Horseshoe Bend
In order fully to understand the position in which Sax and his friend were soon to be placed, it is necessary to go back several weeks and find out what had happened to the famous Boss Stobart.
Joe Archer, the storekeeper at Oodnadatta who had been so kind to the boys, had told them that the drover had not been heard of since he had called in at Horseshoe Bend. It is possible to connect up with the Overland Telegraph Line at Horseshoe Bend, and Stobart had taken advantage of this opportunity of getting into touch with Oodnadatta.
Boss Stobart, with a thousand Queensland cattle, reached the Finke about midday. The Finke is a wide river of soft white sand, bordered on each side by gnarled and ancient gum trees. Not once in the memory of white man had the Finke carried water from its source in the Macdonnel Ranges to its mouth in the great dry salt Lake Eyre, and the trees which mark its course, and can be seen from many, many miles away scattered about the landscape, gain their nourishment from a water-supply fifty or sixty feet below the arid surface.
The drover saw the cattle safely over the dry creek, put them on camp in a clay-pen surrounded by sandhills, and then rode up to the little group of rough buildings which, because the Finke makes an almost complete turn on itself just there, goes by the name of Horseshoe Bend. The Horseshoe Bend licensed store is a low iron building ornamented on two sides by a broad veranda. Clustered at the back are a hut of split box logs thatched with cane, an iron-roofed cellar, and a few primitive outbuildings. These, with a large set of yards and troughs for watering cattle, make what is not only the homestead of a six-thousand-square-mile cattle station, but also an important depot on the Great North Stock Route, a postal and telegraph station, and the residence—when he is not away on the run—of a justice of the peace. In a cramped and dusty office, where, amid the buzzing of innumerable flies, while the temperature climbs above 110° F. every day for five months in the year, the news of Europe and Asia can be heard tick-tacked in code by inserting a little plug. The reports of a war in India, of an active volcano in South America, or of a cricket match in England could be heard at Horseshoe Bend in the centre of the Australian desert before people in Melbourne knew anything about it. The only thing necessary is to insert a little metal plug and make the current run through the recorder.
But the plug hangs idle on its nail; the recorder is covered with dust; no one bothers about either Europe or Asia. What chiefly concerns the few white men who are able to live in Central Australia are the price of stock, the best place to find a little dried grass or bush, and water. Always water, water, water—everything else is of secondary importance—cattle-feed and water.
The conversation between Stobart and the man behind the bar was all about the needs and the ways of stock. The drover hitched his horse to a veranda-post and walked into the dark drinking-room stiffly, for he had been in the saddle since three o'clock that morning, and had done some hard riding after restless cattle.
"Good-day," said Stobart.
"Good-day," replied Tom Gibbon. "Travelling?"
"Yes. Cattle. How's the water down the road?"
The man consulted a paper nailed on a board. It contained the names of all the water-holes from Alice Springs to Oodnadatta. He began to read, running his finger below the words and pronouncing them slowly: "Yellow—dry. Sugar-Loaf—dry. Anvil Soak—dry. One Tree Well—only enough for a plant; makes very slow. Simpson's Hole—dry. In fact the whole lot are dry till you get as far as the Stevenson Bore. You're right after that. How many've you got?"
"A thousand."
"Holy sailor! You'll never get through. Bob Hennesy was the last man down with cattle. He got as far as the Crown and had to leave them on a well there. They were as poor as wood. No stock passed this way for three months."
Boss Stobart had been a drover in Central Australia for thirty years, and the names of the water-holes which Tom Gibbon had read out were very familiar to him. Tom, however, was new to the country and did not know who his visitor was. Stobart did not show any surprise at the state of the country to the south of him, but merely remarked casually: "Oh, well, I'll have to go round then. I'm a good month ahead of time."
The barman did not know what going round meant, but had no wish to display an ignorance which was really quite evident to the drover, so he asked: "What'll you drink?"
"Got any sarsaparilla?"
Tom Gibbon laughed. It seemed a good joke to him that a bushman should ask for a teetotal drink. "Yes, any amount of it," he answered. "'Johnny Walker', 'Watson's No. 10', 'King George'—any brand you like."
"I said sarsaparilla, not whisky," said Stobart.
The laugh died out on Tom Gibbon's face. "D'you mean it?" he asked.
"Why, yes. What d'you think I'd ask for it for if I didn't want it?"
The sarsaparilla bottle was taken down from the shelf and put on the counter, together with a glass and a water-bag. "Have one with me?" invited the drover.
"No, thanks," replied the other. "I don't care for that stuff. A man needs something with a nip to it in this country."
Stobart poured out his drink and watered it. "Does he?" he asked quietly. "When you've been in this country as long as I have, you'll know what's good for you."
When his visitor had gone, Tom Gibbon asked a black-fellow who the man was that preferred sarsaparilla to whisky. He got rather a shock when the native told him that the man was not a namby-pamby new-chum as he had suspected, but was one whose name and deeds were known and talked about from one end of the country to the other.
"That one?" exclaimed the black-fellow in surprise.
"You no bin know um that one, eh? Him Boss Stobart. Big fella drover. Him bin walk about this country since me little fella. Him big fella drover all right, altogether, quite."
The "big fella" drover rode over to the cattle and, instead of starting them due south along the Great North Stock Route, he gave them a drink at Horseshoe Bend troughs and then set out west. For several days he and his black-boys travelled the mob through country which he knew well, and he managed to find enough dry grass and bush to keep the animals in fair condition, and enough water to give them a drink every other day.
He was making towards the Musgrave Ranges, knowing that the great mass of high country which loomed on the western horizon day after day was sure to have water-holes and gullies full of cattle-feed along the base of it. One day he watered the cattle at a little water-hole surrounded by box trees, under a low stony rise, and put them on camp in the open and arranged the watches. It was still an hour before sunset when Boss Stobart, after giving the cattle a final inspection, was riding back to camp to make a damper and cook a bucket of meat, when he was startled by seeing a boot track. They were in totally uninhabited country, and the sight was just as startling as a naked black-fellow in the middle of Sydney in the busy part of the day would be.
He followed it for a yard or two. The footprints turned outwards. A white man had made those tracks. They were only about a day old. What was a white man on foot doing in such a place? The drover stopped and looked back. The line of tracks was crooked and seemed as if a staggering man had made it, but the general direction was from the north. Stobart rode on slowly and thoughtfully. The wandering tracks led to a little clump of mulga trees about a couple of hundred yards away from the water-hole.
Suddenly the old stock-horse which the man was riding drew back and snorted with alarm. Something was moving in those trees. Stobart urged the horse on. Just at the edge of the clump of scraggy timber the animal shied again. A man's shirt was lying on the ground. Trousers and boots were a little distance away, and then an old battered felt hat was found upturned in the sand. Finally the horse became so much afraid that Stobart was obliged to dismount and tie it to a tree while he followed the tracks on foot. He had only a little farther to go before he too saw what his horse had already seen—a naked white man staggering round and round in a small clearing among the trees.
The man took no notice when Stobart appeared. He was quite unconscious. The drover shouted, but there was no more response than if the desert silence had remained unbroken. By the tracks of his shuffling bare feet he must have been drawing that terrible circle for several hours, while the pitiless sun beat down on his unprotected head. His tongue lolled out of his mouth and was dark-coloured and swollen, his head jerked forward loosely with each stride, and his tottering legs were bent almost double at the knees. If he sank just a little lower, his hanging hands would touch the ground, and he would crawl over the burning sand like any other dying beast, round and round, round and round, for nothing but utter exhaustion would stop that parade of death.
Boss Stobart stood directly in the path of the shambling figure. It came on unheeding, with glazed eyes and spent senses, and bumped into the drover as if the hour had been pitch-dark midnight instead of a summer afternoon. Stobart caught it before it fell, and laid the limp body down very gently and looked into the man's face. He uttered an exclamation of amazement. It was Patrick Dorrity, a man whom he had seen only a few months before, cooking on Tumurti Station.
Pat Dorrity and Stobart were old friends. Pat had a fondness for a spree and had consequently never risen above the level of a casual station cook, wandering about in this capacity over the huge area of the north, where his friend the drover, who did not have the same weakness, had gone on earning the confidence and respect of every stock-owner in the country, till he was now a shareholder in more than one prosperous station property.
But bushman friendships are not based on bank balances, and the two had remained good friends. As a proof of this, the last time they had met, Pat had told the drover about a gold-mine he knew of in the Musgrave Ranges. At first Stobart laughed at the old Irishman, for there were as many reputed gold-mines in the Musgraves as there were men who had gone after them and not come back. But gradually Pat had won him over, for in the veins of every bushman runs enough gambler's blood to make the sporting risk of a gold-mine very alluring. The two men wrote to Sergeant Scott, of Oodnadatta, who was a great friend of both of them, and arranged that they would start out for the Musgraves as soon as Stobart had delivered the cattle.
Since coming to this decision, the care of a thousand bush cattle had taken up so much of Boss Stobart's attention that he had none to give to the proposed trip, and he was, therefore, all the more amazed to come across one of the partners in the venture in such a pitiable plight.
The man was perishing. Water in abundance was only two hundred yards away, yet here he was dying of thirst. Such is the irony of the desert.
Pat Dorrity's horse had been abandoned ten miles back, and the tottering man had walked on, till, when he had managed to stagger to the top of the last sandhill, and had seen two clumps of timber, one of box and one of mulga, his senses had played him false and he had gone to the mulgas.
Stobart did not stop to wonder how his old friend had come to such a pass. He needed water. Everything else must wait. The strong man lifted the weak one and walked away to his horse, leading it to the camp near the water-hole. At the sight of that little pool of muddy liquid, the closing eyes of the perishing man opened and his weak body struggled to be free; his mouth tried to shape sounds but could not do so, for his tongue was swollen and his throat dry.
The drover was too old a bushman to allow the perishing man to have all the water he wished for. Gradually the swelling of the tongue was reduced, then the parched throat was relieved by driblets of water, and even then, when Pat Dorrity could have swallowed, he was only allowed to take a sip at a time, or he would have vomited so badly that some internal rupture would have resulted.
Before Boss Stobart went on watch that night, his old friend was sleeping peacefully, with his thirst quenched, and having had a small meal of soaked damper also.