At the beginning of the century Mount Lion was four times its present size. During a Saturday evening it was then impossible for any person to run from end to end of its broad main street on account of the crowds on the sidewalks and the horses, buggies, and carts in the road.
At the time Bony first visited Mount Lion it depended on two sources of wealth to stave off utter extinction. Windee Station provided the hotel with “cheque-men” and the stores with trade. The situation of the town made it a junction for mail-cars from Broken Hill in the south, Tibooburra in the north, and Wilcannia in the east. Travellers on these cars were compelled to spend one night at Mount Lion.
The sun rose one Sunday in a sky normally clear of clouds, and by eight o’clock shone fiercely on the iron and tin roofs and glittered on the pepper-trees lining the single thoroughfare, trees planted in the bygone prosperous days. Two cows reposed in the shade of the tree outside the main door of the hotel, and innumerable goats lay beneath other trees or foraged in backyards whose fences had broken down. Across the road from the police-station a number of hens were enjoying dust-baths amid a rubble of broken bricks and mortar, all that remained of a one-time important bank. Of the inhabitants there was no sign.
It was, indeed, a city of silence. At rare intervals a cock crowed, and at still rarer intervals the yellow-crested cockatoo in his petrol-case cage hung from the roof of a store veranda chattered sleepily, or said with great distinctness: “How dry we are!”
And then, as the buzzing of a bee, there came from the direction of Windee Station the roar of a motor-engine. Doubtless the pigeons on the convent roof could see the red dust rising from the south-west road as a smokecloud from a destroyer. Then out of the belt of pine country shot a motor-truck, its headlamps now and then catching and sending back the sunlight, and rushed with increasing roar across the low paraffin bush plain which surrounded the town and which formed the town common.
On the outskirts of the town the driver very wisely slowed to some three miles per hour, out of respect for his truck’s springs; for, although he paid the authorities in Sydney a tax of six pounds every year to drive that truck, never a penny of any motorist’s money had ever been spent on the streets of Mount Lion.
As a small dinghy in an Atlantic gale, the truck came slowly along the street, and finally into harbour within the shade of the pepper-tree outside the hotel. The cow ceased not to chew her cud, although barely an inch separated her hindquarters from the truck-wheel.
“Oo wouldn’t be a cow?” inquired a little, clean-shaven, red-faced man sitting beside the driver.
“I wouldn’t,” decided the driver. “If I were a cow I could not appreciate beer.”
The first speaker alighted nimbly, when a search began for tobacco and papers. Without interest he looked over the town, and then with returning interest at the cow.
“Every time I takes a bird’s-eye view of this burg I am reminded of me home town in Arizonee,” he remarked to the cow. “Even you has the same markings as Widder Smith’s milker. Hey, Dash! Have you got a match?”
The truck-driver, having alighted, searched his clothes. He was almost six feet in height and slim with it, although there was power in the carriage of his body. Scrupulously shaven, his weather-beaten face, his perfect teeth, revealed when he spoke, the crisp curling brown hair, and the cheerful hazel eyes, indicated a man in the prime of life.
“I haven’t a match, Dot, my dear friend,” he replied in a tone of voice which placed him instantly as from England’s upper middle class. “If, however, we arouse the estimable Mr Bumpus, you will be able to purchase a box and buy me a drink with the change.”
With one accord they sauntered round the corner and, via the case and barrel-filled yard at the rear, came to Mr Bumpus’s bedroom door, which opened on the back veranda. The door they opened without ceremony, then stood in the doorway, which commanded a view of Mr Bumpus’s head on one pillow and Mrs Bumpus’s head on the other.
“Hu-umph!” growled Dot.
“Pardon me!” murmured Dash.
The lady was first to awake. Her eyes opened to the intruders, and then shut as though she was suffering a nightmare.
“Good afternoon!” Dash remarked pleasantly.
“Nice evening!” added Dot with a chuckle.
“How dare you, Mr Dash and Mr Dot?” squealed Mrs Bumpus. Dash bowed.
“For the fair we dare all, madam,” he said. “Awake thy lord, sweet one, for it is near to midday.”
“Eh! Wot’s marrer?” grumbled Mr Bumpus when an elbow was dug into his well-cushioned ribs.
“Dot and Dash have come to town, Mr Bumpus,” explained the tall man at the door. “The day is fast going. Yet if you wish to sleep till night, throw me the keys of the bar and sleep on.”
“You’ll-fine-’em-on-the-was’-stan’,” Mr Bumpus murmured, evidently desiring to sleep until night did fall.
“Pardon, sweetheart!” Dash said deferentially, and walked to the washstand to secure the bunch of keys. When he rejoined Dot at the door he turned and smiled, and wagged his finger reprovingly. “Loveliest, Dot and Dash will take coffee and bacon and eggs for supper. Arise before you have to light the lamps.”
“Go away!” ordered Mrs Bumpus with a giggle.
Dash bowed with grace and closed the door, whereupon the oddly assorted pair walked along the passage, paused before a door whilst Dash selected a key and opened it, and entered the bar from behind the counter. Without speech, the little man lifted the layer of many wet sacks from a line of bottles laid as tin soldiers put to bed by a small boy, and placed two of them on the counter. From a stock beneath the counter he replaced the bottles taken, carefully readjusting the bags and pouring water over them from a glass jug. So far away from any source of ice, the evaporation from wet bags was the only cooling agency to hand.
Dash opened the bottles and placed each against a glass on the counter, after which he laid four shillings on a shelf above the cash register and, turning, jumped up backwards beside a glass and bottle. Dot climbed to a similar position via a chair.
“Australia’s greatest natural resource, my dear Dot, is its beer,” observed Dash.
“Which is why I left Arizonee,” Dot said fervently.
“Beer taken in moderate doses on a hot Sunday morning in October is an experience of which to dream whilst one is skinning kangaroos or rabbits.”
“You sure brand the right maverick this time, Dash.”
“The man who found out that water evaporating from a loosely woven material cools beer was rightly entitled to a peerage,” Dash went on sententiously.
“He sure was,” Dot agreed, holding his bottle against the light from a small window and sighing to see it empty. Then, as an afterthought, he went on: “Saying, of course, that he was an Englishman. If he was Amurrican he deserved orl the luck in the White House stakes. What about it?”
There appeared no doubt in the mind of the tall man to what his companion referred, for he said:
“Possibly it would be a wise procedure, my dear friend. As yet I do not hear sizzling bacon or smell the fragrant coffee, therefore let us indulge again in Australia’s greatest natural resource. Your turn to serve—and pay.”
Dot’s button of a nose wrinkled with a smile and his somewhat large blue eyes twinkled with good-humour when he slid down to the floor via the chair.
“If only I was a bartender!” he drawled reflectively, calling forth reproof.
“How your fancy does change! A little while ago you wanted to be a cow. As a bartender you would not appreciate beer to the extent you do as a skin- and fur-getter. Be content to be as you are! Do you ever hear me complain of my position in life? No, sir! I am satisfied, or rather I pretend to be, even to myself. Dot, my greatest respects! Er—did you pay?”
The history of these two men, so far as the people of Windee Station and Mount Lion knew, dated back some five years. Dash’s right name was Hugh Trench, and he received a letter precisely five
weeks after every quarter-day from a firm of lawyers in London. He came to Windee with a letter of introduction to Jeffrey Stanton, and it was understood that he was to be a jackeroo.
Dot, whose christian name was William, was at that time a dingo-trapper employed on Windee, and between these two, so different in stature, mentality and social position, there sprang up a very close friendship. For a reason that none knew, when Trench had been at Windee some three years he gave up the position he had occupied as jackeroo, with its attendant privilege of living with the squatter, and joined Dot as a trapper and shooter of vermin for profit. Their physical contrast, so accentuated when they were together—and they were rarely apart—won for them the nicknames Dot and Dash.
There was one thing that they kept to themselves in spite of their friendship, which was never clouded by a quarrel or serious difference, and that was their history before they came to Windee. Neither of them knew why the other had migrated to Australia, although Dot was aware that Dash originated in Hampshire, and Dash knew that Dot was reared in Arizona, U.S.A.
When Mr Bumpus entered the bar, each of them was flanked by three empty bottles on the counter, and the sum of twelve shillings reposed on the shelf above the cash register. Mr Bumpus was still in his striped pyjamas and not yet thoroughly awake. He was a large florid man of uncertain temper, and to Dash’s polite good morning he grunted. Without smiling, the tall partner said:
“Ah, Mr Bumpus, a faint discoloration on the liver this morning. Trade exceedingly good to a late hour, apparently. Yes, we will have a bottle apiece with you with pleasure. You will find our account settled on the shelf there.”
“Why can’t you let a man have a little bit of sleep? I can’t go night and day, and besides, to-day is Sunday.”
“A very excellent day for beer,” Dash reminded him, still unsmiling. “Did young Jeff have a sporting evening?”
“He’ll be thinking so this morning,” Mr Bumpus said a little less sleepily, producing a further round of bottles. “The road he’s travelling leads to Suicide Corner. It’s my business to sell liquor, but I hate to see a young feller like him getting outside so much of it.”
“Still hogging the whisky?” questioned Dot.
“Yes, worse luck, and vermouth and gin and rum.”
“Quite a mixture,” Dash murmured. “What room does he occupy?”
“Number two.”
“Well, if you will be so kind as to pour me out a nobbier of whisky in a large glass of soda-water, I will endeavour to persuade him to have breakfast. Presently he must return with us to Windee, as we are due to-night at Nullawil.”
“Wa’ for?”
“The overseer and his wife, as you know, were recently married. We are to tin-kettle them.”
“Well, for heaving’s sake take young Jeff with you.” Bumpus added two further liquids to the whisky-and-soda. Mixing it well with a glass rod, he gave it to Dash, adding: “If young Jeff keeps going on like this, I’ll be falling foul of the old man, and that I can’t afford.”
“Leave him to me, Mr Bumpus,” Dash proclaimed in his grand manner. “Youth and folly go together. We were all young years and years ago.”
When he had gone, Dot said:
“We sure are gettin’ old, Bumpus. I’ll shout this time.”
Chapter Nine
Father Ryan Leaves Town
WITHOUT KNOCKING, Dash opened the door of room No. 2 and entered, closed the door, and, going to the bed, stood silently looking down on the occupant. The bed lay lengthwise beneath the wide-open window, through which the intermittent breeze came to belly the lace curtains over the recumbent figure, still dressed in trousers and shirt.
Jeffrey Stanton, junior, was a young man of twenty-two. His robust frame made him bigger than his father, but it lacked the leanness and the wiry muscles still characteristic of the owner of Windee. There was in the face of this young man, whilst he lay breathing strenuously, pride and obstinacy, but no trace of the moral weakness to be expected in one in his condition. His forehead was low and broad as that of his sire, and in regarding the chin and slightly open mouth Dash was reminded of Marion Stanton. Seating himself in a chair at the head of the bed, he put down the tumbler of Mr Bumpus’s “reviver” on the washstand and said, in his soft grandiloquent manner:
“The hour is nine o’clock, my very debauched friend. Arise and suffer your ablutions before we break our fast.”
No alteration in the sleeper’s breathing indicated that he heard. Dash removed his wide-brimmed hat with one hand and ran the fingers of the other through his hair, thereby revealing the sunburn of his features and the rim of white, hat-protected skin at the summit of his forehead. His mouth then was like a spring rat-trap, but when he spoke again the even white teeth softened its grim outlines.
“Your appearance reminds me of a particularly dear old sow on the pater’s home farm,” he said loudly.
This time the sleeper stirred and, as the porcine mentioned by Dash, grunted.
“I would really like to smoke a cigarette, but I fear, should I strike a match, that your breath would cause an explosion,” the tall man observed in yet louder tones.
The response this time was a groan combined with a grunt. Dash sighed, and when the sigh was concluded his mouth was again hinting at a rat-trap. Slowly he turned his body away from the bed, and, stretching out a long arm, took from the washstand an enamelled ewer. It was a large ewer and full of water, but it required no effort for Dash to move it in a circular motion, his arm still outstretched, until it hovered over the sleeper’s face. Then from its lip there fell a gentle stream.
Young Jeff moved aside his face as though a fly walked his nose. The stream of water followed. Quite suddenly he opened his eyes. The water fell into them. He opened his mouth and the water filled it. The stream was endless, apparently inexhaustible. The young man guggled and writhed, clawed at the saturated pillows, finally sat up with wildly glaring eyes and waving hands. On the crown of his head fell the stream of water. It splashed as a jet from a garden-hose, washed his hair into his eyes, and streamed down his back and chest, saturating an expensive tussore-silk shirt. And then suddenly the stream subsided to a trickle, from a trickle languished to single drops. The empty ewer was replaced on the washstand, and Dash turned back to find himself regarded with bloodshot grey eyes and a passion-distorted face.
“You—you—you!” he cried, rage making him inarticulate.
“Softly, softly, my dear Jeff!” Dash admonished unsmilingly. He reached for the glass, this time keeping his eyes on the young man. Young Jeff saw a light in the hazel orbs, and from a raging lion became a sulky pup. It was then that Dash smiled and offered him Mr Bumpus’s concoction, which he took without thanks and drank. The whisky constituent made him shudder violently, and when the glass had been as violently thrown against the wall he threw himself back again on the pillow.
“I had an uncle,” remarked Dash, “who during the two closing years of his life was carried up to bed by two footmen every night at eleven o’clock. My uncle was a gentleman and a man. He drank beer all day long, and eighteen sixty-two port after dinner, yet he arose at six o’clock in the morning and spent an hour galloping round the park.”
“Oh—shut up!” cried young Jeff, flinging one wet arm across his eyes to banish the light.
“The trouble, I believe, is that your reading is wrong,” continued Dash. “You have been studying the lives of the strong silent men portrayed by romantic ladies, who (the men, not the ladies) invariably order their valets to bring them whiskies-and-sodas. In real life the strong silent man who doesn’t say much—myself, for instance—always shuns whiskies-and-sodas and sticks to beer, otherwise he would not be a strong silent man.”
“Damn you, Dash! Will you shut up?” demanded young Jeff, jerking up to a sitting posture and throwing his legs over the bedside.
“Gladly,” assented Dash, but he added a qualification: “if you will dress and come to breakfast.”
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br /> “Don’t talk to me of breakfast,” came the snarl.
“I must, my dear Jeff. A thin slice of unbuttered toast and a cup of strong coffee will make you fit for the drive home. Dot and I have come to town this morning especially to buy a shirt and take you home. If, after breakfast, you still feel unwell, we will then remove the distilled spirit remaining in your—er—inside by driving the truck up and down the main street of this beautifully paved town at five miles an hour.”
“I’m not leaving the hotel to-day,” Jeff decided, with out-thrust chin. “And you remember that I am the boss’s son, and that you are one of the boss’s servants.”
“I remember only that your father is my friend,” Dash said with remarkably altered voice. The indolence, the ambiguity, of his speech was but a mask after all, as was the gently smiling amused expression, replaced now by a brittle hardness. “If you are not off that bed in ten seconds, I’ll run you out and kick you round Bumpus’s backyard. Spring to it!”
The look and the tone of command utterly astonished young Jeff. It was as though he discovered a complete stranger in a man he had known ever since his return from college. Dash got up and moved his chair to the farther wall, and when he again seated himself and fell to rolling a cigarette young Jeff was stripping off his wet underclothes with shaking hands. The tall man’s features relaxed into their habitual lines, and his voice, when he spoke again, was pitched to its usual mildness.
“Of course you must go home, old boy,” he said, blowing smoke towards the curtains. “We are giving the Fosters a tin-kettling to-night. The boss and Miss Stanton are going. All hands are going. Dot and Dash are going. You are going. Before we left this morning Miss Stanton asked me to remind you of it.”
Bony - 02 - Sands of Windee Page 5
