Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/31

 wire fence, which he commands him to follow, till he meets the jackaroo sent with a water-bag to meet him. If this good angel (not otherwise angelic-seeming) 'drops across' him, well and good; if not so, or he does not 'cut the tracks' of a station team, or the lonely mailman going a back road, God help him! Soon will the crows gathering expectant round a pair of eagles, telegraph to the sharp-eyed scouts of the wilderness that they may ride over and see the dried-up, wasted similitude of what was once a man.

No such tragedy was likely to be enacted in the case of our two shearers. They were fairly mounted. They had food and water to spare. Bill was an experienced bushman, and both men had been along this track before. So they followed the winding trail traced faintly on the broad green sheet of spring herbage, sometimes almost invisible—or wholly so, where an old sheep camp had erased the hoof- or wheel-marks—turning to the right or the left with confident accuracy, until they 'picked up' the course again. Wading girth-deep through the subsidiary watercourses—billabongs, cowalls, and such—bank high in this year of unusual rain and plenty (they are synonymous in riverine Australia, 'arida nutrix'), and scaring the water-fowl, which floated or flew in countless flocks. That gigantic crane, the brolgan (or native companion), danced his quadrille in front of them, 'advance, retire, flap wing, and set to partner,' before he sailed away to a region unfrequented by the peaceful-seeming but dangerous intruder. Crimson-winged, French grey galah parrots fluttered around them in companies, never very far out of shot; the small speckled doves, loveliest of the columba tribes, rose whirring in bevies, while the

To the inexperienced European traveller beholding this region for the first time, all-ignorant of the reverse side of the shield, what a pastoral paradise it would have seemed! Concealed from his vision the dread spectres of Famine, Death, Ruin, and Despair, which the shutting-up of the windows of Heaven for a season, has power to summon thereon.

This was a good year, however, in pastoral parlance.