‘The first I knew of it was when Peter came to the house about an hour

afterwards, leading his horse, and without the children. I said--I

said, “O my God! where’s the children?”’ Her fingers fluttered up to her

temples.

‘Don’t mind about that, Maggie,’ said the Boss, hurriedly, stroking her

head. ‘Tell Jack about the fairies.’

‘You were away at the time, Walter?’

‘Yes, Maggie.’

‘And we couldn’t find you, Walter?’

‘No, Maggie,’ very gently. He rested his elbow on his knee and his chin

on his hand, and looked into the fire.

‘It wasn’t your fault, Walter; but if you had been at home do you think

the fairies would have taken the children?’

‘Of course they would, Maggie. They had to: the children were lost.’

‘And they’re bringing the children home next year?’

‘Yes, Maggie--next year.’

She lifted her hands to her head in a startled way, and it was some time

before she went on again. There was no need to tell me about the lost

children. I could see it all. She and the half-caste rushing towards

where the children were seen last, with Old Peter after them. The

hurried search in the nearer scrub. The mother calling all the time

for Maggie and Wally, and growing wilder as the minutes flew past. Old

Peter’s ride to the musterers’ camp. Horsemen seeming to turn up in no

time and from nowhere, as they do in a case like this, and no matter

how lonely the district. Bushmen galloping through the scrub in all

directions. The hurried search the first day, and the mother mad with

anxiety as night came on. Her long, hopeless, wild-eyed watch through

the night; starting up at every sound of a horse’s hoof, and reading

the worst in one glance at the rider’s face. The systematic work of the

search-parties next day and the days following. How those days do fly

past. The women from the next run or selection, and some from the town,

driving from ten or twenty miles, perhaps, to stay with and try to

comfort the mother. [‘Put the horse to the cart, Jim: I must go to that

poor woman!’) Comforting her with improbable stories of children who had

been lost for days, and were none the worse for it when they were

found. The mounted policemen out with the black trackers. Search-parties

cooeeing to each other about the Bush, and lighting signal-fires. The

reckless break-neck rides for news or more help. And the Boss himself,

wild-eyed and haggard, riding about the Bush with Andy and one or two

others perhaps, and searching hopelessly, days after the rest had given

up all hope of finding the children alive. All this passed before me as

Mrs Head talked, her voice sounding the while as if she were in another

room; and when I roused myself to listen, she was on to the fairies

again.

‘It was very foolish of me, Mr Ellis. Weeks after--months after, I

think--I’d insist on going out on the verandah at dusk and calling for

the children. I’d stand there and call “Maggie!” and “Wally!” until

Walter took me inside; sometimes he had to force me inside. Poor Walter!

But of course I didn’t know about the fairies then, Mr Ellis. I was

really out of my mind for a time.’

‘No wonder you were, Mrs Head,’ I said. ‘It was terrible trouble.’

‘Yes, and I made it worse. I was so selfish in my trouble. But it’s all

right now, Walter,’ she said, rumpling the Boss’s hair. ‘I’ll never be

so foolish again.’

‘Of course you won’t, Maggie.’

‘We’re very happy now, aren’t we, Walter?’

‘Of course we are, Maggie.’

‘And the children are coming back next year.’

‘Next year, Maggie.’

He leaned over the fire and stirred it up.

‘You mustn’t take any notice of us, Mr Ellis,’ she went on. ‘Poor Walter

is away so much that I’m afraid I make a little too much of him when he

does come home.’

She paused and pressed her fingers to her temples again. Then she said

quickly--

‘They used to tell me that it was all nonsense about the fairies, but

they were no friends of mine. I shouldn’t have listened to them, Walter.

You told me not to. But then I was really not in my right mind.’

‘Who used to tell you that, Mrs Head?’ I asked.

‘The Voices,’ she said; ‘you know about the Voices, Walter?’

‘Yes, Maggie. But you don’t hear the Voices now, Maggie?’ he asked

anxiously. ‘You haven’t heard them since I’ve been away this time, have

you, Maggie?’

‘No, Walter. They’ve gone away a long time. I hear voices now sometimes,

but they’re the Bush Fairies’ voices. I hear them calling Maggie and

Wally to come with them.’ She paused again. ‘And sometimes I think I

hear them call me. But of course I couldn’t go away without you, Walter.

But I’m foolish again. I was going to ask you about the other voices, Mr

Ellis. They used to say that it was madness about the fairies; but then,

if the fairies hadn’t taken the children, Black Jimmy, or the black

trackers with the police, could have tracked and found them at once.’

‘Of course they could, Mrs Head,’ I said.

‘They said that the trackers couldn’t track them because there was rain

a few hours after the children were lost. But that was ridiculous. It

was only a thunderstorm.’

‘Why!’ I said, ‘I’ve known the blacks to track a man after a week’s

heavy rain.’

She had her head between her fingers again, and when she looked up it

was in a scared way.

‘Oh, Walter!’ she said, clutching the Boss’s arm; ‘whatever have I been

talking about? What must Mr Ellis think of me? Oh! why did you let me

talk like that?’

He put his arm round her. Andy nudged me and got up.

‘Where are you going, Mr Ellis?’ she asked hurriedly. ‘You’re not going

to-night. Auntie’s made a bed for you in Andy’s room. You mustn’t mind

me.’

‘Jack and Andy are going out for a little while,’ said the Boss.

‘They’ll be in to supper. We’ll have a yarn, Maggie.’

‘Be sure you come back to supper, Mr Ellis,’ she said. ‘I really don’t

know what you must think of me,--I’ve been talking all the time.’

‘Oh, I’ve enjoyed myself, Mrs Head,’ I said; and Andy hooked me out.

‘She’ll have a good cry and be better now,’ said Andy when we got away

from the house. ‘She might be better for months. She has been fairly

reasonable for over a year, but the Boss found her pretty bad when he

came back this time. It upset him a lot, I can tell you. She has turns

now and again, and always ends up like she did just now. She gets a

longing to talk about it to a Bushman and a stranger; it seems to do her

good. The doctor’s against it, but doctors don’t know everything.’

‘It’s all true about the children, then?’ I asked.

‘It’s cruel true,’ said Andy.

‘And were the bodies never found?’

‘Yes;’ then, after a long pause, ‘I found them.’

‘You did!’

‘Yes; in the scrub, and not so very far from home either--and in a

fairly clear space. It’s a wonder the search-parties missed it; but it

often happens that way. Perhaps the little ones wandered a long way and

came round in a circle. I found them about two months after they were

lost. They had to be found, if only for the Boss’s sake. You see, in

a case like this, and when the bodies aren’t found, the parents never

quite lose the idea that the little ones are wandering about the Bush

to-night (it might be years after) and perishing from hunger, thirst,

or cold. That mad idea haunts ‘em all their lives. It’s the same, I

believe, with friends drowned at sea. Friends ashore are haunted for a

long while with the idea of the white sodden corpse tossing about and

drifting round in the water.’

‘And you never told Mrs Head about the children being found?’

‘Not for a long time. It wouldn’t have done any good. She was raving

mad for months. He took her to Sydney and then to Melbourne--to the best

doctors he could find in Australia. They could do no good, so he sold

the station--sacrificed everything, and took her to England.’

‘To England?’

‘Yes; and then to Germany to a big German doctor there. He’d offer a

thousand pounds where they only wanted fifty. It was no good. She

got worse in England, and raved to go back to Australia and find the

children. The doctors advised him to take her back, and he did. He spent

all his money, travelling saloon, and with reserved cabins, and a

nurse, and trying to get her cured; that’s why he’s droving now. She was

restless in Sydney. She wanted to go back to the station and wait there

till the fairies brought the children home. She’d been getting the fairy

idea into her head slowly all the time. The Boss encouraged it. But the

station was sold, and he couldn’t have lived there anyway without going

mad himself. He’d married her from Bathurst. Both of them have got

friends and relations here, so he thought best to bring her here. He

persuaded her that the fairies were going to bring the children here.

Everybody’s very kind to them. I think it’s a mistake to run away from a

town where you’re known, in a case like this, though most people do it.

It was years before he gave up hope. I think he has hopes yet--after

she’s been fairly well for a longish time.’

‘And you never tried telling her that the children were found?’

‘Yes; the Boss did. The little ones were buried on the Lachlan river at

first; but the Boss got a horror of having them buried in the Bush, so

he had them brought to Sydney and buried in the Waverley Cemetery near

the sea. He bought the ground, and room for himself and Maggie when they

go out. It’s all the ground he owns in wide Australia, and once he had

thousands of acres. He took her to the grave one day. The doctors were

against it; but he couldn’t rest till he tried it. He took her out, and

explained it all to her. She scarcely seemed interested. She read the

names on the stone, and said it was a nice stone, and asked questions

about how the children were found and brought here. She seemed quite

sensible, and very cool about it. But when he got her home she was back

on the fairy idea again. He tried another day, but it was no use; so

then he let it be. I think it’s better as it is. Now and again, at her

best, she seems to understand that the children were found dead, and

buried, and she’ll talk sensibly about it, and ask questions in a quiet

way, and make him promise to take her to Sydney to see the grave

next time he’s down. But it doesn’t last long, and she’s always worse

afterwards.’

We turned into a bar and had a beer. It was a very quiet drink. Andy

‘shouted’ in his turn, and while I was drinking the second beer a

thought struck me.

‘The Boss was away when the children were lost?’

‘Yes,’ said Andy.

‘Strange you couldn’t find him.’

‘Yes, it was strange; but HE’LL have to tell you about that. Very likely

he will; it’s either all or nothing with him.’

‘I feel damned sorry for the Boss,’ I said.

‘You’d be sorrier if you knew all,’ said Andy. ‘It’s the worst trouble

that can happen to a man. It’s like living with the dead. It’s--it’s

like a man living with his dead wife.’

When we went home supper was ready. We found Mrs Head, bright and

cheerful, bustling round. You’d have thought her one of the happiest and

brightest little women in Australia. Not a word about children or the

fairies. She knew the Bush, and asked me all about my trips. She told

some good Bush stories too. It was the pleasantest hour I’d spent for a

long time.

‘Good night, Mr Ellis,’ she said brightly, shaking hands with me when

Andy and I were going to turn in. ‘And don’t forget your pipe. Here it

is! I know that Bushmen like to have a whiff or two when they turn

in. Walter smokes in bed. I don’t mind. You can smoke all night if you

like.’

‘She seems all right,’ I said to Andy when we were in our room.

He shook his head mournfully. We’d left the door ajar, and we could hear

the Boss talking to her quietly. Then we heard her speak; she had a very

clear voice.

‘Yes, I’ll tell you the truth, Walter. I’ve been deceiving you, Walter,

all the time, but I did it for the best. Don’t be angry with me, Walter!

The Voices did come back while you were away. Oh, how I longed for you

to come back! They haven’t come since you’ve been home, Walter. You

must stay with me a while now. Those awful Voices kept calling me, and

telling me lies about the children, Walter! They told me to kill myself;

they told me it was all my own fault--that I killed the children. They

said I was a drag on you, and they’d laugh--Ha! ha! ha!--like that.

They’d say, “Come on, Maggie; come on, Maggie.” They told me to come to

the river, Walter.’

Andy closed the door. His face was very miserable.

We turned in, and I can tell you I enjoyed a soft white bed after months

and months of sleeping out at night, between watches, on the hard ground

or the sand, or at best on a few boughs when I wasn’t too tired to pull

them down, and my saddle for a pillow.

But the story of the children haunted me for an hour or two. I’ve never

since quite made up my mind as to why the Boss took me home. Probably

he really did think it would do his wife good to talk to a stranger;

perhaps he wanted me to understand--maybe he was weakening as he grew

older, and craved for a new word or hand-grip of sympathy now and then.

When I did get to sleep I could have slept for three or four days, but

Andy roused me out about four o’clock. The old woman that they called

Auntie was up and had a good breakfast of eggs and bacon and coffee

ready in the detached kitchen at the back. We moved about on tiptoe and

had our breakfast quietly.

‘The wife made me promise to wake her to see to our breakfast and say

Good-bye to you; but I want her to sleep this morning, Jack,’ said the

Boss. ‘I’m going to walk down as far as the station with you. She made

up a parcel of fruit and sandwiches for you and Andy. Don’t forget it.’

Andy went on ahead. The Boss and I walked down the wide silent street,

which was also the main road; and we walked two or three hundred yards

without speaking. He didn’t seem sociable this morning, or any way

sentimental; when he did speak it was something about the cattle.

But I had to speak; I felt a swelling and rising up in my chest, and at

last I made a swallow and blurted out--

‘Look here, Boss, old chap! I’m damned sorry!’

Our hands came together and gripped. The ghostly Australian daybreak was

over the Bathurst plains.

We went on another hundred yards or so, and then the Boss said quietly--

‘I was away when the children were lost, Jack. I used to go on a howling

spree every six or nine months. Maggie never knew. I’d tell her I had to

go to Sydney on business, or Out-Back to look after some stock. When

the children were lost, and for nearly a fortnight after, I was beastly

drunk in an out-of-the-way shanty in the Bush--a sly grog-shop. The old

brute that kept it was too true to me. He thought that the story of the

lost children was a trick to get me home, and he swore that he hadn’t

seen me. He never told me. I could have found those children, Jack. They

were mostly new chums and fools about the run, and not one of the three

policemen was a Bushman. I knew those scrubs better than any man in the

country.’

I reached for his hand again, and gave it a grip. That was all I could

do for him.

‘Good-bye, Jack!’ he said at the door of the brake-van. ‘Good-bye,

Andy!--keep those bullocks on their feet.’

The cattle-train went on towards the Blue Mountains. Andy and I sat

silent for a while, watching the guard fry three eggs on a plate over a

coal-stove in the centre of the van.

‘Does the boss never go to Sydney?’ I asked.

‘Very seldom,’ said Andy, ‘and then only when he has to, on business.

When he finishes his business with the stock agents, he takes a run out

to Waverley Cemetery perhaps, and comes home by the next train.’

After a while I said, ‘He told me about the drink, Andy--about his being

on the spree when the children were lost.’

‘Well, Jack,’ said Andy, ‘that’s the thing that’s been killing him ever

since, and it happened over ten years ago.’

A Bush Dance.

‘Tap, tap, tap, tap.’

The little schoolhouse and residence in the scrub was lighted brightly

in the midst of the ‘close’, solid blackness of that moonless December

night, when the sky and stars were smothered and suffocated by drought

haze.

It was the evening of the school children’s ‘Feast’. That is to say that

the children had been sent, and ‘let go’, and the younger ones ‘fetched’

through the blazing heat to the school, one day early in the holidays,

and raced--sometimes in couples tied together by the legs--and caked,

and bunned, and finally improved upon by the local Chadband, and got

rid of. The schoolroom had been cleared for dancing, the maps rolled and

tied, the desks and blackboards stacked against the wall outside. Tea

was over, and the trestles and boards, whereon had been spread better

things than had been provided for the unfortunate youngsters, had been

taken outside to keep the desks and blackboards company.

On stools running end to end along one side of the room sat about twenty

more or less blooming country girls of from fifteen to twenty odd.

On the rest of the stools, running end to end along the other wall, sat

about twenty more or less blooming chaps.

It was evident that something was seriously wrong. None of the girls

spoke above a hushed whisper. None of the men spoke above a hushed oath.

Now and again two or three sidled out, and if you had followed them you

would have found that they went outside to listen hard into the darkness

and to swear.

‘Tap, tap, tap.’

The rows moved uneasily, and some of the girls turned pale faces

nervously towards the side-door, in the direction of the sound.

‘Tap--tap.’

The tapping came from the kitchen at the rear of the teacher’s

residence, and was uncomfortably suggestive of a coffin being made: it

was also accompanied by a sickly, indescribable odour--more like that of

warm cheap glue than anything else.

In the schoolroom was a painful scene of strained listening. Whenever

one of the men returned from outside, or put his head in at the door,

all eyes were fastened on him in the flash of a single eye, and then

withdrawn hopelessly. At the sound of a horse’s step all eyes and ears

were on the door, till some one muttered, ‘It’s only the horses in the

paddock.’

Some of the girls’ eyes began to glisten suspiciously, and at last the

belle of the party--a great, dark-haired, pink-and-white Blue Mountain

girl, who had been sitting for a full minute staring before her, with

blue eyes unnaturally bright, suddenly covered her face with her hands,

rose, and started blindly from the room, from which she was steered in

a hurry by two sympathetic and rather ‘upset’ girl friends, and as she

passed out she was heard sobbing hysterically--

‘Oh, I can’t help it! I did want to dance! It’s a sh-shame! I can’t help

it! I--I want to dance! I rode twenty miles to dance--and--and I want to

dance!’

A tall, strapping young Bushman rose, without disguise, and followed the

girl out. The rest began to talk loudly of stock, dogs, and horses, and

other Bush things; but above their voices rang out that of the girl from

the outside--being man comforted--

‘I can’t help it, Jack! I did want to dance! I--I had such--such--a

job--to get mother--and--and father to let me come--and--and now!’

The two girl friends came back. ‘He sez to leave her to him,’ they

whispered, in reply to an interrogatory glance from the schoolmistress.

‘It’s--it’s no use, Jack!’ came the voice of grief. ‘You don’t know

what--what father and mother--is. I--I won’t--be able--to ge-get

away--again--for--for--not till I’m married, perhaps.’

The schoolmistress glanced uneasily along the row of girls. ‘I’ll take

her into my room and make her lie down,’ she whispered to her sister,

who was staying with her. ‘She’ll start some of the other girls

presently--it’s just the weather for it,’ and she passed out quietly.

That schoolmistress was a woman of penetration.

A final ‘tap-tap’ from the kitchen; then a sound like the squawk of a

hurt or frightened child, and the faces in the room turned quickly in

that direction and brightened. But there came a bang and a sound like

‘damn!’ and hopelessness settled down.

A shout from the outer darkness, and most of the men and some of the

girls rose and hurried out. Fragments of conversation heard in the

darkness--

‘It’s two horses, I tell you!’

‘It’s three, you----!’

‘Lay you----!’

‘Put the stuff up!’

A clack of gate thrown open.

‘Who is it, Tom?’

Voices from gatewards, yelling, ‘Johnny Mears! They’ve got Johnny

Mears!’

Then rose yells, and a cheer such as is seldom heard in scrub-lands.

Out in the kitchen long Dave Regan grabbed, from the far side of the

table, where he had thrown it, a burst and battered concertina, which

he had been for the last hour vainly trying to patch and make air-tight;

and, holding it out towards the back-door, between his palms, as a

football is held, he let it drop, and fetched it neatly on the toe of

his riding-boot. It was a beautiful kick, the concertina shot out into

the blackness, from which was projected, in return, first a short,

sudden howl, then a face with one eye glaring and the other covered by

an enormous brick-coloured hand, and a voice that wanted to know who

shot ‘that lurid loaf of bread?’

But from the schoolroom was heard the loud, free voice of Joe Matthews,

M.C.,--

‘Take yer partners! Hurry up! Take yer partners! They’ve got Johnny

Mears with his fiddle!’

The Buck-Jumper.

Saturday afternoon.

There were about a dozen Bush natives, from anywhere, most of them lanky

and easy-going, hanging about the little slab-and-bark hotel on the

edge of the scrub at Capertee Camp (a teamster’s camp) when Cob & Co.’s

mail-coach and six came dashing down the siding from round Crown Ridge,

in all its glory, to the end of the twelve-mile stage. Some wiry,

ill-used hacks were hanging to the fence and to saplings about the

place. The fresh coach-horses stood ready in a stock-yard close to the

shanty. As the coach climbed the nearer bank of the creek at the foot of

the ridge, six of the Bushmen detached themselves from verandah posts,

from their heels, from the clay floor of the verandah and the rough slab

wall against which they’d been resting, and joined a group of four or

five who stood round one. He stood with his back to the corner post

of the stock-yard, his feet well braced out in front of him, and

contemplated the toes of his tight new ‘lastic-side boots and whistled

softly. He was a clean-limbed, handsome fellow, with riding-cords,

leggings, and a blue sash; he was Graeco-Roman-nosed, blue-eyed, and

his glossy, curly black hair bunched up in front of the brim of a new

cabbage-tree hat, set well back on his head.

‘Do it for a quid, Jack?’ asked one.

‘Damned if I will, Jim!’ said the young man at the post. ‘I’ll do it for

a fiver--not a blanky sprat less.’

Jim took off his hat and ‘shoved’ it round, and ‘bobs’ were ‘chucked’

into it. The result was about thirty shillings.

Jack glanced contemptuously into the crown of the hat.

‘Not me!’ he said, showing some emotion for the first time. ‘D’yer think

I’m going to risk me blanky neck for your blanky amusement for thirty

blanky bob. I’ll ride the blanky horse for a fiver, and I’ll feel the

blanky quids in my pocket before I get on.’

Meanwhile the coach had dashed up to the door of the shanty. There

were about twenty passengers aboard--inside, on the box-seat, on the

tail-board, and hanging on to the roof--most of them Sydney men going up

to the Mudgee races. They got down and went inside with the driver for

a drink, while the stablemen changed horses. The Bushmen raised their

voices a little and argued.

One of the passengers was a big, stout, hearty man--a good-hearted,

sporting man and a racehorse-owner, according to his brands. He had

a round red face and a white cork hat. ‘What’s those chaps got on

outside?’ he asked the publican.

‘Oh, it’s a bet they’ve got on about riding a horse,’ replied the

publican. ‘The flash-looking chap with the sash is Flash Jack, the

horse-breaker; and they reckon they’ve got the champion outlaw in the

district out there--that chestnut horse in the yard.’

The sporting man was interested at once, and went out and joined the

Bushmen.

‘Well, chaps! what have you got on here?’ he asked cheerily.

‘Oh,’ said Jim carelessly, ‘it’s only a bit of a bet about ridin’

that blanky chestnut in the corner of the yard there.’ He indicated an

ungroomed chestnut horse, fenced off by a couple of long sapling poles

in a corner of the stock-yard. ‘Flash Jack there--he reckons he’s the

champion horse-breaker round here--Flash Jack reckons he can take it out

of that horse first try.’

‘What’s up with the horse?’ inquired the big, red-faced man. ‘It looks

quiet enough. Why, I’d ride it myself.’

‘Would yer?’ said Jim, who had hair that stood straight up, and an

innocent, inquiring expression. ‘Looks quiet, does he? YOU ought to know

more about horses than to go by the looks of ‘em. He’s quiet enough just

now, when there’s no one near him; but you should have been here an

hour ago. That horse has killed two men and put another chap’s shoulder

out--besides breaking a cove’s leg. It took six of us all the morning to

run him in and get the saddle on him; and now Flash Jack wants to back

out of it.’

‘Euraliar!’ remarked Flash Jack cheerfully. ‘I said I’d ride that blanky

horse out of the yard for a fiver. I ain’t goin’ to risk my blanky neck

for nothing and only to amuse you blanks.’

‘He said he’d ride the horse inside the yard for a quid,’ said Jim.

‘And get smashed against the rails!’ said Flash Jack. ‘I would be a

fool. I’d rather take my chance outside in the scrub--and it’s rough

country round here.’

‘Well, how much do you want?’ asked the man in the mushroom hat.

‘A fiver, I said,’ replied Jack indifferently. ‘And the blanky stuff in

my pocket before I get on the blanky horse.’

‘Are you frightened of us running away without paying you?’ inquired one

of the passengers who had gathered round.

‘I’m frightened of the horse bolting with me without me being paid,’

said Flash Jack. ‘I know that horse; he’s got a mouth like iron. I might

be at the bottom of the cliff on Crown Ridge road in twenty minutes with

my head caved in, and then what chance for the quids?’

‘You wouldn’t want ‘em then,’ suggested a passenger. ‘Or, say!--we’d

leave the fiver with the publican to bury you.’

Flash Jack ignored that passenger. He eyed his boots and softly whistled

a tune.

‘All right!’ said the man in the cork hat, putting his hand in his

pocket. ‘I’ll start with a quid; stump up, you chaps.’

The five pounds were got together.

‘I’ll lay a quid to half a quid he don’t stick on ten minutes!’ shouted

Jim to his mates as soon as he saw that the event was to come off. The

passengers also betted amongst themselves. Flash Jack, after putting the

money in his breeches-pocket, let down the rails and led the horse into

the middle of the yard.

‘Quiet as an old cow!’ snorted a passenger in disgust. ‘I believe it’s a

sell!’

‘Wait a bit,’ said Jim to the passenger, ‘wait a bit and you’ll see.’

They waited and saw.

Flash Jack leisurely mounted the horse, rode slowly out of the yard, and

trotted briskly round the corner of the shanty and into the scrub, which

swallowed him more completely than the sea might have done.

Most of the other Bushmen mounted their horses and followed Flash Jack

to a clearing in the scrub, at a safe distance from the shanty; then

they dismounted and hung on to saplings, or leaned against their horses,

while they laughed.

At the hotel there was just time for another drink. The driver climbed

to his seat and shouted, ‘All aboard!’ in his usual tone. The passengers

climbed to their places, thinking hard. A mile or so along the road the

man with the cork hat remarked, with much truth--

‘Those blanky Bushmen have got too much time to think.’

*****

The Bushmen returned to the shanty as soon as the coach was out of

sight, and proceeded to ‘knock down’ the fiver.

Jimmy Grimshaw’s Wooing.

The Half-way House at Tinned Dog (Out-Back in Australia) kept Daniel

Myers--licensed to retail spirituous and fermented liquors--in drink and

the horrors for upward of five years, at the end of which time he lay

hidden for weeks in a back skillion, an object which no decent man would

care to see--or hear when it gave forth sound. ‘Good accommodation

for man and beast’; but few shanties save his own might, for a

consideration, have accommodated the sort of beast which the man Myers

had become towards the end of his career. But at last the eccentric Bush

doctor, ‘Doc’ Wild’ (who perhaps could drink as much as Myers without

its having any further effect upon his temperament than to keep him

awake and cynical), pronounced the publican dead enough to be buried

legally; so the widow buried him, had the skillion cleaned out, and the

sign altered to read, ‘Margaret Myers, licensed, &c.’, and continued to

conduct the pub. just as she had run it for over five years, with the

joyful and blessed exception that there was no longer a human pig and

pigstye attached, and that the atmosphere was calm. Most of the regular

patrons of the Half-way House could have their horrors decently, and,

comparatively, quietly--or otherwise have them privately--in the Big

Scrub adjacent; but Myers had not been one of that sort.

Mrs Myers settled herself to enjoy life comfortably and happily, at

the fixed age of thirty-nine, for the next seven years or so. She was

a pleasant-faced dumpling, who had been baked solid in the droughts of

Out-Back without losing her good looks, and had put up with a hard life,

and Myers, all those years without losing her good humour and nature.

Probably, had her husband been the opposite kind of man, she would have

been different--haggard, bad-tempered, and altogether impossible--for

of such is woman. But then it might be taken into consideration that she

had been practically a widow during at least the last five years of her

husband’s alleged life.

Mrs Myers was reckoned a good catch in the district, but it soon seemed

that she was not to be caught.

‘It would be a grand thing,’ one of the periodical boozers of Tinned Dog

would say to his mates, ‘for one of us to have his name up on a pub.; it

would save a lot of money.’

‘It wouldn’t save you anything, Bill, if I got it,’ was the retort. ‘You

needn’t come round chewing my lug then. I’d give you one drink and no

more.’

The publican at Dead Camel, station managers, professional shearers,

even one or two solvent squatters and promising cockatoos, tried their

luck in vain. In answer to the suggestion that she ought to have a man

to knock round and look after things, she retorted that she had had one,

and was perfectly satisfied. Few trav’lers on those tracks but tried

‘a bit of bear-up’ in that direction, but all to no purpose. Chequemen

knocked down their cheques manfully at the Half-way House--to get

courage and goodwill and ‘put it off’ till, at the last moment, they

offered themselves abjectly to the landlady; which was worse than bad

judgment on their part--it was very silly, and she told them so.

One or two swore off, and swore to keep straight; but she had no faith

in them, and when they found that out, it hurt their feelings so much

that they ‘broke out’ and went on record-breaking sprees.

About the end of each shearing the sign was touched up, with an extra

coat of paint on the ‘Margaret’, whereat suitors looked hopeless.

One or two of the rejected died of love in the horrors in the Big

Scrub--anyway, the verdict was that they died of love aggravated by the

horrors. But the climax was reached when a Queensland shearer, seizing

the opportunity when the mate, whose turn it was to watch him, fell

asleep, went down to the yard and hanged himself on the butcher’s

gallows--having first removed his clothes, with some drink-lurid idea of

leaving the world as naked as he came into it. He climbed the pole, sat

astride on top, fixed the rope to neck and bar, but gave a yell--a yell

of drunken triumph--before he dropped, and woke his mates.

They cut him down and brought him to. Next day he apologised to Mrs

Myers, said, ‘Ah, well! So long!’ to the rest, and departed--cured of

drink and love apparently. The verdict was that the blanky fool should

have dropped before he yelled; but she was upset and annoyed, and it

began to look as though, if she wished to continue to live on happily

and comfortably for a few years longer at the fixed age of thirty-nine,

she would either have to give up the pub. or get married.

Her fame was carried far and wide, and she became a woman whose name was

mentioned with respect in rough shearing-sheds and huts, and round the

camp-fire.

About thirty miles south of Tinned Dog one James Grimshaw,

widower--otherwise known as ‘Old Jimmy’, though he was little past

middle age--had a small selection which he had worked, let, given up,

and tackled afresh (with sinews of war drawn from fencing contracts)

ever since the death of his young wife some fifteen years agone. He was

a practical, square-faced, clean-shaven, clean, and tidy man, with a

certain ‘cleanness’ about the shape of his limbs which suggested the

old jockey or hostler. There were two strong theories in connection with

Jimmy--one was that he had had a university education, and the other

that he couldn’t write his own name. Not nearly such a ridiculous nor

simple case Out-Back as it might seem.

Jimmy smoked and listened without comment to the ‘heard tells’ in

connection with Mrs Myers, till at last one night, at the end of his

contract and over a last pipe, he said quietly, ‘I’ll go up to Tinned

Dog next week and try my luck.’

His mates and the casual Jims and Bills were taken too suddenly to

laugh, and the laugh having been lost, as Bland Holt, the Australian

actor would put it in a professional sense, the audience had time to

think, with the result that the joker swung his hand down through an

imaginary table and exclaimed--

‘By God! Jimmy’ll do it.’ (Applause.)

*****

So one drowsy afternoon at the time of the year when the breathless day

runs on past 7 P.M., Mrs Myers sat sewing in the bar parlour, when a

clean-shaved, clean-shirted, clean-neckerchiefed, clean-moleskinned,

greased-bluchered--altogether a model or stage swagman came up, was

served in the bar by the half-caste female cook, and took his way to the

river-bank, where he rigged a small tent and made a model camp.

A couple of hours later he sat on a stool on the verandah, smoking a

clean clay pipe. Just before the sunset meal Mrs Myers asked, ‘Is that

trav’ler there yet, Mary?’

‘Yes, missus. Clean pfellar that.’

The landlady knitted her forehead over her sewing, as women do when

limited for ‘stuff’ or wondering whether a section has been cut

wrong--or perhaps she thought of that other who hadn’t been a ‘clean

pfellar’. She put her work aside, and stood in the doorway, looking out

across the clearing.

‘Good-day, mister,’ she said, seeming to become aware of him for the

first time.

‘Good-day, missus!’

‘Hot!’

‘Hot!’

Pause.

‘Trav’lin’?’

‘No, not particular!’

She waited for him to explain. Myers was always explaining when he

wasn’t raving. But the swagman smoked on.

‘Have a drink?’ she suggested, to keep her end up.

‘No, thank you, missus. I had one an hour or so ago. I never take more

than two a-day--one before breakfast, if I can get it, and a night-cap.’

What a contrast to Myers! she thought.

‘Come and have some tea; it’s ready.’

‘Thank you. I don’t mind if I do.’

They got on very slowly, but comfortably. She got little out of him

except the facts that he had a selection, had finished a contract,

and was ‘just having a look at the country.’ He politely declined a

‘shake-down’, saying he had a comfortable camp, and preferred being out

this weather. She got his name with a ‘by-the-way’, as he rose to leave,

and he went back to camp.

He caught a cod, and they had it for breakfast next morning, and

got along so comfortable over breakfast that he put in the forenoon

pottering about the gates and stable with a hammer, a saw, and a box of

nails.

And, well--to make it short--when the big Tinned Dog shed had cut-out,

and the shearers struck the Half-way House, they were greatly impressed

by a brand-new sign whereon glistened the words--

HALF-WAY HOUSE HOTEL,

BY

JAMES GRIMSHAW.

Good Stabling.

The last time I saw Mrs Grimshaw she looked about thirty-five.

At Dead Dingo.

It was blazing hot outside and smothering hot inside the weather-board

and iron shanty at Dead Dingo, a place on the Cleared Road, where

there was a pub. and a police-station, and which was sometimes called

‘Roasted’, and other times ‘Potted Dingo’--nicknames suggested by the

everlasting drought and the vicinity of the one-pub. township of Tinned

Dog.

From the front verandah the scene was straight-cleared road, running

right and left to Out-Back, and to Bourke (and ankle-deep in the red

sand dust for perhaps a hundred miles); the rest blue-grey bush, dust,

and the heat-wave blazing across every object.

There were only four in the bar-room, though it was New Year’s Day.

There weren’t many more in the county. The girl sat behind the bar--the

coolest place in the shanty--reading ‘Deadwood Dick’. On a worn and torn

and battered horse-hair sofa, which had seen cooler places and better

days, lay an awful and healthy example, a bearded swagman, with his arms

twisted over his head and his face to the wall, sleeping off the death

of the dead drunk. Bill and Jim--shearer and rouseabout--sat at a table

playing cards. It was about three o’clock in the afternoon, and they had

been gambling since nine--and the greater part of the night before--so

they were, probably, in a worse condition morally (and perhaps

physically) than the drunken swagman on the sofa.

Close under the bar, in a dangerous place for his legs and tail, lay a

sheep-dog with a chain attached to his collar and wound round his neck.

Presently a thump on the table, and Bill, unlucky gambler, rose with an

oath that would have been savage if it hadn’t been drawled.

‘Stumped?’ inquired Jim.

‘Not a blanky, lurid deener!’ drawled Bill.

Jim drew his reluctant hands from the cards, his eyes went slowly and

hopelessly round the room and out the door. There was something in the

eyes of both, except when on the card-table, of the look of a man waking

in a strange place.

‘Got anything?’ asked Jim, fingering the cards again.

Bill sucked in his cheeks, collecting the saliva with difficulty, and

spat out on to the verandah floor.

‘That’s all I got,’ he drawled. ‘It’s gone now.’

Jim leaned back in his chair, twisted, yawned, and caught sight of the

dog.

‘That there dog yours?’ he asked, brightening.

They had evidently been strangers the day before, or as strange to each

other as Bushmen can be.

Bill scratched behind his ear, and blinked at the dog. The dog woke

suddenly to a flea fact.

‘Yes,’ drawled Bill, ‘he’s mine.’

‘Well, I’m going Out-Back, and I want a dog,’ said Jim, gathering the

cards briskly. ‘Half a quid agin the dog?’

‘Half a quid be----!’ drawled Bill. ‘Call it a quid?’

‘Half a blanky quid!’

‘A gory, lurid quid!’ drawled Bill desperately, and he stooped over his

swag.

But Jim’s hands were itching in a ghastly way over the cards.

‘Alright. Call it a---- quid.’

The drunkard on the sofa stirred, showed signs of waking, but died

again. Remember this, it might come in useful.

Bill sat down to the table once more.

Jim rose first, winner of the dog. He stretched, yawned ‘Ah, well!’ and

shouted drinks. Then he shouldered his swag, stirred the dog up with his

foot, unwound the chain, said ‘Ah, well--so long!’ and drifted out and

along the road toward Out-Back, the dog following with head and tail

down.

Bill scored another drink on account of girl-pity for bad luck,

shouldered his swag, said, ‘So long, Mary!’ and drifted out and along

the road towards Tinned Dog, on the Bourke side.

*****

A long, drowsy, half hour passed--the sort of half hour that is as long

as an hour in the places where days are as long as years, and years hold

about as much as days do in other places.

The man on the sofa woke with a start, and looked scared and wild for a

moment; then he brought his dusty broken boots to the floor, rested his

elbows on his knees, took his unfortunate head between his hands, and

came back to life gradually.

He lifted his head, looked at the girl across the top of the bar, and

formed with his lips, rather than spoke, the words--

‘Put up a drink?’ *

* ‘Put up a drink’--i.e., ‘Give me a drink on credit’, or

‘Chalk it up’.

She shook her head tightly and went on reading.

He staggered up, and, leaning on the bar, made desperate distress

signals with hand, eyes, and mouth.

‘No!’ she snapped. ‘I means no when I says no! You’ve had too many last

drinks already, and the boss says you ain’t to have another. If you

swear again, or bother me, I’ll call him.’

He hung sullenly on the counter for a while, then lurched to his

swag, and shouldered it hopelessly and wearily. Then he blinked round,

whistled, waited a moment, went on to the front verandah, peered round,

through the heat, with bloodshot eyes, and whistled again. He turned and

started through to the back-door.

‘What the devil do you want now?’ demanded the girl, interrupted in her

reading for the third time by him. ‘Stampin’ all over the house. You

can’t go through there! It’s privit! I do wish to goodness you’d git!’

‘Where the blazes is that there dog o’ mine got to?’ he muttered. ‘Did

you see a dog?’

‘No! What do I want with your dog?’

He whistled out in front again, and round each corner. Then he came back

with a decided step and tone.

‘Look here! that there dog was lyin’ there agin the wall when I went

to sleep. He wouldn’t stir from me, or my swag, in a year, if he wasn’t

dragged. He’s been blanky well touched [stolen], and I wouldn’ter lost

him for a fiver. Are you sure you ain’t seen a dog?’ then suddenly, as

the thought struck him: ‘Where’s them two chaps that was playin’ cards

when I wenter sleep?’

‘Why!’ exclaimed the girl, without thinking, ‘there was a dog, now I

come to think of it, but I thought it belonged to one of them chaps.

Anyway, they played for it, and the other chap won it and took it away.’

He stared at her blankly, with thunder gathering in the blankness.

‘What sort of a dog was it?’

Dog described; the chain round the neck settled it.

He scowled at her darkly.

‘Now, look here,’ he said; ‘you’ve allowed gamblin’ in this bar--your

boss has. You’ve got no right to let spielers gamble away a man’s dog.

Is a customer to lose his dog every time he has a doze to suit your

boss? I’ll go straight across to the police camp and put you away, and

I don’t care if you lose your licence. I ain’t goin’ to lose my dog. I

wouldn’ter taken a ten-pound note for that blanky dog! I----’

She was filling a pewter hastily.

‘Here! for God’s sake have a drink an’ stop yer row.’

He drank with satisfaction. Then he hung on the bar with one elbow and

scowled out the door.

‘Which blanky way did them chaps go?’ he growled.

‘The one that took the dog went towards Tinned Dog.’

‘And I’ll haveter go all the blanky way back after him, and most likely

lose me shed! Here!’ jerking the empty pewter across the bar, ‘fill that

up again; I’m narked properly, I am, and I’ll take twenty-four blanky

hours to cool down now. I wouldn’ter lost that dog for twenty quid.’

He drank again with deeper satisfaction, then he shuffled out,

muttering, swearing, and threatening louder every step, and took the

track to Tinned Dog.

*****

Now the man, girl, or woman, who told me this yarn has never quite

settled it in his or her mind as to who really owned the dog. I leave it

to you.

Telling Mrs Baker.

Most Bushmen who hadn’t ‘known Bob Baker to speak to’, had ‘heard tell

of him’. He’d been a squatter, not many years before, on the Macquarie

river in New South Wales, and had made money in the good seasons, and

had gone in for horse-racing and racehorse-breeding, and long trips to

Sydney, where he put up at swell hotels and went the pace. So after a

pretty severe drought, when the sheep died by thousands on his runs, Bob

Baker went under, and the bank took over his station and put a manager

in charge.

He’d been a jolly, open-handed, popular man, which means that he’d been

a selfish man as far as his wife and children were concerned, for

they had to suffer for it in the end. Such generosity is often born of

vanity, or moral cowardice, or both mixed. It’s very nice to hear the

chaps sing ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’, but you’ve mostly got to pay

for it twice--first in company, and afterwards alone. I once heard the

chaps singing that I was a jolly good fellow, when I was leaving a place

and they were giving me a send-off. It thrilled me, and brought a warm

gush to my eyes; but, all the same, I wished I had half the money I’d

lent them, and spent on ‘em, and I wished I’d used the time I’d wasted

to be a jolly good fellow.

When I first met Bob Baker he was a boss-drover on the great

north-western route, and his wife lived at the township of Solong on

the Sydney side. He was going north to new country round by the Gulf of

Carpentaria, with a big mob of cattle, on a two years’ trip; and I and

my mate, Andy M’Culloch, engaged to go with him. We wanted to have a

look at the Gulf Country.

After we had crossed the Queensland border it seemed to me that the Boss

was too fond of going into wayside shanties and town pubs. Andy had been

with him on another trip, and he told me that the Boss was only going

this way lately. Andy knew Mrs Baker well, and seemed to think a deal of

her. ‘She’s a good little woman,’ said Andy. ‘One of the right stuff. I

worked on their station for a while when I was a nipper, and I know.

She was always a damned sight too good for the Boss, but she believed in

him. When I was coming away this time she says to me, “Look here, Andy,

I’m afraid Robert is drinking again. Now I want you to look after him

for me, as much as you can--you seem to have as much influence with him

as any one. I want you to promise me that you’ll never have a drink with

him.”

‘And I promised,’ said Andy, ‘and I’ll keep my word.’ Andy was a chap

who could keep his word, and nothing else. And, no matter how the Boss

persuaded, or sneered, or swore at him, Andy would never drink with him.

It got worse and worse: the Boss would ride on ahead and get drunk at a

shanty, and sometimes he’d be days behind us; and when he’d catch up to

us his temper would be just about as much as we could stand. At last he

went on a howling spree at Mulgatown, about a hundred and fifty miles

north of the border, and, what was worse, he got in tow with a flash

barmaid there--one of those girls who are engaged, by the publicans up

country, as baits for chequemen.

He went mad over that girl. He drew an advance cheque from the

stock-owner’s agent there, and knocked that down; then he raised some

more money somehow, and spent that--mostly on the girl.

We did all we could. Andy got him along the track for a couple of

stages, and just when we thought he was all right, he slipped us in the

night and went back.

We had two other men with us, but had the devil’s own bother on account

of the cattle. It was a mixed-up job all round. You see it was all big

runs round there, and we had to keep the bullocks moving along the route

all the time, or else get into trouble for trespass. The agent wasn’t

going to go to the expense of putting the cattle in a paddock until

the Boss sobered up; there was very little grass on the route or the

travelling-stock reserves or camps, so we had to keep travelling for

grass.

The world might wobble and all the banks go bung, but the cattle have

to go through--that’s the law of the stock-routes. So the agent wired

to the owners, and, when he got their reply, he sacked the Boss and sent

the cattle on in charge of another man. The new Boss was a drover coming

south after a trip; he had his two brothers with him, so he didn’t want

me and Andy; but, anyway, we were full up of this trip, so we arranged,

between the agent and the new Boss, to get most of the wages due to

us--the Boss had drawn some of our stuff and spent it.

We could have started on the back track at once, but, drunk or sober,

mad or sane, good or bad, it isn’t Bush religion to desert a mate in a

hole; and the Boss was a mate of ours; so we stuck to him.

We camped on the creek, outside the town, and kept him in the camp with

us as much as possible, and did all we could for him.

‘How could I face his wife if I went home without him?’ asked Andy, ‘or

any of his old mates?’

The Boss got himself turned out of the pub. where the barmaid was, and

then he’d hang round the other pubs., and get drink somehow, and fight,

and get knocked about. He was an awful object by this time, wild-eyed

and gaunt, and he hadn’t washed or shaved for days.

Andy got the constable in charge of the police station to lock him up

for a night, but it only made him worse: we took him back to the camp

next morning and while our eyes were off him for a few minutes he

slipped away into the scrub, stripped himself naked, and started to hang

himself to a leaning tree with a piece of clothes-line rope. We got to

him just in time.

Then Andy wired to the Boss’s brother Ned, who was fighting the drought,

the rabbit-pest, and the banks, on a small station back on the border.

Andy reckoned it was about time to do something.

Perhaps the Boss hadn’t been quite right in his head before he started

drinking--he had acted queer some time, now we came to think of

it; maybe he’d got a touch of sunstroke or got brooding over his

troubles--anyway he died in the horrors within the week.

His brother Ned turned up on the last day, and Bob thought he was the

devil, and grappled with him. It took the three of us to hold the Boss

down sometimes.

Sometimes, towards the end, he’d be sensible for a few minutes and talk

about his ‘poor wife and children’; and immediately afterwards he’d

fall a-cursing me, and Andy, and Ned, and calling us devils. He cursed

everything; he cursed his wife and children, and yelled that they were

dragging him down to hell. He died raving mad. It was the worst case of

death in the horrors of drink that I ever saw or heard of in the Bush.

Ned saw to the funeral: it was very hot weather, and men have to be

buried quick who die out there in the hot weather--especially men who

die in the state the Boss was in. Then Ned went to the public-house

where the barmaid was and called the landlord out. It was a desperate

fight: the publican was a big man, and a bit of a fighting man; but

Ned was one of those quiet, simple-minded chaps who will carry a thing

through to death when they make up their minds. He gave that publican

nearly as good a thrashing as he deserved. The constable in charge of

the station backed Ned, while another policeman picked up the publican.

Sounds queer to you city people, doesn’t it?

Next morning we three started south. We stayed a couple of days at

Ned Baker’s station on the border, and then started on our

three-hundred-mile ride down-country. The weather was still very hot, so

we decided to travel at night for a while, and left Ned’s place at dusk.

He parted from us at the homestead gate. He gave Andy a small packet,

done up in canvas, for Mrs Baker, which Andy told me contained Bob’s

pocket-book, letters, and papers. We looked back, after we’d gone a

piece along the dusty road, and saw Ned still standing by the gate; and

a very lonely figure he looked. Ned was a bachelor. ‘Poor old Ned,’ said

Andy to me. ‘He was in love with Mrs Bob Baker before she got married,

but she picked the wrong man--girls mostly do. Ned and Bob were together

on the Macquarie, but Ned left when his brother married, and he’s been

up in these God-forsaken scrubs ever since. Look, I want to tell you

something, Jack: Ned has written to Mrs Bob to tell her that Bob died of

fever, and everything was done for him that could be done, and that he

died easy--and all that sort of thing. Ned sent her some money, and she

is to think that it was the money due to Bob when he died. Now I’ll have

to go and see her when we get to Solong; there’s no getting out of it,

I’ll have to face her--and you’ll have to come with me.’

‘Damned if I will!’ I said.

‘But you’ll have to,’ said Andy. ‘You’ll have to stick to me; you’re

surely not crawler enough to desert a mate in a case like this? I’ll

have to lie like hell--I’ll have to lie as I never lied to a woman

before; and you’ll have to back me and corroborate every lie.’

I’d never seen Andy show so much emotion.

‘There’s plenty of time to fix up a good yarn,’ said Andy. He said no

more about Mrs Baker, and we only mentioned the Boss’s name casually,

until we were within about a day’s ride of Solong; then Andy told me the

yarn he’d made up about the Boss’s death.

‘And I want you to listen, Jack,’ he said, ‘and remember every word--and

if you can fix up a better yarn you can tell me afterwards. Now it

was like this: the Boss wasn’t too well when he crossed the border. He

complained of pains in his back and head and a stinging pain in the back

of his neck, and he had dysentery bad,--but that doesn’t matter; it’s

lucky I ain’t supposed to tell a woman all the symptoms. The Boss stuck

to the job as long as he could, but we managed the cattle and made it as

easy as we could for him. He’d just take it easy, and ride on from camp

to camp, and rest. One night I rode to a town off the route (or you did,

if you like) and got some medicine for him; that made him better for a

while, but at last, a day or two this side of Mulgatown, he had to give

up. A squatter there drove him into town in his buggy and put him up

at the best hotel. The publican knew the Boss and did all he could for

him--put him in the best room and wired for another doctor. We wired for

Ned as soon as we saw how bad the Boss was, and Ned rode night and day

and got there three days before the Boss died. The Boss was a bit off

his head some of the time with the fever, but was calm and quiet towards

the end and died easy. He talked a lot about his wife and children, and

told us to tell the wife not to fret but to cheer up for the children’s

sake. How does that sound?’

I’d been thinking while I listened, and an idea struck me.

‘Why not let her know the truth?’ I asked. ‘She’s sure to hear of

it sooner or later; and if she knew he was only a selfish, drunken

blackguard she might get over it all the sooner.’

‘You don’t know women, Jack,’ said Andy quietly. ‘And, anyway, even if

she is a sensible woman, we’ve got a dead mate to consider as well as a

living woman.’

‘But she’s sure to hear the truth sooner or later,’ I said, ‘the Boss

was so well known.’

‘And that’s just the reason why the truth might be kept from her,’ said

Andy. ‘If he wasn’t well known--and nobody could help liking him, after

all, when he was straight--if he wasn’t so well known the truth might

leak out unawares. She won’t know if I can help it, or at least not yet

a while. If I see any chaps that come from the North I’ll put them up

to it. I’ll tell M’Grath, the publican at Solong, too: he’s a straight

man--he’ll keep his ears open and warn chaps. One of Mrs Baker’s sisters

is staying with her, and I’ll give her a hint so that she can warn off

any women that might get hold of a yarn. Besides, Mrs Baker is sure to

go and live in Sydney, where all her people are--she was a Sydney girl;

and she’s not likely to meet any one there that will tell her the truth.

I can tell her that it was the last wish of the Boss that she should

shift to Sydney.’

We smoked and thought a while, and by-and-by Andy had what he called a

‘happy thought’. He went to his saddle-bags and got out the small canvas

packet that Ned had given him: it was sewn up with packing-thread, and

Andy ripped it open with his pocket-knife.

‘What are you doing, Andy?’ I asked.

‘Ned’s an innocent old fool, as far as sin is concerned,’ said Andy. ‘I

guess he hasn’t looked through the Boss’s letters, and I’m just going to

see that there’s nothing here that will make liars of us.’

He looked through the letters and papers by the light of the fire. There

were some letters from Mrs Baker to her husband, also a portrait of her

and the children; these Andy put aside. But there were other letters

from barmaids and women who were not fit to be seen in the same street

with the Boss’s wife; and there were portraits--one or two flash ones.

There were two letters from other men’s wives too.

‘And one of those men, at least, was an old mate of his!’ said Andy, in

a tone of disgust.

He threw the lot into the fire; then he went through the Boss’s

pocket-book and tore out some leaves that had notes and addresses on

them, and burnt them too. Then he sewed up the packet again and put it

away in his saddle-bag.

‘Such is life!’ said Andy, with a yawn that might have been half a sigh.

We rode into Solong early in the day, turned our horses out in a

paddock, and put up at M’Grath’s pub. until such time as we made up our

minds as to what we’d do or where we’d go. We had an idea of waiting

until the shearing season started and then making Out-Back to the big

sheds.

Neither of us was in a hurry to go and face Mrs Baker. ‘We’ll go after

dinner,’ said Andy at first; then after dinner we had a drink, and felt

sleepy--we weren’t used to big dinners of roast-beef and vegetables and

pudding, and, besides, it was drowsy weather--so we decided to have a

snooze and then go. When we woke up it was late in the afternoon, so we

thought we’d put it off till after tea. ‘It wouldn’t be manners to walk

in while they’re at tea,’ said Andy--‘it would look as if we only came

for some grub.’

But while we were at tea a little girl came with a message that Mrs

Baker wanted to see us, and would be very much obliged if we’d call

up as soon as possible. You see, in those small towns you can’t move

without the thing getting round inside of half an hour.

‘We’ll have to face the music now!’ said Andy, ‘and no get out of it.’

He seemed to hang back more than I did. There was another pub. opposite

where Mrs Baker lived, and when we got up the street a bit I said to

Andy--

‘Suppose we go and have another drink first, Andy? We might be kept in

there an hour or two.’

‘You don’t want another drink,’ said Andy, rather short. ‘Why, you seem

to be going the same way as the Boss!’ But it was Andy that edged off

towards the pub. when we got near Mrs Baker’s place. ‘All right!’ he

said. ‘Come on! We’ll have this other drink, since you want it so bad.’

We had the drink, then we buttoned up our coats and started across the

road--we’d bought new shirts and collars, and spruced up a bit. Half-way

across Andy grabbed my arm and asked--

‘How do you feel now, Jack?’

‘Oh, I’M all right,’ I said.

‘For God’s sake!’ said Andy, ‘don’t put your foot in it and make a mess

of it.’

‘I won’t, if you don’t.’

Mrs Baker’s cottage was a little weather-board box affair back in a

garden. When we went in through the gate Andy gripped my arm again and

whispered--

‘For God’s sake stick to me now, Jack!’

‘I’ll stick all right,’ I said--‘you’ve been having too much beer,

Andy.’

I had seen Mrs Baker before, and remembered her as a cheerful, contented

sort of woman, bustling about the house and getting the Boss’s shirts

and things ready when we started North. Just the sort of woman that is

contented with housework and the children, and with nothing particular

about her in the way of brains. But now she sat by the fire looking like

the ghost of herself. I wouldn’t have recognised her at first. I never

saw such a change in a woman, and it came like a shock to me.

Her sister let us in, and after a first glance at Mrs Baker I had eyes

for the sister and no one else. She was a Sydney girl, about twenty-four

or twenty-five, and fresh and fair--not like the sun-browned women we

were used to see. She was a pretty, bright-eyed girl, and seemed quick

to understand, and very sympathetic. She had been educated, Andy had

told me, and wrote stories for the Sydney ‘Bulletin’ and other Sydney

papers. She had her hair done and was dressed in the city style, and

that took us back a bit at first.

‘It’s very good of you to come,’ said Mrs Baker in a weak, weary voice,

when we first went in. ‘I heard you were in town.’

‘We were just coming when we got your message,’ said Andy. ‘We’d have

come before, only we had to see to the horses.’

‘It’s very kind of you, I’m sure,’ said Mrs Baker.

They wanted us to have tea, but we said we’d just had it. Then Miss

Standish (the sister) wanted us to have tea and cake; but we didn’t feel

as if we could handle cups and saucers and pieces of cake successfully

just then.

There was something the matter with one of the children in a back-room,

and the sister went to see to it. Mrs Baker cried a little quietly.

‘You mustn’t mind me,’ she said. ‘I’ll be all right presently, and then

I want you to tell me all about poor Bob. It’s seeing you, that saw the

last of him, that set me off.’

Andy and I sat stiff and straight, on two chairs against the wall,

and held our hats tight, and stared at a picture of Wellington meeting

Blucher on the opposite wall. I thought it was lucky that that picture

was there.

The child was calling ‘mumma’, and Mrs Baker went in to it, and her

sister came out. ‘Best tell her all about it and get it over,’ she

whispered to Andy. ‘She’ll never be content until she hears all about

poor Bob from some one who was with him when he died. Let me take your

hats. Make yourselves comfortable.’

She took the hats and put them on the sewing-machine. I wished she’d let

us keep them, for now we had nothing to hold on to, and nothing to do

with our hands; and as for being comfortable, we were just about as

comfortable as two cats on wet bricks.

When Mrs Baker came into the room she brought little Bobby Baker, about

four years old; he wanted to see Andy. He ran to Andy at once, and Andy

took him up on his knee. He was a pretty child, but he reminded me too

much of his father.

‘I’m so glad you’ve come, Andy!’ said Bobby.

‘Are you, Bobby?’

‘Yes. I wants to ask you about daddy. You saw him go away, didn’t you?’

and he fixed his great wondering eyes on Andy’s face.

‘Yes,’ said Andy.

‘He went up among the stars, didn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ said Andy.

‘And he isn’t coming back to Bobby any more?’

‘No,’ said Andy. ‘But Bobby’s going to him by-and-by.’

Mrs Baker had been leaning back in her chair, resting her head on her

hand, tears glistening in her eyes; now she began to sob, and her sister

took her out of the room.

Andy looked miserable. ‘I wish to God I was off this job!’ he whispered

to me.

‘Is that the girl that writes the stories?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he said, staring at me in a hopeless sort of way, ‘and poems

too.’

‘Is Bobby going up among the stars?’ asked Bobby.

‘Yes,’ said Andy--‘if Bobby’s good.’

‘And auntie?’

‘Yes.’

‘And mumma?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you going, Andy?’

‘Yes,’ said Andy hopelessly.

‘Did you see daddy go up amongst the stars, Andy?’

‘Yes,’ said Andy, ‘I saw him go up.’

‘And he isn’t coming down again any more?’

‘No,’ said Andy.

‘Why isn’t he?’

‘Because he’s going to wait up there for you and mumma, Bobby.’

There was a long pause, and then Bobby asked--

‘Are you going to give me a shilling, Andy?’ with the same expression of

innocent wonder in his eyes.

Andy slipped half-a-crown into his hand. ‘Auntie’ came in and told him

he’d see Andy in the morning and took him away to bed, after he’d kissed

us both solemnly; and presently she and Mrs Baker settled down to hear

Andy’s story.

‘Brace up now, Jack, and keep your wits about you,’ whispered Andy to me

just before they came in.

‘Poor Bob’s brother Ned wrote to me,’ said Mrs Baker, ‘but he scarcely

told me anything. Ned’s a good fellow, but he’s very simple, and never

thinks of anything.’

Andy told her about the Boss not being well after he crossed the border.

‘I knew he was not well,’ said Mrs Baker, ‘before he left. I didn’t want

him to go. I tried hard to persuade him not to go this trip. I had a

feeling that I oughtn’t to let him go. But he’d never think of anything

but me and the children. He promised he’d give up droving after this

trip, and get something to do near home. The life was too much for

him--riding in all weathers and camping out in the rain, and living like

a dog. But he was never content at home. It was all for the sake of me

and the children. He wanted to make money and start on a station again.

I shouldn’t have let him go. He only thought of me and the children! Oh!

my poor, dear, kind, dead husband!’ She broke down again and sobbed, and

her sister comforted her, while Andy and I stared at Wellington meeting

Blucher on the field of Waterloo. I thought the artist had heaped up the

dead a bit extra, and I thought that I wouldn’t like to be trod on by

horses, even if I was dead.

‘Don’t you mind,’ said Miss Standish, ‘she’ll be all right presently,’

and she handed us the ‘Illustrated Sydney Journal’. This was a great

relief,--we bumped our heads over the pictures.

Mrs Baker made Andy go on again, and he told her how the Boss broke down

near Mulgatown. Mrs Baker was opposite him and Miss Standish opposite

me. Both of them kept their eyes on Andy’s face: he sat, with his hair

straight up like a brush as usual, and kept his big innocent grey eyes

fixed on Mrs Baker’s face all the time he was speaking. I watched Miss

Standish. I thought she was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen; it was a

bad case of love at first sight, but she was far and away above me, and

the case was hopeless. I began to feel pretty miserable, and to think

back into the past: I just heard Andy droning away by my side.

‘So we fixed him up comfortable in the waggonette with the blankets

and coats and things,’ Andy was saying, ‘and the squatter started into

Mulgatown.... It was about thirty miles, Jack, wasn’t it?’ he asked,

turning suddenly to me. He always looked so innocent that there were

times when I itched to knock him down.

‘More like thirty-five,’ I said, waking up.

Miss Standish fixed her eyes on me, and I had another look at Wellington

and Blucher.

‘They were all very good and kind to the Boss,’ said Andy. ‘They thought

a lot of him up there. Everybody was fond of him.’

‘I know it,’ said Mrs Baker. ‘Nobody could help liking him. He was one

of the kindest men that ever lived.’

‘Tanner, the publican, couldn’t have been kinder to his own brother,’

said Andy. ‘The local doctor was a decent chap, but he was only a young

fellow, and Tanner hadn’t much faith in him, so he wired for an older

doctor at Mackintyre, and he even sent out fresh horses to meet the

doctor’s buggy. Everything was done that could be done, I assure you,

Mrs Baker.’

‘I believe it,’ said Mrs Baker. ‘And you don’t know how it relieves me

to hear it. And did the publican do all this at his own expense?’

‘He wouldn’t take a penny, Mrs Baker.’

‘He must have been a good true man. I wish I could thank him.’

‘Oh, Ned thanked him for you,’ said Andy, though without meaning more

than he said.

‘I wouldn’t have fancied that Ned would have thought of that,’ said Mrs

Baker. ‘When I first heard of my poor husband’s death, I thought perhaps

he’d been drinking again--that worried me a bit.’

‘He never touched a drop after he left Solong, I can assure you, Mrs

Baker,’ said Andy quickly.

Now I noticed that Miss Standish seemed surprised or puzzled, once or

twice, while Andy was speaking, and leaned forward to listen to him;

then she leaned back in her chair and clasped her hands behind her head

and looked at him, with half-shut eyes, in a way I didn’t like. Once or

twice she looked at me as if she was going to ask me a question, but I

always looked away quick and stared at Blucher and Wellington, or into

the empty fireplace, till I felt that her eyes were off me. Then she

asked Andy a question or two, in all innocence I believe now, but it

scared him, and at last he watched his chance and winked at her sharp.

Then she gave a little gasp and shut up like a steel trap.

The sick child in the bedroom coughed and cried again. Mrs Baker went

to it. We three sat like a deaf-and-dumb institution, Andy and I staring

all over the place: presently Miss Standish excused herself, and went

out of the room after her sister. She looked hard at Andy as she left

the room, but he kept his eyes away.

‘Brace up now, Jack,’ whispered Andy to me, ‘the worst is coming.’

When they came in again Mrs Baker made Andy go on with his story.

‘He--he died very quietly,’ said Andy, hitching round, and resting his

elbows on his knees, and looking into the fireplace so as to have his

face away from the light. Miss Standish put her arm round her sister.

‘He died very easy,’ said Andy. ‘He was a bit off his head at times, but

that was while the fever was on him. He didn’t suffer much towards the

end--I don’t think he suffered at all.... He talked a lot about you and

the children.’ (Andy was speaking very softly now.) ‘He said that you

were not to fret, but to cheer up for the children’s sake.... It was the

biggest funeral ever seen round there.’

Mrs Baker was crying softly. Andy got the packet half out of his pocket,

but shoved it back again.

‘The only thing that hurts me now,’ says Mrs Baker presently, ‘is to

think of my poor husband buried out there in the lonely Bush, so far

from home. It’s--cruel!’ and she was sobbing again.

‘Oh, that’s all right, Mrs Baker,’ said Andy, losing his head a little.

‘Ned will see to that. Ned is going to arrange to have him brought down

and buried in Sydney.’ Which was about the first thing Andy had told her

that evening that wasn’t a lie. Ned had said he would do it as soon as

he sold his wool.

‘It’s very kind indeed of Ned,’ sobbed Mrs Baker. ‘I’d never have

dreamed he was so kind-hearted and thoughtful. I misjudged him all

along. And that is all you have to tell me about poor Robert?’

‘Yes,’ said Andy--then one of his ‘happy thoughts’ struck him. ‘Except

that he hoped you’d shift to Sydney, Mrs Baker, where you’ve got friends

and relations. He thought it would be better for you and the children.

He told me to tell you that.’

‘He was thoughtful up to the end,’ said Mrs Baker. ‘It was just like

poor Robert--always thinking of me and the children. We are going to

Sydney next week.’

Andy looked relieved. We talked a little more, and Miss Standish wanted

to make coffee for us, but we had to go and see to our horses. We got up

and bumped against each other, and got each other’s hats, and promised

Mrs Baker we’d come again.

‘Thank you very much for coming,’ she said, shaking hands with us. ‘I

feel much better now. You don’t know how much you have relieved me. Now,

mind, you have promised to come and see me again for the last time.’

Andy caught her sister’s eye and jerked his head towards the door to let

her know he wanted to speak to her outside.

‘Good-bye, Mrs Baker,’ he said, holding on to her hand. ‘And don’t you

fret. You’ve--you’ve got the children yet. It’s--it’s all for the best;

and, besides, the Boss said you wasn’t to fret.’ And he blundered out

after me and Miss Standish.

She came out to the gate with us, and Andy gave her the packet.

‘I want you to give that to her,’ he said; ‘it’s his letters and papers.

I hadn’t the heart to give it to her, somehow.’

‘Tell me, Mr M’Culloch,’ she said. ‘You’ve kept something back--you

haven’t told her the truth. It would be better and safer for me to know.

Was it an accident--or the drink?’

‘It was the drink,’ said Andy. ‘I was going to tell you--I thought it

would be best to tell you. I had made up my mind to do it, but, somehow,

I couldn’t have done it if you hadn’t asked me.’

‘Tell me all,’ she said. ‘It would be better for me to know.’

‘Come a little farther away from the house,’ said Andy. She came along

the fence a piece with us, and Andy told her as much of the truth as he

could.

‘I’ll hurry her off to Sydney,’ she said. ‘We can get away this week as

well as next.’ Then she stood for a minute before us, breathing quickly,

her hands behind her back and her eyes shining in the moonlight. She

looked splendid.

‘I want to thank you for her sake,’ she said quickly. ‘You are good men!

I like the Bushmen! They are grand men--they are noble! I’ll probably

never see either of you again, so it doesn’t matter,’ and she put her

white hand on Andy’s shoulder and kissed him fair and square on the

mouth. ‘And you, too!’ she said to me. I was taller than Andy, and had

to stoop. ‘Good-bye!’ she said, and ran to the gate and in, waving her

hand to us. We lifted our hats again and turned down the road.

I don’t think it did either of us any harm.

A Hero in Dingo-Scrubs.

This is a story--about the only one--of Job Falconer, Boss of the

Talbragar sheep-station up country in New South Wales in the early

Eighties--when there were still runs in the Dingo-Scrubs out of the

hands of the banks, and yet squatters who lived on their stations.

Job would never tell the story himself, at least not complete, and as

his family grew up he would become as angry as it was in his easy-going

nature to become if reference were made to the incident in his presence.

But his wife--little, plump, bright-eyed Gerty Falconer--often told the

story (in the mysterious voice which women use in speaking of private

matters amongst themselves--but with brightening eyes) to women friends

over tea; and always to a new woman friend. And on such occasions she

would be particularly tender towards the unconscious Job, and ruffle his

thin, sandy hair in a way that embarrassed him in company--made him look

as sheepish as an old big-horned ram that has just been shorn and turned

amongst the ewes. And the woman friend on parting would give Job’s hand

a squeeze which would surprise him mildly, and look at him as if she

could love him.

According to a theory of mine, Job, to fit the story, should have been

tall, and dark, and stern, or gloomy and quick-tempered. But he wasn’t.

He was fairly tall, but he was fresh-complexioned and sandy (his skin

was pink to scarlet in some weathers, with blotches of umber), and his

eyes were pale-grey; his big forehead loomed babyishly, his arms were

short, and his legs bowed to the saddle. Altogether he was an awkward,

unlovely Bush bird--on foot; in the saddle it was different. He hadn’t

even a ‘temper’.

The impression on Job’s mind which many years afterwards brought about

the incident was strong enough. When Job was a boy of fourteen he saw

his father’s horse come home riderless--circling and snorting up by the

stockyard, head jerked down whenever the hoof trod on one of the snapped

ends of the bridle-reins, and saddle twisted over the side with bruised

pommel and knee-pad broken off.

Job’s father wasn’t hurt much, but Job’s mother, an emotional woman, and

then in a delicate state of health, survived the shock for three months

only. ‘She wasn’t quite right in her head,’ they said, ‘from the day

the horse came home till the last hour before she died.’ And, strange to

say, Job’s father (from whom Job inherited his seemingly placid nature)

died three months later. The doctor from the town was of the opinion

that he must have ‘sustained internal injuries’ when the horse threw

him. ‘Doc. Wild’ (eccentric Bush doctor) reckoned that Job’s father was

hurt inside when his wife died, and hurt so badly that he couldn’t pull

round. But doctors differ all over the world.

Well, the story of Job himself came about in this way. He had been

married a year, and had lately started wool-raising on a pastoral lease

he had taken up at Talbragar: it was a new run, with new slab-and-bark

huts on the creek for a homestead, new shearing-shed, yards--wife and

everything new, and he was expecting a baby. Job felt brand-new himself

at the time, so he said. It was a lonely place for a young woman;

but Gerty was a settler’s daughter. The newness took away some of the

loneliness, she said, and there was truth in that: a Bush home in the

scrubs looks lonelier the older it gets, and ghostlier in the twilight,

as the bark and slabs whiten, or rather grow grey, in fierce summers.

And there’s nothing under God’s sky so weird, so aggressively lonely, as

a deserted old home in the Bush.

Job’s wife had a half-caste gin for company when Job was away on the

run, and the nearest white woman (a hard but honest Lancashire woman

from within the kicking radius in Lancashire--wife of a selector) was

only seven miles away. She promised to be on hand, and came over two or

three times a-week; but Job grew restless as Gerty’s time drew near, and

wished that he had insisted on sending her to the nearest town (thirty

miles away), as originally proposed. Gerty’s mother, who lived in town,

was coming to see her over her trouble; Job had made arrangements with

the town doctor, but prompt attendance could hardly be expected of a

doctor who was very busy, who was too fat to ride, and who lived thirty

miles away.

Job, in common with most Bushmen and their families round there, had

more faith in Doc. Wild, a weird Yankee who made medicine in a saucepan,

and worked more cures on Bushmen than did the other three doctors of

the district together--maybe because the Bushmen had faith in him, or

he knew the Bush and Bush constitutions--or, perhaps, because he’d do

things which no ‘respectable practitioner’ dared do. I’ve described him

in another story. Some said he was a quack, and some said he wasn’t.

There are scores of wrecks and mysteries like him in the Bush. He drank

fearfully, and ‘on his own’, but was seldom incapable of performing an

operation. Experienced Bushmen preferred him three-quarters drunk: when

perfectly sober he was apt to be a bit shaky. He was tall, gaunt, had

a pointed black moustache, bushy eyebrows, and piercing black eyes. His

movements were eccentric. He lived where he happened to be--in a town

hotel, in the best room of a homestead, in the skillion of a sly-grog

shanty, in a shearer’s, digger’s, shepherd’s, or boundary-rider’s hut;

in a surveyor’s camp or a black-fellows’ camp--or, when the horrors were

on him, by a log in the lonely Bush. It seemed all one to him. He lost

all his things sometimes--even his clothes; but he never lost a pigskin

bag which contained his surgical instruments and papers. Except once;

then he gave the blacks 5 Pounds to find it for him.

His patients included all, from the big squatter to Black Jimmy; and he

rode as far and fast to a squatter’s home as to a swagman’s camp. When

nothing was to be expected from a poor selector or a station hand, and

the doctor was hard up, he went to the squatter for a few pounds. He

had on occasions been offered cheques of 50 Pounds and 100 Pounds by

squatters for ‘pulling round’ their wives or children; but such offers

always angered him. When he asked for 5 Pounds he resented being offered

a 10 Pound cheque. He once sued a doctor for alleging that he held no

diploma; but the magistrate, on reading certain papers, suggested a

settlement out of court, which both doctors agreed to--the other doctor

apologising briefly in the local paper. It was noticed thereafter

that the magistrate and town doctors treated Doc. Wild with great

respect--even at his worst. The thing was never explained, and the case

deepened the mystery which surrounded Doc. Wild.

As Job Falconer’s crisis approached Doc. Wild was located at a shanty

on the main road, about half-way between Job’s station and the town.

(Township of Come-by-Chance--expressive name; and the shanty was the

‘Dead Dingo Hotel’, kept by James Myles--known as ‘Poisonous Jimmy’,

perhaps as a compliment to, or a libel on, the liquor he sold.) Job’s

brother Mac. was stationed at the Dead Dingo Hotel with instructions

to hang round on some pretence, see that the doctor didn’t either drink

himself into the ‘D.T.’s’ or get sober enough to become restless; to

prevent his going away, or to follow him if he did; and to bring him

to the station in about a week’s time. Mac. (rather more careless,

brighter, and more energetic than his brother) was carrying out these

instructions while pretending, with rather great success, to be himself

on the spree at the shanty.

But one morning, early in the specified week, Job’s uneasiness was

suddenly greatly increased by certain symptoms, so he sent the black boy

for the neighbour’s wife and decided to ride to Come-by-Chance to hurry

out Gerty’s mother, and see, by the way, how Doc. Wild and Mac. were

getting on. On the arrival of the neighbour’s wife, who drove over in a

spring-cart, Job mounted his horse (a freshly broken filly) and started.

‘Don’t be anxious, Job,’ said Gerty, as he bent down to kiss her. ‘We’ll

be all right. Wait! you’d better take the gun--you might see those

dingoes again. I’ll get it for you.’

The dingoes (native dogs) were very bad amongst the sheep; and Job and

Gerty had started three together close to the track the last time they

were out in company--without the gun, of course. Gerty took the loaded

gun carefully down from its straps on the bedroom wall, carried it out,

and handed it up to Job, who bent and kissed her again and then rode

off.

It was a hot day--the beginning of a long drought, as Job found to his

bitter cost. He followed the track for five or six miles through the

thick, monotonous scrub, and then turned off to make a short cut to the

main road across a big ring-barked flat. The tall gum-trees had been

ring-barked (a ring of bark taken out round the butts), or rather

‘sapped’--that is, a ring cut in through the sap--in order to kill them,

so that the little strength in the ‘poor’ soil should not be drawn out

by the living roots, and the natural grass (on which Australian stock

depends) should have a better show. The hard, dead trees raised their

barkless and whitened trunks and leafless branches for three or four

miles, and the grey and brown grass stood tall between, dying in the

first breaths of the coming drought. All was becoming grey and ashen

here, the heat blazing and dancing across objects, and the pale brassy

dome of the sky cloudless over all, the sun a glaring white disc with

its edges almost melting into the sky. Job held his gun carelessly ready

(it was a double-barrelled muzzle-loader, one barrel choke-bore for

shot, and the other rifled), and he kept an eye out for dingoes. He was

saving his horse for a long ride, jogging along in the careless Bush

fashion, hitched a little to one side--and I’m not sure that he didn’t

have a leg thrown up and across in front of the pommel of the saddle--he

was riding along in the careless Bush fashion, and thinking

fatherly thoughts in advance, perhaps, when suddenly a great black,

greasy-looking iguana scuttled off from the side of the track amongst

the dry tufts of grass and shreds of dead bark, and started up a

sapling. ‘It was a whopper,’ Job said afterwards; ‘must have been over

six feet, and a foot across the body. It scared me nearly as much as the

filly.’

The filly shied off like a rocket. Job kept his seat instinctively,

as was natural to him; but before he could more than grab at the

rein--lying loosely on the pommel--the filly ‘fetched up’ against a dead

box-tree, hard as cast-iron, and Job’s left leg was jammed from stirrup

to pocket. ‘I felt the blood flare up,’ he said, ‘and I knowed that

that’--(Job swore now and then in an easy-going way)--‘I knowed that

that blanky leg was broken alright. I threw the gun from me and freed

my left foot from the stirrup with my hand, and managed to fall to the

right, as the filly started off again.’

What follows comes from the statements of Doc. Wild and Mac. Falconer,

and Job’s own ‘wanderings in his mind’, as he called them. ‘They took

a blanky mean advantage of me,’ he said, ‘when they had me down and I

couldn’t talk sense.’

The filly circled off a bit, and then stood staring--as a mob of

brumbies, when fired at, will sometimes stand watching the smoke. Job’s

leg was smashed badly, and the pain must have been terrible. But he

thought then with a flash, as men do in a fix. No doubt the scene at

the lonely Bush home of his boyhood started up before him: his father’s

horse appeared riderless, and he saw the look in his mother’s eyes.

Now a Bushman’s first, best, and quickest chance in a fix like this is

that his horse go home riderless, the home be alarmed, and the horse’s

tracks followed back to him; otherwise he might lie there for days, for

weeks--till the growing grass buries his mouldering bones. Job was on an

old sheep-track across a flat where few might have occasion to come for

months, but he did not consider this. He crawled to his gun, then to a

log, dragging gun and smashed leg after him. How he did it he doesn’t

know. Half-lying on one side, he rested the barrel on the log, took aim

at the filly, pulled both triggers, and then fell over and lay with his

head against the log; and the gun-barrel, sliding down, rested on his

neck. He had fainted. The crows were interested, and the ants would come

by-and-by.

Now Doc. Wild had inspirations; anyway, he did things which seemed,

after they were done, to have been suggested by inspiration and in no

other possible way. He often turned up where and when he was wanted

above all men, and at no other time. He had gipsy blood, they said; but,

anyway, being the mystery he was, and having the face he had, and living

the life he lived--and doing the things he did--it was quite probable

that he was more nearly in touch than we with that awful invisible world

all round and between us, of which we only see distorted faces and hear

disjointed utterances when we are ‘suffering a recovery’--or going mad.

On the morning of Job’s accident, and after a long brooding silence,

Doc. Wild suddenly said to Mac. Falconer--

‘Git the hosses, Mac. We’ll go to the station.’

Mac., used to the doctor’s eccentricities, went to see about the horses.

And then who should drive up but Mrs Spencer--Job’s mother-in-law--on

her way from the town to the station. She stayed to have a cup of tea

and give her horses a feed. She was square-faced, and considered a

rather hard and practical woman, but she had plenty of solid flesh, good

sympathetic common-sense, and deep-set humorous blue eyes. She lived

in the town comfortably on the interest of some money which her husband

left in the bank. She drove an American waggonette with a good width

and length of ‘tray’ behind, and on this occasion she had a pole and two

horses. In the trap were a new flock mattress and pillows, a generous

pair of new white blankets, and boxes containing necessaries,

delicacies, and luxuries. All round she was an excellent mother-in-law

for a man to have on hand at a critical time.

And, speaking of mother-in-law, I would like to put in a word for her

right here. She is universally considered a nuisance in times of peace

and comfort; but when illness or serious trouble comes home! Then it’s

‘Write to Mother! Wire for Mother! Send some one to fetch Mother! I’ll

go and bring Mother!’ and if she is not near: ‘Oh, I wish Mother were

here! If Mother were only near!’ And when she is on the spot, the

anxious son-in-law: ‘Don’t YOU go, Mother! You’ll stay, won’t you,

Mother?--till we’re all right? I’ll get some one to look after your

house, Mother, while you’re here.’ But Job Falconer was fond of his

mother-in-law, all times.

Mac. had some trouble in finding and catching one of the horses. Mrs

Spencer drove on, and Mac. and the doctor caught up to her about a mile

before she reached the homestead track, which turned in through the

scrubs at the corner of the big ring-barked flat.

Doc. Wild and Mac. followed the cart-road, and as they jogged along in

the edge of the scrub the doctor glanced once or twice across the flat

through the dead, naked branches. Mac. looked that way. The crows were

hopping about the branches of a tree way out in the middle of the flat,

flopping down from branch to branch to the grass, then rising hurriedly

and circling.

‘Dead beast there!’ said Mac. out of his Bushcraft.

‘No--dying,’ said Doc. Wild, with less Bush experience but more

intellect.

‘There’s some steers of Job’s out there somewhere,’ muttered Mac. Then

suddenly, ‘It ain’t drought--it’s the ploorer at last! or I’m blanked!’

Mac. feared the advent of that cattle-plague, pleuro-pneumonia, which

was raging on some other stations, but had been hitherto kept clear of

Job’s run.

‘We’ll go and see, if you like,’ suggested Doc. Wild.

They turned out across the flat, the horses picking their way amongst

the dried tufts and fallen branches.

‘Theer ain’t no sign o’ cattle theer,’ said the doctor; ‘more likely a

ewe in trouble about her lamb.’

‘Oh, the blanky dingoes at the sheep,’ said Mac. ‘I wish we had a

gun--might get a shot at them.’

Doc. Wild hitched the skirt of a long China silk coat he wore, free of

a hip-pocket. He always carried a revolver. ‘In case I feel obliged to

shoot a first person singular one of these hot days,’ he explained once,

whereat Bushmen scratched the backs of their heads and thought feebly,

without result.

‘We’d never git near enough for a shot,’ said the doctor; then he

commenced to hum fragments from a Bush song about the finding of a lost

Bushman in the last stages of death by thirst,--

‘“The crows kept flyin’ up, boys!

The crows kept flyin’ up!

The dog, he seen and whimpered, boys,

Though he was but a pup.”’

‘It must be something or other,’ muttered Mac. ‘Look at them blanky

crows!’

‘“The lost was found, we brought him round,

And took him from the place,

While the ants was swarmin’ on the ground,

And the crows was sayin’ grace!”’

‘My God! what’s that?’ cried Mac., who was a little in advance and rode

a tall horse.

It was Job’s filly, lying saddled and bridled, with a rifle-bullet (as

they found on subsequent examination) through shoulders and chest, and

her head full of kangaroo-shot. She was feebly rocking her head against

the ground, and marking the dust with her hoof, as if trying to write

the reason of it there.

The doctor drew his revolver, took a cartridge from his waistcoat

pocket, and put the filly out of her misery in a very scientific manner;

then something--professional instinct or the something supernatural

about the doctor--led him straight to the log, hidden in the grass,

where Job lay as we left him, and about fifty yards from the dead filly,

which must have staggered off some little way after being shot. Mac.

followed the doctor, shaking violently.

‘Oh, my God!’ he cried, with the woman in his voice--and his face so

pale that his freckles stood out like buttons, as Doc. Wild said--‘oh,

my God! he’s shot himself!’

‘No, he hasn’t,’ said the doctor, deftly turning Job into a healthier

position with his head from under the log and his mouth to the air: then

he ran his eyes and hands over him, and Job moaned. ‘He’s got a

broken leg,’ said the doctor. Even then he couldn’t resist making a

characteristic remark, half to himself: ‘A man doesn’t shoot himself

when he’s going to be made a lawful father for the first time, unless he

can see a long way into the future.’ Then he took out his whisky-flask

and said briskly to Mac., ‘Leave me your water-bag’ (Mac. carried a

canvas water-bag slung under his horse’s neck), ‘ride back to the track,

stop Mrs Spencer, and bring the waggonette here. Tell her it’s only a

broken leg.’

Mac. mounted and rode off at a break-neck pace.

As he worked the doctor muttered: ‘He shot his horse. That’s what gits

me. The fool might have lain there for a week. I’d never have suspected

spite in that carcass, and I ought to know men.’

But as Job came round a little Doc. Wild was enlightened.

‘Where’s the filly?’ cried Job suddenly between groans.

‘She’s all right,’ said the doctor.

‘Stop her!’ cried Job, struggling to rise--‘stop her!--oh God! my leg.’

‘Keep quiet, you fool!’

‘Stop her!’ yelled Job.

‘Why stop her?’ asked the doctor. ‘She won’t go fur,’ he added.

‘She’ll go home to Gerty,’ shouted Job. ‘For God’s sake stop her!’

‘O--h!’ drawled the doctor to himself. ‘I might have guessed that. And I

ought to know men.’

‘Don’t take me home!’ demanded Job in a semi-sensible interval. ‘Take me

to Poisonous Jimmy’s and tell Gerty I’m on the spree.’

When Mac. and Mrs Spencer arrived with the waggonette Doc. Wild was in

his shirt-sleeves, his Chinese silk coat having gone for bandages. The

lower half of Job’s trouser-leg and his ‘lastic-side boot lay on the

ground, neatly cut off, and his bandaged leg was sandwiched between

two strips of bark, with grass stuffed in the hollows, and bound by

saddle-straps.

‘That’s all I kin do for him for the present.’

Mrs Spencer was a strong woman mentally, but she arrived rather pale and

a little shaky: nevertheless she called out, as soon as she got within

earshot of the doctor--

‘What’s Job been doing now?’ (Job, by the way, had never been remarkable

for doing anything.)

‘He’s got his leg broke and shot his horse,’ replied the doctor. ‘But,’

he added, ‘whether he’s been a hero or a fool I dunno. Anyway, it’s a

mess all round.’

They unrolled the bed, blankets, and pillows in the bottom of the trap,

backed it against the log, to have a step, and got Job in. It was a

ticklish job, but they had to manage it: Job, maddened by pain and heat,

only kept from fainting by whisky, groaning and raving and yelling to

them to stop his horse.

‘Lucky we got him before the ants did,’ muttered the doctor. Then he had

an inspiration--

‘You bring him on to the shepherd’s hut this side the station. We must

leave him there. Drive carefully, and pour brandy into him now and then;

when the brandy’s done pour whisky, then gin--keep the rum till the

last’ (the doctor had put a supply of spirits in the waggonette at

Poisonous Jimmy’s). ‘I’ll take Mac.’s horse and ride on and send Peter’

(the station hand) ‘back to the hut to meet you. I’ll be back myself if

I can. THIS BUSINESS WILL HURRY UP THINGS AT THE STATION.’

Which last was one of those apparently insane remarks of the doctor’s

which no sane nor sober man could fathom or see a reason for--except in

Doc. Wild’s madness.

He rode off at a gallop. The burden of Job’s raving, all the way, rested

on the dead filly--

‘Stop her! She must not go home to Gerty!... God help me shoot!...

Whoa!--whoa, there!... “Cope--cope--cope”--Steady, Jessie, old girl....

Aim straight--aim straight! Aim for me, God!--I’ve missed!... Stop her!’

&c.

‘I never met a character like that,’ commented the doctor afterwards,

‘inside a man that looked like Job on the outside. I’ve met men behind

revolvers and big mustarshes in Califo’nia; but I’ve met a derned sight

more men behind nothing but a good-natured grin, here in Australia.

These lanky sawney Bushmen will do things in an easy-going way some day

that’ll make the old world sit up and think hard.’

He reached the station in time, and twenty minutes or half an hour

later he left the case in the hands of the Lancashire woman--whom he saw

reason to admire--and rode back to the hut to help Job, whom they soon

fixed up as comfortably as possible.

They humbugged Mrs Falconer first with a yarn of Job’s alleged

phenomenal shyness, and gradually, as she grew stronger, and the truth

less important, they told it to her. And so, instead of Job being

pushed, scarlet-faced, into the bedroom to see his first-born, Gerty

Falconer herself took the child down to the hut, and so presented Uncle

Job with my first and favourite cousin and Bush chum.

Doc. Wild stayed round until he saw Job comfortably moved to the

homestead, then he prepared to depart.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Job, who was still weak--‘I’m sorry for that there

filly. I was breaking her in to side-saddle for Gerty when she should

get about. I wouldn’t have lost her for twenty quid.’

‘Never mind, Job,’ said the doctor. ‘I, too, once shot an animal I was

fond of--and for the sake of a woman--but that animal walked on two legs

and wore trousers. Good-bye, Job.’

And he left for Poisonous Jimmy’s.

The Little World Left Behind.

I lately revisited a western agricultural district in Australia after

many years. The railway had reached it, but otherwise things were

drearily, hopelessly, depressingly unchanged. There was the same old

grant, comprising several thousands of acres of the richest land in the

district, lying idle still, except for a few horses allowed to run there

for a shilling a-head per week.

There were the same old selections--about as far off as ever from

becoming freeholds--shoved back among the barren ridges; dusty little

patches in the scrub, full of stones and stumps, and called farms,

deserted every few years, and tackled again by some little dried-up

family, or some old hatter, and then given best once more. There was

the cluster of farms on the flat, and in the foot of the gully, owned by

Australians of Irish or English descent, with the same number of stumps

in the wheat-paddock, the same broken fences and tumble-down huts and

yards, and the same weak, sleepy attempt made every season to scratch up

the ground and raise a crop. And along the creek the German farmers--the

only people there worthy of the name--toiling (men, women, and children)

from daylight till dark, like slaves, just as they always had done; the

elder sons stoop-shouldered old men at thirty.

The row about the boundary fence between the Sweeneys and the Joneses

was unfinished still, and the old feud between the Dunderblitzens

and the Blitzendunders was more deadly than ever--it started three

generations ago over a stray bull. The O’Dunn was still fighting for his

great object in life, which was not to be ‘onneighborly’, as he put it.

‘I DON’T want to be onneighborly,’ he said, ‘but I’ll be aven wid some

of ‘em yit. It’s almost impossible for a dacent man to live in sich a

neighborhood and not be onneighborly, thry how he will. But I’ll be aven

wid some of ‘em yit, marruk my wurrud.’

Jones’s red steer--it couldn’t have been the same red steer--was

continually breaking into Rooney’s ‘whate an’ bringin’ ivery head av

the other cattle afther him, and ruinin’ him intirely.’ The Rooneys and

M’Kenzies were at daggers drawn, even to the youngest child, over the

impounding of a horse belonging to Pat Rooney’s brother-in-law, by a

distant relation of the M’Kenzies, which had happened nine years ago.

The same sun-burned, masculine women went past to market twice a-week

in the same old carts and driving much the same quality of carrion. The

string of overloaded spring-carts, buggies, and sweating horses went

whirling into town, to ‘service’, through clouds of dust and broiling

heat, on Sunday morning, and came driving cruelly out again at noon.

The neighbours’ sons rode over in the afternoon, as of old, and hung up

their poor, ill-used little horses to bake in the sun, and sat on their

heels about the verandah, and drawled drearily concerning crops, fruit,

trees, and vines, and horses and cattle; the drought and ‘smut’ and

‘rust’ in wheat, and the ‘ploorer’ (pleuro-pneumonia) in cattle,

and other cheerful things; that there colt or filly, or that there

cattle-dog (pup or bitch) o’ mine (or ‘Jim’s’). They always talked

most of farming there, where no farming worthy of the name was

possible--except by Germans and Chinamen. Towards evening the old local

relic of the golden days dropped in and announced that he intended to

‘put down a shaft’ next week, in a spot where he’d been going to put

it down twenty years ago--and every week since. It was nearly time that

somebody sunk a hole and buried him there.

An old local body named Mrs Witherly still went into town twice a-week

with her ‘bit av prodjuce’, as O’Dunn called it. She still drove a long,

bony, blind horse in a long rickety dray, with a stout sapling for a

whip, and about twenty yards of clothes-line reins. The floor of the

dray covered part of an acre, and one wheel was always ahead of the

other--or behind, according to which shaft was pulled. She wore, to all

appearances, the same short frock, faded shawl, men’s ‘lastic sides, and

white hood that she had on when the world was made. She still stopped

just twenty minutes at old Mrs Leatherly’s on the way in for a yarn and

a cup of tea--as she had always done, on the same days and at the same

time within the memory of the hoariest local liar. However, she had a

new clothes-line bent on to the old horse’s front end--and we fancy that

was the reason she didn’t recognise us at first. She had never looked

younger than a hard hundred within the memory of man. Her shrivelled

face was the colour of leather, and crossed and recrossed with lines

till there wasn’t room for any more. But her eyes were bright yet, and

twinkled with humour at times.

She had been in the Bush for fifty years, and had fought fires,

droughts, hunger and thirst, floods, cattle and crop diseases, and all

the things that God curses Australian settlers with. She had had two

husbands, and it could be said of neither that he had ever done an

honest day’s work, or any good for himself or any one else. She had

reared something under fifteen children, her own and others; and there

was scarcely one of them that had not given her trouble. Her sons had

brought disgrace on her old head over and over again, but she held up

that same old head through it all, and looked her narrow, ignorant world

in the face--and ‘lived it down’. She had worked like a slave for fifty

years; yet she had more energy and endurance than many modern city women

in her shrivelled old body. She was a daughter of English aristocrats.

And we who live our weak lives of fifty years or so in the cities--we

grow maudlin over our sorrows (and beer), and ask whether life is worth

living or not.

I sought in the farming town relief from the general and particular

sameness of things, but there was none. The railway station was about

the only new building in town. The old signs even were as badly in need

of retouching as of old. I picked up a copy of the local ‘Advertiser’,

which newspaper had been started in the early days by a brilliant

drunkard, who drank himself to death just as the fathers of our nation

were beginning to get educated up to his style. He might have made

Australian journalism very different from what it is. There was nothing

new in the ‘Advertiser’--there had been nothing new since the last time

the drunkard had been sober enough to hold a pen. There was the same

old ‘enjoyable trip’ to Drybone (whereof the editor was the hero), and

something about an on-the-whole very enjoyable evening in some place

that was tastefully decorated, and where the visitors did justice to the

good things provided, and the small hours, and dancing, and our host and

hostess, and respected fellow-townsmen; also divers young ladies sang

very nicely, and a young Mr Somebody favoured the company with a comic

song.

There was the same trespassing on the valuable space by the old

subscriber, who said that ‘he had said before and would say again’, and

he proceeded to say the same things which he said in the same paper when

we first heard our father reading it to our mother. Farther on the old

subscriber proceeded to ‘maintain’, and recalled attention to the fact

that it was just exactly as he had said. After which he made a few

abstract, incoherent remarks about the ‘surrounding district’, and

concluded by stating that he ‘must now conclude’, and thanking the

editor for trespassing on the aforesaid valuable space.

There was the usual leader on the Government; and an agitation was still

carried on, by means of horribly-constructed correspondence to both

papers, for a bridge over Dry-Hole Creek at Dustbin--a place where no

sane man ever had occasion to go.

I took up the ‘unreliable contemporary’, but found nothing there except

a letter from ‘Parent’, another from ‘Ratepayer’, a leader on the

Government, and ‘A Trip to Limeburn’, which latter I suppose was made in

opposition to the trip to Drybone.

There was nothing new in the town. Even the almost inevitable gang of

city spoilers hadn’t arrived with the railway. They would have been

a relief. There was the monotonous aldermanic row, and the worse than

hopeless little herd of aldermen, the weird agricultural portion of whom

came in on council days in white starched and ironed coats, as we had

always remembered them. They were aggressively barren of ideas; but

on this occasion they had risen above themselves, for one of them had

remembered something his grandfather (old time English alderman) had

told him, and they were stirring up all the old local quarrels and

family spite of the district over a motion, or an amendment on a motion,

that a letter--from another enlightened body and bearing on an

equally important matter (which letter had been sent through the

post sufficiently stamped, delivered to the secretary, handed to the

chairman, read aloud in council, and passed round several times for

private perusal)--over a motion that such letter be received.

There was a maintenance case coming on--to the usual well-ventilated

disgust of the local religious crank, who was on the jury; but the case

differed in no essential point from other cases which were always coming

on and going off in my time. It was not at all romantic. The local youth

was not even brilliant in adultery.

After I had been a week in that town the Governor decided to visit

it, and preparations were made to welcome him and present him with

an address. Then I thought that it was time to go, and slipped away

unnoticed in the general lunacy.

The Never-Never Country.

By homestead, hut, and shearing-shed,

By railroad, coach, and track--

By lonely graves of our brave dead,

Up-Country and Out-Back:

To where ‘neath glorious clustered stars

The dreamy plains expand--

My home lies wide a thousand miles

In the Never-Never Land.

It lies beyond the farming belt,

Wide wastes of scrub and plain,

A blazing desert in the drought,

A lake-land after rain;

To the sky-line sweeps the waving grass,

Or whirls the scorching sand--

A phantom land, a mystic land!

The Never-Never Land.

Where lone Mount Desolation lies,

Mounts Dreadful and Despair--

‘Tis lost beneath the rainless skies

In hopeless deserts there;

It spreads nor’-west by No-Man’s Land--

Where clouds are seldom seen--

To where the cattle-stations lie

Three hundred miles between.

The drovers of the Great Stock Routes

The strange Gulf country know--

Where, travelling from the southern droughts,

The big lean bullocks go;

And camped by night where plains lie wide,

Like some old ocean’s bed,

The watchmen in the starlight ride

Round fifteen hundred head.

And west of named and numbered days

The shearers walk and ride--

Jack Cornstalk and the Ne’er-do-well,

And the grey-beard side by side;

They veil their eyes from moon and stars,

And slumber on the sand--

Sad memories sleep as years go round

In Never-Never Land.

By lonely huts north-west of Bourke,

Through years of flood and drought,

The best of English black-sheep work

Their own salvation out:

Wild fresh-faced boys grown gaunt and brown--

Stiff-lipped and haggard-eyed--

They live the Dead Past grimly down!

Where boundary-riders ride.

The College Wreck who sunk beneath,

Then rose above his shame,

Tramps West in mateship with the man

Who cannot write his name.

‘Tis there where on the barren track

No last half-crust’s begrudged--

Where saint and sinner, side by side,

Judge not, and are not judged.

Oh rebels to society!

The Outcasts of the West--

Oh hopeless eyes that smile for me,

And broken hearts that jest!

The pluck to face a thousand miles--

The grit to see it through!

The communism perfected!--

And--I am proud of you!

The Arab to true desert sand,

The Finn to fields of snow;

The Flax-stick turns to Maoriland,

Where the seasons come and go;

And this old fact comes home to me--

And will not let me rest--

However barren it may be,

Your own land is the best!

And, lest at ease I should forget

True mateship after all,

My water-bag and billy yet

Are hanging on the wall;

And if my fate should show the sign,

I’d tramp to sunsets grand

With gaunt and stern-eyed mates of mine

In Never-Never Land.

[End of original text.]

*****

A Note on the Author and the Text:

Henry Lawson was born near Grenfell, New South Wales, Australia on 17

June 1867. Although he has since become the most acclaimed Australian

writer, in his own lifetime his writing was often “on the side”--his

“real” work was whatever he could find, often painting houses, or

doing rough carpentry. His writing was often taken from memories of his

childhood, especially at Pipeclay/Eurunderee. In his autobiography, he

states that many of his characters were taken from the better class of

diggers and bushmen he knew there. His experiences at this time

deeply influenced his work, for it is interesting to note a number of

descriptions and phrases that are identical in his autobiography and in

his stories and poems. He died in Sydney, 2 September 1922. Much of his

writing was for periodicals, and even his regular publications were

so varied, including books originally released as one volume being

reprinted as two, and vice versa, that the multitude of permutations

cannot be listed here. However, the following should give a basic

outline of his major works.

Books of Short Stories:

While the Billy Boils (1896)

On the Track (1900)

Over the Sliprails (1900)

The Country I Come From (1901) | These works were first published

Joe Wilson and His Mates (1901) | in England, during or shortly after

Children of the Bush (1902) | Lawson’s stay there.

Send Round the Hat (1907) | These two books were first published

The Romance of the Swag (1907) | as “Children of the Bush”.

The Rising of the Court (1910)

Poetry:

In the Days When the World Was Wide (1896)

Verses Popular and Humorous (1900)

When I Was King and Other Verses (1905)

The Skyline Riders (1910)

Selected Poems of Henry Lawson (1918)

Joe Wilson and His Mates was later published as two separate volumes,

“Joe Wilson” and “Joe Wilson’s Mates”, which correspond to Parts I & II

in Joe Wilson and His Mates. This work was first published in England,

which may be evident from some of Lawson’s comments in the text which

are directed at English readers. For example, Lawson writes in ‘The

Golden Graveyard’: “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....”

Alan Light, Monroe, North Carolina, June 1997.

End of Project Gutenberg’s Joe Wilson and His Mates, by Henry Lawson