CHAPTER XX
A caravan—consisting of ten waggons, drawn by teams of six, eight, and ten bullocks, five or six lighter vehicles of various descriptions, half-a-dozen horsemen, and a score of men on foot—was making its way across an undulating plain.
Few words were spoken, for what was there to talk of when one day was but a picture of another? The women, sitting for the most part in the waggons, knitted or worked with but an occasional remark to each other. The men, walking with the oxen, kept on their way as doggedly as the animals they drove, and save for the occasional crack of a whip or a shout from one of the men to his beasts, and the occasional creaking of a wheel, the procession might have seemed to an onlooker a mere phantasmagoria of silent shapes. But the sun was getting low and the oxen beginning almost insensibly to quicken their pace, and all knew that the long day's journey was nearly over, and the water-holes could not be far ahead.
Half an hour later these are reached, and at once a babel of sounds succeeds the previous silence. The children of all ages leap joyfully from the waggons, the men loose the oxen from their harness, and then some of them take them to the lowest water-hole, while the rest, and even the women, lend a hand at the work, and arrange the great waggons into the form of a square. As soon as this is done fires are made with the bundles of bush that the boys and girls have cut during the earlier part of the day's journey and piled on the tailboards of the waggons—long experience having taught them that everything that could burn had been long since cut down or grubbed up within a wide radius of the halting-place.
The horses are hobbled and turned out, to pick up what substance they can find in addition to a slice or two of bread that most of their owners have set apart from the over-night baking. Kettles are soon hanging over the fires, and it is not long before most of the women have their dough ready and placed in iron baking-pots over the red-hot embers, a pile of which is raked over the cover so as to bake it evenly right through. Two or three deer had been shot in the morning by the hunters, and the joints hung over the fires give an appetising odour very welcome to those whose chief article of diet for many weeks has been salt meat.
In one corner of the square a group of three or four men are seated round a fire of their own. It is they whose rifles have provided the meat for the camp, and who in return receive a portion of bread from each of the families composing the caravan.
'We shall not get much more hunting,' one of them said; 'we are getting to the most dangerous part of our journey. We have been lucky so far, for though we know that we have been watched, and have seen several parties of Redskins, none of them have been strong enough to venture to attack us. But now that every express rider we have met has warned us that there is trouble here, that strong caravans have been overpowered and the emigrants massacred, there will be no more wandering away far from the camp. You will have to travel the same pace as the rest of us, Ned,' he added, to the bearded figure next to him. 'It beats me how you have got through as you have, without having your hair raised.'
'I have only made extra journeys where, by all accounts, no Indians have been seen about for some time. Besides, it is only about three or four times we have made two journeys in one. We have simply, when the party we were with have made up their minds to stop a day or two at a water-hole to rest their beasts and to wash their clothes, gone on the next morning with another party who had finished their rest. There seem to be regular places where every caravan that arrives makes a halt for a day or so. We have done this seven times, so I reckon that we have gained fourteen days that way and on five days we have made double journeys, so that altogether we have picked up something like nineteen days on the caravan we started with.'
'Your critters are in good condition, too,' the man remarked.