“Well, I have,” said Mitchell.
“You know Bogan wears goggles to hide his eyes—his wife made him do that. The chaps often used to drop round and have a yarn with Bogan and cheer him up, and one evening I was sitting smoking with him, and yarning about old times, when he got very quiet all of a sudden, and I saw a tear drop from under one of his shutters and roll down his cheek. It wasn’t the eye he lost saving Campbell—it was the old wall-eye he used to use in the days before he was called ‘One-eyed Bogan.’ I suppose he thought it was dark and that I couldn’t see his face. (There’s a good many people in this world who think you can’t see because they can’t.) It made me feel like I used to feel sometimes in the days when I felt things——”
“Come on, Mitchell,” said Tom Hall, “you’ve had enough beer.”
“I think I have,” said Mitchell. “Besides, I promised to send a wire to Jake Boreham to tell him that his mother’s dead. Jake’s shearing at West-o’-Sunday; shearing won’t be over for three or four weeks, and Jake wants an excuse to get away without offending old Baldy and come down and have a fly round with us before the holidays are over.”
Down at the telegraph-office Mitchell took a form and filled it in very carefully: “Jacob Boreham. West-o’-Sunday Station. Bourke. Come home at once. Mother is dead. In terrible trouble. Father dying.—MARY BOREHAM.”
“I think that will do,” said Mitchell. “It ought to satisfy Baldy, and it won’t give Jake too much of a shock, because he hasn’t got a sister or sister-in-law, and his father and mother’s been dead over ten years.”
“Now, if I was running a theatre,” said Mitchell, as we left the office, “I’d give five pounds a night for the face Jake’ll have on him when he takes that telegram to Baldy Thompson.”
TWO SUNDOWNERS
Sheep stations in Australia are any distance from twenty to a hundred miles apart, to keep well within the boundaries of truth and the great pastoral country. Shearing at any one shed only lasts a few weeks in the year; the number of men employed is according to the size of the shed—from three to five men in the little bough-covered shed of the small “cockatoo,” up to a hundred and fifty or two hundred hands all told in the big corrugated iron machine shed of a pastoral company.
Shearing starts early up in northern Queensland, where you can get a “January shed;” and further south, in February, March or April sheds, and so on down into New South Wales, where shearing often lasts over Christmas. Shearers travel from shed to shed; some go a travel season without getting a pen, and an unlucky shearer might ride or tramp for several seasons and never get hands in wool; and all this explains the existence of the “footman” with his swag and the horse man with his packhorse. They have a rough life, and the Australian shearers are certainly the most democratic and perhaps the most independent, intelligent and generous body of workmen in the world.