Gripped By Drought Read online

  Gripped by Drought

  ____________

  Gripped by Drought is a powerful story of a man’s battle not only with the elements of nature which threatened the ruin of his huge Australian sheep-farm, but also with a loveless and unhappy marriage. For Frank Mayne, master of well-nigh a million-acre sheep station, life assumed its most dreary aspect. No rain for his farm, a wife who involved him in an orgy of spending and entertainment, and with disaster just round the corner, there seemed little prospect of Happiness. Yet in the darkest hour of all, after many unexpected and sometimes thrilling situations, the darkest hour of the drought gave way to rain and Mayne’s tribulations became of the past.

  BOOKS BY ARTHUR UPFIELD

  NOVELS

  The House of Cain

  The Barakee Mystery

  The Beach of Atonement

  The Sands of Windee

  A Royal Abduction

  Gripped by Drought

  The Great Melbourne Cup Mystery*

  Wings Above the Diamantina

  Mr. Jelly’s Business

  Winds of Evil

  The Bone is Pointed

  The Mystery of Swordfish Reef

  Bushranger of the Skies

  Death of a Swagman

  The Devil’s Steps

  An Author Bites the Dust

  The Mountains Have a Secret

  The Widows of Broome

  The Bachelors of Broken Hill

  The New Shoe

  Venom House

  Murder Must Wait

  Death of a Lake

  Sinister Stones

  The Battling Prophet

  Man of Two Tribes

  The Bushman Who Came Back

  Bony and the Black Virgin

  Journey to the Hangman

  Valley of Smugglers

  The White Savage

  The Will of the Tribe

  The Body at Madman’s Bend

  The Lake Frome Monster†

  Breakaway House

  NONFICTION

  The Murchison Murders

  *Published only as a serial in the Melbourne Herald, October 22-November 17, 1933.

  †Posthumously published; mostly written byJ.L. Price from Upfield’s copious notes for the projected book.

  THE

  GRIPPED BY DROUGHT

  by

  ARTHUR W. UPFIELD

  ETT Imprint

  Sydney

  Gripped by Drought was originally published by Hutchinson & Co. Ltd., in 1932.

  ETT IMPRINT & www.arthurupfield.com

  PO Box R1906, Royal Exchange NSW 1225 Australia

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publishers.

  First published by Hutchinson & Company 1932

  This eBook edition published by ETT Imprint 2015

  Copyright William Upfield 2015

  ISBN 978-0-9943096-3-1

  Digital edition distributed by

  Port Campbell Press

  www.portcampbellpress.com.au

  eBook Conversion by Winking Billy

  TO MY FRIEND

  E. V. WHYTE

  to whom I am indebted for the pastoral statistics and other data which have made this story possible.

  All characters and incidents in

  this book are entirely fictitious.

  Author’s Preface

  THERE is no greater Australian drama than a three-years’ drought, and such a drought, associated with drought in the human heart, is the theme of this plain tale for plain people.

  The course of this fictitious drought is based on the course of a real drought. I have followed the weather records over an actual three-year drought period, and no city critic can say that such a drought is impossible. Similarly, I have followed actual wool prices over the same period. And, finally, the succession of mental phases which the “new-chum” in the bush proper must live through, or else desert to a city, is real and based on personal experience.

  I should like to add that my original title for this work was the one all-sufficient word Drought. It was found, however, that already a novel under this title was in circulation, so that regretfully the present more sensational title was substituted.

  KALAMUNDA, W.A.

  Contents

  THE FIRST YEAR

  I. DIAMOND DAYS

  II. ATLAS

  III. OLD JOHN

  IV. THE MANAGER OF THURINGAH

  V. THE CAMP

  VI. THE SHEARING

  VII. THE SECOND PHASE

  THE SECOND YEAR

  XIII. THE PICTURE

  IX. FUR

  X. MONEY

  XI. LABOUR

  XII. THE DOOMED

  XIII. THE SECOND SHEARING

  XIV. SPRING-TIME

  XV. THE WARNING

  THE THIRD YEAR

  XVI. “SELL ATLAS!”

  XVII. BATTLE SCENES

  XVIII. THE THIRD SHEARING

  XIX. THE POISON BELT

  XX. THE FALL

  XXI. CONFIDENCES

  XXII. THE GATE-CRASHER

  XXIII. CAMERON’S GREATEST TRIUMPH

  XXIV. THE NEW LIFE

  THE FIRST YEAR

  CHAPTER I

  DIAMOND DAYS

  I

  THAT morning of early June, when Feng Ching-wei rode a spirited dapple-grey mare beside the River Darling in western New South Wales, found his mind busied with a problem that Time was beginning to describe as a Sin of Omission.

  Following considered judgment he had, six months before, refused to take twenty-one shillings a head for nine thousand wether sheep, because the price offered had been half a crown below his own valuation. The morrow would witness the arrival of the prince whose steward he was; and, in rendering account of his stewardship, he might give just reason for dissatisfaction, not for failing to increase the talents lent him–namely, sheep–but for not having decreased them. The number of sheep on the great Atlas sheep-run that morning really should have been less by nine thousand.

  A superb day that tenth of June–a calm, sparkling, intoxicating day, to be found only in the hinterland of Australia during the mid-winter months; a diamond day, for the azure sky was reflected by the pools of water lying in the clay-pans, the golden sunlight was reflected by the myriad leaves of the giant gum trees bordering the river in a stately avenue a thousand miles long, and the very atmosphere was a brilliant crystal that magnified and brought near the western line of red, whale-backed sand-dunes.

  The horse was walking on her toes, her neck arched, her nostrils patches of vivid crimson, her foam-flecked mouth working ever at the restraining bit. Horse and man were passing over a bar of red sand which, crossing the grey river flats from the distant pine lands, stabbed at the river’s flank. Tiny shoots of grass gave to certain of its slopes in alignment with the eye a faint tinge of emerald. Three days previously it had rained.

  No more than the horse had the rider lived in China. Born thirty-one years before on the gold diggings of Tibooburra. in the north-west of the State, of his parents Feng Ching-wei remembered nothing. He had been adopted by Old Man Maync, the creator of Atlas from the wilderness, who had begun to despair of ever having a son of his own. However, when Feng was four, Frank Mayne was born, and the two boys, reared in the same nursery, later attended the same schools and were articled to the same squatter. When Old Man Mayne died in the first year of the Peace, both boys returned to Atlas, where Feng was content to remain firm friend and shrewd financial adviser to the young master who had become sole owner of nearly seventy thousand sheep and a Gove
rnment leasehold of over three-quarters of a million acres.

  The fight Old Man Mayne had fought to leave his son an inheritance was one of grim, almost savage, tenacity, governed by the motto, “What I have I hold.” After the three-years’ drought at the beginning of the century, he had consolidated the financial foundations of Atlas. The nineteen-thirteen-fourteen drought had failed to weaken those foundations, although the flocks were atrociously depleted. When Frank Mayne su”eeded to his inheritance he faced the booming postwar years, and a su”ession of gratifyingly large annual wool cheques had sent him on a three-years’ world tour, leaving Feng Ching-wei sole arbiter of the destinies of Atlas. And on the morrow Frank Mayne was returning to Atlas, bringing with him an English wife and an eleven months’ old baby boy.

  Whilst Feng rode homeward, following the track winding among the wide-spaced box trees growing on the river flats, he recalled the moments when he had sat in the Atlas office with Frank Mayne’s letter before him. The words, the quickly written, impulsive words, lay beneath his hands, which trembled. “Ere you get this, old man, I shall be married.” Married! Frank in England and married! And twenty miles south of Atlas–Ann Shelley!

  They three–Ann Shelley, Frank Mayne, and Feng Ching-wei– were of the same class and generation. They had grown up together, even schooldays failing to come between them. Whilst there never had been a declaration of love between Ann and Frank, before he went away young Mayne had hinted that after he had had his fling he would propose marriage to Ann. With the arrogance of youth he had said it, and Feng then had no doubt that Frank would propose and that Ann would accept him. But Frank married suddenly in England, and he never suspected the hurt he thereby rendered Ann Shelley, the hurt that rebounded from her to his lifelong friend, Feng Ching-wei.

  2

  With the fates of Ann Shelley and Frank Mayne burdening his mind, Feng Ching-wei did not at once see the sun-reflecting car, which emerged from a belt of mallee, speeding towards him at an outrageous pace. It was some seconds after the mare first became excited that the increasing hum of the engine penetrated his curtain of day-dreaming. Then, looking up and recognizing the low-hung body of the Tin Tin car, he reined off the track and dismounted. The car slowed to a stop, a gloved hand was waved to him, the blue silk scarf floating out over the rear of the single-seater beckoned him. With quickened heart-beats he led the horse close to the machine, behind the steering-wheel of which sat the mistress of Tin Tin Station–Miss Ann Shelley.

  “Feng! I have been hoping to meet you,” she exclaimed gaily, her grey eyes alight, her face flushed by the quick rush through the air.

  “Meeting you makes a lovely day-perfect,” Feng murmured.

  “It makes me feel very young–meeting you,” was her parry. “You know, Feng, even though we ‘growed up’ together, and you are four years older than I, you make me always feel–well, juvenile. Your face is without a line, your black eyes regarding me so benevolently are inscrutable. I have never been able to read your thoughts. No wonder you play poker so well! Will you be glad or sorry to step down from the Seat of Atlas to-morrow?”

  “I shall not regret abdicating, Ann,” he said with slow, perfect articulation. “I have done my best to govern Atlas, yet would I rather occupy the position of Grand Vizier; because in that sphere responsibility is less, and I can fill my mind with matters other than sheep and money, fodders and rain.”

  “Your pictures?”

  “Exactly–my pictures. Whilst I paint I am a god. At all other times I am a…worm. For three years I have seldom been a god.”

  He was smiling at her with his old trick of quizzical penetration. His semi-veiled eyes gleamed with the warmth of friendship. He was master absolute of himself.

  “You will want now to have me sit a few more times to finish my portrait. I–well, things at Atlas will be different, won’t they?”

  Search though she did she failed to observe any change in his expression.

  “That is undoubted, Ann. Even so, Mrs. Mayne surely will be as pleased as I shall for you to visit Atlas often. I was hoping that when Frank was again firmly established on the Seat of Atlas you would give me a few more sittings. You see, the portrait that has been occupying both our time and our interest was not satisfactory, almost finished though it was. And you know what I do to a canvas with which I am not satisfied.”

  “You did not destroy it?”

  He inclined his head. She accepted the inclination as his reluctant assent. She did not see his eyes.

  “Feng, you are wicked!” she chided him, genuine regret in her musical voice. “It promised to be your best picture. And now–I’m afraid I shall not be able to come to Atlas very often.”

  Looking up, the swords of their gaze met. What he saw in her eyes hurt him. He said:

  “I believe I understand. The mountain shall go to Mahomet.”

  “You are one of the understanding kind, old boy. It’s three years since he went away, but Time has been a poor doctor. The rain came just in time, didn’t it? Did I not say that the dry spell would not last?”

  “You did,” he assented, again smiling. “You predicted rain to me on the telephone, having observed a bunch of steers racing about with tails elevated. If the frosts hold off, we should show a good picking of grass by shearing time. Another good rain next month, and a further fall in August, will assure us summer feed. How many do you expect to shear this year?”

  “Somewhere about thirty thousand, I suppose. My lambs have done well, in spite of the dry spell. Well, I must go, Feng. Everything ready at Atlas?”

  “Everything, thanks to your assistance. I should have been hopelessly at sea had you not come to my rescue with the decorations and the furniture.”

  “I did it to help you,” she said softly, adding, with a touch of colour in her cheeks, “and Frank. But you’ll say never a word about it, will you? It–it was my real present to him.”

  Unconsciously falling into the imagery of his race, he said:

  “If the greatest-souled man climbed to the top of a mountain peak a hundred miles high, he would see standing on a peak he could never hope to reach, a woman.”

  “She would be very cold, Feng,” Ann said with smiling lips, but with misty eyes. “Au revoir!”

  The engine hummed. Feng Ching-wei stepped back, hat in hand. He was smiling calmly when the girl let out the clutch pedal.

  “Au revoir, Ann!”

  She waved to him and was gone.

  3

  Continuing his meditations, Feng walked on homeward, the mare docilely following. Australian born, reared in the omnipresent bush among Australia’s bluest-blooded squatocracy, educated in Australia’s best schools, there was nothing in his gait or his physical appearance to betray his ancestry. Weighed in European scales he was by no means ill-looking, descended, as he was, from stock much above the coolie class. As a man he was a credit to Old Man Mayne’s judgment of human pedigree, which was as sound as it notably had been in the case of cattle, horses, and sheep. His gabardine-slack encased legs were straight, his body lean and supple, his hands as well formed as those of any polished aristocrat.

  The track presently led him to the river bank at one of its sharp bends. That morning the stream was low, trickling from deep hole to deep hole–the inevitable hole washed out at every sharp elbow. The water was brown. But yesterday it had been as clear as crystal. The rain had sent down a freshet.

  The woman fishing with a hand-line failed to hear the approach of man and horse. She was seated ungracefully at the rocky edge of a large, deep hole; and, observing her, Feng halted, so unusual was it to meet with a female sundowner. For that she was a sundowner, i.e., tramp, was evident. On the branch of a fallen tree partly buried in the bank was laid a rolled “swag”, composed of blankets and personal effects, and near by a billy-can blackened by half a thousand camp fires.

  “Good day!” called Feng.

  The woman stood up, and turned round to look at him on the bank far above her.
r />   “Good day, mister!” she replied in a faint Irish brogue containing a hint of hostility. “How far to Atlas homestead?”

  “From here it would be three miles. Surely you are not travelling alone?”

  “An’ wot’s agin it? Are you objectin’?”

  “Not at all,” Feng told her politely. Slightly amused, he watched her climb the bank. Her bare arms were mahoganied by sun and wind, and in circumference were enormous. Feng felt dwarfed when she stood before him, not by reason of her height, which was no more than his own, but rather by her breadth. Her weather-beaten face, with its button of a nose and now grim mouth, was not unpleasing, but the glint in the wide-spaced, small blue eyes forewarned him. With her hands on her hips she said:

  “Me name is Mary O’Doyle. County Clare, me. Any argument?”

  Feng masked surprise and slight perturbation with a guileless smile, saying:

  “I am a man of peace, madam. If to address you is an offence, you must excuse me, for I did not know it. You will admit that a woman carrying a swag is unusual.”

  “For a year I’ve carried it. Ever since me second husband died beneath the wheels of a table-top wagon,” she said in truculent explanation. “It just shows you, mister, wot drink will do to a man. The blackguard! He left me without a farthing, me as was a gentleman’s datter.”

  “For a year! Have you been on tramp for a year?”

  “Sure! Would ye be havin’ me live on me husband’s relations? An’ ‘im dying in drink. Faugh! ’Enery Jones was a weakling in drink. Six pints would knock ‘im rotten. ’Ad I ’ave known. I would niver ’ave married ’im. I would ’ave stuck to me honoured maiden name av O’Doyle. To go an’ fall off’n a wagon, ’cos ’e was drunk!”