Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/504

 the blinding storm, which now drove full in their teeth. To those unacquainted with the skill, acquired by long experience in this particular occupation, it would have seemed little short of a miracle that four men and a black boy, who had also the special care of a pack-horse, could guide six hundred head of unwilling, half-wild cattle through a thickly-timbered country on so dark a night, with rain and storm to complicate matters withal.

But it was possible. It was done well and effectively. The leader's horse, an Arab-looking grey, visible from time to time, denoted each turn and direction of the road. The quick eyes of the stock-riders were seldom at fault, and detecting each straggling animal, they were instant to urge a wheel before separation from the main body took place. The gregarious habit of cattle was in their favour, as also their indisposition to straggle over-much in the darkness. When they were doubtful, the piercing organ of the man of the woods was called into play. His decision was prompt and unerring.

It was, 'Me see 'um two fellows cow and that one red bullock yan along a gully, likit picaninny way. You hold 'em, this one pack-horse, me fetch 'um.' And back they came accordingly. One hour, then another, had slowly passed. The rain had ceased, but the heavens were ebon black and murky. Still rode the man, who had first spoken, at the head of the great drove, which, lowing from time to time, kept plodding monotonously forward, at other times silent and all but soundless as a procession of ghostly beeves, escorted by a company of spectre horsemen.

Wet and weary, chilled to the bone, too dispirited to speak—indeed conversation would have been difficult under the circumstances of compulsory separation—the jaded stock-riders moved on; the rain-drops showering from the leaves as they brushed from time to time under the low-growing shrubs and sapling eucalyptus, the horses' feet sinking deeply in the clay and decomposed gravel of the forest; or splashing shoulder-deep through the mountain streams that crossed their track; their watchful outlook strained and concentrated to the fullest, each man at his allotted station. It was a phase of Australian backwoods life not always credited to the much-enduring bushman.

'By George! this is a hard life,' soliloquised the weary pioneer, for such he had been in more than one colony, as he