Such Is Life Joseph Furphy (ebook reader screen .TXT) 📖

shove in your lip! I don’t blame Magomery for bein’ nasty; he’s got a right to blaggard me, the way things is; an’ I give him credit. But you! Cr-r-ripes! if I had you a couple o’ hundred mile furder back, I’d learn you manners! I’d make you spring off o’ your tail!”

Folkestone, his head canted to a listening angle, noted with a half-amused, half-tired smile the outlaw’s tirade. Then he rose, drew off his light coat, and laid it across the back of the buggy seat.

“I will thump this fellow, Montgomery,” said he, and he certainly meant it. Priestley was a man of nine stone.

By your favour, once more, and only once. The Englishman proper is the pugilist of the world. The Australian or American maxima may be as brutal, or even more so, but the average efficiency in smiting with the fist of wickedness is, beyond all question, on the English side. “English fair play” is a fine expression. It justifies the bashing of the puny drapers’ assistant by the big, hairy blacksmith; and this to the perfect satisfaction of both parties, if they are worthy the name of Englishmen. Also, the English gentleman may take off his coat to the potsherd of the earth; and so excellent is his discrimination that the combat will surely end even as your novelist describes; simply because no worshipper can make headway against his god, when the divinity hits back. At the same time, no insubordinate Englishman, named Crooked-nosed Yorkey, and made in proportion, ever did, or ever will, suffer manual mauling at the hands of an English gentleman⁠—or any other gentleman, for that matter. What a fool the gentleman would be! No; Crooked-nosed Yorkey is always given in charge; and it takes three policemen to run him in.

English fair-play! Varnhagen von Ense tells us how Continental gentlemen envied the social usage which permitted Lord Castlereagh, in 1815, to show off his bruising ability at the expense of a Viennese cabman⁠—probably some consumptive featherweight, and certainly a man who had never seen a scrapping-match in his life. But English fair-play doesn’t stand transplantation to Australia, except in patches of suitable soil. For instance, when bar-loafer meets pimp, at £1 a side, then comes the raw-meat business. The back-country man, though saturnine, is very rarely quarrelsome, and almost never a pugilist; nevertheless, his foot on his native salt-bush, it is not advisable to assault him with any feebler weapon than rifle-and-bayonet. There is a radical difference, without a verbal distinction, between his and the Englishman’s notions of fair-play. Each is willing to content himself with the weapons provided by nature; but the Southern barbarian prefers a natural product about three feet long, and the thickness of your wrist at the butt⁠—his conception of fair-play being qualified by a fixed resolution to prove himself the better counterfeit.

So Priestley, with a sinister glitter in his patient eyes, had reversed his whipstick, pliant end downward, and bent along the ground. He knew the nature of seasoned pine. A sharp jerk, and the whipstick would snap, supplying a nilla-nilla which would make him an over-match for a dozen Folkestones in rotation. My hand was on Cleopatra’s mane, and my off-foot clear of the stirrup; it would be a Christian act to save Foikestone from the father of a batin’, and Priestley from that sterner father, namely, old father antic, the law. But imminent as the collision seemed, it didn’t come-off.

“Sit down, Folkestone,” said Montgomery, holding his companion’s sleeve with a firm grip, whilst gazing steadily northward through the narrow fringe of timber. Following his eye, I saw a horseman, a mile and a half distant, heading for the homestead at a walk.

“Is that Arblaster, Collins?” demanded the squatter.

I brought my binocular to bear on the horseman. “Nelson,” I replied.

“Better still. Signal him.”

I galloped out into the plain, wheeled broadside on, and waved my hat. The equestrian profile changed to a narrow line, and I returned to the buggy, followed, at a decent interval, by Nelson. I was glad to see Priestley in the act of driving through the gate.

“Come, here, Priestley,” said Montgomery quietly. “You have my permission to follow this track to the Nalrooka boundary⁠—”

“I hope I’ll git some slant to do as much⁠—”

“Silence!⁠—But if you trespass on my feed or water, by God I’ll prosecute you. Another thing. Never in future load anything for me, or come to this station expecting wool. And I may as well warn you that every boundary man in my employ will be on the lookout for you from this time forward. Nelson; you ride behind his wagon to the boundary, and see that he keeps the track.”⁠—A frown gathered on the young fellow’s face, reinforced by a burning blush as Montgomery went on⁠—“Perhaps you scarcely expected me to concur in your opinion, that one ought to spring a bit in a season like this; yet I have no intention of crushing a poor, decent, hardworking devil⁠—that is, if he can add nine miles more to today’s stage, without unyoking. I have already given him a thorough good blackguarding for calculating upon crossing the run. If he trespasses on feed or water⁠—if he doesn’t go straight on with his team, wagon or no wagon⁠—you and I may quarrel.” Who was the spy? Ah! who is the ubiquitous station spy?

“Goodbye, Mr. Montgomery,” said I abjectly.

“Aren’t you coming back to the station for your pocketbook?” he asked, with a glance out of the corner of his eye.

“I find I’ve got it here all the time⁠—wonder how I came to overlook it.”

“Thinking too much about Mrs. Beaudesart,” suggested the squatter. “She won’t be at all displeased to hear of it. Goodbye, Collins. Safe journey.”

I raised my wideawake to Folkestone, who again placed his glass in his eye, and stared at me wonderingly till we tore ourselves apart.

Another mile, and I cleared the pine-ridge. Looking back to the right, I could see Priestley and his guard of honour crawling toward the Faugh-a-ballagh Sand-hills, which