When Harry made the remark contained in the foregoing paragraph, Ned said that it reminded him of a story.
"Well, please tell it," said Dr. Whitney; "we are always ready for good stories."
"I was reading a day or two ago about a man who had a large cattle run in a part of Australia where he had been for several years without any near neighbors. Gold was discovered about ten miles from his place, and a good many people flocked there. The gold mines furnished an excellent market for his beef and for all the vegetables he chose to grow on his place; but, on the other hand, he suffered somewhat by the depredations of lawless characters. Horse stealing seemed to be the popular amusement among the people at the mines, and quite often horses disappeared from the estate and were never seen again.
"But they had one horse, called Stepney, that was a perfect treasure. He was kept for carriage purposes and would never let anybody mount on his back. He would stand perfectly still while being saddled, and while anything was being attached to the saddle, but the instant anybody got on his back he was thrown, and there was not a rider in Australia who could stay in the saddle more than a few seconds.
"About once in a fortnight Stepney would be missing from the paddock, but he always turned up in a day or two, and almost invariably with a saddle on his back, generally a new one, and a miner's 'swag' attached to it, and on most of the occasions the swag contained a goodly amount of gold. Once he came back with a brand new saddle and six hundred dollars' worth of gold, which nobody ever came to claim. The owner said that Stepney was the most profitable horse he ever owned. He paid for himself several times over, and whenever they ran short of saddles, all they had to do was to use Stepney as a trap and 'set' him in the paddock, with entire confidence that he would catch a saddle within a day or two."
"That recalls a story about the way the miners used to try to deceive the bushrangers," said the doctor; "I refer particularly to those who were on their way to the coast with gold in their possession. They used to bore holes in the shafts or frames of their carts and conceal the gold in these holes, and sometimes they managed to hide quantities of gold dust between the inner and outer soles of their boots. One miner took the padding out of his horse's collar and inserted eighty ounces of gold in the hollow. He jogged along the road to Melbourne, suffering a good deal of trepidation at first, but finally arrived within twenty miles of the city with his treasure, and began to feel safe.