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Updated: May 28, 2025
"My God! do look who's here!" he exclaimed facetiously, and then, rapidly, without giving me room for a biting word in return, "no, there's no use now, my boy ... we took on all the cattlemen we needed by ten o'clock this morning." I walked away, disconsolate. I bore on my back my swagman's blanket.
Sky like a wet, grey blanket; plains like dead seas, save for the tufts of coarse grass sticking up out of the water; scrub indescribably dismal everything damp, dark, and unspeakably dreary. Somewhere along here we saw a swagman's camp a square of calico stretched across a horizontal stick, some rags steaming on another stick in front of a fire, and two billies to the leeward of the blaze.
He lost all his things sometimes even his clothes; but he never lost a pigskin bag which contained his surgical instruments and papers. Except once; then he gave the blacks 5 Pounds to find it for him. His patients included all, from the big squatter to Black Jimmy; and he rode as far and fast to a squatter's home as to a swagman's camp.
"A Swagman's Rest?" "Yes. Right here on this very God-forsaken spot. I'd build a Swagman's Rest and call it the Lost Souls' Hotel, or the Sundowners' Arms, or the Half-way House to , or some such name that would take the bushmen's fancy.
These faithful animals fraternised with Pup, while I prospected the premises thoroughly, but without finding even an empty corn-sack, or a dry barrel with both ends out. In making my way back to the road, I noticed, far away in the river timber, the red light of a camp-fire. This was the best sight I had seen since sunset. Some swagman's camp, beyond doubt.
He looked pleadingly at his little mistress across the swagman's trouser-leg. Norah struck her saddle sharply with her whip. "Here, sir! drop it!" Puck dropped it reluctantly, and came across to Bobs, his head hanging. The swagman sat down on the ground and nursed his leg. "That served you right," Norah said, with judicial severity. "You hadn't any business to grab my watch.
And still he went doggedly on, with the ghastly daylight on him like a swagman's ghost out late. And a mongrel followed faithfully all the time unnoticed, and wondering, perhaps, at his master. "What was yer doin' to that girl yesterday?" asked Danny of Yankee Jack next evening, as they camped on the far side of the plain. "What was you chaps sayin' to Alice?
As I sat up I caught sight of a swagman coming along the white, dusty road from the direction of the bridge, where the cleared road ran across west and on, a hundred and thirty miles, through the barren, broiling mulga scrubs, to Hungerford, on the border of Sheol. I knew that swagman's walk.
And that reminded him. "Do you know what I'd do, Harry," he said, "if I won Tattersall's big sweep, or was to come into fifty or a hundred thousand pounds, or, better still, a million?" "Nothing I suppose," I said, "except to get away to Sydney or some cooler place than this." "I'll tell you what I'd do," said Mitchell, talking round his pipe. "I'd build a Swagman's Rest right here."
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