For life seemed so much more easy, so much less necessary to take thought about, now that he had two stations than when he had but one—one likely to be wrested from him. So is it that Difficulty is oft our friend in disguise, Success but the veiled foe which smiles at our faltering footsteps and watches to destroy. He saw now, that with Jack Windsor at Mildool, and Charley Banks, alert, energetic, fully experienced, at Rainbar, his life henceforth would be that of a visitor, a supernumerary—unless indeed he employed his mind in the construction and organisation of ‘improvements’! Ha, ha! ’Vade retro, Sathanas!‘ The Genie was safe immured in his brazen sealed-up vessel. There should he remain.
Still was there one ‘improvement’ in which he had never altogether lost faith, long and dispiriting as had been the divorce between formation and utility. This was the cutting the connecting channel between the Back Lake and the ‘Outer Lake.’ Long had the ‘master’s ditch’ been as useless as a fish-pond in the bosom of the Sahara, as a rose-garden in a glacier, as an oyster-bed in a steppe. Cattle had walked over it; grass had grown in it; stockmen and thoughtless souls had jeered at it, and at the English stranger who had thrown away upon its construction the money of which he possessed a quantity so greatly in excess of his apparent intelligence. As long as he remained the proprietor of the run, it would be hardly in keeping with the manner of the bush to call it ‘Neuchamp’s Folly.’ But had failure or absence chanced to occur in his case, the satirical nomenclature would not have been deferred for a week. In the solitary rides and musings to which, in default of daily work and labour, Mr. Neuchamp was fain to betake himself, it chanced that he had repeatedly examined that portion of this great sheet of water, which rang with the whistling wings of wild fowl, and on breezy days surged with long rippling waves against its bank.
While in Sydney a number of back blocks, at no greater distance from this outer lake than it was from the former ‘frontage,’ had been put under offer to him. What if he should accept the terms—the price was low—and trust to the chance of the next great flood in the full-fed chafing river sending the water leaping down his tiny canal, and thus giving a value never before dreamed of to this splendidly grand but unnatural region. In spite of his half-settled determination to accept no other speculative risks, but, like a wise man, to rest contented with proved success, the next post conveyed instructions to Messrs. Paul Frankston and Co. to close for all the blocks, each five miles square, from A to M, comprising all the unoccupied country at the back of Rainbar and Mildool, at the price named.
On the following morning the weather was misty and unusually cloudy, with an apparent tendency to rain. No rain fell, however; but the raw air, the unusual bleakness of the atmosphere, seemed abnormal to Ernest Neuchamp.
‘I should not wonder,’ said Mr. Banks, in explanation, ‘that it was raining cats and dogs somewhere else, snowing, or something of that sort. Perhaps at the head of the river. If that’s the case, we shall have a flood and no mistake. Such a one as none of us has seen yet. However, we’ve neither hoof nor horn nor fleece on the frontage. It can’t hurt us, that’s one comfort.’
Mr. Banks’s prognostications were correct. Within three days—
... like a horse unbroken,
When first he feels the rein,
The furious river struggled hard,
And tossed his tawny mane,