ozen of us--jackaroos and
colonial-experiencers--who got nothing a year, and earned it.

We had, in most instances, paid premiums to learn the noble art of
squatting--which now appears to me hardly worth studying, for so much
depends on luck that a man with a head as long as a horse's has little
better chance than the fool just imported. Besides the manager and the
jackaroos, there were a few boundary riders to prowl round the fences of
the vast paddocks. This constituted the whole station staff.

Buckalong was on one of the main routes by which stock were taken to
market, or from the plains to the tablelands, and vice versa. Great mobs
of travelling sheep constantly passed through the run, eating up the
grass and vexing the soul of the manager. By law, sheep must travel six
miles per day, and they must be kept to within half-a-mile of the road.
Of course we kept all the grass near the road eaten bare, to discourage
travellers from coming that way.

Such hapless wretches as did venture through Buckalong used to try hard
to stray from the road and pick up a feed, but old Sandy was always
ready for them, and would have them dogged right through the run. This
bred feuds, and bad language, and personal combats between us and the
drovers, whom we looked upon as natural enemies.

The men who came through with mobs of cattle used to pull down the
paddock fences at night, and slip the cattle in for refreshments, but
old Sandy often turned out at 2 or 3 a.m. to catch a mob of bullocks
in the horse-paddock, and then off they went to Buckalong pound. The
drovers, as in duty bound, attributed the trespass to accident--broken
rails, and so on--and sometimes they tried to rescue the cattle, which
again bred strife and police-court summonses.

Besides having a particular aversion to drovers, old M'Gregor had
a general "down" on the young Australians whom he comprehensively
described as a "feckless, horrse-dealin', horrse-stealin', crawlin' lot
o' wretches." According to him, a native-born would sooner work a horse
to death than work for a living any day. He hated any man who wanted to
sell him a horse.

"As aw walk the street," he used to say, "the fouk disna stawp me to buy
claes nor shoon, an' wheerfore should they stawp me to buy horrses? It's
'Mister M'Gregor, will ye purrchase a horrse?' Let them wait till I ask
them to come wi' their horrses."

Such being his views on horseflesh and drovers, we felt no little
excitement