“And do the Banks just shell it out when you want it?”
“You bet they do. Why, they wouldn’t dare to keep it—the police would get them. It isn’t really their money—it’s the money people have put in. They’d just better try to stick to it, an’ I bet they’d see!”
“Well, I don’t see what the Banks get out of it,” Rex said doubtfully. “Who pays ’em?”
“Blessed if I know,” Billy answered, without any sympathy for the difficulties of financial institutions. “I s’pecs they’ve got their own ways of making a living. The one in Barrabri must be jolly fond of Father, ’cause I heard Mr. Holmes say to him, ‘Don’t you worry, old man: the Bank will stick to you.’ But I know Father reckons he hasn’t got enough money in it, an’ that’s why we’re so jolly poor now.”
“Are you poor?” queried Rex, round-eyed.
“Oh, horrid poor,” Billy answered lightly. “But it doesn’t seem to matter much: we have lots of fun, I say, Rex, s’pose we ride round the back paddock where we went with Father that day, an’ have a look at the bullocks. I s’pect he’d be glad to know how they are; I heard him say he must go out there next week, so we might save him the trouble.”
“Right-oh!” Rex agreed.
They shook the ponies into a canter, and, after following the winding of the river for a time, struck across the paddock to a gate. Passing through this, they found themselves in the back paddock of the Emu Plains run. It was a wide stretch of plain, sloping gently back to the river that formed Mr. Weston’s southern boundary, and at present it represented almost all the grazing land on which he could still run cattle. There was coarse grass on it, rough and poor: still, it meant something of a living for cattle, dry as it was, for the water in the river was good, and good water helps stock to live on very poor fare.
There were very few cattle in sight on the plain, and the boys trotted across to the timber near the river, where they knew they would find the bullocks sheltering from the fierce sun. It was not very easy to distinguish anything, so thick was the smoke-haze. Dense as it had been all day, in this corner of the run it was worse than anywhere else.
“My word, you’d think the fires were close!” Billy uttered. “Let’s go over to the corner by Moncrieff’s, Rex, and see if we can see any sign of ’em.”