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Pioneers, The

<h2>CHAPTER XVIII</h2> In the earliest days of Port Southern, settlers tracking inland or further along the coast, had to cross the Wirree, driving their cattle and horses before them. The shallows of the river where they crossed began to be called the Wirree Ford. The tracks converged there, and it was not long before a shanty appeared on the left bank a few hundred yards from the broad and slowly-moving river. The Wirree came down from the hills and flowed across the plains at the foot of the ranges. The whole of the flat land it watered was spoken of as the Wirree river district, or the Wirree. The stream emptied itself into the waters of Bass Straits. Opposite was Van Diemen's Land, the beautiful green island on which penal settlements had been established. Men had been known to escape from it to the mainland. They made the dangerous passage of the Straits in open boats, and sometimes were picked up in an exhausted condition by a frigate policing the coast, or a trader, and sent back to Hobart Town or Port Arthur. Sometimes their dead bodies were tossed by the sea on the shores they had been trying to reach, and sometimes, steering by the muddy waters of the river that flowed out from the nearest point opposite the Island, bearing silt and drift-wood for a couple of miles into the sea, they reached the land of promise and freedom. As the beaten grass path along the seaboard became the main stock route between Port Southern and Rane, a newly-founded settlement at the further eastern end of the coast, a township of curious mushroom growth, cropped up about the Wirree Ford and McNab's shanty. It was a collection of huts, wattle and dab, whitewashed, for the most part; but some of them were of sun-baked sods, plastered together, or of the stones which were scattered over the plains or filled the creek beds. McNab's weatherboard shanty, with its sign-board of a black bull, with red-rimmed eyes on a white ground, was by far the most pretentious. The history of these dwellers about McNab's was a matter of suspicion. They arrived from nowhere, out of the night, silently, and it was surmised, crept up the river in the cockle-shell boats which had brought them over the Straits and were sunk in the slowly-moving river when they had served their purpose. The fertile flats, stretching to the edge of the mountains, had been taken up before McNab got his holding on an arm of the Wirree. He set about acquiring the selvedge of the plains which was cut off from the finer, more arable land by a scrubby line of densely growing ti-tree. Most of the Wirree Ford men ran cattle on these strips of coarse-grassed land, thrashed by the sea breezes. But they were no sticklers for the niceties of boundaries and property laws. They drove their first, wild-eyed, scraggy herds whither they listed, a cursing, blasphemous crew, none dared gainsay them. It was reckoned better to have the good-will than the enmity of the Wirree river men. The body of a settler who had threatened "to have the law of them" for grazing their beasts on his land was, a few days afterwards, found in the river, drifting with the tide out to sea. Some of the Wirree men made a living as fishermen. Others maintained themselves by a desultory farming. They ploughed the grey land of the seaboard with wooden hand-ploughs. But many of them thrived on what they could make out of the stockmen and drovers who passed through the township on their way to Rane or to the Port. McNab was powerful enough even in those days, and many and ingenious were the stories he invented to account for the presence of men who came to the Wirree Ford unexpectedly. As the settlement grew, it did justice to the rumoured accounts of its origin. McNab's was the meeting place of stockmen, drovers and teamsters on the southern roads, and the carouses held there were night-long. It was recognised as a hotbed of thieves and ruffians by the roadsters, and no man of substance or any pretensions at all, would lodge the night in any of the mud-built huts within a stone's throw of the river. Before long, the Wirree men had fat cattle to dispose of. An open space between the huts, not far from McNab's, was used as a sale yard. It was then that settlers who wanted good prices for their beasts had to drive them to the Wirree market. A better bargain was driven in the Wirree square than anywhere else. So Wirree Ford became Wirreeford, and thrived and prospered until it was the busiest cattle market in the south. To a certain extent, its prosperity threw an air of respectability over it. At first, cattle-owners and farmers from the hills entered the township in the morning and left it before the shadows of night fell. They did their business, and left the Wirree not much better off for their coming, venturing into the shanty for a midday meal only, and drinking sparingly, if at all, of the curious, dark spirits it vended. Then stores were opened. There were less fearsome comings and goings. Mrs. Mary Ann Hegarty set up a shanty and proceeded to business with an air of great propriety. Women and children were brought into the township for the cattle sales. Sale days became weekly holidays. They meant the donning of festive ribbands by the women and children, the climbing into high spring-carts and buggies, and driving along the winding track from the hills to the township, where groceries, dress stuffs and household furnishings could be bought, and stowed in the back of the carts for the home journey. Sale days, however, still ended in gaming and drinking brawls at the shanties, and sometimes in the dropping of a heavy, still body into the Wirree, when the tides would carry it out to sea. It was the disappearance of a young farmer from the West Hills after a night at the Black Bull that made Donald Cameron decide to take action. He, backed by other farmers and well-to-do hill settlers, made representations to the Port authorities as to the lawless character and conduct of Wirreeford township. A trooper who rode into it a few days later was pelted with stones, tarred and feathered, and sent back to Port Southern. Then a building was rim-up on the outskirts of the township—a ramshackle house built of overlapping, smooth, pine shingles. It was whitewashed, so that it stood out on the darkest nights to remind roisterers that law and order were in their midst. And as soon as it was finished, John M'Laughlin, a police-sergeant from the Port, took up his residence in it. He mitigated the impression that undue severity would be meted out to evil-doers from the new police head-quarters, by genially brawling with most of his neighbours at McNab's as soon as he arrived, very successfully intimating that he was far too long-sighted, easy-going and convivial a soul to interfere with the Wirree's little way of doing things. Donald Cameron was well known in Wirreeford when it began to be a cattle market of importance. So was Davey—Young Davey—as he was called when he began to go regularly to the sales in the years that followed the fires. Cameron worked all day in the sale-yards with his men. He drove in his own beasts in the morning, threw off his coat for the drafting and, when the sales were over, went out of the township, a stolid, stooping figure, on his heavy bay cob. Although he sometimes made close on a thousand pounds on a day's sales, he went out of the township, as often as not, without spending a penny. It was said that he was the wealthiest man in the countryside, and as "mean as they make 'em." Yet his disinclination to spend money was made subservient to his sense of justice; and a spirit of matter-of-fact integrity that he carried round with him made the Wirree people regard him with suspicious awe. The iron quality of his will, the hard, straight gaze of his eyes, were difficult things for men with uneasy consciences to encounter. Because he was the first man in the country, it was reckoned a matter of prestige to have the patronage of Donald Cameron of Ayrmuir, whether for a meal, store order, or any job whatever. In jest, half earnest, he was called the Laird of Ayrmuir. Wirree men said that Thad McNab loathed Donald Cameron "as the devil loathes holy water." McNab was not the devil in their eyes, nor Donald Cameron holy water, but the saying perhaps suggested to them the composite forces of the two men. Thad, with his twisted mind, his cruel eyes, his treacherous underhand ways, stood to them for something in the nature of the power of evil. Donald Cameron, with his harsh integrity, his unbending virtue, his parsimony, and sober respectability, stood for something in the nature of abstract good. They had the respect for him that people sometimes have for a standard which has been hung before their eyes, and which they have not been able to live up to. But Thad was their aider and abettor. Thad, for all his tyrannies, blackmail, petulances, made life easier for them. They stood by him and blessed him, cursing Donald Cameron and his sort, who would have sent them back to the prison cells and torture of the Island. It was not from motives of sheer kindness that McNab stood by them, they knew, but because it paid him. Nevertheless, the thing worked out in the same way. Donald Cameron was more their enemy than Thad. Thad's feud with him amused them as much as a cock fight; their money was on their own bird, and they barracked for him, idly, light-heartedly, scoffing at his enemy. Almost every man in the Wirree was in McNab's debt. He knew more about their lives and antecedents than was to their soul's comfort. They suspected that more than one of the men who had been taken back to the Island had been put away by McNab, and that those lean, crooked hands of his had fingered Government money—rewards for the capture of escaped convicts. But so long as they were in with Thad McNab, Wirreeford men with pasts that would not bear looking into thought they were all right. Although there were rumours of treacherous dealings on his part, with child-like simplicity, with the faith of the desperate, they trusted McNab, believing that he stood between them and the prisons of Port Arthur. They believed that if they were "in with Thad," they need not wake, sweating, out of their sleep at the thought of the "cat," or worry if, forgetful of consequences, they gave that tell-tale start at the clank and rattle of irons. It was pretty well understood that Thad McNab and Sergeant M'Laughlin "worked" together. Thad had been hand-in-glove with him since he came to the Wirree River. The fact sometimes stood unruly spirits in good stead when there was a merry night at the Black Bull. But when there was an inconvenient accident over the cards once or twice, and when there was a hold-up on the Rane road just outside the township, too, it was conceded that M'Laughlin had earned his screw. Thad saw to it that occasionally he made an appearance of doing his duty. If it had been imagined at head-quarters that Sergeant M'Laughlin winked at irregularities in the application of the law at Wirreeford, he might have been moved on, and that would not have suited the landlord of the Black Bull, who would then have had another man to deal with, or have found that another man was dealing with him. Donald Cameron made no secret of his attitude to McNab. After M'Laughlin had been several months in the township, and there was no outward or visible sight of his having mended its ways, Mr. Cameron made representation to the authorities at Port Southern, and through them to the powers that had their official residence in Melbourne, in respect to Thadeus McNab's position and breaches of the law in Wirreeford. He was clear in his own mind that there was a case against McNab; first, for harbouring convicts escaped from Van Diemen's Land; and secondly, for being the possessor of a still, and for turning it to account in sly grog making. John Ross, Mathew Morrison, and the rest of the hill folk and settlers at the farther end of the plains, upheld him in this effort to rid the district of McNab; but although an inquiry was made, nothing came of it. Donald Cameron gained no extra popularity in the Wirree on the first of his counts. Thad's position was, if anything, strengthened by Cameron's hostility. Every man in the township knew that he had to stand by McNab, or McNab would not stand by him; therefore when an officer from the Port came to investigate conditions in Wirreeford, he found nothing to take exception to. He reported that the local police officer was efficient, and that complaints of the hill settlers were due to a personal rancour existing between Donald Cameron and the landlord of the Black Bull. Thad flourished like a green bay tree after this failure to move him, and forged the weapon of a very serviceable hate against Donald Cameron. He kept it very carefully scabbarded, but occasionally it leapt forth, and its mettle was visible to all and sundry. Ordinarily, Thad kept a locked brain; it was only in rare transports of rage that he revealed anything of its crooked workings. And then those who saw them looked to their own behaviour, and were careful to do nothing that would bring them into its toils. Probably nobody but Cameron himself thought McNab had swallowed that little business of the inquiry when, a few months later, he was fawning round him, telling him that dinners were to be served at the "Bull" on sale days, and that his patronage would be an esteemed favour. Those who heard him say: "Things has not been as they might have been, always, at the Black Bull, Mr. Cameron—you have had reason to complain in the past—but everything is goin' to be different for the future," could not believe their ears. It was very humbly, with a flattering deference, that McNab had asked "the laird" to help him to improve the tone of the place by occasionally having a meal in it. Donald Cameron had been in the habit of taking his meat-pasty, or bread and cheese sandwich to the sale yards in his pocket. He ate his lunch there at midday when most of the men made tracks for the bar opposite. But after a while, he took his meals at the Black Bull, lowering not a whit of his dignity in the doing of it, and treating McNab as curtly in his own establishment as he did anywhere else. When he was down with rheumatics in the early spring, the place had open doors to Davey. He was served like a duke in it. Young Davey promised to be a chip of the old block, the Wirree said. He worked as insatiably as the old man, and was no more than a roadmender by the look of him. His grey trousers had many a patch on them, and his hat was as weathered a bit of felt as was seen in the yards. He walked with the slouch of the cattle-men—men who have spent most of their days in the saddle. When he flung off his hat, it was seen he was good-looking enough, with an air of breed about him, a something the Wirree did not quite get. There was a great deal of his mother in the cast of his features, and his eyes were grey and green like hers, but his mouth was Donald Cameron's set in a boy's face. Davey was a shy, awkward fellow and spoke as little as the old man, though it was acknowledged that if his hand was as rarely in his breeches' pockets as his father's, it was because there was nothing in them. It was well known that Donald Cameron worked his son like a convict, and kept him on short commons, giving him neither wages nor pocket-money, so that he blushed when a down-and-out blackguard asked him for the price of drink and he had not got it to give. He fed with the old man, this young Davey Cameron, and was never seen in the bars. Few of the men who entered the shanties could say that they had had much to do with Cameron and his son, except John Ross and the Morrison boys, who occasionally dropped into McNab's. But they were of the same sort—hardworking, thrifty, God-fearing, respectable, homely people of the hills, who despised the Wirree River township, its antecedents, descendants, and associations, and did business with it only because business was better done there than anywhere else. The Schoolmaster and Deirdre had been gone from the hills for over a year when Wirreeford began to make concessions for the sake of the younger generation. Although cards were shuffled and dice were thrown at the Black Bull, when the rush-lights flickered in the windows after the sales, and the little fires of cow-dung—lighted before the doors of the houses to keep away the sandflies and mosquitoes—glowed in the dusk, sending up faint wreaths of blue smoke, Mrs. Mary Ann Hegarty threw open her parlour, and there was dancing in it until the small hours. The hill people lent the countenance of their presence to days of out-door sports, and to the dancing at Mrs. Hegarty's on Christmas and New Year's day. The Ross boys danced with bright-eyed Wirree girls. Morrison's Kitty and some of the other girls from the hills learnt the reels and jigs that their parents had danced in the country beyond the seas, they were always talking of. The old people danced too. There were nights of wholesome, heart-warming merriment and the singing of old songs. Only Donald Cameron and his wife held aloof from these festivities. But before long it was observed that Young Davey was going to the monthly dancing with the Rosses. He rode down from the hills with the boys and Jess. They made the Wirree streets ring as they galloped to Hegarty's, and their laughter streeled out on the wind behind them, as they went home in the early hours of the morning, when even the roisterers at the Black Bull had fallen asleep in uneasy attitudes about its verandahs. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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