Children of the Bush
by
Henry Lawson



[ Transcriber's notes:  The year of first magazine publication is
shown in the table of contents below.  Additional transcriber's
notes, including a glossary, are included at the end of the EBook. ]




Contents


Send Round the Hat:               1901
The Pretty Girl in the Army:      1901
"Lord Douglas":                   1901
The Blindness of One-eyed Brogan: 1901
The Sundowners:                   1901
A Sketch of Mateship:             1902
On the Tucker Track:              1897
A Bush Publican's Lament:         1901
The Shearer's Dream:              1902
The Lost Souls' Hotel:            1902
The Boozers' Home:                1899
The Sex Problem Again:            1898
The Romance of the Swag:          1901
"Buckholts' Gate":                1901
The Bush-Fire:                    1901
The House that Was Never Built:   1901
"Barney, Take me home Again":     1901
A Droving Yarn:                   1899
Gettin' Back on Dave Regan:       1901
"Shall We Gather at the River":   1901
His Brother's Keeper:             1901
The Ghosts of Many Christmases:   1901






SEND ROUND THE HAT


    Now this is the creed from the Book of the Bush--
    Should be simple and plain to a dunce:
    "If a man's in a hole you must pass round the hat
    Were he jail-bird or gentleman once."



"Is it any harm to wake yer?"

It was about nine o'clock in the morning, and, though it was Sunday
morning, it was no harm to wake me; but the shearer had mistaken me
for a deaf jackaroo, who was staying at the shanty and was something
like me, and had good-naturedly shouted almost at the top of his
voice, and he woke the whole shanty.  Anyway he woke three or four
others who were sleeping on beds and stretchers, and one on a
shake-down on the floor, in the same room.  It had been a wet night,
and the shanty was full of shearers from Big Billabong Shed which had
cut out the day before.  My room mates had been drinking and gambling
overnight, and they swore luridly at the intruder for disturbing them.

He was six-foot-three or thereabout.  He was loosely built, bony,
sandy-complexioned and grey eyed.  He wore a good-humoured grin at
most times, as I noticed later on; he was of a type of bushman that I
always liked--the sort that seem to get more good-natured the longer
they grow, yet are hard-knuckled and would accommodate a man who
wanted to fight, or thrash a bully in a good-natured way.  The sort
that like to carry somebody's baby round, and cut wood, carry water
and do little things for overworked married bushwomen.  He wore a
saddle-tweed sac suit two sizes too small for him, and his face, neck,
great hands and bony wrists were covered with sun-blotches and
freckles.

"I hope I ain't disturbin' yer," he shouted, as he bent over my
bunk, "but there's a cove--"

"You needn't shout!" I interrupted, "I'm not deaf."

"Oh--I beg your pardon!" he shouted.  "I didn't know I was yellin'.
I thought you was the deaf feller."

"Oh, that's all right," I said.  "What's the trouble?"

"Wait till them other chaps is done swearin' and I'll tell yer," he
said.  He spoke with a quiet, good-natured drawl, with something of
the nasal twang, but tone and drawl distinctly Australian--altogether
apart from that of the Americans.

"Oh, spit it out for Christ's sake, Long'un!" yelled One-eyed Bogan,
who had been the worst swearer in a rough shed, and he fell back on
his bunk as if his previous remarks had exhausted him.

"It's that there sick jackaroo that was pickin'-up at Big
Billabong," said the Giraffe.  "He had to knock off the first week,
an' he's been here ever since.  They're sendin' him away to the
hospital in Sydney by the speeshall train.  They're just goin' to take
him up in the wagonette to the railway station, an' I thought I might
as well go round with the hat an' get him a few bob.  He's got a
missus and kids in Sydney."

"Yer always goin' round with yer gory hat!" growled Bogan.  "Yer'd
blanky well take it round in hell!"

"That's what he's doing, Bogan," muttered Gentleman Once, on the
shake-down, with his face to the wall.

The hat was a genuine "cabbage-tree," one of the sort that "last a
lifetime."  It was well coloured, almost black in fact with weather
and age, and it had a new strap round the base of the crown.  I looked
into it and saw a dirty pound note and some silver.  I dropped in half
a crown, which was more than I could spare, for I had only been a
green-hand at Big Billabong.

"Thank yer!" he said.  "Now then, you fellers!"

"I wish you'd keep your hat on your head, and your money in your
pockets and your sympathy somewhere else," growled Jack Moonlight as
he raised himself painfully on his elbow, and felt under his pillow
for two half-crowns.  "Here," he said, "here's two half-casers.
Chuck 'em in and let me sleep for God's sake!"

Gentleman Once, the gambler, rolled round on his shake-down, bringing
his good-looking, dissipated face from the wall.  He had turned in in
his clothes and, with considerable exertion he shoved his hand down
into the pocket of his trousers, which were a tight fit.  He brought
up a roll of pound notes and could find no silver.

"Here," he said to the Giraffe, "I might as well lay a quid.  I'll
chance it anyhow.  Chuck it in."

"You've got rats this mornin', Gentleman Once," growled the
Bogan.  "It ain't a blanky horse race."

"P'r'aps I have," said Gentleman Once, and he turned to the
wall again with his head on his arm.

"Now, Bogan, yer might as well chuck in somethin ," said the
Giraffe.

"What's the matter with the --- jackaroo?" asked the Bogan, tugging his
trousers from under the mattress.

Moonlight said something in a low tone.

"The --- he has!" said Bogan.  "Well, I pity the ---!  Here, I'll chuck in
half a --- quid!" and he dropped half a sovereign into the hat.

The fourth man, who was known to his face as "Barcoo-Rot," and
behind his back as "The Mean Man," had been drinking all night, and
not even Bogan's stump-splitting adjectives could rouse him.  So Bogan
got out of bed, and calling on us (as blanky female cattle) to witness
what he was about to do, he rolled the drunkard over, prospected his
pockets till he made up five shillings (or a "caser" in bush
language), and "chucked" them into the hat.

And Barcoo-Rot is probably unconscious to this day that he was ever
connected with an act of charity.  The Giraffe struck the deaf
jackaroo in the neat room.  I heard the chaps cursing "Long-'un" for
waking them, and "Deaf-'un" for being, as they thought at first, the
indirect cause of the disturbance.  I heard the Giraffe and his hat
being condemned in other rooms and cursed along the veranda where more
shearers were sleeping; and after a while I turned out.

The Giraffe was carefully fixing a mattress and pillows on the floor
of a wagonette, and presently a man, who looked like a corpse, was
carried out and lifted into the trap.

As the wagonette started, the shanty-keeper--a fat, soulless-looking
man--put his hand in his pocket and dropped a quid into the hat which
was still going round, in the hands of the Giraffe's mate, little
Teddy Thompson, who was as far below medium height as the Giraffe was
above it.

The Giraffe took the horse's head and led him along on the most level
parts of the road towards the railway station, and two or three chaps
went along to help get the sick man into the train.

The shearing-season was over in that district, but I got a job of
house-painting, which was my trade, at the Great Western Hotel (a
two-story brick place), and I stayed in Bourke for a couple of months.


The Giraffe was a Victorian native from Bendigo.  He was well known in
Bourke and to many shearers who came through the great dry scrubs from
hundreds of miles round.  He was stakeholder, drunkard's banker,
peacemaker where possible, referee or second to oblige the chaps when
a fight was on, big brother or uncle to most of the children in town,
final court of appeal when the youngsters had a dispute over a
foot-race at the school picnic, referee at their fights, and he was
the stranger's friend.

"The feller as knows can battle around for himself," he'd say.
"But I always like to do what I can for a hard-up stranger cove.  I
was a green-hand jackaroo once meself, and I know what it is."

"You're always bothering about other people, Giraffe," said Tom
Hall, the shearers' union secretary, who was only a couple of inches
shorter than the Giraffe.  "There's nothing in it, you can take it
from me--I ought to know."

"Well, what's a feller to do?" said the Giraffe.  "I'm only hangin'
round here till shearin' starts agen, an' a cove might as well be
doin' something.  Besides, it ain't as if I was like a cove that had
old people or a wife an' kids to look after.  I ain't got no
responsibilities.  A feller can't be doin' nothin'.  Besides, I like
to lend a helpin' hand when I can."

"Well, all I've got to say," said Tom, most of whose screw went in
borrowed quids, etc.  "All I've got to say is that you'll get no
thanks, and you might blanky well starve in the end."

"There ain't no fear of me starvin' so long as I've got me hands
about me; an' I ain't a cove as wants thanks," said the Giraffe.

He was always helping someone or something.  Now it was a bit of a
"darnce" that we was gettin' up for the girls; again it was Mrs
Smith, the woman whose husban' was drowned in the flood in the Began
River lars' Crismas, or that there poor woman down by the
Billabong--her husband cleared out and left her with a lot o' kids.
Or Bill Something, the bullocky, who was run over by his own wagon,
while he was drunk, and got his leg broke.

Toward the end of his spree One-eyed Began broke loose and smashed
nearly all the windows of the Carriers' Arms, and next morning he was
fined heavily at the police court.  About dinner-time I encountered
the Giraffe and his hat, with two half-crowns in it for a start.

"I'm sorry to trouble yer," he said, "but One-eyed Bogan carn't pay
his fine, an' I thought we might fix it up for him.  He ain't half a
bad sort of feller when he ain't drinkin'.  It's only when he gets too
much booze in him."

After shearing, the hat usually started round with the
Giraffe's own dirty crumpled pound note in the bottom of it as a
send-off, later on it was half a sovereign, and so on down to half a
crown and a shilling, as he got short of stuff; till in the end he
would borrow a "few bob"--which he always repaid after next
shearing-"just to start the thing goin'."

There were several yarns about him and his hat.  'Twas said that the
hat had belonged to his father, whom he resembled in every respect,
and it had been going round for so many years that the crown was worn
as thin as paper by the quids, half-quids, casers, half-casers, bobs
and tanners or sprats--to say nothing of the scrums--that had been
chucked into it in its time and shaken up.

They say that when a new governor visited Bourke the Giraffe happened
to be standing on the platform close to the exit, grinning
good-humouredly, and the local toady nudged him urgently and said in
an awful whisper, "Take off your hat!  Why don't you take off your
hat?"

"Why?" drawled the Giraffe, "he ain't hard up, is he?"

And they fondly cherish an anecdote to the effect that, when the
One-Man-One-Vote Bill was passed (or Payment of Members, or when the
first Labour Party went in--I forget on which occasion they said it
was) the Giraffe was carried away by the general enthusiasm, got a few
beers in him, "chucked" a quid into his hat, and sent it round.  The
boys contributed by force of habit, and contributed largely, because
of the victory and the beer.  And when the hat came back to the
Giraffe, he stood holding it in front of him with both hands and
stared blankly into it for a while.  Then it dawned on him.

"Blowed if I haven't bin an' gone an' took up a bloomin' collection
for meself!" he said.

 He was almost a teetotaller, but he stood his shout in reason.  He
mostly drank ginger beer.

"I ain't a feller that boozes, but I ain't got nothin' agen chaps
enjoyin' themselves, so long as they don't go too far."

It was common for a man on the spree to say to him:

"Here!  here's five quid.  Look after it for me, Giraffe, will yer,
till I git off the booze.

"His real name was Bob Brothers, and his bush names, 'Long-'un,'
'The Giraffe,' 'Send-round-the-hat,' 'Chuck-in-a-bob,' and
'Ginger-ale.'"

Some years before, camels and Afghan drivers had been imported to the
Bourke district; the camels did very well in the dry country, they
went right across country and carried everything from sardines to
flooring-boards.  And the teamsters loved the Afghans nearly as much
as Sydney furniture makers love the cheap Chinese in the same line.
They love 'em even as union shearers on strike love blacklegs brought
up-country to take their places.

Now the Giraffe was a good, straight unionist, but in cases of
sickness or trouble he was as apt to forget his unionism, as all
bushmen are, at all times (and for all time), to forget their creed.
So, one evening, the Giraffe blundered into the Carriers' Arms--of all
places in the world--when it was full of teamsters; he had his hat in
his hand and some small silver and coppers in it.

"I say, you fellers, there's a poor, sick Afghan in the camp down
there along the---"

A big, brawny bullock-driver took him firmly by the shoulders, or,
rather by the elbows, and ran him out before any damage was done.  The
Giraffe took it as he took most things, good-humouredly; but, about
dusk, he was seen slipping down towards the Afghan camp with a billy
of soup.

"I believe," remarked Tom Hall, "that when the Giraffe goes to
heaven--and he's the only one of us, as far as I can see, that has a
ghost of a show--I believe that when he goes to heaven, the first
thing he'll do will be to take his infernal hat round amongst the
angels--getting up a collection for this damned world that he left
behind."

"Well, I don't think there's so much to his credit, after all," said
Jack Mitchell, shearer.  "You see, the Giraffe is ambitious; he likes
public life, and that accounts for him shoving himself forward with
his collections.  As for bothering about people in trouble, that's
only common curiosity; he's one of those chaps that are always shoving
their noses into other people's troubles.  And, as for looking after
sick men--why! there's nothing the Giraffe likes better than pottering
round a sick man, and watching him and studying him.  He's awfully
interested in sick men, and they're pretty scarce out here.  I tell
you there's nothing he likes better--except, maybe, it's pottering
round a corpse.  I believe he'd ride forty miles to help and
sympathize and potter round a funeral.  The fact of the matter is that
the Giraffe is only enjoying himself with other people's
troubles--that's all it is.  It's only vulgar curiosity and
selfishness.  I set it down to his ignorance; the way he was brought
up."

A few days after the Afghan incident the Giraffe and his hat had a run
of luck.  A German, one of a party who were building a new wooden
bridge over the Big Billabong, was helping unload some girders from a
truck at the railway station, when a big log slipped on the skids and
his leg was smashed badly.  They carried him to the Carriers' Arms,
which was the nearest hotel, and into a bedroom behind the bar, and
sent for the doctor.  The Giraffe was in evidence as usual.

"It vas not that at all," said German Charlie, when they asked him
if he was in much pain.  "It vas not that at all.  I don't cares a
damn for der bain; but dis is der tird year--und I vas going home dis
year--after der gontract--und der gontract yoost commence!"`

That was the burden of his song all through, between his groans.
There were a good few chaps sitting quietly about the bar and veranda
when the doctor arrived.  The Giraffe was sitting at the end of the
counter, on which he had laid his hat while he wiped his face, neck,
and forehead with a big speckled "sweatrag." It was a very hot day.

The doctor, a good-hearted young Australian, was heard saying
something.  Then German Charlie, in a voice that rung with pain:

"Make that leg right, doctor--quick!  Dis is der tird pluddy
year--und I must go home!"

The doctor asked him if he was in great pain.  "Neffer mind der
pluddy bain, doctor!  Neffer mind der pluddy bain!  Dot vas nossing.
Make dat leg well quick, doctor.  Dis vas der last gontract, and I vas
going home dis year." Then the words jerked out of him by physical
agony: "Der girl vas vaiting dree year, und--by Got!  I must go
home."

The publican--Watty Braithwaite, known as "Watty Broadweight," or,
more familiarly, "Watty Bothways"--turned over the Giraffe's hat in
a tired, bored sort of way, dropped a quid into it, and nodded
resignedly at the Giraffe.

The Giraffe caught up the hint and the hat with alacrity.  The hat
went all round town, so to speak; and, as soon as his leg was firm
enough not to come loose on the road German Charlie went home.

It was well known that I contributed to the Sydney _Bulletin_ and
several other papers.  The Giraffe's bump of reverence was very large,
and swelled especially for sick men and poets.  He treated me with
much more respect than is due from a bushman to a man, and with an odd
sort of extra gentleness I sometimes fancied.  But one day he rather
surprised me.

"I'm sorry to trouble yer," he said in a shamefaced way.  "I don't
know as you go in for sportin', but One-eyed Bogan an' Barcoo-Rot is
goin' to have a bit of a scrap down the Billybong this evenin',
an'---"

"A bit of a what?" I asked.

"A bit of fight to a finish," he said apologetically.  "An' the
chaps is tryin' to fix up a fiver to put some life into the thing.
There's bad blood between One-eyed Bogan and Barcoo-Rot, an' it won't
do them any harm to have it out."

It was a great fight, I remember.  There must have been a couple of
score blood-soaked handkerchiefs (or "sweat-rags") buried in a hole
on the field of battle, and the Giraffe was busy the rest of the
evening helping to patch up the principals.  Later on he took up a
small collection for the loser, who happened to be Barcoo-Rot in spite
of the advantage of an eye.

The Salvation Army lassie, who went round with the _War Cry_,
nearly always sold the Giraffe three copies.

A new-chum parson, who wanted a subscription to build or enlarge a
chapel, or something, sought the assistance of the Giraffe's influence
with his mates.

"Well," said the Giraffe, "I ain't a churchgoer meself.  I ain't
what you might call a religious cove, but I'll be glad to do what I
can to help yer.  I don't suppose I can do much.  I ain't been to
church since I was a kiddy."

The parson was shocked, but later on he learned to appreciate the
Giraffe and his mates, and to love Australia for the bushman's sake,
and it was he who told me the above anecdote.

The Giraffe helped fix some stalls for a Catholic Church bazaar, and
some of the chaps chaffed him about it in the union office.

"You'll be taking up a collection for a joss-house down in the
Chinamen's camp next," said Tom Hall in conclusion.

"Well, I ain't got nothin' agen the Roming Carflics," said the
Giraffe.  "An' Father O'Donovan's a very decent sort of cove.  He
stuck up for the unions all right in the strike anyway."  ("He
wouldn't be Irish if he wasn't," someone commented.)  "I carried
swags once for six months with a feller that was a Carflick, an' he
was a very straight feller.  And a girl I knowed turned Carflick to
marry a chap that had got her into trouble, an' she was always jes'
the same to me after as she was before.  Besides, I like to help
everything that's goin' on."

Tom Hall and one or two others went out hurriedly to have a drink.
But we all loved the Giraffe.

He was very innocent and very humorous, especially when he meant to be
most serious and philosophical.

"Some of them bush girls is regular tomboys," he said to me solemnly
one day.  "Some of them is too cheeky altogether.  I remember once I
was stoppin' at a place--they was sort of relations o' mine--an' they
put me to sleep in a room off the verander, where there was a glass
door an' no blinds.  An' the first mornin' the girls--they was sort o'
cousins o' mine--they come gigglin' and foolin' round outside the door
on the verander, an' kep' me in bed till nearly ten o'clock.  I had to
put me trowsis on under the bed-clothes in the end.  But I got back on
'em the next night," he reflected.

"How did you do that, Bob?" I asked.

"Why, I went to bed in me trowsis!"


One day I was on a plank, painting the ceiling of the bar of the Great
Western Hotel.  I was anxious to get the job finished.  The work had
been kept back most of the day by chaps handing up long beers to me,
and drawing my attention to the alleged fact that I was putting on the
paint wrong side out.  I was slapping it on over the last few boards
when:

"I'm very sorry to trouble yer; I always seem to be troublin' yer;
but there's that there woman and them girls---"

I looked down--about the first time I had looked down on him--and
there was the Giraffe, with his hat brim up on the plank and two
half-crowns in it.

"Oh, that's all right, Bob," I said, and I dropped in half a crown.

There were shearers in the bar, and presently there was some
barracking.  It appeared that that there woman and them girls were
strange women, in the local as well as the Biblical sense of the word,
who had come from Sydney at the end of the shearing-season, and had
taken a cottage on the edge of the scrub on the outskirts of the town.
There had been trouble this week in connection with a row at their
establishment, and they had been fined, warned off by the police, and
turned out by their landlord.

"This is a bit too red-hot, Giraffe," said one of the shearers.
"Them ---s has made enough out of us coves.  They've got plenty of
stuff, don't you fret.  Let 'em go to ---!  I'm blanked if I give a
sprat."

"They ain't got their fares to Sydney," said the Giraffe.  "An',
what's more, the little 'un is sick, an' two of them has kids in
Sydney."

"How the --- do you know?"

"Why, one of 'em come to me an' told me all about it."

There was an involuntary guffaw.

"Look here, Bob," said Billy Woods, the rouseabouts' secretary,
kindly.  "Don't you make a fool of yourself.  You'll have all the
chaps laughing at you.  Those girls are only working you for all
you're worth.  I suppose one of 'em came crying and whining to you.
Don't you bother about 'em.  _You_ don't know 'em; they can pump
water at a moment's notice.  You haven't had any experience with women
yet, Bob."

"She didn't come whinin' and cryin' to me," said the Giraffe, dropping
his twanging drawl a little.  "She looked me straight in the face an'
told me all about it."

"I say, Giraffe," said Box-o'-Tricks, "what have you been doin'?
You've bin down there on the nod.  I'm surprised at yer, Giraffe."

"An' he pretends to be so gory soft an' innocent, too," growled the
Bogan.  "We know all about you, Giraffe."

"Look here, Giraffe," said Mitchell the shearer.  "I'd never have
thought it of you.  We all thought you were the only virgin youth west
the river; I always thought you were a moral young man.  You mustn't
think that because your conscience is pricking you everyone else's
is."

"I ain't had anythin' to do with them," said the Giraffe, drawling
again.  "I ain't a cove that goes in for that sort of thing.  But
other chaps has, and I think they might as well help 'em out of their
fix."

"They're a rotten crowd," said Billy Woods.  "You don't know them,
Bob.  Don't bother about them-they're not worth it.  Put your money in
your pocket.  You'll find a better use for it before next shearing."

"Better shout, Giraffe," said Box-o'-Tricks.

Now in spite of the Giraffe's softness he was the hardest man in
Bourke to move when he'd decided on what he thought was "the fair
thing to do."  Another peculiarity of his was that on occasion, such
for instance as "sayin' a few words" at a strike meeting, he would
straighten himself, drop the twang, and rope in his drawl, so to
speak.

"Well, look here, you chaps," he said now.  "I don't know anything
about them women.  I s'pose they're bad, but I don't suppose they're
worse than men has made them.  All I know is that there's four women
turned out, without any stuff, and every woman in Bourke, an' the
police, an' the law agen 'em.  An' the fact that they is women is
agenst 'em most of all.  You don't expect 'em to hump their swags to
Sydney!  Why, only I ain't got the stuff I wouldn't trouble yer.  I'd
pay their fares meself.  Look," he said, lowering his voice, "there
they are now, an' one of the girls is cryin'.  Don't let 'em see yer
lookin'."

I dropped softly from the plank and peeped out with the rest.

They stood by the fence on the opposite side of the street, a bit up
towards the railway station, with their portmanteaux and bundles at
their feet.  One girl leant with her arms on the fence rail and her
face buried in them, another was trying to comfort her.  The third
girl and the woman stood facing our way.  The woman was good-looking;
she had a hard face, but it might have been made hard.  The third girl
seemed half defiant, half inclined to cry.  Presently she went to the
other side of the girl who was crying on the fence and put her arm
round her shoulder.  The woman suddenly turned her back on us and
stood looking away over the paddocks.

The hat went round.  Billy Woods was first, then Box-o'-Tricks, and
then Mitchell.

Billy contributed with eloquent silence.  "I was only jokin',
Giraffe," said Box-o'-Tricks, dredging his pockets for a couple of
shillings.  It was some time after the shearing, and most of the chaps
were hard up.  "Ah, well," sighed Mitchell.  "There's no help for
it.  If the Giraffe would take up a collection to import some decent
girls to this God-forgotten hole there might be some sense in
it. . . .  It's bad enough for the Giraffe to undermine our religious
prejudices, and tempt us to take a morbid interest in sick Chows and
Afghans, and blacklegs and widows; but when he starts mixing us up
with strange women it's time to buck."  And he prospected his pockets
and contributed two shillings, some odd pennies, and a pinch of
tobacco dust.

"I don't mind helping the girls, but I'm damned if I'll give a penny
to help the old---," said Tom Hall.

"Well, she was a girl once herself," drawled the Giraffe.

The Giraffe went round to the other pubs and to the union offices, and
when he returned he seemed satisfied with the plate, but troubled
about something else.

"I don't know what to do for them for to-night," he said.  "None of
the pubs or boardin'-houses will hear of them, an' there ain't no
empty houses, an' the women is all agen 'em."

"Not all," said Alice, the big, handsome barmaid from Sydney.
"Come here, Bob."  She gave the Giraffe half a sovereign and a look
for which some of us would have paid him ten pounds--had we had the
money, and had the look been transferable.

"Wait a minute, Bob," she said, and she went in to speak to the
landlord.

"There's an empty bedroom at the end of the store in the yard," she
said when she came back.  "They can camp there for to-night if they
behave themselves.  You'd better tell 'em, Bob."

"Thank yer, Alice," said the Giraffe.

Next day, after work, the Giraffe and I drifted together and down by
the river in the cool of the evening, and sat on the edge of the
steep, drought-parched bank.

"I heard you saw your lady friends off this morning, Bob," I said,
and was sorry I said it, even before he answered.

"Oh, they ain't no friends of mine," he said.  "Only four' poor
devils of women.  I thought they mightn't like to stand waitin' with
the crowd on the platform, so I jest offered to get their tickets an'
told 'em to wait round at the back of the station till the bell
rung. . . .  An' what do yer think they did, Harry?" he went on, with
an exasperatingly unintelligent grin.  "Why, they wanted to kiss me."

"Did they?"

"Yes.  An' they would have done it, too, if I hadn't been so
long. . . .  Why, I'm blessed if they didn't kiss me hands."

"You don't say so."

"God's truth.  Somehow I didn't like to go on the platform with them
after that; besides, they was cryin', and I can't stand women cryin'.
But some of the chaps put them into an empty carriage."  He thought a
moment.  Then:

"There's some terrible good-hearted fellers in the world," he
reflected.

I thought so too.  "Bob," I said, "you're a single man.  Why don't
you get married and settle down?"

"Well," he said, "I ain't got no wife an' kids, that's a fact.  But
it ain't my fault."

He may have been right about the wife.  But I thought of the look that
Alice had given him, and---

"Girls seem to like me right enough," he said, "but it don't go no
further than that.  The trouble is that I'm so long, and I always seem
to get shook after little girls.  At least there was one little girl
in Bendigo that I was properly gone on."

"And wouldn't she have you?"

"Well, it seems not."

"Did you ask her?"

"Oh, yes, I asked her right enough."

"Well, and what did she say?"

"She said it would be redicilus for her to be seen trottin' alongside
of a chimbley like me."

"Perhaps she didn't mean that.  There are any amount of little women
who like tall men."

"I thought of that too--afterwards.  P'r'aps she didn't mean it that
way.  I s'pose the fact of the matter was that she didn't cotton on to
me, and wanted to let me down easy.  She didn't want to hurt me
feelin's, if yer understand--she was a very good-hearted little girl.
There's some terrible tall fellers where I come from, and I know two
as married little girls."

He seemed a hopeless case.

"Sometimes," he said, "sometimes I wish that I wasn't so blessed
long."

"There's that there deaf jackaroo," he reflected presently.  "He's
something in the same fig about girls as I am.  He's too deaf and I'm
too long."

"How do you make that out?" I asked.  "He's got three girls, to my
knowledge, and, as for being deaf, why, he gasses more than any man in
the town, and knows more of what's going on than old Mother Brindle
the washerwoman."

"Well, look at that now!" said the Giraffe, slowly.  "Who'd have
thought it?  He never told me he had three girls, an' as for hearin'
news, I always tell him anything that's goin' on that I think he
doesn't catch.  He told me his trouble was that whenever he went out
with a girl people could hear what they was sayin'--at least they
could hear what she was sayin' to him, an' draw their own conclusions,
he said.  He said he went out one night with a girl, and some of the
chaps foxed 'em an' heard her sayin' `don't' to him, an' put it all
round town."

"What did she say `don't' for?" I asked.

"He didn't tell me that, but I s'pose he was kissin' her or huggin'
her or something."

"Bob," I said presently, "didn't you try the little girl in Bendigo
a second time?"

"No," he said.  "What was the use.  She was a good little girl, and I
wasn't goin' to go botherin' her.  I ain't the sort of cove that goes
hangin' round where he isn't wanted.  But somehow I couldn't stay
about Bendigo after she gave me the hint, so I thought I'd come over
an' have a knock round on this side for a year or two."

"And you never wrote to her?"

"No.  What was the use of goin' pesterin' her with letters?  I know
what trouble letters give me when I have to answer one.  She'd have
only had to tell me the straight truth in a letter an' it wouldn't
have done me any good.  But I've pretty well got over it by this
time."

A few days later I went to Sydney.  The Giraffe was the last I shook
hands with from the carriage window, and he slipped something in a
piece of newspaper into my hand.

"I hope yer won't be offended," he drawled, "but some of the chaps
thought you mightn't be too flush of stuff--you've been shoutin' a
good deal; so they put a quid or two together.  They thought it might
help yer to have a bit of a fly round in Sydney."

I was back in Bourke before next shearing.  On the evening of my
arrival I ran against the Giraffe; he seemed strangely shaken over
something, but he kept his hat on his head.

"Would yer mind takin' a stroll as fur as the Billerbong?" he said.
"I got something I'd like to tell yer."

His big, brown, sunburnt hands trembled and shook as he took a letter
from his pocket and opened it.

"I've just got a letter," he said.  "A letter from that little girl
at Bendigo.  It seems it was all a mistake.  I'd like you to read it.
Somehow I feel as if I want to talk to a feller, and I'd rather talk
to you than any of them other chaps."

It was a good letter, from a big-hearted little girl.  She had been
breaking her heart for the great ass all these months.  It seemed that
he had left Bendigo without saying good-bye to her.  "Somehow I
couldn't bring meself to it," he said, when I taxed him with it.  She
had never been able to get his address until last week; then she got
it from a Bourke man who had gone south.  She called him "an awful
long fool," which he was, without the slightest doubt, and she
implored him to write, and come back to her.

"And will you go back, Bob?" I asked.

"My oath!  I'd take the train to-morrer only I ain't got the stuff.
But I've got a stand in Big Billerbong Shed an' I'll soon knock a few
quid together.  I'll go back as soon as ever shearin's over.  I'm
goin' to write away to her to-night."


The Giraffe was the "ringer" of Big Billabong Shed that season.  His
tallies averaged a hundred and twenty a day.  He only sent his hat
round once during shearing, and it was noticed that he hesitated at
first and only contributed half a crown.  But then it was a case of a
man being taken from the shed by the police for wife desertion.

"It's always that way," commented Mitchell.  "Those soft,
good-hearted fellows always end by getting hard and selfish.  The
world makes 'em so.  It's the thought of the soft fools they've been
that finds out sooner or later and makes 'em repent.  Like as not the
Giraffe will be the meanest man out back before he's done."

When Big Billabong cut out, and we got back to Bourke with our dusty
swags and dirty cheques, I spoke to Tom Hall:

"Look here, Tom," I said.  "That long fool, the Giraffe, has been
breaking his heart for a little girl in Bendigo ever since he's been
out back, and she's been breaking her heart for him, and the ass
didn't know it till he got a letter from her just before Big Billabong
started.  He's going to-morrow morning."

That evening Tom stole the Giraffe's hat.  "I s'pose it'll turn up in
the mornin'," said the Giraffe.  "I don't mind a lark," he added,
"but it does seem a bit red hot for the chaps to collar a cove's hat
and a feller goin' away for good, p'r'aps, in the mornin'."

Mitchell started the thing going with a quid.

"It's worth it," he said, "to get rid of him.  We'll have some
peace now.  There won't be so many accidents or women in trouble when
the Giraffe and his blessed hat are gone.  Any way, he's an eyesore in
the town, and he's getting on my nerves for one. . . .  Come on, you
sinners!  Chuck 'em in; we're only taking quids and half-quids."

About daylight next morning Tom Hall slipped into the Giraffe's room
at the Carriers' Arms.  The Giraffe was sleeping peacefully.  Tom put
the hat on a chair by his side.  The collection had been a record one,
and, besides the packet of money in the crown of the hat, there was a
silver-mounted pipe with case--the best that could be bought in
Bourke, a gold brooch, and several trifles--besides an ugly valentine
of a long man in his shirt walking the room with a twin on each arm.

Tom was about to shake the Giraffe by the shoulder, when he noticed a
great foot, with about half a yard of big-boned ankle and shank,
sticking out at the bottom of the bed.  The temptation was too great.
Tom took up the hair-brush, and, with the back of it, he gave a smart
rap on the point of an in-growing toe-nail, and slithered.

We heard the Giraffe swearing good-naturedly for a while, and then
there was a pregnant silence.  He was staring at the hat we supposed.

We were all up at the station to see him off.  It was rather a long
wait.  The Giraffe edged me up to the other end of the platform.

He seemed overcome.

"There's--there's some terrible good-hearted fellers in this world,"
he said.  "You mustn't forgit 'em, Harry, when you make a big name
writin'.  I'm--well, I'm blessed if I don't feel as if I was jist
goin' to blubber!"

I was glad he didn't.  The Giraffe blubberin' would have been a
spectacle.  I steered him back to his friends.

"Ain't you going to kiss me, Bob?" said the Great Western's big,
handsome barmaid, as the bell rang.

"Well, I don't mind kissin' you, Alice," he said, wiping his mouth.
"But I'm goin' to be married, yer know."  And he kissed her fair on
the mouth.

"There's nothin' like gettin' into practice," he said, grinning
round.

We thought he was improving wonderfully; but at the last moment
something troubled him.

"Look here, you chaps," he said, hesitatingly, with his hand in his
pocket, "I don't know what I'm going to do with all this stuff.
There's that there poor washerwoman that scalded her legs liftin' the
boiler of clothes off the fire---"

We shoved him into the carriage.  He hung--about half of him--out the
window, wildly waving his hat, till the train disappeared in the
scrub.

And, as I sit here writing by lamplight at midday, in the midst of a
great city of shallow social sham, of hopeless, squalid poverty, of
ignorant selfishness, cultured or brutish, and of noble and heroic
endeavour frowned down or callously neglected, I am almost aware of a
burst of sunshine in the room, and a long form leaning over my chair,
and:

"Excuse me for troublin' yer; I'm always troublin' yer; but there's
that there poor woman. . . ."

And I wish I could immortalize him!




THAT PRETTY GIRL IN THE ARMY


    Now I often sit at Watty's, when the night is very near,
    With a head that's full of jingles--and the fumes of bottled beer;
    For I always have a fancy that, if I am over there
    When the Army prays for Watty, I'm included in the prayer.
    It would take a lot of praying, lots of thumping on the drum,
    To prepare our sinful, straying, erring souls for Kingdom Come.
    But I love my fellow-sinners! and I hope, upon the whole,
    That the Army gets a hearing when it prays for Watty's soul.
                                             -When the World was Wide.


The Salvation Army does good business in some of the outback towns of
the great pastoral wastes of Australia.  There's the thoughtless,
careless generosity of the bushman, whose pockets don't go far enough
down his trousers (that's what's the matter with him), and who
contributes to anything that comes along, without troubling to ask
questions, like long Bob Brothers of Bourke, who, chancing to be "a
Protestant by rights," unwittingly subscribed towards the erection of
a new Catholic church, and, being chaffed for his mistake, said:

"Ah, well, I don't suppose it'll matter a hang in the end, anyway it
goes.  I ain't got nothink agenst the Roming Carflicks."

There's the shearer, fresh with his cheque from a cut-out shed,
gloriously drunk and happy, in love with all the world, and ready to
subscribe towards any creed and shout for all hands--including Old
Nick if he happened to come along.  There's the shearer, half-drunk
and inclined to be nasty, who has got the wrong end of all things with
a tight grip, and who flings a shilling in the face of out-back
conventionality (as he thinks) by chucking a bob into the Salvation
Army ring.  Then he glares round to see if he can catch anybody
winking behind his back.  There's the cynical joker, a queer mixture,
who contributes generously and tempts the reformed boozer afterwards.
There's the severe-faced old station-hand--in clean shirt and
neckerchief and white moleskins--in for his annual or semi-annual
spree, who contributes on principle, and then drinks religiously until
his cheque is gone and the horrors are come.  There's the shearer,
feeling mighty bad after a spree, and in danger of seeing things when
he tries to go to sleep.  He has dropped ten or twenty pounds over bar
counters and at cards, and he now "chucks" a repentant shilling into
the ring, with a very private and rather vague sort of feeling that
something might come of it.  There's the stout, contented,
good-natured publican, who tips the Army as if it were a barrel-organ.
And there are others and other reasons--black sheep and
ne'er-do-wells--and faint echoes of other times in Salvation Army
tunes.

Bourke, the metropolis of the Great Scrubs, on the banks of the
Darling River, about five hundred miles from Sydney, was suffering
from a long drought when I was there in ninety-two; and the heat may
or may not have been another cause contributing to the success, from a
business point of view, of the Bourke garrison.  There was much beer
boozing--and, besides, it was vaguely understood (as most things are
vaguely understood out there in the drought-haze) that the place the
Army came to save us from was hotter than Bourke.  We didn't hanker to
go to a hotter place than Bourke.  But that year there was an
extraordinary reason for the Army's great financial success there.

She was a little girl, nineteen or twenty, I should judge, the
prettiest girl I ever saw in the Army, and one of the prettiest I've
ever seen out of it.  She had the features of an angel, but her
expression was wonderfully human, sweet and sympathetic.  Her big grey
eyes were sad with sympathy for sufferers and sinners, and her poke
bonnet was full of bunchy, red-gold hair.  Her first appearance was
somewhat dramatic--perhaps the Army arranged it so.

The Army used to pray, and thump the drum, and sing, and take up
collections every evening outside Watty Bothways' Hotel, the Carriers'
Arms.  They performed longer and more often outside Watty's than any
other pub in town--perhaps because Watty was considered the most
hopeless publican and his customers the hardest crowd of boozers in
Bourke.  The band generally began to play about dusk.  Watty would
lean back comfortably in a basket easy-chair on his wide veranda, and
clasp his hands, in a calm, contented way, while the Army banged the
drum and got steam up, and whilst, perhaps, there was a barney going
on in the bar, or a bloodthirsty fight in the backyard.  On such
occasions there was something like an indulgent or fatherly expression
on his fat and usually emotionless face.  And by and by he'd move his
head gently and doze.  The banging and the singing seemed to soothe
him, and the praying, which was often very personal, never seemed to
disturb him in the least.

Well, it was about dusk one day; it had been a terrible day, a hundred
and something startling in the shade, but there came a breeze after
sunset.  There had been several dozen of buckets of water thrown on
the veranda floor and the ground outside.  Watty was seated in his
accustomed place when the Army arrived.  There was no barney in the
bar because there was a fight in the backyard, and that claimed the
attention of all the customers.

The Army prayed for Watty and his clients; then a reformed drunkard
started to testify against publicans and all their works.  Watty
settled himself comfortably, folded his hands, and leaned back and
dozed.

The fight was over, and the chaps began to drop round to the bar.  The
man who was saved waved his arms, and danced round and howled.

"Ye-es!" he shouted hoarsely.  "The publicans, and boozers, and
gamblers, and sinners may think that Bourke is hot, but hell is a
thousand times hotter! I tell you"

"Oh, Lord!" said Mitchell, the shearer, and he threw a penny into
the ring.

"Ye-es! I tell you that hell is a million times hotter than Bourke!
I tell you---"

"Oh, look here," said a voice from the background, "that won't
wash.  Why, don't you know that when the Bourke people die they send
back for their blankets?"

The saved brother glared round.

"I hear a freethinker speaking, my friends," he said.  Then, with
sudden inspiration and renewed energy, "I hear the voice of a
freethinker.  Show me the face of a freethinker," he yelled, glaring
round like a hunted, hungry man.  "Show me the face of a freethinker,
and I'll tell you what he is."

Watty hitched himself into a more comfortable position and clasped his
hands on his knee and closed his eyes again.

"Ya-a-a-s!" shrieked the brand.  "I tell you, my friends, I can
tell a freethinker by his face.  Show me the face of a---"

At this point there was an interruption.  One-eyed, or Wall-eyed,
Bogan, who had a broken nose, and the best side of whose face was
reckoned the ugliest and most sinister--One-eyed Bogan thrust his face
forward from the ring of darkness into the torchlight of salvation.
He had got the worst of a drawn battle; his nose and mouth were
bleeding, and his good eye was damaged.

"Look at my face!" he snarled, with dangerous earnestness.  "Look
at my face!  That's the face of a freethinker, and I don't care who
knows it.  Now!  what have you got to say against my face,
`Man-without-a-Shirt?'"

The brother drew back.  He had been known in the northwest in his
sinful days as "Man-without-a-Shirt," alias "Shirty," or "The
Dirty Man," and was flabbergasted at being recognized in speech.
Also, he had been in a shearing-shed and in a shanty orgy with
One-eyed Bogan, and knew the man.

Now most of the chaps respected the Army, and, indeed, anything that
looked like religion, but the Bogan's face, as representing
free-thought, was a bit too sudden for them.  There were sounds on the
opposite side of the ring as from men being smitten repeatedly and
rapidly below the belt, and long Tom Hall and one or two others got
away into the darkness in the background, where Tom rolled helplessly
on the grass and sobbed.

It struck me that Bogan's face was more the result of free speech than
anything else.

The Army was about to pray when the Pretty Girl stepped forward, her
eyes shining with indignation and enthusiasm.  She had arrived by the
evening train, and had been standing shrinkingly behind an Army lass
of fifty Australian summers, who was about six feet high, flat and
broad, and had a square face, and a mouth like a joint in boiler
plates.

The Pretty Girl stamped her pretty foot on the gravel, and her eyes
flashed in the torchlight.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourselves," she said.  "Great big men
like you to be going on the way you are.  If you were ignorant or
poor, as I've seen people, there might be some excuse for you.
Haven't you got any mothers, or sisters, or wives to think of?  What
sort of a life is this you lead?  Drinking, and gambling, and
fighting, and swearing your lives away!  Do you ever think of God and
the time when you were children?  Why don't you make homes?  Look at
that man's face!" (she pointed suddenly at Bogan, who collapsed and
sidled behind his mates out of the light).  "Look at that man's face!
Is it a face for a Christian?  And you help and encourage him to
fight.  You're worse than he is.  Oh, it's brutal.  It's--it's wicked.
Great big men like you, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves."

Long Bob Brothers--about six-foot-four--the longest and most innocent
there, shrunk down by the wall and got his inquiring face out of the
light.  The Pretty Girl fluttered on for a few moments longer, greatly
excited, and then stepped back, seemingly much upset, and was taken
under the wing of the woman with the boiler-plate mouth.

It was a surprise, and very sudden.  Bogan slipped round to the
backyard, and was seen bathing his battered features at the pump.  The
rest wore the expression of men who knew that something unusual has
happened, but don't know what, and are waiting vacantly for
developments.--Except Tom Hall, who had recovered and returned.  He
stood looking over the head of the ring of bushmen, and apparently
taking the same critical interest in the girl as he would in a
fight--his expression was such as a journalist might wear who is
getting exciting copy.

The Army had it all their own way for the rest of the evening, and
made a good collection.  The Pretty Girl stood smiling round with
shining eyes as the bobs and tanners dropped in, and then, being
shoved forward by the flat woman, she thanked us sweetly, and said we
were good fellows, and that she was sorry for some things she'd said
to us.  Then she retired, fluttering and very much flushed, and hid
herself behind the hard woman--who, by the way, had an excrescence on
her upper lip which might have stood for a rivet.

Presently the Pretty Girl came from behind the big woman and stood
watching things with glistening eyes.  Some of the chaps on the
opposite side of the ring moved a little to one side and all were
careful not to meet her eye--not to be caught looking at her--lest she
should be embarrassed.  Watty had roused himself a little at the sound
of a strange voice in the Army (and such a clear, sweet voice too!)
and had a look; then he settled back peacefully again, but it was
noticed that he didn't snore that evening.

And when the Army prayed, the Pretty Girl knelt down with the rest on
the gravel.  One or two tall bushmen bowed their heads as if they had
to, and One-eyed Bogan, with the blood washed from his face, stood
with his hat off, glaring round to see if he could catch anyone
sniggering.

Mitchell, the shearer, said afterwards that the whole business made
him feel for the moment like he felt sometimes in the days when he
used to feel things.

The town discussed the Pretty Girl in the Army that night and for many
days thereafter, but no one could find out who she was or where she
belonged to--except that she came from Sydney last.  She kept her
secret, if she had one, very close--or else the other S.-A.  women
were not to be pumped.  She lived in skillion-rooms at the back of the
big weather-board Salvation Army barracks with two other "lassies,"
who did washing and sewing and nursing, and went shabby, and half
starved themselves, and were baked in the heat, like scores of women
in the bush, and even as hundreds of women, suffering from religious
mania, slave and stint in city slums, and neglect their homes,
husbands and children--for the glory of Booth.

The Pretty Girl was referred to as Sister Hannah by the Army people,
and came somehow to be known by sinners as "Miss Captain."  I don't
know whether that was her real name or what rank she held in the Army,
if indeed she held any.

She sold _War Crys_, and the circulation doubled in a day.
One-eyed Bogan, being bailed up unexpectedly, gave her "half a
caser" for a _Cry_, and ran away without the paper or the
change.  Jack Mitchell bought a _Cry_ for the first time in his
life, and read it.  He said he found some of the articles intensely
realistic, and many of the statements were very interesting.  He said
he read one or two things in the _Cry_ that he didn't know
before.  Tom Hall, taken unawares, bought three _Crys_ from the
Pretty Girl, and blushed to find it fame.

Little Billy Woods, the Labourers' Union secretary--who had a poetic
temperament and more than the average bushman's reverence for higher
things--Little Billy Woods told me in a burst of confidence that he
generally had two feelings, one after the other, after encountering
that girl.  One was that unfathomable far-away feeling of loneliness
and longing, that comes at odd times to the best of married men, with
the best of wives and children--as Billy had.  The other feeling,
which came later on, and was a reaction in fact, was the feeling of a
man who thinks he's been twisted round a woman's little finger for the
benefit of somebody else.  Billy said that he couldn't help being
reminded by the shy, sweet smile and the shy, sweet "thank you" of
the Pretty Girl in the Army, of the shy, sweet smile and the shy,
sweet gratitude of a Sydney private barmaid, who had once roped him
in, in the days before he was married.  Then he'd reckon that the Army
lassie had been sent out back to Bourke as a business speculation.

Tom Hall was inclined to reckon so too--but that was after he'd been
chaffed for a month about the three _War Crys_.

The Pretty Girl was discussed from psychological points of view; not
forgetting the sex problem.  Donald Macdonald--shearer, union leader
and labour delegate to other colonies on occasion--Donald Macdonald
said that whenever he saw a circle of plain or ugly, dried-up women or
girls round a shepherd, evangelist or a Salvation Army drum, he'd say
"sexually starved!"  They were hungry for love.  Religious mania was
sexual passion dammed out of its course.  Therefore he held that
morbidly religious girls were the most easily seduced.

But this couldn't apply to Pretty Girl in the Army.  Mitchell reckoned
that she'd either had a great sorrow--a lot of trouble, or a
disappointment in love (the "or" is Mitchell's); but they couldn't
see how a girl like her could possibly be disappointed in love--unless
the chap died or got into jail for life.  Donald decided that her soul
had been starved somehow.

Mitchell suggested that it might be only a craving for notoriety, the
same thing that makes women and girls go amongst lepers, and out to
the battlefield, and nurse ugly pieces of men back to life again; the
same thing that makes some women and girls swear ropes round men's
necks.  The Pretty Girl might be the daughter of well-to-do
people--even aristocrats, said Mitchell--she was pretty enough and
spoke well enough.  "Every woman's a barmaid at heart," as the
_Bulletin_ puts it, said Mitchell.

But not even one of the haggard women of Bourke ever breathed a
suspicion of scandal against her.  They said she was too good and too
pretty to be where she was.  You see it was not as in an old settled
town where hags blacken God's world with their tongues.  Bourke was
just a little camping town in a big land, where free, good-hearted
democratic Australians, and the best of black sheep from the old world
were constantly passing through; where husband's were often obliged to
be away from home for twelve months, and the storekeepers had to trust
the people, and mates trusted each other, and the folks were
broad-minded.  The mind's eye had a wide range.

After her maiden speech the Pretty Girl seldom spoke, except to return
thanks for collections--and she never testified.  She had a sweet
voice and used to sing.

Now, if I were writing pure fiction, and were not cursed with an
obstinate inclination to write the truth, I might say that, after the
advent of the Pretty Girl, the morals of Bourke improved suddenly and
wonderfully.  That One-eyed Bogan left off gambling and drinking and
fighting and swearing, and put on a red coat and testified and fought
the devil only; that Mitchell dropped his mask of cynicism; that
Donald Macdonald ate no longer of the tree of knowledge and ceased to
worry himself with psychological problems, and was happy; and that Tom
Hall was no longer a scoffer.  That no one sneaked round through the
scrub after dusk to certain necessary establishments in weather-board
cottages on the outskirts of the town; and that the broad-minded and
obliging ladies thereof became Salvation Army lassies.

But none of these things happened.  Drunks quieted down or got out of
the way if they could when the Pretty Girl appeared on the scene,
fights and games of "headin' 'em" were adjourned, and weak, ordinary
language was used for the time being, and that was about all.

Nevertheless, most of the chaps were in love with that Pretty Girl in
the Army--all those who didn't _worship_ her privately.  Long Bob
Brothers hovered round in hopes, they said, that she'd meet with an
accident--get run over by a horse or something--and he'd have to carry
her in; he scared the women at the barracks by dropping firewood over
the fence after dark.  Barcoo-Rot, the meanest man in the back
country, was seen to drop a threepenny bit into the ring, and a rumour
was industriously circulated (by Tom Hall) to the effect that One-eyed
Bogan intended to shave and join the Army disguised as a lassie.

Handsome Jake Boreham (_alias_ Bore-'em), a sentimental shearer
from New Zealand, who had read Bret Harte, made an elaborate attempt
for the Pretty Girl, by pretending to be going to the dogs headlong,
with an idea of first winning her sorrowful interest and sympathy, and
then making an apparently hard struggle to straighten up for her sake.
He related his experience with the cheerful and refreshing absence of
reserve which was characteristic of him, and is of most bushmen.

"I'd had a few drinks," he said, "and was having a spell under a
gum by the river, when I saw the Pretty Girl and another Army woman
coming down along the bank.  It was a blazing hot day.  I thought of
Sandy and the Schoolmistress in Bret Harte, and I thought it would be
a good idea to stretch out in the sun and pretend to be helpless; so I
threw my hat on the ground and lay down, with my head in the blazing
heat, in the most graceful position I could get at, and I tried to put
a look of pained regret on my face, as if I was dreaming of my lost
boyhood and me mother.  I thought, perhaps, the Girl would pity me,
and I felt sure she'd stoop and pick up my hat and put it gently over
my poor troubled head.  Then I was going to become conscious for a
moment, and look hopelessly round, and into her eyes, and then start
and look sorrowful and ashamed, and stagger to my feet, taking off my
hat like the Silver King does to the audience when he makes his first
appearance drunk on the stage; and then I was going to reel off,
trying to walk as straight as I could.  And next day I was going to
clean up my teeth and nails and put on a white shirt, and start to be
a new man henceforth.

"Well, as I lay there with my eyes shut, I heard the footsteps come
up and stop, and heard 'em whisper, and I thought I heard the Pretty
Girl say `Poor fellow!' or something that sounded like that; and just
then I got a God-almighty poke in the ribs with an umbrella--at least
I suppose it was aimed for my ribs; but women are bad shots, and the
point of the umbrella caught me in the side, just between the bottom
rib and the hip-bone, and I sat up with a click, like the blade of a
pocketknife.

"The other lassie was the big square-faced woman.  The Pretty Girl
looked rather more frightened and disgusted than sentimental, but she
had plenty of pluck, and soon pulled herself together.  She said I
ought to be ashamed of myself, a great big man like me, lying there
in the dust like a drunken tramp--an eyesore and a disgrace to all the
world.  She told me to go to my camp, wherever that was, and sleep
myself sober.  The square-jawed woman said I looked like a fool
sitting there.  I did feel ashamed, and I reckon I did look like
a fool--a man generally does in a fix like that.  I felt like one,
anyway.  I got up and walked away, and it hurt me so much that I went
over to West Bourke and went to the dogs properly for a fortnight, and
lost twenty quid on a game of draughts against a blindfold player.
Now both those women had umbrellas, but I'm not sure to this day which
of 'em it was that gave me the poke.  It wouldn't have mattered much
anyway.  I haven't borrowed one of Bret Harte's books since."

Jake reflected a while.  "The worst of it was," he said ruefully,
"that I wasn't sure that the girl or the woman didn't see through me,
and that worried me a bit.  You never can tell how much a woman
suspects, and that's the worst of 'em.  I found that out after I got
married."

The Pretty Girl in the Army grew pale and thin and bigger-eyed.  The
women said it was a shame, and that she ought to be sent home to her
friends, wherever they were.  She was laid up for two or three days,
and some of the women cooked delicacies and handed 'em over the
barracks fence, and offered to come in and nurse her; but the square
woman took washing home and nursed the girl herself.

The Pretty Girl still sold _War Crys_ and took up collections,
but in a tired, listless, half shamed-faced way.  It was plain that
she was tired of the Army, and growing ashamed of the Salvationists.
Perhaps she had come to see things too plainly.

You see, the Army does no good out back in Australia--except from a
business point of view.  It is simply there to collect funds for
hungry headquarters.  The bushmen are much too intelligent for the
Army.  There was no poverty in Bourke--as it is understood in the
city; there was plenty of food; and camping out and roughing it come
natural to the bushmen.  In cases of sickness, accident, widows or
orphans, the chaps sent round the hat, without banging a drum or
testifying, and that was all right.  If a chap was hard up he borrowed
a couple of quid from his mate.  If a strange family arrived without a
penny, someone had to fix 'em up, and the storekeepers helped them
till the man got work.  For the rest, we work out our own salvation,
or damnation--as the case is--in the bush, with no one to help us,
except a mate, perhaps.  The Army can't help us, but a fellow-sinner
can, sometimes, who has been through it all himself.  The Army is only
a drag on the progress of Democracy, because it attracts many who
would otherwise be aggressive Democrats--and for other reasons.

Besides, if we all reformed the Army would get deuced little from us
for its city mission.

The Pretty Girl went to service for a while with the stock inspector's
wife, who could get nothing out of her concerning herself or her
friends.  She still slept at the barracks, stuck to the Army, and
attended its meetings.


It was Christmas morning, and there was peace in Bourke and goodwill
towards all men.  There hadn't been a fight since yesterday evening,
and that had only been a friendly one, to settle an argument
concerning the past ownership, and, at the same time, to decide as to
the future possession of a dog.

It had been a hot, close night, and it ended in a suffocating sunrise.
The free portion of the male population were in the habit of taking
their blankets and sleeping out in "the Park," or town square, in
hot weather; the wives and daughters of the town slept, or tried to
sleep, with bedroom windows and doors open, while husbands lay outside
on the verandas.  I camped in a corner of the park that night, and the
sun woke me.

As I sat up I caught sight of a swagman coming along the white, dusty
road from the direction of the bridge, where the cleared road ran
across west and on, a hundred and thirty miles, through the barren,
broiling mulga scrubs, to Hungerford, on the border of Sheol.  I knew
that swagman's walk.  It was John Merrick (Jack Moonlight), one-time
Shearers' Union secretary at Coonamble, and generally "Rep"
(shearers' representative) in any shed where he sheared.  He was a
"better-class shearer," one of those quiet, thoughtful men of whom
there are generally two or three in the roughest of rough sheds, who
have great influence, and give the shed a good name from a Union point
of view.  Not quiet with the resentful or snobbish reserve of the
educated Englishman, but with a sad or subdued sort of quietness that
has force in it--as if they fully realized that their intelligence is
much higher than the average, that they have suffered more real
trouble and heartbreak than the majority of their mates, and that
their mates couldn't possibly understand them if they spoke as they
felt and couldn't see things as they do--yet men who understand and
are intensely sympathetic in their loneliness and sensitive reserve.

I had worked in a shed with Jack Moonlight, and had met him in Sydney,
and to be mates with a bushman for a few weeks is to know him
well--anyway, I found it so.  He had taken a trip to Sydney the
Christmas before last, and when he came back there was something
wanting.  He became more silent, he drank more, and sometimes alone,
and took to smoking heavily.  He dropped his mates, took little or no
interest in Union matters, and travelled alone, and at night.

The Australian bushman is born with a mate who sticks to him through
life--like a mole.  They may be hundreds of miles apart sometimes, and
separated for years, yet they are mates for life.  A bushman may have
many mates in his roving, but there is always one his mate, "my
mate;" and it is common to hear a bushman, who is, in every way, a
true mate to the man he happens to be travelling with, speak of _his
mate's mate_--"Jack's mate"--who might be in Klondyke or South
Africa.  A bushman has always a mate to comfort him and argue with
him, and work and tramp and drink with him, and lend him quids when
he's hard up, and call him a b--- fool, and fight him sometimes; to
abuse him to his face and defend his name behind his back; to bear
false witness and perjure his soul for his sake; to lie to the girl
for him if he's single, and to his wife if he's married; to secure a
"pen" for him at a shed where he isn't on the spot, or, if the mate
is away in New Zealand or South Africa, to write and tell him if it's
any good coming over this way.  And each would take the word of the
other against all the world, and each believes that the other is the
straightest chap that ever lived-"a white man!" And next best to
your old mate is the man you're tramping, riding, working, or drinking
with.

About the first thing the cook asks you when you come along to a
shearers' hut is, "Where's your mate?"  I travelled alone for a
while one time, and it seemed to me sometimes, by the tone of the
inquiry concerning the whereabouts of my mate, that the bush had an
idea that I might have done away with him and that the thing ought to
be looked into.

When a man drops mateship altogether and takes to "hatting" in the
bush, it's a step towards a convenient tree and a couple of
saddle-straps buckled together.

I had an idea that I, in a measure, took the place of Jack Moonlight's
mate about this time.

"'Ullo, Jack!" I hailed as he reached the corner of the park.

"Good morning, Harry!" said Jack, as if he'd seen me last yesterday
evening instead of three months ago.  "How are you getting on?"

We walked together towards the Union Office, where I had a camp in the
skillion-room at the back.  Jack was silent.  But there's no place in
the world where a man's silence is respected so much (within
reasonable bounds) as in the Australian bush, where every man has a
past more or less sad, and every man a ghost--perhaps from other lands
that we know nothing of, and speaking in a foreign tongue.  They say
in the bush, "Oh, Jack's only thinking!"  And they let him think.
Generally you want to think as much as your mate; and when you've been
together some time it's quite natural to travel all day without
exchanging a word.  In the morning Jim says, "Well, I think I made a
bargain with that horse, Bill," and some time late in the afternoon,
say twenty miles farther on, it occurs to Bill to "rejoin," "Well,
I reckon the blank as sold it to you had yer proper!"

I like a good thinking mate, and I believe that thinking in company is
a lot more healthy and more comfortable, as well as less risky, than
thinking alone.

On the way to the Union Office Jack and I passed the Royal Hotel, and
caught a glimpse, through the open door, of a bedroom off the veranda,
of the landlord's fresh, fair, young Sydney girl-wife, sleeping
prettily behind the mosquito-net, like a sleeping beauty, while the
boss lay on a mattress outside on the veranda, across the open door.
(He wasn't necessary for publication, but an evidence of good faith.)

I glanced at Jack for a grin, but didn't get one.  He wore
the pained expression of a man who is suddenly hit hard with the
thought of something that might have been.

I boiled the billy and fried a pound of steak.

"Been travelling all night, .Tack?" I asked.

"Yes," said Jack.  "I camped at Emus yesterday."

He didn't eat.  I began to reckon that he was brooding too much for
his health.  He was much thinner than when I saw him last, and pretty
haggard, and he had something of the hopeless, haggard look that I'd
seen in Tom Hall's eyes after the last big shearing strike, when Tom
had worked day and night to hold his mates up all through the hard,
bitter struggle, and the battle was lost.

"Look here, Jack!" I said at last.  "What's up?"

"Nothing's up, Harry," said Jack.  "What made you think so?"

"Have you got yourself into any fix?" I asked.  "What's the
Hungerford track been doing to you?"

"No, Harry," he said, "I'm all right.  How are you?"  And he
pulled some string and papers and a roll of dusty pound notes from his
pocket and threw them on the bunk.

I was hard up just then, so I took a note and the billy to go to the
Royal and get some beer.  I thought the beer might loosen his mind a
bit.

"Better take a couple of quid," said Jack.  "You look as if you
want some new shirts and things." But a pound was enough for me, and
I think he had reason to be glad of that later on, as it turned out.

"Anything new in Bourke?" asked Jack as we drank the beer.

"No," I said, "not a thing--except there's a pretty girl in the
Salvation Army."

"And it's about time," growled Jack.

"Now, look here, Jack," I said presently, "what's come over you
lately at all?  I might be able to help you.  It's not a bit of use
telling me that there's nothing the matter.  When a man takes to
brooding and travelling alone it's a bad sign, and it will end in a
leaning tree and a bit of clothes-line as likely as not.  Tell me what
the trouble is.  Tell us all about it.  There's a ghost, isn't
there?"

"Well, I suppose so," said Jack.  "We've all got our ghosts for
that matter.  But never you mind, Harry; I'm all right.  I don't go
interfering with your ghosts, and I don't see what call you've got to
come haunting mine.  Why, it's as bad as kicking a man's dog."  And
he gave the ghost of a grin.

"Tell me, Jack," I said,  "is it a woman?"

"Yes," said Jack, "it's a woman.  Now, are you satisfied?"

"Is it a girl?" I asked.

"Yes," he said.

So there was no more to be said.  I'd thought it might have been a lot
worse than a girl.  I'd thought he might have got married somewhere,
sometime, and made a mess of it.

We had dinner at Billy Woods's place, and a sensible Christmas dinner
it was--everything cold, except the vegetables, with the hose going on
the veranda in spite of the by-laws, and Billy's wife and her sister,
fresh and cool-looking and jolly, instead of being hot and brown and
cross like most Australian women who roast themselves over a blazing
fire in a hot kitchen on a broiling day, all the morning, to cook
scalding plum pudding and redhot roasts, for no other reason than that
their grandmothers used to cook hot Christmas dinners in England.

And in the afternoon we went for a row on the river, pulling easily up
the anabranch and floating down with the stream under the shade of the
river timber--instead of going to sleep and waking up helpless and
soaked in perspiration, to find the women with headaches, as many do
on Christmas Day in Australia.

Mrs Woods tried to draw Jack out, but it was no use, and in the
evening he commenced drinking, and that made Billy uneasy.  "I'm
afraid Jack's on the wrong track," he said.

After tea most of us collected about Watty's veranda.  Most things
that happened in Bourke happened at Watty's pub, or near it.

If a horse bolted with a buggy or cart, he was generally stopped
outside Watty's, which seemed to suggest, as Mitchell said, that most
of the heroes drank at Watty's--also that the pluckiest men were found
amongst the hardest drinkers.  (But sometimes the horse fetched up
against Watty's sign and lamppost--which was a stout one of
"iron-bark"--and smashed the trap.)  Then Watty's was the Carriers'
Arms, a union pub; and Australian teamsters are mostly hard cases:
while there was something in Watty's beer which made men argue
fluently, and the best fights came off in his backyard.  Watty's dogs
were the most quarrelsome in town, and there was a dog-fight there
every other evening, followed as often as not by a man-fight.  If a
bushman's horse ran away with him the chances were that he'd be thrown
on to Watty's veranda, if he wasn't pitched into the bar; and victims
of accidents, and sick, hard-up shearers, were generally carried to
Watty's pub, as being the most convenient and comfortable for them.
Mitchell denied that it was generosity or good nature on Watty's part,
he said it was all business--advertisement.  Watty knew what he was
doing.  He was very deep, was Watty.  Mitchell further hinted that if
he was sick _he_ wouldn't be carried to Watty's, for Watty knew
what a thirsty business a funeral was.  Tom Hall reckoned that Watty
bribed the Army on the quiet.

I was sitting on a stool along the veranda wall with Donald Macdonald,
Bob Brothers (the Giraffe) and Mitchell, and one or two others, and
Jack Moonlight sat on the floor with his back to the wall and his hat
well down over his eyes.  The Army came along at the usual time, but
we didn't see the Pretty Girl at first--she was a bit late.  Mitchell
said he liked to be at Watty's when the Army prayed and the Pretty
Girl was there; he had no objection to being prayed for by a girl like
that, though he reckoned that nothing short of a real angel could save
him now.  He said his old grandmother used to pray for him every night
of her life and three times on Sunday, with Christmas Day extra when
Christmas Day didn't fall on a Sunday; but Mitchell reckoned that the
old lady couldn't have had much influence because he became more
sinful every year, and went deeper in ways of darkness, until finally
he embarked on a career of crime.

The Army prayed, and then a thin "ratty" little woman bobbed up in
the ring; she'd gone mad on religion as women do on woman's rights and
hundreds of other things.  She was so skinny in the face, her jaws so
prominent, and her mouth so wide, that when she opened it to speak it
was like a ventriloquist's dummy and you could almost see the cracks
open down under her ears.

"They say I'm cracked!" she screamed in a shrill, cracked voice.
"But I'm not cracked--I'm only cracked on the Lord Jesus Christ!
That's all I'm cracked on---."  And just then the Amen man of the
Army--the Army groaner we called him, who was always putting both feet
in it--just then he blundered forward, rolled up his eyes, threw his
hands up and down as if he were bouncing two balls, and said, with
deep feeling:

"Thank the Lord she's got a crack in the right place!"

Tom Hall doubled up, and most of the other sinners seemed to think
there was something very funny about it.  And the Army, too, seemed
struck with an idea that there was something wrong somewhere, for they
started a hymn.

A big American negro, who'd been a night watchman in Sydney, stepped
into the ring and waved his arms and kept time, and as he got excited
he moved his hands up and down rapidly, as if he was hauling down a
rope in a great hurry through a pulley block above, and he kept
saying, "Come down, Lord!" all through the hymn, like a bass
accompaniment, "Come down, Lord; come down, Lord; come down, Lord;
come down, Lord!" and the quicker be said it the faster he hauled.
He was as good as a drum.  And, when the hymn was over, he started to
testify.

"My frens!" he said, "I was once black as der coals in der mined!
I was once black as der ink in der ocean of sin!  But now--thank an'
bless the Lord!--I am whiter dan der dribben snow!"

Tom Hall sat down on the edge of the veranda and leaned his head
against a post and cried.  He had contributed a bob this evening, and
he was getting his money's worth.

Then the Pretty Girl arrived and was pushed forward into the ring.
She looked thinner and whiter than I'd ever seen her, and there was a
feverish brightness in her eyes that I didn't like.

"Men!" she said, "this is Christmas Day-."  I didn't hear any more
for, at the sound of her voice, Jack Moonlight jumped up as if he'd
sat on a baby.  He started forward, stared at her for a moment as if
he couldn't believe his eyes, and then said, "Hannah!" short and
sharp.  She started as if she was shot, gave him a wild look, and
stumbled forward; the next moment he had her in his arms and was
steering for the private parlour.

I heard Mrs Bothways calling for water and smelling-salts; she was as
fat as Watty, and very much like him in the face, but she was
emotional and sympathetic.  Then presently I heard, through the open
window, the Pretty Girl say to Jack, "Oh, Jack, Jack!  Why did you go
away and leave me like that?  It was cruel!"

"But you told me to go, Hannah," said Jack.

"That-that didn't make any difference.  Why didn't you write?"
she sobbed.

"Because you never wrote to me, Hannah," he said.

"That--that was no excuse!" she said.  "It was so k-k-k-cruel of you,
Jack."

Mrs Bothways pulled down the window.  A new-comer asked Watty what the
trouble was, and he said that the Army girl had only found her chap,
or husband, or long-lost brother or something, but the missus was
looking after the business; then he dozed again.

And then we adjourned to the Royal and took the Army with us.

"That's the way of it," said Donald Macdonald.  "With a woman it's
love or religion; with a man it's love or the devil."

"Or with a man," said Mitchell, presently, "it's love and the devil
both, sometimes, Donald."

I looked at Mitchell hard, but for all his face expressed he might
only have said, "I think it's going to rain."



"LORD DOUGLAS"

    They hold him true, who's true to one,
    However false he be.
                          -The Rouseabout of Rouseabouts.


The Imperial Hotel was rather an unfortunate name for an out-back town
pub, for out back is the stronghold of Australian democracy; it was
the out-back vote and influence that brought about "One Man One
Vote," "Payment of Members," and most of the democratic legislation
of late years, and from out back came the overwhelming vote in favour
of Australian as Imperial Federation.

The name Royal Hotel is as familiar as that of the Railway Hotel, and
passes unnoticed and ungrowled at, even by bush republicans.  The
Royal Hotel at Bourke was kept by an Irishman, one O'Donohoo, who was
Union to the backbone, loudly in favour of "Australia for the
Australians," and, of course, against even the democratic New South
Wales Government of the time.  He went round town all one St Patrick's
morning with a bunch of green ribbon fastened to his coat-tail with a
large fish-hook, and wasn't aware of the fact till he sat down on the
point of it.  But that's got nothing to do with it.

The Imperial Hotel at Bourke was unpopular from the first.  It was
said that the very existence of the house was the result of a swindle.
It had been built with money borrowed on certain allotments in the
centre of the town and on the understanding that it should be built on
the mortgaged land, whereas it was erected on a free allotment.  Which
fact was discovered, greatly to its surprise, by the building society
when it came to foreclose on the allotments some years later.  While
the building was being erected the Bourke people understood, in a
vague way, that it was to be a convent (perhaps the building society
thought so, too), and when certain ornaments in brick and cement in
the shape of a bishop's mitre were placed over the corners of the
walls the question seemed decided.  But when the place was finished a
bar was fitted up, and up went the sign, to the disgust of the other
publicans, who didn't know a licence had been taken out--for licensing
didn't go by local option in those days.  It was rumoured that the
place belonged to, and the whole business was engineered by, a priest.
And priests are men of the world.

The Imperial Hotel was patronized by the pastoralists, the civil
servants, the bank manager and clerks--all the scrub aristocracy; it
was the headquarters of the Pastoralists' Union in Bourke; a barracks
for blacklegs brought up from Sydney to take the place of Union
shearers on strike; and the new Governor, on his inevitable visit to
Bourke, was banqueted at the Imperial Hotel.  The editor of the local
"capitalistic rag" stayed there; the pastoralists' member was
elected mostly by dark ways and means devised at the Imperial Hotel,
and one of its managers had stood as a dummy candidate to split the
Labour vote; the management of the hotel was his reward.  In short, it
was there that most of the plots were hatched to circumvent Freedom,
and put away or deliver into the clutches of law and order certain
sons of Light and Liberty who believed in converting blacklegs into
jellies by force of fists when bribes, gentle persuasion and pure
Australian language failed to convert them to clean Unionism.  The
Imperial Hotel was called the "Squatters' Pub," the "Scabbery,"
and other and more expressive names.

The hotel became still more unpopular after Percy Douglas.  had
managed it for a while.  He was an avowed enemy of Labour Unionists.
He employed Chinese cooks, and that in the height of the anti-Chinese
agitation in Australia, and he was known to have kindly feelings
towards the Afghans who, with their camels, were running white
carriers off the roads.  If an excited Unionist called a man a
"blackleg" or "scab" in the Imperial bar he was run out--sometimes
with great difficulty, and occasionally as far as the lock-up.

Percy Douglas was a fine-looking man, "wid a chest on him an' well
hung--a fine fee-_gure_ of a man," as O'Donohoo pronounced it.
He was tall and erect, he dressed well, wore small side-whiskers, had
an eagle nose, and looked like an aristocrat.  Like many of his type,
who start sometimes as billiard-markers and suddenly become hotel
managers in Australia, nothing was known of his past.  Jack Mitchell
reckoned, by the way he treated his employees and spoke to workmen,
that he was the educated son of an English farmer--gone wrong and sent
out to Australia.  Someone called him "Lord Douglas," and the
nickname caught on.

He made himself well hated.  He got One-eyed Bogan "three months'
hard" for taking a bottle of whisky off the Imperial bar counter
because he (Bogan) was drunk and thirsty and had knocked down his
cheque, and because there was no one minding the bar at the moment.

Lord Douglas dismissed the barmaid, and, as she was leaving, he had
her boxes searched and gave her in charge for stealing certain
articles belonging to the hotel.  The chaps subscribed to defend the
case, and subsequently put a few pounds together for the girl.  She
proved her gratitude by bringing a charge of a baby against one of the
chaps--but that was only one of the little ways of the world, as
Mitchell said.  She joined a Chinese camp later on.

Lord Douglas employed a carpenter to do some work about the hotel, and
because the carpenter left before the job was finished, Lord Douglas
locked his tools in an outhouse and refused to give them up; and when
the carpenter, with the spirit of an Australian workman, broke the
padlock and removed his tool-chest, the landlord gave him in charge
for breaking and entering.  The chaps defended the case and won it,
and hated Lord Douglas as much as if he were their elder brother.
Mitchell was the only one to put in a word for him.

"I've been puzzling it out," said Mitchell, as he sat nursing his
best leg in the Union Office, "and, as far as I can see, it all
amounts to this--we're all mistaken in Lord Douglas.  We don't know
the man.  He's all right.  We don't understand him.  He's really a
sensitive, good-hearted man who's been shoved a bit off the track by
the world.  It's the world's fault--he's not to blame.  You see, when
he was a youngster he was the most good-natured kid in the school; he
was always soft, and, consequently, he was always being imposed upon,
and bullied, and knocked about.  Whenever he got a penny to buy
lollies he'd count 'em out carefully and divide 'em round amongst his
schoolmates and brothers and sisters.  He was the only one that worked
at home, and consequently they all hated him.  His father respected
him, but didn't love him, because he wasn't a younger son, and wasn't
bringing his father's grey hairs down in sorrow to the grave.  If it
was in Australia, probably Lord Douglas was an elder son and had to do
all the hard graft, and teach himself at night, and sleep in a bark
skillion while his younger brothers benefited--they were born in the
new brick house and went to boarding-schools.  His mother had a
contempt for him because he wasn't a black sheep and a prodigal, and,
when the old man died, the rest of the family got all the stuff and
Lord Douglas was kicked out because they could do without him now.
And the family hated him like poison ever afterwards (especially his
mother), and spread lies about him--because they had treated him
shamefully and because his mouth was shut--they knew he wouldn't
speak.  Then probably he went in for Democracy and worked for Freedom,
till Freedom trod on him once too often with her hob-nailed boots.
Then the chances are, in the end, he was ruined by a girl or woman,
and driven, against his will, to take refuge in pure individualism.
He's all right, only we don't appreciate him.  He's only fighting
against his old ideals--his old self that comes up sometimes--and
that's what makes him sweat his barmaids and servants, and hate us,
and run us in; and perhaps when he cuts up extra rough it's because
his conscience kicks him when he thinks of the damned soft fool he
used to be.  He's all right--take my word for it.  It's all a mask.
Why, he might be one of the kindest-hearted men in Bourke
underneath."

Tom Hall rubbed his head and blinked, as if he was worried by an idea
that there might be some facts in Mitchell's theories.

"You're allers findin' excuses for blacklegs an' scabs, Mitchell,"
said Barcoo-Rot, who took Mitchell seriously (and who would have taken
a laughing jackass seriously).  "Why, you'd find a white spot on a
squatter.  I wouldn't be surprised if you blacklegged yourself in the
end."

This was an unpardonable insult, from a Union point of view, and the
chaps half-unconsciously made room on the floor for Barcoo-Rot to fall
after Jack Mitchell hit him.  But Mitchell took the insult
philosophically.

"Well, Barcoo-Rot," he said, nursing the other leg, "for the matter
of that, I did find a white spot on a squatter once.  He lent me a
quid when I was hard up.  There's white spots on the blackest
characters if you only drop prejudice and look close enough.  I
suppose even Jack-the-Ripper's character was speckled.  Why, I can
even see spots on your character, sometimes, Barcoo-Rot.  I've known
white spots to spread on chaps' characters until they were little
short of saints.  Sometimes I even fancy I can feel my own wings
sprouting.  And as for turning blackleg--well, I suppose I've got a
bit of the crawler in my composition (most of us have), and a man
never knows what might happen to his principles."

"Well," said Barcoo-Rot, "I beg yer pardon--ain't that enough?"

"No," said Mitchell, "you ought to wear a three-bushel bag and
ashes for three months, and drink water; but since the police would
send you to an asylum if you did that, I think the best thing we can
do is to go out and have a drink."


Lord Douglas married an Australian girl somewhere, somehow, and
brought her to Bourke, and there were two little girls--regular little
fairies.  She was a gentle, kind-hearted little woman, but she didn't
seem to improve him much, save that he was very good to her.

"It's mostly that way," commented Mitchell.  "When a boss gets
married and has children he thinks he's got a greater right to grind
his fellowmen and rob their wives and children.  I'd never work for a
boss with a big family--it's hard enough to keep a single boss
nowadays in this country."

After one stormy election, at the end of a long and bitter shearing
strike, One-eyed Bogan, his trusty enemy, Barcoo-Rot, and one or two
other enthusiastic reformers were charged with rioting, and got from
one to three months' hard.  And they had only smashed three windows of
the Imperial Hotel and chased the Chinese cook into the river.

"I used to have some hopes for Democracy," commented Mitchell, "but
I've got none now.  How can you expect Liberty, Equality or
Fraternity--how can you expect Freedom and Universal Brotherhood and
Equal Rights in a country where Sons of Light get three months' hard
for breaking windows and bashing a Chinaman?  It almost makes me long
to sail away in a gallant barque."

There were other cases in connection with the rotten-egging of
Capitalistic candidates on the Imperial Hotel balcony, and it was
partly on the evidence of Douglas and his friends that certain
respectable Labour leaders got heavy terms of imprisonment for rioting
and "sedition" and "inciting," in connection with organized
attacks on blacklegs and their escorts.

Retribution, if it was retribution, came suddenly and in a most
unexpected manner to Lord Douglas.

It seems he employed a second carpenter for six months to repair and
make certain additions to the hotel, and put him off under various
pretences until he owed him a hundred pounds or thereabout.  At last,
immediately after an exciting interview with Lord Douglas, the
carpenter died suddenly of heart disease.  The widow, a strong-minded
bushwoman, put a bailiff in the hotel on a very short notice--and
against the advice of her lawyer, who thought the case hopeless--and
the Lord Douglas bubble promptly burst.  He had somehow come to be
regarded as the proprietor of the hotel, but now the real proprietors
or proprietor--he was still said to be a priest--turned Douglas out
and put in a new manager.  The old servants were paid after some
trouble.  The local storekeepers and one or two firms in Sydney, who
had large accounts against the Imperial Hotel (and had trusted it,
mainly because it was patronized by Capitalism and Fat), were never
paid.

Lord Douglas cleared out to Sydney, leaving his wife and children, for
the present, with her brother, a hay-and-corn storekeeper, who also
had a large and hopeless account against the hotel; and when the
brother went broke and left the district she rented a two-roomed
cottage and took in dressmaking.

Dressmaking didn't pay so well in the bush then as it did in the old
diggings days when sewing-machines were scarce and the possession of
one meant an independent living to any girl--when diggers paid ten
shillings for a strip of "flannen" doubled over and sewn together,
with holes for arms and head, and called a shirt.  Mrs Douglas had a
hard time, with her two little girls, who were still better and more
prettily dressed than any other children in Bourke.  One grocer
still called on her for orders and pretended to be satisfied to wait
"till Mr Douglas came back," and when she would no longer order what
he considered sufficient provisions for her and the children, and
commenced buying sugar, etc., by the pound, for cash, he one day
sent a box of groceries round to her.  He pretended it was a mistake.

"However," he said, "I'd be very much obliged if you could use 'em,
Mrs Douglas.  I'm overstocked now; haven't got room for another tin of
sardines in the shop.  Don't you worry about bills, Mrs Douglas; I can
wait till Douglas comes home.  I did well enough out of the Imperial
Hotel when your husband had it, and a pound's worth of groceries won't
hurt me now.  I'm only too glad to get rid of some of the stock."

She cried a little, thought of the children, and kept the groceries.

"I suppose I'll be sold up soon meself if things don't git
brighter," said that grocer to a friend, "so it doesn't matter
much."

The same with Foley the butcher, who had a brogue with a sort of
drawling groan in it, and was a cynic of the Mitchell school.

"You see," he said, "she's as proud as the devil, but when I send
round a bit o' rawst, or porrk, or the undercut o' the blade-bawn, she
thinks o' the little gur-r-rls before she thinks o' sendin' it back to
me.  That's where I've got the pull on her."

The Giraffe borrowed a horse and tip-dray one day at the beginning of
winter and cut a load of firewood in the bush, and next morning, at
daylight, Mrs Douglas was nearly startled out of her life by a crash
at the end of the cottage, which made her think that the chimney had
fallen in, or a tree fallen on the house; and when she slipped on a
wrapper and looked out, she saw a load of short-cut wood by the
chimney, and caught a glimpse of the back view of the Giraffe, who
stood in the dray with his legs wide apart and was disappearing into
the edge of the scrub; and soon the rapid clock-clock-clock of the
wheels died away in the west, as if he were making for West Australia.

The next we heard of Lord Douglas he had got two years' hard for
embezzlement in connection with some canvassing he had taken up.  Mrs
Douglas fell ill--a touch of brain-fever--and one of the labourers'
wives took care of the children while two others took turns in
nursing.  While she was recovering, Bob Brothers sent round the hat,
and, after a conclave in the Union Office--as mysterious as any
meeting ever called with the object of downing bloated Capitalism--it
was discovered that one of the chaps--who didn't wish his name to be
mentioned--had borrowed just twenty-five pounds from Lord Douglas in
the old days and now wished to return it to Mrs Douglas.  So the thing
was managed, and if she had any suspicions she kept them to herself.
She started a little fancy goods shop and got along fairly
comfortable.

Douglas, by the way, was, publicly, supposed, for her sake and because
of the little girls, to be away in West Australia on the goldfields.


Time passes without much notice out back, and one hot day, when the
sun hung behind the fierce sandstorms from the northwest as dully
lurid as he ever showed in a London fog, Lord Douglas got out of the
train that had just finished its five-hundred-miles' run, and not
seeing a new-chum porter, who started forward by force of habit to
take his bag, he walked stiffly off the platform and down the main
street towards his wife's cottage.

He was very gaunt, and his eyes, to those who passed him closely,
seemed to have a furtive, hunted expression.  He had let his beard
grow, and it had grown grey.

It was within a few days of Christmas--the same Christmas that we lost
the Pretty Girl in the Salvation Army.  As a rule the big
shearing-sheds within a fortnight of Bourke cut out in time for the
shearers to reach the town and have their Christmas dinners and
sprees--and for some of them to be locked up over Christmas
Day--within sound of a church-going bell.  Most of the chaps gathered
in the Shearers' Union Office on New Year's Eve and discussed Douglas
amongst other things.

"I vote we kick the cow out of the town!" snarled One-eyed Bogan,
viciously.

"We can't do that," said Bob Brothers (the Giraffe), speaking more
promptly than usual.  "There's his wife and youngsters to consider,
yer know."

"He something well deserted his wife," snarled Began, "an' now he
comes crawlin' back to her to keep him."

"Well," said Mitchell, mildly, "but we ain't all got as much
against him as you have, Began."

"He made a crimson jail-bird of me!" snapped Bogan.  "Well," said
Mitchell, "that didn't hurt you much, anyway; it rather improved your
character if anything.  Besides, he made a jail-bird of himself
afterwards, so you ought to have a fellow-feeling--a feathered
feeling, so to speak.  Now you needn't be offended, Bogan, we're all
jail-birds at heart, only we haven't all got the pluck."

"I'm in favour of blanky well tarrin' an' featherin' him an' kickin'
him out of the town!" shouted Bogan.  "It would be a good turn to
his wife, too; she'd be well rid of the---."

"Perhaps she's fond of him," suggested Mitchell; "I've known such
cases before.  I saw them sitting together on the veranda last night
when they thought no one was looking."

"He deserted her," said One-eyed Bogan, in a climbing-down tone,
"and left her to starve."

"Perhaps the police were to blame for that," said Mitchell.  "You
know you deserted all your old mates once for three months, Bogan, and
it wasn't your fault."

"He seems to be a crimson pet of yours, Jack Mitchell," said Bogan,
firing up.

"Ah, well, all I know," said Mitchell, standing up and stretching
himself wearily, "all I know is that he looked like a gentleman once,
and treated us like a gentleman, and cheated us like a gentleman, and
ran some of us in like a gentleman, and, as far as I can see, he's
served his time like a gentleman and come back to face us and live
himself down like a man.  I always had a sneaking regard for a
gentleman."

"Why, Mitchell, I'm beginning to think you are a gentleman
yourself," said Jake Boreham.

"Well," said Mitchell, "I used to have a suspicion once that I had
a drop of blue blood in me somewhere, and it worried me a lot; but I
asked my old mother about it one day, and she scalded me--God bless
her!--and father chased me with a stockwhip, so I gave up making
inquiries."

"You'll join the bloomin' Capitalists next," sneered One-eyed Bogan.

"I wish I could, Bogan," said Mitchell.  "I'd take a trip to Paris
and see for myself whether the Frenchwomen are as bad as they're made
out to be, or go to Japan.  But what are we going to do about
Douglas?"

"Kick the skunk out of town, or boycott him!" said one or two.  "He
ought to be tarred and feathered and hanged."

"Couldn't do worse than hang him," commented Jake Boreham, cheerfully.

"Oh, yes, we could," said Mitchell, sitting down, resting his elbows
on his knees, and marking his points with one forefinger on the other.
"For instance, we might boil him slow in tar.  We might skin him
alive.  We might put him in a cage and poke him with sticks, with his
wife and children in another cage to look on and enjoy the fun."

The chaps, who had been sitting quietly listening to Mitchell, and
grinning, suddenly became serious and shifted their positions
uneasily.

"But I can tell you what would hurt his feelings more than anything
else we could do," said Mitchell.

"Well, what is it, Jack?" said Tom Hall, rather impatiently.

"Send round the hat and take up a collection for him," said
Mitchell, "enough to let him get away with his wife and children and
start life again in some less respectable town than Bourke.  You
needn't grin, I'm serious about it."

There was a thoughtful pause, and one or two scratched their heads.
"His wife seems pretty sick," Mitchell went on in a reflective tone.
"I passed the place this morning and saw him scrubbing out the floor.
He's been doing a bit of house-painting for old Heegard to-day.  I
suppose he learnt it in jail.  I saw him at work and touched my hat to
him."

"What!" cried Tom Hall, affecting to shrink from Mitchell in horror.

"Yes," said Mitchell, "I'm not sure that I didn't take my hat off.
Now I know it's not bush religion for a man to touch his hat, except
to a funeral, or a strange roof or woman sometimes; but when I meet a
braver man than myself I salute him.  I've only met two in my life."

"And who were they, Jack?" asked Jake Boreham.

"One," said Mitchell--"one is Douglas, and the other--well, the
other was the man I used to be.  But that's got nothing to do with
it."

"But perhaps Douglas thought you were crowing over him when you took
off your hat to him--sneerin' at him, like, Mitchell," reflected Jake
Boreham.

"No, Jake," said Mitchell, growing serious suddenly.  "There are ways
of doing things that another man understands."

They all thought for a while.

"Well," said Tom Hall, "supposing we do take up a collection for
him, he'd be too damned proud to take it."

"But that's where we've got the pull on him," said Mitchell,
brightening up.  "I heard Dr Morgan say that Mrs Douglas wouldn't
live if she wasn't sent away to a cooler place, and Douglas knows it;
and, besides, one of the little girls is sick.  We've got him in a
corner and he'll have to take the stuff.  Besides, two years in jail
takes a lot of the pride out of a man."

"Well, I'm damned if I'll give a sprat to help the man who tried
his best to crush the Unions!" said One-eyed Bogan.

"Damned if I will either!" said Barcoo-Rot.

"Now, look here, One-eyed Bogan," said Mitchell, "I don't like to
harp on old things, for I know they bore you, but when you returned to
public life that time no one talked of kicking you out of the town.
In fact, I heard that the chaps put a few pounds together to help you
get away for a while till you got over your modesty."

No one spoke.

"I passed Douglas's place on my way here from my camp to-night,"
Mitchell went on musingly, "and I saw him walking up and down in the
yard with his sick child in his arms.  You remember that little girl,
Bogan?  I saw her run and pick up your hat and give it to you one day
when you were trying to put it on with your feet.  You remember,
Bogan?  The shock nearly sobered you."

There was a very awkward pause.  The position had become too
psychological altogether and had to be ended somehow.  The awkward
silence had to be broken, and Bogan broke it.  He turned up Bob
Brothers's hat, which was lying on the table, and "chucked" in a
"quid," qualifying the hat and the quid, and disguising his feelings
with the national oath of the land.

"We've had enough of this gory, maudlin, sentimental tommy-rot," he
said.  "Here, Barcoo, stump up or I'll belt it out of your hide!
I'll--I'll take yer to pieces!"

But Douglas didn't leave the town.  He sent his wife and children to
Sydney until the heat wave was past, built a new room on to the
cottage, and started a book and newspaper shop, and a poultry farm in
the back paddock, and flourished.

They called him Mr Douglas for a while, then Douglas, then Percy
Douglas, and now he is well-known as Old Daddy Douglas, and the Sydney
_Worker_, _Truth_, and _Bulletin_, and other democratic
rags are on sale at his shop.  He is big with schemes for locking the
Darling River, and he gets his drink at O'Donohoo's.  He is scarcely
yet regarded as a straight-out democrat.  He was a gentleman once,
Mitchell said, and the old blood was not to be trusted.  But, last
elections, Douglas worked quietly for Unionism, and gave the leaders
certain hints, and put them up to various electioneering dodges which
enabled them to return, in the face of Monopoly, a Labour member who
is as likely to go straight as long as any other Labour member.



THE BLINDNESS OF ONE-EYED BOGAN

    They judge not and they are not judged--'tis their philosophy--
    (There's something wrong with every ship that sails upon the sea).
                                     -The Ballad of the Rouseabout.

"And what became of One-eyed Bogan?" I asked Tom Hall when I met him
and Jack Mitchell down in Sydney with their shearing cheques the
Christmas before last.

"You'd better ask Mitchell, Harry," said Tom.  "He can tell you
about Bogan better than I can.  But first, what about the drink we're
going to have?"

We turned out of Pitt Street into Hunter Street, and across George
Street, where a double line of fast electric tramway was running, into
Margaret Street and had a drink at Pfahlert's Hotel, where a counter
lunch--as good as many dinners you get for a shilling--was included
with a sixpenny drink.  "Get a quiet corner," said Mitchell, "I
like to bear myself cackle."  So we took our beer out in the fernery
and got a cool place at a little table in a quiet corner amongst the
fern boxes.

"Well, One-eyed Bogan was a hard case, Mitchell," I said.  "Wasn't
he?"

"Yes," said Mitchell, putting down his "long-beer" glass, "he
was."

"Rather a bad egg?"

"Yes, a regular bad egg," said Mitchell, decidedly.

"I heard he got caught cheating at cards," I said.

"Did you?" said Mitchell.  "Well, I believe he did.  Ah, well," he
added reflectively, after another long pull, "One-eyed Bogan won't
cheat at cards any more."

"Why?" I said.  "Is he dead then?"

"No," said Mitchell, "he's blind."

"Good God!" I said, "how did that happen?"

"He lost the other eye," said Mitchell, and he took another drink.
"Ah, well, he won't cheat at cards any more--unless there's cards
invented for the blind."

"How did it happen?" I asked.

"Well," said Mitchell, "you see, Harry, it was this way.  Bogan
went pretty free in Bourke after the shearing before last, and in the
end he got mixed up in a very ugly-looking business: he was accused of
doing two new-chum jackaroos out of their stuff by some sort of
confidence trick."

"Confidence trick," I said.  "I'd never have thought that One-eyed
Bogan had the brains to go in for that sort of thing."

"Well, it seems he had, or else he used somebody else's brains;
there's plenty of broken-down English gentlemen sharpers knocking
about out back, you know, and Bogan might have been taking lessons
from one.  I don't know the rights of the case, it was hushed up, as
you'll see presently; but, anyway, the jackaroos swore that Bogan had
done 'em out of ten quid.  They were both Cockneys and I suppose they
reckoned themselves smart, but bushmen have more time to think.
Besides, Bogan's one eye was in his favour.  You see he always kept
his one eye fixed strictly on whatever business he had in hand; if
he'd had another eye to rove round and distract his attention and look
at things on the outside, the chances are he would never have got into
trouble."

"Never mind that, Jack," said Tom Hall.  "Harry wants to hear the
yarn."

"Well, to make it short, one of the jackaroos went to the police and
Bogan cleared out.  His character was pretty bad just then, so there
was a piece of blue paper out for him.  Bogan didn't seem to think the
thing was so serious as it was, for he only went a few miles down the
river and camped with his horses on a sort of island inside an
anabranch, till the thing should blow over or the new chums leave
Bourke.

"Bogan's old enemy, Constable Campbell, got wind of Bogan's camp, and
started out after him.  He rode round the outside track and came in on
to the river just below where the anabranch joins it, at the lower end
of the island and right opposite Bogan's camp.  You know what those
billabongs are: dry gullies till the river rises from the Queensland
rains and backs them up till the water runs round into the river again
and makes anabranches of 'em--places that you thought were hollows
you'll find above water, and you can row over places you thought were
hills.  There's no water so treacherous and deceitful as you'll find
in some of those billabongs.  A man starts to ride across a place
where he thinks the water is just over the grass, and blunders into a
deep channel--that wasn't there before--with a steady undercurrent
with the whole weight of the Darling River funnelled into it; and if
he can't swim and his horse isn't used to it--or sometimes if he can
swim--it's a case with him, and the Darling River cod hold an inquest
on him, if they have time, before he's buried deep in Darling River
mud for ever.  And somebody advertises in the missing column for Jack
Somebody who was last heard of in Australia."

"Never mind that, Mitchell, go on," I said.

"Well, Campbell knew the river and saw that there was a stiff current
there, so he hailed Bogan.

"'Good day, Campbell,' shouted Bogan.

"`I want you, Bogan,' said Campbell.  `Come across and bring your
horses.'

"`I'm damned if I will,' says Bogan.  `I'm not going to catch me
death o' cold to save your skin.  If you want me you'll have to bloody
well come and git me.'  Bogan was a good strong swimmer, and he had
good horses, but he didn't try to get away--I suppose he reckoned he'd
have to face the music one time or another--and one time is as good as
another out back.

"Campbell was no swimmer; he had no temptation to risk his life--you
see it wasn't as in war with a lot of comrades watching ready to
advertise a man as a coward for staying alive--so he argued with Bogan
and tried to get him to listen to reason, and swore at him.  `I'll
make it damned hot for you, Bogan,' he said, `if I have to come over
for you.'

"`Two can play at that game,' says Bogan.

"`Look here, Bogan," said Campbell, `I'll tell you what I'll do.
If you give me your word that you'll come up to the police station
to-morrow I'll go back and say nothing about it.  You can say you
didn't know a warrant was out after you.  It will be all the better
for you in the end.  Better give me your word, man.'

"Perhaps Campbell knew Bogan better than any of us.

"`Now then, Bogan,' he said, `don't be a fool.  Give your word like
a sensible man, and I'll go back.  I'll give you five minutes to make
up your mind.' And he took out his watch.

"But Bogan was nasty and wouldn't give his word, so there was
nothing for it but for Campbell to make a try for him.

"Campbell had plenty of pluck, or obstinacy, which amounts to the
same thing.  He put his carbine and revolver under a log, out of the
rain that was coming on, saw to his handcuffs, and then spurred his
horse into the water.  Bogan lit his pipe with a stick from his
camp-fire--so Campbell said afterwards--and sat down on his heels and
puffed away, and waited for him.

"Just as Campbell's horse floundered into the current Bogan shouted
to go back, but Campbell thought it was a threat and kept on.  But
Bogan had caught sight of a log coming down the stream, end on, with a
sharp, splintered end, and before Campbell knew where he was, the
sharp end of the log caught the horse in the flank.  The horse started
to plunge and struggle sideways, with all his legs, and Campbell got
free of him as quick as he could.  Now, you know, in some of those
Darling River reaches the current will seem to run steadily far a
while, and then come with a rush.  (I was caught in one of those
rushes once, when I was in swimming, and would have been drowned if I
hadn't been born to be hanged.)  Well, a rush came along just as
Campbell got free from his horse, and he went down-stream one side of
a snag and his horse the other.  Campbell's pretty stout, you know,
and his uniform was tight, and it handicapped him.

"Just as he was being washed past the lower end of the snag he caught
hold of a branch that stuck out of the water and held on.  He swung
round and saw Bogan running down to the point opposite him.  Now, you
know there was always a lot of low cunning about Bogan, and I suppose
he reckoned that if he pulled Campbell out he'd stand a good show of
getting clear of his trouble; anyway, if he didn't save Campbell it
might be said that he killed him--besides, Bogan was a good swimmer,
so there wasn't any heroism about it anyhow.  Campbell was only a few
feet from the bank, but Bogan started to strip--to make the job look
as big as possible, I suppose.  He shouted to Campbell to say he was
coming, and to hold on.  Campbell said afterwards that Bogan seemed an
hour undressing.  The weight of the current was forcing down the bough
that Campbell was hanging on to, and suddenly, he said, he felt a
great feeling of helplessness take him by the shoulders.  He yelled to
Bogan and let go.

"Now, it happened that Jake Boreham and I were passing away the time
between shearings, and we were having a sort of fishing and shooting
loaf down the river in a boat arrangement that Jake had made out of
boards and tarred canvas.  We called her the _Jolly Coffin_.  We
were just poking up the bank in the slack water, a few hundred yards
below the billabong, when Jake said, `Why, there's a horse or
something in the river.'  Then he shouted, `No, by God, it's a man,'
and we poked the _Coffin_ out into the stream for all she was
worth.  `Looks like two men fighting in the water,' Jake shouts
presently.  `Hurry up, or they'll drown each other.'

"We hailed 'em, and Bogan shouted for help.  He was treading water
and holding Campbell up in front of him now in real professional
style.  As soon as he heard us he threw up his arms and splashed a
bit--I reckoned he was trying to put as much style as he could into
that rescue.  But I caught a crab, and, before we could get to them,
they were washed past into the top of a tree that stood well below
flood-mark.  I pulled the boat's head round and let her stern down
between the branches.  Bogan had one arm over a limb and was holding
Campbell with the other, and trying to lift him higher out of the
water.  I noticed Bogan's face was bleeding--there was a dead limb
stuck in the tree with nasty sharp points on it, and I reckoned he'd
run his face against one of them.  Campbell was gasping like a codfish
out of water, and he was the whitest man I ever saw (except one, and
_he'd_ been drowned for a week).  Campbell had the sense to keep
still.  We asked Bogan if he could hold on, and he said he could, but
he couldn't hold Campbell any longer.  So Jake took the oars and I
leaned over the stern and caught hold of Campbell, and Jake ran the
boat into the bank, and we got him ashore; then we went back for Bogan
and landed him.

"We had some whisky and soon brought Campbell round; but Bogan was
bleeding like a pig from a nasty cut over his good eye, so we bound
wet handkerchiefs round his eyes and led him to a log and he sat down
for a while, holding his hand to his eye and groaning.  He kept
saying, `I'm blind, mates, I'm blind!  I've lost me other eye!' but we
didn't dream it was so bad as that: we kept giving him whisky.  We got
some dry boughs and made a big fire.  Then Bogan stood up and held his
arms stiff down to his sides, opening and shutting his hands as if he
was in great pain.  And I've often thought since what a different man
Bogan seemed without his clothes and with the broken bridge of his
nose and his eyes covered by the handkerchiefs.  He was clean shaven,
and his mouth and chin are his best features, and he's clean limbed
and well hung.  I often thought afterwards that there was something of
a blind god about him as he stood there naked by the fire on the day
he saved Campbell's life--something that reminded me of a statue I saw
once in the Art Gallery.  (Pity the world isn't blinder to a man's
worst points.)

"Presently Jake listened and said, `By God, that's lucky!' and we
heard a steamer coming up-river and presently we saw her coming round
the point with a couple of wool-barges in tow.  We got Bogan aboard
and got some clothes on him, and took him ashore at Bourke to the new
hospital.  The doctors did all they knew, but Bogan was blind for
life.  He never saw anything again--except `a sort of dull white
blur,' as he called it--or his past life sometimes, I suppose.
Perhaps he saw that for the first time.  Ah, well!

"Bogan's old enemy, Barcoo-Rot, went to see him in the hospital, and
Bogan said, `Well, Barcoo, I reckon we've had our last fight.  I owe
you a hiding, but I don't see how I'm going to pay you.'  `Never mind
that, Bogan, old man,' says Barcoo.  `I'll take it from anyone yer
likes to appoint, if that worries yer; and, look here, Bogan, if I
can't fight you I can fight for you--and don't you forget it!'  And
Barcoo used to lead Bogan round about town in his spare time and tell
him all that was going on; and I believe he always had an ear cocked
in case someone said a word against Bogan--as if any of the chaps
would say a word against a blind man.

"Bogan's case was hushed up.  The police told us to fix it up the
best way we could.  One of the jackaroos, who reckoned that Bogan had
swindled him, was a gentleman, and he was the first to throw a quid in
the Giraffe's hat when it went round for Bogan, but the other jackaroo
was a cur: he said he wanted the money that Bogan had robbed him of.
There were two witnesses, but we sent 'em away, and Tom Hall, there,
scared the jackaroo.  You know Tom was always the best hand we had at
persuading witnesses in Union cases to go home to see their mothers."

"How did you scare that jackaroo, Tom?"  I asked.

"Tell you about it some other time," said Tom.

"Well," said Mitchell, "Bogan was always a good woolsorter, so,
next shearing, old Baldy Thompson--(you know Baldy Thompson, Harry, of
West-o'-Sunday Station)--Baldy had a talk with some of the chaps, and
took Bogan out in his buggy with him to West-o'-Sunday.  Bogan would
sit at the end of the rolling tables, in the shearing-shed, with a boy
to hand him the fleeces, and he'd feel a fleece and tell the boy what
bin to throw it into; and by and by he began to learn to throw the
fleeces into the bins himself.  And sometimes Baldy would have a sheep
brought to him and get him to feel the fleece and tell him the quality
of it.  And then again Baldy would talk, just loud enough for Bogan to
overhear, and swear that he'd sooner have Bogan, blind as he was, than
half a dozen scientific jackaroo experts with all their eyes about
them.

"Of course Bogan wasn't worth anything much to Baldy, but Baldy gave
him two pounds a week out of his own pocket, and another quid that we
made up between us; so he made enough to pull him through the rest of
the year.

"It was curious to see how soon he learned to find his way about the
hut and manage his tea and tucker.  It was a rough shed, but everybody
was eager to steer Bogan about--and, in fact, two of them had a fight
about it one day.  Baldy and all of us---and especially visitors when
they came--were mighty interested in Bogan; and I reckon we were
rather proud of having a blind wool-sorter.  I reckon Bogan had thirty
or forty pairs of eyes watching out for him in case he'd run against
something or fall.  It irritated him to be messed round too much--he
said a baby would never learn to walk if it was held all the time.  He
reckoned he'd learn more in a year than a man who'd served a lifetime
to blindness; but we didn't let him wander much--for fear he'd fall
into the big rocky waterhole there, by accident.

"And after the shearing-season Bogan's wife turned up in Bourke---"

"Bogan's wife!" I exclaimed.  "Why, I never knew Bogan was
married."

"Neither did anyone else," said Mitchell.  "But he was.  Perhaps
that was what accounted for Bogan.  Sometimes, in his sober moods, I
used to have an idea that there must have been something behind the
Bogan to account for him.  Perhaps he got trapped--or got married and
found out that he'd made a mistake--which is about the worst thing a
man can find out---"

"Except that his wife made the mistake, Mitchell," said Tom Hall.

"Or that both did," reflected Mitchell.  "Ah, well!--never
mind--Bogan had been married two or three years.  Maybe he got married
when he was on the spree--I knew that he used to send money to someone
in Sydney and I suppose it was her.  Anyway, she turned up after he
was blind.  She was a hard-looking woman--just the sort that might
have kept a third-rate pub or a sly-grog shop.  But you can't judge
between husband and wife, unless you've lived in the same house with
them--and under the same roofs with their parents right back to Adam
for that matter.  Anyway, she stuck to Bogan all right; she took a
little two-roomed cottage and made him comfortable--she's got a
sewing-machine and a mangle and takes in washing and sewing.  She
brought a carrotty-headed youngster with her, and the first time I saw
Bogan sitting on the veranda with that youngster on his knee I thought
it was a good thing that he was blind."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because the youngster isn't his," said Mitchell.

"How do you know that?"

"By the look of it--and by the look on her face, once, when she
caught me squinting from the kid's face to Bogan's."

"And whose was it?" I asked, without thinking.

"How am I to know?" said Mitchell.  "It might be yours for all I
know--it's ugly enough, and you never had any taste in women.  But you
mustn't speak of that in Bourke.  But there's another youngster
coming, and I'll swear that'll be Bogan's all right.

"A curious thing about Bogan is that he's begun to be fidgety about
his personal appearance--and you know he wasn't a dood.  He wears a
collar now, and polishes his boots; he wears elastic-sides, and
polishes 'em himself--the only thing is that he blackens over the
elastic.  He can do many things for himself, and he's proud of it.  He
says he can see many things that he couldn't see when he had his eyes.
You seldom hear him swear, save in a friendly way; he seems much
gentler, but he reckons he would stand a show with Barcoo-Rot even
now, if Barcoo would stand up in front of him and keep yelling---"

"By the way," I asked, "how did Bogan lose the sight of his other
eye?"

"Sleeping out in the rain when he was drunk," said Mitchell.  "He
got a cold in his eye."  Then he asked, suddenly:

"Did you ever see a blind man cry?"

"No," I said.

"Well, I have," said Mitchell.

"You know Bogan wears goggles to hide his eyes--his wife made him do
that.  The chaps often used to drop round and have a yarn with Bogan
and cheer him up, and one evening I was sitting smoking with him, and
yarning about old times, when he got very quiet all of a sudden, and I
saw a tear drop from under one of his shutters and roll down his
cheek.  It wasn't the eye he lost saving Campbell--it was the old
wall-eye he used to use in the days before he was called 'One-eyed
Bogan.'  I suppose he thought it was dark and that I couldn't see his
face.  (There's a good many people in this world who think you can't
see because they can't.)  It made me feel like I used to feel
sometimes in the days when I felt things---"

"Come on, Mitchell," said Tom Hall, "you've had enough beer."

"I think I have," said Mitchell.  "Besides, I promised to send a
wire to Jake Boreham to tell him that his mother's dead.  Jake's
shearing at West-o'-Sunday; shearing won't be over for three or four
weeks, and Jake wants an excuse to get away without offending old
Baldy and come down and have a fly round with us before the holidays
are over."

Down at the telegraph-office Mitchell took a form and filled it in
very carefully: "Jacob Boreham.  West-o'-Sunday Station.  Bourke.
Come home at once.  Mother is dead.  In terrible trouble.  Father
dying.--MARY BOREHAM."

"I think that will do," said Mitchell.  "It ought to satisfy Baldy,
and it won't give Jake too much of a shock, because he hasn't got a
sister or sister-in-law, and his father and mother's been dead over
ten years."

"Now, if I was running a theatre," said Mitchell, as we left the
office, "I'd give five pounds a night for the face Jake'll have on
him when he takes that telegram to Baldy Thompson."




TWO SUNDOWNERS


Sheep stations in Australia are any distance from twenty to a hundred
miles apart, to keep well within the boundaries of truth and the great
pastoral country.  Shearing at any one shed only lasts a few weeks in
the year; the number of men employed is according to the size of the
shed--from three to five men in the little bough-covered shed of the
small "cockatoo," up to a hundred and fifty or two hundred hands all
told in the big corrugated iron machine shed of a pastoral company.

Shearing starts early up in northern Queensland, where you can get a
"January shed;" and further south, in February, March or April
sheds, and so on down into New South Wales, where shearing often lasts
over Christmas.  Shearers travel from shed to shed; some go a travel
season without getting a pen, and an unlucky shearer might ride or
tramp for several seasons and never get hands in wool; and all this
explains the existence of the "footman" with his swag and the horse
man with his packhorse.  They have a rough life, and the Australian
shearers are certainly the most democratic and perhaps the most
independent, intelligent and generous body of workmen in the world.

Shearers at a shed elect their own cook, pay him so much a head, and
they buy their rations in the lump from the station store; and
"travellers," i.e. shearers and rouseabouts travelling for work, are
invited, as a matter of course, to sit down to the shearers' table.
Also a certain allowance of tea, sugar, flour or meat is still made to
travellers at most Western station stores; so it would be rather
surprising if there weren't some who, travelled on the game.  The
swagman loafer, or "bummer," times himself, especially in bad
weather, to arrive at the shed just about sundown; he is then sure of
"tea," shelter for the night, breakfast, and some tucker from the
cook to take him on along the track.  Brummy and Swampy were
sundowners.

Swampy was a bummer born--and proud of it.  Brummy had drifted down to
loaferdom, and his nature was soured and his spirit revengeful against
the world because of the memory of early years wasted at hard work and
in being honest.  Both were short and stout, and both had scrubby
beards, but Brummy's beard was a dusty black and Swampy's fiery
red--he indulged in a monkey-shave sometimes, but his lower face was
mostly like a patch of coarse stubble with a dying hedge round it.
They had travelled together for a long time.  They seemed at times to
hate each other with a murderous hatred, but they were too lazy to
fight.  Sometimes they'd tramp side, by side and growl at each other
by the hour, other times they'd sulk for days; one would push on ahead
and the other drop behind until there was a mile or two between them;
but one always carried the billy, or the sugar, or something that was
necessary to the comfort of the other, so they'd come together at
sundown.  They had travelled together a long time, and perhaps that
was why they hated each other.  They often agreed to part and take
different tracks, and sometimes they parted--for a while.  They agreed
in cadging, and cadged in turn.  They carried a spare set of
tucker-bags, and if, for instance, they were out of sugar and had
plenty flour and tea, Brummy or Swampy would go to the store,
boundary-rider's hut, or selector's, with the sugar-bag in his hand
and the other bags in his shirt front on spec.  He'd get the sugar
first, and then, if it looked good enough, the flour-bag would come
out, then the tea-bag.  And before he left he'd remark casually that
he and his mate hadn't had a smoke for two days.  They never missed a
chance.  And when they'd cadged more tucker than they could
comfortably carry, they'd camp for a day or two and eat it down.
Sometimes they'd have as much as a pound of tobacco, all in little
"borrowed" bits, cut from the sticks or cakes of honest travellers.
They never missed a chance.  If a stranger gave Swampy his cake of
tobacco with instructions to "cut off a pipeful," Swampy would cut
off as much as he thought judicious, talking to the stranger and
watching his eye all the time, and hiding his palm as much as
possible--and sometimes, when he knew he'd cut off more than he could
cram into his pipe, he'd pu