The Tracks We Tread/Chapter 15
Chapter XV
“Looks like ole Joe Page ev’ry time,” said Moody.
Danny spanked a hogget forward by application of the draughting gate, and smudged the sweat from his forehead.
“It don’t look like him, yer idjit,” he said explosively. “It is him. Now you just hook it, Joe. I ain’t goin’ ter be done wi’ these pants ’fore shearin’s over. An’ there won’t be anythin’ but the equivocating buttings lef’ then.”
Joe was a password in the district sheds. He cadged a coat here, a pair of boots somewhere else, and cast dungarees and old hats by the score. He hooked his arms over the rail and smiled blandly.
“Yer’ll kip the buttons fur me, anyways, Danny,” he suggested.
“I’m makin’ them inter a teething necklace fur me sister’s baby,” said Danny, stolidly. “Go an’ ring yer little game outer Lou.”
Further down the heat of the sun-swept race Lou was hustling sheep with his cap, with a manuka bough, with sharp whistles, and the power of his fore-bent knees. Above the noise and hurry of the draughting yards, and above the yap-yap of Danny’s blue Smithfield by his foot, he heard and gave answer.
“Cut along into the shed, Joe, and ask for Mogger. You’ll find him on the presses. He’s always got things to spare.”
“Joe—don’t yer go ter do———” But a ram slewed the gate over with his horn, and Danny plunged into the tideway, vivid-speeched and alert, to turn the river that set awry to the yards.
All the glory of summer was over Mains, on the hills and the bush-dark gullies. All the savage glare and heat of it was over the yards where sheep cried and coughed, and shook the rails with the soft weight of their bodies; and where dogs were thick underfoot, noisy, clever and keen; obedient ever to the quick whistle, to the shout through the dust, and to the swerve of an up-flung hand. The races roared with choked life; the three draughting gates throbbed back and forth under power of quick eye and quick brain and quick hand. The dust was dry in each man’s throat, and the grit of it between his teeth. And all the welter of sound and ruled haste and heat did not shake the compass point that he steered by. For a Colonial learns by doing, and by doing again; and this is the only true way to get technical skill.
The last ram butted Danny on the hip, so that he sent a kick after him as the gate swung idle. Then he sat on the rail to charge his pipe while Moody swept six more down the paddock to round up another mob.
“Yer a fair skunk, Lou,” he said.
Lou cut tobacco slowly. The grease and dirt of sheep were on his bared arms and his shirt, and his boots were burst at the toes. But still there was something in the carriage of his head that would turn women and not a few men to look at him twice.
“Old Joe’ll strike a snag in Mogger—unless he’s wanting ribbons,” he said.
“I ’opes as Mogger’ll do some strikin’ ’fore long,” said Danny, with feeling, and took six sets of rails and a gate in answer to Steve’s howl from the filling pens.
He snatched a gum stick from somewhere, dived into the ruck, and hammered the stumbling bodies up the grating to the bowels of the shed. Here new sounds and new stenches held sway: the rasp of the presses forward, the mutter of the shears, the hundred other noises pent in by the dark of iron roof that creaked in the grasp of the sun rays.
There was smell of the tar-pot, and of sheep, and of heated men; and the strange oily scent of a well-yoked fleece. Danny slammed the gate behind the last straggler and made out for air, past the length of the board where the men stopped dripping, and the fleecies swooped and circled like gulls.
“I’ve filled up wi’ a entrancin’ lot o’ smellers this go, Creash,” he said. “Come off of the Pinetop where we bin cultivatin’ Californian thistle, they did.”
Creash grinned, turning his sheep over.
“Takes the all of a sewin’ needle to git through my hide. Go an’ tell Luttrell. He’s soft.”
But Ted Douglas was telling Luttrell things at that instant. And Danny paused, smelling trouble. For he knew Luttrell’s tongue, and he knew that “back-talk” was no tender to the shed boss on Mains.
“When I’m wantin’ your biography I’ll ask fur it,” said Ted, with his hands deep in his coat pockets. “I don’t care what you did in Orstralyer. A man who can’t shear his two hundred there is a fool. But the man what does more than his one hundred here—on these sheep—he’s goin’ to git fired, an’ don’t you forgit it. We ain’t over-keen on seein’ fancy wool work under the Mains brand.”
“Crewel work is the belligerent name fur it,” suggested Danny; and Scott shouted from the loft:
“Are he wantin’ a cork ter his shear p’ints, Ted?”
“Not so much as you’re wantin’ it in your mouth,” returned Ted, sharply.
Luttrell’s great buck teeth showed under the ragged moustache, and his hands shook on the idle shears. But the steady eyes and voice broke him down. He swerved sullenly into the pen, dragged out his sheep, and opened up with the clean clever blow of the ringer. Danny grunted approval.
“The ole apostrophe!” he said. “He’d ’a’ had the head off of anyone else as blocked him. But there ain’t much leakin’ on Mains wi’ you at the sluices, Ted.”
Ted gave no answer. He passed the tables with quick commanding sight on the wool bins, the branders, the hurrying fleecies, and the men that wrought with the presses and bales. At end of the south board he stood, and each shearer felt him there on the instant. Ted knew that they felt him, and the apple of his throat ached in sudden pain. For not Steve nor another was fitted to take his place in the shed, on the cattle camps, on the ranges in the mustering season. And yet, for Jimmie, he would leave Mains to fall or to fight according to the wisdom of Steve or another. Because this much is true of men all the world through: they give hand-and-lip service to a superior; but only to a leader of their class will they give thew-and-body service to the utmost. Scannell knew this when he laid power on Ted’s shoulders; and Ted knew.
“On’y fur Jimmie,” he said underbreath. “I can’t help it if there ain’t another chap fit—Baxter!”
Danny heard the shout where he was draining a half-dozen pannikins by the big doors.
“Ted ain’t sweet ter-day,” he remarked, rubbing against a new-branded bale. “Did Joe come askin’ him fur handkerchees an’ hair-ile an’ things, Ike?”
“Joe ast me,” said Mogger, with his weight on the bale hook, and the muscles outsprung on his forehead. “He said as Lou tole him ter.”
Scott grinned, jerking a thread from the twine hank.
“The game ain’t ter the dealer this time, though,” he said.
“What’d yer do, Mog?” Danny slung down the last pannikin, and stood upright.
“Jes’ guv him Lou’s coat. He lef it here last ‘Spell-o,’” said Mogger, composedly, and tumbled the bale into the brander’s hands.
Danny fell over in abandonment of joy and giggled until the brander—who happened to be Scott—saw the smudged “First Combing,” and tracked the final “g” to Danny’s left shoulder. Thereafter, Danny went out headlong on the mass of sweepings drawn from the shed; picked himself up, and returned to the little gates in a kindly tenderness that puzzled Lou until he came for his coat after the night’s cutout. This was long past the meal hour, for the work of the station hands does not snap with the shearer’s bell; and thirty-seven men lay round the whares where the grass was tramped dust, or scattered down the long paddock in the dusk with the ring of quoits to mark them. Lou satisfied his hunger. Then he came out and satisfied Mogger, and, incidentally, Tod and several more. Tod was fullfed with happiness, for a mixed crowd was incense in his nostrils. He flung his vitriol dispassionately, while Mogger sat with out-stretched legs in the dust, and told passers-by that “It was wuth it.”
“Not as Lou’s fists dun’t git home quick as his tongue most times,” he explained; “but it was wuth it. A reel good coat, an’ no error. Joe called me a pattron, too. That means a banefactor ter Society.”
“It don’t,” said Danny, whom Suse had initiated in several mysteries. “It means a thing as gels cuts their frocks on. Joe were pullin’ yer leg, Mogger.”
“I’d be a good pattron fur a gel ter cut a husbin’ on, then,” said Mogger, stretching himself. “Yer tell that ter Suse, Danny, supposin’ she’s wantin’ ter change ’er mind ’fore it’s too late.”
“Arrah, bedad, it’s only colleens loike Miss Effie has the sinse to do that,” remarked Tod. “It’s on wid Kiliat, all roight, now, an’ off wid Randal—more be token as he’s shankin’ down-hill wid all the power lef’ to him.”
“Randal was allers a fool,” said Scott, falling out of a dispute that had been over-hot. “He’s workin’ a hatter’s claim up Chinaman’s Gully now, and gittin’ his washups from the Lion drainage. Makes a colour p’raps once in four days, he does. A fine sort o’ life, that.”
Someone spoke above the murmur of voices where the tobacco clouds hung on the dusk.
“Oh, go it! We’re mighty ready to jump on a man for goin’ lame. Suppose you hunt round for the last his boot was made on, next time.”
“It’s wise ye are,” said Tod, dryly. “We buys thim ready-made, me bosthoon; an’ wan lasht does for the lot—until it is worn out. Bhut it does not pinch us all.”
Ted Douglas smoked slowly.
“You allers talk clever when you’re not meanin’ it. Tod,” he said. “Till our feet is all made on one last, too, I reckin there’ll gene’ly be some on us goin’ lame.”
A Queenslander sat up with a crackle of the brushwood stack at his foot.
“There’s a time comin’ when we’ll make our own bloomin’ lasts an’ our own bloomin’ laws,” he said. “No ready-made foolery. We won’t hev no corns then.”
Danny rolled over, and pulled the accordeon toward him.
“Belike we won’t hev no boots nayther, yer contagious yard o’ shingle! Paddy, cut along in an’ tell Lou as the audience is requestin’ him ter come an’ oblige wi’ ‘The Ole Bullock Dray.’”
In the close dark of the eating-whare where the cook and the slushy juggled with tin plates and dirty water, Lou was drawing a three-shed cheque from young Benson by power of five cards and some science. He retired Paddy with direct insult, and the quoit players came back to raise choruses and to fling uncurbed jokes that angered Ted Douglas. He got to his feet, speaking curtly:
“I’m goin’ out to the river downs arter keas. Any on you comin’ along?”
Ike stifled a yawn and raised himself by sections. He was bone-weary, as every hand on Mains had a right to be. But when a man does not give jealousy he usually gives adoration to the other of his own age and rank who has distanced him.
“I am, Ted. Wait till I gits my gun.”
Steve had seen Ike sluicing the rust out of his old single-barrel the evening before, and he growled distinct warning until the tread of feet ceased to echo on the warm earth where he lay.
Past the woolshed gates the two fell on Scannell with his clever little 303 in his arm-pit. Not age nor sorrow of soul could kill the sportsman in Scannell, and he stepped it alertly; through manuka and tawhina scrub, round the swamp head, and up the tussock terraces beyond.
The dew had loosed scent on the still air. Scent of tussock and languid-sweet manuka bloom; of bush in far-below gullies, and cow breath and subtle smells from the flax and the faint evening primrose. To the westing the long, long afterglow quivered still in pale gold, and the rush of the river round the terrace foot sounded clear and serene. Ted was not speaking, for the calm of the night was steadying his soul against what should be. Ike listened, sharp-eared, for the kea call, and whistled out the answer gladly when sound caught them on the lip of the first slope.
They dropped over it as one, and unshorn ewes blundered away at their coming. But a dark heap lay on the breast of the tussock with a picnic party atop.
The party cursed in parrot jabber; drew off five paces, and cursed again. Guns spoke thrice with red fire. Then Ted came on his knee, feeling over the bloody wool for the kidneys that yet were warm.
“There’s life enough in the blood to pull the p’ison through it,” he said, and proceeded to work straightway.
Ike nosed his way forward carefully, cuddling his old gun and walking the lean sheep track in the half light with the snarl of shingle on rocks straight below. Ted stood up, cleansed his hands in the tussock spines, and said :
“That makes the hundred, sir.”
Scannell kicked at a fallen flutter of green and red feathers.
“Brutes!” he said. “They’re hanging about late this year. We must work ’em systematically when shearing’s done, Ted.”
Ted’s hand gripped on his rifle. He spoke very low.
“’Fraid you’ll hev to git someone else to run that game. I—want to leave arter shearin’s done.”
“Leave! Leave! You don’t know what you’re talking about. Leave Mains! You couldn’t do it, Ted.”
“I wants ter leave after shearin’.” Scannell caught the shake in the tone.
“Are you tired of the old life, Ted?”
“No! You knows I ain’t! But—I wants ter go.”
“Why?”
There was a silence. The very far murmur of sheep plucked at Ted’s heart strings. The mighty head of the Brothers across the river and across the lower hills called him in every grand curve of it against the stars. At his feet the downs rolled away; dimpled, and lush with feed for the sheep that he might not control at next muster.
“Why, Ted?”
“It’s just—Jimmie. He might be wantin’ help somewhere, an’ I can give it.”
“Jimmie? Jimmie Blaine? Ted, I won’t believe that you are wanting to bring him to justice!”
Ted laughed just a little, standing big and still against the stars.
“Thanky, sir. No—Jimmie’s my mate. He’s easily ’feared, an’ there’s suthin’ on his mind———”
“Quite likely,” said Scannell, dryly.
. . . “An’ bein’ a Carth’lic he thinks a powerful lot o’ dyin’ unshrived an’ that sort o’ thing. It makes me sick o’ times ter think what might be happenin’ ter the little chap.”
“He tried to ruin you, Ted. He would have perjured himself to do it if he had had the pluck.”
“I loves him,” said Ted, slowly. “An’ love’s the kind o’ thing as yer can’t let out the slack o’ or wind it up jes’ as yer like. He’s weak as a girl, an’ I loves him as I’ll never love a girl. I must find him, sir.”
Scannell was angry for the space of five minutes. Then he said something that hurt Ted more than the anger.
“I thought you loved Mains, Ted.”
“Don’t! Don’t! You knows as I—I———”
Scannell’s hand sought the hard young one, and gripped it.
“I’m sorry—but it’s hard on me, too. I’ll never get another headman like you, Ted. Well—you’ll see us through shearing?”
“Wouldn’t I have gone a month ago ef I hadn’t meant that? Yes, I’ll wait till that is done.”
“Then,” said Scannell, “we had better go on. For there is no more to say.”