At Toolara the party was augmented by a tame dingo, belonging to Mr. Parklands. He was most appropriately named Beelzebub. For, in his own realm, the vast kingdom of this chief, he reigned unequalled.
A magnificent specimen of the Australian dingo, bright orange as to colour with a white ring round the neck, he boasted of long sweeping hair and was feathered like a Gordon setter. The intelligence expressed by his flag was marvellous, and its language various and comprehensive as that of a semaphore. His face alone, if fate had but permitted the painting of it to Sir Edwin Landseer, would have been well worth a thousand guineas at the Royal Academy. Plainly visible therein were foresight, decision, craft, and self-control, in sufficient quantity to furnish forth a Cabinet Ministry. You could not look upon the calm countenance without feeling a conviction that against all ordinary foes that gifted animal was safe, as Achilles upon the Trojan plain. Like unto the Homeric hero he was invulnerable save in one point, the poisoned bait, that talismanic safeguard which assures the pastoral future of Australia.
To his credit be it stated, Beelzebub did not in any way identify himself with the party, who were, through this discreet conduct, not included in the anathemas he was destined to bring down on his own head. He kept about a quarter of a mile from the road, in a course parallel with the waggon.
Five miles had been travelled when the first victim to his fiendish arts appeared. Norval, leisurely boiling the evening camp kettle, the while watching his flock peacefully nibbling towards the yard, is thunderstruck to see those splendid wethers, filled with salt-bush and water, suddenly sundered as if by a red streak of lightning, and the division farthest from him sent across the plain racing for their lives, with the devil himself whipping in.
Then does that unhappy Gael pursue, with his longest strides and Anglo-Ossianic oaths, but to no purpose. The astute dog-fiend, when the fat-laden flyers had collapsed suddenly and hopelessly, through sheer breathlessness, turns him round, curls his noble flag far over his back, and, like the famed coyote, ‘vanishes through an atmospheric crack.’
This trifling adventure was witnessed by Brandon, Parklands, and Mr. Neuchamp with great interest. The sheep did not belong to them. The dog was fully believed to be a dingo errant, running his diurnal stage of duty. And, in the end, it would conduce to the benefit of the merino interest, as Norval would be roused into a course of spasmodic bait-laying, which possibly might bring a few genuine freebooters off their perches. Aymer Brandon, after a hearty laugh all round and the assertion from Sparks that they ‘couldn’t lick him,’ dropped the whipcord on to his team and swept away over a splendid salt-bush plain, level as a bowling green, though slightly differing in colour. As they threaded a clump of box, the corpse (apparently) of Beelzebub was descried stretched out under a tree, looking rather more dead than the reality. The crafty one permitted himself to be passed without the motion of a muscle, and was no more seen until a mile or two on, when a cloud of dust, with a red thunderbolt darting to and fro therein, proclaimed the fact that another shepherd was in process of disestablishment.
The short Australian twilight had commenced, when Parklands took the reins to pilot the coach into a deep horse-shoe bend unknown to Brandon, near to the opposite bank of which stood the half-way house. At a nobly undeniable pace did the gallant Sparks tool through the glades of mighty red gum patriarchs, the roots of which, long fed by river springs, deep piercing the soft alluvium, had made them loftier, broader, wider of shade than the fatherland. He had shot more than one polygonum creek, straight and true as an Indian the Saults St. Marie’s boiling rapid, when Brandon shouted, ‘Where the blazes are you driving—slap into the river? I can’t see how these nags will take a water jump!’
‘By Jove!’ said the iron-nerved Sparks, as with a clever sweep he came to anchor, the near wheels going several inches over the river bank in the operation, with a drop to the water at an angle of seventy-five or a hundred feet, ‘so I am. Jump out, boys. Can’t lick us.’
The events of the day had occasionally startled Mr. Neuchamp, but his sangfroid won the admiration of Parklands and his friend. He had exhibited no tendency to jump out before he was told; and Brandon was afterwards heard to state his conviction, that if Sparks had charged the Darling four-in-hand with characteristic carelessness of results, Ernest would have simply sat back and kept his chin up, in profound undoubting faith that he would be landed safely upon the opposite bank.
The horses were promptly unharnessed and turned out amidst luxuriant pasture, after which all hands crossed the Great River in Gregor’s dug-out to that gentleman’s hotel. An apology for the primitive appearance of the place was thought necessary by Parklands, so considerate ever is the outgoing proprietor to the intending purchaser. Ernest assured him that, though slightly inferior to the Royal, he had already, since his arrival in Australia, been lodged more humbly. Having witnessed one another’s signature in passable whisky, towels were produced, and the dust of the day consigned to the river.