Читать книгу Half Crown Bob and Tales of the Riverine - Price Warung - Страница 5

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Three days afterwards the boats were at Swan Hill together. What the big boat gained during the day she lost during the night.

Jim knew the river intimately, while the skipper of the Resolution had to find his course by the rude charts of the river-men, and not being backed by a life-acquaintance with the characteristics of the stream, he was often in a tangle. When he found himself--as frequently happened--gingerly steering through deep water where the chart showed a sand-spit, he had always a fear that he might find a sand-spit calmly embracing a snag where the paper marked ten or twelve feet of water. He was under the necessity, therefore, of tying up at nightfall. Jim, on the other hand, ran as long as he could at night, without breaking his engineer and fireman, while the man who (assuming his certificates were all right) could have taken a Cunarder to Sandy Hook, or brought out a P. and O. boat from Southampton to Melbourne, was compelled to grin and bear the sting as best he might, when the Jessie, whom he had passed hours before, returned the compliment after nightfall. The three sharp whistles with which the Jessie would greet him sounded saucily, and her exhaust, he could have sworn, checked him. And, if those mechanical taunts were not sufficient, he was compelled to hear wordy insults that incurably hurt his vanity.

"Skipper!" would sing out all the barge-men, as the Jessie Jane came abreast of the Resolution, "blest if that ain't Toff Linton's boat. Wot's he waitin' for?"

Jim would maintain a decent silence, then the barge-man would answer himself.

"He's hopin', surely, as the moon 'll rise soon, so's he can take the long'tood."

Then the deck-hands would join in: "No, that 'tain't it. He's waitin' for the dew to fall, so's he can get some way on her."

"You're wrong, all o' you," would now interject the mate. "His crew's struck. He war pilotin' the boat up the billabong backwater."

"Ga--arn," another rouseabout would sneer. "He's an appointment with Black Nell at the Melool wood-pile, and he carn't wax his moustache while the boat's a-steamin', so he ties up."

So the jokers of the river would dash their humours against the sides of his cabin. Their joking had the additional bitterness for Linton, that it was never answered by his own men. An impressive characteristic of the river was, that the men of a boat were loyal to their skipper, as a rule. Let the skipper be trying to make a point in a trip or to score off a rival--either by coarse chaff or by sheer rapid steaming--and they would help him with lung and limb, forfeit for him their sleep and meal-time, or even effect that most precious of sacrifices, the abandonment of their "between-trip sprees." And when his men did not champion a skipper through good report and through evil report, and back him up in straight river reaches, and over the moral snags, generally of the feminine order, that were always on the shore in readiness to wreck any "boat chap," you may safely depend that the skipper wasn't "white." Now Linton's crew never "jawed back" when the Jessie Jane's fellows hurled their jibes at the Resolution's chief, and Linton had been long enough in the trade to take that as an emphatic condemnation in advance of anything he might do. And therefore, being full of human nature, and not being a saint out of the missionary books, he grew as venomous and tyrannical as he dared. Certainly he did not dare greatly, democracy was too substantial a thing on the rivers twenty years ago to be assailed with impunity by a little tinselled god. It is flabbier now; boat-hands deputationize the deity of the pilot-house now, where in the seventies they would have seen whether the Murray a' Bidgee water wouldn't have taken some of the lace-frilled nonsense out of him.

When the boats, then, were at Swan Hill, it was an even chance which should get through first at 'Chuca, and so gain the first shot at the cranes.

The Resolution would, without doubt, with her superior power, beat the Jessie by four hours if there was clear daylight running all the way, and it would be a remarkable thing indeed if, with that advantage, she could not win the Mungadel job. But the four hours were just the difference the Jessie could make up by nightfall, in the twenty-four to thirty-hour run from Castle Donnington (Swan Hill) to Echuca. Thus honours were easy.

Linton and Barton met at Echuca, just as the latter had dispatched the wire most boat-masters send thence to Echuca.

Barton cheerily nodded a "Morning," which Linton surlily acknowledged.

"It'll be nose and nose work, Captain Linton," said the Jessie's skipper.

"Bosh! you're out of it. I'm not going to race either!"

"Nor I; fair heel-and-toe running--that's what I'm going to make of it."

"I'd not bother if I were you. Save your fuel and the risk of a blow-up."

"Not a bit of it, old man. See the 'state' at Albury last Saturday?" And he pointed as he spoke to a bit of blue paper posted at the post-office, which recorded the state of the Murray, "above summer-level."

"Yes, twenty feet. What of that?"

"That means, old man, you're not going to get past Pugga Milly till that water comes down. I know you scraped getting over the Bitch and Pups."

"How the devil do you know that? By George! if any of my men have been blabbing!"

"Keep your temper--none of them's been blabbing. But, man, you needn't tell me you didn't scrape. When you're down eight feet, and the water on the reef is eight feet also, you've got to scrape to get over. And you can't warp over Pugga Milly. I can if I need to!--but I won't!"

"Very well," and Linton turned to go. "Pugga Milly or no Pugga Milly I'm going to run Mungadel stores up and down for two seasons."

"Perhaps you may, Linton, if I give you a billet on the new barge I shall build, as soon as I finger the cash for the freight on the Mungadel wire now waiting for me at Echuca wharf."

Having fired this shot, Jim Barton prepared to send his telegram to the Echuca agents that he was just clearing from the "Hill." As he handed it in, and threw down the shilling, the operator, who had heard part of his conversation with Linton, asked him if he were racing the Resolution. In a few hurried words Jim related the conditions of the trip.

"Wish you luck, Jim, I'm sure," said the operator, as he pulled down the glass slides of the pigeon-hole. "If you get the Mungadel work it will be the making of you."

The words stuck persistently to Jim. Tom M'Grundy had said exactly the same thing. His mate kept on saying it. And now the E. T. O. man, who knew everybody's concerns on the river, and whom everybody knew, repeated it. Since he had started, he had been trying to forget how much depended on the trip up to now. Doing his best to win, he had yet freed himself of thinking of the prize. But the blessed words stuck, and do what he would he could not forget them.

It would be the making of him indeed! And as the Resolution dropped into the stream, and the Jessie Jane followed her after a five minutes' interval, Jim, answering the former's horn with his shrill whistle, felt, as he turned the whistle-cock, that he was defying fortune as well as Linton's boat. The one thing that saves commerce from infecting with leprous taint all that she touches, is her alliance with the genius of home and the spirits of the household. Where this is absent, how contemptible is trade, how degrading is the whole system of barter and speculation!

Now Jim thirsted for gold, not to gratify his vanity or the mere lust of getting, but in order to obtain the means of enriching his own individual life with the good things that life in general offers to man. He wanted gold to win and keep a wife, and to rear "an independent shed." He wanted the means to enjoy honourable leisure, and for books, travel, anything that would make him a stronger and more fruitful man. He had ambitions, had this mallee river-bred man, that were not bounded by the mallee-rim on the south side of the Murray, or by the box and gums on the north bank. Inch by inch he had carved a path upward. Inch by inch he would mount higher--if the Fates pleased. If a man's sinews and a man's thoughts could turn the sparse opportunities which offered into gold, they should be his. And here, right here, was the biggest chance yet within his grasp. Fail now, and he would run a mortgaged boat till Providence pleased that the boiler should blow up, with himself on board. Get the Mungadel contract, and through the long vista of coming years he saw himself moving on from success to success, and from triumph to triumph--first in the commercial world, and then--the ambition was so sacred as to be no more than half uttered to his own heart--in the political world. Jim, ordinarily clear--headed enough, was yet so simple as to believe that politics had some use for clean-souled men.