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The gins and the black boys caught fresh mounts out of these and started away, driving some fifty head of cattle selected from a mob that made their headquarters within a few miles of the house. Most of them were old stagers, and strung away in the evening quite tranquilly, while the blacks, always smoking, rode listlessly after. Considine produced two stockwhips, and gave one to Charlie.
Firing over their heads had no effect, nor threats of a bayonet charge, but when two Australian bushmen began plying stockwhips, those niggers made themselves scarcer than mice on the smell of a cat. As a good manipulator of the stockwhip can pull the cork from a bottle, maybe these plotters were afraid of having their guilty secrets picked from them.
A cool, shady hall, hung round with coats, hats, stockwhips; a gun in the corner, and on a slab, the most beautiful nosegay you can imagine. Remarkable that for a bachelor's establishment; but there is no time to think about it, for a tall, comfortable-looking housekeeper, whom Sam has never seen before, comes in from the kitchen and curtseys. "Captain Brentwood not at home, is he?" said Sam.
Then comes a tussle to get that particular beast out of the yard while the others shall be kept in. Often, in spite of the dreaded stockwhips, one of the guardians of the slip-panels gets knocked over, and then away goes the mob of terrified beasts, tearing along the beach, and giving no end of trouble to get them back again.
All the men were armed with stockwhips, the handles of which are eighteen inches long, and the lash nine feet, and they move about among the ranks, bringing refractory animals back into order, while the dogs, the light cavalry of the regiment, preserved discipline in the wings. The travelers were struck with the admirable arrangement of the drove.
'Twas merry 'mid the backwoods, when we spied the station roofs, To wheel the wild-scrub cattle at the yard, With a running fire of stockwhips and a fiery run of hoofs; Oh! the hardest day was never then too hard.
From Six Mile Point, Flathouse, Nine Mile Stone follow the footpeople with knotty sticks, hayforks, salmongaffs, lassos, flockmasters with stockwhips, bearbaiters with tomtoms, toreadors with bullswords, greynegroes waving torches. The crowd bawls of dicers, crown and anchor players, thimbleriggers, broadsmen. THE CROWD: Card of the races. Racing card! Ten to one the field! Tommy on the clay here!
"Each of us is to take a revolver," Jim said; "there are five altogether, and the men who haven't got them will have to use their stockwhips as signals if they find anything. Three shots to be fired in the air if help is wanted.
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