After a man had had a year or two at this kind of work, he was good, or rather bad, for anything. These young chaps, like us, had done pretty well at these games, and one of them, falling in with Starlight, had proposed to him to put up a couple of hundred head of cattle on Outer Back Momberah, as the run was called; then father and he had seen that a thousand were as easy to get as a hundred. Of course there was a risky feeling, but it wasn’t such bad fun while it lasted. We were out all day running in the cattle. The horses were in good wind and condition now; we had plenty of rations—flour, tea, and sugar. There was no cart, but some good pack-horses, just the same as if we were a regular station party on our own run. Father had worked all that before we came. We had the best of fresh beef and veal too—you may be sure of that—there was no stint in that line; and at night we were always sure of a yarn from Starlight—that is, if he was in a good humour. Sometimes he wasn’t, and then nobody dared speak to him, not even father.

He was an astonishing man, certainly. Jim and I used to wonder, by the hour, what he’d been in the old country. He’d been all over the world—in the Islands and New Zealand; in America, and among Malays and other strange people that we’d hardly ever heard of. Such stories as he’d tell us, too, about slaves and wild chiefs that he’d lived with and gone out to fight with against their enemy. “People think a great deal of a dead man now and then in this innocent country,” he said once when the grog was uppermost; “why, I’ve seen fifty men killed before breakfast, and in cold blood, too, chopped up alive, or next thing to it; and a drove of slaves—men, women, and children—as big nearly as our mob, handed over to a slave-dealer, and driven off in chains just as you’d start a lot of station cattle. They didn’t like it, going off their run either, poor devils. The women would try and run back after their piccaninnies when they dropped, just like that heifer when Warrigal knocked her calf on the head to-day.” What a man he was! This was some thing like life, Jim and I thought. When we’d sold the cattle, if we got ‘em down to Adelaide all right, we’d take a voyage to some foreign country, perhaps, and see sights too. What a paltry thing working for a pound a week seemed when a rise like this was to be made!