Read Online To Ride a Fine Horse by Mary Durack - Free Book Online Page A

stood guard until, convinced that no harm was to befall him, he could at last be persuaded to come out from hiding.
    Many years later the poet Banjo Paterson wrote an amusing ballad called ‘The Bush Christening’ which the same Pat thought must have been inspired by the story of his once unusual baptism. At all events the fears of the boy as described in the ballad were exactly his own:
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    â€˜He was none of your dolts—he had seen them brand colts,
    And it seemed to his small understanding,
    If a man of the frock made him one of the flock,
    It must mean something very like branding.
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    So away with a rush he set off for the bush,
    While the tears in his eyelids they glistened—
    â€œ ’Tis outrageous,” says he, “to brand youngsters like me;
    I’ll be dashed if I’ll stop to be christened!” ’
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    Then came the great day when the first Cobb and Co. coach came through and before long a network of roads and transport began to break down the loneliness of the far west.
    Naturally, in the midst of all this progress and prosperity there were some tragic happenings too, such as when a five-year-old daughter of Patsy’s sister, Sarah Tully, wandered from her home, about twenty-five miles from Thylungra, and became lost. It was three days before the child was found, in one of the many dry gullies or ‘breakaways’ worn by the flooding creeks, her little dead hand still clutching a bunch of bush flowers.
    Soon after this, Patsy’s boys John and Pat became lost with their old tutor. The boys had always loved going for walks and were irritated when Mr Healy, who had no sense of direction whatever, began going along ‘to look after them’. One day when the old man started heading back in quite the wrong direction they decided for fun to see how far he would go before realizing his mistake. After two miles they felt the joke had gone far enough but Mr Healy stubbornly refused to admit his mistake until even the boys had lost their bearings. By nightfall they were hopelessly lost.
    As Patsy and the younger natives were away from the station, Mrs Patsy had sent at once for her brother John at Kyabra and by dawn the following morningCostello, Scrammy Jimmy and several other natives were on the trail. The tracks of the wanderers became impossible to follow over hard, stony ground and after two days and two nights the searchers had begun to despair, when Scrammy Jimmy, with an ear to the ground, declared he heard Mr Healy’s voice. They found the old man at last, lying alone and calling out in delirium: ‘Keep to the north-east, children! Keep to the north-east!’
    The tracks of some natives then led the anxious searchers to a camp near a native well where they found the boys hungrily eating kangaroo and wild berries. They told how the blacks had found them some hours before, and how Mr Healy, then quite out of his mind, had fought them fiercely. They had been forced to leave him and the natives had brought the boys to their camp for food and water before taking them home.
    The search party returned at last with the old tutor, still shouting and struggling, tied to a horse’s back. He had stripped off his clothing in delirium, and as the skin was almost entirely burned from his body it was feared he would die before reaching the station. He survived, however, and under patient nursing came slowly back to life. Although almost blind, and incapable of further work, he lived on at Thylungra, happy in the illusion that he earned his wages as station book-keeper and business adviser.
    This incident increased Patsy’s sense of gratitude and affection for the natives and also his grave concern for the state of affairs that closer settlement had brought about. The old tribes, finding their lands and waters dwindling on all sides had taken to the wholesale killing of stock and not all the new settlers showed the tact and patience of the earlier