“Well,” returned Jack (after his companion had opened his mind, as men often do in the bush to a chance acquaintance—so rare ofttimes is the luxury of congeniality), “I am not sure that you are altogether wrong. It squares with your temperament. Mine is altogether opposed to such views. I think twenty years on the Warroo, with the certainty of a plum and a baronetcy at the end, would kill me as surely as sunstroke. Isn’t that sheep?”
As Jack propounded this grammatically doubtful query, he directed Stangrove’s attention to a long light-coloured line at a distance. It was soon evident that it was sheep coming towards them. To Stangrove’s great relief, they proved to be the missing flock, in charge of one of the volunteers sent out in all directions, if only they might perchance manage to drop across them. Upon being counted they were only fifteen short. Ten being accounted for by the domestic declaration of Mr. Stangrove, the other five were left to take their chance, and the flock sent back to a new shepherd, vice Strawler superseded.
Stangrove brightened up considerably after this recovery of his doubtfully-situated property. Byron asserts “a sullen son, a dog ill, a favourite horse fallen lame just as he’s mounted,” to be “trifles in themselves,” but adds, “and yet I’ve rarely seen the man they didn’t vex.” So with lost sheep. You must lose a dozen or twenty—you hardly lose more than fifty, say from ten to five-and-twenty pounds—not a sum to turn the scale of ruin by any means. Yet, from the time that the announcement is made of “sheep away” until they are safely counted and yarded, rarely does the face of the proprietor relax its expression of weighty resolve and grave foreboding.
Jack found by his companion’s avowal that at least one person besides Bertie Tunstall held the same unprogressive but eminently safe opinions. “Here’s a man,” said Jack, “with a worse climate, far less recreation and variety than I had, and see how he sticks to his fight! However, I am differently constituted—there’s no denying it. If Stangrove’s father had not been somewhat of the same kidney, he and I would have had little chance of discussing our theories on the banks of the Warroo.”
“And so you won’t be tempted into fencing?” demanded Jack, returning to the charge.
“Not just at present,” rejoined Stangrove. “I do not say but that if I find myself surrounded by fencing neighbours, willing to share the expense and so on, in a few more years I may give in. But I am a firm believer in the Safe. I am now in a position of absolute security, and I intend to continue in it.”
“But suppose bad seasons come?”
“Let them! I have no bills to meet. I can weather them again as I have done before, when on this very station we had to boil down our meat to a kind of soup; it was too poor to eat otherwise. We outlived that. Please God, we shall do so again.”
“I suppose you had terrible losses?”
“You may say that; if another season came like it, the country would be ‘a valley of dry bones,’ literally. But even if I lost all my increase for a year, and a proportion of my old stock, it would only shake me, not break me. A man who is in debt it cooks altogether—that is the difference.”