Jim and I used to hear him talking like this to some of the squatters whose runs we passed through, as grave as you please. They used to ask him to stay all night, but he always said “he didn’t like to leave his men. He made it a practice on the road.” When we got within a fortnight’s drive of Adelaide, he rode in and lived at one of the best hotels. He gave out that he expected a lot of cattle to arrive, and got a friend that he’d met in the billiard-room (and couldn’t he play surprisin’?) to introduce him to one of the leading stock agents there. So he had it all cut and dry, when one day Warrigal and I rode in, and the boy handed him a letter, touching his hat respectfully, as he had been learned to do, before a lot of young squatters and other swells that he was going out to a picnic with.

“My confounded cattle come at last,” he says. “Excuse me for mentioning business. I began to hope they’d never come;‘pon my soul I did. The time passes so deuced pleasantly here. Well, they’ll all be at the yards to-morrow. You fellows had all better come and see them sold. There’ll be a little lunch, and perhaps some fizz. You go to the stock agents, Runnimall and Co.; here’s their address, Jack,” he says to me, looking me straight in the eyes. “They’ll send a man to pilot you to the yards; and now off with you, and don’t let me see your face till to-morrow.”

How he carried it off! He cantered away with the rest of the party, as if he hadn’t a thought in the world except about pleasure and honest business. Nobody couldn’t have told that he wasn’t just like them other young gentlemen with only their stock and station to think about, and a little fun at the races now and then. And what a risk he was running every minute of his life, he and all the rest of us. I wasn’t sorry to be out of the town again. There were lots of police, too. Suppose one of them was to say, “Richard Marston, I arrest you for --.” It hardly mattered what. I felt as if I should have tumbled down with sheer fright and cowardliness. It’s a queer thing you feel like that off and on. Other times a man has as much pluck in him as if his life was worth fighting for—which it isn’t.