The Pioneers

by Katharine Susannah Prichard

  CHAPTER XLII

  "There's bad news from Cameron's, Deirdre."

  Steve came in from the road.

  A bullock wagon had just passed from the Wirree. Deirdre had seen ithalt up. She had seen the bullocks standing with dumb, dull patienceunder the yoke, swinging their tails to keep the flies off. Some of themhad gone down on their knees by the roadside, while the teamster had adrink and yarned with Steve. Then she had heard the cracking of theteamster's whip, his oaths and calls to the beasts, and the creaking ofthe heavy, blue-washed cart as it went on again.

  "What is it?" she asked breathlessly, thinking of Davey.

  "Old Cameron," Steve said. "Johnny Watson says he was found dead on theroad by Long Gully--a tree fallen on him--this morning."

  "Steve!"

  There was horror, and yet a vague relief, in her exclamation.

  "Johnny says, Cameron went down to the Black Bull yesterday evening, andthere was trouble between him and McNab--McNab having let him in forthis cattle stealin' case, knowing Davey was in it," Steve went on. "ButThad got round him somehow, telling him that he didn't know Davey was init, and he'd get off, anyhow, bein' Cameron's son. Buttered the old manup that way. Conal and the Schoolmaster'd be nabbed for sure, he madeout. They were good enough friends when they parted only he'd had more'na jugful, and a couple of the boys had to give him a leg-up to hishorse. The brute must've shied at the dead tree near the gully, theground was cut up round it. It fell on them both. Mrs. Cameron found 'mthis morning."

  "I'll go and see if there's anything I can do for her."

  Deirdre took her hat down from behind the door.

  Steve went on talking of Donald Cameron, muttering in his vague,childish fashion.

  "However he came to get in with McNab I can't make out," he said. "Thereweren't no two greater enemies a while back. Oh, he was as mean as youmake them, D.C., but he made his mark in the country."

  Deirdre had on her hat.

  "I'm going, Steve," she said. "I won't stay unless Mrs. Cameron's got noone with her; but the Rosses and Mrs. Morrison are sure to be there."

  "Right, Deirdre!" he replied.

  She took her bridle from its nail by the door, and went into the paddockbeyond the stable, calling the chestnut. He heard her cry: "Coup lad!coup laddie!" and saw the white-stocking, at her call, come gallopingacross the newly-green grass, gilded with sunshine. She slipped thebridle over his head, brought him into the yard, saddled him and turnedout to the road.

  With thoughts of the tragedy that had befallen Mrs. Cameron, as she wentalong the winding track under the trees, were woven wonderings as to howDonald Cameron's sudden death would affect Davey and the Schoolmaster.

  It was on the roadside by the Long Gully that Mr. Cameron had died. Theold tree by the gully had fallen at last, and on Donald Cameron. AtRane, while Dan and she were living there, a man had been killed by afalling tree, but it was strange that Davey's father should have died inthis way, she thought, he who had been the first settler in the hills.

  She wondered if he had ring-barked the tree--score its living greenwood--if he had killed it, and in turn it had killed him, pinning him tothe earth with its great bulk of dead and rotting timber. She could seeDavey's father, heavy, squarely-built, in shabby, dark clothes, lyingbeneath it, his grey hair blood-dabbled, his face bruised and blackened.The man who had conquered the wilderness had lain there, on the veryroad he had made, broken, cast aside--a thing that life had done with.It was as if the wilderness had taken its revenge.

  She slipped from the chestnut's back in a sunny clearing and gathered ahandful of freckled and golden-eyed, white honey-flowers, twisted sometendrils of creepers and blades of ferns among them, and tied themtogether with a long piece of grass.

  When she came in sight of the weatherboard house crouching against thepurple wall of the hills, Deirdre realised again what Donald Cameron haddone. The cleared paddocks spread round it on every side. An orchardclimbing the slope to the left showed in dark leafage against the greyand green of the forest. Cattle dappled the furthest hillside. The barnsand sheds and stables behind the house formed a small village. He hadmade it, cleared the forest for it. He had done all this, she realised,and so much besides, and now he was dead, the man of iron will andindefatigable energy.

  There were two or three of the neighbours' carts in Cameron's yard.

  Deirdre opened the gate and shut it when she and White Socks had passedthrough. She hung the chestnut's bridle over a post by the barn, andlifted his saddle.

  Speckled fowls and handsome buff and yellow pullets stalked about theyard, pecking industriously even under the legs of the Ross's andMorrison's horses, which, with harness looped back on them, their nosesdeep in fodder bags, stood beside the carts. In the brilliant sunshine,on a wood-stack, struck against the clear blue sky, a black roostercrowed at intervals.

  Mrs. Cameron's sitting-room was in semi-darkness. Deirdre heard thehushed talking, exclamations and sound of weeping as she went into it.

  "It's you, Deirdre!" Mrs. Cameron said when she saw the girl. Her voicewas flat and tired; she seemed to have scarcely strength enough tospeak.

  Deirdre kissed her with quivering lips, and eyes welling.

  The room was full of people. She did not see who they were at first inthe half dark.

  "If only Davey were here!" Mrs. Cameron cried.

  Deirdre knelt beside her.

  "Perhaps he'll come," she whispered.

  "Did you gather the flowers for his father?"

  Mrs. Cameron's eyes had fallen on the little bouquet in Deirdre's hands.

  "I brought them for Davey," Deirdre said.

  Mrs. Cameron's hands quivered in hers.

  "We must keep her cheerful, not let her spirits get down," one of thevisitors said in Deirdre's ear.

  Jessie Ross brought in tea, and some newly-made scones.

  "You must eat this now, dear, to keep up your strength," Mrs. Ross saidto Mrs. Cameron, taking a chair beside her.

  Mrs. Ross talked of her milking, and the calves she had poddied duringthe wet weather; and the other women, gathering round, talked in seriousand melancholy fashion of their milking and the calves they had hadtrouble with during the winter. They gave each other recipes for creamcheese, and jam, and cakes to be made without eggs.

  "And I've discovered a sure way of making hens lay in the winter," saidMrs. Ross.

  "Have you?" replied Mrs. Cameron, listlessly.

  "Yes, indeed, and I'll tell you just what it is, Mary!"

  "Oh, it's of no interest to me now, with Davey away and his fathergone," Mrs. Cameron cried.

  She kept her hold of Deirdre's hand.

  "To think of him--Davey's father--in there, Deirdre --lying so still andcold, he that was so strong and nobody could break, or turn," she said."You haven't seen him yet. You must come with me."

  "Presently, dearie, but you must drink your tea and eat this little bitof scone first," Mrs. Ross said.

  The neighbours talked again nervously, cheerfully, in subdued tones, ofthe weather, the sales, and what the men of their households were sayingabout things in general.

  "We mustn't let her brood," they said anxiously to each other.

  Mrs. Cameron did not seem to hear or notice them. When she stood in thesilent room with Deirdre looking down on the white-sheeted figure ofDavey's father, she turned to the girl with a sharp cry.

  "It's a sad, sad thing to be parting from your life's mate, Deirdre,"she said. "To think that he should have died like that ... after allthat he's done--he that made this hill country. To have gone without aword from anyone, or a clearing-up of the misunderstandings between us.And Davey not to see him again!"

  She broke down and sobbed utterly.

  Mrs. Ross and Mrs. Morrison took her, each by an arm, and led her backto the sitting-room. The hum of strained, subdued and cheerfulconversation began again.

  Mrs. Cameron went to the door with Deirdre.

  "If only they'd let me be, child!" she cried,
kissing her. "If onlythey'd let me be. It's very good of them all to bother, but if onlythey'd let me be!"

  As the chestnut padded softly along the track home to Steve's, Deirdrewondered again what effect Donald Cameron's death would have on Daveyand Dan. It would make Davey a rich man, she knew. Donald Cameron hadbeen reputed wealthy when she and the Schoolmaster first came to thehills, and he had not been drinking long enough to have squandered muchmoney. "It would take more than a gallon of rum to make old Cameronloosen his purse strings," she remembered having heard Conal say.

  To Dan and to her it would make very little difference in the end. Therewould still be McNab. The train of her thought snapped. For a moment,with all her passionate youth, she envied Donald Cameron his stillness.

  A night and a day remained before she would have to tell McNab that shehad made her choice. Every beat of the chestnut's hoofs on the softroadside drove what he had said into her brain. She knew no more nowthan she did a week ago what was going to happen to Davey and theSchoolmaster, or how the case was going. Perhaps less, since DonaldCameron's death. But her mind was made up as to what McNab's answerwould be. She had never really had any doubt as to what it must be, andhad asked for time as one asks to have the window open before settlingdown to passing the day in a dark and airless room.

  Deep in her mind there was still, however, a vagrant hope, a fairy,child-like thing, a phantom assurance of the impossibility of what wasdemanded of her, a belief, like thistle-down, as faint and fragile, thatsomething unheard of, miraculous, would happen to help her, and at thesame time save Dan and Steve and Davey.