by Zane Grey
“Sterl, don’t forget Leslie is still down there,” said Beryl appealingly. “Those horses will be the death of her yet.”
“Les is all right, Beryl. Standing this trek as well as any of us. But you, girl, you’ve only begun to pick up. Please rest.”
“Sterl, I’ll do my bit,” replied Beryl, smiling up at him. She might not have realized that she was telling him she had begun to learn a great lesson of life. How frail she looked, yet her sad face seemed lovelier than ever. She had courage—that thing Sterl respected more than all else in man or woman. If she lived, she would come through this fire pure gold. If! Sterl had a melancholy regurgitation of old emotions. They did not last. He went out along the saddle to look for Leslie. He could see the colored splashes of cattle along the green slopes. And in a fertile corner under the saddle he espied the horses.
There was gold in the hilltops in the distance—the last steps of dying day. Dully he comprehended that the scene might be grand, but he had no interest in it. He was tired. Depression gnawed at him, spiritually and physically. Then he espied Leslie climbing the slope on foot, in the track of the wagons. Presently she saw him and waved. Lithe and supple, browned by exposure, clear-eyed as a falcon, her drover’s garb ragged and soiled, she always dragged a meed of praise from him.
“Howdy, Sterl. Been worrying about me?” she panted, a gauntletted hand at her full breast.
“No, Les. Only King and the remuda.”
“King, Jester, Duke, Lady Jane, all tiptop. Sorrel is lame. Count is fagged out…oh, Lord! Is that what…we climbed out…to see? Sterl, will we ever, ever get through this Deception Pass?”
“I don’t know…and don’t care much.”
“Sterl!…that’s not like you. Oh, dear boy, you’re worn out. You and Red have done the work of two men. So has everybody! After all, it’s something to fight.”
“Fight! What for?”
“To beat this trek.”
“Les, you and Beryl make me a little ashamed,” replied Sterl.
“Sterl, you and Red all through this terrible year…almost a year…have filled my heart, and Beryl’s, and Mum’s with courage to carry on. Small wonder that you lag a little now. But don’t fail me, Sterl. And don’t let Red fail Beryl. It is he who has saved her…who is changing her very soul. Oh, I know he seldom looks at her…never speaks to her. But no matter. She sees, she feels, she thinks…. Sterl, would you mind…holding me for a bit…like you used to?”
But Sterl evaded that, despite the warmth she stirred in his cold heart, and made excuses, and, talking kindly to her, he led her to camp. In the dusk they sat on the ground to eat and drink—not that they had appetite for the eternal fare which had become tasteless, but because of the need for strength. Darkness fell upon silent trekkers, some going to their beds, and others about their jobs, and all with plodding spirits, bowed but not broken.
It took all the next morning to drive the mob up over the saddle. Friday had returned from his scout below. To Stanley Dann he spread his wonderful, sinewy black hands, fingers wide. “Boss, might be cattle go alonga dere,” he said, and manifestly he meant they should separate, as his fingers indicated, and streak through various channels to what ever lay at the end of that green maze.
Like a great waterfall the mob poured off the saddle, to roll and wag and clatter down, to disappear at will in the jungle. It was Sterl’s opinion that they could not have followed the wagons, and perhaps that was what Friday had intimated. Nor could the drovers leave the wagons to try to hold the mob. But the horses were kept back to go with the wagons.
Then began a feverish and ceaseless labor of fourteen men to chop and build a road for six wagons through ten miles of wilderness jungle. It was a Herculean task. It dwarfed all their former labors put together. At first it was fraught with worry about the cattle. After five days of digging, chopping, carrying rocks, packing supplies, wading all day long in mud and water and grass, all the toilers except Stanley Dann and Slyter forgot about the cattle and horses. Every day Friday, whose duty it was to report on the mob, as well as ferret out the best way through the jungle, would say—“Cattle along dere farder.”—and that day when he said—Cattle gone!”—there was not one of the trekkers who betrayed grief. It was now a battle for their lives. Without wagons they could not freight supplies for so large a band, and without supplies they would starve.
Their beef gave out, and two drovers, mounted on horses, could not find even a crippled steer to shoot. Slyter swore he would starve before he ate horse flesh, but the other men ate it, and the women did so without being aware of the fact. Slyter and Red and Sterl toiled all day at road making, and droved the horses near camp at night. Leslie kept track of them by day.
During the daylight hours the flies were almost as fierce as at the Forks, and at night the mosquitoes were so thick and bloodthirsty that they would have killed an unprotected man. The second cook practically died on his feet, sticking it out with fever and dysentery, and then collapsing finally, after all. Monkton was bitten by a death-adder, and for days his life was despaired of. Injuries multiplied as the men grew so weary that they could not be vigilant.
In the middle of that jungle Eric Dann made a startling proposal. “We’ve got to abandon the wagons and pack out!”
It was midday, hot and muggy, when the men had halted a half hour for tea and damper. Stanley Dann, dirty and sweaty and bedraggled, gazed at this blood kin of his with great amber eyes that had not lost their magnificent light.
“How about the women?” he asked.
“They can ride horse back. I asked Beryl. She said she could,” Eric returned eagerly.
“We are two thousand miles from anywhere. Beryl would die.”
“If she gave out…we could pack her,” exclaimed this extraordinary man.
The giant shook his shaggy golden head wearily, as if it was useless to listen to his brother.
“We can’t get through,” bawled Eric Dann, his voice rising high. “I climbed up to see. We’re not halfway! Man, would you sacrifice us all for your worthless daughter?”
When Stanley Dann rose to that jibe, all the mildness and weariness of him appeared never to have been. The swelling of his wide chest attested to what his outburst would be.
“Oh, I know,” shouted Eric, yielding to the fear that was his major failing. “I’ve heard Ormiston’s brag. Beryl was a fool over him…a vain, brazen….”
Red Krehl leaped upon Dann and felled him. He would have killed the man, too, but for a sharp cry. Beryl and Leslie, coming from Beryl’s wagon to the cook shack, had heard and seen. That cry and Beryl’s presence obviated further violence on Red’s part. But it could not silence him.
“I’m gonna kill this brother of yore’s yet,” bitterly predicted the cowboy. “Ain’t it enough thet he got us into this hellhole…that he proposed we pack out of heah to save his own yellow hide? Ain’t thet enough without his lowdown…?”
“Red, don’t kill Uncle Eric. Not for me!” cried Beryl passionately. “I’m not worth it. I was a fool. I was vain, brazen, mad! But Eric only knows the half. I plotted with Ash Ormiston…that he steal me from my bed. I was to go with him willingly. He meant to rush Dad’s mob…to kill anyone who opposed him…especially to kill Eric, with whom he had plotted. I agreed to go with him to save Uncle Eric’s life, and Dad from ruin, if not worse. But Ormiston betrayed me. He stole Dad’s cattle. He would have murdered Uncle Eric but for me. He…he….”
She broke down then. Leslie led her away from the stunned group of men. Eric Dann heard that denunciation, for he slunk away under a tree. Of all present, Sterl thought his friend Red seemed the most staggered by Beryl’s revelation. But it was not in his case, as with the others, that Beryl’s participation in Ormiston’s plot had come to light. Red had known that. He had kept it secret from Sterl. And he knew now why the girl had betrayed him and her father and all of them. What a pity she had not remained there to see Red Krehl in that moment.
After what seemed a
long silence, Stanley Dann said: “Men, we are being sorely tried, but let us not lose our faith in God and in each other. Krehl, I thank you for withholding from your creed. But I disagree with my daughter. She is worth all she disclaimed she was not.”
“Wal, boss, if you ask me, I kinda reckon so myself,” returned Red Krehl ponderingly.
“All of you back to work. We are going through!” boomed the leader.
Sterl bent for his shovel and whispered to his friend. “Pard, now another job of mine is to keep you from being shot in the back.”
Before many more hours passed that break in their toil, with its resurging of lulled passions, was forgotten in the sheer physical prostration of effort that could not have been prolonged if life itself had not been at stake.
This was the only period so far on the trek that Stanley Dann neglected his record of travel. If they ever got through this fight with nature, it must be a black memory, a blank page.
When, at last, the implacable trekkers reached the end of that impasse and were sunk to their lowest ebb, the black man Friday found a gateway for them out into the open.
The hour came when they faced vastly different country from that which Eric Dann had pictured to them. No one except Sterl, perhaps, thought of Dann’s mistake or falsehood.
A few miles below a gentle green slope, out upon a velvet green down, Stanley Dann’s mob of cattle grazed in a great colorful patch. Beyond them spread endless green downs dotted with clumps of pandamus and palms, on and on, apparently forever, streaked by black fringes of trees, and bisected from league to league by shining water, and bordered by what resembled limitless purple horizon. That was what Sterl’s eyes beheld, and that was why Stanley Dann boomed his prayer of gratitude to heaven. They were also so overjoyed to get clear of that awful jungle and the awful toil, to see the cattle peacefully grazing, that no one of them asked audibly where they were. They did not care. They were again delivered. Only Sterl thought of what Eric Dann had sworn, that the country beyond the range would be the same as the headwaters of the Diamantina.
Chapter Twenty-four
Days of leisurely and comfortable going now, over level downs with grass and water abundant. But one jarring fact—in a week’s trekking, they reached a point opposite the flattening out of that range whose crossing had cost them so many supplies, so much toil and life. By a week’s detour, they could have gone around it. Six weeks more than lost.
With firewood so scarce, whenever they found any dead wood Bill insisted on packing enough for the next camp. Flocks of wildfowl were seen in flight, but only herons and cranes were met on the downs. One flock of emus rewarded Sterl’s unflagging gaze. Kangaroos were scarce. A number of small streams were forded every day; they ran every whither, but offered no obstacle to the trek.
Then, one afternoon late, the black, ragged line that had gradually grown for days turned out to be a good-size river. It flowed north. It presented a problem, not only to cross, but because the water, flowing the wrong way, upset their calculations. The Warburton, for which Dann thought he was trekking, would have flowed due west. According to the leader’s rude map, when they crossed it, they would be headed north between the Never Never Land and the Gulf. They would head all the streams flowing into the Gulf. Sterl and Red agreed that this was good calculating on their leader’s part. At Dann’s conference, the first for a long time, Red and Sterl agreed with Slyter that they would like to get back along the fringe of these boundless downs, instead of crossing them.
“This is the Flinders River,” asserted Eric Dann positively. “I remember it. Probably we are two or three hundred miles from the Gulf”
“Flinders River? Gulf?” Stanley echoed aghast. “That means salt-water, crocodiles, and cannibal aborigines!”
“Gosh!” ejaculated Red Krehl. A mention of those threats corroborated his doubts. “Boss, of course, hunches mean nothin’ a-tall to you. But let’s follow mine an’ rustle back onto dry land.”
Any suggestion of the cowboy’s was to Eric Dann like waving a red flag at a bull.
“Stanley, it’s along the fringe of the Never Never that bad blacks are to be encountered,” he said impressively. “If we cross here and continue northwest, we’ll avoid them.”
“How do you know that?” demanded the leader intensely.
“I know it,” returned Eric stubbornly.
“What is your objective?”
“Southeast of the Port Darwin,” answered the brother glibly. “There are fertile ranges. We can choose to stop there, if you like, and send in to Darwin for supplies. I think you will decide for them, instead of the Kimberleys.”
If Eric Dann was capable of absolute sincerity, here seemed to be the moment when he adhered to it. Perhaps this had been his scheme all along, since Ormiston would have none of him.
“Yes, true enough,” mused the leader. “We have that information from more than one reliable source. It appeals to me for reasons of salvation. I could always move on to the Kimberleys. Eric, one more word before I say the die is cast. I never expected you to travel straight as a beeline to our objective. You have made mistakes…this last one, terrible! You will make more. But in your heart, are you honest?”
Before the stern and just leader, the hawk-eyed cowboys and the dubious Slyter with his drovers, Eric Dann solemnly asserted his truth. But to the soul-searching Sterl, used to watching men where greed and hate and life and death hang in the balance, the man was a liar.
Four days were consumed in crossing this river; and it turned out that Dann’s elaborate plans were unnecessary. The maintaining of a camp on each side, so as to guard both cattle and supplies seemed a wise move. But no aborigines appeared, and the cattle were too tame to get out of their own tracks, except to graze.
The river, which Leslie called the Muddy, appeared to be fresh-water, although it had a weedy taste, and the middle channel had to be swum. Neither accident nor injury marked the crossing of the wagons, although it took dragging and persistent labor. Friday had averred—“No croc’ along here.”—which good news of the absence of the fearful twenty-foot crocodiles of the Northland was received with gratification.
Early on the fourth day, with four wagons and the horses safely across, the mob of five thousand cattle was started. All the drovers took part in this. They expected any and all kinds of trouble. But they had none. The mob waded and swam across in an hour, a record job, with one drawback only, which was that they spread nearly a mile along the far shore.
Dann’s big wagon, which was Beryl’s domicile, presented a problem. The drovers, particularly Eric who had come to regard himself as more than a guide, wasted time arguing. Finally Stanley Dann took Red’s advice. The wagon was driven out until the water was over hub deep on the wheels, and from there ten men on horse back packed the contents piece by piece. Then the big wagon was ferried across the deep channel with ropes and horses. By noonday it had been safely crossed and repacked.
Leslie and Beryl, with Friday, had been left to the last. Then Stanley Dann sent the cowboys, Larry and Rollie, back to fetch the girls.
“Where’s a horse for me to ride?” demanded Beryl, as the bedraggled riders waded their horses out on the bank.
“Boss’s order is for us to pack you over,” Larry replied quite uneasily.
“Oh…so I’m a sack of flour…or maybe an empty one?” asked the girl sarcastically.
“Your dad didn’t think you were quite strong enough to ride,” went on Larry.
To Sterl’s surprise, and certainly to Red’s, Beryl acquiesced without further remark. Sterl thought he could guess the reason.
“Sterl, will you pack me on King?” asked Beryl, turning away a little from the others. Certain it was that she winked one of her big violet eyes at Sterl.
“I couldn’t think of it, Beryl,” replied Sterl mildly.
“Beryl, I’d be afraid to risk you on this nag,” put in Larry.
“I’ll take you,” interposed Rollie, who was as dense as he was
kind.
“Pooh! On that horse? No, indeed,” returned the young lady whose eyes had begun to sparkle.
Leslie, who had been about to protest with spirit and perhaps berate those drovers, happened to meet Sterl’s glance, and then she bit her tongue.
“Red, I’d feel safer with you on Duke. He’s so big,” said Beryl casually, with downcast eyes. “Besides, you have packed me before.”
“Yeah? Wal, why didn’t you wear yore pants?” returned Red, far removed from gallantry in this instance.
Beryl flushed vividly at that blunt query. “I haven’t worn my riding clothes for a long time.”
“You cain’t straddle a hoss in thet dress.”
“I couldn’t, Mister Krehl…and look decent,” retorted Beryl, whose temper was seldom proof against Red.
“Wal, you might have thought to put on yore nightgown,” drawled Red, as deadly cool as if he were facing a man who had provoked him.
“Red!”
“Come on. Gimme yore hand…stick yore foot in my stirrup. Aw!…so Mister Hazelton has to butt in!”
Sterl had leaped off to help Beryl up in front of Red. She was so slim that she fitted across his knees. Red put his left arm around her, and Beryl put her right arm about his neck. Anyway Sterl looked at the position, it was an embrace—reluctant on Red’s part, subtly willing on Beryl’s. She laid her head back and looked up at him.
“Red, it won’t take long,” said Sterl in cheery significance. But he did not mean the trip across.
“I don’t care how long it takes…if only…,” murmured Beryl, with a hint of her old audacity.
There was nothing revengeful or unresponsive in Red Krehl. Sterl caught a fleeting glimpse of the soft yearning glow in Beryl’s violet eyes. There would not have been any use or any sense in trying to resist that. Sterl dated his faith in Beryl Dann’s awakening from that moment. How could she help but love the cowboy? But Red’s reaction was as natural as his sincerity was hidden.
