und things there at a pretty pass. Not a drop of rain had fallen up
to now on the station for nearly nine months. YOU know what that means
on the top of two dry seasons. As soon as I was fit, we rode over the
run inspecting--I and Ninnis and Moongarr Bill. There's a lot of riding
over one thousand square miles, and we didn't get our inspection done
quickly. Day after day we travelled through desolation--grass withered
to chips, creeks and waterholes all but empty, cattle staggering like
drunken men, only it was for WANT of drink. The trees were dying in the
wooded country; and in the plains the earth was crumbling and
shrinking, and great cracks like crevasses were gaping in the black
soil where there used to be beautiful green grass and flowers in spring.

The lagoon was practically dried up, and the little drain of water left
was undrinkable because of the dead beasts that had got bogged and
dropped dead in it. They were short of water at the head-station, and
we had to fetch it in from a waterhole several miles off that we fenced
round and used for drinking--so long as it lasted. When we were
mustering the other side of the run, it came to our camping at a sandy
creek where we could dig in the sand and get just enough for horses and
men. The water of the Bore I'd made, was a bit brackish, but it kept
the grass alive round about and was all the cattle had to depend on.
You can think of the job it was shifting the beasts over there from
other parts of the run which was what we tried to do, so long as they
were fit for it.

We were selling what we could while there was still life left in the
herd, but the cattle were too far gone for droving. We managed to
collect a hundred or so--sent them in trucks from Crocodile Creek
Terminus, for boiling down and netted about thirty shillings a head on
them. That was all. I guess that--by this time, out of my eleven
thousand head with No. 666 brand on them I'd muster from four to five
hundred. The mistake I made was in not selling out for what I could get
at the beginning of the Drought. But it was the long time in
Leichardt's Town that had me there.

It was bad luck all through from first to last. Mustering those beasts
for boiling down started that old spear wound afresh. Until it got well
again, there was nothing for it but to sit tight and wait.

Moongarr Bill left to make a prospecting trip on my old tracks up the
Bight--took Cudgee and the black-boy with him. He had an ide