‘I’m not so sure of that,’ said Charley; ‘it looks very like setting in dry, and what’s more, Jack Windsor thinks the same, and the blacks say “big one water, longa lake dry up, like’t long time”―that looks bad.’ ‘And suppose it does,’ said Ernest, cutting his _Review_ carefully, ‘surely there will be grass and water enough on the run for all our stock?’ ‘Not so sure of that. In this part the grass goes all to nothing in a dry year, breaks off, and blows away, making the country look like a brick-field. Besides, I was reading in Sturt’s _Exploration_; capital book it is’―(Mr. Banks had been craftily led into the path of literary exercise by tastes of travel and adventure, of which line of action he was passionately fond)―‘well, I was reading that the year the Captain went down the Murrumbidgee first, 1827, was a terrible drought―worse than anything we have had since. That year was the driest summer in England known for a century.’ ‘What of that?’ ‘Why, didn’t you tell me that your letters from England, the last mail, said they were having an awfully hot season _for them_, brooks nearly dry, people having to cart water ten miles, and so on. Well, _our summer follows theirs_ in a kind of way six months after. So I’m afraid we are in for a regular dry season, if not a drought.’ ‘And does that make so much difference?’ asked Ernest coolly. ‘This seems a dry country at the best of times; Nature should be equal to any emergency in that line, from the practice she ought to have had in this topsy-turvy continent.’ ‘My word, and so she is in a general way,’ said the youngster, standing up for his native land. ‘But a drought, the real thing I mean, a dry summer after a dry winter, is something awful. I can recollect one when I was a little chap at school, and that was something I never forgot.’ ‘What was it like, Charley? I’m never afraid of facts; half the evil of life arises from not looking _them_ in the face.’ ‘Well, but some facts frighten you like a ghost does, however straight you may look them in the face,’ said the lad. ‘In the year I remember, lots of squatters lost their stock to the last head, and were ruined out and out. There was no beef or mutton fit for a blackfellow to eat. Flour was a hundred pounds a ton, and had to be mixed with ground rice. All of us boys were taken from school because bread was too dear―not that we cared about that. Nobody could sell anything. People almost forgot what money was like, there was so little of it.’ ‘We must hope for the best,’ said Mr. Neuchamp firmly, though, as he was speaking, an unpleasant thought flitted through his brain of how he should make things pleasant with Messrs. Oldstile and Crampton, if the easily negotiated drafts of fat cattle could no longer be collected from Rainbar camp. ‘We may have summer rains or thunder showers; the least thing seems to cause the herbage to grow hereabouts.’