Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/394

 his burial in the capacity of chief mourner. He lies under a black-wood tree on an 'island' in the mere, where the close-spreading clover blossoms climb and struggle amid the tussock grass of the marshes. He was accorded respectful interment, and my grief was more sincere than that which accompanies more ostentatious funerals. He had not perhaps the opportunity which another year would have furnished of leaving an illustrious progeny in the Port Fairy district, but some of his offspring made their mark.

Dundee, being my principal hackney and stock horse, was a wonderful performer. An admixture of Clifton blood gave him height and 'scope.' He had the sloped Romeo shoulder, with propelling machinery of unusual power. He was fortunately just short of racing speed. But he was a grand 'camp horse'; could be ridden without flinching right into the shoulder of the worst outlaw of the herd, carrying a fourteen-stone weight over any three-railed fence, and stay for a week. He lived to make a trans-Murray reputation, and still the wild riders of the mallee remember the powerful chestnut that was so well to the front with Sylvester Browne and the brothers Beveridge in more than one 'moonlighting' foray.

Ben Bolt, his half-brother, was a bright chestnut, with four white legs, a broad blaze, and a considerable quantity of white in the corners of his eyes, with which he had an uncanny way of regarding his rider. He was truly illustrious in more ways than one. There is no record of any white man (or black one either) having seen him tired. At the end of the longest day, or the most terrific 'cutting-out' work, Ben's head was up, his clear eyes watchful, his uneasy tail, switching slowly from side to side, like a leopard not fully agitated. He had been known to leave Melbourne after a trip with fat cattle (his rider had a young wife on the station certainly), and late on the second day the marshes of the Eumeralla were in sight. A hundred and eighty miles—winter weather too! I can state from personal experience that as a hackney he was deliciously easy, fast, and free. But the luxurious sensation of being so charmingly carried was modified by the ever-present thought that he could 'buck you into a tree-top' whenever it so pleased him; and at what minute the fit might take him no one had ever been able to foretell.