“It’s not quite so bad as that,” said George. “I shall lose my year’s work unless rain comes, and most of the cattle and horses besides; but I shall be able to get a few pounds to go on with, however the season goes.”

“Oh! if you like to bow and scrape to rich people, well and good.” I said; “but that’s not my way: We have as good a right to our share of the land and some other good things as they have, and why should we be done out of it?”

“If we pay for the land as they do, certainly,” said George.

“But why should we pay? God Almighty, I suppose, made the land and the people, too, one to live on the other. Why should we pay for what is our own? I believe in getting my share somehow.”

“That’s a sort of argument that doesn’t come out right,” said George. “How would you like another man to come and want to halve the farm with you?”

“I shouldn’t mind; I should go halves with someone else who had a bigger one,” I said. “More money, too, more horses, more sheep, a bigger house! Why should he have it and not me?”

“That’s a lazy man’s argument, and—well, not an honest man’s,” said George, getting up and putting on his cabbage-tree. “I can’t sit and hear you talk such rot. Nobody can work better than you and Jim, when you like. I wonder you don’t leave such talk to fellows like Frowser, that’s always spouting at the Shearer’s Arms.”

“Nonsense or not, if a dry season comes and knocks all our work over, I shall help myself to someone’s stuff that has more than he knows what to do with.”

“Why can’t we all go shearing, and make as much as will keep us for six months?” said George. “I don’t know what we’d do without the squatters.”

“Nor I either; more ways than one; but Jim and I are going shearing next week. So perhaps there won’t be any need for ‘duffing’ after all.”

“Oh, Dick!” said Aileen,“I can’t bear to hear you make a joke of that kind of thing. Don’t we all know what it leads to! Wouldn’t it be better to live on dry bread and be honest than to be full of money and never know the day when you’d be dragged to gaol?”

“I’ve heard all that before; but ain’t there lots of people that have made their money by all sorts of villainy, that look as well as the best, and never see a gaol?”

“They’re always caught some day,” says poor Aileen, sobbing, “and what a dreadful life of anxiety they must lead!”

“Not at all,” I said. “Look at Lucksly, Squeezer, and Frying-pan Jack. Everybody knows how they got their stock and their money. See how they live. They’ve got stations, and public-houses and town property, and they get richer every year. I don’t think it pays to be too honest in a dry country.”