Page:While the Billy Boils, 1913.djvu/246



was raining―'general rain.'

The train left Bourke, and then there began the long, long agony of scrub and wire fence, with here and there a natural clearing, which seemed even more dismal than the funereal 'timber' itself. The only thing which might seem in keeping with one of these soddened flats would be the ghost of a funeral―a city funeral with plain hearse and string of cabs―going very slowly across from the scrub on one side to the scrub on the other. Sky like a wet, grey blanket; plains like dead seas, save for the tufts of coarse grass sticking up out of the water; scrub indescribably dismal―everything damp, dark, and unspeakably dreary.

Somewhere along here we saw a swagman's camp―a square of calico stretched across a horizontal stick, some rags steaming on another stick in front of a fire, and two billies to the leeward of the blaze. We knew by instinct that there was a piece of beef in the larger one. Small, hopeless-looking man standing with his back to the fire, with his hands behind him, watching the train; also, a damp, sorry-looking dingo warming itself and shivering by the fire. The rain 216