‘Bother!’ exclaimed Mr Barton, the Manager of Tarnpirr, as he finished reading one of his letters on a certain evening.
‘What’s the matter, papa?’ asked his daughter, Daisy, pausing with the teapot in her hand.
‘Oh, nothing much, my dear,’ he replied; only we are to have company. The firm is sending up the 444th cousin of an Irish Earl to learn sheep-farming, and I suppose I’ve got the contract to break him in. That’s all.’
‘I wish your mother could be at home, Daisy,’ he continued. ‘I never did care much about these colonial-experience fellows. They generally give a lot of trouble, especially when they’re well connected. There, read the precious letter for yourself. Pity we couldn’t put him into the hut, instead of making him one of ourselves—eh, Daisy?’
The girl laughed as she read aloud,—
‘Mr Fortescue is highly connected; and as he not only brings introductions from the London office, but 209also possesses an interest in several properties out here, we hope you will do your best to make him comfortable, and to give him that insight into the business that he seems desirous of acquiring at first hand.’
‘Why, daddy!’ she exclaimed, ‘you ought to think yourself honoured—“highly connected,” not merely “well,” remember—by such a charge! As for myself, I am all anxiety to see him.’
‘I don’t think anything of the sort, then, Daisy,’ said her father. ‘And if I could afford to do so, I should like to tell them that I consider it a piece of impertinence on their part to ask me to receive a perfect stranger, knowing how I am situated alone with you, how small the place is, and how roughly we live. But one can’t ride the high horse on a hundred and fifty pounds a year!’
And the Manager of Tarnpirr sighed, and stared thoughtfully into his cup.
In the general sense of the word, Daisy Barton was not a pretty girl, inasmuch as she possessed not one regular feature. But it was such a calm, quiet, pleasant face, out of which dark blue eyes looked so tenderly and honestly at you, that one forgot to search for details in the charm of the whole. Add to this, one of the neatest, trimmest, most loveable little figures imaginable, and you may have some faint idea of the pleasant picture she made as she sat thinking which of the two spare rooms should be got ready for the new inmate. Mrs Barton was never at the station. 210She was a confirmed invalid, and resided permanently in a far southern town. Daisy and an old Irishwoman kept house.
In due course the ‘highly connected’ one arrived, bringing with him as much luggage as sufficed to fill the extra room.
He was a tall, good-looking Englishman, and he gazed around at the small bare house with its strip of burnt-up, dusty garden, and background of sombre eucalypti; at the squalid ‘hut;’ the sluggish, dirty river; and the barren forlornness of everything, with a look on his face that caused Mr Barton to chuckle, and think to himself that the new-comer’s stay would be short. The manager had expected a youngster, not a grown man of five or six and twenty, and he was rather puzzled.
This self-possessed, languid sort of gentleman, with well-cut features, long moustache, and slow, pleasant-sounding, if rather drawling, speech, wasn’t by any means the sort of creature that Mr Barton was accustomed to associate with the term ‘jackaroo,’ and its natural corollary, ‘licking into shape.’
‘A fellow with lots of money, I expect,’ he said to Daisy that night after their guest, pleading fatigue, had retired. ‘One of those chaps who just come out to have a look around, and then off home again with wonderful stories about the wild Australian Bush.’
‘Yaas; shouldn’t wondah, now, Mistah Barton, if you ah not quaite correct,’ laughed Daisy, mischievously. 211‘Oh, papa, do all the folk in England talk as if they were clean knocked up?’
‘Only the highly-connected ones, my dear,’ replied her father, smiling. ‘It’s considered quite fashionable, too, amongst our own upper ten. He’ll lose it after he’s been bushed a few times. I shouldn’t imagine from his looks, however, that he’s got much backbone. He’ll be away again presently—too rough a life.’
And, in fact, poor Fortescue at first often did get bushed.
Luckily for him, perhaps, a camp of blacks settled at Tarnpirr shortly after his arrival, and these made a regular income by hunting for and bringing him back. And he was very considerate.
Once, when he had been missing for three days, and Mr Barton and Daisy were half out of their minds with fright, he made the blacks who were bearing him home, tattered and hungry, and faint from exposure, go ahead for clean clothes and soap and water before he would put in an appearance. This incident only confirmed Mr Barton the more in his idea that he had to do with a man lacking strength of character—a dandy willing to sacrifice everything to personal outward show. His daughter thought quite otherwise.
However, in time, ‘Barton’s Jackaroo,’ as he was called throughout the district of the lower rivers, became a favourite, not only at Tarnpirr, but on the neighbouring runs. Even old Bridget admitted that 212‘he was a good sort ov a cratur, barrin’ the want ov a bit more life wid him.’
But he was always calm and self-possessed; and the Manager was accustomed to swear that a bush fire at his heels wouldn’t make him quicken his pace by a step.
And once Daisy, in a moment of irritation, confided to her father that she felt inclined to stick a needle into his jackaroo for the sake of discovering whether that provoking air of leisurely languor was natural or assumed.
‘He’s got no backbone, my dear,’ said the Manager, laughing. ‘But try him by all means. I’ll bet you ten to one he only says what he did last week, when that old ram made a drive at him in the yard, and knocked him down and jumped on him.’
‘And what did he say to that?’ asked Daisy eagerly.
‘Well,’ replied Mr Barton, laughing again, ‘when he’d cleaned the mud out of his eyes and mouth, he looked surprised and said “Haw!”’
‘Oh,’ said Daisy, disappointedly. ‘But what ought he to have said to show that he had a backbone, papa?’
‘Well,’ replied her father vaguely, ‘you know, Daisy—er—um—well, that is—um—a great many people, my dear, your father amongst them, perhaps, would be apt to say a good deal on such an occasion.’
‘I have a better opinion than ever of Mr Fortescue,’ cried Daisy indignantly at this. ‘Because he keeps his 213temper, and doesn’t go on like Long Jim or Ben the Bullocky when any little thing happens, he’s got no pluck or resolution! I own he exasperates one sometimes with his calm, dawdling ways. But if he were pushed, I shouldn’t be surprised to find more in him than he gets credit for after all!’
‘Umph!’ said Mr Barton glancing kindly, but with rather a troubled face, at the flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes upturned to his own. And as he rode over the run that day the burden of his thoughts was that the sooner his serene-tempered jackaroo got tired of the Bush the better it would be for all of them.
. . . . . . . . . .
‘Ned, if the river ain’t a-risin’, an’ risin’ precious quick, too, call me a Dutchman! ’Arf-an-hour ago the water warn’t near them bullocks, and now it’s right agin their ’eels!’
‘Well,’ replied his mate, glancing towards the brown stream slowly spreading over the flat, ‘we’re safe enough. I’ll forgive it if it comes over this. Tell you what, though, you might catch the pony an’ canter up to the station, an’ tell ole Barton as there’s some water a-comin’. He might have some stock he’d like to git out o’ the road. An’ you might’s well git a lump o’ meat while you’re there.’
So Ned, of the travelling bullock team, went with the news to Tarnpirr, lower down.
But Mr Barton that very morning had been to Warrooga township, and the telegraph people had said no word of floods or heavy rain at the head of the river. 214Around Tarnpirr and district the weather had been dry for weeks, so the Manager was not in the least uneasy.
‘It’s only a bit of a fresh, Brown,’ said he. ‘It’ll soon go down again. Thanks all the same, though. Meat? Yes, of course. And now you’d better go over to the kitchen and get your dinner.’
‘Boss reckons it’s nothin’,’ said Ned, returning that evening. ‘No rain fall’d up above.’
‘We wouldn’t need shift anyhow,’ replied the other, preparing to cook the meat given them by Mr Barton, who little dreamt how welcome it would be to some people later on. ‘We’re a lot higher here than they are at the station. I saw “Barton’s Jackaroo” just now, out ridin’ with Miss Daisy. He’s a rum stick, he is.’
‘But ain’t she a little star!’ exclaimed Ned enthusiastically.
‘She are; all that!’ replied his mate. ‘Finest gall on the rivers. Too good by sights for any new-chum.’
And so the pair sat and yarned and watched the treacherous water of what was to become the biggest flood since ’64 stealthily eating its way up amongst the long grass of the sandridge, sneaking quietly into little hollows, then pretending to creep back again, then with a rush advancing a miniature wave further than ever. Sat and talked and watched the brown expanse broaden until the tall oaks that bordered the banks were whipping the fierce current with their slender tops, sole mark now to show where lay mid-stream.
215‘It’s a darned big lump of a fresh!’ quoth Ned doubtfully.
‘It’ll be down afore mornin’,’ replied his mate. ‘And anyhow it can’t do us real bad, seein’ what we’ve got in the loadin’. But there’s no danger ’ere on this ridge.’
So they turned in under their tarpaulins, and never heard how the water hissed at midnight as it crept, little by little, advancing, receding, but always gaining, into their carefully covered-up fire.
. . . . . . . . . .
In the snug sitting-room at Tarnpirr, with lamps burning brightly, and curtains drawn against the lowering dusk, sat Herbert Fortescue and Daisy Barton, their heads pretty close together over a chessboard.
‘I’m going across to the Back Ridge out-station this afternoon,’ had said Mr Barton. ‘I sha’n’t be home before to-morrow; I want to see how Macpherson’s getting on with those weaners. Needn’t bother about the river. It’s only a fresh, or Warrooga would have sent us word.’
Alas for dependence on Warrooga with its absent trooper, and absent-minded operator, who was warned, just after Manager Barton left him, that masses of water were coming down three rivers towards Tarnpirr!
Had he but taken horse and galloped out the few miles, or sent, things might have happened very differently, and this story would never have been written. But as it was—
‘There!’ exclaimed Daisy, ‘my king is in trouble 216again. I feel out of sorts to-night. It’s very close. Shall we go on to the verandah?’
‘With pleasure,’ said the young man rising. ‘But it’s as dark as pitch outside. Give me your hand, please, for fear you stumble.’
Hesitating for a moment, their eyes met, and with deepening colour she placed her hand in his, and they went out through the long window into the night. It was very quiet, and the darkness felt woolly and warm. No light glimmered anywhere, and the only sound was the cry of a solitary mopoke coming from amongst the spectral boles of the box trees.
‘The men are in bed, I suppose,’ said Daisy, glancing towards their hut.
‘They are away on the run,’ replied Fortescue, ‘drawing fencing stuff for the new line. But it’s a wonder we don’t see the blacks’ fire.’
As they stood leaning against the garden fence a soft continuous ripple, mingled with a sound like the sighing of wind through tall belars fell on their ears.
‘It’s only the river,’ said Daisy, ‘I’ve often heard it making that mournful noise when it’s rising over its banks. Shall we walk as far as the camp?’
It was a rough track, and more than once, but for the sustaining arm of her companion, Daisy would have come to grief over log or tussock.
But they got there at last, guided by a few dim sparks from expiring fires.
‘Why, it’s deserted,’ exclaimed Daisy, as they found 217themselves amongst the empty gunyahs. ‘They’re gone, dogs and all.’
‘Off on some hunting expedition, I expect,’ replied Fortescue, laughing. ‘They look at me in a comically disgusted manner of late since I left off getting bushed so regularly.’
It was too dark to see the water, but they stood for a long time listening to the swish of it as it ran full-lipped from one steep high bank to the other, telling with eerie mutterings and whisperings, and curious little complaining noises, and low hoarse threatenings of what it would presently do, and the mischief it would work, but in language all untranslatable by its hearers.
‘What a sweet little lady it is,’ said Fortescue to himself as, later, he sat on the edge of his bed staring straight before him into a pair of tender, steadfast eyes conjured out of the darkness. ‘I wonder if she does? I’m nearly sure of it, thank heaven! Why, she is worth coming here and roughing it like this, and being called “Barton’s Jackaroo” twenty times over for!’ and he laughed gently. ‘Fancy a prize like that hidden away amongst these solitudes. I wonder what her father will say? Anyhow, I won’t put it off any longer. I’ll ask him to-morrow.’
With which resolution he laid down and went to sleep, still thinking on Daisy Barton.
He awoke with a start, and lay listening to noises in his room, the remnants, as he imagined, of some grotesque dream.
Gurglings there were, and agonised squeakings and 218scrapings, with, now and then, ploppings and splashings as of many small swimmers. Then something cold, wet and hairy, crawled over his hand.
Shaking it off with an exclamation, he jumped out of bed, and with the shock of it, stood stock still for two minutes up to his knees in water.
Then, striking a match, he saw that his room was awash, and that all sorts of articles were floating about it, drawn hither and thither by the current which swelled and eddied between the old slabs. Up a corner of blanket, touching the water, swarmed a great host of ants, tarantu............