“Nothing could be simpler. Get the landlord to receipt my bill while I write out a cheque, and ask George if he’s put my saddle and bridle into the coach.”
The girl ran out. He wrote the cheque for the account, which he had seen before breakfast. Then more carefully, a receipt for the cob in the name of Sheila Maguire, in which he enclosed a sovereign. “Isn’t that your side-saddle? Where’s your horse? You haven’t got one, eh? Why, I thought every girl in this country had one.”
“Mine got away; I’m afraid I’ll never see him again.”
“What will you give me for the cob? he’s easy and safe if you don’t try the Razor Back business with him?”
“I wouldn’t mind chancing a tenner for him, sir.”
“Would you, though? Well, I’ll take it. There’s the receipt. You can pay me when I ask for it.”
At that moment, the coachman having drawn on his substantial gloves, mounted the box and called out “All aboard!” Mr. Blount pressed the receipt and the sovereign into the girl’s reluctant hand, who came out of the room with rather a heightened colour, while the driver drew his lines taut as the passenger mounted the box and was whirled off, if not in the odour of sanctity, yet surrounded with a halo (so to speak) of cheers and good wishes.
Once off and bowling along a fairly good road behind a team of four fast horses, specially picked for leaving or approaching towns, a form of advertisement for the great coaching firm of Cobb and Co. (then, as now, famed for speed, safety and punctuality throughout the length and breadth of Australasia), Mr. Blount’s spirits began to improve, keeping pace, indeed, with the rising of the sun and his own progress. That luminary in this lovely month of early spring was seen in his most favourable aspect.
The merry, brawling river, now rushing over “bars” gleaming with quartz pebbles, the boom of the “water-gun,” the deep, reed-fringed reaches, in which the water-fowl dived and fluttered, alike engaged the traveller’s alert interest. The little river took wilful, fantastic curves, as it seemed to him through the broad green meadows. Sometimes close-clinging to a basaltic bluff, over which the coach appeared to hang perilously, while on the other side was the mile-wide, level greensward, thickly covered with grazing kine and horses. The driver, a wiry native from the Shoalhaven gullies, was cheerful and communicative.
He was in a position to know and enlarge upon the names and characters of the different proprietors of the estates through which they passed. The divisions were indicated by gates in the fences crossing the roads at right angles, at which period Mr. Joshua Cable requested his passenger to drive through while he jumped down and opened the gates and shut them after the operation was concluded. As this business was only necessary at distances varying from five to ten miles apart, the stoppages were not serious; though in one instance, where the enclosure was small and the number of gates unreasonably large, his temper was ruffled.