about anything -- something, all the same, that warned men
not to make free with him.

He and Mitchell fished along the Billabong all the afternoon;
I fished a little, and lay about the camp and read. I had an instinct
that the Lachlan saw I didn't cotton on to his camping with us,
though he wasn't the sort of man to show what he saw or felt.
After tea, and a smoke at sunset, he shouldered his swag,
nodded to me as if I was an accidental but respectful stranger
at a funeral that belonged to him, and took the outside track.
Mitchell walked along the track with him for a mile or so,
while I poked round and got some boughs down for a bed, and fed and studied
the collie pup that Jack had bought from the shearers' cook.

I saw them stop and shake hands out on the dusty clearing,
and they seemed to take a long time about it; then Mitchell started back,
and the other began to dwindle down to a black peg and then to a dot
on the sandy plain, that had just a hint of dusk and dreamy far-away gloaming
on it between the change from glaring day to hard, bare, broad moonlight.

I thought Mitchell was sulky, or had got the blues, when he came back;
he lay on his elbow smoking, with his face turned from the camp
towards the plain. After a bit I got wild -- if Mitchell was going
to go on like that he might as well have taken his swag and gone
with the Lachlan. I don't know exactly what was the matter with me that day,
and at last I made up my mind to bring the thing to a head.

"You seem mighty thick with the Lachlan," I said.

"Well, what's the matter with that?" asked Mitchell. "It ain't