WALES AND SKETCHES.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 5567, 16 May 1896, Page 1

WAL ES AND SKETCHES.

hH AUSTRAUAN BUSH TRACK. [By J. D.- Hennessey, Author of " Wynnum White's Wickedness," f The Dis-Honourable," &c] {All Rights Reserved.) Chapter XIV. MISS BELLA CBUTffBS. "You will be getting terribly tired of leading thia long letter, but the strangeness of my story must be my apology for iia length. I want you to know it all, and somehow, although it seems to me an astonishing amount of writing, probably it will appear less to you. I would sit up all night to read abont your goings on at Smoke Island since I left you ; although I expect you have got on all right enough without me, and as for the old man — but there I must try and tell my story without anticipating. " I don't think anything can be more exasperating than having to wait by yourself, as I had to do, in a strange house. But you know men have not a bit of. thought. "Mr Crumbs on our arrival called out for' Bella/ and showed me into a sort of best parlour off the hall, and then went back to the buggey and that was the last of him I saw for the night. "Now- fancy that, for a man who had just before thrown his hat up against the ceiling, and urged me to marry him that very night. I sat there expecting every moment that Miss Belli Crumbs would bustle in to greet and welcome me, if only in deference to her brother. But I saw no Miss Bella Crumbs ! " I must have sat alone for nearly half an hour, when an ancient, sour-looking, middle-aged woman came in. . • " ' Tea is ready, mann/ she said. " 'May I go to my room and take off my hat first/ 1 said. "'Yes, mann, certainly. Miss Crumbs is away visiting a sick woman, the wife of a stockman, across tlie creek/ — (there is always some place across the creek about a station.) 'Mr Crumbs has gone over to woolshed paddock to see a valuable horse that has been taken ill/ she continued. "You may guess how glad I felt that I still retained the appellation of. Dorna Stoneham. It would have been just the Bame if I had' been Mrs Jeremiah Crumbs ! He would have gone off after that wretched horse sncMeft me. " However, I told Betty, the servant, that I was tired and would not wait, so I hurried with my tea. It was a good, plain meal laid in a bachelor and spinster sort of room, with stiff straight-backed chairs covered in hair cloth. I sat up as proper as you please, and the aforesaid elderly individual told me to please make myself at home and ring if I wanted anything. ' Miss Crumbs/ she said, 'may be in at any moment' " I heartily wished that Miss "Crumbs and Mr Crumbs might both delay their coming until I had finished with the steak and tomatoes, and apple pie. I got Betty to take my things to my room, and I finished my tea and announced that I should retire for the eight. • "It was not a bad room they had given me — indeed, it was both comfortably furflished and commodious. There^was a kind of bay window m addition to a square one, and big cupboards. I found in the morning that the bay window looked onto a. flower and fruit garden which sloped down to the creek. There was no key to lock the door, however, so I propped a chair op against it, and was soon asleep. "When I awoke in the morning there was a pleasant-faced woman of about five-snd-thirty standing smiling at the foot af the bed, with a cup of tea in her .hand. "Tm Bella/ she said, with a smile, ''and I've brought you a cup of tea. lam so sorry that you had such an unfortunate reception last night. Jeremiah has been up this two hours, worrying around, and ho would have me comit right in with the tea, to apologise the very moment you woke up.' " It was nice tea, with sweet, rich cream, and lovely thin bread and butter, and I found Bella Crumbs almost as nice as the tea, so Tfe were soon good friends. Jeremiah had told her, she said, that he was going to marry me, and, looking at me with ■tv .--.p; "•'■<?.':-; r^tte, Bella said that Bhe L-.std 'mo .'•t ?:--at" s;-avfc, and was very glad. Ai:d really whsr T .heard from her the -V:'y" or their t-a-vry life, I was not so much .-u>:pris»;d thai; she wanted Jeremiah aiarri'.'ii. ' . :' rV.7f.-ve-'. I i:>fvie' a great fuss, for I >■;;•'.-:;■. to coTiliir I.^1 .^ my journey/ at once; i>A. i.V ,;y v;oii]:l nwt hear of it, and to mdi .?-'•'• -t&j lor a few days Mr Crumbs „;;•>;! thii! as 1 would not have him to ;--y:J-i^r.'-\iy is-'. Bella should go with me jsv-ira-i oars'; ;-raey, and that we should b.vo t. sc : 'aa'.^ cr- Shy stockmen to travel with ;.2s. and. .-, t after the horses, etc. *:.••/ ' • ■ Id i ■'. • .1 ■ ' ad drive spare horses in ■ Front of them, while Bella, and myself drove together in a buggy. • " I should like to tell you all about the house and gardens and station, but it will never do to begin, for I don't know where it would end. I learnt from Bella, that their father . Thomas Crumbs, had been 'sent ouf as n. boy for some ridiculous thing. He was a baker's lad and went home to his master foufpence short of his cash one night, so an enlightened English judge of those strange days, had ! him deported with others to Botany Bay. Well, when their mother died, she left Thomas Crumbs -with, two boys, Jeremiah andEzelriel, one girl, Bella, and money and property to the value of over a quarter of a million. There were four stations wellstoclaed,anda heap of money- invested, and in the bank ; but her father swore that if One of them attempted to get married during' 'his life time, he would not leave them a cent. " They all three of them had any quantity of opportunities of marriage; but they worked on and waited, hoping that their father would change his mind, orasEzekiel said, '.do some other thing/ But they worked and saved and ,grew richer arid richer in vain ; the old man keeping everything under his thumb, and would neither change his mind, nor die. So at last Ezekiel, who had been in love with a girl for nearly ten years, told him he was not going to wait any longer, and one day marched out with only a five pound note in his pocket, and got. married, and forfeited his? share; but Jeremiah, who was the eldest, and Bella, the next, went oniin the old round, day by day, and year by year, until the old man at last died, when they Found out that Jeremiah had been left twoAirds and Bella one-third of the property ; >ut oh condition that not a penny of it was ftven to Ezekiel. " ' You marry Jeremiah, dear/ said

Bella, " I don't want him to marry any of the women-folk in the neighbourhood. He is wonderfully struck with you, and he h«is been a good son, and a good brother, and although he is a little old, he is not as old as he looks, and I am sure he will make a pattern husband." " She was only a little woman, but really I found her that good and kind, that I almost said yes to her brother, so as to please her ; but almost was not quite ; and I couldn't properly forgive him for leaving me by myself that first evening. I told him that it would have been just the same if I had been his wife, and that if he wanted to marry me he wouldhaveto fetch me from the Western Plains, . " ' All right, Dorna,' he said, ' you shall go, and I will be at Western Plains with a parson within a month after you arrive there/ So it was settled, and after three weeks' travelling, and a lot of hair-breadth escapes and wonderful adventures, here 1 am at last at Western Plains, writing about my travels, and in the daily expectation of fJnifHrig myself face to face with Jeremiah Crumbs. " What I shall say to Mm when he conies — winch lam afraid he will— l cannot tell. I am sure that I don't want to marry him — nor anyone else. Ifs my belief that onehalf the married women have been bothered into it by the men. "I ought to tell you that the last forty odd miles I travelled entirely by myself. I had expected that Marjory's husband would be waiting for me at Yarrabong Station, so I sent Ralph and Jansen, the two ptockmen, back when we reached the supposed border line between South Australia and West — no one here knows exactly where they are. I travelled on to Yarrabong alone. You see it was a great plain country, and when they left me to return, Yarrabong was actually in sight, so that it seemed all right enough. But it is very difficult to gauge distances correctly on these plains. It looked about five miles, but proved to be nearer five-and-twenty. "However I must not let myself run on ■with any details of what I saw that hot' afternoon on those great far reaching prairies, where the grass was on an average five feet high, for I have to tell you of my next two days' adventures, which will bring my story to a close for the present. "I scared the people at Yarrabong, as well as myself, however, that same afternoon, over a mirage I saw, which I took for a fearful grass fire, and rode up to the station at a gallop to let them know about jit. :•.'■' • "I found Yarrabong a queer place. The people are named Twining and they, are the nearest neighbours but one to Marjory and John. ' They don't rent or- own the place, but just squat on the land, and scarcely see a visitor from one year's end to another. There are three brothers, of the Twinings, all bachelors, and really not nearly as rough as you might expect. Their father was a shepherd, and the boys managed to save a hundred pounds or so shearing, and. bought a hundred head of cattle, and pushed out into the Never Never j country. They have an arrangement by which they get mailsonceaqnarter ,-butthey own allegiance to no Government, and pay no rent. For years they carried their lives in their hands with hostile natives. "John's run is just the same, and is divided from the Twinings by a strip of desert ; but the few sheep they have are shepherded by blacks, and the cattle look after themselves. .There is of course nothing in the shape of overstocking out here, so the absence of boundaries . and fences makes no difference. " I found on making myself known that my telegram, which was supposed to have caught their quarterly mail, had not passed through, so John was not there to meet me. It was seventy miles on from there to Western Plains, and I intended to ride that distance by myself. I could of course have waited at Yarrabong. Two of the Twinings were at home and when they knew I was Marjory's sister and-that my brother-in-law, John Holdfast of Western Plains, was to have met me, they pressed me in their rough way to stop for a day or two, and then one of them would ride over with me : but as I learnt that I could have a fresh horse, I persisted in going on the next day, for I had a spell at another place that week. , " There was another thing, too, although the Twinings were kind and all that, I found out that they had no white woman about the place, and I could not feel at home there. The station homestead was just a number of rough slab shanties, with covered ways between them I guessed, too, that I had turned the elder of the two brothers out of his sleeping quarters, and, although they were hospitality itself, and in a rough way did every possible thing to make me feel at home, I could not bear the place. " After an hour or so a black gin, who could talk English very well, was brought in to wait upon me; 'she had shoes and stockings on, and a neat print gown and coloured handkerchief fantastically twined around her woolly head. Brit the simple creature, in her vanity of being so dr.essed, lot it out at once that she was got up for the occasion, and soon made me know that she thought herself so fine a lady that she could not be expected to do any work. I stumbled over her on one of the verandahs afterwards smoking a short pipe, and playing cards with three other blacks. It is a wild rough life on these interior stations, 1 can tell you, although I believe the Twinings are better than most. "I determined, therefore, to go on, especially as I learnt that a couple of teams had been through the previous month, and that there had been no rains to destroy their tracks. You see there are no proper roads out here — just bridlepaths from place to place, and these are so little used, and so cut yip by cattle and othei' tracks,' that travelling is done by the sun, and compass, and watercourses, and the lay of the country, as much as anything else. Wild horses (brumbies) and wild cattie, are occasionally met with, and when you camp out, it is wise to keep a look out for dingoes, so you may imagine that the Twinings regarded me as a very daring and extraordinary sort of woman ; but I gave them to understand that I was a regular bush girl, and had not had an ordinary bringing up. 'f You will wonder, perhaps, how I managed to get along from station to station in this 'wild .country after parting with Bella Crumbs; bub you must remember that I had the two stockmen with me until now, and we got introductions from one owner or manager to another, and the sight of a young girl on horseback out in these wild parts put them all in a flutter, so that we had no trouble to borrow horses or anything we wanted. Then, too, both Mr Crumb3and John Holdfast were known by name, and it is wonderful how hospitable and neighbourly' these far western squatters are. * " Jim, the elder of the three Twinings, said at last with great gravity, that he would not 'think of my going all the -way

! alone,, and announced at supper that he should ride with me the next morning as far as his station, which was thirty miles on the road, and then he would get his man to put -me well upon the road the next day, unless I would prefer for him to •come on with me. He said that he had not John Holdfast for seven months, and k -would not at all mind the ride over.

" So it was arranged, and we left Yarrabon'g soon after sunrise the next morning, riding regular wiry bush horses. Mr Twining's was' a bruinbie they had broken in,. ; and the horse would look round at me every now and then for the first few miles, and snort at me like a wild thing. I suppose I was the first woman he had ever seen on horseback. Mr Twining had put me' upoi a. splendid blood horse which he said had won several races, but was as quiet as a lamb, except when ridden fast in company with other horses. " I don't know why that morning ride was so specially impressed upon me, unless that I now for the first time began to feel that I was nearing my long and weary journey's end. There was a heavy dew on everything, and we passed out of the sliprails of the station paddock by the side of a stockyard; and were at once out upon the wild trackless, fenceless bush. "We rode through a belt of she-oaks, and there was neither road nor track, for the teams previously referred to had left by another set of slip-rails. We picked them up later on, and then kept to a bit of a track, for I ound that the .people here do their best to keep a track marked for general convenience, but I soon saw that I could never have found my way here alone. "'I would like to reach .the Eock Wells if possible by about eight o'clock/ said Twining, ' but we must not knock the horses up at the start, if y°u are to get into Western Plains fairly early to-morrow. There is some good sweet grass at the Wells, and there is water still there, so we can give the horses a feed and drink, and have some tea and damper for ourselves.' . . "He talked away, and gave me all sorts of information as to what to do if I was lost, and how to distinguish between cattle tracks which led to, and away from water. The out station we were going to was known as Salt -Bush Hollow, where he had a German- superintendent and his wife stopping, with a couple of, black boys as stockmen. It was a bit of country by a small lagoon, a sort of oasis in a desert, and he had two or three hundred head of cattle there. He said that the chief work of his people was to see that none of the stock were speared by the blacks ; there was no fear of their leaving the put station as there was always plenty of water and grass. .' „ " The country we were now riding over was mostly black and chocolate soil, but there was no water except in floods, and then he said the whole place in a few hours was turned into a great sea. " 'How do people escape them ?' I asked. " ' I will show you/ he said, 'just on the other side of this flat I was caught in a flood storm once, and had to camp fot three days before the water went down, ? and the old camp is still there. •It proved 'to be a sort of platform about three feet high, made by pulling logs together and piling them up in a square, one on top of the other, and then putting boughs over them for a support. ■ ..-..' , . , | "'I was for nearly three days/ he said, '■'■ camped on the top of thafe! affair,: with my horse tied to a tree, standing in about two feet of water. As Boon as it began to fall I started, and had to swim in several of the hollows; and I. rode ten miles by the sun, without once seeing the colour of the ground until I reached the station fence. That was the worst flood I have known.' " The flies were very bad here, and for an hour or so after we had camped at the Rock Wells, where we found good water and had something to eat. ■ The flies are little black wretches such as are unknown on the, { coast, and they are terrible troublesome' especially in well grassed country. All the men wear veils. When we got on to the desert with nothing but a few spinifex' bushes about, they entirely left us ; but they came back again when we reached the grass country which for many square miles surrounds Salt Bush Hollow out-station. They are especially bad for about two or three months during the hot weather, and then look out for sandy-blight ! ". However .we rode into the out-station about midday, and found not a creature at home except a couple of dogs. It was just a rough shanty made of strips of bark with a lean-to ,; three rooms in all. The woman was down at the lagoon with her two children, as Mr Twining guessed, doing the family -washing, and he rode dawn to bring her up. The poor creatnre kissed, my hands, and cried when she saw me, she hadn't seen a white woman for over eighteen months. " Imagine the sort of lives these people must live out here : and yet it was a pretty situation, for the house was erected upon a rise overlooking a great grassy hollow plain, with the lagoon, which seemed to run itself out into a big swamp at one' end, sparkling in the clear atmosphere under the summer sun. ' • (To be continued.)