“Gladly,” assented Dash, but he added a qualification: “if you will dress and come to breakfast.”
“Don’t talk to me of breakfast,” came the snarl.
“I must, my dear Jeff. A thin slice of unbuttered toast and a cup of strong coffee will make you fit for the drive home. Dot and I have come to town this morning especially to buy a shirt and take you home. If, after breakfast, you still feel unwell, we will then remove the distilled spirit remaining in your—er—inside by driving the truck up and down the main street of this beautifully paved town at five miles an hour.”
“I’m not leaving the hotel to-day,” Jeff decided, with out-thrust chin. “And you remember that I am the boss’s son, and that you are one of the boss’s servants.”
“I remember only that your father is my friend,” Dash said with remarkably altered voice. The indolence, the ambiguity, of his speech was but a mask after all, as was the gently smiling amused expression, replaced now by a brittle hardness. “If you are not off that bed in ten seconds, I’ll run you out and kick you round Bumpus’s backyard. Spring to it!”
The look and the tone of command utterly astonished young Jeff. It was as though he discovered a complete stranger in a man he had known ever since his return from college. Dash got up and moved his chair to the farther wall, and when he again seated himself and fell to rolling a cigarette young Jeff was stripping off his wet underclothes with shaking hands. The tall man’s features relaxed into their habitual lines, and his voice, when he spoke again, was pitched to its usual mildness.
“Of course you must go home, old boy,” he said, blowing smoke towards the curtains. “We are giving the Fosters a tin-kettling to-night. The boss and Miss Stanton are going. All hands are going. Dot and Dash are going. You are going. Before we left this morning Miss Stanton asked me to remind you of it.”
“Damn the tin-kettling! The silly——”
“The police are lookin’ for you, Dash,” announced Dot from the suddenly opened door. “An’ breakfuss is ready.”
“I will submit to be interviewed by the police,” agreed Dash, rising elegantly from the rather rickety chair. But before he left he said to young Jeff: “Hurry up and dress, old lad, and we will have a beer before coffee. I really think that beer before coffee is preferable to a liqueur after coffee. But as for getting drunk,” he added significantly, “it must not occur again. Your position to-day will not allow of it. Please understand that thoroughly.”
“Day, Dash!” snapped Sergeant Morris when he and the tall man met in the passage. “Got a ’phone message just now from Mr Stanton saying that the car is giving trouble. It was to come in for Father Ryan and me. We’re headed for Fosters’ tin-kettling. Mr Stanton suggested that you would give us a lift.”
“Delighted, my dear sir, delighted,” Dash murmured without enthusiasm. “I wish to purchase a shirt, and Dot, I believe, desires to don a new pair of gabardine trousers. We’ll be ready to start in an hour.”
“Good! I’ll hunt up Father Ryan. Young Jeff going out?”
“Oh yes! He is dressing now.”
The sergeant’s eyes narrowed. “Fat head, I suppose?” he growled.
“A gentleman never has a fat head,” replied Dash, in a mildly reproving tone.
“Humph!” And Sergeant Morris was gone.
Five minutes later Dot and Dash and young Jeff sat down to breakfast, of which young Jeff consumed two pieces of toast and two cups of coffee. At the hour of departure Dot and Dash, who had purchased their goods from a storekeeper who made no bones about serving them that day, stood beside the truck awaiting their passengers, one of whom was then settling a stiff liquor-bill with Mr Bumpus.
Father Ryan, who lodged with the sergeant and his wife, toddled along when young Jeff made his appearance, and smiled broadly at each of them in turn. To young Jeff he said, in his faint Irish brogue: “You’re fined five pounds, young feller.”
“You fined me that amount last time I was in,” the young man objected seriously.
“Of course I did, me bhoy. You were drunk last time you came to town. You were drunk last night, for when I looked into the parlour you were trying to play the piano with your feet. The next time it will be ten pounds. I shall expect your cheque,” and his reverence dug the young man playfully in the ribs.
Father Ryan was the only representative of God left in Mount Lion. He was known and revered by bushmen as far away as Marble Bar in Western Australia as the greatest little man within the continent. No matter what denomination a man professed, if any, he went to Father Ryan with his income-tax forms or difficult letters that required answering, or to defend him in the police-court—for Father Ryan was a very able advocate when Sergeant Morris prosecuted on the d. and d. charge; whilst the women took to him their babies when they were sick, and their male relatives when they had the toothache.
When a man from Windee or one of the smaller neighbouring stations went into Mount Lion to spend there a week or a fortnight, during which he was nearly always drunk, for there was no other form of amusement, he was known as a “cheque-man”. Some there were who spent their money recklessly and cut out their cheques in a state bordering on delirium tremens; others, a minority, were more conservative, more sober, and less helpless when the day came for them to return to the semi-desolation of the bush for a further twelve months.
In the bigness of his heart Father Ryan loved all these lonely men, many of whom were without family or family ties. He knew the stagnancy of their existence and the mental depression with which the bush afflicts them, and he forgave them their lapses into very occasional drunkenness as did his Master. He placed them all in one of two classes, which he called “Gentlemen” and “Drunks”.
When a “Gentleman” cheque-man came to town Father Ryan demanded half a sovereign for his benevolent fund, and got it. On the arrival of a “Drunk” cheque-man he bailed him up and demanded three, four, or five pounds for his benevolent fund, according to the degree of doctoring it would require to send the man back to his job or find him another. And the “Drunk” invariably paid up.
When, therefore, a bushman was no longer a cheque-man, when, likely enough, he was a pitiful, palsied wretch, turned out of the hotel “broke”, faced with the multi-coloured demons because the booze supply was stopped, Father Ryan was prepared to pick him up, take him to his lodgings in defiance of Sergeant Morris, and, aided and abetted by Mrs Morris, wean him gently from John Barleycorn, build up the food-starved body, finally take him to one of the stores and rig him out with new ready-made clothes and despatch him, per mail-car, back to his job.
No one ever had observed Father Ryan to frown. His face was beaming, as it invariably was, when he fined young Jeff, and it was still beaming when, later in the day, the opportunity occurred to reprove the young man for his folly in a manner wholly distinct from that of the ranting “wowser”. Young Jeff found himself addressed and advised by a worldly-wise man, a true sportsman, and a pal.
On the way back to Windee, Dash drove the truck with Father Ryan beside him and the sergeant at the farther end of the seat, whilst young Jeff and Dot sat behind on the floor.
“An’ how’s the ’roos coming in, Dash?” inquired Father Ryan conversationally.
“Just now, they’re a failure, your reverence,” the tall man told him. “You will understand, of course, that the kangaroos no longer have their winter coats, and that it’s not yet sufficiently warm to get them in paying numbers at the watering-places.”
“Ah yes, that is so,” admitted the little priest. “What a pity it is that the poor things have to be shot!”
“I agree. Sometimes I regard myself as a murderer. It wouldn’t be so bad if there was any sport in getting them, any equality between them and the hunter.”
“Sport!”