The brandy and water fetched him to pretty well, but after that he began to talk, and we couldn’t stop him. Towards night he got worse and worse and his head got hotter, and he kept on with all kinds of nonsense, screeching out that he was going to be hung and they were waiting to take him away, but if he could get the old mare he’d be all right; besides a lot of mixed-up things about cattle and horses that we didn’t know the right of.

Starlight said he was delirious, and that if he hadn’t someone to nurse him he’d die as sure as fate. We couldn’t be always staying with him, and didn’t understand what was to be done much. We didn’t like to let him lie there and die, so at long last we made up our minds to see if we could get Aileen over to nurse him for a few weeks.

Well, we scribbled a bit of a letter and sent Warrigal off with it. Wasn’t it dangerous for him? Not a bit of it. He could go anywhere all over the whole country, and no trooper of them all could manage to put the bracelets on him. The way he’d work it would be to leave his horse a good way the other side of George Storefield’s, and to make up as a regular blackfellow. He could do that first-rate, and talk their lingo, too, just like one of themselves. Gin or blackfellow, it was all the same to Warrigal. He could make him self as black as soot, and go barefooted with a blanket or a ‘possum rug round him and beg for siccapence, and nobody’d ever bowl him out. He took us in once at the diggings; Jim chucked him a shilling, and told him to go away and not come bothering near us.

So away Warrigal went, and we knew he’d get through somehow. He was one of those chaps that always does what they’re told, and never comes back and says they can’t do it, or they’ve lost their horse, or can’t find the way, or they’d changed their mind, or something.

No; once he’d started there was no fear of him not scoring somehow or other. Whatever Starlight told him to do, day or night, foul weather or fair, afoot or on horseback, that thing was done if Warrigal was alive to do it.

What we’d written to Aileen was telling her that father was that bad we hardly thought he’d pull through, and that if she wanted to save his life she must come to the Hollow and nurse him.