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Updated: June 29, 2025
Less than a quarter of a mile from the station she reined in her horse. Why should she bother about it? she asked herself angrily. Was she going to make herself the laughing-stock of the place? Was she going to show to all Birralong the truth of her feelings for Tony?
Nearer inspection left the solitude untouched, but robbed the picture of all else. Once, tradition averred, a hardy, daring denizen of Birralong had ventured out to the Three-mile for a yarn and a smoke with Slaughter.
On the other hand, if Bobby came with them, he might learn a lot about what was said around Birralong on the subject of Ailleen and Dickson, and with that in his mind Tony gave his consent.
I've got eyes, and I uses them." It was Nuggan's pride to think that Birralong had never been in want of any information on any subject after reference had been made to him. It was therefore bitter to hear his latest version of the last local problem airily dismissed as a fairy tale. "You've got no call to criticize," he went on, as Tony did not answer.
And yet Tony, not apparently on the spur of the moment, but calmly and with his eyes open, had thrown in his lot with the three fossickers, and had gone off without scarcely a word to any one. Why, Birralong collectively did not know, for there had not been time as yet for an assemblage to take place on the verandah of Marmot's store. The riddle would not long remain unsolved when it had.
"He's the dead spit of his father, if you want to know," Barber answered savagely; and Tap again slunk back. When Bobby Murray rode from Birralong with a couple of months' supply of stores for the mining camp, he found that during his brief absence the others had made great progress in their work.
As the finish drew near, the men composing the audience scarcely breathed as Tony played his strokes, until their nerves were strained and their muscles quivered as he stood with an unfinished break at two points from home, and his opponent ten behind. It was an easy shot, so easy that Birralong almost cheered, but caught its breath in a gasp, lest it should put the champion off his stroke.
Later, when rumour had it that the Lady of Barellan had claimed that Tony and not Dickson must be her son, Birralong was prepared to support her, more especially when it was known that Ailleen had never wavered in her allegiance to the champion of the district.
He had always held the proud position of "ringer" in the shearing-sheds of the stations round Birralong, beating all comers by never having a tally of less than a hundred sheep shorn a day, and that with the old-fashioned hand-shears.
With the regularity of the date itself the letter appeared, bearing the Sydney postmark on the cover, and as regularly Slaughter allowed it to rest a few days at the store, as though he knew both the mental anxiety it caused the habitués of the verandah as they tried to worry out some feasible explanation of its appearance, and the moral struggle its presence caused Marmot, who, as postmaster, felt bound by every tie of duty to hold it inviolate for the addressee, while, as the centre of Birralong gossip, he yearned to fathom the secret of its source, even at the cost of opening it.
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