if one could have distinguished the horns. They may have struck
a soft track or level, or rounded the buttress of the hill higher up,
but before they had time to reach or round the foot of the spur,
blurs, whispers, stumble and clatter of hoofs, jingle of bridle rings,
and the occasional clank together of stirrup irons, seemed shut off
as suddenly and completely as though a great sound-proof door
had swung to behind them.

It was dark enough on the glaringest of days down in the lonely hollow
or "pocket", between two spurs, at the head of a blind gully
behind Mount Buckaroo, where there was a more or less dusty patch,
barely defined even in broad daylight by a spidery dog-legged fence
on three sides, and a thin "two-rail" (dignified with
the adjective "split-rail" -- though rails and posts were mostly of saplings
split in halves) running along the frontage. In about the middle of it
a little slab hut, overshadowed by a big stringy-bark shed,
was pointed out as Johnny Mears's Farm.

"Black as -- as charcoal," said Johnny Mears. He had never
seen coal, and was a cautious man, whose ideas came slowly.
He stooped, close by the fence, with his hands on his knees,
to "sky" the loom of his big shed and so get his bearings.
He had been to have a look at the penned calves, and see that all slip-rails
were up and pegged, for the words of John Mears junior,
especially when delivered rapidly and shrilly and in injured tones,
were not to be relied upon in these matters.

"It's hot enough to melt the belly out of my fiddle," said Johnny Mears
to his wife, who sat on a three-legged stool by the rough table
in the little whitewashed "end-room", putting a patch of patches