Happy Dick, also, had his own peculiar form of welcome. “Good-day! Real glad to see you!” was his usual greeting. Sure of his own welcome wherever he went, he never waited to hear it, but hastened to welcome all men into his fellowship. “Real glad to see you,” he would say, with a ready smile of comradeship; and it always seemed as though he had added: “I hope you’ll make yourself at home while with me.” In some mysterious way, Happy Dick was at all times the host giving liberally of the best he had to his fellow-men.
He was one of the pillars of the Line Party. “Born in it, I think,” he would say. “Don’t quite remember,” adding with his ever-varying smile, “Remember when it was born, anyway.”
When the “Overland Telegraph” was built across the Australian continent from sea to sea, a clear broad avenue two chains wide, was cut for it through bush and scrub and dense forests, along the backbone of Australia, and in this avenue the line party was “born” and bred—a party of axemen and mechanics under the orders of a foreman, whose duty it is to keep the “Territory section” of the line in repair, and this avenue free from the scrub and timber that spring up unceasingly in its length.
In unbroken continuity this great avenue runs for hundreds upon hundreds of miles, carpeted with feathery grasses and shooting scrubs, and walled in on either side with dense, towering forest or lighter and more scattered timber. On and on it stretches in utter loneliness, zigzagging from horizon to horizons beyond, and guarding those two sensitive wires at its centre, as they run along their single line of slender galvanised posts, from the great bush that never ceases in its efforts to close in on them and engulf them. A great broad highway, waiting in its loneliness for the generations to come, with somewhere in its length the line party camp, and here and there within its thousand miles, a chance traveller or two here and there a horseman with pack-horse ambling and grazing along behind him; here and there a trudging speck with a swag across its shoulders, and between them one, two, or three hundred miles of solitude, here and there a horseman riding, and here and there a footman trudging on, each unconscious of the others.
From day to day they travel on, often losing the count of the days, with those lines always above them, and those beckoning posts ever running on before them and as they travel, now and then they touch a post for company—shaking hands with Outside: touching now and then a post for company, and daily realising the company and comfort those posts and wires can be. Here at least is something in touch with the world something vibrating with the lives and actions of men, and an ever-present friend in dire necessity. With those wires above him, any day a traveller can cry for help to the Territory, if he call while he yet has strength to climb one of those friendly posts and cut that quivering wire—for help that will come speedily, for the cutting of the telegraph wire is as the ringing of an alarm-bell throughout the Territory. In all haste the break is located, and food, water, and every human help that suggests itself sent out from the nearest telegraph station. There is no official delay—there rarely is in the Territory—for by some marvellous good fortune, there everything belongs to the Department in which it finds itself.
Just as Happy Dick is one of the pillars of the line party, so the line party is one of the pillars of the line itself. Up and down this great avenue, year in year out it creeps along, cutting scrub and repairing as it goes, and moving cumbrous main camps from time to time, with its waggon loads of stores, tents, furnishings, flocks of milking goats, its fowls, its gramophone, and Chinese cook. Month after month it creeps on, until, reaching the end of the section, it turns round to creep out again.
Year in, year out, it had crept in and out, and for twenty years Happy Dick had seen to its peace and comfort. Nothing ever ruffled him. “All in the game” was his nearest approach to a complaint, as he pegged away at his work, in between whiles going to the nearest station for killers, carting water in tanks out to “dry stage camps,” and doing any other work that found itself undone. Dick’s position was as elastic as his smile.