at which point I recognised that Ada was a cow!"
There was a howl from the boys.
"I believe you made it up yourself," Downes accused him. "It sounds like the drivel you'd write!" Which led to retaliation on the part of the injured Macleod, and they wrestled until their horses ended the matter by going off in opposite directions—the combatants, refusing to separate, being left on the ground still wrestling. The horses were restored by Dick and Stephens, weak with laughter, and they resumed progress.
They crossed a belt of timber fringing a creek that in summer dwindled to a few muddy waterholes, and struck across a sandy plain, where saltbush and spinifex grew among outcrops of ironstone. The grass was harsh and scanty, and the breeze brought with it loose particles of sand.
"Glad we haven't much of this country," Macleod said. "And it gets worse the further you go in this direction—no water, except native wells, and you can't always rely on them; and no grass except dry sticks."
"Can stock live on it at all?" Dick asked.
"They'll eat the salt bush sometimes—in a bad year. But it isn't a white man's country, this sort of stuff, unless you can get gold out of it. I think it must have been intended for that," Macleod said. "Further out in the desert they used to say that at the Creation that part must have been meant for the bottom of the sea, only the sea wouldn't lob there!"
"My father used to prospect in that country," said Stephens, the Perth boy. "He never found any gold worth picking up, and then he struck two dry wells and 'did a perish,' and he wouldn't have got back alive if some other prospectors hadn't found him. He says that where the early miners used to camp for any time they used to cut a spiral ringbark in the big trees, from as high as they could reach to the ground. Then, if it rained—not that it often did—the water running down the tree would get caught in this spiral cut, and flow down the tree to the ground. They nailed a bit of tin there to lead it into a bucket."
"Seems a complicated way of getting a drink," remarked Downes.
"The only other way was to condense—and condensed water wasn't up to much," Stephens answered. "I guess those old prospectors earned all the gold they got."