'No, yer didn't then,' snarled Stoate.
'Well, I have before this, and more than once. I expect you're loafing on your mate, who's a decent fellow, and the sooner he parts company with a hound like you, the better. But this is our hut, and out you go, or I will, and that's the long and short of it. Come on, Joe!'
'The public's not on for a sermon to-night, Janus, old man,' said the young fellow before mentioned. 'Paddy's got his monkey up, and it'll be bloody wars if you don't clear. Yer mate's a cove as we'd like to spend the evenin' with, but the votin's agin yer, Janus, it raly is.'
'I came in with Stoate,' said Bill, 'and in course I'm here to see it out with him, man to man. But this is your hut, and not ours, mate, so we'd better get back to our camp—good-night all!'
CHAPTER II
The sun-rays were slowly irradiating 'the level waste, the rounded grey' which accurately described the landscape, in the lower Riverina, which our travellers had reached after a fortnight's travel, and where the large and pastorally famous sheep station of Tandāra had been constructed. Far as the eye could range was an unbroken expanse of sea-like plain, covered at this spring time of year with profuse vegetation—the monotony being occasionally relieved by clumps of the peculiar timber growing only amid the vast levels watered by the Darling. The wilga, the boree, and the mogil copses were in shape, outline, and area so curiously alike, that the lost wanderer proverbially found difficulty in fixing upon any particular clump as a landmark. Once strayed from the faint irregular track, often the only road between stations thirty or forty miles apart—once confused as to the compass bearings, and how little hope was there for the wayfarer, especially if weary, thirsty, and on foot! The clump of mogil or wilga trees, which he had toiled so many a mile in the burning afternoon to reach, was the facsimile of the one left, was it that morning or the one before? More than once had he, by walking in a circle, and making for apparently 'creek timber' at variance with his original course, found himself at the same clump, verified by his own tracks, and the ashes of his small fire, as the one which he had left forty-eight hours ago.
Reckless and desperate, he takes the course again, feeling weaker by two days' hard walking—footsore, hungry—above all, thirsty, to the verge of delirium. Let us hope that he falls in with a belated boundary rider who shows him an endless-seeming wire fence, which he commands him to follow, till he meets the jackaroo sent with a water-bag to meet him. If this good angel (not otherwise angelic-seeming) 'drops across' him, well and good; if not so, or he does not 'cut the tracks' of a station team, or the lonely mailman going a back road, God help him! Soon will the crows gathering expectant round a pair of eagles, telegraph to the sharp-eyed scouts of the wilderness that they may ride over and see the dried-up, wasted similitude of what was once a man.
No such tragedy was likely to be enacted in the case of our two shearers. They were fairly mounted. They had food and water to spare. Bill was an experienced bushman, and both men had been along this track before. So they followed the winding trail traced faintly on the broad green sheet of spring herbage, sometimes almost invisible—or wholly so, where an old sheep camp had erased the hoof-or wheel-marks—turning to the right or the left with confident accuracy, until they 'picked up' the course again. Wading girth-deep through the subsidiary watercourses—billabongs, cowalls, and such—bank high in this year of unusual rain and plenty (they are synonymous in riverine Australia, 'arida nutrix'), and scaring the water-fowl, which floated or flew in countless flocks.
That gigantic crane, the brolgan (or native companion), danced his quadrille in front of them, 'advance, retire, flap wing, and set to partner,' before he sailed away to a region unfrequented by the peaceful-seeming but dangerous intruder. Crimson-winged, French grey galah parrots fluttered around them in companies, never very far out of shot; the small speckled doves, loveliest of the columba tribes, rose whirring in bevies, while the
swift-footed 'emu' over the waste