Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/34

 Good wages, good rations, and pays cash on the nail when the men want it. Don't even give cheques, and that blocks the publican, because a chap can pay as he goes, and needn't hand his cheque over the bar counter. But I know what he'll say to the delegate, or any other man that tells him he's not to be boss in his own shed.'

'What'll that be?' asked Stoate, with a sidelong look, half of curiosity, half of concealed malice.

'He'll tell 'em to go to hell and mind their own business, and leave him to look after his; that he'll see the Union and every one connected with it d—d first before he'll give up the right to manage his own property in his own way.'

'We'll show him different—that is, the Union will,' said Stoate, correcting himself hastily. 'His property! Who made it? who dug the tanks and put up the fences, and shepherded the sheep afore they was paddocked? and built the blooming shed, as is an emblem of tyranny, to my thinking—when every man ought to have his five 'underd or a thousand ewes of his own, and a neat little place to shear 'em in? His property! I say it's our property. We made it—with the labour of our 'ands—and we ought to have the biggest say in the managin' of it.'

'What about buyin' the sheep and cattle, and the horses, and the payin' of wages this year?' said Bill. 'Suppose they come o' theirselves, "kinder growed," as the nigger gal says in that book about slavery in America, as Jenny read out to me last winter.'

'Wages be hanged!' retorted the disciple of Henry George and Bellamy. 'Our labour makes the fund out of which they pays their bloomin' wages, as they call 'em—infernal skinflints, as they are. It's dashed easy for them as gets the profits of our hard earnin's to dribble a trifle back, hardly enough to keep us in workin' order, like them team 'orses as is just turned out—a bite of chaff, and that's about all.'

'Well, only for the chaff, they'd be deaders the first dry season—down from weakness for a week or two, with their eyes picked out by the crows, and the ants eatin' 'em alive. I've seen the wild "brumbies" like that. I expect they ought to go on strike for stable keep, and three feeds of oats a day?'

'Men and 'orses is different—you can't compare 'em, in the way of their rights.'