He and the Schoolmaster watched her flying out across the faintly moonlit paddocks. The dogs were soon working round the mob in a far corner where the fence panels were down. Deirdre drove them through the opening. The black boy was on the road waiting to keep the beasts' noses northwards with an adroit flick of his whip. It was with an occasional lowing and rattling of horns, the brush and rattle of hoofs on the dry timber that they passed out into the shadows of the road.
The Schoolmaster had no fear that Deirdre could not manage this handful of yearlings and old cows. She had chased calves from paddock to paddock when she was big enough to straddle a pot-bellied pony, and had cracked a light whip which Conal had made for her, with a fall a couple of inches shorter than his own, round many a restless herd when Conal and he were droving and she was on the roads with them. It was the bitterness of not being able to drive himself that plagued Farrel: the consciousness of having to stand by and let her do what there was danger in doing, incensed him. Steve watched the road for sound or sign of men and horses from Wirreeford. Then he chased his own two milkers up from the cow paddock and ran them backwards and forwards along the road where the mob had passed, to obliterate its tracks.
A weight was off the Schoolmaster's mind when Steve said that Deirdre and the black were out of sight. He knew that by taking the cattle along the narrow tracks on the ledges of the hills, she would save them. Narrow Valley scrubs would screen them from curious eyes. If M'Laughlin came, the road would tell no tales. Steve's cows had made it look as if a mob had passed in the opposite direction beyond the shanty, and he and the Schoolmaster had a story to fit the tracks. They did not think that anybody but themselves knew the way under the trees on the Valley hillsides. Only if M'Laughlin brought a tracker would he be able to follow Deirdre.
Farrel wondered how word had reached McNab, and what foolhardiness had led Conal to bring these branded calves to the paddock below Steve's. For a moment the idea that Conal, baited and maddened with drink, might have given some hint at McNab's of the beasts being in Steve's paddock, occurred to him. And then there was Davey. For a while his mind brooded over what had happened to him.
"It was only mad with drink, Conal could have shot at a man in the dark," he told himself. "The open fight is his way." Conal and he had been friends a good many years, and there was something in his estimate of the man which defied the idea that he had shot Davey. And yet it looked as if he had. Why was he not in? He had left Wirreeford an hour before Davey. Conal was on the road before Davey. And he had been drinking at McNab's. He had been taunted with Deirdre's name.
"It was only mad with drink he could have done it," the Schoolmaster told himself again. And even then a fierce contempt and condemnation surged within him. The memory of Deirdre's fired young womanhood; of the look in her face, of the glow in her eyes, told him what this hurt to Davey meant to her.
Steve watched in the room beside Davey.
His shrunken, crippled limbs ached. His head sank on his breast. He drooped and slept forgetfully. The Schoolmaster strode the length of the kitchen. The fire smouldered low. He threw some wood on it. The crackling flames flashed and played freakishly across the room. He wondered if Conal would come—where he was. The hours passed. There was no sound or sign of late riders from the Wirree. He opened the door of the hut. The night was very still. Only a mopoke called plaintively in the distance.
There was a stir in the room in which Davey was sleeping. Farrel heard Steve's voice in startled and sleepy protest. The door opened, Davey stood on the threshold his eyes with a delirious brightness in them.
"What have you done about those calves?" he asked, his voice quick and clear.