good men
they make. They like the half-soldiering kind of life, and if they
stick steady at their work, and show pluck and gumption, they mostly
get promoted. Goring was a real smart, dashing chap, a good rider for an
Englishman; that is, he could set most horses, and hold his own with us
natives anywhere but through scrub and mountain country. No man can ride
there, I don't care who he is, the same as we can, unless he's been at
it all his life. There we have the pull--not that it is so much after
all. But give a native a good horse and thick country, and he'll lose
any man living that's tackled the work after he's grown up.

By and by we got to Nomah, a regular hot hole of a place, with a log
lock-up. I was stuck in, of course, and had leg-irons put on for fear I
should get out, as another fellow had done a few weeks back. Starlight
and Warrigal hadn't reached yet; they had farther to come. The trial
couldn't come till the Quarter Sessions. January, and February too,
passed over, and all this time I was mewed up in a bit of a place enough
to stifle a man in the burning weather we had.

I heard afterwards that they wanted to bring some of the cattle over, so
as Mr. Hood could swear to 'em being his property. But he said he could
only swear to its being his brand; that he most likely had never set
eyes on them in his life, and couldn't swear on his own knowledge that
they hadn't been sold, like lots of others, by his manager. So
this looked like a hitch, as juries won't bring a man in guilty of
cattle-stealing unless there's clear swearing that the animals he sold
were the property of the prosecutor, and known by him to be such.

Mr. Hood had to go all the way to Adelaide himself, and they told me we
might likely have got out of it all, only for the imported bull. When
he saw him he said he could swear to him point blank, brand or no brand.
He'd no brand on him, of course, when he left England; but Hood happened
to be in Sydney when he came out, and at the station when he came up. He
was stabled for the first six months, so he used to go and look him over
every day, and tell visitors what a pot of money he'd cost, till he
knew every hair in his tail, as the saying is. As soon as he seen him
in Adelaide he said he could swear to him as positive as he could to
his favourite riding horse. So he was brought over in a steamer from
Adelaide, and then drove all the way up to Nomah. I wished he'd broken
his neck before we ev