"I'm a good-for-nothing now, Deirdre," he said low and bitterly. "There's mighty little I can do ... and there'll be less presently. I want enough money to get us away from here—and keep us by and by when—"
He did not say it, but she knew that he meant when the night of blindness had fallen on him.
"It was because you were afraid for me," she murmured. "Afraid because of that necklace, who it might have come from, afraid—"
He nodded.
"And if you get the money we can go away from here and never come back to the Wirree River any more?"
The Schoolmaster smiled. He was surprised at the eagerness of her voice.
"Yes," he said, "but that was what was bothering me. I thought you would not like to be leaving the place. You were always wanting to come back when we were away before."
"Oh," a little fluttering sigh went out of her, "but I'll be glad to go now! Tell me what you're going to do?"
"There's moonlight to-night, and we want to get a mob of wild cattle," he said quietly. "A couple of hundred are eating their heads off in the scrub above Narrow Valley. Do you remember when we were living here, riding up the range, sometimes we'd start a cow, or steer, and it would plunge away through the brushwood, scared as a rabbit! After the fires more breakaways joined the mob. We lost a couple of cows—- so did Steve—others did too. Well, I told Conal about these beasts a while ago. He made up his mind to get them. He and Steve's black boy 've run up a stockyard near McMillan's hut in Narrow Valley, and Conal and he mean to take the mob with that lot of Maitland's cattle he brought down for fattening, not this, but last trip, up by the Snowy River into New South Wales."
"It isn't as you may say, permitted by law," he continued. "But most of the cattle men who can do it, do—even the squatters when they get a chance. Down here they don't think scrub cattle worth the getting. Rosses staked a couple of horses a month or two ago, and lost a good dog after this mob. Cameron doesn't think them worth his while, so why shouldn't we have them if we can get them. If we get a couple of beasts with brands on them, among the wild ones, it may be worth drafting them out and driving them back to the hills. But the hair grows thick on scrub cattle; there's no need to be brand hunting. If Conal weren't such a fine stockman, we couldn't do it. There's nobody like him.