The head stock-keeper, whose name is Lythe, but who is generally known upon the station as “the Squire,” is a very different kind of man to his two stockmen. These individuals belong to a much lower type of humanity, and are apparently without any education whatever, save a superficial knowledge of horses and cattle.
Born of good parentage in an English “racing county,” Lythe is a fair average sample of a certain class of men not very uncommon in up-country Australia. Life’s chessboard has been with him an alternating record of white, glowing triumphs, and black disgrace of wild, feverish saturnalia and rough toiling at the hardest kinds of colonial work. A wild boyhood, a wilder time at Sandhurst, a meteoric existence as Cornet in a lance regiment,—with the attendant scintilla of champagne suppers, racehorses, and couturières,—and then he slipped on to a “black square” and became a “rouseabout” on an Australian run. Presently he rises again, by making for himself a bit of a name as a successful “overlander” or cattle-drover, and, becoming rich, moves “on to the white.” He is a squatter, takes up-country, loses all, and then becomes an irreclaimable tippler. “Black square” again, and here he is, working hard to “knock up” another cheque,—a well-educated, useful member of society when free from liquor; a wild, quarrelsome savage from the time he reaches the first “grog-shanty” on his way “down south,” till he returns “dead broke” to “knock up another cheque” at the station.
Claude’s hosts at the little out-station—who, like most Australian colonists, are as hospitably minded as their means will allow them to be—do all they can to render his visit to their rough home as agreeable as possible. They even indulge him with a few bush songs, whilst the after-supper pipe is being smoked. One of these, sung in a voice gruff and husky with shouting to the cattle all day, to the air of a well-known nautical ditty, is descriptive of the first “taking up” of the Never Never Land, and has a taking chorus, concluding thus:—
“Then sing, my boys, yo! ho!
O’er desert plains we go
To the far Barcoo,
Where they eat Ngardoo,
A thousand miles away.”
At nine o’clock “the Squire” and Claude say good-bye to the others, and mounting their horses, which have been brought up to the house across the dewy, moonlit pastures by a pair of attendant sprites, proceed leisurely in the direction of the head-station.
Around the riders stretches the tranquil indigo and silver glory of a marvellous phantasmagoria, painted by earth’s cold-faced satellite. And accustomed to the softer beauties of a New Zealand moonlight night, Claude cannot help exclaiming to his companion upon the strange, phantom-like appearance that all the familiar objects around him appear to have put on beneath the argent rays. Even that most unpoetical object, the stockyard, where the imprisoned cattle are roaring impatient of restraint, seems, with its horrid carcase gallows, all dressed with a silvery, mystic robe of light, as if transformed into a spectre castle, filled with moaning, long-horned beings of another world.