As it lurked in ambush
just round the first bend in a winding bush track - apparently keeping
one eye on the "Pub"; and then we caught a gleam of white roofs away
beyond further bends in the track, where the Overland Telegraph
"Department" stood on a little rise, aloof from the "Pub" and the Police,
shut away from the world, yet attending to its affairs, and,
incidentally, to those of the bush-folk: a tiny Settlement, with a tiny
permanent population of four men and two women - women who found their own
homes all-sufficient, and rarely left them, although the men-folk were
here, there, and everywhere.
All around and within the Settlement was bush: and beyond the bush,
stretching away and away on every side of it, those hundreds of thousands
of square miles that constitute the Never-Never - miles sending out and
absorbing again from day to day the floating population of the Katherine.
Before supper the Telegraph Department and the Police Station called on
the Cottage to present compliments. Then the Wag came with his welcome.
"Didn't expect you to-day," he drawled, with unmistakable double meaning
in his drawl. "You're come sooner than we expected. Must have had luck
with the rivers "; and Mac became enthusiastic. "Luck!" he cried. "Luck!
She's got the luck of the Auld Yin himself - skinned through everything
by the skin of our teeth. No one else'll get through those rivers under
a week." And they didn't.
Remembering the telegrams, the Wag shot a swift quizzing glance at him;
but it took more than a glance to disconcert Mac once his mind was made
up, and he met it unmoved, and entered into a vivid description of the
"passage of the Fergusson," which filled in our time until supper.
After supper the Cottage returned the calls, and then, rain coming down
in torrents, the Telegraph, the Police, the Cottage and the "Pub" retired
to rest, wondering what the morrow would bring forth.
The morrow brought forth more rain, and the certainty that, as the river
was still rising, the swim would be beyond the horses for several days
yet; and because of this uncertainty, the Katherine bestirred itself to
honour its tethered guests.
The Telegraph and the Police Station issued invitations for dinner, and
the "Pub" that had already issued a hint that "the boys could refrain
from knocking down cheques as long as a woman was staying in the place"
now issued an edict limiting the number of daily drinks per man.
The invitations were accepted with pleasure, and the edict was attended
to with a murmur of approval in which, however, there was one dissenting
voice: a little bearded bushman "thought the Katherine was overdoing it a
bit," and suggested as an amendment that "drunks could make themselves
scarce when she's about." But Mine Host easily silenced him by offering
to "see what the missus thought about it."
Then for a day the Katherine "took its bearings," and keen, scrutinising
glances summed up the Unknown Woman, looking her through and through
until she was no longer an Unknown Woman, while the Maluka looked on
interested.
