eback when he was a
young dude fighting in the bush in Poland."

Mitchell lay silent a good while; then he yawned.

"Ah, well! It's a lonely track the Lachlan's tramping to-night; but I
s'pose he's got his ghosts with him."

I'd been puzzling for the last half-hour to think where I'd met or heard
of Jack Drew; now it flashed on me that I'd been told that Jack Drew was
the Lachlan's real name.

I lay awake thinking a long time, and wished Mitchell had kept his yarn
for daytime. I felt--well, I felt as if the Lachlan's story should have
been played in the biggest theatre in the world, by the greatest actors,
with music for the intervals and situations--deep, strong music, such as
thrills and lifts a man from his boot soles. And when I got to sleep I
hadn't slept a moment, it seemed to me, when I started wide awake to
see those infernal hanging boughs with a sort of nightmare idea that the
Lachlan hadn't gone, or had come back, and he and Mitchell had hanged
themselves sociably--Mitchell for sympathy and the sake of mateship.

But Mitchell was sleeping peacefully, in spite of a path of moonlight
across his face--and so was the pup.

The Darling River

The Darling--which is either a muddy gutter or a second Mississippi--is
about six times as long as the distance, in a straight line, from its
head to its mouth. The state of the river is vaguely but generally
understood to depend on some distant and foreign phenomena to which
bushmen refer in an off-hand tone of voice as "the Queenslan' rains",
which seem to be held responsible, in a general way, for most of the
out-back trouble.

It takes less than a year to go up stream by boat to Walgett or Bourke
in a dry season; but after the first three months the passengers
generally go ashore and walk. They get sick of being stuck in the same
sort of place, in the same old way; they grow weary of seeing the same
old "whaler" drop his swag on the bank opposite whenever the boat ties
up for wood; they get tired of lending him tobacco, and listening to his
ideas, which are limited in number and narrow in conception.

It shortens the journey to get out and walk; but then you will have to
wait so long for your luggage--unless you hump it with you.

We heard of a man who determined to stick to a Darling boat and travel
the whole length of the river. He was a newspaper man. He started on
his voyage of discovery one Easter in flood-time, and a month later the
captain got