“Hang on! Keep cool!” Mac yelled, in a frenzy of apprehension, as he swung on his end of the wire. Jackeroo became convulsed with laughter, but the Măluka pulled hard, and I was soon on the right side of the river, declaring that I preferred experiences when they were over. Later Mac accounted for his terror with another unconscious flash of humour. “You never can count on a woman keeping cool when the unexpected happens,” he said.
We offered to haul him over. “It’s only a matter of holding on and keeping cool,” we said; but he preferred to swim.
“It’s a pity you didn’t think of telegraphing this performance,” I shouted across the floods; but, in his relief, Mac was equal to the occasion.
“I’m glad I didn’t,” he shouted back gallantly, with a sweeping flourish of his hat; “it might have blocked you coming.” The bushman was learning a new accomplishment.
As his clothes were to come across on the wire, I was given a hint to “make myself scarce”; so retired over the bank, and helped Jackeroo with the dinner camp—an arrangement that exactly suited his ideas of the eternal fitness of things.
During the morning he had expressed great disapproval that a woman should be idle, while men dragged heavy weights about. “White fellow, big-fellow-fool all right,” he said contemptuously, when Mac explained that it was generally so in the white man’s country. A Briton of the Billingsgate type would have appealed to Jackeroo as a man of sound common sense.
By the time the men-folk appeared, he had decided that with a little management I would be quite an ornament to society. “Missus bin help me all right,” he told the Sanguine Scot, with comical self-satisfaction.
Mac roared with delight, and the passage of the Fergusson having swept away the last lingering torch of restraint he called to the Măluka; “Jackeroo reckons he’s tamed the shrew for us.” Mac had been a reader of Shakespeare in his time.
All afternoon we were supposed to be “making a dash” for the Edith, a river twelve miles farther on; but there was nothing very dashing about our pace. The air was stiflingly, swelteringly hot, and the flies maddening in their persistence. The horses developed puffs, and when we were not being half-drowned in torrents of rain we were being parboiled in steamy atmosphere. The track was as tracks usually are “during the Wet,” and for four hours we laboured on, slipping and slithering over the greasy track, varying the monotony now and then with a floundering scramble through a boggy creek crossing. Our appearance was about as dashing as our pace; and draggled, wet through, and perspiring, and out of conceit with primitive travelling—having spent the afternoon combining a minimum rate of travelling with a maximum of discomfort—we arrived at the Edith an hour after sundown to find her a wide eddying stream.
“Won’t be more than a ducking,” Mac said cheerfully. “Couldn’t be much wetter than we are,” and the Măluka taking the reins from my hands, we rode into the stream Mac keeping behind, “to pick her up in case she floats off,” he said, thinking he was putting courage into me.