Winni had mounted a ruddy bay colt Warieda was breaking, and Warieda was riding out from the yards on his own gelding, beside the colt. The colt threw up his heels, a little distance from the yards, twisted, started bucking, rooting and prancing. He flew off at a gallop, propped, bucked, and Winni flew to earth. Up in an instant he swore after the runaway.
“I stick ’m! I stick ’m!” he cried.
Warieda galloped after the colt, who with tail stuck out, head up, and barrel bouncing on short stiff legs, was making for the distance.
Warieda brought the colt back and heaved Winni into the saddle again.
Winni swung as the colt swung, clapped like a spider to his sides, stuck and weathered a spasm of rooting, while Hugh and the rest of the boys at the stock-yard fence watched, crowing gleefully.
“Winni’s fair shook on riding this colt!” Hugh exclaimed.
Three times the colt threw him and three times Winni jumped up, shrieking furiously, and mounted again.
Hugh was for stopping the contest. But Warieda would not have it.
“Best let ’m finish, You,” he said.
And Hugh, gazing at the youngster, mastered his fear. He watched the boy wrestle with the colt, humour and outwit him, until the wild thing knew and settled down to that light weight on his back, slim strong wrist on his jaw.
“By God, he’s a kid to be proud of, isn’t be?” Hugh called to Warieda. “Be as good a horseman as you are, Warieda!”
Warieda’s dark eyes lit to their pleasure and satisfaction.
“Good man, Winni,” Hugh yelled as the boy rode in, showing off a little, careless and cock-a-hoop in his excitement and triumph.
It was next day the colt took his vengeance. With a flying root he sent Winni to earth, so that he lay, crumpled and unconscious, on the stones out from the stock-yard.
Hugh was first out and beside him, picked the lad up in his arms, and sent Wanna flying to the house for whisky. He carried Winni to the buggy shed and knelt over him until the curled lashes fluttered and the imp’s dreaming, fathomless eyes looked into his own.
Bewilderment, wonder and rage returned to Winni’s eyes. He started up, looking for the colt.
“Where is he? I stick ’m!” he cried.
How they had laughed, Warieda, Chitali, and the rest of them, standing about, and glancing out to where Mick had tied the horse against the stock-yard fence.
But Winni fell back unconscious again, blood streaming from the wound in his head, as he moved. Hugh saw Coonardoo bending over him.
Mollie had gone into the half dark of the big shed while Hugh was there, watching the boy.
Coming from the brilliant sunshine, she could not see at first. Then Hugh’s white shirt and his face as he crouched beside Winni impressed themselves on her.
She saw Coonardoo, a tin of water beside her, holding a wet rag to Winni’s head, Warieda, Chitali, and two or three of the other boys standing silent, aghast at the back of the shed.
“What’s the matter?” Mollie asked sharply. “He’s not dead, is he?”
Hugh got up from his knees.
“No,” he said, “he’ll be all right now.”
Hugh wheeled out of the shed. He walked towards the house, steering unsteadily as though he were drunk. Mollie went after him.
“What on earth’s the matter?” She looked at Hugh curiously when they stood together in the sitting-room, under the enlarged portrait of Mrs Bessie. “I’ve never seen you so upset in my life.”
“Oh … thought the kid was killed,” Hugh muttered. “Seeing him crumple up like that … and the crack, as he hit the ground.”
He opened the cupboard, took out a bottle of whisky, poured himself a stiff peg, and went along the veranda for the waterbag.
Mollie stared after him. His wrenched face, the suffering of his eyes, surprised her.
“’Pon my word” — her thought formed slowly — “anybody’d think it was your own child had been nearly killed. You weren’t anything like so upset when the buggy horses bolted and Phyllis and Cora and I were bumped out.”
Hugh stared at Mollie as she spoke, as if an idea had just come to him. He drank his whisky, standing a little away from her, walked into the sitting-room again, put the bottle back in the cupboard, shut the folding doors and went into the kitchen with his glass.
He could not talk just then. It would not be safe, he realized, still under the shock of knowing Coonardoo’s boy mattered so much to him. He had kept an eye on the lad, seen he was well fed and got a new pair of trousers now and then. But the rush of fear and anguish which assailed him when Winni lay where the colt had thrown him was too passionate and overwhelming to be reasoned about. It was there to be reckoned with; that was what he had to get hold of. He was sick, and shook to the fear which had pierced. They were mad to have let the kid try a young horse like that. He had spirit all right, but Hugh promised Warieda a piece of his mind for giving Winni such a “roughie” to ride.
The thought brought its cooling reminder. After all, it was for Warieda to say what the boy should do. But no, Hugh argued with himself, the blacks knew he would not allow unfair chances to be taken with boys in the stock-yards, Mick or Wanna, any more than Winni. And Mollie — what was it she had said?
That was a different matter. He guessed what the thought she had put up would do in her mind.
“Anybody’d think it was your own child,” she had said. And Hugh saw the suspicion stirring in her grey-green eyes.
She would brood over it, pump the gins, try to worm the truth out of him. What was there to do? Nothing — except lie consistently. Hugh would have liked nothing better than to claim the youngster, treat him as his son, make a fuss of him, give him clothes, have him taught to read and write, as he would in any other circumstances. But there was Warieda, his pride in the boy. Were his love and pride greater than Warieda’s, Hugh asked himself? He was fond of the kid; but could he do for Winni what Warieda was doing, teaching him to handle horses, fit him for an independent life in his natural surroundings? Warieda was on his own with horses. And how would Warieda take shattering of the belief that Winning-arra was his own son?
Hugh did not know whether the belief could be shattered; but he determined that never in any way would he allow it to be tampered with, if he could help it.
Next morning Winni was up at the yards, his head swathed in bandages, ready to mount and ride the colt again. But Hugh said harshly, “No, you’re not to ride today.”
He had stalked off down to the house. The blacks looked after him, wondering. They knew Youie too well to disobey. Winni understood he could not ride if You had spoken against it; but he felt shamed and discredited, broken in his pride of horsemanship.
He lay in wait for Hugh as he went up to the yards next morning and begged to be given the colt again.
“I stick ’m, You,” he begged. “I stick.”
Warieda and the others laughed, hearing the youngster. Hugh looking over to them caught their good-humoured amusement at the boy’s spirit and his concern.
“What do you say, Warieda?” he asked.
“Got to have few busters,” Warieda replied. “We’ll give Pan a turn in the yard first.”
“Right.”
During the morning Hugh went up to the yards. He watched Warieda handling and humouring the colt, teaching Winni how to make friends with a horse, keep out of the way of his heels. The youngster followed his movements with an assurance and boldness which amazed and delighted everybody.
“Beat you for your own job some day, Warieda,” Hugh cried.
He joked with the boys and Winni about the fall. Asked Winni what he had done to the colt to make him carry on like that, bluffing out the buster in the high-handed genial fashion these goings-to-earth of a good horseman were usually the occasion of.
The boys grinned and joked back with him. Winni hung his head, sulky and shamefaced. He wanted to mount the horse and ride again next morning. But Warieda knew better than that; no need for Hugh to give him a piece of his mind. Warieda had judged and condemned himself, although Hugh was there to see that the roughie, as they called him, got more riding and handling before he went out of the yards again.
When Warieda went out with Pan, a week or so later, Winni rode the colt and rode him well.
Hugh was surprised at Mollie’s silence. That it was as sultry as the day before a storm he recognized, and prepared to leave the homestead. He arranged to go out to one of the wells until she had time to forget and gather a crop of new grievances. Mollie waited and watched. She had gazed long and curiously, at the son of a whirlwind next time she saw him. And saw Hugh stamped all over him. But questioning Meenie and Bardi about Winni, she met only the blank wall of their stupidity, feigned and invulnerable.
Winni was no darker than many a Greek or Italian in fruit and fish shops, or oyster saloons, in Geraldton. His features were aboriginal certainly, but with a refinement; and his ears were Hugh’s ears, his finger-nails the finger-nails of a half-caste. Mollie did not mean to ask Hugh any questions. She had rummaged out all the facts she cared for. They were sufficient.
Mrs Bessie’s death … Coonardoo in charge … Hugh’s illness and Coonardoo nursing him at the homestead. The baby in her arms when Hugh came back from the coast. His name even, son of the whirlwind. Hugh had lied to her. Of course he had lied. Mollie knew her Nor’-West well enough to know now that on this subject most men lied to their wives.
But so sour and hostile had her mind become towards Hugh that she found pleasure really, a secret mean joy, in following the suspicion which had risen against him, and piecing the evidence for and against it. There was much more for than against. She realized her knowledge would mean power. It was a whip she could use over Hugh. She knew well enough how to scourge him with it.
When she told Hugh that she knew what he wished to hide, she could make terms, Mollie decided. Her own terms. Terms, he would not, could not, consent to. She knew what almost any woman in her position would do. She would declare it was a shame and a disgrace for Coonardoo and the boy to remain on Wytaliba, while she was there. They must be sent away. But where? That was not her business. After all there was Nuniewarra and Geary. Why couldn’t Coonardoo go to Geary?
Mollie could not quite persuade herself she was justified in asking Hugh to do that. She knew very well he would not do it. Her natural good sense assured her she would be asking him to do what even she could not imagine his doing. But she was determined to go away; to make him suffer for all the suffering she had endured because he refused to live anywhere but on Wytaliba.
She did not arouse herself to much wrath and virtuous indignation about what had happened before she married Hugh. He had a strict code of what he called honour, she knew. After they were married she was quite willing to believe there had been nothing between Hugh and Coonardoo. She could not trace anything to lay against him on that score. In fact, Mollie was sure, the more she thought of it, that Hugh prided himself on being “a faithful husband”. She had driven him from her so often with perverse pleasure in thwarting his passion and to reap his gratitude and remorse. It was a vague perception of that, now, which incensed her.
She wondered vaguely whether Hugh had married her to escape Coonardoo. She knew enough of him to understand he had some queer idealisms locked away at the back of his brain. He loathed Sam Geary and the way he lived with native women. It was for fear he should ever become like Sam that Hugh had resolved to take a wife back to Wytaliba after he was ill, Mollie guessed. “A wife?” And she was that. Hugh had been very good to her; they were happy enough; got on quite well together for the first years.
But latterly, under the strain of the long summers, in the throes of her dissatisfaction, Mollie had reproached and abused him for her ill health and the children, until Hugh swore never to touch her as a wife again. He did not come near her room. And for so long he had kept his word that Mollie was consumed with a resentment she could not explain. She liked to have this sound grievance against Hugh, it seemed; and to remove it removed her good ground for upbraiding and humiliating him.
When she spoke she was sure of herself. She knew just what she was going to say.
The girls were playing in the garden, and Winni, strolling down from the stock-yards — a slender figure already with the gait of a horseman — stood to watch them. He leant over the fence, a white rag still tied round his head, showing under his hat.
“Good man, Phyllis,” he called as Phyllis threw a hand-spring and picked herself up in good style. She shook red sand out of her hair and ran over to the fence.
Winni considered himself too much a man to play with the little girls and youngsters from the uloo any more, although he would have liked to show them what bonny somersaults he could throw; and walk on his hands as well.
The horses were ready and he was going out with Hugh. Winni would have charge of the packs. He had come up to the house for Hugh’s tucker bags and pack.
Hugh came out from the kitchen where Coonardoo had been stowing tea, flour and sugar in the bags. Mollie, stretched in one of the hessian chairs on the veranda, knew well enough he was going out to avoid the scene which he suspected she had in store for him. She did not intend that he should escape.
“Hugh,” she called, as he walked across the veranda, his spurs chinkling.
Hugh stood and looked towards her. Seeing she had more to say, and knowing the morose concentration of her gaze, he went towards her.
“Well?” he asked.
“What are you going to do about it?”
“About what?”
Mollie’s glance strayed to the garden where Winni was still leaning over the fence talking to the children.
“Winni?” Back to him those grey-green angry eyes swerved. Hugh gathered his forces for what he had resolved to say. Mollie stopped him with a passion, vindictive and uncontrollable. “I know what you’re going to say and it’s no use! You’ve lied to me before. Winni’s your own son and Coonardoo’s his mother. I know. It’s no good saying he isn’t!”
Hugh looked back along the veranda. The gins were in the kitchen.
“Hold your tongue, for God’s sake!”
“I’ve held my tongue long enough, though I believed you really, until a day or two ago. I’ve been a fool, but not —”
“You’re mad,” Hugh gasped, “to say what you’re doing. Even if it’s true.”
He was in no mood to deny; make a fool of himself for Mollie’s benefit. “They don’t know.” He jerked his head to the kitchen. “You know what the blacks believe. Warieda —”
“I understand all that.” Mollie was almost blithe in the realization of her power. “But what are you going to do about it? That’s what I want to know.”
“Do?” The resentment of his long repression was in Hugh’s muttered undertone. “What I have always done.”
“That’s all?” Mollie queried. “Oh no, that’s not all. You don’t mean to say you imagine you’re going on, just as you’ve always done. You don’t mean to say you think I’m going to stay here with your gin and her half-caste brat —”
“Mollie!” Hugh sweated under her outpouring.
“No,” she continued. “That’s one thing I won’t stand. It’s an insult. No decent man would ask his wife to live in the same house as his gin. They’ve got to go, Coonardoo and her son. You’ve got to send them away.”
Hugh gazed at her. What had happened to the woman? Had she lost her reason?
“Don’t be absurd,” he said. “You know it’s impossible. Coonardoo was born here. She grew here, as they say. It would kill her to go away. Wytaliba folk are not like others. In all the twenty years we’ve been here, they’re never been off the station, once. And Warieda —”
“Let him go too.”
“Warieda?” Hugh could not grasp the idea. To send Coonardoo and her child away was impossible, of course, preposterous. They could not be sent away. They belonged to Wytaliba; were part of the place as the air and the trees were. But Warieda, the pride of the station, the best horseman and breaker in the Nor’-West, what would the place be without him? And to send him away — Warieda who had resisted every tempting offer made him to work for bigger, wealthier stations? Warieda, who boy and man had served Hugh with a loyalty and friendship beyond understanding; in all the time after his mother’s death, the long years of mustering, droving, and breaking, through the droughts. It was unthinkable. He would sooner chop off his right hand, Hugh told himself. How on earth could Mollie suggest it? What had happened to the woman? She used not to be unreasonable like this.
“Have you thought,” Hugh asked, trying an appeal, “what you’ve said yourself about Coonardoo? You could not get on without her. What she has done for you when the children were little? Have you thought what it would mean to her?”
“Have you thought,” Mollie flashed, “what it means for me to see her, and that boy, about the place?”
Hugh entreated; he tried by every means to reach Mollie’s good nature, to make her understand the situation as he saw it. He promised he would do everything within his power to make her happier, more comfortable.
But Mollie, with all the obstinacy of a small mind, realized her power. She had found the stick to beat Hugh, and was beating him to her satisfaction.
Either Coonardoo and Winni must go — or she would, she said, taking the children with her.
Hugh tried every way he could think of to move and soften her. But Mollie had planned her campaign. She knew what she wanted; and how she was going to get what she wanted.
“It was when I was alone up here, after mother died,” Hugh explained, pleading with her, throwing himself on her mercy. “I’d have gone mad or died but for Coonardoo and Warieda. And never again, I swear, Mollie.”
“You’ve lied to me before,” Mollie reminded him coldly. “I would not bother any more, if I were you.”
“But I say, old girl, you don’t believe, you don’t think …” Hugh protested.
“Coonardoo’s been here all the time I’ve been away.”
“But I say …” Hugh despaired of making headway against her resolution.
“I like Sam Geary’s way better, after all,” Mollie declared. “At least he doesn’t ask a white woman to live with his gins.”
“By God!” Hugh sprang to his feet, his face tortured. “I haven’t asked you to live with gins. You’ve had the best I could give you always — and if that’s not enough, then go and be damned to you.”
He seized his hat and turned from the veranda.
The day was hers. Mollie was satisfied with the result of the conflict.
“Very well,” she said. “When can you take us down?”
“As soon as you like.”
Hugh could see Mollie’s point of view, he assured himself. Almost any other white woman would have carried on as she did — except, perhaps, his mother … and she had loved the country more than her husband. Nothing would lead her from it. Ted Watt could do anything he pleased, so long as he left her in peace to run the station as she liked.
Of course, Mollie was entitled to feel herself outraged. The women in Geraldton would agree with her when she told them the story. They would say she was quite right to refuse to live on Wytaliba with Coonardoo and Winni.
Perhaps Mollie was right; he had lived so long among the aborigines, Hugh told himself, he was seeing black; thinking black. He felt things as Warieda and Coonardoo did; saw their right to live and work on Wytaliba as long as they wished. He could see nothing but wrong in Mollie’s demand for them to be driven off. It could not be done. Should not be done. Hugh could not do it. He would not. He had promised himself to keep faith with the aborigines on Wytaliba, as they kept faith with him. Was he to be less scrupulous observing the unwritten law between them than they? Was the honour of a white man not to be equal to an aborigine’s? Hugh swore his should be. He would keep faith if he died for it.
Riding out over the wide tawny plains, the scene with Mollie re-enacted itself. Over and over again it flitted, pursuing and tormenting him.
Wytaliba without Warieda, Coonardoo, Winni. What would it be? Hugh was devastated by a sense of utter loss, irretrievable disaster. The possibility was not to be thought of.
If Mollie went, and the children went, after all what difference would it make to Wytaliba? He had a sense of relief in the thought of being able to face the homestead without the feeling of walking into a shindy. There was rarely anything to look forward to at the house, these days, except a row or unpleasantness of some sort. The prospect of going in through the garden gate and having the old homeliness, quiet and restful, comforted him. He could see himself stretched on the veranda, reading and sleeping at midday.
The more he thought of it, the more reconciled Hugh was to the idea. After all, it should be less costly for Mollie to stay down in town, put the children to school, than for them to be coming and going every winter. When he returned to the station, he had become so accustomed to the idea that he was almost pleased Mollie had thought of it, disposed to be kindly and complaisant. He would tell Mollie, Hugh decided, he was going to make her as generous an allowance as the station could stand. That might please her; perhaps they would part good friends.
Before he left the homestead Hugh warned Mollie against showing Coonardoo any ill will.
“If you do, you’ll have the place on your hands until you go down,” he declared. “Nobody’ll do a turn for you.”
“Coonardoo, Coonardoo!” Mollie jeered. “Can’t you think of anybody but Coonardoo?”
But Hugh guessed Mollie was shrewd enough to realize she must treat the gins as she had always done, if they were to continue doing the work of the household, until she went away.
That the tongue-banging at the homestead had something to do with Coonardoo the uloo guessed and resented. For so long Coonardoo had been the person in favour there. She had done everything for Mollie for years, growing gaunt and docile in her service. And from her power at the homestead Coonardoo had attained a position quite unusual for a gin, in the uloo. Of course, she was Warieda’s woman, and Warieda was the most powerful man in the camp. But he, too, respected the way Hugh, Mollie and the children deferred to, and depended on, Coonardoo.
Humble and untiring at the house, Coonardoo in the uloo was a different person. She ruled the camp with an intelligence and authority which were unquestioned, although she was wise enough never to let it be seen or guessed she ruled except through Warieda. As the person with influence over Hugh and Mollie she was obeyed; her requests were attended to. Had she not the giving of flour and sugar, issues of namery and tuckerdoo in her keeping? But Coonardoo out of favour: everybody was whispering and wondering about it.