Chapter Twenty Eight.
The Massacre at Findlayson’s Farm.
By the time Elsie and Rupert had returned from their wanderings winter was once more coming on; but already both the sister and brother had got a complexion.
The house was quite furnished now, guest room and all. It was indeed a mansion, though I would not like to say how much money it had cost Archie to make it so. However, he had determined, as he said himself to Bob, to do the thing properly while he was about it.
And there is no doubt he succeeded well. His garden too was all he had depicted it in his letter home.
That Archie had succeeded to his heart’s content in breaking ties with the old country was pretty evident, from a letter received by him from his father about mid-winter.
“He had noticed for quite a long time,” the Squire wrote, “and was getting more and more convinced, that this England was, agriculturally speaking, on its last legs. Even American inventions, and American skill and enterprise, had failed to do much for the lands of Burley. He had tried everything, but the ground failed to respond. Burley was a good place for an old retired man who loved to potter around after the partridges; but for one like himself, still in the prime of his life, it had lost its charms. Even Archie’s mother, he told him, did not see the advisability of throwing good money after bad, and Uncle Ramsay was of the same way of thinking. So he had made up his mind to let the place and come straight away out. He would allow Archie to look out for land for him, and by-and-bye he would come and take possession. Australia would henceforth reap the benefit of his genius and example; for he meant to show Australians a thing or two.”
When Archie read that letter, he came in with a rush to read it to Bob, Harry, and Sarah.
“I think your father is right,” said Bob.
“I tell you, Bob, my boy, it isn’t father so much as mother. The dear old mummy speaks and breathes through every line and word of this epistle. Now I’m off to astonish Elsie and Roup. Come along, Bounder.”
Meanwhile Findlayson became a regular visitor at the farm.
“Why,” Archie said to him one evening, as he met him about the outer boundary of the farm, “why, Findlayson, my boy, you’re getting to be a regular ‘sundowner.’ Well, Miss Winslow has come, and Craig is with us, and as I want to show Branson a bit of real Australian sport, you had better stop with us a fortnight.”
“I’ll be delighted. I wish I’d brought my fiddle.”
“We’ll send for it if you can’t live without it.”
“Not very weel. But I’ve something to tell you.”
“Well, say on; but you needn’t dismount.”
“Yes, I’ll speak better down here.”
Findlayson sat up on top of the fence, and at once opened fire by telling Archie he had fallen in love with Elsie, and had determined to make her his wife. Archie certainly was taken aback.
“Why, Findlayson,” he said, “you’re old enough to be her father.”
“A’ the better, man. And look here, I’ve been squatting for fifteen years, ever since there was a sheep in the plains almost. I have a nice little nest egg at the bank, and if your sister doesna care to live in the Bush we’ll tak’ a hoose in Sydney. For, O man, man, Elsie is the bonniest lassie the world e’er saw. She beats the gowan (mountain daisy).”
Archie laughed.
“I must refer you to the lady herself,” he said.
“Of course, man, of course—
“‘He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
Who dares not put it to the test
To win or lose it all.’”
So away went Findlayson to put his fate to the test.
What he said or what she said does not really concern us; but five minutes after his interview Archie met the honest Scot, and wondrously crestfallen he looked.
“She winna hae me,” he cried, “but nil desperandum, that’ll be my motto till the happy day.”
The next fortnight was in a great measure given up to pleasure and sport. Both Branson and Bounder received their baptism of fire, though the great Newfoundland was wondrously exercised in his mind as to what a kangaroo was, and what it was not. As to the dingoes, he arrived at a conclusion very speedily. They could beat him at a race, however; but when Bounder one time got two of them together, he proved to everybody’s satisfaction that there was life in the old dog yet.
Gentleman Craig never appeared to such excellent advantage anywhere as in ladies’ society. He really led the conversation at the dinner-table, though not appearing to do so, but rather the reverse, while in the drawing-room he was the moving spirit.
He also managed to make Findlayson happy after a way. The Scotchman had told Craig all his troubles, but Craig brought him his fiddle, on which he was a really excellent performer.
“Rouse out, Mr Findlayson, and join the ladies at the piano.”
“But, man,” the squatter replied, “my heart’s no in it; my heart is broken. I can play slow music, but when it comes to quick, it goes hard against the grain.”
Nevertheless, Findlayson took his stand beside the piano, and the ice thus being broken, he played every night, though it must be confessed, for truth’s sake, he never refused a “cogie” when the bottle came round his way. Towards ten o’clock Findlayson used, therefore, to become somewhat sentimental. The gentleman sat up for a wee half hour after the ladies retired, and sometimes Findlayson would seize his fiddle.
“Gentlemen,” he would say, “here is how I feel.”
Then he would play a lament or a wail with such feeling that even his listeners would be affected, while sometimes the tears would be quivering on the performer’s eyelashes.
At the end of the fortnight Findlayson went to Brisbane. He had some mysterious business to transact, the nature of which he refused to tell even Archie. But it was rumoured that a week or two later on, drays laden with furniture were seen to pass along the tracks on their way to Findlayson’s farm.
Poor fellow, he was evidently badly hit. He was very much in love indeed, and, like a drowning man, he clutched at straws.
The refurnishing of his house was one of these straws. Findlayson was going to give “a week’s fun,” as he phrased it. He was determined, after having seen Archie’s new house, that his own should rival and even outshine it in splendour. And he really was insane enough to believe that if Elsie only once saw the charming house he owned, with the wild and beautiful scenery all around it, she would alter her mind, and look more favourably on his suit.
In giving way to vain imaginings of this kind, Findlayson was really ignoring, or forgetting at all events, the sentiments of his own favourite poet, Burns, as impressed in the following touching lines:
“It ne’er was wealth, it ne’er was wealth,
That bought contentment, peace, or pleasure;
The bands and bliss o’ mutual love,
O that’s the chiefest warld’s treasure!”
His sister was very straightforward, and at once put her brother down as a wee bit daft. Perhaps he really was; only the old saying is a true one: “Those that are in love are like no one else.”
It was the last month of winter, when early one morning a gay party from Burley New Farm set out to visit Findlayson, and spend a week or two in order to “’liven him up,” as Harry expressed it.
Bob was not particularly fond of going much from home—besides, Winslow and he were planning some extensions—so he stopped on the Station. But Harry went, and, as before, when going to the kangaroo hunt, Gentleman Craig was in the cavalcade, and of course Rupert and Elsie.
It would have been no very difficult matter to have done the journey in a single day, only Archie was desirous of letting his brother and sister have a taste of camping out in the Bush.
They chose the same route as before, and encamped at night in the self-same place.
The evening too was spent in much the same way, even to singing and story-telling, and Craig’s lullaby to Baby, when she and Elsie had gone to their tent.
Morning dawned at last on forest and plain, and both Harry and the brothers were early astir. It would have been impossible to remain asleep much after daybreak, owing to the noise of the birds, including the occasional ear-splitting clatter of the laughing jackasses.
Besides, towards morning it had been exceedingly cold. The first thing that greeted their eyes was a thorough old-fashioned hoar frost, the like of which Archie had not seen for many a year. Everything gleamed, white almost as coral. The grass itself was a sight to see, and the leaves on the trees were edged with lace. But up mounted the sun, and all was speedily changed. Leaves grew brightly green again, and the hoar frost was turned into glancing, gleaming, rainbow-coloured drops of dew.
The young men ran merrily away to the pool in the creek, and most effectually scared the ducks.
The breakfast to-day was a different sort of a meal to the morsel of stiff damper and corned junk that had been partaken of at last bivouac. Elsie made the tea, and Etheldene and she presided. The meat pies and patties were excellent, and everyone was in the highest possible spirits, and joyously merry.
Alas! and alas! this was a breakfast no one who sat down to, and who lives, is ever likely to forget.
Have you ever, reader, been startled on a bright sunshiny summer’s day by a thunder peal? And have you seen the clouds rapidly bank up after this and obscure the sky, darkness brooding over the windless landscape, lighted up every moment by the blinding lightning’s flash, and gloom and danger brooding all round, where but a short half hour ago the birds carolled in sunlight? Then will you be able, in some measure, to understand the terribleness of the situation in which an hour or two after breakfast the party found themselves, and the awful suddenness of the shock that for a time quite paralysed every member of it.
They had left the dismal depths of the forest, and were out on the open pasture land, and nearing Findlayson’s house, when Craig and Archie, riding on in front, came upon the well-known bobtailed collie, who was the almost constant companion of the squatter. The dog was alive, but dying. There was a terrible spear-gash in his neck. Craig dismounted and knelt beside him. The poor brute knew him, wagged his inch-long tail, licked the hand that caressed him, and almost immediately expired. Craig immediately rode back to the others.
“Do not be alarmed, ladies,” he said. “But I fear the worst. There is no smoke in Findlayson’s chimney. The black fellows have killed his dog.”
Though both girls grew pale, there were no other signs of fear manifested by them. If Young Australia could be brave, so could Old England.
The men consulted hurriedly, and it was agreed that while Branson and Harry waited with the ladies, Archie and Craig should ride on towards the house.
Not a sign of life; no, not one. Signs enough of death though, signs enough of an awful struggle. It was all very plain and simple, though all very, very sad and dreadful.
Here in the courtyard lay several dead natives, festering and sweltering in the noonday sun. Here were the boomerangs and spears that had fallen from their hands as they dropped never to rise again. Here was the door battered and splintered and beaten in with tomahawks, and just inside, in the passage, lay the bodies of Hurricane Bill and poor Findlayson, hacked about almost beyond recognition.
In the rooms all was confusion, every place had been ransacked. The furniture, all new and elegant, smashed and riven; the very piano that the honest Scot had bought for sake of Elsie had been dissected, and its keys carried away for ornaments. In an inner room, half-dressed, were Findlayson’s sister and her little Scotch maid, their arms broken, as if they had held them up to beseech for mercy from the monsters who had attacked them. Their arms were broken, and their skulls beaten in, their white night-dresses drenched in blood. There was blood, blood everywhere—in curdled streams, in great liver-like gouts, and in dark pools on the floor. In the kitchen were many more bodies of white men (the shepherds), and of the fiends in human form with whom they had struggled for their lives.
It was an awful and sickening sight.
No need for Craig or Archie to tell the news when they returned to the others. Their very silence and sadness told the terrible tale.
Nothing could be done at present, however, in the way of punishing the murderers, who by this time must be far away in their mountain fastnesses.
They must ride back, and at once too, in order to warn the people at Burley and round about of their great danger.
So the return journey was commenced at once. On riding through the forest they had to observe the greatest caution.
Craig was an old Bushman, and knew the ways of the blacks well. He trotted on in front. And whenever in any thicket, where an ambush might possibly be lurking, he saw no sign of bird or beast, he dismounted and, revolver in hand, examined the place before he permitted the others to come on.
They got through the forest and out of the gloom at last, and some hours afterwards dismounted a long way down the creek to water the horses and let them browse. As for themselves, no one thought of eating. There was that feeling of weight at every heart one experiences when first awakening from some dreadful nightmare.
They talked about the massacre, as they sat under the shadow of a gum tree, almost in whispers; and at the slightest unusual noise the men grasped their revolvers and listened.
They were just about to resume their journey when the distant sound of galloping horses fell on their ears. Their own nags neighed. All sprang to their feet, and next moment some eight or nine men rode into the clearing.
Most of them were known to Craig, so he advanced to meet them.
“Ah! I see you know the worst,” said the leader.
“Yes,” said Craig, “we know.”
“We’ve been to your place. It is all right there with one exception.”
“One exception?”
“Yes; it’s only the kid—Mr Cooper’s little daughter, you know.”
“Is she dead?” cried Archie aghast.
“No, sir; that is, it isn’t likely. Mr Cooper’s black girl left last night, and took the child.”
“Good heavens! our little Diana! Poor Bob! He will go raving mad!”
“He is mad, sir, or all but, already; but we’ve left some fellows to defend the station, and taken to the trail as you see.”
“Craig,” said Archie, “we must go too.”
“Well,” said the first speaker, “the coast is all clear betwixt here and Burley. Two must return there with the ladies. I advise you to make your choice, and lose no time.”
It was finally arranged that Branson and one of the newcomers should form the escort; and so Archie, Harry, and Craig bade the girls a hurried adieu, and speedily rode away after the men.