‘Simple as striking matches,’ said Dave Regan, Bushman; ‘but it gave me the biggest scare I ever had—except, perhaps, the time I stumbled in the dark into a six-feet digger’s hole, which might have been eighty feet deep for all I knew when I was falling. (There was an eighty-feet shaft left open close by.)
‘It was the night of the day after the Queen’s birthday. I was sinking a shaft with Jim Bently and Andy Page on the old Redclay goldfield, and we camped in a tent on the creek. Jim and me went to some races that was held at Peter Anderson’s pub., about four miles across the ridges, on Queen’s birthday. Andy was a quiet sort of chap, a teetotaller, and we’d disgusted him the last time he was out for a holiday with us, so he stayed at home and washed and mended his clothes, and read an arithmetic book. (He used to keep the accounts, and it took him most of his spare time.)
‘Jim and me had a pretty high time. We all got pretty tight after the races, and I wanted to fight Jim, or Jim wanted to fight me—I don’t remember which. We were old chums, and we nearly always wanted to fight each other when we got a bit on, and we’d fight if we weren’t stopped. I remember once Jim got maudlin drunk and begged and prayed of me to fight him, as if he was praying for his life. Tom Tarrant, the coach-driver, used to say that Jim and me must be related, else we wouldn’t hate each other so much when we were tight and truthful.
‘Anyway, this day, Jim got the sulks, and caught his horse and went home early in the evening. My dog went home with him too; I must have been carrying on pretty bad to disgust the dog.
‘Next evening I got disgusted with myself, and started to walk home. I’d lost my hat, so Peter Anderson lent me an old one of his, that he’d worn on Ballarat he said: it was a hard, straw, flat, broad-brimmed affair, and fitted my headache pretty tight. Peter gave me a small flask of whisky to help me home. I had to go across some flats and up a long dark gully called Murderer’s Gully, and over a gap called Dead Man’s Gap, and down the ridge and gullies to Redclay Creek. The lonely flats were covered with blue-grey gum bush, and looked ghostly enough in the moonlight, and I was pretty shaky, but I had a pull at the flask and a mouthful of water at a creek and felt right enough. I began to whistle, and then to sing: I never used to sing unless I thought I was a couple of miles out of earshot of any one.
‘Murderer’s Gully was deep and pretty dark most times, and of course it was haunted. Women and children wouldn’t go through it after dark; and even me, when I’d grown up, I’d hold my back pretty holler, and whistle, and walk quick going along there at night-time. We’re all afraid of ghosts, but we won’t let on.
‘Some one had skinned a dead calf during the day and left it on the track, and it gave me a jump, I promise you. It looked like two corpses laid out naked. I finished the whisky and started up over the gap. All of a sudden a great ‘old man’ kangaroo went across the track with a thud-thud, and up the siding, and that startled me. Then the naked, white glistening trunk of a stringy-bark tree, where some one had stripped off a sheet of bark, started out from a bend in the track in a shaft of moonlight, and that gave me a jerk. I was pretty shaky before I started. There was a Chinaman’s grave close by the track on the top of the gap. An old chow had lived in a hut there for many years, and fossicked on the old diggings, and one day he was found dead in the hut, and the Government gave some one a pound to bury him. When I was a nipper we reckoned that his ghost haunted the gap, and cursed in Chinese because the bones hadn’t been sent home to China. It was a lonely, ghostly place enough.
‘It had been a smotheringly hot day and very close coming across the flats and up the gully—not a breath of air; but now as I got higher I saw signs of the thunderstorm we’d expected all day, and felt the breath of a warm breeze on my face. When I got into the top of the gap the first thing I saw was something white amongst the dark bushes over the spot where the Chinaman’s grave was, and I stood staring at it with both eyes. It moved out of the shadow presently, and I saw that it was a white bullock, and I felt relieved. I’d hardly felt relieved when, all at once, there came a “pat-pat-pat” of running feet close behind me! I jumped round quick, but there was nothing there, and while I stood staring all ways for Sunday, there came a “pat-pat”, then a pause, and then “pat-pat-pat-pat” behind me again: it was like some one dodging and running off that time. I started to walk down the track pretty fast, but hadn’t gone a dozen yards when “pat-pat-pat”, it was close behind me again. I jerked my eyes over my shoulder but kept my legs going. There was nothing behind, but I fancied I saw something slip into the Bush to the right. It must have been the moonlight on the moving boughs; there was a good breeze blowing now. I got down to a more level track, and was making across a spur to the main road, when “pat-pat!” “pat-pat-pat, pat-pat-pat!” it was after me again. Then I began to run—and it began to run too! “pat-pat-pat” after me all the time. I hadn’t time to look round. Over the spur and down the siding and across the flat to the road I went as fast as I could split my legs apart. I had a scared idea that I was getting a touch of the “jim-jams”, and that frightened me more than any outside ghost could have done. I stumbled a few times, and saved myself, but, just before I reached the road, I fell slithering on to my hands on the grass and gravel. I thought I’d broken both my wrists. I stayed for a moment on my hands and knees, quaking and listening, squinting round like a great gohana; I couldn’t hear nor see anything. I picked myself up, and had hardly got on one end, when “pat-pat!” it was after me again. I must have run a mile and a half altogether that night. It was still about three-quarters of a mile to the camp, and I ran till my heart beat in my head and my lungs choked up in my throat. I saw our tent-fire and took off my hat to run faster. The footsteps stopped, then something about the hat touched my fingers, and I stared at it—and the thing dawned on me. I hadn’t noticed at Peter Anderson’s—my head was too swimmy to notice anything. It was an old hat of the style that the first diggers used to wear, with a couple of loose ribbon ends, three or four inches long, from the band behind. As long as I walked quietly through the gully, and there was no wind, the tails didn’t flap, but when I got up into the breeze, they flapped or were still according to how the wind lifted them or pressed them down flat on the brim. And when I ran they tapped all the time; and the hat being tight on my head, the tapping of the ribbon ends against the straw sounded loud of course.
‘I sat down on a log for a while to get some of my wind back and cool down, and then I went to the camp as quietly as I could, and had a long drink of water.
‘“You seem to be a bit winded, Dave,” said Jim Bently, “and mighty thirsty. Did the Chinaman’s ghost chase you?”
‘I told him not to talk rot, and went into the tent, and lay down on my bunk, and had a good rest.’
Dave Regan, Jim Bently, and Andy Page were sinking a shaft at Stony Creek in search of a rich gold quartz reef which was supposed to exist in the vicinity. There is always a rich reef supposed to exist in the vicinity; the only questions are whether it is ten feet or hundreds beneath the surface, and in which direction. They had struck some pretty solid rock, also water which kept them baling. They used the old-fashioned blasting-powder and time-fuse. They’d make a sausage or cartridge of blasting-powder in a skin of strong calico or canvas, the mouth sewn and bound round the end of the fuse; they’d dip the cartridge in melted tallow to make it water-tight, get the drill-hole as dry as possible, drop in the cartridge with some dry dust, and wad and ram with stiff clay and broken brick. Then they’d light the fuse and get out of the hole and wait. The result was usually an ugly pot-hole in the bottom of the shaft and half a barrow-load of broken rock.
There was plenty of fish in the creek, fresh-water bream, cod, cat-fish, and tailers. The party were fond of fish, and Andy and Dave of fishing. Andy would fish for three hours at a stretch if encouraged by a ‘nibble’ or a ‘bite’ now and then—say once in twenty minutes. The butcher was always willing to give meat in exchange for fish when they caught more than they could eat; but now it was winter, and these fish wouldn’t bite. However, the creek was low, just a chain of muddy water-holes, from the hole with a few bucketfuls in it to the sizable pool with an average depth of six or seven feet, and they could get fish by baling out the smaller holes or muddying up the water in the larger ones till the fish rose to the surface. There was the cat-fish, with spikes growing out of the sides of its head, and if you got pricked you’d know it, as Dave said. Andy took off his boots, tucked up his trousers, and went into a hole one day to stir up the mud with his feet, and he knew it. Dave scooped one out with his hand and got pricked, and he knew it too; his arm swelled, and the pain throbbed up into his shoulder, and down into his stomach too, he said, like a toothache he had once, and kept him awake for two nights—only the toothache pain had a ‘burred edge’, Dave said.
Dave got an idea.
‘Why not blow the fish up in the big water-hole with a cartridge?’ he said. ‘I’ll try it.’
He thought the thing out and Andy Page worked it out. Andy usually put Dave’s theories into practice if they were practicable, or bore the blame for the failure and the chaffing of his mates if they weren’t.
He made a cartridge about three times the size of those they used in the rock. Jim Bently said it was big enough to blow the bottom out of the river. The inner skin was of stout calico; Andy stuck the end of a six-foot piece of fuse well down in the powder and bound the mouth of the bag firmly to it with whipcord. The idea was to sink the cartridge in the water with the open end of the fuse attached to a float on the surface, ready for lighting. Andy dipped the cartridge in melted bees’-wax to make it water-tight. ‘We’ll have to leave it some time before we light it,’ said Dave, ‘to give the fish time to get over their scare when we put it in, and come nosing round again; so we’ll want it well water-tight.’
Round the cartridge Andy, at Dave’s suggestion, bound a strip of sail canvas—that they used for making water-bags—to increase the force of the explosion, and round that he pasted layers of stiff brown paper—on the plan of the sort of fireworks we called ‘gun-crackers’. He let the paper dry in the sun, then he sewed a covering of two thicknesses of canvas over it, and bound the thing from end to end with stout fishing-line. Dave’s schemes were elaborate, and he often worked his inventions out to nothing. The cartridge was rigid and solid enough now—a formidable bomb; but Andy and Dave wanted to be sure. Andy sewed on another layer of canvas, dipped the cartridge in melted tallow, twisted a length of fencing-wire round it as an afterthought, dipped it in tallow again, and stood it carefully against a tent-peg, where he’d know where to find it, and wound the fuse loosely round it. Then he went to the camp-fire to try some potatoes which were boiling in their jackets in a billy, and to see about frying some chops for dinner. Dave and Jim were at work in the claim that morning.
They had a big black young retriever dog—or rather an overgrown pup, a big, foolish, four-footed mate, who was always slobbering round them and lashing their legs with his heavy tail that swung round like a stock-whip. Most of his head was usually a red, idiotic, slobbering grin of appreciation of his own silliness. He seemed to take life, the world, his two-legged mates, and his own instinct as a huge joke. He’d retrieve anything: he carted back most of the camp rubbish that Andy threw away. They had a cat that died in hot weather, and Andy threw it a good distance away in the scrub; and early one morning the dog found the cat, after it had been dead a week or so, and carried it back to camp, and laid it just inside the tent-flaps, where it could best make its presence known when the mates should rise and begin to sniff suspiciously in the sickly smothering atmosphere of the summer sunrise. He used to retrieve them when they went in swimming; he’d jump in after them, and take their hands in his mouth, and try to swim out with them, and scratch their naked bodies with his paws. They loved him for his good-heartedness and his foolishness, but when they wished to enjoy a swim they had to tie him up in camp.
He watched Andy with great interest all the morning making the cartridge, and hindered him considerably, trying to help; but about noon he went off to the claim to see how Dave and Jim were getting on, and to come home to dinner with them. Andy saw them coming, and put a panful of mutton-chops on the fire. Andy was cook to-day; Dave and Jim stood with their backs to the fire, as Bushmen do in all weathers, waiting till dinner should be ready. The retriever went nosing round after something he seemed to have missed.
Andy’s brain still worked on the cartridge; his eye was caught by the glare of an empty kerosene-tin lying in the bushes, and it struck him that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to sink the cartridge packed with clay, sand, or stones in the tin, to increase the force of the explosion. He may have been all out, from a scientific point of view, but the notion looked all right to him. Jim Bently, by the way, wasn’t interested in their ‘damned silliness’. Andy noticed an empty treacle-tin—the sort with the little tin neck or spout soldered on to the top for the convenience of pouring out the treacle—and it struck him that this would have made the best kind of cartridge-case: he would only have had to pour in the powder, stick the fuse in through the neck, and cork and seal it with bees’-wax. He was turning to suggest this to Dave, when Dave glanced over his shoulder to see how the chops were doing—and bolted. He explained afterwards that he thought he heard the pan spluttering extra, and looked to see if the chops were burning. Jim Bently looked behind and bolted after Dave. Andy stood stock-still, staring after them.
‘Run, Andy! run!’ they shouted back at him. ‘Run!!! Look behind you, you fool!’ Andy turned slowly and looked, and there, close behind him, was the retriever with the cartridge in his mouth—wedged into his broadest and silliest grin. And that wasn’t all. The dog had come round the fire to Andy, and the loose end of the fuse had trailed and waggled over the burning sticks into the blaze; Andy had slit and nicked the firing end of the fuse well, and now it was hissing and spitting properly.
Andy’s legs started with a jolt; his legs started before his brain did, and he made after Dave and Jim. And the dog followed Andy.
Dave and Jim were good runners—Jim the best—for a short distance; Andy was slow and heavy, but he had the strength and the wind and could last. The dog leapt and capered round him, delighted as a dog could be to find his mates, as he thought, on for a frolic. Dave and Jim kept shouting back, ‘Don’t foller us! don’t foller us, you coloured fool!’ but Andy kept on, no matter how they dodged. They could never explain, any more than the dog, why they followed each other, but so they ran, Dave keeping in Jim’s track in all its turnings, Andy after Dave, and the dog circling round Andy—the live fuse swishing in all directions and hissing and spluttering and stinking. Jim yelling to Dave not to follow him, Dave shouting to Andy to go in another direction—to ‘spread out’, and Andy roaring at the dog to go home. Then Andy’s brain began to work, stimulated by the crisis: he tried to get a running kick at the dog, but the dog dodged; he snatched up sticks and stones and threw them at the dog and ran on again. The retriever saw that he’d made a mistake about Andy, and left him and bounded after Dave. Dave, who had the presence of mind to think that the fuse’s time wasn’t up yet, made a dive and a grab for the dog, caught him by the tail, and as he swung round snatched the cartridge out of his mouth and flung it as far as he could: the dog immediately bounded after it and retrieved it. Dave roared and cursed at the dog, who seeing that Dave was offended, left him and went after Jim, who was well ahead. Jim swung to a sapling and went up it like a native bear; it was a young sapling, and Jim couldn’t safely get more than ten or twelve feet from the ground. The dog laid the cartridge, as carefully as if it was a kitten, at the foot of the sapling, and capered and leaped and whooped joyously round under Jim. The big pup reckoned that this was part of the lark—he was all right now—it was Jim who was out for a spree. The fuse sounded as if it were going a mile a minute. Jim tried to climb higher and the sapling bent and cracked. Jim fell on his feet and ran. The dog swooped on the cartridge and followed. It all took but a very few moments. Jim ran to a digger’s hole, about ten feet deep, and dropped down into it—landing on soft mud—and was safe. The dog grinned sardonically down on him, over the edge, for a moment, as if he thought it would be a good lark to drop the cartridge down on Jim.
‘Go away, Tommy,’ said Jim feebly, ‘go away.’
The dog bounded off after Dave, who was the only one in sight now; Andy had dropped behind a log, where he lay flat on his face, having suddenly remembered a picture of the Russo-Turkish war with a circle of Turks lying flat on their faces (as if they were ashamed) round a newly-arrived shell.
There was a small hotel or shanty on the creek, on the main road, not far from the claim. Dave was desperate, the time flew much faster in his stimulated imagination than it did in reality, so he made for the shanty. There were several casual Bushmen on the verandah and in the bar; Dave rushed into the bar, banging the door to behind him. ‘My dog!’ he gasped, in reply to the astonished stare of the publican, ‘the blanky retriever—he’s got a live cartridge in his mouth——’
The retriever, finding the front door shut against him, had bounded round and in by the back way, and now stood smiling in the doorway leading from the passage, the cartridge still in his mouth and the fuse spluttering. They burst out of that bar. Tommy bounded first after one and then after another, for, being a young dog, he tried to make friends with everybody.
The Bushmen ran round corners, and some shut themselves in the stable. There was a new weather-board and corrugated-iron kitchen and wash-house on piles in the back-yard, with some women washing clothes inside. Dave and the publican bundled in there and shut the door—the publican cursing Dave and calling him a crimson fool, in hurried tones, and wanting to know what the hell he came here for.
The retriever went in under the kitchen, amongst the piles, but, luckily for those inside, there was a vicious yellow mongrel cattle-dog sulking and nursing his nastiness under there—a sneaking, fighting, thieving canine, whom neighbours had tried for years to shoot or poison. Tommy saw his danger—he’d had experience from this dog—and started out and across the yard, still sticking to the cartridge. Half-way across the yard the yellow dog caught him and nipped him. Tommy dropped the cartridge, gave one terrified yell, and took to the Bush. The yellow dog followed him to the fence and then ran back to see what he had dropped.
Nearly a dozen other dogs came from round all the corners and under the buildings—spidery, thievish, cold-blooded kangaroo-dogs, mongrel sheep- and cattle-dogs, vicious black and yellow dogs—that slip after you in the dark, nip your heels, and vanish without explaining—and yapping, yelping small fry. They kept at a respectable distance round the nasty yellow dog, for it was dangerous to go near him when he thought he had found something which might be good for a dog to eat. He sniffed at the cartridge twice, and was just taking a third cautious sniff when——
It was very good blasting powder—a new brand that Dave had recently got up from Sydney; and the cartridge had been excellently well made. Andy was very patient and painstaking in all he did, and nearly as handy as the average sailor with needles, twine, canvas, and rope.
Bushmen say that that kitchen jumped off its piles and on again. When the smoke and dust cleared away, the remains of the nasty yellow dog were lying against the paling fence of the yard looking as if he had been kicked into a fire by a horse and afterwards rolled in the dust under a barrow, and finally thrown against the fence from a distance. Several saddle-horses, which had been ‘hanging-up’ round the verandah, were galloping wildly down the road in clouds of dust, with broken bridle-reins flying; and from a circle round the outskirts, from every point of the compass in the scrub, came the yelping of dogs. Two of them went home, to the place where they were born, thirty miles away, and reached it the same night and stayed there; it was not till towards evening that the rest came back cautiously to make inquiries. One was trying to walk on two legs, and most of ‘em looked more or less singed; and a little, singed, stumpy-tailed dog, who had been in the habit of hopping the back half of him along on one leg, had reason to be glad that he’d saved up the other leg all those years, for he needed it now. There was one old one-eyed cattle-dog round that shanty for years afterwards, who couldn’t stand the smell of a gun being cleaned. He it was who had taken an interest, only second to that of the yellow dog, in the cartridge. Bushmen said that it was amusing to slip up on his blind side and stick a dirty ramrod under his nose: he wouldn’t wait to bring his solitary eye to bear—he’d take to the Bush and stay out all night.
For half an hour or so after the explosion there were several Bushmen round behind the stable who crouched, doubled up, against the wall, or rolled gently on the dust, trying to laugh without shrieking. There were two white women in hysterics at the house, and a half-caste rushing aimlessly round with a dipper of cold water. The publican was holding his wife tight and begging her between her squawks, to ‘hold up for my sake, Mary, or I’ll lam the life out of ye.’
Dave decided to apologise later on, ‘when things had settled a bit,’ and went back to camp. And the dog that had done it all, ‘Tommy’, the great, idiotic mongrel retriever, came slobbering round Dave and lashing his legs with his tail, and trotted home after him, smiling his broadest, longest, and reddest smile of amiability, and apparently satisfied for one afternoon with the fun he’d had.
Andy chained the dog up securely, and cooked some more chops, while Dave went to help Jim out of the hole.
And most of this is why, for years afterwards, lanky, easy-going Bushmen, riding lazily past Dave’s camp, would cry, in a lazy drawl and with just a hint of the nasal twang—
‘’El-lo, Da-a-ve! How’s the fishin’ getting on, Da-a-ve?’
‘When we got tired of digging about Mudgee-Budgee, and getting no gold,’ said Dave Regan, Bushman, ‘me and my mate, Jim Bently, decided to take a turn at droving; so we went with Bob Baker, the drover, overland with a big mob of cattle, way up into Northern Queensland.
‘We couldn’t get a job on the home track, and we spent most of our money, like a pair of fools, at a pub. at a town way up over the border, where they had a flash barmaid from Brisbane. We sold our pack-horses and pack-saddles, and rode out of that town with our swags on our riding-horses in front of us. We had another spree at another place, and by the time we got near New South Wales we were pretty well stumped.
‘Just the other side of Mulgatown, near the border, we came on a big mob of cattle in a paddock, and a party of drovers camped on the creek. They had brought the cattle down from the north and were going no farther with them; their boss had ridden on into Mulgatown to get the cheques to pay them off, and they were waiting for him.
‘“And Poisonous Jimmy is waiting for us,” said one of them.
‘Poisonous Jimmy kept a shanty a piece along the road from their camp towards Mulgatown. He was called “Poisonous Jimmy” perhaps on account of his liquor, or perhaps because he had a job of poisoning dingoes on a station in the Bogan scrubs at one time. He was a sharp publican. He had a girl, and they said that whenever a shearing-shed cut-out on his side and he saw the shearers coming along the road, he’d say to the girl, “Run and get your best frock on, Mary! Here’s the shearers comin’.” And if a chequeman wouldn’t drink he’d try to get him into his bar and shout for him till he was too drunk to keep his hands out of his pockets.
‘“But he won’t get us,” said another of the drovers. “I’m going to ride straight into Mulgatown and send my money home by the post as soon as I get it.”
‘“You’ve always said that, Jack,” said the first drover.
‘We yarned a while, and had some tea, and then me and Jim got on our horses and rode on. We were burned to bricks and ragged and dusty and parched up enough, and so were our horses. We only had a few shillings to carry us four or five hundred miles home, but it was mighty hot and dusty, and we felt that we must have a drink at the shanty. This was west of the sixpenny-line at that time—all drinks were a shilling along here.
‘Just before we reached the shanty I got an idea.
‘“We’ll plant our swags in the scrub,” I said to Jim.
‘“What for?” said Jim.
‘“Never mind—you’ll see,” I said.
‘So we unstrapped our swags and hid them in the mulga scrub by the side of the road; then we rode on to the shanty, got down, and hung our horses to the verandah posts.
‘“Poisonous” came out at once, with a smile on him that would have made anybody home-sick.
‘He was a short nuggety man, and could use his hands, they said; he looked as if he’d be a nasty, vicious, cool customer in a fight—he wasn’t the sort of man you’d care to try and swindle a second time. He had a monkey shave when he shaved, but now it was all frill and stubble—like a bush fence round a stubble-field. He had a broken nose, and a cunning, sharp, suspicious eye that squinted, and a cold stony eye that seemed fixed. If you didn’t know him well you might talk to him for five minutes, looking at him in the cold stony eye, and then discover that it was the sharp cunning little eye that was watching you all the time. It was awful embarrassing. It must have made him awkward to deal with in a fight.
‘“Good day, mates,” he said.
‘“Good day,” we said.
‘“It’s hot.”
‘“It’s hot.”
‘We went into the bar, and Poisonous got behind the counter.
‘“What are you going to have?” he asked, rubbing up his glasses with a rag.
‘We had two long-beers.
‘“Never mind that,” said Poisonous, seeing me put my hand in my pocket; “it’s my shout. I don’t suppose your boss is back yet? I saw him go in to Mulgatown this morning.”
‘“No, he ain’t back,” I said; “I wish he was. We’re getting tired of waiting for him. We’ll give him another hour, and then some of us will have to ride in to see whether he’s got on the boose, and get hold of him if he has.”
‘“I suppose you’re waiting for your cheques?” he said, turning to fix some bottles on the shelf.
‘“Yes,” I said, “we are;” and I winked at Jim, and Jim winked back as solemn as an owl.
‘Poisonous asked us all about the trip, and how long we’d been on the track, and what sort of a boss we had, dropping the questions offhand now an’ then, as for the sake of conversation. We could see that he was trying to get at the size of our supposed cheques, so we answered accordingly.
‘“Have another drink,” he said, and he filled the pewters up again. “It’s up to me,” and he set to work boring out the glasses with his rag, as if he was short-handed and the bar was crowded with customers, and screwing up his face into what I suppose he considered an innocent or unconscious expression. The girl began to sidle in and out with a smart frock and a see-you-after-dark smirk on.
‘“Have you had dinner?” she asked. We could have done with a good meal, but it was too risky—the drovers’ boss might come along while we were at dinner and get into conversation with Poisonous. So we said we’d had dinner.
‘Poisonous filled our pewters again in an offhand way.
‘“I wish the boss would come,” said Jim with a yawn. “I want to get into Mulgatown to-night, and I want to get some shirts and things before I go in. I ain’t got a decent rag to me back. I don’t suppose there’s ten bob amongst the lot of us.”
‘There was a general store back on the creek, near the drovers’ camp.
‘“Oh, go to the store and get what you want,” said Poisonous, taking a sovereign from the till and tossing it on to the counter. “You can fix it up with me when your boss comes. Bring your mates along.”
‘“Thank you,” said Jim, taking up the sovereign carelessly and dropping it into his pocket.
‘“Well, Jim,” I said, “suppose we get back to camp and see how the chaps are getting on?”
‘“All right,” said Jim.
‘“Tell them to come down and get a drink,” said Poisonous; “or, wait, you can take some beer along to them if you like,” and he gave us half a gallon of beer in a billy-can. He knew what the first drink meant with Bushmen back from a long dry trip.
‘We got on our horses, I holding the billy very carefully, and rode back to where our swags were.
‘“I say,” said Jim, when we’d strapped the swags to the saddles, “suppose we take the beer back to those chaps: it’s meant for them, and it’s only a fair thing, anyway—we’ve got as much as we can hold till we get into Mulgatown.”
‘“It might get them into a row,” I said, “and they seem decent chaps. Let’s hang the billy on a twig, and that old swagman that’s coming along will think there’s angels in the Bush.”
‘“Oh! what’s a row?” said Jim. “They can take care of themselves; they’ll have the beer anyway and a lark with Poisonous when they take the can back and it comes to explanations. I’ll ride back to them.”
‘So Jim rode back to the drovers’ camp with the beer, and when he came back to me he said that the drovers seemed surprised, but they drank good luck to him.
‘We rode round through the mulga behind the shanty and came out on the road again on the Mulgatown side: we only stayed at Mulgatown to buy some tucker and tobacco, then we pushed on and camped for the night about seven miles on the safe side of the town.’
‘Talkin’ o’ Poisonous Jimmy, I can tell you a yarn about him. We’d brought a mob of cattle down for a squatter the other side of Mulgatown. We camped about seven miles the other side of the town, waitin’ for the station hands to come and take charge of the stock, while the boss rode on into town to draw our money. Some of us was goin’ back, though in the end we all went into Mulgatown and had a boose up with the boss. But while we was waitin’ there come along two fellers that had been drovin’ up north. They yarned a while, an’ then went on to Poisonous Jimmy’s place, an’ in about an hour one on ‘em come ridin’ back with a can of beer that he said Poisonous had sent for us. We all knew Jimmy’s little games—the beer was a bait to get us on the drunk at his place; but we drunk the beer, and reckoned to have a lark with him afterwards. When the boss come back, an’ the station hands to take the bullocks, we started into Mulgatown. We stopped outside Poisonous’s place an’ handed the can to the girl that was grinnin’ on the verandah. Poisonous come out with a grin on him like a parson with a broken nose.
‘“Good day, boys!” he says.
‘“Good day, Poisonous,” we says.
‘“It’s hot,” he says.
‘“It’s blanky hot,” I says.
‘He seemed to expect us to get down. “Where are you off to?” he says.
‘“Mulgatown,” I says. “It will be cooler there,” and we sung out, “So-long, Poisonous!” and rode on.
‘He stood starin’ for a minute; then he started shoutin’, “Hi! hi there!” after us, but we took no notice, an’ rode on. When we looked back last he was runnin’ into the scrub with a bridle in his hand.
‘We jogged along easily till we got within a mile of Mulgatown, when we heard somebody gallopin’ after us, an’ lookin’ back we saw it was Poisonous.
‘He was too mad and too winded to speak at first, so he rode along with us a bit gasping: then he burst out.
‘“Where’s them other two carnal blanks?” he shouted.
‘“What other two?” I asked. “We’re all here. What’s the matter with you anyway?”
‘“All here!” he yelled. “You’re a lurid liar! What the flamin’ sheol do you mean by swiggin’ my beer an’ flingin’ the coloured can in me face? without as much as thank yer! D’yer think I’m a flamin’——!”
‘Oh, but Poisonous Jimmy was wild.
‘“Well, we’ll pay for your dirty beer,” says one of the chaps, puttin’ his hand in his pocket. “We didn’t want yer slush. It tasted as if it had been used before.”
‘“Pay for it!” yelled Jimmy. “I’ll——well take it out of one of yer bleedin’ hides!”
‘We stopped at once, and I got down an’ obliged Jimmy for a few rounds. He was a nasty customer to fight; he could use his hands, and was cool as a cucumber as soon as he took his coat off: besides, he had one squirmy little business eye, and a big wall-eye, an’, even if you knowed him well, you couldn’t help watchin’ the stony eye—it was no good watchin’ his eyes, you had to watch his hands, and he might have managed me if the boss hadn’t stopped the fight. The boss was a big, quiet-voiced man, that didn’t swear.
‘“Now, look here, Myles,” said the boss (Jimmy’s name was Myles)—“Now, look here, Myles,” sez the boss, “what’s all this about?”
‘“What’s all this about?” says Jimmy, gettin’ excited agen. “Why, two fellers that belonged to your party come along to my place an’ put up half-a-dozen drinks, an’ borrered a sovereign, an’ got a can o’ beer on the strength of their cheques. They sez they was waitin’ for you—an’ I want my crimson money out o’ some one!”
‘“What was they like?” asks the boss.
‘“Like?” shouted Poisonous, swearin’ all the time. “One was a blanky long, sandy, sawny feller, and the other was a short, slim feller with black hair. Your blanky men knows all about them because they had the blanky billy o’ beer.”
‘“Now, what’s this all about, you chaps?” sez the boss to us.
‘So we told him as much as we knowed about them two fellers.
‘I’ve heard men swear that could swear in a rough shearin’-shed, but I never heard a man swear like Poisonous Jimmy when he saw how he’d been left. It was enough to split stumps. He said he wanted to see those fellers, just once, before he died.
‘He rode with us into Mulgatown, got mad drunk, an’ started out along the road with a tomahawk after the long sandy feller and the slim dark feller; but two mounted police went after him an’ fetched him back. He said he only wanted justice; he said he only wanted to stun them two fellers till he could give ‘em in charge.
‘They fined him ten bob.’
Dave and I were tramping on a lonely Bush track in New Zealand, making for a sawmill where we expected to get work, and we were caught in one of those three-days’ gales, with rain and hail in it and cold enough to cut off a man’s legs. Camping out was not to be thought of, so we just tramped on in silence, with the stinging pain coming between our shoulder-blades—from cold, weariness, and the weight of our swags—and our boots, full of water, going splosh, splosh, splosh along the track. We were settled to it—to drag on like wet, weary, muddy working bullocks till we came to somewhere—when, just before darkness settled down, we saw the loom of a humpy of some sort on the slope of a tussock hill, back from the road, and we made for it, without holding a consultation.
It was a two-roomed hut built of waste timber from a sawmill, and was either a deserted settler’s home or a hut attached to an abandoned sawmill round there somewhere. The windows were boarded up. We dumped our swags under the little verandah and banged at the door, to make sure; then Dave pulled a couple of boards off a window and looked in: there was light enough to see that the place was empty. Dave pulled off some more boards, put his arm in through a broken pane, clicked the catch back, and then pushed up the window and got in. I handed in the swags to him. The room was very draughty; the wind came in through the broken window and the cracks between the slabs, so we tried the partitioned-off room—the bedroom—and that was better. It had been lined with chaff-bags, and there were two stretchers left by some timber-getters or other Bush contractors who’d camped there last; and there were a box and a couple of three-legged stools.
We carried the remnant of the wood-heap inside, made a fire, and put the billy on. We unrolled our swags and spread the blankets on the stretchers; and then we stripped and hung our clothes about the fire to dry. There was plenty in our tucker-bags, so we had a good feed. I hadn’t shaved for days, and Dave had a coarse red beard with a twist in it like an ill-used fibre brush—a beard that got redder the longer it grew; he had a hooked nose, and his hair stood straight up (I never saw a man so easy-going about the expression and so scared about the head), and he was very tall, with long, thin, hairy legs. We must have looked a weird pair as we sat there, naked, on the low three-legged stools, with the billy and the tucker on the box between us, and ate our bread and meat with clasp-knives.
‘I shouldn’t wonder,’ says Dave, ‘but this is the “whare” * where the murder was that we heard about along the road. I suppose if any one was to come along now and look in he’d get scared.’ Then after a while he looked down at the flooring-boards close to my feet, and scratched his ear, and said, ‘That looks very much like a blood-stain under your stool, doesn’t it, Jim?’
I shifted my feet and presently moved the stool farther away from the fire—it was too hot.
I wouldn’t have liked to camp there by myself, but I don’t think Dave would have minded—he’d knocked round too much in the Australian Bush to mind anything much, or to be surprised at anything; besides, he was more than half murdered once by a man who said afterwards that he’d mistook him for some one else: he must have been a very short-sighted murderer.
Presently we put tobacco, matches, and bits of candle we had, on the two stools by the heads of our bunks, turned in, and filled up and smoked comfortably, dropping in a lazy word now and again about nothing in particular. Once I happened to look across at Dave, and saw him sitting up a bit and watching the door. The door opened very slowly, wide, and a black cat walked in, looked first at me, then at Dave, and walked out again; and the door closed behind it.
Dave scratched his ear. ‘That’s rum,’ he said. ‘I could have sworn I fastened that door. They must have left the cat behind.’
‘It looks like it,’ I said. ‘Neither of us has been on the boose lately.’
He got out of bed and up on his long hairy spindle-shanks.
The door had the ordinary, common black oblong lock with a brass knob. Dave tried the latch and found it fast; he turned the knob, opened the door, and called, ‘Puss—puss—puss!’ but the cat wouldn’t come. He shut the door, tried the knob to see that the catch had caught, and got into bed again.
He’d scarcely settled down when the door opened slowly, the black cat walked in, stared hard at Dave, and suddenly turned and darted out as the door closed smartly.
I looked at Dave and he looked at me—hard; then he scratched the back of his head. I never saw a man look so puzzled in the face and scared about the head.
He got out of bed very cautiously, took a stick of firewood in his hand, sneaked up to the door, and snatched it open. There was no one there. Dave took the candle and went into the next room, but couldn’t see the cat. He came back and sat down by the fire and meowed, and presently the cat answered him and came in from somewhere—she’d been outside the window, I suppose; he kept on meowing and she sidled up and rubbed against his hairy shin. Dave could generally bring a cat that way. He had a weakness for cats. I’d seen him kick a dog, and hammer a horse—brutally, I thought—but I never saw him hurt a cat or let any one else do it. Dave was good to cats: if a cat had a family where Dave was round, he’d see her all right and comfortable, and only drown a fair surplus. He said once to me, ‘I can understand a man kicking a dog, or hammering a horse when it plays up, but I can’t understand a man hurting a cat.’
He gave this cat something to eat. Then he went and held the light close to the lock of the door, but could see nothing wrong with it. He found a key on the mantel-shelf and locked the door. He got into bed again, and the cat jumped up and curled down at the foot and started her old drum going, like shot in a sieve. Dave bent down and patted her, to tell her he’d meant no harm when he stretched out his legs, and then he settled down again.
We had some books of the ‘Deadwood Dick’ school. Dave was reading ‘The Grisly Ghost of the Haunted Gulch’, and I had ‘The Dismembered Hand’, or ‘The Disembowelled Corpse’, or some such names. They were first-class preparation for a ghost.
I was reading away, and getting drowsy, when I noticed a movement and saw Dave’s frightened head rising, with the terrified shadow of it on the wall. He was staring at the door, over his book, with both eyes. And that door was opening again—slowly—and Dave had locked it! I never felt anything so creepy: the foot of my bunk was behind the door, and I drew up my feet as it came open; it opened wide, and stood so. We waited, for five minutes it seemed, hearing each other breathe, watching for the door to close; then Dave got out, very gingerly, and up on one end, and went to the door like a cat on wet bricks.
‘You shot the bolt OUTSIDE the catch,’ I said, as he caught hold of the door—like one grabs a craw-fish.
‘I’ll swear I didn’t,’ said Dave. But he’d already turned the key a couple of times, so he couldn’t be sure. He shut and locked the door again. ‘Now, get out and see for yourself,’ he said.
I got out, and tried the door a couple of times and found it all right. Then we both tried, and agreed that it was locked.
I got back into bed, and Dave was about half in when a thought struck him. He got the heaviest piece of firewood and stood it against the door.
‘What are you doing that for?’ I asked.
‘If there’s a broken-down burglar camped round here, and trying any of his funny business, we’ll hear him if he tries to come in while we’re asleep,’ says Dave. Then he got back into bed. We composed our nerves with the ‘Haunted Gulch’ and ‘The Disembowelled Corpse’, and after a while I heard Dave snore, and was just dropping off when the stick fell from the door against my big toe and then to the ground with tremendous clatter. I snatched up my feet and sat up with a jerk, and so did Dave—the cat went over the partition. That door opened, only a little way this time, paused, and shut suddenly. Dave got out, grabbed a stick, skipped to the door, and clutched at the knob as if it were a nettle, and the door wouldn’t come!—it was fast and locked! Then Dave’s face began to look as frightened as his hair. He lit his candle at the fire, and asked me to come with him; he unlocked the door and we went into the other room, Dave shading his candle very carefully and feeling his way slow with his feet. The room was empty; we tried the outer door and found it locked.
‘It muster gone by the winder,’ whispered Dave. I noticed that he said ‘it’ instead of ‘he’. I saw that he himself was shook up, and it only needed that to scare me bad.
We went back to the bedroom, had a drink of cold tea, and lit our pipes. Then Dave took the waterproof cover off his bunk, spread it on the floor, laid his blankets on top of it, his spare clothes, &c., on top of them, and started to roll up his swag.
‘What are you going to do, Dave?’ I asked.
‘I’m going to take the track,’ says Dave, ‘and camp somewhere farther on. You can stay here, if you like, and come on in the morning.’
I started to roll up my swag at once. We dressed and fastened on the tucker-bags, took up the billies, and got outside without making any noise. We held our backs pretty hollow till we got down on to the road.
‘That comes of camping in a deserted house,’ said Dave, when we were safe on the track. No Australian Bushman cares to camp in an abandoned homestead, or even near it—probably because a deserted home looks ghostlier in the Australian Bush than anywhere else in the world.
It was blowing hard, but not raining so much.
We went on along the track for a couple of miles and camped on the sheltered side of a round tussock hill, in a hole where there had been a landslip. We used all our candle-ends to get a fire alight, but once we got it started we knocked the wet bark off ‘manuka’ sticks and logs and piled them on, and soon had a roaring fire. When the ground got a little drier we rigged a bit of shelter from the showers with some sticks and the oil-cloth swag-covers; then we made some coffee and got through the night pretty comfortably. In the morning Dave said, ‘I’m going back to that house.’
‘What for?’ I said.
‘I’m going to find out what’s the matter with that crimson door. If I don’t I’ll never be able to sleep easy within a mile of a door so long as I live.’
So we went back. It was still blowing. The thing was simple enough by daylight—after a little watching and experimenting. The house was built of odds and ends and badly fitted. It ‘gave’ in the wind in almost any direction—not much, not more than an inch or so, but just enough to throw the door-frame out of plumb and out of square in such a way as to bring the latch and bolt of the lock clear of the catch (the door-frame was of scraps joined). Then the door swung open according to the hang of it; and when the gust was over the house gave back, and the door swung to—the frame easing just a little in another direction. I suppose it would take Edison to invent a thing like that, that came about by accident. The different strengths and directions of the gusts of wind must have accounted for the variations of the door’s movements—and maybe the draught of our big fire had helped.
Dave scratched his head a good bit.
‘I never lived in a house yet,’ he said, as we came away—‘I never lived in a house yet without there was something wrong with it. Gimme a good tent.’