“And I’m afraid they’re not quite escaped yet,” he said. “The feed on the hills is giving out, and the wild dogs are playing havoc. I’ve nearly made up my mind to bring down as many as I can get again, and kill them all and boil them down for tallow.”
Ess shuddered, and they drove in silence down to the high fence, which had been repaired again where the rails had been pulled out to let the sheep through.
“Don’t get down,” he said, when she made a movement to spring out and open the gate. “The horses and I have come here too often not to know the trick of doing without dismounting.”
He drove alongside and lifted the latch, and pushed the gate open with the butt of his whip, whirled the horses round and trotted through, leaned out and swung it back, so that it slammed to and the latch clicked into place.
“It’s hot down here,” he said, lifting his hat and wiping his brow. Ess laughed.
“It’s hot everywhere, isn’t it?” she said. “I’m really forgetting what it feels like to be cool.”
“You’ll get the heat into your bones if you stay here a time,” said the boss; “most of us do, and we shiver like a wet dog if it comes a cold wind. We get them cold enough in the winter sometimes in the hills—cold enough for us, anyway.”
“You might almost think we were at sea here,” said Ess, looking round the straight-edged empty horizon.
“We have plenty of space round us,” agreed the boss. “Ten thousand acres is a Small Holding with us. And some of the holdings run up toward the million acres. Big figures, eh, but this is a country of big figures. It’s eight miles across this paddock as the crow flies, and it’s longer the other way. You don’t find the like of that in the inside country now, do you?” He spoke with an air of subdued pride, and Ess looked round her at the flat dead plain, with nothing in sight but an occasional scurrying rabbit, and wondered that a man could find anything to be proud of in such country.
“There was a man lost in one of our back paddocks that’s not as big as this,” the boss went on. “One of the boundary riders found his bones and rags of clothes near two years after, and there was a note safe and tight in his billy can. He’d tried to take a short cut from one tank to another, and it had come on a grey day or two—the sun clouded over so he couldn’t steer his way—and he wandered round and round and crossways for four days, and then wrote the note. And Lord knows how long he walked or crawled after that. And one of my own men lost the track coming across this very paddock, although the road’s scored plain enough, as you see. He took a track that branched off, and he thought was the main one, and it petered out, and he tried to cut across to the other track. He missed it somehow, and was out for a day and a night. You’d wonder a man could get lost with the hills back there to guide him, but he said a mirage or something hid them. But he’s no bushman of course—he’s an Englishman. And often men lose their heads when they first find they’re lost.”