“I shouldn’t have sold if I could have helped it, you may be sure,” answered Jack; “but the thing is done, and it’s no use thinking about it. The sooner it’s over the better.”
“Just as you please—just as you please,” said the stranger. “You will oblige me by considering me in the light of a guest during my short stay. I must go back the end of the week. I don’t know that I need do anything but count the sheep, in which our friend here (turning to M‘Nab) perhaps will help me. Everything being given in, I sha’n’t bother myself or you by inspecting the station plant. The wash-pen and shed speak for themselves.”
“Thank you very much,” said Jack; “delivering over a station is generally a nuisance, especially as to the smaller matters. I remember being at Yillaree, when Knipstone was giving delivery to old M‘Tavish. They had been squabbling awfully about every pot and kettle and frying-pan, all of which Knipstone had carefully entered—some of them twice over. To complete the inventory he produced a brass candlestick, saying airily, ‘The other one is on the store table.’ ‘Bring it here, then, you rascal,’ roared M‘Tavish. ‘I wouldn’t take your word for a box of matches.’”
“The purchase-money was somewhere about eighty thousand pounds,” remarked Bagemall, who seemed to remember what every station had brought for the last ten years. “A paltry fifty pounds couldn’t have mattered much one way or the other.”
The next morning the counting began in earnest. A couple of thousand four-tooth wethers had been put in the drafting yard, for some reason or other, and with this lot they made a commencement. Now, except to the initiated, this counting of sheep is a bewildering, all but impossible matter. The hurdle or gate, as the case may be, is partially opened and egress permitted in a degree proportioned to the supposed talent of the enumerator. If he be slow, inexperienced, and therefore diffident, a small opening suffices, through which only a couple of sheep can run at a time. Then he begins—two, four, six, eight, and so on, up to twenty. After he gets well into his tens he probably makes some slight miscalculation, and while he is mentally debating whether forty-two or fifty-two be right, three sheep rush out together, the additional one in wild eagerness jumping on to the back of one of the others, and then sprawling, feet up, in front of the gate. The unhappy wight says “sixty” to himself, and, looking doubtfully at the continuous stream of animals, falls hopelessly in arrear and gives up. In such a case the sheep have to be re-yarded, or he has to trust implicitly to the honour of the person in charge, who widens the gate, lets the sheep rush out higgledy-piggledy, as it seems to the tyro, and keeps calling out “hundred”—“hundred” with wonderful and almost suspicious rapidity. Yet, in such a case, there will rarely be one sheep wrong, more or less, in five thousand. Thus, when arrived at the yard, M‘Nab looked inquiringly at the stranger, and took hold of one end of the hurdle.
“Throw it down and let ’em rip,” said Mr. Bagemall. “You and I will count, and Mr. Redgrave will perhaps keep tally.”
Keeping tally, it may be explained, is the notation of the hundreds, by pencil or notched stick, the counter being supposed only to concern himself with the units and tens.
M‘Nab, who was an unrivalled counter, relaxed his features, as recognizing a kindred spirit, and, as the sheep came tearing and tumbling out, after the fashion of strong, hearty, paddocked wethers, he placed his hands in his pockets and reeled off the hundreds, as did Mr. Bagemall, in no time. The operation was soon over. They agreed in the odd number to a sheep. And M‘Nab further remarked that Mr. Bagemall was one of those gifted persons who, by a successive motion of the fingers of both hands, was enabled (quite as a matter of form) to check the tally-keeper as well. Paddock after paddock was duly mustered, driven through their respective gates, and counted back. In a couple of days the operation, combined with the inspection of the whole run, was concluded.
Sitting in the veranda after a longish day’s work, all smoking, and Jack looking regretfully at his garden, which, small and insignificant compared with the exuberant plantation of Marshmead, was very creditable for the Warroo, and indeed was just about to make some small repayment for labour in the way of fruit, Mr. Bagemall remarked—
“I didn’t know you had any blacks about the place. Does this lot belong here?”