“I was afraid,” said Jack, “that you were a little too sharp with these fellows of late. I know, too, what they are capable of. But no one could have foreseen such an outrage as this. The next thing to consider is how to knock up a rough makeshift that we can shear in.”
“That doesn’t give me any trouble,” answered the spirit-stricken M‘Nab; “we could do as we did last year; but the season is a month forwarder, and we shall have the burrs and grass-seed in the wool as sure as fate. But for that, I shouldn’t so much care.”
M‘Nab departed gloomily to his own room, refusing consolation, and spent the rest of the day writing circulars containing an accurate description of the suspected ones to every police-station within two hundred miles.
Then it came to pass that the three outlaws were soon snapped up by a zealous sergeant, “on suspicion of having committed a felony,” and safely lodged in Bochara gaol. There did they abide for several weary months, until the Judge of the Circuit Court was graciously pleased to come and try them.
The loss in the first instance was sufficiently great. The labour of many men for nearly a year; every nail, every ounce of iron contained in the large building had been brought from Melbourne; the sawyers’ bill was considerable. Twice had the men employed to put on the shingles deserted, and the finishing of the roof was regarded by the anxious M‘Nab as a kind of miracle. The sliding doors, the portcullises, the hundreds of square feet of battening, the circular drafting-yard; all the very latest appliances and improvements, united to very solid and perfect construction, made an unusual though costly success. And now, to see it wasted, and worse than wasted. “It is enough to make one believe in bad luck, Mr. Redgrave!” said Mr. M‘Nab, who had just quitted his bedroom.
“I am afraid it means bad luck for this season,” pursued he; “our wool will be got up only middling, and if prices take a turn downward it will be very puzzling to say what the damage done by this diabolical act of arson will amount to.”
“We must hope for the best,” said Jack, who, feeling things very keenly at the time, had a great dislike to the protracted torture which dwelling upon misfortunes always inflicts upon men of his organization. “The deed is done. To-morrow we must rig up a second edition of last year’s proud edifice.”
The sheep were shorn, certainly. Mr. Redgrave did not exactly permit the crop of delicate, creamy, serrated, elastic, myriad-threaded material to be torn off by the salt-bushes, or to become ragged and patchy on the sheeps’ backs. But the pleasure and pride of the toilsome undertaking, the light and life of the pastoral harvest, were absent. There was a total absence of rain; so there was a good deal of unavoidable dust. The men could not be got to take the ordinary amount of pains; so the work was thoroughly unsatisfactory. Then, in spite of all the haste and indifferent workmanship purposely overlooked by M‘Nab, the grass-seed and clover-burr ripened only too rapidly, and the ewes and lambs, coming last, were choke-full of it. The lower part of every fleece was like a nutmeg-grater with the hard, unyielding, hooked and barbed tentacles. M‘Nab groaned in spirit as he saw all this unnecessary damage, which he was powerless to prevent, and again and again cursed the hasty word and lack of self-control which, as he fully believed, had indirectly caused this never-ending mischief.
“A thousand for the shed, and another thousand for damage to wool,” said he one day, as he flung one of these last porcupine-looking fleeces with a disgusted air into a rude wool-bin made of hurdles placed on end. “It’s enough to make a man commit suicide. I feel as if I ought to walk to Melbourne with peas in my boots.”
“Never mind, M‘Nab,” said Jack, consolingly; “as I said before, the thing is done and over, and we may make ourselves miserable, and so injure our thought and labour fund. But that won’t build the shed again. Luckily the sheep are all right—they couldn’t burn them. I never saw a better lot of lambs, and the numbers are getting up to the fifty thousand I once proposed as a limit. What’s the total count we have passed through?”