it all in his youth, and he paid for it this day, full tale. And there lay no side-track for has feet if he would keep Mains’ honour unsmirched in the eyes of the boys.
No man on Mains could ride the bay mare save Ted Douglas only. The boys of that day had slung him on her back when she was raw, young and untamed as himself. They had broken each other to cattle-work, and taken their falls together when ways were rough; and not a stockman from Riverton north to the Stour could wheel a breaking piker against the pair.
The echoes were mad among the black spurs and the naked scarps and the long slopes where the toi-toi shook. The mid-day pressed its hot hands down on the yards; and through the dust and the weary crying of weaners, and the bellow and stampede of furious scrubbers, the Mains boys yarded their muster, slacked girths, and squatted straightway on the grass with damper and floods of hot tea. They were sweat-marked and blood-marked, burnt black to the shirt-line, and cheerful as the moko-mokos in the bush-comer by the waterfall. Scannell fed them; and winks flickered the round of rough faces as Ted Douglas talked technicalities with nothing behind.
“Hand over that five bob you owe me,” said Scott, suddenly.
Tod knocked aside the stretched hand.
