The Squatter's Dream

“I dare say he didn’t get the best of you, Master Geordie,” said Jack, kindly; “he’d be a sharp fellow if he did. You were going to muster the ‘Lost Waterhole Camp’ soon, weren’t you?”

“There’s a mob there that wants bringing in and regulating down there just uncommon bad. I was biding a bit, till you came home.”

“Well, Geordie, you can call me at daylight to-morrow. I’ll have an early breakfast and go out with you. You know I haven’t been getting up quite so early lately.”

“You can just wake as early as any one, when you like, sir; but I’ll call you. What horse shall I tell Harry?”

“Well, I’ll take ‘the Don,’ I think. No, tell him to get ‘Mustang,’ he’s the best cutting-out horse.”

“No man ever had a better servant,” thought Jack as he sat down in half an hour to his well-appointed table and well-served, well-cooked repast.

Geordie Stirling was as shrewd, staunch a Borderer as ever was reared in that somewhat bleak locality, a worthy descendant of the men who gathered fast with spear and brand, when the bale-fires gave notice that the moss-troopers were among their herds. He was sober, economical, and self-denying. He and his good wife had retained the stern doctrines in which their youth had been reared, but little acted upon by the circumstances and customs of colonial life.

Jack applied himself to his dinner with reasonable earnestness, having had a longish ride, and being one of those persons whose natural appetite is rarely interfered with by circumstances. He could always eat, drink, and sleep with a zest which present joy or sorrow to come had no power to disturb. He therefore appreciated the roast fowl and other home-grown delicacies which Mrs. Stirling placed before him, and settled down to a good comfortable read afterwards, leaving the momentous question of migration temporarily in abeyance. After all this was over, however, he returned to the consideration of the subject. He went over Fred Tunstall’s arguments, which he thought were well enough in their way, but savoured of a nature unprogressive and too easily contented. “It’s all very well to be contented,” he said to himself; “and we are very fairly placed now, but a man must look ahead. Suppose these runs are cut up and sold by a democratic ministry, or allowed to be taken up, before survey, by cockatoos, where shall we be in ten years? Almost cockatoos ourselves, with run for four or five hundred head of cattle; a lot of fellows pestering our lives out; and a couple of thousand acres of purchased land. There’s no living to be made out of that. Not what I call a living; unless one were to milk his own cows, and so on. I hardly think I should do that. No! I’ll go in for something that will be growing and increasing year by year, not the other way. This district is getting worn out. The land is too good. The runs are too small and too close to one another, and will be smaller yet. No! my idea of a run is twenty miles frontage to a river – the Oxley or the Lachlan, with thirty miles back; then with twenty thousand ewes, or even ten to start with, you may expect something like an increase, and lots of ground to put them on. Then sell out and have a little Continental travel; come back, marry, and settle down. By Jove! here goes – Victory or Westminster Abbey!”

Inspired by these glorious visions, and conceiving quite a contempt for poor little Marshmead, with only 2,000 cattle and a hundred horses upon its 20,000 acres, Jack took out his writing materials and scribbled off the following advertisement: —

“Messrs. Drawe and Backwell have much pleasure in announcing the sale by auction, at an early period, of which due notice will be given, of the station known as Marshmead, in the Hampden district, with two thousand unusually well-bred cattle of the J R brand. The run, in point of quality, is one of the best, in a celebrated fattening district. The cattle are highly bred, carefully culled, and have always brought first-class prices at the metropolitan sale-yards. The improvements are extensive, modern, and complete. The only reason for selling this valuable property is that the proprietor contemplates leaving the colony.”

“There,” said Jack, laying down his pen, “that’s quite enough – puffing won’t sell a place, and everybody’s heard of Marshmead, and of the J R cattle, most likely. If they haven’t, they can ask. There’s no great difficulty in selling a first-class run. And now I’ll seal it up ready for the post, and turn in.”

Next morning, considerably to Geordie’s disappointment, Jack declined to go out to the “Lost Waterhole Camp,” telling him rather shortly (to conceal his real feelings) that he thought of selling the place, and that it would be time to muster when they were delivering.

“Going to sell the run!” gasped Geordie, perfectly aghast. “Why, master, what ever put such a thing into your head? Where will ye find a bonnier place than this? and there’s no such a herd of cattle in all the country round. Sell Marshmead! Why, you must have picked up that when in town.”

“Never mind where I picked it up,” said Jack, rather crossly; “I have thought the matter over well, you may believe, and as I have made up my mind there is no use in talking about it. You don’t suppose Hampden is all Australia?”

“No, but it’s one of the best bits upon the whole surface of it – and that I’ll live and die on,” said Geordie. “Look at the soil and the climate. Didn’t I go across the Murray to meet they store cattle, and wasna it nearly the death of me? Six weeks’ hard sun, and never a drop of rain. And blight, and flies, and bush mosquiteys; why, I’d rather live here on a pound a week than have a good station there. Think o’ the garden, too.”

“Well, Geordie,” said Jack, “all that’s very well, but look at the size of the runs! Why, I saw 1,000 head of fat cattle coming past one station I stayed at, in one mob, splendid cattle too; bigger and better than any of our little drafts we think such a lot of. Besides, I don’t mind heat, you know, and I’m bent on being a large stockholder, or none at all.”

“Weel, weel!” said Geordie, “you will never be convinced. I know you’ll just have your own way, but take care ye dinna gang the road to lose all the bonny place ye have worked hard for. The Lord keep ye from making haste to be rich.”

“I know, I know,” said Jack, testily; “but the Bible says nothing about changing your district. Abraham did that, you know, and evidently was getting crowded up where he was.”

“Master John, you’re not jestin’ about God’s Word! ye would never do the like o’ that, I know, but Elsie and I will pray ye’ll be properly directed – and Elspeth Stirling will be a sorrowful woman I know to stay behind, as she must, when all’s sold and ye go away to that desolate, waesome hot desert, where there’s neither Sabbaths, nor Christian men, nor the Word once in a year.”

The fateful advertisement duly appeared, and divers “intending purchasers,” introduced by Messrs. Drawe and Backwell, arrived at Marshmead, where they were met with that tempered civility which such visitors generally receive.

The usual objections were made. The run was not large enough; the boundaries were inconvenient or not properly defined; the stock were not as good as had been represented; the improvements were not sufficiently extensive. This statement was made by a young and aristocratic investor, who was about to be married. He was very critical about the height of the cottage walls, and the size of the sitting-room. The buildings were too numerous and expensive, and would take more money than they were worth to keep in repair. This was the report and opinion of an elderly purchaser (Scotch), who did not see the necessity of anything bigger than a two-roomed slab hut. Such an edifice had been quite enough for him (he was pleased to remark) to make twenty thousand pounds in, on the Lower Murray, and to drink many a gallon of whisky in. As such results and recreations comprised, in his estimation, “the whole duty of man,” he considered Jack’s neat outbuildings, and even the garden —horresco referens!– to be totally superfluous and unprofitable. He expressed his intention, if he were to do such an unlikely thing as to buy the wee bit kail-yard o’ a place, to pull two-thirds of the huts down.

All these criticisms, mingled with sordid chaffering, were extremely distasteful to Jack’s taste, and his temper suffered to such an extent that he had thought of writing to the agents to give no further orders for inspection. However, shortly after the departure of the objectionable old savage, as he profanely termed the veteran pastoralist, he received a telegram to say that the sale was concluded. Mr. Donald M‘Donald, late of Binjee-Mungee, had paid half cash, and the rest at short-dated bills, and would send his nephew, Mr. Angus M‘Tavish, to take delivery in a few days.

Long before these irrevocable matters had come to pass, our hero had bitterly repented of his determination. Those of his neighbours who were not on such terms of intimacy as to expostulate roundly, like Tunstall, could not conceal their distrust or disapproval of his course. Some were sincerely sorry to lose him as a neighbour, and this expression of feeling touched him more deeply than the opposition of the others.

Mr. M‘Tavish arrived, and, after delivery of his credentials, the last solemnities of mustering and delivery were duly concluded.

The “nephew of his uncle” was an inexperienced but deeply suspicious youth, who declined to take the most obvious things for granted, and consistently disbelieved every word that was said to him. Geordie Stirling with difficulty refrained from laying hands upon him; and Jack was so disgusted with his “manners and customs” that, on the evening when the delivery was concluded, he declined to spend another night at old Marshmead, but betook himself, with his two favourite hacks, specially reserved at time of sale, to the nearest inn, from which he made the best of his way to the metropolis.

The disruption of old ties and habitudes was much more painful than he had anticipated. His two faithful retainers located themselves upon an adjoining farm, which their savings had enabled them to purchase. To this they removed their stock, which was choice though not numerous. Geordie, after his first warning, said no more, knowing by experience that his master, when he had set his mind upon a thing, was more obstinate than many a man of sterner mould. Too sincere to acquiesce, his rugged, weather-beaten lineaments retained their look of solemn disapproval, mingled at times with a curiously pathetic gaze, to the last.

With his wife Elspeth, a woman of much originality and force of character, combined with deep religious feeling of the old-fashioned Puritan type, the case was different.

She had a strong and sincere affection for John Redgrave, whom she had known from his early boyhood, and in many ways had she demonstrated this. She had unobtrusively and efficiently ministered to his comfort for years. She had not scrupled to take him to task in a homely and earnest way for minor faults and backslidings, all of which rebukes and remonstrances he had taken in good part, as springing from an over-zealous but conscientious desire for his welfare. His friends smiled at the good old woman’s warnings and testifyings, occasionally delivered, when performing her household duties, in the presence of any company then and there assembled, by whom she was not in the slightest degree abashed, or to be turned from any righteous purpose.

“Eh, Maister John, ye’ll no be wantin’ to ride anither of thae weary steeplechasers?” she had been pleased to inquire upon a certain occasion; “ye’ll just be fa’in doon and hurtin’ yersel’, or lamin’ and woundin’ the puir beastie that’s been granted to man for a’ useful purposes!”

She had been in the habit of “being faithful to him,” as she termed divers very plain spoken and home-thrusting exhortations in respect to his general habits and walk in life, whenever she had reason to think such allocution to be necessary. She had taken him to task repeatedly for unprofitable reading upon, and lax observance of, the Sabbath; for a too devoted adherence to racing, and the unpardonable sin of betting; for too protracted absences in the metropolis, and consequent neglect of his interests at Marshmead; and, generally, for any departure from the strict line of Christian life and manners which she rigidly observed herself, and compelled Geordie to practice. Though sometimes testy at such infringements upon the liberty of the subject, Jack had sufficient sense and good feeling to recognize the true and deep anxiety for his welfare from which this excess of carefulness sprang. In every other respect old Elsie’s rule was without flaw or blemish. For all the years of their stay at Marshmead, no bachelor in all the West had enjoyed such perfect immunity from the troubles and minor miseries to which Australian employers are subjected. Spotless cleanliness, perfect comfort, and proverbial cookery, had been the unbroken experience of the Marshmead household. It was a place at which all guests, brought there for pleasure or duty, hastened to arrive, and lingered with flattering unwillingness to leave.

And now this pleasant home was to be broken up, the peaceful repose and organized comfort to be abandoned, and the farewell words to be said to the faithful retainer.

Jack felt parting with the old woman more than he cared to own; he felt almost ashamed and slightly irritated at the depth of his emotion. “Confound it,” he said to himself, “it’s very hard that one can’t sell one’s run and move off to a thinly-stocked country without feeling as if one had committed a species of wrong and treachery, and having to make as many affecting farewells as I have no doubt my governor did when he left England for the terra incognita Australia.”

“Well, Elsie,” he said, with an attempt at ease and jocularity he was far from feeling, “I must say good-bye. I hope you and Geordie will be snug and comfortable at your farm. I’ll write to you when I’m settled in Riverina; and, if I do as well as some others, I shall make a pot of money, and be off to the old country in a few years.”

He put out his hand, but the old woman heeded it not, but gazed in his face with a wistful, pleading look, and the tears filled her eyes, not often seen in melting mood, as she said —

“Oh, Maister John, oh, my bairn, that I should live to see you ride away from the bonny home where ye’ve lived so long, and been aye respeckit and useful in your generation. Do ye think ye have the Lord’s blessing for giving up the lot where He has placed ye and blessed ye, for to gang amang strangers and scorners – all for the desire of gain? I misdoot the flitting, and the craving for the riches that perish in the using, sairly – sairly. Dinna forget your Bible; and pray, oh, pray to Him, my bairn, that ye may be direckit in the right way. I canna speak mair for greetin’ and mistrustin’ that my auld een have looked their last on your bonny face. May the Lord have ye in His keeping.”

Her tears flowed unrestrainedly, as she clasped his hand in both of hers, and then turned away in silence.

“Geordie,” said our hero, strongly inclined to follow suit, “you mustn’t let Elsie fret like this, you know. I am not going away for ever. You’ll see me back most likely in the summer, for a little change and a mouthful of sea air. I shall find you taking all the prizes at the Hampden show with that bull calf of old Cherry’s.”

“It’s little pleesure we’ll have in him, or the rest of the stock, for a while,” answered Geordie. “The place will no be natural like, wantin’ ye. The Lord’s will be done,” added he, reverently. “We’re a’ in His keepin’. I’d come with ye, for as far and as hot as yon sa-andy desert o’ a place is, if it werena for the wife. God bless ye, Maister John!”

CHAPTER III

“So forward to fresh fields and pastures new.” —Milton.

Jack’s spirits had recovered their usual high average when he found himself once more at the club in a very free and unfettered condition, and clothed with the prestige of a man who had sold his station well, and was likely to rise in (pastoral) life.

He was bold, energetic, moderately experienced, and had all that sanguine trust in the splendid probabilities of life common to those youthful knights who have come scatheless through the tourney, and have never, as yet, been

“Dragged from amid the horses’ feet,With dinted shield and helmet beat.”

He derived a little amusement (for he possessed a keen faculty of observation, though, as with other gifts, he did not always make the best use of that endowment) from the evident brevet rank which was accorded to him by the moneyed and other magnates. His advice was asked as to stock investments. He was consulted upon social and political questions. Invitations, of which he had always received a fair allowance, came in showers. Report magnified considerably the price he had received for Marshmead. Many chaperons and haughty matrons of the most exacting class bid eagerly for his society. In short, Jack Redgrave had become the fashion, and for a time revelled in all the privileged luxury of that somewhat intoxicating position. Notwithstanding a fine natural tendency desipere in loco, our hero was much too shrewd and practical a personage not to be fully aware that this kind of thing could not last. He had a far higher ambition than would have permitted him to subside into a club swell, or a social butterfly, permanently. He had, besides, that craving for bodily exercise, even labour, common to men of vigorous organization, which, however lulled and deadened for a time, could not be controlled for any protracted period.

He had, therefore, kept up a reasonably diligent search among the station agents and others for any likely investment which might form the nucleus of the large establishment, capable of indefinite expansion, of which he had vowed to become the proprietor.

Such a one, at length (for, as usual when a man has his pockets full of money, and is hungering and thirsting to buy, one would think that there was not a purchaseable run on the whole continent of Australia), was “submitted to his notice” by a leading agent; the proprietor, like himself in the advertisement of Marshmead, was “about to leave the colony,” so that all doubt of purely philanthropical intention in selling this “potentiality of fabulous wealth” was set at rest. Jack took the mail that night, with the offer in his pocket, and in a few days found himself deposited at “a lodge in the wilderness” of Riverina, face to face with the magnificent enterprize.

Gondaree had been a cattle-station from the ancient days, when old Morgan had taken it up with five hundred head of cattle and two or three convict servants, in the interests and by the order of the well-known Captain Kidd, of Double Bay. A couple of huts had been built, with stock-yard and gallows. The usual acclimatization and pioneer civilization had followed. One of the stockmen had been speared: a score or two of the blacks, to speak well within bounds, had been shot. By intervals of labour, sometimes toilsome and incessant, oftener monotonous and mechanical, the sole recreation being a mad debauch on the part of master and man, the place slowly but surely and profitably progressed – progressed with the tenacious persistence and sullen obstinacy of the race, which, notwithstanding toils, dangers, broils, bloodshed, and reckless revelries, rarely abandons the object originally specified. Pioneer or privateer, merchant or missionary, the root qualities of the great colonizing breed are identical. They perish in the breach, they drink and gamble, but they rarely raise the siege. The standard is planted, though by reckless or unworthy hands; still goes on the grand march of civilization, with splendour of peace and pomp of war. With the fair fanes and foul alleys of cities – with peaceful village and waving cornfield – so has it ever been; so till the dawn of a purer day, a higher faith, must it ever be, the ceaseless “martyrdom of man.”

“And the individual withers,And the race is more and more.”

Gondaree had advanced. The drafts of fat cattle had improved in number and quality – at first, in the old, old days, when supply bore hard upon demand, selling for little more than provided an adequate quantity of flour, tea, sugar, and tobacco for the year’s consumption. But the herd had spread by degrees over the wide plains of “the back,” as well as over the broad river flats and green reed-beds of “the frontage,” and began to be numbered by thousands rather than by the original hundreds.

Changes slowly took place. Old Morgan had retired to a small station of his own with a herd of cattle and horses doubtfully accumulated, as was the fashion of the day, by permission of his master, who had never once visited Gondaree.

The old stockmen were dead, or gone none knew whither; but another overseer, of comparatively modern notions, occupied his place, and while enduring the monotonous, unrelieved existence, cursed the unprogressive policy which debarred him from the sole bush recreation – in that desert region – of planning and putting up “improvements.”

About the period of which we speak, it had occurred to the trustees of the late Captain Kidd that, as cattle-stations had risen much in value in that part of the country, from the rage which then obtained to dispose of those despised animals and replace them with sheep, it was an appropriate time to sell. The station had paid fairly for years past. Not a penny had been spent upon its development in any way; and now, “as those Victorian fellows and others, who ought to know better, were going wild about salt-bush cattle-stations to put sheep on – why, this was clearly the time to put Gondaree in the market.”

As Jack drove up in the unpretending vehicle which bore Her Majesty’s mails and adventurous travellers to the scarce-known township of “far Bochara,” the day was near its close. The homestead was scarcely calculated to prepossess people. They had passed the river a couple of miles back, and now halted at a sandy hillock, beneath which lay a sullen lagoon. There were two ruinous slab huts, with bark roofs, at no great distance from each other. There was a stock-yard immediately at the back of the huts, where piles of bones, with the skulls and horns of long-slain beasts, told the tale of the earliest occupation of the place.

There was no garden, no horse-paddock, nothing of any kind, sort, or description but the two huts, which might have originally cost ten pounds each. Jack, taking his valise and rug, walked towards the largest hut, from which a brown-faced young fellow, in a Crimean shirt and moleskin trousers, had emerged.

“You are Mr. – Mr. – Redgrave,” said he, consulting a well-thumbed letter which he took out of his pocket. “I have orders to show you the place and the cattle. Won’t you come in?”

Jack stepped over two or three impediments which barred the path, and narrowly escaped breaking his shins over a bullock’s head, which a grand-looking kangaroo dog was gnawing. He glanced at the door, which was let into the wall-plate of the hut above and below, after the oldest known form of hinge, and sat down somewhat ruefully upon a wooden stool.

“You’re from town, I suppose?” said the young man, mechanically filling his pipe, and looking with calm interest at Jack’s general get-up.

“Yes,” answered Jack, “I am. You are aware that I have come to look at the run. When can we make a beginning?”

“To-morrow morning,” was the answer. “I’ll send for the horses at daylight.”

“How do you get on without a horse-paddock?” asked Jack, balancing himself upon the insecure stool, and looking enviously at his companion, who was seated upon the only bed in the apartment. “Don’t you sometimes lose time at musters?”

“Time ain’t of much account on the Warroo,” answered the overseer, spitting carelessly upon the earthen floor. “We have a cursed sight more of it than we know what to do with. And Captain Kidd didn’t believe in improvements. Many a time I’ve written and written for this and that, but the answer was that old Morgan did very well without them for so many years, and so might I. I got sick of it, and just rubbed on like the rest. If I had had my way, I’d have burned down the thundering old place long ago, and put up everything new at Steamboat Point. But you might as well talk to an old working bullock as to our trustees.”

“What are the cattle like?” inquired Mr. Redgrave.