but because I used to tell yarns about a man named Jack
Ellis--and so the chaps nicknamed me.

The Boss spoke little to the men: he'd sit at tucker or with his pipe
by the camp-fire nearly as silently as he rode his night-watch round the
big, restless, weird-looking mob of bullocks camped on the dusky
starlit plain. I believe that from the first he spoke oftener and more
confidentially to me than to any other of the droving party. There was a
something of sympathy between us--I can't explain what it was. It seemed
as though it were an understood thing between us that we understood each
other. He sometimes said things to me which would have needed a deal of
explanation--so I thought--had he said them to any other of the party.
He'd often, after brooding a long while, start a sentence, and break off
with 'You know, Jack.' And somehow I understood, without being able to
explain why. We had never met before I engaged with him for this trip.
His men respected him, but he was not a popular boss: he was too gloomy,
and never drank a glass nor 'shouted' on the trip: he was reckoned a
'mean boss', and rather a nigger-driver.

He was full of Adam Lindsay Gordon, the English-Australian poet who
shot himself, and so was I. I lost an old copy of Gordon's poems on the
route, and the Boss overheard me inquiring about it; later on he asked
me if I liked Gordon. We got to it rather sheepishly at first, but
by-and-by we'd quote Gordon freely in turn when we were alone in camp.
'Those are grand lines about Burke and Wills, the explorers, aren't
they, Jack?' he'd say, after chewing his cud, or rather the stem of his
briar, for a long while without a word. (He had his pipe in his mouth as
often as any of us, but somehow I fancied he didn't enjoy it: an empty
pipe or a stick would have suited him just as well, it seemed to me.)
'Those are great lines,' he'd say--

'"In Collins Street standeth a statue tall--
A statue tall on a pillar of stone--
Telling its story to great and small
Of the dust reclaimed from the sand-waste lone.

*****

Weary and wasted, worn and wan,
Feeble and faint, and languid and low,
He lay on the desert a dying man,
Who has gone, my friends, where we all must go."

That's a grand thing, Jack. How does it go?--
"With a pistol clenched in his failing hand,
And the film of death o'er his fading eyes,
He saw the sun go down on the sand