“Oh, well! He’ll die in a good cause,” I said cheerfully and Dan’s gravity deserted him.
“You’re the dead finish!” he chuckled, and without further ceremony, beyond the taking off his boots, rolled into his mosquito net for the night.
We heard nothing further from him until that strange rustling hour of the night—that hour half-way between midnight and dawn, when all nature stirs in its sleep, and murmurs drowsily in answer to some mysterious call.
Nearly all bushmen who sleep with the warm earth for a bed will tell of this strange wakening moment, of that faint touch of half-consciousness, that whispering stir, strangely enough, only perceptible to the sleeping children of the bush—one of the mysteries of nature that no man can fathom, one of the delicate threads with which the Wizard of Never-Never weaves his spells. “Is all well my children?” comes the cry from the watchman of the night; and with a gentle stirring the answer floats back “All is well.”
Softly the pine forest rustled with the call and the answer; and as the camp roused to its dim half-consciousness, Dan murmured sleepily, “Sool’em, old girl” then after a vigorous rustling among the leaves (Sool’em’s tail returning thanks for the attention), everything slipped back into unconsciousness until the dawn. As the first grey streak of dawn filtered through the pines, a long-drawn out cry of “Day-li-ght”—Dan’s camp reveille—rolled out of his net, and Dan rolled out after it, with even less ceremony than he had rolled in.
On our way back to the homestead, Dan suggesting that the “missus might like to have a look at the dining-room,” we turned into the towering timber that borders the Reach, and for the next two hours rode on through soft, luxurious shade; and all the while the fathomless spring-fed Reach lay sleeping on our left.
The Reach always slept; for nearly twelve miles it lay, a swaying garland of heliotrope and purple water-lilies, gleaming through a graceful fringe of palms and rushes and scented shrubs, touched here and there with shafts of sunlight, and murmuring and rustling with an attendant host of gorgeous butterflies and flitting birds and insects.
Dan looked on the scene with approving eyes. “Not a bad place to ride through, is it?” he said. But gradually as we rode on a vague depression settled down upon us, and when Dan finally decided he “could do with a bit more sunshine,” we followed him into the blistering noontide glare with almost a sigh of relief.
It is always so. These wondrous waterways have little part in that mystical holding power of the Never-Never. They are only pleasant places to ride through and—leave behind; for their purring slumberous beauty is vaguely suggestive of the beauty of a sleeping tiger:—a sleeping tiger with deadly fangs and talons hidden under a wonder of soft allurement; and when exiles in the towns sit and dream their dreams are all of stretches of scorched grass and quivering sun-flecked shade.
In the honest sunlight Dan’s spirits rose, and as I investigated various byways he asked “where the sense came in tying-up a dog that was doing no harm running loose.” “It waren’t as though she’d taken to chivying cattle,” he added, as, a mob of inquisitive steers trotting after us, I hurried Roper in among the riders; and then he wondered “how she’ll shape at her first muster.”