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<h2>CHAPTER XXI</h2> In the Wirree, Farrel was never known as anything but the Schoolmaster. Everybody called him that—even Deirdre when she spoke of him. They had gone to live in a cottage on the outskirts of the township. The Schoolmaster had taken up his old trade, though it was understood he had been droving with Conal for Maitland the greater part of the time he had been away. Deirdre had wandered with him wherever he went, and it was on her account he was anxious to get back to steadier and more settled ways of life, it was said. Before long two or three of the brown-skinned Wirree children were trotting to the cottage for lessons every day. The south had heard a great deal of Sam Maitland, head of the well-known firm of Maitland & Co., stock-dealers, of Cooburra, New South Wales. There had been a bad season in the north-west for a couple of years. Maitland had bought up poor beasts and sent them to fatten in the south. Conal had been driving them through Wirreeford at intervals of two or three months, taking the fattened beasts back on the return journey over the border after he brought down the starvers. All the week the township slept peacefully in the spring sunshine. When a clear, young moon came up over the plains in the evenings, it drenched them with wan, silver light. But on Friday morning at dawn, the cattle came pouring into the town, with a cracking of whips, barking of dogs, yelling and shouting of men and boys. With a rush and a rattling of horns, they charged along between the rows of huddled houses, swinging from one side to the other of the track, wild and fearful-eyed, with lowered heads, long strings of glistening saliva dripping from their mouths. They seemed to be searching for the opportunity to break and head out to the hills again; But ringed with cracking whips, brushing horses, snapping dogs, they were turned into the sale-yards. The one street of Wirreeford had been cobbled for some distance on either side of the sale-yards because the cattle and horses made a sea of mud about them when the spring rains had soaked into the soft earth. The stores and shanties were full on sale days. Drovers, rough-haired, hawk-eyed men, with faces seared and seamed with the dust of the roads, hands burnt, and broken with barcoo, slouched along the streets, or stood watching their cattle, yarning in desultory fashion, leaning over the rails of the drafting yards. They smoked, or chewed and spat, in front of the shanties, and at night sprawled over the table at the Black Bull, playing cards or tossing dice. A mob that had travelled a long way was often yarded the night before the sales. When the selling for the day was over, the beasts that had come down from the hills were driven out along the Rane road, and got under Way for the northern markets; but sometimes they were left in the yards, lowing and bellowing all night, while the stockmen who were going to take charge of them spent the evening at the Black Bull, or Mrs. Mary Ann's. The township was full of the smell of cattle and dogs, and of the muddy, slowly-moving river that had become a waste-butt for the houses. In the early spring, breezes from the ocean with a tang of salt in them blew right through the houses, and later, when the trees by the river blossomed, and bore masses of golden down, a warm, sweet, musky fragrance was wafted to their very doors. It overlaid the reek of the cattle yards, the fumes of rank spirits and tobacco that came from the shanties. And in the long glimmering twilights when the light faded slowly from the plains and the wall of the hills changed from purple to blue and misty grey, they were caught up into the mysterious darkness of the night—those perfumes of the lightwood and wattle trees in blossom—and rested like a benediction in the air. From their shabby, whitewashed wattle-and-dab hut on the outskirts of the town the Schoolmaster and Deirdre could watch the twilight dying on the plains and breathe all the fragrance of the trees by the river when they were in bloom. The plains spread in vivid, undulating green before the cottage to the distant line of the hills, and the grass was full of wild flowers, all manner of tiny, shy, and starry, blue, and white, and yellow flowers. Deirdre had watched Davey bring cattle down from the hills across the plains. She had seen him riding off runaways. Once a heifer had broken and careered over the plains before the cottage. Davey had chased after her at breakneck speed, and, rising in his stirrups, had swept his stock-whip round her, letting it fall on her plushy hide with ripping cracks. He had flogged the beast, driving her with strings of oaths, his dog, a black and tan fury, yelping and snapping at her nozzle, until the blood streamed from it, and with a mutinous bellow she turned back to the mob again. Deirdre had watched him going home in the evening with his father, or some of Cameron's men, at the heels of a mob, his eyes going straight out before him. He never looked her way or seemed to see her where she stood, at the gate of the whitewashed cottage within a hundred yards of the river. She had been chasing Mrs. Mary Ann's geese from the river across the green paddock that lay between the shanty and the Schoolmaster's house, when Davey rode out of the township towards her, one evening. He was driving a score or so of weedy, straggling calves. Deirdre stood by the roadside and waited for him, her eyes luminous in the dusk. The wind had whipped her hair to the long tendrils it used to hang in when they raced each other along the roads from school. "Davey!" she called, as he came towards her. There was appeal in her voice. But Davey stared at her as though he had not seen her, and passed on. "You're a rude, horrible boy! And I hate you, hate you, hate you!" she cried passionately after him. When they met again it was near the sale-yards, when the street was thronged with people from the hills. She had seen his horse hitched to the posts outside McNab's, and so was ready for him when they passed. The path was so narrow that they could not avoid brushing. But Deirdre's chin was well up and her eyes very steady when they met his under his hat brim. Such gloomy, morose eyes they were that she looked into. She almost exclaimed with surprise at them. Her mouth opened to speak. But Davey was as intent on passing as she had been. His face had an ugly, sullen look, something of his father's dourness. After he had passed she stood still and watched him. He crossed the road and went into the Black Bull. The Schoolmaster saw him there in the evening. It was not often Farrel was seen in the tap-room of the Black Bull, though there was always a lighting of eyes, a shifting of seats in anticipation of a lively evening when he appeared. He wondered what Davey Cameron was doing there. His father had been crippled with rheumatism for a couple of weeks and Davey had charge of his business. Farrel wondered if he had begun to swagger, to give himself airs on the strength of it. He seemed on good terms with McNab and most of the men in the bar, but his acknowledgment of Dan's greeting was off-hand and he went soon after Farrel came in. The Schoolmaster's eyes met McNab's; but McNab's eyes never met any man's for very long. Perhaps he was afraid of the inner man a stranger might get glimpse of, afraid to let any one else see in his eyes the secrets of that sly, spying soul of his. Now that Farrel had only one eye, McNab feared him less, although when the concentrated light of the Schoolmaster's spirit poured from it in a single beam, he fidgeted, showed craven and was glad to escape. No one had the knack that Dan Farrel had of showing McNab to the Wirree for what he was. The Schoolmaster could string McNab up before the eyes of the men in the bar on the thread of one of his whimsical humours and show him dangling, all his crooked limbs writhing, his twisted face simmering with wrath. He could pin McNab with a few, lightly-flung words and make a butt of him, where he stood before his rows of short-necked, black and muddied bottles. He would have him quivering with wrath, impotent against that bitter, blithe wit and the laughter it raised. He laughed too—McNab. He was wise, as cunning as a dingo. Though his eyes were baleful, and his hands shook as he poured the raw spirits from his bottle into a mug beside him, he laughed. "It's a mad game y're on with McNab," Salt Watson, one of the oldest of the Wirreeford men, said to the Schoolmaster one evening on his way home. "Give it up, Dan! It's good enough to make the boys laugh, but you've only to look at Thad's face when he smiles to know what he is promising himself of it all." The Schoolmaster had watched McNab's face when he smiled. He had learnt all he wanted to. He knew what Salt meant. For awhile he dropped out of the circle round Thad's bar. When he made one of it, his laughter was less frequent, and he missed McNab when his lightly-flung arrows of wit whistled in the assembly. His spirits had suffered a depression. Some of the men thought the trouble with his eyes was on his mind. He avoided encounters with McNab, though none of them had any idea he was afraid of Thad. His one eye was more than a match for Thad's two any day, they knew. There was no open quarrel between them. The Schoolmaster's duelling with McNab had never been more than a laughing matter, a pricking, rapier fashion, in the intervals of card-playing and drinks. It had an air of good-fellowship. His humour had a quality of amiability, though nobody was deceived by it, least of all Thad himself. There was always contempt and an underlying bitterness in it. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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