Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/17

 the old mare, who, being fat and frolicsome after her spell, "carried him and his swag first-rate."

'As to the two farms, no doubt it would give them all they knew, at first, to live and pay interest. But other people could do it, and why shouldn't they? Look at the Mullers! The bark hut they lived in for the first few years is still there. They kept tools, seed potatoes, odds and ends in it now. Next, they built a snug four-roomed slab cottage, with an iron roof. That's used for the kitchen and men's room. For they've got a fine brick house, with a verandah and grand furniture, and a big orchard and more land, and a flock of sheep and a dairy and a buggy and—everything. How I should like a buggy to drive myself and the children to the township! Wouldn't it be grand? To be sure they're Germans, and it's well known they work harder and save more than us natives. But what one man and woman can do, another ought to be able for, I say!'

And here Jenny shut her mouth with a resolute expression and worked away at her needle till bedtime. Things were going on comfortably with this meritorious young couple, and Bill was getting ready to start for the annual trip 'down the river,' as it was generally described. This was a region distant three hundred miles from the agricultural district where the little homestead had been created. The 'down the river' woolsheds were larger and less strictly managed (so report said) than those of the more temperate region, which lay near the sources of the great rivers. In some of them as many as one hundred, two hundred, even three hundred thousand sheep were annually shorn. And as the fast shearers would do from a hundred to a hundred and fifty sheep per day, it may be calculated, at the rate of one pound per hundred, what a nice little cheque would be coming to every man after a season's shearing. More particularly if the weather was fine.

Bill was getting ready to start on the following morning when a man named Janus Stoate arrived, whom he knew pretty well, having more than once shorn in the same shed with him.

He was a cleverish, talkative fellow, with some ability and more assurance, qualities which attract steady-going, unimaginative men like Bill, who at once invited him to stay till