“Our luck has turned,” said Jack; “no more accidents; though it’s strange that, when all is unnaturally successful, something is sure to happen. If the engine was to smash, a valve or some small trouble to happen, I should feel that the ring of Polycrates had been thrown into the Warroo, and not returned by an officious codfish.”
“I don’t know about Polly Whatsyname’s ring,” said Mr. M‘Nab, whose education had not included the classics; “but things couldn’t be better. I shall put those weaners back into the river paddock again. The grass is all going to waste.”
“Just as you like,” said Jack, who had forgotten his caution now that the emergency was over. “I suppose we shall have the dust blowing in about a fortnight.”
“By then we shall be done shearing. I don’t care what comes after,” answered the manager. “And now I must go back to the shed.”
“Thank God, it’s Saturday night!” said Jack, as they sat down to their dinner at the fashionable hour of nine p.m. “I enjoy a good bout of work; it’s exciting, and pulls one together. But one wants a little sleep sometimes; likewise something to eat.”
“This has been a middling hard week,” graciously admitted M‘Nab, who rarely would concede that any amount of labour constituted a really laborious term. “One more week, and every dray will be loaded up, and the wool off our hands.”
“Do you think the weather will hold good? It had rather a lowering, hazy look to-day.”
“That means that it’s raining somewhere else,” said M‘Nab, uninterestedly. “It’s very often our share of it on the Warroo here.”
“Don’t know—somehow I have had a queer feeling all day that I can’t account for. Hard work generally goes to raise my spirits in view of the splendid appreciation of food and sleep that follows. But I have felt what the teller of tales calls a ‘presentiment’—a foreshadowing of evil—if such a thing can be.”