With Those Wires Above Him, Any
Day A Traveller Can Cry For Help To The Territory, If He Call While
He
yet has strength to climb one of those friendly posts and cut that
quivering wire - for help that will
Come speedily, for the cutting of the
telegraph wire is as the ringing of an alarm-bell throughout the
Territory. In all haste the break is located, and food, water, and every
human help that suggests itself sent out from the nearest telegraph
station. There is no official delay - there rarely is in the
Territory - for by some marvellous good fortune, there everything belongs
to the Department in which it finds itself.
Just as Happy Dick is one of the pillars of the line party, so the line
party is one of the pillars of the line itself. Up and down this great
avenue, year in year out it creeps along, cutting scrub and repairing as
it goes, and moving cumbrous main camps from time to time, with its
waggon loads of stores, tents, furnishings, flocks of milking goats, its
fowls, its gramophone, and Chinese cook. Month after month it creeps on,
until, reaching the end of the section, it turns round to creep out
again.
Year in, year out, it had crept in and out, and for twenty years Happy
Dick had seen to its peace and comfort. Nothing ever ruffled him. "All
in the game" was his nearest approach to a complaint, as he pegged away
at his work, in between whiles going to the nearest station for killers,
carting water in tanks out to "dry stage camps," and doing any other work
that found itself undone.
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