A term of dread was apparently settling down upon the land when John Redgrave resolved to stay at home the summer-time through. Such were the prospects which confronted him as he rode from paddock to paddock, among the tens of thousands of sheep, and watched from day to day the pasturage shrivel up and disappear; the water retire into the bosom of the sun-baked earth.
The days were long, even dreary, and as the summer wore on they seemed longer and more dreary still. Hot, glaring, breezeless—there was no change, no relief—apparently no hope. There was no sign of distress among the Gondaree flocks. In that well-watered, well-pastured, well-fenced, and subdivided station the stock scarcely felt the pressure of the death-like season which was decimating the flocks in less-favoured localities. But everything that was heard, said, or thought of in that melancholy time tended to depression and despair. “This man had lost ten thousand sheep, having made too late a start for the back country, and been unable to reach water from the intervening desert. They—fine, strong, half-fat wethers—had gone mad with thirst—obstinately refused to stir—as is the manner of sheep in their extremity, and had perished to the last one. Then some one had sold three thousand weaners for ninepence a head, a well-grown lot too.”
As the panic and the season acted and reacted upon one another, by the time the summer had passed, and the autumn and the cold nights, but still dry, stern, merciless as the summer, had come, the value of stock and stations had come to be nominal.
People of imaginative temperaments began to ask themselves whether they could have been sane when they in cool blood set down 20,000 sheep and a station as value for £20,000 or £25,000. Had such prices been actually paid?
Yes, actually paid! Not in golden sovereigns, perhaps, but in good cheques upon perfectly solvent bank accounts, and in bills of exchange, which were legally strong enough to extract the last penny of their value from him whose name was written under the talismanic word “accepted.” The money had been there, doubtless; and now it seemed as if it had turned into withered leaves, like the fairy gold in the old legends.
So mused Jack on his daily rounds, as wearily he rode day after day, often on a weak and tired horse, for grass was none, and hay and corn were considerably dearer than loaf sugar; or when he lighted his pipe at night, and sat staring at the stars, while M‘Nab wrote up his accounts, and generally bore himself as if droughts were merely passing obstacles to the prosperity which must eventually attend the proprietor of well-classed sheep and a fenced-in run.
The famine year dragged on. Long will that season be remembered throughout the length and breadth of the great island-continent. Its history was written in the hearts of ruined men—in the dangerously-tasked minds of many a proprietor whom “luck and pluck” carried through the ordeal. Still the drought grasped with unrelenting gripe the enfeebled flocks—the thirst-maddened and desperate herds. The great merchants of the land were beginning to grow accustomed to the sound of the terrible word “bankruptcy.” All bank shares had fallen, and were falling, to prices which showed the usual cowardly distrust of the public in the time of trial. Rumour began to be busy with the names of more than one bank, including the Bank of New Holland, which had, it was asserted, made stupendous advances to the squatters. “Hadn’t they lent old Captain Blockstrop a quarter of a million, and even that wouldn’t do? Every day the directors met, old Billy used to talk to the manager in much the same tone of voice that he had been accustomed to use to his first mate, and demand ten, twenty, or thirty thousand pounds, as the case might be. ‘I must have it, Mr. Shrood,’ the old man would roar out, ‘if I’m to carry on, or else, sir, the house of William Blockstrop and Co. will have the shutters up to-morrow morning.’ And he got the money of course.”
“And suppose he didn’t get it?” might remark an inquiring bystander, innocent of the mighty system of involuted financial machinery.
“Not get it!” would Croker, or Downemouth, flaneurs informed in all the monetary diplomacy of the day, say—“Do you suppose that bank can afford to let old Blockstrop drop? No, sir; rotten as the commercial and pastoral interests are, they know better than to cut their own throats just yet. Other fellows may have to sell their sheep for half-a-crown a head, and take to billiard-marking, or ‘pies all hot,’ for all the bank cares; but once you’re in like old Blockstrop they can’t let you go.”
Autumn passed over, winter commenced—that is, the month of June arrived. The rain seemed as far off as ever. One day Jack smiled grimly as he observed the anachronism of a tolerably smart bush-fire, which was burning away merrily, not the grass, good wot, but the dried forest leaves which lay inches deep on the bare bosom of the tranced and death-like earth.