Here he roused and told the storekeeper. Then up
the creek to Home Rule, dreariest of deserted diggings.
He struck across the ages-haunted bush, and up Chinaman's Creek, past
"the Chinamen's Graves," and through the scrub and over the ridges
for the Talbragar Road. For he had to see Jack Denver home from start
to finish.
Glaring, hot and dusty, lay the long, white road; coated with dust
that felt greasy to the touch and taste. The coffin was in a
four-wheeled trap, for the solitary hearse that Mudgee boasted then
was to meet them some three miles out of town--at the racecourse, as
it happened, by one of those eternal ironies of fate. (Jones, the
undertaker, had had another job that morning.) The long string of
buggies and carts and horsemen; other buggies and carts and horsemen
drawn respectfully back amongst the trees here and there along the
route; male hats off and held rigidly vertical with right ears as the
coffin passed; and drivers waiting for a chance to draw into the line.
Think of it; up early on the first morning, a long day at the races, a
long journey home, awake and up all night with grief and sympathy.
Some of the men had ridden till daylight; the women, worn out and
exhausted, had perhaps an hour or so of sleep towards morning--yet
they were all there, except Ben Duggan, on the long, hot, dusty road
back, heads swimming in the heat and faces and hands coated with
perspiration and dust--and never, never once breaking out of a slow
walk.
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