Part 13 (1/2)

Finn was in no mood for disputes of any sort, and so, though exceedingly weary now, he made a wide detour to satisfy the nervousness of the flea-bitten grey stallion, and began a diagonal descent upon the south side of Tinnaburra. Just as the sun cleared the horizon over his right shoulder, Finn dropped wearily down from a clump of wattle upon a broad, flat ledge of many-coloured rock which caught the sun's first glinting rays upon its queer enamel of red and brown and yellow lichen. From this point Finn looked down a densely-wooded mountain side, and out across a tolerably well-timbered plain to hills which stood nearly forty miles away. It would have made an eyrie for a king eagle. Finn had already slaked his thirst hurriedly a mile back, in a chattering, rock-bedded mountain streamlet. And now he was weary beyond all further endurance. He had been sick, and sore, and stiff, and sadly out of condition when he started; and he had been travelling now for six hours. A feeling of security had stolen over him since he reached the topmost ridge of Tinnaburra. The very fragrance of the air told him, as he drew it in through his nostrils, that he was far from the works of men. Food he could not think of while every bone and muscle in his great body ached from weariness. By the edge of the rock was a sandy hollow, over which a feathery shrub drooped three or four of its graceful branches at a height of three feet from the ground. Finn eyed this inviting spot steadily for two or three minutes, while his aching sides continued to heave, and his long tongue to sway from one side of his jaws. Then he stepped cautiously into the sheltered nook, turned completely round in it three or four times, and finally sank to rest there in a compact coil, and with a little grunt of contentment and relief.

Finn opened his eyes, and half-opened them, many times during the day; once, to his utter amazement, when a huge wedge-tailed eagle swept gloriously past with a lamb in its talons no more than ten feet from his nose; but the day was practically done, and nightfall approaching, when the Wolfhound finally rose from his sandy bed and stretched his seven-foot length from nose to tail. The long stretch drew a sharp whine from him towards its end, when the stiffness and soreness of his limbs, and of some of his more recent burns and bruises, found him out. But even in the pain there was a sense of luxury and gladness for Finn. His sleep had not been devoid of sudden starts, of shudderings and twitches, born of fearful dreaming; but now that he was broad awake, and in the hushed grey twilight looked out across forty miles of wild open land, with never a sign of tent or house, or other work of man, his heart swelled within him with satisfaction and content, and he drew deep breaths of grateful pleasure and relief before setting out upon the descent of Tinnaburra, and, if it might be, the capture of a supper.

Before Finn had travelled half a mile along the hill-side, he made his first acquaintance with the snake people. In descending at a sharp angle from the side of a fallen tree, his fore-feet just sc.r.a.ped the end of the tail of a nine-foot carpet snake, whose colouring was vivid and fresh. Before Finn knew what had happened, one coil of the sinuous reptile's body was about his left hind-leg, and, as the startled Wolfhound wheeled in his tracks, the big snake's head rose at him with a forbidding, long-drawn ”Ps-s-s-s-t!”

of defiance. The rapidly tightening pressure about his muscular lower thigh produced something like panic in Finn's breast; but, luckily enough, his panic resulted in speeding him toward precisely the right course of action. He feinted in the direction of his hind-leg, and then, as the snake plunged for his neck, his jaws flashed back and caught the reptile just behind the head. A single bite was sufficient, for it smashed the snake's vertebrae and almost divided it. A moment later Finn's teeth were at the coil about his hind-leg, and in another instant he was free. But he was too greatly shocked to make a meal upon the remains of his enemy, which is what he should have done, and, after taking a good look at its long, brilliantly-coloured body, he was glad to make off down the hill, travelling now with a good deal more caution than he had shown before. It was a merciful thing for Finn that his first contact with the snake people should have brought him in touch only with the powerful and courageous carpet snake, and not with one of the many deadly venomous members of his tribe.

This experience rather shook Finn by reason of its utter strangeness to him. He recalled the spitting venom of the native cat, of whose kill he had caught a fleeting glimpse on the previous night. That again was rather strange and outside his experience.

This great open wild world was certainly quite unlike the mild, half-domesticated and cared-for little patch of wild that Finn had claimed as his hunting-ground beside the Suss.e.x Downs. Just then a laughing jacka.s.s started a hoa.r.s.e chuckle above Finn's head, and a big white c.o.c.katoo, startled by the jacka.s.s, flew screaming out from the branches of a grey gum, with the agonized note in its cry which these birds seem to favour at all seasons, and quite irrespective of the nature of their occupations at the moment. The loose skin on Finn's shoulders moved uneasily, as he trotted along, using the most extreme care.

But, with all his care, he was in strange surroundings, and his bush-lore was all to learn; and because of his strangeness his most careful gait seemed a noisy and clumsy one to the little wild folk of that mountain side, and Finn saw none of them. By chance he saw one of the larger kind, however, and the sight of it added to his sense of strangeness, for it was unlike any other beast he had ever seen. This was a large female rock wallaby, a big grey doe, with her young one. The youngster was at the awkward age, free of the teat, yet unable to travel alone. It was nibbling and playing some distance from its big mother when she had her first warning of Finn's approach, in the crackling of dead twigs under his powerful feet. The youngster showed awkwardness in getting to its snug retreat in the mother's pouch, and so, by these delays, Finn was given his glimpse of a big marsupial in the act of taking a fifteen-foot leap through the scrub. Finn almost sat down on his haunches from astonishment. But, unlike the snake, the wallaby inspired him with no sort of fear, possibly by reason of its evident fear of him. It was, however, another item in the strangeness, the complete unfamiliarity of Finn's present surroundings.

It seems absurd to suggest that the great Wolfhound may have been suffering from loneliness, seeing that he had never been so thankful for anything else in his whole life as he was for his escape from the circus, with its small army of men-folk and animals. But it is a fact that as Finn plodded along through the wild bush to the south of Tinnaburra, he began to be haunted by a sense of isolation and friendlessness. It was now thirty hours since he had tasted food, and it seemed that game shunned his trail, for he saw none of the many small animals he had pa.s.sed on the previous night; and the sight he had had that day of the great wedge-tailed eagle, of the carpet snake, and of the grey rock wallaby, these only added to the uncanny strangeness of his surroundings. In one sense, persecution, witting and unwitting, had made a wild beast of him during his confinement in the circus; but, by reason of the close confinement which had accompanied these persecutions, increasing self-dependence and self-reliance had not come with the access of fierceness and wildness. Finn inherited fighting instincts and savage ferocity under persecution from a long and n.o.ble line of hunting and fighting ancestors. But he inherited few instincts which bore practically upon the matter of picking up his own living, of walking alone, of depending exclusively upon himself, and of leading the solitary life of the really wild carnivora. But this would have troubled him very little if the scene of his present wanderings had been, say, some part of Suss.e.x. As it was, the big snake, the huge eagle, the screaming c.o.c.katoo, the nerve-shaking cachophony of the jacka.s.s, and the half-flying progress of the big wallaby, all combined with the huge wildness of the country and its vegetation to oppress Finn with the sense of being a lone outcast, an outlier in a foreign land which was full of sinister possibilities. The recollection of that hissing nine-foot worm, of a thickness as great and greater than that of his own legs, lingered unpleasantly with Finn. Also, he was getting very hungry.

While these impressions were sinking into the Wolfhound's mind, the country through which he was travelling was becoming more open, more like a long-neglected park, in which many of the trees were dead, and all had a gaunt and scraggy look, with their thin, pointed grey-green leaves, their curiously tortured-looking limbs, and their long, rustling streamers of decaying bark. But, however Finn might feel in the matter of loneliness, it was with a pang of something like horror that he came presently upon a barbed wire fence, exactly like the one he had leaped on the previous night, directly after leaving the circus. Could it be possible that the circus had been moved during the day to this place, and the barbed wire fence brought with it? Finn prowled cautiously up and down that fence for a couple of hundred yards in each direction, peering beyond it, and sniffing and listening with the extreme of suspiciousness, before he finally leaped the wire and continued his way in a south-easterly direction.

Five minutes later he saw a rabbit, and though he lost it, by reason of the fact that it was sitting within a foot of its burrow and disappeared with lightning-like rapidity at sight of Finn, yet he was cheered by this homely sight, and pursued his way with renewed hope in the matter of supper. A moment later and he stopped dead in his tracks as though shot, and then crawled softly aside to take cover behind a thicket of scrub.

In topping an abrupt little ridge, he had come suddenly into full view of a bark gunyah or shanty, in the triangular opening of which, beside a bright fire, sat a man and a big black hound. A billy-can swung over the fire on a tripod of stakes, and the man was engaged with his supper. Finn did not know, of course, that the man was a boundary-rider, and his dog a not very well-bred kangaroo-hound. The wind was north-west, or the kangaroo-hound would surely have scented Finn's approach and given tongue.

For a long time Finn lay under the cover of his thicket, peering through the darkness at the boundary-rider and his dog. And while Finn gazed his thoughts were very busy, both with matters of his own knowledge and experience, and with vague instinctive knowledge, dream knowledge and dream experiences, which came to him from his forbears of old, even as a setter's or a pointer's hunting knowledge comes to him in the vanguard of experience. The thing that most impressed Finn in the picture he saw was the figure of the black hound, stretched at ease beside the fire, steadily eyeing its master. Every once in a while the man would break a chunk from his damper, or cut a morsel from his meat and toss it to the kangaroo-hound, who opened and closed its jaws like a steel trap, and gulped the gift with portentous solemnity, and absolutely without visible sign of any emotion whatever. The hound showed only watchfulness. Finn heard its jaws snap, and could almost hear the gulp which disposed of each morsel. The sight and the sound gave an edge to the Wolfhound's already keen appet.i.te, and, almost unconsciously, he drew nearer and yet nearer to the gunyah, crouching low to the ground as he moved, his hind-quarters gathered under him ready for springing, like a huge cat.

There was no suggestion of circuses, or cages, or cruelty about the picture Finn saw; but his recent experiences had been far too severe to admit of anything like the old simple trustfulness in his att.i.tude. That could never be again. Even hunger would never make this Wolfhound trustful again. But for all that, there was something in the picture of the camp-fire and the pair who sat beside it which drew Finn strongly; tugging somehow at his heart-strings; pulling at him strongly, softly; drawing him, as by silken cords of instinct and immemorial a.s.sociation. So far as his own life in the world went, this was the first camp-fire Finn had ever seen. One could not say exactly how or why it should have been so, but it is a fact that, while crouching Finn gazed upon and crept closer to that camp-fire, his mind was full of affectionate thoughts and memories of the Master, and of the old days of their happy companions.h.i.+p. Up till this evening he had not thought of the Master for many days.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER XVIII

TOO LATE

It was doubtless the camp-fire picture which filled the lone Wolfhound's mind with thoughts of the Master; but, while there is no suggestion of telepathy about it, it was none the less an odd coincidence that, at the very hour of Finn's approach to a camp-fire in the bush, a dozen miles and more to the south-east of Tinnaburra, the Master should have been approaching the big house by the harbour outside the capital city, three hundred miles away, with a mind full of Finn. Yet so it was. And at that moment the Master's reminiscent thoughts of the Wolfhound were to the full as affectionate as were Finn's thoughts of him.

The Mistress of the Kennels had more than justified the doctor's prophecies. Less than a month of life in the mountains had given her back her old energy and strength. The third week there had given her also the acquaintance, soon to ripen into friends.h.i.+p, of a certain squatter's wife, who was spending a few weeks in the hills with her husband and three children. Before the acquaintance was a week old the Mistress of the Kennels had been pressingly invited to make her home with the squatter and his wife at their station, for a time at all events, in order that she might supervise the education of the three youngsters, and, also, give the squatter's wife the benefit of some of her experience in the rearing of dogs. The Master could have found a minor opening on the same station, but decided that he could not afford to take up a life which offered no particular prospect of advancement, and was confirmed in his decision by an offer that was made to him at this time to join, in a working capacity, a small prospecting party which was setting out for a tract of back-block country said to be extremely rich in gold, copper, and silver. And so, for a time, the Master and the Mistress had parted company.

Now, while there are many prospectors in Australia who, during a lifetime of adventurous toil, have never made much more than a labourer's wage, there are others who have made and lost many fortunes, to whose credit may be placed a score or more of rich discoveries, and much wealth enjoyed by other people. The leader of the Master's party was of this latter cla.s.s, and less than three weeks after the outsetting of this particular expedition, the party had pegged out a considerable number of rich claims. Some of these claims had been of a kind which admitted of good deal of highly profitable alluvial working but the majority called for the use of machinery and the outlay of capital. Accordingly, the party gathered to themselves such surface gold as was obtainable--the Master's share came to 260--and then, laden with samples of ore, returned townward, with a view to selling their claims to mining capitalists, before starting out upon a second and more protracted journey. The fascination of the prospector's calling had gripped the Master strongly, and he gladly agreed to remain a member of the party. But, in the meantime, having reached the city, he had determined to pay a visit to Mr. Sandbrook's house, first, that he might have the satisfaction of seeing Finn again and, secondly, in order that he might try the effect of a substantial money offer in the matter of regaining possession of his Wolfhound. And so now while Finn was thinking of him, in the heart of the wildest part of the Tinnaburra country, three hundred miles away, the Master strode up the hill overlooking the city and the harbour, strongly hopeful that he might soon have the great hound he had bred trotting by his side.

Mr. and Mrs. Sandbrook were both away from home, but one of the daughters of the house explained to the Master how, after ”sulking desperately for two whole days,” the Wolfhound had basely deserted his luxurious new home, and never been heard of since. She showed the Master an advertis.e.m.e.nt offering a reward of five-and-twenty pounds for Finn's recovery, and was at some pains to make clear the indubitable fact that her father had paid very dearly indeed for the doubtful privilege of possessing for two days a Wolfhound who had ”treated everybody as if they were dirt under his feet.” The Master expressed sympathy in sentences which were meant to be loyal excuses for Finn; and then he turned and walked back to the city, heavy at heart for the loss of the great Wolfhound whom he had loved, and feeling vaguely that the money he had made was not such a very precious thing after all. He placed the greater part of it at the disposal of the Mistress of the Kennels, and went back to his fellow-prospectors.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER XIX

THE DOMESTIC LURE

As Finn drew closer to the camp-fire, the savoury smell of the stewed mutton the man by the gunyah was eating came sailing down the breeze into his nostrils, emphasizing his hunger to him, and reminding him strongly of the days in which carefully cooked foods had been his portion every day. But the Wolfhound's desire for food was nothing like so keen a thing as his dread of renewed captivity, and his approach to the camp-fire was an ill.u.s.tration of the extreme of animal caution. His powerful limbs were all the time gathered well under him, prepared for instant flight.

Suddenly and simultaneously two things happened. A log on the fire broke in half, allowing a long tongue of flame to leap up and light the ground for fifty yards around, and the kangaroo-hound turned its greyhound-like muzzle sharply to one side and saw Finn. In the next instant three things happened together: the man's eyes followed those of his dog and saw Finn; the dog leaped to its feet and barked loudly; and Finn jumped sideways and backwards, a distance of three yards. Then the man said, ”By ghost!” and the kangaroo-hound bounded forward towards Finn.

Now it was not in Finn's nature to run from a dog, and so, as the boundary-rider did not move, he held his ground. But his recent experiences had all made for hostility and the fighting att.i.tude toward other animals; and so, instead of standing upright and awaiting the salutations of the lesser creature in a courteously non-committal manner, as he would have done in the old days, Finn held his hind-quarters bunched well under him ready for springing, his fore-legs stretched well before him, his jaws slightly parted, and the lips lifted considerably from his fangs, while eyes and nostrils, and slightly raised hackles, though making no killing threat, said very plainly, ”Beware! I am not to be trifled with!”