hed out, all in a long string. You'd 'a thought no
mortal men could 'a kept 'em in that blind hole of a place. But father
headed 'em, and turned 'em towards the peak. The dog worried those that
wanted to stay by the yard or turn another way. We dropped our whip on
'em, and kept 'em going. In five minutes they were all a-moving along
in one mob at a pretty sharpish trot like a lot of store cattle. Father
knew his way about, whether the country was thick or open. It was all as
one to him. What a slashing stockman he would have made in new country,
if he only could have kept straight.

It took us an hour's hard dinkum to get near the peak. Sometimes it was
awful rocky, as well as scrubby, and the poor devils of cattle got as
sore-footed as babies--blood up to the knee, some of 'em; but we crowded
'em on; there was no help for it.

At last we rounded up on a flat, rocky, open kind of a place; and here
father held up his hand.

'Let 'em ring a bit; some of their tongues are out. These young things
is generally soft. Come here, Dick.' I rode up, and he told me to follow
him.

We walked our horses up to the edge of the mountain and looked over. It
was like the end of the world. Far down there was a dark, dreadful drop
into a sort of deep valley below. You couldn't see the bottom of it.
The trees on the mountain side looked like bushes, and they were big
ironbarks and messmates too. On three sides of us was this awful,
desolate-looking precipice--a dreary, gloomy, God-forsaken kind of spot.
The sky got cloudy, and the breeze turned cold and began to murmur
and whistle in an odd, unnatural kind of way, while father, seeing how
scared and puzzled I was, began to laugh. I shuddered. A thought crossed
my mind that it might be the Enemy of Souls, in his shape, going to
carry us off for doing such a piece of wickedness.

'Looks queer, doesn't it?' says father, going to the brink and kicking
down a boulder, that rolled and crashed down the steep mountain side,
tearing its way through scrub and heath till it settled down in the glen
below. 'It won't do for a man's horse to slip, will it, boy? And yet
there's a track here into a fine large paddock, open and clear, too,
where I'm going to put these cattle into.'

I stared at him, without speaking, thinking was he mad.

'No! the old man isn't mad, youngster,' he said; 'not yet, at least. I'm
going to show you a trick that none of you native boys are up to, smart
as you think yours