"Blow this," said Barker. "We'll lighten up."
We emptied out part of the pickle, and proceeded. After we had ploughed along a mile or so, I said "Blast the stuff!" so we emptied out some more. A little further, and we mutually damned it, and jettisoned the whole cargo, finding even the empty cask all too heavy on that dreadful road. It took us the next two days to get the balance of the stuff out. We got sick of unloading the old nag, hauling him out of the bog, and loading him up again.
It would have been an enlightening sight for the city "go-on-the-land- young-man" person to have seen us slowly crawling along between the gloomy walls of scrub, squash! squelch! splash! covered with mud and sweating with the heat, Paddy ahead with two bags of tinned stuff, Barker next with two fifties of flour slung by straps over his shoulders, I last with two dozen of jam in my shirt, and a seventy of sugar across my neck, with sacking round it to keep it a bit dry. By cripes! It made us appreciate Barker's dry snug little crib, really beautifully built of split-out stuff, roof and all. It was quite waterproof.
I would have quite enjoyed living there, if only it hadn't been for Barker's infernal tongue. He soon found I didn't take very much rousing up, so of course it was a great joke to "gittim wild." With this end in view, he assumed a particularly galling habit of patronisingly referring to me as "Me good mahn," or more often "Me good little mahn." I think he must have spent his hours devising ridiculous names, and springing them on us at night. Paddy suffered in silence under "Me little gohanna;" his dog, with a sort of Zulu touch, was dubbed "Little-snake-with-the-teeth-so-sharp-and-big;" while I was driven to a state bordering on homicidal mania by a week of "Me little axe-handle breaker," because I fractured the handle of the doddery firewood axe—already badly sprung and wobbling—which he had sworn should last the year out.
The more we expostulated, the worse he got. He had a pair of cats ("Curse-guts" and "Stinker"), of whom he was so fond that he took them to bed with him at night, and then blamed me for bringing fleas to the camp, after a night spent in scratching himself. With as much sense of music as a cow, he used to drone out all day the one song he knew in a dismal monotone. It was a doleful ditty; something about "Why did they sell Killarney?"
He was very superstitious, and I'm ashamed to say that I once or twice got my own back on him through this weakness—but only when very wild.
I made him lose a night's sleep once through suddenly jumping out of bunk, opening the door, slamming it to again, and then turning wild-eyed to Barker, whispering: "It's there again, Jack!" He was keen on his garden, and he and Paddy had about a dozen different kinds of vegetables growing, with bananas and pineapples to beat the band. When the latter were ripening we had to light big fires to keep the flying foxes off, and it gave one a creepy feeling to lie round one of the fires before turning in, swapping yarns, and watching the countless myriads of bat things stream steadily across the sky in an unbroken cloud by the hour together. (Note for orchardists: These pests don't alight anywhere near a decent blaze.)
I finished my contract with Barker by the end of May, and got enough out of it to renew my credit with the storekeeper, and pay the £3 inspection fee for survey of improvements, prior to borrowing from the Agricultural Bank, so that I could go on falling on my own place. I applied for £120, to fall sixty acres; the loan was granted. Payment by instalments as work proceeded, and terms twenty-one years at five per cent. interest. Getting my old friend Len Vincent to help me, I re-started on my own place early in June.
CHAPTER XV.