‘Well, bushrangers or not, I got within twenty miles of Boree; and then my head got so full of fancies, that I settled to make a call on Ben Bolt, and do it in two hours. Suppose the coach was earlier than usual! No passengers, or only some young squatter, who wanted to go faster and to stop nowhere—and tipped the driver! I’ve seen these things done before now.
‘So I took the old horse by the head, gave him a hustle and a pull, and, by George, if you’ll believe me, sir, he went away with his mouth open, as if he hadn’t only been out to the Back Lake. The sun was down then, and the night air was coolish. But I knew the track well, and as we sailed along, Ben Bolt giving a kind of snort every now and then, same as he used to do when he didn’t know the place he was going to, I felt that I had the field beat, and the race as good as won. I thought I could see Carry a-beckonin’ to me at the winning-post. I hardly think I pulled up three times, I felt that eager, and bound to win or die, before I saw the light of the Boree Inn, and the coach stables across the plain.
‘“Has the coach from down the river come in yet, Joe?” says I to the ostler, trembling all over.
‘“No, nor won’t be this hours yet; you needn’t have rode so fast.”
‘“I couldn’t afford to be late,” says I. “Lend us a rug while I cool my old horse a bit. He’s carried me well this day, if he never does another.”
‘Ben didn’t look beat—nor yet half beat. My belief is he could have done another twenty or thirty miles without cracking up. But a hundred miles is a hundred miles, and no foolish ride, even in this country where horses are as plenty as wallabies, such as they are, so I did my best for him. I let him rinse his mouth, and then I walked him up and down, with the rug on, for a solid hour. Of course he broke out at first, but he gradually dried and come all right. Before the coach started with me on board, he was doing nicely for the night, littered down (for we foraged some straw out of the bottled ale casks) and eating his feed just as he would after a longish day’s muster out back at Rainbar.’
‘I am very glad he carried you so well, John,’ said Mr. Neuchamp, at the conclusion of this antipodean Turpin’s ride; ‘but how did you speed in the last and most momentous stage?’
‘Oh, that was easy drafting enough,’ replied Mr. Windsor, who apparently had considered that portion of his matrimonial adventure which depended upon horseflesh as the really important and exciting part of the transaction. ‘I was safe and sound in Parramatta on the Thursday afternoon. I heard enough about the grand wedding for next day—but I never let on. Said I was off by sea to Queensland to look at some store cattle, and hired a trap, with a fairish horse, and a boy to mind it, which I drove down to the cross-roads, just about a mile from the “Cheshire Cheese.” There was an old woodcutter’s hut just inside the fence at the corner. So I left the boy there, and told him to hold the horse among the trees, and not to go away till I came—if it wasn’t till dinner-time to-morrow. Of course, I squared him right. He was sharp enough; them Parramatta boys mostly are.
‘Down I goes to the old house, and marched in quite free and pleasant like, to spend the evening for the sake of old times. There was Carry looking half dull, half desperate, like a mountain filly three days in the pound—as I told her afterwards—though she was among her own people, in a manner of speaking.
‘There was Homminey, and some other Hawkesbury chaps, full of their jokes and fun—my word! if I could only have gone in at him and his best man, a great, slab-sided, six-foot-three fellow, just about as scraggy as he was tallowy, I think I could have spoilt both their figure-heads—one up and the other down.