“Whatever are you a-doin’ of, Brummy?” gasped Swampy in great astonishment.
“Wait and see,” growled Brummy, with awful impressiveness, as if he were going to cut Swampy’s throat after he’d finished shaving. He shaved off his beard and whiskers, put on a hat and coat belonging to Swampy, changed his voice, dropped his shoulders, and went limping up to the station on a game leg. He saw the cook and got some “brownie,” a bit of cooked meat and a packet of baking powder. Then he saw the storekeeper and approached the tobacco question. Sandy looked at him and listened with some slight show of interest, then he said:
“Oh that’s all right now! But ye needn’t ha’ troublt shavin’ yer beard—the cold weather’s comin’ on! An’ yer mate’s duds don’t suit ye—they’re too sma’; an’ yer game leg doesn’t fit ye either—it takes a lot o’ practice. Ha’ ye got ony tea an’ sugar?”
Brummy must have touched something responsive in that old Scot somewhere, but his lack of emotion upset Brummy somewhat, or else an old deep-rooted superstition had been severely shaken. Anyway he let Swampy do the cadging for several days thereafter.
But one bad season they were very hard up indeed—even for Brummy and Swampy. They’d tramped a long hungry track and had only met a few wretched jackaroos, driven out of the cities by hard times, and tramping hopelessly west. They were out of tobacco, and their trousers were so hopelessly “gone” behind that when they went to cadge at a place where there was a woman they were moved to back and sidle and edge away again—and neither Brummy nor Swampy was over fastidious in matters of dress or personal appearance. It was absolutely necessary to earn a pound or two, so they decided to go to work for a couple of weeks. It wouldn’t hurt them, and then there was the novelty of it.
They struck West-o’-Sunday Station, and the boss happened to want a rouseabout to pick up wool and sweep the floor for the shearers.
“I can put one of you on,” he said. “Fix it up between yourselves and go to work in the morning.”
Brummy and Swampy went apart to talk it over.
“Look here! Brum, old man,” said Swampy, with great heartiness, “we’ve been mates for a long while now, an’ shared an’ shared alike. You’ve allers acted straight to me an’ I want to do the fair thing by you. I don’t want to stand in your light. You take the job an’ I’ll be satisfied with a pair of pants out of it and a bit o’ tobacco now an’ agen. There yer are! I can’t say no fairer than that.”
“Yes,” said Brummy, resentfully, “an’ you’ll always be thrown’ it up to me afterwards that I done you out of a job!”