Читать книгу Landtakers: The Story of an Epoch - Brian Penton - Страница 6

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Derek Cabell glared round at the ramshackle buildings of the Moreton Bay Penal Settlement. His gesture of impatience, failing even to startle the dog, which slept on with its nose to its tail, or the drowsy horse he had tethered to his boot, only confirmed his deep sense of personal futility.

Red earth and blue sky met in the jagged line of a near horizon. In the middle of this vault stood the settlement--a prison within a prison. Shanties built of black bark twisted by the fierce sun, with crazy-shaped doors and glassless windows. Jail and barracks of stone. A yellow stone windmill. A long, dusty, empty street. Sheep, a few cows, pigs, wide patches of yellow Indian corn. At one side of the valley a river shimmered in the sunlight; at each end of the valley the bush. Into illimitable blue distance it faded, across unexplored mountains and plains, grey, motionless and silent.

His eyes screwed up against the harsh light, his boyish features matted in lines of discontent, Cabell sat on the side of the road and bitterly compared this crude scene with an image of his native Dorset village. The violence with which he beat at the flies buzzing in a black cloud round his face and neck revealed the intensity of his feelings.

A detachment of soldiers and yellow-clad convicts approached from the other end of the street as though upon air. Only the rattle of a chain here and there was to be heard, for the dust was inches thick and soft as powder. It rose in clouds from their feet and cast a smoky shadow on the ground.

With undisguised contempt Cabell watched the detachment go by. There were men of all sizes, in every stage of decrepitude. Shuffling feet, round shoulders, faces prematurely aged by sun, hard work and under-nourishment. The soldiers' uniforms were unbuttoned and dirty. Dust and sweat mixed in the lines of their withered faces. Of the convicts few were unmarked by disease or mishap. The scarlet rash of poisoned blood covered their arms like long gloves. Black stumps of teeth showed through their lax mouths. Legs dragged heavily that had been broken and badly set. Hands lacked fingers. And bitten deeply into all, convicts and soldiers alike, was the pockmark of spirits desolated by ennui and despair.

The detachment having halted in the shadow of a stone arch farther up the street, Cabell turned his attention gloomily to an old man, with a face like a dried-up orange in colour and texture, who was lying stretched out under a bullock-dray that had halted in the middle of the road. Flies were crawling over the old man's face and exploring his open mouth. But Deaf Mickey Moran, Mickey the Shellback, who had seen twenty years of life in her Majesty's great jailyard, Australia, who had been starved, ironed, flogged, frozen and sunstruck while his skin had become a nerveless, calloused hide, was not likely to lose any sleep for a few flies. (Had there not been a time when he had eaten flies and been glad of them?) He slept with his face in the dust and snored like a pig.

Cabell called the old man: "Mickey! Wake up, confound you." He spoke in a petulant way, and when the old man did not move, his full, red lower lip thrust out like a spoiled child's. "I'll wake you up," he muttered, and, seizing a stick from the ground, threw it with all his strength at the old man's head. It ricocheted off the bony skull and hit the dog sleeping behind him. The dog growled.

Mickey opened his eyes and looked at the dog. "What's wrong with ye?" he grumbled at it. "Lie down."

"Mickey Moran," Cabell said, venting his bottled-up feelings on the old man, "why don't you answer when I call you?"

Mickey turned the lobe of an enormous ear with the tips of fingers that seemed to be wearing away with labour. "Master?"

"How many?" Cabell shouted, pointing up the street. "How many have they got to do?"

Mickey reflected. "That's what I don't know exactly, master," he said. "Ten or more, I reckon it is. There's Shake Brown for nickin' over the fance and pinchin' some plums out of the Cove's garden, and the two young divils was with him. There's that nigger went to sleep mindin' the Jim Crows last week and let half an acre get et up. There's Punch Judah for smokin'." He counted them off slowly on his fingers.

"Ten!" Cabell struck viciously at a fly on his neck. "Hours," he said. "Curse them!"

"Hours," Mickey repeated, and lay down in the dust again.

Cabell pulled his cabbage-tree hat on to his head. Hours. How they leaked away in this cursed place! Hours, days, weeks, months. The blood of your best years, how it drained out unnoticed in this land of tons of time! In a burst of wilful pessimism he tormented himself with a vision of a Derek Cabell forty years hence, still sitting by the side of this road and waiting for the fulfilment of unmaturing dreams. He positively sweated with fear as he looked at that figure, which was really Mickey Moran with the addition of a few horrible features glimpsed in the ranks of the convicts.

In an instant he was on his feet, driven by an irresistible anxiety to do something. He untied the reins from his boot, tightened the girth, and climbed into the saddle. The horse started, woke, shuffled forward a few paces, and stopped. Its head drooped to the ground again. The dog did not even bother to look up, as though it realized the impotence of this gesture when there was literally nothing to do and nowhere to go.

People were coming out of the houses now and going towards the arch, where quite a crowd had collected. It looked like a prayer-meeting and was as quiet as one. Some settlers sat loosely on their horses, watching over the heads of the soldiers or talking to each other. An aboriginal strode past and mingled with the people. He carried a spear and wore a dirty blanket over his shoulder. On his right foot he had a boot, which was nearly crippling him. Behind came his wife with a wicker basket on her shoulder. The basket contained a dead kitten, a sheep's head and some crusts. She was nearly stark naked, and grease dripped off her hair and ran down her breasts and back like sweat.

Cabell pulled his horse on to the road and ambled to the arch. One of the horsemen nodded and said "Still here?"

"Still here," Cabell grumbled, reining.

Shyly his eyes appraised, from white sunbonnet to heavily booted feet, the woman to whom this man had been talking. One big red hand held a child to her breast, the other grasped the bridle of a restive horse and a heavy riding crop. She was about thirty years old, grim about the eyes and mouth, but--a woman.

"It's nearly through, Mrs Duffy," the horseman who had greeted Cabell told her. "And a good job they're making of it for ye."

She grunted impatiently. "It won't teach him nothing," she said. "He'll be drunk again tomorrow."

"Och!" the horseman chided her, laughing. "Take him in hand yeself, why don't ye, then? Ye'll be a widder within this year, him drinking like that."

She showed him a pair of sunken dark eyes. Vestiges of a fast-vanishing prettiness clung to her, of a girlish charm that had once curved her flat cheeks and softened the bony frame. "That man, he was a good husband once, Mr Flanagan," she said. "That's before he got into his bit of trouble and come here. Now he's nothing but a sly, brawling, soaking good-for-nothing." She spat into the dust. "I'm as good as a widder now, that's tellin' ye square."

Flanagan bent down. "Remember I'll be comin' across about that cow next week, won't ye?"

"I'll be seeing you." She nodded and turned away.

Flanagan joined Cabell and they rode off down the street together.

"There's a woman for ye," Flanagan chuckled. "Brings her husband in once a month to be flogged. She took up some land and got him assigned to her. But she don't take no lip. She just waits till he's drunk himself asleep, claps the darbies on him, hooks him up to her stirrup, and brings him in for fifty on the bare back. And no questions asked."

Cabell was silent, thinking about her, about women, white women. Soft, round Dorset faces with cherry-coloured cheeks and red lips. Girls with soft voices who smelt like milk; the girls in Owerbury high street on Sunday morning. His black eyebrows drew together.

Flanagan was thoughtful, too. He stroked his downy, fair beard, behind which a youthful face, browner than Cabell's and more amiable and sly, concealed itself. "I saw her come up the street six years ago," he said. "Just a bit of a sheilagh, and a more nicely spoken one never come out of Ireland." His grey eyes grew sad. "She's not like that now. Still . . . ten thousand sheep. . . . And a woman at that! That's sayin' a lot."

They had arrived at a grog shanty, a tumbled-down one-roomed shed built of bark. The place was full of men drinking, many drunk. It was dark, because it had no windows and a door just wide enough to squeeze through, and smelt of sweat, dust and rum. A bar, made of bark slabs nailed on saplings driven into the earth floor, cut off one corner. A couple of logs and boxes provided the only seats.

Flanagan shouted loud greetings round the room--a popular man; but Cabell hesitated in the doorway, repelled, as always, by the faces which turned to look at them. Whatever had been there of friendliness, forbearance and common human decency, life had scored out with her crudest die. The skin hung to their skulls like shrunk leather, their eyes had retreated into deep sockets and were calculating and suspicious; their lips pressed tightly together so that no colour showed. Their harsh voices, their ungracious gestures, their watchfulness uncovered for him suddenly the surface of a life in which men had not yet made the social contract that softens the brutality of "everyone for himself". At least, so it seemed to him.

Really the scene was commonplace enough: a number of settlers with unkempt beards and dusty clothes who passed the time drinking while their convict servants were being flogged; a few soldiers, drunk and quarrelsome, and half a dozen bodies stretched out in the dirt, dead drunk. But for some reason he never forgot it. Long after Pat Dennis's pub had changed, he was given to talking about "that mob at Pat Dennis's" with a curious inflexion of contempt and fear. In his mind those faces and voices became a symbol, apparently, of all the ruthless, unscrupulous, man-against-man struggle that was the life of this epoch.

He would have gone away at once only Flanagan had already ordered a drink for him, so he shouldered through the crush and took the sticky glass which the barman, Pat Dennis, had filled with the only liquor he sold--a villainous, black, thick mixture of rum, tobacco juice and bluestone. Flies blackened the top of the bar, the walls, the faces of the drunks fallen asleep; flies buzzed in the thick air, brawled over the barman's ragged beard, bred and eternally replenished their voracious stock in the bunches of gum-leaves hung from the ceiling.

"Hev yez heard about Bill Purves?" the barman asked them when they put their glasses down.

"Drinking himself off the hooks again?" Flanagan said.

"He'll never no more taste liquor. He's been burnt in half," Dennis told him.

"Burnt in half?"

"Sure. Last week it was. Takes the short cut through Mahoney's scrub that was burning off. Wind blows up. Down comes a stinking great hunk of timber on him. Smashes his arm and leg to smithereens and pins him underneath. After a bit he comes round, sees the fire's in the butt, hollers himself hoarse, then writes a note to his old woman on a bit of bark. One of Mahoney's blacks tracked him down yest'y. Head and shoulders here, legs there, heap of ashes in between. Clean as a whistle."

The drinkers round about listened, but none of them made any comment except Carney, an ex-convict who was in a fair way to becoming a rich squatter. "Now, if I'd 'a known that," he said, preening a tobacco-stained beard, "I'd 'a been down there like a shot to cheer up that pore widder."

His friend Curry, another ex-convict, spat scornfully. "You! You ain't got the condition for cheerin' up a widder like that one. 'D be like puttin' one of them skinny Welsh bulls in with my cows. 'D be a widder in a week again, she would."

Laughter dismissed the tragic end of Purves. Pat Dennis was already telling them how Darrow, a young Englishman, had been cleared out by the scab and had nearly drunk himself into the D.T.s with worry.

An institution, this barman, in a land where men lived far apart and news was hard to come by. Like many others in the room, he was an Old Hand, had done time for sheep-stealing. But he was fat now and prosperous-looking, despite the dirt crusted on his singlet and trousers. They said that when he started the grog shanty a year before he had bought a hophead of rum and had never bought any more. But man must drink, and there was nothing else to drink. In a place where everybody knew everybody else, men would have taken even worse drink than this from a news-vendor such as he was. He had information about events that had happened only a month ago in Sydney, five hundred miles away, as well as stories of murders, hangings, abscondings and calamities among their common acquaintances. His little ferret eyes sparkled when he told them about disaster and death, and promised it with knowing winks when he could only report someone's lucky strike. It was noticeable that the first kind of news never failed to silence the bar, while the second got only a few grunts and doubtful head-shakings.

"Rain coming, gents?" he asked Flanagan, pointing through the door at the line of cloud that daily formed along the horizon of the thirsty valley.

They looked at it hopefully for a moment or two and listened to its faraway muttering.

Flanagan shook his head. "That's not rain, Pat. That's only God's bloody gammon," he said.

"Well, it rained down Waring Downs week before last," Pat said, naming a place two hundred miles away. "Inch and a half in half an hour. And when the blessed thing stopped its racketing there wasn't a damned beast breathing on the place. Drownded everything." He rubbed his podgy hands cheerfully.

"'Tis a fine country," Flanagan laughed. "If you ain't killed with the sunstroke or drove loony for the want of decent company or poisoned with Pat's liquor, 'tis drownded you'll be. A real and regular God's own country, as they say."

Dennis leant across the bar, winked, and nudged him. "That's the God's truth, surely," he said. "Hev yez heard what's happened at Peppiott's?"

"Not Jack Peppiott?" Cabell put in, ready to defend a man who was, unlike so many of the others, a free settler and not without the elements of decency.

Dennis nodded and pointed to the corner of the room farthest from the bar. A man was sitting on a box; his hands, on his knees, gripped a bottle and a glass. He was a big man with a fine head and intelligent eyes. They were fixed on the ground, brooding with a terrible look of impotent rage. Without raising his eyes, he blindly filled the glass and drained it.

"Peppiott drunk!" Flanagan said, surprised.

"Swore he'd never come in here," Dennis said, smiling. "But they all come sooner or later to get away from it. Every dog has his day, they reckon." He nodded two or three times. "But he ain't drunk, though he'd give half his guts to be; I'll swear he would."

"What's the matter?" Flanagan asked.

Dennis chuckled. "What d'you think? Comes home suddenly and finds his old woman locked up in the storeroom with one of the lags. He flogs them both half to death with a stockwhip, grabs his gun and goes out lookin' for his brats to finish them off. But he couldn't find them nowhere, so he comes down here. He ought to be blind with the stuff he's soaked up in the last twelve hours, and he ain't turned a hair."

"Mrs Peppiott!" Cabell said, horrified.

Flanagan's grey eyes opened wide. "I'll be damned. There's a woman I'd've said . . . Well, and she the daughter of an English lord!"

Dennis winked his little black eyes. "It's all fair on top with them and black as Newgate's knocker inside."

Cabell's cheeks darkened. The anger that had been working in him all day flushed a stream of hot blood through his body. He glared round at the company and listened to their conversation: four topics reiterated with endless, monotonous violence--sheep, women, schemes to get more cheap convict labour, and the prospect of a drought that would rape their possessions from them. He wanted to tell them that he loathed them. He wanted to stand beside Peppiott and protect him against their sly, knowing glances. But his tongue was frozen.

He was very young, not quite twenty-two years old. He was homesick. He was lonely. He had just seen a woman who was once young and pretty watching her husband flogged. He had heard of death coming in a horrible way to a man he knew. He had so far hardly understood the tragedy at Peppiott's, but he had caught a glimpse of Peppiott's eyes and had seen in them the shadow of pain. What he felt was something more intimate than sympathy. The sufferings of these people became his own. It was perhaps a kind of self-pity he felt. It became sheer terror of the country in which such things could happen and of the men who could stand by and not be moved to horror by them.

"These la-di-dah women," Pat Dennis was saying, "they've all got the itch if you only knew."

Cabell found his tongue. "Don't you talk like that about Mrs Peppiott!" he said angrily, reaching over the bar and giving Dennis a shove. "She's--she's a lady."

Dennis looked surprised. "What's that? A lady?"

"A lady, yes," Cabell told him. "And in case you don't know what that is, it's a woman who wouldn't put her foot where your shadow had been."

"So's yer old woman," Dennis grumbled, not quite understanding.

Two little white spots spread out in a fan shape from the corners of Cabell's eyes, and the nostrils of his thin nose widened. Dennis jumped away from the bar, expecting to be hit.

"You scum! You dare--"

"Here, me boy, me boy," Flanagan hastily intervened. "What's it bitin' ye at all then?"

Cabell shook himself free. "To hear that--dirty brute talk you wouldn't think it was Peppiott who got him a ticket-of-leave, would you?" He pointed at the door. "Why, he'd be rattling his chains out there still if it weren't for Peppiott."

Dennis's mouth closed like a trap and his little eyes sank back into their sockets. He muttered and went off to the other end of the bar.

Flanagan grinned. "That's one won't dance at your wedding, me boy, nor forget to spit in your noggin if he gets the chance."

"What do I care? He was a lag," Cabell said. "Now he's a--a swine."

"Come, come!" Flanagan slapped his shoulder. "You've got to get over them Nancy English ways. We're all the Lord God's swine together here. A civil tongue and a blind eye's more use than all them high-and-mighty sentiments. You won't make no friends without."

"Friends!" Cabell flared up again. "Think I want friends here?" He gestured round the bar. "Floggers," he grumbled. "That's all they are. The whole lot of them. There's nothing in this country but a lot of floggers and jailbirds." He had a swift vision of the continent, silent and unfriendly, dotted here and there with such clearings as this, pinpoints on its verge, peopled by such men as he had seen marching down the street, with men like these Currys and Carneys for their masters, all hating it, hating each other, hating those who were not like them, not scarred and starved and ironed, hating their unending exile, and sending down into the future their passionate hatred.

"Yes, you're right. We're all the same. Offscourings," he said irritably. "We're only here because we're not wanted in England. And, floggers or not, we all hate, hate, hate all the time. We hate the place. We hate each other. We hate those that sent us here." He paused to take a deep breath and looked up with passionate, dark eyes. By contrast with the eyes of his companion, which watched him from afar as it were, detached and cool but thoughtful, what secrets of a young and tormented spirit were here exposed! They stared out defiantly, but their gaze shifted watchfully from side to side. The heavy black eyebrows had learned a trick of supercilious disparagement, but the eyes were fixed on Flanagan's face with the peculiar anxiety of one beseeching to be understood and reassured. They were at once wide and frank, withdrawn and distrustful. A first glance was struck by their ingenuous clarity; a second by the suggestion of thoughts cunningly concealed behind the mask of youthful uncertainty. From all this a shrewd observer would have decided that Cabell was at that stage of development where the spirit has broken adrift from its old moorings and wanders blindly in search of new ones.

He frowned and pushed his soft, shaven chin into Flanagan's face. "I've got four brothers in England," he said bitterly. "They sent me here, and by God don't I hate them!" The tan on his cheek went a shade darker and his voice, dropping suddenly to an undertone, took on a vibration of concentrated venom that surprised even Flanagan, who had been following his outburst with mildly conciliatory attempts to make him finish his drink.

Cabell pushed the glass away. "'Just the place for you.' That's what they told me. 'Freedom. Money. Fine life.' Ach! Look at it." He seized Flanagan by the shoulder and pointed through the door. "A damned graveyard."

His voice was so urgent that some of the tough Old Hands standing near glanced involuntarily at the bush, whose heartbreaking indifference, immensity and loneliness they had only too many reasons to know. Not a quiver in the grey leaves. Only a shimmering veil of brazen sunlight hardening the earth and turning the scant pastures to powder.

"Money out of that ground, eh?" Cabell muttered. "Money out of scab and footrot? Fine life, isn't it? Oh, a fine life for the flies and the bugs and the lice and the fleas. And what about freedom in a jailyard fifty times as wide as England?" He dropped a discouraged hand. "I hate it," he said rather pathetically. "I loath it. It's so different from England, this eternal, cursed, colourless bush."

"Well now," Flanagan said soothingly. "What you want, me boy, is just a good dose of Holloway's. Isn't it now?"

"No, it isn't," Cabell said. "I know what I want. I ought to get like these. . . ." He substituted a gesture round the bar for a word. "Well, I won't. There. I'll cut my throat first." He glared defiantly.

"Get along with ye," Flanagan urged him. "'Tis a bit too much of Pat's poison ye've got wandering loose in ye brain pan." He gave Cabell a shove and steered him towards the door.

"There now," Curry grunted as they passed him. "There's a cocky upstart for ye."

"Thinks he's too bloody good for us," Carney said.

Flanagan hastened him out. He had his own reasons for taking an abusive young new chum under his wing in the face of the general disapproval which now showed itself in howls and catcalls and a stream of black spittle that just missed Cabell's boot. His sly wink to them said as much.

Cabell had just reached the door when he heard a voice call "Hey you, limejuicer, Johnny Newcome!" Turning, he found that Peppiott, whom he had quite forgotten in his excitement, was following him unsteadily across the room.

"I want to tell you something," Peppiott said, taking him apart from Flanagan. But at that moment his eye lighted on Cabell's dog, which was busy scratching off its surplus fleas in the doorway. Peppiott frowned, ran to the door and kicked the dog savagely. He turned on Cabell. "Don't keep sluts," he said. "What d'you want to keep a slut for?"

"It's not a slut," Cabell told him. "It's a dog."

"Ah, don't tell me--they're all sluts," Peppiott shouted. "They make the house stink. Use somebody else's."

Cabell stared at him. His eyes were bloodshot but sane.

Flanagan tapped Cabell's shoulder. "Aw, leave the old gazebo. He's drunk."

"Do you think I'm drunk?" Peppiott asked.

"No," Cabell said.

He held Cabell's arm tightly. "You think you know all about it. But you don't. Look here, can you wait?"

"Now?" Cabell asked.

"No, not now. Can you wait till you're good for nothing else?" He gazed intently into Cabell's eyes for several seconds. Then he shook his head. "You're as good as done for," he said. "If there were tigers, you'd be all right."

Cabell tried to withdraw his arm, but Peppiott dug his nails in. He came closer, till his breath, stinking from all the bad liquor he had swallowed, burned on Cabell's cheek. "I'll tell you something," he said. "There are no tigers. Nothing happens. That's the curse of it. You pray for something to startle you, something to shoot at. But--nothing happens. D'you understand?"

"I think so," Cabell said.

"No you don't," Peppiott replied impatiently. "You'd hang yourself." He trembled through all his body, as though chilled to the bone. "Look here," he said. "I had a place right out in the Never Never. I was a nipper like you. It had three inches of soil. We got a drought. I waited two years. One day a wind came and blew the dirt right out of the ground and piled it up against the trees. Next day the rain started, but there was only the clay left."

"Yes, I do understand," Cabell told him.

"You're cocked up," Peppiott said. "You think it depends on you. But it doesn't. It'll just break you and change you and break you again. If you had the patience of fifty stone sphinxes you might see it through--or go mad."

The despair in his voice brought a look of pity into Cabell's eyes. This seemed to strike Peppiott like a fist. He jerked his head back, glared, and thrust Cabell away.

Cabell pulled his hat straight and prepared to follow Flanagan.

Peppiott watched him sulkily for a moment, then burst into a wild laugh. "Ah," he shouted. "Mister Bloody Cabell. He knows what a lady is, he does. Well, here's to you, Mister Cabell. Long life to you. And here's to the day when you find yourself bogged in the country with a lady hanging round your neck." He drained his glass melodramatically, raised it above his head, and crushed it in his hand.

Bewildered, Cabell watched the blood run down Peppiott's wrist and soak into his sleeve.

"And as for you," Peppiott was shouting, "you prison louse, take that!" and he flung the bottle at Dennis's head. Dennis dived behind the bar and the bottle smashed to pieces on the wall.

The crowd laughed. "Good old Peppiott."

"Go it, Peppiott."

"Buy a goat, Peppiott," Carney said. "It saves you a lot of trouble."

Cabell turned and ran after Flanagan.

They rode some distance up the street before Flanagan spoke. "Ye're daft, ye fool; ye're daft. Now, fancy breaking out on a single drink like that!"

"Oh, it's not the drink," Cabell said wearily. "It's my sheep. I've nearly gone crazy thinking about them."

Flanagan stroked his beard and sideways considered his companion's face, by contrast almost girlish with its soft contours and olive skin and the long, thin, sensitive nose and red lips. "That's a ginger bastard, that McGovern," he agreed. "He'll steal the fleas off a dog if it didn't watch him."

"Watch?" Cabell said helplessly.

They passed a field of corn where the crow-minder was going round and round with his rattle, stirring up hordes of black crows that seated themselves on the fence until he had passed, then settled into the corn again. The futility of this idiotic labour pressed upon Cabell an infuriating sense of his own powerlessness.

"How the devil can I watch? I can't be everywhere on a fifty-mile run at once, can I?"

"There'll be some more gone when you get back," Flanagan suggested.

"Of course. That's why he sent me down here to get the boy flogged. He's getting worse every day, too. Oh, I could murder him."

"Mind your step there, me boy," Flanagan warned him. "That's an old trick of his, to fasten the thought of murder on you. He'll kill you on the spot and prove it was your own doing."

"But why don't the men split on him?" Cabell demanded. "They must know what he does with what he steals."

Flanagan winked and pointed at the crowd of convicts and soldiers and settlers gathered round the arch, past which they were riding. A voice was cursing, threatening, yelling "Hit on the back, you dirty flogger!" which told them that O'Duffy, the flogger, was up to his old trick of making the lash curl round under the belly, where no protective crust of calloused weals had grown.

"While they've got breath in their bodies he can flog out or starved bellies he can stuff with double rations, you'll have a hard job coaxing anything about your lost sheep out of them boys," Flanagan said. "I tried that. Last month he lifted that bit of a stallion I bought in Sydney."

"Not the roan?"

"The same." Flanagan nodded. "You're not the only poor sod who would like to see that one laid out. There've been cattle disappearing around here for a long time. But them hills behind Murrumburra is worse than a fly trap. I know. I've been lost in them."

Discouragement got the better of Cabell. He put his hand impulsively on Flanagan's arm. "You're stocking up again," he said. "Take what I've got left and let me get out of this place. I'll start farther away on my own."

Flanagan's grey eyes concealed a sly thought as he replied disparagingly, "What's a thousand of them poor jumbucks to me?"

They pulled up at the bullock-dray. Mickey was laying down the law to a lad in convict's clothes who gazed at him with the loosened eyes and mouth of one wandering in some limbo of terrifying phantoms. The youth was a little older than Cabell, as thin as a rake, with a dirty down covering his chin and hollow cheeks, and pink-rimmed lashless eyes. He did not seem young, but old and withered and diseased, and looked more like a half-starved white mouse than anything else.

"What're ye grumbling about at all?" Mickey mocked him. "Didn't ye get a trip and two days in town; didn't ye, darlin'? And didn't the master here give ye a hunk of bacca, eh? Yer lout, yer!"

Cabell bent down and shouted roughly in the boy's ear. "You better get up on the load."

"Well, when did I get made a coachman for lags," Mickey complained, stumping angrily up and down as the lad climbed into the cart. "By Henie, no one never carried me home after a floggin'. And who's goin' to catch it if he bleeds on the Cove's tobacco, eh?"

"Now, if I was in your place," Flanagan said confidentially, "I'd make them canary-birds sing."

"But how, how?"

"Ah, get along with ye." Flanagan laughed. "Ye're too softhearted to kill the flies in yer tea." Then, serious, he added: "Listen, honey. McGovern's promised Carney five hundred head of Durhams and three thousand ewes in lamb. Now that's the three thousand they lost down at Finney's last year when the shepherds took to the bush. They're worth something to me if I can get them. And the roan stallion--ye'd make a slave of me for life if ye delivered that back. See? Use your brains, me boy, and you'll set yourself up for a new start. Good day till I see ye." Before Cabell could reply he put his horse into a trot and was off down the road.

Mickey's fourteen-foot bullock-whip cracked echoes out of the hill, the bullocks stirred, and a cloud of hot dust rose around them, concealing within a few minutes all sign of earth or sky.

Cabell rode ahead, thoughtfully.

In the river an abo stood waist-deep, spearing fish. Motionless he stood, as everything else in this sad, grey world was motionless. Two gins with pendulous black-nippled breasts sat on the bank watching him. Heat quivered from the stone walls of the barracks, from the slab roofs of the houses. Noiseless on the padded streets the ghosts of ten bullocks and a lame convict followed Cabell through the red haze.

Just outside the town they passed another cornfield. The crow-minder was sitting on the edge of the road, staring vacantly into the distance. The crows lined the fences, the branches of the trees, and discussed with sardonic chatter their conquered adversary. But there was one they could not defeat. He stood in the middle of the cornfield--a scarecrow made from the skin of an abo flayed for the purpose and stuffed with straw. Against the empty, burnished sky he tried to raise his jet-black arms, but they were broken at the elbows. The straw was beginning to come out at the eyes and nostrils.