Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/332

 from twenty to forty-five bales, has been moving off in detachments since the commencement. In a day or two the last of them will have rolled heavily away. The 1400 bales, averaging three and a half hundredweight, are distributed, slow journeying, along the road, which they mark from afar, or standing huge and columnar, like guide tumuli, from Anabanco to the waters of the Murray. Between the two points, a hundred and fifty miles, there is neither a hill nor a stone. All is one vast monotonous sea of plain—at this season a prairie-meadow exuberant of vegetation; in the late summer, or in the occasional and dreaded phenomenon of a dry winter, dusty and herbless as a brickfield, for hundreds of miles.

Silence falls on the plains and waters of Anabanco for the next six months. The woolshed, the wash-pen, and all the huts connected with them are lone and voiceless as s in a city of the plague.