The Rescue
Yarloo followed the Musgrave native's tracks for about half a mile in a nearly south direction, and then came upon a stony plain with a few large bushes growing at one end of it. He gave a yell of delight. They were needle-bushes. The party was saved. Here was water, stored by nature right in the middle of an arid desert.
The trees were all about five or six feet high, though some were much bushier than others. Yarloo chose one which was very wide-spreading, and began piling dry bark and twigs and anything which would burn quickly and easily, right in the middle of the tree, all among the branches. He went on till the needle-bush was carrying as big a load as it possibly could.
Then he made fire. He pulled two pieces of wood out of his hair; one was the size of a man's palm, a flat piece of soft bean-wood with a little hollow in the middle of it; the other was a stick about as thick as a pencil but nearly twice as long, of hard mulga wood. He squatted down and set the soft piece on the ground and held it in place with his toes, and teased out a few pieces of very dry bark till they were like tinder, and put it near the hollow. Then he took the long piece of mulga and twirled it with his two hands in the hollow. He did this faster than any white man could possibly twirl it, and in a couple of minutes a coil of smoke came up from the pile of bark. Yarloo blew this into a flame and made a little fire. When it was burning well, he threw the blazing sticks into the needle-bush. There was a crackling sound for a moment or two and then a roar, as the flames licked up the dry fuel, till in a very short time the needle-bush was a blazing bonfire.
The black-fellow waited till the flames had died down, and then started to dig around the roots a few feet away from the tree. He was so skilful at this that he soon exposed the main roots. Then he chopped off one or two of them and set the pieces upright in the quart-pot. A thin dark liquid began to drain out of the roots and collect in the pot till it was half-full. Yarloo took a drink and chopped up some more roots, and when the quart-pot was full he returned to camp.
It needed great care and patience to minister to the perishing white boys, and not many natives would have done what Yarloo did for Sax and Vaughan during that blazing day. He made trip after trip to the stony plain where the needle-bushes were growing, and, with the water obtained in this way, he gradually revived his two friends. Sax was his first care, and after he had softened the boy's tongue so that drops of liquid could trickle down his throat, the drover's son quickly revived sufficiently to help Yarloo with the more serious case of Vaughan. The powers of recovery which a healthy lad possesses are wonderful, and before nightfall both lads were sitting up under the shelter, with their thirst quite quenched, and actually feeling hungry.
Yarloo went away for the last time to get another quart-pot of water from the needle-bushes. To do this, he had to fire another tree. It was about half an hour after sunset and nearly dark, and the bonfire lit up the plain and could be seen for miles.
Mick Darby saw it as he rode along at the end of a very tiring day. When he had reached Sidcotinga Station, late the evening before, the yards had been full of working horses ready to set out on a big cattle-muster the next morning. He could not have struck a more favourable time. Before he went to bed that night, he and the manager drafted off a plant of six good horses, stocked a set of pack-gear with cooked tucker, and filled two big canteens with water all ready for an early start the following day. Mick could easily have slept late the next morning, but when he woke up, as he always did, at the rising of the morning star, he did not turn over and go to sleep again, but roused himself, had a drink of tea and a chunk of bread and meat, and started out back on his tracks, accompanied by a station black-boy whom the Sidcotinga manager had lent him. The horses were fresh; they had just come in from a six months' spell and would be turned out again directly they returned. So Mick did not hesitate to ride hard. He rode to such good purpose that he did not expect to pull up till he had reached the camp where he had left the boys, and was riding along, with seven miles still to go, when he saw the blazing needle-bush.
He loosened his revolver and rode over at once to investigate. It was fortunate that he did so, for he would have reached the old camp and found it, not only deserted, but also wrecked, with torn gear and evidences of wanton destruction all over the place. He would naturally have thought that his former companions had either been killed or carried off, and as the sandstorm had covered up all tracks, he would not have known which way to follow them.
Yarloo was squatting down, watching the roots drain the precious liquid into the quart-pot, when he heard the sound of hobble-rings striking one another as they hung from the neck of a horse. Then a hoof struck a stone. Such sounds in the desert meant one thing and one thing only, white men. Yarloo stood up and gave the call: "Ca—a—a—w—ay!" (not coo-ee, as is usually supposed).
It was answered by a white man's voice out of the gathering darkness: "Hul—lo—uh!"
In a few minutes Mick Darby rode up. He saw Yarloo, and the smouldering needle-bush, and knew that something was wrong.
"What name?" he asked.
"White boy close up finish," replied Yarloo, still taking care of the quart-pot of dark water.
"Close up finish?" echoed Mick in surprise. "What name you no sit down longa that camp same as me yabber (as I told you)?"
Yarloo tried to explain, but his vocabulary of white man's words was too small. He broke off at last and said: "White boy, they yabber (they'll tell you)."
"But white boy close up finish," objected the drover.
"No finish now," grinned Yarloo, pointing to the other burnt needle-bushes near. "No finish now. Him good fella now, quite."
This relieved Mick's mind greatly, and he set off at once, guided by Yarloo, to the bough-shelter where Sax and Vaughan were sitting. It was a very happy reunion. The boys were still weak, but the thirst, which would have killed them if the stranger black-fellow had not put that sprig of needle-bush in the quart-pot, was quite gone. They were very hungry. A fire was soon lit, and neither of the lads had ever enjoyed a meal so much as they did that one. The food was plain, though much better than what they had been having for the past weeks. The bread had been made with yeast, which makes it far nicer than baking-powder damper, and the Sidcotinga cook had included a few currant buns with the tucker. The story of their adventures was told at length and gone over more than once, for each boy supplied what the other did not remember, and there had been many hours during which Vaughan's memory had recorded nothing.
One thing, however, remained a secret. Only Sax knew about it, and he obeyed his father's injunction not to tell anybody of his whereabouts. He did not tell Mick that the strange nigger who had saved their lives had mentioned the name Boss Stobart.
Yarloo came in for his share of praise, and richly did he deserve it. The black-boy sat down with the white men after tea and listened to what was said without making any remarks, and with a stolid expression. But when, just before they all turned in for the night, Mick handed him a new pipe, a box of matches, and—greatest luxury of all—a tin of cut-up tobacco, he beamed all over his honest black face and grunted his supreme satisfaction with the gift. He did not think that he had done anything heroic; he had acted so towards the white boys because a certain white man had treated him well in the past, but these simple signs of Mick's approval made him the happiest black-fellow in all Central Australia.