Capricornia

The voice——“Wha——ho there!”

Crash! The couplings clanked throughout the train. The children fell. The black ones howled at top of lungs. Nawnim was silent, clinging desperately to the struggling dog. They rose together, to stand huddled like yarded sheep. Hiss and bubble and clatter and chatter and bunkerlunk behind them and around.

Then to the sudden great delight of the black ones, their parents climbed over the side. Nawnim turned from watching wild embracings to look for Anna. He was watching when a bell clanged. One of the children shrieked, as though the brazen tongue had struck on flesh. Nawnim gasped.

The voice——“Aller—bo—ud!”

Sounds waxed louder, reached a climax, suddenly stilled. Then pheeeeeeeeep! And the voice——“Rightaway Fitz—ledder go!”

Dead silence—silence presaging a dire event. Nawnim’s knees knocked.

Then a Shriek——a Hssss——then Snort! Snort! Snort! The truck leapt under Nawnim’s feet. He reeled, clutching at the wall. Then the engine shrieked again, and hissed and raged and roared and filled the truck with smoke and steam and cinders.

Nawnim fell on the dog, which yelped and snapped. Chaos raged in the undercarriage. Wheels groaned and squealed and thumped. Chains and drawbars rattled and crashed. No piccaninny shrieked louder then than Nawnim. He thought it was The End.

A few sound whacks from a hard black hand soon told him that he was alive and with his kind. The black hand lifted him from the floor and dumped him in a sitting posture by the wall. Overhead reeled black and white clouds in a sapphire sky, and rocky walls and grass and trees, all dancing madly.

After a while his terror subsided. Rain poured down and proved his condition earthly at least. Rain roared and raged down. The truck would have been filled to the top but for the gaping holes in its bottom. Then the sun beat down and charged the soaking truck with steam and the stench of sweating flesh. By now little Nawnim had found a crack in the wall he leant against. He examined it carefully to be assured that it was no inlet for danger, then set an eye to it, to see a world of trees go spinning by in a wild arboreal corroboree. A red wall leapt at him. He gasped and hastily withdrew. But nothing happened; so he peeped again, and stared and stared and was amazed.

The train roared over culverts rocking, clattered over bridges shuddering, panted up inclines clanking, raged down declivities rattling as though falling to pieces. Swollen creeks flew underneath; jungles flashed by; stony hills leapt out of grassy plains and plunged into forests; flocks of geese swept up from swamps; a herd of buffalo charged into the bush; while little Nawnim stared and stared and was amazed.

Back from the engine with the din and smoke and soot and steam were flung the chink of glass and the sound of whitemen’s voices raised in song; and similar sounds joined the whirlwind that followed the van; for the progress of the train to Copper Creek was not so much a business as a pleasure, not so much a journey as a locomotive picnic for the passengers and crew.

Sometimes the engine stopped for water, or to drop stores at fettlers’ camps, or to accumulate the steam to take it up a heavy grade. It was an old machine and badly strained and prodigal of its vitality. On account of the prodigality, stops were sometimes made to give the fireman a rest and a chance to damp with something from a bottle the fire he stoked within himself while feeding the greedy furnace. And at least two stops were made while the engineer went back with water to extinguish fires that had broken out in axle-boxes missed by the Inspector of Rolling-Stock. When the train was stopped, the clinking and singing could be heard to better advantage by the people in the trucks, who looked towards the source and licked their sooty lips.

So the hours passed. Little Nawnim, worn out in body and mind by buffetings and sights and sounds, at length fell asleep with head on the weary dog. And while he slept the niggers ate his sweets.

At two o’clock in the afternoon the train bowled over the Caroline River Bridge and rolled into the 80-Mile Siding, just as Mrs Pansy McLash, the keeper of the Siding House, was flogging a herd of goats from her garden. The goats surged on to the railway, intent on escaping the stockwhip whistling behind; and Mrs McLash went after them, intent on teaching them the lesson of their lives. The small crowd waiting before the Siding House yelled at the woman and the goats. The woman turned and saw the train, tripped on a rail and fell. The crowd, among which was Oscar, rushed to her assistance,

Finding that the chase had ceased, the goats drew up and looked to see what had happened. The track was packed with them. Mrs McLash screamed as she was raised, “My God—my goats!”

“Goats!” yelled the fireman to the engineer.

The engineer looked, then shot a hand to a valve and released a mighty jet of steam. The goats looked interested, but did not move. The engineer laid hold of the reversing-gear. Fireman and passengers rushed to the hand-brakes. The locked wheels raged against the strain. Every bolt and plate of the engine rattled. Coal crashed out of the tender. Water shot out of the tank. The engine halted in an atmosphere of goats. The goats themselves were well on the way to Copper Creek.

Mrs McLash came up to the engine fuming, vowing to report the engineer for neglecting to whistle on the bridge. He promptly silenced her by presenting her with two wet bottles of beer, saying winningly, “Tchsss! Off the ice in town, Ma, and all the way up in the water bag. All chilly and bubbly and liquidy—and all for you, my heart.”

She swallowed, and staring at the bottles muttered, “Don’t try to blarney me.”

“Now who’d do that!” cried the engineer. “But where’s young Frank? Ah! There he is.” He looked at a figure, clad in khaki pants and sleeveless cotton singlet, bent over the driving-mechanism. It was Frank, son of the widow McLash, or her Pride and Joy as she called him. He was a low-browed youth of about twenty, very big for his age, swarthy as a Greek, and shaped rather like a kewpie doll, having a rotund pendulous paunch and a distinctly egg-shaped head. He looked around.

“Good-o Frank,” said the engineer. “Water her up and have a look see what’s knockin’ back of the steam-chest there. There’s a couple of waggons to come off. Charlie’ll tell you.”

Mrs McLash’s anger was gone completely, douched not nearly so much by the beer as by this attention to her son. She loved alcoholic liquor next to her Pride and Joy, but would have gone and lived for ever on salt-bush and dew in a desert for his sake. Indeed she had done something like that by coming to live in Capricornia, because she had forsaken a cosy little shop she had owned in her native city of Flinders and friends of a lifetime and a perpetual supply of cheap liquor, to save him from a life of crime. His last place of residence in Flinders was the Spring Hill Reformatory, where he was sent for the second time in his young life for committing burglary. His mother had secured his release by swearing to take him away to what they called down there The Landof Oppurtunity. She had done well. Two years before it had been his ambition to become a first-class criminal; now it was to become the engineer of the Copper Creek train.

People who had come to hear the siding-mistress assail the engineer, turned with the pair and followed them to the house. Oscar was not one of them. He had been at the brakevan getting his stores and the district mail. He met the others on the veranda.

When Jock Driver saw Oscar he shouldered his way to him. He and Oscar had lately quarrelled over a mixed-up train-load of imported breeding bulls. He bawled at Oscar, “Why—there’s the big Mister Shillingsworth——hey there, I wanner word wi’ you!”

Oscar looked and scowled. Jock was drunk. He tripped on the mat at the dining-room door, and staggering, crashed into the iron wall. After sprawling against the wall for a second or two, he stood erect and bawled at Oscar, “By jees Orscar—j’know you’n me’s relairted?”

Again Oscar scowled.

“Aye,” cried Jock. “S’blunny fact. I’m fawster fawther y’ lil nevvy No-name—so’m fawster brither t’you—aint it? Ha! Ha! Ha! You’n me gawstrewth—n’y’dunno it—Ha! Ha! Ha!”

He reeled against Oscar, who flung him off crying, “What’s wrong with you—gone mad?”

Jock laughed till he wept, and while doing so staggered to the wall. “Uncle Orscar,” he gasped. “Gawd—thaht’s it—Uncle Orscar! Hey guard—hey Chawlie—where’s lil yeller bawstid—lil No-name—bring’m lennim see’s grea’ big gennelmally Uncle Orscar—Ha! Ha! Ho!”

“Shut your meaty moosh or I’ll shut it for you,” cried Oscar.

Jock stopped laughing and glared, then lurched into a fighting attitude and bawled, “I’ll crack ye—big flash coo!”

Oscar blew out his big moustache contemptuously, snapped, “Rat of a Pommy!” and picked up the mail-bag and walked down the veranda to the little room at the end called the Post-Office.

In the dining room Jock attempted to make more trouble, choosing as his victim the half-caste waiter Elbert, a mottled-brown-faced youth of about the same age as Frank McLash, though of nothing like the same physique, as could be seen at once, because he wore a ragged khaki shirt and trousers that betrayed by extraordinary looseness at the waist the fact that they had belonged to Frank.

“Yeller scoom!” bawled Jock, making a rush at him. “By jees——”

Mrs McLash pushed Elbert into the kitchen and stepped in front of Jock and drove him protesting to a seat.

“Him!” bawled Jock. “Why thaht’s the yeller bawstid——”

“I know what he done, my good man. He pinched his wife back off you who pinched her off of him. I’m surprised at you. Sit down’n eat your dinner and leave the poor skelington thing alone. He never had a decent feed in his life till he come here.”

“I tell you——”

“Shut up or I’ll kick you out!”

Jock obeyed. For a while he mouthed about Elbert, then remembered Oscar and began to mouth about him, explaining why he had called him Uncle Oscar, while giving the impression that Mark had several half-caste children. His audience could listen with ease, because Oscar had gone off with his little daughter Marigold to avoid further contact with Jock. While Jock was talking, Oscar and Marigold were watching Frank McLash shunting trucks.

Just before the train left, while passengers were leaving the dining-room and Mrs McLash was occupied with collecting the money, Jock slipped into the kitchen and caught Yeller Elbert unawares. Mrs McLash came to the rescue with a broom.

“I’ll dawg him,” shouted Jock, struggling with the woman, “I’ll dawg thaht moongrel bawstid off face yearth I will—lemme at him——”

“Get on the train!” screeched Mrs McLash. “Think I want a thing like you on me hands for a fortnight? Get out or I’ll brain you—Hey!—Hey!—stop, you cheat, you aint paid me for your dinner!”

For some time after the train had gone Oscar stood on the track conversing with members of the fettling gang, while Marigold sat on the Siding House veranda on the knee of Mrs McLash, innocently listening to a low-spoken discussion of her Uncle Mark and Cousin No-Name. Mrs McLash’s companions were her son, Joe Steen, a settler of the neighbourhood, who was reputed to be her lover, and Peter Differ, who was employed by Oscar. While they talked they kept their eyes on Oscar, delighted to have the laugh on one they hated for his superiority. He stood there with the shabby grubby fettlers, tall and erect and neat and clean as ever. It was not clothes that made him so. He would have looked superior as a swagman. He wore a battered wideawake hat, faded blue tunic-shirt, rusty black neckerchief, grubby white moleskin pants, and spurred topboots that were colourless with dust. Nor was it means that made him so. Any of the fettlers were better off in respect of ready-money than he was.

The discussion stopped abruptly when Oscar left the gang and came across. All looked at him with something like respect, except young Frank, who looked at the landscape and snickered. Oscar glanced at Frank distrustfully. They were not friends, these two, having become rather too well acquainted as master and man in the early days of Frank’s residence in the district.

Mrs McLash began to talk at once of a piece of news that had come up with the train. There followed a pause, during which Oscar, leaning against a veranda post, rolled a cigarette, and Frank, lolling on haunches near him, bombarded an ant with spittle. Then Frank said in a thin drawling voice, “Eh Oscar—you hear about your yeller nephew?”

Oscar looked at him while licking the cigarette.

“That kid Jock Driver was tellin’ you about.”

Out of the corner of his eye Oscar saw Frank’s mother shake her head and glare. He asked, “What’s that?”