nty fights. You see, it was this
way. I hadn't long got these two gins; and just before the rains the
wild geese come down in thousands to breed, and the blacks all clear out
and camp by the lagoons, and kill geese and eat eggs and young ones all
day long, till they near bust. It's the same every year--when the wild
geese come the blacks have got to go, and it's no use talkin'. So I was
slavin' away here--out all day on the run with the cattle--and one night
I comes home after being out three days, and there at the foot of the
bunk was the two gins' trousers and shirts, folded up; they'd run away
with the others.

"So I goes after 'em down the river to the lagoons, and there was
hundreds of blacks; but these two beauties had heard me coming, and was
planted in the reeds, and the other blacks, of course, they says, "No
more" when I arst them. So there I was, lonely. Only me and the Chinaman
here for two months, 'cause his gin had gone too. So one day I ketches
the horses, and off I goes, and travels for days, till I makes Pike's
pub, and there was this woman.

"It seems from what I heard afterwards that she'd just cleared out from
some fellow she'd been livin' with for years--had a quarrel with him.
Anyhow, I hadn't seen a white woman for years, and she was a fine
lump of a woman, and I got on a bit of a spree for a week or so, you
know--half-tight all the time; and it seems some sort of a parson--a
mish'nary to the blacks--chanced along and married us. She had her lines
and everything all right, but I don't remember much about it. So then
I'm living with her for a bit; but I don't like her goin's on, and I
takes the whip to her once, and she gets snake-headed to me, and takes
up an axe; and then one day comes a black from this place and he says to
me, he says, "Old man," he says, "Maggie and Lucy come back." So then I
says to my wife, "I'm off back to the run," I says, "and it's sorry I am
that ever I married you." And she says, "Well, I'm not goin' out to yer
old run, to get eat up with musketeers." So says I, "Please yourself
about that, you faggot," I says, "but I'm off." So off I cleared, and I
never seen her from that day till this. I married her under the name of
Keogh, though. Will that make any difference?"

This legal problem kept them occupied for some time; and, after much
discussion, it was decided that a marriage under a false name could
hardly be valid.

Then weariness, the weariness of open-air, trave