On the morrow such a sight met John Redgrave’s eyes as they had not looked upon since he entered into possession of Gondaree. The cottage was built, as has been before related, upon a bluff, and was believed to be impregnable by the highest flood that ever came down the Warroo. When Jack walked into the verandah, and saw by the pale dawn-light the angry waters, deep, turbulent, and wide as his vision went, rushing but a few feet below the floor on which he trod, he felt as if he were at sea, and trusted that the older residents had made no miscalculation. It was certainly a novel experience in that dry and thirsty land to hear the “roar of waters” so closely brought home to one’s bed and board. On the other side of the river, far as the eye could see, the vast flats were as an inland sea, the trees standing in the water like pillars in a vast aqueduct, their stems forming endless colonnades.
This augured badly for his own river-paddock, and, breakfast hastily concluded, he started down to see if any of the sheep were visible from the opposite bank of the anabranch. He managed to get near enough to sweep the flats with a field-glass, and at last made out the greater part of the weaners, huddled together upon a small rise, surrounded by water, and not much above the general level. Here, though cold and hungry, they might remain in safety till the flood fell, if the waters rose no higher. But there lay the danger. The waters surrounded them for a long stretch on every side. Even if they could get near them, nothing would induce young sheep to face a much less expanse of water. The current was too rapid to work any species of raft. If the river continued rising through the night, there would not be a sheep of these three thousand and more alive by daylight.
Jack turned sick at heart with the bare idea. Good heavens! was he to be eternally the sport of circumstance and the victim of disaster? Was there such a thing as Bad Luck, an evil principle, in which he had steadfastly disbelieved, but which he did not doubt in other cases had hunted men to their doom? Could it possibly happen in his own case? How rarely do men accept any of life’s evils as possibilities in their own cases! Here, however, he was again face to face with an unsolved difficulty, a peril imminent, deadly, and well-nigh hopeless of escape. Three thousand some hundreds of beautiful young sheep, with fourteen months’ wool on. Another two thousand pounds gone at one blow! It was enough to make a man hang himself.
He had a long consultation with M‘Nab, who had settled in his own mind that nothing could be done, except drown a man or two, in trying conclusions with such a waste of water, with large logs and uprooted trees whirling madly down the stream, which indeed looked like a lake dislodged from its moorings, and mad for a view of the distant sea.
So he calmly waited the issue, hoping for a fall during the night, and cursing himself, as deeply as a sound Presbyterian could afford to do, for having brought this loss upon his employer by over-greed of grass. The river did not fall. Indeed, it rose so rapidly that on their last visit to the place of observation they could hear the continuous bleating of the hapless sheep—a token that they were alarmed and endangered by the rising tide.
All that night the sound was in Jack’s ears as he listened at intervals, or tossed restlessly on an uneasy bed.
With the earliest dawn he was astir and down at the look-out. There had evidently been a considerable rise during the night. He saw that the water had made a clean breach over the spot occupied by the flock—of the whole number, there was not a solitary sheep to be seen. He would have been saved a few days of anxious expectation—a feeling between utter despair and trembling hope—had he known that his friends at Juandah, that very day, had seen scores of their carcases floating past their windows, but were happily unconscious of their particular ownership.
For nearly a week Jack was inconsolable—he took no interest in the remaining portion of the shearing, which M‘Nab finished with his customary exactness, paying off the shearers, washers, and extra hands, and despatching every pound of wool and every sheepskin as if the last of the clip—like a cow’s milk—was the richest and most valuable.
The floods had rolled away, and the sun shone out hotter than ever upon miles of blackened clover and mud-covered pasturage, entirely ruined for the year by the unseasonable immersion. When they rode over the paddock the sight was pitiable in the extreme. By far the greater proportion of the drowned sheep had been floated away bodily, as the “cruel, crawling tide” rose inch by inch in the darkness, till they were swept from footing. But many were found entangled in drift-wood, carried into large hollow trees—as many as fifteen or twenty, perhaps, in one cluster—black and decomposing, with the wool bleaching in great strips and masses. A miserable sight for John Redgrave, in truth, who, but a fortnight since, had considered that wool almost in his pocket, and every shorn weaner good value for half a sovereign all round. Then the confounded fama clamosa of the affair. The local papers had quick and fast hold of the tale:
“We are deeply grieved to hear that Mr. Redgrave of Gondaree, who has spared no cost in improving that valuable property, has lost ten thousand sheep in the late disastrous flood.” Next week—“We have much pleasure in stating that Mr. Redgrave has had only five thousand sheep drowned, but we had not then learned that his wool-shed and wash-pen, with a portion of the clip, were entirely washed away.” And so on.