Sat, each served with a slice of
damper that carried a smaller slice of beef upon it, providing the "push"
by cutting off small pieces of the beef with a pen-knife, and "pushing"
them along the damper to the edge of the slice, to be bitten off from
there in hearty mouthfuls.
No butter, of course. In Darwin, eight months before we had tasted our
last butter on ship-board, for tinned butter, out-bush, in the tropics,
is as palatable as castor oil. The tea had been made in the Maluka's
quart-pot, our cups having been carried dangling from our saddles, in the
approved manner of the bush-folk.
We breakfasted at the Springs, surrounded by the soft forest beauty; ate
our dinner in the midst of grotesque ant-hill scenery, and spent the
afternoon looking for a lost water-hole.
The Dandy was to build his yard at this hole when it was found, but the
difficulty was to find it. The Sanguine Scot had "dropped on it once,"
by chance, but lost his bearing later on. All we knew was that it was
there to be found somewhere in that corner of the run - a deep permanent
hole, "back in the scrub somewhere," according to the directions of the
Sanguine Scot.
Of course the black boys could have found it; but it is the habit of
black boys to be quite ignorant of the whereabouts of all lost or unknown
waters, for when a black fellow is "wanted" he is looked for at water,
and in his wisdom keeps any "water" he can a secret from the white folk,
an unknown "water" making a safe hiding-place when it suits a black
fellow to obliterate himself for a while.
Eventually we found our hole, after long wanderings and futile excursions
up gullies and by-ways, riding always in single file, with the men in
front to break down a track through scrub and grass, and the missus
behind on old Roper.
"Like a cow's tail," Dan said, mentally reviewing the order of the
procession, as, after dismounting, we walked round our find - a
wide-spreading sheet of deep, clay - coloured water, snugly hidden behind
scrubby banks.
As we clambered on, two bushmen all in white, a dog or two, and a woman
in a holland riding-dress, the Maluka pointed out the inaptness of the
simile.
"A cow's tail," he said, "is wanting in expression and takes no interest
in its owner's hopes and fears," and suggested a dog's tail as a more
happy comparison. "Has she not wagged along behind her owner all
afternoon?" he asked, "drooping in sympathy whenever his hopes came to
nothing; stiffening expectantly at other times, and is even now vibrating
with pleasure in this his hour of triumph."
Bush-folk being old fashioned, no one raised any objection to the term
"owner," as Dan chuckled over the amendment.
