ll the time and would soon be tripped up and found out.
For, whatever else I have been I was never much of a liar. No, I'll
never go home.

"I become momentarily conscious about daylight. The flies on the track
got me into that habit, I think; they start at day-break--when the
mosquitoes give over.

"The cook rings a bullock bell.

"The cook is fire-proof. He is as a fiend from the nethermost sheol
and needs to be. No man sees him sleep, for he makes bread--or worse,
brownie--at night, and he rings a bullock bell loudly at half-past
five in the morning to rouse us from our animal torpors. Others, the
sheep-ho's or the engine-drivers at the shed or wool-wash, call him, if
he does sleep. They manage it in shifts, somehow, and sleep somewhere,
sometime. We haven't time to know. The cook rings the bullock bell and
yells the time. It was the same time five minutes ago--or a year ago.
No time to decide which. I dash water over my head and face and slap
handfuls on my eyelids--gummed over aching eyes--still blighted by the
yolk o' wool--grey, greasy-feeling water from a cut-down kerosene
tin which I sneaked from the cook and hid under my bunk and had the
foresight to refill from the cask last night, under cover of warm,
still, suffocating darkness. Or was it the night before last? Anyhow, it
will be sneaked from me to-day, and from the crawler who will collar it
to-morrow, and 'touched' and 'lifted' and 'collared' and recovered by
the cook, and sneaked back again, and cause foul language, and fights,
maybe, till we 'cut-out'.

"No; we didn't have sweet dreams of home and mother, gentle poet--nor
yet of babbling brooks and sweethearts, and love's young dream. We are
too dirty and dog-tired when we tumble down, and have too little time to
sleep it off. We don't want to dream those dreams out here--they'd only
be nightmares for us, and we'd wake to remember. We MUSTN'T remember
here.

"At the edge of the timber a great galvanised-iron shed, nearly all
roof, coming down to within 6ft. 6in. of the 'board' over the 'shoots'.
Cloud of red dust in the dead timber behind, going up--noon-day dust.
Fence covered with skins; carcases being burned; blue smoke going
straight up as in noonday. Great glossy (greasy-glossy) black crows
'flopping' around.

"The first syren has gone. We hurry in single files from opposite ends
of rouseabouts' and shearers' huts (as the paths happen to run to the
shed) gulping hot tea or coffee from a pin