‘We did keep ’em, and that’s about all I know,’ responded the fierce drover of other days. ‘_How_ we did it the devil only knows. I swore enough that night for him to lend a hand, if he’s on for such fakes, as some says. I rode slap into Tin Pot, the black boy, once, taking him for an old cow, and Tommy Toke, the white lad, ran against a tree and knocked one of his horse’s eyes clean out. Well, daylight came at last, and we had the cattle at our own price, blast ’em. All day they was very sulky and slinged along, and wouldn’t feed. Well, we was sulky too, for we’d no time to stop and cook a bite, it was so thick.’ ‘What started ’em so?’ inquired the landlord; ‘they’d had a deal of camping before they came so far.’ ‘God knows!—a kangaroo or a bear, or they saw a ghost or a blackfellow—something we couldn’t see; and once they were fairly up, the devil himself wouldn’t get them to settle again. Now I knew a first-rate camp two or three miles from the bottom of this here hill, almost as good as a yard, but with a bit of feed and water in, a regular wall of rock all round; one man, with a fire, could keep ’em first-rate. So my dart was to get to this place, and I was looking forward to a bit of hot damper and a warm quart or two of tea, with a quiet smoke. ‘Just as I thinks of this we turned the corner, and there, in the narrowest part of the road, was a road gang, as they call it, a goodish crowd of chained convicts makin’ believe to mend the road, with a party of soldiers to look after ‘em, and a young officer to look after the soldiers, and a white-whiskered, hard-hearted old rascal of a corporal to look after _him_. ‘The corporal was a-walking up and down, on guard, backwards and forwards, very stiff and solemn. There’d been a chap bolted (and shot dead, too) the night afore, so he had on a bit of extra pipeclay. ‘Our mob propped, dead—the cattle and Tin Pot and Tommy Toke—at what they’d never seen afore. Now we couldn’t give the party the go-by anyhow, unless they went into their huts.’ ‘Why not?’ asked Mr. Neuchamp, deeply interested. ‘Because the mountain was like the side of a house above the road, and fell straight down below five hundred feet, like a sea-cliff. There was just that chain or two of level track, and that was all. I goes up to the corporal, “I say, mate,” says I, “can’t you get your canaries off the track here for about a quarter of an hour, and let my mob of cattle pass?” ‘He looks at me, turning his eyes, but not his head, and keeps on marching up and down like a blessed image; all he says was, “Make an application to the officer in command,” says he. ‘So I looks about, and presently I sees a slight-built young fellow, in a shell jacket, lounging about a tent.