At daybreak he was at it again, shouting among his horses, as he culled
his team of "done-ups," and soon after breakfast was at the head of the
south track with all aboard.
"So long, chaps," he called. "See you again half-past eleven four
weeks"; and by "half-past eleven four weeks" he would have carried his
precious freight of letters to the yearning, waiting men and women hidden
away in the heart of Australia, and be out again, laden with "inside"
letters for the outside world.
At all seasons of the year he calls the first two hundred miles of his
trip a "kid's game." "Water somewhere nearly every day, and a decent
camp most nights." And although he speaks of the next hundred and fifty
as being a "bit off during the Dry," he faces its seventy-five-mile dry
stage, sitting loosely in the saddle, with the same cheery "So long,
chaps."
Five miles to "get a pace up" - a drink, and then that seventy-five miles
of dry, with any "temperature they can spare from other parts," and not
one drop of water in all its length for the horses. Straight on top of
that, with the same horses and the same temperature, a run of twenty
miles, mails dropped at Newcastle Waters, and another run of fifty into
Powell's Creek, dry or otherwise according to circumstances.
"Takes a bit of fizzing to get into the Powell before the fourth
sundown," the Fizzer says - for, forgetting that there can be no change of
horses, and leaving no time for a "spell" after the "seventy-five-mile
dry " - the time limit for that one hundred and fifty miles, in a country
where four miles an hour is good travelling on good roads has been fixed
at three and a half days. "Four, they call it," says the Fizzer,
"forgetting I can't leave the water till midday. Takes a bit of fizzing
all right"; and yet at Powell's Creek no one has yet discovered whether
the Fizzer comes at sundown, or the sun goes down when the Fizzer comes.
"A bit off," he calls that stage, with a school-boy shrug of his
shoulders; but at Renner's Springs, twenty miles farther on, the
shoulders set square, and the man comes to the surface. The dice-throwing
begins there, and the stakes are high - a man's life against a man's
judgment.
Some people speak of the Fizzer's luck, and say he'll pull through, if
any one can. It is luck, perhaps - but not in the sense they mean - to
have the keen judgment to know to an ounce what a horse has left in him,
judgment to know when to stop and when to go on - for that is left to the
Fizzer's discretion; and with that judgment the dauntless courage to go
on with, and win through, every task attempted.
The Fizzer changes horses at Renner's Springs for the "Downs' trip"; and
as his keen eyes run over the mob, his voice raps out their verdict like
an auctioneer's hammer. "He's fit. So is he. Cut that one out. That
colt's A1. The chestnut's done. So is the brown. I'll risk that mare.
That black's too fat." No hesitation: horse after horse rejected or
approved, until the team is complete; and then driving them before him he
faces the Open Downs - the Open Downs, where the last mail-man perished;
and only the men who know the Downs in the Dry know what he faces.
For five trips out of the eight, one hundred and thirty miles of
sun-baked, crab-holed, practically trackless plains, no sign of human
habitation anywhere, cracks that would swallow a man - "hardly enough
wood to boil a quart pot," the Fizzer says, and a sun-temperature
hovering about 160 degrees (there is no shade-temperature on the Downs);
shadeless, trackless, sun-baked, crab-holed plains, and the Fizzer's team
a moving speck in the centre of an immensity that, never diminishing and
never changing, moves onward with the team; an immensity of quivering
heat and glare, with that one tiny living speck in its centre, and in all
that hundred and thirty miles one drink for the horses at the end of the
first eighty. That is the Open Downs.
"Fizz!" shouts the Fizzer. "That's where the real fizzing gets done, and
nobody that hasn't tried it knows what it's like."
He travels its first twenty miles late in the afternoon, then, unpacking
his team, "lets 'em go for a roll and a pick, while he boils a quart pot"
(the Fizzer carries a canteen for himself); "spells" a bare two hours,
packs up again and travels all night, keeping to the vague track with a
bushman's instinct, "doing" another twenty miles before daylight; unpacks
for another spell, pities the poor brutes "nosing round too parched to
feed," may "doze a bit with one ear cocked," and then packing up again,
"punches 'em along all day," with or without a spell. Time is precious
now. There is a limit to the number of hours a horse can go without
water, and the thirst of the team fixes the time limit on the Downs.
"Punches 'em along all day, and into water close up sundown," at the
deserted Eva Downs station.
"Give 'em a drink at the well there," the Fizzer says as unconcernedly as
though he turned on a tap. But the well is old and out of repair, ninety
feet deep, with a rickety old wooden windlass; fencing wire for a rope; a
bucket that the Fizzer has "seen fit to plug with rag on account of it
leaking a bit," and a trough, stuffed with mud at one end by the
resourceful Fizzer.
