Gripped By Drought Read online

  His activities at this time were producing amazing results. Undoubtedly his success in catching foxes, like his success in rabbit-trapping, was based less on downright slavish labour, although this aspect was by no means unimportant, than on a paradoxical love of all wild things–a love that demanded and received an intensive study of the habits of the animals he slew.

  It is remarkable that when the mating season starts foxes will not take a poisoned bait, whether of meat, fish, or butter. Obviously, Mace thought, they must eat something. Inquiries of old hands and other trappers failed to produce the solution of this mystery, a failure that put an end to fox-trapping at a period when fox pelts are at their best. Undeterred by failure, he held a post-mortem examination on a fox he had caught in a dingo trap, which revealed the fact that Reynard was subsisting on centipedes, scorpions, and trapdoor spiders.

  His surprising catches this winter rested also on one other thing.. During the three months of his foxing operations on Atlas it rained but once, and then only seven points. The absence of surface-water compelled the foxes, with the sheep, to visit the comparatively few dams and wells. They came to Mace, instead of his being compelled to seek out their favourite natural watering-places.

  When the last lingering watchful crow had followed the last galah flock to the distant gum trees, Tom Mace dragged the sheep’s head at the end of the rope completely round the dam outside the mullock embankment. The mark on the ground made by the passage of the head was distinct, but the darkness was fast making it hard for him to follow when over the mark he laid a complete line of poisoned baits about two feet apart.

  His preparations now complete, he walked the few hundred yards to his truck, parked beneath a wattle-tree, against which was his camp. On the fire he threw thick dead timber, and then proceeded scrupulously to wash his hands clean of possible poison crystals, as well as to scrub his finger-nails. Later, when the leaping flames made the walls of night draw close about the camp, he grilled mutton chops on a netted wire grid, and ate them with hearty relish to the accompaniment of buttered damper, for now winter was come the luxury of butter was made possible.

  Not an insect of any kind moved over the surface of the windswept, sand-ribbed ground. It was too cold to sleep on his camp-stretcher, and he scorned to erect the tent. Unrolling a mattress of straw, he laid on it his blankets, and at that end nearest the fire set his pillow so that when he lay down the fire provided ample light.

  Drawing at a cigarette, the stars claimed his idle attention. Familiar with that celestial jeweller’s show-window, recognizing all, yet able to name but a few of those marvellous, distant worlds, Mace, as he always did, dreamed of Eva and the now rapidly approaching time when he could offer her a home of her own.

  Already this season he had secured more than six hundred foxes, four hundred of which he had skinned and for each pelt would receive something like eight shillings. Whereas the rabbits had provided grains of gold, the foxes now were providing small gold nuggets. The total of his banking account already reached three hundred pounds, and before the mating season put a stop to his foxing activities he hoped to increase it by another hundred at least.

  Eva! Pretty, trusting, innocent Eva! She was now kept constantly busy by Ethel Mayne’s succession of house parties. She saw the arrival of a real chef from Sydney, a butler from Melbourne, a chauffeur to drive Ethel’s single-seater, a boots, and a kitchen help, in addition to three extra maids from Broken Hill. The butler was young and good looking. There were moments when Tom Mace feared that butler, and at the same time lashed himself for doubting his Eva.

  Lying on his blankets, the “quok-quoks” of quarrelling foxes came to him from the direction of the dam, and sometimes a fox’s barked “whorl-whorl” or softer “quok-quok” from an animal coming from far to drink.

  Early Mace turned in. Once–at two o’clock–he was aroused by the cold to replenish the fire with wood. Not trusting his own time sense, his alarm-clock roused him at half-past six, and, until the day gave requisite light, he ate a little breakfast and smoked cigarettes.

  When the coming day had lit the sky, yet before the darkness had lifted from the earth, he carried a dozen chaff-bags and an empty tin to the place where his poison-trail began and ended. There he waited, beating the cold out of his hands by slapping them against his legs. Overhead a crow flew with swishing wings and a mocking “caw-aw”, determined to be early and to steal a feast–if possible, to alight on a dead fox and tear its pelt with its beak.

  The light came slowly. Carrying the tin and several of the bags, Mace began to walk over the trail to retrieve the baits not taken by the foxes, which, if left, might months later constitute a menace to stockmen’s dogs. Now it became a race between the crows and himself. He found but seven of the estimated two hundred baits. The light, strong and revealing, showed him the bright, reddish brown bodies of foxes; some lying close beside the trail, some on the dam banks, some away out on the clear, smooth sand-patches. At a jog-trot he gathered fox to fox, and covered them with the chaff-bags to defy the crows, and whilst doing so he counted his catch. Thirty-four were easily gathered. He found five at the edge of the water in the dam where, the poison eating at their vitals, they had gone to drink-and to die the sooner. Hurrying in ever widening circles round the dam, he found fox after fox, some hidden in the inequalities of the ground. For three hours he quested, as far distant as half a mile from the trail. Small knots of crows, settled on red sand like ink-drops on red blotting-paper, revealed to him the position of yet other foxes, and to those he raced to rescue the precious pelts. Lastly he looked to the crows to find for him any remaining carcasses he had missed.

  By ten o’clock he decided he had found all he was likely to find. They numbered sixty-one. It was June. The pelts, long and silky to the touch, would average in the Sydney fur market eleven shillings.

  For the rest of that day he was occupied in carefully skinning his catch. Although he ran a poisoned trail that night, he secured only eight the following morning. The skins he tacked with short pieces of wire to hard clay-pan country to dry, and covered them with bags for protection against the crows and eagles till he should return for them from a night’s poisoning at another dam or well.

  The fur fever burned in Mace more fiercely than could the gold fever. He had no thought but of money and Eva.

  2

  To Frank Mayne his home had become a populous hotel in which he felt himself to be an intruder. The incessant clamour, the rushings about, the excursions, he did, however, emphatically refuse to allow to distract him from his work, and for many days at oft-repeated periods he escaped to the peaceful solitudes, working with the hands or accompanying MacDougall.

  He denied his wife nothing.

  July came in, dull and cold, trying to rain, yet the threat of rain a mockery in face of the cold south wind. Mayne was riding home across a river paddock late one afternoon whilst small black puff-clouds passed slowly eastward beneath the higher dun-coloured unbroken cloud-mass. He rode with a light heart, because this day the wind blew fitfully from the north, which indicated rain.

  But, when two miles from the homestead, he saw that which contracted his brows. He was crossing grey river flats, and abruptly was met by a bunch of very young lambs which had been sheltering in the lee of a newly fallen tree-branch. Bleating pitifully, seeming as lost children in the woods, they ran to meet him, and, when he reined in his horse, stood looking up at him still bleating woefully, little flanks tucked inwards with hunger, weak legs trembling. The sight of them weighted his heart with sadness.

  For he knew why these lambs were there, far from the flock of mothers–knew they were doomed to die, prey of the eagles, of the foxes remaining from Mace’s hauls, and the crows. In every paddock now occupied by ewes and lambs, there would be other abandoned lambs, tens and twenties together, totalling in all many hundreds.

  They were the outcasts, the Ishmaels, the abandoned of mothers who had not sufficient milk for twins. The lack of g
reen feed kept the supply of milk very low, and the ewes with twins knew that the supply of their bodies was sufficient to nourish one only of the twins. Those mothers, therefore, had hunted away from the udder the condemned, who, weakening from lack of nourishment, were left behind by the flock, thereafter to gather into small parties, pitifully weak and frightened, watched by the insatiable crows in neighbouring trees and the giant eagles circling low in the sky, to be attacked immediately they lay down and devoured alive.

  Mayne counted twenty-two lambs in that party, and passed a second gathering of deserted lambs numbering eleven before he reached the stockyards, when he unsaddled and freed his horse. With his face cast in thoughtful lines he hesitated outside the garden gate, heard the high treble of a woman’s voice, sighed, and turned back to the office.

  “Have you completed that rough half-yearly balance-sheet I asked for, Barlow?” he said to the old accountant.

  “I am working at it now, Mr. Mayne. I will have it ready in twenty minutes or so.”

  Mayne nodded and, before seating himself at his desk, took from a wall-hook the weather records for that year. Moodily he filled his pipe, turned a sheet, lit his pipe, and fell to studying the sheet devoted to the past month of June.

  The total rainfall had been seventeen points. Nine points had fallen on the twelfth, and eight points on the thirteenth. Three days had been overcast and two cloudy. Twenty-five days in this month, a month preceding mid-winter, had been cloudless. Turning back this sheet, he studied that for May. The rain had been nil. Two days had been cloudy, twenty-nine cloudless.

  “God! What a season!”

  “I beg your pardon, Mr. Mayne?” inquired Barlow politely.

  With bitterness Mayne laughed.

  “I was not aware I spoke my thoughts aloud,” he said. “I was thinking what a devil of a dry winter we have had, so far.”

  “It certainly has been very bad,” Barlow agreed, and again attacked his masses of figures.

  Mayne rang up Forest Hill.

  “That you, Mac? How’s the weather looking out your way?”

  “Good. Very good. It might rain.”

  “It is not raining yet?”

  “No–worse luck,” MacDougall replied regretfully. “Anyway, it mightn’t rain here first. The disturbance appears to be working directly south, and if so, it will begin to rain at both ends of Atlas at the same time.”

  “The ewes are deserting one of their twin lambs, Mac. I came across two deserted bunches this afternoon.”

  MacDougall’s voice came in a low growl.

  “I’ve been expecting that. If only we had had half an inch of rain in April, it would have prevented the sun burning off the green shoots started by that March rain. It’s a pity, because even if it rains to-night it won’t save the abandoned lambs.”

  “It will strengthen the others, though, and the sheep in time for shearing,” Mayne pointed out. “We want about three inches.”

  “Let’s hope we’ll get it,” MacDougall grunted. “When do we start lamb-marking?” Mayne considered, his gaze on a calendar in a silver frame on the desk before him.

  “Better make it Monday, July 21st,” he said slowly. “Lamb-marking will occupy us only a fortnight this year, by the look of things. And if it does rain to-night there will be time for the ground to dry a bit. So long! I’ll ring up again about eight.”

  3

  With Barlow’s rough balance-sheet in his hand, Frank Mayne left the office and walked along to Feng’s bungalow. From Government House there now came the sound of gramophone music. His wife and her guests would be lounging in the drawing-room, drinking afternoon tea, careless of time and money, oblivious of the opening phase of the battle with drought, unaware of the worry eating into his brain, the awareness of which would have astonished them. They thought Atlas to be a perpetual gold-mine.

  With the freedom of an old friend, he walked straight into Feng’s sitting-room-studio, where he found Feng seated before a leaping fire, reading a novel and sipping tea.

  “Going to rain, Frank?” asked the Australian Chinaman, pulling an easy chair to the fire for his visitor.

  “May do–hope so, Feng,” was Mayne’s view when he slumped into the proffered chair. “That buttered toast smells good.”

  “Mary will bring you some,” Feng said in his quiet, restful tone of voice, and having rung for Mary O’Doyle, that woman of parts appeared. “Mary, tea and toast for Mr. Mayne, please.”

  “Shure! An’ it’s a day for toast and tay,” Mary said warmly, and ambled away.

  “You look worried, old man,” Feng observed.

  “I am worried. The ewes are deserting their twin lambs.”

  “It was to be expected.”

  “Still, it is heartbreaking to see them and to be unable to do anything. Affairs are looking blue. Have you any idea how far I am behind at June thirteenth?”

  “Well, I have and I have not,” Feng replied. “I suppose Atlas is behind to the extent of fifteen thousand.”

  Mayne’s mouth was a thin red line. For nearly half a minute he continued to stare at his lifelong friend. Then:

  “Adding the cost of artificial feeding to our normal exes, we’re behind close on nineteen thousand pounds. And only half the year gone, and our average annual exes over ten years only seventeen thousand three hundred.” Mary entered with Mayne’s tea. “Take a look at the balance-sheet while I appreciate Mary’s toast. Thank you, Mary!”

  Silently he sipped the tea Mary O’Doyle poured out for him. The night was crowding into the room and Feng was reading by firelight. Mary switched on the electric and drew close the curtains across the windows before withdrawing. When Feng Ching-wei spoke, it was as though he owned Atlas.

  “I see that our ration account has exceeded three thousand pounds for the first six months of the year,” he said; “and, if I remember rightly, three thousand pounds has been our annual average. Our motor expenditure has gone up. Horse feed, of course, is bound to be heavy. We cannot save anything on the artificial feeding and the scrub-cutting. And you will have noted, Frank, that this half-yearly statement does not include the shearing expenses, which an annual statement would do. From a casual glance our expenses appear to have jumped to over double our ordinary average expenses. Even the wages account is almost double.”

  For a few minutes Frank Mayne made no comment. Then:

  “Blast the drought! I thought that March rain meant the end of it. If only it would rain in floods to-night!”

  “Rain or not, Frank, we’ve got to face the position,” Feng said in soft, yet steely tones. “In nautical parlance, we’re sailing too close to the wind. We’ve got to cut down the wages bill. Petrol consumption must be cut down to set off the extra expenditure on horse feed, and the ration account must be substantially lowered.”

  Mayne’s friend was now very earnest. He was leaning forward, a forefinger tapping each of his points on the balance sheet with a hollow sound.

  “Forgive my plain speaking, Frank,” he went on. “I do it, remember, as a pal of long standing. You’re a better sheepman than I, but I am a better financier than you. We have got to recognize that in present conditions Atlas cannot stand the expense it is being put to, to entertain Mrs. Mayne’s successive relays of guests. The increase in the ration account is due entirely to Government House, as, too, is the increase in the wages account. A chef, a butler, a kitchen man, a boots, and five housemaids, as well as a chauffeur, is a staff beyond the reach even of Atlas, when it has to face artificial feeding to preserve the breeding flocks. In short, I must repeat that it cannot go on.”

  Another and a much longer silence fell between them, Feng gazing steadily at Mayne and Mayne gazing as steadily into the fire. Presently the squatter vented a deep sigh of mental weariness.

  “I must talk it over with Ethel,” he said, rising abruptly. “Thanks for the tea. See you later.”

  Feng heard him pass out, heard him cross the veranda and heard, too, the wicket-gate creak. Then he
heard rapid steps recrossing the veranda. The room door was flung inward. Round the edge of it appeared Frank Mayne’s transformed face. He was smiling.

  “Feng, old lad, it’s raining!” he almost shouted.

  4

  The manager of Thuringah, a property of half a million acres, surveyed himself in the long bevelled mirror standing in a corner of his dressing-room. He saw a splendid soldierly figure, an inch above six feet in height, most certainly a man of distinction both in face and form. Even when not consciously observed the face was full of magnetic power, the expression a blend of ruthlessness and gentleness. The gleaming white of his shirt-front and collar emphasized the high colour of his complexion, which might have been mistaken for sun-tan, but was the result of bodily indulgence. The brilliant blue eyes looked out of the mirror candidly, appraisingly, and for nearly half a minute the chiselled features practised the slow breaking smile that was one of Cameron’s most potent weapons.

  Alldyce Cameron was one of those men who exert, without effort, a universal fascination for women, and who create in other men an equally universal desire to kick them. Strangely, this masculine desire to kick Cameron was produced less by jealousy than by his blatant self-assurance, based as it was on his undoubted gift for leadership. Despite the fact that a highly placed war general disliked him, it was due to that general’s wife that Cameron rose so rapidly in rank.

  Of his many ambitions, the highest, the most fiercely desired, the ultimate, was–Woman. Woman was Cameron’s God. Woman was the sole spring and font of his life, the absolute director of his existence, and as to the possession of Woman his politics were purely socialistic. The youngest son of a Scottish peer, Woman had been the cause of his leaving Cambridge. His uncle, the shipping baron, took him into his office; but Woman drove him from London to a managership in Queensland, and again Woman had transferred him to Thuringah, New South Wales.

  It was his over-socialistic politics regarding Woman which so disgusted his cynical father and his equally cynical uncle. To him, in desperation, said the uncle, a white-haired, handsome man, seated behind a magnificent desk: