‘You don’t believe it,’ said Mr. Cottonbush calmly, rubbing his tobacco assiduously in his hands preparatory to lighting his pipe. ‘Levison writes that stock are going up in Victoria to astonishing prices, and that what they’ll reach, if the gold keeps up, no man can tell. So your cattle might fetch twenty pounds after all.’
‘What would you advise me to do with the Freemans’ stock, now that I have got them?‘ asked Ernest.
‘If I was in your place,’ said Mr. Cottonbush judicially, ‘I should stick to the cattle, for every one of them, down to the smallest calf, will be good money when the rain comes. The sheep also you may as well keep: they’ll pay their own wages if you put ’em out on a bit of spare back country, and there’s plenty that your cattle never go near. You could bring ’em in to shear them, and they’ll increase and grow into money fast enough. You might have ten thousand sheep on Rainbar and never know it.’
‘I don’t like sheep much,’ said Ernest; ‘but these are very cheap, if they live, and there is plenty of room, as you say. And the horses?’
‘Sell every three-cornered wretch of ’em—a set of upright-shouldered, useless mongrels—directly you get a chance,’ said Mr. Cottonbush with unusual energy of speech. ‘And now you’re able to clear the run of ’em, being your own, which you never could have done if they remained theirs. You’d have had young fellows coming for this colt or that filly till your head was gray.’
‘I hope not,’ said Ernest, laughing; ‘but I am glad to have all the stock and land of Rainbar in my own hands once more.’
Mr. Cottonbush departed at dawn, and once more Ernest was alone in the gray-stricken, accursed waste, wherein nor grass grew nor water ran, nor did any of these everyday miracles of Nature appear likely again to be witnessed by despairing man.
Still passed by the hungry hordes of travelling sheep, still the bony skeletons of the passing cattle herds. No rain, no sign of rain! All pastoral nature, brute and human, appeared to have been struck with the same blight, and to be forlorn and moribund. The station cattle became weaker and less capable of exertion; ‘lower,’ as Charley Banks called it, as the cold autumn nights commenced to exhibit their keenness. The Freemans relinquished all control over their cattle, and chuckled over the weakly state of the Rainbar herd.
The autumn had commenced, a peerless season in all respects save in the vitally indispensable condition of moisture. The mornings were crisp, with a suggestive tinge of frost, the nights absolutely cold, the days, as usual, cloudless, bright, and warm. If there was any variation it was in the direction of a lowering, overcast, cloudy interval, when the bleak winds moaned bodingly, but led to no other effect than to sweep the dead leaves and dry sticks, which had so long passed for earth’s usual covering, into heaps and eddying circular lines. The roughening coats on the feeble frames of the stock, now enduring the slow torture of the cold in the lengthening nights, told a tale of coming collapse, of consummated, unquestioned ruin. Daily did Ernest Neuchamp dread to rise, to pass hours of hopeless despondency among these perishing forms, dying creatures roaming over a dead earth during their brief term of survival! Daily did he almost come to loathe the sight of the unpitying sun, which, like a remorseless enemy, spared not one beam of his burning rays, veiled not one glare of his deadly glance. He had an occasional reminiscence of the steady, reassuring tones, the unwavering purpose of which abode with the very presence of Abstinens Levison. But for these he felt at times as though he could have distrusted the justice of an overruling Power, have cursed the hour of his birth, and delivered himself over to despair and reprobation.
While Mr. Neuchamp was not far removed from this most unusual and decidedly unphilosophical state of mind, it so chanced on a certain afternoon (it was that of Wednesday, the eighteenth day of May, as was long after remembered) that he and Jack Windsor were out together, a few miles from home, upon the ironical but necessary mission of procuring a ‘fat beast.’ This form of speech may be thought to have savoured too much of the wildly improbable. The real quest was, of course, for an animal in such a state of comparative emaciation as should not preclude his carcass for being converted into human food. The meat was not palatable, but it supported life in the hardy Anglo-Saxon frame. It was all they had, and they were constrained to make the best of it.