Читать книгу The Sands of Windee - Arthur W. Upfield - Страница 15

Stars and Shadows

The car began to climb; the song of the engine was like the low hum of a child’s top; and now, when the track twisted round the slopes of the hills boulder-strewn and supporting a growth of stunted wattle and mulga, it seemed to the travellers that constantly they rushed towards a black precipice, and always at the last second, the precipice fled ahead once more, a further intervening stretch of the track being revealed to them. The blackness of the hills at first lay on one side towering above them; and on the other side a lighter shadow was more menacing, for it was the emptiness of a void, and a little later the hill shadows closed on both sides, leaving but a narrow margin of star-studded sky above.

Half an hour later the glare of several fires came into view, and when the headlights swung round in a wide arc in taking the curve the ruddy glow of the fires vanished and there leapt into reality the figures of several scantily clad blackfellows standing facing them, and to one side a huddled collection of squatting gins, outside a few ragged humpies built of tree-boughs and discarded sheets of corrugated iron. Young Jeff stopped the car before a substantial stone house, now occupied by two stockmen, wherein he had first seen the light of day. It was Jeff Stanton’s first home, Range Hut.

“Good night, boss!” a voice said, and there standing beside the car was a little wiry white-haired and white-bearded aboriginal.

“Good night, Moongalliti!” Stanton replied affably. “The trucks pass short time ago?”

“Ya-as, boss. Tree—one—two—tree. Gettin’ plurry crowd on this track, eh?”

Father Ryan chuckled. Several younger bucks loomed behind the patriarch.

“Only two, Moongalliti,” Stanton corrected.

“The two station trucks and Dot and Dash,” a young man said in clear English.

“Ya-as. Dot and Dash. Him tree.”

“Humph! That you, Ludbi?”

“Yes, boss.”

“When are you going back to the homestead? I’ve work to be done, and I want you and Harry.”

“We go bimeby,” old Moongalliti said importantly.

“We’re going to-morrow, boss,” the more civilized Ludbi informed them with greater precision.

“Ya-as, to-morrow, boss,” Moongalliti instantly agreed. “’Nother blackfeller come—long—way away. Beeg feller corroboree. We go homestead to-morrow. Cook ’em up tucker—marloo—bungarra. Plenty blackfeller—plenty tucker—beeg feller corroboree.”

“Sounds cannibalistic,” growled Sergeant Morris.

“Well, look here, Moongalliti: you understand you throw-um spear your beeg corroboree, I come and use-um beeg waddy,” Stanton said sternly.

“Na-na, boss. Blackfeller all right. Plenty good feller. You gibbit flour, eh?”

“I’ll see. On the way in, you keep all them dogs at heel, or I’ll be throwing out some poison baits.”

The threat raised a squeal from an invisible gin. “We keep orl dogs tied, Mithther Stanton. You no poison ’em. Poor dog—poor dog!”

“Very well, Mary, do as I say. When you get to homestead Mrs Poulton wants your help with the washing.”

“And don’t you forget, Mary,” Mrs Poulton warned her; at which Mary laughed much more soundfully than many a white woman, and the other gins as well as the bucks joined her as though it were a great joke.

Young Jeff, geared in low, let out the clutch, and they slid away amid a chorus of “Good night, boss!” and sped forward over the zigzagging track with the hill shadows continuing to hug them.

“They do mix up the language, for sure,” Mrs Poulton confided to the sergeant. “Marloo in their own language means kangaroo, and bungarra is a bushman’s word for goanna. There’s going to be some cuts and bruises at the end of that corroboree. There always is.”

“It wouldn’t be a corroboree without a fight,” the policeman opined.

“Indeed it wouldn’t. And that white-whiskered devil is the worst of the lot. Do you know what he did to Gunda because she ran away with Toff?”

“No. She’s Moongalliti’s new wife, isn’t she?”

“Yes, poor thing! Promised him when she was a baby like I might promise you an unweaned kitten,” the lady explained a little indignantly. “Anyway, a young buck from Queensland named Toff came down and she ran away with him. When old Moongalliti discovered it he sent Ludbi and Warn and Watti after them. Ludbi can track, you know. He tracked them nearly to the Queensland border, even though they kept to the high stony tablelands. Toff got away, but they brought back Gunda, who was judged by the old man. And what do you think? He ordered them to hold her down, and then got Ludbi to drive his spear underneath her knee-cap. For weeks she went about with a forked stick for a crutch. She’ll never be able to run any more, poor thing.”

The sergeant added some condemnatory words to Mrs Poulton’s, but Jeff Stanton began to chuckle, and the others were compelled to join in with him.

“The blacks know how to deal with disobedient wives, Mrs Poulton,” he said, still chuckling.

“I think it is a shame. Poor thing! You ought to lock up that old devil, Mr Morris.”

“I never interfere with ’em unless they go a-murdering,” was the sergeant’s viewpoint. “Anyway, I’ll bet Gunda thinks a lot more now of her husband.”

Mrs Poulton sighed with evident perplexity. Then she admitted with a seemingly lighter heart: “Well, yes. She told me when I asked her if she didn’t hate Moongalliti that ’ole feller him no good husband, but he good to poor little Gunda. He give me puppy-dog. Me orl right now.’ ”

When the car slid out on the northern plain of slightly undulating country, with here and there small areas covered thickly with flat, smooth pebbles, Bony was thinking of Ludbi’s tracking powers, and wondering why he and the others were so loath to track about Marks’s abandoned car. There was something very strange in that, and he decided that after the corroboree he must make friends with them, in a fashion that only his being a half-caste made feasible.

The farther north they proceeded the more numerous became the clusters of trees which the headlights revealed, until the scrub was as thick as that which lay between the homestead of Windee and Mount Lion. Every eight to twelve miles they were stopped by a gate, which Bony got out to open and shut after the car had passed through. Mile after easy flowing mile was indicated by the ivory-faced speedometer until they saw in front a small red light and later the three trucks were revealed drawn up beyond the last gate. A match was struck and held against a cigarette, and for a second the round chubby face of Dot was shown them. And then they were halted behind the third truck, that owned by the strangely assorted partners. The drivers came back and stood near Jeff Stanton, who asked them if there had been any trouble on the road. On being assured that the trip had been uneventful, he said:

“Well, go on and pull up behind the cart-sheds. Tell the fellows to make no noise, for I suppose we must conform to the regulations.”

Engines hummed. They saw the first truck get away, and two minutes after—to avoid the dust—the second, and, after a further interval of a minute or so, that driven by Dash. Young Jeff made no start for a full five minutes, since Marion reminded him that Mrs Poulton and she were wearing clothes easily ruined by dust.

Two miles brought them to the out-station named Nullawil. Bony glimpsed a house beyond a line of pepper-trees and several whitewashed huts and outhouses and then he was descending amidst a small crowd of men each of whom bore a glinting petrol-tin and a stick wherewith to beat it. Sensing an eager spirit of joyous expectancy, he felt a tin thrust under his arm and a short bar of iron slid into his hand, and heard Jeff Stanton say:

“Padre, escort Mrs Poulton, please. Marion, your arm! the rest follow on in twos and don’t beat your tins until the right moment.”