gang again! The police are in
pursuit! That's what we'd see in the papers. We had 'em sent to us
regular; besides having the pick of 'em when we cut open the mail bags.

And now--that chain rubbed a sore, curse it!--all that racket's over.
It's more than hard to die in this settled, infernal, fixed sort of way,
like a bullock in the killing-yard, all ready to be 'pithed'. I used to
pity them when I was a boy, walking round the yard, pushing their noses
through the rails, trying for a likely place to jump, stamping and
pawing and roaring and knocking their heads against the heavy close
rails, with misery and rage in their eyes, till their time was up.
Nobody told THEM beforehand, though!

Have I and the likes of me ever felt much the same, I wonder, shut up
in a pen like this, with the rails up, and not a place a rat could creep
through, waiting till our killing time was come? The poor devils of
steers have never done anything but ramble off the run now and again,
while we--but it's too late to think of that. It IS hard. There's no
saying it isn't; no, nor thinking what a fool, what a blind, stupid,
thundering idiot a fellow's been, to laugh at the steady working life
that would have helped him up, bit by bit, to a good farm, a good wife,
and innocent little kids about him, like that chap, George Storefield,
that came to see me last week. He was real rightdown sorry for me,
I could tell, though Jim and I used to laugh at him, and call him a
regular old crawler of a milker's calf in the old days. The tears came
into his eyes reg'lar like a woman as he gave my hand a squeeze and
turned his head away. We was little chaps together, you know. A man
always feels that, you know. And old George, he'll go back--a fifty-mile
ride, but what's that on a good horse? He'll be late home, but he can
cross the rock ford the short way over the creek. I can see him turn his
horse loose at the garden-gate, and walk through the quinces that lead
up to the cottage, with his saddle on his arm. Can't I see it all, as
plain as if I was there?

And his wife and the young 'uns 'll run out when they hear father's
horse, and want to hear all the news. When he goes in there's his meal
tidy and decent waiting for him, while he tells them about the poor chap
he's been to see as is to be scragged next month. Ha! ha! what a rum
joke it is, isn't it?

And then he'll go out in the verandah, with the roses growin' all over
the posts and smellin' sweet i