at for the first time, wasn't it?

Well, we got the cattle drafted to rights, every sort and size and age
by itself, as near as could be. That's the way to draft stock, whether
they're cattle, sheep, or horses; then every man can buy what he likes
best, and isn't obliged to lump up one sort with another. We had time
to have a bit of dinner. None of us had touched a mouthful since before
daylight. Then we began to see the buyers come.

There'd been a big tent rigged, as big as a small woolshed, too. It came
out in a cart, and then another cart came with a couple of waiters, and
they laid out a long table of boards on trestles with a real first-class
feed on it, such as we'd never seen in our lives before. Fowls and
turkeys and tongues and rounds of beef, beer and wine in bottles with
gilt labels on. Such a set-out it was. Father began to growl a bit.
'If he's going to feed the whole country this way, he'll spend half the
stuff before we get it, let alone drawing a down on the whole thing.'
But Jim and me could see how Starlight had been working the thing to
rights while he was swelling it in the town among the big bugs. We told
him the cattle would fetch that much more money on account of the lunch
and the blowing the auctioneer was able to do. These would pay for the
feed and the rest of the fal-lals ten times over. 'When he gets in with
men like his old pals he loses his head, I believe,' father says, 'and
fancies he's what he used to be. He'll get "fitted" quite simple some
day if he doesn't keep a better look-out.'

That might be, but it wasn't to come about this time. Starlight came
riding out by and by, dressed up like a real gentleman, and lookin' so
different that Jim and I hardly dared speak to him--on a splendid horse
too (not Rainbow, he'd been left behind; he was always left within a
hundred miles of The Hollow, and he could do it in one day if he was
wanted to), and a lot of fine dressed chaps with him--young squatters
and officers, and what not. I shouldn't have been surprised if he'd
had the Governor out with him. They told us afterwards he did dine at
Government House reg'lar, and was made quite free and welcome there.

Well, he jumps down and shakes hands with us before them all. 'Well,
Jack! Well, Bill!' and so on, calls us his good faithful fellows, and
how well we'd brought the cattle over; nods to father, who didn't seem
able to take it all in; says he'll back us against any stockmen in
Australia