Aftermath
DURING THE NIGHT the uproar down the creek broke out sporadically, and when dawn lightened the sky Bony, with Jack Withers, who was as much interested as the half-caste, made their way to the scene of the commotion. They found the two tribes on opposite banks of the creek, the women and children behind the men, the women screaming shrilly and their lords howling guttural threats.
“Wonderwot’s stung ’em,” said the man with the awful squint.
“Woman! Woman undoubtedly is the cause of it,” Bony opined. “Ninety per cent of murders, riots, and private fights are caused by woman-peace-loving woman.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if youain’t right,” Withers said in his slow drawl, as though Bony’s statement conveyed an entirely new idea. “Ole Moongalliti looks terrible narked, and Merteeain’tlookin ’ too cheerful.”
The chiefs occupied front places. Moongalliti, attired only in a loincloth, clutched a heavy murrawirrie in his left hand, and three or four wooden spears, with iron-hard, needle-pointed tips, in the other. Mertee was similarly armed. The bucks behind each were armed likewise with spears andmurrawirries. Of the opposing armies only Moongalliti was really angry. The bucks’ faces were sullen, and appearances indicated that the majority of them would much prefer peace with honour, and a few more hours’ sleep to recompense them for the time lost during the night.
Moongalliti was walking up and down before his bucks, his face continually turned towards Mertee, his white hair and beard matted, his long thin legs looking like jointed ebony rulers. From his wide mouth flowed a stream of unintelligible jargon, which a child could have seen expressed insults, invective, and lurid curses.
“My! Ain’t he going some?” chuckled Withers.
“It will end in a brawl,” said Bony.
“Hope so. Ain’tseen a dog-fight for years.”
“Nor I. It will amuse me,” agreed Bony calmly. “In a few minutes the spears will begin to fly. I suggest we climb this tree to gain a better view.”
“I’m on”-and in thirty seconds Withers was on a comfortable branch, which gave him a grand-stand seat. Bony climbed up beside him.
The exultation of his warrior ancestors lifted him entirely out of his ordinary existence. Everything was forgotten in the fierce expectation consuming him. His cooking job, the necessity to prepare breakfast on time, was simply wiped from his mind.
“Look, Bony! Mertee’swarmin ’ up at last!”
“He had to. No self-respecting aboriginal could for long stand Moongalliti’s unpleasant language.”
Moongalliti suddenly slithered down the steep bank to the dry sandy bottom of the creek. He dropped his murrawirrie, and with his left hand took from his right all the spears but one. White foam was on his lips, and his face was terrible in its passion. His body, bearing a score of battle-scars, shook and trembled whilst he defied Mertee, cursed him and his father and his mother, and implored him to become a man and come down to him and fight.
“Ah!” Withers sighed long and with great content when Mertee, with an answering yell, sprang down to the creek-bottom, where the opponents were but twenty yards apart.
“Oo-um-oo-um-oo-um-oo-um-oo-um!” yelled Moongalliti.
“Yulm-yulm-yulm-yulm-yulm-yulm!” responded Mertee.
With the swiftness of light Moongalliti’s arm was flung back, for a fraction of a second the spear became horizontal, and then the weapon was flying towards Mertee with deadly precision.
“Got him!” shouted Withers.
“No!” cried Bony.
To the watchers it appeared that the spear had reached Mertee, but in that last second he stepped smartly aside, and the spear passed to touch the ground yards behind him and slither over it for yet further yards. To a new-chum his agility was nothing less than amazing. In comparison a Spanish bullfighter would have seemed as slow as a turtle on land.
Mertee used a spear-thrower, a perfectly balanced piece of flat wood with a socket at its extremity to hold the butt of the spear. He bent over sideways as an athlete putting the weight, straightened as a length of clock-spring, and his spear described an arc. It rose much higher than Moongalliti’s head, and then rushed down on him. As briskly as Mertee he stepped aside, and the spear quivered in the ground close behind him.
“ ’Otstuff, Bony, old lad!” Withers cried.
“It will become hotter,” Bony told him gleefully.
Again the two combatants each threw a spear, and again each stepped aside. A third and a fourth time spears were exchanged without a hit. It was then that Moongalliti’s cunning became apparent; for, when at last neither he nor his opponent had a spear left in hand, Mertee was forced to run back to pick up Moongalliti’s hand-thrown spears, whereas his own stick-thrown spears stuck up out of the ground close behind Moongalliti. Not for nothing had the white-headed chief fought his hundred fights.
His hands reached out and swept up two of Mertee’s spears, and then he rushed on Mertee, who was running back to retrieve a spear many yards to his rear. He reached one. Moongalliti stopped. Mertee crouched to pick it up. Moongalliti threw. Mertee seized the desired spear, sprang upward and to one side. But when he leapt aside Moongalliti’s spear was hanging from his left thigh.
The bucks roared, the gins screamed, the children on one side yelled insults to the children on the other. Withers clapped his hands and yelled: “Encore, encore!”-almost falling off the bough. Bony’s eyes were twin points of blazing blue light.
The concert of all these sounds utterly drowned the barks and yelps of the numberless dogs. Momentarily, even Moongalliti was stunned. He appeared transfixed with astonishment to observe Mertee dancing on his right leg and holding the spear in his left thigh with both hands. Mertee shrieked more with humiliation than with pain. He continued to shriek until his ebony chest was flecked with foam, when it appeared that he became insensible to pain, for he suddenly plucked out the spear and, still shrieking, dashed for his murrawirrie and rushed madly on Moongalliti. Seeing him coming, the heavy awkwardweapon, used as a sword, whirling about his head, Moongalliti made haste to retrieve his murrawirrie and rushed to meet him.
“Scrum! Scrum! Get to it! Get to it!” yelled Withers when the bucks of both sides leapt down to the creek-bed. Spears began to fly in all directions. Everyone yelled or screamed, and Withers, to keep his end up, added to the uproar.
“Let ’emalone! Damnit, let ’emalone! Boo-hoo! You’ll spoil it! Let ’emalone… let ’emalone!”
The women were now jumping and slithering down the creek-banks, and, utterly regardless of the vicious spears, sprang on those which fell near them and broke them into half a dozen pieces. Bony and Withers saw one of the three young men whose backs were caked with mud stagger with a spear right through his chest and collapse. Another buck dropped like a pole-axed bullock when a murrawirrie was brought down on his head from behind. After that it was difficult to follow the actions of any unit, because the men were bunched as in a Rugby scrum, and the women clawed at them from the rear in vain efforts to pull them away.
Excitement made Bony speechless. His blood was aflame with ecstasy, and he was moving back along the branch to reach the main stem by which to get down to join in the fray, when from almost below them the reports of a double-barrelled shot-gun very nearly caused both him and Withers to fall to the ground.
The effect of these reports was astounding. There followed instant silence, instant cessation of all movement. It was as though what had gone before was a rapidly screened talking picture, when the machinery had broken down and the scene on the sheet had become a fixture. And then, precisely as though the operator had adjusted his machine and set the picture again in motion, the crowd broke and fled the instant two further shots roared up and down the creek.
“Go it, Moongalliti!” Withers yelled with a resumption of enthusiasm.“Even money on Moongalliti! Ten to one on Noonee! Hop it, Noonee, hop it! By cripes, you’ll beat him at the post!”
Mertee painfully but manfully followed his fast-disappearing tribe into the belt of timber dividing the creek from the plain. A mob of “home blacks” rushed down along the creek-bed, helter-skelter towards their camp, followed in the rear by old Moongalliti, with Noonee, his first wife, almost as old and six times his weight, close on his heels.
“Let’s ’avea look at the dead ’uns, Bony,” the irrepressible Withers suggested gaily, and, without bothering to climb down the tree, he lowered himself from the branch and dropped the nine or ten feet. Bony followed him, and when he stood on the creek-bank he came face to face with Jeff Stanton.
“Why-in-hell didn’t you try and stop ’em?” Jeff demanded.
“Stop ’em?” Withers echoed, a look of utter astonishment causing his eyes to cross still more. “Stop ’em? Why, I wouldn’t ’avestopped ’emfor a hundred quid! It’s the bestbleedin ’ dog-fight I seen for years.”
“I am glad you enjoyed yourself, Jack,” Jeff said with biting sarcasm. Then: “We had better examine the corpses.”
Together with Bony, Withers, and most of the homestead hands, Stanton gained the creek-bed, and at that moment one of the corpses sat up, gazed round blankly, uttered a yell and, springing to his feet, raced up the farther bank as quickly as a dog-chased squirrel runs up a tree. Stanton fired two more cartridges into the air to hurry him, but further haste appeared impossible.
The buck with the spear sticking out between his shoulder blades was quite dead. He was Moongalliti’s son, Ludbi. A third casualty was alive and seemed merely stunned.
“The biterbitten, ” murmured Bony.
“Moongalliti urged them on to fight when they were by no means inclined, and the only one killed of them all is Moongalliti’s son, whom he loved.”
“Humph! What’s this?”
Up the creek came a small flock of women, led by Noonee and Moongalliti. The old man walked proudly erect, his white head thrown back, his beard matted with blood from a cheek wound. Stanton and his men drew back. Moongalliti came and looked down on the face of his son. His lips twitched. The women raised their arms and wailed. Noonee, Ludbi’s mother, cried aloud and fell on the body.
And Moongalliti, erect as a soldier, arms hanging stiffly at his sides, turned towards the east, silent, his face immobile save for his trembling lips.
Bony touched his bare shoulder, and the old man’s eyes came slowly to rest on him.
“Moongalliti,” Bony said softly, “Ludbi was a man. Beneath the moon last night he faced its cradle.”
Bony raised his right arm as a sign.
Slowly the old man’s right arm went up too, and when it rose the fierce face softened and tears fell down his scarred and wounded cheeks.