Page:While the Billy Boils, 1913.djvu/360

 There are many camp-fire yarns about old Baldy Thompson.

One New Year the shearers―shearing stragglers―roused him in the dead of night and told him that the shed was on fire. He came out in his shirt and without his wig. He sacked them all there and then, but of course they went to work as usual next morning. There is something sad and pathetic about that old practical joke―as indeed there is with all bush jokes. There seems a quiet sort of sadness always running through out-back humour―whether alleged or otherwise.

There's the usual yarn about a jackeroo mistaking Thompson for a brother rouser, and asking him whether old Baldy was about anywhere, and Baldy said:

'Why, are you looking for a job?'

'Yes, do you think I stand any show? What sort of a boss is Baldy?'

'You'd tramp from here to Adelaide,' said Baldy, 'and north to the Gulf country, and would'nt find a worse. He's the meanest squatter in Australia. The damned old crawler! I grafted like a nigger for him for over fifty years'―Baldy was over sixty―'and now the old skunk won't even pay me the last two cheques he owes me―says the bank has got everything he had―that's an old cry of his, the damned old sneak; seems to expect me to go short to keep his wife and family and relations in comfort, and by God I've done it for the last thirty or forty years, and I might go on the track to-morrow worse off than the meanest old whaler that ever humped bluey. Don't you