ft them alone. Long before dawn, before
even the morning star had risen, flies buzzed around them, making life
well-nigh unbearable.

A halt was made about noon for dinner, the packs and saddles taken off
the horses for an hour, and then the journey was resumed, each man
riding a fresh horse, for no one rides the same horse all day in
Central Australia, if he can possibly help it.

Evening camp was usually made near a water-hole or native well, but
sometimes the horses had to go as long as two days without a drink.
They were unsaddled and hobbled out, and allowed to roam about all
night and pick up scanty bits of food. It amazed the white boys to see
what very little herbage of any kind there was for an animal to live
on. No grass; just a dry uninviting bush here and there, growing up
out of loose barren sand, with, at long intervals, a clump of twisted
mulga trees. Yet the horses "did" well, and certainly the thousand
T.D.3 bullocks which had come down from the territory looked none the
worse for their trip over country just as barren as the boys were now
camped on.

After tea was the time the two white boys enjoyed most, for Mick would
light his pipe then, prop himself up against his swag, and, with a
quart-pot of tea by his side, tell them yarns about the back country.
Many of these narratives included Boss Stobart, for he and Mick had
gone about together a great deal, and had established overland droving
records which are still unbeaten. He told of drought and flood, of
thirst and hunger, of cattle rushes and disease, of mining camps, of
Afghans and their camels, of Chinamen and opium, of grog shanties, of
troopers, of wild blacks and still wilder whites, until his listeners'
minds flamed at the thought that they, even they, were in the country
where such adventures had taken place--and perhaps some day would be
met with by themselves. And at night, when they lay out on their swags
under the cool sky, which looked so much farther away than it did in
cities, and heard the high quavering hunting-call of the dingo, their
thoughts would go, not towards the scenes where they had spent their
boyhood, but onwards into the unknown.

One day, when the routine of "the road" had gone on for more than a
fortnight, they were crossing a broad expanse of hard stony country,
shut in on the north by dense mulga scrub, when Sax noticed a thin
column of smoke rising from the trees a few miles away. He could
hardly believe