The Port Zodiac meatworks, which was flourishing at the time of Oscar’s entry into grazing, had been closed for some years. The loss of this trade had not been felt so much, because, as it had slowly declined, the trade in cattle on the hoof with the Philippines, incipient at the time of Oscar’s entry, had increased in a manner more than compensatory. Now the Philippines’ market had also failed, had suddenly collapsed, indeed, owing to the very thing responsible for the great prosperity of grazing in the South—the European War.
It happened thus. The cattle-steamer Cucaracha, already a vehicle of trouble for Oscar, had been arrested for trafficking with a German raiding-cruiser prowling about the Silver Sea. Her people were American citizens of Spanish and Philippino origin and hence in no way bound to favour any party in the hostilities; but the rights of Neutrals were not receiving much reverence anywhere at the time from those maintaining Freedom of the Seas; she was locked up in some sort of nautical prison while a lengthy argument on International Law went on. A complicated business. A diabolic business it was to Oscar, the devil behind it that Damned Dago Gomez, and the design of it another cowardly blow at himself. So he thought, although he knew that Captain Gomez had changed his ship immediately after helping Jasmine to change her affections. He hoped that the fellow might have been taken as a traitor and shot.
The S.S. Cucaracha was not replaced; nor did she return to the Capricornian trade for many a year. Such a comparatively unremunerative occupation as that of carrying a few score head of cattle six times a year from Port Zodiac to Port Marivelles was not worth a ship-owner’s thought at a time when half the world’s shipping was locked up by blockade and a good half of what was free lay in Jones’s Locker and the rest was being paid any price its owner demanded to carry cargoes into the zone of war.
Exciting times were those for the world in general, but dull in far-off Capricornia; good times for the graziers of the Southern States with the multitudinous railways and easy distances from stations to abattoirs and ships, hard times for the graziers of that distant land which was divided from such happy outlets by a wilderness of which the width was not reckoned in mere hundreds of miles but thousands.
Differ was well aware of this state of affairs and how it affected Oscar. Therefore Oscar, who disregarded the fact that the man had done what he had in honest belief that he could rectify it, thought the imposture particularly mean. But at the outset he wished to deal with Differ leniently. He went out to Coolibah Creek and told him what he thought of him, which was even less than he had thought when he set out, because he found the fellow drunk and living in utter squalor, with his Javan Princess more than ever his drudge. Oscar went too far with expressing his opinion. From cringing, Differ flew into a rage, took up a gun, drove him off his property. Oscar went for the police.
Differ was arrested on the charge of having obtained goods by false pretence. He was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, one of which he spent in jail, the rest, because it was found that he was suffering from an internal growth, in hospital. Far from treating Oscar as one he had wronged or who had wronged him, he honoured him by sending him Constance to take care of. He sent her with a letter describing her as “a tender flower at a dangerous age, who must be shielded from the evil world.” She was then thirteen. Oscar could do nothing but take her.
Differ came out of hospital about a month before Mark’s return. He did not go straight home. He went to Red Ochre, where he stayed a long while convalescing, whiling the time with teaching Marigold and Norman and behaving as one who had been irreparably injured by a faithless friend. By the time he went back to Coolibah Creek his crime had cost Oscar a good hundred pounds.
The people of Capricornia took little interest in the European War at first. Not only were they about as far removed from the seat of it as it was possible for anyone to be and almost utterly ignorant of the cause of it and virtually unconcerned in the issues, but they were out of range of the propaganda of those who would have had them become as frenzied as most of the rest of the world was at that time. There was but one newspaper in the country, The True Commonwealth, which was published in Port Zodiac once a week and, lacking means to deal with telegraphic news, devoted to local topics and the strongly anti-imperialistic views of the man who ran it. Such references as The True Commonwealth made to the war did anything but lead the populace to think the affair any business of theirs. And the news and propaganda in imperialistic papers imported once a month by the mail-boat from the South lacked power because it lacked continuity and was stale. Even such slave-minded people as the Government Officers in town were for a long while of opinion that it would make no difference to Australia who won the war so long as Australia kept out of it.
Then a war-monger, or Sooler, as such people were called in the locality, made his voice heard in the land. He was Timothy O’Cannon, ganger of the railway, a soldier born, his birth-place being the garrison at Southern Cross Island in Cooksland, where his father had been a sergeant-major and he himself had served some little time. His own attention to the vastness of the war was drawn by chance when once, while on a visit to town, he found in the hotel where he was staying an English magazine containing photographs taken in the war-zone. As an artilleryman he was particularly interested in the great guns that were being used. He wrote to a newsagent in the city of Flinders asking for a regular supply of this magazine and of a certain strongly imperialistic local daily. Thus he became an agent of the Propagandists. He spoke of the Belgian Atrocities as though he had witnessed them. When he had read and digested and succumbed to these journals he passed them on.
If ever a man made a true unselfish voluntary sacrifice in that European War it was the same Tim O’Cannon. He sacrificed the chance to take a soldier’s part in it, which to him meant the chance to attain to paramount glory. Countless times he all but sooled himself into khaki. But much as he loved that cloth he loved his children more. He was the father of four quadroons who were regarded as half-castes because the lighter part of their mother’s blood was Asiatic; and he was only too well aware of what their future would be should he desert them. So he had to satisfy his lust for homicide with passing on the urges of the Propagandists and sooling the able-bodied off to war and hounding pacifists and enemies into retirement. Thus for a while. Then he conceived the glorious idea of growing cotton to feed the thundering guns. He imported cotton-seed from Cooksland, where cotton-growing for the war had already begun, and planted it on the little cattle-station to which he had previously given his spare time.
People scoffed at O’Cannon’s cotton, saying at first that it would never see the Wet through, then that it would never live through the Dry. It flourished and bore well. The price he got for his crop was grand. Then Capricornia went cotton mad. The Government imported seed by the ton and gave it away, and set up a great experimental culture-station at Red Coffin Ridge, a place on the railway between the Caroline and Black Adder Creek. It was Tim O’Cannon who suggested the building of the station. As the instigator of the madness he should have been given the post of Superintendent. He was not. His character was against him. He was regarded as a combo. The job was given to Humbolt Lace, a Government clerk, who claimed to be an amateur botanist.
Oscar planted cotton at Red Ochre. Differ planted cotton at Coolibah Creek and considered the future of his Javan Princess assured. The people of the Caroline Siding, except Karl Fliegeltaub, whom O’Cannon had hounded into retirement, banded together and established the biggest cotton-plantation in the country. Patriotism for profit! The very pursuit in which the Propagandists themselves were occupied! Thus Capricornia, freest and happiest land on earth, was dragged into a war between kings and queens and plutocrats and slaves and homicidal half-wits, which was being waged in a land in another Hemisphere, thirteen thousand miles away.
Nature was against it. The wholesale planting was begun at the end of the Wet Season in 1916. The following Wet was the heaviest for many a year. Every plantation was washed bare. Karl Fliegeltaub and Mick O’Pick got drunk on the strength of it. The cotton-boom collapsed.
So