e weak-kneed up and screaming
against "blacklegging" as a thing accurst. And when she understood that
the fight was over, while apparently it was waxing thicker, she had
waited to see what the end would be, longing for something she knew not
what. She used to go down town, sometimes of an evening, to watch the
military patrols, riding up and down with jingling bits and clanking
carbines and sabres as if in a conquered city. She heard, in her
workroom, the dull roar of the angry thousands through whose midst the
insolent squatters drove in triumphal procession, as if inciting to
lawlessness, with dragoon-guarded, police-protected drays of blackleg
wool. Then the end came and the strike was over, leaving the misery it
had caused and the bitter hatreds it had fostered and the stern lesson
which all did not read as the daily papers would have had them. And now
the same Organised Capitalism which had fought and beaten the maritime
men and the miners, refusing to discuss or to confer or to arbitrate or
to conciliate, but using its unjust possession of the means of living to
starve into utter submission those whose labour made it rich, was at the
same work in the Queensland bush, backing the squatters, dominating
government, served by obsequious magistrates and a slavish military and
aided by all who thought they had to gain by the degradation of their
fellows or who had been ground so low that they would cut each other's
throats for a crust or who, in their blind ignorance, misunderstood what
it all meant. And there were wild reports afloat of resistance brooding
in Queensland and of excited meetings in the bush and of troops being
sent to disperse the bushmen's camps. Why did they endure these things,
Nellie thought, watching and waiting, as impotent to aid them as she was
to save the baby dying now beside her. Day by day she expected Ned.

She knew Ned was in the South, somewhere, though she had not seen him. He
had come down on some business, in blissful ignorance of the nearness of
the coming storm, but would be called back, she knew, now this new
trouble had begun. And then he would be arrested, she was sure, because
he was outspoken and fearless and would urge the men to stand out till
the last, and would be sent to prison by legal trickery under this new
law the papers said had been discovered; all so that the unions might
break down and the squatters do as they liked. Which, perhaps, was why
her thoughts for the time b