gale. It was great fun pulling over the tops of fences and dams in and out among the trees, but we could not get right over to the road. We got the boat stuck, and had to get out and pull her along. Now and again we’d come to a deep gutter, and down one of us would go over his head. It was beginning to get rather chilly by the time the coach came along. It would have made a striking picture: the boat in foreground and the scarlet coach with its four horses coming towards us—sometimes with the water over the wheels and horses almost swimming—and then, as far as the eye could reach, the plain one sheet of water. We were wishing we could have had a photo of the scene.
I tell you, when we got back to Brookong we were glad to get dry things on. We three started a fire in the school-room and stayed there. The water rose all day, and at night they were rowing the boat between Grierson's house and our residence. At eight o’clock Sunday night it was into the store, and we had to turn to and shift two tons of flour and one of sugar into a place of safety. The lamb-markers had all come into the station, and everything seemed pretty safe as far as the men were concerned.
. . . We went to bed on Sunday night with three inches of water in our rooms. It never rose any higher, and on Monday was beginning to fall. Then the bad news came. A man coming in from Green's Gunyah hotel, where the lamb-markers had been camped, reported finding two of them dead on the main road about two miles from Brookong. Some of them had left the public-house to come in on Sunday in a waggonette. They were all drunk, and these two unfortunates had dropped out of the cart and lain there and perished—how, can never be ascertained. The coroner would not come out: he was afraid of the creek. He wired out to bury them, and held an enquiry a week afterwards; but their comrades swore that they were all so drunk they remembered nothing. Yet they were able to drive ten miles in that fearful storm, and never hit a tree or miss a gate.
