"So long, chaps," he called. "See you again half-past eleven four
weeks"; and by "half-past eleven four weeks" he would have carried his
precious freight of letters to the yearning, waiting men and women hidden
away in the heart of Australia, and be out again, laden with "inside"
letters for the outside world.
At all seasons of the year he calls the first two hundred miles of his
trip a "kid's game." "Water somewhere nearly every day, and a decent
camp most nights." And although he speaks of the next hundred and fifty
as being a "bit off during the Dry," he faces its seventy-five-mile dry
stage, sitting loosely in the saddle, with the same cheery "So long,
chaps."
Five miles to "get a pace up"--a drink, and then that seventy-five miles
of dry, with any "temperature they can spare from other parts," and not
one drop of water in all its length for the horses. Straight on top of
that, with the same horses and the same temperature, a run of twenty
miles, mails dropped at Newcastle Waters, and another run of fifty into
Powell's Creek, dry or otherwise according to circumstances.
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