Robbery Under Arms - Rolf Boldrewood (most important books of all time .TXT) 📗

The great dart is to keep the young stock away from their mothers until they forget one another, and then most of the danger is past. But if calves with one man’s brand on are seen sucking another man’s cows, it is pretty plain that the brand on the calves has been put on without the consent of the owner of the cows⁠—which is cattle-stealing; a felony, according to the Act 7 and 8 George IV, No. 29, punishable with three years’ imprisonment, with hard labour on the roads of the colony or other place, as the Judge may direct.

There’s a lot of law! How did I learn it? I had plenty of time in Berrima Gaol⁠—worse luck⁠—my first stretch. But it was after I’d done the foolishness, and not before.

“Now then, you boys!” says father, coming up all of a sudden like, and bringing out his words as if it was old times with us, when we didn’t know whether he’d hit first and talk afterwards, or the other way on, “get out the lot we’ve just branded, and drive ’em straight for that peak, where the water shines dripping over the stones, right again the sun, and look slippy; we’re burning daylight, and these cows are making row enough, blast ’em! to be heard all the way to Banda. I’ll go on and steady the lead; you keep ’em close up to me.”

Father mounted the old mare. The dog stopped behind; he knew he’d have to mind the tail⁠—that is the hindmost cattle⁠—and stop ’em from breaking or running clear away from the others. We threw down the rails. Away the cattle rushed out, all in a long string. You’d ’a thought no mortal men could ’a kept ’em in that blind hole of a place. But father headed ’em, and turned ’em towards the peak. The dog worried those that wanted to stay by the yard or turn another way. We dropped our whip on ’em, and kept ’em going. In five minutes they were all a-moving along in one mob at a pretty sharpish trot like a lot of store cattle. Father knew his way about, whether the country was thick or open. It was all as one to him. What a slashing stockman he would have made in new country, if he only could have kept straight.

It took us an hour’s hard dinkum to get near the peak. Sometimes it was awful rocky, as well as scrubby, and the poor devils of cattle got as sore-footed as babies⁠—blood up to the knee, some of ’em; but we crowded ’em on; there was no help for it.

At last we rounded up on a flat, rocky, open kind of a place; and here father held up his hand.

“Let ’em ring a bit; some of their tongues are out. These young things is generally soft. Come here, Dick.” I rode up, and he told me to follow him.

We walked our horses up to the edge of the mountain and looked over. It was like the end of the world. Far down there was a dark, dreadful drop into a sort of deep valley below. You couldn’t see the bottom of it. The trees on the mountain side looked like bushes, and they were big ironbarks and messmates too. On three sides of us was this awful, desolate-looking precipice⁠—a dreary, gloomy, Godforsaken kind of spot. The sky got cloudy, and the breeze turned cold and began to murmur and whistle in an odd, unnatural kind of way, while father, seeing how scared and puzzled I was, began to laugh. I shuddered. A thought crossed my mind that it might be the Enemy of Souls, in his shape, going to carry us off for doing such a piece of wickedness.

“Looks queer, doesn’t it?” says father, going to the brink and kicking down a boulder, that rolled and crashed down the steep mountain side, tearing its way through scrub and heath till it settled down in the glen below. “It won’t do for a man’s horse to slip, will it, boy? And yet there’s a track here into a fine large paddock, open and clear, too, where I’m going to put these cattle into.”

I stared at him, without speaking, thinking was he mad.

“No! the old man isn’t mad, youngster,” he said; “not yet, at least. I’m going to show you a trick that none of you native boys are up to, smart as you think yourselves.” Here he got off the old mare, and began to lead her to the edge of the mountain.

“Now, you rally the cattle well after me,” he said; “they’ll follow the old mare after a bit. I left a few cows among ’em on purpose, and when they draw keep ’em going well up, but not too fast.”

He had lengthened the bridle of the mare, and tied the end of a light tether rope that he had round her neck to it. I saw her follow him slowly, and turn down a rocky track that seemed to lead straight over a bluff of the precipice.

However, I gave the word to “head on.” The dog had started rounding ’em up as soon as he saw the old mare walk towards the mountain side, and the cattle were soon crushed up pretty close to the mare’s heels.

Mind this, that they were so footsore and tender about the hoofs that they could not have run away from us on foot if they had tried.

After “ringing” a bit, one of the quiet cows followed up the old mare that was walking step by step forward, and all the rest followed her like sheep. Cattle will do that. I’ve seen a stockrider, when all the horses were dead beat, trying to get fat cattle to take a river in flood, jump off and turn his horse loose into the stream. If he went straight, and swam across, all