butter and nothing else. However, on November 23rd the mutton-birds
began to come in thousands, and then I was soon living in clover. I
had any quantity of hard-boiled eggs and roast fowl, for I could
knock down the birds with a stick.

"But, Jack, what have you been doing since I met you the year before
last? You had a train of pack bullocks and a mob of cattle, looking
for a run about Mount Buninyong. Did you start a station there for
Imlay?"

"No, I didn't. I found a piece of good country, but Pettit and the
Coghills hunted me out of it, so Imlay sold the cattle, and went back
to Twofold Bay. Then Charles Lynot offered me a job. He was taking
a mob of cattle to Adelaide, but he heard there was no price for them
there, so he took up a station at the Pyrenees, seventeen miles
beyond Parson Irvine's run at the Amphitheatre. I was there about
twelve months. My hut was not far from a deep waterhole, and the
milking yard was about two hundred yards from the hut. The wild
blacks were very troublesome; they killed three white men at
Murdering Creek, and me and Francis, Clarke's manager, hunted them
off the station two or three times. The blacks were more afraid of
Francis than of anybody else, as besides his gun he always carried
pistols, and they never could tell how many he had in his pockets.
Cockatoo Bill's tribe drove away a lot of Parson Irvine's sheep, and
broke a leg of each sheep to keep them from going back. The Parson
and Francis went after them, and one of our stockmen named Walker,
and another, a big fellow whose name I forget. They shot some of the
blacks, but the sheep were spoiled.

"There was a tame blackfellow we called Alick, and two gins, living
about our station, and he had a daughter we called picaninny
Charlotte, ten or eleven years old, who was very quick and smart, and
spoke English very well. One morning, when I was in the milking
yard, she came to me and said, 'You look out. Cockatoo Bill got your
axe under his rug--sitting among a lot of lubras. Chop you down
when you bring up milk in buckets.'

"I had no gun with me, so I crept out of the yard, and sneaked
through the scrub to get into the hut through the back door, keeping
out of sight of Bill and the lubras, who were all sitting on the
ground in front of the hut. We had plenty of arms, and I always kept
my double-barrelled gun loaded, and hanging over the fireplace. I
crept inside the hut, reached down for the gun, and pe