by Zane Grey
Silently the five rose from behind the fringe of brush to peer through rents and over the top. Sterl was surprised to see a wide stretch of water, mirroring three fires and fantastic figures of dancing aborigines. The camp was fully two hundred yards distant. There were three fires around which a hundred or more moved in strange gyrations, filling the air with solemn and discordant chant. Yet it had a peculiar rhythm. It was symbolic. The smell of roasting meat pervaded the atmosphere, and did not divert the attention from movement and music that must have been ritual. They were wild men. That they were not actually beasts—that there was hope for their dark and undeveloped brains lay in the presence of Friday, the black man, who had led the white avengers to the attack. The distance was about a hundred yards.
“Plenty black fella,” whispered Friday in tense excitement. “Big corroboree! Full debbil along hoss meat! Bimeby bad!”
“I should snicker to snort,” whispered Red. “Mebbe he means thet hossflesh has gone stale. They want long-pig! Let’s frame it thet way.”
Sibilant whispers attested to the three drovers, roused to grim, death-dealing mood. Sterl said: “It’s a cinch they’ll roast us next!”
“All right, heah’s the deal,” whispered Red tensely. “It’s a long shot. But we’re bound to pile some of them. Make shore of yore first shot. Then empty yore rifles pronto, reload, an’ we’ll slope. Ben, take the extreme right. Rollie, you next. Then Larry…pard Sterl, forget yore Injun-lovin’ weakness, an’ shoot like you could, if one of us was in there roastin’ on the coals.”
They cocked and raised their rifles. Sterl drew down upon a dense group of dark figures huddled together, swaying in unison.
“One…two…three…shoot!” hissed Red.
The rifles cracked. Instantly there ensured a terrific scene of terror and shrieking activity. Pandemonium broke loose. The aboriginals knocked against each other in their mad rush. And a merciless fire poured into them. Sterl’s ears dulled to the cracking volleys. On each side of him flame and smoke belched forth. Sterl aimed and shot as swiftly as his faculties permitted. When his rifle was hot and empty, he peered through the smoke. Red was still shooting, using his shotgun now. One of the drovers was doing likewise. From the circle of light, gliding black forms vanished. But around the fires lay prone aborigines, and many wrestling, writhing, shrieking.
“Slope…fellers.” Red ordered huskily, and they turned away on the run. Friday led the way. Sterl followed closely. The drovers thudded behind. They ran swiftly at first, then gradually slowed down. The grass tripped them. Red fell headlong. Larry followed suit. At length, the cowboy halted from exhaustion.
“Reckon we’re out of reach of them spears,” he gasped. “I ain’t used to runnin’. Wal, did it work?”
“Work? It was a massacre,” declared Benson in hoarse, broken accents.
“Ground was…covered with abo’s,” added Larry.
Rollie exclaimed in deep, inaudible words that were eloquent without being distinguishable. Sterl kept his thoughts to himself. Such liberation of passionate deadly instinct had its reaction. “Let’s rustle for camp,” added Red. “They’ll all be scared stiff.”
His premonition had ample vindication. There was no sight of anyone in camp until Friday ran into the firelight. Then they all appeared from under the wagon.
“What the hell?” boomed Dann, rifle in hand, as he stalked out.
“Were you attacked?” Slyter queried sharply.
Beryl ran straight into Red, to throw her arms around him, then sink limply upon his breast. Red upheld her, while he looked over her head at the frightened drovers.
“Boss, the abo’s didn’t stalk us,” he said. “We went after them. It jest had to be done.”
Red appeared to realize that he had a girl in his arms. She had not fainted, as was manifest in her movement, when she gazed up at Red and slipped her hands down to his coat. She was beyond thinking of what her actions betrayed.
“We blasted hell out of them,” declared Benson. “And it was a good thing.”
“Hazelton, are you dumb?” asked Slyter testily, his strain relaxing.
“Wholesale murder, boss,” replied Sterl. “But justifiable. When we saw them dancing ’round their fires…. Well, Friday intimated that we might be roasting next on their spits.”
“Oh, Red!” cried Beryl. “I thought you had broken your promise…that you might be….”
A heart of flint would have melted at her faltering voice, so pregnant with love, if it could have withstood the white face and darkly dilated eyes.
“Umpumm, Beryl,” Red returned, visibly moved as he released himself and steadied her on her feet. “We was shore crazy, but took no chances. Mebbe we done them pore devils wrong when we figgered them cannibals. But, honest, I had thet hunch…. Beryl, you an’ Leslie can feel shore thet bunch of abo’s won’t hound us again.”
Red’s prediction turned out to be true. There were no more raids on the horses, no more smoke signals on the horizon. But days had to pass before the drovers believed in their deliverance.
They trekked off the downs into mulga and spinifex country, covered with good grass, fairly well watered, and dotted with dwarf gums and fig and pandamus trees. The ground was gradually rising, but the low hills that had been seen from the downs could not be sighted.
They came next into a region of anthills. Many a field of these queer, earthier habitations had been passed through, but this one gave unparalleled and remarkable evidence of the fecundity and energy of the wood- and leaf-eating ants. The hills shone gray and yellow in the sunlight. They were of every conceivable size and shape, up to the height of three tall men, and broad in proportion. In shape they were round, domed, fluted, or square. Each one had been built around and over a stump. They did not stand close together, yet they appeared to be as numerous as the gum trees they subsisted on. At night they shone ghostly in the starlight. Sterl found that every dead log he cut into was only a shell—that the interior had been eaten away. And from every dead branch or part of a live tree poured forth an army of black or red ants, furious at the invasion of their homes.
At last Sterl understood the reason for Australia’s magnificent eucalyptus trees, predominating everywhere in greater or lesser degree. In the ages past, during the evolution of this oldest continent, nature had developed the gum tree with its many varieties, but all secreting the poisonous eucalyptus oil, as defensive a characteristic as the spines on a cactus. Other trees had developed a hardness of fiber that was impervious to the ravages of ants.
In due course, the trekkers camped on a range of low hills, with a watercourse which gave them an easy grade. Followed to its source, that stream led to a divide. Water here ran toward the west. That was such a tremendous circumstance, so significant in its power to stir almost dead hopes, that Dann called a halt where the pass widened out. They pitched camp to rest, to recuperate, to make much needed repairs, and to try to recapture something of that spirit which they felt had been blunted, if not broken.
The highest hill near that camp was not a mountain, but from its summit, four or five hundred feet up, next morning Sterl and Slyter, accompanied by Friday, gazed out to the west with awe and fear.
Down in camp the last preparations for a start were being made. Dann was waiting for a report on the land ahead. The trek had achieved another crisis, perhaps the most important of all. If any direction for the drovers could be more unknown than another, this west was it.
“It is that unknown country beyond Outback Australia!” exclaimed Slyter, and there was awe in his tone.
The black man, Friday, made a slow, grand gesture which seemed symbolic of the infinite. Indeed, this abyss resembled the void of the sky. Sterl had feeling enough left in him to be deeply moved. But not by appreciation of beauty! It was an appalling vision of immensity and endlessness.
The early morning was hot, clear, windless. No dust or haze obstructed his view. Beneath and beyond him yawned what seemed a thousand leagues of green
-patched, white-striped slope, leading down, down to a nothingness.
That emptiness out there struck at Sterl’s intelligence. It was nature’s secret. It did not mean to be solved. It was the last stronghold of the elements. It had taken hundreds of millions of years to evolve into what it was, and it seemed to flaunt a changeless inhospitality in the face of man.
But if it was not verdant, it certainly was not barren. Sterl could make sense of the land that his gaze commanded. The stream which flowed out of the pass meandered through a parklike bushland. It shone like a waving ribbon in the sun. Sterl made sure of it for twenty, thirty miles, then it faded into the green that had become gray and the gray that ended in blue. The widely separated gum trees looked like tufts of weeds; the pale patches might have been bleached grass; the roll of land resembled a rippling sea.
An austere and terrific loneliness infested that boundless area. It was the other half of the world. It dreamed and brooded under the hot sun. On and on forever it spread and sloped and waved away into infinitude, its monotony inscrutable and insupportable.
“Never…Never…Land!” gasped Slyter.
Sterl had not needed to be told that. But he faced his aboriginal comrade.
“White fella go alonga dere nebber come back!” said Friday.
Sterl’s mood augmented rather than quieted as they approached the blond giant who awaited them. At camp, Slyter reported simply and truthfully that the trek had passed on to the border of the Never Never Land. No need to repeat the aborigine’s warning.
“Good!” boomed Stanley Dann. “The promised land at last! Roll along, you trekkers!”
Red Krehl averted his gaze from the dark eyes of havoc that spoke so eloquently from Beryl’s small, brown face. Sterl had no word for the tragic question in Leslie’s hazel eyes. These young women had passed beyond filial duty. It was primitive love, born of the travail, the agony, the terror, that upheld them. But Sterl accorded them the highest meed of reverence that was in him. A thousand to one were the chances against their ever crossing the Never Never. Yet, as they rode out of the wide portal into the unknown, with the dry eucalyptus fragrance closing their nostrils, with the wagons rolling ahead of the wagging mob, for Sterl the moment was grand in the extreme.
Midsummer caught Dann’s trek out in the arid interior. They knew it was midsummer by the heat and drought, but in no other way, for Dann had long forgotten his journal and Sterl had long since tired of recording labor, misery, fight, and death. Always he imagined events would be recorded upon his memory in letters of fire, yet all had become effaced except the unforgettable few.
They had followed a stream for weeks. Here and there, miles apart, they found clear pools in rocky places. The bleached grass had grown scant, but it was nutritious. If the cattle could drink every day or two, they would survive. But many of the weak dropped by the wayside. Cows with newly born calves had to be driven from the water holes, and, when the calves failed, the mothers refused to leave them. Some mornings the trek would be held up because of strayed horses. Some were lost. Dann would not spare the time to track them. The heat was growing intense. If the duststorms came, a halt would have to be made.
The trek had become chaotic when the drovers reached a zone where rock formations held a succession of pools of clear water, one that amounted to a pond.
“Manna in the wilderness!” sang out Stanley Dann joyfully. “We’ll camp here until the rains come again!”
To the girls that meant survival. To the drovers it was exceedingly joyous news. The water was a saving factor, just in the nick of time. Sterl and Red welcomed that reprieve. Rest seemed a heavenly thing. Hope and faith were hard to eradicate from the human breast. Long reaches of scant, bleached grass waved away under the hot sun. Dead, gnarled gum trees vied with the live ones and gave the veldt a forlorn appearance. The only kangaroos they saw were dead ones that Slyter said had traveled too far for water. The omnipresent parrots, cockatoos, and magpies were remarkable for their absence.
Everywhere were evidences of a long cessation of rain in these parts. In good seasons the stream must have been a fair little river, and during flood time it had spread all over the flat. Birds and animals had apparently deserted the locality. The grass was bleached white; the plants had been burned sere by the sun; trees appeared to be withering.
Dann gave orders to the drovers to unhitch, and unpack, then bury the putrefying and sun-dried bodies of birds and kangaroos that lay scattered about to poison the air and water.
There was a deep pool of pure water in a shaded pocket among the rocks; there were many other pools, and one long pond, all of which would provide drink for man and beast over an indefinite period until the rains came. This fortunate circumstance and the miles and miles of spare grass solved the drovers’ critical problem.
Dann said philosophically to Slyter: “We have water enough and meat and salt enough to exist here for five years.” That showed his trend of thought. Sterl heard Slyter reply that the supply of water would not last half as long as that. “We’ll have to build a strong brush roof over that pond, in case the duststorms begin,” he added.
The most welcome feature of this camp was the cessation of haste. For days and weeks and months the drovers had been working beyond their strength. Here they could make up for that. The horses and cattle, after a long, dry trek, would have to be driven away from this sweet water. Very little guarding would they need.
Sterl and Red, helped by Friday, leisurely set about selecting a site, pitching their tent, making things comfortable for a shady, though sparsely timbered, bench just above flood-water stage. The cowboys selected their location on the edge of the high bank with huge rocks adjacent. They put up the tent and a canvas shelter. They hauled out the hammocks which had not been unrolled since the Forks. They improvised a table from the wagon seat and placed boxes to sit upon. This work gave Sterl and Red a peculiar feeling, verging upon pleasurable sensation. It took them back to boyhood camping days. They snaked into camp dead trees to be chopped up and split at leisure. A permanent camp without a plentiful supply of firewood was unthinkable for a cowboy. Friday, too, liked his little fire of faggots laid crosswise on red embers.
Working at these tasks, which were interspersed with rests in the shade out from under the hot sun, took up the whole first day. Everyone else had been very busy likewise. At supper Sterl gazed around to appreciate a house-like camp. But if, or when, it grew windy in this open desert, he imagined they would have more to endure than even the scorching heat of the Forks camp.
“Wal, I don’t give a damn about nothin’ a-tall as long as my cigarettes hold out,” drawled Red as they were hunting through their packs. But his most pessimistic talk could usually be discounted.
After sundown they were called to supper. The labor of the drovers accounted for a wide shelter with rock-walled fireplace built high, so that the women need not bend over while getting meals, a wind-break, rude table and benches made of poles, a well-screened meat box, and other conveniences which had long been wanting.
Mrs. Slyter laid out the same old food and drink, but almost unrecognizable as such because of her skill in cooking and serving. As for Beryl and Leslie, their help was not inconsiderable. Red summed it up in his inimitable way: “Wal, dog-gone it, I reckon a cowboy could stand a grub line forever with two such pretty waitresses. Heah you air, girls, thin as beanpoles an’ burned brown as autumn leaves…and yet you shore make a feller glad jest to see you!”
“Red, that is sweet flattery from you,” retorted Beryl. But she was pleased.
“We’re not as thin as beanpoles,” asserted Leslie. This epithet of Red’s was not wholly true, yet how slim and frail Beryl was, and how slender the once sturdy Leslie!
But, indeed, few and far between were the relapses into the old badinage and pleasantry which had once been so marked. They were a sober group. The womenfolk, having served the supper, joined the drovers at the table. Afterward, Larry and Rollie cleared away the utensils and
washed the dishes. The drovers sat and smoked a while, conversing desultorily.
“No flies or mosquitoes here,” said Dann.
“Flies will come bye and bye,” replied Slyter.
“There’ll be a good few calves dropped here.”
“And colts foaled, too. But we have lost so many!”
“We’ll make up for all that here.”
“If pulero does not break out in the mob.”
“Well! Well! Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof!”
“Boss, where did you figger we air?” asked Red.
“Somewhere out in the Never Never Land. Five hundred miles Outback, more or less.”
“An’ about what time of year?”
“It is summer, early or late…I don’t know.”
“Dann, I’ll catch up with my journal now,” interposed Sterl. “I can recall main events, but not dates.”
“Small matter now. Keep on with your journal, if you choose. But I’ve changed in that regard. I don’t care to recall things. No one would ever believe we endured so much. And I would not want to discourage future drovers. The details of our trek will never be history.”
Slyter remarked reflectively: “If, in case, you know…we left records in sealed tins or boxes nailed on trees, we’d have hardly a hope of their ever being seen by white people. The abo’s would find and destroy them.”
“Yes, yes. But I have cut my mark on a thousand trees along this trek.”
Red puffed a cloud of smoke to hide his face, while he drawled: “Girls, you’re gonna be old maids shore as shore can be, if we ever get out alive.”
“You bet we are, Krehl, if help for such calamity ever depended on Yankee blighters we know,” cried Leslie with spirit.
Beryl’s response was surprising and significant. “We are old maids now, Leslie dear,” she murmured dreamily. “I remember how I used to wonder about that. And to…to pine for a husband. But it doesn’t seem to matter now.”