Part 6
By-and-bye the boys came to the head of a fern-tree gully, and plunged into its moist, warm, dim, luxuriant jungle, overshadowed by gigantic trees. Even what they call the "dwarf" tea tree ran up there to more than one hundred feet. They rode under blackwood trees, twenty feet round at the ground, and without a branch on the straight bole for eighty feet, beech trees two hundred feet high, and gum trees with tops twice as high as theirs. Huge creepers draped and interlaced those monsters. Some of the fern trees were more than fifty feet high, and above the feathery fans of the little ferns great stag-horns spread their antlers, and nest-ferns drooped their six-foot fronds. There were fragrant sassafras trees, too, in the gully, and the gigantic lily pierced the jungle with its long spear-shaft.
As the boys were forcing their way through it on their horses, with many a scratch and damp smack in the face from the swinging boughs, they came suddenly upon a little square of broken-down, almost smothered fencing. Inside there was more jungle, but a rough wooden cross showed them that they were looking at a bush grave. Initials and a date had been rudely carved upon the cross, but an A and 8 were all that could be made out of them. The boys had never heard of any one buried there, and it made them very serious at first to find a forgotten grave in that lonely place. They got off their horses, and took off their hats, and stood looking at the grave for some minutes in silence. Then they mounted again, and rode on, feeling, until they got out of the gully, as if they had been at a funeral. They had other things to think about when they rode into the sunshine again. They had the cattle to look up, and a camping-place to pick, because they were not going back to Wonga-Wonga until next day. But when they sat by their fire in the evening, with the weird night-wind moaning in the bush and sighing through the scrub around them, their thoughts went back to the bush grave.
"_We_ may die some day like that, Donald," said Harry, "without a soul to know where we're buried. It seems dreary somehow, don't it?"
"Somebody maun hae kenned where that puir fellow was buried," answered logical Donald, "because he couldna hae buried himsel', and put that cross up, and cut his name on't."
"Ah, perhaps the other fellow murdered him," cried Harry. "And yet he'd hardly have put the cross up, if he had. No, I expect there were two of them out going to take up new country, just as you and me may be out some day, and one of 'em died. It must have been dreary work for the other chap then, and perhaps he died all by himself, and nobody knows what became of _him_."
When the boys got back to Wonga-Wonga with their cattle, they made inquiries about the grave in the fern-tree gully, but no one else on the station had either seen it or heard of it before. Old Cranky, the men said, was the only one likely to know anything about it. The old man happened to come to Wonga-Wonga three days afterwards, and Harry at once began to question him about the grave. At first Old Cranky seemed not to understand what he was being asked--then a half-sly, half-frightened look came into his face, and he said that he knew every foot of the Bush for many a mile anywhere thereabouts, and he was sure there wasn't a grave in it. Then he said he had never been in _that_ gully; and then he said, Oh yes, he had, and there was a grave in it years back--he remembered now--why, it was an old mate of his--they had been lagged together and had cut away together, because the cove was such a Tartar, and Squinny had knocked up, and it was _he_ who had buried him there, and put up a cross to keep the devil off. He remembered it now as if it had all happened yesterday.
"And is it up yet?" the old man went on. "My word! a A and a 8? Oh, the A was for Andrew--that was Squinny's name--Andrew Wilson. Didn't you see ne'er a W? I mind the knife slipped, an' I cut my finger makin' it. 8? Let's see--it was 18, summut 8, or was it 17? when I buried Squinny."
And then Old Cranky burst out laughing, and said that he had been gammoning Harry all through--_he_ knew nought about the grave, and didn't believe there was one. Harry had been spinning him a yarn, and so he had spun Harry one to be quits.
All this was very queer, but Old Cranky was so very queer that Harry didn't think much of it, coming from him. But when Harry told Donald about it, Donald looked very suspicious, and said,
"Anyhow, when we've a chance, we'll go and see whether there _is_ a W on the cross. Where is Old Cranky?"
"I left him yarning away in the horsebreaker's hut," answered Harry; but when the boys strolled down there, they found that Old Cranky had left the station without coming up as usual to the house. Two days afterwards he came back, and as soon as he saw Harry he called out,
"There, I knowed I was right. I've been all through yon gully, and there's no more a grave in it than there is in the back o' your hand. You goo an' look again--I'll goo with you, if ye like."
But when the boys did go back to the gully, it was without Old Cranky. They were not exactly afraid of him, but still they preferred the old snake-charmer's room to his company in such a place. They thought they could ride almost straight to the grave, but from top to bottom, and from side to side, they rode through and through the gully without finding again the broken fence and crumbling cross.
"We couldn't have been dreaming, Donald, could we?" asked Harry.
"Nay, lad," answered Donald, "but we shouldna hae let that auld scoon'rel get the start of us. We'll not see him at Wonga-Wonga again, in a hurry, I'm thinkin'."
But Old Cranky did turn up again there in a few weeks' time, and chuckled greatly when he heard of the boys' unsuccessful hunt. That was his last visit to Wonga-Wonga. A short time afterwards he was found dead in the Bush, with his dogs standing over him, and his tame snakes wriggling about him. He had died of old age merely, and was buried in the Bush in which he had spent the greater part of his life. Old Cranky had been the "oldest inhabitant" in that part of the colony; and when he was gone, people began to rake up old stories of the old convict times in which he had figured. One day a settler, to whose father Old Cranky had been assigned, was dining at Wonga-Wonga, and telling us what he remembered of the old lag.
"Had your father one Wilson?" asked Donald.
"Well, really, he had so many, and it's so long ago, that I can't remember," said the gentleman.
"Was your father a Tartar?" was Donald's next very rude question.
"I dare say he was," the son answered laughingly, "and he had need to be with such a set of scamps as he had to manage. If you hadn't kept your eye on them, and let them feel the weight of your hand now and then, they'd have been on you like caged tigers when they see the tamer's turning funky."
"If you can't remember a Wilson, can you remember a body that went by the name of Squinny?" persisted Donald, like a barrister; "and did he take to the Bush because he couldna stand the floggings he got?"
"Squinny! You're right. I do remember a man of that name. No, he didn't take to the Bush. He was drowned crossing a creek--at least, that's what the fellow that was out with him said. By-the-bye, it was this very Old Cranky. But what do you know about him--what makes you ask?"
Then the boys told what they had seen and heard, and afterwards hadn't seen. Everybody at table, of course, came to the conclusion that Wilson had met with foul play in the gully from Old Cranky, and then been buried there by him in the way he had described.
"If you could find the grave," said the settler, "I'll be bound you'd find a cracked skull in it; but of course the old rascal cleared away all tracks of the fence and the rest of it, when Harry put him up to what he'd seen. Besides, what would be the good of finding out anything? You can't hang the old villain now, and, if he was alive, you'd have hard work to bring the thing home to him. The little I remember, and what he told the boys, is about all the evidence you'd have, and really I don't remember much, and the old scoundrel was always cranky. Besides, candidly, I don't see that it would do much good to scrag one villain for knocking another on the head all those years ago. The fellow would have been dead by this time somehow, and perhaps Old Cranky did society a good turn in finishing him off when he did. What do _you_ think, Mr. Howe? I think, for my part, that a good many fellows that could be very well spared have been settled in that way in the colony; just as the ants, they say, eat up the rats and the cockroaches. The curious thing is, that Old Cranky should have taken so much trouble to bury the man decently, with the name and date, and all the rest of it, and then forgotten all about it. But he was always a comical coon, was Old Cranky. A native wouldn't have done a silly thing like that, Mr. Howe. We're up to time of day; ain't we, Harry?"
"Anyhow, we're a deal better than the English, though I didn't know you called yourself a native," answered Harry. "We shouldn't have any scamps in the colony if it wasn't for the lot they sent us out from home; though, after all, the old hands are twice the men the new chums are that come nowadays. A set of stuck-up milksops! They don't know anything, and they can't do anything, and yet they talk as if they'd done the colony a great honour in coming to it, to be always growling at it because they ain't 'cute enough to get on here."
Harry and Donald did not make their appearance at the Wonga-Wonga dinner-table next day. They had started early in the morning for the fern-tree gully, with a pick and a spade, determined to make one more effort to discover the grave and unravel its mystery.
For a long time their hunt was as fruitless as before, but at last Harry cried out,
"I'm almost certain it was somewhere here! Don't you remember there was a blue gum close by, with a hole that looked like a black fellow grinning, half-way up? There's the tree--or else it's the image of it, and I never saw two trees exactly alike before."
Donald got off his horse, and poked about in the scrub for some time. Presently he said, "Ye're richt." He had been trying the ground with the handle of the pick, and it had run into seven loosely filled-up, hard-sided and hard-bottomed holes, arranged like this:
"Don't ye see?" said Donald, pointing out the outside ones; "there's where the posts stood, and this inside one is where the cross stood. The auld villain didn't dig up the bones, though, if there _are_ any bones, for the earth hasn't been stirred anywhere else."
The boys set to work with a will, and about five feet below the surface they came to a rusty-yellow crumbling skeleton. There was nothing in the look of the bones from which the boys, at any rate, could tell how their owner had met his death. But they dug up also what turned out to have been a white bone-handled pocket knife, when they had washed off the earth that encrusted it. The blades were almost eaten up by rust; the handle was the colour of bad teeth, and the rivets fell out, and it dropped asunder as the boys handled it; but on one of the sides was cut--"Andrew Wilson."
The boys put back the bones, and filled in the earth again, and knocked up a rude fence once more round the grave. The sun went down as they were finishing their task, and before they got out of the gully the huge funguses at the foot of the shadowy trees were gleaming like lucifer-matches in the dark, and the curlews were wailing most dolefully. Both boys were very glad to ride out where there was nothing between them and the clear starry sky.
"I wouldn't camp in there for a thousand pounds," said Harry, looking back at the deep wooded gorge; and even Donald confessed that the place seemed "nae canny."
IX. THE OLD CONVICT TIMES.
The settler who remembered Old Cranky's antecedents was Mr. Walter Daventry, son of a deceased Captain Daventry, who had moved up into the Kakadua district from the sea-coast, where he had first made himself a home. If I tell you something about Mr. Walter's boyhood, you will get a notion of Australia in the old convict times. This Captain Daventry was a military settler. When Mrs. Daventry, and her son Walter, and her maid Phoebe, went out from England to join the captain on his grant, both mistress and maid thought they were never to know what comfort was again--that they were going, so to speak, to the world's back-yard, in which all kinds of dirty rubbish were shot. Walter would have preferred India or Canada; people teased him so when they learnt that he was going to "Botany Bay"--asking him when he was sentenced to transportation--how many years he had got--and a good many more such silly questions, which they thought a great deal wittier than Walter did. Still, any change was acceptable that would take him away from the dull little Norfolk town that never seemed thoroughly awake, and its dark, long, low-pitched grammar-school, in which two masters, in cap and gown, nodded over their far-apart desks, and pretended to teach Walter and another small boy, and tried to fancy that they were preparing a lanky hobbydehoy for the University. Masters, hobbydehoy, and small boy all half-envied Walter, in a drowsy kind of way, when one morning he burst into that gloomy old school-room to say good bye. An hour afterwards he was rattling out of the dreamy little town along the Ipswich road, _en route_ for London. The coachman was making his leaders and the off-wheeler canter, the guard was _tootle-tooing_ on his horn; the townspeople stood at their doors and the inn gates, sleepily watching the coach that had come from great Norwich and was going to still greater London, and sleepily waving their hands to proud Walter, who had begged for an outside place, instead of being shut up in the stuffy inside with Mamma and Phoebe and an old gentleman, who wore a bandana under his fur travelling-cap, and got out for refreshment at every inn at which the coach stopped to change horses, munching ham sandwiches and drinking cold brandy and water almost without intermission when the coach was in motion. Walter had a much pleasanter companion in the coachman, behind whom he sat, and who told him stories about the gentlemen's seats they passed, and gave him the biographies of all the horses, and even let him hold the reins sometimes, when Mr. Jehu got down at a roadside house to deliver a parcel or drink a glass of ale. Walter enjoyed the first part of the journey exceedingly, but he was very tired and sleepy before it was over.
As the coach swung through Mile End turnpike, the coachman woke him up with a back thrust of the butt-end of his whip, and said,
"Now, then, squire, you can reckon yourself in London."
Walter just opened his heavy eyes, and then shut them again--not thinking much of the Great City, if _that_ was London. By the time the coach got to its inn, he was so sound asleep again that a waiter had to carry him up to bed. The ride from Norfolk to London, however, was flying on eagles' wings compared with the voyage from London to Sydney. In those days the magnificent steamers and sailing clippers that now arrive almost daily at or from Australia had not been dreamt of. At long intervals clumsy old tubs of ships and barques sailed for the far-off southern land, pottered about for months at sea, and at last turned up at the Antipodes, seemingly more through good luck than good management. The barque in which our party sailed was named the _Atalanta_. Walter had often read through the proper names at the end of his Latin dictionary, and was greatly amused by the barque's flying name when he found how she crawled. She had to put in at Plymouth, Lisbon, Bona Vista, Rio, and the Cape. She was just half a year and half a month in getting from the Nore to Port Jackson Heads.
Once inside the Heads, however, even Mrs. Daventry and Phoebe picked up a little spirit, and Walter was in ecstasies. Both sky and water were so brightly blue, the islands sprinkled on the water looked so pretty, and, though the trees seemed almost as black as ink to English eyes, the rocky, wooded shores, sweeping down to the little coves and bays, beached with white sand that shone like silver under the glowing sun, had a fairyland-like look. Sydney then had not the fine buildings it boasts of now, but the town was so much more civilized in appearance than Mrs. Daventry and Phoebe expected, and the little country houses, that even then had begun to dot the south side of the harbour, were such darling little nests, that both mistress and maid fell in love with Sydney. Captain Daventry came on board as the _Atalanta_ let go her anchor in Sydney Cove. He was very brown, and he had a long curly beard. He was dressed more lightly than he would have been at home, but still he was dressed, and like a gentleman. A horrid load was lifted from Mrs. Daventry's mind, since she had half given in to Phoebe's belief that Master would only wear a bit of 'possum or kangaroo skin about his loins, and that he would carry a spear instead of a walking-stick. As for Walter, he was very proud of the brown manly-looking Papa whom he had not seen since he was almost a baby.
"Oh, Walter," cried Mrs. Daventry to her husband, when the kissing was over, "I hope your farm is close by. I used to think that they sent the convicts out here because it was a hideously ugly hole, but this is a love of a place."
"It's nicer to look at than to live in," the captain answered. "What with convicts and emancipists, you'd soon be sick of living in Sydney. No, my grant is some miles up-country. There's a nasty swarm of ticket-of-leavers round it, but, of course, you'll have nothing to do with them. And then there are some good fellows of our sort within reach--some of them married, too. What a time you've been! I was down two months ago looking out for you. It's quite by chance I'm down now. However, there'll be room on the dray for your luggage, if you haven't brought out a ship-load, and we'll start home to-morrow, if one night will be rest enough for you. I've been buying some horses, and you and Walter can ride two of them, and help me to drive the rest. You'll be better off than you were before you married me, old lady. You had only one horse then, but I can give you your pick out of a dozen or two now. Of course Walter has learnt to stick on a horse somehow, though you couldn't keep a pony for him? The girl will have to learn to ride, too, if she wants to get about up-country. In the meantime she can go up on the dray. The bullock-driver is an assigned servant, but he's as true as steel, and that's more than I can say for some of the beggars I've got."
But when the loaded dray was brought to the inn door next morning, with a chair on it for Phoebe, she had learnt that assigned servant meant convict, and refused at first to take her seat. She wasn't going to have her throat cut with her eyes open, she screamed. The bullock-driver, Long Steve, was a good-tempered fellow, and did his best to calm her.
"Why, law bless ye, miss," he said, "I've got an old 'ooman an' half a dozen kids. What call have I got to do any harm to a pretty gal like you?"
But flattery was thrown away on Phoebe. She entreated her mistress not to leave her to the tender mercies of that wicked-looking man, and made such a fuss that at last her master was obliged to say,
"Well, look here, Phoebe. If you don't go in the dray, you must either stay in Sydney, or walk, or ride one of the horses. Take your choice--which shall it be?"
Phoebe mounted the dray then, and though it was night when she reached her journey's end, she was on quite good terms with Long Steve when he helped her off the dray. She had been talking to him for hours, half condescendingly, half propitiatingly, thinking all the time what a capital adventure it would be to relate in her first letter home. In that letter Phoebe made out that Long Steve had committed half a dozen murders, whereas the honest fellow had never committed one. A great many terrible scamps were sent out to Australia in the old convict times, but, mixed up with them, there were men who were far better fellows than many of the people left at home.
Late in the afternoon the Captain and his party reached his farm. "Oh, what a first-rate broad!" Walter, fresh from Norfolk, exclaimed, when the riders had mounted the top of the shore-hills, and were looking down on the lagoon which the farm fringed--a lagoon with thickly-wooded banks, cleared here and there, a little stream running into it at one end, and at the other a sandy bar over which the sea was breaking.
Mrs. Daventry was delighted at first with her new home. A pretty flower-garden sloped down to the lagoon, and the verandah of the snug one-storey house of brick and weather-board was smothered in passion-flower. The Captain had furnished the house as comfortably as he could for his wife, and altogether it seemed a much smarter, livelier place than the dark old house in the dull, grass-grown side-street of the little Norfolk town where she had been economizing whilst her husband was first doing military duty, and afterwards building this snug nest in New South Wales. There was no need, apparently, to economize now. Beef and mutton were the commonest of things at Daventry Hall. Cream, butter, eggs, honey, pigs, poultry, fish and game were all to be got, to almost any extent, upon the premises. Besides English vegetables, there were pumpkins and sweet potatoes in the kitchen garden. There was a nice vineyard, which Walter mistook at first for a field of currant-bushes; and in the orchard there were raspberries and strawberries and mulberries, pears and pomegranates, figs and plums and loquats, oranges and lemons, peaches, apricots and nectarines, and gigantic rock and water melons. Walter thought of the scanty pennyworths of sour apples that he used to get in Norfolk, and for a week or two devastated the orchard and the vineyard like a 'possum or a flying-fox. As soon as it was known that Mrs. Daventry had arrived, the Captain's friends and their wives rode over to Daventry Hall, and then there was a round of dinners at the friends' houses, and then the Captain gave dinners in return, and both Mrs. Daventry and Phoebe were delighted with the gaiety. But when things settled into everyday course, and, as often happened, Captain Daventry was away from home for hours together, they both began to fall back into their old dread of Australia. Mrs. Daventry had been proud at first of having so many servants inside and outside the house, but it was not pleasant to remember that all except Phoebe were convicts. Captain Daventry was a strict, but then not a severe master, and so he got on pretty well with his assigned servants, but in all their faces--except Long Steve's and his wife's--there was a shallow, time-serving look, however cringingly civil they might be, that was not assuring.