When Harry made the polite speech to me I quoted at starting, I was lounging, smoking, in a rocking-chair on a verandah, and could not help feeling that I must look very much like “a crawler” to the upright little fellow who looked down on me from the top of Cornstalk, with his leather letter-bag strapped across his grass-cloth jumper. He had ridden ever so many miles through the hot wind, and was going to ride back ever so many miles through it, and yet he gave himself the unconcerned airs of a young salamander.
“My word! you are a lazy lot,” he proceeded presently. “Nobody here seems to be doing anything but smoking and nobblerizing. There’s a whole mob of fellows shouting for spiders and stone fences at the ‘Macquarie Arms,’ and the ‘Royal,’ and the ‘General Bourke,’ and when I came by the police-barracks I saw the sergeant and all the constables with their coats off under the fig tree in the yard—half of them asleep, and the other half smoking. What do you think that lazy old pig Reynolds was doing? I had to take a message to him from father about some Court House business, and when I got to his place I couldn’t make anybody hear. So I went in and poked about till I got down into that little cellar of his where he keeps his beer, and there was old Reynolds, with all his clothes off, on the bricks, and his Chinaman pitching water on him out of a bucket. He’s a nice fellow to be Clerk of Petty Sessions! If Englishmen can’t stand our climate, they oughtn’t to come to it, and then expect us to pay them wages for shirking their work.
“There’s old Biggs, the postmaster. He’s been long enough in the colony, you’d think, to get used to it—he might almost have been one of the First Fleeters—and yet he kept me waiting ever so long for my letters. He was ‘so overcome with the heat,’ poor man! in lifting the mail-bag out of the cart, that he had to go and nobblerize at the ‘Royal’ before he felt equal to opening it. I declare little Marston, the mail guard, is the only fellow I have seen in Jerry’s Town to-day with a mite of go in him—though he is an Englishman. But then they say he used to be a lieutenant in the army. Look there, Mr. Howe: your English officers, that you think such heavy swells at home, are glad to get us to employ them as mail guards, and milkmen, and things like that. I wonder how little Marston likes carrying a carbine and lugging about the letter-bags.”
The heat, although he professed not to care a pin for it, had so plainly affected Harry’s temper that I invited him to get off his horse and finish his abuse of things English in the shade of the verandah. At first he loftily declined to dismount, but he did get down, and stayed chatting with me so long that I could see he did not quite relish the thought of his hot ride home. Harry’s was not cooling conversation. Marston had told him of dozens of teamsters that the mail had passed on the road “stuck up” round dry water-holes and fast-drying fords, with three-fourths of their bullocks dead, and the others so weakened that they could only get upon their knees when they tried to rise from the ground. Harry had had a chat, too, with a bullock-driver who had managed to struggle on into Jerry’s Town that morning.
“He looked just like a black fellow,” said Harry, “with the dust and the heat; and he says that up the country on M’Grath’s Plains there is not a drop of water to be got for fifty miles any way, and the sun and the bush-fires have burnt every bit of grass right down to the roots. The country looks as black as if it was covered with cinders, he says, and there are cracks a foot wide in the ground.”
Things were not much better at Wonga-Wonga, Harry informed me. Most of the water-holes were dried up, and bulls and bullocks, cows and calves, sheep and lambs, brood-mares and foals, were lying rotting round them, with crows and carrion hawks feasting on their carcases, or else half buried in the sticky mud at the bottom which the sun was baking as hard as brick. The sheep that were left alive were lying panting under the trees, too languid even to bleat; and the bullocks were standing crowded together in what had once been swamps and chains of ponds, bellowing dolefully, or lashing off the flies in silent despair. Mr. Lawson, and Sydney, and the overseer were riding about in search of grass and water, so that they might not “lose all the beasts,” and everything in the garden and cultivation-paddocks was shrivelled up into tinder and touchwood. That morning, as Harry rode in, he had seen parrots and lories gasping like fishes out of water on the grey branches, and falling dead, as if they had been shot by the sunbeams, when they tried to fly across the open. When Harry galloped homewards at last through the blazing light and the fiery air, it seemed strange that he did not drop to the ground like the parrots.
We had had bush-fires in our neighbourhood for some time, but that night the bush seemed to be alight for miles all round Jerry’s Town; and next day, although the flames were not so plain (until the sun had gone down again), grey and black smoke dimmed even the blazing sun, and rolled in stifling clouds into the little town. When everything is dried up as things get dried up in an Australian drought, a lucifer match, or the ashes of a pipe, carelessly thrown down, may set square miles of forest on fire; an old pannikin or an empty bottle may act as a burning-glass, and do the same; and sometimes, for the sake of the luxuriant young grass that will spring up where old withered grass has been burnt, when the rains come, settlers selfishly set fire to it, if the wind is not blowing towards their homesteads, reckless of the loss of life and property they may cause—it is impossible to say how far beyond. That night and day (as I guessed at the time, and as I learnt afterwards) were a dreadful night and day for my Wonga-Wonga friends. Mr. Lawson, and Sydney, and the tutor, and the boys, and a good many of the men too, sat up all night. The women and girls went to bed, but they couldn’t go to sleep, the air was so stiflingly close and smoky, and it was so startling when they looked out of their bed-room windows to see the flames leaping redder and redder out of the brooding and rolling smoke-clouds. The moon was up, but her light—made bloody by the lurid atmosphere through which it seemed to have to force its way—only gave a still more uncanny look to the landscape.
Poor Miss Smith was half wild with fear, and Mrs. Lawson and her girls, although they did not show their fear so much, were really more frightened at heart, perhaps, because they understood better what their fate would be if from one quarter or another a roaring bush-fire rushed down right upon them. Not much breakfast was eaten at Wonga-Wonga next morning: haggard, pale faces looked anxiously across the table at one another.
Thicker and thicker the smoke rolled in; the heat every moment grew hotter. The head-station sheep were still in their hurdles, gasping for breath. What was the good of sending them out into the burning bush, even if the shepherds would have gone with them? The men stood about watching the fires, and wondering what was to become of them. They would have made a rush for Jerry’s Town, and Mr. Lawson would have sent all his womenfolk thither too, but the bush was on fire between the station and the township. Harry and Donald, of course, were scared like other people, but—boys are such queer little animals—in the midst of their fright they could not help feeling pleased that they would have no school that day, and so they half enjoyed the general consternation.
The hot wind was blowing directly from the north, driving the roaring, crackling flames and the suffocating smoke before it. If it had kept in that quarter, the house, and huts, and outbuildings at Wonga-Wonga would have been in great danger, since the broad road of destruction which the fierce fire was eating through the bush would have passed within a furlong or two of the house, and that and its belongings might easily have been gobbled up with a side-lick or two of the bush-fire’s forked tongues. But when the wind veered about half a point towards the northwest, the Wonga-Wonga people thought it was all up with them. The rushing fire was now steering straight at them like an inevitable express train. The blinding, throat-tickling, lung-clogging smoke-clouds rolled in denser and denser. In spite of the sunlight, the grey clouds spat out pink, and russet, and golden flame plainer and plainer. Flocks of wild cockatoos flew wildly screaming overhead, making the already scared tame cockatoo grovel like a reptile as they flew by. Singed kangaroos and wallabies bounded over the garden fence. Dingoes, looking more cowardly than ever, but cowed into tameness, put their tails between their legs and slunk into the barn. Snakes wriggled along half roasted. Mobs of horses and cattle went by like a whirlwind and an earthquake in a mad stampede. Poor stupid sheep, their small brains quite addled by terror, ran hither and thither purposelessly, stood stock-still to let the flames catch them, or plunged right into the flames. It was an awful time; but so long as the merest chance of life remains, it is the best policy, and our duty to Him who gave us our lives, to do our best to save them, if they can be saved without disgrace.