The cattle, of course, couldn’t travel very fast; ten or twelve miles a day was enough for them. I could have drowned myself in the creeks as we went crawling along sometimes, and I that impatient to get forward. Eighty miles it was from Cunnamulla to the Queensland border. Once we were over that we’d have to be arrested on warrant, and there were lots of chaps, like us, that were “wanted,” on the far-out north stations. Once we sighted the waters of the Warrego we should feel ourselves more than half free.

Then there was Jim, poor old Jim! He wrote to say he was just starting from Melbourne, and very queer he felt about leaving his wife and boy. Such a fine little chap as he’d grown, too. He’d just got his head down, he said, and taken to the pulling (he meant working) like our old near-side poler, and he was as happy as a king, going home to Jeanie at night, and having his three pounds every Saturday. Now he was going away ever so far by land and sea, and God knows when he might see either of ‘em again. If it wasn’t for the fear he had of being pitched upon by the police any day, and the long sentence he was sure to get, he’d stay where he was. He wasn’t sure whether he wouldn’t do so now.

After that Aileen had a letter, a short one, from Jeanie. Jim had gone. She had persuaded him for the sake of the boy, though both their hearts were nearly broken. She didn’t know whether she’d done right. Perhaps she never might see him again. The poor fellow had forfeited his coach fare once, and come back to stay another day with her. When he did go he looked the picture of misery, and something told her it was their last parting.

Well, we struck the river about ten miles this side of Cunnamulla, where there was a roadside inn, a small, miserable kind of place, just one of those half-shanties, half-public-houses, fit for nothing but to trap bushmen, and where the bad grog kills more men in a year than a middling break-out of fever.

Somewhere about here I expected to hear of the other two. We’d settled to meet a few miles one side or the other of the township. It didn’t matter which. So I began to look about in case I might get word of either of ‘em, even if they didn’t turn up to the time.