The Book of the Bush Part 14

For many days the Rises were peopled with prospectors, but one by one they dropped away. The chief constable was loath to leave the riddle unsolved; he had the instinct of the sleuth-hound on the scent of blood. He had been a pursuer of bad works amongst the convicts for a long time, both in Van Diemen's Land and in Victoria, and had helped to bring many men to the gallows or the chain-gang. He had once been shot in the back by a horse thief who lay concealed behind the door of a shepherd's hut, but he secured the horse thief. He was a man without nerves, of medium height, strongly built, had a broad face, ma.s.sive ears, wide, firm mouth, and strong jaws.

One night after the searchers had departed to their various homes, the chief remained alone in the Rises, and leaving his horse hobbled at a distance, cautiously approached Nosey's hut. He placed his ear to the outside of the weatherboards, and listened for some time to the conversation of Nosey and his wife, expecting to obtain by chance some information about the disappearance of the other shepherd.

Nosey was in a bad temper, swearing and finding fault with everything. Julia was prudent and said little; it was best not to say too much to a man who was so handy with the family axe. But at last she made use of one expression which seemed to mean something.

She said, "Oh, Nosey, you murdering villain, you know you ought to be hanged." There was a prophetic ring in these words which delighted the chief constable, and he glued his great ear to the weatherboards, eagerly listening for more; but the wrangling pair were very disappointing; they would not keep to the point. At last he walked round the hut, suddenly opened the door, and entered. Nosey was struck dumb at once. His first thought was that his plan had been sprung, and that the murder was out. The chief addressed Julia in a tone of authority, imitating the counsel for the crown when examining a prevaricating witness.

"Now, missus, remember you will be put on your oath. You said just now, 'Oh, Nosey, you murdering villain, you know you ought to be hanged.' Those were your very words. Now what did you mean? On your oath, mind; out with it at once."

But Julia was not to be caught so easily. She replied:

"Oh, bad luck to him, he is always angry. I don't know what to do with him. I did not mean anything."

"You did not mean anything about Baldy, I suppose, did you, now?"

queried the constable, shamefully leading the witness, and looking hard at Nosey.

Julia parried the question by heaving a deep sigh, and saying: "Hi, ho, Harry, if I were a maid, I never would marry;" and then she began singing a silly old song.

The constable was disgusted, and said:

"My good woman, you'll find there will be nothing to laugh at in this job, when I see you again."

As he left the hut, he turned at the door and gave one more look at Nosey, who had stood all the time rivetted to the ground, expecting every moment that the constable would produce the handcuffs. Soon afterwards Julia went outside, walked round the hut, and stayed awhile, listening and looking in every direction. When she returned, Nosey said, in a hoa.r.s.e whisper:

"Is he gan yet?"

"I think," replied Julia, "he won't be coming again to-night. He has thrown away his trouble this time, anyhow; but ye must hould your tongue, Nosey, if ye want to save your neck; he means to have you if he can."

Nosey stayed on the run some weeks longer, following his sheep. It would not be advisable to go away suddenly, and, moreover, he recollected that what the eye could not see might some time be discovered by another of the senses. So he waited patiently, standing guard as it were over the dead, until his curiosity induced him to pay a farewell visit by daylight to the place where Baldy was buried.

There had been hot weather since the body had been deposited in the shallow grave, and the crevices among the piles of bluestones had been filled by the wind with the yellow stalks of decayed gra.s.s.

Nosey walked round his own particular pile, and inspected it closely.

He was pleased to find that it showed no signs of having been touched since he raised it. It was just like any of the other heaps of rocks around it. He had, at any rate, given Baldy as good a funeral as circ.u.mstances would permit, better than that of many a man who had perished of hunger, heat, and thirst, in the shelterless wastes of the Never-Never Land, "beyond Moneygrub's farthest run." Nosey and the weather had done their work so well that for the next fifteen years no shepherd, stockman, or squatter ever gave a second look at that unknown grave. The black snake coiled itself beneath the decaying skeleton, and spent the winter in secure repose. The native cat tore away bits of Baldy's clothing, and with them and the yellow gra.s.s made, year after year, a nest for its young among the whitening bones.

Everything, so far, had turned out quite as satisfactorily as any murderer could expect. Nosey had been game to do his man, and he had done him well. Julia was prudent enough to hold her tongue for her own sake; it was unlikely that any further search would be made for the lost shepherd; he had been safely put out of sight, and not even Julia knew where he was buried.

Nosey began to have a better opinion of himself than ever. Neither the police nor the law could touch him. He would never be called to account for putting away his brother shepherd, in this world at any rate; and as for the next, why it was a long way off, and there was time enough to think about it. The day of reckoning was distant, but it came at last, as it always does to every sinner of us all.

Nosey resigned his billet, and went to Nyalong. He lived in a hut in the eastern part of the township, not far from the lake, and near the corner of the road coming down from the Bald Hill. Here had been laid the foundation of a great inland city by a bush publican, two storekeepers, a wheelwright, and a blacksmith. Another city had been started at the western side of Wandong Creek, but its existence was ignored by the eastern pioneers.

The shepherd soon began to forget or despise the advice of his wife, Julia; his tongue grew loose again, and at the bar of the inn of the crossroads his voice was often heard loud and abusive. He felt that he had become a person of importance, as the possessor of a secret which n.o.body could discover. What he said and what he did was discussed about the township, and the chief constable listened to every report, expecting that some valuable information would accidentally leak out.

One day a man wearing a blue jumper and an old hat came down the road, stepped on to the verandah of the inn, and threw down his swag.

Nosey was there, holding forth to Bill the Butcher, d.i.c.k Smalley, Frank Barton, Bob Atkins, Charley Goodall, and George Brown the Liar.

A dispute occurred, in which the presumptuous stranger joined, and Nosey promptly knocked him off the verandah into the gutter. A valid claim to satisfaction was thus established, and the swagman showed a disposition to enforce it. He did not attempt to regain his position on the boards, but took his stand on the broad stone of honour in the middle of the road. He threw up his hat into the air, and began walking rapidly to and fro, clenched his fists, stiffened his sinews, and at every turn in his walk said:

"You'll find me as good a man as ever you met in your life."

This man's action promised real sport, and true Britons as we all were we were delighted to see him. Nosey stood on the verandah for a minute or two, watching the motions of the swagman; he did not seem to recollect all at once what the code of honour required, until Bill the Butcher remarked, "He wants you, Nosey," then Nosey went.

The two men met in the middle of the road, and put up their hands.

They appeared well-matched in size and weight. The swagman said:

"You'll find me as good a man as ever you met in your life."

Nosey began the battle by striking out with his right and left, but his blows did not seem to reach home, or to have much effect.

The swagman dodged and parried, and soon put in a swinging blow on the left temple. Nosey fell to the ground, and the stranger resumed his walk as before, uttering his war cry:

"You'll find me as good a man as ever you met in your life."

There were no seconds, but the rules of chivalry were strictly observed; the stranger was a true gentleman, and did not use his boots.

In the second round Nosey showed more caution, but the result was the same, and it was brought about by another hard blow on the temple.

The third round finished the fight. Nosey lay on the ground so long that Bill, the Butcher, went over to look at him, and then he threw up the sponge--metaphorically--as there was no sponge, nor any need of one.

The defeated Nosey staggered towards his hut, and his temper was afterwards so bad that Julia declined to stay with him any longer; she loosed the marriage bonds without recourse to law, and disappeared. Her husband went away westward, but he did not stay long. He returned to Nyalong and lived awhile alone in his hut there, but he was restless and dissatisfied. Everybody looked at him so curiously. Even the women and children stood still as he pa.s.sed by them, and began whispering to one another, and he guessed well enough why they were looking at him and what they were saying--"That's Nosey the murderer; he killed Baldy and hid him away somewhere; his wife said he ought to be hanged, and she has run away and left him."

When the hungry hawk comes circling over the grove of crookedy gum in which two magpies are feeding their callow young, the bush is soon filled with cries of alarm. The plump quail hides himself in the depths of a thick tussock; the bronze-winged pigeon dives into the shelter of the nearest scrub, while all the noisiest scolds of the air gather round the intruder. Every magpie, minah, and wattle-bird within a mile joins in the clamour. They dart at the hawk as he flies from tree to tree. When he alights on a limb they give him no peace; they flap their wings in his face, and call him the worst of names. Even the Derwent Jacka.s.s, the hypocrite with the shining black coat and piercing whistle, joins in the public outcry, and his character is worse than that of the hawk himself, for he has been caught in the act of kidnapping and devouring the unfledged young of his nearest neighbour. The distracted hawk has at length to retreat dinnerless to the swampy margin of the river where the tallest tea-trees wave their feathery tops in the wind.

In like manner the human hawk was driven from the township. He descended in the scale of crime, stole a horse, and departed by night.

Bill, the butcher, said next day: "Nosey has gone for good this time. He will ride that horse to death and then steal another."

At this time I rode through the Rises and called at the two huts; I found them occupied by two shepherds not unlike the former tenants, who knew little and cared less what had become of their predecessors.

Time empties thrones and huts impartially, and the king feels no pride in his monument of marble, nor the shepherd any shame beneath the shapeless cairn which hides his bones.

At this time the old races both of men and animals were dying out around Lake Nyalong, and others were taking their places. The last black child ever seen in the township was brought by its mother to the hut of a white woman. It was naked and very dirty, and she laid it down on the clay floor. The white woman's heart was moved with pity at the sight of the miserable little bairn. She took it up, washed it with warm water and soap, wrapped it in flannel, and gave it back to the mother. But the lubra was loath to receive it. She said, "Black picaninny all die. No good; white picaninny live."

The kangaroo, wombat, and dingo were fast dying out, as well a the blackfellow. We could all see well enough how the change was brought about. Millions of years ago, new species may have been evolved out of the old species, but nothing of the kind happens now. The white men of Australia were not evolved out of the black men. There are no family ties, and never will be, between the kangaroo, the wombat and wallaby, and their successors, the cattle, the sheep, and the goats.

We can kill species, but we can't create any.

The rabbit, destined to bring Nosey to the gallows, was a favoured animal on Austin's station at the Barwon. It was a privilege to shoot him--in small quant.i.ties--he was so precious. But he soon became, as the grammar says, a noun of mult.i.tude. He swarmed on the plains, hopped over the hills, burrowed among the rocks in the Rises, and nursed his mult.i.tudinous progeny in every hollow log of the forest. Neither mountain, lake, or river ever barred his pa.s.sage.

He ate up all the gra.s.s and starved the pedigree cattle, the well-born dukes and d.u.c.h.esses, and on tens of thousands of fertile acres left no food to keep the nibbling sheep alive. Every hole and crevice of the rocks was full of him. An uninvited guest, he dropped down the funnel-shaped entrance to the den of the wombat, and made himself at home with the wild cat and snake. He clothed the hills with a creeping robe of fur, and turned the Garden of the West into a wilderness. Science may find a theory to account for the beginning of all things, but among all her triumphs she has been unable to put an end to the rabbit. War has been made upon them by fire, dynamite, phosphorus, and all deadly poisons; by dogs, cats, weasels, foxes, and ferrets, but he still marches over the land triumphantly.

For fifteen years Nosey roamed from station to station under various names, between Queensland and the Murray, but wherever he went, the memory of his crime never left him. He had been taught in his boyhood that murder was one of the four sins crying to heaven for vengeance, and he knew that sooner or later the cry would be heard.

Sometimes he longed to unburden his mind to a priest, but he seldom saw or heard of one. The men with whom he worked and wandered were all like himself--lost souls who had taken the wrong turn in the beginning of their days, the failures of all trades and professions; thieves, drunkards, and gamblers; criminals who had fled from justice; men of pleasure and, therefore, of misery; youths of good family exported from England, Ireland, and Scotland to mend their morals, to study wool, and become rich squatters. All these men get colonial experience, but it does not make them saintly or rich. Here and there, all over the endless plains, they at last lie down and die, the dingoes hold inquests over them, and, literally, they go to the dogs, because they took the wrong turn in life and would not come back.

In 1868 Nosey and his two mates were approaching a station on the Lachlan. Since sunrise they had travelled ten miles without breakfast, and were both hungry and weary. They put down their swags in the shade of a small grove of timber within sight of the station buildings. Bob Castles said:

"I was shearing in them sheds in '52 when old Shenty owned the run.

He was a rum old miser, he was, would skin two devils for one hide; believe he has gone to h.e.l.l; hope so, at any rate. He couldn't read nor write much, but he could make money better'n any man I ever heard of. Bought two runs on the Murray, and paid 180,000 pounds for 'em in one cheque. He kept a lame schoolmaster to write his cheques and teach his children, gave him 40 pounds a year, the same as a shepherd. Lived mostly on mutton all the year round; never killed no beef for the station, but now and then an old bullock past work, salted him down in the round swamp for a change o' grub. Never grew no cabbage or wegetables, only a paddock of potatoes. Didn't want no visitors, 'cos he was afraid they'd want to select some of his run.

Wanted everything to look as poor and miserable as possible. He put on a clean shirt once a week, on Sabbath to keep it holy, and by way of being religious. Kept no fine furniture in the house, only a big hardwood table, some stools, and candle boxes. After supper old Mother Shenty sc.r.a.ped the potato skins off the table into her ap.r.o.n --she always boiled the potatoes in their jackets--and then Shenty lay down on it and smoked his pipe till bedtime, thinking of the best way to keep down expenses. A parson came along one day lifting a subscription for a church, or school, or something. He didn't get anything out of old Shenty, only a pannikin of tea and some damper and mutton. The old cove said: 'Church nor school never gave me nothing, nor do me no good, and I could buy up a heap o' parsons and schoolmasters if I wanted to, and they were worth buying. Us squatters is the harrystockrisy out here. The lords at home sends out their good-for-nothing sons to us, to get rich and be out of the way, and much good they does. Why don't you parsons make money by your eddication if it's any good, instead of goin' round beggin'?

You are all after the filthy lucre, wantin' to live on other folks.'

I was holdin' the parson's horse, and when he got into the saddle, he turns to old Shenty, and says: 'From rottenness you sprung, and to rottenness you'll go. Your money will drag you down to h.e.l.l; you'll want to throw it away, but it will burn into your soul for all eternity.'

"I am mortal hungry," continued Bob, "and they don't give no rations until about sundown, and we'll have to wait six hours. It's hard lines. I see there's an orchard there now, and most likely a wegtable garden--and cabbages. I'd like some boiled beef and cabbage. It wouldn't be no harm to try and get somethin' to eat, anyhow. What do you say, Ned? You was a swell cove once, and knows how to talk to the quality. Go and try 'em."

Ned went and talked to the "quality" so well that he brought back rations for three.

Towards the end of the year Nosey arrived at Piney Station, about forty miles from the Murray, and obtained employment. Baldy's bones had been lying under the rocks for nearly fifteen years. It was absurd to suppose they could ever be discovered now, or if they were, that any evidence could be got out of them. Nosey felt sure that all danger for himself was pa.s.sed, but still the murder was frequently in his mind. The squatter was often lonely, and his new man was garrulous, and one day Nosey, while at work, began to relate many particulars of life in the old country, in Van Diemen's Land, and in the other colonies, and he could not refrain from mentioning the greatest of his exploits.