She stamped her foot again, jabbed her
forefinger at the door,
and said, "Go-o-o!" in a tone that startled the majority of the company
nearly as much as it did Danny. Then Yankee Jack threw down his cards,
rose from the table, laid his strong, shapely right hand -- not
roughly --
on Danny's
ragged shoulder, and engineered the drunk
gently through the door.
"You's better go out for a while, Danny," he said; "there wasn't much harm
in what you said, but your cheque's gone, and that makes all the difference.
It's time you went back to the station. You've got to be careful
what you say now."
When Jack returned to the parlour the barmaid had a smile for him;
but he didn't take it. He went and stood before the fire,
with his foot resting on the fender and his elbow on the mantelshelf,
and looked blackly at a print against the wall before his face.
"The old beast!" said Alice, referring to Danny. "He ought to be
kicked off the place!"
"HE'S AS GOOD AS YOU!"
The voice was Jack's; he flung the stab over his shoulder,
and with it a look that carried all the
contempt he felt.
She gasped, looked blankly from face to face, and witheringly
at the back of Jack's head; but that didn't change colour
or curl the least
trifle less closely.
"Did you hear that?" she cried, appealing to anyone.
"You're a nice lot o' men, you are, to sit there and hear a woman insulted,
and not one of you man enough to take her part -- cowards!"
The Sydney jackeroo rose impulsively, but Jack glanced at him,
and he sat down again. She covered her face with her hands
and ran hysterically to her room.
That afternoon another bushman arrived with a cheque,
and shouted five times
running at a pound a shout, and at intervals
during the rest of the day when they weren't fighting or gambling.
Alice had "got over her temper"
seemingly, and was even kind
to the
humble and contrite Danny, who became
painfully particular
with his "Thanky, Alice" -- and afterwards offensive
with his unnecessarily
frequent threats to smash the first man
who insulted her.
But let us draw the curtain close before that Sunday afternoon at Stiffner's,
and hold it tight. Behind it the great curse of the West is in evidence,
the chief trouble of unionism -- drink, in its most
selfish, barren,
and
useless form.
. . . . .
All was quiet at Stiffner's. It was after
midnight, and Stiffner
lay dead-drunk on the broad of his back on the long
moonlit verandah,
with all his patrons asleep around him in various
grotesque positions.
Stiffner's
ragged grey head was on a
cushion, and a broad maudlin smile
on his red, drink-sodden face, the lower half of which was bordered
by a dirty grey beard, like that of a frilled
lizard. The red handkerchief
twisted round his neck had a
ghastly effect in the bright
moonlight,
making him look as if his
throat was cut. The smile was the one
he went to sleep with when his wife slipped the
cushion under his head
and
thoughtfully removed the loose change from about his person.
Near him lay a heap that was Danny, and spread over the bare boards
were the others, some with heads pillowed on their swags,
and every man about as drunk as his neighbour. Yankee Jack lay across
the door of the barmaid's bedroom, with one arm bent under his head,
the other lying limp on the
doorstep, his handsome face turned out
to the bright
moonlight. The "family" were sound asleep
in the detached
cottage, and Alice -- the only
capable person
on the premises -- was left to put out the lamps and "shut up" for the night.
She extinguished the light in the bar, came out, locked the door,
and picked her way among and over the drunkards to the end of the verandah.
She clasped her hands behind her head, stretched herself, and yawned,
and then stood for a few moments looking out into the night,
which softened the
ragged line of mulga to right and left,
and veiled the awful
horizon of that great plain with which
the "traveller" commenced, or ended, the thirty-mile "dry stretch".
Then she moved towards her own door; before it she halted and stood,
with folded arms, looking down at the
drunken Adonis at her feet.
She
breathed a long
breath with a sigh in it, went round to the back,
and
presently returned with a buggy-
cushion, which she slipped under his head
-- her face close to his -- very close. Then she moved his arms
gently off the
threshold, stepped across him into her room,
and locked the door behind her.
There was an
uneasymovement in the heap that stood, or lay, for Danny.
It stretched out, turned over, struggled to its hands and knees,
and became an object. Then it crawled to the wall, against which
it slowly and
painfully up-ended itself, and stood blinking round
for the water-bag, which hung from the verandah rafters
in a line with its
shapeless red nose. It staggered forward,
held on by the cords, felt round the edge of the bag for the tot,
and drank about a quart of water. Then it staggered back against the wall,
stood for a moment muttering and passing its hand aimlessly over
its poor ruined head, and finally collapsed into a
shapeless rum-smelling heap
and slept once more.
The jackeroo at the end of the verandah had awakened from his
drunken sleep,
but had not moved. He lay huddled on his side, with his head on the swag;
the whole length of the verandah was before him; his eyes were wide open,
but his face was in the shade. Now he rose
painfully and stood
on the ground outside, with his hands in his pockets,
and gazed out over the open for a while. He
breathed a long
breath, too --
with a groan in it. Then he lifted his swag quietly
from the end of the floor, shouldered it, took up his water-bag and billy,
and sneaked over the road, away from the place, like a thief.
He struck across the plain, and tramped on, hour after hour, mile after mile,
till the bright moon went down with a bright star in attendance
and the other bright stars waned, and he entered the timber
and tramped through it to the "cleared road", which stretched far and wide
for twenty miles before him, with
ghostly little dust-clouds
at short intervals ahead, where the frightened rabbits crossed it.
And still he went
doggedly on, with the
ghastlydaylight on him --
like a swagman's ghost out late. And a mongrel followed faithfully
all the time unnoticed, and wondering, perhaps, at his master.
"What was yer doin' to that girl yesterday?" asked Danny of Yankee Jack
next evening, as they camped on the far side of the plain.
"What was you chaps sayin' to Alice? I heerd her cryin' in her room
last night."
But they reckoned that he had been too drunk to hear anything
except an
invitation to come and have another drink; and so it passed.
The Hero of Redclay
The "boss-over-the-board" was leaning with his back to the wall
between two shoots,
reading a
reference handed to him by a green-hand
applying for work as picker-up or woolroller -- a shed rouseabout.
It was
terribly hot. I was slipping past to the rolling-tables,
carrying three fleeces to save a journey; we were only
supposed to carry two.
The boss stopped me:
"You've got three fleeces there, young man?"
"Yes."
Notwithstanding the fact that I had just slipped a light
ragged fleece
into the belly-wool and "bits" basket, I felt deeply injured,
and righteously and
fiercelyindignant at being pulled up.
It was a fearfully hot day.
"If I catch you carrying three fleeces again," said the boss quietly,
"I'll give you the sack."
"I'll take it now if you like," I said.
He nodded. "You can go on picking-up in this man's place,"
he said to the jackeroo, whose
reference showed him to be a non-union man --
a "free-labourer", as the pastoralists had it, or, in plain shed terms,
"a blanky scab". He was now in the comfortable position of a non-unionist
in a union shed who had jumped into a sacked man's place.
Somehow the lurid
sympathy of the men irritated me worse than
the boss-over-the-board had done. It must have been on
account of the heat,
as Mitchell says. I was sick of the shed and the life.
It was within a couple of days of cut-out, so I told Mitchell
-- who was shearing -- that I'd camp up the Billabong and wait for him;
got my cheque, rolled up my swag, got three days' tucker from the cook,
said so-long to him, and tramped while the men were in the shed.
I camped at the head of the Billabong where the track branched,
one branch
running to Bourke, up the river, and the other
out towards the Paroo -- and hell.
About ten o'clock the third morning Mitchell came along
with his cheque and his swag, and a new sheep-pup, and his quiet grin;
and I wasn't too pleased to see that he had a shearer called "the Lachlan"
with him.
The Lachlan wasn't popular at the shed. He was a brooding,
unsociable sort of man, and it didn't make any difference to the chaps
whether he had a union ticket or not. It was pretty well known in the shed
-- there were three or four chaps from the district he was reared in --
that he'd done five years hard for burglary. What surprised me
was that Jack Mitchell seemed thick with him; often, when the Lachlan
was sitting brooding and smoking by himself outside the hut after
sunset,
Mitchell would perch on his heels
alongside him and yarn.
But no one else took notice of anything Mitchell did out of the common.
"Better camp with us till the cool of the evening," said Mitchell
to the Lachlan, as they slipped their swags. "Plenty time for you to start
after
sundown, if you're going to travel to-night."
So the Lachlan was going to travel all night and on a different track.
I felt more comfortable, and put the billy on. I did not care so much
what he'd been or had done, but I was green and soft yet,
and his presence embarrassed me.
They talked shearing, sheds, tracks, and a little unionism --
the Lachlan
speaking in a quiet voice and with a lot of sound, common sense,
it seemed to me. He was tall and gaunt, and might have been thirty,
or even well on in the forties. His eyes were dark brown and deep set,
and had something of the dead-earnest sad expression you saw
in the eyes of union leaders and secretaries -- the straight men
of the strikes of '90 and '91. I fancied once or twice I saw in his eyes
the sudden furtive look of the "bad egg" when a mounted trooper
is spotted near the shed; but perhaps this was prejudice.
And with it all there was about the Lachlan something of the man
who has lost all he had and the chances of all he was ever likely to have,
and is past feeling, or caring, or flaring up -- past getting mad
about anything -- something, all the same, that warned men
not to make free with him.
He and Mitchell fished along the Billabong all the afternoon;
I fished a little, and lay about the camp and read. I had an instinct
that the Lachlan saw I didn't cotton on to his camping with us,
though he wasn't the sort of man to show what he saw or felt.
After tea, and a smoke at
sunset, he shouldered his swag,
nodded to me as if I was an
accidental but
respectful stranger
at a
funeral that belonged to him, and took the outside track.
Mitchell walked along the track with him for a mile or so,
while I poked round and got some boughs down for a bed, and fed and studied
the
collie pup that Jack had bought from the shearers' cook.
I saw them stop and shake hands out on the dusty clearing,
and they seemed to take a long time about it; then Mitchell started back,
and the other began to
dwindle down to a black peg and then to a dot
on the sandy plain, that had just a hint of dusk and
dreamy far-away gloaming
on it between the change from glaring day to hard, bare, broad
moonlight.
I thought Mitchell was sulky, or had got the blues, when he came back;
he lay on his elbow smoking, with his face turned from the camp
towards the plain. After a bit I got wild -- if Mitchell was going
to go on like that he might as well have taken his swag and gone
with the Lachlan. I don't know exactly what was the matter with me that day,
and at last I made up my mind to bring the thing to a head.
"You seem
mighty thick with the Lachlan," I said.
"Well, what's the matter with that?" asked Mitchell. "It ain't
the first felon I've been on
speaking terms with. I borrowed half-a-caser
off a
murderer once, when I was in a hole and had no one else to go to;
and the
murderer hadn't served his time, neither. I've got nothing
against the Lachlan, except that he's a white man and bears
a faint family
resemblance to a certain branch of my tribe."
I rolled out my swag on the boughs, got my pipe,
tobacco, and matches handy