‘So sore was the delirious goad,
I took my steed and forth I rode,’
says the remorseful Marmion; and but that in the present state of the fodder market no horses had been stabled at Rainbar for many a day, our latter-day Crusader might have followed out the idea literally. As it was he but arose at earliest dawn and mechanically took the garden path, trusting to find some excuse for an hour or two of hard manual labour which might guide or exorcise the evil spirits that were rending his very soul.
He had been putting out all his strength for an hour or more, and was in much the same bodily state and condition as if he had taken a ten-mile spin with a greatcoat on, after the prescription of Mr. Geoffry Delamayn, when he observed a solitary horseman wending his way along the ‘up-river’ road, which was distinguishable more by dust than by colouring from the grassless waste through which it wound.
The stranger, who was habited in a collarless Crimean shirt and rather dilapidated habiliments generally, rode his emaciated steed steadily on at the slow, hopeless, leg-weary jog to which most of the horses of the territory had long been reduced, until he reached the garden gate. Ernest,—taking him for granted as the usual ‘reporter’ of travelling sheep, about to clear off the last fragments of what once had been pasture; an invalid shepherd, making for the Drewarrina Hospital; a mounted tramp or ‘traveller’ looking for work, with no great hope of, or indeed concern about, finding it; or lastly, a supernumerary for some travelling stock caravan, who had been ‘hunted’ for drunkenness or inefficiency,—raised not his head. For any or all of these toilers of the waste there would be the unvarying hospitality of the men’s hut. But the stranger sat calmly upon his despondent horse at the gate surveying Ernest’s exceedingly efficient spade performance with apparent approval, until at length he broke silence. ‘My word, Mr. Noochamp, you’re nigh as good as a Chinaman. You’d make wages at post-hole digging, if the rain forgets to come and we’re all smothered. How’s those AD store cattle getting on?’
Ernest looked up hastily and indignantly at the first tones of the stranger’s accost, but immediately relaxed his visage and flung down his spade as he recognised in the horseman’s countenance the grave, reflective lineaments of Abstinens Levison.
END OF VOL. II
Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh.
Transcriber’s Note
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.