"Round them up," cried Ives, "but look out! That mare can turn in her own length, and will when they do!"
The warning was timely to the very second: almost simultaneously the sheep doubled, and round spun both horses as in the air. Moya jerked and swayed, but kept her seat. Ives headed the mob for the fence, and for the moment the nonsense was out of them.
"Bravo, Miss Bethune!" said he. "You'll make a better bushman than ever I should."
Moya clouded like an April sky; the instant before she had been deliciously flushed and excited. Her companion, however, was happily intent upon his sheep.
"That's the way to start," he said, "with fifty or sixty at one swoop; you can work a mob like that; it's the five or six that give the trouble. I have reason to know! There's a corner of one of the paddocks in our South Block where a few of the duffers have a meet every morning, just because there's some water they can smell across the fence; won't draw to their own water at the opposite corner of their own paddock, not they! No, there they'd stick and die of thirst if one of us wasn't sent to rout them out. It was my billet every day last week, and a tougher one I never want. One time there was less than half a dozen of 'em: think of driving five weak sheep through eight or nine miles of scrub without a dog! It would be ten miles if I followed both fences religiously; but I'm getting so that I can cut off a pretty fair corner. Yes, it's pretty hard graft, as they say up here, a day like that; but your water-bag holds nectar, while it lasts; and may your wedding-cake taste as good as the bit of browny under a pine, Miss Bethune!"
"What's browny?" asked Moya hastily.
"Raisins and baking-powder," said Ives, with a laugh; "but I've got enough for two in my pocket, so you shall sample it whenever you like. By the way, aren't you thirsty yet?"
Moya was.
"It's the dust from the sheep, which you profess to relish, Mr. Ives."
"Only because it's like no other dust," explained the connoisseur. "And water-bag water's like no other kind."