ng a new station at length drove it out of my
head.

I suppose a year had elapsed from the night when the fame of the
double-fisted stockman first reached me. I had to take a three days'
journey to buy a score of fine-wooled rams, through a country quite new
to me, which I chose because it was a short-cut recently discovered. I
got over, the first day, forty-five miles comfortably. The second day,
in the evening, I met an ill-looking fellow walking with a broken
musket, and his arm in a sling. He seemed sulky, and I kept my hand on
my double-barreled pistol all the time I was talking to him; he begged a
little tea and sugar, which I could not spare, but I threw him a fig of
tobacco. In answer to my questions about his arm, he told me, with a
string of oaths, that a bull, down in some mimosa flats, a day's journey
ahead, had charged him, flung him into a water-hole, broken his arm, and
made him lose his sugar and tea bag. Bulls in Australia are generally
quiet, but this reminded me that some of the Highland black cattle
imported by the Australian Company, after being driven off by a party of
Gully Rakees (cattle stealers), had escaped into the mountains and
turned quite wild. Out of this herd, which was of a breed quite unsuited
to the country, a bull sometimes, when driven off by a stronger rival,
would descend to the mimosa flats, and wander about, solitary and
dangerously fierce.

It struck me, as I rode off, that it was quite as well my friend's arm
and musket had been disabled, for he did not look the sort of man it
would be pleasant to meet in a thicket of scrub, if he fancied the horse
you rode. So, keeping one eye over my shoulder, and a sharp look-out for
any other traveler of the same breed, I rode off at a brisk pace. I made
out afterward that my foot friend was Jerry Johnson, hung for shooting a
bullock-driver the following year.

At sun-down, when I reached the hut where I had intended to sleep, I
found it deserted, and so full of fleas, I thought it better to camp
out; so I hobbled out old Gray-tail on the best piece of grass I could
find, which was very poor indeed.

The next morning, when I went to look for my horse, he was nowhere to be
found. I put the saddle on my head and tracked him for hours; it was
evident the poor beast had been traveling away in search of grass. I
walked until my feet were one mass of blisters; at length, when about to
give up the search in despair, having quite lost the trac