world! Talk of your ten thou' a year and what it'll buy! You
know, Harry, how it feels when a steer takes the slack of your
rope, and your pony sits back! Where in England can I buy that?
You know the rising and the falling of days, and the boundless
spaces where your heart grows big, and the thirst of the desert
and the hunger of the trail, and a sun that shines and fills
the sky, and a wind that blows fresh from the wide places!
Where in parcelled, snug, green, tight little England could I
buy that with ten thou'--aye, or an hundred times ten thou'?
No, no, Harry, that fortune would cost me too dear. I have
seen and done and been too much. I've come back to the Big
Country, where the pay is poor and the work is hard and the
comfort small, but where a man and his soul meet their Maker face
to face."


The Cattleman had finished his yarn. For a time no one spoke.
Outside, the volume of rain was subsiding. Windy Bill reported
a few stars shining through rifts in the showers. The chill that
precedes the dawn brought us as close to the fire as the
smouldering guano would permit.

"I don't know whether he was right or wrong," mused the
Cattleman, after a while. "A man can do a heap with that much
money. And yet an old 'alkali' is never happy anywhere else.
However," he concluded emphatically, "one thing I do know: rain,
cold, hunger, discomfort, curses, kicks, and violent deaths
included, there isn't one of you grumblers who would hold that
gardening job you spoke of three days!"