The Pioneers Read online

  E-text prepared by Christine Bell and Marc D'Hooghe(https://www.freeliterature.org)

  THE PIONEERS

  by

  KATHARINE S. PRICHARD

  CHAPTER I

  The wagon had come to rest among the trees an hour or two before sunset.

  It was a covered-in dray, and had been brought to in a little clearingof the scrubby undergrowth. Two horses had drawn it all the way from thecoast. Freed of their harness, they stood in the lee of a great gum,their flanks matted with the dust which had caked with the run of sweaton them. The mongrel that had followed at their heels lay stretched onthe sward beside them. A red-dappled cow and her calf were tethered to awheel of the wagon, and at a little distance from them were two batteredcrates of drooping and drowsy fowls.

  On a patch of earth scraped clear of grass and leaves, the fire threwoff wisps of smoke and the dry, musky incense of burning eucalyptus anddogwood. It had smouldered; and a woman, stooping beside it, was feedingit with branches of brushwood and sticks that she broke in her hands oracross her knees.

  A man was busy in the interior of the wagon, moving heavy casks andpieces of furniture. He lifted them out, piled them on the ground andspread a couple of sheepskins over them. Then he threw a sheepskin and ablanket of black and brown tweed on the floor for the night's resting.

  It had been climbing the foothills for days, this heavy, old-fashionedvehicle, and the man and the woman had climbed with it, she driving thecow and calf, he giving his attention to the horses and clearing thetrack. So slowly had it toiled along that at a little distance it lookedlike some weary, indefatigable insect creeping among the trees. Thehorses--a sturdy young sandy-grey mare and a raw, weedy, weather-wornbay--seemed as much part of it as its wooden frame, ironshod wheels, andawning of grimy sailcloth.

  They tugged at their load with dull, dumb patience and obstinacy,although the bay had stumbled rather badly the whole way. The man hadput his shoulder to the wheel, helping the horses up the steep banks andlong, slippery sidings. He had stood trembling and sweating with themwhen heavy places in the road were past, the veins knotted in hisswarthy forehead, the bare column of his throat gasping for the mountainair. There was the same toiling faculty in him that there was in thehorses--an instinct to overcome all difficulties by exertion of themuscles of his back.

  The wagon had creaked garrulously on the long slopes, and stuttered andgroaned up the steep hill sides. It had forded creeks, the horsessplashing soberly through them and sending the spray into the air oneither side. It had crashed over the undergrowth that encroached on thetrack, an ill-blazed stock route among the trees, and again and againthe man had been obliged to haul aside fallen timber, or burn it whereit lay, and cut away saplings, in order to make a new path.

  The wagon was filled with boxes and bags of food stuffs and pieces offurniture. Inside it smelt like a grocer's shop; and it had trailed themingled odour of meal, corned meat, hemp, iron, seed wheat, crude oiland potatoes through the virgin purity of the forest air. Beneath itsfloor, in wrappings of torn bags, straw and hessian, were lashed awooden plough, a broad-bladed shovel, and half a dozen farming andcarpentering tools. The fowls--a game rooster, a buff hen and a speckledpullet--hung in wicker baskets from wooden pegs at the back. They andthe cow and her calf had wakened strange echoes in the forest, therooster heralding every morning at dawn this advance guard ofcivilisation.

  When the vehicle had reached the summit of the foothills, the track fellwavering into the green depths of the forest behind it, a wale of brokenferns, slain saplings, blue gums and myrtles, mown down as with a scytheby its wheels. The timbered hills fell away, wave upon wave, into themists of the distance, and the plains stretched outward from them to thefaintly glittering line the sea made on the dim horizon. Somewhere tothe west on those grey plains, against the shore of an inlet, was thetownship of Port Southern from which they had come.

  Donald Cameron, after studying a roughly-made plan and the wall of theforest about him, had taken the mare by her sandy forelock and turnedthe wagon in among the trees on the far side of a giant gum, blazed witha cross, on which the congealing sap had dried like blood. Steering anorth-westerly course, the wagon had tacked among the trees and come tothe clearing.

  And now that all preparations for the night were made, he took theanimals to the creek for water. It ran at the foot of the long, lowhillside and could be heard crooning and gurgling under the leafy murmurof the forest.

  Leaving the fire, the woman went to a fallen trunk, sat down and gazedinto the shadows gathering among the trees. A rosy and saffron mist hungbetween their thronging boles. The peace of the after-glow held thehills, the chirring of insects and the shrill sweet calling of birds hadquivered into silence. Only a leafy whispering stirred the quiet.

  For a moment the fire of her clear spirit burnt low. Hope and couragewere lost in dreams. There was wistfulness in her grey eyes as they wentout before her, wistfulness and heartache. She seemed to be reading thescroll of the future, seeing a dim, mysterious unrolling of joys andsorrows with the eyes of her inner vision.

  The sun had set when Cameron returned. He tethered the cow to the wheelof the wagon and clamped rusty hobbles about the horses' fetlocks. Thenhe looked towards the woman.

  "Mary!" he called.

  She did not hear, and he walked towards her.

  A man of few words, Cameron did not speak as he searched his wife'sface.

  "I--I was dreaming," she said, looking up, startled at the sight of him.

  "You're not grieving?" he asked.

  There was a tremor in his voice, though its roughness almost coveredthat.

  "No, not grieving," she said. "But thinking what it will be to us andour children, by and by, in this place. It is a new country and a newpeople we're making, they said at home, and I'm realising what theymeant now."

  "Aye. But it's a fine country!"

  Cameron's eyes travelled the length of the clearing, over the slope ofthe hill. They took in the silent world of the trees, the rosy mist thatstill glowed between their slender, thronging stems. There was pride andan expression of sated hunger in his glance.

  "It's all ours, this land about here," he said.

  "Yes?"

  Her eyes wandered too.

  "I have worked all my days, till now," he said, reviving a bittermemory, "without so much as a plot of sour earth as big as y'rehandkerchief to call my own. Worked for other men, sweated the body andsoul out of me ... and now, this is mine ... all this ... hundred acres... and more when I'm ready for it, more, and more, and more...."

  He paused a moment, all the emotion in him stirred and surging. Then,with a short-drawn breath that dismissed the past and dedicated thoughtand energy to the future, he went on:

  "I marked this place when I came through to the Port with Middleton'scattle, last year. I'll run cattle--but I want to clear and cultivatetoo. Up there where there are trees now will be ploughed fields and anorchard soon. The house and barns'll be on the brow of the hill. By andby ... we shall have a name and a place in the country."

  His wife's eyes were on his face. He had spoken as though he were takingan oath.

  "No doubt it will be as you say, Donald," she said, with a faint sigh."But it is a strange lonely land, indeed, without the sight of a roof inall the long miles we have come by. Never the sound of a human voice, orthe lowing of cattle."

  Donald Cameron did not reply. He was envisaging his schemes for thefuture. Not a man given to dreams, the thoughtful mood had taken him;his breath came and went in steady draughts. His face was set to themould of his musing; there was determination in every line of it. Agloomy face it was, rough-cast, with deep set eyes.

  His wife's words and the sigh that went with them were repeated in aremote brain cell.
/>   "You should be giving thanks, not complaining," he said, his gazereturning to her. "We must do that now--give thanks for the journeyaccomplished."

  And, as if it were the last duty of a well-spent day, he knelt on thegrassy earth, and Mary knelt beside him.

  Donald Cameron addressed his God as man speaks to man; yet his voice hada vibrating note as he prayed.

  "O Lord," he said, "we thank Thee for having brought us in safety to ournew home. We thank Thee for having brought us over the sea, through thestorms and the troubles on the ship when there was nothing to eat butweevily biscuits, and the water stank, and there was like to be mutinywith the men in the chained gangs. We--we thank Thee, this woman and I.She is a good woman for a man to have with him when he goes to the endsof the earth to carve out a name and a place for himself."

  He paused thoughtfully for a moment; and then went on:

  "I have said all that before; but I have been thinking that it would dono harm to say it again now that we are ready to begin the new life, andwill need all Thy help and protection, Lord. We thank Thee for havingbrought us all the miles from the coast, and the beasts and the wagon,in safety--though the bay horse I bought of Middleton's storekeeper isturning out badly. He was a poor bargain at the best of it--weak in theknee and spring-halted. Do Thou have a care of him. Lord. It will be abig loss to me if he is no use ... with all the clearing and cartingthere will be to do soon."

  He talked a little longer to the Almighty, asking no favour, butintimating that he expected to be justly dealt by as he himself dealt byall men. In the matter of the bay, he said that he did not think aGod-fearing man had been treated quite as well as, under thecircumstances, he might have been; but he imputed no blame--except toMiddleton's storekeeper--and gave thanks again.

  A man of middle height, squarely built, Donald Cameron had the looselyslung frame of a farm labourer. The woman beside him, although herclothes were as poor and heavy as his, was more finely and delicatelymade. The hands clasped before her were long and slender.

  The prayer ended, they rose from the grass. Cameron's eyes covered hiswife. A gust of tenderness swept him.

  "There was not what you might call much sentiment about our mating," hesaid. "But I doubt not it has come, Mary."

  "Yes, Donald." Her clear eyes were lifted to his. "May I be a true andfaithful wife to you."

  "Y're not regretting at the long journey's end?" he asked.

  "It's not that,"--a sigh went from her--"but that I'm not worthy ofyou."

  "Whist," he said. "You're my woman--my wife. It's all done with, thepast."