Читать книгу All That Swagger - Miles Franklin - Страница 11

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Delacy's grand artificial limb was a peg with a socket attached by straps to the waist. He became nimble with it on practice, and Doogoolook's wide laughter full of teeth, but empty of sound, conveyed that Danny and the brown horse were now both nullah-mundoeys.

The coolness of valleys and streams draped in ferns and shrubs, their fragrant aromatic purity, still enthralled him. The encircling ramparts guarded a kingdom, for which he would have forsaken the bread and butter of home and wife as for an enchantress. The beckoning fastnesses should now guard twenty or thirty walers sufficiently mature for the Indian market.

"And how will ye handle them with but one leg?"

"Have I no ingenuity?"

Refreshed by her excursion into the outer world, Johanna now admitted that there was property in the mountains, but decreed that never again should Danny traipse off by himself. Therefore, in company with Hannon and Doogoolook, he set out once more when summer was bold in the land. Johanna had Maeve and Mrs Harmon, and an artisan, who knew something of farm work.

Delacy went by Keebah, and Urquhart accompanied him down the precipices. The mare had to carry him every yard of the way now. He detached the peg leg lest in the scrabbling and lurching it be smashed against tree or rock. Regardless of age or sex, Danny's mount was always a "mare". In this case it was the imported Irish lady of exquisite paces, given him by Mrs Evans, when her heart had been touched by his infirmity.

"Mules would be fine for this country," said Urquhart.

"Never wan of the unclean beasts would I run on me country. Nature repudiates such perversion and allows no further issue. That should teach a civilized man."

Danny uttered no word of repining about his leg, nor suffered any tremor that its loss made him less a man.

A nest of bulldog ants occupied the floor of the hut. Bats possessed the rafters. Wombats had burrowed under the wall plates. Kangaroo rats had snug homes in tussocks around the door step. From one a black snake issued to his doom in the shape of Doogoolook.

Urquhart tarried to lend a hand and cast an eye on the country beyond Delacy's. His sons were growing up. "There's little sense to risk bones raising cattle in these wilds to make the land stink with rendering them down."

"But faith, a man who cannot look at the future is only a come-day-go-day contraption."

When those boys whom Johanna was rearing for him would throw their weight into the scale they would be bound to Burrabinga by firmer considerations that a paltry wage and rations of beef and flour, sugar, tea, rum and tobacco.

Nullah-Mundoey's headquarters were in the fields of kangaroo grass, as high as his withers, on the burned river bank. The cripple had kept the mob from dispersing and there was a fine display of mares, fillies and colts.

With a couple of stockmen Delacy began the trapping and branding of cleanskin cattle which had retreated beyond the domain of the horses. His brand and his earmarks were put on all cattle caught. Colts and fillies had their baptism. Horses with other brands were advertised.

Doogoolook was becoming a marvellous horseman and stockman, and yokels who came to Burrabinga had to follow his lead. That of Danny was hardly less daring. He rode the gorges at a furious pace, hallo-ing like a demon, depending on the "mare". Mind transformed horse and rider. Danny never fell from the horse nor the horse under him. He raged with industry from day-break and until long after night fell by the light of fires in the cavernous hearth. He struggled for money for extra labour, to put up adequate yards and huts, and above all to make a cutting around the worst pinches. It was almost more than could be expected of horses to traverse the precipices when laden. "But with the pinches reduced, sure an old woman in a donkey cart would have no distress in flipping back and forth."

Danny classified the live stock. Horses were taken to Bewuck, and Moore's breakers engaged to prepare them as cavalry chargers. Distraught heifers and steers went down the river to be tamed. "Och, dragging the life out of ye'rself and no peace to anny one else," said Johanna.

"What else can a man do for an honest indipindence in a raw country with no capital but his hands?"

"There's plenty that don't drive themselves so extremely."

"Plenty of vaygabonds like the cattle spoilers of old." Danny waved his pipe towards squatters; men who had started with capital and whose fortunes were enlarging like snowballs. "Some of those who would have driven me off if they could."

"'Tis not in ye to be rich. The rich have more hard-fistedness. And ye bullock everything ye'rself, and wan man power can't extind. The great succeeders put other fellows to work for them while they reap the spoils."

Danny was a pioneer of Australian democracy in its levelling-aspects, which later socio-economists were to discredit as obstructing to intellectual progress.

The marriage had shaken down. Johanna now saw Danny and it for what they were. Danny, in the way of many spouses, had to take adventures of the spirit without his wife, but he valued her as a nest with eggs in it at the base of his fortune, while he experimented with the superstructure. The mountains were his aisling, his Dark Rosaleen. Not that this was a conscious indulgence, the physical campaign left no time for introspection nor even for sentiment, until he came to be accounted childish with age, but he faced the ranges with unabating zest. Arrived there he had the satisfaction of a bandit in retreat, only that Delacy had no strain of the outlaw ii him. He was civilized.

The return of the blacks one summer, after two years' absence, was heralded by the unease of the cattle, which were driven away to safety. The aborigines' rights as ground landlords in the Burrabinga kingdom were respected by the payment of two beasts. No one connected with Delacy would have dared to "disrespect" a gin.

Two chiefs came to the hut and demanded Doogoolook. "I've often wondered that the wild taste has not come on him," said Delacy to Hannon.

Doogoolook went with his people. The alternative was death. Danny conveyed that his ward was entitled to a horse, blankets, etc., but this was disregarded. Danny could not be sure that Doogoolook was happy in departure, and in the days that followed sorely missed one whom he discovered to have been as useful as two newly-imported whites. "Sure, he's one of the whitest men I ever knew."

Two months later he saw a form emerge from the tall trees across the river, and welcomed the returning Doogoolook. He had attained his manhood; he pointed to tangible evidence. He was now entitled to marry, but the gins apportioned to him were the worse for wear, so he had been allowed to return, perhaps because of his muteness and Delacy's early rescue of him. The facts are not recorded. No aurist ever tried to decide whether Doogoolook's muteness was the result of destroyed vocal chords, or merely of shock.

Delacy's second decade of colonizing found him strenuously engaged with his two homes. New South Wales had settled down to a sedate tempo, when suddenly the composition of life in the new continent blew up over night.