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The noise of the cattle became much louder, though the mob was not yet in sight. 'I wish I hadn't got to go off before the branding, he said. 'These Breeza Downs people always want to claim every cleanskin*. You might tell Ninnis and Moongarr Bill, Biddy, to keep a sharp look-out.
'You'll find opportunity enough for doing that if you ride back to Breeza Downs and lend the Specials your valuable assistance in protecting the sheep-owners against the Unionists. And I might remind you, as I reminded that damned Organiser who's fired my run, that there's a hundred pounds reward still waiting for anybody who catches the men that robbed my drays and killed my horses.
'The Pastoralist Executive at Tunumburra have asked us cattle-owners who are more likely to be let alone than the sheep-men, to help in garrisoning the sheep-stations; and I've promised to ride over to Breeza Downs to-morrow and do my share in protecting the place. Harris and I are going together. Lady Bridge seemed more interested in blowing smoke-rings than in her husband's news.
All night he tended her, fighting the fever as he had fought the fire at Breeza Downs, plying her with continued fomentations, dosing her with quinine, laudanum and the various medicines he had found efficacious. For never was a better doctor for malarial fever than Colin McKeith he had had so much experience of it.
Maule's impressions of Tunumburra where he had met McKeith in the township hotel, and the two had apparently, in the usual Bush fashion, got on intimate terms the rumours of an armed camp of Unionists, and the expected conflict between them and the sheep owners and free shearers at Breeza Downs, whither the Government specials were bound.
'You've got your warrant, I suppose, he asked incidentally. The Police Sergeant looked a little uncomfortable. 'Well, fact is, I wouldn't waste time going back to Breeza Downs head-station for that. Mr McKeith's there and they had a bit of an alarm. Those Unionist skunks tried to fire the shed one night, but no particular damage was done, and they've dispersed.
By one of those strange links of association, which at moments of unexpected crisis bring back things impersonal, unconnected, the sound of his own laugh recalled the rattle of earth, upon the dry outside of a sheet of bark in which, during one of their boundary rides at Breeza Downs lately, they had wrapped for burial the body of a shepherd found dead in the bush.
Here was Harris taking a legitimized revenge on Wombo, and doubtless also on herself. Clearly, he had been patrolling the Breeza Downs boundaries in search of Unionist incendiaries, and seizing Wombo instead, had acted promptly without waiting for a warrant or consulting McKeith. Wombo would be charged at the township with theft of the gun and murder of Oola's husband.
Letting her mind drift along side-tracks, she resented now there having come no suggestion from the Breeza Downs women that she should accompany her husband and share the benefits of police protection, or which appealed to her far more the excitement of what might be going on there. Of course, though, there was nothing for her to be nervous about here she wished there might have been.
The same boat that brought up the specials brought a hundred or more free labourers, and they're on their way up to the different sheep-stations along the river a lot of them for Breeza Downs, where Windeatt has begun shearing.
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