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“A bit of a booze won’t hurt me, Joe, you old fool,” he said. “We’ll have one more night of it, for the sake of Auld Lang Syne, and start at daylight in the morning. You go and see to the horses, it will straighten you up. Take the saddle off and hobble ’em out.”

But I insisted on starting at once, and Jack promised he would. We were gloriously happy for an hour or so, and then I went to sleep.

When I woke it was late in the afternoon. I was very giddy and shaky; the girl brought me a whisky-and-soda, and that steadied me. Some more shearers had arrived, and Jack was playing cards with two of them on top of a cask in the bar. Thomas was dead drunk on the floor, or pretending to be so, and his wife was behind the bar. I went out to see to the horses; I found them in a bush yard at the back. The packhorse was rolling in the mud with the pack-saddle and saddlebags on. One of the chaps helped me take off the saddles and put them in the harness-room behind the kitchen.

I’ll pass over that night. It wouldn’t be very edifying to the great, steady-living, sober majority, and the others, the never-do-wells, the rovers, wrecks and failures, will understand only too well without being told–only too well, God help them!

When I woke in the morning I couldn’t have touched a drink to save my life. I was fearfully shaky, and swimming about the head, but I put my head over a tub under the pump and got the girl to pump for a while, and then I drank a pint of tea and managed to keep it down, and felt better.

All through the last half of the night I’d kept saying, in a sort of drink nightmare, “I’ll go for Peter M’Laughlan in the morning. I’ll go for Peter as soon as I can stand!” and repeating Clara Barnes’s words, “Ride for Peter if anything happens. Ride for Peter M’Laughlan.”

There were drunken shearers, horsemen and swagmen sleeping all over the place, and in all sorts of odd positions; some on the veranda with their heads on their swags, one sitting back against the wall, and one on the broad of his back with his head on the bare boards and his mouth open. There was another horse rolling in its saddle, and I took the saddle off. The horse belonged to an English University man.

I went in to see how Jack was. He was lying in the parlour on a little, worn-out, horse-hair sofa, that might have seen better days in some clean home in the woman-and-girl world. He had been drinking and playing cards till early that morning, and he looked awful–he looked as if he’d been boozing for a month.

“See what you’ve done!” he said, sitting up and glaring at me; then he said, “Bring me a whisky-and-soda, Joe, for God’s sake!”

I got a whisky-and-soda from the girl and took it to him.

I talked to him for a while, and at last he said, “Well, go and get the horses and we’ll start.”

I got the horses ready and brought them round to the front, but by that time he’d had more drink, and he said he wanted to sleep before he started. Next he was playing cards with one of the chaps, and asked me to wait till he’d finished that game. I knew he’d keep promising and humbugging me till there was a row, so at last I got him aside and said:

“Look here, Jack, I’m going for Peter M’Laughlan—“

“Go to hell!” said Jack.

I put the other horses back in the yard, the saddles in the skillion, got on my horse and rode off. Thomas and the others asked me no questions, they took no notice. In a place like that a man could almost do anything, short of hanging himself, without anyone interfering or being surprised. And probably, if he did hang himself, they’d let him swing for a while to get a taste of it.