Joe Wilson and His Mates Part 26

'The Flour of Wheat carried his mate, Dinny Murphy, all the way in from Th' Canary to the hospital on his back. Dinny was very bad--the man was dying of the dysentery or something. The Flour laid him down on a spare bunk in the reception-room, and hailed the staff.

'"Inside there--come out!"

'The doctor and some of the hospital people came to see what was the matter. The doctor was a heavy swell, with a big cigar, held up in front of him between two fat, soft, yellow-white fingers, and a dandy little pair of gold-rimmed eye-gla.s.ses nipped onto his nose with a spring.

'"There's me lovely mate lying there dying of the dysentry," says the Flour, "and you've got to fix him up and bring him round."

'Then he shook his fist in the doctor's face and said--

'"If you let that lovely man die--look out!"

'The doctor was startled. He backed off at first; then he took a puff at his cigar, stepped forward, had a careless look at Dinny, and gave some order to the attendants. The Flour went to the door, turned half round as he went out, and shook his fist at them again, and said--

'"If you let that lovely man die--mind!"

'In about twenty minutes he came back, wheeling a case of whisky in a barrow. He carried the case inside, and dumped it down on the floor.

'"There," he said, "pour that into the lovely man."

'Then he shook his fist at such members of the staff as were visible, and said--

'"If you let that lovely man die--look out!"

'They were used to hard-cases, and didn't take much notice of him, but he had the hospital in an awful mess; he was there all hours of the day and night; he would go down town, have a few drinks and a fight maybe, and then he'd say, "Ah, well, I'll have to go up and see how me lovely mate's getting on."

'And every time he'd go up he'd shake his fist at the hospital in general and threaten to murder 'em all if they let Dinny Murphy die.

'Well, Dinny Murphy died one night. The next morning the Flour met the doctor in the street, and hauled off and hit him between the eyes, and knocked him down before he had time to see who it was.

'"Stay there, ye little whipper-snapper," said the Flour of Wheat; "you let that lovely man die!"

'The police happened to be out of town that day, and while they were waiting for them the Flour got a coffin and carried it up to the hospital, and stood it on end by the doorway.

'"I've come for me lovely mate!" he said to the scared staff--or as much of it as he baled up and couldn't escape him. "Hand him over. He's going back to be buried with his friends at Th' Canary. Now, don't be sneaking round and sidling off, you there; you needn't be frightened; I've settled with the doctor."

'But they called in a man who had some influence with the Flour, and between them--and with the a.s.sistance of the prettiest nurse on the premises--they persuaded him to wait. Dinny wasn't ready yet; there were papers to sign; it wouldn't be decent to the dead; he had to be prayed over; he had to be washed and shaved, and fixed up decent and comfortable. Anyway, they'd have him ready in an hour, or take the consequences.

'The Flour objected on the ground that all this could be done equally as well and better by the boys at Th' Canary. "However," he said, "I'll be round in an hour, and if you haven't got me lovely mate ready--look out!" Then he shook his fist sternly at them once more and said--

'"I know yer dirty tricks and dodges, and if there's e'er a pin-scratch on me mate's body--look out! If there's a pairin' of Dinny's toe-nail missin'--look out!"

'Then he went out--taking the coffin with him.

'And when the police came to his lodgings to arrest him, they found the coffin on the floor by the side of the bed, and the Flour lying in it on his back, with his arms folded peacefully on his bosom. He was as dead drunk as any man could get to be and still be alive. They knocked air-holes in the coffin-lid, screwed it on, and carried the coffin, the Flour, and all to the local lock-up. They laid their burden down on the bare, cold floor of the prison-cell, and then went out, locked the door, and departed several ways to put the "boys" up to it. And about midnight the "boys" gathered round with a supply of liquor, and waited, and somewhere along in the small hours there was a howl, as of a strong Irishman in Purgatory, and presently the voice of the Flour was heard to plead in changed and awful tones--

'"Pray for me soul, boys--pray for me soul! Let bygones be bygones between us, boys, and pray for me lovely soul! The lovely Flour's in Purgatory!"

'Then silence for a while; and then a sound like a dray-wheel pa.s.sing over a packing-case.... That was the only time on record that the Flour was heard to swear. And he swore then.

'They didn't pray for him--they gave him a month. And, when he came out, he went half-way across the road to meet the doctor, and he--to his credit, perhaps--came the other half. They had a drink together, and the Flour presented the doctor with a fine specimen of coa.r.s.e gold for a pin.

'"It was the will o' G.o.d, after all, doctor," said the Flour. "It was the will o' G.o.d. Let bygones be bygones between us; gimme your hand, doctor.... Good-bye."

'Then he left for Th' Canary.'

The Babies in the Bush.

'Oh, tell her a tale of the fairies bright-- That only the Bushmen know-- Who guide the feet of the lost aright, Or carry them up through the starry night, Where the Bush-lost babies go.'

He was one of those men who seldom smile. There are many in the Australian Bush, where drift wrecks and failures of all stations and professions (and of none), and from all the world. Or, if they do smile, the smile is either mechanical or bitter as a rule--cynical. They seldom talk. The sort of men who, as bosses, are set down by the majority--and without reason or evidence--as being proud, hard, and selfish,--'too mean to live, and too big for their boots.'

But when the Boss did smile his expression was very, very gentle, and very sad. I have seen him smile down on a little child who persisted in sitting on his knee and prattling to him, in spite of his silence and gloom. He was tall and gaunt, with haggard grey eyes--haunted grey eyes sometimes--and hair and beard thick and strong, but grey. He was not above forty-five. He was of the type of men who die in harness, with their hair thick and strong, but grey or white when it should be brown.

The opposite type, I fancy, would be the soft, dark-haired, blue-eyed men who grow bald sooner than they grow grey, and fat and contented, and die respectably in their beds.

His name was Head--Walter Head. He was a boss drover on the overland routes. I engaged with him at a place north of the Queensland border to travel down to Bathurst, on the Great Western Line in New South Wales, with something over a thousand head of store bullocks for the Sydney market. I am an Australian Bushman (with city experience)--a rover, of course, and a ne'er-do-well, I suppose. I was born with brains and a thin skin--worse luck! It was in the days before I was married, and I went by the name of 'Jack Ellis' this trip,--not because the police were after me, but because I used to tell yarns about a man named Jack Ellis--and so the chaps nicknamed me.

The Boss spoke little to the men: he'd sit at tucker or with his pipe by the camp-fire nearly as silently as he rode his night-watch round the big, restless, weird-looking mob of bullocks camped on the dusky starlit plain. I believe that from the first he spoke oftener and more confidentially to me than to any other of the droving party. There was a something of sympathy between us--I can't explain what it was. It seemed as though it were an understood thing between us that we understood each other. He sometimes said things to me which would have needed a deal of explanation--so I thought--had he said them to any other of the party.

He'd often, after brooding a long while, start a sentence, and break off with 'You know, Jack.' And somehow I understood, without being able to explain why. We had never met before I engaged with him for this trip.

His men respected him, but he was not a popular boss: he was too gloomy, and never drank a gla.s.s nor 'shouted' on the trip: he was reckoned a 'mean boss', and rather a n.i.g.g.e.r-driver.

He was full of Adam Lindsay Gordon, the English-Australian poet who shot himself, and so was I. I lost an old copy of Gordon's poems on the route, and the Boss overheard me inquiring about it; later on he asked me if I liked Gordon. We got to it rather sheepishly at first, but by-and-by we'd quote Gordon freely in turn when we were alone in camp.

'Those are grand lines about Burke and Wills, the explorers, aren't they, Jack?' he'd say, after chewing his cud, or rather the stem of his briar, for a long while without a word. (He had his pipe in his mouth as often as any of us, but somehow I fancied he didn't enjoy it: an empty pipe or a stick would have suited him just as well, it seemed to me.) 'Those are great lines,' he'd say--

'"In Collins Street standeth a statue tall-- A statue tall on a pillar of stone-- Telling its story to great and small Of the dust reclaimed from the sand-waste lone.

Weary and wasted, worn and wan, Feeble and faint, and languid and low, He lay on the desert a dying man, Who has gone, my friends, where we all must go."

That's a grand thing, Jack. How does it go?-- "With a pistol clenched in his failing hand, And the film of death o'er his fading eyes, He saw the sun go down on the sand,"'--

The Boss would straighten up with a sigh that might have been half a yawn-- '"And he slept and never saw it rise,"'

--speaking with a sort of quiet force all the time.

Then maybe he'd stand with his back to the fire roasting his dusty leggings, with his hands behind his back and looking out over the dusky plain.

'"What mattered the sand or the whit'ning chalk, The blighted herbage or blackened log, The crooked beak of the eagle-hawk, Or the hot red tongue of the native dog?"

They don't matter much, do they, Jack?'

'd.a.m.ned if I think they do, Boss!' I'd say.

'"The couch was rugged, those s.e.xtons rude, But, in spite of a leaden shroud, we know That the bravest and fairest are earth-worms' food Where once they have gone where we all must go."'