ong talk they had together over the
various troubles that beset the manager of a station.

It would hardly be supposed that a girl could give much advice on such
matters, and at first her total ignorance of the various difficulties
amused him; but when she came to understand them better, her cool
common-sense compelled his admiration. His temperament was nervous and
excitable, and he let things fret him. She took everything in a cheery
spirit, and laughed him out of his worries. One would not expect to
find many troubles in rearing sheep and selling their wool; but the
management of any big station is a heavy task, and Kuryong would have
driven Job mad.

The sheep themselves, to begin with, seem always in league against their
owners. Merinos, though apparently estimable animals, are in reality
dangerous monomaniacs, whose sole desire is to ruin the man that owns
them. Their object is to die, and to do so with as much trouble to their
owners as they possibly can. They die in the droughts when the grass,
roasted to a dull white by the sun, comes out by the roots and blows
about the bare paddocks; they die in the wet, when the long grass in
the sodden gullies breeds "fluke" and "bottle" and all sorts of hideous
complaints. They get burnt in bush fires from sheer malice, refusing to
run in any given direction, but charging round and round in a ring
till they are calcined. They get drowned by refusing to leave flooded
country, though hunted with frenzied earnestness.

It was not the sheep so much as the neighbours whose depredations were
drawing lines on Hugh Gordon's face. "I wouldn't care," he confided to
Miss Grant, "if they only took a beast or two. But the sheep are going
by hundreds. We mustered five hundred short in one paddock this month.
And there isn't a Doyle or a Donohoe cow but has three calves at least,
and two of each three belong to us."

He dared not prosecute them. No local jury would convict in face of the
hostility that would be aroused. They had made "alibis" a special study;
the very judges were staggered by the calmness and plausibility with
which they got themselves out of difficulties.

A big station with a lot of hostile neighbours is like a whale with
the killers round it; it is open to attack on all sides, and cannot
retaliate. A match dropped carelessly in a patch of grass sets miles of
country in a blaze. Hugh, as he missed the stock, and saw fences cut
and grass burnt, could only grind his