As the first grey streak of
dawn filtered through the pines, a long-drawn out cry of "Day-li-ght"
Dan's camp reveille rolled out of his net, and Dan rolled out after it,
with even less ceremony than he had rolled in.
On our way back to the homestead, Dan suggesting that the "missus might
like to have a look at the dining-room," we turned into the towering
timber that borders the Reach, and for the next two hours rode on through
soft, luxurious shade; and all the while the fathomless spring-fed Reach
lay sleeping on our left.
The Reach always slept; for nearly twelve miles it lay, a swaying garland
of heliotrope and purple waterlilies, gleaming through a graceful fringe
of palms and rushes and scented shrubs, touched here and there with
shafts of sunlight, and murmuring and rustling with an attendant host of
gorgeous butterflies and flitting birds and insects.
Dan looked on the scene with approving eyes. "Not a bad place to ride
through, is it?" he said. But gradually as we rode on a vague depression
settled down upon us, and when Dan finally decided he "could do with a
bit more sunshine," we followed him into the blistering noontide glare
with almost a sigh of relief.
It is always so. These wondrous waterways have little part in that
mystical holding power of the Never-Never. They are only pleasant places
to ride through and leave behind; for their purring slumberous beauty is
vaguely suggestive of the beauty of a sleeping tiger: a sleeping tiger
with deadly fangs and talons hidden under a wonder of soft allurement;
and when exiles in the towns sit and dream their dreams are all of
stretches of scorched grass and quivering sun-flecked shade.
In the honest sunlight Dan's spirits rose, and as I investigated various
byways he asked "where the sense came in tying-up a dog that was doing no
harm running loose." "It weren't as though she'd taken to chivying
cattle," he added, as, a mob of inquisitive steers trotting after us, I
hurried Roper in among the riders; and then he wondered "how she'll shape
at her first muster."
The rest of the morning he filled in with tales of cattle-musters tales
of stampedes and of cattle rushing over camps and "mincing chaps into
saw-dust" until I was secretly pleased that the coming muster was for
horses.
But Jack's reprieve was to last a little longer. When all was ready for
the muster, word came in that outside blacks were in all along the river,
and the Maluka deciding that the risks were too great for the missus in
long-grass country, the plans were altered, and I was left at the
homestead in the Dandy's care.
