I remember that time well. She stopped me one day as I was riding past to ask me if I'd seen Jack, and I got off my horse. Her chin and mouth began to twitch and tremble and I saw her eyes filling with tears. She laid her hand on my arm and asked me to promise not to drink with Jack if I met him, but to try and persuade him to come home. And—well, have you, as a man, ever, with the one woman that you can't have, and no matter at what time or place, felt a sudden mad longing to take her in your arms and kiss her—and damn the world? I got on my horse again. She must have thought me an ignorant brute, but I felt safer there. And when I thought how I had nearly made a fool of myself, and been a cowardly brute, and a rotten mate to my mate, I rode ten miles to find Jack and get him home.

He straightened up again after a bit and went out and got another shed, and they say that Peter M'Laughlan got hold of him there. I don't know what Peter did to him then—Jack never spoke of it, even to me, his old mate; but, anyway, at the end of the shearing season Jack's cheque came home to Clara in a registered envelope, addressed in Peter's hand-writing, and about a week later Jack turned up a changed man.

He got work as a temporary clerk in the branch government land office at Solong, a pretty little farming town in a circle of blue hills on the banks of a clear, willow-fringed river, where there were rich, black-soil, river-flat farms, and vineyards on the red soil slopes, and blue peaks in the distance. It was a great contrast to Ross's Creek. Jack paid a deposit on an allotment of land, a bit out of town, on the river bank, and built a little weather-board box of a cottage in spare times, and planted roses and grape-vines to hide its ugliness by and by. It wasn't much of a place, but Clara was mighty proud of it because it was "our house." They were very happy, and she was beginning to feel sure of Jack. She seemed to believe that the miserable old time was all past and gone.

When the work at the land's office gave out, Jack did all sorts of jobs about town, and at last, one shearing season, when there was a heavy clip of wool, and shearers were getting L1 a hundred, he decided to go out back. I know that Clara was against it, but he argued that it was the only chance for him, and she persuaded herself that she could trust him. I was knocking about Solong at the time, and Jack and I decided to go out together and share his packhorse between us. He wrote to Beenaway Shed, about three hundred: miles north-west in the Great Scrubs, and got pens for both of us.

It was a fine fresh morning when we started; it was in a good season and the country looked grand. When I rode up to Jack's place I saw his horse and packhorse tied up outside the gate. He had wanted me to come up the evening before and have tea with them and camp at his place for the night. "Come up! man alive!" he said. "We'll make you a shake-down!" But I wouldn't; I said I had to meet a chap. Jack wouldn't have understood. I had been up before, but when I saw him and Clara so happy and comfortable, and thought of the past and my secret, and thought of myself, a useless, purposeless, restless, homeless sort of fellow, hanging out at a boarding-house, it nearly broke me up, and I had to have a drink or two afterwards. I often wonder if Clara guessed and understood. You never know how much a woman knows; but—ah, well!

Jack had taken my things home with him and he and Clara had packed them. I found afterwards that she had washed, dried and ironed some collars and handkerchiefs of mine during the night. Clara and Jack came out to the gate, and as I wouldn't go in to have a cup of tea there was nothing for it but to say good-bye. She was dressed in a fresh-looking print blouse and dark skirt, and wore a white hood that fell back from her head; she was a little girl, with sweet, small, freckled features, and red-gold hair, and kind, sympathetic grey eyes. I thought her the freshest, and fairest, and daintiest little woman in the district.

I was Jack's mate, so she always treated me as a sort of brother-in-law, and called me by my Christian name. Mates are closer than brothers in the bush.

I turned my back and pretended to tighten the straps and girths on the packhorse while she said good-bye to Jack. I heard her speaking earnestly to him, and once I heard her mention Peter M'Laughlan's name. I thought Jack answered rather impatiently. "Oh, that's all right, Clara," he said, "that's all over—past and gone. I wish you would believe it. You promised never to speak of that any more."

I know how it was. Jack never cared to hear about Peter; he was too ashamed of the past, perhaps; besides, deep down, we feel a sort of resentment towards any reference to a man who has helped or saved us in the past. It's human nature.

Then they spoke in low tones for a while, and then Jack laughed, and kissed her, and said, "Oh, I'll be back before the time's up." Then he ran into the house to say good-bye to Mary's sister, who was staying with her, and who was laid up with a sprained ankle.

Then Clara stepped up to me and laid her fingers on my shoulder. I trembled from head to foot and hoped she didn't notice it.

"Joe," she said, looking at me with her big, searching grey eyes, "I believe I can trust you. I want you to look after Jack. You know why. Never let him have one drink if you can help it. One drink—the first drink will do it. I want you to promise me that you will never have a drink with Jack, no matter what happens or what he says."

"I never will," I said, and I meant it.

"It's the first time he's been away from me since he gave up drinking, and if he comes back all right this time I will be sure of him and contented. But, Joe, if he comes back wrong it will kill me; it will break my heart. I want you to promise that if anything happens you will ride or wire for Peter M'Laughlan. I hear he's wool-sorting this year at Beenaway Station. Promise me that if anything happens you will ride for Peter M'Laughlan and tell him, no matter what Jack says."

"I promise," I said.

She half-held out her hand to me, but I kept both mine behind my back. I suppose she thought I didn't notice that she wanted to shake hands on the bargain; but the truth was that my hands shook so, and I didn't want her to notice that.

I got on my horse and felt steadier. Then, "Good-bye, Clara"—"Good-bye, Jack." She bore up bravely, but I saw her eyes brimming. Jack got on his horse, and I bent over and shook hands with her. Jack bent down and kissed her while she stood on tiptoe. "Good-bye, little woman," he said. "Cheer up, and I'll be back before you know where you are! You mustn't fret—you know why."

"Good-bye, Jack!"—she was breaking down.

"Come on, Jack!" I said, and we rode off, turning and waving our hats to her as she stood by the gate, looking a desolate little thing, I thought, till we turned down a bend of the road into the river.

As we jogged along with the packhorse trotting behind us, and the quart-pots and hobble-chains jingling on the packsaddle, I pictured Clara running inside, to cry a while in her sister's arms, and then to bustle round and cheer up, for Jack's sake—and for the sake of something else.

"I'll christen him after you, Joe," said Jack, later on, when we'd got confidential over our pipes after tea in our first camp. It never seemed to enter his head that there was the ghost of a chance that it might be a girl. "I'm glad he didn't come along when I was drinking," he said.

And as we lay rolled in our blankets under the stars I swore a big oath to myself.

We got along comfortably and reached Beenaway Station in about a week, the day before the shearers' roll-call. Jack never showed the slightest inclination to go into a shanty; and several times we talked about old times and what damned fools we'd been throwing away our money over shanty bars shouting for loafers and cadgers. "Isn't this ever so-much better, Joe!" said Jack, as we lay on our blankets smoking one moonlight night. "There's nothing in boozing, Joe, you can take it from me. Just you sling it for a year and then look back; you won't want to touch it again. You've been straight for a couple of months. Sling it for good, Joe, before it gets a hold on you, like it did on me."

It was the morning after cut-out at Beenaway Shed, and we were glad. We were tired of the rush and roar and rattle and heat and grease and blasphemy of the big, hot, iron machine shed in that dusty patch in the barren scrubs. Swags were rolled up, saddle-bags packed, horses had been rounded up and driven in, the shearers' cook and his mate had had their fight, and about a hundred men—shearers, rouseabouts, and wool-washers—were waiting round the little iron office to get their cheques.

We were about half through when one bushman said to another: "Stop your damned swearin', Jim. Here's Peter M'Laughlan!" Peter walked up and the men made way for him and he went into the office. There was always considerably less swearing for a few feet round about where Peter M'Laughlan happened to be working in a shearing-shed. It seemed to be an understood thing with the men. He took no advantages, never volunteered to preach at a shed where he was working, and only spoke on union subjects when the men asked him to. He was "rep." (Shearers' Union representative) at this shed, but squatters and station managers respected him as much as the men did.

He seemed much greyer now, but still stood square and straight. And his eyes still looked one through.

When Peter came out and the crowd had cleared away he took Jack aside and spoke to him in a low voice for a few minutes. I heard Jack say, "Oh, that's all right, Peter! You have my word for it," and he got on his horse. I heard Peter say the one word, "Remember!" "Oh, that's all right," said Jack, and he shook hands with Peter, shouted, "Come on, Joe!" and started off with the packhorse after him.

"I wish I were going down with you, Joe," said Peter to me, "but I can't get away till to-morrow. I've got that sick rouseabout on my hands, and I'll have to see him fixed up somehow and started off to the hospital" (the nearest was a hundred miles away). "And, by the way, I've taken up a collection for him; I want a few shillings from you, Joe. I nearly forgot you. The poor fellow only got in about a fortnight's work, and there's a wife and youngsters in Sydney. I'll be down after you to-morrow. I promised to go to Comesomehow* and get the people together and start an agitation for a half-time school there. Anyway, I'll be there by the end of the week. Good-bye, Joe. I must get some more money for the rouser from some of those chaps before they start."

[* There is a postal district in new South Wales called "Come-by-Chance"]

Comesomehow was a wretched cockatoo settlement, a bit off the track, about one hundred and fifty miles on our road home, where the settlers lived like savages and the children ran wild. I reckoned that Peter would have his work cut out to start a craving for education in that place.

By saying he'd be there I think he intended to give me a hint, in case anything happened. I believe now that Jack's wife had got anxious and had written to him.

We jogged along comfortably and happily for three or four days, and as we passed shanty after shanty, and town after town, without Jack showing the slightest inclination to pull up at any of them, I began to feel safe about him.

Then it happened, in the simplest way, as most things of this sort happen if you don't watch close.

The third night it rained, rained heavens-hard, and rainy nights can be mighty cold out on those plains, even in midsummer. Jack and I rigged up a strip of waterproof stuff we had to cover the swags on the packhorse, but the rain drove in, almost horizontally, and we got wet through, blankets, clothes and all. Jack got a bad cold and coughed fit to break himself; so about daylight, when the rain held up a bit, we packed up and rode on to the next pub, a wretched little weather-board place in the scrub.

Jack reckoned he'd get some stuff for his cold there. I didn't like to speak, but before we reached the place I said, "You won't touch a drink, Jack."

"Do you think I'm a blanky fool?" said Jack, and I shut up.

The shanty was kept by a man who went by the name of Thomas, a notorious lamber-down,* as I found out afterwards. He was a big, awkward bullock of a man, a selfish, ignorant brute, as anyone might have seen by his face; but he had a loud voice, and adopted a careless, rollicking, hail-fellow-well-met! come-in-and-sit-down-man-alive! clap-you-on-the-back style, which deceived a good many, or which a good many pretended to believe in. His "missus" was an animal of his own species, but she was duller and didn't bellow.

[ * "Lamber-down," a shanty keeper who entices cheque-men to drink. ]

He had a rather good-looking girl there—I don't know whether she was his daughter or not. They said that when he saw the shearers coming he'd say, "Run and titivate yourself, Mary; here comes the shearers!"

But what surprised me was that Jack Barnes didn't seem able to see through Thomas; he thought that he was all right, "a bit of a rough diamond." There are any amount of scoundrels and swindlers knocking about the world disguised as rough diamonds.

Jack had a fit of coughing when we came in.

"Why, Jack!" bellowed Thomas, "that's a regular churchyarder you've got. Go in to the kitchen fire and I'll mix you a stiff toddy."

"No, thank you, Thomas," said Jack, glancing at me rather sheepishly, I thought. "I'll have a hot cup of coffee presently, that'll do me more good."

"Why, man alive, one drink won't hurt you!" said Thomas. "I know you're on the straight, and you know I'm the last man that 'ud try to get you off it. But you want something for that cold. You don't want to die on the track, do you? What would your missus say? That cough of yours is enough to bust a bullock."

"Jack isn't drinking, Thomas," I said rather shortly, "and neither am I."

"I'll have a cup of coffee at breakfast," said Jack; "thank you all the same, Thomas."

"Right you are, Jack!" said Thomas. "Mary!" he roared at the girl, "chuck yerself about and get breakfast, and make a strong cup of coffee; and I say, missus" (to his wife), "git some honey and vinegar in a cup, will yer? or see if there's any of that cough stuff left in the bottle. Go into the kitchen, you chaps, and dry yourselves at the fire, you're wringing wet."

Jack went through into the kitchen. I stepped out to see if the horses were all right, and as I came in again through the bar, Thomas, who had slipped behind the counter, crooked his finger at me and poured out a stiff whisky. "I thought you might like to have it on the quiet," he whispered, with a wink.

Now, there was this difference between Jack and me. When I was on the track, and healthy and contented, I could take a drink, or two drinks, and then leave it; or at other times I could drink all day, or all night, and be as happy as a lord, and be mighty sick and repentant all next day, and then not touch drink for a week; but if Jack once started, he was a lost man for days, for weeks, for, months—as long as his cash or credit lasted. I felt a cold coming on me this morning, and wanted a whisky, so I had a drink with Thomas. Then, of course, I shouted in my turn, keeping an eye out in case Jack should come in. I went into the kitchen and steamed with Jack for a while in front of a big log fire, taking care to keep my breath away from him. Then we went in to breakfast. Those two drinks were all I meant to have, and we were going right on after breakfast.

It was a good breakfast, ham and eggs, and we enjoyed it. The two whiskies had got to work. I hadn't touched drink for a long time. I shouldn't like to say that Thomas put anything in the drink he gave me. Before we started breakfast he put a glass down in front of me and said:

"There's a good ginger-ale, it will warm you up."

I tasted it; it was rum, hot. I said nothing. What could I say?

There was some joke about Jack being married and settled and steadied down, and me, his old mate, still on the wallaby; and Mrs Thomas said that I ought to follow Jack's example. And just then I felt a touch of that loneliness that some men feel when an old drinking mate turns teetotaller.

Jack started coughing again, like an old cow with the pleuro.

"That cough will kill you, Jack," said Thomas. "Let's put a drop of brandy in your coffee, that won't start you, anyhow; it's real 'Three Star.'" And he reached a bottle from the side-table.

I should have stood up then, for my manhood, for my mate, and for little Clara, but I half rose from my chair, and Jack laughed and said, "Sit down, Joe, you old fool, you're tanked. I know all about your seeing about the horses and your ginger-ales. It's all right, old man. Do you think I'm going on the booze? Why, I'll have to hold you on the horse all day."

"Here's luck, Joe!" said Jack, laughing, and lifting up his cup of coffee with the brandy in it. "Here's luck, Joe."

Then suddenly, and as clearly as I ever heard it, came Clara's voice to my ear: "Promise me, whatever you do, that you will never have a drink with Jack." And I felt cold and sick to the stomach.

I got up and went out. They thought that the drink had made me sick, but if I'd stayed there another minute I would have tackled Thomas; and I knew that I needed a clear head to tackle a bullock like him. I walked about a bit, and when I came in again Jack and Thomas were in the bar, and Jack had a glass before him.

"Come on, Joe, you old bounder," said Jack, "come and have a whisky-and-soda; it will straighten you up."

"What's that you're drinking, Jack?" I asked.

"Oh, don't be a fool!" said Jack. "One drink won't hurt me. Do you think I'm going on the booze? Have a soda and straighten up; we must make a start directly."

I remember we had two or three whiskies, and then suddenly I tackled Thomas, and Jack was holding me back, and laughing and swearing at me at the same time, and I had a tussle with him; and then I was suddenly calmer and sensible, and we were shaking hands all round, and Jack was talking about just one more spree for the sake of old times.

"A bit of a booze won't hurt me, Joe, you old fool," he said. "We'll have one more night of it, for the sake of Auld Lang Syne, and start at daylight in the morning. You go and see to the horses, it will straighten you up. Take the saddle off and hobble 'em out."

But I insisted on starting at once, and Jack promised he would. We were gloriously happy for an hour or so, and then I went to sleep.

When I woke it was late in the afternoon. I was very giddy and shaky; the girl brought me a whisky-and-soda, and that steadied me. Some more shearers had arrived, and Jack was playing cards with two of them on top of a cask in the bar. Thomas was dead drunk on the floor, or pretending to be so, and his wife was behind the bar. I went out to see to the horses; I found them in a bush yard at the back. The packhorse was rolling in the mud with the pack-saddle and saddlebags on. One of the chaps helped me take off the saddles and put them in the harness-room behind the kitchen.

I'll pass over that night. It wouldn't be very edifying to the great, steady-living, sober majority, and the others, the never-do-wells, the rovers, wrecks and failures, will understand only too well without being told—only too well, God help them!

When I woke in the morning I couldn't have touched a drink to save my life. I was fearfully shaky, and swimming about the head, but I put my head over a tub under the pump and got the girl to pump for a while, and then I drank a pint of tea and managed to keep it down, and felt better.

All through the last half of the night I'd kept saying, in a sort of drink nightmare, "I'll go for Peter M'Laughlan in the morning. I'll go for Peter as soon as I can stand!" and repeating Clara Barnes's words, "Ride for Peter if anything happens. Ride for Peter M'Laughlan."

There were drunken shearers, horsemen and swagmen sleeping all over the place, and in all sorts of odd positions; some on the veranda with their heads on their swags, one sitting back against the wall, and one on the broad of his back with his head on the bare boards and his mouth open. There was another horse rolling in its saddle, and I took the saddle off. The horse belonged to an English University man.

I went in to see how Jack was. He was lying in the parlour on a little, worn-out, horse-hair sofa, that might have seen better days in some clean home in the woman-and-girl world. He had been drinking and playing cards till early that morning, and he looked awful—he looked as if he'd been boozing for a month.

"See what you've done!" he said, sitting up and glaring at me; then he said, "Bring me a whisky-and-soda, Joe, for God's sake!"

I got a whisky-and-soda from the girl and took it to him.

I talked to him for a while, and at last he said, "Well, go and get the horses and we'll start."

I got the horses ready and brought them round to the front, but by that time he'd had more drink, and he said he wanted to sleep before he started. Next he was playing cards with one of the chaps, and asked me to wait till he'd finished that game. I knew he'd keep promising and humbugging me till there was a row, so at last I got him aside and said:

"Look here, Jack, I'm going for Peter M'Laughlan——"

"Go to hell!" said Jack.

I put the other horses back in the yard, the saddles in the skillion, got on my horse and rode off. Thomas and the others asked me no questions, they took no notice. In a place like that a man could almost do anything, short of hanging himself, without anyone interfering or being surprised. And probably, if he did hang himself, they'd let him swing for a while to get a taste of it.

Comesomehow was about fifteen miles back on a track off the main road. I reckoned that I could find Peter and bring him on by the afternoon, and I rode hard, sick as I was. I was too sick to smoke.

As it happened, Peter had started early from his last camp and I caught him just as he was turning off into Comesomehow track.

"What's up, Joe?" he asked as I rode up to him—but he could see.

"Jack Barnes is on the booze at Thomas's," I said.

Peter just looked right through me. Then he turned his horse's head without a word, and rode back with me. And, after a while, he said, as if to himself:

"Poor Clara! Poor little lassie!"

By the time we reached the shanty it was well on in the afternoon. A fight was stopped in the first round and voices lowered when the chaps caught sight of us. As Peter walked into the bar one or two drunks straightened themselves and took off their hats with drunken sentiment.

"Where is Jack Barnes, Thomas?" asked Peter, quietly.

"He's in there if you want to see him," said Thomas, jerking his head towards the parlour.

We went in, and when Peter saw Jack lying there I noticed that swift, haunted look came into his eyes, as if he'd seen a ghost of the past. He sat down by the sofa to wait until Jack woke. I thought as he sat there that his eyes were like a woman's for sympathy and like a dog's for faithfulness. I was very shaky.

Presently Thomas looked in. "Is there anything I can do for you, M'Laughlan?" he asked in as civil a tone as he could get to.

"Yes," said Peter, "bring me a flask of your best whisky—your own, mind—and a glass.

"We shall need the whisky for him on the track, Joe," said Peter, when the flask came. "Get another glass and a bottle of soda; you want a nip." He poured out a drink for himself.

"The first thing we've got to do is to get him away; then I'll soon put him on his feet. But we'll let him sleep a while longer. I find I've got business near Solong, and I'm going down with you."

By and by Jack woke up and glared round, and when he caught sight of Peter he just reached for his hands and said, "Peter! Thank God you've come!" Then he said, "But I must have a drink first, Peter."

"All right, Jack, you shall have a drink," said Peter; and he gave him a stiff nobblerq. It steadied Jack a bit.

"Now listen to me, Jack," said Peter. "How much money have you got left?"

"I—I can't think," said Jack. "I've got a cheque for twenty pounds here, sewn inside my shirt."

"Yes; but you drew thirty-six in three cheques. Where's the rest?"

"Thomas has ten," said Jack, "and the six—well, the six is gone. I was playing cards last night."

Peter stepped out into the bar.

"Look here, Thomas," he said quietly, "you've got a ten-pound cheque from Barnes."

"I know I have."

"Well, how much of it does he owe you?"

"The whole, and more."

"Do you mean to tell me that? He has only been here since yesterday morning."

"Yes; but he's been shoutin' all round. Look at all these chaps here."

"They only came yesterday afternoon," said Peter. "Here, you had best take this and give me the cheque;" and Peter laid a five-pound note on the bar. Thomas bucked at first, but in the end he handed over the cheque—he had had several warnings from the police. Then he suddenly lost all control over himself; he came round from behind the bar and faced Peter.

"Now, look here, you mongrel parson!" he said. "What the —— do you mean by coming into my bar and, interfering with me. Who the —— are you anyway? A ——!" He used the worst oaths that were used in the bush. "Take off your —— coat!" he roared at last, shaping up to Peter.

Peter stepped back a pace and buttoned his coat and threw back his head.

"No need to take off my coat, Thomas," he said, "I am ready."

He said it very quietly, but there was a danger-signal—a red light in his eyes. He was quiet-voiced but hard-knuckled, as some had reason to know.

Thomas balked like a bull at a spread umbrella. Jack lurched past me as I stood in the parlour door, but I caught him and held him back; and almost at the same moment a wretched old boozer that we called "Awful Example," who had been sitting huddled, a dirty bundle of rags and beard and hair, in the corner of the bar, struggled to his feet, staggered forward and faced Thomas, looking once again like something that might have been a man. He snatched a thick glass bottle from the counter and held it by the neck in his right hand.

"Stand back, Thomas!" he shouted. "Lay a hand—lay a finger on Peter M'Laughlan, and I'll smash your head, as sure as there's a God above us and I'm a ruined man!"

Peter took "Awful" gently by the shoulders and sat him down. "You keep quiet, old man," he said; "nothing is going to happen." Thomas went round behind the bar muttering something about it not being worth his while to, etc.

"You go and get the horses ready, Joe," said Peter to me; "and you sit down, Jack, and keep quiet."

"He can get the horses," growled Thomas, from behind the bar, "but I'm damned if he gets the saddles. I've got them locked up, and I'll something well keep them till Barnes is sober enough to pay me what he owes me."

Just then a tall, good-looking chap, with dark-blue eyes and a long, light-coloured moustache, stepped into the bar from the crowd on the veranda.

"What's all this, Thomas?" he asked.

"What's that got to do with you, Gentleman Once?" shouted Thomas.

"I think it's got something to do with me," said Gentleman Once. "Now, look here, Thomas; you can do pretty well what you like with us poor devils, and you know it, but we draw the line at Peter M'Laughlan. If you really itch for the thrashing, you deserve you must tempt someone else to give it to you."

"What the —— are you talking about?" snorted Thomas. "You're drunk or ratty!"

"What's the trouble, M'Laughlan?" asked Gentleman Once, turning to Peter. "No trouble at all, Gentleman Once," said Peter; "thank you all the same. I've managed worse men than our friend Thomas. Now, Thomas, don't you think it would pay you best to hand over the key of the harness-room and have done with this nonsense? I'm a patient man—a very patient man—but I've not always been so, and the old blood comes up sometimes, you know."

Thomas couldn't stand this sort of language, because he couldn't understand it. He threw the key on the bar and told us to clear out.

We were all three very quiet riding along the track that evening. Peter gave Jack a nip now and again from the flask, and before we turned in in camp he gave him what he called a soothing draught from a little medicine chest that he carried in his saddle-bag. Jack seemed to have got rid of his cough; he slept all night, and in the morning, after he'd drunk a pint of mutton-broth that Peter had made in one of the billies, he was all right—except that he was quiet and ashamed. I had never known him to be so quiet, and for such a length of time, since we were boys together. He had learned his own weakness; he'd lost all his cocksureness. I know now just exactly how he felt. He felt as if his sober year had been lost and he would have to live it all over again.

Peter didn't preach. He just jogged along and camped with us as if he were an ordinary, every-day mate. He yarned about all sorts of things. He could tell good yarns, and when he was fairly on you could listen to him all night. He seemed to have been nearly all over the world. Peter never preached except when he was asked to hold service in some bush pub, station-homestead or bush church. But in a case like ours he had a way of telling a little life story, with something in it that hit the young man he wanted to reform, and hit him hard. He'd generally begin quietly, when we were comfortable with our pipes in camp after tea, with "I once knew a young man—" or "That reminds me of a young fellow I knew—" and so on. You never knew when he was going to begin; or when he was going to hit you. In our last camp, before we reached Solong, he told two of his time-fuse yarns. I haven't time to tell them now, but one stuffed up my pipe for a while, and made Jack's hand tremble when he tried to light his. I'm glad it was too dark to see our faces. We lay a good while afterwards, rolled in our blankets, and couldn't get to sleep for thinking; but Peter seemed to fall asleep as soon as he turned in.

Next day he told Jack not to tell Clara that he'd come down with us. He said he wouldn't go right into Solong with us; he was going back along another road to stay a day or two with an old friend of his.

When we reached Solong we stopped on the river-bank just out of sight of Jack's house. Peter took the ten-pound cheque from his pocket and gave it to Jack. Jack hadn't seen Peter give the shanty-keeper the five-pound note.

"But I owed Thomas something," said Jack, staring. "However did you manage to get the cheque out of him?"

"Never mind, Jack, I managed," said Peter.

Jack sat silent for a while, then he began to breathe hard.

"I don't know what to say, Peter."

"Say nothing, Jack. Only promise me that you will give Clara the cheques as soon as you go home, and let her take care of the cash for a while."

"I will," said Jack.

Jack looked down at the ground for a while, then he lifted his head and looked Peter in the eyes.

"Peter," he said, "I can't speak. I'm ashamed to make a promise; I've broken so many. I'll try to thank you in a year's time from now."

"I ask for no promises," said Peter, and he held out his hand. Jack gripped it.

"Aren't you coming home with me, Joe?" he asked.

"No," I said; "I'll go into town. See you in the morning."

Jack rode on. When he got along a piece Peter left his horse and moved up to the head of the lane to watch Jack, and I followed. As Jack neared the cottage we saw a little figure in a cloak run out to the front gate. She had heard the horses and the jingle of the camp-ware on the pack-saddle. We saw Jack jump down and take her in his arms. I looked at Peter, and as he watched them, something, that might have been a strange look of the old days, came into his eyes.

He shook hands with me. "Good-bye, Joe."

He rode across the river again. He took the track that ran along the foot of the spurs by the river, and up over a gap in the curve of blue hills, and down and out west towards the Big Scrubs. And as he rounded the last spur, with his packhorse trotting after him, I thought he must have felt very lonely. And I felt lonely too.



THE STORY OF "GENTLEMAN ONCE"

They learn the world from black-sheep, Who know it all too well. -Out Back.

Peter M'Laughlan, bush missionary, Joe Wilson and his mate, Jack Barnes, shearers for the present, and a casual swagman named Jack Mitchell, were camped at Cox's Crossing in a bend of Eurunderee Creek.

It was a grassy little flat with gum-trees standing clear and clean like a park. At the back was the steep grassy siding of a ridge, and far away across the creek to the south a spur from the Blue Mountain range ran west, with a tall, blue granite peak showing clear in the broad moonlight, yet dream-like and distant over the sweeps of dark green bush.

There was the jingle of hobble-chains and a crunching at the grass where the horses moved in the soft shadows amongst the trees. Up the creek on the other side was a surveyors' camp, and from there now and again came the sound of a good voice singing verses of old songs; and later on the sound of a violin and a cornet being played, sometimes together and sometimes each on its own.

Wilson and Barnes were on their way home from shearing out back in the great scrubs at Beenaway Shed. They had been rescued by Peter M'Laughlan from a wayside shanty where they had fallen, in spite of mutual oaths and past promises, sacred and profane, because they had got wringing wet in a storm on the track and caught colds, and had been tempted to take just one drink.

They were in a bad way, and were knocking down their cheques beautifully when Peter M'Laughlan came along. He rescued them and some of their cash from the soulless shanty keeper, and was riding home with them, on some pretence, because he had known them as boys, because Joe Wilson had a vein of poetry in him—a something in sympathy with something in Peter; because Jack Barnes had a dear little girl-wife who was much too good for him, and who was now anxiously waiting for him in the pretty little farming town of Solong amongst the western spurs. Because, perhaps, of something in Peter's early past which was a mystery. Simply and plainly because Peter M'Laughlan was the kindest, straightest and truest man in the West—a "white man."

They all knew Mitchell and welcomed him heartily when he turned up in their camp, because he was a pathetic humorist and a kindly cynic—a "joker" or "hard case" as the bushmen say.

Peter was about fifty and the other three were young men.

There was another man in camp who didn't count and was supposed to be dead. Old Danny Quinn, champion "beer-chewer" of the district, was on his way out, after a spree, to one of Rouse's stations, where, for the sake of past services—long past—and because of old times, he was supposed to be working. He had spent his last penny a week before and had clung to his last-hope hotel until the landlord had taken him in one hand and his swag in the other and lifted them clear of the veranda. Danny had blundered on, this far, somehow; he was the last in the world who could have told how, and had managed to light a fire; then he lay with his head on his swag and enjoyed nips of whisky in judicious doses and at reasonable intervals, and later on a tot of mutton-broth, which he made in one of the billies.

It was after tea. Peter sat on a log by the fire with Joe and Jack Mitchell on one side and Jack Barnes on the other. Jack Mitchell sat on the grass with his back to the log, his knees drawn up, and his arms abroad on them: his most comfortable position and one which seemed to favour the flow of his philosophy. They talked of bush things or reflected, sometimes all three together, sometimes by turns.

From the surveyors' camp:

I remember, I remember, The house where I was born, The little window where the sun Came peeping in at morn—

The breeze from the west strengthened and the voice was blown away.

"That chap seems a bit sentimental but he's got a good voice," said Mitchell. Then presently he remarked, round his pipe:

"I wonder if old Danny remembers?" And presently Peter said quietly, as if the thought had just occurred to him:

"By the way, Mitchell, I forgot to ask after your old folk. I knew your father, you know."

"Oh, they're all right, Peter, thank you."

"Heard from them lately?" asked Peter, presently, in a lazy tone.

Mitchell straightened himself up. "N—no. To tell the truth, Peter, I haven't written for—I don't know how long."

Peter smoked reflectively.

"I remember your father well, Jack," he said. "He was a big-hearted man."

Old Danny was heard remonstrating loudly with spirits from a warmer clime than Australia, and Peter stepped over to soothe him.

"I thought I'd get it, directly after I opened my mouth," said Mitchell. "I suppose it will be your turn next, Joe."

"I suppose so," said Joe, resignedly.

The wind fell.

I remember, I remember, And it gives me little joy, To think I'm further off from heaven, Than when I was a boy!

When Peter came back another thought seemed to have occurred to him.

"How's your mother getting on, Joe?" he asked. "She shifted to Sydney after your father died, didn't she?"

"Oh, she's getting on all right!" said Joe, without elaboration.

"Keeping a boarding-house, isn't she?"

"Yes," said Joe.

"Hard to make ends meet, I suppose?" said Peter. "It's almost a harder life than it could have been on the old selection, and there's none of the old independence about it. A woman like your mother must feel it, Joe."

"Oh, she's all right," said Joe. "She's used to it by this time. I manage to send her a few pounds now and again. I send her all I can," he added resentfully.

Peter sat corrected for a few moments. Then he seemed to change the subject.

"It's some time since you were in Sydney last, isn't it, Joe?'

"Yes, Peter," said Joe. "I haven't been there for two years. I never did any good there. I'm far better knocking about out back."

There was a pause.

"Some men seem to get on better in one place, some in another," reflected Mitchell, lazily. "For my part, I seem to get on better in another."

Peter blinked, relit his pipe with a stick from the fire and reflected.

The surveyor's song had been encored:

I remember, I remember—

Perhaps Peter remembered. Joe did, but there were no vines round the house where he was born, only drought and dust, and raspy voices raised in recrimination, and hardship most times.

"I remember," said Peter, quietly, "I remember a young fellow at home in the old country. He had every advantage. He had a first-class education, a great deal more money than he needed—almost as much as he asked for, and nearly as much freedom as he wanted. His father was an English gentleman and his mother an English lady. They were titled people, if I remember rightly. The old man was proud, but fond of his son; he only asked him to pay a little duty or respect now and again. We don't understand these things in Australia—they seem formal and cold to us. The son paid his respects to his father occasionally—a week or so before he'd be wanting money, as a rule. The mother was a dear lady. She idolized her son. She only asked for a little show of affection from him, a few days or a week of his society at home now and then—say once in three months. But he couldn't spare her even that—his time was taken up so much in fashionable London and Paris and other places. He would give the world to be able to take his proud, soft old father's hand now and look into his eyes as one man who understands another. He would be glad and eager to give his mother twelve months out of the year if he thought it would make her happier. It has been too late for more than twenty years."

Old Danny called for Peter.

Mitchell jerked his head approvingly and gave a sound like a sigh and chuckle conjoined, the one qualifying the other.

"I told you you'd get it, Joe," he said.

"I don't see how it hits me," said Joe.

"But it hit all the same, Joe."

"Well, I suppose it did," said Joe, after a short pause.

"He wouldn't have hit you so hard if you hadn't tried to parry," reflected Mitchell. "It's your turn now, Jack."

Jack Barnes said nothing.

"Now I know that Peter would do anything for a woman or child, or an honest, straight, hard-up chap," said Mitchell, straightening out his legs and folding his arms, "but I can't quite understand his being so partial to drunken scamps and vagabonds, black sheep and never-do-wells. He's got a tremendous sympathy for drunks. He'd do anything to help a drunken man. Ain't it marvellous? It's my private opinion that Peter must have been an awful boozer and scamp in his time."

The other two only thought. Mitchell was privileged. He was a young man of freckled, sandy complexion, and quizzical grey eyes. "Sly Joker" "could take a rise out of anyone on the quiet;" "You could never tell when he was getting at you;" "Face of a born comedian," as bushmen said of Mitchell. But he would probably have been a dead and dismal failure on any other stage than that of wide Australia.

Peter came back and they sat and smoked, and maybe they reflected along four very different back-tracks for a while.

The surveyor started to sing again:

I have heard the mavis singing Her love-song to the morn. I have seen the dew-drop clinging To the rose just newly born.

They smoked and listened in silence all through to the end. It was very still. The full moon was high. The long white slender branches of a box-tree stirred gently overhead; the she-oaks in the creek sighed as they are always sighing, and the southern peak seemed ever so far away.

That has made me thine for ever! Bonny Mary of Argyle.

"Blarst my pipe!" exclaimed Mitchell, suddenly. "I beg your pardon, Peter. My pipe's always getting stuffed up," and he proceeded to shell out and clear his pipe.

The breeze had changed and strengthened. They heard the violin playing "Annie Laurie."

"They must be having a Scotch night in that camp tonight," said Mitchell. The voice came again:

Maxwelton Braes are bonny— Where early fa's the dew, For 'twas there that Annie Laurie Gie me her promise true—

Mitchell threw out his arm impatiently. "I wish they wouldn't play and sing those old songs," he said. "They make you think of damned old things. I beg your pardon, Peter."

Peter sat leaning forward, his elbows resting on his knees and his hands fingering his cold pipe nervously. His sad eyes had grown haggard and haunted. It is in the hearts of exiles in new lands that the old songs are felt.

"Take no thought of the morrow, Mitchell," said Peter, abstractedly. "I beg your pardon, Mitchell. I mean——"

"That's all right, Peter," said Mitchell. "You're right; to-morrow is the past, as far as I'm concerned."

Peter blinked down at him as if he were a new species.

"You're an odd young man, Mitchell," he said. "You'll have to take care of that head of yours or you'll be found hanging by a saddle-strap to a leaning tree on a lonely track, or find yourself in a lunatic asylum before you're forty-five."

"Or else I'll be a great man," said Mitchell. "But—ah, well!"

Peter turned his eyes to the fire and smiled sadly. "Not enjoyment and not sorrow, is our destined end or way," he repeated to the fire.

"But we get there just the same," said Mitchell, "destined or not."

But to live, that each to-morrow, Finds us further than to-day!

"Why, that just fits my life, Peter," said Mitchell. "I might have to tramp two or three hundred miles before I get a cut* or a job, and if to-morrow didn't find me nearer than to-day I'd starve or die of thirst on a dry stretch."

[ * Cut—a pen or "stand" in a shearing shed ]

"Why don't you get married and settle down, Mitchell?" asked Peter, a little tired. "You're a teetotaller."

"If I got married I couldn't settle down," said Mitchell. "I reckon I'd be the loneliest man in Australia." Peter gave him a swift glance. "I reckon I'd be single no matter how much married I might be. I couldn't get the girl I wanted, and—ah, well!"

Mitchell's expression was still quaintly humorous round the lower part of his face, but there was a sad light in his eyes. The strange light as of the old dead days, and he was still young.

The cornet had started in the surveyors' camp.

"Their blooming tunes seem to fit in just as if they knew what we were talking about," remarked Mitchell.

The cornet:

You'll break my heart, you little bird, That sings upon the flowering thorn Thou mind'st me of departed joys, Departed never to return.

"Damn it all," said Mitchell, sitting up, "I'm getting sentimental." Then, as if voicing something that was troubling him, "Don't you think a woman pulls a man down as often as she lifts him up, Peter?"

"Some say so," said Peter.

"Some say so, and they write it, too," said Mitchell.

"Sometimes it seems to me as if women were fated to drag a man down ever since Adam's time. If Adam hadn't taken his wife's advice—but there, perhaps he took her advice a good many times and found it good, and, just because she happened to be wrong this time, and to get him into a hole, the sons of Adam have never let the daughters of Eve hear the last of it. That's human nature."

Jack Barnes, the young husband, who was suffering a recovery, had been very silent all the evening. "I think a man's a fool to always listen to his wife's advice," he said, with the unreasonable impatience of a man who wants to think while others are talking. "She only messes him up, and drives him to the devil as likely as not, and gets a contempt for him in the end."

Peter gave him a surprised, reproachful look, and stood up. He paced backwards and forwards on the other side of the fire, with his hands behind his back for a while; then he came and settled himself on the log again and filled his pipe.

"Yes," he said, "a man can always find excuses for himself when his conscience stings him. He puts mud on the sting. Man at large is beginning all over the world to rake up excuses for himself; he disguises them as 'Psychological studies,' and thinks he is clean and clever and cultured, or he calls 'em problems—the sex problem, for instance, and thinks he is brave and fearless."

Danny was in trouble again, and Peter went to him. He complained that when he lay down he saw the faces worse, and he wanted to be propped up somehow, so Peter got a pack-saddle and propped the old man's shoulders up with that.

"I remember," Peter began, when he came back to the fire, "I remember a young man who got married——"

Mitchell hugged himself. He knew Jack Barnes. He knew that Jack had a girl-wife who was many times too good for him; that Jack had been wild, and had nearly broken her heart, and he had guessed at once that Jack had broken out again, and that Peter M'Laughlan was shepherding him home. Mitchell had worked as mates with Jack, and liked him because of the good heart that was in him in spite of all; and, because he liked him, he was glad that Jack was going to get a kicking, so to speak, which might do him good. Mitchell saw it coming, as he said afterwards, and filled his pipe, and settled himself comfortably to listen.

"I remember the case of a naturally selfish young man who got married" said Peter. "He didn't know he was selfish; in fact, he thought he was too much the other way—but that doesn't matter now. His name was—well, we'll call him—we'll call him, 'Gentleman Once.'"

"Do you mean Gentleman Once that we saw drinking back at Thomas's shanty?" asked Joe.

"No," said Peter, "not him. There have been more than one in the bush who went by the nickname of 'Gentleman Once.' I knew one or two. It's a big clan, the clan of Gentleman Once, and scattered all over the world."

"By the way," said Mitchell—"excuse me for interrupting, Peter—but wasn't old Danny, there, a gentleman once? I've heard chaps say he was."

"I know he was," said Peter.

"Gentleman Once! Who's talking about Gentleman Once?" said an awful voice, suddenly and quickly. "About twenty or thirty years ago I was called Gentleman Once or Gentleman Jack, I don't know which—Get out! Get out, I say! It's all lies, and you're the devil. There's four devils sitting by the fire. I see them."

Two of the four devils by the fire looked round, rather startled.

Danny was sitting up, his awful bloodshot eyes glaring in the firelight, and his ruined head looking like the bloated head of a hairy poodle that had been drowned and dried. Peter went to the old man and soothed him by waving off the snakes and devils with his hands, and telling them to go.

"I've heard Danny on the Gentleman Once racket before," remarked Mitchell.

"Seems funny, doesn't it, for a man to be proud of the fact that he was called 'Gentleman Once' about twenty years ago?"

"Seems more awful than funny to me," said Joe.

"You're right, Joe," said Mitchell. "But the saddest things are often funny."

When Peter came back he went on with his story, and was only interrupted once or twice by Danny waking up and calling him to drive off the snakes, and green and crimson dogs with crocodile heads, and devils with flaming tails, and those unpleasant sorts of things that force their company on boozers and madmen.

"Gentleman Once," said Peter, "he came from the old country with a good education and no character. He disgraced himself and family once too often and came, or was sent, out to Australia to reform. It's a great mistake. If a man is too far gone, or hasn't the strength to live the past down and reform at home, he won't do it in a new country, unless a combination of circumstances compels him to it. A man rises by chance; just as often he falls by chance. Some men fall into the habit of keeping steady and stick to it, for the novelty of it, until they are on their feet and in their sane minds and can look at the past, present and future sensibly. I knew one case—But that's got nothing to do with the story.

"Gentleman Once came out on the remittance system. That system is fatal in nine cases out of ten. The remittance system is an insult to any manhood that may be left in the black sheep, and an insult to the land he is sent to. The cursed quarterly allowance is a stone round his neck which will drag him down deeper in a new land than he would have fallen at home. You know that remittance men are regarded with such contempt in the bush that a man seldom admits he is one, save when he's drunk and reckless and wants money or credit. When a ne'er-do-well lands in Melbourne or Sydney without a penny he will probably buck-up and do something for himself. When he lands with money he will probably spend it all in the first few months and then straighten up, because he has to. But when he lands on the remittance system he drinks, first to drown homesickness. He decides that he'll wait till he gets his next quarter's allowance and then look round. He persuades himself that it's no use trying to do anything: that, in fact, he can't do anything until he gets his money. When he gets it he drifts into one 'last' night with chums he has picked up in second and third-rate hotels. He drinks from pure selfishness. No matter what precautions his friends at home take, he finds means of getting credit or drawing on his allowance before it is due—until he is two or three quarters behind. He drinks because he feels happy and jolly and clever and good-natured and brave and honest while he is drinking. Later on he drinks because he feels the reverse of all these things when he is sober. He drinks to drown the past and repentance. He doesn't know that a healthy-minded man doesn't waste time in repenting. He doesn't know how easy it is to reform, and is too weak-willed to try. He gets a muddled idea that the past can't be mended. He finds it easy to get drink and borrow money on the strength of his next quarter's allowance, so he soon gets a quarter or two behind, and sometimes gets into trouble connected with borrowed money. He drifts to the bush and drinks, to drown the past only. The past grows blacker and blacker until it is a hell without repentance; and often the black sheep gets to that state when a man dreads his sober hours. And the end? Well, you see old Danny there, and you saw old Awful Example back at Thomas's shanty—he's worse than Danny, if anything. Sometimes the end comes sooner. I saw a young new-land-new-leaf man dying in a cheap lodging-house in Sydney. He was a schoolmate of mine, by the way. For six weeks he lay on his back and suffered as I never saw a man suffer in this world; and I've seen some bad cases. They had to chloroform him every time they wanted to move him. He had affected to be hard and cynical, and I must say that he played it out to the end. It was a strong character, a strong mind sodden and diseased with drink. He never spoke of home and his people except when he was delirious. He never spoke, even to me, of his mental agony. That was English home training. You young Australians wouldn't understand it; most bushmen are poets and emotional.

"My old schoolmate was shifted to the Sydney Hospital at last, and consented to the amputation of one leg. But it was too late. He was gone from the hips down. Drink—third-rate hotel and bush shanty drink—and low debauchery."

Jack Barnes drew up his leg and rubbed it surreptitiously. He had "pins and needles." Mitchell noticed and turned a chuckle into a grunt.

"Gentleman Once was a remittance man," continued Peter. "But before he got very far he met an Australian girl in a boarding-house. Her mother was the landlady. They were bush people who had drifted to the city. The girl was pretty, intelligent and impulsive. She pitied him and nursed him. He wasn't known as Gentleman Once then, he hadn't got far enough to merit the nickname."

Peter paused. Presently he jerked his head, as if he felt a spasm of pain, and leaned forward to get a stick from the fire to light his pipe.

"Now, there's the girl who marries a man to reform him, and when she has reformed him never lets him hear the last of it. Sometimes, as a woman, she drives him back again. But this was not one of that sort of girls. I once held a theory that sometimes a girl who has married a man and reformed him misses in the reformed man the something which attracted her in the careless scamp, the something which made her love him—and so she ceases to love him, and their married life is a far more miserable one than it would have been had he continued drinking. I hold no theory of that kind now. Such theories ruin many married lives."

Peter jerked his head again as if impatient with a thought, and reached for a fire-stick.

"But that's got nothing to do with the story. When Gentleman Once reformed his natural selfishness came back. He saw that he had made a mistake. It's a terrible thing for a young man, a few months, perhaps a few weeks after his marriage, to ask himself the question, 'Have I made a mistake?' But Gentleman Once wasn't to be pitied. He discovered that he had married beneath him in intellect and education. Home training again. He couldn't have discovered that he had married beneath him as far as birth was concerned, for his wife's father had been a younger son of an older and greater family than his own—But Gentleman Once wouldn't have been cad enough to bother about birth. I'll do him that much justice. He discovered, or thought he did, that he and his wife could never have one thought in common; that she couldn't possibly understand him. I'll tell you later on whether he was mistaken or not. He was gloomy most times, and she was a bright, sociable, busy little body. When she tried to draw him out of himself he grew irritable. Besides, having found that they couldn't have a thought in common he ceased to bother to talk to her. There are many men who don't bother talking to their wives; they don't think their wives feel it—because the wives cease to complain after a while; they grow tired of trying to make the man realize how they suffer. Gentleman Once tried his best—according to his lights—and weakness. Then he went in for self-pity and all the problems. He liked to brood, and his poor little wife's energy and cheerfulness were wearying to him. He wanted to be left alone. They were both high-spirited, in different ways; she was highly strung and so was he—because of his past life mostly. They quarrelled badly sometimes. Then he drank again and she stuck to him. Perhaps the only time he seemed cheerful and affectionate was when he had a few drinks in him. It was a miserable existence—a furnished room in a cheap lodging-house, and the use of the kitchen.

"He drank alone.

"Now a dipsomaniac mostly thinks he is in the right—except, perhaps, after he has been forced to be sober for a week. The noblest woman in the world couldn't save him—everything she does to reform him irritates him; but a strong friend can save him sometimes—a man who has been through it himself. The poor little wife of Gentleman Once went through it all. And she stuck to him. She went into low pubs after him."

Peter shuddered again. "She went through it all. He swore promises. He'd come home sober and fill her with hope of future happiness, and swear that he'd never take another glass. 'And we'll be happy yet, my poor boy,' she'd say, 'we'll be happy yet. I believe you, I trust you' (she used to call him her 'bonny boy' when they were first married). And next night he'd come home worse than ever. And one day he—he struck her!"

Peter shuddered, head and shoulders, like a man who had accidentally smashed his finger.

"And one day he struck her. He was sober when he did it—anyhow he had not taken drink for a week. A man is never sober who gets drunk more than once a week, though he might think he is. I don't know how it happened, but anyway he struck her, and that frightened him. He got a billet in the Civil Service up-country. No matter in what town it was. The little wife hoped for six months.

"I think it's a cruel thing that a carelessly selfish young man cannot realize how a sensitive young wife suffers for months after he has reformed. How she hopes and fears, how she dreads the moment he has to leave her, and frets every hour he is away from home—and suffers mental agony when he is late. How the horror of the wretched old past time grows upon her until she dares not think of it. How she listens to his step and voice and watches his face, when he comes home, for a sign of drink. A young man, a mate of mine, who drank hard and reformed, used to take a delight in pretending for a few minutes to be drunk when he came home. He was good-hearted, but dense. He said he only did it to give his wife a pleasant surprise afterwards. I thought it one of the most cruel things I had ever seen.

"Gentleman Once found that he could not stand the routine of office work and the dull life in that place. He commenced to drink again, and went on till he lost his billet. They had a little boy, a bright little boy, yet the father drank.

"The last spree was a terrible one. He was away from home a fortnight, and in that fortnight he got down as deep as a man could get. Then another man got hold of him and set him on his feet, and straightened him up. The other man was a ruined doctor, a wreck whose devil was morphia. I don't hold that a man's salvation is always in his own hands; I've seen mates pull mates out of hell too often to think that.

"Then Gentleman Once saw the past as he had never seen it before—he saw hope for the future with it. And he swore an oath that he felt he would keep.

"He suffered from reaction on his way home, and, as he neared the town, a sudden fear, born of his nervous state, no doubt, sent a cold, sick emptiness through him: 'Was it too late?'

"As he turned into the street where he lived, he noticed a little group of bush larrikins standing at the corner. And they moved uneasily when they caught sight of him, and, as he passed, they touched and lifted their hats to him. Now he knew that he had lost the respect even of bush larrikins; and he knew enough of the bush to know that a bushman never lifts his hat to a man—only to death, and a woman sometimes. He hurried home and read the truth in his wife's eyes. His little boy was dead. He went down under the blow, and she held his head to her breast and kept saying. 'My poor boy, my poor boy!'

"It was he that she meant, not the boy she had lost. She knew him, she understood him better than he did himself, and, heart-broken as she was, she knew how he was going to suffer, and comforted him. 'My poor boy, my poor, foolish boy!'

"He mended the past, as far as he could, during the next two years, and she seemed happy. He was very gentle, he was very kind to her. He was happy, too, in a new, strange way. But he had learned what it was to suffer through his own fault, and now he was to learn what it was to suffer through no fault of his own, and without the consolation of saying 'I was wrong! I was to blame!' At the end of the two years there was another child, and his wife died."

The four sat silently smoking until Jack Barnes asked:

"And what did he do then, Peter?"

"Who?" said Peter, abstractedly.

"Why, Gentleman Once."

Peter roused himself.

"Well, I've told the story, and it is about time to turn in," he said. "I can't say exactly what Gentleman Once did when his wife died. He might have gone down to a deeper depth than Danny's. He might have risen higher than he had ever been before. From what I knew of his character he would never have gone down an easy slope as Danny has done. He might have dropped plump at first and then climbed up. Anyway, he had the memory of the last two years to help him.

"Then there's the reformed drunkard who has trained himself to take a drink when he needs it, to drink in moderation—he's the strongest character of all, I think—but it's time to turn in."

The cornet up the creek was playing a march.

Peter walked across and looked at Danny, who seemed to be sleeping as peacefully as could be expected of him.

Jack Barnes got up and walked slowly down the creek in the moonlight. He wanted to think.

Peter rolled out his blankets on the grass and arranged his saddle-bags for a pillow. Before he turned in Mitchell shook hands with him, a most unusual and unnecessary proceeding in camp. But there's something in the bush grip which means "I know," or "I understand."

Joe Wilson rolled out his blankets close to Mitchell's camp; he wanted to enjoy some of Mitchell's quiet humour before he went to sleep, but Mitchell wasn't in a philosophical mood. He wanted to reflect.

"I wonder who Gentleman Once was?" said Joe to Mitchell. "Could he have been Danny, or old Awful Example back there at the shanty?"

"Dunno," said Mitchell. He puffed three long puffs at his pipe, and then said, reflectively:

"I've heard men tell their own stories before to-night Joe."

It was Joe who wanted to think now.

About four o'clock Mitchell woke and stood up. Peter was lying rolled in his blanket with his face turned to the west. The moon was low, the shadows had shifted back, and the light was on Peter's face. Mitchell stood looking at him reverently, as a grown son might who sees his father asleep for the first time. Then Mitchell quietly got some boughs and stuck them in the ground at a little distance from Peter's head, to shade his face from the bright moonlight; and then he turned in again to sleep till the sun woke him.



THE GHOSTS OF MANY CHRISTMASES

Did you ever trace back your Christmas days?—right back to the days when you were innocent and Santa Claus was real. At times you thought you were very wicked, but you never realize how innocent you were until you've grown up and knocked about the world.

Let me think!

Christmas in an English village, with bare hedges and trees, and leaden skies that lie heavy on our souls as we walk, with overcoat and umbrella, sons of English exiles and exiles in England, and think of bright skies and suns overhead, and sweeps of country disappearing into the haze, and blue mountain ranges melting into the azure of distant lower skies, and curves of white and yellow sand beaches, and runs of shelving yellow sandstone sea-walls—and the glorious Pacific! Sydney Harbour at sunrise, and the girls we took to Manly Beach.

Christmas in a London flat. Gloom and slush and soot. It is not the cold that affects us Australians so much, but the horrible gloom. We get heart-sick for the sun.

Christmas at sea—three Christmases, in fact—one going saloon from Sydney to Westralia early in the Golden Nineties with funds; and one, the Christmas after next, coming back steerage with nothing but the clothes we'd slept in. All of which was bad judgment on our part—the order and manner of our going and coming should have been reversed.

Christmas in a hessian tent in "th' Westren," with so many old mates from the East that it was just old times over again. We had five pounds of corned beef and a kerosene-tin to boil it in; and while we were talking of old things the skeleton of a kangaroo-dog grabbed the beef out of the boiling water and disappeared into the scrub—which made it seem more like old times than ever.

Christmas going to New Zealand, with experience, by the s.s. Tasmania. We had plum duff, but it was too "soggy" for us to eat. We dropped it overboard, lest it should swamp the boat—and it sank to the ooze. The Tasmania was saved on that occasion, but she foundered next year outside Gisborne. Perhaps the cook had made more duff. There was a letter from a sweetheart of mine amongst her mails when she went down; but that's got nothing to do with it, though it made some difference in my life.

Christmas on a new telegraph line with a party of lining gangmen in New Zealand. There was no duff nor roast because there was no firewood within twenty miles. The cook used to pile armfuls of flax-sticks under the billies, and set light to them when the last man arrived in camp.

Christmas in Sydney, with a dozen invitations out to dinner. The one we accepted was to a sensible Australian Christmas dinner; a typical one, as it should be, and will be before the Commonwealth is many years old. Everything cold except the vegetables, the hose playing on the veranda and vines outside, the men dressed in sensible pyjama-like suits, and the women and girls fresh and cool and jolly, instead of being hot and cross and looking like boiled carrots, and feeling like boiled rags, and having headaches after dinner, as would have been the case had they broiled over the fire in a hot kitchen all the blazing forenoon to cook a scalding, indigestible dinner, as many Australian women do, and for no other reason than that it was the fashion in England. One of those girls was very pretty and—ah, well!—

Christmas dinner in a greasy Sydney sixpenny restaurant, that opened a few days before with brass band going at full blast at the door by way of advertisement. "Roast-beef, one! Cabbage and potatoes, one! Plum pudding, two!" (That was the first time I dined to music.) The Christmas dinner was a good one, but my appetite was spoilt by the expression of the restaurant keeper, a big man with a heavy jowl, who sat by the door with a cold eye on the sixpences, and didn't seem to have much confidence in human nature.

Christmas—no, that was New Year—on the Warrego River, out back (an alleged river with a sickly stream that looked like bad milk). We spent most of that night hunting round in the dark and feeling on the ground for camel and horse droppings with which to build fires and make smoke round our camp to keep off the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes started at sunset and left off at daybreak, when the flies got to work again.

Christmas dinner under a brush shearing-shed. Mutton and plum pudding—and fifty miles from beer!

An old bush friend of mine, one Jimmy Nowlett, who ranked as a bullock-driver, told me of a Christmas time he had. He was cut off by the floods with his team, and had nothing to eat for four days but potatoes and honey. He said potatoes dipped in honey weren't so bad; but he had to sleep on bullock yokes laid on the ground to keep him out of the water, and he got a toothache that paralysed him all down one side.

And speaking of plum pudding, I consider it one of the most barbarous institutions of the British. It is a childish, silly, savage superstition; it must have been a savage inspiration, looking at it all round—but then it isn't so long since the British were savages.

I got a letter last year from a mate of mine in Western Australia—prospecting the awful desert out beyond White Feather—telling me all about a "perish" he did on plum pudding. He and his mates were camped at the Boulder Soak with some three or four hundred miles—mostly sand and dust—between them and the nearest grocer's shop. They ordered a case of mixed canned provisions from Perth to reach them about Christmas. They didn't believe in plum pudding—there are a good many British institutions that bushmen don't believe in but the cook was a new chum, and he said he'd go home to his mother if he didn't have plum pudding for Christmas, so they ordered a can for him. Meanwhile, they hung out on kangaroo and damper and the knowledge that it couldn't last for ever. It was in a terrible drought, and the kangaroos used to come into the "Soak" for water, and they were too weak to run. Later on, when wells were dug, the kangaroos used to commit suicide in them—there was generally a kangaroo in the well in the morning.

The storekeeper packed the case of tinned dog, etc., but by some blunder he or his man put the label on the wrong box, and it went per rail, per coach, per camel, and the last stage per boot, and reached my friends' camp on Christmas Eve, to their great joy. My friend broke the case open by the light of the camp-fire.

"Here, Jack!" he said, tossing out a can, "here's your plum pudding."

He held the next can in his hand a moment longer and read the label twice.

"Why! he's sent two," he said, "and I'm sure I only ordered one. Never mind—Jack'll have a tuck-out."

He held the next can close to the fire and blinked at it hard. "I'm damned if he hasn't sent three tins of plum pudding. Never mind, we'll manage to scoff some of it between us. You're in luck's way this trip, Jack, and no mistake."

He looked harder still at the fourth can; then he read the labels on the other tins again to see if he'd made a mistake.

He didn't tell me what he said then, but a milder mate suggested that the storekeeper had sent half a dozen tins by mistake. But when they reached the seventh can the language was not even fit to be written down on a piece of paper and handed up to the magistrate. The storekeeper had sent them an unbroken case of canned plum pudding, and probably by this time he was wondering what had become of that blanky case of duff.

The kangaroos disappeared about this time and my friend tells me that he and his mates had to live for a mortal fortnight on canned plum pudding. They tried it cold and they tried it boiled, they tried it baked, they had it fried, and they had it toasted, they had it for breakfast, dinner and tea. They had nothing else to think, or talk, or argue and quarrel about; and they dreamed about it every night, my friend says. It wasn't a joke—it gave them the nightmare and day-horrors.

They tried it with salt. They picked as many of the raisins out as they could and boiled it with salt kangaroo. They tried to make Yorkshire pudding out of it; but it was too rich.

My friend was experimenting and trying to discover a simple process for separating the ingredients of plum pudding when a fresh supply of provisions came along. He says he was never so sick of anything in his life, and he has had occasion to be sick of a good many things.

The new-chum jackaroo is still alive, but he won't ever eat plum pudding any more, he says. It cured him of homesickness. He wouldn't eat it even if his bride made it.

Christmas on the goldfields in the last of the roaring days, in the palmy days of Gulgong and those fields. Let's see! it must be nearly thirty years ago! Oh, how the time goes by!

Santa Claus, young, fresh-faced and eager; Santa Claus, blonde and flaxen; Santa Claus, dark; Santa Claus with a brogue and Santa Claus speaking broken English; Santa Claus as a Chinaman (Sun Tong Lee & Co. storekeepers), with strange, delicious sweets that melted in our mouths, and rum toys and Chinese dolls for the children.

Lucky diggers who were with difficulty restrained from putting pound notes and nuggets and expensive lockets and things into the little ones' stockings. Santa Claus in flannel shirt and clay-covered moleskins. Diggers who bought lollies by the pound and sent the little ones home with as much as they could carry.

Diggers who gave a guinea or more for a toy for a child that reminded them of some other child at home. Diggers who took as many children as they could gather on short notice into a store, slapped a five-pound note down on the counter and told the little ones to call for whatever they wanted. Who set a family of poor children side by side on the counter and called for a box of mixed children's boots—the best—and fitted them on with great care and anxiety and frequent inquiries as to whether they pinched. Who stood little girls and boys on the counter and called for the most expensive frocks, the latest and best in sailor suits, and the brightest ribbons; and things came long distances by bullock dray and were expensive in those days. Impressionable diggers—and most of them were—who threw nuggets to singers, and who, sometimes, slipped a parcel into the hands of a little boy or girl, with instructions to give it to an elder sister (or young mother, perhaps) whom the digger had never spoken to, only worshipped from afar off. And the elder sister or young mother, opening the parcel, would find a piece of jewellery or a costly article of dress, and wonder who sent it.

Ah, the wild generosity of luck-intoxicated diggers of those days! and the reckless generosity of the drinkers. "We thought it was going to last for ever!"

"If I don't spend it on the bairns I'll spend it on the drink," Sandy Burns used to say. "I ha' nane o' me own, an' the lass who was to gi' me bairns, she couldn't wait."

Sandy had kept steady and travelled from one end of the world to the other, and roughed it and toiled for five years, and the very day he bottomed his golden hole on the Brown Snake Lead at Happy Valley he got a letter from his girl in Scotland to say she had grown tired of waiting and was married. Then he drank, and drink and luck went together.

Gulgong on New Year's Eve! Rows and rows of lighted tents and camp-fires, with a clear glow over it all. Bonfires on the hills and diggers romping round them like big boys. Tin kettling—gold dishes and spoons, and fiddles, and hammers on pointing anvils, and sticks and empty kerosene-tins (they made a row); concertinas and cornets, shot-guns, pistols and crackers, all sorts of instruments, and "Auld Lang Syne" in one mighty chorus. And now—a wretched little pastoral town; a collection of glaring corrugated-iron hip-roofs, and maybe a rotting propped-up bark or weather-board humpy or two—relics of the roaring days; a dried-up storekeeper and some withered hags; a waste of caved-in holes with rain-washed mullock heaps and quartz and gravel glaring in the sun; thistles and burrs where old bars were; drought, dryness, desolation and goats.

Lonely graves in the bush and grey old diggers here and there, anywhere in the world, doing anything for a living, lonely yet because of the girls who couldn't wait, but prospecting and fossicking here and there, and dreaming still.

They thought it was going to last for ever.

Christmas at Eurunderee Creek, amongst the old selection farms in the western spurs of the Blue Mountains. They used to call it "Th' Pipeclay" thirty years ago, but the old black names have been restored. They make plum puddings yet, weeks beforehand, and boil them for hours and hang them in cloths to the rafters to petrify; then they take them down and boil them again. On Christmas Eve the boys cut boughs or young pines on the hills, and drag them home and lash them to the veranda-posts.

Ted has turned up with his wife and children from his selection out back. The wheat is in and shearing is over on the big stations. Tom—steady-going old Tom—clearing or fencing or dam-sinking up-country, hides his tools in the scrub and gets his horse and rides home. Aunt Emma (to everyone's joy) has arrived from Sydney with presents (astonishing bargains in frocks, etc.) and marvellous descriptions of town life.

Joe, "poor" Mary's husband, who has been droving in Queensland since the Christmas before last—while poor Mary, who is afraid to live alone, shared a skillion and the family quarrels at home—Joe rides day and night and reaches home at sunrise on Christmas morning, tired and dusty, gaunt and haggard, but with his last cheque intact. He kisses his wife and child and throws himself on the bed to sleep till dinner-time, while Mary moves round softly, hushes the baby, dresses it and herself, lays out Joe's clean things, and bends over him now and then, and kisses him, perhaps, as he sleeps.

In the morning the boys and some of the men go down to the creek for a swim in the big shady pool, under the she-oaks and take their Sunday clothes with them and dress there.

Some of them ride into town to church, and some of the women and children drive in in spring-carts—the children to go to Sunday school, leaving mother and the eldest daughter—usually a hard-worked, disappointed, short-tempered girl—at home to look after the cooking.

There is some anxiety (mostly on mother's part) about Jim, who is "wild," and is supposed to be somewhere out back. There was "a piece of blue paper" out for Jim on account of sweating (illegally using) a horse, but his mother or father has got a hint—given in a kindly way by the police-sergeant—that Jim is free to come home and stay at home if he behaves himself. (There is usually a horse missing when Jim goes out back.)

Jim turns up all right—save that he has no money—and is welcomed with tearful affection by his favourite sister Mary, shakes hands silently with his father, and has a long whispered conversation with his mother, which leaves him very subdued. His brothers forbear to sneer at him, partly because it is Christmas, partly on mother's account, and thirdly, because Jim can use his hands. Aunt Emma, who is fond of him, cheers him up wonderfully.

The family sit down to dinner. "An old mate of your father's"—a bearded old digger—has arrived and takes the place of honour. ("I knowed yer father, sonny, on the diggings long afore any of you was ever thought on.")

The family have only been a few hours together, yet there is an undercurrent of growling, that, to the stranger, mysterious yet evident undercurrent of nastiness and resentment which goes on in all families and drags many a promising young life down. But Aunt Emma and the old mate make things brighter, and so the dinner—of hot roast and red-hot plum pudding—passes off fairly well.

The men sleep the afternoon away and wake up bathed in perspiration and helpless; some of the women have headaches. After tea they gather on the veranda in the cool of the evening, and that's the time when the best sides of their natures and the best parts of the past have a chance of coming uppermost, and perhaps they begin to feel a bit sorry that they are going to part again.

The local races or "sports" on Boxing Day. There is nothing to keep the boys home over New Year. Ted and his wife go back to their lonely life on their selection; Tom returns to his fencing or tank-sinking contract; Jim, who has borrowed "a couple of quid" from Tom, goes out back with strong resolutions for the New Year, and shears "stragglers," breaks in horses, cooks and clerks for survey parties, and gambles and drinks, and gets into trouble again. Maybe Joe "knocks about" the farm a bit before going into the Great North-West with another mob of cattle.

The last time I saw the Old Year out at Eurunderee the bushfires were burning all over the ranges, and looked like great cities lighted up. No need for bonfires then. Christmas in Bourke, the metropolis of the great pastoral scrubs and plains, five hundred miles west, with the thermometer one-hundred-and-something-scarey in the shade. The rough, careless shearers come in from stations many dusty miles out in the scrubs to have their Christmas sprees, to drink and "shout" and fight—and have the horrors some of them—and be run in and locked up with difficulty, within sound of a church-going bell.

The Bourke Christmas is a very beery and exciting one. The hotels shut up in front on Christmas Day to satisfy the law (or out of consideration for the feelings of the sergeant in charge of the police station), and open behind to satisfy the public, who are supposed to have made the law.

Sensible cold dinners are the fashion in Bourke, I think, with the hose going, and free-and-easy costumes.

The free males take their blankets and sleep in the "park;" the women sleep with doors and windows open, and the married men on mattresses on the verandas across the open doors—in case of accidents.

Christmas in Sydney, though Christmas holidays are not so popular as Easter, or even Anniversary Day, in the Queen city of the South. Buses, electric, cable and the old steam trams crowded with holiday-makers with baskets. Harbour boats loaded down to the water's edge with harbour picnic-parties. "A trip round the harbour and to the head of Middle Harbour one shilling return!" Strings of tourist trains running over the Blue Mountains and the Great Zigzag, and up the coast to Gosford and Brisbane Water, and down the south coast to beautiful Illawarra, until after New Year. Hundreds of young fellows going out with tents to fish in lonely bays or shoot in the mountains, and rough it properly like bushmen—not with deck chairs, crockery, a piano and servants. For you can camp in the grand and rugged solitude of the bush within a stone's throw of the city, so to speak.

Jolly camps and holiday parties all round the beautiful bays of the harbour, and up and down the coast, and all close to home. Camps in the moonlight on sandy beaches under great dark bluffs and headlands, where yellow, shelving, sandstone cliffs run, broken only by sandy-beached bays, and where the silver-white breakers leap and roar.

And Manly Beach on a holiday! Thousands of people in fresh summer dress, hundreds of bare-legged, happy children running where the "blue sea over the white sand rolls," racing in and out with the rollers, playing with the glorious Pacific. Manly—"Our Village"—Manly Beach, where we used to take our girls, with the most beautiful harbour in the world on one side, and the width of the grandest ocean on the other. Ferny gullies and "fairy dells" to north and south, and every shady nook its merry party or happy couple.

Manly Beach—I remember five years ago (oh, how the time goes by!)—and two names that were written together in the sand when the tide was coming in. And the boat home in the moonlight, past the Heads, where we felt the roll of the ocean, and the moonlit harbour—and the harbour lights of Sydney—the grandest of them all.



Transcriber's Notes:

Henry Lawson 17th June 1867 - 2nd September 1922.

These stories were first published as a collection in 1902. Republished as "Send Round the Hat" and "The Romance of the Swag" in 1907.



Notes on Australianisms. Based on my own speech over the years, with some checking in the dictionaries, e.g. "Macquarie Book of Slang" (2000), Oxford English Dictionary. Not all of these are peculiar to Australian slang, but are important in Lawson's stories, and carry overtones.

anabranch: A bend in a river that has been cut through by the stream. The main current now runs straight, the anabranch diverges and then rejoins. See billabong. Barcoo-rot. "Persistent ulceration of the skin, chiefly on the hands, and often originating in abrasions". (Morris, Australian English). Barcoo is a river in Queensland. billabong. Based on an aboriginal word. Sometimes used for an anabranch, but more often used for one that, in dry season or droughts especially, is cut off at either or both ends from the main stream. It is often just a muddy pool, and may indeed dry up completely. blackfellow: condescending for Australian Aboriginal blackleg: someone who is employed to cross a union picket line to break a workers' strike. As Molly Ivins said, she was brought up on the three great commandments: do not lie; do not steal; never cross a picket line. Also scab. blanky or ——: Fill in your own favourite word. Usually however used for "bloody"—see crimson/gory. blooming: actually used in speech instead of "bloody" (see crimson). bluey: swag. Explanation in Lawson's "The romance of the Swag" here. bob: one shilling bullocky: Bullock driver. A man who drove teams of bullocks yoked to wagons carrying e.g. wool bales or provisions. Proverbially rough and foul mouthed. bummer: A cadger or bludger. Someone who begs for food. Interesting Americanism already. Also, tramp. (Different meaning today) bush: originally referred to the low tangled scrubs of the semi-desert regions (cf. 'mulga' and 'mallee'), and hence equivalent to "outback". Now used generally for remote rural areas ("the bush") and scrubby forest. bushfire: wild fires: whether forest fires or grass fires. bushman/bushwoman: someone who lives an isolated existence, far from cities, "in the bush". (today: a "bushy") bushranger: an Australian "highwayman", who lived in the 'bush'— scrub—and attacked especially gold carrying coaches and banks. Romanticised as anti-authoritarian Robin Hood figures—cf. Ned Kelly—but usually very violent. bunyip: Aboriginal monster, inhabiting waterholes, billabongs particularly. Adopted into European legends. caser: Five shillings (12 pence to the shilling, 20 shillings to the pound ("quid")). As a coin, a crown piece. chaffing: teasing, mocking good-humouredly churchyarder: Sounding as if dying—ready for the churchyard = cemetery crimson = gory: literary substitutes for "bloody"—the "colonial oath", unacceptable in polite company. Why, is a complete mystery. Popularly explained as contraction of "by Our Lady". Unproved. In reproducing (badly) a German's pronunciation of Australian, Lawson retains the word, but spells it "pluddy". dood: Dude. A classy/cool dresser. drover: one who "droves" droving: driving on horseback cattle or sheep from where they were fattened to a a city, or later, a rail-head. fiver: a five pound note gory, see crimson Homebush: Saleyard, market area in Sydney humpy: rough shack half-caser: Two shillings and sixpence. As a coin, a half-crown. jackaroo: (Jack + kangaroo; sometimes jackeroo)—someone, in early days a new immigrant from England, learning to work on a sheep/cattle station (U.S. "ranch".) jim-jams: the horrors, d.t.'s jumbuck: a sheep (best known from Waltzing Matilda: "where's that jolly jumbuck, you've got in your tucker bag".) larrikin: anything from a disrespectful young man to a violent member of a gang ("push"). Was considered a major social problem in Sydney of the 1880's to 1900. The Bulletin, a magazine in which much of Lawson was published, spoke of the "aggressive, soft-hatted stoush brigade". Anyone today who is disrespectful of authority or convention is said to show the larrikin element in the Australian character. lucerne: Alfalfa in US mallee: dwarfed eucalyptus trees growing in very poor soil and under harsh rainfall conditions. Usually many stems emerging from the ground, creating a low thicket. mateship: See Lawson story, "Mateship". A heavily romanticised, but nevertheless very practical form of (male) loyalty to a (male) companion who travels with/works with him. A "mate" provides not only companionship, but help in emergencies. Typical of an Australian in the "outback"—or "Never-Never", or under war conditions. A man without a mate was a "hatter"—"his hat covers his family". Such a person might go "ratty" (see further in The romance of the Swag). Equivalent to the "buddy system" in SCUBA diving. metalled: of a road, covered in crushed rock (e.g. "blue metal") mulga: Acacia sp. ("wattle" in Australian) especially

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