Let me describe the scene, for probably few readers of this magazine outside Australia have ever beheld anything like it, though many of the middle-aged and old men "down under" will slap their thighs and say, "Jove! I've seen it hundreds of times."
Picture to yourself first of all a wide, undulating plain, dotted here and there with clumps of needle-bush growing in loose reddish sand, with lignum and ti-tree not altogether absent, while in the distance could be seen the mingled greens and blues of the salt-bush and blue-bush. Beyond that, miles away, was a long semi-circular line of black—the untouched acacia scrub.
In such a scene as this were gathered, one day in 1877, a small crowd of two or three hundred men, a sprinkling of women and children, and a multitude of dogs, while horses of every size, shape, and colour, from the great draught stallion, brought there to advertise his points to the new settlers, to the slim, clean-limbed thoroughbred, whose business was to make the sport, were tied to trees or being led up and down, awaiting their turn to run. Rogues and vagabonds of every description were among that small crowd—three-card men, purse-trick men, and all the lower strata of the criminal class, for in those days the bush race-meeting was a small goldmine to men for whom the cities and larger towns had become temporarily too warm.
The course was a circle of about a mile and a quarter in circumference, marked out by flags on either side, the jumps for the steeplechase—four sets of three stiff panels of post and rail—being erected just inside the inner flags. The race consisted of three heats of one mile each, run at intervals during the day, the riders, of course, weighing out every time.
I will not detail the events on the flat, from the maidens to the hurry-scurry; they passed off uneventfully amid the usual good-natured enthusiasm of a crowd of rough men out for a day's fun.
Just as the saddling-bell—a kerosene tin beaten with a stick—rang for the first heat of the steeplechase, Brady, the owner of a horse called Barmaid, came up to my uncle, whom I had accompanied to the meeting, and hurriedly whispered in his ear.
"Never!" cried my uncle, in amazement. "You don't mean it!"
"It is a fact," said Brady; "he's lying out there in the ti-tree, absolutely helpless. We nearly shook his teeth out, but he didn't move."
"Hocussed, eh?"
"Yes; and if Lean didn't do it I'm a nigger," snapped Brady. "I told him not to even speak to him, and yet he goes and actually drinks with him! Confound him!" he added, viciously, as he thought of his lost chance, for though the horse Lean owned and was to ride, a big, raking brown gelding called Pawnbroker, was favourite, Brady's little bay mare was a clever fencer, and had pace enough to lose his rival on the flat. The stake, too, was twenty-five pounds, quite a respectable sum for so small a meeting, and Brady had his mare well backed.