FullReads

He walked up and down a half-dozen times, his breast heaving.

“It’s all very well for the man who is brought up to it, and who has seen nothing else. Case can exist in four walls; he has been brought up to it and knows nothing different. But a man like me–

“They wanted me to canter between hedge-row,–I who have ridden the desert where the sky over me and the plain under me were bigger than the Islander’s universe! They wanted me to oversee little farms–I who have watched the sun rising over half a world! Talk of your ten thou’ a year and what it’ll buy! You know, Harry, how it feels when a steer takes the slack of your rope, and your pony sits back! Where in England can I buy that? You know the rising and the falling of days, and the boundless spaces where your heart grows big, and the thirst of the desert and the hunger of the trail, and a sun that shines and fills the sky, and a wind that blows fresh from the wide places! Where in parcelled, snug, green, tight little England could I buy that with ten thou’–aye, or an hundred times ten thou’? No, no, Harry, that fortune would cost me too dear. I have seen and done and been too much. I’ve come back to the Big Country, where the pay is poor and the work is hard and the comfort small, but where a man and his soul meet their Maker face to face.”

The Cattleman had finished his yarn. For a time no one spoke. Outside, the volume of rain was subsiding. Windy Bill reported a few stars shining through rifts in the showers. The chill that precedes the dawn brought us as close to the fire as the smouldering guano would permit.

“I don’t know whether he was right or wrong,” mused the Cattleman, after a while. “A man can do a heap with that much money. And yet an old ‘alkali’ is never happy anywhere else. However,” he concluded emphatically, “one thing I do know: rain, cold, hunger, discomfort, curses, kicks, and violent deaths included, there isn’t one of you grumblers who would hold that gardening job you spoke of three days!”