‘Yes, yes; I’ll tell you what it is, mates,’ said one; ‘this confounded reading and writing, that don’t give plain fellows like you and me a chance;—now, if it were to come to fighting for a living, I don’t care whether it was half-minute time and London rules, rough and tumble, or single stick, or swords and bayonets, or tomahawks,—I’m dashed if you and me, and Two-Handed Dick, wouldn’t take the whole Legislative Council, the Governor and Judges—one down ’tother come on. Though, to be sure, Dick could thrash any two of us.’ I was too tired to keep awake, and dozed off, to be again and again disturbed with cries of ‘Bravo, Dick!’ ‘That’s your sort!’ ‘Houray, Dick!’ all signifying approval of that individual’s conduct in some desperate encounter, which formed the subject of a stirring narrative. For months after that night this idea of Two-Handed Dick haunted me, but the bustle of establishing a new station at length drove it out of my head. I suppose a year had elapsed from the night when the fame of the double-fisted stockman first reached me. I had to take a three days’ journey to buy a score of fine-woolled rams, through a country quite new to me, which I chose because it was a short cut recently discovered. I got over, the first day, forty-five miles comfortably. The second day, in the evening, I met an ill-looking fellow walking with a broken musket, and his arm in a sling. He seemed sulky, and I kept my hand on my double-barrelled pistol all the time I was talking to him; he begged a little tea and sugar, which I could not spare, but I threw him a fig of tobacco. In answer to my questions about his arm, he told me, with a string of oaths, that a bull, down in some mimosa flats, a day’s journey a-head, had charged him, flung him into a water-hole, broken his arm, and made him lose his sugar and tea bag. Bulls in Australia are generally quiet, but this reminded me that some of the Highland black cattle imported by the Australian Company, after being driven off by a party of Gully Rakees (cattle stealers), had escaped into the mountains and turned quite wild. Out of this herd, which was of a breed quite unsuited to the country, a bull sometimes, when driven off by a stronger rival, would descend to the mimosa flats, and wander about, solitary and dangerously fierce. It struck me as I rode off, that it was quite as well my friend’s arm and musket had been disabled, for he did not look the sort of man it would be pleasant to meet in a thicket of scrub, if he fancied the horse you rode. So, keeping one eye over my shoulder, and a sharp look-out for any other traveller of the same breed, I rode off at a brisk pace. I made out afterwards that my foot friend was Jerry Jonson, hung for shooting a bullock-driver, the following year.