Capricornia. Xavier Herbert

through weakness than through wilfulness. Twice again during that Wet Season he was reprimanded by His Honour. Throughout that period Oscar mostly ignored him. Still he was at the head of the stair.

      Wet Season passed. The Shillingsworths completed their first year of service in Capricornia. Then, one day in May, Oscar passed a remark over lunch—or Tiffin, as he called it—that led to Mark’s divining that a plot had been hatched by the Medical and Railway Departments to effect the dismissal of Chook Henn. Oscar did not intend to disclose the plot. He said what he did merely with intent to sting the disreputable Chook Henn’s bosom friend. And Mark would not have divined it had he not known that such a plot was to be expected. Chook was off duty on the spree. Previous attempts by his superiors to catch him had failed because the doctor they had sent to prove his condition had been loath to report the facts. But another doctor had been added to the staff, an officious fellow who did not drink. Mark made a few cunning inquiries at his office that afternoon. As soon as possible he slipped away to warn Chook, who should have been marshalling his train for the trip to Copper Creek.

      Next morning the new doctor had to go to the Yards to find Chook, who was on his engine, shaky of hand and ill of temper. The doctor came with the Loco-Foreman, who ordered Chook to come down from the cab so that the doctor might see if he were fit to do his duty. Chook was prepared. At sight of them he had sent his fireman away to see about coal. He produced a copy of Rules and Regulations and showed the Foreman and the doctor that he was forbidden either to leave his engine unattended or to allow anyone not taking part in his work to enter the cab. He then became abusive. Doctor and Foreman went away amid derisive laughter of a crowd of low fellows.

      Unfortunately for Mark, or perhaps fortunately, Chook in his fuddled state had made known the fact that he had been warned. An Enquiry was held. It was a simple matter to trace the betrayal to Oscar. His Honour sat in judgment. Oscar was accused of that worst of all offences in Civil Service—Blabbing. He looked so bemused and miserable that Mark was smitten to the heart. Mark took the blame, and more, told the Cabinet that he had discovered their paltry plot unaided, that Oscar was the best man in the Service, and the only honest, decent, and intelligent one, and that the faithful service he gave was pearl cast before mean, gutless, brainless, up-jumped swine, chief of which was His Blunny Honour. Mark worked himself into a towering rage. He was still expressing his opinion of his superiors when there was no-one left in His Honour’s sanctum to hear but Oscar and himself. Oscar gripped his hand and said huskily, “Thanks Son, you’re a man.” For less than that, romantic Mark would have gladly gone to jail.

      Mark and Chook were dismissed on the same day. They celebrated by getting drunk with Krater and a man named Harold Howell on some of the £25 that Mark was given to pay his passage home. A few days later Mark and Chook between them bought a twenty-ton auxiliary lugger for £500, and with great festivity named it the Spirit of the Land. About a week afterward they sailed in company with Krater’s lugger to Flying Fox, taking with them Harold Howell and another young man named Skinn, to help Ned Krater make of trepang-fishing the most important industry of the land.

      Trepang, the great sea-slug, prized by wealthy Chinamen as a delicacy and aphrodisiac!

       SIGNIFICANCE OF A BURNT CORK

      IF Mark and his companions had had the energy to execute the plans with which they went to Flying Fox they might have turned the fair place into a township and themselves into bumbles. They planned to build houses, stores, curing-sheds for the trepang they intended to bring in by the shipload, and a jetty, and a tramway, and a reservoir, and—this was inventive Mark’s idea—a dam across the mouth of the saltwater creek and a plant connected with it for drawing electric power from the tide. They did nothing much more in the way of building than to erect a number of crazy humpies of such materials as bark and kerosene-cans, into which they retired with lubras to keep house for them. Mark built for himself by far the best house, and furnished it very neatly. The lubra he selected was a young girl named Marowallua, who, after he had wasted much time in trying to teach her to keep house to suit his finicking taste, he found was with child. He sent her away, refusing to believe that the child was his, and took another girl. It was Krater who caused him to disbelieve Marowallua. Krater said that several times he himself had been tricked into coddling lubras in the belief that they were carrying children of his, to find at last that he had been made cuckold by blackfellows. Marowallua went off to the mainland with her people.

      The humpies were set up on the isthmus between the creek and the sea, among a grove of fine old mango trees and skinny coconuts that Krater had planted. In these trees lived a multitude of the great black bats called flying foxes, the coming of which when the mangoes began to bear was responsible for the renaming of the island. Back some little distance from the settlement lay a large billabong, screened by a jungle of pandanuses and other palms and giant paper-barks and native fig trees. The billabong provided much of the food of the inhabitants. Yams and lily-roots grew there in abundance; and it was the haunt of duck and geese, and a drinking-place of the marsupials with which, thanks to Krater’s good sense in helping the natives to preserve the game, the island abounded. More food was to be got from the mainland, where now there were to be found wild hog and water-buffalo, beasts descended from imported stock that had escaped from domesticity. And still more food was to be got from the sea, which abounded in turtle and dugong and fish. The whitemen left the hunting to the natives. It was not long before the settlement became self-supporting in the matter of its supplies of alcoholic liquor as well, thanks to Chook Henn, who discovered that a pleasant and potent spirit could be distilled from a compound of yams and mangoes.

      The months passed, while still the trepanging-industry remained in much the same state as it had throughout all the years of Krater’s careless handling of it. It was not long before Krater showed that he resented the intrusion of the others. Thereafter, Mark and Chook and the other young men fished for themselves.

      Wet Season came. The Yurracumbungas returned in force to their Gift of the Sea. Wet Season was drawing to a close, when one violent night the lubra Marowallua gave birth to her child. A storm of the type called Cockeye Bob in Capricornia, which had been threatening from sundown, burst over Flying Fox in the middle of the night, beginning with a lusty gust of wind that ravaged the sea and sent sand hissing through the trees. Then lightning, like a mighty skinny quivering hand, shot out of the black heavens and struck the earth—CRASH! The wind became a hurricane. Grass was crushed flat. Leaves were stripped from trees in sheets. Palms bent like wire. Flash fell upon flash and crash upon crash, blinding, deafening. Out of nothing the settlement leapt and lived for a second at a time like a vision of madness. Misshapen houses reeled among vegetation that lay on the ground with great leaves waving like frantically supplicating hands. Rain stretched down like silver wires from heaven of pitch to earth of seething mud. Rain poured through the roof of Mark’s house and spilled on him. He rose from his damp bed, donned a loin-cloth, and went to the open door.

      As suddenly as it had come the storm was over. The full moon, rain-washed and brilliant, struggled out of a net of cloud, and stared at the dripping world as though in curiosity. The air was sweet. For a while the ravaged earth was silent. Then gradually the things that lived, goannas, flying foxes, snakes, men, frogs, and trees, revived, began to stir, to murmur, to resume the interrupted business of the night. From a gunyah in the native camp came the plaint of one whose business had only just begun.

      Mark returned to bed. He was not feeling well. Of late he had been drinking too much of Chook’s potent grog. He lay behind the musty-smelling mosquito-net, smoking, and listening idly to a medley of sounds. Water was dripping from the roof; a gecko lizard was crying in the kitchen; mosquitoes were droning round the net; frogs were singing a happy chorus on the back veranda.

      The silhouette of a human form appeared in the doorway. It was a lubra. Another joined her. Two for sure, since two is dear company at night in a land of devil-devils. They stood whispering. Mark thought that they were come to sell their favours for tobacco or grog. When one stole in to him he growled, “Get to hell!”

      The lubra bent over, plucked at the net, said softly, “Marowallua bin droppim piccanin, Boss.”

      After