The Pioneers

by Katharine Susannah Prichard

Sale days, however, still ended in gaming and drinking brawls at the shanties, and sometimes in the dropping of a heavy, still body into the Wirree, when the tides would carry it out to sea.

It was the disappearance of a young farmer from the West Hills after a night at the Black Bull that made Donald Cameron decide to take action. He, backed by other farmers and well-to-do hill settlers, made representations to the Port authorities as to the lawless character and conduct of Wirreeford township.

A trooper who rode into it a few days later was pelted with stones, tarred and feathered, and sent back to Port Southern.

Then a building was rim-up on the outskirts of the township—a ramshackle house built of overlapping, smooth, pine shingles. It was whitewashed, so that it stood out on the darkest nights to remind roisterers that law and order were in their midst. And as soon as it was finished, John M'Laughlin, a police-sergeant from the Port, took up his residence in it. He mitigated the impression that undue severity would be meted out to evil-doers from the new police head-quarters, by genially brawling with most of his neighbours at McNab's as soon as he arrived, very successfully intimating that he was far too long-sighted, easy-going and convivial a soul to interfere with the Wirree's little way of doing things.

Donald Cameron was well known in Wirreeford when it began to be a cattle market of importance. So was Davey—Young Davey—as he was called when he began to go regularly to the sales in the years that followed the fires.

Cameron worked all day in the sale-yards with his men. He drove in his own beasts in the morning, threw off his coat for the drafting and, when the sales were over, went out of the township, a stolid, stooping figure, on his heavy bay cob. Although he sometimes made close on a thousand pounds on a day's sales, he went out of the township, as often as not, without spending a penny.

It was said that he was the wealthiest man in the countryside, and as "mean as they make 'em." Yet his disinclination to spend money was made subservient to his sense of justice; and a spirit of matter-of-fact integrity that he carried round with him made the Wirree people regard him with suspicious awe. The iron quality of his will, the hard, straight gaze of his eyes, were difficult things for men with uneasy consciences to encounter. Because he was the first man in the country, it was reckoned a matter of prestige to have the patronage of Donald Cameron of Ayrmuir, whether for a meal, store order, or any job whatever. In jest, half earnest, he was called the Laird of Ayrmuir.

Wirree men said that Thad McNab loathed Donald Cameron "as the devil loathes holy water."

McNab was not the devil in their eyes, nor Donald Cameron holy water, but the saying perhaps suggested to them the composite forces of the two men. Thad, with his twisted mind, his cruel eyes, his treacherous underhand ways, stood to them for something in the nature of the power of evil. Donald Cameron, with his harsh integrity, his unbending virtue, his parsimony, and sober respectability, stood for something in the nature of abstract good. They had the respect for him that people sometimes have for a standard which has been hung before their eyes, and which they have not been able to live up to. But Thad was their aider and abettor.

Thad, for all his tyrannies, blackmail, petulances, made life easier for them. They stood by him and blessed him, cursing Donald Cameron and his sort, who would have sent them back to the prison cells and torture of the Island. It was not from motives of sheer kindness that McNab stood by them, they knew, but because it paid him. Nevertheless, the thing worked out in the same way. Donald Cameron was more their enemy than Thad. Thad's feud with him amused them as much as a cock fight; their money was on their own bird, and they barracked for him, idly, light-heartedly, scoffing at his enemy.