on or
hesitation.

He'd nurse sick boundary-riders, shearers, and station-hands, often
sitting in the desolate hut by the bedside of a sick man night after
night. And, if he had time, he'd look up the local blacks and see how
they were getting on. Once, on a far outback sheep station, he sat for
three nights running, by the bedside of a young Englishman, a B.A. they
said he was, who'd been employed as tutor at the homestead and who died
a wreck, the result of five years of life in London and Paris. The poor
fellow was only thirty. And the last few hours of his life he talked to
Peter in French, nothing but French. Peter understood French and one
or two other languages, besides English and Australian; but whether the
young wreck was raving or telling the story of a love, or his life, none
of us ever knew, for Peter never spoke of it. But they said that at the
funeral Peter's eyes seemed haunted more than usual.

There's the yarn about Peter and the dying cattle at Piora Station one
terrible drought, when the surface was as bare as your hand for hundreds
of miles, and the heat like the breath of a furnace, and the sheep and
cattle were perishing by thousands. Peter M'Laughlan was out on the run
helping the station-hands to pull out cattle that had got bogged in the
muddy waterholes and were too weak to drag themselves out, when, about
dusk, a gentlemanly "piano-fingered" parson, who had come to the station
from the next town, drove out in his buggy to see the men. He spoke to
Peter M'Laughlan.

"Brother," he said, "do you not think we should offer up a prayer?"

"What for?" asked Peter, standing in his shirt sleeves, a rope in his
hands and mud from head to foot.

"For? Why, for rain, brother," replied the parson, a bit surprised.

Peter held up his finger and said "Listen!"

Now, with a big mob of travelling stock camped on the plain at night,
there is always a lowing, soughing or moaning sound, a sound like that
of the sea on the shore at a little distance; and, altogether, it might
be called the sigh or yawn of a big mob in camp. But the long, low
moaning of cattle dying of hunger and thirst on the hot barren plain
in a drought is altogether different, and, at night there is something
awful about it--you couldn't describe it. This is what Peter M'Laughlan
heard.

"Do you hear that?" he asked the other preacher.

The little parson said he did. Perhaps _he_ only heard the weak lowing
of cattle.

"Do you thin