trees had been
ring-barked (a ring of bark taken out round the butts), or rather
'sapped'--that is, a ring cut in through the sap--in order to kill them,
so that the little strength in the 'poor' soil should not be drawn out
by the living roots, and the natural grass (on which Australian stock
depends) should have a better show. The hard, dead trees raised their
barkless and whitened trunks and leafless branches for three or four
miles, and the grey and brown grass stood tall between, dying in the
first breaths of the coming drought. All was becoming grey and ashen
here, the heat blazing and dancing across objects, and the pale brassy
dome of the sky cloudless over all, the sun a glaring white disc with
its edges almost melting into the sky. Job held his gun carelessly ready
(it was a double-barrelled muzzle-loader, one barrel choke-bore for
shot, and the other rifled), and he kept an eye out for dingoes. He was
saving his horse for a long ride, jogging along in the careless Bush
fashion, hitched a little to one side--and I'm not sure that he didn't
have a leg thrown up and across in front of the pommel of the saddle--he
was riding along in the careless Bush fashion, and thinking
fatherly thoughts in advance, perhaps, when suddenly a great black,
greasy-looking iguana scuttled off from the side of the track amongst
the dry tufts of grass and shreds of dead bark, and started up a
sapling. 'It was a whopper,' Job said afterwards; 'must have been over
six feet, and a foot across the body. It scared me nearly as much as the
filly.'

The filly shied off like a rocket. Job kept his seat instinctively,
as was natural to him; but before he could more than grab at the
rein--lying loosely on the pommel--the filly 'fetched up' against a dead
box-tree, hard as cast-iron, and Job's left leg was jammed from stirrup
to pocket. 'I felt the blood flare up,' he said, 'and I knowed that
that'--(Job swore now and then in an easy-going way)--'I knowed that
that blanky leg was broken alright. I threw the gun from me and freed
my left foot from the stirrup with my hand, and managed to fall to the
right, as the filly started off again.'

What follows comes from the statements of Doc. Wild and Mac. Falconer,
and Job's own 'wanderings in his mind', as he called them. 'They took
a blanky mean advantage of me,' he said, 'when they had me down and I
couldn't talk sense.'

The filly circled off a bit, and then stood staring--as a mob of
brumbies