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The Bush-Fire
by
“I know Ross and the boys,” he said, “and I don’t believe they dogged the sheep. Why, they’ve only got a Newfoundland pup, and an old lame, one-eyed sheep-dog that couldn’t hurt a flea. Now, father, this sort of thing has been going on long enough. What difference does a few paltry acres make to us? The country is big enough, God knows! Ross is a straight man and–for God’s sake, give the man a chance to get his ground fenced in; he’s doing it as fast as he can, and he can’t watch his cattle day and night.”
“Are you going to do as I tell you, or are you not?” shouted Wall.
“Well, if it comes to that, I’m not,” said Billy. “I’m not going to sneak round a place all night and watch for a chance to pound a poor man’s cows.”
It was an awful row, down behind the wool-shed, and things looked so bad that old Peter, the station-hand, who was a witness, took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves, ready, as he said afterwards, “to roll into” either the father or the son if one raised a hand against the other.
“Father!” said Billy, though rather sobered by the sight of his father’s trembling, choking passion, “do you call yourself an Englishman?”
“Yes!” yelled Wall, furiously. “What the hell do you call yourself?”
“If it comes to that I’m an Australian,” said Billy, and he turned away and went to catch his horse. He went up-country and knocked about in the north-west for a year or two.
II
ROMEO AND JULIET
Mary Wall was twenty-five. She was an Australian bush girl, every inch of her five-foot-nine; she had a pink-and-white complexion, dark blue eyes, blue-black hair, and “the finest figure in the district,” on horseback or afoot. She was the best girlrider too (saddle or bare-back), and they say that when she was a tomboy she used to tuck her petticoats under her and gallop man-fashion through the scrub after horses or cattle. She said she was going to be an old maid.
There came a jackaroo on a visit to the station. He was related to the bank with which Wall had relations. He was a dude, with an expensive education and no brains. He was very vain of his education and prospects. He regarded Mary with undisguised admiration, and her father had secret hopes. One evening the jackaroo was down by the homestead-gate when Mary came cantering home on her tall chestnut. The gate was six feet or more, and the jackaroo raised his hat and hastened to open it, but Mary reined her horse back a few yards and the “dood” had barely time to jump aside when there was a scuffle of hoofs on the road, a “Ha-ha-ha!” in mid-air, a landing thud, and the girl was away up the home-track in a cloud of dust.
A few days later the jackaroo happened to be at Kelly’s, a wayside shanty, watching a fight between two bushmen, when Mary rode up. She knew the men. She whipped her horse in between them and struck at first one and then the other with her riding-whip.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!” she said; “and both married men, too!”
It evidently struck them that way, for after a bit they shook hands and went home.
“And I wouldn’t have married that girl for a thousand pounds,” said the jackaroo, relating the incidents to some friends in Sydney.
Mary said she wanted a man, if she could get one.
There was no life at home nowadays, so Mary went to all the bush dances in the district. She thought nothing of riding twenty or thirty miles to a dance, dancing all night, and riding home again next morning. At one of these dances she met young Robert Ross, a clean-limbed, good-looking young fellow about her own age. She danced with him and liked him, and danced with him again, and he rode part of the way home with her. The subject of the quarrel between the two homes came up gradually.