To Ride a Fine Horse by Mary Durack Page A

cousin’s arms. Seeing that he had breathed his last young John laid him gently on the ground, sprang into the saddle and galloped on. Darkness closed in and it was after midnight before he reached the camp where Big Johnnie’s brothers were anxiously awaiting their return. They had all set off at once to bury the dead man and had found the body pinned to the ground with over twenty spears.
    Word of the murder quickly went around the countryside, and mates of the popular young stockman gathered from far and near determined to take their revenge on the local tribes and teach them a lesson they would not forget.
    After all, however, it was the white men who learned a lesson from that desperate and fruitless chase. For weeks they followed the trail of the runaways from camp to camp, realizing at last that the natives, in mockery of their poor tracking ability, were deliberately strewing their path with broken weapons, flint spear heads and the bones of animals. They struck spears into the trunks of trees and dragged sticks along the ground, leading the avenging party in foolish circles and leaving them clueless at last at the foot of a perpendicular limestone cliff.
    From this time on the white men knew that their only hope of gaining supremacy over the local tribes lay in dividing their loyalty, in winning the trust and friendship of the younger men to help destroy the power of the tribal elders.
    Patsy decided he and Pumpkin must go to Kimberley at once and they boarded the next ship for Cambridge Gulf. Their arrival was quite unexpected and badly timed, they were told, for the wet season had set in and the track to the stations lay through quicksand bog and running rivers. Patsy, however, refused to wait at the gulf, for with Pumpkin and a compass he declared he would find his way anywhere and was ready to face all hazards. They left in driving rain with the five splendid Thylungra horses they had brought on the ship, ploughed through bog, swam rivers and crossed the Ord on a tarpaulin raft with the horses tied behind.
    Imagine the surprise and delight of the two lonely boys who met them at the little tent on the river that served them as a house! Patsy knew they would have had little chance as yet to put up a permanent place and realized also that in his anxiety for their education he had taught them few practical skills. He and Pumpkin started at once to build a mud-brick house with roof of thatched spinifex, yards for the stock, fences for the horses, and to plant pumpkins and melons in the rich river soil. It was like old times for Patsy and Pumpkin to be toiling side by side from daylight till dark, riding together to track the straying stock.
    The town life had not really satisfied Patsy’s energetic nature. He was happy to be at work again and to realize that he had lost none of his old strength and vigour, and he was overjoyed when stockmen he had employed on Thylungra began to turn up at Argyle. These had mostly come to Kimberley with prospecting parties, but the excitement at Hall’s Creek had wanedas the easily collected surface gold began to peter out, and they had come to the stations in search of work. Before long Patsy and his boys might almost have imagined they were back at Thylungra, in the happy days of evening sports and music and practical jokes. The only difference was that none of the settlers had yet dared bring their families to this remote loneliness where the natives had been hostile from the start and where no one escaped the terrible recurring attacks of malaria fever. For himself Patsy was confident that the blacks would soon be won over if tactfully approached and that the fever would disappear as in Queensland when living conditions improved.
    A few local native boys had already come into service at Argyle, and Pumpkin had at once undertaken their training. Patsy had never encouraged the Thylungra natives to speak the popular ‘pidgin’ form of English and Pumpkin was