a decent-sized sheep property (and nothing is so expensive as a small one), you must have an overseer. Jack was not going to be penny-lunatic enough to be his own manager. And the right sort of man must be thoroughly up to all the latest lights and discoveries—not a working overseer, a rough, upper-shepherd sort of individual who counted sheep and helped to make bush-yards, but a fairly-educated modern species of centurion, whose intelligence and knowledge of stock (meaning sheep) were combined with commercial shrewdness and military power of combination. A man who could tell you in a few minutes how much a dam displacing several thousand cubic yards of earth ought to cost; how many men, in what number of days, should complete it; what provisions they ought to consume; and what wages, working reasonably, they ought to earn. A man full of the latest information as to spouts and soda, hot water and cold, with a natural turn heightened by experience, for determining the proportionate shades of fineness, density, freeness, and length of staple which, in combination, could with safety be taken as a model for the ideal merino. A man capable of sketching, with accuracy and forethought, the multifarious buildings, enclosures, and “improvements” necessary for a sheep-station in the first year of its existence, or of conducting the shearing to a successful issue without them at need.
For subalterns so variously gifted a demand had of late years grown up, owing to the large profits and wonderful development of the wool-producing interest. Of one of these highly-certificated “competition-wallahs” John Redgrave had determined to possess himself.
In Mr. Alexander M‘Nab, late of Strathallan, and formerly of Mount Gresham, he deemed that he had secured one of the most promising and highly-trained specimens of the type.
Sandy M‘Nab, as he was generally called, was about eight-and-twenty years of age, the son of a small but respectable farmer in the north of Ireland, in which condition of life he had acquired an early knowledge of stock, and an exceedingly sound rudimentary education. Far too ambitious to content himself with the limited programme of his forefathers, he had emigrated at sixteen, and worked his way up through the various stages of Australian bush apprenticeship, until he had reached his present grade, from which he trusted to pass into the ranks of the Squatocracy.
Having secured this valuable functionary, and covenanted to pay him at the rate of three hundred per annum, his first act was to despatch him, after a somewhat lengthy consultation, to inspect a small lot of ten thousand ewes, and on approval to hire men and bring them to Gondaree. It was necessary to lose no time; lambing would be on in June, in August shearing would be imminent. And the cattle would require to be off, and the sheep to be on, somewhere about April, if the first year’s operations were to have any chance of being financially successful.
The stores having been purchased, and Mr. M‘Nab with his letter of credit having been shipped, that alert lieutenant, with characteristic promptitude, reporting himself in readiness to embark at six hours’ notice, nothing remained but for Mr. Redgrave to “render himself” again at Gondaree in the capacity of purchaser.
He accordingly cleared out from the club with alarmingly stern self-denial, and, declining to risk his important existence in the Warroo mail, took the road in the light American waggon, with his spare horses and a couple of active lads accustomed to bush work.
After a journey of ordinary duration and absence of adventure, he once more sighted the unromantic but priceless waters of the Warroo, and beheld, with the eye of a proprietor, the “waste lands of the Crown”—most literally deserving that appellation—with the full right and title to which, as lessee, he stood invested.
Mr. Hawkesbury, in apparently the same Crimean shirt, with black and scarlet in alternate bars, stood smoking the small myall pipe in much the same attitude at the hut door as when Jack was borne off by two jibs and a bolter in the Warroo mail. Bob the cook, the dark hues of his apparel unrelieved by any shade of scarlet, appeared in his doorway with his hands in his pockets, but betraying unwonted interest as the cortège ascended the sandhill.
Ordering the boys to let go the horses, and to pitch the tent, which he had used on the journey, at a safe distance from the huts, Jack descended with a slight increase of dignity, as of one in authority, and greeted his predecessor.
“So you’ve bought us out,” he said, after inspecting carefully the letter which Jack handed to him, “and I’m ordered to deliver over the cattle, and the stores—there ain’t much of them—and the horses, and in fact the whole boiling. Well, I wish you luck, sir; the run’s a good ’un and no mistake, and the cattle are pretty fair, considering what’s been done for ’em. I suppose you won’t want me after you’ve taken delivery.”
“I shall be very glad if you will stay on,” quoth Jack, whose honest heart felt averse to ousting any man from a home, “until the cattle are cleared off; after that I shall have another gentleman in charge of the sheep and place generally. By staying two or three months you will oblige me, if it suits your arrangements.”
“All right,” answered Mr. Hawkesbury: “I know the cattle pretty well, and I dare say I can save as many as will cover my wages. I think you’ll find them muster up pretty close to their book-number.”
The signal shot of the campaign was fired, so to speak, upon the arrival of Mr. John Rooney, who came in a few days by appointment to take the first draft of the Gondaree fat cattle.
Jack was sitting outside of his tent, like an Arab sheik, and thinking regretfully of the flower-laden evening breeze which he had so often inhaled at the same hour at Marshmead, when a tall, soldierly-looking man rode up on a tired horse and jumped off with an unreserved exclamation of relief.
“Hallo! Rooney, is that you, in this uncivilized part of the world? Rather different from the old place, isn’t it! Come in, and I’ll have your horse hobbled out. You mustn’t expect stables or paddock or any other luxuries on the Warroo.”
“Sure, I know it well—my heavy curse on the same river; there never was any dacency next or anigh it. Didn’t they lend me a buck-jumper at Morahgil to-day, and the first place I found myself was on the broad of my back.”
“What a shame! Did they give you another horse?”
“They did not. I rode the same devil right through. It’s little bucking he feels inclined for now.”
“So I should think, after an eighty-mile ride. When did you leave?”
“About twelve o’clock. I was riding all night, and got there to breakfast. The last time I took cattle from Morahgil I happened to knock down the superintendent with a roping pole, maybe that’s why he treated me so—the mane blayguard.”
“Well, he ought not to have let such a trifle dwell on his mind, perhaps. But take a glass of grog, Rooney, while the fellow gets your tea.”
“Faith, and I will, Masther John; and it’s sound I’ll sleep to-night, fleas or no fleas. A man can’t do without it for more than three nights at a time.”
In a few days the muster was duly concluded, and three hundred prime bullocks secured in the ancient but massive stockyard. One of Rooney’s drovers and a couple of road hands had arrived the evening before, to whom they were intrusted. Rooney was too great a man to be able to afford the time to travel with his own cattle, and had, indeed, a score of other mobs to meet, despatch, buy, or sell, to arrive in as many different and distant parts of the colony.
“Well, Masther John,” said he, “I won’t deny that I haven’t lifted a finer mob this season. Isn’t it a murthering fine run, when it puts the beef on them big-boned divils like that? If ye had some of those roan steers we used to get at the Lost Waterhole Camp, sure they wouldn’t be able to see out of their eyes with fat. I’ll
