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Lose your temper, and be over particular: off go Billy May, Abraham Lawson, and half-a-dozen of your best men, making a weekly difference of perhaps two or three thousand sheep for the remainder of the shearing. Can you not replace them? Not so! Every shed in Riverina will be hard at work during this present month of September and for every hour of October.
Thompson mounted his horse and cantered after, with the heavy coil of rope across the front of his saddle. I accompanied him. At the very extremity of the clump, and not fifty yards from the house, was one of those bottomless quagmires too common in Riverina.
He entered the tent, and spoke to the sleeper, with suppressed eagerness in his voice. The watch below attired himself and came forth; then followed a formal introduction; and in another couple of hours such was the clearness and receptivity of these young men's minds I had made them acquainted with all I knew of the geology of Upper Riverina.
I knew him well, for we had been partners in dogflesh and colleagues in larceny when we were, as poets feign, nearer to heaven than in maturer life. And, wide as Riverina is, we often encountered fortuitously, and were always glad to fraternise. Physically, Thompson was tall and lazy, as bullock drivers ought to be.
"Palmam qui meruit ferat," responded Willoughby, instantly recovering his temper. "Smoker Nelson dem your skins, come up once more!" Dixon's bullocks were exceptionally docile, for that uncultivated animal was one of the most humane and skilful drivers in Riverina; therefore, about twenty-five minutes sufficed to place his team in readiness for a start.
"Riverina it is then," Bradby agreed with a laugh. "All places are the same to me. I've no more liking for one than for another." So it came about that the valley faded away into the dim distance south of them, and presently they were toiling across the barrier of mountains that cuts Northern Victoria off from the rest of the State. The tragedy happened that evening.
"And you admit that you knew Alexander quite well out there?" "Most intimately, in the Riverina, some fifteen or twenty years ago; he was on my station as almost everything a gentleman could be, up to overseer; and by that time he was half a son to me, and half a younger brother." "But no relation, as a matter of fact?" "None whatever, but my very familiar friend, as I have already told you."
A few days showery weather having, therefore, wellnigh driven our shearers to desperation, out comes the sun in all his glory. He is never far away or very faint in Riverina.
As with Antony, 'tis one of those odd tricks that sorrow shoots out of the mind." There was a few minutes' silence. I was thinking of the Christian squatter, and so, no doubt, was many another wanderer at the same moment. "But he'll come back to Riverina when he delivers the loading?" suggested the boundary man. "Who?" "This Alf Morris." "I don't think so. I know he does n't intend it."
"Not if I could play any better instrument such as the violin, or the concertina; though I should in any case avoid the piano, for fear of flattening the ends of my fingers. Still, the jews-harp is a jews-harp; and this is the very best I could find in the market. Humble as it looks, and humble as it undeniably is, it has sounded in every nook and corner of Riverina.
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