Page:While the Billy Boils, 1913.djvu/323

 afterwards that my friends was so sorry about it, and that I was such a good sort of a chap, after all, when I was dead that―that I was sorry I didn't stop dead. You see, I was one of them chaps that's better treated by their friends and better thought of when―when they're dead.

'Ah, well! Never mind.…Talking of killing bushmen before their time reminds me of some cases I knew. They mostly happened among the western spurs of the ranges. There was a bullock-driver named Billy Nowlett. He had a small selection, where he kept his family, and used to carry from the railway terminus to the stations up-country. One time he went up with a load, and was not heard of for such a long time that his missis got mighty uneasy; and then she got a letter from a publican up Coonamble way to say that Billy was dead. Someone wrote, for the widow, to ask about the waggon and the bullocks, but the shanty-keeper wrote that Billy had drunk them before he died, and that he'd also to say that he'd drunk the money he got for the carrying; and the publican enclosed a five-pound-note for the widow―which was considered very kind of him.

'Well, the widow struggled along and managed without her husband just the same as she had always struggled along and managed with him―a little better, perhaps. An old digger used to drop in of evenings and sit by the widow's fire, and yarn, and sympathise, and smoke, and think; and just as he began to yarn a lot less, and smoke and think a lot more, Billy Nowlett himself turned up with a load of rations for a sheep station. He'd been down by the