“You must know then,” commences “the Squire,” after the manner of Master Tommie in “Sandford and Merton,” “that, like most new chums in Australia, I wandered about a good deal over this great, sunburnt island before ever I settled down as head stock-keeper at Murdaro. During part of that time I followed the calling of an overlander. An ‘overlander,’ Mr. Angland,—for, as you haven’t any of the breed in New Zealand, I’ll explain what that is,—is Queensland-English for a long-distance drover; and a rough, hard life it generally is. Cattle have to be taken long distances to market sometimes from these ‘up-country’ runs. I have taken several mobs of ‘fats’ (fat bullocks) from the Never Never Land to Sydney,—a distance of about fifteen hundred miles.
“Now, when my story begins I was ‘boss’ of a road-party taking fat cattle down to Sydney from Contolbin station on the Lachlan. In fine weather, when there’s plenty of grass or herbage, and water every twenty miles or so, a drover has rather a jolly time of it, after he’s trained the cattle to camp properly, take it altogether: an open-air life, with just enough exercise to make him enjoy his ‘tucker’ (food). But, like most lines of life, there are more bitters than sweets connected with the ‘overlanding’ profession. Sometimes there’s no water for forty, fifty, perhaps ninety miles at a stretch,—for instance, on the Birdsville and Kopperamana track,—and keeping awake for days and nights together, you must push on (with the sun at 120° in the shade, sometimes) taking your cattle, at their own pace, along the Parakelia-covered sand-hills till the next water-hole is reached. And at other times there is too much water, and it is a case of swimming rivers every few miles, or else sitting down for a stream to run by for a few weeks,—riding through mud, sleeping on mud, drinking mud, and eating it too, for the matter of that, for weeks at a time. I’ve done that at the Wyndham crossing of the Cooper more than once. But on the particular trip I am going to refer to, the weather was more what you, as an Englishman, will understand better than most Australians, for it had been snowing hard for several nights in succession upon the Swollowie Mountains, over which our road, from Orange to Bathhurst, lay, and the air was almost as cold and chilly as it ever is in the old country.
“I never shall forget the sight that poor old Sanko, one of my native boys, was when he came off the middle watch, the first night we reached the high country. Sanko was a ‘white-haired boy’ when he came off watch to call me that morning, and no mistake about it, although his waving locks and beard had been as black as night the day before.
“No, Mr. Angland, he hadn’t seen a ghost! You’re a bit too fast.
“But he had seen something strange to him, and that was a fall of snow. And when he poked his head in at the door of the ‘fly’ (tent) and called me, his good-humoured, hairy face was white with snow crystals. He really gave me a kind of ‘skeer,’ as our American cousins call it, for a moment. He looked like the apparition of some one I had known in life. I thought I was dreaming at first; and I had had fever a little while before, and was still rather weak from its effects. I mention this because the scare Sanko gave me may have made a more lasting impression upon me than I thought at the time, and had something to do with what happened the next night. All I did at the time, however, was to tell Sanko not to call the next watch, as the cattle would not shift in the snow. And rolling myself up in my blankets, I was soon asleep again.
“One of the greatest hardships of cattle droving is the watching necessary at night. All sorts of things may occur to frighten them; and when that does happen, off they rush, a resistless flood of mad animals, into the darkness, breaking each other’s necks and legs, and the remainder getting lost. Cows that want to return to where they dropped a calf will sometimes start a mob. The cunning brutes will watch you as you ride past them on your ‘night horse’ on your way round the mob, and then slink off into the shadows, and be miles back along the track by daylight. A thunderstorm is also a frightful cause of mobs stampeding. But the worst thing to be dreaded by the drover is a deliberate attempt to frighten the cattle by cattle-thieves, or ‘duffers,’ as we call them, who used in my time—there’s little of it done now, I believe—sometimes to steal the larger part of a travelling herd by this means. Well, the plan of these midnight robbers is to watch till your horses have wandered a bit from the camp, and then, getting amongst them, slip their hobbles and drive them quietly away. Then, knowing you can do nothing to stop them, the rascals proceed to startle the cattle by shouting, a gun-shot, or some such means; and you are lucky if you get half your horses, let alone half your cattle, back again.
“It is necessary to tell you all this in order that you may understand my ghost tale.
“These mountains we were coming to, as I knew, had been the scene of several exploits of this kind, and it made me anxious to get through by daylight. There was a very rough lot of Cornish miners working on the hills, in the Icely goldmines; and, rightly or wrongly, we drovers mostly used to put these midnight stampedes down to these ‘Cousin Jacks.’ But some of the older cattle-men upon the road, and all the inhabitants of the (then) sparsely peopled district, declared that these occurrences were due to no human interference. They said that the gorge in the mountains, that I should have to pass through to-morrow with my cattle, was haunted by the spirit of a murdered man, whose corpse was ‘planted’ where he had fallen many years since, with the knife of a treacherous mate still sticking in his ribs. It was this deceased gentleman’s nightly constitutionals that were supposed to account for the various disastrous rushes of mobs of cattle in the mountain glen during past years. I had often heard it used as an argument, in favour of those who upheld the spectre-theory, that the camp horses had been found still hobbled after these rushes,—an oversight of which no experienced ‘cattle-duffer’ would be guilty. Well, I felt rather anxious about the matter, but as I had arranged my stages so as to camp at the foot of the ranges that night, I thought I should be able to push on over the fatal pass before the next sun went down.
“You may imagine my annoyance then, on the morning when Sanko poked his ‘frosty paw’ into my tent, to discover that the snow would delay our progress for some hours. The creeks would be ‘big’ till midday, and there were several reasons why I could not camp another night where I was. I determined, therefore, to push on and try my luck.
“The sun blazed out, and the white, patchwork mantle on the blue-grey hills disappeared as if by magic. But the Fates were against us. First our horses did not turn up till late; then the cows we had with us kept on getting bogged in the muddy billabongs, and had to be hauled out. And what with one delay and another, I saw the sunset redden the cliffs before us as we crossed Chamber’s Creek and entered the pass, and knew that I must camp my cattle there for the night, and no help for it.