Cumner's Son and Other South Sea Folk Part 8

Then he called him by his real name, and the people were amazed.

Cushnan Di, as he had been known to them, said quietly:

"If my Lord will give me place near him as general of his armies and keeper of the gates, I will not ask that my city be restored, and I will live near to the Palace--"

"Nay, but in the Palace," interrupted c.u.mner's Son, "and thy daughter also, who hath the wisdom of heaven, that there be always truth s.h.i.+ning in these high places."

An hour later the Dakoon pa.s.sed through the Path by the Bazaar.

"Whither goes the Dakoon?" asked a native chief of McDermot.

"To visit a dirty beggar in the Residency Square, and afterwards to the little house of Cushnan Di," was the reply.

IX. THE PROPHET OF PEACE

The years went by.

In the cool of a summer evening a long procession of people pa.s.sed through the avenues of blossoming peach and cherry trees in Mandakan, singing a high chant or song. It was sacred, yet it was not solemn; peaceful, yet not sombre; rather gentle, aspiring, and clear. The people were not of the city alone, but they had been gathered from all parts of the land--many thousands, who were now come on a pilgrimage to Mandakan.

At the head of the procession was a tall, lithe figure, whose face shone, and whose look was at once that of authority and love. Three years' labour had given him these followers and many others. His dreams were coming true.

"Fighting, fighting, naught but fighting for honour and glory and homes and kine, but naught for love, and naught that there may be peace."--This was no longer true; for the sword of the young Dakoon was ever lifted for love and for peace.

The great procession stopped near a little house by the Aqueduct of the Failing Fountain, and spread round it, and the leader stepped forward to the door of the little house and entered. A silence fell upon the crowd, for they were to look upon the face of a dying girl, who chose to dwell in her little home rather than in a palace.

She was carried forth on a litter, and set down, and the long procession pa.s.sed by her as she lay. She smiled at all an ineffable smile of peace, and her eyes had in them the light of a good day drawing to its close.

Only once did she speak, and that was when all had pa.s.sed, and a fine troop of hors.e.m.e.n came riding up.

This was the Dakoon of Mandakan and his retinue. When he dismounted and came to her, and bent over her, he said something in a low tone for her ear alone, and she smiled at him, and whispered the one word "Peace!"

Then the Dakoon, who once was known only as c.u.mner's Son, turned and embraced the prophet Sandoni, as he was now called, though once he had been called Tang-a-Dahit the hillsman.

"What message shall I bear thy father?" asked the Dakoon, after they had talked a while.

Sandoni told him, and then the Dakoon said:

"Thy father and mine, who are gone to settle a wild tribe of the hills in a peaceful city, send thee a message." And he held up his arm, where a bracelet shone.

The Prophet read thereon the Sacred Countersign of the hillsmen.

THE HIGH COURT OF BUDGERY-GAR

We were camped on the edge of a billabong. Barlas was kneading a damper, Drysdale was tenderly packing coals about the billy to make the water boil, and I was cooking the chops. The hobbled horses were picking the gra.s.s and the old-man salt-bush near, and Bimbi, the black boy, was gathering twigs and bark for the fire. That is the order of merit--Barlas, Drysdale, myself, the horses and Bimbi. Then comes the Cadi all by himself. He is given an isolated and indolent position, because he was our guest and also because, in a way, he represented the Government. And though bushmen do not believe much in a far-off Government--even though they say when protesting against a bad Land Law, "And your Pet.i.tioners will ever Pray," and all that kind of yabber-yabber--they give its representative the lazy side of the fire and a fig of the best tobacco when he bails up a camp as the Cadi did ours. Stewart Ruttan, the Cadi, was the new magistrate at Windowie and Gilgan, which stand for a huge section of the Carpentaria country. He was now on his way to Gilgan to try some cases there. He was a new chum, though he had lived in Australia for years. As Barlas said, he'd been kept in a cultivation-paddock in Sydney and Brisbane; and he was now going to take the business of justice out of the hands of Heaven and its trusted agents the bushmen, and reduce the land to the peace of the Beat.i.tudes by the imposing reign of law and summary judgments. Barlas had just said as much, though in different language.

I knew by the way that Barlas dropped the damper on the hot ashes and swung round on his heel that he was in a bad temper. "And so you think, Cadi," said he, "that we squatters and bushmen are a strong, murderous lot; that we hunt down the Myalls--[Aborigines]--like kangaroos or dingoes, and unrighteously take justice in our own hands instead of handing it over to you?"

"I think," said the Cadi, "that individual and private revenge should not take the place of the Courts of Law. If the blacks commit depredations--"

"Depredations!" interjected Drysdale with sharp scorn.

"If they commit depredations and crimes," the Cadi continued, "they should be captured as criminals are captured elsewhere and be brought in and tried. In that way respect would be shown to British law and--" here he hesitated slightly, for Barlas's face was not pleasant to see--"and the statutes."

But Barlas's voice was almost compa.s.sionate as he said: "Cadi, every man to his trade, and you've got yours. But you haven't learned yet that this isn't Brisbane or Melbourne. You haven't stopped to consider how many police would be necessary for this immense area of country if you are really to be of any use. And see here,"--his face grew grim and dark, "you don't know what it is to wait for the law to set things right in this Never Never Land. There isn't a man in the Carpentaria and Port Darwin country but has lost a friend by the cowardly crack of a waddy in the dead of night or a spear from behind a tree. Never any fair fighting, but red slaughter and murder--curse their black hearts!"

Barlas gulped down what seemed very like a sob.

Drysdale and I knew how strongly Barlas felt. He had been engaged to be married to a girl on the Daly River, and a week before the wedding she and her mother and her two brothers were butchered by blacks whom they had often befriended and fed. We knew what had turned Barlas's hair grey and spoiled his life.

Drysdale took up the strain: "Yes, Cadi, you've got the true missionary gospel, the kind of yabber they fire at each other over tea and buns at Darling Point and Toorak--all about the poor native and the bad, bad men who don't put peas in their guns, and do sometimes get an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.... Come here, Bimbi." Bimbi came.

"Yes, master," Bimbi said.

"You kill that black-fellow mother belonging to you?"

"Yes, master."

"Yes," Drysdale continued, "Bimbi went out with a police expedition against his own tribe, and himself cut his own mother's head off. As a race, as a family, the blacks have no loyalty. They will track their own brothers down for the whites as ruthlessly as they track down the whites. As a race they are treacherous and vile, though as individuals they may have good points."

"No, Cadi," once more added Barlas, "we can get along very well without your consolidated statutes or High Courts or Low Courts just yet. They are too slow. Leave the black devils to us. You can never prove anything against them in a court of law. We've tried that. Tribal punishment is the only proper thing for individual crime. That is what the nations practise in the islands of the South Seas. A trader or a Government official is killed. Then a man-of-war sweeps a native village out of existence with Hotchkiss guns. Cadi, we like you; but we say to you, Go back to your cultivation-paddock at Brisbane, and marry a wife and beget children before the Lord, and feed on the Government, and let us work out our own salvation. We'll preserve British justice and the statutes, too. ... There, the damper, as Bimbi would say, is 'corbon budgery', and your chop is done to a turn, Cadi. And now let's talk of something that doesn't leave a bad taste in the mouth."

The Cadi undoubtedly was more at home with reminiscences of nights at the Queensland Club and moonlight picnics at lovely Humpy Bong and champagne spreads in a Government launch than at dispensing law in the Carpentaria district. And he had eager listeners. Drysdale's open-mouthed, admiring "My word!" as he puffed his pipe, his back against an ironbark tree, was most eloquent of long banishment from the delights of the "cultivation-paddock"; and Barlas nodded frequently his approval, and was less grim than usual. Yet, peaceful as we were, it might have puzzled a stranger to see that all of us were armed--armed in this tenantless, lonely wilderness! Lonely and tenantless enough it seemed. There was the range of the Copper-mine hills to the south, lighted by the wan moon; and between and to the west a rough scrub country, desolating beyond words, and where even edible snakes would be scarce; spots of dead-finish, gidya, and brigalow-bush to north and east, and in the trees by the billabong the cry of the c.o.c.katoo and the laughing-jacka.s.s. It was lonely, but surely it was safe. Yes, perhaps it was safe!

It was late when we turned in, our heads upon our saddles, for the Cadi had been more than amusing--he had been confidential, and some political characters were roughly overhauled for our benefit, while so-called Society did not escape flagellation. Next morning the Cadi left us. He gave us his camps--Bora Bora, Budgery-Gar, Wintelliga, and Gilgan--since we were to go in his direction also soon. He turned round in his saddle as he rode off, and said gaily: "Gentlemen, I hope you'll always help to uphold the majesty of the law as n.o.bly as you have sustained its envoy from your swags."

Drysdale and I waved our hands to him, but Barlas muttered something between his teeth. We had two days of cattle-hunting in the Copper-mine hills, and then we started westward, in the tracks of the Cadi, to make for Barlas's station. The second day we camped at Bora Bora Creek. We had just hobbled the horses, and were about to build a fire, when Bimbi came running to us. "Master, master," he said to Drysdale, "that fellow Cadi yarraman mumkull over there. Plenty myall mandowie!"--('Master, master, the Cadi's horse is dead over there, and there are plenty of black fellows' tracks about.')

We found the horse pierced with spears. The Cadi had evidently mounted and tried to get away. And soon, by a clump of the stay-a-while bush, we discovered, alas! the late companion of our camp-fire. He was gashed from head to foot, and naked.

We buried him beneath a rustling sandal-tree, and on its bark carved the words:

"Sacred to the memory of Stewart Ruttan."

And beneath, Barlas added the following:

"The Cadi sleeps. The Law regards him not."

In a pocket of the Cadi's coat, which lay near, we found the picture of a pretty girl. On it was written:

"To dearest Stewart, from Alice."

Barlas's face was stern and drawn. He looked at us from under his s.h.a.ggy brows.

"There's a Court to be opened," he said. "Do you stand for law or justice?"