Against the other side of the rock wall, the black boys had built a second fire. The horses were hobbled and grazing along the green border of the creek. The buggy propped up, was covered with a tarpaulin. The pack-bags had disgorged their contents. A miscellaneous heap of camp properties lay on the ground. And now, Cudgee's axe was at work again, stripping a section of bark from a gum tree, for what purpose Lady Bridget did not divine.
She walked down to the creek and stood among the rocks at its edge. She had expected a rippling stream, and, to her disappointment, saw only a broad strip of dry sand, along which Moongarr Bill was mooching, a spade in his hand.
'What are we going to do for water?' she exclaimed.
'Dig for it, my ladyship,' answered Moongarr Bill. 'That's one of the upside-down things in 'Stralia. Here's two of them—mighty queer, come to think of it—the rivers that run underground and the cherries that grow with their stones outside.'
Lady Bridget observed that she was already acquainted with that oft-quoted botanical phenomenon. In her rides around Leichardt's Town she had been shown and had tasted the disagreeable little orange berry which has a hard green knob at the end of it and is, for some ironical reason, called a cherry. She also told Moongarr Bill that in England she had seen a dowser searching for hidden springs by means of a forked hazel twig carried in front of him which pointed downwards where there was water and asked why Australians didn't adopt a similar method. At which Moongarr Bill laughed derisively, and said he did not hold with any such hanky-panky.
'Bad luck, Biddy,' McKeith said behind her. 'If there had been the proper amount of rain in these last three or four months, we'd have had the one thing that's wanting now to make this the ideal camp I've had on the top of my fancy—a running creek of pure water. But never mind—the water's there, though you can't see it.... That's got it, Bill!'
For already the sand was darkening and moisture was oozing in the hole Moongarr Bill had been digging, and which he widened gradually into a respectable pool of water. When it had settled down, all the billies were filled and the horses driven to it, whinnying for a drink.
Lady Bridget watched the evening meal being prepared between the two fires—only watched, for she was sternly forbidden to set hand to it.
'No canned goods, nor cooked food,' McKeith said, were allowed at this lay-out. Moongarr Bill was first-class at frying steak. He himself was going to boil the quart-pot tea and would give Biddy a demonstration in johnny-cakes, made bush fashion at their own camp fire. The sheet of bark had been cut into sections—one sub-divided into small squares to serve as plates. The inside looked clean as paint, and smelled of Mother Nature's still-room. Colin mixed the flour and water upon the larger sheet and worked up a stiff dough. He kneaded it, slapped it between his broad palms, cut it and baked the cakes in the ashes; then, butter being the only luxury permitted, he split them and buttered them; and Lady Bridget found in due time that not even the lightest Scotch scones taste better than bush johnny-cakes.
Quart pot tea, likewise—made also in true bush fashion. First the boiling of the billy—Colin's own particular billy, battered and blackened from much usage—half the battle, he explained, in brewing bush tea. Then, regulation handfuls of tea and brown store sugar thrown in at the precise boiling moment. Now the stirring of the frothing liquid with a fresh gum-twig. Then the blending and the cooling of it—pouring the beverage from one quart pot into another, and finally into the pannikins ready for the drinking.