LITTLE dust-demon lifted itself lazily from the white cross-track beaten out yesterday by the passing of many thousand sheep, and fled over the tussock with desire to reach the purple horizon-hills that make New Zealand's back-bone. But the heat caught it and smothered it with the coming night; and, restlessly, stillness over-crept the plain and lay there. Crandeck's saddle-grip tightened ever so little with the tightening of his heart-cords, and the whistle lost sound on his lips. For the power-charged silence that fell away to the four wide corners of earth was hateful to him. It was the sea, without life, without movement. It was the empty beginning of the world before man moved on the face of it. And, more truly than all, it was the rimless, mysterious country that had clogged his feet through the dreams of many years, and he feared it.
There was evil in the sensuous smell of flax-swamp that rose to windward; and in the clumps of stiff, wide headed cabbage-trees that whispered together with a feverish tapping of dried fronds; and in the tussock that rolled out eternally before the stumbling hoofs to meet the livid sky afar off.
There had been yellow tussock below Harton through all the slow day's grilling, and there had been molten sky above. But he shook the stoop from his shoulders and snuffed the flax-smell in contentment. “It's good to get the reek of town out of your head,” he said. “Jamison talks of draining this swamp. That's the little game he'll get you on to, Crandeck.”
“He's got a hope,” said Crandeck, clacking his stirrup-irons wearily. “I'll have to put in my year, because the dad has stumped up the premium. But I'm not going to stay longer, and I'm not going to learn to farm this ocean. Farm! I'd sooner dig up all England with a toothpick! What's the matter with this country, Harton? It's brutal.”
“It's—hard,” admitted Harton, looking out on the dumb world that held such promise of unturned wealth for them that understood. “But that's because it's young. Wait ten years—twenty. Wait till we've tamed the plain, and cropped it, and”
His mare blundered into a smudge that was low matakuri scrub, and out into another that was sword-edged Spaniard.
Crandeck drew off, with a grin on his mouth. “D'you want to start on that stuff to-night? For if it's all the same to you I'd sooner get to our diggings first. It'll be as black as sin directly.”
Harton's keen gaze ran out into the night. At all angles was blank dusky distance, jagged with clumps of scrub. “Can't. No perspective left. I guess we'll have to wait.”
“Wait! wait! here!” Crandeck said some private words of his own. “Wait for what? Day?”
“Our Lady. She'll be lighting up directly. You got any matches, Crandeck?”
Crandeck handed them over. And stained-glass visions mixed themselves in his brain with moons and stars and Colonial wax matches.
“Our who?” he said.
“Jamison's daughter. “Harton's rough voice took a softer note. “Our Lady of the Plain, and the only woman for thirty-odd miles round, bar Jamison's old housekeeper. We all call her 'Our Lady.'”
“The only woman!” said the man from England. “Great heavens above! The only woman!”
Harton's saddle creaked. He was gathering himself for direct speech.
“The only woman,” he said. “But you are not the only man, and you needn't begin to think it. There are always half a score fellows knocking about Jamison's station”
“Quite so. Of course there would be. Where do you come in?”
“That's no business of: yours,” said Harton in sudden curtness. “Look here, Crandeck, it's as well to be plain about this. We—we all think a lot of Our Lady”
“Sort of syndicate. I see.”
“You don't,” said Harton, losing his temper. “Our Lady is a child, and we are her playmates; and if you dare to put other thoughts into her head, and to wake her out of her childhood, you'll suffer for it, Crandeck. We'll all see to that.”
“I've noticed before that you have a nice way of putting things,” said Crandeck slowly. “I should call you a tactful man, Harton; and I mean to treat your Lady of the Plain exactly as I like. The ruck of you can reckon with me afterwards if you want to. And as we're speaking from the shoulder, I should like to tell you that I think you're infernally impertinent. Now, how much longer have we got to wait for that light?”
“There she goes. Come on. Steer clear of that blind creek.”
“And what is the light?” demanded Crandeck, gaining sweetness from Harton's evident wrath.
“Lantern from a flagstaff on Jamison's hill, for benefit of fellows who would otherwise peg out in Jamison's water-holes. Keep to starboard unless you want to bog the colt, can't you!”