While the Billy Boils by Henry Lawson

Author:Henry Lawson
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Frontier and pioneer life -- Fiction, Australia -- Social life and customs -- Fiction, Short stories
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
Published: 2019-08-26T20:28:09+00:00

* * *

It must be near one or two o’clock. The fire is burn­ing low. Al­lig­ator lies with his head rest­ing on his paws, and watches the wall. He is not a very beau­ti­ful dog, and the light shows nu­mer­ous old wounds where the hair will not grow. He is afraid of noth­ing on the face of the earth or un­der it. He will tackle a bul­lock as read­ily as he will tackle a flea. He hates all other dogs—ex­cept kangaroo-dogs—and has a marked dis­like to friends or re­la­tions of the fam­ily. They sel­dom call, how­ever. He some­times makes friends with strangers. He hates snakes and has killed many, but he will be bit­ten some day and die; most snake-dogs end that way.

Now and then the bush­wo­man lays down her work and watches, and listens, and thinks. She thinks of things in her own life, for there is little else to think about.

The rain will make the grass grow, and this re­minds her how she fought a bush-fire once while her hus­band was away. The grass was long, and very dry, and the fire threatened to burn her out. She put on an old pair of her hus­band’s trousers and beat out the flames with a green bough, till great drops of sooty per­spir­a­tion stood out on her fore­head and ran in streaks down her blackened arms. The sight of his mother in trousers greatly amused Tommy, who worked like a little hero by her side, but the ter­ri­fied baby howled lust­ily for his “mummy.” The fire would have mastered her but for four ex­cited bush­men who ar­rived in the nick of time. It was a mixed-up af­fair all round; when she went to take up the baby he screamed and struggled con­vuls­ively, think­ing it was a “black man;” and Al­lig­ator, trust­ing more to the child’s sense than his own in­stinct, charged furi­ously, and (be­ing old and slightly deaf) did not in his ex­cite­ment at first re­cog­nize his mis­tress’s voice, but con­tin­ued to hang on to the mole­skins un­til choked off by Tommy with a saddle-strap. The dog’s sor­row for his blun­der, and his anxi­ety to let it be known that it was all a mis­take, was as evid­ent as his ragged tail and a twelve-inch grin could make it. It was a glor­i­ous time for the boys; a day to look back to, and talk about, and laugh over for many years.

She thinks how she fought a flood dur­ing her hus­band’s ab­sence. She stood for hours in the drench­ing down­pour, and dug an over­flow gut­ter to save the dam across the creek. But she could not save it. There are things that a bush­wo­man can not do. Next morn­ing the dam was broken, and her heart was nearly broken too, for she thought how her hus­band would feel when he came home and saw the res­ult of years of la­bour swept away. She cried then.

She also fought the pleur­opneu­mo­nia—dosed and bled the few re­main­ing cattle, and wept again when her two best cows died.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.