Robbery under Arms Part 13

'You've some call to crow if you can work things like that. How you ever got him away beats me; but not more than how you managed to keep him hid with a ring of troopers all round you from every side of the district.'

'We had friends,' father said. 'Me and Warrigal done all the travelling by night. No one but him could have gone afoot, I believe, much less led a blood horse through the beastly scrub and ranges he showed us. But the devil himself could not beat him and that little brute Bilbah in rough country.'

'I believe you,' I said, thinking of our ride yesterday. 'It's quite bad enough to follow him on level ground. But don't you think our tracks will be easy to follow with a thousand head of cattle before us? Any fool could do that.'

'It ain't that as I'm looking at,' said father; 'of course an old woman could do it, and knit stockings all the time; but our dart is to be off and have a month's start before anybody knows they are off the run. They won't think of mustering before fat cattle takes a bit of a turn. That won't be for a couple of months yet. Then they may catch us if they can.'

We had a long talk with Starlight, and what he said came to much the same. One stockman they had 'squared', and he was to stand in. They had got two or three flash chaps to help muster and drive, who were to swear they thought we were dealers, and had bought cattle all right. One or two more were to meet us farther on. If we could get the cattle together and clear off before anything was suspected the rest was easy. The yard was nearly up, and Jim and I wired in and soon finished it. It didn't want very grand work putting into it as long as it would last our time.

So we put it up roughly, but pretty strong, with pine saplings.

The drawing in was the worst, for we had to 'hump' the most of them ourselves. Jim couldn't help bursting out laughing from time to time.

'It does seem such a jolly cheeky thing,' he said. 'Driving off a mob of cattle on the quiet I've known happen once or twice; but I'm dashed if ever I heard tell of putting up duffing improvements of a superior cla.s.s on a cove's run and clearing off with a thousand drafted cattle, all quiet and regular, and him pottering about his home-station and never "dropping" to it no more than if he was in Sydney.'

'People ought to look after their stock closer than they do,' I said.

'It is their fault almost as much as ours. But they are too lazy to look after their own work, and too miserable to pay a good man to do it for them. They just get a half-and-half sort of fellow that'll take low wages and make it up with duffing, and of course he's not likely to look very sharp after the back country.'

'You're not far away,' says Jim; 'but don't you think they'd have to look precious sharp and get up very early in the morning to be level with chaps like father and Starlight, let alone Warrigal, who's as good by night as day? Then there's you and me. Don't try and make us out better than we are, d.i.c.k; we're all d----scoundrels, that's the truth of it, and honest men haven't a chance with us, except in the long run--except in the long run. That's where they'll have us, d.i.c.k Marston.'

'That's quite a long speech for you, Jim,' I said; 'but it don't matter much that I know of whose fault it is that we're in this duffing racket.

It seems to be our fate, as the chap says in the book. We'll have a jolly spree in Adelaide if this journey comes out right. And now let's finish this evening off. To-morrow they're going to yard the first mob.'

After that we didn't talk much except about the work. Starlight and Warrigal were out every day and all day. The three new hands were some chaps who formed part of a gang that did most of the horse-stealing in that neighbourhood, though they never showed up. The way they managed it was this. They picked up any good-looking nag or second-cla.s.s racehorse that they fell across, and took them to a certain place. There they met another lot of fellows, who took the horses from them and cleared out to another colony; at the same time they left the horses they had brought.

So each lot travelled different ways, and were sold in places where they were quite strange and no one was likely to claim them.

After a man had had a year or two at this kind of work, he was good, or rather bad, for anything. These young chaps, like us, had done pretty well at these games, and one of them, falling in with Starlight, had proposed to him to put up a couple of hundred head of cattle on Outer Back Momberah, as the run was called; then father and he had seen that a thousand were as easy to get as a hundred. Of course there was a risky feeling, but it wasn't such bad fun while it lasted. We were out all day running in the cattle. The horses were in good wind and condition now; we had plenty of rations--flour, tea, and sugar. There was no cart, but some good packhorses, just the same as if we were a regular station party on our own run. Father had worked all that before we came. We had the best of fresh beef and veal too--you may be sure of that--there was no stint in that line; and at night we were always sure of a yarn from Starlight--that is, if he was in a good humour. Sometimes he wasn't, and then n.o.body dared speak to him, not even father.

He was an astonishing man, certainly. Jim and I used to wonder, by the hour, what he'd been in the old country. He'd been all over the world--in the Islands and New Zealand; in America, and among Malays and other strange people that we'd hardly ever heard of. Such stories as he'd tell us, too, about slaves and wild chiefs that he'd lived with and gone out to fight with against their enemy. 'People think a great deal of a dead man now and then in this innocent country,' he said once when the grog was uppermost; 'why, I've seen fifty men killed before breakfast, and in cold blood, too, chopped up alive, or next thing to it; and a drove of slaves--men, women, and children--as big nearly as our mob, handed over to a slave-dealer, and driven off in chains just as you'd start a lot of station cattle. They didn't like it, going off their run either, poor devils. The women would try and run back after their pickaninnies when they dropped, just like that heifer when Warrigal knocked her calf on the head to-day.' What a man he was! This was something like life, Jim and I thought. When we'd sold the cattle, if we got 'em down to Adelaide all right, we'd take a voyage to some foreign country, perhaps, and see sights too. What a paltry thing working for a pound a week seemed when a rise like this was to be made!

Well, the long and short of it is that we mustered the cattle quite comfortably, n.o.body coming anext or anigh us any more than if we'd taken the thing by contract. You wouldn't have thought there was anybody nearer than Bathurst. Everything seemed to be in our favour. So it was, just at the start. We drafted out all the worst and weediest of the cattle, besides all the old cows, and when we counted the mob out we had nearly eleven hundred first-rate store cattle; lots of fine young bullocks and heifers, more than half fat--altogether a prime well-bred mob that no squatter or dealer could fault in any way if the price was right. We could afford to sell them for a shade under market price for cash. Ready money, of course, we were bound to have.

Just as we were starting there was a fine roan bull came running up with a small mob.

'Cut him out, and beat him back,' says father; 'we don't want to be bothered with the likes of him.'

'Why, I'm dashed if that ain't Hood's imported bull,' says Billy the Boy, a Monaro native that we had with us. 'I know him well. How's he come to get back? Why, the cove gave two hundred and fifty notes for him afore he left England, I've heard 'em say.'

'Bring him along,' said Starlight, who came up just then. 'In for a penny, in for a pound. They'll never think of looking for him on the Coorong, and we'll be there before they miss any cattle worth talking about.'

So we took 'Fifteenth Duke of Cambridge' along with us; a red roan he was, with a little white about the flank. He wasn't more than four year old. He'd been brought out from England as a yearling. How he'd worked his way out to this back part of the run, where a bull of his quality ain't often seen, n.o.body could say. But he was a lively active beast, and he'd got into fine hard fettle with living on saltbush, dry gra.s.s, and scrub for the last few months, so he could travel as well as the others. I took particular notice of him, from his little waxy horns to his straight locks and long square quarters. And so I'd need to--but that came after. He had only a little bit of a private brand on the shoulder. That was easily faked, and would come out quite different.

Chapter 12

We didn't go straight ahead along any main track to the Lower Murray and Adelaide exactly. That would have been a little too open and barefaced.

No; we divided the mob into three, and settled where to meet in about a fortnight. Three men to each mob. Father and Warrigal took one lot; they had the dog, old Crib, to help them. He was worth about two men and a boy. Starlight, Jim, and I had another; and the three stranger chaps another. We'd had a couple of knockabouts to help with the cooking and stockyard work. They were paid by the job. They were to stay at the camp for a week, to burn the gunyahs, knock down the yard, and blind the track as much as they could.

Some of the cattle we'd left behind they drove back and forward across the track every day for a week. If rain came they were to drop it, and make their way into the frontage by another road. If they heard about the job being blown or the police set on our track, they were to wire to one of the border townships we had to pa.s.s. Weren't we afraid of their selling us? No, not much; they were well paid, and had often given father and Starlight information before, though they took care never to show out in the cattle or horse-stealing way themselves. As long as chaps in our line have money to spend, they can always get good information and other things, too. It is when the money runs short that the danger comes in. I don't know whether cattle-duffing was ever done in New South Wales before on such a large scale, or whether it will ever be done again. Perhaps not. These wire fences stop a deal of cross-work; but it was done then, you take my word for it--a man's word as hasn't that long to live that it's worth while to lie--and it all came out right; that is as far as our getting safe over, selling the cattle, and having the money in our pockets.

We kept on working by all sorts of outside tracks on the main line of road--a good deal by night, too--for the first two or three hundred miles. After we crossed the Adelaide border we followed the Darling down to the Murray. We thought we were all right, and got bolder. Starlight had changed his clothes, and was dressed like a swell--away on a roughish trip, but still like a swell.

'They were his cattle; he had brought them from one of his stations on the Narran. He was going to take up country in the Northern Territory.

He expected a friend out from England with a lot more capital.'

Jim and I used to hear him talking like this to some of the squatters whose runs we pa.s.sed through, as grave as you please. They used to ask him to stay all night, but he always said 'he didn't like to leave his men. He made it a practice on the road.' When we got within a fortnight's drive of Adelaide, he rode in and lived at one of the best hotels. He gave out that he expected a lot of cattle to arrive, and got a friend that he'd met in the billiard-room (and couldn't he play surprisin'?) to introduce him to one of the leading stock agents there.

So he had it all cut and dry, when one day Warrigal and I rode in, and the boy handed him a letter, touching his hat respectfully, as he had been learned to do, before a lot of young squatters and other swells that he was going out to a picnic with.

'My confounded cattle come at last,' he says. 'Excuse me for mentioning business. I began to hope they'd never come; 'pon my soul I did. The time pa.s.ses so deuced pleasantly here. Well, they'll all be at the yards to-morrow. You fellows had all better come and see them sold. There'll be a little lunch, and perhaps some fizz. You go to the stock agents, Runnimall and Co.; here's their address, Jack,' he says to me, looking me straight in the eyes. 'They'll send a man to pilot you to the yards; and now off with you, and don't let me see your face till to-morrow.'

How he carried it off! He cantered away with the rest of the party, as if he hadn't a thought in the world except about pleasure and honest business. n.o.body couldn't have told that he wasn't just like them other young gentlemen with only their stock and station to think about, and a little fun at the races now and then. And what a risk he was running every minute of his life, he and all the rest of us. I wasn't sorry to be out of the town again. There were lots of police, too. Suppose one of them was to say, 'Richard Marston, I arrest you for----' It hardly mattered what. I felt as if I should have tumbled down with sheer fright and cowardliness. It's a queer thing you feel like that off and on.

Other times a man has as much pluck in him as if his life was worth fighting for--which it isn't.

The agent knew all about us (or thought he did), and sent a chap to show Mr. Carisforth's cattle (Charles Carisforth, Esq., of Sturton, Yorkshire and Banda, Waroona, and Ebor Downs, New South Wales; that was the name he went by) the way to the yards. We were to draft them all next morning into separate pens--cows and bullocks, steers and heifers, and so on.

He expected to sell them all to a lot of farmers and small settlers that had taken up a new district lately and were very short of stock.

'You couldn't have come into a better market, young fellow,' says the agent's man to me. 'Our boss he's advertised 'em that well as there'll be smart bidding between the farmers and some of the squatters. Good store cattle's been scarce, and these is in such rattling condition.

That's what'll sell 'em. Your master seems a regular free-handed sort of chap. He's the jolliest squatter there's been in town these years, I hear folk say. Puts 'em in mind of Hawdon and Evelyn Sturt in the old overlander days.'

Next day we were at the yards early, you bet. We wanted to have time to draft them into pens of twenty to fifty each, so that the farmers and small settlers might have a chance to buy. Besides, it was the last day of our work. Driving all day and watching half the night is pretty stiffish work, good weather and bad, when you've got to keep it up for months at a time, and we'd been three months and a week on the road.

The other chaps were wild for a spree. Jim and I had made up our minds to be careful; still, we had a lot to see in a big town like Adelaide; for we'd never been to Sydney even in our lives, and we'd never seen the sea. That was something to look at for the first time, wasn't it?

Well, we got the cattle drafted to rights, every sort and size and age by itself, as near as could be. That's the way to draft stock, whether they're cattle, sheep, or horses; then every man can buy what he likes best, and isn't obliged to lump up one sort with another. We had time to have a bit of dinner. None of us had touched a mouthful since before daylight. Then we began to see the buyers come.

There'd been a big tent rigged, as big as a small woolshed, too. It came out in a cart, and then another cart came with a couple of waiters, and they laid out a long table of boards on trestles with a real first-cla.s.s feed on it, such as we'd never seen in our lives before. Fowls and turkeys and tongues and rounds of beef, beer and wine in bottles with gilt labels on. Such a set-out it was. Father began to growl a bit.

'If he's going to feed the whole country this way, he'll spend half the stuff before we get it, let alone drawing a down on the whole thing.'

But Jim and me could see how Starlight had been working the thing to rights while he was swelling it in the town among the big bugs. We told him the cattle would fetch that much more money on account of the lunch and the blowing the auctioneer was able to do. These would pay for the feed and the rest of the fal-lals ten times over. 'When he gets in with men like his old pals he loses his head, I believe,' father says, 'and fancies he's what he used to be. He'll get "fitted" quite simple some day if he doesn't keep a better look-out.'

That might be, but it wasn't to come about this time. Starlight came riding out by and by, dressed up like a real gentleman, and lookin' so different that Jim and I hardly dared speak to him--on a splendid horse too (not Rainbow, he'd been left behind; he was always left within a hundred miles of The Hollow, and he could do it in one day if he was wanted to), and a lot of fine dressed chaps with him--young squatters and officers, and what not. I shouldn't have been surprised if he'd had the Governor out with him. They told us afterwards he did dine at Government House reg'lar, and was made quite free and welcome there.

Well, he jumps down and shakes hands with us before them all. 'Well, Jack! Well, Bill!' and so on, calls us his good faithful fellows, and how well we'd brought the cattle over; nods to father, who didn't seem able to take it all in; says he'll back us against any stockmen in Australia; has up Warrigal and shows him off to the company. 'Most intelligent lad.' Warrigal grinned and showed his white teeth. It was as good as a play.

Then everybody goes to lunch--swells and selectors, Germans and Paddies, natives and immigrants, a good many of them, too, and there was eating and drinking and speechifying till all was blue. By and by the auctioneer looks at his watch. He'd had a pretty good tuck-in himself, and they must get to business.

Father opened his eyes at the price the first pen brought, all prime young bullocks, half fat most of them. Then they all went off like wildfire; the big men and the little men bidding, quite jealous, sometimes one getting the lot, sometimes another. One chap made a remark about there being such a lot of different brands; but Starlight said they'd come from a sort of depot station of his, and were the odds and ends of all the mobs of store cattle that he'd purchased the last four years. That satisfied 'em, particularly as he said it in a careless, fierce way which he could put on, as if it was like a man's----impudence to ask him anything. It made the people laugh; I could see that.

By and by we comes to the imported bull. He was in a pen by himself, looking first-rate. His brand had been faked, and the hair had grown pretty well. It would have took a sharp hand to know him again.

'Well, gentlemen,' says the auctioneer, 'here is the imported bull "Duke of Brunswick". It ain't often an animal of his quality comes in with a mob of store cattle; but I am informed by Mr. Carisforth that he left orders for the whole of the cattle to be cleared off the run, and this valuable animal was brought away in mistake. He was to return by sea; but as he happens to be here to-day, why, sooner than disappoint any intending buyer, Mr. Carisforth has given me instructions to put him up, and if he realises anything near his value he will be sold.'

'Yes!' drawls Starlight, as if a dozen imported bulls, more or less, made no odds to him, 'put him up, by all means, Mr. Runnimall. Expectin'

rather large shipment of Bates's "d.u.c.h.ess" tribe next month. Rather prefer them on the whole. The "Duke" here is full of Booth blood, so he may just as well go with the others. I shall never get what he cost, though; I know that. He's been a most expensive animal to me.'

Many a true word spoken in jest. He had good call to know him, as well as the rest of us, for a most expensive animal, before all was said and done. What he cost us all round it would be hard indeed to cipher up.

Anyhow, there was a great laugh at Starlight's easy way of taking it. First one and then another of the squatters that was going in for breeding began to bid, thinking he'd go cheap, until they got warm, and the bull went up to a price that we never dreamed he'd fetch. Everything seemed to turn out lucky that day. One would have thought they'd never seen an imported bull before. The young squatters got running one another, as I said before, and he went up to 270 Pounds! Then the auctioneer squared off the accounts as sharp as he could; an' it took him all his time, what with the German and the small farmers, who took their time about it, paying in greasy notes and silver and copper, out of canvas bags, and the squatters, who were too busy chaffing and talking among themselves to pay at all. It was dark before everything was settled up, and all the lots of cattle delivered. Starlight told the auctioneer he'd see him at his office, in a deuced high and mighty kind of way, and rode off with his new friend.