I—I thought you were lying out hurt.”
She saw his slim form beside the greater bulk of the horse, halted when the animal moved between them, shaking itself, to trot to the trough beside the windmill. Then she was clinging to her son, and he was saying, the school-given accent still in evidence: “I’m all right, mother. I wanted to get the sheep away from the Channels. What a rain, dear! We must have had an inch already. Let’s hope it’ll rain six inches and fill the lake.”
A dull tattoo of hoofs preceded the arrival of Jimmy Partner who ground his feet before his horse could stop. Quick fingers began their work of removing the saddle.
“I told Nero about the message at Black Gate,” he said.
“Oh!” responded John Gordon a trifle vaguely, then hastened to add: “Oh, the message! Yes, that’s right, Jimmy. The tribe will start off for Deep Well first thing in the morning. Old Sarah is due to pass out. She must be the oldest lubra of the Kalchut. Now hurry along and get washed and change those clothes. Have you got clean shirt and vest and pants?”
“Too right, Johnny Boss.”
Mother and son began the walk across to the house, marked in the void by the light in the kitchen-living-room.
“I’m sorry we’re so late,” John Gordon said, slipping an arm about the gaunt figure. “Didn’t think this rain was coming when we left this morning, and I would have worried all night had I left the sheep on the Channel country.”
“But I’ve been so anxious, dear, so terribly anxious,” she complained. “I couldn’t help thinking of that night twelve years ago.”
The arm about her increased its pressure.
“I know,” he said, tenderly. “You are a bit of an old worry pot, aren’t you? The fact is that you have been too closely associated with the blacks, especially the lubras, and have borrowed much of their belief in the supernatural. Because poor dad failed to come home one night, you needs must imagine that I won’t turn up. It’s piffle when you come to think of it, isn’t it? Anyway, I’m home safe and sound, and it’s raining good and hard and looks like raining all night, and perhaps it will rain for a week and we’ll have feed and water for years. I don’t see anything to worry about, but everything to dance about.”
He opened the wicket gate for her and she hurried on into the house to look to the dinner, the fire, and then to take up airing underclothes and lay them on his bed beside his second best trousers and coat. She was humming a little tune as she passed back again to the kitchen, but the humming gave place to a cry of concern when she saw on John’s throat a wide bluish mark.
“It’s nothing, and it doesn’t hurt,” he quickly told her. “I was riding under a mulga-tree in the dark when a low branch gave me a knock. There’s no damage done, so don’t worry about it or I’ll have to take you in hand and talk to you seriously for being a bad woman. Now, what’s for dinner? I’m hungry. And here’s Jimmy Partner.”
The cloud in her big eyes passed, but she followed him with a bottle of embrocation, to fuss about him until he applied some of it to the bluish mark.
When they sat down to dinner it was still raining.
Chapter Two
The Bush Takes a Man
Bill the Better began his day’s work at seven in the morning when he rode out into the horse paddock to bring in the working hacks for the stockmen stationed at the homestead of the great Karwir cattle station.
He was a shrimp of a man, this Bill the Better. Scanty hair failed to cover a cranium that would have delighted Cesare Lombroso who, it will be remembered, determined criminals by their heads. A long nose appeared to divide the gingery moustache which he constantly pulled down by the ends, and watery blue eyes invariably contained an expression of great hope of a brighter future.
On this morning of the nineteenth of April the alarm clock awoke Bill the Better as it did every weekday, and instantly the quiet of the iron roof announced to him that the rain had ceased and that the horses would be wanted.
Only the two station cooks were astir thus early, and uttering a lurid curse that he was the unfortunate third, Bill the Better set off for the stable, at the side of a maze of cattle and horse yards, for the night horse. It was then he saw the big, jet-black gelding, bridled and saddled, standing beyond the gate spanning the road to Opal Town.
“Crummy!” he said loudly. “That there’s Handerson’s ’orse. Ha! Ha! I might win that two quid off Charlie yet.”
The Karwir groom swerved from the line he was following to the stable to follow another line that brought him to the hardwood gate. There, resting his arms on the top rail, he regarded the horse whilst a smile played over his irregular features. Raising his voice, he said directly to the gelding:
“Ha! Ha! So you didn’t bring Mister Blooming Jeffery Handerson ’ome? So you left ’im somewhere out there in Green Swamp Paddock, did yer? Well, I’m hopin’ you broke his flamin’ neck, and then I’m hopin’ you turned back to him and kicked the stuffin’ outer ’im. Then I wins a coupler quid and does a chortle, rememberin’ that time that Mister Bloomin’ Jeffery Handerson took to me.”
Turning away from the gate, Bill the Better walked across to that gate in the canegrass hedge surrounding the big house, washing his hands with invisible soap and blithely whistling. It being a part of his duties to keep tidy the garden within the canegrass fence, as well as to clean the many windows of the rambling house, he knew the room occupied by Mr Eric Lacy who was known over an enormous area of country as Young Lacy, the son of Old Lacy.
Bill the Better tapped vigorously on the window of Young Lacy’s bedroom until the window was raised and beyond appeared a tousled red head and a pair of keen hazel eyes. Once again the groom was washing his hands with invisible soap, and he said with satisfaction somewhat extraordinary:
“The Black Emperor’s standing outside the Green Swamp gate. Mr Handerson’s saddle and bridle still on ’im. Lunch bag looks empty. No tracks made by Mr Handerson showing as ’ow he left the animile there and come on acrost to ’is room, or any tracks showin’ that ’e came as far as the gate on The Black Emperor’s back.”
The clipped voice of Young Lacy issued from the room.
“Wait there, Bill. I’ll be out in a second.”
It was five seconds and no more when Young Lacy joined Bill the Better. He was arrayed in a wonderful dressing-gown of sky-blue with scarlet facings. His deep red hair was unbrushed and unruly. Of medium height and yet robust of body, his feet protected by yellow slippers, he did not speak until they were outside the garden gate. Bill the Better was continuing to wash his hands with invisible soap and was still whistling a lively tune.
“Doesn’t it strike you that Mr Handerson may be lying out in Green Swamp Paddock seriously injured?” inquired Young Lacy, deliberately prefixing the name with an aspirate. Some twenty-five years old, he looked a bare nineteen.
“Too right!” replied Bill the Better. “I got a coupler quid on ’im being dead, and a quid on ’im being that busted up that ’e’s got to be taken to the hospital at St Albans. As I lost seven and a tray over the flamin’ rain, I’m sorta wanting to make a bit over on Mr Handerson.”
“I suppose you’d bet on your funeral?”
“Yes, any time you like, Mr Lacy. I’m game to bet you a level fiver you dies first outer us two. We can put the money in an envelope wot can be kept in the office safe and handed out to the winner.”
“Tish, man! You’re a ghoul.”
Arrived at the gate giving entry to Green Swamp Paddock and the road to Opal Town, Bill the Better swung it open sufficiently to permit them to pass and then reclosed it. The great black gelding now stared at them with wide, white-rimmed eyes, his ears flattened and his legs iron-stiff, a beautiful horse and yet the devil incarnate. Without hesitation, Young Lacy walked to it and