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The horses were again hobbled to prevent them from straying, and then the men all settled down to breakfast. Vaughan usually took charge of the tea. Directly a quart-pot came to the boil, he tipped in some sugar and a pinch of tea, and moved the pot away from the fire. Sax superintended the tucker a slab of damper, or a Johnny-cake, and a chunk of salt meat for each man.
Then Bill would make a fire and boil his quart-pot, and roast a bit of mutton, while his horse had a mouthful of grass and a spell. "You remember Bill, Andy? Big dark man, and a joker of the loud sort. Never slept with a blanket over him always folded under him on the sand or grass.
"It goes in all right, but when it's cooked it won't come out, and you have to use the quart-pot for an egg-cup and make tea later on."
There is a positive felicity in this attitude of soul, comparing most favorably with the negative happiness of Nirvana. "Taking it easy, Tom?" conjectured a familiar voice. "No, Steve," I murmured, without even raising my eyes. "Tea in the quart-pot there. What are you after? Or is someone after you?" "Prospecting for a bite of grass." "Well, you've bottomed on the wash.
My missus is one of 'em, and she went bush with me when I'd nothing but a skeeto net and a quart-pot to share with her." Then, slapping the Maluka vigorously on the back, he told him he'd got some sense left. "You can't beat the little 'uns," he declared. "They're just the very thing."
He would naturally have thought that his former companions had either been killed or carried off, and as the sandstorm had covered up all tracks, he would not have known which way to follow them. Yarloo was squatting down, watching the roots drain the precious liquid into the quart-pot, when he heard the sound of hobble-rings striking one another as they hung from the neck of a horse.
He was very excited and only stayed long enough to put the quart-pot down on the ground, before he grabbed his weapons and disappeared into the scrub in the opposite direction, running as hard as he could, yet making no more noise than a cat. He had not returned the quart-pot exactly as he had found it. When he took it away, it was empty, but now it contained a sprig of sharply-pointed leaves.
Bardell, after enjoying, for many years, the esteem and confidence of his sovereign, as one of the guardians of his royal revenues, glided almost imperceptibly from the world, to seek elsewhere for that repose and peace which a custom-house can never afford." This was a pathetic description of the decease of Mr. Bardell, who had been knocked on the head with a quart-pot in a public-house cellar.
Sax and Vaughan at once saw their mistake and began to feel a little foolish because of the attitude they had tried to take up. Yarloo was evidently in grim earnest, for he repeated his former question: "S'pose me gib it quart-pot, you no drink um till to-morrow sunrise, eh?" "All right, Yarloo," agreed Sax.
No butter, of course. In Darwin, eight months before we had tasted our last butter on ship-board, for tinned butter, out-bush, in the tropics, is as palatable as castor oil. The tea had been made in the Maluka's quart-pot, our cups having been carried dangling from our saddles, in the approved manner of the bush-folk.
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