At last we rounded up on a flat, rocky, open kind of place; and here father held up his hand.

“Let ‘em ring a bit; some of their tongues are out. These young things is generally soft. Come here, Dick.” I rode up, and he told me to follow him.

We walked our horses up to the edge of the mountain and looked over. It was like the end of the world. Far down there was a dark, dreadful drop into a sort of deep valley below. You couldn’t see the bottom of it. The trees on the mountain side looked like bushes, and they were big ironbarks and messmates, too. On three sides of us was this awful, desolate-looking precipice—a dreary, gloomy, God-forsaken kind of spot. The sky got cloudy, and the breeze turned cold and began to murmur and whistle in an odd, unnatural kind of way, while father, seeing how scared and puzzled I was, began to laugh. I shuddered. A thought crossed my mind that it might be the Enemy of Souls, in his shape, going to carry us off for doing such a piece of wickedness.

“Looks queer, doesn’t it?” says father, going to the brink and kicking down a boulder, that rolled and crashed down the steep mountain side, tearing its way through scrub and heath till it settled down in the glen below. “It won’t do for a man’s horse to slip, will it, boy? And yet there’s a track here into a fine large paddock, open and clear, too, where I’m going to put these cattle into.”

I stared at him, without speaking, thinking was he mad.

“No! the old man isn’t mad, youngster,” he said; “not yet, at least. I’m going to show you a trick that none of you native boys are up to, smart as you think yourselves.” Here he got off the old mare, and began to lead her to the edge of the mountain.

“Now, you rally the cattle well after me,” he said; “they’ll follow the old mare after a bit. I left a few cows among ‘em on purpose, and when they ‘draw’ keep ‘em going well up, but not too fast.”

He had lengthened the bridle of the mare, and tied the end of a light tether rope that he had round her neck to it. I saw her follow him slowly, and turn down a rocky track that seemed to lead straight over a bluff of the precipice.

However, I gave the word to “head on.” The dog had started rounding ‘em up as soon as he saw the old mare walk towards the mountain side, and the cattle were soon crushed up pretty close to the mare’s heels.

Mind this, that they were so footsore and tender about the hoofs that they could not have run away from us on foot if they had tried.

After “ringing” a bit, one of the quiet cows followed up the old mare that was walking step by step forward, and all the rest followed her like sheep. Cattle will do that. I’ve seen a stockrider, when all the horses were dead beat, trying to get fat cattle to take a river in flood, jump off and turn his horse loose into the stream. If he went straight, and swam across, all the cattle would follow him like sheep.