‘The same here!—and—I, and I,’ came from the other proprietors.
‘I suppose there’s room enough for all of us; we needn’t tread on each other’s toes when we reach the land of promise?’ said Ardmillan.
‘Enough for the whole district of Yass and something to spare,’ said their guest. ‘I was only over a portion of it, but I could see no end of open country from the hill-tops. It’s a place that will bear heavy stocking—thickly grassed and no waste country to speak of. After you leave the mountains, which are barren and rough enough, you drop down all of a sudden upon thinly-timbered downs—marshy in places, but grass up to your eyes everywhere.’
‘I like that notion of marshes,’ said Fred Churbett pensively. ‘I feel as I should enjoy the melody of the cheerful frog again. His voice has been so long silent in the land that I should hail him as a species of nightingale, always supposing that he was girt by his proper surroundings of the “sword-grass and the oat-grass and the bulrush by the pool.”’
‘How was it you managed to drop across this delightful province, Warleigh?’ said Wilfred. ‘I should like to hear, if you don’t mind telling us, how you crossed the mountains towards the south. Old Tom and Dick Evans said they were inaccessible; that there was no good country between them and the coast.’
‘Old Tom knew better,’ said their guest quietly. ‘We had a long talk the last time I was at Warbrok; he said then if any one could find a road for cattle the other side of the Snowy River, after you pass Wahgulmerang, he was dead certain there was any amount of fine country beyond, between it and the coast.’
‘How did he get to know?’
‘It seems he was stock-keeping once on one of the farthest out runs, and a mate of his, who was “wanted” for some cross work or other, came along and asked him to put him away for a bit, till the police got tired of hunting him. The old man gave him some rations, and told him of a track through the gullies, which took him to the leading spur, by which, of course, he could get on to the table land. Only an odd white man or so had ever been there. After a week he got “tired of looking at forty thousand blooming mountains” (as he told Tom afterwards), and being a resolute chap, with gun and ammunition, he thought he would make in towards the coast. Anyhow he was away all the winter. When he came back he told Tom that he had dropped in with a small tribe of blacks, who had taken to him. They spent the winter by the side of a great lake, fishing and hunting. There was plenty of fine grass country in all directions when you got over the main range.’
‘And why did he come away from Arcadia?’ asked Argyll.
‘From where?’ asked the unclassical narrator. ‘No; that wasn’t the name. It was Omeo. A grand sheet of water on a kind of hill-plain, with ranges all round, and one tremendous snow-peak you could see from anywhere. Well, he got tired of the whole thing—didn’t know when he was well off, like most men of his sort—so he made tracks back again. Old Tom didn’t believe all the story. But he thought afterwards that there must be something in it, and that it would be worth while some day to have a throw in and find the lake at any rate.’