty or a hundred feet down--was on the surface about

the time when men was frogs. Now----’

But it’s with the missing-link surface we have to do, and had the

friends of the local departed known what Dave and Jim were up to they

would have regarded them as something lower than missing-links.

‘We’ll give out we’re tryin’ for the second bottom,’ said Dave Regan.

‘We’ll have to rig a fan for air, anyhow, and you don’t want air in

shallow sinkings.’

‘And some one will come poking round, and look down the hole and see the

bottom,’ said Jim Bently.

‘We must keep ‘em away,’ said Dave. ‘Tar the bottom, or cover it with

tarred canvas, to make it black. Then they won’t see it. There’s not

many diggers left, and the rest are going; they’re chucking up the

claims in Log Paddock. Besides, I could get drunk and pick rows with the

rest and they wouldn’t come near me. The farmers ain’t in love with

us diggers, so they won’t bother us. No man has a right to come poking

round another man’s claim: it ain’t ettykit--I’ll root up that old

ettykit and stand to it--it’s rather worn out now, but that’s no matter.

We’ll shift the tent down near the claim and see that no one comes

nosing round on Sunday. They’ll think we’re only some more second-bottom

lunatics, like Francea [the mining watchmaker]. We’re going to get our

fortune out from under that old graveyard, Jim. You leave it all to me

till you’re born again with brains.’

Dave’s schemes were always elaborate, and that was why they so often

came to the ground. He logged up his windlass platform a little higher,

bent about eighty feet of rope to the bole of the windlass, which was a

new one, and thereafter, whenever a suspicious-looking party (that is

to say, a digger) hove in sight, Dave would let down about forty feet of

rope and then wind, with simulated exertion, until the slack was taken

up and the rope lifted the bucket from the shallow bottom.

‘It would look better to have a whip-pole and a horse, but we can’t

afford them just yet,’ said Dave.

But I’m a little behind. They drove straight in under the cemetery,

finding good wash all the way. The edge of Jimmy Middleton’s box

appeared in the top corner of the ‘face’ (the working end) of the drive.

They went under the butt-end of the grave. They shoved up the end of the

shell with a prop, to prevent the possibility of an accident which might

disturb the mound above; they puddled--i.e., rammed--stiff clay up round

the edges to keep the loose earth from dribbling down; and having given

the bottom of the coffin a good coat of tar, they got over, or rather

under, an unpleasant matter.

Jim Bently smoked and burnt paper during his shift below, and grumbled a

good deal. ‘Blowed if I ever thought I’d be rooting for gold down among

the blanky dead men,’ he said. But the dirt panned out better every

dish they washed, and Dave worked the ‘wash’ out right and left as they

drove.

But, one fine morning, who should come along but the very last man

whom Dave wished to see round there--‘Old Pinter’ (James Poynton),

Californian and Victorian digger of the old school. He’d been

prospecting down the creek, carried his pick over his shoulder--threaded

through the eye in the heft of his big-bladed, short-handled shovel that

hung behind--and his gold-dish under his arm.

I mightn’t get a chance again to explain what a gold-dish and what

gold-washing is. A gold washing-dish is a flat dish--nearer the shape

of a bedroom bath-tub than anything else I have seen in England, or the

dish we used for setting milk--I don’t know whether the same is used

here: the gold-dish measures, say, eighteen inches across the top. You

get it full of wash dirt, squat down at a convenient place at the edge

of the water-hole, where there is a rest for the dish in the water just

below its own depth. You sink the dish and let the clay and gravel soak

a while, then you work and rub it up with your hands, and as the clay

dissolves, dish it off as muddy water or mullock. You are careful to

wash the pebbles in case there is any gold sticking to them. And so till

all the muddy or clayey matter is gone, and there is nothing but clean

gravel in the bottom of the dish. You work this off carefully, turning

the dish about this way and that and swishing the water round in it. It

requires some practice. The gold keeps to the bottom of the dish, by

its own weight. At last there is only a little half-moon of sand or fine

gravel in the bottom lower edge of the dish--you work the dish slanting

from you. Presently the gold, if there was any in the dirt, appears in

‘colours’, grains, or little nuggets along the base of the half-moon of

sand. The more gold there is in the dirt, or the coarser the gold is,

the sooner it appears. A practised digger can work off the last speck of

gravel, without losing a ‘colour’, by just working the water round and

off in the dish. Also a careful digger could throw a handful of gold

in a tub of dirt, and, washing it off in dishfuls, recover practically

every colour.

The gold-washing ‘cradle’ is a box, shaped something like a boot, and

the size of a travelling trunk, with rockers on, like a baby’s cradle,

and a stick up behind for a handle; on top, where you’ll put your foot

into the boot, is a tray with a perforated iron bottom; the clay and

gravel is thrown on the tray, water thrown on it, and the cradle rocked

smartly. The finer gravel and the mullock goes through and down over a

sloping board covered with blanket, and with ledges on it to catch the

gold. The dish was mostly used for prospecting; large quantities of wash

dirt was put through the horse-power ‘puddling-machine’, which there

isn’t room to describe here.

‘’Ello, Dave!’ said Pinter, after looking with mild surprise at the size

of Dave’s waste-heap. ‘Tryin’ for the second bottom?’

‘Yes,’ said Dave, guttural.

Pinter dropped his tools with a clatter at the foot of the waste-heap

and scratched under his ear like an old cockatoo, which bird he

resembled. Then he went to the windlass, and resting his hands on his

knees, he peered down, while Dave stood by helpless and hopeless.

Pinter straightened himself, blinking like an owl, and looked carelessly

over the graveyard.

‘Tryin’ for a secon’ bottom,’ he reflected absently. ‘Eh, Dave?’

Dave only stood and looked black.

Pinter tilted back his head and scratched the roots of his

chin-feathers, which stuck out all round like a dirty, ragged fan held

horizontally.

‘Kullers is safe,’ reflected Pinter.

‘All right?’ snapped Dave. ‘I suppose we must let him into it.’

‘Kullers’ was a big American buck nigger, and had been Pinter’s mate for

some time--Pinter was a man of odd mates; and what Pinter meant was that

Kullers was safe to hold his tongue.

Next morning Pinter and his coloured mate appeared on the ground early,

Pinter with some tools and the nigger with a windlass-bole on his

shoulders. Pinter chose a spot about three panels or thirty feet along

the other fence, the back fence of the cemetery, and started his hole.

He lost no time for the sake of appearances, he sunk his shaft and

started to drive straight for the point under the cemetery for which

Dave was making; he gave out that he had bottomed on good ‘indications’

running in the other direction, and would work the ground outside the

fence. Meanwhile Dave rigged a fan--partly for the sake of appearances,

but mainly because his and Jim’s lively imaginations made the air in the

drive worse than it really was. A ‘fan’ is a thing like a paddle-wheel

rigged in a box, about the size of a cradle, and something the shape of

a shoe, but rounded over the top. There is a small grooved wheel on the

axle of the fan outside, and an endless line, like a clothes-line, is

carried over this wheel and a groove in the edge of a high light wooden

driving-wheel rigged between two uprights in the rear and with a handle

to turn. That’s how the thing is driven. A wind-chute, like an endless

pillow-slip, made of calico, with the mouth tacked over the open toe of

the fan-box, and the end taken down the shaft and along the drive--this

carries the fresh air into the workings.

Dave was working the ground on each side as he went, when one morning

a thought struck him that should have struck him the day Pinter went to

work. He felt mad that it hadn’t struck him sooner.

Pinter and Kullers had also shifted their tent down into a nice quiet

place in the Bush close handy; so, early next Sunday morning, while

Pinter and Kullers were asleep, Dave posted Jim Bently to watch their

tent, and whistle an alarm if they stirred, and then dropped down into

Pinter’s hole and saw at a glance what he was up to.

After that Dave lost no time: he drove straight on, encouraged by the

thuds of Pinter’s and Kullers’ picks drawing nearer. They would strike

his tunnel at right angles. Both parties worked long hours, only

knocking off to fry a bit of steak in the pan, boil the billy, and throw

themselves dressed on their bunks to get a few hours’ sleep. Pinter had

practical experience and a line clear of graves, and he made good time.

The two parties now found it more comfortable to be not on speaking

terms. Individually they grew furtive, and began to feel criminal

like--at least Dave and Jim did. They’d start if a horse stumbled

through the Bush, and expected to see a mounted policeman ride up at

any moment and hear him ask questions. They had driven about thirty-five

feet when, one Saturday afternoon, the strain became too great, and Dave

and Jim got drunk. The spree lasted over Sunday, and on Monday morning

they felt too shaky to come to work and had more drink. On Monday

afternoon, Kullers, whose shift it was below, stuck his pick through the

face of his drive into the wall of Dave’s, about four feet from the end

of it: the clay flaked away, leaving a hole as big as a wash-hand basin.

They knocked off for the day and decided to let the other party take the

offensive.

Tuesday morning Dave and Jim came to work, still feeling shaky. Jim

went below, crawled along the drive, lit his candle, and stuck it in the

spiked iron socket and the spike in the wall of the drive, quite close

to the hole, without noticing either the hole or the increased freshness

in the air. He started picking away at the ‘face’ and scraping the clay

back from under his feet, and didn’t hear Kullers come to work. Kullers

came in softly and decided to try a bit of cheerful bluff. He stuck his

great round black face through the hole, the whites of his eyes rolling

horribly in the candle-light, and said, with a deep guffaw--

‘’Ullo! you dar’?’

No bandicoot ever went into his hole with the dogs after him quicker

than Jim came out of his. He scrambled up the shaft by the foot-holes,

and sat on the edge of the waste-heap, looking very pale.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Dave. ‘Have you seen a ghost?’

‘I’ve seen the--the devil!’ gasped Jim. ‘I’m--I’m done with this here

ghoul business.’

The parties got on speaking terms again. Dave was very warm, but Jim’s

language was worse. Pinter scratched his chin-feathers reflectively till

the other party cooled. There was no appealing to the Commissioner for

goldfields; they were outside all law, whether of the goldfields or

otherwise--so they did the only thing possible and sensible, they joined

forces and became ‘Poynton, Regan, & Party’. They agreed to work the

ground from the separate shafts, and decided to go ahead, irrespective

of appearances, and get as much dirt out and cradled as possible before

the inevitable exposure came along. They found plenty of ‘payable dirt’,

and soon the drive ended in a cluster of roomy chambers. They timbered

up many coffins of various ages, burnt tarred canvas and brown

paper, and kept the fan going. Outside they paid the storekeeper with

difficulty and talked of hard times.

But one fine sunny morning, after about a week of partnership, they got

a bad scare. Jim and Kullers were below, getting out dirt for all they

were worth, and Pinter and Dave at their windlasses, when who should

march down from the cemetery gate but Mother Middleton herself. She was

a hard woman to look at. She still wore the old-fashioned crinoline and

her hair in a greasy net; and on this as on most other sober occasions,

she wore the expression of a rough Irish navvy who has just enough drink

to make him nasty and is looking out for an excuse for a row. She had

a stride like a grenadier. A digger had once measured her step by her

footprints in the mud where she had stepped across a gutter: it measured

three feet from toe to heel.

She marched to the grave of Jimmy Middleton, laid a dingy bunch of

flowers thereon, with the gesture of an angry man banging his fist down

on the table, turned on her heel, and marched out. The diggers were dirt

beneath her feet. Presently they heard her drive on in her spring-cart

on her way into town, and they drew breaths of relief.

It was afternoon. Dave and Pinter were feeling tired, and were just

deciding to knock off work for that day when they heard a scuffling in

the direction of the different shafts, and both Jim and Kullers dropped

down and bundled in in a great hurry. Jim chuckled in a silly way, as if

there was something funny, and Kullers guffawed in sympathy.

‘What’s up now?’ demanded Dave apprehensively.

‘Mother Middleton,’ said Jim; ‘she’s blind mad drunk, and she’s got a

bottle in one hand and a new pitchfork in the other, that she’s bringing

out for some one.’

‘How the hell did she drop to it?’ exclaimed Pinter.

‘Dunno,’ said Jim. ‘Anyway she’s coming for us. Listen to her!’

They didn’t have to listen hard. The language which came down the

shaft--they weren’t sure which one--and along the drives was enough to

scare up the dead and make them take to the Bush.

‘Why didn’t you fools make off into the Bush and give us a chance,

instead of giving her a lead here?’ asked Dave.

Jim and Kullers began to wish they had done so.

Mrs Middleton began to throw stones down the shaft--it was Pinter’s--and

they, even the oldest and most anxious, began to grin in spite of

themselves, for they knew she couldn’t hurt them from the surface, and

that, though she had been a working digger herself, she couldn’t fill

both shafts before the fumes of liquor overtook her.

‘I wonder which shaf’ she’ll come down,’ asked Kullers in a tone

befitting the place and occasion.

‘You’d better go and watch your shaft, Pinter,’ said Dave, ‘and Jim and

I’ll watch mine.’

‘I--I won’t,’ said Pinter hurriedly. ‘I’m--I’m a modest man.’

Then they heard a clang in the direction of Pinter’s shaft.

‘She’s thrown her bottle down,’ said Dave.

Jim crawled along the drive a piece, urged by curiosity, and returned

hurriedly.

‘She’s broke the pitchfork off short, to use in the drive, and I believe

she’s coming down.’

‘Her crinoline’ll handicap her,’ said Pinter vacantly, ‘that’s a

comfort.’

‘She’s took it off!’ said Dave excitedly; and peering along Pinter’s

drive, they saw first an elastic-sided boot, then a red-striped

stocking, then a section of scarlet petticoat.

‘Lemme out!’ roared Pinter, lurching forward and making a swimming

motion with his hands in the direction of Dave’s drive. Kullers

was already gone, and Jim well on the way. Dave, lanky and awkward,

scrambled up the shaft last. Mrs Middleton made good time, considering

she had the darkness to face and didn’t know the workings, and when Dave

reached the top he had a tear in the leg of his moleskins, and the blood

ran from a nasty scratch. But he didn’t wait to argue over the price of

a new pair of trousers. He made off through the Bush in the direction of

an encouraging whistle thrown back by Jim.

‘She’s too drunk to get her story listened to to-night,’ said Dave. ‘But

to-morrow she’ll bring the neighbourhood down on us.’

‘And she’s enough, without the neighbourhood,’ reflected Pinter.

Some time after dark they returned cautiously, reconnoitred their camp,

and after hiding in a hollow log such things as they couldn’t carry,

they rolled up their tents like the Arabs, and silently stole away.

The Chinaman’s Ghost.

‘Simple as striking matches,’ said Dave Regan, Bushman; ‘but it gave me

the biggest scare I ever had--except, perhaps, the time I stumbled in

the dark into a six-feet digger’s hole, which might have been eighty

feet deep for all I knew when I was falling. (There was an eighty-feet

shaft left open close by.)

‘It was the night of the day after the Queen’s birthday. I was sinking a

shaft with Jim Bently and Andy Page on the old Redclay goldfield, and

we camped in a tent on the creek. Jim and me went to some races that was

held at Peter Anderson’s pub., about four miles across the ridges, on

Queen’s birthday. Andy was a quiet sort of chap, a teetotaller, and

we’d disgusted him the last time he was out for a holiday with us, so he

stayed at home and washed and mended his clothes, and read an arithmetic

book. (He used to keep the accounts, and it took him most of his spare

time.)

‘Jim and me had a pretty high time. We all got pretty tight after the

races, and I wanted to fight Jim, or Jim wanted to fight me--I don’t

remember which. We were old chums, and we nearly always wanted to fight

each other when we got a bit on, and we’d fight if we weren’t stopped. I

remember once Jim got maudlin drunk and begged and prayed of me to fight

him, as if he was praying for his life. Tom Tarrant, the coach-driver,

used to say that Jim and me must be related, else we wouldn’t hate each

other so much when we were tight and truthful.

‘Anyway, this day, Jim got the sulks, and caught his horse and went home

early in the evening. My dog went home with him too; I must have been

carrying on pretty bad to disgust the dog.

‘Next evening I got disgusted with myself, and started to walk home. I’d

lost my hat, so Peter Anderson lent me an old one of his, that he’d worn

on Ballarat he said: it was a hard, straw, flat, broad-brimmed affair,

and fitted my headache pretty tight. Peter gave me a small flask of

whisky to help me home. I had to go across some flats and up a long dark

gully called Murderer’s Gully, and over a gap called Dead Man’s Gap,

and down the ridge and gullies to Redclay Creek. The lonely flats

were covered with blue-grey gum bush, and looked ghostly enough in the

moonlight, and I was pretty shaky, but I had a pull at the flask and a

mouthful of water at a creek and felt right enough. I began to whistle,

and then to sing: I never used to sing unless I thought I was a couple

of miles out of earshot of any one.

‘Murderer’s Gully was deep and pretty dark most times, and of course it

was haunted. Women and children wouldn’t go through it after dark; and

even me, when I’d grown up, I’d hold my back pretty holler, and whistle,

and walk quick going along there at night-time. We’re all afraid of

ghosts, but we won’t let on.

‘Some one had skinned a dead calf during the day and left it on the

track, and it gave me a jump, I promise you. It looked like two corpses

laid out naked. I finished the whisky and started up over the gap. All

of a sudden a great ‘old man’ kangaroo went across the track with a

thud-thud, and up the siding, and that startled me. Then the naked,

white glistening trunk of a stringy-bark tree, where some one had

stripped off a sheet of bark, started out from a bend in the track in a

shaft of moonlight, and that gave me a jerk. I was pretty shaky before

I started. There was a Chinaman’s grave close by the track on the top

of the gap. An old chow had lived in a hut there for many years, and

fossicked on the old diggings, and one day he was found dead in the

hut, and the Government gave some one a pound to bury him. When I was a

nipper we reckoned that his ghost haunted the gap, and cursed in Chinese

because the bones hadn’t been sent home to China. It was a lonely,

ghostly place enough.

‘It had been a smotheringly hot day and very close coming across the

flats and up the gully--not a breath of air; but now as I got higher I

saw signs of the thunderstorm we’d expected all day, and felt the breath

of a warm breeze on my face. When I got into the top of the gap the

first thing I saw was something white amongst the dark bushes over the

spot where the Chinaman’s grave was, and I stood staring at it with

both eyes. It moved out of the shadow presently, and I saw that it was

a white bullock, and I felt relieved. I’d hardly felt relieved when, all

at once, there came a “pat-pat-pat” of running feet close behind me!

I jumped round quick, but there was nothing there, and while I stood

staring all ways for Sunday, there came a “pat-pat”, then a pause, and

then “pat-pat-pat-pat” behind me again: it was like some one dodging and

running off that time. I started to walk down the track pretty fast,

but hadn’t gone a dozen yards when “pat-pat-pat”, it was close behind me

again. I jerked my eyes over my shoulder but kept my legs going. There

was nothing behind, but I fancied I saw something slip into the Bush to

the right. It must have been the moonlight on the moving boughs; there

was a good breeze blowing now. I got down to a more level track, and

was making across a spur to the main road, when “pat-pat!” “pat-pat-pat,

pat-pat-pat!” it was after me again. Then I began to run--and it began

to run too! “pat-pat-pat” after me all the time. I hadn’t time to look

round. Over the spur and down the siding and across the flat to the road

I went as fast as I could split my legs apart. I had a scared idea that

I was getting a touch of the “jim-jams”, and that frightened me more

than any outside ghost could have done. I stumbled a few times, and

saved myself, but, just before I reached the road, I fell slithering

on to my hands on the grass and gravel. I thought I’d broken both

my wrists. I stayed for a moment on my hands and knees, quaking and

listening, squinting round like a great gohana; I couldn’t hear nor

see anything. I picked myself up, and had hardly got on one end, when

“pat-pat!” it was after me again. I must have run a mile and a half

altogether that night. It was still about three-quarters of a mile to

the camp, and I ran till my heart beat in my head and my lungs choked up

in my throat. I saw our tent-fire and took off my hat to run faster. The

footsteps stopped, then something about the hat touched my fingers, and

I stared at it--and the thing dawned on me. I hadn’t noticed at Peter

Anderson’s--my head was too swimmy to notice anything. It was an old hat

of the style that the first diggers used to wear, with a couple of loose

ribbon ends, three or four inches long, from the band behind. As long

as I walked quietly through the gully, and there was no wind, the tails

didn’t flap, but when I got up into the breeze, they flapped or were

still according to how the wind lifted them or pressed them down flat

on the brim. And when I ran they tapped all the time; and the hat being

tight on my head, the tapping of the ribbon ends against the straw

sounded loud of course.

‘I sat down on a log for a while to get some of my wind back and cool

down, and then I went to the camp as quietly as I could, and had a long

drink of water.

‘“You seem to be a bit winded, Dave,” said Jim Bently, “and mighty

thirsty. Did the Chinaman’s ghost chase you?”

‘I told him not to talk rot, and went into the tent, and lay down on my

bunk, and had a good rest.’

The Loaded Dog.

Dave Regan, Jim Bently, and Andy Page were sinking a shaft at Stony

Creek in search of a rich gold quartz reef which was supposed to exist

in the vicinity. There is always a rich reef supposed to exist in the

vicinity; the only questions are whether it is ten feet or hundreds

beneath the surface, and in which direction. They had struck some

pretty solid rock, also water which kept them baling. They used the

old-fashioned blasting-powder and time-fuse. They’d make a sausage or

cartridge of blasting-powder in a skin of strong calico or canvas, the

mouth sewn and bound round the end of the fuse; they’d dip the cartridge

in melted tallow to make it water-tight, get the drill-hole as dry as

possible, drop in the cartridge with some dry dust, and wad and ram with

stiff clay and broken brick. Then they’d light the fuse and get out of

the hole and wait. The result was usually an ugly pot-hole in the bottom

of the shaft and half a barrow-load of broken rock.

There was plenty of fish in the creek, fresh-water bream, cod, cat-fish,

and tailers. The party were fond of fish, and Andy and Dave of fishing.

Andy would fish for three hours at a stretch if encouraged by a ‘nibble’

or a ‘bite’ now and then--say once in twenty minutes. The butcher was

always willing to give meat in exchange for fish when they caught more

than they could eat; but now it was winter, and these fish wouldn’t

bite. However, the creek was low, just a chain of muddy water-holes,

from the hole with a few bucketfuls in it to the sizable pool with an

average depth of six or seven feet, and they could get fish by baling

out the smaller holes or muddying up the water in the larger ones

till the fish rose to the surface. There was the cat-fish, with spikes

growing out of the sides of its head, and if you got pricked you’d know

it, as Dave said. Andy took off his boots, tucked up his trousers, and

went into a hole one day to stir up the mud with his feet, and he knew

it. Dave scooped one out with his hand and got pricked, and he knew it

too; his arm swelled, and the pain throbbed up into his shoulder, and

down into his stomach too, he said, like a toothache he had once, and

kept him awake for two nights--only the toothache pain had a ‘burred

edge’, Dave said.

Dave got an idea.

‘Why not blow the fish up in the big water-hole with a cartridge?’ he

said. ‘I’ll try it.’

He thought the thing out and Andy Page worked it out. Andy usually put

Dave’s theories into practice if they were practicable, or bore the

blame for the failure and the chaffing of his mates if they weren’t.

He made a cartridge about three times the size of those they used in the

rock. Jim Bently said it was big enough to blow the bottom out of the

river. The inner skin was of stout calico; Andy stuck the end of a

six-foot piece of fuse well down in the powder and bound the mouth of

the bag firmly to it with whipcord. The idea was to sink the cartridge

in the water with the open end of the fuse attached to a float on

the surface, ready for lighting. Andy dipped the cartridge in melted

bees’-wax to make it water-tight. ‘We’ll have to leave it some time

before we light it,’ said Dave, ‘to give the fish time to get over their

scare when we put it in, and come nosing round again; so we’ll want it

well water-tight.’

Round the cartridge Andy, at Dave’s suggestion, bound a strip of sail

canvas--that they used for making water-bags--to increase the force of

the explosion, and round that he pasted layers of stiff brown paper--on

the plan of the sort of fireworks we called ‘gun-crackers’. He let the

paper dry in the sun, then he sewed a covering of two thicknesses

of canvas over it, and bound the thing from end to end with stout

fishing-line. Dave’s schemes were elaborate, and he often worked his

inventions out to nothing. The cartridge was rigid and solid enough

now--a formidable bomb; but Andy and Dave wanted to be sure. Andy sewed

on another layer of canvas, dipped the cartridge in melted tallow,

twisted a length of fencing-wire round it as an afterthought, dipped it

in tallow again, and stood it carefully against a tent-peg, where he’d

know where to find it, and wound the fuse loosely round it. Then he

went to the camp-fire to try some potatoes which were boiling in their

jackets in a billy, and to see about frying some chops for dinner. Dave

and Jim were at work in the claim that morning.

They had a big black young retriever dog--or rather an overgrown pup, a

big, foolish, four-footed mate, who was always slobbering round them

and lashing their legs with his heavy tail that swung round like a

stock-whip. Most of his head was usually a red, idiotic, slobbering grin

of appreciation of his own silliness. He seemed to take life, the world,

his two-legged mates, and his own instinct as a huge joke. He’d retrieve

anything: he carted back most of the camp rubbish that Andy threw

away. They had a cat that died in hot weather, and Andy threw it a good

distance away in the scrub; and early one morning the dog found the cat,

after it had been dead a week or so, and carried it back to camp,

and laid it just inside the tent-flaps, where it could best make

its presence known when the mates should rise and begin to sniff

suspiciously in the sickly smothering atmosphere of the summer sunrise.

He used to retrieve them when they went in swimming; he’d jump in after

them, and take their hands in his mouth, and try to swim out with them,

and scratch their naked bodies with his paws. They loved him for his

good-heartedness and his foolishness, but when they wished to enjoy a

swim they had to tie him up in camp.

He watched Andy with great interest all the morning making the

cartridge, and hindered him considerably, trying to help; but about noon

he went off to the claim to see how Dave and Jim were getting on, and to

come home to dinner with them. Andy saw them coming, and put a panful of

mutton-chops on the fire. Andy was cook to-day; Dave and Jim stood with

their backs to the fire, as Bushmen do in all weathers, waiting till

dinner should be ready. The retriever went nosing round after something

he seemed to have missed.

Andy’s brain still worked on the cartridge; his eye was caught by the

glare of an empty kerosene-tin lying in the bushes, and it struck him

that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to sink the cartridge packed with clay,

sand, or stones in the tin, to increase the force of the explosion. He

may have been all out, from a scientific point of view, but the notion

looked all right to him. Jim Bently, by the way, wasn’t interested in

their ‘damned silliness’. Andy noticed an empty treacle-tin--the

sort with the little tin neck or spout soldered on to the top for the

convenience of pouring out the treacle--and it struck him that this

would have made the best kind of cartridge-case: he would only have had

to pour in the powder, stick the fuse in through the neck, and cork and

seal it with bees’-wax. He was turning to suggest this to Dave, when

Dave glanced over his shoulder to see how the chops were doing--and

bolted. He explained afterwards that he thought he heard the pan

spluttering extra, and looked to see if the chops were burning. Jim

Bently looked behind and bolted after Dave. Andy stood stock-still,

staring after them.

‘Run, Andy! run!’ they shouted back at him. ‘Run!!! Look behind you, you

fool!’ Andy turned slowly and looked, and there, close behind him, was

the retriever with the cartridge in his mouth--wedged into his broadest

and silliest grin. And that wasn’t all. The dog had come round the fire

to Andy, and the loose end of the fuse had trailed and waggled over the

burning sticks into the blaze; Andy had slit and nicked the firing end

of the fuse well, and now it was hissing and spitting properly.

Andy’s legs started with a jolt; his legs started before his brain did,

and he made after Dave and Jim. And the dog followed Andy.

Dave and Jim were good runners--Jim the best--for a short distance; Andy

was slow and heavy, but he had the strength and the wind and could last.

The dog leapt and capered round him, delighted as a dog could be to find

his mates, as he thought, on for a frolic. Dave and Jim kept shouting

back, ‘Don’t foller us! don’t foller us, you coloured fool!’ but Andy

kept on, no matter how they dodged. They could never explain, any

more than the dog, why they followed each other, but so they ran, Dave

keeping in Jim’s track in all its turnings, Andy after Dave, and the

dog circling round Andy--the live fuse swishing in all directions and

hissing and spluttering and stinking. Jim yelling to Dave not to follow

him, Dave shouting to Andy to go in another direction--to ‘spread out’,

and Andy roaring at the dog to go home. Then Andy’s brain began to work,

stimulated by the crisis: he tried to get a running kick at the dog, but

the dog dodged; he snatched up sticks and stones and threw them at the

dog and ran on again. The retriever saw that he’d made a mistake about

Andy, and left him and bounded after Dave. Dave, who had the presence of

mind to think that the fuse’s time wasn’t up yet, made a dive and a grab

for the dog, caught him by the tail, and as he swung round snatched

the cartridge out of his mouth and flung it as far as he could: the dog

immediately bounded after it and retrieved it. Dave roared and cursed at

the dog, who seeing that Dave was offended, left him and went after Jim,

who was well ahead. Jim swung to a sapling and went up it like a native

bear; it was a young sapling, and Jim couldn’t safely get more than ten

or twelve feet from the ground. The dog laid the cartridge, as carefully

as if it was a kitten, at the foot of the sapling, and capered and

leaped and whooped joyously round under Jim. The big pup reckoned that

this was part of the lark--he was all right now--it was Jim who was out

for a spree. The fuse sounded as if it were going a mile a minute. Jim

tried to climb higher and the sapling bent and cracked. Jim fell on his

feet and ran. The dog swooped on the cartridge and followed. It all took

but a very few moments. Jim ran to a digger’s hole, about ten feet deep,

and dropped down into it--landing on soft mud--and was safe. The dog

grinned sardonically down on him, over the edge, for a moment, as if he

thought it would be a good lark to drop the cartridge down on Jim.

‘Go away, Tommy,’ said Jim feebly, ‘go away.’

The dog bounded off after Dave, who was the only one in sight now; Andy

had dropped behind a log, where he lay flat on his face, having suddenly

remembered a picture of the Russo-Turkish war with a circle of

Turks lying flat on their faces (as if they were ashamed) round a

newly-arrived shell.

There was a small hotel or shanty on the creek, on the main road, not

far from the claim. Dave was desperate, the time flew much faster in

his stimulated imagination than it did in reality, so he made for the

shanty. There were several casual Bushmen on the verandah and in the

bar; Dave rushed into the bar, banging the door to behind him. ‘My dog!’

he gasped, in reply to the astonished stare of the publican, ‘the blanky

retriever--he’s got a live cartridge in his mouth----’

The retriever, finding the front door shut against him, had bounded

round and in by the back way, and now stood smiling in the doorway

leading from the passage, the cartridge still in his mouth and the fuse

spluttering. They burst out of that bar. Tommy bounded first after one

and then after another, for, being a young dog, he tried to make friends

with everybody.

The Bushmen ran round corners, and some shut themselves in the stable.

There was a new weather-board and corrugated-iron kitchen and wash-house

on piles in the back-yard, with some women washing clothes inside.

Dave and the publican bundled in there and shut the door--the publican

cursing Dave and calling him a crimson fool, in hurried tones, and

wanting to know what the hell he came here for.

The retriever went in under the kitchen, amongst the piles, but, luckily

for those inside, there was a vicious yellow mongrel cattle-dog sulking

and nursing his nastiness under there--a sneaking, fighting, thieving

canine, whom neighbours had tried for years to shoot or poison. Tommy

saw his danger--he’d had experience from this dog--and started out and

across the yard, still sticking to the cartridge. Half-way across

the yard the yellow dog caught him and nipped him. Tommy dropped the

cartridge, gave one terrified yell, and took to the Bush. The yellow dog

followed him to the fence and then ran back to see what he had dropped.

Nearly a dozen other dogs came from round all the corners and under the

buildings--spidery, thievish, cold-blooded kangaroo-dogs, mongrel sheep-

and cattle-dogs, vicious black and yellow dogs--that slip after you in

the dark, nip your heels, and vanish without explaining--and yapping,

yelping small fry. They kept at a respectable distance round the nasty

yellow dog, for it was dangerous to go near him when he thought he had

found something which might be good for a dog to eat. He sniffed at the

cartridge twice, and was just taking a third cautious sniff when----

It was very good blasting powder--a new brand that Dave had recently got

up from Sydney; and the cartridge had been excellently well made. Andy

was very patient and painstaking in all he did, and nearly as handy as

the average sailor with needles, twine, canvas, and rope.

Bushmen say that that kitchen jumped off its piles and on again. When

the smoke and dust cleared away, the remains of the nasty yellow dog

were lying against the paling fence of the yard looking as if he had

been kicked into a fire by a horse and afterwards rolled in the dust

under a barrow, and finally thrown against the fence from a distance.

Several saddle-horses, which had been ‘hanging-up’ round the verandah,

were galloping wildly down the road in clouds of dust, with broken

bridle-reins flying; and from a circle round the outskirts, from every

point of the compass in the scrub, came the yelping of dogs. Two of them

went home, to the place where they were born, thirty miles away, and

reached it the same night and stayed there; it was not till towards

evening that the rest came back cautiously to make inquiries. One was

trying to walk on two legs, and most of ‘em looked more or less singed;

and a little, singed, stumpy-tailed dog, who had been in the habit of

hopping the back half of him along on one leg, had reason to be glad

that he’d saved up the other leg all those years, for he needed it

now. There was one old one-eyed cattle-dog round that shanty for years

afterwards, who couldn’t stand the smell of a gun being cleaned. He it

was who had taken an interest, only second to that of the yellow dog, in

the cartridge. Bushmen said that it was amusing to slip up on his blind

side and stick a dirty ramrod under his nose: he wouldn’t wait to bring

his solitary eye to bear--he’d take to the Bush and stay out all night.

For half an hour or so after the explosion there were several Bushmen

round behind the stable who crouched, doubled up, against the wall, or

rolled gently on the dust, trying to laugh without shrieking. There

were two white women in hysterics at the house, and a half-caste rushing

aimlessly round with a dipper of cold water. The publican was holding

his wife tight and begging her between her squawks, to ‘hold up for my

sake, Mary, or I’ll lam the life out of ye.’

Dave decided to apologise later on, ‘when things had settled a bit,’ and

went back to camp. And the dog that had done it all, ‘Tommy’, the great,

idiotic mongrel retriever, came slobbering round Dave and lashing his

legs with his tail, and trotted home after him, smiling his broadest,

longest, and reddest smile of amiability, and apparently satisfied for

one afternoon with the fun he’d had.

Andy chained the dog up securely, and cooked some more chops, while Dave

went to help Jim out of the hole.

And most of this is why, for years afterwards, lanky, easy-going

Bushmen, riding lazily past Dave’s camp, would cry, in a lazy drawl and

with just a hint of the nasal twang--

‘’El-lo, Da-a-ve! How’s the fishin’ getting on, Da-a-ve?’

Poisonous Jimmy Gets Left.

I. Dave Regan’s Yarn.

‘When we got tired of digging about Mudgee-Budgee, and getting no gold,’

said Dave Regan, Bushman, ‘me and my mate, Jim Bently, decided to take a

turn at droving; so we went with Bob Baker, the drover, overland with a

big mob of cattle, way up into Northern Queensland.

‘We couldn’t get a job on the home track, and we spent most of our

money, like a pair of fools, at a pub. at a town way up over the border,

where they had a flash barmaid from Brisbane. We sold our pack-horses

and pack-saddles, and rode out of that town with our swags on our

riding-horses in front of us. We had another spree at another place, and

by the time we got near New South Wales we were pretty well stumped.

‘Just the other side of Mulgatown, near the border, we came on a big mob

of cattle in a paddock, and a party of drovers camped on the creek. They

had brought the cattle down from the north and were going no farther

with them; their boss had ridden on into Mulgatown to get the cheques to

pay them off, and they were waiting for him.

‘“And Poisonous Jimmy is waiting for us,” said one of them.

‘Poisonous Jimmy kept a shanty a piece along the road from their camp

towards Mulgatown. He was called “Poisonous Jimmy” perhaps on account

of his liquor, or perhaps because he had a job of poisoning dingoes on a

station in the Bogan scrubs at one time. He was a sharp publican. He had

a girl, and they said that whenever a shearing-shed cut-out on his side

and he saw the shearers coming along the road, he’d say to the girl,

“Run and get your best frock on, Mary! Here’s the shearers comin’.” And

if a chequeman wouldn’t drink he’d try to get him into his bar and shout

for him till he was too drunk to keep his hands out of his pockets.

‘“But he won’t get us,” said another of the drovers. “I’m going to ride

straight into Mulgatown and send my money home by the post as soon as I

get it.”

‘“You’ve always said that, Jack,” said the first drover.

‘We yarned a while, and had some tea, and then me and Jim got on our

horses and rode on. We were burned to bricks and ragged and dusty and

parched up enough, and so were our horses. We only had a few shillings

to carry us four or five hundred miles home, but it was mighty hot and

dusty, and we felt that we must have a drink at the shanty. This was

west of the sixpenny-line at that time--all drinks were a shilling along

here.

‘Just before we reached the shanty I got an idea.

‘“We’ll plant our swags in the scrub,” I said to Jim.

‘“What for?” said Jim.

‘“Never mind--you’ll see,” I said.

‘So we unstrapped our swags and hid them in the mulga scrub by the

side of the road; then we rode on to the shanty, got down, and hung our

horses to the verandah posts.

‘“Poisonous” came out at once, with a smile on him that would have made

anybody home-sick.

‘He was a short nuggety man, and could use his hands, they said; he

looked as if he’d be a nasty, vicious, cool customer in a fight--he

wasn’t the sort of man you’d care to try and swindle a second time.

He had a monkey shave when he shaved, but now it was all frill and

stubble--like a bush fence round a stubble-field. He had a broken nose,

and a cunning, sharp, suspicious eye that squinted, and a cold stony eye

that seemed fixed. If you didn’t know him well you might talk to him for

five minutes, looking at him in the cold stony eye, and then discover

that it was the sharp cunning little eye that was watching you all the

time. It was awful embarrassing. It must have made him awkward to deal

with in a fight.

‘“Good day, mates,” he said.

‘“Good day,” we said.

‘“It’s hot.”

‘“It’s hot.”

‘We went into the bar, and Poisonous got behind the counter.

‘“What are you going to have?” he asked, rubbing up his glasses with a

rag.

‘We had two long-beers.

‘“Never mind that,” said Poisonous, seeing me put my hand in my pocket;

“it’s my shout. I don’t suppose your boss is back yet? I saw him go in

to Mulgatown this morning.”

‘“No, he ain’t back,” I said; “I wish he was. We’re getting tired of

waiting for him. We’ll give him another hour, and then some of us will

have to ride in to see whether he’s got on the boose, and get hold of

him if he has.”

‘“I suppose you’re waiting for your cheques?” he said, turning to fix

some bottles on the shelf.

‘“Yes,” I said, “we are;” and I winked at Jim, and Jim winked back as

solemn as an owl.

‘Poisonous asked us all about the trip, and how long we’d been on the

track, and what sort of a boss we had, dropping the questions offhand

now an’ then, as for the sake of conversation. We could see that he

was trying to get at the size of our supposed cheques, so we answered

accordingly.

‘“Have another drink,” he said, and he filled the pewters up again.

“It’s up to me,” and he set to work boring out the glasses with his rag,

as if he was short-handed and the bar was crowded with customers, and

screwing up his face into what I suppose he considered an innocent or

unconscious expression. The girl began to sidle in and out with a smart

frock and a see-you-after-dark smirk on.

‘“Have you had dinner?” she asked. We could have done with a good meal,

but it was too risky--the drovers’ boss might come along while we were

at dinner and get into conversation with Poisonous. So we said we’d had

dinner.

‘Poisonous filled our pewters again in an offhand way.

‘“I wish the boss would come,” said Jim with a yawn. “I want to get into

Mulgatown to-night, and I want to get some shirts and things before I go

in. I ain’t got a decent rag to me back. I don’t suppose there’s ten bob

amongst the lot of us.”

‘There was a general store back on the creek, near the drovers’ camp.

‘“Oh, go to the store and get what you want,” said Poisonous, taking a

sovereign from the till and tossing it on to the counter. “You can fix

it up with me when your boss comes. Bring your mates along.”

‘“Thank you,” said Jim, taking up the sovereign carelessly and dropping

it into his pocket.

‘“Well, Jim,” I said, “suppose we get back to camp and see how the chaps

are getting on?”

‘“All right,” said Jim.

‘“Tell them to come down and get a drink,” said Poisonous; “or, wait,

you can take some beer along to them if you like,” and he gave us half

a gallon of beer in a billy-can. He knew what the first drink meant with

Bushmen back from a long dry trip.

‘We got on our horses, I holding the billy very carefully, and rode back

to where our swags were.

‘“I say,” said Jim, when we’d strapped the swags to the saddles,

“suppose we take the beer back to those chaps: it’s meant for them, and

it’s only a fair thing, anyway--we’ve got as much as we can hold till we

get into Mulgatown.”

‘“It might get them into a row,” I said, “and they seem decent chaps.

Let’s hang the billy on a twig, and that old swagman that’s coming along

will think there’s angels in the Bush.”

‘“Oh! what’s a row?” said Jim. “They can take care of themselves;

they’ll have the beer anyway and a lark with Poisonous when they take

the can back and it comes to explanations. I’ll ride back to them.”

‘So Jim rode back to the drovers’ camp with the beer, and when he came

back to me he said that the drovers seemed surprised, but they drank

good luck to him.

‘We rode round through the mulga behind the shanty and came out on the

road again on the Mulgatown side: we only stayed at Mulgatown to buy

some tucker and tobacco, then we pushed on and camped for the night

about seven miles on the safe side of the town.’

II. Told by One of the Other Drovers.

‘Talkin’ o’ Poisonous Jimmy, I can tell you a yarn about him. We’d

brought a mob of cattle down for a squatter the other side of Mulgatown.

We camped about seven miles the other side of the town, waitin’ for the

station hands to come and take charge of the stock, while the boss rode

on into town to draw our money. Some of us was goin’ back, though in

the end we all went into Mulgatown and had a boose up with the boss. But

while we was waitin’ there come along two fellers that had been drovin’

up north. They yarned a while, an’ then went on to Poisonous Jimmy’s

place, an’ in about an hour one on ‘em come ridin’ back with a can of

beer that he said Poisonous had sent for us. We all knew Jimmy’s little

games--the beer was a bait to get us on the drunk at his place; but we

drunk the beer, and reckoned to have a lark with him afterwards. When

the boss come back, an’ the station hands to take the bullocks, we

started into Mulgatown. We stopped outside Poisonous’s place an’ handed

the can to the girl that was grinnin’ on the verandah. Poisonous come

out with a grin on him like a parson with a broken nose.

‘“Good day, boys!” he says.

‘“Good day, Poisonous,” we says.

‘“It’s hot,” he says.

‘“It’s blanky hot,” I says.

‘He seemed to expect us to get down. “Where are you off to?” he says.

‘“Mulgatown,” I says. “It will be cooler there,” and we sung out,

“So-long, Poisonous!” and rode on.

‘He stood starin’ for a minute; then he started shoutin’, “Hi! hi

there!” after us, but we took no notice, an’ rode on. When we looked

back last he was runnin’ into the scrub with a bridle in his hand.

‘We jogged along easily till we got within a mile of Mulgatown, when

we heard somebody gallopin’ after us, an’ lookin’ back we saw it was

Poisonous.

‘He was too mad and too winded to speak at first, so he rode along with

us a bit gasping: then he burst out.

‘“Where’s them other two carnal blanks?” he shouted.

‘“What other two?” I asked. “We’re all here. What’s the matter with you

anyway?”

‘“All here!” he yelled. “You’re a lurid liar! What the flamin’ sheol do

you mean by swiggin’ my beer an’ flingin’ the coloured can in me face?

without as much as thank yer! D’yer think I’m a flamin’----!”

‘Oh, but Poisonous Jimmy was wild.

‘“Well, we’ll pay for your dirty beer,” says one of the chaps, puttin’

his hand in his pocket. “We didn’t want yer slush. It tasted as if it

had been used before.”

‘“Pay for it!” yelled Jimmy. “I’ll----well take it out of one of yer

bleedin’ hides!”

‘We stopped at once, and I got down an’ obliged Jimmy for a few rounds.

He was a nasty customer to fight; he could use his hands, and was cool

as a cucumber as soon as he took his coat off: besides, he had one

squirmy little business eye, and a big wall-eye, an’, even if you knowed

him well, you couldn’t help watchin’ the stony eye--it was no good

watchin’ his eyes, you had to watch his hands, and he might have

managed me if the boss hadn’t stopped the fight. The boss was a big,

quiet-voiced man, that didn’t swear.

‘“Now, look here, Myles,” said the boss (Jimmy’s name was Myles)--“Now,

look here, Myles,” sez the boss, “what’s all this about?”

‘“What’s all this about?” says Jimmy, gettin’ excited agen. “Why, two

fellers that belonged to your party come along to my place an’ put up

half-a-dozen drinks, an’ borrered a sovereign, an’ got a can o’ beer on

the strength of their cheques. They sez they was waitin’ for you--an’ I

want my crimson money out o’ some one!”

‘“What was they like?” asks the boss.

‘“Like?” shouted Poisonous, swearin’ all the time. “One was a blanky

long, sandy, sawny feller, and the other was a short, slim feller with

black hair. Your blanky men knows all about them because they had the

blanky billy o’ beer.”

‘“Now, what’s this all about, you chaps?” sez the boss to us.

‘So we told him as much as we knowed about them two fellers.

‘I’ve heard men swear that could swear in a rough shearin’-shed, but I

never heard a man swear like Poisonous Jimmy when he saw how he’d been

left. It was enough to split stumps. He said he wanted to see those

fellers, just once, before he died.

‘He rode with us into Mulgatown, got mad drunk, an’ started out along

the road with a tomahawk after the long sandy feller and the slim dark

feller; but two mounted police went after him an’ fetched him back. He

said he only wanted justice; he said he only wanted to stun them two

fellers till he could give ‘em in charge.

‘They fined him ten bob.’

The Ghostly Door.

Told by one of Dave’s mates.

Dave and I were tramping on a lonely Bush track in New Zealand, making

for a sawmill where we expected to get work, and we were caught in one

of those three-days’ gales, with rain and hail in it and cold enough to

cut off a man’s legs. Camping out was not to be thought of, so we

just tramped on in silence, with the stinging pain coming between our

shoulder-blades--from cold, weariness, and the weight of our swags--and

our boots, full of water, going splosh, splosh, splosh along the

track. We were settled to it--to drag on like wet, weary, muddy working

bullocks till we came to somewhere--when, just before darkness settled

down, we saw the loom of a humpy of some sort on the slope of a

tussock hill, back from the road, and we made for it, without holding a

consultation.

It was a two-roomed hut built of waste timber from a sawmill, and was

either a deserted settler’s home or a hut attached to an abandoned

sawmill round there somewhere. The windows were boarded up. We dumped

our swags under the little verandah and banged at the door, to make

sure; then Dave pulled a couple of boards off a window and looked in:

there was light enough to see that the place was empty. Dave pulled

off some more boards, put his arm in through a broken pane, clicked the

catch back, and then pushed up the window and got in. I handed in the

swags to him. The room was very draughty; the wind came in through

the broken window and the cracks between the slabs, so we tried the

partitioned-off room--the bedroom--and that was better. It had been

lined with chaff-bags, and there were two stretchers left by some

timber-getters or other Bush contractors who’d camped there last; and

there were a box and a couple of three-legged stools.

We carried the remnant of the wood-heap inside, made a fire, and put

the billy on. We unrolled our swags and spread the blankets on the

stretchers; and then we stripped and hung our clothes about the fire

to dry. There was plenty in our tucker-bags, so we had a good feed. I

hadn’t shaved for days, and Dave had a coarse red beard with a twist in

it like an ill-used fibre brush--a beard that got redder the longer it

grew; he had a hooked nose, and his hair stood straight up (I never saw

a man so easy-going about the expression and so scared about the head),

and he was very tall, with long, thin, hairy legs. We must have looked a

weird pair as we sat there, naked, on the low three-legged stools, with

the billy and the tucker on the box between us, and ate our bread and

meat with clasp-knives.

‘I shouldn’t wonder,’ says Dave, ‘but this is the “whare” * where the

murder was that we heard about along the road. I suppose if any one was

to come along now and look in he’d get scared.’ Then after a while he

looked down at the flooring-boards close to my feet, and scratched

his ear, and said, ‘That looks very much like a blood-stain under your

stool, doesn’t it, Jim?’

* ‘Whare’, ‘whorrie’, Maori name for house.

I shifted my feet and presently moved the stool farther away from the

fire--it was too hot.

I wouldn’t have liked to camp there by myself, but I don’t think Dave

would have minded--he’d knocked round too much in the Australian Bush to

mind anything much, or to be surprised at anything; besides, he was more

than half murdered once by a man who said afterwards that he’d mistook

him for some one else: he must have been a very short-sighted murderer.

Presently we put tobacco, matches, and bits of candle we had, on the two

stools by the heads of our bunks, turned in, and filled up and smoked

comfortably, dropping in a lazy word now and again about nothing in

particular. Once I happened to look across at Dave, and saw him sitting

up a bit and watching the door. The door opened very slowly, wide, and

a black cat walked in, looked first at me, then at Dave, and walked out

again; and the door closed behind it.

Dave scratched his ear. ‘That’s rum,’ he said. ‘I could have sworn I

fastened that door. They must have left the cat behind.’

‘It looks like it,’ I said. ‘Neither of us has been on the boose

lately.’

He got out of bed and up on his long hairy spindle-shanks.

The door had the ordinary, common black oblong lock with a brass knob.

Dave tried the latch and found it fast; he turned the knob, opened the

door, and called, ‘Puss--puss--puss!’ but the cat wouldn’t come. He shut

the door, tried the knob to see that the catch had caught, and got into

bed again.

He’d scarcely settled down when the door opened slowly, the black cat

walked in, stared hard at Dave, and suddenly turned and darted out as

the door closed smartly.

I looked at Dave and he looked at me--hard; then he scratched the back

of his head. I never saw a man look so puzzled in the face and scared

about the head.

He got out of bed very cautiously, took a stick of firewood in his hand,

sneaked up to the door, and snatched it open. There was no one there.

Dave took the candle and went into the next room, but couldn’t see the

cat. He came back and sat down by the fire and meowed, and presently

the cat answered him and came in from somewhere--she’d been outside

the window, I suppose; he kept on meowing and she sidled up and rubbed

against his hairy shin. Dave could generally bring a cat that way.

He had a weakness for cats. I’d seen him kick a dog, and hammer a

horse--brutally, I thought--but I never saw him hurt a cat or let any

one else do it. Dave was good to cats: if a cat had a family where Dave

was round, he’d see her all right and comfortable, and only drown a fair

surplus. He said once to me, ‘I can understand a man kicking a dog, or

hammering a horse when it plays up, but I can’t understand a man hurting

a cat.’

He gave this cat something to eat. Then he went and held the light close

to the lock of the door, but could see nothing wrong with it. He found a

key on the mantel-shelf and locked the door. He got into bed again, and

the cat jumped up and curled down at the foot and started her old drum

going, like shot in a sieve. Dave bent down and patted her, to tell her

he’d meant no harm when he stretched out his legs, and then he settled

down again.

We had some books of the ‘Deadwood Dick’ school. Dave was reading ‘The

Grisly Ghost of the Haunted Gulch’, and I had ‘The Dismembered Hand’,

or ‘The Disembowelled Corpse’, or some such names. They were first-class

preparation for a ghost.

I was reading away, and getting drowsy, when I noticed a movement and

saw Dave’s frightened head rising, with the terrified shadow of it on

the wall. He was staring at the door, over his book, with both eyes.

And that door was opening again--slowly--and Dave had locked it! I never

felt anything so creepy: the foot of my bunk was behind the door, and

I drew up my feet as it came open; it opened wide, and stood so. We

waited, for five minutes it seemed, hearing each other breathe, watching

for the door to close; then Dave got out, very gingerly, and up on one

end, and went to the door like a cat on wet bricks.

‘You shot the bolt OUTSIDE the catch,’ I said, as he caught hold of the

door--like one grabs a craw-fish.

‘I’ll swear I didn’t,’ said Dave. But he’d already turned the key a

couple of times, so he couldn’t be sure. He shut and locked the door

again. ‘Now, get out and see for yourself,’ he said.

I got out, and tried the door a couple of times and found it all right.

Then we both tried, and agreed that it was locked.

I got back into bed, and Dave was about half in when a thought struck

him. He got the heaviest piece of firewood and stood it against the

door.

‘What are you doing that for?’ I asked.

‘If there’s a broken-down burglar camped round here, and trying any of

his funny business, we’ll hear him if he tries to come in while we’re

asleep,’ says Dave. Then he got back into bed. We composed our nerves

with the ‘Haunted Gulch’ and ‘The Disembowelled Corpse’, and after a

while I heard Dave snore, and was just dropping off when the stick fell

from the door against my big toe and then to the ground with tremendous

clatter. I snatched up my feet and sat up with a jerk, and so did

Dave--the cat went over the partition. That door opened, only a little

way this time, paused, and shut suddenly. Dave got out, grabbed a stick,

skipped to the door, and clutched at the knob as if it were a nettle,

and the door wouldn’t come!--it was fast and locked! Then Dave’s face

began to look as frightened as his hair. He lit his candle at the fire,

and asked me to come with him; he unlocked the door and we went into the

other room, Dave shading his candle very carefully and feeling his way

slow with his feet. The room was empty; we tried the outer door and

found it locked.

‘It muster gone by the winder,’ whispered Dave. I noticed that he said

‘it’ instead of ‘he’. I saw that he himself was shook up, and it only

needed that to scare me bad.

We went back to the bedroom, had a drink of cold tea, and lit our pipes.

Then Dave took the waterproof cover off his bunk, spread it on the

floor, laid his blankets on top of it, his spare clothes, &c., on top of

them, and started to roll up his swag.

‘What are you going to do, Dave?’ I asked.

‘I’m going to take the track,’ says Dave, ‘and camp somewhere farther

on. You can stay here, if you like, and come on in the morning.’

I started to roll up my swag at once. We dressed and fastened on the

tucker-bags, took up the billies, and got outside without making any

noise. We held our backs pretty hollow till we got down on to the road.

‘That comes of camping in a deserted house,’ said Dave, when we were

safe on the track. No Australian Bushman cares to camp in an abandoned

homestead, or even near it--probably because a deserted home looks

ghostlier in the Australian Bush than anywhere else in the world.

It was blowing hard, but not raining so much.

We went on along the track for a couple of miles and camped on the

sheltered side of a round tussock hill, in a hole where there had been a

landslip. We used all our candle-ends to get a fire alight, but once we

got it started we knocked the wet bark off ‘manuka’ sticks and logs and

piled them on, and soon had a roaring fire. When the ground got a little

drier we rigged a bit of shelter from the showers with some sticks and

the oil-cloth swag-covers; then we made some coffee and got through the

night pretty comfortably. In the morning Dave said, ‘I’m going back to

that house.’

‘What for?’ I said.

‘I’m going to find out what’s the matter with that crimson door. If I

don’t I’ll never be able to sleep easy within a mile of a door so long

as I live.’

So we went back. It was still blowing. The thing was simple enough by

daylight--after a little watching and experimenting. The house was built

of odds and ends and badly fitted. It ‘gave’ in the wind in almost any

direction--not much, not more than an inch or so, but just enough to

throw the door-frame out of plumb and out of square in such a way as to

bring the latch and bolt of the lock clear of the catch (the door-frame

was of scraps joined). Then the door swung open according to the hang of

it; and when the gust was over the house gave back, and the door swung

to--the frame easing just a little in another direction. I suppose

it would take Edison to invent a thing like that, that came about by

accident. The different strengths and directions of the gusts of wind

must have accounted for the variations of the door’s movements--and

maybe the draught of our big fire had helped.

Dave scratched his head a good bit.

‘I never lived in a house yet,’ he said, as we came away--‘I never lived

in a house yet without there was something wrong with it. Gimme a good

tent.’

A Wild Irishman.

About seven years ago I drifted from Out-Back in Australia to

Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, and up country to a little town

called Pahiatua, which meaneth the ‘home of the gods’, and is situated

in the Wairarappa (rippling or sparkling water) district. They have a

pretty little legend to the effect that the name of the district was not

originally suggested by its rivers, streams, and lakes, but by the

tears alleged to have been noticed, by a dusky squire, in the eyes of

a warrior chief who was looking his first, or last--I don’t remember

which--upon the scene. He was the discoverer, I suppose, now I come to

think of it, else the place would have been already named. Maybe the

scene reminded the old cannibal of the home of his childhood.

Pahiatua was not the home of my god; and it rained for five weeks.

While waiting for a remittance, from an Australian newspaper--which, I

anxiously hoped, would arrive in time for enough of it to be left (after

paying board) to take me away somewhere--I spent many hours in the

little shop of a shoemaker who had been a digger; and he told me yarns

of the old days on the West Coast of Middle Island. And, ever and anon,

he returned to one, a hard-case from the West Coast, called ‘The Flour

of Wheat’, and his cousin, and his mate, Dinny Murphy, dead. And ever

and again the shoemaker (he was large, humorous, and good-natured) made

me promise that, when I dropped across an old West Coast digger--no

matter who or what he was, or whether he was drunk or sober--I’d ask him

if he knew the ‘Flour of Wheat’, and hear what he had to say.

I make no attempt to give any one shade of the Irish brogue--it can’t be

done in writing.

‘There’s the little red Irishman,’ said the shoemaker, who was Irish

himself, ‘who always wants to fight when he has a glass in him; and

there’s the big sarcastic dark Irishman who makes more trouble and

fights at a spree than half-a-dozen little red ones put together;

and there’s the cheerful easy-going Irishman. Now the Flour was a

combination of all three and several other sorts. He was known from the

first amongst the boys at Th’ Canary as the Flour o’ Wheat, but no one

knew exactly why. Some said that the right name was the F-l-o-w-e-r, not

F-l-o-u-r, and that he was called that because there was no flower on

wheat. The name might have been a compliment paid to the man’s character

by some one who understood and appreciated it--or appreciated it without

understanding it. Or it might have come of some chance saying of the

Flour himself, or his mates--or an accident with bags of flour. He might

have worked in a mill. But we’ve had enough of that. It’s the man--not

the name. He was just a big, dark, blue-eyed Irish digger. He worked

hard, drank hard, fought hard--and didn’t swear. No man had ever heard

him swear (except once); all things were ‘lovely’ with him. He was

always lucky. He got gold and threw it away.

‘The Flour was sent out to Australia (by his friends) in connection with

some trouble in Ireland in eighteen-something. The date doesn’t matter:

there was mostly trouble in Ireland in those days; and nobody, that

knew the man, could have the slightest doubt that he helped the

trouble--provided he was there at the time. I heard all this from a man

who knew him in Australia. The relatives that he was sent out to were

soon very anxious to see the end of him. He was as wild as they made

them in Ireland. When he had a few drinks, he’d walk restlessly to and

fro outside the shanty, swinging his right arm across in front of him

with elbow bent and hand closed, as if he had a head in chancery, and

muttering, as though in explanation to himself--

‘“Oi must be walkin’ or foightin’!--Oi must be walkin’ or foightin’!--Oi

must be walkin’ or foightin’!”

‘They say that he wanted to eat his Australian relatives before he was

done; and the story goes that one night, while he was on the spree, they

put their belongings into a cart and took to the Bush.

‘There’s no floury record for several years; then the Flour turned up on

the west coast of New Zealand and was never very far from a pub. kept

by a cousin (that he had tracked, unearthed, or discovered somehow) at a

place called “Th’ Canary”. I remember the first time I saw the Flour.

‘I was on a bit of a spree myself, at Th’ Canary, and one evening I was

standing outside Brady’s (the Flour’s cousin’s place) with Tom Lyons and

Dinny Murphy, when I saw a big man coming across the flat with a swag on

his back.

‘“B’ God, there’s the Flour o’ Wheat comin’ this minute,” says Dinny

Murphy to Tom, “an’ no one else.”

‘“B’ God, ye’re right!” says Tom.

‘There were a lot of new chums in the big room at the back, drinking and

dancing and singing, and Tom says to Dinny--

‘“Dinny, I’ll bet you a quid an’ the Flour’ll run against some of those

new chums before he’s an hour on the spot.”

‘But Dinny wouldn’t take him up. He knew the Flour.

‘“Good day, Tom! Good day, Dinny!”

‘“Good day to you, Flour!”

‘I was introduced.

‘“Well, boys, come along,” says the Flour.

‘And so we went inside with him. The Flour had a few drinks, and then

he went into the back-room where the new chums were. One of them was

dancing a jig, and so the Flour stood up in front of him and commenced

to dance too. And presently the new chum made a step that didn’t please

the Flour, so he hit him between the eyes, and knocked him down--fair

an’ flat on his back.

‘“Take that,” he says. “Take that, me lovely whipper-snapper, an’ lay

there! You can’t dance. How dare ye stand up in front of me face to

dance when ye can’t dance?”

‘He shouted, and drank, and gambled, and danced, and sang, and fought

the new chums all night, and in the morning he said--

‘“Well, boys, we had a grand time last night. Come and have a drink with

me.”

‘And of course they went in and had a drink with him.

*****

‘Next morning the Flour was walking along the street, when he met a

drunken, disreputable old hag, known among the boys as the “Nipper”.

‘“Good MORNING, me lovely Flour o’ Wheat!” says she.

‘“Good MORNING, me lovely Nipper!” says the Flour.

‘And with that she outs with a bottle she had in her dress, and smashed

him across the face with it. Broke the bottle to smithereens!

‘A policeman saw her do it, and took her up; and they had the Flour as a

witness, whether he liked it or not. And a lovely sight he looked, with

his face all done up in bloody bandages, and only one damaged eye and a

corner of his mouth on duty.

‘“It’s nothing at all, your Honour,” he said to the S.M.; “only a

pin-scratch--it’s nothing at all. Let it pass. I had no right to speak

to the lovely woman at all.”

‘But they didn’t let it pass,--they fined her a quid.

‘And the Flour paid the fine.

‘But, alas for human nature! It was pretty much the same even in those

days, and amongst those men, as it is now. A man couldn’t do a woman

a good turn without the dirty-minded blackguards taking it for granted

there was something between them. It was a great joke amongst the boys

who knew the Flour, and who also knew the Nipper; but as it was carried

too far in some quarters, it got to be no joke to the Flour--nor to

those who laughed too loud or grinned too long.

*****

‘The Flour’s cousin thought he was a sharp man. The Flour got “stiff”.

He hadn’t any money, and his credit had run out, so he went and got

a blank summons from one of the police he knew. He pretended that he

wanted to frighten a man who owed him some money. Then he filled it up

and took it to his cousin.

‘“What d’ye think of that?” he says, handing the summons across the bar.

“What d’ye think of me lovely Dinny Murphy now?”

‘“Why, what’s this all about?”

‘“That’s what I want to know. I borrowed a five-pound-note off of him a

fortnight ago when I was drunk, an’ now he sends me that.”

‘“Well, I never would have dream’d that of Dinny,” says the cousin,

scratching his head and blinking. “What’s come over him at all?”

‘“That’s what I want to know.”

‘“What have you been doing to the man?”

‘“Divil a thing that I’m aware of.”

‘The cousin rubbed his chin-tuft between his forefinger and thumb.

‘“Well, what am I to do about it?” asked the Flour impatiently.

‘“Do? Pay the man, of course?”

‘“How can I pay the lovely man when I haven’t got the price of a drink

about me?”

‘The cousin scratched his chin.

‘“Well--here, I’ll lend you a five-pound-note for a month or two. Go and

pay the man, and get back to work.”

‘And the Flour went and found Dinny Murphy, and the pair of them had a

howling spree together up at Brady’s, the opposition pub. And the cousin

said he thought all the time he was being had.

. . . . .

‘He was nasty sometimes, when he was about half drunk. For instance,

he’d come on the ground when the Orewell sports were in full swing and

walk round, soliloquising just loud enough for you to hear; and just

when a big event was coming off he’d pass within earshot of some

committee men--who had been bursting themselves for weeks to work the

thing up and make it a success--saying to himself--

‘“Where’s the Orewell sports that I hear so much about? I don’t see

them! Can any one direct me to the Orewell sports?”

‘Or he’d pass a raffle, lottery, lucky-bag, or golden-barrel business of

some sort,--

‘“No gamblin’ for the Flour. I don’t believe in their little shwindles.

It ought to be shtopped. Leadin’ young people ashtray.”

‘Or he’d pass an Englishman he didn’t like,--

‘“Look at Jinneral Roberts! He’s a man! He’s an Irishman! England has

to come to Ireland for its Jinnerals! Luk at Jinneral Roberts in the

marshes of Candyhar!”

*****

‘They always had sports at Orewell Creek on New Year’s Day--except

once--and old Duncan was always there,--never missed it till the day he

died. He was a digger, a humorous and good-hearted “hard-case”. They all

knew “old Duncan”.

‘But one New Year’s Eve he didn’t turn up, and was missed at once.

“Where’s old Duncan? Any one seen old Duncan?” “Oh, he’ll turn up

alright.” They inquired, and argued, and waited, but Duncan didn’t come.

‘Duncan was working at Duffers. The boys inquired of fellows who came

from Duffers, but they hadn’t seen him for two days. They had fully

expected to find him at the creek. He wasn’t at Aliaura nor Notown. They

inquired of men who came from Nelson Creek, but Duncan wasn’t there.

‘“There’s something happened to the lovely man,” said the Flour of Wheat

at last. “Some of us had better see about it.”

‘Pretty soon this was the general opinion, and so a party started out

over the hills to Duffers before daylight in the morning, headed by the

Flour.

‘The door of Duncan’s “whare” was closed--BUT NOT PADLOCKED. The Flour

noticed this, gave his head a jerk, opened the door, and went in. The

hut was tidied up and swept out--even the fireplace. Duncan had “lifted

the boxes” and “cleaned up”, and his little bag of gold stood on a

shelf by his side--all ready for his spree. On the table lay a clean

neckerchief folded ready to tie on. The blankets had been folded neatly

and laid on the bunk, and on them was stretched Old Duncan, with his

arms lying crossed on his chest, and one foot--with a boot on--resting

on the ground. He had his “clean things” on, and was dressed except for

one boot, the necktie, and his hat. Heart disease.

‘“Take your hats off and come in quietly, lads,” said the Flour. “Here’s

the lovely man lying dead in his bunk.”

‘There were no sports at Orewell that New Year. Some one said that the

crowd from Nelson Creek might object to the sports being postponed on

old Duncan’s account, but the Flour said he’d see to that.

‘One or two did object, but the Flour reasoned with them and there were

no sports.

‘And the Flour used to say, afterwards, “Ah, but it was a grand time we

had at the funeral when Duncan died at Duffers.”

. . . . .

‘The Flour of Wheat carried his mate, Dinny Murphy, all the way in from

Th’ Canary to the hospital on his back. Dinny was very bad--the man was

dying of the dysentery or something. The Flour laid him down on a spare

bunk in the reception-room, and hailed the staff.

‘“Inside there--come out!”

‘The doctor and some of the hospital people came to see what was the

matter. The doctor was a heavy swell, with a big cigar, held up in front

of him between two fat, soft, yellow-white fingers, and a dandy little

pair of gold-rimmed eye-glasses nipped onto his nose with a spring.

‘“There’s me lovely mate lying there dying of the dysentry,” says the

Flour, “and you’ve got to fix him up and bring him round.”

‘Then he shook his fist in the doctor’s face and said--

‘“If you let that lovely man die--look out!”

‘The doctor was startled. He backed off at first; then he took a puff at

his cigar, stepped forward, had a careless look at Dinny, and gave some

order to the attendants. The Flour went to the door, turned half round

as he went out, and shook his fist at them again, and said--

‘“If you let that lovely man die--mind!”

‘In about twenty minutes he came back, wheeling a case of whisky in a

barrow. He carried the case inside, and dumped it down on the floor.

‘“There,” he said, “pour that into the lovely man.”

‘Then he shook his fist at such members of the staff as were visible,

and said--

‘“If you let that lovely man die--look out!”

‘They were used to hard-cases, and didn’t take much notice of him, but

he had the hospital in an awful mess; he was there all hours of the day

and night; he would go down town, have a few drinks and a fight maybe,

and then he’d say, “Ah, well, I’ll have to go up and see how me lovely

mate’s getting on.”

‘And every time he’d go up he’d shake his fist at the hospital in

general and threaten to murder ‘em all if they let Dinny Murphy die.

‘Well, Dinny Murphy died one night. The next morning the Flour met the

doctor in the street, and hauled off and hit him between the eyes, and

knocked him down before he had time to see who it was.

‘“Stay there, ye little whipper-snapper,” said the Flour of Wheat; “you

let that lovely man die!”

‘The police happened to be out of town that day, and while they were

waiting for them the Flour got a coffin and carried it up to the

hospital, and stood it on end by the doorway.

‘“I’ve come for me lovely mate!” he said to the scared staff--or as much

of it as he baled up and couldn’t escape him. “Hand him over. He’s going

back to be buried with his friends at Th’ Canary. Now, don’t be sneaking

round and sidling off, you there; you needn’t be frightened; I’ve

settled with the doctor.”

‘But they called in a man who had some influence with the Flour, and

between them--and with the assistance of the prettiest nurse on the

premises--they persuaded him to wait. Dinny wasn’t ready yet; there were

papers to sign; it wouldn’t be decent to the dead; he had to be

prayed over; he had to be washed and shaved, and fixed up decent and

comfortable. Anyway, they’d have him ready in an hour, or take the

consequences.

‘The Flour objected on the ground that all this could be done equally as

well and better by the boys at Th’ Canary. “However,” he said, “I’ll

be round in an hour, and if you haven’t got me lovely mate ready--look

out!” Then he shook his fist sternly at them once more and said--

‘“I know yer dirty tricks and dodges, and if there’s e’er a pin-scratch

on me mate’s body--look out! If there’s a pairin’ of Dinny’s toe-nail

missin’--look out!”

‘Then he went out--taking the coffin with him.

‘And when the police came to his lodgings to arrest him, they found the

coffin on the floor by the side of the bed, and the Flour lying in it on

his back, with his arms folded peacefully on his bosom. He was as

dead drunk as any man could get to be and still be alive. They knocked

air-holes in the coffin-lid, screwed it on, and carried the coffin, the

Flour, and all to the local lock-up. They laid their burden down on the

bare, cold floor of the prison-cell, and then went out, locked the door,

and departed several ways to put the “boys” up to it. And about midnight

the “boys” gathered round with a supply of liquor, and waited, and

somewhere along in the small hours there was a howl, as of a strong

Irishman in Purgatory, and presently the voice of the Flour was heard to

plead in changed and awful tones--

‘“Pray for me soul, boys--pray for me soul! Let bygones be bygones

between us, boys, and pray for me lovely soul! The lovely Flour’s in

Purgatory!”

‘Then silence for a while; and then a sound like a dray-wheel passing

over a packing-case.... That was the only time on record that the Flour

was heard to swear. And he swore then.

‘They didn’t pray for him--they gave him a month. And, when he came

out, he went half-way across the road to meet the doctor, and he--to his

credit, perhaps--came the other half. They had a drink together, and

the Flour presented the doctor with a fine specimen of coarse gold for a

pin.

‘“It was the will o’ God, after all, doctor,” said the Flour. “It was

the will o’ God. Let bygones be bygones between us; gimme your hand,

doctor.... Good-bye.”

‘Then he left for Th’ Canary.’

The Babies in the Bush.

‘Oh, tell her a tale of the fairies bright--

That only the Bushmen know--

Who guide the feet of the lost aright,

Or carry them up through the starry night,

Where the Bush-lost babies go.’

He was one of those men who seldom smile. There are many in the

Australian Bush, where drift wrecks and failures of all stations and

professions (and of none), and from all the world. Or, if they do smile,

the smile is either mechanical or bitter as a rule--cynical. They seldom

talk. The sort of men who, as bosses, are set down by the majority--and

without reason or evidence--as being proud, hard, and selfish,--‘too

mean to live, and too big for their boots.’

But when the Boss did smile his expression was very, very gentle, and

very sad. I have seen him smile down on a little child who persisted in

sitting on his knee and prattling to him, in spite of his silence and

gloom. He was tall and gaunt, with haggard grey eyes--haunted grey eyes

sometimes--and hair and beard thick and strong, but grey. He was not

above forty-five. He was of the type of men who die in harness, with

their hair thick and strong, but grey or white when it should be brown.

The opposite type, I fancy, would be the soft, dark-haired, blue-eyed

men who grow bald sooner than they grow grey, and fat and contented, and

die respectably in their beds.

His name was Head--Walter Head. He was a boss drover on the overland

routes. I engaged with him at a place north of the Queensland border to

travel down to Bathurst, on the Great Western Line in New South Wales,

with something over a thousand head of store bullocks for the Sydney

market. I am an Australian Bushman (with city experience)--a rover, of

course, and a ne’er-do-well, I suppose. I was born with brains and a

thin skin--worse luck! It was in the days before I was married, and I

went by the name of ‘Jack Ellis’ this trip,--not because the police

were after me, but because I used to tell yarns about a man named Jack

Ellis--and so the chaps nicknamed me.

The Boss spoke little to the men: he’d sit at tucker or with his pipe

by the camp-fire nearly as silently as he rode his night-watch round the

big, restless, weird-looking mob of bullocks camped on the dusky

starlit plain. I believe that from the first he spoke oftener and more

confidentially to me than to any other of the droving party. There was a

something of sympathy between us--I can’t explain what it was. It seemed

as though it were an understood thing between us that we understood each

other. He sometimes said things to me which would have needed a deal of

explanation--so I thought--had he said them to any other of the party.

He’d often, after brooding a long while, start a sentence, and break off

with ‘You know, Jack.’ And somehow I understood, without being able to

explain why. We had never met before I engaged with him for this trip.

His men respected him, but he was not a popular boss: he was too gloomy,

and never drank a glass nor ‘shouted’ on the trip: he was reckoned a

‘mean boss’, and rather a nigger-driver.

He was full of Adam Lindsay Gordon, the English-Australian poet who

shot himself, and so was I. I lost an old copy of Gordon’s poems on the

route, and the Boss overheard me inquiring about it; later on he asked

me if I liked Gordon. We got to it rather sheepishly at first, but

by-and-by we’d quote Gordon freely in turn when we were alone in camp.

‘Those are grand lines about Burke and Wills, the explorers, aren’t

they, Jack?’ he’d say, after chewing his cud, or rather the stem of his

briar, for a long while without a word. (He had his pipe in his mouth as

often as any of us, but somehow I fancied he didn’t enjoy it: an empty

pipe or a stick would have suited him just as well, it seemed to me.)

‘Those are great lines,’ he’d say--

‘“In Collins Street standeth a statue tall--

A statue tall on a pillar of stone--

Telling its story to great and small

Of the dust reclaimed from the sand-waste lone.

*****

Weary and wasted, worn and wan,

Feeble and faint, and languid and low,

He lay on the desert a dying man,

Who has gone, my friends, where we all must go.”

That’s a grand thing, Jack. How does it go?--

“With a pistol clenched in his failing hand,

And the film of death o’er his fading eyes,

He saw the sun go down on the sand,”’--

The Boss would straighten up with a sigh that might have been half a yawn--

‘“And he slept and never saw it rise,”’

--speaking with a sort of quiet force all the time.

Then maybe he’d stand with his back to the fire roasting his dusty leggings,

with his hands behind his back and looking out over the dusky plain.

‘“What mattered the sand or the whit’ning chalk,

The blighted herbage or blackened log,

The crooked beak of the eagle-hawk,

Or the hot red tongue of the native dog?”

They don’t matter much, do they, Jack?’

‘Damned if I think they do, Boss!’ I’d say.

‘“The couch was rugged, those sextons rude,

But, in spite of a leaden shroud, we know

That the bravest and fairest are earth-worms’ food

Where once they have gone where we all must go.”’

Once he repeated the poem containing the lines--

‘“Love, when we wandered here together,

Hand in hand through the sparkling weather--

God surely loved us a little then.”

Beautiful lines those, Jack.

“Then skies were fairer and shores were firmer,

And the blue sea over the white sand rolled--

Babble and prattle, and prattle and murmur’--

How does it go, Jack?’ He stood up and turned his face to the light, but

not before I had a glimpse of it. I think that the saddest eyes on earth

are mostly women’s eyes, but I’ve seen few so sad as the Boss’s were

just then.

It seemed strange that he, a Bushman, preferred Gordon’s sea poems to

his horsey and bushy rhymes; but so he did. I fancy his favourite poem

was that one of Gordon’s with the lines--

‘I would that with sleepy soft embraces

The sea would fold me, would find me rest

In the luminous depths of its secret places,

Where the wealth of God’s marvels is manifest!’

He usually spoke quietly, in a tone as though death were in camp; but

after we’d been on Gordon’s poetry for a while he’d end it abruptly

with, ‘Well, it’s time to turn in,’ or, ‘It’s time to turn out,’ or he’d

give me an order in connection with the cattle. He had been a well-to-do

squatter on the Lachlan river-side, in New South Wales, and had been

ruined by the drought, they said. One night in camp, and after smoking

in silence for nearly an hour, he asked--

‘Do you know Fisher, Jack--the man that owns these bullocks?’

‘I’ve heard of him,’ I said. Fisher was a big squatter, with stations

both in New South Wales and in Queensland.

‘Well, he came to my station on the Lachlan years ago without a penny in

his pocket, or decent rag to his back, or a crust in his tucker-bag, and

I gave him a job. He’s my boss now. Ah, well! it’s the way of Australia,

you know, Jack.’

The Boss had one man who went on every droving trip with him; he

was ‘bred’ on the Boss’s station, they said, and had been with him

practically all his life. His name was ‘Andy’. I forget his other name,

if he really had one. Andy had charge of the ‘droving-plant’ (a tilted

two-horse waggonette, in which we carried the rations and horse-feed),

and he did the cooking and kept accounts. The Boss had no head for

figures. Andy might have been twenty-five or thirty-five, or anything in

between. His hair stuck up like a well-made brush all round, and his big

grey eyes also had an inquiring expression. His weakness was girls, or

he theirs, I don’t know which (half-castes not barred). He was, I think,

the most innocent, good-natured, and open-hearted scamp I ever met.

Towards the middle of the trip Andy spoke to me one night alone in camp

about the Boss.

‘The Boss seems to have taken to you, Jack, all right.’

‘Think so?’ I said. I thought I smelt jealousy and detected a sneer.

‘I’m sure of it. It’s very seldom HE takes to any one.’

I said nothing.

Then after a while Andy said suddenly--

‘Look here, Jack, I’m glad of it. I’d like to see him make a chum of

some one, if only for one trip. And don’t you make any mistake about the

Boss. He’s a white man. There’s precious few that know him--precious few

now; but I do, and it’ll do him a lot of good to have some one to yarn

with.’ And Andy said no more on the subject for that trip.

The long, hot, dusty miles dragged by across the blazing plains--big

clearings rather--and through the sweltering hot scrubs, and we reached

Bathurst at last; and then the hot dusty days and weeks and months that

we’d left behind us to the Great North-West seemed as nothing,--as I

suppose life will seem when we come to the end of it.

The bullocks were going by rail from Bathurst to Sydney. We were all one

long afternoon getting them into the trucks, and when we’d finished the

boss said to me--

‘Look here, Jack, you’re going on to Sydney, aren’t you?’

‘Yes; I’m going down to have a fly round.’

‘Well, why not wait and go down with Andy in the morning? He’s going

down in charge of the cattle. The cattle-train starts about daylight. It

won’t be so comfortable as the passenger; but you’ll save your fare, and

you can give Andy a hand with the cattle. You’ve only got to have a

look at ‘em every other station, and poke up any that fall down in the

trucks. You and Andy are mates, aren’t you?’

I said it would just suit me. Somehow I fancied that the Boss seemed

anxious to have my company for one more evening, and, to tell the truth,

I felt really sorry to part with him. I’d had to work as hard as any

of the other chaps; but I liked him, and I believed he liked me. He’d

struck me as a man who’d been quietened down by some heavy trouble, and

I felt sorry for him without knowing what the trouble was.

‘Come and have a drink, Boss,’ I said. The agent had paid us off during

the day.

He turned into a hotel with me.

‘I don’t drink, Jack,’ he said; ‘but I’ll take a glass with you.’

‘I didn’t know you were a teetotaller, Boss,’ I said. I had not been

surprised at his keeping so strictly from the drink on the trip; but now

that it was over it was a different thing.

‘I’m not a teetotaller, Jack,’ he said. ‘I can take a glass or leave

it.’ And he called for a long beer, and we drank ‘Here’s luck!’ to each

other.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I wish I could take a glass or leave it.’ And I meant

it.

Then the Boss spoke as I’d never heard him speak before. I thought for

the moment that the one drink had affected him; but I understood before

the night was over. He laid his hand on my shoulder with a grip like a

man who has suddenly made up his mind to lend you five pounds. ‘Jack!’

he said, ‘there’s worse things than drinking, and there’s worse things

than heavy smoking. When a man who smokes gets such a load of trouble on

him that he can find no comfort in his pipe, then it’s a heavy load.

And when a man who drinks gets so deep into trouble that he can find no

comfort in liquor, then it’s deep trouble. Take my tip for it, Jack.’

He broke off, and half turned away with a jerk of his head, as if

impatient with himself; then presently he spoke in his usual quiet

tone--

‘But you’re only a boy yet, Jack. Never mind me. I won’t ask you to take

the second drink. You don’t want it; and, besides, I know the signs.’

He paused, leaning with both hands on the edge of the counter, and

looking down between his arms at the floor. He stood that way thinking

for a while; then he suddenly straightened up, like a man who’d made up

his mind to something.

‘I want you to come along home with me, Jack,’ he said; ‘we’ll fix you a

shake-down.’

I forgot to tell you that he was married and lived in Bathurst.

‘But won’t it put Mrs Head about?’

‘Not at all. She’s expecting you. Come along; there’s nothing to see in

Bathurst, and you’ll have plenty of knocking round in Sydney. Come on,

we’ll just be in time for tea.’

He lived in a brick cottage on the outskirts of the town--an

old-fashioned cottage, with ivy and climbing roses, like you see in some

of those old settled districts. There was, I remember, the stump of a

tree in front, covered with ivy till it looked like a giant’s club with

the thick end up.

When we got to the house the Boss paused a minute with his hand on the

gate. He’d been home a couple of days, having ridden in ahead of the

bullocks.

‘Jack,’ he said, ‘I must tell you that Mrs Head had a great trouble at

one time. We--we lost our two children. It does her good to talk to a

stranger now and again--she’s always better afterwards; but there’s very

few I care to bring. You--you needn’t notice anything strange. And agree

with her, Jack. You know, Jack.’

‘That’s all right, Boss,’ I said. I’d knocked about the Bush too long,

and run against too many strange characters and things, to be surprised

at anything much.

The door opened, and he took a little woman in his arms. I saw by the

light of a lamp in the room behind that the woman’s hair was grey, and

I reckoned that he had his mother living with him. And--we do have odd

thoughts at odd times in a flash--and I wondered how Mrs Head and her

mother-in-law got on together. But the next minute I was in the room,

and introduced to ‘My wife, Mrs Head,’ and staring at her with both

eyes.

It was his wife. I don’t think I can describe her. For the first minute

or two, coming in out of the dark and before my eyes got used to the

lamp-light, I had an impression as of a little old woman--one of those

fresh-faced, well-preserved, little old ladies--who dressed young, wore

false teeth, and aped the giddy girl. But this was because of Mrs Head’s

impulsive welcome of me, and her grey hair. The hair was not so grey as

I thought at first, seeing it with the lamp-light behind it: it was like

dull-brown hair lightly dusted with flour. She wore it short, and

it became her that way. There was something aristocratic about her

face--her nose and chin--I fancied, and something that you couldn’t

describe. She had big dark eyes--dark-brown, I thought, though they

might have been hazel: they were a bit too big and bright for me, and

now and again, when she got excited, the white showed all round the

pupils--just a little, but a little was enough.

She seemed extra glad to see me. I thought at first that she was a bit

of a gusher.

‘Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come, Mr Ellis,’ she said, giving my hand a

grip. ‘Walter--Mr Head--has been speaking to me about you. I’ve been

expecting you. Sit down by the fire, Mr Ellis; tea will be ready

presently. Don’t you find it a bit chilly?’ She shivered. It was a bit

chilly now at night on the Bathurst plains. The table was set for tea,

and set rather in swell style. The cottage was too well furnished

even for a lucky boss drover’s home; the furniture looked as if it had

belonged to a tony homestead at one time. I felt a bit strange at first,

sitting down to tea, and almost wished that I was having a comfortable

tuck-in at a restaurant or in a pub. dining-room. But she knew a lot

about the Bush, and chatted away, and asked questions about the trip,

and soon put me at my ease. You see, for the last year or two I’d

taken my tucker in my hands,--hunk of damper and meat and a clasp-knife

mostly,--sitting on my heel in the dust, or on a log or a tucker-box.

There was a hard, brown, wrinkled old woman that the Heads called

‘Auntie’. She waited at the table; but Mrs Head kept bustling round

herself most of the time, helping us. Andy came in to tea.

Mrs Head bustled round like a girl of twenty instead of a woman of

thirty-seven, as Andy afterwards told me she was. She had the figure and

movements of a girl, and the impulsiveness and expression too--a womanly

girl; but sometimes I fancied there was something very childish about

her face and talk. After tea she and the Boss sat on one side of the

fire and Andy and I on the other--Andy a little behind me at the corner

of the table.

‘Walter--Mr Head--tells me you’ve been out on the Lachlan river, Mr

Ellis?’ she said as soon as she’d settled down, and she leaned forward,

as if eager to hear that I’d been there.

‘Yes, Mrs Head. I’ve knocked round all about out there.’

She sat up straight, and put the tips of her fingers to the side of her

forehead and knitted her brows. This was a trick she had--she often did

it during the evening. And when she did that she seemed to forget what

she’d said last.

She smoothed her forehead, and clasped her hands in her lap.

‘Oh, I’m so glad to meet somebody from the back country, Mr Ellis,’

she said. ‘Walter so seldom brings a stranger here, and I get tired of

talking to the same people about the same things, and seeing the same

faces. You don’t know what a relief it is, Mr Ellis, to see a new face

and talk to a stranger.’

‘I can quite understand that, Mrs Head,’ I said. And so I could. I never

stayed more than three months in one place if I could help it.

She looked into the fire and seemed to try to think. The Boss

straightened up and stroked her head with his big sun-browned hand, and

then put his arm round her shoulders. This brought her back.

‘You know we had a station out on the Lachlan, Mr Ellis. Did Walter ever

tell you about the time we lived there?’

‘No,’ I said, glancing at the Boss. ‘I know you had a station there;

but, you know, the Boss doesn’t talk much.’

‘Tell Jack, Maggie,’ said the Boss; ‘I don’t mind.’

She smiled. ‘You know Walter, Mr Ellis,’ she said. ‘You won’t mind him.

He doesn’t like me to talk about the children; he thinks it upsets me,

but that’s foolish: it always relieves me to talk to a stranger.’ She

leaned forward, eagerly it seemed, and went on quickly: ‘I’ve been

wanting to tell you about the children ever since Walter spoke to me

about you. I knew you would understand directly I saw your face. These

town people don’t understand. I like to talk to a Bushman. You know we

lost our children out on the station. The fairies took them. Did Walter

ever tell you about the fairies taking the children away?’

This was a facer. ‘I--I beg pardon,’ I commenced, when Andy gave me a

dig in the back. Then I saw it all.

‘No, Mrs Head. The Boss didn’t tell me about that.’

‘You surely know about the Bush Fairies, Mr Ellis,’ she said, her big

eyes fixed on my face--‘the Bush Fairies that look after the little ones

that are lost in the Bush, and take them away from the Bush if they are

not found? You’ve surely heard of them, Mr Ellis? Most Bushmen have that

I’ve spoken to. Maybe you’ve seen them? Andy there has?’ Andy gave me

another dig.

‘Of course I’ve heard of them, Mrs Head,’ I said; ‘but I can’t swear

that I’ve seen one.’

‘Andy has. Haven’t you, Andy?’

‘Of course I have, Mrs Head. Didn’t I tell you all about it the last

time we were home?’

‘And didn’t you ever tell Mr Ellis, Andy?’

‘Of course he did!’ I said, coming to Andy’s rescue; ‘I remember it now.

You told me that night we camped on the Bogan river, Andy.’

‘Of course!’ said Andy.

‘Did he tell you about finding a lost child and the fairy with it?’

‘Yes,’ said Andy; ‘I told him all about that.’

‘And the fairy was just going to take the child away when Andy found it,

and when the fairy saw Andy she flew away.’

‘Yes,’ I said; ‘that’s what Andy told me.’

‘And what did you say the fairy was like, Andy?’ asked Mrs Head, fixing

her eyes on his face.

‘Like. It was like one of them angels you see in Bible pictures, Mrs

Head,’ said Andy promptly, sitting bolt upright, and keeping his big

innocent grey eyes fixed on hers lest she might think he was telling

lies. ‘It was just like the angel in that Christ-in-the-stable picture

we had at home on the station--the right-hand one in blue.’

She smiled. You couldn’t call it an idiotic smile, nor the foolish

smile you see sometimes in melancholy mad people. It was more of a happy

childish smile.

‘I was so foolish at first, and gave poor Walter and the doctors a lot

of trouble,’ she said. ‘Of course it never struck me, until afterwards,

that the fairies had taken the children.’

She pressed the tips of the fingers of both hands to her forehead, and

sat so for a while; then she roused herself again--

‘But what am I thinking about? I haven’t started to tell you about the

children at all yet. Auntie! bring the children’s portraits, will you,

please? You’ll find them on my dressing-table.’

The old woman seemed to hesitate.

‘Go on, Auntie, and do what I ask you,’ said Mrs Head. ‘Don’t be

foolish. You know I’m all right now.’

‘You mustn’t take any notice of Auntie, Mr Ellis,’ she said with a

smile, while the old woman’s back was turned. ‘Poor old body, she’s a

bit crotchety at times, as old women are. She doesn’t like me to get

talking about the children. She’s got an idea that if I do I’ll start

talking nonsense, as I used to do the first year after the children were

lost. I was very foolish then, wasn’t I, Walter?’

‘You were, Maggie,’ said the Boss. ‘But that’s all past. You mustn’t

think of that time any more.’

‘You see,’ said Mrs Head, in explanation to me, ‘at first nothing would

drive it out of my head that the children had wandered about until they

perished of hunger and thirst in the Bush. As if the Bush Fairies would

let them do that.’

‘You were very foolish, Maggie,’ said the Boss; ‘but don’t think about

that.’

The old woman brought the portraits, a little boy and a little girl:

they must have been very pretty children.

‘You see,’ said Mrs Head, taking the portraits eagerly, and giving them

to me one by one, ‘we had these taken in Sydney some years before the

children were lost; they were much younger then. Wally’s is not a good

portrait; he was teething then, and very thin. That’s him standing on

the chair. Isn’t the pose good? See, he’s got one hand and one little

foot forward, and an eager look in his eyes. The portrait is very dark,

and you’ve got to look close to see the foot. He wants a toy rabbit that

the photographer is tossing up to make him laugh. In the next portrait

he’s sitting on the chair--he’s just settled himself to enjoy the fun.

But see how happy little Maggie looks! You can see my arm where I was

holding her in the chair. She was six months old then, and little Wally

had just turned two.’

She put the portraits up on the mantel-shelf.

‘Let me see; Wally (that’s little Walter, you know)--Wally was five and

little Maggie three and a half when we lost them. Weren’t they, Walter?’

‘Yes, Maggie,’ said the Boss.

‘You were away, Walter, when it happened.’

‘Yes, Maggie,’ said the Boss--cheerfully, it seemed to me--‘I was away.’

‘And we couldn’t find you, Walter. You see,’ she said to me, ‘Walter--Mr

Head--was away in Sydney on business, and we couldn’t find his address.

It was a beautiful morning, though rather warm, and just after the

break-up of the drought. The grass was knee-high all over the run. It

was a lonely place; there wasn’t much bush cleared round the homestead,

just a hundred yards or so, and the great awful scrubs ran back from the

edges of the clearing all round for miles and miles--fifty or a hundred

miles in some directions without a break; didn’t they, Walter?’

‘Yes, Maggie.’

‘I was alone at the house except for Mary, a half-caste girl we had, who

used to help me with the housework and the children. Andy was out on the

run with the men, mustering sheep; weren’t you, Andy?’

‘Yes, Mrs Head.’

‘I used to watch the children close as they got to run about, because

if they once got into the edge of the scrub they’d be lost; but this

morning little Wally begged hard to be let take his little sister down

under a clump of blue-gums in a corner of the home paddock to gather

buttercups. You remember that clump of gums, Walter?’

‘I remember, Maggie.’

‘“I won’t go through the fence a step, mumma,” little Wally said. I

could see Old Peter--an old shepherd and station-hand we had--I could

see him working on a dam we were making across a creek that ran down

there. You remember Old Peter, Walter?’

‘Of course I do, Maggie.’

‘I knew that Old Peter would keep an eye to the children; so I told

little Wally to keep tight hold of his sister’s hand and go straight

down to Old Peter and tell him I sent them.’

She was leaning forward with her hands clasping her knee, and telling me

all this with a strange sort of eagerness.

‘The little ones toddled off hand in hand, with their other hands

holding fast their straw hats. “In case a bad wind blowed,” as little

Maggie said. I saw them stoop under the first fence, and that was the

last that any one saw of them.’

‘Except the fairies, Maggie,’ said the Boss quickly.

‘Of course, Walter, except the fairies.’

She pressed her fingers to her temples again for a minute.

‘It seems that Old Peter was going to ride out to the musterers’ camp

that morning with bread for the men, and he left his work at the dam

and started into the Bush after his horse just as I turned back into the

house, and before the children got near him. They either followed

him for some distance or wandered into the Bush after flowers or

butterflies----’ She broke off, and then suddenly asked me, ‘Do you

think the Bush Fairies would entice children away, Mr Ellis?’

The Boss caught my eye, and frowned and shook his head slightly.

‘No. I’m sure they wouldn’t, Mrs Head,’ I said--‘at least not from what

I know of them.’

She thought, or tried to think, again for a while, in her helpless

puzzled way. Then she went on, speaking rapidly, and rather

mechanically, it seemed to me--