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Three-score years of wise choice in the perpetually-recurring alternatives of life, had made the Golden Rule his spontaneous impulse; and now, though according to the shapen-in-iniquity theory, he must have had faults, no one in Riverina, below the degree of squatter, had proved sharp enough to detect them. It was considered bad form to express approval of anything he did. 'Stewart!
He said: "That policeman was once a shepherd of mine up in Riverina, but I see he don't know me now has grown too big for his boots. Cuts me dead, don't he? Ha! ha! ha! Well I never!" The stranger's name was Robinson; he had been selling some cattle to a neighbouring squatter, and was now on his way home.
"And what makes you think he has left Riverina for good?" asked the boundary man absently. "Catch him leaving Riverina. He knows he has a good character as a quiet, decent, innoffensive sundowner nobody's enemy but his own and experience has taught him that any kind of tolerable reputation is better than no reputation at all." "I don't mean him," said the boundary man constrainedly.
He has a stockingful of his own. It's a well-known fact that few carriers of Riverina cleared as much money as he did, and probably not one spent less. Stewart gave him £200 for his plant, and he never broke the cheque; posted it whole; Stewart himself took charge of it, as he told me in his gossiping way. Let Alf alone.
As I passed through the angle formed by the creek and the river, about half a mile from home, there came to my cars the cheery clink-clink of hobble-chains, the jangle of horse-bells, and the gleam of a dozen camp-fires. The shearing was done out in Riverina now, and the men were all going home.
So at dinner-time all the sheep in the sheds, put in overnight in anticipation of such a contingency, are reported shorn. All hands are then idle for the rest of the day. The shearers dress and avail themselves of various resources. Some go to look at their horses, now in clover, or its equivalent, in the Riverina graminetum. Some play cards, others wash or mend their clothes.
When he was not away in Riverina inspecting a flock of sheep, he was attending the Homebush Fat Stock Sales, rushing away out to Bourke, or tearing off down the Shoalhaven to buy some dairy heifers. He was a familiar figure at the Goulburn sale-yards every Wednesday, always going into town the day before and not returning till a day, and often two days, afterwards.
He was a sort of bush missionary up-country and out back in Australia, and before he died he was known from Riverina down south in New South Wales to away up through the Never-Never country in western Queensland. His past was a mystery, so, of course, there were all sorts of yarns about him.
In view of the soul-destroying ignorance which saturates society, it may be well to repeat that this central point of the universe, Riverina Proper, consists of a wide promontory of open and level plain, coming in from the south-west; broken, of course, by many pine ridges, clumps of red box, patches of scrub or timber, and the inevitable red gum flats which fringe the rivers.
He then directed Hyde to return to his sheep, and not let those blank blacks humbug him out of clothes any more. But nothing would induce the shepherd to remain another day; he forswore pastoral pursuits for the rest of his life. His courage had been tried and found wanting; he had been covered or, rather, uncovered with disgrace; and his dignity at least in Riverina was gone for ever.
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