by Zane Grey
“Eric, you’ve lost your temper,” replied Stanley, severely. “Calm yourself. These cowboys have been a help to me, not a detriment. As others — and you — have been!”
Eric Dann’s visage grew purple.
“By God, I’ll turn back!” he shouted.
“But that wagon and team are mine,” rejoined Stanley Dann, controlling evident heat.
“I don’t care. I’ll take them. I’ve earned them on this infernal trek!”
Red Krehl slid off his horse.
“Bah! It’s a bluff, boss. He hasn’t got the nerve.”
“Wait, Krehl,” ordered Stanley Dann. “Eric, what is it you want?”
“You brought me on this trek as partner and guide,” hoarsely shouted Eric.
“Yes, I did.”
“Then hold to that contract or I’ll leave you!”
“Eric, I was not aware that I had broken it. Very well, I will hold to it — come what may,” returned the leader.
“It’s understood that I am the guide?”
“Yes. But you must guide us. Once more, for the last time, do you know this country?”
“Yes, I do,” rasped Eric, passionately, yet he gulped as if something had stuck in his throat. “In a general way, I mean. This is an enormously vast country...”
“Yeah, an’ you know it?” interrupted Red, with stinging scorn.
“Yes, I know it, you — you—” burst out the goaded drover, foaming at the mouth.
“Dann, you’re a —— liar! Go for yore gun — if you got the guts!”
“KREHL!” thundered the leader.
“Too late, boss. Stay where you air. Come on, Mr. Eric Dann, throw yore gun!”
Pale-faced instead of red now, gasping and speechless, Eric Dann turned to spread wide his hands, appealing to the leader.
“Let this end here!” commanded Dann.
“All right, boss, it’s ended,” replied Red, curtly. “But I’ll bet you live to see the day you wish it’d ended my way!”
And they trekked into the hills. Days without end before what seemed to be the pass; Sterl lost track of days. By now, Slyter, beating down the opposition of Eric Dann, had insisted that the wagons go ahead; for in places they had actually to improvise roads. Sometimes three miles a day were good going. The cattle found little grass and took to browsing. Many of them strayed. The drovers rode herd at night in five-hour shifts. Slyter’s second wagon, with Roland driving, went over a steep bank. He escaped, but the horses had to be shot. Often at night Sterl and Red could find no level place to pitch their tent. They would drop on the ground, cover their heads against mosquitoes and sleep like logs nevertheless. More and more, Sterl inclined to the truth of Red’s caustic forecast.
The nightmare days up a V-shaped valley which led to the deceiving pass. And then the trek seemed halted for good. Eric and Larry and Slyter returned in defeat from their scouting. But Friday, last to get back, galvanized their low spirits and energies.
“Go alonga me,” he said, and the black had never failed them yet.
They hitched six horses to a wagon, and with a drover on each side, pulling with a lasso, and whipping the teams, hauled over the “saddle” which had blocked them. It took all the rest of that day to get the other wagons over. The mob had to be left behind in the valley until the morrow.
Riding across that saddle, Sterl groaned his disappointment at the apparently impenetrable labyrinth of jungle and rock-ribbed confines ahead. Ten miles or more of incredibly rough going stretched ahead — a distance that might as well have been ten times that — and then a gap and a blue void. And then — another conference.
“We will go on,” declared Stanley Dann. “We can’t get through,” averred Slyter. “I’ve missed the — the way,” added Eric Dann, falteringly.
No one paid any attention to him.
“Larry, Bligh, what do you say?” queried the leader.
They replied practically in unison that it looked very bad, well-nigh impassable. “Hazelton?” he boomed.
“Boss, we can’t go back,” said Sterl. “Krehl, what do you think?”
“Me? Wal, I ain’t thinkin’ atall,” drawled the cowboy.
“Don’t bandy ridicule with me!” roared Stanley Dann.
“All right, boss. Excoose me. I ain’t no mule-haid. I think we must find a way out thet we cain’t see from heah.”
“Right! Men, look for a place where we can camp.”
They camped on the right side of the saddle at the base of a rugged slope. Firewood and water had to be carried up, a job Red and Sterl took upon themselves. There were no idle hands any more. Even Beryl helped Mrs. Slyter and Bill.
“You’ve only begun to pick up,” said Sterl to her that evening. “Please rest.”
“Sterl, I’ll do my bit,” replied Beryl, smiling up at him. She might not have realized that she was telling him she had begun to learn a great lesson of life. How frail she looked, yet her sad face seemed lovelier than ever! She had courage — that thing Sterl respected more than all else in man or woman. If she lived she would come through this fire pure gold.
He went out along the saddle to look for Leslie. He met her climbing the slope on foot, in the track of the wagons, lithe and supple, clear-eyed as a falcon, her drover’s garb ragged and soiled.
“Howdy, Sterl. Been worrying about me?” she panted.
“No, Les. Only King and the remuda.”
“King, Jester, Duke, Lady Jane, all tiptop. Sorrel is lame. Count is fagged out. Sterl, will we ever, ever get through this pass?”
“I don’t know — and don’t care much.”
“Sterl! — that’s not like you. Oh, dear boy, you’re worn out!”
“Les, you and Beryl make me feel a little ashamed,” replied Sterl.
“Sterl, you and Red all through this terrible year have filled my heart, and Beryl’s, and Mum’s with courage to carry on. Small wonder that you lag a little now! But don’t fail me, Sterl. And don’t let Red fail Beryl. It is he who has saved her — who is changing her very soul...Sterl, would you mind — holding me a bit — as you used to?”
But Sterl evaded that, despite the warmth she stirred in his heart, and made excuses, and talking kindly to her he led her to camp. Darkness fell upon silent trekkers, some going to their beds and others about their jobs, and all with spirits bowed but not broken.
It took all the next morning to drove the mob over the “saddle.” Friday had returned from a scout. To Stanley Dann he spread his wonderful, sinewy black hands, fingers wide. “Boss, might be cattle go alonga dere,” he said, and manifestly he meant they should separate and streak through various channels to whatever lay at the end of that green maze. So like a great waterfall the mob poured off the “saddle,” to roll and clatter down, to disappear almost at will in the jungle.
Then began the feverish and ceaseless labor of fourteen men to chop and build a road for six wagons through ten miles of wilderness jungle.
It dwarfed all their former labors. After five days of digging, chopping, carrying rocks, packing supplies, wading in mud and water and grass, all the toilers except Stanley Dann and Slyter forgot about the cattle and horses. Every day Friday, whose duty it was to report on the mob would say: “Cattle along dere farder,” and that day when he said: “Cattle gone!” not one of the trekkers betrayed anxiety. It was now a battle for their lives.
In daylight, the flies were almost as fierce as at the forks, and at night the mosquitoes were so thick and bloodthirsty that they would have killed an unprotected man. The second cook practically died on his feet, sticking it out with fever and dysentery, and then collapsing. Monkton was bitten by a death adder and for days his life was despaired of.
In the middle of that jungle Eric Dann made a startling proposal.
“We should abandon the wagons and pack out!”
Stanley Dann, soiled and sweaty and bedraggled, gazed at this blood kin of his with great, amber eyes that had not lost their magnificent light.
; “What about the women?” he asked.
“They can ride horseback. I asked Beryl. She said she could,” returned Eric, eagerly.
“We are two thousand miles from anywhere. Beryl would die.”
“If she gave out — we could carry her!” exclaimed this extraordinary man.
The giant shook his shaggy golden head, wearily, as if it was useless to listen to his brother.
“We can’t get through,” bawled Eric Dann, his voice rising. “I climbed up to see. We’re not halfway! Man, would you sacrifice us all for your worthless daughter?”
Red Krehl leaped upon Dann and felled him. He would have kicked the man, too, but for a sharp cry. Beryl and Leslie had heard and seen. But it could not silence him.
“Dann, I’m gonna kill this brother of yores yet,” bitterly predicted the cowboy.
“Red, don’t kill Uncle Eric. Not for me!” cried Beryl, passionately. “I’m not worth it. I was a fool. I was vain, brazen, mad! But Uncle Eric only knows the half. I planned with Ash Ormiston — that he should seem to steal me from my bed. He meant to kill anyone who opposed him — especially to kill Uncle Eric, with whom he had plotted. I agreed to go with him, to save Uncle Eric’s life, to save Dad from ruin, if not worse. But Ormiston betrayed me. He stole Dad’s cattle. He would have murdered Uncle Eric but for me. He — He...”
She broke down then. Leslie led her away from the stunned group of men. Eric Dann slunk away under the trees. Of all present, Sterl thought, his friend Red seemed the most staggered by Beryl’s revelation. It was not in his case, as in that of the others, that Beryl’s participation in Ormiston’s plot had come to light. Red had known that! He had kept it secret even from Sterl. But now he knew why the girl had betrayed him and her father and all of them.
After what seemed a long silence Stanley Dann said: “Men, we are being sorely tried, but let us not lose our faith in God and in each other. Krehl, I thank you, but I disagree, with my daughter. She is worth — all she declared she was not.”
“Wal, boss, if you ask me, I kinda reckon so myself,” returned Red Krehl, ponderingly.
“All of you back to work. We are goin’ through!” boomed the leader.
Sterl bent for his shovel and whispered to his friend: “Pard, now my job is to keep you from being shot in the back!”
Before many more hours passed that break in their toil, with its resurgence of lulled passions, was forgotten in sheer physical exhaustion.
But at last, and when the trekkers were sunk to their lowest ebb, Friday found a gateway for them out into the open. They faced vastly different country from that which Eric Dann had pictured to them. A few miles below a gentle green slope, out upon a velvet green down, Stanley Dann’s mob of cattle grazed in a great colorful patch. Beyond them spread endless other downs dotted with clumps of pandanuses and palms, streaked by black fringes of trees, bisected from league to league by shining threads of water, and bordered by limitless purple horizon. They were all so overjoyed to get clear of that awful jungle that no one of them asked audibly where they were. Only Sterl thought of what Eric Dann had sworn — that the country beyond the range would be the same as that at the headwaters of the Diamantina.
CHAPTER 24
DAYS OF LEISURELY and comfortable going now, over level downs with grass and water abundant but firewood so scarce that whenever they found any deadwood Bill collected it for the next camp. But one jarring fact — in a week’s trekking they reached a point opposite the flattening out of that range whose crossing had cost them so many supplies, so much toil and life. By a week’s detour, they could have gone round it. Six weeks more than lost!
Late one afternoon, the black, ragged line that had gradually grown for days turned out to be a good-sized river. It flowed north. It presented a problem, not only to cross, but because the water, flowing the wrong way, upset their calculations. The Warburton, for which Dann thought he was trekking, would have flowed due west. According to the leader’s rude map, when they crossed it they would be headed north to a point between the Never-never Land and the Gulf and would cross the headwaters of all the streams flowing into the Gulf. At Dann’s conference, the first for a long time, Eric Dann asserted positively. “This is the Flinders River. Probably we are two or three hundred miles from the Gulf.”
“Flinders River? Gulf?” echoed Stanley, aghast. “That means salt water, crocodiles and cannibal abo’s!”
“Gosh!” ejaculated Red Krehl. “Boss, of course, hunches mean nothin’ atall to you. But let’s follow mine an’ rustle back onto dry land.”
Any suggestion of the cowboy’s was to Eric Dann like a red flag to a bull.
“Stanley, it’s along the fringe of the Never-never that bad blacks are to be encountered,” he said, impressively.
“How do you know that?” demanded the leader intensely.
“I know it,” returned Eric, stubbornly. “What is your objective?”
“Southeast of Port Darwin,” answered the brother, glibly, “there are fertile ranges. We can choose to stop there, if you like, and send in to Darwin for supplies. I think you will decide for this site instead of the Kimberleys.”
“Yes, true enough,” mused the leader. “We have that information from more than one reliable source. I could always move on to the Kimberleys. Eric, you have made mistakes — this last one, terrible! But in your heart are you speaking honestly?”
Before that stern and just leader, the hawk-eyed cowboys, and the dubious Slyter with his drovers, Eric Dann solemnly asserted his truth. What — Sterl wondered — was his game?
The river, which Leslie called the Muddy, appeared to be fresh water, though it had a weedy taste, and the middle channel had to be swum. Neither accident nor injury marked the crossing of the wagons and the herd, though it took four days of persistent labor.
Leslie and Beryl, with Friday, had been left for the last. Stanley Dann sent the cowboys Larry and Rollie back for them.
“Where’s a horse for me to ride?” demanded Beryl, as the bedraggled riders waded their horses out to the bank.
“Boss’s order is for us to pack you over,” replied Larry, uneasily.
To Sterl’s surprise, and certainly to Red’s, Beryl acquiesced without further remark.
“Red, I’d feel safer with you on Duke. He’s so big,” said Beryl, casually. “Besides you have carried me already.”
Sterl leaped off to help Beryl up in front of Red. Red put his left arm around her, and Beryl put her right arm around his neck. Anyway Sterl looked at the position it was an embrace, reluctant on Red’s part, subtly willing on Beryl’s. She laid her head back and looked up at him.
“Red, it won’t take long,” said Sterl, in cheery significance. But he did not mean to trip across.
“I don’t care how long it takes — if only...” murmured Beryl, with a hint of her old audacity.
Red’s reaction was as natural as his sincerity was hidden. “Slope along, Duke,” he drawled. “Pick out that deep hole, fall in, an’ never come up!”
Red entered the river with Larry close on one side and Rollie on the other. Leslie waited for Sterl, who watched the trio ahead for a moment before he started. Then he became aware of Leslie’s poignant joy at sight of Beryl in the cowboy’s arms.
“Oh, Sterl! Isn’t love wonderful?” she sighed, dreamily.
“It must be. I can’t speak from personal experience, as evidently you can. But real love must be wonderful.”
“That’s true, you devil!” flashed Leslie, disrupted from her sweet trance, and rode ahead of him, splashing the water in great sheets.
Sterl idled along, reflecting sadly that this little byplay had been the first pleasantry, the first lessening of the raw tension, for many a week.
Dann’s caravan covered in five days some fifty miles of green downs, not one long or short stretch differing noticeably from any other. Its beauty palled, its sameness irritated the nerves; its monotony grew unbearable.
But on that fifth day darker and app
arently, higher ground broke the level horizon. Two more days’ travel proved that it consisted of low ridges and round areas covered with dense but scrubby timber. No blue foothills, however, loomed above the wandering black line of scrub. And the day came when Sterl, gazing backward, could no longer see the shadowy, purple ranges. They kept on to the northwest, traveling by compass.
“Slyter,” said Sterl, at Blue Grass camp, “if we are trekking through this country to get to the headwaters of the Warburton — it’s all right. But if we’re trekking deeper into these downs...”
“Red says if we follow this four-flusher Eric Dann much farther we’ll be lost.”
“We’re the same as lost now, Sterl. But I won’t nag Stanley any more. He’s set. We’re going through, he swears. Says to remember the bad times before — how we always came out.”
Days and days and days! And dark cool dewy nights, when the stars blazed white, the bitterns boomed from the reed-bordered lakes and streams, and the owls hooted dismally in the pandanus scrub! The moon soared in the sky, blanching the endless downs. Solitude reigned. Sterl fought a feeling that they had reached the end of the world. Insupportably slowly the trek went on into this forbidding land of grass.
They came at length into a stranger, blacker, wilder country.
The dense growth of bush denoted a river — a river somewhere beyond the dark fringe of giant ash trees and bloodwoods and enormous trees with multiple trunks grotesque and gnarled. They camped where a huge wide-spreading banyan afforded a thick green canopy for the whole caravan. A boiling spring of sweet water ran away from the bank of bushland, forming a little stream that meandered away toward a pale lake, black and white with waterfowl. Kookaburras flew under the trees, perched on branches to watch the intruders, but they were silent. And that strange feature alone affected the morbid trekkers. The sun slanted in what appeared the wrong direction. Sterl was completely turned around. Red wearily said he did not give a damn and that he wished what was going to happen would come pronto.
Friday appeared at suppertime. There was that in his mien to induce awe. All the trekkers mutely interrogated him; then the leader asked, “What ho, Friday?”