'Twasn't as
funny as it looked, though," he assured us, finding us unsympathetic,
"and nobody was exactly sorry when one of the lads on duty came along to
hear the fun, and stock-whipped the old poker back to the mob."
The Maluka and the Dandy soon proved it was nothing to be "treed."
"Happens every time a beast's hauled out of a bog, from all accounts,
that being the only thanks you get for hauling 'em out of the mess." Then
Dan varied the recital with an account of a chap getting skied once who
forgot to choose a tree before beginning the hauling business, and
immediately after froze us into horror again with the details of two
chaps "lying against an old rotten log with a mob of a thousand going
over 'em "; and we were not surprised to hear that when they felt well
enough to sit up they hadn't enough arithmetic left between 'em to count
their bruises.
After an evening of ghost stories, a creaking door is enough to set teeth
chattering; and after an evening of cattle-yarns, told in a cattle camp,
a snapping twig is enough to set hair lifting; and just as the most
fitting place for ghost stories is an old ruined castle, full of eerie
noises, so there is no place more suited to cattle-camp yarns than a
cattle camp.
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