He took a picture or two, and tried to sell them in Wilgandra, but they were still frameless, and he only raised a pound by the sale of both.
It was his neighbour Daly who helped him most; he saved him his fifty shilling railway ticket by sending him to Sydney in charge of a dozen trucks of sheep.
Landed there after the almost intolerable journey, he tried desperately for work—even beat up an old friend or two, who looked askance at his shabby appearance. One offered him a pound which he could ill spare, having fallen on hard times himself, the other wrote him half a dozen useless recommendations to various business men.
Cameron hung around the quay in a sort of fascination; no pilot boat went out but he did not tremble, no great ship came round Bradley's Head but he felt it bore his wife on board. The transports sent from the Cape for the Bush Contingent—The Atlantian and the Maplemore—were already anchored out in the stream, the great numbers painted on their sides adding an unusual note to the shipping on the smiling harbour. Launches and heavily weighed boats bearing timber for the horse-boxes were continually putting off from the quay to cross the intermediate stretch of water to where they lay.
The bustle and movement woke Cameron to life again, and the knowledge that he must do something, if it were only to take a header into the plentiful water; not here at the quay where a thousand eyes would see, but from one of the quiet bays or headlands the harbour has so many of.
Then he pulled himself together again, recognised it was want of food that had begot such cowardice in him, and spent his last shilling on a good meal. After that he tramped out to Randwick to the camp, and asked for Private Mortimer Stevenson.
The sentry jerked his head in a certain direction, and Cameron made his way to where some ten thousand perhaps of Sydney's citizens, women and children, had crowded, as they crowded almost every afternoon, for the novelty of seeing the bushmen drill.
It was an odd, unmilitary spectacle. Uniforms were not yet served out, and there seemed no regularity as to height. Here a sunburnt fellow from 'out back' drilled in a tattered flannel shirt and a pair of ancient moleskins that had seen several hard shearing seasons. Next to him was some wealthy squatter's son in a well-cut light grey suit, then a rough fellow with a beard half a foot long, moleskins again, and an old red handkerchief tied round his throat, then a lad, a fine well-grown fellow in the white flannels he played tennis in on his far-off station. None of the pomp, the éclat of militarism was there—not even the discipline; the men gossiped cheerfully with each other even while they stood in their ranks, they laughed at the girls in the crowd—even threw kisses to them. They were a fine, independent-looking lot, and you knew at a glance at them that they would think no more of carrying their lives in their hands than most people think of carrying umbrellas. But you marvelled how they were to assume in so few weeks' time the well-groomed, spick-and-span, automatic appearance you had hitherto associated with the word soldiers.
Cameron watched the different squads for a little time, and felt proud of Mortimer when he found girls and men were pointing him out and saying. 'That one, look! the fourth from the end; he's a splendid-looking fellow, isn't he?' 'See that fourth chap, that's the sort of man we want to represent us.'
But the drilling and the hoarse cries of the hardworked sergeants seemed endless, and Cameron wandered on and watched the riding and shooting tests which separated the genuine bushmen from the counterfeits, who swarmed here, as easily as the winnow separates the grain from the chaff. At last the squads broke up, and the men mixed with the crowd or went off, mopping their steaming faces, to their tents or the canteen.