‘I’m glad these crawlers of cattle are branded up and done with while it’s dry, likewise the horses. All this kind of work is so much easier and better done in dry weather,’ said the relaxing manager. ‘They’re not a very gay lot to look at now. But I shouldn’t wonder to see you knocking ten pounds a head out of some of those cats of steers before this day two years.’ ‘Ten pounds a head!’ echoed Ernest. ‘Why not say twenty, while you’re about it?’ ‘You don’t believe it,’ said Mr. Cottonbush calmly, rubbing his tobacco assiduously in his hands preparatory to lighting his pipe. ‘Levison writes that stock are going up in Victoria to astonishing prices, and that what they’ll reach, if the gold keeps up, no man can tell. So your cattle _might_ fetch twenty pounds after all.’ ‘What would you advise me to do with the Freemans’ stock, now that I have got them?‘ asked Ernest. ‘If I was in your place,’ said Mr. Cottonbush judicially, ‘I should stick to the cattle, for every one of them, down to the smallest calf, will be good money when the rain comes. The sheep also you may as well keep: they’ll pay their own wages if you put ’em out on a bit of spare back country, and there’s plenty that your cattle never go near. You could bring ’em in to shear them, and they’ll increase and grow into money fast enough. You might have ten thousand sheep on Rainbar and never know it.’ ‘I don’t like sheep much,’ said Ernest; ‘but these are very cheap, if they live, and there is plenty of room, as you say. And the horses?’ ‘Sell every three-cornered wretch of ’em—a set of upright-shouldered, useless mongrels—directly you get a chance,’ said Mr. Cottonbush with unusual energy of speech. ‘And now you’re able to clear the run of ’em, being your own, which you never could have done if they remained theirs. You’d have had young fellows coming for this colt or that filly till your head was gray.’ ‘I hope not,’ said Ernest, laughing; ‘but I am glad to have all the stock and land of Rainbar in my own hands once more.’ Mr. Cottonbush departed at dawn, and once more Ernest was alone in the gray-stricken, accursed waste, wherein nor grass grew nor water ran, nor did any of these everyday miracles of Nature appear likely again to be witnessed by despairing man. Still passed by the hungry hordes of travelling sheep, still the bony skeletons of the passing cattle herds. No rain, no sign of rain! All pastoral nature, brute and human, appeared to have been struck with the same blight, and to be forlorn and moribund. The station cattle became weaker and less capable of exertion; ‘lower,’ as Charley Banks called it, as the cold autumn nights commenced to exhibit their keenness. The Freemans relinquished all control over their cattle, and chuckled over the weakly state of the Rainbar herd.