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Pioneers, The

<h2>CHAPTER XXXV</h2> After the sales on the following Friday, when the dust of the yards was heavy in the air, and the stock horses stood in irregular, drooping lines outside the Black Bull and Mrs. Mary Ann Hegarty's, Davey made his way to where on an open space of land the church had been built. Wirreeford had out its lights—garish oil flares and rush candles—and the little fires lighted before the doors of the houses to keep off sand flies and mosquitoes, smouldered in the dusk, sending up wreaths of blue smoke. He had made up his mind as to what he was going to do. During the week Conal had been mustering and branding the cows and calves drafted from the scrub mob. Davey had worked with him, and many of the calves he had scarred with Maitland's double M. were the progeny of his father's cattle. Half a dozen cows bore the D.C. brand under their thick hair. Conal had wanted to pay him off. He had told Davey that there was no need for him to burn his fingers with this business, and that he could run the mob to the border, or to Melbourne, across the swamp, if the south-eastern rivers were down; but he was short-handed, Davey knew; a sense of obligation urged him to stick to Conal until the whole of the mob they had moonlighted together was disposed of. Conal had insisted on getting the cows and calves into a half-timbered paddock below Steve's, the day before, and had run a hundred of Maitland's fattened beasts with them. He meant to make a start and have the mob on the roads early next morning. There was a race-meeting in the long paddock behind McNab's that Friday. Conal and he had come into the Wirree to show themselves before starting off on their overland journey. Almost every man in the countryside was there. Davey wondered why the Schoolmaster had not come down to the township with Conal and himself. He had been a different man since their return, very silent, scarcely stirring from his chair in the back room, while Deirdre hovered, never very far from him, anxious and protective as a mother-bird. She had not told him what had happened while Conal and he were away—how the Schoolmaster had said to her one day, suddenly: "It's very dark, Deirdre. Is there going to be a storm?" The sunshine was blank and golden out of doors. "No," she had said, laughing. "There's not a sign of one." "Where are you?" he asked, his voice strange and strained. "Why, I'm here just beside you," she replied. He put out his hands. "I can't see you," he said. "It's the dark, Deirdre! My God ... it's the dark." For a long time he had sat staring while she knelt beside him, crying, murmuring eagerly and tenderly, trying to soothe and to comfort him. But from that time the dimming and obliterating of the whole world had begun for him. The heavy darkness had passed. It was not all night yet, but a misty twilight. He had forbidden her to speak of it, so that Davey did not know. Conal and Steve had guessed, but Davey's mind, busy with its own problems, was slower to realise what was going on about him. It had roused every loyal and fighting instinct in him to see his mother with that look of suffering on her face; his father in the way of becoming McNab's prey—losing all that he had gained through years of toil and harsh integrity by falling into the pigs' trough McNab had set for him. It was that stern righteousness of his, his sober, stolid virtue, which had given Cameron the place in the respect and grudging homage of the countryside that his wealth and property alone would not have won for him; they had cloaked even his meanness with a sombre dignity and brought him the half-jesting title of the Laird of Ayrmuir. Davey led his horse into the paddock beside the church where the vehicles which had brought the hill folk to the township were standing. The horses out of the shafts, their heavy harness still on their backs, were feeding, tethered to the fence, or to the wheels of the carts and buggies. He stood beside the high, old-fashioned buggy that had brought Mary and Donald Cameron to Wirreeford. He rubbed his hand along Bessie's long coffin-box of a nose, and told her on a drifting stream of thought that he had decided to go home, to ask his father to forgive him, and that he meant to try to get on with him again. Her attitude of attention and affection comforted him. The people began to come from the church. They stood in groups by the doorway talking to each other. One or two men came into the paddock to harness-up for the home journey. Davey put the mare into her shafts. He was fastening the traces when Mary Cameron came round the back of the buggy. A catch of her breath told that she had seen him. "Davey!" she cried. He saw her face, the light of her eyes. "Mother!" he sobbed. His arms went round her, and his face with the rough beard—such a man's face it had become since it last brushed her's—was crushed against her cheek. "I'm coming home," he said, his voice breaking. "Not now, not to-night, but in a little while. I'll ask the old man to forgive me and see if we can't get along better." "Davey! Davey!" she cried softly, looking into his face, a new joy in her own. "Oh, but they are sad days, these! Have you heard what they are saying of your father? They tell me that you have been over the ranges." "Yes," Davey said. She scarcely recognised his voice. "It's because of father—because of what they're saying—I'm coming home. I won't have them say it ... after all he's done ... do you think I'm going to let him lose it, if I can help it." There was a passionate vibration in his voice. "How did it happen? I saw you on Friday and followed you home." "Oh, my boy!" Her hand trembled on his shoulders. "It was you then? What's come to your father I don't know at all. He's not the same man he used to be. It's that man at the Black Bull. He's got hold of him—I don't know how ... but he's been drinking there often now, and he never used to be a drinking man—your father. I think it was his disappointment with you at first ... I'm not blaming you, Davey. It wasn't to be expected you'd do anything but what you did. I'm not blaming you. But there were the long evenings by ourselves, after you'd gone. He sat eating his heart out about it before the fire, and I couldn't say a word. He was thinking of you all the time—but his pride wouldn't let him speak. He was seeing the ruin of his hopes for you. He meant you to be a great man in the district. Then McNab began talking to him. Your father thinks McNab's doing him a good turn in some way, but I feel it's nothing but evil will come to us from him. The sight of the man makes me shiver and I wonder what harm it is he is planning for us." Her voice went to Davey's heart. "I know, mother," he said. "But it'll be all right soon. The old man'll pull up when I come home. I'll tell him I mean to be all he wants me to be. I was a fool before, though I don't think I could go on in the old way even now. But he'll be reasonable if I go the right way about asking him. I've a deal more sense than I had. I've sobered down a lot ... can see things straighter. I won't be having any dealings with McNab again—and I'll get father to cut him. The pair of us'll be more than equal to him. But I've got to finish my job with Conal first ... it wouldn't be playing the game to leave him just now." "Is it Conal you've been working with, Davey?" her eyes went up to his anxiously. "Yes," he said. "Your father's been talking a lot about this work of Conal's," she went on, a troubled line in her forehead. "He says the Schoolmaster's in it too. McNab's been talking to him about it, and they mean to interfere in some way. He's talked a good deal about it when he didn't know he was talking, driving home in the evenings. But McNab's making a fool of him for his own purposes, and to do harm to Mr. Farrel, I think. I was trying to tell your father that, but he wouldn't hear me. Oh, why have you got yourself mixed up with duffing and crooked ways, Davey?" "What did he say?" Davey asked. "I don't remember all of it." She swept her brow with a little weary gesture. "It was all mumbling and muttering, and I couldn't hear half what he said—but it was to do with cattle. And to-day McNab came over to the yards as soon as we arrived and I heard him say: 'I've got word where there's a mob with brands won't bear lookin' into, to-night. I'll tell M'Laughlin, and he'll get a couple of men to work with him. If you'll come round to the parlour we can fix up what's to be done.'" Davey jerked his horse's bridle, pulling him round to mount. "I meant to take you home myself to-night, mother," he said. "But I'll have to find Conal and tell him this. There's no time to lose." "I'll be all right, Davey," she said tremulously; "I'll go and wait for your father at McNab's. He's there now. And we're quite safe with Bess taking us home. She knows every inch of the way." Davey kissed her hurriedly. He turned out of the church paddock towards Hegarty's. There was a dance in full swing, and he thought that Conal might be there. But although a new fiddler was in his element and most of the young people in the district jigging, Conal was not. He went back along the road to McNab's. Outside, in the buggy, Mary Cameron was sitting. She turned and smiled when he rode up to her. Her face had a shy happiness, but the patience and humility of her waiting attitude infuriated him. He swung off his horse and opened the door of McNab's side parlour. Cameron was sitting at the small, uneven table, a bottle of rum and glasses before him. McNab on the other side of the table, leaning across it was talking to him, his voice running glibly. The light of an oil lamp on the table between them showed his yellow, eager eyes, the scheming intensity of the brain behind them, the lurking half-smile of triumph about his writhing, colourless lips. M'Laughlin, leaning lazily back in his chair, his long legs stretched under the table, sat watching and listening to him. McNab sprang to his feet with an oath when he saw Davey in the doorway. "Mother's waiting for you outside," he said, lifting Donald Cameron by the elbows and leading him to the door. He turned on McNab with his back to it. "I'll be looking after my father's affairs from this out," he said. "And you remember what I promised you if you interfered with me again ... you'll get it sure as I live." He slammed the door. Donald Cameron, stupid with McNab's heavy spirits, was unprepared for this masterful young man whose rage was burning to a white heat. He went with him as quietly as as a child. Davey helped him into the buggy. "Keep him away from McNab," he said to his mother, "and I'll be home as soon as I can." She smiled, the shy, happy smile of a girl, nodded to him, and they drove off. Davey went back into the bar of the Black Bull, with its crowd of stockmen, drovers, shop-keepers and sale-yard loungers. "Where's Conal?" he asked. "Does anybody know if he's left the town yet?" There was a roar of laughter. "He was looking for you an hour ago, Davey," a drunken youngster yelled gaily. "Was in here, 'n McNab gave him a turn about the Schoolmaster's girl—" "McNab was tellin' him you'd made-up to marry her. You should have heard Conal go off," somebody shouted. "Where is he?" There was a sharpness about Young Davey's question that nobody liked. "Who? McNab?" "No, Conal!" McNab had come into the bar and was standing watching him, his face livid. "Round somewhere lookin' for your blood," the same jovial youngster, who had first spoken, cried. "Seen him go up towards the store a while ago, Davey," Salt Watson said slowly. No one smelt mischief brewing quicker than he. He had seen McNab's face. He knew Young Davey's temper and the sort of man he was growing. He knew Conal, too, and that no love was lost between them. It was an urgent matter would send Davey looking through the town for Conal that way, he guessed, and knowing something of the business they had in hand, as an old roadster always does, imagined the cause of the urgency. McNab looked as if Davey's anxiety to find Conal had taught him something too. Davey flung out of the bar. He straddled his horse again and went flying off down the road to the store. Conal was not there. Someone said he had been, and set out for the hills an hour earlier. Davey made off down the road again, doubling on his track, past the Black Bull. He thought that he would catch up to Conal on the road, and that they would be back at Steve's before M'Laughlin and his men were out of Wirreeford. The culvert over the creek that he had watched Bess shy at and take in her own leisurely fashion a week before, was not half a mile from the outskirts of the township. The creek banks on either side were fringed I with wattles and light-woods. As the mare rattled across it there was a whistling crack in the air. Davey pitched on her neck. Terrified, she leapt forward. He clung to her, swaying for a while, yet never losing his grip. He knew that someone had shot him from the trees by the culvert. There was a sharp pain in his breast; blood welled from it. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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