“Seems a harmless sort of chap, that new chum,” said Pinnock.
“He’ll do all right,” said Charlie casually. “I’ve met his sort before. He’s not such a fool as he lets on to be. Shouldn’t wonder if he killed somebody before he gets back here, anyhow.”
“How did you get on at the dancing saloon?” asked Pinnock.
“Oh, slow enough. Nothing worth seeing. Good-bye.”
They sneaked on board the steamer without meeting the Bo’sun or anybody, and before evening were well on their way to No Man’s Land.
There are few countries in the world with such varieties of climate as Australia, and though some stations are out in the great, red-hot, frying wastes of the Never-Never, others are up in the hills where a hot night is a thing unknown, where snow falls occasionally, and where it is no uncommon thing to spend a summer’s evening by the side of a roaring fire. In the matter of improvements, too, stations vary greatly. Some are in a wilderness, with fittings to match; others have telephones between homestead and out-stations, the jackeroos dress for dinner, and the station hands are cowed into touching their hats and saying “Sir.” Also stations are of all sizes, and the man who is considered quite a big squatter in the settled districts is thought small potatoes by the magnate “out back,” who shears a hundred and fifty thousand sheep, and has an overdraft like the National Debt.
Kuryong was a hill-country station of about sixty thousand acres all told; but they were good acres, as no one knew better than old Bully Grant, the owner, of whose history and disposition we heard something from Pinnock at the club. It was a highly improved place, with a fine homestead—thanks to Bully Grant’s money, for in the old days it had been a very different sort of place—and its history is typical of the history of hundreds of others.
When Andrew Gordon first bought it, it was held under lease from the Crown, and there were no improvements to speak of. The station homestead, so lovingly descanted upon in the advertisement, consisted of a two-roomed slab hut; the woolshed, where the sheep were shorn, was made of gumtree trunks roofed with bark. The wool went down to Sydney, and station supplies came back, in huge waggons drawn by eighteen or twenty bullocks, that travelled nine miles a day on a journey of three hundred miles. There were no neighbours except at the township of Kiley’s Crossing, which consisted of two public-houses and a store. It was a rough life for the young squatter, and evidently he found it lonely; for on a visit to Sydney he fell in love with and married a dainty girl of French descent. Refined, well-educated, and fragile-looking, she seemed about the last person in the world to take out to a slab-hut homestead as a squatter’s wife. But there is an old saying that blood will tell; and with all the courage of her Huguenot ancestry she faced the roughness and discomforts of bush life. On her arrival at the station the old two-roomed hut was plastered and whitewashed, additional rooms were built, and quite a neat little home was the result. Seasons were good, and the young squatter might have gone on shearing sheep and selling fat stock till the end of his life but for the advent of free selection in 1861.