Eustace and Kearney, men somewhere in their thirties I suppose, then, and both natives of the colony, having first seen the light somewhere round Moreton Bay, would shake their heads and reckon the Runnibede country must have always heen subject to droughts, and mighty big ones, except, they supposed, in odd seasons, when it must have rained mighty hard to make up for it. "And it must have been just at the end of one of those blanky good years," they would tell the Govemor, "that you first came and saw this place." And often enough they would recite the fate of Burke and Wills, to prove "what sort of bloody country it must always have been as far west as a man could go." Little they knew of it, to be sure. Though kings amongst horsemen and cattlemen, there wasn't the spirit that the Governor could expect to find solace in.
But there was one other, Tom Merton, only a young chap then, of eighteen or nineteen, who always backed the Governor up. And what a favourite Tom was right from the first day he started work on Runnibede. I was at the stare the morning he rode up leading a pack-horse, to ask the Governor if there was any chance of a job of stock-riding.
"You're a young looking chap," the Governor said to him, "to be out this far looking for a job by yourself."
“I can’t help that, Mr. Winchester," he laughed — that pleasant laugh he always had, no matter what was happening—-and he tilled back a big cabbage tree hat and showed those big grey eyes and freckled face of his. "I was quite young when I was born, y' know."
