Читать книгу Landtakers: The Story of an Epoch - Brian Penton - Страница 12

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Cabell rode into the homestead yard just after sunset that evening. The barking of the dogs brought McGovern to the door.

"Aha, is that the little limejuicer at last?" he called. "I thought you'd mizzled."

"Why should I?" Cabell grumbled.

McGovern merely laughed, a low, rich and vibrant laugh with many mocking undertones.

He sensed trouble in the air. McGovern was in a gay mood and kept singing to himself and stretching his shoulders like a dog preparing for action. That was one sign of it. The other was an unusual quietness in the lags' hut.

He unsaddled his horse, threw a bucket of water over her back, and let her out into the paddock. A man was going about with a flare, lighting the dingo fires round the sheep pens. Flashes of sheet lightning sketched the outline of the buildings, the looming hump of the ranges, spread a carpet of white sheep across the near landscape.

In the darkness of the harness shed Cabell gave up trying to find a peg to hang his bridle on, and flung it irritably against the wall. Then he braced himself and went across the yard to the humpy. McGovern, his hands thrust in the tops of his trousers, still sprawled across the narrow doorway. His body soaked the air for a yard around with a rank smell of sweat and tobacco and rum.

Cabell began to force his way past, but when he was almost through an incident happened which, small enough in itself, was yet typical of McGovern and so humiliating to Cabell that he never forgot it. On a sudden impish impulse, apparently, McGovern expanded his shoulders and pinned him to the door-jamb.

Cabell stood a good inch over six feet, and two years of hard work had put a lot of solid flesh on to him, but beside McGovern he looked a weed, panting and struggling to free himself--"like a beetle on a pin," as McGovern said with immense relish, glancing down sideways and roaring with laughter. It was all over in ten seconds, but in that time the doubts and misgivings and hesitations of months died in Cabell.

McGovern stopped laughing to remark with naïve pride, "You know what? I broke a fellow's rib doing that once."

Cabell rose slowly from the dust and looked at him. The blood flushing into his head made his lips look colourless. But he could not speak. His mouth quivered and tears began to well out of his eyes.

"Hmn! A hot-tempered fellow," McGovern said, stroking the golden pelt of his chest thoughtfully, but adding after a while, with a deep, ironic laugh, "God bless his heart and liver, did I hurt the little limejuicer?" He reached out to lay his finger on Cabell's chest, where blood was beginning to distil from the chaffed flesh, but Cabell beat his hand down, pushed him aside, grabbed a piece of rag from his bunk and fled from the humpy.

McGovern stared out at the thickening darkness for a few seconds, then rubbed his hands together.

There was a knowing twinkle in his eyes, which lurked in the weed-fringed grottoes of his eye-sockets like suspicious little animals. Even so, they were the most prominent feature on that face, barring a pair of thick lips and a set of perfect teeth that flashed out of the furze of golden beard whenever he smiled. What kind of a face it was there was nothing to show, for the beard, tangled and matted, filled with burrs and grass-seeds, stained with tobacco and greasy, covered everything but the red tip of a flat nose. He was always laughing and talking, in a deep, friendly voice capable of infinite shades of expression, but all the time his eyes lived their secretive life apart, twinkling gaily when his mouth looked downcast, retreating doubtfully when he laughed. But it was difficult to draw any conclusion from this, except that McGovern was by no means the simple, lazy, drunken, cheerful fellow he pretended to be.

For the rest he was not altogether unpleasant-looking, despite his bandy legs which had grown round the belly of a horse and his wide shoulders which tipped him over at every step so that he seemed to have a hard struggle to get straight again. There was an air of swagger and braggadacio about him that went well with his Viking beard and his deep voice, but like these it probably served a purpose--the same purpose perhaps. In fact, it was impossible to believe that he ever did anything without a purpose--and that a very obscure one. Happy-go-lucky, lounging, careless--yes, the most dangerous and aggressive kind of man. Ugly as he was, he had a way of preening and stretching his body that made the muscles ripple so that the whole rugged frame seemed transfused with graceful energy.

Add to this that he was the result of a liaison between a lady of some consequence in the south and one of her convict servants, a flash confidence trickster, that he had lived on his wits for nearly thirty years, that he had been soldier, jailer, cattle thief, that he had spent all his life in the company of convicts, and one can guess what sort of an antagonist he was likely to be.

When Cabell returned he was sitting at the table--four struts driven into the floor with a slab of bark for a top--sucking at a pannikin of black tea. Before him lay a damper with a chunk torn out, a tin plate of boiled potatoes, a corner of black salt-beef with a jack-knife sticking in it, and a dish of rice and raisins. Among the food stood a lamp, a tin filled with bad fat in which a piece of rag was burning. The fat sizzled and gave off a rancid smoke that coated walls and rafters with dust-filagreed soot. Soot lay thick on the floor, lightly feathered Cabell's cheek, made a glistening paste in the sweat on McGovern's forehead. Even worse was the dung fire burning in the middle of the humpy to keep out mosquitoes. The grey smoke hung over the table, stung Cabell's throat, and made his eyes water. But the mosquitoes still came and buried themselves in his fresh skin like fiery sparks. To soot, dung smoke, mosquitoes and the vermin which bred plentifully in the dusty floor McGovern was alike indifferent.

Cabell sat down. He had been washing his hands. McGovern looked at them--white, long-fingered, with clean nails--then looked at his own--squat, red, ingrained with dirt and greasy. He smiled.

After glowering disgustedly at the flies and the soot for a while, Cabell reached out for the food. McGovern promptly seized his hands in two hairy paws, threw back his head and laughed. They repeated the struggle at the door.

Cabell wrenched his hands away and jumped up from the bench. "I know what this means," he said, breathless. "You're trying to frighten me. You've been stealing my sheep again."

McGovern put his feet up on the table and clasped his hands across his belly. "Stealing your sheep?" he said in a tone of mild surprise, but his smile, his belittling glance said quite plainly "Of course I steal your sheep, fool. What do you expect?"

"I know you do," Cabell said in a shaky voice.

"Go on. Who's been telling you?"

"I don't need to be told." He gestured. "Every time I go away. . . ."

McGovern nodded amiably. "Come to think of it, you lost some day before yest'y."

"How many?"

"Sixty--more or less."

"Sixty!" Cabell swallowed a lump. "Why, confound you, I. . . ."

He raised his hands as though to empty the kettle of tea over McGovern's face, but instead buried them in his hair and let out a groan. Before this cool bravado, expressed in bantering smiles, his courage ebbed out. He turned away, but the strength and vigour of the man were inescapable. They throbbed through the table, which moved against him as McGovern's deep breath rocked it to and fro; when he went to the door they pursued him in laughter that at once maddened and chilled him.

The sky was ablaze with stars. Their alien faces looked down coldly. He felt lonely and bleak. In a fit of dejection he thought, "I'll never get away. Never. I'll rot. I'll go mad like Peppiott. I can't fight them. They're too cunning." Tears of self-pity thickened in his eyes.

The dogs came out to welcome Mickey and Pete with the dray. Lowing and rattling their chains, the bullocks trailed into the yard. A halo of dust ringed the dingo fires.

The sight of the cart, reminding him how calmly McGovern had packed him off to Moreton Bay, quickened Cabell's sense of injury again. He spun round and demanded in a husky but firmer voice, "If you didn't lift them--if the dingoes took them--the skins must be there. Where are they?"

McGovern picked his teeth with the meat-knife, grunted. "Find them, limejuicer. Find them."

"Limejuicer, limejuicer!" Cabell cried in exasperation. "I won't always be a limejuicer."

McGovern laughed a complacent laugh and stroked his arm.

Cabell scowled. "You think I'm like these wretched lags. You think that frightens me. Well, I tell you now, I won't take another step off Murrumburra till I get back every sheep I've lost."

"You mean it?"

"I do."

McGovern looked up with a sly grin. "Now, if I was in your boots," he said softly, "I'd be on a better lay than that."

Struck by the tone of his voice, Cabell glanced at him.

He leant across the table and pointed to the lags' hut. "Quiet, eh? Why?"

Cabell had forgotten the convicts, who at this hour were usually quarrelling over scraps of food and cursing each other. There was one who sang mournful songs far into the night, another who sat at the door weeping and wailing about the pains in his head, a third who kept running out to spit on a tree where McGovern had cut his name. But even these madmen were quiet tonight.

"What's the matter with them?"

McGovern spat on the floor, in the hollows of which lay water, and tea-leaves, and half-chewed gristles, and dog dung. "I laid the tape round them a bit," he said off-hand. "They came with a stink about that last dollop of meat."

"It was only half-rations. You know it was."

"A bit of guts-ache's good for them sometimes," McGovern said. "It takes their mind off things. Oh, they'll soon forget it when Gursey's flogged."

"Gursey?"

"Aha, a mate of yours?" He took his feet from the table and sat up.

"Rubbish!" Cabell flushed. Then after a silence he stammered, "Only . . . well, what could you possibly want to flog him for?"

McGovern stroked his beard and gave him an inscrutable grin. "We'll soon think of something when it's time."

"You're a filthy brute!" Cabell burst out. "Now I know what's behind this. You think. . . . He didn't tell me about the sheep, see. I asked him and he wouldn't. You're going to have him flogged because you think he told me you were stealing my sheep."

"Barking up the wrong tree again," McGovern told him calmly. "I wouldn't have the bastard flogged for all the rum in Bengal." He puffed at his pipe, then said, with a wink, "He's fly, is Mr Gursey. Did you know he was going to top all us superintendents and start a republic of lags?"

"How should I know?" Cabell flushed again.

"But you do. Ha, ha!" McGovern laughed good-naturedly. "Friend Gursey doesn't talk about nothing in the smithy."

"I don't know what you mean," Cabell mumbled, nearly as red as McGovern himself now.

McGovern winked and strolled to the door.

In the yard Mickey was stumbling about among his bullocks. "Away wah yeh, ye swabs!" he shouted in their language, kicking them. They turned slowly and dragged off. The smell of dust and fresh dung floated into the room.

"Leave that load tonight. Just as it stands," McGovern called to him.

Mickey came into the light and wagged his bald head angrily at McGovern. "For what would ye be puttin' more temptations in the blasted world then unless ye're Himself, the Divil and all?" he complained.

"Do as I say."

Mickey went off grumbling, and, after scratching the side of his face thoughtfully and turning his eyes from the dray to the lags' hut and back to the dray, McGovern grunted and returned to the table.

He sat down beside Cabell and prodded him with the stem of his pipe. "Look you here, my boy, he's a red-hot man, Joe. But he's set on getting his Ticket before the year's out, so he's running with the lambs for a bit, eh?" He nodded shrewdly. "You could put your finger in his gob and he wouldn't bite it."

"Have you tried?" Cabell asked in a challenging voice.

McGovern laughed heartily. "You've got me there. It wasn't me finger I put in his mouth the other day."

Cabell grimaced. "Ach, you're a disgusting brute," he said. "I saw what you did. You tied him up and smeared his face with--with that filth."

"Ah, you don't understand Joe," McGovern told him. "It wasn't the dung but the tying-up that made him look like he did. He crept off like a mouse, though, didn't he?"

Cabell frowned at the table. He knew that McGovern was weaving a web round him, but how and where he did not know. McGovern's face, at once lazily cheerful and slyly calculating, told him nothing. He fidgeted with the meat-knife for a second or two, then dug it deep into the table. Words impatiently escaped him again. "You must be a monster, an absolute maniac, if you haven't got some purpose treating him like that." He brushed the hair out of his eyes with a gesture of helplessness. "Nobody could be so brutal, not even in this country."

"Ah!" McGovern rose and stretched himself, smiled ironically.