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Philiberta: A Novel

Chapter XXVIII. A Shepherd

page 192

Chapter XXVIII. A Shepherd.

On the evening of the same day Philiberta descried, some little distance still ahead, a shepherd's hut; and knew that she had successfully followed the Moffit boundary-rider's terse directions as to route.

The inhabitant of the hut beheld her while yet afar off, and came leisurely forward to meet her on her nearer approach.

'Got any bacca?' were his first words.

'Not any,' replied Philiberta.

'Good God! fancy a chap travelling without. Any liquor?'

'None.' 'Then what the devil did you come here for?' cried the man angrily, while his great eyes, almost wolfish a moment before, now grew misty with disappointment. 'I beg your pardon, mister,' then said he, dropping his voice pathetically, 'but my bacca's been out for the last three days, and this month's rations haven't been sent along yet. It sours a man, that does. The way I want a bit o' bacca is worse than hunger, blest if it isn't.'

'Have you tried gum leaves?' said Philiberta, remembering that she had heard of them as a good substitute for the bushman's consolation.

'Yes, I travelled over to a dwarf gum patch the night before last after the sheep had gone to roost. I dried the leaves in a shovel over the fire, and have both smoked and chewed them ever since. They're better than nothing, but they ain't satisfying; no, they ain't satisfying. Ain't you going to get down?'

'Why, yes,' said Philiberta, dismounting with some trepidation; she was anxious to preserve her disguise thoroughly here, and felt scarcely sure of herself yet. 'I suppose you won't mind camping me for the night.'

'Oh, it makes no difference to me, only it's short commons here until the rations are sent along. No sugar for the tea, no salt for the damper. Flour's low, but there's plenty of mutton; I killed a sheep only yesterday.'

'Oh, I don't mind a little inconvenience, if you are quite page 193sure I shall not put you to any,' said Philiberta, flinging her rein over her arm and endeavouring to walk with a careless masculine swagger.

'Steal them togs?' inquired the shepherd, eyeing her outfit curiously.

'I beg pardon?' 'Them clothes—did ye steal 'em?'

'No, I did not. Why?'

''Cause it looks to me they was made for a bigger chap than you.'

'Oh, I dare say,' said Philiberta, with an assumption of indifference. 'I've been down with brackish water cholera, and it has thinned me a little.'

'Yes? Shortened you a bit too, I should say. But it don't signify to me—why should it?' said the shepherd, evidently mistrusting her explanation, but still unsuspicious about her sex. 'If ye'd like a smoke, here's an old pipe; but there's only gum leaves, ye know.'

'Thanks, but I don't smoke.'

'Might ha' known that. No smoker would ever travel without tobacco. Would ye like some tea?'

'Indeed I should. It is dry hot work crossing the plains. I got through the bottle of cold tea I started with before the day was half gone. I am very thirsty now.'

'By George! Yonder's Jingaree with the rations,' exclaimed the shepherd, looking out across the country with that farsighted gaze that only comes to men who scan endless wastes of flat land, or great expanses of blue ocean, day after day and month after month, without a break. 'Up with your pecker, mister; you won't come off so badly after all. And I shall get my bacca, thank God!' Impossible to convey any idea of the earnest gratitude expressed in those two words.

Presently a good-looking young half-caste rode up leading a pack-horse by the bridle.

'What the —— do you mean by being two days behind time, you thundering ugly black rot?' shouted the shepherd in greeting. 'For two pins I'd lock you up in the hut here and starve you to death, you cursed fluke!'

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The lad only grinned all over his face, and set to work easing his horses.

'One bottle square gin, by Gosh!' said he, carefully and reverently unpacking the same. 'That set you up, old fellah, eh? Misser Brown say, before you get drunk, you please not forget tell Sandie and Darkie' (the two sheep dogs) 'take good care of sheep till you get sober again. Baccy here, sugar here, tea, salt, flour; all right. Dam good thing be shepherd for Misser Brown, my word!' He was off again at a gallop. 'Good-bye.'

'Now,' said the shepherd, with a sigh of positive happiness, 'if you don't mind, mate, I'll have just one whiff before the billy boils. Lord! how I did need it!'

'I can make the tea,' said Philiberta, preparing to do so; 'I can cook the chops and damper too.'

'I dessay,' remarked the shepherd, watching her contentedly through a vile-smelling blue cloud of smoke. Tobacco was as inferior in quality as most other provisions up there. 'I dessay. You look so blessed fit. By George! but you are a delicate-looking specimen to be alone on the wallaby track, and no mistake. Was you chief cook and bottle-washer at your last billet, may I ask?'

'No, I was not,' replied Philiberta, affecting impatient annoyance. 'And it isn't my fault I look poor. I told you I'd been laid up with cholera; you ought to know how that sort of thing pulls a fellow down.'

'Oh well, no harm. Don't get mad about a bit of chaff. You needn't bother about damper. I made an extra lot this morning. I'll fry the mutton. Sit down: you look regularly knocked up, my boy. Lie down there in my bunk. I'll look after the tea.'

Philiberta obeyed gladly enough, poor soul; for she was well nigh fainting from weakness and unwonted fatigue.

The shepherd worried her no more with queries or remarks, but plied her kindly with such hospitality as lay in his power, and hobbled her horse so that the animal might not get too far astray. Philiberta wrapped herself well in the bunk blankets, page 195more with a view to concealing herself than to secure warmth, and slept as surely as she had never slept in her life before.

When she awoke the sun was high, and the hut empty. A fire was burning in the broad sod fireplace that filled up one end of the hut; and the billy was steaming away furiously on the hook suspended from the cross bar in the chimney. On, the hearth stood the frying-pan, with the inevitable slice of leg of mutton hissing softly therein; on the rough slab table stood a huge corner of damper, and the usual pannikin-and-tin-plate table-service.

Philiberta dragged her stiffened limbs from the bunk and had some breakfast. How good everything tasted, for all it was so rough and she so tired. The day had not attained its full heat yet; a life-giving breeze swept in at the open door of the hut. A slow-shifting whitey-brown line afar off revealed the shepherd's whereabouts. A nearer object of vision was Philiberta's horse, well hobbled, and trying to make out a fair breakfast upon the close-cropped, already brown grass. A sense of restful peace pervaded everything, and crept in with the soft silent breeze upon a sorely tired weak woman.

'I will camp here to-day,' she said, contriving an impromptu couch with the blankets, in front of the doorway, so that she might get every possible whiff of the delicious air. 'I could not go far if I tried, so stiff am I with yesterday's journey. I will rest here all day.'

The shepherd came in about sunset.

'Putting in another day?' said he.

'Yes; I felt too stiff to go on.'

'Glad you stopped,' he said heartily. 'I wouldn't mind if you were too knocked up for a week. Things ain't so dal'd lively up here that one gets easy sick of company.'

'I expect you find it rather lonely sometimes.'

'Lonely! Look here,' said the man, lowering his voice to an earnest undertone. 'Look here, it gets so lonely sometimes that I've got to make company.'

'And how do you do it?' asked Philiberta, somewhat startled by his sudden manner.

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'How do I do it? Why, I just think out to myself who I'd most like to see, and I begin to think hard about them, and I call them once or twice, and, by God! there they are!'

He spoke this so sharply that Philiberta sprang to her feet.

'Oh, not now, I don't mean,' said the shepherd, reassuringly. 'Not now, but when I call them. The only difficulty is,' he continued confidentially, 'they won't come alone. They used to at first, you know, and then we got on all right, but lately I can't call one of 'em but a whole mob crops up. Scores of 'em; hundreds of 'em; the plain gets covered with 'em; and the tramp of 'em sounds worse than a mob of sheep in a dark stampede. Did you ever hear a mob of sheep run round on a dark night when they'd been startled?'—'Yes.'

Philiberta knew that weird sound well—the dull awful rush of thousands of small hoofs going round and round in a panic-stricken circle.

'Well, it's like that, only worse.'

'Don't you think square gin has something to do with it?' said Philiberta.

'If it wasn't for square gin,' answered the shepherd mournfully, 'square gin and bacca, mate, I should soon never hear nothing again. Without square gin and bacca what is there to keep a chap from swinging himself with his leather belt in his own doorway?'

Philiberta understood the case well enough. In the old bush days she had heard of such things often.

How could any man spend the days and the weeks and the months and the years in that unutterable monotony—seeing nothing human save once a month perhaps, having no company but those maddeningly stupid masses of wool, and the dogs—(heavens! what a boon beyond price are those dogs to those men!)—how could any man live that life, with its one occasional break—a 'spree' and delirium tremens—and continue sane? This man's worst time was yet to come. Philiberta, deeply sorry for him, prayed in her heart that it might be wholly averted as she bade him farewell early next morning and rode away, followed, until out of sight, by his big, yearning, lonely eyes.