I wasn’t very gay for a bit, but I had a good horse under me, another alongside, a smartish lot of cash in notes and gold, some bank deposits, too, and all the world before me. My dart now was to make my way to Willaroon and look sharp about it. My chance of getting through was none too good, but I settled to ride a deal at night and camp by day. I began to pick up my spirits after I got on the road that led up the mountain, and to look ahead to the time when I might call myself my own man again.

Next day after that I was at Willaroon. I could have got there overnight, but it looked better to camp near the place and come next morning. There I was all right. The overseer was a reasonable sort of man, and I found old George had been as good as his word, and left word if a couple of men like me and Starlight came up we were to be put on with the next mob of cattle that were going to Queensland. He did a store cattle trade with the far-out squatters that were stocking up new country in Queensland, and it paid him very well, as nearly everything did that he touched. We were to find our own horses and be paid so much a week—three pounds, I think—and so on.

As luck would have it, there was a biggish mob to start in a week, and road hands being scarce in that part the overseer was disappointed that my mate, as he called him, hadn’t come on, but I said he’d gone another track.

“Well, he’ll hardly get such wages at any other job,” says he, “and if I was Mr. Storefield I wouldn’t hire him again, not if he wanted a billet ever so bad.”

“I don’t suppose he will,” says I, “and serves him quite right, too.”

I put my horses in the paddock—there was wild oats and crows-foot knee-high in it—and helped the overseer to muster and draft. He gave me a fresh horse, of course. When he saw how handy I was in the yard he got quite shook on me, and, says he—

“By George, you’re just the chap the boss wants to send out to some new country he’s going to take up in Queensland. What’s your name? Now I think of it he didn’t tell me.”

“William Turner,” says I.