VIII. A BUSH GRAVE.

One day Harry and Donald had been sent a good way from home to drive in a small mob of cattle, to swell the large one which Mr. Lawson was mustering at Wonga-Wonga for another overland trip to Port Phillip. The shortest cut to where they expected to find the cattle was over a high ridge—so high that on the crest there were very few trees, and those very little ones, sheltering in hollows like sentries in their boxes. In winter snow lies on the ridge, but it was not winter then, and the boys and their horses both thought the air deliciously cool, and the short grass and tiny Alpine herbs deliciously green, when they had scrambled up the rugged mountain-track, and stood panting on the top. A great ocean of dark wood, with here and there a shoal-like patch of flat or clearing, spread on all sides beneath them. Of course, the cattle were not to be driven home that way, but to be headed round a spur of the ridge that ran into the plain at its foot seven or eight miles off. An easy gully there ran through the range of hills. As the boys went down the ridge, however, they saw a mob of cattle, wild cattle, some turned, and some born so. The “Rooshians” stood stock-still for a minute, looking at the intruders with red angry eyes, as if they meditated a charge; but the boys cracked their stockwhips, and then off went the Rooshians, shaking the ground as they thundered along. The boys saw a little mob of wild horses, too—descended from stray tame ones, like the American mustangs. Only one of these, a mare, seemed ever to have been even nominally tame. There was just a trace of a brand on her off flank; but the rest apparently had never had their skins scarred by a branding-iron, or their hoofs singed or cramped with a shoe. There were three or four mares in the mob, and a stallion, and a score or so of foals of different sizes. They were all as plump as plums, and yet they galloped off like the wind, with their long tails sweeping the ground, and their great curly manes tossing like waves about their necks and eyes.
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A little farther down the boys came to a hollow full of kangaroo-grass, and a mob of mouse-coloured, deer-eyed kangaroo were camped in it. Some were nibbling the spiky brown grass, with their fore feet folded under them like hill sheep. Some were patting one another, and tumbling one another over like kittens. Others were watching in a ring two “old men” that were fighting. One of the boxers was a nearly grey “old man,” with a regular Roman nose; the other was darker and younger, but nearly as tall, and so he did not intend to let old Roman-nose cock over him any more. The old does were looking on as if they hoped their contemporary would win, but the darkie seemed the favourite of the young “flying does.” The two bucks stood up to each other, and hit out at each other, and tried to get each other’s head “into chancery” in prize-ring style; but sometimes they jabbered at each other, just like two Whitechapel vixens, and they gave nasty kicks at each other’s bellies, too, with their sharp-clawed hind feet. They were so taken up with their fight that they let the boys watch it for nearly five minutes. When they found out, however, that they were being watched, they parted sulkily, and hopped off to “have it out” somewhere else, as fighting schoolboys slope when they see a master coming, or fighting street-boys when they see a policeman. After them hopped the rest of the mob, and Harry and Donald gave chase to one of the does. She had come back to pick up her “Joey.” The little fellow jumped into her pouch head foremost like a harlequin, and then up came his bright eyes and cocked ears above the edge of the pocket, and away Mrs. Kangaroo went with her baby. She tried hard to carry him off safe, but the boys had got an advantage over her at starting, and threatened to head her off from the rest of the mob. Into her apron-pocket went Mrs. Kangaroo’s fore paw, and out came poor little Master Kangaroo. The mother was safe then, but it would have been easy to capture the fat, half-stunned baby. The boys, however, did not wish to encumber themselves with a pet, and, besides, they could not help pitying both the baby and his mamma. So they turned their horses’ heads, and presently, when they looked back, they saw the doe watching them, and then bounding to pick up once more the Joey she had “dinged.”
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By-and-bye the boys came to the head of a fern-tree gully, and plunged into its moist, warm, dim, luxuriant jungle, overshadowed by gigantic trees. Even what they call the “dwarf” tea tree ran up there to more than one hundred feet. They rode under blackwood trees, twenty feet round at the ground, and without a branch on the straight bole for eighty feet, beech trees two hundred feet high, and gum trees with tops twice as high as theirs. Huge creepers draped and interlaced those monsters. Some of the fern trees were more than fifty feet high, and above the feathery fans of the little ferns great stag-horns spread their antlers, and nest-ferns drooped their six-foot fronds. There were fragrant sassafras trees, too, in the gully, and the gigantic lily pierced the jungle with its long spear-shaft.
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As the boys were forcing their way through it on their horses, with many a scratch and damp smack in the face from the swinging boughs, they came suddenly upon a little square of broken-down, almost smothered fencing. Inside there was more jungle, but a rough wooden cross showed them that they were looking at a bush grave. Initials and a date had been rudely carved upon the cross, but an A and 8 were all that could be made out of them. The boys had never heard of any one buried there, and it made them very serious at first to find a forgotten grave in that lonely place. They got off their horses, and took off their hats, and stood looking at the grave for some minutes in silence. Then they mounted again, and rode on, feeling, until they got out of the gully, as if they had been at a funeral. They had other things to think about when they rode into the sunshine again. They had the cattle to look up, and a camping-place to pick, because they were not going back to Wonga-Wonga until next day. But when they sat by their fire in the evening, with the weird night-wind moaning in the bush and sighing through the scrub around them, their thoughts went back to the bush grave.

“A ROUGH WOODEN CROSS SHOWED THEM A BUSH GRAVE.”

“We may die some day like that, Donald,” said Harry, “without a soul to know where we’re buried. It seems dreary somehow, don’t it?”
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“Somebody maun hae kenned where that puir fellow was buried,” answered logical Donald, “because he couldna hae buried himsel’, and put that cross up, and cut his name on’t.”

“Ah, perhaps the other fellow murdered him,” cried Harry. “And yet he’d hardly have put the cross up, if he had. No, I expect there were two of them out going to take up new country, just as you and me may be out some day, and one of ’em died. It must have been dreary work for the other chap then, and perhaps he died all by himself, and nobody knows what became of him.”
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When the boys got back to Wonga-Wonga with their cattle, they made inquiries about the grave in the fern-tree gully, but no one else on the station had either seen it or heard of it before. Old Cranky, the men said, was the only one likely to know anything about it. The old man happened to come to Wonga-Wonga three days afterwards, and Harry at once began to question him about the grave. At first Old Cranky seemed not to understand what he was being asked—then a half-sly, half-frightened look came into his face, and he said that he knew every foot of the Bush for many a mile anywhere thereabouts, and he was sure there wasn’t a grave in it. Then he said he had never been in that gully; and then he said, Oh yes, he had, and there was a grave in it years back—he remembered now—why, it was an old mate of his—they had been lagged together and had cut away together, because the cove was such a Tartar, and Squinny had knocked up, and it was he who had buried him there, and put up a cross to keep the devil off. He remembered it now as if it had all happened yesterday.

“And is it up yet?” the old man went on. “My word! a A and a 8? Oh, the A was for Andrew—that was Squinny’s name—Andrew Wilson. Didn’t you see ne’er a W? I mind the knife slipped, an’ I cut my finger makin’ it. 8? Let’s see—it was 18, summut 8, or was it 17? when I buried Squinny.”
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And then Old Cranky burst out laughing, and said that he had been gammoning Harry all through—he knew nought about the grave, and didn’t believe there was one. Harry had been spinning him a yarn, and so he had spun Harry one to be quits.

All this was very queer, but Old Cranky was so very queer that Harry didn’t think much of it, coming from him. But when Harry told Donald about it, Donald looked very suspicious, and said,

“Anyhow, when we’ve a chance, we’ll go and see whether there is a W on the cross. Where is Old Cranky?”

“I left him yarning away in the horsebreaker’s hut,” answered Harry; but when the boys strolled down there, they found that Old Cranky had left the station without coming up as usual to the house. Two days afterwards he came back, and as soon as he saw Harry he called out,
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“There, I knowed I was right. I’ve been all through yon gully, and there’s no more a grave in it than there is in the back o’ your hand. You goo an’ look again—I’ll goo with you, if ye like.”

But when the boys did go back to the gully, it was without Old Cranky. They were not exactly afraid of him, but still they preferred the old snake-charmer’s room to his company in such a place. They thought they could ride almost straight to the grave, but from top to bottom, and from side to side, they rode through and through the gully without finding again the broken fence and crumbling cross.

“We couldn’t have been dreaming, Donald, could we?” asked Harry.

“Nay, lad,” answered Donald, “but we shouldna hae let that auld scoon’rel get the start of us. We’ll not see him at Wonga-Wonga again, in a hurry, I’m thinkin’.”
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But Old Cranky did turn up again there in a few weeks’ time, and chuckled greatly when he heard of the boys’ unsuccessful hunt. That was his last visit to Wonga-Wonga. A short time afterwards he was found dead in the Bush, with his dogs standing over him, and his tame snakes wriggling about him. He had died of old age merely, and was buried in the Bush in which he had spent the greater part of his life. Old Cranky had been the “oldest inhabitant” in that part of the colony; and when he was gone, people began to rake up old stories of the old convict times in which he had figured. One day a settler, to whose father Old Cranky had been assigned, was dining at Wonga-Wonga, and telling us what he remembered of the old lag.

“Had your father one Wilson?” asked Donald.

“Well, really, he had so many, and it’s so long ago, that I can’t remember,” said the gentleman.

“Was your father a Tartar?” was Donald’s next very rude question.
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“I dare say he was,” the son answered laughingly, “and he had need to be with such a set of scamps as he had to manage. If you hadn’t kept your eye on them, and let them feel the weight of your hand now and then, they’d have been on you like caged tigers when they see the tamer’s turning funky.”

“If you can’t remember a Wilson, can you remember a body that went by the name of Squinny?” persisted Donald, like a barrister; “and did he take to the Bush because he couldna stand the floggings he got?”

“Squinny! You’re right. I do remember a man of that name. No, he didn’t take to the Bush. He was drowned crossing a creek—at least, that’s what the fellow that was out with him said. By-the-bye, it was this very Old Cranky. But what do you know about him—what makes you ask?”
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Then the boys told what they had seen and heard, and afterwards hadn’t seen. Everybody at table, of course, came to the conclusion that Wilson had met with foul play in the gully from Old Cranky, and then been buried there by him in the way he had described.

“If you could find the grave,” said the settler, “I’ll be bound you’d find a cracked skull in it; but of course the old rascal cleared away all tracks of the fence and the rest of it, when Harry put him up to what he’d seen. Besides, what would be the good of finding out anything? You can’t hang the old villain now, and, if he was alive, you’d have hard work to bring the thing home to him. The little I remember, and what he told the boys, is about all the evidence you’d have, and really I don’t remember much, and the old scoundrel was always cranky. Besides, candidly, I don’t see that it would do much good to scrag one villain for knocking another on the head all those years ago. The fellow would have been dead by this time somehow, and perhaps Old Cranky did society a good turn in finishing him off when he did. What do you think, Mr. Howe? I think, for my part, that a good many fellows that could be very well spared have been settled in that way in the colony; just as the ants, they say, eat up the rats and the cockroaches. The curious thing is, that Old Cranky should have taken so much trouble to bury the man decently, with the name and date, and all the rest of it, and then forgotten all about it. But he was always a comical coon, was Old Cranky. A native wouldn’t have done a silly thing like that, Mr. Howe. We’re up to time of day; ain’t we, Harry?”
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“Anyhow, we’re a deal better than the English, though I didn’t know you called yourself a native,” answered Harry. “We shouldn’t have any scamps in the colony if it wasn’t for the lot they sent us out from home; though, after all, the old hands are twice the men the new chums are that come nowadays. A set of stuck-up milksops! They don’t know anything, and they can’t do anything, and yet they talk as if they’d done the colony a great honour in coming to it, to be always growling at it because they ain’t ’cute enough to get on here.”
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Harry and Donald did not make their appearance at the Wonga-Wonga dinner-table next day. They had started early in the morning for the fern-tree gully, with a pick and a spade, determined to make one more effort to discover the grave and unravel its mystery.

For a long time their hunt was as fruitless as before, but at last Harry cried out,

“I’m almost certain it was somewhere here! Don’t you remember there was a blue gum close by, with a hole that looked like a black fellow grinning, half-way up? There’s the tree—or else it’s the image of it, and I never saw two trees exactly alike before.”

Donald got off his horse, and poked about in the scrub for some time. Presently he said, “Ye’re richt.” He had been trying the ground with the handle of the pick, and it had run into seven loosely filled-up, hard-sided and hard-bottomed holes, arranged like this:
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Diagram.

“Don’t ye see?” said Donald, pointing out the outside ones; “there’s where the posts stood, and this inside one is where the cross stood. The auld villain didn’t dig up the bones, though, if there are any bones, for the earth hasn’t been stirred anywhere else.”

The boys set to work with a will, and about five feet below the surface they came to a rusty-yellow crumbling skeleton. There was nothing in the look of the bones from which the boys, at any rate, could tell how their owner had met his death. But they dug up also what turned out to have been a white bone-handled pocket knife, when they had washed off the earth that encrusted it. The blades were almost eaten up by rust; the handle was the colour of bad teeth, and the rivets fell out, and it dropped asunder as the boys handled it; but on one of the sides was cut—“Andrew Wilson.”
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The boys put back the bones, and filled in the earth again, and knocked up a rude fence once more round the grave. The sun went down as they were finishing their task, and before they got out of the gully the huge funguses at the foot of the shadowy trees were gleaming like lucifer-matches in the dark, and the curlews were wailing most dolefully. Both boys were very glad to ride out where there was nothing between them and the clear starry sky.

“I wouldn’t camp in there for a thousand pounds,” said Harry, looking back at the deep wooded gorge; and even Donald confessed that the place seemed “nae canny.”