Part 16 (1/2)
In the morning Bill would hardly take the trouble to prepare a breakfast for himself, and the clothes he wore were not those that Finn had always seen him in before. Bill presently tied up the hanging door of the gunyah and mounted his horse. Jess and Finn followed him as their wont was, but their hearts were sad, and Bill's glowering looks gave them no encouragement. For almost seven miles they followed Bill, and then, after leaping a low ”dog-leg”
fence, they found themselves in the one wide street of Nargoola towns.h.i.+p. Bill cantered slowly down the empty road till he came to the ”First Nugget Hotel,” and there he drew rein and finally hitched his horse's bridle to a verandah post. Then he strode across the verandah and disappeared within the ”hotel,” and Jess remembered--many things.
Finn remained with Jess, a few yards from the horse, waiting; but whereas the experienced Jess lay down in the dust, Finn stood erect and watchful beside her. He was already rather nearer to the house than he cared about; and the air was heavy with the scent of man and his works. Finn was acutely uncomfortable, and told Jess so as plainly as he could, with a hint as to the advantages of returning to the bush. But Jess urged patience, and tucked her nose under one of her hind-legs.
Presently one or two men came straggling down the street and made overtures to Finn, after standing and gazing upon him with admiring astonishment, and slowly piecing together his connection with Bill and Jess through the horse. Bush folk have a way of arriving at their knowledge of people through horseflesh.
”My oath!” exclaimed one of the men. ”He's got a touch of the Tasmanian blood in him, all right. I guess old man Hall's pets have been busy back in the hills there. Wonder how Bill got a-holt o'
_him_!”
And then, with every sign of deferential friendliness, the man endeavoured to approach Finn. But though Jess lay still, showing only pointed indifference where the men were concerned, Finn leaped backward like a stag, and kept a good score of paces between the men-folk and himself.
The man who made the remark about Finn and Tasmanian blood had never seen the zebra wolf, as it is sometimes called, owing to the stripes which often occur in its coat, or he would not have thought of Finn in this connection. The Tasmanian wolf is a heavy, long beast, with a truncated muzzle, short legs, a thin, taper tail, and a very ma.s.sive shoulder and neck. Wolves of this type have been known to keep six hunting-dogs absolutely at bay, and finally to escape from them. Their appearance is more suggestive of the hyaena than of any such symmetrically beautiful lines as those of Finn's graceful, racy build. But, by reason of his great height and size, Finn was strange to the Nargoola man, and he, having heard of old Jacob Hall's strange importations from Tasmania, at once linked the two kinds of strangeness together in his mind, and saw only further reason for so doing in the fact that he was quite unable to get within a dozen paces of touching the Wolfhound.
Out of consideration for the patient Jess, Finn endured the discomfort of waiting beside the ”First Nugget” all through that day, though he never ventured to sit down even for a moment; there among the man-smells and the threatening shadows of the houses, each one of which he regarded as the possible headquarters of a circus, the possible home of a ”Professor.” But when evening set in, and Jess still showed no sign of forsaking her post, Finn could endure it no longer, and told his friend several times over that he must go; that he would return to the camp in the bush and wait there. The nuzzling touches of Jess's nose said plainly, ”Wait a bit, yet! What's your hurry?” But Finn was in deadly earnest now.
He refused to be restrained even by a little whimpering appeal, in which Jess made every use she could of the craft of her s.e.x, showing exaggerated signs of weakness and distress. ”Well, then, why not come with me?” barked Finn in reply, fidgeting about her on his toes. Jess pleaded for delay, and licked his nose most persuasively. But Finn's mind was made up, and he turned his shoulder coldly upon the b.i.t.c.h, while still waiting for some sign of yielding on her part. But Jess was bound to her post by ties far stronger than any consideration of her own comfort or well-being; and, as a matter of fact, forty Wolfhounds would not have moved her from that verandah--alive. Also, of course, she had not Finn's violent distaste for the neighbourhood of man and his works. She had never been in a circus. She had never been suddenly awakened from complete trust in mankind to knowledge of the existence of mad man-beasts with hot iron bars; so Finn would have told her.
In the end, Finn gave a cold bark of displeasure and trotted off into the gathering twilight, leaping the fence and plunging into the bush the moment he had pa.s.sed the last house of the towns.h.i.+p.
Half an hour later he killed a fat bandicoot, who was engaged at that moment in killing a tiny marsupial mouse. A quarter of an hour after that, Finn lay down beside the ashes of the fire before the gunyah, his kill between his fore-legs. He rested there for a few minutes, and then, tearing off its furry skin in strips, devoured the greater part of the bandicoot before settling down for the night; as much, that is, as he ever did settle down, these days.
His eyes were not often completely closed; less often at night, perhaps, than in the daytime. But he dozed now, out there in the clear patch where the gunyah stood, free of all thoughts of men and cages. And the bush air seemed sweeter than ever to him to-night after his brief stay in the man-haunted towns.h.i.+p.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
CHAPTER XXIII
THE OUTCAST
For nine consecutive days and nights Finn continued to regard the empty gunyah in the clear patch as his home, to eat there, and to rest there, beside the ashes of the fire, or in the shadow of the shanty itself. And still Jess and her man came not, and the Wolfhound was left in solitary possession. Once, when the heat of the day was past, Finn trotted down the trail to the towns.h.i.+p, and peered long and earnestly through the dog-leg fence in the direction of the ”First Nugget.” But he saw no trace of Jess or her man; and, for his part, he was glad to get back to the clear patch again, and to take his ease beside the gunyah.
He had recently struck up a more than bowing acquaintance with the koala that he had once dragged through a quarter of a mile of scrub to the gunyah, and was now in the habit of meeting this quaint little bear nearly every day. For his part, Koala never presumed to make the slightest advance in Finn's direction, but he had come to realize that the great Wolfhound wished him no harm, and, though his conversation seldom went beyond plaintive complainings and lugubrious a.s.sertions of his own complete in offensiveness, Finn liked to sit near the little beast occasionally, and watch his fubsy antics and listen to his plaint. Koala was rather like the Mad Hatter that Alice met in Wonderland; he was ”a very poor man,”
by his way of it; and, though in reality rather a contented creature, seemed generally to be upon the extreme verge of shedding tears.
Another of the wild folk that Finn met for the first time in his life during these nine days, and continued to meet on a friendly footing, was a large native porcupine, or echidna. Finn was sniffing one afternoon at what he took to be the opening to a rabbit's burrow, when, greatly to his surprise, Echidna showed up, some three or four yards away, from one of the exits of the same earth. The creature's shock of fretful quills was not inviting, and Finn discovered no inclination to risk touching it with his nose; but, having jumped forward in such a way as to shut Echidna off from his home, they were left perforce face to face for a few moments. During those moments, Finn decided that he had no wish to slay the ant-eating porcupine, and Echidna, for his part, made up his exceedingly rudimentary little mind that Finn was a fairly harmless person. So they sat up looking at one another, and Finn marvelled that the world should contain so curious a creature as his new acquaintance; while Echidna doubtless wondered, in his primitive, p.r.i.c.kly fas.h.i.+on, how much larger dogs were likely to grow in that part of the country. Then the flying tail of a bandicoot caught Finn's attention, and the pa.s.sing that way of an unusually fat bull-dog ant drew Echidna from reflection to business, and the oddly ill-matched couple parted after their first meeting. After this, they frequently exchanged civil greeting when their paths happened to cross in the bush.
But, unlike the large majority of Australia's wild folk, Finn was exclusively a carnivorous animal, and this fact rather placed him out of court in the matter of striking up acquaintances in the bush, since meetings with the Wolfhound were apt, as a general thing, to end in that very close form of intimacy which involves the complete absorption of the lesser personality into the greater, not merely figuratively, but physically. Finn might, and frequently did, ask a stray bandicoot, or rabbit, or kangaroo-rat to dinner; but by the time the meal was ended, the guest was no more; and so the acquaintance could never be pursued further. Finn would have been delighted, really, to make friends with creatures like the bandicoot people, and to enjoy their society at intervals--when he was well fed. But the bandicoots and their kind could never forget that they were, after all, food in the Wolfhound's eyes, and it was not possible to know for certain exactly when his appet.i.te was likely to rise within him and claim attention--and bandicoots.
Therefore, full or empty, hunting or lounging, Finn was a scourge and an enemy in the eyes of these small folk, and, as such, a person to be avoided at all cost, and at all seasons.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Spurring his horse forward.]
The hunting in the neighbourhood of the gunyah was still amply sufficient for Finn's needs; and, as he continually expected the return of Bill and Jess, he did not forage very far from the clear patch. He generally dozed and rested beside the humpy during the afternoon, preparatory to hunting in the dusk for the kill that represented his night meal. It was on the evening of his tenth day of solitude, and rather later than his usual hour for the evening prowl, that Finn woke with a start in his place beside the gunyah to hear the sound of horse's feet entering the clear patch from the direction of the station homestead. There was no sign of Jess that nose or eye or ear could detect, but Finn told himself as he moved away from the gunyah that this was doubtless Bill, and that Jess would be likely to follow. As his custom was, where Bill was concerned, Finn took up his stand about five-and-twenty paces from the humpy, prepared gravely to observe the boundary-rider's evening tasks: the fire-lighting, and so forth. As the new-comer began to dismount, or rather, as he began to think of dismounting, he caught a dim glimpse of Finn's figure through the growing darkness. It was only a dim glimpse the man caught, and he took Finn for a dingo, made wondrous large in appearance, somehow, by the darkness. He was both astonished and exceedingly indignant that a dingo should have the brazen impudence to stand and stare at him, within thirty yards of camp, too. In his hand he carried a stock-whip, with its fifteen-foot fall neatly coiled about its taper end. Swinging this by the head of its fall, he flung it with all his might at Finn, at the same time rising erect in the saddle and spurring his horse forward at the gallop to ride the supposed dingo down.
”G-r-r-r, you thieving swine! I'll teach ye!”
The voice was strange to Finn, and very hoa.r.s.e and harsh. The Wolfhound cantered lightly off, and the rider followed him right into the scrub before wheeling his horse and turning back toward the camp. Before he moved Finn gave one snarling growl; and the reason of that was that the heavy b.u.t.t-end of the stock-whip handle had caught him fairly in the ribs and almost taken his breath away.
From the shelter of the bush, Finn peered for a long while at the camp from which he had been driven; and as he peered his mind held a tumult of conflicting emotions. He saw the man gather twigs and light a fire, just as Bill had been wont to do. But he knew now that the man was not Bill. He heard the man growling and swearing to himself, just as a creature of the wild does sometimes over its meals. As a matter of fact, this particular man had been removed from a post that he liked and sent to this place, because Bill had left the district; and he was irritable and annoyed about it.