hard to find in a bad season, when the country is stocked for good seasons.
Runnymede home station--Mooney and Montgomery, owners; J. G. Montgomery,
managing partner--was a mile or so beyond the further corner
of the ram-paddock, and was the central source of danger.

Presently the tea leaves were thrown out of the billies;
the tuckerboxes were packed on the pole-fetchels; and the teams got under way.
Thompson pressed me to camp with him and Cooper for the night,
and I readily consented; thus temporarily eluding a fatality which was
in the habit of driving me from any given direction to Runnymede homestead--
a fatality which, I trust, I shall have no farther occasion to notice
in these pages.

We therefore tied Fancy beside Thompson's horse at the rear of his wagon,
and disposed Bunyip's pack-saddle and load on the top of the wool;
the horse, of course, following Fancy according to his daily habit.

A quarter of a mile of stiff pulling through the sand of the pine-ridge,
and the plain opened out again. A short, dark, irregular line,
cleanly separated from the horizon by the wavy glassiness of the lower air,
indicated the clump of box on the selection, four miles ahead;
and this comprised the landscape.

Soon we became aware of two teams coming to meet us; then three horsemen
behind, emerging from the pine-ridge we had left. As the horsemen
gradually decreased their distance, the teams met and passed us
without salutation; sullenly drawing off the track, in the deference
always conceded to wool. Victorian poverty spoke in every detail
of the working plant; Victorian energy and greed in the unmerciful loads
of salt and wire, for the scrub country out back. The Victorian carrier,