‘I take the lot,’ said Wilfred decisively.
And though there was a murmur from the crowd, and one stalwart dame said, ‘That’s not fair, thin; I med sure I’d get a pen of springers myself,’ the auctioneer confirmed his right, and the dairy lot became his property.
It turned out, as is often the case, that the first offered stock were the most moderate in price. Many of the buyers had been holding back, thinking they would go in lots of twenty, and that better bargains might be obtained. When they found that the stranger had carried off all the best dairy cows, their disappointment was great.
‘Serves you right, boys,’ was heard in the big voice of the proprietor; ‘if you had bid up like men, instead of keeping dark, you’d have choked the cove off taking the lot. Serves you all dashed well right.’
The remaining lots of cattle consisted of weaners, two and three-year-old steers and heifers. Of fat cattle the herd had been pretty well ‘scraped,’ as Donnelly called it, before the sale. For most of these the bidding was so brisk and spirited that Wilfred thought himself lucky in securing forty steers at twenty-five shillings, which completed his drove, and were placed in the yard with the cows.
Then came the horses; nearly a hundred all told—mares, colts, fillies, yearlings, with aged or other riding-horses. These last Donnelly excused himself for selling by the statement that if he took them to Monaro half of them would be lost trying to get back to where they had been bred, and that between stock-riders and cattle-stealers his chance of regaining them would be small.
‘There they are,’ he said; ‘there’s some as good blood among them as ever was inside a horse-skin. They’re there to be sold.’
The spirit of speculation was now aroused in Wilfred, or he would not have bought, as he did, half-a-dozen of the best mares, picking them by make and shape, and a general look of breeding. They were middle-sized animals, more like Arabs than the offspring of English thoroughbreds, but with a look of caste and quality, their legs and feet being faultless, their heads good, and shoulders fair. They fell to a bid of less than ten pounds each, and with foals at foot, Wilfred thought they could not be dear.
‘Them’s the old Gratis lot,’ said Mr. Donnelly. ‘I bought ’em from Mr. Busfield when they was fillies. You haven’t made a bad pick for a new hand, sir. I wish you luck with ’em.’
‘I hope so,’ said Wilfred. ‘If you breed horses at all, they may as well be good ones.’ As he turned away he caught the query from a bystander—