Wilderness Trek (1988) Page 15

  The answer that sprang to Sterl's lips was both cruel and insulting, but somehow he could not hold back the words: "Yes," he said caustically, "I sure hate the idea of having to spend a year longer in the society of two shallow, mindless girls like you and Beryl."

  Her face burned red, her eyes blazed, and there was little doubt that but for Red's intervention she would have struck him. He went on his way, deeply disturbed by the encounter. Red caught up with him.

  "Say, pard, the kid would have smacked the daylights out of you but for me," he said.

  "That didn't escape me, Red."

  "I left her cryin'. That was a mean kind of speech you gave her, Sterl."

  "Agree with you," Sterl snapped. Then after a pause, "Did you look at Beryl?"

  "Shore. Beryl was surprised. Mebbe she's not so strong for them noble idees of bein' true to her Dad. Mebbe she's been talked into elopin' with Ormiston."

  "Ah, I had that thought, too. I hoped I was wrong. Red, Eric Dann was sunk at his brother's decision. Sunk!"

  "He oughta be overjoyed. If he ain't--why ain't he? He always struck me as kinda phony--weak or somethin'. Gosh, ain't it hot again? Thet false alarm last night made us expect this gosh-awful sun wouldn't shine no more."

  "But the air feels different."

  There was an infinitesimal humidity in the atmosphere that morning. That afternoon white clouds, like ships at sea, sailed over the ranges to the northeast. They were good to see. Before they crossed the zenith the heat had dissipated them. The sunset was ruddy, dusky, smoky. The cattle lowed. There was an uneasy activity among the birds and kangaroos. Friday talked to the old men among the aborigines, and returned uncommunicative.

  After supper, Sterl was reading by firelight when Red nudged him. In the gloaming distance--Ormiston and Beryl!

  "Watch awhile, pard. It won't be long now!" said Red, getting up to glide off like an Indian.

  Out of the corner of his eve Sterl watched Leslie, and knew she would approach him. At last she did.

  "Red has followed them--Ormiston and Beryl. What's he going to do? Kill that blighter?"

  Sterl did not answer.

  "Eric Dann has got the willies, whatever Red means by them," went on Leslie, restlessly, edging closer. "And he was drinking whisky. In this heat!"

  "How do you know?"

  "I saw him. I smelled it. Sterl, the rains will come?"

  "Friday says bimeby. Mebbe soon. Mebbe no."

  "I thought I'd die last night, hoping, waiting. It'll never rain. We'll all dry up and blow away."

  Leslie came closer, and suddenly, desperate, sat down beside Sterl.

  "You hateful, callous, unforgiving cowboy!" she whispered, huskily.

  "Leslie, how very unflattering!" he rejoined, mildly.

  "I hate you!" she burst out.

  "That is only natural, Leslie. Your are a headstrong child."

  "Headstrong, yes, but I'm not even a girl any more. I'm old. I'll be like these gins, presently."

  "Very well, then, you're old. What of it?"

  "Oh, I don't care. Nobody cares. You don't. I--I wish I'd thrown myself away on Ormiston."

  "Yeah? Is it too late?"

  "Don't be a damn fool," she flashed. "It's bad enough for you to be a monster of indifference. A man of rock! I'm sick. I'm wild. I'm scared. I'm full of--of--"

  "You must be full of tea, darling," interposed Sterl, lightly.

  "Sterl Hazelton, don't you dare call me that--that--when you're making fun of me. I'm so miserable. And it's not all about myself."

  "Who then?"

  "Beryl. She's strange. She was lovely to me for awhile. Now she's changed. She's--numb. Sterl, you must do something, or she'll go away with him!"

  "Les, hadn't you better go to bed?" he queried, gently.

  "Yes. I'm weak as a cat and wet as water. But before I go I want to tell you something I heard Mum say to Dad. Mum said: 'I see Hazelton doesn't go to the lubras any more.' And Dad replied: 'I hadn't noticed. But it's none of your business, woman.' Then Mum snapped: 'Bingham Slyter, I didn't hold it against Sterl. I'd do it myself, if I were a man! In this horrible hole, where God only knows what keeps us from going mad!'

  "Well, well!" ejaculated Sterl, taken aback, and flustered. "Then what did your dad say?"

  "He swore terribly at Mum."

  Sterl relaxed into the flimsy protection of silence. All these good people might be forgiven for anything. It was a diabolical maelstrom--this trek.

  "That--distressed me--Sterl," went on Leslie, falteringly. "I'm as crazy as Mum, or any of them. I--I lied when I said I hated you. It hurt me that about you--and the lubras. But I forgive you. I--I don't care. There! I've told you. Maybe now I can sleep."

  She ran off sobbing. It was well, he reflected, that she did. A kind word, a tender touch from him at that crucial moment would have brought the distracted girl into his arms. There could never be anything between them. He could keep the secret that had made him a man without a country.

  Sterl sat there a long time. The fire died down and Friday crossed a couple of sticks over the ashes. Mosquitoes began to snarl. Red returned, dragged his feet, his gait like that of a whipped cur. A furious flame of passion waved over Sterl. That this cowboy, as keen as flint, a man who had laughed and drawled in the very face of death--that he should crawl back to the firelight, ashamed and abased, crushed at the weakness or perfidy of a girl, was too revolting to withstand. Sterl leaped up muttering, "I won't endure it!" Then a deep low roll of thunder brought him to himself.

  Chapter 17

  Thunder! Deep, detonating, long-rolling! Krehl approached the burned-out campfire, his head lifting like that of a listening deer. Again the heart-shaking rumble!

  "You heah, pard?" he queried.

  "You bet. Deeper, heavier tonight, Red."

  Friday loomed out of nowhere, soft-stepping, black as the night. He replenished the fire with two sticks laid crosswise, squatted down, rested his weapons, and became a statue like black marble. Friday could sleep in any position, at any time. Sterl had caught him asleep standing on one leg, like a sandhill crane.

  Back inside the tent, pulling off his boots, Sterl said, "What kicked you in the middle, pard?"

  Red heaved a sigh. "Somethin' wuss tonight, Sterl. I had my gun out to kill Ormiston when that first clap of thunder fetched me to my senses."

  Sterl cursed his friend lustily. It silenced Red and relieved his own overwrought feelings. Then he stretched out on the hot blankets to rest if not to sleep. As on the night before, this thundering forerunner of the season's storms passed by the forks, booming on, rolling on to rumble and mutter and die away in the distance. Day broke. And when the sun rose, fire again possessed the sky and earth.

  At breakfast Larry told how three thunderstorms had passed by about midnight; the last had gone to the west of the forks.

  "We'll get socked right in the eye tonight," he said, cheerfully.

  "Folks, am I gettin' balmy or is it hot sooner an' wusser than yestiddy mawnin'?" inquired Red.

  Slyter interposed to inform them that the last day of a hot spell was the hottest. The temperature this day would top one hundred and thirty degrees. If the forks had been a +dusty place, with hot gales blowing, life would have been impossible.

  "As long as your face is wet, you're all right," he said. "But if it gets dry and hot, look out. Keep in the shade with a pail of water and bathe your head."

  When Sterl followed Red to their tent, Friday pointed to Eric Dann crossing the main fork of the dry river bed toward Ormiston's camp. Sterl got his field glass from under a flap of the tent.

  "From what I heard last night," said Red. "He's carryin' a message from the big boss. He's gonna persuade Ormiston to drive his herd back on this side, before the river rises. Haw! Haw! Like hell--"

  "Here by this log," interrupted Sterl. "Nobody can see us." He adjusted the glass. At first glance he saw that Ormiston's camp was a busy place considering the torrid heat. Drovers naked to the wais
t were carrying things from one wagon to another. Ormiston paced under a shelter of palm and pandanus leaves. His right-hand man, Bedford, sat on the ground mending harness. They saw Eric Dann plodding up the sand of the river slope, and their remarks must surely have fitted their malevolent looks. But in a moment more the drover was again the smiling Ormiston, greeting his visitor agreeably. They talked, and Sterl did not need to hear them to know that Eric Dannn ever delivered his brother's message.

  "Lemme have a look, you hawg," spoke up Red. He glued his eyes to the glass and remained rigid for a long time.

  "Wal, thet's over, whatever it was," he said, presently. "Dann is comin' back. He's carryin' the world on his shoulders, if I know a sucker when I see one. He doesn't know Ormiston is goin' to double-cross him, any more than does Stanley Dann. Gosh, I can hardly wait to bore thet beady-eyed bastard! There he goes, 'back to thet wagon they're packin'."

  His ice-blue eyes glinted as he faced Sterl. "All over but the rain--an' the shootin,' pard," he rang out.

  "Well, dammit, suppose we go over there and do the shooting before it rains," snapped Sterl.

  "Now! There ain't no good motive yet thet'd go far with--Stanley Dann. We gotta have thet. What we been waitin' for all these months? Use yore haid, pard."

  "Red, oughtn't we tell Stanley?"

  "Hell no! Not before, an' ruin our chance to bore that hombre. Afterward we won't have to talk. Ormiston will raid the boss's mob an' remuda, shore as yore born."

  "Okay then. But where does Beryl come in?"

  "Pard, thet stumps me, too. Beryl thinks Ormiston will take the Gulf road, now thet Stanley has given in. But Ormiston isn't takin' it, as we know. An' I'm about shore there's no hope of Ormiston persuadin' Beryl to elope. He ain't the kind of a man who'd risk much for a woman. Shore you've seen how Beryl has failed lately. She'd be a burden. What he wants air hosses an' cattle."

  "Red, you're overshooting here," declared Sterl. "Beryl's physical condition wouldn't deter him one single whit, if he wants her. He has to travel with wagons. She can be packed like a bag of flour. If she dies on the way, what the hell?"

  "Wal," cut in Red, wearily, "let's wait for the show-down. It's a cinch Ormiston will try to steal some of Dann's hosses an' cattle. Mebbe some of Slyter's too. But if he's as pore a bushranger as he is everythin' else, why, hell, it'll make us laugh!"

  Stanley Dann sent orders by Cedric for all to lie quiet that day, protected from the direct rays of the sun. Before that, the cattle had strung out in the shade of the trees along the river-banks. Kangaroos kept to the brush. The whirling hordes of flies were out early, but they soon vanished. The sun was too hot for them. The younger blacks stayed in or by the water; the older ones did not move from their shelters.

  Sterl and Red found the inside of the tent unendurable. Almost naked they lay under their wagon on the grass. Friday lay in the shade of a big gum tree. That was the only time Sterl ever saw him incapacitated. He, too, although as perfect an engine to resist the elements as evolution had ever turned out, had to fight for his life.

  The sun set at last. That awful odor of the blast furnace closed. In the west colossal thunderhead clouds loomed halfway to the zenith. Low down over the horizon their base was a dusky purple, but as they billowed and mushroomed upward, the darker hues changed to rose and gold, and their rounded tops were pearl white.

  Friday appeared stalking under the gum trees. He came directly to them.

  "Howdy," he said, using the cowboy greeting Sterl had taught him. And accompanying it was a transfiguration in the black visage that Sterl recognized as Friday's exceedingly rare smile.

  "Boss, rain come," he said, as if he were a chief addressing a multitude of aborigines.

  "Bimeby?" asked Sterl, huskily.

  "Alonga soon night. Rain like hell."

  A call to supper disrupted this conversation. While the cowboys forced themselves to partake of the eternal damper, meat and tea, the magnificent panorama of pillared cloud pageant lifted perceptibly higher. The bases closed the gaps between and turned to inky black. The purple deepened and encroached upon the gold, blotting it out until the sculptured, scalloped crowns lost their pearl and white. Slyter heard the good news and ran across the way to tell the Danns. Red whooped and hobbled after him, evidently to inform Beryl.

  "I'm going to ride herd tonight," announced Leslie, brightly, approaching Sterl.

  Her face showed the havoc of these torrid weeks less than that of anyone else, Sterl observed, but the change was enough to give him a pang.

  "Yeah? You look like it," he rejoined, dubiously.

  "How do I look?" she retorted, hastily. "Terrible."

  "So do you. If I look terrible you should see Beryl! What do you mean by terrible?"

  "Eyes hollow, lines you didn't use to have."

  "Oh, Sterl! Am I pretty no longer?"

  "You couldn't help being pretty, Leslie!" replied Sterl, yielding as always to the appeal which destroyed his relentlessness.

  "Then I'm not to ride herd with you tonight?"

  "I didn't say so."

  "But you're my boss.

  "Long ago, Leslie, before this trek had made me old and you a little savage--then I called myself your boss. But no more!"

  "What if I am a little savage?" she asked, wistfully.

  Red and Slyter returned from the Dann camp, and Slyter said: "Saddle up, all hands. Stanley wants the mob driven into that basin out there, and surrounded."

  Sterl went on with Red. The afterglow of sunset shone over the land. The vast mass of merging clouds shut out the northeast. The two seemed to be in conflict.

  "I seen Beryl," Red was saying, his voice deep with pain. "She lay on her bed under the wagon. When I called she didn't answer. I stepped up on the wheel, so I could look down at her. I spoke an' she whispered, 'Bury me out on--the lone prairie!' You know I used to sing thet to her--before Ormiston... Sterl, could Beryl Dann look at me like thet, smile like thet, say thet to me if she meant to run off with this black-faced rustler?"

  "Red, give me something easy," replied Sterl, grimly, "Back home I'd swear to God she couldn't. But out here, after what we've gone through, I say hell yes, she could! Take your pick."

  "Pard, if you was me, would you watch Beryl's wagon tonight, instead of guardin' herd?"

  "No!--Red, you might kill Ormiston, and kill him too soon. Let these Danns find out what we know. Then you can break loose an' I'll be with you. Man alive, she can't get away--Ormiston can't get away--not with her or his stolen cattle or his life. If he took Beryl on horseback we'd run him down. Red, old man, come to your senses!"

  "Thanks, pard. Reckon I--I was kinda queer. Mebbe the heat--Heah's the hosses."

  "What'll you ride?" asked Sterl, as he, looked the remuda over. King whinnied and thudded toward him.

  "Leslie's Duke. He's a big water dog. An' mebbe there'll be a flood. Them clouds all same Red River color, pard."

  Mounted, the cowboys headed for the grassy basin already half covered with cattle. Slyter, pounding along to join the cowboys, expressed anxiety for his horses. Red said he was sure that they would stand, unless run down by a frightened mob. The peril lay with the cattle.

  Stanley Dann rode around the mob, hauling up last where Sterl and Red had been joined by Larry and Roland. "Station yourselves at regular intervals. Concentrate on the river and camp sides," said Dann. "Probably the mob won't rush. If they do, keep out of their way. They won't run far. From the looks of it we are in for a real storm."

  "Let's stick pretty close together," suggested Sterl to Red.

  "You can't lose me, pard!"

  "The air's stirring. Smells dusty!"

  "But it's them low clouds thet holds the storm. Gosh, but they're black!"

  Then the first deep, detonating thunder rolled toward the waiting drovers. The tired, heat-dulled cattle gave no sign of uneasiness.

  "Bet you they won't stampede," called Red, some yards to Sterl's right.

  "They're English cattl
e. They can't be scared, maybe," returned Sterl, jocularly.

  Thunder boomed over the battlements of the ranges north and east. Flashes of lightning flared from behind them. Puffs of moving air struck Sterl in the face, hot like the breath of fire. The lacy foliage of the eucalyptus trees began to toss against a sky still clear. Heavy thunderclaps turned Sterl's gaze back to the storm. The front of it had rolled over the ranges.

  "Whoopee!" yelled Red. "She's acomin', an' a humdinger!"

  A hot gale struck Sterl. He turned his back, and felt that he was shriveling up like leather in a flame. The gum trees bent away from its force; streaks of dusty light sped along the ground; the afterglow faded into a gloaming that was a moving curtain before the wind. Leaves and grass and bits of bark whipped by, and King's mane and tail stood straight out.

  All at once Sterl's senses awoke to a startling fact. The hot furnace blast had gone on the wind! The air was cool--damp! Red's wild yell came, splitting Sterl's ear. And with it a roar, steady, gaining, tremendous--the roar of rain.

  The pall bore down upon them, steel-gray in the blazes of white fire, to swallow up earth and night and lightning and thunder. He could not see a hand before his face. But how he reveled in that drenching!

  It swallowed up time, too, and he almost forgot the great mob of cattle. But to think of them was futile. Sterl shut his eyes, bent his head, and thanked heaven for every drop of that endless torrent. Stanley Dann's faith and prayers were justified; the trek was saved! Then a rough hand on his shoulder roused him. He opened his eyes. The lightning flashes were far to the west, and the thunder rolled with them. The rain was pouring down, but not in a solid sheet. He could see indistinctly.

  "Pard!" yelled Red, close to his ear. "Stampede! Feel the ground shakin'!"

  Chapter 18

  "Let's find the break!" shouted Red. "You ride back. I'll ride ahaid."

  Turned away from the pelting rain, Sterl could distinguish the darker line of cattle against the white grass. They were not moving on this side. He rode forward and checked King to listen again. There was a decided roar of hoofs, but it was lessening in volume.