Goring, I could see by his ways, had been a swell, something like Starlight. A good many young fellows that don’t drop into fortunes when they come out here take to the police in Australia, and very good men they make. They like the half-soldiering kind of life, and if they stick steady at their work, and show pluck and gumption, they mostly get promoted. Goring was a real smart, dashing chap, a good rider for an Englishman; that is, he could sit most horses, and hold his own with us natives anywhere but through scrub and mountain country. No man can ride there, I don’t care who he is, the same as we can, unless he’s been at it all his life. There we have the pull—not that it is so much after all. But give a native a good horse and thick country, and he’ll lose any man living that’s tackled the work after he’s grown up.

By and by we got to Nomah, a regular hot hole of a place, with a log lock-up. I was stuck in, of course, and had leg-irons put on for fear I should get out, as another fellow had done a few weeks back. Starlight and Warrigal hadn’t reached yet; they had farther to come. The trial couldn’t come till the Quarter Sessions. January, and February, too, passed over, and all this time I was mewed up in a bit of a place enough to stifle a man in the burning weather we had.

I heard afterwards that they wanted to bring some of the cattle over, so as Mr. Hood could swear to ‘em being his property. But he said he could only swear to its being his brand; that he most likely had never set eyes on them in his life, and couldn’t swear on his own knowledge that they hadn’t been sold, like lots of others, by his manager. So this looked like a hitch, as juries won’t bring a man in guilty of cattle-stealing unless there’s clear swearing that the animals he sold were the property of the prosecutor, and known by him to be such.