Dancy tried to refuse, but the woman urged the gifts on her. ‘Maybe you can do the same for me some day. If you’re going, you’d better get along before it’s too dark.’
‘Which is the way to Mt McDonald, missus?’ the Stray asked.
‘Mt McDonald?’ The woman was surprised. ‘Why, you go through Woodstock, but you ain’t going there.’
The Stray realised her mistake. ‘You won’t tell anyone, will yer?’ she asked anxiously. ‘Not that I’ve got anything to hide or that. It’s the kid leavin’ his home. We don’t want no trouble with the Child Welfare.’
Mrs Little knew all about the Child Welfare. She nodded reassuringly. ‘Don’t you worry. They may say I’m a p’lice pimp.’ Her face flushed angrily, as she remembered the unforgivable insult. ‘But I wouldn’t have nothing to do with the p’lice.’
‘Good on you, missus. Come on, Jimmy.’
Mrs Little stood a long time looking after them, until they came to the turn of the road that led through Logan, and from Logan south on the first long stretch towards Woodstock, and Crookwell a hundred miles away; two tiny dark figures, lonely and insignificant under the swelling, rosy wings of the sky.
18
I
The Woodstock Road leads out from Logan through gentle land, with willows leaning to drink the creeks. Rolling miles of wheat ripen towards harvest, showing every shade through cream and buff to the colour of dry cedar-berries; and there are ploughed paddocks, fallow land, grazing ground, hard outcroppings of rock where the trees still hold on grimly, with other outpost trees scattered through the fields as shade for cattle and sheep. Wide, open, generous country, with the free winds flinging thistle-down. The iron roofs of homesteads shine like polished silver in the dark knot of the homestead trees. The road loiters from neighbour fence to neighbour fence like a contented farmer coming home from town.
Drovers with their sheep; cattle-men riding behind a herd of white and red steers; cars that swirled past in a cloud of callous dust — all these took the road with the Stray and Jimmy on Monday morning. The two had sheltered the night under a bridge, and they awoke to see the water smoking among the reeds, as though the early light had set it smouldering.
The Stray was first awake. She rolled over and rubbed her eyes; then she lay for some time watching a group of little waterhens fussing like middle-aged ladies at a sale. They had crocodile-skin shoes; grey, silk stockings; black coats and skirts with a smart white strip down the tail; and little red crests tipped over their eyes. Something about them reminded the Stray of Phippsy, and she laughed. Jimmy woke up and regarded her questioningly. He did not quite know what to make of Dancy; but he already liked her; so he smiled a little, though he did not know what the joke was.
They each ate a crust of bread, and shouldered their bundles. Both were dirty and aching and stiff; but walking, or rather limping through the glorious morning raised their spirits. Smoke was rising over the farm roofs and a dog barked. Pale yellow butterflies floated about their own affairs. An old kookaburra in a nest in a hollow branch was in trouble with a group of sparrows. They had set on him and were making his life a misery. The willy-wagtails were teaching their young to fly; the little blue-wrens tittupped along the fences and over the green wheat that was turning gold. Dandelions were growing gaily beside the road; and presently the two wanderers passed an old orchard, hot and breathless in the arms of the hills.
‘We ought to get to Woodstock today,’ the Stray remarked hopefully. ‘Maybe we’ll get a lift, Jimmy. Seems to me we’re going to be lucky. Don’t know why, but I got a feeling we’re lucky.’
She turned and hopefully surveyed the way they had come. There was nothing in sight but the empty road and the walls of wheat, and, farther away, the dark line of hills. Around the next turn of the road a drover came jogging towards them; and the Stray stopped him to ask if he had seen a van the way he had come, a brown van with a brown horse; but the drover had joined the road a few miles back and had been travelling across country by the stock route.
‘I would’ve missed it,’ he said, twitching his fly-veil, and regarding the two kindly. ‘I guess they can’t be far ahead, eh?’
He was an inquisitive man, and wanted to know all about the Stray and Jimmy; but they evaded his questions and hurried on. Presently cars began to pass them. Commercial travellers in big sedans, the back seats piled high with luggage, were hurrying through these little ‘dumps’ of towns contemptuously and racing to the big centres; men who drove a hundred-and-fifty miles a day, and interviewed customers in towns fifty miles apart; go-getters with no time to waste on a girl and a small boy trudging along. Big trucks roared past loaded with goods, and at these the Stray looked more hopefully. But each was a fresh disappointment. Presently, foot-weary, the travellers flung themselves under the trees, and wiped their faces, dislodging a horde of flies that rose buzzing from the packs.
‘’Strufe! but I must be cartin’ about a ton of these flies,’ the Stray grumbled. ‘They got wings. Why don’t they fly? We got to walk, ain’t we?’ She broke off a small bough and swished it in front of her face.
‘Means it’s going to rain,’ Jimmy said, weather wise.
‘Who says so?’ the Stray demanded, surveying the cloudless sky.
‘Uncle Hegarty.’
‘I guess the flies don’t need no excuse,’ the Stray replied. ‘They’d do it, rain or no rain. Geeze! if they was money, we’d be millionaires.’
Money was a subject very much in her mind. Her four pounds should last herself and Jimmy for food for some time. They would not need to ask for anything at farms, and so be remembered should enquiries be made that way for Jimmy. Snow had only a week’s start. He would have to wait for his dole at Cowra; and by going to Woodstock and not waiting for dole themselves they would be cutting off part of the road. The road from Cowra joined the road from Woodstock at Mt McDonald. If Snow was going through to Crookwell, by Mt McDonald, then there was only one road he could use, a steep road, according to all accounts, that wound up and up to Mt McDonald, that town of dead gold-mines, then down the other side of the mountain to Wyangala Dam; and then up again over the mountain and down again to Reid’s Flat. From there he would go either to Bigga or Rugby, probably Rugby, because the road was better for a horse.
‘It’s going to rain,’ Jimmy said again; and he was right.
They got a lift from a farmer that took them as far as Woodstock, out of which they climbed again in the early afternoon. The clouds were dragging purple skirts over the hills that were no longer rolling gently, but humped like so many camels for the storms to ride. Far down the slopes in the valleys tiny trickles of water ran; but up on the road, winding round the great shoulders of the mountains, the Stray and Jimmy were thirsty.
‘Here she comes,’ Jimmy announced, looking towards the rain with all the satisfaction of the successful prophet of disaster.
‘And tell me we ain’t got no luck,’ the Stray responded jubilantly. ‘Here comes a car.’
They halted expectantly, waiting, but the car flashed past. Then, a hundred yards farther on, it halted.
‘Come on.’ The Stray pulled Jimmy by the hand. ‘He’s stopped for us. I said we was lucky.’
Jimmy did not need any urging. They hurried forward. The driver of the car had jumped out, seized a stick, and very efficiently despatched a large tiger snake in the middle of the road. Jumping into his car again, he was off before the Stray could do more than gasp:
‘Hey, mister, wait on.’
The two stood forlornly watching the car recede.
‘Well, one way we’re lucky, Jimmy,’ the Stray attempted to comfort her comrade. ‘We might of stepped on that snake.’
Jimmy’s mind was on the problem of shelter. ‘We could make for that old shearers’ hut,’ he suggested. A weather-beaten hut on top of a hill had caught his eye.
The heavy drops were spattering down and, despite their weariness, they almost ran. By the time they gained the hut, which was lo
cked, the rain was roaring on its tin roof. Luckily a verandah projected over the beaten earth by the front door, and under this verandah the two took refuge. Darkness came down in a roaring spate of water, and there was no wood to light a fire. Cold and shivering, Jimmy and the Stray crouched under their one thin blanket on the cold earth, and ate some bread and jam. Presently they fell asleep. It must have been three hours later that the movements of some unseen animal awakened the Stray.
‘Oo!’ She drew closer to Jimmy. ‘There’s a great rat bigger’n a cat.’
‘It’s a ’possum,’ Jimmy said, half contemptuous.
The creature approached them adventurously. The boy put out his hand, and the opossum promptly bit it.
‘The shearers must have tamed it,’ Jimmy remarked.
It was plain the opossum was not afraid. It came scampering round, and when the Stray slapped at it with her hat, that was all part of the game. It tried to scratch open the sack in which the bread was wrapped, and had to be beaten off. After every discouragement the opossum would retire round the corner of the hut disheartened, and presently come lumbering back for more. All night long it sniffed and scampered and raced round them; and when the Stray put the bread under her head for a pillow, it bit her ear with its sharp teeth. Towards dawn the ’possum realised at last that neither of these big things wanted to play or had biscuits to give, so it went off in search of other sport.
The morning was bright and clear, and Jimmy and the Stray were off early. They had walked for three hours when a baker overtook them; and, although his car was piled high with fresh-smelling loaves, he beckoned them to stand on the running-board. In this manner they came to Mt McDonald among the peaks of the ranges. The baker, a good-natured man, gave them a loaf of bread, and called to all the people he knew, asking for Snow.
No one had seen or heard of him; and, certainly, in this lonely place, where ice lay in winter, and the winds blew most of the year, a brown van would have excited some comment. Cars passed through at the week-end from all towns within a day’s distance, going down to Wyangala for boating and fishing; but there were not many brown vans.
The Stray’s heart sank. ‘Maybe he’s gone some other way?’ she suggested; but they told her that was impossible. All the roads had been drowned when the big dam was built. ‘Well, if he comes froo this way,’ Dancy instructed them, ‘you tell him his wife and Jimmy is on ahead Crookwell way, and we’ll wait for ’im there.’
The baker was going down the other side of the slope to the dam, and the two went with him, exclaiming in amazement as the great sweep of water came in view. They took up their bundles at the bottom of the slope, and trudged along the high rampart of the dam and round the prisoned waters. The road led to the left along the shore, where drowned trees stood up out of the little, lapping waves that slapped in against the grass. It was hot down here, with the black cypress pines taking all the air before it eddied to the bottom of this great ditch. The rocks were grey hot, burning to the touch. Lizards flashed in the dead wood. When they came to an open slope of grass by the waterside, the Stray sank down in the shade.
‘I can’t go no farther, Jimmy,’ she said weakly.
The boy sat down beside her. ‘Where d’you suppose Dad is?’ he asked.
‘Search me,’ the Stray answered despondently. Then she brightened. ‘We could make some tea.’
They built a little fire and heated some water for tea. They rested a long time; then they had a bathe, Jimmy in his trousers, the Stray in her very insufficient and ragged underwear. They rested again, and presently they felt better.
‘We might get a lift in that launch the baker was talking about,’ Jimmy remarked. ‘Goes up as far as Bigga.’ He looked round critically. ‘We got to find its landing.’
Finding the landing of a launch in all those bays and curves and inlets was like looking for one scallop in the hem of a wedding garment. Groaning, the Stray got to her feet. ‘It don’t leave till midnight,’ she reminded Jimmy.
The small boy regarded her impatiently. His confidence in Dancy had been undermined by her failure to discover traces of Snow. ‘Dad might be in Crookwell now,’ he said pointedly.
They could not waste time. They had come to find his father. If Snow got his dole at Crookwell next Thursday, they should be there waiting. They plodded off round the shore, looking for the place where the launch was moored. ‘You can’t miss it,’ they had been told; but it seemed a desperately long time before they came out on a slope beside some beehives, and beheld a long jetty, running out into the water, and two motor-launches rocking placidly beside.
Here the Stray and Jimmy spent the rest of the afternoon, idly browsing, and, when they could rouse the energy, bathing. Neither could swim, and they were afraid of this great, mysterious stretch of water, where trees grew up out of the waves, as though they were on dry land. There was something uncanny about the trees growing so freely half in the water, going lower and lower until their tops were submerged, like people slowly going down into a mist.
The moon rose over the sharp, black shoulder of a hill, and the silence and strangeness of everything made them eager for sleep. Dancy was glad she had Jimmy with her. She could never have endured to be alone in this great pit between the hills with that big moon glowing down and lonely blackbirds flying and calling remotely. They lay at their little fire and talked in undertones; Jimmy about things a boy knows; the finding of nests; fishing for yabbies; horses and their ways. The Stray told him about the city, the streets and the roaring of trains, and bridges. Jimmy said he wouldn’t like so many people.
The Stray admitted she didn’t like the city either. ‘I liked it travellin’,’ she exclaimed. ‘But I’d like it best if I had a bit of a place to settle in like, a place of me own, green and little …’ She broke off abruptly. ‘Aw, what’s the use?’
‘If I had a rabbit-trap,’ said Jimmy, after some thought, ‘I could catch us a rabbit.’ He was a boy with a very practical mind. Jimmy never bothered to speculate. He liked to be doing something all the time, if it was only rolling up their packs in a new way. He was very old for eleven and very shrewd. He had decided to join his father and had just gone off without a word. With Jimmy to think was to act.
The Stray was wakeful because her supply of tobacco had run out. This was partly due to the fact that Jimmy smoked, and he had been smoking her tobacco, having none of his own. They dropped to sleep at last, and were awakened by the bright lights of a car dazzling their eyes, as it came almost noiselessly over the grass from the road. It contained passengers for the launch, and was driven by the launch’s owner, of whom they immediately begged a lift. But he shook his head. The launch was not going to Bigga. It was going up the opposite shore of the lake, many miles from their hoped-for destination.
‘Well, we’ll just have to walk,’ the Stray decided gloomily; and they settled back to sleep again.
Walk they did, all the long, weary, hot pull up the mountain, where the road wiggled like a snake through the thin trees, and small springs gushed through the grass below the last high rim that cut off the world on one side of the steep from the world on the other. A cold, bitter wind blew towards them as they paused for breath, and saw below the farms rolling again, on and on, as they rolled everywhere, chrome and burnt sienna and ochre and madder, umber and dun, and chocolate-coloured earth, and green wheat, and dried stunted trees, and grass for grazing, and trim farmhouses with fly-proof doors and windows and wire fences and corrugated-iron roofs; all as though they had been turned to a pattern, and the pattern laid out even on top of a range so high that it seemed when you were climbing that you were clawing your way up the steep gables of the world.
They descended on to a long, level plateau, and presently stopped to bathe their feet, for they had been walking since dawn, where a little stream ran by grey granite boulders under willow trees. Mint grew wild along its grassy edge, and, as they crushed the leaves, the mint smelt pleasant and cool. But a big leech, with gold stripes on his
black velvet, came out in the stream to investigate their toes, and they hastily replaced their broken shoes over the blisters.
‘We might as well have a bit to eat, Jimmy love,’ the Stray suggested.
Jimmy eyed her approvingly. He was always hungry himself.
It began to cloud over and the chilly wind grew colder and colder. They trudged on, not talking much, for they were very tired, and it seemed as though such things as shelter and warm beds, while very desirable, were fantastic and incredible things. The freezing grey hilltops, waiting for the rain, lowered round them, and the wind was roaring now, scudding and thundering in miles and miles of thick forest that lay ahead, forest through which the road clove like a knife. Even the flies had taken cover; everything had taken cover but the two who moved on because there was nothing else to do. Speculatively they eyed haystacks and farm sheds as they passed, always half-deciding to ask for shelter, and then once more agreeing to push on to a ‘better place.’ They did knock at one door — that of a storekeeper by the roadside — but the man could not hear them for the wind.
Whenever they thought of approaching a house to beg for shelter, they were seized with the panic timidity that, sooner or later, overcomes all those who travel the road. The very thought of a stranger’s house makes them uneasy and suspicious. All dwellers between four walls are enemies, hostile, uncaring and incalculable.
Far overhead, an aeroplane kept them company for a short time. They watched it eagerly until it disappeared under the roaring grey arch of the storm, which, risen now to a hurricane force, was tearing off the boughs of the trees and flinging them contemptuously after the travellers.
The Battlers Page 26
