He wires to me to go and inspect
them quick and lively before someone else gets them, and I ride and
drive and coach hundreds of miles to get at some flat-sided pike-horned
mob of brutes without enough fat on them to oil a man's hair with. I've
to go right away out back now and take over a place that the old man
advanced some money on. He was fool enough, or someone was fool enough
for him, to advance five thousand pounds on a block of new country with
five thousand cattle on it--book-muster, you know, and half the cattle
haven't been seen for years, and the other half are dead, I expect.
Anyhow, the man that borrowed the money is ruined, and I have to go up
and take over the station."

"What do you call a book-muster?" said the globe-trotter, who was
spending a month in the country, and would naturally write a book on it.

"Book-muster, book-muster? Why, a book-muster is something like
dead-reckoning on a ship. You know what dead-reckoning is, don't you?
If a captain can't see the sun he allows for how fast the ship is going,
and for the time run and the currents, and all that, and then reckons up
where he is. I travelled with a captain once, and so long as he stuck
to dead-reckoning he was all right. He made out we were off Cairns, and
that's just where we were; because we struck the Great Barrier Reef, and
became a total wreck ten minutes after. With the cattle it's just the
same. You'll reckon the cattle that you started with, add on each
year's calves, subtract all that you sell,--that is, if you ever do sell
any--and allow for deaths, and what the blacks spear and the thieves
steal. Then you work out the total, and you say, 'There ought to be five
thousand cattle on the place,' but you never get 'em. I've got to go
and find five thousand cattle in the worst bit of brigalow scrub in the
north."

"Where do you say this place is?" said Pinnock. "It's called No Man's
Land, and it's away out back near where the buffalo-shooters are. It'll
take about a month to get there. The old man's in a rare state of mind
at being let in. He's up at Kuryong now, driving my brother Hugh out of
his mind. Hugh would as soon have an attack of faceache as see old Bully
looming up the track. Every time he goes up he shifts every blessed
sheep out of every paddock, and knocks seven years' growth out of them
putting them through the yards; then he overhauls the store, and if
there's a box of matches short he'll keep Hugh up half the nigh