him, not even father.

He was an astonishing man, certainly. Jim and I used to wonder, by
the hour, what he'd been in the old country. He'd been all over the
world--in the Islands and New Zealand; in America, and among Malays and
other strange people that we'd hardly ever heard of. Such stories as
he'd tell us, too, about slaves and wild chiefs that he'd lived with and
gone out to fight with against their enemy. 'People think a great deal
of a dead man now and then in this innocent country,' he said once
when the grog was uppermost; 'why, I've seen fifty men killed before
breakfast, and in cold blood, too, chopped up alive, or next thing to
it; and a drove of slaves--men, women, and children--as big nearly as
our mob, handed over to a slave-dealer, and driven off in chains just
as you'd start a lot of station cattle. They didn't like it, going off
their run either, poor devils. The women would try and run back after
their pickaninnies when they dropped, just like that heifer when
Warrigal knocked her calf on the head to-day.' What a man he was! This
was something like life, Jim and I thought. When we'd sold the cattle,
if we got 'em down to Adelaide all right, we'd take a voyage to some
foreign country, perhaps, and see sights too. What a paltry thing
working for a pound a week seemed when a rise like this was to be made!

Well, the long and short of it is that we mustered the cattle quite
comfortably, nobody coming anext or anigh us any more than if we'd
taken the thing by contract. You wouldn't have thought there was anybody
nearer than Bathurst. Everything seemed to be in our favour. So it was,
just at the start. We drafted out all the worst and weediest of the
cattle, besides all the old cows, and when we counted the mob out we
had nearly eleven hundred first-rate store cattle; lots of fine young
bullocks and heifers, more than half fat--altogether a prime well-bred
mob that no squatter or dealer could fault in any way if the price was
right. We could afford to sell them for a shade under market price for
cash. Ready money, of course, we were bound to have.

Just as we were starting there was a fine roan bull came running up with
a small mob.

'Cut him out, and beat him back,' says father; 'we don't want to be
bothered with the likes of him.'

'Why, I'm dashed if that ain't Hood's imported bull,' says Billy the
Boy, a Monaro native that we had with us. 'I know him well. How's he
come to get back? Why, the cove