At the beginning of the century Mount Lion was four times its present size. During a Saturday evening it was then impossible for any person to run from end to end of its broad main street on account of the crowds on the sidewalks and the horses, buggies, and carts in the road.
At the time Bony first visited Mount Lion it depended on two sources of wealth to stave off utter extinction. Windee Station provided the hotel with “cheque-men” and the stores with trade. The situation of the town made it a junction for mail-cars from Broken Hill in the south, Tibooburra in the north, and Wilcannia in the east. Travellers on these cars were compelled to spend one night at Mount Lion.
The sun rose one Sunday in a sky normally clear of clouds, and by eight o’clock shone fiercely on the iron and tin roofs and glittered on the pepper-trees lining the single thoroughfare, trees planted in the bygone prosperous days. Two cows reposed in the shade of the tree outside the main door of the hotel, and innumerable goats lay beneath other trees or foraged in backyards whose fences had broken down. Across the road from the police-station a number of hens were enjoying dust-baths amid a rubble of broken bricks and mortar, all that remained of a one-time important bank. Of the inhabitants there was no sign.
It was, indeed, a city of silence. At rare intervals a cock crowed, and at still rarer intervals the yellow-crested cockatoo in his petrol-case cage hung from the roof of a store veranda chattered sleepily, or said with great distinctness: “How dry we are!”
And then, as the buzzing of a bee, there came from the direction of Windee Station the roar of a motor-engine. Doubtless the pigeons on the convent roof could see the red dust rising from the south-west road as a smokecloud from a destroyer. Then out of the belt of pine country shot a motor-truck, its headlamps now and then catching and sending back the sunlight, and rushed with increasing roar across the low paraffin bush plain which surrounded the town and which formed the town common.
On the outskirts of the town the driver very wisely slowed to some three miles per hour, out of respect for his truck’s springs; for, although he paid the authorities in Sydney a tax of six pounds every year to drive that truck, never a penny of any motorist’s money had ever been spent on the streets of Mount Lion.
As a small dinghy in an Atlantic gale, the truck came slowly along the street, and finally into harbour within the shade of the pepper-tree outside the hotel. The cow ceased not to chew her cud, although barely an inch separated her hindquarters from the truck-wheel.
“Oo wouldn’t be a cow?” inquired a little, clean-shaven, red-faced man sitting beside the driver.
“I wouldn’t,” decided the driver. “If I were a cow I could not appreciate beer.”
The first speaker alighted nimbly, when a search began for tobacco and papers. Without interest he looked over the town, and then with returning interest at the cow.
“Every time I takes a bird’s-eye view of this burg I am reminded of me home town in Arizonee,” he remarked to the cow. “Even you has the same markings as Widder Smith’s milker. Hey, Dash! Have you got a match?”
The truck-driver, having alighted, searched his clothes. He was almost six feet in height and slim with it, although there was power in the carriage of his body. Scrupulously shaven, his weather-beaten face, his perfect teeth, revealed when he spoke, the crisp curling brown hair, and the cheerful hazel eyes, indicated a man in the prime of life.
“I haven’t a match, Dot, my dear friend,” he replied in a tone of voice which placed him instantly as from England’s upper middle class. “If, however, we arouse the estimable Mr Bumpus, you will be able to purchase a box and buy me a drink with the change.”
With one accord they sauntered round the corner and, via the case and barrel-filled yard at the rear, came to Mr Bumpus’s bedroom door, which opened on the back veranda. The door they opened without ceremony, then stood in the doorway, which commanded a view of Mr Bumpus’s head on one pillow and Mrs Bumpus’s head on the other.
“Hu-umph!” growled Dot.
“Pardon me!” murmured Dash.
The lady was first to awake. Her eyes opened to the intruders, and then shut as though she was suffering a nightmare.
“Good afternoon!” Dash remarked pleasantly.
“Nice evening!” added Dot with a chuckle.
“How dare you, Mr Dash and Mr Dot?” squealed Mrs Bumpus. Dash bowed.
“For the fair we dare all, madam,” he said. “Awake thy lord, sweet one, for it is near to midday.”
“Eh! Wot’s marrer?” grumbled Mr Bumpus when an elbow was dug into his well-cushioned ribs.
“Dot and Dash have come to town, Mr Bumpus,” explained the tall man at the door. “The day is fast going. Yet if you wish to sleep till night, throw me the keys of the bar and sleep on.”
“You’ll-fine-’em-on-the-was’-stan’,” Mr Bumpus murmured, evidently desiring to sleep until night did fall.
“Pardon, sweetheart!” Dash said deferentially, and walked to the washstand to secure the bunch of keys. When he rejoined Dot at the door he turned and smiled, and wagged his finger reprovingly. “Loveliest, Dot and Dash will take coffee and bacon and eggs for supper. Arise before you have to light the lamps.”
“Go away!” ordered Mrs Bumpus with a giggle.
Dash bowed with grace and closed the door, whereupon the oddly assorted pair walked along the passage, paused before a door whilst Dash selected a key and opened it, and entered the bar from behind the counter. Without speech, the little man lifted the layer of many wet sacks from a line of bottles laid as tin soldiers put to bed by a small boy, and placed two of them on the counter. From a stock beneath the counter he replaced the bottles taken, carefully readjusting the bags and pouring water over them from a glass jug. So far away from any source of ice, the evaporation from wet bags was the only cooling agency to hand.
Dash opened the bottles and placed each against a glass on the counter, after which he laid four shillings on a shelf above the cash register and, turning, jumped up backwards beside a glass and bottle. Dot climbed to a similar position via a chair.
“Australia’s greatest natural resource, my dear Dot, is its beer,” observed Dash.
“Which is why I left Arizonee,” Dot said fervently.
“Beer taken in moderate doses on a hot Sunday morning in October is an experience of which to dream whilst one is skinning kangaroos or rabbits.”
“You sure brand the right maverick this time, Dash.”
“The man who found out that water evaporating from a loosely woven material cools beer was rightly entitled to a peerage,” Dash went on sententiously.
“He sure was,” Dot agreed, holding his bottle against the light from a small window and sighing to see it empty. Then, as an afterthought, he went on: “Saying, of course, that he was an Englishman. If he was Amurrican he deserved orl the luck in the White House stakes. What about it?”
There appeared no doubt in the mind of the tall man to what his companion referred, for he said:
“Possibly it would be a wise procedure, my dear friend. As yet I do not hear sizzling bacon or smell the fragrant coffee, therefore let us indulge again in Australia’s greatest natural resource. Your turn to serve—and pay.”
Dot’s button of a nose wrinkled with a smile and his somewhat large blue eyes twinkled with good-humour when he slid down to the floor via the chair.
“If only I was a bartender!” he drawled reflectively, calling forth reproof.
“How your fancy does change! A little while ago you wanted to be a cow. As a bartender you would not appreciate beer to the extent you do as a skin-