eyes--a little tartar he was too. I suppose
it was the sight of him that unconsciously reminded me of my infernal
theory, and set me off on it, without warning me. Anyhow, it got me
mixed up in an awful row with the woman and her husband--and all their
tribe. It wasn't an easy thing to explain myself out of it, and the row
hasn't been fixed up yet. There were some Chinamen in the district.

I took a good-size fencing contract, the frontage of a ten-mile paddock,
near Gulgong, and did well out of it. The railway had got as far as the
Cudgeegong river--some twenty miles from Gulgong and two hundred
from the coast--and 'carrying' was good then. I had a couple of
draught-horses, that I worked in the tip-drays when I was tank-sinking,
and one or two others running in the Bush. I bought a broken-down waggon
cheap, tinkered it up myself--christened it 'The Same Old Thing'--and
started carrying from the railway terminus through Gulgong and along the
bush roads and tracks that branch out fanlike through the scrubs to the
one-pub towns and sheep and cattle stations out there in the howling
wilderness. It wasn't much of a team. There were the two heavy horses
for 'shafters'; a stunted colt, that I'd bought out of the pound for
thirty shillings; a light, spring-cart horse; an old grey mare, with
points like a big red-and-white Australian store bullock, and with the
grit of an old washerwoman to work; and a horse that had spanked along
in Cob & Co.'s mail-coach in his time. I had a couple there that didn't
belong to me: I worked them for the feeding of them in the dry weather.
And I had all sorts of harness, that I mended and fixed up myself. It
was a mixed team, but I took light stuff, got through pretty quick, and
freight rates were high. So I got along.

Before this, whenever I made a few pounds I'd sink a shaft somewhere,
prospecting for gold; but Mary never let me rest till she talked me out
of that.

I made up my mind to take on a small selection farm--that an old mate of
mine had fenced in and cleared, and afterwards chucked up--about thirty
miles out west of Gulgong, at a place called Lahey's Creek. (The places
were all called Lahey's Creek, or Spicer's Flat, or Murphy's Flat, or
Ryan's Crossing, or some such name--round there.) I reckoned I'd have
a run for the horses and be able to grow a bit of feed. I always had a
dread of taking Mary and the children too far away from a doctor--or a
good woman neighbour; but there wer