CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

BACK ON THE LAND.

Eusty came to meet me with old Bandicoot and the buggy. Mr. Blackshaw had come in with him to do a little business and save horse-flesh. The day was a horror. A western hurricane filled the world with wind gales, icy as winter, and fogged the air with dust. There had been no rain. There was no sign of spring.

I expected things to be rather desperate, remembering what they had been a month ago, and letters from home had had but one theme, but coming from the green coastal belt, the city warmth, brightness and beauty, where people daintily dressed rode on the comfortable trams and enjoyed every other convenience and entertainment of existence, the contrast was shocking. The bare cooked paddocks by the way filled me with a feeling of despair.

“It’s a good thing you didn’t stay away any longer or I reckon you would have had to walk home. Old Bandicoot is almost too poor to draw you,” remarked Eusty, giving the brave old friend an unnecessary flick of the whip and raising the dust from his long shabby coat from which his bones protruded.

Pa was about the same. “Serve him right,” continued Eusty. “He oughter learn not to be pokin’ his nose so close into the baits. We can take a short cut through Burrawong, the gates ain’t locked.”

Burrawong was one of the larger stations in which much of the good land of the district was locked. The cockies usually had to follow the main road, but since the drought the owners had opened one of their permanent water-holes so that the poorer settlers could cart water to their homesteads. They were to be seen with a cask and a dray bucketing water into troughs to a few staggering animals which had been watered thus since January, now eight months past.

In a hot dust storm the sun shows as a ball of blood, this being a cold sirocco, it showed like a full moon. I shut my eyes against the whirling grit and wrapped my cape around me while Eusty urged poor old Bandicoot to keep toddling. In the paddocks of Burrawong, sheep skins lined the fences. The emaciated carcasses attracted flocks of black croakers and their dismal clamour filled the day.

“They’ve put on a couple of men to each paddock to skin the sheep as they die,” remarked Mr. Blackshaw. “They’ll have their work cut out after this wind. It topples the jumbucks over and they ain’t got strength to get up again. There were a few clouds knocking about yestiddy, but this wind has cooked their chances. Burrawong is about cooked, and so are we.”

“Like us,” chimed Eusty. “Nearly all the cows pegged out while you were away. Old Roany and Nellie went first, and we have to lift up old Taralga twice a day; she can’t hold out much longer.”

A dray passed loaded with wood and drawn by three horses. The tears came as I noted the condition of the animals. That morning they had been lifted on to their feet, and yet they struggled so gallantly for their incompetent masters—panting, trembling, staggering through their purgatory under lash and objurgation. My heart seemed to suffocate.