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Finally every one was ready to mount, and then we and the drovers exchanged polite farewells and parted, seller and buyer each confident that he knew more about the cash for that cheque than the other. No doubt the day came when those drovers ceased to marvel at the Maluka's simple trust.
Though the girl tenderly loved animals, and shrank from the sight of suffering, she forced herself to see the killing, that she might know how to depict the death agony on canvas. Though obliged to mingle more or less with drovers and butchers, no indignity was ever offered her.
At sun-up, the drovers, still sweetly smiling, announced that two bullocks had strayed during some one's watch. Not in theirs, they hastened to assure us, when Dan sniffed scornfully in the background.
We had a white horse in one window, and a brown horse in the other, to announce to the drovers that we supplied horse-medicines. And we had all the patent medicines in the known world, even to the "all-sufficient medicine for mankind" of Mr Enouy; having which, I wondered, on my first arrival, why we troubled ourselves about any others.
Early in June the herd began to assume its required numbers. George Edwards returned, and we naturally became bunkies, sharing our blankets and having the same guard on night-herd. The drovers encouraged all the men employed to bring along their firearms, and when we were ready to start the camp looked like an arsenal.
It was, it is true, the custom for landed proprietors, as well as their tenantry, to deal in the trade of grazing and selling cattle. In those days, no Lowlanders, nor any English drovers, had the audacity to enter the Highlands.
The news will speedily spread that two men of the appearance of drovers have been taken on suspicion of being emissaries from Scotland, and it will cause no little uneasiness among all those on whom we have called. They cannot tell whether any papers have been found upon us, nor what we may reveal to save ourselves, so they will have a strong interest in getting us free if possible."
Meantime two other guests had arrived, a couple of drovers from North Carolina, who brought into the circle by this time a wood-fire had been kindled in the sitting-room, which contained a bed, an almanac, and some old copies of a newspaper a rich flavor of cattle, and talk of the price of steers. As to politics, although a presidential campaign was raging, there was scarcely an echo of it here.
Bent over his unconscionable feet, he stole away amongst the trees, and a few minutes later Rogers moved oft slowly in another direction, towards the lights of the Drovers' Arms. His thoughts as he strolled were not very favourable to his fellow criminal. 'Let me once get my hands on that gold, he muttered, 'an' I'll bolt for 'Frisco.
The guard had just finished an account of a desperate fight which had happened at one of the fairs between the drovers and the farmers with their whips, and the boys with cricket-bats and wickets, which arose out of a playful but objectionable practice of the boys going round to the public-houses and taking the linch-pins out of the wheels of the gigs, and was moralizing upon the way in which the Doctor, "a terrible stern man he'd heard tell," had come down upon several of the performers, "sending three on 'em off next morning in a po-shay with a parish constable," when they turned a corner and neared the milestone, the third from Rugby.
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