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"Bogan's case was hushed up. The police told us to fix it up the best way we could. One of the jackaroos, who reckoned that Bogan had swindled him, was a gentleman, and he was the first to throw a quid in the Giraffe's hat when it went round for Bogan, but the other jackaroo was a cur: he said he wanted the money that Bogan had robbed him of.
Buckalong was a big freehold of some 80,000 acres, belonging to an absentee syndicate, and therefore run in most niggardly style. There was a manager on 200 pounds a year, Sandy M'Gregor to wit a hard-headed old Scotchman known as "four-eyed M'Gregor", because he wore spectacles. For assistants, he had half-a-dozen of us jackaroos and colonial-experiencers who got nothing a year, and earned it.
"Well, it seems he had, or else he used somebody else's brains; there's plenty of broken-down English gentlemen sharpers knocking about out back, you know, and Bogan might have been taking lessons from one. I don't know the rights of the case, it was hushed up, as you'll see presently; but, anyway, the jackaroos swore that Bogan had done 'em out of ten quid.
In my time there was as many live men in the bush who was supposed to be dead as there was dead men who was supposed to be alive though it's the other way about now what with so many jackaroos tramping about out back and getting lost in the dry country that they don't know anything about, and dying within a few yards of water sometimes.
They'd tramped a long hungry track and had only met a few wretched jackaroos, driven out of the cities by hard times, and tramping hopelessly west.
"Never mind that, Jack," said Tom Hall. "Harry wants to hear the yarn." "Well, to make it short, one of the jackaroos went to the police and Bogan cleared out. His character was pretty bad just then, so there was a piece of blue paper out for him.
When the shearers come every one is free to go inter the kitchin an' forage for hisself when he feels hungry so long as he pays for his drink. But the jackaroos can't pay for drinks, an' I have ter pay carriage on the flour an' tea an' sugar an' groceries an' it all tells up by the end o' the year.
An' three or four herrin'-gutted jackaroos comes along about dinner-time, when the table's set and the cookin' smellin' from the kichen, with their belts done up three holes, an' not the price of a feed on 'em. What's a man ter do? I've known what it is ter do a perish on the track meself. It's not the tucker I think on. I don't care a damn for that.
We had, in most instances, paid premiums to learn the noble art of squatting which now appears to me hardly worth studying, for so much depends on luck that a man with a head as long as a horse's has little better chance than the fool just imported. Besides the manager and the jackaroos, there were a few boundary riders to prowl round the fences of the vast paddocks.
Bogan went pretty free in Bourke after the shearing before last, and in the end he got mixed up in a very ugly-looking business: he was accused of doing two new-chum jackaroos out of their stuff by some sort of confidence trick." "Confidence trick," I said. "I'd never have thought that One-eyed Bogan had the brains to go in for that sort of thing."
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