After that, the way led off the main road, on by a less used track through wilder country. Here Wombo, the black boy, was waiting—Moongarr Bill having gone on with the pack horse to the camping place—and helped to unharness the two leaders which he drove before him ahead. The trees thickened, the buggy wheels caught on stumps. Cudgee had to get down at intervals and, with his axe, lop and clear fallen timber. Every mile the progress grew slower and the forest more lonely. No sign now of a selector's clearing, or of any human occupation.... But there was a pack of emus hustling and shaking their big bunches of feathers like startled ballet girls.
'I feel as if part of the Zoo had been let loose,' said Lady Bridget when again there bounded along in the near distance a pair of kangaroos with a little Joey kangaroo taking a lesson in locomotion behind its parents.
They were still in the gum forest, but now and then came a belt of gidia scrub—mournful trees with stiff black trunks and grey green foliage and a pale sort of wattle flower smelling like dead cattle when rain is about, as McKeith explained. But there was no rain about now, and, in truth, he would have welcomed the unpleasant odour. Perhaps it was that which made the ground so stark and bare beneath these trees where no grass will grow. The sun was lowering when they left the gidia. Out in the gum forest again, the birds were chattering before retiring to rest. All life is still in the bush at mid-day, but now there were curious scutterings among the grass tussocks, and the whirr of its insect population sounded all round. The country got prettier—swelling pastures and stony pinches and a distant outline of hills. They could see the green line of a water course.
'Plenty water sit down along a creek?' McKeith asked the black boy. But Cudgee shook his woolly head.
'Ba'al* mine think it, Massa. No rain plenty long time.'
[*ba'al—the Aboriginal negative.]
McKeith sighed. The dark shadow of coming drought is a fearsome spectre on the Never-Never Land.
CHAPTER 7
A COO-EE sounded long, clear, vibrant. Moongarr Bill and Wombo, who had gone on ahead, were fixing camp. Lady Bridget's musical voice caught up the note. She answered it with another COO-EE, to Cudgee's delight.
'My word! Ba'al newchum, that feller white Mary,' said he.