Such Is Life by Joseph Furphy (children's books read aloud .TXT) 📕

got only the work that intermittently slothful men wouldn’t take at the price. It is scarcely necessary to add that he had a wife and about thirteen small children, mostly girls.

“Mornin’, chaps,” said this plebeian, standing between the wind and our nobility, with a hand on each doorpost. “Hope you’re enjoyin’ yourselves. Say, Moriarty; I’m waitin’ to git that bit o’ loadin’ off.”

“I’ll be with you in two minutes,” replied the young storekeeper. “I know you always want to get away.”

“Say, chaps,” continued the bullock driver, advancing into the room, and glancing confidentially round the table, “think there’s any use o’ me stickin’ up the boss for leaf to take the buggy-track to Nalrookar? See, I could make the Fog-a-bolla Tank tonight; an’ there’s boun’ to be a bit o’ blue-bush, if not crows-foot, on them sand-hills. Then I’d fetch Nalrookar tomorrow, easy. I got two-ton-five for there; an’ I’m thinkin’ I’ll have a job to deliver it, if I can’t git through your run. What do you think, chaps?”

“Why didn’t you take this into consideration when you loaded?” demanded young Arblaster.

“Well, beggars ain’t choosers,” replied the apostle of brute force and ignorance. “Fact was, Arblaster, I bethought me what a lot o’ work I’d done for Magomery, one time or another, an’ what good friends me an’ him always was; an’ I says to myself, ‘Well, I’ll chance her⁠—make a spoon, or spoil a horn.’ That’s the way I reasoned it out. See, if I got to turn roun’, an’ foller the main track back agen to the Cane-grass Swamp, an’ take the Nalrookar track from there, I won’t fetch the station much short o’ fifty mile; an’ there ain’t a middlin’ camp the whole road. Everythin’ et right into the ground. Starve a locust. ’Sides, I’m jubious about the Convincer Sand-hill, even with half a load. Bullocks too weak.”

“Well, it’s hardly likely the boss would let you cross the run,” replied Arblaster. “He’d be a d⁠⸺⁠d fool if he did.”

“I’m afraid there’s no use asking him, Priestley,” added Nelson. “He won’t make a thoroughfare of the run, at any price. For instance, when Baxter and Donovan delivered that well-timber in the Quondong Paddock, the other day, they weren’t five mile from the main road⁠—and a gate to go through⁠—but he made them come right back by the station; thirty mile of a roundabout; and their cheques weren’t forthcoming till they did it. No, Priestley; to ask Montgomery is simply to get a refusal; and to argue with him is simply to get insulted.”

“Well, I s’pose I must worry through, some road,” said the bullock driver resignedly, as he turned and went out.

“Fifty miles instead of twenty-two,” remarked Mooney. “Hard enough case.”

“And yet it’s necessary, in a sense,” replied Nelson. “Same time, anybody except the like of Montgomery would spring a bit in a season like this. I couldn’t crush a poor, decent, hardworking devil like that. I’d give him a thorough good blackguarding for calculating upon crossing the run; and then, as a matter of form, I’d send a man with him, to see him across. Well, I suppose we must go and get our mot d’ ordre, boys.”

So we left the breakfast-room to Ida. The four narangies, with the practical M’Murdo, went to the veranda of the boss’s house for their day’s orders; Moriarty, with a ring of keys in his hand, sauntered across to the store; and I managed to drag myself out to a seat built against the south side of the barracks, whence I torpidly surveyed the scene around, whilst listening to my vitality whistling out through four million yawning pores.

In an open shed, near the store⁠—where two tribesmen were now assisting Priestley to unload⁠—a travelling saddler and Salvationist, named (without a word of a lie) Joey Possum, was at work on the horse-furniture of the station; his tilted wagonette, blazoned with his name and title, Joseph Pawsome, Saddler, standing close by. Watching these lewd fellows of the baser sort at their sordid toil, my mind reverted to certain incidents of the preceding night, and so drifted into a speculation on the peculiar kind of difficulties which at certain times beset certain sojourners on the rind of this third primary orb. The incidents, of course, have nothing to do with my story.

But as the mere mention of them may have whetted the reader’s curiosity, I suppose it is only fair to satisfy him.

The night in question seemed, from an astrological point of view, to be peculiarly favourable to the ascendancy of baleful influences. The moon hung above the western horizon, in her most formidable phase⁠—just past the semicircle, with her gibbous edge malignantly feathered. Being now in the House of Taurus, she had overborne the benignant sway of Aldebaran, and was pressing hard on Castor and Pollux (in the House of Gemini). Also, her horizontal attitude was so full of menace that Rigel and Betelgeux (in Orion) seemed to wilt under her sinister supremacy. Sirius (in Canis Major), strongest and most malevolent of the astral powers, hung southwest of the zenith, reinforcing the evil bias of the time, and thus, from his commanding position, overruling the guardianship of Canopus (in Argo), southwest of the same point. Lower still, toward the south, Achernar seemed to reserve his gracious prestige, whilst, across the invisible Pole, the beneficent constellations of Crux and Centaurus exhibited the very paralysis of hopelessness. Worst of all, Jupiter and Mars both held aloof, whilst ascendant Saturn mourned in the House of Cancer.

Such was the wretched aspect of the heavens to my debilitated intelligence, as I slunk home from the swimming-hole, toward midnight. I was somewhat comforted to observe in Procyon a firmness which I attributed to the evident support of Regulus (in the House of Leo); but the most reassuring element in an extremely baleful horoscope was Spica (in the House of Virgo), scarcely affected by the moon’s interference, and now ascending confidently from the eastern horizon.

Still, to my washed-out