ppose when Bill there has squeezed all he
can out of you I'll stand a show of getting something. He's a regular
Shylock, he is.'

I pushed my hat forward and rubbed the back of my head and stared at the
buggy.

'Come across to the Royal, Joe,' said Bob.

But I knew that a beer would settle the business, so I said I'd get the
wool up to the station first and think it over, and have a drink when I
came back.

I thought it over on the way to the station, but it didn't seem good
enough. I wanted to get some more sheep, and there was the new run to
be fenced in, and the instalments on the selections. I wanted lots of
things that I couldn't well do without. Then, again, the farther I got
away from debt and hard-upedness the greater the horror I had of it. I
had two horses that would do; but I'd have to get another later on, and
altogether the buggy would run me nearer a hundred than fifty pounds.
Supposing a dry season threw me back with that buggy on my hands.
Besides, I wanted a spell. If I got the buggy it would only mean an
extra turn of hard graft for me. No, I'd take Mary for a trip to Sydney,
and she'd have to be satisfied with that.

I'd got it settled, and was just turning in through the big white
gates to the goods-shed when young Black, the squatter, dashed past the
station in his big new waggonette, with his wife and a driver and a lot
of portmanteaus and rugs and things. They were going to do the grand
in Sydney over Christmas. Now it was young Black who was so shook after
Mary when she was in service with the Blacks before the old man died,
and if I hadn't come along--and if girls never cared for vagabonds--Mary
would have been mistress of Haviland homestead, with servants to wait on
her; and she was far better fitted for it than the one that was there.
She would have been going to Sydney every holiday and putting up at the
old Royal, with every comfort that a woman could ask for, and seeing
a play every night. And I'd have been knocking around amongst the big
stations Out-Back, or maybe drinking myself to death at the shanties.

The Blacks didn't see me as I went by, ragged and dusty, and with an
old, nearly black, cabbage-tree hat drawn over my eyes. I didn't care
a damn for them, or any one else, at most times, but I had moods when I
felt things.

One of Black's big wool teams was just coming away from the shed, and
the driver, a big, dark, rough fellow, with some foreign blood in him,
didn't seem in