es
struck. He left the news at Newton's selection, and Old Bones Farm, and
at Foley's at the foot of Lowe's Peak, close under the gap between Peak
and Granite Ridge. Then he turned west, at right angles to the main
road, and took a track that was deserted except for one farm and on
every alternate Sunday. He passed the lonely little slab bush "chapel"
of the locality, that broke startlingly out of the scrub by the track
side as he reached it; and left the news at Southwick's farm at the
end of the blind track. At more than one farm he left the bushwoman
hurriedly looking up her "black things;" and at more than one, one of
the boys getting his bridle to catch his horse and ride elsewhere with
the news.

Ben rode back, through the moonlight and the moon-shadow haunted
paddocks, and the naked, white, ringbarked trees, along Snakes Creek,
parallel with the main road he had recently travelled till he struck
Pipeclay Creek again lower down. He turned down the track towards
the river, and at the junction left word at Lowe's--one of the old
land-grant families. The dogs woke an old handy man (who had been "sent
out" in past ages for "knocking a donkey off a hen-roost"-as most of
them were) and Ben told him to tell the family.

At Belinfante's Bridge across the Cudgegong Ben struck a big camp of
bullock-drivers, some going down with wool and some going back for more.

"Hold on, Ben," cried Jimmy Nowlett, from his hammock under his wagon as
Ben was riding off--"Hold on a minute! I want to look at yer."

Jimmy got his head out of his bunk very cautiously and carefully, and
his body after it--there were nut ends of bolts, a heavy axle, and
extremely hard projections, points, and corners within a very few short
inches of his chaff-filled sugar-bag pillow. Slipping cannily on to
his hands and knees, he crawled out under the tail-board, dragging his
"moles" after him, and stood outside in the moonlight shaking himself
into his trousers.

Jimmy was a little man who always wore a large size in moleskins--for
some reason best known to himself--or more probably for no reason at
all; or because of a habit he'd got into accidentally years ago--or
because of the motherly trousers his mother used to build for him when
he was a boy. And he always shook himself into his pants after the
manner of a woman shaking a pillow into a clean slip; his chin down on
his chest and his jaw dropped, as if he'd take himself in his teeth,
after the manne