The Land of the Kangaroo Part 14

"Well, please tell it," said Dr. Whitney; "we are always ready for good stories."

Thus encouraged, Ned spoke as follows:--

"I was reading a day or two ago about a man who had a large cattle run in a part of Australia where he had been for several years without any near neighbors. Gold was discovered about ten miles from his place, and a good many people flocked there. The gold mines furnished an excellent market for his beef and for all the vegetables he chose to grow on his place; but, on the other hand, he suffered somewhat by the depredations of lawless characters. Horse stealing seemed to be the popular amus.e.m.e.nt among the people at the mines, and quite often horses disappeared from the estate and were never seen again.

"But they had one horse, called Stepney, that was a perfect treasure. He was kept for carriage purposes and would never let anybody mount on his back. He would stand perfectly still while being saddled, and while anything was being attached to the saddle, but the instant anybody got on his back he was thrown, and there was not a rider in Australia who could stay in the saddle more than a few seconds.

"About once in a fortnight Stepney would be missing from the paddock, but he always turned up in a day or two, and almost invariably with a saddle on his back, generally a new one, and a miner's 'swag' attached to it, and on most of the occasions the swag contained a goodly amount of gold. Once he came back with a brand new saddle and six hundred dollars' worth of gold, which n.o.body ever came to claim. The owner said that Stepney was the most profitable horse he ever owned. He paid for himself several times over, and whenever they ran short of saddles, all they had to do was to use Stepney as a trap and 'set' him in the paddock, with entire confidence that he would catch a saddle within a day or two."

"That recalls a story about the way the miners used to try to deceive the bushrangers," said the doctor; "I refer particularly to those who were on their way to the coast with gold in their possession. They used to bore holes in the shafts or frames of their carts and conceal the gold in these holes, and sometimes they managed to hide quant.i.ties of gold dust between the inner and outer soles of their boots. One miner took the padding out of his horse's collar and inserted eighty ounces of gold in the hollow. He jogged along the road to Melbourne, suffering a good deal of trepidation at first, but finally arrived within twenty miles of the city with his treasure, and began to feel safe.

"While he was driving slowly along with his cart he was overtaken by a man on horseback, who explained that he was in a hurry, as the police were after him for a fight he had been concerned in with another man.

His horse was exhausted and he would give the miner ten pounds to exchange horses.

"As the animals were of about equal value, the miner a.s.sented and proceeded to unharness his horse. When he took off the collar the other man seized it, put it on his horse and jumped into the saddle, which he had not removed; then he rode away, to the astonishment of the angry miner, waving his hand and saying by way of farewell:--

"'The collar is all I wanted, friend. I don't care to make any horse trade now.'

"You are doubtless aware," said their Ballarat friend, "of the operations of the bushrangers, and how the police used sometimes to torture those that they captured in order to make them reveal the secret of the hiding place of their gold. They tell a story of a fight between a gang of bushrangers and the police in which the leader of the robbers, known as 'Kangaroo Jack,' was mortally wounded. He was lying on the ground dying; there could be no mistake about that. The police captain, I will call him Smith, but that wasn't his name, sat down by his side and said:--

"'Come, Jack, you are going to die and there is no help for you. Tell me where your gold is.'

"'I won't do it,' replied Jack. 'I won't tell you or anybody else!'

"Smith pressed him, but Jack was obstinate. Smith continued to urge and Jack to refuse until death sealed the bandit's lips.

"Smith was afterward telling the story to one of his fellow-officers, and remarked in conclusion:--

"'I think it was downright mean of Jack that he wouldn't tell me where his gold was. I know he had at least fifty thousand dollars' worth stowed away somewhere. He knew he couldn't take it with him, and it couldn't do him any good, and it would have been a very tidy sum for me.

He couldn't have any personal ill-will to me, as I didn't shoot him myself. I think it was downright mean, don't you?'

"His friend agreed with him, and no doubt he would have been willing to share the plunder if it could have been found."

CHAPTER XII.

A SOUTHERLY BURSTER--WESTERN VICTORIA.

The day after their return to Melbourne, our friends were treated to an entertainment which, as Harry said, "was not down on the bills." It was what the Melbourneites called a "southerly burster," a storm which is peculiar to Australia, and particularly to the southern portion of it.

They had already experienced showers of such force that the gutters of the streets were filled to a depth of a foot and more, and sometimes the whole street was covered. Most of the street crossings are bridged so that the water can run away with comparative ease.

The water at such times flows with terrific force. Men attempting to cross the gutters, who make a misstep, are lifted off their feet and are instantly swept down by the current, and in case they should be carried under one of the crossings they are liable to be drowned.

We will listen to Harry as he described in his journal their experience with a southerly burster.

"When we arose in the morning," said Harry, "the weather was delightful and we thought it would be a fine day for an excursion. There was not a cloud in the sky and the breeze was blowing from the northeast. A barometer hung in the hallway of the hotel, and Dr. Whitney remarked, as he came out from breakfast, that it was falling rapidly. A gentleman who was standing by his side heard the remark and said:--

"'I think we are going to have a burster; that is the way it usually begins. If you have any engagements to go out to-day and they are not absolutely imperative, you had better postpone them.'

"Ned and I overheard what he said and wondered what a burster was. We said nothing, however, as we expected to find out by practical experience.

"All through the forenoon the barometer continued to fall. The sky remained clear until a little past noon, and the wind blew gently from the northeast as before. Suddenly we saw a white cloud rolling up from the northeast and spreading over the heavens until they were completely covered. Ma.s.ses of dust came with the wind, which increased in force for a time and then lulled a little.

"Suddenly the wind went around to the south and blew a gale, yes, a hurricane. It started off at about thirty miles an hour, but before it ended its visit it was blowing fully seventy miles an hour, at least that is what the papers said next day. I am told it sometimes reaches a velocity of one hundred miles an hour, and has even been known to exceed one hundred and forty miles. These tremendous winds do a great deal of damage. They drive s.h.i.+ps ash.o.r.e or overwhelm them at sea; they devastate fields and forests and level a great many buildings.

"The barometer fell rapidly in the forenoon, as I have mentioned; it was the thermometer's turn in the afternoon. The mercury stood at about ninety degrees Fahrenheit in the middle of the forenoon, and it remained so until the wind chopped around to the south. An hour after the change of wind it stood at seventy degrees, and an hour later at fifty. I am told that it sometimes drops thirty degrees in half an hour, but such occurrences are unusual.

"This is a good place to say that sudden changes in the temperature are very common in Australia, and that the change from midday to midnight is far greater than any to which we are accustomed in the United States.

When we have a change of twenty or thirty degrees in a single day we regard it as unusual. What would you say to one hundred and ten degrees at noon and fifty degrees at midnight? This is quite common in the interior of Australia and not at all infrequent on the coast.

"The thermometer runs very high in this country, and it is not at all rare for it to indicate one hundred and twenty-five or one hundred and thirty degrees Fahrenheit. One traveler has a record of one hundred and thirty-nine degrees in the shade and one hundred and seventy-two in the sun. I am told that in South Melbourne the thermometer once made an official record of one hundred and eleven degrees in the shade and one hundred and seventy-nine degrees in the sun.

"So great is the heat of the sun at midday that travelers generally try to avoid it if they can do so. It is the plan of most people who travel on horseback, in wagons, or on foot, to start before daylight, and keep going until nine or ten o'clock. Then they halt and rest until three or four o'clock in the afternoon, when they move on and continue until late in the evening. Of course, the railways are not run on that principle, as the locomotive is not supposed to be affected by the outside temperature.

"But I am getting away from the southerly burster. The wind blew like a hurricane. It kept up this rate for about three hours, filling the air with dust so that we could not see across the street. Though the doors and windows were tightly closed, the dust found its way inside the house and was present everywhere; every article of furniture was covered with it.

"We found it in the food, we found it in our beds, and the next day when I opened my trunk to take out some articles of clothing, I actually found that the dust had worked its way inside in a perceptible quant.i.ty.

One of the waiters of the hotel said, that always after a burster they found dust inside of bottles of mineral water which had been tightly corked up to the time of opening. I am inclined to doubt the truth of his a.s.sertion, particularly as he offered no doc.u.mentary evidence to confirm it.

"Along towards night it came on to rain, and, oh, how it did rain! It poured as though the flood gates of the skies had all been opened at once. It rained not only cats and dogs, as the old expression has it, but lizards, scorpions, snakes, and I don't know what else, at least it did figuratively. The gutters of the streets were filled, and then we were able to see how easy it was for a man, and especially for a child, to be drowned in them. I have seen it rain hard in a good many places, but am sure I never saw it rain harder than it did at the end of that southerly burster.

"I remarked as much to a gentleman whose acquaintance we had made in the hotel, and he answered:--

"'Oh, nonsense. That is no rain at all.'

"'No rain at all,' I answered. 'Do you have worse rains than this in Australia?'

"'Why, certainly we do,' he replied. 'I have known it to rain so hard that this would be a sprinkle by comparison. I remember the 25th of February, 1873, when nine inches of rain fell here in Melbourne inside of nine hours. An inch of rain in an hour is a good deal, isn't it?'

"Ned and I admitted that it was, and then our informant continued:--

"'I happened to be in Newcastle early in 1871, when they had the greatest rainfall that I ever saw or heard of in any country. In less than three hours ten and a half inches of rain fell, and the story was that it was so thick that the fishes in the harbor could not distinguish between the rain cloud and the bay, and actually swam up half a mile or so into the air. One man said that he had a barrel with both ends knocked out, and the rain went in at the bung hole faster than it could run out at the ends.'

"I asked the gentleman how long the storm lasted, and he said that twenty-one hours elapsed between the beginning and the end of it, and during that time twenty inches of water fell, and the streets of Newcastle were like small rivers.

"The gentleman remarked, in conclusion, that it was a great pity the rainfall was not distributed more evenly, both in time and amount, than it is. Some parts of the coast get a great deal more rain than they have any use for. The floods destroy a large amount of property, and the superfluous rain flows away in the rivers, inundating large areas of ground and doing more harm than good, but through the greater part of the interior the rainfall is far less than the land requires. The ground becomes parched, the streets dry up, and the gra.s.ses wither, and the whole face of nature presents a scene of sterility. Sometimes there is no rain for long periods. There have been times when not a drop of rain fell for two years, and but for the heavy dews at night, a vast extent of land would have been absolutely turned to a desert. Cattle and sheep perished by the million, of starvation and thirst. The production of grain fell off enormously and the whole country was very seriously affected.

"Ned asked if no remedy had ever been found or proposed for this state of affairs.

"A remedy had been suggested, said the gentleman, which would save herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, but it would not save from destruction the crops in the fields.

"'What is that?' Ned asked.

"'It is a system of storing water throughout the interior of the country so as to save the precious fluid when the rainfall is excessive. There are many places, great numbers of them, where nature has so formed the ground that the storage of water would be comparatively easy. I have already begun it on my sheep run, and other sheep owners have done the same thing. It is an expensive work, but I believe it will pay in the end.'

"'There are three places on my land where broad valleys terminate at their lower ends between hills forty or fifty feet high. Now, by building a dam from one of these hills to the other, I can flood any one of these valleys to any depth I choose up to the height of the hills. It was only recently that I finished work at one of these places, and I have gangs of men busy with the other two. For the present I shall make my dams thirty feet high, and this will give me at each of the three places a lake of fresh water with about forty acres of surface area. If I can fill these lakes every winter with water, I think I will have enough to keep my sheep through the dry season, after making liberal allowance for loss by evaporation and in other ways. Of course, such a system of storing water is only practicable where the owner of a place has sufficient capital for the purpose. The poor man, with his small flock of sheep, can hardly undertake it.'