Wilderness Trek (1988) (13 page)

"Hathaway verified it," went on Slyter. "Told me Ormiston, Woolcott, and those drovers Bedford and Jack, gambled every night."

When Slyter went about his tasks Red came out of his dumb shell. "Pard, thet ain't so. It's another of Ormiston's lies. Hathaway might believe it. He always went to bed with the chickens. For months, almost, either I have seen Ormiston with Beryl, or I have been with Jack an' Bedford. Cairds was never mentioned to me an' you know I had a roll thet would have choked a cow."

That night Leslie, in picking up a bundle of firewood, neglected to put on her gloves, and was severely bitten by a red-back spider. She made light of it, especially after Friday returned to paste some herb concoction of his own upon the swelling hand. Sterl had found a better remedy for snakebite than whisky. He plied the girl with coffee, and walked her up and down for hours, keeping her awake until she fell asleep in his arms from exhaustion. Then he carried her to the wagon and laid her on her bed.

Then when they called Red to ride herd, it was to discover that he was ill with chills and fever, the like of which had never before befallen that cowboy. But he refused to stay in bed. By breakfast time, he was so ill he could not sit his horse. Stanley Dann declared that his ailment was intestinal and came from something he had eaten. Red swore and asked for whisky. He traveled that day on the dray, high on top of the great load of flour sacks, where he went to sleep.

Leslie should not have ridden at all, but neither her father nor Sterl could dissuade her. "Shucks," she said, "I'm all right. I won't give in to thet pesky old red-back!" She was absorbing the cowboy vocabulary.

Sterl rode close to her that day, during which she fell twice out of her saddle. But she did not lose her sense of humor.

"Red said I'm gonna be a genuine cowgirl, didn't he?" she said when she slid out of her saddle the second time. "Dog-gone it, Sterl, if I fall off again treat me to some of that--that medicine you gave me back at Purple Land camp."

Two days of laborious travel followed. Before sunset of the first, the expedition stalled on the banks of a considerable stream with steep banks. Even when the mob, driven across in advance, had trampled out crude roads, it required eight horses to drag each wagon across. Leslie was still too weak to brave the treacherous current and Sterl, mounted on King, carried her across in his arms. Mid-current, she looked up and said softly:

"I'd like to ride all the rest of way like this."

"Yeah? Three thousand miles?" responded Sterl. And he registered this little occurrence as one of the dangerous incidents--if not misfortunes--that were multiplying.

A dry camp that afternoon awakened Sterl anew to the alarming probability that lack of water headed Stanley Dann's list of obstacles to the trek. Friday anticipated a native corroboree that night, and it was forthcoming, with its accompaniment of dingo choruses and dog howls. Dann's order was to let the aborigines alone, unless they stole into camp to attack. Morning disclosed no evidence that the blacks had killed cattle, but Slyter shrewdly declared that their leader could have found out had he put Friday and the cowboys to hunting tracks.

All day the smoke signals rose far ahead, the sun burned hotter, the tiny flies swarmed invisibly around the riders' and drovers' heads. At dusk flying foxes, like vampire bats, swished and whirred over the camps; opposums and porcupines had to be thrust out of the way. Every piece of firewood hid a horde of ants, and as they crawled frantically away, Bill the cook scooped them back into the fire with a shovel.

Then there was a large insect which came out of decayed wood--blue-black, over an inch long--which was not a biter like the fierce ants, but decidedly more annoying in the vile odor it gave off when discovered. Snakes, too became more common in this bush. Sterl espied a death adder under his lifted foot and stepped on it before he could jump. After that he and Red did not take off their chaps at the end of the day's trek; and Sterl cut down an extra pair of his for Leslie to wear. The girl's extraordinary delight in them was equaled by the picturesque exaggeration of her charm.

For weeks after Woolcott's death Ormiston had kept mostly to his camp. He had even somewhat neglected Beryl, a circumstance Red had made the most of. Stanley Dann remarked that Ormiston had taken the Woolcott tragedy very grievously. Dann had been gratified by the drover's throwing his cattle in with the main mob. The strained relation was certainly no worse, if it had not grown better. But Sterl was not deceived by Ormiston. Red had abandoned his plan of intimacy with Ormiston's drovers. He bided his time. He still clung to his belief that Beryl Dann would--be instrumental in exposing Ormiston in his true colors.

One night, Red returned to camp rather earlier than usual; and his look prepared Sterl for a disclosure.

"Pard, I jest happened to heah somethin'," he whispered, impressively, leaning his falcon-shaped red head to Sterl. "I was after a bucket of water for Beryl, kinda under cover of the bank where the brook was clean. Ormiston with Jack an' Bedford came along above. I heahed low voices, kinda sharp, before they got to me. Then right above Ormiston spit out: 'No, I told you. Not till we get to the haidwaters of the Diamantina.'"

Sterl echoed his last four words. "Red, what do you figure from that?"

"Wal, it's plain as print so far. Whatever Ormiston has in mind it's to come off thar. I figure that those two hombres want to pull off the deal sooner."

"You used to have brains. Cain't you help me figgerin' what the hell?"

"I'll try. Suppose I analyze this. Then you give me your old cowboy American slant."

"Hop to it, pard."

"Ormiston wants to be a partner of Stanley Dann's after the trek. Or to get control of a big mob of cattle, and marry Beryl. He is working his deal so that when he threatens to split out from this drive, Dann will give almost anything to keep him. Ormiston's drovers want a showdown for their labors or a speed-up of the break."

"You ain't calculatin', anythin' atall on our idee thet Woolcott was murdered?"

"That is a stickler, I admit, but I am trying to find a more credible motive for those other Australians."

"Pard, listen to a little plain sense from a Texas hombre who's knowed a thousand bad eggs... Ormiston is a drover, mebbe, a cattleman, mebbe. He's after cattle, all he can steal!... It's a cinch he killed Woolcott, or had one of his outfit do it. Woolcott probably bucked. Wanted to go back to Dann. An' he got Woolcott's cattle, didn't he? The gamblin' debt can be discounted. Ormiston is workin' to persuade some of Dann's riders to side with him. I know thet. They jest damn near approached me! Wal, muss thet all up an' figger. Ormiston has control of three thousand haid. He'll get hold of more, by hook or crook. An' he'll split with Dann at the haidwaters of thet river, take Beryl with him by persuasion or force, an' light out for some place he is figgerin' on... Thet, my son, is what Old Dudley Texas says!"

"All same just another bloody rustler!"

"All same jest another bloody cow thief, like hundreds we've knowed an' some we've hanged."

"Stanley Dann will never believe that until too late."

"Reckon not.'But we might talk Slyter into findin' out he was alive... Queer dee, ain't it?"

"Queer--sure!" returned Sterl.

"Red, we can't let it go on--come to a head."

"We jest can," retorted Red. "For the present.

"Somethin' will happen one of these days, jest like thet crack of Ormiston's I heahed today, an' always there's the chance Beryl will put us wise to Ormiston. I'm layin' low, Sterl. We've been in some tough places. This is shore the toughest. Let's not let it get the best of us."

"Red Krehl, did I have to come way out here to Australia to appreciate you?" demanded Sterl.

"You sense things beyond my powers... But, old timer, I swear I'll rise to this thing as you have risen. And I'll take a long hitch in my patience."

Chapter
11

The trek plodded on, day after day. And more and more Sterl felt himself back to the level of the unconscious savage as represented so strikingly in the black man Friday, who had mental processes it was true, but was almost wholly guided by his instincts and his emotions. It was a good thing, he reflected. It made for survival. Thrown against the background of the live and inanimate forces of the earth, man had to go back. He discussed his mood sometimes with his companions of his campfires. Slyter laughed, "We call it 'gone bush.' I would say it denoted weak mentality!" Leslie gave proof to his theory by flashing, "Sterl, you make me think. And I don't want to think!" Stanley Dann said, "Undoubtedly a trek like this would be a throwback for most white men; unless they found their strength in God." Well, he himself had a job to do--to deal with Ormiston. When that was finished, he could revert to the savage!

Stanley Dann eventually arrived at the conclusion that any one of several streams they had crossed might have been Cooper Creek, famed in the annals of exploration. But he admitted that he had expected a goodly stream of running water. Long ago, Sterl thought, Dann should have been warned by a sun growing almost imperceptibly hotter that water would grow scarcer. Still, always in the blue distance, mountain ranges lent hope. Through this bush, the endless monotony of which wore so strangely on the trekkers that desert country would have been welcome, they never made an average of five miles a day. Dry camps occurred more and more often; two-day stays at waterholes further added to the delay.

In October the expedition at last worked out of that "Always-always-all-same-land," as Red Krehl named it, to the gradual slope of open grass leading down to what appeared to be a boundless valley to the west with purple mountains to the north. Water would come down out of them. A thread of darker green promised a river or stream. They were three days in reaching it--none too soon to save the cattle.

The mob got out of hand; its rush dammed the stream. Many of the cattle drowned; others were mired in the mud; a few were trampled to death. The horses fared badly, though not to the point of loss.

"Make camp for days," was Stanley Dann's order, when mob and remuda had been droved out upon the green. The night watch was omitted. Horses and cattle and trekkers rested from nightfall until sunrise.

Day disclosed the loveliest site for a camp, the freest from flies and insects, the richest in color and music of innumerable birds, the liveliest in game that the drovers had experienced. But ill luck still dogged the trek. Next morning, Larry reported that horses were missing from the remuda.

"Sterl," said Slyter, "I suppose that you, being a cowboy, can track a horse?"

"Used to be pretty good," said Sterl. He got his rifle, and started.

But he only lost himself in the deep bush, and continued to be lost for three days. Afterward, he looked back on his adventure with mixed feelings of chagrin and of glory in the experience. The chagrin rose from the fact that in an obscure stretch of jungle he mistook the faint tracks of a band of cassowaries for those of King's shod hoofs, nor realized it until he came upon a flock of these great, awkward, ostrich-like birds staring at him with protruding, solemn eyes.

The rest, he remembered afterward only in snatches.

An open space where foliage and a cascade of the stream caught an exquisite, diffused golden light breaking through blue rifts in the green dome overhead. Tiny flying insects, like sparks from a fire, vied with wide-winged butterflies in a fascinated fluttering over a pool that mirrored them, and the great opal-hued branches above, and the network of a huge-leafed vines, and the spears of lacy foliage. Flycatchers, birds, too beautiful to be murderers, were feeding upon the darting, winged insects.

A splash in a pool, and a movement of something live, distracted Sterl's attention from the tree tent he was examining. He saw a strange animal slide or crawl out on the bank. It had a squatty body that might have resembled a flat pig, but for the thick fur on its back. It had a long head, which took the shape, when Sterl located the eyes, of an abnormal and monstrous bill of a duck. Sterl stared, disputing his own eyesight. But the thing was an animal and alive. It had front feet with long cruel claws. Its back feet and tail were hidden in the grass. All of a sudden Sterl realized that he was staring at the strangest creature in this strange Australia, perhaps in the world, no less than Leslie's much-vaunted duck-billed platypus.

Morning after a cool, wet night on the ground. Light ahead and open sky prepared Sterl for a change in the topography of the bush. And a low hum of falling water was the voice of a waterfall. Out from under giant trees he stepped to the brink of a precipice and to a blue sun-steaked abyss that brought him to a standstill.

The sun, gloriously red and blazing, appeared again to be in the wrong place. Sterl had to reconcile himself that this burst of morning light came from the east. Yet no matter how badly a man was lost he dared not deny the sunrise. The abyss at his feet had the extraordinary beauty, if not the colossal dimensions, of the Arizona canyons he had known from boyhood. Up from his right sounded a low, thunderous roar. By craning his neck he saw where the stream leaped off, turning from shining green to lacy white. It fell a thousand feet, struck a ledge of broken wall, cascaded over and through huge rocks, to leap from a second precipice, from which purple depths no murmur arose. Walls opposite where Sterl stood, rust-stained and lichened, dropped down precipitously into shadow. On his own side the sun tipped the ramparts with rose and gold, and blazed the great wall halfway down.