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I could see them quite distinctly as, no doubt, they could see me; but we kept a decorous silence until the Fizzer came in, then at the Fizzer's shout the walls of Jericho toppled down. "The missus sick!" I heard him shout. "Thought she looked in prime condition at the Springs." "So I am now," I called; and then the Fizzer and I held an animated conversation through the walls.
"A bit off," he calls that stage, with a school-boy shrug of his shoulders; but at Renner's Springs, twenty miles farther on, the shoulders set square, and the man comes to the surface. The dice-throwing begins there, and the stakes are high a man's life against a man's judgment. Some people speak of the Fizzer's luck, and say he'll pull through, if any one can.
Maybe the Fizzer feels "a bit knocked out with the sun," and the water for his perishing horses ninety feet below the surface; or "things go wrong" with the old windlass, and everything depends on the Fizzer's ingenuity. The odds are very uneven when this happens a man's ingenuity against a man's life, and death playing with loaded dice.
"Jones travelling with cattle for Wave Will," reads the Department; and that gossiping friendly wire reporting Jones as "just leaving the Powell," the letter lies in the Fizzer's loose-bag until he runs into Jones's mob; or a mail coming in for Jones, Victoria River, when this Jones is on the point of sailing for a trip south, his mail is delivered on shipboard; and as the Department goes on with its work, letters for east go west, and for west go south in mail-bags, loose-bags, travellers' pockets or per black boy each one direct to the bush-folk as a migrating bird to its destination.
But then supper came every night and the Fizzer once in forty-two. At the first sound of voices, Cheon bustled in. After supper, as we went for our evening stroll, we stayed for a little while where the men were lounging, and after a general interchange of news the Fizzer's turn came. News! He had said he had stacks of it, and he now bubbled over with it.
"Real fine old water too," the Fizzer shouts in delight, as he tells his tale. "Kept in the cellar for our special use. Don't indulge in it much myself. Might spoil my palate for newer stuff, so I carry enough for the whole trip from Renner's." If the Downs have left deep lines on the Fizzer's face, they have left none in his heart. Yet at that well the dice-throwing goes on just the same.
Already it had ridden a couple of hundred miles, with its baby hands playing with the reins, and before it reached home again another five hundred would be added to the two hundred. Seven hundred miles on horse back in a few weeks, at one year old, compares favourably with one of the Fizzer's trips. But it is thus the bush develops her Fizzers.
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