It wasn’t as bad as it looked; and after a little stumbling and plunging and drifting the horses were clambering out up the opposite bank, and by next sundown—after scrambling through a few more rivers—we found ourselves looking down at the flooded Katherine, flowing below in the valley of a rocky gorge.
Sixty-five miles in three days, against sixty miles an hour of the express trains of the world. “Speed’s the thing,” cries the world, and speeds on, gaining little but speed; and we bush-folk travel our sixty miles and gain all that is worth gaining—excepting speed.
“Hand-over-hand this time!” Mac said, looking up at the telegraph wire that stretched far overhead. “There’s no pulley here. Hand-over-hand, or the horse’s-tail trick.”
But Mine Host of the “Pub” had seen us, and running down the opposite side of the gorge, launched a boat at the river’s brink; then pulling up-stream for a hundred yards or so in the backwash, faced about, and raced down and across the swift-flowing current with long, sweeping strokes; and as we rode down the steep winding track to meet him, Mac became jocular, and reminding us that the gauntlet of the Katherine had yet to be run, also reminded us that the sympathies of the Katherine were with the stockmen; adding with a chuckle, as Mine Host bore down upon us. “You don’t even represent business here; no woman ever does.”
Then the boat grounded, and Mine Host sprang ashore—another burly six-foot bushman—and greeted us with a flashing smile and a laughing “There’s not much of her left.” And then, stepping with quiet unconcern into over two feet of water, pushed the boat against a jutting ledge for my convenience. “Wet feet don’t count,” he laughed with another of his flashing smiles, when remonstrated with, and Mac chuckled in an aside, “Didn’t I tell you a woman doesn’t represent business here?”
Chapter 4
The swim being beyond the horses, they were left hobbled out on the north banks, to wait for the river to fall, and after another swift race down and across stream, Mine Host landed every one safely on the south side of the flood, and soon we were clambering up the steep track that led from the river to the “Pub.”
Coming up from the river, the Katherine Settlement appeared to consist solely of the “Pub” and its accompanying store; but beyond the “Pub,” which, by the way, seemed to be hanging on to its own verandah posts for support, we found an elongated, three-roomed building, nestling under deep verandahs, and half-hidden beneath a grove of lofty scarlet flowering ponchianas.
“The Cottage is always set apart for distinguished visitors,” Mine Host said, bidding us welcome with another smile, but never a hint that he was placing his own private quarters at our disposal. Like all bushmen, he could be delicately reticent when conferring a favour; but a forgotten razor-strop betrayed him later on.
In the meantime we discovered the remainder of the Settlement from the Cottage verandahs, spying out the Police Station as it lurked in ambush just round the first bend in a winding bush track—apparently keeping one eye on the “Pub”; and then we caught a gleam of white roofs away beyond further bends in the track, where the Overland Telegraph “Department” stood on a little rise, aloof from the “Pub” and the Police, shut away from the world, yet attending to its affairs, and, incidentally, to those of the bush-folk: a tiny Settlement, with a tiny permanent population of four men and two women—women who found their own homes all-sufficient, and rarely left them, although the men-folk were here, there, and everywhere.