Читать книгу Half Crown Bob and Tales of the Riverine - Price Warung - Страница 13

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She stuck to the Chows when Kingsley's better judgment would have sent them adrift.

"Dick, there's Katie, and I don't like to be beaten, dear. I'll work double, but go back to the old plan I won't. I'll not confess we're beaten. We save forty pounds a month by having them aboard. That'll buy us a new barge next season. And, Dick how the rivers 'ud laugh at us having to own up we're wrong."

So six-foot Dick, with the broad shoulders and the bronzed face, was wheedled by his fatherly love, and his wife's cooing, and his skipper's pride into continuing a foolish policy. He was manly enough to face a crowd of drunken deck-hands when they rushed from the wharf-side on to the Lizzie's deck to avenge the insult to their class implied in the engagement of the Chinese; manly enough to face them and strong enough to thrash them. Nevertheless, his love and his pride made him weak, and he kept to his plan. He worked double-tides himself; was skipper, deck-hand, mate, and bargeman in turns. And worked his wife, too, double-tides. The rougher work she could not, of course, manage, but her little hands grasped the wheel almost continually when steam was up. She would stand in the pilot-house for nine and ten-hour watches, clad in neat blue serge with bright brass buttons. Beat the sun ever so hotly, or blew the wind ever so blastingly, she kept her post. In her long spells of duty she learnt the river so well that no other mate possessed an equal knowledge. She knew all the landmarks and guiding points, and where the water shoaled, and where the current would lodge the snags. She threaded with delicacy of touch the boat's way under overhanging gums to dangerous landing-places, and up shallow channels to wood-piles, and when she was at the wheel, the boat seemed to steal from her something of womanly felicity of movement, and went in and out of the pinches and bends with a more graceful swaying of her stem and a softer beat of her paddles. By the close of Kingsley's fourth season, his mate Nell was the most accomplished steering hand, bar Bill Davies and Ted Barnes, on the three rivers. Even the river-men who hated Kingsley for his alliance with Celestials admitted as much. When six steamers and nine barges were stuck up by the falling water at Campbell's Island, Kingsley's mate put the nose of the Lizzie right up the channel, and with swift nervous balancing of the wheel, drove her through devious cross-cuts and over treacherous spits of sand that masked ghastly snags beneath their glittering whiteness into deep water.

"D--d if she war't take the craft over wet grass nex'!" cried the Riverina's mate, Jim Morris, with an honest chord of admiration ringing in his rough voice.

And if you think anybody on the rivers desired greater praise than that, you don't know the Murray boating trade!

The close of the fourth season brought them, though Capt'n and Mate Kingsley knew it not, the beginning of the end. Fate had dealt out to them some first-class cards, but she had made the shuffle with her hand covered with a poisonous glove.

During the summer off-season when the rivers were down, and the boats laid up, the Kingsleys visited Melbourne to taste the rare joys of a sweet home life for a few months. After one happy day spent on the St. Kilda beach beneath the ti-tree clumps, in and out of which the father and mother played hide-and-seek with their laughing child, the captain strolled into the baths. He rolled himself luxuriously in the pungent waves, as was his wont in the greenish Murrumbidgee after a warm day's work on Hay wharf, and showed the other bathers a trick or two of fancy swimming. But they looked strangely at him as he leapt out of the water, with a curious shrinking made visible in their glance. For upon his head, and limbs, and body, like miniature moons surrounded by rose-flushed halos, were white spots encircled by pinkish aureoles. All over him, from the broad forehead that he had held aloft as a frontlet of manly pride in the face of all men, to the curving ankle which it would have defied the skill of Phidias to mould in marble, the horrid blotches appeared.

He saw the things himself. As he gazed upon them, scarcely alarmed as yet, and with no dawning of the horrible truth glimmering its way into his brain, his strength went from him--the strength that had nurtured the copious hairiness of the massive chest whereon the spots clustered more closely--and he fell, a log, on the deck of the bathing platform. One only of the bathers drew near him--a young doctor. "Keep back all!" the latter cried, and then ordered blankets to be brought. With careful touch he covered Kingsley up, and then, striving vainly to overcome a natural repugnance, whispered to the barely conscious man: "Where do you live?" Dick told him, muttering with a feeble discordance, and prayed: "What is--the matter with me?"

The doctor rose up, and motioned the staring bathers and attendants away. They obeyed the gesture--some who were half-attired gathering up their garments and dressing as they went. The doctor knelt again by Dick's side. "Are you a man?" he said. "Can you take--a blow?"

"Yes," answered Dick, "if you--don't hit--my wife--and child--as well."

"The blow will hit all you care for."

He paused, and the air was heavy with the respirations of the two men before he went on.

"You are a white leper--and a dead man."