from Moscow. Finally, I lost fourteen on the trip--exactly the number
I had got dishonestly. As for the second wagon, I gave it to Baxter
for fetching the load the last fifty mile. I thought this might clear away
the curse, so I didn't fret over it. I felt as if Charley
had got satisfaction. But I wasn't going to get off so cheap.
Two years afterward--you remember, Dixon?--I bought that thin team
and the Melbourne wagon from Pribble, the contractor. Dixon, here,
was driving for Pribble at that very time, and he can tell you
how Dick the Devil cleaned me out of my fine old picked team and the new wagon,
leaving me to begin afresh with the remains of Pribble's skeletons
and my own old wagon. Then a year or two afterward, I went in debt
to buy that plant of Mulligan's--him that was killed off the colt at Mossgiel--
and that same winter the pleuro broke out in my lot, and they went
like rotten sheep till fourteen were gone; and then, of course,
the plague was stopped. Not having any use for Mulligan's wagon,
I swapped her for a new thirty-by-twenty-four wool-rag, and a Wagga pot,
good for eight or ten mile on a still night; and, within a month,
Ramsay's punt went down with my wagon; she's in the bottom
of the Murrumbidgee now, with eight ton of bricks to steady her,
and the tarpaulin and bell to keep her company. She'll be fetching
the most critical planks out of a steamer some of these times,
and I'll get seven years for leaving her there. Afterward,
when I was hauling logs for pontooning, on the Goulburn, I kept
buying up steers and breaking them in, till I had two twelves; and one day
I left sixteen of them standing in yoke while I went looking round
for a good log; and suddenly I heard a crash that rattled back and forward
across the river for a quarter of an hour. I had a presentiment
that Providence was on the job again, and I wasn't disappointed.
One of the fallers had left a tree nearly through when he went to dinner;
and a gust of wind sent it over, and it carried a couple of other trees