Part 31

Some time in the night Bill woke, and found Joe sitting up in bed crying.

“Why, what's the matter, Joe?”

“I never done a mean thing like that before,” sobbed Joe. “I wished I'd chucked meself down the shaft instead. The master trusted me, Will; an' now, if he asks me to-morrow, I'll have to tell a lie.”

“Then tell the truth, Joe, an' take the hidin'; it'll soon be over--just a couple of cuts with the cane and it'll be all over.”

“Oh, no, it won't. He won't never trust me any more. I've never been caned in that school yet, Will, and if I am I'll never go again. Oh! why will you run away from home, Will, and play the wag, and steal, and get us all into such trouble? You don't know how mother takes on about it--you don't know how it hurts father! I've deceived the master, and mother and father to-day, just because you're so--so selfish,” and he laid down and cried himself to sleep.

Bill lay awake and thought till daylight; then he got up quietly, put on his clothes, and stole away from the house and across the flat, followed by the dog, who thought it was a 'possum-hunting expedition. Bill wished the dog would not be quite so demonstrative, at least until they got away from the house. He went straight to the shaft, let himself down carefully on to one of the old logs, and stooped to pick up the note, gleaming white in the sickly summer daylight. Then the rotten timber gave way suddenly, without a moment's warning.

. . . . .

They found him that morning at about nine o'clock. The dog attracted the attention of an old fossicker passing to his work. The letter was gripped in Bill's right hand when they brought him up. They took him home, and the father went for a doctor. Bill came to himself a little just before the last, and said: “Mother! I wasn't running away, mother--tell father that--I--I wanted to try and catch a 'possum on the ground.... Where's Joe? I want Joe. Go out, mother, a minute, and send Joe.”

“Here I am, Bill,” said Joe, in a choking, terrified voice.

“Has the master been yet?”

“No.”

“Bend down, Joe. I went for the note, and the logs gave way. I meant to be back before they was up. I dropped it down inside the bed; you watch your chance and get it; and say you forgot it last night--say you didn't like to give it--that won't be a lie. Tell the master I'm--I'm sorry--tell the master never to send no notes no more--except by girls--that's all.... Mother! Take the blankets off me--I'm dyin'.”

The Story of the Oracle

“We young fellows,” said “Sympathy Joe” to Mitchell, after tea, in their first camp west the river--“and you and I ARE young fellows, comparatively--think we know the world. There are plenty of young chaps knocking round in this country who reckon they've been through it all before they're thirty. I've met cynics and men-o'-the-world, aged twenty-one or thereabouts, who've never been further than a trip to Sydney. They talk about 'this world' as if they'd knocked around in half-a-dozen other worlds before they came across here--and they are just as off-hand about it as older Australians are when they talk about this colony as compared with the others. They say: 'My oath!--same here.' 'I've been there.' 'My oath!--you're right.' 'Take it from me!' and all that sort of thing. They understand women, and have a contempt for 'em; and chaps that don't talk as they talk, or do as they do, or see as they see, are either soft or ratty. A good many reckon that 'life ain't blanky well worth livin''; sometimes they feel so blanky somehow that they wouldn't give a blank whether they chucked it or not; but that sort never chuck it. It's mostly the quiet men that do that, and if they've got any complaints to make against the world they make 'em at the head station. Why, I've known healthy, single, young fellows under twenty-five who drank to drown their troubles--some because they reckoned the world didn't understand nor appreciate 'em--as if it COULD!”

“If the world don't understand or appreciate you,” said Mitchell solemnly, as he reached for a burning stick to light his pipe--“MAKE it!”

“To drown THEIR troubles!” continued Joe, in a tone of impatient contempt. “The Oracle must be well on towards the sixties; he can take his glass with any man, but you never saw him drunk.”

“What's the Oracle to do with it?”

“Did you ever hear his history?”

“No. Do you know it?”

“Yes, though I don't think he has any idea that I do. Now, we were talking about the Oracle a little while ago. We know he's an old ass; a good many outsiders consider that he's a bit soft or ratty, and, as we're likely to be mates together for some time on that fencing contract, if we get it, you might as well know what sort of a man he is and was, so's you won't get uneasy about him if he gets deaf for a while when you're talking, or does funny things with his pipe or pint-pot, or walks up and down by himself for an hour or so after tea, or sits on a log with his head in his hands, or leans on the fence in the gloaming and keeps looking in a blank sort of way, straight ahead, across the clearing. For he's gazing at something a thousand miles across country, south-east, and about twenty years back into the past, and no doubt he sees himself (as a young man), and a Gippsland girl, spooning under the stars along between the hop-gardens and the Mitchell River. And, if you get holt of a fiddle or a concertina, don't rasp or swank too much on old tunes, when he's round, for the Oracle can't stand it. Play something lively. He'll be down there at that surveyor's camp yarning till all hours, so we'll have plenty of time for the story--but don't you ever give him a hint that you know.

“My people knew him well; I got most of the story from them--mostly from Uncle Bob, who knew him better than any. The rest leaked out through the women--you know how things leak out amongst women?”

Mitchell dropped his head and scratched the back of it. HE knew.

“It was on the Cudgegong River. My Uncle Bob was mates with him on one of those 'rushes' along there--the 'Pipeclay', I think it was, or the 'Log Paddock'. The Oracle was a young man then, of course, and so was Uncle Bob (he was a match for most men). You see the Oracle now, and you can imagine what he was when he was a young man. Over six feet, and as straight as a sapling, Uncle Bob said, clean-limbed, and as fresh as they made men in those days; carried his hands behind him, as he does now, when he hasn't got the swag--but his shoulders were back in those days. Of course he wasn't the Oracle then; he was young Tom Marshall--but that doesn't matter. Everybody liked him--especially women and children. He was a bit happy-go-lucky and careless, but he didn't know anything about 'this world', and didn't bother about it; he hadn't 'been there'. 'And his heart was as good as gold,' my aunt used to say. He didn't understand women as we young fellows do nowadays, and therefore he hadn't any contempt for 'em. Perhaps he understood, and understands, them better than any of us, without knowing it. Anyway, you know, he's always gentle and kind where a woman or child is concerned, and doesn't like to hear us talk about women as we do sometimes.

“There was a girl on the goldfields--a fine lump of a blonde, and pretty gay. She came from Sydney, I think, with her people, who kept shanties on the fields. She had a splendid voice, and used to sing 'Madeline'. There might have been one or two bad women before that, in the Oracle's world, but no cold-blooded, designing ones. He calls the bad ones 'unfortunate'.

“Perhaps it was Tom's looks, or his freshness, or his innocence, or softness--or all together--that attracted her. Anyway, he got mixed up with her before the goldfield petered out.

“No doubt it took a long while for the facts to work into Tom's head that a girl might sing like she did and yet be thoroughly unprincipled. The Oracle was always slow at coming to a decision, but when he does it's generally the right one. Anyway, you can take that for granted, for you won't move him.

“I don't know whether he found out that she wasn't all that she pretented to be to him, or whether they quarrelled, or whether she chucked him over for a lucky digger. Tom never had any luck on the goldfields. Anyway, he left and went over to the Victorian side, where his people were, and went up Gippsland way. It was there for the first time in his life that he got what you would call 'properly gone on a girl'; he got hard hit--he met his fate.

“Her name was Bertha Bredt, I remember. Aunt Bob saw her afterwards. Aunt Bob used to say that she was 'a girl as God made her'--a good, true, womanly girl--one of those sort of girls that only love once. Tom got on with her father, who was packing horses through the ranges to the new goldfields--it was rough country and there were no roads; they had to pack everything there in those days, and there was money in it. The girl's father took to Tom--as almost everybody else did--and, as far as the girl was concerned, I think it was a case of love at first sight. They only knew each other for about six months, and were only 'courting' (as they called it then) for three or four months altogether, but she was that sort of girl that can love a man for six weeks and lose him for ever, and yet go on loving him to the end of her life--and die with his name on her lips.