unded
the last spur, with his packhorse trotting after him, I thought he must
have felt very lonely. And I felt lonely too.

THE STORY OF "GENTLEMAN ONCE"

They learn the world from black-sheep,
Who know it all too well.
-Out Back.

Peter M'Laughlan, bush missionary, Joe Wilson and his mate, Jack Barnes,
shearers for the present, and a casual swagman named Jack Mitchell, were
camped at Cox's Crossing in a bend of Eurunderee Creek.

It was a grassy little flat with gum-trees standing clear and clean like
a park. At the back was the steep grassy siding of a ridge, and far away
across the creek to the south a spur from the Blue Mountain range
ran west, with a tall, blue granite peak showing clear in the broad
moonlight, yet dream-like and distant over the sweeps of dark green
bush.

There was the jingle of hobble-chains and a crunching at the grass where
the horses moved in the soft shadows amongst the trees. Up the creek on
the other side was a surveyors' camp, and from there now and again came
the sound of a good voice singing verses of old songs; and later on
the sound of a violin and a cornet being played, sometimes together and
sometimes each on its own.

Wilson and Barnes were on their way home from shearing out back in the
great scrubs at Beenaway Shed. They had been rescued by Peter M`Laughlan
from a wayside shanty where they had fallen, in spite of mutual oaths
and past promises, sacred and profane, because they had got wringing wet
in a storm on the track and caught colds, and had been tempted to take
just one drink.

They were in a bad way, and were knocking down their cheques beautifully
when Peter M'Laughlan came along. He rescued them and some of their cash
from the soulless shanty keeper, and was riding home with them, on some
pretence, because he had known them as boys, because Joe Wilson had a
vein of poetry in him--a something in sympathy with something in Peter;
because Jack Barnes had a dear little girl-wife who was much too good
for him, and who was now anxiously waiting for him in the pretty little
farming town of Solong amongst the western spurs. Because, perhaps, of
something in Peter's early past which was a mystery. Simply and plainly
because Peter M'Laughlan was the kindest, straightest and truest man in
the West--a "white man."

They all knew Mitchell and welcomed him heartily when he turned up in
their camp, because he was a pathetic humorist