yes the sudden furtive
look of the "bad egg" when a mounted trooper is spotted near the shed;
but perhaps this was prejudice. And with it all there was about the
Lachlan something of the man who has lost all he had and the chances
of all he was ever likely to have, and is past feeling, or caring, or
flaring up--past getting mad about anything--something, all the same,
that warned men not to make free with him.

He and Mitchell fished along the Billabong all the afternoon; I fished
a little, and lay about the camp and read. I had an instinct that the
Lachlan saw I didn't cotton on to his camping with us, though he wasn't
the sort of man to show what he saw or felt. After tea, and a smoke at
sunset, he shouldered his swag, nodded to me as if I was an accidental
but respectful stranger at a funeral that belonged to him, and took the
outside track. Mitchell walked along the track with him for a mile or
so, while I poked round and got some boughs down for a bed, and fed and
studied the collie pup that Jack had bought from the shearers' cook.

I saw them stop and shake hands out on the dusty clearing, and they
seemed to take a long time about it; then Mitchell started back, and
the other began to dwindle down to a black peg and then to a dot on the
sandy plain, that had just a hint of dusk and dreamy far-away gloaming
on it between the change from glaring day to hard, bare, broad
moonlight.

I thought Mitchell was sulky, or had got the blues, when he came back;
he lay on his elbow smoking, with his face turned from the camp towards
the plain. After a bit I got wild--if Mitchell was going to go on like
that he might as well have taken his swag and gone with the Lachlan. I
don't know exactly what was the matter with me that day, and at last I
made up my mind to bring the thing to a head.

"You seem mighty thick with the Lachlan," I said.

"Well, what's the matter with that?" asked Mitchell. "It ain't the first
felon I've been on speaking terms with. I borrowed half-a-caser off a
murderer once, when I was in a hole and had no one else to go to; and
the murderer hadn't served his time, neither. I've got nothing against
the Lachlan, except that he's a white man and bears a faint family
resemblance to a certain branch of my tribe."

I rolled out my swag on the boughs, got my pipe, tobacco, and matches
handy in the crown of a spare hat, and lay down.

Mitchell got up, re-lit his pipe at the fire, and mooned round for
a while