In the Rises no plough could make a line
through the rocks, and the boundaries there were imaginary. Stray
cattle were roaming over the country, eating the grass, and the main
resource of the squatters was the Pounds Act. Hay was then sold at
80 pounds per ton at Bendigo; a draft of fat bullocks was worth a
mine of gold at Ballarat, and, therefore, grass was everywhere
precious. No wonder if the hardy bullock-driver became a cattle
lifter after his team had been impounded by the station stockman when
found only four hundred yards from the bush track. Money, in the
shape of fat stock, was running loose, as it were, on every run, and
why should not the sagacious Nosey do a little business when Baldy's
fat sheep were tempting him, and a market for mutton could be found
no farther away than the Nyalong butcher's shop.
Baldy left the township happier than usual, carrying under his arm
two bottles of Old Tom. He was seen by a man who knew him entering
the Rises, and going away in the direction of Nosey's hut, and then
for fifteen years he was a lost shepherd. In course of time it was
ascertained that he had called at Nosey's hut on his way home. He
had the lost sheep on his mind, and he could not resist the impulse
to have another word or two with Nosey about them. He put down the
two bottles of gin outside the door of the hut, near an axe whose
handle leaned against the wall.
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