y
the Maoris.

New Year's Night

It was dark enough for anything in Dead Man's Gap--a round, warm, close
darkness, in which retreating sounds seemed to be cut off suddenly at a
distance of a hundred yards or so, instead of growing faint and fainter,
and dying away, to strike the ear once or twice again--and after
minutes, it might seem--with startling distinctness, before being
finally lost in the distance, as it is on clear, frosty nights. So with
the sounds of horses' hoofs, stumbling on the rough bridle-track through
the "saddle", the clatter of hoof-clipped stones and scrape of gravel
down the hidden "siding", and the low sound of men's voices, blurred
and speaking in monosyllables and at intervals it seemed, and in hushed,
awed tones, as though they carried a corpse. To practical eyes, grown
used to such a darkness, and at the nearest point, the passing blurrs
would have suggested two riders on bush hacks leading a third with an
empty saddle on its back--a lady's or "side-saddle", if one could have
distinguished the horns. They may have struck a soft track or level, or
rounded the buttress of the hill higher up, but before they had time
to reach or round the foot of the spur, blurs, whispers, stumble and
clatter of hoofs, jingle of bridle rings, and the occasional clank
together of stirrup irons, seemed shut off as suddenly and completely as
though a great sound-proof door had swung to behind them.

It was dark enough on the glaringest of days down in the lonely hollow
or "pocket", between two spurs, at the head of a blind gully behind
Mount Buckaroo, where there was a more or less dusty patch, barely
defined even in broad daylight by a spidery dog-legged fence on
three sides, and a thin "two-rail" (dignified with the adjective
"split-rail"--though rails and posts were mostly of saplings split in
halves) running along the frontage. In about the middle of it a little
slab hut, overshadowed by a big stringy-bark shed, was pointed out as
Johnny Mears's Farm.

"Black as--as charcoal," said Johnny Mears. He had never seen coal, and
was a cautious man, whose ideas came slowly. He stooped, close by the
fence, with his hands on his knees, to "sky" the loom of his big shed
and so get his bearings. He had been to have a look at the penned
calves, and see that all slip-rails were up and pegged, for the words of
John Mears junior, especially when delivered rapidly and shrilly and in
injured tones, were not to be