Gripped By Drought Read online

  “Ya-as! An’ if they won’t come, bring me out another voice,” requested the tubby man.

  The dogs were now useless, for the weary sheep took not the slightest notice of them. With dust-rimmed eyes and lolling tongues they continued their work, trotting up and down behind the sheep, but now made no effort to drive into the main body the stragglers.

  Only one man was needed to guard both wings and keep the now slow-walking leaders headed for White Well. The sheep walked with their heads low, as automata without consciousness. Even when a dog leapt across the backs of a press of them, there was no movement indicating normal fear. Three men, leading their bored horses, flailed sheep’s backs with their hats, “ya-hoodled” with cracked voices, and constantly lifted sheep to their feet and urged them forward. Clouds of fine dust were wafted over them by the cold wind.

  When the sun went down there was still half a mile to travel to reach the yards at White Well, for at three o’clock Fred Lowe had been obliged to let the sheep rest for an hour. The cook at White Well came and joined them in their work and his voice alone could be heard, and his arms alone moved energetically.

  It was quite dark when the sheep were finally yarded for the night. The following day it was necessary to keep them shepherded in the vicinity of White Well, feed them morning and evening, and yard them again for a second night before attempting to move them nearer the shearing shed.

  3

  As has been stated, White Well was situated in the bottleneck of Atlas caused by the resumption of an area of land by the Government under its Closer Settlement Acts. The boundary of Westmacott’s holding lay within one mile of White Well, and to White Well one morning came Mrs. Westmacott riding a grey horse.

  She was a small, wiry woman, about forty-six years of age, with a strong Scottish accent and large grey eyes that were the only handsome feature of her sun-wrecked face. Hearing the approach of her horse, the White Well cook went out to meet her.

  “Are any of the riders about?” Mrs. Westmacott asked anxiously.

  “Nope. They won’t be home till sundown, missus. Anything up?” replied the cook.

  “I don’t know, but Harry never came home last night. I’ve been riding the paddocks since daybreak, and I can’t find him. His horse came home in the middle of the night without the saddle, but still wearing the bridle.”

  “Musta bin thrown. Lying out somewheres, perhaps?”

  “It looks like it,” the woman agreed. “I was hoping Fred Lowe or some of the hands was here, and could come an’ help.”

  “There’s only me and Tom Mace, missus. Tom’s at the yards there. You ride over and tell ’im to come in, and I’ll make you a drink of tea time you an’ him come back.”

  “All right. If anything’s happened to Harry now young Harry’s gone, it will––”

  “Don’t think about it, missus. Go and get Tom Mace,” urged the cook.

  Mrs. Westmacott rode away to the yards on her weary horse, and the cook, after hanging a billy-can over the fire in the open hearth, rang up the Atlas homestead. Feng answered the call, and heard the object of Mrs. Westmacott’s visit.

  “Mr.Mayne is away, Jack. How many horses are out there?”

  “Five, not counting the two colts.” “Saddles?”

  “None spare.”

  “Very well, Jack,” came the calm voice from the Atlas office. “Get Mace to run in the horses. Keep Mrs. Westmacott there. I’ll bring out two men and five saddles right away.”

  “Goodo, Mr. Feng!”

  Mace arrived at the huts, and left immediately on Mrs. Westmacott’s horse to drive in the loose horses in the miles-quare horse paddock. Mrs. Westmacott was conducted into the scrupulously clean dining-kitchen-room, and made to sit in the cook’s home-made easy chair to drink tea.

  “Don’t you worry, missus,” she was told. “Mr. Feng is bringing out a coupler ’ands, and, with ’im, that’ll make five of us. We’ll light on Harry in no time.”

  The woman, after the first sharp look at the cook, gazed fixedly into the log fire. She sipped the tea gratefully, but would not eat.

  “Young Harry–and now his father/’ she said slowly and softly, over and over again.

  “Don’t you worry,” urged the cook compassionately, while cutting thick meat sandwiches to be made into five packets to be tied to saddle-bows.

  Mace brought the loose horses to the horseyards in the corner of the paddock with a thunder of hoofs, and watered and fed Mrs.

  Westmacott’s grey in the almost wind-wrecked stable nearby. In this crisis he lost all nervousness in his speech. As the cook had done, he urged the bushwoman not to worry.

  “What time did Harry leave yesterday?” he asked, seated on an upturned petrol-case on the opposite side of the fire. “About three o’clock,” Mrs. Westmacott said dully. “He should have been home by dark.”

  “Where was he headed?”

  “In a new paddock lying along the Atlas boundary we call North Paddock.” “How big?”

  “Six miles by four.”

  “What work was he going to do?”

  “He went out to cut the throats of the sheep that were down and dying, and skin them.” “Oh!”

  After that there fell a long silence. The two men realized in those simply spoken words the long tragedy of the Westmacotts. Years of labour, of voluntary hardship, so that money with which to buy sheep might be saved. The good years when prosperity rewarded their efforts and increased the number of their flocks. The ultimate overstocking, the necessity of sending some of the sheep to feed off the roads of Victoria, the tragedy of foolish young Harry, an innocent, inexperienced boy. The withering of the sheep feed and its blowing away by the wind. The lack of money to pay for artificial feeding, the long agony of watching sheep die, and the final desperate wish to save at least the woolled skins.

  A roaring truck brought Feng Ching-wei and two men. Mace met him outside the huts and gave him the necessary information he had obtained from Mrs. Westmacott.

  “Do you know the Westmacott country?” Feng asked him.

  “Yes. I trapped rabbits there two years ago.” “Wait.”

  Feng Ching-wei went inside the kitchen and found Mrs. Westmacott crying silently. The courage maintained for a year was breaking down. Feng said gently:

  “Mrs. Westmacott, it appears likely that your husband is lying out injured. When found it will be necessary to bring him straight in for medical attention. It might be necessary to take him to the hospital at Broken Hill. I want you to stay here, so that if your husband does require medical attention you will be able to go with him. You will stay here–alone?”

  “Yes, I will stay here alone.”

  “Better still, will you go with Gus to the Atlas homestead and stay with my housekeeper, Mary O’Doyle?”

  “No. I’ll stay here. Harry might want me. I’ll have hot water and things ready.”

  “Very well. Don’t think too much. Wc shall not be long.”

  She was still sitting, silently crying, staring into the fire when they left her; but when the sound of their horses’ thudding hoofs drifted in to her through the open door, she rose and put several kerosene buckets of water to heat at the fire. She wondered why Mace was driving his truck and not riding a horse.

  Arrived at the southend of the Westmacott North Paddock, the four horsemen spread out to work the ground as though mustering for sheep, Mace following in his truck, the best way he could, a centre line, thus having two riders on each flank.

  They found Harry Westmacott at a set of newly constructed sheep-yards. In the yards were some nine hundred sheep. Of the nine hundred a bare hundred were alive. Westmacott was singing whilst he cut the throat of sheep after sheep, and stacked the unskinned carcasses in a great heap. The sheep he was killing, and had been killing all through the previous night, were poor in condition, yet not dying sheep.

  He was quite docile when they put him in Mace’s truck and took him to Broken Hill, where, of course, he was certified to be insa
ne.

  4

  The shearing proceeded without interruption. All through the brilliant, sun-filled days the roar of machinery inside the shed vied with men’s raucous “ya-hoodling” and the staccato barks of dogs without, distance softening the uproar, which reached Government House as the sound of angry bees in a hive. The nights were governed by frost, when Ethel’s guests played bridge or viewed the latest films. In the shearers’ quarters quietness was indicated of weary men lying asleep or reading.

  One man in the Atlas employ was at work every day with a horse and dray. They called him the “Burying Party”, an epithet that enraged him almost beyond endurance. He was a tall, cadaverous man of fifty or thereabouts, owning a very white face from which sprouted very black whiskers. Where ever he went, about the homestead or near the shed, he constantly heard voices proclaiming: “Here comes the Burying Party!”

  At the end of the last run every day, the shorn sheep were taken from the pens and herded into a small paddock bordering the river, where clumps of tobacco-bush and the river gums gave the utmost shelter from the frosts.

  It was the duty of the “Burying Party” to drive his horse and dray into this paddock, and there feed the live sheep with lucerne, before collecting the dead sheep to cart them three miles away and burn them. The dead sheep lay in bunches, their snow-white, woolless bodies contrasting sharply with the grey earth.

  Some mornings the “Burying Party” had to cart fifty sheep away to the burning place, where dry wood was plentiful; some days it was sixty or seventy-sheep killed by the cold of the first night’s exposure without their wool.

  And so the work and the losses continued to the bitter end of this second shearing, when the day of reckoning came. Seated at his table in the Atlas office, Mayne chewed the stem of his unlit pipe, and pondered on the shearing tallies and those given him by the “Burying Party”. Opposite him sat Feng Ching-wei. Presently emitting a deep sigh, Mayne brushed aside the papers, straightened up in his chair and encountered his friend’s eyes with his own.

  “Feng, old man, things are looking blue, but not as blue as they could be,” he said with unusual slowness. “Of the 27,000 ewes shorn last year, only 21,000 turned up this shearing. Only 8,000 wethers came to light of the 17,000 shorn last year. We shore 17,000 lambs last year and only 7,000 turned up this year as hoggets. This year we shore 12,000 lambs instead of last year’s total of 17,000. And the frosts have killed 3,271 sheep. At the close of last year’s shearing Atlas ran 66,000 sheep. Now it has but 45,000. We’ve lost 21,000 sheep in the twelve months.”

  “Well…it cannot now be said that Atlas is overstocked, Frank.”

  “That is correct,” Mayne agreed quickly. “And because we’re no longer overstocked we should pull through. That half-inch of rain which fell last night will whip up the feed and give us a start for the early summer. If it rains during September it will certainly enable us to swim with the tide.”

  “That is so,” admitted Feng, yet without conviction.

  Mayne continued with increasing cheerfulness in his voice. He was like a man seemingly pleased at the prospect of successfully deluding himself.

  “In consequence of our losses, naturally our output has fallen. Last year we produced 1,850 bales of wool; this year the total has fallen to 990. It is a good thing that the market inclines to rise above last year’s prices.”

  “Your figures do not include the sheep and wool from Westmacott’s place?” “No.”

  For several seconds Feng’s eyes bored into the very soul of the man sitting opposite him. Abruptly they became masked by tender good-humour. He said:

  “You’re a likeable cuss in many ways, old man, but as a business man you suffer from fits of quixotic foolishness. You had the chance, you still have the chance, to buy Westmacott’s place for three thousand pounds; and, despite financial stringency, I would have purchased, and now urge you to purchase, land which would wipe out the bottle-neck and add twenty thousand to the value of Atlas.”

  Mayne shook his head.

  “I couldn’t take advantage of the woman’s adversity to realize one of my life’s dreams, Feng. Just remember! First they lose those sheep sent away with the son. Secondly, they lose the son. Thirdly, the man loses his reason and the woman the active support of her husband. As you know, I offered Westmacott seven thousand some time ago. To-day the place has no buyer. The sum of three thousand pounds placed on it by Mrs. Westmacott is absurd, and much less than half the proper value. She had to have money to retire to Adelaide, for she couldn’t carry on alone. In the circumstances I think Old Man Mayne would have done what I have done–advanced her two thousand pounds, with a legal note to pay the balance of five thousand two years hence.”

  “Should we get a bad year next year you might well lose your two thousand.”

  “If we do, that sum won’t save us; and, anyway, we have the use of Westmacott’s selection meanwhile. Just now two thousand is two thousand; but I cannot afford to pay away seven thousand, and I could not afford to see anyone else get that property from a desperate woman who might accept one thousand for the place, lock, stock, and barrel. No. Times and the season will change. They always do. This is a wonderful country to pick up after bad times. History has proved it.”

  “Still, it is well to assume that the change might be delayed another year, or even two years. Take my tip, and be cautious. The small Atlas profit of £4,000 last year will become a small deficit this year, that is certain. And now, even though the seasonal prospects are a little brighter, be advised and sell every butcher’s carcass we have.”

  For fully a minute Mayne considered this. Then:

  “No,” he argued, shaking his head. “No. We might get seven shillings a head for the remaining fats, whilst if it rains good and hard in the near future we would get sixteen shillings and more by Christmas.”

  Feng attempted to argue back, but, as a mere friend, was unable to argue with force. Mayne was obdurate. He believed even more firmly than on his return from New Zealand that the dry spell was now at an end. He viewed the problem from the standpoint of one holding all he has for a market rise based on the occurrence of rainfalls that might come at once or be indefinitely deferred: being afraid, genuinely afraid, of having it on his conscience that he sold sheep at a panic price, when if he had held he could have sold them for at least double.

  It is not to be doubted that Frank, like his father, was a gambler. As a foil to this characteristic was Feng’s shrewdness. Feng did not believe that the dry period was at an end. There could not have been found half a dozen squatters in the Western Division of the State who would have agreed with him, but no arguments put forward by Frank Mayne could turn him from his conviction that Atlas faced an evil drought.

  Feng advised, urged, implored Mayne to sell all he could of his sheep whilst the market remained at the slightly higher point; but Mayne was stubborn. The majority of the squatters, viewing the situation as he did, also held on.

  This was the critical decision that doomed Atlas and dozens of other stations as well.

  “At least, Frank,” Feng said in desperate earnestness, “cut down your household expenses. Reduce your petrol and oil expenditure and put off every man who can be spared.”

  “But why?” expostulated Mayne. “1 decide to hold the sheep because the season is looking favourable; and, because that is so, there is no need to cut exes and sack men. If I follow your advice regarding expenditure, it is a tacit admission that I do not believe the coming season will be good, and am wrong by holding on to saleable stuff. I admit that we–that is, Ethel and I–have been living rather extravagantly, and I have made up my mind to persuade her to stop her house-parties. But, as for putting off men–no!”

  He tapped the table smartly with an open hand, the action of an impatient employer with a too argumentative departmental chief. Yet, when he rose to his feet, he smiled cheerfully at Feng Ching-wei before passing out of the office.

  CHAPTER XIV

  SPRI
NG-TIME

  I

  THIS year the seed-eating birds did not nest in the numbers usual to a normal year, but the carnivorous birds bred with unwonted fecundity, for their food supplies were abnormal. Long stretches of the river-bed were dry, and a selector above Wilcannia sowed a crop of oats along a mile stretch of sand-bottom–and reaped a harvest. Water in the holes at the bends mysteriously maintained its level, and in the depths lurked giant cod that preyed on the perch, which in turn preyed on the tiny fish that might have become giant cod.

  Feng Ching-wei’s life during these months of drought was far more independent than ever it had been. Before the coming of Ethel Mayne he had occupied rooms in Government House, which gave him all the privacy he desired, yet still kept him chained to the communal system presided over by a housekeeper in the employ of a man not himself.

  With those conditions he was not dissatisfied. They had existed from the day he and Frank Mayne had come home to mourn Old Man Mayne and carry on the work of Atlas. He accepted them because he had known no other. Not until the furnishing of his bungalow did he appreciate real independence, and not until the coming of Mary O’Doyle did he experience that peculiar masculine satisfaction of being properly cared for.

  Little links of confidence eventually formed for him the chain of Mary’s harsh history, a chronicle of years of unwomanly labours unsoftened by the influence of real affection. Wielding a pickaxe, toiling at a windlass over a mine shaft, and yoking and driving a bullock team are not labours that help a woman to love or to be loved. The incredible conditions ruling the birth of her one child, which died a few weeks later, give sufficient proof of this. When she was heavy with child, she and her husband each drove a bullock team over the Broken Hill-Wilcannia track in the heat of early summer. They were nine miles from water when the pains came to Mary. She shouted to her husband to stop his team and keep an eye on hers whilst she went into the bush for an hour, produced her baby, brought it back to her wagon, and drove her team the nine miles to water.

  Almost all her life she had worked as a man, and better than many a man. Frugal in her habits, she made money for her two husbands to squander on drink. All her life she had sought for love, and had found but poor imitations of it. When death took her baby it left her with nothing.