little bundle of greasy one-pound notes, which, for me,
certainly had a very substantial look. I knew instinctively that my
friend wanted me to help him out by pursuing the inquiry; but for the
time I shirked it, and we talked of other things. Later in the day I
returned to it, as a moth to a candle, undeterred, partly impelled
thereto, in fact, by the assured foreknowledge that the process would
hurt.

'But what will you do, Ted, now you've given up Mannasseh Ford? Will
you take another job round the Creek here, or----'

I paused, scanning my only friend's face, and seeing my loss of him
writ plainly in his downcast eyes and half-shamed expression. (I am
not sure but what there may have been more of the human boy, the
child, in Ted, than in myself.)

'Oh, well, mate,' he said haltingly, and then stopped altogether. He
was drawing an intricate pattern in the dust with the blade of his
pen-knife, a favourite pastime with bushmen. The pause was pregnant.
At last he looked up with a toss of his head. 'Oh, come on, mate,' he
said impatiently. 'Swim across to-night, an' we'll beat up Queensland
way. I tell ye, travellin' 's fine. Ye've got no boss to say do this
an' that. You goes y'r own way at y'r own gait. Ye'd better come.'

'So you'll go, Ted. I knew you would,' I said, musing in my rather
old-fashioned way. It seems a smallish matter enough now; but I know
that at the time I was conscious of making a momentous sacrifice, of
taking a step of epoch-making significance. Somehow, the very
greatness of the sacrifice made me the more determined about it. I
should lose my only friend, a devastating loss; and the more clearly I
realised how naked this loss would leave me, the more convinced I felt
that my decision was right. There is, of course, a kind of gluttony in
self-denial; one's appetite for sacrifice, and particularly in youth,
may be undeniably avid.

'Well, I did try to stop,' he muttered, almost sullenly for him. And
then, with that toss of his head, and the glimmering of a frank smile:
'But I can't stick it. Humpin' a swag's about all I'm fit for, I
reckon. You're right, too, it's no game for your father's son.' And
here his kindly face lost all trace of anything but friendliness.
'Only, what beats me is what in the world else can ye do, mewed up in
this--this blessed work'us. That's what has me beat.'

The crisis was passed, and with it the last of Ted's shamefaced
constraint. It was admitted between us th