[COMPLETE STORY.] A Hero in Dingo Scrubs

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXIV, Issue 4, 28 January 1905, Page 53

[COMPLETE STORY.] A Hero in Dingo Scrubs

An Australian Sketch

This is a story—about the only one — <of Job Falconer, boss of the Talbragar sheep-station up-country in New South Wales in the early eighties, when there .Were still runs in the Dingo Scrubs o\it of the hands of the banks, and yet squatters who lived on their stations. Job would never tell the story himself, at least not complete; and as his family grew up he would become as angry as it was in his easy-going naiture to become if reference were made to the incident in his presence. But his wife —little, plump, bright-eyed Gerty Falconer —often told the story with brightening eyes to womenfriends over tea, and always to a new woman-friend, but always in the mysterious voice which women use in speaking of private matters amongst themeelves. On such occasions she would be particularly tender’ towards unconscious Job, and ruffle his thin sandy hair in a way that embarassed him in company—made him look as sheepish as an old big-horned ram that has just been shorn and turned amongst the ewes. Then, on parting, the woman-friend would give Job’s hand a squeeze that would surprise him mildly, and look at him as if she could love him. According to a theory of mine, Job, to fit the story, should have been tall, and dark and stern, or gloomy and quicktempered; but he wasn’t. He was fairly tall, but he was fresh-com ptexioned and sandy—his skin was pink to scarlet in some weathers, with blotches of umber—and his eyes were pale-gray; his big forehead loomed babyishly, his arms were short, and his legs bowed to the saddle. Altogether he was an awkward, unlovely bush-bird —on foot; in the saddle it was different. The incident was brought about by Job’s recollection, still strong and vivid, of a certain occurrence many years before. Job was a boy of fourteen when he saw his father's horse come home riderless, circling and snorting up by the stockyard, head jerked down whenever the hoof trod on one of the snapped ends of the bridle reins; the saddle twisted over the side, with bruised pommel and knee-pad broken off. Job’s father wasn’t hurt much; but Job’s mother, an emotional woman, and then in a delicate state of health, survived the shock for only threee months. "She wasn’t quite right in her head,” they said, “from the day the horse came home till the last hour before she died.” Strange to say, Job’s father, from whom Job inherited his seemingly placid nature, died three months after his wife. The doctor from the town was of the opinion that Job’s father must have “sustained internal injuries” when the horse threw him. Doe. Wild (eccentric bush-doctor) reckoned that Job’s father was hurt inside when his wife died, and hurt so badly tliat he couldn’t pull round; but doctors differ all over the world. Well, it came about in this way. Job ’Falconer had been married a year, and had lately started wool-raising on a pastoral lease he had taken up at Talbragar. It was a new run, with new slab-and-bark huts on the creek for a homestead, new shearing-shed, yards—wife and everything new, ami he was expecting a baby. Job felt brand-new himself at the time, so he said. It was a lonely place for a young woman ; but Gerty was a settler’s daughter. The newness took away some of the loneliness, she said, and there was truth in that. A bush-home in the scrubs looks lonelier the older it gets, and ghostlier in the twilight, as the bark and .slabs whiten, or rather grow gray, in fierce summers; and there’s nothing- under God’s sky so W'eird, so aggressively lonely, as a deserted old home in the bush.

Job’s wife, had a half-caste “gin” for company when Job was away on the run, nnd the nearest white woman—a hard but honest Lancashire woman from within the kicking radius in Lancashire, wife of a selector—was only seven miles away. She promised to be at hand, and camo over two or three times a week; but Job grew restless as Gerty's time grew' near, and wished that he had insisted on sending her to the nearest town, thirty miles off, as originally pro-

posed. Gerty’s mother, who lived in town, was coining to see her over her trouble; Job had made arrangements with the town doctor; but prompt attendance could hardly be expected of a doctor who was very busy, who was too fat to ride, und who lived thirty miles away. Job, in common with most bushmen and their families round there, had more faith in Dr. Wild, a weird American, who made medicine in a saucepan, and worked more cures on bushmen than the other three doctors of the district—maybe because the bushmen laid faith in him, or he knew the bush and bush constitutions, or perhaps because he'd do things which no “respectable practitioner” dared do. I’ve described hint in another story. Some said he was a quack, and some said he wasn’t. There are scores of wrecks and mysteries like him in the bush. He drank fearfully, and “on his own,” but was seldom incapable of prescribing or performing an operation. Experienced bushmen preferred him three-quarters drunk; when perfectly sober lie was apt to be a bit shaky. He was tall and gaunt, and had a pointed black moustache, bushy eyebrows and piercing black eyes. The worst of him was that his movements were eccentric. He lived where he happened to be; in a town hotel, in the best room of a homestead, in the skillion of a sly-grog shanty, in a shearer’s or digger’s or shepherd’s or boundaryrider’s hut, in a surveyor's camp, in a black fellow’s camp, or by a log in the lonely bush when the horrors were on him. It seemed all one to him. He lost all his things sometimes, even his clothes; but he never lost a pig-skin bag which contained his surgical instruments and papers—except once; then he gave the blacks five pounds to find it for him. His patients included all, from the big squatter to Black Jimmy; and he rode as far and fast to a squatter’s home as to a swagman’s eamp. When nothing was to be expected from a poorselector or station-hand, and the doctor was hard up, he went to the squatter for a few pounds. He had occasionally been offered checks of fifty and a hundred pounds by squatters for “pulling round” their wives or children; but such offers always angered him. When he asked for five pounds he resented being offered a ten-pound check. He once, under the influence of his demon, sued a doctor for alleging that he held no diploma; but the magistrates, on reading certain papers, suggested a settlement out of court, which both doctors agreed to, the other doctor apologising briefly in the local paper. It was noticed thereafter that the magistrate and town doctors treated Doe. Wild with great respect —even at his worst. The thing was never explained, and the case deepened the mystery which surrounded Doc Wild. As Job Falconer’s crisis approached Doc Wild was located at a shanty on the main road, about half-way between Job’s station and the town; township of Come-by-Chance—expressive name; and the shanty was the Dead Dingo Hotel, kept by James Myles, who was known as Poisonous Jimmy, either as a compliment to or a libel on the liquor he sold. Job’s brother Mac was stationed at the Dead Dingo Hotel, with instructions to hang around on some pretence, and see that the doctor didn’t either drink himself into delirium tremens or get sober enough to become restless; to prevent his going away, into follow him if he did; and to bring him to the station in about a week's time. Mae—rather more careless, brighter and more energetic than his brother —was carrying out these instructions while pretending, with rather great success, to be himself on the spree at the shanty.

One morning early in the specified week, Job’s uneasiness was suddenly increased by certain symptoms; so he seat the black-boy for the neighbour’s wife, and decided to ride to Come-by-Chance to hurry out Gerty’s mother, and see, by the way, how Doc. Wild

and Mae were getting on. On the arrival of the neighbour’s wife, who drove over in a spring-eart, Job mounted his horse, a freshly broken filly, and started.

“Don’t be anxious, Job,” said Gerty as he bent down to kiss her. “We’ll be all right. Wait! you’d better take the gun—you might see those dingoes again. I’ll get it for you.” The dingoes (native dogs) were verybad amongst the sheep, and Job and Gerty had started three together close to the track the last time they were out in company —without the gun, of course. Gerty took the loaded gun carefully down from its straps on the bedroom wall, carried it out and handed it up to Job, who bent and kissed her again; she brought the powder and shot flasks, got another kiss, and then he rode off.

It was a hot day—the beginning of a long drought, as Job found to his bitter cost. He followed the track for five or six miles through the thick, monotonous scrub, and then turned off to make a short cut to the main road across a big, ring-barked flat. The tall gum trees had been ring-barked (a ring of bark taken out round the butts), or rather “sapped”—that is, a ring cut in through the sap —in order to kill them, so that the little strength in the poor soil should not be drawn out by the Jiving roots, and the natural grass on which the Australian’s stock depends should have a better show. For three or four miles the hard dead trees raised their barkless ami whitened trunks and leafless branches, and the gray-and-brown grass stood tall between, dying in the first breath of the coming drought. All was becoming gray and ashen here, the heat blazing and dancing across objects, and the pale brassy dome of the sky cloudless over all, the sun a glaring white disc with its edges almost melting into the sky. Job held his gun carelessly ready—it was a double-barrelled muzzle-loader, one barrel smooth-bore for shot., and the other rifled—and he kept a lookout for dingoes. He was saving his horse for a long ride, jogging along in a careless bush-fashion, hitched a little to one side; and I’m not sure that he didn’t have a leg thrown up and across in front of the pommel of his saddle. He was riding along, and thinking fatherly thoughts in advance perlraps, when suddenly a great, black, greasy-looking iguana scuttled off from the side of the track, amongst the dry tufts of grass and shreds of dead bark, and started up a sapling. “It was a whopper,” Job said afterwards. “Must have been over six feet, and a foot across the body. It scared me nearly as much as the filly.”

The filly shied off like a rocket. Job kept his seat instinctively, as was

natural to him; but, before he couk. more than grab at the rein lying loosely on the pommel, the filly ‘'fetched up” against a dead box-tree, hard us castiron; and Job’s left leg was jammed from stirrup to pocket. “I felt the blood Hare up,” he said, “and I knowed that, that"—Job swore now and then in an easy-going way—-"I knowed that that blanky leg was broken all right. I threw the gun from me and freed the left foot from the stirrup with my hand, and managed to fall to the right, as the filly started off again.” What follows comes from the statements of Doe Wild and Mae Falconer, and Job’s own “wanderings in his mind,” as he called them. “They took a blanky mean advantage of me,” he said, “when they had nse down and 1 couldn't talk sense.” The filly circled off a hi'., and then stood staring—as a mob of brumbies (wild horses —shot to save grass, for horse-hair, and because of the scrub stallions betting amongst station stock) when fired at will sometimes stand watching the smoke. Job’s leg was smashed badly, and the pain must have been terrible; but be thought then instantaneously, as men do in a fix. No doubt the scene at the lonely bushhouse of his boyhood flashed before him; bis father’s horse appeared riderless, and he saw the look in his mother’s eyes— Now, a bushman’s first,- best and quickest chance in a fix like Job’s is that his horse goes home riderless, the alarm is raised, and the horse’s tracks are followed back to him; otherwise he might lie for days or weeks, till the growing grass buried his mouldering bones. The place where Job lay was an old sheep-track across a - flat where few might have occasion to come for months; but he did not consider this, lie crawled to his gun, then to a log, dragging gun and smashed leg after him. How he did it lie doesn’t know. Half-lying on one side, he rested the barrel on the log, took aim at the filly, pulled both triggers, and then fell over and lay with his head against the log; and the gun-barrel, sliding down, rested on his neck. He had fainted. The crows were interested, and the ants would come by-and-by. J>Wild had inspirations; anyway he did tilings which seemed, after they were done, to have been suggested by inspiration, and in no other possible way. Be often turned up where and ■when he was wanted above all men. and at no other time. He had gypsy blood, they said; but anyway, being thiemystery he was. and having the face he had. and living the life he lived anti doing the things he did, it was quite probable that he was more nearly in

touch than we with that awful, invisible world all round and between us, of which we only ace distorted faces and hear disjointed utterances when we are “suffering u recovery’’ or going mad. On the morning of Job’s accident, and after a long brooding silence, Doc. Wild suddenly said to Mac Falconer: “Oct the bosses, Mac. We’ll go to the station.” Mac, used to the doctor’s eccentricities, went to see about the horses. Then, who should drive up but Mrs Spencer, Job’s mother-in-law, on her way from town to the station. She stayed to have a eup of tea and give her horse a feed. She was square-faced and was considered a rather hard and practical woman: but she had plenty of solid flesh, good sympathetic common sense, and deep set and humorous blue eyes. She lived in the town comfortably on the interest of some money which lier husband had left in the bank, ami drove an American waggonette with a good width and length of “tray” behind; 'and on this occasion she. had a pole and two horses, in the trap was a new mattress and pillows, a generous pair of new white blankets, and boxes containing necessaries, delicacies, kind luxuries. All round, she was an excellent mother-in-law for « man (o have, on hand at a critical time. Speaking of the mother-in-law, I would like to put in a word for her right here. She is universally considered a nuisance in times of peace and comfort; but when illness or serious trouble comes home, then it’s “Write to mother!” “Wire for mother!" “Send some one to fetch mother!” “i’ll go and bring mother!’’ If she is not near: “Oh, I wish mother was here!” “(f mother were only near!” When she is on the spot, hear the anxious son-in-law: “Don’t you go, mother! “You'll stay—won't you, mother —-till we're all right! I’ll get some one to look after your house, mother, while you’re here.” But Job Falconer was fond of his mother-in-law at all times. Mae had some trouble in finding and catching one of the horses. Mrs Spencer drove on, and Mac and the doctor caught up to her about a mile before she reached the homestead track, which turned in through the scrubs at the corner of the big ring-barked flat. Doc. Wild and Mac. followed the cartToad, and as they jogged along on the edge of the scrub the doctor glanced once or twice, across the flat through the dead, naked branches. Mac looked that way. The crows were hopping about the branches of a tree away out in the middle of the flat, flopping down from branch to branch to the grass, then rising hurriedly and circling. “Dead beast there!” said Mae, out of his bushcraft. “No, dying,” said Doc. Wild, with less bush experience but more int ellect. “There’s some steers of Job’s out there somewhere,” muttered Mac. 'I hen, suddenly, “It ain’t drought—it’s the ploorer at last, or I'm blanked!” Mac feared the advent of that cattleplague pleuro - pneumonia, which was raging on some stations, but had hitherto kept clear of Job's run. “We’ll go and see if you like,” suggested Doc. Wild. They turned out across the flat, the horses picking their way amongst the dried tufts and fallen branches. „ “There ain’t no sign o’ cattle theer, said the. doctor. “More likely a ewe in trouble about her lamb. “Or the blanky dingoes at. a sheep, Baid Mac. “I wish we, had a gun; might get a shot at them.” Doe. Wild hitched the skirts of a long China silk coat he wore free of a hippocket. He. always carried a revolver. “In case 1 feel obliged to shoot a hist person singular one of these hot days, ho explained once — whereat bushmen scratched the backs of their heads and thought feebly, without result. ’Wed never git near enough for a shot, the doctor said; then he commenced to hum fragments from a bush-song about the finding of a lost bushman in the last stages of death from thirst i The crown kept flyin’ up. boys! The crows kept (lyin' up! JTho dog, he seen and whimpered, boys, Though tie was but a pup. ‘lt must be somethin’ or other,” muttered Mac. “Look at them blanky crows!*' The lost was found, we brought him round. And took him from the place, JThlle the anU was swarmin' on the ground, An' the crows wu Bayin' grace. **£Ulloa! whal’t limit” cried Mac,

who was a little In advance, and rode a tall horse. It was Job's filly lying saddled and bridled, with a rifle-bullet through shoulder and chest, as they found on subsequent examination, and her head full of kangaroo-shot. She was feebly rocking her head against the ground, and marking the dust with her hoof, as if trying to write the reason there. The doctor drew his revolver, took a cartridge from his waistcoat pocket, and put the filly out of her misery in a very scientific manner; then something —professional instinct or the something supernatural about the doctor — led him straight to the log, hidden in tho grass, where Job lay as we left him, and about fifty yards from the dead filly, which must have staggered a few yards off after being shot. Mac followed, slinking violently. “Oh, my God!" iie cried, with the woman in his voice and his face so pale that his freckles stood out like buttons, as the doctor said afterwards. “Oh, my God! he’s shot himself!” “No, he hasn’t,” said the doctor, deftly turning Job into a healthier position, with his head from under the log and his mouth to the air. He ran his eyes and liaiuts over him, and Job moaned. “He’s got a broken leg,” said the doctor. Even them he couldn’t resist making a characteristic remark, half to himself: “A man doesn’t shoot himself when he’s going to be made a lawful father for the first time—unless he can" see a long way into the future.” Then he took out his whisky flask and said briskly to Mac, “Leave me your waterbag”—Mac carried a canvas water bag slung under his horse’s neck—-“and ride back to the track, stop Mrs Spencer, and bring the waggonette here. Tell her it’s only a broken leg.” Mae mounted and rode off at a breakneck pace. •As he worked, the doctor muttered, “He’s shot his horse. That’s what gits me. The fool might have lain here <for a week. I’d never have .suspected spite in that carcass—and I ought to know men.” But as Job came round a little Doc. Wild was enlightened. “Where’s the filly?” cried Job suddenly, between groans. “She's all right,” said (he doctor in a tone that might have been resentfully envious. “Stop her!” cried Job, struggling to rise. “Stop her! —O God! my leg.’ “Keep quiet, you fool!’’ “Slop her!" yelled Job. “Why stop her?” asked the doctor. “She won’t go fur,” he added. “She’ll go home to Gerty,” shouted Job. “Slop her! stop her!” “Oh —ho!” drawled the doctor to himself. “f might have guessed that; and 1 ought to know men.” “Don’t take me home!” demanded Job in a semi-sensible interval. “Take me to Poisonous Jimmy’s, and tell Gerty I’m on the spree.” When Mac and Mrs Spencer returned v. ith the waggonette, Doc.’ Wild was in bis shirl-sleeves, his Chinese silk coat having gone for bandages. The lower half of Job’s trouser-leg and his elastichide boot lay on the ground, neatly cut off, and his bandaged leg was sandwiched between two strips of bark, with grass stuffed in the hollows, and bound by saddle-straps. “Thai’s all I can do for him for tho present.” Mrs. Spencer was a strong woman menially, but she arrived rather pale and a little shaky; nevertheless she tallied out as soon as she got within earshot of the doctor: “What’s Job been doing now}” Job, by tho way, had never been remarkable for doing anything. “He’s got his leg broke, and shot his horse,” replied the doctor. “But,” ho added, “whether he’s been a hero or a fool I dunno. Anyway, it’s a mess all round.” They unrolled the bed, blankets, and pillows in the bottom of the trap, backed it against the log to have a step, and got Job in. It was a ticklish job, but they had to manage it; Job, maildened by pain and heat, and only kept from fainting by whisky, groaning and raving and yelling to them to stop his horse.

“Lucky we got him before the anta did,” muttered the doctor. Then *>e had an iuspiration. “You bring him on to the shepherd’s hut this side the station. We must leave him there. Drive carefully, and pour brandy into kun now and then; when the brandy's done pour whisky, then gin; keep the rum till the last.** The doctor had put *

supply of spirits in the waggonette at Poisonous Jimmy’s. “I’ll take Mac's horse and ride on and send Peter, the elation luuid, back to the hut to meet you. I’ll be baek myself if I can. Thia business will hurry things up at the station.” Which last was one of these apparently insane remarks of the doctor’s which no sane and sober man could fathom or see a reason for —except in Doe. Wild’s madness. The doctor rode off at a gallop. The burden of Job’s raving all the way was of the dead filly: “Stop her! She must not go home to Gerty! God, help me shoot!—-Whoa! Whoa, there! Cope — cope — cope! Steady, Jessie, old girl.” Jessie was the filly’s name. “Aim straight—aim straight! Ah! I’ve missed! —Stop her!” “I never met a character like that inside a man that looked like Job on the outside,” commented the doctor afterwards. “I’ve met men behind revolvers and big moustaches in California; but I’ve met a derned sight more men behind nothing but a good-natured grin here in Australia. These lanky sawny bushmen will do things in an easy-go-ing way some day that’ll make the Old World sit up and think hard.” He reached the station in time, and twenty minutes or half-an-hour later he left the case in the hands of the Lancashire woman, whom he saw reason to admire, and rode back to the hut to help Job. whom they soon fixed up as comfortably as possible. They humbugged Mrs Falconer first with a yarn of Job’s alleged phenomenal shyness and gradually as she grew stronger and the truth less important they told it to her; and so instead of Job being pushed, scarlet-faced, into the bedroom to see his first-born, Gerty Falconer herself took the child down to the hut, and so presented Uncle Job with my first and favourite cousin and bush-chum. Doc. Wild stayed round until he saw Job comfortably moved to the homestead; then he prepared to depart. “I’m sorry,” said Job, who was still weak —“I’m" sorry for that there filly. I was breaking her into a side-saddle for Gerty when she should get about. I wouldn’t have lost her for twenty quid.” . “Never rniud, Job/* said the doctor. “I, too, once shot an animal I was fond of—and for the sake of a woman; but that animal walked on two legs and wore trousers. Good-bye Job.” And he left for Poisonous Jimmy’s. HENRY LAWSON.