The Rising of the Court | Page 7

the mud splasher, of
buggy or cart, and, laying his head on it, sob as he rode, careless of tyre
and spokes, till a woman pushed him off gently:
"Take care of the wheel, Jim--mind the wheel."
The eldest son held the most painful position, by his mother's side in
the first buggy, supported by an aunt on the other side, while somebody
led his horse. In the next buggy, between two daughters, sat a young
fellow who was engaged to one of them--they were to be married after
the holidays. The poor girls were white and worn out; he had an arm
round each, and now and again they rested their heads on his shoulders.
The younger girl would sleep by fits and starts, the sleep of exhaustion,
and start up half laughing and happy, to be stricken wild-eyed the next
moment by terrible reality. Some couldn't realize it at all--and to most
of them all things were very dreamy, unreal and far away on that lonely,
silent road in the moonlight--silent save for the slow, stumbling hoofs
of tired horses, and the deliberate, half-hesitating clack-clack of
wheel-boxes on the axles.
Ben Duggan rode hard, as grief-stricken men ride--and walk. At Cooyal
he woke up the solitary storekeeper and told him the news; then along
that little-used old road for some miles both ways, and back again,
rousing prospectors and fossickers, the butcher of the neighbourhood,
clearers, fencers, and timber-getters, in hut and tent.
"Who's that?"

"What's up?"
"What's the matter?"
"Ben Duggan! Jack Denver's dead! Killed ridin' home from the races!
Funeral's to-morrow. Roll up at Talbragar or the nearest point you can
get to on the government road. Tell the neighbours and folks."
"Good God! How did it happen?"
But the hoofs of Ben's horse would be clattering or thudding away into
the distance.
He struck through to Dunne's selection--his brother-in-law, who had
not been to the races; then to Ross's farm--Old Ross was against racing,
but struck a match at once and said something to his auld wife about
them black trousers that belonged to the black coat and vest.
Then Ben swung to the left and round behind the spurs to the school at
Old Pipeclay, where he told the schoolmaster. Then west again to
Morris's and Schneider's lonely farms in the deep estuary of Long
Gully, and through the gully to the Mudgee-Gulgong road at New
Pipeclay. The long, dark, sullenly-brooding gully through which he had
gone to school in the glorious bush sunshine with Jack Denver, and his
sweetheart--now but three hours his hopelessly-stricken widow; Bertha
Lambert, Ben's sweetheart--married now, and newly a grandmother;
Harry Dale--drowned in the Lachlan; Lucy Brown--Harry's school-day
and boy-and-girl sweetheart--dead; and--and all the rest of them. Far
away, far away--and near away: up in Queensland and out on the
wastes of the Never-Never. Riding and camping, hardship and comfort,
monotony and adventure, drought, flood, blacks, and fire; sprees
and--the rest of it. Long dry stretches on Dead Man's Track. Cutting
across the country in No Man's Land where there were no tracks into
the Unknown. Chancing it and damning it. Ill luck and good luck.
Laughing at it afterwards and joking at it always; he and Jack--always
he and Jack--till Jack got married. The children used to say Long Gully
was haunted, and always hurried through it after sunset. It was haunted
enough now all right.
But, raising the gap at the head of the gully, he woke suddenly and
came back from the hazy, lazy plains; the
Level lands where Distance hides in her halls of shimmering haze, And
where her toiling dreamers ride towards her all their days;
where "these things" are ever far away, and Distance ever near--and

whither he had drifted, the last hour, with Jack Denver, from the old
Slab School.
"I wonder whether old Fosbery's got through yet?" he muttered, with
nervous anxiety, as he looked down on the cluster of farms and
scattered fringe of selections in the broad moonlight. "I wonder if he's
got there yet?" Then, as if to reassure himself: "He must have started an
hour before me, and the old man can ride yet." He rode down towards a
farm on Pipeclay Creek, about the centre of the cluster of farms,
vineyards, and orchards.
Old Fosbery--otherwise Break-the-News--was a character round there.
If he was handy and no woman to be had, he was always sent to break
the news to the wife of a digger or bushman who had met with an
accident. He was old, and world-wise, and had great tact--also great
experience in such matters. Bad news had been broken to him so many
times that he had become hardened to it, and he had broken bad news
so often that he had come to take a