Arthur Upfield - Battling Prophet

Rain scatted on the corrugated-iron roof, just to mock the drought. The wind was rising. The day passed out in a painful swoon, and Mr. Luton drew the blinds with care, locked both front and back doors, and prepared his dinner of cold fish and hot tea.

Untold millions of men would have revelled in Mr. Luton’s situation. The stove burned warmly. The light shed brilliance on the clothed table bearing the dish of cold fish flanked by cut lemons. The doors were shut, barring out from this castle the night and the wind. And in the basement was that of such allure as to bring old Omar Khayyam leaping from his dusty grave.

Yet material comforts alone do not achieve the acme of content. Mr. Luton had come to value home comforts, but not above the value and importance of friendships. Friendship is like a tree-the slower it grows the stronger the weft and the longer the life.

To pluck a man off a pub wood-heap, cart him off from the scene of his fall and nurse him back to sanity used not to be an uncommon act. There was little of the ‘do good-ers’ about these Samaritans-just plain insurance taken out against the day when they, too, might lie with the dingbats on a pub wood-heap. Friendship is not formed thus, but is formed between men who experience together hardships, trials, and victories. The icy winds of winter sweeping day and night across saltbush plains, and the torrid heat of summer within a mulga forest, will unite men or send them tearing madly out to a salubrious city. Because young Benjamin Wickham joined John Luton in the job of moving tons of goods’ with a string of bullocks, nothing could break a friendship thus cemented.

“Excepting death.”

Which was what Mr. Luton was thinking as he ate his dinner, sitting stiffly upright in the Windsor chair with table manners of long ago.

The rain stopped scarring on the roof. It had to, because Ben had said it wouldn’t rain enough to fill an egg-cup off an acre catchment ofclaypan. Having dined, Mr. Luton cleared the table, washed the dishes and strode to the front sitting-room fire. He sat in this favourite easy chair listening to the seven o’clock news, but this evening even the items about the Cold War failed to arouse his usual contemptuous snort. But when the silky tones of the announcer introduced the news reviewer, he did snort:

“Not here you don’t, you ruddy echo.”

The growing fire drove him back, so that he couldn’t touch the fender with hisslippered feet. And then his eyes rose slowly, to rest their gaze on the bullock yoke.

With axe and adze, chisel and glass-paper he had fashioned that yoke and fitted it on the neck of the finest bullock that ever lived. It had been a hefty steer, and no man could say what breed he was. Awkward, unreliable, rebellious when yoked into the middle of the team. Awkwardness gave place to sure and deliberate movement, and very early in its career Mr. Luton found it unnecessary to use his whip.

Eventually, Squirt was promoted to lead bullock on the offside, the key position in the team, because as the off-side leader he was partially shielded from the driver by the near-sider. No matter where Mr. Luton was along the line of twenty-six or twenty-eight animals in pairs, as long as his voice reached Squirt, this magnificent leader instantly obeyed. Team bullocks are quite intelligent in the hands of an intelligent driver, and Squirt was a king among bullocks.

A grand old feller, Squirt. Sell him! No. When Mr. Luton sold the team after Ben had left to take up his inheritance, he kept Squirt in a pub stable and yard for a month, and then took him to his grazing property, where both could enjoy comparative retirement from those endless tracks flowing from mirage to mirage.

With the place went equipment, among which was a heavy two-wheel dray. When Mr. Luton needed firewood, he would take the huge whip to the home paddock gate and crack it. Within minutes Squirt would appear, and Mr. Luton would yoke him between the shafts of the dray and set forth for a load of dry timber. He would drive the old bullock between standing trees, leaving but an inch or twoclearance to the wheel-hubs. He would command Squirt to ‘come here’ or to ‘gee-off’, and the animal actually appeared to delight in obeying. Often he would look back over a shoulder, at first Mr. Luton thought, at himself. It occurred to him that Squirt was looking back for the long-vanished team mates, and so he pretended the team mates were behind Squirt, and put on the performance of old days. The shouted profanity, the masterly conjunction of adjectives, and the strings of most improper nouns brought the ghosts of all the dead ‘artists’ of the tracks crowding around Mr. Luton with admiration. And Squirt would actually pretend he was straining his insides to haul the dray from a non-existent bog.

He died of old age. Mr. Luton spent four days digging a grave and burying him, like a kid mourning a car-slain pup.

A man has to love something. What is love? You tell me.

Ben turned up, an older Ben, a Ben more assured of his own strength, the same old fighting Ben created by Mr. Luton from a Ben who was disillusioned and soured. Ben wanted a mate-that’s all. Ben was having a rough time down at Mount Mario, what with a sister who never ceased her efforts to reform him, and the professional meteorologists who had never ceased to scorn his work, in press, in conference, in private homes and clubs and bars.

A snort! A bender! The hoo-jahs! Rub the bottle! The genie! Take us back twenty years! The glare of the sun! The dust of the track! The smell of the bullocks! The atomic reports of the whips! The muscles under the hides of men and beasts rippling with power!

Thus passed the evening of this day. About eleven, Mr. Luton went to bed, having wound his pocket watch, filled his pipe, and set a glass of water on the bedside table. When he woke and snapped on the light, it was shortly after one o’clock. He drank the water and set a match to his pipe and lay with the bedclothes tucked under his chin and one hand gripping the pipe-bowl.

It appeared that the heeler at the bottom of the garden couldn’t sleep either. Now and then he would emit a short yelp as though tormented by a flea, because he couldn’t be hungry, and he needn’t be cold if he stayed inside his kennel.

Having smoked the pipe of peace, Mr. Luton snapped off the light and tried for sleep. It was very quiet without, save for the occasional bark of the dog, added to, at long intervals, by the barking of the other. Marauding fox, thought Mr. Luton. Well, the hens were locked up safely enough.

An hour passed and still Mr. Luton was awake. Leaving the bed, he dragged on a dressing-gown and raised the window blind. Outside, the garden with the laundry and the wood-shed and distant hen-house were stilled by the moon, as were the trunks of the trees beyond the garden.

Mr. Luton broke abruptly into positive action. He switched off the bedroom light and passed to the living-room, where he re-kindled the stove cinders with brushwood. He dragged the table aside and went down under, taking no light, and presently came up with an unopened case marked ‘Rum’.

Re-closing the trap, replacing the linoleum, and pulling the table back to its normal position, he opened the case with a steel implement like a jemmy, and having a claw which easily ripped wood lightly nailed. Without haste, Mr. Luton poured rum into a tin pint pannikin, and added a few drops of water.

While this first deep-noserwas establishing contact, he removed the sheaths from the remaining eleven bottles, placed the bottles in the cupboard beside the stove and the straw he pushed into the stove. Two drinks later, he smashed the case into kindling wood, and tidily placed it in a small box kept handy for the purpose.

The tide in the bottle was down two-thirds when he went to the back door, intending to shout at the irritating dog. The moon was low. No cloud marred the radiant night.