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Mrs Woods tried to draw Jack out, but it was no use, and in the evening he commenced drinking, and that made Billy uneasy. “I’m afraid Jack’s on the wrong track,” he said.

After tea most of us collected about Watty’s veranda. Most things that happened in Bourke happened at Watty’s pub, or near it.

If a horse bolted with a buggy or cart, he was generally stopped outside Watty’s, which seemed to suggest, as Mitchell said, that most of the heroes drank at Watty’s–also that the pluckiest men were found amongst the hardest drinkers. (But sometimes the horse fetched up against Watty’s sign and lamppost–which was a stout one of “iron-bark”–and smashed the trap.) Then Watty’s was the Carriers’ Arms, a union pub; and Australian teamsters are mostly hard cases: while there was something in Watty’s beer which made men argue fluently, and the best fights came off in his backyard. Watty’s dogs were the most quarrelsome in town, and there was a dog-fight there every other evening, followed as often as not by a man-fight. If a bushman’s horse ran away with him the chances were that he’d be thrown on to Watty’s veranda, if he wasn’t pitched into the bar; and victims of accidents, and sick, hard-up shearers, were generally carried to Watty’s pub, as being the most convenient and comfortable for them. Mitchell denied that it was generosity or good nature on Watty’s part, he said it was all business–advertisement. Watty knew what he was doing. He was very deep, was Watty. Mitchell further hinted that if he was sick he wouldn’t be carried to Watty’s, for Watty knew what a thirsty business a funeral was. Tom Hall reckoned that Watty bribed the Army on the quiet.

I was sitting on a stool along the veranda wall with Donald Macdonald, Bob Brothers (the Giraffe) and Mitchell, and one or two others, and Jack Moonlight sat on the floor with his back to the wall and his hat well down over his eyes. The Army came along at the usual time, but we didn’t see the Pretty Girl at first–she was a bit late. Mitchell said he liked to be at Watty’s when the Army prayed and the Pretty Girl was there; he had no objection to being prayed for by a girl like that, though he reckoned that nothing short of a real angel could save him now. He said his old grandmother used to pray for him every night of her life and three times on Sunday, with Christmas Day extra when Christmas Day didn’t fall on a Sunday; but Mitchell reckoned that the old lady couldn’t have had much influence because he became more sinful every year, and went deeper in ways of darkness, until finally he embarked on a career of crime.

The Army prayed, and then a thin “ratty” little woman bobbed up in the ring; she’d gone mad on religion as women do on woman’s rights and hundreds of other things. She was so skinny in the face, her jaws so prominent, and her mouth so wide, that when she opened it to speak it was like a ventriloquist’s dummy and you could almost see the cracks open down under her ears.

“They say I’m cracked!” she screamed in a shrill, cracked voice. “But I’m not cracked–I’m only cracked on the Lord Jesus Christ! That’s all I’m cracked on—.” And just then the Amen man of the Army–the Army groaner we called him, who was always putting both feet in it–just then he blundered forward, rolled up his eyes, threw his hands up and down as if he were bouncing two balls, and said, with deep feeling:

“Thank the Lord she’s got a crack in the right place!”

Tom Hall doubled up, and most of the other sinners seemed to think there was something very funny about it. And the Army, too, seemed struck with an idea that there was something wrong somewhere, for they started a hymn.