United States or Cayman Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Anyway, Moongarr Bill is a match for them.... And you'll just mind the lot of you that it's my orders to stockwhip blacks off the place, and that if any Unionist delegates show their faces through the sliprails they're not allowed to stop five minutes inside the paddock fence.
There is more trouble about a cow that is lost, and hasn't been milked for two days. The boy takes the cows up to the paddock sliprails and lets the top rail down: the lower rail fits rather tightly and some exertion is required to free it, so he makes the animals jump that one. Then he "poddies"-hand-feeds the calves which have been weaned too early.
The grass had grown up round the sliprails; it was as strange and forsaken-looking as if it belonged to a deserted station. As we rode up a man comes out from an angle of the fence and gives a whistle. We knew, almost without looking, that it was Warrigal. He'd come there to meet Starlight and take him round some other way.
Where he sat, the garden fence, overgrown with withered passion vines, bounded his vision, and had anybody ridden or driven up the hill through the lower sliprails, he would not have seen them, probably would not have heard them. For there were no longer dogs, black boys, Chinamen or station hands to voice intimation of a new arrival. All the old sounds of evening activity were hushed.
They seemed drunk with fatigue, and could scarcely sit their horses. When they dismounted they could hardly stand. Their feeble COO-EES at the sliprails brought out Ninnis, who had been sent home in the afternoon and had been taking some well-earned repose so as to be ready for the next shift happily not required.
I wish I could have got at him. 'I see the swell chap first him as made out he was the owner, and gammoned all the Adelaide gentlemen so neat. There was a half-caste chap with him as followed him about everywhere; then there was another man as didn't talk much, but seemed, by letting down sliprails and what not, to be in it.
An', arter that, she 'pounded some of our bullicks that got into her lucerne paddick one night when we was on the spree in Mudgee, an' put heavy damages on 'em. She'd left the sliprails down on purpose, I believe. She talked of puttin' the police onter us, jest as if we was a sly-grog shop.
Certain it is that, even as she spoke, a rider on a sweating horse was seen coming at full speed up the flat; he put his horse over the sliprails that led into the house paddock without any hesitation, and came on at a swinging gallop. "What is this?" said Ellen Harriott, "more trouble? It is only trouble that comes so fast. Why, it is one of Red Mick's nephews!"
Then came the critical time at the Lower Sliprails. The shadows from the setting sun lengthened quickly on the siding, and then the sun slipped out of sight over a "saddle" in the ridges, and all was soon dusk save the sunlit peaks of the Blue Mountains away to the east over the sweeps of blue-grey bush. "Ah, well! Mary," said Harry, "I must make a start now."
You're always mistaking people. It might have been someone else." "I know Harry Dale on horseback two miles off!" roared Uncle Abel. "And I knowed her by her cape." It was Mary's turn to gasp and stare at Uncle Abel. "Uncle Abel," she managed to say, "Uncle Abel! Wasn't it at our Lower Sliprails you saw them and not Buckolts' Gate?" "Well!" bellowed Uncle Abel.