strongest excitement.

Pip could not think where all the men had sprung from. There were
some twenty or thirty of them, stockmen, shearers "on the
wallaby," as their parlance expressed lack of employment, two
Aboriginals, exclusive of Tettawonga, who was smoking and looking
on with sleepy enjoyment, and several other of the station hands.

In the first yard there were five hundred cattle that had been driven
there the night before, and that just now presented the appearance of
a sea of wildly lashing tails and horns. Such horns!--great,
branching, terrific-looking things that they gored and fought each
other madly with, seeing they could not get to the common enemy
outside.

Just for the first moment or two Pip felt a little disinclined to
quit the stronghold of his horse's back. The thunder of hoofs and
horns, the wild charges made by the desperate animals against the
fence, made him expect to see it come crashing down every minute.

But everybody else had gone to "cockatoo"--to sit on the top rail
of the enclosure and look down at the maddened creatures, so at length
he fastened his bridle to a tree and proceeded gingerly to follow
their example.

At a sudden signal from Mr. Hassal the men dropped down inside,
half along, one side and half the other. The object was to get a
hundred or two of the cattle into the forcing-yard adjoining, the gate
to which was wide open. Pip marvelled at the courage of the men;
for a moment his heart had leaped to his mouth as bullock after