The Anthology of Colonial Australian Adventure Fiction by Ken Gelder

Author:Ken Gelder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2011-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Guy Boothby

Billy Binks—Hero

1898

It was at the close of the hottest day, of the hottest week, of the hottest month, of the hottest year that ever I remember in a fairly long colonial experience, that I made the acquaintance of that precocious ragamuffin, William Binks, since called—Hero.

So hot indeed was it that summer on the great plains that stretch away across Queensland, from the Dividing Range to the Never-Never country on the other side of the border, that even the oldest blacks agreed in saying that they could not remember such another in the whole course of their lives.

I was managing a frontier station in Queensland at the time, the western boundary of which extended almost up to the South Australian border. On one side of the fence was grass, grass, interminable grass, and on the other only sandy wastes and spinifex. Perhaps because there was nowhere to go when you had passed it, we never met a stranger to the westward of the head station, and for the same reason but few to the eastward. If you would properly understand what I am about to tell you, you must be sure always to bear this fact in mind.

When first I met the subject of my narrative I was out with two companions looking for lost horses in our back country, and our search had already lasted three days longer than we had expected it would do. No man who has not experienced a summer in that part of the world could have any possible conception of what having to do work in it means. Imagine overhead a cloudless sky; underfoot, a dry, cracked, unwholesome-looking earth, that quivers and seems to rise and fall before one as if set on carriage springs. On either hand, mirages may be observed: exquisite pools of water where moisture there is none, surrounded by thickly-foliaged trees and backed by mountain-ranges when there are not a thousand trees in five hundred square miles and scarcely a hillock over ten feet high in more than twice that area.

It was nearly dusk, and, according to custom, we were beginning to look about us for a place where we might pitch our camp. As I have said, our party consisted of three men—myself, a station hand, and a small black boy named Rocca. We had four animals—three saddle-horses and one pack-horse; and I can safely assure you we were all sick to death of the business that had occasioned our absence from home.

Behind us and on either hand stretched the plain as far as the eye could reach, flat and unbroken as a billiard-table; but ahead we could just distinguish the presence of a small water-course, flanked, as is usual in that part of Queensland, by a fringe of dull-green coolabahs and ti-trees. Towards it we made our way, hoping almost against hope that when we reached it we should find a little water left in some hole for our tired animals. For ourselves we had no need to be anxious, as the pack-horse still carried an untouched bag.

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