“Aren’t you going to pick him up again?” cried Carew.
“No more,” replied Frying Pan, carelessly. Then he grinned, and volunteered a remark. “Make that feller plenty tired walk home again,” he said. And this was his only conversation during a two-hundred-mile journey.
At night they usually managed to reach a station, where the man in charge would greet them effusively, and beg them to turn their horses out and stay a week—or a year or two, just as long as they liked. They met all sorts at these stations, from English swells to bushmen of the roughest. Sometimes they camped out, putting hobbles on the horses, and spreading their blankets under the buggy on a bed of long grass gathered by Frying Pan.
As they got further out, the road became less and less defined, stations fewer, and everything rougher. They left the sheep-country behind them and got out into cattle-land, where “runs” are measured by the hundred square miles, and every man is a law unto himself. They left their buggy after a time, and pushed on with pack-horses; and after travelling about two hundred miles, came to the outer edge of the settled district, where they stayed with two young Englishmen, who were living under a dray, and building their cattle-yards themselves—the yards being a necessity, and the house, which was to come afterwards, a luxury. The diet was monotonous—meat “ad libitum,” damper and tea. They had neighbours within sixty miles, and got letters once in two months by riding that distance. “Stay here a while,” they said to the travellers, “and take up some of the country near by.”
“We’re to take over the country Redman took up,” said Charlie. “It joins you doesn’t it?”
“Yes. See those far blue ranges? Well, we run to them on this side, and Redman’s block runs to them on the other.”
“Don’t your cattle make out that way?” asked Charlie.
“No fear,” replied he, laughing. “We’ve some good boundary riders out there.”
“What do you mean?”
“The wild blacks,” answered the Englishman. “They’re bad out on those hills. You’ll find yourselves in a nice shop when you take that block over. There’s a pretty fair humpy to live in, that’s one thing. What do you call the place?”