A boding gloom seemed to fall suddenly like a pall from the branches of the sighing, whispering, sad-voiced water-oaks, as they followed the winding track which led along the bank of the tiny streamlet to the small alluvial flat, upon which lay two—pah, what shall I say?—two figures covered with rugs, which may or may not have exhibited the human outline. ‘They lay as dead men only lie.’ A swarm of flies arose at the lifting of the coverings, and a terrible and intolerable odour diffused itself around. ‘Great God!’ cried Ernest, ‘are these repulsive, fast-decaying masses of corruption all that are left of the high-hearted, gallant fellows I saw ride out of Turonia so short a while ago? Poor human nature, upon ever so slight summons, and must we come to this! Accursed be the greed of the yellow gold which brought our brother men to so hideous an ending.’

As these reflections flowed from the sympathetic heart of Ernest Neuchamp with a natural force that could not be controlled, he turned in time to notice that Mr. Merlin had directed the coverings to be removed from the corpses, and had instituted, in spite of their revolting condition after forty-eight hours’ exposure to a burning sun, a thorough and searching examination.

One man, Carroll, lay on his side with face half upturned and arm outstretched, in the hand of which was grasped a revolver with a barrel discharged. An expression of defiance was still legibly imprinted upon the features—a bullet wound through the centre of the forehead had without doubt been the cause of death. The strong man had fallen prone, as if struck by lightning, and for ever, ever more the wondrous infinitely complicated machine was arrested. The soul had passed into the region of endless life, death, sleep, sorrow, joy!

‘This man has been shot from the front, Greffham, shouldn’t you say?’ pronounced the clear, incisive tones of Mr. Merlin. ‘He may or may not have been standing up to his assassin. If so, it was a species of duel, and the best shot and quickest had it. If you wouldn’t care about standing there, now, by that oak-tree, raise your arm, so; by Jove, you would be just in the position that the man must been in that dropped the poor sergeant.’

‘Just the sort of thing that Greffham would have gone in for if he was hard up,’ said Mr. Bright, chuckling. He was reckless as to the flavour of his jests, far from particular if only they were ‘hot’ enough.

‘You are always thinking of that gold-buyer of yours that was shot, Bright,’ said Greffham, wincing uneasily, though, under the concentrated gaze of three remarkably steady pairs of eyes,—Merlin’s, Bright’s, and Markham’s. ‘It’s my belief that Halliday shot himself; he was something like you, in always carrying half a bushel of revolvers, and, like your battery, it went off accidentally sometimes.’

‘There’s a boot mark in the sand underneath that oak-tree,’ said Markham, with great suavity; ‘it’s the very model of your track, Mr. Greffham, that you made there. Excuse me, sir.’

‘I suppose other people wear boots as well as I,’ he said. ‘Bushmen and diggers are deuced rough, and all that, but they haven’t come to going barefoot yet.’

‘Nor wearing French boots with very narrow heels,’ said Markham, as he measured the imprint of the said bottine with a small pocket rule. ‘However, boots don’t go for much, unless corroborated.’ With this sapient speech Mr. Markham closed his remarks and apparently lost interest in the scene.

‘Now this poor fellow,’ interpolated Mr. Merlin, lifting up the trooper’s face, and parting the thickly clustering brown curls, ‘has been shot from behind. Here’s the little hole through the back of his head, and the pistol must have been pretty close, as the powder has burned one side of it considerably. He has simply fallen over on his face, and there was an end of him. Here you can see where the valise containing the gold and notes was unstrapped from Sergeant Carroll’s saddle. The saddles had been put back to back on the ground. One carbine is here still, and one is missing.’

‘By Jove!’ said Greffham, ‘you know everything, Merlin. You’re like the man in the Arabian Nights who described the camel that had passed the day before,—lame, blind of an eye, having lost two front teeth, and loaded half with rice and half with dates, and yet never saw him at all. You’re a wonderful fellow! You’re so devilish sharp.‘

‘And you’re a more wonderful fellow; you’re so devilish cool,’ said Merlin. ‘I do know a thing or two, and, upon my soul, I have need—par exemple, old fellow—it was devilish good-natured of you to come out all the way with us, but it has just occurred to me that you seem to have seen these poor fellows so very lately, just before they were rubbed out, that, quite as a matter of form, I must trouble you to explain your proceedings on that day to the authorities. Lionel Greffham!‘ continued he, in a voice which, raised and vibrating, was so utterly changed that Ernest Neuchamp did not know it as that of this smiling satirist with his society talk and ready rapier of repartee, ‘I arrest you on suspicion of murder and robbery.’

Perhaps the least astonished and agitated individual of the company was the accused himself. He swung round on one heel as Merlin laid a sinewy grasp upon his shoulder, and, drawing a small foreign-looking revolver from his breast, aimed fair at the heart of his quondam companion. At the same moment he was covered by the weapons of Markham, the troopers, and of Mr. Bright, who held straight for his former acquaintance with unmistakable aim and determination.

‘It’s no use, Mr. Greffham,’ said Markham, ‘I made your popgun safe at the inn last night. It would never have done to leave you the chance of giving us “Squirt Street.” It won’t pop if you pull the trigger for a week. Say you could drop Mr. Merlin, why we can “twice” you over and over.‘

Mr. Merlin’s clear gray eyes glittered with unwonted excitement. He also held a revolver in his right hand. ‘My dear fellow,’ he said, ‘all excitement is bad form. You must be aware that you are only arrested on suspicion. Nothing may turn up to implicate you any more than Bright there, but in all these cases a man in my position has a duty to perform, and you know well I should do mine if you were my own brother, or the best friend I had in the world.’

By this time Greffham had recovered his usual composure. ‘I don’t doubt that for one moment, Merlin,’ he said, with sardonic emphasis. ‘I think you have such a talent in that line that you would rather enjoy “running in” your own father. However, business is business. You’ve thrown down your card, and as you seem to hold all the trumps at present, you must have the odd trick.‘

‘Precisely, precisely,’ assented Mr. Merlin; ‘I always thought you a devilish sensible fellow. So now we must make a start for home. I am afraid that I must—just as a matter of form, you know—Markham.‘

That wary official moved forward, and noticing, without seeing, as it were, that his superior officer still held his revolver ready for immediate use, produced a pair of handcuffs, and with the ease and quickness of long experience slipped them over the wrists of him who was doomed never to sleep unfettered more.

The party, now become a procession, moved quietly homeward to Turonia. They halted at the inn, the landlord of which was considerably surprised at seeing the great Mr. Greffham’s hands closed before him, while a trooper led his horse by a rein. Up to this period he had not the smallest suspicion that the lavish swell, who, like all men who affected wholesale piracy, was ‘quite the gentleman’ in the matter of free spending of money, could be possibly mixed up with a cold-blooded murder and an extensive robbery. But now his intellect being permitted freedom, he remembered that Mr. Greffham had called at his inn at no long time after the troopers, one of whom he knew well, and furthermore that he remembered hearing a shot at a great distance. It might have been a revolver. He could not say. It was firearms of some sort. Might have been two shots. Saw nothing.

Ernest observed that Markham noted down in a large pocket-book the exact minute and hour of the faint report of firearms to which the innkeeper testified, the exact time at which the troopers were last seen alive by him, and the time of the arrival of Greffham; and those minor matters being definitely settled, Mr. Merlin conducting the interrogation in a very different voice from his society one, the subdued, if not noticeably saddened procession took the road for Turonia. It was late when they reached that somewhat peculiar settlement, but the streets were profusely lighted, busy, and more thronged than at noonday. When the modern inland Australian substitute for ‘a plump of spears beneath a pennon gay’ rode straight for the camp, the foremost trooper leading the horse of a manacled prisoner, whom many keen eyes at once recognised as Lionel Greffham, a low but savage murmur came from the dense and excited crowd. Whatever interest or enthusiasm might have been evoked in Mr. Neuchamp’s breast by the wonders and novelties of the great goldfield and its heterogeneous, picturesque population, had now collapsed. A feeling of doubt and horror succeeded. A tinge of blood, a brooding death-shadow, was over the splendour and the glamour of the enormous treasure-pile which now in ceaseless, countless profusion seemed daily won from the reluctant earth. He heard to his great satisfaction that Mr. Banks and his party had arrived; that Levison’s manager, a man of boundless experience in stock, more particularly cattle, was already hard at work at the muster, and that every day an increasing number of the female cattle destined for Rainbar was drafted and delivered to the ‘tailing mob’ in Mr. Banks’s charge.

Satisfying himself by inspection that the very ordinary routine work of mustering a herd, when the mere numbers and sex were alone concerned, and where no battles had to be fought over individuals of disputed age, size, or quality, could be very safely delegated to subordinates, Ernest rode over to Branksome Hall for a farewell visit.

There he found himself an object of interest and friendly welcome, somewhat heightened by his late adventurous journey in company with Mr. Merlin. The young ladies were deeply shocked at the terrible finale to their acquaintance, slight as it had ever been, with the unhappy man who was now a prisoner and presumably a felon, where once he had shone a star of the first magnitude. Mr. Branksome was sufficiently a man of the world to have always distrusted the handsome and unscrupulous adventurer. Beyond a formal call he had never been encouraged to see much of the interior of the Hall.

‘Terrible affair this, Neuchamp,’ said the host, as the whole party sat in the drawing-room before that evening summons had sounded which few are sufficiently philosophical or sympathetic to decline. ‘I never had a high opinion of Greffham—always distrusted the man, but as to his murdering a couple of poor devils of troopers for the sake of a couple of thousand ounces of gold, why, I should as soon have expected him to have dropped strychnine into one’s soup-plate at the Occidental at lunch.‘

‘Never fancied him,’ said the Colonel; ‘deuced well-dressed, well-set-up fellow; been in a cavalry regiment. But he had a cold-blooded, hard way of looking at one—bad eye too, cruel, devilish cruel—that man has taken life before, I swear—know the expression well, killing is not the fashion much in this country, too young yet—life too valuable—you don’t know the signs of it.‘

‘I can hardly hear to speak of it,’ said the eldest Miss Branksome. ‘To think that any one of education and gentleman-like habit, for he was a gentleman as far as manner, appearance, every outward observance can make one, should have descended so low, gone down into the very pit of murder and theft, for what? What could have driven him to the edge of such a precipice? Surely there must be demons and fiends who have power over men’s souls.’

‘Extravagance, gambling, the habit of spending money without working for it,’ said her father. ‘Debt in one shape or other is one of the demons allotted to torment mortality in this period of the world’s history. The demoniac of the age is the man who has bills or liabilities coming due without the means to meet them. He may appear ordinarily clothed and in his right mind, but, after some torturing hour, it may be related of him, as of this unhappy wretch, the evil “spirit tare him,” and he “wallowed foaming.’”

‘It seems a wonderful thing that he didn’t apply to some of his friends, doesn’t it?’ queried Mr. Neuchamp. ‘He seemed to have plenty of them. Even if he had not been completely put right they could surely have given him enough to secure breathing time; but murder, robbery, pah! it is purely incredible to me, predicated of a man that we have all met more or less in habits of intimacy.’

‘Nothing so wonderful about that,’ said the Colonel; ‘deuced cool, clever adventurer, you know, without one morsel of feeling in favour of what some people call principle, humanity, or honesty. Seen the style before. Big loot of any kind is the thing to bring out such a man in real form. Known fellows in Indian service too, by gad, who would kill a prisoner in cold blood or burn half a village for the sake of a few diamonds or a hoard of gold mohurs.’

‘It’s positively awful, dreadful, miserable,’ said the youngest Miss Branksome. ‘I shall dream of nothing else for a month, I know. Papa, isn’t that the dinner bell? Now there’s a forfeit if anybody says a word about gold or murder or anything belonging to Turonia again this evening. We shall be quite demoralised with all this FouchÉ business. There’s Mr. Bright begins to look as if he was going to act upon “information received” every time I see him.‘

The inmates of that pleasant home finished the evening without overt allusion to the awful tragedy which had overshadowed their neighbourhood, and brought dishonour and death, rare visitors ere this, even to the reckless, toiling, far-gathered goldfields community. But in every heart, from time to time, in the pause of the conversation, in the silence of the night hour, arose the dimly-outlined picture of the lonely flat where the sighing oaks whispered and faintly wailed over two motionless figures, dread and silent, among the thick, dry, waving grass. On the reverse shadow-tracery a well-known figure, with an evil light in the cold blue eyes, a hellish sneer on the short, curved lip, was pacing the gloomy flags of a felon’s cell!

Though Mr. Neuchamp on the morrow parted with great regret from his kind friends of Branksome Hall, he could not conceal from himself that Turonia, under the circumstances, would be the last place in which he should choose to linger. A shadow of gloom, a savour of blood, was with the whole place and surroundings in his eyes, and though the streets still trembled as before under the tread of an army of Britain’s best workers, and though at night there was store of pleasant society and excitement, all interest in the gold city had marvellously abated. Mr. Neuchamp was impatient until his moving contingent should be ready for the road, and to that end betook himself with grateful energy to the distraction of mustering the herd.

With the efficient aid of Mr. Cottonbush, the much-experienced overseer deputed by Mr. Levison to carry out this particular duty, the whole herd was mustered and drafted with an economy of time and completeness of result very astonishing to Ernest.

His part was confined to giving Mr. Cottonbush a receipt for nineteen hundred and seventy head of female cattle of all sorts, sizes, and ages, and having divided the said cows and heifers into two droves, an immediate departure was made for Rainbar. Mr. Banks was permitted to examine and explore the wonders of Turonia for the space of one day only; and after bidding farewell to his friends at the camp and at Branksome Hall, Mr. Neuchamp rejoined his party, manfully performing his share of road work until, after many a weary week’s travelling and monotonous daily drudgery, they struck the river within a day’s ride of Rainbar.

When Mr. Neuchamp once more alighted at the door of his cottage he felt the pleasurable glow which is rarely absent from the mind of any healthily constituted man returning after absence to his home.

‘Home, sweet home!’ hummed Mr. Neuchamp. ‘I don’t know whether the time-honoured words strictly apply to Rainbar, but I’m glad to see the old place again. The grass looks none too fresh, though, as if they had had little or no rain. It would have been inspiriting to have seen a little green after all the terrible dry weather we have had. I suppose these two thousand new cattle will be able to keep alive. As for paying for them, if I had not Levison’s advice and guarantee to depend upon, I should utterly despair of it.’

He had finished his evening meal when Mr. Jack Windsor was announced, that gentleman having been all day ‘out back,’ and having but just returned. He was unaffectedly glad to see Ernest, and gave a favourable account of the stock and station matters generally.

‘I don’t say as we’ve had much of a break-up of the dry time,’ he said, ‘but the rains come very stiddy and soaking every now and then. Besides, there’s been one or two fine thunderstorms out back, where I’ve been to-day. The feed’s a deal better than any I see in here. We’re a-getting on towards the end of the autumn now, and we might have a regular wet season, that will just crown us. I suppose the store cattle is all right.’

‘In very fair strength and spirits, Jack. Mr. Banks thought that they would do splendidly here before spring, if there was any rain at all.’

‘If it wasn’t for these confounded cockies,’ said Mr. Windsor, ‘that big flat would be a first-rate place to break ‘em into, while they’ll have to be at the water every day. But it’s no use thinking of it. I’ve had a deal of bother with ‘em as it is; them boys are always cutting about the run on horseback, looking for a calf, or a colt, or something. I’d give a tenner out of my own pocket they was all out of that and back at Bowning or some other stringy-bark hole as is fit for ‘em.’

Three days had elapsed since this conversation, when the two large droves of patient, slow-moving cattle arrived at Rainbar. Mr. Windsor was much impressed by their general appearance, and asserted confidently that such a lot of cows and heifers had never before been seen on the river.

‘They’re regular first-class bred ‘uns, that’s what they are,’ he asserted; ‘that’s the best of going in with a man like Levison. He’s always got the sugar, consequence he always gets the worth of his money, and doesn’t get put off with half-and-half goods. He knows a thing or two, does Levison. Anyhow he’s a stunning mate to go shares with.’

After a short time spent in making necessary arrangements for the new arrivals, Mr. Neuchamp commenced to review his position. Much seriousness of visage resulted from the financial examination.

In the first place no cattle had been sold in his absence. Nor were there now any in sufficiently high condition to be turned into cash with the same facility as of old. A considerable hole had been made in the overdraft which Messrs. Oldstile and Crampton had grudgingly permitted him. He had signed bills at twelve months’ date for the late purchase of cattle; and accommodating as Mr. Levison might be, the acceptances would have to be met or provided for at maturity. Prospectively profitable as the transaction was, Mr. Neuchamp commenced to make acquaintances with the ominous suggestion, ‘Bankruptcy,’ and to wonder whether he should really, in spite of all his plans, prudence, and philanthropy, be compelled, even as others were whom he had contemptuously pitied in old times, to surrender unconditionally.

Of this dread and final catastrophe Mr. Neuchamp had a lively horror which no sophistry could abate. He was not one to fall back upon the many excuses and palliations which the fluctuating markets, the uncertain season, afforded. No, no; the stoppage of payment meant Ruin and Disgrace. It would sound the knell of hope, would proclaim dishonour inevitable, irrevocable, as well as the total failure of all the plans and projects which his heart held dearest. His perusal of the newspapers, which had accumulated to a goodly pile in his absence, brought no hint of indulgence. The markets were low; the season had not yet improved so as to place the stock out of danger. If all debts incurred were to be met, there was little expectation of being able to liquidate them by the aid of the stock then depasturing upon Rainbar.

More than this, he found among his correspondence an epistle from Messrs. Oldstile and Crampton, written in the very old-fashioned manner affected by that sound but non-progressive firm. It informed their very worthy and most esteemed constituent, Mr. E. Neuchamp, that the five hundred pounds last paid to his credit was exhausted, and that unless, of course, his account was supported by remittance, they could under no circumstances continue to honour his orders.

A letter from Paul Frankston, though kind and hearty in tone, was not reassuring. He said that the times were exceedingly bad,—so bad that even he, Paul, had had work to meet his engagements, and had at no time for many years past been so sorely pressed. He noticed that every day fresh station properties were being brought into the market, and hoped that an utter crash and collapse of stock and stations was not about to take place, as in 1842-43. The only reason for believing that a favourable change would take place in the stock-market was that the yield of gold appeared to be increasing, and that though temporary inconvenience had taken place, he, Paul, fully believed that in the course of a year or two there would be a very different state of matters. He therefore advised Ernest to be hopeful, and, while keeping down expenses to the narrowest limit, to hold on to his station with his eyelids, so to speak. Those who had done so at any former period of the country’s history were now wealthy men. He believed yet that Ernest, if he steadily adhered to his proper work and—pardon him—abstained from speculative experiments, would eventually do well. He hoped that he had got his newly-purchased store cattle safely on the run. He had the greatest confidence in Levison’s unerring judgment in such matters. He might be unduly prejudiced in his favour, but he had never known him to be wrong. If everything went to the bad, no doubt this purchase would make matters no worse. If otherwise, they were the nucleus of a future, and not a small one either. His last advice was to keep the ordinary station work in the best possible trim, and not to spend one shilling in other than absolute necessities. Antonia was very well, but did nothing but read all day. He had suggested her going in for a degree at the University, but she had not cared for the suggestion. When rain came perhaps Ernest might manage another run down the country.

Mr. Neuchamp steadily devoted himself to a full consideration of the matters placed before him in this letter—considerate and delicate in feeling, as indeed had been every word and line of advice received by him from Paul Frankston from the very beginning of their acquaintance. No one could have fancied that the whole of the obligation had been upon his, Ernest’s, side, from the day when he first exploded Hartley Selmore’s politico-economical arrangement for subsidising holders of station properties with the capital of ingenuous newly-arrived colonists. For how much generous hospitality, shrewd counsel, often implied rather than proffered, substantial assistance and unswerving friendship, was he not his debtor? And Antonia? The more he saw of girls generally,—and he did not rate those Australian young ladies, who had equal advantages of training, society, and culture, at a jot below their English contemporaries,—the more deep became his conviction of her unusual range of thought, depth of feeling, and purity of mind. As the dry, cool wind of the Australian autumn wailed and sighed over the wide gray plains, and around the useful but unromantic edifices which went to make up the homestead at Rainbar, Ernest began to feel a somewhat intensified, intolerable sensation of intellectual loneliness. For the hundredth, five hundredth, time he wished that it would rain. Why did it not rain? Was the land accursed, like Egypt in the olden Pharaoh days? Rain would do so much. Put an end to his anxieties about the stock. Improve the condition and lessen the expense of the new cattle. Perhaps, nay, certainly, send up the price of stock generally. Liberalise the ideas of Messrs. Oldstile and Crampton. Render a trip to town possible; and oh, the sight once more of the verandah at Morahmee! the savour of the fresh brine-laden air! the sight of the foam-fringed billows of the unbounded sea! the—— But the further contemplation of impossible delights, rendered such by his now comparatively lengthened inland exile, was sternly repressed by the philosophic mind of Mr. Neuchamp. And rain, in England at least, had always seemed such a little thing—to be had for nothing; to be guarded against by the timid, complained about by the superficial, anathematised by the reckless, constant in and out of season—a nuisance, a drug, a daily dread. Why then, in the name of all the mighty, merciful powers, did it not rain? It was clearly no use fretting about the absence of the gladdening, fertilising phenomenon in a dry and thirsty land, or philosophising about the relation of monsoons to icebergs, any unusual protraction or prominence in which natural facts and forces of the calm unswerving giantess, Nature, might alter climates and prices, from Lake Alexandrina to the Snowy River, from Carpentaria to the county of Cumberland. The matter on hand was the plain and prosaic adjustment of his ‘duty a dead sure thing,’ and admitting of but little variation from the point.

Therefore for the present, and as day after day arose bright and cool, with breezy morn and pure fresh bracing atmosphere, unhappily suggestive of continuous dry weather, Mr. Neuchamp, discarding theories, reveries, and projects, sternly addressed himself to work. From earliest dawn to a late hour the whole of the little community was astir. It had been with a feeling of deep satisfaction that Ernest had watched, for the first time, the great droves of ‘new cattle’ spread, unchecked, over the Rainbar plain, and take their first meal of the scanty but highly nutritive salsolaceous herbage. Bred in a ‘sour grass’ country, far inferior for fattening purposes, though having merits of its own, the docile, highly-bred herd might be expected, under ordinary conditions, to grow and develop in the most unprecedented manner. There is a peculiar pleasure, felt by all station proprietors, in the examination of the droves or flocks of store stock placed for the first time upon their new pastures. Generally purchased at a comparatively low price, and passing from inferior to superior fattening country, if the season be favourable a cheering alteration takes place. It is pleasant for the sheep-owner to perceive his ‘large-framed healthy wethers’ (as per advertisement) laying on condition day by day, passing through all the stages of comparative obesity which enables him to ‘top the market’ with them as fat sheep, having previously denuded them of a fleece which, perhaps, fully pays the cost of the original purchase.

But the gratification known to the purchaser of ‘store’ or ‘lean’ cattle, either for fattening or for increase, is of a higher and more intense, because of a more complex, nature, as becomes the more individualised character of the stock.

Day by day, if but the pasture be sufficient, the range wide, the weather favourable, the season propitious, the stockmen practised and efficient—if, I repeat, all these conditions be fulfilled—then indeed does the happy pastoralist taste all the joys of his successful and pleasant position. Day by day, as he rides forth in the fresh morn, the warm kind eve, he notes the stranger kine more habitually wander out to the springing pasture and back to the creek, marsh, river, which is their water privilege. He sees the steers grow glossy of hide, thicker, lengthier, ripen into marketable bullocks. He sees the tiny she yearlings grow into sonsy heifers; the angular cows into imposing, deep-brisketed, flat-backed matrons, ever and anon with younglets, ‘to the manor born,’ and likely in time to pay double the original cost of the parent, with a high percentage for personal profit. Lastly, the first draft of bullocks picked from these, if a mixed herd, pays for the whole lot—steers, bullocks, cows, and calves—leaving the spirited purchaser with a tolerably large and increasing herd, all profit.

Many of these pleasurable emotions would have found lodging in the breast of Mr. Neuchamp had circumstances, that is, the season, been favourable. But nothing was favourable. The skies were like brass—even as the money market—with no rent or fissure through which mercy or change could by any means be perceived. The scanty pasture provoked the instinct-guided cattle to wander far and fast. In pursuit Ernest was fain to hurry, personally or vicariously, till every horse on the establishment, Osmund included, had as much as he could do to carry his rider for a day’s slow journey. Indeed the said rider was occasionally to be descried carrying his saddle home upon his own proper back, having left his weak and weary steed out on the plain.

The original herd, every beast of which had been bred and reared at Rainbar, was not altogether badly off. Acquainted with every nook and corner of the run, they ‘went back’ almost incredible distances for grass, only returning to the bare vicinity of the water when desperate with thirst. It is wonderful what privation in that respect the half-wild herds of cattle and horses will undergo in a dry country in a dry season, without seriously imperilling their health and strength. If they can only procure a debauch upon water from time to time, they stave off famine in a manner quite impossible to the shorthorns and unadventurous beeves of more rainy climes, more succulent pastures.

As to the members of the co-operative settlement—the cockatoos, as Jack Windsor incorrectly called them—they were not, in that time of trial, an element of help or consolation. Their cattle had increased even suspiciously fast. The untoward season had brought out the narrow greed and cunning of their natures into unpleasant prominence.

Under the impression that Ernest would most probably be ruined and be compelled shortly to sell Rainbar, they arrived at the conclusion that there was nothing to be gained by concession, and so gradually threw off any semblance of deference. They rigidly enforced the exclusion of the Rainbar cattle from their very extensive pre-emptive grass rights, and they hunted with their dogs new cattle and old indifferently, not particularly caring, it would seem, whether they were or were not lost.

Ernest was first grieved, then indignant, at this gross ingratitude. Under the influence of these feelings he expostulated with them warmly, alleging his right, as having advanced a portion of the purchase-money for their holdings, to some consideration, if the general sympathy and kindness which he had accorded to them was to go for nothing.

Abraham Freeman replied that they did not see that they had anything to thank him for, particularly that they had left good homes to come to this confounded dry sand-heap of a country. That they intended to stick up for their pre-emptives, as the cattle were all their dependence now, and that if he wanted to make terms with them, they would be satisfied with that portion of the run—with the river frontage, of course—which lay to the westward of their settlement. If he just gave them the use of that bit of country—it was only five or six miles in length, and didn’t go far back—then they would bind themselves not to take up any more of his run.

This last implied threat completed the obliteration of the last shred of Mr. Neuchamp’s patience. These heartless, unprincipled wretches, whom he had raised from a position of indifferently paid toil, akin to daily labour, to that of thriving graziers, basely forgetful of his exceptional benevolence, were actually trading upon their power of annoyance and injurious occupation of his run! Very bitter were Mr. Neuchamp’s reflections when this evil growth of human nature was thus indisputably proved. Had it not been so bad a season he might have overlooked it. But now, when fate and the very skies were at war with him, this instance of ingratitude overpowered all philosophic calmness.

He immediately convened a meeting of the heads of families of the house of Freeman, and informed them, in sufficiently decided tones, that he found himself to have been mistaken in his estimate of their principles and characters; that he had sought to benefit them chiefly; had already assisted them to a partial independence, and that he had looked for some decent recognition of his efforts for their sole advantage. They had chosen to deceive and to threaten. He was resolved now to confine them strictly to their land, to require repayment of the money which he had lent, and to hold no terms of any kind whatever with them.

Messrs. Freeman Brothers were somewhat astonished by Ernest’s capacity for righteous indignation. They had not expected anything of the sort. They had looked for unlimited toleration. They now began to consider that a declaration of war might possibly result injuriously to their own interests, and they possibly had the grace to remember that, up to this stage of the affair, Mr. Neuchamp had been considerate, or, in their phraseology, ‘soft,’ to an extent altogether unprecedented in their experience of the pastoral tenants of the Crown. They would have no more loading, an easy way of providing themselves with the very moderate amount of cash necessary for their ordinary expenditure.

Certainly they did not need any large outlay. There are few lands under the sun, the Coral Islands of that charmed main the Great South Sea excepted, where there is such a possibility of tranquil, joyous progress along life’s pathway, without the use of the circulating medium, as in the settlements of the older colonies of Australia.

For instance, the Freemans had, as it were for nothing, house-room, fuel, water, and light. Their garden supplied them with an annual crop of pumpkins, melons, and other esculents, which gave them vegetable food for the greater part of the year. Far larger crops might have been produced by a comparatively trifling increase of labour or thought. They had milk, butter, and meat from their herd, in ordinary years in profusion. The few necessaries which they were absolutely reduced to import or purchase were clothes, of which, owing to the mildness of the climate, they needed but few; tea and sugar, salt and flour, with a trifling stock of household utensils and furniture. With respect to the tea and sugar, a large reduction might have been made in this section had it been the fashion, as it was the exceptional practice, of isolated settlers to substitute milk for the former, as an ordinary adjunct to the three meals of the day.

But tea in Australia, grateful alike in the burning heat of summer and in the bitter frosts and sleet of winter—portable, innocuous, nutritive, and slightly stimulating—is the beer of the common people; and we know from experience that the attempt ‘to rob a poor man of his beer’ has always hitherto proved unpopular and unsuccessful.

We must therefore assume that a half-chest of tea and a couple of bags of medium brown sugar must be added to the expenditure of the small farmer, or ‘free selector,’ as he is now universally called.

Australia is not a good game country. Still the different varieties of the kangaroo are palatable and nutritious, more resembling the flesh of the hare and rabbit, with a flavour of veal, than beef or mutton. With the aid of a brace of rough greyhounds—the kangaroo-dog of the colonists—these are easily procured in any quantity. The skins are worth a shilling each, and are useful as mats or for coverings. The rivers and creeks, particularly the larger watercourses, are generally filled with fresh-water codfish and several other divisions of the perch family. These are considered to afford valuable supplementary aid to the perhaps scanty supply of butchers’ meat, on many a far-out farm in summer time.

With regard to the condition of the rather exclusive settlement formed and owned by the Freeman family, they had each made shift to bring from a couple to half a dozen brood mares, perhaps originally purchased for from half-a-crown to half-a-sovereign each, out of the Bowning pound. These hardy, though not perhaps well-bred, animals had increased wonderfully since their arrival, and were now, of themselves, quite a small herd. The younger members of the Freeman families could of course ride like Comanches, and no inconsiderable portion of their time was spent in running in these swift and half-wild mustangs, breaking them, losing them, finding them; and in all these operations and employment galloping around and across the Rainbar run, to the wrath and constant annoyance of Jack Windsor and Charley Banks.

Some effort was made, in a half-sullen, half-apologetic way, by Abraham Freeman to remove the ban under which the whole settlement lay. But Ernest was fixed and implacable in righteous disapproval. He gave strict orders that no stock of the offending co-operatives was to be permitted to graze upon the Rainbar run; that the boys were to be told that they would be summoned for trespass if they were found riding over the run or driving stock off without notice. War was declared in form. The strayed cattle belonging to the smaller graziers were placed in the Rainbar yard from time to time, and kept there till taken away by their owners. They were not permitted to purchase any articles from the station store. And, in fine, a blockade cordon was morally drawn round that nucleus of agricultural co-operative progress which had called forth so many sanguine prophecies. Mr. Neuchamp was sternly immutable and indignant of attitude. Slow to arouse and difficult to persuade of intentional wrongdoing, he was very loath to retreat from any gage of battle thus produced.

Both Charley Banks and Jack Windsor regarded this latter step with disapprobation. It had been ridiculously credulous and weak, according to their mode of thought, to invite the Freemans to settle on Rainbar. It was lamentably imprudent to quarrel openly with them now they were settled.

The second brother assented without much hostile observation, regretting that they had fallen out for nothing, as he expressed it; and Mr. Joe Freeman smiled in a scarcely reassuring manner, as Charley Banks thought, and said if it came to a pounding match, the cove would find that they could do him a deuced sight more hurt than he could do them.

Mr. Windsor, who had seen more of the ways of small freeholders, and understood their modes of feeling and action better than did Charley Banks, much less Mr. Neuchamp, did not regard this open declaration of hostilities as likely to add to their comfort, profit, or advantage.

‘Mr. Neuchamp did a soft thing in bringing these chaps here, and now he’s acting far from wise in letting ‘em know what he thinks of ‘em. He ought to have kept in with ‘em and watched ‘em, and if they went “on the cross” about the stock, he’d have had ‘em safe and sound in Drewarrina Gaol some fine day.’

This was Jack’s idea of justifiable free-selectoricide. It might occasionally miss fire, but in the long-run it was very likely to bag the ‘picker-up of unconsidered trifles’ in the shape of unbranded stock.

‘Those chaps can do the boss a deuced sight more damage than he can do them if they’re drove to it,’ continued Mr. Windsor. ‘They watch him when he isn’t thinkin’ of them, and if our cattle ain’t on their land, they can make ‘em trespass any night they please. I know the likes of them well, and I’d rather take ‘em quiet than hustle ‘em any day.’

‘You’re not far wrong, Jack,’ assented Mr. Banks. ‘We must keep these new cattle close, or they’ll have a lot ready for Drewarrina pound some fine morning, as sure as my name is Charley Banks.’

By careful watching, by riding early and riding late, this highly probable outcome of the feud between Mr. Neuchamp and his late protÉgÉs was for a time avoided. But

It is questionable whether Byron had the operation of the Lands Occupation Act for the colony of New South Wales in view when he penned these lines, but they apply as closely to the general consequences of that great statute as if his lordship had intended to settle the affairs of Australia, after leading to victory the anti-Turkish party of the day.

The brothers Freeman, by a peculiar mental process, had managed to ignore the very substantial aid in cash and employment, the former still unrepaid, furnished by Mr. Neuchamp. By fixing all their attention upon his latter line of conduct, they became convinced that in denying their cattle access to every portion of the Rainbar run he had inflicted upon them a great wrong. This they determined to avenge if not to redress; and one fine morning an ill-written note, brought by a brown-faced urchin of ten years old about breakfast time, informed Mr. Neuchamp that William and Joseph Freeman had discovered three hundred and forty-seven of his cattle trespassing upon their land, which cattle were now in their custody, and which they proposed driving to Drewarrina pound (about seventy miles off) if not forthwith released with damages and expenses paid.

‘What in the name of all that’s rascally can we do?’ inquired Ernest of Charley Banks, as he tossed the note over to him across the breakfast table. ‘I feel inclined to go down and take the cattle by force. The dishonest, scheming vagabonds!’

‘That’s what I should like to do,’ said Banks, ‘and I think Jack and I could hammer that Bill Freeman and his brother, but I’m afraid it won’t do. If we rescue the cattle we can be summoned and fined; besides taking us all the way to that rascally hole of a township.’

‘Then let them keep them, and drive them over to the pound. The damage can’t be much.’

‘And let them hunt them over, and yard them half the time?’ demanded Mr. Banks. ‘No, that wouldn’t do either. The cattle wouldn’t recover it for the whole season. You’ll have to buy him off. So much a head. It’s the shortest way through it.’

Mr. Neuchamp groaned. This way was degrading. A pecuniary loss, for which he did not care so much as he ought to have done, for Ernest was one of those people who rarely regard a cheque or order as the bag of golden sovereigns that anything over a ten-pound note really is. Also, a loss of dignity, which he felt keenly, that he should be placed in the dilemma of having to pay to release his own cattle from his own tenants, so to speak, or to see them injured and lowered in value by those base burghers of the corporation he had himself led into the land of promise!

‘There is nothing else to be done,’ said Charley. ‘They have the best of us now; we must pay.’

‘I don’t believe the cattle were on their land at all,’ pleaded the founder of the society.

‘That’s nothing,’ opposed Mr. Banks, ‘they’ll swear they found ’em there, and bring three or four witnesses to prove it; you’d better give me a cheque for thirty pounds, and let me square it with them. I think we shall get out for that.’

Mr. Neuchamp much regretted sacrificing any portion of his latest and probably concluding advance from Messrs. Oldstile and Crampton in such an unsatisfactory manner, but was compelled to employ that only universal solvent, a cash payment. Mr. Banks departed with the magic missive. I have no authentic record of what actually passed between him and Bill Freeman, but he returned with the cattle. It was also noticed that no peculiar exacerbation occurred between the litigants after this interview.

Another month wore away in the performance of the ordinary work, and the endurance of rather more than the ordinary crosses and losses consequent upon the still protracted drought.

No rain. And again, no rain. Nothing grew. All nature became daily more wan, pale, leafless. The crop of expenses, inevitable and regular, in contradistinction to the produce of the season, grew and matured, until once more the limit of advance agreed to by Messrs. Oldstile and Crampton was definitely reached. Of this ultimate fact Mr. Neuchamp was unpleasantly reminded by the return, unpaid, of his last half-dozen orders, arriving by the mail preceding that which furnished an exceedingly formal letter, advising the unpleasant step which his agents, to their extreme regret, had been compelled to take.

Ernest felt this hitherto unknown annoyance to be the precursor of a financial earthquake, in which possibly his present possessions and future hopes might be engulfed.

He tried to consider his position with the calmness proper to so grave a conjuncture. But he had much difficulty in preserving the requisite freedom from disturbance. Ever and anon would come, as with a lightning flash, the vision of all his cherished projects disappearing down the dark chasm of insolvency and ruin.

His stud of Australian Arabs, now so promising, would be sold for the price of bush mustangs. His store cattle, nearly broken to the run, would be as valueless as if, in spite of their high breeding, they had been composed in great part of the ‘scrub-danglers,’ one of whom had so unwarrantably assaulted him on his arrival at Rainbar. His pet engineering scheme, unfinished and derided, would be henceforth ticketed among the denizens of the locality as Neuchamp’s Folly. Ernest had not more than the ordinary share of self-love, through which nature makes provision for the preservation of the individual, but he commenced to feel by anticipation the pangs which are inseparable from pronounced failure in any soever enterprise or profession. He heard Mr. Jermyn Croker’s unqualified verdict that ‘he had always been a philanthropic lunatic, from whom nothing else could have been expected; the only wonder being that any one had been found fool enough to trust him, and thereby enable him to make so respectable a smash of it.’ Others doubtless would follow in the same suit. Even the good-natured Parklands and the charitable Aymer Brandon, who gave, as they required indeed, much frank social absolution, could scarcely refrain from unreserved condemnation of his ‘improvement’ theory. As to the ‘grateful tenantry’ idea, represented by Freeman Brothers, with their grass-rights, their hostility, and their herds and their flocks—for they had lately purchased a thousand debilitated travelling sheep at about sixpence per head—it would not bear thinking of. He was now in full endurance of the reactionary stage of despondency occasionally bestowed as a counterpoise to the ordinarily high average of tone with which the sanguine man is blessed or cursed, as the case may be. As Mr. Neuchamp reviewed his generous and lofty aims, his far-reaching plans and projects dependent upon so kindly a future for success, he inclined to the latter reading. They appeared to him in this his dark hour as the fantasies of an opium-eater or the dream-palaces of a slumbering child.

Mr. Neuchamp, after a day spent in sad consideration, unfortunately permitted himself to pursue the unending evil of regret during the night. His heightened imagination multiplied disaster and enlarged evil to such a degree that he was more than once tempted to spring from his thorny couch and take to the broad starlit plain for the relief of exercise.

says the remorseful Marmion; and but that in the present state of the fodder market no horses had been stabled at Rainbar for many a day, our latter-day Crusader might have followed out the idea literally. As it was he but arose at earliest dawn and mechanically took the garden path, trusting to find some excuse for an hour or two of hard manual labour which might guide or exorcise the evil spirits that were rending his very soul.

He had been putting out all his strength for an hour or more, and was in much the same bodily state and condition as if he had taken a ten-mile spin with a greatcoat on, after the prescription of Mr. Geoffry Delamayn, when he observed a solitary horseman wending his way along the ‘up-river’ road, which was distinguishable more by dust than by colouring from the grassless waste through which it wound.

The stranger, who was habited in a collarless Crimean shirt and rather dilapidated habiliments generally, rode his emaciated steed steadily on at the slow, hopeless, leg-weary jog to which most of the horses of the territory had long been reduced, until he reached the garden gate. Ernest,—taking him for granted as the usual ‘reporter’ of travelling sheep, about to clear off the last fragments of what once had been pasture; an invalid shepherd, making for the Drewarrina Hospital; a mounted tramp or ‘traveller’ looking for work, with no great hope of, or indeed concern about, finding it; or lastly, a supernumerary for some travelling stock caravan, who had been ‘hunted’ for drunkenness or inefficiency,—raised not his head. For any or all of these toilers of the waste there would be the unvarying hospitality of the men’s hut. But the stranger sat calmly upon his despondent horse at the gate surveying Ernest’s exceedingly efficient spade performance with apparent approval, until at length he broke silence. ‘My word, Mr. Noochamp, you’re nigh as good as a Chinaman. You’d make wages at post-hole digging, if the rain forgets to come and we’re all smothered. How’s those AD store cattle getting on?’

Ernest looked up hastily and indignantly at the first tones of the stranger’s accost, but immediately relaxed his visage and flung down his spade as he recognised in the horseman’s countenance the grave, reflective lineaments of Abstinens Levison.

END OF VOL. II

Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh.