Put how Tom could use his head in the bush; his resourcefulness was almost uncanny, and there was no hole once into that he couldn't find a way out of. There were few who could ride like him in the pine scrub, and how he could hurtle a hearse down the sides of mountain ranges! The part he, played, and the way he rode those blacks down in rescuing Dorothy when the Cooby tribe kidnapped her, was the greatest thing ever done by man on Runnibede. And how she loved him! But that, too, is another story.
Though the homestead tanks had all gone dry and the creeks seemed as if they didn’t want to run any more. there still was Curlew Lagoon. And what a wonderful lagoon that was! I really wonder if in the best of seasons the Garden of Eden was ever anything like it. It was the most charming spot I have ever known. About two miles outside the home paddock boundary it spread itself, a bread, calm, silvery shimmering sheet of deep, clean water. Curlews out of number haunted it, screaming their dirges like the cries of a whole kingdom of lost souls. The Station Creek rising in the pine-clad ranges rippled into the northern end of it, and out again at the southern, to wind along on its way to join the Condamine. There and there on its smooth surface, you could see the splashes of fish. and many a huge cod, and swags of jew were handed out of it. And around it the blacks often camped, swimming and fishing and holding their weird, wild corrobborees, Over the great rock-slides the thin smoke of their fires curled by day, and by night the sparks
