The Tracks We Tread/Chapter 2
Chapter II
The long wooden eating-whare smelt of onions and meat, and rang with the talk of Scannell’s men at breakfast. Red, frosty sunlight struck the clattering tinware to mix there with the red of the fire; and the slow peace of Sunday lay over the men. Lou blocked the door for an instant, causing Beckett and Scott to shout wrath from their card-game among the dirty plates. Then he swung his legs over a form, and pushed out a place between Mogger and Buck.
“Send along the tea-pot,” he said; “and that pannikin. Where’s the milk?”
Beyond Steve, Danny’s freckled face bobbed out of line.
“Mornin,” he said politely. “Ter-morrer mornin’. Did yer know it? We put in a detail of a day’s work while yer was etherealisin’ up in the hills.”
“Never gettin’ yer Sat’day night’s spring-cleanin’, neither,” shouted Beckett, whilst Scott promptly revoked.
Tod spread himself on the battle of dispute delightedly, and Buck said:
“Slep’ in yer boots, Lou, didn’t yer?”
The last forty hours had been sufficiently heavy to break another man. But Lou grinned, dredging brown sugar into his pannikin.
“Who roped in Art Scannell?” he said.
“Give us another. The boss said you did it. We runned till we was sick of it. Then we comed back—down the old track.”
“That’s a lie,” said Danny, cheerfully. “We was sick of it ’fore we started. Who was the idjit as found him? You or Randal?”
“It was a close thing. But Randal claimed the stakes—which were Art.”
“He’d sooner be claimin’ the Miss-takes,” giggled the cook, tossing tin plates into the sink, and Tod returned, wild-haired, to the table.
“Well, now, but that’s a pity,” he said. “I’d putt by two masses for the dirty sowl of him, which I was takin’ the money down to Father Denis to-day.”
“Hand it in fur Jimmie’s soul,” suggested Danny. “He cud do wi’ suthin’ ter kip it from drippin’ out o’ his boot-heels every time he runs away.”
Jimmie’s life at Mains was a day old. But half the boys on the station had made his nose bleed at the district school in years past—unless Ted Douglas were by. Now Douglas put a leg over the narrow table, and followed it.
“Are you goin’ to take that back?” he asked.
Danny’s freckled nose reefed in a grin.
“Deciduously, yer great lumberin’ hipperotermus. Let it go fur Jimmie’s boots, then. Double ’eels, fur perfrontin’ a leak.”
Jimmie flung a scone to secure attention, and his boy-face was unflushed.
“Don’t spile him to-day, Ted,” he said. “He's goin’ down ter see his girl, an’ it tuk him a half-hour oilin’ his bang. Jes’ take him ter pieces pretty, an’ put him tergether agin wi’ that face o’ his turned inside ef yer can manage it.”
Lou blinked through the haze of breath and steam.
“Mains has got a nut in you, Jimmie who-ever-you-are,” he murmured.
Then he went across the yard to his bunk and slept until the noise of a boxing-skirmish, conducted under strictly scientific rules, drew him out to the gay sunshine of the sloping paddock that ended in a rush-bound creek.
Danny was referee and umpire and general promoter, and half the township were there by special invitation. Scannell of Mains allowed all things—in reason; and once, when the vicar objected, he said:
“What would you have the men do? Ride through to the next township and demand drinks as travellers? Too many do that sort of thing already.” Scott sifted through the mob, laying bets. It is quite certain that he would have done the same in church, had the vicar ever haled him there. Lou stopped him.
“Who’s that girly-looking kid clapping Gordon?” he asked.
“One of Gordon’s shift on the Lion Hydraulic—Roddy Duncan. He’s a chum of Art Scannell’s.”
“Art Scannell!” breathed Lou. Then he broke Roddy’s treble laugh with a question. You know Mr. Art Scannell, eh?”
“He’s a pal of mine,” said the boy, turning in a pride that he could not make careless.
“I congratulate you. Does he ever speak to you of his sister?”
“Miss Effie? Often. An’ I see her myself. She comes up to the claim———”
“Do you know anything of Randal?”
“I seen him a few times at Phelan’s,” said Roddy.
“Ah! with Art Scannell, of course.” Phelan’s was the lowest hotel in the township. “Well, I hope you’ll drop into Blake’s some evenings—when Art doesn’t want you. I’ll be very glad to see you, you know."
Lou strolled off from Roddy’s flushed thanks. The dead-level of indifference had no favour for him, and Randal would make a good enemy. Mogger asked what he was grinning for, and Lou answered, jerking his head toward the distant black spur:
“Ted Douglas has just taken Jimmie up there—to vow to love, cherish and protect him, I suppose. It’s a great thing to have a mate—for the mate.”
Here Lou spoke raw truth. Because seven kinds of love out of eight are one-sided, and the world knows that the eighth is the same.
Beyond the black spur Douglas lay on the dead bracken, and smoked in a silence that hurt him. Jimmie drew his thin little knees under the clasp of his hands, and stared down the tussock gully where sheep fed on the snow-loosened slopes. Presently he said:
“Don’t see as it’s a thing to get in a sweat about, anyways.”
“Don’t you?” Ted Douglas sat up, and his strong unlined face was tender. “Ah, but you knows that you does! You can’t come that over me, Jimmie. I’m ’feared this is too tough a place for you, lad. Cattle-work puts grit into a man; but it puts the devil into him too. Our chaps have got it proper. They won’t stand any sort o’ funkin’, an’ you———”
“I got a tongue ter skin ’em with. That’s more’n you hev.”
Douglas felt his great muscles where the sleeves fell away from the forearm.
“I wonder what it feels like to feel afraid,” he said slowly.
“Hell,” said Jimmie, laconically.
Douglas punched holes in the turf, and his lips tightened. He said;
“I tolt you not to come to Mains. We got to go back after cattle next week. I was up with the boss this mornin’. He guv me the names.”
“An———?”
“An’ you’re one to go, Jimmie.”
Then Jimmie pivotted swiftly, speaking words that Ted Douglas would never have forgiven in another man. But he loved Jimmie.
“I couldn’t stop it,” he said, gravely. “If you’re scared, you must hook it. You’ll have to do your whack of graft here, Jimmie.”
“I don’t mind the ridin’. But if the brutes come chargin’—.Ted—oh, Ted———”
Douglas put his arm round the thin shoulders, and his grave young eyes were dark with pity.
“There’s a bit o’ a mutton-bird’s egg as won’t harden though you boil ’em for a year,” he said. “You’ve had some firin’—is there nothin’ won’t bile the funk out of you, Jimmie?”
But Jimmie looked across the low hills to the smoke-wreaths of the unseen township, and he gave no answer.
The township ran two cemeteries; but the one on the manuka-hill overlooking the river knew best who “kept company” and who were only “walking out” in Argyle. For the young have no fear in making love among the dead. And these had been dead so very long that the ever-lasting pea and the clematis and the foxglove had taken railings and headstones for their own, and wedded with the gorse and briar to give birth to new life.
“But that makes no odds,” said Steve. “Bein’ miners, it’s ten ter one these ain’t their right names at all. There was lots ran under false colours in the early days—an’ some do it now.”
He knelt on a wooden slab, scratching the green moss from it with his finger-nail, and his Sunday coat was tight on his shoulders. The girl who had ordered this spoke with a catch in her throat:
“Don’t! Oh, don’t say that! Poor things! Here’s ‘Of your mercy pray for the soul’—suppose it was the wrong soul, after all?”
Steve sat back on his heels, and looked up. No other man on Mains had his reach of arm or his power in a fight. But his heart was as big as his body, and as tender as that was tough.
“There ain’t any souls as ’ud be the worse for a prayer from you, Maiden,” he said.
Maiden was slim and sweet and supple as a manuka-slip. Her hat was pushed back to a halo on the fine soft hair, and the half-smile on her mouth was wistful.
“If yer was thinkin’ o’ my soul, Maiden———” ventured Steve.
“I wasn’t. I was thinkin’ of Lou Birot’s.”
“Lou Birot!” Steve came to his feet, and his voice grated. “Lou! Why?”
“Why not?” said Maiden.
“I won’t deny as he’d be the better for some prayin’ over,” said Steve, dryly. “But I’d ruther ’tweren’t you did it.”
“I don’t know as I asked you what you’d rather,” said Maiden, with dignity. “Lou wanted me to go walkin’ with him to-day; but I’d promised you. I mean to go with him next———”
“Yer won’t,” said Steve, in sudden fierceness. “Not with Lou—ever. Maiden, yer don’t know him. He’s a bad lot. A rotten bad———”
“He’s got prettier ways’n you have———”
“Yes,” said Steve with a grin. “The boys’ll tell yer that. Sweet pretty ways he’s got. But they’re not ways fur a gel like you, Maiden.”
“You’re cowards, the lot of you,” cried Maiden, gripping a half-fallen grave-stone in both little hands. “You’re allers passing back-talk about Lou. You’re all jealous of him ’cause he’s good-lookin’ an’ clever—what’s he done, then, that you’re so much better than he is?”
No man could cow Steve. But he stammered before the child-eyed thing in the print frock.
“I—I couldn’t tell it yer, my girlie. There’s lots o’ ways a chap has. . . . Looky here, Maiden: if yer’ll lump him inter yer prayers wi’ Art Scannell an’ Jimmie Blaine, I don’t mind.”
“And with you?”
Steve looked over the peaceful graves to the flood of sunlight down the peaceful gully, and the half-crescent of the township at end of it.
“If yer like—so long as you remembers me anyways, my girlie,” he said.
Fifteen miles off Randal was not exactly praying over Art Scannell. He stood in the hut door-way with Murray, and Murray frowned with bitten lips.
“He’s weak as a baby,” said Randal. “He needs home and bed, and feeding up. What are you going to do about it? Well?”
“Bring up a trap from the township and drive him home, I suppose. You can ride that black devil of his. But if ever I wanted to put the handcuffs on a man—and he’ll do more harm yet. It shakes a fellow’s belief—look out. He’s waking.”
But it was two days before Murray brought Art Scannell home. Randal rode in at the sunset; rubbed down the mare, fed her, and walked up the track to the house. Tod was sluicing his head in a bucket; but he brought it out with a chuckle as Randal passed by the whare.
“Bedad, thin, me foine boyo,” he murmured, “there’s apt to be the big throuble for ye directly.”
“Where?” demanded Moody, opening an eye. He was lying on his stomach, waiting for the tea-bell.
“Och; it’s jist hersilf comin’ wid wan Randal wud sooner be afther meeting wid a chopper than wid her, if Scott shpoke the truth.”
“Scott can’t speak truth,” said Moody, blinking up the track. “Miss Effie and Kiliat! That skunk’s allers here.”
“Ye’ve said it. And Randal is apt to know of it, too.”
The path was narrow, with wet grass on each side. Randal made way, touching his cap. And the girl nodded carelessly, listening to Kiliat. Randal tramped on up the track, and Moody turned with a grunt.
“Told yer Scott lied. They never put eyes on each other.”
“Ye’re the wise man, entoirely,” said Tod, and his voice nettled Moody.
“More’n you are then! Go and drip on somebody else fur a spell, can’t ye? Here’s Cookie. He ain’t had a wash this week. Or Kiliat cud do wi’ some drownin’.”
Kiliat was manager of the Lion Hydraulic Sluicing Company, with Ormond to do the work. He was known through the land as a fool, and the Packer, who owned his own private one-horse claim next door, wept when he told of Ormond’s patient mending of pipes and patching up of trestles.
“That Comp’ny’s suckin’ the Lion dry,” he said. “With Kiliat to show ’em the way. An’ cuttin’ down wages too, ain’t they, Gordon?"
“You mind yer bloomin’ business,” said Gordon, suddenly hostile.
The Packer scratched his throat with a dirty finger-nail.
“Never ’ave I called a man my master,” he said, in the pride of the free.
Randal crossed the flagged verandah, and knocked on the door of the man he called master.
“Jack told me at the stable that you wanted to see me,” he said.
Scannell pushed his chair back from the desk, and looked at Randal straightly. Few could tell when the knife was in his flesh, for he did not flinch from it.
“They tell me you have saved my son’s life. I—thank you, Randal.”
Randal was yet gentleman enough to flush under the true eyes. Scannell of Mains had small reason to give thanks there.
“You needn’t. Murray did as much. What? Yes, sir. Very well.”
The bellow of the tea-bell caught him at the little gate, and he stopped in a sudden sickness. For it was all the strait years of work-life that called from the whare. Then his eyes changed; he laid his hand on the side-rail, leapt it, and ran with long strides to the stables. For Kiliat rode up the pine avenue, and above the fences a little dark head showed alone. She sprang at his tread; her hands out; her face glowing.
“Oh, I’m glad—glad. I wanted to tell you———”
“Effie—dearest—I’m too dirty———”
But the earth gave three clipped moments of Heaven. Then Randal stood back.
“You’d no right to let me touch you,” he said. “Out here! And in daylight! You make me a brute to you, Effie. I must go———”
“Wait! Ah! it shouldn’t be me to say that! Are you so hungry, then?”
“Yes,” said Randal; and his eyes brought the colour swiftly.
“I—I never meant—I want to thank you for Art———”
“Please don’t,” said Randal dryly. “Your father has done that.”
“Oh! And my thanks don’t count? No— you said I wasn’t to let you touch me. Well, but you deserve punishing———”
“Let me earn my forgiveness then, dear.”
The mischief left her face.
“There is something I wanted—you know Roddy Duncan from the Lion? He’s such a nice little boy, and I’ve often seen him up there. But—but—he is always with Art; and dear old Art, he—I can’t speak to Mr. Ormond myself—but—you know———”
They were the same fine-cut features and long-lashed eyes that Randal had followed into deeps that shook his soul at the remembering.
“I know, dear. I’ll go down and see Ormond to-night. He can put a check-strap on Roddy, if you wish it. I’ll do what I can to-night. We go out to camp at day-break, you see.”
He had a twenty-mile ride behind him, and four nights that he did not speak of behind that. But he took saddle again that evening under a wet sky, with Danny’s blessing chasing him out.
“We’re evolutin’ teetotalers up at the camp, you’ll remember; an’ you’re not ter bring back more’n a bottle o’ lavender water fur Ike———”
Randal ducked from Ike’s quick-flung pannikin, and went out on a crest of laughter. It was Danny who last week had discovered Ike behind the brick oven, blue in the face, and spitting “Jockey Club” emphatically.
“Wot’s the little game?” demanded Danny.
Ike rubbed himself, and leaned on the wall.
“Nellie up at the ’ouse told me I’d fair come over any gal if I scented meself. But I’m blamed ef I’ll drink all that bottle fur any gal livin’. She’ll hev to take me smellin’, or leave me.”
Danny carried the bottle back to the whare, and told things. And Ike had taken little joy in life since. For the Mains boys knew what to do with a joke when they saw one.
The night was cold with grey blankets over the hills, and a soft mist rolling along the river. By the blaze of Phelan’s one door-lamp Randal caught sight of Art’s back in the bar, with Roddy Duncan’s bright face beside it.
He slung through the township full-speed, took the track past the Creek to the Lion, and learnt from Fysh that Ormond was three miles off with Father Denis. He turned then, with wrath on his mouth; rode back, and flushed Ormond in the smoke of the priest’s little room.
“That young box-man of yours is with Art Scannell in Phelan’s bar," he said, "I’ve learnt something of Art this last week, and I know he’ll mess Roddy up pretty quick. Better put a spoke in his wheel, hadn’t you?”
Ormond knew Randal as a gentleman may know a station-hand. He put down his pipe.
“Who sent you down to tell me that?” he demanded.
“That’s my business. Your business is to look after your men—that is, if you consider your responsibilities at all.”
“Please don’t apologise for teaching me my responsibilities,” said Ormond.
“Don’t mean to. Are you going to rope in Roddy, or are you not?”
Ormond blinked across at the other as he stood, straight and lean, in the door, with the rain on his yellow oil-skins, and his hard face grey with cold. Then he got up and spoke as no man of Randal’s birth had spoken to him these fifteen years. Father Denis clapped his fat hands on his knees.
“An’ ye’re all right, then, the pair ov ye. Thrust ye tu know a man when ye sees him, Ormond. Bring him along tu the fire; an’ shut the dure, for it’s cowld enough to freeze tin regimints on us. There’s a chair goin’ beggin’—ye’ll have whisky, Mr. Randal?”
Randal’s nerve forsook him. In the colonies no work is derogatory to a man unless he makes it so. He may clean pig-sties, and the friends of his college days will not forsake him; but to take the first step down the ladder which few climb again, must and does lose him touch with his class. This is the inexorable law. Randal was half-way down that ladder long since, and the fierce passion which swept Effie Scannell on its tide might never bear him up ward in this world. But the taste of the old years dried his mouth and blinded his eyes as Ormond brought Navy-cut, and decanters that sparkled, and pushed a cushioned chair where the firelight shone. He sloughed his pride with his oil-skins, and sat down. But his tongue was dumb, and Ormond guessed why, with a sudden pity and shame. Father Denis sailed down-wind breezily.
“Bedad; ye’re jist the man I’m wantin’ the handlin’ ov this long while,” he said.
“How so?” Randal’s voice showed suspicion on the undertow.
“Ye’re strong. That boy there’s another.” He jerked a fat thumb at Ormond. “Ye’re both good men in yer hand———”
“You mistake,” said Randal, sharply. “I’m a hand myself.”
“Blathers! A strong man houlds men all over the worrld an’ back agin. An’ ye can git where I can’t git, Randal. Intu Blake's bar-parlour———”
“You’d not find much you cared for there.”
“I’d find men.” He blew smoke from his nostrils, and his big heart shone in his eyes, “I’m wantin’ men,” he said.
Ormond’s grin showed the white teeth gripped on the pipe-stem.
“Men like Lou Birot—and Jimmie Blaine—and Rogers?” he suggested.
“I’m wid ye, entoirely. Them most ov all. Ye’ll not heal a wound wid the splinter stayin’ in it.”
“The wound has bred the splinter.”
The priest looked at Randal quickly.
“Begorra; that’s the ould riddle ov the hin an’ the egg. We’ll not ask which came fust, then. Bhut we’ll thry tu get the splinter out.”
“You never will,” said Randal, as one who knew.
“Import a few more chuckers-out made on Murray’s last,” murmured Ormond.
This pricked Randal’s flesh, and roused him.
“You can trust most communities to sift the sound from the rotten. We require a man to ride straight, and to hit straight, and to live straight———.”
“Ye measure the last distance wid a mighty crooked shtick, then,” said Father Denis, dryly.
Randal reddened.
“We don’t ask religion—or sobriety—or the outward graces of speech. But a man who rides and hits out straight can’t live very crooked.”
“By Jove,” cried Ormond, “you’ve nailed him there! Didn’t I tell you. Father? When we see a man’s hand shake on the rifle-stock or the rein we mark him down at once. For we knew him in his youth. But the tourists who belt through New Zealand, giving tongue, and picking up stuff as they run—they go back and use this man for a text, not knowing that he is outside the pale already.”
“An’ which ov us have the right tu put up the pale?” said the priest, gravely.
“The men do it. The rotters and the others—the chaps who are going to help cook the world’s pie in the future. But the tourist doesn’t know anything about them.”
“It’s a hot fire many ov thim will use for the bakin’,” said Father Denis, his eyes on Randal’s shut hand and mouth.
“I believe you. They will be the men who have learnt first-hand. And you can’t learn anything without sweating some of the greenness out of you first. The men who learn first-hand aren’t generally sappy.”
“If that pie has no taste ov burrn tu it, ’twill be because ye’re dead fust, Ormond. Crow away on yer dung hill, me young cock. It is not the worrld will be throubled by ye.”
Ormond stood up, straddling before the fire. His shadow fell across the room to a girl’s face on the wall. That face was Father Denis’ story. It had taught him all he knew.
“This is a populous farmyard, and it’s going to be noisier than you think. In this way. It is the People who make the Colonies. It is the Aristocracy who make the Old World—and the Laws. Well, the People stand flat-foot upon the earth, and you can’t upset them, because they’ve nothing to fall off. Can’t you see the pull it gives them?”
Randal glanced up at the virile face and the square set of the shoulders.
“What the devil does it matter, anyway?” he said. “They upset themselves—into their six feet of soil—at the end. Then the Aristocracy have the pull—with a well-dried family vault.”
“We do something toward making a New World first, though. The kind of world that doesn’t think so much of three languages and blue blood as it does of muscle and endurance and the old, old dogma that a man works for himself and a woman—one woman.”
“It will be a stupider world,” said Randal, frankly.
“It will be cleaner———.”
Father Denis exploded, flinging back his head in a great gust of laughter.
“Ah, git away wid ye an’ yer politics, Ormond. Ye’d talk the head off the Lion’s lift-poipe. Faith, ye’ve got in wan from the shouldher that toime, Randal, for all ye’ve bin sookin’ silence so long.”
It was sight of Ormond leaning against the mantel-shelf with its old china and heavy bronze candle-sticks that suddenly flicked Randal back into realisation. Far away—in town—Ormond was yet free of the clubs and of ladies’ drawing-rooms. His own feet were on the track up which there is no returning. And only the man who has been there knows what it means to see his equal above him.
He stood up stiff with the hardness back on his face. He called Ormond “Sir” in a sudden defiance, and went out to the night with his shoulders bowed under the old weight. Father Denis drew at his pipe in a long silence. Ormond said blankly:
“What scared him?”
“Himsilf—an’ you.” The priest’s eyes fell on the length and breadth of the other man. “He’ll hate ye wan ov these days—or love ye. Bhut I’ll never git hould of him. A man who has fed wid the beasts ov the shtable will not come back tu the banquetin’-hall. For why? Because it wud be tu ‘come back.’”