To Ride a Fine Horse Read Online Free PDF

slim and upright on his fine stockhorse, John Costello with his merry laugh, his quick springing step and already a beard like a young bushranger, and Stumpy Michael, a quiet good-looking boy, still beardless and with little experience as yet in the bushmanship for which he was to make his name.
    Another of the party was Jim Scanlan, already reckoned a good Australian stockman although no more than five years out from County Clare. Then there was Darby Durack’s brother-in-law, young Tom Kilfoyle, a veteran of the droving tracks at twenty-one, and besides all these relatives, a German cook and a typical Australian stockman named Jack Horrigan, bandy-legged through riding from childhood, trousers tucked into high-heeled elastic-side boots and wide-brimmed hat fastened under the chin with a strap.
    In two and a half months they had reached the little outpost town of Bourke and had travelled, following the rivers, about six hundred miles. Here they found that a number of parties had lately settled in the far north-western corner of New South Wales and others had moved in over the Queensland border to the northeast. This party struck out on a fresh route to the north-west, up the Warrego, across the Cuttaburraand on to the sandy, treeless plains of the Paroo. Here, just south of the border, was fair country and what looked like permanent springs. There was too little grass, however, so they established a depot and leaving most of the horses in charge of the other three, Patsy, John Costello, Stumpy Michael and Jack Horrigan pushed on with the cattle.
    The drought that held the northern part of New South Wales in its grip, and that they hoped might improve as they moved on, instead grew steadily worse. Sadly they trailed their cattle through dusty mulga scrub and over parched bare plains, until they realized they could take the stock no further before finding water. Scouts riding on ahead found a little in the Bulloo River and returned to bring on the thirsty stock, but already some of the horses were falling in their tracks and had to be shot where they lay.
    The suffering cattle smelt water on the wind from a mile away and broke into a frenzied stampede. Four men on weakened horses stood no chance of wheeling them as they plunged forward to the river, trampling fallen beasts to pulp under their hoofs. Half were drowned while the rest drank until they nuzzled the mud and were too exhausted to pull themselves from the bog. The heartbroken drovers had to shoot them before moving up the river to find more water for themselves and their poor horses.
    Desperately they pushed on, for although their stock had perished they were still hopeful of finding better country and so making their hard trip worth while. On some stages of their journey they had seen signs of native camps and had ridden warily, on the look-out for an ambush and the sudden flash of spearsfrom the scrub. The natives had probably been watching them all the time, wondering what these poor foolish white men were doing in a country where only the black people knew how to live, for as the party moved on into an even more waterless waste a little group of black figures came towards them out of the mirage of the blistering plain. All were naked except for belts of woven hair, the men carrying their bundles of long, thin spears and throwing-sticks, with emu feather head-dresses or dangling circlets of dingo tails to whisk away the flies as they went along. The women wore armlets of possum skin and necklets of kangaroo teeth or small human bones—the remains of drought-born babies that had been killed and eaten, to be born again, they believed, in some better season. One or two carried little ones, surprisingly fat, and gazing up from curved bark coolamons swung about their mothers’ shoulders.
    John Costello and Jack Horrigan, who had had previous experience of Aborigines in their natural state, knew that, coming towards them openly, in company with their women,