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Updated: June 24, 2025
The boys were too much amazed to speak. They looked at one another in blank dismay. They were indeed in a fix. Drover Stobart waiting for them in Oodnadatta, and here they were in Hergott Springs, and no chance of getting out of it for a month or two. Whatever were they to do? Their bushman friend did not leave them long in uncertainty.
It was not much of a place to look at, but Sax and his friend thought it was wonderful. They had travelled across the desert for a month in order to reach that little collection of buildings, and during that time they had not seen a fence or a roof of any kind, and the only sign of civilization had been an artesian bore two days out from Oodnadatta.
As soon as possible without arousing suspicion, Stobart sent Yarloo to Oodnadatta with a note for Sax, hoping that Sergeant Scott would be able to send out a rescue party at once. But, as we have seen, the trooper was away from home and nobody knew when he would be back again.
The Oodnadatta trucking-yards are made of iron rails set in concrete and are capable of holding more than a thousand head of stock. Once the cattle are in, nothing matters, for the yards are strong enough to hold elephants. But the job is to get them in. Inch by inch the grumbling mass of irritable beasts was urged forward by the white drover and his boys.
Most of them were heavily loaded with stores for Oodnadatta which had come up on the same train as the boys had travelled by. More than a score of men had helped to unload the trucks that morning, and to arrange the bags and cases and bales ready for being roped to the camel-saddles. The boys were very much amused by the antics of three or four calf-camels.
"Boss Stobart, him say, you walk longa Oodnadatta. You find um my son. You give 'im paper yabber. Him good fella, Boss Stobart, so I go. My name Yarloo." The words came slowly, as if the man were repeating something he had said over and over in his mind. But the words were quite distinct. He handed the "paper yabber" to Sax, and disappeared.
The two men rode up the gully to the top, crossed over the spur, dipped down into a larger gully, and struck out south-west for a plain stretching towards Oodnadatta which Yarloo remembered, where there were one or two good water-holes and plenty of cattle-feed for many days.
The same crowd would watch it start out in the morning on the last stage of its long journey to Oodnadatta, the railway terminus and the metropolis of Central Australia. There were very few passengers on the train, and all of them seemed known to everybody and were greeted with hearty handshakes and loud rough words of welcome back to the North.
It is possible to connect up with the Overland Telegraph Line at Horseshoe Bend, and Stobart had taken advantage of this opportunity of getting into touch with Oodnadatta. Boss Stobart, with a thousand Queensland cattle, reached the Finke about midday. The Finke is a wide river of soft white sand, bordered on each side by gnarled and ancient gum trees.
But if the teams were at the Katherine, so were the teamsters, and so was the Pub; and when teamsters and a pub get together it generally takes time to separate them, when that pub is the last for over a thousand miles. One pub at the Katherine and another at Oodnadatta and between them over a thousand miles of bush, and desert and dust, and heat, and thirst.
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