The Mailman's Yarn an Ower True Tale

'Rum things happen in the bush, you take my word for it,' suddenly broke out Dan M'Elroy as we were sitting smoking round a camp fire, far back in the 'Never Never' one night. The whole tract of country west of the Barcoo was under water that summer. We were all stuck hard and fast, about fifty miles from Sandringham, waiting for the creeks and cowalls to go down. They weren't small ones either-twenty feet deep in some places and half a mile wide. There were a dozen teamsters with wool-waggons, Jim and me and two black boys with four hundred head of fat cattle from Marndoo. A police trooper bringing down a horse-stealer for trial, committed by the Bench there, made up the party. The prisoner was made comfortable-only chained to a log for safety. Here we were, waiting, waiting, and had to make the best of it. We walked about in the daylight, and did a bit of shooting. We'd put up a bough yard for the cattle, more for the exercise than anything else; and to make the time pass we'd taken to telling yarns. Some of them were that curious I wish I hadn't forgotten 'em. But this one that Dan told that night I shall remember to my dying day. He was the mail contractor between St. George and Bolivar Run, a weather-beaten Bathurst native, as hard as iron-bark, who'd have contracted to run the mail from the Red Sea to Jordan in spite of all the Arabs if they'd made it worth his while. He was afraid of nothing and nobody. In his time he had been speared by blacks, shot at by bushrangers, fished for dead out of flooded creeks, besides being 'given up' in fever, ague, and sunstroke in exploring of mail routes through the 'Never Never' country. Hairbreadth escapes were daily bread to him. He seemed to thrive on 'em, but this one must have been out of the common way.

He looked round over the great plain, where we could see the glimmer of water on every side by the light of the low moon, just showing, red and goblin-like. A murmuring wind began to whisper and sob among the stunted myall, swaying the long streamers as if they were mourning for the dead. It felt colder, though we'd piled up the logs on the fire lately, when he filled his pipe and said: 'We'll turn in after this, but you may as well take it to sleep on. It was nigh twenty year ago it happened, yet it comes back to me now as fresh as I saw it that cursed night. You chaps remember,' he said, taking a good steady draw at his pipe, by way of starting it and the yarn at the same time,-'you remember, as I told you, I was running a horse mail between Marlborough Point and Waranah, somewhere about '68. A different season from this, I tell you. No rain for about eighteen months, and when the autumn came in dry, with the nights long and cold, the sheep began to die faster than you could count 'em. I had a fairish contract, and though the mail was a heavy one, I was able to manage it by riding one horse and leading a packer. A terrible long day's ride it was-three times a week-eighty-five mile. Of course I had a change of horses, but I didn't get in till eleven or twelve at night to Waranah. The frosty nights had set in, and sometimes, between being half-frozen and dead-tired, I could hardly sit on my horse.