By Blow and Kiss

CHAPTER XIX

When the men came back to Thunder Ridge, they found that Ess had gone down to the home station at Coolongolong. Sinclair, the boss, had been up in his sulky, and asked her if she was ready to go back with him.

“We won’t have room for half-a-dozen huge trunks, you know, Miss Lincoln,” he laughed. “You’ll have to pack close this time.”

“I’ve got everything I’ll need in one dress-basket, which will go under the seat,” she assured him. “I’ve had some lessons on the necessity of travelling light.”

She flushed a little to herself at the memory of the giving of that lesson and the buggy ride that had followed, and ran in to say good-bye to Aleck Gault.

“Good-bye, Miss Ess,” he said. “Don’t be away longer than you can help, and see if you can find some roses to bring back in your cheek. I’ll be getting into trouble with Ned Gunliffe if you don’t. He’ll be saying you’ve worn yourself to death doing sick-nurse.”

She bade him good-bye gaily enough, but went wishing that he and the others would not talk so about her in connection with Ned Gunliffe. She knew that she had no right to resent such talk or feel hurt by it, but the fact remained that she did, and again she found herself wishing that she had not agreed to their engagement being spoken of yet – she would not allow herself to wish that she had not consented to it at all.

She went out and took her seat in the sulky, and the boss laid his whip lightly across the trotters, and they spun through the gate and on down the rocky slope.

“And what are you thinking of the out-back country, Miss Lincoln?” he said. “You’ve seen a slice of it now.”

“I still think it’s rather dreadful,” she answered. “It seems so cruel. The way the poor sheep had to be handled and driven nearly made me sick, and then it was such a narrow escape they had after all.”

“And I’m afraid they’re not quite escaped yet,” he said. “The feed on the hills is giving out, and the wild dogs are playing havoc. I’ve nearly made up my mind to bring down as many as I can get again, and kill them all and boil them down for tallow.”

Ess shuddered, and they drove in silence down to the high fence, which had been repaired again where the rails had been pulled out to let the sheep through.

“Don’t get down,” he said, when she made a movement to spring out and open the gate. “The horses and I have come here too often not to know the trick of doing without dismounting.”

He drove alongside and lifted the latch, and pushed the gate open with the butt of his whip, whirled the horses round and trotted through, leaned out and swung it back, so that it slammed to and the latch clicked into place.

“It’s hot down here,” he said, lifting his hat and wiping his brow. Ess laughed.

“It’s hot everywhere, isn’t it?” she said. “I’m really forgetting what it feels like to be cool.”

“You’ll get the heat into your bones if you stay here a time,” said the boss; “most of us do, and we shiver like a wet dog if it comes a cold wind. We get them cold enough in the winter sometimes in the hills – cold enough for us, anyway.”

“You might almost think we were at sea here,” said Ess, looking round the straight-edged empty horizon.

“We have plenty of space round us,” agreed the boss. “Ten thousand acres is a Small Holding with us. And some of the holdings run up toward the million acres. Big figures, eh, but this is a country of big figures. It’s eight miles across this paddock as the crow flies, and it’s longer the other way. You don’t find the like of that in the inside country now, do you?” He spoke with an air of subdued pride, and Ess looked round her at the flat dead plain, with nothing in sight but an occasional scurrying rabbit, and wondered that a man could find anything to be proud of in such country.

“There was a man lost in one of our back paddocks that’s not as big as this,” the boss went on. “One of the boundary riders found his bones and rags of clothes near two years after, and there was a note safe and tight in his billy can. He’d tried to take a short cut from one tank to another, and it had come on a grey day or two – the sun clouded over so he couldn’t steer his way – and he wandered round and round and crossways for four days, and then wrote the note. And Lord knows how long he walked or crawled after that. And one of my own men lost the track coming across this very paddock, although the road’s scored plain enough, as you see. He took a track that branched off, and he thought was the main one, and it petered out, and he tried to cut across to the other track. He missed it somehow, and was out for a day and a night. You’d wonder a man could get lost with the hills back there to guide him, but he said a mirage or something hid them. But he’s no bushman of course – he’s an Englishman. And often men lose their heads when they first find they’re lost.”

After they passed through the next fence and trotted some distance in the next paddock, Ess pointed.

“Are those trees?” she asked. “Or another mirage?”

“They’re trees,” said the boss; “dead ones. There’s quite a clump of them, and nobody knows where they came from. They grew where there wasn’t a sign of one before, and died in a couple of years. It was the rain that brought them up. It’s fair wonderful what the rain brings up at times, and how quick. You wouldn’t think now to look round you that a week’s good rain would be enough to fetch the grass out up to your knees. But I’ve seen the time when the kangaroo grass came to my waist, and me sitting in the saddle. I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever see Coolongolong green again,” he finished with a little sigh.

“Why, surely, Mr. Sinclair,” said Ess. “It must rain before very long now.”

“There’s no must about that out here,” said the boss. “It mightn’t rain enough to spoil a lady’s silk dress in the next twelve months. It mightn’t rain a good heavy shower in the next five years or twenty-five for all we know, though that would be worse than is ever likely. Five is easy possible, though. And, then again, it might start to-night, little and all as it looks like it, and not stop for a month. We’re fifteen miles from the nearest bend of the river here, but I’ve seen it flooded and running like a river over this very paddock. You spoke of it looking like a sea, but I’ve seen it like a sea – water from one horizon to the other.”

“Let’s hope we’ll see it again,” said Ess, brightly, “although not if it’s going to flood Coolongolong out. I’d rather be in the hills then.”

The boss smiled at her. “The home station stands higher than ever a flood has reached yet,” he said, “but I’d be glad enough to see it washing round the walls of it to-morrow. I could build another one if I wanted, with the money that would mean. There it is amongst the trees now – can you see?”

“How beautifully green the trees are,” cried Ess. “They look so cool and refreshing, too.”

“Yes,” said the boss, proudly. “And I can give you fresh fruit and green vegetables for your dinner to-night, and you can walk on grass as thick and soft as velvet in the garden. And it’s all the work of man’s hands, and I’ve watched every blade and leaf grow. I put an oil engine pump in, and we carry the water from the river by a pipe.”

“Why did you put the house so far from the river?” said Ess. “I should have thought it would have been so much nicer right on the banks.”

“So it would,” said the boss, laughing; “so it would – as long as it stayed on the banks. But the first time the river came down in flood – ” he finished the sentence with a significant sweeping gesture.

They drove in through the homestead gate, and Ess’s eyes sparkled at the sight of trim green hedges and vivid green grass. The contrast was the more pleasant after the heat and dryness and dust of the arid wastes they had been driving over.

“Oh, I’m so glad I came, Mr. Sinclair,” she cried. “It is beautiful.”

“You’ll understand maybe how proud I am of it,” said the old boss, lovingly looking round, “and what it would mean to me to lose it.”

“Don’t,” she pleaded. “You won’t – you can’t lose it.”

“Well, well, I’m glad to have it to show you while it’s still my own,” he said. “Now jump down. There’s the housekeeper at the door. She’ll show you your room and make you comfortable. And you can have a real bath and a shower, and maybe Ah Sing will let you walk in the garden and pluck a flower or two.” He nodded towards the Chinaman who was spraying the grass with a hose, and oddly enough the thought in Ess’s mind as she watched the sparkling shower fall was the pity that such beautiful water should be wasted – she would have liked to drink it all.

Ess stayed at the home station for over a week, and the old boss and the housekeeper made much of her, and petted her, and let her ask questions to her heart’s content.

Indeed it is doubtful if the boss did not get more pleasure from answering her questions and showing her the house than she had from asking them and being shown it.

He took her round the outside and pointed out the walls made of concrete – concrete brought up in bags from the coast, and carried by the station waggons the long miles from the railway to the township, and the township to the station, and mixed and moulded in moulds made on the station, and built in walls by his own men’s labour. Everything had been done under his own direction and planning and eye. He had drawn his own plans, his own men had hewn the timber from his own trees, and sawn them in the saw-pit by hand. They had dug the foundations, and laid the floors, and built the walls, and cut joists and rafters, and put the roof on; they had made and fitted every door and window, and done their own plumbing and glazing and painting and papering – only in one or two of the bedrooms was there any wall paper in the house, though; the other rooms were walled with beautiful light-coloured native woods. A considerable amount of the furniture was station made, and, looking at it, Ess could hardly believe that it had not been turned out by a city factory. There were no carpets on the wood floors; they were merely stained, and scattered thick with rugs made from the black and white skins of the station sheep, or of the foxes trapped and killed on the run. The wide hall from which the living rooms opened was hung round with native weapons, boomerangs, and spears, and waddies, the huge head and sweeping horns of an immense bull, the masks and brushes of foxes, the skins of kangaroos, wild dogs, black swans, and snakes.

This hall was the boss’s chiefest pride, and he told Ess endless tales of the trophies round the walls; of how much he had paid for that ram, whose head looked down on them – “the first stud ram I bought, Miss Lincoln, and I’d only about twelve hundred sheep then. I’ve shorn over sixty thousand in one shearing since then” – the ancestry for generations back of the prize bull; the tale of the riding down and killing of that fox; the long hunts and innumerable traps and poison baits it took to kill that dingo; this skin of a snake that had been killed when they were clearing the ground for the foundations of the house (“he bit me too, and I’d a bad day from the bite I tell you. And I said I’d have his skin, and hang it over where he was killed; and so I did – right under where we stand was the spot”).

And as the stories went on, and the boss ran back over the years and told the tales of his first days there, when the country was rank wild and there wasn’t a fence on or near it, the thought kept haunting Ess – “And now what if he loses it?”

And then one night the boss came back from Thunder Ridge and told her quietly and simply that he was at the end of the string – he had given orders for the sheep to be brought down, as many as could be rounded up and were fit to travel in, and killed to boil down for tallow.

Ess could have wept for very pity.

“I brought you a letter,” said the boss, and handed it to her. She took it mechanically and glanced at the strange writing, and when the boss left her she tore it open and looked first at the signature. It was signed “Ned.”

With a little gesture of impatience – she hated the thought of receiving or having to write anything in the way of a love-letter, she told herself, although, if she had analysed the feeling, she would have known it was love-letters from or to Ned that she disliked the thought of – she turned back and read the letter through.

Her amazement grew as she read – grew and changed swiftly to indignation, and then to hot anger.

“My Dear Ess,” the letter said, “I was sorry to find you had gone when we returned here, especially as I had something of importance to say to you. I had meant to wait till you returned here or till I could see you, but I feel that it is a thing I ought not to delay letting you know my views of, as possibly your knowing them, and how emphatic they are, may check the mischief. If you will look at the enclosed note, you will understand what I refer to. No matter how it came into my possession – it is enough that it did so, and that it shows me clearly that you have been led, cheated into it perhaps by a misguided sense of pity, to meeting secretly the man I told you I wished you to have nothing whatever to do with. I am not concluding that you meant any harm by these meetings, but whether harm would come of them or not I do not care – I wish them to stop for ever. My own feelings to you have in no way changed, but – ”

Ess ceased to read, with an angry exclamation. “What does he mean? What note – ” She looked in the envelope she still held, and plucked a twisted scrap of paper from it.

On the outside fold was clearly written “Steve Knight,” and inside was a scribbled pencil note – “Come over again to-night. Sorry I was rude last night, but remember our compact. – E.L.”

She recognised the writing and initials instantly. They were her own.

Ess went to her own room and wrote two notes. To Ned Gunliffe she wrote: “I have received your letter and enclosure. I have only to reply that I refuse utterly to have anything to do with a man who distrusts me or imagines me capable of the conduct you evidently do. I never wish to see you or hear from you again. – Ess Lincoln.”

To her uncle she wrote: “Will you, please, in Ned Gunliffe’s presence, show the enclosed note to Steve Knight, and tell him I wish him to say where and when he received it? You will remember my sending it to him by you when we were all in camp. I have just received it from Ned Gunliffe, and have told him I never want to see him again. Please say nothing of this to the others at the Ridge – only that Ned and I are no longer engaged. – Ess.”

She left the letters in the rack in the hall, knowing that they would probably be taken over next day.

Usually a man rode over to the coach road twice a week – once to leave the letter bag hanging on the roadside for the passing coach to pick up, and once to bring back the bag it dropped. The incoming bag was due next day, and a man would ride over with the Thunder Ridge letters, and would take hers with him.

Next day, when the man brought the mail in, she went to the hall where the boss was sorting it out, and got hers – she still wrote to and heard from her friends in the city – and heard the man say “The river’s coming down good an’ heavy, an’ they tell me there’s been a lot o’ rain out-back in the hills.”

The boss looked at him quietly. “And how high is it in the river?”

“Up to the seven-foot peg,” said the man, and the boss nodded and picked the Ridge letters out, and gave him Ess’s from the rack and sent him off.

“Rain in the hills,” said Ess, who had listened breathlessly to the conversation. “Does that mean we’ll get it here?”

The boss smiled at her sadly. “I’m afraid not, my dear. They often get rain up there, where we don’t get a drop. It’s a long way from here, and much higher you see. But if the river would rise another three foot, we might have it running up the billabongs. There’s an old channel that runs out for a dozen miles beyond the station here, and curves round and back to the river again. If the river rises high enough to flood that, we’d have a few hundred acres in grass soon after. But it’s just as likely to drop the three foot by morning as to rise it. Still, you know, we can hope – we can hope.”

“I do hope, oh, indeed I hope,” said Ess, earnestly. “And if it rose more than the three foot?”

“Every foot it rose would flood hundreds of acres more of my paddocks,” said the boss. “There’s another billabong further over towards Thunder Ridge that begins to flow even before this ten-foot mark is covered. Twelve or fourteen foot would mean thousands of acres flooded, and it might keep the sheep going quite a spell longer. But twelve foot and over is running a banker, and we can hardly expect that.”

It was evident however that hope had risen in his heart, for twice that day he sent a man to the river to see how it was, and twice the report came back – “Still rising.”

The next time the old man had his own sulky brought round, and Ess asked that she might go with him. They drove fast, the boss flicking constantly at the horses, and when they dodged through the trees and swept up the slope of the river banks and halted abruptly within a pebble toss of the steep cliff that dropped to the water’s edge, Ess looked eagerly at the crawling brown flood, and then – for that told her nothing of what she wished to know – at the boss’s face.

“It’s dropped a couple of inches,” he said quietly, and Ess could not understand his calm in the face of such possibilities as hung on the rise or fall of inches of water. “A couple of inches,” he repeated, “since the last man was here, and that’s only a few hours ago. I’m afraid it’s only been a heavy shower in the hills, and it’s over.”

He pointed out the pegs he had had driven deep in the steep bank opposite, so that he could mark the rise and fall, and he drove along the bank amongst the trees to show her the entrance to the billabong he had spoken of. “You’ll notice that the banks are several feet higher than the plains beyond,” he said, “and here at the entrance to the billabong there’s a cut out of this embankment. When the water rises to the level of the cut, it overflows, and wanders round the depression in the plain till it finds its way back lower down.”

“Wait,” said Ess, and jumped down and ran to the break in the bank, and slid down into it, and stooped and laid something in the centre of it, and clambered out again and ran back to the sulky.

“You’ll think me horribly childish, or foolish, or superstitious, or something,” she said breathlessly, “when I tell you what I was doing. It was a little charm I had, something that was given to me by a very dear friend years ago, and has always been dear to me. It’s a luck-bringer, and I’ve laid it there with a little wish that it will bring the water up and up, and flooding over it, and out across the plains.”

But there was no laughter in the eyes of the boss as he looked at her, only his unspoken thanks for the thought and the wish.

They drove back in silence, each busy with their own thoughts.

And next morning Ess was wakened by a shrill coo-ee and a rattling at the door just after daybreak. She heard opening and shutting doors and the boss’s voice at the front door.

And in five minutes there was a tap at her door, and in reply to her quick “Yes – what is it?” the boss’s voice came, steady and quiet as ever, but with just a trace of excitement and jubilation in it. “She’s up, Miss Lincoln – up over the ten and still rising – and your luck-bringer is under water.”

CHAPTER XX

All that morning low clouds drifted across the sky, and Ess was in and out to examine them, and look long across the plain in the hope of seeing the rain clouds looming up.

And when a thin light shower drifted down, Ess sang for very joy, and ran to the old housekeeper, and begged her to come out in it and feel it falling. The housekeeper laughed at her and shook her head. “Wait,” she said, “wait, my dear. It’s soon yet to be rejoicin’. ’Tisn’t a shower like that we’re needin’, and I fancy the boss is countin’ more on the water from the river than from the clouds.”

“It’s going to rain; it’s going to rain,” sang Ess, and danced out to the verandah again to watch the moisture dripping slowly from the trees.

But within half an hour the shower passed and the sun came out again. Ess went down to the gate and looked across the plain. It was steaming like a cauldron, and when the boss drove up he pointed to the vapour and laughed. “There goes your rain,” he cried, “off back to the clouds again. But, never mind, that sort of watering-can sprinkle isn’t much good to us. Come and I’ll show you something, though – something that’s coming in over your luck-bringer.”

She jumped up, and he drove to where a silver streak was showing on the horizon, and when they came to it he pulled up, and Ess watched the trickle of water creeping slowly, so slowly, across the plain. She gazed at it in fascination – this fraction-of-an-inch-deep flood – that seemed so stealthy and deliberate in its movement. The dry earth yawned hungrily for it, and the hot sand drank it in, but still it crept on and on, widening and spreading towards their feet even as they watched.