The two men stood, half-clad as they were, in the darkness, ever deepest before dawn, while louder, and more distinctly, they heard the fall, the roar, the rush of the wild waters of an angry flood down a deep and empty channel. A very deep excavation had been scooped of old by the Warroo at the commencement of the anabranch, which, leaving the river at an angle, followed its course for miles, sometimes at a considerable distance, before it re-entered it.
“My conscience!” said M‘Nab, “I never heard the like of that before—in these parts, that is. I would give a year’s wage I hadn’t crossed those weaners back. I only did it a day or two since. May the devil—but swearing never so much as lifted a pound of any man’s burden yet. We’ll not be swung clear of this grip of his claws by calling on him.”
With this anti-Manichæan assertion, M‘Nab went forth, and stumbled about the paddock till he managed to get his own and Jack’s horse into the yard. These he saddled and had ready by the first streak of dawn. Then they mounted and rode towards the back of the river paddock.
“I was afraid of this,” said Jack, gloomily, as their horses’ feet plashed in the edge of a broad, dull-coloured sheet of water, long before they reached the ridge whence they usually descried the back-creek channel. “The waters are out such a distance that we shall not be able to get near the banks of this infernal anabranch, much less throw a bridge over any part of it. There is a mile of water on it now, from end to end. The sheep must take their chance, and that only chance is that the river may not rise as high as Stangrove says he has known it.”
“I deserve to be overseer of a thick run with bad shepherds all my life,” groaned M‘Nab, with an amount of sincerity in his abjectly humiliated voice so ludicrous that Jack, in that hour of misery, could scarcely refrain from smiling. “But let us gallop down to the outlet; it may not have got that far yet.”
They rode hard for the point, some miles down, where the treacherous offshoot re-entered the Warroo. It sometimes happens that, owing to the sinuosities of the watercourses of the interior, horsemen at speed can outstrip the advancing flood-wave, and give timely notice to the dwellers on the banks. Such faint hope had they. By cutting across long detours or bends, and riding harder than was at all consistent with safety to their clover-fed horses, they reached the outlet. Joy of joys, it was “as dry as a bone.”
“Now,” said M‘Nab, driving his horse recklessly down into the hard-baked channel, “if we can only find most of the sheep in this end of the paddock we may beat bad luck and the water yet. Did the dog come, I wonder? The Lord send he did. I saw him with us the first time we pulled up.”
“I’m afraid not,” said Jack; “we’ve ridden too hard for any mortal dog to keep up with us, though Help will come on our tracks if he thinks he’s wanted.”
“Bide a bit—bide a bit,” implored M‘Nab, forgetting his English, and going back to an earlier vernacular in the depth of his earnestness. “The dog’s worth an hour of time and a dozen men to us. Help! Help! here, boy, here!”
He gave out the canine summons in the long-drawn cry peculiar to drovers when seeking to signal their whereabouts to their faithful allies. Jack put his fingers to his mouth and emitted a whistle of such remarkable volume and shrillness that M‘Nab confessed his admiration.