16 THE ROMANCE OF RUNNIBEDE
thing we’d hear the Governor’s voice thundering after us to "come back here, you young scoundrels; do you want to break your necks?" But we kids, when across a horse, hadn’t time to think of a broken neck. Unless we could keep the animal going like the wind we were never contented. Advice from our elders to "go steady and let the ponies alone" was uncalled for interference by "silly old coves" afraid to put a horse out of a canter, and who didn’t want te see anybody else enjoying themselves. That’s what we reckoned, but we were truly very young those days, Ted and I.
"And when the eastern boundary is finished," I recollect the Governor telling mother one day, "that'll be the last I’ll do in the way of improvements for a while.... the range makes a good enough fence on the northern side, and the stock rarely cross the Condamine on the south — not even now when it’s little more than a chain of waterholes. And it doesn’t matter about the western end — they may go in that direction as far as they please.”’
Though wages in those days were about as low as possible the Governor must have paid out a lot of money for labour before he got the old run into anything like working order. But that didn’t worry him — nothing, I fancy, ever worried him much at that time. The Australian bush was all new and strange to him then. It was his Eldorado. Besides, the spirit of romance and adventure was strong in the Governor. But what often makes me wonder now is that he ever got men to do the work at all for him, considering the rough and isolated conditions that
