“Why?” says father, getting up and glaring with his eyes, “because I was a blind, ignorant dog when I was young, as had never been taught nothing, and knowed nothing, not so much as him there” (pointing to Crib), “for he knows what his business is, and I didn’t. I was thrashed and starved, locked up in a gaol, chained and flogged after that, and half the time for doing what I didn’t know was wrong, and couldn’t know more than one of them four-year-old colts out there that knocks his head again the yard when he’s roped, and falls backwards and breaks his neck if he ain’t watched. Whose business was it to have learned me better? That I can’t rightly say, but it seemed it was the business of the Government people to gaol me, and iron me, and flog me. Was that justice? Any man’s sense’ll tell him it wasn’t. It’s been them and me for it since I got my liberty, and if I had had a dozen lives they’d all have gone the same road!”

We none of us felt in the humour to say much after that. Father had got into one of his tantrums, and when he did he was fit to be tied; only I’d not have took the contract for something. Whatever it was that had happened to him in the old times when he was a Government man he didn’t talk about. Only every now and then he’d let out just as he did now, as if nothing could ever set him straight again, or keep him from fighting against them, as he called the swells and the Government, and everybody almost that was straight-going and honest. He’d been at it a good many years, one way and another, and anyone that knew him didn’t think it likely he’d change.

The next dust we got into was all along of a Mr. Knightley, who lived a good way down to the south, and it was one of the worst things we ever were mixed up in. After the Turon races and all that shine, somehow or other we found that things had been made hotter for us than ever since we first turned out. Go where we would, we found the police always quick on our trail, and we had two or three very close shaves of it. It looked as if our luck was dead out, and we began to think our chance of getting across the border to Queensland, and clear out of the colony that way, looked worse every day.

Dad kept foraging about to get information, and we sent Warrigal and Billy the Boy all over the country to find out how it was things were turning out so contrary.