Outback Station

by Aaron Fletcher

  She was barely recognizable with her face sooty from campfires and her hair a tangle under the dusty brim of a man's hat. Under the grimy, shapeless man's coat, her dress was in dirty tatters. Dipping the jug into the water, she desperately yearned to be free of the bushrangers. And with equal intensity, she longed to avenge what they had done to her.

  A few days later, there was a lavish abundance of water when they camped beside a wide, muddy river. West of the river, however, the terrain was even more arid than before, with long stretches between sources of water. Crowley finally became bored with the bloodthirsty sport of shooting kangaroos, and again brought up the subject of turning back. He gradually became more insistent, arguing with Hinton about it.

  When they were debating the subject beside the fire one night, Hinton became angry. "Have done with your bloody whining, Crowley!" he snapped. "It can't be all that much farther to the sheep station."

  "You've been saying that for weeks," Crowley retorted. "Having a go at that woman now and again would make this bloody place easier to bear. When am I going to get my turn with her?"

  Lying only a few feet away, Alexandra looked at the men and listened to the conversation more closely as Hinton made his usual reply. "Like I've told you," he growled, "it'll be when I say you can."

  "Aye, that's right," Crowley agreed. "You give the orders and no one's questioning that. I'm just asking you when it'll be."

  Apprehension gripped Alexandra, because of the man's wheedling tone instead of his usually demanding one. Having learned much about Hinton and his childish, overbearing self-importance, she knew that Crowley had taken an approach that might be successful.

  Hinton frowned, stroking his greasy, blond beard as he pondered, then shrugged. "It'll be when we have the sheep," he replied. "Then she'll be yours and you can do whatever you bloody like to her."

  It was too far in the future to satisfy Crowley, who nodded glumly and reached for his blanket to unroll it beside the fire. Her heart sinking in dismay, Alexandra turned and looked up at the stars, the time now more or less defined when an even worse nightmare would begin for her.

  Along with her dread, she deeply resented being treated as chattel, completely dependent upon the whims of another. For the first time in her life, she was eager to kill, but that offered no solution. Her only weapon was the knife in the hem of her dress, and even if she attacked the men while they slept, she knew she would be unable to kill all of them.

  During the following days, with growing apprehension, she noticed a gradual change in the foliage. Even to her inexperienced eye, it appeared to be better pasturage than the terrain they had crossed. The men failed to observe it, making no comment about it, but the barren stretches became more and more infrequent. Then, shortly after they set out one morning, fear gripped her as she saw a cloud of dust several miles to the southwest. It was being raised by a flock of sheep.

  Hours passed, but none of the men noticed the dust as Alexandra watched it anxiously from the corners of her eyes. At midday, it was straight to the south and much closer, seeming painfully obvious to her. Snively finally saw it. "Look there!" he called out excitedly, pointing. "Look at that dust. Do you suppose a flock of sheep is stirring it up?"

  The other two men peered to the south, then exclaimed in satisfaction. "That's what it is, Snively," Hinton replied happily. "Tie the pack horses to this brush here, and we'll go take a look."

  Snively hastily tethered the pack horses at the side of the track, then mounted. They set out to the south across the rolling hills at a fast canter. Dust boiled up, and Alexandra hoped the stockman would notice it, but Hinton foresaw that possibility. After they had covered over half the distance to the flock, he slowed the pace to a trot, raising little dust.

  When Hinton led the way into the concealment of trees on top of a hill, the flock was in a wide valley a mile away. The sheep had just been driven from another grazing area to the valley, the dust they had raised dissipating. They milled about in clusters and cropped the foliage as a stockman and several dogs watched over them.

  Alexandra noticed a second stockman, or possibly a youth who was an apprentice, and three horses on the far side of the valley. He was beside a copse, building a hut at the edge of the trees. Dust in the distance caught her eye, and she looked at it more closely. It was from another flock that was several miles away.

  As the bushrangers were discussing how they would deal with the stockman, their attitudes grimly nonchalant, Alexandra interrupted them and pointed out what she had seen. The men gazed across the valley.

  Crowley shook his head skeptically and said that he saw nothing. "I don't see any of that either," Hinton agreed. "How about you, Snively?"

  The younger man was silent for a moment, peering closely, then he nodded. "She's right," he announced. "There's two or three horses over by those trees, and I believe a man is over there. And there's dust from sheep over in that direction. She's got some eyes in her head."

  "And a bloody big mouth," Crowley added, noting Hinton's sudden wary attitude. "Hinton, if there is another stockman, we can deal with two as easily as one. And another flock doesn't make any difference."

  "It bloody does make a difference," Hinton replied emphatically. "If there's another flock only a few miles away, how far do you think we'd get with this one before we had men chasing us?"

  "Bloody hell!" Crowley snarled. "I didn't come all this way to listen to reasons why we can't do what we came here for!"

  "And I didn't come all this way to be shot down by a mob of bloody stockmen!" Hinton retorted, reining his horse around. "We'll find another flock that's safer to take, and that's the end of it!"

  Crowley was speechless with rage, his scarred, bearded face pale and his eyes glaring. He turned to Alexandra, and she braced herself to duck, thinking for a moment that he was going to lash out at her. Then he jerked on his reins, wheeling his horse around to follow Hinton.

  The two bushrangers were furiously silent until they were back at the track. Snively retrieved the pack horses, then Hinton and Crowley argued fiercely again. This time it was about the direction in which they should go. Hinton intended to leave the track and ride northwest to find another flock, but Crowley wanted to stay on the track and continue west.

  "This bloody place is bad enough when we're following a track!" Crowley barked. "But at least we know that we're going where others have been. If we get off the track, we could bloody well get lost out here."

  "Lost?" Hinton sneered. "Are we sniveling brats, or are we men? We can find our way about without getting lost!"

  "How do you know? I've never been more than a few miles from a road or a track, and neither have you! In any event, why leave the track? We found one flock while following it, and we can find another!"

  "And be seen with it, you fool! We saw the dust from a flock while we were on the track, so stockmen can see the dust from a flock that we drive on the track! We're going to have to get off it!"

  The men raged and cursed at each other for a time, then the dispute ended as the other one had. Hinton angrily shouted that they were going northwest, and he was through arguing about it. Then he turned his horse off the track, leading Alexandra's horse. The other two men followed, but Crowley was furious.

  Crossing the rugged terrain was far more arduous than traveling on the track, and the pace was much slower. Alexandra dodged flailing limbs as the horses pushed through thick brush and stands of trees, laboring over the rolling hills. Late that day, Hinton reined beside a small stream in a valley to camp for the night.

  The argument between Crowley and Hinton resumed, the two men ranting and raving at each other. Along with his rabid anger, there was a taut edge of quaking fear in Crowley's voice as he insisted that they could become lost in the far reaches of the outback. Snively was prudently silent, but his attitude reflected complete agreement with Crowley.

  Snively gathered wood for a fire, and Hinton roared at him that the smoke might be seen. Hearing that, Alex
andra stopped measuring out the peas and rice and took out the cheese and ship biscuit. She cut slices of cheese and gathered up handfuls of the biscuit, then passed them out to the men.

  Alexandra ate then pulled her blanket over her. The lack of a fire made the men's disquiet in their surroundings more acute, Hinton and Crowley sitting near each other despite their hostility. Looking up at the stars, Alexandra smiled as she heard them stirring uneasily, then she went to sleep.

  The next day, she saw that there was ample reason to doubt Hinton's ability as a leader in the wilderness, because he had a very poor sense of direction. After skirting around steep hills and other obstacles in the line of travel, he often veered far off a northwesterly direction. They passed two flocks during the day, one so near that Alexandra could smell the sheep, but the bushrangers failed to detect them.

  When they made camp that evening, Crowley heatedly insisted that they have a fire. "I'm not going to go through another dark night in this bloody weird place," he snarled. "And there's no reason not to have a fire, because it'll be seen by nothing but bloody wild animals!"

  Obviously wanting a fire himself, Hinton relented. With a fire blazing, Alexandra prepared the usual hot meal, adding a generous portion of pickled cabbage on her plate. As the men were eating, she noticed with satisfaction that Crowley and Hinton had crusty brown spots on the back of their hands, the first sign of scurvy.

  The following day, Hinton found a flock, a cloud of dust billowing up as it moved from one grazing area to another. He led the way in a wide circle, getting in front of the flock to look at it as it passed. Concealed in a thick stand of brush, Alexandra and the bushrangers watched as the sheep came into view a few hundred yards away.

  Alexandra's attention was drawn by the people with the flock, a stockman, an Aborigine woman, and their offspring. The dozen or more children ranged from a baby the woman carried and the toddlers on her horse to youths who were driving the sheep. The man was most unusual of all, looking completely out of place in the outback.

  Instead of stockman's garb, he wore a broadcloth frock coat, a high collar and cravat, and a top hat with a flared crown. Moreover, he was the only one doing nothing to help move the family and sheep. Small children helped the youths drive the sheep, while even the toddlers on the woman's horse clutched halter ropes and led five pack horses laden with supplies and equipment. The man worked over a sketchbook on his saddle horn, completely oblivious to the activity around him.

  Crowley was eager to steal the sheep, commenting gleefully about the large flock. Alexandra knew what the fate of the family would be, and she had to restrain herself from voicing her horror. Then she relaxed as Hinton said that some of the youths were old enough to use firearms or might escape with word of what had happened. Another violent argument began, the two men screaming at each other for hours once again.

  For the next two days, as they headed northwest, the men found no more flocks, and Crowley insisted that they had gone too far from the track to find any. It appeared to Alexandra that he was correct, because she saw no evidence of sheep herself. But on the morning of the third day, they came to a wide swath of tramped ground and foliage where a very large flock had been driven northward a few weeks before.

  For once, Hinton and Crowley conversed instead of shouting at each other. Crowley expressed reservations about following the trail and going any farther from the track, wanting to turn back before they became lost. Hinton acknowledged that they were many miles from the track, but insisted that the trail made by the flock appeared very promising. The two men finally agreed to find the sheep and to examine the situation, and to turn back toward the track if some reason prevented their stealing them.

  The trail the sheep had made led straight through a deep belt of boxwood. On the other side of the forest, the flock had been driven up and across a bare, rocky mountain that stretched east and west. As she rode across the crest of it with the bushrangers, Alexandra scanned the terrain ahead and saw where the flock was located. Miles away to the north, she saw a very faint smudge of dust on the horizon.

  It took the bushrangers four days of tediously tracking the flock to find out what Alexandra had learned in a moment on the mountaintop. The trail first led northwest to several hundred acres of savanna, with a hut and a huge, well-built fold of logs and brush in the center of it. The sheep had grazed there for a time, and after searching for a day, the men found the trail where they had been driven to a similar pasture to the east. From there, the flock had been driven northwest again.

  During the afternoon of the fourth day, Hinton led the way across a dry creek bed and up a forested slope on the other side of it. In the trees at the top of the hill, he reined and lifted a hand for the others to stop. A valley some three miles long and almost a mile wide lay ahead where the flock grazed. Crowley and Snively moved up beside Hinton, and the three men looked at the flock, discussing it.

  Alexandra leaned from side to side, peering through the trees. At the top of a hill on the opposite side of the valley was another of the large, secure folds, with a hut in the shade of trees near it, and a pond surrounded by tall trees at one side of the hill. Below the fold was a wide swath of bare ground where the sheep had trampled down the grass and brush when they had been taken to pasture and returned at night.

  The sheep were loosely bunched at a distance up the valley, and some ten dogs were scattered around them. Three horses grazed on a rise overlooking the flock, two of them hobbled and the other one with a saddle. A man sat on the ground near the horses, and Alexandra's anxiety increased as she craned her neck and scanned the entire valley. Although the flock was a very large one, it appeared that only a single stockman tended it.

  The bushrangers had come to the same conclusion, and Crowley commented in a grimly gleeful tone, "This is the one we've been looking for, Hinton. It's a long way from other flocks, the biggest one that we've seen, and there's just one stockman."

  "I can't see but one from here," Hinton agreed cautiously. "Let's go closer on foot and get a better look."

  When the horses were tethered, Alexandra followed the bushrangers as they went down the hill, angling up the valley toward the sheep. As the trees thinned out, Hinton led the way through the thickest brush on the slope, working closer to the flock, then stopped several hundred yards from it.

  At the lower elevation, all of the valley's shallow hollows and contours were in clear view, and Alexandra saw that there was indeed only one stockman with the flock. The bushrangers discussed that in ruthless satisfaction, then talked about how to steal the sheep.

  "We'll make camp at that dry creek on the other side of the hill," Hinton said, "then wait until just before dawn. It'll be easier to deal with him then, and less chance that one of us will get shot. The sheep will also be in the fold and easier for us to handle."

  While the men talked, Alexandra watched the dogs. When she and the bushrangers had come down the slope, the dogs had been sitting and lying down as they watched the sheep. Now the nearest dogs were pacing restlessly, glancing over the sheep and looking toward the brush where she and the men were hidden. She hoped they would bark in warning, but they merely continued moving and looking.

  The stockman stood up, tucking a double-barrel musket under his arm. He took the hobbles off the two spare horses, then led them by their halter ropes to the saddled horse and mounted it. He rode around to the side of the flock toward the head of the valley, then uncoiled a long whip and snapped it, the loud report ringing out like a gunshot.

  A surge of motion passed through the flock, each sheep turning away from the crack of the whip and trotting a few paces. The sheep now headed toward the pond and fold, and moved down the valley at a slow walk, grazing along the way. The dogs raced back and forth at the sides of the flock, heading off sheep that tried to break away.

  "That stockman looks familiar," Hinton mused, combing his fingers through his ragged, blond beard. "He looks a lot like that bloody foreman who tried to make me marry
that woman I knocked up."

  "The foreman?" Crowley replied, shaking his head. "What would that bastard be doing here, Hinton? That stockman is a hefty size right enough, but he couldn't be that foreman. I wish he was, though, so we could spend about a week at doing him in an inch at a time."

  Hinton laughed grimly, then shrugged. "Whoever he is, he's seen his last sunrise. Let's get back to that dry creek bed and make camp."

  The man also seemed vaguely familiar to Alexandra, but he was too far away for her to see his features. She followed the bushrangers as they began moving quietly back up the hill, and glanced over her shoulder at the stockman, trying to think where she might have seen him before. Then she dismissed it, thinking about the situation confronting her.

  If the men's plans materialized, Hinton would turn her over to Crowley and Snively the next day. Her only hope of escaping that fate lay in doing what the most basic considerations of humanity demanded of her. She had to find a way to help the stockman, or at the very least warn him that the bushrangers were nearby and intended to kill him.

  David Kerrick already knew that someone was nearby. As always when they detected strangers, his dogs had been uneasy. Someone had been across the valley from the flock, but the behavior of the dogs now indicated that the intruders had left the valley.

  As he followed the flock toward the pond, David speculated that the dogs had detected some Aborigines. They wandered through the area from time to time and often wanted some mutton which he always gave them. Sometimes they loitered in the vicinity for a day or two before revealing themselves, and what had happened that day had occurred before.

  Other than Aborigines, the possibilities were few. Although he was grazing his own flock now, he was sure that Pat Garrity would visit to bring some supplies and see how he was faring as a gesture of friendship. However, he had left Wayamba Station only a few weeks before, so it was much too soon for Pat to visit, and if it had been him, the station owner would have simply ridden down into the valley.