The Pioneers

by Katharine Susannah Prichard

  CHAPTER XVIII

  In the earliest days of Port Southern, settlers tracking inland orfurther along the coast, had to cross the Wirree, driving their cattleand horses before them. The shallows of the river where they crossedbegan to be called the Wirree Ford. The tracks converged there, and itwas not long before a shanty appeared on the left bank a few hundredyards from the broad and slowly-moving river.

  The Wirree came down from the hills and flowed across the plains at thefoot of the ranges. The whole of the flat land it watered was spoken ofas the Wirree river district, or the Wirree. The stream emptied itselfinto the waters of Bass Straits. Opposite was Van Diemen's Land, thebeautiful green island on which penal settlements had been established.Men had been known to escape from it to the mainland. They made thedangerous passage of the Straits in open boats, and sometimes werepicked up in an exhausted condition by a frigate policing the coast, ora trader, and sent back to Hobart Town or Port Arthur. Sometimes theirdead bodies were tossed by the sea on the shores they had been trying toreach, and sometimes, steering by the muddy waters of the river thatflowed out from the nearest point opposite the Island, bearing silt anddrift-wood for a couple of miles into the sea, they reached the land ofpromise and freedom.

  As the beaten grass path along the seaboard became the main stock routebetween Port Southern and Rane, a newly-founded settlement at thefurther eastern end of the coast, a township of curious mushroom growth,cropped up about the Wirree Ford and McNab's shanty.

  It was a collection of huts, wattle and dab, whitewashed, for the mostpart; but some of them were of sun-baked sods, plastered together, or ofthe stones which were scattered over the plains or filled the creekbeds. McNab's weatherboard shanty, with its sign-board of a black bull,with red-rimmed eyes on a white ground, was by far the most pretentious.The history of these dwellers about McNab's was a matter of suspicion.They arrived from nowhere, out of the night, silently, and it wassurmised, crept up the river in the cockle-shell boats which had broughtthem over the Straits and were sunk in the slowly-moving river when theyhad served their purpose.

  The fertile flats, stretching to the edge of the mountains, had beentaken up before McNab got his holding on an arm of the Wirree. He setabout acquiring the selvedge of the plains which was cut off from thefiner, more arable land by a scrubby line of densely growing ti-tree.Most of the Wirree Ford men ran cattle on these strips of coarse-grassedland, thrashed by the sea breezes. But they were no sticklers for theniceties of boundaries and property laws. They drove their first,wild-eyed, scraggy herds whither they listed, a cursing, blasphemouscrew, none dared gainsay them. It was reckoned better to have thegood-will than the enmity of the Wirree river men. The body of a settlerwho had threatened "to have the law of them" for grazing their beasts onhis land was, a few days afterwards, found in the river, drifting withthe tide out to sea. Some of the Wirree men made a living as fishermen.Others maintained themselves by a desultory farming. They ploughed thegrey land of the seaboard with wooden hand-ploughs. But many of themthrived on what they could make out of the stockmen and drovers whopassed through the township on their way to Rane or to the Port.

  McNab was powerful enough even in those days, and many and ingeniouswere the stories he invented to account for the presence of men who cameto the Wirree Ford unexpectedly.

  As the settlement grew, it did justice to the rumoured accounts of itsorigin. McNab's was the meeting place of stockmen, drovers and teamsterson the southern roads, and the carouses held there were night-long. Itwas recognised as a hotbed of thieves and ruffians by the roadsters, andno man of substance or any pretensions at all, would lodge the night inany of the mud-built huts within a stone's throw of the river.

  Before long, the Wirree men had fat cattle to dispose of. An open spacebetween the huts, not far from McNab's, was used as a sale yard. It wasthen that settlers who wanted good prices for their beasts had to drivethem to the Wirree market. A better bargain was driven in the Wirreesquare than anywhere else. So Wirree Ford became Wirreeford, and thrivedand prospered until it was the busiest cattle market in the south.

  To a certain extent, its prosperity threw an air of respectability overit. At first, cattle-owners and farmers from the hills entered thetownship in the morning and left it before the shadows of night fell.They did their business, and left the Wirree not much better off fortheir coming, venturing into the shanty for a midday meal only, anddrinking sparingly, if at all, of the curious, dark spirits it vended.

  Then stores were opened. There were less fearsome comings and goings.Mrs. Mary Ann Hegarty set up a shanty and proceeded to business with anair of great propriety. Women and children were brought into thetownship for the cattle sales. Sale days became weekly holidays. Theymeant the donning of festive ribbands by the women and children, theclimbing into high spring-carts and buggies, and driving along thewinding track from the hills to the township, where groceries, dressstuffs and household furnishings could be bought, and stowed in the backof the carts for the home journey.

  Sale days, however, still ended in gaming and drinking brawls at theshanties, and sometimes in the dropping of a heavy, still body into theWirree, when the tides would carry it out to sea.

  It was the disappearance of a young farmer from the West Hills after anight at the Black Bull that made Donald Cameron decide to take action.He, backed by other farmers and well-to-do hill settlers, maderepresentations to the Port authorities as to the lawless character andconduct of Wirreeford township.

  A trooper who rode into it a few days later was pelted with stones,tarred and feathered, and sent back to Port Southern.

  Then a building was rim-up on the outskirts of the township--aramshackle house built of overlapping, smooth, pine shingles. It waswhitewashed, so that it stood out on the darkest nights to remindroisterers that law and order were in their midst. And as soon as it wasfinished, John M'Laughlin, a police-sergeant from the Port, took up hisresidence in it. He mitigated the impression that undue severity wouldbe meted out to evil-doers from the new police head-quarters, bygenially brawling with most of his neighbours at McNab's as soon as hearrived, very successfully intimating that he was far too long-sighted,easy-going and convivial a soul to interfere with the Wirree's littleway of doing things.

  Donald Cameron was well known in Wirreeford when it began to be a cattlemarket of importance. So was Davey--Young Davey--as he was called whenhe began to go regularly to the sales in the years that followed thefires.

  Cameron worked all day in the sale-yards with his men. He drove in hisown beasts in the morning, threw off his coat for the drafting and, whenthe sales were over, went out of the township, a stolid, stoopingfigure, on his heavy bay cob. Although he sometimes made close on athousand pounds on a day's sales, he went out of the township, as oftenas not, without spending a penny.

  It was said that he was the wealthiest man in the countryside, and as"mean as they make 'em." Yet his disinclination to spend money was madesubservient to his sense of justice; and a spirit of matter-of-factintegrity that he carried round with him made the Wirree people regardhim with suspicious awe. The iron quality of his will, the hard,straight gaze of his eyes, were difficult things for men with uneasyconsciences to encounter. Because he was the first man in the country,it was reckoned a matter of prestige to have the patronage of DonaldCameron of Ayrmuir, whether for a meal, store order, or any jobwhatever. In jest, half earnest, he was called the Laird of Ayrmuir.

  Wirree men said that Thad McNab loathed Donald Cameron "as the devilloathes holy water."

  McNab was not the devil in their eyes, nor Donald Cameron holy water,but the saying perhaps suggested to them the composite forces of the twomen. Thad, with his twisted mind, his cruel eyes, his treacherousunderhand ways, stood to them for something in the nature of the powerof evil. Donald Cameron, with his harsh integrity, his unbending virtue,his parsimony, and sober respectability, stood for something in thenature of abstract good. They had the respect for him that peoplesometimes have for a standard whic
h has been hung before their eyes, andwhich they have not been able to live up to. But Thad was their aiderand abettor.

  Thad, for all his tyrannies, blackmail, petulances, made life easier forthem. They stood by him and blessed him, cursing Donald Cameron and hissort, who would have sent them back to the prison cells and torture ofthe Island. It was not from motives of sheer kindness that McNab stoodby them, they knew, but because it paid him. Nevertheless, the thingworked out in the same way. Donald Cameron was more their enemy thanThad. Thad's feud with him amused them as much as a cock fight; theirmoney was on their own bird, and they barracked for him, idly,light-heartedly, scoffing at his enemy.

  Almost every man in the Wirree was in McNab's debt. He knew more abouttheir lives and antecedents than was to their soul's comfort. Theysuspected that more than one of the men who had been taken back to theIsland had been put away by McNab, and that those lean, crooked hands ofhis had fingered Government money--rewards for the capture of escapedconvicts. But so long as they were in with Thad McNab, Wirreeford menwith pasts that would not bear looking into thought they were all right.Although there were rumours of treacherous dealings on his part, withchild-like simplicity, with the faith of the desperate, they trustedMcNab, believing that he stood between them and the prisons of PortArthur. They believed that if they were "in with Thad," they need notwake, sweating, out of their sleep at the thought of the "cat," or worryif, forgetful of consequences, they gave that tell-tale start at theclank and rattle of irons.

  It was pretty well understood that Thad McNab and Sergeant M'Laughlin"worked" together. Thad had been hand-in-glove with him since he came tothe Wirree River. The fact sometimes stood unruly spirits in good steadwhen there was a merry night at the Black Bull. But when there was aninconvenient accident over the cards once or twice, and when there was ahold-up on the Rane road just outside the township, too, it was concededthat M'Laughlin had earned his screw. Thad saw to it that occasionallyhe made an appearance of doing his duty. If it had been imagined athead-quarters that Sergeant M'Laughlin winked at irregularities in theapplication of the law at Wirreeford, he might have been moved on, andthat would not have suited the landlord of the Black Bull, who wouldthen have had another man to deal with, or have found that another manwas dealing with him.

  Donald Cameron made no secret of his attitude to McNab. After M'Laughlinhad been several months in the township, and there was no outward orvisible sight of his having mended its ways, Mr. Cameron maderepresentation to the authorities at Port Southern, and through them tothe powers that had their official residence in Melbourne, in respect toThadeus McNab's position and breaches of the law in Wirreeford. He wasclear in his own mind that there was a case against McNab; first, forharbouring convicts escaped from Van Diemen's Land; and secondly, forbeing the possessor of a still, and for turning it to account in slygrog making. John Ross, Mathew Morrison, and the rest of the hill folkand settlers at the farther end of the plains, upheld him in this effortto rid the district of McNab; but although an inquiry was made, nothingcame of it.

  Donald Cameron gained no extra popularity in the Wirree on the first ofhis counts. Thad's position was, if anything, strengthened by Cameron'shostility. Every man in the township knew that he had to stand by McNab,or McNab would not stand by him; therefore when an officer from the Portcame to investigate conditions in Wirreeford, he found nothing to takeexception to. He reported that the local police officer was efficient,and that complaints of the hill settlers were due to a personal rancourexisting between Donald Cameron and the landlord of the Black Bull.

  Thad flourished like a green bay tree after this failure to move him,and forged the weapon of a very serviceable hate against Donald Cameron.He kept it very carefully scabbarded, but occasionally it leapt forth,and its mettle was visible to all and sundry. Ordinarily, Thad kept alocked brain; it was only in rare transports of rage that he revealedanything of its crooked workings. And then those who saw them looked totheir own behaviour, and were careful to do nothing that would bringthem into its toils.

  Probably nobody but Cameron himself thought McNab had swallowed thatlittle business of the inquiry when, a few months later, he was fawninground him, telling him that dinners were to be served at the "Bull" onsale days, and that his patronage would be an esteemed favour. Those whoheard him say: "Things has not been as they might have been, always, atthe Black Bull, Mr. Cameron--you have had reason to complain in thepast--but everything is goin' to be different for the future," could notbelieve their ears. It was very humbly, with a flattering deference,that McNab had asked "the laird" to help him to improve the tone of theplace by occasionally having a meal in it.

  Donald Cameron had been in the habit of taking his meat-pasty, or breadand cheese sandwich to the sale yards in his pocket. He ate his lunchthere at midday when most of the men made tracks for the bar opposite.But after a while, he took his meals at the Black Bull, lowering not awhit of his dignity in the doing of it, and treating McNab as curtly inhis own establishment as he did anywhere else. When he was down withrheumatics in the early spring, the place had open doors to Davey. Hewas served like a duke in it.

  Young Davey promised to be a chip of the old block, the Wirree said. Heworked as insatiably as the old man, and was no more than a roadmenderby the look of him. His grey trousers had many a patch on them, and hishat was as weathered a bit of felt as was seen in the yards. He walkedwith the slouch of the cattle-men--men who have spent most of their daysin the saddle.

  When he flung off his hat, it was seen he was good-looking enough, withan air of breed about him, a something the Wirree did not quite get.There was a great deal of his mother in the cast of his features, andhis eyes were grey and green like hers, but his mouth was DonaldCameron's set in a boy's face. Davey was a shy, awkward fellow and spokeas little as the old man, though it was acknowledged that if his handwas as rarely in his breeches' pockets as his father's, it was becausethere was nothing in them. It was well known that Donald Cameron workedhis son like a convict, and kept him on short commons, giving himneither wages nor pocket-money, so that he blushed when a down-and-outblackguard asked him for the price of drink and he had not got it togive.

  He fed with the old man, this young Davey Cameron, and was never seen inthe bars. Few of the men who entered the shanties could say that theyhad had much to do with Cameron and his son, except John Ross and theMorrison boys, who occasionally dropped into McNab's. But they were ofthe same sort--hardworking, thrifty, God-fearing, respectable, homelypeople of the hills, who despised the Wirree River township, itsantecedents, descendants, and associations, and did business with itonly because business was better done there than anywhere else.

  The Schoolmaster and Deirdre had been gone from the hills for over ayear when Wirreeford began to make concessions for the sake of theyounger generation.

  Although cards were shuffled and dice were thrown at the Black Bull,when the rush-lights flickered in the windows after the sales, and thelittle fires of cow-dung--lighted before the doors of the houses to keepaway the sandflies and mosquitoes--glowed in the dusk, sending up faintwreaths of blue smoke, Mrs. Mary Ann Hegarty threw open her parlour, andthere was dancing in it until the small hours.

  The hill people lent the countenance of their presence to days ofout-door sports, and to the dancing at Mrs. Hegarty's on Christmas andNew Year's day. The Ross boys danced with bright-eyed Wirree girls.Morrison's Kitty and some of the other girls from the hills learnt thereels and jigs that their parents had danced in the country beyond theseas, they were always talking of. The old people danced too. There werenights of wholesome, heart-warming merriment and the singing of oldsongs.

  Only Donald Cameron and his wife held aloof from these festivities. Butbefore long it was observed that Young Davey was going to the monthlydancing with the Rosses. He rode down from the hills with the boys andJess. They made the Wirree streets ring as they galloped to Hegarty's,and their laughter streeled out on the wind behind them, as they wenthome in the early hours of the mornin
g, when even the roisterers at theBlack Bull had fallen asleep in uneasy attitudes about its verandahs.